I can’t understand why we don’t question the stagnating status quo – we just stagnate along with it. Groupthink, that’s what it is. Unquestioning conformity: just do your job and don’t ask anything. I suggest you have a read of George Orwell’s 1984: it’ll get you up to speed.

Nobody can handle someone harshly questioning the system that we base our entire sense of worth upon. Try telling anyone about mercantile capitalism, and how money is intrinsically worth sweet fuck all, and note the reaction you get.

Due to lack of imagination they’ll either go comatose and bleat ignorance, or they’ll get aggressive and try to (usually stupidly) tear down your argument with a series of open-ended, loaded, narrow-minded questions: expecting a fucking answer handed to them on a silver platter.

But, but, but…

But you’re mindfucked by the dollars you poor soul. A slave to the system: merely man-hours within the eternal barter system of debt. Just look at how many serial numbers represent you in your life – bank cards, tax file numbers, drivers licence, Medicare cards, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are corporate or legal representations of the natural person: shackles to the politico-economic matrix.

Google ‘natural person’ if you don’t know what I’m talking about. And if you ever happen to find yourself standing in front of a judge, make sure you state that you are the ‘natural person’ not the corporate or legal representation of the natural person.

Just because I question these systems, doesn’t mean that have any answers. Yet. How can I have any answers when nobody wants to talk with me about said systems? I’d gladly engage in any constructive criticism aimed at nothing less than the total replacement of our current political, economic and spiritual systems. But nooo, that’s just too bloody hard isn’t it?

Like, oh my God, that would require me thinking outside the realms of my normal thought processes, I would have to, like, think about other people, places and things and I don’t know if I could handle that. I mean, like, compassion and empathy just doesn’t fit in with my self-absorbed materialistic lifestyle – and, like, Neighbours is on later anyway.

And don’t get me started on the tell-lie-vision: the most insidious tool of the mercantile capitalism system. Think about it: tell-lie-vision is paid for by the corporations’ advertising agencies. What kind of message do you think comes out through the Idiot Box – apart from a message that dogmatically reinforces the apparent need for mercantile capitalism?

Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, the same bullshit consumerist canon spews out through the monitor. Buy this, buy that, high def this, low cal that, most apps this, least cost that, blah, blah, friggin’ blah. The monotony is never ending. But most people would rather watch this garish carnival of high definition distraction than actually discuss the goings on in world around us.

Anyone noticed how aggressively the Banking Cartels are advertising nowadays? Nowadays being six months after the Global Fake Calamity that they created. They’re our best friends now, telling us that savings accounts and investments and loans and diversifying capital and fixed interest rates are all the rage these days.

Come deposit your money with us, we’ll look after it – until we think you need a financial shake up again, then we’ll pull your fiscal security blanket out from under your feet again. And you’ll come back again and again, because you never learnt to think outside the cashbox.

How can we continually be sucked into this vile lattice of greed, ignorance and selfishness? I’ll tell you why, because the whole fucking mercantile system preys on our insecurities and need for acceptance – just like religion – that’s why.

Check out the new Mc-FKN-Donald’s advertisements and tell me I’m wrong. They imply, to children no less, that they’ll be cool and popular if they have a McBirthday Party. Fabulous tactic that. I wish I was so heartless as to be able to think up such wonderful psychological manipulation. Lifetime consumers: here we come. McMinions.

I love spending time with my six year old niece, watching her ask questions of the world – why is this, why is that – and helping her to find the answers: with a dash of culture jamming thrown in for good measure. It saddens me that a great majority of adults no longer gaze upon the world with the same questioning eyes.

Something seems to have been lost along the way, and I don’t think it is impossible to find it again, but while we sit around not questioning anything and thinking we know all answers, all we do is allow the system, and therefore society, to stagnate. No successful evolution has ever come through stagnation: stagnant attempts at evolution are called FOSSILS.

True Lives’ Rhino MC said it best when he said: “question this, question that, question that to which you don’t know how to react.”

Never stop questioning. If you do, you may as well give yourself a lobotomy and find some crappy assembly line job in some Asian Export Processing Zone.

Why we ‘honour’ such horrible deaths is beyond me. The traumatic/negative energy released at the site of every War-time murder/mass-murder can’t be good for the collective consciousness. I don’t see why this should be celebrated at all. I get the fact that humans have this fascination with death, and whatever is beyond death, but it’s got me fucked as to why we have to honour our most morbid of actions: the ‘legal’ genocide that is War. Honour thine murderer, I suppose.

Well, fuck that. War is the most atrocious activity that we as humans engage in, and there is no way on Earth that you can get me to respect and honour it. Period. No way. Nobody is going to call me unpatriotic because I don’t want to die in Wars that are built upon lies. Just as the War on Terror is based on lies and manipulation, so too were the two ‘Great Wars’ based on lies and manipulation. Do your own research, if you can handle the truth.

Maybe War had its place once, but we are no longer Bronze Age savages pillaging their neighbours in the name of exploration. Or are we? Personally, I don’t think we are. We are surely more intelligent, more compassionate and more globally aware than our fore bearers were. Aren’t we? Or are we stupider, less compassionate and globally ignorant?

I certainly hope not.

Instead of reinforcing the apparent dogmatic need for War, by celebrating previous Wars every year, why not look toward a future where War is unthinkable. As far as I’m concerned War already is unthinkable. You can’t actively participate in the murder of another by actually using your brain and heart. It is not possible, unless you are too far gone: a desensitised drone person enslaved in the capitalist matrix.

But hey, at least you’ll get a good wage slaughtering your fellow human beings. Between AU $60,000 and AU $80,000 just for the cannon fodder, you can earn even more if you hone your murdering skills to the next level of murderousness.

Lest we forget what War really is: murder – plain and simple.

Our country was built on immigration: does anyone remember the ‘bride ships’ that bought European women out here in the 1950s and 60s? How times change, eh?

Our prime minister has taken a hardline approach on the subject: instead of smiling like a git like he usually does, he now frowns when talking about it. His/our government has deemed these refugees ‘illegal immigrants’, and thus warped the public perception of them. Just another case of the political speechwriters convoluting the English language in order to sway the xenophobic masses.

Bleat! Stupid curry-munchers should stay in their own fucken country, eh Bazza? Yeah Dazza, fucken black cunts. I’m gunna bash ‘em cos I don’t understand ‘em! Yeah! Bleat! Bleat!

I think I was told once, when I was younger, that the politicians work for the people – not the other way around. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?!? Aren’t they supposed to do what we want, instead of inflicting their own sheltered, narrow-minded, upper-crust attitudes upon the commoners??

The refugees are on an AUSTRALIAN boat in AUSTRALIAN waters, and they aren’t being let in to our wonderful, expansive, sparsely populated country. Excuse me, Mr KRudd, esteemed bespectacled leader, but don’t we have obligations under international human rights laws to protect those fleeing from warzones? Hold on a minute, let me just take off my pants and do a big SHIT all over the Geneva Convention, eh? What a fucking disgrace.

Gotta love those United Nations organisations that posture this way and that, spouting humanitarian drivel but not actually doing a fucking thing, because they are – in effect – paper tigers. Departments of smoke and mirrors, doublespeak and hollow rhetoric: claiming to have foresight toward the future, but really just wanting the system to stay the same. Because Mercantile Capitalism needs the poverty, the displacement of peoples, and the wars in order to sustain it. I’m pretty sure Sri Lanka doesn’t manufacture weapons, but they sure do have a lot of them in the country.

Can nobody see this ghastly vicious circle? War and weapons make money: money makes the world go round. Ergo: war and weapons make the world go round. If we are going to sell uranium to US weapons manufacturers, then we should be willing to accept the fallout (no pun intended). If we are going to be involved in the MK Ultra War on Terror, then we should expect terrorised refugees from all over the globe.

Our politicians are not our intellectual superiors. We need to make them work for us again. Find out the electorate you live in and mail your local MP a letter, or better yet find out where their office is and hand deliver it – that way you interact with them directly. Enough people do that and they’ll react in some way. You can instigate change or you can just sit there and believe in change.

Television: the one-stop non-stop indoctrination shop. This marvellous piece of technology has been ticking away in homes for half a century now, propagating the seeds of the all-consuming Mercantile Capitalist canon amongst those who happen to gaze upon its hypnotic screen. Not a hard task when most households in the West have multiple TVs. It’s been part of my life since for as long as I can remember.

That steady torrent pouring out through the CRT or LCD monitor, that insidiously multifaceted symphony of musical jingles and catchphrases, aimed at provoking the Western world’s shopping zombies into mindless frenzies of mass consumption. Frenzies only possible because the Western slave can stay so detached from the secondary slave class that occupy the Asian Export Processing Zones that manufacture all the consumables. Sale now on!

I can flick on the Idiot Box anytime of the day or night, and my mind will be bombarded incessantly with false versions of unattainable realities, dogmatic repetition of the pseudo-value of material objects, the apparently absolute need for dependency on currency, feigned concern for the 3^rd World urchins, news that becomes advertising, advertising that becomes news: the cycle is never ending.

I’ve read somewhere recently:

“Australian children on average watch 2 hours and 30 minutes of TV per day. In terms of advertising this means that Australian children watching commercial TV are likely to see: 30 commercials per hour; 75 commercials per day, and 23,000 commercials per year.”

So just begin to imagine how zombified a child will become if he or she watches 4 hours of television a day between the ages of six and fifteen years old. And who’s the biggest spending demographic in our marvellously oversupplied world? Teenagers, that’s who, the next generation of maturing brains being moulded into the ‘shopping zombie’ mentality before being unleashed upon their parents’ wallets. Which, in turn, perpetuates the cycle: the parent teaches the child its’ own indoctrinated Mercantile Capitalist views.

The Idiot Box is the pinnacle of Mercantile Capitalism’s indoctrination ‘products’. It is a wondrous contradiction in its own right: a tangible physical manifestation of our obvious creativity and intelligence, yet it spreads a mentality so monotonous and vulgarly stupid that it can no longer be ignored.

The culture of Mercantile Capitalism is a blight on the collective psychology of our species. It is a self-serving, self-perpetuating, self-destructive sickness that eats into the core of our spiritual being, and manifests in the way we behave toward our natural environment and global neighbours.

Radical change is needed to remove this parasitic state of mind from our society. Obama’s “change we can believe in” will not achieve anything: because we’re all so busy being distracted by the pursuit of monetary wealth and material possessions that we have no time to instigate the change even if we wanted to. We can believe in change as much as we like, but until we actually do something, the system will just remain as it is. The slave class majority must realise its power and rise to challenge this disgusting illness inflicted upon the world by the ruling Merchant Class.

Zach De La Rocha said it best when he said: “You gotta take the power back.”

We must not let the human race stagnate in this compartmentalised and divisive system of servitude. Evolution of intellect must permeate the masses, before our current form of conditioning permanently paralyses us into mindless conforming automatons.

Think outside the Idiot Box…

The television program The Chasers War On Everything aired a comedy skit a few months ago that depicted children suffering from terminal illnesses wishing for trips to Disneyland or to meet Zac Efron, only to receive gifts of a pencil case and a stick from the “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” because “they’re going to die anyway”.

Outrage screamed the mob. Lynch them from the highest branch. The reaction from the public was swift and resulted in the television show being cancelled for two weeks, and the Chasers team having to give a televised apology to all who happened to chance upon this tawdry snippet of black humour. Even the Prime Minister threw in his two bob. Fair shake of the sauce bottle.

I must admit that when I watched the skit I did laugh – from shock mostly – but it wouldn’t be The Chasers War On Everything if there wasn’t controversial content. For those who don’t know, the television program takes a satirical and often dark look at the current state of politics, current affairs, news reporting and the world in general. That is what they are known for, and every new season they try to outdo their most outrageous skit from the previous season. If the Chasers team won’t raise (or lower) the bar, then who will?

I don’t understand how a fictional joke, portrayed through the media of film and beamed into our High Definition Idiot Boxes, can provoke more outrage than the fact that thousands of children die every day in the real world. UNICEF states recently that, in 2007, 9.2 million children under the age of five died from preventable causes – half of them in Africa. That’s roughly 25,000 children every day. Twenty five thousand! Every four days the number of children (under 5) that has died is equivalent to a sell-out crowd at the MCG. That’s a lot of bodies. That’s a lot of lives never given the chance to flourish.

I don’t think the Chasers team deserved to be raked over the coals and pulled off the air because of this. The ABC had the chance to stop the show from airing, but they didn’t.

And we shouldn’t forget that the ABC has championed freedom of expression through film and television for decades now. Without the ABC we would be subjected to the commercial media’s barrage of insipid, self-indulged, Americanised, sheeple fodder.

There are worse things happening in reality than there are in the fictitious realms of Tell-lie-Vision.

Some people tell me I have an anger problem, that I need to take a chill pill, that I need to relax, to be cool, to cheer up, to calm down, et cetera. Id’ have to agree with them. Because when I look around at this planet and see how the previous generations have treated it, and still treat its inhabitants: I get angry. Very fucking angry.

Sometimes I feel like I’m only person left on this godforsaken planet that actually gives a fuck about it and us. So many people I talk to are trapped in the capitalist matrix, comfortable drones with a one track mind – money, money, money – that have become inactive and detached from one another. Consenting: conforming to how they are told to live. Not caring about how many dead Iraqis it takes to fill their petrol tank. Not caring about how GM crops make you infertile. Not paying a single iota of attention to anything else, unless it directly impacts their lives. Reactionless, detached automatons: that’s what the capitalist matrix grows.

Oh, I’m too busy trying to earn a dollar, so I can’t possibly give a flying fuck about those who carry water-buckets on their heads for 20km just so they can provide for their family. I mean, they don’t even have any money!

They don’t have any money. Interesting. Well, disgusting actually. Twenty percent of the world lives in apparent comfort, while the rest can’t even plug in to the matrix: a bit fucked, don’t you think?

But nobody questions the fucking system, do they? Noooooooo. That would be just too fucking hard, wouldn’t it?

Well fuck that bullshit. I’m not going to stand by and watch capitalism run this planet into the ground. No way. I will be raging hard and fast against this oppressive machine for as long as it takes to see real change, not change you can believe in, but actual change. The Evolution is coming.

We need to work toward a system that doesn’t continually exceed demands, a system that doesn’t create more waste than we know what to do with, a system that includes all of humanity and not just the people in the developed countries: a system that isn’t based on greed. So much for the seven deadly sins, eh?

I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my favourite bands, The Offspring:

..the wind blows, I lean into the wind

my anger grows, I’ll use it to win

the more you say, the more I defy you

so get out of my way…

Maybe that’s why religion isn’t so popular nowadays. I mean, sure, there’s sex in the church, but it’s usually molestation and child rape. Not a good sales pitch, especially when the priests involved tell the victim it’s their fault and that the victim is a shameful sinner that needs come back for another dose of ‘our little secret’. All with the apparent permission from God, of course: because God says it’s ok for men to play with little boys/girls genitals. And then the church feigns shock at the fact the hordes no longer flock toward their voodoo-mumbo-jumbo dogma.

How the fuck does religion/the church get away with telling the world that it’s full of filthy sinners, when history shows us that they are the most atrocious bunch of murderers, paedophiles, bigots, racists, suppressors, and out and out power trippers that the world has ever seen? How, I ask.

It’s all about the shame: it’s a goddamned throw-back of an emotion that only manipulative pricks use to assert power over others. Get rid of it. Shame should’ve died out when Derryn Hinch lost his spot on TV. Shame, shame, shame.

Sex being shameful. It’s got me fucked what sort of a headcase would think up such an idea. What kind of sad lonely lost little god-botherer had an orgasm all those years back and decided it was the devils’ work? Fornication, well, that’s even worse! And let us not mention those that bed with same sex, for they’ll surely burn in hell!

Come on, people, for God’s sake. No: for our sake. When will we move past this absurd notion that natural reproductive urges are to be frowned upon and demonised? Just take a look at the priests to see what 20 or 30 years of sexual repression does: in turns them into paedophiles. Can no-one see the vicious circle?

Our ancients never looked at sex or masturbation as evil: it was often encouraged and seen as a ‘rite of passage’ into manhood/womanhood. Trust the Christians and the Catholics to label the phallus and the clitoris horrible sinful things, that when played with will send your soul straight to hell. Bhahahahahaa! What a fucking joke.

So, when I see sex-based advertising, it doesn’t bother me at all. If it’s that iiNet git telling me (during children’s TV programming) about their new “broadband in a sexy little box” while a choir sings hellelujah in the background, it doesn’t bother me. Or if it’s an ad for Oakley Sunglasses, a two by one metre larger than life poster in the middle of a shopping centre displaying a bikini-clad model (with a pouch bigger than a kangaroo), it still doesn’t bother me. Why should it?

The Capitalist leviathan may have one unexpected upside: through risqué advertising it has liberated, and is still liberating, the western world’s sexual views and is slowly pushing the God Delusion from the zeitgeist. I’m sure the sixties were great, but I wasn’t there. And still, forty years after all that sexual revolution, the shadow of shame, the denial of our nature, still permeates our society. Hopefully for not much longer.

You know the old cliché: make love, not war…

During this session I learned how disgracefully we (still) treat Australia’s indigenous people. I learned about horrible massacres in Timor. I learned about the devious propaganda of Dictator Robert Mugabe. I also learned to speak a morning greeting in a foreign language.

It’s all good that writers can create wondrous fantasy worlds about boy wizards and whatnot, but what about the fundamentally wrong actions taken by certain entities on this planet? Who’s going to write about that? Journalism has become a laughing stock, a paid advertisement, so who’s going to show the world the harsh reality of how horrendously we can behave toward each other? Not Stephanie Meyer that’s for sure. No vampires in the Rwandan genocide. Or in Iraq. Or in Government.

We in the West have the freedom to express what we think and feel with relatively no fear of repercussions. We have the intellect to create complex economic, political, and social systems (and govern these systems), yet we do not speak up against inhumane criminal acts within these systems. We sit idly by, desensitised to violence through the idiot box, and just watch it all unfold in glorious Hi-Def.

In-activists, that’s what we’ve become.

Well, not me. These people showed me that I can’t stop and I won’t stop telling the world how it is. The filtered lies that Joe Average gets fed through commercial television are just plain disgraceful. Corporate backed News – advertising in disguise – is making the world complacent. How else can we have sat by for a decade and let the US Army slaughter thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians? Because we have become inactive. Desensitised drone-people caught in the capitalist matrix.

The knowledge I gained at the MWF poured petrol on the spark inside me. The flame will never go out now.

We can no longer forget our luggage or voice a politically-incorrect joke in an airport without the fear of the security guards running and tackling us to the ground and screeching “terrorist” while they hold their guns to our head and their knees in our back. Smokers are now relegated to the street corner in order to practice their government-inflicted vicious circle. A little sidenote: if the government actually cared about human life, rather than capitalism and taxes, they would ban cigarettes all together. Youth (or anyone) now deemed as “engaging in anti-social behaviour or likely to cause fear in others” can be forced to ‘move on’ from PUBLIC SPACES – this is LAW. Woe is my larrikin spirit.

Just look at the ‘bikie control’ laws that the Government is still pushing hard to pass. If you didn’t know, these yet introduced laws will forbid the ‘known criminal associates’ within these groups from congregating anywhere in public, in private, or otherwise. These laws punish the group for the actions of the few, and will strengthen the ‘move on’ powers that the police currently enforce.

But would you consider the God Squad, or the Harley Owners Group, or the Melbourne Scooter Club, or the Ulysses Club, or the Falcon GT club, or the Monaro Club of Victoria as groups with known criminal associates? I certainly wouldn’t, that’s for sure. But these laws (if passed) will give the law enforcers open slather on who and what they deem is a criminal organisation. I suggest the Monaro Club members stop doing any burnouts and restrict the noise level of their cars, before it’s too late!

Sounds fair enough, maybe. But that law had better refer to corporations as well. Alas, multi-billion dollar crooks seem to be outside of the law most all of the time these days. Lucky for Coca-Cola Amatil then, isn’t it? They can keep murdering their South American Union Reps for as long as they please now.

If you want half an idea of how convoluted and self-serving the law system is (for those who control it on this planet), just take a look at the differences between the rich and the poor when one of either class is charged with the same crime: the sentences are never the same.

Ex US soldier and veteran, Timothy McVeigh, was charged with murder, conspiracy, possession of explosives, and possession of weapons of mass destruction, after he lashed out at what he thought was a “tyrannical” US regime by bombing a government building in Oklahoma City fourteen years ago. His actions killed 168 people, including 19 children – which McVeigh referred to as “collateral damage”. He was sentenced to death and executed in 2001.

On the other hand, a group of elitists, calling themselves the US government, has incited an invasion and occupation of a foreign country under false pretences (conspiracy), murdered thousands of INNOCENT men, women, and children (collateral damage) using explosives and WMD’s, and this horrendous extermination of human life still continues to this day, yet not a single one of these elitist sons of bitches has been brought to justice. They probably never will be. You know why? Because they control the justice. Just us – get it? But, anyway.

Consider this hypothetical: your grandma has a knitting club, maybe a member of your grandma’s knitting club is opinionated and says something anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-government, anti-whatever and word gets around of her opinion, maybe your grandma’s friend has some respect and sway in the community, maybe some people listen to your grandma’s friend and start to think for themselves, maybe the knitting club doubles in size, maybe during a knitting session one day the door’s kicked in by black-clad SOG’s and your poor grandma and all her friends are arrested, dragged off to prison, and convicted for ‘conspiracy to commit dissent’, or some other jumped-up bullshit accusation.

Once you’ve stopped laughing at my ‘ridiculous’ anecdote, google “conscientious objector” and have a look at what happened to those kind of people back in the day. Oh, you don’t like war and everything it stands for, eh? Well, we’ll just have to kill you then. Not so funny now, is it?

Protest and rebellion are deeply rooted in our culture, from the Mutiny on the Bounty, to the so-called Rum Rebellion, to the Eureka Stockade, to Ned Kelly, to the Tent City in Canberra, to Premier Steve Bracks’ pie in the face, and to the Taxi Driver Uprising outside Flinders Street Station. Without the freedom to gather and express our disagreement with the authorities, Australia would still be a penal colony (well, at least NSW would be!), and we would all be passive drones.

I’m proud of the fact that past Australian’s have had the balls to stand up to ‘the man’ and tell him what they think. If these new laws get made concrete, we won’t even be allowed to gather together into a group in order to voice our opinion. Divided and conquered, that’s what we’ll be. Straight out of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Well, up until then, I’m going to be screaming my fucking head off about the damage inflicted upon this world, and our society, in the name of profits and so-called ‘laws’, before we no longer can.

It was recently revealed to the public that a former detective, being remanded on a murder charge at the Barwon Prison for seven months, has developed a “moderate to severe” mental illness during his stay. Well, prison can do that to a man can’t it? We all know that. What’s that old cliché? Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time. Murderers are murderers, plain and simple. Or you could jazz it up, like the US Army does when talking about their elite soldiers, and call them Alpha-Males.

The 23-bed high-security Acacia Unit, where the former detective stayed, is used to house the state’s most dangerous and violent prisoners. Premier John Brumby’s “a prison within a prison”. Inmates are locked-down for twenty-three hours a day and can go years at a time without seeing sunlight, trees or grass. The Court of Appeals granted the former detective bail, one of the judges that granted the murdering swine bail said the remand conditions probably breach international human rights obligations.

Human beings are social creatures, if you isolate a human for two years, it will end up a severely damaged person: no ifs, buts, or maybes. Twenty-three hours a day staring at the same pale walls, the same pale bed, the same tell-lie-vision, the same steel door, the same Dunlop volleys for years and years on end. How stimulating. But you can still screech to the guy in the next cell over, you may not see him and he may not see you, but you both know of each other’s existence. Just a bit of hardened concrete and steel in the way, that’s all.

The prison system claims to rehabilitate the outlaws of our society. Rehabilitate, ha! More like debilitate. Therefore, it wasn’t a very smart move by the Courts to send a murdering former police officer into the midst of the most psychopathic group of cop-haters in Victoria, was it? Could you imagine the total and utter primal fear that would’ve coursed through that detective’s veins every night?

Here fishy, fishy, fishy. Fresh fish. Here fishy, fishy. Like Shawshank – but real. Is it any surprise then that he went nuts? Not to me it isn’t. Pure headfuckery. The thing that gets my goat is that it took until one of their own got affected before the law enforcers would even look into the state of Victoria’s prisons.

But that’s always the way isn’t? Unless something touches the apparent upper crust of our society directly, nothing gets done about it. Studies have been conducted for years now about the detrimental effects the prison system has on the people who become a part of it. Does the term ‘repeat offender’ ring any bells? The system reaps what it sows.