undead parasitic lifeform

At a symposium of sociologists, economists, and political scientists that met in a ramshackle ballroom located near the seedy part of Las Vegas boulevard, an undead parasitic lifeform was recognized, debated, and correctly named. Long bearing the incorrect label of Federal Reserve System, the symposium identified it as an Indebtedness Generation Scheme Designed To Reduce The American People Under Absolute Despotism, or InGeSc-DeRePe-UnMoDe.

By keeping the American People in a state of constant indebtedness to a privately held organization that legally controls the supply of their money, the Federal Reserve System is one of economic and financial enslavement that requires no walls, guards, or bars. Instead, each second of every day, this unconstitutional and anti-democratic zombie parasite has been sucking out the country’s lifeblood for nearly 110 years, draining it of liberty and ruining justice for all.

Shortly before the end of the symposium, a combination of armed police and military forces forcefully entered the building under the pretext of fighting terrorism. After each attendee was shot to death, the ballroom was set alight and allowed to burn to the ground, leaving few if any traces of what had transpired.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

free things made

Working well into the night, and long past their usual quitting-time of Right About Now, a group of human beings working at a factory in a Vietnamese free-economic-zone bent to the task of making free shirts. “Remember,” their foreman had told them at the beginning of their long shift, the unpleasant man screaming at the top of his lungs so as to be heard over the cacophony made by the running looms. “These #7 through #16 upper-body garments will be given out free-of-charge to persons attending the Global Summit of Capitalistic Inequality in Dubai, next month, so they must be made well, and quickly!” The workers – mostly women belonging to an underprivileged ethnic group who were working for mere pennies an-hour – shared secret and contemptuous looks with one another before hurrying to their posts within the cavernous production-hall, some of them risking health and safety to access hard-to-reach portions of their respective machines. In an attempt to live up to the quality-control demands of their corporate slave-masters, the women produced the required quantities of shirts in just under the amount of time allotted for their task, which prompted further screaming and abuse from the foreman, who accused them of trying to pad their paychecks by lolly-gagging, and dragging their feet.

After walking in single file out of the factory under the watchful gaze of a pair of security guards who executed random searches of their persons and lunch containers, the women all but ran to the gates leading to the road outside. Waiting dejectedly in the rain for a shuttle to take them back to the outskirts of the slum where they lived (unaccompanied workers are prohibited from walking through, or existing in, the free-economic-zone), the women sang songs and told stories of their tribes' long-lost glory days as behind them a different group of underpaid workers loaded the free shirts into trucks for transport to a nearby seaport. “Someone mentioned that these were free garments,” said Humei Hong, a local truck-driver, as he was doing a voluntary inspection-walk around his leased rig. “I don't know for whom they are free, though, since they're not free for us – the last time I asked if I could have one for free, I couldn't find work for six months.”

Later that year, at the Inequality in Capitalism summit in Dubai, the shirts were indeed given out free-of-charge, mostly to corpulent rich people with lightly-toned skin arriving on tax-payer-funded corporate jets, who wore them for but a single day before tossing them in the trash.

(p.s. TANSTAAFL – There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on easy living

Attention, citizens of America: keep doing that to which you are accustomed; do not alter your ways; do not conserve resources; do not research and implement in your own lives methods for sustainable or self-sufficient living. Let not your minds be filled with worry, nor pay any heed to the fear-mongers spreading false intelligence about environmental degradation, the worldwide depletion of nutrients from the soil, the rapid extinction of species large and small, massive crop failures, algal blooms that suffocate all other sea-life, or reports of a garbage patch the size of continental Europe floating in the Pacific Ocean. You must do nothing to save fair Columbia – she who is our common, tender motherland – or to rejuvenate her paved-over soil, her once-clean rivers, her now-contaminated lakes, her exploited meadows, her clear-cut forests, her mono-cultured fields, or her cities that creep and sprawl like fungi out into their once-abundant surroundings.

Do not plant your own victory garden, do not ride a bicycle, do not turn off lights when they are not needed, do not entertain yourselves, do not criticize your elected officials, do not reduce, reuse, or recycle, do not turn off your car's engine if it should idle longer than thirty seconds, do not close your house's windows when running the air-conditioning, do not gather electricity from the sun, do not mow your lawn using muscle-power, and do not put on a sweater instead of turning on your furnace. All you must do – and all that is expected of you – is to buy food made by someone you shall never meet, to cast your ballot in elections that you are powerless to truly sway, to wave a plastic, Chinese-made American flag when you are told to wave it, to watch TV for more than an hour a day, to shop at stores (the big discount retailers) that cut costs by supporting slavery in Africa, Asia, and South America, to fear foreigners, immigrants, and the phantom threat of terrorism, to relinquish your rights by continuing to support the anti-patriotic, freedom-destroying Patriot Act, to fill your car's tank with terrorism-funding, war-necessitating gasoline, to contract diabetes and other diseases by eating too much food, and to lead a generally leisure-filled, comfortable life that amounts to little more than sloth.

Please, do not worry, citizens of America – because your pastor tells you not to, because your politician tells you not to, because advertisers tell you not to. Do not even try to break the chains and shackles of your self-imposed slavery to conspicuous consumption, to the hollow notion of convenience, and to the idea that someone else is going to fix your problems for you. Do nothing, please, but kick back in your foreign-made recliner, wearing your Bangladeshi-sweatshop-made clothes, sipping from an imported plastic cup a brew of artificial colors mixed with refined corn sugar, and watch as the world burns around you.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on my postal commie nightmare

I watch, each day, with loathing and great trepidation, as an agent of the socialist ideal drives up to a box at the end of my unpaved driveway into which he deposits slender pieces of folded and stamped paper, or, occasionally, a carefully-wrapped package. Then, his foul work done, he speeds off rapidly, as if part of an escape pattern calculated to send shivers down my spine. I have seen the agent close-up, and he wears the uniform of the United States Postal Service. Be warned, citizens of America: there are commies in our midst.

The U.S. Postal Service, or USPS, is a stubborn and tenacious holdout of the communistic infestation that has blighted this nation since before we had a presidency, a Congress, or a Supreme Court, and before the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written (let alone drafted). For nearly two and a half centuries, we have suffered from the benefits of this institution; for too long has it served all persons equally, and at low cost; for too long have we wallowed under this communistic oppression. The bastard Benjamin Franklin served as post-master to the state of Pennsylvania; he allowed this stubborn poison to infect his adopted colony; he even encouraged its spread to other colonies of the time. Such a man was Franklin, such a base and vile miscreant, such a foul agent of ever-creeping socialism, that in his supposedly enlightened time he was seduced and enslaved by forces acting in the interest of the general Welfare.

It is well that under the presidency of George Walker Bush the United States Postal Service was all but annihilated through clever and dastardly schemes (in part by being forced to accumulate within a short amount of time a full decade's worth of pension payments); if he had been but successful, we would still be singing his praises not only for engaging America in ground wars in two separate, sovereign nations, but also for wiping from the face of our shining land the final remnants of foul socialism. There is no option but the capitalistic option; there may be no services rendered but for those done by for-profit corporations; the dream of a state bent on improving the general Welfare and seeing to the domestic Tranquility was just that – a hollow, worthless dream conjured up by such scum as foul olde Franklin. Let no further socialists darken the threshold of my home – not to bring me my new shoes, nor to bring me the bill for my new shoes, not even to drop off a Festivus card – for I refuse to interact with commies, no matter how sunny their demeanor, how pleasantly they might smile, or with what sort of conviction they perform their duties in rain, sleet, and hail. A pox upon all commies, I say.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

declaration of corporate supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on belief

My beliefs, like the beliefs of any person, are complex.
  Foremost, I believe in the teachings of the Tao Te Ching, that simple and profound work that exalts humility, frugality, and mercy.
  I believe in the perpetual yet fragile nature of Liberty, that state of mind in which the pure deep essence of a person's innermost core bubbles out into the world unfettered and pure.
  I believe that goddess Athena visits me at times (when I am exhibiting qualities for which she is the patron goddess), instilling in me superhuman abilities and making me shine with a great, visible light.
  I believe that the birds are watching me, keeping an eye on me and reporting my actions to their respective gods, be those gods Wednesday or Athena or any of the other gods that use birds to spy on us.
  I apologize when I step on a young bamboo shoot, in the belief that my destructive action might turn the entire grove against me.
  When cutting the lawn here, I am in constant anguish, as I can see the tiny beasts, the insects and whatnot, scampering before the whirling blades of death, rushing to escape my descending foot; I weep for their mangled little bodies, for their lifeless husks, and ask for their forgiveness.
  I believe that each and every person in this world has the potential to do great things, to change mankind in fantastic and unprecedented ways, although most are too poor (in the developing world) or too lazy (in the developed world) to develop the method for unleashing this potential. (I also believe that capitalism stunts the flowing of true potential, forcing the individual to replace his search for Happiness with the scramble to merely survive.)
  I believe that a group of shape-shifting giant space aliens live in the dense foliage of the bamboo grove, that they flee at my approach, that they make a terrible rustling sound when I appear too suddenly and too close by.
  I believe that I am an embodiment of Loki, the Norse god of chaos, and that my purpose in life is to disrupt the standard methods and to bring change into the world, for good or ill.

  I believe all these things (and many others, such as the Pan-Human-Consciousness and the Ancient Alien Theory), and I believe none of them.
  Unlike a member of an established religion, my beliefs are fluid, ever-changing, never set in stone and never shoved in the face of the person I run into at the supermarket. At any moment I may believe in all of the above things or in none, in some part-way and in others fully (although I most always perform the whole practice of apologizing-to-living-things-I-accidentally-trample-or-kill).

  My beliefs are absurd, but I know they are absurd, and I cherish them for their absurdity. For the most part (except of course for this blogposting), I keep them to myself. I would never dare to berate another for his or her lack of belief in my beliefs. I would never approach another and ask if he has accepted the Flying Spaghetti Monster as his one and only living and ever-watchful Saviour, nor would I confront another and ask if he has accepted Allah as his one and only true god (mostly because I don't feel like talking to the FBI again and explaining to them, again, that I am not a terrorist).

  So, those are my beliefs, although they aren't, really, as I believe in that which cannot be named, that which is inexhaustible, that which has no form, that which has a name so powerful that to say it would be to rend the very fabric of the universe, that which has a form so subtle that it is the form of all things and no things.
  And yet, unlike a believer in an established religion, I will (and do) change my beliefs if presented with superior and logical evidence that they are wrong.
  My belief-systems are flexible, expanding and contracting with every stroke of the bellows.
  My beliefs will never convince me that the actions of another person merit persecution or death (unless said actions involve rape, theft, or murder). My beliefs will never convince me that they are superior to the beliefs of anyone else in the world.
  I yearn only to exhibit my beliefs through my actions, never by cornering of someone at the local home-improvement store or by yelling at strangers on a street-corner in Hollywood.
  My beliefs are my business; they belong to me alone. I will never kill for my beliefs, nor will I enslave another person, nor will I berate another person for not sharing my beliefs.

  So, for all those people who find it necessary to spread vocally the word of their god, stop. Keep it to yourselves, and let the rest of us rational, flexible folk get on with our lives. Your rigid adherence to religious doctrine is sad, at best. Keep your religious observances out of our legislatures, out of our court-rooms, out of our public places. Keep America tolerant; keep her free.

  Vote NO on American theocracy.

Ultima Ratio Regum
Juliet Papa Romeo