RidleyBook poised for publication. Each ad buy triggers 1 page

[Dave Ridley]

Here's the first published excerpt of a "proto-book" I'm writing about the early days of the Free State Project.  If you like it...you'll read to the end of the snippet.  There you'll learn how to get a "page of your own" published, how to buy ads in the book and move it closer to completion.  This project will move forward only as ads are purchased...in that respect and nearly every other, it's the antithesis of the Ridley Report.

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Part III
SHADOWS OF THE MAHATMA
2005-06

"It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government."
     - Patrick Henry

FIRST SHADOW

The authoritarian orgy through which America has passed, and continues to pass, differs from all others of U.S. inception, in the immense power of the rulers and the tame acquiescence of the ruled.   Our blundering yet dangerous agencies of control had, by and large, long histories.  They had lashed out their subjects before.  But now all the cruelties of all the bureaucracies were brought together, and not only suspects but entire populations were thrust haphazard into the funnel of the surveillance regime.

Washington, having loosed the Orwellian genie, kept well in the van of violation.  Brazen defiance of nearly every Constitutional check became her barely challenged hallmark.  But she was followed step after step by the hungry ministries of city and state, enticed to her stifling orbit by the dangling bait of Federal funding.

Citizens vanished from the streets and mouldered in their cells five years and more without trial; authorities seized the currency of innocents and charged it with felonious offense.  Wars were proclaimed and inflicted for decades against unapproved fluids and plants, gentle patients summoned from hospital beds, caged into steel boxes for consuming the contraband cures.

Infant-clutching mothers were gunned down from behind at distance, unconforming cultists burned where they stood in flimsy compounds.  Was it suicide?  Murder?  The quick-arriving bulldozers told no tales.

In tribute to Federal bans on armed pilotry, our hapless neighbors were slaughtered in their travels or carbonized under imploding office towers.  Our children bled or burned to death on alien sands, crusading to spread a freedom that mimicked communism, for a republic that mimicked empire.

Foreign death rates blossomed by the hundreds of thousands.
Alien guerrillas resisted and were tortured under American fists, their privations playfully photographed.

In a moment of meteorologic catastrophe, the far-off wars, or something briefly like them, came crackling into our streets.  And those warriors we had quietly supported with our care parcels and yellow ribbons....

Those warriors turned upon us, came crashing through our doors, seizing our every means of defense, betraying us to the mercy of the looting hordes.   

These were the abuses shocked into public memory by headline; others less disputed would proceed on a wider scale.  Authorities and soldiers in every station loyally opposed the excesses; others at every level joined in or hid their perpetration.  Few took blame; fewer still served sentence.  All ate of the taxpayer's sustenance.

Meanwhile gulags dressed as prisons kept the restless in awe, prisons dressed as schools kept them in ignorance. 

But these developments, these vices, were no monopoly of any one nation or government.  On balance, the peril waxed even greater around the remainder of the Western world.   For in near every "free" country, the spirit of subservience to government grew steadily...powers once held dear to the individual, ceded with thoughtless ease to Authority. 

And in every U.S. state, the organization and structure into which souls were fitted by government's schools and laws...bloated and armed this current.  Trained in their very classrooms to report and eventually surrender vast portions of their own wages, instructed from youth to turn in parent and neighbor for the most victimless of offense, ceaselessly reminded of government's saving history by teachers beholden to its largess...they learned to sacrifice, for the hungry Collective Good, near half the flower of their labor.

Far more than their vices, the virtues of these citizens ill-directed or misdirected by their rulers became the cause of their own undoing, the source of the general catastrophe.   And these rulers, these presidents and town tyrants, how far were they to blame?  Was there any one soul of eminence and responsibility whose devil heart conceived and willed the entirety of this awful thing?  One rises from the study of America's descent into tyranny with a prevailing sense of the defective control individuals wreak upon national fortunes.

The limited minds of even the wisest governors, their inability to measure success as a business would, the climate of opinion in which they dwell and their partial contributions to the mighty problem, all this must surely be considered before the complete condemnation of the rulers or the complete acquittal of the ruled can be pronounced.  Events got on to certain lines, and no one was willing and able to get them off again.  Washington clanked thoughtlessly, recklessly toward the crater and dragged us all in with.

But fierce, unthinking support consumed the heart of many a well-meaning citizen.  Others, apprehending the danger, nevertheless succumbed to fear of its source.  And ascendant over both these ill sentiments...a reigning, numbing apathy initially dominated and paralyzed the plurality.  (Above section Modeled on: Churchill, World Crisis I, p. 9-14)

But the dimming lights of liberty shown brighter in some places than others. And toward the American state where they flickered the brightest, a trickle of political migration had begun.   Here the desperate schemes of these outnumbered "Free Staters" must play out and must play out to victory.  For their bridges were largely burned away, and there was no further line of defense to which they could retreat.  But how does a movement, seeming to number not one in ten thousand, prevail?

The answer was to show itself in one selfless, brilliant act.

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More details about the book and how it will publish: As some of you know, I've been poking around intermittently on this project since 2007.  Till now I've left it on the back burner...writing only when there's nothing else to do. 

Theoretically I'm ready to begin distributing the first pages, as a series.  The publication method will be almost totally outside the normal system - spreading slowly at first via forum threads, then perhaps printouts, blogs, .rtf files.  It may grow into podcasts or audio-only reports on my YouTube channel.  Some sections might re-appear as full-blown video productions.  The more ads I sell the further the thing goes. 

But I'm going to let each page sit unpublished or even unfinished until it has an advertiser.   You would know that by sponsoring a page...you're essentially bringing it to the world and the next page a step closer to publication.  Unlike the Ridley Report, ads will probably *not* get most of their views during the initial publication.  Viewership/distribution will more likely swell over time...as long as there are advertisers the story will gain momentum. 

Today I'm offering ads for the first page and will publish it within two weeks of the sale:

Page 1 (Preface):  One line ad for $20

You can speak for ads on the next pages, but they won't print until all the pages before them have sold.

Page 2:  Two line ad, $20
Page 3: One line ad: $15
Page 4: One line ad: $15
Page 5: Three line ad: $25

What you get out of an ad purchase:   
- Page publishes within two weeks which otherwise would not be published
- Initially appears on at least four web forums.
- Then your ad follows the page pretty much everywhere I put it for two years.  This could mean you end up in podcast versions, hard copies, Ridley Reports, etc.

Examples of how a text ad might look:

In web forum format: http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php?topic=19132.msg308549#msg308549
In .rtf format:  http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=19129.0;attach=5613

Send an e-mail to RidleyReport at live period com if you'd like to commission one or more pages.

[Pat K]