Catching up with friends and family over the holidays is always a treat for me. My wife, Donna, loves Christmas time and always makes it special for our family. Our 2 boys and two girls (17 – 21 years old) have provided us with countless memories of enjoyment year round and we are happy to make Christmas time a special time for them. So during visits and parties I do my best to avoid sharing all of what I’ve learned over the past year as publisher of FreedomsPhoenix, or what I fear is in store for us all in the years to come. But there are always rays of hope and indications of how we will eventually emerge from the darkness, as humanity tends to do.

“So, Ernie, what have you been up to?” is the most common question. My usual response is the same over the phone as it is in person, “Oh, the same ‘ole stuff. You know, saving the planet one mind at a time”. This exchange is code talk for, ‘Are you sure you want to hear all about how many more steps we’ve taken towards a totalitarian state?’. Over the years everyone I know is either already subscribed to FreedomsPhoenix or know about my passion for liberty and my willingness to engage authority publicly. So I do my best to keep the conversation light and focus on their experiences since last we talked. If they demonstrate an interest then I encourage them to provide me their email address with a promise to subscribe them to the daily headlines of FreedomsPhoenix as a way to understand what keeps me busy. But things have noticeably changed in the last few months.

For all of December I have been preparing myself for this article. It is the end of the first full year of FreedomsPhoenix during an eventful year that was well chronicled by us. It is also the beginning of a new year that I believe will be even more significant due to the events that await us. With my awareness heightened I have also been spending a lot of time training and communicating with more writers. We are also constantly improving the site for the next phase of development. But what has caused me the most trouble writing this article and made it so much more difficult than what I am use to, is the varied concerns of so many close friends, family and new acquaintances.

Many are experiencing now what I remember going through during my “awakening”. The first “Matrix” movie did a good job of expressing the emotion of many people. Most notably the scene that has the character Morpheus meeting Neo for the first time. “You know something is wrong with the world but you don’t know what it is. Like a splinter in your mind it is driving you Mad”. I guess I could have titled this article “Mind Splinters”, but what is a mind splinter?

Primetime television is largely sponsored by cures for mind splinters. Multiple reminders each commercial break tell us that the anxiety we feel about the world around us has a cure,… and it comes in pill form. ‘If the grinding heel of the government’s jack-boot on your neck is making you lose sleep then we got a government approved solution for you’. Some commercials even inform us that by contacting the company we can get a discount if we don’t have insurance or otherwise can’t afford the cure for a severe mind splinter infection.

It is no surprise to many that children at ever younger ages are being forced to take chemicals so that they conform to dictated behavior, which can be summed up with, “Sit Down and Shut Up”! Also, the central authority would very much like to know where you are, where you have been, what you were doing and how you spent your money. It is no surprise for us to have just reported here that an individual file is created for every child born. Several years ago I remember reading a letter from a dying woman to her infant granddaughter where she did her best to explain why her daughter, the grandchild’s mother, didn’t get along with the grandmother. She went on to explain how her daughter had felt deprived of a normal mainstream life due to the grandmother’s unwillingness to obtain a Social Security number for herself or her daughter. She used her final words to a generation she’d have no other access to, to explain a simple concept that I will always remember,… ‘Ranchers always brand and number their cattle’.

Whatever the real intensions behind the creation of governments here in America, the stated reasons appealed to specific desires of a vast majority so as to gain popular support. The idea that governments can be justly instituted to defend individual rights received enough of that popular support. I don’t wish to bore you with the opinion of how collectives evolve, but I do want to focus on the idea that we can expect malicious intent to be wrapped in the cloak of a mission to “do good”. Since even the public school do-gooders claim that ‘good is better than bad’, the mission to redefine the word “good” is to be expected. To get a population to allow a central authority to socially and economically engineer every human being for ‘their own good’ is an important hurdle for collective power to overcome. The claim that Public Education isn’t working supposes that the real intent of public education is,… education. If ‘government indoctrination’ is the goal then it is easy to argue that the system is working just fine. But the collectivists are being challenged and I feel a mighty conflict is about to explode all around us.

Raising 4 children to young adulthood has provided me with the experience of competing with many entities that wish to take on the role of “parent”. But by focusing on the efforts that use coercive means to gain access to my children’s minds and bodies I can see a clear pattern that I hope a year of archiving on FreedomsPhoenix demonstrates. The collectivists are afraid.

If you are not within our control, you are out of control is a statement representative of too many that has obtained government positions. Time Magazine’s naming of “You” as their Person of the Year is representative of what has been a growing awareness of those that regularly use the Internet already. That almost any individual wishing to share information with others not only has the ability to do so, but immediately has more credibility than any government release of information. Even the mainstream press’ (MSP) credibility is easily surpassed. Any teenager with inside information and a Blog can bring down the most powerful dictator.

Information is a lot of things, but information is not nearly as powerful as secrets.

For weeks I have been digging for a growing splinter in my mind. Just a couple of days ago I plucked the splinter by reasoning out what is behind many developments behind the news. A pattern was right in front of me that I could recognize. I knew it would be simple, it always is. I tend to separate the good guys from the bad guys by determining “which wish to simply be left alone and which are those that just won’t leave them alone”. So what was the mind splinter? Those that won’t leave us alone are very afraid that their secrets will become common knowledge.

Too simple for you? Not if you think about the power of secrets.

FreedomsPhoenix is perfectly formatted for exposing secrets, archiving secrets, providing context for the secrets, following the secrets and sharing secrets.

I’m very excited about what is going to happen in 2007. Oh, it’ll get a lot worse before it gets better, I know that. I’ll write again about my predictions for 2007 in more detail. But I was so relived to be rid of my mind splinter that I wanted to share it with you all. I’m not expecting a revelation concerning any particular ‘conspiracy’. I’m expecting an avalanche of secrets that will make it difficult to keep up. In fact I suspect that a defense might be to increase the volume with misinformation to hide the facts. But the structure of FreedomsPhoenix is such that peer review and the diversity of perspectives is such that we are far more immune than most sites and I know we will continue to grow as an effective force in the struggle for liberty. In fact I intend to be very effective.

And I need your help,… I’ll be writing about that soon as well.

The Sleeper Has Awakened,

Ernest Hancock

Publisher - FreedomsPhoenix