Category: Author

Bill Gates vs. Elon Musk…What Gives? Part 1

Everyday on social media I see hate and love for these two men. The Democrats adore Gates; the Republicans adore Musk; Democrats loath Musk; Republicans loath Musk. There are, of course, other billionaires who interfere with campaign finance like George Soros, but he’s an enigma for another day. Today I want to ponder these two because they are very similar and I wanted to lay out a comparison as unbiasedly as I could to look to see if there is a justification for the criticism each receives from their opponents. I will say upfront that I do not like Bill Gates. I do not trust him to clean my toilet much less give me healthcare advice. I will also say that my opinion of Elon Musk is guarded. I haven’t decided on him yet. I am not a fan or an opponent. I don’t think that I have enough information. Perhaps after researching this blog post I will and I will be able to state definitively my opinion. 
I think it is important to compare the two on equal grounds, to compare their familial backgrounds, their educations, social and community histories, as well as their business endeavors. To only compare their business and political activities would not do either of them or us justice. Because of the wealth of information needed to cover these two men, this post will be done in two parts. This first part will cover Bill Gates.
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955. His father was a lawyer and his mother, Mary, sat on the boards of a bank and the United Way. They would divorce later. Bill was small of his age much of his life and he was often bullied by his classmates. Early on he was introduced to computers and programming which he had an affinity for and was fascinated by. He and a few of his fellow students became engaged in programming for their school after getting caught in more elicit computer activities.
“At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside Prep School. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of TIC-TAC-TOE that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.” (Wikipedia references Manes, Stephen, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America. (1994) Touchstone Pictures. ISBN 0-671-88074-8)

From there we all know how Bill Gates and others created Microsoft and became the billionaire we think we all know today, but I am not sure we really do know the man. At age 69, Mr. Gates has amassed a net worth of 107 billion dollars which ranks as the 15th richest man in the world today. He is a college dropout, having dropped out of Harvard after two years. He is divorced and has three children. He has become known for his “philanthropic” work in Africa and work in environmental and education. For people on the left, he is a hero; for people on the right, he is a bully with questionable intentions.

Bill Gates has founded numerous foundations, investment companies, and businesses. These include Cascade Investments, Branded Entertainment Network, Terrapower, Breakthrough Energy, Gates Ventures, The Gates Foundation, and, of course, Microsoft. We will look at each of these.

1. Cascade Investments LLC oversees the investments of the Gates Foundation and the personal assets of Bill Gates. The funds are managed by Michael Larson. The most interesting aspect of the investment company in my opinion is that it is the single largest owner of farmland in the United States of America owning 269,000 acres of land through a network of shell companies. For those of us interested in maintaining family owned farms, this should be of interest. Why would a single man need to own this much land? In this same vein, Gates has significant interests in a company called Ecolab. “Headquartered in Minnesota, Ecolabs has become one of the world’s leading hygiene and food safety-tech companies. Recently, Cascade bought up another $32 million worth of shares of the company, expanding Gates’ stake from 10.7% in 2012 to over 21% in 2022. He is still the largest shareholder of the company.” (www.andsimple.co/cases/cascade-investment-bill-gates/). This should be particularly interesting given the mood in the US against food additives and toxins and the drive to move away from fake food which is in stark contrast to Gates’ support for the elimination of beef and for plant based and lab created foods. Additionally, Gates is a majority shareholder in Canadian Railways, AutoNation, and John Deere. Are you seeing a pattern yet?

2. Branded Entertainment Network, also known as BenLabs, is a product placement, influencer marketing, and licensing company created by Gates in 1989 as Interactive Home Systems and later rebranded as Corbis. “Originally…its mission was to research multimedia systems that would combine visual images, audio, motion video, and animation, all in digital form.” (https://www.theartnewspaper.com/1996/06/01/how-fares-the-digital-revolution-a-look-at-the-corbis-corporation) In 1997, Corbis changed its model again to licensing the images and footage it had in its inventory. In those early days, they had no competition because they had the largest inventory with “half a million images relating to all areas of human endeavour from fine and applied arts (less than 10%) to architecture, travel and geography, famous people, history, popular culture, science and technology ‘to a depth satisfactory for secondary school or undergraduate university curricula.’ Corbis offered museums and artistic outlets like the Ansel Adams Trust expanded markets and they did all the work for them at little to no cost. But, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Copyright issues presented problems for Corbis in the beginning, but the Clinton Administration aided with a working group on intellectual property and revised intellectual property rights into the digital age. And then in 2016, Gates sold the key collections to China’s Unity Glory International. So much for patriotism, huh? Corbis’ key competitor today, Getty Images, took over the role of licensing of images within North America. What happened? According to Eric Cohen, who once worked in sales for Corbis, they promised a lot, failed to deliver, wanted to control too much, issues with photographers, legal issues, and the internet. The internet’s easy access to digital photos has dramatically reduced the need for pricey licensed photographs when a photograph can be purchased for almost nothing on a site like Shutterstock. And finally, Corbis never made a profit. This was not a shining day for Gates.

3. Terrapower is a nuclear power design and development engineering company which is developing a class of nuclear reactors called traveling wave reactors. The company was founded in 2006 by Bill Gates and Chris Levesque (CEO), and is partially funded by the Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bill Gates’ investment in the power plant comes by virtue of Cascade Investments LLC. Terrapower is located in Kemmerer, Wyoming as the site for a 345 MWe Natrium reactor using a molten salt energy storage system. The site broke ground in June 2024 beginning preparation for the as-yet unapproved reactor. It is estimated to cost $4 billion, with the DOE supplying half of that cost, and Gates contributing $1 billion of his money via Cascade. So what are “traveling wave reactors”? The idea of a traveling wave reactor is that they convert typically non-fissile fertile nuclides into fissile nuclides in-situ and shift power production from the “burned” region to the “bred” region. The belief is this would allow for the benefit of a closed fuel cycle without the expense and proliferation-risk of enrichment/reprocessing plants. Moreover, they say the reactor could be installed underground and could operate for 100 years. Again, this has yet to be proven. There also seems to be some involvement in this program by Warren Buffet and his company PacifiCorp. Nuclear power is clean energy and is renewable. People have been weary of it since the Three Mile Island spill, but it is unwarranted because that has been the only one since that time of that magnitude.

4. Breakthrough Energy founded in 2015 with the purpose of accelerating innovation in sustainable energy and technologies that reduce greenhouse gases. BE consists of several organizations which invests in a variety of startup companies that are attempting to commercialize new concepts such as nuclear fusion, large-capacity batteries, and microbe-generated biofuels. Some of the members of the group include Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Meg Whitman, Mark Zuckerberg, and the University of California (Why is a public university using tax dollars to join a private group?). Some of their projects include:

A. Verdox—carbon capture. On February 2, 2022, Breakthrough Energy agreed to join an investors syndicate providing $80 million in capital to Verdox, Inc.

B. Methanol fuel cells (August 2022)—conversion of methanol to electricity.

C. Data Blanket—Wildfire drone technology start-up.

5. Gates Ventures is a personal service company of Bill Gates. It is comprised of his personal staff, a think tank, and a technology investment portfolio. The think tank is centered on issues of health and global development. Dr. Niranjan Bose is the director of the company. Dr. Bose has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Dartmouth, an MS in biological sciences and a BS in pharmaceutical sciences from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He has been working with Bill Gates since 2007 on various health related issues, especially Alzheimer’s and Gastroenterological disorders.

6. Gates Foundation, formerly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the 3rd largest charitable foundation in the world (has a TON of power!) with an endowment of $75.2 BILLION as of December 2023. Since its founding, the foundation has endowed and supported a broad range of social, health, and education developments, including the establishment of the Gates Cambridge Scholarships at Cambridge University.That’s Cambridge in ENGLAND, NOT the USA, FOLKS. Considering he dropped out of Harvard after 2 years, should we be surprised he doesn’t support US education or US students? Coincidentally (or not) in October 2019, the BMGF partnered with the WEF to host the tabletop exercise called Event 201 in NYC. What was Event 201, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “the exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe PANDEMIC in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences". Guess what virus they “simulated” in their illustration? THE CORONAVIRUS! Now, isn’t that crazy. One year prior to an actual outbreak of a severe pandemic of an actual coronavirus. Wow. The fact that he was already talking about a pandemic killing millions back in 2014 ought to have us concerned. We ought to also be concerned about his continued investments in Monsanto and the lack of substantial improvement in outcomes for African farmers and hunger deepening. Gates Foundation interference in Africa has not improved outcomes for families according to research. According to U.S. Right to Know, “Evidence suggests that the green revolution has failed to improve health or reduce poverty and has created many problems. These include hooking farmers in a debt cycle with expensive inputs, growing pesticide use, environmental degradation, worsening soil quality, reduced diversity of food crops, and increased corporate control over food systems.” (www.usrtk.org/bill-gates/critiques-of-gates-foundation/) Critics say that the Gates Foundation and others like them are making power plays to increase their control over global agriculture policies at the United Nations. I will say it here, though I am not the first to say it, CONTROL THE FOOD AND YOU CONTROL THE PEOPLE. If someone has this kind of need for control, I call that evil.

Bill also has some moral issues. Of course, we know that he had a long term affair while married to Melinda. That was the ultimate cause of their divorce. There was also an investigation of some inappropriate conduct with an employee, but he stepped down before the investigation was complete and there’s those pesky allegations of connections to Jeffrey Epstein, too. I also take offense to his having meetings with the reprehensible dictator Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman in his home. This man is no friend of the United States or anyone in the West. He may pretend to be. He may buy our warplanes. He may invite us to his country and lavish us with his gifts, but make no mistake, his hatred for the United States runs deep and he has no problems killing us. To think otherwise is simply foolish. The only people who should be allowed in his company should be seasoned diplomats and our leaders who know how to handle him and have accountability if something were to go wrong. An unelected, non-governmental employee has no business meeting with a world leader in his home like this. If you have not watched the movie The Dissident, I would encourage you to do so. You’ll understand what I am saying about the Saudi prince once you do.

Here’s the thing folks. Bill Gates, and others like him, are unelected power players with far too much money and influence. He is part of the problem, not the solution. These people are like the crickets in a Bug’s Life. There are few of them, but they are way too full of themselves. They feel entitled because of their money. Bill Gates doesn’t even have a college degree and he thinks we should bend down and take his healthcare and food advice? Hell no. I knew from day one coronavirus was a scam and was biowarfare. I had enough experience in the Army to see that right away. He’s not dictating anything to me. And let’s not forget his influence with Common Core. Oh yes, the Gates Foundation put that little piece of excrement together too. There are things I can agree on with him. Nuclear power is a good idea, but that’s about where I stop.

So, I will end my research on Bill Gates here. Stand by for my blog post on Elon Musk to follow.

The Backstory of a Story I Bet You Thought Was A Fairytale!

While I have been doing my “This Week in History” post (and I do enjoy researching those events), I thought I would do something different this time, especially since I needed to do some new posts. I subscribe myself to several historical social media pages and I was catching up on them over the past few days, and so I decided to pick one of those to focus on here.

Growing up our parents read to us many stories, many of which are fairytales which have been passed down over many generations. Fairtales like “Beauty and The Beast”, “Jack and The Beanstalk” and “Rumpelstiltskin” are believed to be thousands of years old. These stories are believed to have their roots in Eastern and Western Indo-European languages that split around 4,000 years ago. “Stories from the 1001 Nights”, more commonly known as “Arabian Nights”, was published about 900 AD. More well-known to most of us are the Grimm Brother’s Fairytales which were published in 1815. The stories themselves, however, are much older. Hans Christian Anderson’s tales were published in 1835 and are still quite popular today because of the adaptations by Walt Disney.

One fascinating fairytale familiar to most children is that of the Pied Piper. Like most of the Grimm Brother’s tales, this story also comes from Germany during the Middle Ages. A stranger arrives in a quaint German village. The gentleman scares away a plague of rats and then lures away the children while whistling a tune on his pipe. The story may actually has some basis in fact.

The story takes place in 1284 in the village of Hamelin in Lower Saxony in Northwest Germany. This area of Germany was undergoing a rapid change both socially and economically. It was becoming a center of Christianity, with pagan settlements disappearing from its borders. It was booming economically having become the home of the Hanseatic League, an alliance of trading partners in the Northern European cities. Hamelin was becoming the place to be, to thrive and to survive in Germany. However, the city had a rat problem and piper was the man hired to deal with the issue. For his services he was to be paid 1,000 guilders. He played his pipe and lured the rats out of Hamelin and drowned them in the River Weser, but something unexpected happened. The mayor reneged on his promise to pay.

Instead of the 1,000 guilders, the mayor offered the piper only 50. The piper was obviously angry. In retaliation, the piper was said to have determined to steal away the town’s children as revenge. As the story is told, this was said to have happened on June 26, 1284. The piper changed from his brightly, multicolored clothing into an all green suit and lured away 130 children using his pipe music to a local cave and they were never seen again. Another story says that the children were led to a hill where they entranced into jumping off.

Research into the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the 20th and 21st Century has produced several plausible theories for how this story may have actually happened in the town of Hamelin, Germany in the late 13th Century. One such theory suggests that the children may have suffered from some form of mass psychogenic illness which created a dancing like mania among them. Another suggests that the Pied Piper is a symbolic character used as a symbol for the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the town that killed the children and that the story was created to help explain the excessive grief the people could not verbalize.

One last theory relates the Pied Piper as being a recruiter for young people to go to Eastern Europe to help spread Christianity. Researchers have studied surnames that appear within and around the town of Hamelin in the 13th Century and found the same surnames in the Baltic Sea region and further east around the same time. They hypothesize that this suggests significant emigration from Hamelin to Eastern Europe and the Baltic region at same time in the late 13th Century and late Medieval period. Thus, they believe the story is allegorical rather than factual.

What do you think?

Remembering the Reason for the Season: Finding Jesus in the Old Testament

As a member of a Protestant denomination I did not learn as much about the Old Testament growing up as I did about the New Testament. The focus most often is, of course, about the life and teachings of Jesus because we want to make certain that we understand what we need to know in order to obtain salvation. However, once we have that secured by accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior, then we do need to learn all parts of the Bible.

One of my favorite and memorable learning moments in my life came when I was in college and I attended a presentation by a group young adults from Jews for Jesus. Interestingly enough at the time, I had not found my biological family and I did not know yet that I was Jewish. I wish I had because I probably would have sought the group out so that I could have learned more about their organization so that I could learn more about the Jewish side of me. But that isn’t the purpose of this post.

What was fascinating to me was to hear them point out all the scripture passages in the Old Testament that pointed towards Jesus, even specifically describing how Passover pointed to Jesus. It was amazing how each part of the Passover celebration pointed directly to Jesus. I thought I would share some of the scripture passages from the Old Testament with you and how those passages prophesied Jesus.

  1. The nations will be blessed through Abraham’s lineage.
    • PROPHECY: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3).
    • FULFILLMENT: “And you are heirs of the prophets and of the covenant God made with your fathers. He said to Abraham, ‘Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be blessed.’ When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways” (Acts 3:25-26).
  2. The scepter will come through Judah
    • PROPHECY: “The scepter will not depart from Judah, not the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his” (Genesis 49:10)
    • FULFILLMENT: Judah is part of Jesus’ genealogy. “The son of Amminadab, the son of Ram, the son of Hezron, the son of Perez, the son of Judah” (Luke 3:33)
  3. The virgin will give birth, and he will be called Immanuel (God with us)
    • PROPHECY: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14)
    • FULFILLMENT: “The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35)
  4. The Messiah will end up in Egypt
    • PROPHECY: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1)
    • FULFILLMENT: “So he [Joseph] got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (Matthew 2:14-15).
  5. The Christ will be born in Bethlehem
    • PROPHECY: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.” (Micah 5:2)
    • FULFILLMENT: “When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. ‘In Bethlehem in Judea,’ they replied, ‘for this is what the prophet has written: ‘“But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’” (Matthew 2:4-6)
  6. Jesus would become the perfect sacrifice
    • PROPHECY: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart” (Psalm 40:6-8)
    • FULFILLMENT: “Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, my God’”
      • “First he said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them’—though they were offered in accordance with the law. Then he said, ‘Here I am, I have come to do your will.’ He sets aside the first to establish the second. And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:5-10)
  7. Jesus would draw the Gentiles to himself
    • PROPHECY: “In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious” (Isaiah 11:10)
    • FULFILLMENT: “Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him. So the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’
      • “Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. ‘Sir,’ they said, ‘we would like to see Jesus’” (John 12:18-21)
  8. The Messiah would be preceded by a forerunner
    • PROPHECY: “A voice of one calling: ‘in the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain’” (Isaiah 40:3-4)
    • FULFILLMENT: “John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, ‘I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, “Make straight the way for the Lord’” (John 1:23).
  9. Jesus would be despised and rejected
    • PROPHECY: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” (Isaiah 53:3)
    • FULFILLMENT: “All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff” (Luke 4:28-29).

These prophecies take us from prior to his birth all the way to his death showing us that Jesus was the Messiah God promised all along. I believe it is important for us to focus on Jesus at Christmas and less upon Santa Claus. There are those who feel Christmas is more pagan than Christian because of a perceived connection to an ancient Roman festivals known as Saturnalia, celebrated on December 17th, and Sol Invictus, which is celebrated on December 25th. Puritans argued that some Christmas traditions were borrowed from paganism and should be rejected.

However, early Christian theologians like John Chrysostom (386 AD) wrote that Christmas was celebrated on December 25th long before any alleged pagan influences. Traditions of decorating trees, exchanging gifts, and hanging wreaths are more modern and don’t appear to have a direct historical connection to any pagan festivals. These claims of pagan connections seem to come from misinterpretations of historical sources, if not fabrications to suit an intended purpose.

Certainly, there is no direct knowledge of Jesus’ exact birthdate, but that isn’t the point. Do we need to know anyone’s birthday in order to celebrate their birth? No, of course not! There is plenty of evidence for Jesus’ existence. We know from non-Christian sources like Tacitus, a Roman historian circa 56-120 AD who spoke of Jesus in his writings; Pliny the Younger, another Roman historian circa 61-113 AD who wrote about people worshipping Jesus; and Josephus a Jewish historian circa 37-100AD who wrote a book entitled Antiquities of the Jews and included two references to Jesus in said book. Moreover there were early Christian references to Jesus including the Pauline Epistles written by Paul and the Gospels, as wells a scholarly consensus as to the existence of Jesus. If we know he existed, then we obviously ought to celebrate the birthday of the Lord and Savior of the greater majority of the globe, right? Absolutely we should, no matter what time of year we decide to do it.

I hope that you have a wonderfully blessed Christmas and the happiest of New Year’s!

The Dark Truth Behind ‘Wicked’ and Oz’s Origins

I realize this post may be controversial for those who do not have the faith that I have. If that’s you, then you can take a pass on this is post, BUT let me say that I care about your soul and that I don’t wish for anyone to spend their eternal life in hell. I pray that everyone comes to know Jesus as I do, but it is a personal choice.

The Movie “Wicked”, in theaters now, is based upon the Broadway play of the same name which is based upon the characters of L. Frank Baum. There is much most of us don’t know about these books and this man that we ought to know. For most of us our knowledge stops at the 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” starring Judy Garland. The movie is a mixture of song, dance, charm, a bit of eerie fear, and a heartwarming ending. But the author and these books carry a much darker and more evil foundation.

L. Frank Baum and his wife Maude were members of a religious sect called Theosophy. Theosophy is a religious and philosophical system that originated in the United States in the late 19th century. It is based on the writings of Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky and draws upon the European philosophies like Neoplatonism and Asian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Theosophists believe in a deeper spiritual reality that can be accessed through meditation, intuition, or revelation. He believed in the theory of elementals (invisible, vapory beings) popularized in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877), and like the Rosicrucians’ belief in the combining of God and nature, and not unlike William Butler Yeats’ (Mason and Fabian) search for a new mysticism. They believed in reincarnation, karma, and did not believe in Satan.

Further, the Baums believed that mans time on earth was but one step on the path towards enlightenment which passed through many states of consciousness and many universes. Baum believed in essentially a religion of nature. He believed each element: water, earth, fire, air could be broken down further—Air, sylphs; Water, nymphs or undines; Earth, gnomes; Fire, salamanders, for example. Then each of these could be broken down into smaller categories based upon the four states of matter: gas, liquid, solid, and energy. In his writings, science and magic are one and the same.

Women played a critical role in the belief systems of the Baums. Mrs. Baum and her mother, a radical feminist named Matilda Gage, often had seances and clairvoyants in their home. Mrs. Gage was so radical that she believed the suffragettes of her day were too conservative and she created her own suffrage organization, The Women’s National Liberal Union. Mrs. Gage was also interested in palm reading and astrology.

The Land of Oz was composed of 4 triangular pyramid shaped countries pointing inward like a Mason rose croix or a Rosicrucian cross. The “Emerald” color may have been chosen because it was Baum’s birth stone or because it is considered by some to be a stone of prophecy, which leads to another interpretation of the story. This interpretation suggests that the journey to the Emerald city is simply a journey to the center of ourselves because the Emerald City was the center of Oz. It was here that Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion would find the answers they were looking for. When the Wizard gives his trinkets to the travelers, he tells them that they had the answers all along, they just had to “look inside themselves”.

Unlike the newest adaptation of the story, Wicked, which revolves around the witches—The Wicked Witches of the East (the Black Witch) and West and the Good (White) Witch of the North and South known as Glinda, the original book is quite different. The MGM movie also took some liberties with the story. For example, there was no Professor Marvel in the book. As we know from the original story, Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the East when her house lands on her upon her arrival in Oz. The Black Witch represents the darkness of humanity which exists in all of us. Dorothy is then challenged by the Wicked Witch of the West who wants to retaliate and avenge her sister’s death. Glinda helps Dorothy to navigate around her sister along the yellow brick road to arrive safely in Emerald City to see the Wizard so that she can ask the Wizard to go home. But the Wizard requires that she first kill the Wicked Witch of the West and bring him her broom. Dorothy does as he ask by showing courage and standing up to the Wicked Witch and throwing water on her.

The story behind Wicked, however, attempts to portray a different perspective to these witches and was not written by Baum. This adaptation was based upon Gregory Macguire’s novels and it is complete rewriting of the story of the witches in an attempt to make them more relatable and likable, as if we need to like and relate to witches. The main character is the Wicked Witch of the West, now known as Elphaba. The story aims to explain the contentious relationship between Elphaba and the Wizard. The Good Witch of the North and South starts out in this story as “Galinda”, and the two are neither sisters nor friends.

Elphaba has a chip on her shoulder because of being green and being treated differently because of her green skin. Galinda, on the other hand, is considered beautiful and the popular girl in the college of magic. The revelation comes when the Wizard is discovered to be an evil man out for himself to the detriment of the green people. He manipulates the Ozian people to discriminate against the green people leading them to become called “wicked”. This all sounds like a treatise on systemic racism in America set to music, doesn’t it?

Like with most movie adaptations much from the books have been left out, and it should. The books written by Macguire are not for children, if they’re really for anyone. USA Today’s review of the books had this to say,

“The “Wicked” book by Gregory Maguire has key adult differences from the stage adaptation. One of the opening scenes is puppets having sex. When we first meet Elphaba in the book, she’s a feral infant who is muzzled after biting off people’s appendages. The book contains drinking, drugs, sexual assault, prostitution, crime and wild sex parties between humans and animals.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2024/11/26/wicked-book-series-gregory-mcguire-oz/76590427007/

There are so many problems with the Oz stories and the Baums, but what made me walk away from the stories and movie was when I discovered its connection to the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra. MK-Ultra is the CIA’s program to create various methods of mind control. One of these methods was using trauma. Trauma based mind control, also known as Monarch Programming, uses horrific mental, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to cause mental disassociation which then would create a mind controlled slave. It creates an amnesia barrier between the person’s ordinary identity and the new identity or other personality. While the CIA claims that the program ceased, there are those who believe it continues covertly under a new name.

Almost all documentation relating to MK Ultra mentions the importance of the movie Wizard of Oz in the creation of mind control objectives. One of the ways they supposedly used the Wizard of Oz to control people was to dress was the victim according to the programming use on them. To trigger a victim, they could put red shoes on someone. This would cause the victim to enter a dissociative state. Dissociation is known as “going over the rainbow”.

In the process of traumatizing the victim, drugs like LSD, cocaine, and opium were also used to aid in the dissociative process. Some people consented to the drug testing through programs at universities and in hospitals in the United States and Canada. Others were tested on without their knowledge or consent, like prisoners. Some like Cathy O’Brien have openly spoken about their expenses in this program. I recommend this YouTube video with Cathy. https://youtu.be/-ouRmUm7cM8?si=Nr9yZTIC3Bd2Y1h7 There were 144 subprojects under the MK-Ultra Project at the CIA. It would be difficult to almost impossible to know if all had been disbanded or if some continue to this day.

Knowing that stories like the Wizard of Oz and Wicked incorporate demonic and occult themes, that they have been used to torture people and children is enough for me to stay away. My father always told me that “you get out what you put in.” If you open yourself up to evil, you’re likely to get evil out at some point. That isn’t a risk that I am willing to take for myself and certainly not for my children. I hope you will stay away as well.

Have a great week!

Stop & Give Thanks & Pray

“Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name.” Psalms 100:4 NIV

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks. The election is over and we will have a new (old) president in the New Year. For over half of the country, that is terrific news and a burden has been lifted. For the others, they are unhappy, but they shouldn’t be any more worried than those over half were for the past four years were, right? After all they thought the past four years were awesome when the other over half thought it was horrible. Some of the behaviors I saw in videos after the election was over were absolutely ridiculous; adults having temper tantrums like 2-year old children. I do not recall any other time in my life seeing adults behave in this manner. What we really need to do right now is STOP! I mean really STOP! STOP all the noise, politics, bickering, division, anger, etc., and we need to GIVE THANKS for everything we have because WE HAVE A LOT TO BE THANKFUL FOR.

If you consider everything you see and hear online and on video these days, we sound like the most ungrateful nation of people on earth. We complain about the most minuscule nonsense. We have taught our children and grandchildren to complain about things we would have never been allowed to complain about because these things would’ve never been issues in our homes. Our parents and grandparents did not cater to every whim we had. They did not ask us what we wanted to eat for dinner. Our mothers and grandmothers cooked and we ate what was on the plate in front of us. We either ate for dinner or we ate for breakfast (or the next dinner); it was our choice. There was no complaining about it, or that was a butt whooping.

We also wore the clothes that were purchased for us, or that were given to us; many times those were “hand me downs” from older siblings or family members. There was no complaining about that either. You may or may not have liked your “hand me downs”. I didn’t mind mine so much because they came from my cousins who I thought were really cool. They didn’t live in the same town as me, so no one else saw them wearing those clothes. Now, if you had multiple siblings of the same gender and those clothes went through multiple kids, that could be embarrassing, but you couldn’t complain about it where your parents could hear it. You just got used to sharing…sharing everything clothes, bikes, books, everything. This just doesn’t happen today. Everyone has their own things and no one truly knows what real sacrifice is like, at least not the greater majority of this country.

For the 37.9 million (11.5%) of the US population who lives in poverty, this is not about them. We know that they know about sacrifice and about saving every penny to do what you can for your family. This is about teaching our over privileged children the real value of what they have and to respect it because from where I sit, they do not.

Recently, I was watching some videos on YouTube that reviewed videos by “influencers” on TikTok. The reviewer was criticizing the “influencers” for lying about their lifestyles in order to make money. It wasn’t news to me, but it did get me to thinking about this whole fake world that the Internet has created for “influencers” that generates millions, if not billions, of dollars of income. It truly boggles the mind because these young people create videos of fake lifestyles to sell products that they may or may not use to make money. The viewer, I assume, watches these videos believing that these “influencers” live like this, or do they really understand that the video may be false and they don’t really care? If they don’t care, what does that say about them? It all sounds like this creates, promotes, and sustains mental illness. Even more disturbing is when these videos involve families, especially those where children are forced to participate by their parents. I recall when my daughter watched a family with two children, a son and a daughter who reviewed toys, food, and games. I thought it was very strange. I thought the parents were strange. They did not have regular jobs. They had quit their jobs to YouTube full time with their children. That was strange to me. How could make money doing that, and why would you want to do that to your children? It did not seem healthy to me.

This is not healthy. All of these unhealthy lifestyles being promoted via the Internet and going to drive us further into a very dangerous place. That is why I believe it is time for us to STOP! We need to take account of what our priorities are for our families, especially our children. Somehow we have to stop promoting these fake lifestyles and start promoting what is real, what is authentic, what truly matters to the heart and soul of human beings. The election was only one part of the needed change in direction for the United States. If we do not continue to pivot and repent, taking account of all we are doing wrong, nothing will truly change. This means not just looking at what’s wrong with the nation, but also with ourselves and our individual families. Some of us will have lots of work to do, and others not so much, but we will all have work to be done. My guide is found in The Word…The Bible. Everything we need to know is found there.

As we gather around our tables this Thanksgiving, we MUST THANK GOD for all HE has done for us this year. We MUST ask him to continue to guide us in the RIGHT DIRECTION and AWAY from the dangerous path we have set ourselves on. We MUST ask for HIS protection for our families and our country and we MUST ask for HIS forgiveness for how we have gotten ourselves in this predicament. We cannot stop there, either. We MUST continue to pray and we MUST teach our children to pray and to find their strength in the Lord, not in the things of the world. Everything that this nation has comes from the blessings of the Lord, not from anything we have earned or could ever earn. Share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with your children. The more we pray, the harder the evil one will work against us, so that makes all the more important.

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” Ephesians‬ ‭6‬:‭10‬-‭17‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Happy Thanksgiving!

Forgive The Absence

I wanted to apologize for the lack of posts recently. It isn’t for not wanting to, but I have been suffering from a persistent health issue called gastroparesis. I have had this struggle periodically since 2014 when I became very ill. It was a situation I had never experienced before and my life has never been the same since.

In mid 2014, I began to feel a bit off. I wasn’t sure why. I was in my mid-40s and I knew that things start to change about that age with the body. I had my daughter in 2008 and it had been a bit rough on my body. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was something I had the back of my mind.

As the months progressed, I felt worse. It took a significant turn in late August. I felt awful. I had a migraine that lasted 3 weeks. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. When I did sleep, I was having horrific nightmares. I was living on melatonin to sleep and caffeine tablets to wake up. My appetite was gone.

In September, I went to my OB/Gyn for help. At first, he told me that he thought it was psychological and suggested that I see a psychiatrist. Let me tell you, this did not go over well and I was unhappy. He did agree to do extensive bloodwork. Three days later, he called me and apologized for his statements. He said that my TSH was 19 and my estrogen level put me in menopause. This is a significant reason for my symptoms. He put me on Synthroid immediately. I knew that it would only take a few weeks and I would feel better…except that isn’t what happened.

At the same time, I had started vomiting every time I ate. I couldn’t keep any food down. I also had a terrible cough. I would cough until the point that I would throw up. Three days after the vomiting started, diarrhea started. This continued for over two months. I went to my gastroenterologist for help. He started running tests. I had upper and lower endoscopies, both of which were normal. Every test I had came back normal. I then talked my husband into taking me to Emory University to their GI Department.

The day before Thanksgiving 2014 we drove to Atlanta to meet with a doctor in the GI department at Emory. It was not the appointment we expected to have. We met with a young female doctor. She spent the first 30 minutes of the appointment telling me that I needed a psychiatrist because I was depressed. Then, she told me that she recommended a gastric emptying test. I asked about my cough and she told me to see a pulmonologist.

We returned home and I had the gastric emptying test at our local hospital. We finally had a diagnosis…Gastroparesis. By the way, one of the symptoms of gastroparesis is a cough!! I didn’t need a pulmonologist. I was so angry that this woman had wasted my time and money to lecture me about being depressed after being in bed for 2 months, throwing up everything I ate, and gaining 45 lbs in the process, and she did not know that coughing is a symptom of gastroparesis? I wrote a long letter to her supervisor at Emory about her behavior and her lack of knowledge of her own specialization.

So thus began my struggle with a condition that I will have for the rest of my life caused by my thyroid getting so out of whack. The nerves that stimulate the muscles of the stomach to move food out of the stomach are essentially paralyzed. It takes medication to help stimulate the nerves to work. To help, the diet has to be restricted to foods that do not require long digestion time. So, no raw vegetables or fruit and cutting back on red meat (stinks because I love steak).

There are periods that I go through when my stomach works fairly well and I can eat what I want just in much smaller portions. However, like now, there are times when things are not good, and I cannot eat solid food at all. It can get so bad that I throw up everything I eat. This time I have not been throwing up because I have not been eating much in order to not throw up. I have mostly been living on water and very little food. It can take its toll on my energy level and, sometimes, my emotions. I can actually get a bit depressed and frustrated with it. Who wouldn’t?

I find it exceptionally frustrating because I gained a lot of weight in spite of the fact that I wasn’t eating anything, and I still don’t eat a lot, but because of my thyroid disorder I have no metabolism either. This year has been the worst year since 2014 for my gastroparesis, which leads me to believe that it may be getting worse. There are not many medications that help. I have tried several over the years and none of them are great and some have some yucky side effects. I am lucky to not be in a situation like many who have gastroparesis from diabetes and get to a point where they have to have feeding tubes. I hope I never get to that point.

There are some new devices that are coming into the market, but they are expensive. One of these devices is an implanted electronic muscle stimulating device. Electrodes are implanted onto the wall of the stomach and when needed the electrodes can stimulate the stomach muscles to work to aid in digestion. One of these devices runs about $30,000.00 and is not yet FDA approved, so not yet covered by insurance either, though I go to VA for my healthcare now because of the high cost of my conditions and no insurance company wanting to cover me.

So in closing, I apologize for my in ability to post regularly. It is not my intention and I hope that in the next few months I will recover and will get back to a more regular schedule.

Have a great week!

Our Traditional Ways Work

I have always thought of myself as fiercely independent. I believed that I had to be this way because of being an orphan. I never felt that I could truly trust anyone. After I met my husband Michael, this independent spirit began to wane. I used to think those Christian women who believed in submission were crazy. Why would anyone want to do that? When I married the first time, my husband and I always said that we would do things 50/50. It never worked out that way, but that’s what we said. After that marriage fell apart and I began to do soul searching and I read more of my Bible and I talked to people, got counseling, my mind slowing began to change.

I was single for eight years before I met Michael; he had been divorced and single for fourteen. I had my son from my first marriage. He had no children. I was very concerned for my son because his father was not involved at all. I needed someone who was going to be a good father and someone on whom I could depend. I began to see how God’s plan for his family made sense and that was what I wanted. I wasn’t raised to be traditional. My parents did not have a traditional marriage in the sense that my mother really ran the show more so than my father. They both disciplined me. I was far more scared of my mother than my father. My father was more affectionate and spent more time with me, in spite of the fact that he worked so much, than my mother did. Once I was in high school and college, I did not see either of them much because they traveled a lot. My parents raised me to go to college and get a job and marriage was not necessarily a life goal to aspire to because I could do it all myself and didn’t a men to take care of me or my needs.

When Michael and I met and fell in love, I was absolutely sold out on a traditional marriage because I absolutely trusted him to be a Godly husband. He has not given me any reasons not to trust that he will always make decisions in the best interest of our family and that God is at the center of it all. This is such an enormous stress relief compared to how my life was in my first marriage. But the world is changing now and we are encountering social issues that are throwing us curve balls we never imaged having to think about.

Unlike the majority of couples, we do not have conflicts about money. We don’t because, for the most part, we are in agreement on those issues. The problem we have now is that, even though our income is more now than it has ever been, costs are also more than they have ever been. Even though we should be in a situation where life should be fabulous, we feel more stressed about money now than we did years ago when we made so much less. So, I am trying to find more ways to save. Obviously, I am trying to cut expenses where I can. I try to cut unnecessary spending where I can, but you know how that goes…just when you think you’re doing great up pops an expense you were not expecting like a medical bill, or a car repair, or a vet bill. There is always something. So, you never feel like you are getting ahead.

So, now, I am learning to make some of our food at home. Trying to making things like yogurt, butter, cream cheese, sour cream, etc which can be cheaper and better for you made fresh at home instead of buying at the store. We have lost our knowledge of how to make these food items because food makers wanted to make everything for us, convince us it was cheaper and more convenient for them to make it for us, and then they poison us with their chemical concoctions. It is truly a mess we have gotten ourselves into. I remember is college I got to be friends with several international students and I had three of them over for dinner one night. My mother asked them what was the most unusual item they found in America. They all said the same thing…Dough in a can! They were shocked that we did not have freshly baked bread every day like they have in Europe. It is crazy because bread really is not that difficult to make, it is delicious, and homemade is so much better than the preservative ridden, seed oil filled grossness sold in our grocery stores. So, I am learning the skills of my grandmother and great-grandmother. This week I am learning to tinder fat for beef tallow so that I can throw out my seek oils. I made a few mistakes, but they weren’t fatal. I’ll be better on the next batch and on down the road. Gardening and other skills are on my to-do list for this year as well.

We feel the health and welfare of our family is worth the sacrifice of a little time and maybe a little money here and there. Some may save us some; some might be a tad more, but be a health benefit. Progress isn’t worth it if it’s the progress that is killing us, right? All these forever chemicals, plastics that are inside our bodies, and we wonder why we have more childhood cancer, more autism, more obesity. But the same people who protest these things are the same people who jumped on board with an unproven COVID vaccine and multiple boosters and who promote “food” made inside laboratories. The shift from calling “meat” to calling it “protein” is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. Over time, the powers that be hope you forget the word “meat” altogether and that you will eat anything called “protein”, so that means you will eat anything they put in front of you called “protein” whether it is actual “meat” protein that comes from an animal or protein that comes from insect, plant, or chemical created in a lab and you will not question it. I say, “No, I will not.” And be assured, those same powers that be will not be eating the same food as you. They will still be eating whatever they want and it will not be lab created because they are better than you.

The only way to beat their system is not to play in their system. It is to buy local and to make your own; to make as much of your own as you can and to work with your neighbors as you can. It is time to get back to 1930-1960s America where we knew our neighbors and we worked together. Women worked together gardening, picking fruits and vegetables, snapping peas, canning, making cheese, butter, sewing, working together to raise our families. This how our country survived wars and hard times. We can do it again in the face of all the craziness going on, we can do it again, but it requires an American spirit of tradition. What do you say?

Have a great week!

The Love of Reading & Writing

The new wave in education today seems to be a enormous push towards science, technology, environment or engineering (I am not sure), and mathematics. While all of these are worthwhile endeavors, I fear that the appreciation and love of our language, reading, and writing will be lost. One only need look at the decline in knowledge of grammar and punctuation over the past 20 years. Cursive and legible handwriting have disappeared completely…except in my homeschool.

As a genealogist and author, I writing and reading are my passions. Nothing thrills my heart more than to find an interest, research the topic and its issues, and then write about it. I love the construction of writing a novel. Researching the time period, place, and history of where my novel will take place is just as thrilling as writing a nonfiction, news/editorial type story. To do any writing assignment well, though, the writer must know grammar and punctuation rules. A “texting” type language exists nowhere else except in our Internet driven social media driven world. Artificial Intelligence may degrade that even further as it becomes more dominant. (A time I dread!)

It is unfortunate that the laziness of this new world is destroying our language. Punctuation is nonexistent in texting. The formality of writing a business letter is being replaced by the more informal email. As an “old” lady, I, of course, type messages in complete sentences and use appropriate punctuation (though, if the message is one sentence, I may pass on the ending punctuation). I refuse to do otherwise because I appreciate our language, as I would hope Germans, French, Dutch, etc., appreciate theirs.

I do not know what is taught these days in high school literature courses. My daughter, who is entering 10th grade in the Fall, read classic, mostly American, literature this year. She read Hawthorne, Twain, McCullers, Wells, Lee, and others. Next school year, we will read international authors to correspond with our world history course.

The greatest part of reading, in my opinion, is the ability to envision the places and people as you read the story. You can transport yourself as an invisible observer in the story as it is unfolds. As a child who spent many hours alone, reading allowed me to imagine myself as the part of a large family, to live in an exotic location, to be a princess. While you can do this while watching a movie, it isn’t the same because movies often draw conclusions where the book may not have. Movies today leave little to our imaginations, which is disheartening.

When we read books, regardless of who wrote them or where they were written or where they take place, we read the story with our own world view and perspective. A story can have hundreds of different versions depending on the reader. To me this is one of the most amazing aspects of reading and writing.

As a writer I want to describe my characters so that the reader fully understands the character and his/her importance to the story. However, an author shouldn’t go too far with description because you want to the leave room for the reader to imagine the character for himself/herself.

For our children to fully understand and appreciate the written word, they have to learn to use their imaginations. This begins at birth. We immediately begin to show children how to play, how to imagine being a mommy or a daddy, how to play “house” or “work”, how to be a superhero. This education should really never end, except that, of course, they must also learn to live in reality, but that is a topic for another blog post.

As I have watched children over the past 15 years and the changes in education, I have seen difficult subjects being forced down upon younger and younger children; children who do not yet possess the necessary skills to do that work. We know that a child’s brain goes through well defined stages of growth which do not end until around the age of 25. Children are losing their playing time. This is the time when they learn by playing. Instead, they are being forced to sit still and listen to instruction which their little bodies are not able to do. When they inevitably move around, talk, or fail to pay attention, we punish them. Later, we become aggravated because our children are not able to cope, to appropriately interact with each other, or to modify their behavior to the situation. It is because we have robbed them of the most important socializing period of their lives…pre-k to second grade.

I agree that math, science, and technology are important, but if the student cannot write in a logical, well reasoned and structured manner to communicate what they have learned about these topics, what good is it? There are no subjects in education that are not important. All of these skills and knowledge work together to create the well-rounded student. Children need to be challenged to learn the subjects that they do not like as much as they need to focus on the ones that they love. As with most situations in life, we learn far more from the accomplishments made in those difficult times than we do when things are going easy.

Challenge your children to read. Challenge them to write. Challenge them to practice their handwriting. Make it a contest with your handwriting. Show them a letter written to you from an older person and see if they can read it. Print out a document from the 19th century before printing became commonplace. Read it together. These are wonderful bonding opportunities and another way to challenge them in their education because, after all, we parents are responsible for everything they learn.

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