Americans calling themselves sovereign citizens “don’t register children’s births, carry driver’s licenses or recognize the court system” and believe that “The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a ‘straw man,’ that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.”
Hoping to practice “preservation through relocation,” a group is trying to move a beautiful old church 900 miles from Buffalo to Atlanta. St. Gerard’s Church is “a Gilded Age approximation (at one-third scale) of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, one of the four major basilicas of Rome.”
Monks can’t make coffins , rules the state of Georgia, because they are not licensed funeral directors. “In order to sell caskets legally, the monks would have to apprentice at a licensed funeral home for a year, take a funeral industry test, and convert their monastery into a “funeral establishment,” installing equipment for embalming,” reports Tim Drake in the National Catholic Register . “The monks’ story is just one example of a national problem in which industry cartels use government power to protect themselves from competition,” notes the Institute for Justice, which is taking up their case.
Some people seem to be addicted to Apple , writes Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph . “[Y]ou have the total Apple obsessives who exhibit a quasi-religious fanaticism that the company does nothing to discourage,” says a former Apple employee he quotes. ” . . . When a new product is launched, it’s the same faces at the front of the line every time. They treat the staff like celebrities, trying to ingratiate themselves. At the Genius Bar, they’ll show you Apple products from years ago, and you’ll have to pretend you haven’t seen them before, because they need their egos massaged. It’s kind of sad. Well, it is sad.”
