The Human Parable

Mark Boyle -Bank of Ideas

2012-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

From the Right To Resist the "Duty To Submit"

2012-01-14T17:06:00.000-08:00

by William Norman Grigg

Anne Dekins was a loud-mouthed party girl – or at least, that's what the arrest warrant suggested. Whatever she may have done in the past, Miss Dekins was quietly minding her own business when Officer Samuel Bray found her on the street and began to haul her away.

Dekins wasn’t inclined to go quietly, and she put up a struggle. Her cries for help attracted the interest of several armed men led by an individual named Tooley, who confronted Bray and demanded to know what he was doing to the frantic woman. The officer produced his official credentials and insisted that he was making a lawful arrest for "disorderly conduct." When witnesses disputed that description, Bray called for backup.

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Testing to see if you are and Eco Poser

2012-01-12T09:37:00.000-08:00

By Paul Wheaton

It’s cool to be green. Especially in Missoula. Here’s how to test to see if you are an Eco Poser.

As the decision makers decide our future, it often seems to boil down to one philosophy of “green” vs. another philosophy of ”environmentalism”. And then an “eco” position is thrown in just to make things interesting. Aren’t these all supposed to be the same?

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The Entanglement of Compassion and Liberty

2012-01-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Column by Glen Allport.

Exclusive to STR

- 1 -

Hidden yet Fundamental Connections

I am fascinated by quantum mechanics, and particularly by what is called the quantum enigma (also known as the measurement problem). Among the most startling aspects of this enigma is that consciousness and physical reality are connected in some fashion, such that at the quantum level – the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles like photons and electrons – unobserved particles are not solid entities but merely clouds of probability. Conscious observation is what prompts a particle to assume specific physical reality. Indeed, the physical world – meaning the entire universe – may be created by conscious perception. Given that the role of conscious observation at the quantum level is well-proven and (almost) beyond dispute – which is not to say it is understood – it is unsurprising that some well-known and well-respected physicists believe that stars and galaxies also decohere (from clouds of probability into actual physical objects) upon observation, just as subatomic particles in the physicists' laboratories do. Is that idea too pedestrian for you? Perhaps you'd like to test-drive the "many worlds" interpretation, in which each possibility is resolved on observation into in its own newly-created universe.

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Patriot Pauls and Patriot Acts

2011-06-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

By tzo

Wow. Lots of buzz lately about Rand and Ron Paul and the Patriot Act. It's got me to thinking...

This is for all the Paul supporters out there who believe that their Constitutional vision of returning the nation to the noble framework laid out by Thee Founding Fathers™ is the end to be attained. This is for all those who are disillusioned, dissatisfied, irritated, enraged, uneasy or downright afraid. This is for all those who, after watching the government chokehold tighten in the face of “legitimate” efforts to breathe easier, ask “But what can we do about it?”

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No One is Illegal

2011-06-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

To Anarchism We Must Go!

2011-06-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

SOMETIMES TELLING THE TRUTH makes you seem like a moron or lunatic, at least people tend to think so. This is perhaps the reason anarchists are thought of as lunatics. But the logic is clear: why would you need an army unless to fight wars? Why do the police need guns unless to scare and intimidate the public?

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Larken Rose

2011-06-11T09:07:00.001-07:00

Eyes of the Wolf

2011-02-16T01:07:00.000-08:00

By: Rotating Matter

You might not understand me
but if you can accept getting to know me
you will be able to see
what is
is the a result of both U and I

Therefor you can not know me
unless you know U
as I could not possibly
know I unless I knew thy

This is not something I write for U
but something that I write for time
This is to be as the strokes of the keys
flow the direction

I am the man that came
from the master plan
to be
hear now that I am
and I will be so long as I can
see for an eternity

They are the words that come and go
from the two that for
that by and buy from the phi in the sky
could not decide why
all the U's and I could walk the line

Was it forwards
or backwards
from space to place
or just a reflection
across the face

Is It Important How You Shutdown?

2011-01-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

By A Thought in the Field.

It's time to become conscious of the reaction as well as the action. It has been said by some such as, Bruce Lipton, that the brain operates in a controlled pattern. That thru the stimuli of cells. The cells act in the same way a body reacts.

Kinda seems obvious since a body is made up of individual cells. His work is very interesting and should be carefully examined under the microscope of the mind. With your mind, and as his work brings up, whose mind are you operating under? Have you examined it to make sure it was really yours?

Before you read any further you should check out the video "The Power Of Consciousness". If you have checked out the video and comprehended what was being discussed with your own mind then check out this info as well LINK:.....

Once you have taken a look at these two things you should be able to understand the importance of the question and can think it out for yourself. Or if you don't want to waste your time thinking you can read on. Or maybe, you are just curious about what I have to say, so you can check it against your own thoughts. What ever your reason the below is my thoughts on the information is presented, and my own expansions of thought.

The mind is the command center of the body it controls the functions of all the pieces based on the information it receives form the individual cells surrounding it. Where does that leave the brain? Are they the same thing isn't the mind a result of the the brain or is the brain a result of he mind. Well as the great labyrinth (of so-called science) has revealed the operation of the brain, we can now reassess the question. I refer to it as so-called science by the way because I have actually reflected on the origin and meaning of the word. Science is not a thing it is only a method of observation and as such is only as good as the mind operating the cells in the current placement within the field. The field just another word for space, circular meanings and all.

Didn't that placement have an effect or what?

The placement of ones cells, that would be your cells or maybe the dogs cells. They are just all cells by the way. If you weren't currently aware of that, then you need to start paying a little more attention. I'm not writing this so you can just read it. I am writing it so you will actually think about it. If you don't want to think about it then what is presented will do you no good. So you might as well go masturbate in the street so the field will know that all you seek is to waste your existence.

As I was previously saying, in case you missed it yet this is an internal dialog I am trying to have it with you, but you do not seem to want to listen. So here I sit writing the thought down instead so maybe you will stumble across it at some time and join the conversation. If this offended you it was your fence not mine. Now that you have joined in lets continue, and thanks to all those that were here from the beginning. The mind is the voice. The voice is the commander of the center. The center is the place were the information is processed that is downloaded from the field. The field is the potential information that is waiting to be processed by the sense of its reception. Thats right it really is a circle.

Don't fight the flow pay attention to the direction of the receivers
Make note of the information and check it against your consciousness.

You know the part of you that actually takes the time to analyze.

It is you?
Is that all you are?
Well that and cells acting together with a common goal directed by the thought. Thats right cells really are separate entities just like you processing information from the position within the experience. It is you, thought, that directs matter not matter that directs you the thought. And if you are directing the matter then it really is all your fault? That is not an accusation by the way, just a self discovery. I realize that it was my fault so I am just trying to tell you that I truly understand now how my thought or lack there of, has really effected you both directly and indirectly.

Well maybe you haven't been paying attention to the direction of the matter because no one ever told you it was important. No one ever told me as well. I had to take the time to think and come to the conclusions myself by looking at, and examining the information I was receiving from the thoughts of others.

Now on to the main question, is it important to know how to properly shut the signal down? I think it is. My reasoning being that if the signal is directing the intentions of the field by relaying information back to the field by interacting with it. You know when it exists as your existence is your interaction with the field. What is the Matter? Ya, I know, funny, is it? I'm not going to answer the question for you by the way that would be impossible. Not that I could not answer the question, just that I could not do it for you. I answered the question already I said yes, and gave you my reasoning but I can never answer a question for you. For I am not such an arrogant prick to think that I know some thing you do not know only that I have taken the time to reason it out and if you take the time you will probably take it further. Then we can really start interacting with this field in a conscious manner.

Why do I think it is important to interact in a conscious manner?
Both the actions and reactions of all thought, both conscious and unconscious, effects the reactions to the actions of the thoughts of the matter.

Circular, I know.
Maybe it's what makes the merry-go-round so fun.
Were did they all go by the way?
Maybe it is under my feet I say. To be.............

No Fear in the Now

2011-01-17T06:35:00.001-08:00

The Power Of Consciousness

2011-01-16T18:48:00.001-08:00

NATURAL LAW; OR THE SCIENCE OF JUSTICE:

2010-12-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

By: Lysander Spooner

PART FIRST.

CHAPTER 1.

THE SCIENCE OF JUSTICE.

Section I.

The science of mine and thine --- the science of justice --- is the science of all human rights; of all a man's rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is the science which alone can tell any man what he can, and cannot, do; what he can, and cannot, have; what he can, and cannot, say, without infringing the rights of any other person.
It is the science of peace; and the only science of peace; since it is the science which alone can tell us on what conditions mankind can live in peace, or ought to live in peace, with each other.
These conditions are simply these: viz., first, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.

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Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

2010-12-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

by Étienne de la Boétie

I see no good in having several lords:

Let one alone be master, let one alone be king.

THESE WORDS Homer puts in the mouth of Ulysses,¹ as he addresses the people. If he had said nothing further than "I see no good in having several lords," it would have been well spoken. For the sake of logic he should have maintained that the rule of several could not be good since the power of one man alone, as soon as he acquires the title of master, becomes abusive and unreasonable. Instead he declared what seems preposterous: "Let one alone be master, let one alone be king." We must not be critical of Ulysses, who at the moment was perhaps obliged to speak these words in order to quell a mutiny in the army, for this reason, in my opinion, choosing language to meet the emergency rather than the truth. Yet, in the light of reason, it is a great misfortune to be at the beck and call of one master, for it is impossible to be sure that he is going to be kind, since it is always in his power to be cruel whenever he pleases. As for having several masters, according to the number one has, it amounts to being that many times unfortunate. Although I do not wish at this time to discuss this much debated question, namely whether other types of government are preferable to monarchy,² still I should like to know, before casting doubt on the place that monarchy should occupy among commonwealths, whether or not it belongs to such a group, since it is hard to believe that there is anything of common wealth in a country where everything belongs to one master. This question, however, can remain for another time and would really require a separate treatment involving by its very nature all sorts of political discussion.

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Land Of Laws?

2010-10-27T13:52:00.001-07:00

Patriots and even plain folk who merely consider themselves citizens of a nation often have a great reverence and even fetishistic tenacity to the law. I have often heard the claim the United States is a land of laws, as if this should mean something to me and make me feel guilty for not prostrating myself before the allegedly mighty and benevolent State. Though such a claim is true in an unexpected way, the argument issuing thereof begs the question weather such laws do and should bind me or any other human.

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The Path Is (The Destination Is the Path)

2010-08-18T07:28:00.000-07:00

This is the path, is the destination. Is the path.

And so you have your mantra: There is no way to individual liberty—individual liberty is the way.

If all this still sounds too touchy-feely, new age-y to you, then perhaps you haven’t yet truly grokked the message. There are no blueprints here; no recipes. No bulleted and numbered lists in a Powerpoint presentation. The State is a state of mind and freedom is another state of mind: It’s all between your ears.

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The State

2010-08-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Today psychopaths and schizophrenics are running around looking for the golden eggs of the lost dinosaurs. They peer behind the trees, turn over the benches, rip the leafs from the trees and burn the earth. Prying eyes look with the need of greed the want of lust and the urge of fulfillment. Every blade of grass is cut low leaving it exposed to the intense rays of the sun to be scorched for the shiny reflection that waits in anticipation. Around the corner and under the bridge the blue unicorns and purple jackalopes skip across the ashes of paradise drenched with the blood of their past meal.

These are the days of the Statist, believing in illusions and delusions willing to sacrifice children to glutton the stomach of death. They call themselves teachers, preachers, judges, congressmen, presidents, policemen, and so on and so on. In reality they are delusional fools, rapists, thief's, and murdering psychopaths who wear fancy coats, dark robes, shiny badges, funny hats, and blood stained shoes. The paper is holy, the pen is magical, the words written cast the spell. Citizens bow down to the written decry or the boot will be placed to your neck and the knife in your back. Titles and costumes surround the stage as the game is played, but who designed the board and what are the rules? Ah you dare to ask questions, shame shame now you will be labeled and soon disabled as no one dares question the tool.

But don't fret as your voice will be heard, just don't dare speak, your concerns will be taken, just don't dare complain, your life will be saved but only for the last breath. It is not theft if done by the many nor rape if voted by many a dick nor murder merely war.

On paper magic lines are drawn from theoretical here to the theoretical there. The names are placed and the boundaries are defined. One name against another the game will begin as the lines clash on the whim of the mystical pen. It is day one with the smell of death in the wind the days of the past are no more for it is now the clock shall begin. This is the world of fiction where the players are but a few psychopaths and the pieces a many bleeding fools saturating the fields of earth. The game is nearly over and it is time to tally the score.

The words have been written the readers selected the interoperation decreed is rule. If you are wearing one of the many costumes with the fancy hats or dark ropes strip down and make your decrees, for you are defiantly sane. A sane man knows of no mystical pens nor magic robes, for the artificial is powerless. So stand bare defending your holy words and precious maps for they are not your delusions, you are sane. You are not a mere pawn in the game but a master player with insights of strategy and knowledge of the rules. Leave your skin bare with no shame nor hesitation for truly the state is real, and your magical power is divine.

The many are but fools indoctrinated from birth to be blind to life only seeing what is dead. How did it come to be this way? I say it is the image that was put in your head. I invite you back to reality, it is were we shall go if you choose to be part of existence. Reality a most splendid place where the motions and emotions of objects in space, passing by and through each other, reflect the light of existence creating true presence. Life is the option, or simply put to be or not to be, that is the question now, and now is forever.

There exists only one authority and that is the authority of the one. The one is the only, all else is only a collection of the one come together to appear to be the many. No other has or will have what Man has if you chose to take possession of it. You are the one and only authority of you, take possession of yourself. Possession of me is mine, and thee is thine. The law is natural, defined by reality, not by he or thee, nor the two or three. Mankind please join me in reality it is where you were intended to be.

It all goes back in the Box

2010-08-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Mind Control

2010-07-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Truth of the Matter

2010-07-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

Freeman finds himself within the borders claimed by a government. This human being decides he does not want to participate in the government organization anymore, so he quits. He then finds a nice plot of "public" property and claims it as his own. He is quickly confronted with a government participant named Citizen, who informs him that the land belongs to the government, and he is trespassing. Continue.....

2010-05-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

#069 - Another Brick in the Wall, part 2 - An Interview w...

Gnostic Media - Jan Irvin

2010-05-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

#068 - Another Brick in the Wall, part 1 - An Interview w...

Gnostic Media - Jan Irvin

Libertarianism in One Sentence

2010-05-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

Other people are not your property. In other words: They are not yours to boss around. Their lives are not yours to micromanage. The fruits of their labour are not yours to dispose of. It doesn't matter how wise or marvelous or useful it would be for other people to do whatever it is you'd like them to do. It is none of your business whether they wear their seatbelts, worship the right god, have sex with the wrong people, or engage in market transactions that irritate you. Their choices are not yours to direct. They are human beings like yourself, your equals under Natural Law. You possess no legitimate authority over them. As long as they do not themselves step over the line and start treating other people as theirproperty, you have no moral basis for initiating violence against them ' nor for authorising anyone else to do so on your behalf.

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Bosnian Pyramid

2010-05-23T16:49:00.000-07:00

1789

2010-05-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

By Jim Davies

It's often said that America was once a free country, but that its freedom has been heavily damaged by a relentless growth in government. Some (like Aaron Russo in his documentaryAmerica: from Freedom to Fascism) date the decline from 1913, when the Federal Reserve was chartered and the Income Tax enacted; but I no longer think it began that late. The "Pristine State" advocates suppose that there was once in our history a kind of Eden from which we have fallen, and so that all we need now is somehow to get back there – to "constitutional rule." There wasn't, and we don't. I think our troubles began no later than 1789.

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Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty WIth It.

2010-04-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

By Paul Craig Roberts

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

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2010-04-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

The Division of Responsibility

I'm Allowed to Rob You!

2010-04-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

A Society of Criminals

2010-04-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

By Ben O'Neill

Recently, a friend of mine complained about a spate of burglaries that had occurred near her newly bought home. A house down the street from hers had been burgled in the weeks before, and her next-door neighbor had been burgled not long afterward. In the latter case, the thieves had made off with a large-screen plasma television set and a laptop computer, apparently having walked out of the house with them in broad daylight.

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2010-04-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

Diffusion and Confusion

By: tzo

So once again someone has sent an airborne explosive device into a building that supposedly housed the “enemy” organization, and innocent people were killed and injured as part of the collateral damage.

And then it is discovered that the attacker had a “manifesto” of sorts that purports to explain the rationale for the strike. The four page “screed” begins "We the People..." and the full text can be found Continue..........

The Philosophy of Liberty

2009-12-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

Republican & Democrat Hypocrisy

2009-12-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

Written by Marc Stevens
Thursday, 12 November 2009 15:42

The hypocrisy these days is sickening, not from the politicians; we all know they’re a bunch of criminals who couldn’t care less about their victims. No, I’m speaking of the rank hypocrisy from the victims – republicans and democrats alike. The attention on government health care is as unrelenting as the hypocrisy.

“Democrats” claim government mandated insurance is humane because people shouldn’t die because they don’t have health insurance. "Republicans” talk about liberty, that people should not be forced to buy a product or service. Really, where have I heard that before?

Rush Limbaugh and some other “conservative” radio hosts are talking about this being the first time in American history Americans would be forced to pay for a service. What??? Apparently Rush has never heard of an obscure group calling themselves "government"?

Government is a service you’re forced pay for. How did that escape the most brilliant “conservative” minds?

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Delusions

2009-11-29T14:46:00.000-08:00

No Treason

2009-11-13T12:21:00.001-08:00

LysanderSpooner.org

NO TREASON.

_____________

No. 1.

_____________

BY LYSANDER SPOONER

_____________

BOSTON:

PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR,

No. 14 Bromfield Street.

1867.

______________________________________________

Entered according to Act of congress, in the year 1867,

By LYSANDER SPOONER,

in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, for the District

of Massachusetts.

______________________________________________

[*iii]

INTRODUCTORY.

_____________

The question of treason is distinct from that of slavery; and is the same that it would have been, if free States, instead of slave States, had seceded.

On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.

The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle --- but only in degree --- between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and [*iv] asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that --- in theory, at least, if not in practice --- our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established.

If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.

[*5]

NO TREASON

No. 1.

Notwithstanding all the proclamations we have made to mankind, within the last ninety years, that our government rests on consent, and that that was the rightful basis on which any government could rest, the late war has practically demonstrated that our government rests upon force --- as much so as any government that ever existed.

The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate ourselves from our connexion with England, and also to coax a scattered and jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is sufficient for us --- as for all governments --- simply to say: Our power is our right.

In proportion to her wealth and population, the North has probably expended more money and blood to maintain her power over an unwilling people, than any other government ever did. And in her estimation, it is apparently the chief glory of her success, and an adequate compensation for all her own losses, and an ample justification for all her devastation and carnage of the South, that all pretence of any necessity for consent to the perpetuity or power of government, is (as she thinks) forever expunged from the minds of the people. In short, the North [*6] exults beyond measure in the proof she has given, that a government, professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing dissent, than any government, openly founded on force, has ever done.

And she claims that she has done all this in behalf of liberty! In behalf of free government! In behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent!

If the successors of Roger Williams, within a hundred years after their State had been founded upon the principle of free religious toleration, and when the Baptists had become strong on the credit of that principle, had taken to burning heretics with a fury never seen before among men; and had they finally gloried in having thus suppressed all question of the truth of the State religion; and had they further claimed to have done all this in behalf of freedom of conscience, the inconsistency between profession and conduct would scarcely have been greater than that of the North, in carrying on such a war as she has done, to compel men to live under and support a government that they did not want; and in then claiming that she did it in behalf of the of the principle that government should rest on consent.

This astonishing absurdity and self-contradiction are to be accounted for only by supposing, either that the lusts of fame, and power, and money, have made her utterly blind to, or utterly reckless of, he inconsistency and enormity of her conduct; or that she has never even understood what was implied in a government's resting on consent. Perhaps this last explanation is the true one. In charity to human nature, it is to be hoped that it is.

What, then, is implied in a government's resting on consent?

If it be said that the consent of the strongest party, in a nation, is all that is necessary to justify the establishment of a government that shall have authority over the weaker party, it [*7] may be answered that the most despotic governments in the world rest upon that very principle, viz: the consent of the strongest party. These governments are formed simply by the consent or agreement of the strongest party, that they will act in concert in subjecting the weaker party to their dominion. And the despotism, and tyranny, and injustice of these governments consist in that very fact. Or at least that is the first step in their tyranny; a necessary preliminary to all the oppressions that are to follow.

If it be said that the consent of the most numerous party, in a nation, is sufficient to justify the establishment of their power over the less numerous party, it may be answered:

First. That two men have no more natural right to exercise any kind of authority over one, than one has to exercise the same authority over two. A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.

Second. It would be absurd for the most numerous party to talk of establishing a government over the less numerous party, unless the former were also the strongest, as well as the most numerous; for it is not to be supposed that the strongest party would ever submit to the rule of the weaker party, merely because the latter were the most numerous. And as a matter of fact, it is perhaps never that governments are established by the most numerous party. They are usually, if not always, established by the less numerous party; their superior strength consisting of their superior wealth, intelligence, and ability to act in concert.

Third. Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority; but by "the people;" the minority, as much as the majority. [*8]

Fourth. If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

Fifth. Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally --- perhaps more than equally, because more boldly --- rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. There is no more reason, then, why a man should either sustain, or submit to, the rule of the majority, than of a minority. Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice. And all talk about them, in matters of government, is mere absurdity. Men are dunces for uniting to sustain any government, or any laws, except those in which they are all agreed. And nothing but force and fraud compel men to sustain any other. To say that majorities, as such, have a right to rule minorities, is equivalent to saying that minorities have, and ought to have, no rights, except such as majorities please to allow them.

Sixth. It is not improbable that many or most of the worst of governments --- although established by force, and by a few, in the first place --- come, in time, to be supported by a majority. But if they do, this majority is composed, in large part, of the most ignorant, superstitious, timid, dependent, servile, and corrupt portions of the people; of those who have been over-awed by the power, intelligence, wealth, and arrogance; of those who have been deceived by the frauds; and of those who have been corrupted by the inducements, of the few who really constitute the government. Such majorities, very likely, could be found in half, perhaps nine-tenths, of all the countries on the globe. What do they prove? Nothing but the tyranny and corruption of the very governments that have reduced so large portions of [*9] the people to their present ignorance, servility, degradation, and corruption; an ignorance, servility, degradation, and corruption that are best illustrated in the simple fact that they do sustain governments that have so oppressed, degraded, and corrupted them. They do nothing towards proving that the governments themselves are legitimate; or that they ought to be sustained, or even endured, by those who understand their true character. The mere fact, therefore, that a government chances to be sustained by a majority, of itself proves nothing that is necessary to be proved, in order to know whether such government should be sustained, or not.

Seventh. The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that --- however bloody --- can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.

III

But to say that the consent of either the strongest party, or the most numerous party, in a nation, is sufficient justification for the establishment or maintenance of a government that shall control the whole nation, does not obviate the difficulty. The question still remains, how comes such a thing as "a nation" to exist? How do millions of men, scattered over an extensive territory --- each gifted by nature with individual freedom; required by the law of nature to call no man, or body of men, his masters; authorized by that law to seek his own happiness in his own way, to do what he will with himself and his property, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal liberty of others; authorized also, by that law, to defend his own rights, and redress his own wrongs; and to go to the assistance and defence of any [*10] of his fellow men who may be suffering any kind of injustice --- how do millions of such men come to be a nation, in the first place? How is it that each of them comes to be stripped of his natural, God-given rights, and to be incorporated, compressed, compacted, and consolidated into a mass with other men, whom he never saw; with whom he has no contract; and towards many of whom he has no sentiments but fear, hatred, or contempt? How does he become subjected to the control of men like himself, who, by nature, had no authority over him; but who command him to do this, and forbid him to do that, as if they were his sovereigns, and he their subject; and as if their wills and their interests were the only standards of his duties and his rights; and who compel him to submission under peril of confiscation, imprisonment, and death?

Clearly all this is the work of force, or fraud, or both.

By what right, then, did we become "a nation?" By what right do we continue to be "a nation?" And by what right do either the strongest, or the most numerous, party, now existing within the territorial limits, called "The United States," claim that there really is such "a nation" as the United States? Certainly they are bound to show the rightful existence of "a nation," before they can claim, on that ground, that they themselves have a right to control it; to seize, for their purposes, so much of every man's property within it, as they may choose; and, at their discretion, to compel any man to risk his own life, or take the lives of other men, for the maintenance of their power.

To speak of either their numbers, or their strength, is not to the purpose. The question is by what right does the nation exist? And by what right are so many atrocities committed by its authority? or for its preservation?

The answer to this question must certainly be, that at least such a nation exists by no right whatever.

We are, therefore, driven to the acknowledgment that nations and governments, if they can rightfully exist at all, can exist only by consent. [*11]

IV.

The question, then, returns, what is implied in a government's resting on consent?

Manifestly this one thing (to say nothing of the others) is necessarily implied in the idea of a government's resting on consent, viz: the separate, individual consent of every man who is required to contribute, either by taxation or personal service, to the support of the government. All this, or nothing, is necessarily implied, because one man's consent is just as necessary as any other man's. If, for example, A claims that his consent is necessary to the establishment or maintenance of government, he thereby necessarily admits that B's and every other man's are equally necessary; because B's and every other man's right are just as good as his own. On the other hand, if he denies that B's or any other particular man's consent is necessary, he thereby necessarily admits that neither his own, nor any other man's is necessary; and that government need to be founded on consent at all.

There is, therefore, no alternative but to say, either that the separate, individual consent of every man, who is required to aid, in any way, in supporting the government, is necessary, or that the consent of no one is necessary.

Clearly this individual consent is indispensable to the idea of treason; for if a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war upon it, he does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor that is, as a betrayer, or treacherous friend.

All this, or nothing, was necessarily implied in the Declaration made in 1776. If the necessity for consent, then announced, was a sound principle in favor of three millions of men, it was an equally sound one in favor of three men, or of one man. If the principle was a sound one in behalf of men living on a separate continent, it was an equally sound one in behalf of a man living on a separate farm, or in a separate house. [*12]

Moreover, it was only as separate individuals, each acting for himself, and not as members of organized governments, that the three millions declared their consent to be necessary to their support of a government; and, at the same time, declared their dissent to the support of the British Crown. The governments, then existing in the Colonies, had no constitutional power, as governments, to declare the separation between England and America. On the contrary, those governments, as governments, were organized under charters from, and acknowledged allegiance to, the British Crown. Of course the British king never made it one of the chartered or constitutional powers of those governments, as governments, to absolve the people from their allegiance to himself. So far, therefore, as the Colonial Legislatures acted as revolutionists, they acted only as so many individual revolutionists, and not as constitutional legislatures. And their representatives at Philadelphia, who first declared Independence, were, in the eye of the constitutional law of that day, simply a committee of Revolutionists, and in no sense constitutional authorities, or the representatives of constitutional authorities.

It was also, in the eye of the law, only as separate individuals, each acting for himself, and exercising simply his natural rights as an individual, that the people at large assented to, and ratified the Declaration.

It was also only as so many individuals, each acting for himself, and exercising simply his natural rights, that they revolutionized the constitutional character of their local governments, (so as to exclude the idea of allegiance to Great Britain); changing their forms only as and when their convenience dictated.

The whole Revolution, therefore, as a Revolution, was declared and accomplished by the people, acting separately as individuals, and exercising each his natural rights, and not by their governments in the exercise of their constitutional powers.

It was, therefore, as individuals, and only as individuals, each acting for himself alone, that they declared that their consent that is, their individual consent for each one could consent only [*13] for himself --- was necessary to the creation or perpetuity of any government that they could rightfully be called on to support.

In the same way each declared, for himself, that his own will, pleasure, and discretion were the only authorities he had any occasion to consult, In determining whether he would any longer support the government under which be had always lived. And if this action of each individual were valid and rightful when he had so many other individuals to keep him company, it would have been, in the view of natural justice and right, equally valid and rightful, if he had taken the same step alone. He had the same natural right to take up arms alone to defend his own property against a single tax-gatherer, that he had to take up arms in company with three millions of others, to defend the property of all against an army of tax-gatherers.

Thus the whole Revolution turned upon, asserted, and, in theory, established, the right of each and every man, at his discretion, to release himself from the support of the government under which he had lived. And this principle was asserted, not as a right peculiar to themselves, or to that time, or as applicable only to the government then existing; but as a universal right of all men, at all times, and under all circumstances.

George the Third called our ancestors traitors for what they did at that time. But they were not traitors in fact, whatever he or his laws may have called them. They were not traitors in fact, because they betrayed nobody, and broke faith with nobody. They were his equals, owing him no allegiance, obedience, nor any other duty, except such as they owed to mankind at large. Their political relations with him had been purely voluntary. They had never pledged their faith to him that they would continue these relations any longer than it should please them to do so; and therefore they broke no faith in parting with him. They simply exercised their natural right of saying to him, and to the English people, that they were under no obligation to continue their political connexion with them, and that, for reasons of their own, they chose to dissolve it. [*14]

What was true of our ancestors, is true of revolutionists in general. The monarchs and governments, from whom they choose to separate, attempt to stigmatize them as traitors. But they are not traitors in fact; in-much they betray, and break faith with, no one. Having pledged no faith, they break none. They are simply men, who, for reasons of their own --- whether good or bad, wise or unwise, is immaterial --- choose to exercise their natural right of dissolving their connexion with the governments under which they have lived. In doing this, they no more commit the crime of treason --- which necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith --- than a man commits treason when he chooses to leave a church, or any other voluntary association, with which he has been connected.

This principle was a true one in 1776. It is a true one now. It is the only one on which any rightful government can rest. It is the one on which the Constitution itself professes to rest. If it does not really rest on that basis, it has no right to exist; and it is the duty of every man to raise his hand against it.

If the men of the Revolution designed to incorporate in the Constitution the absurd ideas of allegiance and treason, which they had once repudiated, against which they had fought, and by which the world had been enslaved, they thereby established for themselves an indisputable claim to the disgust and detestation of all mankind.

____________

In subsequent numbers, the author hopes to show that, under the principle of individual consent, the little government that mankind need, is not only practicable, but natural and easy; and that the Constitution of the United States authorizes no government, except one depending wholly on voluntary support.

Sow the Seed

2009-09-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Living is the component that defines life. Love is the seed from witch divine joy springs forth. Today the world is overflowing with a river of fear, greed, and hate. Tomorrow the world will be filled with? What tomorrow holds is up to you and me as our actions in the now determine the moment to come. Just as the flower can not bloom if the seed does not fall, love can not flow if the tap is closed.

The time is now as it has always been and will always be, and now is your time to prepare the garden for the seeds. First the ground must be cleared of the junk and debris that clutters out the trees. As we remove the trash and prepare the ground for the sowing of the seed it is important to take notes of the topography of the earth and sky.

How does the rain flow?
In what direction does the prevailing wind blow?
Where does the summer sun rise and set?
Where among the clouds does the winter sun spring forth before finally taking a rest?

The mind is but a garden it is you who must become the steward and the earth will again be free.

Stop the Projector

2009-07-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

It's well past time to stop the projector and change the real.

It is the duty of each individual to control their thought and the image that is projected by these thoughts. For six to seven thousand years the mind of the mob has been manipulated to create a false image, leading to the mass projection of fiction. The projectors of fiction are worn out and eroding in the cesspool of greed and corruption that brought them to the screen. As the mind reawakens to it's divine nature, and the thought is unshackled from the devises of control, reality will once again shine bright for all to see.

The current image being projected through the mind of the masses is coming to an end. The lights are coming up as the seats empty, the waste lays on the floor, and the image fades away leaving in its wake an empty screen. The watcher has become the watched, as the duty to become the director dawns from above.

The sun rises bringing with it a new day as the rays of light shine down with joy giving energy to the projection of the eternal image of conscious beings. Man the perfection of creation, existing on all plains of being, being aware of one's self, willingly accepting the power and authority of the one, voluntarily working as two, will create a new image out of love for all to see. It is the image of the original thought, "eternal co-creation inspired by the power of love".

What image are you creating and what reality are you projecting on the screen? Reality is but a projection of thought, control the thought and direct the scene.

A Grand New Day

2009-06-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Good day to all as we awaken from the nights sleep and leap for the coming new day. Lets us wash in the divine waters and eat from the grandest of tables. The day brings a new light to the the journey through immortality, as the mind, body, and soul become one with the divine consciousness. Let us co-create on this day a splendid future for all to come and bring joy to the universe in its splendid beauty.

Water that which brings life.

2009-05-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Link:

2009-03-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

If we don't seek to understand consciousness, can we actually ever make a conscientious decision. We perceive that being awake is what constitutes being conscious. When we wake we are conscious and when we sleep we are unconscious, got your lights turned out?

Holding on to 'know thyself'

2009-03-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

It's embarrassing I know, but I have never taken a trip. Of the psychotropic variety, that is. Everyone I know has done so, but somehow I missed out. I have no great philosophical objection to it all. Quite the opposite - so many people have told me that I really must do it that I've put the word out that if anyone comes across a goldtop mushie, pop it in some honey and give me a hoy. Continue>>>

Don Tolman: Whole foods

2009-03-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

Song worth sharing

2009-03-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

All the things that I wanted I can't change them now.
I can be free in the long run or I can be free right now.
I can dream about loving or I could love you right now.
Because the whole point of my trying to reach you some how.
To reach out and touch you and let you know I been loving you always from a long time ago.
I've been loving you always your precious and so fine, and your the crowning, crowing glory of my life time.
Every woman is an angel that you treat like one, you can look at your victims and see the damage you have done.
You can stop stop the hurting and the waters will clear.
There in the mirror love will appear.
Love will appear before your eyes, open your heart now and let love inside.
All the things that I wanted I can't change them now.
I can be free in the long run or I can be free right now.
I can dream about loving or I could love you right now.
Because the whole point of my trying to reach you some how.
Ya the whole point of my trying to reach you some how.

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=1518837

I send my love to you.
Phil

John Harris- "It's an illusion"

2009-02-15T11:04:00.001-08:00

August Spies autobiography, 1886.

2009-02-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

Autobiography of
August Spies

"Barbarians, savages, illiterate, ignorant Anarchists from Central Europe, men who cannot comprehend the spirit of our free American institutions," of these I am one. My name is August Vincent Theodore Spies, (pronounced Spees). I was born within the ruins of the old robbers castle Landeck, upon a high mountain's peak (Landeckerberg), Central Germany, in 1855. My father was a forester (a government administrator of a forest district); the forest house was a government building, and served -- only in a different form -- the same purposes the old castle had served several centuries before. The noble Knighthood of Highway robbery, the traces of which were still discernable to the remnants of the old castle, had passed away to make room for more genteel and less dangerous forms of plunder and robbery, as carried on in the modern dwelling under the present government. But while the people from old custom designate this and similar old ruins in the vicinity as "old Robber Castles," they speak with great deference of the present government buildings, in which they themselves are daily and hourly fleeced; they would even, I believe, fight for the maintenance of these lawful institutions.

How greatly these "Barbarians" differ from the intelligent American people! Tell the Americans to fight for the maintenance of our commercial robbing posts and fleecing institutions -- tell them to fight for the protection of the lawful enterprises of our Board of Trade men; Merchant princes, Railroad kings, and Factory lords -- would they do it? Alas, more rapidly, I fear, than those "Barbarians from Central Europe, who cannot comprehend the spirit of our free American institutions."

Viewed from a historic standpoint my birthplace is quite an interesting spot. And this is the only excuse I can offer for my selection of the place for said purpose. I admit I ought not have made the mistake, ought not have been born a foreigner, but little children, particularly unborn children, will make mistakes! However, I find no fault with such wise and intelligent men as Mr. Grinnell and His jury, for hanging men who were injudicious in the selection of their birthplace. Sins of this character deserve severe punishment; "society must protect itself against offenses of this kind."

But speaking of castle Landeck. Follow me there, reader, on a bright and clear day. We make our way up the old tower. Take care, or you will stumble over the debris. That? Oh, that is a piece of an old torture rack; we found it in one of the subterranean walks, together with several pieces of old ugly weapons, once used to maintain order among the victims but why do you shudder? The policeman's outfit of to-day is not quite so blunt and barbaric, it is true, but it is as effective and serves the same purpose. So, now, take my hand, I'll help you on top of the ruin. Look out for the bats. These winged lovers of darkness have great resemblance with kings, priests and masters in general; they dwell in the ruins of the "good old times," and become quite noisy when you disturb them or expose them to the light; adders, too, made this place their favorable habitation in former years and rendered it very dangerous for any one to place his sacrilegious foot upon this feudal monument; we killed them. They were the companions of the bats and owls; their fate has given the latter much uneasiness, and tears were entertained that something terrible would happen -- that the ghosts of the old 'noble knights' and 'noble dames' would come back and avenge the rudeless annihilation of the venerable reptiles, but nothing of the kind has transpired. I need hardly add that the work of renovation was greatly impeded by these venomous creatures; since their extermination we have made remarkable progress

You smile! Oh, no, I am not speaking of those other reptiles you seem to think of. But here, we have reached the top. Great view, is it not! Over there, about thirty minutes walk from here, (west) you see another ruin like this; that is castle Dreieck, and over there an equal distance (southwest) you see another one, Wildeck. And now look down in the fertile valleys, the beautiful meadows and fields and flourishing villages! Of the latter you can count a dozen, all located around this mount; and do you know that all these villages and others which have been laid waste during the thirty years war were tributary to the robbers who ruled over them in these three castles? Yes, the people in these villages worked all their lives from early dawn till late at night to fill the vaults of those noble knights, who in return had the kindness to maintain 'Peace and order' for them. For example: If one of these toiling peasants expressed his dissatisfaction of the existing order of things, if he complained of the heavy and unbearable tasks placed upon him, 'law and order' demanded that he be placed upon one of those racks you have seen a relic of, to be tortured into obedience and submission. 'Society had to protect itself against this class of criminals.' The noble knights had their Grinnells, Bonfields and Pinkertons as well as their descendants have them today; and while they were less civilized than their descendants of our time, they got along wonderfully well. To accomplish their beneficent objects, they did not even require the assistance of a Chicago jury.

Many of the peasants were put to an ignominious death. Some of them would persist in their folly that it could not be the object of society nor the intention of Providence to have a thousand good people kill themselves in a laborious life for the glory, enrichment and grandeur of a few ungrateful, vicious wretches. Such dangerous teachings were a menace to society, and their promulgators were unceremoniously stamped out.

Not more than 200 feet from where we stand there is a perpendicular (chasm) hole of volcanic origin; it is about 8 feet in length and 3 in breadth; its depth has never been ascertained. The saying goes that scores of girls were cast into this terrible abyss by the valiant Knights during their reign of peace and good order! It is said that these benevolent "respectables" of ancient times kidnapped the pretty girls of the villages, carried them like birds of prey to their lofty abodes, and then when they got tired of them, or found ,,something better," disposed of them in this way.

Oh, I see, you shake your heads incredulously! Have you never seen the dumping grounds of the modern knighthood in our large cities-a similar abyss? No? It is more frightful than the one I have told you about; its name is prostitution.

You don't believe the people would have borne all these outrages-? My friend, your rebellious spirit carries you away. The "orderly and good people" suffered these atrocities just as silently as our "law and order abiding workingmen" bear them today. I told you what happened to those who showed resistance!

My words make you sad, turn you pessimistic? Let me show you something else. Look through these two mounts; can you see a tower in the dim distance-yes? At the side of this tower are yet to be seen the ruins of the first chapel built in the realms of the old heathen, but free and liberty-loving Germans. It was founded by one of the apostles of St. Boniface, in the eighth century; his name was Lullus. With this chapel and others that soon followed the poison of Oriental servilism, the gospel of man's degradation, resignation and asceticism was first introduced. The old Cherutker and Katten, who had

in mortal combat thrust the Roman eagle to the ground, were less successful in resisting the mind infecting poison of pestilential Rome; it came flowing in incessantly through the channels of the Christian church. It is true, the healthy and robust Germans were not an easy prey to the pessimistic belief of a debauched and dying race-(Rome) they never have been good Christiansbut they became sufficiently infected to lose their consciousness and pride of manhood for a while, to fall into the despairing vagaries of the Orient, and as a natural consequence into serfdom. If life had no value, why then aspire to liberty? Friend, the ruins of yonder chapel is the monument of an epoch that gave birth to such robberburgs as the one we stand upon. The people would have raised these roosts to the ground long before they did, if the priest had not stood between them and "Law and Order." The priest is an essential indivisible part of the despot and oppressor; he is the conciliatory link between them and their victims.

These two ruins, once sacred as the pedestals of social order, are prophetic monuments. Man will so stand upon the ruins of the present order and will say as you say now-"was it possible !"

But now turn around-along this mountain chain, northeast, there, where the earth dips mistily into the horizon, the periphery of our view-do you see yonder gray spot, it looks like a small cloud? Yes? That's the Wartburg, you have heard of Wartburg. It was here, where Dr. Martinus Luther lived and worked, an instrument of the revolutionary forces; the revolutionary forces, my friend, that gradually had developed in these villages.

It is our custom to attribute great movements to single individuals, as being their merit. This is always wrong and it was so with Luther. The Germanic race could not digest the Byzantinian philosophy as embodied in the Judaic and Christian teachings. The idea that this world was calculated to be simply a purgatory and our life a martyrdom was repulsive to them, was that servitude and despotism were growing from the seed of the new religion and developing, where once had been the habitation of liberty; developing at such a rate, that patience ceased to be a virtue. The rebellious spirit of the people. their animosity to the doctrine of self-abnegation, imposed upon them by the church, had been successfully calmed and suppressed by the priests for several centuries. But as the iniquties of the "nobility," and the domestic burdens of the people grew unbearable this spirit burst out in flames, and in Luther found a crystallization point.

From the Wartburg then the mighty wave of the reformation rolled forth. It was the Occident struggling in self- preservation against the Orient. The love of liberty which had been lying spellbound in the people's heart for generations, now flowed out in lucid streams; the magic spell was broken But the "nobility," while they wanted liberation from the despotism of the Roman Church, they liked the privileges the latter had given them; the patent to rob the peasants of their labor too well-they scorned the idea of the common people aspiring to economic freedom. Was not "spiritual liberty," a change of certain religious notions, enough for any common man? Luther soon became the tool of these cheating knaves, and wielded his pen in condemnation of the objects contended for by the people. He denounced the true and brave leaders of the people, the fearless Thomas Muenzer and his associates, worse than the Pope had denounced him shortly before.

And when the liberty-thirsty people finally took up their scythes and axes and forks, and drove the "noble Knights" from their robbers' roosts, it was Luther who brought about a vast conspiracy of the latter against the people. It is characteristic that now all religious differences were set aside and all petty tyrants combined to subdue the people. Papist or Lutheran, all were instantly united in the crusade against labor. (America at this time presents an analagous spectacle: Republicans and Democrats "embrace each other as Nectar and Ambrosia," wherever labor rises for emancipation.)

Of course, the people were conspirators and incendiaries. Hear what Thomas Muenzer said:---Lookyou, the sediment of the soup of usury, theft and robbery are the Great, the masters. they take all creatures as their property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air; and the vegetation of the earth. And then they preach God's commandment to the poor; 'Thou shall not steal.' But this is not for themselves. They bone and scrape the poor farmer and mechanic until these have nothing left, then, when the latter put their hands on the sacred things, they are hanged. And Doctor Liar says, Amen! The masters do it themselves. that the poor man hates them. The cause of the rebellion they won't abolish, how then can things change to the better. And I say this, I am an incendiary-let it be so!" No, these words were not spoken in Judge Gary's court! You make a mistake, reader, the language is not modern, it's 400 years old And the man who used it was in the right. He interpreted the Gospel, saying that it did not merely promise blessings in heaven, but that it also commanded the equality and brotherhood among men on earth. The champions of law and order and Christendom chopped his head off.

The rebels were victorious at first, but against the united vassals of their oppressors they could not stand. At the foot of this mount they were defeated, down there, where you see that big rock, surrounded by magnificent oaks, the battle for freedom was fought and, alas, lost. No, it was not lost, it was merely interceded by a temporary victory of the enemy.

The spirit of the Reformation was the "eternal spirit of the chainless mind," and nothing could stay its progress. Gibbets, stakes, tortures, and dungeons were of no avail. On the contrary, the blood of the martyrs only intensified the flame of liberty, until it sprang from land to land, kindling everywhere the discontent of the oppressed in its irresistible triumphant course.

These ruins still bear evidence of its tremendous force! The most momentous thing accomplished by this rebellious and lawless spirit, however, was the openings of the new world. The reformation gave birth to the young giant, America; it gave England a Cromwell and France a Richelieu. Its fermenting force drove the Huguenots from France and the Puritans from England. But for the reformation and the persecution of its adherents, these early settlers of the western hemisphere would have remained in France and England as good and law-abiding citizens. As dangerous elements, society had to protect itself against them, and they fled over the Atlantic rather than to suffer martyrdom at home for their "advanced ideas."

The reformation, my friend, which started right here, in the country where four centuries later the "Barbarian Anarchists" came from, "who cannot comprehend the spirit of American institutions," etc broke down the feudal barriers, which impeded human progress. It was asserted in a thirty year's war, that laid the continent desolate, that the exercise of free thought and opinion as well as scientific investigation should no longer be suppressed because they conflicted with religious superstitution and dogma generally believed in and sanctified by custom. The "good and law-abiding" people were fanatically opposed to those in favor of that imperative change, and oceans of blood had to be shed in consequence. The ruins you see here wherever you turn your eyes bear witness of the terrible war that is not yet ended-the war for human emancipation and freedom. economic, political and religious. Every one of these ruins is a milestone on the path of social progress. At our feet lies the historic chausee, upon which Napoleon's victorious armies, much against the intention of their grand empereur, carried the seed of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" to the far cast, and there opened a new perspective to the purblind eyes of the oppressed and down-trodden millions of our race. Aye. even now that seed is bringing forth good fruit. Russian dungeons, gibbets and Siberia bear witness.

Now, friend, before we retire from this retrospective view. look once more into the mirror of the past I.000 years, observe closely the traces that lead from yonder chapel to this castle, from this castle to the Wartburg, from the Wartburg to the battlefield below here and to their ruins, and then follow them to England, France and America, follow them up to this day and then tell me, if you do not see the contours of the future reflected You do!

I have dwelled at great length in describing my (barbarian) birth place, but in so doing I have traversed in a general way over the history of I,000 years. The present status of society is but the result of the struggle of human kind during this and preceding periods-yes, struggle! "You cannot reform the world by the sprinkling of rose oil," said Mirabeau, and history proves the correctness of this statement. In no age did the rulers and despoilers of our race relinquish their hold upon the throat of their victims, until forced so-by logic and argument? No Blood, the precious sap was ever the price of liberty.

My years of childhood were pleasant. I played and studied. How different from the childhood of the offsprings of the average workingman in this "glorious, civilized and-according to Grinnell-enlightened country." The children of the proletaire have no youth; the spring of life has no sunshine, no blossoms, no flowers for them! If there is a discernible object in their existence it is that of serving to make life happy and pleasant for those who tread upon them. In my native land children must attend school daily from the age of 6 to that of 14; every child in that "Barbarian country" is thus compelled to attend school for 8 years, and cannot therefore be "utilized and made to pay" by either their parents or factory lords. In this enlightened country the children of the wage-workers do not attend school in the average more than two years; they learn just enough to serve as a piece of organic machinery, and as such they are "let out" to benevolent and Christian employers in their tenderest years. Their vitality, which is needed for their own bodily and intellectual development, is in such wise tapped from the innocents and turned into gold for our "law and order" loving, respectable citizens. They die from consumption before they attain their maturity, or resort to whiskey, thinking thereby to restore their lost vigor. If they escape early destruction, their career is generally terminated in one of those charitable or reformatory institutes known as the insane asylum, the penitentiary, or poorhouse.

But woe to the wretch who condemns this order of things! He is an "enemy of civilization," and "society must protect itself against such criminals." . .... There comes the star-spangled Mephisto, Bonfield, with his noble guards of "Liberty;" there comes the savior of the state, Grinnell, with the visage of a Sicilian brigand, there comes the hireling juror, and there comes the vast horde of social vultures. Unisono is the anathema. Unisono is the cry- "To the gallows!"

"Society" is saved, and "Liberty and order" -- of the policeman's club -- triumph! Selah!

I do not intend to say that the condition of the wage-workers in Germany is better than in this country, but I will say that I never saw such real suffering from want as I have seen in this country. And there is more protection for women and children in Germany than here.

(I was educated for a career in the government service forest branch.) As a child I had private tutors, and later visited the Polytechnicum in Cassel. At the age of seventeen my father died suddenly, leaving a large family in moderate circumstances. As I was the eldest one I did not feel justified in continuing my studies-they were expensive-and concluded to go to America, where I had and have now a number of well-to-do relatives. I arrived in New York in 1872 and upon the advice of my friends I learned the furniture business. The following year I came to Chicago, where I have resided ever since; though I may add that I have been away from the city occasionally for some time. Once, with the intention of settling in the country, I worked on a farm for a year. But seeing that the small farmers and renters were in a worse plight even than the city wage-workers, and that they were equally dependent, I returned to the city. I have also traveled over the Southern States to get acquainted with the country and people, and at another time, I joined an exploring expedition through Upper Canada, which failed.

When I arrived in this country I knew nothing of Socialism, except what I had seen in the newspapers, the "public teachers" (?), and from what I'd read I concluded that the Socialists were a lot of ignorant and lazy vagabonds "who wanted to divide up everything." Having come but very little in contact with people who earned their living by honest labor in the old country, I was amazed and was shocked when I became acquainted with the condition of the wage-workers in the new world.

The factory, the ignominious regulations, the surveillance, the spy system, the servility and lack of manhood among the workers and the arrogant arbitrary behavior of the boss and his associates-all this made an impression upon me that I have never been able to divest myself of. At first I could not understand why the workers, among them many old men with bent backs, silently and without a sign of protest bore every insult the caprice of the foreman or boss would heap upon them. I was not then aware of the fact that the opportunity to work was a privilege, a favor, and that it was in the power of those who were in the possession of the factories and instruments of labor to deny or grant this privilege. I did not then understand how difficult it was to find a purchaser for one's labor. I did not know then that there were thousands and thousands of idle human bodies in the market, ready to hire out upon most any conditions, actually begging for employment. I became conscious of this very soon, however, and I knew then why these people were so servile, why they suffered the humiliating dictates and capricious whims of their employers. Personally I had no great difficulty in -getting along." I had so many advantages over my co-workers. I would most likely have succeeded in becoming a respectable business man myself, if I had been possessed of that unscrupulous egotism which characterizes the successful business man, and if my aspirations had been that of the avaricious Hamster (the latter belongs to the family of rats, and his "pursuit in life" is to steal and accumulate; in some of their depositories the contents of whole granaries have often been found; their greatest delight seems to be possession, for they steal a great deal more than they can consume; in fact they steal, like most of our respectable citizens, regardless of their capacity of consumption). My philosophy has always been that the object of life can only consist in the enjoyment of life, and that the rational application of this principle is true morality.

I held that ascetism, as taught by the Church, was a crime against nature.

Now observing that the vast mass of the people were wasting their lives in drudgery, accompanied with want and misery, it was but natural for me to inquire into the causes. (I had up to that time never read a book, or even an impartial essay on Modern Socialism). Was this self-abegnation, this selfcrucifixion of the people voluntary, or was it forced upon them, and if so, by whom?

About this time, while looking over my books in search of something, my attention was attracted by this passage from Aristotle:` "When, at some future age, every tool upon command, or by predestination, will perform its work as the art works of Daedalus did, who moved by themselves, or like the three feet of Hephaestos, who went to their sacred work spontaneously, when thus the weaver shuttles will weave by themselves, then we will no longer require masters and slaves.-

Had this time, long ago anticipated by the great thinker, not come? Yes, it had. There were the machines. But master and slave still existed. The question arose in my mind, is their existence still necessary?

Antiporas, a Greek poet, who lived at the time of Cicero, had in a like manner greeted the invention of the water- mill (water power) as the emancipator of male and female slaves. "Oh, these heathens!" writes Karl Marx, after quoting the above; "they knew nothing of Political Economy and Christendom! They failed to conceive how nicely the machines could be employed to lengthen the hours of toil and to intensify the burdens of the slaves. They (the heathens) excused the slavery of one on the ground that it would afford the opportunity of human development to another. But to preach the slavery of the masses in order that a few rude and arrogant parvenus might become 'eminent spinners,' 'extensive sausage makers' and 'influential shoe black dealers'-to do this they lacked the specific Christian organ.

I think it was in 1875, at the time the "workingmen's Party of Illinois," was organized, when, upon the invitation of a friend, I visited the first meeting in which a lecture on Socialism was delivered. If viewed from a theoretical standpoint this lecture, delivered by a young mechanic, was not very impressive, but the substance I win simply say that this lecture gave me the passeparout to the many interrogation marks which had worried me for a number of years.

I procured every piece of literature I could get on the subject; whether it was adverse or friendly to Socialism made no difference. In the beginning I was a visionary, an enthusiast. I believed as so many righteous people do today that the truth only required to be expressed, the argument only to be made to enlist every good man and woman in the good cause of humanity. In my youthful enthusiasm I forgot to apply the experience of historical progress to this particular case. But to my great sorrow I soon became convinced that the bulk of humanity were automatons, incapable of thinking and reasoning, altogether unconscious of themselves, simply tools of custom.

"For from the sordid is man made,
Usage and custom he doth call his nurse."

-Goethe.

But nothing could discourage me. The study of French, German and English economists and social scientists soon made me view things differently than I had seen them in my first enthusiasm. Buckle's "History of Civilization," Karl Marx' "Kapital," and Morgan's "Ancient Society" have probably had the greatest influence over me of any-I now became an attentive observer of the various social phenomena myself. The last ten years have been very favorable for such investigation as I sought. I found my favorite teachers corroborated everywhere.

I think it was in 1877 when I first became a member of the Socialistic Labor Party. The events of that year, the brute force with which the whining and confiding wage slaves were met on all sides impressed upon me the necessity of like resistance. The latter required organization. Shortly afterwards I joined the "Lehr und Wehr Verein," an armed organization of the workingmen, numbering about I,500 well-drilled members. As soon as our patricians saw that the canaille were arming for defence to repel such scandalous attacks in the future as had been made upon them in 1877, they at once commanded their law agents in Springfield to prohibit workinginen from bearing arms. The command was obeyed.

The workingmen also went into politics, independent politics. I served as a nominal candidate myself several times, but when the noble patricians and the political augurs saw that they were successful in electing a number of their candidates, a conspiracy was organized to disfranchise them by fraudulent count and like methods. The workingmen. thereupon left the ballot with disgust.

Although I have myself in past years advocated political action, I have never for an instant believed that thereby the social evils would be abolished or even that reforms, benefiting the workingmen, could thus be brought about,-I viewed "political action," simply and solely as a good means of propaganda. Believing, as I do, that the economic body, is the organism of society, the substructure of all social, political, and moral institutions and operations, I cannot but repel the idea that the foundation of society could be changed by alterations of it, or by a structure that rests upon it, and would tumble down the very minute the foundation was touched.

The economic emancipation in my opinion can be achieved through an economic struggle only, not through politics-although the latter may be one of the many forces of organization, necessary in the development of things to bring the final struggle to a focus. Indeed it looks so at the present time.

To enter into this question more thoroughly in a mere autobiography would lead us too far. But if your readers should desire to hear my views upon this subject, I shall gladly furnish you a special contribution.

As stated before, since my arrival in New York (1872 until 1879) I was engaged in the furniture business (upholstery). Being of a very independent disposition, I began to work for myself in 1876 by opening a small shop. In the same year my mother, three little brothers and one sister emigrated to this city, with whom I have lived ever since, and who were for some years dependent upon me. Nothing very eventful occurred during these years.

In the spring of 1880 the Arbeiter Zeitung, the German workingmen's organ, a paper which had been started in 1872 as a weekly, and which had since grown into an influential daily, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Mismanagement was the cause of it. I was called upon by the society to take the management, and shortly after was elected superintendent, and still later editor. The paper was saved, and has at this writing the largest circulation of any German paper in this city. The German workingmen are justly proud of their organ; it belongs to them as a class, and no one has a private interest in it. I hope our English-speaking friends may soon follow this example. An English daily workingmen's paper, owned and controlled by the workingmen is surely needed here.

The politicians tried to befriend themselves with me; looking for the support of the Arbeiter Zeitung. And when they failed as they always did, they began to hate me. The worst thing they could say against me was -- "he is a fanatic." So demoralized and degraded have the champions of "free government" (for them!) become that in the judgment of a man that is not in the market, who is not for sale, must necessarily be a fanatic!

One of the members of the grand jury which indicted us has issued a pronunciamento to the effect that we were mercenaries, who made money out of the labor agitation, was Banker E. S. Dreyer. This same man was treasurer of the Democratic campaign committee during the last presidential campaign, during which said committee offered me $I0,000 if I would agree to say nothing damaging of Cleveland. He certainly must have known this; and he must have also known that I morally "bounced" the man who made the offer (he happened to be a friend of mine) out of the office. This same man, Dreyer, about three years ago had sold a piece of property to the School Board for $32,000. The property was located on the corner of Cass and Illinois streets. The common council was about to ratify the bargain when I learned that the same lots had shortly before been offered for sale for-I think-$I6,000. I made all the noise I could, an investigation proved the attempted "boodler," and the "job" was spoiled.

When I consider that such men as he have indicted and convicted me and my comrades for murder; when I consider that these are the men who raise the cry that we are "dangerous to society," I am reminded of the old dodge, ',stop the thief!" But it is sad to reflect that the good people are so easily being led astray.

Among those whose wrath I have brought upon me are our governors, the good police. For years I have exposed their blackmailing practices, their brutalities and general "pursuits." If their deeds and behavior could not bear the light, it was not my fault! When about eleven and a half years ago I had the desk sergeant of the West Chicago Avenue station arrested for brutally outraging a young girl while in the station, and nearly killing her (Martha Seidel), the star-spangled libertines of the city swore dire vengeance. They have got it now, they think.

That I have made myself generally obnoxious to the extortionists and fleecers during my management of the Arbeiter Zeitung-this I need hardly add. To conclude with: I am proud of the enemies, and no less of the friends I have made.

I have been a member of the "Ameri-Kanische Turner Bund" for a long number of years. Two years ago I was elected a delegate to the national convention of this powerful organization, and succeeded in having a socialistic plank inserted in the platform.

I was also a member of the Knights of Labor once -- about three years ago -- but the Assembly to which I belonged dissolved, and I never since have renewed my membership, principally, because I never liked secrecy or ceremonies in an organization. But I have frequently lectured in meetings of "Knights," when invited.

As an oral agitator among the wage-workers, I have been very active. I was a delegate to the congress of the Revolutionary Socialists, held in this city, in 1881, and also a delegate to the congress of the International Working People's Association, held in Pittsburgh, in 1883.

I have addressed meetings in most of the industrial cities in the states. During the strike in the Hocking Valley I visited that locality and spoke to enthusiastic meetings, notwithstanding the good Pinkertons who threatened to kill me and who attended the meetings with Winchester rifles.

My connection with the meeting on the Haymarket, on May 4th, 1886, did not go beyond that of an invited speaker. I had been invited to address the meeting in German, but no English speakers being present I spoke in English. The meeting had been called by the representatives of a number of Trades Unions. Those present were workingmen of all beliefs and views; they were not Anarchists, nor were the speeches anarchistic, they treated on the eight-hour question. Anarchism was not even referred to by anyone. But Anarchism was good enough to serve as a scape-goat for Bonfield. This fiend, in order to justify his murderous attack upon that meeting, said "they were Anarchists." -Anarchists! Oh, horror!" The stupid mass imagined that -Anarchists- must be something very bad, and they joined in the chorus with their enemies and fleecers: "Crucify! Crucify!"

"Tis easy to astonish or appal

The vulgar mass which molds a horde of slaves."

All the pertaining to this matter may be found in my speech before my hangman Gary and his worthy assistants.

In the cause of humanity and light, Yours,

A. Spies.

Two brains which do you choose?

2009-02-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

A Path

2008-10-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

As I walk down this dark, overgrown path I will stumble and occasionally fall over the many obstacles in the way. Falling is not a concern along the path less traveled as it is a sure thing, having the strength to regain footing is the only issue. The way is not smoothly paved or lit up with bright lights like main street. There are few signs showing the path, or what direction to take as the next fork in the road approaches. The path is so remote that very few have traveled along it's steep winding edge and not got faint of heart. Those that are encountered on the path don't remember which way they came, only when they started and what direction they now consider forward. The trails lead up and down and around and around but there is a sense of excitement and reality the whole way. When one ventures down this path of truth there is very little doubt that forward is the way to go.

The Marijuana Trick

2008-10-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

Doug Yurchey – 2005

And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land. – Ezekiel 34/29

Where did the word 'marijuana' come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant...as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which was printed on hemp paper for 150 years:

* All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s; Hemp Paper Reconsidered, Jack Frazier, 1974.

* It was LEGAL TO PAY TAXES WITH HEMP in America from 1631 until the early 1800s; LA Times, Aug. 12, 1981.

* REFUSING TO GROW HEMP in America during the 17th and 18th Centuries WAS AGAINST THE LAW! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1769; Hemp in Colonial Virginia, G. M. Herdon.

* George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.

* Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow's export to England; Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer.

* For thousands of years, 90% of all ships' sails and rope were made from hemp. The word 'canvas' is Dutch for hemp; Webster's New World Dictionary.

* 80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc. were made from hemp until the 1820s with the introduction of the cotton gin.

* The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross's flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp; U.S. Government Archives.

* The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th Century; State Archives.

* Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 5000 years in China, although hemp industrialization probably goes back to ancient Egypt.

* Rembrandts, Gainsborough’s, Van Gogh’s as well as most early canvas paintings were principally painted on hemp linen.

* In 1916, the U.S. Government predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down. Government studies report that 1 acre of hemp equals 4.1 acres of trees. Plans were in the works to implement such programs; Department of Agriculture

* Quality paints and varnishes were made from hemp seed oil until 1937. 58,000 tons of hemp seeds were used in America for paint products in 1935; Sherman Williams Paint Co. testimony before Congress against the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act.

* Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.

* Hemp called 'Billion Dollar Crop.' It was the first time a cash crop had a business potential to exceed a billion dollars; Popular Mechanics, Feb., 1938.

* Mechanical Engineering Magazine (Feb. 1938) published an article entitled 'The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown.' It stated that if hemp was cultivated using 20th Century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The following information comes directly from the United States Department of Agriculture's 1942 14-minute film encouraging and instructing 'patriotic American farmers' to grow 350,000 acres of hemp each year for the war effort:

'...(When) Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable...

...Now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese...American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as of our industries...

...the Navy's rapidly dwindling reserves. When that is gone, American hemp will go on duty again; hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for victory!'

Certified proof from the Library of Congress; found by the research of Jack Herer, refuting claims of other government agencies that the 1942 USDA film 'Hemp for Victory' did not exist.

Hemp cultivation and production do not harm the environment. The USDA Bulletin #404 concluded that hemp produces 4 times as much pulp as wood with at least 4 to 7 times less pollution.

From Popular Mechanics, Feb. 1938:
'It has a short growing season...It can be grown in any state...The long roots penetrate and break the soil to leave it in perfect condition for the next year's crop. The dense shock of leaves, 8 to 12 feet above the ground, chokes out weeds.

...hemp, this new crop can add immeasurably to American agriculture and industry.'

In the 1930s, innovations in farm machinery would have caused an industrial revolution when applied to hemp. This single resource could have created millions of new jobs generating thousands of quality products. Hemp, if not made illegal, would have brought America out of the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division of Kimberly Clark owned vast acreage of timberlands. The Hearst Company supplied most paper products. Patty Hearst's grandfather, a destroyer of nature for his own personal profit, stood to lose billions because of hemp.

In 1937, Dupont patented the processes to make plastics from oil and coal. Dupont's Annual Report urged stockholders to invest in its new petrochemical division. Synthetics such as plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, Dacron, etc., could now be made from oil. Natural hemp industrialization would have ruined over 80% of Dupont's business.

THE TRICKS

Andrew Mellon became Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury and Dupont's primary investor. He appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. These men took an obscure Mexican slang word: 'marihuana' and pushed it into the consciousness of America.

MEDIA MANIPULATION

A media blitz of 'yellow journalism' raged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hearst's newspapers ran stories emphasizing the horrors of marihuana. The menace of marihuana made headlines. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from car accidents to loose morality.

Films like 'Reefer Madness' (1936), 'Marihuana: Assassin of Youth' (1935) and 'Marihuana: The Devil's Weed' (1936) were propaganda designed by these industrialists to create an enemy. Their purpose was to gain public support so that anti-marihuana laws could be passed.

Examine the following quotes from 'The Burning Question' aka REEFER
MADNESS:
*a violent narcotic.
*acts of shocking violence.
*incurable insanity.
*soul-destroying effects.
*under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an axe.
*more vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine) is the menace of marihuana!

Reefer Madness did not end with the usual 'the end.' The film concluded with these words plastered on the screen: TELL YOUR CHILDREN.

In the 1930s, people were very naive; even to the point of ignorance. The masses were like sheep waiting to be led by the few in power. They did not challenge authority. If the news was in print or on the radio, they believed it had to be true. They told their children and their children grew up to be the parents of the baby-boomers.

On April 14, 1937, the Prohibitive Marihuana Tax Law or the bill that outlawed hemp was directly brought to the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is the only one that can introduce a bill to the House floor without it being debated by other committees. The Chairman of the Ways and Means, Robert Doughton, was a Dupont supporter. He insured that the bill would pass Congress.

Dr. James Woodward, a physician and attorney, testified too late on behalf of the American Medical Association. He told the committee that the reason the AMA had not denounced the Marihuana Tax Law sooner was that the Association had just discovered that marihuana was/is hemp.

Few people, at the time, realized that the deadly menace they had been reading about on Hearst's front pages was in fact passive hemp. The AMA understood hemp to be a MEDICINE found in numerous healing products sold over the last hundred years.

In September of 1937, hemp became illegal. The most useful crop known became a drug and our planet has been suffering ever since.

Congress banned hemp because it was said to be the most violence-causing drug known. Anslinger, head of the Drug Commission for 31 years, promoted the idea that marihuana made users act extremely violent. In the 1950s, under the Communist threat of McCarthyism, Anslinger now said the exact opposite. Marijuana will pacify you so much that soldiers would not want to fight.

Today, our planet is in desperate trouble. Earth is suffocating as large tracts of rain forests disappear. Pollution, poisons and chemicals are killing people. These great problems could be reversed if we industrialized hemp. Natural biomass could provide all of the planet's energy needs that are currently supplied by fossil fuels. We have consumed 80% of our oil and gas reserves. We need a renewable resource. Hemp could be the solution to soaring gas prices.

THE WONDER PLANT

Hemp has a higher quality fiber than wood fiber. Far fewer caustic chemicals are required to make paper from hemp than from trees. Hemp paper does not turn yellow and is very durable. The plant grows quickly to maturity in a season where trees take a lifetime.

ALL PLASTIC PRODUCTS SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP SEED OIL. Hempen plastics are biodegradable! Over time, they would break down and not harm the environment. Oil-based plastics, the ones we are very familiar with, help ruin nature; they do not break down and will do great harm in the future. The process to produce the vast array of natural (hempen) plastics will not ruin the rivers as Dupont and other petrochemical companies have done. Ecology does not fit in with the plans of the Oil Industry and the political machine. Hemp products are safe and natural.

MEDICINES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. We should go back to the days when the AMA supported hemp cures. 'Medical Marijuana' is given out legally to only a handful of people while the rest of us are forced into a system that relies on chemicals. Hemp is only healthy for the human body.

WORLD HUNGER COULD END. A large variety of food products can be generated from hemp. The seeds contain one of the highest sources of protein in nature. ALSO: They have two essential fatty acids that clean your body of cholesterol. These essential fatty acids are not found anywhere else in nature! Consuming hemp seeds is the best thing you could do for your body. Eat uncooked hemp seeds.

CLOTHES SHOULD BE MADE FROM HEMP. Hemp clothing is extremely strong and durable over time. You could hand clothing, made from hemp, down to your grandchildren. Today, there are American companies that make hemp clothing; usually 50% hemp. Hemp fabrics should be everywhere. Instead, they are almost underground. Superior hemp products are not allowed to advertise on fascist television. Kentucky, once the top hemp producing state, made it ILLEGAL TO WEAR hemp clothing! Can you imagine being thrown into jail for wearing quality jeans?

The world is crazy...but that does not mean you have to join the insanity. Get together. Spread the news. Tell people, and that includes your children, the truth. Use hemp products. Eliminate the word 'marijuana.' Realize the history that created it. Make it politically incorrect to say or print the M-word. Fight against the propaganda (designed to favor the agenda of the super rich) and the bullshit. Hemp must be utilized in the future. We need a clean energy source to save our planet. INDUSTRIALIZE HEMP!

The liquor, tobacco and oil companies fund more than a million dollars a day to Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other similar agencies. We have all seen their commercials. Now, their motto is: 'It's more dangerous than we thought.' Lies from the powerful corporations, that began with Hearst, are still alive and well today.

The brainwashing continues. Now, the commercials say: If you buy a joint, you contribute to murders and gang wars. The latest anti-hemp commercials say: If you buy a joint...you are promoting TERRORISM! The new enemy (terrorism) has paved the road to brainwash you any way THEY see fit.

There is only one enemy; the friendly people you pay your taxes to; the war-makers and nature destroyers. With your funding, they are killing the world right in front of your eyes. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY TOBACCO. HALF A MILLION DEATHS EACH YEAR ARE CAUSED BY ALCOHOL.

Ingesting THC, hemp's active agent, has a positive effect; relieving asthma and glaucoma. A joint tends to alleviate the nausea caused by chemotherapy. You are able to eat on hemp. This is a healthy state of being.

The hemp plant is an ALIEN plant. There is physical evidence that hemp is not like any other plant on this planet. One could conclude that it was brought here for the benefit of humanity. Hemp is the ONLY plant where the males appear one way and the females appear very different, physically! No one ever speaks of males and females in regard to the plant kingdom because plants do not show their sexes; except for hemp. To determine what sex a certain, normal, Earthly plant is: You have to look internally, at its DNA. A male blade of grass (physically) looks exactly like a female blade of grass. The hemp plant has an intense sexuality.

HEMP IS ILLEGAL BECAUSE BILLIONAIRES WANT TO REMAIN BILLIONAIRES!

Man's mortification into sheeple

2008-05-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

Why is mankind acting like sheep? Someone on a forum asked me this question the other day after a post I responded to. While I started writing a response I asked myself why is this not one of the main questions asked by everybody trying to wake people up. Is the ignorance of the masses the main cause of the whole problem?

To find out why men are currently acting like sheeple you have to go back to the basics of humanity and look at what has driven mankind in the current direction. Taking a look back at some of the greatest creations known to man, the pyramids in Khemit and the Americas, you get a glimpse into the time period of decline. In western culture children are taught that humanity believed the world was flat until this great man Columbus came along and proved them wrong by stumbling upon the Americas. What a load of horse shit, and yet go out on the street and ask someone who discovered the Americas? When looking back at history of humans from a clear lens one can make out the writing on the canvas. Not only was the Americas not discovered but the world was known not to be flat as the mathematics of the Earth and Universe are contained in the pyramids which date back a lot longer then most are willing to admit.

The “civilized world,” as one might call it, has been lied to continuously for ages and it is getting worse in recent years. The masses have fallen asleep into a story and do not wish to wake up for the fear that with awareness comes responsibility. This state of sleepwalking has turned men into sheeple, and men will stay in this state until they realize they are dreaming or till they’re shaken consciously. This awakening will start when man realizes that scientifically, politically, and most of all religiously they have been lied to.

When dealing with the religion aspect of the story you see the first rise of group thought and control. All religion is based on fear of death and the promise of knowing how to obtain the afterlife. For if one does not fear death then control proves to be impossible. Fear of death is not natural only the instinct of survival is natural, while fear of "the end" is purely contrived illusion.

Fear is a conditioned response and not a natural feeling; it has been used to control man for the last stage or cycle of creation. The current stage is nearing its end; when and how? Who knows, only those which creation has shown. Many people have realized that what is written in the universe around them is all a message to the story of life. There is not a place one looks in the dimensional Universe that the story is not written. However, many choose to ignore the writings of creation for the writings of man, leading civilization into darkness.

Control's most successful tool has been to remove man from the earth, creating a separation from creation. No part of creation sees itself but only the whole of creation as one with self. Man's perceived separation from creation has led to the fear of purpose and worship of self. This has allowed man to be controlled threw the senses of the physical world.

Religion plays on the worship of self as the ultimate creation and thus perceived separation from creation. This concept has controlled man for the last 3,000 years or so. As a part of creation one cannot separate from creation, for all that was has always been. This is the message spoken by many enlightened or conscious messengers throughout history.

Religion is the practice of separation and worship of self as the divine creation, made to rule all other creation. When man perceives himself as separate from creation, fear is born. Thru this fear man can be controlled and manipulated to obey like dogs, by the way a very unnatural response for any animal. Men have tried to control the true teachings of creation, but will not succeed, for the message is written not only in the canvas of the physical dimension but as part of the whole creation.

As separate from creation, man must serve a purpose, instead of being a part of purpose. As one searches for truth of self one can be led back to the whole of creation and thus realize self only as a part of all creation. With the realization of being a part of all creation comes the responsibility of conscious thought and action.

A man can learn more about life by spending a day truly reading the canvas of the Universe than a lifetime in a library. Problem is man has forgot how and what to read. Those that look for the answers in man's knowledge will search for eternity; those that look for the answers in creation's knowledge will find in its way.

As creation cycles through consciousness, the realization of all as purpose will become again and all will wake form slumber. For the self perceived is only an illusion of the reflection perceived by self.

Fall of Mankind

2008-04-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

The Patriarchal Led Decent of Evolution

Man has led the world down a path of destruction and deceit into the abyss of darkness spread over the Mother of life with the shift from the matriarchal structure to the patriarchal structure. The two bodies of life from which all living creatures have been born are the Sun and the Earth. The Sun is the seed of life providing the energy and light for existence. The Earth is the caretaker and supporter of life providing the womb in which life grows. One cannot have life without both of these bodies. Humans from the known beginning of existence worshiped and cherished the Mother as the creator of life. It was not until the rise of modern patriarchal religion in society that the shift was made from life to death. With the rise of religion came the fall of mankind in to the current abyss of separation from creation. A seed can not grow without nutriment of Earth nor can it come into existence on its own.

The theory that humans have evolved in a linear pattern to an advanced civilization is a fallacy that must be corrected in order to change the current path of death to life.

The Existence of Consumption

2008-03-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

Existence and consumption are reliant on one another for one is not possible without the other. So the question is, is existence the product of consumption or is consumption the product of existence. Observations of existence on Earth would lead one to believe that consumption is the product of existence, thus all that exist must consume. If everything that exist's must consume what existed before consumption. The old adaptation "what came first the chicken or the egg".

Many question the term consumer when it is used by those in power to describe the minions. It is understandable due to the use of the word as merely calling people buyers of useless things. In all actuality consumption is life and life is consumption so all life could in fact be referred to as consumers. The current problems in the existence of consumers is the rate at which they are consuming. Out of all the organisms on Earth humans are relatively the only ones which consume more than is required for existence. When one examines all the questions regarding uses of power and control a common theme appears throughout, which is regulating that which is required for existence. Humanity must only look in the mirror to find the answer to the question of existence for ones consumption is it's existence.

Time = Control

2008-03-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

Time: The Dogma of Control
By Phil Williamson

Time is the controlling factor of society; we define our lives around it and make plans according to it. Society is in all regards regulated by time. As humans we are instructed at what point in time we are allowed to participate in all aspects of life within society. Life is in fact a journey thru time. So what is Time? Time can be simply defined as the movement thru space. What and whose movement, thru what space is time as we accept it defined as. A year is one revolution of the Earth around the Sun. Is the Sun the determent of all time or just Earth time?

The Earth rotates on its axis at approximately 1000 mph, completing roughly 365.25 rotations per cycle around the sun. NASA says it takes “365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 9.54 seconds to circle the sun.” So the Earth spins on its axis at 1000 mph completing one rotation in regards to the Sun in 24 hours and takes approximately 365.25 of these rotations to complete one revolution around the sun. So our basis for a solar year is one revolution of the Earth around the Sun, and solar day is one rotation of the Earth on its axis in regards to the position of the sun. So can we define time as a the relationship of the Earth to the Sun and the forces placed on one another do to rotational gravity.

It seems as though this makes some sense due to the fact that we live on Earth and depend on the Sun for life. However Earth is just one spec of mud revolving around the Sun a spec of light moving thru the infinite universe. So lets take a closer look at time and break it down into smaller parts as understood in society. A day is the 360 degree rotation of the Earth in regards to the sun, broken down into 24 hours or 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. So what is an hour?

An hour is defined according to Encarta as; “3,600 seconds, one of 24 equal parts of a day, or a measure of longitude equal to 15 degrees or one twenty-fourth of a great circle.” So an hour is 1/24 of a day or 15 degrees of the Earth's rotation on its axis. To understand this it must first be understood that objects in the Universe come to a complete rotation in 360 degrees. The Earth rotates 360 degrees in one day in relation to the sun. Thus an hour is defined as 1/24 or 15 degrees of the Earth’s 360 degree rotation on its axis in regards to the Sun. Now that an hour has been defined lets define a minute. A minute according to Encarta is, “a period of 60 seconds or a 60th part of an hour.” If a minute is 1/60 of an hour and an hour is a 1/24 of a day. Then a minute is 1/1440 of a day. If a day is the 360 degree rotation of Earth in regards to the Sun then a minute is 1/4 of a degree of the Earth’s rotation. Now lets break it down a little further a minute consists of 60 seconds, thus a second is 1/60 of a minute, 1/3600 of an hour, and 1/86,400 of a day. So a day is the Earth’s 360 degree rotation, thus a second is 1/240 of a degree of Earth’s rotation.

So time as defined in days, minutes, and seconds all relate to the Earth’s 360 degree rotation on its axis, and a year is the amount of rotations on that axis to complete a revolution of the Sun. So has the Earth always rotated at the same velocity on its axis and revolved around the sun at the same velocity. Simple answer, no it has not. So if time on Earth is defined as Earth’s 360 degree rotation and its revolution around the Sun then time is not a constant do to the increasing and decreasing velocity of rotation, and revolution of the Earth.

Lets now take a look at the calendar used throughout society as the schedule of time. The official calendar of Earth society at present is the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar was proposed by Aloysius Lilius, a physician from Naples, and adopted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The calendar consists of 365.2452 days divided into twelve months, or 52 weeks consisting of seven days. Why seven days in a week and twelve months in a year? Weeks and months have no relation to any objects movement through space. The notion of seven days comes from the earliest civilizations understandings of creation. The Christian church would have you believe that it is an original revelation of the Bible. However this is not the case, the Samaritans and the Mayans had an understanding of the seven cycles of creation way before Christianity was founded. But is there any reasoning scientifically for a seven day week? There is no relationship between the Earth and the Sun that occurs every seven days. Nor is there any relationship between the Earth and the Sun that suggests a year is twelve months.

So we have a definition of time that is based on the Earth’s rotation and its revolution around the Sun and a calendar that divides the year into twelve months and 52 weeks consisting of 7 days with no scientific relationship to the definition that is time on Earth. Let it also be known that the Gregorian Calendar was not simply adopted by all cultures, but was forced on society by the sword. Many cultures had there own calendars that consisted of 360 days and was divided into different increments. The Catholic Church spread the Gregorian Calendar throughout these cultures and killed all those that opposed it.

The Gregorian Calendar adopted many different aspects of pagan cultures such as the days of the week which are actually named after Gods of the Anglo-Saxton culture. The days of holidays celebrated throughout the world have origins far out dating the Gregorian Calendar as well. The aspect of the calendar is a very powerful one, and I suggest that one should look into the many different calendars and how they were used throughout different cultures. Calendars are in fact the basis for all control and the power of this control affects all aspects of life. Currently the biggest dogma of today’s society is what day it is. For the day is defined by the calendar.

So, what is time? It is the basis of all systems of control. For all actions and perceptions of society are defined by the dogma of time. For if time is defined as the physical travel of an object thru space determined by that objects velocity, and velocity is the rate in which an object moves thru space in a given time then time is undetermined. So if time is undefined then there is neither past nor future only present. Time is in fact only a theory or more appropriately a religion. The largest religion on the planet Earth, most believe in time without questioning its basis. The Earth's rotation on its axis as it revolves around the Sun at its current velocity is not time but only the relationship of gravity between two objects in a small area of space. So when you think that you don’t have enough time you need only realize time does not exist. Or is the Earth’s rotation and revolution determining your existence?

Sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/earth_worldbook.html
Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation
http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-definitions.html

The Nature of Control

2008-02-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

Control is a natural aspect of all societal species on earth. Representing itself through the need and will to be in the lead of others actions and destinations. Why as Man do we seek to control and lead others? Is it for self preservation, preservation of the species as a whole, or is it just an underlying nature of the society. Control is the leading factor in all aspects of the organization, and to really understand the nature of this one must look at its origins in human society and as well observe the role of control in nature.

Government, Religion, Education, Media, and many other aspects of human society were founded with the desire to control the thoughts and actions of others. For the last 2,000 years of what we understand of human development there has been those that seek to lead and control the actions and thoughts of others. This relationship has always caused conflict between the leaders and those followers wanting to gain the position of control. I argue that the ongoing struggle to gain control of the human race is at the heart of all the problems mankind has caused for humans and all living things on this earth.

The fight for freedom from control is a natural reaction to being enslaved. Thus throughout history mankind has been fighting those that seek to control and oppress them and others. The individuals who have fought the oppressors, claim to be fighting for freedom from oppression. Is the fight really about freedom from oppression or is it about who is in control of the oppression. Throughout history man has fought one form of control to install another form of control founded on different beliefs but with the same general outcome, (governance of society). In the end each individual man only has himself to blame for being controlled, for one's own actions and choices lead directly to the following outcomes.

Over time this fight for freedom from oppression has turned in to a battle for absolute freedom. However, there is an aspect to absolute freedom that many either knowingly or unknowingly fear. With absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility. Thus I hear many people talk about freedom and liberty, but many do not actually want the personal responsibility that comes with true and absolute freedom.

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
George Bernard Shaw

Truth Behind Psychology

2008-02-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Lies My Psychology Professors Taught Me

David McGowan

"[New] technologies are conditioning a growing segment of the society to regard all deviance as sickness and to accept increasingly narrow standards of acceptable behavior as scientifically normative ... Together the new programs and technologies are part of a burgeoning establishment involving welfare institutions, universities, hospitals, the drug industry, government at all levels, and organized psychiatry (itself in large part a creation of government) ... The ideal, in the view of the behaviorists, is the paranoid's dream, a method so smooth that no one will know his behavior is being manipulated and against which no resistance is therefore possible ... There is no longer a set of impositions which he can regard as unjust or capricious and against which he can dream of rebelling. To entertain such dreams would be madness. Gradually, even the ability to imagine alternatives begins to fade. This is, after all, not only the best of all possible worlds; it is the only one."
Peter Schrag

Mind Control, Pantheon 1978

I have a degree in psychology from UCLA. I don't know exactly where it is, though I'm sure it's safely filed away somewhere. It's not really worth much though. I don't mean that it doesn't have much value in the job market, though that is surely the case. No, it isn't worth much because it was awarded to me on the supposition that I had gained a substantial level of knowledge about the field of psychology, which in hindsight was clearly a faulty premise.

It's not that I didn't try to learn. I actually did a very good job of regurgitating back the information that was presented to me, even graduating with honors. No, the problem was that - despite the exalted reputation of the UCLA psychology department - none of my professors seemed to be particularly interested in teaching me what psychology is really about. Continued...

HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

2008-02-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

SOME LESSONS FROM THE UNDERGROUND
HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
BY JOHN TAYLOR GATTO
Editor's note: John Taylor Gatto was the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 and has been named New York City Teacher of the Year three times.
Footnotes appear in red, and are to be found at the end of the article.

EXTENDING CHILDHOOD

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people known to history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. This candor can be heard clearly in a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen before the First World War:
: We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be put to death, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren't conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.

Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. That's what important men and academics called it. The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. Certain writings of Alexander Inglis carry a hint of schooling's role in this ultimately successful project to curb the tendency of little people to compete with big companies. Overproduction became a controlling metaphor among the managerial classes from 1880 to 1930, and this profoundly affected the development of mass schooling.

I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley's Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why. As Cubberley puts it:
: It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking ... [is) opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor.

The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.
Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal-powers (other than the US), each of which had already gonverted its common population into an industrial proletariat long before.

This is the same Ellwood R Cubberley, it should be noted, who wrote in his Columbia Teachers College dissertation of 1905 that schools were to be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products ... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

Arthur Calhoun's 1919 Social History of the Family notified the nation's academics what was happening. Calhoun declared that the fondest wish of utopian writers was coming true: The child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He offered a significant forecast, that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit." Three years later, Mayor John F. Hylan of New York said in a public speech that the schools had been seized as an octopus would seize prey, by "an invisible government." He was referring specifically to certain actions of the Rockefeller Foundation and other corporate interests in New York City which preceded the school riots of 1917.

The 1920s were a boom period for forced schooling, as well as for the stock market. In 1928, a well-regarded volume called A Sociological Philosophy of Education claimed: "It is the business of teachers to run not merely schools but the world." A year later, the famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, announced: "Academic subjects are of little value." His colleague at Teachers College, William Kirkpatrick, boasted in Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.

THE GENETICISTS' MANIFESTO

Meanwhile, at the project offices of an important employer of experts, the Rockefeller Foundation, friends were hearing from president Max Mason that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior." This dazzling ambition was announced on April 11, 1933. Schooling figured prominently in the design.

Rockefeller had been inspired by the work of Eastern European scientist Hermann Müller to invest heavily in genetics. Müller had used X rays to override genetic law, inducing mutations in fruit flies. This seemed to open the door to the scientific control of life itself. Müller preached that planned breeding would bring mankind to paradise faster than God. His proposal received enthusiastic endorsement from the greatest scientists of the day, as well as from powerful economic interests.

Müller would win the Nobel Prize, reduce his proposal to a 1,500 word Geneticists' Manifesto, and watch with satisfaction as 22 distinguished American and British biologists of the day signed it. The State must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said Müller. School would have to separate worthwhile breeders from those slated for termination.

Just a few months before this report, an executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected "to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force." You can't get much clearer than that.

WWII drove the project underground but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination. Great private corporate foundations led the way.

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY PUT TO THE SWORD

Thirty-odd years later, between 1967 and 1974, teacher training in the US was covertly revamped through coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, select universities, global corporations, think tanks, and government agencies, all coordinated through the US Office of Education and through key state education departments, like those in California, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Important milestones of the transformation were: 1) an extensive government exercise in futurology called Designing Education for the Future, 2) the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, and 3) Benjamin Bloom's multi-volume Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, an enormous manual of over 1,000 pages which, in time, impacted every school in America. While other documents exist, these three are appropriate touchstones of the whole, serving to make clear the nature of the project underway.

Take them one by one and savor each: Designing Education, produced by the Education Department, redefined the term "education" after the Prussian fashion as "a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." State education agencies would henceforth act as on-site federal enforcers, ensuring the compliance of local schools with central directives. Each state education department was assigned the task of becoming "an agent of change" and was advised to "lose its independent identity as well as its authority" in order to "form a partnership with the federal government."

The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967 1. The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators - nothing less than "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed fore-shadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which accompany the practice of forced schooling at present.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters, one where participatory democracy will largely disappear. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant that they need to be controlled and regulated for society's good. Under such a logical regime, school terror can only be regarded as good advertising. It is sobering to think of mass schooling as a vast demonstration project of human inadequacy, but that is at least one of its functions.

Postmodern schooling, we are told, is to focus on "pleasure cultivation" and on "other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world." Thus the socialization classroom of the twentieth century's beginning - itself a radical departure from schooling for mental and character development - can be seen to have evolved by 1967 into a full-scale laboratory for psychological experimentation.

School conversion was assisted powerfully by a curious phenomenon of the middle to late 1960s, a tremendous rise in school violence and general school chaos which followed a policy declaration (which seems to have occurred nationwide) that the disciplining of children must henceforth mimic the "due process" practice of the court system. Teachers and administrators were suddenly stripped of any effective ability to keep order in schools since the due process apparatus, of necessity a slow, deliberate matter, is completely inadequate to the continual outbreaks of childish mischief all schools experience.

Now, without the time-honored ad hoc armory of disciplinary tactics to fall back on, disorder spiraled out of control, passing from the realm of annoyance into more dangerous terrain entirely as word surged through student bodies that teachers' hands were tied. And each outrageous event that reached the attention of the local press served as an advertisement for expert prescriptions. Who had ever seen kids behave this way? Time to surrender community involvement to the management of experts; time also for emergency measures like special education and Ritalin. During this entire period, lasting five to seven years, outside agencies like the Ford Foundation exercised the right to supervise whether "children's rights" were being given due attention, fanning the flames hotter even long after trouble had become virtually unmanageable.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, occurring at the peak of this violence, informed teacher-training colleges that under such circumstances, teachers had to be trained as therapists, they must translate prescriptions of social psychology into "practical action" in the classroom. As curriculum had been redefined, so teaching followed suit.

Third of the new gospel texts was Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, 2 in his own words, "a tool to classify the ways individuals are to act, think, or feel as the result of some unit of instruction." Using methods of behavioral psychology, children would learn proper thoughts, feelings, and actions, and have improper attitudes they brought from home "remediated."

In all stages of the school experiment, testing was essential to localize the child's mental state on an official rating scale. Bloom's epic spawned important descendant forms: mastery learning, outcomes-based education, and "school to work" government-business collaborations. Each classified individuals for the convenience of social managers and businesses, each offered data useful in controlling the mind and movements of the young, mapping the next adult generation.

THE DANGAN

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics - symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller - decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political State, as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that school served as an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." Pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy when you look beyond the rhetoric of the left and right.

It's important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

The entire academic community in the US and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time, and to this contingent school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny. In Thorndike's memorable words, conditions for controlled selective breeding had to be set up before the new American industrial proletariat "took things into their own hands."

The entire academic community in the US and abroad had been Darwinized and Galtonized by this time, and to this contingent school seemed an instrument for managing evolutionary destiny. In Thorndike's memorable words, conditions for controlled selective breeding had to be set up before the new American industrial proletariat "took things into their own hands."

America was a frustrating petri dish in which to cultivate a managerial revolution, however, because of its historic freedom traditions. But thanks to the patronage of important men and institutions, a group of academics were enabled to visit mainland China to launch a modernization project known as the "New Thought Tide." For two years Dewey himself lived in China, where pedagogical theories were inculcated in the Young Turk elements, then tested on a bewildered population which had recently been stripped of its ancient form of governance. A similar process was embedded in the new Russian state during the 1920s.

While the American public was unaware of this undertaking, some big-city school superintendents were wise to the fact that they were part of a global experiment. Listen to H.B. Wilson, superintendent of the Topeka schools:
: The introduction of the American school into the Orient has broken up 40 centuries of conservatism. It has given us a new China, a new Japan, and is working marked progress in Turkey and the Philippines, The schools...are in a position to determine the lines of progress.
-Motivation of School Work (1916)...

Thoughts like this don't spring full-blown from the heads of men like Dr. Wilson of Topeka. They have to be planted there.

The Western-inspired and Western-financed Chinese revolution, following hard on the heels of the last desperate attempt by China to prevent the British government market in narcotic drugs there, placed that ancient province in a favorable state of anarchy for laboratory tests of mind-alteration technology. Out of this period rose a Chinese universal tracking procedure called the "Dangan," a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing every student's intimate life history from birth through school and onward. The Dangan constituted the ultimate overthrow of privacy. Today, nobody works in China without a Dangan.

By the mid-1960s preliminary work on an American Dangan was underway as information reservoirs attached to the school institution began to store personal information. A new class of expert, like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie endowments, quietly began to urge collection of personal data from students and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing. Surreptitious data gathering was justified by Tyler as "the moral right of institutions."
OCCASIONAL LEITER NUMBER ONE

Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spending more money on forced schooling than did the government itself. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were themselves spending more. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear an excerpt from the first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board as it occurred in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):
: In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple ... we will organize children ... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

This mission statement will reward multiple rereadings.

INTELLECTUAL ESPIONAGE

At the start of WWII, millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted. 3 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to 1944; the fighting force - both those inducted and those turned away - had been mostly schooled in the 1930s. Eighteen million men were tested; 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier-a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years before, the dip was so small it didn't worry anybody.

WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service, but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth-grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s; it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.

A third American war began in the mid-1960s, By its end in 1973, the number of men found non-inductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on - the number found illiterate, in other words - had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s-much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups-but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941, which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952, now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent, but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper; they could not read for pleasure; they could not sustain a thought or an argument; they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through Army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate, and you probably don't want to know, not really, what people in those days con sidered literate; it's too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version, you find your self in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable that only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818, the US was a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those sinple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, and white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago, but 60 years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.

In their famous bestseller, The Bell Curve, prominent social analysts Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein say that what we're seeing are the results of selective breeding in society. Smart people naturally get together with smart people, dumb people with dumb people. As they have children generation after generation, the differences between the groups get larger and larger. That sounds plausible, and the authors produce impressive mathematics to prove their case, but their documentation shows that they are entirely ignorant of the military data available to challenge their contention. The terrifying drop in literacy between World War 11 and Korea happened in a decade, and even the brashest survival-of-the-fittest theorist wouldn't argue evolution unfolds that way. The Bell Curve writers say black illiteracy (and violence) is genetically programmed, but like many academics they ignore contradictory evidence.

For example, on the matter of violence inscribed in black genes, the inconvenient parallel is to South Africa, where 31 million blacks live, the same count living in the United States. Compare numbers of blacks who died by violence in South Africa in civil war conditions during 1989, 1990, and 1991 with America's peacetime mortality statistics, and you find that far from exceeding the violent death toll in the US, or even matching it, South Africa had proportionately less than one-quarter the violent death rate of American blacks. If more contemporary comparisons are sought, we need only compare the current black literacy rate in the US (56 percent) with the rate in Jamaica (98.5 percent) - a figure considerably higher than the American white literacy rate (83 percent).

If not heredity, what then? Well, one change is indisputable, welldocumented, and easy to track. During WWII, American public schools massively converted to non-phonetic ways of teaching reading. They stopped teaching students to look at words as combinations of letters, sounding them out, and instead started using the disastrous whole-word method, which has students memorize the meanings of entire words through sheer repetition (the method used by Dick and Jane and Dr. Seuss).

On the matter of violence alone, this would seem to have an impact: According to the Justice Department, 80 percent of the incarcerated violent criminal population is illiterate or nearly so (the rate for all imprisoned criminals is 67 percent). There seems to be a direct connection between the humiliation poor readers experience and the life of angry criminals 4. As reading ability plummeted in America after WWII, crime soared; so did out-of-wedlock births, which doubled in the 1950s and doubled again in the 1960s when bizarre violence for the first time became commonplace in daily life.

When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a 300-year-old American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sound with letters; thus, home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read during slavery and as late as 1930 averaged only three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers suddenly stopped teaching children to read; they had no fallback position. Not helpless because of genetic inferiority but because they had to trust school authorities to a much greater extent than white people.

Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how
600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:
: After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren't faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn't.

In 1882, fifth-graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader. William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student-teacher of fifth-graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper: "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS
If you have a hard time believing this revolution in the contract ordinary Americans had with their political State was intentionally provoked, it's time to meet William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. Nobody else who rose out of the ranks of professional pedagogues, other than Cubberley, ever had the influence Harris did. Harris standardized our schools and Germanized them. Listen as he speaks in 1906:
: Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
-The Philosophy of Education (1906)..

Listen again to Harris, giant of American schooling, leading scholar of German philosophy in the Western hemisphere, editor/publisher of The Joumal of Speculative Philosophy which trained a generation of American intellectuals in the ideas of the Prussian thinkers Kant and Hegel, the man who gave America scientifically age-graded classrooms to replace successful mixed-age school practice:: The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
-The Philosophy of Education (1906)..

Nearly a hundred years ago, this schoolman thought that self-alienation was the secret to successful industrial society. Surely he was right. When you stand at a machine or sit at a computer, you require an ability to withdraw from life, to alienate yourself without a supervisor. How else could that be tolerated unless prepared in advance by simulated Birkenhead drills? School, thought Harris, was sensible preparation for a life of alienation. Can you say he was wrong?

In exactly the years Cubberley of Stanford identified as the launching time for the school institution, Harris reigned supreme as the bull goose educator of America. His was the most influential voice teaching what school was to be in a modern, scientific State. School histories commonly treat Harris as an old-fashioned defender of high academic standards, but this is a grossly inadequate analysis; as a philosophical Hegelian, Harris believed children were property and the State had a compelling interest in disposing of them as it pleased. Some would receive intellectual training, most not. Any distinction that can be made between Harris and later weak-curriculum advocates (those interested in stupefaction for everybody) is far less important than substantial agreement in both camps that parents or local tradition could no longer determine the individual child's future.

Unlike any official schoolman until Conant, Harris had social access to important salons of power in the United States. Over his long career he furnished inspiration to the ongoing obsessions of Andrew Carnegie, the steel man who first nourished the conceit of yoking our entire economy to cradle-to-grave schooling. If you can find copies ofThe Empire of Business (1902) orTriumphant Democracy (1886), you will find remarkable congruence between the world Carnegie urged and the one our society has achieved.

Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" idea took his peers by storm at the very moment the great school transformation began - the idea that the wealthy owed society a duty to take over everything in the public interest was an uncanny echo of Carnegie's experience as a boy watching the elite establishment of Britain and the teachings of its State religion. It would require perverse blindness not to acknowledge a connection between the Carnegie blueprint, hammered into shape in the Greenwich Village salon of Mrs. Botta after the Civil War, and the explosive developments which restored the Anglican worldview to our schools.
Of course, every upper class in history has specified what can be known. The defining characteristic of class control is that it establishes a grammar and vocabulary for ordinary people, and for subordinate elites, too. If the rest of us uncritically accept certain official concepts such as "globalization," then we have unwittingly committed ourselves to a whole intricate narrative of society's future, too, a narrative which inevitably drags an irresistible curriculum in its wake.

Since Aristotle, thinkers have understood that work is the vital theater of self-knowledge. Schooling in concert with a controlled workplace is the most effective way ever devised to foreclose the development of imagination. But where did these radical doctrines of true belief come from? Who spread them? We get at least part of the answer from the tantalizing clue Walt Whitman left when he said that "only Hegel is fit for America." Hegel was the protean Prussian philosopher capable of shaping Karl Marx on one hand and J.P. Morgan on the other; the man who taught a generation of prominent Americans that history itself could be controlled by the deliberate provoking of crises. Hegel was sold to America in large measure by William Torrey Harris, who made Hegelianism his lifelong project and forced schooling its principal instrument in its role as a pee rless agent provocateur.

Harris was inspired by the notion that correctly managed mass schooling would result in a population so dependent on leaders that schism and revolution would be things of the past. If a world could be cobbled together by Hegelian tactical manipulation, and such a school plan imposed upon it, history itself would stop. No more wars, no civil disputes, just people waiting around pleasantly like the Eloi in Wells'The Time Machine. Waiting for Teacher to tell them what to do. The psychological tool was alienation. The was to alienate children from themselves so they couldn't turn inside for strength, to alienate them from their families, religions, cultures, etc. so no countervailing force could intervene.

Carnegie used his own considerable influence to keep this expatriate New England Hegelian as the US Commissioner of Education for sixteen years, long enough to set the stage for an era of "scientific management" (or "Fordism," as the Soviets called it) in American schooling. Long enough to bring about the rise of the multilayered school bureaucracy. But it would be a huge mistake to regard Harris and other true believers as merely tools of business interest; what they were about was the creation of a modern, living faith to replace the Christian one which had died for them. It was their good fortune to live at precisely the moment when the dreamers of the empire of business (to use emperor Carnegie's label) for an Anglo-American world-State were beginning to consider worldwide schooling as the most direct route to that destination.

Both movements, to centralize the economy and to centralize schooling, were aided immeasurably by the rapid disintegration of old-line Protestant churches and the rise from their pious ashes of the "Social Gospel" ideology, aggressively underwritten by important industrialists, who intertwined churchgoing tightly with standards of business, entertainment, and government. The experience of religion came to mean, in the words of Reverend Earl Hoon, "the best social programs money can buy." A clear statement of the belief that social justice and salvation were to be had through skillful consumption.

Shailer Mathews - dean of Chicago's School of Divinity, editor of Biblical World, president of the Federal Council of Churches - wrote his influential Scientific Management in the Churches (1912) to convince American Protestants they should sacrifice independence and autonomy and adopt the structure and strategy of corporations:
: If this seems to make the Church something of a business establishment, it is precisely what should be the case.

If Americans listened to the corporate message, Mathews told them they would feel anew the spell of Jesus.

In the decade before WWI, a consortium of private foundations drawing on industrial wealth began slowly working toward a long range goal of lifelong schooling and a thoroughly rationalized global economy and society.

MR. YOUNG'S HEAD WAS POUNDED TO JELLY

The most surprising thing about the start-up of mass public education in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts is how overwhelming ly parents of all classes soon complained about it. Reports of school committees around 1850 show the greatest single theme of discussion was conflict between the state and the general public on this matter. Resistance was led by the old yeoman class - those families accustomed to taking care of themselves and providing meaning for their own lives. The little town of Barnstable on Cape Cod is exemplary. Its school committee lamented, according to Katz's Irony of Early School Reform, that "the great defect of our day is the absence of governing or controlling power on the part of parents and the consequent insubordination of children. Our schools are rendered inefficient by the apathy of parents."

Years ago I was in possession of an old newspaper account which related the use of militia to march recalcitrant children to school there, but I've been unable to locate it again. Nevertheless, even a cursory look for evidence of State violence in bending public will to accept compulsion schooling will be rewarded: Bruce Curtis' book Building the Education State 1836-1871 documents the intense aversion to schooling which occurred across North America, in Anglican Canada where leadership was uniform, as well as in the US where leadership was more divided. Many schools were burned to the ground and teachers run out of town by angry mobs. When students were kept after school, parents often broke into school to free them.

At Saltfleet Township in 1859, a teacher was locked in the schoolhouse by students who "threw mud and mire into his face and over his clothes," according to school records - while parents egged them on. At Brantford in 1863, the teacher William Young was assaulted to the point (according to his replacement) that "Mr. Young's head, face and body was, if I understand rightly, pounded literally to jelly." Curtis argues that parents' resistance was motivated by a radical transformation in the intentions of schools-a change from teaching basic literacy to molding social identity.

The first effective American compulsory schooling in the modern era was a reform school movement which Know-Nothing legislatures of the 1850s put into the hopper along with their radical new adoption law. Objects of reformation were announced as follows: respect for authority, self-control, self-discipline. The properly reformed boy "acquires a fixed character," one that can be planned for in advance by authority in keeping with the efficiency needs of business and industry.

Reform meant the total transformation of character, behavior modification, a complete makeover. By 1857, a few years after stranger adoption was kicked off as a new policy of the State, Boutwell could consider foster parenting (the old designation for adoption) "one of the major strategies for the reform of youth." 5 The first step in the strategy of reform was for the State to become the de facto parent of the child. That, according to another Massachusetts educator, Emory Washburn, "presents the State in her true relation of a parent seeking out her erring children."

The 1850s in Massachusetts marked the beginning of a new epoch in schooling. Washburn triumphantly crowed that these years produced the first occasion in history "whereby a State in the character of a common parent has undertaken the high and sacred duty of rescuing and restoring her lost children ... by the influence of the school." John Philbrick, Boston school superintendent [ed. note: perhaps an ancestor of Herbert Philbrick, the Massachusetts McCarthy-era informer who "Led Three Lives"?], said of his growing empire in 1863, "Here is real home!" All schooling, including the reform variety, was to be in imitation of the best "family system of organization"; this squared with the prevalent belief that delinquency was not caused by external conditions - thus letting industrialists and slumlords off the hook - but by deficient homes.

Between 1840 and 1860, male schoolteachers were cleansed from the Massachusetts system and replaced by women. A variety of stratagems was used, including the novel one of paying women slightly more than men in order to bring shame into play in chasing men out of the business. Again the move was part of a well-conceived strategy: "Experience teaches that these boys, many of whom never had a mother's affection ... need the softening and refining influence which woman alone can give, and we have, wherever practicable, substituted female officers and teachers for those of the other sex."

A state report noted the frequency with which parents coming to retrieve their own children from reform school were met by news that their children had been given away to others, through the State's parens patriae power. "We have felt it to be our duty generally to decline giving them up to their parents and have placed as many of them as we could with farmers and mechanics," reads a portion of Public Document 20 for the state of Massachusetts, written in 1864. To recreate the feelings of parents on hearing this news is beyond my power.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF SUBJECTION

Administrative utopias are a peculiar kind of dreaming by those in power, driven by an urge to arrange the lives of others, organizing them for production, combat, or detention. The operating principles of administrative utopia are hierarchy, discipline, regimentation, strict order, rational planning, a geometrical environment, a production line, a cellblock, and a form of welfarism. Government schools and some private schools pass such parameters with flying colors.

In one sense, administrative utopias are laboratories for exploring the technology of subjection and as such belong to a precise subdivision of pornographic art: total surveillance and total control of the helpless. The aim and mode of administrative utopia is to bestow order and assistance on an unwilling population. To provide its clothing and food. To schedule it. In a masterpiece of cosmic misjudgment, the phrenologist George Combe wrote to Horace Mann on November 14, 1843:
: The Prussian and Saxon governments by means of their schools and their just laws and rational public administration are doing a good deal to bring their people into a rational and moral condition. It is pretty obvious to thinking men that a few years more of this cultivation will lead to the development of free institutions in Germany.

Earlier that year (May 21, 1843), Mann had written to Combe: "I want to find out what are the results, as well as the workings of the famous Prussian system." Just three years earlier, with the election of Marcus Morton as governor of Massachusetts, a serious challenge had been presented to Mann and to his Board of Education, including the air of Prussianism surrounding it and its manufacturer/politician friends. A House committee was directed to look into the new Board of Education and its plan to undertake a teachers college with $10,000 put up by industrialist Edmund Dwight. Four days after its assignment, the majority reported out a bill to kill the board! Discontinue the Normal School experiment, it said, and give Dwight his money back:
: If then the Board has any actual power, it is a dangerous power, touching directly upon the rights and duties of the Legislature; if it has no power, why continue its existence at an annual expense to the commonwealth?

But the House committee did more; it warned explicitly that this board, dominated by a Unitarian majority of 7-5 (although Unitarians comprised less than 1 percent of the state), really wanted to install a Prussian system of education in Massachusetts, to put "a monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect to the true spirit of our democratical institutions." The vote of the House on this was the single greatest victory of Mann's political career, one for which he and his wealthy friends called in every favor they were owed. The result was 245 votes to continue, 182 votes to discontinue, and so the House voted to overturn the recommendations of its own committee. A 32-vote swing might have given us a much different twentieth century than the one we saw.

Although Mann's own letters and diaries are replete with attacks on orthodox religionists as enemies of government schooling, an examination of the positive vote reveals that from the outset the orthodox churches were among Mann's staunchest allies. Mann had general support from Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist clergymen. At this early stage they were completely unaware of the doom secular schooling would spell for their denominations. They had been seduced into believing school was a necessary insurance policy to deal with incoming waves of Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany, the cheap labor army which as early as 1830 had been talked about in business circles and eagerly anticipated as an answer to America's production problems.

The reason Germany, and not England, provided the original model for America's essay into compulsion schooling may be that Mann had a shocking experience in English class snobbery while in Britain, which left him reeling. Boston Common, he wrote, with its rows of mottled sycamore trees, gravel walks, and frog ponds, was downright embarrassing compared with any number of stately English private grounds furnished with stag and deer, fine arboretums of botanical specimens from faraway lands, marble floors better than the tabletops at home, portraits, tapestries, giant gold-frame mirrors. The ballroom in the Bullfinch house in Boston would be a butler's pantry in England, he wrote. When Mann visited Stafford House of the Duke of Cumberland, he went into culture shock:
: Convicts on treadmills provide the energy to pump water for fountains. I have seen equipages, palaces, and the regalia of royalty side by side with beggary, squalidness, and degradation in which the very features of humanity were almost lost in those of the brute.

For this great distinction between the layered orders of society, Mann held the Anglican Church to blame. "Give me America with all its rawness and want. We have aristocracy enough at home and here I trace its foundations." Shocked from his English experience, Mann virtually willed that Prussian schools would provide him with answers, says his biographer Jonathan Messerli.

Mann arrived in Prussia when its schools were closed for vacation; he toured empty classrooms, spoke with authorities, interviewed vacationing schoolmasters, and read piles of dusty official reports. Yet from this non-experience he claimed to come away with a strong sense of the professional competence of Prussian teachers! All "admirably qualified and full of animation!" His wife, Mary, of the famous Peabodys, wrote home: "We have not seen a teacher with a book in his hand in all Prussia; no, not one!" This wasn't surprising, for they hardly saw teachers at all.

Equally impressive, he wrote, was the wonderful obedience of children; these German kinder had "innate respect for superior years." The German teacher corps? "The finest collection of men I have ever seen - full of intelligence, dignity, benevolence, kindness and bearing Never, says Mann, did he witness "an instance of harshness and severity. All is kind, encouraging, animating, sympathizing." On the basis of imagining this miraculous vision of exactly the Prussia he wanted to see, Mann made a special plea for changes in the teaching of reading. He criticized the standard American practice of beginning with the alphabet and moving to syllables, urging his readers to consider the superior merit of teaching entire words from the beginning. "I am satisfied," he said, "our greatest error in teach-
ing lies in beginning with the alphabet."

The heart of Mann's most famous Report to the Boston School Committee, the legendary Seventh, rings a familiar theme in American affairs: It seems even then we were falling behind! This time behind the Prussians in education. In order to catch up, it was mandatory to create a professional corps of teachers, just as the Prussians had. And a systematic curriculum just as the Prussians had. Mann fervently implored the board to accept his prescription ... while there was still time!

That fall, the Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools published its 150-page rebuttal of Mann's Report. It attacked the Normal schools proposal as a propaganda vehicle for Mann's "hot bed theories, in which the projectors have disregarded experience and observation." It belittled his advocacy of phrenology and charged Mann with attempting to excite the prejudices of the ignorant. Its second attack was against the teacher-centered, non-book presentations of Prussian classrooms, insisting the psychological result of these was to break student potential "for forming the habit of independent and individual effort." The third attack was against the "word method" in teaching reading, and in defense of the traditional alphabet method. Lastly, it attacked Mann's belief that interest was a better motivator to learning than discipline: "Duty should come first and pleasure should grow out of the discharge of it."
....................................

Sixty years later - amid a well-coordinated attempt on the part of industrialists and financiers to transfer power over money and interest rates from elected representatives of the American people to a "Federal Reserve" of centralized private banking interests -George Reynolds, president of the American Bankers Association, rose before an audience on September 13, 1909, to declare himself flatly in favor of a central bank modeled after the German Reichsbank. As he spoke, the schools of the United States were being forcibly rebuilt on Prussian lines.

On September 14, 1909, in Boston, the President of the United States, William Howard Taft, instructed the country that it should "take up seriously" the problem of establishing a centralized bank on the German model. As the Wall Street Journal put it, an important step in the education of Americans would soon be taken to translate the "realm of theory" into "practical politics," in pedagogy as well as finance.

Dramatic symbolic evidence of what was working deep in the bowels of the school institution surfaced in 1935. At the University of Chicago's experimental high school, the head of the Social Science department, Howard C. Hill, published an inspirational textbook, The Life and Work of the Citizen. It is decorated throughout with the fasces, symbol of the Fascist movement, an emblem binding government and corporation together as one entity. Mussolini had landed in America.

The fasces are strange, hybridized images - one might almost say Americanized. The bundle of sticks wrapped around a two-headed axe, the classic Italian Fascist image, has been decisively altered. Now the sticks are wrapped around a sword. They appear on the spine of this high school text, on the decorative page introducing part one, again on a similar page for part two, repeating on part three and part four, as well. There are also fierce, military eagles hovering above those pages.

The strangest decoration of all faces the title page, a weird interlock of hands and wrists which, with only a few slight alterations of its structural members, would be a living swastika 6. The legend announces it as representing the "united strength" of Law, Order, Science, and the Trades. Where the strength of America had been traditionally located in our First Amendment guarantee of argument, now the Prussian connection was shifting the locus of attention in school to cooperation, with both working and professional classes sandwiched between the watchful eye of Law and Order. Prussia had entrenched itself deep inside the bowels of American institutional schooling.

A CRITICAL APPRAISAL

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the Civil War in big cities and the defeated South, some of the best minds in the land, people fit by their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as they watched its first phalanx of graduates take their place in the traditional American world. All of these speakers had been trained themselves in the older, a-systematic, non-institutional schools. At the beginning of another new century, it is eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers of ours had to say about the mass schooling phenomenon as they approached their own fateful new century.

In 1867, world-famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:
: School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.

Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar judgment. The year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of scientific psychology in Germany:
: Many had hoped that by giving a partial reaching to great numbers of persons, a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the results have not equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate ourselves,

In 1885, the president of Columbia University said:
: The results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither very flattering nor very encouraging.

In 1895, the president of Harvard said:
: Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A young man whose intellectual powers are worth cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as the schools now insist upon.
When he said this, compulsion schooling in its first manifestation was approaching its forty third year of operations in Massachusetts and was running at high efficiency in Cambridge, where Harvard is located.

Then the great metamorphosis to an even more efficient scientific form of pedagogy took place in the early years of the twentieth century. Four years before WWI broke out, a well-known European thinker and schoolman, Paul Geheeb, whom Einstein, Herman Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer all were to claim as a friend, made this commentary on English and German types of forced schooling:
: The dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them have failed. People complain about the "overburdening" of schools; educators argue about which parts of curriculum should be cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions.

In 1930, the yearly Inglis Lecture at Harvard made the same case:: We have absolutely nothing to show for our colossal investment in common schooling after 80 years of trying.

Thirty years passed before John Gardner's Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation in 1960 added this:
: Too many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they are misfits.

The record after 1960 is no different. It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have been continued into the schools of 2000 and beyond. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930, and thus we buy even more of what mass schooling dollars always bought.

THE CULT OF FORCED SCHOOLING
The most candid account we have of the changeover from old-style American free-market schooling to the laboratory variety under the close eye of society's managers is a book long out of print. But the author was famous enough in his day that a yearly lecture at Harvard is named after him, so with a bit of effort on your part, and perhaps a kind word to your local librarian, in due time you should be able to find a hair-raising account of the school transformation written by one of the insiders. The book in question bears the soporific title Principles of Secondary Education. Published in 1918 near the end of the great school revolution, Principles offers a unique account of the project written through the eyes of an important revolutionary. Any lingering doubts you may have about the purposes of government schooling should be put to rest by Alexander Inglis, The principal purpose of the vast enterprise was to place control of the new social and economic machinery out of reach of the mob 7.

The great social engineers were confronted by the formidable challenge of working their magic in a democracy, the least efficient and most unpredictable of political forms. School was designed to neutralize as much as possible any risk of being blindsided by the democratic will. Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., writing of his grandfather, Senator Aldrich - one of the principal architects of the Federal Reserve System which had come into being while Inglis' cohort built the schools, and whose intent was much the same, to remove economic machinery from public interference - caught the attitude of the builders perfectly in his book Old Money. Grandfather, he writes, believed that history, evolution, and a saving grace found their best advocates in him and in men like him, in his family and in families like his, down to the close of time. But the price of his privilege, the senator knew, "was vigilance - vigilance, above all, against the resentment of those who never could emerge." Once in Paris, Senator Aldrich saw two men "of the middle or lower class," as he described them, drinking absinthe in a cafe. That evening back at his hotel he wrote these words: "As I looked upon their dull wild stupor I wondered what dreams were evolved from the depths of the bitter glass. Multiply that scene and you have the possibility of the wildest revolution or the most terrible outrages."

Alexander Inglis, author of Principles of Secondary Education, was of Aldrich's class. He wrote that the new schools were being expressly created to serve a command economy and command society, one in which the controlling coalition would be drawn from important institutional stakeholders in the future. According to Inglis, the first function of schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority. This prepares the young to accept whatever management dictates when they are grown.

Second is the diagnostic function. School determines each student's "proper" social role, logging it mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function, sorting. Individuals are to be trained only so far as their likely destination in the social machine, not one step beyond. Conformity is the fourth function. Kids are to be made alike, not from any passion for egalitarianism, but so future behavior will be predictable, in service to market and political research.

Next is the hygienic function. This has nothing to do with individual health, only the health of the "race." This is polite code for saying that school should accelerate Darwinian natural selection by tagging the unfit so clearly that they drop from the reproduction sweepstakes.

And last is the propadeutic function, a fancy word meaning that a small fraction of kids will slowly be trained to take over management of the system, guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle.

And there you have the formula: adjustment, diagnosis, sorting, conformity, racial hygiene, and continuity. This is the man after whom an honor lecture in education at Harvard is named. According to James Bryant Conant - another progressive aristocrat from whom I first learned of Inglis in a perfectly frightening book called The Child, the Parent, and the State (1949) - the school transformation had been ordered by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, Conant himself is a school name that resonates through the central third of the twentieth century. His book, The American High School Today (1959), was one of the important springs that pushed secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960s and forced consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones. His career began as a poison gas specialist in WWI, a task assigned only to young men whose family lineage could be trusted, with other notable way stations on his path being service in the secret atomic bomb project during WWII and a stint as US High Commissioner for Germany during the military occupation after 1945.

In his book Conant brusquely acknowledges that conversion of oldstyle American education into Prussian-style schooling was done as a coup de main, but his greater motive in 1959 was to speak directly to men and women of his own class who were beginning to believe the new school procedure might be unsuited to human needs, that experience dictated a return to older institutional pluralistic ways. No, Conant fairly shouts, the clock cannot be turned back! "Clearly, the total process is irreversible." Severe consequences would certainly follow the break-up of this carefully contrived behavioral-training machine: "A successful counter-revolution ... would require reorientation of a complex social pattern. Only a person bereft of reason would undertake [it]."

Reading Conant is like overhearing a private conversation not meant for you yet fraught with the greatest personal significance. To Conant, school was a triumph of Anglo/Germanic pragmatism, a pinnacle of the social technocrat's problem-solving art. One task it performed with brilliance was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial spirit, a mission undertaken on perfectly sensible grounds, at least from a management perspective. As long as capital investments were at the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs running about with a gleam in their eye, who would commit the huge flows of capital needed to continually tool and retool the commercial/industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire population could become producers, young people were loose cannons crashing around a storm-tossed deck, threatening to destroy the corporate ship; confined, however, to employee status, they became suitable ballast upon which a dependable domestic market could be erected.

How to mute competition in the generation of tomorrow? That was the cutting-edge question. In his take-no-prisoners style, acquired mixing poison gas and building atomic bombs, Conant candidly tells us that the answer "was in the process of formulation" as early as the 1890s. By 1905 the nation obeyed this clarion call from coast to coast: "Keep all youth in school full time through grade twelve." All youth, including those most unwilling to be there and those certain to take vengeance on their jailers.

President Conant was quick to acknowledge that "practical-minded" kids paid a heavy price from enforced confinement. But there it was - nothing could be done. It was a worthy trade-off. I suspect he was being disingenuous. Any mind sophisticated enough to calculate a way to short-circuit entrepreneurial energy, and ideology-driven enough to be willing to do that in service to a corporate takeover of the economy, is shrewd enough also to have foreseen the destructive side effects of having an angry and tough-minded band of prisoners forced against its will to remain in school with the docile The net result on the intellectual possibilities of class instruction was near total wipe-out.

Did Conant understand the catastrophe he helped cause? I think he did. He, of course, would dispute my judgment that it was a catastrophe. One of his close friends was another highly placed school man, Ellwood P. Cubberley, the Stanford education dean. Cubberley had himself written about the blow to serious classwork caused early experiments in forcing universal school attendance. So it wasn't as if the destruction of academic integrity came as any surprise to insiders. Cubberley's house history of American education refers directly to this episode, although in somewhat elliptical prose. First published in 1919, it was republished in 1934, the year after Conant took office at Harvard. The two men talked and wrote to one another. Both knew the score. Yet for all his candor, it isn't hard to understand Conant's reticence about discussing this procedure. It's one thing to announce that children have to do involuntary duty for the State, quite another to describe the why and how of the matter in explicit detail.

Another prominent Harvard professor, Robert Ulich, wrote in his own book, Philosophy of Education (1961): "[We are producing] more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfill.... These men and women will form the avant garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say [people like these] were responsible for World War II."
Although Ulich is parroting Toynbee here, whose Study of History was a standard reference of speculative history for decades, the idea that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature would be a sword pointed at established order has been common in the West since at least the Tudors, and one openly discussed from 1890 onwards.

Thus I was less surprised than I might have been to open Walter Kotschnig's Unemployment in the Leamed Professions (1937) - which I purchased from a college graduate down on his luck for 50 cents off a blanket on the street in front of Columbia University - to find myself listening to an argument attributing the rise of Nazism directly to the expansion of German university enrollment after WWI. For Germany, this had been a short-term solution to postwar unemployment, like the G.I. Bill, but according to Kotschnig, the policy created a mob of well-educated people with a chip on their shoulder because there was no work - a situation which led swiftly downhill for the Weimar Republic.

A whole new way to look at schooling from this management perspective emerges, a perspective which is the furthest thing from cynical. Of course there are implications for our contemporary situation. Much of our own 50 to 60 percent post-secondary college enrollment should be seen as a temporary solution to the otherwise awesome reality that two-thirds of all work in the US is now part-time or short-term employment. In a highly centralized corporate workplace becoming ever more so with no end in sight, all jobs are sucked like debris in a tornado into four hierarchical funnels of vast proportions: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional. Once work is preempted in this monopoly fashion, fear of too many smart people is legitimate, hard to exaggerate. If you let people learn too much, they might kill you. Or so history and Senator Aldrich would have us believe.

Once privy to ideas like those entertained by Inglis, Conant, Ulich, and Kotschnig, most contemporary public school debate becomes nonsense. Without addressing philosophies and policies which sentence the largest part of our people to lives devoid of meaning, we might be better off not discussing school at all.

Endnotes
1. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the US Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (1310).
2. A fuller discussion of Bloom and the other documents mentioned here, plus much more, is available in the writings of Beverly Eakman, a Department of Justice employee, particularly her book The Cloning of the American Mind (Huntington House, 1998).
3. The discussion here is based on Regna Lee Wood's work as printed in Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch's Network News and Views (and reprinted many other places). Together with other statistical indictmentsfrom the National Adult Literacy Survey, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and a host of other credible sources-it provides chilling evidence of the disastrous turn in reading methodology. But in a larger sense the author urges every reader to trust personal judgment over "numerical" evidence, whatever the source. During the writer's 30-year classroom experience, the decline in student ability to comprehend difficult text was marked, while the ability to extract and parrot "information" in the form of "facts" was much less affected. This is a product of deliberate pedagogy, to what is the burden of my essay.
4. A particularly clear example of the dynamics hypothesized to cause the correlation can be found in Michael S. Brunner's monograph "Reduced Recidivism and Increased Employment Opportunity Through Research-Based Reading Instruction," United States Department of Justice (June 1992). Brunner's recent book, Retarding America (Halcyon House, 1993), written as a Visiting Fellow for the US Department of Justice, is recommended. A growing body of documentation causally ties illiteracy to violent crime. A study by Dennis Hogenson, "Reading Failure and Juvenile Delinquency" (Reading Reform Foundation), attempted to correlate teenage aggression with age, family size, numbers of parents present in home, rural versus urban environment, socioeconomic status, minority group member ship, and religious preference. None of these factors produced a significant correlation. But one did. As the author reports: "Only reading failure was found to correlate with aggression in both populations of delinquent boys." An organization of ex-prisoners testified before the Subcommittee on Education of the US Congress that in its opinion illiteracy was an important causative factor in crime, "for the illiterate have very few honest ways of making a living." In 1994 the US Department of Education acknowledged that two-thirds of all incarcerated criminals have poor literacy.
5. The reader will recall such a strategy was considered for Hester Prynne's child, Pearl, in Hawthorne's Scariet Letter. That Hawthorne, writing at mid-century, chose this as a hinge for his characterization of the fallen woman Hester is surely no coincidence.
6. Interestingly enough, several versions of this book exist - although no indication that this is so appears on the copyright page. In one of these versions, the familiar totalitarian symbols are much more pronounced than in the other.
7. A Harvard professor with a Teachers College Ph.D., Inglis descended from a long line of famous Anglicans. One of his ancestors, assistant Rector of Trinity Church when the Revolution began, in 1777 fled the onrushing Republic; another wrote a refutation of Tom Paine's Common Sense and was made the first Bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787; and a third, Sir John Inglis, commanded the British forces at Lucknow during the famous siege by the Sepoy mutineers in 1857. Is the Inglis bloodline germane to his work as a school pioneer? You'll have to decide that for yourself.

Website: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

Critically Thinking

2008-02-05T17:43:00.000-08:00

Critical thinking is the only thing that separates man from the rest of the animals, yet most do not use this gift on a daily basis. Careful examination of the world and elements of nature is the only way in which humans can move forward. By questioning excepted facts and opinions man has discovered; the world is not flat, the earth rotates around the sun, the laws of gravity, humans did not magically appear on earth, and many other things. However these things were only discovered by a few intelligent radical individuals, because the majority of civilization was to ignorant to asks questions. It's seems that over relative time civilization would learn from the few to question all generally excepted principals, however facts change and people stay the same ignorant gullible sheep.
I bring this up to explain the basic human instinct of survival. The media has programed people to believe their survival depends on the system that controls their thoughts and actions. So to question the system would be to question survival, however survival of the human only requires four things; air, water, food, and shelter. Every other aspect of the world is put in place to distract the population from realizing who is controlling the things that you need for survival. I pose this question, if money becomes worthless (which actuality it is) how will you get water, food and shelter? Why would you depend on someone else to control your basic needs for survival? But then again don't question the system, or why a few are but in charge of controlling the survival of all.

Mission

2008-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

I have created this site to share information on a broad range of topics of human behavior. My hope is that the information will lead to serious contemplation of Human nature and why we do the things we do. I encourage debate on all topics and issues, and hope that with debate we can learn to solve the problems that we as humans have created in this world.