haiku 28 Mar 2018

Fearful of shadows
In love with consumer goods
Lonely, lost, and sad

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

hale, healthy hallucinations

Dreams are, in essence, hallucinations. While dreaming, we see, hear, and feel things that exist nowhere except within the subconscious mind. Absent the type of appropriate sleep that facilitates reaching dream-state, we humans tend to become listless, our brains foggy, our moods sullen and prone to depression. Some research suggests that dreams help improve social interactions. Another theory is that dreams help us connect with our emotions, reducing the burden of negative ones such as fear and worry.

Consequently, it is important to do everything possible to get a good night’s sleep that is neither too long nor too short. This author knows that strenuous physical exercise during the day helps him fall asleep quickly. He also knows that the presence of both light and sound keep him from sleeping well, wherefore he makes his bedroom dark and quiet before going to bed. One of the reasons he doesn’t drink booze is because he knows that the use hard drugs such as alcohol poses a danger to healthy sleep patterns. Also important is not eating food or drinking water before bedtime, as these can interrupt nocturnal cycles.

There are few if any drawbacks to having the kind of sleep that allows to occur dreams, but many risks associated with poor sleep-related habits. For long-term health and a free bout of beneficial hallucinations, please skip the mind-altering drugs and try to get a good night’s sleep.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

freedom to choose

Some time ago, NPR aired a debate about whether or not Pennsylvania should sell off the liquor stores it owns and operates. During this debate, a woman advocated for the rights of consumers to have access to the best possible selection of booze, saying that choice is freedom and that freedom is the American way. (The author is paraphrasing here). Since 1971, the federal government of the United States of America has waged war on the right of every person under its jurisdiction to choose for himself which drugs to introduce to his body; since passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 (CSA), Liberty has been under constant and incessant attack from local, state, and federal government, the very agents who should have been protecting her, all along.

When the state makes some drugs illegal (weed, coke) while profiting from and promoting the sale of other drugs (alcohol, nicotine), it chooses sides, sending millions of non-violent persons to jail for wanting to do with their bodies as they saw best fit. The XIV amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect against just such governmental overreach, stating: “[no] State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law[.]” If a person should demonstrate an inability to handle certain drugs without posing a threat to himself or others, he should be banned from consuming those drugs. Individuals, however, who have not been banned by a judge from smoking weed should feel free to do so as often as they wish; no aspect of the Constitution gives any branch of our government the right to infringe upon the common freedom of all individuals living in America by passing a law as destructive to our inalienable and immutable rights as is the tyrannical Controlled Substances Act of 1971.

In the 42 years since adoption of the CSA, the business of punishing and incarcerating non-violent Americans for consuming and possessing their drugs of choice has become big business. Lawyers, judges, parole and police officers, wardens, jail builders, and drug warlords all continue to profit from the ban on certain drugs. We the People must make the right to choose inalienable once more and strike down the prohibitions currently in place; then, the individuals just mentioned would have to go out and get jobs of actual usefulness instead of being allowed to game a system that punishes freedom-loving Americans for pursuing their Happiness as they see best fit. A person's body is the only piece of property he cannot live without; he may do with it as he pleases so long as he is not infringing demonstrably upon the right of any other person to life, liberty, or property. To lock someone up for changing his brain chemistry by smoking weed is no different from locking him up for changing his brain chemistry by eating a large bowl of sugary breakfast cereal. Let us realign ourselves with this nation's founding principles and legalize the freedom to choose by ending the madness that has brutalized Liberty every day for the past 15,330 days. Fight tyranny; act freely; defend Liberty. Mahalo. 

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

no third candidate

Occasionally, while at home or in my car, I listen to NPR, to catch the news and maybe an interesting show or two. In the weeks leading up to the period in this year of 2012 when the electoral collage shall again appoint someone to be president of these United States of America, my local public radio station, WITF, has been focusing much of its attention on this impending appointment, analyzing debates, reporting on the results of different polls, and airing interviews of average citizens and government officials alike. During one segment, this news outlet asked political scientists, pollsters, and focus groups to craft a third-party candidate who might stand a chance of liberating our electoral process from the chains of our current two-party political duopoly (which is effectively a single-party-monopoly, since the asses and the pachyderms are so similar to one another as to be two sides of the same coin). I admit that I only caught the first segment of this show, and part of the second; I did not hear the opinions of the focus groups, only a brief summary thereof; but I fully agreed with the political scientists, who conjured up a candidate bent on freeing America from under the weight of her massively overgrown federal government, a person dedicated to the idea that all persons of legal age should have the right to decide what substances to put into their bodies, be those substances alcohol, hashish, cocaine, tobacco, heroin, or caffeine.

Curiously, however, I did not hear mention of governor Gary Johnson, the candidate for the Libertarian Party in America, who, with a few exceptions, is (with a capital I) the physical embodiment of the the third-party candidate dreamed up by WITF's political scientists. Furthermore, this once-dependable medium failed to mention Dr. Jill Stein, the candidate for America's Green Party, who made such a strong showing at last night's third-party candidates' debate that she has all but won my vote. Pollsters and focus-groups aside (poll numbers are so easily skewed as to make them all but useless, and focus-grouping is for rich people and big corporations that are too risk-averse to make up their own minds), I found it shameful that a public radio group would prove itself so deeply entrenched in the political status-quo as to not even consider mentioning the Libertarian or Green Parties as valid third options for voters sick and tired of America's twin big-business political juggernauts. (It is inconceivable, undemocratic, and unjust that in a land of more than 150,000,000 persons of voting age just 2 political parties have all the power.)

When the wealth of a nation is on the table, the few persons holding the purse-strings will rarely let them go; when the long-term future of a nation is at stake, the fools who got it into the mess in the first place will say anything to shift the blame onto someone else's shoulders. I cannot truly fault WITF, or NPR, for staying with the herd and pretending that debates between but two of the half-dozen candidates contending for the electoral college's appointment to the presidency could in any way change the outcome of the farce that will occur this November 6th. The only hope for America, the only way for us to strip the bloated political machines of their power, is to reshape the entire fabric of this nation; we start by saying, aloud: “This bullshit has gone on for too long”; we start by demanding that the ideals set forth in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are secured for us diligently and without further waffling; we start by standing out in the cold and in the rain and forcing the slumbering among us back into wakefulness. We can have Liberty, equality, and justice in this land, but only if we are willing to fight for them, every day of our lives. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

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

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