I celebrated my birthday Saturday in the best of all possible ways, a bagel in the morning,
dim sum for lunch,
a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich for supper,
Ted Drewes for dessert, and CDs/DVDs for after (White Stripes, Hellboy, and Doctor Who).
Yes, after resisting for 33 years, I’ve drunk the Doctor’s Kool-Aid.
Between dim sum and Ted Drewes, we stopped at the Central branch of the Public Library to see an “original copy” (sorry, I chortle whenever I say that) of the Declaration of Independence.
There was something a little twisted about the circumstances of the Declaration display. Not the Declaration itself; it was sealed in a glass case and you could file by and examine it as closely as you liked for as long as you wanted. You could take pictures (no flash). There were about 30 people ahead of us so it didn’t take long to work through the queue. The strange note came in the form of the handout we received when we walked in the door.
On one side of the handout was a Xerox of the original Declaration, complete with signatures. On the back was an article about what happened to the signers. Some were captured by the British and executed as traitors. Several more lost all they had and died penniless. At the bottom of the article was a curious sentence. “Although some of these men suffered and died for their defense of liberty (as America’s political prisoners do today) others went on to become respected leaders of society.” The article was credited to Serendipity at serendipity.li/jsmill/decl_men.htm
Since “America’s political prisoners” was underscored on the handout, I was curious about what the source was trying to say. I headed for the Serendipity site and was flabbergasted to see that the underscored phrase was indeed a link which took me to a page with this patriotic message.
“The United States of America, which styles itself hypocritically as a defender of human rights, keeps many people behind bars (when it doesn’t simply kill them, as in the case of pro-marijuana activist Grover Crosslin) because they dare to express (non-violently) their opposition to the unjust policies of the U.S. government. That is to say, in addition to the many dissidents now in their graves there are many locked away as political prisoners. These are often members of ethnic minorities, perhaps because the United States, which was built upon the exploitation of black people by white, has always denied the human rights of its ethnic minorities.
The United States govt. insists that the U.S. is a country where its citizens and residents enjoy freedom. But they can’t even go for a walk in the evening without the risk of being arrested and thrown into jail.” And to prove this, there’s a link to a story about a guy who was arrested and thrown into jail because he went for a walk.
The root URL (www.serendipity.li) is a hodge-podge of links to every whacked-out conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard of and some I haven’t. If you surf there, you’ll learn that Zionists control Wikipedia, 9/11 was a government conspiracy, Waco was a government conspiracy, UFO cover ups are a government conspiracy, in fact, pretty much every bad thing that’s ever happened was a government conspiracy (except the Zionist conspiracies).
The guy(s) at Serendipity (who, to my shame, describe themselves as Libertarian) would no doubt theorize that the propagation of this link on the handout was part of a subtle conspiracy perpetrated by a shadowy group to get subversive information into the hands of the unsuspecting dupes of the imperialist US government. I, on the other hand, suspect somebody at Cricket Communications just Googled “men who signed the Declaration of Independence”, grabbed the first link, and used it for their handout without checking the source.
But it COULD be a conspiracy.
Poppa
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