on Grigovian anarchy

Much has been said of late in the international press about the merits of anarchy and the benefits that this complete and total liberty bestow upon all persons lucky enough to have lived it even once. The citizens of the United States of America gave up their liberty in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks for the fleeting assurance of safety, thereby proving themselves worthy of neither liberty or safety; luminaries from various universities and myriad walks of life point to the months and years following those tragic events as the period during which the last vestiges of Ynki anarchy were bashed to bits by the batons of terrorism-addled police officers, when they were steamrolled to nothingness under the massive weight of rapidly expanding federal power.

Compare the sad state of liberty in the western hemisphere to the abounding freedom and joyous prosperity in which the people of the Glorious Republic of Grigovia wallow. Here, in modern, high-speed Grig, the nation's capital, people of all ages do as they please to their own bodies and minds so long as they are not directly violating their neighbors' person, freedom, or property; here, from the smallest cottage sitting in the highest high-valley village to the largest apartment complex set firmly into the low granite cliffs of the rushing Yalung river, people leave their doors unlocked in the knowledge that true lovers of liberty would never dare to enter the home of another with sinister purpose, take things without paying for them, or do anything to harm his meager belongings or physical health without written and notarized permission. This notion of liberty-through-responsibility does not just govern interpersonal relationships: it is alive and well also in business, where environmental pollution is virtually nonexistent, contracts are rarely broken, people live up to their word, and a company in a position to monopolize a market will choose rather to encourage competition than to face the wrath of an army of babushkas willing to boycott anyone trying to make them pay a single kopper more than something is worth.

The roots of total liberty extend deep into Grigovia's past. Beginning with the nation's spiritual founder, Krikuv the Watchful, who came to the area to escape European plague-rats and to breed tubers for his mythical green-tuber borscht (the recipe for which is said to have survived to his day in the spicy concoction of the late Queen Pylta the Terrible), nearly all subsequent leaders – with the exception of a few puppet-kings installed by meddlesome proto-Russian czars in the 19th century – have turned away supplicating emissaries and invading armies alike, in no small part because of a rabidly-allegiant populace and the freedom and democracy it has enjoyed since wise Krikuv first started applying the lessons he'd gleaned from his vast collection of old Greek and Latin texts. Grigovia's modern anarchy stems from King Hyu-Yennd Yündlennd, who abdicated in 1912 after attending a series of lectures held in Vienna by famed Hungarian anarchist Dr. Wilhelm D. Tomaz; it continues to this day in the likes of Erya Rovend – who recently broke Grigovia's boycott of the United Nations in order to tell the U.S.A. to, “Kindly go fuck yourselves and leave my fellow Grigovians alone” – and in the smiles and shouts of legions of school children who begin in preschool to learn the basics of close-quarters-combat instead of being allowed to run around mindless during their lunch break. The Glorious Republic of Grigovia proves every day that anarchy foments liberty, and her people prove that liberty is the wellspring of Happiness, a phoenix rising from the ashes of fear and oppression. Praise be to anarchy, and to old man Krikuv.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on our Declarational legacy

  The United States of America was founded on such principles and organized in such form as to make the People Safe and Happy. In order for us to preserve for future generations even a shred of this nation's potential, we must redirect her course to honor and perpetuate the aims of the Declaration of Independence, and the promise of the Constitution. While this may sound complicated, the founders of our nation designed a relatively simple system with clearly defined parameters and expectations, those being: bestowing upon all mankind the inalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; forming a more perfect Union; establishing Justice; insuring the domestic Tranquility; providing for the common defence; providing for the general Welfare; and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

  Current conditions in our Union of States infringe upon the Liberty of the People by dictating how we might dispose of our bodies (by consuming drugs or aborting unwanted fetuses), and by allowing the People to indenture themselves to undemocratic and totalitarian corporations that offer the shallow promise of monetary gain at the expense of individual pride and self-sufficiency. These conditions undermine the general Welfare by eliminating funding for public schools, and by leaving us exposed, lacking a national health care system, to the ravages of sickness and disease. These conditions infringe upon the Safety of the People by exposing us to hostility from without (due to our continuing occupation of countries that Muslims consider holy), by allowing too young citizens to drive, by polluting the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels, and by granting privileged status to the economic interests of the top 20% at the expense of the economic Safety of the remaining 80% of the population, a privilege that furthermore does injury to Justice and the general Welfare alike when one considers that many millions of American children go hungry every day (see here).

  These self-contradictory conditions are tearing apart our country from within. We have made our government bloated and inefficient by adding layers of bureaucracy to Homeland Security and by paying corporations interested solely in their own bottom line exorbitant sums to supply and assist our troopers deployed overseas; we as a People have lost our way, capable neither of compromise for the sake of national progress nor of peaceful cooperation with fellow citizens who do not share our political or religious opinions. As long as our nation persists, however, the Constitutional parameters are the benchmarks against which all legislation and all government actions must be weighed. Any legislation or acts that infringe thereupon (such as the Patriot Act, and the 1970 Controlled Substances Act) are estimable to tyrants only, and, as they violate the very essence upon which America was founded, must be repealed immediately.

  Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration call for the dominion of one religion over the remaining religions or over the federal or state governments. Therefore, efforts by Sarah Palin and Rick Perry to spread like a suffocating blanket the teachings of their New Apostolic Reformation over our various halls of government can not, and will not, be successful. Similarly, any persons or groups calling for the incorporation of the rules of a specific religion into the laws of the land have no right to carry out their goals; indeed, any such efforts seek to abolish the Blessings of Liberty, and are thus intrinsically anti-American. The only acceptable actions that the various governments existing in these United States might initiate are those that satisfy the parameters of the Constitution and the Declaration alike.

  For us as a People to realign ourselves with the founding parameters and principles, we should: ensure the general Welfare by extending Medicaid to all citizens, by pursuing medical research (stem cells) that exhibits significant potential for healing, and by making affordable and high-quality education available to all persons equally; reinstate Liberty by granting women full custodianship over their bodies, and by extending to all grown citizens the right to consume whichever drugs they think best; provide for the common defence by recalling our armed forces from territories not our own, so that they might defend the motherland; create and expand domestic markets so that our citizens might pursue a decent Happiness on their own soil; form a more perfect Union by abolishing electoral laws that favor a few states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida) at the expense of the remaining forty six states; rekindle the dying flame of Justice by retraining our police forces to protect rather than circumvent the rights granted the individual by the Constitution, and by altering the current rules of electoral fund-raising, rules that amplify well-funded interests while making irrelevant the voice of the common man; recalibrate the three branches of government so that they might once again gain the tender balance between executive, legislative, and judicial powers, a balance central to the (Constitutionally) correct functioning of our nation.

  There are many more changes that must be made before we will have met the parameters of our founding documents, but the few suggestions mentioned above will put us back on track. As Benjamin Franklin said, We have created a republic, but only if we can keep it. In order to regain this grasp, we must break down existing legal and moral conditions, so that we and our Posterity might once again enjoy the full, unbridled joy of the Blessings of Liberty.

  p.s. requiescat in pacem, Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

revenue through regulation

  On Saturday last, on NPR, the topic of discussion revolved around allowing hunters in Pennsylvania (PA) to hunt on Sundays. Individuals representing the PA game commission and hunters' groups were in attendance, giving their opinions on the merits of Sunday hunting and debating the various statistics for and against this suggestion. One of the main arguments for Sunday hunting was that the increased activity and travel within and to the state would bring upwards of six hundred million dollars in revenues to the state coffers. During a segment in which the announcer read listener emails aloud, a commenter wisely stated that, since the state is currently facing bankruptcy, any revenue streams that could generate money for the state that did not in any demonstrable way cause harm to large segments of the population and that did not infringe upon the People's constitutional right to life, liberty, and property (their bodies), any such revenues are needed to keep the state afloat during these times of economic hardship.

  This is a solid argument based on the idea that, by licensing individuals to perform and engage in activities that bring them joy or satisfaction, and by said licensing to ensure that the People remain safe and secure in their person while not negatively affecting or otherwise infringing upon the rights of others, the People should be granted the ability to act in liberty and to enjoy those activities they wish to do while contributing to the economic well-being of the state as a whole.

  This argument also remains solid when applied to the concept of granting licenses to individuals who desire to cultivate and consume Mood Altering Substances in the privacy of their own homes. The legalization of the cultivation and consumption of marijuana, for example, by fully emancipated adults in the privacy of their homes who are not demonstrating a willingness or desire to harm others in any way, would: provide steady and reliable revenues to the state coffers through licensing and cultivation fees; reduce overall crime by limiting the power of organized criminal enterprise; decrease state expenditures on prisoner housing by eliminating roughly twenty percent of state prison populations that are made up of non-violent drug offenders (see here); lower the instances of gateway or crossover consumption by reducing the average, upstanding drug consumer's need to visit drug dealers to obtain the means by which he should decide to pursue his Happiness; and reinstate liberty to the American citizen by granting her that right that is enumerated in the constitution, and thus allowing her to take responsibility for her actions and to lead her life as she sees best fit so long as she is not infringing demonstrably upon the enumerated rights of others.

  Additional revenues can also be generated by placing a usage and manufacturing tax on individuals brewing, distilling, or consuming alcohol, a Mood Altering Substance that in its use is responsible for widespread physical harm and for various societal suffering, most notably assault, battery, rape, and otherwise violent and aggressive acts. We would do well to tax those who so brazenly tax our society with their consumption of alcohol.

  The commenter rightly stated that activities that do not threaten the well-being of others and that are well-managed and well-structured can provide revenue to the state, through licensing and fees, thus allowing the People to live their lives in liberty by the methods that to them shall seem most likely to affect their economic, spiritual, or bodily Happiness. Marijuana consumption in the United States has remained constant throughout the so-called War On Drugs (see here) over the last forty years, billions of dollars have been spent to restrict the People in their liberty, billions of dollars that could have been funneled into state and federal coffers through the legalized, taxed, and structured manufacture and distribution of the drugs Americans want to consume. Just as there are laws in place to assure that Mood Altering Substances (MAS) such as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee products are manufactured in ways that will not harm the consumer, the manufacturing processes of all other MAS must be regulated to ensure that the American citizen can access and consume whichever MAS he or she decides are best while being fully confident that those MAS are not contaminated with toxic or otherwise dangerous fillers.

  According to the Declaration of Independence (see here for the document you should read once a week), the purpose of government is to bring about the Safety and Happiness of the People. We already allow for the safe manufacture of certain MAS; let us now allow for the safe manufacture of all MAS, so as to satisfy the constitutional right of the People to be safe in the property (their bodies) while they are operating rationally under the liberty of thought and deed.

  If a person can be entrusted with the responsibility of handling and operating a weapon in areas where other people are present, that person should be entrusted with the responsibility of handling and consuming, in the privacy of their own home, whichever MAS they decide would serve them best.

  Give the people liberty, and they will prove that they are worthy of rational thought and virtuous action.

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 not necessarily operating here), only occasionally and perfunctorily respectful to the Opinions of Mankind, declare that the economic wellbeing 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 all who work in this country; that we have the right to speculate with 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 forcibly lobotomized; 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 are 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 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 saturate the lands with chemicals to make plants grow instead of learning from the soil, to poison the streams with mine-tailings, 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 quasi-totalitarian states, 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 Capitalisic Greed, 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 Shreik of Lies, preferring rather to profit from spying on the People (through the sale and maintenance of the materials necessary to the surveilance society), under the falsely-titled and unpatiotic Patiot 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 preferrable to ingenuity, that watching TV is preferrable 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 ninety-nine percent of all Americans shall toil ceaselessly to make us, those of the remaining One Percent, rich beyond reckoning, that governemnt is not instituted to secure the Rights of the People, and that they have neither the Right to alter nor to abolish their governemnt, even though it long ago abandoned them to satisfy the needs of the most monied few, as it is too late, and they waited too long to act.

  So suck it, you hard-working American fools, suck it good and hard.

on open carry laws

  This morning, on my way to get lowfat Greek yogurt (worthless tree-hugger that I am) and a dozen eggs, I had paused to peruse the flower selection in front of my local grocery store when I saw a man exiting a nearby pharmacy. The black bundle on his right hip was either a pistol or a bulky black cellphone with a detachable clip.
  Curious, I watched the lanky and mud-splattered chap enter his dented light-blue Honda crossover, reverse out of his parking spot at high speed, run one stop sign, and then another. I walked out into the road after he had passed, pointing at the stop sign and wagging my finger. The man slammed on the brakes, reversed to my location, and rolled down the passenger window.
  "Stop sign," I said, patting the metal octagon affectionately.
  "Do you want me to get out of this car and beat the shit out of you?"
  I chuckled and said again, Stop sign, with the adrenaline surging in my veins and my knees flexing instinctively into a fighting stance. As I backed away to gain more secure footing, I ascertained that the individual was in fact packing heat.
  With a parting, "Fuck you, motherfucker," the individual sped over to the tobacco store, where he most likely found sympathy with the nice and accommodating ladies behind the counter.

  This man broke two traffic laws in a parking-lot frequented by slow-moving septuagenarians and families with small children. He was armed with a semi-automatic, nine-millimeter pistol that likely held fourteen rounds, and the sole discernible purpose of his lawlessness and hostility was to satisfy his addiction to nicotine.
  I have discussed with a range of individuals the psychological affect of being armed. Furthermore, I have directly experienced the nearly god-like feeling one gets when one knows that there is a cold, hard, death-spitting machine tucked into one's trouserband. While I fully support the right to keep and to bear arms (a Constitutional right), I think that allowing individuals to waltz around in public with pistols on their belts can endanger the general public.
  With a firearm on your hip, you feel invincible, powerful, nearly omnipotent, for you are displaying to the world your ability to extinguish life with the twitch of a finger (whereas you would otherwise have to get your hands dirty strangling your opponent to death, to name but one method). Would the aforementioned individual have been so brash and so flippant had he not been strapped? Perhaps he might have been, and perhaps he might not have been, but allowing him to roll around town at ten in the morning in a residential area with a pistol on his belt in no way reduces his tendency to lawless and aggression; if anything, it heightens his clearly twisted sense of self-importance, and allows him to think that his agenda, no matter how trivial, trumps the bodily safety of those around him.
  This bedraggled chap might be the exception to the rule, one lone asshole in a community of otherwise law-abiding and sensible armed citizens, but, as we saw with Jared Loughner in Arizona, one individual is all it takes to get the blood flowing in the streets. So, where do we draw the line? I believe rigorous psychological examination should be a prerequisite to firearm ownership, but, since I currently reside in Pennsylvania, a state in which it is more difficult to procure booze than guns, mine is more than likely the minority opinion.
  The great travesty I see in this situation is that this individual, because of the Constitutional protection, is allowed to act in the aforementioned way, while individuals pursuing their Happiness (smoking drugs) in the privacy of their own homes, without in any way threatening demonstrably the Safety of those around them, must be in constant fear of having their doors smashed down by armed police officers executing a no-knock raid. Has our republic truly descended to a state in which the public display of weaponry is more important than the liberty to privately pursue one's Happiness?
  Woe be unto freedom. The individual has no right to do with his ultimate private property, his body, as he or she deems best fit. The right to bear Arms has superseded the right to individual Liberty. The ability to deal death enjoys a far higher standing in our society than the ability, as a fully emancipated adult, to decide how to elevate the mind. The state of affairs in our country is in shambles, our concept of Justice tarnished beyond recognition.
  Woe be unto Lady Liberty, for while she stands tall in New York Harbor clutching the Declaration of Independence with stoic pride, we have allowed: the Torch of Progress to burn out; powerful interests to place limits on our most fundamental principles, among them the pursuit of Happiness.
  Speak out. Stand up. Spread freedom.

Ultima Ratio Regum
场黑麦 John Paul Roggenkamp

on Safety and Happiness

  The Declaration of Independence, to use business parlance, is the mission statement to the Constitution's business plan. Without the Declaration, the Constitution is a merely an outline for civil government. With the Declaration, the Constitution is a malleable, living document whose purpose is to make real the few driving ideas behind the Declaration: that all persons are equal, that together they share the inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and that their government exists solely to bring about their Safety and their Happiness.
  We hear in our legislative bodies and in the press of great battles being waged along moral and idealistic lines, yet seldom do we hear this fundamental question: Will this piece of legislation bring about the Safety and/or the Happiness of the greatest possible majority of the population? Instead, we are told: that the rich will suddenly turn into magnanimous fountains of job-creation if their taxes are lowered further; that the elderly will somehow thrive when forced to purchase their own health-care plans in exceedingly complex markets; that our statue to the goddess of Liberty, she who stands proudly in New York Harbor, is a liar, her flame now extinguished, the promise of our land's vast potential reserved solely for the growing masses of native poor who already huddle here.
  We have lost sight of the essence of the American Dream, the idea that each person who here dwells may determine the parameters of his or her Happiness, and that as long as those parameters do not constrict or endanger the parameters set by other people, he or she has the inalienable Right to Pursue that Happiness. Without Safety, however, the parameters of Happiness are largely symbolic, and no attempt to Pursue Happiness can be successful. For this reason, our founding fathers distilled the myriad purposes of government into just two fundamental reasons for government: to effect, i.e. to create, to bring about, to make, the American people Safe and Happy.
  Does our current government expend every conceivable effort to make us Safe and Happy? I must applaud the extraordinary efforts of Director Mueller and the reformation of the FBI under his watch. Aside from my personal experience with the wild-eyed agents who targeted me in their desperate search for a scape-goat (see here), I believe the FBI is performing admirably in its efforts to fulfill the first promise of the Declaration - to keep the American people Safe. Furthermore, our police and fire departments (with some exceptions, of course) are also performing their efforts in this regard in admirable fashion.
  While the fulfillment of the promise of Safety is widely pursued and well-funded, the fulfillment of the promise of Happiness has been at best neglected, at worst countermanded. We have allowed an economic system (capitalism) to spread in this country, a system that rewards a few for the labor of all, a system that affords a few the capacity to Pursue their Happiness with wild abandon while denying the vast majority of the population the capacity to do the same, a system that reduces every year thousands of hard-working Americans to wage-slaves living one personal disaster away from abject poverty. Rather than allowing each American to consume whichever substances she deems most likely to affect positively her state of mind, her Happiness, we have: outlawed all but the most deadly, and mundane (alcohol and tobacco): routinely incarcerated individuals found to possess any substance other than these mundane and deadly few; funneled vast sums of money into the hands of pharmaceutical corporations that engineer and distribute street drugs under different names; deemed it wise to feed our children synthetic cocaine and synthetic amphetamines to help them succeed in school.
  Our government's efforts to live up the Declaration's promise of Safety are commendable, but without equally expansive efforts to bring about the Happiness of all Americans equally, the Safety efforts are for naught. In order for the American citizen to start down the Path to Happiness, three key requirements must be met: food, clothing, and shelter. Should these key requirements be in place, the individual will be able to determine the breadth of his abilities, which will then allow him to determine a way to support himself through the effortless expression of those abilities, otherwise known as Productive Happiness. Our current, capitalistic approach, is one that requires the individual to labor constantly in fields not necessarily optimally balanced against his abilities, thus keeping him from determining the parameters of his Happiness, from living a life of Happiness; capitalism in America therefore violates the second promise of the Declaration.
  For many reasons, this is not a desirable state of affairs. A tiny fraction of our population does not have the right to receive the fruits of the labors of a majority of that population. We cannot allow some drugs to be tolerated and others not. We cannot afford to waste the untapped potential of our citizens by providing them with no better place to express their abilities than from behind a convenience-store cash register. We cannot allow millions of American children to suffer daily from food insecurity (see here). We can and we must provide for the Safety and Happiness of all Americans equally.
  So, next time you see politicians fighting over whatever piece of legislation is on the table, write or call their offices and ask if the legislation in question brings about the Safety and Happiness of the greatest possible majority of American citizens. Together, we can realign our country with the dual promises of the Declaration of Independence. Together, we can unleash the great untapped potential that simmers within each of us. Together, we can fulfill the promises of Safety and Happiness first to each American equally, and then equally to all mankind.

Ultima Ratio Regum

John Paul Roggenkamp

common

The only thing common to the common person is the capacity, kindled through schooling and set ablaze in the Pursuit of Happiness, to achieve the extraordinary. The State of California, by establishing and promoting the community college system, has proven this to be true, by elevating millions of her people to heights unknowable but a century ago. The exuberances of politically motivated, greed-based decisions that have cast her into dire straights aside, she has proven that there is little that ordinary people cannot do if given the tools with which to unleash the potential that lurks within us all.
To our elected officials: cutting school funding and waging endless war is not the way to make good on the pledge of the Declaration of Independence, that most supreme document that obliges you effect, or to bring into being, to create, the Safety and Happiness of the American citizenry. You must change you ways. Unleashing the power of learning on the populace is dangerous to any entrenched ruling class, for it fosters critical thinking and rational analysis; but, together, hundreds of millions strong, the Yankee can achieve an ecologically sound, sustainable evolution of mankind unlike anything you could, with your hearts set on monetary riches and personal power, possibly imagine. You have probably engaged us in wars to keep us in fear. You have likely funneled untold billions of taxpayer dollars into your pockets and into the pockets of your sycophants because you thought the People too stupid, too short-sighted to cry foul, but we have not been sleeping, nor have we not been watching. Revert now, reexamine your ways, and ask yourselves this: am I doing everything in my power to make the People Safe and Happy. Be honest. Squelch your money-lust, your rapacious need for material possession. It is not too late for the People, but you may well have gone too long without a taste of the blind rod of humility. You serve us, sirs and madams. Never forget that.

Ultima Ratio Regum.
John Paul Roggenkamp