A Slave To Ignorance

 

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Of the many crimes against humanity committed by modern schooling - I don't use "education" because it doesn't exist - is the lack of language study.  This is certainly by design, because buried in the very words we use is the history of civilization, slapping us in the face every time we write, read, speak, or listen.  It is no mistake that the Trivium of true education were the essential skills of grammar, logic and rhetoric, nor is it a mistake that the word for tedious detail is "trivia".

It would be funny, were it not so tragic, that the social justice warriors (SJWs) who bellow themselves blue about systemic racism and the injustice of black slavery are using a term that literally means "white slave".

The word "race" is rather interesting.  There are two parallel origins for the two distinct meanings.  In Old Norse, it meant "current," like the flow of water, and ultimately came to mean a sontest of speed.

More interesting is the meaning of "race" referring to someone's ethnicity.  This sense of the word came to English in the 1600s, from Middle French meaning "origins, lineage, family".  In other words, a "racist" is simply someone who is proud or bullish on their family or lineage.  In the true sense of the word, nearly every human on the planet is racist.  And if every human on the planet is racist, then no one is.  Even in the modern fad of urban tribalism popular among the SJWs, promoting their group or "tribe" is, by definition, racist.

While all of this is fun and fascinating, as real education always is, the word that will blow the dear reader out of his or her chair is "slave".

Slave literally refers to the Slavic people of Eastern Europe.  That's right, the very word "slave" comes from a race of WHITE European people who were valued as excellent slaves as late as the 16th century.  In fact, it seems that the Romans adopted the word "sclavus" from the name of this race of people.

The origin, or etymology, of the word "slave" can be found pretty much anywhere educated people congregate.  There are extensive citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is the go-to source for the history of English words.

To quote one online source, etymonline.com:

"The oldest written history of the Slavs can be shortly summarised--myriads of slave hunts and the enthralment of entire peoples. The Slav was the most prized of human goods. With increased strength outside his marshy land of origin, hardened to the utmost against all privation, industrious, content with little, good-humoured, and cheerful, he filled the slave markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa."

What is particularly notable here is that the Slavs were highly prized as slaves across three continents, including Africa.  Thus, white slaves were being traded in Africa BEFORE the first known African slaves were brought to the New World.

It would seem that the vaunted New York Times' 1619 Project is crumbling before our eyes, and all we've done so far is look only at the history of two words, so far.  We haven't even touched the reasons why so many Europeans were escaping to the New World.

The history and, thus, the truth about racism and slavery are buried deep in the English language, and by extension, global history and culture.  We can point to Biblical accounts of the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, or the 140,000 American and European POWs in Japan in World War 2, or the "coyotes" running humans across the southern US border as you read this.

Slavery is as old as humanity.  Since records have been kept, humans have bought and sold other humans to do the jobs no one else wanted.  As the previous quote shows, certain races were prized for their qualities as slaves (Slavs).  The Irish and Welsh were (are?) valued for their mining experience and as domestic servants.  Mohawks were legendary ironworkers in the constuction of Manhattan.  Even today, Asians are pressed into service for meticulous and repetitive assembly work.

The Barbary pirates were legendary slave traders along the north and west coasts of Africa.  These people, know as the Berbers, were Turkish and Arab Muslims who began trading slaves after the conquests of Libya, Algeria and Morocco in the 1500s (note the date).  These pirates or corsairs captured and sold thousands of African and European slaves, and were likely not only the source of slaves for the New World, but expanded operations to become the (or at least some) pirates of the Caribbean, as well.

A common form of slavery, even today, is indentured servitude.  Think of it as a kind of "voluntary" or contractual slavery, where one sells one's self or a family member into slavery for a period of time, in the hopes of gaining a skill or craft, or transport to a new land.  The modern internship is nothing but a form of contractual slavery, where one works for little or nothing to gain experience and possibly have an inside track to employment.

My uncle Patrick was the only surviving male of his generation, because his indentured servitude as a house boy in Butte, Montana, kept him out of the coal mines, while his brothers all died of black lung.  In a sense, my mother's family survives thanks to slavery.

The foregoing is not to excuse slavery.  It is a horrid and inhumane practice, especially where it is involuntary.  It is not, however, a reason to offer one group of people victim points over another.  The SJWs and various activist groups have no valid claim to slavery as their personal excuse to inflict mayhem and pain on others.  There is hardly a race (family, lineage, tribe) on the planet that has not been enslaved at some point by another race, or even their own.

The very words "race" and "slave" carry with them the amazingly diverse history of their origins.  To call someone a racist is literally saying they are concerned with their family first, over any others.  To claim exclusive victimhood over slavery based on nothing more than skin color defies the root of the word itself - and in fact is racist  Blaming Europeans for slavery is precisely saying Europeans are responsible for "European chattel humans".

The absurdity of the SJW argument and the apologetics for looting and rioting are, prima facie, circular arguments that tie themselves into literal and historical knots.

Ultimately, this ridiculous situation is the fault of schooling and the dearth of education.  Those who spout their slogans in defense of the indefensible have no clue what they are saying, and defeat their own arguments with the very words they choose.

We can never end the barbaric practice (the word "barbaric" itself a slander against men with beards) of slavery until we realize that the word itself is multi-racial.  We also need to reclaim the word "race" as not something evil or vile, but in fact celebrates our individual and collective heritage.  Race is an affirmation of family, not a slur to weaponize in service of ideology.

Next time you welsh on a bet, go dutch treat, get your irish up, complain about an indian giver, or call someone a slave, remember that you are using someone's race as a derogatory term.  And next time someone calls you racist, thank them for acknowledging your family comes first.

We cannot solve problems until we fully admit what the problems are.  If you lance one boil, but leave another to fester, you have done nothing to begin the healing.

Carnies And Rubes, Part 4

The reader is encouraged to view Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for the complete argument.

Understand that by the nature of the medium, this series is necessarily cut short.  The Protocols is a rather long and detailed document with a multi-spectrum approach to global domination.  I will reiterate that despite the use of terms like "Jew" and "Goyim", the writer is not Jewish, and is most likely coming from some off-shoot of Roman Catholicism, which would perforce include the Knights Templar and the Western banking system.

Before concluding this analysis, it is necessary to look at one final passage, called Protocol No. 16.  This one deals with education and the take-over of universities to re-educate (stupefy) the masses.  The key paragraphs are:

"1. In order to effect the destruction of all collective forces except ours we shall emasculate the first stage of collectivism - the UNIVERSITIES, by re-educating them in a new direction. THEIR OFFICIALS AND PROFESSORS WILL BE PREPARED FOR THEIR BUSINESS BY DETAILED SECRET PROGRAMS OF ACTION FROM WHICH THEY WILL NOT WITH IMMUNITY DIVERGE, NOT BY ONE IOTA. THEY WILL BE APPOINTED WITH ESPECIAL PRECAUTION, AND WILL BE SO PLACED AS TO BE WHOLLY DEPENDENT UPON THE GOVERNMENT.

"8. In a word, knowing by the experience of many centuries that people live and are guided by ideas, that these ideas are imbibed by people only by the aid of education provided with equal success for all ages of growth, but of course by varying methods, we shall swallow up and confiscate to our own use the last scintilla of independence of thought, which we have for long past been directing towards subjects and ideas useful for us. The system of bridling thought is already at work in the so-called system of teaching by OBJECT LESSONS, the purpose of which is to turn the GOYIM into unthinking submissive brutes waiting for things to be presented before their eyes in order to form an idea of them .... In France, one of our best agents, Bourgeois, has already made public a new program of teaching by object lessons."

 It is as if the writer is describing events at Western universities, especially in the US, in the past decade from a vantage point 120 years ago.  The degradation of the Humanities and Sciences, the "safe spaces" and violent attacks on unsanctioned speech, the mindless repetition on mantras (misogynist, racist, sexist, etc.), and the demonisation of "white patriarchal" history all fall neatly into these two paragraphs.

It is incredible to believe that a document that accurately predicts the events and trends of the last century is a forgery, as is often claimed.  Even the very abridged sample of the text given in this analysis shows that is far too prescient to be dismissed lightly, and a thorough reading brings up many more such parallels.

It is my contention that this document was purposely planted in the public domain for several reasons.

First, we know from experience that conspirators relish placing their plans in people's faces as a means of toying with the aware individuals.  This is true both of mass murderers (the recent "Facebook killer" for one) and global cabals.  This kinds of behavior grants the perpetrator a feeling of power and superiority, in that their plan is publicly known, yet they cannot be caught.

Second,  the liberal use of terms like "Jews", "Zion" and "Goyim" conveniently deflects blame onto a target group, while allowing the perpetrators to openly demonize and discredit the document, thus hiding in plain sight.  Because of the target, one can easily envision elements of the Roman Church, notorious for its hatred of Jews over centuries, planting this document both to publicize its agenda, as well as place blame on a despised ethnic group.  This would also explain the Church's support of the Nazis, whose philosophy was based in part on The Protocols.  Not only did the Third Reich match much of the agenda put forth in the document, but its persecution of the Jews was equally desirable.  Furthermore, the location of discovery on a park bench in Odessa, the Ukraine, provided another layer of deflection, if needed, by implicating elements of the Orthodox Church.

Third, The Protocols' overwhelming focus on gold, economics and control of the money supply would implicate some group deeply involved in banking.  In the West, this points directly at the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights of Malta, all three historically linked to the formation and promotion of the Western banking system.  Certainly, the Roman Church feared the Templars enough to launch a pogrom on the group in the 1300s, and research has shown strong evidence that they went underground and continued to influence financial systems in the West, perhaps even into the present day.

Fourth, even a superficial reading of The Protocols leaves one with the strong impression that the history of the past century and even current events are indeed being directed by some entity that prefers to remain hidden, except that its agenda can be clearly discerned running like a thread through so many influential events.

After reading The Protocols, it is also instructive to study the history of the demise of European monarchies and rise of fascism/socialism in the 20th century, as well as to re-examine authors such as Henry Ford, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot.  The many parallels and similarities are inescapable.

In conclusion, it should be clear now that The Protocols have been purposely maligned in order to both hide their agenda in plain sight, as well as provide sufficient distractions for those seeking the responsible party.  It is important for the reader to carefully guard against being misled, as that is a primary purpose of this document.

It is my purpose in writing this series to destigmatize research in this area.  By not allowing oneself to be distracted with the need to blame any one group, the document provides both predictive power to see the direction of current events, and a means to fight back against this massive fraud and attempt to enslave humanity.  It is also possible to detect the reasons why so many thinkers and researchers perceive panic on the part of the elite, as they struggle to maintain humanity on the path they have set for us.

In the realm of free thought and speech, there is no voice so offensive that we cannot learn something from it.  The fact that The Protocols appear to be manifesting themselves on the nightly propaganda broadcasts makes it all the more important that the aware mind investigate any avenue that provides understanding and defense against the onslaught.  It also makes us more sympathetic to those who have been ensnared in this agenda unwittingly.  The Progressive movement is not entirely responsible their plight, though we cannot hold them blameless for failure to educate themselves.

In the spirit of free inquiry, I implore the reader to place The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on his reading list.  If nothing else, it provides historical perspective on many key events in the past 100 years.  At best, it provides a way forward in fighting a pernicious evil that has usurped humanity's growth for far too long.  It also provides tests for identifying the works of this evil in current events, and like a kitchen light, causes the cockroaches to scatter.

It is an old axiom that naming one's fears takes away their power.  By clearly identifying what haunts us, we are empowered to defeat it.  Demystifying our global predicament is a major step in correcting it.  It is my contention that The Protocols hold a major key to doing just that.

Carnies and Rubes, Part 3

The reader is encouraged to see Parts 1 and 2 to follow the argument presented here.

The Protocols is an extensive document comprised of 29 theses that culminated in global domination.  What has kept my attention for more than 20 years is the fact that this document is a virtual blueprint for the events of the 20th century, and into the 21st.  It is inconceivable to me that a "fake" document dating to at least the late 1800s could have so accurately predicted world events 120 years into the future, unless it is an actual plan that has indeed been enacted by whomever is responsible.

Due to limitations and the fact that a full analysis of The Protocols could absorb volumes of books, I will focus superficially on a handful of the theses given, and hope that the reader will be intrigued enough to read the rest for himself and make his own conclusions.

We start with Protocol No. 7:

"5. We must compel the governments of the GOYIM to take action in the direction favored by our widely conceived plan, already approaching the desired consummation, by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly promoted by us through the means of that so-called "Great Power" - THE PRESS, WHICH, WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS THAT MAY BE DISREGARDED, IS ALREADY ENTIRELY IN OUR HANDS.

"6. In a word, to sum up our system of keeping the governments of the goyim in Europe in check, we shall show our strength to one of them by terrorist attempts and to all, if we allow the possibility of a general rising against us, we shall respond with the guns of America or China or Japan."

Again, I remind the reader that this document dates to at latest the 1890s.  These two paragraphs come under the heading "UNIVERSAL WAR".Notice that the writer says "they" will use terror in Europe to keep the nations there in line, and control the narrative through the media - which "they" state is already completely in their control.

In the second paragraph, the writer states clearly that the militaries of the US, China and/or Japan will be used if terror attacks fail to keep the nations in line.  Here, it is instructive to note World Wars 1 and 2, where the US was tricked into joining both times, and whose outcomes led first to the League of Nations, then to the UNnied Nations.

I don't think I need to rehearse the facts concerning media control, as everything from Project Mockingbird to the 2016 election clearly shows that the assertion of media control is quite true.

In Protocol No. 9, we find the following:

"10. WE HAVE FOOLED, BEMUSED AND CORRUPTED THE YOUTH OF THE "GOYIM" BY REARING THEM IN PRINCIPLES AND THEORIES WHICH ARE KNOWN TO US TO BE FALSE ALTHOUGH IT IS THAT THEY HAVE BEEN INCULCATED.

"13. You may say that the GOYIM will rise upon us, arms in hand, if they guess what is going on before the time comes; but in the West we have against this a manoeuvre of such appalling terror that the very stoutest hearts quail - the undergrounds, metropolitans, those subterranean corridors which, before the time comes, will be driven under all the capitals and from whence those capitals will be blown into the air with all their organizations and archives."

The first paragraph clearly indicates the use of education as a weapon.  By completely befuddling schoolchildren and teaching outright lies and facts, they will be incapable of thinking clearly or independently.  I daresay this is precisely the case in the US, if not the Western world.

The second paragraph seems to imply the use of massive terror attacks on the order of 9/11, 7/7 and so forth, as a means to control and manipulate the masses and the laws.  It also mentions the construction of underground bases from which to launch the complete destruction of capital cities, along with the full infrastructure of government and all historical records.  One envisions Dick Cheney sitting in his war bunker on September 11th, as the records of the IRS, NSA, FBI, and more are destroyed.

I will leave the reader with a selection from Protocol No. 13, which should need no commentary on my part for the aware mind.  Remeber: 1890s:

 "3. In order to distract people who may be too troublesome from discussions of questions of the political we are now putting forward what we allege to be new questions of the political, namely, questions of industry. In this sphere let them discuss themselves silly! The masses are agreed to remain inactive, to take a rest from what they suppose to be political (which we trained them to in order to use them as a means of combating the GOY governments) only on condition of being found new employments, in which we are prescribing them something that looks like the same political object. In order that the masses themselves may not guess what they are about WE FURTHER DISTRACT THEM WITH AMUSEMENTS, GAMES, PASTIMES, PASSIONS, PEOPLE'S PALACES .... SOON WE SHALL BEGIN THROUGH THE PRESS TO PROPOSE COMPETITIONS IN ART, IN SPORT IN ALL KINDS: these interests will finally distract their minds from questions in which we should find ourselves compelled to oppose them. Growing more and more unaccustomed to reflect and form any opinions of their own, people will begin to talk in the same tone as we because we alone shall be offering them new directions for thought ... of course through such persons as will not be suspected of solidarity with us.

"4. The part played by the liberals, utopian dreamers, will be finally played out when our government is acknowledged. Till such time they will continue to do us good service. Therefore we shall continue to direct their minds to all sorts of vain conceptions of fantastic theories, new and apparently progressive: for have we not with complete success turned the brainless heads of the GOYIM with progress, till there is not among the GOYIM one mind able to perceive that under this word lies a departure from truth in all cases where it is not a question of material inventions, for truth is one, and in it there is no place for progress. Progress, like a fallacious idea, serves to obscure truth so that none may know it except us, the Chosen of God, its guardians."

More to come...

It Ain't Art Till It Hurts

In my career, I have been a writer, producer, director, actor, designer, sculptor, painter, poet, musician, composer, cinematographer, videographer, photographer, critic, and reviewer.  I have studied art, art history, theater, film, and language.  I have been a patron and collector.  And in every case, I have assiduously avoided glorifying the profane and shocking my audience.

I love art.  I am an artist.  I create provocative things that are pleasant and edify.

I hate contemporary art.

I detest Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.  I would kindle my hearth with Jackson Pollock if I could afford the price of admission.  I find Andy Warhol detestable and pedestrian.  I think much of Edward Albee is disposable.  I find much of Philip Glass' later work to be a parody of his earlier genius.  And pretty much anything produced in any art form since the late 70s is vile and corrupt.

That's the short answer.

At some point in the history of art, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, art took a dark and foreboding turn into the nihilistic and desperate.  With the decay of the education system across the board, artists were forced to do anything to get attention, though once gotten, they had no idea what to do with it.  So they pissed on crucifixes, shat on canvasses, shot spastic out-of-focus rubbish, and pounded their tail ends on keyboards like children unable to express themselves with good diction.

The critics, unable to utter coherent phrases, oohed and ahhed over these sophomoric tantrums as if they were timeless masterpieces.  They convinced the well-heeled to drop obscene amounts of money on these trash heaps, which they did because they, too, were uneducated and slovenly.

Across the aesthetic spectrum, crass practitioners reinforced each other's errors.  The idiots created rubbish, which the critics hailed as genius, which the nouveau riche bought in a craven attempt to look chic.

All the while, the uncultured cretins pressed the concept that art was not objective, that art was "expression", and that art was nearly anything removed from context and well lit with a glass of wine and a few slices of over-ripe cheese.

The fact is, art is a language that has grammar and vocabulary developed over centuries of human experience.  It can be spell-checked and graded just like any high school essay.  Most especially, once you are trained in the language, you recognize slang and poor usage immediately.

When schools (at any level) are stressed financially, without fail the first thing to be jettisoned is the art department.  Not that it matters much, since most art teachers are clueless about the fundamentals, nor how to relate them to the world at large.

Most people anymore are unaware that art has its own grammar, vocabulary and tropes, like any language.  It should be taught as a language and used as a language.  It has genres and traditions, like any literary system, and it has a profound effect on society because it transcends boundaries like no other language can.

The grammar of art includes balance, harmony, rhythm, variety, emphasis, gradation, movement, pattern, and proportion.  These create the syntax of art - the composition of the visual sentence into which meaning is poured.

The vocabulary of art is space, line, shape, form, color, texture, and value.  These are the words that carry meaning and emotion.  They create depth, breadth, heighth, weight, and significance.

On top of these are the tropes, such as myth, legend, history, religion, humanity, and dozens of other tales and emotions.

At best, contemporary art is a jumble of vocabulary without structure or meaning.  In the case of Jackson Pollock and many others, it is literally letters and words completely out of context, highlighting form without function, and entirely devoid of meaning.

By the time the art world had devolved to Andy Warhol, art had become glorification of common objects far beyond any true significance.  At this point, the mundane and profane had triumphed over the aesthetic and beautiful.  It was akin to speaking jibberish interlaced with profanities.  In other words, it was not only meaningless, it was offensive.

The purpose of this devolution of art is horrific in its simplicity.  It is a concerted effort to reduce the human mind to its most base level and remove any possibility of rising above it.  Beethoven has become Snoop Dogg.  Michaelangelo has reduced to Millie Brown.  William Shakespeare has rotted out to Hamilton.

Make no mistake, this has been a planned train wreck.  If humans are unable to understand the great works of the past, much less approach or exceed their artistry, then they will be entirely too stupid to challenge the ruling class.  How gratifying it must be for the Master Class to profit from the swine wallowing in the slime, literally immersing cultural icons in feces and urine and celebrating it as transcendent.

Soon, if now already, humanity will be cut off from its heritage, unable to grasp the basics, much less interpret the message.  It does not matter the medium - whether words or paint, stone or music.  Once divorced of history and culture, the masses become nothing more than malleable objects and playthings of the self-appointed gods.

If you have children or grandchildren, it is vital that they receive proper education in the arts - all arts.  They must be taught the grammar and vocabulary of art, no matter what medium.  They should not be allowed to graduate without having written a story, acted in a play, recited a poem, thrown and fired a pot, painted a canvas, and sung a song.  They should know not only the structure of the language, but at least have spoken a few paragraphs of the great masters.

In fact, when was the last time you went to the museum, enjoyed a play, or attended the symphony?  The best teacher is example.

The War On Words

Perhaps you've never really thought about this, but why is language so important?

There's a lot of noise lately about gender pronouns.  The Swedes added a new gender-less third-person singular pronoun a while back.  The German language has had three genders for centuries.  So has Russian.  Indonesian has a gender-less third-person singular that likely stems from Sanskrit roots.  So what's the big deal?

English has four third-person singular pronouns, two of which are gender-neutral: he, she, it and one.  He, she and one are primarily used for humans, while it can be used for just about anything.  Consider the couple who has just found out they are pregnant.  Folks commonly ask (these days), "Do you know what IT is yet?"

Gender is an exclusively linguistic construct.  Except for a tiny fraction of one percent of the global population, humans come in two sexes: male and female.  We are all genetically XX or XY, with a smattering of folks having XXY or XYY, and the latter two usually suffer medical issues all their lives.  Therefore, "he" and "she" accurately designate the sex of 99.99% of the world's population, and a million dollars' worth of surgery cannot change one's sex.

The stupid part of the whole pronoun argument is not that English (and many other languages) already have gender-neutral pronouns, it's that most humans do not address people in the third-person.  In English, we always address someone as "you", which is appropriate for both formal and informal, as well as male or female.  All of the plural pronouns are gender-neutral, so the point is moot in those cases.  Of course, "I" is the pronoun of self and is appropriate for any gender, sex, race, orientation, or whatever.

Apparently, in all the socio-political bullshit being spread over the pronoun argument, folks have forgotten about "one", which is a very old and gender-neutral pronoun in the English language that is often used in formal conditionals, but could easily be adopted for common language.  It doesn't have the baggage of "it" and even carries a certain formal connotation, thus offering a fine alternative to "he" or "she".  The Irish commonly use "your one" to refer to a singular third person.

So, what is this pronoun dust-up really all about?  Answer: cutting the culture off from its roots.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell made a point of noting the State's efforts to reduce the NewSpeak dictionary down to the most basic vocabulary.  The theory was that if people don't have a word for something, they can't think about it, nor can they convey it to others via speech or text.

This, in a nutshell, is what the pronoun war is all about.  It is one of several efforts to eradicate vocabulary from the language.  As the vocabulary contracts, it becomes harder and harder to access literature.  Within a generation or two, one is unable to make sense of books that are even a century old.  As the effort progresses, they are unable to understand books written even decades ago.

Take a look at this passage from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

      Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne...

I doubt many native speakers of English could read most of this, much less speak it accurately, and the language is just 600 years old.  The inability of modern English speakers to read the text is not part of a concerted effort by the Powers That Be to cut off our culture, it is just the natural evolution of language.

Now try Beowulf or Shakespeare in the original language.

Today, folks can barely understand the language of the US Constitution, which is only 200 and some years old, because the sentence structure is beyond the capabilities of most "schooled" readers (I purposely chose "schooled" over "educated").

Under a full onslaught of "language police", how long would it be before we could no longer read last year's New York Times?  How long before the vast majority of people could no longer access information reserved only for the highest levels of society?  Isn't that already happening?

Listen to "Man On The Street" interviews on any given outlet.  Decide for yourself if the vast majority of folks even know about Chaucer, much less have read or even less understood Chaucer, especially in the original texts.  These folks couldn't even compose a thought that included an idea from Canterbury Tales.

Orwell was right.

The effort to change and edit language is not about people's feelings.  Who really cares what a tranny in Berkeley wants to be called?  The point is to cut off access to the masses of vocabulary, grammar and ideas by making history and literature unintelligible to the hordes.

If you don't know something exists, you will likely never look for it.  And if you stumble upon it by accident, you would never be able to comprehend it.  You wouldn't have the tools to even begin to decipher the thoughts contained in the text.

The Catholic Church did this for millennia by printing the Bible in Latin and saying the mass in Latin.  Unless you were highly educated, you had no idea what was contained in those words.  Even more to the point, the church hierarchy could tell you it meant anything they wanted, and you would have no way of challenging them.

The "language police" are not about sparing the feelings of a few, they are about cutting off the many from the vast reservoirs of human experience.  Without literature, the past only exists for a lifetime, and then it dies.  Without language, the past will cease to exist and the State will be everything that is.

If you want to save your culture, and by extension humanity, the only things you need to teach your children and grandchildren are the Trivium and a love of literature.

They are the best and only true weapons we have against Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism.

The World Late And Soon

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be 
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

When William Wordsworth penned this lament of the Industrial Revolution in 1807, he could not imagine just how materialistic and divorced from Nature we humans have become.  It never ceases to amaze me how little we modern humans know of the Natural cycles and processes that feed, cloth and sustain us.

I recall an incident in 1996, when Comet Hyakutake rolled through the Solar System putting on a rather amazing display during closest approach to Earth.  One evening, I was laying out on the lawn with my binoculars and camera capturing images and observing the comet.  It was early evening and a group of neighborhood kids had gathered around trying to figure out what I was doing.

"What are you looking at," one asked.  As I glanced around at them, I was truck that not one was looking up to see what was clearly hanging over their heads.

"Comet Hyakutake," I replied, pointing up at the glowing object stretching nearly 1 degree across the sky.

"What a comet?" one asked.  Only two or three of the dozen or so kids actually followed my pointing finger upwards.  I was floored, or at least grassed.

These were all school-age kids who apparently had not heard anything in school about one of the most dazzling cometary displays that I could remember, much less they.  When I was in school, at least the science teacher would have made a whole series of lectures on the subject and assigned us to go out and observe the phenomenon and make a report.

These kids had no idea the comet was putting on such a display, nor even what a comet was.  And so was born Uncle B's impromptu astronomy class.

For a week, we met on the lawn at sundown to note how the comet had changed, moved and behaved.  We looked through the large field binoculars I owned and kept an observation log with drawings and notes about our observations.

They were awed, as was I.  Me, not so much by the comet, which was truly awesome, but by the ignorance of these children who ranged from kindergarten to fifth or sixth grade.

Perhaps, I reasoned, growing up on a farm with infinite dark skies, no TeeVee or games or devices and a rather nice telescope I had gotten on Christmas,  Maybe I was an aberration, an exception.  But my peers were equally informed, even if they didn't have an interest to sit out on cold winter nights and stare at the Universe.

Many of the children seemed completely unaware that there was a sky, much less that it was full of things to look at and that moved around on schedules that were years, decades or even centuries long.  Not only did many of them not follow my pointing finger, I had to prompt them to look up.  The comet was quite obvious, even in overlit city skies at sunset.  It was one of the most arresting sights in the night sky I have ever seen, not to mention in that March of 1996.

Later that year, I noticed two families on the street had shiny new telescopes and could occasionally be seen out in the yard watching the Moon or planets.  I felt gratified that I had opened some horizons for at least a few people, and several of the kids would occasionally wander by to ask if anything fun was going on "up there".  Since they asked, I assumed they weren't doing any independent research, but at least they were now aware of something called "the sky".

I could go on with dozens of similar examples: how I taught my wife gardening and to plant seeds during the New Moon and harvest during the Full Moon.  She's become an obsessed fanatic about gardening now, loving the daily changes in plants and the satisfaction of eating things she nurtured from seed.

Of my own children, one is an animal lover and operates a pet grooming and training service.  He got that from the dozens of exotic pets we kept when he was growing up, such as snakes, gerbils, rats (snake food), turtles, a Great Dane and a Basset Hound, and others I've since forgotten without looking through the photo album.

The other loves mountain, jungle and ocean environments.  She leans more to the artist side, like Dad, but has gone on dives, jungle excursions and mountain hikes, and prefers the more natural settings of Austin or Denver, to the industrial life of Houston.  Perhaps she was influenced by our annual treks to New Mexico to explore canyons, mountains and rivers.

They both know about the mass extinction known in geology as the K-T Boundary.  We would stop along the highway road cuts in West Texas to notice that in one layer, there were millions of sea shell, plant and fish fossils, then a thin white line, then above it...nothing.

The point of all this is that anymore the schools are worthless and the gee-gaw tech distractions are multiplying like rabbits, but with very little effort and a lot of fun, the Universe will teach anyone willing to listen.  We stumble over it, walk past it and live under it every moment of every day if we stop just for a second to notice.

The world is too much with us, late and soon!  Why not set aside some time in Life to unplug, sit back and just observe the glorious pageant going on all around us for free!  We bought our ticket at birth and it's good for a lifetime.  There is nothing a movie or gaming studio can produce that is even a fraction as amazing and entrancing as a simple bug crawling across the floor, like that cockroach in the corner I need to go stomp on.

When I Was A Kid...

When I consider the most meaningful learning experiences in my life, a TeeVee or computer do not figure into them at all.

The most meaningful experiences I had, and which still strongly affect my thinking, were the times I spent wandering around with my dog on the farm.  Chasing critters, watching ant piles, following the cows, fishing, looking through my telescope...all those things kids don't do anymore...taught me all sorts of life lessons, not to mention just plain old observation of the world around me.

In the old days, teachers would take us outside on pleasant spring or fall days and we would identify trees and plants, insects and clouds.  How did ants carry loads many times their size?  What kinds of clouds signaled what kinds of weather?  What times of the year did you see butterflies, cicadas and woolly boogers?  Where did squirrels bury their nuts and why?

Anymore, you can drop a kid off a block from home and they couldn't navigate back, because they've never been further than a few feet from a screen that gives them everything they are supposed to know, and even that screen is getting dumber.  I think George Carlin put it best when he said if you drop your kid off on a street corner and he's still there the next day, you got a dumb kid.

My folks hardly ever let us watch TeeVee.  My dad called it a "goddam commie conspiracy," while my more circumspect mom preferred that we read books for entertainment, and bless her for that.  It really didn't matter, though, because three miles outside Moulton, Texas, with no cable, we were rather limited on what signals we could pull down out of the atmosphere.

I grew up with the entire Life Cycle around me.  By the tender age of 8 or 9, I had already seen a dozen different animals mate, give birth and die.  We butchered some for food and had to kill some for medial reasons.  I had fun shaping freshly laid eggs (the shells are still soft), hunting and tracking, and learning how to field dress (gut and skin) an animal if I bagged one.

Every year I knew the joy of tilling soil, planting seeds and eating the results of my hard work.  In fact, nothing tastes better than fruits and vegetables you grow and harvest yourself.  Tomatoes still warm from the Sun with a dash of salt are still one of my favorite snacks.

I learned how to hunt edible mushrooms and pick wild berries - in Texas, wild dewberries, blackberries and Mustang grapes are everywhere in season.

An 8- or 9-year-old child today would likely starve to death in a field of food, never having seen edibles in their natural state.  He has never seen anything born or die, and even when the Boots the family cat passed on, he was too engrossed in Warcraft to notice, never having developed a bond with anything other than the game console.

Parents now plunk their kids down in front of a screen and they hardly stir for the next 18 years.  If the kids get a little antsy and want to blow off some energy, the folks shove pills down their throats to prevent them from interrupting Mom and Dad's stupor.

Animal breeders will tell you that animals kept penned up get stupid.  In humans, we call this "institutionalized."  They are unable to function in the real world, because they have no experience outside the confines of their walls.

There is plenty of blame to go around.  City living, corporate shilling and lazy parents come to mind.  Am major problem is that the parents of school-aged children are themselves the products of TeeVee and gaming consoles.  They don't know how to live in the real world, and thus are incapable of teaching their children how to do it.  Furthermore, they are unmotivated to change the situation, either for themselves or their children.

I suppose I'm kind of a weird one.  When I wanted to learn about cars, I bought some old junkers and tore them apart to rebuild them.  I can't imagine being a teen now and having no clue how to change the oil, much less re-shoe the brakes or tear down the block.  It probably helped that I had to use a tractor as a kid that would break down a mile from the house, so I either had to fix it on the spot, or walk two miles (round trip).

I took my kids out to West Texas, or to the mountains in New Mexico at least twice a year (summer and winter).  We would hike for hours, learn how to find water in the desert, how to get directions from lichen, or read animal tracks to know which ones we didn't want to encounter.  We would pick fossils out of the road cuts and see that below the K-T boundary, there were piles of fossils, but above it were none.  We learned what kinds of trees and plants grew at which altitudes, and the differences between conifer and deciduous trees, and which birds preferred to nest in which trees.

I don't know how many of the details they retained, but I know from watching them as adults that they learned to observe, analyze and act on information from the world around them.  That's more than I can say for many of their peers.

It would terrify me to raise kids now.  Everything comes through a screen, and then parents wring their hands because their kids find the real world boring and uninteresting.  This leads the parents to panic and shove pills down the poor children's throats, thus exacerbating the problem.

I have to think that if I were raising kids now, I would be like my dad and curse the "goddam commie" boob tube.  I'd at least take away the remote so they would have to stir once in a while to change the channel.

A Modest Proposal, Part 1

Back in the day, one of my favorite columnists was William Safire.  His specialty was criticizing the use of language in the public sphere according to the classic skills of the old Trivium of the liberal arts.

To refresh our memories, the Trivium is defined by Wikipedia as:

"...a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell."

The Trivium was made up of three specific skills: grammar, logic and rhetoric.  Mastery of these skills allowed the student to understand ordered information, analyze its content and express an opinion in a coherent manner.  Thus, the foundation of clear and rational thought, and the ability to express it, required the precise use of language.

For centuries, Latin was the language of choice for educated people, if for no other reason than because it is a very precise one.  English has more or less supplanted Latin in the past two hundred years owing to its ability to absorb vocabulary and grammar from other languages, which unfortunately for those who teach the language, makes it rather complex and occasionally non-sensical.

The reason this has come up again is that, as George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the control of language imparts control of the mind.  If one can effectively reduce the vocabulary and simplify the grammar of a language, one can control the thoughts - and the actions - of the masses.

Orwell postulated that IngSoc would use Newspeak to control thought over time by eliminating words and concepts that were offensive to the State.  Eventually, he said, the masses would be unable to form a rational thought on certain topics because there simply were no words to do so.  And even if an individual could host an offensive thought, he would be unable to clearly express it due to a lack of structure (grammar) and rhetorical ability.

Ultimately, the masses could not conceive of anything other than a string of slogans approved by the Central Party.  There would be no history, no books other than the Newspeak dictionary, and no reference in the public sphere to anything other than what the State wished the masses to have.

Every year we see this in action, as the general vocabulary and grammar of the mass media devolves to lower and lower levels.  Even now, if one learned everything from the media, one would be unable to express anything above an eighth grade level (being generous here).

When I was a child, my father bought a set of McGuffey Readers, that were the grade school standard of US education in the late 1800s and early 1900s.   Contemporary collage-level students would struggle with much of the sixth grade material in these books.

If you have experienced the language abilities of the average teenager on Facebook or other social media, then you know that IngSoc has triumphed.  The median language abilities of most young Americans and Europeans has devolved to near-incoherence.  Spelling and grammar are virtually non-existent and the relative importance of what these people find noteworthy is inane.  Basic things, such as knowing that data and bacteria are plurals, and being able to match cases and tenses accordingly are nearly gone.  In my own experience with students, even being able to identify subjects, verbs and objects is a skill all but lost.

Most of the problem I lay at the feet of Political Correctness.  This one effort has bombarded modern culture with the message that certain thoughts and vocabulary are off limits.  The arbiters of PC have spent decades modifying language and forbidding public discourse on certain topics, to the point that modern education has been reduced to sloganeering and jingoism in the service of the State's agenda.  Young people can no longer dissociate the message from the messenger, nor critically analyze an argument to glean the facts from opinion and speculation.  In short, they can't think.

In fact, it has finally come to the point where certain topics are so taboo that Ivy League college students are reduced to emotional blobs by the mere encounter with certain words or phrases.  Imagine the depth of the programming required to reduce a human being to sobs over a word.  Millennia of cultural development to produce a generation incapable of reason and slave to emotion.

The situation is well beyond critical.  The amount of remediation required to reverse this kind of indoctrination is staggering.  We must face the fact that our culture may be lost forever, because it is a chain that once broken, cannot be repaired.

The best that we remaining rational people can do at this point is to follow the example of the secret societies and go underground until the eventual complete destruction of the society that has built such a tragedy.  As in medieval Europe, we must protect knowledge and our progeny from this self-destructive society and work towards the New Renaissance in a couple of centuries.

Actions such as homeschooling, tossing out the TeeVee and spending hours teaching our children and grandchildren in the time-tested classical liberal arts.  There is little other choice.  The false culture is so all-pervasive and the techniques used so powerful that any contact with it will cause damage.

Even as I write, I am watching adult friends become consumed with Pokemon Go, to the point that even self-preservation is not enough to overcome the addiction.  I see young adults I have known since childhood become angry and defensive when certain ideas are brought up for debate, unwilling and unable to ideas on their own merit, and choosing instead to simply deny that the concepts exist.

For this reason, I am proposing a complete different take on prepping and survival, focusing not on food and shelter, but on knowledge and information.  Come back tomorrow for Part 2.

Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of...

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Liberalism went wrong when it started viewing rights as goody packages handed out by government like Halloween candy to favored voting/donor blocks.

Conservative went wrong when they started seeing business as nothing more than handing out advice with eye-popping price tags to up-and-coming Third World manufacturers.

Bernie Sanders is the ultimate expression of Liberalism.  He is a Socialist who believes that government should spend its entire time telling everyone how to live.

Donald Trump is the ultimate expression of Conservatism.  He is a Fascist who thinks that corporations should spend all their time telling government what to do.

Hillary Clinton is...well, Hillary.  All she cares about is getting rich and wielding power.  She spent her career using her husband as a meat puppet.  Once she stepped out into the light, folks were horrified - and rightly so.

Europe has been facing more or less the same choices, with ultra right and left battling it out in Austia and (so-called) Neo-Fascists rising quickly in France and Germany, as people are artificially limited to two choices - right and left - when dealing with profound social and economic problems.

The problem here is that for the better part of a century, we have all been taught that there are only two solutions to every problem - government runs everything and business runs everything.  This results in a myopic view of solutions that have boxed in the social dialogue and prevented real change for the better.  As the old saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

One of the most profound and Earth-shaking philosophical changes of the past 500 years has been ignored, for the most part.  We have been so indoctrinated by the Left/Right paradigm and the mercantilist interests that we have forgotten the one major movement that created Western domination of global political and economic discussions.

I'm referring, of course, to the Age of Enlightenment.  This is one of those things most of us (who were awake) learned about in high school and college, but it was glossed over like a minor bump in the road to Hell.  This period of history changed everything to the point that most educated people can't even conceive of a world that is pre-Enlightenment, yet we have forgotten most of its important precepts and have even started moving backwards along the socio-political spectrum.

This radical shift in Western philosophy produced prodigious minds such as Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.  It created constitutional governments, separation of church and state, REAL tolerance, and individual liberty.  It was the philosophical underpinning of the great revolutions of the 18th century and was the beginning of the end of slavery and equality under the Law.  It also was the first domino that led to the demise of Western monarchies (for the most part) and the rise of the democratic republic, where everyone had a say in government except when it came to certain unaLIENable rights that could never be abridged for any member of society.

Radical.  Wide-ranging.  Profound.  Fundamental.

This movement was to sweep the world in the next three centuries.  Where monarchs survived, they gave up significant power to elected bodies.  Slavery as an institution died, though it has remained underground due to religious permissiveness.  Enumerated rights have become core elements of governance.  And the inseparable tie between religion and government has slowly eroded through much of the world.

However, many of these ideas have become deeply corrupted.  The issue of rights, for instance, have been muddled, probably by design.  Entrenched interests don't give up control easily.

As modern Liberalism has shown, many people think that rights are handed out by governments as rewards for political favor.  These are not rights, these are permissions that can be revoked just as easily.  Thus, rights have become optional packages, like power seats and windows in cars, that can be purchased for loyalty and donations.  All sorts of special interests clamor for rights packages, claiming minority or abused status, forgetting that rights are inherent (under the Enlightened view) in every human by virtue of birth.  Hell, there are even useful idiots out there fighting for animal rights when we still haven't settled what they mean for humans, or which are unaLIENable.

Conservatives, on the other hand are more concerned with the rights of corporations than with human rights.  They would have organizations become "persons" and fight to protect corporate interests over the individual.  The result has been a subtle form of neo-slavery where humans are captured by a society set up to feed corporations with wage slaves and where the Boards and Executives enjoy unfettered immunity while the rest of us suffer.

What the world needs is a return to the original ideas and back off the ridiculous and unsustainable interpretations that have taken over the Enlightenment.  The problem is that this reversal requires education, and that has been usurped by both the Left and the Right, with the former pushing social agendas, and the latter pushing mercantilist agendas.

People talk a lot about dropping off the grid and getting out of the matrix without really realizing what it is and how to get out.  The secret is education.  Get yourself and your kids out of the indoctrination mills and return to real mental development.

Efforts, such as homeschooling are one major way to get out of the matrix.  A return to the classic liberal arts education (liberal in its true sense) is vital.  Nothing, though, will work when we ourselves are not educated.  You can't teach what you don't know.  This requires an effort.

Begin by turning off the teevee.  This is critical.  You don't need anything on it - at all.  There is almost nothing of value there.

With the extra time not sucked up by the propaganda machine, you can turn to sites like Gutenberg, where the collected works of Rousseau, Locke, Smith, and Bacon are absolutely free to download.  Then spend a couple of months reading the philosophical foundation of the world we really wanted and thought we were getting with the Western Civilization package deal.  Once you've done this, you will suddenly see what has gone wrong with our world, and exactly what we have to do to fix it.

You might want to spend some time over at the Mises Institute, as well.  A little time here will give you a free education in what is wrong with the global economy and how we can fix it, as well.

Now that you've got a free Master's education in global politics and economics, you can focus your efforts on rebuilding the world and educating the next generation in how to continue fixing Mommy and Daddy's mishandling of things.  It's never too late, at least as long as all the tools are free at your fingertips.

Be warned, though.  These are dangerous ideas.  The vested interests have invested 300 years trying to repair the damage done by the Enlightenment and they won't give up easily.  With a little effort and courage, though, we can complete the work of those great thinkers and doers, and finish the creation of a true New Golden Age for Mankind.

If you think this is an impossibly huge and unatainable goal, just look at the vast changes just a handful of radical thinkers and writers created just 300 years ago,  Things like real sustainability, real tolerance and real freedom are just a few books and a bit of effort away.  All you need to do first is find that little OFF switch on the teevee.

Minimum Wage, Maximum Headache

приветствовать наших новых!  Many thanks to henrymakow.com for carrying my article! And tip of the hat to BeforeItsNews.com!

I hate to burst everyone's bubble (not really), but raising minimum wages does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.  Oh sure, it feels good the first paycheck or two when you see that extra $5 a week that the tax man left you, but it won't last long.

Here's the problem: when you raise the minimum wage, then employers have to raise prices or fire people to cover the additional cost.  Thus, the prices of all products across an entire region (covered by the minimum wage) go up, so whatever "extra" money you got from the tiny raise is now balanced out by higher costs.  You rather quickly find yourself back in the same place you were to start with, and in some cases, without a job, as well.

Minimum Wage is one of those feel-good issues that has almost exactly zero benefit to anyone.  Raising it only creates hardship and higher prices over the long run, and does not improve the lives of either employers or employees.  You are far better off negotiating with an employer for better wages and buying only locally produced products, whenever possible, as well as expanding and getting certified in new skills.

The crux of the problem is exported manufacturing.  When almost everything is imported, prices are entirely at the mercy of foreign exchange rates and foreign producers.  They have no incentive to reduce prices, since their prices have nothing to do with the costs of producing export goods.

On the other hand, a local producer has immediate feedback from sales.  If prices are too high, he can immediately adjust to balance costs with revenues, and match prices to the local market, which includes the average wage.

You may or may not know this, but there is a mathematical formula to calculate minimum wage:

Minimum Living Wage = (poverty line) * (household size) / (# workers in household)

If you take a minute to think about this formula, then like all algebraic equations, you will notice that by tinkering with any variable, you can change the entire outcome.

The biggie is the "poverty line."  How does one calculate an absolute minimum amount of money to live?  We need to know tax rates, cost of various goods, utilities, food, and transportation.  This is such a subjective number that folks could argue till the cows come home about where to draw the line.

For instance, someone in a cold climate will have higher heating and clothing costs.  Someone who lives far from their job will have higher transportation costs.  Utilities will cost more in remote locations.  In the US, some states will have higher taxes than others.  Suffice it to say, how do you calculate a one-size-fits-all "poverty line" for a large population?

Despite all these issues involved just in calculating a minimum wage, we are still left with the simple economic fact: when costs go up, prices go up.  Unless the minimum wage is raised every six months or so, there is no way for it to keep pace with the inflation it causes.  Even worse, in times of deflation, which are likely coming soon to a nation near you, who would be willing to lower the minimum wage?  Try explaining that to the great unwashed masses.  According to Wikipedia:

Effective January 1, 2015 there were 29 states with a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum. From 2014 to 2015, nine states increased their minimum wage levels through automatic adjustments, while increases in 11 other states occurred through legislative or ballot changes. The federal minimum wage peaked at about $10 in 1968, as measured in 2014 inflation-adjusted dollars.[1]

Inflation and deflation are tricky bastards.  According to the Inflation Calculator, that 1968 money has been inflated more than 500% by 2014, and we are still waiting to find out the nasty truth about the past two years.

In the end, all a minimum wage does is create false hopes and unreal expectations.  It all sounds so sweet and wonderful, but the subtle if not completely hidden effects are both destructive and self-defeating.

A better solution to this problem is an educated population with good negotiating skills, minimal regulatory interference for entrepreneurs and small business owners, and a solid monetary system that doesn't lose significant value year over year.  Most importantly, stop looking to government to solve the problems of daily life.  No matter what it does, it will screw up everything and make the situation far worse.  Self-reliance and education will always be the best approach to any problem.

Minutae And Intersections

What is wrong with modern education systems?  Why can't we turn out smart people?  And what kind of system created the giants of history?

Modern education has become the domain of "educational theorists" who spend their time worrying about techniques and feel-good pablum that does nothing to educate.  Silly little trust exercises, group think workshops and rote jingoism are not education.  They are indoctrination.  Indoctrination does not teach one how to think, but what to think.

Students graduate with no framework on which to build a lifetime of learning.  In fact, most come out of school thinking they now know everything they will ever need to know.  This is a horrible and frightening fact that serves only those who need button-pushers and lever-pullers.  The biggest problem is that the corporate world is fast replacing the pushers and pullers with a far more (so they think) malleable and controllable workforce.  And even bigger problem is that these poor folks have no tools to think their way out of the coming wave of mass worker displacement.

It is a fact that many of the giants, on whose shoulders we stand, did not receive the standard 16-year education we consider necessary today.  People like Thomas Edison, Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Einstein had only the most cursory educations, by our current standards, yet they changed the world with little more than the ability to read, write and cipher, and a strong impulse towards autodidacticism (self-learning).

One thing notably missing in today's world of corporate education are schools of thought, even though the idiom still exists.  Once upon a time, different schools had different approaches to learning and the belief systems they espoused.  A quick look at art history shows that most of the great movements in art came out of specific schools with innovative approaches to the philosophy and techniques that creates art.  The Bauhaus, for instance, distinguished itself by merging handcrafts with fine art, and teaching a "form follows function" philosophy of art and architecture.  Aristotle, Plato and Euclid all created schools to promote their unique views and interpretations of the real world.

This approach had the advantage of allowing students to choose for themselves which philosophies best suited their own weltanschauungs and created a true marketplace of ideas.  Professors survived by having world views that were more actionable than another.  One chose a university, not by success on the football field, but by which one taught the most successful ideas and processes.

In the modern system, there is little difference in schools anywhere.  One is taught the Big Bang, Evolution, Electrical Theory and so on as if it is all set in stone, with no room for improvement or, especially new ideas.  Instead of reading the giants and discussing their propositions, and then arguing with the professors, one sits quietly in lectures, memorizes "facts" and vomits them onto bubble forms, never having learned why or whether there are competing ideas.

In Western education (Eastern followed a similar track), there were the Trivium and Quadrivium.  The Trivium we all know as Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric (input/processing/output).  The Quadrivium consists of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy (observation of the Natural World).  Together, these are the seven Liberal Arts that every educated person was required to know in order to think critically and express their ideas coherently.  Only after mastering the Liberal Arts could one go on to specialize in the Practical Arts (law, medicine, etc.) or Trades (finance, manufacturing, etc.).

This is radically different from the namby-pamby Educational Theory approach.  Educational Theory seeks the simplest and most effective means to stuff information into a brain.  It does nothing to teach processing and expression (at least non-emotional kinds).  It is experiential rather than intelectual, and focuses on "approaching a child at their developmental level," rather than challenging the child to rise up to something greater.

No wonder the vast majority of kids today are deathly bored in school.  No challenges to learning and a future of drone living pulling one specific lever and pushing one specific button.

On top of these radically different approaches to learning and content, there are no options in schools of thought.  The information at Harvard is the same as the information as Cal Tech, with the only possible differences in the organization of the chapters of the "professor's" textbooks.

Even worse, there is no sense of connection between disciplines.  In other words, there is no philosophical connection between the arts and sciences.  Cosmology and Philosophy are just credits on the transcript, not a means of uniting diverse information into a coherent picture of the Universe.  Without the tools of critical thinking, kids can't take new information, analyze it and plug it into a resolved tapestry of understanding.  And without that ability, there can be no new ideas, processes or insights.

The current technique of education presents a finish picture to young minds.  When new information comes along, the mind tries to fit it into the finished picture.  If it doesn't fit, it is discarded without any attempt to modify or interpret the information with a basic set of tools.  Thus, radically new ideas are thrown out because no one can analyze the structure of the idea or express it with any kind of coherence.

I was lucky.  I had some very intelligent teachers, beginning with my parents.  My teachers spent a lot of time showing me that class work was only a taste of what is available.  I was taught how to be an autodidact, a self-teacher.  I was given the tools to analyze and express new ideas, and incorporate them into my weltanschauung.

People are amazed at how many languages I speak (17 with 4 fluent).  It's easy, actually.  Once you master grammar, the rest is plugging in vocabulary.  Grammar is more or less the same in every human form of communication.  There are subjects, verbs, objects, qualities, quantities, and time.  That's it!  The rest is just learning how to say "green" with different words.

Grammar teaches framework.  Logic teaches structure.  Rhetoric teaches expression.  Music teaches harmony.  Geometry teaches Nature.  Astronomy teaches place.  Arithmetic teaches quantification.  Together, they form a complete image of the Universe we call Philosophy, and Philosophy leads to Cosmology, which is speculation on how it all began and how it will all end.

What a sad, tiny little Universe today's students must inhabit.  They are presented with a complete story.  The walls are already built and they only need to run around touching up the plaster and paint.  Nothing to discover.  Nothing to invent.  No room for changing the world.  WYSIWYG.  And the only thing you are allowed to see is what "they" tell you to see.

Without the basic tools, these poor young minds have no way to teach themselves, and worse, no desire, because they believe everything is "settled science."  They resign themselves to a lifetime of pushing and pulling, never knowing how vast their potential truly is.  With a steady steam of cinematic history and "unreality" (a.k.a. Virtual Reality), they can't even distinguish between what is real and what is complete fantasy.  How can you evaluate a film "based on a true story" if you have never studied history and don't know what a book is.

Truly, the only answer is to become an autodidact first, then teach your children, as well.  We cannot depend on ANY schools in the modern system to actually educate anyone.  They are pusher-and-puller factories.  If you want children who will change the world and have any hope of becoming true leaders, then the process begins with your own habits.

Turn off the teevee.  Use your computer for research and reading in your spare time.  Write a blog to clarify your thoughts and challenge others to think about new things.  The place to start is HERE.  It's never too late to improve yourself.

The rest will follow.

Rainin' All Over Da World

Ever get the feeling you live in a Magritte painting?

Been raining banksters lately.  Just goes to show you that when they say it's a dog-throw-dog-from-the-window world out there, they ain't kidding!

If you don't follow him regularly, it would be worth your while to pop over to Joseph Farrell's site and check out the brilliant job he has done of constructing a scenario involving global geopolitical realignments, tying bear bond scandals, gold repatriation and events like the Ukraine together.

Without a doubt, we are seeing the end of the world as most of us have known it.  In fact, you'd have to be well over 100 or so and able to recall Woodrow Wilson's administration to remember it any other way.

As for the banksters, it appears they are eating their young.  The thirty-something guys who are falling out of closed windows and popping nail guns into the backs of their skulls obviously pose some sort of threat to the new world order.

Now, when I say "new world order" without caps, I am intending to refer to an apparent shift that is not in the Western global hegemony playbook, commonly called the New World Order.  There is a shift going on that wasn't part of the Orwellian vision (which as we should know was based on the real thing).  The wheels set in motion by the Bavarian Illuminati back in the late 1800s is collapsing quickly, and there is a scramble to reshore the walls.

Imagine a giant game of Risk.  You build up your armies on the two or three countries you control, and when you figure you've got it together, you launch on a campaign to take over the world.  Things go great unless you are trying to hold Asia/Kamchatka.  The borders are long and open from a dozen different directions.  Not even Kublai Khan could hold it.

The Western empire, like so many in history, has dashed its ship on the rocks of Afghanistan and China.  Like an octopus when it touches heat, its tentacles shrivel and it retreats into its tiny cove, squirting a cloud of banksters as it goes.

The Western empire is collapsing under the weight of its own ambitions.  Having spent centuries building up armies, manipulating education and populations, testing with Hitlers and Mussolinis, and perfecting new/ancient technologies, it figured the time was ripe to venture forth.  With World War 2 having devastated most of the world (save the Americas), they Central Cabal saw an opportunity to set their plan in motion.

And it worked...for about a 100 years.

But like all empires, this one came up against the one intractable thing that brings down every attempt to dominate the world - human nature.

There are two things, outside of Maslow's Heirarchy, that guarantee failure of any group to ever gain complete control of the world.  One is greed, and the other is liberty.

No matter how true your believers are, there will always be those who have designs on the reins of power, or who look with envy on the wealth of the inner circle.  In either case, they will begin to draw others to their schemes and quietly undermine the Iron Fist out of simple greed.  This is the destruction from within.

Meanwhile, any dominated people will strive to gain freedom.  It is the core desire of any human.  Some will feel it enough to begin acting on it.  We generally call them patriots if they win, and terrorists if they don't.  In any event, they know that they have no hope of open assault on the Beast, so they chip away at it piece by piece.  It's like those video games where you come up again the big beastie at the end, and you have to keep attacking and running, attacking and running, slowly wearing down its hit points.

From these two forces eventually the octopus feels the heat and like lightning, shrinks back within its walls of safety.  Just as we see going on with the US-led Western empire.  Ukraine, Syria and raining banksters are just several of a great number of symptoms readily apparent to those who look for them.  The empire is crumbling.

The real problem, and what will become the biggest problem for those who just want to be left alone to live out their lives in peace, is this: so many people have been focused on stopping and dismantling the empire.  From my experience, the fight has been going on at least 50 years now.  Originally, it was what most folks called the "lunatic fringe", then it was the "conspiracy theorists", now it's a great number of "normal" folks.

There are plenty of folks out there now telling you to wake up and see what's happening.  But it's already happened.  Now we need to figure out what to do in the aftermath before some other New World Order or Illuminati step in to fill the vacuum.

See?  That's the problem.  This hydra we keep fighting doesn't die easily.  It backs off, licks its wounds and then comes on again in a slightly different form.  Meantime, folks think they get it whupped and head on back to the house to plow the fields and raise their kids.  The more you hack up this beast, though, the more little beasties come at you later.

The way we finally and completely kill this nasty critter that has plagued humanity for millennia is education.  We need to stop handing over education of our children to someone else.  Whoever controls education will be the one through whom the little beasties rise up again.

By education, I don't mean hugging trees and putting condoms on bananas.  I mean, "Here son, read Plato's Republic by the end of the week and be prepared to argue for or against, and why."  I mean controlling the content and quality of media.  I mean injecting real art and beauty into every part of our lives.  I mean working to bring every human up to the highest levels, rather than drag them all down into the most squalid (the current model).

Ultimately, it means taking full and complete responsibility for our own education.  Too many of us see a diploma as the end of something.  It is, in fact, only the beginning.  What that diploma means is that you should have learned the ability to think critically and to apply the greatest of human knowledge to any problem.  Now it is your responsibility to continue that process alone, reading, writing, gathering with friends on a Friday night to loosen the tongue and argue - by argue I don't mean fight, I mean state a position and defend it with reason.

Start a discussion group this week with some close friends.  Set the goal of reading something (preferably not junk fiction) and discussing it.  Invite the kids to sit around and listen, even join in if they have something valuable to add.  Turn off the TeeVee and take control of your mind.  Fill it instead with culture and art and criticism and reason.

The art of the dinner party is nearly dead, but I clearly remember sitting around with the old folks, and later at my own table, over a couple of bottles of good Cabernet and arguing the finer points of Kant, Chaucer, Joyce, Aristotle, etc.  The problem is we have allowed the nabobs and idiots to laugh us into submission, which is why the inmates now run the asylum.  We need to take it back and the war begins with dinner conversation and regular visits to the museum and theater.  It begins by taking your kids to Shakespeare rather than Disney.  It begins with the will to never stop education until you can't physically hold a book any more, but even then you can get someone to read to you, if you know anyone who can read big words anymore.

As a population of humans on this small planet, we are coming to a massive cross-road in history.  The ruling class is on its knees and their replacements have not yet felt strong enough to go head-to-head.  This is our chance, as free humans, to take back what was lost centuries ago - so long ago that none of us remember being free.  But we have books by folks who were free and who knew how to be free.

Now is the time to read those books.  Then start having close friends over for dinner.  Afterwards, pour out the libations and let the conversation begin!  This is the seed of freedom!

It used to be that you had to go to a friend's house with a good library in order to have ready references, but now we have the tool you are using this very moment.  The world's libraries are at your fingertips!  Use it!  Use your mind!  Take control of your destiny and end the centuries-long domination by a self-appointed elite.

And while you're at it...get a good umbrella.  I hear there's a storm a-comin' and those raindrops look awful big.

A New Superhero - Renaissance Man

Compartmentalization equals death.

Once upon a time, education included the Trivium and Quadrivium.  A student was required to survey the sum total of human experience before being allowed to specialize in a degree.  This is what we call a liberal arts education - liberal being the operative word in that it set one free.

A recent article triggered some deep thinking on the state of the world and the mess that we call education today.

People have gotten so narrowly focused that they not only cannot think outside the box, they can't even define the limits of the box because they can't see that far.  A typical college graduate enters the work force so specialized that he or she is incapable of drawing on multiple points of view in problem-solving.  Inspiration for the really big breakthroughs requires the ability to call on multiple disciplines.  Creativity thrives on the ability to approach any problem from many different angles.

The concept of the "renaissance man" has long since died out.  People who can competently play a muscal instrument, recite poetry, pursue independent investigations into the sciences, be able to speak more than one language fluently, discuss history with some authority, travel extensively, and so on are vanishingly rare anymore.

One key to a well-rounded education is reading.  It seems that most people one encounters these days don't read at all, or if they do, it is only within the field of their career.  Those who still read the news seem to only draw from select sources whose socio-political outlook matches their own.  Few will consciously seek out viewpoints that diverge from their own just to consider the arguments presented.

In observing this state of things, I begin to believe that it is by design.  Having populations that are highly specialized keeps them ignorant of opposing ideas, and thus divided and unable to work together.  This division serves the purpose of preventing large numbers of people from diverse backgrounds from forming alliances that could effectively change political systems.  Without unity, there is no power, and so it serves the Powers That Squat to keep us all ignorant and unable to communicate effectively.

A college graduate that has spent most of his matriculation focused on accounting makes a good wage slave.  They don't question much and are incapable of solving problems in other areas, effectively pidgeon-holing the employee and preventing them from knowing too much about how the rest of the business functions.  If he were too broadly educated, the accountant would be an effective threat to the equally pidgeon-holed executives and their corner offices and juicy paychecks and bonus packages.

Think about black projects in government or corporate worlds.  The most effective way to keep a project a secret is to let as few people in on the Big Picture as possible.  Company A has only enough information to produce their widget, but how that widget fits into the overall scheme is a mystery.

The same is true with populations.  By having an educational system geared towards specialization, people are effectively cut off from seeing the Big Picture, and so never have enough information to challenge the status quo.  This keeps most people nicely compliant, and those who get out of hand never know enough of the Big Picture to ever be a real threat.  If anyone ever causes real damage to the system, it is by sheer dumb luck and even the 'perpetrator' is unaware of what he has done.

The cited article talks about how specialization has stifled creativity, and in that respect, it is absolutely right.  However, it stops short of hitting the problem on the head.  At some level of society, it serves an elites' purpose to stifle free though and keep people pidgeon-holed because it ensures their hegemony.

This brings us to one of the main themes here on the Far Side: the internet is a huge threat to the ruling classes.  That people have free and easy access to so much information endangers the carefully crafted system of specialization.  They must scramble to ensure that we the people never figure out that we don't need their educational system anymore.  If we did, not only would they be unable to maintain their system of putting every college graduate in indentured servitude with student loans, those same graduates would start to become a real threat to the system itself as the Big Picture began to reveal itself.

The stifling of creativity due to specialization is not an unintended consequence, it is the very point of it.  The so-called education system we have is a weapon used to keep us in our assigned stations in life.  Our most effective defense and best weapon is reading and learning everything we can get our hands on.

When we understand how history, art and science work together to form a Big Picture, we will suddenly find why the Trivium and Quadrivium of the ancient world were called a "liberal" education.  Knowledge is freedom - liberation and liberty.  To obtain it requires reading, and not fiction (though it has its place).  It requires reading history, scientific theses, literature, philosophy, religious texts, and law.  It requires us to express ourselves through the arts, and to appreciate how others have done the same.

Only when we can draw on the sum total of human knowledge and experience can we call ourselves free.  It is not an easy task, but it is necessary if we are to survive as a species.  Slavery comes in many subtle forms, and 'education' is one of the most insidious, for it makes us feel intelligent while binding our minds with chains even more effective than physical ones.

If we spent just half the time we devote to TeeVee reading non-fiction from a variety of disciplines, we would see the world change radically and quickly for the better.