Mark Sanford and South Carolina's Bailout

Mark Sanford participates in an ugly organization. He believes in taking what is yours and giving it to someone else. He wants to put you in jail for things you might like to do that couldn't harm anyone else but that he doesn't want you to do anyway. If he didn't believe in this than he would have had to lie constantly to get elected and stay elected. He didn't lie. He is a good man, not a liar. As a politician theft and coercion are simply his trade.

How can he be so bad and yet good? That's because he is a basically good man locked in a decadent time. In a decadent time institutions are dysfunctional. Requirements made on individuals are burdensome and meaningless in a decadent time.

On December 2, 2008 Governor Sanford, along with Governor Rick Perry of Texas, had this to say about the bailout:

As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show for it.

In the process, the federal government is not only burying future generations under mountains of debt. It is also taking our country in a very dangerous direction -- toward a " bailout mentality" where we look to government rather than ourselves for solutions. We're asking other governors from both sides of the political aisle to join with us in opposing further federal bailout intervention for three reasons.

First, we're crossing the Rubicon with regard to debt.

One fact that's been continually glossed over in the bailout debate is that Washington doesn't have money in hand for any of these proposals. Every penny would be borrowed...

Second, the bailout mentality threatens Americans' sense of personal responsibility.

In a free-market system, competition and one's own personal stake motivate people to do their best. In this process, the winners create wealth, jobs and new investment, while others go back to the drawing board better prepared to try again...

Third, we'd ask the federal government to stop believing it has all the answers...

In the rush to do "something" to help, federal leaders would be wise to take a line from the Hippocratic Oath, and pledge to do no (more) harm to our country's finances. We can weather this storm if we commit to fiscal prudence and hold true to the values of individual freedom and responsibility that made our nation great.

Mark Sanford is one of the good bad people who can't imagine a world without a coercive government, but at least he is a man who tries to keep the government he is part of from becoming worse. He will fail.

He is now a spokesman for responsible fiscal policy. He knows that South Carolina will be forced to bail out California which has doubled the size of its government. He knows that South Carolina would be better off opting out of any federal bailout. But South Carolina can't bail out of the bailout because it is captive. The United States government will ruin South Carolina's money no matter what. It has come up with all sorts of money packages that it will dangle before the companies that will benefit and the counties that will benefit when South Carolina accepts the money. If Governor Sanford will not accept the money than the legislature will do it anyway. And South Carolina's money (the United States dollar) will be ruined either way.

Mark Sanford has never been more right than he is now to stand against the bailout. He is acting like a man of principle. If he continues to do so than he will cease to be a politician which will be to his credit. I predict that he will cave in and accept the bailout money, but if he doesn't than he will be part of the solution.

The solution, of course, is for South Carolina to bail out of the United States.

All Bad All the Time

People watch television more than any other activity: 3.5 hours a day is the average. For reading and other activities the figures did not go above 30 mins.

Wikipedia

We are changing mentally. We are changing our minds. And many people are having their minds changed for them.

Our minds take in everything we see for evaluation and consideration. Sometimes we try what we have seen others do adapting what seems to work for further trials.

Nor are we unaffected by exposure to bad examples. Not everyone, perhaps, but most of us will become inured to bad behavior if exposed to it long enough. At the very least, if we can't escape it we will make peace with it

Our character is being formed while the TV is on. And the Tved mind of the TVed individual tells him that bad behavior is not treated the same way on TV as he experiences it in actual word and deed. It is not treated in a better way but in a way consistent with a fantasy intrinsic to a TV world, the world controlled by the TVers (the owners of the TV licenses), their sponsors and ultimately their government licensor.

Without TV most minds retain the religion and mores of their parents, the politics of their class, and the roles tradition has assigned to their gender and age, etc. Social harmony requires this. It is a natural prerequisite of man in society, and fundamental to civilization.

Mores derive from the established practices of a society.....They consist of shared understandings about the kinds of behavior likely to evoke approval, disapproval, toleration or sanction, within particular contexts.

Wikipedia

The world of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable is different for the TVed individual. It is being orchestrated. While watching TV the TVed's universe of experience and range of ideas are being subtly manipulated in ways neither random nor in the TVed person's own hands nor in the hands of his family or associates, but firmly in those of the TVer and his overseers.

For every TVed there exist TVers. The TVer views the TVed as a set of eyeballs and/or a wallet and nothing more. The TVer wants those eyeballs. He doesn't care what the TVed needs or believes except in so far as it helps him manipulate the Tved.

The TVer's ideals are secondary to the product he hawks but those ideals will be evident wherever he thinks he can get away with inserting them. He wants to make money or have influence or both, and he must satisfy the government licensor. He doesn't want grief for something he broadcasts. But he and those he must satisfy seek to control the thinking of their audience and they do every thing they can think of to get better at it.

One broadcast at a time the reality the TVer portrays etches itself on the unconsciousness of the TVed's mind changing his thinking forever without his ever becoming conscious of it. Eventually the vales and assumptions of the TV world become more real than any others. It's just a matter of time.

constant exposure to social mores is thought by some to lead to development of an individual moral core, which is per-rational and consists of a set of inhibitions that cannot be easily characterized except as potential inhibitions against taking opportunities that the family or society does not consider desirable. These in turn cannot be easily separated from individual opinions or fears of getting caught.

Wikipedia

Every moment you spend in front of the TV you are in the world of mental lockdown, on a narrow path maintained by the business owners and government censors of the networks. And every moment that you are there they are telling you what is worth thinking about and in what ways it is OK to think about it. If there are points of view to be aired then the TVer frames the debate, invites “opposing” spokespersons (acceptable to him) and gives weight according as he would have attention grow or wane.

The great blogger Fred Reed wrote:

The genius of television is that, to shape a people as you want, you don't need unrestrained governmental authority, nor do you need to tell people what you want of them. Indeed, if you told them what to do, they would be likely to refuse.

No. You merely have to show them, over and over, day after day, the behavior you wish to instill. Show them enough mothers of illegitimate children heartwarmingly portrayed. Endlessly broadcast storylines suggesting that excellence is elitist. Constantly air ghetto values and moiling back-alley mobs grunting and thrusting their faces at the camera – and slowly, unconsciously, people will come to accept and then to imitate them. Patience is everything. Mold the young and in thirty years you will have molded the society. Don't tell them anything. Just show them.

And television is magic: People can't not watch. No matter how bad the fare is, how much it offends against their most deeply held values, they will stare at it rather than be alone with their thoughts.

And yet a few individuals give it up as I did. As the years pass clarity returns.

Should Government Schooling Be Abolished

Teleology (Greek: telos: end, purpose) is the philosophical study of design and purpose.

Wikipedia

There exists a subject class unable to imagine a condition of existence without an ever expanding government presence in its life. So inured to servitude has it become, that the wide world of liberty outside its mental shackles appears a threatening place. So habituated to obedience to the state have its subjects lately become, that government is daily emboldened to thrust ever more intrusive indignities (or so they would seem to a free people) upon it.

The manifest existence of this condition would be instantly clear to any citizen of the Colonies at the time of the Revolution for Independence, and not alone to patriots. Patriots went to war over the imposition of a tiny stamp tax.

The intrusion of nameless functionaries with massive volumes of restrictions, fees and regulations, requiring a stamp of approval upon nearly every act, private and public, simply would have been unimaginable to anyone then living. Had even a tiny fraction of this tyranny been attempted against this freedom loving people, government would have been swept away in an instant .

Albert Jay Nock educational theorist and social critic wrote:

[My teachers] did not pretend to believe that everyone is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. [...] They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others.

Why does government segregate children from the rest of society and regiment them like interchangeable units while claiming to educate them? What is government trying to accomplish?

Philosopher, Herbert Spenser wrote:

... what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life — to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this — a government ought to mold children into good citizens…. It must first form for itself a definite conception of a pattern citizen; and, having done this, must elaborate such system of discipline as seems best calculated to produce citizens after that pattern. This system of discipline it is bound to enforce to the uttermost. For if it does otherwise, it allows men to become different from what in its judgment they should become, and therefore fails in that duty it is charged to fulfill.

If government is made up of powerful individuals organized so as to take and wield power, then the purpose of government education is to form children into beings useful to these people. The courses of instruction, then, are not the purpose of government schools because what and how well students learn doesn't affect these individuals. What affects them is their subjects' attitudes toward their institution, namely, government. The courses of instruction are bait only, specious arguments for the government schools, while their actual purpose is indoctrination. In fact, government schools are, and can not be other than, indoctrination camps, aka. total institutions.

A total institution, ... is an institution where all parts of life of individuals under the institution are subordinated to and dependent upon the authorities of the organization. Total institutions are social microcosms dictated by hegemony and clear hierarchy. The total institution acts as a secret society within the society, one which shapes newcomers willingly or unwillingly into a new and more or less permanent social role.

Wikipedia

Public schooling, like every other human invention, succeeds or fails according as its intrinsic tendency serves its established goal.

Every institution promulgates the implicit assumptions underpinning its existence. Thus, every free-market institution, by attracting resources through competition for voluntary patronage and support, implicitly promotes the principle that individual freedom of choice deserves to determine between winners and looses. Conversely, government schools (which are funded through confiscation and filled through coercion) inure everyone engaged with them to involuntary servitude. This is their elemental and essential product.

From the standpoint of government, its schools succeed because they teach conformity, obedience, and dependence. Those are its purposes, principles and products, not critical or independent thinking, and not adherence to moral principle which would only undermine obedience toward government. Authority is its unspoken justification and end. And government schooling succeeds in these areas regardless of its efficacy in teaching reading, writing or arithmetic simply by being government schools.

Libertarian, Mrs. Isabel Paterson wrote:

Nowhere will there be any inducement to teach the "supremacy of the state" as a compulsory philosophy. But every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later, whether as the divine right of kings, or the "will of the people" in "democracy." Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property, and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey.

The method of delivery is itself the message. The important thing about the product is not its content but where it comes from. Its message: government is necessary.

Government knows that the individual's belief in himself is its natural enemy. Public belief in voluntary, self-regulating human interaction would destroy dependence on coercive institutions. Government schools are monuments to the truth that unbrainwashed people constitute a threat to the governing elite.

Blogger Chris Hedges wrote:

The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies...are dying.

They are being murdered.

Once the indoctrination machine was established its control became the obvious goal of all those who would mold the thinking of the subject class. Before the existence of this institution it was necessary to convince, as Thomas Payne succeeded in doing with his pamphlet, Common Sense.

With this institution the emphasis shifted to indoctrination.

Blogger Jim Fedako wrote:

..if your goal is to create citizens who support the collective, and you are not willing to take up arms, you adopt a Gramscian approach and slowly destroy the institutions of free association – of liberty and freedom. You attack the family, the church, etc., in a roundabout way. You employ the strategy of the indirect approach – you indoctrinate the youth. By doing so, you break the bond of parent and child without resorting to loud confrontations and street fighting. You simply use the classroom to define the state and its minions as maternal and paternal figures. Then, you sit back and allow subsequent generations – educated by the state – to chip away at the bedrock institutions over time. Sure, you have the occasional pitched fight, but these only serve as feints covering your flanking maneuvers. Your war is not one of attrition; it is one of subversion and time.

From generation to generation whatever government wishes to instill in its captives is entirely secondary to obedience and dependence. All of government cooperates in the maintenance of government schools , but only the regnant cabal gets to fine tune the program. With a self refreshing supply of captives and nothing so distracting as customer dissatisfaction or competitive choice to threaten it, intellectual fads meet with little resistance.

Physician Stephen La Tulippe wrote:

Since the seizure of our academic infrastructure by 60’s Leftists several decades ago, the system’s core agenda has veered into the wilds of multiculturalism, ethical relativism, and radical egalitarian socialism... And despite the system’s miserable failure at teaching basic academic skills, it is having a raging success at this corrupt new political undertaking.

Whether in the hands of atheistic materialists or authoritarian theists, at bottom the institution is statist, and inimical to the liberal ideal of the primacy of the individual's rights against government encroachment.

Government schools are poison.

The Work We Have Before Us

It's hard to know what to do. I can roughly imagine a life of freedom but I have never known freedom and probably never will. Unfreedom is in the air. Most everything is already locked down and the last bits are being nailed down right now. The U S Regime of Repression under which I function has berzerked. And World Repression is now the main repression project.

Total control is the order of the day. We can talk about it and yet we are powerless to change it.

Iron chains are an ancient technology of restraint. Leather whips are another. Tasers are cool too, and they are new.

But the main levers are Government Schools and TV. With them total subjugation is inevitable and in fact largely already here.

Humans in control of humans - that's the point.

I want them off my back.

Therefore, I am the enemy of anybody and any group who wants to tell me what I can and can't do with or put into my own body. I am the enemy of anybody and any group who wants to tell me what any other adult and I can and can't do together. I am the enemy of anybody and any group who wants to tell me what I can and can't do with on my own property. I am the enemy of anybody or any group who wants to steal from me - and that is all that taxes are: taxes are always theft. And I am the enemy of anybody and any group that wants to tell anyone else what to do or not to do with themselves and their own property.

And I don't want to have to fight never ending battles against laws devised by my enemies just to keep them from messing with me. I don't know what rights are but I want to associate only with men and women who are convinced of these same principles and are willing to do the hard and dangerous work of living a public life in favor of them and of publicly exposing the enemies of fundamental freedom.

The essential divide among human beings is between the controllers and the controlled.

The essential divide among the controlled is between those who detest their controllers and those who do not.

The essential divide among those who who detest their controllers is between those who act and those who do not.

Act.