Culture — Not Race — Determines Many Crime Stats

If you know Los Angeles neighborhoods, USC is in the "hood" and UCLA is not:
there have been 117 homicides within two miles of the USC campus but only seven near UCLA.

PJ Media » Culture — Not Race — Determines Many Crime Stats

Gentle readers, we are about to sail into dangerous waters, on the rocky shoals of which John Derbyshire recently ran aground and got himself sacked from National Review. So we must do our best to steer carefully through the many hazards lest we come to a similar fate. Yes, I say “we” because while I, in opining as I am about to on race and crime, may risk losing commercial opportunities as a writer, you the reader face risks as well. If you travel in those circles in which discussions of race are limited to extolling the many glories of “diversity,” and if after reading what follows below you are found by your peers to be insufficiently condemnatory of me and what I’ve written, you are in jeopardy of being ostracized to a life of social exile among the wretched and unenlightened.

You’ve been warned, so here we go.

I’ve been with the Los Angeles Police Department for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years. (I keep the details of my tenure and assignment vague so as to foil the efforts of those seeking to unmask me, the number of whom may soon increase.) I’ve spent the better part of my career working in neighborhoods in South and South Central Los Angeles, i.e. those most bedeviled by violent crime. I have also spent time working in some of L.A.’s most affluent neighborhoods, so I feel qualified to comment on the differences I’ve observed over the course of a long career combating crime and villainy in America’s second-largest city.

For the record, I concur with Mark Steyn, who in his discussion of the Taki’s Magazine piece that got John Derbyshire expelled fromNational Review, pointed to culture rather than racial determinism as explaining socioeconomic differences between groups of people. “Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados?” Steyn asks. “Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.”

A similar comparison – with similarly stark results – can be made in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times maintains a database of statistical information on cities and neighborhoods across L.A. County. The communities of View Park-Windsor Hills andBaldwin Hills-Crenshaw are adjacent to one another in an area four to five miles northeast of Los Angeles International Airport. The concentration of black residents in View Park-Windsor Hills, at 86.5 percent, is the highest of any area measured in the L.A. Timesdatabase. The Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw neighborhood, just to the north, is home to the county’s fifth-highest concentration of blacks, at 71.3 percent.

-go to link-

He is running as if the last three years didn’t happen. Obama’s Surreal Campaign

He ran the first time with a record, now he runs without a record.

What he has done are things of which no one is proud! Who would be?

Obama’s Surreal Campaign - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online

3-14-12 By Victor Davis Hanson

As the election year heats up, we seem not to have noticed the surreal nature of the campaign. One would expect Barack Obama to run on his record from 2009 to 2012, and especially during 2009–10, when he had a solidly Democratic Congress and passed his signature Obamacare. But he is not. Instead, we are hearing only that the probable opposition nominee, Mitt Romney, will be embarrassed by the similarities between Obamacare and his own Romneycare in Massachusetts. Examine that logic: Supposedly landmark legislation is now defended not on its own merits or popularity, but by a sort of “He did it too”?
During the 2004 campaign, the Kerry camp derided 5.5 percent unemployment as proof of a “jobless recovery.” Today 8.3 percent is deemed a sign of a real rebound. In 2008, when George W. Bush had borrowed $4 trillion over eight years, the deficits were termed by candidate Obama as “unpatriotic”; trumping that total in just four years is now called much-needed “stimulus.”

The price of gasoline has more than doubled since January 2009, and the rise is not over yet. This summer might still see the price triple in less than four years. In the old days of Economics 101, supply and demand had, by general consensus, some effect on price. I think the president believes that still, since he is pondering another release from the strategic petroleum reserve. Why, then, is he asking us to believe that putting off limits vast areas of known oil and gas reserves in Alaska, offshore, in the West, and in the Gulf of Mexico will not have much effect on gasoline prices? Vast new production of natural gas on private lands has helped radically lower natural-gas prices. But drilling for new oil is again caricatured as it was in 2008 (when candidate Obama advised us instead to inflate our tires and tune up our cars; this time he is touting algae), as if newly pumped oil from a freshly discovered field were not as efficacious as previously pumped oil from a reserve. In an age when unemployment is high, the budget deficit obscene, and our trade deficit at near-record levels, more U.S.-produced oil — aside from lowering gasoline prices — would create jobs, enrich the Treasury, and curtail what we must borrow abroad.
-more at link-

Marx, Jesus, or Obama, Who Are You Going To Believe

While walking on water, Obama talks to Chauncey Gardener and thinks Jesus wants us to pay higher taxes. Obama thinks he talks to Jesus. He talks to Mohammad. He talks too much. ♘

Marx, Jesus, or Obama, Who Are You Going To Believe - Page 1 - Floyd and Mary Beth Brown - Townhall Conservative

2-4-12 Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

President Obama has hit a new low. By promoting his reasoning for hiking taxes on the rich at the National Prayer Breakfast, he diminished the seriousness of his proposals and manipulated Jesus' teachings for his own political purposes.

Listening to Obama talk about taxation almost as a form of worship was beyond the bounds as he said, "For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required." He was quoting and distorting the Gospel of Luke and the Parable of the Faithful Servant. And, as Christians, we are greatly grieved by what Obama has done.

Obama is quoting a small portion of a lengthy answer given by Christ in response to a question by St. Peter. Here is a more complete version of Christ's dialogue from the New International Version:

"Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth; he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, 'My master is taking a long time in coming,' and he then begins to beat the menservants and maidservants and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked."

-more at link-

Hoover started FDR’s New Deal that put the US into a long deep depression. There was little "Great" about it.

There is nothing "Great" about this recession either. Bush, his cronies, and the Democrat Congress intervened in the economy. Then Obama deepened the current recession by restructuring it with Obamacare and continuous over-regulation! The path is familiar and has led to economic perdition.

Nothing but incompetent government intervention.

FDR’s Advisers Knew What Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman Don’t | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

by Steven Horwitz posted August 18, 2011

One persistent myth that libertarians and other free-market types have to unmask is that President Herbert Hoover’s belief in laissez faire was responsible for dramatically worsening what became the Great Depression. The myth that Hoover stood around and did nothing while the economy collapsed gets repeated ad nauseum in the media by pundits including everyone from Nobel Prize winners like Paul Krugman to, most recently, MSNBC talk-show host Rachel Maddow.

The punditry is right about one thing: Hoover can be blamed for turning what would have likely been a severe but short market correction in the wake of the artificial boom of the 1920s into a deep and long Great Depression. The reason, however, is not that Hoover did nothing, but that he did many things. Hoover, much like FDR, was skeptical about free markets, as both his earlier work as secretary of commerce and his own description of his beliefs made clear. Faced with the worsening crisis in the fall of 1929, he expanded the federal government’s role in a whole variety of ways.

Long List of Interventions

Without going into detail about any one of them, the Hoover interventions include: expanded public works, greater government control over agriculture, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, a virtual end to immigration, government loans for construction and other businesses, and greater enforcement of antitrust laws. Most important was Hoover’s pressuring businesses to not cut wages even as the prices of their output fell. The result was higher real wages, which were responsible for the unemployment rate topping out at 25 percent, causing the greatest human toll of the Great Depression. (I ignore here the very important mistakes made by the Federal Reserve System in allowing the major deflation to take place, not because it was unimportant – it was crucial to making matters worse – but because Hoover had no real control over the Fed.)

Hoover also proposed budgets that raised total federal expenditures by almost 50 percent in nominal dollars and over 60 percent when we adjust for the deflation. He ran budget deficits in 1931 and 1932 that were 52.5 percent and 43.3 percent of total federal expenditures those two years. No year under Roosevelt between 1933 and 1941 had a deficit that large. Finally, in 1932 Hoover presided over the largest peacetime tax increase ^[1] in U.S. history, which among other things increased the income-tax rate on top incomes from 25 to 63 percent. This is hardly the program of a man committed to laissez faire.

[read on at the above link and read more in depth in Amity Shlaes' "Forgotten Man"]

Cut Obama's spending off and eliminate funding for wasteful and useless agencies!

We sure got 'change we can believe in' from a president more incompetent than Carter.

News from The Associated Press

Aug 7, 11:03 full short post

S&P executive: 1 in 3 chance of future downgrade

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Standard & Poor's official says there is a 1 in 3 chance that the U.S. credit rating could be downgraded another notch if conditions erode over the next six to 24 months.

The credit rating agency's managing director, John Chambers, tells ABC's "This Week" that if the fiscal position of the U.S. deteriorates further, or if political gridlock tightens even more, a further downgrade is possible.

Chambers also said Sunday that it would take "stabilization and eventual decline" of the federal debt as a share of the economy as well as more consensus in Washington for the U.S. to win back a top rating.

S&P downgraded the U.S. rating Friday, from AAA to AA+, for the first time.

© 2011 The Associated Press.