the awful Civil Rights Act of 1964

oughta be a law

oughta be a law oughta be a law

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was wrong-headed plunder of unalienable rights, unconstitutional, and should be repealed.  It won’t be.  No way, but it should, along with the Age Discrimination Act of 1967, the Americans with Disabilities Act, every iteration of minimum wage laws . . . and much more.

As near as I can recall or determine from current review, no one in either the House or Senate – whether voting aye or nay — and neither the President who pushed for the law (John F. Kennedy) nor the President who signed it (Lyndon Baines Johnson) thought rationally and logically.  Otherwise, it would be safe to say that all of them, when swearing their oaths upon assuming office, would have had Pinocchio Moments.  I believe, however, that they didn’t lie – no hidden-behind-the-back crossed fingers – they were just ignorant.

So-called “civil rights” cannot and may not trump natural law.  So-called “civil rights” cannot and may not trump the unalienable rights with which each human being comes endowed “from the Creator or Nature’s God.”  “Natural law” is result of rational/logical analysis, based on what can be observed, of what can and cannot make sense.  It can and should be applied whether one is religious or not, devout, agnostic or atheist.

Okay, so here comes explanation.  It must be consumed rationally and logically.  Feelings don’t matter here.  Facts and logic do, so thinking, not feeling, mind not heart.  First, each human being comes sovereign, that is to say, subject to no other without explicit permission.  The one and only exception is temporary, and has to do with children, who are subject to parents until capable of leaving that status.  One cannot argue otherwise, say, that some people come sovereign while others not, or that there is no such thing as sovereignty, or that one race comes sovereign, others not, one sex comes sovereign while the other not.  Rationally and logically, any such argument or assertion falls apart of its own weight.

Given that, then, it follows that each human being (as opposed to, say, pig or head of lettuce) comes endowed “by the Creator or Nature’s God” with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty (the right to do whatever the heck you want . . . just as long as not infringing on another’s like rights in the process), and to property (from whence comes the pursuit of happiness).  Given that, then, each human being also has a right to self-defense of the above.  It follows rationally and logically.  To argue otherwise would be to nullify all unalienable rights.

Clearly to anyone reading, who pays attention and observes, human beings plunder others’ unalienable natural rights regularly and with impunity.  Robbers, rapists, murderers, drunk drivers, dictators, monarchs and other thugs do their things around the globe.  So, because you have a right doesn’t mean you get to exercise it.  Rights must be defended constantly.

America’s Founders understood, and proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence our unalienable rights as predicate for what was to follow, the United States Constitution.  We the People, whether individually or collectively, could not grant authority that we did not ourselves possess.  Thus, We the People authorized the U.S. Government to collectively protect and defend the unalienable rights each of us had.  So we tasked that government with collectively self-defending us, no more and no less.

Please note that as an adult human being you have an unalienable (may not be taken away) right to enter into any relationship you wish with any other adult who freely agrees.  You as well have an unalienable (may not be taken away) right to NOT enter into any relationship you wish.  Liberty.  Incidentally, implied in the 1^st amendment is “freedom of association”.

Does the U.S. Government have legitimate authority to discriminate?  No.  It must protect and defend the universal unalienable rights of each American equally.  Does each human being on Planet Earth possess an unalienable right from the Creator to discriminate, based on age, sex, race, hair color, perceived attractiveness, ability or disability, height, weight, smoking, drinking, 40-time or vertical, or any other conceivable basis?  Yes.  Absolutely.  And we ALL do it constantly.  Choose a date?  Discriminate.  Choose a mate?  Discriminate.

Did you take note that unalienable rights do NOT include stuff, commodities, anything produced by someone else.  You have no right to groceries, housing, a car, medical care, pharmaceuticals, entry into my home, entry into my restaurant.  To argue otherwise is to argue in favor or some people being sovereign while others are not, to some having a right to property and others not, indeed to argue in favor of slavery.

May you smoke in my home or restaurant?  If, and only if, I say so.  May you carry a gun into my home or restaurant?  If, and only if, I say so.  May I pay you $2.50 per hour for a job?  If you agree to it.  May I hire only white people?  Sure.  I’ll be ignoring a lot of potential talent, but, hey, I have an unalienable right to stupidity.  May I hire only black people?  Sure.  I’ll be ignoring a lot of potential talent, but, hey, I have an unalienable right to stupidity.

May government dictate any of that?  No. Definitely not.  CAN government do so?  Obviously.  And it needs to be stopped.

So, Hu’s your daddy?

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Let’s say you’re earning $7.25 per hour and your prospects are that you’ll never earn more.    You make $7.25 x 30 hours per week x 50 weeks, so $10,875 per year, and you pay zero taxes.  Meanwhile, you’re spending $17,875 per year on your day-to-day expenses.  Oh, and you’ve agreed in writing to in the future pay others $543,750 . . .  and they’re all counting on you.  This more-than-half-a-mil will come due at $25,000 per year on average.

So, Hu’s your daddy?  Hang on.  I’ll get to that.

The above scenario for an individual is proportional to where the U.S. Government is today.  That government takes in some $2.1 trillion per year, spends more than $4 trillion, and has unfunded liabilities of in excess of $100 trillion.  Just Medicare is more than $34 trillion more than that government will collect from employers and employees.

To whom is the U.S. Government indebted?  The single largest debt holder is the “Social Security Trust Fund.”    Incidentally, that’s precisely the same accounting gimmick perpetrated by Enron.  Everyone expecting to collect Social Security benefits should know that every penny ever contributed is long gone, spent on other stuff.  What’s in the “lockbox”?  IOUs from the government to itself.

Foreign governments own 46% of U.S. Government debt, with China at the top and Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong also in the top half-dozen.  This debt is a mix of securities due to be paid back in one-year, three-year, five-year, and ten-year periods.  Since there is zero chance that the U.S. Government can repay this debt on demand, who is it that owns the White House and its occupant?  Who is it that owns congress?  Who is it who will dictate U.S. foreign policy with respect to North Korea and Iran?  Who can dictate to the U.S. Department of Education what will and will not be in textbooks used in America’s schools?

Hu’s your daddy?  The president of the People’s Republic of China is Hu Jintao.  That’s Hu.

America’s most-dangerous enemy? Government. Our government.

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Who is Enemy #1 for the CIA?  Tie between the FBI and NSA.  Who is Enemy #1 for U.S. Army Infantry?  U.S. Army Armor. What’s the primary objective for the CIA, FBI, NSA, Armor, Infantry, etc.?  Getting more funding.  Growing.

Where is the primary focus for the CIA, FBI, NSA, Department of Defense and every other federal department and agency?  Tie between the House Ways & Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.

Why is the finding following 9-11 that intelligence-gathering agencies failed to share info with each other now found in 2013 following the Boston Marathon bombing to be an even worse problem than back then?  See the first two paragraphs.

Where would you find any federal department or agency administrator or staffer who last month suggested a way to better share information with another department or agency or to cut costs or become more-efficient?  In the unemployment line.  Why do federal departments and agencies never ever solve a problem?  Because solving a problem rather than creating a new and bigger one gets you a cut in staff or funding since you now have less that needs doing.

Do you remember your first-ever cell phone?  If you’ve got even a few wrinkles and an expanding midsection, it was a bag phone, only worked very-local, cut out a lot, and did nothing but transmit voice.  And we only got that once the gubmint got outa the way of telephone providers and allowed a marketplace.  Now consider your current smartphone, say, a QE5, and consider that our air-traffic controllers today use systems to track airplanes akin to that bag phone.  They’re watching little white dots on black screens.

If that seems incredible and bizarre to you, go back and re-read the first four paragraphs above.  It should then become clearer to you.  We fliers would be better off if each pilot strapped his new iPhone to a wing, and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) used google.  Or we might ship each flight via FedEx or UPS.  Either could tell us exact location, when takeoff occurred, expected moment for landing, and exact current location and direction.

Is TSA (Transportation Security Administration) designed to protect the flying public from future dangers?  Please stop long enough to note that every new initiative of TSA is in response to the last security breakdown – think shoe bomber, then underwear bomber, etc. – and never something new.  When the success rate for U.S. Government departments and agencies in achieving purported missions is zero, why is it that every time something bad happens, Americans in lockstep scream for government to “Do something!!”?

I humbly commend to you another essay hereon at http://thedrpete.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/americas-problem-isnt-americans-ignorance-it-is-americans-stupidity-america-is-no-longer-fixable/

America’s problem isn’t Americans’ ignorance; it is Americans’ stupidity. America is no longer fixable.

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The now-near-everywhere talk of the “low-information voters” misses the REAL crisis.  If America had gobs of “low-information voters” who are but UNINFORMED, that’d be a problem, but the issue in that case would be ignorance, and that’s fixable with education.  If, on the other hand, America has scads of “low-information voters” who are UNINFORMABLE, that’s a crisis because the issue now is stupidity, and you can’t fix stupid.

My assessment, I’m sorry to say, is that we face the latter.  The problem isn’t that Johnny and Janey can’t read.  It’s not even just that Johnny and Janey can’t think.  The problem is that Johnny and Janey don’t even know what thinking is.  When they feel, they believe they’re thinking.  Fact-based and reality-based rationality and logic have now become for masses of multiple generations of government-school-indoctrinated-chronological adults impossible.

I could recount from 1876 William Graham Sumner’s saga of the “forgotten man” and FDR’s progressive redefining of said, or the pre-1930s meaning of “liberal” and again FDR’s redefining of it.  I could recount John Dewey’s progressive destruction of American education or FDR’s evisceration of the U.S. Constitution, or of LBJ’s massive assault on said. But the actual history of how America let it, happen can only be understood by those who have avoided the already-described stupidity.  That’s singing to a too-small choir.

Even if you are one of the few who even today discipline your pre-schoolers, teaching them to read, to speak, to pick up after themselves, to not hit others except in self-defense, and to respect and take care of their toys and other possessions, after you shop for school supplies with them, and in their rooms they carefully organize and pack them, they’ll head off for the first day of government-operated schools with kindergarten.  When their new teacher starts on the first morning, the first order of business will be to have all of what’s in your kids’ backpacks – the pencils, each sharpened and all lined up, the notebook, the ruler, maybe crayons – passed to the front of the room where the teacher will redistribute them so that everyone has the same amount and variety . . . just to be “fair”.

The teacher – most-likely having been in the bottom-half on high school test scores, and again on SATs or ACTs, then having entered the near-most-Mickey-Mouse majors in college, i.e., education, then graduating much-less-prepared than other majors, then passing, after maybe a dozen tries, a teacher-certification exam appropriate for 4^th-grade-level, and after joining and paying first dues to the teachers’ union, will not wait a nanosecond to begin with your children the progressive re-indoctrination, redefining individual rights to liberty and property into collective so-called “rights”.

What the kindergarten teacher starts, her successors will continue with praise for trying versus achieving, participating versus winning, giving versus competing, sharing versus producing.  Denigrated will be capitalism, business, profit, wealth, becoming rich, discriminating, family, personal responsibility, individual initiative, creativity, self-interest.  Celebrated will be intentionally-underperforming, giving-back.  Soccer games will be disallowed from keeping score.  No dodgeball.  No “honor roll”.  We’ll honor kids for “community service” much more than for, say, learning math, science, history, language, to think, to analyze, to employ logic.

We’ll celebrate “no child left behind”, when said serves to but dumb-down many so as to make a few feel better than they have earned or deserve. When 4 of 5 players on the court in basketball games are black – that despite being only 15% of the population – no one sees a problem with that.  When 80+% of whites exceed black performance in academics – though in the aggregate whites have IQs one standard deviation higher than do blacks in the aggregate — we call that “discrimination”.  When men earn more National Merit scholarships than women – even though they outnumber women in the “genius” category 7-to-1 – we redo the SAT exams so as to eliminate “discrimination”.  When more women attend college than do men, we just applaud.  “Fairness”.  Misdirected feeling posing as rational and logical thinking.

What progressives have accomplished since World War II here in America was accomplished in France between WW-I and WW-II.  The Nazis invaded France in 1942 expecting fierce resistance because the French troops in the First War had been so.  What happened, however, was that the Nazis invaded and the French couldn’t reach fast enough for their white flags to surrender.  If Russians or Chinese or Islamists or Iranians or North Koreans landed in, say, Atlanta or Des Moines or Dallas, today’s young Americans would respond with, “Whatever.”  They, and for most of them their parents and for a few even their grandparents, don’t believe in and revere America.  They’ve been progressively indoctrinated.  “Give me liberty or give me death”?  Americans no longer know what liberty even is, much less why one would fight for it or die for it.

If one can think rationally and logically, and if one is committed to living in reality, one can determine with near-certainty what can and cannot make sense of the world in which we live and can observe.  The result of the process is known as “natural law”.  Clearly each human being comes sovereign.  Clearly each human being comes endowed with the unalienable rights to life, to liberty, and to property (from whence comes the pursuit of happiness).  Clearly one also comes endowed with the unalienable right to self-defense of those rights.  Clearly no one comes endowed with the right to commodities, i.e., what others produce, e.g., shelter, groceries, employment, medical care, education, etc.  Clearly there is no such thing as group or collective rights.  Men have no rights that women don’t, whites that blacks don’t, heterosexuals that homosexuals don’t, etc.    Clearly happiness and success must be pursued, struggled for, and achieved.  They are not delivered, say, by Dominoes.  An overwhelming-majority of Americans, not only don’t understand a thing in this paragraph, but are incapable of doing so.  That is why America is no longer fixable.

I’m needin’ some help, so I’m askin’

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Fellow blogger, jm, over at http://marcjan.wordpress.com/ encouraged me late last year to try to be persuasive to independents and undecideds of the rightness of conservatism and libertarianism, and adherence to the U.S. Constitution versus progressivism/liberalism, and to wean some gimmes and moochers, those who ride in the wagon rather than help pull it, to vote for liberty rather than stuff.  After his third admonition to me, I bit.

For sure, I reasoned, Republicans weren’t getting anything accomplished. Those guys do nothing but try to counter the slander of their Democrat counterparts, so are always playing defense, never positively and proactively espousing the brilliance of the Founders, the limitations and shackles removed by eschewing government-doled-out stuff.

To reach my target audiences, I knew that wordpress wouldn’t get me to them, so I adopted some social media outlets.  I tweet, albeit not as much as I should, from @the_drpete.  And I facebook from http://www.facebook.com/LibertyTheSineQuaNon.

There at my “facebook community”, while I’m getting substantial viewership (in the many thousands), and lots of “Likes” (dozens to the site as a whole and many more in toto to various posts), I don’t think that I’m engaging enough people comfortably for them to reply and engage in discussion.  That is what I seek to accomplish.

If you tweet, please “follow” me so I can reciprocate, and we can, maybe, expand our reach.  If you facebook or are willing to, please come engage at my “community”, maybe stimulate some discussion.  I can even make you an “administrator” so that you can post some of your attempts to engage and stimulate new thinking.

I’m needin’ some help, so I’m askin’.

America’s “lost manufacturing sector”?

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Since 1975, U.S. manufacturing output has more than doubled.  That, of course, ain’t the buzz.  Are you among the duped?

If you listen to thugs at the AFL-CIO or Teamsters or if you watch and listen to President Obama’s State of the Union Address (without a strip across the screen reminding you that the speaker lies a lot), that’s the buzz.  There is more manufacturing output in the United States than in any other country, and it remains some 18% of the global total.

During the 20^th century America’s farm output quadrupled while jobs for farmworkers declined by 5,000%.  Did evil farmers ship those jobs overseas?  No, that’d be sorta tough to do.  What they did was to buy some of Eli Whitney’s cotton gins, and then some internal-combustion-engine plows and tractors and harvesters, etc., and automate and computerize, increasing productivity, efficiency, and accuracy.

What has happened to U.S. manufacturing is similar.  Then, add to that the intra-U.S. shifting of remaining manufacturing jobs away from unions and to right-to-work states.  Despite all of the productivity increases, the number of manufacturing jobs in right-to-work states has actually increased.

Have any manufacturing jobs been exported?  Sure.  Absolutely, but that’s a small part of the dynamic.  Unions and their Democrat-politician collaborators see the role of business as providing jobs.

Producers – including farmers and manufacturers – know that the role of the businesses they own and operate is to provide value to consumers such that profits result.  That means innovating, employing technological advances, increasing productivity, reducing costs, whether by relocating to right-to-work states or other lower-taxes and lower-regulations and lower-red-tape countries.

If Americans and its national government want to have more manufacturing occur in America, two things should happen:  (1) Repeal the 16^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (2)  Get Congress to pass and the POTUS to sign into law HR-25, the FairTax.  Manufacturers from around the globe will flock in droves to our shores to set up shop.  America’s balance of trade will explode into the plus side

Government is by nature incompetent, incoherent, bloated, and tyrannical

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If you’re hired by a businessperson to head a department of, say, research and development, your mission will be to produce the most and best new stuff at the lowest cost possible.  If your expenses are high and your output low, you’ll be fired, and find it difficult to get employed elsewhere.

Government life, on the other hand, is much different.  If you’re appointed to, say, head the U.S. Department of Education, you may think that you should you should maximize output while minimizing cost, but if you do that, you’ll be seen by everyone in the department as enemy #1 and by the heads of all the other departments as a pariah.  In government your mission is to increase the number of employees, report that you’re “working on it”, spend over budget, thus getting more funding the following year. When you finish your tenure, you’ll surely be hired as a consultant or lobbyist.

Okay, you say, you’re right, drpete, the federal government has gotten out of hand, but aren’t you generalizing a bit?  Let’s try this.  Your small town mayor proposes that the town really needs to develop a playground for the kids, so she appoints a blue-ribbon committee to design it.

At the first blue-ribbon meeting, Abe starts by asserting that job#1 is to define what is to be included in the park.  Beth counters that, no, job #1 is to determine where – say, on which side of the tracks – the park is to be located.  Caroline chimes in with anywhere’s fine, just not on my street.  Doug, always looking to find an “affirmative action” cause, suggests locating it near the poorest neighborhood so that property values there will be increased.  Ellen says that having the park there might be dangerous and that many parents would, thus, keep their kids from using it.

Guaranteed that you’ll hear from some Tom, Dick, or Harry, along with some Tanya, Dorothy, or Harriet about ecological impacts, the impacts on wildlife, the risks of standing water resulting in a designation as a “wetland”, the importance of the play being noncompetitive and nonviolent, that the equipment materials be produced with sustainable energy, the importance of materials used being biodegradable or, if not, recyclable.  You’ll also be told it essential to “buy local” and to use only union workers.

And after you assemble all of the ideas, concerns, agendae in an incoherent three-ring-binder of a couple-thousand pages, where will it go?  To the Town Council.  Uh-oh, another committee.

In the U.S. Army, who is Infantry’s worst enemy, al Qaeda?  No, it’s Armor.  The more tanks Armor gets, the fewer troops Infantry gets.  Where’s the Army’s battlefield?  House Ways & Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee.

In the U.S. Department of Agriculture, how come, as the number of farms and the number of farm workers has declined precipitously, the Department has grown precipitously?  Because Ag has almost nothing to do with farms and farming anymore.  When you hear about the “Farm Bill”, it’s a misnomer.  It’s about food stamps for 1 in 7 Americans.  It’s about subsidizing corn and ethanol while mandating its inclusion in gasoline, that despite increasing pollution markedly in the process.

If all persons were angels, there’d be no reason for government.  All persons, however, aren’t angels.  If all persons in government were angels, there’d be no need to restrict government.  All persons in government, of course, aren’t angels.  In fact, the percentages are awful.

Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) on Meet the Press in August of 1975 more than 37 years ago, speaking about the NSA (National Security Agency) and its eavesdropping capability, said, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything . . . If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back.”  And much earlier one Thomas Jefferson said, “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny, when the government fears the people, there is Liberty!”  And today, I fear that government . . . big time.

The “kill list”?

When we add to said that governments have authority to use force that no one else has, when we add that governments are spending others’ money, when we add that governments are really sets of committees, and we count ourselves fortunate when one invents a camel while trying for a horse rather than, say, a tarantula or crocodile; well, anyone not in government who’s happy to see it grow is either a colluding cheater or an imbecile.

Recently, 13 agents from the U.S. Department of Education, acting as a SWAT Team raided at gunpoint a California home at 6 a.m., pulled a Kenneth Wright outside in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and held him for six hours while terrifying his three children, ages 3, 9, and 11.  Yes, I did say, Education.  All this was to investigate Wright’s estranged wife’s use of federal student aid, but she didn’t even live in that house.  The Heritage Foundation says that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center trains agents for more than 80 federal agencies. The CATO Institute estimates that there are now about 40,000 such raids per year.  And today, I fear that government . . . big time.