Toto

L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz was a member of the Theosophical Society, which is an organization based on occult research and the comparative study of religions. Baum had a deep understanding of Theosophy and, consciously or not,  created an allegory of Theosophic teachings when he wrote the Wizard of Oz.

"There is no danger that dauntless courage cannot conquer, there is not trial that a spotless purity cannot pass through; there is no difficulty a strong intellect cannot surmount."
   -  H.P. Blavatsky

Surrounded by artifices and special effects, the Wizard comes across as cruel, rude and unwise. The Wizard is in fact a stand-in for the personal God of the Christians and the Jews, the oppressive figure used by conventional religions to keep the masses in spiritual darkness: Jehova or Yahwe. It is later discovered that the Wizard is a humbug, a charlatan, who scares people into worshipping his Wizard. He surely could not help the characters complete their quest. If you read literature of Mystery schools, this point of view towards Christianity is constantly expressed.
After all is said and done, the brains, the heart and the courage needed to complete Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion’s quests were found within each one of them. Mystery Schools have always taught their students that one must rely on oneself to obtain salvation.  Throughout the story Dorothy’s dog Toto represents her “inner voice”; her intuition. Here’s a description of Toto taken from the Theosophical Society’s website:

“Toto represents the inner, intuitive, instinctual, most animal-like part of us. Throughout the movie, Dorothy has conversations with Toto, or her inner intuitive self. The lesson here is to listen to the Toto within. In this movie, Toto was never wrong. When he barks at the scarecrow, Dorothy tries to ignore him: “Don’t be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don’t talk.” But scarecrows do talk in Oz. Toto also barks at the little man behind the curtain. It is he who realizes the Wizard is a fraud. At the Gale Farm and again at the castle, the Witch tries to put Toto into a basket. What is shadow will try to block or contain the intuitive. In both cases, Toto jumps out of the basket and escapes. Our intuitive voice can be ignored, but not contained.
  In the last scene, Toto chases after a cat, causing Dorothy to chase after him and hence miss her balloon ride. This is what leads to Dorothy’s ultimate transformation, to the discovery of her inner powers. The balloon ride is representative of traditional religion, with a skinny-legged wizard promising a trip to the Divine. Toto was right to force Dorothy out of the balloon, otherwise she might never have found her magic. This is a call for us to listen to our intuition, our gut feelings, those momentary bits of imagination that appear seemingly out of nowhere.”

Henri Cartier Bresson

Great Article about Henri

First learned of this brilliant soul in Christa Parravani's class at Keene State. His idea of the decisive moment fascinates me, and anyone who has ever seen a perfect picture but failed to capture it with their photographic device in time will know the bittersweet emotions associated with this idea.

 

Lynx III

http://www.westernjournalism.com/a-message-from-one-of-the-attorneys-at-obamas-eligibility-proceedings-in-atlanta/
A Message From One Of The Attorneys At Obama’s Eligibility Proceedings In Atlanta

http://www.activistpost.com/2012/01/busted-monsanto-abusing-illegal-workers.html
Busted: Monsanto Abusing Illegal Workers in ‘Slave-Like’ Conditions

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/01/19/lausd-students-roundly-reject-healthier-school-lunch-menu/
LAUSD Students Roundly Reject Healthier School Lunch Menu

http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2012/01/i_am_not_a_criminal_unless_big_pharma_sez_so.php#more
I Am Not A Criminal... Unless Big Pharma Sez So

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RNKV0pLEMc
Ron Paul: I'd VETO the Indefinite Detention Act (NDAA)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002241517
The Pig in the XL Pipeline

http://theintelhub.com/2011/03/30/secret-presidential-chemtrail-budget-uncovered-exceeds-billions-to-spray-populations-like-roaches/
Secret Presidential Chemtrail Budget Uncovered – Congress Exceeds Billions To Spray Populace Like Roaches

http://americanpolicy.org/2011/03/31/agenda-21-in-one-easy-lesson/
Agenda 21 In One Easy Lesson

http://www.newswithviews.com/Marquardt/kathleen103.htm
AGENDA 21: THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

http://www.dailypaul.com/208794/cnn-gop-advertiser-list-and-sample-letter
CNN GOP Debate Advertiser List and sample letter

What You Didn't Know About John Wilkes Booth & Jesse James

I found this article about a year ago and got a kick out of it:

The outlaw Jesse Woodson James killed the actor John Wilkes Booth at the Grand Avenue Hotel in Enid, Oklahoma in 1903 after Booth continually reneged on his oath to never talk about his secret membership in the Masonic-oriented Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) and to never mention the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

John Wilkes Booth did not die in Garrett’s tobacco barn in 1865 as is commonly supposed. Booth was saved by his brother Knights and spirited immediately down into Texas after the assassination. He lived and worked for many years in Granbury under the alias ‘John St. Helen.’

His own granddaughter Izola Forrester affirmed in her 1937 book This One Mad Act that Booth had been aided and abetted in his escape from Washington by the KGC. It was common knowledge in the Booth family that he never died in the barn...

 Read more!

Can you say... bribery?

Hollywood Moguls Stopping Obama Donations Because of President's Piracy Stand

        Internet sites on their SOPAStrike may be conducting a blackout but Hollywood studios are conducting a boycott. I’ve learned that Hollywood studio chiefs individually and as a group are drawing a line in the sand on the piracy issue with the Obama re-election campaign and refusing to give any more donations.  
        The blowup came after President Obama on Saturday dashed moguls’ hopes that he would remain on the sidelines in the dispute over the U.S. House Of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act. In a posting on the White House web site, three of the Obama administration’s top officials for Internet and intellectual property matters said that  they share many of the concerns that the Internet community has about the Hollywood-supported bills. The trio said that they “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” 
         Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Special Assistant to the President Howard Schmidt tried to soften the blow to Hollywood by acknowledging that that online piracy is “a serious problem that requires a  serious legislative response.” They added that they plan to host an online event “to get more input” on the matter. 
         But Hollywood moguls told me they “didn’t know it was going to be as over the top as it was” and took this as a declaration of war. “We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one studio chief explained to me. “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right. But Obama went against it. I’m personally not going to support him anymore and not give a dime anymore,” another movie mogul who’s also a well-known Obama supporter told me this week.
         So far the most outspoken mogul against the Obama administration on this issue has been Rupert Murdoch who on Saturday told his new Twitter audience: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.” But I’ve learned that other moguls privately are having “direct and personal conversations” with Obama and his administration and the Democratic Party. 
         Several moguls have informed Obama’s newly anointed Hollywood re-election liason to the entertainment community Nicole Avant and her husband who is helping her, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos, that they are pulling out of major fundraisers planned over the next few days and won’t participate in any more headed by Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (whom they see as in the pocket of the Internet giants like Google).
          One of those events is a major January 31st fundraiser attended by First Lady Michelle Obama at the Beverly Hills home of Avant and Sarandos. There’s another LA fundraiser for the First Lady on February 1st. And both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be coming for more fundraisers here in coming weeks.  The moguls are telling Avant and Sarandos to count them out. “Now is when all the fundraises are starting. But everyone in my position is really pissed. It’s a real conundrum,” one mogul told me.
         Alarmed by the mogul boycott, Sarandos sent a personal plea to the Hollywood studio chiefs over the weekend begging them to continue supporting the Obama re-election campaign even though he knows they are disappointed with the Obama administration’s position on the piracy bills. Several moguls, in response, ”sent back word saying ‘Fuck You’ basically,” one insider tells me, expressing how they feel used and abused by the President despite their campaign contributions. I’ve learned that Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman Jim Gianopulos even sat down and wrote his good friend (and fellow Greek-American) Sarandos an articulate note over the weekend the gist of which said that he and his fellow moguls won’t give any more money if they keep getting taken for granted. One insider told me, “Jim explained that this notion that the Hollywood community will continue giving regardless of its business interests has to be taken into consideration. The message was, ‘Don’t expect Hollywood to show up and say ‘Who do I write the check to’ anymore.”
         The moguls are reminding Obama et al that, in the words of one studio chief, “God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests. There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood. The issue at hand — piracy — is a legitimate concern. But Google and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment industry by saying we’re trying to shut down the Internet just because we don’t want them to advertise pirated movies. As for other claims, we make 24. We don’t make national security problems.”
         The boycott even extends to many of the moguls’ families who also are big Obama and Democratic Party donors. The situation is serious because many moguls and/or their families comprise Obama’s top bundlers in the TV/movie/music biz. Bundlers as defined by opensecrets.org are “people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who’s willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big ‘bundle’.” These donors direct more money to the candidates than anyone else. As of September 2011 these 357 elite bundlers were directing at least $55,900,000 for Obama’s re-election efforts — money that has gone into the coffers of his campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee, according to opensecrets.org. That figure by now has significantly increased and will continue to do so.

Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior

Excerpt from April 4, 1967 speech in New York City titled, "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence"
 

"It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops."

Lynx II

http://www.naturalnews.com/034567_TSA_body_scanners_cancer.html
Radiation Doctor Admits TSA Naked Body Scanners Can Cause Cancer

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2012/01/05/ron-paul-comments-on-obama-%E2%80%98recess%E2%80%99-appointments/
Ron Paul Comments on Obama ‘Recess’ Appointments

http://laist.com/2012/01/06/who_left_behind_more_trash_occupy_l.php
Who Left Behind More Trash: Occupy Los Angeles or the Rose Parade?

http://artopia444.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/mk-ultra-tv-hollywood/
MK Ultra’s [Not So Secret] Relations With Hollywood, & the Darkening of TV

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x88zjp_hulu-an-evil-plot-to-destroy-the-wo_shortfilms
Hulu, an evil plot to destroy the world commercial - with Alec Baldwin

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/sopa-is-a-symbol-of-the-movie-industrys-failure-to-innovate/250967/
SOPA Is a Symbol of the Movie Industry's Failure to Innovate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dflRiO3fJfw&feature=player_embedded
Ron Paul Interview On John King USA 01/06/12

Venice & Touch of Evil

Ever since I moved to Los Angeles I have enjoyed spending time in Venice Beach. Something about the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica mountains as the backdrop to this open air market of artists and local vendors, skaters, crazies, graffiti, Rip Cronk murals... makes this place to me one of the coolest places in America. 

How did such a place come to be?

According to the Venice Historical people, Abbot Kinney, tobacco magnate, won a flip of a coin contest for land development on the Westside of Los Angeles. For some odd reason he chose the marshy Ballona Wetlands side, and although others mocked him, the man had a vision. 

Wiki:

When Venice of America opened on July 4, 1905, Kinney had dug several miles of canals to drain the marshes for his residential area, built a 1,200-foot (370 m)-long pleasure pier with an auditorium, ship restaurant, and dance hall, constructed a hot salt-water plunge, and built a block-long arcaded business street with Venetian architecture. Tourists, mostly arriving on the "Red Cars" of the Pacific Electric Railway from Los Angeles and Santa Monica, then rode Venice's miniature railroad and gondolas to tour the town. But the biggest attraction was Venice's mile-long gently sloping beach. Cottages and housekeeping tents were available for rent.

This was the great era of amusement piers which lasted throughout the 1900s to this day, with the Santa Monica Pier still in existence. Although it really has nothing on what the original piers had. Okay there is a roller coaster and an aquarium that somehow is always closed whenever I try to go. And you can get your name on a piece of rice!

Click Here to redirect to historic maps of Venice!

Love this link, gives you a great idea of how many canals there were!

Alot of the street names were Italian influenced. I have read that Washington Boulevard used to be called Leona street. So why did the names change? Sometime in the mid 20s it was proposed that Venice be annexed to the city of Los Angeles. Although locals were against it, people living in Los Angeles apparently moved to Venice so they could influence the vote. They also later voted on filling in almost all of the canals! Bummer dude.

In 1929, as Venice of America fell into decline, oil was discovered in the peninsula. A decade later, the landscape had been completely pillaged, with more than 400 oil wells puncturing the built environment. Drilling and spillage further polluted the already abandoned and clogged canals. Los Angeles had neglected Venice so long that, by the 1950s, it had become the "Slum by the Sea." 

With the exception of new police and fire stations in 1930, the city spent little on improvements after annexation. The city did not pave Trolleyway (Pacific Avenue) until 1954 when county and state funds became available. Low rents for run-down bungalows attracted predominantly European immigrants, and young counterculture artists, poets and writers. 

The Beat Generation hung out at the Gas House on Ocean Front Walk and at Venice West Cafe on Dudley. This post-apocalyptic setting became a perfect fit for Orson Wells' border-noir cinematic masterpiece Touch of Evil. But, what may come as a surprise to many, the oil industry actually flourished in Venice until the 1970's.

Something else that came out of Venice Beach

Fast forward 40 years, now there are no more oil wells, just million dollar condos on what are the last remaining Venice canals!

It's makes a very interesting day to go to the Oceanfront walk in Venice, take in the ever changing graffiti park, watch the people, look at all the wares and paintings and rocks and bones for sale, see all of the wild street performers, smell the ocean wind, and witness the majesty of the Santa Monicas as a backdrop for it all.

The amusement, bohemian, slum vibe is still there, intermingling with the last 106 years of evolution that all started with a flip of a coin.

Doing a Background Check on CNN

Via Economic Policy Journal:

Since CNN broadcasters seem so intent on looking back decades into promo letters and newletters put out by one of Ron Paul's organizations,when everyone admits Ron Paul did not write the letters, lets take a look at the background of some of those affiliated with CNN. It's as elitist as you can get, with strong ties to the CIA recruiting ground, Yale University

Read more...

Agent Orange in your salad

(NaturalNews) Residents of a small West Virginia town near a Monsanto chemical production plant have filed a class action lawsuit against the agri-giant for pollution caused by the decades-long production of 2,4,5-T, a chemical compound that represents about half of the infamous Agent Orange herbicide. At the very same time, the Dow Chemical Company is seeking government deregulation of a new genetically-modified (GM) variety of corn resistant to 2,4-D, the other half of Agent Orange.

Agent Orange is the same herbicide chemical weapon that the US government sprayed over agricultural land in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and that has been banned since the 1970s. Nearly a half million people were killed, and another half million children born with birth defects, as a result of the mass murder sprayings conducted by the US government and military.

 Learn More...

Also, if you have yet to see the documentary "The World According to Monsanto", check it out!!

WATCH The World According to Monsanto

The first time I saw it it really opened my eyes to the global implications of the company's agenda.

Did you know the effects of Monsanto GM cotton have created a "suicide belt" in India?

Random good things that happened in 2011

Video Stumble:

Thought this was a pretty wild clip show!