Bill Collier

The Right To Cluster

Bill Collier July 30, 2021

We believe and assert that every person within their own familial or other bonds, and through freewill participation by all persons involved, owns a right to cluster together with other people on a private basis to nurture and promote their way of life. Everyone who disputes this right has an authoritarian psychosis and cannot properly and humanely interact with society outside of their innermost lust to dominate their neighbors.

It is, as with every right, impractical to say this right has no limits but, like all rights, those limits must exist only where the practice of this right overwhelmingly harms the rights of others, uses coercion, or involves a tort against another person.

A right to cluster may be somewhat limited by the practical necessity of ensuring a right to fair housing. As an example, if the only housing for many miles is controlled by these clusters of people and you don’t fit in with any of them, then, practically speaking, your right to fair and equal access to housing is, at the very least, undermined. That being said, the likelihood of this every occurring may be slim as natural market forces will compel even clustered living groups to lease residential space to the public under fair housing laws as a way of offsetting costs.

Clustering is not isolating. If you cluster with other people you don’t cut yourself with others outside you cluster group. The world is too interconnected to allow for isolation in clustering but it is also too top-down to neglect the use of clustering as a way of increasing your resources and support in the face of top-down efforts to control you.

What we are asserting is that a cluster of people, and we generally think 120 adults of the same mutual affinity group (the IRS calls it a fraternal bond) is the upper practical limit, has every right to dwell together and make membership in their mutual affinity group a basis of freewill participation. A cluster is not a large-scale group (like an entire mutual benefit, refugee support, and missions society), that is a freewill participatory association, which we also own a right to form. A cluster is a body of people with a mutual affinity bond that is capable of acting as a larger extended multi-family household community that can be self-governing and achieve mutual self-reliance and self-sustainability.

Clusters of people may be a collection of people who live near each other and who create shared spaces and common facilities both for mutual benefit and shared purposes. They will tend to be a combination of residential and non-residential participants who revolve around 120 or so adults of the same affinity group all of whom feel and act as a familial community.

A cluster may in fact include people who are not part of the core affinity group, such as staff, people being housed as refugees, people leasing space, friends and family who reside with members, and children of members who live on site. To cluster is to live more freely and to have the pooled resources and mutual support needed to live in a more luxurious manner than your present means might allow.

People can cluster, people should cluster, people have a right to cluster, and as our shipwrecked civilization flounders into crisis after crisis, people will be compelled by necessity to cluster. It is for this reason we assert this right now, the right to cluster together with others in a familial bond based on a mutual affinity or identity.

How might clustering be abused? Namely, we may see people try to cluster in larger and larger groups in order to essentially discriminate against others. They may only want white people, they may hate people who aren’t monogomous and heterosexual, they may hate Muslims, they may hate Christians or Atheists, and on and on.

Scrutiny of clusters is morally justified to prevent these torts against others, who have an equal right to exist and live, or cluster, and who, within the broader community, must be accorded all the same rights and respect as everyone else. But a cluster of up to 120 adult members and everyone attached to them in a neighborhood setting is not a violation of anyone’s rights.

Within the Upadaria project, we emphasize pluralism to such a degree we encourage Upo Clusters, what we call Shireholds as a group and Estates or Castles for larger single clustered living hubs, to actually set aside space for leasing to the public based on fair housing laws. We don’t, however, beleive it is justified to mandate this, although we strongly feel it is a good thing to do.

It is our conviction that a clustered living arrangement should have the following features (these are ethical standards, not coercive laws):

1. It is based solely on freewill participation within a clearly defined set of shared ideals, principles, practices, mandates, and standards agreeable to all who freely join the community.

2. It is not too large that all the adults members could not get together in person and form a concensus about governance, resource allocation, and the such. Thus around 120 adults begins to be an upper limit to a cluster.

3. It is positively for something, like its way of life or sociocultural identity, it is not based on hatred or violence toward others and it doesn’t promote hatred or violence toward others.

4. It is based on ideas and beliefs more than things like race or ancestry, even if its mutual affinity is based on some sort of nationhood or ethnic identity. As an example, a Scottish Christian mutual affinity may tend to attract people of Scottish ancestry but it would welcome anyone of any race or color who simply had an affinity for and a desire to live a Scottish-Christian way of life.

5. As much as it can, it sets aside around 10% of its housing options for refugees/people in crisis and 20% to be leased to the public under fair housing laws to serve others and prevent itself from becoming insular while contributing to the existence of fair housing access for all.

6. People who join own shares, not the physical building, and if they leave or must be removed, they are either duly compensated or they remain on site but their status changes. Unless they commit a real tort or crime, they are never shunned or shamed for ceasing their active participation.

7. Mutual self-reliance and sustainability are the chief material aims, the object being to assure the physical, emotional, and spiritual sustenance of all persons who are members or who are connected thereto, even people who lease space, and always on the basis of offering and providing, never imposing, such help and support.

Note: if done right, the public will crave leasing space from a Upo Cluster, a cluster based on the Upadarian nationality, because it will assure them of sustenance even during hardships and of safety during times of crisis or disaster.

That all being said, clustered living is an inherent right. A cluster of all black people or all white people isn’t our ideal and we feel these can become insular, prejudicial, and self-destructive, but the right to do things others think is wrong, provided it does no harm to others, cannot be denied.

The right to cluster is a new formulation, but it has always been an inherent right, we believe, even if unrecognized as such on a formal basis.

Authoritarian Islam Shunned By A Growing Plurality of Iranians

Bill Collier July 30, 2021

According to TFI Global, an India-based global news service, citizens of Iran are beginning to openly shun authoritarian Islam. The anti-regime protests are in their third week, despite violent responses, mostly over such things as lack of water due to a nationwide draught, lack of electricity, and Iran’s foreign policy which sees billions of dollars wasted on adventures that do not serve the Iranian people.

Demonstrators in major Iranian cities have called for the death of their leaders and an end to the religious system. One common cry is “no Gaza, no Lebanon, I sacrifice my soul for Iran”, a cry that has surfaced in almost every protest since the massive 2009 protests. For the most part, Democrats has essentially been soft on or turned a blind eye to such protests, for instance in 2009 President Obama did nothing to show any tangible support for the protests.

Deaths, injuries, and widespread arrests and detentions are continuously happening as vans show up in neighborhoods and pull out 500 activists at a time and then disappearing them. Far from causing the protests to stop without their now detained leaders, new leaders keep stepping forward and the protests persist. One openly wonders if some Democrats look on this oppression and wish they too could round up their opponents, based on the rhetoric of many Democratic leaders and the press who are using January 6th as a casus belli to oppress all Republicans.

It is hard to predict the stability of the regime which is being propped up by Russia and China and which the current US Administration seems to tacitly support and is willing to “negotiate with” to ease sanctions and further boost the regime. The alliance of authoritarians from China and Russia and even America’s Democratic Party establishment against freedom sees three distinctly different forms of authoritarianism colluding to prop up yet a fourth version of authoritarianism. It seems that what connects them is a fundamental belief that the few should lord over the many and that this is best for stability.

From America’s secular hedonism to Iran’s Islamist cultism, the common theme is that whatever the ruling class believes must and can be imposed by force on everyone. Any authoritarian government, or would-be authoritarians (the US is not an authoritarian state despite the outlandish and fantastical aspirations of the Democratic Party establishment and its lunatic fringe base), would naturally react against any popular uprising. This is the reason why the Democrats cannot bring themselves to side with the Iranian people in a meaningful and substantive way.

Azadi, meaning freedom, is the craving of what appears to at least be a growing plurality of Iranians and any craving for total freedom will be shunned by every authoritarian of every stripe, on principle. The problem for Azadi in Iran is that the movement is not presently capable of meeting force with force and nor does it have any tangible support from any outside power.

Freedom Through Clustered Housing “Freeholds”

Bill Collier July 30, 2021

Freedom is the domain of the free and free people are individuals whose rights, persons, and property are respected by others but maintained through their material independence. While freedom has political implications, and there is such a thing as political freedom, freedom is more like a state of being through mostly material independence and self-sufficiency.

We introduce the general concept of extended “extended freeholds” consisting of around 10-20 or so adults who inwardly feel and behave as a family unit, even if they aren’t related by blood, and who share or individually own enough resources to ensure the basic physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of every participant.

Within the Upadaria project, we refer to these Extended Freeholds as Kinship Groups and their facilities as either Estates with multiple houses or Villas with multiple condos in a single building.

This is a sort of cohousing idea, albeit with much more privacy and much less collectivism. An Extended Freehold, or a Upo Estate or Villa, is not a collective but it does use a combination of intentional extended kinship, cooperation, collaboration, and organcic cohesiveness to save money and pool resources while nurturing a shared way of life.

The Kinship Mandate

WE IMPART THE PRACTICES AND VIRTUE OF KINSHIP

We form small, extended familial groups and practice mutual care and support with our relatives, fellow Upadarians, and fellow Believers according to a Biblical blueprint. We refer to these as Kinship Groups wherein we view the success and well-being of those we are connected to as equally important as our own.

The 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Protocol Eight

This concept of extended and intentional kinship is essential in times like these when all the meta-structures of society engender abject dependency by the individual who is separated and isolated from others because of a radical individualism that, ironically, is paving the way to collective top-down control by the few over the atomized and undifferentiated many.

The all-out assault on the moral and sociocultural foundations for a society wherein most people are raised in a loving home by a mom and dad, and an extended family and community, is aimed at dividing people so much that only a mass of atomized and undifferentiated individuals remain. Such a divided mass of atomized individuals is quite easy to control through top-down social, economic, cultural, and political structures.

An Extended Freehold Villa may look like a mansion with 3-5 condos for families and 2-3 single adult residences with common areas for residents and non-resident members of a mutual benefit society represents a new architecture and a new mode of living that nurtures the individual without smothering them.

With the possible exception of well-off people who can afford all the accouterments of material self-sufficiency, and staff, most average people CANNOT swim against this tide or resist its material pressures on their own WHILE maintaining a high level of prosperity. Additionally, most cannot afford the luxuries a small group of 10-20 adults could afford through pooling resources and/or doing some of the work cooperatively themselves.

The concept of an extended freehold comes back to a freehold as a piece of land and connected assets whereby a family could 100% meet is basic needs. The extended part of it comes from the fact that a few families, around 20 adults in total, who cluster together near each other or on the same “freehold” of a few acres or partial city block, can become fairly self-sufficient.

We speak of clustered housing as opposed to cooperatives, communes, and cohousing, although strictly speaking an extended freehold may be partially classified as cohousing. This concept of an extended freehold as a household group consisting of a few nuclear families and single adults who are part of those families and a number of non-residential members of a mutual benefit society is far from any form of collectivization. It actually nurtures and supports the individual, giving them more freedom than they ever could have as an atomized individual under a meta-scale, top-down system of control.

An extended freehold might be a group of families who live near enough to each other to build the tools for self-reliance such as food and energy production. Again, within the Upadaria project we call these freehold groups “kinship groups” and their physical space an Estate or a Villa. But this is a form of an extended Freehold

Ideally, this concept envisions people in these household groups doing some sort of clustered living arrangement where perhaps there are 5-10 homes and/or apartments clustered around a Common House with food and energy production in the center as well. Or it may be a single mansion-like building with 5-10 condos connected to common areas featuring luxury appointments.

The legal structures to make this happen include a mutual benefit society (501 c 8, IRS defined “fraternal benefit society”), mutual benefit corporations, mutual assurance funds, a land trust, and/or other entities as needed. Two points are necessary here: we have researched some of the particulars and legal structures but, secondly, this short essay is only conceptual.

Basically, we call this “clustered living” in terms of lifestyle and “clustered housing” in terms of the physical infrastructure. What is important here is that if you don’t begin to seriously consider clustered living and, eventually, clustered housing, that you will find that maintaining your freedom and prosperity gets harder and harder.

The very basis of the new authoritarianism within the West is to atomize society in a massive “divide and conquer” power move. You refusing to countenance the need to cluster together with people who share your beliefs, values, and convictions is exactly what the people who think they own you want you to do. Stay atomized, stay vulnerable, stay enslaved.

The extended freehold as a concept allows you to cluster together with such people and build the local means of your own material self-sufficiency, which is the greatest defense against the socioeconomic pressures that are brought to bear when you defy the top-down power agenda. It is the most practical counter to authoritarianism that is reactive but proactive, it doesn’t just slow the trend toward authoritarianism, it reverses it.

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Bill Collier July 29, 2021

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Legally Gamed Elections Make A Mockery Of “Democracy”

Bill Collier July 29, 2021

Storm clouds gather as people ask themselves openly whether whoever won the White House truly won. In 2016 Democrats blamed “Russia collusion” and asserted that Trump was never legitimate while in 2020 the Republicans returned the favor blaming a “rigged” vote-counting conspiracy theory. But the problem may not be “legal”, as in a crime or fraud, it may be something perfectly legal but absolutely unethical.

By Bill Collier, Publisher- Legally gamed elections are the result of dirty pool, merely legerdemain and blatant and dishonest media collusion with their favored Party, the Democrats in most cases, the Republicans in fewer cases. This turns our much vaunted “democracy” into a sham because no true “informed consent” is possible under these shady circumstances.

The 2020 election wasn’t stolen by fraud, it was unethically hijacked through media manipulation and extra-legal legerdemain, e.g. unelected bureaucrats enacting policies that ran afoul of state law and ignored the legislatures. We realize some feel strongly that real fraud occured, and if or when we see extraordinary proof to back these extraordinary claims, we will change our tune.

That being said, the 2020 election, and MANY OTHERS, some favoring Republicans, were not truly fair and free of dirty tricks which, while “legal”, are certainly not ethical. Gamesmanship as opposed to honestly conveying your true intentions, philosophy, and character colors our elections and makes a mockery of any concept that winners of our elections truly have a mandate earned through informed consent.

This does not mean Biden didn’t legally win, it means, in part, he had “legally rigged” the process to give him an unfair advantage by the way the rules were changed and by the corruption of a “free press” that is merely a lapdog to the Democratic Party. It’s not fraud but it is dirty pool. It is perfectly legal to game the system and play dirty pool and to not ever really and honestly earn the informed consent of voters who basically have no idea what you true intentions, philosophy, and character are!

Dirty pool is integrated fully into our politics and while both Democrats and Republicans play dirty pool habitually, Democrats are just better at it right now, although not always and in many ways 2020 was a bad year for them. Currently, the Democrats, despite all the dirty tricks and legerdemain they could muster, only have a slim majority in the House and a tie in the Senate broken by the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.

Elections as we see them all over the world are not capable of being a free and fair competition in which informed electors choose candidates based on an accurate knowledge of their true intentions, philosophy, and character. This is true in Israel, Germany, Russia, and the good old US of A, but, obviously, even more true in Russia, for example.

Is it possible to have free and fair elections where true informed consent based on honestly knowing the intentions, philosophy, and character of candidates can be obtained? We have strong doubts and the trend away from this possibility just isn’t getting any better, nor do we foresee any changes.

Alternative models cannot be created at scale in our present sociocultural and political structures because they are stratified and stagnant. Trying to change things like the behavior of unethical “reporters” who literally lie and misrepresent things for purely partisan purposes, robbing people of their right to informed consent, is beyond this civilization’s capacity. Moreover, how would you “regulate” the press to make them behave without destroying the very concept of a free press?

The “solution”, unfortunately, if you want to stop bad actors like the miscreants who populate both Parties from getting into office, is to understand and master election gamesmanship and legerdemain and to find new ways to reach voters and get through the media propaganda assault on their very psyche. Even if your intentions, philosophy, and character are truly good, so that truly informed people would choose you if they knew the truth, the path to victory isn’t to simply hope your “truth” will speak for itself.

The “truth” is not enough under the current electoral system, which is geared toward rewarding legerdemain, media corruption, and dirty tricks more than a straightforward and accurate comparison of the intentions, philosophy, and character of the candidates. You can be labeled horrendous things even if this isn’t who you are or you can be labeled awesome things even if you are far from awesome.

While fighting the electoral battle, using all the means to hand, should never be off the table, building freedom must depend on strategies that go beyond this reliance on election outcomes. If you are frustrated at election outcomes, the answer is both to get better at playing the actual electoral game but, even moreso, building relationships, associations, and structures that unilaterally liberate as much of your economic and physical life from the control of politics as possible.

The Dire Need For Extended Kinship Beyond The Nuclear Family

Bill Collier July 29, 2021

Why are things like marriage, the nuclear family, and happy childhoods so under threat of extinction and what did we all get wrong in raising our own children too quickly, at age 18, become autonomous beings cut off from the family home?

We emphasize freedom. But most people think freedom is purely an individual thing. However, in practical terms, if freedom is only an individual thing, then every lone individual or detached nuclear family stands as a sole figure against mega forces, like monopoly corporations and the central government, and the vagaries of life and nature, defenseless and vulnerable.

Freedom must necessarily include shared identity and the shared sovereignty to define that identity in terms and according to standards reflective of the individual’s beliefs, values, and convictions. This is not something the culture of today even grasps, which is why the atomization of individuals and their emotional and economic vulnerability is only getting worse.

This leads to the introduction of something we have lost in our culture, not merely an extended family of around 20 or so adults clustered near each other, but a cluster of such extended family groups consisting of around 120 adults which is self-contained, self-sustaining economic and sociocultural unit, a fractal of an entire nation or even an entire civilization.

The Shirehold

WE INTENTIONALLY PRACTICE EXTENDED KINSHIP

People are not made to be isolated and separated. Life in the Kingdom is not just about what we do individually, but how we live with others. Our lifestyle is an expression of agape love in family, community, and collaboration. A Shirehold is an intentional multifamily extended household community in close geographical proximity.

From The 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Protocol Seven

Clustering together with people you warmly feel kinship toward is essential to both personal freedom and shared freedom that shields you from external influence and control that isn’t in your best interest. We can say, regardless of the politics of the hour, that without a deliberate restoration of this kind of extended kinship, at the scale of a tribal band or village, freedom itself will continue to fade and centralized top-down control will increase until we are all atomized cogs in a machine that uses us like a commodity.

When family as an idea lost that sense that it was, organizationally, a self-sustaining and self-contained socioeconomic unit, a fractal of the whole national people and of civilization, it became insular and fragmented. Only self-actualization and the benefits, of love and affection, for the individual mattered.

It’s not that tribal bands of around 120 adults and their extended households of around 15 adults didn’t in some way also emphasize these benefits to the individual. The more healthy ones did and likely endured for centuries. But in practical, material matters, the outsider would see them as economic or corporate bodies as well as social and cultural familial groups.

When people mostly see family as two adults under the same roof or a single person and children, and when they only “marry for love”, then the atomized little “family” is hopelessly weak and incapable of meeting its basic needs without dependency on external structures. When the FEELING of love decreases this “family” is split or when external pressures grow beyond what two people can bear, there is suffering and even a potential breakdown.

In the Upadarian sociocultural and spiritual belief system, what we call a Shirehold, as a community of individuals within extended multi-family household groups, is for us the essence of family and such family ought to cluster together in the same physical space wherever possible. As some say, “family can be anything you want”, we agree, and while we certainly don’t want to compel anyone to adopt our Shirehold model for what family means, we also desire to be free and do so in peace.

Extended multi-family kinship groups connected to each other as a community of such groups, what we call a Shirehold, is for us the core constituency for our civilization. It, and only it, is a fractal of the whole civilization. While the individual, the nuclear family, and the kinship group of around 20 or so adults are essential elements of the Shirehold, the Shirehold is for us the true family. It is this and nothing less than this.

We are not proposing that people who don’t buy into this and whose idea of family differs aren’t families. Family, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But for us, family isn’t its elements alone, like the individual and a nuclear family, it is this collaborative and mutualist community of around 120 adults who have a high degree of organic cohesiveness.

The argument against, say, having a cluster of around 30 to 50 nuclear families and related single adults living in the same space exclusively together, is rooted in the fair housing law. This law is in many ways perfectly useful, in principle and spirit. It prevent discrimination in housing. But its focus is too narrow, it isn’t based on the core fractal of human civilization. This fractal isn’t the nuclear family, it is these 120 adult extended kinship communities.

A Shirehold estate of a few houses and apartments belonging to a mutual benefit corporation owned by Shirehold members is essentially a self-contained sociocultural and socioeconomic body or, as we say, the core constituent entity and fractal of human civilization. Without this fractal being alive and well, civilization will further devolve in every way. Atomization leads to dissolution.

As noted, what we call the Shirehold is the smallest possible fractal of an entire civilization. Our concept of pluralism is based on kinship groups of people who cluster together as a household community, that is, a self-sustaining sociocultural and socioeconomic fractal of civilization.

Throughout history, most of these tribal bands of around 120 or so adults had a form of kinship not connected to blood. In most cases where remains can be tested, where one of these bands existed, the blood ties of their members were not prevelant. In other words, kinship wasn’t usually limited to blood kin. Wheoever shared your values and shared in the common good was kin.

There are potential pitfalls and real tradeoffs in seeking to revive this extended multi-family household community in the form of something like a Shirehold community.

In the past, extended multi-family households tended to relegate women to menial roles, though this was neither universal nor essential to the model. Additionally, there is the problem of feeling surrounded and suffocated or even feeling controlled or limited. This isn’t a feature of healthy Shireholds, by whatever name you call them, but of unhealthy ones. Stratified gender roles and interference with individual spiritual sovereignty are not essential to or an inevitable feature of these tribal bands, extended multi-family household communities, or, as we call them, Shireholds.

But it is true that when you decide to be connected to other people there are some seeming limits on your own scope of choices. The tradeoff of total individual autonomy is loneliness and vulnerability to mega corporations and the government, against whose mechanisms of influence and control you have no defense.

Shireholds would be massively empowering to individuals, give you more say in the social and cultural as well as economic milieu of your life than ever before, and shield you from external mechanisms of influence and control that pressure you to conform to things not suitable to your interests or values.

They would, however, spell the end of your lone ranger life and require some level of commitment and participation in the lives of others. Nothing good is free of any cost or inconvenience, but the tradeoff is always well worth the cost. The benefits are far greater than whatever you have left behind.

We argue that something like a Shirehold community is essential to the individual, marriage, the nuclear family, and childhood. It is also essential to a prosperous, healthy, and free society. If we desire to build freedom anew we have to find a way to develop these intentional Shirehold communities based on some form of organic cohesiveness that is strictly based on freewill participation by consensus among equal peers.

Around 120 adults, and whatever other connections they have as a body to other adults, living in close harmony, both physically and spiritually, both socioculturally and economically, is the core fractal and constituent entity of any nation of people, of the area-wide Ecclesia as a spiritual city-state of the Elect, of any country, of any civilization, and of the entirety of human civilization.

This is a shared conviction and value, it’s neither a doctrine nor a proposed law. The same concept of a single house or apartment and a single nuclear family applies to these Shirehold communities which may include 30 or 50 houses/apartments in a clustered living space with its own economic and material self-reliance resources capable of ensuring the physical well-being of every member. Legally, the ability of individuals to form such communities as an extended multi-family household community based on some form of adoptive kinship, should be as sacred as any human right.

The ability and power to choose and be part of a clustered living arrangement of around 120 adults who have a shared kinship of some kind must be asserted and respected by the greater society as it should any form of family people desire. The arbitrary limitation on what constitutes a family is a form of intolerance and bigotry against a broad spectrum of choices each individual should be free to make.

An entire book could be written about the Shirehold: what it is, why it must exist, why it is essential to Christian culture and a Biblical lifestyle, what its advantages and costs are, its governance in the modern world, its structures and functions, and why its right to exist must be codified into laws which only envision single home “families” and which do not take into account multi-house familial living arrangements where “family” is much larger than a nuclear family.

We do not propose these Shireholds as a racial or genetic construct: they would best be purely voluntary freewill participatory kinships based on a shared identity rooted in a common set of beliefs, values, and convictions. In our case, we propose a form of intentional spiritual nationhood within the larger universal nationhood of all Believers in Yeshua.

Our ideal communities are pluralistic communities made up of diverse individuals and nuclear families who still use the Western model of individualism and diverse clustered living estates or neighborhoods for different types of multi-family extended household communities, what we call Shireholds.

The only reason we want these estates, which are where Shireholds would cluster together, to be more or less exclusive to members of the same Shirehold is because, for us, a Shirehold is the basic family unit, while the individual, the nuclear family, and the kinship group are all elements of this family unit.

We recognize the danger of discrimination in housing, but this danger can be mitigated through a legal limit on the size of an estate, much as a single house can limit who lives there. An estate conjointly owned through a mutual benefit corporation whose shares must be owned by people of the same Shirehold, for instance, doesn’t discriminate any more than a single house occupied exclusively by members of the same nuclear family.

We further recommend that a Shirehold estate have space for helping internal refugees and asylees as well as offer housing and retail space to the public to offset costs for members. These housing options would certainly not discriminate in any way.

Regardless of all that, people clustered together as an extended multi-family household community of around 120 adults will form the basis of the emergent civilization. These structures will endure through whatever upheavals and crises will come because the old and dying civilization that surrounds us continues its detachment and atomization.

The development of these Shireholds as our basic family model and their eventual clustered living lifestyle as a single self-contained and mutually self-reliant sociocultural and socioeconomic body of people is essential to building resilient freedom. The ultimate proof against corporate and/or government gigantism and centralized control of your life is the restoration, in modern form, of what were once self-contained tribal bands.

How To Respond When Reason Fails

Bill Collier July 28, 2021

Considering the course set by the Democrats, it is clear that reason has failed. The Democratic Party has hearkened to the darkest voices of intolerance and bigotry against anyone and anything that isn’t woke enough for their rather outlandish and bizarre tastes.

We must remember that our Union of sovereign and free people in their sovereign and free states and counties has many mechanisms with which to prevent too much power from concentrating into too few hands. We also as individuals and as free associations have many ways to take back our agency from corporations owned by people whose first and only loyalty it seems is to the Democratic Party.

Reason has failed but the answer is not physical violence. This isn’t necessary and all the outlandish rhetoric of the left which seems to reveal a heart seduced by the siren call to a one-party rule is more an issue of their character than a true threat to our country.

It is definitely unforgivable rhetoric when you lie and demonize your opponents while proposing ever-increasing authoritarian responses to your phantom right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the government. But the power to actually fulfill this rhetoric lies beyond their reach, especially if we the People, the remnant who still remain loyal to the Union as an empire of freedom, use the means we have at hand to block the authoritarian agenda.

On one hand the Democrats are sounding like crazed Soviets and performing “show trials” in which all of their opponents are in trial for treason against the state. On the other hand, the emperor has no clothes. When push comes to shove the American people and all their local and state governments won’t tolerate this garbage. So it’s a lot of noise and chest-beating headed into some fanstistical nightmare, pure bliss evidently for the lunatic fringe who control the Democrats. But it’s not substantive and it’s not going to succeed.

One wonders if Nancy Pelosi is actually that delusional in her dotage or she is just playing theater to appease her base while doing nothing of substance they desire. Either way she is a crumb for even entertaining these cretins, and cretins they all are because their hearts beat hatred daily against freedom and against the Union.

This cold civil war, which is not going to become hot because the rebels on the left are pusillanimous, once against pits slavers again the free. Once again Democrats evince a design of slavery, albeit more disguised as global cronyist feudalism that touts socialist rhetoric, and this time the aim is for everyone of every color to work the plantation.

Old habits die hard and the Democrats have never, not since 1860, warmed up to the notion of America as a Union of sovereign and free people in sovereign and free counties and states where power flows from the bottom to the top, wherein the top is subordinated to the bottom, not the other way around.

Democrats have gone past reason and common sense. They are now trapped by their own vile rhetoric into a cycle of continuous denouncements and accusations while disguising and covering up their own outlandish conduct.

The best response is to reinvigorate the institutions designed to prevent our Union from being taken over from within by quislings who despise our freedom. First is our own self-reliance, building mutual self-reliance at the local level and using new web tools to connect and collaborate on a nationwide scale. Second is reinvigorating our local, county, and state governments to openly defend the Bill of Rights and refuse to countenance breaches thereof, including taking legal measures or simply not doing business with companies that coordinate to effectively limit the freedom of Americans.

The entire and untapped power of our Union is able to prevent these loony words from becoming anything more than the swan song for a party that has lost touch with reason and reality.

Don’t Let Others Control Your Narrative

Bill Collier July 27, 2021

By Bill Collier- Own your own narrative, don’t give it to others. People will misread you, ascribe wrong motives to you, misunderstand you, misrepresent you, and judge you falsely. They will create a narrative about you and even try to make you agree with their narrative about who and what you are, what you did or didn’t do, why you did or didn’t do it, and what that says about your character or intentions. They have no such right and you owe them nothing.

A strong desire to experience affection and acceptance is common to most people and this often causes us to be very concerned about how others feel toward us or what they think about us. So we find ourselves as focused on the appearances of what we do as on what we do, which begins to consume more energy than the things we are doing.

Although I often say “relationships are the brass ring of life”, the weakness of this idea comes when our desire for those relationships clouds our thinking to such a degree that we are trying to ensure not only that our actions make these people happy but that they also appear in the best light. This is high energy focus directed at the wrong things and it is a fool’s errand.

When you feel uneasy or stressed it is usually for fear of some kind of unpleasantness, which could be a loss or hazard or just something that doesn’t feel good to us. If in our minds we get a “high” from people liking us and thinking well of us, then we will experience unpleasantness when we feel rejected or neglected.

My life has become a pressure cooler experience for lots of reasons, and I am sure many of you have the same thing happen at times. But one good part of these pressure cooker experiences is that they bring a certain clarity as to who and what should be paid attention to, or how much energy should be used.

That friend who is so easily offended or needs constant attention or reassuring and who essentially threatens your relationship over small to medium “infractions” becomes unessential. In your pressure cooker experience, their expectations, even if reasonable but beyond your present emotional or time constraints, are just not worth adhering to. So, sadly, they may threaten to or actually move on and whereas you may have once had the energy to assuage them, now you just let them go.

All this tends toward a more inner focus, hopefully toward Christ within us, but definitely away from the voices and demands of others. When we don’t have the psychic, emotional, or physical energy to give yourself to meeting other’s expectations and when they therefore cast judgements upon us, we find it easier to move on and ignore them. It’s not that this makes us happy to do, it doesn’t, but in comparison to whatever has you in a pressure cooker experience, it’s just not nearly as important as it once was.

Sitting around playing scenarios in your head about why someone misjudged you or, worse, and this is our focus here, doubting your own narrative about yourself is a “crazy making” exercise. In a pressure cooker experience if you want to get through it daily, you begin to either lose the energy to do this or, if you persist in this, you begin to lose functionality in life in general.

Your narrative about yourself should come from your relationship with Jesus Christ and your best understanding of God’s Word and the leading of the Holy Spirit. If you understand who you are, what you are, and why you are in God’s mind, then you begin to craft your own narrative, a story of adventure and overcoming, that describes your past, defines your present, and guides your future.

You will make mistakes and sometimes your motivation may be suspect. You don’t want to become so full of yourself that you don’t welcome criticism or evaluate yourself on the basis of a truth standard. But these things don’t define or change your narrative about yourself and your story about who and what you are.

Getting to a place where you genuinely care about other people but you don’t obsess or put too much energy into what they think or feel about you, or how they want to define you, is a process of controlling your own focus. Thoughts of what others think or feel about you can come unbidden, it’s just natural. But what we give ourselves to focus on is mostly up to us.

One technique I have used is to interrogate those feelings to see if in this opinion others express about me there isn’t some truth. Some of my harshest critics and haters, who meant me no good will at all, have offered me a chance to see a hint of truth in their over-the-top accusations which I have leveraged to make improvements.

I have at times experienced being “misjudged” and sidelined in what I saw as an underhanded way because I was unable to make certain truthful things about myself visible in a convincing way. I was misread and probably misrepresented in my capabilities and resources, perhaps even my intentions, by people who should have known better.

Each time my focus returned to the core truth behind the broader lies. The core truth may have been that I was not very good at presenting myself or something about me or I wasn’t digiligent enough to avoid a minor mistake that my opponents used to justify tearing me down and rejecting me. Often our harshest critics and haters have actually siezed on something of substance and we should be thankful for the opportunity to see this and deal with it.

This is different from someone trying to define a narrative about you that isn’t what you believe about yourself. It is true that only God truly knows your heart, but this doesn’t mean anyone other than you is better at knowing your heart, nor that they speak for God.

I have lived a life more in public that most people and my actions and words have been seen my hundreds of thousands of people at different times. My life has been an open book and people have sometimes used this to paint and untrue and malicious narrative about my life. Every word or deed I have ever done in public, and most have been in public, becomes a potential for an opponent to misrepresent and twist around in the worse possible light.

The fact I have always believed in trying over and over until you succeed has even led to me being accused of either being a failure or being a schemer. The internet is littered with the debris of countless efforts to actualize the inner push of my life and I bear absolutely zero shame about it! The fact it has seemed to come together of late, over the past few years, may make some think I got lucky, but essentially my strategy was to keep trying and surviving until the dice rolled my way.

Regardless of what the future brings, whether more success or failures and setbacks, the narrative of my life belongs to God who has given it to me. If you think my narrative is a bunch of hooey, that’s all fine, I cannot give myself over to feeling any concern about that.

My own history is largely ruled by my own predilection toward being concerned with what people think and feel about me. I want warm and loving affection and unconditional acceptance of my personage probably more than most people, though I may be wrong about that. For this reason, the many times others have totally changed my narrative into a hideous caricature of weirdness, bad intentions, or whatever based on lies or misreading things, or taking things too far and inflating them out of proportion, have been painful.

Again, because I often do things on a larger scale seen by more people, I have had what I think is a high dosage of this sort of narrative hijacking that can totally invalidate a person even in their own eyes.

Why do I like military things, is it because I am a warmonger? Why am I so ultra-conservative in my life, is it because I am intolerant of others? Why do I strongly prefer being self-employed, is it because I have a problem with authority? Why do I say I have a grand purpose connected to historical processes, is it because I am full of myself?

On one hand, I truly desire and actually do live my life openly and publicly with a lot of transparency but on the other hand I have struggled with what others think and feel about me and I have been devastated when they said things about me that were not a reflection of my narrative about myself.

What has begun to happen, and what I am sharing for your edification, is that I realize I cannot necessarily change what I feel or desire so much as I can choose what I focus my energy and time on. It still stings when someone tries to hijack my narrative and defines me in a way that isn’t fair or truthful, but what I choose to do, after I have already interrogated that feeling to find any grain of useful criticism, is to focus on other things.

I find that the longer I put my focus elsewhere, the less a situation upsets me and if this happens quickly I realize how unimportant that situation is in relation to my own journey.

What is your narrative, how do you define yourself and your ambitions, and how do you define your journey and destination? I would counsel you to go to the well of God’s presence, to search the Scriptures, and to seek the leading of the Holy Spirit until you feel you have a solid understanding of these things. Find how God in His mind defines you and consciously seek to align your behavior, words, and choices with that person. Vocalize who you are in such terms.

The other thing I do is simply choose to connect mostly with people who, while they may critique me, I feel and know are essentially on my side. They are people who are “for” me, they are people who believe my narrative is substantially true even when I do not perfectly follow it. My inner circle don’t expect perfection from me, but neither do they accept when I go against my own narrative or drop the ball. I don’t have to worry about how they feel about me and when they do critique me, I can trust they are coming from a good place.

At times I am forced, by necessity, especially in business, to deal with people who frankly aren’t the kind of people I would place in my inner circle. But my goal is always to get closer and closer to a place where all my relationships and associations are with the kind of people who could become inner circle people in my life.

I have either turned down or let go of major “opportunities” when the people I would need to be connected to aren’t fair or decent toward me for whatever reason, even if my own mistakes contributed to the situation. In other words, I can refuse to blame people for misunderstanding me or thinking the worst of me while also choosing to limit my connections to people who wouldn’t ever do that to anyone else.

So in my focus, when people not liking me or believing false things about my narrative begins to bother me I try to focus on other things, even if it’s s funny video. I also try to spend my time and energy with people who will both critique me and nurture my own narrative about myself.

The people in my inner circle aren’t easily offended, don’t threaten the relationship for anything but a very serious breech (and very few things qualify as such), don’t cosign my nonsense, tend to interpret my actions in a most charitable way, give me the benefit of the doubt, challenge me to get better, but also nurture and celebrate my narrative about myself. The reverse is also true.

I don’t have time for non-essentials and, right now, under the current pressure cooker experience I am going through, I barely have time or energy for anything beyond very basic survival and taking care of essential business. My life doesn’t give me the luxury of being terribly reliable for anything that isn’t truly mission critical, which includes both my mission and that of those who are in my inner circle.

The control of your narrative belongs to God and then you, in that order, and anyone outside of you and God has no right to think that they know you better than God knows you and you know you. Avoid such people of you can, ignore their judgements by focusing on other things if you must deal with them. But you own your narrative, God and you, nobody else!

Freedom Manifesting In A Trust Community

Bill Collier July 27, 2021

Who can you trust during those times when you are vulnerable or when a crisis vurges on a major tragic upheaval? For most people, there is no good answer to this question. For most people, trust beyond perhaps their immediate nuclear family is difficult, they just aren’t sure who really is on their side without an ulterior motive.

A trust community is a larger body of people who are reasonably confident that through shared identity and participation they can trust one another. For practical reasons, they tend to live within reasonable driving distance of each other. We may not know everyone in a trust community personally, but we know that if they have been confirmed as members of the community by people who do know them that they have the kind of character, integrity, and values that make them trustworthy.

Our concept of a Trust Community comes from Protocol Six of The 17 Protocols of Upadaria.

A Trust Community

WE PRACTICE THE WAYS OF A TRUST COMMUNITY CENTERED ON YESHUA, THE CHRIST

Through intentionally building trust communities, Believers can connect with others for mutual profit, support, empowerment, liberation, and fulfillment of purpose.

– From The 17 Protocols of Upadaria, Protocol Six

The entire concept of what we call “the Upadarian Revolution” is unilateral change from within our own lives, relationships, and associations that never seeks to impose itself through politics or force on other people. This is important in the concept of a trust community, because while these communities use the language of a distinct village, town, or city, they aren’t political entities and their members consist only of those who freely desire to participate in them.

A trust community is a larger than neighborhood scale collection of people who use trust as their basis of connection and freewill participation. A trust community is capable of providing for most all the basic needs of its participants and of assuring the safety and sanctity of their liberty, their well-being, and their wealth and property from all hazards. To be part of a trust community you share an identity with others and the basis of that identity are the ideals, principles, and practices you all agree are the common standards and norms of behavior, of relationships, and of your association.

Imagine a city of, say, 100,000 souls, like the heart of London, and 30 square miles of land distributed in chunks and pieces throughout an area of 1,000 square miles containing 800,000 people. This is a larger-scale trust community embedded within an entire area, distinct and unique in its diversity expression of community, but also connected to the whole area as a constituent community.

This may sound rather theoretical, but the implementation of trust community is practical and to be intentional about creating such communities is a very peaceful, revolutionary act. It removes much of your social, cultural, and economic life from the influence and control of a corrupt ruling class who are presiding over a dying civilization and its abusive structures.

Our ideal larger scale trust community is a Shire, a term from old England that basically became equivalent to a county but that invokes the idea of an area which is self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-governing but which is an interdependent part of a larger commonwealth. Another way we present this is through a concept we call a distributed private city, a city-like organizational structure that has various facilities and participants spread all throughout an area that has many physical cities.

At the smallest level, the trust community is like an intentional community that just has parts of itself, as well as its individual participants, spread throughout a local area. They may not all live within the same plot of land, but they have structures and associations they regularly participate in that essentially give them the self-reliance of an intentional community.

One of our key breakthrough ideas, and one we often repeat, is that trust community requires something equivalent to a shared national identity. And by this we do not mean race or ancestry, nations are far more than collections of people whose common trait is race or ancestry. In their purest form, nations are ideals and values that are freely adopted as the basis of a shared identity.

A trust community without something equivalent to a shared nationality either begins to become disjointed as people argue over basic assumptions and norms or it stays together through a strong-armed, top-down system of control. If that something that connects everyone isn’t fairly cohesive in terms of ideals and values, then only some use of manipulation, control, or coercion will keep it together. A trust community has no manipulation, control, or coercion, what keeps it together is trust and that trust organically flows from shared ideals, principles, and practices.

We use the term “organic cohesiveness” to describe the cohesiveness of a trust community and even a spiritual nation. In our approach, the broader trust community is based on freedom ideas and standards but the heart of the community consists of a core of people who share our spiritual nationality as their own nationality. What makes this cohesiveness organic, as opposed to artificial, is that it comes through strictly voluntary freewill participation in a commonly shared identity based on shared ideals and values.

Trust communities are based on nested shared identities, so they can be diverse and pluralistic in their broader application and close-knit and unanimous in their more narrow application. It isn’t either-or. Christians can connect over an entire area and behave together like a spiritual city-state. People who love freedom, Freedomists, can form area and county level freewill participatory associations called Freedom Shires which focus on upholding the rights, persons, and property of themsleves and their fellow citizens.

A Upadarian trust community is a Shire which includes constituent communities called Cantons, Villages, and Manors. These are all groupings of people who at some level adopt the shared Upo, Ecclesian, Freedomist, or Upadarian identities. Thinking in these terms of a massive shift away from the atomized life and from assumed identities that may not reflect your innermost beliefs, values, and convictions.

When someone is using trust community and connected to others, they see themselves as virtual or spiritual citizens of a distributed city-state that has its own social, cultural, economic, and civic structures and associations that are not controlled by the present civilization’s ruling class.

Building economic structures where trade and commerce are governed by the ideals and values you believe in cannot just be an individual thing. You need virtual and physical spaces to conduct business and norms and standards everyone agrees to follow with integrity. A trust community creates these things and, through something like a subscription or membership, funds the kinds of spaces needed for this activity.

What we are proposing with a trust community is that we have to be quite intentional about our larger scale activities with people who are within driving distance of each other and who share the same ideals and values. Our platform helps people make these area-level connections and formalize them through prescribed frameworks and blueprints, including decision-making processes and even physical facilities.

If we want to be part of a society and nation we can proudly say are centered on Yeshua, we should be intentional about connecting and associating with people of like convictions to create our own internal social, cultural, economic, and civic structures, resources, and services that aren’t controlled by anyone but us. Our concept of trust community applies broadly to any body of people whose organic cohesiveness is such that it distinguishes them from a society whose values they cannot cosign or support and certainly don’t want to be governed by.

It is a practical and existential necessity to build trust communities when the society in which you live operates and is governed by values which, if you were to follow them, would violate your own beliefs, values, and convictions.

Through a practical application of trust community it is not our intention to reform or change society, it is our intention to sow the seeds of a new spiritual nation as the vanguard people of a new civilization. Our peaceful and spiritual revolution is all about unilateral change from within ourselves, our relationships, and our associations.

The White Wokatariate Doesn’t Speak For The Ute Tribe!

Bill Collier July 26, 2021

The Ute Tribe, in the press release below, slams a woke leftist writer for daring to speak “outrage” in the Tribe’s name over the fact the University of Utah sports teams are called “The Running Utes.”

Virtue signaling that disrespects the tribe and could do real economic harm has no place in decent society where human dignity is mutually honored by all. But the wokatariate aren’t interested in justice, they are more about making themselves look good and enjoying the perverse power of canceling others and imposing their own unopopular anr dangerous ideas.

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Luke Duncan chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe Business Committee, the governing body of the Ute Indian Tribe, has issued a press release scolding a woke activist and University of Utah emoloyee who “demands” the school stop using the Ute name.

The Ute tribe is made up of three bands: the Uintah, the Whiteriver and the Uncompahgre; two representatives from each band are elected to serve four-year terms on the Business Committee.

The tribe’s Uintah and Ouray Reservation is located in northeastern Utah, approximately 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. It’s the second-largest Indian reservation in the United States, covering more than 4.5 million acres.

Last month, The Salt Lake Tribune ran a commentary titled, “Time for the U. to Give up its Native American Nickname.” The author, a University of Utah employee named Christopher Mead, argued that the University of Utah needs to stop using the name “Running Utes.”

Our business committee, the elected governing body of the Ute Indian Tribe, was incensed and deeply troubled when we read the piece. Mead’s approach in raising this issue on behalf of our tribe, and the implicit attitude of saving the Ute people from themselves, lacks common sense. It undermines tribal rights, it causes conflict between native and non-native communities, and it negates our ability as a sovereign nation to make appropriate decisions for our people.

The Ute Indian Tribe is a major economic engine in northeastern Utah. We work closely with the state, local governments, and major institutions to address long-standing issues that range from preservation of cultural and environment resources to responsible energy development. These relationships are valuable to us, and an op-ed like Mead’s has a devastating impact on them, and on the trust we have built over many years.

Let us be clear. Only the Ute Indian Tribe can speak for itself. And regarding the matter at hand, the Ute Indian Tribe encourages the University of Utah to use our name for its sports programs.

Our tribe drafted the Athletics Naming Agreement, and the university has used the Ute name with our full support since 1972. In fact, we just renewed our memorandum of understanding in December for another five years, and we retain trademark rights to the Ute Proud name and imagery.

The relationship between the Ute Indian Tribe and the University of Utah is a long and valued one, and it’s a source of pride to our tribal members. Not only does it reflect our shared commitment to building genuine respect for and understanding of our tribe’s history, it also has significant educational benefits for our youth.

In a key part of the agreement, the university provides a Ute Proud education campaign (http://uteproud.utah.edu/) during the football, basketball, and gymnastics seasons. This campaign explains Ute Indian history and the Ute Indian Tribe’s cultural and economic contributions to the state.

The campaign also provides a code of conduct that educates sports fans about inappropriate behaviors that dishonor the Ute and other Native American populations. The Ute Indian Tribe assigns a tribal representative to work with the university to develop and approve all campaign elements.

Our tribe is well aware that this association with the University of Utah‚ the flagship institution of higher learning in our state — raises tribal visibility and community awareness. Once a year, the university’s halftime show incorporates a traditional powwow with appropriate and approved cultural tie-ins, providing a valuable opportunity to educate and promote understanding.

In addition, the university supports campus events to raise awareness of American Indian cultures, from the annual campus powwow to Native American Month. It has added educational materials about the Ute Indian Tribe to first-year student orientation, and it’s making those materials available through its American Indian Resource Center as well.

This is important to us, after enduring the devastating termination and assimilation policies of the last century. We will not be invisible, or erased.

Ute Mountain Ute Tribe wins Energy grant for solar project in Utah
What’s more, the University of Utah actively supports Ute Indian students and other federally recognized American Indian students who are attending the university, and it provides annual financial support to the Ute Indian Tribe to enhance K-12 education on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.

The University of Utah recognizes that the Ute name is at the core of our tribe’s cultural identity and that of our members, and it constitutes an inseparable element of our rich cultural traditions. The university also has consistently expressed its honor in being allowed to use the Ute name with due respect and integrity.

We are a sovereign nation with an absolute right to self-determination. The Athletics Naming Agreement was ours to make, and it’s grounded in mutual respect. We will not accept efforts of non-natives, who do not know the history or understand the work we have done, calling for its demise.

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