Monthly Archives: February 2014

Government Employees

Government Employees
By Myron Pauli

For some unfathomable reason, Americans surrender control over their lives, liberty, and property to local, state, and federal governments. After they do this, they often have a sort of buyer’s remorse – perhaps changing the person at the top will do it: Cuomo begat Pataki who begat Cuomo at the state level. Or Clinton begat Bush who begat Obama who begat Clinton at the federal level – as the French say, plus ca change c’est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same). If “elections” to change the captain of the ship do not bring about Utopia, then perhaps it is the lazy and stupid crew – the “government employees”.

The often heard answer is that the bureaucracy does not work because of the idiot bureaucrats. The fact is that the primary rule of a bureaucracy is “COVER YOU’RE A**” – intelligent vs. stupid or lazy vs. diligent takes a distant place to the prime directive.

LAZY employees! Be careful what you wish for! Do you really want a government of zealous workaholic Torquemadas1? What we need are IRS auditors harassing twice as many small businesses; TSA perverts fondling twice as many women; CIA agents waterboarding twice as many ‘terrorists’; NSA listening to twice as many phone calls; SWAT teams breaking twice as many doors down of suspected dope-smokers in the middle of the night; twice the number of weddings in Pakistan blown up by drones.

And keep in mind that bureaucrats dispense money – so what we need are: twice as many ethanol grants, twice as many Solyndras, twice as many foreign governments bribed, twice as many food stamps handed out, twice as many community organizers, twice as many ‘research grants’ for ‘lesbian studies in amphibians’, twice as many no-bid cost-plus contracts, twice as many grants from the National Endowment for the Arts … And then we have those LAZY regulators – let them get off their butt and write twice as many EPA and OSHA and Medicare and IRS rules – all of them contradicting other rules. After all, these extra regulations will cause jobs for thousands of lawyers and accountants and Bastiat can break a few windows from his grave2.

No, my friends – with most of what government does – pay these guys to take the whole year off except for 1 day of cake and bonuses for the “laziest” bureaucrat who did the least damage to the nation and/or to the world at large. “In spite of the temptation to screw things up, you did less beyond the call of duty”.

STUPID employees! Admittedly, National Institutes of Health might be able to use a Pasteur or Salk but does your local SWAT team need them? Aren’t we better off with Steven Jobs3 innovating at Apple than handing out housing subsidies? Would you want to employ Beethoven dispensing food stamps, Einstein operating drones, Michelangelo listening to your phone calls, and Pythagoras fondling airplane passengers? Can you imagine Sigmund Freud waterboarding! (Please get on the couch, Abdul, while I hook up the hose and ask you about your mother). Given the nature of government, America is far better off if the capable and intelligent are used productively in what remains of private enterprise. Taking useful and innovative people from where they can be constructive and letting them run free “regulating” the state, nation, and planet is a definite prescription for the sadomasochistic. As for stupid presidents – if I have to choose between “stupid” Gerald Ford and our only Ph.D. president, Woodrow Wilson4, give me a harmless mediocrity anytime and anyplace.

For one who believes that government that governs least governs best, I have NO inherent objection to lazy or stupid (under the assumption that the political system will not ever allow a government agency to be dismantled). But I will make one confession – it would be nicer if our bureaucrats were more polite!

—– —- REFERENCES —- —-
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_de_Torquemada
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
3. http://barelyablog.com/steven-jobs-%E2%80%93-capitalist-hero/
4. http://barelyablog.com/woodrow-the-worst/

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

Redcoat Pillock, Piers Morgan, Axed

Britain, Constitution, GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law

I sincerely hope the smug mug of Don Lemon, one of CNN’s many stupid and sanctimonious activists-anchors, will follow Piers Morgan into oblivion.

Morgan has finally been axed. For three years this pillock preached treason from his perch at CNN. I say treason not because he was undermining the dead-letter US Constitution, as some have claimed, but for the following reasons spelled out in “The Peerless Malevolence of Redcoat Piers Morgan”:

Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one’s country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one’s countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)

A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man.

It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights.

Knowing full well that a mere ban on assault rifles would not give him the result he craved, our redcoat turncoat has structured his monocausal appeals against the individual’s right to bear arms as follows:

1) The UK once experienced Sandy-Hook like massacres.
2) We Brits banned all guns, pistols too.
3) There were no more such massacres.

Were Morgan agitating for the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution—I’d call him a patriot, although he’d be preaching against the Constitution. My Amendment bias, why? The Constitution itself, in places, undermines individual rights. Therefore, to the extent that the document comports with the natural law, to that extent the Constitution is a good thing; to the extent that it flouts natural justice, it is bad. Inescapably—and more often than not—natural justice therein has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

Thus, it is not Piers’ “attack on the 2nd Amendment” per se that makes him a traitor; it is that the 2nd Amendment is natural law, namely, it is based on a universally accepted, timeless moral principle. Because he is undermining this immutable principle, Morgan is suborning treason against his countrymen.

MORE.

Even Piers’ friends at the “New York Slimes” had to concede that,

Mr. Morgan’s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III, peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.

‘The Deep State’

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Government, Homeland Security, The State

If possible, disregard the statist, leftist elements of Mike Lofgren’s essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” by which I mean Lofgren’s grief over partisan gridlock in Washington (if only), about the GOP’s plot to render the “executive branch powerless” (I wish); his conviction that “Wall Street is the ultimate owner of the Deep State,” and that corruption flow from it, rather than from government outward, to say nothing of his idiotic antipathy for Ayn Rand. Yes, there is a lot of nonsense here.

Concentrate, if you can, not on Lofgren’s analysis, but on his factual insights into what he terms “The Deep State”:

… Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2] …

… The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. …

…the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.

… Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. … The Deep State, based on the twin pillars of national security imperative and corporate hegemony, has until recently seemed unshakable and the latest events may only be a temporary perturbation in its trajectory. But history has a way of toppling the altars of the mighty. …

MORE.

Yes, “The Deep State” is bad, but so are aspects of Mike Lofgren’s analysis of it.

Conservative Argument From Feelings Against Fem Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action, Ann Coulter, Argument, Conservatism, Feminism, Gender, Reason

Presumably pursuant to the posts “Conservatives and Lefties United Against The Beauty Ideal” and “With Some Exceptions, ‘Women Are Fascists At Heart,’” Ben Cohen of “American Thinker” has been kind enough to send me his piece, “The Legitimacy of White Male Anger.”

Thanks.

My problem, however, with “The Legitimacy of White Male Anger” is its non-stop apologetics, which come close to accepting the premise of “gender parity through affirmative action,” provided women are a little more gracious about all the concessions they are getting.

“Those demanding that more women be hired in various academic fields” are “sanctimonious and callous,” “blatantly self-serving”; not nice, demanding.

This amounts to psychologizing, not arguing.

Moreover, why is it “bad” for men to have given an “unfriendly reception” to women who’ve been forcibly integrated into the traditionally male trades?

If they don’t deserve to be on the job, on merit, why does friendliness matter; why is it the focus here? And why have men taken to arguing like women? (“You hurt my feelings. Be nice.” Or, “do feminists ever stop and consider the men’s perspective?”)

It’s disconcerting.

As an individualist, I am all for recruiting your lesbian, Amazonian lady to the traditionally male occupations. She is a rare creature who can match men in physicality. Seek her. Keep her. In an increasingly feminized, soft society, warrior women need the military, for example, as an outlet for their abilities. Let these women join the police, military or the fire brigade. An exception, not the rule, however, is the woman who can match a man in strength, speed, physical endurance and handiness.

So why on earth is male “unfriendliness” toward women who force them to do double duty on the job relevant? Even the woman-glorifying, TV cop series we all watch can’t help but display men outrunning their partners, catching up to the criminal, pummeling the thug, and saving the more feeble female cop’s life.

A male cop who serves along a 100 pound woman with silicone for breasts is risking his life. Receiving her with hostility into the force is hardly the issue here. Neither is it wrong.

I hardly think an “unfriendly” reception is the crux of the matter in the grander program of engineered gender parity.

Read “Freeze! I Just Had My Nails Done!” by Ann Coulter, where she gets straight to the matter:

How many people have to die before the country stops humoring feminists? … The inestimable economist John Lott has looked at the actual data. (And I’ll give you the citation! John R. Lott Jr., “Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)

It turns out that, far from “de-escalating force” through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won’t reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)

Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott’s analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent. …

MORE.