I have a son who is a very bright young man. He was bored in school, as all bright people are, and so was restless and acted up. His teacher wanted him to be tested for ADD. I refused to allow that, and instead did an end run, taking him to a private physician for a battery of tests. The result, said the wonderful pediatrician: “The kid is bored.” Thereafter the teacher was instructed to introduce more rigor into his lessons,  the dumbest thing I had ever heard. The answer, to get him out of school, was not practical. I could not home school, and  we are structured to deny basic opportunities to people who have not endured formal schooling. But at least I was able to stop them from drugging him.

We all have family or friends who are treated for ADD, ADHD, aka boredom in school. The kids are not the problem, but rather the schools. The “diseases” are a trap, as there are no defineable physical symptoms, but rather a set of “behaviors” that indicate presence. It is quackery.

The reason it is quackery is because all of us throughout our lives manifest those symptoms at various times. As a CPA I have to sit through tedious seminars, frightfully boring. I deliberately choose large seminars so I can sit in the back and mess with my IPad or daydream. Those are symptoms of ADD. But I not not have ADD. No one has it. It does not exist.

This all comes to mind because I was looking last night for a test given to students in 1910. I had heard of this before and did not take it seriously, as there is so much fakery and distortion in the Internet. But the test is real. I reproduce it at the bottom.

Schooling in the 19th and early 20th century was not a lifetime occupation. People entered trades and professions, even law and medicine, without spending 16-20 years in the classroom. They could do this because education was rigorous and designed to train the mind to think. A person who knows how to think has all the armor needed for life, and can enter any field and figure things out by means and of focus,  exploration and collaboration.

But that all changed with the need for factory workers, bureaucrats (me – that’s all a CPA is) and soldiers. Schools were worked over, truancy laws passed, and we were all introduced to the tedium of lines, bells, and dumbed-down memorization. Further, we were sold the idea that more years of tedium produces better learning, so that a college graduate is a learned person. When I think back now on my intellectual state on graduation from college, I see a man with a very limited mind.

That was bad enough, and was our state of affairs when I was in school in the fifties and sixties. Since then it has only gotten worse, as nothing waits outside for the average person besides a boring job (if lucky), mortgage, student loan, and medical bills. Oh yeah, and elections and the Super Bowl. So the dumbing down process has gotten more intense. The people who designed our education system, with its drugs and testing, know that it produces non-thinking automatons.

They want that outcome. They do not want thinking people who experience the wide range of excitement, challenge, disappointment, pain and ecstasy that we call life. They want that experience narrowed down, and our receptors inhibited.

I experience this daily now as I write here and view comments here and elsewhere, and realize that perhaps half a dozen people who read this blog are capable of dealing with its content. I wrote yesterday about the excitement of solving the McCartney riddle, and got this comment:

You’re still being fooled, and are a fool.

If that sort of comment were not typical, if that person were an exception … but he is not. His range of intellectual motion is stifled, so he cannot experience anything beyond the tedious little world of he-said-she-said politics and pretty faces reading scripted news. He is a product of schooling. He cannot think properly. He cannot imagine things.

Life is an exciting journey that gets even more exciting as we age and learn more. They start us there on mood altering drugs in school to narrow or range of reception. They keep it up with all of these mood medicines, and now legal pot. They want us, they need us dumbed down and uncomplicated, compliant.

And it is sad to watch. It is working.

I have learned that climate change is a hoax, but a useful one. Anything that keeps people in a constant state of fear is useful to the ruling class. I grew up during the (fake) Cold War and in a state of fear, the bomb and communism being so evil. That is how they controlled us in those days. (Running out of oil was a useful scam too. I lived through two Arab boycotts, both fake. I thought they were real.)

These days it is climate change, ISIS, terrorism in general, but I noticed something else yesterday – fear of financial collapse.

Here’s something to think about: Don’t invest in the stock market. Avoid consumer debt, student loan debt, anything that puts you in a position of having to produce a sum certain every month that has to be given over to people who did not earn it.

If that means owning a smaller house than you’d like, that is reality. Drive a heap – old cars that run well are treasures. (Ours are 11 and 10 years old, Japanese, and so well-built, and paid for.)

Are you afraid of what your life will be if you don’t get that college degree? You’re better off without the degree and the debt. You’re left to your own devices. Who ever said that learning only comes from college?

This sounds like heresy, even unrealistic, but what it means is you need to do everything possible to avoid the financial grid. It is a trap. It is meant to be a trap. It is no accident that student loans are handed out like candy with no expectation of performance or even a job on the other end. They are meant to be hung around your neck to keep you in debt and under control throughout your life. Avoid them. (In a sane world college would be based on ability and performance, the tab picked up by all of us via taxes. There are remedies aplenty for slouches.)

Is there another financial collapse on the way? Of course! They are planned. A change of administration often signals the timing, though I don’t know why. With each one the most powerful people go around behind sweeping up the wreckage. The big eat the small.

But truth be told, we have an economy of people making, growing and selling things that are not nail salons or massage parlors. We are all in some form talented enough to survive. We are taught not to develop our real talents, but rather to learn to be good employees, take on massive debt, and lead lives of quiet desperation.

The answer, don’t do that, sounds trite and unworkable. But it is not if you start today. If you are already in the student loan trap, your impetus, your first step should be to shed that burden. If it were me, I would look first to convert it to a form of debt that I can walk away from if I am trapped.

Think about it. Nobody on the other end “earned” that annuity that has you strapped down. It’s all in your head.

Certain words grate on me – they are used to avoid using using other words. It is part of how we process things, I suppose, a way of denying reality.

For example, on NPR and I suppose elsewhere too, they do not use the word “advertising.” They say “message.” They don’t even say “commercial message,” just “message”, as in “Car Talk follows after this “message.”

When I purchased a Kindle, I wanted one free of advertising, and said that to the Amazon.com gal on the phone. She corrected me, and said “you mean messages.” I said “no, advertising” and she corrected me again. So this is a conscious policy, like “support the troops” or “drill baby drill,” a PR way of undermining our thought processes. Advertising is an intrusive and subversive pain in the ass. Call it what it is.

It is like saying “mental illness” rather than “people who are suffering.”

Yes, the is that other phrase that annoys me, “mental illness.” “People who are suffering” places the blame for the pain that people endure correctly on outside influences. These would be things like advertising, agitation propaganda, alcohol and drugs (including the legal ones like antidepressants), fake news, and financial stress. They all interrelate.

Advertising is a huge negative influence, for instance, creating pent-up demand and unhappiness with current stuff, causing us to spend too much. Advertising works because it makes us unhappy. It also leads to credit card debt, a source of stress.

Agitprop was very properly described by NATO during Operation Gladio as a “strategy of tension.” These days they run fake shooting events (it used to be fake serial killers) and false flag events like 911, Boston, Paris. San Bernardino and now Brussels to keep us in a state of anxiety. Fear is a governing tool. It is how they control our thoughts and more importantly, draw support for their never-ending wars of aggression.

“Mental illness” implies an internal source for our pain, a brain defect, normally fixed by pills. But oddly, we don’t find mental illness in primitive societies. To me, this lays the problem not on us, but on our culture and our leadership. Left to our own devices, free of advertising and agitprop and bankers and the tax man, drug free and sober, we tend to be happy and well adjusted. Virtually all of us.

Of course now and then we will find someone truly off-center, someone unable to cope due to bad wiring, but it is rare. Very rare. And we have the social outliers – people who suffer alienation due to things like very high IQs or homosexuality – they don’t fit. But in a healthy society, outliers are not condemned or mistreated. Rather, they are accepted and treated with respect.

So what to do about “mental illness?” That is clever misdirection. It leads to more pills, interventions, more nanny state stuff. Merely asking the question in a different manner produces a different result.

How do we control the outside influences that are making us angry and agitated? It is not our fault. It is our leadership. It is the TV, the movies, the spooks, the financial predators (now selling “reverse mortgages,” one of the most abusive financial tools ever invented.) How do we break free?

1. Turn off your TV.
2. Avoid movies that contain unnecessary violence and gratuitous sex or embedded propaganda. Kind of like … most of them.
3. Ignore “news.” (“I get all the news I need from the weather report.” (Paul Simon))
4. Vote, but only by means of write-in. We choose the candidates, rather than having them selected for us.
5. Take no drugs other than those that actually cure physical ailments, like antibiotics.
6. Meet your neighbors, enjoy their company.
7. Drink in moderation. Excessive drinking, labeled “alcoholism,” has many bad outcomes, one of which is the “ten twelve-step program,” a perverse form of groupthink.
8. Don’t gamble.
9. Meditate. (Praying is merely a form of meditation.)
10. Read. That too is a form of meditation.

I got lectured earlier this week about mental illness, told I am a fool who just promotes the whole “just tough it out” thing. It is as if I am blind to people in agony or the need for intervention during crisis to save lives. I am not blind, but dammit, if you blame people for their troubles when the causes of the suffering almost all external, nothing will ever be solved.

Of course we are witnessing more and more people in pain and suffering. We need to discuss why.

We are at a resort at the base of Mt. Arenal, an active volcano. It is quite lovely here. Our friends are birders and are being treated to birds never seen before, and the pools are a choice of very warm to modestly cool, all flowing from a hot springs.

We we traveled through high country today as our guide talked about Costa Rica education, customs, taxes. I noticed that houses had no numbers or mailboxes. He said that there is no postal service here, that everyone pays bills on line or at the grocery store, and that houses are identified by directions from known landmarks, like centuries and museums. So if you call 911 (they have an active service), you tell the operator, for instance, to go three blocks south of the cemetery, turn left at a mango tree, and go to the third house on the right.

It works, he said. Prior to the Internet everything was handled via a central office in their towns where people paid their bills through a local official.

Internet very busy here at our resort, cannot upload photos of this beautiful spot.