Look! A Book!

"Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about and having those strangers work on your child’s mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years? Could there be a more radical idea than that?"

--John Taylor Gatto

The absolute best thing you can do to jumpstart any child's education is teaching them to read the most common words. If you can make the reading process less of a struggle, the skill will snowball and the world of the written word will become their inheritance.

Once a child can read, the biggest obstacle to learning is often not being motivated to know. Many of us can probably think of instances where we struggled to learn something and then some time later, armed with a compelling reason to learn, we then came back and easily picked it up.

"...many of the people we consider "intellectuals" seem more to be "intellectualizing" where they take incorrect or hollow conclusions and support them with words that sound smart but have no depth or meaning."

--@laochspiorad

It is easier to cover up poor ideas with audio or visual media than it is with plain writing. This is why making the reading process an easy & enjoyable one is one of the most important skillsets you can give to a child. There's also, I think, something magical about reading text (especially as most people read aloud in their minds) blurring the line between reader & writer in a way that video & audio interactions do not.

"I feel sad that the brave new age of instant information didn't make things or us better. We may need to re-evolve as humanity before any of this makes any impact at all."

--@themorrigan1973

The world is currently awash in books, articles, & other forms of analysis on national & regional issues. But the closer you get to home the less there is. There is certainly value in knowledge & discussion of larger issues, and some of them will end up impacting your local community. But many will not. How many millions end up transfixed by the story du jour which will never impact their lives? It used to be only occasionally a kid would fall down a well and captivate a nation. Now? It's non-stop.

"As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis."

--George Orwell

For most of human history, the individual minds & personalities you interacted with were those that were in your immediate physical surroundings. With the advent of forms of mass communication, from the written word on crude paper to the internet, we increasingly ceded that spotlight to faraway minds. How many children no longer look to their immediate elders for wisdom? How many find the contents of their minds, their acquired wisdom, is valued at near-zero by those others who surround them? What does this do to us as individuals and entire societies?

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

--Edward Bernays

We need to expand the creation of local culture. Every tool, trick, and tactic used here to engage with national or global issues can also be used to engage with local issues. Such engagement is also likely to have a greater impact at the local level.

"It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

--Mark Twain

Whether you focus on local or national issues, if you're seeking to really help free #WeThePeople then monetary rewards may be hard to come by. But if you're ultimately building towards something massive, even if you don't know what it is yet, then the potential for non-monetary rewards increases dramatically.

"If our society is founded on fictions, which it is, tearing them down only helps if we have a secure platform on which to land and bring others along with us."

--@themorrigan1973

A book is a concentrated package of knowledge, wisdom, or information. An ebook is harder to censor than many other forms of modern information exchange. A social media account & its entire history created over years can be purged in an instant. A digital book on the other hand can be burned and then quickly reappear in its exact same form.

"I think once we take away the right of free speech we may never get it back. My big concern...is who makes the decision, what speech is allowable and what is not?"

--Susan Bro

That's the trouble with a book. The elite can never quite be sure it's gone. Maybe it's lurking out there in some dank, dark place. A fungus blooming and spreading among minds. That's the kind of thing that drives the elite mad. It's what they really fear. And it's why they spend so much time & resources attempting to keep you dumb & docile.

"Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."

--George Orwell

A book can't be caged or killed. You can't bust down a book's door at 5am. You can't threaten a book's family. It can't get hit by a bus or have it's heart give out after too many Krispy Kremes (or vaccines).

A book only requires a momentary internet connection and a tiny amount of data to spread far and wide. You could fill an average flash drive with thousands of them. A book is an attempt to make some sense of the world. A library allows an entire people to grow in wisdom. Or at least it should. It all depends on what you've got inside those walls, metaphorical or real. So let's start filling our libraries, digital & not, with local culture.

"I am trying to save the world for my family"

--@eucaliptus

The library is often better than the streets if you want to defeat the elites.

"The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline."

--Carroll Quigley

This piece is an excerpt from the first release by PP Press. You can find the complete ebook, A Few Drops of PP (Volume 1) here. Is the title a bit of juvenile toilet humor? Certainly. But there's more serious purposes as well. For instance, it's considerably harder to be painted as a sinister extremist threat by government, media, or NGOs if there's a few "peepee" puns. Imagine if Bin Laden had done his videos looking like the Cat-in-the-Hat or something: Totally not intimidating unless you're a crazy Twitter user.

Some might argue it reduces credibility. But those people need to take life a little less serious. You'll never make it out alive. Everybody poops & many scratch their ass. And some of them discuss serious things too.

I also might highlight that for 4 years so-called mature journalists, politicians, and others went on about supposed "peepee tape" blackmail on Trump. But, should some of those same people & their supporters like to attack my credibility and the "seriousness" of my analysis that's fine by me. I'm always open to being a punching bag to both expose hypocrisy and encourage people to make my real arguments for me.

Finally, as you may be aware, we now have drag queens & top-scar beavers on children's TV. They're coming for the minds of the youth. So maybe a bit of juvenile humor every now and then catches the eye of some young person and encourages them to take a closer look.