Chemtrails

Chemtrails  photo: Wiki

If you google 'chemtrails,' the first several listings pops up as 'chemtrail conspiracy theory.' 

What are chemtrails?  Is it some kind of conspiracy or behind the scenes science experiment run amok?  What's going on here and can it hurt you?

My good friend Ileana Johnson has done the heavy-lifting research on chemtrails, giving me permission to reprint her findings.

Ileana Johnson

 Johnson was born and reared in communist Romania.  She came to the USA to attend university and earned a PhD in Economics and German, as well as a masters in German and Linguistics. She's a best selling author of UN Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy at Amazon, Echoes of Communism, Liberty on Life Support, and the upcoming book Communism 2.0 Twenty-Five Years Later.    

Echoes of Communism recounts a profoundly discordant, shocking glimpse of what life’s like when the state controls all aspects of its citizens’ lives. 

Johnson taught economics at the university level for 30 years, and is a radio commentator on Liberty Express Radio on Butler on Business, every Wednesday at 10:34 EST.  She’s fluent in five languages, including Italian. She and her husband visit Italy often. Johnson is the most educated-and wise-woman I know. I believe that wisdom stems from her insightful understanding of life and government during her formative years in Romania, with her nurturing family there. She is a legal immigrant and proud American citizen by choice.

Chemtrails  photo: Ileana Johnson

Is It Another Conspiracy Theory?

by Ileana Johnson (link to Ileana's blog:  https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=544967548880849841#editor/target=post;postID=2462888877450202008 )

While hiking through the woods, I am having a Rachel Carson “silent spring” moment. It’s early fall, nature is still beautiful, albeit a bit dry. There are no birds chirping, no squirrels, no snakes, just an annoying horse fly and a few mosquitoes. The fern gully is bone dry; all ferns have turned rusty brown from lack of rain. I finally spot a few small fishes darting about in the yellowish creek water.

The sky is blue for now but crisscrossed by grey and white trails that don’t disappear at all like vapors do but dissipate and blend hours and hours later into a strangely colored mist with blue-grey edges that blanket the sky. What is this? Why are the trails so perfectly parallel in both directions and intersecting like a chess board? Why would a plane maneuver in this grid pattern if it’s flying the shortest distance possible to a specific destination?

Conspiracy theorists call them chemical trails. Public officials have admitted that aluminum flakes are dropped from planes to “block the sun’s rays,” attempting to fix global warming. With so many real scientists acknowledging that global warming is a hoax and the climate change industry is an effort to fleece the public of trillions of dollars in carbon taxes across the globe, why are they spraying harmful chemicals into the atmosphere? Why have we engaged in weather modification for decades?

Pilots, doctors, and scientists gave their educated opinion to Shasta County Board of Supervisors on the issue of geoengineering/weather modification spraying of nanoparticles of various chemicals such as barium, strontium, and aluminum into the atmosphere. They voted unanimously to send the information obtained during this hearing to the EPA, the California Air Resources Board, and state and federal legislators. http://www.krcrtv.com/news/politics/geoengineering-on-agenda-at-board-of-supervisors-meeting/26972572

Here are excerpts from testimony of various participants and concerned citizens at the Shasta County Board of Supervisors hearing:

“The condensation trails occur in cold air (-30 degrees F) at higher altitudes, 30,000 feet plus; carbon dioxide and water vapor in that exhaust turns to ice crystals, that’s what you see, the white stream behind it; they warm up quickly and dissolve, and it never lasts more than a minute.” “These trails I’ve seen in the sky are not natural and are not normal.” (Jeff Nelson, former commercial airline pilot)
“If you take a two-mile walk on a cold day and you can turn around and see your condensation trail tracking all the way back for two miles, that’s how crazy it is to think that what we are looking at in the sky are condensation trails.” (Iraja Sivadas, member, Union of Concerned Scientists)

Chemtrails  photo: Ileana Johnson

“Chemtrails are real; they’re spraying almost every day. I’ve watched the clouds, I’ve watched the spraying. We are in great danger from this pollution that’s coming down over us.” (Allan Buckmann, former Military Meteorologist/Fish and Game Biologist)

“I became interested in chemtrails when I was in Hawaii and Hawaiians were very vocal about it. When micronized aluminum is breathed in, it leaves a metallic taste in your mouth.”(Dr. Frank Livolsi, doctor and pilot)
“When you look up at the sun and you see a white haze, that is aluminum floating in the air and is coming from aircraft.” (Mark McCandlish, former Defense Industry technician)

“There is a huge amount of aluminum found; these sprays contain aluminum, strontium, barium, and manganese. Aluminum is common in a bonded form not in a free form, and we are finding high rates of free-form aluminum in the soil which is not natural.” (Iraja Sivadas)
“The metal compounds that are being used are environmentally dangerous; we need to be monitoring them and test them.” (Allan Buckman)

“Water samples tested 13,100 micrograms/liter of aluminum, normally it should be zero. Pristine snow on Mount Shasta had 61,000 mcg/liter of aluminum, four times the amount found in the soil. Where is this stuff coming from if it’s not coming from the soil?” (Francis Mangles, 35 year USFS biologist)

“I am seeing clouds I’ve never seen before, almost every day, and NASA even named a few of these new clouds.”(Allan Buckmann)
“NASA conducted research in metallized fuel, we’re actually putting aluminum oxide right into the fuel because it has two atoms of aluminum and three atoms of oxygen and during the combustion it releases all that oxygen and dramatically increases efficiency but it leaves aluminum in the air.”(Mark McCandlish)

“We’ve got things coming from the sky down. As it [aluminum] comes down, it is in our air that we breathe into our nostrils, it goes into our brains, in the frontal lobe. The contaminant aluminum is the number one neuro-free radical in the brain to cause early Alzheimer’s.” (Dr. Steven Davis, D.C., C.T.N.)

“I’ve been practicing for 17 years and in the past five years I’ve seen a number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and other neuro-degenerative diseases tremendously increase, almost quadruple.” (Dr. Hamid Rabiee, Neurologist)

Dr. Steven Davis voiced his concern about ADD which started in the 70s and autism which “was not on the radar, there were no documents, no information, there was one case in 100,000 children. Today, there is one case in 48 boys. I was part of the early group looking for aluminum in ADD and ADHD. All those children that started to develop those phenomena had high levels of aluminum. When we figured out protocols to detox them out, to free their bodies of those contaminants, their brains came back. When we do this to the aged, it does not come back as quick but it will come back. I’ve seen Alzheimer’s in 56 year olds when it used to be only in 80 year olds.”

Dr. Frank Livolsi reminded the audience about the big move to remove aluminum from deodorant and cooking pots years ago because it caused Alzheimer’s. “Look what they are doing to us now,” he added.

Mark McCandlish told the audience that 50 nanoparticles are the size of a red blood cell, that is how invasive they can be to a single cell.
Francis Mangles was more concerned about the collapse of agriculture as we know it because of the spraying with toxic chemicals.
Allan Buckmann was alarmed about overloading the ecosystem with aluminum, overwhelming and destroying microbial systems. “How did Monsanto know to create aluminum-resistant plants?”

Francis Mangles said that “aquatic and terrestrial insects have taken a nose dive with a 20 percent reduction with the exception of ants.”
Mark McCandlish said that trees absorb the thermal nanoparticles of barium and aluminum through the root system and, when trees burn, they burn considerably hotter, increasing the cost and danger of putting outforest fires. “The impact on human health is also dramatic.”

Joseph Marman testified that he personally tested aluminum in water. He found large amounts of barium, aluminum, and strontium in a sample he held up that looked like a cobweb. Since they destroyed his previous sample, he said he was not letting go of this one. (Joseph Marman, attorney) 

Francis Mangles said that in Shasta County, “aluminum in soil has doubled in the last ten years and the soil is ten times more alkaline. Aluminum blocks essential nutrients. I am unable to restore normal pH in my garden because nanoparticles are now in the circulatory systems of both plants and humans.” 

Mark McCandlish talked about a study called “In vitro toxicity of aluminum nanoparticles in rat alveolar macrophages” and how long-term exposure to aluminum nanoparticles suppresses the immune system.

Chemtrails photo: Carol Wallwork

Joseph Marman concluded that the Board of Supervisors in Suffolk County, NY has outlawed geochemical engineering and Hawaii passed an ordinance banning geochemical engineering. Experimentation on humans is prohibited in this country, he said, and if anyone does experiment, they have 30 days to inform Congress. He wanted to know why was aluminum spiking in Shasta County, cases of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and why are there strange cobweb-like fibers on the ground? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPnWaBsMYnY&feature=em-share_video_user

All these private citizens, with years and years of experience in molecular biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, agriculture, research, and flying, have put their reputations on the line and testified that chemical experimentation through aerial nanoparticle spraying of aluminum, barium, and strontium to modify the weather has been conducted for decades. Conspiracy theorists or not, many questions remain unanswered. 

Ex-CIA Director John Brennan, on chemtrails:

 https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Brennan+video+on+geoengineering+spraying&view=detail&mid=C9E44A693050411F502EC9E44A693050411F502E&FORM=VIRE 

 *

On Edge in the New World

Carol outside the Rayburn House Office Building       photo: Claire

November 16, 2018

Over a decade ago I used to go to Washington DC  3-4 days a week while a student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. It's been four years since my last visit, but the Middle East Forum, Dr. Daniel Pipes' think tank, hosted a panel discussion Wednesday at noon at the Rayburn Senate Office Building, just south of the Capitol.  The topic: "De-Platforming, a New Problem."   

Tommy Robinson via video from the UK, Ezra Levant to the right of Kassam     photo: Claire

 The guest of honor was Tommy Robinson, via a live, two-way video link from the UK, because he could not get a visa to attend this and other meetings with Republican lawmakers.  Robinson has  tirelessly covered the story ignored by much UK establishment media—the rampant Muslim rape gangs that prey on vulnerable English girls, primarily in northern UK.  He contends he was wrongfully imprisoned in May for nearly 2 months, for covering the sentencing portion of one the many trials.

photo: wiki

 Claire went with me.  So much has changed in the District since I last visited.  We drove by the National Museum of African American History on Constitution. It's more beautiful than photos convey, although it's a bit looming for the size of it's site.  The building’s cladding is the most complex and unusual I’ve ever seen, specially in sunlight.  It must look even more interesting from the inside.  We walked past an outdoor memorial to severely injured combat veterans.  Seeing these new additions, even briefly, was the best part of our day in the District.

The Rayburn room could seat about 50 and was 3/4s full.  We needed to sit near the front so I could hear.  We sat in the middle of the second row, right next to a man wearing a yarmulke.  Dr. Pipes family escaped Poland and the Nazis during WWII.  He, like his father before him, is a historian who strives to portray as honest a picture as possible of what’s going on in the Middle East.

Besides Tommy Robinson, the panel consisted of Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona, Raheem Kassam, a UK writer and editor, Ezra Levant, CEO of Rebel News, a Canadian conservative, and Ann Marie Waters, the head of newly formed 'For Britain' political party, with Dr. Pipes moderating.

Dr. Pipes had just started introducing the panelists when the man in the yarmulke jumped up and starting shouting that everyone there were racist haters. “Shame on you,” he must have shouted 100 times in an booming, actor-trained voice.  He shouted vile accusations against Rep. Gosar, Robinson, Levant and Waters, then directed the same at all of the attendees.  There was no pause in his verbal attack, no room for debate, just a constant fevered rant of the most intense degree. 

As soon as the man in the yarmulke started shouting, I stood and walked over to wall.  Claire started filming him on her cell phone and Raheem came over to him and began peppering him with questions: “What’s your name? Who are you with?” etc.  A man near us called him a fake Jew.  Some women tried to engage the shouter, but he wasn’t having it, he just kept shouting.  He was like a badly trained Rottweiler, in a barking frenzy.

Rep. Gosar, one of three true conservatives in Congress, and a keen advocate of free speech, gave the man, and his two less-verbose, self-proclaimed Muslim women agitators in the back of the room, a good 7 minutes before calling the Capitol police, who removed them from the room with little effort.

Who was he?  Was he Jewish?  Can he actually believe those gross generalizations he shouted?  Was he a paid provocateur? Being in that room yesterday was the closest I’ve ever knowingly sat next to a fascist, right next to someone who believes that only his politics were valid so mine must be stomped out.  

He was also so unlike any Jewish person I've ever known.  My closest friends at my first job at St. Louis U. and in college were Jewish.  A hallmark of their character was an ability to debate and exchange ideas with joyful elan.  They expanded my worldview. They were true students of Socrates. This man with the yarmulke, however, rattled everyone, except Tommy, who joked that it’s a shame he couldn’t have actually been with us (as a quite young man he too eagerly settled issues with fisticuffs).

For the next hour and a half we listened to a measured discussion of the countless ways free speech is being erased by technology worldwide.  Each panelist recounted how their work has been targeted by so-called algorithms which led to them being banned by this or that social platform and or banking connection.  Ezra Levant suffered dirty tricks involving a Scandinavian cruise he was lining up for conservative holiday makers.  It had to be cancelled at great expense to him. Waters recounted how social media was used to disrupt her forming and maintaining her free speech political party by deliberately sending confusing/conflicting messages to her data-base attendees, further silencing her. 

Raheem and Carol     photo: Claire

It was all thoroughly depressing yet oddly heartening too, to have a chance to see in person leaders of the opposition to this dire state of affairs.  Raheem cheerfully and charmingly signed my copy of his 2018 book that I brought with me, “Enoch was Right: The Rivers of Blood Speech 50 years On.”

Dr. Pipes, a soft-spoken academic, was a a gracious moderator.  He apologized that the security measures he'd taken didn't prevent the unpreventable.

All of the panelists made mention of what Ms. Waters aptly described as ‘our outspoken guest,’ in wise and poignant observations.  I suspect they've experienced such behavior before and probably far more intensely. Needless to say, I did not expect Wednesday to be quite such a visceral learning experience regards the shocking, real people working so hard to destroy our freedom of speech.

We didn't have time to visit long afterwards, because Claire had to get back to work, so we dashed by the exquisite autumnal plantings of the U.S. Botanical Garden, the injured war vets memorial, and that seemingly serene part of the District.  

Claire navigated us through the Tidal Basin back to the Roosevelt Bridge and Highway 66 west, usually easy going at 2 p.m.  But not this Wednesday.

Just before reaching a wide underpass, a police car flashed past on 66, going east, then within a minute, must have turned around and was zooming past the far right lane of our westbound lanes in the darkened gloom of the underpass.  Traffic slowed then stopped.  Another police car was already up ahead at the end of the underpass. 

Highway 66 underpass inside the Beltway    photo: Claire

In the eastbound lane a wild looking, long haired man was erratically dashing to each stopped or slowing car, frantically trying to open their doors, then rushing in front of any car that tried to dodge him and get away.  When he hopped over the barrier into our westbound lane, eastbound traffic sped away.  As he headed to our lane, I inched our van into the right lane just before he came running toward us, then behind our van. 

At that moment a secret service agent, or possibly plain clothed policeman, had his fire arm drawn and pointed straight at me—for a mercifully brief moment—right before he zipped in front of the car in front of us, then along side both our cars as he was yelling for the man to drop, who’d by now had run behind our van, then onto the verge.  A state policeman was doing the same behind us.  They wrestled the man to the ground and at that point traffic started moving again.  We resumed our westward journey home. We found no mention of the incident in the media, all another day in the District.
 
It was a fitting end, I suppose, to what I'd seen that afternoon of Washington DC after a long hiatus.  Stunningly beautiful buildings but with a looming malaise at its heart, a teetering on edge of a new not so brave world.

Stay safe out there.

The New Censorship Happening Now

June 2018 new book shelves, Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/10/robert-spencer-video-banned-books-week-features-only-leftist-books?replytocom=1999216#respond

Banned Books Week Features Only Leftist Books

The above video is an insightful and keen-eyed examination of how culture controls the flow of information, specially book circulation.

I live in Fairfax County, VA, and the Fairfax County Public Library (FCPL) used to have a fair collection. However, about 10 years ago, someone in the library hierarchy okayed purging thousands of older books, to make way for new ones. That's the delicate balance of libraries everywhere. Ideally, libraries contain a well-rounded history of our past, plus cutting edge peaks of insight at our present and potential future. This appears to be no longer the case in FCPLs.

The great book purge wasn’t formally announced, but some keen-eyed community journalist got photos of FCPL dumpsters full of old books. I suspect such a story would not be published today. I can only imagine what might have been dispatched to those dumpsters, tired and damaged books sure, but also what hidden gems? I have often reserved the only copy of an old classic in the collection.  So what happens when it wears out, get damaged or lost?

Until about 2009 the FCPL collection was far more balanced.  Since then most new books are philosophically left of center, increasingly, far left of center.  Notably, books critically analyzing Islam have become functionally extinct in the new book additions to the FCPL collection.

Most of the branch libraries have two giant book sales each year.  A  revenue generated culling could have sold the dumpster books in the sales, instead of tossing away thousands of dollars worth of books.  Chantilly Regional Library usually nets $23,000-$25,000 in their spring AND fall sales, mostly donated books. It's rather hard not to infer an element of Fahrenheit 451 censorship afoot in the great purge.

As of last fall, even the joyful freedom to recirculate older books in these giant sales is dying a swift death as the Library Board demanded each library’s charity that manages the book sales( the profits of which fund new counters, tables, chairs, technology, etc.) must now supply onerous financial records of their sales that even the federal government does not require for non-profits' tax returns. Alas, many of the Friends of the Library groups have closed up shop. Although Chantilly Library, the most successful in our area, is putting up with these demands.

Some of the BEST books I’ve bought in the past 10 years have been  from these sales. Many of them would be on the Robert Spencer's invisible list of banned books.
 
The book sales are a specially dynamic pipeline for private booksellers too, who then resell them on Amazon, Abe’s Books, etc., and until this dire FCPL accounting demand, had been the most annoying change in recent years in the giant book sales, for these enterprising booksellers clogged up the aisles with their boxes of books as they swooped in ahead of others with their little scanning devices that give them book value instantly. These booksellers often purchased $300-$900 each in used books per sale! so the Friends groups put up with them. Where will these sellers now get old books in such an accessible manner?

The results of limiting access to divergent ideas is another way of controlling history.  There's also no publicly available list of the titles that were purged from the library.

I propose citizens donate books to the library that they regard as essential to understanding the world.  Authors: donate a copy of your books to your local libraries too!  Many times I buy a book because I first read it in the library.  I advise vigilant follow-up of your donation to ensure it make it into the collection

New releases, Fairfax County Public Library June 2018

If you were to peruse the New Release bookcases you would find a astonishingly disproportionate number of them in the Dewey decimal system from 300-340 range, specifically cultural war issues from the extreme left of the spectrum. It's as if the library is salting every issue with far left ideology, normalizing it, equalizing its voice in the stacks, while purging conservative perspectives.  Net result: a distorted portrait of who we are, and where we've been. 

One of the more unnerving aspects of this brave new world is the children's New Picture Books section.  On a recent trip to Chantilly Regional Library with my five year-old grandson, I found one lighthearted new book, about a bear’s nose, all the rest dealt with pretty heavy subjects, i.e. refugees living in war zones, starvation in Africa, what it's like to be different, racism, myriad ways of being unhappy but precious little about the sweet zaniness that sparks childhood joy and imagination.  

There are children that have experienced unbearable trauma, and at an older age good books should be a lifeline for understanding pain. However, I contend there's a therapeutic quality in savoring gentle normalcy.  I also believe it's best not to dwell on the 'real life' bad, specially in the 1-to-5 age group. Even board books, for the 1-2 year olds are now being politicized. It sets the stage for victim-hood, instead of empowerment.  Healthy people do best when they believe themselves capable, not victims.
 

Beatrix Potter's children's books

In the old days, most children's literature was about fair play, tricksters, how the earth works, bad things that happen to the foolish, fun and games, and how to survive mistakes with blossoming wisdom. Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books cover that spectrum with big words, exquisite artwork and delightfully fun character names that trip off the reader's tongue with lighthearted whimsy.

Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

I welcome books on a variety of childhood experiences, but not to the near exclusion of the delightful buoyancy of this age. 

Chantilly Library has been my refuge, my anchor and where I have gone in times of trouble, personal and civic. It was the second place I went after 9-11. The first was Borders, where the only book on Islam was by by Karen Armstrong, an English ex-nun, now convert to Sufi Islam, whose book was a hagiography, so it was little help in my understanding of what just happened in NYC, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.

Whomever controls books--what's published, distribution, accessibility of differing viewpoints to all strata of society-- limits or expands our known universe.  Wisdom and dependable scholarship are needed now more than ever.

Learning what works and doesn't work in life with Peter Rabbit

P.S.

The point of Robert Spencer’s video on banned books is there is NO FORMAL LIST of banned conservative books, because libraries, book reviewers, talk shows, even schools just ignore works that don't conform to the philosophy of post-modern multiculturalism.  If you ignore them there's zip buzz about the ideas they present. 

FCPL has 100 copies of Bob Woodward’s, Fear-Trump in the White House 2018. I put my name on the reserve list in September and there were 632 ahead of me. Every newspaper, talk show, cable news show interviewed him, chatting about his book. That’s what buzz generates.

Fairfax County Public Libraries, in Virginia, near Washington DC does NOT have Robert Spencer’s latest book, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, or the one before that, Confessions of an Islamophobe. Nor has CNN, ABC, public radio/tv reviewed these books. This is hidden censorship.  If authors have bad ideas, don't hide that, instead, debate why or why not. 

By the way, FCPL has six books by Robert Spencer, none later than 2009 publication date.

(Now ex) Congressman Keith Ellison proposed that books not approved by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a radical left organization, should no longer be available for sale on Amazon. In another life, a sitting congressman making such an unconstitutional  suggestion would have been unthinkable.  We are barreling past soft censorship at mach speed, toward something history has shown always turns out badly.

That's the problem when you flirt with passionate feelings based on nothing but passionate feelings. 

https://garydemar.com/muslim-congressman-keith-ellison-demands-amazon-stop-selling-books-the-splc-dislikes/

For some time I have been compiling a list of books I discovered the FCPL doesn't have in its collection. 

Partial list of books NOT in FCPL collection:

-The Rational Bible-Exodus: God, Slavery and Freedom 2018 by Dennis
 Prager
-Enoch was Right 2018 by Raheem Kassam

-All Out War-The Plot to Destroy Trump 2018 by Edward Klein

-American Pravda—My Fight For the Truth in an Era of Fake News 2018
  by James O’Keefe

-Killing the Deep State-The Fight to Save President Trump 2018 by
  Jerome Corsi 

-The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education 2018 by
  Warren Treadgold 

-Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Ann Applebaum 2017.  FCPL
 has just 2 copies of a book written by a Pulitzer prize winning
  Washington Post columnist. Yet it has 100 copies of Bob Woodward’s
  latest, a critique of President Trump, a subject examined in detail throughout the mainstream media.  Applebaum's book reveals 
  shocking, little known details of the catastrophe that was the USSR 

-The Tyranny of Silence 2016 by Flemming Rose
-See Something Say Nothing 2016 by Philip Haney
-The Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase
  America 2015 by Jim Simpson
 -No books or videos after 2015 by Dinesh D’Souza, including his 2016
  blockbuster documentary film, Hillary's America & Death of a
  Nation

-Credentials to Destroy—How and Why Education Became Weapon to
  Destroy 2013 by Robin S. Eubanks
-Echos of Communism 2011 by Ileana Johnson Paugh
 -Willing Accomplices 2011 by Kent Clizbe
-There are no books by Trevor Loudon, notably his breakout book,
  The Enemies Within, about communist infiltration of the U.S. Congress,
  right across the Potomac.  Ironically there is a book with the
  same title about the Cambridge University spies of the 1930s-1960s, 
  how they embedded themselves in the top echelon of UK society, just
  as the communists are doing in the U.S. Congress today
-Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical
  Islam 2008 by Robert Chandler
-The Punjab Trap—Pham Xuan An: The Spy Who Didn’t Love Us by Luke
  Hunt -Also not available on Amazon.  It's about the betrayal of
  Americans in Vietnam

This list does not include the many missing books not included in FCPL's collection before I realized there was a pattern unfolding.
I share my list of special books and why they've made a difference to me--in comments, editorials wherever I can.  I must now kick into the next stage by sharing them with teachers, librarians, friends and politicians.

The genius of these propaganda patterns is how it's made Ray Bradbury's fireman character in his Fahrenheit 451 redundant.  His firemen no longer need to physically intimidate by rushing around burning books.  Now all the state controlled schools and media just ignore what doesn't fit the acceptable narrative.  

Books at their best inspire, confound, push us to understand the world, and ourselves.  Without this push-pull of ideas we become mynah birds, chirping birdbrains.

The Incredible Lightness of Cashmere

January is the best time to purchase cashmere clothing, when the sales begin.  This remarkable fiber has many fine qualities.  It’s incredibly soft, lightweight yet has exceptional heat retaining capability.  Because its so lightweight you look less bulky. It’s also hand washable (check the label and ask a knowledgeable sales clerk.  More clothes than you think can be gently hand washed, i.e. no wringing, just gently squeezing water out, then rolling up in a towel. My favorite designer’s clothes were all washable until about a year ago when ‘dry clean only’ appeared.  The clerk said some customers thought ‘washable’ meant in a machine, and perish the thought, with hot water.)



Cashmere is one of the most durable fabrics.  Jim still has a cashmere scarf I gave him 48 years ago...its only setback caused by moths in Galveston before I discovered garment bags, and a tea stain.  But now it' quadrupled its value because of its lineage and sheer endurance!
 
Cashmere comes from an Asian goat, originally from Kashmir, India, now bred in China, Mongolia and central Asia,according to Martha Stewart Living magazine.  Sheep and angora goats can produce 10 pounds of wool from one shearing.  Cashmere goats are different, their fibers’ are harvestable only once a year, during molting season. It then takes a week to comb out the long strands by hand. Net gain: 4 oz.of wool per goat.  It takes l0 oz. to make a woman’s single-ply sweater.


             You get the picture.  The downside of cashmere is its cost.

Take heart!  Now is prime cashmere sale season.  Good cheap cashmere is an an oxymoron but cheaper cashmere is possible to find.  Look at high end department stores' January sales.  I found a fabulous Italian cashmere sweater loomed by one of the best, Loro Piana, at 75% off!  I’m not fond of outlet stores because they often have designs that never graced the racks of Neimans or Nordstroms, which makes me to wonder as to their true pedigree.

The best cashmere mills are in Italy and Scotland. Be careful or you may end up with a blend of cashmere with lesser fibers.  If the label says 100% cashmere and is scratchy and rough, pass it up.  If you squeeze good cashmere and let it go it will hold it’s shape.

Although you may gasp at your initial out-of-pocket cost, keep in mind it may last 30 to 40 years.  If you select a universal design you’ll have made a sound investment, especially if you treat your cashmere properly.  This means storing in a breathable garment bag because of moths and of course hand washing as carefully as you would a newborn babe, using a gentle soap such as Forever New (32 oz. cost $15 but lasts for years. and it’s made in South Dakota!).  Proper hand washing can significantly lessen your dry cleaning footprint, too.

Besides its softness, incredible warmth and beauty I find it endearing that a cashmere goat's wool is harvested today using the same methods as hundreds of years ago and the best cleaning method is one of the oldest. Compared to diamonds, boats, fast cars, fancy estates, a cashmere sweater at $200 is one of the cheapest luxuries.  Not only is it chic it has green bona-fides to boot!  Happy New Year & Cashmere season!