Grey Matters

If this wasn’t on the Federal Business Opportunities (federal government) web site, I’d think it was one of those Internet urban legends. No such luck.

This is a link to an ATF order for 2000 Blue Leatherman Micra pocket tools. It wants them all engraved with “ATF-Asset Forfeiture” and “Always Think Forfeiture”

See:

http://www.fbo.gov/spg/DOJ/BATF/APMD/840400000029/Amendment%20to%20Combined%20Synopsis_Solicitation%2003.html
Apparently, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (formerly just Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms — ATF) thinks that ATF stands for “Always Think Forfeiture.” Very funny. Comforting to know that this federal agency has seizing citizens’ assets as such a high priority.

ATF has always been known for its heavy-handed tactics but this seems a bit brazen, even for ATF.

Written 2008-03-20

Unfortunately, I missed Obama’s “race” speech the other day. I did manage to catch an interview about it though. I can only shake my head in wonder.

At the very least, the Obama/Wright association shows a severe lack of political savvy. The moment he started thinking about a presidential run, Obama’s handlers and advisors should have addressed the Wright problem. That they didn’t see it as a problem speaks volumes.

One possibility is that they believed Wright’s beliefs and attitude were sufficiently mainstream that there was no Wright problem. They’d be not far off the mark if they were thinking only in terms of the black community. The fact is, a surprising (to white people) percentage of blacks do in fact believe that AIDS was created by the CIA to kill off blacks.

The October 29, 1990 edition of The New York Times reported that 29% of black New Yorkers indicated belief that AIDS was “deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people,” versus one in twenty (5%) among white New Yorkers.

In the same poll, 60% of black New Yorkers indicated belief that government “deliberately” made drugs available to poor black people, versus 12% among white New Yorkers.

I suspect that the numbers (both black and white) are up since the 1990 poll. These theories have had lots of time to percolate and it is human nature to believe that our problems are caused by someone else.

In another 1990 survey, reported in the November 2, 1995 edition of The Boston Globe:

34% of black churchgoers polled in five cities believed “the AIDS virus was produced in a germ warfare laboratory.”

A 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll found:

52% of Americans believe it is likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African-Americans in U.S. inner cities.

In the December 4, 1991 edition of The New York Post, comedian Bill Cosby said that AIDS was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like.”

In a Benneton advertisement (see November 12, 1992 edition of Rolling Stone for an example), movie director Spike Lee said, “AIDS is a government-engineered disease.”

Though shocking to whites, the number of blacks who believe the CIA / AIDS theory espoused by Rev. Wright is substantial. My theory is that Obama’s people didn’t think it was a problem because everyone knows it to be true. Their mistake was in projecting this belief into the non-black community.

Courts have recognized that “reasonable regulation” of firearms is permissible. But can any regulation be “reasonable” if its effects are in fact detrimental? Has this ever been explored in court?

Many, many laws and regulations are a net detriment to society. They may in fact successfully aid the intended beneficiaries and have the desired effect but, on net, do more harm than good by causing unwanted consequences. The subsidization of out-of-wedlock births is one such. The mother and child do in fact receive government benefits as intended, but then society has more families living in poverty, more kids growing up without fathers and thus more crime. The harm done is worse than any good claimed. Lots of well-meaning laws do more harm than good.

But with gun laws, in particular, even the intended beneficiaries end up worse off. We’re supposed to get less crime as a result of tougher gun control. That’s always been the promise. And the continued existence of crime is forever the impetus for new “gun control” legislation.

Anyone familiar with “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws” by John R Lott knows there is ample evidence that the “gun control” prescription just leads to more violent crime. Can making things worse ever be a “reasonable” thing?

Has anyone ever challenged the reasonableness of a law because it had the opposite of its intended effect? If one really had their (statistical) ducks in a row, mightn’t reasonableness be made an issue? Or do the courts recognize a right for government to make unreasonable laws and regulations?

What about simple efficacy? Let’s argue: “The law does not have the intended effect and injures others. It must be repealed, no matter how reasonable it may appear.”

I suppose that by now I should know that there’s no place for common sense in government, only agendas.

Written 2007-10-28

Democrats, in a further attempt to divide the American people into squabbling divisions arguing amongst ourselves, have decide to turn native Hawaiians into a tribe. (Note that I use “native” here in the they-arrived-here-somewhat-before-us sense, not the born-in-the-U-S-A sense).

As always, it’s about money. Due to a recent Supreme Court ruling, Democrats cannot give it away to native Hawaiians as they’ve been doing. Turns out giving special benefits to persons of a particular race, just because they are that race, is racist. Who knew?

The only way to continue giving away that particular money (and Democrats love nothing so much as giving away other peoples’ money) is to give it to a governmental entity. So native Hawaiians have to form a tribe where there was none previously, to govern native Hawaiians, if they want the gravy train to continue stopping at their station.

Here’s an article about it.

I’m struggling to understand why Barack Obama is considered “black” or African American. As I understand it, he’s equal parts black and white, having a (black) Kenyan father and a (white) Kansan mother.

50/50. Toss a coin. Seems like it could be called either way but most everyone thinks of him as black. Why is that? Do you consider him black?

I’m going to continue thinking of him as white. To do otherwise is to buy into the attitude of racist blacks who think that Obama is “not black enough” or that of racist whites who think that any amount of black taints one’s whiteness.

I cannot for the life of me understand why people (and our government) are so obsessed with something as superficial as skin color. Race and skin color do not define who we are, character does, culture does. And the culture that matters most to me is American.

If an American puts his (or her) ethnicity first, or considers ethnicity to be more important than being American, more significant than character, that person is a hyphenated American.

Teddy Roosevelt said: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. A hyphenated American is not an American at all… Americanism is a matter of the spirit, and of the soul…The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans…each preserving its separate nationality…. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans…. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American.”

We each need to consider what it means to be American and how we can best protect America from becoming just another country full of warring tribes. Racial “diversity” is a pointless goal since race is such a superficial criterion. True diversity comes from a diversity of ideas and ideals.

It’s time for true color blindness, not further obsession with color that blinds us to a person’s true identity.