sway the vote

“It’s an eyesore, a blight on our city, which not many of our citizens enjoy,” said an older council member who’d received a handful of complaints from his affluent neighbors. “Therefore, I propose we keep allocating funds to get rid of it.” A few of his younger colleagues knew that it drew people to the city and gave it an authentic and inimitable character. They disagreed with him, but there were too few of them to sway the vote.

And, so, New York City joined a thousand other municipalities across the United States and fitted out squads of workers with paint rollers and long-handled scrapers. They loosed the workers on up-and-coming parts of town, giving them license to paint over, deface, scrape off, and otherwise remove the vast collections of street art that had theretofore covered otherwise blank and underutilized street poles. The workers attacked ten thousand and one unique examples of cunning artistic expression deemed mere trash by a group of disconnected bureaucrats who cared not for the creative potency of Big Apple denizens.

The workers scraped and sprayed and rollered, destroying countless pieces of the city’s unique cultural heritage. Adding insult to injury, the city council had not even had the decency, poise, or foresight to at least take pictures of said priceless works of art before having them trashed. In the wake of the art desecration squads, the city lay bare, raped of its color, efficiently monetized, franchised, and sterilized for the benefit of profits-hungry corporations. New York City’s street-side art museums are dying at the hands of her elected officials, and the world is a less beautiful place for it.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

a rowdy din

The human he loves him a good diversion, be it book sex running or television; that last one’s the worst for it pulls a soul in spellbinding with colors and a rowdy din. All plans and hopes crumble when its screen doth flash and hours are spent without bringing in cash and hours are spent with bum glued to the couch for lack of much movement one becomes a grouch. The cure is to jettison and throw away that T.V. set - not soon but now here today - and hone skills like just how to tell a story which must be done slowly not sped up or hurried. At least please don’t talk about shows that are good or how others simply must watch them and should get caught up on all of the action that blares between spots for companies selling their wares. The T.V. set cuts people off from their peers and keeps them divided for years upon years, and helps them think that talking heads tell the truth or that there were others besides John Wilkes Booth. So shut it off please at least but for a while and watch how your body responds with a smile and watch then your brain activate and reboot when vanished is that which is wasteful at root.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

CDC - DEA joint venture

Working closely with specialists in Atlanta, Georgia, the Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA) top brass has expanded its rules and guidelines for regulating nearly every aspect of the lives of average Americans. In addition to persecuting individuals who affect the body with drugs, the tyranny-minded DEA is adding a suite of new parameters for regulating and punishing persons who have excess or insufficient body weight, strange or unconventional haircuts (such as the mullet, Iroquois, or tonsure), tattoos and other bodily modifications such as facial piercings, poor dental health, or an overall lack of proper hygiene. While it already has the power to force the People to take any pills they may not have been taking, to force them to eat their recommended daily allowance of fiber, and to make sure they do not exceed their weekly ration of hard spirits, this most recent expansion of the DEA's power surprises no one – not anarchists, not neo-anarchists, not even communists, socialists, republicans, neo-republicans, libertarians, nihilists, or vegans.

Said DEA junior press agent Yhett Redunindab, ”It has long been legal for the individual to cut off his nipples, to seal those nipples in airtight containers, and to insert and display the severed discs of flesh in translucent plugs that fill his stretched-out earlobes – but no more. Upon consideration, we, and our infallible colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), concluded that such external disfigurement is no different than the internal disfigurement caused by smoking dope or snorting crank, and that, therefore, we can punish anyone who should remove and display his man-teats in such fashion.” An information packet handed out after the briefing outlined additional regulations, such as a prohibition on tattooing designs other than those approved by one's state legislature, the outlawing of religious attire (bonnet, habit, or hijab) by women, the forced consumption of one's recommended daily allotment of pork, and bans on bulimia, obesity, sloth, jaundice, and the wearing of baggy or sagging pants, shirts that bunch up in the back, popped collars, magenta-colored silk blouses, and socks that are visible above the shoe-rim.

“If a person should think she can just go out and get a unicorn design cut with ink into her left forearm, that person would be thinking wrong,” said Mr. Redunindab while being escorted by heavily-armed civilian contractors to a row of idling black vehicles. “The body is not the individual's property to do with as she pleases, nor do the parameters of Liberty cover activities such as mainlining horse or not eating healthily while within the privacy of one's home. We are watching, we are listening, we do not need warrants, and we shall be making sure that everyone plays to whichever tune we decide, arbitrarily, is best.” When asked how he thought the public would respond once they found out the extent to which the federal and state governments were violating the Constitutional directive to secure the Blessings of Liberty equally to each and every citizen, the agent simply pointed to the individual who had asked the question and laughed as two unsmiling, teeth-grinding contractors dragged her by the hair and threw her in a nearby river.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

private sector triumphs

Last Thursday evening, quietly, and with little fanfare, the private companies constituting America's military industrial complex declared success in their efforts to undermine and ultimately destroy liberty, democracy, and free speech at home and abroad. During a lavish ceremony held at an opulent dining room located in a convention center built using local taxes-dollars, these enemies of freedom toasted themselves, each other, and their cronies in Washington, cronies who used the federal 2012 defense bill to enrich these fools by nearly $400 billion. “NASA just spent $1.6 billion sending a miniature laboratory to Mars,” said the head of a powerful aeronautics contractor, to uproarious applause. “One point six billion? I can see from this here podium seventeen different fellow defense contractors who made that much in stock options in the ten minutes after the President signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA 2012). It warms my heart to know that those $400 billion were used to make the persons in this room rich instead of being wasted on launching more scientific labs into space, feeding malnourished children, or developing methods for raising crops in Earth's barren and waterless places. We have done it, gentlemen – hoodwinked hundreds of millions of clueless motherfuckers into making us wealthier and more powerful than they could possibly imagine.”

Called in 1961 by outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower the greatest threat to democracy that this country has ever known, a few tens of thousands of defense contractors routinely cheat over three hundred and ten millions of common American citizens out of roughly half the money we commoners give the government in the form of taxes, every year. “With four hundred billion dollars, we could refurbish a thousand schools, explore the seas and space, pay a hundred thousand school-teachers decently, rebuild a thousand bridges, cure a dozen diseases, and perfect renewable-energy-gathering-systems such as solar, tidal, wind, and thermal,” said Shurucq Tamzal, PhD, spokeswoman for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). “But no matter how many recommendations this office makes to leaders in the White House or Congress, they keep shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of private individuals who profit from constant and continuous conflict – war on a global scale. So, basically, when the U.S. makes war, defense contractors get rich. This is a disgrace, a farce, not at all how the persons who founded this nation intended us to be doing things. At least, that's my opinion; please don't quote me on it.”

Defense contracting is as old as war itself, a business which in the age of modern warfare and endless armed struggle has no time for or interest in maintaining freedom and democracy for an uneducated, disinterested, television-addled population. In his closing remarks before ceding the stage to Creed – a religiously-conservative music group – the aforementioned aeronautics contractor said, “Frankly, we need the general American public to stay stupid and glued to the idiot-box for five hours every day, because, otherwise, it would ask too many questions, wanting to know who keeps giving us hundreds of billions of its tax-dollars. I thank my lucky stars for the wizards who make compelling, high-drama, high-quality TV programming.”

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

New Hampshire secedes

Last Tuesday, in Concord, the capital of this now-sovereign nation of 1.3 million individuals, the decision was announced to bow quietly out of the Union of American States. Initiated by a referendum in which 98% of the voting population supported secession (and inspired by New Hampshire's history as the first post-colonial sovereign nation in the Americas), the move comes at a time of increasing national and international doubt over the feasibility of the Union in general. During a brief ceremony completely devoid of fanfare, bluster, or celebration, the governor for the state, a Dr. Florentine B. Mistleblanch, declared, “For too long have we citizens of the once fine state of New Hampshire – and the now fine nation of Nu-Hemp-Sure – merely payed lip service to our motto, 'Live free or die.' Since all persons who are alive at this time will soon be totally and completely free of any and all outside interference, this shall cease to be just a slogan, and it will become a reality.”

Polls conducted in the wake of last fall's referendum showed that individuals living in this ex-state wanted nothing to do with such other states as North Carolina, a state that is currently in the process of passing laws to codify marriage according to hard-line Christian rules. (As of press-time, Christianity is merely one religion among many thousands of different religions practiced in America; it is neither the nation's founding religion nor its dominant religion.) Said governor Mistleblanch while unlocking her bicycle from a nearby stop-sign, “We don't want to be lumped together in the minds of the world with leaders seeking to overthrow reason; we do not care to associate with madmen looking to rule according to one – and only one – religious codex; and we want nothing to do with lunatics who abolish the principles of liberty and democracy by installing and maintaining theocratic rule. We invite the North Carolinians to do as they please, but we proud denizens of the Hempen-Shire want nothing to do with such crazy, freedom-destroying schemes.”

Nu-Hemp-Sure is the world's newest nation, and the fourth – following Canada, Puerto Rico, and Panama – to officially renounce, rescind, or refuse membership in the crumbling, tyrannical, and politically-corrupted collection of – formerly United – States of America.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on novus ordo seclorum

  Every American dollar bill bears the slogan novus ordo seclorum, Latin for New Order for the Ages. The federal government of the United States (the fed) persecutes this new order in hot and cold military conflicts, and by wagingwar on those of its own citizens who would consume drugs other than those it itself licenses or sells.

  Regardless of whether you are American or not, and if you are, whether or not you vote: if you handle US currency, and if you conduct business with it, you give your tacit consent to the aims printed on the American greenback – if you use dollar bills, you perpetuate and maintain this new order for the ages. (I have followed with interest efforts in economically struggling communities to switch to location-specific para-currencies, efforts which seem to nullify the paper money printed by the US Treasury.) In the not too distant past, the fed faced oppressive and mass-murdering dictators that it had to destroy, which required it to reorder its economy and to draft its mission statement anew. By consequence the world was also ordered anew, and the smaller players held their breath as clear battle lines emerged, and as nuclear missile silos sprouted in the Urals, and in the Midwest.

  The outline of this new order began to change in the 1970s, when the fed abandoned the gold standard, causing the US Dollar to decline. Then, it changed the rules for financial regulation, allowing for rampant and destructive speculation, so that now the two hundred and fifty thousands of Americans who speculated best (the Point Oh Five) control the corporate structures that in turn control most aspects of society. But it is the duty of the federal government to shape a new order for the ages, and no other party – not the 0.05% nor the military-industrial complex – can manifest the destiny of this nation with the sort of extreme prejudice and blind dedication needed to finish the job.

  Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

on disc golf & Taoism

  The game of disc golf (in which players, in the fewest number of tosses, throw discus-like plastic discs from a designated point to a specially-designed metal catch basket) is in certain aspects akin to the elusive tenets of Taoism. Similar to the enduringly simple (but all-encompassing) message that Lao Tzu bound up in the Tao Teh Ching, the game of disc golf is at root an easy task, one that increases in difficulty, however, in tandem with the player's internal stress levels.

  The more pressure the player puts on herself to make, say, a difficult shot into the wind around a copse of trees, the harder that shot, and her subsequent shots, will be. She will be trying to force her body to move so that the disc goes in a very specific direction, but, from her rigid posture and from her attempted dominance over her body, her shot will fly foul. As in Taoism, so in disc golf we must always remember that any attempt to subjugate the Universe to one's own will is bound to backfire, and the most coveted things (such as making that nasty headwind bank-shot) are the hardest to get. (Therefore, the Tao teaches us not to covet anything, as coveting leads invariably to ruin.) The more the player pushes to make the shot the way she thinks the shot should be made, the less she is tapping into her body's inherent ability to not only make the shot, but to do it with finesse and without pride.

  The effective disc golfer is he who can put his ego aside. The great disc golfer she who can revert to a pure animal state by incorporating her ego into herself (thus neutralizing it), a pure animal state that allows her to throw her disc far and straight, her body moving in its own curious rhythms, her mind freed from sadness and joy, her entire being focused solely on the fraction of time at which the disc leaves her calloused fingers. In my humble opinion, this is the magical, secret point that forms the center of the teachings of Taoism: rather than telling you to worship in such way to that god at this time of year, the Tao Teh Ching focuses on reducing you to your most basic and fundamental forms, forms that compel you to act with complete impartiality, intent only on breaking time from This Moment to The Next. Taoism helps you to clear your mind of all the clutter and pollution of modern society; with the Tao, you can more readily realize your deep, latent potential: you can learn to express it. The Tao focuses on deeds, not words, on completing tasks with skill and aplomb but without taking pride in them, or letting them influence your emotional state.

  So is it, at times, with the sport of disc golf. The less thought-interference there is during the throwing phase, the more fluid your body motion. The less the ego is involved, the greater the chance that you will make that daring sidewinder shot around that group of bushes. So keep on diminishing and diminishing until there is nothing left – the Tao is like a bellows that is never made empty, even though it seems hollowed out. The more you draw from it, the harder it works; the less emphasis you put on your own personal achievement, the more you operate for the good of the world, an island of calm in a sea of chaos. One of the trickiest parts, however, is learning not to covet the Tao. To covet anything is to destroy it, so toss your discs with quiet competence, without ever yearning for success, your only desire a state of primal simplicity.

  Your body knows what to do. Now all you have to do is get your mind out of the way.

Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp