Wesley Howe

Some people are upset about the Chinese government blocking access to specific websites for what the government considers to be inappropriate material for their citizens. It was reported they had recently completely blocked access to all of UTube.

A lot of people are concerned about human rights and censorship of anti-government statements by the Chinese. Besides large commercial sites, small blogger sites have been banned for statements that are critical of the Chinese government.

My opinion is that if the Chinese banned this website, I would have a lot fewer headaches because the number of  attempts to hack the website would go down considerably. Serious attempts are made regularly by Chinese websites to compromise web pages and steal information from end users. While Eastern Europe and Russia are also hotbeds of hacker activities, China certainly hosts many online criminals.

Having them banned from your accessing your website would be a blessing for most webmasters.

I am not a particular fan of Mr. Obama… I have expressed my opinion on his chances for success before, and I believe they are low. I think he has potential, in that he may be remembered alongside Jimmy Carter as presiding over some of the worst times in modern history. Economically, we’ve gone from the frying pan into the fire under his short term in office, and I do not see any upside coming soon. Regardless of who is at fault, or when the problem started, and why, if conditions continue to deteriorate, Barack “Barry” Obama will own the failure.

He is already losing his aura of invincibility, and his supporters are turning slowly. You can see this in the amount of criticism levelled at him for his joke on Leno’s show about the Special Olympics. People are crying that this is unfair, and mean. Somewhere in this melee are people who oppose Obama and want to pour gasoline on the fire. But what is telling is that there is no one stepping forward to defend him among his supporters.

As far as the joke goes, there is really nothing wrong with it except it is exactly on target. The speech police would like to erase any mention of “disadvantaged” people in a negative light.  The fact is that the Special Olympics were created as a place where expectations were lowered for a special reason. But lowered expectations and a great cause do not change the fact that most of the contests are awkward and in general poorly executed. Like Mr. Obama’s bowling… but at least he recognizes his shortcomings there. Trying to pretend that Special Olympians don’t fall short by ordinary standards is not realistic, and attacking people that dare say so is censorship by intimidation.

In Arizona, a gun shop owner is accused of conspiring with Mexican nationals to use straw buyers (people with clean records paid maybe $100 to pose as the gun buyer) to supply the “Mexican Drug Gangs” with guns. At least one gun used in the murder of a high official was traced back to his store. I feel comfortable that a jury will be able to sort out whether the owner was complicit or if he was just another pawn in a criminal scheme, but Mexico complains that the sale of guns in the U.S. is one of their problems with the high violence in their country, especially near the border with the U.S.

So let us reflect on that. We have laws already against buying guns for someone else and laws that require a check against criminal records for every gun sale, gun sellers have plenty of record keeping and retentin requirements already. Anyone that has ever bought a gun knows that they have to fill out a several page form, “with no abbreviations”, and then wait for the check to be completed (which generally takes little time). We enforce these laws, as is evidenced in part by the prosecution of the gun shop owner in AZ (that is the official U.S. Postal abbreviation for Arizona that you can’t use on the gun purchase form).

What the Mexicans are really complaining about is that they cannot keep guns purchased in the U.S. out of their country. They do not have any checks at the border, criminals can just put them in the trunk and drive right into their country. They have a problem, easily evidenced from counting corpses with bullet holes in them, but their lax security is passed over in favor of trying to blame the U.S. for the problem.

So the Congress-critters here are going to help solve their problem on the backs of U.S. citizens. Of course, one thing they are certain of is that we need to once again enact an “assault weapons ban”. That is a paper tiger, a “feel good” sop to liberal gun haters. The previous assault weapons only banned essentially cosmetic items on some rifles, like bayonette mounts. Someone shot by a .223 rifle, whether equipped with a standard stock or a folding stock, regardless of the bayonette mount presence or absence, will suffer the same wound (and one likely to be fatal). This same rifle is used, frequently here in Texas, to kill wild hogs (but that is a different problem). But hey, they are going to “get tough” and “do something”.

The other proposed solution is to give some more of our taxpayer funds to the Border Patrol so they can check vehicles leaving the U.S. going to Mexico for these problem guns. As if the U.S. right now has unlimited funds for starting new governmental programs, we now want to enforce Mexican law? If we want to help Mexico, then perhaps we should help them set up their own surveillance program. Then, if U.S. law enforcement sees a suspicious vehicle, we can pass the information on. Why would we want to use U.S. officials lacking clear constitutional authority to stop vehicles leaving the U.S., and to be firther endangering U.S. law enforcement officials (hey, these guys are criminals already, no telling what they might do in a confrontation)? Let us help the Mexicans solve their problem, but not with bandaids and police-state tactics.