…if Obama is a US presidential candidate, why is he campaigning in Jordan and Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. Iraq and Afghanistan I could understand for the sake of the troops, but why should he be trying to curry favour with Iraqi politicians or other Middle Eastern governments?

Or is he already so sure of his victory landslide that he doesn’t even care to campaign amongst us bitterclingy gun-toting Bible thumpers anymore?

And finally, how will the MSM convince us that it is fair and unbalanced, now that it is so far in the tank for Obama’s campaign?

Methinkls that if Chris Matthews’ leg tingling gets any worse, they’ll have to amputate.

Sometimes parody can be closer to the truth than what we care to think: the Onion, a widely read satire news site read by the 18-44 year old demographic recently published an article about the recent string of economic bubbles (namely the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble).

The article suggests several possible alternatives around which a bubble could form, including this one, which sounds like a bubble which may have already long since burst:

The most support thus far has gone toward the so-called paper bubble. In this appealing scenario, various privately issued pieces of paper, backed by government tax incentives but entirely worthless, would temporarily be given grossly inflated artificial values and sold to unsuspecting stockholders by greedy and unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

“Little pieces of paper are the next big thing,” speculator Joanna Nadir, of Falls Church, VA said. “Just keep telling yourself that. If enough people can be talked into thinking it’s legitimate, it will become temporarily true.”

Funny thing. Last I checked, there was quite the bubble for paper - Federal Reserve Notes or the US Dollar since 1913.

Copied from a Free Republic post someone made in 2003. Worth taking a look at again, especially in a Presidential election year, to see just how far we’ve come, no?

Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.

At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen:

[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]

CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.

Greetings again, dear Reader from the Future.

I must apologize for my earlier verbosity… as a trader, I normally must carefully measure my words when convincing some farmer to buy my tools or sell me his produce at a certain price. But when permitted opportunity to expound on things past, I tend to forget any sense of brevity.

Moreover, I suspect I may have troubled you with all the ink and wax spent detailing my inner bothers over our generational gaps and conflicts. I pray, dear reader, that you have been willing to look over that, as here I shall talk of the things I have seen or heard of, rather than those of my fathers or my familial quirks.

On politics beyond North America:

Now I suppose that there is still a Windsor to sit on the British throne, or perhaps a Hohenzollern who would be King of Prussia, though that poor throne had been trampled under foot long before the days of my grandfather’s grandfather; of what happens in Europa I could only speculate on, only to know that a certain pretender has made loud claims to being “Petrus Romanus, the “Lord of the Romans”, and of what remains of Christians. Whatever that means. The only noteworthy thing I ever heard from England was that the moon-god cultists were forbidden from landing in there on pain of death. Likewise, France, and particularly its capital, were once nearly overrun with those cultists, and “Le Front National” may have become the author of atrocities unimaginable against the Mohammedan cultists.

I have heard of similar unsavory things which the German speaking nations of Europe have done to the Turks in their midst, though had heard on the wireless shortwave that rather than slaughtering them outright as the French had done to their population, the Germans had offered a period of amnesty for all the moon-god worshipers to leave their lands, which a good many of them did leave. The Norwegians and Swedes, on the other hand, were unparalleled in their revenge against the Islamic invaders who had tormented their nations with all manner of rapes and beatings pon their youth of either gender, in the years leading up to the Great Purge. As a child, I remember hearing those wireless broadcasts whenever the electricity would work, of the impalements and burnings and streetlight after streetlight lined with hanged Musselmen.

Little is known today of Russia, beyond her use of nuclear weaponry one time to annihilate the Muslim holy cities during their high holy days, sending upwards of ten or twelve million those moon-god worshiping cultists to a fiery hell. They largely keep to themselves, with the Kievans, the Minksies and Muscovites trading largely amongst themselves and the few cities that remained in East Europa after the Plague of 2042. On the other hand, there might be a Russian or Ikrayni sitting around a campfire near his steamwagon wondering what became of the once high-and-mighty Yanks. We certainly do not have the world influence we used to.

The Middle East is mostly depopulated, save for the Turks, who have turned to older tribal gods as the worship of Allah fell by the way. Elsewhere, the old black gold has long since become too difficult to extract, and who the radiation had not killed off, the rest largely reverted to ancient tribalisms or removed themselves to other cultures, where such could be done without arousing suspicion.

This is not to say that Islam has disappeared; it as simply been altered in one place, or made ineffective somewhere else. With out the magical moon rock to prostrate themselves to five times each day, reduced to radioactive slag… their god was unable to protect them or itself.

Moving onward… Africa is what it always has been - a hellhole of murder and mayhem… and we of the once developed world, have largely rejoined them in ancient savagery.

In Latin America, it is hard to tell what has happened there; I suspect things are not altogether different, though much of the market here for their pharmaceuticals has dried up due to the ongoing hostilities with the Aztecas and the MaraSalvistas. In fact, anything coming out of Latin America has to pass through Azteca hands, so the reliability of anything coming up from there is questionable.

Brazil seems to be surviving, as I hear tell that they have a small export market for ethanol, which burns a bit more powerfully than the black slime we used to cook up from the oil shale rocks, or the green slime (also not quite oil, but distillable into a type of bang-juice) we now grow in glass towers. They have an advantage with being in the tropics where sugar cane grows like grass here; but we can grow a lot of green slime which can cook up about 200 gallons of bang juice per tower per year, and is about as good as the Brazilian hooch.

That hooch though, is still a bit better than the black slime which we used to make between here and Estes Park (before it was destroyed) from shale, which took almost as much bang juice to cook off the shale rocks as could be gotten from a drum of black slime, nearly a 1:1 exchange … and both are far better than corn ethanol, which everyone older than five considers to be about the stupidest idea anyone ever came up with, short of jumping off of a bridge. These days, ruining a corn harvest will about near get you the death penalty.

The Caribbean, and particularly Cuba, has done surprisingly well. It has become the shipping hub of the Gulf Coast and even into old Republic ports once more, and with them keeping helping the Canal open after the Mayan Revolutionary Crisis along with a handful of Republic missile destroyers still serving well after their original life-expectancy, Cuba is quite the star of the seas, and a major regional power. Apparently, Cuba had long been able to subsist without foreign gas, and though it had shacked up with Venezuela’s Presidente Eternal (some stupid slug descended from the first wretch to hold that title by the name of Chavez) for a few decades, eventually the Castroistas that had long ruled the isle were replaced by a more republican form of government. Their economy is easily on a par with the total of the remaining cities identifying themselves as part of the old Republic, and possibly their northern trading partners in Quebec and the New Maritime States as well, to say nothing of the other lesser Caribean city-states that benefit from Cuba’s success.

And to think I might have had a stake in some of that had I took up that offer to migrate back to the Republic… I could possibly be calling a villa with an actual flush toilet in Havana home instead of circuiting between several sod or wood hovels with outdoor privies. But that would have meant having to survive for a time under one of the petty tyrants that the remnant of the old Federal Government had installed over the remaining cities, or under one of the warlords that “protected” the smaller cities at the fringes of the old Republic, until I had found a way to Havana.

Across the Great Peaceful Ocean in the West, one may hear tales of another empire that once was truly great in turns since antiquity, then fallen during the rise of the Western powers, and once more ascendant in the closing days of cheap and abundant oil fuel, only to finally be broken up into several very angry, and very hungry territories held by warlords with missiles and nobody to really use them on, though Beijing itself had been immolated by one or more rebel commanders seeking to destroy the children of Mao once and for all.

Another rumour had it that the Japanese had in those last heady days of food wars and resource wars turned toward the weapon that had once laid her bare before the old Republic, and used it on China’s Great City as a dread warning not to pillage Japan, but I am not sure if I can accept that: for the Japanese suffered greatly during the Food Wars, their population nearly quartered for want of rice and fish and fresh water, and their cities then clogged to overflowing as their port cities were inundated with meltwater from the poles. More or less cut off from fuel, and with a pacifist principle that was put aside altogether too late, they once more turned inward to isolation, and very little is heard from that land… though, being in part Japanese myself, I suppose one day I might test that whispered rumour that while quite isolationist, Japan still welcomes her sons in the interest of rebuilding her population. You see, when the end of cheap oil and all that came with it finally arrived, most Japanese were well over practical child-rearing age, and actually quite elderly.

It is no exaggeration that the famines preyed quite heavily on the elderly, many of whom willingly starved themselves for the benefit of the younger, but the famines and related diseases also took a far more disproportionate share of the children, and young adults and healthier Japanese as well. I am unsure of how they are, as the Japanese internet has long since been lost by satellite (they fell to the earth long before I was born) and is longer connected by transoceanic cable; I haven’t heard from Uncle Takeo and Aunt Michiko in quite a number of years now, not discounting the time it takes to cross the ocean, much less traffic in mail over several varyingly hostile territories.

Now, though I promised not to prattle on about generational issues, I must pause to reflect on the differences in culture: the Asian cultures, and especially the Japanese, tend to honour age with a far greater degree of esteem than we do here in the West. In no more case was this evident during the early years of the Great Downturning, where many of us set ourselves to the butchery of our elders, and then to those not of our ethnicity near to us, the Asians (particularly the Japanese) did no such thing. Rather, the elders there took it upon themselves largely to sacrifice themselves by taking no food that the youngest children might live, and then also for the survival of nursing mothers and young fathers, that they might have food enough to try to earn a living such as could be had. This I learned from Uncle Takeo whom I mentioned earlier, before we lost contact; our great grandmother’s family had taken them in before Japan had closed her doors to all outsiders, when cousin Ryuunosuke was but a baby (I was about three or four myself at the time)… and confirmed when I finally met Ryuunosuke some fifteen years ago when I had dealings with the fishing fleet he works for. Her sacrifice allowed Uncle Takeo’s family to survive.

Aside from the Japanese, most other Asian nations have done quite poorly, or in the case of those nations which were already quite poor, their situation has hardly changed for the better. Though I suspect that if the Chinese were to pull together again, they might be able to resurrect their polluted land; that, and the Chinese were always a fecund lot, still having today about 900 millions, or about half the remaining population of the world. Too bad that they cannot see eye to eye toward reuniting their land.

Yet, the same might be said for North America, of which I may speak in much more informed detail: here is where two once-great nations now lay divided. I shall now briefly tell you of the outcomes of these two nations.

“Canada” still exists as a rump nation with very, very little central authority, coming out of the very impoverished capital at Ottawa; it has little means to press her authority it in the swath of communities in what used to be the provinces of Alberta to what is functionally still Ontario. As a side note, the Royal Mounted Police are folks you’d rather not have dealings with: they are and have been pretty much judge, jury, and executioner in Ontario. That said, they have very little influence or reach outside of Ontario, though the rare story leaks out about the Mounties lynching some poor idiot who runs afoul of them in the badlands between cities. In the city states outside of Ontario, and especially in the Quebecois parishes, when they are foolish enough to go into the Frogs’ territory, it usually the Mounties who get lynched.

The Mounties claims to power all over old Canada are about as laughable as the old Republic’s attempts to reconquer Colorado or West Texas from the Aztecas, much less quell the African rebellion on their southern borders.

What used to be “British” Columbia broke off from Canada in my teen years, and joined the nominal republic of Cascadia (which consisted of the former states of Washington, most of Oregon and two or three northern California), and any idea of Canadian integrity seems to be further and further from reality as individual city states like Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Moose Jaw flirt with joining the Rocky Mountain Union, another nominal “republic” of most of the towns and cities in the former Montana, parts of Wyoming, parts of Nebraska, parts of the Dakotas, and a small stretch of Minnesota. These confederacies are mostly in name only, and exist to repel encroachments from the still-hungry Aztecas (who arguably fought very bravely for their land, but it is a brutally hot land, and utterly worthless for the type of subsistence agriculture most of us have been reduced to). In the case of the above named “Canadian” cities, they also face encroachment and raids from militant gangs formed from the surviving Metis tribes that since the Downturning have made much ado about the joining their cause with La Raza Azteca. This is of lesser concern, since the Aztecas have more or less accomplished their generational goals of reversing the effects of the ancient Guadalupe Treaty which old Mexico signed with a much younger, much more restive Republic some 240 years ago. That, and the Aztecas really, really hate things like “winter” and “snow”, and mountains… which supposedly are gateways to the hells inhabited by their old tribal gods.

And then there is Colorado, which has some arable land, but now has fallen to squabbling amongst the “repatriated” Native American tribes and the Aztecas, as well as the few hardy farmers holed up in the mountains and high passes where even Azteca braves think twice about venturing into, and some of the northernmost counties which were well within artillery range of the Wyoming Guard and the Nebraska Defense Militia, to say nothing of the harrassing the Aztecas got from the Lakota Nation foraging parties. Arguably, these militias are the axis upon which the so-called Rocky Mountain Union turns; the other towns and cities are far enough removed to elect not to have their own militias, and they make a minimal contribution of men to these units - some by agreement, and others under the unspoken but well understood notion that it would be good to have some men trained in the use of arms should things break down between the member cities of the union.

Now it should be understood by the reader that these territories (notably the RMU, Cascadia, and that unraveling patchwork of a “nation” that calls itself Canada) that enforcement of laws between city states is sparse, and that there is yet much banditry in the badlands between them. Justice, when executed, is very local, and more often than not, is very swift and severe. What used to be enshrined as protection from cruel punishments (and still is, in some city codes and even in the RMU constitution) is a byword in this harsher world. It is safe to say that in our cities for the most part, egregious or gratuitously violent crime is rare. Similar policies seem to be the rule of the day across the Great Missi River in the old Republic, and I hear even the once very humanistic city-states of the New Maritime States and those in Quebec have laid hold of these basic concepts.

There are exceptions, of course. That old haven of vice and perversion, SanFran, and its sister city of Shao-Tien (a Chinese-populated city whose name literally means “Little Heaven”, though you’d might consider it to be a fetid patch of buildings amidst so many other burnt-out buildings - beauty being in the eye of the beholders, I expect) have done well in holding back the Aztecas, who are repulsed by the rampant sodomy of the SanFranites and the able fighting ability of the Chinese.

Although I expect that the sodomites and the Chinese have worked together to hold the Presidio, which commands a nice height from which to drop artillery shells onto anyone desiring to storm the cities, they seldom have much to do with each other, aside from any “recruitment” the sodomites may undertake of any curious young Chinese who want to see the strange men across town.

The Great Quake of 2067 razed much of the ancient architecture, and much of the ruination was transformed into vineyards (SanFran’s other great export beside catamites) and other farmland.

There isn’t much to say about the Southwest - now the territory of the Aztecas, who cleaned out any non-member of “La Raza” with ruthless efficiency. It has been said that in the space of the ten years it took for the old Republic to realize that it was not going to win a battle of attrition without resorting to massive nuclear war on its own continent, at least 54 million people - mostly white “Americans” were butchered in grisly ways, with some help from the Mexican Army, until the Republic finally resorted to nuking Mexico City and Nuevo Leon, taking some 25-30 million of them along for the ride, and using biologic weapons throughout the wider part of the border region - a germ that specifically killed livestock and the corn that fed them to induce famine throughout the region.

So even if the Southwest could be reconquered, it would be rather useless for trying to raise any food or livestock on any large scale - it has been only in the later part of my lifetime that food raids have more or less stopped, or at least slowed to a barely noticeable level; perhaps they are growing more of their own food now. Or they could be squabbling for more Mexican land on their southern “borders”.

The Neo-African South still revels in its utter barbarity, and one wonders how long its many fractious city states will keep from devouring each other. Though that wretched rock in Mecca has long since been reduced to radioactive slag (surprisingly through the agency of the Russians) many citizens in that once proud Southron region still follow that cult of the moon god, and various interpretations of his law are cause for much bloodshed amongst themselves. And the laughably small and impotent “Revived Confederate States of America”, consisting of a large handful of counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a wee sliver of South Carolina that had majority white populations, exercise no small amount of brutality - especially against roving bands of raiders from further south who venture into their highly fortified areas. Florida was quickly separated into its coastal communities of either white or (mostly) Cuban population, most of which is slowly finding its way back to Cuba for the better fortunes that island nation is having. In its more wild state, Florida is actually rather inhospitable, particularly with the coastal flooding that has inundated the once prized beaches, and the inland swamps are hatcheries for all manner of vile plague-bearing insects. Only Pensacola, Miami, Rocket City, and Disni Fortress, along with some naval bases held by the force of the old Republic remain.

As nasty as Florida otherwise is, there are a few noteworthy places. The Disni Fortress is a rather odd place; apparently it used to be a playful place to bring one’s children. Grandpa once told me of his trip he made there with his parents as a child; he disliked the experience rather intensely for the crowds that pressed in on him, but he told me that it was set up on the worship of a giant mouse and his friends. Apparently, people were willing to spend large somes of paper money there, and the surrounding areas were like a paradise. In my father’s day, it was a last redoubt for the defenders of Orlando when the Brotherhood of Nubia and its allies from the Marasalvas (a gang aligned with the Aztecas) had stopped slaughtering one another long enough to try to destroy the naval bases used by Republic Littoral Ships from shelling the life out of their coastal settlements. For some stupid reason, they over extended themselves, and most perished in the swamps and swamp/jungle reclaimed farmlands between Orlando and Disni. Apparently, the defenders still stand guard, looking for anyone foolish enough to take their lands they are trying to reclaim for farming.

Rocket City is notable if only for one very large building, which I am told once housed great missiles capable of going to the Moon and even to Mars, and back. What a futile exercise that must have been, and a horrendous waste of fuel. I do not think very many people live there, and I have no intention on trying to find out with my own eyes. Miami is on the decline, with half of it underwater, and the other half overgrown by vegetation and inhabited by crocodiles. This is one of the few east-coast cities I have seen pictures of, and it is one of the few cities worse off than New York City: it gets flattened a bit more each passing decade by the seasonal hurricanes, without people interested in rebuilding it.

Perhaps we should be aggrieved for the apparent loss of our once-treasured security from such harsh treatment, but I said earlier, these are harsh times for most folk.

Now of the believers, I can only say that many were looking to the return of the Saviour, as they always have throughout the generations. And where some tried setting dates, as always, they were proven wrong. One cannot discern His return merely by judging how truly rotten the world has become, beyond His warning that it would be “as it was in the days of Noe”. Nor could anyone say for certain that technology or the transmission of information is a qualifier; we still have an internet, however sporadic and expensive it may be, and even less reliable as a purveyor of either good news or truth, and there still remains the shell of the old Republic, much smaller and still shattered, though as a tablet of marble thrown to the ground - the pieces still lay very close to each other.

Other pieces were irrevocably thrown apart, as are most of the city-states today are separated by wide swaths of dusty or weed-choked lands once prized as a “breadbasket for the world”, only to be crossed at great peril and expense. Few indeed, save for the extremely wealthy and well armed dare to take their chances on the great roads which are fast reverting back to grassy trails for lack of use.

On a happier note, bison - or the descendants of domestic cattle and bison - are coming back in bigger herds each year. They more or less manage, and with the rising wolf and mountain cats that hunt them, along with the Lakota, I don’t see them getting to a point where they start foraging in human settlements any time soon. The down side to them over domestic cattle is their tough texture; the upside is one need not worry about someone poaching them as you might with your domestic heifers, and they feed themselves.

I have heard that things are a little better east of the Great Missi River, where the old Republic still has some power… most of which was used to seal its southern borders from the Neo-African separatists who made a big slaughter of the minority populations there. Of course, the Republic’s soldiers were no saints either, in cleansing their ethnic African population for fear of them acting as a fifth column. The fires of the revolution were still smoldering when I was born, more than half a lifetime ago; that land is all but impassable now, and the rumours persist of much savagery, cannibalism, and other barbarity which supposedly would make the every day barbarity between (and even among) the Western City-States and of “reclaimed” settlements of La Raza Azteca to be all but but sweetness and light.

Now that is something I can relate to, having myself fought in many of the border skirmishes and knowing firsthand of the Sack of Denver as a youth; say what you like of those Azteca brutes, they are determined fighters, and have almost always fought to win, or died down to the last man. One might say the same of the defenders as well, but very few survived, particularly in the opening battles of the War of Reconquest. There are no prospects, at least that I am aware of, for any of the city states to attempt to liberate the Reconquered lands; the Republic is too tired and weakened after 70 years of international wars, and then another 80 years of domestic ones.

I must now retire for the night. Perhaps on another occasion I will write more, but I have to prepare for a trip to Boy-Z, if I am to get there before the month is finished.

- Ryuuichi Johannson, 8d.5m.2082A.D. (presumed)

Greetings, to whoever finds this record.

Hopefully, it finds its way to some future historian in a less perilous time, or perhaps by someone in the coming Millennial Kingdom before this world and all the matter in it are dissolved by fire, that it might help people of that time understand what this present age has been like. By the old common reckoning, I write this in the seventh day of the fifth month after the winter solstice, near the summer of what I believe to be the 2,082nd year of our Lord - you must know that at this time, I cannot guaranteed this as an accurate date.

Accurate reckoning was somewhat lost about sixty years ago, as international communications and standards fell apart during the Great Downturning, and people have over the years localized and keep their times without much regard for accuracy, even inventing new conventions, much to what I would expect to be our mutual frustration. With that in mind, I hope that any future historian who finds this can adjust for whatever comes to be their standard reckoning of time.

A little about myself: I am known as Ryuuichi Johannson, perhaps a rather odd name for the region I live in. One of my grandparents was Japanese, and her husband was enraptured with all things Japanese, and so began a naming convention that has either been a blessing or an annoyance in our family. To familiars, I go by the anglicized name of “Lou”, which is suitably close enough for this region’s understanding and intonation of English, which has begun to break down very much and differentiate from region to region. For example, New York “Englitch spekeda” is as nearly unintelligible to me as Quebecois French is, and even my grandpa who grew up the better part of his life there before the Downturning had difficulty understanding those few New Yorkers who came to live in our town before he passed on several years ago. Those folks - the D’amato family (name sounds like the vegetable) have handily picked up what must have seemed to them, our bumpkinish brogue.

It is all just as well: my sparing knowledge of Japanese which Grandma taught me is probably out of way out synch with the Japanese spoken today after almost sixty years of isolation. I hope to get lucky again (I haven’t been able to contact my family in Japan for quite a long time) and actually meet someone either else from Japan or some lucky survivor who might have outlived or outran the famines and ethnic wars in California, or if I can make it up to Vancouver sometime again in the near future, which has a relatively flourishing population of Japanese.

Unfortunately, the folks in this region are as xenophobic as my distant Japanese relatives across the ocean ever are, and my blood and my looks are sufficiently diluted enough by my European blood that nobody probes into my ancestry that deeply. Father is less so fortunate, and moved half my lifetime ago to Seatac , the capital in Cascadia, where the locals are slightly more tolerant. A sad episode that was for all of us; Mother lost her life when we fell back from the Burning of Casper some twenty years ago - which was a very nasty retaliatory strike by the Aztecas deep in our territory as a response for our joint forces raid with the Nebraskans and Lakotans to disable the nukes and steal the warheads stored in an old Republic army base near one of the Azteca capitals, Albuqerque. The raid itself went as splendidly as could ever be hoped for; diversionary attacks on their granaries to pull them away from an already thinly guarded post.

I nearly believe that the Aztecas had no clue what the nukes were, what their purpose was for, but they knew that those shiny rockets had some purpose, if only they could figure them out. Over the couple or three dozens of years since they overran Albuquerque, it had never occurred to them to either move the weapons or figure out how the rockets worked (although in reality, none of us could likely figure out how to even launch them - legend has it that they were “programmed” to hit targets in what used to be in China) … and our years of spying were about to pay off.

Our team leader knew enough to vent the fuel in the rockets so that they’d never be launched, and we even recovered a couple of warheads like the militia bosses up in Larry-me and Lincoln wanted. I suppose that they would like to figure out a way to catapult them on top of an Azteca city one day, much as the California Resistance tried to do to Lost Angels after it fell to the Azteca hordes. Father told me that the only thing that happened was that the warhead was detonated incorrectly, spreading radioactive minerals all over much of the city, which means that Lost Angels is a great place to live if you like to count tumors.

We were making our way back to friendlier lines, having just crossed over into Utah or Deseret or whatever it is that the Mormons want to call their homeland these days - when we got the awful news - 25,000 non-combatants burned to death in their sleep, as well as plenty of crops put to the torch.

Father never quite forgave himself for losing her, and the locals became even more afraid of those who don’t look like them; he left town, and I stayed to help rebuild, and build up a trading business between the various settlements in the barely unified “Rocky Mountain Union”.

Though I have been a trader and a traveler - at least through most of the passable regions of North America - and all too often an unwilling warrior in the interests of our survival… I am something of a historian by hobby, when I might have that rare moment of time to indulge it. There is little that remains recoverable presently of the time before the Great Downturning. Most books have either been burnt for fuel (something which I am deeply at odds with, but I suppose that a largely illiterate people, has no need for books that are conveniently available and which stand between them and frostbite or starvation), or are otherwise inaccessible, locked away in repositories whose keys have been lost to time, or worse, whose books have been lost to the depredations of time, humidity, and rot. And digital media, while far more durable, is even more sparse, most of it is inaccessible for lack of machines and the power to run them. The few machines that do exist are either in control of remnants of the old Republic’s military (which is its government, by the way), or a few remaining technicians who know how to operate these machines which were once new to our grandfathers, and have not been much improved since then.

Lest I sound like a complaining soul, one must understand what truly has been lost to this continent, which once ruled much of the affairs of the world, and was considered by its people at one time, and hoped for by its founders some centuries ago, to be the pinnacle of what the man-governed nation-state: a beacon of hope, liberty, and freedom for all her citizens, however imperfectly it was, given mankind’s many shortcomings.

That old Republic, she at last ruled supreme over a decaying time when fossil fuels, overinflated fiat money, and much more refined vices were in abundance, a time where oil-powered wagons roamed the flatways of the earth as do the bison roam them now. Whole cities devoted to sensuality and vice sprung up as leprous blotches on our society, and the love of paper falsely called “money” supplanted the more nobler virtues of self-sacrifice and love for one’s fellow human; the worship of created things supplanted the love of the Creator that made them, and so it would seem that a just and divine, loving God who would not suffer to impose Himself over His people but rather be invited by them to rule as their King slowly but increasingly removed His divine hand of protection from over the nation, allowing her to reap the bitter harvest of her seeds of greed sewn long ago.

Some evidence of these excesses certainly remain; most accept that there were such ridiculously outsized oil-powered vehicles, as some of the more well built carriages remain to this day as rusted hulks on the shoulders of the flatways, or those stacked up at certain checkpoints and tolling points between the city-states, either by the civil authorities or by the bandits exercising their right to tax passers-by through the force of arms. In the cities, especially the coastal cities, great towers still stand (though many have crumbled and become the dwelling place of swarms of feral cats, rats, and birds, and others by bandit gangs, and still others reclaimed as towns in their own right) as testimony to our former greatness. Today, it is a massive undertaking to get twenty or thirty young men to help raise a barn, or a dozen men to raise a farm house or restore an older house. I can scarcely imagine the time and effort needed to erect one of those towers.

And it is very hard for me to conceive of unchecked numbers of these mechanical beasts going to and fro on the old flatways, unimpeded by bandits or militiamen at the toll collection points they set up on whims, usually on the pretense of “collecting funds for the common defense”. I tell you that many of these “militiamen” or “sheriffs” are only a badge’s width from being bandits themselves. The sail-cars and steam wagons and slime-cars of today are far fewer, and far less powerful, at least in terms of how the old stories go, and we certainly lack for the flying craft of decades gone by, though some slime-powered ultra-light craft are used by the militias or bandits for spying out the land.

As I am fairly handy with the such novel and modern conveyances as the sail-bike, horse-and-cart, steam trucks, and sail-cars (quite handy out here where the Chinook winds can put some speed under you) and have even driven a slime-car at the brisk speed that can keep up with a horse at full canter more than once, none of these could get me from Casper to Boy-Z (a stupid name for a town, but that’s how the locals there like it) in less than a week. I can only dream of what Grandpa told me about making the same trip in an oil car in under 10 hours!

Or when he flew in a great flying-craft with a thousand other people to Japan in under a half-day, which if Japan were still allowing foreigners in, it would take a tramper ship four months to six months to make on sail power, praying that the winds and weather were right. Or going from Lost Angels (sorry for that, as I have no idea how to pronounce or write that dreadful moniker the Aztecas gave it in their Nahuatl language) to New York in less time it takes me to get from Casper to Cheyenne in a streamlined slime-car on a good day and a tailwind to boot!

It might have been hard enough for members of my grandfather’s generation, of whom a very scarce few remain on the earth, and more so for my father’s peers to have parted with the fantastic machines and technologies and conveniences of their day, much less to accept living in this wretched and altogether grievous manner, but such is our lot, and the bed prepared for us by our forefathers from long ago is ours to lay in.

How about modern politics? Where once we elected Presidents, Congresses and I suppose in other countries which had their kings and parliaments as the highest ruling bodies, now only remain mayors and in a few rare cases, paramount leaders - often attempting to be petty regional tyrants, little more than brigands and thugs who gained access to much firepower in the earlier days of the Downturning) as the our authorities. If liberty, as some ancient philosopher and one of the reputed founders of the old Republic posited, was the fruit of some “liberty tree” watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots, I dare say that for all the blood spilled in this land, it has failed to nourish the roots of that same tree, or it has altogether dies as the direct result of ill treatment or ignorance of its owners in the much hated “Boomer Generation”.

The last few generations have become in my day something of a fascinating object of discussion: you see, the tale of the generations began with the Boomers’ parents, the so-called “Greatest Generation” that survived an economic depression that may have approached the order of suffering that we have seen, albeit for a short twelve or so years, followed by about four years of international wars over some issue of one European country tearing up the others, and by some manipulations of a President hell bound to get us into the war to spark the faltering economy, essentially picking a fight with Japan which Grandpa told me had something of an alliance with the nasty European country.

This “Greatest Generation” was set to the task of warring and sparking the economy, which as I understand, did just that, setting the stage for the old Republic’s rise from mere “regional power” status to “superpower” status in so short a time. While these “Greats” were not without their faults, they had sacrificed much of their life to the service of their nation. In the decades following that global war, they sired the largest crop of children ever seen in one generation - the so-called “Baby Boom” of the late 1940s - 1950s, according to standard reckoning. We relate to that generation as “Boomers” for another meaning of the word, the great economic Boom that characterized the better part of their duration on the earth - I say the better part, as the trailing edge of that generation saw the beginning of the Downturning; most of the older members of the Boomers had already passed on to either death or senility by then.

And here is where the Boomer’s children - mostly the “Doomers” born in the 1970s through the early 1990s, and the younger “Millennium Kids” that followed them into the 2010s which include my grandpa and father respectively, were filled with deep anger at the excesses and perceived selfishness of the Boomers. I think here in North America, it was especially bad how the Doomer and Millenium generations over-reacted — my father seldom ever talked about those first days of the Downturning, but he did mention those times where the economy was wracked with unimaginably expensive fuel costs, then followed by food and pharmaceutical riots, and then finally the first massive die-offs by famine and disease, topped off by the people freezing to death those first few winters where heating oil could not be had…

… and the sights of people trying to barter their collections of music and moving pictures and pornography and now-useless oil-cars for food that was nearly not to be had must have been a sorry sight indeed.

There is only so much pop-culture and related junk that could be bartered for basic survival, which is something that the average person then simply had no idea about. Everyone was as literate in book learning and technology as they are illiterate today, just as most folks today can get by with sparse fixings, but should they find a book, they’d be as clueless as to do with it than a younger Doomer would have been his first time some sixty years ago trying to start a fire with a hatchet, some kindling, and a sparking stone.

Somehow, there was a massive failure on the part of the Boomers to pass on to their children and later generations those necessary skills for survival - which the Boomers never needed to acquire from their parents for the life handed them on a platter: so in retrospect, whose fault was it anyway?

Given the same circumstances, would our very human and sinful nature encourage that same degree of massive, unvarnished selfishness in our generation?

Perhaps then, the Boomers were unjustly butchered (both physically as well as metaphorically) by the Doomers and the Millenium Kids, and are ill-remembered to this day my generation, who perhaps out of some self-righteous hubris have largely termed ourselves the “Rebuilders”. And perhaps it is hubris that allows us to speak so ill of our elders, as some among the Millenium Kids are speaking more freely about the failings of the leading edge of the Doomers as they pass on into history, that they failed to have spoken to their fathers much more forcefully. For it is now whispered, “When they were young adults, they saw the cliff coming… could they not have taken far more drastic action to prevent the Downturning, or to soften its impact?”

Or what shall we say to our own parents of the “Millenium”, who were so quick to exact vengeance and cut down the last of the Boomers (and very likely, some of the elder Doomers whose ages overlapped the youngest Boomers) in their nearsighted cries of “Death to all over sixty!”

What will our children say of us when our backs are turned? Will they despise us for failing to hasten the revival from the stone age back to the gleaming castles in the sky our forefathers built? What shall our unvarnished title be? Instead of the self-ennoblement of being “Rebuilders”, will we be merely the “Scroungers” or “Foragers” who gave up any hope of restoring the Republic, as we have seen to have barely attained at least some form of cohesive or effective patchwork of regional nation-states?

I cannot say for certain what they will think, or say. I (think) am near to my fifty-fifty year now, born well into the unravellings of the old order, and my sons are old enough to become fathers in their own right, and my daughter shall soon be given to one of her suitors for a nice exchange of gifts to prove his worthiness for my daughter’s hand, just as my boys have scrimped for their gifts to their wives’ fathers.

I can only hope that I have passed on to them values that had to be caught up from the ethers by my parents, for my grandparent (may their souls rest peacefully) were hardly instructed in self-sacrifice by their Boomer parents before them: indeed, I desired (and still do desire) my sons to be thoroughly equipped for the realities of this life.

To them, gave I not hardly a chip of silver for their wedding gifts to their prospective wives, though my dearest Miranda relented and gave them both three ounces of gold from her personal store - a woman’s merciful touch, no doubt. Mercy, tendered with love: for a most stern teacher of the noble woman’s way of the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 31, was my dearest Miranda for our daughter, even becoming so bold as to correct me for coddling her where she failed in her chores.

By no means am I perfect, for the old Johannson temperament of boneheaded pride can run deep… but I pray that my sons, who, God willing, shall continue that rebuilding with a realization of revival of some form of republican government which when tempered with by the repentant and humble hearts of its citizens, may yet rise again if the Lord Jesus tarries yet a few more generations. Perhaps, our children will be our first true generation of “Rebuilders” that will have largely forgotten of, or have no ill-memory of the Boomers, being by then four-score or more years removed from them.

I seem to have waxed rather long here, and shall be needing to get more paper from the store. That, and I shall need to literally wax this paper in a paraffin coating, in hopes of preserving this.

If time permits, I shall write more.

- Ryuuichi Johannson, 7d.5m.2082A.D. (presumed)

Yup, it is true:

If your little wee one has the audacity to turn his or her nose up at curry or couscous, he or she just might be in need of some re-education to set them straight on their racist, non-foreign food loving attitudes.

This from the Telegraph:

Whatever happened to “being a member of the Clean Plate Club”, or the old tried and true “there are starving children in Biafra (Africa) who’d love to have your dinner”?

The National Child’s Bureau, funded by various UK governmental organs has apparently laid down its diktat for correcting these wayward three-year-olds from inadvertently starting down the path to racialism and Nazism for the dislike of ethnic foods.

One thing about Britain these days that I just can’t stop thinking about: as many things that are wrong with America, the UK has always been a few years ahead of us down the road to socialism and authoritarianism - just far enough to show those of us who are looking for it, exactly what sort of an hellish Orwellian nightmare awaits us, if we do not reject thought crimes legislation and other bizarre socialist engineering.

These are inspired by by the Obey Giant series of posters done up by Frank Shepard Fairey for Senator Barack Obama. While those posters have a certain propagandistic flair reminiscent of era leading up to WW2 in certain nations, and of the Communist Bloc nations until the end of the Cold War, they certainly bring home the point of what Obama’s form of Marxism will bring us.

In a somewhat lighter vein, and in at least a partial tribute to Mr. Fairey’s work, I decided to do a few equivalent works, albeit one that hopes to portray the positive messages of restoration of America to her Constitution, and freedom for her people.

“Restore the Republic”

“Puppet Show”

“Break these Chains”

(hat tip to the Campaign for Liberty site for the video feed).

This video from the fine folks over at the John Birch Society does a right good job of describing what a “Republic”, and how the United States are indeed a Republic, and not a “democracy” as we keep hearing from the mass media and academia.

I have long suspected that the emergence of the Neo-Conservative dominance (NeoCons) in Republican politics was a device to supplant what had been the Old Right traditions of liberty, limited government, and non-interventionism, with the vain and expensive pains and punishments of the police state, overreached government, and global adventurism in the name of empire - the acquisition of client states by whose acquiescence is also gained with a bitter hatred for the conqueror.

What is troublesome, and what many people do not see for what it is, instead, claiming it to be all a part of an “inevitable and gradual shift of the American public to the left” as some pundits claim, but rather a subtle bait-and-switch: as many (but certainly not all) Neo-conservatives have had a history of being leftists and liberals in their now and increasingly distant youth who have embraced the grand statist designs and interventionism of their liberal ancestors (Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Truman to name a few) .

There is a saying among some of us Paleo-conservatives that the we did not leave the Republican Party mainstream, but that the Party has left - and moved to the left - of us. This is proving to be a truism, in that as the “new right” of the 1960s grew out of the decisive split between the decidedly liberal Rockefeller “country club” Republicans (most of whom came from the Northeastern “Yankee” states) and those who followed Barry Goldwater, as well as the Old Right that had decried the New Deal as something wrought by the Devil himself.

History bears that the Old Right had fallen out of favour, as much shown the door as the John Birchers and the last of the America Firsters had been when William F. Buckley, Jr., had drummed them out of the Party Faithful.

Actually, we have been here all along, waiting for history and wisdom to vindicate their children; yet, I am as yet uncertain what shall be left to us if the GOP, or at least, those left among the American people who want a strong America without mixture in socialism and its sovereignty irretrievably broken.

The line between the Rockefellerites (now better known by the perjorative “RiNOs”, or “Republicans in Name Only” and those who had followed in the van of Goldwater, particularly Ronald Reagan, came to be blurred (much to Goldwater’s later chagrin) as Reagan (a former Truman Democrat) and his “70% compromise” became the rule of the day to unite the Party, and win those undecided independent voters and marginally conservative Southern Democrats (formerly Dixiecrats among them).

This “70% principle” was based on the idea that where the interests of the divergent factions of the GOP meshed (from Reagan’s point of view particularly - strong national defense, opposition to Soviet Communism, and certain allowances for larger government) , the party would benefit from this compromise. Reagan’s victories with this coalition of the conservatives both old and new, and North (moderates and liberals) and South (social conservatives and the “religious right”) and West (libertarians and small government proponents) was a smashing success in 1980, along with other elements contributing to his victory.

As successful as the Reagan Coalition was throughout the 1980s, it gave rise to an otherwise increasingly left-leaning GOP leadership, specifically, the NeoCons - as the former Rockefellerites merged with the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the party, we see the rise of the Bush Dynasty, and along with it, the Republican Revolution of 1994 which brought in many who empathized with the promise of a new American Empire whilst claiming to want to reduce and not repeat the mistakes of the previous Democratic incumbents who they had replaced.

Instead of reducing and repealing the mistakes of Clinton - especially his international adventurism to spread “democracy” at gunpoint, the GOP became a plaything of the Neocons and the PNAC - the “Project for a New American Century” whose goal was to remake the world in America’s image, as well as secure America’s place at the head of the world table.

China, Russia, and India. along with the European Union might - and have received such grandiose notions as the effrontery that it is; in large measure, it has cost us that very place in the court of world opinion that the NeoCons desire to take by force and by manipulation of market forces.

Today’s NeoCons may well have fallen far short of Goldwater’s standard through its excessive accommodations of liberal ideals of big-government statism and interventionism, and worse, may be all but a ruse from the left (of we may hold the NeoCons’ origins as 1960s liberals against them) to play as political Bobbsey Twins as the Old Right is thought to be relegated to the role of a forgotten Danny Rugg - once a scary figure of McCarthyism and conspiracy theories grown old into as a crazy old uncle to be forever locked up in the actic as a marginalized and laughable fool by the mainstream of the GOP…

In the 1964 election, Goldwater’s once said that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” If indeed PaleoCons are to be painted as marginalized contrarians who continually thumb our noses at the mainstream mess of moderated mediocrity that the (now left-wing) GOP has become — mired by similar if not the same traps as the farther left Democrats have long faced — then it is not without a small amount of displeasure that I should point out that the contest of left vs. far left will only drag this nation further into national malaise and international derision as long as we heel to the failed policies of Socialism and government forced social engineering

The relegation to the Old Right to the margins serves a purpose best described by one late Samuel Francis, who in his day was derided as something of a irregular man, and even accused of racism and antisemitism by his enemies. Regardless of his actual position on matters of race, he said one thing in particular that catches my interest, per the September 2003 article he wrote for Chronicles Magazine (not available online at this time) :

This silence about the paleocons was the result, in part, of the abysmal ignorance of the writers of most such articles but also of the hidden purpose that lurked beneath much of what they wrote. That purpose was not so much to “deconstruct” and “expose” the neocons as to define them as the real conservative opposition, the legitimate (though deplorable and vicious) “right” against which the polemics and political struggle of the left should be directed. The reason the left prefers the neocon “right” to a paleo alternative is, quite simply, that the neocons are essentially of the left themselves and, thus, provide a fake opposition against which the rest of the left can shadowbox and thereby perpetuate its own political and cultural hegemony unchallenged by any authentic right.

This sums up quite well the development of the “evil of the two lessers” we face every four years now at the ballots for some time.

For anyone so interested, here is a link to some yard signs I drafted up this weekend for the budding grassroots campaign for Chuck Baldwin:

http://www.chuckbaldwinforum.com/pdfs-for-baldwin-yard-signs-t-289.html

Some samples are below:

Visit the Chuck Baldwin Forum at the link above to download the full size (18″ x 24″ yard sign size) PDF files, which you can have printed up at your local print shop.