Phew. I'm not a Christian, but I know quality when I see it in a person. I know a courageous man, and a deeply good man. This guy has gone to prison as a result of what he has revealed. For robbing a bank. Just watch a few minutes of this and you will see what a ridiculous notion that is.
Incendiary - this guy is smart, incisive, and backs up what he says endlessly. But holy shit - what he says, well - you will see everything differently afterwards.
Consequently it can be argued that our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored, and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the soviet Union or Communist China. No western foundation will award grants to investigate such topics, few Western academics can "survive" by researching such theses and certainly no major publisher will easily accept manuscripts reflecting such arguments.
Siim Kallas confirmed that the EU would apply "maximum pressure" to force airlines to comply with European legislation and offer refunds to passengers, but said individual countries could provide aid to companies in the form of market-rate loans and guarantees.
He said the EU aimed to fast-track proposals by the end of the year for an integrated European airspace, with a "single sky" to replace the current system of each country monitoring its own airspace.
"The volcanic ash crisis that paralysed European air transport for nearly a week made it crystal clear that the single European sky is a critical missing link in Europe's infrastructure," Iata director general Giovanni Bisignani said this week.
Kallas said the EU was also aiming to introduce Europe-wide planning to provide other forms of transport should one mode become so stricken again.
John Taylor Gatto is a remarkable man. Voted teacher of the year in New York, he stood up and gave one of the most incendiary speeches I have ever seen transcripted.
The following are exerpts from the text of a speech by him accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990 (emphases mine).
Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell
Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled.
To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but in a national order increasingly disintegrated, in a national order in which only humanly successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic (because community life which protects the dependent and weak is dead and only networks remain), the products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.
“How will they learn to read?!” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them — time they need to grow up — and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this because no reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.
The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I’ve known in this respect — they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of school teachers who materialistically “grade” everything — and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.
FAMILY is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. THE CURRICULUM OF FAMILY is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it.
Fairly brings tears to my eyes to hear such things. Bravo. Here's the great man elaborating further:
Perhaps the single most damaging thing schools teach is that it's bad and wrong to fail.
But when we learn to walk, we fail over and over before we get it right.
Indeed, without failure we as humans simply cannot truly learn anything.
What we can do is parrot things back - in fact we can get 100% that way in school tests.
In life there's no such thing as 100%, there's only the hustle. If scared of failure, we become paralysed, unable to function with the creativity and originality which is our own peculiar character make up. We keep doing the same things, the safe things, over and over. We specialise. We practice routine. Our minds relax, our hearts stiffen. We practice frivolity without gaiety, and earnestness without seriousness. We forget how the game should be played.
Something doesn't feel right. The biggest halting of air flight in Europe since World War 2. Because of a volcano in Iceland? I haven't seen any ash, and I'm in London, so I'm also on the path to the rest of Europe - if there was ash going there it would be passing through here. Nothing - clear skies.
Besides, even if there were traces, surely pilots could avoid them by flying at different altitudes or going by different routes?
Let's take a closer look. Indeed, the ash has not arrived on UK shores yet. In fact, apparently the eruption started on March 20th, so pretty much a full month ago. The ash has been moving very slowly since:
And then we have this:
That's an image from the BBC website, which seems like a work of fiction. Now, it's pretty clear that the ash would not disrupt most flights, except those to Iceland itself. It may become an issue in a few weeks when it's path is revealed, but for now it's not. It's moving very slowly, and can be monitored and avoided.
Why do the New World Orderists want to shut down air travel? Perhaps just to convince themselves that they can. Prison planet, here we are.
In contrast to much of mainland Europe, Iceland's airspace remains open.
It's business as usual in terms of flights going in and out of Reykjavik, says the BBC's Ann Courtney from the Icelandic capital. Flights are departing for the US, Glasgow and Dublin. Some flights have been cancelled as a result of the airspace closures elsewhere in Europe though, she adds.
Read that again. Yes, it really is all a giant hoax.
Well at least someone's come out with their suspicions. Not that the story in the Mail gives much of a coherent story. But there is this bit:
But he claims there were also serious language problems between the control tower at the military airport near Smolensk and the crew as the aircraft began its descent, and final approach, 'without our permission'.
So they're saying he went and landed "without permission"? Just because he was, you know, in a bit of a hurry?
the abandonment of that solitude which was at once the trademark of adolescence and the source of its deepest despairs as of its dubious ecstasies. And frequently this solitude was creative. From it some times came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and contributed to giving us our poets, artists, scientists . . . But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. Into these mindless associations the young flock like cattle. The fee they pay for initiation is abandonment of self and immersion in the herd . . . This innovation can yield no social gain. For it is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived. In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized.
Groupthink, herd instinct, sheeple... The goal of fascism has always been to turn the Many into the Mob.
this is written by a libertarian ludic libertine hedonist, individualist, primal foodie, atheist, apolitical, Darwinian amateur philosopher. Standing, as are we all, on the brink of the Greatest Depression. I think the following ideas currently floating around like malignant parasitic insects, ubiquitous and iniquitous, need re-examination or outright extermination:
Democracy
Vaccines
“Too big to fail”s
Religion & “belief”
Environmentalism
The BBC
Marriage as a deal for men
Corporatism
Vegetarianism
Prohibition of drugs
Discipline & sacrifice
Zero sum views of the world
“Rights”
Common Fisheries Policy
“Hope”
Agriculture
Myth that fat is bad for you
Credentialism
Economics
“Teams” & teamwork
And they're all related. For now the first thing I’ll link to, to set the tone, is this exhilarating paradigm-busting essay on why work should be abolished.