Education or Indoctrination    By R.E. Darby

The fact that these two concepts are and have been traditionally contraversial, is itself and indicationof the confusion our species is in regarding the value of the individual as apposed to that of the organizedsocial group. This is usually couched in the terms of the 'interests of society over those of the individual'.

Bureaucracy or People

The struggle between the needs of society and those of the individual is as old as Humans have been social. Like most struggles, there are tradeoffs, but what happens when the tradeoffs favor the interests of one more than the other? And what if society's interests become primarily the interests of its bureaucracy or infrastructure?

Just plug the title of this article into any search engine and see what you get. This is a highly controversial subject but most views miss the point altogether. Almost all the results that we got back from the search engines were based on a specific agenda. For example; one was all about how a particular political organization was trying to impose their own indoctrination on the public school system while failing to acknowledge that State local and Federal governments as well as various teachers unions and associations, have for decades imposed their doctrine on the public school system on a regular basis.

Education

What these people seem to be missing, is the basic purpose of an educational system in the first place. And in so doing, they fail to identify some fundamental flaws in the current system. For example; like most social infrastructure systems, the education system has failed to adapt and or adjust to the natural changes of time, and therefore is unable to respond to current needs in an appropriate manner.

A small example of this is the continued requirement for algebra to the extent that without it, a student cannot go passed a certain educational point. In the real world, how many citizens ever need to know algebra? Yet this archaic requirement is still being enforced, while at the same time, actual critical educational goals such ascritical thinking skills, emotional intelligence or indeed, Human intelligence is never even discussed. To a free independently thinking person this is incredible. Why wouldn't an educational system demand that one of its first educational goals be the mastering of quality thinking skills before the student is exposed to the onslaught of information. Think about it. We send our young to an institution that is run by bureaucrats who are following the instructions of politicians, without first arming them with the ability to process information accurately and thereby protect themselves from false assumptions that may be servinga manipulative agenda?

Education and Politics?

And this of course is probably the point. Bureaucrats / politicians are not likely to eagerly embrace real education because that might produce actually aware and intelligent citizens, and that is, and has always been, perceived as a threat to those obsessed with power and control. On the other hand, social indoctrination is likely to produce good well behaved and obedient robots. This is also the root of the overall problem / dilemma. Our educational system has been in place for decades and has indoctrinated generation after generation. Who then will have the thinking skills necessary to generate the appropriate questions that might have the potential for creating the doubt necessary to seek alternative solutions or even innovative thought on these critical subjects?

It's almost like civilization has a built in catch 22. Society reaches a point in its development where its own survival is its primary objective and so must suppress the population in order to achieve that objective. Beyond a certain point of social suppression by means of indoctrinization, the population is less and less able to break free of their enslavement / domination. It is difficult if not impossible to address a problem that we are not able to be aware of.

The solution? Awareness! But we don't see much of that going on these days. There is one small ray of hope however. There is a growing self improvement and personal development movement that has at least the potential for waking us up from our cultural trance. This industry is still pretty much in its infancy, but they are pursuing ideas that have solid potential and are worth checking out.

I think Stefan Molyneux has it right when he says that the only way to advance to a free society is to heal ourselves, to live with integrity, and to parent our children (if any) in a rational and non-violent manner.

He has done a nice series (among many other related videos) on this called "The Bomb in the Brain", which I highly recommend, alongside his numerous videos on peaceful/philosophical parenting.

See the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbiq2-ukfhM (The Bomb in the Brain pt 1)

http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/23711.aspx (reference material for the BITB series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P772Eb63qIY (Statism is Dead pt. 3 - The Matrix)

(see below)

Also see the work of John Taylor Gatto, who was an expert teacher (5 Teacher of the Year awards in New York) before studying the foundations of modern schooling for 10 years, which lead to the excellent book found here http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm, among other excellent books, articles, and interviews/lectures, many of them free online.

What he discovered is that modern schooling is based on a Prussian model, which sought to suppress independent thinking and action in favour of a dumbed-down population of non-elites that were easily controllable by government and other established power structures.

Yes, he is a very clever man. Some people have accused him of being a cultist due to his large following. Then again, some people think anarchist are agents of chaos. 

In psychological terms, cult and its associated words have a defined meaning which is seldom met when the word is used in political conversation. Needless to say, JTG is not a cultist in any legitimate meaning of that word from anything of his work that I've ever seen. That noted, modern schooling is much more cult-like than what he proposes if you really think about it.

And I wouldn't use the word clever to describe him, I would say he is highly knowledgeable and skilled in the areas of teaching, learning, childhood development, and related subjects. I would also say that he has reached a pretty deep understanding of "modern" (read: state-sponsored, propagandistic) schooling, and that he has worked long and hard to reveal the damage it has done and is doing in the US and elsewhere.

Related, see the work of Alexis de Tocqueville (author of Democracy in America, circa 1835), in which it was noted that the population of the US at the time was highly educated and entrepreneurial and was increasing wealth at a high rate, despite - or perhaps because of - the non-formation of mandatory/state schooling at the time.

Well: I wrote some people.

A cult of personality is very political.

I don't think he is a cult leader anymore than Socrates was. I feel Socrates  was also very clever, as is anyone who can make a living as a philosopher.

Highly educated people are not always clever. Nor are clever people all ways highly educated. I have Alexis in my personal library. He is currently out on loan, along with the writings of over a dozen of America's founding fathers to my cousin. She has a PHD in psychology and her husband is an agrarian libertarian. They home school their children (I send mine to a montessori, and pinch a bit of the black soil with my own green thumb too) and their oldest son was interested in learning more about the history of America, so I lent him the tools to learn.

Once he has digested the knowledge it will be up to him to see what use can be made of the information.

But he is a clever lad so I have faith in his potential. 

But enough of splitting hares (sp)...

Now, where did I put my RIOT gear?! Oh yes down the rabbit hole...

did he say coked up personality? Damn you Freud!!

The Rise of Europe's Private Internet Police

Activists are fighting to rein them in.

In 2005, Peter Mahnke, a resident of the English town of St. Margaret's, Middlesex, set up acommunity website. For the past seven years, he and a handful of local volunteers have been publishing regular updates about local events, parks, new businesses, weather, and train schedules. All G-rated and uncontroversial.

Yet in early March, for reasons that remain unclear, the St. Margaret's website was blocked throughout Britain on mobile Internet services offered by Orange (a subsidiary of France Telecom) and T-mobile (owned by Deutsche Telecom). The site had fallen victim to a nationwide child-protection system run by the mobile companies themselves. Somehow the system, which activists say is rife with errors, had classified the site as "adult" content, causing it to be blocked on all phones by default.

The accidental censorship of the St. Margaret's community website highlights a larger reality of the Internet age: The digital networks and platforms we depend upon for all aspects of our lives -- including the civic and political -- are for the most part designed, owned, operated, and governed by the private sector. Internet and mobile services empower us to organize and communicate in exciting new ways, and indeed have been politically transformative in democracies and dictatorships alike. But the connectivity they provide has also created tough new problems for parents, law enforcement, and anybody wanting to protect their intellectual property. Democratically elected governments face political pressure from a range of vocal and powerful constituencies to take urgent action to protect children, property, and reputations. Increasingly, however, the job of policing the Internet is falling to private intermediaries -- companies that are under little or no legal obligation to uphold citizens' rights. In effect, they end up acting simultaneously as digital police, judge, jury, and executioner.

European governments may not have intended to create a "privatized police state," but that is what digital rights activists in Europe warn is happening, due to growing government pressure on companies to police themselves. As Joe McNamee, director of the Brussels-based nonprofit European Digital Rights Initiative (EDRI), puts it, "We are sleepwalking further and further along a road on which we've decided that our right to communication and privacy shall be put in the hands of arbitrary decisions of private companies."

I think people have an excellent example of anarchism (the workable and non-violent type) in the internet and computer industy. Computer products and services get faster, cheaper, and better every day, wikipedia is a viable alternative to paid encyclopedias, and e-bay is built on an honour/review system, without extensive rules, regulation, or "law enforcement".

Regarding the ACTA/PIPA/etc., it seems that people who can afford it are generally quite willing to pay for quality goods at competitive prices, assuming they can find the lawful owners selling them online, itunes being a prime example. Stuff that is not able to be purchased is effectively free instead of being unavailable, and with the upside of creating or revealing demand for goods and services that was not there - or at least not obvious - before. This allows legal sales of the product or related products to be made when the demand becomes known, which again benefits everyone overall.

I think it is worth pointing these things out when people suggest we need "policing" of the internet, or any other rules, regulation, laws, etc. As laws on fraud, theft, and other genuine crimes already exist in any healthy society - and rightly so IMO - there seems no good reason to supress the internet under additional rules/regulations/laws/etc. that can only do harm to those using it.

As for the idea that private companies would create any type of "internet police state" outside of government coercion, I think this is impossible. I would be wary of involving government (via passing laws) in this, I would instead focus on how strong, healthy, and adaptive the internet is in its natural (free-market) state, and how government involvment in any area outside of genuine law enforcement and border protection inevitably does more harm than good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/03/wikileaks-us-eu-gm-crops

White House Blocking Release of Monsanto-Linked Lobbyist’s Email

The Intel Hub
By Madison Ruppert
February 22, 2012

The Obama administration is now blocking a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an environmental group, Public Employees for Environment Responsibility (PEER), which is attempting to uncover Obama’s connections to Monsanto-linked lobbyists.

Keep in mind, Monsanto’s products have been linked to some horrific effects on biological systems like the human body, not the least of which is creating necrosis and significant mutations in critical cell types.

Also quite noteworthy is the fact that Monsanto was actually recently found guilty of chemical poisoning in the case of a French farmer.

The group suspects the Obama White House of working with these lobbyists to defend genetically engineered (GE) crops and the attempts to get these GE crops planted in wildlife refuges across the United States.

Part of the information which is currently being withheld by the Obama administration is part of an email from January 2011 from a lobbyist to a top White House policy analyst.

This lobbyist was with the Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, which regularly represents the interests of companies specializing in GE seeds like Syngenta and the infamous multinational giant Monsanto.

The White House claims that they had to block portions of the email because it contained information on BIO’s lobbying strategy.

They claimed that if this strategy was released, it could cause damage to the group’s competitiveness and those of the companies it represents.

“We suspect the reason an industry lobbyist so cavalierly shared strategy is that the White House is part of that strategy,” said Kathryn Douglass, the staff counsel for PEER.

Douglass is arguing that the email should be public record, adding, “The White House’s legal posture is as credible as claiming Coca Cola’s secret formula was ‘inadvertently’ left in a duffel bag at the bus station.”

PEER has been doing phenomenal work exposing the connections between our government and BIO lobbyists, including the release of internal emails last July.

The email release revealed that Peter Schmeissner, a senior science policy analyst and member of the biotechnology working group at the White House, actually had been corresponding with a BIO lobbyist about one of PEER’s legal challenges.

The lawsuit, filed by PEER and their allied groups, was quite successful in that it halted the planting of GE crops within the wildlife refuges across northeastern states.

PEER has obviously not given up and they continue to fight the planned plantings of GE crops across the nation.

In some of the emails obtained by PEER from 2010, it was found that Adrianne Massey, a biotechnology lobbyist for quite a while, asked Schmeissner if the “interagency working group” is addressing the legal challenges put forth by PEER.

In addition, Massey forwarded some of the environmental assessments of the proposed GE crop plots at other wildlife refuges across the United States. These assessments could supposedly protect GE crop plots in wildlife refuges from further legal challenges in the future.

The emails obtained by PEER spurred them to seek out information on the “interagency working group” referred to by Massey which is known as the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group via FOIA request.

The group boasts high-level officials from most of the Obama administration’s agencies that deal with agriculture and trade, even the State Department, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to PEER.

These discoveries have led PEER to file a lawsuit against the White House in an attempt to get the information which was withheld from their FOIA requests.

This would include not only the Massey email in question but the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group’s schedule, the items on their agenda and their work related to GE crops in general.

An attorney for BIO filed an affidavit which claims that the withheld portions of Massey’s email contain “mistakenly” forwarded trade secrets.

“BIO operates in an advocacy environment in which there are many organizations that oppose the use of biotechnology, particularly in the agricultural arena, and that seek to persuade federal, state and local agencies to restrict the technology’s use. If this information were released, competitors could imitate or seek to counteract BIO’s strategy and further their own contrary agendas at the expense of BIO and its members,” the attorney wrote.

The White House is also claiming that they withheld the information according to current disclosure law, but PEER isn’t buying it, and likely rightly so.

Jeff Ruch, PEER’s Director told Truth-Outthat he believes that the withheld Massey email actually has the details of a concerted effort being made by BIO lobbyists to have the White House help make sure that the environmental assessments of the GE crops on wildlife refuges are so strong that they cannot be challenged on a legal basis in the future.

This is because groups like PEER regularly challenge the legally required environmental assessments in order to hold up projects like planting GE crops on wildlife refuges in court.

Deborah Rocque, an official with the United States Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS), claimed last year that the FWS had actually been allowing farming on refuges for years.

Rocque claims this is part of habitat restoration efforts and that the planting of herbicide-resistant GE crops would actually allow conservationists to grow ground cover while still killing unwanted weeds with herbicidal products.

However, even classifying these types of crops as “herbicide-resistant” is misleading, because in the case of “Roundup Ready” crops produced by Monsanto the crops actually still absorb all of the incredibly harmful Roundup but instead of dying, these crops are genetically engineered to be able to survive the herbicide.

This means that if these products are moved into the food supply, there are trace amounts of Roundup which actually make it to the dinner table.

The mere presence of herbicides in the environment is something that any true conservationist would avoid like the plague, so Rocque’s statement is laughably nonsensical.

PEER seems to realize the ulterior motive behind the effort to plant GE crops on wildlife refuges, which they see as an attempt by the Obama administration to boost exports of the crops.

While European countries remain relatively skeptical about the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods and some other countries have actually banned certain seeds, the United States government shares none of these concerns.

PEER says that the White House and its working group is trying to give trade partners the impression that the United States government thinks GE crops are so environmentally safe that they can even be planted on wildlife reserves.

Such a vote of confidence could increase the willingness of trade partners to import the GE crops, which have quite a long list of potential hazards associated with their use.

Truth-Out has been doing one of the best jobs of keeping track of the United States’ efforts to pressure foreign nations into accepting exports and GE crops, including countries like France and Spain.

Through the release of some WikiLeaks cables, it was found that essentially United States diplomats were working for companies like Monsanto by going around the world promoting their GE products.

The first legal challenge relating to the planting of GE crops on wildlife reserves came after PEER was contacted by biologists with the FWS who were opposed to the planting of GE crops on said reserves.

Later, PEER actually received an internal email which they believe shows that Tom Vilsack, Secretary of the USDA, actually was pressuring FWS to support GE crops.

In the email, dated January 14, 2011, David Hayes, the Interior Department Deputy Secretary, relayed to some of the top Interior Department and FWS officials that, “Apparently Vilsack is somewhat exercised that the Administration is not being consistent in supporting genetically modified crops.”

Of course when asked about this high-level pressure, Rocque claimed that she was completely unaware of any internal pressure coming from the upper levels of the Obama administration.

This is just more of the “I do not recall” plausible deniability nonsense.

Hopefully PEER’s legal challenges will be treated in a just manner and we will be able to get an accurate glimpse in the world of corporatism which is so egregiously damaging our nation.

The case of Monsanto and the American diplomats promotion of their products is just about the most perfect example of how corrupt our so-called government has really become.

The military seeks to "break recruits down" mentally and emotionally, then rebuild them as killing machines, something (killing) very unnatural for human beings to do, espcially in close quarters.

See the work of former Army Ranger Lt. Col Dave Grossman (Ret.) for more on this, via such books as "On Killing" and "On Combat", among others...

Related, the number of former military veterans who are homeless is massive, something like 100 000+ from what I've heard.

Big Banks and Drug Money

http://www.moneyreformparty.org.uk/