Term Limits
One of the larger (ongoing) topics swirling around is the topic of term limits for elected officials. This is not likely to get done any time soon. An act of law limiting the power and influence of the lawmakers themselves is a hard sell for anyone. However, a de facto limit can be imposed within a political party.
At the Texas GOP Convention, much thought was put into this. We were pitched the idea of effectively using the Right of Association to impose term limits on our own candidates. If a person has held office for a certain number of terms, they are ineligible to secure a Republican nomination from the Republican Party of Texas. they would be welcome to run as a Democrat or as an Independent, just not on the Republican ticket.
We all know a person who ran, won, and worked as a Republican has little to no chance of securing a nomination on the Democrat ticket. We also know Independents secure 10% or less of the vote. This policy effectively drains the Texas GOP swamp.
This may not be a sweeping policy to fix the entire issue, but we can clean up our side of the street at the very least. Even the people who have no time to research candidates and vet policymakers should have some guidance from their party and their party’s delegates. This mechanism forces that to be the case.
Career & Technical Ed
I am a member of the expert elite class. I hold degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Women’s Studies. These degrees have served me well mainly because I am STEM-based and the world compensates STEM. Although I would not trade my degrees, this way, I understand, is not the only way.
Career and Technical Education has taken a back seat in recent memory. When I was in High School, CTE was extremely important. In fact, I was well-studied in computer network engineering in anticipation of going the CTE route after High School. This option was concrete, reachable, understandable, and approachable for a young high school student. Further, a CTE certification commands high compensation. Many of those who take CTE seriously can earn $60K or more without going $200,000 in debt to a university.
This is one (among many) reason I made my way to Ellis County, TX. CTE is well respected and well-supported in this area. When I was young, I had the option of CTE and I would not have done as well as I have in life absent that option. I want the same for my children.
The choice to get the training necessary to complete a certification and enter adulthood with a title is a great choice. The people I know who have certifications did far better than those without in the COVID lockdowns. When your set of skills builds and maintains the infrastructure relied upon by today’s society, you tend to weather storms well.
Here in Wacahachie, high school students have the express option of taking up a technical education path. They can leave high school certified and ready to work. The main differences between CTE and college are
CTE starts you the day after high school graduation if you are successful in your certifications
CTE incurs significantly less debt
CTE is more hands-on and focused on the vocation whereas college is more general
Both CTE and college can be foregone in early life and taken up later if one would like making both a good option after a life event or for a change of pace.
The generality of college can give some pause to families. Not all colleges are created equal. Some colleges have been referred to as “indoctrination camps”. The breadth of agency a college is given in the shaping of our youth is a factor these institutions have been tuning for quite some time. Some colleges are more liberal and provide just about everything imaginable as a focus area, minor, or major so the student can choose the education they seek to receive. Other colleges have a more classical interpretation of their place in society and have tailored curricula that has been curated mercilessly to provide the precise education they seek to provide.
All of this fluff is left to an individual’s own reading and curiosity when taking the CTE route. As far as I can tell there are no gender studies or critical race theory CTE programs offered. CTEs provide a focused program to the very pursuit for which it has been written.
This is all to say there is a choice students can make. College is not the end all be all. For some careers (like software, data, and AI) college makes a great deal of sense. For other things, it may not make sense. I know a lot of people paying off student loans for programs they don’t use in jobs they could have gotten without the debt; I don’t know anyone certified in electrical or pipefitting who is in that same position.
Contract With Texas
This is one of the most important movements in Texas at present. It is effectively asking our Republican political candidates to pledge they will do their jobs. We all know they have not been doing their jobs. We can all feel the weight of their failure to perform. It is common sense they should be doing better, but they overwhelmingly do not pledge to do better.
A full list of signatories and abstainers can be found on the website. We can see why failing to sign would send a powerful, anti-liberty, anti-grassroots message upon inspection:
Only solicit support for Speakership from Republican members
End the practice of awarding Democrats with committee chairmanships
Ensure all GOP legislative priorities receive a floor vote before any Democrat bills
Replace the current liberal Parliamentarians with staff committed to only offering advice on adherence to House rules, not to advancing their personal ideology
Limit the Speaker to two terms to reduce their power over individual members
Ensure there are no longer any Democrat-majority committees
Stop parliamentary abuse by requiring only substantial adherence to House rules to keep hyper-technical points of order from killing good legislation
Allow audio/video recording of all House proceedings, including point of order debates
Start substantive work as soon as Session begins to end delays that kill priority legislation
Reform the Calendars Committee to increase transparency and accountability
Select a Republican as Speaker Pro Tempore
Decentralize power by prohibiting the distribution of political funds from the Speaker.
If you ran on the Republican ticket, you were, through Freedom of Association, endowed with the ability to do so by your Republican constituency. This implies you are accountable to the Republicans who put you in that position. you are not accountable to the Governor of TX; you are not accountable to the President of these United States. You are accountable to We, the People. Things do not work backward here; we are not Democrats. We do not worship Government. We do not wait for Government to fix our problems. We do not kow tow to the current order. This was made clear the last round of primaries where 15 incumbents lost their seats.
If you do not represent our values, we will remove you from the ticket. This is plain, simple, easy, and understandable.
Trying Job Market
The job market is really rough these days. I have done plenty of hiring in the past, and this is the worst I have seen. I am in tech so this may vary, but there are two salient threads from my perspective:
Experienced people are staying put a lot longer than usual
Inexperienced people are flooding recruiters and HR reps with resumes
Since the market is so weak, the experienced stay where they are. This means the firms who have the experienced people, are not hiring the way they used to. It was once that a person could use a mid tier position to get a good salary while awaiting a high-tier opening at another firm; now, if the job is “good enough” no one is willing to take the risk leaving for whatever grass might be on the other side of the fence. With this backup in employee churn comes significant headwinds for those looking to break into the industry.
The more difficult it is to break into an industry, the worse it feels to those at the bottom. We are seeing 100+ resumes per open position. One’s chances of success are marginal especially if there is nothing special about the applicant. The longer someone has on their resume between graduation and their first employment, the more questions it raises in the recruiters’ heads making things even worse. These difficult times call for new and varied approaches to get one’s foot in the door.
With 100+ applicants, HR needs some way of knowing how to pick the “1st one”. The easiest way is by referrals; they take the referrals first. Those searching and finding themselves at a dead end should show up to meetups and conferences. Some of these events are free of charge, and if you are not working, you should be able to find one to attend nearby. Talking to people and shaking hands is the fastest way into a job. The people you meet will likely know of an open position or know of someone who is searching for candidates. You don’t need to work for a fortune 500 company to earn a fortune; anywhere that pays enough should do just fine.
I also see a lot of people clout-chasing and title-choosing. None of this matters. No one cares if you are a Widget Designer I or a Widget Designer II; they only care that the widgets work and you only care that you are fairly compensated. Apply for everything, even if it looks out of reach. HR people often write the job descriptions, and as a result, you can usually get through an interview process successfully without everything on the list. Even if the job is not the one you want, once you work inside of an organization it is easier to transition to a different department if you play your cards right. The biggest drag on a candidate is a long period of non-employment; do not fall into this just because the words on your name tag might not be what you want. Take what you get and put a plan together to make your pivot.
While you are not working, do some community service. It will fill in the gap and get you in front of more people, shaking more hands, and potentially lead to a fruitful connection with a job at the end of the tunnel. There is no rule that you cannot socialize and network while volunteering; you might as well be getting something out of it.
The real point is, no matter what is going on, one cannot wait around for random happenstance or the Government to fix the job market. A successful person adapts and moves with the winds of change. Be your own hero.
Democratic Weakness
It is a sobering realization that the seeds of tyranny can be sown so easily. The birth of the United States was founded on the belief in every individual’s inalienable, natural rights, bestowed upon them by their Creator. These rights were considered self-evident. However, in the 1800s, a profound battle of ideologies unfolded, pitting pro and anti-slavery forces against each other. The anti-slavery advocates, aligning with the concept of inalienable rights, found themselves in a moral struggle against the pro-slavery forces who vehemently disagreed.
A man by the name of Calhoun was, perhaps, history’s greatest critic of this self-evidence. He argued, inter alia, that it was far from self-evident that all men were created equal - that Government’s job was to take these unequal births and align them to duties best suited by birthright. In Calhoun’s vision, some persons (whites) were born of better position than others (blacks). Freedom would, then, be a reward for good behaviour. The better a group behaved, the less governance would be imposed upon that group. The worse a group behaved, well, they could be relegated to outright chattel.
Once we have human chattel, we certainly have tyranny. All Calhoun needed to do was distract from self-evidence and change the focus from individual liberties to group behaviour, and we descend very quickly into an unequal society where rights are given by the Government according to group membership rather than power and sovereignty being the people’s to distribute.
Our nation’s founding is full of accidents of timing. Two great writers and speakers simultaneously fought for the cause of abolition: Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. Although they had their differences, they were both instrumental in the eventual success and persistence of the founding’s principles. Douglass attacked the premise of slavery as a valid and natural order quite directly when he said:
“Natural and harmonious relations easily repose in their own rectitude, while all such as are false and unnatural are conscious of their own weakness, and must seek strength from without. Hence the explanation of the uneasy, restless, eager anxiety of slaveholders.” - Frederick Douglass, June 16, 1861
In more contemporary language, we mean to express that laying out a society within which black and white coexist on equal terms with equal opportunity takes far less work than laying out a society of the opposite kind. As nature exists without a human organizing hand, it must stand to reason that a society of master-slave dynamics is one far from and against the natural rites. This is why the slaveholders must fight so hard and violently to maintain their position. More of this was stated by President Lincoln one year prior:
“In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.” Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860
It was true that the anti-slave States meant to leave alone the slave states. They had left them for at least 3 generations. The slave States; however, pressed forward and attempted to grow their aristocratic society past their own boundaries. It was clear that the slave States would not bend to reason, and would never calm their fire. In fact, every argument the US had over the slavery question was lost by the North until 1850. Every single argument was given to the slaveowners. In the 1850s, a series of events gave strong Due Process rights to free blacks, and the South could not abide this.
You see, the South was fine to live harmoniously when it would get its way. It was fine to stand by the union of States as long as the union would kow tow to its order. It loses one argument and attempts to bail out of the entire arrangement. Democrats, it would appear, have always been this frail and childish. Lincoln argued that the Constitution so ratified by all States cannot be then broken by a single party. It is a contract, and no party can decide to leave a duly sworn to contract without the consent of the other parties. Lincoln then leads us to fight for the union as a whole:
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." - Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860.
As we know, the Democrats lost then and the union was preserved. Our Creator-given natural rights were reaffirmed in that time. Now, we have a similar unnatural order attempting to subvert the founding. Again, this subversion is the work of Democrats.
Democrats would have the Federal Government take property from those who had earned it, and redistribute it among the lazy. They despise property rights.
Democrats would have the Federal Government impose measures upon the States that the State’s people would never elect for. They despise a pursuit of happiness.
Democrats would have the Federal Government run our elections when this is a duty clearly given to the States in the Constitution. They despise free, fair, and secure elections.
Democrats would have the Federal Government impose religious and ideological prescriptions upon the youth when this is a duty given to the Parents by our Creator. They despise families.
Democrats would have the Government decide what individual liberties a person, family, and community have rather than those individual liberties heretofore established. They despise freedom.
A great Democrat thinker by the name of Woodrow Wilson stated in an overt attempt to undermine the principles of the founding “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.” The preface of course being the part regarding inalienable rights. He and his contemporaries (typically referred to as the Progressives) argued that the world had moved on from what had given rise to the Constitution, and as such, the Constitution should be replaced by a new social order - that the Government should be able to control the individual’s liberties in the context of the whole society,
We see the same thread pulled through from prior Democrats. We see Democrats attempting to govern according to a group dynamic rather than according to an individual’s freedoms. All it takes is to disagree with or ignore the self-evidence of the inalienable natural rights. Once rights are no longer inalienable, they are subject to removal. This is the Democrats’ game. This continues to this very date.
The reason Democrats are so fragile was explained by Douglass. Their move toward tyranny is unnatural and thus cannot repose in its own rectitude. Instead, they are conscious of their own weakness and must use the Government as a tool to strike down those of us who live in our individuality. The Democrat seeks to crush those who disagree with them under the full weight and force of an outsized Government. We resist because it is right to resist. We will always remember what our first Republican President taught: that right makes might.
https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/9084
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/abraham-lincoln-cooper-union-speech-text/
More Civic Engagement
Civic Engagement is free or cheap. It is not expensive. Any social class can do this. We all need to be doing this. It is past the time for laziness and faith without works. This is our nation, and we need to take it back.
Here in Ellis County, it is free to become a volunteer voter registrar. It is super easy to register voters. You have voters fill out the form completely and give the completed forms back to the registrar in person. It is that simple. You do not need to purchase forms, the forms are provided to you. You do not need to purchase anything, the registrar’s office has the materials. You can do this while block walking. you can do this while shopping. You can do this while your children play in the parks. You can do this while at events around the community. Get it done.
It is extremely cheap to rent a pavilion at a park; at the time of writing it is under $100 for a full day here. I am sure the prices vary by location, but public facilities are generally very low cost. Schedule a day to go out, hang some signs, and register voters. Take some campaign materials of your supported candidates with you. Hell, if you don’t want to spend the money, wait for some other event to happen and register voters there. Get it done.
We need more callers, letter writers, and brief writers. The swamp creatures who serve in Austin and in DC only value their own time. They value nothing else. The Judges who populate our courts are similarly situated. We need to be calling these elected officials and writing to them. We need to be filing briefs in the cases that affect our rights. If you do not know how to write effective letters or briefs, I will help you. This is the most important work we can do. The voice of We, the People, is absent from our justice system, Austin, and DC; this needs to change. Get it done.
This is our nation. We need to start acting like it. There is work to do, and we will complete that work.