Friday, March 5, 2010

The Pentagon Shooter Was a Libertarian

UPDATED

Last night, a man named John Patrick Bedell shot and wounded two police officers at an entrance into the Pentagon (or as Lew Rockwell calls it, the Pentagram) before being killed himself (here). It turns out he was a physics graduate from San Francisco interested in computers and electrical engineering. He was also a libertarian interested in Austrian economics and a firm opponent of drug prohibition.

Here's his Wikipedia user page, although he hasn't updated it since February 2007. Wikipedia will probably scrub it soon scrubbed it, so I'm posting its contents here:

User:JPatrickBedell

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My hope is to use the creativity of markets and advanced technology to transcend the destructive regimes that have fastened themselves upon the world. I have dreamed for an number of years of creating v:production econosystems, which I hope to apply to the creation of v:security service econosystems using new and economic mechanisms and information technology.

I have a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and studied biochemistry at San Jose State University. I've studied electrical engineering with the goal of creating microsystems for molecular analysis.[1][2][3][4] You can see a proposal to use aluminum anodization as an adsorption method for DNA molecules on CMOS chips at v:DNA_integrated_circuit/proposal_import_2007 (which originates from an unsuccessful DARPA proposal to create a "microMIRV" interoperable with standard firearms ammunition), and a proposal to use xenon difluoride to create a picoliter-scale computer-controlled device for sorting biomolecules (available at v:Capillary_electrode_array/proposal_import_2007), including DNA and protein molecules. My goals include the discovery of a protein sequence for the diamondase enzyme, enabling the creation of macroscale diamond structures, and the creation of self-assembled macrosystems with CMOS DNA-integrated circuits. The scale of these and other projects have led me to develop financial instruments representing information as a tool to manage large projects that are very knowledge-intensive.

I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow, as a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions and institutions such as the coup regime of 1963 that maintains itself in power through the global drug trade, financial corruption, and murder, among other crimes. My work to develop information currency is an effort to create a framework for information management that uses financial markets to create the economic signals (prices) that will effect complex human actions in the real world based on specified information. My desire for justice led me to violate what I think is one of the most unjust laws, cannabis prohibition, by growing 16 cannabis plants on my balcony in Irvine, CA from March 2006 to June 2006. I've posted the Orange County, CA District Attorney's complaint for this offense at http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/JPatrickBedell_2006-06-06_cannabis_felony_complaint .

One desired result of my effort is (will be) billions and billions of carefully cultivated, highly valuable cannabis plants growing throughout the United States with complete security of property. I have posted the image to the right in order to illustrate the use of cannabis as a monetary system using digital financial instruments. There are two information currency units in each of the PDF417 codes pictured. One of the information currency units is drawn from a series with "one gram cannabis" with the underlying asset, and the second ICU in each code has as its underlying asset the URL http://www.mises.org/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf and the SHA-1 digest value of the file at that location (fd8205cb8b4793d43b57ba6f6c7367aa700c307a). This is a way of associating the work of Ludwig von Mises with financial value, which may be a tool to implement his ideas in reality. I hope someday to see full-reserve banking and observance of Article One, Section 10 of the US Constitution.

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow's civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn't exist in 1938!

I am looking for collaborators for ongoing commercial and intellectual efforts. Email to jpbedell at mises.com is welcome!

The liberals will go crazy over this. Usually, the military is the target of liberals (such as anti-war protesters vandalizing recruitment centers), whereas right-wing political violence attacks the bureaucratic wing of the state (OKC bombing, Joe Stack). This was a week after Joe Stack's IRS plane attack and this shooting was probably inspired by last week's attack - Bedell was a nerdy man fascinated by computers (like Stack) and he was a Misean libertarian (meaning anti-government).

Indeed, the neocons are already spewing out lies - which the liberals will probably use for their own agenda. Take Fox News' headline to an AP story: "Pentagon Shooter Railed Against U.S. on Internet." Note that the shooter did not rail against the US in his various online posts, but rather against the federal government and its actions. In particular he thought the feds were covering up the death Air Force Colonel James Sabow, whom he and others believe did not commit suicide but was murdered as a result of a plot involving CIA drug trafficking. Bedell was not anti-American, but rather anti-government. The difference between a country and its government has been lost on most modern Americans, whether liberal or (neo)conservative.

As he was a computer nerd, he left traces all over the internet. He had a Linkedin profile stating he was an MSEE (Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, most likely). His Facebook page is still up (here) and his friends list is quite interesting. He's friends with a few notable libertarians - Lew Rockwell and William Norman Grigg (which doesn't necessarily mean anything - Lew Rockwell has several thousand FB friends), as well as a bunch of South Asians. I'm sure some neocon will use that as "evidence" that he was part of some foreign group, but it's more likely that he met them in his electrical engineering program since South Asians fill the electrical engineering programs (both as students and professors) in American universities.

Bedell was into cannabis, even going so far as to post a picture of his marijuana to WikiCommons here. In many of his postings on the Internet he showed an interest in Rothbardix, a Linux distro he was working on, that was tied to this concept he envisioned called "information currency." He describes that on his YouTube channel here. Of course, his online presence will soon begin to be scrubbed away so I was sure to save all of what I found. He was an interesting fellow.

In some ways it seems as if he was a Joe Stack copycat, but he was a different man overall. Joe Stack was angry with the IRS, whereas John Patrick Bedell was critical of the whole political and economic system altogether. Also, Stack had a family, whereas Bedell seems to be a high IQ, but lonely computer nerd with plenty of time to become well-read.

I can't help but wonder if these attacks are just a couple of isolated incidents that will soon be forgotten or whether the Second American Revolution is beginning around us...

UPDATE: At around 2:00 AM I noticed that Wikipedia scrubbed his user page (which was formerly here). I knew they would, as they scrubbed James von Brunn's user page after he carried out his shooting. His Facebook is still up, oddly enough.

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