http://www.freepatriot-press.com/2009/11/aristocrats.html "Do you know who my father is in this town?" the stranger asked. "No, I've no idea. Was he the one who taught you to stand directly under tree branches you were felling with a 20 foot extension chain saw? Did he show you how to do that backward somersault while holding a chain saw?" "You have no idea who you messed with today." These were some of the more printable parts of the exchange. There were a large number of unpleasant words on his part. It all began when I was peacefully enjoying the quiet of my father's guest house some time back. Then the roar of a chain saw cut the air. Vrrrr....rrrrr...roooom! Up from my keyboard and out to the parlor. Sure enough, the chain saw was quite close, just next door. Ever mindful of Voltaire's advice that we tend to our gardens, I went out to have a look. Standing on my front porch I was just in time to see the aforementioned aristocrat's son cut through the branch high over his head and do his backward somersault. "Are you okay?" I shouted, ready to rush over with my emergency medical kit. "Fine," he replied, getting up. He then began to explain to his girlfriend (as the co-worker later developed to be) how the branch let go early. As if the branch had volition in the matter of its cutting and falling, as if he had not pulled a bone headed maneuver. Trimming the neighbor's trees were this team of two who must have been hired off Craig's List judging by the shiny candy apple red new SUV parked past the neighbor's house. It had a low-boy trailer, empty at the moment. But I was just speculating, little did I know. Finished with the one tree, this scion of an exceptional family came crashing through the hedges onto my father's property. "What are you doing on my property?" I asked, in a pleasant tone of voice. He looked up at the tree branch he had been told to cut, which connected to the trunk of the tree fully over the neighbor's land. Then he looked at me. "What are you doing on my property?" I reiterated. "You are a f###er aren't you?" he replied. So he moved back to the neighbor's side of the hedge, crashing through again, and tried to reach the branch while staying on the neighbor's side. Meanwhile, his co-worker moved around the other side of the tree through a gap in the hedge (nice enough not to crash through, I guess) and here she was, standing on my father's land. "What are you doing on my property, miss?" I asked. So far, I hadn't moved. They both became foul-mouthed at this point and shouted and ranted and railed. But they moved back off my father's land. Which seemed best, since it would fall to my neighbor's home-owner's insurance if this dimwit killed or injured himself on her land. But my father's if he did it on Dad's side of the hedge. Now, why should I care? It isn't my land, actually. But my father had a stroke recently and was laid up in the hospital. He is old enough to have spent time in France and Germany during WW2. Signal corps, not exactly high combat, but some of the crews he sent down to clear tunnels in German cities did run into die hard Nazis determined to blow up the switching stations. (Most of them were nice old guys who surrendered eagerly, seeking food and wanting to preserve the switching system they had labored to keep running through the war. Others were maniacs.) So it fell to me to be at home to help Mom, visit Dad frequently, take Mom to visit Dad, and the guest house (about two miles away, in a mid- size city in Kansas) was available for my use. I cannot begin to say how dismal it was to live in the USA again. The local humane society wanted to talk to my mother about whether I could adopt a dog. It seems they feared I might not have "permission" to have a dog in the house - in a home owned by my family. Weird. Naturally, I told them to go shove it. I see no reason to have my eighty-plus-year-old mother condescended to on the phone by a bureau- rat. The humane society can keep their dogs. There are plenty available in the private sector. A curious letter arrived the day I went outside to watch the aristocratic moron do his tumbling routine while juggling a chain saw. The letter was from a bureau-rat in city government whose inspector slut had stopped by to measure the height of a few flowering plants in the front yard, name them weeds, and tsk. I must have missed her visit. The functionary dated his letter 6 October, demanded the "weeds" be cut down by 18 October, and mailed the letter 29 October. Fun. But I digress. The aristocrat's son was shouting at me. Apparently my neighbor is his aunt or sister, who knew? And she is better loved than the son. Who could fail to prefer such an athletic young man with tumbling and juggling skills? He seemed to feel it essential that he show me a gigantic bicep muscle by way of threatening me. How very droll. Do I know who his father is? No. Not at all. Do I care? Not even a bit. The American Revolutionary war was fought to end this nonsense about aristocracy. In Colonial America, a poor man would have to jump off the sidewalk into the muddy street, doff his cap, and avert his eyes when "his betters" strolled by. A great many Tory aristocrats in North America were killed, or chased off the land they had stolen, or tarred and feathered (sometimes a death sentence - infection was a bitch in those days) or made to drink boiling hot tea straight out of the pot. A lot of salt in the water made the boiling point higher. It seems clear that the general state of freedom in America is not what it once was. The land has been filled with bureau-rats and officers to eat out our existence. The population has been prevented, with laws obstructing the immigration and naturalisation of foreigners. The government has refused to encourage free trade, commerce, and the movement of persons for the purpose of pursuing important labors. The government has prevented the appropriation of new lands in Antarctica, where Americans have valid claims, on the high seas or sea floors, or on the Moon and other celestial bodies. Why? To prevent a frontier, to keep everyone bottled up. You should check out Frederick Jackson Turner on the importance of the frontier in American culture (1893 or so, "closing of the American frontier," a Harvard PhD thesis, as I recall). And then review the 1957 Antarctica treaty, 1967 Outer Space treaty, and 1982 law of the sea treaty. The administration of justice is incredibly corrupt. Look at the case of Sam Dodson in New Hampshire now ongoing, and related cases of liberty activists beaten, jailed without charges, refused writ of habeas corpus, threatened - and Keene, NH is by no means unusual. The government has made judges dependent on the will of legislatures, rather than independent. In particular, sentencing mandates cause millions of persons "convicted" of non-violent non-crimes such as possessing pharmaceuticals, plants, or guns, to be incarcerated or on probation or parole. Strange, because God gave us all the herbs bearing seed to be as meat for mankind, and the bill of rights guarantees our natural and ancient right to keep and bear arms. Swarms of officers are here to harass our people and eat out our substance. That many of these persons are apparently living amongst those they seek to rule, in wood houses no less, defies understanding. Gasoline is cheap and plentiful. The government keeps among us, in times of peace (and we are in such a time since no war has been declared, not against Iraq, not against Afghanistan; and no war against the United States is possible without the commission of treason) standing armies. The military has been made independent of and superior to the civil power. Military personnel detain persons without charging them with any crime, without benefit of clergy or other counsel, without any time limit on detention, and without any possibility of the great and ancient writ of habeas corpus. Moreover, these military and CIA personnel torture prisoners to death - at least 48 that we know, probably 100 or more that we've heard of, and easily thousands about whom we know nothing. What's more, the constitutional scholar who taught constitutional law at posh upscale and aristocratic University of Chicago and is now president says that indefinite detention and torture are powers he is authorised to have under the constitution. The government has combined with others to subject Americans to jurisdictions foreign to our constitution, including the United Nations. USA military personnel have been ordered to strip off their American flags and make dominant the UN flag (case of Michael New, Kosovo, c 1995). These other governments are unacknowledged by our people, but the government gives assent to their acts of pretended legislation. Large bodies of troops, including brigade combat teams have been quartered among us. What enemies does the government have here? As Patrick Henry asked, so long ago, the answer is obvious. They can be meant only for us. USA military personnel, mercenary contractors, defense suppliers, and CIA agents commit murder, rape, and other crimes, not only on foreigners but also on Americans. They are protected from punishment for these crimes by mock trials. In the case of one woman gang raped by defense suppliers, she was prevented from suing by a pretend contract with KBR. Trade and commerce has been interdicted and cut off, especially at the airports and at the borders, but also in other routine ways, on the high seas. Taxes have been imposed without the consent of the individuals taxed. Trial by jury has been replaced by extortion and plea bargains, also murder. Americans have been transported beyond seas to be tortured to death for pretended offenses. The United States government, the state governments, the county and city governments, have abdicated government here, declaring the American people out of their protection, and waging war against us. These wars include the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on money laundering, the war on privacy, the war on checking books out of the library, and many other wars. Making war on the American people is treason, as defined in the constitution, because "we the people" formed the United States - so making war on us is making war on the United States. The government has plundered our property, ravaged our people, burnt our churches, and destroyed the lives of our neighbors. The works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of a civilized nation continue night and day. In every stage of these oppressions, Americans have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Indeed, protestors have been locked into "free speech zones" and attacked by riot police time and again, or shot by national guard. A government whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to rule a free people. Which brings me back to my neighbor and her mysterious tree trimming activity. And to the odd inspection and late post marked "notice of violation." Are Americans a free people? Or are they subservient, divided by power and influence into the productive who toil to pay taxes and the aristocracy who screw with everyone else, while running roughshod over other people's property, liberties, and lives? It is a rhetorical question. A great many Americans aren't worthy of the freedom they once inherited. If you are, and if this country disappoints you, please allow me a moment to disappoint you further. I've lived in Europe, Africa, Asia, and several other countries in this hemisphere. I travel widely, and have been looking for a free place to build a stairway to the planets and stars. There is none. If you want to do bold things, if you want to innovate, if you want to be your own person, there is no place for you on this planet. Which means that those of us who choose to live free have to make a place for ourselves. The price of liberty always ends up being the same. It requires the blood of patriots and of tyrants. The vast effusion of blood is coming. It comes, whether I will it or not. It comes, and the devastation, the betrayals, the deaths, and the suffering of those who don't die is an emotional toll the sounding of which sends shock waves to those poor souls able to conceive of such things. The economic devastation of the Great Depression is nothing compared to what happened in 1722. That depression lasted until 1782, and the suffering then in part inspired the American and French revolutions. The economic devastation that began in 1997 and began to be widely perceived a decade later has not reached its nadir yet. We have much further to fall to a meaningful "reset" level for the economy. The worst part of the global economic crisis of 1929-1948 were the war years. These began in China and Africa about 1933. Japan and Italy went on rampages and killing sprees. The war you know about formally from your text books allegedly began in September 1939 for the British empire and in December 1941 for the USA empire. The post-war years started out with another economic recession, but many war-time measures were lifted. The boom that arrived was a result of much smaller government. But the war itself didn't really end. It morphed. It morphed into a global economics dominance game. It morphed into endless cold war with a hobgoblin "global communist conspiracy." And it morphed into a military industrial complex with a vengeance. The endless war in Vietnam was exactly what the death merchants wanted. They wanted a long war so they could sell a lot of stuff to the military. About two trillion dollars in today's terms (using the price of gold) were spent from 1965 to 1975, on a war that went nowhere. About seven to eight million lives were ended, or horribly altered by wounds, during that war in Southeast Asia - mostly lives of Vietnamese, Laotian, or Cambodian villagers. And it was all based on a lie - there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, and LBJ knew it. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Bush knew it. But the war in Afghanistan hadn't been big enough, soon enough, to generate three trillion dollars in costs. So the war in Iraq was exactly what the death merchants wanted. Make no mistake, your government has been replaced. The how of it is of some interest, and might be more clearly understood if liars like Arlen Specter hadn't made up ideas like the magic bullet theory to explain the assassination of JFK. But the how of it is not all that important. What happened is what always happens - well meaning people were beguiled and evil people took over. The why of it is not particularly difficult either. Trillions of dollars. Some sell their souls cheap. Yes, a trillion is a cheap price for your soul, nearly nothing against the value of the hundreds of thousands or millions slaughtered (depending on what you believe about which war). Think of all the things those people would have invented, the diseases they would have cured, the asteroids full of platinum group metals they might have mined, the star systems with Earth like planets they might have discovered. Consider God's own cornucopia. You don't have to go far to see it. Just go out on a cloudless night and look up. The universe is infinite in all those directions, and an infinity of narratives exist. (Perhaps the habitable narratives are only the ones in which the large hadron collider doesn't work? lol) The Solar System is bathed in more energy from the Sun than we can use in a billion years at current rates of energy use. There are many other planets (ten or twelve which have cleared most of their orbits, of which Jupiter is not one - see the Trojan asteroids) and dozens of minor planetary bodies or moons. There is a moon in our sky, and we call it The Moon. Mars has an atmosphere we can use for many things, and can be terra formed in forty years to have an Earth normal surface pressure. (Four hundred years for Earth normal partial pressure of oxygen.) There are more platinum group metals in a single asteroid we've surveyed by radar and spectrograph than have been mined in the history of mankind. And some moron thinks I care who his father is? There is an old joke you can see on Youtube. Search for "the aristocrats." There are many comics who have done different versions of this joke, but it is all to the same point. Aristocrats are the most disgusting, filthy, foul-mouthed, evil, decadent, idiotic, inbred, and festering source of foolishness on Earth. They don't contribute anything of value. All they want to do is rape each other and steal your resources. Kill you if you get in their way. Slaughter millions in Southeast Asia for fortunes in helicopter sales. I've blogged a bit about the topic of divestment at divestfromdeath dot wordpress dot com. And you should, you know, not invest with the death merchants. Get your pension funds out of such investments, too. In the not-too-distant future, a tidal wave of blood is coming. It is not of my making. I have not set in motion the weeks of reckoning when tyranny will be opposed, overthrown in some places, ascendant in others. I have not set in motion the angry retaliations on the various "sides" in these coming conflicts. But I can see it coming. I can smell the blood, the fear, the deaths, the carnage, and the burning bodies. I am powerless to prevent it. Depending on how it all comes out, the people who survive might have a destiny among the stars. It would be nice to think so. However, tyrants in the past did not have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as these do. And these tyrants have used those weapons on American soil, against Americans, and many have suffered. Nevada test site nuclear detonations generated fall out that was allowed to fall on civilians down wind who were not warned nor removed. CS gas was used on the Branch Davidians. Terror weapons were used at the G20 protests in Pittsburgh earlier this year. And syphilis was injected into black men who were not told that it could be cured. Your government has also used LSD to provoke all kinds of behavior from civilians. You seek a society without coercion, where you are free to use your property and your labor as you see fit, harming no one else, enjoying the fruits of your effort. You seek a society of consent. You abhor initiatory force, but you are prepared to defend yourself. If necessary, you might retaliate if it seemed needful for preventing future outrages. Such a society would be able to encourage the brightest minds to create the most amazing things. Such a society would be able to ascend to the heavens, plumb the reaches of the farthest star, use the resources of the entire Solar system to attend to the problems of people here on Earth. Such a society would be rich beyond measure in culture, in trade, in commerce, in wealth, in opportunity. No such society exists on Earth. So I ask you, would you like to create one? Or perhaps more than one - freedom is a many splendored thing.