And Lo, An Enraged Male

Is it a bit much to fantasise about resurrecting Hubert H. Humphrey just to make him eat an endless number of hats?

Heh. Funny how that has been forgotten. BTW, having just relooked it up, technically it wasn’t hats but pages of the Title VII wtf thingy he said he would eat.

“If [anyone] can find in Title VII … any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.”

Anyhow…so I then asked Grok, “So how did we get here?” To which:

It happened through a gradual shift in interpretation, enforcement, and policy—moving from the 1964 Act’s focus on color-blind nondiscrimination to race-conscious “affirmative action” aimed at equal results.

Humphrey and the bill’s supporters insisted Title VII banned discrimination and preferential treatment or quotas. The text prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Section 703(j) explicitly said nothing in the title required preferential treatment to correct imbalances. Yet within a few years the practical meaning changed. Here’s the main sequence:

1. Executive branch expansion of “affirmative action”

• President Kennedy’s 1961 Executive Order 10925

• President Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246

• Johnson’s famous 1965 Howard University speech signaled the conceptual shift: equality of opportunity was not enough; the goal became “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

2. Agency enforcement and the “disparate impact” doctrine

The new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance began treating statistical underrepresentation of minorities as evidence of discrimination

The pivotal Supreme Court case was Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The Court held unanimously that Title VII prohibits practices that are “fair in form, but discriminatory in operation” if they have a disparate racial impact and are not shown to be job-related and consistent with business necessity. Intent to discriminate was no longer required.

3. Explicit goals, “Philadelphia Plan,” and court approval of preferences

• Under President Nixon, the Department of Labor imposed the Philadelphia Plan (1969–70),

• In United Steelworkers v. Weber (1979), the Supreme Court allowed a voluntary private affirmative-action plan that reserved training slots for Black workers, even though it explicitly preferred them over more senior white workers. The Court said Title VII did not ban all voluntary race-conscious remedies for past discrimination.

• Later cases (Fullilove, Bakke, Grutter, etc.) permitted limited race-conscious measures in contracting and university admissions while rejecting rigid numerical quotas in some contexts. In practice, “goals” and “diversity” efforts often functioned like soft quotas.

4. Institutional and cultural reinforcement

Employers, universities, and government agencies adopted numerical targets to demonstrate compliance and reduce litigation risk. Civil-rights organizations, academics, and parts of the bureaucracy increasingly defined fairness in terms of proportional group outcomes rather than individual treatment. Once the focus moved from stopping discrimination against individuals to engineering demographic results, race-conscious preferences became routine in many institutions.

Congress never repealed the original nondiscrimination language, and later statutes (including the Civil Rights Act of 1991) largely preserved the disparate-impact framework while adding some procedural limits. The result was a dual system: the statute still said “no discrimination,” while enforcement, court doctrine, and institutional practice treated racial balancing as a legitimate or required remedy.

In short, the original color-blind understanding was overtaken by administrative expansion, a key Supreme Court reinterpretation of “discrimination,” political support for race-conscious remedies, and institutional incentives to manage by the numbers. That is how policies that function as quotas or strong preferences became widespread despite the explicit assurances given in 1964.

I tried to shorten some of that but the remaining is so ridiculous yet pertinent to the decline I gave up. But there’s no such thing as a slippery slope. The philosophers proved that there isn’t, so shut up you uneducated cretin.

I suppose after all that, I’m obliged to make a bookmark…

And in some good news department, street takeover? Georgia State Trooper don’t play.

If my private doctor is incompetent, I can go to another one. Quickly. Not so with the NHS. Just one story I have heard is that if you need a hip replacement or similar you must wait so long that you are no longer a good candidate for one (the whole joint deteriorates). 

While I would agree, in principle, I’m about at the point of not caring. I have been fortunate most of my life to be rather healthy, at least until the last few years, not needing much from the medical profession. However lately, the more I use this system that I have paid incredible amounts of money into, via insurance, my entire life (and don’t push that BS that my employer paid some of it. It was my labor that paid for all of it) I question it all.

Since retirement and moving to a smaller community in the mountains, my choice of medical insurance is not a choice. It’s as bad as working, which was something I thought I would be gaining some control over. I am literally stuck with only one option. Which then dictates what doctors I am able to use. I could go out of network of course, and I can afford it, but then wtf I’m buying insurance for? I would prefer to have no insurance at all but that’s not allowed. So my insurance is a tax on top of what I am trying to purchase. Then of course if I do need a referral, the doctor assumes that I am limited to my plan. Which then creates awkward conversations. I’m on my fourth primary care physician in six years because two of them decided to become specialists, thus even my “choices” in that regard are now further limited.

Nah. Bear don’t give a shit.

Elk, otoh. Yesterday, just a wee bit north of me and kinda south of you.