Left Handed, Four Eyed, Small Town & Catholic - and they call me Lucky???

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Part I.

As of today we have seven weeks until the election and thirteen weeks until the End of Time according to the Mayan calendar.  What a contrast?  Seven like the seven sacred days of creation, or the light.  Or thirteen like the superstitious and foreboding number of the dark.

So I am going to tell you about my newest book that is a work in progress in hopes it gives you something new to consider while distracting you from the lies and deception in everyday life which none of us needs.

By the way, don't bother trying to buy it yet because I can't finish it until we survive the End Times in 13 weeks.  I'm really quite tired of sequels.

Youth truly is wasted on the young.  If only we could have waited until we piled up all those experiences, feelings, joys, failures, loves found and lost loves before we lost our innocence, our ability to dream and our faith in the unknown.

Instead we spend a lifetime getting beaten down, educated I guess they call it, tricked, fooled, disappointed and occasionally, well, we might even find a moment to get happy.

That is not to say everyone is that way but now that I am much older and wiser I have noticed there are fewer and fewer happy people.

But who am I to talk?  The title of this article, "Left Handed, Four Eyed, Small Town & Catholic - and they call me Lucky???" is actually the title of my latest book, unfinished, which is my somewhat cavalier attempt at an autobiography.

Most autobiographies are about famous people so I certainly don't expect this book to ever be on the New York Times best seller list.  I mean I'm just a Hayseed from Iowa.

How many people do you know that start life with four strikes against them?  You see, I would have been most fortunate if those were the only strikes against me in life.  But no, my role as entertainer to the gods or archangels or whatever celestial beings needed comic relief was far more endowed with strikes against me than being merely left handed, four eyed, small town and Catholic.

My maternal side of the family, the Campbell clan, left me with a legacy of the fantastic and mysterious ways of the Dark Irish, a familiarity with the little people from Fairies to Leprechauns, an unsought awareness of the ancient Druid wizards and high priests, healers and storytellers, and a whole bunch of other weird, mystical and metaphysical stuff.

One might say I was genetically manufactured with the best and worst of Scotland, Ireland and the Celtic Campbell clan.  The ultimate hybrid DNA.

Then there was the paternal side, the Putnam clan, mostly English aristocrats with a touch of German engineering and inventiveness, and pretty much at odds with everything from the whimsical and magical world of my mother's ancestors.  They were the aristocratic ancestry leading to various figures of nobility I dare not mention lest I sully their memories in the history books we read.

Why my father's non-Catholic ancestors even had their own big church near London shortly after the English drove the Catholics out of Britain, meaning back when my father's side in jolly old England drove my mother's side from their ancient homes in the Scottish Highlands to Ireland and eventually to land here in America.

I don't know a lot about DNA and genetic coding but if we are the product of our parents and ancestors combined DNA then I must have lived in a constant state of revolution and never known who I could trust from my own family.

However, I cannot afford to believe in the children inheriting the sins of their fathers or mothers or ancestors.  From the little genealogy I have dared to research about my family the burden of sins like those are of such tremendous magnitude that us siblings haven't got a chance in Hell of living normal lives.

That sucks...

When I get to the Pearly Gates and confront St. Peter I expect he will not find my name on the invitation list.  And based on the sins of my families my judgment was a foregone conclusion long before I even died.

Still I am a writer and storyteller by birthright, ancestry and intuitive expectation and I am an occasional believer, when it suits my purpose, that we can create our own reality so don't be surprised that at the moment of my birth I had the dreadful realization that a very serious mistake had been made.

It was a dread that would haunt me through my life.  You see, I just knew there was a serious mix up at God's baby processing facility in Heaven and some absent-minded angel had sent me to the wrong family on earth.

Over time it was to become obvious.

I was supposed to be born a Rothschild in the legendary House of Rothschild in London, home of one of the most mysterious and powerful families in history.  Of course there is no single House of Rothschild but castles all over Europe and the world.

My real family owned nations, kings, diamonds, gold, banks and politicians.  Though my palate back in Iowa called for lobster, caviar, sconces and tea, I was stuck with pork, corn, hamburgers and hot dogs.

I did the best I could in a world without soufflé.

Of course, there were serious sacrifices.   I expected armies of servants, limos and trillions of dollars, but I had to settle for an apartment in small town Iowa, parents who were just college students themselves, and a family history of bizarre tragedies and wild magic.

So very reluctantly I was forced to accept the cards I had been dealt in life and rest assured it was the last time I ever trusted a card dealer.

However, I never let go of the hope that one day when the baby factory in Heaven was audited they would find and rectify the fatal mistake that made a potential Rothschild prodigy into a cursed Campbell-Putnam ancestor.

I really don't like all that "sins of the father" talk, it hits far too close to home.

Go back to the 1600's, just after the age of my favorite Queen of England, Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.   During her reign she did her best to prevent her father's (Henry the VIII no less her mother having been beheaded by old Henry) orders to persecute the Catholics by forcing them to renounce their Catholic faith or drive them from Britain.

It just so happens that one of the most powerful Catholic clans in Scotland was the Campbell clan, my folks.  For decades, maybe centuries they had ruled in the desolate but beautiful Scottish Highlands and fought against the imperial English rule.

Of course it was the same English rule that the non-Catholic Putnam family in London was advocating.  After Elizabeth's death at the turn of the 17th century the rule was finally enforced and the Campbell clan was given a choice, denounce your Catholic faith or go to Ireland.

What a choice.  Give up all ancestral religion, rights, titles and property under Great Britain or go to Ireland.   They made it sound as if Ireland was a far worse fate than losing everything.

Well my family had been Irish more recently than we were English so we knew the deceitful Brits were lying about Ireland.  They just hated the place because the Irish kept rejecting English rule.

Needless to say my ancestors held to their conviction and were thus banished from their homeland, estates and titles.  After a few generations in Ireland the Campbell family then migrated to America.  They were victims of one side of the family curse.

Once the Putnam's got the Campbell and other Catholics out of England they then migrated to America as well, arriving sometime earlier than the Campbell clan in the mid sixteen hundreds.

Specifically the Putnam's arrived in New England and some chose to settle in a Puritan place called Salem, Massachusetts,  just in time for the Salem Witch trials.  Thus set in motion the other half of the family curse.

Here it gets quite complicated.  Just take a look at the court transcripts of that fateful and tragic trial in the 1690's.

You see, there was a Puritan Putnam family who spent years creating a safe and isolated haven to protect the "witches" from harm by the village church fanatics.

Then into the story comes a young Putnam girl named Anne, but not from the Putnam family creating the safe haven, rather she was the minister's daughter from town.  She told her preacher father she had been possessed by the witches and made to do things against her will.

A bunch of other local kids joined the chorus and all those witches being protected by one Putnam family were arrested and tried for practicing Black Magic on those poor innocent children of the villagers by the other Putnam family.

You probably heard the rest.  A couple of dozen witches were burned or hanged to death, later the kids admitted they made up the story, and thus began the curse of the Salem witches cast upon the immediate and all future Putnam descendants until the blood line was wiped out.

It was as good a curse as any ancient Egyptian curse (King Tut) or Medieval curse from the Spanish Inquisition.

At any rate I would not have thought much about the curse except one day I was reading about Amelia Earnhardt, the world famous airplane pilot, and I realized that Amelia married a certain George Putnam of the New England Putnam family when she was 33 years old, and six years later she disappeared off the face of the earth.

Well, so goes the story of my ancestry as passed down from generations of Celtic and thus Irish storytellers.  My Irish grandfather on the Campbell side used to tell me one should only half believe any good story told.

But I can tell you this.  Where I was born, Iowa City, Iowa, was home to the University of Iowa Scottish Highlanders Marching band, one of the most famous bagpipe bands in the world.  Why were they also found far from the magical land of the Loch Ness monster in the same town where I lived in Iowa? 

Here are the Highlanders performing as I used to see them when I went to the stadium to watch them practice.

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Note from the Publisher:

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There are over 960 articles published in the Coltons Point Times that are archived and accessible to you through the years and months displayed in the index.  They represent a pretty fair representation of the way things still are today.

Another index of some of the most popular articles appears just above my publisher photo on the left.  Just click and it gives you choices.

A lot of interesting things are covered and a lot of ideas have been presented in the CPT on our problems and how to fix them.  With so little progress being made toward this by our politicians, however, the articles will be timely for some time to come.

Many articles attempt to clarify the truth in what we are being fed by the media since so much of the media no longer consider truth and objectivity to be viable and these articles are also worth perusing.

However, I am taking my own advice when I said earlier the most important thing we can do between now and the presidential election was to turn off television and stop listening or reading the news until it was over.  I did quit writing articles.

As of today we have seven weeks until the election and thirteen weeks until the End of Time according to the Mayan calendar.  What a contrast?  Seven like the seven sacred days of creation, or the light.  Or thirteen like the superstitious and foreboding number of the dark.

Through it all I will continue to ignore the nonsense and silliness of politicians and their election campaigns.

Instead I am going to tell you about my newest book that is a work in progress in hopes it gives you something new to consider while distracting you from the lies and deception in everyday life which none of us needs.

By the way, don't bother trying to buy it yet because I can't finish it until we survive the End Times in 13 weeks.

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Memorial Day - Honoring our Heroes

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China & America - It's Time for a New Partnership

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How long does it take for a nation like the United States who is now 236 years old, to recognize the incredible history, knowledge, science, health and many other aspects of a culture like China who is now over 5,500 years old?

China not only is an ancient civilization but it has a mysterious, metaphysical and mystical legacy that captivates and becomes the source of fable, folklore and fantasy.

This ancient society has contributed much more than myth and legend, however, with health and wellness through Traditional Chinese Medicine, (TCM) being among the most significant.  The following description is from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Shi-hua Wu & wife

"Traditional Chinese medicine, which encompasses many different practices, is rooted in the ancient philosophy of Taoism and dates back more than 5,000 years. Today, TCM is practiced side by side with Western medicine in many of China’s hospitals and clinics.

TCM is widely used in the United States. Although the exact number of people who use TCM in the United States is unknown, it was estimated in 1997 that some 10,000 practitioners served more than 1 million patients each year.

According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey, which included questions on the use of various CAM therapies, an estimated 3.1 million U.S. adults had used acupuncture in the previous year.

In addition, according to this same survey, approximately 17 percent of adults use natural products, including herbs, making it the most commonly used therapy. In another survey, more than one-third of the patients at six large acupuncture clinics said they also received Chinese herbal treatments at the clinics.

Underlying the practice of TCM is a unique view of the world and the human body that is different from Western medicine concepts. This view is based on the ancient Chinese perception of humans as microcosms of the larger, surrounding universe—interconnected with nature and subject to its forces. The human body is regarded as an organic entity in which the various organs, tissues, and other parts have distinct functions but are all interdependent. In this view, health and disease relate to balance of the functions.

The theoretical framework of TCM has a number of key components:

Yin-yang theory—the concept of two opposing, yet complementary, forces that shape the world and all life—is central to TCM.

In the TCM view, a vital energy or life force called qiIn traditional Chinese medicine, the vital energy or life force proposed to regulate a person’s spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health and to be influenced by the opposing forces of yin and yang. circulates in the body through a system of pathways called meridians. Health is an ongoing process of maintaining balance and harmony in the circulation of qi.

The TCM approach uses eight principles to analyze symptoms and categorize conditions: cold/heat, interior/exterior, excess/deficiency, and yin/yang (the chief principles). TCM also uses the theory of five elements—fire, earth, metal, water, and wood—to explain how the body works; these elements correspond to particular organs and tissues in the body.

These concepts are documented in the Huang Di Nei Jing (Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor), the classic Chinese medicine text."

When it comes to America's view of China today it is largely a holdover of the Cold War view of the Soviet Union and Red China.  They were opponents, competitors, adversaries and anything else that might inspire fear.

We often forget that the Soviet Union, the first Communist nation, was in power for nearly 75 years while China has been Communist just 63 years.  China was our ally back in World War II as first Japan and then the Soviet Union overran China.

World War II left China with over 22 million military and civilian deaths , second in deaths only to the Soviets who suffered 45 million deaths.  This compares to the United States, active in both the Atlantic and Pacific campaigns, who suffered a total of 296,000 deaths, military and civilian.

China is no longer the suppressive state that once rigidly enforced birth control or suppressed human rights.  Just this week Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident in the middle of an international crisis when he fled to the US Embassy in China, was released by the Chinese along with his family to move to the United States so he could attend New York University law school.

Not only is China the largest purchaser of US Treasury Bonds, but China is investing substantial funds in US businesses like this weeks $6 billion purchase of AMC Theaters.

This fall China will elect a new president and it is expected to be Xi Jinping, now vice president of China and the apparent successor to President Hu Jintao.

Mr. Xi is expected to formally take the reins of the world’s second-largest economy and fastest-modernizing military power late in 2012.

Recently Xi Jinping made a whirlwind tour of the US from Congress and the White House to Iowa cornfields and then to California and he gave hints of a new opportunity for Chinese American partnerships if we can just get past the misconceptions of the past.

His views of the West remain difficult to divine. He once told the American ambassador to China over dinner that he enjoyed Hollywood films about World War II because of the American sense of good and evil, according to diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

On a visit to Mexico in 2009, when he was defending China’s record in the global financial crisis before an audience of overseas Chinese, he suggested that he was impatient with foreigners wary of China’s new power in the world.

“Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us,” he said. “First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?”

Who is he?

Currently China's vice-president and vice chair of the Central Military Commission (which controls the army).  He is the s on of Xi Zhongxun, one of the Communist Party's founding fathers.  Xi joined the ruling party in 1974.  His wife, singer Peng Liyuan, describes him as frugal, hardworking and down-to-earth.

Most important, he will be the new leader of China and it is time we gave the Chinese what they have earned and deserve, a partnership agreement with the US.  Remember, China still maintains direct access to North Korea, Iran and Syria.

The construction activity in China dominates the world economic market and directly impacts on commodity prices, crude oil supplies, even wood for housing.

It is time we treat them as the second most powerful force on Earth.

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America and the Russian Bear - Time for a change of direction?

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Foreign policy is slow to change here in the US of A.  It seems as if once we decide who are the good guys and bad guys we never get around to seeing if they have changed or our relationship has changed over the years.

Take Russia for example.  Until the fall of the Tsar in 1917 Russia was an ally of the United States and in fact Russia was probably responsible for saving the USA during our own Civil War.

Since most history books seem to have ignored this crucial story perhaps a reminder is in order.  In 1862 when it appeared as if the Confederacy might win the war the British and French governments, both of whom were backing the Confederacy over the Union, moved their own troops into Canada and Mexico respectively and were prepared to attack Lincoln and the Union at the first opportunity.

With the Union Army nearly wiped out by Confederate commander Robert E. Lee  the most important battle of the Civil War was about to take place at Gettysburg.  Lincoln knew the outlook was bleak and that any intervention by British and French troops on behalf of the South would win the war.

Secretly, so secretly that his own personal secretaries and the Secretary of War Stanton did not know, Lincoln sent a courier to the Tsar with a private note from him asking for help. When the courier reached Russia and got to the Tsar he said he had a private letter from President Lincoln and before he said another word, before the letter was even opened, the Tsar said he had such a high regard for the new American President he would do whatever Lincoln asked.

What Lincoln asked was that Russian, the greatest enemy in the world of Great Britain and France, let the European powers know that any invasion by them of America would be considered an act of war against Russia as well.

Not only did the Tsar agree but he sent his fleet into New York and San Francisco harbors to help defend the North as he sent couriers to Britain and France to warn the kings an invasion of America would be considered an act of war against Russia as well.

After the fall of Russia to Communism in 1917 the Communist Manifesto to conquer the world kept the Soviet Union at arms length, only because Hitler and Nazi Germany posed a far greater threat.

For the period of World War II we were allies with the Soviet Union and in fact American arms and weapons sent to Russia helped keep Hitler from conquering the Soviets. However, as soon as the war ended we were bitter Cold War enemies and that lasted until about 1990 when the Communist control over the Soviet Union collapsed.

After that we tried to make the new Russia into an American reflection of Democracy and nearly destroyed the countries of the former Soviet Union.  It has taken over 20 years for Russia to recover and begin the long process toward limited democracy.

I believe it is time a new American foreign policy be adopted toward Russia and China that reflects the new world situation, alliances and common interests.  Yet we continue to treat both countries with Cold War suspicion and mistrust.

This story deals with Russian USA relations.  A follow up will outline a new USA China relationship.  Tantamount to both countries is the need for the USA to articulate a willingness on behalf of America to become a true partner and ally of Russia while recognizing that the Russian people and culture may never be able to adopt our brand of democracy, but at least they can move toward such a goal.

In Russia we have a nation over 2,500 years old with a rich culture and history thousands of years older than democracy or communism.  While Russia is one of the top ten nation's in the world in terms of economy, our minimum support for the Russian government has left friction between nations and unrest in the United Nations.

Russia and China are aligned with their old allies like North Korea, Iran and Syria, thus there is additional tension between the USA and them, especially when issues get to the United Nations Security Council.  Russia and China have consistently vetoed resolutions against the three countries mentioned.

With the recent election of Vladimir Putin to his third term as President of the Russian Federation there is a window of opportunity to move to improve relations with this ancient culture but it will take initiative on our part as much of the world has been confused by the strange foreign policy of America.

Though Russia has fallen from a Superpower to the 9th strongest economy on Earth there are still many assets like an abundance of natural resources, that are vital to Europe.  In addition any strategic defense treaties between the two would eliminate the need for many more treaties with other nations.

It is time we put behind suspicion and fear and stop treating Russia like a potential threat and move forward to improve relations across the spectrum with this sleeping giant which is a true indication of the Russian potential.

We should recognize Putin as the survivor he is from the Communist and KGB regimes and though we may not be enamored with his personal habits and bravado, he has now been elected president three times and served four more years as prime minister.  That is a powerful indication of support from the people of Russia.

Yes there is corruption in Russia just as there is corruption in America, in the halls of government in fact.

Yes there is voter fraud in elections just like we had in Florida during the 2000 election.

Russia may have corrupt businesses but look what our Wall Street has done to the world economy because of greed.

And of course the Russians and Chinese alike have developed powerful cyber hacking capabilities through the Internet but didn't our intelligence agencies hack them first?  Don't they have a right to defend their computers from being hacked by us?

There is too much good that can be accomplished by cooperation between the US and Russia in many fields from medicine to space (already we are dependant on them to get into space), from global environmental issues to nuclear proliferation.

I say roll the clock back to the time of Lincoln when Russia saved the United States and then work together to build a better world.

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