Non-Governmental Organizations' Role in Global Governance

“The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.”        – Will and Ariel Durant in Lesson of History

Photo: Wikipedia

The developed world appears to be changing in the same direction, at the same time, at an alarming speed, relatively speaking. What is the common dominator and drive behind this change towards a one world global governance and global citizenship? What is rushing everything towards global socialism? How is this possible when countries have different levels of development, education, economies, government, history, religion, wars, and conflicts?

The wails and demands of “equality” resound in the corridors of power and in the main stream media around the globe. I’ve heard the tired-out claims that “Socialism means genuine social equality,” giving “basic rights to the working class – the right to a job, education, health care, a secure retirement, a decent standard of living, a world without war.” This idyllic and utopian socialism will be attained by “the establishment of workers’ power.”

I have experienced the reality of socialism and it was quite different than the rhetoric. Not only were the workers not equal nor in power, but they were in abject poverty when compared to the working middle class under the much maligned “capitalism.”

Then there is the nagging and very important question – Who or what gives and guarantees all these rights that the socialists want? It can’t be God because socialists are atheists; atheism is their religion. It can’t be government because bureaucrats, who confiscate wealth to distribute it from producers to non-producers, eventually run out of other people’s money and the whole scheme collapses.

The Industrial Revolution is blamed for many ills in society, including the manufactured anthropogenic global warming which spawned an entire environmental industry of climate change worth trillions annually.  Will and Ariel Durant believed that the Industrial Revolution “brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals…”

Will and Ariel Durant, historians who are considered two of the greatest thinkers of our time, wrote in “The Lessons of History” (1968) that there are three important lessons of biological history:

1.       Life is competition – “Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.”

2.       Life is selection – “Inequality is natural and inborn”

By Nature, “we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.”

3.       Life must breed - …”a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high;” in nature “a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.”

Nature knows how to restore balance in nations through “pestilence, famine, and war,” they added.

Durant called the rapidly emerging one world government of today, the “international government,” which was the result, in his opinion, of industry, banking and finance, and international trade across sovereign borders.

In the current world we have oligarchies in which a tiny minority elite rules. This rule can be imposed by birth (aristocracy), by religion (theocracy), or by vast wealth (democracy).

Observing the role of the United Nations around the world and their environmentalist militancy expressed through sustainable development of Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and other population control organizations, an elite composed of mostly western billionaires is moving the world towards a one world government with its own global police force, military, banking and finance, commerce, renewables, science, agriculture, land and water use, and industry.

But how were they able to achieve such infiltration in every country in the developed and not-so developed world? The most obvious answer is through indoctrination in schools, emphasizing erasure of borders (flooding the world with refugees and illegal aliens as their right), dumbing down standards of intellectual aspirations, removing true history from the curriculum of various nations, making children feel ashamed of their country’s history and accomplishments, preparing them as early as kindergarten for global citizenship, and removing their allegiance to their parents and to their country and placing it in the hands of the globalist educators/indoctrinators.

In addition to indoctrination in schools and through mass media, other very important vectors of transformation into one world governance include the United Nations, government finance, and politics at all levels. Additionally, cultural decadence, moral and religious degradation, race baiting, political correctness with charges of racism and hate speech, and class enmity/violence coupled with accusations of phony “white privilege” round out the indoctrination into global socialism.

How do the United Nations, government finance, and politicians influence local and state governments to change in the same desired global direction? It is quite simple – through the honey pot of taxpayer grants and competitive financial awards which are administered by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), currently operating in every country in the world with additional money from special interest groups and billionaires.

These non-profits and lobbying groups are awash with cash which hook those in need of funds, people, towns, and regions around the world, making them dance to the tune of progressivism, equality, social justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice, inching them closer and closer to one world global governance.

The NGOs are hard at work around the world employing volunteers and young people who either cannot find a job in their fields, are on a quest to find themselves, or enjoy traveling and exploring while being paid to further what they perceive to be a noble cause or idea. NGOs are classified as charitable, service, participatory, and empowering.

NGOs are organized around communities, cities, on a national level or on an international level. Other euphemistic names for NGOs are “private voluntary organization,” “civil society,” “independent sector,” “self-help organization,” grassroots organization,” “volunteer sector,” “transnational social movement,” and “non-state actors” (NSAs).

The abbreviated terms used by NGOs are: http://www.ngo.in/types-of-ngos.html

-          BINGO (a business-friendly international NGO)

-          CITS (looking for young talent in research and development)

-          CSO (civil society organization)

-          DONGO (donor organized NGO)

-          ENGO (environmental NGO)

-          GONGO (government-operated NGO)

-          INGO (international NGO)

-          QUANGO (quasi-autonomous NGO)

-          TANGO (technical assistance NGO)

-          MANGO (market advocacy NGO)

-          GSO (grassroots support organization)

-          CHARDS (community health and rural development society)

The World Bank classifies NGOs as advocacy and operational. Advocacy NGOs promote a cause through lobbying, media, and aggressive activism. Operational NGOs create and implement development projects in communities, on national levels, or international levels.

Most of the grants and money distributed through NGOs come with strings attached which require the receivers to adopt the one world government underlying stance and regulations. When strapped for immediate funds, the receivers agree to the terms and are thus hooked for a long time.

NGOs, with their lobbyists, activists, volunteers, and supporters, are the busy workers of the ant colony of global progressivism working for billionaires, for financiers, for government regulatory and bureaucratic organizations, and the United Nations to promote, create, develop, and enforce one world governance.

 

"I've lived in Your Future and It Did Not Work"

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, a Russian writer born in 1942 but educated at Cambridge, was a dissident in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s. Because he exposed the Soviet practice of jailing political prisoners in psychiatric institutions, the young Russian was sentenced to twelve years (1964-1976) in prison, labor camps, and psychiatric wards under the brutal Soviet regime that did not allow any dissenting opinions. He was released to the West in 1976.

After the fall of the Soviet empire, the Russian government invited him in 1992 to testify against the criminal actions of the Soviet Communist Party.  According to Paul Belien, who interviewed Bukovsky in 2006, in order to “prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet secret archives. He is one of the few people ever to have seen these documents because they are still classified. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, however, he managed to copy many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Soviet government.” http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865

The documents Bukovsky was able to read and copy, allegedly confirm “the existence of a ‘conspiracy’ to turn the European Union into a socialist organization.”

Vladimir Bukovsky is not shy about calling both the demised Soviet Union and the European Union a “monster.” No sooner had they buried the communist monster, he said, that a new leviathan was created – the European Union.

The similarities of the two are obvious to Bukovsky. The Soviet Union was ruled by fifteen unelected people who appointed each other and were not accountable to anyone.  The Supreme Soviet was the Soviet Union’s parliament that rubber-stamped what the Politburo decided.  Nobody dared to diverge from its platform.

The EU is governed by twenty people who are also not elected, are not accountable to anyone, meet in secret, and nobody can fire them.  Parliament members are so unimportant that they only get one minute to speak in the chambers.  The EU Parliament is “elected on the basis of proportional representation, which is not true representation,” Bukovsky said. The similarity with the Supreme Soviet is glaring. It votes on silly things and the average MP can only speak six minutes per year in the chamber, he added.

There are hundreds if not thousands of “Eurocrats,” handsomely paid, with huge staffs, privileges that people can only dream of, and attractive bonuses; and nobody really knows exactly what they do or “fail to do.”

Bukovsky described how the Soviet Union was created by force, many times with military occupation. Likewise, the EU was created by “coercion and economic bullying,” he noted.

Nations did not necessarily join the EU voluntarily. They voted in referendum after referendum “until the people voted the way that was wanted.” Bukovsky called it a “shotgun marriage.”

The Soviet Union had to constantly grow and spread; otherwise it would have collapsed. The historic entity, the Soviet people, was created at the expense of nationalities that were forced to relinquish their customs, languages, and ethnic traditions. Bukovsky sees the same development about the European Union.  The entity EU created is called European, a person with no national feelings, living as a pawn in a multi-national community.  And eventually, we will all become global citizens subjugated to the power of the U.N. and those elitists that pull its strings.

When the Soviet Union collapsed after 73 years, the end result was widespread ethnic conflict, in the wake of the destruction of the nation-state.  Likewise, Brussels is absorbing nation-states with the idea that eventually they will cease to exist. There are already changes in school curricula, separating students from their history and their identity as French, Greek, or Italian citizens and turning them into European or global citizens.

Corruption was endemic in the Soviet system and such corruption is “flashing in the EU.” They keep telling us the same story in the EU as in the Soviet Union,” that a federal state is necessary in order to avoid war. “

There are no Soviet style Gulags in the EU but “political gulags” called political correctness.  PC stifles freedom of speech installing a self-imposed gulag in which you are not allowed to speak of race, of ideology, to criticize Islam or the massive influx of illegal immigrants and refugees.

How did the European Union come to be? In his opinion, the turning point occurred in 1985-86 when the Italian communists and German Social-Democrats visited Gorbachev complaining about the onslaught of ‘wild capitalism.’ The left-wing parties of the West feared the loss of influence and prestige to capitalism which coincided with the communists’ fear. To avert this evil, they decided to “introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once.”

“The Soviets came to a conclusion and to an agreement with the left-wing parties that, if they worked together, they could hijack the whole European project and turn it upside down. Instead of the open market, they would turn it into a federal state.”

Bukovsky described, in his interview with Paul Belien, a meeting that took place in January 1989 between Gorbachev and a delegation of the Trilateral Commission composed of the former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, American banker David Rockefeller, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  The goal was to convince Gorbachev to “integrate Russia into the financial institutions of the world, such as GATT, the IMF, and the World Bank.”

During the meeting, as revealed in the documents Bukovsky was allowed to peruse, Giscard d’Estaing told Gorbachev, “Mr. President, I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen – probably within 15 years – but Europe is going to be a federal state and you have to prepare yourself for that. You have to work out with us, and the European leaders, how you would react to that, how would you allow the other East European countries to interact with it or how to become a part of it, you have to be prepared.”

Bukovsky continued in his 2006 interview with Paul Belien,

“This was January 1989, at a time when the Maastricht Treaty [1992] had not even been drafted. How the hell did Giscard d’Estaing know what was going to happen in 15 years’ time? And surprise, surprise, how did he become the author of the European constitution?” [2002-2003]

Bukovsky expressed his concern to Belien about the Europol with powers much bigger than the former KGB, including diplomatic immunity. They will police 32 kinds of crimes, he said; particularly worrisome to Bukovsky then was the crime of “racism” and “xenophobia.”  A British government bureaucrat allegedly had told him that “those who object to uncontrolled immigration from the Third World will be regarded as racist and those who oppose further European integration will be regarded as xenophobes.”

“The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness.” 

As seen everywhere, not just in Europe, political correctness has become an “oppressive ideology.” Hate speech laws in regards to race relations, religious speech, and Islam represent a “systematic introduction of ideology which could later be enforced with oppressive measures.” Democracy is disappearing rapidly and systematically. Civil liberties are suspended and emergency powers by executive order are introduced.

As the recent events in Germany and other European countries have shown, the out-of-control refugee invasion is creating huge problems for its native citizens while the bureaucrats and politicians are turning a blind eye, telling their own constituents that rhetoric against the unwanted flood of refugees of military age, who rape and pillage, is just as bad as the hundreds of European women who were molested and raped.

Bukovsky believes that “The EU has grown the seeds of its own demise.  Unfortunately, when it collapses, and it will, it will leave a massive destruction behind, with huge economic and ethnic problems.” He continued, “The old Soviet system was incapable of reform and so is the EU. But there is an alternative, to being ruled by those two dozen self-appointed officials in Brussels, it is called independence. You don’t have to accept what they have planned for you. After all you have never been asked if you wanted to join. I have lived in your future, and it did not work.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHOuc12J4W4

If decisive rejection of such plans would only be so easy! U.N’s Agenda 21 signed in 1992 has already been implemented around the world under the guise of Sustainable Development.  Agenda 21 has now morphed into its sister on steroids, Agenda 2030, United Nation’s vision of global socialism, controlling every aspect of human life.

The Climate Change Industry and the Religion of Green

We are so lucky that Al Gore’s “true planetary emergency” did not take place. He predicted it ten years ago at the Sundance Film Festival where his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” premiered.  It was the result of an environmental crusade he embarked upon that would make him a billionaire, a Nobel Prize and a Golden Globe winner  – “Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.” http://www.cbsnews.com/news/2006-al-gore-does-sundance

His dire predictions that the planet will be flooded, islands will be swallowed up by the melting of the glaciers, and the planet will roast did not happen.  The surface temperatures have increased in some areas thanks to El Nino, a natural event, not because of anthropogenic CO2, the gas of plant life. 

Dr. John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville, is quoted:  http://whatssupwiththat.com/2015/12/19/uah-un-climate-change-goal-new-trend-analysis-shows-were-there-now/

“The fastest warming place on Earth over the past 37 years has been in the Arctic Ocean north of the Svalbard archipelago, where temperatures have been rising 0.5 C (about 0.9 degrees F) per decade. The fastest cooling spot was over the eastern Antarctic near Dome C. Temperatures there have been falling at the rate of 0.41 C (about 0.74 degrees F) per decade.”

According to Dr. Roy Spencer, the global-average warmth during El Nino is caused by the solar energy but also by the vertical circulation of the Pacific Ocean basin.  http://drroyspencer.com/2016/01/what-causes-el-nino-warmth/

“The short answer is that, during El Nino, there is an average decrease in the vertical overturning and mixing of cold, deep ocean waters with solar-heated warm surface waters. The result is that the surface waters become warmer than average, and deeper waters become colder than average. The opposite occurs during La Nina.”

Non-scientists confuse weather events with climate and base their decision to support the anthropogenic global warming theory now termed climate change on “consensus science” which would be a derisive designation if the stakes were not so expensive for humanity. Consensus means agreement of opinion; science is based on fact, not opinion. Data seem to contradict supporters of the climate change industry but it does not slow down their rabid assault on civilization. Real scientists, labeled deniers and skeptics, are marginalized, ridiculed, fired, and even made subjects of inquiries resembling witch hunts.

Cashing in billions and trillions on weather and on climate that has been changing for millennia, on fear of planetary Armageddon, is just one aspect of the nefarious Agenda 21, a document signed in 1992 by 178 countries, including the United States, whose linchpin is Sustainable Development, controlling almost every aspect of business activity and human existence, now expanded into Agenda 2030, as some dubbed it “Agenda 21 on steroids.”

The fact, that Congress has not ratified the 40-chapter document, has not stopped every administration since to implement Agenda 21 through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who received grants from the federal government and then distributed those funds around the country to entice them to accept and implement Agenda 21 at the state and local levels.

Destroying capitalism and rearranging life in accordance with the dreams of elitist one world bureaucrats, rewilding the planet and reintroducing grey wolves, high-rise mixed- use buildings with tiny apartment living, population control, replacement of cars with light rail and biking, elimination of suburbia and of private property is truly the plan behind Agenda 21. Its environmentalist “useful idiots” supporters have not bothered to read the ample document released under the aegis of United Nations.

I wrote about the transformation of U.N.’s Agenda 21 into Agenda 2030 and explained the core goals of this lengthy document. http://canadafreepress.com/article/75315

Man has not been responsible for climate change over the millennia; the Vostok ice core samples have proven that; nor was man responsible for the Little Ice Age in the Middle Ages that had caused famine and death due to shortened food growing seasons and freezing temperatures that even affected Napoleon’s unprepared army in Russia. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.html
 

John Kerry told the crowd at COP21 conference in Paris that global warming is junk science yet they are still going to fleece us with the fake climate change industry fees and taxes.

“The fact is that even if every single American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels out of their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what, that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.  If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions, it wouldn’t be enough. Not when more than 65 percent of the world’s pollution comes from the developing world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAtiygrbTSg
 

As the planet did not cooperate to deliver the global warming they had hoped for, the radical environmentalists renamed it climate change – and it is a very profitable industry of renewables, carbon swaps, solar panels, biofuels, and wind turbines.

Even though the billionaire father of the global new world order Agenda 21, now renamed Agenda 2030, the Canadian Maurice Strong, passed away on November 27, 2015, there are important supporters who have picked up the fleecing torch of “climatism,” a potential cash cow worth trillions of dollars.  

In 1976 Maurice Strong was the head of the newly created Petro-Canada, advised the gas industry, and made billions in oil and carbon trade-offs. He was alleged to have been a member of the Board of Directors of the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emissions registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

Fox News called Maurice Strong the “godfather of the environmental movement,” the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi.  It is interesting that China was the place where the “self-declared, life-long socialist” chose to live for a while and die, in “one of the world’s biggest producers of industrial pollution, [which] has been profiting from the trading of carbon emission credits – thanks to heavily politicized U.N.-backed environmental deals engineered by Strong in the 1990s.” http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/02/08/at-united-nations-curious-career-maurice-strong.html

The whole agenda pushed by the U.N. hurts the interests of the American people. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-AL) has introduced a bill to restore U.S. sovereignty and withdraw U.S. from the U.N., a corrupt organization dubbed the “dictators club.” The bill, titled The American Sovereignty and Restoration Act of 2015 (H.R. 1205), faces an uphill battle as Congress seems unwilling to make and pass laws that represent the interests of the American people. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr1205/text

In Siskiyou County, the fifth largest county by land mass in California, on the Oregon border, ranching has kept the area unspoiled but the environmentalists have decided to reintroduce the grey wolf, endangering 45,000 people and the ranchers’ herds of cattle grazing freely on the land. The city residents believe that the introduction of “majestic predators howling in some distant corner of their state” is romantic. Nobody really understands that rewilding at the expense of humans  is one of the goals of Agenda 21. http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article51700790.html

Andrea Hutchinson transformed herself from a housewife and mother to agricultural activist in Canton, Oklahoma, where her family homesteaded in Dewey County in 1893, after hearing many horror stories of farmers fighting to keep their farms, property rights, and their land under the assault of “visioning committees,” environmentalist NGOs, and U.N. Agenda 21’s ICLEI operatives who have infiltrated boards of supervisors and zoning boards across the country.  She wants her family to be able to continue the ranching tradition.  The stories she heard ranged from “drones, abuse of the EPA, to threats of Endangered Species destroying livelihoods.”  http://www.hpj.com/archives/concern-over-agenda-turn-cattlewoman-into-agricultural-activist/article_ca963ae3-5227-5f17-821c-4acaa37472e0.html?mode=jqm

In a period of natural drought, Save the American River Association advocated that “retiring and curbing water rights for 300,000 acres of contaminated land farmed in the San Joaquin Valley would cost approximately $1 billion” in compensation to farmers, “a reasonable price to pay to stop the poisoning of California’s environment” and it “would free up 455,000 acre-feet of water annually.” Would this “contaminated land” in San Joaquin Valley, asked Katy Grimes, be the 600 farms along I-5 that produce $1 billion worth of food each year? These are not unsustainable crops, retiring them is a war on agriculture, on our ability to feed Americans. http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article52319970.html

It is interesting that the water “rationers” are considering such drastic measures when, according to California officials, wet weather added 6.4 billion gallons of fresh water to Lake Tahoe (2 inches) and new snow is at “136 percent of normal levels.” The snowpack was measured in Sierra Nevada at 54 inches. http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/ca-snowpack-136-of-normal-how-will-water-rationers-spin-that/?utm_source=CAPoliticalReview.com&utm_campaign=2909021a1f-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b855a22bd3-2909021a1f-302742409

Destroying farms and taking as many out of production as possible, endangering food production and survival, would help achieve another goal of Agenda 21 – depopulation. We seem to have exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity.” Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in 2015 that the entire global warming hoax was designed in order to destroy capitalism. “Really, we should make every effort to change those numbers [population] because we are already, today, exceeding the planet’s planetary carrying capacity,” Figueres claimed.  This is an outrageous statement, particularly when we look at the low fertility rates in the developed world, way below replacement values. http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/04/27/un-official-we-should-make-every-effort-to-depopulate-the-planet-2/

Once suburbia is destroyed and the land given back to wilderness, the population will be moved into high-rise, mixed-use micro apartments, stacked and packed, ranging from 150-360 square feet, mostly smaller than the average hotel room. It is like sticking people into closets. Promoting living in Mega Cities, Christiana Figueres praised the high-rise living because renters can grow their food on terraces, collect rainwater on the roof, and get their electricity from solar panels on balconies/roofs. What can possibly go wrong with such an unsustainable scenario? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seDpS2QEoNw

Speaking at the anti-COP21 climate summit in Paris, Dr. Istvan Marko, professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and co-author of The Bankruptcy of Climatism,  said, “All conclusions being reached by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] are actually flawed conclusions.” The dogma of “climatism” is perpetuated in spite of ample evidence to the contrary because governmental research grants come with strings attached to this fake religion of anthropogenic global warming.

Marko said, “It is almost like a religion, you know, you have the original sin, the original sin is carbon dioxide, and the one who committed it is the human being. So we all have to repent.”

In his speech at the summit, “The Nostradamuses of Climate Change and Their Erroneous Prophecies,” Dr. Marko repeated what all thinking humans already know, CO2 is the gas of plant life and our oxygen. “The worst thing that can happen is decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.” Greenhouses add more CO2 in the air because their plants thrive on carbon dioxide.

Thanks to CO2, “there is a greening around the world.” According to Dr. Randall Donohue, findings of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU) revealed that during 1982-2010 an eleven percent increase in “CO2 fertilization” has increased the foliage in arid areas of Australia, North America, the Middle East, and Africa. http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html

All this “climatism” is not about saving the planet, “It’s the slow erosion of your own individual liberty, that’s what is at stake with COP21.” He stated that for half the annual cost of the Kyoto Protocol ($150 billion), people in the third world could have running water, electricity, food, and education. http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/22232-at-anti-un-climate-summit-scientist-slams-alarmist-religion

Would it not be better to solve real problems instead of chasing problems that do not exist, creating a profitable climate change industry while enabling the U.N. bureaucrats to live a lavish lifestyle, jet-setting around the world to promote their hoax?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Propaganda, Totalitarians, and Somnambulism

Propaganda indoctrination springing from totalitarian regimes can have two human reactions: apathy and indifference to everything happening around you, admitting to yourself that there is nothing you can do about it, or the intense desire to study and understand it as if that process alone begins to redress what is wrong with such a system.

Take for example, the much maligned and hated Christopher Columbus. It is not possible that one single human being had caused all the havoc the leftist academia and their worshippers are heaping upon his memory.

Columbus managed to sail his way to the new world, and on October 12, 1492 sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, even though he was looking for a western passage to China and India. There is such rabid leftist and misplaced hatred for this man as if he was the biggest genocidal maniac in the history of the world. The cause of such virulent reactions is likely the decades of propaganda indoctrination in schools masquerading as history.

“Totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over again how criminally the Western world has acted toward innocent and peaceful people.” (Dr. Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 71)

Can we coexist with a totalitarian system?  It is highly unlikely because the definition of coexistence of the totalitarian is quite different from the definition of the free citizen, living in peace with one another. To a totalitarian, coexistence means total subordination to their whims, plans, and ideology. “The psychological roots of totalitarianism are usually irrational, destructive, and primitive, though disguised behind some ideology.” (p. 74)

The citizens of totalitarianism become robots, speak in whispers, and look over their shoulders, officially bombarded by speeches and slogans that are empty and devoid of meaning and logic. Human beings must conform to survive and thus become robots. Man becomes mentally coerced and intimidated. Humans then become herds of sheeple—indoctrinated by enthusiasm and happy expectations for promised change and then followed and replaced by feelings of terror and panic. Dr. Meerloo calls it “personal and political somnambulism” or sleepwalking. (p. 82)

In the March 7, 1968 episode of Dragnet, titled “The Big Departure,” teenagers are determined to start their own country on an island off the coast of California. To finance this new country, they are caught shoplifting, and the infamous Jack Webb gives them a lecture that seems fitting even today. http://www.itsworthashare.com/jack-webbs-the-big-departure-speech-still-holds-true-today/#isGACLTqKEAVq3Af.99

Every generation feels dissatisfied with what they possess even though they have opportunities and wealth that other nations can only dream of, but they expect the world to understand their misplaced dissatisfaction. Without a real poverty baseline or point of reference, they have no idea how well off they truly are when compared to other nations or other points in history. Nothing is ever perfect but usually each generation lives better than the previous one.

“You are taller, stronger, better educated, and you live longer than the last generation. And we don’t think that’s all together bad. You probably have never seen a quarantine sign on your neighbor’s door, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough. Probably none of your classmates have been crippled with polio,” said the Dragnet character Jack Webb.

Leftist academia is quick to point out that Americans are war mongers and thus immoral. But a lot of people around the world are “free today to make their own mistakes because of it” and to spew the venom of progressivism.

“You are in a hurry, you grew up on instant orange juice, flip a dial--instant entertainment, dial seven digits--instant communication, turn a key, push a pedal--instant transportation, flash a card--instant money, push a few buttons--solve a problem, but some problems you cannot get quick answers to no matter how much you want them.”

You want equality, social justice, instant gratification and reward without effort. How can you justify stealing from the rich and the middle class and giving to the welfare class as “entitlements” when they never made an effort to earn it, paid taxes into such a fund, nor were they entitled to? How can you hurt somebody or steal from someone who was never responsible for the wrongs of the past? Where is the social justice in that?

Jack Webb’s advice resonates for people with experience and common sense. “Don’t break things up in the name of progress. Don’t break a stick over someone’s head to get them to see the light. Be careful of his rights! Your property, your rights, and your person are not any better than his. And next time, you may be the one to get it. You knew a man who killed six million people and called it social improvement.”  A new country will never solve your problems-- just make the old one work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZo2hhvvlpw (Dragnet, Jack Webb’s the Big Departure speech)

A 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre, explained reality through the lens of boredom, an “unconscious, self-perpetuating form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.” In this theory, the process of boredom makes a person fall asleep and a sleeping individual cannot say no.

“I met this Swedish physicist who told me that he no longer watches television, reads newspapers, completely cuts them out of his life, because he really does feel the wind leading into some kind of Orwellian nightmare and everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot,” explained one of the characters.

New Yorkers, he said, are a classic example of people who want to leave their town but they can’t because “New York is the model for the new concentration camp that has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride, they built their own prison and they live in this state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and, as a result may have lost the capacity and the ability, having been lobotomized, to leave or even see it as a prison.”  

He lamented that he and his friends should get out but “the problem is where to go because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.”

He continued, “It’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before it was extinguished, and this is the beginning of the rest of the future. From now on, all there is going to be around are these robots, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left around to remind them that there was once a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts, and history and memory are now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JLWyPxt7g

History Forgotten, the Armenian Genocide and the Assyrians Today

“Around the world, Christians are facing violence, persecution, brutality in a way we have not seen in generations.”  – Rey Flores, “The Wanderer”

Yazidi boy in Iraqi Kurdistan
August 2014 Photo: Wikipedia

The leftist charlatans with their fake “war on women” movement are deafly silent in the face of a real genocide, the deliberate and brutal torture and killings of Christian men and women.  Yazidi women and girls are kidnapped, raped, and driven into a life of slavery to ISIS as forced converts to Islam.

A small army of resistance is fighting the scourge of ISIS, in a valiant attempt to save what is left of their Assyrian tribes and of their women.  ISIS is bent on eradicating them, their religion, their ancient culture, and any archeological remnant of their history. Their churches are destroyed while ancient artifacts and monuments are blown up. Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II said that “forced displacement on the basis of religious beliefs, be it Islam or Christianity, is a crime against humanity,” referring to the war crimes inflicted upon his people by ISIS in Mosul. http://unitedassyrianappeal.org/

Pope Francis spoke in 2014 about the Armenian genocide during Mass in the Armenian Catholic rite at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  Church leaders and the Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan were in attendance. He spoke about humanity witnessing “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” in the 20^th century.  “The first, which is widely considered, ‘the first genocide of the 20^th century,’ struck your own Armenian people,” he said. The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s mass killings were followed by other genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Bosnia.

In 2015 Pope Francis mentioned three “massive and unprecedented tragedies” of the last century, the “Great Crime,” the methodical genocide of Armenian Christians who “were killed because of their faith,” and the “atrocities of the Nazis and of the communists, along with other mass killings…” http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/04/12/pope_focuses_on_divine_mercy_in_mass_for_armenians/1136249

As Christians, it is our duty and responsibility to keep alive the memories of those killed, the Pope said. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” Pope Francis continued.

BBC News reported on April 12, 2015 that Turkey was angry with Pope Francis’ description of the mass killings of Armenians under Ottoman rule in WWI as “genocide.”  Turkey plays down the genocide as smaller numbers of deaths resulting from the WWI clashes in which ethnic Turks have also suffered.  

Most Western scholars regard the 1.5 million Armenians civilians, who were deliberately deported between 1915-1916 to desert regions where they succumbed to starvation and thirst, as genocide. Countries like Belgium, Canada, Argentina, France, Italy, Russia, and Uruguay recognize the mass killings of Armenians as genocide. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32272604

For the first time, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered condolences in 2014 to the grandchildren of the Armenians who were massacred in 1915. This year marks a century since the atrocities were committed, and, until all countries recognize that the genocide had occurred, it is an incomplete mourning exacerbated by denial stories to this day. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/turkey-erdogan-condolences-armenian-massacre

Why were Armenians massacred by the Turks? To understand the reason, you must understand who the Armenians were, how, and why they lived under the Ottoman Empire, and their status as non-Muslims, “non-believers,” and second-class citizens.

Armenians are ancient people who lived in Anatolia some 2500 years ago. They had their own distinctive alphabet and culture. There are 6 to 7 million Armenians today, half living in the Republic of Armenia, while the rest are scattered in the U.S., Russia, France, Lebanon, and Syria.

In the year 301 A.D., the King of Armenia was the first ruler to adopt Christianity as the official state religion, even before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Captured by the Ottoman Empire in the 15^th century, Armenia was absorbed into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, along with a large swath of European lands. As subject of the Sultan, Armenians had less freedom, had to pay higher taxes, were discriminated against, and were not allowed to serve in the military.

Unhappy with the second-class citizen status, by the end of the 1800s, Armenians demanded equality. In the 1890s the Bloody Sultan who was presiding over a weak government, used massacres as a way to maintain law and order.  In 1894-1896 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Hamidian massacres under the rule of Abdul Hamid II, a foreshadowing of what was to come in 1915. http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hamidian.html

When the Young Turks forced the Sultan out in 1908, Armenians were allowed to serve in the military. In 1912-1913 the Christian regions of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire.

According to Vahaken Dadrian, Director of the Genocidal Research at Zoryan Institute, as quoted on a film aired on PBS, http://asbarez.com/133128/acclaimed-armenian-genocide-documentary-to-air-on-pbs/

“For the first time in recent history, the glorious Ottoman army suffered a major military defeat at the hands of their former subject-nations, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs,” losing in two weeks 75 percent of their former European territories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vahakn_Dadrian

The despair borne by such a loss in the Balkans gave rise to a deep hatred against Christians, inflamed by Ottoman refugees’ stories, refugees thrown out of Christian lands, turning angry Turks against their indigenous Christian population, the Armenians – “Revenge, revenge, revenge, there is no other word.”

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau published in 1918 his personal account of the Armenian genocide. Chapter 24, The Murder of a Nation, describes in grizzly detail how Armenian men, who were formerly soldiers and cavalrymen in the Turkish army, were stripped of their arms and transformed into road workers and “pack animals.” Carrying heavy loads onto their backs, these men were whipped and bayonetted by the Turks into the Caucasus Mountains, sometimes waist-deep through snow. 

“They had to spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground. … They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped,” while the Turks robbed them of their possessions and their clothes. “Squads of 50-100 men were taken in groups of four, marched to a secluded spot a short distance from the village,” they were stripped naked and shot, having been forced to dig their own graves.

Morgenthau described the fate of an entire Armenian regiment sent to Diarbekir. Agents notified Kurdish tribesmen to attack and kill these weak and starved soldiers “that they might gain that merit in Allah’s eyes that comes from killing a Christian.”

Ambassador Morgenthau explained how “throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.”

When thousands failed to turn in weapons, the Turks ransacked churches, desecrated altars, marched the naked men and women through the streets, letting them be whipped by angry Turkish mobs. Those imprisoned who did not manage to flee into the woods and caves were subjected to the “bastinado” torture, the beating of the soles of the feet until they burst and had to be amputated.

Crucifixion, pulling of fingernails, of hairs, of eyebrows, tearing of flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pouring hot oil into the wounds were some of the barbaric methods of torture drawn from the records of the Spanish Inquisition.

Torture was just the beginning of the Armenian atrocities. What was to come was the actual destruction of “an entire Armenian race” by deporting it to the south and southeastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian Desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Morgenthau said, “The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region.” They knew they would die on the way of thirst, starvation, or murdered by “Mohammedan desert tribes.”

 
The deportations took place through the spring and summer of 1915. The entire Armenian population of villages was ordered to appear in the main square, sometimes with little time to prepare, their homes and possessions confiscated for “safekeeping” and then divided among Turks. Once the deported Armenians had traveled several hours, they were attacked and killed in secluded valleys by Turkish peasants with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.

The “caravans of despair” originated in thousands of cities and villages in the Ottoman Empire.  Ambassador Morgenthau described how village after village and town after town were emptied of its Armenian population and, in six months, “about 1.2 million people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.” He believed it absurd that the Turkish government claimed to deport Armenians to “new homes,” the real intent was extermination. He concludes, “The details in questions were furnished to me directly by the American Consul in Aleppo, and are now on file in the State Department at Washington.” (Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story:  A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2010)

Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856-1946) “details how Turkey fell under the influence of Germany and how this led to the Armenian Genocide. In a trial run of the extermination of the Jews, the Germans orchestrated the murder and exile of the Armenians from Turkey, with ‘Turkey for the Turks’ as a rallying cry. The similarities to the Holocaust are chilling.”

Also chilling is the recent discovery made by Stefan Petke of the Technical University of Berlin who uncovered rare WWII footage that documents the existence of Muslim units (The Free Arab Legion) in the Nazi army who were used as ‘working soldiers’ because they “were a complete failure in the battlefields of Tunisia in 1943.” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4645922,00.html

The Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass starvation of his own people seems forgotten because schools spend no time discussing the atrocities committed. The good people of the world turned a deaf ear then just like they are doing today. The Ottoman/Islamist ISIS massacre against Christians continues to this day in Iraq and the good people of the world are doing little to help the victims.

 

 

 

 

 

Why Is Donald Trump Good for America?

In New Hampshire August 19, 2015
Photo: Wikipedia

The often ostentatious Trump irritates Democrats, the liberal media, and the establishment Republicans for many reasons. They cannot understand how his popularity soars in the polls no matter what he says and what they do to unseat him, or what dirt, real or imagined, they try to dig up.

Donald Trump is a populist and a nationalist. He loves his country and does not like the path that the current administration and its supporters on both sides of the isle have chosen for 320 million Americans, even though at least half have vociferously expressed their desires, to seemingly deaf elected representatives and senators, to maintain our sovereignty, our Christian roots, our market-based economy, our traditions, and our exceptionalism.

Donald Trump is a successful alpha male, which Hispanic populations, with their cultural machismo, greatly respect. He is a billionaire who has experienced success and failure, yet has come back unscathed like a Phoenix bird from the ashes of bankruptcies, divorces, law suits, and other life-altering events. He is wise and knows how to manipulate and keep his enemies closer. He is brash and doubles down on his opinions which later turn out to be based on fact. He comes back with evidence to support his opinions.

Trump is not intimidated by media bullies, cyber bullies, and other individuals whose jobs are to take him down at all costs. He is loud, he is insulting at times, but he fights back. He does not roll over and play door mat to the ruling elites. He is a successful politician in his own right already. It takes guts and knowing the ropes to maneuver the mine-field of business in order to be so successful. He does not need the financial support of PACs even though political endorsements are beneficial. He does not have to compromise his belief system in order to receive money from big donors.

Unlike many politicians, Hollywood, and other assorted famous individuals, he has raised, in spite of his many divorces, a beautiful family, with highly successful, intelligent, and educated children. He believes in the American dream built the right way and in the success of our Judeo-Christian nation.

Donald Trump understands well the threat of unchecked immigration, open borders, of Islam, and of ISIS. He sees the need to build a fence along the southern border where people who wish to do us harm are entering day and night, hidden among those who are mostly economic refugees looking for a better life which their countries have failed to provide. But we have to care of the needs of our own population first.

Trump’s background and history are well known - he is an American born and raised in the United States to two American parents. His credentials are public knowledge and easy to access. He has America’s interest at heart and understands that we must preserve our Constitutional Republic if the country is to survive in the form that has made it the most successful nation on the planet for almost 240 years.

Because of his business acumen, Trump understands the damage that the many free trade agreements have wrought on the American manufacturing and on our trade imbalance: NAFTA, CAFTA, TIP, TPP. These trade deals are destroying our manufacturing sector, turning our country into a service economy, staffed with many foreign nationals who are brought here in ever-increasing numbers to replace American workers and professionals at half the wages, not the living wages liberals are advocating.

Someone said, Trump took a $1 million loan and turned it into a $10 billion empire. Even though he may have inherited some money from his dad, Trump is a man who knows how to make money, how to make a corporation highly successful despite temporary setbacks. He elegantly and cleverly defined and redefined “the art of the deal.”

Trump is not a supporter of political correctness, a liberal-forced form of free speech self-censorship. “The big problem this country has is being politically correct. I don’t have time for political correctness.”

Trump would hire the best minds in the business to deal with whatever problems may arise. He is fair, measured, and deliberate, but is not afraid to say, “You are fired.”

Donald Trump supports things that hard-working, tax-paying Americans care about such as jobs, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of the press, a press that reports the news not manufactures them to please the ruling administration, military strength, securing our borders, taking care of our veterans, ending crony government, enforcing the Constitution, and praising American exceptionalism instead of criticizing America on foreign soil.

Despite the media narrative, women and Hispanics love Donald Trump. Lobbyists are apoplectic because he has accepted no special interest money like the other candidates. He is a great negotiator who knows how to win in order to build an empire, a skilled executive, an honest man who does not deceive the public with polished and clever rhetoric coached in lies. Trump knows how to make sound decision and would thus help cut wasteful Washington spending.

In the face of so many vicious attacks from all directions, from “friends” or foes, Trump did not lose his resolve, patience, or his courage. Speaking without a teleprompter, Donald Trump is himself and listens to his audience. He understands the dangers our nation is in, attacked by those who do not want to maintain our borders, our language, laws, and our culture. He understands that such a nation would become a global entity under the aegis of U.N.

Donald Trump fearlessly speaks about the Christian persecution, the need to protect our gun rights, the need to curtail illegal immigration because it does not benefit the American citizens, it hurts those who are at the bottom of the pay scale and the legal immigrants who are already here and struggling to overcome their poor prospects. Trump understands the dire situation created by the true, two-digit unemployment, and our unpayable national debt approaching $19 trillion.

Trump may be the only qualified candidate who can truly say, he will devote all resources necessary to make America great again and to bring back the American dream.

Technology and the Delusional Mind

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” – Winston Churchill

The Ship of Fools

I often wondered if progressives around me live in an alternate reality. How else can people so fat claim poverty and oppression when citizens of other countries live on less than $2 a day and are so thin, you can count their ribs through their skin?  What causes this obvious delusion?

There are quick answers - mental illness, mass hysteria, abundance, lack of jobs, lack of a moral compass, disintegration of families, the MSM telling them constantly that they are oppressed and enslaved to the “evil” white male, too much drug use, and indoctrination in schools to the detriment of history, causing them to lose the ability to grasp reality and to discern real from nonexistent.

Liberals have even invented the term “affluenza” in a misguided attempt to excuse bad behavior and criminality of their affluent offspring who don’t understand the difference between right and wrong.

When one loses touch with “verifiable reality” and becomes dependent on someone else to interpret reality for them, delusion sets in, a “more primitive stage of awareness” when rumor and falsehood become truth set in stone. Such deluded humans are controlled by retrograde and primitive thinking. Retrogression is caused by constant false information coming from the media, teachers, and the government.

If humans no longer think for themselves and don’t verify information against reality, their sole experience comes from dogma. It is thus not surprising that large groups of people act on command under “powerful mass emotions” and hysteria. Rational thinking is absent, replaced by submissiveness to ideologies overwhelming them with false information, in this case extreme liberalism, termed “progressivism.” There is nothing progressive about collectivism, communism, Marxism, Maoism, Stalinism, Castroism, and statism. Progressivism should actually be called regressivism, regressing to a failed ideology which resulted in the mass murder of 100 million people.

Radio, television, computers, electronic games, cell phones, and social media destroy face to face communication, discussion, affectionate relationships, attention, human interaction, and love. The creative mind is destroyed by turning a person engrossed in a blue screen into a mindless and devoid of feeling drone, an obedient soul, un-adapted and unable to cope with reality, easy to submit to authority, incapable of discerning what is real and what is contrived.

Technology saves us a lot of time, extra work, and aggravation. But in using it, conversation and direct human contact have become a lost art. People go out to dinner and everybody is on their smart devices, lone persons staring in cyberspace. Conversation, free exchange of ideas, human contact, and the creative spirit are gone.

The fascination with smart devices is an addiction with strange sexuality, with unresolved emotional turmoil, with the need to connect with total strangers while dressed in pajamas, with the narcissistic need for momentary celebrity, and with aggressive fantasies.

These addictions steal our free time, robs us of creativity and uniqueness, we become denizens of a pseudo-world in cyberspace; parents have no time for their children, children have no time for their parents, and become totally enrapt in the fantasy and the magic offered by the blue screen while hypnotized into this form of non-verbal but mesmerizing communication.

People have died texting and driving, stepping in front of a moving car, into a deep hole, over a ravine, into a pole, while totally engrossed into the hypnotizing blue screens of their smart devices.

Our cyber world and real world are interdependent now. We erased the physical sovereign boundaries and added the Internet web of highways across oceans. Dr. Meerloo’s words of sixty years ago seem quite fitting. “The machine that became a tool of human organization and made possible the conquest of nature, has acquired a dictatorial position.” (Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 166)

The need for speed, for instant communication has altered the thinking process because machines can now do the thinking for us. The thinking process becomes devoid of emotion and creativity. A “moral problem gets repressed and is displaced by a technical or statistical evaluation.” Thus children and adults alike become victims of the “paralyzing and lazy-making tendencies” of our advanced technology.

Without the free exchange of ideas which allows for the expansion of the mind, it is easy to see how delusion can set in, prey to the first smooth-talking individual that comes along and mesmerizes the listeners.

Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo explained in his 1956 book, “Rape of the Mind,” which focused on “the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing, how small and large communities are susceptible to collective delusion, often under the influence of one obsessed person.” Without what he terms, “free verification and self-correction,” dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu and others were made possible.

Dr. Meerloo gave examples of crews at sea or communities cut off from the world, which, because of their isolation, had experienced “contagious religious mania coupled with ritual murder.” These people became victims to their own limited viewpoint.

Delusion can be seen today among some young people who do not understand how deluded they are because they’ve been exposed their entire lives to the same misguided and false narrative, information limited and channeled by the ideology of the left.

Delusions are instilled by organizing and manipulating younger generations by Twitter, Facebook, and other MSM outlets that hide reality and only report what they want their minions and followers to know. If a delusion is carefully implanted by educators, it can be quite difficult to correct because these delusions consist of rumors fed as reality, without the opportunity to verify the manufactured information.

In totalitarian societies most people are not allowed to be free thinkers and become victims of delusion. Massive and constant brainwashing in schools and universities, fed by continuous propaganda, make it almost impossible for students to view anything objectively. Dr. Meerloo called it “mental pollution” which leads to “mental contagion” caused by totalitarian propaganda. Even “free citizens in a free country must be on their guard to protect themselves” from this mental contagion.

History had demonstrated painfully time and time again that countries and citizens, in which “governments supervised and limited the flow of ideas into the minds of men,” did not fare well. There is a reason why we have the First and the Fourteenth Amendments.

Yet free thinking and individuality are under attack by progressive ideologues who pollute the deluded masses with the failed ideas of collectivism, multiculturalism, impossible coexistence with Islam, and the superiority of primitive cultures, all represented in the globalist Common Core standards of education.