In short, one might conclude that all knowledge, wisdom, and wit are confined to those who inhabit New York City, Washington DC, or Hollywood.
I am now in my 6th decade of life experience - which was gained in many cities in the U.S. and in about 30 foreign countries. That experience has included the U.S. Marines, law school, the ATF, the CIA, Fortune 500 executive, writer, public speaker, educator, editor, and publisher - for openers. For over 20 years, I have written articles off and on for various magazines and newspapers. I've had an enormous number of letters published in major national publications. The Outback is the rural area in Northeast Texas where I have lived for the past 11 years. Each Saturday (or so) I will attempt to post a new set of musings from the Outback.
It appears that magazines and newsletters are getting more and more desperate to have you renew early - to help their cash flow. When you send money for a subscription, you are already lending them money for operating expenses for the next year. If you don't pay attention and send in a renewal six months in advance of the expiration of your subscription, you truly become a philanthropist. I renewed "PC Magazine" in November of 2001 and am already getting renewal notices! Everything I subscribe to hounds me month after month to renew, long before my subscription is to expire. If they send you Business Reply prepaid envelope, put in some of the junk that fell out of your credit-card statements and send the envelope back to the publisher. If everybody did this, they might get the message. They pay to send it. They pay to get it sent back. Make 'em pay.
Many times, I have seen a tip to sterilize a kitchen sponge by wetting it and heating it in a microwave (for an unspecified time). Recently, I read that you should soak kitchen sponges in a solution of water and Clorox. I tried the Clorox thing, and the somewhat dingy-looking sponge I used to wipe the counter came out sparkling. Given the germ-killing capabilities of Clorox, this is probably the best way to clean the sponges. It also helps to buy new ones rather frequently. Use the old ones for mopping up floor spills or cleaning the car.
In the previous Outback, I mentioned a lady on "Wheel of Fortune" who solved a puzzle as "ARMadillo and Laredo Texas." Days later, a TV reporter in Dallas reported on a mailbox pipe bomb in ARMarillo. Yikes. Remember this. An ARMadillo has body ARMor. Amarillo is a city.
Sun Microsystems is getting a larger following for its StarOffice productivity suite. Version 5.2 sells for $39.95! It contains a word processor, spreadsheet, database, calendar program, presentation program, and e-mail. You can open files created in Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, and AmiPro. It is supported on Solaris, Linux, and Windows platforms. Version 6.0 will be available May 21, 2002, for $79.95. Check out the very impressive information and testimonials for StarOffice at the www.sun.com website. Walter Mossberg, in the WSJ for May 16, does not have much of a good word for StarOffice. But, Walter is part of the media and computer elite, who have tons of money and think nothing of paying about $500 for Microsoft Office. Us poor folks in the Outback don't spend that much on all our software combined. Remember, the average reader of the WSJ thinks $39.95 for a bottle of wine is average. I pay $6.95 for a pretty good Merlot and get a case discount to boot. So, StarOffice may have some bumps, if one man's experience can be trusted to be a "test." Walt complains that StarOffice does not import complex Office documents well. And I thought the point of using StarOffice was to get away from Microsoft Office. I must have missed the point. My WordPerfect Suite imports Office docs very well, or so I am told. I have never found the need to do that! If I want to read a Word document, I use the free Word Viewer, or use Quick View Plus to read other "foreign" Microsoft files.
The author of the Melissa virus (W97M.Melissa - and variants), David L. Smith, age 33, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison. There was agreement that the damage caused by Melissa exceeded $80 million. This is not some "cute and benign" pastime by some harmless computer geeks. It is cyber terrorism, plain and simple. Norton Anti-virus currently lists 61,011 variations of viruses that are protected against. There are over 7,000 "common viruses." One idiot down, at least 6,999 to go.
Government Reverses 2nd Amendment Stance - Oh Really?
The media are such whores. We have seen several headlines recently that the government has "reversed" its stand on the Second Amendment, and now says that it confers an individual right to bear arms. Please. I have followed the "individual" versus "militia" debate for over 40 years, ever since I was a young Federal agent enforcing the Federal firearms laws. This latest bit of media propaganda is simply unconscionable.
Writing in NEWSWEEK, Elanor Clift said: "But this week in an abrupt shift, the Bush administration is advocating a new interpretation of the Constitution that would significantly broaden gun rights and overturn decades of established law. Ms. Clift, that is one of the most outrageous and irresponsible statements on the subject that I can imagine. You are simply a stupid twit! Read on and you will see why that is true.
On may 12, Morley Safer, introducing a segment on CBS's "60 Minutes," said: "The long-held interpretation by the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment gives militias, not individuals, the constitutional right to bear arms got a jolt last week when the Bush administration urged the court to rule otherwise." CBS (Communist Broadcast System) has long been guilty of distortions and lies about the gun-control and gun-ownership issues. Many of us have documented some of them over the years. But, for Morley Safer to say that "the Bush administration urged the court to rule otherwise" is a blatant lie! You will see why that is so when I discuss the briefs to the Court by the U.S. Solicitor General. And please note that here was yet another instance of the repetition of the tired, but faulty, argument that the Supreme Court has "long-held" that the right to bear arms relates only to "militias." Not really.
The weight of scholarly research, as opposed to liberal hysterical ranting, has always been that the Second Amendment confers a right for individuals to bear arms. The government hasn't changed its position. A couple of noteworthy people, including the Attorney General and the U.S. Solicitor General have just said publicly what everyone who has ever done any serious research has always known. There is an individual right to bear arms.
Most of the 20,000 plus gun laws were passed by state legislatures, under the Police Powers reserved to them in the Constitution. I have a new compilation of state gun laws, published by the BATF. It is comprised of 411 letter-size pages. These state legislatures did not anguish over whether there is an individual right or only a right of a militia to bear arms. Many state constitutions speak of an individual right to bear arms, and many even use words like "for personal protection and that of the family." Did all these states misinterpret the guideline they were using called the U.S. Constitution? I don't think so. They simply wrote laws that they thought were needed (a horribly wrong-headed assumption in many cases), without debating about who has a right to bear arms.
The issue to these legislatures is preventing or punishing crime, not who has a right to bear arms. Even those who insist that the right is an individual one, do not claim that it is an absolute right. So, if the "individual right" theory should ever be squarely ruled on favorably by the Supreme Court, there would still be a right to pass reasonable laws to regulate the sale and use of guns. No court is going to say there is an absolute right to own a gun without any restrictions. Trust me.
Most Federal gun laws are "justified" by using the taxing power or the power to regulate interstate commerce which are granted the Federal government under the Constitution. The regulation of automatic weapons (machine guns, etc.) is pegged to the "taxing power." There is seldom a need to even discuss whether the right to bear arms is an individual right. The Congress just finds a "ruse" under which to pass a gun law - and they do it. The regulation of gun dealers, for example, is tied to the power to regulate interstate commerce. Why bother with a discussion of whether the right to bear arms is an individual right? This is one reason why there are so few Federal court cases that even come close to being exactly "on point" regarding whether there is an individual right to bear arms.
Much is being made of the briefs filed by the U.S. Solicitor General, which are part of this alleged "reversal of a 60-year government policy." Read the damn briefs (www.findlaw.com). What the man says is that the government has no quarrel with the legality of the laws in question that regulate the sale and possession of guns. Only that the question raised on appeal about a violation of Second Amendment rights is irrelevant, and the Supreme Court should not hear the cases.
In the brief regarding Timothy Joe Emerson v. United States of America, it is noted that the court of appeals found that after a detailed textual and historical analysis of the Second Amendment, it concluded that the Amendment "protects the right of an individual .... to privately possess and bear their own firearms...." But, it said that the law under which Emerson was convicted did not violate his rights under the Second Amendment, "as it is subject to limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions or restrictions ... that are reasonable and not inconsistent with the right of Americans generally to keep and bear their private arms ...."
Judge Parker on the appeals court, in a concurring opinion (upholding the conviction of Emerson on a gun charge) declined to address the Second Amendment question of whether the right to bear arms is a collective or an individual right. He observed that: "Whatever the nature or parameters of the Second Amendment right, be it collective or individual, it is a right subject to reasonable regulation."
In the John Lee Haney v. Unites States of America case, a man was convicted of owning a machinegun, in violation of the National Firearms Act. He is not too bright. He showed up at a police station, told them he had unregistered machinguns and that the federal government lacked the authority to require him to obtain a license. He appealed his conviction, claiming his Second Amendment rights had been violated. In his brief to the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General, Theodore B. Olson, said, in part:
"The government agrees with petitioner (Mr. Haney) that the Fifth Circuit's decision in Emerson (that there is an individual right to bear arms) reflects a sounder understanding of the scope and purpose of the Second Amendment than does the court of appeals' decision in the instant case. Petitioner's constitutional challenge to Section 922 (o) does not warrant this Court's review, however, because the statutory ban on private possession of machieguns is valid under either analytic approach." (That is, it is valid under either the "militia" or "individual right" analysis.) In other words, the Second Amendment is irrelevant to most gun-crime convictions. What did I tell you earlier?
One of the times you hear a dialog about whether the right to bear arms is an individual right is when an anti-gun group wants to ban guns, or a class of guns. They trot out the tired "militia" argument, which is not supported by a preponderance of scholarly research. And they inevitably bring up the "precedent" of the Miller case, which they said "settled" the matter that the right to bear arms relates only to the "militia." How absurd. This case, United States v. Miller was decided in 1939. The proponents of the "militia" argument have to reach back over 60 years to cite a case that really did not settle the issue by any means. It was in fact, a botched-up mess that settled very little.
The Supreme Court actually said that defendants Miller and Layton were militiamen, since the militia included "all males capable of acting in concert for the common defense." The justices could not agree whether sawed-off shotguns, which were regulated by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (the law being questioned), qualified as militia weapons. The defendants did not argue the point, or they might have won their appeal. Neither the defendants, nor their attorney, even showed up in court! The justices sent the case back to the lower court for additional fact finding, which never took place.
Those who pin their hopes on the "militia" theory, as opposed to an individual right to bear arms, and build their case using U.S. v. Miller, are on very shaky grounds. But they keep repeating the Miller Mantra, as that is all they have. The overwhelming preponderance of scholarly research shows clearly that there is an individual right.
The "militia" argument has one overriding purpose. If the anti-gun people can convince the Supreme Court to rule that there is no individual right to bear arms, then the way is clear to ban all personal firearms. That is the goal of many. It is so transparent that so far courts have seen through the smokescreen and simply refused to rule on the matter with any specificity.
For example, I cited the May 12 "60 Minutes" program. They did a segment with doctors about guns as a public-health issue. I have written about this before (see: "The AMA is Losing Its Way" in the Outback for June 29, 2001, and "Doctors Have Written the Wrong Prescription for Guns" in the Outback for April 14, 2001). One of the goals of the doctor group is to "ban handguns." The only way this will ever be possible is if the Supreme Court clearly decides that there is no individual right to bear arms. So far, Miller, et al. nothwithstanding, they have not done so.
In the years that I enforced the Federal Firearms Act and the National Firearms Act as a Federal agent, I never heard the word "militia" uttered, not by an investigator, not by a supervisor, and not by a U.S. Attorney. The laws were based on Congressional powers to regulate interstate commerce and based on the taxing power. In the case of a state law, the basis is the police powers of the states. That is, "rights reserved to the states." Whether you are a member of a militia, the Boy Scout rifle team, or defending yourself and your family is irrelevant. The question always is: "Did you violate the provisions of the Federal statute or state law?
Remember what Elanor Clift said: "But this week in an abrupt shift, the Bush administration is advocating a new interpretation of the Constitution that would significantly broaden gun rights and overturn decades of established law. Now, you can see that there is no advocating of a new interpretation of the Constitution. She simply lied. And how will gun rights be broadened? Even though he believes there is an individual right to bear arms, the U.S. Solicitor General stands by the convictions in the Emerson and Haney cases. What broadened rights? Look at my explanation of the underpinnings of state and Federal gun laws. Neither group of laws depend upon any interpretation of the Second Amendment. Overturn decades of established law, Miss Clift? How is that going to happen? I can hardly wait for your well-researched legal opinion to back up that ridiculous outburst.
The government gets away with Constitutional rape, in many cases. I have campaigned for many years, without success, against the BATF's (my former employer) "sporting purposes" test for banning certain firearms. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there any hint that the Second Amendment confers a right to hunt deer or ducks. If anything, the right is (clearly defined in many state constitutions) to protect yourself and your family, against others who would harm you, and more fundamentally, to protect against an oppressive government.
Thus, the "Sporting Purposes" test is a fraud, perpetrated to carry out a government policy which is at odds with the Constitution, that is, controlling guns based on their intended purpose.
If the Supreme Court ever decides a case that is squarely on the point of an "individual right to bear arms," I would be stunned if they said there is no such individual right. Even if there were nine liberal justices on the court at the time. To do otherwise would risk an armed rebellion when the government started passing laws to take away guns. I would be willing to give up my life in such a fight, as it is such a fundamental right. The Court will duck that issue for as long as it can. It has been ducking it since 1939! Why change?
There simply is not a leg to stand on to deny the individual right. All arguments to the contrary are fragmented, or distortions of case law, or outright lies. In my 40 years of following the gun- control debate, I have seen a ton of "outright lies" foisted off on us by the anti-gun crowd. But, as Herr Joseph Goebbels* learned in the German Third Reich, if you shout a lie loud enough and often enough, people will accept it as truth. Sarah Brady, take note. You are in distinguished (?) company. Recently, Elanor Clift and Morley Safer - and many others in the media.
So, just ignore the "Radical Reversal of Opinion" headlines. They are just more thrashing about by the anti-gun crowd and their puppets in the media. Even the most zealous Democrat in Congress has never seriously contested that there is an individual right to bear arms. Well, maybe Sen. Schumer, but he borders on being mentally unstable on the issue. He used to scream at people on talk shows when talking about the subject. They know it is a losing argument. They rely instead on hysteria, distortions, and specious "research" to further their agenda of gun confiscation.
In all years I enforced the gun laws or wrote articles on the subject, I never got lied to by the NRA or other mainstream gun groups. But, dealing with the anti-gun crowd was like being in a treatment center for pathological liars. Sarah Brady and her gang were egregious liars, for example. But the Brady law passed, because the elite media was behind it. And so it goes, Herr Goebbels.
By the way, in the two cases in which the U.S. Solicitor General filed briefs, as noted above, one law is based on the Commerce Clause and the other on the Taxing Power. I explained all that before, but just wanted to reinforce it with two real cases.
Think about this. The Congress must already implicitly agree that there is an individual right to bear arms. Otherwise, why have they passed so many laws that regulate the individual use of guns? If anybody in Congress actually believed that U.S. v. Miller is the law of the land, i.e., that the right to bear arms relates only to militias, they could have long ago passed legislation banning the private possession of firearms. A majority of states have enacted laws that allow qualfied citizens to carry concealed weapons. It is hard to think of a more clear vindication of the notion of an individual right to bear arms. Are all those states in violation of the U.S. Constitution? Not a chance. Put that in your Bong and smoke it.
A footnote: As I read over the several articles that I chose to print for reference on the subject at hand, I noticed that all were written by women. The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, NEWSWEEK, Associated Press, and so on. I love ladies, and especially smart ones who can write. But, I am a little suspicious that the media has opened the kennel and turned loose on us a bunch of liberal, bleeding heart, female attack dogs. There are also a lot of men who write anti-gun articles. I just found it interesting that all the articles I printed were written by women.
(*Herr Joseph Goebbels was in the bunker in Berlin with Hitler and Eva. He and his wife and six children died at their own hands - on May 1, 1945. The children were given cyanide. Poor timing. The day before, Hitler had, in his will, named Goebbels Chancellor of the Reich. Not that it would have been a good job to have, given the circumstances. Nice of you to think of me Adolph, just before I blow out my brains. This is no doubt the genesis of the phrase "hollow gesture." Just like the pre-suicide "marriage" of Hitler and Eva Braun.)
Halle Berry - First Half-Black Woman to Win an Academy Award
Relax. This is not a racist piece. It is quite the opposite. I just wanted to grab your attention.
During her Academy Award acceptance speech, Halle Berry spoke of herself as a "woman of color." We will never make the final leap to an integrated society if we keep tagging people with racial labels.
First, a little background. Halle Berry's mother is white. Her black, and abusive father, Jerome, abandoned Halle and her mother when Halle was four years old. Her mother, Judith, moved the family to a predominantly white neighborhood in a suburb of Cleveland.
Halle attended a nearly all-white school. It is said that she was subjected to discrimination at an early age. She was the school's newspaper editor, class president, honor society member, a cheerleader, and prom queen. Interesting. That resume seems to belie the idea that she suffered much discrimination. At least, not a lot around her school, where she was obviously "Miss Everything." Halle has said that her mother told her she should consider herself black because that would be the way others would perceive her. Thanks a lot, mom.
Miss Berry's adult life has been marked by severe ups and downs, but nothing unusual by Hollywood standards. "Normal" in Hollywood is usually code for personal chaos.
Now, Halle is hailed as the first black woman, the first African-American woman, to win an Oscar. I did not watch the Oscar ceremonies, but it was reported that she thanked the (black) community for standing behind her. She never once mentioned, or paid tribute to, her white mother - who raised her. I did some digging and came up with a web site devoted to interracial marriage discussions. There were a lot of people mad as hell that neither Halle or the media noted that her mother is white. They speak of the continuing effort to brand people as "people of color" no matter how slight that heritage may be.
Here is the crux of the issue. As our society tends more and more to engage in interracial marriages, when are we going to stop calling people African-Americans when any slight part of their gene pool was from a person of color? The same with Asian-Americans, and so on. Are we going to use DNA and a percentage on a scale to determine ethnicity?
I have never thought of Halle Berry as a black person - as an African-American - but simply as a beautiful young lady with a dark complexion. But, by perpetuating the idea that she is "black," she unwittingly becomes a foil of the old-line black leaders who trade on the idea that all blacks are victims.
There are still many problems, but minorities increasingly graduate from college, have well paying jobs, and live in upscale neighborhoods. The salary figures will probably surprise you. Between 1991 and 1999 among blacks with a bachelor's degree salaries increased 37% to "$36,000. Whites, who had a big head start, increased to $45,000. In the past 25 years, 10,000 blacks have graduated from the top 25 business schools. And so on. Progress has been more substantial than the "victimologists" will admit to.
The old class warfare of victimization is wearing thin. Blacks need to dump Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Blacks need to demand that the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, Marion Frances Berry, be removed or muzzled. She is the high-priestess of victimology and a very divisive influence on the racial dialog in this country. Her actions in refusing to seat President Bush's nominee to the Commission are beneath contempt. She dares anyone to cross her, knowing she can cry "race' if she is questioned or chastised. Pathetic. A disgrace to blacks.
Blacks should line up behind people like John McWhorter and Walter Williams, who preach responsibility, education, and opportunity - not victimization, government handouts and quotas. Prof. McWhorter is a brilliant black author and speaker. My pen-pal Prof. Walter Williams, writes a syndicated column. I have seen some enlightened young black ministers on FOXNews, for example. Why don't these people come to the front and lead? Jackson, Sharpton, and Ms. Berry are anchors around the neck of black progress.
Do a search on the speeches and writings of Prof. John H. McWhorter. One book is "Losing the Race - Self Sabotage in Black America." Read some of the syndicated columns of Prof. Walter Williams (www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/). Prof. Williams, after reading some of the columns I wrote years ago, flattered me by asking the question of how I managed to keep my various government jobs as long as I did, given my propensity for straight talk. He used to pinch hit for Rush Limbaugh on the radio. Yowee. A black professor subbing for Rush. Read him. You will understand why. He is brilliant and refreshing. There are others, but these two gentlemen come to mind, along with Thomas Sowell
While I am up here on the box, consider the difficulty blacks have had in deciding what to call themselves. Who is it that decides on these name changes? Fascinating.
When I was a kid, blacks were Negroes. It was not good or bad. It was just what they were called.
Then somebody decided they should be called "blacks" with a lowercase "b". Why give up an uppercase N (Negro) for a lowercase b (black)? Beats me. Maybe if I knew more about black history, I would understand this curious name change.
Finally, the politically-correct crowd decided that African-American was a more proper name. One that would get more respect. Tell that to Gen. Colin Powell, for example, whose parents are from Jamaica. Does that make him a Jamaican-American?
As if all this jerking folks around by telling them they need to call themselves something new, is not bad enough, look at some of the organizations and entities in existence:
NAACP (The CP stands for "colored people" Now transformed into "people of color")
United Negro College Fund, Inc.
National Black United Fund
African-American Charities
The Black Caucus in the House of Representatives
If I were a black person, I would be saying "Jesus, make up your minds."
By the way, have you ever heard anyone refer to Michael Jordan as "an African-American basketball player"? Think about that.
I am reminded of a conversation I had many years ago in Frankfurt, Germany, with the visiting head of my Division from HQ at the CIA. I was complaining about my title, which of course, nobody except a few in our close-knit group even knew. I wanted a more grand title. My boss, whom I admired greatly, looked at me and said: "You want a title? Open the dictionary. Pick any fucking title you want." He made his point. It was what I was worth as a human being. It was how I did my job. It was the importance of the work that I was doing that counted. "Pick any fucking title you want " put everything in perspective. Titles and labels are irrelevant.
Before I moved to the Outback, I was married to a beautiful, slightly olive-skinned, woman who was half Lebanese - and born in America. Nobody called her Lebanese-American. They could not tell by looking. So, a lot of folks escape the label business because people are not sure of their ethnicity. Being part "black" is not so easy to pass by without notice.
Barbara Walters interviewed Diana Ross and her five children. As I looked at the kids, their features and varied skin tones, I wondered who their father was. In fact, I wondered about Diana's parentage. Her appearance tends to make me believe that she has a white ancestor somewhere in the past. Well, Diana laid it all out about the kids. She was married to a Jew and had two girls by him. One girl was the result of a relationship with a black man, Berry Gordy at Motown Records. (Rhonda, was not told until she was 13-years-old that her real father was Gordy. She thought her dad was Diana's Jewish husband, Robert Silberstein.) The two boys are the result of her marriage to a Norwegian - white as the Norwegian snow, of course. All-in-all, a family that makes for an interesting sociological study.
Barbara said that Halle Berry had told her that her white mother had told Halle to consider herself to be black, because that is how she would be perceived. When Barbara asked the Ross kids about their perception of their ethnicity, the answers were penetrating. One girl said she considered herself to be black, but she also thought of herself as being half Jewish. Evan, the 13- year-old fair skinned son (his dad is Norwegian) answered that he was not black and he was not white. He was "in the middle," and he was happy with that. We need more Evans.
So, Halle Berry is a "woman of color." Which color? Black? White, with a dusky hue? Take your pick. After all, she is 50/50. Can't we get beyond this nonsense? She was married to the "black" baseball player David Justice. Suppose instead that she had married the Yankee's Derek Jeter, who is listed in one biography as African-American/Irish (mother is Irish). If they had children, they would be tagged as "black" children. But how much of a percentage of black would they be? As mentioned before, will we start checking DNA to see who qualifies as black? Remember, there is the movement out there to pay reparations for slavery. And there is affirmative action. What percentage is required? Where will the cutoff be? See how ridiculous this is?
I will be dead before all this changes. But, I hope that my grandkids will read this sometime in the future and one will say, "Boy, the people back in grandpa's time were really stupid. They had all those labels for everybody. It made no sense." That, of course, would be the grandkid who married a Chinese girl from California - well a girl whose mother was Chinese and whose father was Mexican. And so it will go, until the distinctions are finally so blurred that such things will no longer be an issue. The solution, you see, will not be political, or mandated by the government. It will be evolutional.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Richard C. Rhodes
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