Category Archives: Family

History of the Frankfurt School

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | September 04, 2022

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory

Photograph taken in Heidelberg, April 1964, by Jeremy J. Shapiro at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.

Removed from YouTube, reposted here on BitChute…

Note: Original removed from YouTube: History of the Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism [Full] – YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRrPhXhNDX0

Feigning Our Shock and Horror at Netflix’s ‘Cuties’

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | September 12, 2020

So we are having a big kerfuffle over the Netflix’s film ‘Cuties’ as though this is without precedent.  Au contraire!  Before ‘Cuties’ we had:

  • 1976 film: Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old prostitute working at a 42nd Street brothel in New York, in the film ‘Taxi Driver
  • 1978 film: Brooke Shields ‘Pretty Baby‘- soft core child porn
  • 1980 film: Brooke Shields ‘The Blue Lagoon‘ – soft core child porn
  • 1994 film: Natalie Portman ‘Léon: The Professional‘ – Unusual relationship between Leon and Mathilda, a 12-year-old girl.
  • 1997 film ‘Lolita’ based on a 1955 novel written by Vladimir Nabokov of the same name detailing a sexual relationship between a middle-aged man and a 12-year-old girl.
  • 1999 film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ where Leelee Sobieski played a jailbait prostitute, Milich’s daughter.

And many foreign movies push the envelope farther.

    • 1977 Italy and West Germany –  Eva Ionesco in Maladolescenza – child porn
    • 2017 Argentinian film “Desire,” which opens with a scene involving a young girl having her first orgasm.
    • 2020 Austria and Germany – ‘The Trouble With Being Born‘ 10-year-old android and her “Daddy”

Of course this list is only a small part of mainstream’s exploitation of child sexuality.   So can we at least say ‘Cuties’ sexualizing children is nothing new?  Add to this all the kiddie beauty pageants across America sexualizing kids and you can see the sexualization of children is widespread, systemic and nothing new.

And it is historic

As far back as July 1885 The Pall Mall Gazette published “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” written by William Thomas Stead:  a series of newspaper articles on child prostitution in England.   Stead even purchased a 13 year old girl to aid in his research.

More on ‘The Maiden Tribute’ can be found here:  On the matter of William Thomas Stead …

Wikipedia: “Prostitution of children dates to antiquity. Prepubescent boys were commonly prostituted in brothels in ancient Greece and Rome. According to Ronald Flowers, the “most beautiful and highest born Egyptian maidens were forced into prostitution…and they continued as prostitutes until their first menstruation.” Chinese and Indian children were commonly sold by their parents into prostitution. Parents in India sometimes dedicated their female children to the Hindu temples, where they became “devadasis”. Traditionally a high status in society, the devadasis were originally tasked with maintaining and cleaning the temples of the Hindu deity to which they were assigned (usually the goddess Renuka) and learning skills such as music and dancing. However, as the system evolved, their role became that of a temple prostitute, and the girls, who were “dedicated” before puberty, were required to prostitute themselves to upper-class men. The practice has since been outlawed but still exists.”

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On the matter of man, woman and the family

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | November 12, 2019

It’s been my observation that women are at the heart of our culture and civilization. Women magically transform a house into a home and sit at the seat of a healthy, happy family –which is a fundamental building block of what I consider society. So from my perspective, where the women goes; so goes society.

Now in the patriarchal society of Western Christendom, there have been many abuses against women which our modern societies have attempted to correct. From my perspective, this attempted correction has been an abysmal failure on many counts but not all. In our rush for egalitarian perfection, we have ignored the fundamental physical, mental and emotional differences between male and female; and many have wondered why we should value the physically stronger male at all.

Not too long ago, man’s successful interface with the world depended on the physical as much –or more– than the intellectual; and so, it was up to the physically stronger male to offer safety and protection to the physically weaker female. For this arrangement, there was a contract: the contract said that if the male would protect the female, the female would build a home and provide children for the home. In today’s technical society, we still need the physical strength of the male for certain tasks, but this value proposition has been greatly depreciated.

So on the road to correct our patriarchal abuses, we have gained some parity in terms of self-determination for the female, but we have lost much in terms of our fundamental building block of society we call the family. We have lost a fundamental respect for the position the matriarch holds in building a strong, happy and healthy family. We have thrown her out into the streets to fend for herself and we have turned her into an object of sex for sex’s sake only. Innocence and virtue no longer have lasting value, but to be consumed on demand; and to be degraded. Her fertile womb from which the family springs has been turned into a death chamber for our next generation. Our naive and short-sighted rush for equality convinced us infanticide is a reasonable choice for family planning.

We have lost our wholesomeness, our innocence and our commitment to the idea of one man, one woman and one family.

We have shirked our responsibility; we fail to take ownership of our actions, and so we are turned over to our own devices and avarice.

Like cackling hyenas over a recent kill, we feast at the hoax sold to us as sexual freedom and equality, we choose death over life, debauchery over love and are left howling into the vast existential abyss of meaninglessness — without our families.

The Baby Choice

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | Sep 24, 2016

The inversion of language

The inversion of language

My college philosophy teacher was and probably still is an atheist, yet he was an amazingly brilliant teacher … one of my best. Despite his lack of faith or belief in things unseen or unproven by his deductive method, he was staunchly anti-abortion. He reasoned as did I that once you minimize or devalue life at one end of the spectrum (very young) what logically will prevent you from minimizing it at the other end (very old); and once so done, one’s foot is squarely placed on the proverbial slippery slope. And where does this slope lead? Well it leads to further adjustments at either or both ends. So if we have scarce resources —which we always do– the value of a person prior to being productive for society would be less than say a person of working age and likewise the value of an older person incapable of vigorous work would be less valuable. So at some point, this logic trip leads us to the conclusion of stratification of value based on age; such that a society would be more interested in investing and/or saving the life of someone between the age of 18 and 35 say. Outside this range, you are less valuable and therefore on your own; or possibly a candidate for post-birth abortion. In fact this is already occurring. We have death panels with Obamacare and recent opinion polls on college campuses show a growing approval of post-birth abortion up to age five if it would save jobs. So there you have it. Ideas have power and they have consequences that on first blush you may not have even considered.

If you are religious, you can find many persuasive arguments against abortion from the pulpit; but if you are not religious, these arguments are unimpressive, unconvincing and annoying.  If you believe that there is no creator, and that we are just the end result of eons of random successful genetic mutations originating from a primordial soup, the idea of a fetus being just a blob of cells like your liver or spleen– to be removed at will when necessary or convenient– is intellectually reasonable if not entirely emotionally satisfying.  The non-religious would naturally wonder what the big fuss is all about and rightfully feel these religious nuts are encroaching on “my reproductive rights!”   Amazingly, however, faith has found a place in the hearts of the faithless…once the fetus is beyond the birth canal, umbilical cord cut and fetus viable; it somehow magically attains full rights of an individual human being and is so named.   This is part of a long list of “well-established” facts that comprise the credo of the secular world.  They reason that perhaps life may begin a bit earlier than this, but not by much.  To make things more confusing, we are told that no one really knows when life begins anyway; so we can now use this fuzzy construct to smudge any clear demarcation and add confusion to the ill-trained mind.

What kind of barbarian would deny a woman the right to control her own body or her right to practice birth control as she sees fit?   And what about rape, incest and the mother’s life or the quality of life of the infant due to poverty, genetic irregularities, malformations or congenital maladies?  Or you wanted a boy and not a girl or it’s just not convenient just now.  Surely you must see the logic of allowing women to abort their fetuses?   And, to combat the religious nuts, there are websites dedicated to proving that abortion is biblical just in case you are not so sure about all this Deity stuff.  So what’s the big deal?  The non-believer has every angle covered.  It’s just a medical procedure performed by a doctor and his patient.

So, if we are to make any headway on this debate, we have two choices:  we can convert everyone on the planet to agree with our particular religious views—unlikely– or we can take a logical, scientific view upon which believers and non-believers can agree.

So what is a fetus?  Is it a blob of cells?  Yes and no.  Is it a weed or a flower, trash or treasure? A series of electrochemical reactions or a blessing?  I think we can agree that the term fetus is a cold, disinterested name given to a very young human.  It is not a dog.  It is not a cat and it is not a liver or an abscessed tooth to be pulled or a hair or finger nail to be cut.  It is something different.  It depends on the mother for sustenance but it is not part of the mother and does not share its DNA with any other cell in the mother’s body.  Every cell in the Mother’s body has the same DNA as every other cell in the Mother’s body except the fetus or baby which resides within the mother’s womb…there by no fault of its own. Helpless, nature’s most vulnerable.  The baby possesses some DNA from the Father and some from the Mother but woven together in a very unique way.   No two siblings are exactly alike even identical twins differ in terms of gene expression and space and time…and none possess the same combination of DNA as the Mother.

So I think we can safely say that the fetus is not part of the Mother’s body in any logical since unless you also consider the male’s penis part of the mother’s body during coitus and could be aborted as well if not attached to a legally defined separate human.  But such conclusions illustrate the foolishness of the abortionists logic more than my crassness.  And we can safely say that the fetus is a young human though we may disagree if it is alive or not. Since we have no good definition of life this can be problematic.  Some viruses defy our definition of life by many accounts; however, most of us can tell the difference between a virus and a rock yet we get confused when discussing a fetus.

For the non-believer none of this may matter much anyway since the pain to the little human is short –if at all– and it benefits the greater good of the collective to reduce the population, but you must admit that this is a little more consequential than getting a tooth removed or a haircut and there may be some ethical question about killing an innocent life.  And for the agnostic or the ethically challenged… if perchance there is a Creator, I would imagine this creator might be just a little bit pissed at a people who chose of their own free will to pass a law that has resulted in the death of over 58 million of His most innocent ones.

Additional Reading from ClearNFO:  Opus 014: The Hoax of materialism

Sources:

The Three Graces

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | July 26, 2016

File this under productivity.

David Brown

David Brown

As a parent of four, I have always marveled at the potential my children represented. My youngest is now 17, but as a young parent, I thought of how I might best influence their successes and the enjoyment of their lives. My childhood successes and enjoyments sustained me through some difficult times and frightful events that were hidden in my future. So as an adult, I reflect on my childhood to draw on experiences that might help guide me to be a better parent. I realize that many of my youthful experiences might seem ordinary, but at the time had significant long-term impacts and benefits for me personally. Some of these experiences included my immersion in music, art and literature. I can never forget these wonderful times or how they have improved the enjoyment of my life ever since.

So when I posted a beautiful picture of the ‘Three Graces’ (below) on Facebook, I was pleasantly surprised to read Marty Lawrence’s response below my picture. Marty put words to my enjoyment of this great work through a simple, short poem; bringing me instantly back to some of the best memories of my cherished childhood. This is the power of poetry and the power of art.

The Three Graces

1831, by Jean-Jacques Pradier - Musée du Louvre, Paris

1831, by Jean-Jacques Pradier – Musée du Louvre, Paris

The three graces said thus
Come sing, dance with us.
By our beauty be charmed.
We bring joy, never harm.
Mirth, splendor, good cheer
Abound when we’re near.
Come sing, dance with us,
Come sing, dance with us.

–Marty Lawrence from ‘The Queens of Song’ © 2005

Now to continue this story, my wife was a full-time mom and all our children are mostly grown; but I still remember those very special moments when I would sing, play the guitar and read to them at bedtime.  These were very special times for me and for my kids.    I believe this had a positive impact on their lives.  I know it did on mine.   In today’s economy, where both parents work full-time, it can be difficult to find the time, energy and resources to spend time with our children on a regular basis. If major gaps creep into this quality time, we can grow apart, and lose that special connection and influence; so I was happy to discover Marty had put her considerable talents to good use: Marty put together some excellent resources that she originally created for her God Child, Willow.  Marty drew upon her creative background to assemble some fun tools parents can use now with their children.   I’m told that these resources have had a great impact on Willow and so I present some of them here for your enjoyment and consideration.

A few examples from Marty’s poARTry

blue dancers garden still life

About Marty…

Marty Lawrence

Marty Lawrence

Martha (Marty) Lawrence was born in Dunmore, PA; she is one of seven children born to Dr. & Mrs. Salvatore Lawrence. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a minor in Philosophy from Marywood University in Scranton, PA.

While living in Northeast PA, she was co-owner and artistic director for The Dance Ensemble, a small semi-professional dance company with dance schools located in Scranton and Moscow, PA.

Marty is the author of P&Q’s Colorful Journey through the Garden of Good Manners (music by Ron Baltz & illustrations by Cortney Tucker), and poARTry, a collection of children’s poems inspired by great works of art. Her supposition is: “The Arts introduce children to beauty and truth and it is the Arts which make us truly human.”

Currently she resides in Jacksonville, FL and works in human resources and payroll for Frito-Lay.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of either collection, Marty can be contacted via email: martylawrence@comcast.net

 

Homosexuality and Chimerism, Rethinking Our DNA

by KRISTINA BRUCECutting the Gordian Knot | July 30, 2015

Science is full of “Eureka!” moments. Why is something so obvious being ignored?

It has perplexed me for a number of years now that the scientific community has not come to the conclusion that homosexuality is predominately genetically based. It doesn’t require an advanced degree in reproductive genetics to connect the dots and come to a conclusion which would be relatively simple with today’s technology to confirm.

DNAI became aware of the possibility of proving a genetic basis for sexual orientation in 1991, after reading the work of Dr. Simon LaVey; a Cambridge and Harvard educated neuroscientist who had shown anatomical differences in the hypothalami of deceased homosexual men who had succumbed to A.I.D.S.. His findings demonstrated that the hypothalami of the gay men studied were consistently the same size of a female.  The study had a small sample group, because of course there just aren’t that many gay men offering up their corpses for necropsies on a daily basis. The study was derided by many in the scientific community and not a tremendous amount of attention was given to it as the years went by. About a decade ago though I had my own eureka moment when I learned more about genetics and the existence of chimerism, mosaicism, vanishing twins and the existence of even microchimerism between mothers, their children and even transplant recipients. It didn’t take long after learning about these naturally occurring phenomena to put 2 and 2 together.

The vast majority of homosexuality is likely the result of chimerism.

I will try to break it down in as few words as possible how chimerism is most likely the basis of non-traditional sex orientation or sexual identity.

Not everyone is running around with just one set of DNA. Nope, many of us unknowingly carry blue prints from not just one plan but two and sometimes even more individuals. How does this happen? Well it’s pretty interesting. Many times women produce more than one egg during ovulation. As a matter of fact, many pregnancies are multiple para in the beginning, it’s just that not very many second or third eggs are viable and don’t make it to implantation. So when these other embryos break apart on their little trip down the fallopian tube, cells from the demised gamete can come in contact with a viable one. When this occurs, often times the viable gamete absorbs and incorporates the DNA of the non-viable twin into its own structure. It’s why you see people occasionally express these traits as an odd colored eye or a shock of blonde hair in a scalp dominated by brunette. Most times it’s not noticeable at all because where this DNA has been incorporated isn’t seen. There are cases of women whose reproductive organs are not their own but that of an unborn twin. Imagine going to have genetic testing to see if your children are a match for a kidney transplant only to find that you’re not a genetic match with your child. Then being told that they are only a close relative because the ovaries which produced them belonged to your unborn sister. This was the case for one 52-year-old woman suffering from renal failure. Read the case study here. There have been multiple cases discovered in recent years of mothers who have given birth to the children of their own unborn twin as in the case of Lydia Fairchild.

How to recognize a chimera? Most times you can’t.

Animals born in large litters are more chimeric than humans. Cats are a good example of this. Male calico cats and male tortoise colored cats are chimeras. They’re expressing the female coat patterns but retain the sex organs of the dominant male DNA. In humans sometimes you’ll see subtle things like dark patches of skin which tan differently than other body parts, elaborate mosaic patterns of different colored skin and even the occasional supernumerary nipple. Some of them are striking to look at.

Read the full article at Cutting the Gordian Knot.

What’s it all about?

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | May 17, 2015

David Brown

David Brown

There is something philosophers call ‘ontological knowledge’ that is also called innate knowledge. This knowledge lies beneath the critical thinking and reason realm (see ClearNFO: The structure supporting cherished beliefs…). We can offer up excuses and explanations and generate descriptions that seduce our vaulted egos into believing we have conquered a fact or two, providing thereby, some sort of understanding or wisdom; yet all this cognitive effort turns out insufficient and unsatisfying when dealing with the ontological realm.  The ontological deals with the feelings of love for one’s spouse of many years and the comfort, trust and effortless commitment that interweaves its tapestry, bonding the relationship. This realm also includes the birth or adoption of your first child; and for me, my pure joy and amazement and the miracle of my first grandchild … this is what I wrote when my beautiful Kylee B was born…

Yesterday had to go down in my life as a perfect day…(October 7, 2010 at 6:48am)
My beautiful 19 year old daughter had her first baby and my first grand baby yesterday.  For those into stats… she was born at 3:02 PM, 20.25 inches long and weighed in at a whopping 7.1 lbs.  Both the mother and the child are doing very well.  My daughter had a very quick and easy labor and the child was born healthy and beautiful.  The hospital was perfect.  The room was very large, comfortable and well equipped with all necessary amenities including chairs, a large sofa, TV, CD/VCR Player, Refrigerator, etc.  The mother and child never had to move from the birthing room and the family was left alone to admire and get to know our new addition in privacy, peace, quiet and comfort.   Interestingly the new baby was cleaned up and placed skin to skin on the mother’s bosom…what an incredible way to bond!  In the other birthings I’ve attended, the child is whisked away from the mother into a cold room all by its self. Both families were in attendance for the entire event.  It was very obvious to this observer that this special gift from God was born into two awesome families who will surround and protect and love and cherish our new addition.

So, what’s it all about? The ‘it’ here is life, and It’s about the family. It’s as simple as that. Why? Because you can only have so many Ferraris, summer homes, iPhones, iPads, etc. And for me, there is no success that can compensate for failure in the home.

Am I here to make your feel bad or jealous or to envy my perfect life or my perfect relationship? Not at all for my life is not perfect and my history is strewn with failures, heartbreaks and disappointments that would likely curl your toenails and straighten your hair. My intent rather is to communicate what I have learned based on my failures and successes.

Am I here to micromanage your life and tell you how to live or what is important to you? Not at all. I would never be so presumptuous as to believe that I have all the answers or that my truth is immutable; yet for me, I have found great joy and satisfaction within the family.

For me, Natalie Merchant expresses this well in her song below entitled ‘Beloved Wife’

Dionne Warwick Alfie – What’s it all about, Alfie?

On the Matter of Government and Marriage

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | April 29, 2015

Reported on DRUDGE today: ALITO: Why Not Let 4 Lawyers Marry One Another?

Supreme_Court_US_2010The implicit assumption in begging the Supreme Court to rule on marriage is that the government has any legitimate interest in things as personal as marriage. They do not. The government has insinuated itself illegitimately into every nook and sinew of our personal lives and our society. I say keep out! The root of so many of our problems is government sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. Government = Force and if you want liberty, I say limit the scope and reach of government. Being mostly a libertarian at heart, I want the government out of my business and out of my personal life; so my answer to Alito’s question above is that it is none of the government’s business if 4 or 20 lawyers marry each other. However, neither is it the government’s business to force a bakery shop to make a cake for anyone whom they do not want to bake a cake for; neither is it the government’s business to force a church to marry someone whom they choose not to marry. The government needs to stay out of marriage period. Marriage is a religious and a cultural tradition, not the purview of the government. We need to start pruning the tree of tyranny, not asking it permission to get married or forcing our neighbor to bake us a cake.

Unconditional Love? Does it exist?

David Brown Pic SnapShotWhat is unconditional love? It’s love with no conditions, of course, which is close to impossible to attain if you carry this out to some theoretical level of the absurd. But for general parlance, we can all understand the useful idea of unconditional love. For example, you may love your wife or your kids unconditionally, but there are obvious conditional connections going on there; and you may love all humanity or nature but then how do these lofty constructs gain any real emotional juice or practical application?

For me, my parents represented good examples of unconditional love. Sure, they would beat my ‘bo-hinny’ if I stepped out of line, but they were always there and always cared through thick or thin. Another example, is the idea of the Goodly Shepard who would leave his entire flock of let’s say 100 sheep or so to go find and rescue that one unique, black little sheep that had wandered away from the flock, slipped off the side of a cliff and was hopelessly trapped, surely to die of exposure or in the jowls of a hungry wolf.   If you have ever been that black sheep, and if someone has ever rescued you for no good reason, then you know what unconditional love feels like.  Feels pretty darned good.

Unconditional love, when you receive it, changes you profoundly and forever. It means you are special and uniquely valuable just because you are you. You are not just a series of electro-chemical reactions in the material world. You are more. You have value. This unconditional love deeply binds ethics and character into the individual, it binds the family unit together, which in turn binds society and produces a better world for all of us to live in.

This is why it is important to realize that the small human we call a fetus is not just a blob of protoplasm to be discarded as you would an abscessed tooth, long finger nails or unkempt hair.  And this is why it is important to revere, honor and respect our elderly, even if they can no longer contribute financially to the economy. If we want a better world to live in, we must start by being better people to live with; and for me, unconditional love is a good place to start.

Related topic …
Prince Ea “LOVE” (Everything you have been told was a lie)

Abortion

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | November 01, 2014

My college philosophy teacher was and probably still is an atheist, yet he was an amazingly brilliant teacher … one of my best. Despite his lack of faith or belief in things unseen or unproven by his deductive method, he was staunchly anti-abortion. He reasoned as did I that once you minimize or devalue life at one end of the spectrum (very young) what logically will prevent you from minimizing it at the other end (very old); and once so done, one’s foot is squarely placed on the proverbial slippery slope. And where does this slope lead? Well it leads to further adjustments at either or both ends. So if we have scarce resources—which we always do–the value of a person prior to being productive for society would be less than say a person of working age and likewise the value of an older person incapable of vigorous work would be less valuable. So at some point, this logic trip leads us to the conclusion of stratification of value based on age; such that a society would be more interested in investing and/or saving the life of someone between the age of 18 and 35 say. Outside this range, you are less valuable and therefore on your own or possibly a candidate for post-birth abortion. In fact this is already occurring. We have death panels with Obamacare and recent opinion polls on college campuses show a growing approval of post-birth abortion up to age five if it would save jobs. So there you have it. Ideas have power and they have consequences that on first blush you may not have even considered.

Additional reading on this topic …

Miscellaneous Observations on Abortion

Opus 014: The Hoax of materialism