Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

Looking more like a good shoot

The recently released autopsy report appears to indicate that the witness who claimed Michael Brown was shot in the back, with his arms raised up in surrender, was completely lying and the subsequent protests are based on an intrinsically false premise:

Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a police officer, sparking protests around the nation, was shot at least six times, including twice in the head, a preliminary private autopsy performed on Sunday found.

One of the bullets entered the top of Mr. Brown’s skull, suggesting his head was bent forward when it struck him and caused a fatal injury, according to Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the City of New York, who flew to Missouri on Sunday at the family’s request to conduct the separate autopsy. It was likely the last of bullets to hit him, he said.

Mr. Brown, 18, was also shot four times in the right arm, he said, adding that all the bullets were fired into his front.

My first thought is that was remarkably good shooting for a cop. The fact that Brown’s head was bent forward when he was struck indicates that both the video witness and the friend of the police officer involved were telling the truth when they reported that the 6’4″, 292-pound Brown was charging the officer when he was shot dead.

None of this excuses the militarization of the police across America, or the initially over-the-top response to the protests that involved heavy machine guns and armored personnel carriers. But it is looking increasingly as if, in this particular case, the entire affair is concerns nothing more than a cop justifiably shooting a vibrant criminal who tried to attack him.

Which, of course, says nothing about the justification for every other police shooting in the country.

More Ferguson details

A newly discovered witness statement is contradicting the mainstream media narrative of a man getting shot while surrendering with his hands up:

#1 How’d he get from there to there?
#2 Because he ran, the police was still in the truck – cause he was like over the truck
{crosstalk}
#2 But him and the police was both in the truck, then he ran – the police got out and ran after him
{crosstalk}
#2 Then the next thing I know he doubled back toward him cus – the police had his gun drawn already on him –
#1. Oh, the police got his gun
#2 The police kept dumpin on him, and I’m thinking the police kept missing – he like – be like – but he kept coming toward him
{crosstalk}
#2 Police fired shots – the next thing I know – the police was missing
#1 The Police?
#2 The Police shot him
#1 Police?
#2 The next thing I know … I’m thinking … the dude started running … (garbled something about “he took it from him”)

This is terribly important because if Mike Brown had been shot, and he advanced towards the cop instead of surrendering, it would substantiate the narrative that the policeman shot in self-defense due to the fact that he was being threatened with severe bodily harm.

This corroborates an account of the event given by a friend of Officer Darren Wilson:

Well, then Michael takes off and gets to be about 35 feet away. And, Darren’s first protocol is to pursue. So, he stands up and yells, “Freeze!” Michael and his friend turn around. And Michael taunts him… And then all the sudden he just started bumrushing him. He just started coming at him full speed. And, so he just started shooting. And, he just kept coming. And, so he really thinks he was on something.”

It’s far too unlikely that these two accounts are similar accidentally, having been from such disparate sources. The seeming witness in the background conversation is speaking with detail about the tragic shooting, and in a manner that runs contrary to the widespread version.

That doesn’t make it a good or necessary shoot, but it does belie the “execution” story.

Why didn’t they shoot?

I can understand the frustration of this citizen of Ferguson. But is it really any mystery why the Ferguson police are a little reluctant to pull the trigger these days?

A black Ferguson resident spoke with News Channel 5 TV in St. Louis. He said, “Why were the officers standing back? Why don’t they shoot these looters?”

On Friday night several Ferguson area businesses were hit by looters.

** Liquor Store Looted
** Sam’s Meat Market
** Chinese restaurant (for second time this week)
** Beauty Supply Store Looted
** Electronics Store Looted
** Domino’s Pizza fire – May have been inside the business
** Bus Stop Vandalized

This is why the officers were standing back. Apparently Africans in Ferguson are now literally outside the law:

County Police told Fox 2 News that its officers were at the Ferguson Market earlier when looters showed up, but were ordered to “Stand down” by Missouri State Highway Patrol incident commanders at the scene and basically withdrew and allowed the looters to have their way with the store.  

UPDATE: Not that I am inclined to cut the overmilitarized cops any slack whatsoever, but here are pictures of the new Trayvon, that poor widdle Negro child who never done nothing to nobody just a few minutes before he was assassinated while minding his own business by a white raciss police officer.

The fact that Michael Brown was an oversized thief prone to petty violence and throwing his weight around doesn’t justify his shooting. But it does paint a very different picture of what went down after he was confronted by the police officer who killed him while he was strutting down the middle of the street with his stolen Swisher Sweets.

We’ve been warning you

esr points out the obvious. Twice.

I join my voice to those of Rand Paul and other prominent libertarians who are reacting to the violence in Ferguson, Mo. by calling for the demilitarization of the U.S.’s police. Beyond question, the local civil police in the U.S. are too heavily armed and in many places have developed an adversarial attitude towards the civilians they serve, one that makes police overreactions and civil violence almost inevitable.

But I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths. And there’s another injustice being done here: the specific assumption, common among civil libertarians, that police overreactions are being driven by institutional racism. I believe this is dangerously untrue and actually impedes effective thinking about how to prevent future outrages.

In the Kivila language of the Trobriand Islands there is a lovely word,
“mokita”, which means “truth we all know but agree not to talk about”. I
am about to speak some mokitas.

First, it’s ridiculous that some liberals have been feigning to be ignorant of libertarians protesting the militiarization of the badge gang. Radley Balko has singlehandedly led the charge against it, and been backed up by Glenn Reynolds’s campaign to advocate the legal right of the citizenry to film the police. There are scores of posts dating back years right here on this blog under the tag NWA was right. It’s the Left that has been silently approving of the growing police state, not the libertarian Right. I don’t need to add my voice to esr’s and Rand Paul’s because it has been there all along. Demilitarize the police and do it now!

Second, the Left simply has to deal with racial reality. In the USA, crime is a predominantly black problem. Not because they’re poor, not because the Man is keeping them down, not because of slavery, but because blacks are, on average, less intelligent, possess shorter time preferences, and are much more likely to have a genetic predisposition towards aggressive behavior than the rest of the population. Those are three facts that have been repeatedly substantiated by science and there is literally nothing to discuss about them except for the consequences. Nor are they any more in doubt or racist than the statement that young men between the ages of 15 and 30 commit more crime than old women between the ages of 65 and 80 is sexist or ageist.

Third, I endorse Instapundit’s suggestion: “A simple rule would be to provide that police can have only weapons that
a civilian could lawfully possess, since they’re civilians themselves.”

A nonexistent nation

A commenter at Pharyngula doesn’t understand that there are more than two sides in America these days. Considerably more:

nich, 12 August 2014 at 9:15 pm
In fact, speaking of the fucking Bundy brigade, where the fuck are all the freedom fighters using their precious 2nd amendment rights to protect the citizenry from tyranny? They’ll show up armed to the teeth to protect some fucking cows and keep the darkies on their side of the border, but the government actually rolls up in armored vehicles to squash a legitimate protest and it’s fucking crickets from these clowns.

Of course it’s “fucking crickets”. The legitimate protest is not being conducted by their people. “American citizen” is now as meaningless a term as “citizen of the world” or “member of the human race”. The “darkies” in Ferguson who are, quite rightly in my opinion, protesting the latest murder of one of their own by the badge gang, have absolutely nothing in common with the armed, civilized freedom fighters who successfully withstood the federal forces at the Bundy ranch.

It’s not even an “enemy of my enemy” situation, because the Missouri police are not the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.

There is no nation in America any longer. The Left shattered whatever post-Civil War remnants of it remained in 1965, and it is gradually discovering that its fictitious “melting pot”, its romantic mythology of an “idea nation”, will not long survive the reality of differing peoples harboring radically different ideas inside the same borders. The armed white Christians in America will fight to defend themselves when finally forced to do so, but they’re no more likely to fight for African-Americans in Missouri than they are for African-Africans in Rwanda or the Congo. Or than any of those Africans were willing to show up to fight for a European-American rancher in Nevada.

I very much doubt that many, if any, of the Bundy Brigade support the Missouri police. But why should they risk their lives or shed any blood in the interest of defending those who are not their kind? After all, the police and the federal agents are American citizens too.

I’ve been reading Max Hasting’s book on World War I. It’s interesting, even though I disagree with his core perspective on who kicked it all off. The USA is, in some respects, in a position similar to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900. The analogy is far from perfect, but the key similarity is that of a fundamentally divided multi-ethnic empire with incompetent, overly centralized leadership carelessly throwing its weight around while failing to realize how the empire’s internal divisions make it dangerous for it to do so. Barack Hussein seriously weighing military intervention in Iraq while ignoring the flag of ISIS flying in New Jersey is as insane as anything Franz Joseph ever did.

When cynical leaders engage in wars, thinking to unite the people behind them, they tend to forget that this works when the people are, in fact, a people. A single people, a nation. Otherwise, the stresses of war tend to fracture countries on their ethnic and ideological divides. Once an identifiable Anglo-Saxon Christian nation possessed of a unique transnational ideology, the USA is no longer a nation in any meaningful sense of the word except for lines on a political map.

Many sincerely believed that the ideological aspect trumped the Anglo-Saxon and Christian aspects. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that, despite the survival of its trappings, the former has not survived the loss of the latter two elements. One should be no more surprised that the Bundy Brigade declined to come to the assistance of the blacks of Ferguson than one is that the Roman citizens of Gaul failed to come to the assistance of the Jews during the Great Revolt of 66 AD in Judea.

An erroneous conclusion re crime

Ron Unz is a smart guy and he does a lot of good work. But I strongly suspect he made a fundamental error in his examination of race and crime rates:

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009. One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data. Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions. If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality. Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status. But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

He’s correct about blacks committing crime at much higher rates than whites. But I think I can show that his conclusion that Hispanics commit rates at about the same rate as whites is wrong. The reason is that the metric he chose to try to pull out the information that the FBI is hiding is suboptimal.

I reached a very different conclusion when looking at race and homicide by firearm in 2012.

We will assume, for the sake of argument, that Hispanic victims are synonymous with Hispanic killers. The BJS supports this assumption, reporting that from 1976 to 2005, 86% of white victims were killed by whites and 94% of black victims were killed by black.  A CDC report states: “Homicide rates in 2010 among non-Hispanic, African-American males 10-24 years of age (51.5 per 100,000) exceeded those of Hispanic males (13.5 per 100,000) and non-Hispanic, White males in the same age group (2.9 per 100,000).”

We’re not concerned with the black homicide rate since we already know that.  What interests us is how the remaining 4,116 gun homicides are divided between whites and Hispanics.  The distribution indicated by the CDC report shows that 3,388 were Hispanic and only 728 were white.  This may be a little skewed by the focus on young males, but nevertheless provides a very credible estimate of 6.8 per 100k population, which would put the US-Latin firearms homicide rate in between Nicaragua at 5.9 and Paraguay at 7.4.  It would also indicate that the US-White homicide rate is 0.32 per 100k population, a per capita rate very close to The Netherlands at 0.33 although still higher than France, Germany, or the UK.

Now, it is theoretically possible that while young Hispanics commit a disproportionate amount of firearms homicide, Hispanics of all ages commit other crimes at the same rate as whites. This strikes me as a very unlikely conclusion, especially in light of what we know anecdotally from police and media reports.  Obviously more work needs to be done before the matter can be considered settled, but I think that this is sufficient to call Mr. Unz’s conclusion into question.

Fabled “Roots”

I’d heard that a fair amount of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning “Roots” was fictitious, but I didn’t know that a considerable amount of the book was plagiarized, or that the entire thing is about as historically legitimate as “Star Wars”.

Unfortunately, the general public is largely unaware of how Haley’s monumental family autobiography, stretching back to 18th-century Africa, has been discredited. Indeed, a 1997 BBC documentary expose of Haley’s work has been banned by U.S. television networks – especially PBS, which would normally welcome such a program.

Coincidentally, the “Roots” anniversary comes amid the growing scandal over disclosures of historian Stephen Ambrose’s multiple incidents of plagiarism. Because as Haley himself was forced to acknowledge, a large section of his book – including the plot, main character and scores of whole passages – was lifted from “The African,” a 1967 novel by white author Hal Courlander.

But plagiarism is the least of the problems in “Roots.” And they would likely have remained largely unknown, had journalist Philip Nobile not undertaken a remarkable study of Haley’s private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.

The result was featured in a devastating 1993 cover piece in the Village Voice. It confirmed – from Haley’s own notes – earlier claims that the alleged history of the book was a near-total invention…. Historical experts who checked Haley’s genealogical research discovered that, as one put it, “Haley got everything wrong in his pre-Civil War lineage and none of his plantation ancestors existed; 182 pages have no basis in fact.”

Given this damning evidence, you’d think Haley’s halo would long ago have vanished. But – given this week’s TV tribute – he remains a literary icon. Publicly, at least. The judge who presided over Haley’s plagiarism case admitted that “I did not want to destroy him” and so allowed him to settle quietly – even though, he acknowledged, Haley had repeatedly perjured himself in court.

The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider Haley’s prize, awarded in 1977 – in what former Columbia President William McGill, then a board member, has acknowledged was an example of “inverse racism” by a bunch of white liberals “embarrassed by our makeup.”

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, the left-wing literary establishment is desirous of the perceived success of black authors. The science fiction community is literally decades behind in handing out affirmative action awards to inept and derivative authors of diversity.

Quarantine the continent

Did the USA learn nothing from the AIDS epidemic? Why is a single flight from Africa being permitted to land anywhere in the USA or Europe? Do people not realize that were it not for the fact that he didn’t live long enough to board his flight to MSP, the eight hospital workers that Patrick Sawyer infected in Nigeria might well have been in St. Paul, Minnesota?

Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse told a Congressional Hearing that the WHO is underreporting the Ebola epidemic. “Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.”

Isaacs told of a prominent Liberian doctor who “openly mocked the existence of Ebola” by trying to enter a hospital isolation ward with no gloves or protective clothing. He and another man who accompanied him to the hospital both died within five days, Isaacs said. At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa. Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

Equipment might not be a problem for much longer. Finding people to wear them will. Ebola is rapidly killing off the medical personnel and shutting down the hospitals. The dead are being left to die in the street, where with a last effort, some of them crawl out to expire.

How many millions are going to have to die in the name of multiculturalism and insanity before we end it as the madness that it has always been? Africa is hapless and hopeless and it is not America’s or Europe’s job to save it. And neither America nor Europe will even be able to help it if we import its cultural dysfunctionalities and turn all of our cities into Detroits.

Perhaps we’ll be fortunate this time and the Ebola epidemic will remain
in Africa despite the medical community’s apparent determination to
spread it around the world… this time. And why are these infected Western health workers being back to their home countries? Salute their efforts to save others elsewhere, by all means, but they have no right, none at all, to put their home nations at risk.

UPDATE: “On Saturday, Guinea announced that it had closed its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia in a bid to halt the virus’s spread.”

So, if Guinea has done it, why don’t we? What can possibly be worth taking the chance of having it spread via air travel?

Will she write the story?

A female journalist gets a bigger story than she bargained for:

The woman was reporting on illegal immigration from France to Britain and police believe the attack was carried by some of the men she intended to write about in the northern France port.

Detectives described the attack as being of a “particularly brutal nature”….

The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was described as “a London student who had travelled to France to highlight problems surrounding clandestine immigration.”

I have little sympathy for this woman, and none at all if she fails to honestly tell her fellow Brits about what happened to her at the hands of these poor immigrants who are just seeking a better life in Britain.  This is why: “this is believed to be the first time that a journalist trying
to highlight their plight has been attacked.” 

If the damned pro-immigration press would be more honest about the terrible cost of immigration to the native population, I tend to doubt she would have traveled there to “highlight their plight” in the first place.

Europe belongs to us

Statements don’t get much more powerful than that. This generation appears to already know it is going to have to fight the corrupt power of the anti-democratic EU, but they have a powerful message that is going to resonate across Europe, and hopefully, across the Atlantic as well.

It’s fascinating to see how strongly people react to the video. Does it fill you with pride and hope, or does it fill you with anger and fear? Your instinctive reaction, not your subsequent intellectual rationalizations, will tell you whether you are on the side of Western civilization or against it.

The awakening of the European nations is a prelude to the great battle of the 21st century, which will be the struggle for America.