The War On Fun

For the last seven years, we have lucubrated beyond the bounds of propriety around here.  It's gained us a loyal little following of very smart people, and we really appreciate all the folks who stop by regularly to listen to us enumerate our inner-most hopes and desires.  Thanks y'all!

Just thought I'd get that off my chest, because I was starting to asphyxiate from the weight of it.

So what's going on around the ranch, or tempat pertanian yang luas berikut gedung-gedungnya as they say around these parts ('ranch' is one of those words that doesn't translate into Indonesian).

As you regulars already know, we've started up Indonesia's first cabaret.  Like the word "ranch," it's a bit hard to translate a 500-year-old Western tradition into Indonesia.  Things like satire, double-entendre and dry wit just don't exist in this culture.  It is hard to translate something that is untranslatable, and humor is one of the hardest.  Doesn't stop me from taking up the challenge, though.  There is certainly enough interest in it, and being the only one of anything is usually a good thing.

The kicker is trying to raise investment.  How do you describe something that doesn't exist?  Basically, to fully appreciate what I want to do, I have to actually produce the show, and at that point, I don't need the investment.  It's one of those glorious Catch-22s in life.

There is a method to my madness, though.  Or so I like to think.

Since economic tracking became wide-spread, it has become axiomatic that entertainment and education are the two best industries to survive an economic downturn.  The problem is, you can't be like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and say, "Hey kids!  I've got a barn, let's do a show!"

Entertainment is a fickle business.  To me, Monty Python is hysterical, but to a lot of people I know, it just mystifies them.  To me, Citizen Kane is a brilliant character study that broke every single rule of camera movement in place up to that time, but to many people, it's a boring old black-and-white movie with no special effects.

So how do you make fun of politics in a country where, for 30 years, such a thing got you a personal firing squad?  How do you play with sexual mores in a highly conservative culture where children still marry off in birth order and kids live at home until they get married?  How do you make literary allusions in a culture with precious little literature?

You can begin to appreciate the rather fine line I am attempting to tread.

But the biggest challenge is not culture, or language or any other controllable factor.  No, it's government.

I'm not the brightest monkey in the tree, but if I know enough to understand the relationship of entertainment to economics, then you can bet someone in government does too.

Sure enough, the Province of Jakarta went and raised a 30.5% tax on all entertainment, except oddly, golf.  As one might expect, government in desperate attempts to support useless bureaucracies  will, like all parasites, kill the host by sucking it dry.  Obviously, this kind of egregious tax has a massive chilling effect on people's desires to operate venues, bring or produce shows, and especially attend shows that are expensive enough just to cover costs.

Thinking that it will cash in on the survivability of entertainment in slow economies, the geniuses in government will do everything possible to kill operators and audiences, thus having the exact opposite effect of what was desired.

In the end, what we have is social engineering, whether intended or not.  Just when people need a couple of hours of escape from their misery, the government steps in to make sure that even that tiny relief is equally miserable.

More importantly, though, what we see here is a kind of proof that bad times are coming.  Governments, who steal our money to perform studies to figure out how to survive at our expense, are obviously seeing the writing on the wall.  And the evidence comes from a place where most people wouldn't look...entertainment.  I'm willing to bet there are similar moves around the world to suck on entertainment revenues, but I am also willing to bet that the horrific box office numbers from this past blockbuster season are a symptom, as well.

My bet is that we will start to see the rise of a massive underground entertainment market.  People will seek entertainment, and suppliers will find a way to circumvent the burdensome taxes and regulations trying to cash in on it.  Look for things like underground cinemas and cabarets presenting home-grown fare at very reasonable prices.  And since the places where these things will arise are not registered venues with broad market awareness, the place to start looking is in underground publications.

It is one of Nature's Laws that when government tries to squeeze the population a little tighter, more of them will slip through the fingers.

One thing is absolutely certain - art is like life, it finds a way.  No matter how hard tyrants and dictators have tried to control and suppress art and entertainment throughout the millennia, it has always found expression some how.  If there is a defining feature of human beings, it is that they create art for the enjoyment of others and the elevation of the spirit.

At a time when people will demand entertainment as an escape, governments will try harder to both control and profit from it, which will in turn cause art to (once again) go underground.  The one big hope is that when this has happened in the past, it led to great periods of creativity and explosions of expression.

That's one thing Hollywood has never figured out - it's not the budgets, but the limits that make creativity happen.

Turn Off, Tune Out, Take It Back

Hmmm...so now Bammy wants to cut the military in half?  What gives?

Oh sure, we can write this off as election year posturing, and no doubt that's part of it.  After three years of slaughter, he wants to come across as the Man O' Piece.  He can read the polls.  He can see that Ron Paul, despite everything the blowhards are telling the world, is screaming up the ladder because he wants to put an end to all the military adventures in 170 countries around the planet.  But there's more to it.  A lot more.

See, the bastards in the Medieval World Order never do anything without 20 different angles from which they can profit.

In this case, one thing they have are their precious drones.  They can now project force anywhere on the planet without the risk of using soldiers who can think, read their oath of office and get tired of BS.  Now a handful of die-hard, brainwashed, mental midgets can play video games in a cave in Colorado and kill thousands by remote control.

It protects Their investment in the mental midgets' training, and they can blow up as many drones as they want and just build more on the taxpayers' backs.  What a great plan!  They can even paint them different colors and blame it on other countries, since there's no pilot inside to give it away.  Hell, they can even blow up a wedding party and blame it on equipment malfunction.

Gosh, why didn't WE think of that?!

Wait!  There's more!

The gummint's new enemy du jour is now the American people, right?  All the laws are in place to turn the War on Terror into a domestic game.  So who needs the military any more?

Heck, there's what...tens of thousands of militarized police in America?  And with a couple hundred thousand soldiers out of work, they can find gainful employment gunning down grade schoolers in the hallways of America's fine educational institutions!

Ultimately, that's the Goal of Goals.  Going back to those polls, They can see that Americans are getting restless.  They aren't drinking enough fluoride and swallowing enough Xanax.  They're starting to wake up and smell the Arabica bean juice lovingly picked by Juan Valdez in Columbia.  It could be the Bolivian marching powder, too.  But regardless, folks are starting to ask too many questions and they aren't happy with the pat answers.

Time to up the ranks of the home-grown military.  Yup, so many folks though it would be the Ruskies or the Cubans or the Chinese.  They never expected that their own fighting boys and girls would be turned on them. Makes you proud to wave your little Made-In-China plastic flag, doesn't it?

And the beauty of the whole plan is that the good American people won't stand together to protect each other.  They've been so Balkanized into hating this group or distrusting that group, and even when they can organize, it doesn't take long for folks to start calling each other "feds" and "agents provocateur".

It'll all start with rounding up gangs or drug runners.  Everyone will cheer, because they are happy to see their perceived enemies treated rough.  But then it will be Muslims.  OK, still no problem.  Then it will be 'preppers' and 'conspiracy theorists'.  They're all weird and crazy, so that's OK.

By the time they're carting off Joe Six-Pack, there won't be anyone to protest.  The only folks left will be the mental midgets who can't scratch together a complete sentence, but who make pretty good servants for the bloated uber-klassen.

There's still enough folks who: 1) think they still own anything, and 2) who are so desperate to believe everything is still normal, that no one is willing to put up a good social disobedience.

The way things SHOULD be working is that when they come to repo the neighbors house, the entire neighborhood pours out and surrounds the house.  Folks should be spending their two remaining dollars at mom-and-pop stores, but they're all owned by...*gasp*...THOSE people, so no one will give them the business.  They'd rather throw it all at Wally-Mart, where everything is made in another country and whose management would love to be Uncle's Company Store.

People have been completely warped by the propaganda.

Hell, even China recognizes it.  The other day, they ordered all the low-brow rubbish to be taken off of prime-time TeeVee, and replaced with classic dramas, literature and other high-falootin' fare.  Jus try that in America!  There really would be riots if folks couldn't get their Two and a Half Men fix, or plant themselves in front of the NFL/NBA/WHL/WWF/etc. mindlessness.

To paraphrase Tim Leary, turn off, tune out, and get real.

My last column seemed to strike a chord with a number of readers.  They really liked the idea of taking back the culture...of establish a counter-culture to fight the Medieval World Order.  One latched on to the statement that, "We always loose because we always play their game."

Remember, everything you know, everything you do, everything you think, is a product of the elite casino.  Everyone knows that the casino is a cash cow, because everyone always loses, and the house always wins.  When it's your game and you make the rules, then you are guaranteed to win the game.

Get out of their game.

Look at it this way.  Take complete stock of everything and everyone in your life that you don't pay tax on.  If there's anything on your list, then that is really what you have left.  For most folks, about the only thing on the list will be air, and they're trying to tax that with cap-and-trade.

You have nothing, so you have nothing to lose.  Anything you think you can lose is an illusion.  They can take your house, your car, your children, and your life and get away scott clean, because they own the courts, too.

The time for feeling complacent is over.  You are Their property, until you do something to stop it.  The neo-Nazis are NOT the idiots with shaved heads spouting racist claptrap...the real ones are in political office right now.

Requiem For A Nation

Once upon a time, I believed the hype about America being the greatest country ever.  In fact, the founding ideals were pretty astounding, in that a country that free had never been tried before, at least since the creation of the modern nation-state.

The dream went bust on Halloween afternoon 1981.  I had just spent about a year and a half backpacking around the world.  I was 19, and with that experience in my hip pocket, I could call myself a worldly guy.  I had seen quite a bit of life and the world, having my passport stamped in 37 countries on three continents.  In all that time and in all those places, I pretty much had a free ride through immigration.  About the hardest time was getting out of Morocco, because I smoked Marlboros, which implied that I was a hash smoker.  Long story that.

Anyway, I looked a bit scruffy, sure, but that's to be expected after such an adventure.  My beard and hair had grown pretty long, and I had a pretty severe sunburn from a nude beach in Australia, so I wasn't able to bathe before jumping on the plane home.

At immigration, the jerk at the counter was passing folks through with nary a glance at them, most being foreigners.  When I got to the counter, he spent 20 minutes looking at my photo and then at me, asking me questions about why I had been out of the country for so long.  I mean real second-degree kind of questions. I, of course, having been raised a Texian and with a strong foundation in history, politics and law, was not about to answer any of them, and said so.

Finally, the jerk pointed at a side bench and said, "See that man over there?  He likes people with beards."

I muttered something rude under my breath, calling the jerk's paternity into question and implying that the other fellow's sexual orientation might have something to do with his affinity for beards.

I stepped to the second counter where I got more questions about where I had been and why.  I quoted Edmund Hillary and left it at that.  Jerk 2, being dissatisfied with my disdain for jackboots proceeded to completely dismantle my backpack, which (after a year and a half) was a masterpiece of intricate packing.

His grinned the whole time, as he literally undid every single item in the pack and threw it on the floor.  I made some comment about the obvious similarities to Nazi Germany and how I had been much freer outside the US than I was just momets after arriving on my home soil.  Figured I had nothing to lose, since the bastard was determined to make as big a mess of my possessions as he could.  My only crime was having dared to go abroad for an extended leave and brazenly defending my right not to answer intimate questions about it.

That was 1981, and from that point on, I know precisely what tyranny was.  I hadn't found it in any other country on my travels, save East Germany.  It was still decades before TSA would be created, but the foundation was already there.

Quite a few years later, while I was involved with the Texas secessionist effort, some group came out with a study showing that every single American, big and small, was controlled by more than 20,000 laws the minute they rolled out of bed in the morning.  Who could possibly follow the law when there were so many?  I noticed the headline the other day that 40,000 new laws took effect on January 1.  Not counting all the years and laws in between, that's 60,000 laws governing your life.

That can only mean one thing...no human being who lives in America can go through a normal day without breaking some laws.  It's impossible with that many laws in effect.  At some point, you're going to trim your nails the wrong way, or use the wrong light bulb or use too much water in your morning flush.

I have to say, that's pretty much insane.

The most egregious part of all that is the NDAA, euphemistically called the National Defense Authorization Act.  It literally declares every man, woman and child who has US citizenship to be enemies of the US.  At any point, and for any arbitrary reason, you can be declared an enemy combatant, stripped of your citizenship and imprisoned and tortured without legal representation or even notification of next of kin.  You just vanish into a Kafka-esque nightmare.

Back in the day, when the evil commies were sending folks off to psychiatric hospitals for 'rendition,' they came across a rather stalwart fellow named Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  They tried every trick in the book, but could not break him.  Finally, he was asked why this was so.  He simply answered that they had already taken everything of value from him, so he had nothing left to lose.

These are dangerous times.  When you have 300 million people with nothing left to lose, great upheavals in history tend to result.  Sad to say, this will probably not end well.  The record gun sales before Christmas speak to a great many folks taking things pretty seriously, regardless of who they envision will be at the business end of those guns.

The real answer to this situation is so much more pleasant.  The US has reached this point because their culture has been corrupted by the controllers.  The simplest and most effective answer is to take it back.  It's a time for folks to start creating new art, new music and new literature, but keep it out of the corporate grist mills.  Instead, start distributing it on the net, passing out CDs, printing up books and trading them at fairs.  Create beauty and pleasant things and refuse to let the corporations feed off of it.  Keep it at the real level.

We teeter now at the brink.  The number of similarities between the US and Nazi Germany are eerie.  The Enabling Act and the Patriot Act, the SS and the TSA, the Reichtstag fire and 9.11.  Even the US wars shadow Germany's 'lebensraum,' with blitzkrieg replaced by 'shock and awe.'  An ominous black cloud is drawing down on North America.  Both periods in history center around global economic depressions.  There's no escaping the historical rerun, but there is still an opportunity to change the course of events.

The election of Ron Paul presents an interesting possibility.  It would force the shadow elite into the open.  They have already exposed their media manipulations because of him.  We are likely to see blatant fraud at the polls.  If he wins, They will be forced to kill him or watch all their plans and machinations set back decades, if not centuries.  That 70% of all donations from military and federal employees are going to Ron Paul is very telling.

It's as if the world is holding its collective breath.  The masks are off and all sides can see who is really behind them now.  It's just a matter of time before someone blinks, and when they do, all hell will break loose.  The question is, which side?  It's a foregone conclusion that the side who shoots first will lose.  The damnedable part is that the US government is doing everything it can to provoke just about everyone in the world, including its own citizens.  It is itching for a fight, but so far, no one will give it any satisfaction, and if it starts the fight, it will lose all credibility, though it has precious little remaining.

Profound changes are coming, even more so than those already past.  Without a doubt, the side of evil and tyranny has already lost.  It always does, but it never fails to keep trying.  Insanity is a sad thing to witness.  The rules are different this time around, though.  No side has a fall-back position.  It will be an all or nothing fight.  What we on the good side must realize is that we can't succumb to their tactics.  We must do something completely different.

We must take back the culture.  We must extract ourselves from the means by which they control us, and that is done with media of all types.  We must find alternative channels to communicate and educate and entertain. We must boycott the TeeVee and the movies and the radio.  We must completely ignore all the avenues by which they project power into our lives.

Every eyeball, every eardrum, every taste bud becomes a weapon against our own minds and souls.  Only by shutting them out completely can we hope to dismantle their ivory towers.  If we unite, not in war or protest, but in truth and beauty and unity, we can destroy them without a single shot being fired or noose being strung. Just stop listening.

If no one listens to their talking heads, if no one buys their music, if no one reads their books, if no one goes to their movies, it will kill them as surly as any weapon.  If we create our own counter-culture and refuse to let them usurp it, it will cause them to wither and die.  Support bands who don't want a recording contract.  Read books that don't have major publishers.  Watch movies that aren't distributed by the major studios.  Better yet, create your own and share it with your friends.

It's a strange concept and it seems all too simple.  But it is, and it works.  The 1960s in America was a radical time because the counter-culture was out of Their control.  It didn't take long, though, for Them to absorb it by greed and avarice.  They only win because we play their game.

It's time to change the rules.