The internet is not free.
If you aren’t exchanging something of value for what you are spending your time on then you are the product from which someone besides you is exchanging value. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter/X and Facebook are putting all of your signals/data to work for them. They maintain their fabulous riches by monetizing all the data you voluntarily feed into their insatiable maw. Additionally, they are gateways to big data for the rising totalitarian global surveillance state. And the social engineers are using the algorithms to wage psychological warfare on humanity.
For these reasons, and many more, I am withdrawing from the internet as panopticon. I am not going to use the internet as a public commons anymore. I am going to think of it as mostly a surveillance weapon.
Biography
Michael Stuart Heath was born on August 12, 1961 in Athens, Ohio to parents Edward Irving Heath and Nancy Lou Stuart (maiden name). Michael’s father was employed locally in between service in the Air Force and obtaining his Masters Degree. Shortly after his birth Michael was carried to Maine where his father obtained his Masters Degree in Forestry at the University of Maine in Orono. The Heath family was completed with the birth of a brother, David, three years later.
The Forestry Degree’s completion qualified Edward for a job in Annapolis, Maryland where Michael spent most of his infancy. Edward’s career advancement led him west in Maryland to Cumberland County where he served as leader of a Tri-County planning agency. Michael progressed through his public education in Cumberland, Maryland.
High points through these years were annual trips to Maine where his mother’s father, Lawrence, lived. He existed in Michael’s infant consciousness as a nearly mythic figure. Lawrence Stuart was the Commissioner of State Parks for Maine during the boy’s formative years.
The family moved back to Maine between Michael’s junior and senior year in high school. Michael’s parents purchased Archie’s Army Navy Store in Augusta. Working for the family business was one of Michael’s earliest jobs.
Michael met Pauline True during his senior year. The couple fell in love while Michael was working for his parents and attending classes at the University of Maine at Augusta. Pauline graduated one year after Michael. She went to college in Missouri. Michael joined her there, and they married soon after.
Pauline’s deep faith in God attracted Michael as much as her cheerleader good looks. The married couple continued their educations together until they became pregnant with their first child. This pivotal development came during Michael’s senior year in college. Pauline was in her junior year. The couple wrestled with the idea of continuing Michael’s studies beyond a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Religion/Philosophy. They decided to create a family and raise it in the Augusta, Maine area. Both sets of parents lived there.
Michael completed his college degree and the couple settled into a Christian Community named Bethany Acres in Winthrop, Maine. They spent the next four years in a real world religion and philosophy practicum. Michael served as Executive Director. To the son who caused the move to Maine were added two more boys in three years.
Michael’s career path took him into politics after Bethany Acres. He spent the next twenty years leading the “conscience of Maine” — The Christian Civic League. His degree in Religion and Philosophy equipped him to serve as a principled and uncompromising leader. These attributes helped put the League on the international map. The institution never failed to resist political efforts to expand affirmative legal “rights” so that they included the “right” to sexual evil in the Pine Tree State.
The uniparty’s big money in Maine was on the side of sexual evil.
In 2009 Heath resigned his leadership post at the League. He took his place as an unskilled laborer in the workforce until his retirement in the fall of 2023.
Heath never stopped thinking about religion, philosophy and politics as he earned his daily bread delivering packages and people for FedEx, the Post Office and a local County Agency. His provocative and hard hitting blogging earned him an unjust termination from FedEx shortly after the global lock down in 2020. The firing included a surprise visit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Shortly before these profoundly troubling events Michael entered the Roman Catholic Church, where he pursues his moral and religious development today. Michael and Pauline were living in Mt. Airy, North Carolina at this time.
Sensing ominous developments, especially in global and national politics, Heath felt a duty to return to Maine and stand for Governor. He needed to prove to himself that he had no lingering political base to whom he owed the responsibility of statewide political leadership. He terminated his campaign in early 2022 having been unsuccessful in his attempt to raise money and qualifying signatures.
Today Michael is a happily retired blogger enjoying time with his wife of over four decades, and his growing family that now includes seven grandchildren and two daughters-in-law, in addition to his three sons.
