Category Archives: Education

James Joyce

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | Aug 18, 2015

Joyce in Zurich, c. 1918

Joyce is not for everyone –especially my High School English teacher! I did my high school thesis on ‘Finnegans Wake’ by the Irish writer James Joyce and received a big, fat ‘F’ from my unimpressed teacher; thus my interest in this podcast from Corbett and Thomas Sheridan on Joyce’s ‘A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man‘. Despite my early failure at literature, I persisted, and found our lives can be much richer than we can imagine by experiencing the amazingly fine literature that is always just a single book away. One of my favorite courses at the University was two semesters of ‘The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vols 1 & 2.’ What an amazing class!!!! Broadened and enriched my life in ways I cannot explain, yet has impacted my life every day since. Reading fine literature is like doing interior decorating to magically turn your house into a home; only here, your mind is the interior and the decorating is done with literature.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – FLNWO #29 | Corbett • 08/17/2015 •

Corbett Report: In this edition of Film, Literature and the New World Order James is joined by author, artist, podcaster and researcher Thomas Sheridan of ThomasSheridanArts.com. Together they tackle James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man…and the entirety of the Joycean ouevre. Is Joyce the ultimate anti-imperialist, post-colonial, iconoclastic exile hero? The smith of the uncreated conscience? A literary magician? A man whose hand did many other things as well? All and none of the above? Yes I said yes he will yes.

Homosexuality and Chimerism, Rethinking Our DNA

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by KRISTINA BRUCE | Cutting the Gordian Knot | July 30, 2015

Science is full of “Eureka!” moments. Why is something so obvious being ignored?

It has perplexed me for a number of years now that the scientific community has not come to the conclusion that homosexuality is predominately genetically based. It doesn’t require an advanced degree in reproductive genetics to connect the dots and come to a conclusion which would be relatively simple with today’s technology to confirm.

I became aware of the possibility of proving a genetic basis for sexual orientation in 1991, after reading the work of Dr. Simon LaVey; a Cambridge and Harvard educated neuroscientist who had shown anatomical differences in the hypothalami of deceased homosexual men who had succumbed to A.I.D.S.. His findings demonstrated that the hypothalami of the gay men studied were consistently the same size of a female. The study had a small sample group, because of course there just aren’t that many gay men offering up their corpses for necropsies on a daily basis. The study was derided by many in the scientific community and not a tremendous amount of attention was given to it as the years went by. About a decade ago though I had my own eureka moment when I learned more about genetics and the existence of chimerism, mosaicism, vanishing twins and the existence of even microchimerism between mothers, their children and even transplant recipients. It didn’t take long after learning about these naturally occurring phenomena to put 2 and 2 together.

The vast majority of homosexuality is likely the result of chimerism.

I will try to break it down in as few words as possible how chimerism is most likely the basis of non-traditional sex orientation or sexual identity.

Not everyone is running around with just one set of DNA. Nope, many of us unknowingly carry blue prints from not just one plan but two and sometimes even more individuals. How does this happen? Well it’s pretty interesting. Many times women produce more than one egg during ovulation. As a matter of fact, many pregnancies are multiple para in the beginning, it’s just that not very many second or third eggs are viable and don’t make it to implantation. So when these other embryos break apart on their little trip down the fallopian tube, cells from the demised gamete can come in contact with a viable one. When this occurs, often times the viable gamete absorbs and incorporates the DNA of the non-viable twin into its own structure. It’s why you see people occasionally express these traits as an odd colored eye or a shock of blonde hair in a scalp dominated by brunette. Most times it’s not noticeable at all because where this DNA has been incorporated isn’t seen. There are cases of women whose reproductive organs are not their own but that of an unborn twin. Imagine going to have genetic testing to see if your children are a match for a kidney transplant only to find that you’re not a genetic match with your child. Then being told that they are only a close relative because the ovaries which produced them belonged to your unborn sister. This was the case for one 52-year-old woman suffering from renal failure. Read the case study here. There have been multiple cases discovered in recent years of mothers who have given birth to the children of their own unborn twin as in the case of Lydia Fairchild.

How to recognize a chimera? Most times you can’t.

Animals born in large litters are more chimeric than humans. Cats are a good example of this. Male calico cats and male tortoise colored cats are chimeras. They’re expressing the female coat patterns but retain the sex organs of the dominant male DNA. In humans sometimes you’ll see subtle things like dark patches of skin which tan differently than other body parts, elaborate mosaic patterns of different colored skin and even the occasional supernumerary nipple. Some of them are striking to look at.

Read the full article at Cutting the Gordian Knot.

The Populist Cry For Glass-Steagall

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by Guest Writer KRISTINA BRUCE | CLEARNFO.com | July 16, 2015

The housing crash of 2008 wiped out over $6 trillion dollars in American assets and dropped household net worth by almost 40%. Not only that but the banking debacle also cost an additional $26 trillion in bailouts and another $3.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing. The latter was to keep interest rates low in an attempt to jump-start housing sales. We’ve frequently seen mention of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (GS) as the mechanism which could have averted the banking crisis and it’s making headlines again as a bill originally introduced in 2013 by the unlikely duo of Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ). It seems the memories of the American public like goldfish aren’t very long because what’s old seems to be new again.

Was Glass-Steagal actually doing the job of protecting the public from the evils of retail and investment banks interconnectedness, collusion and risk taking when it was still in place? No it wasn’t. Enacted in 1933, by the time a portion of it, yes only a portion was repealed in 1999 with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the banks had long been involved in the very same activities which are once again being blamed for creating the crisis. Pay no attention to the fact that GS regulation would have had no effect on the failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Fannie Mae nor Freddie Mac. Oh and please ignore the fact that in 2004 the SEC decided to raise banks debt-to-capital ratio from 12:1 to 30:1. Surely that had no effect on how much more risk they were able to take on. Right? No it was all Glass-Steagall the politicians proclaim!

The reality is that Glass-Steagall stopped doing anything to protect anybody at the very latest in the era of Harold Geneen and International Telephone and Telegraph Corp (ITT). Why this reference? Because that was sort of the most famous example of a wave of large mergers and acquisitions which certainly showed up in the finance sector around that time. It didn’t take nearly as long to recognize in the business sector how very destructive the way Geneen gobbled up companies into IT&T was, to form this weird conglomerate of unrelated businesses. Eventually it destroyed the core business and that is what people should keep in mind as we go down the rabbit hole. Hands in too many pies eventually lead to big mistakes and malinvestment.

The point of that example is to compare it to the reunification of the finance sector which began around the same time and it soon got to a point that commercial banks, investment banks and proprietary trading banks had no separation that could be overcome no matter what the goofball regulators did and we’re talking the 1970’s here! Forty years ago not; even in this century! It had been going on for so long that by 1999 it was argued Glass–Steagall was already “dead.” One of the latest incidents before GS was repealed was Citibank’s 1998 affiliation with Salomon Smith Barney, one of the largest US securities firms, was permitted under the Federal Reserve Board’s then existing interpretation of the Glass–Steagall Act. They just did whatever the hell they wanted to and they’ll do it again. It was not long after Citibank/SSB that Clinton publicly declared “the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate.” All they did was once again codify illegal behavior by changing the law just as the current administration has codified all sorts of illegal acts through the National Defense Authorization Act, The Federal Grounds Protection Act, continually extending the Patriot Act, the Freedom Act and this horrid upcoming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. They tell you that they’re protecting you then they change the law to benefit the banking corporate cartel and also strip you of your rights.

What’s more is that the politicians are being disingenuous and playing on the naiveté of the public when it comes to both their short memories and lack of attention as to how the banking industry works. In Warren’s opinion as stated in a New York Times article from 2012; when asked if GS had been in place at the time of the financial crisis if it would have averted it or reduced banking loses, her reply ;

“The answer is probably ‘No’ to both.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin who did the interview summed up Warren’s motives for pushing GS reinstatement at the time hit the nail on the head:

“In my conversation with Ms. Warren she told me that one of the reasons she’s been pushing reinstating Glass-Steagall — even if it wouldn’t have prevented the financial crisis — is that it is an easy issue for the public to understand and “you can build public attention behind.”

She added that she considers Glass-Steagall more of a symbol of what needs to happen to regulations than the specifics related to the act itself.”

Bingo! It resonates with the populace. It makes them feel as though someone is actually doing something even if it is meaningless. It’s pandering.

Is there more to this though? Is there possibly something here from which the banks might actually benefit? I think there is. Pandering alone is not usually motive enough for politicians like McCain who is so entrenched they’ll probably remove him from the senate in a body bag or Warren who has already become so popular that her political career is almost ensured for as long as she desires to remain in the senate.

What happens if the new and improved GS 2.0 is passed? Well within 5 years the retail banks will have to divest themselves of all activities deemed exclusive to investment banks and vice versa. In some cases the government will also reserve the right to force cessation of certain activities in an even shorter time frame where it feels there is imminent risk to the public. That means a lot of shifting of business will have to be done in a very short matter of time. Do you reckon that retail banks are just going to hand over that portion of their business to investment banks and the investment banks will do so in kind? Not likely. On top of that, there are portions of assets each hold which neither would even want to dirty their hands with.

It is likely that toxic assets are becoming so burdensome and eminently destructive that the major banks would actually welcome a superficial break-up at this point. It would give them an opportunity to spin some of the absolutely worthless portions of the $1.2 QUADRILLION holdings of completely unregulated derivatives market. This of course would be shoveled into smaller entities which could later be allowed to implode and without implicating the parent companies. It would also give them plausible deniability for the offload if it was government mandated too!!!

They’ve got $TRILLION$ in bad derivatives bets which are going to eventually go sour no matter how much money they print and infuse the banks with. There’s a global economic slowdown and a currency devaluation war going on right now which ensures it’s going to happen at some point in the not too distant future. You bet your bottom dollar they’d love to get a huge portion of that off the books sooner than later! If they spin-off these toxic assets themselves everyone’s going to blame Goldman Sachs, Chase, HSBC and myriad other “too big to fails” for having done so. If government *snickering* “forces” them to become smaller, then the heat is off the parent entities when these bets do go bad for their spun-off children.

It doesn’t matter a whit if these banks create new separate entities to handle portions of business they will be precluded from engaging in. Most of what will be spun off are bets on junk and holdings in the grossly overvalued stock market; which is becoming more and more difficult to prop up, not just here in the U.S., but globally. The Chinese stock market was falling so precipitously that last week the government had to place stringent controls on selling by major holders for the next 6 months. They initiated discounts on transaction fees and decreased margin requirements to encourage buying. At the same time the NYSEX was halted for half a day which still is somewhat mysterious. At the same time the Euro zone is in a tremendous mess with Greece, which if it doesn’t go Germany’s way could set off a domino effect of similar defaults and send their markets into a tail spin. Doesn’t it seem awfully convenient that simultaneous to this all of the sudden, a 2-year-old bill which had been lost in the shuffle is suddenly in vogue again? The banks want to take out the trash and this is the perfect cover to do it under.

The general populist cry is understandable. The banks are robbing them blind and they want it to stop. The problem is that Glass-Steagall isn’t going to do much of anything other than give the banks an opportunity to stick it to them again. Say it publicly though and most folks’ hair bristles and spit flies out their mouths as they scream, “It’s better than nothing!” They want so badly to believe that some politician somewhere is doing something, ANYTHING on their behalf that when you gore the sacred ox of Glass-Steagall they lose all logic. The problem is that economics is a dismal science which even a goodly portion in the industry of trading and finance don’t fully understand. How are we to expect a public whose economic education on the subject generally amounts to the cumulative sound bites they’ve heard on the evening news and a blurb or two from the likes of FOX News, MSNBC and their endless parade of bobble head commentators, to really have a grasp on what’s being proposed? At best it will do little to nothing. At worst it may be a Trojan Horse leaving another swath of destruction which the banking industry will casually walk away from relatively unscathed.

Note: The Glass-Steagall Act was enacted in 1933 to limit commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. In short it was a wall of separation between commercial and investment banking. The 1999 repeal permitted Wall Street investment banking firms to gamble with their depositors’ money that was held in affiliated commercial banks.

By Guest Writer Kristina Bruce ⋅ July 16, 2015
Read more from Kristina Bruce at Cutting the Gordian Knot

Observations on Psychology

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | July 14, 2015

On the path to deeper insights into the workings of the mind…

The Mind according to David Brown – click to enlarge

Now I’m no friend to psychology or psychiatry in their current incarnations; mostly because of their sorry histories and their current fraud posing as a science. I am for discovering truth that we can use productively, and I’m all for going out on a limb to discover new important information. If you want to know more on the evils of psychology and psychiatry, please see the following mental health watchdog site CCHR International. Important Note: While I do not endorse or support Scientology or any of its organizations, CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights International) has produced some valuable research on psychology and psychiatry.

Some basics:

Conscious Mind: That part of the mind that is self-aware. Has quick and current memory that is easily accessed. If I ask you your name, you don’t have to go look it up or spend a lot of time trying to remember it. If however I ask what you were doing last Wednesday at 2 p.m. you might remember or then again you might have to go look at your calendar or sit for a while until it magically came to you just exactly what you were doing. If I asked you what you were doing 10 years ago on Wednesday at 2 p.m. you might never be able to answer this unless it was a major event like a marriage, birth, graduation or funeral or if you kept meticulous notes in your diary. In any event the conscious mind is similar to the RAM in your computer. It is quick, readily accessible and limited to how many things it can hold at one time. Directly connected to the conscious Mind is the CPU or the processor that allows us to do simple logic and calculations much like our old trusty computer. So here we have a useful description of the conscious mind. It’s where we live. So the barrier between the conscious and the subconscious can be seen as a semipermeable membrane whose job it is to allow the conscious mind to focus and concentrate on the tasks at hand while the subconscious records everything verbatim and unprocessed by the analytical mind of the self-aware consciousness.

The subconscious mind: collects all data available and records it mostly unprocessed, unorganized and verbatim. It is like a jungle of unorganized raw data including recordings of all five (5) senses, including spatial, positional information and emotions. It is separated from the conscious mind by a membrane to keep the clutter out of the way so that the conscious mind can focus on specific, limited tasks and just get shit done. There are many ways of accessing the contents of the subconscious mind.

Remembering (PULL); Storytelling (PUSH); Archetypes

One is through the effort of trying to remember something. This would be a pull action whereby you are pulling information from the subconscious into the conscious mind. Another is with storytelling. Story telling uses archetypes which are able to penetrate the separation between the conscious and subconscious thus providing direct access to write (or push) information into the subconscious mind for a more permanent and meaningful memory. See the Joseph Campbell video below on mythology, archetypes and storytelling.

Curtain (Membrane)

The Semipermeable Membrane: provides the separation –think curtain– between the conscious and subconscious mind. This separation is a modern invention that allows modern man to focus on the tasks at hand and on the abstract using symbols, basic math and logic, etc. Without this separation the verbatim data recorded in the subconscious mind would flood into the conscious mind.

So let’s see if we can apply these basic concepts and discover some useful information.

Postulate 1: When we cut our finger, the physical body goes into action to isolate the injury to prevent infection or damage to the rest of the body while it uses its power to heal. There is a scab and then when the healing completes, there may be a scar, but the body has been preserved and protected. Likewise, when we sustain severe psychic damage, the mind goes into action to isolate the injury to prevent additional damage to the rest of the mind. If the psychic damage is severe enough and if the human child is young enough the mind takes a snapshot of the entirety of the horrific insult, wraps it up enclosed in a hard case like a butterfly’s chrysalis and tucks it away somewhere in the deep recesses of the subconscious; hopefully never to be seen or heard from again. These snapshots contain everything recorded including all five senses, feelings, etc. Later, these repressed, tucked-away memories may reveal themselves when a person experiences an irrational feeling to what most would consider a minor event. This event for some reason restimulates the emotional memory, the details of which have been forgotten or tucked away in the protective chrysalis.

Postulate 2: If the child is under six years old and experiences substantial trauma, then there is great likelihood of splitting the personality into a separate partition which may arise years later when the right circumstances present themselves. This separate personality may have a different voice, personality, handwriting, etc. And can be switched into the main console of the conscious mind while the normal conscious mind is switched off. This may cause a loss of time when the normal mind switches back into charge. When there are multiple, time-separated severe psychic traumas, more splits to the personality can occur. In these cases, there may be one personality that dominates or controls the others. This personality will have its own name (Janie) and may even be referred to as an animal (Tiger). In severely split personalities this dominate personality will attempt to reconstruct a new whole personality out of the desperate parts in a desperate attempt to maintain sanity. This leads inevitably to a complete loss of what most of us think of as a self. Deep psychic damage may also result in what is termed psychosomatic transfer or illness wherein the psychic damage is converted into a physical aliment or pain.

Example 1: A man is standing on a ladder when he suddenly falls injuring his leg and is knocked unconscious. While unconscious a nearby dog is barking. Despite being unconscious, all this data is being recorded. Years later, the man discovers that despite his leg healing, it still hurts at odd times. It turns out that when a dog is barking his leg starts to hurt, but he is unable to draw the connection.

Example 2: A young girl is raped in a bathtub surrounded by small, pink tile. The event is so horrific that this memory is wrapped up nice and neatly and tucked away into the deep recesses of her subconscious as a repressed memory. Later as an adult, her husband finds her irrational hatred for small, pink tile disturbing … she has no idea why she despises small pink tile, but just has the urge to scratch it off the wall.

Conclusion: So we can see that despite the mind’s best attempt to protect itself, problems still exist only to rear their ugly head sometime in the future; sometimes causing irrational, painful and disturbing behavior apparently without explanation. These memories can have power over our lives. One way to deal with this power is to re-live these painful memories through the conscious mind so that they can be properly processed and then re-filed into the subconscious mind properly with full knowledge and analysis of the event. Freud explains this beautifully below. One caution is that if the semipermeable membrane is ever severely breached, the unprocessed jungle that is the subconscious can flood into the conscious mind causing psychosis which can be very dangerous to you and those around you.

It is common to refer to psychic injuries as being analogous to physical injuries: “There is still an open wound from when he or she betrayed me.” Or “I still need time to heal from my recent divorce before I start a new relationship.” So it makes sense to use those things familiar to us in the physical world to help describe what is going on in the emotional or psychic world. It makes for good communication where we can all understand what is going on.

Likewise, when Sigmund Freud explained the subconscious and its action of suppression at his second lecture of five on ‘The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis’ in 1910, he used common physical reference devices like a lecture hall and an unruly member of the audience to help communicate this novel idea…

Freud’s Lecture Hall

[10] Perhaps I may give you a more vivid picture of repression and of its necessary relation to resistance, by a rough analogy derived from our actual situation at the present moment. Let us suppose that in this lecture-room and among this audience, whose exemplary quiet and attentiveness I cannot sufficiently commend, there is nevertheless someone who is causing a disturbance and whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering, and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention from my task. I have to announce that I cannot proceed with my lecture; and thereupon three or four of you who are strong men stand up and, after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So now he is ‘repressed’, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the interruption shall not be repeated, in case the individual who has been expelled should try to enter the room once more, the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place their chairs up against the door and thus establish a ‘resistance’ after the repression has been accomplished. If you will now translate the two localities concerned into psychical terms as the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’, you will have before you a fairly good picture of the process of repression.

[13] Our most valuable lesson from Breuer’s observation was what it proved concerning the relation between symptoms and pathogenic experiences or psychical traumas, and we must not omit now to consider these discoveries from the standpoint of the theory of repression. At first sight it really seems impossible to trace a path from repression to the formation of symptoms. Instead of giving a complicated theoretical account, I will return here to the analogy which I employed earlier for my explanation of repression. If you come to think of it, the removal of the interrupter and the posting of the guardians at the door may not mean the end [1]of the story. It may very well be that the individual who has been expelled, and who has now become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble. It is true that he is no longer among us; we are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his sotto voce comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and his shouting and banging on the door with his fists interfere with my lecture even more than his bad behaviour did before. In these circumstances we could not fail to be delighted if our respected president, Dr Stanley Hall, should be willing to assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. He would have a talk with the unruly person outside and would then come to us with a request that he should be re-admitted after all: he himself would guarantee that the man would now behave better. On Dr Hall’s authority we decide to lift the repression, and peace and quiet are restored. This presents what is really no bad picture of the physician’s task in the psychoanalytic treatment of the neuroses.

[14] To put the matter more directly. The investigation of hysterical patients and of other neurotics leads us to the conclusion that their repression of the idea to which the intolerable wish is attached has been a failure. It is true that they have driven it out of consciousness and out of memory and have apparently saved themselves a large amount of unpleasure. But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognisable substitute for what has been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression. This substitute for the repressed idea – the symptom – is proof against further attacks from the defensive ego; and in place of the short conflict an ailment now appears which is not brought to an end by the passage of time. Alongside the indication of distortion in the symptom, we can trace in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea that was originally repressed. The paths along which the substitution was effected can be traced in the course of the patient’s psycho-analytic treatment; and in order to bring about recovery, the symptom must be led back along the same paths and once more turned into the repressed idea. If what was repressed is brought back again into conscious mental activity – a process which presupposes the overcoming of considerable resistances – the resulting psychical conflict, which the patient had tried to avoid, can, under the physician’s guidance, reach a better outcome than was offered by repression. There are a number of such opportune solutions, which may bring the conflict and the neurosis to a happy end, and which may in certain instances be combined. The patient’s personality may be convinced that it has been wrong in rejecting the pathogenic wish and may be led into accepting it wholly or in part; or the wish itself may be directed to a higher and consequently unobjectionable aim (this is what we call its ‘sublimation’); or the rejection of the wish may be recognised as a justifiable one, but the automatic and therefore inefficient mechanism of repression may be replaced by a condemning judgement with the help of the highest human mental functions – conscious control of the wish is attained.

–S Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis SECOND LECTURE

NOTE: YouTube removed this video: Joseph Campbell demonstrates how story telling, myths and archetypes can communicate directly to the subconsciousness for more permanent and meaningful memories. Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (1/7) – The Hero’s Adventure

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE POWER OF MYTH
Ep. 1: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘The Hero’s Adventure’

Campbell’s ‘The Power of Myth’ Notes:

Published on Jun 11, 2015

Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: “Follow your bliss. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanities. He transferred to Columbia University, where he received a BA in English literature in 1925 and an MA in Medieval literature in 1927. Campbell studied Old French, Provençal and Sanskrit at the University of Paris in France and the University of Munich in Germany. He learned to read and speak French and German. Campbell expressed a desire to pursue the study of Sanskrit and Modern Art in addition to Medieval literature. Campbell, the great chronicler of the ‘hero’s journey’ in mythology, recognized patterns that paralleled his own thinking in one of Ricketts’s unpublished philosophical essays. Echoes of Carl Jung, Robinson Jeffers and James Joyce can be found in the work of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as Campbell In 1934 Campbell accepted a position as professor at Sarah Lawrence College. This year had a profound influence on his thinking about Asian religion and myth, and also on the necessity for teaching comparative mythology to a larger, non-academic audience. Campbell’s ideas regarding myth and its relation to the human psyche are dependent in part on the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, but in particular on the work of Carl Jung, whose studies of human psychology greatly influenced Campbell. Campbell’s concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called “folk” and “elementary” ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. A Hero’s Journey, he explains God in terms of a metaphor: God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being.

Quotes from Joseph Campbell
– The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are
– We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us
– A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than ourself
– Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls
– I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
– It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure
– The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature
– Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer
– Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again
– Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble
– Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
– What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else
– Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths
– We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about
– God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that
– Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging
– If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s
– The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply
– The question is whether you are going to say a heartly yes to your adventure
– All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you
– The cave you fear to enter holds the treasures you seek
– If you are falling…. dive! Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain

Additional reading material:

The Greenbaum Speech Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse 1992 from Cassiopaea Website Also at Rense

Psychology & the separation of the conscious and subconscious
Freud and Steiner were contemporaries:
– Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939 (83 years)
– Rudolf Steiner: 27 February 1861 to 30 March 1925 (64 years)

Our Connection with the Elemental World (Steiner)
Observations on Psychology – the separation of the conscious and subconscious and Meet Rudolf Steiner (ClearNFO)

For more on Archetypes see: Carl Gustav Jung on Archetypes and Carol Pearson’s the ‘Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World’

Additional reading from ClearNFO:

Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses

MK-ULTRA, Monarch & Paperclip

Kids Say and Do the Darndest things…

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | July 13, 2015

Snow White (Schneewittchen) Dead 7 year old in glass coffin (click for larger view)

Years ago when my kids were much younger, I took it upon myself to sing and play my guitar (Dylan, Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, etc.) and read books to my kids at night before bed. One of my favorite books was the ‘Picture Bible’ by Iva Hoth (Author), Andre Le Blanc (Illustrator). Whether you are a Christian or not, it is a book that once you start is almost impossible to put down.

Anyway looking for new material, I happened upon a big thick book called ‘Grimms’ Fairy Tales’ – the original. Lo and behold as I started reading the first tale, it became more and more grim, violent, and so grotesque I had to stop reading and go to the next tale; only to find the same … I did this about four times and then started skimming the book for any tale that wasn’t just horrifically gross. There were none. So I told the kids that this book was not appropriate and I would no longer be reading from it. What I inadvertently did was place a secret desire within their hearts to find out what was really in this horrid book. To this end, my 16 year old son Jack has covetously latched on to this book and placed it in his own private library for future reference and reading.

So last night at midnight Jack bursts into my office with an amazing crooked smile of bewilderment on his face. He explained that he was just sitting around thinking about Walt Disney’s Snow White and realized that this couldn’t have been the original story so he asked himself if he had any references to this story in his library and sure enough he did in Grimms’ Fairy Tales; so he read the entire thing. He was amazed at what he read. First off the prince was a pedophile. Snow White was only 7 not in her teens or 20s as Disney would have us believe. The queen ate the boars heart the huntsman brought back thinking it was the heart of Snow White. Despite being told by the 7 dwarfs not to answer the door while they were away, Snow White answered the door three times and was killed by the queen three times. Jack surmised that Snow White was so frigging stupid that she deserved to die. The apple was not red but ½ was red and ½ was white. The queen ate the white half to show Snow White that it was A-Okay to eat the red half so Snow White did. Of course since Snow White was so darned pretty, the 7 dwarfs decided to put the dead Snow White in a glass coffin to preserve her beauty. Again weird. Now Jack asked me what kind of sicko prince would want a dead 7 year old in a glass coffin? Then to top things off, at the wedding of the prince and the 7 year old, the queen was

The Queen’s Iron Shoes

punished for her attempted murders: a pair of glowing-hot iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen. She is forced to step into the burning shoes and to dance until she drops dead

You just never know what your 16 year old is doing in the privacy of their room… it may not be what you suspect.

Wikipedia: Snow White

Wikipedia: Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Joe Plummer’s ‘Leaving the Illusion’ (2015 Edition)

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | June 29, 2015

Leaving the Illusion | Joe Plummer

For years I’ve struggled with the problem of how to communicate the real documented history of the Western world against a huge sea of misinformation, propaganda and out right lies promulgated by our all-encompassing power structures which envelop our lives. There seemed to be but one course; and that was to read, read, read and study. With work and family commitments, most people just don’t have time to read the tens of thousands of pages necessary to bring this orchestrated mirage into sharp focus; so the propagandists win the NFO-War by default, simply because they own the major media organs of the state and corporate controlled entertainment and news media, which is all most people ever see.

This fabricated field of acceptable assumptions is what I term the ‘walled-garden of history and politics’; this is where our trusted pundits live, battling their truth-claims: whether they be on the right or the left, or somewhere in between; the game is always played within the confines of these walls, and we who live within the ‘Walled Garden’ are never, ever to reexamine the assumptions which form the foundation of the walls, because if the assumptions prove faulty, then the entire wall might come tumbling down. These are the rules that must be observed for acceptance and success. This contrived reality sets the rules of the game and of permissible discourse: woe be it to anyone who dares look over these walls of prefabricated assumptions, built by the power-elite in their comfy ivory towers of perfect knowledge of right and wrong; truth and falsehoods. This garden –surrounded by walls– represents the establishment’s consensus, group-think and therefore absolute, inviolable truth to the majority of people. This hoax, is their true power.

So how to penetrate the impenetrable without the personal desire or the luxury of years reading and studying the actual documented facts of history exposed by the likes of Carroll Quigley, Antony C. Sutton, Joe Plummer and others?

Unlike many who pontificate based on the assumptions of the power-elite, Joe Plummer has paid his dues. Joe has spent much of his life studying the thousands of pages which document the real history of the Anglo-American Establishment, and now you can be the beneficiary of Joe’s amazing journey. As you read Joe’s three excellent books, the scales will fall from your eyes and you will see clearly perhaps for the first time in your life. The unintelligible will now make sense when placed in its proper context.

Leaving the Illusion by Joe Plummer is his first and only Novel which though fanciful is based solidly on detailed research and fact. This book, I believe, is one of the keys to the problem I identified above of unlocking and freeing the masses from the social engineering that has been so successful in the West and around the globe. Please read and enjoy Joe’s excellent book and maybe you too can leave the illusion. But don’t stop there, the facts upon which this book rests are summarized, documented and condensed in Joe’s other two books: ‘Dishonest Money and Tragedy and Hope 101′.

Full Text of Leaving the Illusion

Leaving the Illusion (2015 Edition)
Source: JoePlummer.com

“Imagine for a moment what it would be like; ten years worth of hard work and a life-long dream, gone. Your self respect and dignity, in shambles. As you question what you’re made of, and as you wonder how you’ll ever claw your way back to the top, an incredible opportunity presents itself. There is only one catch: It will cost you everything you know about the world around you.

Leaving the Illusion delves into the darkness of an unseen world; a world where the “dominant few” do as they please to the “inferior many” that live beneath them. For the insiders, there is unimaginable wealth, power and privilege. For all others, there is only deception, theft and violence. Given a choice, which group would you join? Are you sure? The price of admission might be more than you can afford.”

Related Reading and Viewing at ClearNFO:

Homeschooling

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | June 27, 2015

Home Schooling: Big Winner

Now this is impressive:

‘Texas Gov. Abbott appoints homeschool mom to chair state Board of Education.’

Most people are totally unaware of the following stats: ACT and GPA are HIGHER in homeschoolers than public, Catholic and private schools. AND the Four-Year College Graduation is HIGHER in homeschoolers than Public, Catholic and Private. All this success without massive taxpayer funding. The sad thing is that these homeschoolers are forced to pay –not just for their local schools and the $20,233,827,000 annually for the failed U.S. Department of Education– they also pay thousands for their home education, thus placing unfair financial burdens on these households who choose to home-school. How do I know? Been there, done that. Do I blame the teachers? Not so much. Why? You can’t win in a system designed for failure and the perpetuation of fat-cat, puffed-up, know-it-all bureaucrats.

Just the facts on Homeschooling…

PRODUCTIVITY: Necessary Bridges …

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | June 15, 2015

Necessary Bridges by Rashid Kapadia

Below are a couple of important videos in the category of ‘PRODUCTIVITY’. The first video is a speech I recorded earlier this year at the HESS Club in Houston, TX. The second is an interview I recorded with this same speaker. Many people have a fear of public speaking and therefore avoid this at all cost. By avoiding public speaking, I feel that we may be limiting our careers and opportunities in both our business and personal lives. This is why I think this book is so darned important. This is not your standard book on public speaking, but rather a book written by an engineer and a project manager; and I might add a personal friend of mine, Rashid Kapadia. Having the mind of an engineer, Rashid has undertaken a different approach to this topic than I have seen before, and has made some amazing and useful discoveries that I think we all can use in our daily lives. I hope you get as much out of this as I did and make a commitment to purchase and read Rashid’s excellent book. Enjoy.

Necessary Bridges: Public Speaking and Storytelling for Project Managers and Engineers
Rashid N Kapadia PMP
PMI-Houston
February 10, 2015 PeliPeli
February 11, 2015 HESS Club
Necessary Bridges: Public Speaking and Storytelling Feb 11, 2015

Rashid Kapadia Interview – Necessary Bridges

Show Notes:

Necessary Bridges
www.necessarybridges.com/

Email:
info@NecessaryBridges.com
rashid.kapadia@gmail.com

Amazon [Kindle Edition]
Necessary Bridges: Public Speaking & Storytelling for Project Managers & Engineers

Ted talks: Flow, the secret to happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Steven Kotler, “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance”

Is a Duck Watching You?

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | May 29, 2015

Anatidaephobia: the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you

Wouldn’t surprise me to find ‘Anatidaephobia’ in the fanciful and non-scientific book of psyches and propaganda entitled ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)’ where everything is a disorder. The DSM is the Psyche’s attempt at creating their own PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference) thus giving them the appearance of legitimacy and therefore allowing them to attach to the great money teat of qualified health insurance. However, the duck picture featured here is a very funny and interesting picture. And, I’ve often wondered if some humans possess a 6th sense alerting them when someone is secretly watching. BTW, the DSM is just another example of science by consensus masquerading as real science. Anyone capable of critical thought recognizes that science by consensus is not science at all but propaganda. Don’t buy their BS. Think for yourself. Beyond the muting and the destruction of countless lives, you will find behind the DSM are billions of dollars in Big Pharma psych drugs which are the proximate cause and are at the scene of the crime of the majority of the mass murders we view in horror in today’s headlines. Yet this fact is lost on our MSM (“Mainstream Media“). Despite documented evidence that gun ownership in the USA reduces crime, these crimes are attributed rather to gun ownership by the media which receive 70% or their advertising revenue from Big Pharma. At the same time, there exists some evidence that certain psychoactive drugs when used properly can have short-term, beneficial effects for psychosis and for bipolar disorder; however, long-term they are not curative and don’t treat the root of the problem. It is important to also read the warning labels on most of these drugs which include “Homicidal & Suicidal Ideation”, which explains much of the irrational carnage we find at gun-free schools, movie theaters, etc.

Reference Documentation:

Kennedy Drops Bombshell: 70% News Ad Revenue From Pharma
Fear of Ducks Phobia – Anatidaephobia
Here’s a good source for the evils of the Psych industry and their sorry history: CCHR

Related topics from ClearNFO: The Corruption of Science

Memorial Day – 2015

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by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | May 25, 2015

Fort Hood has put a boot on the ground for every American life lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. A powerful memorial. Yet, another way to honor the war dead is to put a stop to all these pointless, unconstitutional wars.

If you have time to read the three well-researched and documented books by Antony C. Sutton listed here …

1) Wall Street & the Rise of Hitler; 2) Wall Street and FDR; 3) Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: The Remarkable True Story of the American Capitalists Who Financed the Russian Communists … the self-righteous myths that tell us the USA is all about the spreading of democracy and the protecting of freedom will become an obvious, painful hoax to you. Yes, I too believed in these myths, but after the JFK assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the obvious coverup concerning the attacks on 9/11, it was finally time for me to dig in, invest some time and take a closer look at what our government was actually doing. Do I disparage our brave soldiers who fight to protect this country; who believe they are fighting for truth, justice and the American way? Not at all. I honor their well-intended sacrifices. But I am now aware of the deals made behind closed doors, as documented by Carroll Quigley (Anglo-American Establishment), Sutton and other top historians that base their research — not on official establishment propaganda– but on the facts as they find them; thereby removing the political spin and propaganda that we have all grown up believing. This is the critical point for me: If we care to regain the honorable ideals of a free and prosperous people, we must confront the evil that has infiltrated our government and surreptitiously controls the money system and therefore the government and all its machinery. This can not be done by pretending that facts are not facts. So if you choose to take this brave journey to the truth, buckle your seat-belts, it going to be a bumpy ride.

Here is just one example how our vaulted sultans of American Foreign policy honor our military:

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

― Henry Kissinger

P.S. And to all my fellow patriotic citizens: Before you go about bashing my head against the wall with your fists, please read the above mentioned three books by Sutton and then we can sit down as adults and talk –not fight– about solutions and the sad predicament we all find ourselves and our beloved America in now on this May 25th, 2015 Memorial Day.

More reading on this topic here:

U.S. Soldiers Died for Empire and Hegemony
by Jacob G. Hornberger May 25, 2015

America: The Greatest Force for Good? (ClearNFO)

Is the U.S. a force for good or evil? (ClearNFO)

From Wikipedia: Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans — established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.

War Is A Racket (text)
By Major General Smedley Butler

War is a Racket (Video) by Smedley Butler is a famous speech denouncing the military industrial complex. This speech by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient exposes war profits that benefit few at the expense of many. Throughout his distinguished career in the Marines, Smedley Darlington Butler demonstrated that true patriotism does not mean blind allegiance to government policies with which one does not agree. To Hell with war.

Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex.