Update for June and why it's been so long

Hi there, it's June, almost halfway through in fact.
I've been having some real computer troubles, I lost the whole thing more than once. I have found there are certain buttons you do not want to push and certain areas where you do not want to check the wrong box. There are no warnings before or after.
I learned that windows can delete a while hard drive without being told or even asking if you want to.
I've learned a lot about things not to do in Windows XP.
I spent hours and days and weeks searching the web for fixes to the troubles the problems I had.

There was something else that got my attention in the middle of all these problems and that is that Goggle and Yahoo are not what they used to be, not as good at returning search results on topic.

I believe it has to do with money more than anything, with the people who buy show my site first. And I am sick and tired of seeing no matter what I type in show up in a side column for some company who can sell me whatever by having what ever it was I typed in to search for inserted into the blank space in their standard line, and I am really tired of those links never working, producing nothing but a blank page; when I look at what is in the browser address space it is never the site address I supposedly clicked on.


Anyone else notice this problem?
Well friends, it's very late, I'm very tired so I'm going to bed now. I'll get back here as soon as I can and tell you the rest of the story about what's been going on around here lately.

Some Good News for a Change and a bit of bad news too

I have good news, well and some bad news, to report today.

First the Good news, I was laying in bed last night when it finally dawned on me that even though my docs, my 92 page brief and all the supporting evidence, got deleted, I still have printouts of a lot of things from the previous years. All I have to do is scan them back in, or just make copies.
The other good news is I finally located some web sites, pages and documents, that have the much needed "fair value is not fair market value" phrase within them, I had originally found only one, a court case out of Colorado, today I am happy to announce I found several, and counting, pages using Gahoo/Yoogle, which if you don't know about it has a split screen with yahoo results on one side and Google results on the other, and yes most times there is a difference.
Here is the link WWW.gahooyoogle.com go ahead and try it out.

So things are moving forward.

I got a letter from the State Tax Appeal Board last week, it seems I forgot to include the notice from the county board when I filed for the appeal. They gave me 10 days [from the day they mailed it; May 1, 2006] to return it to them, I'm hoping that weekends don't count. I don't go to the post office everyday, sometimes only once a week or less. So I had only two days, if weekends count, to get it back to them. I sent a note explaining that I didn't get the letter until the 5th, didn't open it until the 6th and mailed it back the next possible day, Monday the 8th, it could get there by the 10th if it goes right through. I'm only maybe 25 miles give or take as the crow flies from Olympia, but 60 miles or more by road, the mail from out here on the other hand goes first to Portland Oregon and then back to Washington. I'm hoping it took the fast route.


The other Bad News, is I am still trying to recover the lost/deleted files. I got one program I could at least understand, plus it was Freeware, it found over 41,000 lost files. The problem is few of them were saved on a different drive, it recommends not trying to save on the same drive the lost files are on, and most of those found either won't open or are blank. I got a couple to open, they appear to be program files, like sample pages and such. I am almost ready to give up and start all over again, but I won't do that yet, there is way to much to get back, too much time involved, like the years it took me to create and collect them all. Not to mention some files that I actually bought.

More Good News

I got busy yesterday and did some dirt plowing and then planting, not to mention filtering out a lot of sticks and roots inbetween. It is going to take me a really long time to create the new garden plus. This old body is in loud rebellion with the digging and stick finding, throwing out, part. But with no one else left around here to share the chores I get to do ALL of them myself. So I now have corn [which is showing] green beans, edible pea pods, tomatoes [ several kinds], dill, cucumbers, pumpkins, radishes, zucchini [I got nuts and planted a whole row of the stuff], onions, and more to come. Plus there are the berries and grapes and the rhubarb here and there. Then the trees, apple, pear, and peach, so far only the three apple trees are producing, the others need a year or three more before fruit will grow. Now I need to prepare and figure out what else to plant in the acre plus of bare dirt still out there; maybe next year.

So keep tuned for updates, and if you read this let me know, if you are interested in my appeal let me know.

Beware what you do in Windows XP

I had the ultimate bad experience the other day. I have been changing hard drives around in this machine, got two inside it and one external hard drive. But I made a real goof, not knowing it could happen and Windows didn't even give me a notice or a chance to not do it or anything.

I had to send one of the drives back because I couldn't get the system to recognize it as being there, more on that later.
So when I got it back I pulled one out and put it in, it was an 80 gig the one I pulled was a 160 gig, my original and still C: drive is only a 40 gig. Anyway, the computer was shut down, asleep hibernating whatever it does on its own, enough so that I have to push the power button to get it to revive. I had a brief thought that I should wake it up and then shut it down, but I didn't thinking it wouldn't matter I just pulled the plug and opened it up and swapped the drive out, put the 160 gig back in.
BUT when I turned it back on Windows deleted all the contents of that drive, which just happened to contain all of my docs, music, videos, programs and way more things. It was my back up in fact.
But due to other problems I had to dump everything I lost from the C: drive in an attempt to defrag it. By the way I couldn't even defrag after removing a lot of things, it said that google earth was the problem, it had files that couldn't be defragged, I don't understand that but that's what it said.
So there I was with the drives all installed, the external hooked up and formatted and all my data gone in the blink of an eye, well a few seconds longer. The Documents folder was only a measly 4.7 gigs
This was not something I had even an inkling of an idea could happen.
So beware of XP, it makes decisions all on its own and won't even ask you for permission.

In the old DOS days I had a program, from either Norton or PC-Tools that did some great things, one of them was to undelete files. Back then a file only got the first letter of its name changed to a symbol, the computer seeing that symbol would ignore the file, not show it as being there and all you had to do was change the first letter back and it would show the file again.
I don't know how XP works but I'm hoping it is still the same way.
I am hoping that it is still possible to recover everything.
I looked at a couple of so called undelete programs for sale these days, but they looked way over my head and due to the amount of data lost I don't want to take a chance on really losing it forever. The greatest loss is the 4 years of data collecting I did on my property tax case. I have a not too good print out of the 92 page brief so I can scan a lot of it, but there was so much more I had that was a part of the findings.
The good news, the hopeful news is my youngest has a friend she tells me who knows how to do things like undelete lost files. I told her to find him that I would buy the software if needed and pay him for his time. I'm still waiting but I have high hopes she will find him.
The notice came today from the State Tax Appeal board, I've not open it yet.
If I need to type everything all over again from scratch I can do it but it's the web pages I had logged in that are the greatest loss. Mostly from legal sites and such, things that supported my position that True and Fair value is not Fair Market Value, things that took years to find.
Well just wanted to give you a little warning to not do what I did.

I said I would add more on the system not seeing the drive as being there. It did see it but not openly, seems if you delve deep into windows there is a place where it will show up, but not as an active drive, it shows a small red X in a circle like icon, how was I supposed to know all you had to do was click on it and follow the directions. It was a Hitachi drive I emailed them and they sent back how to do it instructions, which made me wonder if the one I had sent back wasn't actually good. You see when I installed the 160 gig, it was a Seagate it just showed up as being there and windows asked me if I wanted to format it, simple easy no problems. I expected the same thing, so at least I learned something new about XP. And that is XP I think has far too many hidden areas, areas within areas, within areas, of controls.

May 2006 arrives

Thought I would add a bit here on local events.
A nice big bull dozer arrived last week and spent the next 5 days moving dirt around, burning a stump pile bigger than the house, it raged for at least 5 days and now sits there with only one stump left, that one was dug up as an after the fact find so it arrived too late to burn as the fire was only a pile of coals. But not to worry there is an acre or two of bare dirt now chock full of roots and branches all bone dry as the trees were logged back in 92. So for the whole of this summer and maybe next summer small bon fires are the name of the game, which also means lots of hotdogs and marshmallows on sticks.
It is great to finally look out on that bare dirt because after almost 30 years I can finally start planting fruit trees, flowers, vegetables, grapes, berries and whatever else I can find to create a visual treat to the eyes.
For now I'm going to seed most of it in either red clover or alf-alpha, both are in the green manure category, meaning they enrich the soil as they grow. It will depend on which seeds I can find and of course the cost per acre because after the dozer bill comes in there won't be a lot left this month. I was lucky in that Leon the dozer owner takes payments, plus he only charges $60 and hour with an operator. For those of you that don't know that is far cheaper than I could rent a smaller one for and I would need to run it myself.

The other good news is I finally got the rhododendron bushes off eh truck. They were sitting there for 4 weeks exactly. I picked them up off of freecycle. Each was some 5' tall and about as wide. Took 4 of us just to slide them up the ramp onto the truck, took my back a week plus to recover from it, but well worth the effort. One bloomed on the truck, a brilliant red, the other is just now blooming a bright pink. They certainly add something to all the green of the forest around me.
And while doing all of this we happened to notice one dead tree, there are several dozen of them from an ice storm a few years back, this one stands about 20 feet high or more and about 15" thick, there is a nice round hole in the side about 5 feet from the broken top, inside that hole is a woodpecker, working up a frenzy pecking away clearing out space for a nest.
I've only seen the hen so far but I did notice last year a huge red headed woodpecker working the trees in that area, so I'm having hopes that this will be their nest. I need to look them up and see if they keep a nest for years, I hope they do as it will be fun to watch the young ones grow.


So now I finally have cleared space enough to build my woodshop which is a life long dream since childhood, and plenty of good dirt to plant things in, things to eat that is, and a few flowers for color here and there, stripes and patches of them, what ever I feel like doing, I could even create pictures if I wanted. I've seen that done in magazines and books, you just plant different colors according to a graph plan and when they bloom you see the picture. I've spent the last 20 years drawing plans for this property, all sorts of designs so it will be interesting to see what finally emerges.

Why do printers quit working at the worst possible moments?

I attempted to print out one of my replies to the assessors office. To separate out the request for the law he claims requires him to assess your property at 100% of its Fair market Value. I have been requesting for some 4 to 5 year now that he tell me which law it is, so I can look it up and read it for myself. Up until last week the question was never acknowledged. Now I get a reply stating they have no obligation to enter into any debate or discussion over the law. I don't want a discussion or debate either I just want him to "show me the law" as is my right.
So I get this letter of reply written, after 5 days of editing and redoing it again and again, only to find my printer won't print it.
I was starting to get the feeling maybe I wasn't supposed to send it, but then I figured it was just some hex put on me by the Evil Prince stopping me, it would however print out in color, so I printed it out in dark blue and sent it off.
After two days of trying to figure out the problem, it was an almost new cartridge, well one of the recycled ones at half cost, I came to the conclusion it had arrived with not very much ink inside.
I put in another of the "new" ones and bingo it now prints just fine in black. Go figure.

At least I can now print away until it too runs dry. So I get to send in my other letter, the one for disclosure of his methods. I had to separate the issues of show me the law and show me the method as they are playing word games.

And I still need to get my appeal to the State Tax Board in ASAP.

Oh the Fun of it all.

By the way if anyone who reads this would like to get involved in fighting to have your property tax taken to the proper level just drop me a note, I think my email is posted on the page for replies, I'm still learning about how this Blog thing works, I'll get better as time goes by.

County Board of Equalization [property tax] Decision

I got my property tax appeal decision in the mail yesterday. If this wasn't such a serious matter I would have laughed until I fell down on the ground and rolled all over the place .

If you remember I mentioned that the 5 member board admitted that none of them had read all of what I presented as evidence; I got the impression, I could see it in their eyes, read it in their faces, that none had read more than a page or two if that. And I would lay odds none had bothered to read it all after the hearing. Which makes the decision I got in the mail a joke.

They wrote in their notice, their decision, that due to the lack of any clear and concise evidence they had to find in favor of the assessor, never mind that he didn't really present any evidence, just a note with three addresses on it, those were supposed to be the comps I guess. You see the law here says that the assessor is given the presumption of correctness. Meaning he is trusted to have done his job and he need not offer any actual proof that he did.

I also got a letter yesterday from the assessors office about my request for disclosure. At the bottom of the letter was a short paragraph that said they would not get into any discussion or debate over the law with a Citizen.
To quote" In regards to the issue of the use of verbiage fair market value, The Assessor-Treasurer, or any of his staff, are not required to enter into a debate about interpretation of the laws, court findings, legal options and written directions from the State of Washington that govern the assessment of properties in Pierce County in response to a public record or information request." Now isn't that interesting?
I was not opening a discussion or debate but simply asking that the Assessor provide me with a copy of the law he advertises both orally and in print he claims requires him to assess property at 100% of its Fair Market Value.

He won't answer my question, he won't disclose or provide a copy of that law because there is no such law. So instead of admitting the mistake he is clouding the whole issue, ducking and dodging it with smoke and mirrors. But never fear my fellow Citizens because I will not give up on this quest. I don't give up once I have sunk my teeth into something like this. In fact it now has my dander up that they are playing games and refusing to make disclosure, as required by law, freedom of information and all that.
So in keeping with the Game he is creating I am going to make it a whole separate issue, all on its own, under the Freedom of Information requirements and see how he responds to that form of a request.


So I am off to file a next level appeal to the State Tax Board. And start preparing next years appeal, it has to be filed by the end of June. It is going to be filed every year for the rest of my life, well as long as I own property. I keep hopes that someday the rest of you will rise up, wake up, and join me. After all as the assessor says, and prints in his literature, you should be paying, Not a Penny More, than you are legally required.

Cow farts worth Billions, more even,

I was told something interesting the other day, that it is possible to turn Cow farts into Diamond.

I didn't tell the guy right off I though he had been drinking too much, well we were in a bar. But I had talked to him before and he always knew what he was talking about in the areas we discussed and we got into a few deep ones, Super Strings even.
Anyway I jotted it down on a coaster and looked it up when I got home. And yes people are making diamond with methane. No one as far as I could find out isn't actually collecting Cow farts, but they are almost pure methane.
What I did learn is that there is a process using methane and low heat [well 600 degrees], the other process for making artificial diamonds uses extreme temperatures and pressure.
Diamond is grown in layers. The race now is to grow the layers faster. One report I read had it up to 100 microns and hour.

But it was the practical things that will be done with the new product that caught my eye, intrigues me a great deal. Imagine diamond coatings on your eye glasses, windows, paint your car with it, even flooring, bearings for machinery, the list goes on.
Diamonds as we all know are the hardest substance, material on this planet.
I think this is really exciting, it offers an opportunity to clean up the air on this planet. And in the process we get diamond in about any shape and form we want.

This also clears up a question that's been rolling around in the far back dust bins of my mind.
Years ago I read some Jewish stories, their histories, folk takes whatever one might call them. In one it said that when Adam was ejected from the Garden in Eden that he didn't leave empty handed; he carries a book with him. Adams book contained all the knowledge he needed to go forth into the hostile real world. The book was made of Emerald, ruby, and diamond if I remember correctly, Gem anyway, the pages were made out of gem. I learned not that long ago, a few years back, the spot on the grocers counter where the laser reads the bar code, it looks like glass. It is not glass but instead a synthetic clear ruby. Glass would scratch in a short amount of time, ruby doesn't.

Then there is the other biblical story about the new Jerusalem floating down to earth with extremely long , very tall, and quite thick walls of emerald, ruby, and diamond. So it looks like the science is there to allow such creations, it has just taken us a very long time to reclaim what we once knew.

Anyway; I'm excited about this new process, we can soon have diamond coated everything, forget very soft shiny Gold that quickly wears away, Diamond never wears out.
Think of micro-scopic thin diamond threads, to weave cloth out of; even if you couldn't ear it there are other more commercial applications where thins could make good use of a coating of diamond cloth, electronics, electricity, power generations businesses, general manufacturing businesses. Diamond will make the best bearings for industries huge machines.

BUT; First think cheap, methane is in an over abundant supply and we could stand to get rid of the things used in this process, methane, carbon.


Diamond Films:

This is the first one I read, good info:
http://www.highbeam.com/library/docfree.asp?DOCID=1G1:9280459&ctrlInfo=Round19%3AMode19b%3ADocG%3AResult&ao

Here are a couple more

http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=2207

See section 2 part way down the page, this has formulas written out.
http://idol.union.edu/~malekis/ESC24/KoskywebModules/sa_q.htm



About the old process, how to Grow a Diamond in 3 days: click on the link
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/60II/main616666.shtml

You can Yahoo or Google or Ask dot com for more if you see the excitement in it I did, still do.

Don't ya just love learning new things?

Taxes; which are legal which are not?

In Washington State this is pay your property taxes month, although it's really more like rent now as the State has made it clear it holds ultimate ownership of all lands. They forgot the Emperor holds original title to All the Northern Provinces, and my Brother, The King, holds all of the California's and a few points east and south, you see when we were much younger we split the west coast of North America up into two domains, that was many years ago; I claimed the North and he claimed the South.

Back to Washington, this State is unique in that it is the only State in the US that uses the term "True and Fair Value" when speaking of property taxes. That terminology begins in the State Constitution and follows through in all of the laws written.
However; there is a problem.
Few Citizens understand what that really means and the assessors have changed its original intent into current fair market value which means they now collect taxes based on inflation.
Each year property owners are mailed a small postcard advising of the next years tax value. Few if any read the fine print which tells one how to go about protesting, appealing the increase, and it's always an increase.
It has taken me most of the past four years to sift out the truth and find evidence to prove almost everyone is being overtaxed on the property, their homes. And more importantly it took me a lot of time to find a written court decision to back up what I know to be the real truth. Funny it is that what one says is always taken with a grain of salt if that much, while what you find was said previously, even if it was a hundred or more years ago is given great weight and consideration.

Each year I win a bit more as I find more evidence to support my position. But it is an uphill, up mountain battle.
This year at the first round, the county board of equalization, I was astounded at the lack of consideration on the other side of the table. You see this year I presented a 92 page brief, my basic argument, a collection of facts, evidence, and explanations.
The first thing I was told by the 5 person panel [appointed Citizens] was that no one had bothered to read all of the evidence. I was then offered exactly 20 minutes to explain it to them; an impossible task. Ten minutes into it they told me that the County said they couldn't get into the area I was discussing, which by the way as the actual law of the State.
But I knew it was more of a formality even going to that level of the appeal process and that they would find against me; they always do. But I wanted a face to face, for the record, it is recorded on tape.
The next level is the State board of tax appeal and at that level things are much different, better in many ways for the Citizen. And I have always won something at that level; now that I have the court cases, the precedents they have been asking for, I am in a much better position for winning.

I am still battling with the county assessors office, trying to get full disclosure from them of their methods, how they really arrive at their determinations.
Even more important is that the assessor tells everyone, even prints it on his pamphlets, that he is "required by law" to assess all property at "100% of its Fair Market Value", I have been petitioning him for four years now to divulge exactly which law it is that is he is quoting. To date he has refused any response to that question, or to even acknowledge it was asked.
Not a big surprise considering that there is no such law. You see he is one of those in government that has created authority and powers off the grid, to suit himself, he has his own opinions of what is legal and what is not, of which portions of what the law requires him to do that he will comply with, or not. Since no one has ever challenged him he has been running free for years.
He knows I know he is lying to the People and that I can prove it.

My only problem is I can't afford the price of a good lawyer to haul him in front of a Judge. That will change at some point in the future. In the meantime he ducks and dodges me.

The latest ploy on his part is the sudden claim that he has found some 620 pages of documents under my request and wants me to pay for 25 cents a page for copies of them under the claim that what I requested disclosure of is outside the boundaries of my appeal.

Since all I have ever requested was full documentation of how he arrived at his determination, the methods used, I listed each thing the law requires him to use and noted that my request included but was not limited to those things I had written down, just in case I missed some specific type of document.
I sent him a reply stating I found it hard to believe he found that many pages for this one parcel, but that if I were to believe him and were to fork over the money he is demanding, I requested a signed affidavit that each of the 620 pages was specifically read, studied, and actually used in the assessment of the specific parcel in question. I'm not paying for pages that have nothing to do with it, pages that were not used as a part of the process for the parcel under appeal. More importantly is the still unaddressed, unanswered question of which law is he quoting to justify his overvaluation for the purpose of collecting tax revenue, that request was at the top of my letter.
So right now we are at a standstill I guess, because it's been well over two weeks and he has sent no response. Not unusual, he did the same thing last year. But someday he will stand before a Judge and I can't wait to be there to hear his excuses for failure to disclose.

In some ways this has come to be like a Keystone Cops comedy. But it is a most serious issue, one that has tremendous potential to upset the governments apple cart, and that also makes it a dangerous situation. Governments do not take lightly to anyone either limiting or reducing their taxing ability, their revenue stream. But like the Assessor also prints in his literature, we the people should pay "Not a Penny More" than what we are legally obligated to pay.


I still have a lot of research left to do, a lot of evidence to uncover, I need to get into the archives to root out the original records dealing with why True and Fair value was used instead of Fair Market Value. Some people tell me I am being too nit-picky over a few words, that I should just let it go and pay whatever is demanded.
What they fail to understand is that the law is word specific and that being nit-picky over words and phrases is normal, is most common, in fact it is expected by the courts. After all, what is the law but words, and since we the people are held to the letter of the law it is our solemn duty and obligation as Citizens to see to it that the Government is also held to the same exacting standards as we the people; after all fair is fair, isn't it?

As time allows I will post explanations of the specifics of this case, explain to you what I have discovered, and why it is so important. It has taken me many years to gather the facts, to learn what I know of this area of the law, so please be patient with me as it will take a while to write it out so you can understand it, to teach it to you. It's like an onion, there are many layers involved.

I thank you for reading this far and I encourage you to join in, post your comments and ask a question when you need to. I will do my best to answer all that write.

For now I'll post this and add more as soon as I can.

I'll also be posting on other areas I have vested interests in, I hope you will enjoy reading and discussing those as well.

Original Post

Greetings from The Great Emperor Ho, Ruler of all the Northern Provinces.

From time to time I will share my thoughts, ideas, and other intersting things with you. I do hope you enjoy them, if nothing else I hope they stimulate your own neurons
and raise interesting questions you will feel the need to find answers for.