Pro-Choice Paranoia

Having just watched another pro-choice advocate crying foul on the CBS decision to air a commercial during the Super Bowl that features Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother having a conversation about her choice to carry the future college football star to term, I was struck by the consistent theme of what I can only call “paranoia.”

I’ll explain:

Last year, the same argument broke out when a Catholic group attempted to buy Super Bowl time to run an ad that told the story of President Obama’s mother’s pregnancy and her “choice” not to abort him. Similarly, the Tebow ad doesn’t mention any court cases or in any way make a claim as to the legal ramifications of the abortion status quo. Instead. both ads merely seem to advocate the idea that there are benefits to having a child rather than aborting it. The outcry, though, in both cases is that the organizations behind the ads and the messages themselves have the hidden agenda of overturning Roe vs. Wade and banning abortion, altogether.

The interesting point to me is that this message has to be extrapolated from the context of the pro-life/pro-choice divide. If there is no mention of the courts, no condemnation of those who perform or request abortions, and no call for funding of pro-life initiatives, the outcry has to be based on the idea that there is a hidden agenda. I’m not a trained psychologist but this reminds me of two things. First, it is paranoia to display a consistent pattern of believing there is a hidden threat behind actions of others that have no prima facie message to that effect. Second, it looks like projection if pro-choice advocates are constantly claiming that there is an ulterior motive to simply presenting an advocacy of choosing life within the current legal framework.

If I were a paid advocate for a cause (pro-choice) and an industry (abortion) that received most of its early government support toward the purpose of eliminating “undesirable” minority populations through voluntary genocide, yeah, I’d maybe be worried that others were covering their true objectives.

We the People Declare This Bill Void

We are currently witnessing the evolution of the patriots’ response to the “health care bill.” The question that seems to be raised is what the next step should be. To many, the answer is nullification by the States if the bill is not indefinitely delayed by court challenges. Both of these efforts need to press forward as it is imperative that this abomination not be forced on the American people.

There is another solution, though. We the People are the ultimate power in American governance. We give consent to govern to the States which have formed, under The Constitution for the United States, a federal government to serve in their disputes. We the People are at the top of the power structure envisioned by the founders and manifested in the charters of our country; The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. These documents were made possible by adherence to a common law process that was described by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the others who formed the Continental Congress which drafted the charters.

This process has been repeated and the product of that gathering will be made available on Christmas Eve, 12/24/2009. I’ll skip the extended history lesson and just give you the basic procedure:

1. Leading up to the First and Second Continental Congresses, the people humbly petitioned the colonial government and the crown for the redress of grievances as was accepted common law practice. The last clause of the First Amendment enshrines that principle into our charters.

Over the last few decades, Bob Schulz, We the People Foundation, and others have been peacefully petitioning under this doctrine. Not only has the federal government and the Supreme Court ignored these petitions like the Crown did, they have ruled that the government has no responsibility to respond.

2. The first two Congresses were ultimately composed of representatives from 12 of the 13 colonies (92%) elected through common means to carry out the business of the people by giving credit to the petitions, formalizing support, and seeking peaceful resolutions by instructing the government on proper steps to restore lawful order.

The Third Continental Congress is composed of delegates from 48 of 50 States (96%) and held its first session in St. Charles, Illinois, in November of 2009. I represent the People of the State of Ohio. Its statement, a culmination of petitions and instructions to the Federal government, the several States, and the People, is called the “Articles of Freedom” and will be formally released, tomorrow.

3. The first two Continental Congresses were answered with repeated injuries and insults which lead ultimately to their final work products, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. Before reaching that point, they had decided that the last peaceful remedy was to withhold financial support from the colonial government and impose “economic sanctions” as penalty for the Crown’s negligence of duty under common law.

The Third Continental Congress is recommending that continued injury will result in similar economic sanctions but we are also including an additional step. We seek the signatures of “a goodly number of millions” for a couple of reasons. First, the courts have adopted the practice of dismissing challenges to abuse of power for “lack of standing.” They argue that, because anyone has standing in some issues, essentially none of us do. Signers to the Articles of Freedom will stand together to rebuke that claim. Second, those who choose to impose “economic sanctions” on their own have every right to do so but even solid legal defenses for their actions do not keep them out of jail. The federal government does not respond well to such challenges. A few of us acting on our own is sure to result in our arrests. Fifteen million of us doing so together, on the other hand, will both cripple the tyrants and make our incarceration difficult, to say the least.

I need each of you to consider your signature and help in spreading this message. We need signatures. We need Americans, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, to hang together for we will surely all hang separately if we do not. Tomorrow, the Articles of Freedom will be available and digital signatures collected at this site:

http://articlesoffreedom.us

The organization that brought Washington DC to a crawl must now be tasked with returning our servant government to its proper role. I will answer any question. This demands all of us. We the People may nullify “any law repugnant to The Constitution,” as well.

Evolution of a Revolution – Journal Impressions of CC2009

You can find out more about The Continental Congress 2009 at http://www.cc2009.us http://www.wethepeoplefoundation.org and http://www.givemeliberty.org

“A Technologist, Like Benjamin Franklin”

Before I left for Continental Congress, so much had already happened. In trying to recall that and give a reasonably brief account of that time, I remember a question that Mr. Kostic had asked quite a few days into the event on one of those late, late nights. He actually addressed it to Jeremy Doucet of Rhode Island by saying something to the effect of “you’re not one of those ‘everything happens for a reason’ people, are you?” Jeremy shifted his feet around in the hotel hallway outside of my room. I waited to give Mr. Doucet a few seconds to answer and it became clear that he had trouble floating a reply. Into the silence of that moment, my mind began to pour. Too much had happened, so much had yet to happen, and signs were clear from the moment I first contacted our state coordinator about CC2009 that I could not have been anywhere else for those twelve days. My head cocked to the side and I checked Jeremy for the response that was his if he would take it. I looked back at Mr. Kostic and I said in the trance-like voice I had known from so long ago as one who found rising to such challenges a way to expose a part of myself I couldn’t help but like, “I am.”

In Ohio, we were blessed with a dedicated and utterly likeable state coordinator. When I first was told about CC2009, I had seen her name on the state page and noticed that her listed address was in the city where I lived. I first offered help and then I came to realize just how busy she, like many others I am sure, had to have been back when the leaves first started to change colors and fall from the trees. I noticed a few days after that initial exchange of hurried emails that one could, in fact, nominate themselves. I had some reservations about that idea but the first candidate forum was a quick fifteen minute drive from my house. If nothing else, I thought, it would certainly be a learning experience. My life had been hectic for the last few years, having gone through a lengthy and bitter divorce. My activism was scant having attended a few rallies, my contacts were few although I boasted a solid politically-oriented presence on a few social networking sites, and my particular study of the Constitution was good among the general public but would be a bit less so in the crowd I wanted to be a part of. I wrote my “stump speech” about an hour before I gave it. Being one of those “everything happens for a reason” people, I should have known it would have more to do with my experience in St. Charles than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

My primary sell was two-fold; I had a good understanding of legal language and had written a few “bills” based on transitioning from large federal programs to state administration and I did so using primarily input from those I disagreed with. Our forum just happened to coincide with the G20 protests in Pittsburgh so I told a crowd of mostly self-identified tea-partiers and “912ers” that we needed to reach out to the people in Pittsburgh because we were, in essence, protesting the same thing in different ways. I believe cooperation in methods and information would be helpful to those who approach liberty from any end of the political spectrum. The other thing I emphasized was that I had project management experience and had turned around a computing help desk with an abysmal record by focusing on the empowerment of base-level employees and engaging customers. Additionally, I said, I brought the perspective of a technologist, like Benjamin Franklin, as many of our founders brought unique abilities and ideas to the first Continental Congress and those meetings that came after. If you talked to me for any length of time in St. Charles, I probably told you that story and said something like “I should have known that God would make me live up to a promise like that.”

A few conference calls and meetings later, I was Ohio’s second delegate largely on the strength of mail-in ballots which came from people I had never met face-to-face. I thank my friends on the internet in its various incarnations for entrusting me with that purpose and I hope I was able to deliver. On the morning of Wednesday, November the 11^th, I packed my bags along with two laptop computers, my desktop computer, and two extra monitors tightly into my convertible and drove the six hours to St. Charles.

“I came here to complain about taxes.”

I didn’t utter those words until the Saturday before we left but it’s certainly the best way to describe why I came to the Continental Congress. The other goal I had was to take full advantage of the scant time on the original agenda for what were described as “civic actions.” I arrived and quickly found Jim Davis, the lead delegate from Ohio. We talked about Ohio’s third delegate, Trisha Connell, who was en route and running a bit behind. While I was standing in line to register, we complained that the original 2PM deadline to be ready for the opening session was coming too quickly and it was moved to 3. I was in my suit and ready although I never managed to fully unpack and that stayed true for all twelve days. In truth, had Trisha arrived when we expected her to, I wouldn’t have pushed so hard for the first motion that passed at the Congress – to amend the prewritten rules to allow laptops during the proceedings. My plan was that when Trisha figured out where she was, I could look up directions and drive out to meet her. I lobbied the idea a bit at dinner and was first in line with the motion when the session resumed. It passed. It also changed CC2009, for better or worse. I had said in online discussions with delegates before the Congress that the people of Ohio couldn’t care less if I attached my name to something that came out of the event. I now jokingly refer to that motion as the “Dickerhoof Amendment to the Rules.” Trisha finally showed up the next morning but didn’t last the day.

I’m not going to spend much time talking about what a fiasco the first couple of days were. That subject will probably be covered in such detail as to make the reader engage in wonder at how anything was accomplished. Instead, I’ll just say that my first motion which was somewhat hotly contested at the time, ended up changing the Congress over those twelve days. When speaking about it with Charles Zoeller who ended up being the steady balance to my manic work in the Secretary’s chair, he had mixed feelings. I stated more or less and I would hope we came to some agreement on the idea that laptops should have either remained banned or been something of a requirement. People can find their own distraction in any environment but the disconnect of one generation from the next was at least initially amplified by the use of electronics. I recalled that Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocals to allow those with eye conditions to take part in reading and shaping the founding documents of this country. Would Franklin have remained quiet had bifocals been banned at that first Continental Congress? In remarking that there could not be one set of rules for the front table, decorated on that first day with a row of laptops, and the delegates who had already begun testing their ability to hide their devices, I was fulfilling the promise I had made to bring that technologist’s perspective. Besides, I had thought, there was no reason to use paper to print out the volumes of information I had on my machines. Love it or hate it, technology increased the efficiency and improved the weight of product that CC2009 passes on to America. It landed me on the stage a few days later and cost me the opportunity to complain too much about taxes.

The Super-Secret Admin Committee

After lunch on the second day, Richard Fry of Kansas informed me during a quick discussion on the impasses that were facing the delegates that he had been appointed the Chairman of the Administrative Processing Committee. He asked if I was interested and I said that I was and that the job before us reminded me quite a bit of the one I was paid for back home. I described it as “herding cats.” The idea was that a room full of liberty-minded people was a great thing for learning but that desire to be heard wasn’t necessarily a recipe for doing. We ducked out of the afternoon session and found a spot by the pool to begin talking about what could be done to make sure the Continental Congress would not remain in the same vicious stall that had marked the first three sessions and was intensifying as we met. I tried to emphasize that part of the problem was that pre-packaged instructions were being handed to delegates after lecture-style presentations with the hopes that they would stamp them and pass them on. I didn’t see that as a possibility. The other members of the committee and I tried to hash out a few ideas for speeding things up. My input was that the panic cost time, that the workload should be divided, and using a committee approach to separate instructions would allow us to use time between sessions by breaking the connection between presentation, discussion, and votes. “Storm to norm” is a pretty self-explanatory idea but Information Technology managers have it beaten thoroughly into our heads. As for the others, I will let them tell their own story.

After our meeting had gone on for quite a while, one of the delegates came to the meeting and sat down with us for a few minutes. I do not remember his name but he brought a very important message with him: things were deteriorating in the session and we were, in his estimation, the last best hope for fixing it. With that pronouncement, the members of the committee dedicated ourselves to producing the right recommendations, deadlines be damned, and we would stay up all night if we had to. All of us did. We had reached our own impasse in the committee when I realized that it was time to employ another lesson I had already learned in my life; that thinking visually does more to break down disagreements than hours of debate. I told the group I would return with a whiteboard and I left for the office. I asked Todd McGreevy for one of the two that was available in the office and for every dry-erase marker he had. I returned to the committee, illustrated my idea and then things just clicked. Jeff Lewis illustrated one of the most important lessons I have ever learned about this country simply by putting it on that board. His idea was that each committee report with separate instructions for the federal government, the states, and the people. He drew “WTP” on top, states under it, and congress under that. It immediately occurred to me that it was the first time I had seen the chain of command under the Constitution correctly described.

We had to do a bit of fighting to get our findings in front of President Badnarik and Vice-President Gonzales. It was worth it, in the long run. I didn’t stick around for our presentation but I had faith in Richard and the Jeffs (Lewis and Williams) to deliver it well and they did. Schaeffer Cox and I went on to a meeting of the People’s Action Caucus but awoke to the first session the next day to find our committee’s plan in action. We scrapped the entire idea of the agenda schedule outside of scheduled speakers, meals, and special events. I believe that if not for the work of that committee and the abundant use of technology at the Continental Congress, we may have returned a few instructions for Congress or the states and only because the dreaded “rubber stamp” would have fallen. A few days after that initial meeting, a woman I had befriended referred to the Committee on Administrative Processing as “they” and it was widely believed that we were secretively altering the course in St. Charles. I replied that “I am they” and that we had committed our plans so that civic actions, the goal we shared, wasn’t pushed to the side in a mad dash at the end of the Congress because we would have fallen so desperately behind the original agenda. I am grateful for the members of that committee and the work we did. Yes, we cost you all a great deal of sleep but fatigue in the defense of this nation is a badge of honor I wore from that day on. Where did I go from the committee meeting? I went to the second meeting of the People’s Action Caucus, of course.

Synergy

Many of us who gathered in St. Charles had the same fear; that we were intended as a rubber stamp on Bob Schulz’s agenda. Let me make it quite clear that I don’t blame Bob for that even if it was his explicit purpose from day one. The original event was supposed to be much longer than twelve days and the “pre-packaged” feel of the agenda we were given prior to arrival had more to do with expediency than ulterior motives. For reasons discussed in connection with the Admin Committee, it just wasn’t going to work. Besides, as I often reminded myself, it was a Continental “Congress” and not a “Conference.” At the end of a session on the first day, a speech by Dan Gonzales seemed to resonate with a number of us. We gathered around him when the session ended and a group of people who were individually terrible at remembering names tried to address each other. By foresight, perhaps, Schaeffer Cox of Alaska was born to parents who gave him a name that was easily distinguished from average American male tags and not so odd as to be hard to recall in a pinch. I engaged him in conversation. Those of who were primarily interested in things that citizens could do to combat the monster that government could become would form an unofficial sort of committee. Schaeffer took it from there. We didn’t have the name until much later that night after our first meeting, a trip to an empty ballroom, and a return to the hotel bar. We had a name, a mission statement, rules, and most importantly a purpose.

At the first meeting of the People’s Action Caucus, we got together and started feeling each other out. Most every one of the twenty-plus people that attended that first meeting were much better friends before we left St. Charles and our unity from the beginning fueled the belief that we could accomplish something amazing. We split off into two groups to discuss the agenda items for the next day and come up with resolutions for each. Schaeffer ran the meeting with order and the “salty cracker” approach he had described earlier on the floor. Both groups came up with something. Both groups had the mutual support of the other when they would bring their motions to the floor. We had strategy, justifications, and each other. The next day, we brought a statement of purpose and a resolution concerning “hard/honest money” to the floor. Both passed quickly and with little discussion of the language we had worked diligently to refine for that reason. As Jeff Williams said, we needed to start with a small victory. When I followed him to call the question and vote the statement through, I said only the Congress needed one. There was applause, there were congratulations, and at last we had a sense of what our contribution would be. Let it be stated “for the record” that we were identified as the young and “mavericks.” What we had really done was to take the knowledge and practice of our “wiser” members and translated it into the energy of the “hopeful.” We were proud and understandably so but should have recognized that pride rarely comes without a price.

A Visit from Bob Schulz

The People’s Action Caucus got back together that night. The first order of business was to pat ourselves on the back. We had done what everyone else at the Congress seemed incapable of doing; we brought our crafted our own resolutions carefully, we guaranteed each other support, we brought the motions to the floor, and then we got them passed. We had members that were sitting in on some of the committees that were formed that day and so thirteen of us met to discuss strategy, the next step, and what are “end game” was. I will admit that I used the word “hijack” quite a bit and it was a poor choice. Nonetheless, we had acknowledged our power so discussing what to do with it made sense. We talked and “brainstormed.” We discussed the agenda items for the next day. We carried on for about an hour when my state coordinator called to let me know our alternate, Steve McMasters, was on his way to replace Trisha who had checked out of the hotel that morning. I informed the group that Steve would make a great addition to the caucus. Things were going so well that it didn’t seem to register that Bob Schulz, the man whose dream the Continental Congress had been for so long came into the room to listen to our discussion. In my mind, pride was poison and it was telling me that Bob’s agenda simply didn’t matter anymore. I thought that CC2009 was our show to run for the remaining ten days. Bob was a great man and I knew this from having read extensively about him before taking two weeks’ vacation and spending all of my food money on gas to get to St. Charles. Selfishly, I had thought that it was now Bob’s turn to get on board with our agenda.

Judith Whitmore joined him not long after. I know this is something of a tease but it’s not my place to reveal what was said during that meeting. I heard some of the bravest statements in that room that I will likely ever hear. My heart goes out to each and every person who sat through the entire affair not the least of which were Bob and Judith. It was in that meeting that I recognized that I shared the desperation of being a young father and faced with the prospect of my son living under the tyranny of our supposedly “servant government,” I was too quick to forget what others had already sacrificed. For my own part, I will share what I remember most vividly saying to Bob and Judith who approached us first as if visitors in their own home. I recall as if I said it today that the words did not spend any more time in my head than it took to reach my tongue. I told Bob I had studied him exhaustively, that I found him to be a patriot of unquestionable character and deed, and that my purpose at CC2009 was to take his incredible knowledge and distribute it so that some of the hardships that he endured could be avoided by millions of Americans coming together to retake our country. Bob did something I could not have possibly expected when faced with such unbridled arrogance out of the mouth of a man who has still not contributed 1/1000 of what he has to the cause of liberty: he listened. I didn’t meet formally with the PAC after that night but we spread out and took our resolve in new directions. Many of us started to really listen and that is another turning point that the Continental Congress can count among its historic course.

The Secretary Knows Everything

My mother had often reminded me that secretaries often know more about how any company or organization works than anyone else in it and I would generally reply to her that such a statement was expected from those who did much but were repaid little. I am coming to realize at a much deeper level than I could have even a few years ago that my mother is always right. Just like the understandable concerns about the secrecy of the Admin Committee, I feel I need to explain how I came to become the Secretary so that the record will defend me when I cannot afford the time. On third day of CC2009, Jeremy Doucet approached me after I took a prolonged morning nap and managed to miss the first session. He informed me that he was now the “clerk” and was assisting the secretary who was elected as a non-delegate during the first session. He wanted to know if I would help him with computer issues as sort of a “deputy clerk.” I believe that God puts me where he needs me to be and the move just made sense. Despite the earlier adoption of amended rules that allowed laptops, the technology in the room was not being utilized to do much besides recording minutes and collecting finished documents after some editing on the floor. When I first sat on the stage, I turned to an online collaboration tool that had been made available to delegates but to that point had been largely used so that certain people could antagonize others on the internet in addition to in the hallways. I began to shape it so that it could display data on committees and that it was intuitive for distributing documents or getting them to the secretary and clerks to be printed, distributed, and edited. That was most of what I did on the first day.

 A little later, the secretary informed Jeremy and I that she was overwhelmed. She didn’t know what to expect but what was being asked of her was clearly more than she had signed on for. She “asked’ by telling us that she would like to leave and probably wouldn’t return if we would be willing to take over her duties. We agreed. That night, Jeremy and I discussed which of us might be Secretary and who would then be the Vice-Secretary. After we both figured out that neither of us wanted to be prime position, we decided that Co-Secretaries sounded better and fit with the principles of consensus and self-governance. The next morning, we started taking over every aspect of that job we were capable of. It seemed a poke in the eye that we had been “nominated” later and unanimously elected to the position that the parliamentarian had asked Charles Zoeller, a delegate from Kentucky, to take minutes as the acting secretary. As we came together, though, Charles was invaluable. His taking minutes freed us up to collect reports, get them printed, and distribute them so that the body had a reasonable, if not optimal, amount of time to read them. When Jeremy began following a different path toward the end of the Congress, Charles and I began to work in sync quite naturally. I had suggested that I could run two monitors more efficiently than most people could run one and that duty became mine. In terms of paper organization, I was a mess and Charles had himself together quite nicely. We later certified the reports, motions, amendments, and findings of the Continental Congress with surprising ease because my digital copies matched his paper records with few exceptions. Again, God had a way of making me live up to that Franklin comparison. I thank God for that opportunity.

I could write an entire book about what I learned from this experience, the power of the Secretary in a meeting such as CC2009, and the secrets that people may or may not wish to be aired. Certainly, I am again a tease. Most of what I learned I put on display in some form or another. If you saw me working, keep in mind you saw about one-fifth of what I was doing. Manipulating the screen was one thing but I was working behind the scenes to get feedback on what to fix next. I fix things for a living and I’ve found that simply asking people what they want or consider important is more valuable than spending my time guessing. I also learned that people can come together much more easily off-camera and face-to-face so, when I knew different groups or people were working on similar projects, I let them know to get together. I learned that the best way to be heard and really listened to was to let everyone else have their say, first. My speeches to the body became mostly procedural after I took the Secretary’s chair; urging people to focus first on their common ground, reminding CC2009 that the clock was ticking, or taking time to read a message called “fortune cookie” that was as true when I read it as it was weeks earlier when I had written it. When I finally spoke to advocate a position, the adoption of the preamble sub-committee’s work as read by Jeff Williams, the body came together. As for secrets, well, a secretary doesn’t reveal those as trust remains my most valuable currency.

The Evolution of a Revolution

I am eternally grateful to all those who stuck out those historic twelve days. To a great degree, what the Continental Congress achieves has much more to do with what happens next. Another point I had made in my candidate’s speech was that I wanted to find ways to reach out to different groups who might think we’re opposed to their efforts. I wrote a blog about how the real enemies of liberty use false divisions to keep Americans focused on guarding against each other while the thieves sneak in the back door to rob us of our treasure. Similarly, those divisions exist within Continental Congress and the false “left-right” paradigm we’ve all been fed for years. That lie is told with the help of distractions and inefficiencies that run through our communication and I believe at my core that things happen for a reason and I was meant to occupy the Secretary’s chair so that much work could be done in twelve days. Without that bit of history, perhaps we would not have enough material to win over some on the traditional “right” who would take offense to our condemnation of the Patriot Act and abuses of the War Powers clause. Perhaps we would have pushed to the side those two efforts and others that help us reach out to the traditional left who are willing to listen now that the blunt force of overreaching central government is revealed. I shudder to think that sixty or eighty percent of what we accomplished would have been a generous estimate of our abilities without freeing up the channels of information by utilizing our tools and by my being held to the promises I told Ohioans. My primary goal was to bring the collaborative approach to education and knowledge-sharing that I had developed in working for the state to a community of patriots. It became my slogan, of sorts, but I will reiterate it here for the record: I would measure the success of CC2009 by the idea that I wanted to leave St. Charles with ten times more work than I came with. That as the objective, I can gladly report that this is initially, at least, a smashing success. We have a public to win over and we have a good number of tools to do it with.

I had told others on the first few days of the Congress that it was my intention to write a book about the proceedings and that I would entitle it “the evolution of a revolution.” I thank Mr. Kostic for taking that task upon himself. I thank Bob Schulz for gathering us, Michael Badnarik for giving up the chance to speak eloquently more often for the mantle of the Presidency. I thank Dan Gonzales for using the position of the Vice-President to push willingly toward the goal of a finished product. I thank the PAC for making me feel welcome. I thank every delegate who stuck it out for being a part of this. I thank the Technology Sub-Committee for standing behind me. I thank the people of Ohio for sending me. To the God-fearing people who read this, let us thank God for such work as this. For those who do not know God, I thank God you’re on our side. Yes, I’m one of those “everything happens for a reason people” and I wouldn’t have changed a thing about those twelve days.

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

When Senator John McCain stumbled and almost did the “Wright” thing, America had some idea what it was getting itself into. Like the warning label on a pack of cigarettes, you knew it was there but it didn’t seem to get into our heads. We on the Right can blame ourselves for not being vocal enough. We’d certainly share that blame with media who was more interested in bizarre theories about Sarah Palin’s baby than they were in where Barack Obama went to church. Bringing up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright wasn’t a matter of questioning the Democrat candidate’s faith, it was about the dangers of electing a man who could sit and listen to hate speech for 20 years and not flinch. Now that the same ideas spewed out of Wright’s hate-hole are finding their way into Presidential policies and affairs, don’t act surprised.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

But McCain did make a more regular attempt to point out that Bill Ayers was a little too close to our naïf-in-chief. It would have been nice if the now state-run-media had given the poor guy a little bit of help. Again, Chicago politics was at work behind the scenes, making sure that O-bedient minions like Chris Matthews spent more time educating you on the finer points of the “Bridge to Nowhere” than he did explaining why we might be a little cautious in electing a man with close ties to a Weather Underground lunatic. How many Obama voters knew that Ayers admitted to his roles in several deaths, including his girlfriend during a late night bomb making session? “Make love not war!” Hardly. Nobody, including McCain, said you couldn’t talk to men who have done bad things. On the other hand, why is it surprising that the man in the Oval Office has a soft touch with terrorists? Some of us aren’t surprised at all.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

After the glow and lights of the inauguration wore off, President Obama went right to work on his agenda. For those who think health care reform was his top priority, remember that his first act in office was to repeal the Mexico City Policy which restricted the flow of taxpayer dollars to foreign organizations that may use that money for abortions. This wasn’t a surprise to those of us who knew about his opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act while he was a state senator in Illinois. Aside from the obvious complaints about the expenditure and forcing Christian and other religious Americans to essentially pay for abortions, the President signed his order the day after the anniversary of Roe versus Wade – to avoid the publicity. The man has a penchant for doing things when we aren’t looking. I’m not surprised. I knew he lied about his reasons for opposing BAIPA during the last debate and the media never called him on it. I knew and, and if you knew me, I told you.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I don’t have to say much about the “transparency” and “new tone in Washington” we were promised and never given. Plenty of people have documented that in more ways than I can hope to. On the other hand, I noticed when Obama appointed Rahm Emmanuel as his chief-of-staff because I had heard the stories. Rahm never recanted for acts like sending dead fish to people who he didn’t agree with or using backroom deals and dirty tactics to get his work done the “Chicago Way.” Like Michelle Obama who hangs her hat on community organizing activities like championing a health program for the poor that literally left some of them dying on the side of the road, Rahm’s presence in the White House meant that the “new tone” often wouldn’t be heard until it was too late. Criticize the President? Lose your job. Ask Gerald Walpin who was forced out as Americorps Inspector General when he questioned Michelle’s friend Kevin Johnson over bad bookkeeping and possibly embezzled funds. Ask Major Stefan Cook who wanted his deployment revoked until Obama proved he was qualified to be commander-in-chief and then was fired from his private industry job with little explanation. If you paid attention to the way the Obama team plays the game, like I did, you wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

I knew that “No Drama Obama” had that (choke) cool exterior because he had a team that was willing to force opponents in his first election out of the race so that he essentially ran unopposed. I knew I didn’t trust a man who would throw his pastor under the bus for political expediency and who called his grandmother a racist to deliver a mediocre speech about race. A man who would deliver such a pronouncement of the woman that raised him in front of the entire world without so much as a waiver in his voice is dangerous. That’s why I wasn’t shocked at all when I discovered  that a website at whitehouse.gov asked Americans to report “fishy” email and communication carrying “disinformation” about the President’s health care “reform” proposals. I was angry, yes. I spent the better part of the day telling everyone I knew to turn themselves in and overwhelm this sad prank the Joker is playing on this country. I was resolved. But that was just the beginning. The administration has also passed legislation that would allow it to effectively shut down the internet if it determines there is a “crisis” and they have every intention of using the idea of “net neutrality” to push new regulations on Internet content. Yes, the White House has also put out a contract to spend your tax dollars on monitoring social networking sites. I told you the Orwellian “Fairness Doctrine” was just the start. When the President and his advisors talked so openly about using regulation to silence conservative talk radio, it only made sense that they wouldn’t stop there. I knew it was coming.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

To the patriots who read this and will not stop until this administration is taken to task for its mangling of our Constitution, I salute you. To the Twitter peeps at #tcot #tlot #teaparty #ocra #iamthemob and the rest, I salute you. To the people like Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann and a million watchdogs of democracy, I salute you. We will not be stopped and we will be heard. We will tell our representatives just exactly what that title means. We will tell administrative bullies like Emmanuel and the First Lady that Chicago politics doesn’t even belong in the Windy City. We will hold tea party after tea party and no town hall meeting will be a quiet, obedient audience for the shock troops of real disinformation. We will stand up, we will watch you here, and we will hold you accountable for every affront to justice you commit. We’ll make a thirty-point swing in Virginia elections and a victory over the New Jersey gangster-Democrat establishment a rallying cry. We’ll take what we learned in New York’s 23^rd district and make sure that conservatism wins regardless of the letter by the candidate’s name. We told you that when the socialists overplay their hand, America will be paying attention and we’ll be coming soon to take our country back.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Liberty be a Lady

A Special Tribute to Lady Libertas (@ladylibertas93 on Twitter)

It’s time for a break from intellectualized condensation of conspiracy theories. There’s been a rash (take that how you will) of blog “hit pieces” on some of my friends so, as I am want to do, I am answering darkness with light and hatred with a post about one of my favorite “tweeps:” Lady Libertas.

Kinda Like a Twitter Mom…

When I first started on Twitter, I was pretty much a blind mouse in a maze. I signed up for an account because a few of my friends and employees had and it seemed like “the thing to do.” Some of my more amazing acts of Twitter infancy were posting the serial number for my trial edition of Nero, following local services like the parking bot at my place of work, and tweeting “what are you doing?” about once a day. I announced to one of my coworkers that I was so bored with the mess that I was just going to quit. Knowing my politics, he suggested I check “Top Conservatives on Twitter.” I definitely didn’t think I qualified but I signed up on the website and I figured I’d let the top conservatives figure that out for themselves. I lurked and lurked, learning about hash-tags, link shortening services, and picture uploading sites. Finally, I made the mistake of contributing in my own special way and that’s how I first met Lady Libertas (henceforth to be referred to in this post simply as “Lady” J).

I first “made my mark” by going after trolls. If you’re not savvy, a “troll” is a person who spends their time on the net trying to ruin everybody else’s day. TCOT, the aforementioned “Top Conservatives On Twitter,” functions sort of like a message board or a group on other social networking sites. When somebody who disagrees with conservatism adds the TCOT tag (#tcot) to their tweet, I consider this the twitter extension of “trolling.” I thought this was bad form so my goal was to combat this with a combination of humor and links to sites that answered the trolls’ claims. I knew practically nobody and a few people, over time, stepped in to let me know when I did something stupid or to offer gentle advice. None were as helpful back in those days as Lady. Because she had a WordPress.com blog to expand on Twitter conversations, I needed one. Because Lady was so honest and forthcoming in arguments about her associations with people conservatives are regularly accused of hating, I stopped caring how my friends would “play” in TCOT land. I tweeted once something about the book Ender’s Game and she told me she was a fan. We decided we’d make an interesting parallel to Locke and Demosthenes because, as I said, I was the civil one and, as she said, we were plotting to take over the world.

Fishy Emails and Czar Fails

We talked back and forth quite a bit and expanded that to Skype, a voice over IP (VOIP) program and email when Twitter got the big hack-job a few months ago. I remember clearly trying to figure out how to use the thing that night while Twitter tried to work and failed over and over again. @cprater and @kimberlyhaney were also on the call with us. When the others retired for the night, Lady and I continued talking and, though it’s been sparse at times, we have been ever since. When I made it my mission to take down the “fishy” White House site that asked you to turn in your neighbors, Lady kept the message going whenever I had to leave my computer. In turn, she popularized the use the #fishy tag and even put up Seesomethingfishy.com.

I don’t know exactly what I’ve done to earn her friendship but I was on a conference call with her on the night when we first started looking into former “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones and may God rest his career, permanently. When Lady tweeted “Who is Van Jones?” and a series of links we dug up together, there were five or six tweets with his name in it that turned up in the search and all but one was positive (the last being a link to a benign story). A month or so later, Glenn Beck picked up the story on TV but Lady is largely responsible for bringing it to Twitter at least four weeks before the rest of the world cared. Lady was there, in other words, for those first few important victories that taught conservative net junkies we could make a difference and that we had something of an obligation to do so. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for her service. Personally, I probably wouldn’t be around without her. At the very least, my crusades would be against boredom at work and meaningful use of Twitter, not tyranny and the greed of nameless conspiracies.

So Lady “Lee-burr-toss” J I thank you from the bottom of my IRL heart. God bless you and keep you. I’m glad you’re on our side.

A Patriot’s Resume

Unfortunately, it seems we don’t get to see as much of Lady on twitter, lately. Fortunately, that’s because she’s very busy doing all kinds of good stuff. I’m blatantly stealing from the “about” section of her WordPress.com blog (also in my blog-roll) but repetition is the mother of interest. At any rate, here’s some of what our Fishy Czar has been up to:

-          Was one of the chief organizers of South Florida Tea Parties (now she’s moving)

-          She’ll soon be the Political Editor for “73wire.com :” (73 Wire on Twitter) an online news site with Eric Odom of the American Liberty Alliance (taking on HuffPo!)

-          She writes a guest blog for The Persistent Conservative

-          She’ll be doing podcasts for The Persistent Conservative with @magician2012 and @zombieshootout

The closing line from her “about” page:

“Rock on, Patriots!  We are making a difference & I am so proud to be fighting the good fight with all of you!”

I, for one, can’t wait.

How to Steal Everything: The Greatest Heist Ever

This is part four of The Fractal Conspiracy series.

We all fall down.

Ring around the rosey,
A pocketful of posies.
ashes, ashes.
We all fall down!

This is a nursery rhyme just about everyone is familiar with and a great many are also aware of the theory that it serves a much greater purpose than entertainment. Although Snopes.com (as is their fashion, as of late) dismisses the idea, Wikipedia.org offers a more balanced interpretation of the idea by giving evidence against the claim rather than dismissing it, out of hand. If you’ve never heard, the rhyme is said to be a sort of public service announcement for children that tells them how to indentify signs of the bubonic plague and why to avoid it. If you know the symptoms of the plague, this should seem plainly obvious. The plague can be identified by the infected that have a circular rash around a central, reddish discoloration of the skin. Before people knew much about the actual disease, a mixture of herbs and flowers, such as posies, were used to ward off aerial transmission of the plague. Bodies were burned, hence the ashes. “We all fall down!” is self-explanatory. Those who disagree question the timing of the first written record of the song and split hairs concerning the timing and nature of different versions of the plague. Those who have read the series about The Fractal Conspiracy Theory thus far know enough not to discount the obvious, though, and shouldn’t do so in this case.

“The demon was an idea, the demon is awake.” – The Band Soul Coughing: “Unmarked Helicopters”

I promised names in this article and I will not leave you without them, but we must remember what we have learned so far. In the first article, I wanted to give you the idea that there could be an idea so powerful and ubiquitous that it could act as a sort of conspiracy with no mastermind and no formal plan. In the second article, I wanted to demonstrate that if you step back from the idea of secret groups in conflict, you could also see the very obvious course of history; the continual opposition of nations externally and how that influences and is influenced by internal divisions within a nation. The third article explains that, if you take another step back, you could see many things we think of today as secret agendas and the groups that fuel them are no more secret to each than they are to normal people.

Richard Dawkins is, generally, a blight upon the world and a strike against good-natured atheists, everywhere. Being a Christian, I disagree with atheists on their worldview but I’ve found quite a few who are aware that their beliefs are just that; atheism is a faith. Dawkins, on the other hand, is so arrogant in his belief that there is no God that he considers any disagreement to be the product of ignorance, which I would argue is ignorance itself. Nonetheless, in his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins laid out one of the most useful tools for the thoughtful discussion of ideas in history; the meme. Like a gene, he argued, memes were ideas that were transmitted from person to person and existed in institutions like faiths as part of a larger code much as DNA is a collection of genes. The Christian religion at its most intellectually refined and common base has the primary meme of love of God and the primacy of faith in that God above all else. As a result, it tends to foster secondary memes like charity as an expression of God’s love, individual responsibility to that loving God, and regular worship as an explicit expression of one’s relationship with God.

The Fractal Conspiracy in this framework is less a fully-functioning meme organization/organism like a religion and more like an analogy to an RNA virus. It’s primary meme is narcissism. As a result, the secondary memes reflect the inevitable separation from a whole humanity that a narcissist must have because their love of self makes it impossible to honor a God who loves all life equally. From it, we can observe that greed is then justified because the self must be more deserving than others who are less absorbed or “enlightened,” the fostering of artificial divisions because it enables the pursuit of the material and because the abstraction of material wealth reflect the fundamental separation of the narcissistic self from less desirable elements of humanity, paternalism because the less “enlightened” are not worthy of the vestiges of power, and ultimately secrecy in their pursuits because the natural reaction of others is either revulsion at such selfishness or competition from those who believe similarly.

Imagine, if you will, a pyramid with four corners at the base. Narcissism is the summit of this pyramid and greed, division, paternalism, and secrecy are the four bases. As the memetic virus spreads from one group to another, the pyramid is replicated in each new layer. The top pyramid must maintain its supremacy through use of the tools exemplified in the four bases so that new hosts of the virus may not be allowed to supplant the older iterations. At the base of every level within The Fractal Conspiracy, then, one of the four base functions from a superior organization or individual determines the inferior host’s function by relying on its subordinate’s own narcissism to keep its attention looking downward at the less “enlightened” and therefore, “less worthy.” If the organizational structure of the conspiracy were any different, it would divide against itself internally and ultimately become extinct as a meme-virus. But, because this particular packaging of narcissism is supported by four base ideas that bolster each other and the ultimately powerful love of self, the focus of all within it is eternally on those with a position of less power within the larger fractal expression and, finally, on those who remain uninfected and, hence, “cannot understand” what the conspirators hold so dearly that it trumps and replaces faith. Make no mistake, though, narcissism and the four base ideas are present in every individual in every group that is part of the larger Fractal Conspiracy and it even governs the structure and function of those organizations.

In this way, the Fractal Conspirators may act in concert without any central plan because the meme-virus produces the same resultant behavior over and over again. The superior members can readily identify like-minded individuals because there is a common language that the conspiracy produces. The most obvious manifestation of this mother tongue was exploited by James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles in exposing ACORN for its employees’ willingness to help with a sex-slave trade in minors because the pair spoke the words of the four bases. They exemplified paternalism by treating underage prostitution casually as something that was justified and secrecy by acknowledging that traditional values couldn’t hope to understand what they must hide. James’ future political aspirations promised division against establishment moorings and greed was evident in the idea of taking exorbitant amounts from the girls or evading the tax code to take from the public. James and Hannah knew their place, though, not mentioning that those who helped them had been robbed by an organization that refused to pay its employees and whose founder’s brother embezzled nearly $1 million. Narcissism is always looking downward. The problem for ACORN was that James and Hannah were acting but had observed the pattern enough to pass themselves off as carriers of the virus, at least to the least of its infected. Of course, if ACORN was exposed then it must be allowed to wither on the vine. A virus knows no mercy for an organism that cannot survive and help it to spread.

And now we will examine the faces of the Fractal Conspiracy.

The Ballad of Rosia Montana

The simple Romanian-to-English translation of Rosia Montana is “the red creek.” Since the times of the Roman Empire, the mountain has been mined for precious metals and most especially gold. Particularly frightening to Christians is the historical observation that mining activity at Rosia Montana, in the hills of Romania, releases cyanide and other toxic chemicals into a nearby river, causing it to “run red.” These environmental hazards have caused the closing of the mine and many nearby villagers are thankful that their homes and source of water are no longer polluted with deadly substances and environmental groups have cheered this. Recently, however, state-secret reports detailing just how much gold is available at the site have been leaked and ended up in the hands of financiers who wish to reopen mining. When an opportunity to satisfy one of the needs that arise from the base ideas of the conspiracy becomes so obvious, the most superior members have a hard time keeping their identities from being associated with acts that are repulsive to the larger public because time limitations often have the effect of nullifying their attempts at secrecy. Rosia Montana is just such an opportunity.

The current contract for mining rights at the site are owned by a Canadian company called Gabriel Resources. The principle owner of this company is a man named Frank Timis. He had gathered investors in the project by carefully relaying the contents of the Romanian government’s survey of the mountain to a select few behind closed doors and then promising that work was under way to reverse the legal ban on mining activity at the site. Greenpeace, the World Bank Group, and various church leaders have all stepped up to combat attempts by Timis and Gabriel Resources to open a new mine. As a result, the stock price of the company has continually gone up and down over the past fourteen years and, every time they dip, Timis and his fellow investors purchase more and more of the company. Then, almost as if by mandate, there will be news of a development that causes the price to rise, again. Greenpeace became somewhat mollified by Gabriel’s promise to clean up existing pollution at the site. If there’s one name you expected to see in this article, you are now rewarded. It seems George Soros, through his Soros Foundation, has offices in Romania and they are working to make changes within the Romanian government much as his representatives do, here in the United States. Soros has, in his own words, “encouraged him (Timis) to seek a constructive solution in Rosia Montana that would meet the legitimate demands of opponents to the mine.”

But Soros claims to have no financial or practical interest in the mine. Is he lying? It may come as a shock to some who have followed me this far but the answer is “no.” Soros rarely lies. His specialty is creating a web of loose connections and covering his tracks with money in such a way that he may even be capable of denying his intentions even to himself with perfect rationale. Instead, he holds an interest through Newmont Mining, his associate John Paulson owns another large portion through Electrum Holdings, a former partner in Apex Mining named Thomas Kaplan owns another, and, along with his brother Paul Soros, have at times owned as much as 30%. Their money retreats from Gabriel before the price comes down and then returns before it goes up. In this way, they advance their position within the company with each cycle, getting more and more for their investments and a greater share of Gabriel Resources. Perhaps they will ultimately own the company outright or another of their firms will absorb it and the contract on Rosia Montana. Whatever the case may be, the relevant fact is that Soros has a hand in Greenpeace, the Soros Foundation, the Romanian government, and the World Bank Group. Whether by careful orchestration or skillful manipulation of chaos, investor money is collected, used to drive up the value of the Soros gang’s stake, then they sell out, and finally they buy back in at a larger percentage and repeat.

You could call this “smart investing” if it weren’t for a little detail: the larger pattern of the Fractal Conspiracy throughout history has been the unfortunate closeness of government power and production of abstract wealth. Sure, gold is concrete and material wealth but Gabriel Resources hasn’t pulled an ounce out of Rosia Montana. Instead, the gold may be a nice cherry but the Sunday is the continual theft of the company’s abstracted value from unwary investors by a coordinated few. I am simply unwilling after this much exposure to the pattern to chalk this up as good business or coincidence. Soros originally made his fortune by speculation of the British Sterling against the interests of the UK’s banks and in doing so he made no secret of the fact that he manipulated the psychology of the currency market, itself. George Soros loves no man more than George Soros. He directs political ideology from his foundations like a paternalist, lives greed through his manipulation of wealth concepts to his own gain, divides companies and countries against themselves or uses an agent like Greenpeace, and does all of it with amorphous networks designed to prevent forecasting of his motives and actions. Though I will not subject myself to my own critique of traditional conspiracy theories by naming him as a director of The Fractal Conspiracy, he is certainly one of the purest expressions of it. John Paulson, Paul Soros, Thomas Kaplan, and Frank Timis are all names you should know. Paulson may be closer to Soros than his own wallet, though. Consider that those two made money from the same financial crisis that grips America now with near-ten percent unemployment.

Watering the Tree of Tyranny

From Discoverthenetworks.org, a description of the Cloward-Piven Strategy: First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Discoverthenetworks.org notes that an early promoter of this strategy was the Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky who is best known for his book Rules for Radicals which outlined his plan summarized by the site:

• Identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power
• Created a blueprint for revolution under the banner of “social change”
• Two of his most notable modern-day disciples are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

While this might sound like the fantasy ramblings of two leftist academics and their partner in ideology, consider how close this strategy is in goals and methods to what was outlined by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov. Under his alias, Tomas Schuman, he gave a lecture which has come to be known as “Sleepers Emerge and Messiah Appears.” His claim was that the KGB spent the majority of its funds in American operations to bring about a crisis in the United States that would drive the population to accept the mandates of strong central power and financial concentration brought about by a demagogue “savior” whose solutions had the common thread of socialist policy.

Working directly from the recommendations of Cloward, Piven, and Alinsky, Wade Rathke founded ACORN in 1970 with help from George Wiley who also had direct and open ties to the two Columbia professors and Alinsky. Rathke and Drummond Pike co-founded the Tides Foundation to fund left-wing activist groups and he is currently their Board Chairman. He also “serves” with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO. Together, these organizations have tied the hands of companies through extortion, participated in an immense campaign of voter fraud, driven the state of New York into bankruptcy, embezzled money from their employees and donors,  and laid the foundation for an endless maze of like-minded individuals in hundreds of organizations across this nation. The advocacy of Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s campaigns to force or incentivize banks to extend mortgages to traditionally unqualified individuals may prove to be Rathke’s most important contribution to The Fractal Conspiracy. ACORN devoted much of its time to picketing banks that resisted these regulations and in helping buyers take advantage of federal and state programs that ultimately culminated in the housing market and credit crunch of 2008. These groups had their crisis and had identified their savior, Barack Obama, years earlier as he worked for Project Vote, another Rathke brainchild. In Project Vote, Rathke had identified an opportunity to expand the ideas of Cloward, Piven, and Alinsky by using similar techniques to identify and promote politicians friendly to his cause and deliver victories to them through persistent application of taxpayer-funded grants.

You’ve Been Robbed

Despite the obvious nature of what seems like a (somewhat) bloodless leftist coup, this is more about Rosia Montana than it is about the network. The false division created by these groups working within an American populace that revolted in horror when the inner workings of ACORN were exposed instead served the purpose of separating the people of this nation from the wealth they created. This isn’t about spreading the wealth; it’s about collecting it. All of these groups and their strategies have the concerted effect of increasing taxation and then distributing it to these groups. They are what Bezmenov called “useful idiots.” They have played a part in finishing what the Federal Reserve started in 1913. When these “saviors” came to regulate our system of currency and exchange, they made no secret of the idea that they would prefer the US dollar be separated from a precious metal standard. Together with banking and securities giant Goldman-Sachs have played some part in every financial crisis in modern American history. At each of these crescendos, the symphony of greed, paternalism, division, and secrecy were played to centralize more and more wealth as it became increasingly more abstract. At each phase, money was borrowed with interest from the financiers and even the Tides Foundation charges an 8% fee for transferring donations to circumvent political advocacy and tax regulations. Slowly but surely, a percentage of every dollar of wealth generated by Americans is being transferred to the effective heads of The Fractal Conspiracy. Perhaps the worst part is that there’s no head to cut off because the directors of this orchestra believe that they are entitled to their greed, paternalistic because they believe they know best, divisive because they prefer critique to solutions, and secretive because they believe we simply couldn’t understand their “superior knowledge.” The simple reason they have chosen to use the left in America is because this country is fundamentally center-right and leftist ideology is agreeable to centralizing money in a strong state, making it easier to steal from one unaccountable government than from 300 million citizens. When they drain America to the breaking point, they will move their operation to China and perhaps go about promoting what they portray as a right-leaning agenda. All that’s certain for now is that we’ve been taken and that China is next.

More names are warranted but, if you aren’t convinced by now, my furthering of this argument won’t convince you or maybe you’d rather have an old-fashioned conspiracy with meat-on-the-bone. In the interest of the narrative, this article will end with a more complete list organized by which of the base ideas they most seem to represent.

Singing a New Song

I will end as I began; with a song. Simple rhymes have served a historical purpose in demonstrating fundamental knowledge in a way that is easier for the mind to store. I have a song for the greatest heist in history that demonstrates its most important property: it never ends. The Fractal Conspiracy is not an end-game and, in fact, it’s evil brilliance is that it persists from nation to nation and era after era. If we do not expose it and destroy it now, perhaps this song will warn future generations. Maybe it should be translated into Chinese:

The stranger plants a seed,

It grows into a weed.

And every time your garden’s fed

The weed will change and grow and spread

So you’re the stranger’s feed.

 

Greed: The Bilderberg Group, Jeffery Immelt of GE, The Apollo Alliance, The Treasury Department, Warren Buffett, The Rockefeller Family, the Rothschild family

Paternalism: The Trilateral Commission, The Council on Foreign Affairs, the Clinton Initiative, elements of the environmentalist movement, Agenda 21 proponents, the World Health Organization

Secrecy: Google and its founders, the KGB, Swiss banks, elements of the CIA and NSA

Division: The Frankfurt School, the mainstream media, The Council on Foreign Relations, Moveon.org, Organizing for America, the academic elite, elements of American labor unions

 

The Fractal Conspiracy Series:

Iteration 1: The Fractal Conspiracy Theory

Iteration 2: Fractal Opposition Technique

Iteration 3: Data Points of a Nameless Conspiracy

Data Points of a Nameless Conspiracy

This part three of The Fractal Conspiracy Theory series

I started off with a simple question: Could there be a global conspiracy of significant historical length with no mastermind or stated agenda? You should easily be able to tell what I think the answer to that question is but simply asking it has given me a way to read through conspiracy theories with a new eye. Consider, if you will, the “truthers.” This is a name associated with the those who believe the terrorist attacks of 9/11/09 were an “inside job.” In other words, truthers believe the US government planned and carried out the destruction of the World Trade Center and the damage at the Pentagon. The exact theory has many variations. I find all of them to be lacking and most likely false. My assertion, though, rests on a very simple logical evaluation: a conspiracy in this case is unnecessary. These attacks were not deliberately staged, I believe, because Occam’s Razor says so and there’s a much better explanation: The Fractal Conspiracy.

In previous articles in this series, I’ve talked a bit about Yuri Bezmenov, and ex-KGB defector whose primary claim was that the KGB spent 85% of its budget on “ideological subversion:” the idea that a country is most easily weakened from within by subverting its press, educational system, and in general by infiltration and indoctrination. If the USSR was steering this ship, perhaps the captain is dead and the course is set, the goal would ultimately be to weaken the Unites States of America to Soviet influence and eventually a bloodless, communist revolution. Nonetheless, we see more evidence of this technique this week as videos are released of school children singing praises to President Obama in the tunes of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Jesus Loves Me.” But it’s also extremely well-documented that the KGB played a large financial and administrative role in the formation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Iranian “revolution” of 1979, and in many other parts of the Arab world prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, real or otherwise. So why would you even need a conspiracy to convince 19 Islamo-fascists to fly planes into American symbols of wealth and power? Well, you wouldn’t. Why would you need to set explosives in the World Trade Center and Pentagon when large passenger planes were capable of doing such damage and there were terrorists who boarded these planes with every intent of dying for their religion? You wouldn’t need to. The Fractal Conspiracy was guiding them all along. (Note: while the Soviet motive in doing this was not genuinely Islamic critique of Western peoples, the hate is no less real and there is plenty reason to defend ourselves.)

In the article in this series prior to this one, “Fractal Opposition Technique,” I laid out a case for a big part of the pattern being a continual series of oppositions built up both between and within nations for the purpose of continually distracting the world’s people and “leaving the back door open,” so to speak. Not only does this constant drumbeat of opposition play a role in keeping our eyes off of the wealth of our nations, but it also provides another mechanism for gathering a nation’s currency in a strong central government. The Fractal Conspiracy tends to create hatred so great for opposition of powerful nations that secret groups will make their own plans for terrible acts without any formal call to action. There are other great examples of this throughout history. Consider the admittedly staged destruction of the USS Maine to spur on the Spanish-American War. Arguably, a Russian spy ended up in a London Hospital obviously poisoned and dying of brain cancer because he planned to expose a cover-up of the now Russian Federation’s bombing of one of its own apartment complexes to provide justification for the invasion of oil-rich Chechnya. If you look at any such conspiracy theory in the framework of history, the data produces itself. Strip away the false divisions I talked about in the last article and you’re left with fantastic data that describes the Fractal Conspiracy.

I’ll explain further: In the theories I’ve just mentioned, the commonality is a hate of another group of people that is funded by intelligence of a foreign power and then allowed to foster on common news stories. Whether explicitly involved or not, the news media’s constant attention to conflict between groups allows for this hatred to be nurtured without constant instruction or a central plan. When one of these groups becomes so consumed by hatred and convinced that physical attack is their best means of expression, they will attack a symbolic target of their opposition in a way that is so horrifying as to compel their target group to respond with even greater force. If the two groups have a vastly different amount of power, you get the total military destruction of Iraq or Chechnya. If the two groups are similar in power and military strength, you get the constant conflict and misery of the Middle East. Either way, the masses and the governments behind them will sacrifice liberty and wealth to strong central control and demand the purchase of weapons. Either way, the Fractal Conspiracy wins.

Let’s look at some contemporary conspiracy theories with the same eye:

H1N1 Vaccine - Some citizens are concerned that the government will make the use of the formerly-named “swine flu” vaccine mandatory and will use RFID tags to track those who have taken it. This is especially frightening to Christians because, in the Book of Revelations, the mark of the beast is written on either the right hand or the forehead and that’s exactly where the locator bracelet is going to go. Analysis: those who favor mandatory vaccinations and tracking do so because they have been convinced by corporate health representatives and the World Health Organization that H1N1 represents a global pandemic that will kill potentially billions if unchecked. Those who oppose mandatory vaccinations do so because they claim (correctly, in my opinion) that it is relatively untested, might kill more people than the flu itself like it did in the 1970s, and tracking is an unnecessary breach of liberty. Conclusion: International financiers like George Soros are putting billions of dollars into biotech stocks pushing the pandemic scare and opposition to the vaccine is making it easy to identify those who oppose the Fractal Conspiracy in at least one way.

Obama’s Internal Police Force – Barack Obama made it a campaign promise that he would build a civilian army at least as well-funded as the current military. As President, he signed the GIVE Act that would lay a foundation for a large organization that would either be a part or in the model of AmeriCorps. Analysis: Those who favor such an organization point out that it will be capable of doing large amounts of good by spreading “volunteerism” (in quotes because paid activism doesn’t fit the definition, in my opinion) and effecting social change. Opponents stress first that, even if such an organization is entirely based on good intentions, it is nonetheless a completely extra-constitutional arrangement that serves to further disseminate the political views of its founding ideology. Second, even if the motives of those who desire such a force are perfectly noble, it could be a powerful weapon in the hands of a less-principle group of successors as a sort of domestic privacy-violation machine with millions of eyes and the potential to become militarized. Conclusion: Germany, modern Russia, and other historical examples prove that large, domestic groups with a seemingly noble foundation can be tools of internal division and are often hijacked by demagogues. The Fractal Conspiracy operates on internally dividing the hegemonic winners of extra-national conflicts after their victory becomes clear.

The New World Order - George H. W. Bush became the first leader of a Western democracy to endorse the idea that the coming decades would bring about the (positive) alignment of major powers with a single economic and political body. The United Nations is typically the seat of political power in these theories and the G-20 (formerly G-8, formerly G-7) will usurp the economic sovereignty of member nations. Analysis: While it is undeniable that the United States of America is ceding more and more power to international bodies like the United Nations, the G-20, and the North American Union, proponents say that such a future is inevitable in an age where you can be physically anywhere in the world in less than a day and communication infrastructure makes the virtual time less than a second. Opponents point out that this often comes at a cost to individual and national liberty, that it is often in direct conflict with founding documents like the Constitution, and this “eventuality” points in many religions to the “end times” or the beginning of a similarly terrible conflict. Conclusion: There is absolutely no conspiracy necessary to explain globalism but the motive for it is the ultimate expression of the Fractal Conspiracy in many ways. It provides a foil to liberty-minded people the world over and a false umbrella under which conflict will continue just as it has with the United Nations. The New World Order will simply be another way to collect wealth in a central place so that is easier to process into the hands of the Fractal Conspiracy’s true benefactors.

In all of these examples, political agenda of one group creates such fear and opposition in a group of people that they will inevitably form their own secret cabals and plans for dealing with them. The formation of these groups will become known to their opposition who will do the same. It is important that the modern “mother of all conspiracy theories,” the 9/11 truther movement, is perhaps the best example of this. Soviet nudging by the KGB inspired a hatred of America that was fed by US involvement in the Middle East. Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda were formed to deal with the perceived threat of American culture and influence threatening Islam. Established “conservative” (again in quotes because their purpose is counter to the philosophy) cabals like the Skull and Bones produced members that reacted predictably to terrorist violence and groups formed that were counter to their perceived internal threat like the Soros-funded Moveon.org. The cycle repeats itself at every level, like a fractal. The Fractal Conspiracy requires division within divisions within divisions. In this way, a populace in constant conflict is ripe for the exploitation of those who see the bigger picture and profit from it, giving them no reason to expose this headless snake if they do not possess the ethical fortitude to do so.

The data points tell us that The Fractal Conspiracy is defined by a rather simple formula: greed for the wealth of nations transferred to a learned few who recognize the false divisions they help to foster and justified by the idea that their vision of humanity is superior to those they subjugate. Like all fractals, the staggering complexity of patterns within patterns represented as fourth-dimensional graphic phenomenon, this conspiracy with no mastermind is simply defined by a formula of a common ideology that is every bit as twisted as its results. Death and conflict are not enemies of the Fractal Conspiracy who sees them as parts of human nature, inseparable from human history, and ultimately a way to profit by collecting the wealth and other liberties of those who are not as “enlightened” as they are.

Few have been as daring as science-fiction author H.G. Wells in describing the central formula of the Fractal Conspiracy. His writings about the “open conspiracy” of the “New World Order” illustrate the base arrogance of the idea in a way that gives me pause. I wonder if Wells intended to provide the masses a backdoor method for educating themselves on the greatest heist in history or if this was a genuine slip of a man so arrogantly involved in the process that he was not worried that his writings would be reviewed and called what they were. He described the ideology which he claimed as his own that it was unnecessary to keep such plans to himself. He called for socialism as a means to control the distribution of wealth and also as a way to prevent such liberties that would ultimately lead the expression of discontent with that system and its collapse. To do so, he sought to inform the like-minded that these goals were best accomplished by creating an endless dictatorship within the capitalist Western powers of bureaucracies which usurped the power of publically elected officials and replaced it with lifetime appointments that ruled by the decree of regulation. In this way, the populace would lose their will to fight a behemoth government that constantly filtered the wealth of the creative masses to their baron-masters who could use the tools of the state and a complicit media to drown out any threat to this coup from within. Thanks in large part to thinkers like Wells, the Fractal Conspiracy now had an end-game with no end. In fact, if I’m correct and the Fractal Conspiracy is a simple collection of disastrous beliefs, Wells provided the closest thing it has to a mastermind: a paternalist vision of central order through control that is amorphous, powerful unlike any social mechanism in history, and capable of losing any one of its heads to respond with ten more.

If I’m right, we’d expect the Fractal Conspiracy to produce smaller versions of this idea in society that we can observe having each of those effects. Like the game of telephone, the original message will be a bit scrambled, it won’t exactly fit our definitions, but, like a fractal, the pattern will be unmistakably clear. We’ll owe a great debt of gratitude to Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe, and Hanna Giles if this is the turning point in history where the Fractal Conspiracy is exposed and defeated. Their work in exposing corruption around the Obama White House has so far brought the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now), and their unwitting allies in the major media squarely into view. Non-governmental groups like ACORN and SEIU (Service Employees International Union) are partnering with Executive-branch powers to take taxpayer money and use it so support a common political agenda of liberal/progressive expansion of federal powers. Not reliant on the media, alone, the White House has also sought the help of the NEA to support propaganda in the guise of art, again with taxpayer money. When ACORN was exposed as an organization that would almost uniformly, in any of its offices, offer tax help to launder money from an underage sex-slave-trade operation into a like-minded political campaign, the Census broke ties with them, Congress passed legislation to defund them, and the IRS began an investigation. But, low and behold, they shifted the financial focus to their sister organization, the SEIU, and Breitbart’s biggovernment.com has found that FEMA money for such non-related tasks as fire control and prevention is being given to ACORN. The pattern is complex and it will, over time, become so prevalent that stopping it seems like a tireless battle. The Fractal Conspiracy exists within the framework of these organizations and the same rules apply. There is no such thing as corruption if you believe that your task is so important that the ends justify the means. There is no such thing as corruption if you believe you are opposed by powerful groups that you simply must defeat and the media provides people in groups like ACORN with foils like Freedomworks and the “angry, evil mob” spurred on by “corporate shills” like “the racist Glenn Beck” and “greedy Republicans. All the while, ACORN, SEIU, and the White House are simply making it easier for the real thieves of the Fractal Conspiracy to steal the wealth of the United States.

As a quick note, yes, the disinformation techniques of the Fractal Conspiracy do extend down to the true-believers who aren’t on the take. Just like Van Jones, President Obama’s “Green Czar,” admitted truther, and communist, took on Glenn Beck through colorofchange.org under the false pretense of racism, Twitter is a great place to observe the hateful disinformation on a personal level. I am called a racist on a daily basis which is somewhat ridiculous for this father of two biracial children. I have been accused of being “a racist who did jail time for beating up Hispanics in Ohio,” another baseless charge counteracted by a simple criminal records search. Most recently, an angry, self-described “liberal” twitterer took offense to my challenge of her open challenge to be debated. A day later, she called a manager in another department of the division I work in. Thankfully, Twitter does log these conversations. When she told the manager that I had referenced “sex with animals,” I showed my reply to her that her partisan bleating reminded me of the quote “four legs good, two legs baaaad,” from Orwell’s Animal Farm. When I challenged that her unemployment was a result of bad economic policy by the current administration, she answered by saying that next I would make fun of the illness and death of her family members. She repeated this charge to the manager as if I had said it. Again, these things are logged. (Note: upon review, the user has protected and erased some of her more damning tweets but you can see them all by searching twitter for “rdickerhoof nakedaxiom“) The Fractal formula transmits its way down through the behavior of the individual’s perceived leader. I have responded previously to charges by Nancy Pelosi that conservatives are “astroturf” “paid activists” and the White House’s call for you to report your neighbor for talking with them and disagreeing with the Administration’s assessment of their claims. The formula, in other words, needs no hardened infrastructure to be transmitted and ideological blindness can cause one to perpetuate it even without a personal share of the fiat-cash cow.

There is a belief in some Christian sects that to name a disease gives it power. This is why they seek to avoid doctors and favor the use of prayer. I believe that God gave us the gift of language and that naming a disease gives those who wish to cure it a common framework for discussing both successful and unsuccessful techniques. I have now given you the central formula is what I have chosen to call “The Fractal Conspiracy.” I do this, not because I wish to give it power, but because we need a way to discuss a strategy that we find in every secret group and allied secretive societies that exist in every government and every segment of society that deals with the transfer and distribution of wealth. A fiat currency allows these movements to be free from any solid validation of their actual worth and instead to operate above anything approaching a sensible, objective set of countermeasures. Hence, the Fractal Conspiracy is the only name I can find that fits. If there is no mastermind and no single document that describes this phenomenon, I will do so. I gave a speech this last weekend (links: video, somewhat non-matching text) in which I told an audience of libertarian-minded constitutionalists, many of whom were affiliated with various Tea Party groups, that anti-capitalist protestors at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit were actually protesting the same thing but most likely had a negative opinion of Tea Parties. In documenting my theory of the Fractal Conspiracy, I hope to give a rallying cry that talks around the false divisions we’ve been indoctrinated with by our would-be masters. People like Breitbart, O’Keefe, and Giles along with blogger and writer Michelle Malkin (links: blog, book Culture of Corruption) describe the heads of it as they appear. If we are to defeat the Fractal Conspiracy, we must also know it by its pattern so that we are ready to recognize the ten heads that appear to replace lost faces like ACORN and give them a similar fate. We must collect and share data and I hope this gives you a way to give that data some meaning.

The next article will be entitled “How to Steal Everything: The Greatest Heist Ever.” Names will be named.

(Other articles in the series:”The Fractal Conspiracy Theory” “Fractal Opposition Technique” “Please Warn China” “How to Steal Everything: The Greatest Heist Ever” ““Ending the Theft of History”)

Continental Congress Questions Part 1

Answers to Questions Regarding the We the People Continental Congress – by Ron Dickerhoof Jr., candidate from the State of Ohio

America is facing a Constitutional Crisis. Are there any of the petitions for redress that you have a specific idea of a remedy for?  What other issues, outside of the petitions, are important to you?  What ideas do you have to discuss at the Continental Congress that could serve to restore our Republic?

In each case, the redress of the seven petitions of grievance must be constitutionally sanctioned or the answer will be every bit as bad as the realties they are meant to question. The Constitution describes the power to create courts subordinate to the Supreme Court. In these times our leaders, a term I use more out of convenience than respect and deference, are operating so far out of the bounds of the rule-of-law that a Court of Redress is in order. No regional court in existence is properly situated to answer for crimes and liabilities inflicted upon the people of an entire nation and the Supreme Court has proven ineffective at handling even simple questions of constitutional legality. While the Supreme Court must remain in a position to review decisions of the Court of Redress, the principle of its formation is more important than the speculative act of considering the High Court’s reaction to it. The Court of Redress must consist of both a criminal and civil body that answers petitions with opinions and have only the power to compel punishment and remuneration from the federal government itself and its officials in all three branches. While it would be considerably more difficult to achieve politically, it is no less desirable to seek a constitutional amendment that makes the membership of the Court of Redress not a matter of appointment but of election in the fashion of republican representation as it is in the House and Senate but with the extra lesson of stricter term limits made very explicit in its founding language. Each of the seven petitions, in my opinion, would require both prosecution and compensation to serve the purpose of justice and just compensation. As for specific remedies, I can only say that there is no way to regain for ourselves what has been taken from us through violation of the Constitution and the principle of the rule of law. It is not to us that the redress of grievances will be much of a remedy but to successive generations of American citizens. For their sake, I would hope that the bare minimum judgment would be the removal from office of all who have broken the law and the forfeiture of the government’s illegal means of procurement as just compensation for us is an unimaginable cost.

That being said, I believe there is also a Constitutional basis for at least two additional grievances. The first would be to demand redress for the surrendering of sovereignty to foreign powers in addition to the existing petition concerning the North American Union. In just the past few days, we’ve seen the President of the United States making overtures to both the United Nations and the G-20 Summit to surrender our constitutional rights to foreign powers. Second, I think a petition for a redress of grievances is in order when it comes to the subject of dereliction of duties of our representatives in the House and Senate. Congress should not pass laws and the President should not sign into law any bill that they have not written, read, or made available to the people to review. This is not only a violation of campaign promise, simple respect for the citizens, and the oath of office, but Article VI of the Constitution demands the oath of office. That oath requires faithful execution of duties and the preservation and defense of the Constitution. Making citizens subject to bills that are not understood by anyone who takes this oath is certainly not faithful execution and, obviously, anyone guilty of such is not defending the Constitution to “the best of (their) ability.”
In light of the current economic situation, what are your views on our monetary system, and how should we proceed if we want to restore sound money and a true free market system as our fore fathers intended?

There are two ways to envision “money.” The first is that money is a resource, like any other. In this model, the supply can be increased or decreased. This requires economists to figure out what amount of money is best in a given situation. It requires that we keep a close eye on things like interest rates and inflation. It requires constant tinkering and you’re ultimately left with a choice between two devils: government control subject to political whims and shifting ideas or control by an independent body that is subject to its own ideology, greed, and potential for corruption. Or there’s another way to look at money. It can be a representation of a thing of value that facilitates free trade and barter between people. In this model, money must have a standard like a precious metal or something similarly timeless and it cannot be manipulated but serves the people. This is what Lincoln meant by the Greenback – the green paper was backed by gold. The bankers of Europe despised Lincoln and the gold-standard dollar because it prevented them from manipulating our American currency. If we return to a currency that has a real, tangible value, we will deprive today’s fiscal tyrants and manipulators of their greatest weapon; arbitrary control.
Since the petitions address grievances that are constitutional violations, a remedy for many of them would be to restore constitutional order.  With that in mind, it seems the real problem at hand is the tyrannical government.  What ideas do you have to peacefully resolve this tyranny and put the power in the hands of the people? 

I think it’s too easy to stay in the frame of mind that new legislation is bad legislation. In 1789, the Constitution was new legislation and it still stands as the single greatest work of law in human history. That being said, we have federal legislation, and let’s not forget regulation, that would take many lifetimes to prune of extra-constitutional authority and waste. That gives us a few options. We can either challenge these laws in the courts one at a time like those who would typically oppose us in such an effort do, we can do something reactionary and radical and just find some way to toss out categories of these laws wholesale, or we can learn a lesson from the Constitution’s most consistent principle. The best law is that which limits the scope of the enforcing body. We need to think about supporting and passing legislation that requires that the federal government must continually review laws and regulations in a set period of time and prevent them from lumping separate statutes together so that representatives and constituents have time to review even separate pieces of a single act on their own merits. This process must be continual, have a structure that is clearly defined and crystal clear on requiring due diligence of elected officials and courts in this process, and it must use technology and sunshine principles to make the process open to any citizen who cares to look.
The 10th amendment states that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the States or to the people.  In the federal government’s plan to gain control of, and authority over, almost everything in our lives, what can be done to remind them and us of their proper role. What should we do to restore the 10th amendment and the principles of our founding documents?

 

In a word: talk. In three words: don’t shut up. So much has been done in the last 80 years to silence patriots and even Americans who have the “nerve” to question those in the seats of power. We have been called crazy, attacked personally, and intimidated to the point where our media, intellectual elite, and academics were largely shocked at the volume of the reaction that this soft (and sometimes very hard) tyranny earned. In the last six months, I’ve participated in protests, I’ve started writing a great amount of material on this subject including a health care plan of my own that I based on the idea that states, not the federal government, improved the welfare system and they’re surely a better bet to do the same for healthcare, and I’ve been a part of the energy that good, god-fearing, hard-working everyday Americans are feeling, now. We have a couple of fairly obvious directions that this energy can be moved in. First, and this is the thing that nobody really wants, we could butt heads with our opposition and meet power with face-to-face confrontation. Even if we’re successful in shifting the balance of power in Washington and in our state capitals, we’ll be trading old tyrants for new ones and the animosity that the last twenty years has snowballed into will continue or grow worse. The second simple idea I like a lot better. We do what the founders intended when they formed a government where farmers, smiths, craftsmen, and scholars of history dedicated a few years of their life and ran for public office. We keep the volume up but now we trade the critique of protest for the tools of the statesman and take this opportunity to expand the idea of a government that limits itself to every level of power. It’s going to take an amazing amount of effort to put good people in office. It’s going to take diligence to ensure that those people remain true to their principles. It’s going to take creativity to find ways to write legislation that peels back layer upon layer of bureaucratic tyranny. But most of all, it’s going to take memory and remembering why we’re here today and what we’re about. I’m here for my children and thank God that looking at them reminds me of that every day.

Of the issues we face outside of our borders, what is most important to you with regards to our foreign policy and what can be done peacefully to help solve the escalating problems throughout the world?

 

The most pressing international issue of this century and a good part of the last century is the procurement of energy. I don’t have to remind anyone that our primary concern in the Middle-East is oil. That’s an ugly truth and it obscures, in the minds of some, our duty to our friends in Israel and elsewhere. But it’s also important to realize that we are engaged in a war of international law and military posturing over dozens of locations around the globe including the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the shores of our own states. If we want to be able to defend our own interests and our allies then we have to be clear that the United States of America remains the first world power that is the opposite of an empire. International law and the public opinion of other countries are not important to my adherence to principle. That being said, we do ourselves the most favor abroad by being responsible and charitable first at home. We need to take responsibility for producing our own energy by mining our resources wherever we may do so safely and charitable in awarding the profits of that effort to those who produce it. We need to remove regulations and incentives that have no part in a limited government and allow the free market, not politicians and their friends, to facilitate the development of new energy technologies and the enhancement of existing methods like nuclear and coal. I have a couple of jokes, if you will. The first is that nuclear power is the only green technology that’s actually ready for prime time and it gets glowing reviews in countries like France and Japan. The second is that if we spent as much money researching clean coal technology as we do incentivizing ethanol, wind, and solar power, then only good kids would get a lump in their stockings. All jokes aside, American energy is the quickest and most practical tool we can use to improve our international lot. A second tool of diplomacy that I think we overlook because it’s so simple is transparency. Just as badly as I want all political meetings with lobbyists and special interests to be available to the public in every form of media they could ask for, we need sunshine laws to keep our meetings with both friends and “not friends” above reproach. If foreign leaders don’t agree to open diplomacy streamed live to every person who asks for it, we don’t go and we let their people be the judge of their intentions.

One of the petitions for redress of the We the People Foundation is on the issue of the Federal Income Tax, please explain your views on the Federal Income Tax and offer any solutions you may have to problems you feel are important regarding this issue.
I like easy questions and this is one. The Federal Income Tax, I believe, is unconstitutional. The most common response I hear to that claim is that the courts have upheld and that’s merely a matter of semantics that doesn’t answer the logic behind the challenge. Even to those that think that it’s so necessary that we can ignore our founding documents in this case, I say there is a better way. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel, thankfully, because much of the work on this answer has already been done by proponents of the fair tax. The basic idea is that the national federal income tax is repealed and replaced with a 20-ish percent sales tax. If you’re not familiar there are other provisions that answer some complications and potential criticisms of the idea that we can get into if anyone is interested or has questions. Let’s think, though, about the advantages of a system like that over our current one. No more double taxation on producers. No death tax on families and especially farmers. Those who come here illegally and work will no longer be incentivized to remain off the books because they’ll be paying taxes, now, too. Additionally, the fair tax includes a monthly rebate based on the amount of sales tax a person or household is expected to have paid on necessities and that calculation is made so that those below the poverty line would pay, in essence, no tax. So, for the first time in our nation’s history, it would make more sense to be honest about income documentation and citizenship. The argument about the definition of marriage becomes irrelevant, as it should be, to the federal government because marital status would have no bearing on federal decisions except as agencies choose to give or deny benefits and those agencies already decide their policies individually. The tyranny of those who have misused the interstate commerce clause like a weapon would be over. The minutia of the tax code would no longer be a way to reward cronies and political contributors and a major source of corruption would be done away with. Perhaps most importantly, though, the math of taxation would begin to make sense. The fair tax is not applied disproportionally and could not be applied coercively. It would be the product of voluntary engagement in free trade and avoided entirely by those who wish to produce all they desire on their own. In times of surplus or shortage, one rate is changed. I doubt anyone who says that their idea of an efficient government involves paying politicians and their staff large salaries to continually tweak and debate hundreds and thousands of lines of tax codes trying to reach some magic formula of economic and social balance. We’d be multitasking, trading constitutional for not, efficient for corrupt, and the Internal Revenue Service for a calculator.

Are you prepared to spend November 8-22 in Illinois listening to and presenting ideas to restore the Constitution?  Are you going to make an effort to report back to the People watching at home? If elected will you be open for public input, and will you listen to and represent the state of Ohio?  Will you listen to ideas of other delegates from Ohio and other states? 

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I doubt anyone who has gone this far in the process is likely to have answered any part of that with a “no.” We’re all doing this because we love our country and our families. We have seen a problem develop, we have become part of a chorus of opposition to tyranny and an assault of the rule of law, and now we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and do something about it. In reading between the lines on this question, I’m looking at it as a matter of trust. I wish you could talk to the people that work for me and the people I work for and they’ll tell you about my dedication to getting a job done right. If you could talk to my family, they’d tell you about my dedication to them. Many of you talk to my God and I can tell you that I have been blessed by Grace with the ability to answer questions like this not only because of the talents He has given me but also because God has seen me through my personal dark times and will see us through the process of restoring this great nation. One thing you can take, though, as a direct sign of my diligence and dedication to this country is evident by my effort. I am tireless in conversation and organization online. I have conversations everyday about solutions and I’ll gladly continue a conversation with anyone who will listen. I have written a great deal about my own experiences, my problems with the direction this country seems to be headed in, and most importantly about what we the people can do about it. I wrote my own 10-page health care bill because I was tired of hearing that there was only one solution and that it had to be dictated to us by people who wouldn’t stand as I do to answer for it. That’s an awful lot about me, though. Can I listen? Yes. I’m engaged in this process because I have every intention of finding a way to be heard and understood. That’s something you only get when you take the time to listen and I hope my care in being as open as possible is some proof of that. Most of what I write, if you’re interested, isn’t aimed at people I’d expect to agree with. To do that, I’ve had to learn to listen but caring honestly about the people of this country doesn’t give me much of a choice.
Which part of which founding document means the most to you?  Why?  What are the principals behind that particular passage? 

 

I think the idea of picking a single founding document is a bit problematic in the same way that picking a favorite finger would be. What would you do with only your favorite finger? Instead, I’m going to give you a chorus that runs through the principle three documents that I cherish; the Declaration of Independence which gave us the idea of country, the Constitution that gave that idea a name and shape, and the Bill of Rights which guarantees the people of this nation those liberties which are so important as to be named explicitly so that no person should be permitted even the potential to ignore them. That chorus reads like this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”…that “we the people of the United States…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Declaration attributes rights naturally to us by our creator and correctly notes that these rights are unalienable. That being true, the Preamble to the Constitution is carefully worded so that it is established “for” the United States of America, not “by” it or “over” it. Because our Founders were aware that the first rights to be taken by tyrants are that of faith and expression and that failing to explicitly protect the right of open communication could ultimately lead to the manipulation of the words of the Declaration and Constitution, diligence to this chorus meant that the First Amendment had the strongest wording and even includes the specific mention of redress. The principle that underlies all of this is God-given liberty. Because of this, the Declaration’s principle is the expression of liberty. The Constitution’s principle is the protection of liberty through self-disciplined governance. And, finally, the First Amendment has the principle of nurturing liberty by assuring that conditions favorable to its growth are maintained. Good government serves the people so that they may continue to serve themselves, their families, and their Creator if they so choose. What we do now is to sing the next refrain of that chorus by petitioning for a redress of grievances so that our children and their children and their children can continue the resounding praise of life. That is our call, our commitment, and our challenge.

“We the People” Continental Congress Stump Speech.

I hope to represent the great State of Ohio at the We the People Continental Congress. My name is Ron Dickerhoof Jr. For the sake of convenience, call me a “pro-life libertarian” and, if that’s too wordy, we’ll just go with “conservative.”

There’s a quote that’s attributed to at least five different men and perhaps it wasn’t said by any of them. It goes something like “show me a man who is not liberal at age 20 and I’ll show you a man with no heart. Show me a man who is not conservative after the age of 30 and I’ll show you a man with no brain.” If that’s a timeline for the development of political ideology, then I’m right on schedule. When I first went to college fourteen years ago, I was convinced of the fundamental fairness of equal outcomes. When I first laid eyes on my newborn son almost three years ago to this day, it completed a process of transformation to the idea that the only fairness we could and should count on was that of equal opportunity. Since that time, I’ve been tireless in trying to push the age requirement for thoughtful political beliefs back a few years so that others don’t have to wait as long as I did to wake up.

I want to be part of the Continental Congress to continue that work. I have been in awe of the American people’s will to protest a growing tyranny that we have waited too long to confront. Whether it’s online, in the streets, or in the halls of government buildings, the one thing that has most amazed me is how much energy we can generate, together, in defense of our liberty and rights. Now the challenge we face is to take that energy and transform it into action. We can and will begin to change the faces of our representatives in the coming years but we cannot allow this energy to remain only a tool of critique. We the people will assemble this November to show the congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and the myriad of extra-constitutional and flatly unconstitutional federal bureaucracies what leadership really looks like. That is where our energy must go.

Make no mistake, though, because this will be a different kind of leadership than people are used to seeing. This will be a listening leadership. I am a supervisor of a computing support center a few miles away at a rival college to the one in this town. I earned that position by taking a group with a 65% satisfaction rating that solved half of the problems before it and turning those numbers into 90% satisfaction and 80% success without escalation. I did this by listening. Where the previous managers had used regulation and punishment as their main tools, I used communication and empowerment of my employees. Now, in the footsteps of the great technologist Benjamin Franklin, it’s time to take the varied experiences of everyday Americans and use them to form a more perfect government. I have been hearing my whole life but to really listen requires response and dialogue and that is why I am asking for your support, today.

I made a brief reference in my opening remarks to my current political label and that’s something that I’ll make no apology for. On the other hand, I will say that we have something like 300 million patriots in this nation, give or take a few, regardless of what they call themselves. For example, some of those who think they would disagree with me are in Pittsburgh this very moment protesting at the G-20 summit, in essence, the very same thing that Tea Party patriots have rallied against; a loss of our sovereignty to an unconstitutional corporate-statist agenda. Another thing I would bring to We the People Congress is a commitment to and knowledge of methods of communication that bridge the false divide that the elite in this country continue to foster for their own gain and at our expense. I used this experience to write my own health insurance reform proposal and most people who look at it, regardless of what label they give themselves, seem to think it was written by someone like them. I try not to ruin the surprise.

Ultimately, though, the reason I want to represent Ohio at the We the People Congress is because being here today is no accident. It is my purpose. My faith instructs me that so long as I am open to the purpose in my life, I will always be where I am supposed to be. I love my family, my country, and my God and so it’s only natural that I am here in hopes of defending them. Do not doubt that our challenges our great and the road may be long but the defense of liberty is never just about opposing tyranny. Our unalienable rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I stand before you today because the threat to those rights cannot go unanswered but in giving that answer we will affirm the hope of our Founders that the gifts of our Creator will be glorified when government exists to nurture and not limit them. I will continue to stand with you as we “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” We will succeed because we must. As has been said before, a single candle can illuminate a dark room but darkness will never extinguish a room bathed in light. We will be victorious and thank you.

Fractal Opposition Technique

This is the second post in The Fractal Conspiracy series.

The biggest problem with just about every conspiracy theory that I’ve ever read is that they tend to assume some sort of end-game. In other words, whoever is doing the evil, according to the conspiracy theorist, has an ultimate objective; usually “world domination.” This presents a clear problem for the theorist. If you’re a “successful” conspiracy buff, it means your theory has made it out to the masses. If you’re on the right track and the masses know about it, chances are the people you’re trying to expose know all about you and your theory. That means all the evildoers have to do to discredit you is not to make their pursuit of the end-game obvious. Now you’re a loon, a kook, and a nut-job. Congratulations.

But what if a conspiracy didn’t revolve around a plot to rule the world or any goal that could be marked by a specific time or accomplishment? What if the defining characteristic of the conspiracy was a “begin-game?” The Fractal Conspiracy isn’t something you can easily put a finger on. There’s a well-known old saying that goes something like “to kill a snake, cut off its head.” If your begin-game was a snake with no head, you will have made the task of stopping your plan nigh impossible. That is the nature of what we who uphold the principle of liberty are faced with. Again, as with the introductory post, I urge you to step back a bit so that the pattern emerges. The Fractal Conspiracy is about being able to see how a simple pattern can be reflected in every part of conspiracy theories and that unnamed phenomenon, not a single iteration of it, is the truth.

Consider the primary technique of disinformation throughout history. You don’t need to find secret documents or names of top-level conspirators, but it’s plainly observable in the story of human conflict and it stretches back farther than even my ability to describe it. Let’s say you were part of the conspiracy and your goals were to put yourself in a position of power. I’ll explore the nature of power in a later post but, suffice it to say, the primary way to achieve the goal of power is to seize wealth. Creating wealth is difficult work and why bother when others are more than willing to do the work for you and you have a tried-and-true method for taking it from them. You need a distraction. If you can turn people against each other, they’ll barely notice you slipping through the back door while they’re busy guarding the castle gate.

The most obvious example of this in most of our collective memories is the conflict between the United States and the now (maybe) defunct Soviet Union. Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB defector, came to America and began spreading word that the real crux of the Soviet intelligence community wasn’t “James Bond” style espionage. Bezmenov said that 15% of KGB funds were spent on what we normally think of when we hear the word “spy.” 85% of the budget, he said, was for a program called “ideological subversion.” In other words, the KGB was most interested in brain-washing or converting “true believers” in the American press, government at all levels, and the education system. The goal was to indoctrinate an entire generation so that they turned on the principles of our republican/democratic/capitalist system. This was not because they wanted a willing populace ripe for a communist takeover. The goal was much simpler: to divide Americans against each other to make us weak. If you are not aware of the pattern, you might think those who help the dividers would rise to fill the power void. You’d be wrong. Bezmenov tells us that these “useful idiots” will be the first marked for extermination. There is a penalty for learning your part in The Fractal Conspiracy too quickly.

Lee Harvey Oswald, an avowed communist, killed John F. Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert F. Kennedy, was obsessed with defeating the “Illuminati” and Bill Ayers dedicated a book to this like-minded killer. Fidel Castro had Che Guevera killed to continue his corruption unchallenged. The Bolsheviks ran Trotsky out of Russia because he would not submit to their darker plans. The dividers among us will divide amongst themselves and others have argued that they are divided even within their individual psyches.

Now take a step back. The Soviet Union is gone. Of course, another KGB defector named Anatoly Goyitsin and Former CIA Director of Counterintelligence James Angleton would argue that the “collapse” of the USSR was faked, but that is relatively unimportant to today’s discussion. This technique of turning a nation against itself from the outside is repeated over and over again and it happened to the Soviet Union just as it is happening to the United States, today. The rise and fall of powerful nations is so predictable as to appear scripted. Spain rose on the tide of its opposition to the Ottoman Empire. France rose as it opposed Spain. Britain became the most powerful empire in history because it defeated France. Britain’s decline made the United States the world’s superpower. At each step along the way, every world power had a foil that used the Fractal Opposition Technique to divide its people. The great irony is that the foil nation, the Soviet Union in our case, did not ultimately become the benefactor of their own hard work. Instead, it is China that stands to benefit from the internal chaos tearing at the fabric of America.

The Fractal Opposition Technique is an iteration of the pattern because its elements are clearly identified every time it is used. Those who seek to divide a people must emphasize the differences in their enemies and, in some cases, even help that process along through migrating populations. They will convince a people through both covert and overt communications that they are different from their neighbors. You’ve heard the arguments enough to know them before you even read the next bit. Rich are to be hated by the poor. Black must fight white, white must fight brown, black must make sure that brown doesn’t get theirs first, and so on and so on. Young must challenge old for control of the seats of power. After this message takes hold, those who become fearful of the “others” among them rush for control of the nation through political means and strengthen the power of central government making it easier for their enemies to do harm to them when the winds of fortune change. All the while, behind the curtain, The Fractal Conspiracy is nudging us along toward conflict.

Take one more step back. You will notice that The Fractal Conspiracy uses traditional conspiracy theories to keep us moving in this direction. Skull and Bones, Fabian Socialists, H.G. Wells’ open conspiracy “New World Order,” and other groups like the Free Masons are all very real. For years, conspiracy theorists have been trying to come up with a coherent theory that links these groups with seemingly different political ideologies, motives, and goals. The thing is, those groups are only part of the picture for a very simple and obvious reason: their purpose which they, most likely, do not understand is to oppose each other. Remember in my last post when I told you that if you know the name of a person or group, the theory about them is almost certainly false? Their existence is two-fold. First, they do have some power in shaping a limited agenda against those who oppose their ideology. Second, and more important, their purpose is to balance each other and breed enough fear in those unconnected folks who find them to be a threat. When you react in fear, you make bad decisions and you leave yourself open to that you do not see.

If you are a victim of The Fractal Opposition Technique, you will be staring out the front gate of the castle when the robber slips in through the back door.