our system’s sun

Native American activists in the Dakotas seeking to defend their lifeblood waters are being met by a militarized police force whose goal is to defend the short-term financial gains of a multinational corporate entity. This should not surprise anyone - since its inception, the American republic has abused, marginalized, and stolen from the indigenous tribespeople who originally inhabited Turtle Island (the North American continent). Previously, the Sioux tribe was forced violently from its ancestral lands by the U.S. military so that Americans of European Descent (i.e. white people) could take over the fields and valleys the tribe had for millennia groomed, tamed, and settled. Now, in the previously unwanted territories to which it was sent, the Sioux tribe is again under assault, this time so that an oil pipeline can be dug into its sacred soils and under its treasured rivers. Using technologies to capture and utilize solar power, America could run entirely on the nearly endless supply of fresh energy that arrives each morning from Sol, our system’s sun. Instead, America runs on old sunlight trapped by plants long ago in formations now buried deep below the earth - black, viscous old sunlight that must be pumped from deep underground before being moved often thousands of miles to refineries and storage dumps by pipeline, train, or truck. If each Ynki home or business were to collect its own solar electricity and use that self-generated power to cook food, make heat, or run electric automobiles, each Ynki home or business would become independent of (and by necessity take profits away from) the corporations that control this nation’s energy economy. These corporations want to make sure that American homes and businesses run on old and dirty rather than new and clean sunlight, since, this way, they get paid for each watt of energy used. Therefore, they spend untold millions of dollars lobbying against investment and research in solar-energy technologies; such technologies could upend their market dominance and disrupt their profit margins, and they will do nearly anything to maintain their stranglehold on consumer freedom. It bothers them not that the fluids containing old sunlight, if allowed to flow freely, tend to poison the land and pollute the waters - the only thing that matters to these corporations is that the Ynki simply can’t do without what they are selling and that he will pay a high price to maintain his addiction. If a person is concerned about the sad state of affairs in the Dakotas but cannot join the Standing Rock Sioux at their water protection sites, he ought consider reducing the amount of old sunlight he uses by heating less and driving fewer miles. Additionally, he ought contact his elected representatives and demand they work toward the adoption of solar energy initiatives instead of acquiescing to the demands of petroleum (old sunlight) producers. Stand strong, brave Sioux brothers and sisters rallying at Oceti Sakowin - this American author recognizes your sacrifice, and thanks you for it. Mahalo.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on presidential selections

Dear fellow Ynki citizens:

As you vote on 8 November 2016, please remember that America is a constitutional republic that tends to operate using certain quasi-democratic institutions. The presidency is not one of those institutions. Americans do not elect their president - the president is selected by the Electoral College, which is in turn made up of persons chosen by the U.S. Senate. This part of the American system of government was set up this way to keep the uneducated masses - the base rabble - from choosing for their highest post a feeble-minded demagogue or a warmongering know-it-all. As currently those are the only feasible options, however, the system’s failures are becoming glaringly apparent. For the most part, the system is not to blame. Rather, we must blame the politicians who for nearly three centuries have altered and amended the original Constitution for their own short-term purposes and gains - those worthless scumbags are responsible for the promise of the American experiment imploding slowly before our eyes. A lumbering Hindenburg of ineptitude, corruption, and greed burning with sickening slowness, it will drag us little people down with it. We are reaping what we sowed - or allowed others to sow for us - and have only ourselves to blame for not demanding sooner a return to the founding principles of equality and justice, a retreat from aggressive war-making on sovereign nations, domestic and foreign alike. From U.S. government agents fighting First Peoples seeking to protect their sacred waters in the Dakotas to U.S. government agents fighting in support of the terrorist group known as Daesh (formerly ISIS, ISIL, and Islamic State) in Syria and Iraq, the balance of U.S. government action lies squarely in the negative realm. How much longer will we little people put up with this? Likely until the two political parties we have given a stranglehold on the lives of nearly 330 million American citizens are forced to share their power, that’s how long.

© JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

on defining RePaRe

Across the world, brave and honest citizens are fighting oppression. Their earstwhile governmental protectors have abandoned them in favor of corporate kickbacks, corruption thinly-veiled. No longer can we the concerned and forward-thinking persons of this modern age sit back and suck down soda-pop while our constitutional rights are stripped from us as fast as the land is stripped of its bounty. No, we are duty-bound to repair society, to repair the Earth, to repair honor and humility and moderation. We start to repair by deciding to RePaRe, which stands for Real Patriots Resist (or Refuse, Rejoin, Reject, Rescind, Rejoice). We resist restrictive and unnecessary ordinances designed to badger and reduce us under tyranny; we refuse to stand idly by as president Obama and his henchmen destory the Bill of Rights; we reject the notion that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be allowed to pass laws that restrict a woman's reproductive rights or keep persons of the same sex from marrying each other; we rescind governmental sovereignty and reclaim that sovereignty for ourselves; and we rejoice at the efforts under way in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and Germany to reoccupy such common areas as have been sold to the lowest bidder by politicains who have forgotten what it means to serve the People. Hats off to all who stand and fight, who put Lives, Fortunes, & sacred Honor on the line to defend those things that government is hellbent on destroing, those things that it was originally designed to protect, foster, and repair. Huzzah.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

on privileged protesting

In these United States, different types of people protest differently. On the one hand are wealth-backed lobbyists and representatives of special-interests who are invited into the personal chambers of Congresspersons and Senators where they voice their concerns, bitch, moan, and explain their reasons for being aggrieved after having handed over a check for many tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand are citizens who cannot afford to give elected officials envelopes filled with cash on a monthly or weekly basis and who therefore must stand outside in the elements, holding signs in their chapped and blistered hands and perhaps telephoning once or twice a day with their state representative's personal secretary in the hope that she might allow them to speak – even if only briefly – to the person who is supposed to be their go-to-guy in Washington. Furthermore, in this, our Corporate Republic of America, certain fabulously-rich individuals can hire slick-tongued, crafty motherfuckers to set up vacations at ski lodges in posh resorts, to which Senators and Congresspersons are invited and where they are wined and dined, harangued and harassed, and bought and sold to such an extent that when they return to Capitol Hill they initiate and support legislation favoring the narrow interests of their new corporate overlords rather than pursuing with single purpose the diverse interests of three hundred millions of common and average citizens. This is how things go in America today, a country whose government was once slightly representative but which now exists merely to increase and to protect the profits of a military-industrial complex that demands constant war and corporations that have been allowed to grow so large that they get away with not paying taxes, degrading and destroying our commonly-shared environmental, stealing and mismanaging the investments of millions of hard-working persons, and brainwashing the public via ubiquitous and constant television, radio, and billboard advertising into thinking that all is well with the world.

All is not well with the world, ladies and gentlemen. The economic system known as capitalism is being used to destroy Nature and to shuffle unimaginable riches into the pockets of fewer than a thousand families across the globe. Television is rotting the brains of millions of previously self-respecting and self-reliant individuals, encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by sitting around all day and not getting out for a nice walk, exposing them to the stale crumbs of televised truthiness rather than forcing them to think critically about the bullshit seeping from the mouths of their favorite painted talking heads.

We did not arrive at this state of affairs accidentally – this was engineered by precisely those individuals who run the aforementioned giant corporations. But who is protesting the downfall of democracy and the desecration of Ladies Liberty and Siblinghood? Only a few hundred thousand people are actively battling this unjust state of affairs, among them the members of Occupy, the Indignados, and the Anti-Fascists, or antifa, who are all carrying on the proud tradition of warring against injustice that started back in the late 1840s, when the members of something called the Paris Commune first took up arms against the overreaches of the state, inspiring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write a short pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto. And, unlike persons who choose to bribe and to corrupt elected officials to get their way, Occupy and antifa do their protesting out in the street, for all the world to see, eschewing back-door dealings for peaceful marches through tear-gas, pepper-spray, and hails of rubber bullets so as to bring attention to the marginalization of Lady Justice, who cannot easily protect herself, as she must remain blindfolded. So, friends, by rising up, speaking out, and never taking the easy way out, you too can help make this world a better place for all people, not just for the super-rich. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

first to go

As an inconsequential blogger with a limited readership and few people perusing my various sites (except, perhaps, those sites specific to street art), I am today still writing and kicking and living and breathing, but who knows for how long. The executive office of the United States – that run by President Barack Hussein Obama – violates regularly the rights of individuals, removing them to foreign locations and holding them prisoner without trial (in a process known as rendition), in clear violation of national and international laws (see here for a fantastic article re: the Charter of the Forest). The president and his equally-corrupt counterparts in the U.S. Congress and Senate allow large and well-financed companies – known as corporations because they have the same rights and privileges as actual persons but cannot be sent to jail for the crimes they commit – to rape the lands and seas of their vast resources, keeping the American people stupefied and misinformed via elaborate and ubiquitous advertising that allow these corporations to profit immensely from the sale of the Commons, those being things that belong to everyone equally, those being things such as the ore and metals in the ground, the chemical compounds dissolved in the air and in the soil, the clear and running water that each of us needs to stay alive, and living and growing things such as cotton, trees, soybeans, corn, oats, cows, pigs, peppers, wheat, chickens, etc.

Because I speak of these things, writing often about the overreaches and the abuses of our sitting president, his predecessors, and their well-heeled corporate cronies – they who shift from corporate officer to appointed official, and back again, in a never-ending cycle of sycophantic, avaricious nepotism – because I speak of these things, banging the dinner-gong to the tune of my own unraveling, for this reason, I will be among the first to go. When our leaders in Washington decide it is time to round up dissidents such as me and to put us in prisons and into labor and death camps for re-education and to keep the minds of the general population free of any doubt about the validity and sustainability of our current economic and political systems, then it will be clear that my bleating was not merely the bitter moaning of a spoiled little whorphan, but that my attempts to get the people of this land to think critically about their lives and about how much television they watch and about their lack of self-reliance and about their whole-scale adoption of conspicuous-consumption-oriented capitalism were more than self-righteous chest-beating.

The only problem about the previous sentence is that none of these here words will exist once I am black-bagged, detained, and murdered, because they will have been wiped away, removed from the world-wide-web, with a single mouse-click deleted from the annals of history, disappeared into the aetherless void with the swift aplomb of a South American dictator. Except, dear friends, we now have North American dictators, Enemies of Liberty such as all Congresspersons and Senators who were in office during July of the year 2012, and Mr. Obama, who signed NDAA 1540 into law, thus allowing the federal government to detain and hold indefinitely American citizens who defy marshal law. (This piece of legislation, ratified unanimously by the White House and Congress, violates the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and international treaties, including the Geneva Convention.)

Yes, my brothers and sisters, because I speak out, because I write on americanifesto and liesmith about the downfall of our democracy and the erosion of our constitutional protections and the rape of the Commons, I shall be among the first casualties of the wave of injustice that is even now swamping this once-fair land. It has been my pleasure to be able to write; it has been my pleasure to be able to bang away for a while on the drums of civil discontentment; but, I think things will become much darker here in America after Obama is appointed to another four years, and I think that things will become worse for people such as me far sooner than they will become better. So, my brave, silent readership, if I suddenly stop posting to my eight separate blogs, and if I stay silent for more than a week's time, it means that I was taken by the federal government of the United States of America, tortured by the federal government of the United States of America, and killed by the federal government of the United States of America, and that my lifeless corpse is rotting at the bottom of some forgotten pit at some unnamed military base in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. C'est la vie, though, and fuck 'em, since I shall gladly die defending the last few remnants of goddesses Liberty and Justice, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on luxury & comfort

This morning, while waiting for father sun to awaken, I heard on the radio an advertisement for a new motor-vehicle made by Lincoln. In this commercial, the company touted the vehicle's salient features, among them “organically tanned leather from Scotland, French stitching, and Moroccan (or Algerian) wood accents.” Beyond my abject loathing for a supposedly American company that pays non-Americans to make pretty, expensive cars for gullible Americans to buy, I find myself seething with rage at the notion in this country that we deserve things such as finery, luxury, and comfort.

If while growing up the the writers of the Declaration of Independence had been told that they deserved luxury, that comfort were their ultimate goal, that it were acceptable for them to let their guards down and to relax in a plush and reclining chair, they would not likely have had the stones to rise up and to spit in the faces of their foreign slave-masters. If the frontiersmen had grown up convinced that luxury and comfort were things they deserved, they probably would never have withstood the privations and hardships associated with crossing continents. If Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr. had become accustomed to soft and easy lives, they would likely have changed neither history nor the fate of millions of otherwise down-trodden and wretched souls.

Attention, citizens of America: life is not comfortable, easy, or luxurious. There is no reason you cannot be Happy in your life, or Safe (these being the primary purposes of government, according to the Declaration), but please do not allow yourself to become addicted to the notion that it will be convenient, plush, or pillow-topped. The more one's supposed luxury, the more one has to lose when one's house burns or floods or gets crushed by falling trees; the more one relies on comfort, the greater will be the fall when hardship returns; the more one believes in the lies spewing from the twisted suck-holes of advertisers, the less likely one is to be able to make do with less; and the more one denigrates oneself by driving a car, the longer one is trapped inside a glass-walled, cash-guzzling, burning metal box.

Today, our nation faces trying times: our people lack above-poverty-level employment, our corporations maximize profits at any and all cost to the worker and to the environment, our politicians have been corrupted by Special Interest, half of our “representatives” in the legislature are millionaires, and our government is a tyrannical juggernaut that wages war upon the Liberty of its own citizens. This is not the time to seek comfort, or luxury – this is the time to batten down the hatches and to prepare for the worst (while still keeping a song in one's heart). The underlying reason for the focus on luxury and comfort of late is that these foul conditions trick the person into thinking that she can rest, that she has done her duty to herself and to humanity, that she deserves certain things that only money can buy. Money cannot buy Happiness, nor can it buy Safety, but it can be used as a tool for self-enslavement to supposedly necessary external conditions. Therefore, the patriot relies on nothing but her bright and bursting spirit; she needs nothing but the calluses growing on her strong, slender hands. Rise up, my fellow Americans: shake off the cruel yoke of luxury, and discard the rusty chains of comfort, because your nation, and Honest Abe, need you strong, sane, and self-reliant.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

on e pluribus unum

Translated from Latin, E Pluribus Unum, America's motto, means: From Many, One. It implies that the purpose of government in this country is to gather together all who dwell here and to mold them into a whole that is greater and more powerful than its individual parts could ever be alone. It does not mean: Make only 0.01% of all Americans fantastically wealthy while the rest wallow in poverty without regular and affordable access to proper health care, well-paying jobs, decent shelter, or healthy, high-quality food.

The robber-baron style, consumption-oriented capitalism currently endorsed and enforced by the American federal government makes but poorly of many, one; we can no longer allow this selfish, short-sighted economic model to poison and destroy the tender, fragile reasons why this nation was formed: to make the people of this land Safe and Happy, and to allow the Blessings of Liberty to rain bountifully upon all, equally. We must change our economic systems, and, if need be, our corrupted and counter-productive modes of government. Arise, patriots, arise as one; read the Declaration of Independence, and fight alongside the indomitable forces of Reason to liberate it from such harsh and heavy chains as those that now imprison it.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit