Ouspensky Describes Learning Self-Remembering...

This came about thanks to Rachel at @alamobasya who got into a back-and-forth with me over the soul..and the part in Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" where soul is described as not existing "ab inizio as in orthodox Christianity"...

If the "soul does not exist ab inizio" and has to be brought into existence by "sustained self-observation", what does that "sustained self-observation" look like?

"Self-remembering" is what that is called in "Esoteric Christianity". It can be described as "conscious self-consciousness"...the second term being my own attempt to succinctly describe what takes some real effort to learn, to understand and to practice...

While doing primal therapy with a group of men and women who had broken away from Janov, a friend of long-standing came to visit me with his other very close friend...

His close friend had been reading Tertium Organum by Ouspensky...he, in fact, ended up getting a Ph.D. in Intellectual History, and, apart from this interest in Ouspensky, was oriented toward Marxism. (Ah! But not for long...)

But, as synchonicity would have it, they ended up talking to a group of people who had an "esoteric school" in the Mission District in San Francisco. They were pupils of a man I won't name right now...were invited to come see a play and join this "esoteric school".

The school was called "The Everyman Theater"...another great coincidence for me.

I had heard about this play, "Everyman", when still in Catholic school. One Monday, in the Quaker school I attended from sixth grade on, for our school assembly, a group put on the play, "Everyman", and I got to see the whole thing acted out..

I was no longer a believer, but I have to say I really appreciated the opportunity to see this Morality Play with its "instructions" for "Everyman" as to how to get to heaven...

Anyway, my friend and his best friend ended up joining the rather expensive school and studying Gurdjieff's teachings (best chronicled by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous...hence the coincidence)....and me?

I went to an introductory meeting and apparently was so obnoxious and off-putting that I got kicked out of it...In a few months, my friends quit. The leader of that school had, in fact, a terrible reputation...(and more on that later).

But, I was intrigued by these men...who were off-putting as well...so I got a copy of Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous... 

I remember the moment I got "it"...self-remembering...and it was not the first time I had run across the term. In fact, it may have been the third time.

I definitely remember reading about it in the book, The Master Game, just after I had dropped out of school.

I didn't understand it then...and I think that the second time I read about it was in the Ouspensky book while sitting in the Shambala bookstore on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley...

But, this third time, I got it...and I remember going up the street self-remembering...amazed at this new piece of psychological practice....and I began using it.

Basically, what I understood was that I had to choose, as it were, to become self-conscious, and, in that moment, I had to resolve to maintain that state. I was able to. I saw I was in a new state of consciousness. 

Self-remembering intensified all my "primals"...the re-experiencing of childhood trauma with the added aspect of a full emotional "feeling" reaction to them...the kind you could never have had then...

I did eventually break through to the shocking/disconcerting view of my own warts-and-all self, as others saw me. Not pleasant at all. More on that at another time...

So, below, if interested, I have collected some of the primary quotes from Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous...and, if you are interested, you might be able to induce it in yourself....

Warning...only one person I have ever explained self-remembering to was able to get it on the first take...I needed three takes..and, sadly, one of my friends, while instrumental in getting me to this experience...never got to this at all...more on that another time as well...

So, interested in "self-remembering"? ....read away!


"Consciousness is considered to be indefinable," I said, "and indeed, how can it be defined if it is an inner quality? With the ordinary means at our disposal it is impossible to prove the presence of consciousness in another man. We know it only in ourselves." "All this is rubbish," said G., "the usual scientific sophistry. It is time you got rid of it. Only one thing is true in what you have said: that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it. And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards. I mean that when it comes again you can see that it has been absent a long time, and you can find or remember the moment when it disappeared and when it reappeared. You can also define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from consciousness. But by observing in yourself the appearance and the disappearance of consciousness you will inevitably see one fact which you neither see nor acknowledge now, and that is that moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical working of the machine. You will then see that you can think, feel, act speak, work, without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not.

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2563-2574).  . Kindle Edition.

"Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have-only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is."

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2574-2580).  . Kindle Edition.

On one occasion at the beginning of a meeting G. put a question to which all those present had to answer in turn. The question was; "What is the most important thing that we notice during self-observation?" Some of those present said that during attempts at self-observation, what they had felt particularly strongly was an incessant flow of thoughts which they had found impossible to stop. Others spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing the work of one center from the work of another. I had evidently not altogether understood the question, or I answered my own thoughts, because I said that what struck me most was the connectedness of one thing with another in the system, the wholeness of the system, as if it were an "organism," and the entirely new significance of the word to know which included not only the idea of knowing this thing or that, but the connection between this thing and everything else. G. was obviously dissatisfied with our replies. I had already begun to understand him in such circumstances and I saw that he expected from us indications of something definite that we had either missed or failed to understand.

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2583-2591).  . Kindle Edition.

"Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you," he said. "That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember yourselves." (He gave particular emphasis to these words.)

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2592-2593).  . Kindle Edition.

"You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still 'is noticed,' 'is seen.' ... In order really to observe oneself one must first of all remember oneself" (He again emphasized these words.) "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2593-2597).  . Kindle Edition.

These words of G.' s made me think a great deal. It seemed to me at once that they were the key to what he had said before about consciousness. But I decided to draw no conclusions whatever, but to try to remember myself while observing myself. The very first attempts showed me how difficult it was. Attempts at self-remembering failed to give any results except to show me that in actual fact we never remember ourselves. "What else do you want?" said G. "This is a very important realization. People who know this" (he emphasized these words) "already know a great deal. The whole trouble is that nobody knows it. If you ask a man whether he can remember himself, he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself, he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness. If a man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the understanding of his being."

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2598-2606).  . Kindle Edition.

But before making deductions, I will try to describe my attempts to remember myself. ' The first impression was that attempts to remember myself or to be conscious of myself, to say to myself, I am walking, I am doing, and continually to feel this I, stopped thought. When I was feeling I, I could neither think nor speak; even sensations became dimmed. Also, one could only remember oneself in this way for a very short time.

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2608-2611).  . Kindle Edition.

This last realization enabled me to come to a certain, possibly a very incomplete, definition of "self-remembering," which nevertheless proved to be very useful in practice. I am speaking of the division of attention which is the characteristic feature of self-remembering. I represented it to myself in the following way: When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe: a line with one arrowhead: I ------> the observed phenomenon. When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line: I <------> the observed phenomenon. Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else. Moreover this "something else" could as well be within me as outside me. The very first attempts at such a division of attention showed me its possibility. At the same time I saw two things clearly. In the first place I saw that self-remembering resulting from this method had nothing in common with "self-feeling," or "self-analysis." It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavor. And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood.

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2616-2631).  . Kindle Edition.

They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one's head, when one hears one's own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside. Sometimes self-remembering was not successful; at other times it was accompanied by curious observations. I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself and I turned into the street on the left having firmly decided to keep my attention on the fact that I would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line of thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy streets. I reached the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. Just round the corner on the Nevsky was a tobacconist's shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes. Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my Hat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters.Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I had changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izvostchik and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.

Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2631-2667).  . Kindle Edition.

All Blog Posts

The latest:

Robert Graves: "No Zeus Sits Upon the Throne"...the Modern World Seen through Myth & Archetype..Part I

Reflections Based on an Email to the Occidental Observer...General View of Nationalism from Jung & Reich

The Real Problem of the Elite...

Ouspensky Describes Self-Remembering...

An exercise that is the basis for esoteric Christian practice...experience of conscience.

Intro to Free Trade & Free Markets Part 1

Intro to Free Trade & Free Markets Part 2

All about the coming econ horror...virtual death of the dollar and its effects on the Fed Gov and our nation-state.

From first on down:

Nefasto I - the War on Our Nation's Integrity From Within

Part II: President Nefasto: Obama and "2016": Review and Analysis

"I Giusti"- The Just Ones. The Role of Diana West with American Betrayal

Corsi Quotes on Vattel's Definition & Concept of "Natural Born"

How to combat gang life in Los Angeles in 5 Easy Steps

China Trade I: Black Hole of World Faux Free Trade : Japan '89 & Macro Econ 101

China Is the Bomb! (Or is it just the firing pin..?)

On Weisel: My Comment at Cory Robin's Blog

Plato, His Republic, Left-Brained Consciousness & the Modern World

How Ancient Greece Drove Out the Feminine

Americanization and Individuation Seen Through Godfather I & II

Intro to Free Trade & Free Markets Part 2

More links on the way..wanted to get it out there...this election will determine if we address the coming econ horror show or if we just continue on and over the cliff....

The problem is really rather simple.

If the United States federal government cannot pay its bills, the United States federal government will cease to exist, not just as a functioning entity, but eventually as anything of meaning at all.

It would undo the very basis of our functioning as a nation-state...from my first blog...it would be totally, totally nefasto...subversive evil. 

Consider for a second what it would mean that the federal government had diminished capacity to hand out Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security checks, food stamp cards, let alone pay the bills for the federal court system, the federal prison system, the United States military, the pensions and salaries of the federal government employees, and all the rest.

Imagine food stamp recipients receiving 20% less in purchasing power…somebody would go hungry. Imagine hospitals and pharmaceutical companies being paid late or with insufficient funds trying to maintain their supply chain to produce needed pharmaceuticals.

The US would be a giant version of the Naples bus system that a few years ago, having not paid its bills for quite some time, had no fuel...and the buses couldn't go out....and, I've got a story about the water supply there as well.

Didn't think I would ever have to compare the mighty US to what is essentially a city run along third-world lines such as Naples...but I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

A crippling blow to the functioning of United States federal government would not necessarily need a dollar that had no purchasing power whatsoever. The crippling blow would only need a substantial reduction that shredded the supply chain for services and product essential to keeping the US running as a nation-state.

There are two ways for this to come about. Both are not merely highly likely but virtually unavoidable.

The first way involves the role of United States dollar as a reserve currency and the second involves the capacity of United States government to pay its interest payments on its debt.

Let's start with the first way: the role of United States dollar as a reserve currency. 

What does that mean?

It means that America's dollars are not just used domestically but are used internationally as the vehicle of exchange whenever a foreign country buys or sells something from another country. They change their money into dollars and then change the dollars into the currency of the second country.

Why do they do that?

They do that because it is impossible to run foreign-exchange markets that constantly compare every currency with every other currency. Therefore governments exchange their money for dollars in every transaction that is international.

As a result of that, there is an enormous amount of dollars floating around the world doing the job as this intermediary currency. It makes the dollar more valuable, and it makes our exports more expensive as a result, while making imports cheaper, making it harder to grow our US economy and get the tax dollars to pay our bills.

For various reasons, other countries' governments have sought for quite some time to exchange their own money directly with the money of other countries. Russia with China and Japan with India, for example.

They have begun to do this.  There is also BitCoin and the International Monetary Fund's own "currency".

When the major trading countries of the world succeed in making the dollar relatively unnecessary for international exchange, the United States dollar will lose its reserve currency status. We will then lose about 20% of our purchasing power because the demand for dollars will go down. People will sell them into a market that needs fewer of them.

The United Kingdom has a currency called the pound. This currency was the international reserve currency until it began losing that role in the 60s and finally lost the role completely by the mid-70s.

As a result of that, the pound lost 20% of its value, and the UK was thrown into economic chaos.

It got so bad that the UK government could not pay bills for the medical system. When you went to the hospital in England, you had to take along your own lunch and your own dinner and sometimes your own bed sheets. Too often, there weren't any.

Our government would have to raise taxes but it wouldn't be able to.

Why not?

If the government raised taxes, it would choke the economy further. The loss of 20% of purchasing power would affect every industry and every corporation and consumer making them instantly poorer.

The economy would shrink rapidly and raising taxes would be absolutely impossible. The government would not also be able to print more money. Or, it could but to no avail.

We will get to an explanation of this in the subsequent blogs, but our government doesn't actually print money. Our Federal Reserve Bank, a privately held bank, not owned by our government, prints our money.

The Federal Reserve Bank can only print so much money without endangering itself as a financial institution and they can only buy so much of our debt and we will go into that in a subsequent blog.

The second scenario involves the destruction of the dollar through simple incapacity to pay the interest on our debt.

Even during the Clinton years, US federal government accumulated $1 trillion of debt. It was about 100 billion and little more per year. From Bush through Obama, the debt has gone up, in essence, astronomically.

The Federal Reserve bank, as I mentioned above, now buys our debt (called "quantitative easing"). This means that it prints out money and takes in our debt. 

If the Fed didn't do that, then the amount of interest we would have to offer to get our debt purchased on the world credit market would be much higher.

That would mean that all interest paid for money on loan in America, for example bank deposits, would go up quite a bit. In the '70s, when the Federal Reserve raised the rates on loans, banks offered interest on deposits of more than 5%...even 6 to 7%. Treasury bills, the actual promissary note of the US gov, offered 10%.

With interest rates that high, our economy would crash because no one could afford to do business as we have been doing. The dollar would increase in value in an economic scenario known as deflation. It would mean that dollars were worth more and goods worth less.

The price of houses would go down, but would be less affordable because of the high interest rates on mortgages. The actual mortgage payment would go up. When you went to sell your house, the house would be "under water", meaning worth less than the mortgage that allowed you to purchase it in the first place.

Banks would become insolvent. The backbone, the essential institutions permitting our economy to function, would be ripped up. Think of 2008.

If and when, not that far away, the US federal government can no longer pay the interest on its debt, then the dollar itself will be refused as currency. The dollar will be seen as funny money, internationally for sure, and even nationally.

This is part of the scenario ZeroHedge has called the coming "Great Generation-Long Depression". Or something like that.."the Humongous Depression"...(started in 1987!)

So now, having alerted you to the grim reality of impending doom regarding our dollar, the lifeblood of our economic system, we will now go over and begin to look at some of the basic concepts of free trade and free market and understand how they've been misused to allow this crisis scenario to develop.

Not a happy task.

Intro to Free Trade & Free Markets Part 1

America is going bankrupt…not technically, but functionally, which is just as bad. (See here, here, here, and here.) And one of the causes is Free Trade, or what passes for Free Trade…what is actually Faux Free Trade.

(Want to read more? Try this, this, and this.)

So, there it is…Free Trade, one of the hottest topics going around. (Well, it was until the race turned into Hillary's attacks on Trump's "misogyny" while deflecting her problem with her email.)

OK, no…it   died rather quickly. I guarantee you it died because the elites wanted it to die. They are the ones who profit the most from this fake or Faux Free Trade… Read about Corporatism vs Capitalism in The Matrix Exposed.

Free Trade is an article of faith in our business class, and anyone who tries to touch their version of free trade is some kind of demonic populist bent on destroying American business and international trade as well. (Great example with Trump as target.)

Free Trade, even (unbelievably!) the terrible Faux Free version we have, has been incorrectly assumed to be some kind of panacea for the world's economic problems, and it's also incorrectly assumed that what we have going now with nations such as Japan, South Korea, and especially China, is "free trade".  We will get to that.

Beyond that, the "free traders" believe that the founder of modern economic theory, Adam Smith, was a "free trader". The Authentic Adam Smith says differently….(page 7)…

"A close reading of The Wealth of Nations and other good evidence
shows that Adam Smith was no doctrinaire free trader. 

 He approves certain monopolies and restraints on trade, export subsidies and restrictions, sumptuary laws, penal taxation, limits on the rate of interest and the issue of bank notes, compulsory qualifications for craftsmen, the pressing of merchant sailors and discrimination against Roman Catholics. 

 He was expert at exploiting the system of nepotism then dominant in the administrations of Britain, India and North America. 

He believed that government should be involved not only in educating but in entertaining the public. The words laisser faire or laissez faire appear nowhere in his work. Though he deplored British commercial policy in Ireland, the Americas and India, he thought the solution was
not independence for those countries, but federation with the mother country."

What I'm going to do in these blogs is try to give some basic but thorough economic lessons to people who might feel that these concepts are too challenging and abstract for them. I wish to make it possible for you to counter those arguments and have a sense of what you want as a citizen with a stake in the future of our country.

I maintain that what many of us have intuitively felt…that so-called "free trade" is neither "free" nor "fair"… have had it right all along. (Has the US turned against Free Trade?)

Further, the only reason these concepts are too challenging and too abstract is because the experts prefer it that way. You can study various societies and you will find even in primitive tribes that there is an elite in the tribe that has control of, let's say, medicine or the healing arts.

Even under these extremely primitive conditions, anthropologists have noted that the medicine men construct an arcane vocabulary and set of concepts to keep their knowledge essentially to the in-group.

So, when you go on-line and you look up these concepts, as I've done recently, you'll come away confused and befuddled.

Worse, the experts get things very, very wrong.

Remember the crash in 2008? Peter Schiff was laughed at on the Neil Cavuto show on Fox Business because he said that the stock market was going to crash. He was not alone in this prediction, and some people made hundreds of millions of dollars going against the conventional wisdom concerning the mortgage industry and United States.

In 1989 everyone saw Japan as about to rise to be the number one economic power in the world. They had all of the top 10 banks in the world. Within one year the Japanese economy crashed, and it has never really recovered. Four of the banks died. No Japanese bank remained among the top 10.

Yet, when I studied it, I was teaching ESL in Milan Italy. Discussing it with bankers and others, anyone could see there was no big mystery behind the collapse. The bubbles were easily predicted and you could account for everything that happened. (We will get to that in re Export-driven Econ Model.)

What you can't account for is the fact that everybody missed the analysis, the obvious prediction, the signs of danger, and let it go on until everything burst.

So not only do they keep this information and knowledge to themselves, they misuse it to make a ton of money, (often- too often- even way too often), at the expense of not only the American people but of the foundations of our society and nation-state.

Part 2 

Americanization and Individuation Seen Through Godfather I & II

Francis Ford Coppola's film, "The Godfather", provides a great opportunity to examine the relationship between Americanization and individuation.

Essentially Michael is on his way to Americanization and would have had the possibility of a real individuation had he avoided assuming the role of his father as godfather.

The film begins with the Corleone family wedding. Kay is there as the girlfriend-fiancé of Michael Corleone. She's actually pulled into the family portrait at the wedding, harbinger of her future relationship both with Michael Corleone and the family.

Michael Corleone makes a big deal to Kay of not being the man his father was. He tells the story of a young Italian-American singer who could not escape from a bad contract with a bandleader. He introduces the phrase "make an offer you can't refuse" to describe the way that, when the Godfather was unsuccessful the first day in getting his godson released from the contract, his father went back with Luca Brazzi, and told the bandleader that "either your brains or your signature is going to be on that contract"- and got the singer released.

N.B.: Many think it's a story about Frank Sinatra. Based on a similar incident, but, actually, Frank Sinatra got out of his contract with the help of a musician union leader. Sinatra's story was plagiarized and re-written, as it were, but too many have assumed it was the truth.

Michael had made that first break with the family line. By having an American fiancé in the aftermath of having fought as a hero in World War II, in spite of the fact that his father had pulled strings to get him out of having to go to war, something his brother Sonny objects to strongly in a scene that you see the end of the movie, you really see the portrait of an Americanized Michael on his way to escaping tradition, a Michael who would not have been owned by tradition...

He gets sucked into the role of the Godfather through the emotional attachment to his father during the duress of the aftermath of the attempted assassination, and all of that "Americanization" and potential individuation is put aside.

The beginning of the shift is well symbolized by Michael Corleone in a telephone booth with Kay Adams shut out, on the outside, feeling helpless as he calls home to find out if his father is still alive, having seen the newspaper headline about the assassination attempt on his father.

Without real ambition, but merely as an extension of things he felt and closely held, i.e. the love of family, he becomes a potential heir to his father. While sitting in what is essentially a throne, as the camera focuses in on him, he proposes the assassination of Solozzo and his police captain bodyguard., which he then carries out with his brother's and Mafia captains' blessings.

Escaping to Sicily, Michael Corleone renounces, in essence, his engagement to Kay Adams and marries a young Sicilian woman.

At this point, you'd have to say that Michael Corleone had reconstituted the energy of his family line, what is called in 19th century racial theory, the "Kultur", of the Sicilian Mafia family.

Michael Corleone's new Sicilian wife is killed, in a car-bombing, and he returns to America and eventually goes back with Kay Adams who still loves him.

While promising to escape his role as the Godfather, subsequent events, his own emotional life, his own lack of insight as to what his father really was, keep him in that role far longer and therefore in a more damaging way than he ever could have imagined.

At the end of the Godfather II, he has a telling conversation with his mother, played by Morgana King, where he expresses fear of losing his family in Italian. (Really a conversation with his Unconscious, with a great collective mother-figure, a kind of seeress, at that moment, which is why the conversation is in Italian, something that evokes a sense of being outside of parochial time)...

She assures him that he cannot lose his family. If that were only the truth....

As the truth about his role as the Godfather comes out near the end of Godfather II, Kay Adams realizes what kind of man she's been married to, the degree of the promises not kept, that he is truly the very man that Michael's sister condemned with harsh words for the murder of her husband and others at the end of Godfather I. 

Ah, yes…the great scene where Michael Corleone lies to Kay, giving her the opportunity to just ask one question "just this once" regarding his business. He assures her that he had nothing to do with the death of his brother-in-law, a complete lie. She beams back at him, totally content.

But, with all of the information that Kay now has, she leaves him, and Michael Corleone ends up all alone, his soul shattered and betrayed, without his wife, the American, even without his own brother that he had had killed.

Kay represents that loss of soul, the loss of relationship to conscience and real values, the kind he was on the verge of adopting as he broke away from his family in an act of rebellion, signing up for the US military to fight in World War II.

In fact, Michael Corleone had used Kay Adams for comfort, to assuage his conscience, and exploited her as he has exploited the American way of life. Yes, Michael cared for her, but entirely on his own terms. Returning from Sicily, he's essentially an emissary of death, surrounded in his dark cave with the plutocrats of the underworld. She doesn't see this...he doesn't see it, either.

The art direction in this masterpiece of cinema is full of indications, a message system in itself as to what is really going on.

I am not sure to what extent Coppola did all of this consciously. Would be a great interview....

Individuation is never that easy. That is, becoming a true individual is counter to nature, evolution that goes upstream, wrenching from inside you every bit of available energy and then some. You are taken up, possessed, with a total examination of what you're actually about, what your values are and why you do things.

That is the self-overcoming of Nietzsche. 

The thing that Michael Corleone couldn't do was see that the man who loved him and that he loved dearly was essentially evil outside of the family. Because the evil happened outside of the family, they couldn't see it and they couldn't feel it and this permitted him to move into the role that he should've avoided as if it were the plague, a plague of the soul.

More on this to come.

How Ancient Greece Drove Out the Feminine

This brief blog is dedicated to Melissa ( @MelissaJaneSays ) who has raised really good points about the war on the feminine conducted by Christianity and the West and by the Catholic Church, in particular.

What I'm trying to do here is create perspective on the process of how the masculine has overridden the feminine by going back in time before the Catholic Church existed so as to demonstrate that the tendency is an existential tendency that's an unfortunate and apparently necessary part of our past, and not simply particular to the Catholic Church.

The first, the most archetypal, theft of the role of the feminine by the masculine occurred in ancient Greece when the cattle-driving men and women from Turkey invaded Greece, conquered it, and made slaves of the indigenous population.

According to some historians, and notably, Robert Graves, the ancient indigenous Greeks didn't understand that sex made babies, or, the women understood it, but they refused to share the knowledge with men. So the women were held in thrall by men who didn't understand that they were the co-creationists of children. The women had a kind of absolute power.

They were an agricultural population who worshiped Hera (name derive from Erith, Earth?), and other goddesses in local cults, the local version of Hera.

The rites of Hera involved the sacrifice of the queen's consort every spring, his entombment and his replacement/resurrection with a new consort for a year. The bodies of the men who were sacrificed were probably eaten by priestesses and their blood scattered on the fields where the nitrogen in the blood helped increase the production of food, validating the whole notion of what they were doing, ie returning sacred blood to be used again.

The sacrificed consorts became Hera's sons and were considered heroes, derived from her name.

A side note: as a boy I always wondered how Hercules could be the son of Zeus. It turns out that Hercules means "little one of Hera", and it's obvious here that the masculine took over what had been traditionally the power of the feminine by changing his parentage to Zeus, a further disrespect of the Feminine.

The cattle drivers knew that sex made babies because they could not possibly take care of a herd of cattle without coming to understand that sex and procreation were connected.

The conquest of the then "Hellenes", the indigenous people of Greece, who became the "Helots", the slaves that served the upper class, brought about a re-dimension of the power of the feminine.

The conquest itself, and the end of the myth of women as divine creatures who give birth to children by themselves without the assistance of men, ended women's essential monopoly on power, especially spiritual power.

Lest you think that this is a conjecture that's way out in left field, I will point out that in the early 1970s in a remote Chinese mountain area, the locals didn't know that sex made babies. Brother and sister raised the children of the female while both of them pursued what would we would consider a very freewheeling sexual lifestyle. This is the original clan model. All members of the clan, all the"kin", were descended from the first brother-sister pair directly from Mother.

In traditional culture, and in Jewish culture until recently, the child could only be a member of the clan if the mother was a member of the clan. This is because the body of the child was considered identical to the body of the mother. So, it seems to be a kind of universally-held notion.

As the men took over ancient Greece, they did not throw out the rites of the then dominant female society but rather took on the role of the priestesses- but with some odd twists.

The men dressed in the robes of the female, donning her breastplates, her wigs, and the double-sided ax, which was a symbol of the waxing and waning moon. The moon in a feminine culture is considered the more important deity in comparison with the sun. The moon is capable of blocking out the sun. Women's menstrual periods are so named because they go in synchrony with the moon, an obvious miracle, as it were.

Zeus, who had been a rather unimportant semi-divine creature previously, now became a major player. His followers, the priests of his rite, went around Greece making deals with all local sites of worship for control.

For Robert Graves, this is the original reason that Hera was "jealous". He means that Hera was jealous because the priestesses of Hera wanted control of all of Greece and its rites, whereas Zeus's followers took over each cult, making deals with the local goddess, with force, ie "rape of Europa".

This whole sacrifice of the prince consort every year was a kind of grand mimicry of nature, which I like to compare to the people on stage at "Rocky Horror Picture Show" who imitated everything that was on screen.

The earth, which is the energy of the Mother, (the Latin mater, which becomes matter), goes through a life cycle like a woman. In the spring the earth is like a child, which becomes like a full woman with the bloom of the trees (May as in "Maya" and June as in "Juno") and gradually goes "gray" as the leaves turn brown and then undergoes a kind of death.

However, everything that shot up out of the ground was considered a son of the mother, a kind of Mercury, a messenger from the earth goddess, a servant and protector. (Even Isaac Newton had such an idea.)

The sacrifice of the queen's prince consort represented the ancient Greeks' understanding of the relationship of the masculine and feminine.

The queen gets to live because she is reborn of herself, but the son of the mother is reborn in the spring out of Hera. The royal couple had to mimic that relationship. So the king was killed and entombed ("returned to womb/tomb") and the new prince walked out representing that renewed plant life of the spring.

Sounds like something re Christianity?

Yes, it certainly does. If the Christians got the myth of rebirth of Jesus from somewhere, that somewhere was everywhere in the Mediterranean where aspects of the original feminine culture lived on.

I'm not saying that I know whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. I'm just explaining some of the pagan origins of the attraction of the myth, whether the event was true or false.

Over time, the queens became more attached to their temporary consorts and looked for a way out of the sacrifice of the prince. Joseph Campbell has a wonderful passage in one of his books where the story is told of how the delay of the sacrifice of the prince worked out under the distraction of an excellent court story teller, so that he's allowed to live.

Accommodations came about over time. Example: they would depose the prince/king for a day, appoint what was called an "Interrex". He would be sacrificed and the old king would come out as the new king and everyone was happy.

The interrex might be a prisoner, and, then, eventually, animals were used. The story of Abraham and Isaac probably came out of a similar change in the view of human sacrifice.

Catholic priests to this day wear what is essentially a dress that goes all the way back to that event where the priests of Zeus took over the rites of Hera and dressed like her priestesses. I remember in kindergarten looking at the priests and wondering why they dressed in dresses and I remember the nuns talking about it.

Yes, it really does make an impression. Gee, that and how come we have a May procession in May and honor the Virgin Mary and all? Goes right back to Matriarchal times...and the beauty contest was the contest to crown someone the representative of the Divine Feminine.

So, this is a great example of how cultural shifts occur under trauma and stress and under a change in the psychological balance brought about by conquest and the knowledge that sex makes babies and that men are partly gods themselves, as are women.

(In another blog, I will look at how the Egyptians lost their feminine God for a God who masturbates the world into existence.)

It all shows that as the left-brain grew in dominance, everything in the rest of the psyche, outside the conscious ego, got assigned to an increasingly distrusted unconscious that could not be counted on to support the power structure of the leading families and of the men who led them.

A "new" feminine arose to help out: one of the undoubted reasons that Athena got created out of previous goddesses is because the upper-class elite women began to have a disposition which favored the elite men...and the needed a myth to accommodate the new goddess...Athena as the true daughter of her father, Zeus.

A quick explanation.

Zeus took an ancient Greek goddess called Metis and, for some reason or other, swallowed her. Robert Graves said that this represented the fact that her rites got subsumed under the priesthood of Zeus. However Metis is a goddess and she really didn't die after being swallowed by Zeus. She continued to be a voice that spoke to him from his belly, his solar plexus, and probably represents two things:

The first would be that the high priestesses of Metis continued to play a role that was important in advising the new priests of Zeus as to what was what in the community...

The second would be that as men shifted to a head-based culture based on command and words, the kind that the American Indian Hopis (?) talked about with Jung in his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, there still remained that need for what today is called "gut instinct".

In the solar plexus we have a connection to the lower half of the body which ends up representing the other half of the psyche outside of the conscious ego.

But, as a result of that union of a traditional Earth mother cult and the new patriarchal Zeus cult, a new kind of feminine was born from the head of Zeus. That new kind of feminine was Athena.

Nowadays Jungian psychologists call the women in corporate offices "Daughters of Athena".

Coco Chanel invented the entire look for the corporate woman. Instead of all that fluffy exaggerated feminine stuff of the past, Coco Chanel, abandoned by her father and raised as an orphan, took the military cloths, the uniforms of her lovers and reworked them into a suit she could wear. Voila! The Chanel suit was born.

So let's get it.

The feminine has been through all kinds of changes in all periods of history, mostly denigrated, but now about to undergo her own re-birth, I maintain, as the masculine overreach has gone on long enough and a re-balancing seems to be manifesting. (Another post.)

It must be pointed out that what has constituted the "new feminine" of today politically and culturally is just the old feminine of Athena, now demanding to be the actual leader, and embodied in the candidacy of an ex-First Lady, almost as if a Greek myth were being acted out in a play....

...hence the terms "collective unconscious"...and "archetypes"...

Plato, His Republic, Left-Brained Consciousness & the Modern World

10:02 AM Thursday July 28, 2016

Pondering the basis of elitism...

Here I am…looking at Plato's Republic…a summary at Wikipedia…thought flashes through me:

Real problem is the gradual taking over of the human psyche by the left-brain, the speech center, the attempt to further conscious control…

Emergence of what we call consciousness. This consciousness is dominated by the language center and is different than the consciousness created by the pictogram cultures that use hieroglyphics to send messages. Pictogram cultures, eg Chinese, use images rather than a phonetic-based writing system. That's why we read left-to-right, activating the Broca speech center in the left-brain, while they can go in either direction.  Pictograms activate the right-brain....and more on that later.

So pre-Socratic culture is the culture of people who can still find the center of the psyche outside of their ego. By the time Socrates comes along, the elite, who need to be in control and understand what they do, have become obsessed with delineating the meaning of various concepts such as justice, which has a basis in what is strongly felt, in our experience. So, our experience is at the basis of the concept...not pure ideation...and this is not to say that our experience is never distorted or merely subjective.

Socrates and Plato abandon the tragedies...all evil comes from an imperfection in understanding or conduct that is our human "error" ...a lack of good ("privatio boni")...not inherent in the system...because that would make God responsible for evil.

By the way, reading Plato, you might think that basically every dinner party in ancient Greece with the elite was a kind of ancient "Charlie Rose Show"....

What the people who are advocates of a certain type of consciousness want are definitions so that they can argue their case concerning their activities and programs in relationship to values. It represents the emergence of a lawyer-like attitude that we begin to be find almost everywhere in the West after the Renaissance and find nearly everywhere in the world today.

In a sense it is the left-brain "mind" taking over for the "gods"...those impulses from within that were considered to come from "on high"...through (in Latin), the "Rex" (king), whose name is the source of the word "reason"...the "rays" of light...or from a very feminine Pythia or female seer who told us what the "Mother" wanted...

This elevation of consciousness (in the word-driven version of it) is part of the mind-body split. It might explain why Apollo killed the lover of his sister.

Apollo killed the lover of his sister because the lover represented a threat to his ownership of the knowledge. Apollo protected the Pythia, the woman who was the oracle at Delphi in Greece.

By the way, the oracle was usually an uneducated shepherd girl...ah..yes..very little left-brain there to interfere with the process of going back into the unconscious through the right-brain, the real "interpretation expert", the "Eve"....more on that later. (Mostly a note for myself right now.)

Socrates and people like Socrates shift to the anti-tragic worldview because, as they become conscious, they begin to judge God by the same concept processes that they use to judge themselves. And with that, begins a long process of making God not responsible for the evil of the world. That continued for literally 1300 years until 17th-century philosophy and especially 19th-century philosophy question the existence of God or question the way he operates.

What's done to people through process of shaming is that a kind of Berlin wall is set up between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. I like to compare it to the scene in the film "The Emerald Forest" where the Brazilian native people come to the edge of the rainforest and see construction of the dam going on. They call it "the edge of the world".

I say that the walling off of consciousness which began with the Socratic philosophers started to come to an end, a real end, in the 19th century with Nietzsche and Jung who began to distinguish that the unconscious is actually a vital and intelligent force that we are in some sense loathe to acknowledge.

Freud essentially deemed the unconscious mind as the unruly element of the psyche, the "Id". He never saw the conscious mind as the source of our capacity to be so unruly and neurotic, as it were.

So between the trauma and the fact that we are left only with this mapbook called the conscious mind, our culture  had to head in a certain direction which has led us to all of our problems that we have today.

Since the unconscious mind and all of its relationship to the collective unconscious is at once denied and cut off, then it follows that the leadership class is the only one with the capacity to understand what needs to be done. I am reminded of the scene in "Remains of the Day" in which the head of the estate puts his head servant certain through hell, embarrassing him concerning his capacity to participate in democracy, as if he had no mind.

Kilroy wasn't there in that scene, but Plato surely was....

Just had the flash that the head of the estate was essentially a fascist as well, albeit a kinder gentler one, and that's why he couldn't understand what he was looking at what he was looking at the Nazis.

But, the American (Christopher Reeve) did with his more pragmatic intelligence...

If the servants have incomplete minds, then they will interpret their instructions incorrectly and that can't be good. So, they must remain tabula rasa to the point of a virtual complete self-extinguishment. It's been the modus operandi of various great institutions from the Catholic Church to the Communist Party.

To be continued....

On Weisel: My Comment at Cory Robin's Blog

Roy Cameron July 4, 2016 at 12:51 pm | #

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/02/13/i-the-holocaust-am-your-god/#comment-119690

It’s all about staring into the face of the Medusa. Got the phrase from Dr Adriana Mazzarella, a Jungian psychiatrist who also happened to be Italian and Jewish. I helped her prepare her English for her seminars in the US for her book, Looking for Beatrice, a Jungian interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy…and, yes, she lived through WWII.

Medusa represents that horror of life that simply turns your entire will to life to stone…something inanimate. I think what is happening here concerning the Holocaust is just that: looking at the Holocaust destroys faith in human nature and in the God that is supposed to have designed us.

If you follow the idea of a Covenant with God quite literally, then you have to ask yourself what good it did to have the Covenant. If God’s means in the world are so terrible, you have to doubt either the existence of God or accept his means-and-ends POV as something apparently unjustified…calling into question every aspect of one’s faith.

Another point of central importance would be the Holocaust’s apparent singularity. Its singularity derives mostly from our capacity to document it. 6 million Ukrainians were killed off by the Bolsheviks without anywhere near the documentation level, given that Russia was essentially a Third-Wold backwater without a great industrial base, and, as a result, the “singularity” of the Holocaust derives from the fact that similar events barely exist in human consciousness.

I also add that, as the Khmer Rouge conducted their Holocaust, I wondered why the phrase “Never Again” did not spur the world into action to prevent such a crime against humanity. Instead, I felt relief that Vietnamese communists, our enemy, rode to the rescue, albeit late.

I also have to agree with anyone who thinks that Wiesel takes it way too far getting into the “sacralizing” and “mystification” of the event. The motives of those who do evil can be understood and fought against. As I said, this happens to anyone who "stares into the Medusa" too long.

Last, but not least: the range of the comments here and their tone..impressive.

China Is the Bomb! (Or is it just the firing pin..?)

The world is going to economic hell, a trans-national globalist hell, in a Made-in-China handbasket that anyone without the usual blinders on saw coming years ago as China successfully reproduced the Japanese export model...without any adjustments for the now plain-to-see after-party no-growth scenario getting played out in Japan....

China Trade And The Inevitability Of Systemic Reset

China has built out its infrastructure, one of the few areas where the US, Brazil, Australia and others could get in on China's growth as a market, furnishing raw materials.

That supplied us with a modicum of cash that did not offset, but took some of the sting out of our enormous trade deficit with China. Now that the infrastructure build-out has slowed down, the world price for iron ore, copper and other raw materials is down. Our deficit grows and our economy slows...

China's exports are down in turn as we import less. The US economy cannot seem to recover...GDP growth on the point of recession...even in the face of extremely low interest rates and OPEC's suicidally low oil price.

This means that the US economy and the world economy are both structurally unsound....too much production in China with artificially low prices from a fixed-currency regime whose government has subsidized all manner of industrial production for export...while the US lives on credit, "monetizing" its debt...

The problem is now so bad that the Obama regime has taken the unusual step to slap a 500% tariff on Chinese steel...a story not covered widely by the financial press.

China Furious afterUS Launches Trade War Nuke: 522% Duty Slapped on Steel Imports

China Trade I: Black Hole of World Faux Free Trade : Japan '89 & Macro Econ 101

In 1989, when I was living in Milan, Italy, I had the opportunity to learn a very big lesson about macroeconomics. It came about because of the systemic collapse of the Japanese economy, which, at that time, had the top 10 banks in the world.

Japan didn't just have the banks; it had an economy which was the envy of the world. Articles had begun to appear in magazines such as Newsweek and Business Week about how journalists wanted to relocate from Washington DC or New York to Tokyo because that's where the action was.

I was going through the process of registering for my job as an ESL teacher, and I had purchased a copy of the International Herald Tribune. It had an article about those banks. They were all Japanese; it was emblematic of the whole transformation of Japan from a country which had lost to the US in World War II to a country which now had an economy in many ways superior to the US and led it in socio-cultural parameters as well.

There is an awful lot of anti-Americanism throughout Europe, and, though I'm broad-minded and can understand a lot of it, there are those who simply wish to strike back at Americans to enjoy a moment of fleeting superiority. There was such a person working in the Milan employment bureau, and he had to go out of his way to notice the article tucked under my arm, and then make a comment about how the top banks were now Japanese - and not American. Of course, it irritated me, but, other than that, I gave it little regard.

The thing that really struck me, though, happened within a year; the Japanese economy imploded. Not only did the Japanese no longer have any of the top ten banks, four of those banks that had failed.

Because so many of my students in ESL were businessmen, and because of my own decades long interest in economics, self-taught, I read whatever I could about the Japanese crash and got to consult with Italian bankers on the whole thing.

Finally, all of it got condensed down to a couple of articles in Business Week that summarized the relevant information and explained what had happened. It was not that complicated to understand the reasons of just how the economic and financial structures had failed.

The real problem, the one I had trouble understanding, was how the Japanese and international financial community had failed to interpret the immediate and relevant economic data correctly.

In other words, there was no great secret or backdoor manipulation that was responsible for creating the crash. There was no really new or particularly novel aspect to the situation. What had created the crash was the failure to interpret their world, a moral and existential blindness, that was fueled by greed and over-optimism.

Essentially, Japan had huge trade surpluses. The trade surpluses with United States were the result of a certain degree of currency manipulation designed to keep Japanese companies in a position to compete with American companies. The surpluses were also the result of internal barriers in Japan which added to the cost of American goods due to the internal inefficiency of their distribution system, which insured even higher prices. Even Japanese goods distributed in Japan cost more than the same product in Los Angeles, which was why Japanese businessmen bought themselves Toshiba computers while they were there.

Japan "sterilized" its US dollars by printing up corresponding sums of Japanese Yen, which were then deposited in the bank, keeping the exchange rate essentially the same. This mountain of Yen had to find its way into the Japanese economy and ended up creating bubbles in the stock and real estate markets. When you combine this with a couple of bad moves by Japanese companies, their economy went into a deep recession. Nissan, one of the most successful automobile companies in the world bet wrong and ended up being owned by the French.

Nissan invested heavily, bent on continuing to improve its robotic assembly line, but the major investment did not provide the return anticipated. The drop in cost of production didn't provide the ROI as the drop in cost didn't result in a significant slice of the US auto market going their way. Renault, a French automobile company, ended up owning Nissan, a tremendous reversal of fortune, emblematic of the whole fall of Japan's econ juggernaut.

The stock market, the real estate market, and Nissan failed within months of each other. Oh! The Japanese mafia, known as Yakusa, was involved as well, making it just that much harder to call in loans...

Four of those great Japanese banks died, while the others lost their status, and the Japanese economy and still hasn't grown in more than 25 years.

So what's the lesson here?

The lesson here is that the financial press and the business community and the government agencies in charge of banking and other aspects of our economy are not capable of seeing past their own prejudices, the narrowness of their own perspective, to get at the truth when the truth is uncomfortable and goes against the grain of what might be deemed the conventional wisdom of the stock market and international banking system.

We saw this again in 2007 when Wall Street collapsed and major banks died, such as Lehman Brothers, and we went back to the same processes that got us there in the first place.

Now what does this have to do with China? Answer: everything...

How to combat gang life in Los Angeles in 5 Easy Steps

Based on a lot of thought and some substantial experience in the problem area, I propose:

1) Put an end to illegal immigration.

2) Put an end to mass immigration, reducing the numbers substantially.

3) Make trade agreements which are of net benefit to the United States, and not just certain corporations or groups within the United States. Be able to quantify and document that net benefit by documenting every negative as well as the positives, in every way possible.

4) Put an end to the culture of self-indulgence and hedonism that was brought in by the late 60s, a culture that hurts poor people the most, even as it's preached by our moneyed elites in all of our media. Here a spiritual renewal, broad-based, will be necessary...

5) Improve the schools. There are a lot of ways to do this without spending more money. One significant way would be to eliminate those teachers, the one in five, who were actually totally incapable. It's been demonstrated ("Waiting for Superman") that just eliminating that one teacher in five will substantially raise reading, writing and math scores for inner-city kids.

Fathers, Fatherhood and Families.

Let's understand that gang life thrives in neighborhoods without fathers where entire groups of young men raise themselves.

Families lack fathers for a number of reasons, all of which are important.

Among them, the first is that poor men contribute little with their small wages to the well-being of the family. Wives see the husbands as expendable and can go on welfare.

There is also a tremendous issue today of war against males, of masculine identity, the false notion that a mother can raise a son as well as a father.

Simply not true.

At a certain age, adolescents typically become hostile to their mothers as they break away from the childhood psyche. Those young-men-in-formation need both the chance to break away and to be initiated into manhood by men who have done just that.

Essentially, gang life is a substitution for this process.

The atmosphere within the home and the capacity of a man and a woman to live together on good terms is also an issue. The general lack of sexual self discipline in our society particularly hurts those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, much more than those at the top.

Once the cycle of poverty begins, its great momentum helps it continue.

If your parents had a bad marriage, and if your same-sex parent, with whom you identify, had enormous problems in life, whether it be in work or in relationships, you usually inherit a lot of the problem and much less of the solution.

So, it can't be said that as soon as we have certain economic issues settled, marriage will become reestablished as the norm among people for whom it has not been the norm for several generations. It can't be said that neighborhoods will suddenly be full of fathers supervising their sons. But, without an economic basis, no family can exist, just like anything else in our society.

Let's take a look at the economic nexus surrounding this problem.

When I was a boy in a major East Coast city, the vast majority of jobs were in industrial production. At a certain point, the shipyards were moved to South Korea because of cheaper labor (?), and the neighborhoods that depended on the shipyards for work were simply destroyed.

These were white people, educated to some extent, having real job skills, who depended on these jobs to take care of families. I didn't see any real efforts to help these families adjust, and the neighborhoods turned into neighborhoods very similar to the poor black neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

The neighborhoods were full of families on welfare, young people on drugs, and a lot of violence secondary to the drug trade, besides whatever went on with the families themselves out of the general sense of frustration and hopelessness.

This pattern has continued.

NAFTA increased the number of illegal immigrants coming to the United States from Mexico because NAFTA killed the livelihood of small Mexican farmers. Their corn was too expensive compared to the price of corn from the United States.

Whole villages have been abandoned.

These farmers without a livelihood used to go to the Maquiladora region to get work on the border with the United States. American managers lived on the American side and commuted to their factories just south of the border where Mexican workers manned the plants.

Then this wonderful thing called "China trade" happened.

The Maquiladora region could no longer expand because they couldn't compete with products from China. So, what did the dispossessed farmers (and others) do and what have they been doing to this day?

They continue to come illegally into the United States to find work. As a result, wages have gone down. Butchers in LA supermarkets get the same wages as decades ago. Young black men and women have a harder time getting jobs. Even summer temporary work has been shunted off to immigrants.

Worse, in some areas, such as Compton, Mexican gang members  have begun harassing, hunting down, killing black people living there in an effort to "ethnically cleanse" Compton of blacks, giving the Mexican Mafia greater control.

Who speaks of this? Practically no one...

Have you ever thought to ask yourself why George W. Bush never secured the border in the wake of 9/11?

Have you ever thought that George W. Bush never secured the border in the wake of 9/11 because, had he done so, the illegal immigrants from Mexico, the refugees from NAFTA's effects there, would have had to stay in Mexico causing major civil unrest?

Have you ever thought that George W. Bush never secured the border in the wake of 9/11 because, had he done so, Mexico would have pulled out of NAFTA, and that would have hurt some enormous Chamber of Commerce-New World Order-Internationalist-Globalist itch that they seem all intent on scratching, starting with a few American farmers who could no longer sell their corn there?

China trade, the cause of the failure of the Maquiladora region to thrive, is premised on fixed currency regimes that are to our detriment. These fixed-currency regimes are a violation in every sense of the notion of actual free trade. For those of you unfamiliar with the notion, if two countries really have free trade, then the medium of exchange, their currencies, do not have a fixed value.

I will do more on that in another blog. There is a lot more to be said.

So, there you have it.

On both sides of the political spectrum there are people dedicated to internationalism and mass immigration. 

They mouth all kinds of platitudes regarding minorities and the poor who are already here, but they refuse to see the evidence that they've actually hurt the situation. They refuse to see the evidence that the only way to help minorities and the poor of any color who are already here is to restrict immigration and to stop the export of jobs.

So, how to fix the problem?

Once again:

1) Put an end to illegal immigration.

2) Put an end to mass immigration, reducing the numbers substantially.

3) Make trade agreements which are of net benefit to the United States, and not just certain corporations or groups within the United States. Be able to quantify that net benefit in every way possible.

4) Put an end to the culture of self-indulgence and hedonism, which poor people are most hurt by.

5) Improve the schools by eliminating those teachers, the one in five, who are actually totally incapable. It's been demonstrated that just eliminating that one teacher in five will substantially raise reading, writing and math scores for inner-city kids.