- The 1000th Post – Isaac Brock Society
Just thought it would be worth taking a moment to acknowledge and celebrate the fact that this is the Isaac Brock Society’s 1000th post. This is a fantastic achievement for a blog that only began in December 2011.
One day this blog will be a very important historical record of a very important time in American History (or perhaps the end of it). As one of the commentators implied:
When historians are trying to understand the reason for the demise of the U.S. – “citizenship-based taxation” will likely be identified as one of the reasons.
Congratulations to all organizers, authors, contributors and commentators! Also a special thanks to all of you READERS (without who I suspect there would be far less incentive to write). Perhaps Petros could post the number of page views on this date – but I suspect that they may have exceeded the one million mark!
Some continuing thoughts and sentiments to pass along:
What is a hit? The meter on this page seems to give us a new hit each time I hit refresh. Google analytics is more conservative. In any case, you are right if we use the meter below plus what we had at wordpress (660K), plus the 14K hits for days after the change to dot.ca while I was trying to come up with a decent counting system (before I put the counter on the page). 660+14+306=980K.
Thank you Petros and other Brockers. I really don’t know where I would be today without you. You have been my anchor in this storm.
@Petros, @All,
I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again. In no special order:
Thanks for the education to me and to so many others.
Thanks for the generosity of professionals and contributors who have done such thorough research and made significant comments to media reports.
Thanks for the opportunity to make the meekest of us stand up for our rights and have a voice.
Thanks to those who took the time to write many letters to our government representatives on either side of whatever border, even though the responses have not been overwhelming.
Thanks to the journalists who have taken the time and research to look into this, especially the ones that told the real story of what we are going through.
Most of all, thanks for the vital support that we have all been given an opportunity to share in here.
Well, there was the last Mohikan, followed with the last American and then afterwards the last Isaac Brock comment on what had once been?
Heartfelt, I echo the comments by @calgary411.
When I think about the wasteland of bewilderment I would still be wandering around in had I not found this site I shudder. I can still get confused about IRS matters but with 70,000 pages of tax code I doubt there is a person on this earth who has it mastered. Thanks to Petros and everyone here for all your contributions of time, insight and support for those of us who have arrived here besieged and/or bewildered. A thousand posts and countless hits prove there was a dire need for the Isaac Brock Society.
Congrats IBS! Thank you Petros for creating such a gathering and rally place. It is a refuge for all of us in the tired, poor, huddled expat masses yearning to be free.
When I first learned about IBS, a few weeks ago, I kind of had the impression that it was mainly a bunch of wealthy right-wingers who talked mostly about renouncing, FATCA, taxes and Obama being evil, probably because they were either wrongly punished or got caught evading taxes and were thus pissed at the US government. By participating here, I figured that I risked being defined as being an enemy of the state under the radar of the IRS. Yet, I was upset that my views were being censured by some media and politicians, I felt annoyed with all the threats against Americans abroad that I was reading, I feel that people should have the right to express themselves and the IRS told me that I “should know” all this tax stuff. Thus, I figured that at IBS, I’d become educated.
And educated I became. I learned that FATCA is indeed damaging not only to Americans abroad, but to the US and the rest of the world. I learned that democrats are mostly responsible for FATCA, I’m learning that Americans abroad are completely unrepresented, I learned that the US government is recklessly causing harm to Americans abroad and I learned that IBS is very well informed and far more correct than I had ever imagined. It’s actually kind of unreal or even shocking. I almost wish that I was still as uneducated and uninformed on the whole thing like how I was in the past, believing that the world is perfect and everything is good, until…
So, thanks for all the efforts made, keep up the good work, do more to cover all the issues troubling Americans abroad!
IBS has done a great job in reacting to news and articles as they happen. We probably have many more active participants than the active staff at ACA has and thus can update information on our site faster. Some participants activity varies due to personal responsibilities, this is normal. But there are enough of us to take up the slack.
Still, I think we need more members and frequent visitors, whether they be USPs abroad, homelanders, or even just foreign citizens who are interested and/or preturbed about what US policy could ultimately mean for the world as a whole, and ultimately them.
Let us Brock On to victory.
This blog mentions testimonials posted on IBS:
http://onesourceblog.com/2012/06/fatca-public-hearing-requests-for-postponement-of-effective-dates-but-no-immediate-irs-response/