The Arizona Traffic Violation Racket

Posted: 6/14/2016

Trigger

Recently, I was pulled over for a speeding violation and for not carrying my car registration when I was just coming down from the Hohokam Expressway (AZ state route 143) in Phoenix, AZ. I was stopped in a 35 Mile zone that about 50 yards further turns into a 45 miles zone by a hidden motorcycle police officer. The traffic violation ticket is issued on behalf of Tempe, AZ.

Greedy Politicians

What a nice way to make loads of money milking citizens! In my case the total amount I have to pay for these two traffic violations including a defensive driving class is a whopping $700. The driving school makes only about $35 out of this total, the rest goes to government.

The Situation

When the police officer stopped me, I:

1. Was Not intoxicated by anything
2. Was Alert and not distracted by anything
3. Was Not involved in any accident or caused harm to anyone
4. Drive this route every work day as it is my commute to work for more than three years. Thus, I know how to drive this route without being too risky or irresponsible
5. Have no history of accidents involving major damage or any injuries or death

For what exactly am I forced by government to pay about $700!

Not Carrying A Car Registration Violation

In the 16th year of the 21st century, I do not believe, I have to carry the paper version of this car registration with me all the time when I drive. I believe, it is, e.g. not even recommended to leave a paper copy of the car registration in your car (hint: car theft).

Anyway, I photographed my car registration and had it with me on my smartphone, so I thought. However, I also recently replaced my old smartphone with a new one and I in the meantime I have so much more pictures stored on my smartphone as well as in the cloud. Since I do not get pulled over very frequently while driving and I was not able to quickly find the photo of my car registration. The police officer insisted anyway I had to show him a paper copy of the car registration as required by the law.

What an outdated law! Or is this about making money from citizens by greedy politicians? Quite possible!

In this day and age (16th year of the 21st century), a police officer can check the car registration on his/her dedicated computer in less than 60 seconds, I would guess. Police officers, even today, do not scan your VIN number on your vehicle, which I find hard to believe. Thus, the requirement for a driver to carry a paper car registration does not make much sense anymore.

This violation costs me more than $200. This is an obscene amount of money for such a petty offense. It costs me almost as much as my speeding violation.

The Antiquated Arizona Department Of Transportation

The Arizona DOT has a very nice website. But I was not able to find smartphone app for a car registration on their website as of today (6/14/2016).

I would urge the courts in Arizona that handle traffic violations to refuse to recognize anymore the traffic violation of not carrying a paper car registration! Our politicians and bureaucrats should be reminded that we live in the 16th year of the 21st century!

Proof Of Car Insurance

We are insured with Geico and Geico provides an app, which I installed on my smartphone. Voila, I was able to show digital proof of my car insurance to the police officer, which he accepted. That is the way it should be.

The Car Insurance Racket

Since it is mandatory to buy a car insurance in the U.S., like it is since 2008 mandatory to buy Obamacare, the threat of points in your driving record because of such petty traffic violations forces you to accept taking a defensive driving class to avoid the points and higher insurance premiums.

For this ‘privilege’, I have to pay the government another $200 in form of various fees and court fees ($135). This is obscene again!

The Regressive Effect Of Fines

These kind of excessive traffic violation fines are extremely regressive in particular for low income people.

If a business (e.g. a bank) would dare to charge these kind of fees to its customers, the U.S. Department of Justice and more than 20 state attorney generals would prosecute this business into submission.

Previous, Related Blog Posts

I have written a long time ago this post about the unconstitutional speed limits in the U.S.

A Critique Of Arthur Murray's Guaranteed Income For Every American

Posted: 6/12/2016

Trigger

Just read Arthur Murray’s A guaranteed income for every American  Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture. It astounds me that the American Enterprise Institute is behind that. Apparently, this gentleman has written a monograph in 2006 on this topic.

Anyway, I am going to reflect on Mr. Murray’s arguments here, because I believe he is not the only proponent defending this baloney of universal, guaranteed income in similar ways.

A Critique

1. Mr. Murray extensively denies that he is not a Luddite. Au contraire, he is one. His argument rests on the fallacious claim that the impending technological revolution of robotics and AI is so extensive that it must be “this time is different”. That is a truly laughable argument. Every time a technology revolution has happened before this claim surely was raised by contemporaries of that time
2. To his credit, Mr. Murray describes in some detail how successful private, voluntary networks of charity and welfare were “displaced” by the New Deal and later the Great Society. Here is a salient quote (emphasis added):
   “A key feature of American exceptionalism has been the propensity of Americans to create voluntary organizations for dealing with local problems. Tocqueville was just one of the early European observers who marveled at this phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time the New Deal began, American associations for providing mutual assistance and aiding the poor involved broad networks, engaging people from the top to the bottom of society, spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens.
   These groups provided sophisticated and effective social services and social insurance of every sort, not just in rural towns or small cities but also in the largest and most impersonal of megalopolises.”
3. So why does Mr. Murray then argue for a new, universal government program (i.e. guaranteed income for everyone) to displace all old, universal government programs (e.g. social security, medicare etc.)? His conclusion is flawed. Mr. Murray should have argued for a return to more private, voluntary charity and welfare to aid the poor or unfortunate.

Previous, Related Blog Posts

See here.

The Transgender Fad & Risks

Posted: 6/10/2016

Trigger

Just read this interesting account by a transgender person with remorse.

Some Remarks

1. I speculate, for some people to become a transgender person is like to reach for The Last Frontier
2. I speculate, for some people to become a transgender person is like grasping for a straw or a remedy to some personal issue
3. The transgender issue has certainly markings of a fad
4. It appears that a large proportion of transgendered people have a high prevalence of comorbid psychiatric disorders (e.g. major depressive episodes, dissociative disorders)  or drug addiction before transgender treatment. It appears there is no hard evidence that these comorbid disorders are caused by gender dysphoria
5. It appears that there is little genetic or biological evidence to justify transgender treatments
6. It appears some doctors have been infected with the transgender bug rushing patients into transgender treatment
7. It appears that doctors and parents are too quick to apply transgender treatment to children without further, careful evaluation

Related Blog Posts

I have previously blogged here about transgender in conjunction with fame and money as motives.

William Ellison Jr. - A Black Slave Owner

Posted: 6/5/2016

Introduction

Perhaps one of the more unusual stories you have ever heard of about slavery in the U.S. The story about this man does not fit in with the predominant narrative that is so widespread among American people by public education.

His story raises many questions about slavery in U.S. history.

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison
2. http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/black-slaveowners/
3. http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm

A Brief Summary Of His Life

1. Born in 1790, died in 1861; A gin maker and a blacksmith living in South Carolina (Source: 1)
2. His slave owner apprenticed him at age 10 to learn artisan trades like gin making (Source: 1)
   (How many other slaves were apprenticed by their slave owners?)
3. After his apprenticeship, he worked as a hired hand in a shop. The slave owner allowed him to keep a portion of his earnings (Source: 1)
4. A free negro and former slave, who purchased his freedom at age 26 (Source: 1)
   (How many slave owners allowed their slaves to buy their own freedom? How often did this happen?)
5. He became a planter and the wealthiest black property owner in the state (Source: 1)
   (Who sold him the land? How many former slaves owned land in the south? Despite being a black landowner's property rights were apparently secured. Was that normal?)
6. By 1850 he had his own cotton plantation (Source: 1)
7. He owned 40 slaves and 1,000 acres at his death (Source: 1)
   (How many black slave owners existed in the south before the American Civil War?)
8. “Although a successful businessman and cotton farmer, Ellison's major source of income derived from being a "slave breeder." … While there was subsequent investment return in raising and keeping young males, females were not productive workers in his factory or his cotton fields. As a result, except for a few females he raised to become "breeders," Ellison sold the female and many of the male children born to his female slaves at an average price of $400.” (Source: 3)
9. “Ellison had a reputation as a harsh master. His slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and clothed. On his property was located a small, windowless building where he would chain his problem slaves.” (Source: 3)
10. “Ellison was so successful, due to his utilization of cheap slave labor, that many white competitors went out of business. Such situations discredit impressions that whites dealt only with other whites.” (Source: 3)
11. “Several times Ellison successfully sued white men for money owed him.” (Source: 3)
12. “The Ellison family joined the predominantly white Episcopalian church. On August 6, 1824 he was allowed to put a family bench on the first floor, among those of the wealthy white families.” (Source: 3)
13. He and his sons supported the Confederates and gave them substantial donations and aid (Source: 1)
14. A grandson fought informally with the Confederates (Source: 1)
    (How many blacks or former slaves fought with the Confederates?)

Black Slave Owners

“Yet at one time or another, free black slaveowners resided in every Southern state which countenanced slavery and even in Northern states. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830. Many of the black masters in the lower South were large planters who owned scores of slaves and planted large quantities of cotton, rice, and sugarcane. In 1860, for example, Auguste Donatto, a free colored planter of St. Landry Parish in Louisiana, owned 70 slaves who worked 500 acres of land and produced 100 bales of cotton. About 600 miles to the east of Louisiana in the county of Sumter, South Carolina, William Ellison, a free colored planter, used the labor of 70 slaves to cultivate 100 bales of cotton in 1861. ... But the majority of the large colored planters lived in Louisiana. … In fact, the city of New York had eight black slaveowners who owned 17 slaves in 1830. In short, the institution of black slave owning was widespread, stretching as far north as New York and as far south as Florida, extending westward into Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. … Many of them were former slaves who were manumitted because of their kinship ties to whites, while others were emancipated for meritorious military duty, faithful service, or saving a life, as well as other reasons. But the ma­jority of the black masters never knew the dehumanization of slavery because they had been born of free black parents. … However, many black masters did not intend to manumit their slaves and viewed the institution of slavery as a source of labor to be ex­ploited for their own benefit. ” (Source: 2)

On Woodrow Wilson's Leaders Of Men

Posted: 6/4/2016

Introduction

I find Woodrow Wilson to be among the worst Big Government (authoritarian) U.S. presidents of the 20th century right next to Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. We The People stiff suffer from many of their awful policies.

The early text by Woodrow Wilson is very revealing. His opinion about masses and individual citizens is as bad as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Wilson clearly appears to be an elitist and believer in the “Great Man of history” nonsense.

I contacted the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library to find a better source of the original text, but the person from the library who responded was of very little help to put it mildly. The text is apparently not available website of the library.

Sources & Attribution

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/leaders-of-men/

June 17, 1890: Commencement address ("Leaders of Men") University of Tennessee, Knoxville

https://www.questia.com/library/115768/leaders-of-men (confirmation of this text)

Wikiquote is here of little help as the excerpts found there are rather trivial and few.

Excerpts & Comments

Emphasis added.

1. “Here, unquestionably, we come upon the heart of the perennial misunderstanding between the men who write and the men who act. The men who write love proportion; the men who act must strike out practicable lines of action, and neglect proportion.”
   [Exactly what President Wilson did, neglect proportion.]
2. “This [see previous quote] would seem to explain the well-nigh universal repugnance felt by literary men towards Democracy.”
   [I suppose, WW writes about himself.]
3. “Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses; they must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.”
4. “No popular leader could write fiction. He could not write fiction.”
   [What an absurd nonsense!]
5. “One of the most interesting and suggestive criticisms made upon Mr. Gladstone’s leadership during the life of his ministries was that he was not decisive in the House of Commons as Palmerston and Peel had been before him. He could not help seeing two sides of a question: the force of objections evidently told upon him. His conclusions seemed the nice result of a balancing of considerations, not the commands of an unhesitating conviction.”
   [This is what Wilson had to say about one of the greatest,  classical liberal British prime ministers.]
6. “The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. The power will fail if it be misapplied; it will be misapplied if it be not suitable both in kind and method to the nature of the materials upon which it is spent; but that nature is, after all, only its means. It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”
   [No authoritarian leader of the 20th century (of which there were many) could have said it better!]
7. “Men in the mass differ from men as individuals. A man who knows, and keenly knows, every man in town may yet fail to understand a mob or a mass-meeting of his fellow-townsmen. ”
   [Wilson’s obsession with mobs!]
8. “Men want the wisdom which they are expected to apply to be obvious, and to be conveniently limited in amount.”
   [Wilson’s awful understanding of individual citizens!]
9. “Persuasion is a force, but not information; and persuasion is accomplished by creeping into the confidence of those you would lead. Their confidence is not gained by preaching new thoughts to them. It is gained by qualities which they can recognize at first sight by arguments which they can assimilate at once: by the things which find easy and intermediate entrance into their minds, and which are easily transmitted to the palms of their hands or to the ends of their walking-sticks in the shape of applause.”
   [Creepy language indeed by Wilson!]
10. “Leadership, for the statesman, is interpretation. He must read the common thought: he must test and calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics. If he fairly hit the popular thought, when we have missed it, are we to say that he is a demagogue? The nice point is to distinguish the firm and progressive popular thought from the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion. But it is fatally easy to blame or misunderstand the statesman.”
    [Here speaks the eternal authoritarian again.]
11. “Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.”
    [Presumably, one of Wilson’s more popular quotes. Wilson here resorts to stigmatizing. Uncompromising is not bad per se.]
12. “’Poetic justice’ we recognize as being quite out of the common run of experience.”
    [Really!]
13. “I do not believe that any man can lead who does not act, whether it be consciously or unconsciously, under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads, -a sympathy which is insight, - an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect. The law unto every such leader as these whom we now have in mind is the law of love.”
    [From the heart rather than the intellect or by the law of love. This is where Wilson becomes incoherent compared to the rest of this text.]
14. “I do not conceive the leader a trimmer, weak to yield what clamour claims, but the deeply human man, quick to know and to do the things that the hour and his people need.”
    [Wilson as a busybody knowing what the people need.]