fuck the state

The Red Son costume is finally complete – authentic ushanka hat with Soviet emblem, hand-drawn Commie Superman t-shirt, weathered gray worker's cape, hammer & sickle belt buckle, and gray pants tucked into high leather work boots. The party is for D.C. political types, mostly Libertarians. I am Red Son, Proletarian Superhuman, and I fear nothing. “Stalin?” people ask incredulously, gawking at me as Obama Robbin' Hood or Spiderman, American Revolutionary or Roaring Twenties flapper. A doe-eyed woman in tight dress and fake-fur coonskin cap says she will go home with me if I make good on my threat to PETA her ass with a gallon of blood. Later, I watch her reluctantly let a man kiss her on the mouth. I am a Proletarian Superhuman; my heart is pure. The inside of the house on the quiet residential street is lit by black-light, and someone has used black-light sensitive tape to write Fuck The State over a prominently-placed Gadsden flag. We chant this slogan while dancing to techno beats, our bodies gyrating wildly as our hearts swell with thoughts of Freedom. I find a flashlight in the grass out back and return it to the mercenary types guarding the front gate, who assure me that their semi-automatic rifles are fakes spray-painted black to look real. I am faster than a speeding bullet; I fear nothing. Next to the backyard bar, near the fire-circle, someone has placed a pumpkin engraved with a hyper-accurate likeness of Lindsey Graham. Our ardor is high, our spirits flicker, aroused. “Have you heard about the revolution?” a man dressed as Trotsky keeps yelling from his post by the kegs of beer. For a spell, he and I harangue all passersby, speaking vehemently of revolution and demanding that our voices be heard. I am a Proletarian Superhuman, and I would like to speak to you about something important. I make a game of pretending to mistake both guys dressed as Where's Waldo for lighthouses – they are gracious and laugh with me; they refuse to be offended. A sexy border patrol agent and I briefly suck face, with me grabbing her mammoth breasts through her shirt, but she is a smoker and I am repulsed by the taste of her mouth. The night deepens; a neighbor calls the cops. “I wish we could smoke some more weed,” a man in a strap-on Amish chin-beard says while inhaling candy from a table over by the kegs. I a Kal-L, chocoholic. Tell me: Do you have a moment to speak about the revolution?

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on getting drilled

For the past ten years, I have endured pain stemming from a number of cavities. Year after year, the caries would grow bigger, creeping ever deeper into the center of my molars, sharp flashes of wince-inducing pain shooting ever more frequently throughout my nervous system. The damage accelerated in 2005 when I moved to Los Angeles and got caught up in the Hollywood bar scene, evaporating into anything-goes partying and the sure-I'll-do-those type of decision making. (“Hey let me just go home real quick and grab my toothbrush,” is not something one is prone to say before embaring on a week-long bender.) Since coming into some cash late in the last century, I kept telling myself: “You have to get your teeth fixed; you have to get your teeth fixed,” but rather than take care of my chompers, I chose to self-medicate and travel to Thailand for three weeks. Finally, though, last week, I bit the bullet (ha!) and placed a call to my local budget dentist, who within two days and for one quarter of the cost of my plane ticket to balmy Siam drilled out the rotten cores of my teeth, swabbed in some medication, filled the holes with durable epoxy, performed a thorough cleaning, and sent me on my way. Oh what joy to be able to chew once more! By refusing to take care of myself and my teeth, I was self-mutilating, and I shall not soon repeat these offenses. Aho.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

on media's bias

During the past year, the conglomerated media outlets that self-identify as National Public Radio (NPR) committed major errors. First, it participated in the blackout campaign waged against Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, the main third party candidates contending against Mitt Romney and Barack Obama for the presidency. (Regardless of the media's efforts to stifle the free flow of information, Johnson received more than a million votes, Stein roughly three hundred thousand.) In the weeks leading up to the election, NPR consistently and repeatedly referred to the Republican (Romney) and Democratic (Obama) candidates as the only two persons running for our highest executive office; not only did NPR not cover the two separate third party presidential debates hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, it didn't even mention that they took place. (Such is the complicity of today's media in maintaining and perpetuating our anti-American and undemocratic two party system that the second round of third party debates aired only on Russia Today, after aljazeera.com one of the most courageous and professional news organizations operating today.)

The second major error committed by NPR is that it reports in detail on most bombings and violent attacks carried out by non-military (insurgent) forces but ignores the daily assassination undertaken against innocent Somalians, Yemeni, and Pakistanis by Americans operating unmanned aerial systems. (Innocent in that the persons killed were never convicted in a court of law.) By tacitly supporting the absurd notion that the American government has a right to conduct and could ever win its War On Terror (terror is a state of mind, and nothing else), NPR perpetuates the lies and misinformation our government needs to keep its citizens ignorant of its regular and enthusiastic violation of international law and the Geneva Convention.

NPR will occasionally speak to a specialist or elected official who has knowledge of the American federal government's drone program, but it rarely airs reports critical of it. Not long ago, National Public Radio was a force to be reckoned with, an upstanding and self-respecting organization that provided the People with information from myriad sources that they could use to make well-rounded decisions. Now, however, NPR has lost much of its journalistic integrity as well as most of the respect it once deserved. Woe be unto us – veritas delenda est.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

America fails, again

America's media outlets fail her People. So widespread is their deceit, and so brazen is their obfuscation, that the 3rd party presidential candidates' debate of 05 November 2012 streamed live only on rt.com, the website for Russia Today. No indigenous source for news – not FOX, ABC, NBC, not even fucking NPR! – has mentioned the name of a 3rd party presidential candidate in the last few weeks, and none of them – not even fucking NPR! – agreed to air Monday night's debate, let alone to acknowledge the existence of candidates besides Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, person such as governor Gary Johnson or Dr. Jill Stein. So deeply entrenched are these media giants – even fucking NPR! – and so fully have they been bought and paid for by the faceless corporations that now control the hearts and minds of millions of once-free ynki, that it is safe to say that this grand experiment of ours has failed. Now, we are following a trajectory similar to that of the Weimar Republic (see truthout.org: “History's Magic Mirror: America’s Economic Crisis and the Weimar Republic of Pre-Nazi Germany”) or the French Third Republic (see truthout.org: “How democracies die”); now, our down-spiral into widespread fascism and state-sanctioned religious extremism is not merely food for thought – it is as certain as death from an Obama drone-strike.

For most of my adult life I have been told that this land's news media is the fourth pillar of government, after, of course, the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; we have seen over the last weeks, however, the true extent of the news-media's sinister power, standing by in silent and docile witness as it corrupted democracy and deliberately destroyed equality and free speech, the very essence of this fragile republic. In that sense, the title of this piece is wrong – it is not America that has failed us, rather we the People who have failed her. I have tried to write about these matters, and I have tried to sound the warning klaxons repeatedly and with growing vigor, but, according to my new slogan: “I write because no one listens.” I could, perhaps, stand out in the cold again holding a sign in protest of or support for this idea or that policy, this notion or that cause, but my efforts would be for naught; just as one can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, so one can lead one's fellow citizens to knowledge but not make them think.

Where does this path we have chosen lead? To the jackbooted and willful destruction of diversity, life, honor, and Truth. This same path is the path taken in the early part of the last century by the people of Germany, who signed away their consciouses for the fleeting security of a chicken in every pot. So vast has our failure become, so readily have we given up our most precious ideals in pursuit of an artificial peace-of-mind and self-enslavement to our material possessions, that we no longer deserve to call ourselves patriots, let alone Americans; real Americans would fight for liberty and not give an inch to petty tyrants ruling from behind the black gates of White Houses; real Americans would demand that all voices be given equal air-time, that all candidates for the presidency be thrown into a room together without make up or polish, prepping or preening, polling or punditry; real Americans would take to the streets in the thousands in order to defend the rights of gays and women instead of shutting off their minds with a click of the television remote. Dear reader, we might have saved a bit of skin by not electing Mitt Romney to the presidency, but our struggle is far from over; indeed, it has just begun. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

tenacious Republican terrorism

Western newscasters are quick to call any Arab suspected of committing acts of violence a terrorist, a practice that appears to have blinded them to the true extent of terrorism right here in America. He calls himself Mitt, and his last name is Romney, and he and his party are pushing a terrorist agenda. Hidden in plain view in the Republican party's presidential platform is a plan to terrorize the homosexual humans living in America, a plan that would turn them into citizens with fewer rights than their heterosexual neighbors, a plan that can have as its only consequence a surge of state-sanctioned violence and hatred against these our same-sex-loving brothers and sisters. Governor Romney has stated openly that if he should become president he would amend our secular Constitution for the first time in nearly a century, adding to it rules found only in the old testament of the Christian bible (see Leviticus 20) that mandate among many other horrible things the murder of gays and the killing of young women who lose their virginity before they are married; the only purpose such an amendment serves is to strike fear in the hearts of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Trans-gender (LGBT) community and to cause these peace-loving and innocent persons to live their lives in constant fear of reproach, disenfranchisement, and assault.

There is another group in the world that encroaches upon the rights of its citizens (be they Women, Gay, Colored, or otherwise), that disenfranchises them, that assaults them, that stands by as their rights are stripped away and they are raped, beaten, and murdered – the Taliban. The Republican party's plan to strip away the rights of homosexuals and to encroach upon the equality guaranteed them in our Declaration of Independence puts the Republican Party in American (RePIA, pronounced “rape-ya”) on equal footing with the Taliban; it exposes the RePIA as a threat to the Safety and Happiness of the American people equal to or greater than the threat posed by other terror-promoting organizations around the world, be they al-Qaida, Hamas, or the Haqqani Network (which continues to hold an American serviceman hostage, see here.)

To vote for RePIA this November 6th is to elect terror; to support Mitt Romney in his drive for our nation's highest office is to spit in the face of lady Liberty, to shit on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and to declare oneself so ignorant of the ideals of equality and freedom that our ancestors once fought and died for as to be unworthy of calling oneself an upstanding member of society, let alone a patriot. To effect true change, to protect our own dreams and aspirations and those of the many generations to come, to take this country back from greased-up bankers and fat-backed politicians, vote for a third-party candidate such as Dr. Jill Stein or governor Gary Johnson. The newscasters won't stop calling votes for third-party candidates wasted votes, so let's all waste our votes on a person who will stop federal oppression and end the wars on drugs and in Afghanistan, a person who will ensure freedom and equality for all citizens regardless of their race, belief, sex, or sexual orientation. Vote green, or vote yellow, and help us liberate America from the cruel lash of mindless hatred, from the heavy yoke of unchecked greed, and from the rusty chains of perpetual strife. Be well, and mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

Sandy boon or bust

Without doubt, both major-party political candidates will try to use the devastation and damage caused by erstwhile hurricane Sandy to their advantage. The incumbent Barack Obama will likely point to the rapid response time and widespread preparedness of thousands of emergency personnel as proof of his competency, as an indication of the methods by which he will tackle the nation's less immediate issues such as high unemployment, growing national debt, and our crumbling infrastructure. The challenger Mitt Romney will likely point to the sluggish federal response and lack of adequate leadership by the current administration as proof that our sitting president must be replaced, that he has a tendency to sit around lackadaisically while America drifts rudderless through the shoals of catastrophe, that his policies have failed, and that he is the greatest threat to the Safety of the People since redcoat placed boot on our soil.

I listened to NPR and checked the news regularly in the days and hours before Sandy made landfall, and, to my knowledge, Mr. Obama analyzed and calculated and fact-checked the storm as much and as thoroughly as he did his primary opponent in their third debate together. (Glaringly omitted from this debate were a couple of the other persons contending for the presidency, among them Dr. Jill Stein and former governor Gary Johnson, who were barred from attending the event and from sparring with their super-slick counterparts by the sinister and undemocratic machinations of the Commission on Electoral Debates a freedom-hating organization controlled jointly by the Democrat and Republican parties.) In all likelihood, Mr. Romney will blame his foe for failing to have prevented every tree from falling and every transistor from shorting out, for not acting quickly enough in his efforts to warn us sodden souls hardest hit by this frankenstorm of its exact path and true destructiveness, for worrying more about controlling the narrative and looking good on camera than visiting shelters and keeping hope alive. Hopefully, however, this time around, Mitt won't blame the few score deaths on the president (as he did following the tragic events in Benghazi) or insinuate that they would not have occurred under his watch, although if were to make such claims, he might alienate a few more swing voters and put himself out of the race altogether, which, in the long run, would work out just fine for liberty and equality here in America.

There is a chance that while he is out smiling condescendingly and surveying the shattered hovels of commoners the Republican challenger will fall into a ditch filled with sewage-mixed seawater and catch such a nasty cold that he will be bedridden for these last few days before the election, sparing us the torture of listening to his pitying smarm and of having to puzzle through the mounting mysteries of his constantly-shifting viewpoints. We shall see how things shake out once the storm of the century has passed. If you are interested in avoiding such disasters in the future, vote Green Party! 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)

risky political correctness

A dangerous trend has spread throughout these shakily-united States: the trend of political correctness. Damaging to honesty, truthfulness, and the very concept of Liberty itself, a person is being politically correct when, before speaking out loud, he stops to ponder whether or not what he is about to say might or might not offend someone within earshot. Rather than encouraging him to speak his mind freely in the knowledge that he has no – nada, null, zero, zilch – no control over the mental processes of other people nor the ability to control how others will react to whatever he chooses to say or do or sign or write, our society demands that he take everyone else's emotional and mental well-being into consideration and censor himself instead of just coming and saying whatever the deuce he intended to say in the first place.

Political correctness is un-American in that it forces us to be liars, to hide our prejudices and our stereotypes deep within the recesses of our souls, where hatred and malcontent tend to fester; it decreases the Safety of all Americans by allowing the bigot to mingle freely amongst open-minded people, his cruel heart filled with a resentment for people of color and a hatred for All Things Strange; it harms the Safety of all Americans by allowing bigotry and racism to build up in the mind of the sad and confused individual until he can no longer stand it, which makes him more likely to lash out physically against the object of his ire, a person with skin slightly darker than his. During more than one conversation between me, an American of European Descent, and Americans of African or Mixed African and European Descent (i.e. between a white person and brown people), I have heard these humans say that they would rather have their racist right out in public, where he can be tagged and avoided rather than for him to have to pretend to be color-blind when he really could care less if he saw a Negro being chained to a pickup truck and dragged.

Furthermore, political correctness emboldens the nitpickers and busybodies among us to wag their fingers at anyone even toeing the line of impropriety, and to say to them with self-righteous but artificial indignation: It's not nice to say this, and you shouldn't say that, because you might hurt this bunch's feelings, and cause that lot to be sad. There are many views espoused by religious extremists in this country – they who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood and who want to amend our preciously secular Constitution to define marriage according to their and only their religious text – views I vehemently oppose and risk Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor to combat; yet while standing out in the snow counter-protesting nuns and stoking the ire of entire church parishes, I chose to speak my mind and to say hurtful and offensive things directly to them, right up in their faces, hardly flinching when they called the cops to complain about the public display of the word vagina, which is the medical term for one part of a woman's sex. I shall stop harping on the past and start encouraging the few lovers of Liberty left on these shores to end self-censorship, to encourage clear and open debate, and to fill their hearts with emptiness; together, we can conquer the scourge of political correctness, preferring honesty to deceit, choosing the Truth over lies. So stand up and speak freely – do it now, or forever scold your niece.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on providing Welfare

For this author, the main reason that we cannot allow Mitt Romney to gain our nation's highest office is that he has never read the Constitution of the United States of America. If the former governor of Massachusetts had at one time read even the preamble to this our second-most sacred document after the Declaration of Independence, he might have retained at least a distant memory that the role of government in this land is to provide for the general Welfare and to secure the Blessings of Liberty to us and to our Posterity. (Perhaps his and his Republican Party's openly-declared plans to amend the Constitution in order to define marriage as between 1 (one) man and 1 (one) woman include secret plans to edit out this embarrassing preamble, this handful of words that contradict Mr. Romney's apparent core beliefs by clearly stating that government in America is supposed to help and uplift as many people as possible, not make as few as possible fabulously rich.)

It is better, perhaps, for Mr. Romeny and the Republican Party in America (or RePIA, pronounced “rape-ya”) to remain ignorant of both the Declaration and the Constitution; if they were to take a closer look at either of these our precious documents, or to do any background investigations into the deeper meanings inherent to these two texts, they may find therein more passages aimed at spreading Liberty and equality amongst the peoples of the world that they would want to remove, amend, excise, cut out, and destroy. Curious to me is that Mitt-the-Governor-of-Massachusetts seemed to understand the role of our government far better than does Mitt-the-Candidate-for-President, he who appears to be catering to – openly and without shame – that billionaire lunatic-fringe that continues to profit from the Great Recession, from this nation's spreading of war across the globe, and from the purposeful and planned destruction of economic equality in America. I watch with consternation while riding my bicycle through this little blue-collar town as more and more banners appear on the lawns of modest homes that support Romney and Ryan; after talking with an Obama-hating neighbor, however, I am gaining some insight into his and the other Romney-supporters' views and methodology.

As far as I can tell, these people passionately hate Obama and timidly support Romney because they expose themselves to the narrow views of but a few political pundits, TV fear-mongers, and syndicated radio talk-show-hosts; they have allowed hatred to fester in their hearts by avoiding any opinions other than those that stoke their ire, preferring cocoons of self-righteous indignation to the rage-stilling effect of a careful and rational analysis of many different sources, news outlets, and opinions (my neighbor mentioned that he despised Obama not for his race but for being an idiot, even though we had not even come close to discussing the tone of our sitting President's skin). Dear reader, please understand that in the past I have been guilty of this same sort of behavior, passionately hating George W. Bush and mocking his every word and deed; now, however, seeing things from the Other Side, I recognize the danger that lurks in such narrow-minded and puffed-up views of the members of political parties. Hatred of this type obscures the true danger that is facing democracy and equality in America, which comes from people thinking that there is a difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties, that one is better than the other, that one has all of the answers and the other, none. Both of these Parties regularly mock the notion of representative government, both cater to fantastically-rich corporate and private donors to the detriment of tens of millions of hard-working average Americans, both are farcical shadows of their former selves, and both long ago sacrificed sacred Honor for the shallow reward of fleeting political power. Woe is unto us, friend – America delenda est; only through dastardly and destructive effort might we change the status-quo, and regain for ourselves all that we have lost. Mahalo, though, and keep fighting.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

dangerous self-seclusion

During the period when America's news outlets still reported on this country's ongoing occupation of the sovereign Republic of Afghanistan, they often spoke about the dangerous seclusion of much of the Afghani population. Living in rugged valleys so inaccessible that neighboring villages are sometimes wholly ignorant of one another, even though they live but a few miles apart, the television's talking-heads spoke long ago of the risks to Liberty, justice, and the rights of women that arise when people live in such seclusion, arguing that it granted their religious and societal leaders absolute power over their minds and bodies.

As things stand in America today, however, religious extremism similar to that practiced by close-minded, militant, and misogynistic Islamic leaders in al-Qaida and Hezbollah has infected the minds of even highly-placed officials in the Republican party, rotting the souls of America's Christian extremists, persons who call themselves dominionists. Just as the threat of religious terrorism that we once thought came from without now comes from within, the American people are secluding ourselves into walled-off little worlds whose borders are defined by the edges of our flat-screen television sets, the rims of our hand-held tablet computers, and the invisibly-reaching tendrils of our Wi-Fi transceivers. This home-grown technological self-seclusion is as great a threat to democracy and freedom as the threat posed by Afghani mullahs instilling hatred-of-all-things-unknown in the minds of children living in distant and dusty valleys. Whereas in Afghanistan many villagers only hear and see and are exposed to a limited and selective view of the world – one they receive from often poorly-educated and ill-informed religious leaders – we in America who choose to spend our lives riveted to self-illuminated talking boxes expose ourselves to a limited and selective view of the world, one we receive from often ill-informed religious and societal leaders who exploit fear-of-the-unknown and the power of oft-repeated lies (as per Goebbels) to corrupt the minds of erstwhile free-thinking and self-respecting citizens.

Many other authors and I have rung the warning-bell previously, altering others to the brainwashing and heart-hardening upon which America's mass-media preys, which it perpetuates at all cost, and which it does with such pervasive effectiveness that its methods were copied by the Nazis themselves – all no no avail; it seems that a majority of us Americans do not care that we have become docile sheep, that our minds are owned by vulture-capitalist billionaires, that our hearts are weighted down by pettiness and greed, or that we allow our views to be shaped by small-minded idiots who squawk at cameras with make-up-caked faces. It is not hard, however, to free our minds from enslavement to television or to allow our opinions to grow out of hubris and humility; the healing begins when we turn off our TVs, toss aside our tablets, switch off our radios, and leave our houses to have a nice walk, driving Fear from our minds with gradual surety and loving effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got it right when, in 1933, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear festers in the minds of people who shut their ears to differing opinions, who close their hearts to the shades of truth found in dissenting voices, who allow themselves to be caught up in religious fervor and nationalistic self-righteousness. Please, friend, remember to doubt everything that you hear, to question all that you are told, and to fight the urge to live in the manner of a secluded villager who believes everything his mullah tells him. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

pirates, parties, September

In honor of Septembarrrr, that mooncycle dedicated to All Things Pirate, let us turn our gazes to the Federal Republic of Germany, where the voice of the common man still has power. While in America people upset with Me-First capitalism, Beltway corruption, and an ever-more-menacing police state must resort to standing out in the street getting pepper-sprayed and handcuffed for expressing their political views, Deutschlanders upset with the status-quo may now look for representation from that nation's newest political party, die Piraten (the Pirates). When discussing America's two-party system and the lunacy of having just two organs to represent and address the concerns of over one-hundred-and-fifty-millions of unique voices, people often tell me that our population is simply too large, and that its members have simply too many different opinions, for there to be more than two political parties, an argument which has never made sense to me.

Can just a couple of parties represent the opinions of our massive voting base better than many different parties tailored to each region individually and to its special and unique demands and abilities? They cannot. In fact, the Democratic and the Republican parties in America do such a poor job not just of promoting the general Welfare but also of securing the Blessings of Liberty to all persons equally that it is a wonder our society has not sooner descended into civil war. Such is the failure of our massive, ineffective, easily-corruptible one-party system (because Dems and Reps are basically two sides of the same coin) that, with the efforts undertaken recently by President Obama to enact in this land a police state, our republic hardly resembles the nation it was just a dozen years ago, in the good old days before we threw up our hands in fearful defeat, rescinding our rights (Patriot Act) and allowing President Bush and his puppetmaster Dick Cheney to violate this nation's two-hundred-year-long refusal to torture or mishandle our prisoners of war (see here for link to page involving U.S. torture cells at Abu Gharib prison) and letting them violate due process, personal privacy, the Geneva Convention, and the notion that every human being – American or not, combatant or not – has the right to a swift trial by his or her peers.

Arrrr! I have fallen into a tirade against old man bushes and his triggerhappy boss, losing myself in vile and vituperative rebuke against the forces of bygone evil. Regarding the links posted above, at least the Germans can now vote instead of hurling paving-bricks and fighting small armies to secure their rights; in America, though, we have come to see police officers as persons with ultimate power, as nearly god-like individulas whom we dare not touch, spite, or trust. We have forsaken personal Liberty and self-determination for a state of questionable Safety in which the only reason the cops exist is to punish us for not following the tens of thousands of different laws that we our political leaders have passed. To whom can we turn in this our time of woe? On whom do we rely to secure for us the Blessings of Liberty and to represent the interests of the Commons and of the common man alike? Our two national political parties do not do these things; Republicans and Democrats sit on Capitol hill in plush, tax-payer-financed office suites receiving visits from lobbyists and corporate donors who hand over envelopes stuffed cash. Oh, if we but lived in a democracy; oh, if our supposed representatives would but give up their fat paychecks, cushy pensions, and comprehensive coverage and try living on minimum wage for a while without access to decent health-care. Then, dear friend, then we would see some positive change in this country. I fear, however, that we may have to wait a few years until a person from the Pirate Party of America takes the presidency. Ho hum teedle-dum and a bottle of mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the audacity

Attention, liberty-loving, self-respecting Americans who mind their own business: the forces of greed, deceit, and religious oppression are running for president. Anyone supporting the notion of equality amongst humans ought help to combat this threat. Long have we winced when our leader spoke of ruling us according to the rules found in Christian bible, which is just one of the countless different religious books that we Americans turn to every day. Messieurs Romney and Ryan just announced that if they should be appointed by the electoral college to the presidency that they would add to our secular Constitution a line defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Not only would such an amendment violate the rights of gay and lesbian Americans of sound mind and legal age to wed whomever they should wish to wed, it would contaminate a pure and honest document with the hateful directive of YHWH, the Christian's jealous (Exodus 20:3) and genocidal (Joshua 6:17) godhead. This, however, is not the gravest threat facing our nation at this time; the greater threat comes from the Republican Party itself, and from its mindless, lie-spewing, line-toeing members, light-skinned and well-to-do individuals, puppets marching in jackbooted lock-step with tears of joy in their eyes as their leaders gut the welfare state and destroy the last remaining remnants of fragile, precious Liberty.

Millions march across the globe to protest the greed of vulture capitalists, the avarice of our corporate overlords, and the cruelty of consumption-oriented capitalism, and yet the members of the Republican Party in America chose as their candidate for our nation's highest office a 1%er, a silver-spoon-sucking, income-tax-evading, private-jet-flying, local-job-destroying douchebag whose first name rhymes with shit. And why shouldn't they? They long ago sold their souls to the first corporate bidder to dangle an envelope stuffed with greenbacks in front of their milky gazes, forfeiting sacred Honor for cash, a paltry exchange. This author is not trying to say that only the Republican Party is a donation-addled behemoth that cannot possibly represent the varied interest of one hundred and sixty millions of American voters; the Democratic Party is just as deaf to the cries of the poor, as blind to the whites of its lies, and as polluted with the foul stink of corporate funding as are its donkey-sucking counterparts across the aisle. It is shocking, though, that the Republicans would prove so disconnected from reality, so stultified in what passes with them for thinking, so bedazzled by the righteous fury of religious conservatism that they would even seriously consider openly releasing the platform they drafted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It appears, however, that my hope for the future of this land was little more than cruel and short-lived fancy, that my belief that we Americans were still a compassionate people bent on uplifting those without means and on perpetuating the notion of personal Liberty was little more than foolhardy delusion.

Beyond this author's whining and my dislike for theocratic rule, the audacity of the 2012 Republican presidential platform is what really chaps my buns, that a party that once included Abraham Lincoln and Theodor Roosevelt could forget that our founding persons conceived this nation as one of Liberty, equality, Safety, and Happiness for all, not as a piggy-bank for brainwashed, super-rich, goose-stepping religious extremists. (America's native religious extremist groups are just as dangerous to our common Safety and Happiness as are foreign religious extremist groups such as al-Qaida or Hezbollah.) A Constitutional ban on gay marriage would destroy the right of each American to choose whom to spend his or her life with, be that person black, white, yellow, tall, short, fat, skinny, hirsute, balding, sick, healthy, gay, straight, whole, crippled, or born without hands. Ultimately, it is not the Republican Party's business, nor is it the business of the federal, state, or local government, nor it is not the business of heterosexual individuals to tell homosexual or transsexual individuals how they should live their lives. So let's all start minding our own business, and focus on making our own lives long, and happy. Stand up, speak out, fight injustice, and keep America free of morally-justified terrorism. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on losing a single vote

I shall not vote during this presidential election cycle. Normally, in the past, I made sure to cast my ballot one way or the other, even if I resided in a state in which, due to my being in the clear political minority, my vote did not count. (Why are there instances in which votes do not count, and why are there only two parties to represent the political interests of over one hundred and fifty millions of individual voters? America's system of representative politics is strange, corrupted, and unjust, indeed.)

Being in a battleground state (Pennsylvania), and living as I do in a predominantly politically and socially conservative area (York County), I know that I should vote this November, but our sitting president, Mr. Barack Obama, has lost my support, and his opponent – a fabulously-rich 1%er named Mitt Romney – embodies so many of the things that I see as wrong with this nation that I would sooner put out my own eyes with a melon-baller than cast a ballot in his favor. Up until recently, Mr. Obama had my support, but he signed NDAA 1540 into law, a defense bill which allows the government of the United States of America in instances of martial law to imprison her own citizens indefinitely, and without trial. (To be fair, NDAA 1540 was ratified unanimously by both the House and Senate, thus implicating all sitting Congresspersons and Senators in this, their most recent crime against Liberty.)

The Constitution of the United States of America contains provisions designed specifically to guard us – the people – against just such tyrannical overreaches. In the first Amendment, the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting[…] the right of the people[…] to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," and in its fifth Amendment the document states that, “No person shall be[…] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” NDAA 1540 makes it so that the American citizen is viewed as a criminal, as a worthless lout, as no better than those dirty Taliban fellows we have spent so much time, blood, and treasure trying to kill over the last ten years; it rescinds the citizen's right to redress grievances; and while federal, state, and local governments have violated the fifth Amendment for decades now by enforcing blanket restrictions on the liberty of the people to smoke or snort or shoot any such drugs they should wish to consume, NDAA 1540 deprives them of their liberty for nothing more than speaking out, or, merely, for being outside of their homes at the wrong time.

This defense bill sounds the death-knell for our country's 224-year-long experiment in individual freedom, granting our government such fantastic power as to make it the most clear and present danger to the rights of mankind that the world has ever seen. Welcome to the police-state, ladies and gentlemen, and get ready for a good, hard rear-ending, because I have the feeling that our leaders in the White House and Congress are only beginning to flex such increasingly awesome might as we have allowed them to give themselves lately. Fellow Children of Liberty, weep with me in shame as we bask in the afterglow of our nation's abject failure, kneeling as we do among the shredded gowns of our goddesses Liberty, and Justice. This November, I shall choose not one of these two evils but none of them, preferring rather to sacrifice my sacred franchise upon the forgotten altar of silent disobedience, since neither of these men is worthy of the post of President. America delenda est.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit