Erstwhile Urban Wanderer

May 26, 2009 – After a lifetime of observation, I’ve come to the unwelcome conclusion that the vast majority of people want to be subservient.

By Dave Eriqat

It’s often claimed that people treasure freedom, but is that true of all people or merely a tiny, independently-minded minority? Unfortunately, a lifetime of observation has led me to conclude that the vast majority of people do not want to be free, either physically or intellectually. They seem repulsed by genuine freedom, as if it’s a grotesque skin disease.

Witness peoples’ willingness, no, eagerness to trade their physical liberty for “security,” which always seems to dangle tantalizingly in the distance, like a carrot, or perhaps more accurately, like a mirage. If people would give up just a little more of their liberty, maybe they’ll finally achieve that ethereal, alluring promise of “security.” They are right, of course: If they continue to give up their liberty, they will eventually find themselves in maximum security.

Perhaps most people are so overwhelmed with life – or so distracted by bread and circuses – that they have insufficient capacity for making all the decisions a truly free person would have to make, so they welcome having someone else making decisions for them. Without the infrastructure of “civilization,” I suspect most people on earth would expire, so at least “civilization” keeps them alive, but at the cost of their freedom. As near as I can tell, prior to the advent of “civilization,” the human population was rather low and not growing very rapidly.

Peoples’ revulsion to freedom is not limited to the physical realm, but is perhaps even more striking in the intellectual realm. Observe how willing people are to bow to false gods and “inconvenient truths,” while ignoring what they see with their own eyes, or rather, what they do not see. (See Why I am a Climate Realist and Coleman’s Corner.) Despite the dearth of dire consequences ensuing from the mythology of anthropogenic global warming, such as the record number of hurricanes that never did seem to materialize, people, even supposedly intelligent people allow their behavior to be governed not by their own interest, but by the politically correct dictate of reducing their “carbon footprint.” I’m all for being environmentally conscious and minimizing my impact on the environment, and I abhor waste and needless destruction. Nevertheless, you won’t catch me ditching a perfectly functional old car and buying a brand new hybrid car in order to reduce my “carbon footprint,” as I’ve seen some people do. I might buy a hybrid car because my old car is dead and needs to be replaced, and the hybrid car is an elegant piece of engineering that’s fuel efficient. But mindlessly internalizing the concept of reducing one’s “carbon footprint” and adjusting one’s behavior accordingly is not the act of a person who wants to be free, but a person who wants to be subservient drone. Who, after all, prescribes this appropriate behavior that the adherent aspires to? It is not himself, but someone in “authority.” (By the way, one way to reduce automobile pollution substantially without consuming all those resources required to manufacture a brand new car is to drive less! Incredible, but true.)

My father listens to a conflicted radio host who claims to be a champion of freedom and a defender of the Constitution, and fulminates daily against big, intrusive government, but then sides with the government when it wants to forcibly inject a boy with chemotherapy drugs against his will. That’s not freedom, but authoritarianism. (See The Survival of Billy Best Proves Cancer Doctors Wrong about Daniel Hauser.) I have a mind to ask this particular radio host which article of the Constitution authorizes the government to force people to undergo chemotherapy treatment (or mandatory vaccinations, for that matter).

Along the same lines, I hear “intelligent” people express their faith that if everyone were forced to buy health insurance, health care costs would miraculously decline. Besides confusing the symptoms (lack of money to pay for health care) for the disease (high health care costs), advocating forcing people to do anything, even if it’s “for their own good,” is not the attitude of a free person, but that of a willing slave; worse, a willing slave who’s willing to enslave others as well.

Recently, I sent an e-mail to my friends and family expressing my outrage that a local government would interfere with a small bible studies class held in a private residence. To my surprise, one friend, a religious one no less, sided with the government, saying he wouldn’t want to have a “church” operating next door to his house. I thought it so perverse: Me, a heathen, siding with religion; and him, a religious person, siding with the government against his own religion! My umbrage at this government assault on a First Amendment freedom aside, I suppose part of my astonishment at my friend’s reaction ensues from the fact that I’ve never cared what my neighbors did with their property. I wouldn’t care if they stored rusting automobile hulks in their front yard. It’s their property, not mine, and as far as I’m concerned, they are free to do what they want with their property.

I think most people don’t trust themselves to “behave,” so they welcome some “authority” – the government, the church, “society,” political correctness – to dictate to them how to behave. If it’s true that people don’t trust themselves, then it logically follows that they don’t trust others either, which explains why they seem even more eager to enslave others than themselves. Actually, I’ve observed this expression of self-doubt many times, such as when people say to me, “Well, if you don’t believe in god or practice a religion, how can you be moral?” Clearly, for them, their church or their deity is the “authority” that controls their behavior. An expression like the hypothetical one above implies that without the guidance of the authority of the church or the deity, such people would have no morals. By contrast, I trust my own conscience, self-respect, wisdom, experience, civility and empathy to “tell” me how to behave. Consequently, because I trust myself, I’m also more inclined to trust others than most people I know, who tend to be authoritarian, subservient and mistrustful of others.

I’ve said in the past that 90% of the people are willing to be subservient, 5% are willing to be their masters and the remaining 5%, people like me, just want to be free and left alone. We don’t want to dominate or be dominated. (Sometimes we call ourselves libertarians.) Clearly, the 90% who embrace subservience do not cherish freedom. Neither do the 5% willing to be the masters. Obviously, if they are willing to be masters of others, they do not value freedom for those others, but what these masters fail to appreciate is that when they elect to dominate others, they aren’t free either, but are slaves to that structure themselves! Should they permit the bonds through which they subjugate others to dissolve, their own livelihoods would be threatened, so they must work forever to sustain their system of dominance. For an example of what I’m talking about, consider all those people employed in law enforcement and the prison industry. People who are truly free and truly treasure freedom for others can exist indefinitely that way since their existence is not contingent on exploiting, or being exploited by others. Quite honestly, it doesn’t bother me that so many people long to be slaves. What bothers me is that they are willing to take me down that path with them.

May 16, 2009 – The current occupant of the White House was elected by hopeful believers in the vague promise of “change.” How’s that working out?

By Dave Eriqat

I genuinely feel sorry for people who voted for Mr. Obama as “anyone but Bush,” even though, as my die-hard Republican mother sagely pointed out, Mr. Bush wasn’t running against Mr. Obama. Do Mr. Obama’s supporters even yet recognize the deception that’s been perpetrated upon them? Or are they obliged to keep supporting him no matter what, just as Mr. Bush’s supporters were obliged to keep supporting him no matter what?

For the record, I consider myself totally impartial. I’m an equal opportunity critic. I despised Mr. Bush (I and II, and even created a satirical web site critical of the latter), Mr. Clinton and now Mr. Obama. I voted for Mr. Reagan twice, Mr. Bush the elder once, and Mr. Clinton once before hanging up my voting spurs for good. (By the way, I didn’t much care for Mr. Reagan either. I voted for him because I was young and dumb.) I’m not a racist – I couldn’t care less what color Mr. Obama is, although also for the record, he is half white. Nor am I a Democrat or Republican. I’m not even a Libertarian although I do favor many of the principles of the Libertarian party and I may have once been a member of the Libertarian party – I don’t remember; that’s how unimportant party affiliation is to me.

I consider myself truly independent. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. Heck, I don’t even vote! It’s a complete waste of time. My sole act of political participation in recent years was giving money to Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign, the only time I’ve ever contributed to a presidential campaign. How much more impartial could I be with respect to the two leading presidential candidates, neither of which was Mr. Paul?

All disclosures complete, I see no “change” whatsoever coming from the new administration of Mr. Obama. All I see is a continuation or acceleration of the worst of Mr. Bush’s policies.

Economy

Let’s start with the economy. Mr. Obama’s latest budget contains a deficit four times the largest deficit under Mr. Bush, with optimistic forecasts of deficits into the foreseeable future that are merely double those of Mr. Bush. Wouldn’t real “change” involve eliminating budget deficits altogether, rather than enlarging them? (I’m not so naive as to believe any of these deficit figures, massaged as they are with ample quantities of statistical slight-of-hand. Nevertheless, I’m comparing “official” figures.)

Or how about transparency in the banking system?

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. (Source: Bloomberg)

It’s our tax money that’s being lent out! We have a right to know where it’s going. Although we became inured to the cloistered nature of Mr. Bush’s administration in such matters, I hoped that Mr. Obama would have offered some “change” in this regard, perhaps with a side dish of honesty.

Then again, by all accounts the recent banking “stress test” initiated by Mr. Obama’s administration was a complete and utter sham.

The bank stress tests currently underway are “a complete sham,” says William Black, a former senior bank regulator and S&L prosecutor, and currently an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. “It’s a Potemkin model. Built to fool people.” Like many others, Black believes the “worst case scenario” used in the stress test don’t go far enough. (Source: The Business Insider)

When people pointed out the absurdity of the stress test, the Federal Reserve replied that the test didn’t paint a complete picture of the banks’ health anyway. So, then, what was the point of the “stress test” to begin with? Where’s the truth? Where’s the transparency?

How does this banking stress test charade differ in principle from Mr. Bush’s WMD and “mushroom cloud” arguments in favor of the Iraq war? Are not both deliberate deceptions? Sure, Mr. Obama “inherited” a mess, but how does perpetuating the pattern of deceit and secrecy ameliorate the mess he inherited? Wouldn’t the best medicine for the mess he inherited be disclosure and honesty?

Perhaps Mr. Obama isn’t interested in actually “fixing” things, but in pursuing another agenda, such as totalitarianism. He has aggressively intervened in areas that have traditionally been off limits to the government, and each of his maneuvers seems to garner a little more authority or control for the federal government. For example, Mr. Obama apparently ordered the ouster of GM’s CEO:

The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said. (Source: Politico)

Some have claimed that Mr. Obama also threatened various bank executives with reprisal if they didn’t go along with his bank bailout plans. Not content with meddling in the corporate sector, Mr. Obama decided to meddle in the affairs of the state of California, ordering the restoration of wages cut in response to that state’s budgetary problems:

In a victory for its labor union friends, the Obama administration has ruled that budget-strapped California cannot cut the wages of in-home care givers since it is accepting federal stimulus funds. (Source: CNSNews.com)

Is it not a prudent course of action for a state that is “budget-strapped” to cut costs, even labor costs? I’m one of the first to decry the relentless assault on labor in this country. The government-corporate fascist alliance has successfully targeted wages in this country for years, and I loath that. But if one is coping with a budgetary crisis – and California certainly has one – then cuts have to be made. In the real world there is no wage fairy that comes along and pays people even when there’s no money. It’s precisely that sort of childish thinking that has brought us to the brink of fiscal destruction where we now find ourselves.

Finally, Mr. Obama wants to convert the government’s equity interest in banks that received bailout funds into voting shares:

In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.
…
Each conversion of this type would force the administration to decide how to handle its considerable voting rights on a bank’s board. (Source: New York Times)

Regardless of whether one agrees with the outcomes at GM, the banks or in California, the pertinent issue is that Mr. Obama is meddling in the affairs of corporations and states as if he’s a monarch, in defiance of our heritage both as a free market economy and a constitutional republic. Do we really want the government to run GM and the banks? I think they had a system like that in the old Soviet Union.

Along with the nationalization of commerce, now Mr. Obama is moving to nationalize the nation’s resources as well:

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold reintroduced legislation today to restore protections for waterways throughout the country that impact the drinking water of more than 100 million Americans. (Source: Common Dreams)

Now, I’ve long admired Russ Feingold as a defender of civil liberties, but I think this law is a dangerous one, despite it being portrayed as a “benefit” to us. (Hmm, haven’t we heard that one so many times before?) It gives too much control to the federal government, not only usurping the rights of states, but allowing the federal government to dictate how each and every person uses their own water source, perhaps even including private wells. It’s just another step in the progression toward a totalitarian state, in which the state owns and controls everything, literally including the air we breathe (Mr. Obama is also attempting to classify the product of our respiration, CO₂, as a “dangerous pollutant”). Interestingly enough, such total control is also part of the broader Marxist doctrine, of which some have claimed Mr. Obama to be a disciple.

Civil Liberties

None of Mr. Bush’s repressive, anti-civil liberties measures, such as sweeping, even illegal wiretapping have been rescinded or reigned in. Neither of the two Patriot Acts has been rescinded or scaled back. In fact, already during Mr. Obama’s administration the DHS has issued three reports (discussed here and here, with a link to the third one addressing “left wing extremists” here), which together classify virtually every American as an “extremist”!

Mr. Obama is pursuing several different initiatives to restrict access to guns and ammunition, from banning certain guns, to imposing onerous rules for the purchase of ammunition, mandating psychological examinations for gun and ammunition buyers, prohibiting the U.S. military from selling its spent cartridges to the private sector, requiring manufacturers to stamp serial numbers on bullets and prohibiting private individuals from reloading their own ammunition. These proposed rules would also require people to discard or use up any old, “noncompliant” ammunition, in effect turning formerly law abiding people who held onto such ammunition, even unwittingly, into criminals, not unlike those individuals who held onto their gold after FDR issued his confiscation directive in 1933. As an aside, when I was a kid younger than ten years of age I began to help my father reload ammunition. I’d clean the cases, he’d melt the lead and cast the bullets, and then we’d load the cartridges together. Then we’d go the shooting range and shoot it. It was a lot of fun and I don’t seem to have been harmed by it. I pay considerable respect to collective wisdom, so what is the unprecedented “run on ammunition” since Mr. Obama assumed office telling us? I think the collective wisdom is that Mr. Obama, the “Constitutional scholar,” is serious, more serious than any prior president about restricting our access to guns. Of course, why he seems intent on doing that is an intriguing and potentially alarming questing in itself.

Mr. Obama is also championing a downright chilling new trend with his gradually encroaching mandatory youth brigade, not unlike that of Adolph Hitler. As a former Boy Scout, I find this article particularly disturbing:

Homeland Security and the FBI are behind the effort to indoctrinate and train the Boy Scouts to become tomorrow’s Gestapo. “Our end goal is to create more agents,” April McKee, a senior Border Patrol agent, told the Times. “Before it was more about the basics,” said Johnny Longoria, a Border Patrol agent. “But now our emphasis is on terrorism, illegal entry, drugs and human smuggling.” (Source: Prison Planet)

Scary looking Boy Scouts (Source: New York Times)

While recruiting Boy Scouts into the “security” apparatus is ominous enough, even the innocuous sounding GIVE Act lays the groundwork for a troubling future of mandatory service to the state:

Passed by the House of Representatives with a 321-105 margin, HR 1388: the Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, dubbed the “GIVE” act, would require the US government to develop a plan to implement a “mandatory service requirement for all able young people”. (Source: Republic Broadcasting Network)

Of course, no totalitarian political system would be complete without a means to silence its critics, and Mr. Obama’s got that covered too:

There’s a new bill working its way through Congress that is cause for some alarm: the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF summary here), introduced by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). The bill as it exists now risks giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most. It should be opposed or radically amended. (Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Notice how the bill would give the government “unprecedented power” while not actually “improving security,” the ostensible purpose of a bill named the “Cybersecurity Act”? What is the real objective of this bill, “security” or “power”? The rationales for shutting down the Internet in response to various vague “emergencies” are just like the rationales for imposing martial law in response to various vague “emergencies,” and this proposed new law is entirely consistent with the broader trend toward granting the government more and more power under the premise that we must have faith that it will use this power wisely and justly. Surely the eight years under the last would-be emperor disabused people of the notion that government can be trusted with unlimited power?

Should shutting down the Internet prove insufficient to quell the “civil unrest” erupting in response to imperial malfeasance, there’s always mandatory vaccination, a civil liberties issue that we came dangerously close to testing during the recent “swine flu” hysteria. The impatience of “officials” itching to break out the needles containing god-knows-what was palpable. Are you willing to take the government’s word for it that the fluid it’s about to inject into your body is good for you? Lest you think my fear of mandatory vaccinations emanating from Mr. Obama’s administration is overwrought, here’s Mr. Obama in his own words:

Last Friday evening, September 5, 2008, I had the opportunity to ask Senator Barack Obama about childhood vaccine safety/choice. His response, “I am not for selective vaccination, I believe that it will bring back deadly diseases, like polio.” (Source: Age of Autism)

And don’t forget that pharmaceutical companies, which are controlled by the same elites that installed Mr. Obama in office, have been angling for years to use the power of government to impose mandatory vaccinations on the populace. Witness profit-seeking pharmaceutical firms pushing for mandatory HPV vaccination of not only young girls, but now young boys too! How on earth did the human species manage to survive all these millennia without pharmaceutical drugs?

Not content to control our guns, our labor, the Internet and our “health,” efforts are also under way to control our food and water as well (I discussed control of water above). The infamous H.R. 875 proposes to grant the federal government extensive new controls over the production of food:

Affects anyone growing food, even if they are not selling it but consuming it. (Source: Educate-Yourself)

Just like the Patriot Acts, this “food safety” bill is lengthy, vague and was largely unread by members of the Congress that voted for it. It gives the government unspecified, but probably far reaching powers to regulate every aspect of food production, including backyard gardens. Oh, they won’t go after backyard gardens at first, but after employment of the standard government tactic of incremental overreach (mission creep), eventually even backyard gardens will be regulated under this bill. I’m sure the government will kindly make a dispensation for those who insist on growing their own food. Such people will merely have to sign an affidavit swearing under penalty of perjury not to distribute their produce to anyone else and will probably have to pay an administrative fee (tax) for a license to grow food. Who knows, the food growing tax may even be so high as to eliminate any cost saving from growing one’s own food, thus encouraging people to buy factory-produced food from corporations.

Long before backyard gardens fall under the scrutiny of the nanny state, though, farmers markets will be a thing of the past, as may small farms themselves. The only entities that will be able to sell food will be those corporate food producers that made generous campaign contributions to get this bill passed, and probably had a hand in writing it. Of course, control over food production meshes neatly with control over water supplies and everything else. (Hmm, is a pattern starting to emerge?)

The final frontier of totalitarian control is the air we breathe, and sure enough, Mr. Obama has his fingers in that pie as well. Although frequent chemtrail spraying seems to have escaped the purview of the Clean Air Act, CO₂, it appears, will not be so fortunate.

Not only is Mr. Obama preposterously proposing to declare CO₂ a “dangerous pollutant,” (even though it’s exhaled by human beings and is vital to plants), but initial estimates place the annual cost of this carbon regulation upwards of $3,000 per family. Coincidentally, consummate elitist and chief proponent of carbon regulation, Mr. Gore, has a huge financial (conflict of) interest in carbon regulation. Worse, such a declaration would give the government sweeping new powers to regulate our behavior. Like threats from “swine flu,” “food safety” and “terrorism,” the threat from “global warming” is nothing more than a farce being perpetrated by the elites of the world in order to control and tax us, a fact unrecognized by the myriad naive adherents to this new “climate change” religion.

Military Adventurism And Empire

While campaigning for the presidency, Mr. Obama sang a pleasant tune of withdrawal from Iraq:

Obama said there is no military solution in Iraq and added that the best way to pressure Iraqi leaders into political reconciliation is to begin immediately removing U.S. troops.
Obama proposed drawing down one to two U.S. combat brigades each month until all combat troops are withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2008. (Source: Voice of America)

Granted, Mr. Obama wasn’t even in office at the end of 2008, but based on the words above, one could reasonably expect that he’d begin withdrawing the troops immediately after assuming office in early 2009. Yet once safely ensconced within the White House, Mr. Obama began singing a different tune:

"Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end," Mr. Obama declared at Camp Lejeune, a sprawling military base in North Carolina that houses the largest concentration of Marines and Navy personnel in the world. (Source: The Washington Times)

Let me say this as plainly as I can: After August 31, 2010, the U.S. will continue to have troops in Iraq. Of course, they won’t be called “combat” troops and Mr. Obama will claim to have followed through on his most recent promise. Such is the utility of political language wielded by shrewd attorneys. Not only is there to be no immediate withdrawal from Iraq, presidential campaign promises and the 2006 congressional election mandate notwithstanding, but the war front is being expanded in Afghanistan and now spreading to Pakistan! How many war fronts does a country need to have before it can be described as waging a “world war”?

Afghan officials reveal that 95 children are among the civilians killed in a US-led strike that is surrounded with the controversy over use of white phosphorous. (Source: Press TV)

Not content to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 21,000 troops there, Mr. Obama’s administration also promises to increase, or at least not decrease airstrikes there:

Gates said in Washington on Thursday that an influx of more than 21,000 US troops would not reduce the demand for airstrikes across the conflict-torn country. (Source: Press TV)

As if the U.S. didn’t already have its hands full with two wars, Mr. Obama is continuing and escalating the “action” in Pakistan to that of full blown war:

The United States began staging drone attacks in Pakistan with greater frequency a year ago. There has been no let-up since President Barack Obama’s administration took office in January, despite complaints from the Pakistani government. (Source: South Africa’s News 24)

All three wars are succinctly summarized by the highly esteemed Paul Craig Roberts, who writes:

Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed America’s reputation and financial solvency and serve no public interest. But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the military/security complex. War is not being ended, merely transferred from the unpopular war in Iraq to the more popular war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Obama, in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, continues to attack “targets” in Pakistan. In place of a war in Iraq, the military/security complex now has two wars going in much more difficult circumstances. (Source: Information Clearing House)

Dennis Kucinich also sums things up with this eloquent one-minute speech (video) before Congress, in which he says plainly enough,

Democrats were elected on a promise to end the war in Iraq.

Since assuming office, there has been no move to close any of our 700+ foreign military garrisons that anchor our global empire. And although Mr. Obama intimated during his presidential campaign that he would prosecute Bush Administration officials for “war crimes” pertaining to the abuse and torture of “detainees,” he seems to have lost all interest in such pursuits:

President Obama’s decision to spare CIA torturers from prosecution stands the Nuremberg principles on their head. (Source: The Huffington Post)

Not only that, he’s jumped headlong into efforts to prevent the release of “detainee” abuse photos, even to the point of defying the orders of a judge who ordered them to be released:

President Obama’s repudiation of his promise to comply with a court order and release Pentagon torture photos marks a qualitative deepening of the cover-up of the crimes carried out under Bush as well as their continuation under the new administration in only slightly altered form. (Source: World Socialist Web Site)

And despite it becoming ridiculously apparent that most of the “detainees” are innocent and harmless, and that whatever confessions were extracted were supplied to halt the torture of the confessors, and that intelligence insiders have come forth recently to admit that torture doesn’t work, the “detainees” are not to be released, but held indefinitely:

The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil — indefinitely and without trial — as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Source: FOX News)

“Indefinitely and without trial”? Is not that the very sort of capricious punishment the authors of our Constitution sought to guarantee would never happen in this country? Obviously, the objective behind infinite incarceration is to save the government (and the former emperor) the embarrassment of having to admit that it made an egregious mistake. So Mr. Obama has decided to cover up one egregious mistake with another. Where’s my “change”?

Not only is no effort being made to close the shameful prison at Guantanamo, but efforts are being made to resume the military tribunals that had been lambasted by the courts:

Breaking a key promise from his campaign, President Barack Obama is expected to announce Friday the return of military commission trials for a small number of terrorism suspects. Obama had previously promised to abolish them. (Source: The Raw Story)

Conclusion

Everywhere one looks, Mr. Obama is breaking campaign promises and continuing or even accelerating the policies of his predecessor, which were the policies of global elite. Mr. Obama even makes use of emperor-like “signing statements,” just like his predecessor. Nowhere do we see any sort of reversal of prior policies toward a correction of past mistakes. Quite the contrary, in reviewing the above list, it’s clear that Mr. Obama really did mean “change” after all, a blitzkrieg of accelerated change down the very same path as before! What’s also clear in many of the articles cited above is that Mr. Obama is not completely in charge, something that many people have said from the beginning. Mr. Obama was installed in his position by the elites to be a smiley face concealing their global agenda of tyrannical plutocracy for them and enslavement for the rest of us.

And please don’t assume that I’m a Republican or a supporter of Mr. Bush; I’m neither. I not only criticized Mr. Bush’s policies regularly and vehemently, but considered him to be one of the worst, if not the worst president in our nation’s history, until now. I daresay the current occupant of the White House may be the worst and most dangerous president ever. And if you don’t want to accept my opinion, please read this long, but excellent (and frightening) essay, titled Stealing The World.

People may complain that I’m being premature in judging Mr. Obama. I disagree. Considering the actions he’s taken so far and his other initiatives in progress, it’s relatively easy to identify a troubling pattern already and logically deduce where things are headed, which should scare the pants off anyone who’s paying attention.

If I had the opportunity, I’d tell Mr. Obama to keep the change.

Update – 18 May 2009

One thing about Mr. Obama that has surprised me is the brevity of his “honeymoon.” Even before he was sworn into office in January of 2009, I sensed a marked decline in public enthusiasm for him, a trend that has accelerated since he took office. Finding articles that are deservedly critical of Mr. Obama is so easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, that I feel guilty by taking advantage of the facile opportunity. Nevertheless, here is a smattering of more such articles I ran across just yesterday and today! I could just as easily find ten times this many. What surprises me too is the dearth of supportive articles. I don’t look for critical articles in particular – I simply note the tone of the articles I run across.

• Like Bush, Obama White House Chooses Secrecy for Key Office

• Obama on torture photos: cover-up and complicity

• Barack Obama, Murderer and War Criminal-in-Chief

• Obama: more dangerous than Bush

• Obama Picks Up Where Bush Left Off – From My Lai to Bala Baluk

• Critics Call Obama’s Tribunals “Bush Lite”

• ACLU: Obama’s revival of tribunals strikes blow to rule of law

• On Torture and War, Obama Sounds Increasingly, and Disturbingly, Like Bush

• Change We Can’t Believe In

• Obama’s latest effort to conceal evidence of Bush era crimes

I believe it’s starting to dawn on people that they’ve been duped. The next step is for them to admit it to themselves. Unfortunately, by the time that happens it may be too late to exercise any meaningful action.

Update – 21 May 2009

This is just too easy, yet, like a sore tooth I cannot help but wiggle, I can’t stop accumulating these links about Mr. “Change” Obama.

• Obama Is Said to Consider Preventive Detention Plan

• Obama signing statement weakens “whistle-blower” protections

• Valerie Plame: Obama is on Bush’s side

• The One Case of Torture Obama Doesn’t Want You to Learn About

• Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama

• Obama Steers Toward Endless War With Islam

Is it just me, or does Mr. Obama sound exactly like Mr. Bush, only more cunning? To be fair, Mr. Obama is apparently going to “order” car makers to increase fuel economy standards. (I thought Congress was supposed to pass such legislation, but I guess Congress has completely abdicated any role in our government other than collecting a paycheck and perks.) Of course, the car makers will have plenty of time and wiggle room within which to comply with the emperor’s edict, and I suspect the fuel economy edict will ultimately have no more teeth to it than the “deal” the emperor made to save $2 trillion on health care costs. That one was a real side splitter. Want to know how the emperor saved $2 trillion? By getting the health insurance companies to agree to slow their rate of cost increases over the next ten years. In other words, they will reduce their profit margins from the obscene to the merely outrageous, but oh, so gradually as to be almost imperceptible.

I guess I’m done now. It’s no longer entertaining to point out the obvious: there is no “change” here, unless “change” refers to the acceleration of past trends. I would like to conclude by saying that it would be nice if all of Mr. Obama’s naive supporters would wake up before it’s too late, but unfortunately, it’s already too late and now we’re all going to have to sleep in the bed we’ve made. Cross your fingers and watch your backs (and your mouths too unless you want to become a guest in one of Mr. Obama’s “preventive detention” facilities).

Update – 24 May 2009

Well, I said I wouldn’t add any more links, but this one is just too good to pass up. What surprises me is just how much the author’s views and my own overlap.

• America’s Nightmare: The Obama Dystopia

It’s becoming increasingly apparent to people why Mr. Obama is moving so swiftly with his agenda of “change”: to get it underway on an irreversible course before people realize what has happened.

Update – 03 June 2009

I can’t help myself, but it’s not my fault. Mr. Obama just won’t cease following in the footsteps of his predecessor, indeed, he’s making every effort to surpass his predecessor. Now that the courts have ordered the government to release the “detainee abuse photographs,” Mr Obama’s compliant Congress is set to pass a law that would retroactively thwart the Freedom Of Information Act under which the court ordered the release of the photographs. Congress is proposing to pass a law (H.R. 2346), which contains a section titled the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009. Yep, they’re passing a law specifically to counter the court’s order to release the photographs. Had Mr. Bush attempted such a stunt, as I’m sure he would have liked, there would have been howls of outrage, yet when Mr. Obama does it nobody says a thing. Perhaps the “change” Mr. Obama was referring to was the ability to get laws passed that his predecessor could only fantasize about.

Update – 06 June 2009

Mr Obama’s pace of “change” is breathtaking. After striking the word “mandatory” from his pre-election written agenda, the GIVE Act (described above) and now this new bill (H.R. 1444) bring the “mandatory” back into the lexicon. The relevant section of H.R. 1444 reads:

SEC 4 (b) (6) Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.

People may scoff and assert that mandatory service to the state builds character and other such drivel. However, according to the highest law of the land, the Constitution, mandatory service is illegal and may not be overruled by a mere act of Congress, but only by means of a Constitutional amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment reads:

Neither Slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Quick, someone call Mr. Clinton about a semantic question, if “mandatory service” is different from “involuntary servitude.” Consider, too, the irony of a black man promoting involuntary servitude, contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment, which was passed immediately after the U.S. Civil War in order to bring an end to the enslavement of blacks.

Although we’re seeing ample “change” in ominous new directions, the repressive measures of Mr. Obama’s predecessor remain firmly intact, as succinctly explained by the headline, Obama Administration Targets Environmental and Animal Rights Activists As Eco-Terrorists, the body of which closes with these promising words:

Clearly it’s the wrong time to be Muslim in America as well as an environmental or animal rights activist. It was true under George Bush and no different under Barack Obama.

While Mr. Obama is certainly delivering some unwelcome “change,” the people who supported him erroneously assumed “change” meant for the better.

May 13, 2009 – Now that’s a video I’d like to see!

By Dave Eriqat

It’s official, governments around the world have gone insane, at least, those of the “west.”

By now many people are aware that governments around the world are committing every conceivable economic mistake in response to the economic collapse pandemic sweeping the globe. Of course, those efforts were never really intended to “fix” anything anyway, but to delay the day of reckoning while bailing out well connected insiders who have paid generous fees to politicians in exchange for preferential attention to their needs. Nevertheless, the governments’ actions still border on the insane because without a vibrant economy and a financially healthy populace, how does government expect to survive? Through military conquest and domestic enslavement alone?

And forget for a moment about those recent reports from Missouri and the DHS that collectively classified every man, woman and child in America as an “extremist.”

Bloated, authoritarian governments around the world are threatened with survival as their Ponzi scheme models begin to unravel. These governments are lashing out wildly like wounded animals, grasping desperately at anything that floats.

Here in California, the governator has appeared in commercials issuing what amount to extortion-type threats to the populace that he will fire teachers, firefighters and police officers if the populace does not approve his tax increases (five or six ballot propositions in all) in the special election being held May 19^th. Never considered by any government is the notion of using the “opportunity” afforded by today’s shrinking fiscal resources to reduce the scope and intrusiveness of government.

In perusing the news today, a routine I look forward to every day during my breakfast, I was startled by a few headlines that really stood out, emblematic of the insanity pervading government today. This first one comes from Britain, which long ago dove into the deep end of the totalitarian swimming pool, mistaking Orwell’s 1984 for a how-to manual. Now poor Britain is having to really stretch to come up with imaginative new bells and whistles to add to its police state, such as:

In the latest example of innovative policing in Britain, the Gloucestershire force is encouraging members of the public to report people wearing too much ‘bling’ during the recession.

I love that phrase, “innovative policing.” I think that’s what they have in Mexico too, where a cop pulls you over and you appease him with a twenty, although I would be more inclined to call Mexico’s version “entrepreneurial policing,” but I digress. The U.S., struggling to catch up with Britain in the Global War on Sanity (GWOS), may have just one-upped Britain with this one from the lofty FDA itself:

Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.

While the entire letter from the FDA sounds like a piece of satire one might find in The Onion, it is not a joke. The out-of-control U.S. Government, whose “regulatory” organization, the FDA, routinely and knowingly permits deadly pharmaceutical drugs and substances such as aspartame onto the market, is going after Cheerios cereal as a drug! If you have any Cheerios in your cupboards, I suggest you keep quiet about it lest the drug warriors come bust down your door, a festive activity they are wont to engage in. I have my fingers crossed in the hope that the government will offer rehab instead of incarceration for Cheerios abusers like myself. In the meantime I look forward to the sequel to the government’s cinematic masterpiece, “Reefer Madness.” I wonder if they will blithely call it “Reefer Madness II.” No, too banal. “Oatmeal Madness”? I’ve got it! How about “Nanny State Madness”?

But the best article of all today was this one:

U.S. Will Pay $2.6 Million to Train Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly on the Job

I daresay, the headline hardly needs any embellishment, but I’ll add some anyway because I like to blab. I just wonder how this program managed to escape Mr. O’s vicious budgetary scalpel which he deftly employed to slash a staggering $17 billion from the federal budget recently. Didn’t hear about that? It was all over the news recently. Mr. O’s financial wizardry notwithstanding, nearly half of the federal budget will still have to be borrowed, some $1.8 trillion, according to current estimates. Borrowed from whom, you ask? Why, from the Chinese, of course. So let me see if I’ve got this straight: We borrow money from China and then spend it in China to teach prostitutes – members of the oldest profession, mind you – how to do their job. No wonder the Chinese aren’t angry about their money being spent so frivolously; the entertainment value is well worth the $2.6 million.

I’m not laughing at the government, but with the government.

Update – 13 May 2009

Here’s an interesting essay, titled Death of a Civilization, that approaches the subject of civilizational insanity from a different angle, including a fascinating tale of mass hysteria, a condition I fear is manifest in our populace today.

Update – 26 May 2009

One week ago, on May 19^th, California voters soundly rejected (by a 2-to-1 margin) five propositions that would have increased taxes and approved a sixth proposition which supposedly prohibits pay raises for government workers during recessions. Not having read the proposition, I suspect that all it does is defer those pay increases until such time as the “recession” is declared over, at which point all that deferred back pay is made up.

Now that voters have done the predictable by rejecting a tax increase during a recession, I guess we’ll see if the governator follows through with his pre-election threat to fire government employees who actually provide service directly to the people. Personally, I’d rather see the governator fire superfluous bodies buried within the layers and layers of bloated government bureaucracy, and maybe put some real-world constraints on lavish retirement benefits too.

May 7, 2009 – A continuation of the short story begun in Chapter 1 – The Facade.

By Dave Eriqat

I woke up in a fog, not unlike that experienced many a time after a night of overindulgent drinking in my youth! In my half conscious state I looked around, trying to focus my blurry gaze on the unfamiliar confines. Seeking to improve my focus, I attempted to rub my bleary eyes, but my arms, feeling as heavy as lead, would not comply. Strangely nonchalant about the refusal of my arms to do my bidding, I craned my neck to observe my surroundings, accepting as a given that craning my neck was the best I could achieve, that the rest of my body would remain firmly affixed at its present location and attitude.

The dimly lit, soothing bedroom was spare and sterile, the few items in it composed of shiny, hard, blandly colored, synthetic materials. The most peculiar thing was the eerie, blue, glowing wall beside the bed. I couldn’t see through the wall, but it appeared to be some kind of opaque glass. As my body slowly came back to life and the fog enveloping my mind dissipated, I began to realize that my arms weren’t merely heavy, but were, in fact, secured to the bed by means of straps. That alarming realization immediately jarred my mind to full consciousness and I instinctively struggled against the straps, which is when I realized that my legs, too, were strapped down. Raising my head off the pillow and looking down the length of my body lying prone on the bed, I observed my bare chest where the sheets had slipped off of me. Squirming around some more against the unrelenting straps, I further realized that I was probably completely nude beneath the sheets.

I vaguely recalled being led into the room the night before and laying down fully dressed, so sometime between then and now I had been undressed. Was it even the night before? For all I knew it could have been a week before, as I had no idea what time it was nor even what day it was. I recalled coming to this place, whatever it was, on March 12, a date that was inexplicably fused into my memory. So what date was today?

Craning my neck again, I vigorously scanned my room as thoroughly as possible, but could see no sign of my clothes, nor even a cabinet or closet in which they might be found. Not that it mattered anyway, since my current position was rather secure. The funny thing was that after deducing that I was nude under the sheets, my main concern was not causing the loose sheets to slip fully off my body!

“Hello?”, I inquired loudly, projecting my voice at the ceiling above me. I guess my desperate outburst was a natural reaction when there is nothing else to do, but immediately after making the inquiry I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the answers to the questions accumulating and bouncing around inside my head. All I really wanted was to get my clothes back and get the hell out of here, but I knew that was unlikely to happen. Nobody would go this amount of trouble to get me here, drug me – I assume I was drugged – and strap me to the bed, only to release me.

Thankfully, nobody responded to my inquiry, so I laid my head back down on the pillow, closed my eyes and tried to relax. Little by little I began to remember details of my past life and the events leading up to my being here.

I remembered that I was a member of an informal social network of “revolutionaries.” Most of us were not actually intent on revolting against, or overthrowing the government or anything like that. In fact, we were largely pacifists, morally opposed to violence. We were regarded as revolutionaries simply for wanting to retain our individual freedom, contrary to the wishes of a government that sought to turn us all into slaves to serve the corporate machine. Of course, that was in the beginning. After a while the line between the “corporate” and “government” sectors became so blurry as to be indiscernible, the very definition of fascism. As the economy relentlessly deteriorated – an unsurprising outcome when the people have little incentive to be industrious or innovative – the government and its corporate partners had to become ever more tyrannical in order to survive. The government’s money became so devalued that it was no longer accepted internationally, so the government had to resort to military conquest to supply the vital resources it needed to exist. Manpower – yes, despite all the robots being utilized, good old human manual labor was still required – was supplied by a vast network of “hard” and “soft” slave labor prisons.

It was starting to come back to me now. The place I reported to on March 12 was one of those very “soft” slave labor facilities, concealed in plain sight, right in the heart of a professional-industrial enclave. Thousands of docile and obedient citizens passed by the prison every day on foot and in cars without even being aware that human slaves, their former neighbors, family members and friends who had “disappeared,” were toiling away within these soulless, innocuous-looking office buildings.

In the early days of our totalitarian nightmare, whenever the government would pass a new law prohibiting some formerly innocuous behavior, we future “revolutionaries” would joke that the government needed more bodies for its slave labor gulag system, what we clinically and nonchalantly referred to then as the “prison-industrial complex.” After the formation of the dreaded Council of Luminaries to provide “expert” advice to the administration, the slave labor model was kicked into high gear and it was no longer a laughing matter. The Luminaries, many of them former military officers, some from hard-line, foreign countries, supervised the efficient and expedient final transformation of our country into a totalitarian state, one of the cornerstones of which was slave labor.

In the initial quest to satisfy the insatiable demand for slave labor, people were being arrested and “disappeared” for the most trivial of reasons, especially for “subversive” and “emotionally harmful” opinions expressed on the old internet, which is why we created The People’s Net (TPN). The government responded to the formation of TPN by launching the War on Subverse specifically to target TPN, which instantly branded me a “revolutionary” since I was one of the initial participants in TPN.

Thinking back on it, though, I think I was always a revolutionary at heart. Even as a child I imagined myself someday being involved in a then unidentified future struggle against oppression and tyranny. That expectation grew increasingly ingrained in me as I grew older, fueled by a lifelong observation of mounting injustice perpetrated by the government against the people.

Is that how one becomes a true revolutionary? I was not one of those unfortunates who lost their homes during the engineered economic calamity a few years earlier, abruptly finding themselves living in abject misery and poverty in one of the many tent cities that sprang up on the outskirts of so many formerly “wealthy” cities. The cruel paradox of all those homeless people was the vast number of empty, surplus homes that remained unoccupied, slowly yielding to the ravages of nature and man. As if to underscore the government’s innate disdain for the people, instead of matching homeless people with vacant homes, the government simply bulldozed the vacant homes to quell criticism of its ineptitude and demands to give the vacant homes to homeless people. The supreme insult was that the destruction of the homes was performed by slave laborers, some of whom were homeless themselves for a time before they became prisoners. The closest these homeless people came to having a home of their own again was driving a bulldozer through one. But at least this policy had one “beneficial” consequence: it helped prop up home prices, to the eternal relief of the financial system, or what remained of it.

Unlike myself, all those “tent people” truly had nothing left to lose and some of them did, indeed, join the active, vociferous revolution, propelled by anger and a hunger for retribution. It didn’t improve the government’s image any that the “little people” began to recognize that the government’s rules applied only to the “little people,” that our “masters” were no longer constrained by any rules, not of morality, legality, justice or anything else. As a boy, all my peers and I watched television shows lauding honor, truth, justice, courage and fairness. Even though those values disappeared from our “leadership” long ago, they still held fast within our hearts, and people of my generation and older increasingly recoiled at the repugnant, amoral, immoral behavior of our leadership, which only fueled their anger. Those people, though, lashing out emotionally, were quite inept as revolutionaries and were easily dealt with and “disappeared” by the government. Most “tent people” were just too bewildered, impotent, frightened and worn out to fight. They were more than content to possess their precious few square feet of dirt, a flimsy bit of nylon fabric for shelter from the sun and the rain and the wind, and regular, predictable handouts of food to keep their omnipresent hunger from becoming unbearable.

By contrast, as an accomplished, even talented software engineer whose skills were much in demand among numerous corporate clients, I enjoyed a fairly steady income during the entire series of transformative calamities: economic collapse, food shortages, energy shortages, water shortages, disease pandemics and numerous tepid foreign invasions to take possession of property that had been used as collateral for loans. Being highly mobile, I was able to steer clear of periodic episodes of life-threatening turmoil, all the while maintaining some semblance of a steady income.

Yet, with each new crisis, the government became ever more tyrannical, intolerant and irrational, not unlike a frightened wild beast fighting back to save its life. After first attempting to lock up massive numbers of “civily unresty” people so they couldn’t cause any more trouble, it quickly became apparent that such mass incarceration was not affordable, even despite the efficient machinery to exploit the labor of the “detainees.” The fact was that there were just too many people being locked up – too many mouths to feed – and it wasn’t long before rumors of mass executions began to seep out of the gulag system. The fact that people often “disappeared,” never to be seen again by their families and friends, only reinforced the spine-chilling rumors.

I had long been repulsed by the growing injustices of the “system,” but assuaged my concerns by reminding myself that there was nothing I could do about it. Still, it made me uneasy knowing that I was working for some of the very corporations that were party to the gulag system, whether their participation involved building the prisons, exploiting the laborers, or both. I even harbored, but suppressed a sneaking suspicion that some of my modeling and database software was actually being used within the gulag system itself, meaning I was indirectly party to it as well. As my anxiety grew over my own culpability in the unjust system, I started to entertain thoughts I never did before. For instance, I tried to identify some thresholds, lines in the sand, so to speak, which I would not cross. Should the time come when I’d be forced to choose between crossing one of these figurative thresholds or doing the right thing, I resolved to choose the latter. But the funny thing was that try as I might, I could not identify any such thresholds. They were too vague, subjective, intangible, and we get used to incremental encroachments on our humanity and morality so we fail to notice how far down a dark path we’ve gone. One must step back a ways to see the extent of what has changed, what has been lost.

One day I literally woke up and realized that my world had crossed all of my inarticulable thresholds. In one fell swoop I realized I could no longer be a party to the system in which I was enmeshed. Perhaps that’s when I, David James Fulton, unwittingly became a revolutionary. Suddenly, nothing I once valued – my house, my job, my lifestyle – mattered any longer. Nevertheless, I permitted momentum to carry me along, as doing so was not only the easiest, most familiar thing to do, but I felt it would avoid activating any alarm bells about my altered behavior, something one had to be careful about even in those early days.

Little by little I began to notice things I had never really paid attention to before, but simply accepted as “normal”: the heavily armed and armored police all around me; the cameras monitoring everything; the myriad paper forms one had to fill out with intimately personal information; the unbelievably complex regulations governing simple things like operating a car or remodeling one’s house; knowing that every form of communication was being monitored and likely stored for future retrieval and use as evidence against one, even if used out of context; the RFID tags that had infiltrated every single item we purchased, and concomitantly, the seemingly infinite number of RFID scanners discretely situated everywhere, such as at every doorway. The total surveillance society had become so “normal” and ubiquitous that even the oldest of us forgot that there was once a time when our world wasn’t like that, when one could engage in innocuous behavior without fear of it being misconstrued or misrepresented as “criminal” behavior.

What was it that compelled us to relinquish our liberty so easily? In retrospect, I suppose it was nothing more than the combination of fear and ignorance. A series of government-sponsored “terrorist” incidents, combined with a general dumbing down of the populace rendered it fearful and unable to think for itself. The populace, also weary from overwork, really had little alternative but to accept the government’s insistence that we trade a little of our liberty for a little of its security. The only problem was that it didn’t take long until the populace had no more liberty to trade.

I remember my first “revolutionary act.” I was sitting in a little coffee house I frequented, savoring my cappuccino while pondering the surveillance camera sweeping to and fro over the premises, when my old friend, Alan Wilkerson, walked in and sat down right at my table. I hadn’t seen Alan in months, but when he sat down at my table he seemed both agitated yet strangely alive with passion.

“Alan! What a pleasant surprise,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Dave, I’m glad I saw you in here.”

“What’s up?”

“Could we get together later?” Then, motioning with his head at the surveillance camera, Alan continued, “Somewhere a bit more private?”

“Sure.”

Draping his lanky frame across the small table and leaning toward me so his face was close to mine, Alan said in a near whisper, “You know the tunnel at the stadium in the park?”

“Yeah.”

“There, tonight, say, 10 PM?”

“How mysterious,” I whispered back, smiling, but Alan didn’t smile in return.

“This is serious, Dave. Please don’t tell anyone about our meeting.”

Intrigued the whole rest of the day, I looked forward to our ten o’clock meeting that night, exceedingly curious about Alan’s mysterious demeanor. When I finally did meet Alan in that dark tunnel that night, I couldn’t help but be astonished by what he had to tell me. He was a key member in what could best be described as a revolutionary organization, whose aim was nothing less than the destruction of the oppressive government. It was like something out of a movie, only it was for real. At no time during our meeting, which lasted until midnight in that dark, cold, urine-fouled tunnel, was Alan’s story betrayed by any touch of humor. He was deadly serious the whole time, except when we parted and he left me with a wry justification for his revolutionary plans, saying of the government, “We’ve got no choice anymore. The way things are, we pretend to vote and they pretend to listen. Meanwhile, things only get worse for us.”

I furtively crept back home, deeply troubled by my meeting with Alan, my nerves on edge, my ears detecting every minute sound, my eyes seeing shadows lurking in every doorway and behind every object. In the past, some of my friends and I had acknowledged that only a revolution to overthrow the government could halt its growing tyranny, but none of us really believed it. None of us really believed there were enough people truly willing to go up against the government to mount an honest to goodness revolution, but I guess Alan did.

The rest of us were content to complain about the government’s growing oppression on our blogs, read our favorite “alternative media” outlets and hope that things would miraculously improve if only we could shine some light on what was happening. At least, that’s how we behaved until it was revealed that so many “alternative” web sites warning of the fascist agenda were, in fact, owned by the very proponents of that agenda, who used these disguised web sites as a means to inure people to the coming changes. In other words, these web sites were actually covert information disseminating organs of the very fascist government we were warning about!

When the first list of “alternative” media sites was published exposing the owners of those sites to be none other than the government itself or its corporate partners, it sent a shock wave through the blogosphere and alternative media world. Suddenly all the blogs and genuine alternative media sites sought to distance themselves from the sites exposed to be frauds. Eventually a web site was set up to reveal the ownership pedigree of all media web sites and blogs, which was declared an “invasion of privacy” and an “act of subversion” by the government. That’s when the government began to pass the first of what would become many laws with real teeth against “subversive” speech, when that speech started to expose a little too much truth. That’s when we programmers started to put together TPN to ensure that we could still communicate in relative safety.

A click at the door of my bedroom brought me back to the present, and I craned my head to watch the door open, I immediately recognized Dr. Octavian, who I met when I first arrived at the facility.

“Oh, oh, I see you recognize me. Not good,” Dr. Octavian noted, shaking his head and scribbling something in his electronic notebook as he walked toward me. “What is your name?”

Not thinking, I blurted out, “Dave Fulton.”

“Uh, huh. I see,” the doctor continued, shaking his head again. “Nurse? Could you bring your kit in here?”

A nurse carrying a small tray containing vials of liquid and some syringes walked into my bedroom and stopped at the doctor’s side. Slipping his electronic notebook in his lab coat pocket, the doctor picked up an empty syringe from the tray and filled it from a vial of clear liquid.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fulton, but you’re not supposed to have any recollection of any time before now. I’m going to have to give you some more of this,” he said, holding up the syringe he just filled. “Nurse, if you please?,” the doctor asked, motioning toward the other side of my bed.

The nurse set her tray down on a small table next to my bed, walked over to the other side of my bed, slid down the sheets and rolled me slightly toward her to present my buttocks to the doctor, who promptly injected me with the syringe. The nurse pulled the sheets back up to my neck, retrieved her tray of goodies and headed for the door, and by the time she and the doctor exited my room I was already fading into oblivion again.

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<<< Chapter 1 – The Facade

May 3, 2009 – Or, what it’s like to live in a Potemkin economy.

By Dave Eriqat

My nose is wrinkling a lot these days, as if continually assaulted by the stench of rotting fish. The rising tension in places such as Pakistan, plus the flu “pandemic” strike me as so many distractions from the bigger crisis rushing toward us, that of economic collapse, caused by the very elites running the world today.

Everywhere one looks they can see evidence of a Potemkin economy, between the inexplicably buoyant stock markets; the lackadaisical shrug by precious metals in response to the economic crises besieging us; the “shadow inventory” of as many as 600,000 foreclosed houses kept off the market in order to prop up prices (to give the size of that “shadow inventory” some perspective, the NAHB forecasts 510,000 housing starts in 2009); the recent banking sector “stress test,” which by all accounts was a public relations sham; the government buying its own debt to create the illusion of a healthy market for it; and the exceedingly low interest rates in response to unprecedented borrowing and spending. It all just looks so contrived.

As their personal fortunes decline, people around the world are beginning to wise up and see more clearly the truth of what is being done to them: the unprecedented theft of public and retirement funds by private bankers; the unrelenting push for global governance, a euphemism for global enslavement; the deliberate destruction of our food supply and the poisoning of our air and water.

This awakening among the masses probably explains why tensions in Pakistan and the Middle East are being stoked and why the swine/avian/beta-engineered flu, or whatever it is, has been hyped beyond all sanity, to frighten the momentarily audacious citizenry back into a submissive mindset.

Meanwhile, the ministry of truth, formerly known as the mainstream media, tells us the economy may have bottomed out. I believe nothing could be further from the truth and that behind the facade of contrived wellness, things are deteriorating as we speak, the myriad clues pointing to a climax sometime this fall.

I picture the powers-that-be struggling heroically to juggle the economy thus, while simultaneously trying to eek out profits for themselves and their cronies. I believe they can only continue this routine for so long before they drop one of the balls they are juggling, followed by the rest of them.

I think they know they cannot continue this charade indefinitely. I think they are simply trying to profit as long as possible, and then when they can no longer profit, they’ll switch to Plan B, which involves a new crisis (a flu pandemic this fall, for instance, once they perfect the virus and legislative policies after the current beta test), a new war (in Pakistan, for instance), or even martial law to control the unruly masses demanding retribution and force feed them deadly vaccines, for their own good, of course.

The saddest thing of all is that the scare tactics and fear mongering work. The people submissively crawl back into their comfort shells and wait to be “saved” by the very powers responsible for our problems, content in the meantime to be entertained by the boob tube and fed by the factory food assembly line. How can they not see?

May 2, 2009 – The government has published a comprehensive dictionary of potential “extremists.” And guess what? We’re all in it.

By Dave Eriqat

It turns out that the report cited in Life in Wonderland was published about a week after another report titled Domestic Extremism Lexicon, likewise published by the Department of Homeland Security. The earlier report is a dictionary of sorts containing 52 “definitions” of extremists, evidently also serving as a warmup for the latter report, yet the earlier report includes some equally inflammatory insights, such as:

aboveground – A term used to describe extremist groups or individuals who operate overtly and portray themselves as law-abiding.

In other words, anyone who operates “overtly” and abides by the law is inherently suspicious.

alternative media – A term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets.

In other words, any media forum that offers “interpretations” that differ from those of the official propaganda organs is considered “alternative,” and presumably “extremist.” After all, this report is titled the Domestic Extremism Lexicon.

anarchist extremism – A movement of groups or individuals who advocate a society devoid of government structure or ownership of individual property. Many embrace some of the radical philosophical components of anticapitalist, antiglobalization, communist, socialist, and other movements. Anarchist extremists advocate changing government and society through revolutionary violence.

So if one opposes the expansion of government into every nook and cranny of our lives, or opposes the clearly economically destructive globalization agenda, they are now considered an extremist. In other words, if one is anti-fascist, one is an extremist.

animal rights extremism – A movement of groups or individuals who ascribe equal value to all living organisms and seek to end the perceived abuse and suffering of animals. They believe animals are sentient creatures that experience emotional, physical, and mental awareness and deserve many of the same rights as human beings; for example, the right to life and freedom to engage in normal, instinctive animal behavior.

Horror of horrors, people who are compassionate toward animals are extremists! What does that make Buddhists?

anti-immigration extremism – A movement of groups or individuals who are vehemently opposed to illegal immigration, particularly along the U.S. southwest border with Mexico, and who have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism to advance their extremist goals. They are highly critical of the U.S. Government’s response to illegal immigration and oppose government programs that are designed to extend “rights” to illegal aliens, such as issuing driver’s licenses or national identification cards and providing in-state tuition, medical benefits, or public education.

Oh my god! If we oppose extending social benefits to “illegal aliens” we are extremists? I had no idea. Next we’ll be considered extremists for wanting to put criminals in jail. Such a stance makes perfect sense, actually, when one examines the characters of those running the country today.

green anarchism – A movement of groups or individuals who combine anarchist ideology with an environmental focus. They advocate a return to a pre-industrial, agrarian society, often through acts of violence and terrorism.

Violent, “green,” anarchists? I have yet to run across anyone who advocates violence as a means to return to a sustainable model of existence. Nevertheless, advocating sustainable lifestyles is apparently now extremist.

Jewish extremism – A movement of groups or individuals of the Jewish faith who are willing to use violence or commit other criminal acts to protect themselves against perceived affronts to their religious or ethnic identity.

I’m surprised this one slipped past AIPAC’s censors. This sounds like a subset of a broader form of extremism known as Zionism.

patriot movement – A term used by rightwing extremists to link their beliefs to those commonly associated with the American Revolution. The patriot movement primarily comprises violent antigovernment groups such as militias and sovereign citizens.

Oh, how could anyone support the “extremist” ideals of that awful American Revolution! What’s next, people who support the ideals of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to be regarded as extremists?

rightwing extremism – A movement of rightwing groups or individuals who can be broadly divided into those who are primarily hate-oriented, and those who are mainly antigovernment and reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority. This term also may refer to rightwing extremist movements that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Reject federal authority in favor of state authority? You mean, as in the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Conclusion

What is startlingly clear about this report, its successor and the Missouri MIAC report is that people who support the Constitution, limited government and individual freedom are considered extremists today. That should really come as no surprise because for a long time government has seen itself as distinct from the people. Hence, any effort by the people to resist the encroachment of government into their lives must necessarily be viewed as threatening by the government.

What is also increasingly clear is that we live in a fascist state, in which the interests of the government and big business are inextricably intertwined. Each new government report of this nature makes it ever clearer that resisting the goals of big business is as much an affront to the new world order as resisting the goals of government itself.

Finally, this “lexicon” gives “authorities” the tools with which to declare anyone an extremist. It mentions “left wing” extremists, as well as “right wing” extremists; “aboveground” extremists and “underground” extremists (what other “ground” is there?); “lone terrorists” and organized groups; “primary targeting,” “secondary targeting” and “tertiary targeting.”

Remember that movie, Six Degrees of Separation? By declaring people who attempt to “influence” “tertiary” targets to be extremists, virtually anybody can be declared an extremist. Do you complain about the high price of food to the checkout clerk? Then you are attempting to influence a tertiary target and therefore you must be an extremist opposed to the globalist agenda of the grocery store corporation.

The frightening thing about these reports is that they are disseminated to underlings who may not possess the wisdom or experience to use good judgment in applying this information. As one observer put it, these reports serve to “radicalize” the police against the citizenry. One need only note the epidemic of tasering citizens for the most trivial and absurd reasons to see this “radicalization” in practice.