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.

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

In the 18th century, the term natural-born citizen derived from an understanding of natural law—the universal, self-evident law America’s Founding Fathers presumed came from God. Natural law was seen as God’s law that ruled human affairs, distinct from positive law, which specified statutes written by human beings to govern human behavior. The Founders would have understood that positive law, to the extent it was correct and bore authority, had to derive from and be consistent with natural law. Writers in the natural law tradition, including Swiss philosopher and diplomat Emerich de Vattel, profoundly influenced the thinking of the Founding Fathers. The term natural-born citizen appears first in a treatise Vattel wrote in 1758 titled Law of Nations: or, Principles of the Natural Law Applicable to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. In Chapter 19, Section 212, Vattel specified: The citizens are the members of the civil society, bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority; they equally participate in its advantages. The natives or natural-born citizens are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.

Jerome, Corsi (2011-05-17). Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President (pp. 33-34). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.

He continued: As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation, and it is presumed as matter of course that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. Vattel again emphasizes the concept that natural-born citizens are those born in the nation to parents who are citizens of the nation: The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children, and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born.

Jerome, Corsi (2011-05-17). Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President (p. 34). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.

Vattel concluded: I say that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will only be the place of his birth, and not his country. Thus, the point of requiring that presidents be natural-born citizens was to prevent foreigners, or those whose allegiance could be attributed to the jurisdiction of foreign sovereigns, from ever being chief executive with the awesome powers of commander in chief. Using Vattel’s definition, natural-born citizen is not a vague concept. Rather, applied to the U.S. Constitution, a natural-born citizen is someone born in the United States to parents who are United States citizens.

Given this definition, a person born in the United States to one U.S. citizen parent and a second who is a citizen of another country would not qualify. Obama’s situation is precisely this: He says he was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a U.S. citizen mother. The assertion that a presidential candidate should be disqualified for being born on foreign soil was arguably weaker if both parents were U.S. citizens when the child was born. Under Vattel’s definition, if the child’s birth location were under U.S. jurisdiction at the time and both parents were U.S. citizens, the child was arguably a natural-born citizen. So, according to Vattel, Charles Curtis and Barry Goldwater would be considered natural-born citizens, provided we consider the territories of Kansas and Arizona to have been part of the United States before they were granted statehood.

Jerome, Corsi (2011-05-17). Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President (pp. 34-35). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.

Had George Romney or Lowell Weicker advanced as presidential candidates, their birthplaces would have become an issue under Article 2, Section 1. With regard to John McCain, whose Democratic critics in 2008 investigated whether he was born at a civilian hospital in the Canal Zone or in a U.S. Navy hospital, some believed birth outside the Navy base would have disqualified him from running for president. There can be no doubt the Founding Fathers were familiar with Vattel’s Law of Nations. On December 9, 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Vattel’s editor, C.G.F. Dumas, in France: “I am much

Jerome, Corsi (2011-05-17). Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President (p. 35). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.

obliged by the kind present you have made us of your edition of Vattel. It came to us in good season, when circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations. [I]t has been continually in the hands of the members of our Congress, now sitting, who are much pleased with your notes and preface, and have entertained a high and just esteem for their author.”73

The First Congress in 1790—whose members included twenty delegates to the Constitutional Convention, eight of them members of the Committee of Eleven that drafted the natural-born citizen clause—passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, 104), which provided: “And the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens.”74

If we incorporate this into the meaning of Article 2, Section 1, it becomes less important for natural-born citizenship that the person is born in the United States, as long as his parents are both U.S. citizens. This interpretation might have allowed Romney and Weicker to be eligible for president despite being born on foreign soil. Still, it is questionable whether being born in Vermont would make Chester Arthur qualified or whether being born in Hawaii would qualify Barack Obama, because of the foreign nationality and presumed allegiance of their fathers.

Critics who object to interpreting the meaning of natural-born citizen in Article 2, Section 1, as a term of natural law have argued that there is “no source to which an appeal can be made to determine what natural law is.”75

 This argument, however, would not make sense to the Founding Fathers, who were familiar with philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, all of whom wrote extensively of natural law as derived from classical Greek and Roman philosophy.

While Hobbes, Locke, and Hume all differed in their exact definitions and applications of natural law, the concept that natural law derived from God and was imbued in human nature was held in common. Moreover, Vattel is careful not to leave the term natural-born citizen vague, but to define it carefully as applying to those born in the nation to parents who are citizens of the nation.

Critics also object that it “makes no sense for a nation of immigrants to consider ‘natural allegiance’ to be determined by where their fathers came from.”

Yet, consider that in Article 2, Section 1, the Founders stipulated as eligible for the presidency not only “natural-born Citizens,” but also “Citizens of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.”

Foreigners, including persons born to one or more foreign parents who were not citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted, were not eligible to be president.

This was the entire point.

The Founding Fathers wanted to exclude foreigners from the presidency because they were distrustful of elevating to chief executive of the nation or commander in chief anyone who by birth might bear allegiance to a foreign nation. That someone was born to a foreign parent reflects no fault of their own, of course, but the Founding Fathers were distrustful that a dual citizen at birth would owe his undivided loyalty to the United States of America.

One final point is grammatical in nature.

 In writing the natural-born citizen clause of Article 2, Section 1, observe that the Founding Fathers capitalized “Citizen,” such that the phrase read “natural-born Citizen.”

In 18th-century English grammatical tradition, the principle was that the noun “Citizen” was being modified by the phrase “natural-born,” which served to further qualify the understanding of “Citizen.”

That is, to be eligible for president, it was not sufficient that a person be a citizen; he also had to be natural-born.

The point is that not all citizens are natural-born, but only natural-born citizens are eligible to be president.

The phrase “natural-born Citizen” was intended to specify that “natural-born” constituted a sub-class within the larger class of “Citizens.” To modern thinkers, the idea of restricting the presidency to natural-born citizens can seem archaic or xenophobic, especially when the United States is itself a nation of immigrants. Still, the clause remains in Article 2, Section 1, and has never been modified or removed by constitutional amendment, even if some today think it would be wise to do so. As long as the natural-born citizen eligibility requirement remains in the Constitution, Americans have an obligation to take the entire phrase seriously and to apply its standard rigorously, without exception. Barack Obama—a Dual Citizen at Birth

Jerome, Corsi (2011-05-17). Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President (pp. 35-37). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition.