Category Archives: Crime

Train The Cameras On Police And First Responders

Crime, Economy, Fascism, Free Markets, Government, Law, Private Property, The State

Police and state-employed firefighters must be tethered electronically by video cams. The cameras worn on the helmets of weaponized government workers—they have enormous license to use their weapons—serve to keep them accountable. Business (say, free-market firefighters hired by an insurer) already polices its workforce, as it is in the business of pleasing, not killing, those it serves. Preventing fraud and abuse on the job is integral* to the job. (Guess why.) When will people get that the incentives that are at work in private property are missing from state-run systems?

Twelve or so minutes into “The Five” on Fox News, a heated airhead debate ensued over the suggestion of removing cameras from the helmets of cops and first responders. Airhead Bob Beckel said cameras must go. Kimberly Guilfoyle (not an airhead, but a bona fide statist) agreed. Poor Dana Ditz. She got it right but by default. She wants to give the boys in blue all the power in the world “to protect us.” Because Dana Ditz can’t reverse a situation in her not-so-nimble mind, she failed to see that cops filming also means cops being filmed, and abuses more likely exposed. (* Today, our Dana discovered the word “integral.” But in pronouncing it, she placed the emphasis incorrectly on the second syllable. Here’s the right way to say “integral.”)

Remember the only victim of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash, last month? She was killed not by the crash, but by our brave first responders.

FSGate:

The San Francisco Fire Department supervisors who took charge of the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash scene were not alerted by firefighters that a 16-year-old passenger had been found near the plane, leaving them powerless to prevent the girl from being run over by a rig after she was covered by fire-retardant foam, footage of the incident shows.

In the case of state employees, the incentive is absent to be really, really, really careful. After all, responsibility for damages and deaths is collectivized; taxpayers pick up the tab; lawmakers enact laws that shield the perp from responsibility, even protecting identities. (That’s why I say name and shame the pimps at TSA.)

Film them. The many good cops won’t mind

Glenn Beck Awakens To The Color Of Hate Crime (But Fails To Credit Those Who Went Before)

Crime, Ethics, Glenn Beck, Morality, Race, Racism

“Oprah Winfrey, you disgust me.” Those were powerful and dramatic words—Glenn Beck’s—but they were probably the only original comments he came up with today on his radio show, during which the broadcaster finally deigned to chronicle one of the most heinous black-on-white hate crimes to have been ignored by mainstream, second-hander media and The Man himself for years.

When Beck used the words “the boyfriend was actually the lucky one,” to segue into a description of the butchering by 5 blacks of twenty-one-year-old Channon Christian, I had an idea where the material might have come from.

Those were words I lifted, last week, from my 2011 book (“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”), for the WND column. Here’s the excerpt from “Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!”:

“Five blacks—four men and a woman—anally raped Hugh, then shot him to death, wrapped his body in bedding, soaked it in gasoline and set it alight. He was the lucky one. Channon, his fair and fragile-looking friend, was repeatedly gang raped by the four men—vaginally, anally and orally. Before she died, her murderers poured a household cleaner down her throat, in an effort to cleanse away DNA. She was left to die, either from the bleeding caused ‘by the tearing,’ or from asphyxiation. Knoxville officials would not say. She was then stuffed in a garbage can like trash.”

White trash.

For the information that he and his much-touted researchers had missed, Beck credited a nameless listener, who, if he exists, is probably an avid reader of what Peter Brimelow dubbed the Guerrilla Press.

Yes, the superb reporters at VDARE have been doing the work Beck and the Republican Lincoln idolators have hitherto refused to do. As has Michelle Malkin, the departed Larry Auster, Jack Kerwick (a much-needed, new arrival), this writer, WND reporters, and others.

Ego has no place in telling the story of, as I put it, the “racial hatred … seared into the mangled white bodies of these victims and many more like them.”

What is important is that Glenn Beck, a powerful broadcaster, may have finally awoken to the color of hate crime.

Still, I do not trust individuals who fail to cite their sources, and do not credit those on whose shoulders they stand. Neither should you. If you want the unvarnished goods on crime from the correct angle—continue to track the guerrilla press.

And—do I really have to tell you this?!—don’t trust anyone who gets behind a mass murderer.

Your mother should have told you as much. (Only the other day, my liberal father reiterated the thought to me that he did not know how anyone could exculpate, much less lionize, Honest Abe .)

Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!

Crime, Journalism, Justice, Media, Race, Racism

“Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Those who’ve never hesitated to tell the truth about the hue of hatred in America are elated. Someone more powerful has stepped up to help do the work so few will do.

In 2010, Bill O’Reilly became the first member of mainstream media to briefly broach a taboo topic: the color of crime in the US. In his July 13th ‘Talking Points’ memo, the famous talker alluded to rates at which blacks commit violent crime proportionate to their numbers in society.

Then as now, Mr. O’Reilly came straight out and said this:

‘African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but according to the Justice Department, they comprise 39 percent of violent crime convictions. Thirty-six percent of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, and 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.’

The Bureau of Justice’s statisticians confirm the long-standing trends to which Mr. O’Reilly alluded. The report, ‘Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008,’ states: ‘Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders,’ and were eight times more likely to murder than whites.

Everyone is, however, tripping over one another to show-off their admiration for Bill O’Reilly. That’s premature.

So elated are the truth-tellers that some have even missed that Bill and the blond brigade of Fox News—in the person of Kirsten Powers and others—are beating on breast about ‘intraracial’ crime-patterns only. Or black-on-black crime. In so doing, these comfort-zone commentators deflect from the white-hot issue of black-on-white violence.

You see, blacks are also more likely to murder whites than the reverse. This likelihood is a trend which O’Reilly and the gang are submerging by emphasizing only the ‘intraracial’ nature of most murders. …”

The complete column is “Who’s Killing Whom? Speak Up, Bill O’Reilly!” Read it on WND.

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Our Parallel Economic Universe

Crime, Economy, Objectivism, Political Economy, Politics, Propaganda, Reason

Financier Peter Schiff’s findings of fact in Florida V. George Zimmerman are much like mine in “The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins,” where it was noted that “Idiocracy elite lacks the ability to separate the political constructs to which it is wedded (racism) from the facts of a case brought in a court of law.”

Or, as Mr. Schiff puts it in “Print the Legend”: “preconceived emotional commitments to a narrative [consistently trumped] demonstrable facts.”

Schiff goes on to compare the parallel reality constructed in the response to the Zimmerman acquittal and the fiction of our economic indices:

“The vast majority of observers continue to subscribe to the dominant narrative that our economy is improving, the Fed’s Quantitative Easing programs are responsible, and that the debt we are currently accumulating is not a long-term problem.”

“The current administration, the media, Wall Street, and the Fed itself, are particularly committed to this narrative. After all, we have been pursuing these policies for more than five years, and many of these parties have a particular emotional and pecuniary investment in a positive outcome. It would be difficult for them now to admit that their preferred cures have not only been ineffective, but harmful. As a result, they will continue to advocate for the current policies until they get the answers they expect.”

“Not only do their underlying assumptions defy economic law and objective rationality, but they are also at odds with the evidence that continues to arrive. The data makes it clear that while asset prices (stocks, bonds, and real estate), are currently being inflated by an activist monetary policy, the real economy continues to stagnate. What supports do exist are based solely on government intervention. Yet they nevertheless discuss a potential Fed exit strategy as if the economy were in a position to make such a transition without bringing on an even more severe recession than the last. In this light, the failure of QEI to produce a real recovery led directly to QEII, and so on to QE Infinity. We are unwilling to challenge our initial assumptions about what is really wrong with our economy and how to fix it.”

“To get a sense of justice and emotional clarity over the death of Trayvon Martin, many cling to the image of a saintly youth and ignore the more difficult reality of a troubled teen picking a fight with an inept neighborhood watchman. Accepting this reality does not lead to a conclusion that Trayvon deserved to die, but it denies the self-justifying conclusions that keep race relations dysfunctional. It also allows us to ignore more troubling and far more common tragedies like the one that befell 18 year old Jett Higham, another African American youth who lost his life in a nighttime run to a local convenience store. The media decided that this tragedy was a non-story, as his killers were also African Americans teens.” [Emphasis added.]