Grey Matters

Race is nothing. Culture and character are everything.

I cannot for the life of me understand some people’s fascination with race. Skin pigmentation is such a superficial thing and yet we make government policy based on that pigmentation. Crazy.

There’s this big hoopla because we might have our “first black president” here in the U.S. First off, I’ve decided that Barack Obama is white. See my posting: Why Is Obama Block? from a year ago.

Secondly, though I understand why electing a black president is important to many people for its symbolic value, I think their fervor is misplaced. If he were, say, the first Muslim presidential nominee, now that would be something. Being black does not define you and drive your actions, but being Muslim certainly does. Blackness does not affect one’s character; religion most definitely does.

Dr. Martin Luther King once dreamed of a future where people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And here we are, 40+ years later, declaring that the election of Barack Obama would be momentous, not for his character, but for the color of his skin.

I share Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind society but government policy is working in the opposite direction. I’m afraid his dream will never come true.

A recent poll showed Barack Obama polling 94 to 1 against John McCain among black voters. Wow. I had no idea McCain’s politics were that much different from Obama’s. McCain has always seemed to me to act more like a Democrat than many Democrats. Which is to say, there are really two Democrats running for president.

Then I recalled that even during the Democratic primaries, among black voters, Obama polled 90 to 10 against Hillary Clinton. Politically, Obama and Clinton are two peas in a pod; they disagree on very little. Yet Obama was preferred 90/10 by black voters. Perhaps there’s something other than political philosophy influencing black voters. I wonder what it could be…

Oh, c’mon, let’s stop kidding ourselves. It’s a racial thing. Blacks tend to vote for blacks, period. When Jesse Jackson ran for president, he got 94% of the black vote. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of his Castro-loving politics.

The disturbing part is that everyone seems to think this is OK. Actually, the reeeaally disturbing part is that the same folks who are OK with blacks’ blatant racism in voting for black candidates would be loudly decrying any such blatant preference of white candidates by white voters. Can you imagine the furor if white voters showed a comparable preference for white candidates?!? 

This is just one aspect of the racial double standard.

Years ago, when I was in the navy, one of my (black) shipmates had a black leather jacket emblazoned on the back with a giant, black, clenched fist and the words “Black Power.” He wore this jacket every time he left the ship in “civvies.” 

Now, everyone leaving the ship on liberty was given a once-over to ensure that dress was appropriate. Cut-off shorts, sandals, shirts without sleeves — these kinds of things would not be permitted. No one ever seems to have found the “Black Power” jacket inappropriate.

Yet, I am all but certain that, if I’d had a similar jacket with “White Power” on the back, I would not have been permitted off the ship. Indeed, I would probably have been placed on report. I was not, at the time, sufficiently bold as to test my theory.

Years later, living in northern Arizona, living just outside the Navajo reservation, I encountered another small but telling example of the racial double standard. Two, actually. The state legislative district in which I lived included a large portion of the Navajo reservation. A non-Navajo simply could not get elected to the state legislature from our district. 

An acquaintance of mine, convinced that he could break the racial barrier and be elected to the state legislature, started campaigning well over a year in advance of the primaries. He was a Democrat, as were most of the Navajos running for state office. He visited every chapter house, talked to all the Navajo people he could. From each meeting he went away convinced that he had the support he sought. He worked at campaigning, really worked hard, for over a year.

Come primary time, he was easily defeated by a Navajo candidate who did little or no campaigning.

One day at work, I used my lunch (half) hour to write a letter to my then state representative, a Navajo. On the way home from work, I stopped at the post office to buy a stamp and mail the letter. At the service counter, the postal worker, a non-Navajo, noted to whom the letter was addressed and said: “He used to come around here when he was just little. It’s so nice to see him grow up and go on to do well for his people.” I’m pretty sure that “his people” did not mean the people of our state legislative district.

We seem to accept that minorities will favor “their people,” and that’s OK. And no one calls these people racist. But let a white person favor white folks and all hell beaks loose.

I remember a network special about race, hosted, I believe, by Bryant Gumbel. It was a quiz about racial attitudes with “no right or wrong” answers. I recall two of the conclusions. The first was that it’s OK for blacks to think they’re better than white people (but not the other way around). The second was that one sign of a racist is that s/he denies s/he’s a racist. 

You may recall Bryant’s 2006 remark that, due to the lack of competing blacks,”…  the Winter Olympic Games look like a GOP convention.” I wonder if he’s even noticed that the NBA looks like a NAACP convention.

And then there’s that whole Affirmative Action thing, making racial discrimination legal again, as long as it’s in favor of blocks and not against them. There simply is no better example of how we embrace the racial double standard.

The Robin Hood of myth and legend is said to have robbed from the rich to give to the poor. He was a hero to ordinary folk and a criminal to those in power. These days, we’d brand Robin and his Merry Men “terrorists.”

In The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, by Howard Pyle, the author writes of Robin and his band saying: “they vowed that even as they themselves had been despoiled they would despoil their oppressors, whether baron, abbot, knight, or squire, and that from each they would take that which had been wrung from the poor by unjust taxes, or land rents, or in wrongful fines. But to the poor folk they would give a helping hand in need and trouble, and would return to them that which had been unjustly taken from them.”

Robin’s England had a feudal system of government. The king, putatively the chief feudal lord, was often just a figurehead. The real rulers were the lords and barons who each administered their own estates and territories, levying taxes and fines, administering justice as they saw fit and demanding fealty from their vassals. Peasants worked their lands and were taxed by their respective lords.

Each lord maintained the equivalent of a military or police force of knights to protect his domain, to dispense justice and to ensure collection of taxes and so on. 

The church also wielded great power in the England of Robin’s day and the church grew to be exceedingly rich, richer even than the lords and kings. (Their great cathedrals are testament to this.) Rather than risk going to hell, peasants tithed to the church and paid for baptisms, burials and assorted other services rather than risk eternal damnation.

Thus, the lords, barons, abbots, knights and squires were effectively the government of their day. Not coincidentally, they were pretty much the only rich people as well. 

Robin Hood was not so much robbing “the rich” as he was robbing the government that had exploited working class people. He returned to them “that which had been unjustly taken from them.”

Robin had nothing against “the rich” as such. In The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Robin actually loans money to a knight, Sir Richard, to help him save his estate from evil exploiters. It is the exploiters whom Robin detested. It just so happened that most of these, in the England of Robin’s day, were the ruling class — the government. 

We have no lords or barons in America, but we do have exploiters, and these are in fact government agents. Government at all levels consumes some 40-50% of everything we Americans produce. If that’s not exploitation, I don’t know what is.

Neither General Motors nor IBM can compel us to pay them money, but government can. Neither AT&T nor Colgate-Palmolive can send out teams of armed enforcers to collect tribute, but government can. Donald Trump cannot seize properties for non-payment of taxes, but government can.

The next time you think about Robin Hood “robbing the rich to help the poor,” just remember what he was really doing — fighting back against an unjust, exploitive government.

Ask me if I “believe in UFOs” and I’ll reply, “Sure.” Ask me if I “believe in global warming” and I’ll again reply in the affirmative. The first response will brand me a kook to many people while the second will hold me in good stead amongst the majority of Americans. Unfortunately, they misunderstand.

Many people take the term “UFO” to mean “flying saucer” or some extra-terrestrial spacecraft. I don’t. I use “UFO” to mean exactly what it was intended to mean: Unidentified Flying Object. So, do I believe in UFOs? Yes, and so does the US Air Force, as it happens. During the years that Project Blue Book was in operation, most all sightings of “UFOs” could be explained one way or another. But about 7% of them could not. These remain unidentified. Since they were seen in the sky, we think of them as flying objects, unidentified: UFOs. These days we’d call them unexplained aerial phenomenon.

Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. But the evidence of flying saucers is lacking. I am unable to believe that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth. I’m going to hold out for actual evidence.

As for “Global Warming,” I take that to mean exactly what it says as well. Warming of the Earth, no more, no less. Most people these days understand the term to mean “human caused (anthropogenic) warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.” Of this latter concept, I remain unconvinced.

I know that warming of the Earth can and does occur naturally and periodically, followed by cooling, because it is well documented that it has happened many times in Earth’s long history. That human activity has had a significant effect on the temperature of planet Earth is yet to be proved. No, really.

For many of the believers of human caused warming, it’s an article of faith; they believe it because they want it to be true. There is no scientific consensus that man-made warming is occuring. To be sure, the IPPC (the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has issued “consensus” reports on climate change but those reports were the reult of a political process which involved alteration of the scientists’ summaries by bureaucrats and the rejection of minority opinion. The “consensus” is artificial. Contrary opinion and evidence are not non-existent, they’ve just been eliminated from the reports by True Believers.

Note: I am not saying that man-made warming is not occurring, I’m simply saying that it has yet to be (satisfactorily) proved. Global Warming alarmists (for the rest of this piece, I’ll use “Global Warming in the popular, mankind-as-bad-guys sense) have made a variety of predictions about how much warming we’ll experience if we don’t change our evil ways. The predictions are all the result of flawed computer models.

A computer model is just a program into which you feed historical data and which then predicts the future. Atmospheric science is a very complicated subject and the computer models are correspondingly complex. But testing a computer model is easy: you feed it data from, say, 1970-1980 and then ask it to “predict” the conditions in 1990. We then compare the model’s predictions against what we know to be true for 1990. If it doesn’t match, the model is flawed and cannot be trusted. The models used by global climate scientists predict too many things that are at odds with what really happened. The models, as currently employed, are flawed and we should not be trusting predictions made by them.

“UFOs” and “global warming” are both misunderstood and misused. They have something else in common. We should believe in neither until we see some hard evidence.

The Democratic National Convention is over, Barack Obama is the Democrat’s nominee and nothing much is changed.

Democrats still want “rich” people to shoulder more of the tax burden. If I may quote Joe Biden, “That’s not change. That’s more of the same.” (Hint: rich people haven’t got enough money for your plans.) 

Democrats still believe that people can’t take care of themselves and need government to care for them. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

Democrats still hate the free market. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

Democrats still think the federal government should be more involved in education — despite a direct correlation between fed involvement and lower achievement. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

Democrats still think that the “promise of America” is some sort of cradle-to-grave safety net where no one wants for anything. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

Democrats still love dependency, because it makes them feel so good to be helping others. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.

And Democrats want to do all their good works using someone else’s money. That’s not change. That’s more of the same.