Gold Shines

“Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” – Mark Twain

People have chased gold since they realized that keeping a barter economy was not always feasible because commodity money like grain rotted, salt scattered, and cows were tough to take to the market. So, they invented money: stone money (Yap Island), salt (China and Roman Empire), ivory (Fiji), elephant hair (Africa), tobacco (Solomon Islands), brick tea money (Siberia), East Indian Money Tree (Malay Peninsula), Copper money (Alaskan Indian), to name a few.

The history of precious metals shows that as early as 2500 B.C. gold, silver, and copper were used in Egypt and Asia Minor to pay for goods and services. The kingdom of Lydia was minting coins in 700 B.C. made of electrum, a pale-yellow alloy of gold and silver.

People minted coins. Silver and gold coins had high value, portability, and payments by tale were made, counting out the right amount rather than weighing it. Even though animals did not die on the way to market, and perishable commodities did not spoil, there was always the possibility of being robbed of commodity money and coins.

Ridges were added to coins made of precious metals because humans filed the edges of coins to get gold or silver dust which they then sold as bullion or bartered for goods.

The next step was storing wealth in gold and silver bars. Bars held value over time and were easier to store as wealth. Most nations store their gold bars with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From this location, nations can request payments to other countries and the respective gold amounts are moved from the safe shelves of the payor to the shelves of the payee.

The one troy ounce ingot today sells for around $5,200, while the 3 kg bar sells for around $167,000. The price of gold has increased dramatically in the last ten years by 700 percent.

If a currency was not made of gold and silver, its value was measured in gold and silver. This gold standard held for a while. After 1971 the gold standard became outdated as countries no longer backed the value of their currency with gold. Inflation exploded as countries printed money without any backing of gold or backing by goods and services. Fiat currency was born. Our U.S. fiat currency, the “greenbacks,” date back to 1862.

According to reports by the World Gold Council, the top 10 countries with the most gold reserves as of January 2025 are: U.S. (8,133.5 tons), Germany (3,355.1 tons), Italy (2,451.8 tons), France (2,436 tons), Russia (2,299.9 tons), China (2,068.8 tons), Switzerland (1,040 tons), Japan (846 tons), India (760.4 tons), and Netherlands (612.5 tons). U.S. gold reserves are kept in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but nobody has seen them in decades.

John Maynard Keynes, the famous Keynesian economist, wrote that gold is a “barbarous relic.”  Used somewhat in electronics and chemistry, gold has major uses in jewelry and as a store of value in ingots and collectible coins.

According to Ed Conway, the typical gold wedding band requires the removal “between 4 and 20 tons of rock” from the top of a mountain while traditional mining methods required “0.3 tons of ore” to make a wedding band.

Conway wrote that, in a single day, three-story tall trucks remove rocks from the top of a mountain, or the hole dug up into a mountain, the weight of the Empire State Building. “For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig out about 5,000 tons of earth.” It is thus no surprise that whole mountains have been torn down to produce gold. Nobody knows the exact amount of pure gold ever extracted.

And how do they produce gold? The rocks blasted out of the mountain are ground into a fine powder which is then mixed with a cyanide solution to separate the gold, quite a toxic method for the earth, humans, and animals.

It is not surprising that humans have tried for ages to turn other metals into gold. Enter medieval alchemists, scientists, and charlatans, trying to find the “philosopher’s stone or the great elixir” that would change lead or other common metals into gold and silver. The most famous alchemist, Nicolas Flamel, a Frenchman, claimed in 1382 that he was able to change lead into silver and mercury into gold.

Even though Nicolas Flamel claimed that he had found the “philosopher stone and the great elixir,” there is no evidence that gold and silver could be transmuted from other metals unless particle accelerators and nuclear reactors were used.

Although unsuccessful, medieval alchemists promoted unknowingly the advancement of chemistry, optics, mathematics, and astronomy. History is full of gold stories which point to human ingenuity and greed.

The medieval ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa (1312-1337), lived in spectacular splendor and largesse thanks to the gold mined in massive quantities by slaves.

Archimedes found the solution to a gold problem when he was hired by Hiero, the king of Syracuse, to detect if his crown was pure gold or was adulterated with silver. Archimedes found the solution while sitting in his bath and ran into the street shouting the infamous “Eureka,” I found it (the solution).

Gold is denser than silver and displaces more water in a tub when a gold crown is submerged than a crown made of both gold and silver. Silver is lighter so less water is displaced when such a crown is submerged.

Very few treasures in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia survived the European melting pot of the Conquistadores who looted temples like the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco.

Pizzaro and his men captured Atahualpa, the emperor of the Incas. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison apartments with gold in exchange for his freedom. He filled one room with gold and two rooms with silver. He kept his word, but Pizzaro not so much. Gold Inca treasures were melted for coins.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus and his men found gold jewelry on Arawak chiefs in the West Indies and, in the next 40 years, the fiercest gold rush ensued and “the majority of the known gold-producing regions of the New World were theirs.”

“The natives of pre-Columbian America prized the gold for its beauty, presuming that the shiny yellow metal had a divine origin. In Mexico, the Aztecs called it the excrement of the gods, while the Incas of Peru thought it to be the sweat of the sun.” Gold was not valued as a major metal for currency. Because it did not corrode, it was used for fishing hooks and other tools, or it was just admired for its beauty in decorative arts. All the gold confiscated by the Spaniards enabled them to fund their fearsome armada.

Not long ago, grave-robbers in Panama sold ancient gold objects to dentists to be melted down for use in dental fillings.

Never forget, “all that glitter is not gold.”

NOTE: Medieval alchemists were somewhat proven correct that lead can be turned into gold, if the CERN Large Hadron Collider from Switzerland is used. During high energy particle collisions, the lead nuclei pass near each other at near-light speeds and generate intense electro-magnetic fields. These fields can trigger photons to knock out protons from the lead atoms, turning them into gold.

Gold has 79 protons while lead has 82.

During Run 2 (2015-2018) 86 billion gold nuclei were created this way, amounting to just 29 picograms, too little to make a gold coin, but it was gold. So, the medieval alchemists' idea of transmuting lead into gold was valid as long as a particle accelerator was used.

Are You Learning From History Or Repeating It?

If one ignores and manufactures history in order to fit the propagandizing narrative de jour, one is never going to learn to avoid repeating unpleasant events and outcomes. History is a great teacher if people are willing to listen to its lessons and to absorb them in a critical and logical way.

Few people today know or have learned in school, for example, that in November 1960, representatives of 81 Communist parties around the world met in Moscow and issued a Communist declaration of purpose wherein the United States was “singled out as the main enemy of communism.”  The world Communist movement’s goal was to achieve world domination. The meeting discussed the fact that “peaceful coexistence” was not possible nor desired. The strategy established 63 years ago was to attack the United States full force with constant propaganda. Those attacks finally paid off in 2023.  

Since then, communist agents sent to the U.S. and those within the Communist Party U.S.A. and other Marxist organizations have disseminated highly effective propaganda through mass media, magazines, newspapers, videos, movies, documentaries, books and pamphlets, leaflets, posters, stickers, post cards, murals, graffiti, violent protests, education, textbooks, libraries, entertainment, radio, cable news, and front organizations targeting minorities, youth, and women, the so called women’s liberation movement.

Communist propaganda turned out to be the most powerful and effective way to influence, condition, and manipulate people around the world.

Education is the medium to manipulate children from kindergarten to college. While parents think that their children are learning useful life-long skills in order to better function in society, the teachers are busy brainwashing students with communist ideology, immorality, perverse sexual acts, drag shows, transgender ideology, and other methods of destroying children’s impressionable minds without parental knowledge or approval.

The agents of Marxist organizations have entered decades ago U.S. education, the labor movement, civil rights movement, lobbies, veterans, culture, minority groups, foreign nationals with an ax to grind because they have not succeeded in reaching their American dream, youth movements, women’s groups, defense, press, radio, television, and Hollywood.

Sixty-three years later the fundamental transformation of America from a Constitutional Republic into a Marxist Oligarchy has finally been achieved.  The citizens are wondering how the globalist Marxists took over the country and the western world so fast. But it was not fast, they have been digging at the foundation of America for decades, like trickling water, until the foundation became so porous and brittle that it collapsed in a seemingly short time with very little opposition.

Communists are very patient, they work on long term plans; they even went underground in 1989 in Eastern Europe, only to regroup into the movement of today to obliterate the last opposition, the United States of America.

It took a lot of radical communist activist work at all levels of society, working in a very tolerant society like the U.S., aided and abetted by some who understood very well what they were doing and by some who were hapless useful idiots.

Infiltration into the American school system was enabled partly by the formation of the Department of Education in 1979 by the Jimmy Carter administration, and the formation of Departments of Education in every state after that.  

The dumbing down of American education did not start with the pretense of teacher certification, by selecting the worst among us to be teachers, but it was a contributing factor.  

The mainstream media spewed lies in unison, using identically imposed daily narratives, but most people only became aware of them when the Internet was developed and social media platforms sprung up.  

The Marxist academia changed the English language with many deceptive euphemisms and thus contributed immensely to public disinformation, the downfall of truth, and the transformation of reality into a Twilight Zone of fantasy.

What better way to indoctrinate into false narratives than by changing the word ‘communism’ into ‘woke’ and by using the ‘social justice,’ ‘equity,’ and the ‘white supremacy’ lies at all levels of government and the military?

We cannot all be equal, but government bureaucrats and politicians are forcing equal outcomes or ‘equity.’ It is just another fallacious narrative to please their blind followers who need ‘safe spaces,’ lack rational thoughts, and are ruled by angry emotions.

How can one live under a government turned against its own citizens and traditions? How can the legal system collapse so fast before our own eyes? How can justice be run properly if judicial positions are filled with corrupt Socialist and Marxist Democrats beholden to billionaire oligarchs who contributed financially to put them in office? By doing so, we are opening the door to repeating the worst moments in our human history.

 

Fredericksburg Flowers

Nurse Woolsey

The verdant fields of Chancellorsville, Virginia, are bursting with wildflowers. The yellows, purple, lavender, white, and pink are delight in the blazing spring sun. It is a humbling experience to walk through the grounds where so many Americans have lost their lives in a Civil War battle won at such great cost, a Confederate pyrrhic victory of sorts, brother fighting against brother. How many cries of agony of the injured or dying soldiers were heard through the gun smoked air and how much innocent blood soaked into the fields surrounding us?

The wildflowers are beautiful every spring and bring to mind the Fredericksburg Flowers. Despite the Civil War doom and gloom, nature sprang to life that spring and with it, its colorful wild flowers. A relief nursing worker from New York, Georgeanna Woolsey, picked wild flowers for a new regiment heading to the front.

“We filled our baskets, trays, and the skirts of our gowns with snow-balls, lemon blossoms, and roses yellow, white, and red. The 8^th New York Heavy Artillery was in the column . . . and [we] tossed roses and snowballs in showers over the men. They were delighted . . . . ‘Oh, give me one . . . . I will carry it into the fight for you;’ and another cheerily, -- ‘I will bring it back again.’”

One such happy New York soldier brought the flowers back as promised – he returned three days later to Miss Woolsey as a corpse, wilted Fredericksburg flowers upon his chest.

The Worst Are Leading Western Society on the Wrong Path

If you are wondering what happened to the American people and the West in general, on the road to committing societal suicide in short order, F. A. Hayek has a plausible answer in his book, The Road to Serfdom.

Hayek, an economist and philosopher, a pioneer in monetary theory and proponent of libertarianism, lists three reasons why the worst elements of society have formed such a strong group of sycophants with homogeneous views on the direction that the western, free market societies must take to become the communist utopia-that-never-was.

1.     "The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.”

However, the education system has made sure that the miseducated are more homogeneous in their indoctrinated views and beliefs via the generalized teaching method of what to think, not how to think.

2.      The ‘docile and gullible’ have no strong convictions of their own and are easily swayed to accept a “ready-made system of values” if “drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

This is where the lying mainstream media comes into play, with their daily scripted and identical reports distributed to them by the socialist Democrat party.

3.      It is “almost a law of human nature” that people tend to agree more on the negative rather than the positive. Therefore, it is easier for people to agree on “the hatred of the enemy” or “on the envy of those better off.”  

The clever narrative becomes ‘we’ vs. ‘they’ and the fight crystalizes under the banner that ‘they’ are the enemy which must be destroyed.  The Soviet totalitarian leaders have vilified the ‘kulaks’ (Russian peasants as defined by Stalin’s regime) and the Germans vilified the ‘Jew.’ (F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 160-161)

The common enemy today labeled by bureaucrats and career politicians as dangerous are the ordinary Americans who love their country, their families, their Christian faith, and who reject the woke-ism of current young generations indoctrinated into believing that everything good about America, its economy, its history, its culture, its values, are evil.

These indoctrinated generations, whether in America or other western nations, believe that anything goes, socialism is great, being responsible humans and citizens is passe, free stuff is the way of life, jobs are for dummies, sex and gender are fluid, and biology is a construct to keep them oppressed.

To say that the worst and not the brightest among us are leading our country and western civilization in the wrong direction is an understatement, they are destroying it, and the damage is already at the point of no return.

Congress screamed insurrection when a few hundred Americans entered their hallowed grounds through the opened doors, taking selfies in the Chamber, but are turning a blind eye and deaf ears when five million illegal aliens have invaded our southern border and are now walking among us, all over the country, unvetted, unchecked, unvaccinated, possibly criminals, murderers, slavers, sex traffickers, and gang members. Can we get our country back after this massive invasion? Probably not.

Can we reverse fifty years of miseducation in public schools and in the high-priced colleges around the globe? Probably not without a lot of misery, sacrifice, and decades of determined efforts from millions of people.

How can all these young people today, with children of their own, help change the miseducation they received and that of their children when they have no memory nor role models to follow in order to cause a positive change to return our country to its former glory?

Worse yet, because of technology, human connections, social skills, and the ability to empathize have declined. Sherry Turkle of MIT wrote that “44 percent of teenagers never unplug from their devices” even when watching movies, eating, playing, or during meals with friends, in school, or with family.

Teenagers are so consumed by social media and influencing that they become unable to focus, to listen, to make eye contact, or read body language, an important non-verbal component of communication. It is easy to see that such humans are easy to sway in the wrong direction, a direction that often undermines their own interests.

As some psychologists remarked, once technology and social media were unleashed, humans have proven unable to be satisfied with being bored, relaxing, doing nothing, and enjoying it. They became irritable, stressed, scattered brained, unable to focus, tense, and anxious without constant stimulation from electronic devices.

Herbert Simon was right when wrote in the 1970s that too much information created a dearth of attention. I certainly saw plenty of that in the classroom from teenagers to adult students in college. People became, as Simon said, “overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.” This state of constant stress caused “exhaustion, frustration, resignation, and even despair” in many people.

An important question must be asked, how capable are these narcissistic people, who are staring constantly into their smart devices and taking selfies, to lead society onto the right path of survival and excellence when they have little general knowledge and understanding of economics and history? Do they even care, in their drug-induced stupor, how many lives socialism and communism have destroyed in the 20^th century or that they are repeating history and expecting a different result?

 

 

Historical Narratives and Should We Change Them to Fit our Modern Culture?

As history is being modified in front of our eyes, to match the narrative of the ruling political class and of the billionaire elites running the tech industry and other crony capitalist empires, one wonders what parts of our history that we believed to be true and accurate have been embellishments of writers from long ago, with their own agendas, or perhaps writing years, decades, and centuries after the fact?

Are historical events based on fact, are they part of surviving records, or have they been orally transmitted, or mis-translated unintentionally from an obscure language and text by a scribe or scholar with good or nefarious intentions?

Pictograms on cave walls, on exterior rocks, before writing had been invented, hieroglyphs on pharaonic tombs, cuneiform writing on tablets, recorded important events in the lives of those who existed thousands of years before us.

Was writing invented to record major events in people’s lives, such as wars, conquests, tribal leaders, life under rulers, births, marriages, disasters? Did people attempt to give more meaning to their lives, to prove that they had existed?

People across the centuries left behind poems and books, epic poems, works of art, their autobiographies, biographies of others, built fancy mausoleums, pyramids, cathedrals, churches, monuments, arches, aqueducts, ancient roads like the Roman Via Appia, still existing in some parts of Italy today, and statues that commemorated their existence, moments in time, significant achievements, defeat, and victories in their lives.  

Their efforts, if they survived the ravages of time and of robbers, and the destruction of those who disagreed with them or fought them in wars, became sources for historical record, including famous epic poems in various cultures such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, the earliest surviving literary text and the second oldest religious text.

Another epic poem, the Iliad, attributed to Homer, although not a historical work, was used at times as a building block for our collective history. But it was not written until the sixth century B.C. in Homeric Greek.

The world’s recorded history probably started with Herodotus when the Roman orator Cicero called him “the parent of history” two thousand years ago. He began writing history the way we understand history today, not the will of some gods from the Roman or Greek Pantheon, but history with real and specific causes, a systemic investigation of geography, geology, politics, and economics.  

Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) wrote his Histories, a detailed account of the Greco-Persian wars, the lives of important kings, and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. He also provided a cultural background to the battles from the standpoint of geography, ethnography (the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures), and historiography (the study of historical writing).

His contemporaries accused him of providing “legends and fanciful accounts” in his Histories. Herodotus defended himself that he wrote what he “saw and [what was] told to him.” But a large portion of his accounts have been confirmed by modern historians and archeologists.

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire at that time; although a Persian subject, he spoke Greek in its Ionian dialect. He was likely schooled in this dialect and studied the works of the Greek poets Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho. The writing gift ran in the family – his uncle Panyassis was a famous poet.

Herodotus traveled extensively, collecting materials and impressions for his book. On this journey of historical discovery, Herodotus, not a rich man, was probably a sailor and merchant, the preferred trade of most adventurers of those times.

It is evident from his book that he admired Athens very much and it stands out in his writings. While in Athens, he met a lot of influential people, i.e., Pericles, a politician and general, dubbed “the first citizen of Athens,” and Sophocles, the Greek playwright.

In 446 B.C. Herodotus read his Histories in Athens publicly - he was so admired that he was rewarded with ten talents, a considerable sum of money in antiquity, with specific weights in gold and silver.

Traveling as a citizen without a country, Herodotus wandered until he established himself in the city-state of Thurii (the modern Calabria in Italy) where he became a citizen, and it is believed that he wrote his Histories in this town, in Ionian dialect, and it is here that he died at the age of 55.

History (from the Greek word, historia, inquiry) studies and documents the past. But history is not just documents, it records in writing the memory of others, the discovery and collection of facts, and how they are interpreted by using written documents, oral accounts (skewed perhaps on purpose, or lost by the passage of time), artifacts, and studying new or old materials such as dirt strata, fauna, flora, tattoos, utensils, pottery, weapons, etc.

Modern historians debate constructively or not, how to interpret new evidence and sources. Should we judge history and change it based on our modern standards of morality and culture that may differ from the past?

Searching for the past allows us to better understand the present. But we should not alter the past to appease those who are offended by historical facts that they deem unacceptable in our cultures today. No matter what historical sources we reference and consider, whether we agree with them or not, all comprise the history of humanity, a history we can learn a myriad of lessons from, a history which is evidence of our collective existence across the millennia.

 

 

 

 

“Global Humanity: The Nouveau Dictatorship” By Mimi Johnson

Wikipedia photo of Chernobyl 1986

I decided to re-visit “Chernobyl” on HBO. Americans in my generation and those before me, remember seeing it reported on the news, watching in disbelief - 1986 was a tough year. Not four months earlier, the Challenger explosion occurred, devastating the U.S., but also the globe in the midst of a continued space race.

If you have no idea what the name refers to, or if you are too young to remember it on the news, “Chernobyl” is a mini-series documenting the events in Pripyat, Ukraine, in April 1986, that led to one of the most horrific nuclear disasters thus far, in our history.

The series ebbs and flows by showing the dynamic contrasts between unsuspecting citizens and the corrupt communist Soviets who were so drunken with power, feeling that they were invincible and their science irrefutable, that they caused mass casualties and suffering reaching as far as parts of Western Europe.

It is an eerie reminder of the continued back and forth misinformation we are receiving in regards to covid-19. “Yes, trust the government scientists, they’ll always do what’s best for us.” “What could possibly go wrong?”

“Stupid people questioning the scientific deities anointed by other mortal humans. How dare you use your brains to question anything?” “Do as you’re told! Don’t you care about others? You’re a horrible person!”

This is how the Ukrainians felt as well and look what happened.  If I could ever give a concise, live action, definition of what a Dictatorship looks like, this disaster would be it.

As I’m watching and browsing Facebook, I come across posts from people on my friends list that continually refer to our country as a “dictatorship” and honestly, melancholy hits like a ton of bricks. None of you, including myself, have any idea of what true tyranny and suffering looks like, unless you’ve escaped communist and socialist dictatorships and have lived to tell your story.

Have you ever engaged people in conversations to learn what true hardships look like? Not just being poor, but being poor and frightened every single day of your life? Not targeted because of skin color, but just targeted for sport?

I continue to read posts of “friends” who claim to be so worried about the virus that they shame those who won’t wear masks, but in the same sentence, say they hope that those people die, particularly Trump supporters, and would snitch on them to ensure some punishment befalls.

What dystopian universe are we living in? Who are you to say something like that while simultaneously falsely touting being on the “right side of history.” Which is it? You’re worried about people contracting the virus and care about humanity or you want to protect only a select brood? If you don’t care about the safety of all people, you’re disingenuous and, in my opinion, a bad person.  Does that attitude sound familiar? It should, as that was many dictator’s agendas. Save only those that comply and think what I tell you to think.

How do you sleep at night knowing you’ve typed horrific rhetoric for the world to see with your name firmly emblazoned on the internet, never to be forgotten or erased? That type of attitude is exactly how the Soviets, amongst many other tyrannical governments, felt about and treated their citizens.

A true dictatorship involves instilling such fear in its citizens that they would NEVER form a march, protest, tear down statues, and attack police. They are drones, never questioning anything, not allowed free thought, and terrified to even deviate from the same path to and from home. The police would never bow to you or stand down, they would eliminate all in their way. They’d never be allowed to voice an opinion other than what is being told to them via the government.

In our society, the narrative is totally controlled by the media, not the government. In fact, in a true dictatorship, the media would be in complete alignment with the government, because it has autonomous control over the people.

You’d be taken from your home and never seen again. It is impressed upon me that Americans have so much unconsciously and consciously biased privilege, that we can’t see the reality of the amount of freedoms we all enjoy despite color or culture, even the freedom to destroy other people and their property and our own sordid history, foolishly thinking this is progress. This is regression.

The only dictatorships I see are the ones shaming and attempting to force their ideals upon others, then laugh at them, ridicule them, and want them dead, because their thoughts don’t align to theirs. I’m ashamed to be associated with anyone who feels that way, and you should be as well. That’s not the definition of democracy, that’s blatant tyranny.

I have never felt so hopeless about the trajectory of our futures. I have tried to be a bastion of reason, hoping that people would listen and analyze data smartly, not sheepishly, but alas, it has fallen on a multitude of permanently deaf ears.

Our society is being led astray by nefarious forces, having the narratives carved out for us, implanted like an evil seed, and unleashed amongst the populace. As each day goes by, those seeds germinate, causing hatred to continually sprout with no end in sight. How do we truly move forward when there isn’t a clear future to be seen? How is it possible that in the span of a couple of decades, we’ve eliminated thousands of years of evolution and act like Neanderthals toward one another? No more reason or critical thought, just victimization and violence; immediately wanting to eliminate any dissonances in thought.

The millions of people, of all faiths, cultures, and races, who died under true oppressive regimes would want more than anything to be here to tell their stories, but unfortunately were not given the opportunity. They would want to educate the masses on unity and the importance of free thought and expression, remind us how good we truly have it, and scoff at the ridiculous things we squabble about.

I don’t want to erase history, I want to be reminded of it daily. I want all to know of the countless sufferings that allow us to be the spoiled, unappreciative humans we’ve become. We’ve reached the 7th level of Dante’s inferno. How do we come back? What is the answer? I don’t claim to know many things, but a very wise person once told me, “listen and read more, talk less. Talking leads to arguing, this leads to misunderstandings, ultimately ending any peaceful means of societal balance.” I’d say listening more and talking less would be a pivotal start.

Pluck the Yew

Interesting tidbit of history of “pluck yew:” This was sent to me by a friend. Please verify independently the source.

“Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers.  Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future.  This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as 'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew').

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and they began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew!  Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentalfricative 'F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute!  It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird.'

And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing. Didn't yew!”

A Visit to Harpers Ferry on Labor Day

B&O Railroad

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, once a bustling government factory town with over 3,000 inhabitants in its heyday, is nestled in Jefferson County, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers. It exists today because the U.S. Armory (located here by George Washington) manufactured small arms here for sixty years, muskets, rifles, and pistols (more than 600,000) from 1801 until the opening days of the Civil War in 1861. With less than 300 inhabitants today, Harpers Ferry was the location of the incipient U.S. military industrial complex.  The factory’s 400 workers produced more than 10,000 weapons a year. 


Harpers Ferry was settled in a valley rich in natural resources: deposits of iron ore, limestone, timber from hardwood forests, and abundant water which attracted many industries.  The town is famous for its picturesque streets, beautiful vistas, a railroad, two rivers, shale rocks, sandstone, and most significantly, for its contribution to the history of the United States.


The metamorphic rocks in Harpers Ferry are over 500 million years old. Layers of mud, silt, and sand were compressed into sedimentary rocks called shale and sandstone. Increased pressure and heat changed sedimentary rocks (chemically and physically) into metamorphic rocks. Many buildings, sidewalks, walls, steps in town are made from such a metamorphic rock, phyllite, and few from quartzite. 


One of the greatest engineering efforts of the 18^th century America was the Patowmack Canal, “the life-long dream of George Washington.”  What is left of it is visible today by Virginius Island.  This bypass canal was linked to others in the Potomac River watershed, making trade more efficient in the area. 


Virginius Island, along the Shenandoah River, was famous for Hall’s Rifle Works. John Hall “perfected interchangeable parts technology and inspired a world-wide revolution in manufacturing. The factory ruins remind us of Harpers Ferry’s contribution to America’s Industrial Revolution.”

Wagon on Shenandoah St.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

On the eve of the Civil War, there were numerous buildings on Shenandoah Street, facing the river – a boarding house, armory workers dwellings, a market house, paymaster’s house, and the U.S. musket factory. Industries, homes, and lives were destroyed during the Civil War when the town changed hands eight times. Today, the foundations of those buildings are outlined by stones chiseled from the nearby rocks.


Famous and ordinary men and women contributed to Harpers Ferry’s heritage: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, John Brown,  Frederick Douglass, Native Americans, pioneers trekking west, canal builders, railroaders, armory craftsmen, immigrants, slaves, freedmen, and the townspeople of Harpers Ferry. 


Thomas Jefferson described in 1783 the passage of the Potomac River through the Blue Ridge as “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” Many hikers have followed the trails and climbed the Jefferson Rock to experience the romance described by Jefferson.


Meriwether Lewis came to Harpers Ferry Armory in March 1803 to supply his now famous Lewis and Clark expedition. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn sent orders to the Armory Superintendent Perkins in Harpers Ferry to help Captain Lewis and advised him to furnish the expedition with weapons, spare parts, and tools.


Meriwether Lewis was President Jefferson’s private secretary and he shared his thirst for adventure and knowledge. President Jefferson had instructed Lewis, “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”


The arms and replacement parts from this armory traveled almost 10,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back and kept the Lewis and Clark expedition alive. Lewis supervised the construction of an iron-framed, skin-clad boat and bought supplies, tomahawks, and rifles. He met Clark in July of that year to begin their journey of “land exploration, waterways, animal life, natural features, and resources of the west.”


George Washington was impressed with the area’s “inexhaustible supply of water,” in an age when water-powered mills and factories were thriving until the Civil War. Water energy powered the Industrial Revolution that caught the town into a frenzy of manufacturing development.

The most controversial figure in Harpers Ferry history was John Brown. On October 16, 1859, Brown and an army of twenty-one men raided and seized the U.S. Armory.  His intention and plan were to spark rebellion to free slaves in the South. He was captured 36 hours later in the Armory fire engine house by U.S. Marines. Brown’s trial was reported and followed closely in newspapers.

“I want to free all the negroes in this state… if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood,” Brown said before his raid.


John Brown made Harpers Ferry a symbol of freedom. Considered a martyr by some and a madman by others, Brown was tried and found guilty of treason, murder, and inciting slaves to rebel. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

Portrait of John Brown

Photo: Museum Archives

The opening in the Blue Ridge Mountains created by water millions of years ago provided passage on foot, by canoe, by ferries, by canals, and by railroads. The C&O Canal and B&O Railroad provided transportation along the river corridor. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), the first major line in America, still runs through Harpers Ferry.  Tourists today see the bridge ruins jutting out of shallow water and canal remnants as transportation had moved on to railroads and highways.


According to museum archives, “the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers was first crossed by a ferry in 1733. Fourteen years later the ferry rights were purchased by Robert Harper and the town became known as ‘Shenandoah Falls at Mr. Harper’s Ferry.’” Robert Harper began the first ferry across the Potomac River in 1747 and it operated until 1824. 

The Catholic Church in Harpers Ferry

Photo: Ileana Johnson

The mountainous terrain and forested landscape became the stage for the Civil War in 1861 and it wedged the town between North and South. According to museum archives, Harpers Ferry was captured and recaptured five times in one day, September 15, 1862. “Gen. Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson forced the war’s largest surrender of U.S. troops at Bolivar Heights, Schoolhouse Ridge, and the Murphy-Chambers Farm.” 


When fighting started in 1861, attributed in part by some to John Brown’s raid, the retreating U.S. troops burned both federal arsenal buildings to the ground to prevent the weapons from being taken by Confederate soldiers.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

The two rivers, the Potomac and Shenandoah, flooded from time and time and the high-water marks were recorded by the hardware store. Then there were times when the water level was too low, and business came to a standstill.  The C&O Canal was forever closed in 1924. The bridges were closed after they were swept away during the 1936 flood and not reopened until the late 1940s. 

Lower Town in Harpers Ferry

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Hiking to Jefferson Rock then, two buildings were visible, a large stone boarding house and a butcher shop and smokehouse erected by local businessman Philip Coons in the 1820s at the request of factory officials. U.S. bought the buildings in 1836, transformed the boarding house into workers’ housing and leased the butcher shop to Coons.

High Street 

Photo: Ileana Johnson

From High Street, climbing the stone steps, one can walk on the Appalachian Trial, passing the Harper House (the oldest house in town), St. Peter’s Catholic Church, ruins, the Jefferson Rock on the left, the gravesite of Robert Harper in the Harper Cemetery, and continue on the Appalachian Trail by Camp Hill and the former Storer College campus. 


From the Point, overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers, the footbridge to C&O Canal and Maryland Heights is visible and the active CSX railroad (former Baltimore & Ohio) with its modern train station. 


Between the foot bridge and the train station there is the original site of John Brown’s Fort and the U.S. Armory Site. John Brown Museum and his Fort in Arsenal Square are clearly visible from the Point. Few buildings are still standing from the lower town as various floods have washed them away and only outlines in stone mark their existence.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Dry Goods Store

The factory town suffered after the destruction of the Armory in 1861, four years of Civil War, transportation changes, and numerous floods followed by periods when the water table was too low. A brewery was built here in 1895 but the 1914 prohibition forced owners to convert it into a bottling factory for sodas and spring water but then a flood destroyed it completely. 

Photos: Ileana Johnson

Baptist missionaries founded Storer College after the Civil War.  John Storer donated $10,000. Storer College acquired buildings that were originally armory supervisors’ housing and graduated its first class in 1872 and “made significant contributions to progress for black Americans. It drew prominent men to its campus, including Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of NAACP.

Dr. Henry T. McDonald, Storer College President, said in 1938, “People from the far corners of the earth will come here to a spot of supreme interest to students of history, students of scenic beauty, and students of nature’s surprising riches.” The school closed in 1955 due to “desegregation, loss of state funding, and dwindling enrollment.”

1862 tent encampment for runaway slaves

Photo: Museum Archives

Harpers Ferry provided protection to “escaped slaves” during the Civil War. There are photographs dated 1862, showing the tent encampment at the musket factory yard. Union forces afforded freedmen some protection. “By 1865 there were about thirty thousand freedmen in the Shenandoah Valley.”


Harpers Ferry is connected to the neighboring states through three trails, The Appalachian Trail, 2176 miles long, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O Canal Towpath) along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland, and Potomac Heritage Trail which extends from Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake in Virginia.


If I could hike through the beautiful forests and rocky terrain from Harpers Ferry, 70 miles more or less, the Potomac Heritage Trail would take me home.

4 in 10 Americans Want Socialism

“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher

Nikita Khrushchev in 1963

Photo: Wikipedia

I don’t put much value in polls. They can be often skewed by the composition of those polled and the honesty with which they answer questions, however, I paid attention to a Gallup poll which claimed that 4 in 10 Americans want socialism, the precursor to communism. If this poll is correct, then Khrushchev’s “conquest without war” would have come to pass decades after his death.

Those asked about their views on socialism, generally have no ability to explain it, or why they desire it; they just think it’s a good idea and they want “free stuff.” Such advocates of socialism have never opened a history book on socialism, nor have they studied the basic Principles of Economics.

They hate capitalism while enjoying the freedom to say so without fear of being sent to a gulag, and owning goods produced by the very capitalism they loathe. To say that they are uninformed fools and tools of the few who are designing the one-party state (Democrat Socialist), is an understatement.

None of the advocates of socialism understand that the European socialist welfare they admire, is supported by high taxes and strong capitalist corporations with shareholders and investors, who pay taxes to the state in order to support such lavish welfare.

In 1903 Lenin founded what was to become eventually the Communist Party with a group of “close knit dedicated professional revolutionaries” who would blindly follow without question the decisions of the leaders. It is important to focus on the word professional, indicating people who were well-trained in political activism, community organizing, and manipulation of the masses. Their goal was to establish “the one-party state” better known as the Party.

The Party allowed “democratic centralism,” meaning that discussion was permitted within certain parameters, until a decision was reached. Once the decision was “adopted,” all minions had to follow it faithfully. The Party was illegal as they were aiming to overthrow the Czarist regime, an act which eventually came to pass.

In 1905 the Party had 8,500 members and a few months before the October 1917 Revolution only 23,000. By 1961, statistics indicate that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had 8,708,000 members, about four percent of the population. (Conquest Without War, Pocket Books, Inc., 1961)

Membership was limited to those who wished to join. “Only workers, peasants, and intelligentsia who are enlightened, active, and devoted to communism are admitted.” They had to understand communism and be “its active soldiers,” supporting its ideas as Karl Marx had envisioned.

One representative (deputy) per 300,000 Russians was chosen to be in the Soviet of the Union, one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet. These representatives were nominated by the Party, trade unions, cooperatives, youth and cultural organizations, all under the boot of the Party’s control. An electoral commission could reject any candidate without giving a reason. The unopposed candidates always received 99 percent of the votes.

In the long line of communist leaders of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev is less known today than Stalin, his contemporary who is responsible for the death of millions. I’m not sure how many victims Khrushchev left behind during his tenure as supreme leader.

During Khrushchev’s formative years, the socialist propaganda was intended for the working class, quite a “minority in overwhelmingly rural Russia.”

The socialist propaganda in today’s America is aimed at affluent college indoctrinated Millennials who decry their “whiteness and white privilege” which happened at the expense of other races. How that suddenly occurred in the 21^st century in one of the most tolerant and law-abiding countries in the world where discrimination of any sort is punishable by law, is unclear and irrational.

The “Party schools” in the Soviet Union were indoctrination centers for the Communist Party membership. It was a privilege to be admitted to such schools, not the phony variety “white privilege” Democrat Socialists in America suddenly claim. Soviet privilege consisted of living in substandard conditions in crowded, unheated dormitories with little food, setting the standard for future modest living conditions under communist dictatorships around the world.

The curricula were composed of interminable meetings during which daily life was deconstructed into Marxist terms and the students’ behavior and attitude toward the “class struggle” was carefully monitored and dissected. They were taught how to better control “the lives of others” through carefully scripted guidelines of mental and physical oppression, depriving the population at large of any choice and of their freedom.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924, a contagion spread across Europe - Russian communists stirred upheavals in Germany, and in other capitalist nations.

The Soviet leadership offered a new brand of “socialism for a new class.” Stalin launched the slogan “socialism in one country,” a socialism that would not turn out to be the promised egalitarian society, but a society in which the Communist Party members would be the sole beneficiaries.

Subservient communist functionaries became the apparatchiki, the bulldozing machine of control through fear, snitching on neighbors and relatives, jail, repressions, and purges. Even the Marxist Trotsky was beaten and exiled as a “left winger,” and the “right wingers” were labeled “petty bourgeois” by Stalinists.

Apparatchiki forced peasants to give up their land, equipment, and animals into collective farms (kolkhozes). If apparatchiki wavered, they were swiftly eliminated as “untrustworthy elements.”

Apparatchiki also watched one another. “Socialist vigilance required the uncovering of deviations and deviationists, the unmasking of the class enemy who might have wormed his way into the Party.”

When the Ukrainian peasants were not delivering enough grain in 1927 and 1928 to feed the urban population, Stalin sent the Party apparatchiki and the secret police on a requisition drive, “liquidating” with machine guns the “kulaks,” peasants they saw as enemies because they were “unwilling to satisfy the demands of the Party agitators.” Peasants resisting collectivization were not just attacked as “kulaks” but as “enemies of the people.”

Stalin “decreed the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and peasants, who could hire workers and owned their farms and agricultural equipment, existed no more.

After “squashing the enemy” of the Party, the “socialist construction” expanded by building up Stalin’s “cult of personality.” The purges that followed eliminated people and confiscated their property which was later distributed to loyal party members for their personal use. The Communist Party was infallible, so scapegoats were found for every failure of the system.

When Stalin died in 1953, a period of “de-Stalinization” began. Khrushchev promised a “great leap forward” for his proletariat who would outproduce the U.S. in per capita meat, milk, and butter and “to make Soviet toilers wealthier than the capitalist slaves.”

Not at any time did the Soviet proletariat live better or wealthier than the “capitalist slaves.” To this day, the Russian overall standard of living is lower than the American standard of living even though the cost of living in Russia is cheaper. The average monthly disposable salary is five times higher in the U.S. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Russia/United-States/Cost-of-living

By the end of the 1960s Khrushchev “stopped the terror of the secret police, emptied the concentration camps, gave his people enough to eat, new apartment housing, and promised détente and peace.”  He even wore a very bourgeois sable-lined winter coat. (Conquest Without War, pp. 39-41)

In his lifetime, Khrushchev failed “to see the communist flag fly all over the whole world” as he so zealously desired, but progress is made in the 21^st century U.S.A. through domestic communist activists, anti-American politicians, and the MSM.

Communism, conceived as a world philosophy and a world movement, “Proletarians of all lands, unite” (The Communist Manifesto), declaring that social class, not nationality, not race, is the important link between humans, has killed 100 million innocents in its quest to conquer the whole world.

Krushchev believed in the “inevitable triumph” of socialism because, he said, “Capitalism is a worn-out old mare while socialism is new, young, and full of teeming energy.”

Having experienced and endured a tough life and severe hardships under the socialism he spoke of, I can honestly say that I would choose capitalism any day over socialism. Nobody will be able to “bury capitalism” as he so enthusiastically desired. Humans are born entrepreneurs.

If the Soviet version of world-wide socialism were to triumph, it logically follows that large countries like Russia, China, or both, with plenty of experience in socialism, would become the world power.

I should also mention that Lenin taught followers in his lifetime that war was inevitable if “imperialism” existed.

An interesting question begs asking, if the socialist proletariat, prompted by the elites of the Communist Party, does conquer the whole world, what are they going to do with it?