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THE NATURE OF MAN

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dove-hawkCandide: or, The Optimist (1762)  It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply “optimism”) by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide’s slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, “we must cultivate our garden”, in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, “all is for the best” in the “best of all possible worlds”.

Candide is characterised by its sarcastic tone as well as by its erratic, fantastical and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious Bildungsroman, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is mordantly matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years’ War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. As philosophers of Voltaire’s day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers through allegory; most conspicuously, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism.

François-Marie Arouet (French: 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, MV 8159historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of several liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

(reference: Wikipedia.org)

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120 YEARS AGO

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FRED OTT SNEEZE 1894

“Fred Ott’s Sneeze” by the Edison Manufacturing Company.

This was the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States.  In the five-second film, one of Thomas Edison’s assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. The film was recorded between January 2, 1894 and January 7, 1894.    Source: Wikipedia

ALIEN INTERVIEW

It is truly amazing to me to think that motion pictures did not exist on this planet until as recently as 120 years ago.  This is only about two life times!!!  When my Grandmother was a young woman, motion pictures were a “new thing”!  She lived on a farm in Michigan.  She raised 8 children.

They, along with a lot of other Americans, were farmers.  They grew their own food, and raised chickens, and had a milk cow.  They churned their own butter and plowed hard dirt fields to grown corn and vegetables to feed themselves.

Their wooden house did not have indoor plumbing.  They pumped water from a hand operated water pump in the front yard.  They carried buckets of water into the house and boiled it on a wood-burning stove for drinking, cooking, bathing and washing clothes!

There was no electricity.  The only source of light and energy were candles, a wood burning stove and a fireplace and kerosene lamps.

Their was no indoor bathroom.  They had a small, wooden “out-house” about 30 yards from the main house.  When you needed to take a pee during the night, you used a brass or porcelain bowl that was kept under the bed.  Or, if you were brave enough, you could walk through the snow to the out-house to take a shit in privacy and freeze your ass off!

No air conditioning.  All the doors and windows were left open during the summer.  In the winter time they sat directly in front of the wood-burning stove, or snuggled together underneath piles of blankets in bed as soon as the sun went down! 

Times have certainly changed, technologically, at least in the USA. Do you ever wonder why and how so many technological innovations have been created during the past 120 years?  During the previous 10,000 years of human history there were nearly NO technical advancements!  Why have there been so many during the past 120 years?

Read the book ALIEN INTERVIEW.  You will find some answers in the pages of this book.

VISIT THE WEBSITE for the book at www.alieninterview.org

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EVERYTHING CHANGES

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Like the dude says, “Everything Changes.  So if you’re tired of being yourself, be somebody else”.  Who says we can’t change our “self” when we want to?  What are we, manikins?  The entire universe depends of change.  If it didn’t change it would get to boring and we’d all leave and go off and create some other universe.

Eytan and the Embassy – “Everything Changes” from Modern Mythology on Vimeo.