Dogs of Orninica (12 page)

It's very telling that there is no word for 'boredom' in any of the Nureongi tongues. Every moment of every day is filled with things to do and see. Simply observing nature can take up hours of a pup's time.

Pups were running in and out of the tent, laughing and playing the whole time we met with the elders. I've never seen so many happy puppies. In Orninica, I'm so used to pups being silent and solemn, walking slowly and deliberately in a straight line, as if they're afraid to accidentally take a wrong step and fall into a pit of scorn. These pups were a whole other animal, and it truly filled me with sadness that our own pups are so without spark.

The one thing that most separates the Nureongi civilization from our own is their complete lack of a banking establishment. There is no fiat currency, no debt, no way to speculate with land or stocks. There's no inflation or haircuts or bail-outs. Even mortgages are a completely foreign concept to the Nureongi. I tried to explain the concept to one of the elders, and he was sure I was kidding him. He just kept laughing and insisting I was pulling his leg.

When a Nureongi couple get married, the community comes together and builds them a home. There's no mortgage or home-owners insurance or property tax or anything. Just a house big enough to home and sustain one family. No fountains or stone columns or dual garages and twin hot-tubs in sight. Just a simple structure built lovingly by the community in celebration of a young couple starting out in life together. And they wouldn't have it any other way.

It makes me wonder what Orninica would be like if we woke up tomorrow and all the banks had vanished. If the debt were suddenly reset and our homes didn't take a lifetime of inflated installments to pay for, but instead a few days of blissful co-operation with our fellow-citizens. Everyone would be able to afford a home. Suddenly, we would be free to pursue whatever interests we felt like pursuing. Our lives would be our own again. We wouldn't need to spend two lifetimes slaving away in cubicles to pay for big ugly indestructible buildings that seem to be designed for some unknown race of dogs that can live for centuries.

We would actually be able to live in our homes, rather than spending every waking moment working tirelessly to maintain them, only making it home to collapse asleep at night. We could breathe easy, knowing the banks couldn't foreclose on our lives the moment we missed an installment, leaving us to starve to death out in the cold.

Just imagine a world without banks.

No more crony capitalism; the collusion of big business, special interests, and intrusive government into one massive cesspool of corruption and misery for everyone not born a Fifi or a Rupulfort. No more printing millions out of thin air, creating miserable inflation, to fend off inevitable economic collapse for another day.

Our two societies are so different in so many ways, but I believe strongly that every Orninican's inherent seeping, restless misery is directly and deliberately put upon us by our bankers. They leech our life-force to fill their private islands with mountains of loot they have plundered from us. They have robbed the future from our pups, and our pups, pups, pups.

Shutter the banks and Orninica will soon be as free and joyful as the great and prosperous Nureongi civilization. Our pups will smile again. The skies will clear again. It's so clear to me now, every ill in the world inevitably leads back to the banking cartels that have trapped us in never-ending serfdom. We're in debt to them before we're even a twinkle in our mother's eye. Removing the banks would reverse so much misery, we would be freed from our subjugation for the first time.

You might scoff and call me naive, insisting that Orninica is far too big to adopt such an anarchic political system, with such loose rules. That Orninica is too great, too cultured, too civilized to hear of such brazen freehanded notions. But it's all smokescreen. At its deepest level, Orninica is ultimately no different than Nureongi. The common dogs sitting in their cubicles in the sprawling cities ask for no more out of life than a Nureongi netting fish from a pond.

The corporations convince us we need piles and piles of things, to be acquired with mountains of credit. I say, push the mountains over. Let them collapse back into the nothingness they came from. All we need is each other; interconnected communities of like-minded livers of life.

It really isn't as complicated as they try to make it seem. Life doesn't come from an assembly line, dogs aren't commodities to be pushed around and managed like stocks and bonds. Brothers and sisters, burn your birth certificates, sink your passports into the sea, let go of absurd notions of nationality and strangling omnipotent government.

We don't need a rubber stamp from a civil servant to officiate ourselves as deceased, just think of the absurdity of this concept; a death certificate! Why would a life need certification and licensing and proof of citizenship every step of the way, in order to be legitimate? What is citizenship exactly? The right to exist on a government's soil? What is a government? An 'organized political unit'? When did we hand this almighty political unit the right to decide who gets to be born, to live and die on the lands that have stood here, stoically for millennia? To decide whether we are worthy of existence.

We can be free dogs, if only we stop granting these despots the power to dictate to us, to define for us what life has to be, with their vile self-serving agendas. Just say no to this overt pyramid scheme we call government, cast out our oppressors and their lies and overhaul everything. Return to logical natural systems, where the earth isn't treated like an unruly convict that needs to be beaten and stomped down and reshaped to fit some disconnected paragon of falsity. Where volumes upon volumes of laws, codes and regulations aren't needed to instruct us how to inhabit our own planet.

Unless we allow them to, they cannot tell us what a life is, what civilization has to be, what we have to do in order to exist on this land they've somehow been allowed to lay claim to. We have to let go of our irrational fear of progress. Ignore the non-stop propaganda machine telling us this is all there is and all there ever can be.

The Nureongi are far more advanced than us. Believe it. They are more evolved than us. They live richly and fully, while we rot away in unremitting misery, never knowing the simple joys of a life without restraints. Our lives are wholly lacking in substance. Success and happiness in the Orninican One World Directive is a lottery with one to a hundred million odds. Yet we continue to dance in the quicksand, choosing between the same two identical, depraved political parties again and again, until we sink a little too far into the pit and suffocate.

It's not working. It never worked. You have to see it, the evidence is all around you. We have no liberty, no privacy, no opportunity. Secret courts and secret police and secret gag-orders abound. Whistle-blowers savagely denigrated by every media body, tortured and incarcerated, their lives forfeited. We are impoverished and oppressed, yet too stubborn to see beyond the old patriotic adage; the 'great Orninican democracy, the land of the brave and free'. Where do you see bravery? Where do you see freedom? Where is this great democracy slumbering? How can this explicit plutocracy we're governed by be mistaken for anything else?

Are our politicians not directly funded with 'contributions' from the wealthy elite? Do corporate lobbyists not write every word of our laws, that are then passed into law by the politicians the same corporations finance? How much more obvious does this madness need to be before it's recognized by anyone not painted by society as a laughable conspiracy theorist extremist in a tinfoil hat?

We have to let go of our dependency on the massive corporations that control every aspect of our lives. Their junky overpriced ware is used against us, to spy on us, to silence us, to numb us into indifference and unquestioning obedience. When was the last time a technology was designed to actually improve our standard of living, rather than simply to create new revenue streams for corporations?

We can embrace free, non-commercial, open source technologies, managed by the very dogs that use them, in their own time; for the good of the community. How is this not preferred over a faceless entity only concerned with amassing greater profit and power for its shareholders?This isn't some romantic theoretical idealism, these are functional systems that continue to operate even in contemporary Orninica right now, but are marginalized, penalized, ignored and ultimately litigated into oblivion by all the 'official' channels in favor of closed, expensive, poorly designed commercial implementations plagued by security holes and backdoors to every government agency that wants its share of the flesh ripped from our bones.

The patent and copyright systems need to be completely overhauled. Too often, brilliant advances in ingenuity are buried by corporations that don't want to risk changing their business model to compete with better technologies. We continue to cling to destructive, outmoded centuries-old concepts like fossil fuels, while incredible, simple alternatives like perpetual-motion, free-energy harvesters invented by amazing minds are buried by corporations for daring to endanger their lucrative monopolies.

If our technology were liberated, every dog on the planet would have free energy harvested from the cosmos, beamed directly to their cars and homes, at an environmental and financial cost of zero.

Yes, such innovations have been invented, and quickly bought up and locked into a vault by our dear corporate overseers. Is this not an unpardonable attack on all life? Think of the suffering that could be averted with perpetual clean energy available to everyone. Think of the advances we would make, unburdened by such crude restraints as power generation and distribution. Think of how cheap food, shelter and consumables would immediately become. The common dog could be free to travel the world as easily as a trust-fund socialite in his yacht.

The only way to liberate ourselves from our captors is to completely demolish the intricate maze-like institutions these elite corporatists have expended so much money and energy into building up, to contain us in their circuitous reality. We must raze the old world and start anew, I am certain our future survival absolutely depends on it.

Rise up and lay claim to your rightful inheritance, dogs of Orninica. The power is within you.

General

THIS HIGHLY CLASSIFIED COMMUNICATION IS FOR THE RECEPIENT'S EYES ONLY, YOU ARE KINDLY INSTRUCTED TO DESTROY IMMEDIATELY AFTER READING.

Esteemed gentle-dogs, you are the captains of industry. The most important and well-bred noble-dogs in the world. I'm sure you've all heard by now, but just in case any of you are holed up on your sleepy private islands incommunicado; it's official, we're starting a new war. Glorious, profit-amassing, perpetual war. All of Nureongi is now yours for the plucking.

What we need to decide now is who gets what. We have to split up the natural resources, the land, the new labor force... The nectar is endless and there's much to decide.

Since Mr. Fitz and Mr. Rupulfort provided the impetus for this wonderful war, they will of course receive priority in the division of the spoils. They have right of first refusal for the biggest items on the agenda. But beyond that, we'll need to set up a meeting at the society and decide how to divide everything amongst yourselves.

First on the agenda is obviously the weapons contracts. We're going to need every comically over-sized chaotically destructive weapon you can muster up. If it can obliterate at least five enemy combatants at a time, we'll buy it. We're going to put on quite a fireworks show for the poor simple natives. And please, don't worry about safety testing, we're on a tight schedule here.

Once we've blown the hell out of everything, and annihilated their unprofitable hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we'll of course need your companies to quickly move in and open up shop. We're thinking we'll start with the obvious; good old Orninican food, so we'll need fast food franchises ready to go. Once the natives get their first taste of processed industrial food, it'll open up a slew of new untapped markets for you to exploit. The 'food' will eventually give them all kinds of wonderful cancers and influenzas you can make a killing from.

Of course, there's a lot of work to be done before we reach that stage. These are very backwards creatures, they don't even have a common currency, instead relying on a primitive barter system. So the first thing we'll be establishing is a central bank. Print up some severely devalued money, issue them all with credit cards, show them how to buy microwave dinners and pay the rent, and we're in business. A lot of you will be the shareholders of the Nureongi central bank, with the biggest stakes of course going to Mr. Fitz and Mr. Rupulfort.

We'll designate a handful of zones for cities, and push the natives towards them from all directions. Can't have them all spread out Willy-nilly if we're going to make proper use of them as a cheap labor supply. Once we've broken their backwards nomadic habits, we'll need construction to begin. Resorts, bars, factories, power stations, corporate farming operations, mines, oil wells, brothels, waste disposal... Some living quarters for the workforce of course, and roads to get them from the slums to their new places of work.

Someone is going to get a contract to lay underwater pipelines to pump any gas and oil we find back to our network. We're certainly going to need fleets upon fleets of the latest peace-keeping drones to keep things civil. I understand the latest prototype can fire twenty-thousand rounds per second? Let's try and double that.

This operation is only going to work if their old way of life is completely decimated. The depopulation effort kick-started by the fast food initiative will help with that, especially if we manage to cull all their elders. Once they start to get sick, we'll have the impetus we'll need to inject them all with mercury laced 'vaccines' and further this most vital agenda. Can't have them sucking up all of our air, now.