I have been doing a LOT of reading this morning about Blacks and the Drug War and what I'm finding is that the Black opinion leaders are going after the President on the subject. Hard. And for the last few months just about continuously. From
Charles Blow at the New York Times to Wilton D. Alston at Lew Rockwell and and a lot of folks in between, I think he will have to shift policy soon under that pressure. My guess is that the policy pivot will come within a few months of the airing of "Prohibition" in early October. Not that I expect any actual change. But even a change in the rhetoric would be welcome. The actual change IMO will come from the Rs. They are a stubborn lot (I can appreciate that) but once they change their minds they will follow through.
Race hustlers have always been with us.
There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs….There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public. – Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915)Here is a guy victimized by the race hustlers:
"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved." - Jesse JacksonBummer Jesse.
In an article on what Obama can do to regain public support, I came across this little gem referring to Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain.
The racist pizza guy?BBBut Herman Cain is Black. Um. I thought the rule was that Black people can't be racist. Wait. I get it. Only Republican Blacks are racist. Those Blacks targeting whites at the Wisconsin State Fair? Republicans all.
In news about all the post racial harmony we have heard so much about lately, there was a Beat Whitey night at the Iowa State Fair.
Des Moines police are trying to determine what led to a series of attacks outside the Iowa State Fairgrounds over the weekend that included the assault of two police officers.Fifty years ago I was marching for civil rights. Well, I ain't marchin anymore.
At least three people were arrested Friday through early Monday morning. Other arrests may occur as officers investigate the incidents, officials said.
There are indications that some of the fights - which appear to involve mostly teenagers and young adults - were racially motivated, police said.
"We don't know if this was juveniles fighting or a group of kids singling out white citizens leaving the fairgrounds," Sgt. Lori Lavorato said. "It's all under investigation, but it's very possible it has racial overtones."
Officials announced last week that they were stepping up security outside the fairgrounds after a series of attacks Aug. 14 that included a pair of stabbings. Investigators are still investigating those assaults and victims intend to pursue charges.
Sgt. David Murillo stated in a report on Friday night, "On-duty officers at the fairgrounds advise there was a group of 30 to 40 individuals roaming the fairgrounds openly calling it 'beat whitey night.' "and:
State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, who has worked to fight gang-related violence, said he doesn't have enough information to decide if the fights were racially motivated. He said police comments that race was involved could miss other factors, such as nonracial taunting.Mr. Abdul-Samad seems to be quite a gamer himself. Note: I have gone into the Zone (as my black friend calls it) from time to time when I lived in Chicago. I always went with an appropriately pigmented escort.
"Unfortunately, like any other city, you have certain parts of town that individuals congregate in," Abdul-Samad said. "You have those that go into that area with no problem, and those who cannot."
He added, "We of course need to work on race relations. If anyone says we don't, they are playing games with themselves."
In a discussion of Black on Hispanic violence at Riehl World View I came across this comment:
The whole issue of where 'Hispanics' will ultimately fit in between whites and blacks has intrigued me for years. While some 'Hispanics', notably Puerto Ricans and Cubans, may be partly or wholly 'black' most of the Latin American 'Hispanics' and certainly the Iberian 'Hispanics' are either white or a mixture of white and descendants of the indigenous peoples who predated the Spanish conquest.I have nothing to add.
I have never forgotten a conversation between one of the leaders of Mecha (and affiliated with LaRaza) and his brother, home on leave from the Army, as a group of us sat drinking beer at a fiesta. The activist was talking about solidarity with blacks, and his brother called bulls**t on him, stating at length and heatedly that when push came to shove, blacks were as hostile to 'Mexicans' (his term) as to whites, that most whites he encountered (though not all) would give Mexicans a fair shot if they spoke decent English and didn't behave like 'pachucos', and that if push came to shove and it came to a race war between the blacks and the whites, he and the other Chicanos he knew in the Army would take the whites any day. His brother listened very thoughtfully. In over 2 more years of knowing him, I never heard him or any of the people he was close to speak of solidarity with blacks again.
Posted by: CatoRenasci Monday, August 16, 2010 at 09:37 AM
Some interesting things are going on in New York State.
During the long years of Republican control, the all-white GOP "conference" would regularly bemoan its lack of diversity, and make extra efforts to recruit minority Senate candidates and hire minority staff.We have come a LONG way baby.
During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers.
But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.
The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, "We've been told to only hire minorities.''
Did you know that the word canvas was derived from cannabis? Well, I digress. Even before I have started. How is that for lack of discipline? Now on to the heart of the matter. Patrick Buchanan (yeah I know) has an interesting column on this past week in Presidential politics.
Barack Obama just had the worst week since his beloved pastor, Jeremiah Wright, decided to expatiate on black liberation theology at the National Press Club.Wait til his wife finds out. Fooling around with Paris. Oh? Not that Paris? Never mind. I guess she comes into the story later.
Coming off his royal progress through the Near and Middle East, Berlin, Paris and London, Barack had surged to a nine-point lead in the Gallup tracking poll. By Friday, he was back to a dead heat with a 72-year-old opponent with none of his natural skills, in a year when grocers are pulling Republican brands off the shelves.
For all its gracelessness, the McCain campaign, given openings by Barack, stepped in and put Muhammad Ali on the canvas.
The first opening was the clumsiness with which Barack dealt with a planned visit to wounded U.S. troops in Landshul, Germany.
While the first half of his foreign trip, to Afghanistan and Iraq, was official, the European tour was campaign related. Yet, it was on this leg that a visit to wounded U.S. soldiers had been scheduled. As campaigning in a military hospital is prohibited, the visit was canceled.
But, instead of going ahead and visiting the troops alone, without aides, press or cameras, Barack bailed out and flew on to Paris.
This left the McCain folks an opening to paint Obama as a cold-hearted opportunist avid to visit a military hospital only if he could bring in press and cameras to record his compassion.Barack has not been reticent about playing the race card. In fact Jon Stewart of Comedy Central, no Republican, has made fun of Barack and others supporting his campaign doing just that.
Enraged Obama aides savagely accused McCain of running a dishonorable campaign. This reflex reaction, and the ugly brawl that ensued, made some Americans think less of Obama, but many more forget what a success his foreign trip had been.
Came then the Paris-Britney ad. This opens with shots of the wayward blondes, then of Barack, presuming to equate the three as vacuous, insubstantial and aimless. Purpose: Disparage Barack’s rock-star popularity and turn it into something laughable.
While the ad seemed both defensive and non-credible, too much of a stretch to be believed — even Republicans derided it as “childish” — it apparently acted as something of a matador’s cape snapped in front of an already tormented Obama.
Stung, Barack retorted: “What they’re going to try is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills you know. He’s risky.”
Barack was accusing the McCain campaign of implying he is risky because he is black.
This was the opening Rick Davis of McCain’s campaign needed to deliver a vicious uppercut to Obama’s jaw, charging him with “playing the race card … from the bottom of the deck.” Added Davis, this was “divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.” McCain, sadly, agreed.
With that, both benches cleared.
Saturday, Bob Herbert of The New York Times charged McCain and the Republican Party with producing ads that are “slimy … foul, poisonous … designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.”
Sunday, Gene Robinson of The Washington Post accused McCain of “running a desperate, ugly campaign.”
The Britney-Paris ad calling Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” was an attempt to “turn Obama’s popularity into a flaw.”
Now, undeniably, McCain’s ad was designed to minimize and mock Obama’s popularity as a modern form of Beatlemania.
But what is wrong with that?
On the weekend, the McCain folks released another ad. Called “The One,” it features Barack’s grandiose pronouncements about who he is, what he means to mankind and the marvelous miracles that await our messiah’s arrival — and twins him with Moses (Charlton Heston) parting the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments.”
The effectiveness of the ad is that people laugh with it, and so doing, laugh at the perceived pretentiousness of Barack Obama.
In a week, Barack, an object of media homage on his trip abroad, has become an object of mockery in much of Middle America. Though his media allies may howl racism, most Americans tend more and more to dismiss this. That card has been played so often it’s dog-eared.
And Barack’s raising the race issue anew seems suicidal. When one is winning the black vote 94 to 1, does it make sense to keep pushing into the face of the 87 percent of Americans who are Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian that the next president will definitely not be one of you?
Juanita Gonzales, a Clinton supporter, says that you need to get over Your White Guilt.
Obama’s ascent rests on White America’s Guilt Ridden identity, a Guilt reaching into all forms of speech and action deemed racist or insulting forming part of a totalitarian race regime mostly enforced against Whites, but to which we are all increasingly hostage. White Guilt is the work of Whites themselves, but its leading exponents are Blacks, while the flames are fanned by a general culture of Victimhood increasingly marketed to to all segments of American society.It is long and it is very good. The Lady sounds like a Republican.
In speaking of White Guilt, I am not speaking of “Whites” per se, but of America’s totalitarian race regime, of which, Jamal argues, Mr. Obama is the main beneficiary.
There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs….There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
– Booker T. Washington
Economist Paul Krugman gets it.
The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key.Yep. I think that perfectly explains Republican Bobby Jindal's win in Louisiana. Krugman is a genius.
Commenter haskell at Durham in Wonderland brings to my attention this interesting quote:
Hiram Revels, an African-American senator from Mississippi, wrote President U.S. Grant:Same as it ever was. Only the parties have been changed."Since reconstruction, the masses of my people have been, as it were, enslaved in mind by unprincipled adventurers, who, caring nothing for country, were willing to stoop to anything no matter how infamous, to secure power to themselves, and perpetuate it..... My people have been told by these schemers, when men have been placed on the ticket who were notoriously corrupt and dishonest, that they must vote for them; that the salvation of the party depended upon it; that the man who scratched a ticket was not a Republican. This is only one of the many means these unprincipled demagogues have devised to perpetuate the intellectual bondage of my people.... The bitterness and hate created by the late civil strife has, in my opinion, been obliterated in this state, except perhaps in some localities, and would have long since been entirely obliterated, were it not for some unprincipled men who would keep alive the bitterness of the past, and inculcate a hatred between the races, in order that they may aggrandize themselves by office, and its emoluments, to control my people, the effect of which is to degrade them."
According to the American founders all men are created equal.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...Does that mean all men have equal talents? Of course not. Some are fast runners and some are slow runners. Some are very smart some are not so smart. The equality the founders professed was equality before the law. And there by hangs a tale.
Running offers the best prima facie case for the potential impact of body type differences. Athletes of West African descent dominate sports requiring speed and jumping, such as basketball and football. They hold the fastest two hundred 100-meter times, all under 10 seconds, and 494 of the top 500 times. In last weekend's NFL draft, of the 69 players who ran the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds or less, only one is white.How about marathons? That is a little different story.
Humans are different, the consequence of thousands of years of evolution in varying terrains. This is not an issue of black and white. East African blacks, from Kenya and Ethiopia, for example, have traveled a different evolutionary path and are genetically distinct in many aspects of their body type and physiology from West Africans. The best East African time in the 100 meters, 10.28 seconds, ranks near 5,000 on the all time list.White folks sure got short changed when it comes to being runners. There must be some kind of athletics white people are good at. In fact there is.
While relatively poor sprinters, East Africans win more than 50 percent of top endurance races. Almost all trace their ancestry to the 6,000-8,000 foot highlands that snake along the western edge of the Great Rift Valley. This region of roughly 1.5 million wins 40 percent of international distance events. The Nandi district in Kenya, 500,000 people – one-twelve-thousandth of Earth's population – sweeps an unfathomable 20 percent, marking it as the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in the history of sports. They win in large measure because elite runners have a near perfect biomechanical package for endurance: lean, ectomorphic physiques and huge natural lung capacity.
"Kenyans are born with a high number of slow twitch fibers," states Bengt Saltin, director of the Institute of Sports Science in Copenhagen. "They have 70 to 75 percent of their muscle fibers being slow. Very many in sports physiology would like to believe that it is training, the environment, what you eat that plays the most important role. But based on the data it is 'in your genes' whether or not you are talented or whether you will become talented."
Genetically linked, highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, lung capacity and the ability to use energy more efficiently are not evenly distributed among populations and cannot be explained. For example, whites of Eurasian ancestry, who have, on average, more natural upper-body strength, predictably dominate weightlifting, field events such as the shot-put and hammer (whites hold 47 of the top 50 throws), and the offensive line in football. Where flexibility is key, East Asians shine, such as in diving and some skating and gymnastic events (hence the term "Chinese splits").What does he mean by cannot be explained? I think he means that there is no explanation for the clustering of traits in certain groups other than isolated populations in different environments. Natural selection. Darwin in action. In the 100,000 years since our ancestors left Africa we have differentiated according to environment. That is pretty rapid evolution.
Several analyses have confirmed the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity. In the most recent, published this year, all but five of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group. When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9 percent of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary.Now here comes the hard part. I think that it is now evident and different races have different athletic talents and even within races there are still more subdivisions. What about cognitive ability? Something the scientists call 'g', but we will call it by its better known but somewhat inaccurate term intelligence quotient or IQ. The term 'g' refers to raw computing power. IQ (not 'g') is divided into two main parts. Verbal and spatial intelligence.
Ashkenazi levels of real world accomplishment are impressive and thus support the IQ studies. Jewish Americans make up no more than three percent of the U.S. adult population. But in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed outSo that is one example of variation on the high end. The results are obvious. The differentiation of the Ashkenazi Jews happened in a span of 1,000 years or less. That is very rapid evolution."During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series." [pp 26-27]Interestingly, the Ashkenazi cognitive advantage seems to be mostly in verbal and numeric, rather than visual, skills. For example, in Hollywood, fewer top cinematographers are Jewish compared to screenwriters or agents.
When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve--the role of intelligence in reshaping America's class structure--a chance to surface.The American Psychological Association, not a hot bed of racism, checked out The Bell Curve and this is what they found.
The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard's faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.
It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve's scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience.
The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public's misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.
Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders' assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
There is no technical dispute on some of the core issues. In the aftermath of The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association established a task force on intelligence whose report was published in early 1996. The task force reached the same conclusions as The Bell Curve on the size and meaningfulness of the black-white difference. Historically, it has been about one standard deviation in magnitude among subjects who have reached adolescence; cultural bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference; and the tests are about equally predictive of educational, social, and economic outcomes for blacks and whites. However controversial such assertions may still be in the eyes of the mainstream media, they are not controversial within the scientific community.What does all this mean?
The most important change in the state of knowledge since the mid-1990's lies in our increased understanding of what has happened to the size of the black-white difference over time. Both the task force and The Bell Curve concluded that some narrowing had occurred since the early 1970's. With the advantage of an additional decade of data, we are now able to be more precise:
(1) The black-white difference in scores on educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly.
(2) The black-white convergence in scores on the most highly "g-loaded" tests--the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability--has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 90 years ago.
Commenter firebug at Durham in Wonderland points out this really wonderful site called Pandagon and a discussion of the Duke case going on there.
They talk about the culture of rape that allowed and encouraged the "rape" of the "victim" in the case.
If Federal Crime Statistics[pdf] are to be believed there is very little white on black rape in America. The numbers show that black on white rape is the predominant interracial rape crime. If you account for population it is even worse.
So I suppose you could say that there is a culture of interracial rape in America.
What supports it? Just listen to the music.
When a culture no longer honors its women, you have a culture in serious decline.
Clayton Cramer discusses the statistics.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
Mark Steyn has a very good piece over at one of America's more conservative papers the Chicago Sun Times (for those of you from the area - quite a reversal, eh?).
If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.What Steyn leaves out is the history of the Democratic Party when it comes to slavery and the Civil War. Or the War of Southern Stupidity if you prefer.
...the Republicans had provoked the South into secession; that the Republicans were waging the war in order to establish their own domination, suppress civil and states rights, and impose "racial equality"; and that military means had failed and would never restore the Union.Things haven't changed much have they? One point: they now adopt racial equality while still opposing religious equality. They hate Conservative Christians and all pro-Israeli Jews.
As was true of the Democratic party as a whole, the influence of Peace Democrats varied with the fortunes of war. When things were going badly for the Union on the battlefield, larger numbers of people were willing to entertain the notion of making peace with the Confederacy. When things were going well, Peace Democrats could more easily be dismissed as defeatists. But no matter how the war progressed, Peace Democrats constantly had to defend themselves against charges of disloyalty. Revelations that a few had ties with secret organizations such as the Knights of the Golden Circle helped smear the rest.You know you can learn a lot by studying history. And what do we learn:
The most prominent Copperhead leader was Clement L. Valladigham of Ohio, who headed the secret antiwar organization known as the Sons of Liberty. At the Democratic convention of 1864, where the influence of Peace Democrats reached its high point, Vallandigham persuaded the party to adopt a platform branding the war a failure, and some extreme Copperheads plotted armed uprisings. However, the Democratic presidential candidate, George B. McClellan, repudiated the Vallandigham platform, victories by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Phillip H. Sheridan assured Lincoln's reelection, and the plots came to nothing.
With the conclusion of the war in 1865 the Peace Democrats were thoroughly discredited. Most Northerners believed, not without reason, that Peace Democrats had prolonged war by encouraging the South to continue fighting in the hope that the North would abandon the struggle. [bold by ed.]
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.
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. I can use the money - well actually I will use the proceeds to buy something from Amazon. I get a better deal that way.
