The Great Disconnect August 26, 2016
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Politics, Politiocal Philosophy.5 comments
Chaos is the mother of tyranny. Chaos reigns when people operate in confusion and disorder. It is a state in which behavior and events are not controlled by reason. Today we are faced with a government and an elite controlled media that lie to the people and then lie about lying. They operate as if the country is theirs to run and ruin for their own personal enrichment. Chaos is a time like today when life makes little sense and we are force-fed such gobbledygook as the economy is booming, President Obama has outperformed Reagan when it comes to job creation and investment, inflation is under control, unemployment is at 4.9%. Over here in reality we are fighting endless wars for peace, working people are being squeezed between stagnant wages and rising prices, and almost as many able-bodied people have dropped out of the workforce as there are people working. This is chaos. This is the seedbed of tyranny.
Our tyrants-in-training have captured the government and the economy, created a dependent class of motor-voters, convinced people that a continually growing debt is sustainable and turned the government into the one who picks winners and losers instead of a free economy. The slow slide down a slippery slope has accelerated into a precipitous procession over a predictable precipice. To those who have seen this coming it is like watching a slow motion train wreck. The coming destruction is not mitigated in the least by decades of warning by the watchmen on the walls.
How is this evolving progression from individual freedom, personal liberty, and economic opportunity into a centrally-planned collectivist corporatist regime possible? It is built upon the alliance of perpetually re-elected political hacks, crony capitalists, and corrupt unions aided and abetted by a sycophant media?
Why have the descendants of the Founders, the Framers, and the Revolution fallen for the same swan song that has led so many others before us down the primrose path to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, despotism, and collapse? I believe it is because the average American has no frame of reference. If we don’t know what has gone before how can we understand what is? Or plan for what might be?
If we don’t know where we came from it is impossible to predict where we are going. Therefore it is helpful to learn how the world became the way it is so that we can work to make it the way we think it should be, for without the past the present will never come into focus and the future will be nothing more than a mist that someone else will bring into focus. History consists of perspectives from the present projected onto facts from the past. While the facts are often disputed the perspectives tend to become quasi-religious dogma expressed as political opinions wherein the present uses the past to shape the future. Examples would be increasing the minimum wage is good for the working poor, infrastructure stimulus is good for the economy, or preemptive war is good for peace.
An important thing to realize across the board in Historical studies is a truism often maligned and sometimes even used as an insult but true nonetheless, everyone is the center of their own world and everyone experiences life from where they stand, and all attempts to speak of “the” experiences of THE people are fabrications that may be agreed upon by scholars but has little relationship to what any one person may experience.
As we mature it is easier to gain an appreciation of History since we have an ever increasing personal experience with the past with which to analyze our present and to project our future.
America’s lack of historical perspective and lack of understanding the basics of civics and economics has led to what I call the Great Disconnect. Here is the condition which we all encounter on a daily basis that exemplifies this educationally instilled mental pathology: How many people do you meet who vote for politicians diametrically opposed to everything they believe in? From everything they say you would imagine they must vote for party X then you find out they are rabid supporters of party Y which is against everything they are for, and they can’t stand the politicians of party X which supports everything they believe in. This is what I call the Great Disconnect.
A historical perspective is the antidote for this pathology.
In essence what I am talking about is using history to build a platform of the past to be a launching pad for the future. We are currently mortgaging the future to pay for the excesses of today. We are spending money that has not been earned by people who have not been born to subsidize the current creature comfort of those who don’t care who pays as long as they get what they want. It is unfortunate for the generations of the future for they will be forced to live in a world that we have created. Our parents conquered the world and left the nation inherited by the Boomers as the sole colossus who bestrides the tides of time. We have wasted the accumulated wealth of two hundred years, created a far flung empire we cannot afford to garrison, and turned a noble experiment in human freedom from a city on a hill into dysfunctional republic functioning as an entrenched oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.
If we had only learned from the mistakes of others, if we had only seen in the sudden collapse of the USSR that we too could follow hubris and collectivism from victory to defeat. Unfortunately it appears the only lesson we have learned from History is that we don’t learn the lessons of History and this is the Great Disconnect.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2016 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
American Pravda and New York’s Sixth Crime Family August 18, 2016
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Politics, Politiocal Philosophy.Tags: 2016 election, Dr. Robert Owens, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, the system is rigged, mainstream media, propaganda, low information voters
3 comments
In America today most people choose only the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media based on the charisma of the news reader, and do not tune into other news options. Do they think they look or sound like authoritative? Are they better looking? Do they have a more pleasing voice? Are they a Male? Are they a female? Are they Gay? Are we not sure? Whatever the reason, it isn’t because they say anything different. It often sounds like they all have the same writers and story selectors. The content is no different. It is perhaps the line-up of the stories and that is about it.
Do you want to hear the story about how the Republican Elite is trying to figure out some way to dump Trump before you hear the story about how the Donald is not fit for the highest office in the land or after? Do you want to learn about the latest polls that show the race is already over before or after you hear how much better Hillary’s economic plan is than the insane proposals of the racist homophobe misogynist Trump?
When I have a chance encounter and what passes for conversation with so many Kool-Aid drinking low information voters i.e progressive induhviduals the conversation usually goes like this:
Me: What do you think about _______ (fill in the blank)?
Progressive Induhvidual: Repeat what ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, etc. has said recently.
Or if they are a Conservative Induhvidual: Repeat what Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, National Review, etc. has recently said.
It is almost impossible to find anyone who has actually read any books on topics of importance such as economics, politics, sociology, or the History that ties them all together.
Several times a year I attend meetings that are filled with nothing but PhDs, professors, and university administrators. All content experts in these very subjects as well as many others. The results are basically the same. The death of critical thinking has led us to a deafening silence in the area of actual personal opinion, a dearth of dialogue, and a collapse of conversation. The American people, who at the time of the Founding saw blacksmiths discussing with candle makers the pros and cons of constitutions and the meaning of liberty or carpenters debating with plumbers the need for a free economy versus the need for public works. Just read the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist Papers, look at the level of thought and speech and ask yourself, “How does the public debate, and the newspaper articles of contemporary America match up?” Today the public debate takes place at about a 3rd grade level compared to the graduate school of those earlier days.
What happened? Back then there weren’t public schools. Churches and families educated their own. Today after generations of highly funded and severely structured public education we have successfully dumbed ourselves down to the lowest common denominator.
Looking at the Bernie Sanders revolt which was contained by the elite in the Democrat Party and the Trump Revolution which over whelmed the elite in the Republican Party it is obvious that we tax paying entities that inhabit flyover country have had enough of the bi-coastal elite that is driving us over the cliff into the third world. Obviously the elite controlled media has dropped their camouflage of objectivity and is all in to make sure their empty pantsuit carries the day so she can carry the water for the donor class all the way to the bank.
At least there has been one pseudo surprise in the Hollywood scripted replay of Primary Colors the Distaff Edition, all of the frothing at the mouth Bernie supporters who were so brave to boo or turn their backs at the recent Democrat Party Spectacle in Philadelphia are falling into line and surprise surprise they are planning to vote for Hillary. Just as evidence surfaces that yes, the entire primary exercise was rigged from the beginning they are going to stand in line to cast their rationally considered and highly principled vote for the very person who engineered the fix, takes her money and marching orders from the crony capitalists, and is arguably the most corrupt person to ever run for the presidency. Who could have seen this coming except a blind man in a dark room with no media access?
The pre-programmed electorate combined with the usual fraud, imported voters and all the dead people who never leave the voting rolls of the corrupt Democrat City fiefdoms, will march in lockstep to the polls to hand America lock-stock-and-barrel to the Clinton Crime Family. Our only hope is that enough people have swallowed the red pill and are willing to at least take a shot at shaking things up before we are swept away by the unregulated immigration invasion and state sponsored outsourcing.
An old saying goes, “There are only two things that are certain in this life, death and taxes.” We have all been programmed to accept this as an inevitable truism. Death to be sure is natural and inevitable. If you were born you will die. Taxes however are not a natural thing. They are in actuality the forced expropriation of funds from the productive taken through the use of the state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force. And so though they are not natural and they are not inevitable like death or gravity they may in realistic terms given the overwhelming preponderance of government power be unavoidable.
If our country follows the dictates of the elite controlled media America becomes the turf of the Sleazy Donna from Chappaqua whose word parsing motto should be the Bart Simpson anthem, “I didn’t do it! Nobody saw me do it! There’s no way. You can’t prove anything.” If the White House once again becomes Bill’s love nest and the George Soros puppet in heels moves into the Oval Office with her rolodex of contributors both foreign and domestic let’s hope we don’t find something else becoming inevitable. Such as critics of the regime joining the ever growing list of questionable deaths that follows New York’s Sixth Crime Family around like a bad odor.
Don’t just opt out because the system is obviously going to hell in a handbasket, vote for a change or shall we say, “See you in the camps”?
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2016 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
History is The Story of Life August 12, 2016
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Politics, Politiocal Philosophy.Tags: History, Dr. Robert Owens, learn from history, Lord Acton, history repeats itself, history of the future
3 comments
The older we get the more of our lives become History. Perhaps that is why it slowly eventually becomes interesting to many people; we can remember so much more of it. The future slides into the present. The present slides into the past. Our lives are the history of the future.
The average American has no Historical perspective. To most people History began the day they were born and it will end when they do. Without a historical perspective we live constantly in an ever progressing NOW and now can always be shaped and molded by whoever has the loudest megaphone at the moment. This puts the lives of the low information citizen in the hands of the establishment and their media mouthpieces.
So many students say, “History is boring, just names and dates” yet if History is boring than so is life, because History is the story of life. It is nothing more or less than the accumulated stories of the lives of people just like us who have lived at different times in what might as well have been different worlds.
These different worlds are the scaffold upon which our own world exists and if we ignore the framework that holds us up we imagine that we are afloat on a sea of forgetfulness beginning each epoch with no guidance from the collected wisdom of those who have gone before. And if we choose ignorance as our starting point can we wonder what will be our end?
What passes for education today doesn’t help much, and in many ways it just muddies the water. The History we are taught in secondary school is often sugar coated or slanted through the eyes and opinions of someone who has been run through the progressive stamping plant that is contemporary teacher training. Either we get an uncritical, “America right or wrong!” or “America’s always wrong!” depending on the slant of the education bureaucracy in the area.
After decades of teaching History to America’s best and brightest I have sadly come to the conclusion that as time goes by people not only know less and less about History but also what they do know isn’t so. It is only when we start to look at alternative views that we find there has always been a great debate as to what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and what it all means. To most of the snowflake generation and even to those older who have swilled the progressive kool-aide it is a micro aggression to try to expose them to anything that contradicts or even conflicts with the mantra of Al Gore’s man-made global warming cult or the anti-colonial views of the Obama zombies. Yet it is these alternative views that make History expansive, exciting, interesting, and informative. Without them it isn’t education it is indoctrination.
Every society and culture has always taught what might be called a glorified History that explains why they exist and should exist as a distinct group. When a country stops teaching this to their young in a few generations it is hard for the people to justify in their own minds why they are who they are and why they should continue to be a distinct people. This leads inevitably to a crisis that usually portends the end. Things are being left out of our History books, purged you might say. What isn’t remembered will be forgotten. That which is not written, is not preserved, passed down or remembered is the dust in the dustbin of History.
History is the best opportunity we have to learn from the mistakes of others. If we ignore these or we never learn of them we face the inevitable reality of repeating these mistakes over and over.
A case in point:
The socialist economics of the USSR and the inefficiencies it caused brought about the implosion of the Soviet empire. After that fall America rushed headlong into socialism itself. After almost 50 years of resisting communism, spending trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives lost or destroyed how did Americans fall for the siren song of, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need”? How did the Cold Warriors morph into interchangeable drones, cogs in a socialist utopian pyramid scheme? They didn’t realize the snake oil the Progressives were selling was the same thing all the other socialists have been selling since the 19th century. They couldn’t see that the hell holes of Cuba and Venezuela are the inevitable result of collectivism carried to its predictable dead end. They had no historical perspective.
Having followed the hope and change of the pied piper Barack Obama, America is teetering on the edge of the abyss. If enough of our fellow citizens bolstered by the best imported voters available and all the dead people in Chicago give Hillary and the Clinton crime family another shot at plundering this country we may well topple over following Rome and Britain into that aforementioned dust bin of History.
It may just be a matter of time until we join the Soviets on the trash heap of History. I remember that we woke up one morning and the USSR was arguably the strongest nation on earth and unarguably the largest, and by the time we went to bed it had disappeared. Since then we have worked hard to limit competition and extend benefits while our self-satisfaction has risen everything else is in decline. Maybe what we need is some Glasnost and Perestroika?
We can’t know what we don’t know but we can know that we don’t know. I first discovered History when I was nine years old, and I realized I didn’t know what had happened in the world before I had arrived. I set off on a journey that has now lasted fifty-eight years. I read and study History on a daily basis. I look for perspectives that may not match my own. I try to extend my understanding by looking at the world from many different viewpoints, and often I find that what I thought yesterday isn’t what I think today. Not that History has changed, but my understanding of it has. And with this evolving understanding comes new ways to move through this puzzle factory we call life.
I heartily recommend anyone who wants to make it through the maze and find the cheese study History so you will learn, someone always moves the cheese.
Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2016 Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens / Edited by Dr. Rosalie Owens
America’s Trojan War August 9, 2016
Posted by Dr. Robert Owens in Uncategorized.add a comment
America’s Trojan War by Dr. Robert Owens portraits a fictional attack by ISIS on America’s capital. America’s Trojan War combines gut wrenching realism and fast paced action to make this feel like it was ripped from the morning’s headlines.
Book Summary: Imagine if 10% of the Syrian refugees flooding into America today are actually more than 20,000 ISIS fanatic suicide warriors ready to die for their Caliph. Forming themselves into four brigade strength units they converge on four armories around DC and then using our own Abrams tanks and Apache gunships they attack the capitol and decapitate our government. This is the story of America rising to the challenge in the second Battle of Washington.
Excerpt #1: When the stairwell doors opened Lisa and a dozen other leaders among the citizen soldiers hurriedly shouted “Hold your fire!!” as half naked and naked women stumbled out into the carnage of the first floor. . . Charging like a bull at a red cape, enraged Americans crashed their way into the many stairwells on the first floor and directly into the waiting massed fire of the Jihadis.
Excerpt #2: Looking at each other across the bullet ridden conference table, the shattered furniture, and the many bodies strewn about they all tried to say, “I love you be safe,” with their eyes before they rushed in different directions leading their squads to the battle none of them wanted and each of them was determined to win.
America’s Trojan War combines gut wrenching realism and fast paced action to make this feel like it was ripped from the morning’s headlines. This is the first fictional book authored by Dr. Robert Owens and available at America’s Trojan War
You can also find his six other books on line through Amazon. Just put in a title and Owens.
Dr. Robert Owens Chronicles the History of the Future 