May 19, 2017

Phil Beaver works to establish opinion when the-objective-truth has not been discovered. He seeks to refine his opinion by listening when people share experiences and observations. The comment box below invites readers to express facts, opinion, or concern, perhaps to share with people who may follow the blog.

Note 1:  I often dash words in a phrases in order to express and preserve an idea. For example, frank-objectivity represents the idea of candidly expressing the-objective-truth despite possible error. In other words, a person expresses his “belief,” knowing he or she could be in error. People may collaboratively approach the-objective-truth.

Note 2: It is important to note "civic" as in citizens for the people more than for the city.

 The Advocate:  See online at theadvocate.com/baton_rouge.

  

Our Views (legislature). In light of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, is the Louisiana Black Legislative Caucus constitutional under the laws of the USA?

In light of the USA’s bemusing, 1791, “freedom of religion,” is it constitutional to invoke Christianity to bid for dominant-opinion in a legislative body?

Fred Bear informed me that this land’s native God is red. The book “God is Red,” seemed to be not about skin color but about a great spirit. It seemed like a mysterious account of the human spirit. I liked the account.

I realize everyone has the right to free expression, but claiming that a specific religious belief is less erroneous than others seems like folly that should have been settled by the Civil War. (See the Declaration of Secession, December 1860.)

When someone lashes at me, “Don’t tell me my God is not almighty,” I realize that civic conversation is not possible. By “civic” I mean individuals collaborating to benefit from the-objective-truth in order to have a more promising future rather than conflict over private hopes for personal afterdeath.

For me, the best part of life is rest. My person was at rest before I was born, so rest during my afterdeath seems nice. Either dust or ashes might serve well.

It seems to me establishing the preamble to the constitution for the USA, signed on September 17, 1787 but neglected since then, may substantially solve these two problems: 1) unconstitutional civil racism and 2) unconstitutional civil Christianity (whatever that may be: red, yellow, black, white, gray, or spiritual).
     

Today’s thought (2 Peter 3:18). The mystery Dean weaves would keep Bible believers focused for a lifetime.

However, as usual, a complete reading of 2 Peter 3 informs us of a deeper context. If we don’t mimic Jesus, we’ll face the destruction of the heavens by fire. To me, it makes more sense to read less mysterious literature.

BTW, 2 Peter 3 may be James Baldwin’s source for “The Fire Next Time,” the title of his 1962 book.

Letters

Film tax (Arduin). The message I get: I’ll give you a job that pays 22 cents an hour if you give me 100 cents.

I have more sense than to participate. However, the Louisiana legislature perceives that I don’t have enough information, so they can force the deal on me.

I know the Legislature could care less about the people who make money on the films produced here. What I cannot discern is who is number one for the Legislature.

Old white people (Spencer). After five decades of Alinsky-Marxist organizing (AMO), anyone who does not comprehend that another person’s God is all powerful just has not encountered black church and dialogues on racism. In other words, it's possible that young man was a member of the Nation of Islam merely placating you.

I understand Mayor Broome addressed old, white insolence today in an open letter. Citizens must understand that people like Broome by edict do not express hate. Let's have a conversation.

  

Rich Lowry column (rigged American politics). Rigged is correct, but it has nothing to do with the temporal political regime or two-party aggravation.

Machiavelli’s analysis of political regimes is masterful.

He covers the American regime in Chapter XI. The people, being theists, count on the Church for not only their afterdeath but for their safety & security during life. Politicians, observing this indolence partner with the priests, and the partnership picks the people’s pockets.

This has been known for 500 years now, so only a dreamer would propose that people collaborate for civic morality for life keeping religious morality a private hope for the believer’s afterdeath.

Relief is available by establishing the civic agreement that is stated in the preamble to the constitution for the USA.

Leger and MaGee column. I agree with the slogan but a different application. “The people of Louisiana deserve better” than its legislature and governor.

Robert Samuelson column (inflation not apparent yet). My first impression is that Milton Friedman and Allan Meltzer drew from evidences in a different global market.

However, I never heard anything from Friedman that did not make sense.

Stephane Grace column (monuments gone). I hope the state will continue to stay out of it.

Let New Orleans auction their property on the international market for the highest bidder. They are going to need a lot of money to put in place the statues they want.

BRAVE extension (Page 1B). I don’t see how Louisiana, with its terrible state governance, can approach the federal government for any help.

Take for example the fake wording in “police-involved shooting” of an armed felon and the expensive protests that followed and inspired the shooting of six police officers.

If teen gangs really are constrained, maybe it is time to focus on minimizing the frequency of people with double digit arrests but still able to carry and conceal a hand gun.

It is interesting that churches and non-profits did not support BRAVE as promised. With reneged local support, why should other states provide?

COA tax vote (Page 1B). If there is a revote, I hope the proposed millage is lower.

However, my best hope is that the vote will be negated and not proposed again. A property tax for this function has no fairness.

Ethics fines (Page 3B). Based on the information in the article, it seems Amoroso has civic integrity.

The fallen (Page 1A). The professional state policemen as well as BRPD officers who impacted my lifetime are unforgettable.

State leadership: not so much.

Edwards at LSU (Page 1A). What’s this new word, “optics?” I hope not to have to read it again.

N.O. folly (Page 1A). The state and nation were hands off as Landrieu embarked on “I don’t know where this will end but know where it will begin.”

I saw let him find out on his own.

Senate labor committee advances LGBT bill (online). I constantly read and write in opposition to social & civil inroads against freedom-from oppression & liberty-to live according to personal preferences. Involving the public in private dreams like gender change lessens freedom from oppression. 

  

It occurs to me my themes, springing from the civic agreement that is stated in the preamble to the constitution for the USA, could explain statistics regarding views on my blog promotethepreamble.blogspot.com. View-statistics follows: 1/3 USA, 1/8 Russia, and 1/20 France, leaving 1/7 for all others, perhaps forty nationalities. Why would Russia and France be interested in the unfortunately neglected preamble to the constitution for the USA? Perhaps for different reasons.

I encourage living in concord with fidelity to the-objective-truth, to self, to immediate family, to extended family including neighbors, to the people, to the nation, to the world and to the universe, both respectively and collectively. Call it comprehensive fidelity. I commend fidelity not to obstruct progress toward technological progress but to preserve choices that make a person’s brief life worth living. Since humankind is the most powerful psychological species, perhaps comprehensive fidelity expresses human living.

Also, I suggest a new field of psychological service I dub “civic practitioner,” were “civic” refers to collaborating for people’s lives starting with your own rather than in concert with the city, government, political power, an ideology, or technology. For example, a father in monogamy with children and grandchildren who suddenly realizes his psychological side always was a woman might be persuaded to uphold fidelity to his body, his wife, and his personal posterity rather than transition into competition with his better-half’s beauty and attire. The civic practitioner assists persons in being human if that’s what they want in their short lifetime---perhaps nine decades or so. People who do not want civic assistance are free to pursue their dreams. After all, people freely observed that birds fly because of wings and tried to mimic them. Why shouldn’t a man freely mimic a woman?

A man who wants to be a woman may need more than femal sex organs. He may need a female brain. “In 2001, researchers from Harvard found that . . . parts of the frontal lobe, responsible for problem-solving and decision-making, and the limbic cortex, responsible for regulating emotions, were larger in women. In men, the parietal cortex, which is involved in space perception, and the amygdala, which regulates sexual and social behavior, were larger [source: Hoag].” See science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/men-women-different-brains1.htm . Legislation based on social trends rather than the-objective-truth seems irresponsible.

Everything I read encourages my obsession with the catalogue of fidelities. I found support in James Poulos’s essay, “Infrastructural Thinking,” National Affairs, No. 31, Spring 2017, page 67. Poulos first asserts that technology is threating human freedom. Society has stopped appreciating being human. “Put bluntly, the case for human freedom cannot succeed if the case for being human fails. [I]ncreasingly, subhuman and post-human fantasies have gained credence at the margins of society and moved toward the mainstream.”

The dignity and equality of a child to remain with the couple that conceived him or her may be defended in Louisiana regardless of technological advances and non-human opinion by the United States Supreme Court, which is, after all, a democratic rather than republican group--- that is, the Supreme Court seems not group that pursues justice. The committee of nine often arrives at “decisions” using a corrupt network of opinion rather than the-objective-truth.

I shared the Poulos reference with my state representatives.

Other forums

facebook.com/phil.beaver.52/posts/10155342344033599?notif_t=like&notif_id=1495156144173909

Note: a person, Buchukuri, posted a web report that Donald Trump resisted black applications for his rental properties in the 1960s. It may be true, but in those days there was lots of black violence. I address the black injustice in the following response to the post that disappeared. I’m not unhappy that the essay against Trump is no longer referenced, but it is on the web for those who like the past as justification for a bad future. I prefer to work on a possible better future.

Buchukuri, I appreciate your concern. There are so many injustices in the world it is difficult to balance them. In this issue, I think theism is at the heart of the debate. I voted for Donald Trump because I think his experiences and observations empower him to offer justice instead of dominant opinion.

When European countries colonized using Africa's commodity for farm-labor, the USA's destiny to be the world's example for justice was set. First African-slaves arrived in 1619.

A pivot point came when loyal English colonists realized the homeland was making slaves of the colonists, the colonists declared independence and fought a war. France was simultaneously conducting the 2nd Hundred years' war with England. The French planned and helped execute the American victory at Yorktown, VA in 1781.

Colonial literature from 1720 to 1774 has assertions that African-slavery was immoral and that if the colonists won independence, they would be bound to emancipate the slaves. Ninety-nine percent of free citizens read the Bible and the Bible condones slavery, perhaps as punishment for sins to the descendants of the sinner. Most colonists did not accept that argument, yet religious ideas are powerful.

The 1783 Treaty of Paris names thirteen independent states. Thus, European descendants in America had experienced freedom-from oppression they would have suffered in their homelands and exercised the liberty-to pursue life according to personal opinion rather than a government-imposed ideology. Fortuitously, their bid for independence was aided by France. The geopolitical reality of the world does not make another event like emergence of the USA likely.

Over the next four years the 13 states, 8 wit slavery economies and 5 with economies that served the slave states, realized they could not survive in the world without forming a nation. Twelve states wrote a draft constitution in 1787, and it had four provisions to empower future emancipation of the slaves: 1) the preamble would establish future civic morality by willing people in their states, 2) religious neutrality by not establishing theism or other religious beliefs, 3) state's rights including the return of escaped slaves, 4) termination of the African slave trade twenty years after ratification, 5) congressional representation for slaves at 0.6 person/slave, and 6) dependence on future generations to discover emancipation feasibility.

Ratification passed on June 21, 1788, with the agreement that the 1st congress would negotiate and add a bill of rights, following English history. The 1st congress reinstated legislative Protestantism, the traditional propaganda that elected officials are divine. Religious education of slaves had been a condition of the Catholic church's doctrine of discovery for God, continued by Luther, so teaching the Bible continued. When the read verses about flogging (bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Flogging) they may have thought, "My master's God is not God I'll worship." Like all literature, people read the Bible with personal perspective.

America grew westward and by 1861 the slave-states ratio had decreased from 8:5 to 15:19, slavery disputes dominating politics when foreign wars were not the attention. Fervent Protestant ministers in the South preached slavery as an institution of God. The election of President Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was a psychological crisis for South Carolina, who seceded from the USA in December with a list of complaints including the North unconstitutionally harboring escaped slaves and other economic actions and concluding "public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.”

Religious zeal inspired 7 states to attack their own USA at Fort Sumter in April, 1781. White people in the South prayed for victory over white people in the North, both sides praying to the same God. Slaves surely questioned their masters' Bible.

Emancipation came in 1785 with the 13th Amendment to the constitution. However, where there is a will there's a way, and whites in the South continued to nourish their Bible interpretation, proven erroneous by both the physics of slavery (guns, whips, brutality and rape) and by military victory by Bible-based prayers in the North. White-favoring segregation prevailed until 1964 and 1965, when black-church led peaceful marching and preaching accomplished the Civil Rights Acts regarding discrimination and voting rights.

Thus, in a 346 year sojourn in this land, under a constitution with the preamble set into operation yet neglected for 176 years, descendants of the slaves had won freedom-from oppression. Yet they still had not experienced the liberty-to live according to personal preference rather than an ideology. In that void, they turned to an emerging conflation of religious beliefs.

Beginning with the crime lordship of Chicago's Al Capone, consequential disruptive practices honed by Saul Alinsky into a political strategy, aided by black power as proposed by the Nation of Islam, and empowered by liberation theology, peace marches of the 1950s turned into street violence and burning of entire communities in the late 1960s and beyond. Alinsky-Marxist organizing (AMO) originated in Chicago, and the story is related by D. L. Adams, 2010. See newenglishreview.org/DL_Adams/Saul_Alinsky_and_the_Rise_of_Amorality_in_American_Politics/ . It has been advanced by the unconstitutional Congressional Black Caucus since the late 1960s, established in 1971.

Even in the 1960s, Donald Trump resisted injustice. Now, thanks to the US republic, President Trump is my vote's best hope, and I think the world's best promise for voluntary public-integrity (or iterative-collaboration for civic safety & security). "Civic" refers to collaborating for human people rather than a government, religion, ideology, or technology.

  

Phil Beaver does not “know” the-indisputable-facts. He trusts and is committed to the-objective-truth of which most is undiscovered and some is understood. He is agent for A Civic People of the United States, a Louisiana, education non-profit corporation. See online at promotethepreamble.blogspot.com.