Education

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
Will Rogers

He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.
Adolf Hitler

It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
Benito Mussolini

Last year Chavez' Minister of Education, Aristobulo Isturiz, laid the groundwork for the new "Bolivarian" education program to be imposed in Venezuela when he announced: "Teachers should be the first soldiers of the revolution ... No Director of a public school shall have his, her job validated unless an evaluation is made, so that we are certain that they know what is the type of republic we want."
- http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/hugo-chavez-brings-autocracy-to-the/

A few thoughts on education:

1. The Constitution of The United States does not give the federal government any authority over public education, unless the rights protected by the constitution itself are somehow violated by a public education system. If you can find any constitutional authority for the feds over education, let me know.

2. Education is very powerful. What better way to shape the values and world-view of the next generation than lock them in a room for several hours a day from an early age, give the teacher an air of authority, and tell them what, not teach them how, to think. It is perfect for social engineers and would-be partners with God, seeking the ever elusive utopia, to monkey with the very values that drive our society. These are people who view the average American as a complete idiot, unable to make the right decisions for himself let alone raise his own children, or vote for the right people (hence ACORN and such). But they can’t just do what they want in a democratic republic with a constitutionally limited government. They must get permission from the very people they detest to do what they want. Controlling the education system is more than just a cornerstone in their social engineering plans, it’s a means of securing power in the future. This is the purpose of the NEA. This is why they can’t stand private schools (except the ones they put their own children in to escape the defective and often physically dangerous schools they themselves created), or home schooling. This is why they cannot tolerate vouchers or any system that will give parents a choice of where their kids will be educated. They can’t risk the possibility that kids will be taught real history, real economics, the ideas of people like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, let alone Jesus Christ.
Public Education holds way too much power and influence to centralized, to be entrusted to a whatever political party happens to be in vogue at the moment. The education of our children is the responsibility of the parents. The family, not the government, is the foundation of civilization, and should remain so.

More

These are the enlightened?

This doesn't surprise me. Nor this. You might think it's far fetched, they can't mean that, no one can be that evil. Remember, it's happened many times over. And almost every time, there were those who saw it coming and sounded the warning only to be brushed off as paranoid, extremists, or fear mongers. I do not equate Obama to Hitler, Stalin, or others of their kind. Maybe a wannabe Mussolini. He uses the same tactics they used. But what scares me is what lies behind the door he's trying to open.

animals

If you knew me, and you don’t, you’d know that I’m a big Pink Floyd fan. So anyway, I was thinking the other day about Animals. For some reason I tend to forget about this album, but, in my opinion, it’s an excellent album. Sure, as a Christian and a conservative, I take issue with some of the lyrics, most of it I like and the music is some of their best. It’s very dark, though, and reminds me of Animal Farm, one of my all time favorite books, though the premise is a bit different.
All that being said, I realized the other day this dark album is a great illustration of how liberals view the world.
You have the pigs. The aristocracy. They are the rich and powerful few who use religion and commercialism to pacify the masses while they exploit them. They run the machine (go ahead, have a cigar).
The sheep are the blissfully ignorant masses. They are the stupid followers who don’t know what’s in their own best interest. They are helpless without a shepherd.
Then there are the dogs. They live in a dog eat dog world. They smile while they stab you in the back. They think of themselves as individualists, but what they don’t know is they are merely pawns in the pig’s game and completely expendable.
The one group left out is the enlightened, the philosopher kings, the anointed as Thomas Sowell calls them in The Vision of the Anointed. These are the ones who care. They are the educated elites. The believe that not only should they be in power, it is their birthright. Pesky inconveniences like constitutions and elections are merely obstacles. The rest of us are too dumb to make decisions for ourselves and would be completely helpless without them. This belief that they are entitled to power allows them to justify any lie or crime necessary for the acquisition of power. Their elitism justifies their binding one standard on us, while holding themselves to almost no standards at all.
They view the world as pre-revolution France. They dream of carrying the banner of equality as they storm The Bastille. And, of course, there’s the guillotine, revenge against those they view as responsible for all they deem unfair.
What I find ironic is their hatred for the perceived aristocracy. Aristocrats view themselves as being of noble birth, a higher breed with access to education and refinement. Therefore they have a right and a duty to rule. So, like the pigs in Animal Farm, they’ve become identical to their enemy.
However, in Pigs on the Wing pt. 1 and 2 the question “if I didn’t care…” is brought up. The idea that we need to care and look out for each other.
Dostoevsky, in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, sums up everything he’d been trying to say with his writing since he was sent to Siberia with only a copy of the New Testament (part of The Bible, for those with a public education) to keep him sane and knock some sense into is increasingly radical left wing mind. He writes:

And really how simple it all is: everything could be arranged at once! The main thing is to love your neighbor as yourself-that is the main thing, and that is everything, for nothing else matters. Once you do that, you will discover at once how everything can be arranged. And yet it is an old truth, a truth that has been told over and over again, but in spite of that it finds no place among men!

Now why does that sound familiar to me?
It is simple. If everyone loved one another in this biblical sense, a genuine desire for the welfare of others, in deed as well as words; if everyone had the wisdom to know what is in the best interest of themselves and others; if everyone had the self-control to overcome the emotions and temptations that push us to act otherwise; we’d have little or no need for government at all. Any economic system would probably work.
Though we aught to promote these values, we must deal with the world as it is and not how we wish it was.
We are people. People are people. All have fallen short of the glory, and all are subject to emotions, hormones, passions, lusts, temptations, ignorance, confusion, selfishness, and momentary lapses of reason. Even good people, and I do believe most are good natured at heart, are capable of doing horrendous things. David, a man after God’s own heart, slept with another man’s wife and had that man killed to cover it up. On top of this, there are those who aren’t good. I don’t believe they were born evil, but somehow they allowed themselves to become evil. This is Planet Earth after all.
For these reasons, we need government. The primary, and I believe, original purpose of government is to protect the people, not to rule over them. The government serves the people, not the other way around.
So what am I trying to say with this rant?
If it is this difficult to govern our own lives, why would be let a stranger, especially politicians and bearcats, govern our lives for us. They too are only human. They are not infallible, even Obama. They are all subject to temptation, stupidity, and the corrupting forces of power. This is precisely why their power should be limited.
These pigs, I mean “anointed” are no more than vindictive, arrogant, narcissistic busy-bodies seeking to congratulate themselves and give their meaningless lives some meaning by prying into everyone else’s business and telling them what they are doing wrong. I deal with way too much of this at work, I don’t want to get from my government as well.
But I guess, that too, is life on Planet Earth.
I guess that’s about all I have say for now; it's late and my brain's gone comfortably numb. If you’re still with me, if your attention span is long enough and you have nothing better to do, thank you for reading. Any thoughts, questions, corrections, or suggestions are more than welcome.
Oh, and condescension is not love.

thoughts on happiness and control

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
- Alexis de Tocqueville


In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert describes a couple studies about control and happiness. In the first study (E. Langer and J. Rodin, “The Effect of Choice and Enhanced Personal Responsibility for the Aged: A field Experiment in an Institutional Setting,” Journal of personality and Social Psychology) two groups of elderly nursing home residents were given a house plant. The first group was told they were responsible for the care of the houseplant. The second group was told the staff would take care of the plant for them. Six months later, thirty percent of the of the residents in the second group, the ones with no control over their plant, were dead, while only fifteen percent of the first group, those who had control, were dead.
The second study (R. Schulz and B. H. Hanusa, “Long-Term Effects of Control and Predictability-Enhancing Interventions: Findings and Ethical Issues,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) had a more tragic outcome. They arranged for students to pay regular visits to nursing-home residents. Members of the first group were allowed to control the timing and duration of the visits. After two months, the members of the first group were happier and healthier than those who had no control over the visits. Several months after the study was concluded, however, a disproportionate number of the first group had died. Imagine being stuck in a nursing-home and having little control of your own life. It would be tough. The first group was given a taste of control over their own lives and benefited greatly, but when that was taken from them, they were worse off than if they never had it to begin with.

The Declaration of Independence states that governments are formed solely to secure our unalienable rights, namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It also states that when any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to abolish it. Now we can debate the what happiness is all day long, but what I do know is that no man, no matter how powerful or eloquent, can give it to you.; you must pursue it yourself. You are your own property. You are also your own responsibility. If you hand over your responsibly, you hand over control. If you look to someone else for happiness, you will never be happy.
We are in the process of handing over control of our employment our income, our retirement, our education, our children’s education, the care of the needy in our families and communities, our housing, our transportation, and the list goes on and on. The federal government gets all of it’s authority from the people, hence “We the People…” As the government gains more and more authority over more aspects of our lives, such as how much we can pay our own employees, it gets that authority from us. We, as individuals, are losing control of our own lives. Not only is this destructive to liberty, obviously, it is destructive to the pursuit of happiness and possibly even to our physical well-being. History is full of example of how governments with unlimited power are destructive to the individuals right to life.
If I continue I’ll start rambling even more than I already am. There should be plenty there to chew on. Think about it and let me know what you think.