Buses to mediocrity

ITL

Several mornings each week I drive to a nearby gym, and on the way pass the massive facility that houses school buses. Even though we live in a mountain community, we are in the heavily populated foothills of Denver. These buses take our thousands of kids to their various institutions each day, a phenomenon our writer Steve Kelly calls “warehousing.” If only they could be set free, but what to do with them?

Kids in this area now start the school year in Mid-August and will continue until mid-June. The state has strict guidelines on how many hours they must attend, what subjects must be taught, what testing standards are used to grade a school’s “performance. The final arbiters of student “success,” GPA and results of SAT and ACT tests, will determine which students are allowed to advance to even higher forms of indoctrination.

Here’s a website that does a different kind of measuring. It is a 2003 study by the Department of Education called the “National Assessment of Adult Literacy.” To my knowledge this assessment had not been repeated since that year, 14 years ago (and eleven years before, in 1992). I don’t know why but speculate that they quit studying it because the results were a fair assessment of not only the failures of our education system, but of the success of real objectives too.  Our leaders do not want thinking citizens.

This page, Key Findings, cuts to the heart of the matter. It breaks down the levels of comprehension among American adults, including college graduates. It has four dividers in our ability to deal with “prose,” or written words, “documents” such as maps, tables, drug and food labels, and “quantitative,” or balancing a checkbook or computing a tip.

The gradation of levels is as follows:

  • Below Basic: no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills;
  • Basic: can perform simple and everyday literacy activities;
  • Intermediate: can perform moderately challenging literacy activities;
  • Proficient: can perform complex and challenging literacy activities;

Here is their graph showing results:

Adult Literacy

The results are consistent in all categories and through all years – only 13-15% of us are proficient, and 30-50% “intermediate;” this after warehousing kids for twelve years of their lives and hammering them with classes, textbooks and tests.

I can conclude that our education system is either a stunning failure, or a modest success. The “success” is contained on both sides of the divider between “proficient” and “intermediate.” In the “proficient” category you will find our doctors, lawyers, scientists, accountants, managers and supervisors. In all the other classes you will find our workers, homemakers, shop owners and unemployed.

Among all of them you will note an absence of any who are skilled at what we call “critical thinking,” which is not even measured. It is here that our education system scores its greatest success. Twelve years, ten months a year, six to eight hours a day, and the vast majority of Americans cannot see through the most crudely constructed  hoax, Sandy Hook for instance, the granddaddy of clumsy.

The reason I write this is because of a string of comments beneath the Yitzhak post (starting here) in which a few lament that we seem unable to reach people. On the other side are those (like me) who simply take heart that life is worth living even as almost all around us miss the education bus, instead riding those yellow school buses on the road to mediocrity.

I have been labeled Pollyanna in outlook because I don’t imagine we can reach people with our work. If you fully absorb the implications of this 2003 study, you will begin to see what a daunting task we face if indeed we want to reach our fellow citizens*.

I suggest that if you are serious about that undertaking, that you measure your audience and adjust your tactics accordingly. You cannot reach them with prose, referral to documents, or arithmetic and math. Forget about logic. You can only reach them, as our leaders know so well, with images, subtle propaganda techniques of persuasion, and by establishing yourself as an authority figure. In other words, fight fire with fire.

Of course, in the process you will become the enemy, as the power that the leadership class has over the vast majority of our people is like a golden ring. Touch it, and it changes you.

*Keep in mind too that if we do score a modicum of success, TPTB simply step up their efforts at keeping the masses under thumb. I mean, what is the “conspiracy theory” meme if not a brilliant maneuver to discourage people from thinking?

40 thoughts on “Buses to mediocrity”

  1. Two of the most notorious Americans named Harris are:
    Columbine’s Eric Harris;
    Atheist Sam Harris.

    They both share the same April 9th Birthday.

    April 9 is the 99th day of the year and Sam Harris published his book “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion” on 9/9 (2014).
    Also in 2014…
    http://ftw.usatoday.com/2014/06/sports-illustrated-houston-astros-2017-world-series-champs-mlb

    Another April 9th birthday was Hugh Hefner.
    His initials being HH, the same as Hurricane Harvey which struck Harris County in Texas hardest.
    Hugh Hefner died aged 91 (as did Harry Dean Stanton) and Hurricane Harvey had 91 confirmed deaths and then there was the Las Vegas shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival which took place on 10/01/2017 leaving 91 days remaining in the year. And the number 91 was linked to a massacre in the movie “It”.

    And Harris County contains the city of Houston – which was struck hard by Hurricane Harvey.
    But then the Houston Astros won the rigged World Series.

    And Hurricane Harvey prepared us for that other villain named Harvey. Mr Weinstein.

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  2. I am not so sure public-education indoctrination is as focused on the prevention of “thinking” as we think. I know it looks that way. it is acting on individual thought that scares the bejesus out of puppet-masters. Scientific method, trivium (A 3-step process that employs; grammar/knowledge, logic/understanding, and rhetoric/wisdom) may lead to a higher order of consciousness that human and other “critical” methods, however, are reserved for the “brightest.”

    What all these seem to have in common is the funnel at various stages that separate, and then aggregate a “special, new” group, a winnowing process that turns every level of thought and learning into an aggregate group — ie. groupthink. The other common denominator is the (direct and passive) encouragement for thinking that never leads to action. Actions speak louder than words, so think whatever you want, that is permitted. Action, however, will get you into a whole new class of unacceptable. Welcome to the “front-lines” of the ongoing battle to preserve life.

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  3. A friend told me , if you’re too dumb or too smart , the Army doesn’t want you .

    Demonstration is a good idea : ” look at that crap they’re spraying
    in the sky , oh you never noticed that ….”
    ” Look at the nose of this airplane poking out the other side
    of this steel building it just went through … ”

    I think everyone has to use logic and reason just to
    survive : If I eat this rotten food I will get sick ,
    If I piss off my husband/wife or boss , my life will be made more difficult .
    I also think it’s not productive to ‘ carve you ideas into stone ‘
    offer it as a possibility .
    Offer the possibility and let them make the logic trail to follow .
    And don’t talk too fast .

    I am still learning everyday , seeing things that are there
    but did not notice :

    When is USA Veterans Day? Veterans Day is always observed on November 11,
    regardless of the day of the week on which it falls.
    This day is the anniversary of the signing of the armistice, which ended the World War I hostilities between the Allied nations and Germany in 11/11/1918.
    Like Independence Day 7 / 4 = 11 .

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  4. More fakery, I strongly suspect:

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/10/greek-terrorist-dimitris-koufodinas-prison-parole-global-outrage

    11 life sentences. Yes, that number 11 again.

    “Visibly greyer after 15 years behind bars, the 59-year-old…”
    59 – 15 = 44.
    November 17 leaves 44 days left in the year.

    In a leap year November 17 is day number 322 in the year. That’s the Skull and Bones number.

    One event that occurred on 17th November, 1997 and which will have it’s twentieth anniversary next week:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_massacre

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  5. Today is the release date of Taylor Swift’s new album “Reputation”

    Taylor Swift releases her new album on 11/10 and it is 1110 days since the release of her previous album.

    Put another way, Taylor Swift releases her new album 3 years 14 days after the release of her previous album on day number 314 of the year.

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  6. Mark,
    I’m reminded of something you’ve commented on before. That is speculating that most of us here were probably somewhat rebellious or anti-authoritarian while in school.
    Even if we didn’t have the lifetime experiences to put the whole “education” system into perspective, we acted out in ways to express our dissatisfaction with it.
    It seems that some people have a sort of innate hatred of authority, even at a young age. It makes sense that those people would be more inclined to be open minded to the kinds if fakery that we research here.

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    1. I have two 30 something awakened sons who each rebelled in high school (one simply put up with it in a sullen fashion and did the bare minimum to graduate; the other was a scholar-athlete who vigorously questioned his teachers). Both boys did not go to college, so missed that indoctrination, and went instead to a 4 year trade school-apprenticeship program. They are doing great and know that life is not about what college they went to, what social milieu they grew up in, or how much money and status they have; they did it their way and although it might have given me a couple of grey hairs at the time, I am very proud of them. They are in a field where their skills are needed and valued. But as Mark has said again and again, they are needles in a haystack. I also have a daughter with wonderful intuitive skills (who accepts some hoaxes and rejects others, so she’s semi awake) – she never enjoyed being confined in a classroom either, and missed out on a two year degree by one class. Yet she’s in a field she loves and which utilizes her natural communication and intuitive skills. So it was a major dislike of their public school environments that my three children have in common, and a natural tendency to think for themselves. More so than their college educated cousins, who put things on social media such as:

      “Oh the horror of another senseless act of violence. We must do more to protect our children from mass shootings when they attend church in Sutherland Springs, a concert in Las Vegas, a school in Sandy Hook…. We need to consider enforcing stricter gun laws so guns don’t end up in the wrong hands. My heart is heavy for all those affected. They will not be forgotten.”

      So what makes these cousins carrying the same blood and dna, educated in the same era, so different – one set is gullible and completely accepting of the media-govt-complex vomiting of hoax after hoax, and the other set are independent questioning critical thinkers. I’m proud to say I birthed the latter, although I personally came awake much later in life. I can still pinpoint the moment that led to my awakening, and it was attended by some serendipitous events such as being handed my first Miles Mathis essay (on Steve Jobs) – I have never looked back.

      As parents, we can encourage our children to question again and again and nurture their curiosity – get them out in Nature, and have old fashioned face-to-face communication with them as often as possible.

      I totally agree with MM that the goal is to become a greater soul.

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      1. Grace,
        It appears the difference between your children and their “higher-learned” cousins is this:
        Your offspring were naturally intuitive and could recognize bullshit. They recognized that sitting for another 4 years of bullshit would be, well, bullshit. They found another way and are content. Their cousins are more easily manipulated into trusting a system that suckered them into paying for further indoctrination. They continue to be duped and manipulated by nonsense, asking the mafia, er, government for more “protection”. Congratulations, you raised a fine lot of humans being instead of zombies.

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        1. Natwurst: thank you – your comment means the world to me. I pinch myself every day in awe of my many blessings. I’m embarrassed how long it took me to see the light and yet it is a blessing to be awake even though the rewards are mostly internal. I can take great comfort in knowing I have these wonderfully deep and penetrating conversations –mostly with my sons . And i can come to POM for some insight as well and receive a most gracious comment such as your’s. Take good care.
          -Grace

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  8. “It seems that some people have a sort of innate hatred of authority, even at a young age.”

    Regarding myself, it’s not that I “hate” authority, it’s because I can detect and see the problems: the various massive frauds, hoaxes, misinformation, manipulation, terrorization, exploitation, cruelty and deceit, etc., perpetrated by the authorities.

    I’m not an anarchist, and I don’t think having an authority is bad. I want there to be some kind of authority that is moral, competent and legitimate – we apparently do not have that today. I believe that societies in the past did have competent and moral authorities and leadership in the past, otherwise I don’t see how western civilization, culture and technology could have developed as it has. Civilizations, societies and nations where the governing authorities degrade and harass their own people cannot prosper, endure and last. It doesn’t have to be this way.

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  9. To start waking up, to grow stronger mentally (physically too) you need to face some adversity. If you are having it too good you will never question, you will never seek for answers/help understanding what is going on. It could be that your career went stone cold due to promotion of less talented people or insiders. It could be your country got destroyed by a real war sponsored by a foreign empire and you had to leave your land, your people, your life. Whatever it is, the trigger has to be some adversity. Most people in US, we are having it too good, even if it is by using a plastic card to get by and be permanently in debt. There’s got to be something in your life to make you start questioning… and that is only a personal affair. In the process, you will find mentors, gurus… and as we have learned, ALL gurus fall down eventually when you catch the trick their up to.

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  10. Great (new) point, Mark. Education I think is key to let the next generation be wiser than we were. I think our generations (Mark could have been my father) are the first who really en masse wake up. Before the internet it was even more fringe than now.

    Let me share some ideas:

    The whole system of ‘education’ is wrong.

    First of all, the set-up; placing 30 children with completely different backgrounds, interests, knowledge and skills in 1 room during a year, and next year again and again and pushing them into a mal they don’t belong to be in,

    And the madness of ‘from 10:00 to 11:00 you get French classes, from 11:00 to 12:00 maths, from 13:00 to 14:00 history’. It’s a completely ridiculous set-up, only done to ease the flow for the organizing powers, but forcing children to learn things at those fixed arbitrary times is completely unnatural and archaic.

    Then the ridiculous bullying that comes from different characters, social background, far too large groups and not monitoring the wellbeing of those children and their respective various backgrounds.

    There are types of “education” that are better at that, like Montessori, but still are in the same boat of teaching the enormous heap of lies that have been spread in history and daily are broadcasted via the tell-lie-vision.

    My idea is a completely different “system”:

    small groups of 8-10 max pupils
    no strict discriminations of ages
    “home” schooling (doesn’t need to be a home, could be any rented space)
    lots of time spent outside; nature teaches biology first-hand, visit places that actually show the topic you talk about
    a much closer integration between the subjects; not first French and then maths, but integrate maths with French, having accessible, simplified maths IN French and then deepen the point in the native tongue of the pupil. Same with “Spanish” and “history”, treat the history of Latin American countries, Spain and the Philippines in that particular language, to able them to read the sources in that language.
    children are eager to learn, but that is destroyed by the current system which makes it an “obligation” and kids do not want to go to “school”. It shouldn’t be too hard to change that.

    On content/subjects:

    starting point is LOGIC. It is one of the most important tools to survive in a world dominated (at least that’s what they believe they do) by liars. All those hoaxes, staged events and other lies suffer from irrationality; a lack of logic. So by teaching the new generation to think logically, they are able to unwind the stories and spot inconsistencies right away
    provide a form of education where theses/case studies are presented and children with the tools and knowledge they have and get can analyze those. That can be done at every level of intelligence and almost every age (after a solid foundation). Not some teacher standing there in front of the classroom telling “how things are”, but present cases and just provide directions and advice about how to tackle those problems; let the children do the work themselves.
    no strict limits between “subjects”; the world is a continuum integrating everything. That way one learns in an integrated project, using “maths” and “physics” and “chemistry” why space travel and nuclear weapons are a hoax. At “history”, integrated in the case study, a teacher can treat the history of those enormous hoaxes and with “languages” you learn how to read other language sources about those hoaxes. That way it’s possible to educate playfully the topic at hand and makes it possible to teach the jargon that is present in each language, potentially downscaled to easier terms for the younger crowd or those who are not at the same intelligence level as others.
    the basis of it all is philosophy, logic, ethics and that shows why statism is completely ridiculous and irrational. There is no age limit to that, you can teach small children those ideas already. “Is Little John allowed to steal your toys, Megan?” “NO!” “Ok, good, and now let’s imagine Little John has a tag that says “government” or “state”, then suddenly he can?” “No, of course not!”
    mix children of different age groups, so older or younger but more advanced children can assist younger or less advanced ones. The only role for the teacher is to give guidance, provide assistance.
    not every child has the same interests, that may be nature rather than nurture and in the current system leads to groupthink and reduction of critical assessment. Form groups of kids who share the same interests and mix them again to have discussions and thus learnings of different interests, also to make them able to deal with other people who are different than them.

    Dealing with the “95%”

    Because children eventually need to function in a world dominated by liars, lies and many believers in those lies, it is essential to prepare them with socializing with others, who have been taught the Disney La La Land version of life. That can be done in small, guided groups where bullying is actively disencouraged and where children can learn from other’s experiences
    in the end it is important to prepare children for further “education”, be it practical or academic (or both), but they need to know stuff that is “generally accepted”, though after the basic scrutiny they learned early on are bullshit. They learned that through the basis; philosophy, logic, reasoning, consistency, arguments, etc. but they need to know a large part of their peers think differently and eerily irrationally. How to deal with that. Using role plays, case studies, etc.
    same with preparations to a “central examination” (or allowance tests for universities and other next educational institutes we have in this world). It is requested that they have “knowledge” of certain things and one way or the other they need to learn about it. So prepare them to not answer to the question “Who was the first man on the Moon and when did that happen” “Nobody and it will never happen”, but the standard Armstrong-Aldrin bullcrap.
    there is paradox in teaching children logic, not lying and being honest versus telling lies to survive, but it is only a paradox; an apparent contradiction, not a real one. It is only pragmatic, not from honesty, arguments, logic, rationality, etc.

    How to set-up

    To accommodate all this some money and organization is needed, but regular “education” is also expensive, so it should be possible. What we’d need is a group of parents or upcoming parents that agree upon these thoughts and the way of learning and what would be able is to show we can do it.

    I think this new method reduces the problem of today where first they get exposed to millions of lies and then need to “unlearn” those and what you get is stronger, more self-conscious, less fearful and thus less susceptible to propaganda new generations that are able to spot lies right away but still are able (enough) to deal with the peers they have who live in Disney La La Land…

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    1. Experience with other people and Nature trumps education as we in the US know it. I am still unlearning all the BS of an extended graduate education. We have all gotten too soft and need more boulders and challenges thrown in our road. Over 100 years ago people walked 20 miles easily and were slim and self reliant.

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  11. I am skeptical of any information coming out of the US Dept. of Education. You don’t know how the people were selected and how the study determined their skill sets: their criteria. . .

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      1. That’s right, studies are usually suspect. It is not an objection. Yes, there are morons running around everywhere but they often are not the ones you would suspect. I moved from a trendy, pseudo-sophisicated area to a place where few have any extra educational experiences although some vocational ones. Surprisingly the morons who I thought would be abundant in Bill Clinton’s state are more savvy about our gov. then most of the people I knew in CA. I was wrong but the real morons were in CA (Hillary, ugh). I suppose it’s all the extra years of indoctrination and following rules. Here we have few rules and this area historically has despised the taxman, revenuers. When I inquired to my handy workers what did they think about so and so. They stepped right up to the bat and told me what I had gathered too by reading, traveling and researching. They also have a country sense of humor about it too. Yes, it’s a wasteland but not where you think. When I travelled around the Western US in my little car, I was happy to find many enlightened people along the way who were happy to share. Many truths there and it was magical.

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          1. P.S. my remarks stem from the fact that I am sick and tired and fed up with the San Franciscan know-it-alls who look down on anyone between SF and NYC. Recall it was in SF that Obama said that dumb thing about red state folks clinging to religion and guns. I ask “what’s the matter with that?” 😉

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  12. It’s early in the morning here, and I haven’t the focus to plough through the whole speach, but here is an oft-quoted chunk of Woodrow Wilson:

    We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_a_Liberal_Education

    One hundred years later, we can expand manual labour to include shaping and shifting our quotas of xlsx and docx.

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    1. The unaddressed question is whether or not we can take an average person, give him/her a liberal education (which involves immersion in grammar, rhetoric and logic), and produce a thinking and vigilant citizen. Of course, I don’t know the answer.

      The presence of controlled mass media in our lives, and not failure of education, is the controlling factor that keeps people in the dark, as I see it.

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      1. These are precisely the top people recruited by the spook/media/military/police services to produce our fake reality, the liberal-educated elite.. Unfortunately that education hasn’t provided any internal moral compass for them. Materially they’ll do OK with a nice fat pension at the end of for not rocking the boat, keeping schtum and defending the lie system. And so it continues. Imagine the sheep all woke up though to what was and had been going on with all these decades, centuries even, of hoaxes and staged events….. that would be a strange unimaginable world.

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      2. I believe the average is potentially a lot higher than currently achieved. The projects – Shakespeare, Mozart, The Beatles, the physicists, – among other things create this idea of genius and so then non-genius, the rest of us. However, even looking at this at face value, the genius factor comes through hard work, not from some innate intelligence. Carol Dweck writes about this. But whhen we realise that each celebrated genius is part of elite pysop, it is even more clear how far the average is suppressed. School is one factor, the mass media another.

        With regards to definitions of liberal education. I am suspicious of the Trivium meme (meme in the pre-lolcatz useful sense of an idea spreading and propogating quasi-gentically). Firstly, because of the fact that it is a meme, and receives so much foregrounding. But secondly because there is the question of grammar, and what exactly this term means. I have seen James Joyce described as a grammarian, I think by Eric McLuhan, because of his collecting and piecing together so much detail about life and language into his books. (And I am aware both Joyce and McLuhan are also part of one project or another, but I still read them to learn from their craft and to untangle the webs they weave. Dangerous?) Grammar, in this sense, is the attention to detail, which serves dear Miles Mathis so well. A grammarian. Linguistically, grammar is then the collection of the details of language, but grammar, and its part in any healthy education, should be more than that.

        On another note, I have been looking at the book you mentioed a few weeks ago, Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. I get stuck on this sentence in the introduction:

        The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.

        Let’s take JFK for example. Certainly a memorable event, but we don’t need further justification on this site to say that the invisible changes of human thought are the manipulations of the hidden hand. I think that Le Bon knows this, and that his analysis of crowds is not a description of a natural human behaviour, but a strand of the scripting of the fake reality we expected to live in.

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        1. I just finished reading Gustave LeBon which is some kind of fake name…maybe derived from Bonniere? His translated science book, The Evolution of Forces, was not worth the price. I was checking for some nuggets about radium, the Curies: the whole atomic energy hoax. LeBon spends half the book railing about the physicists and how their theories are unfounded (no experiments). This is true. He keeps mentioning Carnot who turns out to be a secret relative. All LeBon’s experiments are naturally antiquated. He seems to be a French spook working in Belgium. The Curies are never mentioned which begs research about them. Marie and Pierre were of course “connected” as are The Bonniere’s maybe in the peerage?

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  13. Too many humans and technology ruin everyone’s life. There is no useful work for everyone so the unfortunate are headed for drug addiction to cope with life. Technology makes humans lazy. This leads to the increase in obesity and with it comes the decline in health. Besides a lot of technology is also having a negative effect on the environment.
    If you think about it, society can’t function without rules and these rules are constantly changing. And since technology evolves at such a pace it is hardly fun anymore to live a modern life. People barely come to rest. Is this what it is about? To do things without purpose and never having time to think? My point is all these hoaxes serve a higher purpose: to control the masses and at the same time to establish an order unseen by most. I’m not defending TPTB but there is a logic behind it which does have its place in nature. You can’t have it both ways, either you go for quality or you choose quantity. It’s a parent’s responsibility to raise quality children. 99% failed and the results we see everyday. TPTB brainwashed your kids because YOU let it happen. A stranger will never treat others as if they were his own. From this miseducation we can’t possible be living in another world than we are living in.

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    1. I missed one important point. Most young ppl have never created anything in their life. They don’t know the value of most things other than a price tag. So everything becomes a product even other humans which can be easily disposed of.

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    2. You do not need piles of rules and laws to have a healthy, prosperous society – I completely disagree with you there. And for nearly a million years prior to our current monoculture, our ancestors did just fine. The only real rules were “give as good as you get” and “don’t be too predictable.”

      But then some nine or ten thousand years ago, Totalitarian Agriculture began overtaking the old tribal societies. And the rules became, “if you want food, you have to work and pay someone else for it because you cannot own land”, slowly but surely, century by century expanding in both area and population. The population was roughly stable prior to TA, for hundreds of thousands of years. Now, it doubles roughly every 35 years. Bipedal locusts.

      This overgrowth is the greatest threat to the flora and fauna of Earth, but the greatest asset to TPTB. It ensures their wealth will continue growing exponentially, and the enslavement growing right along with it.

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  14. Had some good conversations with veterans today. Oddly two men in different branches, one participated in the invasion of Guam, the other the invasion of Normandy. They both mentioned it was “quite a show”. That raised my eyebrow, why would they both say that? They all answered a few yes or no questions too, but didn’t go into details or elaborate. I looked at their photo collections and from what we talk about here, some look like paste ups, the photos did have a censor stamp on the back so they had to be approved. Bodies laying on the ground that look like they may be alive and just laying there, a few tanks stuck in mud, some Zero plane wings on ground, destroyed equipment, however nothing convincing.
    I’m seeing these old wars as Theater, somehow to collect billion$ in tax dollars, yet maybe there were skirmishes? I don’t know. I’m just not getting that satisfactory feeling these events took place as we are all told.

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    1. The question is, are there any reliable sources who can confirm that they had enemy contact? Without that it might be possible that those at the front of war were actually just shooting from the distance at covert troops wearing enemy uniforms and this on both sides.

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        1. Looks like the propaganda film corp edited in the troops after a few jeeps went down the Champs. Also there are no liberated French crowds. They did not get the memo. What is your spin on this? The German power marches in Nurembourg and other places looked similar to this liberation march. Crowds listening to the fuerer Hitler, looked fake as well. I’ve had some film editing experience which helps.

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        3. Interesting … i watched the film in silence. I did not catch any soundtrack discrepancies.

          This stems from my seeing a photograph of thousands of troops marching down Champs that looked to me to be the result of darkroom funny business. What I noticed in this film was that the marching troops towards the end had a dark and milky quality about them where everything else was well-lit. They seem to move like a bed of lava. Though they had known abilities to manipulate still photos then, what I thought I saw here was the ability to blend two motion pictures, as there is some crowd movement at the same time as the troops march. That was new to me. I think the troops and the crowd were filmed separately and blended in the dark room.

          Other stuff: power of suggestion has smiling people waving flags juxtaposed in the larger scene to imply that they are happening at the same time, which is standard film-making deceit. (I was watching Mozart in the Jungle last evening, and the conductor and cellist are bowing before a appreciative crowd that is obviously just imaginary. They are still not that good at it!) The parade of a few machines are driven by indifferent soldiers in front of a small and disinterested crowd, by power of suggestion, becomes a massive celebration of liberation by the manipulated spectacle of thousands of marching troops.

          I watched a longer version, nine minutes, that included Charles deGaulle and had even more interspersed smiling flag-waving spectators. In that one the troop scenes looked real, but the Arch was not in the same shot as the troops, more juxtaposition.

          My conclusion, just based in this flimsy propaganda, is that the liberation of Paris was an invented event.

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    1. It looks snakey to me. Her expression looks terribly false. I’ve been around quite a few hardcore victims of similar situations and they never fucking smiled about the topic, ever.

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