spies swine plastic

There are spies in my cell-phone. They were planted by clandestine government agents whose job is to promote corporate profits at the expense of democracy and human rights.

There are swine in the white house. They were installed by people who live their lives in fear of whatever their television sets tell them to fear.

There are children starving in America. They starve because capitalism is the most efficient system ever created to drain resources from the many in order to enrich the few.

Plastic pollutes all waters both salt and fresh. This plastic pollution exists because people living in the Western world have bought into the false notion that some things can be discarded after having been used only once.

As long as billionaires profit from the aforementioned imbalances, they will persist. As long as I and the population at large continue to pursue comfortable lives instead of virtuously meaningful ones, these injustices will continue. I’m waking up. Are you?

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

on falling short

This past Thor's day, I watched a North Korean propaganda video (see here.) Similar to other videos leaked from behind the bamboo curtain, this one was crudely cut together from pirated media; it featured a man explaining the ills of capitalism (his face was blurred out) and the methods by which our Western society keeps us numbed and tuned out to the world around us. I consider myself to be a forward-thinking individual who works hard to counter the incessant lure of materialism, who educates himself through non-US news sources (such as RT.com and AlAribiya.com), who does more than most other people he knows to eat well and avoid processed foods, and who does his part to combat terrorism and protect our natural environment by not driving a car but rather moving himself around on a bicycle. The video referenced above, however – even though it was a low-budget hodgepodge originating in a place the government of the United States says we must fear and mistrust, it made a lot of sense to me; upon watching it, I knew that in my efforts I was falling short, that I was just as much a puppet of this country's capitalistic overlords as my fellow Americans who engage in constant and shameless consumerism. This knowledge waned until I started trolling on tumblr, mesmerized by image upon image of tanned and buxom beauties, whereupon it returned full-force. I sat there in shame, looked upon the shamefulness of my ways, vowed to do better, performed a Death Meditation, and started the healing process anew. Aho.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

mirrors – mirrors everywhere

Look around you. That's right, take a good look around you. Unless you are visually-impaired or you lead a rugged, comfort-less existence out in the woods somewhere, then, while just having looked around, you probably saw a mirrored surface, something in which you saw a reflection of yourself having a look around. We surround ourselves these days with high-gloss, shiny, or mirrored items, with laptops, automobiles, mobile phones, tablet computers, windows, watch-faces, doors, door-handles, hubcaps, handlebars, plates, pots, spoons, and eyeglasses, to name a few. Oh the many mirrors one can gaze longingly into, losing oneself in the strangely hypnotic activity of making eye-contact with oneself. So is its profusion, and such is its commonality, that we can hardly imagine life without the mirror.

Consider, however, that just a few hundred years ago the primary reflective material was a calm surface of water, which only reflects well under optimal conditions and which requires the viewer to suspend himself over it to the point that objects start falling from his pockets and fluids start dripping from his face. Ancient societies understood the dangers of self-observation; their stories include a cautionary tale about a young man named Narcissus who so loved looking at his own reflection that he dove into a pond in an attempt to capture it, whereupon he was promptly ensnared and drowned by pond-nymphs. (I believe that the tale of Narcissus is meant to be taken as a warning of the dangers of getting caught in the tractor-beam of one's own reflection.) It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that many people could afford mirrors or, for that matter, glass; before the 18th century, the few persons who could afford mirrors were fantastically rich individuals who were often so corrupt and so cruel that we wishe they'd have stared at their own reflections more often instead of eradicating villages and enslaving and torturing their own subjects. (The myth about seven years of bad luck resulting from a broken mirror probably dates to before the Industrial Revolution, when portable reflective objects were prohibitively expensive.)

Are we, today, better off for having mirrors everywhere, or can mirrors be blamed in part for our current theory of rational-selfishness (i.e. avarice), that wasteful, ego-centric, quasi-capitalistic economic system that drains our lives of its intrinsic value and imprisons our hearts in shells of self-serving egotism, rendering us incapable of respecting ourselves, each other, and Nature? I find it logical to assume that staring constantly at our own reflections reinforces the notion that we must first look out for ourselves, for Numero Uno, before sacrificing our time or money for the good of other people. Since beginning to ponder these questions, I have looked at my reflection only when necessary, such as when shaving my face or checking for ticks, avoiding even a sidelong glance into a mirror; when I do stop to look, I am often shocked to see the face I have come to associate with myself staring back at me, an image which correspond but poorly to the ebullient spirit burning deeply within my loins. The crux of the matter is this: mirrors disassociate the self from its tender humanity, from its intrinsic goodness; the act fuels and facilitates the ego's ability to hijack the soul, which results in greedy, self-righteous, and short-sighted behavior such as conspicuous consumption and self-banishment into wage-slavery. Therefore, dear friend, please avoid a mirror today, and rescue your soul from the ego's sticky clutches. 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 free time

Today, devices exist in homes across the world that work so that humans do not have to. Among these are dish-washers, vacuum-cleaners, lawnmowers, well-water pumps, washing-machines for clothes, and televisions. Rather than having to wash one's dishes by hand, to sweep furiously at one's carpet, to cut one's grass using muscle power, to maintain water-pressure by hand, to clean one's clothes, or to entertain oneself, these machines – which run either on gasoline burning in their innards or on electricity (that is generated by the burning of coal before it is piped via an enormous network of skeletal electrical towers across vast distances to emerge finally from wall-mounted sockets) – do nearly all of the work that people used to do for themselves. In order to buy these devices, to pay to have them repaired, maintained, and upgraded, ​and to pay for the gasoline and for the electricity required to make them run, their owners must work – depending on their level of skill, influence, luck, and education – at one or more jobs, labor for which they receive financial compensation.

Advertisers market the aforementioned devices as things that will increase the amount of free time available to consumers and as things that are supposed to make life better. In reality, however, these devices do not make life easier for the majority of people who grow accustomed to their use; these devices rob the people of the good, hearty workouts associated with cutting grass using the body's own power, with washing clothes using the body's own power, with washing dishes using the body's own power, and with hauling water using the body's own power; these devices rob the people of the need to maintain the art of storytelling, and of the need to maintain the art of making art. But, aha! I have just had a thought, namely that because these machines exist, and because they reduce the amount of time that people would otherwise have to set aside to take care of their household and garden chores or to come up with clever ways to keep themselves entertained, because of these supposed time-savers, people are able to work longer hours and to work at more than one job in order to maintain their supposedly time-saving devices and to keep buying new ones as the old ones wear out. Therefore, these devices and the oft-repeated lie that they “save time” not only create but also perpetuate the type of wage-slave, consumption-oriented capitalism that, as I type, is being waged against the American people.

I have nothing really against free time, only the way that free time is used. Americans and persons living in industrialized nations similar to ours use their free time to sit around eating highly processed and chemical-laden foodstuffs, watching television, playing video games, and generally getting fatter and unhealthier by the day; if, however these free-time-rich people were to work in community gardens, paint pictures, tell each other stories, go on hikes, or exercise their bodies and minds and make themselves into better and more interesting people instead of poking at touch-screen-equipped tablet computers while turning up the volume on the TV in order to drown out the sound pollution generated by the dishwasher and the washing-machine running at the same time, if these people were to be active and creative and all chip in to make this nation and this planet a greener and quieter place for all then we might slowly redeem ourselves in the opinions and estimations of a candid world. As it stands however, with our federal government owned and operated by the very persons who gain the most – financially – from our brand of wage-slave style capitalism, there is a greater incentive to keep the people fat, stupid, and sold on the idea that there are devices for sale that will make their lives easier or better rather than to encourage them to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-respecting. How much farther down this stinking rabbit-hole of convenience-driven consumerism can we possibly allow ourselves to fall? America delenda est.

agitate – challenge – debunk – restore

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on a SAR lost

Sons of the American Revolution; free-thinking, independent-minded citizens of America; fellow lovers of Liberty; dear few remaining self-sufficient, self-reliant Yankees:

We may have lost, once and for all, a member whom we once thought it possible to save. It was not enough that he allowed himself to be ruled by such fear as was being spoon-fed to the People in the immediate wake of the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. It was not enough that he jumped wholly onto the bandwagon of consumption-oriented market capitalism. It was not enough that he has stocked his home with delicate and costly things in direct violation of the teachings of frugality and compassion attributed to his god Jesus Christ. No, dear brothers of Freedom and sisters of Liberty, I have witnessed with my own eyes his full and complete retreat into madness, his obedient adoption of even the most trivial and poorly-thought-out drivel that tends to slither from the mouths of such politicians as Sarah Palin: he has replaced the compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs with which he once reduced his energy consumption with old-school, incandescent bulbs. Also, he has learned from his wife that it is acceptable to leave the outside windows open for long periods of time while the air-conditioning is on full blast, thus proving to the world his nearly complete lack of self-critical thinking and his nearly total abandonment of the lessons of his childhood when making the little decisions that significantly impact not only his own life but also the wellbeing of every single other person alive today. Neither he nor his wife run surgical emergency operating rooms within the home, nor do they do much more with their eyes that use them to watch television (in this case, literally, the idiot-box); therefore, they do not require immediately-available light in order to save lives or to make the world a better place, only to guide their way from the couch to the refrigerator, and back again; (they therefore have no good reason to need the lights in their home to come to an immediately full brightness and can afford to wait a few moments for CFLs to gain full brightness). This our poor brother's mindset is so alien to our cause of personal hardiness and self-sufficient living, so devoid of hubris, so lacking in self-criticism as to have moved him so very close to the brink of the world of lost causes that I cannot see a way to save his soul from slowly rotting away, unused, inside the dank nether-regions of his unplumbed inner depths. We have lost him, dear siblings in Liberty: lost him to the hype; lost him to the Fear; lost him to the siren-call of false convenience; and lost him to such a mindset that tends to push this nation's problems down the road, kicking the can just far enough into the next generation's territory as to keep it out of sight without actually picking up the can and fucking recycling it.

I have tried speaking, I have tried reasoning, I have tried threats both open and thinly-veiled – all to no avail. Dear friends, fellow Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, if anyone knows how to pull such a fellow as the man described above back from the abyss, back from his blind adherence to the poorly-conceived notions spewing from the suck-holes of our more radical politicians, please contact me or comment on this post, to assist me in my attempts to save this our sibling in Liberty. Please help me, oh dear friends, for I dance with despair, my heart near torn asunder. Mahalo.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

on the magical nature of street art | encyclopediamericanifesto

  There is mysterious work afoot in major cities across America – the work of street artists! Search modern urban architecture's unadorned spaces, and you will find gallery upon gallery of cunningly executed and deftly placed works of art. Look in the forgotten and the underutilized areas so common to today's city, and you will discover a riot of forever changing and seemingly self-rejuvenating works all crammed and pasted and plastered over each other. And if you watch over a few weeks time the canvas of urban art shift and change you will begin to wonder who are the persons who put up these strange and colorful pictures, and how ponderous are their cojones.

  It shall remain a mystery what exactly drives the individual to risk his life simply to showcase his artistic abilities; the street artist keeps from sight – only twice in the last two months have I seen street artists at work, and both times were at night. We may never explain why a person starts suddenly to affix his artwork to previously unadorned public surfaces, just as we may never explain why state and local governments hate street art as much as they do, or why they work so hard to cover it up and remove it. (I suspect that governments make street art illegal so that they can incarcerate gang members for spray painting, although these official bodies have in effect criminalized all public artwork other than that found on billboards or on other tax-revenue-generating places, which makes little sense from an artistic standpoint but complete sense from a capitalistic standpoint.)

  The self-directed urban beautification specialist, or SDUBS, works for neither fame nor money – she operates because she knows it is more important for her to pursue her Happiness freely and without restriction than for all the buildings to look the same. She executes her craft with the sole intention of making the urban environment more beautiful, and she can hardly stand to see a blank space go unfilled. Her city and state will punish her for her efforts, not rewared her. They look upon her as if she were vile and incorrigible scum, yet she has already forgiven them both, because her heart is pure, and devoid of malice.

  場黑麥ioanni elymucampus fecit

p.s. go to urbanartuploads.blogspot.com or to urbanartuploads.tumblr.com to see pictures of street art

on surviving major catastrophe

  Today's rugged man-beast, that brave individual who wishes to survive the upcoming zombie apocalypse, he (or, for the lady-beast, of course, she) will be self-reliant, self-sufficient, and capable of extreme action in dire circumstances.

  Whether you at some point see yourself making the post-apocalyptic wasteland your bitch, or if you merely desire to prove to yourself and to your species how rabidly you cherish life, your first step is to distance yourself from the mindless and continuously occurring buying-shit-for-the-sake-of-buying-shit ritual of consumption-oriented capitalism. Then, learn how to feed yourself cheaply. Reuse items that are in reusable shape. Cancel your contracts to receive broadcast television, and discover the excitement of story-telling. Become disciplined in your use of electricity and water. Learn how to read a map, to hunt, to make fire, to build shelter, and to do any other thing that might keep you alive when the lights go off and the undead come to bang upon ​your doors.

  In order to consider yourself even remotely ready to perform all the tasks necessary to make it through the impending breakdown of civilization, read books often, discipline your mind by delving always into its innermost depths (where you shall face reward and punishment both), and soothe and settle your mental state until its baseline is a serene quietude. As with the mind so you shall discipline the body, by exercising every single day from now until the day of your death. In order to stay alive while the other people around you are losing their heads and dying in stupid and unnecessary ways, you must be ready at any moment to commence with survival. Tens of thousands of city-dwellers have already abandoned their shiny condos and comfortable couches to live the shiftless life of the tough-and-rumble nomad way out at that spot where twilight turns to fog; they are waiting for you to join them.

  Before I commence, there are two more items to add to the never-ending Checklist-Of-Things-To-Do-Before-The-Global-Meltdown (the COTTDBTGM of yore). First is a readiness to abandon the persons you love the most to save your own life. Second is the willingness and audacity to stand tall in the face of grave danger to protect the persons you love the most. The decision which of these to choose will, of course, be up to you.

  Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on ambitions in cash

  During a recent conversation about the merits of socialism, my counterpart argued that ambition, ingenuity, and creativity would disappear in the absence of monetary remuneration for labor. In other words, he claimed that people would stop working if they stopped getting paid money to work, that ambition would vanish if the potential for gain were to also vanish. If this theory were true, fathers would stop showing up to coach their kids' little league teams, our interstate hiking trails would become overgrown for a lack of volunteers to keep them cleared of brush, and nothing would transpire within the walls of churches other than those tasks performed by paid clergy.

  Unknowable man-hours of labor are performed every year in the United States for which the laborers are not paid. This labor is performed to satisfy an ideal, to give back to the community, even to calm that deep inner need to do something positive with which the unlucky among are burdened. I believe this zeal to provide for the common good is inherent to all persons (although most of us have it stamped or beaten out of us at one point or other in our lives). I also believe that our current economic system has ensnared this zeal, and subjugated it to the fleeting, hollow satisfaction of conspicuous consumption.

  It is not as if the people are bad, or shiftless, it is that we have unlearned to cherish those things that are precious beyond their monetary value.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on the pagan power of capitalism

  Capitalism, with all its evil and all its ills, has had one definitely positive affect on American society: to rid our pagan holidays of religious contamination. Neither morality nor meaning matter in the eyes of capitalism – the only thing that matters is making more money. For example: capitalism has freed the ancient holiday of goddess Eostre from the clutches of biblical oppression. As a holiday that once celebrated that goddess who makes women fertile (and the land grow green again), the festival we now know as Easter was high-jacked by religious forces and co-opted for their own narrow uses. In the last half century, however, the ever-grasping paws of capitalistic greed have freed Easter from the Shackles of Scripture, so that we once again celebrate lustful procreation (symbolized by the rabbit) and the return of the teeming things (symbolized by daffodils and other such flowers).

  Similarly, the holiday of the winter solstice, an occasion that has been marked throughout the centuries with lights mounted on pine trees. This holiday was taken hostage by the forces of Christianity, forces that bastardized the logical marking of the passage of time and tied it to the fictitious birth of a fictitious god in a land far removed in time and space. The passing of the winter solstice was only recently liberated by the uncaring hand of capitalism – an emphasis on Santa Claus and the profuse giving of gifts has replaced, thankfully, the (biblically) unspecified day upon which a young lady gave birth, in a (biblically) unspecified structure, in an (biblically) unspecified place, to a male child. (The story of Jesus is a precise retelling of the story of Horus, an Egyptian god born of a virgin who died only to arise from death after three days.) Now, instead of worshiping some stagnant and foreign godhead, during the darkest days of winter we celebrate the coming-together of loved-ones, and shower them with presents as a sign of our affection. Gone are the days of the churchly mandate – capitalism has finally, and for good, removed Christ from Christmas.

  And, most importantly (to me, at least), the uncaring and voracious greed of capitalism has removed any shred of religiosity from the delightfully pagan holiday of Halloween. What started as a heathen ritual to mark the beginning of winter was commandeered by Christian forces, who turned it into All Saint's Day, on which day only the dead of that religion were praised (in effigy). After centuries of suffering under the cruel, stifling blanket of this biblical slavery, Halloween has been dragged from its prison by the ever-hungry maw of monster-capitalism. Gone are the days when Americans celebrated the Christian dead – arrived are the days when we Americans celebrate inventiveness and the ability to take a good scaring, when we shower upon the children of the land many sweet gifts, when we might, for one short night, become someone other than our boring normal selves. (The proliferation of Halloween as a national holiday was made possible by profit-hungry corporations that recognized in it a way to sell cheap, Chinese-made costumes.)

  While I generally abhor capitalism for its tendency to make only a small portion of the American people rich, I celebrate it now for freeing our shared and common history from the clutches of religious oppression. We can ill afford to live according to the rules of a lost tribe of desert people, so it is fitting that the forces of our chosen economic model are wiping our history clean of religious contamination.

  The next time you are carving up a lamb on Easter, remember horny old Eostre, and give your spouse a long, lingering kiss. When you find yourself stringing lights on a tree, remember to go outside and enjoy the longest night of the year. As you are putting the finishing touches on an elaborate and dazzling costume, remember that its job is to scare away the sickness-bringing forces of the impending long cold darkness. Thanks to the religious impartiality of our capitalistic system, you can enjoy these events without being forced to fear the wrath of some jealous, vengeful godhead.

  America is not a Christian nation, nor was it in any way founded upon the Christian faith. Neither easter nor the winter solstice were originally Christian holidays – these pagan rituals were commandeered in order to facilitate the spread of one set of religious teachings. Just how non-Christian is America? We honor the Roman god Saturn on Saturday. On Wednesday, we remember the Norse god Wotan, and on Thursday, his son-brother Thor. In the harbor of New York there stands a large statue of the Roman goddess Libertas (whom we call Lady Liberty), a goddess who holds in one hand the Torch of Progress, in the other a representation of our most treasured of documents, the Declaration of Independence.

  Everywhere in this great land we witness the chaotic jumble of different faiths and systems of belief, all tumbling together and jostling to retain the slightest shred of relevancy. May the uncaring grasp of our institutionalized greed continue to keep American society free of religious one-mindedness! Thank you, lustful and rapacious Capitalism, you old sport, for doing you part to keep America jumbled, confused, and oppression-free.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on slavery by capitalism

  We, the people of America who are not enslaved to watching television or participating in fabricated national shopping rituals, must somehow help the 152 million people who went out to shop on the fake ritual of "Black Friday," a non-holiday that was created to rob the People of their hard-earned greenbacks.

  How do we help these people, and free them from their self-imposed, self-bought slavery?

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on slavery as punishment

  The thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

  By any measure, this amendment does not abolish slavery - it makes slavery into an acceptable, official form of punishment. If my memory serves me correctly, however, few if any convicted criminals have been sentenced recently to slavery or indentured servitude. The use of slavery as a punitive measure would be more useful in some situations, less in others. A petty thief is fairly likely to renounce his life of crime after a few hard seasons under the lash, while a corporate officer convicted of fraud and embezzlement, a white man accustomed to the finest treatment his ill-won gains could bring him, such a man might just emerge from his grueling months toiling in the hot summer sun a humble and reformed person. Similarly, a man-slaughtering cuckold is unlikely to find redemption in tall swaying fields of sugarcane (a modern industry in which slavery is still widespread today), while the bankers who were allowed to profit enormously from the sale of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities would truly understand the meaning of labor if put to task making self-guided V2 rockets in the caves of central Germany.

  Perhaps is is because so many Americans have enslaved themselves willingly to the whore-gods of small-scale capital gain and conspicuous materialism that slavery is not used more frequently as a punitive measure: the slave is already under the yoke, so allowing her to max out her credit cards and providing her with no better outlet at which to express her abounding creativity and endless potential – in her pursuit of food, shelter, and clothing, the Three Fundamental Components of Safety – no better outlet than some menial, repetitive job, her self-imposed and self-maintained slavery ensures that the fruits of her hard labor are not afforded to her but to the very few persons who sit atop America's pyramid-scheme of capitalism. The slave will be in debt until the day she dies, always struggling to make the minimal payment for things she did not truly need, and could not truly afford.

  I abhor slavery. I do not think any person should ever be put (or put themselves) in chains, but as long as our Constitution states that slavery can be utilized as a way to punish criminals, we should consider using it to bring the false princes of capitalism down a peg or two. The humble are not just the backbone of civil society, they are its savior.

  Until next time, I remain, your most humble and loyal servant, &c.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

declaration of corporate supremacy

  When in the course of pursuing profits it becomes necessary to remind the People for whom it is they toil, and to formulate the rules by which they shall lead their lives, we, the assembled capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States (but by no means necessarily operating here), only occasionally and perfunctorily respectful to the Opinions of Mankind, declare that the economic well-being of our executive boards and voting members by far outweighs the Right of the People to Safety and Happiness. The original Declaration of Independence, that document upon which the United States was founded, those words that might have given mankind the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, is, and has for some time now been, a dead and forgotten document, its declaration of unalienable rights null and void, its formulation of the core principle of the role of government - to bring about the Safety and the Happiness of the People - ground to dust under the jack-boot of our Capitalistic Greed.

  We hold these Lies to be enforceable through police action: that a small percentage of Americans should by rights reap the profits generated by the labor of who work in this country and across the known world; that we have the right to speculate and to risk the invested monies of those Americans stupid enough to have entrusted us with their savings, and, when our speculations fail and millions of Americans lose their hard-won gains, to be safe and secure in our gated communities, our ill-begotten money protected by the federal government, our risky businesses kept from failing by the taxes paid by the very people whom we had hoodwinked originally; that we shall profit from the sale of drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, that are legally available to the People, drugs that kill them by the hundreds of thousands and maim them by the millions, while supporting the persecution and the imprisonment of the People in for-profit penitentiaries owned and run by us, for the crime of consuming drugs not to our liking, such as marijuana, drugs that have no discernible negative affect on their health or on their Happiness; that the US government should wage un-winnable wars against faceless foes (see the "war on terror") so that we may continue to manufacture, develop, and sell arms and weaponry, wars that might be won only if every person on Earth were placed in concentration camps and lobotomized forcibly; that we have the Right, through unscrupulous and down-right false advertising, to convince the People that unbridled consumption and unchecked personal debt are the bedrock of the American Dream, that Happiness does not grow from within, that it is not a fragile state of mind that blossoms from patience and self-understanding, but that it is something we cram into our wallets and pocket-books, that we spend in our shopping plazas, that we waste on useless items that supposedly make life easier but that constitute little more than clutter; that it was our patriotic duty to abandon the American manufacturing sector for foreign shores, sacrificing the jobs of millions of our countrymen to boost our profit-margins, allowing children across the Pacific Rim to work as slave-laborers in free-economic-zones so that unemployed Americans could buy cheap goods that break soon after the first use; that we have the Right, regardless of the complaints of tree-hugging hippies, to rape and destroy the land for short-term gain, to poison the streams with runoff from our mine, to clear-cut the once-great forests for export, and to pump the animals we slaughter for food full of steroids and antibiotics instead of providing them with clean and open places in which to live out their short and pathetic lives; that we have willingly and to vast personal profit rejuvenated the methods of the ancient Romans for controlling the lower classes by providing them with bread (fast food) and circuses (television), methods that poison the body and the mind but that keep the rabble blessedly quiet and contented throughout their pitiful and mostly worthless lives; that we will run our corporate societies, not as democracies, but as totalitarian fiefs, while convincing our workers that, through hard and dedicated labor, they might reach the highest rungs of our bogus organizations, while, in reality, they will, after infighting, backstabbing, and reckless self-promotion, find themselves flung out into the cold, the pathways to our fleeting and hollow ranks closed to all but a most rapacious and lustful few.

  At no point in the long yet subtle Process of making a mockery of this once great Nation did we pause to consider that our hoarding of the nation's wealth would violate the Constitutional directive of promoting the general Welfare, although we will, by funneling the collective wealth of all Americans into the pockets of our cronies and fellow oligarchs, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, not to all Americans equally, but to those who have, as we have, dutifully sacrificed their sacred Honor on the altar of the Insatiable Hag of Materialism, to those who have shat, as we have shat, upon the once-grand notion of Liberty and Justice for All. We have stopped our ears to the Voice of Justice, preferring rather the Shriek of Lies, preferring rather to profit from spying on the People (through the sale and maintenance of the materials necessary to the surveillance society), under the unpatriotic and anti-American Patriot Act, rejoicing in the violation of the flimsy protections once, but no longer, afforded the People by the Constitution.

  All this we pledge, and more, for: we have the means to lobby the Legislature for our own gain; we have the money with which to live comfortably for ten lifetimes while millions of American children go to bed hungry each night; we have convinced the People that consumption is preferable to ingenuity, that watching TV is preferable to creative expression and the telling of stories, that there is a universal formula for Happiness, a formula that starts with a dollar sign. We, therefore, the capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States, Assembled, appealing to none but our majority share-holders, by our own authority and the might of our wrongly appropriated wealth, brazenly Publish and Declare, that this Country belongs to Us now, that the dream of a more perfect Union has no place in the world of top-few-capitalism, that eighty percent of all Americans shall toil ceaselessly to make us, those of the remaining Twenty Percent, rich beyond reckoning, that government is instituted not to secure the Rights of the People but to satisfy our every Desire, and that the People have no Right either to alter nor to abolish their government, as it long ago abandoned Them to satisfy the needs of the most monied few, as it is now too late, and They waited too long to act.

  So suck it, you hard-working American fools, and while you are sucking it good and hard, remember that you have abandoned everything for which your ancestors once fought and died.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on dating & economics

  The intricate dance within a romantic relationship can be compared to the efforts of economists struggling to contain erratic market fluctuations. In either situation, the party that responds to the sweeping changes taking place in his counterpart will find himself on the losing side, forever racing to keep up, forever implementing new methods to bring to heel the unfathomable maelstrom he thinks he has the capacity to control. Whether this unfathomable maelstrom be the mind of a woman or the global crude-oil market, the economist, an outside observer inherently blind to the vast and incalculable influences that shape the mood of his counterpart, will enact measures he hopes will soothe the fury of that which he holds dear, often sacrificing long-term stability for the brief elation of short-term gain.
  I have learned one thing about relationships, one truth I have had to relearn time and again: the less you try to control your counterpart, the better off you both will be. When done with patient persistence, attempts to fathom your lover and to steer him in a direction you think best can indeed effect change; the nature of this change, however, will likely range from intensive introspection, over increased volatility, culminating in full-blown systemic meltdown. It is impossible to predict accurately how your counterpart will react to the pressures you have applied – any action will have an appropriate and equal reaction, but its full scope will forever remain known only to the reactive party.
  Imagine for a moment your closest friend, the innumerable events and countless little decisions that helped to mold him into the person you (think you) know today, the environmental and gentic forces that influence continuously the shaping of his being. Now imagine hundreds, thousands, millions of individuals of similar complexity who by going about their daily rounds become what we call markets, with every act shifting the fortunes of various businesses, with each transaction affecting the cycles of supply and demand, their every decision impacting and being impacted upon by unique and innumerable forces. It is all but impossible to know the mind of your closest friend – how could anyone claim to know the minds of thousands of strangers in thousands of different locations across the globe?
  Controlling your lover is a Sisyphean struggle full of complications that subside one day only to reappear the next, a cruel practice that will gut your lover's soul, leaving behind a mindless and docile golem content to do your bidding, within her no room for independent thought, no capacity for abiding Happiness, the dark promise of future abuse her only constant. The controlling lover exhibits deep insecurity and persistent self-loathing every time he endeavors to bend another to his will; the controlling economist exhibits appalling arrogance and damnable small-mindedness every time she endeavors to shape the course of markets influenced by forces far beyond her ability to reckon.
  Just as in dating, attempts to control the market are bound to cause unforeseen complications, new trials that slither forth from the stumps of those just severed, new issues that reduce the economist to the point of mindless docility, her energies sapped by the despair that comes with the realization that, as a single piece of an enormous, shifting puzzle, her actions are unlikely to have the desired affect. In a romantic relationship, the supposedly dominant party can achieve an approximation of control, whereas in the economic arena, a market will defy all attempts at subjugation, the sheer number of influencing factors contributing to its enduring volatility.
  Every economic theory, be it that of John Keynes or Adam Smith, Milton Friedman or Joan Robinson, has proven incapable of condensing the markets into manageable and predictable entities – invariably, each falls short of stabilizing that which cannot be stabilized, causing long term damage greater than the short term benefits with which it is credited. In the romantic as well as in the economic relationship, the method that promises the greatest liberty to the individual is that which disposes of all restrictions on thought and deed, the one that allows for the unfettered fluctuation of markets, the one preferred by humanity since we stood upright and learned to use our thumbs: anarcho-capitalism.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

counterweight Constitution

  Citizens of America: the Constitution of these States is a covenant we all share equally. Simply by being citizens of this land, we give our tacit consent to the opening declaration of this covenant, wherein it is declared that we are one People, a People with the common goal of making for ourselves a more perfect government. Among the established parameters of this goal are Union, Justice, Domestic Tranquility, Common Defense, general Welfare, and Blessings of Liberty, goals that must, by any reckoning, be the counterweight against which all legislation and other national decisions are measured.
  The XIV Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the People life, liberty, and property until they shall be taken from them under due process of law. Blanket prohibitions that restrict individuals in their liberty, foremost among them laws that prohibit the People from possessing and consuming Mood Altering Substances, restrict the individual in her liberty by prohibiting her from utilizing methods by which to pursue her Happiness; they violate her right to dispose of her ultimate property, her body, as she as a consenting and capable adult should decides is in her best interest. Therefore, the Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional, as it infringes upon the individual's constitutional rights to her liberty and to her body even when she has in no way indicated a desire or willingness to do harm to the property of bodies of other people. It is already permitted for the People to dispose of their property in most any other way, by tattoo or surgery or haircut, by consuming of certain Mood Altering Substances (MAS) such as coffee and sugar and alcohol and tobacco, by entertaining in the mind any number of opinions on religion or morality or social equality, all activities or states of mind that are universally recognized as components of liberty. It would be unthinkable for the government of the United States to pass laws specifying by which methods the People would be able to wash or mend property such as socks; it is just as unthinkable that our government specifies the methods by which we affect our only true property, our bodies, by its enforcement of blanket prohibitions on the consumption of specific MAS other than those socially-accepted ones listed above.

  Laws banning the possession and consumption of specific MAS do not insure the Domestic Tranquility requirement set forth in our Constitution, as they do not outlaw the use of alcohol, a substance that in its use is responsible for countless acts of insurrection and aggression, a substance that in its use degrades the general Welfare by enraging its user and reducing his ability to make reasonable judgments, a substance that in its use violates the individual's liberty by often ensnaring her in its addiction and all but forcing her to feed the sickness she has unwittingly brought into her life. Overuse of substances, addictions to substances, especially substances such as tobacco that in its use degrades the general Welfare by ruining the health of the People and leading to their premature demise, addictions are conditions that must be addressed with a logical and compassionate eye, so that the individual can regain the capacity to use those MAS that he decides he needs to facilitate or enhance his pursuit of Happiness instead of being relegated to a prison cell and treated as a criminal for his inability to control his appetites.

  Punishments for consumption of illicit MAS cannot be applied to great swaths of the population for infractions that in no way cause direct and measurable offense to the life, liberty, or property of any other person. Just as a lengthy process is required to deprive a person of Life and to condemn her to death, the removal of liberty can be meted out only on an individual basis by an august panel that shall decide that the person in question should no longer deserve specific and enumerated liberties (the penalty for the continued execution of these liberties being tailored so as to maintain the parameters of the Constitution), thus ensuring that her constitutional right to freedom of action and thought is not taken from her without profound and rational deliberation.

  A person is not sentenced to death for anything less than infringing upon or extinguishing the Life of another person. Therefore, a person cannot have his Liberty revoked unless he has infringed demonstrably upon the right of other people to their Lives, Liberty, or Property, or if he has clearly violated the parameters of the constitution. The incarceration of non-violent drug offenders whose sole purported violation was to consume or possess MAS degrades the general Welfare and the Domestic Tranquility by removing those individuals from their long-established familial and community ties, by restricting them in their ability to work and to be productive, by holding them in close proximity to violent and dangerous criminals.

  A woman seeking to abort an unwanted fetus has the constitutional right to do so. Under the XIV Amendment, she has the right to decide for herself what to do with her body, her only true property, so she may pierce or tattoo it as she sees fit, cut its hair in whatever fashion she desires, eat and let it become fat or exercise and keep it in shape, have her stomach stapled and her organs and cancerous tumors removed, and abort any fetus growing within her female parts. Furthermore, as the Blessings of Liberty have been bestowed upon her, she may decide for herself how best to lead her life; she is allowed to do anything to herself so long as she is not infringing upon the constitutional rights of any other persons (a fetus is a part of a woman's body until it is born, at which point it becomes a baby, or a tiny little person with constitutional rights).

  The requirements of a more perfect Union and the provision for the general Welfare are not being met under our current system of top-few capitalism, under which a minority of the People is compensated in the form of great wealth for the labors of the majority of the People. Allowing the wealthiest few Americans to amass such great wealth gives them the power of the purse strings, which breeds corruption and makes these few rich folks so essential to the reelection of political figures that they become the masters of said political figures, dictating, formulating, and influencing legislation to their own benefit at the expense of the vast majority of the population. To provide for our future Prosperity and to redirect the wealth of this nation toward realizing the Welfare of the People generally, it behooves us to alter the fabric of our corporatized and corrupted society, and to seek new methods by which to assure that all Americans might benefit equally of the bounty inherent to this land that is daily brought forth by the People of this nation.

  Great bodies of men and women have joined the U. S. armed forces to provide for the Common Defense, and vast stockpiles of personal weapons and other mechanical contrivances stand at the ready to assist them in this task. To provide for the Common Defense, however, we must keep these forces at home, on true American soil, so that, if needed, they can defend the American People from threats here at home; we cannot continue to launch wars of aggression, as we did in Iraq in 2003, to protect or to promote the business interests of a tiny fraction of the population that has a corporate or otherwise monetary interest in the oil fields located in that Middle Eastern nation. There is a role for American armed forces to play beyond our shores (humanitarian aide, protecting innocents, punishing those who seek to destroy us), but it cannot ever again be a war of aggression against another sovereign nation. Many good Americans have died, and much of our nation's wealth has been wasted by intervening in conflicts not our own, in nations not our own, against people who just want to see us leave. Let the chips fall where they may, unless they are huge chip-shaped bombs raining down onto our cities.

  Until it comes to pass that all political and government efforts are focused solely on meeting the requirements set forth in the Constitution, and until such time as the rights enumerated in the Constitution are granted to all People fully and without prejudice, the fundamental American documents are protecting only those people who are rich in monetary wealth and political connections; they have ceased to be documents that serve for the elevation of the People generally, and have been high-jacked by an oligarchy that has lost sight of the deep and enduring essence of the American Dream, i.e. Safety, Happiness, and the Blessings of Liberty.

p.s. This is a general appeal to all police officers in America: If you have ever even attempted to trick or browbeat someone into forfeiting their Constitutional rights, or if you operate in a fashion that in any way even attempts to sidestep said rights, and if you have ever sworn an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, take a good look in the mirror, and consider that you very well may have violated your oath. If so, relinquish your post immediately, and pursue a different career.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp