on baking cookies

This morning, I ate some of the cookies my housemates had baked. Not the cookies they’d decorated laboriously, of course, but the bastard plain ones, those misshaped and odd.

There’s more dough in the fridge that I intend to bake up into more cookies - to replace the ones I ate this morning. I’d bought the dough yesterday, you see, because someone had been reduced to tears after learning that the last of the first batch of cookies made a couple of days ago had disappeared down my gaping maw at breakfast time.
I’m trying something where I make an effort to fix the grief and heartbreak I cause in this world instead of ignoring it until it subsides. The dough for making sugar cookies sells for fewer than three dollars, which is more expensive than necessary considering one can buy a container of eight sugar cookies perfectly formed and professionally baked for only a single dollar. The extra dollar and a half, it seems, are the price one pays for adding an egg and a stick of butter and then forming and baking the dough oneself, waiting for it to rise, hovering near the oven, and being disappointed when the cookies don’t come out right.

Next time, maybe I’ll buy the cheaper cookies, microwave them for thirty-odd seconds, then announce that I baked cookies and does anyone want to help decorate them?

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

dollar store commies

As of these last few months of 2012, millions of American citizens are directly supporting the People's Republic of China, our country's primary economic competitor and one of the sole remaining bastions of the socialistic world-view. Every day, Americans support communism in the People's Republic of China; by demanding rock-bottom prices in cities great and small – from the rolling central plains to the rugged western coastline – countless numbers of red-blooded, patriotic Ynki contribute directly to the ascending might of the Middle Kingdom.

Dollar stores, which sell products ranging from shower curtains to miniature cast-resin busts of zebras, stand at the forefront of the Chinese invasion of, and its dominance over, the American economy. Purchasing an item that reads “Made In China” funnels funds directly into the rapidly growing Chinese economy (where most of the consumer items sold in dollar stores are made) rather than into the pockets of producers based in these United States. From the 1980s onward, the capitalistic oligarchy has taken for itself great portions of America's wealth saw an opportunity to further line their pockets, destroying the manufacturing economy in this country by shifting manufacturing capacity to foreign countries. As hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens lost their manufacturing jobs, they had few options than to buy the cheapest products in order to survive; they turned to dollar stores, thereby supporting the very system that had swallowed up their jobs in the first place. The capitalistic oligarchy effectively enslaved the American consumer to the whims of foreign nations by shifting production overseas to special economic zones that are, in everything but name, slave camps.

I welcome our Chinese masters, and greet them cordially by saying Ni-Hao-Ma. As a Son of the American Revolution and a descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims, my blood runs deep in this land. However, I am not blindly patriotic, nor am I inextricably tied to our prevailing economic model, Me-First Capitalism. In fact, I find our prevailing economic model – in which the fruits of the labor of an entire people are re-directed into the a pockets of but a few corporate officers – deeply and intrinsically un-American. I am personally boycotting dollar stores (and, by extension, Walmart, Target, and the rest of the big-box stores), not to harm the Chinese economy but in quiet mourning for our lost manufacturing economy. Join me if you wish, but know that this choice requires paying a bit more money for everyday goods, a sacrifice that rewards itself with feelings of pride and patriotic fervor. Remember – if you aren't buying products made exclusively in the U.S.A, you are party responsible for the gutting of the American manufacturing economy, for the demise of our middle class, for our slipping military hegemony, and for the Chinese government continuing to purchase significant portions of our national debt. In the long run, shopping at dollar stores will not have a positive economic impact on your personal finances, but it will certainly boost the profits of the plutocrats who sold us out to the commies. Mahalo.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥

gasoline: keeping the FUN in Funding Terrorism since 1938

We, the gasoline, kerosene, and crude oil sellers operating in the United States of America, would like to thank the consumers of this land for helping us to fund terrorism. A good portion of the gasoline and other crude-oil-based products we sell is pumped out of the ground by the government of Saudi Arabia, which uses the proceeds from the sale of this flammable black goo to finance terrorist training camps and to purchase weapons and matériel for terrorists cells all over the world. Ever since we first started doing business with the Saudis back in 1938, a hefty portion of every dollar given to us by good, honest, upstanding American citizens in exchange for the gasoline they use to move themselves around in automobiles we in turn have given to a state that sponsors or supports terrorism; therefore, each American who purchases gasoline in any form – be it diesel, jet-fuel, lamp oil, or regular old 87 octane – each of these supposedly patriotic Yankees is a ground-level, small-time fund-raiser for jihad-waging, freedom-hating, tower-toppling terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida and Al-Shabaab.

We here at Shell, Exxon-Mobil, BP, Amoco, Citgo, and Texaco are proud to assist the average American in perpetuating and funding terrorism around the world by continuing to do business with states that support the activities of cowardly, baby-killing mass murderers. So, dear American consumers, keep driving your cars – as much as you can and as far as you are able – and keep those dollars flowing, because the next Nine-Eleven attacks are not going to fucking fund themselves.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on novus ordo seclorum

  Every American dollar bill bears the slogan novus ordo seclorum, Latin for New Order for the Ages. The federal government of the United States (the fed) persecutes this new order in hot and cold military conflicts, and by wagingwar on those of its own citizens who would consume drugs other than those it itself licenses or sells.

  Regardless of whether you are American or not, and if you are, whether or not you vote: if you handle US currency, and if you conduct business with it, you give your tacit consent to the aims printed on the American greenback – if you use dollar bills, you perpetuate and maintain this new order for the ages. (I have followed with interest efforts in economically struggling communities to switch to location-specific para-currencies, efforts which seem to nullify the paper money printed by the US Treasury.) In the not too distant past, the fed faced oppressive and mass-murdering dictators that it had to destroy, which required it to reorder its economy and to draft its mission statement anew. By consequence the world was also ordered anew, and the smaller players held their breath as clear battle lines emerged, and as nuclear missile silos sprouted in the Urals, and in the Midwest.

  The outline of this new order began to change in the 1970s, when the fed abandoned the gold standard, causing the US Dollar to decline. Then, it changed the rules for financial regulation, allowing for rampant and destructive speculation, so that now the two hundred and fifty thousands of Americans who speculated best (the Point Oh Five) control the corporate structures that in turn control most aspects of society. But it is the duty of the federal government to shape a new order for the ages, and no other party – not the 0.05% nor the military-industrial complex – can manifest the destiny of this nation with the sort of extreme prejudice and blind dedication needed to finish the job.

  Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp