Feeding the hamster in your brain
News and things from Liberty and Anarchy around the world.
Freedom Fan Rowan Dow has produced a great design. It’s the classic “Baby On Board” diamond shape, but it says “Not On Board” (as in “not on board with statism and collectivism…”) Features the FreedomFeens.com URL in the top left side of the diamond. Printed on demand by CafePress. Get them HERE.
Some cool friends of mine made this, and it’s awesome. Calender for Ron Paul with the lovely ladies of liberty. Get it HERE.
(As seen on the Colbert Report and the Huffington Post!)
PayPal, as useful as it is, has a nasty habit of freezing funds of people who seek donations for a worthy project but don’t have a government permission slip to do so. There have been several high-profile examples lately of PayPal freezing the donations of everything from buying toys for sick kids to protecting the U.S. Constitution from abuse by police, just because those people didn’t have a 501(c)(3) official tax-free status from the IRS. I’m assuming this is the government’s fault, but PayPal is complicit too.
One of several big issues I have with this, and why I feel PayPal is complicit, is that the PayPal user agreement says nothing about this PayPal rule. I couldn’t find anything about it on the PayPal site in ten minutes of clicking on likely links. And the “setup button page” says nothing about “you must be a licensed 501(c)(3) to use this feature.”
PayPal recently froze a whopping 40,000 dollars gathered by patriot sheriff Richard Mack for a Constitutional Sheriffs Conference.
I realized long ago that PayPal does this, and here are my workarounds. (Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, am not giving legal or tax advice, merely stating what I personally do.)
1.I would NEVER keep an amount of money anywhere NEAR 40,000 dollars in my PayPal account. First, it would be a quality problem if I ever got that much in donations. I’ve never even seen that much money at one time in my life, from donations or from working. But I never keep more than 200 dollars in my PayPal account. I either spend it through PayPal on expenses with people who take PayPal (like my web host, which I often pay a year in advance) or cash it out to my bank account and get cash. Spending it through PayPal does not incur a fee. Cashing it out does incur a small fee, but I feel it’s worth it for the safety of not having it socked away somewhere that it could be frozen.
2. I do not have PayPal links that say “Donate.” I either use a “subscribe” link like I have here, with the explanation that subscribing is really a contribution and does not grant additional access, or I use the PayPal donate link code, but substitute the “Donate” button for the old style “PayPal” button (shown below, feel free to grab and host on your site, please do not hotlink from my site).
In both cases, I add this text in bold, to make it clear I am not a non-profit entity under US law:
Make a donation (donations are NOT tax-deductible, but they might just make you feel really really good)
I believe these two methods to be good due diligence against the heartache of having your funds seized.
–Michael W. Dean
I’ve tried putting a podcast episode on YouTube before. I figured, “It can’t hurt, and it might get more listeners who stumble across it on there based on keywords.” I’ve seen it done before, and thought “How hard can it be?”
Our Freedom Feens podcast is audio only. You can’t put an audio-only file on YouTube. It has to be a video file. And it can’t be a blank audio-only video file. It has to be a video file with at least a still image throughout the whole thing.
I tried doing this once, using our podcast logo as the image, and Adobe Premiere as the editor. I’ve edited a feature-length high-def movie on Premiere, I’m a pretty decent editor, and a very computer-savvy guy. I’m the guy my computer-smart friends call when they have a computer problem.
So I figured I could do this in my sleep: pull a WAV file of a podcast episode into the Premiere timeline, drag in our logo, stretch it to the length of the audio, set the In and Out points, and render. I tried it a dozen times with a dozen output settings and every time it crashed about halfway through. It was like voodoo.
Tonight I thought of trying something else, using a MUCH simpler program, Windows Live Movie Maker.
Adobe Premiere suite costs thousands of dollars, is incredibly complex, and is used to edit a lot of what you see on TV, Windows Movie Maker comes installed free on every computer running Windows, is so simple a retarded monkey could use it, and it is made for editing video slideshows for your grandma.
To open Movie Maker, type Windows Live Movie Maker Into your RUN bar:
^type Windows Live Movie Maker in your Start Bar
Open the Movie Maker program.
^Windows Live Movie Maker
Click on “Home” near the top left of the program.
Click on “Add Videos and Photos”, and add your still image
.
Click “Add Music” to add your audio (it doesn’t have to be music, ours is talking. It just has to be an audio file.)
Click on “Project” near the middle top of the program, pick Widescreen or Standard. (I picked Standard.)
Click “Fit to Music.” (Important.)
Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Project As.” Save your movie as what your want your YouTube video to be named.
Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Movie” and then “Windows Phone Small.” Click “Save” on the box that pops up.
Your movie will render, quickly. It took about ten minutes to render my 106-minute podcast “movie.” The file size was 148 megs, and the audio quality was pretty stunning. Very little loss.
Upload this file to YouTube. Be sure to tag with good, pertinent keywords, and provide a link to your podcast site.
Enjoy!
Michael W. Dean,
Freedom Feens podcast
Check out my final result, here:
Neema Vedadi Interviews Robin Koerner of Blue Republicans [ 50 min 07 s | 114.79 MB ] Download
Neema Vedadi interviews Robin Koerner of Bluerepublican.org and The Huffington Post about why anyone who loves peace and civil liberties should vote for Ron Paul even if they’re Democrats. We also discuss Classical Liberalism, Watching America, the real divide in American politics, breaking the left-right paradigm, and the difference between American and European political discourse.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
