Once I've written a poem and put it on the Internet, an amazing thing happens. It takes on a life of its own. It becomes free. Where it goes I have no control. It's as if it has grown up and left home.
Occasionally it comes back to me, in the form of an e-mail comment from someone who has read it. For the most part though, it is on its own in the world.
What an incredible gift this Internet is. What power if we could bring it into our psyche, and live our lives the same way. My wish to you...
Last days of a dying Republic
Aaron Russo: America Freedom To Fascism You can watch a larger version on YouTube if you wish.
The Republic of America was the first great experiment in individual freedom in recent world history. You can go all the way back to Babylonia and ancient Egypt and you will find no other like it. Unfortunately it is dead.
The reasons it died were the people and powers who, after being soundly defeated in the Battle of Indpendence and sent packing back to London, slowly returned and bought, blackmailed and threatened their way back into power. This video is a small example of some of their evil methods.
The United States of America was born of a revolt against British monarchs and the British corporations. It is important to remember that. In prerevolutionary America corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company and the British East India Company were enormously powerful. While that continued unabated in Canada it came to an abrupt end in America after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, in 1776. That powerful and simple document freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations. For a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans lived as free persons in their own country because the corporations were hobbled by legislation and controlled by each state.
That golden period started to crumble in the last third of the nineteenth century as corporations became more powerful. The turning point was the civil war of 1861. America defeated the British in that war but they did not defeat the real enemy. The corporations and big banks, after having financed both sides of the war, solidified their control of government and their rule over Americans. The civil war was not about slavery, it was about the defeat of individual freedoms and the fascist takeover of America.
People do not declare war on people. Governments declare war on governments and the corporations and big banks pay for it, profiting all the way.
Bill Hicks, a true renegade
On 1 October 1993, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS's Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman was in residence and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down. Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all. It's not what was in Hicks' pants but what was in his head that scared the CBS panjandrums.
Hicks, a tall 31-year-old Texan with a podgy face, aged beyond its years from hard living on the road, was no motormouth vulgarian but an exhilarating comic thinker in a renegade class all his own. Until the ban, which, according to Hicks, earned him "more attention than my other 11 appearances on Letterman times 100", Hicks' caustic observations and mischievous cultural connections had found a wide audience in the UK, where he is still something of a cult figure.
Hicks certainly went for broke and pronounced his real comic self in the banned Letterman performance, which he wrote out for me in a 39-page letter that also recounts his version of events. Hicks had to write out his set because the tape of it, which the Letterman people said they'd send three weeks earlier, had not yet reached him. Hicks, who delivered his monologue dressed not in his usual gunslinger black but in "bright fall colours, an outfit bought just for the show and reflective of my bright and cheerful mood", seemed to have a lot to smile about.
Letterman, who Hicks says greeted him as he sat down to talk with, "Good set, Bill! Always nice to have you drop by with an uplifting message!" and signed off saying, "Bill, enjoy answering your mail for the next few weeks," had been seen to laugh. The word in the green room was also good. A couple of hours later, Hicks was back in his hotel, wearing nothing but a towel, when the call came from Robert Morton, the executive producer of the Letterman show, telling him he'd been deep-sixed. Hicks sat down on the bed.
The New Yorker, 1 November 1993.
Ezra Levant's statement of freedom
Free in Canada
"I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind."
From the Canadian Bill of Rights, July 1, 1960
"Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, was taken to Canada's Orwellian 'Human Rights' Commission for publishing the 'Mohammed' cartoons on his website. This was his statement to the Kangaroo Commission that has become the destroyer of freedom of speech in Canada."
Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a wire" by Perla Batalla
Thank God for the singers
Bird on a Wire, written by Leonard Cohen and performed here by Perla Batalla. A shining example of why all the globalist elite warmongers, and the puppets they have bought, have no right to live in our world.
In the sewer that they have created for us, a few human beings continually attempt to, with the simplicity of children, drag us out. The reason is that they believe. What do you believe? Or do you not believe anymore?
Thank God for the singers and the poets, who have carried me through so many days
when the sun refused to shine, days when my search for a reason seemed so utterly hopeless. It is the singers and the poets who carry me along on their visions and their hope.
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow barlow@eff.org
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
