As relevant today as yesterday – 01

From time to time, I shall link to articles originally written for the former hard copy newsletter, or for Issues & Views-The Website (now an archive), to highlight features whose themes are still relevant. This is the first of such posts.

The ongoing reparations fraud [2004]
What makes the current reparations movement a fraud, whether at Brown University or in the country at large, is the attempt to depict slavery as something uniquely done to blacks by whites. Reparations advocates are doing this for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: That's where the money is.

See also:
Reparations and Irresponsible Demagogues

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No escape [2004]
Until recent years, it was left to prison authorities and each state to determine how best to handle its prison population. Policies were set by wardens and/or state personnel, including decisions about racial and ethnic housing assignments. In general, separation of the races, especially blacks and whites, met with consensus among prison administrators and the inmates as well. But as the social policy of integration in this country took the form of a quasi-religion, becoming a virtue unto itself, some prison officials were forced to abandon common sense policies designed to keep the peace. Prisons came under the inspection of social engineers, who were determined that prison life reflect the standards being imposed on mainstream society.

See more on this prison case (especially Supreme Court Justice Thomas's dissent) in:
The overzealous integrationist court

• • •
When they came for the Baptists . . . [2003]
Anyone who claims that law enforcement saves its most punitive weapons only for the coloreds, and especially for blacks, should pay attention to the case of Matt Hale. ... If you still have any lingering doubts about the dying state of the Constitution, the treatment of Hale should remove those doubts. Even people who despise the teachings of Hale and his World Church of the Creator express astonishment at what is being done to an American citizen, whose primary offense is the thought crime of "hate."

See more on the Hale case in:
Free Speech For Some, But Not For All

• • •
Besieged with Political Correctness from the left and right [2005]
Conservatives have borne the brunt of speech codes and related policies, and have comprised the vast majority of speakers who have been shouted down when they enter the campus public forum. Too many on the left have not spoken out against such forms of censorship, probably because the other side’s ox was being gored. ... The last thing American campuses need is censorship from the right piling onto the preexisting censorship from the left.

• • •
Bringing down families [2002]
These sentences are imposed regardless of a person's role in the crime or other mitigating factors. In this bizarre legal world, prosecutors, not judges decide which charges to bring and determine the final sentence. Many judges are on record for their opposition to mandatory minimum sentencing, especially in cases of the young and/or naive who are seduced by clever drug dealers to act as couriers. The consequences of these immoral sentencing laws are horrendous--mothers of young children incarcerated for periods that span their children's youth; siblings separated from one another, never to be reunited in a family setting; families torn apart, often for good. All because a parent committed an act that is made foolish only because the laws are foolish. They are victims of zealous "drug warriors," who have succeeded in ratcheting up into felony crimes actions that once were misdemeanors.

See more on unjust sentencing laws in:
When judges don't judge
When did we get this mean?
When did we get this mean? - Part 2
Trying to be tougher than the next guy

• • •

There but for the grace of God.... [2002]
And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that thirty-five years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist--a mere spectator--watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them--or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. and so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage. . . . .

• • •
Will rights be restored? [2002]
The war against terrorism is different. Because the struggle is against a shadowy network of adversaries rather than a nation state, it is virtually impossible even to speculate when it might end. ... Indeed, it is not clear how victory itself would be defined. ... The concept of victory becomes more elusive if the goal is the eradication of all terrorism from the planet, as administration officials have sometimes hinted. That is a guaranteed blueprint for perpetual war.

• • •
Trying to fill those recruitment quotas [2005]
Damien Cave tells of other recruiters who have been breaking enlistment rules for months, even hiding police records and medical histories of prospective recruits. One recruiter claimed that his commanding officers have encouraged such deceptions, to meet the Army's recruitment quotas. The recruiter told Cave, "The problem is that no one wants to join. We have to play fast and loose with the rules just to get by."

• • •
Mind-altering greed [2002]
All you have to do is attach money to it (like $400 per child), and then sit back and watch the diagnoses of the supposed "illness" increase by the tens of thousands. ... With more than half of those 7,000,000 children also prescribed Ritalin, the stock-market value of its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, has also soared. Now that company and others are working to introduce a host of new drugs into the classroom, including Prozac and Luvox, which has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for pediatric use. The industry is looking to even greater growth as the pill brigade is targeting pre-school toddlers. The use of psychotropic drugs, like anti-depressants and stimulants, in two to four year olds more than doubled between 1991 and 1995.

• • •
Exposing search and seizure abuse [2001]
If the Founders did, indeed, think of the press as the watchdog of government, it must have been journalists like Karen Dillon whom they hoped would do the watching. Last year, Dillon wrote a series of articles that revealed the nature of "asset forfeiture," the practice whereby law enforcement officers can seize the property of citizens, whether or not any crime has been committed. ... Dillon's articles show how the country's "drug warriors" enrich themselves through this search and seizure ploy, and how important to them is the continuance of the "drug war."

See also:
Raids and more raids
Asset forfeiture, or legal looting
Justice attained through luck, not rights

• • •
Closing the floodgates [2004]
Over the years, England's leaders, as well as those in other Western countries, including the United States, disdained advocates of immigration restriction and eschewed common sense. ... In the U.S., where hospitals are going bankrupt and closing under the burden of a never-ending stream of migrants, the end does not seem near. In California's San Fernando Valley, the region's oldest hospital announced that it will fold by the end of the year, which will bring to six the number of announced shutdowns of such facilities in a little over a year.

See also:
The battle for immigration reform heats up
Immigration: Betrayal By Black Elites

• • •
Five more years for your thoughts [2004]
The brazen, unconstitutional nature of these "Gotcha!" laws, contrived by politically powerful interest groups to penalize American whites, have been cited by legal scholars, lawyers, and lots of just plain, ordinary citizens, who are not deaf, dumb and blind. ... How does one tell if a fight really centered around race, or religion, or gender bias? A court should not have to speculate on such a subject, since, in this case, its only role should be establishing punishment for the actual crime of assault -- the physical, tangible crime, not the "thought crime."

See also Blog post:
Abolish all 'hate crime' laws