The Dumbing Down of America
Johnny Silver Bear

(Editor's Note: As the editor of the Silver Bear Cafe, I spend most of my time researching current events. I explore the markets, the economic war that is being waged on the middle class, precious metals, the source of all the problems that exist in the economy, which is the Federal Reserve, energy, and how to go about surviving financially. Today, I decided to revisit one of my earlier essays, and examine how the news might affect your pocketbook. -JSB)

The Capacity for Critcal Thought

I was listening to a Carl Sagan interview on NPR this weekend that was taped shortly before his death in 1996. During the interview, he brought up the subject of critical thought. This is a subject that I have touched on many times over the years. I am usually pointing out the apparent pandemic lack of the capacity for critical thought that is the result of the intentional repression of knowledge.

When attempting to understand the public's lack in this regard, we are reminded that there are powerful organizations (especially religious and political organizations) that don't want us to think critically, don't want us to ask questions, don't want us to challenge their authority. The powers that be can not stand up to being criticized, so they do every thing they can to interfere with those thought processes that would allow critical thought to flourish. Most students today, the ones in public schools that are subsidized by the federal government, face, not only the burden of basing their foundations on revisionist history, but also putting up with being admonished if they ask the tough questions. They are told told to shut up, or to stop disrupting class, or something to avoid the fact that the teacher has no good answer for that question.

Here is an excerpt from my 2011 essay, Hippies:

Rewriting History

Oxford

Back in 1923, the Carnegie Foundation conducted a contest. The prize was a scholarship to Oxford, in England for a PhD. The Foundation placed advertisements in magazines and on the radio seeking history teachers with Advanced Degrees to compete for the prize. The contest amounted to writing an essay about the current state of America. The judges of the contest declared that twenty young history teachers had won and then swept them off to London. There, they were lined up and each bestowed with PhDs from Oxford as well a Fellowship with the Guggenheim Foundation. They received no further education (just the honorifics) but, instead, were brought back the the USA and became the core of the American Historical Association.

In 1928, the American Historical Association was granted $400,000 by the Carnegie Endowment to write a seven volume study on the direction the nation was to take. The thrust of these books was that "the future of this country belongs to collectivism and humanism."

The AHA has since then, determined what history books will be used in all public schools. If your school district receives any Federal funds, then they are mandated, by Congress, to teach history from these revisionist volumes.

The Carnegie Foundation (in collusion with the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) has been rewriting history for the last eighty-five years. Their goal was to create a passive, dumbed down society that would not oppose their vision for the future. Pretty much everything you think you know is made up.

It's not what you don't know that will screw you up, it's what you are absolutely sure of that is absolutely wrong." - Mark Twain

We have been misled by revisionist crap. Our parents and teachers were misled by revisionist crap. Their parents and teachers were misled by revisionist crap. We have now been collectively dumbed down on purpose for over eighty-five years. It's astounding, to me, that the kids today possess cerebral grey matter that has not been intentionally rendered jello, and still have the sense to react at all.

The dumbing down campaign has been going on for generations. The teachers have been, by design, rendered unable to answer the tough questions. We labor under a system where "no teacher left behind" is a ploy, through which the mass subjugation of our kids can be accomplished. Most faculty members were dumbed down, just like the rest of us, before they became teachers.

We have all been misled. We, like our parents, were subjected to history that was revised, in order to provide and promote a false foundation for our actions, thoughts and attitudes. Revisionist history is evil. It wraps fallacies in the truth, as I recently pointed out by citing an Ayn Rand quote:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . .

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels - and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.

Carl Sagan offers this piece of advice when looking for fallacies in his book The Demon-Haunted World

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct and to understand a reasoned argument, and, especially important, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. This question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premises or starting point, and whether that premise is true.

One of the most important parts of thinking critically is learning what details matter. We're exposed to so much misinformation every day that it's really easy to become distracted

Subsequently, we need to train ourselves to discern the bran from the chaff, and recognize the BS immediately. Start by listening to your gut. If something doesn't sound true, it's probably not. Most of what you hear from Washington is baloney.

All this talk about critical thinking is a prelude to the topic I would like to broach in this weeks commentary. It is a carry over from last week's rant and involves some of the real dangers we face and some thoughts on strategies for survival.

The Evil Fallacy of Government

Every election in modern US history has been a criminal manipulation, choreographed and rigged by political elites and performed by hand-picked elite puppets, each backed by their teams of corrupt war criminals, intelligence/security, advisors and think tank assets. - Larry Chin

I have changed my mind, several times, over the past sixteen years, concerning my understanding of the causation of the demise of the Republic. Because of the changes, I am wont to declare that I now have it figured out, but I admittedly continue to uncover aspects of the conspiracy that I had not realized before.

My first epiphany came when I realized that the Federal Reserve was at the root of the problem. The Federal Reserve has invented, out of thin air, $11 trillion in the last eight years and loaned it to the government. We as American taxpayers are liable for that debt! By the way, $1 Trillion is a stack of $100 bills 680 MILES high. It is a stupid amount and can never be paid back. Not even the interest can never be paid. The Darkside has rendered the entire country (as well as most of the world) insolvent and, in doing so, rendered billions of human beings debt slaves. They have incrementally decimated the concept of property rights and have attempted to reduce us to chattel. They intend to either enslave or eliminate everyone on earth (except themselves, and their cronies).

As I said, initially I thought it was all caused by the machinations of the Federal Reserve. Upon further research, however, I found that the Federal Reserve was just a front for a far larger and more malevolent group. This larger group of elitists makes up the memberships of several organizations, through which a specific agenda is being forwarded. Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothchilds are members of this group.

The Rockefeller family was involved in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations, an off shoot of Cecil Rhode's Fabian Society. David Rockefeller was instrumental in the founding of the Trilateral Commission in the fifties. His family also donated the land, in New York City, upon which the United Nations' headquarters resides.

The United Nations is a puppet front for the group I am discussing, and its central mandate is to create an all powerful, one world government. The group is additionally populated by another quasi secret organization called the Pilgrims Society. Another offshoot of the Pilgrims is the Bilderberg Society. Other quasi secret organizations linked to the group, among others, include Skull and Bones, and the Illuminati.

If you took the time to follow any of the links offered in the previous two paragraphs, you would realize the depth of my interest (obsession) in sorting all this out.

For most, generally casualties of the dumbing down campaign mentioned in the first paragraph, the threat to themselves, and their loved ones, is largely unknown or overlooked. This, too, is by design. I have used the term "Darkside" time and time again in my writings. I am a sixty-six year old baby boomer and an avid fan of the Star Wars' saga. The battle between good and evil is as old as humanity itself. What fascinates me, however, is "why now"? What is happening now, and why have we finally reached critical mass?

The answer to that question, IMHO, is provided by philosophy, scripture, psychology, and human nature. There has always been a faction of the whole, who feel superior. This is generally not the case at all. They are not superior. In fact, I would argue that they are inferior. They are inferior because of their inability to prosper without diminishing the prosperity of others. It is far harder to earn something than it is to steal it, and stealing is exactly what they have been doing for over 2000 years. They constitute an evil cadre of miscreants, but they have, over the years stolen a great deal of money. They have also, in the last three hundred years, used their ill-gotten gains to bribe politicians and legislators the world over to alter laws so that they can more easily expropriate the wealth of humanity.

Here is an excerpt from my 2004 essay, "One if by Land":

"The Dark Side" has successfully placed their agents in positions as politicians ranging from school board members to U. S. presidents, newspaper publishers, columnists, church ministers, university presidents, professors, textbook writers, labor union leaders, filmmakers, radio and television commentators and many others.

These agents control the information available to our people. They manipulate public opinion, elect whomever they want locally and nationally, and never expose the crooked money system. They promote school bonds, expensive and detrimental farm programs, "urban renewal," foreign aid, and many other schemes which place the people more deeply in debt to the bankers. Thoughtful citizens wonder why billions are spent on one program and billions on another which may duplicate it or even nullify it, such as paying some farmers not to raise crops, while at the same time building dams or canals to irrigate more farm land. Crazy or stupid?

Neither. The goal is more debt. Thousands of government-sponsored methods of wasting money go on continually. Most make no sense, but they are never exposed for what they really are: siphons sucking our Nation's economic lifeblood.

Since 1971, when Nixon took us off the last vestiges of the gold standard, the Darkside has been free to ply their nefarious trade unfettered. As a result of the actions of the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the dumbing down campaign has successfully eliminated any resistance from the people. Apparently, "We the People" have been rendered intellectually impotent.

The Darkside has invented as much money out of thin air, as they wanted, and used it, via agents and lobbyists, to buy entire governments, the world over. They are currently having problems with Russia and China. But please understand, that is all this Syrian and Ukrainian stuff is about. The Darkside can't control the world without controlling all the world's resources. If they can control all the resources, they can dictate the number of people that are allowed to reside on the planet. Their intent is to not only rule the world, but also to do away with vast swaths of the world's population.

Obama is a puppet. Obamacare is yet another ploy to steal our wealth and get rid of, what the Darkside considers, "worthless eaters". Please read the following missive carefully.

This is a letter from a senior gentleman in Mesa, Arizona:

Dear Family, Friends, Neighbors and former Classmates,

I just found myself in the middle of a medical situation that made it very clear that "the affordable care act" is neither affordable, nor do they care.

I'll go back about seven years ago to a fairly radical prostate surgery that I underwent. The Urologist (a personal friend) who performed the surgery was very concerned that it was cancer, though I wasn't told this until the lab report revealed it was benign. Since that procedure, I have experienced numerous urinary tract infections, UTI's. Since I had never had a "UTI" prior to the prostate surgery, I assume that it is one of the side effects from surgery, an assumption since confirmed by my Family Doctor.

The weekend of March 8-9, I was experiencing all the symptoms of another bout of UTI. By Monday afternoon the infection had hit with full force. Knowing that all I needed was an antibiotic, I went to an Urgent Care Center in Mesa, AZ., to provide a specimen, a requirement for getting the prescription. After waiting 45 min. to see the Doctor, I started getting very nauseous and light headed.

I went to the Receptionist to ask where the bathroom was as I felt that I was going to throw up. I was told that I would have to wait for the Doctor because I would need to leave a specimen and they didn't want me in the bathroom without first seeing him.

That was when the lights went out, my next awareness was that of finding myself on the floor (in the waiting room) having violent dry heaves, and very confused. At this point, I tried to stand up but couldn't make it, and they made it very clear they weren't going to let me get up until the ambulance got there. By the way, when you're waiting to see the Doctor and you pass out, you get very prompt attention.

Now, "the rest of the story", and the reason for sending this to so many of you.

I was taken to the nearest hospital, to emergency. Once there, I was transported to an emergency examination room. Once I had removed my clothes and donned one of those lovely hospital gowns, I finally got to see a Doctor. I asked "what is going on" I'm just having a UTI, just get me the proper medication and let me go home. He told me that my symptoms presented the possibility of sepsis, a potentially deadly migration of toxins, and that they needed to run several tests to determine how far the infection had migrated.

For the next 3 hours I was subjected to several tests, blood draws, EKG's, and demands for specimens. At about 7:30 the nurse came back to my room to inform me that one of the tests takes 1- 2 days to complete, I asked if they (the results) could be emailed, at which point she informed me that I wouldn't need them emailed because I wasn't going anywhere. I started arguing with her but was told, "if you don't start behaving, I'll start taking your temperature rectally, at which point I became a perfect gentleman. I did tell her I wanted to see the doctor because I had no intention of staying overnight.

Now, this is what I want each of you to understand, please read these next sentences carefully. The doctor finally came in to inform me that he was going to admit me. I said, "are you admitting me for treatment or for observation?" He told me that I would be admitted for observation. I said Doctor, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you admit me for observation my Medicare will not pay anything, this due to the affordable care act , he said that's right, it won't. I then grabbed for my bag of clothing and said, then I'm going home. He said you're really too sick to be going home, but I understand your position, this health program is going to hit seniors especially hard.

The doctor then left the room and I started getting dressed, I was just getting ready to put my shoes on when another doctor (the closer) came into the room, he saw me dressed and said, "where do you think you are going?" I simply said "I'm going home, to which he replied, quite vociferously, no you aren't. I said, "Doc, you and I both know that under the "affordable care act" anyone on Medicare who is admitted to a hospital for observation will be responsible for the bill, Medicare won't pay a cent". At which point he nodded in affirmation. I said, "You will either admit me for a specific treatment or you won't admit me." Realizing he wasn't going to win this one, he said he would prepare my release papers.

A few minutes later the discharge nurse came to my room to have me sign the necessary papers, relieving them from any responsibility. I told her I wasn't trying to be obstinate, but I wasn't going to be burdened with the full (financial) responsibility for my hospital stay.

After making sure the door was closed, she said, "I don't blame you at all, I would do the same thing." She went on to say, "You wouldn't believe the people who elect to leave for the same reasons, people who are deathly sick, people who have to be wheeled out on a gurney." She further said, "The 'Affordable Care Act' is going to be a disaster for seniors. Yet, if you are in this country illegally, and have no coverage, you will be covered in full."

This is not internet hype folks, this is real, I just experienced it personally. Moving right along, this gets worse.

Today I went to a (required) follow up appointment with my Arizona Family Practitioner. Since my white count was pretty high, the follow up was important. During the visit I shared the experience at emergency, and that I had refused to be admitted. His response was "I don't blame you at all, I would have done the same thing". He went on to say that the colonoscopy and other procedures are probably going to be dropped from coverage for those over 70.

I told him that I had heard that the affordable care act would no longer pay for cancer treatment for those 76 and older, is that true? His understanding is that it is true.

The more I hear, and experience the Affordable Care Act, the more I'm beginning to see that we seniors are nothing more than an inconvenience, and the sooner they can get rid of us the better off they'll be.

November is coming folks, we can have an impact on this debacle by letting everyone in Congress know that their responsibility is to the constituents, not the president and not the lobbyists. We need to let them ALL know that they are in office to serve and to look after the BEST INTERESTS of "we the people", their employers, and not to become self serving bureaucrats who serve only out of greed. And if they don't seem to understand this simple logic, we'll fire them.

On the mend, (signed)

REMEMBER: Demand your hospital admission is for TREATMENT and NOT for OBSERVATION!

Conclusion

You must first realize that there are, present in our lives, enemies. You must then know who those enemies are, and act accordingly. The levels of governmental, regulatory, and banking corruption, in the world, have reached the point that they are, not only heinous, but have also attained a state of critical mass. The bad guys who are basically rapacious maniacs, are about to bring the whole thing down, and must be dealt with. Unless We the People get some control over what is going down, the vast majority of the world's population will suffer immeasurably.

Spread the word. Wake up your family and friends. If you do nothing else, spreading the word will help.

Eliminate as much debt as possible, especially “variable rate” debt, such as credit cards and lines of credit. Interest rates will eventually rise, which will leave borrowers unable to repay loans. These borrowers include cities, states and countries. Rising interest rates will provide "the straw that breaks the camels back". If you are present, you will be taken down with everybody else. The elimination of debt offers a “real return” of escaping rising rates by creditors.

Get some control over some fresh water.

If you are depending exclusively on Social Security, stop.

Follow the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well...

Its not what you don't know that will screw you up, it's what you are absolutely sure of that is absolutely wrong. The spin you hear from the mainstream media is intended to mislead you. Open your eyes and face the future. If you leave your head in the sand and ignore it, you are only leaving your butt exposed for the world to kick. This all may sound like gloom and doom, but when you get a handle on what is going to happen, you will have a future filled with opportunity. Fortune favors the Informed.

More next week...

May the Great Spirit be with you always,

Johnny Silver Bear
Chief cook and bottle washer, The Silver Bear Cafe

Disclaimer

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