Diamonds Under Your Nose

I like this article by Oliver DeMille.
http://www.tjed.org/resources/newsletter/december-2010-inspire/

It's about the power of doing the little things.
Here is a good quote from it:
"Find the little things in your life, the things too small to demand your urgent attention, the ones that too often go undone because they are so easy to dismiss. That’s where your power is. That’s the “tipping point” in your life. List them. Do them. Watch your life drastically change."

Quotes

I have come across a few priceless quotes lately.

I'll start with a serious one from "Not Becoming My Mother, & other things she taught me along the way," by Ruth Reichl:
"Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge."

I agree with this statement. When people have confidence in themselves, when they are comfortable in their own skin, then it shows in their demeanor and they way they carry themselves and take care of themselves.
However, the other side of the coin is that when people act graciously, that makes them more beautiful, too. You can see someone you think is gorgeous, but then you see that they act like a jerk and they suddenly don't seem so attractive anymore.


This other quote is from the NaNoWriMo welcome letter. It just makes me chuckle:
"The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse."
How right they are!
That's right folks, one complete week of this month already gone and I foolishly signed up to write a 50,000 word novel before it is over! What was I thinking!? Well now I'm thinking I sure have neglected my blog for a long time. I didn't stick to my goal of writing once or twice a month and now I've set an even loftier goal.
Asi es la vida!

Nutrition Quote

"...[S]oil depletion and years of overfertilizing our soils have resulted in nutrient-depleted food. That's why I recommend a good multivitamin-mineral source for everyone.
Many people need more than the current Recommnded Daily Allowances (RDAs) for optimal health. Here's why: The RDAs for vitamins were developed to keep large populations from getting gross deficiency diseases. RDAs were developed only after large-scale refining of flour became the norm, and deficiency diseases began to affect entire groups of people who no longer ate whole foods. The RDAs do not address individual biological variation. For one person, 80 mg of vitamin C might be optimal; for another, 1,000 mg perday works better. Our nutritional needs are as individual as our fingerprints."
-Christiane Northrup, M.D.

Latter-Day Ruth

[Update: contact info for the writer/producer of Latter-Day Ruth is in the comments]

We used to go to my Grandparents' house every Sunday after church. We would have a yogurt cup full of popcorn and another yogurt cup of root beer. And we would listen to records of LDS music. I loved all of the music of "Saturday's Warrior," "My Turn On Earth," and some songs from "Latter-Day Ruth." The former two are available on iTunes and have been released on video and DVD, but the latter is nowhere to be found.
I would surely like to hear those songs again. Snippets from them have been surfacing in my memory lately.

"Dream - while there's time for dreaming,
Live - and don't forget it's meaning,
Life - goes on, it's what we're after,
Laugh - and don't forget your brother,
Work - and you'll grow old, God willing,
Now - once more and keep repeating,
The show of life goes on."

Strangely, I've never seen the actual musical, only listened to the record. Anyone out there in the world in possession of it on film and able to resurrect it ?

My sister has memories of an early Mormon made movie of a Dad who was severely overweight and depressed, maybe he lost his job or something, I don't know, but he decides he wants to die, but he can't commit suicide, because then his wife wouldn't get the insurance money, so he decides that he'll cause himself a heart attack by running. So, he goes out running one day and pretty much runs until he thinks he's going to die and passes out. But, he doesn't die, so he tries again the next day and the next. Pretty soon, he realizes that he's starting to feel better and turns his life around and improves his health.
Anyone know what that movie is called?

"The Coming Aristocracy" by Oliver DeMille

The following quote actually comes from this article, also by Oliver DeMille:
Vampires As Aristocrats?

"There really is a difference between those who deeply know the classics and those who don’t. History is clear on this point. When only a few really know the classics, an aristocracy always dominates the people. This upper class controls, oversees, manipulates and lives off the blood, sweat and labor of the regular people.

When, in contrast, many study and apply the classics, they elect and oversee their leaders and vigilantly replace them when needed — freedom is maintained and flourishes. It is really that simple."

The Prussian Connection with Our Modern Schools

Best to have John Taylor Gatto explain it, although he refers to many other sources:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7d.htm

I especially like footnote #3.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto

"...The modern schools we attend were the result of a 'revolution' engineered between 1905 and 1930." (prologue, p. xviii)


"Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, heavily subsidized university chairs, researchers, and school administrators, actually spent more money on forced schooling's early years than did the government. Just two men, Carnegie and Rockefeller, were themselves spending more as late as 1915. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of 'modern schooling was constructed without any public participation, or even much public knowledge. Motives were complex, but it will clear your head wonderfully to listen to what Rockefeller's General Education Board thought the mission should be. Its statement occurs in multiple forms, this one taken from a 1906 document called Occasional Letter Number One:
'In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [of intellectual and moral education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educations, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen - of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
In other words, they didn't want brains or talent, just obedience."


I just keep shaking my head at every paragraph.

It was deliberate to create a school system that would produce workers who would not think too deeply and therefore be easy to manage and who would consume more.


Another quote from the book is of Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, speaking to an audience of businessmen in New York City in 1909: "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
Gatto goes on to comment, "Forgoing the privilege of education was not a matter of choice, which probably explains why Wilson's remarks were not broadcast to the common public but were made behind closed doors."

It is just maddening that this system was created by a handful of elite people and then enforced by the government as compulsory. And now three or four generations later people can't imagine an alternative to it! We are scared to jump off the conveyor belt, because that is all we know! We laugh at a liberal arts education because it won't prepare you for a JOB. The joke says,
Q: What does a Liberal Arts graduate say?
(update: I found the joke here)

Of this book, Michael P. Farris, Chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said, "John Taylor Gatto has forcefully presented the case that...a people who believe in freedom will never emerge from a system that starts with coercion."