Summer Solstice in Chicago

It occurred this morning at 5:11AM.
Today's day length is 913 minutes.. longest day of the year.
In six months the shortest day will be 548 minutes long (365 minutes less than today).
SO get out and enjoy the day. For soon it will pass. Carpe Diem because Tempus Fugit. Besides sitting outside last night watching the sun go down and the beautiful fireflies coming out was so pleasant. Enjoy your life.. for it too FUGIT.

This is a question that BEGS to be answered. Public schools don't work.

What If Public Schools Were Abolished? by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

archive.lewrockwell.com

if we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws, and replace it all with market-provided education, we would have better schools at half the...

This school system spends over $16,000 per year per student.

 Do you mean to tell me that you or me or anyone couldn't do it for nearly half? Public education is a lost cause. Stick a fork in it. Let churches and clubs teach the kids with vouchers. I would suggest ten grand per kid. That money follows the student wherever he or she decides to go. Free market. Schools would pop up ALL OVER. IF insanity and teacher's unions didn't prevail.. some even in the buildings they are already occupying. This is crazy

Detroit Public Schools faces bigger deficit, threat of bigger classes

www.freep.com

The head of the teachers union pledged to fight attempts to...

Division

IF this kind of division is bad for a denomination, how much worse is it for a nation. We are divided on so many fronts now. Abortion, Homosex, Gay Marriage but if you argue that the decision to embrace these things by our leadership in Washington, you are accused of being Homophobe or worse RACIST. If you are allegedly a Christiandd and overlook these kinds of gross errors for party affiliation... you are deceived or worse.

Will Embracing Gay Marriage Usher in the Death of a Major Christian Denomination? Praise and...

www.theblaze.com

The Presbyterian Church...

Here is a list of nations more prosperous than the USA, and the common denominator is THEY HAVE NO MINIMUM WAGE.

Don't be fooled. The minimum wage argument is designed to sucker in people to support crooked politicians.

Germany
Finland
Denmark
Iceland
Italy
Liechtenstein
Norway
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland

WE are being led into becoming a third world nation because we have poor education, a rotting culture and crooked politicians who make promises with other people's money. People never learn to work because they can't... the minimum wage stops them.

Dealing with Delusion, Deception and Distraction Part Deux

Earlier today I wrote about the patterns of deception we allow in our lives and the dangers it presents to ourselves and society.

Now I will tell you the cure for deception. It's not truth.. that's a second step. It's admission. "HI, I'M GENE and I've been deceived. (Hello Gene)". Until like an alcoholic a person admits deception, they cannot be healed. Hanging on to the deception is the least painful way of coming out of it. So like a bad drug they do.

We all know the common saying for coming to grip with the truth:

I'm living a lie.
Face up to reality.
Come clean.
Whistle blowing
Washing dirty laundry in public
Honesty is the best policy
Exposing the truth
Transparency
Open government
Open book accounting
I can’t hide my head in the sand anymore.
Many a true word spoken in jest (i.e. a Freudian slip)
Opening up a can of worms
The truth shall set you free
Own up/Face up to the truth
Getting down to brass tacks
Bearing all
Brutal honesty/truth/facts
The Shield of truth.
Illuminating dark places
Shining the light of truth
The undeniable truth
The truth will out
You can’t hide from the truth
I can't kid myself any longer

It is interesting how many of these metaphors are about revealing something that was hidden (face up, expose, transparent, open, can't hide, bearing, illuminating, will out).

Yet greatness requires TRUTH at the most transparent level. Martin Luther King Jr was said by his wife to have been one who constantly fought for his own personal truth:

"He drained his closest friends for advice; he searched within himself for answers; he prayed intensely for guidance. He suspected himself of corruption continually, to ward it off. None of his detractors, and there were many, could be as ruthless in questioning his motives or his judgment as he was to himself." (p. 347, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, 1969)

Telling ourselves a lie requires that we first intentionally blind ourselves to anything that might interrupt our self deception. We fail to notice and it's a visions circle.

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we notice,
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

Jim Collins of how good companies became great in Good to Great. One of his eight conclusions is the need to "confront the brutal facts":

"When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of the situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. And even if all decisions do not become self-evident, one thing is certain: You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated with this principle, and the comparison companies generally did not."

The key is to constantly search for delusion and eschew it.

One of the cardinal rules I TRY to live under is NEVER CON YOURSELF. Try for truth. Dig for reality. Face the pain when it comes. Shine the light of truth as brightly as possible. Do I want my heart broken now or later?

 The path to hell is greased with lies, most of which we tell ourselves. Delusion demeans the deluded. You can fool others for a while, but when the lights go off.. you KNOW you have been had.. by YOU. It's self-deception, self-delusion and self-denial. There is a good reason we lie to ourselves... to avoid pain.

The mind can protect itself against anxiety by diminishing awareness. This mechanism produces a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behavior from the psychological to the social.

It's worse when it affects others. When others are drawn into or controlled by your self delusion. People, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information 'registers' well enough, but its implications -- cognitive, emotional or moral -- are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.

We hear this in our conversation when we reach this point. When it all starts to unravel we say things like:

I don't want to know.
I couldn't take in the news.
It's got nothing to do with me.
Don't make waves.
I looked the other way.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I can't believe this is happening to me.
Ignorance is bliss.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Brush it under the carpet.
I'm just hoping it isn't going to happen.
Why didn't I listen to my intuition, again?

The problem is, once you reach a tipping point in delusion, you almost cannot be brought back. Your worldview is so polluted with lies that the destruction of that worldview will destroy you.

That's why the old adage, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still" is doubly true. If you know or love someone that is profoundly deluded... here's the issue:

He does not think there is anything the matter with him
because

one of the things that is
the matter with him
is that he does not think that there is anything
the matter with him

therefore

we have to help him realise that,
the fact that he does not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things that is
the matter with him.

Given that at best people are only dimly aware that they are deceiving themselves, a number of questions arise:

How would you know a person was self-decieved?
When is it in the best interest of the self-deceiver to be informed?
When should the 'wider system' be informed, even if this conflicts with the interest of the individual? This could be a nation, state, city, company, institution or family.

And how can this be done 'cleanly' (i.e. without imposing your 'map of reality' on them)?

And, it is worth remembering that if a person doesn't act from what they know to be true, and they know truthfully that they could have (i.e. they have evidence for this belief) — then it’s a choice. See those who followed Hitler for an example.

Finally, becoming aware of your own deceptive patterns and how these can be transformed into self-truthfulness is a great way to develop the modelling skills required to work effectively with others who are trapped in delusion.

Guilty as Charged

I’m writing this post for me as much as for anyone. In the past months, I’ve re-read Jim Collins’ How the Mighty Fall and Tim Irwin’s Derailed. Both of these gripping studies review the process of decline in leaders and organizations, especially in leaders who perhaps once thought themselves invincible.

These studies challenge me because I know I’m prideful. I also know that “pride comes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18, HCSB).

With me, use these potential markers of arrogance to avoid such a fall.

10 Ways to Spot Your Own Arrogance

www.churchleaders.com

Use these potential markers of arrogance to avoid such a fall. When a church or institution is led by a man or woman with these characteristics, it is doomed. The rot is from the top down. It's a warning.. but those who...

Let's make a deal

Desperate defenders of the decline in our nation under the deluded leadership in the White House have only ONE response. ONLY ONE. It's like a magic Talisman. Like an incantation. They believe if you say it nothing else matters. No matter the profound ineptness of the current occupant of the White House, one word silences all criticism (as least in the mind of the speaker of the "one word"). That word is BUSH and if that doesn't work, Cheney.

There is one other word that is death to argumentation and causes them to become Verklempt. NAZI. Any comparison of current policy trends to the tactics of the evil in Germany 80 years ago is off limits. OK. I'll make a trade. You never mention BUSH CHENEY again and I won't mention Hitler/Nazi/SS et al.

DEAL??

Hats off to these women. Brave.

Here's a Normandy Beach landing photo they don't show you in textbooks. Brave women of the Red Cross arriving in 1944 to help the injured troops.

I must have an IQ OF TEN MILLION

 















 

Glad Obama took care of this.

I mean there's not much else going on... a guy has to have his priorities. SMH

Gay married vets to get joint plots in national cemeteries

www.washingtontimes.com

Military veterans in same-sex marriages will now be eligible to be buried together in national cemeteries, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced...

Two News Items that Make No Sense

I was at one time part of the Commodity Trading Community in Chicago.  Open Outcry.  People would make notes, trades, based on cards.  When the trade was done the card was thrown to the ground.  At the end of the day all the "Trash" was picked up, archived and stored for years.  The idea was that in a dispute over a trade, the evolution and execution of it could be retrieved.  It was wise business.

All companies of a certain size are advised to keep a full record of all email messages for 6 years.  It's for the protection of stockholders and for the purpose of researching certain errors and omissions. This is a serious thing. 

YET the IRS destroys all copies of all emails for two years, and crushes ALL the drives that has any information on them.  Even NIXON in his worst wasn't even close to this.  Although I recall that some wag suggested he would have done himself a favor by having a bonfire and burned them all.

Since Obama out Nixon's Nixon and Out Carter's Carter... It's really a tragic end to a bad presidency.  Yes there will be people who support Obama no matter what he would do.. they are intentionally blinded by a myth.

The second is the whole flood of Kids coming out of central America crossing into the USA while somehow able to walk 1700 miles unmolested traversing all of Mexico on foot.   Does ANYONE really believe this poppycock?  I have lived and worked in Mexico.  With a gun and good shoes I couldn't successfully do this.  AND 50,000?

Here's the truth.  This is a fast and furious thing.  I haven't figured it out yet.  BUT somehow the drug cartels who also are in the business of being human traffickers have figured out how to do this.  WHY?  To gain a foothold in the USA.  IF you think for a second that the current occupant of the White House doesn't have a part in this you are fooling yourself.   This is part of a strategy to essential OPEN the borders. This is an annexation by default of our southern neighbor.   We will allow them to have a form of bad government, we will allow them to have a currency, an economy of sorts, but it will be a source of cheap labor and eventually OIL.  A hundred years from now (if the USA lasts that long) Mexico and it's states will complete the 80 states of the USA.  Mexico has 30 and the USA has 50.  It's a merger.  How this influx all plays out.. I don't yet understand.. but it does.

Just use some simple reasoning and you see right thru the whole charade.. it's really devious and filled with lies.

The most "Transparent" Administration in history (that was Obama's promise - remember) has presided over:

1. A Bill had to pass in order to see what was in it (Obamacare);
2. Intentionally misleading the American people about the Benghazi affair in order to keep up appearances that Al Qaeda was on the run just weeks before an election;
2. Use a government agency known as the IRS to target political foes (makes Nixon look like a school boy);
4. Lois Lerner's "lost" emails - (come on! Really? We are supposed to believe that? How CONVENIENT!)
5. Revelation of the American government's mining of data - via NSA - that raises a lot of civil liberty questions;
6. VA and the utter contempt it would seem toward veterans in general (WWII Monument shut down);

Unrecovered

How Obama Instituted Common Core on the Sly and how Bill Gates is going to become even more wealthy because of it

It seems like the new Common Core educational standards suddenly
appeared out of nowhere, doesn’t it? All of a sudden, every kid was
getting a Common Core education. The whole thing just materialized
before we got a chance to think about it!



It seems that way, right? Well, that’s because it is that way. By design.



Through
a combination of lavish spending by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and swift
movement by the Obama administration, the Common Core standards that
have now become so controversial were instituted pretty much before
anyone knew what was happening. And of course – this is the Obama
administration we’re talking about – without the cumbersome, annoying
intrusion of democratic processes.



That’s the point of a superb article published recently in the Washington Post. Here’s what happened, according to the Post:

The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development
of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million,
the foundation also built political support across the country,
persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes . . .

Money
flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by
scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of
common standards . . .

President Obama seized the
opportunity to push something through without congressional
input. Gates’ influence permeated the administration.



While
the Gates Foundation created the burst of momentum behind the Common
Core, the Obama administration picked up the cause and helped push
states to act quickly . . .

Several top players in Obama’s
Education Department who shaped the administration’s policies came
either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations
that received heavy funding from the foundation.



Before becoming
education secretary in 2009, Arne Duncan was chief executive of the
Chicago Public Schools, which received $20 million from Gates to break
up several large high schools and create smaller versions, a move aimed
at stemming the dropout rate.



As secretary, Duncan named as his chief of staff Margot Rogers, a top Gates official he got to know through that grant

How Obama Instituted Common Core on the Sly | The Blog on Obama: White House Dossier

This is just wrong. The news report mentions the ACCUSED innocent man's name, but not the miscreant.. the liar.. The woman. Shouldn't SHE be shamed?

Rape charge against Newark man dismissed after woman admits to lying

www.newarkadvocate.com

A rape charge against a 22-year-old Newark man was dismissed Monday after the woman who filed the report told law enforcement officers she lied about being sexually...

Your KNEW this already

A 2013 report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said that 34 percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 26 percent of non-Tea Party Republicans. But you knew that..

Gun Control is Tyranny

I'm pretty sure it is.. since the light on the rocket launcher is all wrong

Listen to this and if you aren't angry.. you dead

This is sick

Blatant: 32 Year Old Woman on Why She Abuses Welfare, Doesn't Work, and Happily Takes Your Money

www.tpnn.com

This did not get nearly the...

YUP

Stupid

Why Collectivism is Always Poised to Win Why Collectivism | Friends Of Liberty

Have you wondered why the TEA Party can only make so much headway, or why the conservative movement in general seems to stall without a brilliant leader? Why do liberals, Democrats, collectivists and leftists always seem to win the hearts and minds of the people? Why don't conservatives? This article attempts to answer these questions. Let's begin with basic premises. The first premise is that collectivists are driven by fear. They congregate for that most basic element of human structure and society, which is security.

Whether the subject is guns, global warming, immigration policy, energy, economics, or, really, any other subject, the collectivist appears to be motivated by fear to avoid catastrophe. They worry constantly about ozone layers, Mexican families divided by border, fracking consequences, capitalism in general, and even the personal habits of human beings upon ecosystems. It's all good. If only the collectivists were able to remain focused on problem-solving, they wouldn't infringe on the rights of those who don't want to participate in their nail-biting. But they can't. In fact, they get so worked up into a frenzy that their explanations become no more than accusations against whoever does not believe their hysteria.

How many times have the collectivists forecast the end of humanity due to climactic chaos? And when it doesn't occur, do the collectivists admit their mistake and calm down? No. They change the story to suit their fears. Again, this wouldn't matter so much if the rest of us weren't dragged along in an unending struggle for liberty. Why Collectivism is Always Poised to Win Why Collectivism | Friends Of Liberty

Too Late?

#Advice

Bad Car Buy

I sold you a car. It wasn't in great shape. One tire low and some misfires. You said, I know how to fix it. I know what to do. You talked about, it you bragged about your solution.. but you didn't do anything. Eventually the tire went flat, on the rim, the engine blew up, oil spilling all over and now you blame ME for selling you a crummy car. You knew what you were getting. I was clear. BUT you had all the answers. Now you are denying any responsibility for this whole fiasco... and that is what has just happened in IRAQ. Bush didn't do it.. he broke it, but you said you could fix it and now you have blown it up. It's not Bush's fault.

In a play or a movie if you see a gun it will be used. This is that

This will be really handy for all those IEDs in Florence.

Surplus US military gear, including MRAPs, going to local police

www.foxnews.com

The large armored truck parked outside the Florence County...

Didn't see it coming

Public School as Child Abuse

Brain on Drugs

He could NOT be worse

Mr. Obama belongs in a category all his own.

www.commentarymagazine.com

President Obama spoke on Iraq earlier today, pledging to do nothing and essentially saying nothing, even as that nation is breaking apart, with Islamic militants overrunning Iraq and vowing to capture Baghdad.

Our southern border is now fully out of control

Border agent laments Mexican gang members entering U.S.: ‘Why are we letting him in here?’

www.washingtontimes.com

Border Patrol officials are swamped by the number of minors crossing illegally into the United States and frustrated that they can’t turn away known Mexican...

Surrounded By Idiots Who Vote

 The definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.   Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:

1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

Think about it! And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century. Makes you wonder who is doing the math.

These three, short sentences tell you a lot about the direction of our current government and cultural environment:

1. We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works. And here's another one worth considering...

 2. Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out of money. How come we never hear about welfare or food stamps running out of money? What's interesting is the first group "worked for" their money, but the second didn't. Think about it..... and Last but not least,

 3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, no pay raises for our military and cutting our army to a level lower than before WWII, but we are not stopping the payments or benefits to illegal aliens.

Am I the only one missing something?