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Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Post #4678 M: Stossel on the War on Drugs; America's Founding I and II; Jorgensen on Health Care Monopolies

Quote of the Day

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, 
for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, 
but the staying down.
Mary Pickford  

Stossel on the War on Drugs



America's Founding I and II





Jorgensen on Health Care Monopolies


Choose Life



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall


Musical Interlude: The Beatles

"A Day in the Life"

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Post #4677 J: COVID-19 Shutdown Diary and Entertainment Notes

It's been a couple of weeks since my last journal post. Since then, I met with my doctor/specialist for the first time in 6 months. Nothing really abnormal, maybe a handful of people in the waiting room. I've transitioned to a new health plan, and I'm getting a little sticker shock from co-pays and high deductibles, but that's not really a COVID-19 issue. I had to fight to get some regular generic prescriptions filled, and it seems that Walmart mistook a 90-day prescription authorization for 30-days, so obviously the doctor thought that I was trying to double my prescription. Ironically, I was earlier told by the doctor's office about 30-day refills until the office reopened for normal walk-ins.

So trying to get that straightened out, I talked to a nurse (for my regular doctor's office/clinic) and I got entirely swerved by this exchange:

(me): By the way, when are you going to reopen for regular patient walk-ins? (I noted the specialist's office was open under Maryland's phased reopenings. In part, I knew they wanted me to do some blood work at my next visit.)
(nurse) (confused): We never stopped seeing patients.
(me): I know you guys have been been seeing patients for things like broken bones or serious health ailments. I'm talking for routine visits.
(nurse): We've never stopped seeing patients.
(me): That's not what your website says. It talks about televisits except for more urgent matters. (I checked the website before making the call
(nurse): I know... We thought people would feel more comfortable during the pandemic with those options, but we never stopped patients from coming in.

I'm just totally floored by this discussion. I had had at least 2 prior phone calls with nurses talking about extending prescriptions until they were ready to accommodate routine visits.

At any rate when I went to the specialist, I mention having a hassle getting my routine med prescriptions filled, and she told me she could renew them. It turned out they could do the blood work down the hallway. (In all they wanted 3 blood vials and a urine sample.) But still: it took about three-quarters of an hour before the nurse was ready for me. I didn't see a lot of people in the waiting room. I know long waits are more the norm than the exception. It was just that I had arranged an early visit to avoid overlapping regular work hours.

I really don't have any anecdotal observations from Maryland; I don't really eat out although the state does allow limited sit-in capacity. I did a couple of Google local searches, and most restaurants, including fast food, are still not showing dine-in; maybe a fifth are showing a dine-in option.

I normally don't discuss politics in my journal posts, but I want to make a number of short points:

  • Apparently NYC leadership is not allowing its contact tracers for COVID-19 exposure to proactively ask if they participated in post-Floyd protests. They're applying an undocumented resident-like "don't ask" position on the theory that those questioned will lie and provide unreliable information. This is an unconscionable double standard because by any measure mass gatherings are breeding grounds for spreading infection. Now to be honest, if you're protesting, you may not be able to identify hundreds of strangers you encountered, but it provides some information about sources, and other protesters may need to take action if they think they might have been exposed.
  • Trump notably made headlines suggesting that testing was leading to higher infection counts and maybe we needed to slow testing. As I recently tweeted that's pretty stupid; it's like some guy refusing to go to a doctor for fear he'll hear bad news. Well, bad news doesn't go away; it may develop into worse news. Information is what we need to contain the disease.  But Ron Paul pointed out an interesting observation: the government is doling out cash to hospitals in part based on COVID-19 head counts, so there's a perverse incentive to test people with little overt symptoms. We really need to look at relative positive rates. Earlier rates were focused on people with identifiable symptoms. Increased counts of infected are expected in the sense that a large percentage of infected show no overt symptoms. That by itself doesn't mean that the infection is spreading, but holding the rate of testing constant, we should not see rising percentages of infections.
  • Face mask mania continues to spread on Twitter (before I recently deactivated my account). The left-fascists are shaming politicians and everyone in a store pushing back against face mask policies. Let's be clear: as I pointed out sometime back in a journal post, I ordered a mask (actually 2) from one of my sisters even before Hogan started his mask fiat; I have constantly worn them since getting my masks, and that won't change in the near future. I myself do not pose a risk; I've only rarely left my apartment for grocery runs and occasional medical visits. So mostly my face mask helps mitigate exposure from others in close proximity. And keep in mind that probably 90%+ of face masks I see others wear are not industrial strength that, say, medical personnel wear. Now you can argue maskless people are freeloading off the face masks worn by others, but really your own risks are marginal if you're protecting yourself, and this is all too paternalistic. Yeah, I can just hear a left-fascist say, "Dude, I don't want to pay for your medical expenses!" But you don't know it's because of not wearing a face mask; maybe you've touched an infected surface and unknowingly infected yourself by touching your face, not washing diligently. Or maybe the mask failed to stop the virus, even if you wore one. Do those hospital costs count?
  • Finally, and I think this point was recently made by Tom Woods and others, the fear-mongering in Texas and elsewhere is being exacerbated by not understanding things like historical utilization rates. The power-seeking left-fascists are hyping things like Texas Children's Hospital opening beds for COVID-19  patients, and you see furious bleeding hearts pointing out that many children there have compromised immune systems, etc. It's gotten to the point that Houston hospital providers felt it necessary to debunk the hysteria. Not every COVID-19 patient visits the ICU, and utilization rates during ordinary times can range say from 70-90% (e.g., when my late Dad was treated for sepsis). Let's point out that Texas' cities are facing nowhere near what we were seeing in NYC several weeks back. Most Texas hospitals indicate they can handle the patient load under current circumstances.

Entertainment Notes

  • Hallmark's two core channels are starting their annual "Christmas in July" two-week cable holiday movie breaks, first starting with HMM (in-process) followed by Hallmark Channel in mid-July. Check your local listings; the schedules may vary on weekends, but it looks like 6PM-midnight EDT or so on weeknights for HMM. One of my gripes is HMM seems more mysteries programming than movies, although I recently caught the end of Hallmark's 2014 flick "In My Dreams", featuring American Idol singer Katharine McPhee. This is an all-time favorite, a fantasy love story where the perfectly matched couple first meet in each other's dreams.
  • Finally, the return of major league sports, in particular major league baseball. Players report tomorrow, and opening day is roughly just over 3 weeks off. I do not particularly enjoy watching reruns of games. No doubt some players will opt out, but it's about time. I don't know the specifics of COVID-19 policies, e.g., capacity constraints, but I'll probably report in a future report.
  • WWE notes: of course, the biggest news is the apparent retirement of The Undertaker (Mark Calaway). I'm somewhat surprised, because I thought they would have been hyping a retirement match and/or doing it in front of a live audience, but WWE had been hyping a multiple episode series, and you could read the writing on the wall. It's interesting to see how they're rebuilding Lashley into a full-nelson monster, and I think it's all aimed at an eventual program with Brock Lesnar. The reemergence of Ric Flair as a mouthpiece for Randy Orton is interesting, and there are some rumors that they may be setting up for a Universal championship reign over McIntyre. There are also rumors of Roman Reigns going over Braun Strowman over the weeks to come. They also have booked Sasha Banks and Bayley, current tag team champs, into the inevitable program over Bayley's belt. The Seth Rollins cult faction is creepy; I'm mildly surprised they didn't do an NXT/Nexus angle on Rollins after he dissed all the current talent there. Still, the storylines are better than they've been for a while

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Monday, June 29, 2020

Post #4676 M: Jorgensen on Happiness; The Tragedy of Hong Kong

Quote of the Day

The higher type of man clings to virtue, 
the lower type of man clings to material comfort. 
The higher type of man cherishes justice, 
the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received.
Confucius 

Kibbe: Jorgensen on Happiness



Ron Paul on Lockdown Hypocrisy



The Tragedy of Hong Kong



Choose Life



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Bob Gorrell via Townhall


Musical Interlude: The Beatles

"With a Little Help From My Friends"

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Post #4675 Commentary Some Reasons Why I've Never Supported (or Will Support) Biden

There are differing reasons why I've never cared for Joe Biden as a politician and more nuanced against him being President.

In terms of the former, a couple of personal issues include his stance on abortion as a fellow Catholic. Now let me point out that although I'm pro-life, I have cast votes for President or other candidates for public office who have been pro-choice/abort. Let's be clear here: I opposed abortion before I ever knew the Church's position on the issue. It's not religious from a standpoint of dogma; Christ Himself never discussed the topic: it was not an accepted practice in Israel during His lifetime. The Church confronted the issue as it expanded in the Roman Empire, including Rome itself, where abortion and infanticide were embraced in the culture. As I've pointed out before, one of the earliest writings by the early Church Fathers is the Didache, which unambiguously condemns said Roman practices. What particularly annoys me is how "Catholic" Dems, including the Kennedy clan, the Cuomo clan, Pelosi, Biden and others have attempted to rationalize their politically obligatory pro-choice viewpoint. They have misrepresented the Church's explicit moral teaching; without going into details, suffice it to say Aristotelian science influenced some Church intellectuals, and Aristotle described a stage development cycle where the pre-born baby became human around the time of viability (perceived movement by the baby) which coincided with ensoulment; the soul, of course, is a key construct in Christianity. So, for some Church intellectuals, abortion became more egregious after ensoulment; Pelosi in particular has used this old controversy to rationalize her departure from the Church's moral position. I'll simply note here that even the old intellectuals realized early abortion frustrated God's plan and gift of new human life, so it's always been considered a grave sin. Arguing that they personally opposed abortion but would not impose their "religious beliefs" on others was disingenuous rubbish. For one thing, abortion was not just opposed by early Jews and Christians; it has been rejected by other religions, cultures and/or societies, e.g., part of the original Hippocratic Oath. In fact, I subscribe to a Secular Pro-Life Facebook group, consisting mostly of agnostics and atheists.

So Biden has earned my contempt by selling out Church teachings for personal political ambition. There is a history of Dem politicians who flipped initial pro-life stances to a more politically convenient pro-choice position (Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton immediately come to mind). Now I've often voted for non-Catholics, even pro-choice Democrats in the past, but if you pose as a faithful Catholic and then seek to rationalize your politically convenient position, you have an integrity issue with me. When I argue against homicide, perjury, or theft, I don't accept the idea that I'm imposing my "religion" on other people. If you are willing to look the other way on abortion, where do you draw the line elsewhere in selling your soul for political ambition? Is it unfair to hold Catholic politicians to a higher standard? Perhaps not, but it's part of my judgment using my own knowledge and experience.

But abortion has only been one factor in my political decisions, two-thirds of libertarians are pro-choice, including last LP nominee Gary Johnson and current nominee Jo Jorgensen. Why have I not been a one-issue voter? For one thing, abortion is not a federal issue, except for certain nuanced policies, like taxpayer funding of abortions. Traditionally abortion and healthcare have been regulated by the states.

There are at least another couple of personal issues. First, there was the Kinnock plagiarism charge during his 1988 campaign. To me, that was a huge integrity issue. In part, at the time I was still an academic who had discovered and enforced incidents of academic dishonesty, and I took political hits from senior faculty and administration officials for doing so. In my own published academic work, you'll find dozens, if not hundreds of cited references. In many of my political essays, you'll find numerous hyperlinks to source materials.

A second concern has to do with the Hunter Biden involvement with an oligarch's natural gas company. As I've recently tweeted, even though I defended the Bidens during Trump's extortion of the Ukraine government which was the focus of the Trump impeachment, I was troubled by the issue (not to mention other Obama Administration personnel at the time). The oligarch was being investigated by the US and EU/British for charges of money laundering and other criminal  behavior. Now Hunter Biden's involvement, from a professional ethics standpoint, would be considered a conflict of interest for Joe Biden, because his executive involvement in Ukraine matters.

In part, this reflects my background. I have a PhD minor in accounting, including a traditional auditing course. There are rigorous standards for an audit firm to certify independent appraisal of financial statements. It's probably best seen from my work for management consulting companies affiliated with audit firms, e.g., Coopers and Lybrand, now part of PwC. Typically I had to list, say, shares owned of client companies, not to mention by relatives, any family connections to clients (e.g., employment, etc.), not just reflecting conflicts of interest in fact but in perception.

There is no doubt in my mind given Joe Biden's role in Ukraine matters that he should have instructed Hunter not to get involved with Burisma. He could not afford the appearance that his family was financially vested in the oligarch's operations which could compromise ongoing criminal investigations. Joe Biden's failure to advise Hunter Biden was intrinsically unethical and corrupt, an unconscionable lapse of judgment. Note that I'm not exonerating Trump's attempt to extort Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. The termination of Shokin, former prosecutor general, had nothing to do with Hunter Biden. The Burisma investigation had to do with certain permits granted to Burisma and other matters in a period predating Biden's joining the board. There were allegations that Shokin was trying to use prosecution of Zlochevsky as a bargaining chip in bribing the oligarch. In fact, Shokin's office issued a letter exonerating the oligarch of British money laundering charges leading to a freeze of assets. Biden's pressure on Ukraine to fire Shokin was precisely because of Shokin's slow-walking corruption investigations, not only accurately reflecting  US policy but there was also pressure from the EU, IMF, and local Ukraine anti-corruption forces. In fact, Shokin targeted local anti-corruption groups.

Even disregarding politics, I have long preferred executive experience, especially in the public sector. Personally I don't regard VP experience as relevant in this regard. Two of the last 3 Democrat Presidents have been Southern Democrats. From Carter through Clinton, only Mondale wasn't a former/current governor. Yet since Gore, all Democratic candidates were primarily US Senators (two former VP's). In the same period, except for McCain, my votes went to former governors: Bush, Romney and Johnson. One of the reasons I had made an exception for McCain was his Gang of 8 (bipartisan) leadership in the Senate. Yes, I'm aware that Jill Jorgensen, the LP nominee and likely the person I'll support this fall, doesn't fit that criterion, but to be honest, I'm not impressed by the experience of either Trump or Biden either. Yes, Trump has been a Presidential apprentice but it seems everyday he is not staying inside the lines of his Constitutional role of enumerated powers.

From a policy perspective, why isn't Biden acceptable? Let me make a short list, which isn't restricted to, but includes the following:

  • Joe Biden has been a criminal justice hawk, including the dubious War on Drugs. I think I clipped the below relevant video in a prior daily post, but current push for criminal justice reform in the wake of the Floyd murder particularly puts Biden in an awkward position.
  • Joe Biden has been a military interventionist hawk, particularly since the 2003 Iraq War and as an Obama adviser. See this post for more detail. 
  • Joe Biden proposes economic growth killing tax increases.
  • Joe Biden is a Big Government tax and spend liberal, proposing, among other things, a massive expansion of ObamaCare, climate change legislation and education spending, gun control, meddling in rural economies, etc.






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Post #4674 Why I Finally Left Twitter Today

No, Twitter did not remove me, but they imposed a 7-day suspension,  probably for using the word "retard" in a reply tweet (discussed below). This was probably the third or fourth suspension over the past year or so, and I'm fed up. This is an issue with Twitter management, and I'm not interested in appealing the absurd suspension. I have no doubt I'm just one of a pattern of libertarians and conservatives who have been harassed, even evicted (Daniel McAdams comes to mind) by the PC elitists on Twitter. (See here and here, for example.) There are literally thousands of "progressive" trolls who daily write things hundreds of times more offensive than anything I've tweeted, but Twitter Mommy doesn't sanction.

In my case, I usually don't send out personal attack tweets; that's not to say I've suffered fools gladly, but usually I'm trying to make a point; I'll sometimes use colorful language more for dramatic effect, like the notorious Cher slap across the face in 'Moonstruck', arguing for the troll to snap out of it. Now others might say that I'm not going to win friends and influence people by being blunt, using negative words or profanity, which is a reasonable point. I've sometimes pointed out a conversation I had with this senior faculty female MIS professor at UWM, who kept interrupting me, repeating a word. It eventually dawned on me she didn't like my choice of words earlier in the conversation and wasn't paying attention to the substance of what I was saying. So that's a fact of human nature: people are going to bring their own conversational expectations into an encounter, and other people's behavior are beyond one's locus of control. In part, most of my adversarial encounters on Twitter involve progressives with cartoonishly over-the-top, badly toned tweets, and I want to send a message that there are other voices out there. There are too many progressives out there for me to waste my time correcting everyone; I'll sometimes pick one randomly to set an example.

What happened in today's incident was I was scanning down one of the typical anti-Trump trends. This one idiot was making reference to the Russian bounty on  US soldiers in Afghanistan allegation. Now keep in mind: I'm Never Trump. The troll phrased things in a way of accusing Russians of murdering US soldiers. (Now I've been beating the drums for some time now, arguing if you're going to criticize Trump, criticize him for not getting us out of Afghanistan already.) These progressive trolls seem to be agitating for a military confrontation with Russia, which I think is very dangerous. So I wrote a tweet along the lines of "Dude! The Russians aren't killing US soldiers; Taliban militants are, and they've been doing it for years without a bounty." So I had moved on to other tweets, when all of a sudden I found myself locked out of my account. They demanded me to remove the tweet in question to start a 7-day suspension during which I would not be able to tweet or do much of anything other than direct messaging my followers (which I haven't done in over 7 years). This was literally the straw that broke the camel's back. I had published something like over 22,000 tweets, and I'm not going to walk on eggshells, so the Twitter fascists are accommodated. It's censorship, plain and simple. They're a private company, not the government, so they can do it. But I'll be damned if I publish content which attracts readers and have to put up with company harassment. I think it's the second time they imposed a week-long exile (and typically there's an actual or implied threat if I continue in my nefarious ways, I will find myself removed), the others were more like day suspensions.

I'm a stats junkie, and technically my readership has probably never been better. I had an implicit objective of attracting at least 1K impressions daily, but not at the sake of tweeting for the numbers. Even though I had 76 followers, that didn't mean I could get there, say with 14 tweets. Many tweets barely break double-digits. It always surprised me when I had a breakout tweet; it never occurred to me in writing a George Washington tweet over the weekend it would attract almost 8000 views. Or the one a few months back that did four times better. There have been a handful of times my daily total went under that daily objective, but I was in a long stretch over weeks averaging better than that, more like twice that number recently.

Now many people do well over that, and I don't know how other libertarian-conservatives do. But take into consideration I knew only 2 of my followers, a Navy buddy and a nephew. So most of the others followed me, mainly on the strength of my tweets.

I haven't decided what to do yet, but it looks like my popular social media digest posts I've been lately publishing on Sundays will change, likely in nature and frequency. I still have a Facebook account, but I normally accept only family and friends (although many posts are publicly available). I may resurrect one of my other blogs I started during the last week-long suspension. I will probably make an announcement in my daily blog and/or in the blog's announcement tab.

Now I've never had Trump's obsession with Twitter, but in fact I've probably spent too much time on Twitter the last several weeks. So it's time I've taken a long overdue break. I don't rule out a return to Twitter one day, but it'll probably be using a different account handle, and the account will likely take a different approach


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Sunday, June 28, 2020

Post #4673 M: SOHO Debate on Racism in the Criminal Justice System;

Quote of the Day

A person who trusts no one can't be trusted.
Jerome Blattner  

SOHO Debate on Racism in the Criminal Justice System

I occasionally embed longer (e.g., 90 minute) videos, especially SOHO debates.



Woods on Lockdown et al.



The National Anthem of Libertaria



National Anthem of Libertaria by Dominic Frisby
melody by Alexander Alexandrov (Russian national anthem)

Arise libertarians!
Above totalitarians.
Our guide is the mighty Invisible Hand.
Reject state controllers
Collectors, patrollers
Our choices are better than government plans.
Taxation is a form of theft.
Free markets and free trade are best.
Free speech, free movement, free minds & free choice
Our actions are all voluntary
Not coerced or compulsory.
War we abhor
Socialism does not work.
No debt or inflation
No stealth confiscation.
No pigs in the trough at the gravy to drink.
No state education
To brainwash our nation.
No experts dictate what to do, what to think.
We scorn your fiat currency!
Gold and bitcoin is our money.
We own ourselves, and we live and let live.
We take responsibility.
Life, love and liberty.
Leave us alone.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Choose Life



Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Pat Cross via Townhall


Musical Interlude: The Beatles

"Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (Title track). I don't think the Beatles released any tune from arguably one of the greatest albums in pop history, if not the greatest. I will exercise blogger privilege and select a number of tunes over the coming week, starting with the infectious title track, which starts with one of the best guitar riffs ever.

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Post #4672 Social Media Digest

Well, I published 3 "viral" tweets this week, including one yesterday (on "Martha Washington"), attracting nearly 8K impressions. Most of my stats, except profile visits, are up over the past month; it does seem my followers are plateauing at about the 75 level.

Twitter






























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Saturday, June 27, 2020

Post #4671 M: Woods on a Lifetime of Exposing Government Lies; Ron Paul on Trump's Trade War with China

Quote of the Day

I was angry with my friend; 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. 
I was angry with my foe; 
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake  

Woods on a Lifetime of Exposing Government Lies



McClanahan on POTUS Rankings

No new podcasts from McClanahan this week, so I've picked up an older episode not yet embedded.



Ron Paul on Trump's Trade War with China



Choose Life


Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Steve Breen via Townhall


Musical Interlude: The Beatles

"The Fool on the Hill"

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Post #4670 Commentary Yes, Black Lives DO Matter

I've mentioned a few incidents in past posts which have tried my patience with the diversity industrial complex on a more personal level. Let me summarize some of these:

  • My mother was raised in a Franco-American section of Fall River, MA. The Catholic Church is at the center of the Franco-American culture. While my USAF NCO Dad was seeking family housing at new assignments while I was in fifth and sixth grades, I started both school years in the same K-8 Catholic schools my maternal grandfather and uncle had attended. (I think at the time some schools were segregated by gender, e.g., my mom attended an all-girls academy through high school.) At any rate. while I was there (and this was during the years where the civil rights battles were being fought with the Church's support, the Beatles were dominating the music charts, etc.), my class' project was supporting a black family in DC. Now I didn't mind stuff like food and clothing donations, but where I drew the line was when the sister (nun) pointed out the Dad's favorite cigarette brand. I knew back then smoking was a bad habit; thank God my own Dad had quit by then (I think they both favored the same brand). I just didn't think we should enable a nasty habit. Even then, I had a sense of moral hazard.
  • My best friend at OLL, RC, was Latino. I was targeting UT (Austin) for grad school in math; I had a near-perfect GPA. UT was doing a recruiting session at OLL (located in the heavily Latino SW section of San Antonio), with a significant Latino base. RC attended as my moral support; to our dismay, RC, an education major with no interest in grad school, was heavily recruited the second he entered the room; I, on the other hand, got nothing more than a split second glance. At one point, my friend pointed me out and said, "Why don't you talk to Ron? He wants to go to your school."
  • We had a heavy presence of La Raza at OLL at the time. One thing they protested while I was there was the lack of Chicano representation in the faculty. There was a related government report that came out pointing, e.g., the philosophy department was all white. Well, it was a small department with two core faculty members, both religious: a Czech-American sister and an Irish immigrant priest. At the time, the few Chicano philosophy professors could get offers from almost any major American university looking to diversify their faculty. 
  • I still remember when my academic career was ending in a recession as a professor, despite a solid publication record and 8 years of teaching a variety of courses, I was getting filtered out of most searches, with one key emphasis was increasing the presence of female faculty in my discipline. I didn't mind competition, even with female ABD's, but I didn't even get a preliminary interview. To be honest, the single white male thing certainly didn't seem to be working in my favor.
I would say, even though I'm unambiguously a blue-eyed Caucasian, I'm different than most white people I've met. For one thing, French was my first language until kindergarten. The teacher worried about communicating with me and at one point (until they gave me an IQ test) thought about holding me back a year. My folks went completely English at home (except when they were alone), and to this day my 6 younger siblings blame me for the fact they're not bilingual. I'm not sure why the folks didn't think they could raise us bilingual like they had been raised, but I think my Mom still had memories of Anglo schoolmates ridiculing her accented English (no, you could never have known when she got married). In fact, when we lived for a year in Alsace-Lorraine,  the local French women thought Mom was a Parisian by her French. When Mom explained she was American, they were in denial: "Americans can't speak French, and you do!". 

Most people won't even try to guess how to pronounce my surname: typically, e.g., at hospitals or clinics, they'll say, "Mr. Ronald???????" My Dad would check on at a restaurant wait list as "Gill met". Ironically, among those who have gotten the pronunciation correct quite often have been men of color, including my latest car salesman. There are a number of French-speaking blacks (e.g., Haiti) or, say, in Cajun country, Louisiana. (Cajuns are cultural cousins of my Quebec ancestors.) One of my best friends, RJ, at UH Catholic Newman was a Cajun, and every time we met, say on a religious retreat, he came with brand new Boudreaux & Thibodeaux jokes that had me laughing convulsively.

Ironically my last academic job offer came from a historically black university near Monroe, LA. They had mismanaged my recruitment, not following up for weeks after my campus visit. I had struggled during the previous 3 years after leaving academia during a recession dealing with anti-intellectual recruiters who didn't respect academic computing. In the interim, I finally got a dream DBA position with a marketing research company (eventually acquired by Equifax). GS actually made a good offer (the best I had ever been offered in academic and about $15K more than my current employers were paying me). If they had made the offer just a few weeks earlier, I would have accepted. But at that point of time, I felt I needed a good year or two of DBA experience to fall back on if my renewed academic career stalled out again. (The job wasn't a tenured one.) I got a heart-broken letter from my prospective chair, Dr. AB, taking the offer rejection personally. It had nothing to do with her; I would have loved working for her. It was just a matter of timing. I thought they had moved on with other candidates; maybe they were battling the bureaucracy to get the offer approved. I will say that GS had the most unusual campus visit/job interview I ever experienced. Typically you're meeting administrators and area faculty and giving a research presentation. GS had me meeting with a group of students, and they were assertive and aggressive, asking me pointed questions about IT employer contacts, etc. How could I  tell them not a single industry recruiter ever approached me in 8 years of university teaching? I think only one employer, Eastman Kodak, ever contacted me (while I was at UTEP) about one student, taking her first course under me, listing me as a reference without my knowledge or consent. As a junior (untenured) faculty member, you're on a publish or perish track; you don't have time to establish a lucrative consulting practice in the local community. I had struggled for 3 years to land work after leaving academia, where industry recruiters basically considered me unemployed for 8 years and whatever skills I had practiced before then probably degraded and obsolete. I thought this one particularly articulate black female student was asking very good questions, but to be frank, although I'm very articulate, I wasn't prepared for this line of questioning. It was the only time I had been interviewed by students. I had no idea how I came across and to what extent, if any, student feedback had on the hiring process.

I was born and raised in an integrated military. I can recall my Mom talking about the Underground Railroad (i.e., supporting fugitive slaves). My best friend while Dad was stationed in France (fifth grade) was Henry, a black military dependent. I attended high school in a heavily Latino Texas border city suburb. I've asked out black and Latina women. A couple I befriended at UH Catholic Newman had a mixed marriage (he was a white postal worker and she was a talented black Christian group lead singer; I can still remember Dan emotionally discussing privately with me how his own parents refused to acknowledge Jane and even their own grandchildren). My closest junior faculty friend during the year I was a visiting professor at Illinois State was an African immigrant. My first government point of contact while working as a contractor at the regional EPA lab in Chicago was a black woman (who, interestingly, came from Sumter, SC, where I had attended junior high at a local AFB). While I worked for Oracle Consulting, I worked for 6 months on an Oakland city project where the IT manager and city DBA I worked with were black as was a fellow consultant I mentored on a project for the state of Oklahoma. The contractor boss I reported to at USPTO was the black company president. On two of my most recent contractor gigs, I've worked with black DBAs, one in a leadership role. I've lived in integrated apartment complexes, sometimes with a black family next door. I don't really discuss family in my posts, but one of my nieces is in a mixed marriage, and they have 5 beautiful kids. I've already explained how I had applied to teach at a historically black university, reporting to a department chair who was a woman of color. People of color have served as professional references. The conventional "progressive" smear of racism is inconsistent with my life experience.

I rarely discuss politics in my professional and personal life (I obviously have a blog and social media accounts; my relatives don't really discuss politics with me, but 2 or 3 nephews have told me they have nuanced pro-liberty leanings, agree with some things I write, disagree with others). I have issues with the diversity industrial complex. I think quotas and policies like contract set-asides are counter-productive; the government is very bad and inefficient at picking winners and losers. LBJ's War on Poverty did not improve on a preexisting trend of declining poverty in the private sector, but some of the policy initiatives had an adverse unintended effect on the stability of urban black families and, if anything, promoted a perpetual underclass dependent on government assistance. Combine that with abysmal public schools, limited employment opportunities, and criminalization of the underground economy (e.g., the War on Drugs), and we see a vicious cycle of despair, where a disproportionately high percentage of black youth and men have a criminal record, which erodes already slim employment prospects.

We have seen tragedies play out in two notorious cases: Eric Garner and George Floyd, who died unnecessarily while in police custody. Eric Garner was arrested over selling "loosies", single cigarettes which New York and other high-taxing states see as a workaround (buying cigarettes in states with lower taxes and arbitraging the cost differential), a victimless crime. In Floyd's case, he was accused of (knowingly?) using a counterfeit $20 bill in making a purchase at a convenience store.

I'm not going to go deeply into policies here, other than to note some position we libertarians and conservatives have staked out, including but not restricted to:

  • school choice, including private school, charter schools, and homeschooling
  • lowering occupational licensing hurdles
  • ending the prosecution of victimless crimes, including the War on Drugs
  • repealing qualified immunity
  • tax-advantaged local area investments
  • lowering costs and obstacles to entrepreneurial activities, including things like food trucks.
We welcome the recent steps towards criminal justice reform, but we have quintuple the relative global incarceration rate and of these unconscionably high numbers, a disproportionate number of these are blacks, who account for roughly 13% of the American population. We need to repeal a vast number of laws, especially those affecting urban black communities, like drug offenses, where a disproportionate number of blacks are incarcerated. We also need to end some pet preferences of "law and order" conservatives with "get tough" policies like minimum sentences and "three strikes".

I don't like GOVERNMENT (not private) social welfare and affirmative action policies, which I think have harmed, not helped blacks. I will simply refer interested readers to the work of prominent black economists, like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.

Personally, I have evolved. There was a time where I found the construct "black lives matter" somewhat inconsistent with the color-blind intent of the post-slavery 14th Amendment. "All lives matter": true enough. But it's hard to argue that the black population has been treated the same, especially by government, federal, state or local. The fourteenth amendment was laxly enforced for nearly a century. It seems every day some stupid regulation, like one over baggy pants, is passed, which targets especially blacks. We have political obstacles in the way of people of color. We have a moral responsibility to fix a government and bad public policy which disproportionately targets the black community.

It's also time for blacks to push back against paternalist Dem "progressive" leadership which has failed most urban communities but thinks are owed political loyalty. Make no mistake: schools are still failing, employment prospects are still challenging, and young black people are still being imprisoned. We can say "black lives matter" not by targeting Confederate and other statues (which don't do a damn thing for most black people but are a Dem version of "wag the dog"), but by providing political reforms, like some of the ones I discuss above. 
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