Such a strange dream...

It's only five thirty in the morning. I had myself all wound up yesterday trying to sleuth out the mysteries of my ancestors. Then to finish off the day I had this exchange with my wife about how she always tells people what a genius she is married to and I replied back that's not exactly the way I put it to people, I tell people that if people were to actually take the ideas I give them and put them to use there would be a lot more millionaires in the world. She looked at me sort of askance like I was some kind of self-delusional fool. Even though it's true!
So it took a lot of effort last night for me to get to sleep and it was likely well after midnight before I could read myself to sleep. I did have a few very brief power naps yesterday evening so it's not a complete loss but I do seem to be putting my spell checker to use this morning. My mind's still in a bit of a fog and with any luck I'll get back to bed and get some more sleep before I actually begin my day.

But there's something I want to say first, something I want to talk about with my always-silent audience, my readers. It's about a dream that I had that just a few minutes ago woke me up. It was a very powerful and emotional and disturbing dream, hopefully the kind that most decent folks never have unless maybe they awaken in a blazing fever or something after hallucinating their way through a bad dream.
As I recall, the dream started with myself and my wife playing some sort of a game that we were accustomed to playing (although I have never played this game with her) where we were together in a room bouncing a small very bouncy golf ball sized rubber ball against the walls where it would bounce hard and fast against a wall and cross the room and bounce against the opposite wall while we, she and I, competed against each other to see who could stop the ball first and make it bounce in another direction. At one point I stopped it by making it bounce against one of the other two walls in the room, something she wasn't expecting and it upset her. I'm thinking now in my awake state that she was upset because she always had to win the game and I had come out of nowhere this time with the audacity to actually win the game myself.
Somehow this morphed into a grey area in the dream where I was outside and she was still inside but we were getting ready to go somewhere but I was in an emotional state of mind that actually is a familiar state of mind for me. I was upset with my wife, emotionally upset, and it had to do with her not winning the game and me somehow being the one who was to blame, the one in the wrong. I frequently am driven to emotional distress by this.
So somehow my beloved cat became involved. I have a love hate relationship with my cat. She's not actually my cat but she is. She is my daughter's cat but we have been the cat's caretakers for about the past decade since our daughter moved out west. This cat was born back in 2004 to a featherweight but loving cat that we used to have and her daddy was a really scruffy looking old tomcat that wandered the neighborhood and if you ever got close enough to get a good look at him he had this large broad face that had this wild look of fear on it just before he bolted and ran off across the road into the woods. He clearly didn't seem to be anybody's cat because he was so scruffy and fearful but I see the broad head and wild look of his face in his little kitten, my cat, so I know he was the daddy.
Even though she has this wildness built into her that has always kept her from being the kind of lap cat that most cat lovers enjoy having, I still enjoy seducing her into enjoying a good heavy purr on a regular enough basis for her to know I'm her daddy, not that untamed broad-faced tomcat that she carries in her genes.
So it came as quite a surprise to me when in this dream I smothered her to death in a soft towel of some sort and put her in a bag or box of some kind and locked her inside the car that my wife and I were preparing to go somewhere in. Within minutes my wife was outside with me or maybe we met at the door when she was coming out and she asked if I had seen the cat. Of course I said no but she kept persisting and eventually she began to suspect that I had done something bad to the cat because, I suppose, I was still in this emotional state trying to hide my anger about not being allowed to win at this bounce ball game.
We went back and forth for awhile about are you sure you haven't seen the cat but eventually she became convinced that I had done the cat in and was hiding it in the car. From there the dream quickly morphed into her needing to get the police involved because I had gone bonkers again. I say again because in real life I am quite accustomed to going bonkers whenever I am forced to face the consequences of not letting her win all the games she plays, the relationship games, the ones that she repeatedly uses to win the dominance she enjoys over me. If you've read this blog over the past five or so years you might be starting to see where this dream is going and why, but for those who are new to it I'll do what I can here to keep you going with this. This dream and the real-life situation that spawned it isn't candy to the reader's eye. It's bitter.
So eventually she does get into the car and she does find the dead cat and I am in the background trying to imagine that I see some life in the cat because of course I never actually wanted the cat dead even though it was for sure me who had killed it but somehow the dream moved from needing to involve the authorities to wandering through the back stage of some training school with gifted students preparing to take their next lessons from accomplished art masters. There was this one older man, a piano expert, trying to lure me into my next music lesson (or was it my first?).
Then somehow as if by magic my wife and I were in a church setting, somewhat of a young adult setting since somehow I have never moved my own spiritual mindset beyond being a young adult I guess, and it was just about time for some of the young people attending to start their confessions and it quickly morphed into one of those things that happen in churches where people are actually allowed to participate and not just sing songs or sit and listen. This was a setting where someone begins their confession and it becomes this well-practiced virtue signaling kind of long-winded  thing where the person doing the confession is feeding their ego by dominating everybody else's time so as soon as I saw that was where I was and my time to speak would never come I got up and walked out and my wife was right behind me trying to get me to stop and return to the confession session.
The next scene - only moments later in dream time - was a night scene where my wife and I were walking along the edge of the woods up on my little farm and we came across a large gathering of kids and church counselor type young people being all happy and having fun around a bunch of campfires in the edge of the woods so here I am in absolute misery still in my deeply disturbed emotional state having just been found to have murdered my pet cat while my wife is making it crystal clear that if it wasn't for me and my bad side we could be enjoying the company of all these happy kids and camp counselors - when something dawned on me, something profound.
The dream becomes fuzzy at this point but my wife and I suddenly wound up inside a car with several other people and it was back in the confessions mode but this time it was my turn to confess and because these confessionals are always such bullshit anyway and because they never actually go anywhere, never accomplish anything, always are just virtue signaling ego trips that never solve any real problems, I was remaining silent. I didn't want to do it. Everybody was waiting and laying this guilt trip on me but I just didn't want to play this game with them and enter into shameful submission. So it went on for awhile and the pressure kept building for me to say something and I kept resisting and finally I swung open the door - I was in the driver's seat - and started to get out but the urge came to me to turn to my wife and say something, over and over again, with the group in the car as my witness. I said, "Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?" Over and over again I said it.
On that note I awoke from my dream.

Why is it that I am the one that always has to change and not you?

Unfortunately this one question has been the story of my life since I married my wife. She was an early subscriber to the "love me for who I am because you're never going to get me to change" crowd. The year 2019 was the year that both of my sons were forcefully put through this same nonsense by their significant others too so it's very fresh in my mind, but buried just beneath the surface, just out of consciousness. I live with this as my reality.
So I jotted down a note on an index card and left it in the kitchen for my wife to eventually see, maybe today, maybe later. It says this:

Here is the question that the victim of a narcissist always asks:
Why is it that I am the one that has to change and not you?

If you've done any reading or have studied narcissism this is a well established concept. This is the reason most counselors advise victims of narcissists to get out of the relationship. This part of the relationship never does change because nobody has the cure for narcissism.

On that note I will post this story and attempt to go back to sleep! Wish me luck!

Haskell Plantation

Yesterday I undertook a family history project. I am now beginning, I hope, a project to record information concerning the early settlement by my ancestors of my home town of Greenville, Maine, originally called Haskell Plantation (or Haskell's Plantation, whichever).

For beginners, the south half of Greenville, or at least six square miles of it, was set aside in 1811 as a grant for the creation of Saco Academy which became Thornton Academy in 1821. This grant of land was supposed to raise the sum of $3,000 to help finance the new school. I'm using the Wikipedia article for Thornton Academy as my reference. Saco Academy first opened in 1813. Oddly enough a distant relative of mine, Ezra Haskell, a cousin many times removed, was the teacher and apparently the second "preceptor" of this school from 1814 to possibly 1819. Reference pages 24 and 51 of this book published in 1899 Collections and Proceedings of the Maine Historical Society Second Series, Vol. X.

From this same book, page 42, I derive that the school chose to raise the $3,000 by taking donations from "subscribers" in 1811, raising $3,825. So they still had the land up north after having raised the required $3,000 as near as I can tell. Page 5 of this book is my reference for the six square miles and the $3,000 required endowment.
From this same reference, a few years after the departure of Ezra Haskell as the school's teacher and "preceptor" the school chose to raise money by somehow transferring the six square mile grant to a much more direct relative of mine, Nathaniel Haskell, my great-grandfather's grandfather. One square miles is 640 acres. The book gives a confusing overview of the transactions involved. From page 40 of the book a committee was appointed in 1820 to decide what was the best way to deal with this half township of land and in August 1820 they decided to sell it provided they could raise $3,000 in the sale. Then in October the committee was authorized to sell the land for "not less than $2,500" by 10% down payment and the rest by mortgage.
On page 40 through 42 the book yoyos so it's hard to make out what really happened. There was a sale in 1824 to Nathaniel Haskell. Another land transfer was dated November 7, 1828 which appears to transfer land from Haskell to the trustees. In March of 1830 it was somehow agreed again to sell the land to Nathaniel Haskell. Somewhere along the way Haskell was required to pay $2,584.92 although he apparently only paid them $460.10 (page 41).
Years ago I found in the indexes for the registry of deeds in Dover-Foxcroft that there was some back-and-forth in these land transfers. At the time, it appeared that the majority of the six square miles transferred back to the academy although Haskell himself kept some and some was sold by Haskell to some of the early settlers. The book speaks of additional sales by the academy of this land starting in 1837. One sale in 1843 to Frederick Young raised $300 at $1.50 an acre. 
The book doesn't say how much money they did raise but it concludes on pages 41 and 42 that they raised $971.10 from sales to Nathaniel Haskell and Young.

There was a fire in 1848 that closed Thornton Academy and it wasn't reopened until 1889.

Update March 1, 2020

Here is a short historical article about Haskell Plantation and Greenville that I hadn't seen before:

History: GREENVILLE, PISCATAQUIS COUNTY, MAINE

Taken from the 1880 book History of Piscataquis County , Maine... by Amasa Loring
This information was provided by this Greenville history website:
Greenville, Maine Genealogy

Family History

I'm not generally interested in family genealogy but the bug hit me last night when I was watching a YouTube video made by a couple of guys traveling the United States/Canada border. They began on Campobello Island crossing the bridge into Lubec, Maine but were soon at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House which straddles the border between Vermont and Quebec. An ancestor of mine, Nathaniel Haskell, settled the town where I live so I started reading about the library and was soon onto a genealogy site tracing my own family tree.
The Haskell name in Maine traces back to Cumberland County. I find it in several areas on this 1857 map of Cumberland County:
Map of Cumberland County, Maine
From the genealogy site I found that Nathaniel had family roots in New Gloucester, now home to Pineland Farms and the Shaker Village. He was a blacksmith and was a resident of Westbrook at the time of the 1820 Census just before his purchase of the south half of what was to become my home town. He married a Stevens from Stevens Plains which seems to perhaps refer to an area in Westbrook just north of Portland. I don't believe she came with Nathaniel to Greenville. It appears that it isn't known when she died but my dad always used to say their daughter, a widower, was the first white woman to live in Greenville. I know, that sounds so racist but it's also historic.
Deborah Haskell
It's interesting that Deborah was born in Paris, Maine where the heritage apple known as the Black Oxford was first discovered by Nathaniel Haskell at about this same time.

I also found the name Nathaniel Haskell among those opposed to the incorporation of the town of Paris (then Massachusetts) on page 48 of the book History of Paris, Maine from ITS SETTLEMENT TO 1880. The petition must have been written in 1792. On page 64 of this book the estimated adult male population in 1792 was 80. The town was incorporated June 20, 1793. He was assigned as a tythingman at the first town meeting in the summer of 1793 but was not mentioned in the 1794 town meeting records. Records on page 609 of this book show the sale of lot 2 range 3 on October 31, 1795, sold by Nathaniel Haskell to Alfred Gates.
Records of birth of Sarah and Nathaniel Haskell's children after 1793 do not indicate the place of birth as Paris (then Massachusetts). Sarah Haskell last gave birth in 1816 to Cyrus Haskell in New Gloucester (still Massachusetts), Nathaniel's home town, where she had given birth to several other of their eight children.

On the 1857 Cumberland County map there is an N. Haskell marked in the Saccarappa area in Westbrook on the main map and on the Saccarappa insert map there is a residence marked Mrs. Haskell on what appears might be the corner of Spring and Main in what I always thought of as the center of town in Westbrook. Further research, however, leads me to the conclusion that this is another Nathaniel Haskell, the son of Solomon Haskell Jr. who died just prior to when a major piece of choice downtown riverfront property downstream of Saccarappa Falls was registered in 1816 to a Nathaniel Haskell, presumably Solomon Jr.'s son and heir. Some of these Haskell family members are buried in the Saccarappa Cemetery.

Another clue just appeared here in this blog post by Thomas Jay Kemp:
My 5th-Great-Grandfather Lt. Nathaniel Haskell in the American Revolution
That would be Sarah (Stevens) Haskell's father-in-law. Could Sarah be buried nearby?

Maybe someday I'll go looking for her gravestone. She may have been from this family:
The Stevens Family of Portland Maine
However I can't seem to find a grave for her in the Evergreen Cemetery on Stevens Avenue in Portland.

Haskell Family History  I didn't realize I was part of such a large family!

Libertarian

The older I become the more I seem to identify with the "Libertarian" political philosophy, whatever that means. Here is an example:

My struggle: The problems and ramifications of Jewish identity politics  February 20, 2020

Most of the people I know would feel that they should be deeply offended by that article.
I don't share those feelings.
Instead, what offends me is the concept that God chose a certain genetic strain of human beings or even a group of adherents to a religion to be superior to all other human beings. No God worthy of my definition of the word "God" would ever do something that disgusting.

Hate

Are you for or against hate? When it comes to allowing or forbidding hate on the various social media platforms what defines hate? It dawned on me recently that when it comes to censorship on social media hate is defined as any person or topic that triggers hatred in their opponents.
Think about that one. Take it home with you. It's a broader concept than good old-fashioned hate - a bit Orwellian.
About 21 minutes into this video there begins a discussion about hate. The question is posed - anyone in this audience who is for hate raise their hands even though a protest group was accusing the entire audience and the speaker of hate. So what does define hate...

Dave Rubin Handles Protesters at UNH (FULL VIDEO) | FREE SPEECH | Rubin Report

Wuhan Coronavirus

Is an epidemic really an epidemic if what really concerns the world is that the name be politically correct?

EXPERT: Coronavirus Outbreak “Just Beginning”  February 14, 2020

By the way, this YouTube channel, China Uncensored, will be one of the first to be disappeared once the Chinese Communists take over the Internet.

Al Jazeera News:
Is China losing control of the coronavirus outbreak? I Inside Story  February 14, 2020

Oh yes, the current politically correct name for this deadly disease, since we wouldn't want to stigmatize the Chinese, is much easier to remember and pronounce. From Wikipedia:

2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease

or simply:

COVID-19

also:

Coronavirus disease 2019

2019-nCoV ARD

novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP)

2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2)

**********************************

The Communist China Approach

The coverup  February 20, 2020

Roger Stone

Some day if Roger Stone lives long enough he should write a bestseller and make millions on it. I'm going to go out on a limb to make this claim but here goes: His story is unique in American history.

Roger Stone is the scapegoat for the entire hate Trump industry, the entire make money by trashing Trump media and get elected by trashing Trump socialist anticapitalist political elite. They couldn't nail Trump with their collusion conspiracy theory and their Mueller report. They couldn't nail Trump with their fake version of Trump's phone call with Ukraine's new leader, so they nailed Roger Stone instead. What's worse is that if Trump steps in and pardons Stone they'll impeach him for doing it. In fact that has no doubt been the plan all along with the Roger Stone trial, rigged start to finish.

There's almost nothing available right now on an Internet search for Roger Stone that doesn't trash President Trump but here is one article that gives a tiny bit of insight:
Nolte: Good Riddance to Mueller’s Monstrous Roger Stone Prosecutors  February 12, 2020

I first became aware of Roger Stone during 2016. He was a frequent guest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel. Alex Jones's YouTube channel was one of the first victims of the YouTube shut down of conservative voices soon after Trump's election. Stone specialized in reporting on rumors about what lay ahead in the political arena.

It appears that he got in trouble with the Deep State and the future Mueller witch hunt when he projected the release of Wikileaks emails damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Apparently his problems with the Deep State predated the theft of those emails however. As I recall he and Alex Jones several times discussed an attempt on Stone's life early in 2016, a poisoning that he survived.

Stone himself is a guy who is easy to dislike. He brags about himself. He's cocky. He's weird to a certain extent although I have always wondered if that was a lingering after-effect from the poisoning. He's usually quite certain of the truth of what he reports. Alex Jones is the same way. But the most important trait that Stone exhibits is that he gives insight into the dirty deeds that go on in American politics. He is an ideal visionary for understanding the Trump phenomenon.

Which is why he is being persecuted by the filthy Demo'rats.

Kangaroo Court

Tucker: Fairness is the most important American idea  February 14, 2020 Fox News

Former AG Whitaker Alleges Deep State Prosecutors Set-Up Barr and Trump  February 13, 2020

Roger Stone jury foreperson's anti-Trump social media posts surface  February 12 and 13, 2020

Tomeka Hart breaks silence about serving as juror on Roger Stone trial   February 12, 2020

Jury selection begins in Roger Stone's trial  November 5, 2019  CBS News on YouTube

Roger Stone found guilty of lying to Congress to protect Trump and his campaign  November 15 and 19, 2019

New Hampshire Primaries - The Consolation Prize

If there is any consolation at all from yesterday's primaries in New Hampshire, it is that Bernie Sanders, the favorite to win the Democratic primary, who won 60% of the New Hampshire primary vote in 2016 with 152,000 plus votes - running against Hillary Clinton - yesterday won something like 26% of the vote with roughly 76,000 votes although not all the votes have been counted yet despite the fact that the polls closed 15 hours ago. So that means this year he may have gotten only half as many votes as he did in 2016.
Agreed those numbers will change when the vote is final. Even so, it comes as good news that his support has dwindled that much in the past four years.

Ukraine Trump Money and the Bidens

Obviously with a title like this it's not me handing out the information.
It's Glen Beck. Glen Beck turns my stomach to be honest. He's the one conservative journalist I can't trust. Well, not true. Alex Jones I don't trust either.
But if you can tolerate Glen Beck for an hour and a half (and I may need to watch this video again) then give this a try:

Glenn Beck Presents: Ukraine: The Final Piece  February 6, 2020

Alex Jones pushes product on his shows. Glen Beck's product is his own media outlet, Blaze TV and it gets pushed hard in this video.

Vindman Fired

Big news today. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman - the officer who testified against his Commander in Chief at the Shifty Schiff House committee impeachment hearings last fall after snitching to the CIA or NSC or whoever it was he snitched to that President Trump had veered from his assigned (or whatever) "talking points" as mentioned in this townhall dot com article - was just fired from his White House job and escorted off the premises.

Yay!!!

However, if you read about this almost anywhere in the mainstream media today it's almost as though this mole had more right to the White House than President Trump himself.

Go figure, eh? And they say there's no such thing as the "deep state".

Dem Dirt

Since the mainstream media seems dedicated to hiding any dirt about the Dems and since the real news is hard to find even on the Internet, I think I'll begin saving links to seemingly truthful stories that don't downplay Dem corruption.

I'll start here: February 6, 2020 One America News Network
Ukraine’s former top prosecutor says Joe Biden demanded dismissal over Burisma probe

Attorney: FBI had been lying about the murder of Seth Rich

PELOSI for PRISON

Democrat Departure

A conversation about the impact that the impeachment could have on the Democrats:

Why Dave Rubin And Many Others Are Leaving The Democratic Party | POLITICS | Rubin Report

The State of the Union 2020 and the Bitch

I just watched President Trump deliver his State of the Union speech. Normally I can't make it through a State of the Union speech but this one was inspiring to say the least. It appeared to me that President Trump used the occasion to take a victory lap in the very chamber that impeached him a month and a half ago. Mr. President, I salute you!

All through the speech, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, sitting behind the President as he spoke, showed her disdain. For nearly the entire speech the Democrats in the audience sat stoic, unwilling to credit the President for his achievements and unwilling to take any credit for the state of the union.

As if that wasn't enough, when the President finished, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took handfuls of her copy of the speech and tore them up.

Sigh... ... … …
The bitch!
What a disgusting and disgraceful old hag she is. Maybe by this time next year the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America will be a Republican. The Democrats don't deserve it. They have used up their line of credit.

Down with the Socialists!

*********

Trump's State of the Union Address

Show starts at 25:40
President's entrance: 30:35
The snub: 33:25
Pelosi's closing fit: 1:53:00

Maine's Better Half

Maine's Senator Susan Collins speaks on the Senate Floor about the two articles of impeachment reflecting virtually the polar opposite of Maine's other senator, Angus Gump - I mean, Angus King whom I wrote about earlier.

Sen. Collins announces plan to vote to acquit on both articles of impeachment

She may well be showing her age but she puts to shame the arguments Angus poses.

I do have one major concern, though, with Senator Collins' reasoning. She says it was not the correct thing for President Trump to be concerned about the Biden issue with corruption in the Ukraine. What I don't understand is why not, why would it be wrong for President Trump to want to know more about the obvious connection between Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and corruption, money laundering or whatever it was? It will certainly be something to watch if the Senate does investigate the Hunter Biden thing as Lindsey Graham says he intends to do. If Senator Collins can't wrap her mind around the fact that this is a problem in the U. S. government, this apparent corruption, then what does that say about her? What shadow does that cast over her? How can she think that kind of thing is acceptable? Why would she side with the Democrats on this problem?

I was in the waiting room of a car dealership today waiting for my car to have an airbag recall completed and in a deja vu from a few weeks ago when I had my wife's car done I picked up today's issue of the Bangor Daily News and was sickened by the constant unending anti-Trump bullshit throughout that newspaper.

Tucker Carlson

Fox News has a talk show host Tucker Carlson who, in my mind at least, attempts to be a Socrates of the modern age. He loves to expose hypocrisy. Here's an interview of him that I am watching at the moment that is doing a good job of explaining where he comes from in his work, why he is who he is:

On Trump, Mainstream Media, and Revolution | Tucker Carlson | MEDIA | Rubin Report  October 2018

It's an insightful and honest interview.

I Hate Ethanol

It's true. I hate ethanol. If it's in your drink it's a solvent that dissolves your brain and your body. If it's in your gasoline it dissolves your wallet!

Swamp Watch: The corrupt ethanol industry

The Face of Truth

Sigh.....….
EPIC! Candace Owens Gets Up And RIPS Nancy Pelosi To SHREDS

More...
The Candace Owens Show: Secretary Carson

Interview - How she became a conservative - Red Pill Black origin
On Her Journey From Left to Right | Candace Owens | POLITICS | Rubin Report  September 2017