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The Next Digital Revolution

Bill Collier July 1, 2021

The decentralization of digtial platforms into an interconnected network of diverse niche communities with deep immersive experiences is web 3.0 and it is coming, whether the technocracy likes it or not.

This is not about the fears of tech censorship or tech bias, this is about the emergence of smarter, more robust technologies and the natural human desire to cluster around and with people who they easily identify with. The natural tendency for people is to want to cluster with people who share something of deep value, be it a belief system, values, lifestyle, interests, skills, or really anything that touches you at the level of identify.

What does this mean, “touches you at the level of identity?” Basically, it’s something so special to you, it is felt and often expressed as if it is part of your identity. I may say, “I am a military collector”, which is different than saying, “I have some military items in a collection.”

In web 2.0 we saw the emergence of meta platforms predicated on the cocnept of an open internet and free speech. While some clustering occurred, basically, they were wide open spaces where almost anything was allowed. Then came web 2.5, almost in some ways a seeming devolution, but in reality a precursor to web 3.0.

In web 2.5 the people paying the bills, the big money people of the corporate world, started worrying about brand friendliness. Also, policy-makers worried about content that was hateful or false and some worried more about decency. Users were overwhelmed with things they didn’t necessarily like or want to even see at all.

What were essentially wild west platforms that focused on attracting everyone of every interest on a more shallow relational basis now found themselves having to engage in much tighter governance. You see, the more you try to control or limit content, the more standards and fact-checking you create, the more difficult and expensive it is to run these platforms.

Good governance requires more than spitting out standards and fact-checking norms. It requires human-powered governance, as in actual people providing governance. But the response to bottom-line conscious platforms is to use algorithms and robots to replace humans, and of any group of people gang-report content, even of that content isn’t what they say it is, a seeming arbitrary suspension or ban takes place.

Governance is way beyond “moderation”, it is guidance and support to participants, treating them like adults and with dignity, and giving them support, not just deciding whether to ban them! Web 3.0 governance will be much more transparent and participatory than anything we have seen before.

We propose that people don’t want to be enmeshed into a virtual community or platform that has content or characters they find disagreeable. The public demand for free speech platforms may not be what some think it is. Nobody has done a study to see what exactly people like, but what we can see is that free speech platforms, while they have an audience, are not capturing any major market share.

This doesn’t mean free speech platforms aren’t desired by enough people to potentially make them viable. They can be viable, but they cannot be the predominant virtual community.

We don’t have a market research study showing exactly what kind of online environment people will tend most to favor. But we all know the human tendency to form cliques and to cluster with people of some like identity and affection. People tend to look more for affirmation than for things that challenge their beliefs, for instance.

The problems with both the meta platforms that started as one thing and are trying to become another and with the free speech alternatives may come down to the issues of governance, it being expensive, brand safety, because as free platforms they need mega sponsors, and this tendency humans to essentially seek affirmation and support from people they identify with.

On one hand, people want to cluster with people they identify with. On the other hand, they want to connect with people more broadly and to express themselves to the world at large. That being said, many just want to be entertained and to have affirmation in the process, they don’t really want or need broader connections online.

Web 3.0 has to both provide these more niche communities people can participate in, and, we predict, they will desire a more immersive experience with participants engaged in all aspects of the community, from content curation to governance. The wall between administration, governance, and participants (as opposed to “users”) will become more blurred: participants will become stakeholders.

While these niche communities will be necessary, it will also be necessary for tomorrow’s netizens to have a way to gather content and data from multiple places in one dashboard and to be able to push content through that dashboard to multiple niche communities or to free speech communities.

Common standards for connecting these communities through API hooks or many other means will emerge and various providers may supply dashboards for people to connect to all these niche communities.

We also foresee that the era of mostly free platforms paid for mostly by mega corporate sponsors will give way to a mostly paid subscription model as participants, again, instead of just users, take control of their data and advertisers focus more on placing their content in PLACES likely visited by their demographic than through serving content across all the virtual spaces to specifically targeted individuals.

The issue of advertising online in the future is a bit off subject, but is somewhat related. Advertising isn’t going away, but the halcyon days where anyone without real advertising smarts could use intimate user data to easily send their content to exactly the right person may be over. The old tried and true methods of scientific advertising targeted to places where your demographic are likely to be found will rule again. The lazy marketer who only knows how to use computer-assisted audience selection will struggle.

Who knows if this sudden stripping of access to that kind of user data will continue. The pressure by the corporate advertisers may be immense, unless they find the new environment actually makes it harder for smaller advertising and would-be competitors to engage.

We envision web 3.0 will be dominated by a decentralized web of mostly niche communities but a few major providers of something like a dashboard that allows people to connect to multiple spaces more conveniently. We foresee these communities will be more immersive and participatory and the line between administrators, governance staff, and participants will be more blurred.

Demand A Right to Self-Preservation, Not Just “The Second Amendment”

Bill Collier June 30, 2021

The Second Amendment debate is wrapped around the axles a reinterpretative legalism and history revisionism, with both sides claiming absolutely that the framers of the Bill of Rights meant precisely what they mean. Getting lost in this word salad thicket of contradiction and wishful thinking sidesteps the deeper truth, a truth which is more sublime than the Second Amendment and which questions the entire basis of the Westphalian order of the nation-state as the prime mover in human civilization.

Let us assume we must craft a legal standard akin to the Bill of Rights which is considered so inviolate that even attempting to pass a law or policy against its standard of justice is considered at least a misdemeanor worthy of permanent disqualification from holding public office or even holding the voting franchise.

To what authority or standards of reason, logic, or justice do we appeal? Ultimately, we are forced to make a priori assumptions amenable to most everyone. As even the Declaration of Independence says, “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (*they meant all HUMANS) are created equal” and that they are endowed by their Creator (whether you calls that Creator God or natural evolution) with certain “inalienable rights”, among which “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is all a priori assumption. Our 21st century declaration of independence might begin thus:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that in advancing the cause of a free and pluralistic society, which is our natural human state as ordered by the Universe, all human beings are created and deemed by law and custom to be equal in value, worth, dignity, and right and that they are inherently endowed with inalienable rights including life, liberty, self-determination, self-preservation, self-expression, and freewill participation through mutual agreement along with the inherent sovereign power to protect their sacred rights, persons, and property from hazards and harms, official or unofficial, foreign or domestic.”

We would further add that each individual elector owns a right to freely participate in the powers of petition, election, initiative, redress, and recall and to have and form their own families, extended families, free associations, communities of trust within a fraternal bond, and national communities as autompmous sociocultural and socioeconomic core constituent entities within our diverse and pluralistic commonwealth.

Again, these are a priori assumptions one either believes or does not believe. But the problem here is that if one believes these assumptions are true then believing thus does no harm to those who disagree, unless the freedom of others grieves them, while those who disagree and wish to deny such freedom must necessarily coerce the Freedomist into compliance.

The Freedomist imagines a world of diverse sociocultural and socioeconomic structures and communities, expressing nationhood in diverse ways but within a common standard of a sort of meta-nationhood based on a Freedomist standard of justice and peace. The anti-freedomist sees a world of much more narrow restrictions because they don’t really trust the freewill choices of others. They can easily disregard these so-called rights, except perhaps in a most narrow, restrictive interpretation.

President Biden’s assault on the Second Amendment, while also factually wrong in its claims gun control and restrictions on weapons were present “from the beginning”, is a radical anti-freedomist. His interpretation and understanding of the Second Amendment makes a hash of the basic right to self-preservation.

The Bidens of this world have a normative view of society: they imagine something in theory and assume they can use the law and public policy to make it so. Freedomists tend toward a more descriptive view of society based on nature, human nature, and the laws of cause and effect and then seek policies that contribute the most to the individual and common good and that reflect this framework of reality.

The right to self-preservation is an a priori assumption. You either think each person and then their primary communities of trust is the prime mover of human civilization therefore owns a right to self-preservation or you do not.

But were we to assume that this right exists and were we not using the legalism of the Second Amendment debate to frame it, but only our a priori assumption, what would our concept of an inherent right to self-preservation look like?

We will make the assumption, which seems logical and fits with human nature as it is, that as self-preservation cannot solely be achieved as a lone individual against any save a few other people, it stands to reason this right is, uniquely among any others, a corporate/collective right that is shared among a body of people. Again, it no more matters to us the ideological or legalistic intent of the framers of the Bill of Rights than it mattered to them how the framers of the English Constitution intended their (unwritten) provisions.

We often say we defend liberty as defined by the original spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights, and as to the Second Amendment, the spirit and intent is deeper than the legalistic interpretation according to the Courts.

We claim that the right to self-preservation is in fact an inherent right owned by the electors in any given commomwealth and this right applies to the individual, their primary community of trust, and the other constituent entities of the commonwealth. Moreover, we claim, regardless of the legal reading and interpretation, that this understanding is far more consistent with the original spirit and intent of than the way Biden interprets it.

The practice of this right can occur at the individual level, but, we propose, as it is also a shared right, its implementation necessarily differs based on the scale of its practice. Basically this means how one practices this right, even what weapons one may access or prerequisite for their use, might differ. Those who argue whether this is alone an individual right or a alone a collective right, miss the spirit and intent of the right to self-preservation, which is all of these things at once.

The inherent right to self-preservation also runs up against a novel of the Westphalian nation-state concept. This novelty is predicated on the notions that the state is the prime mover in human civilization, that nationhood is best expressed and preserved in the form of a national state, and, therefore, that this state is the primary bearer of arms and owns a monopoly of force beyond the limited individual right to self-preservation.

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 set this course and never has the idealistic promise of an international order of such nation-states been achieved. To be sure, if all national peoples who were large enough to be able to sustain themselves, and if different smaller nations of people formed confederal unions for mutual support, we might have a world of over 1000 nation-states or national comfederal unions, and that might be ideal.

But in the 21st century we have multiple ways to express sovereignty and to form sociocultural and socioeconomic bonds with people from around the world. The very scope of nationhood and sovereignty goes well beyond the old limits of geography, ancestry, distance we can travel, and ease with which larger associations can be formed.

We often call ourselves “nationists” instead of “nationalists”, because our concept and practices of nationhood transcend this 17th century civilizational paradigm, the Westphalian nation-state. A nationist believes every national people have a right to self-preservation and includes within the scope of alternative forms of sovereignty, such an enhanced NGO, fraternal benefit societies, domestic fraternal nations, and tribal entities, among other structures.

The idea that the “state” has a “monopoly of force” is inconsistent with either an individual or a shared right to self-preservation. While it is understandable that the scope of the means of self-preservation may vary between individuals, local communities, free associations, and the state and its subdivisions, in general, we hold that the right to self-preservation is inviolate.

We will not delve too far into our conception of this distributed magisterial and imperial mandate, which basically means that the state cannot ever be considered to hold a monopoly in such matters, beyond saying, for instance, a “tribal” structure like a society would not have nuclear missiles, but it (along with community constabulary companies) would likely have anything equivalent to a light infantry regiment, and an individual may have more limitations still, especially if they are not part of a local constabulary company.

Again, setting aside the argument as to the legal definition and meaning of the Second Amendment, which we see as an individual AND a shared right, we see the right to self-preservation as something that includes a responsibility. In essence, access to certain means of self-preservation may require some form of participation in local or other forms of mutual self-preservation, e.g. a local constabulary company (like the militia of colonial America but not like the private militia groups of our day).

We then move on to a ticklish issue: who has a right to keep and bear arms? In general, again, setting aside the present legal structures and laws, we tend to see a separation between mere citizenship and electorship. Electors are stakeholders who earn their status through merit alone, everyone is free to become an elector regardless of race or gender, so long as they adhere to and uphold the country’s charter and something like the Bill of Rights.

The ability to determine who meets this requirement is critical to the preservation of a country and its constituent nations of people. The abuse of this concept, for the purpose of preventing blacks in the south to vote, is morally repugnant. But this racism is most definitely NOT part of this idea: electorship should be earned, not assumed by birth or residency, and it should both be open to all and access to the means of gaining qualifications for electorship should be freely available to all without cost.

The concept of electorship is not part of the present American system and nor will that ever likely change. But the concept of electorship informs our view of self-preservation. The state does not own a monopoly on force, we strongly oppose that archaic notion! But the body of people, in the form of their diverse national societies (societies based on a nationality) and local communities, as well as the state and its constituent entities, as stakeholders, do own a monopoly on force.

In practical terms this means that while citizens own a right to self-preservation at a basic level, they do not have the same level of access to the means of self-preservation as the electors and their corporate bodies or the state.

Again, we are talking theory here, not prescribing policies or laws for America. What we are saying is that the right to self-preservation transcends the Bill of Rights and is both individual and corporate and includes, we think, the right for local communities in an egalitarian constabulary and of private societies based on shared nationhood, to share the monopoly of force with the state.

The workarounds for this may be forming local community policing initiatives which transform the hired police into a mostly voluntary constabulary force, the use of private security cooperatives, efforts to lobbh states to create local state-funded civil defense groups, and a robust defense of the Second Amendment.

As to this concept of electorship, it seems a good idea this country will never adopt, but it does explain our stance on self-preservation as an individual and shared right that comes with responsibilities.

As with most Freedomist ideas, our approach here is mostly on things we can do within existing frameworks to actualize our ideas and convictions. Private efforts like outdoors, hunting, and fishing clubs and security cooperatives coupled with promoting Freedom Sanctuaries and reforming local policing (community policing through a citizen’s constabulary) do not require a change in federal laws or the Constitution can fulfill in spirit this concept of self-preservation.

Heirs Of The Puritans- A Planned Christian Fraternal Benefit and Missionary Society

Bill Collier June 30, 2021

The Puritans get a bad rap partly through myth and partly through genuine mistakes, but we believe the spirit and intent and the arc of their history show forth a path to progress toward a truly Christian society ruled by the great governing principles of the Kingdom.

The Puritans sought as pure and true a manifestation of a Christian lifestyle as possible, supported by a close network of religious, social, cultural, and economic as well as civic, civil, and magisterial structures. The individual within a nuclear family was to be supported by an extended family, the local town or township, and the whole “plantation” (colony) of neighboring towns and villages.

The Puritans, a product of their time to be sure, did not differentiate between those who chose to “make covenant” with them and those who merely lived among them but who might not share their views and convictions. This aspect of the Puritans actually led to their decline and disappearance: by making their entire program a product itself of the state, when the state turned away from its Puritan roots, the Puritan program ended.

But the desire to build a Christian society with its own material support structure is still a viable dream even in this day and age. The means of obtaining that have broadened and no longer require, or justify, the use of a state and its coercive agency to implement. Legal structures such as a faternal benefit society, a land trust, mutual benefit corporations, mutual assurance funds, cooperatives, credit unions, and clubs are all based solely on freewill participatory and involve no coercion and no intolerance toward others.

The vision of the Upadarian Society of America (a planned Christian fraternal benefit and missionary society) is in part inspired by and is the in the direct spiritual lineage and continuation of the Puritan dream, which was to create a materially self-sustaining Christian society. Unlike the Puritans, the plan and design of the Upadarian Society of America is to do all of this through freewill participation and within a larger decentralized framework of governance, including a plurality of leadership, egalitarian structures, and autonomous local chapter communities.

Abandoned are the legalistic traits, but not abandoned is the desire for purity in faith and virtues that nurture life and happiness.

The Upadarian Society of America will more or less, in its design, themes, and structure, resemble in spirit something akin to an indigenous tribe, with Upadarians being patriotic Americans who adopt a shared, intentional nationality based on a way of living and common purpose embraced freely by its Peers. In some ways, Upadarians represent a continuation and modern evolution of the Puritan Tribe, as it were. (Though we cannot forget our strong roots in William Penn’s vision.)

(Note- the Upadarian nationality is intentional and global, Christians of any race or ancestry and of any denomination can adopt this nationality without joining any Upadarian Society.)

This idea represents a scaled-up version of a distributed intentional community of people, connected in freewill participatory association for mutual benefit and to achieve shared goals, namely to promote and practice Christian kinship for obtaining real financial and material independence, to practice missional living and support a holistic world missions effort, and to both provide refuge for ourselves and to fellow Christians and others in crisis.

In practical terms, participation in this Society will provide a more extensive nationwide support structure for Christians pursuing material independency within a decentralized and egalitarian structure that supports, as opposed to lording it over, the individual. But more than that, it continues the Puritan dream, learning from their successes and failures, for a truly Christian society that not only glorifies God but is a witness and influence to the nations.

As a Christian fraternal benefit society, with a focus on kinship, missions, and refuge, the Upadarian Society of America will enable and equip Christians of every race and denomination to be part of a Christian society, to practice independency, and to be an effective witness and influence for Jesus to other people.

In no way would this Society seek anything more than to be free to pursue its shared vision and way of life in peace through freewill participation by its Peers in a decentralized structure of mutual benefit and support.

This is a vision for a nationwide structure that will engender maximum local, autonomous developments and distributed communities that serve Peers of the Society, fellow Christians, and fellow Americans. Patriotic as Americans, sincere as Christians, the Upadarian “nation” of people will foremost seek to serve and glorify Jesus Christ and then our country, America.

Food Independence Through Victory Garden Clubs

Bill Collier June 30, 2021

During both world wars the government advertised and taught the concept of Victory Gardens. These were home gardens that would augment or replace food staples, like potatoes, vegetables, fruits, and beans, with things grown in the garden. But an improvement on this is is a Victory Garden Club, which takes the individual garden plot to a whole new level of good independence.

Food independence doesn’t mean 100% of your food is grown by you or in some mutually beneficial arrangement with other people. It means you have the capacity to meet all your basic nutrition needs through such arrangements if you need to. Instead of merely stockpiling food supplies as preppers do, through the expansion of the Victory Garden to a Victory Garden Club you can always be assured of a self-sustaining food supply.

Basically, the way this works is you have a local network of people. Some are good at gardening. Some have land. Some have money. When anyone contributes some units of value, called Shares, based on either land, time, expertise, money, equipment, or supplies, or some combination thereof, they get a proportional share of the final product.

If you are good at gardening but don’t have land or have land but don’t do gardening, if you have time but not money, or money but not time, you can still participate in a VGC, Victory Garden Club. A VGC with, say, 120 members, and access to around 5 total acres of land, may be able to grow enough food, conceivably, to feed 500 families at any given time.

First, the participants get shares of food bssed on their investment, then the excess may be sold, portions may be canned or preserved and stored, and portions may be used to charity. The proceeds from sales may be partially reinvested in the Club’s assets and provided as dividends to members.

A VGC could actually become profitable for members or, at the least, so financially self-sustaining that eventually members essentially get free food.

The goal is Food Independence. The things grown or raised or what have you are calculated, preferably in coordination with a nutritionist, to ensure the basic nutritional needs of all members could be met through things produced by the VGC. Unlike other “garden” clubs, the VGC might also include chickens for eggs and food, cows or goats for milk, a fish farm, rabbit farms, and other ways to produce meat for members.

A VGC connected to a hunting and fishing club might also supplement the dietary needs of members.

You may not use the term “Victory Garden”, perhaps you prefer “Home Farming Club” or “Food Independence Club.” We like the term “Victory Garden”, even though our version is more expansive and includes raising animals, as an homage to Americana. The Victory Gardens of World War Two, for instance, played a major role in sustaining our population in the battle to end the Nazi scourge.

Here is an example. The Upadarian Society of America is planned as a fraternal benefit society with a focus on Christian kinship, missional living, and providing refuge for ourselves and other fellow Christians in crisis. At the very local chapter level, a Microshire of around 500 members, we plan a Victory Garden Network of 3-5 Clubs that also includes a few sponsored Farmsteads for larger-scale food production.

The aim of the VGN is to produce all the basic food staples plus natural medicinal products within assets owned by the VGN. Additionally, a cafeteria which exclusively serves food produced by the VGN would provide low cost meals to members, including prepared meals for Common Houses (our version of a lodge) where members gather for common meals, free food to people in need, and food ar regular prices to the public as a means of reaching financial self-sustainability.

This illustrates how the VGC can become adaptable and expandable. But it can begin with just a few people and grow as it goes.

The crux of this is taking concrete action at the local level to achieve Food Independence because when you don’t need to rely on the corporate mass market or the government for food and when your supply of food cannot be effected by extra-local disruptions, you are that much more materially independent. Independency is a state of not being materially dependent upon extra-local systems or any system that seeks influence and control that isn’t in your best interest.

The Victory Garden Club is a solid, workable step towards Food Independence and is in keeping with an agenda of Independency.

Hatred Against The Faithful- Fascism Has A New Banner

Bill Collier June 29, 2021

Moses told Pharoah, “let my people go!” His demand, prior to the Exodus itself, was simple: let the children of Israel worship (and, by extension, serve and live for) their God in peace. This demand did not necessitate losing the Hebrews as a work force or expelling them from Egypt.

In the realpolitik and reality of power of ancient Egypt, the children of Israel were slaves under the bondage of what was then one of the great superpowers of its day. Not only were the children of Israel exploited for their labor, but not even their basic religious sentiments and values were respected.

In the realpolitik and reality of power in America nothing looms larger as a cudgel aimed in hateful violence toward the heart of historic Christian moral and religious orthodoxy than the rainbow authoritarianism that demands silence of opponents and even willful participation as a sign of wokeness. Fascism has a new banner, a rainbow banner that must be worshipped on pain of banishment!

(Special note: we separate the rainbow fascists from the actual LGBTQ community who are, overwhelmingly, tolerant and decent people. Of course, the rainbow fascists will equate push-back against their blatant totalitarian intolerance to hatred of LGBTQ individuals, which is a patently absurd libel.)

Hatred against the faithful for their adherence to historic Christian orthodoxy out of a sincere desire to worship, serve, and live for their God in peace is pretty much the heart of the rainbow authoritarian agenda. The aim has never been to elevate some downtrodden class, it has always been to downgrade others and force the majority view into the closet.

We will always say, come what may, “an advanced culture is based on a man and women married for life raising their own biological or adopted children within the maternal enclosure of a nurturing extended family and larger community of trust. ” The gender-bent rainbow authoritarian culture (which is NOT representative of the LGBTQ individual) is a dystopian, savage, and barbaric throwback to primitivism and debauchery, in the eyes of advanced culture.

It remains true, that though we accept, not just tolerate, all people as spiritually sovereign individuals made in the image of their Creator, and though we ourselves would never countenance censoring or inerfering with the basic right of freewill participation by others, based on whatever their sociocultural values are, it will never be enough.

The rainbow authoritarians hate the faithful and yet do not love the people and communities they claim to represent. In fact many of the people in whose name these totalitarians act are among the first to disavow such anti-freedom bigotry. Rainbow fascism, as it is emerging, is more about hatred for those who adhere to historic Judeo-Christian orthodoxy than anything else.

People who are secure in their convictions and whose rights are respected have no need to impose on or punish anyone for merely disagreeing and for choosing their own way of life through their acts of individual conviction and freewill participation.

The punishment of speech that the rainbow fascists don’t like, because it is based on embracing advanced culture rather than what we may see as primitive self-indulgence (knowing of course not everyone agrees), is intolerance itself which we cannot abide and will never submit to.

It doesn’t matter that we have a live and let live attitude or that we don’t feel our concept and practice of what we see as advanced culture needs the coercive power of thr state to force compliance. It does not matter if we genuinely respect others who beliefs, values, and convictions differ. Unless we both applaud the rainbow culture and even participate happily, we are bigots and targets for cancelation.

The average person who may identify with some form of LGBTQ or etc (letters keep getting added), probably wants nothing to do with the rainbow woke cancel culture and its gross and intolerable authoritarianism. They literally do not care if someone disagrees with them as long as their rights are respected and they certainly don’t think a refusal to participate in their way of life is a sign of bigotry.

We who hold that advanced culture rests on marriage between one man and one woman who, unless they are not fertile*, raise their own biological or adopted children within an extended family and larger community of trust do not think people who disagree are bad or inferior or don’t have the same rights as we do. But, as noted, that’s not good enough for the rainbow fascists.

(*Marriage is not solely about children, it is a union between a man and woman that depicts the union between Christ and the Church and is, therefore, Holy in and of itself. Couples do not simply get married to raise children. The focus here is that children have a right and deserve to experience a loving home wherein a marriage mother and father, whether biological or adopted, raise them.)

You don’t agree with our view on the basis of advanced culture? So be it. We embrace the concept of a free and pluralistic society of equals, therefore you and whatever you deem a marriage or a family are free to proceed as you wish. You are not free to censor our beliefs on what constitutes advanced culture and your friendship with us should not be based on our agreement in this vital, but private, aspect of your life.

We do not agree with intolerance or bigotry. But the loose definitions of those terms, which are now crimes in the eyes of some, has become weaponized against mostly the Judeo-Christian who holds to historic orthodoxy. It is beyond the pale, it is a gross injustice, and is the very picture of what bigotry and intolerance look like.

If your views and beliefs are so weak that they cannot sustain refutation or refusal to participate, then you are the problem. This is true whether one is demanding adherence to the historical orthodoxy of the Judeo-Christian tradition or the new unorthodoxy of the rainbow culture.

But today, at this hour, it is not the Judeo-Christian faithful who have any power to impose their sociocultural norms and it is not this community that is seeking cultural hegemony by brute force. The rainbow fascists hate the faithful, that is why they continue to devise new ways to force people between bowing to the new rainbow culture or refusing to compromise their convictions and being canceled out of society, as if banished.

The rainbow fascists are not the LGBTQ folks, who mostly just don’t care about who agrees with them or not. The rainbow fascists are ideological extremists for whom the LGBTQ community is a perfect excuse for their totalitarianism.

Building Safe-Havens In An Age of Insecurity

Bill Collier June 29, 2021

Willem IV- It will be necessary in our increasingly unstable and insecure future, made so by our culture’s deliberate moral and spiritual corruption, to reconsider our basic living arrangements and to consider new forms that are actually based on old forms. Namely, we must consider the necessity of building physical safe havens which can, in an emergency, provide shelter and sustenance to many people.

Call to mind the violent riots staged by such malefactors as Antifa and other radicals using “Black Lives Matter”* as their theme. Now, imagine these roving angry mobs, flung at the world through the worse lies and propaganda and/or through actual outrages, becoming so much more the norm that your community’s likelihood of encountering them becomes high.

(*Black Lives Matter as a concept should be disconnected from some violent authoritarian radical groups using that as their brand.)

The era of insecurity that follows the era of hubris and decadence must necessarily accompany the latter stages of a dying culture within a dying civilization. And the culture of this country as well as the entire Western Civilization are dying. We have collectively sowed to the wind and we will all collectively reap the whirlwind UNLESS we manage to physically remove ourselves from the path of this looming catastrophic storm.

The past is future. When we consider the way the people in earlier days tackled their era of insecurity, we find the monasteries of the 5th and 6th centuries and of the 10th and 11th centuries providing a model which can inspire us right now.

This doesn’t mean we need to build all male religious orders based on vows of poverty and then cloister together behind walls for safety from the barbaric environment beyond. The more important idea of the monastery is that it is a relatively compact, secure, materially self-sustaining facility that could and did provide shelter for far more people than the number who lived there permanently. The monastery preserved the elements of culture which it bore and propagated and which became the seeds of what would eventually become a new civilization.

Like it or not, the future will make the bizarre events of 2020-2021, which are still ongoing, seem like a slow drumming introducing a violent and overwhelming drama that is far louder and more constant in its cacophony than anything most of our living memories can recall.

The physical spaces we will need to shelter and thrive if or when the next plaque of angry rioters, the next pandemic, or the next economic downturn will in many ways be best compared to these monasteries as safe-havens managed by a small permanent community who can host many more people than themselves.

The deliberate creation of safe-haven hubs owned by some form of organically cohesive body of people, not necessarily a religious order but of the same quality, may be essential to the future survival of advanced culture.*

(*Advanced culture is predicated on the goal that all children be raised in a loving home by their own biological or adopted parents who are a married mother and father and all of whom are clustered within a larger nurturing extended family and community of trust.)

We will call a monastery-like hub an “embassy”, for our purpose it represents a sort of outpost and diplomatic mission representing the new civilization in the midst of a dying old civilization and its chaotic environment. These embassies are basically self-contained, materially self-sustaining, and more or less autonomous safe havens operated by some order connected to a larger global network.

An embassy would likely consist of a core community of people who share the same basic beliefs, values, and convictions and the same mission, both to preserve the elements of advanced culture in a barbaric environment and to provide shelter and aid to internal refugees or other refugees in a time of acute crisis. For instance, an embassy of 120 families and attached single adults might be big enough to shelter as many as 1200 families and attached single adults in a major crisis but may at any given time have twice as many refugees on site as residents.

As with many instances where we write about modern adaptations of ancient institutions and structures, the core element remains this thing we refer to as “organic cohesiveness.” The people who run and dwell in such embassies will need a strong religious and cultural homogeneity: they will need to identify with, in conviction and feeling, the same religious and cultural values and common standards as well as the same mission.

The larger communities which emerge around them, whether as in a physical town or just individuals who may subscribe to their emergency/crisis management and assurance services, may indeed embody pluralism. In fact, this is ideal. A closed community that is too homogeneous is bound to become insular and become a ‘Dead Sea” community.

Even our concept of an advanced culture is not a basis of extending aid pluralistic mutual respect. While it is indeed our conviction that this is the proper basis of culture, we are also convinced it must be strictly voluntary. We choose this culture, we do not impose it. We preserve it through our own freewill participation alone, our only demand from society being to let us worship and serve our God in peace.

But as to these embassies, unlike other forms of clustered housing we propose, their residents/managers must have a high degree of organic cohesiveness in order to fulfill their role and maintain unity without recourse to top-down control and rigid hierarchies. People working together in these embassies will become unified in action through a selection process aimed at identifying people who have the same core beliefs and values rather than through a hierarchical system of top-down control and coercion.

But the physical facilities must be capable of enclosing a larger population of refugees within a private area that can be secured in the event a mob or something like that makes an unruly appearance.

The proliferation of these embassies, by whatever name you want to call them, will ensure the greatest number of people safety in times of local catastrophic crisis. As noted, the circle of care is not limited to those who embrace the same religious and cultural beliefs and values. The circle of care is extended on the basis of a free and pluralistic sociocultural community of equals as our vision for the larger diverse society in which we live.

In legal terms, the only ways to create these embassies are through the mutual benefit corporation or a cooperative religious order. Eventually, one can hope, law catches up with that which is necessary and technically possible in our era. A legal structure to allow such embassies, again, by whatever name you prefer, is lacking, but legal structures used in combination are not.

If a group of Jewish, Christian, or other religious and/or sociocultural groups with inherent organic cohesiveness were to form a combine and build such an embassy they could serve themselves and their neighbors. We do not endorse race-based combines as the basis of these embassies because adopted beliefs and freewill participation transcend merely who your ancestors were or your skin color

Race-based combines of people may exacerbate tensions and lead to hostility. Also, organic cohesiveness is about the heart embracing similar things out of free will, it should be open to anyone on the basis of shared beliefs, values, and convictions, and only that.

Our basic proposition is that the modern adaptation of the monastery, what we call an embassy, will become a necessity in the coming decades. While the builders and managers, as well as permanent residents, of such embassies must have a strong organic cohesiveness, their circle of care is extended on the basis of a free and pluralistic society of equals.

PROPOSED Bill of Rights Sanctuary, Collier County, FL

Bill Collier June 28, 2021

The Collier County Commissioners are set to vote on July 13th to approve a “Bill of Rights Sanctuary” ordinance.

“Collier County has the right to be free from the commanding hand of the federal government and has the right to refuse to cooperate with federal government officials in response to unconstitutional federal government measures, and to proclaim a Bill of Rights Sanctuary for law-abiding citizens in its cities and county,” the ordinance reads.

The ordinance is different from the Freedom Sanctuary ordinance we would propose, but is very much in the same spirit.

There are 5 commissioners, 2 solidly for it, 1 who raises what some see as petty trifling “concerns” but who is afraid to be against it, 1 opposed but who has given some reasons for why they might support it, and one just opposed. As for the public, 25 people spoke for the ordinance and none spoke against it.

Predictably, the County’s head attorney opposes it and both warns of negative consequences while claiming the Sheriff cannot enforce the ordinance. The Sheriff stood in wholehearted support.

While public sentiment may favor this ordinance, which prohobits any county personnel or resources to be used to enforce laws that violate the Constitutional rights of citizens, it would appear the top County officials are looking for a way to block the ordinance without appearing to be opposed to its sentiment. It remains to be seen how the public comments and, frankly, weasal language of certain officials will play with the public and whether public pressure will mount to side with the ordinance.

Bomber Biden’s War Plan

Bill Collier June 28, 2021

The endless wars abroad, in which young Americans suffer and die battling enemies of the global oligarchy, are ramping up as Bomber Biden gets into his stride.

In the latest round of bombings, US troops set within a foreign land were set upon by angry, Iran-backed, local militias. The predictable outcome was a series of bombings by the US against bases held by these militias. While it is certainly true these militia thugs, backed by Iran, are bad people with bad ideas, it may not be true the US has any parochial interest ourselves in fighting them.

As for our country, suffering under growing inflation, a weird job crisis, and this internal sociocultural crisis launched by radicals who represent Biden’s core base, there is nothing the American people csn gain from choosing sides in Syria or Iraq.

Credit where credit is due, one Goerge Bush (the elder) began this adventurist wars in mostly Islamic lands debacle with the first Gulf War. The US fought and bled to liberate Kuwait after Iraq invaded in reason to Kuwait blatantly stealing millions upon millions of barrels of oil from Iraq through cross-drilling.

Perhaps letting a former CIA bigwig become President wasn’t the smartest thing the US ever did.

After 911 the US had every right to put a massive hurting to all those powers that either backed or otherwise enabled Al Qeuda and their Wahabist ideology. Backing the Afghanistanis who wanted to overthrow the Taliban, letting them do the fighting on the ground for their own freedom, was certainly within the scope of legitimate responses. But so also would severing ties with Saudi Arabia unless they abandoned their global effort to impart the Wahabist ideology, a key component of which was violent jihad.

As it stands now, after George the younger finished the destabilizing work his father started, which may itself have been the “justification” the Wahabist terrorists needed to gain recruits and funding, the entire scene became a quagmire. From Egypt to Afghanistan, the spector of Islamic Jihad and the destabilization of the entire Islamic world, set on fire mostly through “Western intervention”, has cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and hasn’t improved a thing.

Enter now one Joe “The Bomber”, Biden, or “Bomber Biden” for short. His war plan seems to be the same as Biden the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger, and Obama. Only Trump tried, somewhat, to steer a different course but our woke coterie of globalist generals blocked him at every turn.

Truly, the United States of America in all our economic and military power has become nothing more than a giant cudgel to browbeat the world into submission to a band of globalist oligarchs whose interests do not align with our country’s parochial interests.

This thirst for imperialist dominion over all things and all people for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many is what drives Biden’s War Plan. It is calculated by the needs and interests of this global oligarchy and their planned “reset”, which amounts to modern feudalism.

It it is no wonder that Biden threatens Americans who refuse to abide his wacko interpretation of the Bill of Rights as a permission slip to deny the right of self-preservation even as he bombs bad guys whose success or failure is of no real concern to America’s parochial interests.

His militarism, imperialism, and authoritarianism are precisely what his oligarch overlords demand of him!

The Battle Against The Woke Technocracy

Bill Collier June 27, 2021

The battle against the woke technocracy is at an early stage and will require a long-term, multi-faceted digital guerilla marketing approach.

Even though we stipulate to the fact they have every right to be arrogant SOB’s within their platforms, while making outlandish claims of not being woke authoritarians, and even though we don’t necessarily think they outright want to ban all content that doesn’t agree with woke authoritarianism, we can’t warm up to these people. They are unlikeable in their weird arrogant self-importance.

But kvetching doesn’t usually solve anything. Our deep-rooted desire to overthrow the technocracy is far more parochial than merely being wound up about alleged bias and lack of transparency as to their idiotic “community standards”, which are both a joke in their content and their enforcement. We, and by this we mean more freedom-minded people who seek a decentralized web just as we seek a decentralized politics and a decentralized economy, simply don’t want a digital space owned by cretins who are not friendly or favorable to us.

Put another way, even if you wish to opine that big tech isn’t proactively anti-freedom, you cannot argue they are friends of liberty. This is especially true if your content tends toward a more staunchly, traditional, and socially conservative Judeo-Christian bent. As an example, even suggesting gender is purely biological can get you banned from Twitter. This is the tendency of the woke technocracy.

The desire to upend the marketplace and overthrow the technocracy, however, should not necessarily be about political sabre rattling. The truth many overlook is, done right, even platforms that compete for 5% of the market share could literally make their owners hundreds of millions of dollars. There is a lot of money to be made.

Our approach and focus on overthrowing the technocracy is all about the revenue. There are billions of dollars being funneled to people who got lucky, got in first, and who now want to shield themselves against any new competitors. If you really want to to find the bias of big tech, that’s it: they climbed the ladder of success and now they want to chop it down so we cannot follow.

Unless you have the means and technology to create your own platform, and if you do not like the woke technocracy, regardless of your reasons, then, to put is bluntly, you will need to become a patron of alt tech platforms, as a backer/investor, sponsor, or paid subscriber. We would add, not being willing to pay for content as a user is precisely how you keep big tech on top.

We may choose to zing the big tech overlords from time to time for their ridiculous woke authoritarian preaching and the way they talk down to everyone, but our focus is on the fact there is a massive market for digital content, digital services for self-expression and promotion, and digital tools for connecting with others.

Becoming even a tiny bit player in that space can be quite lucrative and if you do this in a way that serves freedom-minded people and builds freedom in general, advancing the freedom narrative and vision among more and more people, then so much the better.

We are motivated by a desire to broadcast a freedom vision, gather and serve freedom-builders, and advance a pro-freedom agenda in every arena, including the market, the digital space, and even politics. But we understand that the free market, not charity and certainly not kvetching, is the path to advancement for our cause. Of course you can back our efforts by becoming a subscribing here and accessing original, unique content you won’t find anywhere else.

Our voice is unique and will provide you real news and inspirational content that can actually benefit your life in the here and now.

The battle against the woke technocracy is a free market fight, waged through gaining viewers, subscribers, sponsors, and backers who want more freedom-building content and policies within the digital commons. But it’s not a head-to-head fight. We are essentially the digital guerillas huddling in the jungle, trying to avoid a far superior force in open battle.

The battle against the woke technocracy is in a guerilla stage. We therefore propose that, money being the driving force in the market, and money being far more alluring than woke ideology, the paid subscriptions model is our best bet. The paid subscription model both allows for smaller platforms to grow steady as their support base grows, while starting small, and creates enough real revenue that even biased payment processors don’t look askance at the revenue generated for them.

We would suggest that the alt tech, pro-freedom platform community, the community of actual alt tech and alt content providers, connect for mutual benefit and support in the form of freedom tech guild. This guild could leverage its collective weight and spending power so that one platform or digital content provider cannot be easily targeted by a woke payment processor. Or perhaps this group could form a consortium for payment processing, for legal defense and offense, for hosting, and even for a truly good alt tech search engine.

Getting to that place or convincing enough alt tech providers to join such a guild is way beyond our capability unless we ourselves command a large enough audience and paid subscription support base. But something like this, which allows a plethora of platforms to grow and prosper serving niche communities of people, is what will eventually become a thousand and thousands and tens of thousands of cuts that weaken the woke technocracy.

The “free speech platform” model is too complex and requires massive technical, financial, legal, and political firepower with which to rout the predicted monopolist response, which will include effort to cut off technology and all means of processing payments as well as massive demonization by the DNC Press. What makes this model so problematic isn’t just the technology, but the moderation and governance, not to mention the public relations blows that would be landed every day against the platform and its owners and builders.

In addition to all these problems, both real and artificially imposed by the woke technocracy and their allies, there is the fact the marketplace, the potential users, subscribers, and sponsors, don’t really want a free speech space they have to share with actual racists, neonazis, jihadists, chauvinists, nasty trolls, bullies, extremists, or even communists. The market may want more liberalized platforms for the general public than the woke authoritarians wish to provide, but they definitely don’t want the free speech limited only by whatever it’s “legal” to say and they may balk at the notion the government should dictate the moderation policies of platforms.

It is tempting to say the platforms are no different than the phone company, but when a phone call is over the content only exists if one or more parties record it and nobody is being asked to sponsor that content. Moreover, the users themselves are paying for access and use, which doesn’t occur with platforms today. Platforms are stuck with your content and if they want a brand-friendly product for sponsors, and if those sponsors, like most corporations, tend toward the woke authoritarianism spectrum, then content moderation must reflect sponsor wishes.

It’s a pity more and more corporations, perhaps also owing to their market dominance, only seem to care about the sensitivities and interests of a segment of the population while assuming everyone must buy from them because you can’t possibly boycott all the woke authoritarian corporations, but this is a fact of life we have to navigate and invent our way around.

As we see it, the only shortcut is for users to replace the corporate sponsors in such numbers that the total population of users on woke platforms decreases substantively enough to truly awaken the corporate backers to a new reality wherein they have lost access to a substantial plurality of potential customers.

This is not going to be accomplished by creating “one big system” (OBS) to defeat another OBS. What will have to happen is two things: users who are sick of the woke garbage will have to actually pony up and start paying for content and access and providers will need to find innovative ways to serve unique content and meet the needs of more niche communities in awesome ways.

The real problem may be that, even if providers truly do a good job, the user base will pin their hopes on government regulation to force free platforms to be nicer to them instead of the obvious path, which is to financially back friendly platforms and content providers who cannot afford to be free.

The path to overthrow the woke technocracy isn’t easy and there is no simple “fire and forget” solution. It will involve, we imagine, the following:

1. First and foremost, a willingness for users to become paid subscribers to niche platforms and content providers who are trying to compete with the woke technocracy

2. The innovation of providers who focus on niche platforms and/or truly unique content worthy of paid subscriber backing

3. The development of a guild or coalition of providers who share resources and form consortia (plural of consortium) to provide alternatives to the woke corporate payment processors, search, hosting, cdn’s, email list management, and the like

4. While not covered in this article, we also envision a common backbone based on api hooks that allows cross-posting on alt tech platforms, ways for users to create a homepage that collates content from those platforms, and ways to push content on or advertise on various alt tech platforms

For our part we offer unique content HERE for the freedom builder via paid subscriptions, we are building a niche platform for more Christian or socially conservative audience, and we promote other platforms and providers.

It only takes a spark, as they say, and we hope to join those who, together, in this guerilla stage of the battle against the woke technocracy, to be a part of that spark for a truly free and pluralistic digital commons.

Trump Rumbles! The battle between alt tech and big tech truly begins!

Bill Collier June 27, 2021

Donald Trump joined the alt tech platform, Rumble, a YouTube competitor launched in 2013, soaring past 175k channel subscribers in 24 hours. With this we may say the battle between alt tech and big tech truly begins, albeit with alt tech starting very far behind big tech in every metric.

The move comes after much speculation the deplatformed former President would join multiple other platforms, including Twitter-like alt tech platform Parler. But some consider Rumble both a more stable and long-lived platform that isn’t as prone to crashes as the other platforms.

Expectations that many more users will flock to Rumble and that Trump’s account there will eventually eclipse his Twitter following may be premature as Trump had 88.9 million followers on Twitter. However, if in fact one saw anything approaching that on Rumble, it could disrupt the digital landscape as entities seeking to reach that audience would be forced to take Rumble into account for their advertising.

It remains to be seen whether this will significantly boost Rumble’s user base and make this platform a bit competitive with YouTube or even whether Trump’s presence there would be long-lived as this platform may have massive pressures from the corporate and media establishment to remove him. It is probable, however, that this will in fact double or triple Rumble’s user base over the next few months.

One flaw with the platform is that it is a digital platform and is less interactive than, say, Parler or Gab, unless you are producing video content. For non-producers it is more an entertainment platform they access than a platform they use to express themselves. People can watch video content on Trump’s account without subscribing to the platform.

As for President Trump, just how this enables him to connect to his user base and the world remains to be seen. Early promises of a Trump social media platform resulted in a solo micro blog that was abandoned and nothing more. It is not known if this move constitutes his final decision as to how he will approach having a social media presence, but the fact he has an account on Rumble may not necessarily mean his plans to create a new social media platform have been abandoned.

Our own effort to create a new social media platform, called “Upadaria”, as an e-learning, e-commerce, and social networking platform using gamification and a fictional future history, has shown the complexity in creating even a basic platform targeting tens of thousands of niche users. In our case, we are targeting more cosmopolitan but socially conservative Christians who enjoy gamification and immersive learning experiences and who desire to excell at life.

This audience is perhaps a few million people in the US and a few million abroad, especially considering this is a paid subscription based, not a free, platform. Creating a platform to reach the kinds of numbers Trump needs to make it viable is of a much higher magnitude in complexity. Our platform has absolutely no delusions we can become some form of alternative to big tech platforms or a minor competitor, but Trump will aim precisely at that goal and higher.

The work to build a platform that might be competitive with a major platform would be immense and simply having a lot funding would not necessarily shorten the development time. Trump’s platform, if it comes to pass, must be far more robust than our “Upadaria” platform because his target audience is at least 50 million people. The building of the features and user interface, security, hosting, and data infrastructure for such a task, not to mention the moderation and governance tools and manpower, may prove the biggest hurdles for Trump’s team.

We would not discount the notion a Trump social media platform is coming but its development may take more time than perhaps Trump’s digital team have estimated. It may also be far more expensive than projected with little in the way of a funding model to make it financially self-sustaining within even a few years. However, it is possible this new platform will have free and paid membership levels and, with Trump at the helm and all the personalities that would follow, it may be financially viable.

So far, the move to Rumble is perhaps a small opening salvo in the battle between alt tech and big tech for dominance of the digital space. Alt tech is not merely a David to a Goliath, however, it is a fly versus an elephant at this stage. Trump’s move to Rumble may actually, but it remains to be seen, make alt tech more like a David versus a Goliath within a few years.