Massachusetts Academic Experts Recommend Racist Gun Laws

The Boston Globe reporting:

More than a year after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., a panel of academic experts today released a long-awaited report recommending that Massachusetts tighten its gun laws, which are already considered among the toughest in the country.

The panel made 44 recommendations, including that Massachusetts join a national mental health database for screening potential gun owners, that it beef up firearms training requirements, and that it eliminate Class B gun licenses, which are seldom used.

It recommended that the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association help define a series of factors that could be used to prohibit “unsuitable persons” from acquiring firearms. The panel said the current process allows local law enforcement officials too much discretion to determine whether a person is suitable to be granted a license to carry.

It also said Massachusetts should require anyone wanting to purchase a hunting rifle or a shotgun to pass those standards of suitability. That could allow local police chiefs to deny gun purchases to people who have been arrested, but not convicted, of a crime.

Wait, let’s read that last sentence again:

“That could allow local police chiefs to deny gun purchases to people who have been arrested, but not convicted, of a crime.”

Let’s skip past the obvious and not discuss the idea that people who in effect are innocent of any crime would be denied their Second Amendment rights under this proposal by academic experts, and skip to the essence of leftist victimhood political dogma.

“Disparate impact”.

There.

I did it.

I played the race card.

Liberals have been talking about the “disproportional representation of racial minorities (primarily African Americans, hence “Black crime”) at all stages of the criminal justice system, including arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations” (Wikipedia… for what it’s worth), and here they go suggesting a “facially neutral” law that would blatantly have an “adverse impact” on a “protected class” of citizens!

(I am quickly running out of progressive racial catch phrases here. Maybe I shouldn’t have loaded so many up in one sentence.)

So if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts embraces the recommendation of these “academic experts”, not hiring a member of a “protected class” to work in my child care center based on an arrest record for domestic violence or child abuse that did not culminate in a conviction would be both racist and illegal, but the State denying the very same individual their constitutionally-protected right to own a gun would be both legal and socially acceptable.

Pretzel logic much?

This proposal is further proof of the unmitigated disastrous effect that allowing members of academia to craft policy at any level of government could bring about.

 

Le Grand Rant Magnifique

OK…it’s been almost a month.

It’s time.

This is my post-election rant.

People who do not know me well will undoubtedly point out that it has in fact been a month since election night, and suggest that I should…well, let it go.

People who do know me, know that I don’t “let things go” easily. Hell, I’m still pissed off at Jackie Smith for God’s sake.

Pro Football Hall of Fame my ass.

Loser…

A REAL Hall of Fame receiver would have caught that damned pass.

But I digress.

I’ve read nearly every article written (by people worth reading) on the election.

I read the rants and I read the inside stuff, and I read the apocalyptic posts.

I read everything, but I couldn’t write anything. Or rather, every time I began to put my thoughts on the election down, the outcome looked something like this:

“You crazy $*&^%%$#, dumb ##)&^% jackasses! You just #*&^%#$# the whole a#@*^%#@# thing. What the #&^$=(&^ where you $##%** thinking?

Oh…EXCUSE ME!

Did I just #%#* insult you by $#(#%$ suggesting you @#*#&^%^ actually gave this whole #*&^%$# election thing some #*%#$% thought?”

Given the intellectual level that I normally maintain in this blog, those posts where never published.

I am a far bigger person than that.

I like to make sense out of things, to talk things out like civilized people, and look for common ground where none may be readily apparent.

So I decided to talk to some people who do not share my political ideology.

…

…

…

Holy cow, we are in trouble.

It’s not that the people I spoke to lacked a brain, it’s just that shared among so may, one brain falls way short of being efficient at anything, let alone critical thinking.

Take for example my co-worker. I’ll call him Jerry primarily because that’s his real name. Screw anonymity, and Jerry, if you’re reading this get over it…just like you want me to get over the whole “election thing”.

I asked Jerry why he voted for Obama.

(I know…some people claim that I have a rather strong affinity for masochism.)

Jerry’s response was typical, and he spouted every single talking point promoted by MSNBC, falling short of suggesting that it was his own grandmother on the wheelchair being pushed over the cliff by Satan incarnate himself, Paul Ryan. The only reason he didn’t do that was because I know his grandmother, and she’s not on a wheelchair.

She’s in one or another of the Boca West Country Club’s restaurants three nights a week.

I drilled down on his talking points, and began systematically knocking them down one by one.

Jerry’s eyes were glazing over.

“You know,” he said. “I’m just not into politics like you. I’m a Democrat, so I voted for the Democrat.”

OK…now we were getting somewhere.

“My grandfather was a Democrat, and so was my grandmother, and both my parents, so I’m a Democrat, and I vote Democrat.”

“I get that Jerry, I do.” I replied. “But you didn’t vote for a Democrat, you voted for a Communist. Can’t you see that?”

Jerry was actually offended.

“That’s Republican nonsense,” he was getting upset now. “The man is no Communist, and you have no reason to attack him like that. You Republicans are all the same.”

“Jerry, his grandparents were Communists, his parents were Communists, every person that’s had any measure of influence in his life is or was a Communist, INCLUDING his minister, so just like you naturally became a Democrat, he naturally became a Communist…get it?”

Jerry and I don’t talk much any more. We sort of wave as our cars pass each other in the parking lot on those days when I go to the office, his “Obama 2012” bumper sticker still on display.

That was a worthless encounter if there was ever one such thing.

As an afterthought, and just in case any business owner faced with staff reduction decisions due to the impending cost increases associated with the implementation Obamacare is actually reading this, I suggest that the lay offs should begin in the parking lot.

Obama 2012 on the bumper, pink slip on the windshield.

Sadly, the conversation with Jerry was not atypical.

For some it was a racial identity thing, for others it was because they hated Bush. Some actually tried to engage me in how that whole “evil top 1%” (Jerry’s grandmother came to mind there) should be brought to their knees, and yet every time that I agreed with them, and suggested that they should begin with the guy who owns the company we work for, they all looked at me like I was crazy.

Some people (obviously living in that alternate universe where Bizarro lives) thought things were getting better.

Most of them however, kept coming one to the one unifying theme…everyone wanted something for nothing.

People love Obama because they can get shit for free.

Sigh…

How in the world did we manage to go from “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” to Sandra Fluke in just two and a half decades for God’s sake?

What in the HELL is wrong with us?

For the record, purchased in bulk, that $3,000 Ms. Fluke complained about spending in contraceptives during her years at Georgetown Law, translates into 15,000 lubricated condoms.

How do they find time to study?

Do they duct tape the textbooks to the dorms ceilings in Georgetown?

Sad…

What is wrong?

I’ve kept asking myself that question over and over and over again these past few weeks.

How could the people of this country choose Communism freely?

And they did…they don’t know it, but they did.

Check this out:

“Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America—America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.

Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them.”

That’s not FOX News, or World Net Daily, or even Lew Rockwell, calling us an “illiterate society” and Obama a liar.

That’s Pravda.

How did we get here for God’s sake?

This country brought the world out of darkness, driving human growth faster and farther than any other civilization before.

We cooked with fire and rode horseback in 1776, and less than 200 years later we walked on the Moon.

Eons of servitude to the elements and fear of common diseases, and four hundred thousand years from that first spark of fire in a cave to “We the People.”

One hundred and ninety-three years from Philadelphia to the Sea of Tranquility.

We built this, and now we are about to systematically destroy it, all in the name of getting shit for free.

The American Dream, once defined as an opportunity, is now an entitlement, and government of the people, by the people, for the people dies a slow death at the hands of the new ruling classes.

Patricians and Princes residing in DC.

Back in 1951, C.M. Kornbluth wrote what in retrospect could be the scariest SciFi story of all time. Included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, “The Marching Morons” may hold a clue to both our future, and the path we took to get to where we are today.

In this story, a man wakes up after an unintended long-term period of suspended animation brought about by a freak accident.

The world he wakes up to is quite bizarre.

It it all starts to make sense when he finds out that the average IQ of the general population is about 45, and that one of the side effects of the lower IQ is a propensity for humans to give free rein to physical drives, with procreation being the strongest of all natural urges. As a result of that the human population stands at 5,003,000,000 people, made up of three million “elite” (people with average IQ of 100) and 5,000,000,000 morons. The elite, understanding that the population growth cannot be sustained, breed at a far slower rate than the morons, but because of that they have become veritable slaves, working feverishly trying to keep the morons from destroying the human race.

Asides from everything that they must do to keep things running, they must also spend every spare minute seeking a solution to what they call the Poprob”.

Their problem is simple:

• The morons must be managed or they will literally cause billions of deaths, and the eventual destruction of the human race.
• Sterilizing all the morons is impossible since there aren’t enough “elites” to accomplish that task.
• Propaganda encouraging responsible sexual behavior and small families doesn’t work because the morons can’t fight the higher biological drive that calls for them to procreate.

Sound familiar?

Amazingly enough, the resurrected man quickly finds a simple, yet somewhat harsh solution to the problem.

He offers the morons free trips to Venus, which is described as a tropical paradise with blanket trees, ham bushes, and soap roots. In a world-wide frenzy, every nation rushes to get as many of their people to Venus as soon as possible so that they can stake their claim to the free land.

Being built and piloted by morons, the spaceships all blow up en route.

Now, I’ll leave it to you, kind reader to draw the similarities here. Go ahead and inject any time-worn adage pertaining to the odd similarities between science and fiction that you may wish to inject into this, my post-election rant.

They all work.

Sadly, the way things are going, I see 40 Venusian acres and a M.U.L.E. in humanity’s future.

All because those crazy $*&^%%$# dumb ##)&^% jackasses are #*&^%#$# the whole a#@*^%#@# thing. What the #&^$=(&^ are they $##%** thinking?

Oh…EXCUSE ME JERRY!

Did I just #%#* insult you? Was I #&^#^%# out of line by $#(#%$ suggesting you @#*#&^%^ actually gave this whole #*&^%$# election thing some #*%#$% thought?

Yeah well, eat $&^$ and #^%#$&^% die, you *E%^#$# marching moron!
…

…

…

I almost made it, didn’t I?

Maybe they are right, maybe I need to figure out a way to start being better at “getting over” things.

I think I’ll work on that now.

P.S. Why the French title?

If we’re gonna BE Europe, we may as well start speaking the lingo.

P.S.S. @*U^%## you Jackie Smith!

Loser…

OK..I’m done.

Back to getting over stuff.

 

ARGHHHHH!!!!!!

I was catching up on my reading early this morning, when I ran across Paul Krugman’s latest OpEd in yesterday’s NYT, and I just had to single this little tidbit out:

(W)rite off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending.

Back later with some thoughts.

 

Deconstructing Uncle Tom

Jamie Holt over at Best Internet News and Politics weighs in on the decision by Justice Thomas to seek a conference vote on Donofrio v. Wells, and in what has become the norm from the Party of Tolerance and Open-Mindedness®, she brands him an Uncle Tom for doing so.

All Barack Obama had to do was challenge Justice Clarence Thomas in public once, just once, and you had to know he would get a legal challenge out of it.

“I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time, for that elevation, setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the constitution.”

As you can probably imagine, that really infuriated Uncle T(h)om(as) who has spent his entire life ingratiating himself to the powers that be to get to his Supreme Court decision.

I wonder if Ms. Holt has actually ever read the book, or knows a thing about the man who inspired it?

“Uncle Tom”, in one of the fifteen definitions for the term found listed at Urban Dictionary, is described as an “African American male who kisses the white mans ass”, and in another as “…a term used by black people to try to convince other black people that working, education, living well, and setting a good example for their children is selling out.”

So then, who (and what) was ‘Uncle Tom”?

The obvious is that Uncle Tom is the principal character in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly”, a realistic depiction of the “cruel reality” of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Penned by ardent abolitionist and preacher Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not only became the best selling novel in the world during the 19th Century, but the second best selling book of that same period of time behind The Bible.

The novel is credited with fanning abolitionist fires, and intensifying the conflict leading to the Civil War. On meeting Stowe at the onset of hostilities, President Lincoln is quoted as saying, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

In the story, Tom is a man of deep-seated Christian beliefs and steadfast convictions, whose determination and willingness to stand up for his beliefs earns him the begrudging admiration of his enemies. He shares his faith with his masters, and as a result they undergo changes in their attitudes toward slavery. Tom is beaten to death by Simon Legrees’ overseers, for refusing to disclose information about an escaped slave, and in his final act of Christian love, he forgives them. The overseers are so moved by the character of the man they have just killed, that they become Christians themselves.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Tom as a noble hero, a Christian of unwavering faith, not as the weak fool who bows down to whites. That stereotype was propagated by “Tom Shows”, unauthorized stagings of the play that bore little resemblance to the novel. The plays (many of them little more than minstrel shows) were extremely popular during the latter half of the Century, and more Americans of the time became familiar with the story via these unauthorized stage adaptations, than by reading the novel.

Stowe partially based the Tom character on Josiah Henson, an escaped slave who “founded a settlement and laborer’s school for other fugitive slaves” in Canada, whose autobiography was published in 1841, eleven years before the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Ms. Holt does a great disservice to this novel, to the writer, and to the man who inspired it by using the term to denigrate a black man who will not march in step in the rest of the race. Yes…Clarence Thomas is a Conservative, but isn’t it the idea here that individuals are free to form their beliefs, and advance them within our system?

Perhaps it’s time to rethink what constitutes an “Uncle Tom” in our day and age.

The first 16 Black Americans who came to Capitol Hill after the Civil War (two of them Senators) were Republicans…the party of Lincoln. Two decades later, with Democrats back in control of the Southern State legislatures, laws were passed restricting the rights of black Americans to vote, in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. By the 1960’s, after the passing of the Voting Rights Act, the majority of Black Americans are registered (and vote for) Democrats.

After 43 years of loyalty to the Democratic Party, black Americans continue to have the highest rate of unemployment, the highest arrest rate, and the lowest pay rates. An overwhelming number of black Americans live in the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates, attend the worst schools, and have the lowest median income per household.

Why is this?

Is it those evil Republicans and their house Negroes working against the little people and the poor?

As video blogger Macho Sauce reminds us, the notion that Democrats are for the poor, and Republicans are for the rich, is one of the tools used to fool the American people.

He explains how this works:

If Republicans are for the rich, then they need the rich to keep their power, and if they need the rich to keep their power, then they need to keep the rich RICH in order to stay in power. If that’s the case, and Democrats are for the poor as they claim to be, then that must mean that they need the poor to keep their power, and if they need the poor to keep their power, then they need to keep the poor POOR to stay in power. So far, it appears to be working.

Jamie Holt calls Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” from within the antebellum confines of the Democrat plantation, where the vast majority of American blacks have been toiling in thankless devotion for nearly half a century. Time will tell Ms. Holt, but if the past is the precursor to the future, we may come to find out that Barack Obama is not the savior you expect, and like in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, “Uncle T(h)om(as)” will achieve more via his faith and unwavering Conservative beliefs, than the Obamessiah ever will.

There is a temptation to call people like Ms. Holt “Uncle Toms”, considering black America’s standing as long-suffering house slaves to their Democratic overseers, but in light of what we know about Mrs. Stowe’s immortal character, the comparison would be an undeserved compliment, and an insult to a fictional character possessed of more substance and moral strength than our current President-elect.

 

Change?

President-elect Barack Obama named Peter Orszag to the post of White House budget director, then went on to promise what every new President promises while introducing the new budget Director..”review the budget line by line, blah, blah, blah…” but as The Wall Street Journal mentions, there was a subtle detailed that made this press conference a bit different than the rest…while promising to kill programs “that have outlived their usefulness,” Mr. Obama specifically mentioned farm subsidies for the rich.

That’s a change from his previous position on the bill:

“I applaud the Senate’s passage today of the Farm Bill, which will provide America’s hard-working farmers and ranchers with more support and more predictability.”

What’s more, he slammed President Bush and Senator McCain for their opposition to the bill:

“By opposing the bill, President Bush and John McCain are saying no to America’s farmers and ranchers, no to energy independence, no to the environment, and no to millions of hungry people.”

Political hack that he is, President-elect Obama blasted the people who were doing exactly what he promised to do…curtail pork barrel, and accused President Bush and Senator McCain of playing politics, while he himself was the one actually engaging in partisan political games.

President Bush sought a $200,000 cap on annual subsidy payments, but instead Congress sent him a $300 billion bill in which nearly every crop, from corn to sugar, won subsidy increases. That bill set policy for the next five years.

Senator McCain, vehemently opposed the bill, and was blasted by the Obama camp for taking the same position that now the President-elect wants us to believe he is supporting, AFTER the bill has passed, and become policy for the next five years…one year beyond Mr. Obama’s term in office

“In today’s economy, when hardworking American families buy groceries they feel the sting of misguided federal agriculture polices. Instead of fine tuning our farm programs to improve their efficiency, we’ve allowed them to swell into mammoth government bureaucracies that generally exist to serve special interests at the behest of Congressional benefactors. Sixty-nine years after the Great Depression and the advent of the Farm Bill, well into the 21st Century, commodity prices have reached record highs. I believe American agriculture has progressed to the point where we no longer need government grown farms.” — John McCain

So, when given the opportunity to support cuts in subsidies for the rich, Mr. Obama supported them, instead choosing to attack his opponents for doing exactly what he now has instructed Peter Orszag to do.

Partisan politics as usual.

No change yet folks…stay tuned.