

Tea for one

By Mark Gross

rev. 12.28.10

Published by Mark Gross at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Mark Gross

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Foreword

A number of folks have played parts in the development of this quandary that I find myself in. My dad was involved in a number of ways, although his role in total was early and minor. One portion was handing down his off kilter sense of humor to me. This has definitely helped me to appreciate this stranger-than-fiction story. One of my favorites among the many jokes he told me seems particularly appropriate:

A woman is walking down the street in the city. Up ahead, she notices a man stop, walk over to a building, and proceed to bash his head against the wall. As the woman makes her way, she gradually catches up to the head basher, who goes through his head bashing procedure several times before the woman eventually catches up with him. She does so, just as the head basher is completing another self-bashing. She walks up to him and addresses him, saying, excuse me sir, but I couldn't help noticing that, as you walk along, you stop occasionally and bash your head. Why do you do that?

The head basher, with a dazed look and a slight smile, says, "Because it feels so good when I stop!"

I'm sure it would feel great, if only I could find a way - the author.

1: Shock and Awe

The old derelict trundled his shopping cart slowly through the September night toward downtown. He was wearing a sweat stained ball cap, a greasy pair of baggy jeans and a grimy wool blanket as a poncho. If you got within ten feet, you would hear that he was muttering quietly and you would also smell him, the stench of sweat, piss, and decrepitude surrounding him like fog. It was two in the morning on Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend and there was no one else on the streets.

He had first made his appearance wandering around the state capitol several weeks prior. The few cops that had noticed him at first no longer even saw him. He had already blended into the urban landscape, invisible to most. A couple of do-gooders from community organizations had tried to talk with him. They offered him a sermon, a cot and a meal, but no real communication had occurred and they had given him up as a lost soul.

As he made his way among the state office buildings, he stopped occasionally and took one or two aluminum pop cans from the bags in the cart. He set them on top of fiber optic utility panels and traffic light control boxes. At some of his stops, he pried open ground level water line access plates to set cans within them and he also set cans around a number of fire hydrants. Just before he left each of his stops he used a pocket sized torch to light the end of the fuse protruding from the top of each can. Briefly they flared bright, then dimmed as each fuse burned down into the flexible metal tube that separated the burning fuse from the thermite mixture in each can. Then he moved on down the street, methodically working his way through his planned list of targets on his first circuit through downtown. His route kept him out of the field of view of the security cameras.

Within a minute of each of the stops in his first round, the thermite in the cans ignited behind him and the superheated molten iron and aluminum oxide melted through the tops of the utility boxes. Hot liquid metal poured over the wiring and cables within and down into the conduits feeding the boxes from under the street. Traffic lights, telephone service and cable network service went out through blocks of the downtown state office district as he made his way. Water started spewing from the ground level access plates and fire hydrants, slowly flooding the streets.

As he quietly continued on his route, occasionally he would spend some time spreading dozens of steel caltrops around in particular intersections and thoroughfares. He had fabricated them himself, adapting the ancient Roman anti-cavalry weapon to his purpose, which was puncturing and rapidly deflating vehicle tires. He had painted them to blend with the color of the streets.

Completing his first round, he worked his way back. He started moving much more quickly, knowing that the responders would soon be on their way. On this circuit he used a custom made slingshot to lob a half dozen of his pop can thermite bombs onto the top of each of several state office buildings. He did this to ten buildings up to 5 stories tall. He also set several thermite bombs with longer fuses around natural gas lines feeding a few of the buildings. On the roofs of the buildings behind him, the thermite cans ignited and burned holes through the flat roof of each building. Superheated metal poured into the upper floors, melting and burning whatever was below. Some of the incendiary bombs successfully burned down through several of the upper floors of the buildings. Desks, file cabinets, carpets, and papers were ignited and the orange glow of the flames could soon be seen in upper level windows. The sprinkler systems did not function because the city water pressure had dropped to near zero as the streets below continued to flood.

Done with his direct assault on the downtown buildings and infrastructure, he grabbed the last thermite bomb from his shopping cart and then pushed the cart into some shrubs. He began moving more cautiously, using cover as he headed towards the bridge. He was watching and listening to avoid the first police cars and fire trucks that were scurrying towards the downtown area. On the way to the river, he stopped at a large propane tank beside a gas station. He set the thermite bomb he had been carrying on top of the tank. This bomb was 6 pop cans which were taped together with duct tape. It had 6 longer fuses that gave him time to jog away before they ignited, melted a hole in the top of the tank and blew a huge bright fireball into the night sky.

Shortly thereafter he reached the bridge that allowed drivers coming from the interstate access into the downtown area. He went down and disappeared into the brush on the riverbank for a few minutes. He took off the outer layer, his bum outfit, and put on running shoes and a new cap. Then he pulled a couple of large ceramic plant pots filled with thermite from his hiding place there. Working under the bridge, he set them on top of the two main steel load bearing girders which spanned the river. He lit the fuses, then climbed back up to the road and jogged onto the bridge heading away from downtown.

He was now wearing a jogging suit. From the middle of the bridge he threw a bundle, the old shoes wrapped in the bum rags, down into the river. They floated downstream on the surface of the swift dark current for a few moments before slowly sinking into the depths. About 2 minutes after he had jogged across the bridge towards his pickup, the thermite in the pots ignited and poured through the holes in the bottom of the pots onto the bridge beams. The steel beams weakened as they melted. Shortly thereafter, the bridge buckled and one end dropped into the river. The beams were no longer able to carry the load of the heavy, water laden fire truck that was the last vehicle to attempt to cross that bridge for a while.

As the buildings burned, police and firemen did their best to reach the downtown area and limit the damage. They were hampered by the loss of the bridge, the flooded streets and the lack of water pressure. Several fire trucks did make it into the downtown area only to have their tires punctured by the caltrops in the streets before they could reach the burning buildings. The 911 dispatchers had numerous communications problems. Their computer networks were not communicating, landline phones were down, the official radio frequencies and the cellular network were jammed with frantic message traffic.

Once he had jogged back to his pickup, his next destination was the primary power substation just on the edge of town. Arriving there, he lobbed a half dozen thermite bombs over the fence. Within moments after he drove off, the transformers began to burst and were arcing and sparking wildly. The power and cellular network went out over much of the downtown area for a few minutes, until the utility load switching system could reroute the downtown loads through a secondary substation on the other side of town. After he attacked that substation as well, the downtown power grid went out again.

Then he drove his pickup into the hills, watching the growing orange glow of the city that could be seen occasionally in his rearview mirror. After a 15 minute drive he reached the logging road that passed under the power transmission lines. He turned off a short distance up an overgrown side path and parked. He hiked the quarter mile up to the power transmission tower at the peak of the ridge. He located the two thermite bombs that he had hidden near the base of the tower and attached them to two of the four legs supporting the tower. He lit the fuses and hustled back down the hill towards his pickup.

Shortly before he made it back there, the thermite bombs ignited and melted through the two supports of the power line tower. As they buckled, the tower began to lean in the direction that the high tension lines were pulling the tower. The other two supports quickly failed where he had cut into them with the cordless reciprocating saw the previous night. The tower fell over, high voltage lines singing, arcing and snapping under the strain. The remaining lights of the valley surrounding the city went out, leaving only the orange glow of the flames. The falling high voltage lines started a forest fire in the hills, which were very dry after a long hot summer.

He drove back roads and logging roads around the rural outskirts of town, setting several more forest fires as he made his final circuit. Completing that, dawn was breaking as he drove his pickup away from the city awakening to a day of chaos. As he drove, he whistled idly to himself. He was looking forward to watching the news reports about his first nights work. He twitched suddenly and switched on the radio. The news radio announcers were already speculating wildly about his attacks. Driving towards his camp, back in the forested hills about 50 miles out of town, his idle whistling turned to chuckles. Now it was their turn to feel powerless!

Two

Somewhat by chance, I found an economic niche that I could fill in the early '90s. In the same time frame, my wife found me by placing an ad in the personals of the local alternative paper. It was a good match and probably the only way we might have found each other, as we are both painfully shy and socially inept. Locating the economic niche came about through a timely combination of events. First there was the purchase of my first computer in 1986. Then I acquired an AS degree in electronics in 1988. Finally there was Microsoft's release of Windows. With this combination in place I was able to start making a little money working for myself starting in 1992. There was finally something people needed that I could provide.

I have a logical mind which is useful when troubleshooting computers. I can talk with people if I actually have something to talk about. I know how to explain technical subjects using common sense analogies and without a lot of jargon. Unlike many early computer techies, I also know how to keep my ego in check. On the other hand, social small talk is a waste of time, both for me and with me. I just can't do it. I am a nerd, plain and simple. Prior to the early nineties people like me were objects of scorn and derision, considered weird and often outcast, only useful as a high school bullies source of lunch money.

I started advertising my services as a computer consultant in the classified service directory of the local paper in 1992. At that time, only about 10% of households contained a personal computer. My first computer was made by PC's Limited (later to become Dell) and was a clone of IBM's PC-AT. As it was delivered to me, it had an Intel 286 processor, 1 megabyte of RAM, a 1.2 megabyte floppy disk drive, a 20 megabyte hard drive and a 2400 baud telephone modem. Along with an IBM printer, the system cost me more than $4,000 hard earned 1986 dollars. In those days I was punching a clock in a factory as an electromechanical assembler, building bottling and packaging machinery, making about $10 per hour. That $4000 was the best money I ever spent.

As a result of that purchase in 1986, by 1992 I knew how DOS worked and knew how to use it. I was familiar with several varieties of software applications including word processing, spreadsheets and databases. I had communicated with other computer users on bulletin boards with my computer modem. The internet existed at that time, but internet usage was limited mostly to the military, government and academia. As a result of my electronics training, I understood DC electronics and digital/binary logic.

I was in the right place, at the right time and with the right skills and know-how. I was in my mid-30s and had my head on straight. I found myself with a loving and supportive wife who had a good job with good benefits. I grabbed hold of the tail of the tiger and held on for what turned out to be a wild ride.

3: Anger Management Therapy

After his first major attack on the state capital, he spent a month in the hills, returning to the herbicide spraying project which he had been working on through most of the summer. Wherever he found a steep hillside above a major road, railroad tracks or a flood water diversion culvert, he used either a backpack sprayer or a pressure washer to spray a powerful herbicide cocktail to kill the grass and brush. The root systems of these plants held the hillsides together during the heavy winter rains, but not so much during the upcoming winter.

The previous couple of months he had spent working on this project most weekday mornings. He had not been noticed as he traveled the roads in the vicinity of the capital city.. His pickup had been purchased several years before at a BLM auction. He dressed appropriately to the role of a road maintenance worker. No one had ever stopped to question him about what he was doing. During this time, he spent his afternoons, evenings and weekends in town, wearing the smelly old bum persona and finalizing plans for his upcoming attack on the city.

After that attack, he continued with the herbicide spraying project. Working now in the rural hills somewhat further away from the capital, he successfully remained invisible. After a month, things in the capital had started to settle down a bit. The power was back on, the bridge repairs were nearly complete and the forest fires were out. The populace had started to calm down, although the news media pundits were still milking the story for as much airtime as they could. Of course the state police, the FBI and Homeland security teams were hard at work on the case. The currently favored theory was that the attacks were the work of a cell of eco-terrorists or anarchists. Suspected activists of many flavors were getting a lot more grief than usual from law enforcement. Several letters had been received claiming responsibility and thousands of tips had flooded in.

All of this amused him considerably. After the way that he had been treated, after what he had lost and what had been taken from him, he was ready, willing and able to get payback. He also intended to keep getting it until he was too old to continue, or they started to close in on him, whichever came first. Unlike the poor bastard that had flown his light plane into the IRS building about 15 years earlier, he had a plan for a sustained campaign. He would not make one dramatic and futile suicidal attack, instead he would unleash hell on the state in as many ways as he could for as long as he could.

He had spent more than 10 years planning and preparing. They had thoroughly ruined his life and denied him the niche that had taken him so long to find and develop. He took some pride in the fact that through it all he had never squealed like a pig. He was not a pig, in his mind he was a free citizen and as such, it was his duty to take them to school. He was determined to teach the state government a lesson the people of the state would make them remember, or die trying. They had denied him his constitutional rights and the pursuit of happiness, depriving him of the essentials of liberty. He was not going to roll over and die in defeat, no way. Too many had suffered and sacrificed too much to earn freedom from tyranny, it would not be right to surrender that precious hard won freedom without a fight.

Four

By the time the spring of 1995 arrived, I had a database of several hundred regularly repeating customers, approximately 60% early home users and 40% small businesses. At that time, I would estimate that somewhere between 15 to 20% of households contained computers. Windows 3.11 had been user-friendly, reliable and stable enough and the price of clone PC's had declined sufficiently to fuel the growth of a fledgling industry.

Late in the spring of '95, my father's wife called me for help. He was very ill with cancer spreading through his internal organs. She wanted me to come east in late July to help care for him during a couple of months that she had unavoidable business obligations. She was an event planner, with several large corporations as clients, so it was necessary to meet her obligations if her business was to survive. I talked with my brother and he agreed to spell me after the first month or so, so I let her know that I could and would come east and help for at least a month. I started working out how I might continue to operate my computer support business and maintain the customer base from a distance.

At that time my business phone was an early cell phone, a Motorola bag phone. It weighed about 3 pounds and I carried it everywhere with me. Most folks who had them did not carry them, instead they mounted them in their cars. In fact, they were commonly known as car phones. Anyway, my cell provider at that time provided unlimited call forwarding service with no airtime charge, but I would have to pay long distance charges for forwarding calls to another area code.

I decided that I could thereby forward my incoming business calls to a secondary phone line in my dad's home, and that's what I did. Then I just needed someone to pass the calls to, someone to provide computer services to my customer base while I was out of state. This was a trickier problem to solve, but I came up with a plan that worked fairly well and also turned out to be useful in the longer term.

I advertised in the help wanted section of the local papers classifieds – seeking independent computer technicians. Over several weeks, I had about 20 responses from prospects. Ten of these seemed sufficiently skilled and experienced that they might be able to provide the necessary computer support services. Most were technicians with full time jobs who were seeking to supplement their income by working in the moonlight. Three were available during the day, interested in pursuing the possibility of working entirely for themselves, as I did. I told them that I did not have enough work to keep them all as busy as they wanted to be, but that I would initially be distributing work to them equally. This would provide them with the opportunity to prove their skills in action. Based upon customer feedback, the most proficient would end up with the largest share of the work. They all understood and accepted this arrangement, so I had found a team to cover for me.

My business had been growing steadily, so I knew that once I returned, I would likely still have extra work to share with the technicians who had done the best work for the customers. I also knew that by sharing my customer base among 10 different techs, it was unlikely that one or two, who might try to continue working for previously referred customers after I returned, could subtract much from the customer base I had been building up. I didn't have a written contract with these techs, I just laid out the referral fee structure and had an old fashioned handshake agreement with them, based upon the honor system.

My wife stayed in town working her own job. In her spare time, she helped me out by handling the business mail, banking and bills while I was gone. This included depositing the referral fees and tracking the job statement copies from the techs. I was gone for a little more than a month and it all worked out fairly well. Some time after I returned, I learned that a couple of the techs had indeed tried to continue working with some customers outside of the referral system. Between them they cooked up a new partnership venture, which did not work out for long. Most of the customers they had been working with returned to calling me for their computer support needs. So I did learn a number of valuable lessons from the month long experiment.

From the original ten, there were three that had the necessary traits to continue sharing work and customers with. They were honest and honorable, they were technically qualified and they had good communication skills. All three had full time jobs, so the pressure was off me to keep them busy. This did not turn out to be a problem since there was also sufficient new call volume to share with them. While I was out of the state in August, the much hyped release of Windows 95 caused another jump in home and business computer acquisition and use.

Through no fault of my own, I once again found myself to be well positioned, business wise. I had an existing customer base in a fast growing previously non-existent industry with little competition yet. I had a workable, fine-tunable business model and the beginnings of a team to handle growing call volume. I was back in town, ready to go back to work and I did so. In 1996 I personally went out on more than 900 on-site computer support appointments and shared several hundred with other techs as well.

From my direct experience, 1996 was the beginning of the fastest acceleration of growth of the PC industry. It was boom time and the boom lasted for about 5 years. Growth in the industry continued thereafter, but it has not shown the acceleration that it did during that time. By 2001, at least 60% of households contained computers and there were few small businesses that did not use computers in some way.

Don't misunderstand my situation. Although I was in the right place at the right time, I wasn't on easy street. On-site computer user support and computer troubleshooting are not easy. They are also not rocket science. It takes organization and time management skills, an understanding and application of the scientific method, good technical instincts and an incredible amount of patience. If I could get back all the time I've spent watching computers reboot, I would have time for a third childhood. And the time spent working on computers is the easy part.

Working with people, computer users, can be maddening. Many are their own and their computers worst enemy. In my experience the average computer user does more damage to their own computers than all the damage done by viruses, malware, cheap hardware and poorly debugged software, combined. Yet somehow, the user frequently remains oblivious and will usually blame the messenger, the computer, anyone but themselves. They just don't get it. For computer technicians working in user support, the loss of the ability to maintain patience with those computer users who are psychologically blocked and mentally lazy is the primary cause of burnout.

From my experience, computer support requires a union of art and science. As my skills developed, it became a Zen like holistic exercise. When I was at the peak of my skills, I spent occasional entire days in the zone. The computers were responding to my guesswork about their issues. The users were giving me relevant information about their computer problems and we were communicating well. When in the zone, I was working on the computer and the user as a single entity. A computer is a multi-faceted, multi-purpose tool designed for use by the mind. At my peak, the customer learned that and learned how to use their computer as an extension of their mind.

5: His Golden Years

He had fairly well accomplished the objectives of his first attacks without leaving the authorities many clues at all. In Mid-October he decided it was time to let things cool for a bit and head south for the winter. He left the BLM pickup with a full tank of gas in a truck stop with the keys in it. He knew someone would get good use out of it and that it would end up stripped down in a yard somewhere. Then he adopted his Swiss eco-tourist alter ego, complete with fake passport, expensive touring bicycle with panniers and trailer, all-weather cycling outfit and heavily Swiss accented English. He rode to the coast and headed south, taking his time. He spent his nights in motels and campgrounds and paid cash for everything he needed. Within a few weeks he was far enough south to bask in the warm sun once again.

Meanwhile, the winter storms had started lining up and delivering their loads on the capital city and surrounding hills. Shortly thereafter, news reports began to contain items about numerous mudslides blocking highways and railroad tracks. Flooding in the hills was undermining and washing out roads around the capital city. These reports continued throughout the winter. Eventually the authorities could not avoid noticing the trend. The state road department budget for such problems for the winter was depleted within the first few weeks of the arrival of the rains.

Just before the first of the year, he stopped shaving and spent a few nights drinking instead of sleeping. Then he bought some new clothes for a derelict and kept the malodorous old rags that the bum had been wearing. Double bagging the smelly outfit in a daypack, he took the long bus ride back north to the capital city, arriving on a Saturday afternoon. He changed into the bums clothes in the restroom of the bus station and put his own clothes and the daypack into a storage locker. Then he walked over to the city library. Using one of the free public access computers, he hacked into several websites of large corporations headquartered in and around the capital city. He also hacked into the website of a local TV station as well as two local newspapers, including the alternative rag.

As a result of his work, for a few hours each of their front web pages offered a download of an electronic document file. This file was a manifesto he had concocted to incite anarchists to devise their own attacks, to take up and continue his war of attrition and sabotage. Written as if it originated from a group instead of an individual, his manifesto urged activists and anarchists to design their attacks to raise the cost of doing business in general. It also urged them to specifically target government bureaucracies and bureaucrats, as well as unethical corporations that spread foulness where we all have to eat, drink, breathe, and live.

After he was done distributing his manifesto, he walked back to the bus station, retrieved his daypack from the storage locker and changed back into his usual attire. Then he took a bus back south. At one of the buses scheduled food and restroom stops, he left the daypack and the bag with the bums clothing behind. A little more than two days after he had left it, he returned to his rented room in the sunny locale to the south. He had a shave and a shower and then he headed out to find a cold beer and see what the talking heads had to say about his manifesto.

Before the rains left in the spring, the state legislature had to make 3 additional emergency appropriations to fund the clearing and repair of roads. In the early spring, the authorities finally put it together. There had been nearly 7 times as many mudslides and washouts around the capital city than during an average year. It was soon determined that most of the hillsides that had slid out had been treated with herbicides. Shortly thereafter, it was reported that this was likely the work of the same terrorists that had attacked the city after Labor Day. The news pundits tried to figure up the direct costs of the attacks to the state, and the indirect costs to the local and state economies. The numbers they pulled from the air were impressive, even when corrected for the hyperbolic spin of news reportage.

Meanwhile, he spent a quiet winter, getting regular exercise and eating well, enjoying the sunshine. He kept tabs on news reporting from up north, watching closely for any sign that they might have a clue about him. Occasionally, a pundit would speculate that the attacks might have been the work of someone with a grudge against the state or its government, but no one seemed to be looking back far enough to recognize that it might be him. He had deliberately moved out of state and dropped out of sight after the Sheriffs seizure and auction sale of his home more than 10 years previously. The upper level bureaucrats who had persecuted him back then had since retired. They had never showed signs of having enough on the ball to put two and two together anyway.

Also, the release of his manifesto had been effective in a couple of ways. First, it fueled the pursuit of the theory that the attacks had been the work of an organized secret anarchist terror cell. Second, anarchists and activists began to respond with attacks of their own. Some of these were both creative and effective, as he had suggested they should come up with a list of one hundred attacks. From these they should choose the best ten, plan them carefully and then carry them out quickly within the span of a few days for maximum impact. He was also happy to see that his manifesto was now readily and easily available on the internet, having spread to so many underground sites that there was no way the government could prevent or contain its ongoing distribution.

While he waited out the winter, for fun, he enjoyed hanging out in gentlemen's clubs. He liked to drink a couple of beers in the late afternoon and enjoyed the company of women, especially the somewhat older dancers with some road miles. Like him, they were warriors fighting an ancient, ongoing conflict. The dancers waged the battle of the sexes while he was at war with mindless bureaucracy. He was much older than they, but he treated them with respect. Most of them responded to this with appreciation and respected him in return. He tipped them generously for their time, but never bought lap dances nor did he try to grab or fondle them. He listened to them and was genuinely sympathetic to their difficulties, fabricated or real, it made no difference to him.

For money, he did computer support and web site work. The strippers were often customers for his services and also helped him with word of mouth advertising. Whenever they referred a customer to him, he paid them 10% of what he made on the job. As always, he had more work offered to him than he had the time or inclination to do, so he picked and chose the jobs that interested him in some way.

He always took his time with the customers, carefully explained what he was doing, showing them how they might do things themselves the next time. They had the most powerful and far-reaching multi-purpose tool yet devised by man on their desks. He had a working understanding of how that tool worked and how they might apply it. He also had the time, so he gave customers who paid attention and seemed willing to learn the extra effort it took to share some of his understanding with them. He only worked for cash, never gave receipts and kept no records. He figured that, when and if they finally caught up with him, tax evasion would not be an issue. His somewhat off-kilter sense of humor found that to be especially ironic.

Anyway, his winter computer work helped him pass the time and provided sufficient cash for his needs and purposes. In late May, he got on a train and headed back north. He re-adopted his Swiss tourist guise for the trip, with a load of special goodies in his touring backpack for the upcoming summer campaign.

Six

Late in the spring of 1999, I fulfilled over 15 years of dreaming and 3 years of saving, planning and preparation and broke ground on what was to become our home in the country. My wife and I were DINKs, which stands for double income no kids. My wife is very frugal, me not so much. We had been saving for several years and also had some equity in a condo in town. The business was growing, the economy was good and we both had steady incomes, so we went for it. We already owned the land. I had purchased it when I first arrived in the area in the late 80's. Our plan was to spread construction out over 2 or 3 years and self-finance. I did as much of the construction work as I could, on weekends and during slow business times. When I got involved in a particular house project that I could not put on hold to help my own computer customers, I passed their calls to other techs in the group.

It isn't a big house when compared to the McMansions that were being built nearly all over the country at that time – about 1500 square feet. It was a rustic pole frame cabin design, which was unusual enough that it required a structural engineers stamp on the architectural drawings. This design allowed for an elevated living floor which was necessary to acquire a building permit on our 1.5 acre parcel located in the hundred year floodplain. Using a pole frame also saved us some money on foundation costs. The rustic nature of the design allowed me to avoid finish carpentry, which is not my strong suit.

After about two and a half years we had the final construction inspection in mid-November and moved in on Thanksgiving Day, 2001. There was still a lot of finish work to be done, but the house was livable and we were ready to rough it as folks living the country lifestyle do. Things had pretty much gone according to plan. However, construction projects almost always end up costing more than anticipated. As a result, we had to borrow $20k from my wife's twin sister. I got that paid off by early 2003 and we owned it, such as it was, free and clear. At the housewarming, I told everyone "don't laugh, it's paid for", and asked them to overlook both the unfinished and amateurish elements for that reason.

In hindsight, due to the recent and ongoing pop of the real estate bubble, the self-financing of construction was among the best ideas I had. Not only did we cut way down on costs by saving on construction financing, mortgage loan fees and interest, we also completely missed out on the entire 2008 mortgage debacle. Even after the bubble burst and home sale values plummeted, we still have less invested than the post-bubble valuation of our home. Being frugal saved us, big time.

Despite those advantages, DIY (do-it-yourself) still translated into a hell of a lot of work. It was also stressful at times. The most stressful point was at the end of the first fall. After the intensive first 5 months we had it all framed up, sheathed in, roofed and sealed with weather wrap barrier. At that point I suddenly came to appreciate how much work I had set myself up for. I felt completely trapped, "hoist by my own petard", if you will. It was a "be careful what you wish for" type of personal revelation.

Another unexpected result was that, in the process of building the house I learned a great deal more about both construction and design. In the midst of construction, I was able to modify the design quite a bit on the fly. In the final analysis, the house I built did not turn out to be the idealized design that I had in mind, because the ideal changed in the process. However, I also learned enough to know there was no way I would ever consider building another one. In spite of some inevitable compromises we have both come to appreciate our house in the quiet, peaceful countryside. My wife has done what she always does, she made this new house into our home and we have been happy living here.

7: The Summer of Love begins

Shortly after his arrival back in the capital city area, he purchased a pickup truck from a young kid. To conceal his identity during the purchase, he used a fake name and wore one of his favorite disguises. He became a white shoed old duffer, complete with bad hairpiece and checked polyester sport coat. He told the kid he was buying the pickup as a graduation gift for his nephew and paid the full asking price in cash. With no intention of filing the title transfer forms with the DMV, he deliberately and immediately "lost" them. By the time the authorities finally talked to the young fellow about his pickup, the description the kid gave from his memory of the old duffer was completely useless. The resulting widely published artists drawing looked like Don Rickles wearing a hairpiece and bore little resemblance to him, even when he was wearing the old duffer disguise.

The spring rains, although diminishing, usually persist up to and through July 4th in the state. Many tourists drive the scenic coast highway on bicycles, cars and RV's starting in June. His first attacks were designed to scare the tourist trade away from the state that summer. With the upcoming weather report favorable to his plans, late one Thursday evening in June he started driving his newly acquired pickup south from the northern end of the coast road.

He had found an old canopy for the truck and had rigged up six 50 gallon drums in the back, along with a 12 volt air compressor, a compressed air reservoir tank and two pneumatic pumps. In three of the drums was a light oil, in the other three was a thick industrial soap. As he drove along, the pneumatic pumps combined the two fluids together into an emulsion, which was piped over to two pneumatic sprayers, one poking out unobtrusively on each side of the truck bed. Operating the 12 volt controls for the sprayers as he drove, he sprayed the oil and soap mixture on the uphill side of many curves of the coast road. That night he drove the highways entire distance along the states coastline, several hundred miles. He only stopped twice, to switch the pump intakes from emptied barrels to full ones.

Late the next morning, Friday, the rain that had been predicted arrived on the coast in a band moving from north to south. By mid-afternoon, reports of multiple traffic accidents started to come in to the state police. By the early evening, as the rush of weekend coast visitors began in earnest, the accident numbers had climbed from dozens to hundreds. The authorities were forced to close entire length of the now slick and dangerous highway. It stayed closed throughout the weekend as road crews pressure washed the soap and oil off the road.

He went to the movies on Saturday, the day after his long coast road trip, starting with the first matinees and continuing all weekend. He didn't stay to watch anything for long. Over the course of the weekend, he released hundreds of black widow spiders. He had hunted and captured these during the last month he had spent down south. As a result, dozens of theatergoers received painful bites before the authorities forced the theater owners to close and bring in exterminators. Shortly thereafter, news reports led the headlines that the state was once again under attack.

As the weekend of the 4th approached, he removed the canopy from the pickup. From one of his buried caches, he dug up and assembled his custom designed super slingshot, made with multiple long elastic bands that were attached to a tough plastic bowl. The whole contraption was rigidly mounted in the bed of the truck, creating a motorized short range mortar. He also had several spherical thermite mortar bombs from the cache. These bombs were precisely made to weigh exactly 1 kilogram – about 2.2 pounds each and had an aluminum foil outer shell. He had embedded and bound powerful magnets into the outer layer, so they would roll towards and firmly attach themselves to ferromagnetic surfaces.

At 3:30 am that Sunday night he drove this rig, the mortar mounted in the bed covered with a tarp, to his point of attack. This was a frontage road along railroad tracks within a quarter mile of a large fuel tank farm located south of the capital city. Arriving there in a spot he had carefully mapped out to be at the mathematically proper firing distance, he set up quickly. In rapid succession, he lit each bombs fuse and then used the custom slingshot rig and his own weight to launch the aluminum spheres in high arcs. They all landed on the slightly rounded top surface of the tanks he aimed them at. All but one bounced and then rolled to a stop on the steel tank tops. Within 5 minutes of his arrival at the spot, he was done with the attack and had quickly re-covered the slingshot mortar with the tarp. He jumped back in the truck and sped away to the north.

Very soon after he left the launch site, the fuses started to ignite the thermite and all kinds of hell began to break loose in his rear view mirror! As they ignited, the bombs melted through the tops of the tanks and dropped superheated burning metal into the huge quantities of fuel and vapor within. Burning fuel vapor spewed skyward in long fiery jets out of the holes in the top of the tanks. One of the bombs, which had bounced and then rolled off the top of the tank that he had aimed it at, had rolled on the ground and attached itself to the side of a tank full of diesel fuel. When it ignited, it melted through the side wall of the tank and burning diesel fuel began to spew out under pressure. It flooded the tank farm with flaming and smoking fuel from below, while several other tanks spewed fire from their tops! Two of the tanks full of gasoline soon superheated and boiling gasoline exploded the tanks under pressure, sending huge fireballs high into the night sky! Before the first responding fire truck approached the scene, the entire tank farm was ablaze!

He drove high up into the mountains and watched the bright distant blaze with binoculars until well after the sunrise illuminated the carnage he had created in the valley below. Well satisfied with the results of his initial strikes of the summer, he drove back to his camp, cooked some eggs and bacon for breakfast and then took a long morning nap. He needed his rest, because he had busy nights planned for the next several months.

Eight

By 2004, I was too busy dealing with incoming call volume to be able to concentrate sufficiently to do computer support work myself. The team of freelance technicians to whom I passed work had grown considerably. My income from their referral fees, although less than what I had earned myself previously, was growing steadily. I found that I could back off from offering computer services myself and concentrate instead on dispatching and managing the business. As the incoming call volume continued to grow, my role went through a natural shift. I went from providing computer services to providing other services to the team of affiliated technicians. The change in my role was necessary if I was going to adapt to the continued growth of the business.

My new role, although less frustrating than working with computer users can be, did have some downsides. For one thing, some nerds tend towards egomania, which can make them difficult to reason with. It can be difficult for a technician who has convinced himself that the sun shines from his own butt to accept that a dis-satisfied customer may have a valid complaint about the quality of his work. This attitude is also frequently detrimental to developing a rapport with customers.

People don't respond well to being made to feel that a technician, supposedly there to help them solve problems, seems to believe that they are idiots and treats them with obvious disdain. Such technicians don't get many repeat calls asking for their help by name and also generate frequent customer complaints about their work. Those two factors tend to limit the number of calls they get passed during the occasional times of slower call volume. Eventually they move on to something else, hopefully to learn humility somewhere.

The affiliation agreement I had with each member of the team had evolved to include an 8 page guidelines document. This contained details of the referral fee structure and conditions under which I would continue to provide ongoing promotional, organizational, dispatch and management services to them. Most of these conditions were "customer-centric", an industry buzzword of the time which basically meant that they were related to customer service. It was basically common sense stuff. I found through hard won experience that it was best to spell these details out clearly from the beginning. The guidelines were in a printed document each affiliated technician could keep and review when needed.

I would characterize the business relationship that I had with the team of techs as sort of a round table of nerds. The business model had evolved into something very similar to the shareware concept used by free-thinking software developers. I worked for and was paid by the affiliated technicians to make my best efforts to keep them as busy as they wanted to be. In return, they paid me referral fees and were to strive to provide the best possible service to referred customers. By doing so, they often gained the repeat business of loyal customers who would call requesting a particular technician by name, most often those techs that had learned to make the effort to establish a rapport. That is my part of our honor system agreement. I give my word that whenever a customer calls requesting a particular technician by name, that technician will always be referred that call, basically receiving the right of first refusal on that call from that customer.

Over time, good technicians would build up a repeat customer base and would need fewer new customer calls to keep them as busy as they wanted to be. As part of our business relationship, the affiliated technicians gained the backing of an organization which allowed them to take vacations or get ill without necessarily losing their repeat customer base. In my dispatcher role covering the phones, I would pass customer calls asking for them to other techs in the group, who would cover for them while they were not available.

Under the affiliation agreement as it had evolved, the technicians agreed to pay me accumulated referral fees twice a month. After the third time that the total exceeded $200, then they paid me $200 plus half of the total that exceeded $200. I called this the profit sharing plan, which I arranged so that the techs who worked a lot received a discount on the cost of my services. If an affiliated technician stopped paying me accumulated referral fees, of course I stopped passing them calls.

Similar to the shareware concept, the technicians paid me referral fees for the services I provided to them for as long as they found them to be valuable. We had a handshake agreement that, when we parted company, they would not subsequently contact or provide computer services to the customers with whom they had worked during the time the affiliation agreement was in effect.

As you might expect, over time there have been a number of technicians for whom the value of the customer base they had developed while affiliated became greater than the importance they placed on honoring their end of the handshake agreement with me. When this happened, while not happy about it, I looked at it as one of the unavoidable costs associated with operating under this business model. I never tried to enforce the handshake agreement except to plead with such techs to keep their word.

As it happened, the technicians who took this route often did not keep the customer base that they had developed while affiliated. The combination of the technician's greed and ethical limitations would become evident. Sooner or later the customers would return to calling for computer help from the honorable and ethical technicians who remained on my team of affiliated independents.

It turned out that the team usually included several technicians who had been affiliated with my business for years, continually paying me for the services I provided to them. I found it to be personally rewarding to work with honorable and ethical technicians who appreciated the value of the services I provided to them. Among other things, the services I provided allowed them to concentrate on working on computers. Also, during occasional periods of slow call volume, I carried the advertising and promotional expenses, so they had very few expenses of their own unless they were working and simultaneously generating income.

In early 2004, a previously affiliated technician filed an unemployment benefits claim against me. I got a call from the state Employment department about the claim. I called back and talked with an Employment Department employee about the case. During that phone conversation I explained first: that I did not consider the affiliated technicians to be employees because they were paid directly by the customers to whom they provided computer service. Second; I also explained that the technicians paid me referral fees. Lastly; I said that I had stopped passing the unemployment claimant customer calls because he had stopped paying me referral fees. After that brief conversation I did not hear anything further from the state Employment Department. I assume that they denied the unemployment benefits claim against me because it was obvious to them that the technicians and I did not have an employer-employee relationship.

9: Small ball

He was well aware that his attack on the tank farm had gotten the full and undivided attention of the authorities. Knowing that the heat was on, he switched his game plan to small ball for a while. Infrastructure was his target once again, but this time spread throughout the state. He planned steady and continuous attacks meant to make things difficult and when possible, timed them for maximum effect.

The first of these was directed at all the bridges along a thirty mile stretch of the long winding river that runs through the capital city. Early one moonlit evening, he started kayaking downstream about 15 miles up from the city. At almost every bridge, there were conduits under or alongside the bridge carrying cables from one side of the river to the other. He stopped his kayak at all of these bridges that night. He attacked the cable conduits on both sides of each bridge, where the pipes came up from underground to connect with the bridge. His pop can incendiary bombs once again did their work, melting through the conduit walls and pouring hot liquid metal down inside the pipes, destroying lengths of the wiring within. Fiber optics, telephone and network connections went out all along both sides of the river that night and those connections were not easily nor quickly repaired.

One Monday night he similarly attacked all the traffic boxes controlling major intersections in a city to the north of the capital. Traffic did not return to normal for more than a week and there were dozens of accidents. These resulted from the failure of impatient drivers to work together to overcome the lack of street controls of the many intersections effected. The introduction of one chaotic element into an organized system tends to breed further chaos.

One Thursday night he attacked all the cable TV and internet boxes in another town, wiping out TV and internet service to thousands of households. Many had nothing to do through the seemingly longer than usual weekend but talk to each other, read a book, or go out for a drink. Another night he attacked several remote cell phone towers, lobbing his thermite bombs onto their power supply systems.

On another evening he wiped out a power transformer feeding a minor league baseball stadium, darkening the stadium in the middle of the seventh inning stretch. Then, one unusually hot night in late July, he was inspired and got busy. First, he attacked four power substations inside of just under an hour. This shut down air conditioning systems for thousands of wealthier citizens who could afford air conditioning in a state that only occasionally got warm enough for them to feel the need for it. Within the blacked out area, he then attacked the water supply system of one of the oldest towns in the state, draining the water pressure onto the streets. Then he set the quaint historic tourist trap heart of the town ablaze with his incendiaries.

With his ongoing activities in the news, the reports renewed interest in his manifesto among anarchists and activists. Their re-inspired efforts began to multiply as an army of one became an army of ten, then fifty. His activities began to blend in with those of others he had inspired, making it more difficult for law enforcement to discern his attacks from others. He made concerted efforts to vary his materials and methods to further hide his own trail.

As the states longest summer wore on, he and the anarchists and activists were all doing their damnedest to screw up the system. The state's tourist oriented businesses were going bust. Things were frequently not working, communications were often difficult, the cost of everything was rising steadily, gasoline and diesel fuel was outrageously expensive and were in short supply. People started leaving the state in droves, either to vacation or to move elsewhere where things were more peaceful, safer, less frustrating. Everyone remaining in the state was on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

By the time Labor Day arrived, the well oiled engine of business was having real trouble operating in an increasing difficult environment. Chaos and hysteria seemed ascendant and something had to be done. The state chamber of commerce offered a million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the ringleaders of the terrorist cell responsible. The law enforcement authorities were flooded with tens of thousands of worthless tips. Small ball can be a beautiful game when played right.

Ten

In the early spring of 2008, the general economy in our area started to slow. The multiple economic hits raining down upon the nation had created a perfect storm. In the previous year, gas prices had skyrocketed, the credit and real estate markets had all but closed up shop, the American auto industry needed a jump re-start, the stock market dived. In the midst of a changing of the guard and already massively in debt, the feds could do little but blindly borrow, print and throw money at the growing list of problems facing it. State and local governments also faced insurmountable deficits. The storm waves rippled west, washing out the underpinnings of local economies all across the country.

Having started in early February, the most recently affiliated technician in the group was the first to feel the pinch that March. He had not been affiliated long enough to establish a repeat clientele, a group of regular customers calling and requesting him by name, so he still relied on my passing him new customer calls to keep him busy. The overall volume of those new customer calls decreased considerably that March. As always, I distributed and dispatched any new calls that did come in among all the techs, not just the new guy.

Suddenly, all the techs with a longer history in the group were getting fewer calls from their repeat customers, as money tightened up in the local economy that spring. The entire pie was shrinking, so everyone was getting a smaller piece. That is the common experience in a major recession. Of course, in the sense of the economy as a whole, those even less fortunate were the ten percent or more whose businesses failed or who found themselves out of work.

As a result of the slowdown, the new tech approached me in late March, asking for more calls. I explained that he was low man on the totem pole and that any extra calls I might pass to him would be taken from someone else equally as deserving. I suggested that, if he needed more work, he could expand his efforts to find more work himself. After all, he was an independent contractor and was capable of finding and serving customers himself, as well as helping those I found for him.

For his own reasons, he did not make the scheduled early April referral fee payment for customers that I had referred to him and who had paid him for service during the last half of March. As a result of that move on his part, I stopped passing him any calls, since I had other techs who were still paying me referral fees as they promised per the terms of our affiliation agreement. About a month after my last conversation with the new tech, in the last week of April, I received a message from the state Employment Department, informing me that he had filed a claim for unemployment benefits, listing me as his employer. I returned the call, expecting to have a similar conversation as I had had in 2004 with another state Employment Department employee under the same circumstance. It did not work out that way at all.

11: Natural Camouflage

Besides switching to small ball, he also changed up his modus operandi in other ways after the tank farm attack. He spent much less time camped in the hills. Instead, he adopted a couple of different urban roles as camouflage. The first was that of a homeless old man living out of an old pickup. The second was very similar, a homeless person slightly lower on the food chain, seemingly owning merely a bicycle with a trailer and a plastic bin for his belongings. In this second role he slept under bridges and overpasses in poor weather, out in the brush on clearer nights.

In either role he had lots of company, others in similar straits to blend in among. He came to be known to the regulars and got to know some of them as well. Through the summer and into the fall, he moved around a lot from town to town, staying in the state. He had hidden supplies of materials, cash, clothing, etc. stashed in buried caches all over the state. He moved around carefully, with a lot of forethought before he did anything and he kept his eyes open. If they got on to him somehow, he knew they would move quickly and that there would be little if any forewarning before they closed in.

His natural camouflage worked in his favor. He really was a homeless old man. In his early 70's, he was lean and wiry, his heart and wind were still good. However, he didn't have to lose much sleep to look unhealthy and incapable of waging war against the state. Although in pretty good shape for his age, it wasn't much of an act to put on a tired, beaten down look and fake a hitch in his git-a-long.

Since the Sheriff had seized and sold his much loved country home more than 10 years prior, he had no place he felt he could call home. In fact, he felt like a stateless person, a man without a country. He knew that the war he was fighting against the state was his last hurrah. He was determined to carry this banner to his grave. In a way he felt blessed that he had been given a cause to fight and die for. He was going to die - sooner, rather than later anyway, why not die standing up for something?

Twelve

The bureaucrats working for the state Employment Department seem to me to be comparable to horses in harness wearing blinders, but I can understand where they are coming from,. As for the Administrative Law Judge that held the telephone hearing and the state Appeals Court Judges who reviewed the hearing transcript along with my petition requesting their review, well, understanding their position is much more difficult for me. The bureaucrats, besides having an enforcement role, also seem to believe that they have a role in shaping public policy. Employment law has been evolving over many centuries, but in this case they are taking a leap that defies logic and reason. It also has ramifications that none of the state officials involved seem to be able to think far enough ahead to perceive.

There is one linchpin among all the absurd interpretations the Employment Department bureaucrat's have made, without which they are unable to levy the unemployment insurance payroll tax. It is their interpretation that a portion of the amounts paid to the affiliated technicians by the customers constitutes taxable payroll for me. To arrive at the amount of the technicians wage or compensation, they deduct the cost of whatever parts or software the technician purchased on the customers behalf, as well as the referral fee that the technician paid me. It is their contention that the resultant amount is my taxable payroll for that job. I call their interpretation my phantom payroll.

The state Employment Department's argument in support of their interpretation is that I indirectly pay that amount to the technician. They seem to be extending the indirect payment concept from a recent unemployment benefits case involving musicians and agents. In that prior case, the record company paid the musician's agent for a concert held in the state and the agent paid the performer after deducting the agency fee. The record company tried to avoid paying the unemployment insurance payroll tax by claiming that they had not paid the performer, the agent had. The Employment Department won their case against the record company with the indirect payment argument.

In my case they are extending that indirect payment argument a lot further than it can stretch. First, there are no monies originating from my accounts directed to anyone which eventually get to the technicians pockets. Second, for any given quarter or year, the amount of my phantom payroll is about three times the total income of my business, which is the sum of the referral fees I am paid by the technicians.

If I was to deduct the amount of my phantom payroll from my income as a business expense, on the books I would be losing big money each and every year. I would also really be in trouble, having committed tax fraud simply by applying the state Employment Department's phantom payroll concept to real world accounting. This is why I call it a phantom payroll, since it has no reality as a payroll beyond their interpretation, that interpretation being necessary for them to levy the unemployment insurance payroll tax.

After their audit of my accounts and my referral records, the state Employment Department sent me the results. Their bill showed the totals that they had reached for my phantom payroll, going back to January 1, 2006. They fixed that date as the beginning of my employment relationship because the related state law supposedly changed in relevant ways as of that date. Along with my payment of the payroll tax and 18% interest going back to that date, I was required to sign a statement certifying that their figures were a true and accurate accounting of my payroll for the time period of their audit. So not only were they levying a phantom payroll tax upon me, but they were requiring me to sign a confession, if you will, certifying the "truth" of their phantom payroll concept and the accuracy of their audit results.

Furthermore, if were to I sign this confession, I would be subject to further penalties and interest from the state Department of Revenue. These penalties are for failure to file quarterly payroll reports for the entire period, starting January 1, 2006. The amount of these quarterly penalties assessed by the Department of Revenue can vary and are still unknown, as well as the interest rate they will charge going back to January 1, 2006. There is no way I can give in to the Employment Department's extortion attempts and sign the confession. Even if I had that much money in hand, I would not pay them anything. The only way to deal with extortionists is to refuse their ultimatums.

Regarding the figures they have come up with, first there is the principal amount. Getting a handle on that figure begins with the quarterly unpaid unemployment insurance tax on my phantom payroll. Added to that is the state Department of Revenue penalty amount assessed per quarter per "employee" for not filing payroll reports. In addition there are the state Department of Justice attorney fees and whatever the Bureau of Labor and Industries may come up with, plus a few other miscellaneous charges. Figuring for all of this begins January 1, 2006.

The next step in the math is estimating the sum of the interest rates charged on all those amounts, which starts with the Employment Department's steeply punitive 18%. Added to that are whatever currently indeterminate other rates will be charged by the other departments who want a piece of me. A pound of my flesh probably would not be sufficient. Currently, my wild guess-timate about how much all this adds up to begins at a minimum of thirty thousand dollars and could easily be twice that much. It could add up to even more if the Department of Revenue tries to collect payroll withholding taxes, a related but somewhat different kettle of fish.

Comparing those amounts with my income from my tax returns, it seems that l was working entirely to pay the state's extortion during all of 2006 and a large portion of 2007. As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but in my case I was ignorant of the Employment department's "interpretation" of the law until the unemployment benefits claim was filed in April, 2008. In other words, during 2006 and most if not all of 2007, I was unknowingly working as an indentured servant, or a slave of the state.

There are further absurdities to relate. If I were to sign their confession and pay the tax, then the technicians would receive W-2 payroll tax forms showing the amounts of the phantom payroll that I did not actually pay them. They would then need to figure out how to account for these phantom amounts on their tax returns. They already have real income that they actually received from the customers and which they deposited into their own accounts. With the receipt of the phantom W2s, they will also have taxable phantom income which they did not actually receive. The tax on this phantom income is supposedly payable with real dollars.

Being an honorable and honest person, I am neither willing nor able to bear false witness, to falsely certify by my signature that I paid the technicians anything, since I have not. As a result I am faced with an ultimatum from the state government in which my only option is to carry my appeal rights forward in the courts. This has already taken nearly three years. The wheels of bureaucracy and justice turn maddeningly slowly. At this point it seems possible that the appeals process could continue beyond my life expectancy. I believe this is a classic example of being "railroaded", i.e. being shanghaied onto a vehicle with no way off until the end of the line is reached.

If I do not prevail at some point in my court battles as I work through the process of using my various appeal rights, then the state can seize and sell my home. By the time my appeal rights are exhausted, at 18% interest plus unknown other penalties and interest, the value of my house will likely not be sufficient to pay the rapidly compounding total. In order to limit these amounts, the only thing I can control is the principal amount. The only thing I can do to limit that is to shut down my business. I did so as of December 31, 2010.

13: His Odd Epiphany

He varied his methods, but still had favorite themes to his attacks that he tended to stick with. He knew this might eventually lead the authorities to him, but he didn't care. He liked to use natural elements such as fire and water to aid in his attacks or to increase the damaging effects. He did not care for explosives, but did use them on rare occasions, simple and readily available gunpowder being his explosive of choice. Keeping things simple was also a common theme. He had sufficient knowledge of electronics that he could devise timers and other medium tech devices to aid in his attacks. However, he favored low tech such as simple fuses in most cases.

His favorite material for causing all sorts of incendiary damage was thermite. He had first seen its power demonstrated in high school chemistry lab. For a time in his late teens and early twenties he had studied chemistry, planning to become a chemist or chemical engineer. As a result he could easily prepare the necessary ingredients in the correct proportions for such a simple reaction.

Thermite is a mixture of powdered aluminum and powdered rust – iron oxide. When ignited, the reaction produces aluminum oxide and iron, as well as a lot of heat, which is why it is called thermite. Due to the quantity of heat released, the iron and aluminum oxide are produced in their liquid form, molten metal. The oxygen used in the combustion of the aluminum in the thermite reaction is not necessarily taken from the air. As the reaction occurs the oxygen is shifted from the rust to the aluminum. Once ignited, if the proportions of the mixture are correct, then the thermite reaction will even continue underwater.

There was an odd epiphany that struck him one day while working on using thermite for one of his attacks. It suddenly occurred to him that it might play a big part in removing the King Kong sized monkey that had been riding the nations back for decades, namely the addiction to fossil fuels. His thought was that, if the engineering challenges could be overcome, the thermite reaction might be controlled and used in a heat engine. A thermite combustion driven engine design might be used to propel vehicles in some comparable fashion to the fossil fuel driven internal combustion engines used in current vehicles.

The epiphany continued as he also realized that the aluminum oxide end product of the thermite reaction could be recycled. It could be returned to recycling plants in the vicinity of solar electric generating plants, perhaps co-located with nuclear plants for a source of night time power. These plants could be located in sparsely populated, solar energy rich areas of the desert southwest. Using solar or nuclear generated electricity, the aluminum oxide could then be electrically disassociated. That is how most aluminum is currently separated from aluminum oxide ore, called bauxite.

Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the electrochemical process used to disassociate aluminum oxide, but the amounts produced would be minimal in comparison to fossil fuel combustion. The production of carbon dioxide at this point in the cycle also makes it relatively easy to control and limit its release into the atmosphere. Having been regenerated, the powdered aluminum portion of the thermite fuel could then be redistributed to refueling stations. As most know, it is relatively easy to produce the other portion of thermite fuel - rust. As they say, rust never sleeps.

Using the thermite reaction in this manner could create a solar/nuclear power driven cycle that could theoretically continue indefinitely. Energy from the sun directly harnessed to propel motorized vehicles in an environmentally friendly manner – what a strange thought to result from his campaign of destruction! After thinking about it for a while, he decided to keep this revelation about thermite to himself. After all, he was a homeless, stateless person. He had been extorted and robbed by the government. His constitutional rights had been violated and his home had been seized by the state.

Fourteen

The decision that it is necessary to close down my business took nearly three years to reach. During that time I went through the beginnings of an education on the subject of employment law and a refresher on civics and constitutional law. I fought a defensive battle with the state bureaucracy, facing a great deal of uncertainty about the future. The uncertainties I faced were compounded in several ways.

First, the Employment Department seems to have been gaming the system since the beginning. Serving that end, they have generally refused to answer questions from me. Most of the details that I have learned about their interpretations and contentions in this case have been revealed to me during the course of the telephone hearing and the subsequent back and forth of petition and response during the Court of Appeals judicial review.

Second, the local economy has gradually worsened since the unemployment benefits claim was filed in April, 2008. It has been difficult to make any expenditure of time and money into the business. Such expenditures are necessary to keep the business growing in this economic environment, but making them is wasteful if the business model is not viable. I will continue my fight to prove that the business model is viable, but it may be years before someone in a position of authority is forced to admit it.

Third, I was not getting rich operating the business. Under the business model, I was not a business owner raking in profits over and above my salary. Instead, I have been making a decent living wage by providing promotional and organizational services to a team of independent computer consultants. If I was to charge them more than those services were worth to them, they would stop paying me and I would not blame them for doing so, since I would do the same in the same circumstance.

The end result is simple; the methods of the state Employment Department have made it impossible for me to continue to operate the business while I battle with them through the courts. Part of the responsibility for allowing this injustice can be placed at the feet of the state legislature. Another part can be assigned to the office of the Governor, but the majority of the responsibility lies with the Administrative Law section and the state Court of Appeals. Supposedly to protect the unemployment benefits of one disgruntled former technician, the rights of all involved have been infringed upon, but the judges seem to be asleep at their posts.

Prior to performing any computer services for referred customers, that former technician read, understood and accepted the terms and guidelines of the affiliation agreement. The agreed upon terms include his status as an independent contractor, accepting full responsibility for his own work. Of even greater significance, he accepted payment directly from the customers I referred to him, accepted their money in payment for his services to them.

This is the initial false premise that the employment department has failed to recognize as such. His acceptance of that payment from the customer for his services created a completed and paid service transaction. As the law is written, there are two options in that circumstance. First, he is an employee and the customer is his employer. Second, and much more likely, he is a self-employed independent contractor and the customer is just a customer. As a result of the law limiting the possibilities to those two, and only two options, he cannot possibly also be my employee in the same transaction.

At his own option, he spent or deposited their payments in his account, fulfilling the definition of income from self employment. In almost 15 years, among the scores who might have done so, there have only been two former technicians to request unemployment benefits. The state Employment Department apparently denied the request of the first in early 2004.

The rights of customers have been infringed because they have been denied access to a business choice in a supposedly free market. At one point one of the upper level Employment Department bureaucrats actually said to me that it was their job to "level the playing field". The business model I developed allowed the operation of the business with a lower overhead than if I had chosen to hire consultants as employees back in 1995. That lower overhead allowed for more reasonable rates, saving the customers money.

In addition, under my business model, independent consultants in business for themselves had a greater incentive to provide good customer service. They could develop a closer, longer term relationship and rapport with each customer. As a result they earned more, both in the short and long term, by striving for excellence. So, under my business model, the customers paid less and received better service for their money. They have now lost that option, an infringement of their rights by the state government, which is supposed to work to maintain the rights of consumers in a free market.

The Administrative Law Judge that held the telephone hearing was somewhat fixated on comparing my business to other referral based businesses, which I found to be especially meaningless, immaterial, irrelevant, whatever. My business was filling a need in the community and was doing so legitimately. What difference does it make whether there are similar businesses to compare it to?

In my layman's opinion, the independent consultant's rights have been infringed in a number of ways, which I will not list here because the case is ongoing. At some point they may choose to seek their own legal representation and recourse. Basically, under my business model, the independent consultants kept a larger percentage of what the customers paid for their service than they would have under an employment model. They affiliated themselves with larger organization, a group of other independents like themselves, with the benefits of economies of scale and collaboration. They set their own schedules, worked in their own way and used their own tools and methods. The customers, by providing either their feedback complaints or their loyal repeat business, voted on whether those tools and methods were effective and of value to them.

The affiliated technician's expenses were limited and most of their expenses were incurred when they were working and earning. As independents, they maintained the freedom to provide computer services to customers that they found on their own and most did so. They accepted the affiliation guidelines when working with customers that I referred to them. The guidelines were predominately related to effectively serving referred customers. They were an accepted part of the affiliation agreement between us and were mutually understood to be conditions under which that agreement could continue.

While I will readily admit to having been an entrepreneur and a sole proprietor operating a small business, I will not accept that means that I surrendered my own rights as a citizen. Among my rights that have been infringed are: Due process or fairness in judicial proceedings, the right to enter into contracts, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.

The state Department of Justice was somewhat fixated on a couple of issues in their response to my petition for judicial review by the state Court of Appeals. Their first fixation was on the lack of a need for "fact-matching" in the precedent cases the Administrative Law Judge quoted in his decision. Logic and reason are supposed to be at the heart of law. In the logical sense, the degree to which a precedent case cited matches the circumstances and facts of the case in question is a direct indicator of the degree to which that precedent is applicable.

They were also fixated on the issue of the ownership of the customers, an issue of their own fabrication. They cited a precedent case involving cleaning contractors and the "ownership" of customers under contract. I responded in my reply brief that, in this case, the customers owned themselves. Under the business model, we did not create obligations for our customers with contracts. Instead, best efforts were made to ensure that their computer support needs were served in a timely and effective manner. The customers were always free to call us, or someone else, the next time they needed computer help.

There were almost 4000 customer names in the database by 12/31/2010, the date that I shut down the business. Most of them were repeaters and many of those have called repeatedly for years. No contracts were involved and so there were no customer ownership issues until the state Department of Justice created them. Customers called repeatedly because they got the service they wanted in a timely manner and at reasonable rates.

15: The End of the Summer and Fall of Love

He continued playing small ball through Labor Day and well into October. His favorite small attack was a federal offense, one that he had prepared and planned specifically for this, the second year of his campaign. In one of his caches, he had stashed about a hundred of the mini torches that he used to light the fuses to his thermite bombs. On weekday afternoons in early September, he traveled around looking for mailboxes in business districts that appeared to be filling up with mail. When he saw one, he would surreptitiously drop a lit mini-torch and a capped plastic water bottle full of gasoline into the box. On occasion he would hang around long enough to watch the fire crews bust open the mailbox and hose down the pile of smoldering mail.

In late October he prepared to carry out another of his small ball attacks, which required the camouflage of a Halloween costume to carry out. Late on Halloween eve, wearing a Jabba the Hut fat suit, he rode a bicycle on a pre-planned route through the capital city, stopping at ATMs. He sprayed warm gasoline under pressure into the various slots in each ATM and then lit them up. He did not hang about to watch the fire crews try to figure out how gain entry into these heavily armored devices in order to extinguish the burning currency, receipt rolls and electronics within. Moving fast, he hit about twenty ATMs before he decided it was time to ditch the suit and the bicycle and get out of town. The news reports the following day were full of ATM security camera footage of Jabba the Hut playing his evil trick, neither long ago nor far away.

After Halloween, he changed up the game again, swinging for the fences once more. To jumpstart the new game plan, he pulled his 10 foot long custom built radio controlled blimp out of its cache. He used lightweight lithium ion batteries to power the DC electric motors that spun the propellers that gave him control of its short flight. Very early on the Saturday morning of his attack, he was in position, hidden in the woods about four miles upwind from his target. He waited quietly until almost 11 am and then inflated the blimp from a pressurized hydrogen tank. Once it was fully inflated, he allowed it to rise well above the trees before he released it from the tether line. Using the radio control, he got it headed in the right direction and made his way out of the woods to his next vantage and radio control point, about a half mile from the stadium.

As he arrived there, the stadium gates had only been opened for 5 minutes, with eager college football fans already filing in. The blimp made its short voyage uneventfully and he used the radio controls to guide it over the stadium at low altitude and speed. He had carefully painted the blimp fabric with the state university colors and logo, so it drew applause from the small crowd as it came into their view over the stadium.

At the approximate center of the stadium he released the ten pound soap powder payload from the blimps bomb bay. The fine dry powder dropped and then puffed out into a large white cloud in the light breeze before drifting down into the stadium. Then he set off the igniter which burned a hole in the blimp and lit the hydrogen within. Like the Hindenburg more than a century before, it burned spectacularly as it descended to crash on the playing field.

The cloud of white soap powder had also done its job, fueling an anthrax attack panic among the early birds as they rushed back out the gates. In the parking lot, gung-ho early tailgate partiers also panicked. They jumped into their vehicles and started driving madly around the parking lot, crashing into each other and knocking over their sausage and chicken laden barbecues. One reporter got into trouble by using the phrase, "Oh the humanity!" to describe the frenzied scene on the news that evening.

One night just before Christmas he attacked ATMs in a different city, this time wearing a Santa suit. On a bicycle again, he carried a couple of pressurized cans of expanding polyurethane insulating foam. At each ATM, he inserted the applicator tube into all the accessible slots and cracks, taking extra care to fill the bank card slot. This ATM attack was not as attention getting as setting them on fire, so he was able to attack nearly fifty ATM locations before he decided to ditch the suit and get out of Dodge. He knew that the technicians working to clean the glue like foam that had expanded into all the crannies of the mechanisms would have some choice words for him. Cash was a bit harder to come by in that town for the last minute rush that Christmas.

His last attacks before leaving the state for the winter were on the railroads. He chose three remote railroad tunnels in the mountains for his purpose, which was to hamper railroad freight traffic in and out of the state. Over a 48 hour period that was very busy for him, he drove as close as he could and then hiked the remaining distance to all three tunnels in sequence. When he arrived at each tunnel he dug a long, heavy steel crowbar out of the hiding place he had chosen on his previous visit to scope things out. Wearing a headlamp, he then walked down the tracks to the middle of each tunnel. Once there he used the crowbar to pull the rail spikes on several rails and then shifted the loosened rails out of line.

He had to move fast getting out of the third tunnel. A freight train running late approached the tunnel entrance as he was walking out. He had thought that train had already gone through and that he had plenty of time before the next scheduled train approached. Once he was out of the tunnel he kept on running. He knew that the engines pulling the long freight train would soon run off the rails in the middle of the tunnel. The violent energy released within the confined space would likely cause most of the freight cars to also derail. He did not want to be close to the scene when that happened.

It took railroad crews nearly three months to clear away the derailed engines and freight cars from all three derailments. It took another month to repair the damage to the tunnels, check that they were safe and return the rail lines to service. The job was made especially difficult and time consuming by the winter weather in the mountains, which was cold, wet and miserable.

Sixteen

As a former computer technician, logical reasoning is my strong suit, by nature and by force of habit. It has hampered my ability to accept the "reasoning" of the state Employment Department bureaucrats, at least according to them. The same bureaucrat who said that it was his job to "level the playing field" also once chided me for my use of logic in one of my many vain attempts to reason with him. At the time, I was trying to point out to him that the section of the Unemployment Insurance statute that requires employers to submit true and accurate quarterly payroll reports was also an indicator of a flaw in their phantom payroll concept.

My reasoning was that it is impossible for me to know with certainty how much customers have paid affiliated technicians for several reasons. First, in the most basic sense, it is a transaction in which I am neither the payer nor the payee. Second, the technicians do not always submit their referral fee payments and statements. According to the Administrative Law Judge, this was established as a fact during the telephone hearing. The unemployment benefits claimant did not submit his last batch of statements and referral fees for referred work he did during the second half of March, 2008. He had been paid by customers for work he performed, but without his submission of statements and referral fees, I had no way of knowing that he had done the work, nor the amount he had been paid. However, I did know that I had good reason to stop referring customer calls to him.

Third: it is human nature, both for some less than honorable technicians and also some customers, to seek an advantage, to try to save some money if they can. In easy to understand circumstances, technicians have given customers discounts for cash payments for services rendered. For obvious reasons, receipts are not included in these "cash-under-the-table" type of transactions. If you are not familiar with it, just ask the IRS about this particular aspect of human nature.

If I find out this is happening with a particular technician, I stop referring calls to that technician, since the business model depends on the technician understanding and applying the honor system. The affiliated technicians and I have an old fashioned handshake agreement. We both have to be honorable, both must keep our words for the business model to work.

Strange as it may seem, this is actually one of the advantages of the business model. The unethical and greedy technicians soon show themselves by trying to keep the entire pie, instead of continuing to share a portion with me. That's the way the system works: I start out sharing with them. Then once they have established a base of regular, repeat customers, they continue to share with me, if they are ethical. If they are not ethical, they quit paying me and try to continue to work with as many of the customers that I have referred to them as they can. In spite of the short term loss this represents, I see this as advantageous because I, and most customers, would much rather work with honest and ethical people.

However, such clandestine "cash-under-the-table" payments would still fit the phantom payroll concept and, as the statute is written, should be included in the quarterly payroll report accounting. In this circumstance, however, even if I were to contact each referred customer to verify the amount the technician had been paid, it is highly unlikely that I would always receive an honest answer. To me, the application of logic indicates this as a flaw in their phantom payroll concept. My point is that the legislature would not make requirements of employers with which it was impossible to comply. To date, neither the bureaucrats nor the judges have shown any sign of understanding that point.

The illogic and absurdities in the Employment Department's interpretations multiply like rabbits once you start trying to understand their contentions. At the core of their illogic is an equally absurd over-riding premise, actually expressed to me by a bureaucrat honcho during the telephone hearing. His premise was that the problems that their phantom payroll concept has when introduced to accepted accounting practice and the tax code are not indicators of problems with their interpretations. Instead, his suggestion was that I should have exercised due diligence back in 1995 when I created the business model. This suggestion was made at the same hearing in which he objected to my attempt to introduce evidence related to his department's 2004 decline of unemployment benefits to a former affiliated technician. He objected due to the changes to supposedly relevant sections of the statute that became effective January 1, 2006.

So, according to the stated illogic of the Employment Department bureaucrat honcho, I should have exercised clairvoyant due diligence in 1995 to avoid problems with a supposed change to the law in 2006. I also should accept that their interpretations are not the cause of the accounting irregularities and tax code issues that their phantom payroll concept creates. Instead, it should be obvious to me that my otherwise legitimate business model is the source of these problems. Somehow, their illogic escapes me to this day.

I will say that, as boring as this stuff may seem, if they are successful at leveling the playing field then everyone working will be employees, they will be working for chicken feed and most of them will be working overseas.

17: Indirect Payment?

The day after carrying out his last attack on the railroad tunnels, he ran the pickup over a steep wooded embankment and then boarded a bus headed east. For two weeks he rode buses and trains, using disguises and paying cash for everything. Taking a convoluted zig-zag path, he gradually worked his way to Florida, covering his tracks all the way. Once in Florida, he hitch-hiked to Washington DC, took a commuter train to New York City and boarded a casino bus to Atlantic City, his final destination for a while.

During his six month campaign he had raised hell, spread chaos and inflicted terror. It had taken a toll; he felt really old and needed some R & R. He settled into a rented studio room near the boardwalk, looking forward to several months of naps, long walks, playing blackjack, drinking beer, ogling and talking with exotic dancers.

He knew that his attacks had caused innocent victims injury and also knew that some had died at his hands. He had not even tried to deceive himself in that regard, unlike self righteous politicians and military officials. Their own victims, who had suffered as a result of their actions pursuing some cause, would be politely termed collateral damage. To him, this seemed to demean the suffering of the innocent, to add insult to their injury.

Likewise, if he had fought his campaign against an unfriendly regime, American politicians would not have called him a terrorist and directed law enforcement to pursue him as a criminal. Instead they would have lauded him as a heroic figure, a freedom fighter. In his mind, suffering was suffering, regardless of whether it occurred at the hands of a criminal terrorist or a heroic freedom fighter. He didn't enjoy hurting people, but knew that it took more than discomfort to get people to move, to wake them from their everyday lives. Throughout human history, it has always been true that if there is no pain, there is no gain.

He also did not hold the residents of the state responsible for what the state bureaucracy and legal system had done to him, not even indirectly. Unlike the bureaucrats and judges who had persecuted him, he knew what "indirect" meant. For example, he knew that the American people were not indirectly responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende by the vicious right-wing military junta that took over Chile in 1973. He knew that President Richard Nixon was indirectly responsible for that and that the CIA operatives who helped the junta plan and stage their coup d'etat bore direct responsibility.

He also knew that the junta's military dictator, General Pinochet, was directly responsible for the many years of torture and repression of the people of Chile that followed. The suffering of the Chilean people was not collateral damage in a heroic war on communism. Instead, they were innocent victims of a brutal regime that had been empowered by the illegal acts of a misguided American president. Pinochet and his junta were not freedom fighters, they were terrorists who committed crimes against humanity in the name of their own power and enrichment.

Would you judge that the American people can be held indirectly responsible for acts of murder, rape, torture and repression that have been committed around the world on their behalf? In other words, are the American people indirectly responsible for the wages of these sins, committed by public employees or mercenaries under contract and paid with their tax dollars? Do you also believe that there is a fire and brimstone hell? If your answers are to the affirmative, then logic dictates only one conclusion. There are a lot of Americans down there set to flame broil, with a lot more on the way, including me.

Regardless of that conjecture, he knew that the injuries and suffering that he had directly inflicted upon innocent victims around the state were not indirect payback for what was done to him by the states bureaucracy and legal system. He was fighting a terrorist war against the state bureaucracy and had injured and killed innocent victims in the process. He believed that the potential gain, the re-affirmation and re-institution of the constitutional rights of individuals, was sufficient to counter balance the pain he had caused in the process. His infliction of pain on innocent victims was necessary to achieve the gain.

Similarly, he recognized that the injuries and injustices that had been inflicted upon him had been necessary to awaken him to the erosion that had occurred in the constitutional rights of citizens like himself. They had made a mistake in awakening him, as they were learning with each of his attacks. Pain and gain have a cause and effect relationship in human history, there is no escaping it. There is also no denying the progress that has been painfully gained over the centuries.

Eighteen

Now that I have been separated from my niche and my occupation, my posture in this case has shifted from the defensive. Having nothing left to lose and still under the circumstances of being railroaded with no other option but to fight, I am now on the offensive. My analogy for the conflict is that I am trapped in a never-ending demolition derby, playing chicken with a bunch of zombies. Being zombies, of course they are dead from the scalp down, with no agenda but to eat brains – i.e. collect taxes. They also have no understanding of what they have to lose.

The zombies on the opposing side are several state executive branch bureaucracies, the legislature and apparently also the state judiciary. Among the state executive branch bureaucracies are the Employment Department and the Administrative Law section. The Administrative Law judges, although called judges, are not employed by the state judiciary. They are actually attorneys hired as employees of the Employment Department and given the title of Administrative Law Judge.

The office of the Governor, the state Department of Justice, and the state Department of Revenue are also state bureaucracies that I count among my opposition. The Bureau of Labor and Industries is supposedly in there as well. The Department of Justice is the legal representation for the Employment Department in these types of cases. Among the growing multitude of charges accumulating for me in this case, I am also responsible to pay their legal fees.

In addition, I am also responsible for the cost of transcription of the telephone hearing tapes. These were transcribed in order for the Court of Appeals to be able to read the hearing transcript for their judicial review of the hearing. The Administrative Law Judge made his decision based upon his presence presiding over the telephone hearing. He may have also listened to the 8 hours worth of hearing tapes before he reached his decision.

The Governor's office has the constitutional responsibility for supervision of executive branch bureaucracies, but they abdicated that responsibility. Fairly early on in the case, I suspected things were not right and wrote several letters to the office of the Governor. These were passed on directly to the Employment Department. This in spite of my contention that they were not doing things right and needed supervision. Eventually, after several more letters, I received the first and only reply that I was to get from the Governors office. It said that they were not going to reply further and that I should stop writing them.

Instead of abdicating their constitutional supervisory responsibility over state executive branch agencies, the Governors office really needs to set up a state Ombudspersons office. Citizens have a constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances and should have additional opportunity to request such help beyond the courts. Judges in the state judiciary will only converse with attorneys recognized by the state bar, mere citizens have no standing in court.

All of these groups represent the state Goliath that I am up against. Not yet drawn into the fray is the states gargantuan big brother, who also happens to be my uncle, Samuel. So it is yet to be determined whether Samuel will side with Goliath, or with me, his nephew. On one hand, Samuel actually pays for a great deal of the budget of most state's Employment Departments. In addition, I suspect that most of the language of state unemployment insurance law is derived directly from federally supplied boilerplate.

On the other hand the IRS seems to have considerable stake in this case. One obvious stake is their frequently applied definition of income. Another potential stake for the IRS is the advantage of the burden of proof. In nearly all types of state and federal tax cases, except criminal income tax evasion, the burden of proof is placed upon the defendant. In the telephone hearing, it was up to me to prove that the Employment Department's determination that I am an employer was incorrect.

Tyrannical institutions have long misplaced the burden of proof in this way. This is the reason it was placed instead upon the prosecution in criminal cases by the constitution our forefathers crafted here in the USA. The expression "innocent until proven guilty" is derived from this idea. The constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment is based on this idea.

The reason that the burden of proof is so easily misused is related to a concept of logic. Simply stated, it is very difficult to prove a negative premise. For example, the Spanish Inquisition demanded that those accused prove, often under the duress of torture, that they were not heretics. In the '50s, McCarthy's senate hearings similarly tried to require that blacklisted individuals prove that they were not communists. The former Soviet Union required those accused of dissent to prove that they were not insane. The state legislature enacted a provision of law that requires accused entrepreneurs like me to prove that they are not employers.

The burden of proof disadvantage is so great, the process takes so long and is so prohibitively expensive, that most entrepreneurs don't fight this battle once they are accused. They just kowtow to the bureaucrats, take their lumps and pay the tax. Then they raise their business rates, because for any business to survive, the customer must always pay for everything, including taxes, fairly levied or otherwise.

19: Lightning strikes

He returned to the state just after Labor Day. Once again he bought a vehicle from a private party, paying full price in cash, with no intention of registering it. This time he bought an inconspicuous economy car, about ten years old. From there, he went on to pick up some stuff from a couple of hidden caches. Then he was ready to make his attacks for the year, this time over only a four day span.

Starting from the southwest corner of the state and following a carefully preplanned route programmed into a GPS, he drove a zigzag path working gradually to the north. Using a small 12 volt air compressor and a custom pneumatic firing gun, his ammo for this attack were small clear plastic screw together balls that usually contain cheap prizes in gumball machines. Within each of the balls were a firecracker, dozens of wooden match heads, a watch battery and a small circuit board of his own design and manufacture. When the light faded at dusk on the fourth day, it closed a circuit that caused a wire to overheat, glow and then ignite the match heads and the short fuse on the firecracker. When the firecracker exploded, it popped the plastic ball apart and threw flaming match heads in a ten foot circle.

He had about two hundred of these devices with him. From within the car and without stopping, he shot them into the tinder dry grass and brush all over the timber rich western half of the state, working his way north as he did so. After almost three days and nights of this, his attack route ended in the northwest corner of the state. He took a motel room overlooking the ocean and the wide mouth of the large river that was the state's northern border. He got some sleep and then spent several hours scanning the horizon with binoculars.

Eventually he saw what he had been waiting and watching for loom into view. He showered, shaved and dressed in dark sweats and running shoes. Then he went to a fast food joint, ate a quick meal and got back on the road. He stopped and made a few final preparations in a beachfront park. Watching his target with his binoculars, he waited a bit more and then headed towards the bridge as darkness was falling. To the south, the first batch of his match head incendiaries started to pop and ignite brush and forest fires on the hillsides he had targeted.

He drove up onto the long high bridge over the river mouth, slowing and stopping briefly at a point directly over the shipping channel. He turned off his engine and turned on his emergency flashers. A few cars that were behind him went around him without stopping. Then he used another pneumatic firing mechanism, this one larger but similar in design to the match head ball firing device.

In rapid succession he ignited the fuses of, and then fired three spherical 5 pound thermite bombs over the railing of the bridge. They all landed on the deck of the large ocean going liquefied propane gas tanker that was passing slowly under the bridge. The tankers destination was an LPG offload terminal near the states northern port city, about 25 miles upriver. It did not make it there.

He was only stopped on the bridge for about 30 seconds and did not get out of the car. Having completed his attack, he turned off the emergency flashers and restarted the car. Then he continued across the bridge and drove off into the night. Less than ten minutes after they landed on the deck of the tanker, the fuses of his incendiary bombs lit the thermite, which melted through the tanker shell and ignited the vast quantity of LPG fuel within. The tanker suddenly flared bright and then exploded violently, with another of his signature sky high fireballs. The broken and smoking hull of the tanker sank very shortly thereafter, blocking the shipping channel. Liquefied propane and propane gas spread out over the surface of the river for miles, evaporating and burning. For a time, the outlet of one of the greatest rivers in the world was a river of fire.

He drove east for almost 60 hours, stopping only to take several cat naps in rest stops. Finally he left the interstate and drove the car into a vacant lot in a rundown portion of a Midwestern city. He grabbed his daypack and also a gas can out of the trunk. He took the plates off the car, doused it with gas and then set it on fire. Then he jogged a couple miles through the waking city, discarding the plates in a dumpster after a while. Arriving in the downtown area, he went into a diner and had breakfast while he watched the news reports.

A rash of fires had broken out all over the western half of the state he had left behind. Consecutive satellite images from the previous three nights showed a series of bright orange spots spreading from south to north. Aerial photos from the first night showed the river on fire. The last nights satellite pictures showed a multitude of brush and forest fires, with some to the south that had grown larger and linked up with others. The morning news also replayed a newscast from the previous evening. The governor had declared a state of emergency, called out the National Guard and also requested help from the feds and neighboring states to battle the multitude of blazes that threatened to consume the western half of the state.

It appeared that he had successfully raised hell once again. He thought about the law enforcement officials behind him. It seemed highly likely that they would be closing in, and sooner rather than later. There had to be a lot of resources being brought to bear and many thousands of man hours being expended to track him down. Having completed three series of attacks over two years, he had inflicted serious damage on the state, its economy and people. They would not be leaving any stones unturned, even ones somewhat hidden in time like his story. He decided not to push his luck further. The next and final step had to be the endgame. He did not want to be captured and become a clown in a legal and media circus.

He would finish this on his own terms. After breakfast, he walked over to the downtown terminal. He bought a ticket and soon was on a bus headed south. He had a full belly and was really looking forward to a nap. His lightning strike series of attacks on the state had tired him out.

Twenty

There aren't so many people on my side of this case, namely just me and my wife. She's along for the ride because she loves and supports me. I can't help but love her sweet heart, she stands by me without question. Sometimes she even laughs at my jokes!

The other side also has the advantage that I am burdened with proving a negative. In spite of the mismatched numbers and their unfair advantage, we got 'em just where we want 'em, because I also have logical reasoning on my side. The opposition shanghaied me into this marathon exercise in futility with an initial false premise, supported in this premise by the placement upon me of the burden of disproof. Despite the nature of the difficulties involved in bearing and overcoming the burden of proof and despite my failure to find an official or judge willing to listen to reason to this point, I am still hopeful and confident that I will eventually prevail.

It is in the nature of false premises, once you become invested in them, that you become trapped in a self-defeating cycle. You find yourself proposing and attempting to defend increasingly absurd premises to support your original false premise. You just get further and further out on the limb. The original false premise is the termite queen eating the limb you are out on. You then find it necessary to come up with further false premises in an attempt to support your original false premise. These are the growing colony of the termite queen's babies, all also steadily weakening the limb that you have chosen to sit upon.

Another advantage on our side is the fact that many of the "public employees" working as upper level bureaucrats for the state Employment Department are ineffectual. They have the burden-of-proof advantage that I must prove them incorrect and as a result they have become used to successfully bullying entrepreneurs. This makes them arrogant, lazy and thick-headed. For example, there's the honcho Employment Department bureaucrat that suggested that I should have exercised clairvoyant due diligence in 1995 about a change in the law that went into effect in 2006.

This is the same state official that the Governor's office forwarded my letters to. This is the state official that spent several months supposedly "working" to reach the determination that I am an employer. In my first letter to the Governors office, I mentioned the profit sharing plan that is part of the verbal agreement that I have with the affiliated technicians. The profit sharing plan is not included in the guidelines document upon which the Employment Department has been fixated. When it came up during the telephone hearing, this state official was apparently unaware of the profit sharing plan. He apparently had not read my first letter to the Governor.

During the telephone hearing, I asked this state official several revealing questions while he was under oath. Among them I asked him, while he was "determining" that I am an employer, whether he had asked me a single question about my business. He answered that he did not believe so. I also asked him for an approximate percentage of cases in which the supposed employer was paid by the supposed employees. He answered that he could only make an educated guess that zero percent of employers are paid by their employees for services. I asked him whether my case in question constituted a test case for the Employment Department. He answered that it did not. I asked him whether he, or anyone under his supervision in his section, had ever spoken to anyone at the state Department of Revenue about their phantom payroll concept. He said not that he was aware of.

In economics, there are only two basic types of transactions, those involving material goods and those involving services. With their referral fee payments to me, the affiliated technicians are not buying goods from me; they are paying me for services that I have provided to them. Although it may take a while, I look forward to the time that will come when these jokers start doing what all entrenched upper level bureaucrats do when they feel threatened. First, they circle the wagons. Then they start looking for scapegoats. I suggest to each of them in advance that, if you don't already know who the scapegoat is going to be, then it is probably you!

21: The Chicken & Egg / Humpty Dumpty Scenario

Using buses and trains, he took another zig-zag route to his next destination, Las Vegas. He didn't plan to stay for long, but he did plan to have some fun while he was there. In the process, he heard a couple of interesting things. First, a drunk in a strip club told him a little known secret about Vegas, namely how abnormally high the suicide rate was for residents and visitors alike. The same drunk also told him a one liner about Vegas – "Come here on vacation, leave on probation!"

While traveling on his way there, he spent a lot of time thinking about how he had come to be on this road. He knew that many people would dismiss him as insane and his actions as evidence of that. He thought some more about the guy who had flown his light plane into the IRS building fifteen years prior. That guy had been dismissed as insane and quickly forgotten. As he recalled, it seemed that the news reporting which briefly followed the poor guy's futile act hardly touched on seeking reasons behind it. Insanity seemed to have been explanation enough.

He wondered about insanity though. It seemed to him that a Chicken-Egg/Humpty-Dumpty Scenario might well apply to the question. Which came first, the insanity or the guy's problems with the IRS? Did he fall off the wall of reason on his own, or was he pushed?

He also wondered about his own sanity. He knew it was late to consider the possibility that his attacks were not the actions of a sane person. He did not feel insane, but if he was, would he be able to recognize it within himself? Perhaps instead of making his 10+ years of plans and preparations he should have sought counseling and anger management therapy. The counselors might have suggested to him that he should redirect his rage into a positive outlet, telling him it would be therapeutic to write about his experience and his anger about it. He decided to have done that would not have helped, would not have prevented him from conducting his campaign, but only served to focus his rage further.

The decade spent in planning and preparations had actually helped him to work through his reasoning for the war against the state. His attacks may be judged by others to have been insane, but the enemy was real and their wrongful persecution had been real. There was no doubt in his mind that they had provoked him. If one deliberately stomps on something that may be a snake, then one should not be surprised at being bitten. The snake is not blamed for biting back, he has been tread upon and naturally he will bite back. The fault for the response is rightfully left with the idiot who made the ill advised decision to tread on the snake.

By the time he arrived in Sin City, he had worked that all out in his mind. He was ready to have some fun. More so than most, he also didn't give a damn whether what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. He felt fully committed to, and also prepared for, the endgame.

Twenty Two

Without payment in the equation, the difference between employment and self-employment as described in the state law becomes highly subjective. Historically, employment relationships are about transactions, contracts and the balance of power. Since the advent of money with the first coins minted more than 2500 years ago, employers have paid employees and customers have paid self-employed independent contractors.

Part and parcel with that payment, employers have financial power, known as direction and control, that they hold over their employees. Within an written or verbal employment contract, also known as a contract of service for pay, the employer makes a promise of payment to an employee. Acting under the authority of state law, the state regularly enforces this promise of payment. According to the law it doesn't matter if an employee shows up for work and spends all his time there picking his nose. Until the employer terminates the employment contract and fires the employee, the promise of payment must be kept. Under the agreement that I had with the affiliated technicians, they promise to pay me, not vice versa.

Also included in the employment contract, either in written or verbal form, are the elements of direction and control. These specify the requirements that the employer places on the employee and also the terms under which the employer can terminate the contract. When direction and control terms are present in a service contract, they help differentiate between that employment contract and the other type of service contract, that which is used between a customer and an independent contractor, known as a contract for services.

A contract for services can also be in written or verbal form. In it, the customer does not make a rigid promise of payment like an employer does, but instead terms are included which specify when and how the contracted work is to be completed and the customers payment will be made. So, independent contractors do not work under rigid direction and control like employees do. Instead, they operate with a greater degree of autonomy than employees. They work for themselves on their own schedules, promising only results according to the terms of the agreement they have with their customer, who pays them for those results.

A specific provision of the state unemployment insurance tax law says that, when someone is paid to perform a service, there are only two possible options in regards to their status. They must either be an employee, or, if the conditions for an exception to employment are met, they may be an independent contractor. However, the Administrative Law Judge in my case refused to consider my argument that, by virtue of my service to the affiliated techs and their payments to me for those services, our business relationship should be determined according to that provision.

This same provision was actually used against me by the Employment Department, once again relying upon and extending their phantom payroll concept further than it can stretch. Apparently state bureaucrats and judges only consider and apply laws, even simply and clearly stated provisions like that one, when it suits their purposes.

Independent contractors are a significant and necessary micro-economic force. Most, but not all are working on the lowest level of the economy. They represent the smallest of small businesses. Many of them do not register a fictitious business name, instead they choose to do business using their own names. In spite of their precarious position and the important role they play in the economy, the state, specifically the state employment department is not their friend.

In addition to the "leveling the playing field" idea, I have also heard that the state employment department auditors have been telling business owners, managers, and bookkeepers that they should not be writing checks to individuals names, if they want to avoid employment issues. First, this sounds a lot like a government run protection racket. It also sounds to me like state interference in the performance of contracts between individuals and the companies they serve. Any class action law firms paying attention out there? I suspect that there are tens of thousands of independent contractors doing business under their own names in this state.

From the macro-economic perspective, the US Supreme Court recently decided that corporations, perhaps even large multi-nationals, have constitutional rights similar to individual citizens. However, it seems that on the micro-economic side, individual independent contractors do not have the constitutional right known as the right of contract.

The affiliation agreement between myself and the independent technicians, now terminated, was a contract for services. I, an independent contractor, sold services to the technicians, my customers, in exchange for their payment. If we both met the terms of the affiliation agreement, we continued to do business. Businesses contract with each other for services all the time. When individual sized businesses do so, we get interfered with by state bureaucrats. These jokers are not in the habit of thinking about what they are doing before they do it. In addition, once they get started, they are as difficult to stop as a freight train. I know this from direct experience.

23: The Emperor has no Clothes!

At 4:50 pm on a dark, rainy Friday afternoon in early December, he parked his newly acquired and painted painters van into a diagonal slot in front of the state Supreme Court building in the capital city. Wearing paint stained coveralls, with a respirator hanging around his neck, he grabbed the paint roller and two loosely covered 5 gallon buckets from the back of the van.

He headed up the stairs towards the entrance doors. As he approached, an office worker leaving for the weekend stopped to hold the door for him, as he hoped would happen since his hands were full. He strode into the vestibule, nodding as he walked toward the state cop guarding the entrance to the hallway. He took three steps and then faked a stumble, going to one knee as he dumped the two 5 gallon buckets full of warmed gasoline onto the marble floor. As he started to rise, he inserted his right hand into the coveralls, pulling the empty .44 cal revolver from the shoulder holster concealed within.

Without hesitation the state cop drew his 9 mm semiautomatic pistol and shot him twice in the chest. Before he could put a third round into his head, the muzzle flashes from his first two rounds had ignited the billowing cloud of gasoline vapor over the spreading pool of liquid gasoline. The nearly instantaneous combination of burning gasoline vapor with the oxygen in the vestibule caused an explosive pressure wave. This blew open the doors and he was blown back outside, landing head down on his back on the stairs that he had ascended moments before.

As he lay there, he could smell his own singed hair and skin and could feel the pain in his chest, the blood flooding his lungs. His shoulder felt like it had broken when he had collided with the door frame on the way back out. Looking up into the dark clouds, he felt the cool rain falling on his face. He could hear shouts and screams from within the vestibule. It suddenly occurred to him that today, not only was justice blind, but at the moment she also had gas pains and heart burn. He started to chuckle at the thought, but curled up with spasms, coughed up a bunch of blood and died instead.

He had left a copy of this novella on the seat in the van. He had also emailed a .pdf file of the same document to local and national newspapers and also to various websites. Within the document, he listed and took full responsibility for the multitude of crimes which he had committed against innocent victims and for which he had just paid with his life. He concluded his novella as follows:

Before the French Revolution, kings believed that they governed by virtue of their direct familial relationship to a deity, by imperial divine right. The nobility believed that it was their obligation to govern, in French: noblesse oblige. In France after the revolution, most of these types did not believe anything at all, having lost their heads. In France, and in the minds of some of the founding fathers of the USA, a radical idea prevailed for a time. It was that those who govern do so by virtue of the consent of the governed.

More than a century after the French revolution, European anarchists decided it was their responsibility to start assassinating kings and noblemen and did so. In the process, one of them started World War I. By the time that was over, there were few monarchies left holding meaningful power in Europe. The nobility, also sidelined from governance, soon became irrelevant to all but social climbers and paparazzi.

Since that time, two other groups have ascended to power on the global stage. First, the heads of multinational corporations are the new royalty. They believe themselves bestowed with the right to wield power by virtue of the "science" of free market economics. Second, upper level government bureaucrats are the new nobility. Like the noblemen before them, their priority is to maintain and build upon their entrenched positions of authority.

It has become apparent that, like the ill-fated emperors and nobility before them, these new jokers also have no clothes. Anarchists the world over have awakened to their responsibilities. I have been rudely awakened and railroaded into this fight by the bureaucrats. They shanghaied me from my quiet law-abiding existence. They condemned me to indentured servitude, indeed I had been working as a slave of the state for years with no idea that was my role.

It is my destiny that my life is to be expended in this battle. So be it. They have conscripted me and so I have fought. They have trod heavily upon me, woe unto them. I put my affairs in order, gathered and prepared myself and raised some hell. As I told them early on, this is as serious as death. l have waged my war in every way I can imagine, to my last breath. Join me, reader! Brew some tea for yourself!

Twenty four

With that last dramatic act, suicide by cop, my methodically ultra-violent virtual alter ego concluded his tea party. I suspect that some readers will find his war of virtual violence, conducted in the odd numbered chapters of this novella, to be excessive. Please bear in mind that, when and if the state seizes and sells our home, they will really send armed sheriffs deputies to forcibly evict us from our home. If it comes to that, I will not respond to that violence in kind. Instead, I have chosen to try to preempt that attack by using my alter egos virtual violence within the pages of this novella to underscore and emphasize my own very real battle.

As I have attempted to explain, I find myself with no options, well and truly railroaded. For nearly three years I have tried to find a voice of reason somewhere in the state government, with no luck. Setting myself on fire on the steps of the state capital like a Vietnam era protesting Buddhist monk did not seem a viable alternative. An effective way to apply of Gandhi's principles of non-violent non-cooperation to this case has escaped me to this point.

Taking this strange case to the court of public opinion seemed to me to be the only sane and hopefully effective alternative. Using virtual violence to increase reader interest and to underscore the strong arm extortion tactics used by my opponents seemed to me to be the best way to get the publics attention. It was also therapeutic. I, like most, have the usual natural first response to being cornered. However, I feel committed to upholding my end of the social contract, applying the sanity clause, if you will. Writing down my violent inclinations in detail was the next best thing to being there and doing that.

Going back to the strong arm extortion idea, I suspect that many will scoff at this suggestion. In response I contend that the federal RICO anti-racketeering and anti-conspiracy laws might be applied to the conduct of the state Employment Department in this case. However, getting the FBI to take the case would be difficult, since the federal government is "in on the action".

It seems that the feds use the states as employment law bird-dogs as they force employers to implement and pay for all sorts of policy. If they can cram nearly everyone into the mold of either an employer or an employee, then the government doesn't have as much to do or to pay for. It also makes it much easier for them to collect taxes, since employers have to withhold varying amounts corresponding to all sorts of state and federal taxes from employee's paychecks by force of law.

The federal government has also recently been in the virtual counterfeiting business, "creating but not printing" trillions of dollars of increasingly "funny" money. They have done this by "adjusting" the account balances that banks and other financial institutions have with the Federal Reserve. Since transactions of all sorts are increasing virtual, it is not necessary to actually print the dollars to increase the number of them in circulation. This correspondingly decreases the real value, known as the buying power, of each and every dollar - including those in your pocket and bank account.

The federal government also has control of, and for decades has been shamelessly spending the income from, the longest running pyramid scheme in history. Now that the baby boomers are becoming old enough to collect their social security entitlement, the feds have been incrementally adjusting the benefits eligibility age threshold upward.

Their only other choice would be to declare the benefits fund insolvent, because they spent most of the money that they were supposed to be holding in trust on other things. Rather than admitting that, they force the aging population to wait a little longer to collect their benefits and let the actuarial probabilities thin the field of those entitled to collect. Social Security was created and intended as a "golden age" security net. It has devolved into a very lucrative pyramid scheme for the government, a fraudulent way to collect taxes.

For all of us, it is now a just a marathon endurance game, a survival numbers racket. Just to be a player, you have to run the rat race gauntlet long enough to reach the ever increasing entitlement threshold age. Then you only "win" if your "number does not come up" before the amount they pay out is greater than the amount you and your employers paid in over your working lifetime, plus compounded interest.

Do you still think a comparison between our government and organized crime is not appropriate? Does it surprise you that they can so easily abuse the power that they have, at our expense? How many other ways is the government abusing their authority and taking advantage of us? If our government truly governs by the consent of the governed, are they taking advantage of us with our consent, or are they doing so covertly, hoping that we won't catch on?

This reminds me of an only partially humorous comparative listing of the characteristics of computer viruses and Microsoft's Windows operating system that was circulating on the internet some years back. It was surprising how many similarities there were. The story also circulated that some Microsoft's software engineers would covertly refer to their products as "dog food". They were continually surprised that computer users kept on eating it. The reason that most of us kept on eating it was that we had no real choice.

This is also the reason that Americans are not indirectly responsible for the illegal or unethical ways that our government has employed others. We all need to eat and also to feed, clothe and shelter our families, so we have to work. When we work, our employers are forced to withhold taxes from our paychecks. The government spends those forcibly collected tax revenues regardless of our consent or lack thereof. If we have no choice or option, then we have no responsibility, either direct or indirect. Thus, government officials must bear responsibility for the crimes that have been committed by government employees or mercenaries under contract, paid with our tax dollars.

Anyway, please be aware that I am not opposed to the concept of taxation. It is necessary for modern government to perform its functions. However, I am opposed to taxes if they are not fair, not consistently applied, or not based upon clearly defined law. I know what an anti-tax crackpot is, and I am not one of them.

However, it is my firmly held opinion that agencies that have the authority to levy taxes should bear the burden of proof when a tax levy is contested by a citizen. The experiences that I have related here have led me to this conclusion. Tax reform seems to be a popular subject at present. In my opinion, removing the burden of proof which has been unfairly placed upon the citizen and placing it instead upon the agency levying the tax is a necessary first step in any and all tax reform. It is also necessary if citizens, perhaps using class action lawsuits, are to seize the power to enforce government officials accountability for how tax revenues are spent.

I contend that, once those agencies bear the burden of proof, they will likely go through necessary adjustments in both culture and attitude. Most taxpayers are citizens first and should be treated with respect; unless and until it is proven that the citizen has been deliberately evading their tax responsibilities. There is no justification for the prevalent initial posture of most tax levying agencies. They start out pushy and demanding and get worse from there.

In addition, I believe that tax legislation should differentiate between the collection of compensatory interest rates on unpaid tax amounts and punitive charges in cases where the taxpayer is proven to have been deliberately evading their tax responsibilities. With tax laws as complex as they commonly are, there is no justification to start out seeking a pound of flesh. 6% or, better yet, some inflation indexed percentage rate is fair compensation on unpaid balances for taxes that have been proven to have been correctly levied.

One of the functions of modern government is to spend tax revenue wisely, ethically and to serve the common good. Failure to do so is bad governance. While I have always paid my taxes, I am opposed to the misuse of my tax payments. Transparency and accountability in government spending is important.

Lastly, please note that I have no beef with millions of lower level public employees working in cubicles under undoubtedly mind-numbing requirements to do everything by rote. The application of reason, i.e. thinking for oneself, is only permitted at the upper levels of state bureaucracy; in fact it is a necessity. So far I have seen no sign of it.

###

Dear reader, thank you for reading. I hope you took something of value from my novella.

Any literary agents or publishers with an interest in this novella, or in a nearly completed book that I am writing on another subject, please contact me.

Gratefully yours,

Mark Gross

http://www.rentnerd.com

