Category Archives: Crime

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.]

Who’s Killing Whom?

Barack Obama, Crime, Race, Racism

The first black president is also a president for blacks first.

Patrick J. Buchanan in “Leading from behind Al Sharpton”:

The president sent his “thoughts and prayers” to Trayvon’s family.

To George Zimmerman, painted as a racist monster for 16 months, hiding in fear of his life, his Peruvian mother and family under threat – not a word of compassion from the president.

Obama moved swiftly off the trial and into a rambling discourse on the black experience and racial profiling.

But why? The jury said Trayvon was not profiled.

What is Obama up to? Answer. A law professor, he knows this case, based on evidence and testimony, was open and shut. And he knows Eric Holder is not going to file any hate-crime civil rights charges.

Because Holder and Obama know they would be seen as caving to Sharpton & Co., they would get stuffed in court, and the nation would react with outrage to a double-jeopardy, murder-charge, racial prosecution of this persecuted man whose innocence was established in a court of law.

So Obama swiftly changed the subject.

“There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me … before I was a senator.”

“There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

“That happens often,” said Obama. Undeniably. But why do black males awaken such apprehensions and fears? Is it their color?

Well, 13 percent of our population is black. Half of that – say, 6 plus percent – is male. Of that 6 percent, one in six – just 1 percent of the U.S. population – consists of black males age 18 to 29.

Of all black males 18 to 29, writes Ron Unz in “Race and Crime in America,” 28 percent are in jail or prison, or on probation.

The “liberal Sentencing Project organization,” says Unz, estimates that “one-third of all black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.”

Twenty years ago in Chicago, where black kids are gunned down daily, Jesse Jackson was quoted, “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.”

That’s the same apprehension, Mr. President, those women feel on that elevator.

Obama traced the “violence … in poor black neighborhoods” to “poverty and … a very difficult history.”

But slavery and segregation were far closer in time to the black America of the 1950s, and poverty was far greater. Yet we never saw crime and incarceration rates like we see today in black America.

As Unz writes, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta are cities of equal size and poverty rates. Yet Atlanta has 10 times the crime. Oakland and Santa Ana, Calif., are equal in size and poverty numbers. Yet Oakland “has several times the rate of crime.” Why?

Why are white folks nervous about strange young black men in the neighborhood? Perhaps because they commit interracial muggings, robberies and rapes at 35 times the rate of whites.

As newspapers avoid the issue of black racism and rarely give the stats on interracial crime, Obama dwelt lovingly on the indignities of racial profiling – without really addressing the root cause.

It was an uncourageous commentary. Weak as Kool-Aid, said Tavis.

But Obama was where he likes to be, leading from behind – this time behind Al Sharpton.

The complete column is HERE.

On who hates whom in my “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism”:

“Hate crimes are extraordinary in unexpected ways. In addition to being among the most serious crimes, NCV data show that approximately 84 percent of these assaults are violent—a sexual assault, robbery or simple aggravated assault.” And, “Blacks are less likely than both whites and Hispanics to be targeted for reasons of racial hatred.

A significantly higher percentage of victims of violent racial hatred say their attackers were black.” “Nine out of 10 of them identify their race as the reason blacks targeted them.” “For victims reporting white offenders, [only] about three in ten victims cited race as a motive.”

Moreover, and this is crucial, “The number of black hate crime victims was so small, that is statistically insignificant, that it precluded analysis of the race of persons who victimized them.” (Page 36)

As a perplexed alien from outer space will have noted, data don’t move the impious, progressive people of the West; a different drumbeat does. The tom-tom comes from the talkers on the television. Media megaphones dictate —and all political factions accept—that the category of hate crimes applies de facto to white-on-black crime.

Yet white-on-black hate crimes are practically (and certainly statistically) non-existent. These are manufactured myths.

“Who’s Killing Whom” is also a chapter in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot”. Read it.

Breaking: Obama Promises Further Federal Incursion Into States For ‘Trayvon’

Barack Obama, Conflict, Crime, Federalism, Race

The president saw fit to intervene for the second time on the side of a party in a legal matter that has, to date, been resolved in the country’s courts. Whereas his first divisive comments, last year, saw President Obama identify with Trayvon as the son he might have had; Obama moved closer, this time: “Trayvon could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

Obama praised the grieving parents of the late Trayvon Martin, which was understandable, but chose to intone about the specter of growing up with the sense that his presence, as a black man, elicited fear. By the way, even baby Obama crawling into a room ought to have made the company present clutch purses, for here was a baby who would go on to preside over an unparalleled explosion in the USA’s national debt ($17 trillion, and counting).

I will credit the president (of only a segment of the country) for mentioning the rationale behind the frailties of those “racists” who allegedly feared him: The black male’s propensity for violent crime. Black men are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of violent crime. Obama, for the first time ever, stated this brute reality—although he proceeded to blame The System rather than the many individuals who brutalize other human beings. (“Sticks and stones,” right?)

But then Obama is no methodological individualist, now is he?

“From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.” Obama thus promised to follow with a federal fix by way of even more federal incursion into the States.

Note: Not one kind word did Obama offer to six remarkable women: the jury that adjudicated—and agonized over—the State of Florida Vs. George Zimmerman.

As I said, this is a factional president.

UPDATE III: The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins (Walter Block Adjudicates)

Affirmative Action, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Intelligence, Law, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism

“The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… In the course of doing her journalistic due diligence, Van Susteren stumbled upon another falsity peddled by the administration’s front man, Attorney General Eric Holder, mass media and the rest of the “Racial Industrial Complex.”

The slick-tongued Holder had told his primary constituency, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that “people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat,” and that “‘Stand Your Ground’-style laws —such as the one that figured into the George Zimmerman case—’undermine public safety,’ and ‘create dangerous conflicts in our neighborhoods.'”

Why then did the “Instructions read to the Zimmerman jury by The Honorable Debra S. Nelson, Circuit Judge,” state the reverse? Again, I excerpt from Justice Nelson’s instructions on the “Justifiable Use of Force”:

“If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in anyplace where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

It just so happens that Zimmerman was unable to retreat. As the facts showed, conclusively, Tryavon Martin was atop, pounding Zimmerman into the ground. By trial’s end, the prosecution no longer disputed this unassailable fact.

Holder’s lie was compounded by the fact that, as Van Susteren discovered in the course of digging in federal statutes, the law generally recognizes the right of the person who is not the aggressor to stand his ground. …

The complete column is “The Colosseum of Courtroom Cretins.” Read it on WND. .

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UPDATE I: Greta Van Susteren is investigating “The Zimmerman arrest affidavit,“ belatedly, about which a Colorado law-enforcement officer wrote the following last year:

“…is so deficient in properly sourced factual information and full of unsubstantiated, unsourced conclusions, I am appalled that a State’s Attorney would even give it a second look. …”

MORE.

UPDATE II: JIMMY CARTER. I would have expected that an old “white guy” like Jimmy Carter would have a bit of the Cartesian logic in him and come down on the side of the fine jury Zimmerman had. Indeed, here is Former President Jimmy Carter on the George Zimmerman trial:

“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented,” Carter told Atlanta station WXIA-TV.
“The prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself.” he added.
“It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

MORE.

UPDATE III: Walter Block Adjudicates The Law In A Just Society Over at Economic Policy Journal:

Zimmerman was akin to a private (hence justified) cop. He had every right to do what he did. Martin had no right to resist. The only problem I have with this is that Zimmerman should have had some sort of uniform, or badge. Let’s change [the] scenario slightly. Suppose Zimmerman was a real (unjustified govt) cop. There’s no doubt there would not have even have been a trial.