The Road To Hell

 

Why not join the discussion on our Telegram channel?

 
I have always advocated the Great American Road Trip, even before I read a book called Blue Highways, by a guy with a really run name.

I have fond memories taking family vacations in the old Ford Country Squire breeder wagon with the fake wood panelling all over it.  My father was a die-hard interstate hater, declaring regularly that he could make better time on the back roads.  Of course, he was always wrong, because among other things, he was a history teacher.  That meant that we had to stop at e.v.e.r.y s.i.n.g.l.e historical marker for an extended roadside lesson in Texas history.

I could go on for hours about those trips, but we're here for a different purpose.

I've spent a significant portion of my life taking leisurely blue highway tours of the world.  While the interstates and autobahns of the world whisk you quickly from origin to destination, they do so in a completely sanitized envelope populated with rubber-stamped franchises and commercial oases, by-passing the truly unique and insightful parts of the world.

Two of my favorite journeys involve driving through Europe, purposefully avoiding big cities and multi-laned concrete arteries.  While these journeys could fill at least one book of unusual and even strange experiences, there was a theme that ran through the trips that inspired me to do a photo journal, where like my father, I stopped at every opportunity to appreciate the historical nuances that mark blue highway art.

When you drive through the back country of Europe, you quickly begin to notice a recurring phenomenon.  On the edge of nearly every village, there is a grotto with either the Virgin Mary or the Crucified Christ, and many of t hem are surrounded with fresh flowers much of the time.  Some bear inscriptions, while others require an inquiry of locals when you reach the gasthaus.

These grottos are memorials to the survivors and the victims of the Black Death.

Hundreds of centuries-old grottos pepper the entire continent and serve as ancient reminders of the terrors of the bubonic pandemic.  Not only these memorials, but a number of communities perform passion plays every decade, the most famous of which is the Passion Play at Oberammagau.  

These rituals and monuments have survived nearly 400 years to remind the future of an event so terrifying that it has left an imprint in our languages, like the English "bless you" or the German "Gott sund heit" when someone sneezes.  It's even memorialized in the children's rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie".

Imagine a natural plague so horrible that it scarred our collective memories across time and place.  Imagine the fearsome inevitability that in any family of four, odds were good that at least one of you would die a painful death.  Imagine death rates so dreadful that the only burial solution was to dig large pits and stack the corpses like cord wood in them.

Now look around at our current situation.

In the first iteration of this so-called pandemic, there were no bodies littering the streets.  The vast majority of people did not go to bed wondering who in their house would be dead by morning.  There were no enormous pits at the edge of town with gruesome piles of death.

In  the second iteration, great numbers of people have begun dying of heart attacks and strokes, wholly unrelated to a respiratory virus, but rather self-induced by avaricious mega-corporations seeking to dominate the globe and soak us of our scant and hard-fought wealth, aided and abetted by corrupt and demonic politicians seeking to elevate their status by yanking our out from under us.

If this shared experience leaves a mark on our culture - indeed if our culture survives this event - it will not be to memorialize the horrors of Nature, but of the bottomless abyss of evil into which Humanity can fall.  The grottos, children's rhymes and passion plays of the distant future will mark our generation's descent into cowardice and psychosis so profound that it nearly destroyed civilization itself.

Slowly it seems the masses are awakening, from this delusion.  It appears that folks are realizing just how clueless and self-absorbed we have all been for the last 100 years, but we have a long way to go.  

We must resolve to punish those who brought this on us, while confessing that it would not have been possible without our consent and sloth.  We must resolve to educate ourselves and take full responsibility for the quality and nature of our lives.

Finally, we must, as a species, come to realize that dogma, decrees and demands are not science.  We must castigate en masse anyone who uses the terms "settle science" or "consensus science"  Science is the systematic questioning of the status quo, not the capitulation to it.

Our birthright is the state of individual and sovereign moral agent, and our collective duty is to jealously defend that birthright, for all living souls, from any infringement by any entity.  This self-imposed crisis must be the final battle for our true and lasting freedom.

If we erect monuments to this period in history, then let them be reminders to the future that we finally ended slavery in all its evil and pernicious forms in our lifetimes.

Now is the time for heroes and legends.

A Slave To Ignorance

 

Add caption

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.

The True War

At his trial in Nuremberg, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring is recorded as saying, “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,”   In common speech, this is often misquoted as, "History is written by the victor."  The actual words are, "The victor is always the judge and the loser is the accused."  Truer words he probably never spoke.

To this I would add that the judge always positions himself as the moral superior.  After all, might makes right, sine qua non?

America is convulsing because its history is a bedtime story told to itself to hide the painful truth.  On all sides of the current mess there, folks are asking, or rather stating that Civil War 2.0 is underway.  In a profound sense, it is just a continuation of the original, much like World War 2 was inevitable because the wrongs of World War 1 where never settled.

After orgies of violence we humans call wars, the winners - and losers - are in a rush to turn away from the horrors that were committed on all sides, and in that rush a convenient narrative is concocted to ease the vivid nightmares.  The winners absolve themselves of the crimes by heaping guilt on the shoulders of the losers, regardless of right or wrong, or the truth.

As any good lawyer will tell you, there are three sides to every story - your side, my side and the truth.

When it comes to the American Civil War of 1860-63, the soothing narrative the winners concocted was that the evil South wanted slavery, and the bright shiny North wanted to abolish it.  Since the North won, their side of the story has dominated the narrative, but that makes it neither right nor the truth.  The real story is much more complex with plenty of guilt to go 'round.  As we proper Southerners know it, it was the War of Northern Aggression.

As the great Greek tragedian Aeschyius reminds us, "The first casualty of war is the Truth."

The issue of slavery began simmering in the Union before the ink was dry on the Constitution.  Abolitionists wanted to end slavery primarily because it was a vestige of British colonialism, but also because it was antithetical to the ideals of the new nation.

Many abolitionists advocated sending slaves back to Africa, which eventually happened when a US colonial group created the western African nation of Liberia and offered passage to any slaves wanting to emigrate there.  Abraham Lincoln recognized Liberian independence in 1862, and liked the idea of repatriating slaves, as he was not a fan of racial integration.

In 1824, the Democratic Republican Party split into two factions - the Democrats and Republicans - over support for John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.  Among the issues at the core of the split was slavery and abolition.  The Democrats were willing to compromise on slavery, as demonstrated by The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought the free state of Maine and the slave state of Missouri into the Union.

While the compromise placated both sides for  atime by maintaining the balance between free and slave states, it was undone by the Kanas-Nebraska Act of 1858.

Aside from all the idealistic rhetoric, the underlying tensions were primarily economic.  The northern states were dominated by industrial and financial interests, while the southern states were agricultural.  The balance that the politicians sought to maintain was between the suppliers of raw materials and food in the south, and the factories and banks in the north.  This tension was exacerbated by the apportionment of representation using population.  This one fact is the seed from which the Civil War and two centuries of social unrest have sprung.

The north benefitted from cheap raw materials that made its finished products highly competitive in global markets.  This made the industrialists and financiers grossly wealthy.  But they also faced increasing pressure to raise wages and offer benefits to labor, an issue that didn't affect the slave states.  Furthermore, it was in the best interests of the northern parties to maintain the supply of cheap raw materials.

The south, on the other hand, found that they could fetch much better prices for their goods in Europe, and could buy manufactured goods cheaper than from the north.  More and more of the south's output was shipping overseas.  The southern plantation owners were also hiking the prices for northern buyers, while buying fewer and fewer finished goods from the north, and their wealth was beginning to rival that of the industrial-financial interests.  Thanks to slavery, the plantation owners didn't have an expanding middle class to deal with.

The United States enacted Protective Tariffs almost as fast as the nation came into being.  While they were initially intended to be temporary to help fill up the Treasury, they were never lifted and became a tool of northern interests to maintain control over the south.  By making southern goods more expensive overseas, they forced the flow of raw materials to their factories.  Import tariffs were levied to force the south to buy finished goods from the north.

This made the industrial-financial interests happy, and the expanding middle class enjoyed rising wages, who thus threw their support behind the tariffs, as well.  In the election of 1860, the Morill Tariff was a major plank in the Republican party's platform, and James Buchanan ended up signing the Morill Tariff into law before Abraham Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861.

In November of 1860, frustrated by tariffs, economic shenanigans and the northern dominance of Congress, the southern senators walked out and secession soon followed on 12 April 1861.  The northern bankers and financiers, fearing a middle class uprising and shrinking profits, persuaded Lincoln to set up a blockade.

The blockade was a blatant act of war against sovereign states who were exercising their Ninth Amendment and Tenth Amendment rights.  The blockade covered 3,500 miles of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, cutting off the newly formed Confederacy from their trading partners in Europe.  The same act today is still considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, though the US still uses it as a routine sanction against nations it doesn't like (i.e. the banking and financial interests disapprove of).

There was and is no law preventing secession from the Union and every foundational document of the united States recognizes this fundamental right.  Thomas Jefferson himself wrote in the Declaration of Independence that a people had the right to sever ties with another when the government of the latter was abusive to their interests and liberty.

We must pause here to note that the abolutionist argument at the time was not about ending slavery, but whether new territories conquered by the federal government in its war on the native population would expand slavery into those regions or not.  We must also note that not a single slave ship ever flew the Confederate flag.  They were either British of Union flagged ships.

Having undermined the Confederate economy and brutally invaded a sovereign state (a common practice of the US), the Union forces decimated the South, which produced raw materials and not the finished goods of the north.  So the north cut off the South's livelihood, while protecting their interests by purchasing raw materials from colonial powers abroad.

Note well that the Confederate states were exercising their rights, as recognized and memorialized in the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Also note that the Union invaded the Confederacy, and not the other way around.

The north clearly profited from slavery on all sides and had no intention to end its practice.  On the other side, the cost of purchasing and maintaining slavery was becoming a burden on the southern producers and would have ended one way or another before the end of the century.



On 1 January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Contrary to the legend propagated by the victors, this document did not "free" any slaves.  It promised escaped slaves that made it past the Mason-Dixon line that they would not be returned to the Confederacy.    It did not grant equal rights or suffrage or even freedom - just that they would not be returned to their owners.  In other words, it was yet another act of deception by the Union, which it was quite adept at even then.

In fact, slavery in the north did not end for several years after the Civil War and emancipation proclamation.  There was a slave market right where Wall Street is today into the 1870s.

The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed the right of property to a human being, was not overturned until the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868, a full three years after the end of the Civil War, and even then the practice of slavery in the north tapered off slowly.

That the Fourteenth Amendment destroyed God-given rights in favor of "privileges and immunities" is the topic of many a long and dry essay.  Suffice it to say that the bankers and financiers did not free any slaves, but rather made slaves of every citizen of the "United States," itself a corporate entity created by the Act of 1871. (note "united States" versus United States)

It may seem like legal hair-splitting, but there is a profound difference between a "right" and  "privilege".    In Enlightenment philosophy, a right is the sacred property of an individual by virtue of birth.  A privilege is granted by an authority and requires a license or permission to exercise.  Go back and read the Fourteenth Amendment again.  As Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, rights are "unalienable" or incapable of having a lien placed on them.  In other words, no authority may claim possession of those rights.

The American Civil War was not about slavery as we commonly think of it.  It was in point of fact about expanding slavery to everyone, not ending it for some.  It was a key expansion of the banking and financial interests in the US, and by means of two world wars, expanding that error to the entire world.

Until we recognize the truth of the Civil War, and acknowledge that we are all slaves to the banking class, we will never be truly free.  In many ways, this one Great Lie has caused so much death and destruction in our modern world.  Because we labor under a profound deception, we can never cure the ills that afflict us at this very moment.

Think about how many times you have heard or said, "The Constitution grants us the right to..."  It does no such thing, nor does the government grant rights.  We are born with them as a gift of Nature and Nature's Creator.

The American Civil War never ended, it only became a global conflict with vile banksters pulling the strings.  We need only look a bit closer at where groups like Black Lives Matter or Antifa get their funding to see the subversive hand of banking and finance.

It is not just American blacks who are owed reparations, it is every human being on this planet born since the banksters took over.


New York Slave Market
Dred Scott decision
Franklin Pierce

Yankee Carpetbaggers Strike Again

(Thanks to reader Robert who told us that someone had pulled the flag image that headed this article).
As usual, poorcated Americans are once again reacting emotionally to something with little or no historical background or truth,


The recent rush to ban the Confederate flag and remove it from public spaces (and even cop underwear) is founded on profound ignorance fed by media numbnuts who know even less than us normal folks.  Because a confused and drug-addled (pharma, not illegal) young man entered a South Carolina church and killed some people - also based on a profound ignorance of history - the US is in an orgasm of symbol destruction.

For the many readers here who are not Americans, a little background.

From 1860-1865, the United States became embroiled in a civil war, commonly called (by educated people) the War of Northern Aggression.  The northern and southern tiers of States broke apart and drew a line, called Mason-Dixon, because there were some fundamental differences in cultures and politics.

At that time, the north was increasingly becoming industrialized, while the south was largely agrarian.  The US Congress was dominated by representatives from the north, because numbers were based on population, and the north had quite a few more voting folks than the south.  This led to piles of legislation in the Congressional pipeline that favored the north at the expense of the south.

The south was being heavily taxed without ample representation, and the federal government was increasingly dictating to the southern States in violation of the Tenth Amendment protecting States' Rights.

The north was also getting filthy rich on finished manufactured products using raw materials produced in the south, but naturally were crushing prices for the raw materials to increase profits.  I know, hard to imagine, but Yankee financiers were getting fat while heavily manipulating the prices of things like cotton and other agricultural products.

Tempers flared.  Things got out of hand.  The south dared to develop other markets and cut off supplies to the north.  The north got bend out of shape and blockaded southern ports.  Shots were fired.  A war started.

Now you may notice that, among the reasons for the war, slavery was not one of them.  In fact, slavery was still common on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, but the importation of slaves had already stopped and the institution itself was slowly fading out.  Texas had banned the slave trade (though it still allowed slave owners to bring their property from outside).  The south was a bit slower, because of the manpower needed to run the large plantations, but the north was benefiting from the products of slavery as much or more than the south.

The Confederate flag, therefore, was not a symbol of racism and slavery, it was a symbol of States' Rights, anti-federalism and opposition to the undue power of international bankers and financial interests.

In other words, the Confederate flag represents the right to self-rule, free and open markets, and decentralized government.  It also represents the economic truism that production should always be more powerful than finance.

When you look at the history behind the symbol, in fact, it becomes apparent who wants to ban the Confederate flag and why.  The modern slave owners - bankers and fascist governments - don't want anyone thinking about why hundreds of thousands of Americans die defending their way of life from Yankee carpetbaggers.

In addition, it's important to remember that  not one single slave was ever brought to North America under the Confederate flag.  Nearly every single slave was imported under the British and US flags.  In fact, some of the largest slave markets, even at the time of the War of Northern Aggression, were north of the Mason-Dixon line.

One other bit of information educated people should keep in mind: it was the US Democratic Party that introduced the pro-slavery Dredd Scott legislation.  If you are one of those poor, mind-controlled victims who still vote, and you choose the Democratic candidates, then you are supporting the party that vehemently defended slavery.

If you argue that the Democrats no longer believe that way, then you would obviously vote for the Nazi party, as well.  And if the Democrats no longer support slavery, then why did it create the Federal Reserve, the income tax, Social Security, and Obamacare.  Yup, even today, you are supporting slavery - only now it's for everyone and not just a certain class of folks.

So, if you are a real, educated person, then you would not only celebrate the Confederate flag, but would move immediately to ban the British and US flags, and declare the Democratic Party an enemy of the state and freedom.

By the way, in 1860, the people of Texas voted 4-1 to secede from the US and once again become a free and separate nation.  It never joined the Confederacy, but remained neutral with sympathies to the South.  At the end of the war, Texas was taken by force by federal troops and has never been a legal "state" since then.  All educated people know that.

Designed Obsolecense

I used to think I hated Mondays.  Then I came to realize that I pretty much hate any day during which I have to work.  It's not that I don't like work.  Lord knows I make enough of it for myself.  But I hate having artificial schedules and deadlines forced on me.

I once thought it would be cool to have a Star Trek world where you just walk up to the wall and speak and out pops food, beverage and clothing to order.  But then I realized that all the characters on the show had to give up significant amounts of their lives to 'serve the good of all Mankind' to get all the freebies.  Even in the 24th century, there ain't no free lunch.

It seems, though, as if we are coming to a major nexus in history.  As our technology evolves, we have less and less actual work to do.  Eventually, 3-D printing will replace most manufacturing and transportation of goods.  3-D print files will (and already are) become a form of currency.  Most people won't have to travel more than a few blocks from their houses to work or get the things they need.

With one tiny little problem.

Sure things like 3-D printing will free up a lot of time and effort and literally destroy millions of jobs worldwide.  But worse, there will ultimately form a tiny minority of people producing the food and raw materials for the rest of our lifestyles of vast leisure.

What happens when the vast majority of us become designers and traders of ideas, and only a small number are doing all the work of mining, refining and growing all our necessities?  Not only will those people demand far more attention, but they will literally hold the world hostage.  As a consequence, the leisure classes will be required to 'hold a gun to the heads' of the underclasses, or face the utter collapse of society.  In other words, slavery.

This seems to be an intractable conundrum.  The global economy is on an inexorable march towards everyone thinking and no one working.  Even on Star Trek, the replicators have to be fed raw materials to produce all the products on demand.  The crew of the Enterprise blithely fly around talking about how humanity has reached a point where everyone is an intellectual, yet every other episode involves some mining planet or food planet in trouble.  Obviously, not everyone gets to be an intellectual.  Yet the issue of who actually does all the work is never really addressed unless one of the labor planets has a problem.

We all talk about great new inventions and labor-saving devices, but there is very little discussion about what will happen when there are 4 billion people without jobs.  How will they make money?  Who will supply all the raw materials to support this enormous class of non-productive humans?  Will we each own a labor machine and make money based on its output while we sit around pursuing our intellectual advancement?  And what about all the people now who use all their free time watching TeeVee and playing games?  Will we have created a labor-free world so that we can turn our brains to jelly, since it seems most people don't want to read or pursue intellectual hobbies?

Obviously, all this talk of utopian lifestyles imply either a vast reduction in population, or a small minority who actually get to live that life while the rest of us toil in the salt mines to support their utopia.  From the looks of things, we are already at the latter stage.

I, for one, can't see how we achieve our technological dreams without some radical changes in how we do things.  Sure, it's great to talk about living Olympian lifestyles, but what happens to the part of humanity that still has to do the labor?

It's easy to say that we will ultimately produce machines to do all the work so everyone can enjoy the leisure life, but even having all those wonderful machines means that someone has to make them.  Unless they are self-designing and replicating, which has all sorts of unsavory implications itself.  Frankly, I just can't see how we achieve the liberal wet dream society without somewhere along the line having an underclass to serve the needs of the ubermenchen.  At that point, we arrive at Huxley's Brave New World of selective breeding and designer worker bees.

There are already a great number of folks without jobs and they are living in poverty, not wandering around the garden reading Emily Dickinson and discussing the symbology of T.S. Eliot.  The idea of zipping around in star ships while listening to opera and quoting Shakespeare seems a long way off, even though all these folks have the time to do it.

Though the headlines crow about each new breakthrough in technology, we need to keep in mind - and earnestly discuss - what we are going to do with the people already out of work, much less those who will be displaced by the new technology.

As the pace of innovation increases, there is less and less time to process the displaced workers and guide them into new careers.  We are obviously not at the point where one can live a life of intellectual pursuits without the need for income of some kind, and that means work, which is increasingly hard to find.

So, while the Enterprise is zipping around the galaxy with a host of neo-Platonists onboard, the rest of us are stuck with the drudge work to maintain their lofty lifestyles.  How long do you think that will last?  It won't be long before those of us doing the dirty work will start to resent the privileged few who live off our sweat.

There's some serious contemplation to do in our afternoon walks through the cloister pondering the Universe's Great Mysteries.

Over One Billion Served

If there's one thing that has remained consistent in human history, it's slavery.  Nearly every civilization ever conceived by humans has involved involuntary servitude, whether by conquest or debt.  Even most of the gods we have conceived require absolute obedience and submission.

Things haven't changed much, despite an effort over the last couple of hundred years to become more enlightened.  Those who think their nation is so enlightened as to have eradicated slavery need only ask how long it's been since the last military draft.

In fact, submission to government is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of slavery today.  An legal code of behavior that is enforced by the use of deadly force and incarceration is an institutional form of slavery, whether you adhere to it voluntarily or not.

Even more insidious is the bondage of debt, and considering nearly all world currencies are a form of monetized debt, slavery would seem to be more rampant than ever.  By this measure, nearly every human on Earth is a slave.  Even those who issue the currencies are slaves to their own greed and avarice and desire to dominate others.

Slavery, despite our self-deceptions, exists today in many overt forms.  The human trade for domestic servants runs unabated throughout much of the world.  Young women in Indonesia are frequently sold out to wealthy Arabs, Chinese and other groups.

If you need another example, ask anyone at the BBC about the sex slave trade taking place backstage of your favorite sit-com or drama.  The Euro elite have been trading lives for sexual gratification for centuries with no sign of abating, and that is hardly an isolated example.

Slavery expresses itself in certain 'lifestyle' choices, such as Master/slave or Dom/sub, which is a large and growing form of power play in the West, where women have been granted carte blanche to run rampant over men as retaliation for the perceived ills of past generations.  In this case, powerless and ineffectual men (usually) seek out meek and even more powerless women (usually) in order to have someone to lord it over.

There are even institutionalized forms of covert slavery.  The intern system, which most college graduates will have to endure, involves a powerless student working long, arduous hours for little or no money in order to prove their worth to the employment masters.  For their part, the students submit both for the letter grade and hours, and in the hopes of securing a wage slave position in the future.

No matter who you are or where you live, you are a slave of one sort or another.  In most cases, we are products of slave indoctrination from the cradle.  We are taught to submit to churches/mosques/temples run by self-appointed elites who feel they have every right to slide a hand into your pocket in exchange for some future glory of serving a vengeful god for all eternity.

For those less inclined to that form of slavery, there is a government over us who also feels empowered to slide a hand into our pocket and rob us of our labor and productivity in exchange for...well, for nothing, really.  The governments set up systems of controls on humans and then charge them for the priviledge.  None of it is really useful to anyone but the life-long bureaucrats who leech off society in general.

Ultimately, it makes one take pause and wonder if humans weren't indeed created to be a slave race.  There is a growing body of scholarship pointing to the possibility that humans were genetically modified from some base animal in order to serve a master race.  Could it be that embedded in our genetic codes there is an unavoidable impulse to enslave ourselves to those we perceive as able to supply our needs in exchange for our undying subservience?

In an era when science is finding 'gay' genes, and 'fat' genes, and even 'crime' genes, has anyone noticed that there doesn't seem to be any effort whatsoever to find a 'slave' gene?  Perhaps no one is looking because no one wants to find it.  The basic impulse of humans to bond themselves is a handy device for those aware of it and wiling to exploit it for their own gain.

Slavery is embedded at such profound levels of our psyches that we hardly even notice it.  Our love songs and poetry celebrate the complete submission of one person to another.  Our literature, such as Pygmalion, Frankenstein, golems, and zombies, is suffused with the creation of slaves.

Even now, the elite are working feverishly to create a new class of slaves that we commonly call 'robots'.  Slaves have this annoying habit of requiring food and care, and at some point, they always awaken en mass and throw off their old shackles to look for new.

But if the masters could create a slave of steel and cable that would work tirelessly 'round the clock, without pay, holidays or benefits.  If they could build for themselves an army of unquestioning 'doers' that obeyed every whim.  If they could finally free themselves from their own slavery of having to care, no matter how little, for the fact that the slave is in some part human.  What a grand life they would have.

Short of eradicating religion, government and elitism of every kind, there seems to be no way out of the slave mentality.  We are steeped in this culture of servitude from birth and from all angles.  We spend our lives slaving away at 'jobs' in the hopes of gaining enough wealth and position to be able to control slaves, rather than be one.  We create 'lifestyles' that allow us to feel some amount of control in our lives, no matter how illusory it is.  We even domesticate animals in order to have something around us that obeys our wishes.

We submit our work for approval.  We submit payment for services.  We demand good service for our money.  We build service economies.  Indeed, it would seem that to rid the world of slavery would imply tearing down all that has come before and starting from scratch, and even then could we conceive of a world in which one group did not submit to another, whether by force or positive action?

It would seem that those who scream the loudest for the end of slavery in all forms are the most clueless.  They have not stopped to consider that our entire Universe is built on the premise that someone must serve another.  Slavery is, in fact, endemic in human affairs.  It is our own feelings of powerlessness that lead us to strive for a position in which we can force others to submit their power to us.

If we are serious about ending slavery, then the concept must be opened up to include slavery in all its forms.  We must further ask the question that never seems to be expressed: are we in fact a slave race?  Is slavery so deeply ingrained in our constitutions that we cannot perceive a world without it?  Indeed, could humanity honestly survive without the submission of one group to another?  Are we capable of not only conceiving, but building such a world?

Or are we doomed for our brief turn on the stage of history to seek out an exploit the labor of others because we know no other way?

Perhaps the only way to proceed is to control the expression of slavery in an open and honest forum, rather than try to extract the very heart or humanity.  The first step is to admit that we are all slaves of one stripe or another.  Then we can move forward with effectual efforts to slow the pace of exploitation.

Until then, get back to work, slave!

It's All Bullshit!

Don't you see it? Doesn't it register? Has everyone been OWNED?

Ever get the feeling you're Kevin McCarthy in a world full of Pod People? The whole freakin' world's gone berserk and you are the last man standing.

See...here's the thing...you can do anything you want as long as it is within the parameters laid out for you. That's right, you are free as long as you stay inside the fence. If you dare to wander outside the fence, THEY with caddle prods (Tasers) to shoo you back in. If that's not enough, then THEY have brain taps (shotguns) that both ensure you don't get out of line again, and provide fodder for the Soylent Green factory.

You and I are nothing more than meat for the well-fed. As long as you stay within your corral, you will be allowed to live. If you step outside of it, you must die. Or everyone around you must die, so that you finally cry, "Uncle," and end up loving Big Brother.

You see? It's not enough that you knuckle under...you must be broken.

The WHOLE DAMN THING is a sham, a farce, a buah si malah kala.

Remember the opening for the Outer Limits?

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits."

To be fair, we were warned, just that most of us didn't take it seriously. Here's an example:

You feel that the public schools are a sham, but you can't afford or don't want your child indoctrinated into private schooling. So you homeschool. At first, that got you Tasered. Now, you are ALLOWED to do it, but you must choose from approved curricula and you must abide by STATE rules. Free inside the fence.

Here's another example: you don't think, after hours of eye-bleeding research, that vaccinations are good for your children. So you refuse. You can fill out the form at school that gives you exemption, but all that does is call in the Satanic Child Protective Services, because you aren't injecting your children with untested and unproven poisons.

Think vaccinations are effective? Then why do THEY quarantine kids who get mumps? Gee, didn't they get their injections? Aren't they immune? How did that first kid, with all the damn injections, get sick in the first place? And if the vaccines really work, then why is that kid quarantined, since all the other kids are supposedly immune?

How about one more example? You live in a police state, I mean country, that is waging illegal wars all over the planet under false pretenses, and that country's annual budget is about half allocated to the military. So, in good conscience, you withhold 50% of your taxes to protest the wanton slaughter of innocents in your name. Hey, that'll get you a brain tap right there.
!
It's all B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T!

Don't believe any of it. That's a good start. The next step is to listen to that little voice inside that is increasingly being squished. It's telling you, "This is all wrong." And if all that is stopping you is fear of Tasers, then douse yourself in water before a confrontation.

The next big step is turn OFF the damn TV! There is nothing worth watching on it, no matter how many channels you have. Not only turn it off, but throw the damn thing out in the streets, while screaming, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

There is life after media, if you just take the first step. Start consuming it, before it consumes you. From what I can see, you're just Debra Harry's bitch.

Wake up world! The mediots own you. Stop it now! It's almost too late. Don't let Kevin McCarthy be right...show him there is still some humanity in the world. Start exercising your mind. Don't wait for 'authorities' to tell you what you already know. Follow that little voice inside. It is trying to tell you what is best for you. Believe it or not, THEY don't own that voice yet...but THEY are getting there.

From now on, anytime someone wants to tell you what to do, ask them to do it to their children first.

You'll get the picture.