The Nanny State

I'm so sick of "elites" and government leaders dictating to me how to live my life, raise my kids or interact with my fellow citizens. For the last hundred years there has been a progressively accelerating socialist tendency for elites, academics and government bureaucrats, who "know better", to institute laws and regulations to force their "enlightened" perspective on the average American. The central state continues to aggrandize power and force increasingly intrusive legislation down our throats. Now there are bills in Congress to force the psychiatric assessment of our schoolchildren. Ron Paul, a real hero for freedom IMHOP, in his essay "The Therapeutic Nanny State" blows the whistle on this deeply troubling trend. As he so rightly points out, Communist states persecuted Christians, Jews and other religious and undesirable sects as examples of psychiatric illness that required treatment.. treatment in Gulags and prisons. Think this couldn't happen to you or your children.. .welll think again. As Rep. Paul so aptly points out, bureaucratic programs tend to grow well beyond their initial mandate. Still think I'm a radical nut.. check out "Crisis and Leviathan", an obscure but scholarly text that systematically chronicles the ratcheting usurpation of central authority under the guise of crisis.

The founding fathers of our country were wise to distrust highly centralized power. It is dangerous indeed and leads to all sorts of hideous consequences, no matter your political viewpoint, unless you are one of the ruling class....

The Education System... a tale of intrigue

For a long time I have had a very large axe to grind against the education establishment and their the copycat private schools (the Bud Lite "...less filling" mantra comes to mind). Both school systems (there are exceptions I realize, but few) long ago adopted a policy of churning out "good" citizens rather than well rounded, thinking, educated individuals. You don't have to be university professor to do the research and find how Dewey and his fellow Rhodes scholars, and their forerunners including such notables as that cad (hey this is my Blog!) Pres. Wilson hijacked the compulsory school movement into a machine for the dumming down of the populous. This article "Against School" is an excellent primer on how this came about.

There are many powerful forces and groups at play who aren't in the least bit interested in a populous of educated individuals. In fact, there was a long running dialog in England in the late 19th century (that was imported stateside soon thereafter) over just what percentage of the populous should be educated to rule. My memory fails me as to the exact percentage, but it was the general consensus that well less than 10% would be sufficient to rule properly. A variant of the same model, albeit where a larger percentage of Americans should be properly educated, was adopted here. This is an appalling outrage and no amount of well intentioned reform will help save a system devised with an end goal contrary to the educating of individuals. Why would the government want educated citizens? They are harder to rule over and might just not go along with the more "elightened" class of rulers.. better to turn out brainwashed "citizens" that will accept the status quo at face value, pay their taxes with little complaint and endlessly bicker about how they should be given more and better handouts. No wonder there is so much disenfranchisement with where this country is headed... the average person knows something is rotten in Denmark but isn't able to put their finger on what exactly it is. The homeschooling movement is somewhat a threat, but this too will only have a limited effect because of the proliferation of two income homes.

This country was founded on principles of self reliance, duty and responsibility. This article does a good job of making a case for how the school system was engineered intentionally to systematically purge these principles from the common populous. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark and scrapping the "education" establishment would be huge leap forward to righting the sinking ship of America.

Don't believe me? Here is what that scoundrel Woodrow Wilson had to say about the education system, of which he was a chief reformer, in 1909 when he was president of Princeton University, "...[Wilson] said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." I wonder what Jefferson and Franklin would have had to say about this.. I seriously doubt they would agree. Huxley's "Brave New World" paints a grim picture of a society where these very same principles are taken to their logical conclusion.

Footnote: For a deliciously politically incorrect perspective on this.. check on Fred Reed's (aka Fred on Everything") "solutions". Click here for the less than faint of heart.

Myers-Briggs Personality Profiles

Personality profiles have become quite a fascination for me. I have become especially familiar with the Myers-Briggs analysis and classification method based on the psychology of Jung. As I stated in my profile I am an ENTP, which stands for Extroverted-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving. For a full description of my particular profile, click here, ENTP. Understanding this information about yourself and others can help you learn to communicate and relate to others better.

To test yourself, click here. Remember to answer honestly. There are no right or wrong answers, and there are no bad or good profiles. The only goal is to understand your underlying temperament better, not to judge which characteristics are bad or good. At the very least it can serve as great cocktail conversation... or maybe not.

Threads... a definition

The purpose of this site is to share with friends and others my current thoughts... or threads. I am an ENTP (see the next post on Myers-Briggs profiling) so consequently I am continually pondering the unponderable. I can't help but continually analyze the world around me and to be fascinated by all I see. It's a very rare topic that doesn't at least hold my interest for a short period, while others I may contemplate on and off for years.

If you find a topic that interests you, or a position I have espoused that you disagree with vehemently, please feedback and let me know what you think, but you had better know what you are talking about and be able to back up your assertions accordingly or prepare to be ridiculed!

Hello World

This is my first post in blogland, so I figured it would only be appropriate as an homage to programming.