Oaks Park amusement center turns 120 years old

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Disrupting Hanoi's war supplies entering south Vietnam required acrobatic, stunt like air combat jet maneuvers.

Photo and story is featured in this week's Portland Tribune newspaper.

(posted by Elvis Clark on April 28, 2022)

It strikes me that our local, regional and state governments are too quick to lump people into categories based on what I would call arbitrary attributes like skin color, sex, sexual preference, and ethnicity.

One problem with this, besides stereotyping a whole class of people, is our governments may actually be just substituting one type of discrimination with another (for instance, what is called reverse discrimination).  Our governments seem to be not advancing towards MLK's dream of focusing on a person's content of character; but rather, our governments seem to be devolving to treating people based on another form of discrimination (that of reverse discrimination).

When the government imparts deference (special benefits) to one of its arbitrary groupings, this is bound to cause resentment in the group(s) seemingly not receiving deference (special benefits).

Opinion:  Elvis Clark posted on January 17, 2021.

As it turns out, James Garfield is assassinated (it is thought) because he denies a political supporter a job in his administration.

Back in Garfield's times and leading up to his election, every four to eight years depending on how a president served, the federal government used a system called the Spoils System for hiring and firing government management and other employees.  So, these bureaucrats never really got their ways routinizing administration of laws, because they were routinely fired or replaced every four to eight years.

But Garfield's assassination by a disgruntled Spoils System supporter (who sought a government job)  caused his Vice President (Chester Arthur) upon becoming President (with Garfield's death) to ask Congress to make federal government employment based on the so-called Merit System, replacing the buddy system called the Spoils System.

Under the Merit System, government bureaucrats now normally work a whole career in their bureaucracies; and become vested in the well being of their bureaucracy.  Ronald Reagan famously quotes about Government Bureaus:   "a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!” 

The U.S Supreme Court some decades later grants bureaucracies enormous power over us, when it decides in a case called "the Chevron Case" that Courts should give preferential deference to the technical findings of government bureaucrats.

The flaw in the Chevron decision is it ignores the risk government bureaucrats may have personal biases and self interests themselves when they render their technical studies and in their Administrative rule makings.  To this end, today, Supreme Court justice Gorsuch talks of wanting to revisit the Chevron case, believing there is too much reliance on government bureaucracy rule making.

One last point.  President Eisenhower in his famous farewell address (1960) to the U.S nation warns of the "military industrial complex", and this turns out to be prescient  - as it warns of a DEEP STATE bureaucracy.

For the elaborate story of the origins of our Deep State governance, please read the PDF linked here by Randal O'toole of the Cato Institute and member of the Thoreau Society"

https://ti.org/pdfs/APB79.pdf

(posted by Elvis Clark on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2020)