Who We Are

What We Do

We gather stories of people who believe their rights have been violated.

There are many cases where local authorities, laws, rules, or customs, violate the natural law, and people’s rights are thereby violated.  We want people with truly violated rights to have a place to record their complaints and thoughts about the violations. 

We analyze and expound on the stories from our natural rights perspective as a teaching opportunity to help our subscribers and visitors understand natural law and its implications. 

We invite arguments from other perspectives that may oppose the conclusion that the story we collected, or our analysis of it, describes violated rights.  We do this because we believe that conflict is best addressed in the midst of a thorough exposition and understanding of the ideas, ideals, claims, motivations, and powers of all the significant parties to a conflict.

We engage in education, political action, and lobbying, in furtherance of protections for natural rights by civil, institutional, and corporate authorities.

There are too many worthy victims of natural rights violations for us to help everyone who shares a story or claim with us. As our resources permit, we will try to help a few of them. 

For many, recording their stories and/or claims on our website may be all we can do. For some we will try to publicize their stories and connect victims with helpful resources, advocates, and other similarly-situated victims.  And for some, we may have an honest disagreement about whether rights have been violated or not. We invite a respectful, thoughtful discussion of such disagreements, in the spirit of good will and our common humanity, but we cannot allow the discussions or our disagreements to overtake our mission of telling stories of the violated and disregarded, and rendering what support to them that we can.

Why do we serve and support those whose rights have been violated?

• We remember the hurt of being disappointed, bereaved, and disregarded, and we remember a special sense of being violated when we could explain who did it and why they were wrong.
• We are aware of how our wealth and rights are being encumbered every day to the detriment of ourselves, our families, our institutions, and civil society.
• We sympathize with others whose quality of life suffers from the actions of wrongdoers. 
• We believe that this work, in a modest way, will help make a better world by holding our neighbors to account and sharing stories of those who have been mistreated. 
• We believe it will be a better world when we allow both or several sides of a rights issue to air their perspectives, and when we help each side better understand what the other side(s) are thinking, regardless of whose side we believe to be right, wrong, or confused. 
• We value peace and good will. And we believe that peace and good will are only sustainable among people who are aware of each others’ expectations and who subscribe to an understanding of universal rights which respects the dignity and seeks the true and just claims of every person.
• We believe that groups do not have the sort of rights that we are defending here. Corporations, associations, ethnicities, and states, may have something that it is useful to call, “rights”, but these “rights” are agreed upon prerogatives or the logical consequences of actions ascribed to those groups; they are not the natural rights of human beings to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and freedom from violence as long as that person does not initiate, or credibly threaten, violence against others first.  
• We believe that many rights violations happen when the truth is obscured, so we seek to shine a light that makes the truth obvious and thereby restores respectful human relationships. 
• We know that people are flawed, and human bias facilitates the spread of, and reliance on, untruth by people who do not know they are in its thrall. 
• We believe that powerful authorities sometimes deny just and proper rights claims, and that those unjustly denied often are forgotten for years, or even generations, before the biases of their day dissipate, giving public opinion, or the heirs to those original authorities, a chance to change and acknowledge the injustice that was done long ago. This makes the recording of stories and claims about rights violations important, and a justice-serving act. 

Why you should share your stories with us?

• Whether your rights have been violated or upheld, let’s have a conversation about what rights you have, what rights have been threatened, and why someone thought they should do something or fail to do something that harmed you.
• If you or your relatives owned or had customary rights to land that was taken for mining, drilling, corporate agriculture, or colonization, your story and your claim belong here. 
• If you or your relatives lost homes, property, or jobs, due to racial targeting, your story and your claim belong here.
• If you or family’s land was collectivized by a government, with a bad outcome for you and the people who had previously been fed by the agricultural operation on that land, your story and claim belong here. 
• If you or your relatives owned or had customary rights to land that was taken for urban renewal, a freeway, a rail line, an airport, or other public works, your story and your claim belong here.
• Was a nuisance business or public work developed near your home?  Maybe your story belongs here.
• Were you denied a license or permit to do a job or create something you wanted to do?  Maybe your story belongs here. 
• Was your business or job destroyed by lockdowns, occupancy, or distancing requirements?

Example

One of your editors lives in a hilly community on a lake that was set up with a widely advertised rule that new house permits would be denied for structures that significantly block the lake views of existing houses.  Residents also had the prerogative, if growing foliage on another person’s lot blocked their view, to hire a crew to cut trees and other foliage on their neighbor’s lot to restore their view of the lake. But, as the development aged and the community came under the control of a municipal government with elected council members, newcomers to the seats of power simply started denying this social norm, which at one time, everybody knew about and was on the tip of every realtor’s tongue as they marketed lots and houses in this idyllic community.

The people who bought houses in a place like that have the right to perpetuate their prerogative to cut trees on their neighbor’s land. It was something widely understood and agreed to by the early purchasers of the lots and houses. Changing times, the changing wishes of voters, and the changing policy of municipal bureaucrats do not erase the rights of those people who bought into this community with the expectations that they would be able to seek the remedies they were promised to maintain their views of the lake.

One former city council member even sold his house, that had one vacant waterfront lot between his house and his spectacular lake view, on the eve of construction of a new house that blocked his house’s view of the lake.  The new owner had no idea, and had bought the house for the view. This poor sap sold the house in disgust, as soon as his child graduated from the local high school, 3 years later, and a little over a year after the view-blocking house was completed. His story belongs on our website.