Category Archives: Pseudoscience

UPDATED: Coulter On Immigrant Crime

Ann Coulter, Crime, IMMIGRATION, Pseudoscience

Ann Coulter points to the iffy nature of the “studies”—all two of them—showing “that immigrants commit LESS crime than the native population.”

… Reason magazine boasts, for example, that El Paso, Texas, has a large Hispanic population and yet El Paso “is among the safest big cities in America.”

In fact, however, El Paso’s “safe city” ranking is based on an outdated FBI crime index that includes only eight crime categories, excluding such crimes as drunk driving, narcotics offenses and weapons violations. When the FBI’s more complete crime index is used, El Paso has a higher crime rate than the national average. … The two researchers whose work is cited over and over again for the proposition that immigrants are less criminal than Americans are Alex Piquero, criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Bianca Bersani, sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Pew cites their studies — and everyone in the media cites Pew, leading to headlines like these:

“UT Dallas prof finds immigrant kids less likely to commit serious crimes, re-offend” — The Dallas Morning News

“UMass Boston Prof: Stereotype of ‘Criminal Immigrant’ Doesn’t Hold Up” — Targeted News Service

“Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime” — The Washington Post

Curiously, we are never shown the actual studies, but simply told — with some heat — “studies show!”

I looked up some of these alleged studies this weekend. They’re all hidden behind ridiculous Internet paywalls. I was often only the sixth person to read them.

It turns out that neither Piquero nor Bersani compared immigrant crime to “the overall population” — as the British Guardian recently claimed in an article purporting to prove Donald Trump wrong. Rather, they compare immigrants’ crime rate to the crime rate of America’s most criminally inclined subgroups.

Thus, for example, once you get past the paywall, you will find that Piquero and Bersani’s joint study, “Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth,” used as its base group “adolescents who were found guilty of a serious offense.”

THAT’S NOT A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF AMERICANS! It’s a representative sample of teenagers who are convicted criminals.

Similarly, professor Bersani’s oft-cited, but never-read study, “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” looked at a population group that included “an over-sample of Hispanic and African-American youth.”

Instead of immigrants who are less crime-prone than our native blacks and Hispanics, we were hoping for immigrants less criminal than our Norwegians.

True, as Bersani explains, “because many immigrants initially settle in disadvantaged environments and are exposed to a number of crime-inducing risk factors, their experiences may be similar to many native-born minorities — particularly the African-American population.”

But here’s an idea: How about NOT taking in immigrants who are poor, uneducated, come from dysfunctional families and settle in disadvantaged environments? …

The rest.

Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, The Zeitgeist

“Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is the current column. An excerpt:

… Poor Rachel [Dolezal] painted her face orange, gave herself a Sideshow Bob hairdo, and adopted the ideology of the eternally oppressed. Big deal. Most of America’s authentic poseurs are phonies who’ve never been oppressed.

Unlike most blacks, Dolezal—by the admission of the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Washington-State chapter—had done “quality work” to “elevate the issues of civil rights.”

“I just want to feel beautiful, and this is how I feel beautiful,” the woman said rather plaintively. Yes, Dolezal is the white face of parental and societal displacement. Why am I the only one to find her pitiful, even deserving of pity?

In America, black is beautiful.

To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage—heavier than the Holocaust—and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores.

To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society.

To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Owe You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.

Why can’t Rachel have some of that?

Was not Ms. Dolezal displaced for real in her parents’ affections? Rachel’s story should begin with parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal, who adopted four children, “three of whom were African-American while the other was from Haiti.”

Does this fashionable adoption not send a message to a vulnerable girl that she and her biological brother are too pale for their pious parents? …

Read the rest. “Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

Murder In The Skies

Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

Whenever someone commits an evil act, it is inferred, reasoning backwards—B, therefore A is a logical fallacy; a non sequitur—that the criminal was ill, not evil. It is but a matter of time before the exculpation industry adopts their perennial position with respect to Andreas Lubitz, “the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, who was in the cockpit when the plane crashed into the French Alps. Investigators called it a ‘deliberate’ move, one that killed Lubitz and 149 others.” (CBS News)

His motive is still unclear, leading to questions about how the aviation industry screens pilots for issues like mental health. … According to investigators, Andreas Lubitz deliberately set the plane on a doomed descent. Data from an aviation flight-tracking service shows the altitude setting was turned down to 100 feet — its lowest possible level. That action appears to firmly rule out any possibility of an accident.

“Overt action is required to reach up, turn a knob many times to change it from 38,000 feet, to in this case, to 100 feet ,” said Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger – known for the Miracle on the Hudson. “One would never normally in flight set an altitude of 100 feet.”

If Andreas Lubitz did indeed do the deed; he is guilty of murder in the skies. Mass murder in the skies.

Cameron Todd Willingham & The Witchdoctors Who Killed Him

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Pseudoscience

As it has been practiced for decades, arson investigations were more voodoo than science, and “arson sleuths” were often dabblers; “old-timers” who lay claim to a “a body of wisdom,” passed down from one old timer to the next arson investigator. The problem? An innocent individual, Cameron Todd Willingham, was “executed for the arson murder of his three young daughters,” in Texas, in 2004, based on this hocus-pocus.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”

In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”

On September 7, 2009, the New Yorker’s David Grann wrote a lengthy expose, “Trial by Fire,” in which he asked, “Did Texas execute an innocent man?”

On March 9, this year, Maurice Possley, of The Marshall Project, all but confirmed that yes, Texas executed an innocent man.

Read the horror story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who “insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence.”

And the update.