Parents and teachers in Warren County want more money and better benefits for the Mason City School District.
The Mason Education Association, which represents 650 educators, has been negotiating a new employment contract since April. Mason teachers say they’re not only concerned about money and benefits but also concerned about cuts to academic programs and facilities.
The union also declared a “no confidence” position in superintendent Gail Kist-Kline.
The district meanwhile says it’s hopeful that negotiations will continue during the summer months, and a contract settlement will be reached before the beginning of the school year.
According to school board members, Dr. Kist-Kline was hired following a levy failure, and asked to lead during a time of economic challenge that required the district to improve efficiency and make difficult decisions.
The story continued with the MEA (Mason Education Association) threatening to go on strike and late in the afternoon on July 8th 2014, a contract agreement was reached which will then go to a vote by the union members. Teachers all across Ohio rejoiced as one of the wealthiest districts in that state had proven that it was once again ripe for pillaging. The entire story of how the teacher’s union in Mason threatened a hostile action—work stoppage—preventing parents who pay the taxes there from retaining their free baby sitting service at the end of summer, forced the payment of ransom which were pay increases. It was all too reminiscent of an old pirate story about Blackbeard’s blockade of the Charleston harbor in 1718. That old story about pirate action was essentially the same as the modern story of the MEA in Mason, Ohio 2014.
Edward Teach (also Edward Thatch, c.1680—22 November 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of the American colonies. Although little is known about his early life, he was probably born in Bristol, England. He may have been a sailor on privateer ships during Queen Anne’s War before settling on the Bahamian island of New Providence, a base for Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined sometime around 1716. Hornigold placed him in command of a sloop he had captured, and the two engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition to their fleet of two more ships, one of which was commanded by Stede Bonnet, but toward the end of 1717 Hornigold retired from piracy, taking two vessels with him.
Blockade of Charleston
By May 1718 Teach had awarded himself the rank of Commodore and was at the height of his power. Late that month his flotilla blockaded the port of Charleston (then known as Charles Town) in South Carolina. All vessels entering or leaving the port were stopped, and as the town had no guard ship,[40] its pilot boat was the first to be captured. Over the next five or six days about nine vessels were stopped and ransacked as they attempted to sail past Charleston Bar, where Teach’s fleet was anchored. One such ship, headed for London with a group of prominent Charleston citizens which included Samuel Wragg (a member of the Council of the Province of Carolina), was the Crowley. Her passengers were questioned about the vessels still in port and then locked below decks for about half a day. Teach informed the prisoners that his fleet required medical supplies from the colonial government of South Carolina, and that if none were forthcoming, all prisoners would be executed, their heads sent to the Governor and all captured ships burnt.[41]
Wragg agreed to Teach’s demands, and a Mr. Marks and two pirates were given two days to collect the drugs. Teach moved his fleet, and the captured ships, to within about five or six leagues from land. Three days later a messenger, sent by Marks, returned to the fleet; Marks’s boat had capsized and delayed their arrival in Charleston. Teach granted a reprieve of two days, but still the party did not return. He then called a meeting of his fellow sailors and moved eight ships into the harbor, causing panic within the town. When Marks finally returned to the fleet, he explained what had happened. On his arrival he had presented the pirates’ demands to the Governor and the drugs had been quickly gathered, but the two pirates sent to escort him had proved difficult to find; they had been busy drinking with friends and were finally discovered, drunk.[42]
Teach kept to his side of the bargain and released the captured ships and his prisoners—albeit relieved of their valuables, including the fine clothing some had worn.[43]
The behavior of the MEA was essentially of the same morality as Blackbeard’s seizer and extortion of Charleston. Blackbeard’s actions were designed to exploit the weaknesses of the governor; the MEA was designed to exploit the weaknesses of the superintendent of Mason schools. Both groups used force and fear to obtain wealth—the Blackbeard pirates used fear of physical violence, the Mason teachers’ used the fear of work stoppage by refusing to perform contracted obligations as employees of the state of Ohio. There is no real difference between the piratical acts of Blackbeard or the MEA.
So why weren’t the Mason teachers arrested for their piratical acts instead of rewarded with more money? Because the pirates run the government in 2014 unlike in 1718. The only difference between the MEA and Blackbeard is that they are now the lawyers, legislators, and union leaders who have infiltrated the law to have easy access to the plunder of the tax payers. Pirates have changed their tactics over the years—instead of violence and blockades, they just gained a government backed service—like education—and threatened to take that service away unless they obtained their desires. The ideal of the blockade of education services through a labor strike and Blackbeard’s extraction of medical supplies from the Governor of Charleston are the same because tax payers have no other option. There are no other schools for their children to attend just as there was no other way out of the harbor of Charleston for the citizens to embark on any kind of trade by sea. So Blackbeard had the city by the throat and used it to his advantage just as the MEA had Mason by the throat regarding education. The intentions were extortion to fulfill the desires of piracy. The only difference is that these modern pirates in the MEA were backed by the law which is an evolution from the days of Blackbeard. But the intentions were the same—fear, power, and plunder at the expense of others.
So if anyone dared wish to see examples of modern piracy, don’t look to the South China Sea or the dangerous waters off of Somalia—just look in Mason, Ohio at the members of the Mason Teacher’s Association and you will see pirates just as vicious and greedy as Blackbeard.
I’m not a particularly huge Harry Potter fan. There are aspects to it that I enjoy—there is too much magic in it for me—too much mystic fantasy. There is a tendency to hope that the world is different from what it is—so fantastic creations bridge that gap intellectually. But there are some wonderful values explored in the Harry Potter books and movies that have provided many of the values today’s young people possess. But the new Diagon Alley exhibit is a living mythos—that is the point of the place—to put visitors into that world in a way that has never yet been possible anywhere on earth. But to what end—for simple entertainment? Human beings require myths to hold themselves together and put their values in line with priorities. Harry Potter was born out of this need, and it has been so successful that Universal Studios built a magnificent shrine to that mythos.
Mythos carries over into every aspect of human life. It goes to the voting booth, it becomes the focus of productive enterprise in business, it creates the values a family uses to bond themselves to one another—or to fly apart. It provides a mechanism for people to recognize evil, or good depending on the vantage point—a mythos can be either destructive or beneficial—but so long as human beings exist, there will be the creation of myths. Once those myths are created, a physical manifestation will be attempted, such as what Universal Studios has done with Diagon Alley. Visitors to those parks will attempt to bring the values of Harry Potter—for good or bad—into their daily life. So to me, watching the mythos of our world is the most important things a culture can do.
My excitement over this current mythos period is in the realization that only a few years ago none of this easy access to so much mythos was available. When I was a child, Disney World was brand new and nothing like it is now, Universal Studios was simply a dream, Dungeon and Dragons was very primitive and movies were limited in what they could create due to budget constraints and film executives functioning from the philosophies of Kant and Plato. Tolkien was the premier fantasy writer inspiring a new generation that would magnify his work hundreds of times over, the culmination being stories like Harry Potter. And video games were clunky. The opportunity to step into a mythos the way young people can now simply did not exist. But now things are changing rapidly—much more rapidly than any conniving bankers in Europe, or politicians in America can even fathom—any thoughts of potential tyranny are being crushed under the weight of a dynamically changing mythos.
That doesn’t mean all is well, there are major problems that will play out in the years to come—the bankruptcy of America, the continued attempts to spread collectivism to every corner of the earth at the expense of the individual—but those are the results of the previous mythos built by the pre and post Renaissance periods, religious ignorance, and minds so stifled with daily obligations that they did not have the liberty to think. My greatest joy of late has come from Fantasy Flight Games in that they create a product that generates not only a positive mythos—culturally, but a lot of thinking. When those types of entertainment options are coupled with the physical reality of something like Diagon Alley there are real opportunities for massive human enjoyment.
As I write this I know of several individuals planning their visit to Diagon Alley. They are reading the Harry Potter novels again at Steak and Shake at 3 AM in the morning and going to work when the sun comes up. They are playing Fantasy Flight’s Game of Thrones card game at Starbucks with their friends and are living in the mythos of those fantasy realms for a large portion of their life—and that is wonderful for the psychological well-being of their many otherwise treacherous disappointments in life. The joy of the mythos created artificially by the human minds behind Harry Potter and The Game of Thrones replaces the many areas where deficiency has otherwise occurred.
It is not good to substitute reality for fantasy—but it is not good to be crushed by too much reality—and often a positive mythos can alleviate the impact of such a disappointing force. With minds full of value, the diabolical schemes concocted by maniacal tyrants losses their ability because of the hope given by a mythos which feeds an individual mind as opposed to a soul looking to be filled by some come-lately leader drunk with power and filled with ill intent. But Universal Studios has performed a modern miracle, they have recreated Diagon Alley the way that only imaginations had previously contemplated, and made it real. The impact of this dramatic shift in mythos will resonate for quite some time in a positive way as the future unfolds itself out away from the small minds who previously wished to contain it. Diagon Alley is proof that such attempts have failed and that the human mind is now relishing in triumph over feats that are only now available for the first time on planet earth. When such things become real—they become a new reality in the realm of mythos.
Minds free to think, and contemplate new ideals create the mythos that will become the foundations of future values—but more importantly, such minds cannot be controlled. So long as a mind can contemplate mythos, a physical body will reject the chains placed upon it—literal or metaphorical. What I see in Diagon Alley is a culture in America who has professed that it values imagination and thinking to such an extent that it wanted to make it into a physical reality—which is a beacon to the world that imagination is alive and well and that tyrants have no place in Central Florida. You can feel it at the Orlando airport—as you travel down the people movers from the grand departure gate where hotel guest look down into the giant room of people traveling from everywhere in the world to see the theme parks of Florida first hand. Of those great theme parks, Universal Studios has recaptured the lead of the most spectacular attractions among them with Diagon Alley. There is nothing like it anywhere—except deep in the mind those who generate mythos upon a blank page to share with the world and incite in them the freedom of thought which is the greatest gift to civilization that there is.
If I could claim to have had a teacher which had a great influence on my life as many contemporaries feel is so pertinent, it would be Joseph Campbell—which I’ve talked about before. Campbell was in the time of his life at the center of many intersecting ideals and he acquired that center through a grand adventure that could only have been found pursuing an extremely individual course through his life. One of those adventures found him to be one of the characters in the John Steinbeck novel Cannery Row as the great American novelist chronicled those years in that literary work. Steinbeck and Campbell were friends until Campbell fell in love with Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife. The group lived a pre-hippie existence in California as communism was becoming all the rage in America and all these intense experiences became the subject matter of Steinbeck’s novels. In a speech given by Steinbeck over Radio Free Europe in 1954 to the repressed people of Eastern Europe Steinbeck revealed some of his more mature political ideals refined over the years through his art and experiences. It is an eloquent defense of free expression and the power of the individual that represented the culmination of Steinbeck’s life work which is very pertinent to this very day. Instead speaking to the censorship behind the Iron Curtin, as Steinbeck had in the following speech, in the present day, the same censorship is occurring behind the veil of intelligentsia. The goal is the same—just the method of execution has changed. So before elaborating on the life of Steinbeck, Campbell, and our modern times—read that pertinent speech.
“To my friends,
There was a time when I could visit you and you were free to visit me. My books were in your stores and you were free to write to me on any subject. Now your borders are closed with barbed wire and guarded by armed men and fierce dogs, not to keep me out but to keep you in. And now your minds are also imprisoned. You are told that I am a bad writer but you are not permitted to judge for yourselves. You are told we are bad people but you are forbidden to see and to compare. You are treated like untrustworthy animals, subjected to conditioning as cold and ruthless as though you were rats in a laboratory. You cannot travel, you cannot read freely and you cannot work at the profession of your choice. Your writers are the conditioned servants of a regime. All of this is designed to destroy your ability to think.
I beg you to keep alive the integrity of the individual in his ability to judge and compare and create. May your writers write secretly and hold their writing for the time when this grey anesthetic has passed as pass it must. The free world outside your prison still lives. You will join it again and it will welcome you. Everything around you is cynically designed to destroy you as individuals. You must remember and teach your children that they are precious, not as dull cogs in the wheel of party existence, but as units complete and shining in themselves.”
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception”.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went from there to study English Literature at Stanford University in Palo Alto, leaving, without a degree, in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to have his work published, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker[7] at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife.[3][7][8] The two were married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money manufacturing plaster mannequins.[7]
When their money ran out six months later, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey, California. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During this period of the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, as well as fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When that didn’t work, he was not above getting welfare, or rarely even stealing food from the local produce market.[7] Whatever food they had, they would share with their friends.[7] Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row.[7]
Many of Steinbeck’s works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English LiteratureGCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.[28]
At the same time, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: in August 1939, Kern CountyBoard of Supervisors banned the book from the county’s publicly funded schools and libraries.[14] It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions.[29][30] In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity.[31] According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.[32][33]
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss.”[1]
Campbell traveled to California for a year (1931–32), continuing his independent studies and becoming close friends with the budding writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol. On the Monterey Peninsula, Campbell, like Steinbeck, fell under the spell of marine biologistEd Ricketts (the model for “Doc” in Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row as well as central characters in several other novels).[8] Campbell lived for a while next door to Ricketts, participated in professional and social activities at his neighbor’s, and accompanied him, along with Xenia and Sasha Kashevaroff, on a 1932 journey to Juneau, Alaska on the Grampus.[9] Like Steinbeck, Campbell began writing a novel centered on Ricketts as hero, but, unlike Steinbeck, he did not complete his book.[10]
Bruce Robison writes that “Campbell would refer to those days as a time when everything in his life was taking shape…. Campbell, the great chronicler of the ‘hero’s journey’ in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts’s unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell.”[11]
To this day many of the people who infect the literary world are the same Marxists, socialist and political Democrats/communists who hung around circles like the one Campbell and Steinbeck had experimented with creating the same kind of stunted philosophic exploration witnessed in Eastern Europe during 1954. Nowhere else in the world were these concepts challenging convention than they were in places like the Monterey Peninsula during the time of Campbell and Steinbeck who would both move on to become some of the most prolific American writers of the 20th Century. Both men later in their life would be described as conservatives or libertarians depending on the source even though they were surrounded by the typical coastal communists so prevalent in artistic and scholastic circles. In the battlefield of ideals—both men would reject collectivism ultimately. Steinbeck’s thoughts on the matter were easy to see in his speech to Radio Free Europe. Campbell would ultimately develop the simple line, “Follow your bliss,” which is an extremely individual proclamation. Campbell would bounce back and forth for the rest of his life between the cause of that “bliss”–the origin of what makes a unique life part of some programmed destination—be it a god, or some unforeseen force—but his declaration was one that supported vehemently the value of an individual in pursuit of their own life.
I see the work of John Steinbeck as some of the pinnacle moments of observation and discovery ever recorded in human history–because of the impact they had on culture thereafter. His novel, and thus the performance by James Dean in the movie version of East of Eden are some of the most haunting and realistic portrayals of complex human problems ever seen in print. What is vastly important about all these literary works—those of Steinbeck and of Campbell was their sincere dedication to the lives of the individual as the rest of the creative world plunged down the drain of collectivist thought most adequately reflected in the communist push to take over the Democratic Party. Even though modern times has slid treacherously toward socialism—the kind of America that was a product of uniquely individual thinking can be found specifically in Steinbeck’s writing. Those who hated it—those college professors and critics who declared negativity toward Steinbeck were the same type of people spoken to in Eastern Europe—those who desire to destroy the individual in favor of collective salvation. These were aspects of John Steinbeck that were formed during that critical year of 1931 when he and Joseph Campbell were penniless and far from famous—where they worked out a complicated web of the human struggle between collectivism and individualism even when it threatened to destroy things they held precious—namely women. America’s literary future took a drastic turn for the good in these adventures between those two men which would be one of the few pillars left between the America we hope to preserve and the vile intentions of the European collectivists and their desire to spread the dark ignorance of philosophy that John Steinbeck tried to shine through across Eastern Europe in 1954.
This adventure was told in lurid detail in the great book, A Fire in the Mind. Click the link below to read it for yourself. I like the authors—even if they lean too far to the left for me. They are—following their bliss and captured in time the great work of these two men John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell in their struggle to behold the strength of the individual.
MYTHOLOGY / BIOGRAPHY
“A marvelous account of the life of a man who fell in love with stories and became our greatest teller of timeless myths. A feast for the mind, the imagination, and the heart.”
–Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly
“Joseph Campbell was an amazing, abundant, humane man. This book, by incorporating his journals, letters, and a massive offering of his intellectual sources, helps us understand how, in this half-dead world, such a character comes to be.”
–Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John: A Book About Men
“Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind ignites the soul of the reader with immortal longings. To read it is to swim in a river of old with Joseph Campbell, whose capacity for knowledge was as vast as his passion for living. [It is a] potent telling of the quest of one who brought life to myth and myth to life.”
–Jean Houston, author of The Search for the Beloved
Joseph Campbell forged an approach to the study of myth and legend that made ancient traditions and beliefs immediate, relevant, and universal. His teachings and literary works, including The Masks of God, have shown that beneath the apparent themes of world mythology lie patterns that reveal the ways in which we all may encounter the great mysteries of existence: birth, growth, soul development, and death. Biographers Stephen and Robin Larsen were students and friends of Campbell for more than twenty years. With exclusive access to his personal papers and journals, they weave a rich tapestry of stories and insights that catalogue both his personal and public triumphs.
The authors, STEPHEN LARSEN, Ph.D., is the author of The Shaman’s Doorway and The Mythic Imagination. He is a practicing psychotherapist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at SUNY (Ulster). Robin Larsen, Ph.D., is an exhibiting artist and art historian. She is editor-in-chief of the tricentennial biography and anthology Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision. The Larsens co-direct the Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz, New York.
Most people use religion as a bridge to step over bad behavior into what they think is everlasting life. It allows them to make mistakes in their daily living by attending a church on Sunday and being forgiven by some deity. I would encourage you dear reader that if you are too weak-minded to live your life well, to not drink too much, have sex with too many partners, molest the youth, or treat others poorly without the fear of God to keep you in check, than this article is not for you. Keep attending your religion—keep reading its text, and preparing for the life ever after. Because I would rather you waste your life with such a sacrifice if it keeps you from being just another tyrant over the lives of others. But for those with a little discipline and self driven curiosity it is time to scrap the old for the new in regards to religion and come up with some new mythologies which are more meaningful.
Even atheism has become a religion of sorts—its function is to declare that life is to be lived now and it has a kind of hedonism aspect to its followers which is not what I’m talking about. The trouble with the human being is the collective notion of sacrifice which needs to be eradicated without the value of religion being stripped away—the establishment of positive parameters to live life by. If that could be done, than religion would earn its worth, and lose the destructive nature indicative to its existence in whatever form it arrives—whether it is Islamic, Christian, Buddhist or Jewish—it is time to stop worshiping the life and times of old mythologies and folklore with a blind adherence to historical fact. Most of those stories from all the major religions were passed down second-handed from one group of power controllers to another and cannot be trusted. The contents of the writing have been fed to a collective public more to control behavior than to usher them off into the next life—and given what science is attempting to show the human race—they are no longer relevant.
All religions are based on faith, which forces a participant to accept things without evidence. Once the mind is opened to this folly it tends to do the same for virtually everything it encounters. As an example, the Saul Alinsky method which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama so effectively uses allows them to gain a kind of religious following by appealing to the part of a human brain which has been opened to accept religious mythology as fact. This allows them to stand in front of people like a high priest and utter complete lies without anybody questioning them—hiding their bad behavior in the light of day. It was Hillary Clinton who wrote a thesis on Alinsky while at Wellesley College for which she received an “A.” Saul Alinsky offered her a job for her two interviews which Hillary declined. Barack Obama is of the same mind as both Alinsky and Clinton and within the social circles of community organizers and attorneys, they learned how to use Alinsky methods to appeal to the religious nature of people and force them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. Hillary in her critique cited benefactors of Alinsky’s approach to Martin Luther King Jr. and Walt Whitman in the way that Mormons cite Joseph Smith, or Christians do Jesus Christ, or Islam reveres Muhammad. This places the characters of the narrative above reproach and prevents analysis of their actions. Once this is done further inquiry into their motives cease and faith takes over as the guiding light.
More is hidden from the human being under this process than anybody acknowledges and is the largest contributors to the spread of evil throughout the world. The religion itself might actually be beneficial on one level, but since the mind as been opened to accepting things on faith then a chain reaction of bad events often follows. Politicians aligning themselves with a religious order use this open door to get people to accept higher taxes, political corruption, and even the premise of war applying basically the same Saul Alinsky methods. The religious high priest does the same to manipulate the public into committing collective evil without consideration. Because the masses view their participation as a collective enterprise, they use faith to accept their role and cast off logic to the “hand of god.” In this way they do not take responsibility in life for their actions, but instead defer responsibility to a “higher order.”
Once a mind shuns responsibility for their thoughtless actions on their religion, they will do it for their career, their family, their daily commute and soon everything that happens to them is “meant to be,” as if some god were steering their life-like a car down a lost highway. This takes away the responsibility for living and allows people to believe that they are part of something bigger—which then sets the stage for political corruption when the same methods are applied to pass school levies, take away the Second Amendment, or pass Obamacare.
I have thoughts on what should replace the old religions—which are clearly ineffective in the modern world. The life and times of the characters in the Bible, or in the Quran are outdated and no longer relevant. If there is one trait that could be blamed on the Middle East not accepting capitalism and still looking like it did in the times of their religious leaders of thousands of years ago—it is that their religions hold back their social development.
In my family there is a joke about the archangel Gabriel where I say that he met Mary outside of their village and had an affair with her for which she became pregnant. Back then, a woman who became pregnant without having a husband was often killed, so Mary came up with the story of immaculate conception to explain how she came to be in that condition. The reason it’s a joke is because that same Gabriel came to Muhammad in a cave and recited the Quran which then became the sacred text of the fast growing religion in the world. Gabriel was a busy guy…………….he was a lot of places at the start of these two religions—where to this day are in constant conflict in Jerusalem and everywhere else they meet.
I have read the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine for over thirty years and watched carefully the events of study in the Middle East, particularly Israel, Jordon, Egypt and Iraq, and my conclusion was that Gabriel was either a Jim Jones, or Charlie Manson type—charismatic leaders who were deranged intellectually and ran around planting all kinds of seeds—having sex with women putting them in danger culturally and speaking nonsense to lonely hermits in a cave—and anybody else who would listen. Or that Gabriel was some kind of ultraterrestrial prankster designed to occupy the mind of man foolishly on low-level intellectual pursuits while they pulled the strings of society in the desired direction. But what Gabriel was not–was sacred.
I’ve had a few run-ins with these Gabriel types over the years and always send them packing. It helps to be intellectually fit so to see through their ruse—but for irresponsible people looking for a miracle at every turn of their lives living hapless existences like a pinball caught between the bumpers of life—Gabriel types find their minds ripe for plunder. And they become the next tyrants thinking they are bringing to the world a boon.
It is time to evolve and religion as we know it today is holding down the human race. It might hold some individuals together—giving them purpose and meaning. But ultimately that meaning is toward the ends of collectivism and works against individual responsibility. The number one reason that people are having a hard time with capitalism as an economic engine for their nations and instead gravitate toward socialism is because of their addiction to religion and hatred of self-responsible activity. Religion feeds this lack of self-initiative and instead provides a crutch into the next life—allowing this life to be lived poorly and recklessly. After all isn’t it the Christian premise to declare that “we are all sinners?” So what’s the point? Let’s just do what they tell us and hope we can live better in Heaven for eternity. In the meantime we do what our preachers tell us to do, and if our politicians say the same kind of things-we follow them as well. And vast amounts of evil spread across the world as a result—all in the name of some god at the center of religion inspired most of the time by the archangel Gabriel.
It would not surprise me to learn that while Gautama Buddha was sitting under the tree of enlightenment and was approached by the demon Mara where temptations were presented—that Mara’s real name was Gabriel and that he was a feisty traveler with malicious intentions similar to Saul Alisnsky—who was just a “community organizer” who carried on his tongue the end of civilization and single-minded purpose to have sex with lonely women and use religion to pull them into his tent. Thus began all of the world’s primary religions.
It’s time to rethink things—without such people a part of the process.
It took me a few days of extreme anger to calm down enough to even write about the congressional testimony given by IRS commissioner John Koskinen. As I watched the man speak to congress, I saw arrogance at its most audacious exhibition, and a disrespect that unionized government employees have toward their employers, the tax payers. I spend a lot of time talking about this issue and am quite certain about the validity of my arguments. Yet when you see such an obvious case of misconduct happening right in front of our faces—the IRS being caught red-handed with the metaphorical blood dripping from their fingers—and they still declare their innocence–it convinced me that no government employee under any unionized representation can be believed about anything under any circumstance—and that is quite a vote of no confidence. We see school teachers lie routinely about their poor conduct and often the sharpness of their rebuke is hidden behind the lives of children taking away the blunt edges of criticism. But in the case of the IRS—here is a long time government employee in John Koskinen who fully expects the world to believe that a hard drive crash destroyed all the evidence of their targeting conservative groups in an IRS scandal that is the biggest crime to come out of government since Watergate. And the John Koskinen found he could sit in front of the world and declare innocence when the evidence of malpractice is painted all over his organization. The only reasonable thing the guy could have done was admit to the mishaps, promise to make it better, and cooperate. Instead, he dug in deeper destroying evidence and smugly declaring the innocence of the IRS without even knowing what is possible in the world or data collection and the destruction of evidence.
As criminals, the IRS should know that the only way to really lose data on a hard drive is to burn the disk and destroy it completely. Data may not be totally recoverable, but partial information is quite possible even on a malfunctioning hard that has crashed. But even worse, the information was backed up elsewhere with a company called Sonasoft as reported by Breitbart.com and The Blaze over the weekend. That creates a very specific problem for the IRS. They are not in control of the backed up data:
As IRS commissioner John Koskinen sat on Capitol Hill belatedly informing a Congressional committee of the “disappearance” of years of email communications from a host of IRS employees under investigation–including Lois Lerner–it was discovered that the IRS had hired an email backup company to prevent just such a loss of data.
After the commissioner’s testimony, a Twitter user went hunting for info on the IRS and discovered that as far back as 2005 a company named Sonasoft had announced that it had been awarded a data backup contract from the IRS. Even as late as 2009, the company had tweeted about its association with the taxing agency.
So, how is it that commissioner Koskinen was so sure during his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee that all the emails of the very IRS operatives under investigation just happened to have disappeared forever?
The answer is as plain as a gold nugget on top of a pile of shit. It is unequivocally evident—the IRS has attempted to cover up their crime by destroying evidence with the arrogance of government employees who are obviously not very tech savvy. They are caught, busted, and guilty as hell and everyone knows it. As I watched the hearing during Paul Ryan’s portion, I nearly threw my television through the front window, across the yard and into the street. My anger was intense not just because the IRS has confirm everything that people like me have said about them and is turning out to be true—but because they actually are so rotten and corrupt that they are willing to dig in even further to deny, deny, and deny destroying as much evidence as possible to avoid a clear assessment of their crimes. As an organization obsessed with legal terminology they know that as long as there is never any direct evidence, that they cannot be prosecuted. People may not trust them—but at least they won’t be directly guilty. They know that the evidence they are trying to hide from the American people is so damning to them they will do anything to keep it out of everybody’s eyes, even if they must lie to continue the charade.
The so-called lost emails are certainly available for public consumption. No matter what sort of hard drive crash occurred on a localized server, the emails of Lois Lerner will be retrieved and read to the world and all these guilty parties will have much more serious problems to contend with. This is no longer even about politics—this is a crime—a gross abuse of power and it has major implications for the future of the IRS. Over time, it will all come out, and there will be a lot of broken pieces. The trust in that agency is gone forever. The real impact just hasn’t sunk in yet. But it will.
The IRS is an arrogant organization which needs to be dismantled. It was bad before this revelation, and now it doesn’t even have righteousness on its side any longer. John Koskinen should know that the NSA has a record of every email created at the IRS, and likely, so do other agencies. There is nothing private about email. It is like speaking in a shopping mall, or city street. It is a form of communication—but nothing that happens in email should be considered private. Yet these government employees are so arrogant that they actually think they can suppress evidence and went in front of congress and lied about their actions. That is absolutely amazing—astonishingly arrogant, and stupid. These are the people we pay so much! They aren’t even smart enough to understand when the eyes of the world are upon them—and a lot of very smart people analyzing their every word—that they can’t delete a bunch of emails hiding evidence and blame it on an IT failure. That just doesn’t cut it.
John Koskinen said, “I don’t think an apology is owed.” He doesn’t think that the errors of the IRS constitute accountability. Then a Democratic Congressman alluded that the whole scandal was a concocted conspiracy theory not concerned at all by the behavior of the IRS. What we are seeing is a major conspiracy that involves many people—and in this case half of the people on Capitol Hill appear to be guilty. They are using every trick in the book to throw all investigations off their trail, but to no avail. The emails are recovered and have been backed up. All it takes is guts to put them out to the public, who will likely be ready to lynch the IRS once the contents are discovered. When that happens, major heads will roll in Washington D.C. and that is what has everybody scared.
It is in that realization that I nearly destroyed my television and had to spend two full days calming down. I don’t like being lied to, and the IRS has lied to my face and expects me to just go away quietly. Worse yet, it wasn’t directed at me—but at all Americans, and for that—they deserve the wrath that is coming their way. If the Republicans screw this up, they have no hope. The Democrats have placed themselves on a tee and are daring the Republicans to hit them out of the park. If the Republicans really wanted to win in 2014 and 2016, they’d hit the IRS issue hard and without remorse. This is not a conspiracy equivalent to Area 51 and Bigfoot—this is evidence of such things that normally might be regulated to conspiracy theory. In this case, the IRS has done everything everyone who fears it has claimed and the proof is on those backed up emails at Sonasoft.
Let’s make something clear since Jay Carney brought it up on his last day as the White House spokesman—the Bush administration was not a good 8 years for America. And certainly, Obama has been bad for American just in even worse incompetence. There isn’t a competition between the Republican loser in office and the Democrat—they both were terrible. At the end of Obama’s second term, America will have seen 16 years of terrible presidents and America has suffered terribly for it. America will be well over $18 trillion dollars in debt and will have virtually everything that has been taken for granted–good jobs, a flourishing economy, food, power, and medical help in question as Obama leaves the White House. However, the folly doesn’t start there—Clinton was a terrible president, and Bush the senior wasn’t a cup of tea either. It is then no wonder that America is a shell of its former self as the political leadership has reflected a society on the decline. The people who have elected these losers are of less quality than previous generations and the result has been horrible leadership in the White House that has had a detrimental effect on America’s quality in every category.
Nobody will argue that Dick Cheney was far from the best vice president—just as Joe Biden appears to be a complete buffoon in the same position. Jay Carney’s reference to the poor Bush presidency as a defense of the Obama presidency is like saying that thunder is better than lightning in a rain storm—as they accompany each other in the grand scheme of things. It is best to not have a storm at all if no damage is desired—and in politics, it is best to avoid terrible presidents—so to avoid damage once they leave.
Yet is it clear now why America went to war in Iraq? It was to prevent the spread of terrorism, not because of “oil.” It was to keep wealth and resources out of the hands of diabolical terrorists. Does everybody now understand why there must be a border between Mexico and The United States that is secure—because all the impoverished countries from the south in Central America are flocking to the border hoping for relief from their circumstances? The cause of those circumstances is the socialist and tyrannical policies of their corrupt governments giving America the obligation to protect itself by imposing freedom on those places. When such strength is not present—there is no reason for tyrants to oppress their people with no option but to flee those lands of terror in pursuit of opportunities for freedom.
America never should have to concern itself with the affairs of other countries, but when it is the only good place in the world beholding freedom—and immigrants flood our boarders looking for freedom from oppression, America has a right to defend itself by helping those countries have freedom on their own. But if those countries do not have a philosophy that allows for freedom, then it won’t last, like what has happened in Iraq. It is not enough to give a country a set of laws and turn them loose in pursuit of democracy. If most people in the country are corrupt by bad, collectivist thinking, they will not be able to maintain freedom under any circumstances.
For over twenty years now bad presidents have led America on a chase mimicking these bad global governments instead of standing for what was right in defense of freedom. At least Ronald Reagan as an actor/president understood that America had an obligation to help oppressed people so that freedom would spread around the world instead of tyranny—his presidency was a strong one that left the entire world a better place. There were presidents before Reagan who were also pretty good at defending that basic premise from both political parties—but as for the last twenty years, representation for freedom from the White House to the world has been terrible.
Many of the problems experienced presently in the American nation are due to weak leadership and foreign policy vision. Bush and Obama have very little understanding of economics and abandoned capitalism under their terms. Clinton was simply a socialist who defended his corruption with his legal skills as a diabolical lawyer. Without question, he is likely enjoying these current problems as they fit his open border philosophy where the value of America is diminished in favor of a new global government.
The premise that every time Obama is criticized for being a complete idiot, which he is, a defense for his stupidity is not to point at George W. Bush and say “he did it too.” They were both idiots, and they have both left America worse as a nation than it was when they took over as president. But for context, the Pentagon moved the Aircraft carrier George W. Bush off the coast of Iraq to show the terrorist insurgents that America is nearby. That brought forth the thought that it is now unimaginable that a future aircraft carrier would be named, the “Barack Obama.” Such a carrier would be a laughing-stock, and certainly would not incite fear into the opposition. It is in that reality that the quality of the presidents can best be determined. For as bad as Bush was for the free market, he at least understood how to project strength in the military—even if it was at times overreaching. It is better to reach too far in foreign policy than to not reach at all—like Obama has. Lack of American projection of strength to the world leads every cockroach to come forth as a potential tyrant and ruthless dictator—which is what is happening from Russia to the Middle East. And in the end, that is why Barack Obama will forever be known as the worst president in the history of America, and make the top ten list of worst leaders of all time the world over. Obama will own that designation on his own and no deflection to George W. Bush will cover his ignorance from the responsibility of that title.
It is not enough to simply defeat a dictator or to send military support—or to throw money at countries who are functioning from poor philosophic beliefs and collectively based cultures. When that sense of collectivism carries over into religion these countries become even more dangerous to themselves and others. What all poor countries have in common is collective based economies based on Karl Marx and Keynesian thought, and religions based on sacrifice and worship through collective yielding to higher powers. Those failures of thought are what cause hopeful immigrants to pour into the U.S. border and terrorists to believe they have a right to impose religious law against non-believers through force and terror. The failure of the American presidents of the last 20 years is that they failed to identify this root cause—and have instead let them fester unchecked until presently the world is in disarray. Money cannot be thrown at the problem of poor philosophy, and neither can lip service. People have to think differently. They have to “think” like Americans instead of just running to America hoping to be put on welfare and cared for by the tax payer in The United States for the rest of their lives. They have to adopt new philosophies that allow them to have flourishing economies and religions that don’t require the eradication of those who don’t believe the same things under the premise of social collectivism. If traceability between these two differences in thought could be made it is the difference between Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith—or the difference between Aristotle and Plato. The root cause of evil is in philosophy, and it is the philosophy of poor nations which leave people looking to escape into The United States, or to flee tyrants on their way into Bagdad that causes the trouble. The only way to really help the people of the world is to change the way those people think—and Obama, Bush, Clinton as well as many other presidents have put American value into reactive defense instead of assertive projection of philosophies born on American soil—which would do far more good than all the tanks, planes and missiles in world history of stopping tyrants in their tracks. Recent American presidents have failed to show pride in that American philosophy born of Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and Ayn Rand—and that is why they are embarrassments in the context of history—all of them.
For those who thought I was unfair toward President Obama when his campaign opened an office in Mason, Ohio—history has proven me right once again. As usual, those types of people who lean in that particular political direction as Obama supporters have shown why they are so incompetent and living evidence as to why democracies will always fail. The mob cannot rule—because collectively they are too stupid to. I said so much about the Obama supporters who showed up to open the Mason office and many thought I was too harsh. Well, what does anybody think now?
Obama is the worst president in American history and may go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the world, which is saying a lot considering Europe had some terrible kings, and the Roman Empire had a large percentage of fools serving as Emperor. Obama has proven as President of the United States that he is either a diabolical terrorist sent to undermine America as a world power, or he is a complete idiot incompetent to manage anything or anyone. I have often said that Obama was not qualified to manage even a McDonald’s restaurant—and this statement has more than proven to be true. Granted, managing a McDonald’s is not an easy task on a good day, but one would think that it should be within the management capacity of the world’s most powerful so-called leader. Obama could not even do such a thing—he is completely and utterly incompetent.
The list of scandals is growing under Obama’s care, and if there were a defining moment when Obama lost control of his foreign policy, it was Syria when he did not make good on his promise to defend a metaphorical line in the sand. This opened up the opportunity for Russia to push the U.S. in Ukraine, this antagonized aggression in Iran, Iraq and embolden terrorists in Afghanistan—as well as throughout the Middle-East. The wheels are now completely off, and are rapidly deteriorating. The world knows Obama is a fool, and they no longer respect American involvement in anything—which is the fault of the President and his administration.
Obama has in his Justice Department a common thug in Eric Holder involved in scandal after scandal from the IRS, gun dealing, open border debacles, and NSA surveillance. Obama has screwed up virtually everything he has touched in every category that he has touched it. If he has done anything right, it is in his con artist presentation—his ability to get elected and make promises—but he has not been able to make good on anything. I have often referred to him as a used car salesman—who will do and say anything to sell a car—but once you get the car—you realize it’s a lemon. What Obama gives isn’t even a lemon—it’s rather a picture of a lemon printed on garbage.
Obama’s ultimate failure is his socialism that he brought to the American economy. If Bush ran America into debt fighting terrorism, and attacking the free market with micromanagement—Obama put a dagger square in the back of capitalism placing the American economy into the hands of complete idiots—much like himself. Whether it is the Veterans Affairs scandals of mismanagement which actually killed innocent people—it is Obamacare which is destroying the greatest healthcare system in the world. Obama has propped up unionized businesses foolishly and squandered away billions of dollars on green energy hippie concerns. He has further strangled the U.S. economy by going to war with coal, and using the EPA to halt virtually every business development in the nation with over-regulation and government enforced corruption. Before Obama it was difficult to do business with the federal government—now it is nearly impossible. Mindless bureaucrats are in charge of creativity and productive enterprise—which has nearly stopped manufacturing and new job growth. All Obama can do to solve the problem is mindlessly create more government jobs like firefighters, cops, and teachers—or even worse, IRS agents, healthcare workers, or EPA staff which are simply flow over members of the Sierra Club and PETA. He has given activists power over the productive and the productive have simply thrown up their hands and said to hell with it. It’s not worth the headache, the law suits and the pain in the ass to start a new business. Even if a company could launch a new product, their profits are confiscated by the federal government and distributed to the poor, the lazy, and the idiot—the typical Obama supporter. Productivity under Obama has stopped. Existing companies have held their own, but new growth has been embarrassingly stagnating in future development and implementation through capital assets. That is the fault of Obama and his policies of federal terrorism of capitalism.
Obama spent the first four years blaming the previous administration on the state of the world. Now, six years into his presidency, he owns the parade of follies shown daily on the nightly news. All his bad management has caught up to him and he can no longer escape it. What will turn out to be his greatest failure will be that he did win a second term—because history will remember his faults instead of giving him the benefit of doubt of the four years he would have been in office left unproven. Now, he is proven. He’s a proven fool and is simply embarrassing as a human being—let alone a manager of anything.
Obama is way over his head and is proof of what happens when you put a radical community organizer into a responsible position. America and all the trouble currently plaguing the freest country on earth is the result of putting an idiot—and domestic terrorist like Obama into a governing position. Whether Obama is a terrorist by deliberate deceit or under just being a fool is the only question left to answer. Obama will always be known as the worst president in American history and a major step backward in human development. The results of his life and times as an American politician are now beyond refute and are solely in his possession. America would have done much better if it had simply plucked a stressed out fast food manager out of a nearby restaurant and put them in The White House. The results would have been much more productive.
The other intent of this blog, which again was addressed from the very beginning, was that it promised to take readers down the “rabbit hole” of knowledge so to unlock the reasons for many of the events occurring in the world. Of course the reference is to the novel Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll brought to immortal life by the Walt Disney film of the same name. I knew that those reading here would find themselves at some point in a world they never knew existed, but perilously aware that the mechanisms emitting from deep down the Rabbit Hole would explain the type of insanity seen in the nightly news. Such a tragedy is similar to a child watching a puppet show and believing that what they see on stage is real, only to discover as their eyes become more sophisticated that there are strings on the marionettes which extend off stage somewhere. So the inquiring mind gets out of their seat and climbs onto the stage to follow the strings up above the stage where it is discovered that the real manipulators of movement reside. In this way, the “rabbit hole” is anything and everything which helps support the puppet show away from the stage. The stage where the puppets act is the reality witnessed, but anything away from the stage would be considered Rabbit Hole material.
But the rabbit hole of our real life can be much more tragic than a child realizing that the puppets in a show are not real, and are manipulated by talented actors off stage. The realization that from deep down the Rabbit Hole of existence are the mechanisms which affect our daily life from news stories like the ISIS invading Iraq to the countless scandals involving President Obama, the IRS claiming to have lost two years of emails, or the real intentions of the legalization of drugs in America. On this site I also deal with the origin of the human race pointing to religion often as simply a puppet show to mask that true reality—but there is danger in going down such Rabbit Holes. I often give hints to games I endorse, or literary achievements which can help preserve the mind not from the fantasy of escapism, but the linking of a mind back to the accepted reality of the true dream world. Sports are a good mutual bonding agent between life in the Rabbit Hole and the world the rest of the society lives in. I often reference these types of things to keep sanity a close ally when the images of the Rabbit Hole threaten to shatter consciousness. For some people, it is too much to know what is really happening off the stages of life and they do fall into insanity. My goal with this blog is to show people what happens in the Rabbit Hole without destroying the minds of the inquiring minds who want to know more. So not only do I help lead people down the Rabbit Hole, I also provide mechanisms for dealing with the crisis of learning the truth once there.
To me the Rabbit Hole is a way of understanding the world of quantum mechanics and the world of macro and nano technology which is evolving at a rapid rate. From this realm it might be denoted that a ultraterrestrial species lives in conjunction with the human race and injects its influence upon us—and certainly stirs the pot so to speak. So dealing with this species is a conflict which goes well beyond the world of commerce, politics, or acknowledged philosophy—and can really only be discovered through advanced mathematics. Ironically, the author of Alice in Wonderland was a mathematician, and seemed over a century ago—well before anyone at the time had an inclination—whether through tragedy, sexual crises, or just a mind folding over on itself with the realization that all was not what it seemed and lacking a philosophy to deal with it—Lewis Carroll wrote a novel from inside the Rabbit Hole. So for those who thought they understood Alice in Wonderland as a beloved children’s story and classic Disney animated cartoon with images inescapable at Disney World, it is time to reveal what many of the metaphors mean. To make that the easiest transition as possible, I have shown the Cliff Notes below, along with video explaining the meanings of the classic novel. A link to the Cliff Notes origin article is provided below after a rather robust gathering of explanations on Alice in Wonderland and the life of Lewis Carroll are provided.
The novel is composed of twelve brief chapters; it can be read in an afternoon. Each of the brief chapters, furthermore, is divided into small, individual, almost isolated episodes. And the story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river reading a book which has no pictures or dialogue in it. ” . . . and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” Thus, we find many pictures and read much dialogue (although very little of it makes sense) in this novel.
After introducing us to one of the creatures in Wonderland, the Gryphon, for instance, the narrator tells us, “If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.” As noted earlier, Wonderland is filled with strange animals, and Alice’s encounters with these creatures, all of whom engage her in conversations, confuse her even more whenever she meets yet another inhabitant of this strange country.
Slowly losing interest in her sister’s book, Alice catches sight of a white rabbit. However, he is not merely a rabbit; he will be the “White Rabbit,” a major character in the novel. In this first paragraph, then, we learn about the protagonist, Alice, her age, her temperament, and the setting and the mood of the story. In a dream, Alice has escaped from the dull and boring and prosaic world of adulthood — a world of dull prose and pictureless experiences; she has entered what seems to be a confusing, but perpetual springtime of physical, if often terrifying, immediacy.
The White Rabbit wears a waistcoat, walks upright, speaks English, and is worrying over the time on his pocket watch. Alice follows him simply because she is very curious about him. And very soon she finds herself falling down a deep tunnel. For a few minutes, she is frightened; the experience of falling disorients her. Soon, however, she realizes that she is not falling fast; instead, she is falling in a slow, almost floating descent. As she falls, she notices that the tunnel walls are lined with cupboards, bookshelves, maps, and paintings. She takes a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf. But finding the jar empty, she replaces it on a lower shelf, as though she were trying to maintain a sense of some propriety — especially in this situation of absolute uncertainty. As she reflects on the marmalade jar, she says that had she dropped the jar, she might have killed someone below. Alice is clearly a self-reflective young girl — and she’s also relatively calm; her thinking reveals a curiously mature mind at times. But like an ordinary little girl, she feels homesick for her cat, Dinah. In that respect, she is in sharp contrast with conventional child heroines of the time. Although Alice may be curious and sometimes bewildered, she is never too nice or too naughty. But she is always aware of her class-status as a “lady.” At one point, she even fears that some of Wonderland’s creatures have confused her for a servant, as when the White Rabbit thinks that she is his housekeeper, Mary Ann, and orders Alice to fetch his gloves and fan.
Thus, in Chapter I, Carroll prepares us for Alice’s first major confrontation with absolute chaos. And note that Alice’s literal-minded reaction to the impossible is always considered absurd here in Wonderland; it is laughable, yet it is her only way of coping. As she falls through the rabbit-hole, for instance, she wonders what latitude or longitude she has arrived at. This is humorous and ridiculous because such measurements — if one stops to think about it — are meaningless words to a seven-year-old girl, and they are certainly meaningless measurements of anything underground.
In Chapter II, Alice finds herself still in the long passageway, and the White Rabbit appears and goes off into a long, low hall full of locked doors. Behind one very small door, Alice remembers that there is “the loveliest garden you ever saw” (remember, she saw this in Chapter I), but now she has drunk a liquid that has made her too large to squeeze even her head through the doorway of the garden. She wishes that she could fold herself up like a telescope and enter. This wish becomes possible when she finds a shrinking potion and a key to the door. The potion reduces her to ten inches high, but she forgets to take the key with her (!) before shrinking, and now the table is too high for her to reach the key. To any young child, this is silly and something to be laughed at, but on another level, there’s an element of fear; for children, the predictable proportions of things are important matters of survival. Yet here in Wonderland, things change — for no known reason — thus, logic has lost all its validity.
Then Alice eats a cake that she finds, and her neck shoots up until it resembles a giraffe’s. Suddenly, she is a distorted nine feet tall! Clearly, her ability to change size has been a mixed blessing. In despair, she asks, “Who in the world am I?” This is a key question.
Meanwhile, the rapid, haphazard nature of Alice’s physical and emotional changes has created a dangerous pool of tears that almost causes her to drown when she shrinks again. Why has she shrunk? She realizes that she has been holding the White Rabbit’s lost white gloves and fan — therefore, it must be the magic of the fan that is causing her to shrink to almost nothingness. She saves herself by instantly dropping the fan. But now she is desperate; in vain, she searches her mind for something to make sense out of all this illogical chaos, something like arithmetic and geography, subjects that are solid, lasting, and rational. But even they seem to be confused because no matter how much she recites their rules, nothing helps. At the close of this chapter, she is swimming desperately in a pool of her own tears, alongside a mouse and other chattering creatures that have suddenly, somehow, appeared.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is full of parody and satire. And in Chapter III, Victorian history is Carroll’s target. The mouse offers to dry the other creatures and Alice by telling them a very dry history of England. Then, Carroll attacks politics: the Dodo organizes a Caucus-race, a special race in which every participant wins a prize. Alice then learns the mouse’s sad tale as Carroll’s editor narrates it on the page in the shape of a mouse’s very narrow, S-shaped tail. The assembled, unearthly creatures cannot accept ordinary language, and so Alice experiences, again, absolute bafflement; this is linguistic and semantic disaster. Indeed, much of the humor of this chapter is based on Alice’s reactions to the collapse of three above-ground assumptions: predictable growth, an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and an identity that remains constant. We might also add to the concept of a constancy of identity a conformity of word usage. But in Wonderland, Alice’s previous identity and the very concept of a permanent identity has repeatedly been destroyed, just as the principles of above-ground are contradicted everywhere; here in Wonderland, such things as space, size, and even arithmetic are shown to have no consistent laws.
In Chapter IV, the confusion of identity continues. The White Rabbit insists that Alice fetch him his gloves and his fan. Somehow, he thinks that Alice is his servant, and Alice, instead of objecting to his confusion, passively accepts her new role, just as she would obey an adult ordering her about above-ground. On this day when everything has gone wrong, she feels absolutely defeated.
In the rabbit’s house, Alice finds and drinks another growth potion. This time, however, she becomes so enormous that she fills up the room so entirely that she can’t get out. These continuing changes in size illustrate her confused, rapid identity crisis and her continuous perplexity. After repulsing the rabbit’s manservant, young Bill, a Lizard (who is trying to evict her), Alice notices that pebbles that are being thrown at her through a window are turning into cakes. Upon eating one of them, she shrinks until she is small enough to escape the rabbit’s house and hide in a thick wood.
In Chapter V, “Advice From a Caterpillar,” Alice meets a rude Caterpillar; pompously and dogmatically, he states that she must keep her temper — which is even more confusing to her for she is a little irritable because she simply cannot make any sense in this world of Wonderland. Alice then becomes more polite, but the Caterpillar only sharpens his already very short, brusque replies. In Wonderland, there are obviously no conventional rules of etiquette. Thus, Alice’s attempt at politeness and the observance of social niceties are still frustrated attempts of hers to react as well as she can to very unconventional behavior—at least, it’s certainly unconventional according to the rules that she learned above-ground.
Later, Alice suffers another bout of “giraffe’s neck” from nibbling one side of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. The effect of this spurt upward causes her to be mistaken for an egg-eating serpent by an angry, vicious pigeon.
In Chapters VI and VII, Alice meets the foul-tempered Duchess, a baby that slowly changes into a pig, the famous, grinning Cheshire-Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the very, very sleepy Dormouse. The latter three are literally trapped (although they don’t know it) in a time-warp — trapped in a perpetualtime when tea is being forever served. Life is one long tea-party, and this episode is Carroll’s assault on the notion of time. At the tea-party, it is always teatime; the Mad Hatter’s watch tells the day of the year, but not the time since it is always six o’clock. At this point, it is important that you notice a key aspect of Wonderland; here, all these creatures treat Alice (and her reactions) as though she is insane — and as though they are sane! In addition, when they are not condescending to her or severely criticizing her, the creatures continually contradict her. And Alice passively presumes the fault to be hers — in almost every case — because all of the creatures act as though their madness is normal and not at all unusual. It is the logical Alice who is the queer one. The chapter ends with Alice at last entering the garden by eating more of the mushroom that the Caterpillar was sitting on. Alice is now about a foot tall.
Chapters VIII to X introduce Alice to the most grimly evil and most irrational people (and actions) in the novel. Alice meets the sovereigns of Wonderland, who display a perversely hilarious rudeness not matched by anyone except possibly by the old screaming Duchess. The garden is inhabited by playing cards (with arms and legs and heads),who are ruled over by the barbarous Queen of Hearts. The Queen’s constant refrain and response to seemingly all situations is: “Off with their heads!” This beautiful garden, Alice discovers, is the Queen’s private croquet ground, and the Queen matter-of-factly orders Alice to play croquet. Alice’s confusion now turns to fear. Then she meets the ugly Duchess again, as well as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, and a Gryphon introduces her to a Mock Turtle, who sings her a sad tale of his mock (empty) education; then the Mock Turtle teaches her and the Gryphon a dance called the ‘Lobster-Quadrille.” Chapters XI and XII concern the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Here, Alice plays a heroic role at the trial, and she emerges from Wonderland and awakens to reality. The last two chapters represent the overthrow of Wonderland and Alice’s triumphant rebellion against the mayhem and madness that she experienced while she was lost, for a while, in the strange world of Wonderland.
This story is characterized, first of all, by Alice’s unthinking, irrational, and heedless jumping down the rabbit-hole, an act which is at once superhuman and beyond human experience — but Alice does it. And once we accept this premise, we are ready for the rest of the absurdities of Wonderland and Alice’s attempts to understand it and, finally, to escape from it. Confusion begins almost immediately because Alice tries to use her world of knowledge from the adult world above-ground in order to understand this new world. Wonderland, however, is a lawless world of deepest, bizarre dream unconsciousness, and Alice’s journey through it is a metaphorical search for experience. What she discovers in her dream, though, is a more meaningful and terrifying world than most conscious acts of intelligence would ever lead her to. Hence, “Who in the world am I?” is Alice’s constant, confused refrain, one which people “above-ground” ask themselves many, many times throughout their lifetimes.
Throughout the story, Alice is confronted with the problem of shifting identity, as well as being confronted with the anarchy and by the cruelty of Wonderland. When Alice physically shrinks in size, she is never really small enough to hide from the disagreeable creatures that she meets; yet when she grows to adult or to even larger size, she is still not large enough to command authority. “There are things in Alice,” writes critic William Empson, “that would give Freud the creeps.” Often we find poor Alice (and she is often described as being either “poor” or “curious”) in tears over something that the adult reader finds comic. And “poor Alice” is on the verge of tears most of the time. When she rarely prepares to laugh, she is usually checked by the morbid, humorless types of creatures whom she encounters in Wonderland. Not even the smiling Cheshire-Cat is kind to her. Such a hostile breakdown of the ordinary world is never funny to the child, however comic it might appear to adults. But then Wonderland would not be so amusing to us except in terms of its sheer, unabated madness.
One of the central concerns of Alice is the subject of growing up — the anxieties and the mysteries of personal identity as one matures. When Alice finds her neck elongated, everything, in her words, becomes “queer”; again, she is uncertain who she is. As is the case with most children, Alice’s identity depends upon her control of her body. Until now, Alice’s life has been very structured; now her life shifts; it becomes fragmented until it ends with a nightmarish awakening. Throughout the novel, Alice is filled with unconscious feelings of morbidity, physical disgrace, unfairness, and bizarre feelings about bodily functions. Everywhere there is the absurd, unexplainable notion of death and the absolute meaninglessness of death and life.
Alice’s final triumph occurs when she outgrows nonsense. In response to the Queen’s cry at the Knave’s trial: “sentence first — verdict afterward,” Alice responds: “Stuff and nonsense! Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” At last, Alice takes control of her life and her growth toward maturity by shattering and scattering the absurdity of the playing cards and the silly little creatures who are less rational than she is. In waking from her nightmare, she realizes that reason can oppose nonsense, and that it can — and did — win. And now that the dream of chaos is over, she can say, from her distance above-ground, “It was a curious dream,” but then she skips off thinking that — for a strange moment — what a wonderful dream it was.
Of all Lewis Carroll’s major works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has a unique standing in the category of whimsical, nonsense literature. Much has been written about how this novel contrasts with the vast amount of strict, extremely moralistic children’s literature. This is true; Alice is quite different from all other Victorian children’s literature. Yet, as odd as this story appears in relation to the other Victorian children’s stories, this short novel is odder still because it was written by an extremely upright, ultra-conservative man — in short, a quintessential Victorian gentleman.
Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, in the parsonage of Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the third child and eldest son of eleven children of Reverend Charles Dodgson and his wife, Francis Jane Lutwidge. The parents were descended from two ancient and distinguished North Country families. From the Dodgsons, the son inherited a very old tradition of service to the Church and a tradition that he belonged to one of the most respected lineages in England — for example, family legend has it that King James I actually “knighted” either a loin of beef or mutton at the table of Sir Richard Houghton, one of Carroll’s ancestors. This incident has been thought by some critics to have inspired the introductory lines in Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the Red Queen introduces the leg of mutton to Alice: “Alice — Mutton: Mutton — Alice.”
For the sake of those who are curious about pen names and how authors choose one over another, “Lewis Carroll” is an interesting example. While teaching at Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson (Carroll) wrote comic literature and parodies for a humorous paper, The Train. The first of the several pieces submitted to The Train was signed “B. B.” It was so popular that the editor asked Dodgson to use a proper nom de plume; at first, Dodgson proposed “Dares,” after his birthplace, Daresbury. The editor thought that the name was too journalistic, so after struggling over a number of choices, Dodgson wrote to his editor and suggested a number of variations and anagrams, based on the letters of his actual name. “Lewis Carroll” was finally decided on, derived from a rearrangement of most of the letters in the name “Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.” Clearly, Carroll was fascinated with anagrams, and he will use them throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; his interest in anagrams also explains much about the writings in his later life, and his mathematical works. Concerning Carroll, one cannot safely exclude any influence, least of all hereditary ones, but a good case can be made for the formative effect of Carroll’s father on him. Those who knew Reverend Dodgson said that he was a pious and gloomy man, almost devoid of any sense of humor. Yet from his letters to his son, there is recorded evidence of a remarkablesense of fun. For example, in one letter to his son, he speaks of screaming in the middle of a street:
Iron-mongers-Iron-mongers — Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment — fly, fly, in all screwdriver, & a ring, & if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole town of Leeds, & I shall only leave that because I shall not have time to kill it.
To a boy of eight, such correspondence from his father must have greatly heightened his later love for literary exaggeration; indeed, such fanciful letters may have been the genesis for Carroll’s so-called nonsense books.
As we noted, Reverend Dodgson was said to be an austere, puritanical, and authoritarian Victorian man; Lewis Carroll’s mother, however, was the essence of the Victorian “gentlewoman.” As described by her son, she was “one of the sweetest and gentlest women that had ever lived, whom to know was to love.” The childhood of Lewis Carroll was relatively pleasant, full of ideas and hobbies that contributed to his future creative works. His life at Daresbury was secluded, though, and his playmates were mostly his brothers and sisters. Class distinctions did not permit much socializing between children of the parsonage and the “lesser” parish children. Curiously, a number of the Dodgson children, including Carroll, stammered severely. More than one author has suggested that, at least in Carroll’s case, his stammer may have arisen from his parents’ attempts to correct his left-handedness. Isa Bowman, a childhood friend of Carroll’s, has said that whenever adults approached them on their walks, Carroll’s speech became extremely difficult to understand. Apparently, he panicked; his shyness and stammering always seemed worse when he was in the world of adults. This stammering made him into a bit of a “loner” and explains, somewhat, Carroll’s longtime fascination with puzzles and anagrams, solitary games to amuse himself. It was as though the long suppressed, left-handed self endured in the fanciful, literary adult Carroll — in contrast to the very stern adult librarian, mathematics lecturer, deacon, dormitory master, and curator of the dining hall. Carroll was, seemingly, the archetype of the left-handed man in a right-handed world, like his own White Knight in Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).
And now if ever by chance I put My fingers into glue Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe . . .
Carroll’s fondness for games, language puzzles, and the world of the bizarre is further demonstrated in his flair for amusing his brothers and sisters — especially his sisters, which explains, perhaps, his lifelong attraction for little girls. In fact, a great deal of Carroll’s childhood was spent taking care of his little sisters. At home, it was he who was in charge of these seven sisters, and his imagination was constantly being exercised in order to entertain them. In one of his fanciful story games that he invented, he imagined a sort of “railway game,” and as one of the rules of the game, at least three trains had to run over the passengers in order for the passengers to be attended to by physicians. Fortunately, though, rarely were Carroll’s amusements cruel, and when the family moved to the Croft Rectory, Yorkshire, where Carroll’s father assumed the Archdeaconry, Carroll wrote, directed, and performed light, gay plays, and he also manipulated puppets and marionettes for his family and friends.
In addition to the plays that Carroll wrote and the scripts that he composed for his puppet theater, he also wrote poems, stories, and humorous sketches for his own “magazines.” In his “Useful and Instructive Poetry” magazine, for example, a volume that was composed for a younger brother and a sister, he satirized a copybook of stern, dogmatic maxims (a typical Victorian children’s book), and in this poem, he alluded to his own handicap:
Learn well your grammar And never stammer.
Eat bread with butter; Once more, don’t stutter.
Other poems in the volume focus on the theme of fairy tales, an interest which played a large part in the creation of Alice. An early poem of Carroll’s, for instance, “My Fairy,” suggests the contrariness of the creatures that Alice will meet in Wonderland:
I have a fairy by my side Which cried; it said, “You must not weep. “If, full of mirth, I smile and grin, It says, “You must not laugh.” When once I wished to drink some gin, It said, “You must not quaff.”
Similarly, in another early poem, “A Tale of a Tail,” there is a drawing of a dog’s very long tail, suggestive of the very slender, increasingly smaller mouse’s tail in Alice, which coils across a single page in a sort of S-shape. Also, an early poem about someone falling off a wall anticipates Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, and a “Morals” essay reminds one of the ridiculous conversations between the ugly Duchess and the evil Queen in Alice. It is difficult to ignore the writings of Carroll as a child in any analysis of his works, for in his childhood productions, we find conclusive evidence of early imitations, hints, allusions, suggestions, and actual elements of imaginary creatures, dreams, and visions that will appear in his later works.
Education
All his life, Carroll was a scholar; when he was not a student, he was a teacher, and until two years before his death, he was firmly imbedded in the life of Oxford University. Quite honestly, though, nothing very exciting ever happened in Carroll’s life, apart from a trip to the Continent, including Russia. His vacations were all local ones, to his sister’s home in Guildford, his aunt’s home in Hastings, and to Eastbourne, the Lake Country, and Wales. He did not begin his formal schooling until the age of twelve, when he enrolled in Richmond Grammar School, ten miles from the Croft Rectory, but he had already received a thorough background in literature from the family library. Yet it was mathematics — and not English literature — that interested Carroll most. When he was very young, for example, Carroll implored his father to explain logarithms to him, presumably because he had already mastered arithmetic, algebra, and even most of Euclidian geometry.
Carroll entered Rugby in 1846, but the sensitive young child found the all-boys environment highly unpleasant; the bullying abuse, the flogging, and the caning was a daily part of school life. Nonetheless, Carroll was, despite his three years of unhappiness there, an exceedingly studious boy, and he won many prizes for academic excellence.
Carroll matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, and remained there for forty-seven years. But, two days after entering Oxford, he received word of his mother’s death, something which deeply distressed him and seemed to have worsened his stammering. By all accounts, Carroll was not an outgoing student; with little money, and because of his stammer, his circle of friends always remained small. Yet in his academic work, he applied himself with the same energy and devotion that characterized his career at Rugby. He won scholarship prizes, honors in Classical exams, and also won a First Prize in Mathematics. His scholastic efforts were rewarded by a lifetime fellowship and a residency at Christ Church, so long as he remained unmarried and proceeded to take Holy Orders.
In 1854, the year Carroll took his B.A. degree, he began publishing poetry in the student magazines and in The Whitby Gazette. Carroll’s writings had already established him as both a superb raconteur and humorist at Oxford, and in 1854, he began to seriously teach himself how to express his thoughts in proper literary form; it was at that time that his writings began to show some of the whimsy and fantasy that are contained in the Alice books.
In 1857, Carroll took his M.A. degree and was made “Master of the House.” During those years, he immersed himself in literature, mathematics, and also in the London theater. He produced freelance humorous prose pieces and verses for various periodicals, explored theories of dual identities, wrote satires, published mathematical and symbolic logic texts, invented word games and puzzles, and took up photography, a hobby that would make him famous as one of the best Victorian photographers. In short, Carroll became a sort of lesser English equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci. He invented the Nyctograph, a device for writing in the dark, and he also invented a method of remote control self-photography. Helmut Gernshein, the author of Lewis Carroll: Photographer, calls Carroll’s photographic achievements “astonishing”; in his estimation, Carroll “must not only rank as a pioneer of British amateur photography, but I would also unhesitatingly acclaim him as the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century.”
Carroll’s Interest in Little Girls
In every study of Carroll’s life, one finds that Carroll had only the most formal encounters with mature women. There was seemingly no romantic interest in adult women. Some biographers have attributed this asexual interest to Carroll’s stammering and his self-conscious shyness about it. On the other hand, Carroll’s diaries and contemporary accounts about him are full of his encounters with children, nearly always with little girls. He obviously delighted in the company of little girls twelve years old and younger, and his diary records in great detail the aesthetic pleasure that he took in viewing “nice little children.” Carroll’s attractions for little girls were honorable and above reproach — at least we have, almost a century later, absolutely no evidence to the contrary.
Carroll’s interest in discovering new little girls for his photographic studio seems to have amounted to his discovering hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls in his lifetime. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll produced a masterpiece of character study. His photographs are filled with unusually sensitive and candid “personalities” of the subjects. They caught the essence of human beings; they were not merely stiff, embalmed-like “objects.” Occasionally, there is an extraordinary sense of straightforward eroticism — but it is straightforward; it is not murky or perverted. And in nearly every recorded case, Carroll had the full approbation of the child’s parents, and invariably his work was chaperoned, at least indirectly. Had there been any intimacies between Carroll and his young female subjects, it would long ago have been ferreted out by the multitude of Freudian-oriented literary critics.
Today, we can understand why, occasionally, certain people thought Carroll’s photographs to be erotic. Most people now, however, wouldn’t consider them to be. His photographs are alluring; they look as if they almost could speak. They all have a provocative quality about them. But, they are “safe,” and as we view them, they help us to understand Carroll’s interest in seeing children as his own personal, private, peculiar escape from mature sex.
Alice Liddell
In 1846, Carroll met Alice Liddell, the four-year-old daughter of Dean Henry George Liddell of Christ Church. Carroll had already established himself as a close friend of Alice’s elder sister and cousin. But it is Alice who figures most prominently in Carroll’s most famous creation, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
On July 4, 1852, Carroll and a friend, Rev. Robinson Duckworth, took the Liddell children, Lorina (13), Alice (10), and Edith (8) on a boat ride (a row boat) up the Isis River (the local name for the Thames River). As they made their way upstream, Carroll began telling a story about the underground adventures of a little girl named Alice. According to Duckworth, the story “was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning around and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.'”
Upon disembarking, Alice asked Carroll to write out Alice’s adventures for her, and Carroll promised to do so by the following Christmas, but the work was not completed until February 10, 1863. By that time, Alice was eleven, and Carroll was no longer seeing her with the regularity that he used to. Now he had made a new friend, the famous ingénue Ellen Terry, who was nearly seventeen. His interest in Ellen Terry is the closest relationship that Carroll had with an adult woman, apart from his family, of course.
From an initial length of 18,000 words, Carroll’s manuscript expanded to 35,000 words, and the famous English illustrator John Tenniel read it and consented to draw illustrations for it. As Carroll searched for a publisher, he gave anxious thoughts to a perfect title. Various ones came to him: Alice’s Golden Hour, Alice’s Hour in Elf-land, Alice Among the Elves, Alice’s Doings in Elf-land, and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Finally, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was chosen, and Macmillan, the publishers for Oxford University, agreed to publish the book on a commission basis.
Alice was an immediate critical success when it appeared in 1865. The Reader magazine called it “a glorious artistic treasure . . . a book to put on one’s shelf as an antidote to a fit of the blues.” The Pall Mall Gazette wrote that “this delightful little book is a children’s feast and a triumph of nonsense.” About 180,000 copies of Alice in various editions were sold in England during Carroll’s lifetime; by 1911, there were almost 700,000 copies in print. Since then, with the expiration of the original copyright in 1907, the book has been translated into every major language, and now it has become a perennial bestseller, ranking with the works of Shakespeare and the Bible in popular demand. In the words of the critic Derek Hudson: “The most remarkable thing about Alice is that, though it springs from the very heart of the Victorian period, it is timeless in its appeal. This is a characteristic that it shares with other classics — a small band — that have similarly conquered the world.”
I consider Alice in Wonderland to be a real treasure of literature—and relevant in a metaphorical way to Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, which is a favorite of mine—just for the puzzles and allusion to another dream-like existence. Finnegan’s Wake is far more complicated than Alice in Wonderland nearly to the point of being completely useless to the average person. Disney saved Alice in Wonderland by making it relevant as a cartoon—which would have been the only way to preserve such a story as the age of media has cheapened the mind of man by providing information so easily that few wish to think deeply about things any longer—being less prone to exploring the Rabbit Holes of existence—rather than the other way around. The question of the day—philosophically, which reality is the dream in our lives and which is the true reality—and this is my primary concern with this blog.
Most people accept that the words they hear coming from President Obama at a press conference, or a school board announcement for more tax money, or the tragedies on the nightly news reflect the reality of the living world—but I contend that it is far from the case. What we see are only marionettes to a stage play without a title anybody understands, and to learn the plot, title, and actual cast members you have to follow the strings down the Rabbit Hole to where reality actually exists. In this way most of society is already Alice—they are in the land of the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, or the Cheshire-Cat and the way to understand the bizarre behavior of Wonderland—the stage play we are all witnessing in “reality,” is to go down the Rabbit Hole to where quantum mechanics will reveal who holds the strings and ultimately the fate of mankind hidden behind the deceptions of reality.
But beware while traveling down that hole—it is a superhuman journey that requires courage, and a sane mind. While it may seem easy to get up out of your chair while watching a puppet show and gaze up at the puppeteers above the stage with their hands on the strings of the stage actors—it is not. It is one thing to notice that the strings extend beyond the reality of a stage play—it is another to confront those puppeteers on their terms and deal with them directly. For that—it will require every bit of cleverness, and intellectual aptitude that can be gathered—and for that—I have prepared a road map to guide the weary traveler inclined through the curiosity of Alice, to jump down the Rabbit Hole to the truth and to meet the horrors found there squarely, and with valor.
When traveling down this Rabbit Hole, be sure to stay sane, stay grounded, and maintain a relationship to those still stuck in the dream so not to get lost along the way—otherwise—you will never be able to help them down the Rabbit Hole when they are ready to travel. Because it’s only a matter of time before they will. Talk to them about sports, movies, books and other nonsensical trivia because all those things are part of the dream. And most of all beware of ultraterrestrials, they are devious creatures who are more a part of your life than you might wish to acknowledge. To learn more about them, read the Mothman Prophesies by John Keel. The strings of the puppet show extend into their hands—and they are not friends—but rival foes in a fight for the same resources in the long drama known as the human race. Ultraterrestrials have formed religions to serve their needs in a plot they wish to sell to their four-dimensional rivals—us—and they are withholding much of the truth to serve their own ends.
In regard to this movement of changing the name of the Washington Redskins NFL football team, the intention of the parties involved is not reverence of a conquered people, but an emphasis on progressive politics and all the garbage that comes with it. Native American guilt is used in the same way that other Civil Rights violations are exploited to advance social gains by progressive political advocates. Most of the time, the argument is a full proof slam–nobody would dare criticize a socially abused minority group—especially if the critic is in the majority—such as a “white male.” This leaves arguments one-sided and defenseless, which is the nature of the push to change the name of the Redskins to something else. The goal of the endeavor is not respect of the Indians who supposedly lived in North America happily and in accordance with nature before the “white men” came and destroyed their way of life. The goal is power over NFL owners and the public in general. This is a power attempted at the expense of the Native American Indian.
But for those who wish to propel the myth that the Native American had all the answers, they don’t know the history of those people. They don’t know that outside St. Louis was a gigantic “Indian” city of over 30,000 people who likely traded with the Mayans down the Mississippi, across the Gulf of Mexico and straight into Chichen Itza and their culture of human sacrifice. They don’t know that it is highly likely that many of the American Indian tribes—especially the Shawnee who settled Ohio out of Florida where always at war. The Shawnee couldn’t settle just north of Florida because the Cherokee fought them away driving them further. Once in Ohio, they settled just west of the Five Nations of the Iroquois and lived for a few hundred years in the manner that many believe was the way of life for all Indians since the start of time. But in all reality, it was a short time in human history and the Shawnee were long at war with their neighbors much the way the Mayans were constantly at war with neighboring factions. They were not a society living in peace. They were warriors.
Their culture of collectivism was not compatible with the settlers fleeing European statism so war ensued and the Indians lost. They were beaten and dominated by a culture inventing capitalism. They were fighting on equal terms of social evolution, and the Native Americans—who were largely stranded Chinese from various trading missions around the world by gigantic Junk ships circumnavigating the globe far before Christopher Columbus—were beaten by minds further developed creatively, financially, and socially. Indians were not superior to the American Frontiersman. They did not hold the key secrets to the universe, or have a special relationship to Mother Nature. They were hunters, gathers, and fighters, and they lost their fight against the “White Man.”
Even with the help of American culture to get financially on their feet, the Indian nations still resort to their collectivist tendencies, and are economically—poor for the most part. They still are happy to live in villages and avoid using their brains to create new industry, or even create great works of art—because they have allowed themselves to be conquered, even when their conquerors tried to help them. They like many of the poor living in the inner cities of America cannot shake their psychological tendency to live in village huts waiting to act under the direction of some chief. The reason the Indians lost to the American Frontiersman was because they rose and fell as a society based on collective effort as the Americans were individually motivated—and could not be conquered. If one group of frontiersman were scalped, raped and tied to trees as warnings to all who might follow with their innards used as ropes, more American settlers came behind them fearless and in pursuit of freedom. There was not tribal chief in America who decided not to be at war with the Shawnee, the Cherokee, the Iroquois or any other tribe so “White Men” never stopped coming forcing the Indians to yield, and yield and yield until they were all but destroyed.
To their credit, the Americans felt sorry for their conquered rivals and they named their schools and sports teams after the brave antics the Indians showed on the battlefield. If Americans were truly bad, they would have bragged about their conquests of a superior culture over an inferior one–over one culture who yielded to nature and one who sought to overcome it with the power of imagination. But they didn’t, they gave them reservations to live on because in a world dominated by private property ownership, the Indians did not have any money to own any land. So they were given reservations—just to be fair to them.
Over time, the American western tried to incorporate the Indian into American culture through mythological endeavor. And tensions eased between the former frontiersman and the Native American and if the progressives kept their noses out of the situation and did not attempt to exploit them, the American Indian might be more integrated into American society. They may invent new technology, new cars, or even new philosophy—but they haven’t. Instead, they have allowed their name to be exploited by progressives looking for political capital to attack all tenets of capitalism.
The reason for exploiting Indians, specifically in the case of the Washington Redskins is to force a name change of an NFL team and start a chain reaction of appeasement toward progressive causes. The plight of the Indian is the unfairness of American ownership of private property to supplant the open community nature of the Indians. The Indian is valued as superior by progressives because they did not understand the concept of private property, and revered nature with the highest regard—which of course is a dog whistle to liberals and their support of the Green Movement. But the Indian that progressives hold in such high regard, are fictional characters in that they were part of a Utopia in America that was destroyed by the self-greedy Frontiersman. That Utopia never existed, and the Native American Indian was war mongers and deeply in love with battle, which is why an NFL football team wanted their name to begin with. Nobody wants a football team to be named, the “Washington Pacifists,” or the “Liberals.” Nobody wants to play on a football team named after losers, lowlifes or characters of low valor. The NFL has done the memory of the Indian a favor by naming a team after their battlefield antics—instead of the progressive pacifism which ultimately allowed them to be conquered utterly, and completely.
If the Washington Redskins change their name and cave in to the progressive activists advocating such a thing, it will not stop there—but will unleash a floodgate of demands affecting nearly every college and high school in the country. And it won’t have anything to do with the Indian. Their time has come and gone in a flash. They were not Native American in the way that people think they were—instead they were a mix of many cultures—some nomads who crossed the Bering Straight, some where Chinese stranded in North America when giant ships traveled the world well before recorded history has acknowledged the ability, and some where immigrants from Central Mexico who traveled into North America up the Mississippi River and traded with Cahokia and broke away to start their Indian tribes. But they were not Native Americans living in North America from the start of existence with established cultures who owned the New World with a deep history. The American Indian was no more Native American than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Simon Kenton. Daniel Boone had every right to settle the land of Kentucky into Illinois as Tecumseh did. In fact, Blue Jacket was a “White Man” who took up the Shawnee war against the frontiersman. The Indians were a mishmash of cultures that lost philosophically and technologically to a superior culture. Any attempt to highlight otherwise is an attempt to destroy that superior culture with guilt, and lackluster performance to stop the spread of capitalism throughout the world in favor of socialism—which is the standard of the progressive.
I am aware of the controversial nature of these assertions, yet history can confirm it. All anyone who wishes to dispute what I’ve written here need do is study Native American history prior to 1550 AD and they will see that the cultures that resided in North America were no better than any nomadic culture anywhere in the world and were just as primitive. They lost their war with the American Frontiersman fairly and have been remembered through the folklore of a capitalist culture. If not for football teams like the Washington Redskins, who would remember anything of the Indians—even if they were a failure? The NFL has made such memories household names which would otherwise never happen—which is an honor to a society that was a flash in the history of the world. But the Indian was never what the progressives paint them as—a Utopian society that should be followed, and honored with mimicry. That attempt is a falsehood and just another example of how progressives exploit minorities as a way to advance their agenda—even if it means they conduct themselves as complete liars.
It is an unpopular position to state that the American education system is disgraceful, and that the labor unions are destroying the minds of American youth. My position against public education has caused many uncomfortable engagements with people who obviously do not know the facts, or are willingly ignoring them. I have associated with entertainment professionals, science foundations, business leaders, and just casual everyday people and due to my positions, they are not sure whether they like me, or hate me. Yet I am unconcerned by these appraisals, because to my eyes, the worst thing any society can do is destroy the mind of young people. In the 1930’s the United States had the best school system in the world. Now we are ranked at 32 – below Cyprus. More money thrown at teacher unions has not helped American schools. The curriculum taught in these schools have destroyed them and the kids in attendance. The situation has become notably worse in just the few years I have spent covering these issues and making my disapproval so vocal. I know that sooner rather than later, my opinions about public education will be mainstream—so any current resistance to my evaluation will dissolve with time.
Honestly, I can’t think of a more pleasurable event than watching the minds of children coming on. Our society puts a lot of effort into these young people from ages 3 to 5, and it is wonderful to see children learning to talk and interact with the world in a completely open manner—not fearful of failing, no resistance to adventure—just open books looking or good material to imprint upon their brains. Conversely, the saddest is when those minds are turned off. Some of the saddest moments of my life were not the death of loved ones, or the occasional tragedies that happen, but in watching people I have known deliberately turn off their minds through intoxication or deliberate stupidity. A room full of college kids getting “high” in a small fraternity room at Miami University, a passed out girl nude and gang raped by everyone at a party covered with beer, spit and semen, or a former reading advocate who gave up books for cocaine and found themselves a twisted mess within months of making the perilous decision are examples of what I consider the worst examples of human detriment. The young girl I am thinking of saddened me because I thought at the time that once not that long ago she was somebody’s pride and joy. She was a wide-eyed child figuring out that circles and squares were different and she was learning how to string together words to make sentences. The world was alive with adventure and thought and within a decade of that behavior she was robbed of her dignity and abused by others in the same state to be forever tarnished and lowered in her own mind never again to reach for the stars of opportunity. After a few of these events, the young mind always reaches for less, and less until they are unhappy grey hairs on a collision course with their own death only to live fruitless, uneventful lives as a malcontent. Those paths to destruction begin young, and are planted in their minds at public schools—and for that reason—I hate those places.
Children before they attend public schools are alive and curious. After they are numbed and destroyed. By the grades of 3 to 5, most children are so turned off to the world they no longer function properly. By the grade of 6 to 8, children are pulled nearly exclusively into the didactic world of puberty—the public schools are not palaces of adventure and learning—but of sexual pursuits or the option of it through peer group development. Peer groups form and sexual pairings occur along the lines of those boundaries. The appeal of gang raping an intoxicated female once grades 9 through 12 are reached are that alcohol and drugs break down those peer boundaries and inter-pollination of sexual advancement can take place through thoughtless exchange. By the time these tarnished youth arrive in college, the peer groups further devolve into complete social neurosis paving the way for democratic unity. With peer groups stripped away, these minds are now ready to accept their role in the “middleclass” under of course the political upper-class who makes the law and substitutes the teacher role as an object of authority. Once jobs are obtained, and children are born, the public educated victim becomes more “conservative” and may even vote for a Republican. This they hope gives them redeeming value for all the mistakes they made in their past. Two decades later, they are in physical decline and willing to yield to the youth of the next generation not departing wisdom but in worshipping them with a lust not felt in 40 years. Regret fills their minds, corrupts their hearts, and destroys their families. By the time they are in a coffin and visitors come to see their vacant bodies, there are a few good things that are remembered by those left behind, but mostly it is sadness. The sadness is not in missing the person who has died, but in all the potential they had, which was not developed, or lost during their lives by thinking wrongly about things. This pattern of living is getting worse, and is the fault of our public education system.
To measure just how bad the situation is the below statistics come from a friend of mine who used to be a school board member. The information she provides is startlingly illuminating as to the real contents of the public education problem. Public schools are not teaching children, they are simply performing a scam selling an elixir—a cure all to life’s problems—but once consumed the student discovers there is nothing there. I am willing to call the situation what it is—after the scam that it is because of the way it is destroying minds and sending young people into lives of unhappy adulthood where the magic of youth has been destroyed. The confirmation of such an assertion can be seen in the college readiness scores shown below of a number of area schools. More information can be found at my friend’s site linked below.
The college readiness statistic is based on a score of 100%. That means 100% of the senior students in a school took the test and 100% passed the test. Every student had to take and pass at least one AP class. Few schools reach the 100% mark. The math and reading scores are based on the number of seniors that took and the number that passed the Ohio State Exit exam. Listed below are some examples of the scores.
WALNUT HILLS – Rank: Ohio 1 National 77 College Readiness Score 81.3
College Readiness: 92% tested 78% passed
Math – 100% proficient 0% not proficient scored at 4.8
Reading – 100% proficient 0% not proficient scored at 4.4
WYOMING – Rank: Ohio 2 National 110 College Readiness Score 74.4
College Readiness: 83% tested 71% passed
Math – 98% proficient 2% not proficient scored at 4.6
Reading – 97% proficient 3% not proficient scored at 4.4
SYCAMORE H. S. – Rank: Ohio 23 National 514 College Readiness 46.6
College Readiness: 51% tested 45% passed
Math – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.5
Reading – 97% proficient 3% not proficient scored at 4.3
KINGS – Rank: Ohio 31 National 666 College Readiness 42.2
College Readiness: 52% tested 39% passed
Math – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 4.2
Reading – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 3.9
MILFORD – Rank: Ohio 32 National 707 College Readiness 41.4
College Readiness: 54% tested 37% passed
Math – 91% proficient 9% not proficient scored at 4.2
Reading – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 3.9
MASON H. S. – Rank: Ohio 34 National 720 College Readiness 40.9
College Readiness: 44% tested 40% passed
Math – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.6
Reading – 97% proficient 3% not proficient scored at 4.2
LAKOTA EAST – Rank: Ohio 36 National 750 College Readiness 40.4
College Readiness: 44% tested 39% passed
Math – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.4
Reading – 97% proficient 3% not proficient scored at 4.1
LOVELAND – Rank: Ohio 43 National 955 College Readiness 35.7
College Readiness: 42% tested 34% passed
Math – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 4.3
Reading – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.1
LEBANON – Rank: Ohio 51 National 1119 College Readiness 32.6
College Readiness: 41% tested 30% passed (approximately 60 students)
Math – 92% proficient 8% not proficient scored at 4.1
Reading – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 3.9 (near OH Average)
LAKOTA WEST – Rank: Ohio 53 National 1178 College Readiness 31.3
College Readiness: 34% tested 31% passed
Math – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.4
Reading – 95% proficient 5% not proficient Scored at 4.1 (above OH average)
CENTERVILLE – Rank: Ohio 70 National 1436 College Readiness 27.0
College Readiness: 32% tested 25% passed
Math – 94% proficient 6% not proficient scored at 4.4 (above OH average)
Reading – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 4.2 (above OH average)
SPRINGBORO – Rank: Ohio 84 National 1629 College Readiness 23.5
College Readiness: 29% tested 22% passed
Math – 97% proficient 3% not proficient scored at 4.5 (above OH average)
Reading – 98% proficient 2% not proficient scored at 4.1 (above OH average)
MONROE – Rank: Ohio 93 National 1698 College Readiness 22.5
College Readiness: 38% tested 17% passed
Math – 89% proficient 11% not proficient scored at 4.0 (near OH average)
Reading – 96% proficient 4% not proficient scored at 3.8 (above OH average)
VALLEY H. S.(297 students) Not ranked College Readiness 18.3
College Readiness: 30% tested 14% passed
Math – 92% proficient 8% not proficient scored at 4.2 (above OH average)
Reading – 90% proficient 10% not proficient scored at 3.7 (near OH average)
The reason I am going to all this effort to post these scores is so that a valid comparison can be made. Note that Walnut Hills has a college readiness score of 81.3 and that 92% of their senior class took the test. Compare that to Lebanon where only 41% were tested and 30% of those passed the test. If you calculate that out you will find that only 60 AP students passed the test. That is 60 out of approximately 500 students.
The test is pure propaganda meant to disguise what is really going on, and the schools and law makers are all openly participating in the deception. The entire purpose of the test is not to ensure that children are learning, but to keep the money flowing into their incompetent jobs of the labor union employees and tax funded colleges. It is a scam designed to feed off the minds of people only to discard them like dirty laundry in search of the next victim. Ultimately once children learn to read, and think and they see what is really going on, they take on a kind of prison inmate position to the school experience and they make their moves to survive in that culture. They pair up with a peer group to protect them and hope to get out alive. This starts them on a life of bad decisions that lead one into another for the rest of their lives and is caused by the public education experience.
I feel very passionate about those houses of horror. I despise them more now than ever—because I know that the testing, and school scoring have no basis in reality, but are designed with one intention in mind—to convince tax payers to continue funding the insane behavior. They are lies because the real statistic is that Cyprus is now ahead of The United States in educational aptitude. To truly understand how bad the situation really is read the below report, which refers to a 1983 document titled A Nation At Risk. The situation is dire! And remember this; the Department of Education was formed in 1979. The 1983 report was only 4 years into the DOE existence. We are now three decades of destruction into its incompetency now.
So I offer no apologies to the insanity that is public education. It is a failure and should be massively defunded—abandoned, and rebuilt around competitive models. The labor unions should be outlawed, and the curriculum must be totally overhauled. It is the number one problem facing the modern United States because public education is breeding stupidity—not saving the world from it. And for that, I have strong feelings that are quite rational—if the facts are understood in context.
The Overmanwarrior 