Don’t Let PayPal Freeze Your Funds

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frozen funds

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 Make Button Page

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

Putting Your Podcast on YouTube

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Podcast On YouTube

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

^type Windows Live Movie Maker in your Start Bar

Open the Movie Maker program.

Windows Live Movie Maker

^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 Republican

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Neema Vedadi Interviews Robin Koerner of Blue Republicans

Neema Vedadi Interviews Robin Koerner of Blue Republicans [ 50 min 07 s | 114.79 MB ]  Download

Robin Koerner's "Hein-Line"

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.

Robin Koerner

Neo-con right-wing hit piece against Ron Paul that’s so silly it could have been from The Onion

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write what we tell you to write!

The other day this article called “Drugs, Guns and Madness in the Ron Paul Revolution” came out on the inaccurately named neo-con blog, “Accuracy in Media.” It’s so stunningly stupid, you must read it. An Excerpt:

Ron Paul didn’t do as well as the media thought he would in Iowa, but he is moving on toward New Hampshire, where the candidate has what the media call a good “ground game.” But the “Ron Paul Revolution” in New Hampshire looks a lot like what Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn tried to accomplish with the 1960s generation. Disillusioned young people, brainwashed with illegal mind-altering drugs and armed with weapons in the name of “liberty,” are being taught to hate their government and the police. They believe Ron Paul is their savior.

Remember that communist terrorist Dohrn had said, “We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.”

The same attitude is apparent in some of the libertarian-anarchist groups backing Paul in New Hampshire.

In order to grasp this phenomenon, consider what happened at the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) held in New Hampshire in June of last year.

A film called “Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom” was screened for the PorcFest participants. The “weed” is marijuana. This very disturbing video, which carries a warning, features many objectionable scenes, including one of a rapper with a gun dancing in front of a huge poster of marijuana leaves. “Today,” says the narrator, “many cops who enforce pot laws do so because it provides them with cushy jobs, good benefits, and a chance to push people around.”……

It goes on with this tone, for many many paragraphs.

Even real conservatives think it’s a stupid article. This user comment is spot on:

Old Right said:

Wow, Cliff. You and AIM have really gone downhill over the years. I used to enjoy your work on the UN and would distribute AIM’s sister group Accuracy in Academia’s material at my political correctness plagued campus. But man…..what happened to you? This tirade just sounds like some drunk yelling at people in a bar. Oh well. Old-school conservatives used to understand that big government in our own country was the biggest threat to our liberty, not the Gay Muslim Mexicans. Thankfully, that idea has come around again. Ron Paul by far wins the youth vote in Republican polls, and now that the primaries have started he won the under-40 vote demographic in the Iowa caucus. Peace, liberty, and sound money are the future of the conservative movement, Cliff. Get with the program or get left behind.

I think the hit piece came from two reasons:
1. Simply IGNORING Ron Paul is no longer working.
2.There’s a lot more MONEY in sounding insane and mean than there is in making sense. Look at the SPLC. I think of Accuracy in Media as the right-wing SPLC.

The Accuracy in Media site is pretty popular, and the guy who wrote the article, Cliff Kincaid, used to be the editor for Oliver North’s newsletter. (As someone said “No wonder he knows so much about guns, drugs and violence.” lol.) And it got re-blogged on several hundred other blogs. (Probably automatically. They were probably syndicating him and haven’t yet noticed his meltdown, like Old Right has.)

And this isn’t just some fly-by-nite blog of one guy in his mother’s basement. They have an office on tony Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC, a staff of nine, and according to their financial statements, they have nearly five million dollars in assets. Who the hell is funding these trolls? (Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil fortune, according to this.)

Fortunately, like Mr. Burns, they are old and will one day die off. Their ideas will die with them. The path of America will go in one of two directions: socialism, or liberty. Everyone slammed in that article hates socialism as much, if not more, than the guy who wrote it claims to. The only thing that’s going to keep socialism from prevailing is people like the folks slammed in that article, and their good activism and media work.

As horrible of a bullshit bit of writing it is, I’m honored that our Guns and Weed film was included. And of all the things that are being thrown around these days to try to stop Ron Paul, I never thought I’d be one of those things!

Most of the people mentioned in the article are friends of mine.

While this hit piece in “Accuracy” in Media was way off the mark with the tone, I DO feel like it’s right in one respect: we are the spiritual godchildren of the 60s radicals. Or at least I know I can say *I* feel that way.

The first piece of “alternative literature” I ever got my hands on was Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (PDF). That was 1975, I was 11. Sure, he was a commie, but that book is all about guns and weed and not trusting the government and cops.

My older sister lived in New Hampshire in the 70s and I used to visit here there. She was involved in the 70s blockades on the Seabrook Nuclear Plant. She’s an Obama lover now, but she was a big influence on me in showing me “the majority isn’t always correct.”

While most people thought that Timothy Leary and the “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” thing erupted and spread spontaneously, in reality, he and Allen Ginsberg and a few others had frequent conversations about “running it like a business”, and sent out press releases and did a lot of very proactive things like that behind the scenes.

I’m thinking and working like that lately.

The book Steal This Book contains this image, (bad scan from the PDF is here, click to see bigger):

It’s a cartoon of some 60s radicals running a pirate radio/TV station. It’s hard to read all the text in this scan, but I can read two of the word balloons. One is coming from the door, it says “Open up! it’s the police!” “We got some nice LSD for ya! Har har.” The guy in the back right with the pot leaf shirt and the bandoleer and shotgun is looking at the door saying “The mad lackeys are in for a sample of revolutionary justice, folks.”

But the whole idea of pirate radio and TV fascinated me as a kid when I read this. I never did do pirate radio, but I did build legal micro-transmitters as a kid to try to reach the world. So that picture really spoke to me.

Though guns scared me back then. Not these days, I have at least three loaded guns within ten feet of me right now.

But the cool thing is, thanks to the internet, my friends and I reach the world 24/7 with podcasting and satellite radio and community radio. While we’re calmer and not commie, our bedrooms now are the studio in that cartoon above.

–Michael W. Dean

Antigone from Sex, Lies and Anarchy
Above: Antigone from Sex, Lies and Anarchy podcasting

Kevin M. Sanchez-Cruz
Kevin M. Sanchez-Cruz of CopBlock podcasting.

Neema Vedadi
Neema Vedadi podcasting Freedom Feens

Me podcasting Freedom Feens

 

Garrett Fox from Cop Block
Garrett Fox from Cop Block surfing while editing

From left to right, Carla, Stephanie, and Meg, all in-studio during “She Talk live”

Free Talk Live radio broadcast
Free Talk Live remote radio broadcast

Pete Voluntaryist Eyre
Pete Voluntaryist Eyre doing activist video

Ademo Voluntaryist Freeman doing activist video
Ademo Voluntaryist Freeman from Cop Block doing activist video

Stephanie Murphy in her home radio studio

Stephanie Murphy in her home studio

Neema's setup

Michael Dean’s secondary editing setup

This mini air compressor is going to extend my lifespan!

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Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster

I used to spend tons of money on canned air. I use it to clean my keyboard, to clean the inside of my computer, to blow out the clinging dust from my bag-less vacuum cleaner, and a lot of other things. Canned air is expensive, it really ads up, and it’s really toxic….People even huff it to get high, and it causes brain damage. Not something I want to use in my home.

When I go to WalMart weekly with my wife (Which we call “hunting”, because we read somewhere that cats think you’re out hunting when you work and shop,  because you’re gone all day and you always have lots of treats for them), I usually grab a magazine from the racks, read it while she shops, then put it back before we leave. In some gun magazine I ran across an ad for the Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster (Available on Amazon, HERE.)

At 50 bucks, it will pay for itself in me not buying canned air in about six months. It does seem louder than a jet engine (I wear ear plugs) and does get warm quickly (it even says that in the user’s manual) but it gets the job done, without poisoning you or your kitties. It has a 12-foot AC cable, which is enough for most uses, and I just add an extension cord for more. It’s made in the USA by a company that’s been in business for generations. It’s solid steel and built like a tank.

I love it I love it I love it!

MWD