The Need for More Self-defense

I don’t post often enough about self-protection. I wanted to post last week about the Florida school board shooting but thought I would wait to hear what Ignatius Piazza had to say. Here is his blog today. I agree with his comments completely.

Self-discipline to Defeat Discouragement

There is another aspect to the concept of self-discipline. Success is a state of mind. I have heard others teach that all success at elite levels requires the ability to endure pain without losing focus on the prize. The prize is the desired result—the dream. The pain comes from the struggle required to achieve that result—the work, the opposition in yourself, the opposition from others who may not want you to achieve that result, or opposition from the elements as you work out a way of achieving your desired result. Whatever it may be, the achievement comes to the person who is able to focus his mind on the desire and thus keep himself from becoming discouraged in the face of that opposition.

I must work on this. I have allowed my mind to become discourage in such moments. This has limited my levels of success. I intend to fix this in myself and to overcome my own discouragement so I may reacher greater victories. One piece of council I have received to help me with this is to seek for those things which are good and to learn the truth through study. I love the good things and I love to study. And I have found that in my time of deepest discouragement I have turned to my books and similar resources.

Dear reader, what do you do to discipline your mind to keep from becoming discouraged or to get yourself out of discouragement? Please leave a comment below.

Discipline Yourself, Or Someone Else Will

I recently had the opportunity to share a concept with some seven and eight year olds that rings particularly true in our society today.

Discipline yourself or someone else will.

I asked them what they think that means. They were really funny about it. Some said it means you give yourself the spanking when you do something wrong. The general consensus was that you somehow punish yourself in such situations rather than waiting for someone else—a parent, a teacher, or a policeman—to punish you. After having a good laugh together, we discussed the situation in which a person recognizes the choices lying before him, and instead of choosing the wrong action, he disciplines his mind to choose the right on an increasingly consistent basis. I think they came to an understanding that self-discipline contains the mental maturity to make the correct choice so that others don’t have to correct them later on, like the parent, teacher, or worse, government.

Our conversation centered mostly around a child’s behavior in a classroom or at home, but this has deeper societal ramifications. Much of what America is going through right now is a result of society neglecting a self-discipline, such as Napoleon Hill taught, and now paying the consequence of our actions, collectively. Most people point the finger at Washington, the state capitols, or at city hall. While our politicians surely carry some portion of the blame, they are really a mere reflection of a much larger problem. I see a major culprit in each living room throughout the country.  For generations now, society has been living a non-disciplined lifestyle, in the name of freedom that looks more like license than liberty. One stark lesson lying before us teaches that principles govern. We don’t need a tangible force, such as a mother or a teacher or a government, to help us discipline ourselves. When society fails to discipline itself, the laws of the universe combine to discipline that society. Much of our current struggles are a result of that societal lack of self-discipline.

Want to Prosper? Master This One Thing

I have in my possession one of the greatest books on the accumulation of wealth ever written, Napoleon Hill’s The Master-Key to Riches. Why do I think it is one of the greatest? Probably because it is the one I have read the most. He makes some significant assertions in this book. the ideas are presented so succinctly that they cannot be misunderstood. I have had this book in my possession for six or seven years, maybe longer. My copy is tattered and falling apart from so much handling. Nearly every page has at least a small phrase that I have marked for memory and quick reference. I have used the book to help teach the Abundance Paradigm and self-reliance. the pages are dog-eared and folded over to force the finger and the eye to stop at certain points to review the concepts presented therein. Yet, not until this very moment do I finally recognize its message (even though the passage revealing it is marked by my own hand in brilliant yellow). The book ends with Hill’s final message.

It should be obvious to you that the great Master-Key to Riches is nothing more nor less than the self-discipline necessary to help you take full and complete possession of your own mind!

…Remember it is profoundly significant that the only thing over which you have complete control is your own mental attitude!

For this is the Master-Key to Riches!

So, how does one develop the self-discipline Hill speaks of?

Embracing Extremism

The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were acts of extremism because nothing like it in history had ever been attempted

Frankly, I am a little tired of the lazy claim that constitutionalism is extreme. When did this happen? Why is holding to everything this nation once stood for extreme? Perhaps it has always been extreme. After all, the framers of the Constitution could find no satisfactory form of government that adequately protected life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They ended up inventing their own government. I guess that is a little extreme, isn’t it? So be it, then. Let’s call it extreme. But let us not cower from such a name.

It is extreme to say that all men are created equal. It is extreme to say that they are each individual endowed with certain unalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is extreme to say that the proper and only role of government is to protect those rights. It is extreme to claim that if any government becomes destructive of those ends, the people not only have the right but also are duty-bound to replace that government with one more willing to perform its sole purpose. And it is extreme to actually follow through on such claims by laying down a supreme law that restrains that government in such a way as to leave as much freedom to the states and the individual as is rationally possible. It is extreme to say individuals have the right to defend themselves, even with deadly force if necessary. It is extreme to create several levels of government that create certain checks upon themselves so as to guarantee that no one level of government becomes to oppressive of the people. It is extreme to create a system which guarantees the sovereignty of the individual, the state, and a federal entity. These and many other things were crazy back when the Founders set them down.  They are no less extreme today. But extreme is what this nation needs.

Since we began our departure from the extremism of a constitutional republic we also began our moral decline as a nation. We have become a nation bent upon the moral acceptance of those around us, which has included the demand to reject that which has set us apart from the rest of history, our beloved Constitution. Why look outward for acceptance? Why do we look to international courts and protocol to decide upon what we know to be right and true? Why centralize power in a single central government? Why should we re-craft ourselves after the image of a failing, immoral world?

In his 1920 poem, "The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats wrote, "The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." We see the passionate intensity today in many fringe factions. True lovers of the Constitution should not shrink from accusations of extremism but should rather embrace them.

We once knew the truth. We once held inviolate the eternal principles upon which inalienable rights are connected. We once forged a nation that rejected the ignorance of a thousand bloody regimes.

No more freedom-stealing central government, from either side of the aisle. No more oppressing our neighbors through brute government force. No more irrational elections by an unenlightened, non-self-reliant electorate. Only extremism can save us.

Bring back the days when statesmen walked the halls of our beloved capitols. Bring back the days when such works as The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers were published in newspapers, and the common, “ignorant” farmers understood what in the world they were reading, but we today attempt to read such and fail to comprehend a single word (Oh, the irony of the baseless claim!). Bring back the days when men stood up for what they believed and dared declare, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” How many unfit princes have we allowed to rule over us—at every administrative level!

Bring back the days when men of principle ran their own lives and strove for their own self-reliance; when men understood that productivity is the standard of prosperous living, when men knew that God was the author of their prosperity. Bring back the days when words meant something, and a man’s worth was determined by those words and the actions that backed them.

These acts define extremism. It is time to own up to them. Extremism is the essence of excellence. Let the world rot in mediocrity. Let us go on in excellence. Let us return to excellence and break the cycle of pride which circles us around to defamation after opulence. This nation was once the greatest nation on earth. We didn’t get that way by rejecting the extremism of our Founding Fathers. Instead, that extremism catapulted us beyond anything this world ever imagined. And they hated us for it. But instead of boldly standing up for what we knew was right, we cowardly slunk down to their levels and sloughed off the extremism of excellence.

Most associate extremism with violence and irrational behavior. Indeed, the world is full of such behavior. Yet, it is quite easy to behave in such depraved ways. Much more "extreme" is to pose a more rational, peaceful demeanor, refusing to initiate force (physically or emotionally) upon anyone else.

There still is time to hold to or reclaim our once great, extreme status. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is as easy as electing a certain individual to the Senate. Nor do I believe it can be solved by a majority of states essentially overhauling the representation in Congress, or even all branches of the federal government. We have the government we deserve. We as a people are morally bankrupt, not just our politicians; the governments we have are merely images of our standing before the mirror of society. We must stand individually and collectively in the extremism that set us apart originally from the rest of the world and defend what the Founding Fathers handed to us.

Capitalism: The -ism that Isn’t

Many people these days want to reject all the -isms because thy recognize how they fall short of accomplishing the ideal life. They gather all these -isms into one and throw them aside. Marxism, socialism, fascism, corporatism, communism, populism. I even saw one the other day that I had never seen before: Friedmanism, after the 20th century Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman. And even capitalism. The claim is that these -isms are all man-made and therefore must fail, ultimately.

Whether all man-made things must ultimately fail is a question worth debating, but not in this entry. A topic for some other time. In an effort to get to my point today, I will concede this argument and assume that all man-made things will ultimately fail. But not all -isms are man-made.

Men make things because it is innate in their natures to create. Part of the purpose of this life is to practice being like God. He created this world and it is a testimony of the divinity of man that he attempts to create things. Unfortunately, man creates a lot of junk, things that have a tendency to destroy other things or other men. This is why—or one reason why—man-made things must ultimately fail.

Boycotts or Government Intervention? And Is “Socialism” Just a Nasty Extremist Word?

In our ever-increasingly vitriolic world, it is refreshing to come across a blog that presents level-headed reasoning for the various boycotts of British Petroleum in response to the current oil fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico. I considered reposting the entire blog but thought better of it for the space since I also want to post my comment here.

The author of The Ve Magni explained that Newsweek claimed a boycott would not affect BP in any real way and that mom-and-pop locations would feel the brunt of the boycott, then suggested more effective would be to involve the government. Then the blog author presented this lucid argument.

The whole point of free market capitalism is that consumers determine what is successful in the marketplace. Lets say Company X makes mattresses and sells to mom-and-pop mattress stores all across the country. If the mattresses are good quality, comfortable, and reasonably priced, you can bet that consumers will buy them, and both Company X and mom-and-pop will profit. However, if the mattresses are cheap quality, with springs poking your back, and are made of potentially toxic materials, consumers won’t be so eager to buy them. Duh.

So mom-and-pop now have a bunch of crappy mattresses from Company X that they can’t sell. They will stop placing orders with Company X and find a new supplier with a better product. Yes, they may lose money in the short term, but that’s capitalism. Every business gambles when they buy product to resell. In the big picture, after enough stores stop ordering from Company X, they will be forced to either a) improve their products and practices, or b) go out of business. Yes, people will lose jobs. Yes, that’s sad. But is the consumer responsible for paying the salary of everyone involved in the making of a crappy product, or on the payroll of a corrupt company simply because if they don’t buy the product, the company may go out of business?

I posted the following as a comment on that blog and just wanted to share it with everyone here as well.

I agree that action from “we the people” are much more effective than whatever government could do. Also, putting pressure on mom-and-pops, whom we may even know personally, heightens the impact this boycott could have.

One thing about BP that most may not know about or consider:

Government’s Role in the BP Offshore Drilling Debacle: Stay Out

News in my inbox this morning has President Obama defending his administration’s handling of the current British Petroleum accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Talk show pundits criticize him for his lack of effort in this matter and wish to draw up as much ire against him as liberal media did against President Bush during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These incidents and the dozens like them throughout a President’s term of office reveal a heart-wrenching problem within the mindset of most Americans, liberal and conservative, and cause me to proclaim: Socialism is good…when it benefits us.

This of course, it an outright lie. Socialism is never good and always does more than anything, even, and perhaps especially, to those who benefit the most from it. The citizenry of this country is living a deception. As long as both sides clamor to government for the solution of their problems, this country will continue its downward slide into its destructive abyss. The individual man must learn to live in self-reliance. This is the only workable solution. The only role of government, period, in the realm of business is to be a referee of contracts. The only role of government in disasters is to publish what I would call letters of condolences to those involved in the disaster. The only other role of a government is to accept the proper delegation of the preservation of life of its citizens.

Government has no business in this BP emergency or any other.

Thoughts regarding this specific incident

What to Do with the Public Schools

I get many ideas to write based upon what my Facebook friends are talking about. One, a state legislator, posted the following today.

Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire. —William Butler Yeats

This inspirational quote has encouraged many an educator to assess his/her methods of teaching in the classroom. This maxim instructs that it is simply not enough to stuff a pupil or student’s head full of facts and things. Educators muse over creative ways to draw these students’ talents and abilities out from them, and they are often frustrated and depressed that no matter what they do it seems the light within our students is extinguished at an early age.

Indeed, this was the comment by my legislator friend: So why do schools too often extinguish that fire while trying to fill buckets? Many interesting statements have been made by our friends on this subject. I add mine here for further reach. Though they are not fully exhaustive, I believe it is a good start.

Lessons Learned: A Personal Story

I took myself on a pretty hard run this morning. Once a week I hit the track instead of the road, in favor of its soft flat surface…and its calibrated measurements. Every hundred meters I know exactly how far I have gone and I can measure that against the clock to know exactly how I am doing. Out on the street or on the trail, I can never be sure from block to block, but on the track, yeah, a nice controlled environment.

Today, as I circled around my 3 one-mile speed trainings I found my thoughts falling back 3 decades to my junior high school track coach,