St. Louis CofCC Blog

National Policy Institute. The Augusta, Georgia based think tank is the right’s answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Live Science:

A victim might not care if a murderer is a smoker or a vegetarian. But having such knowledge could help police solve a case. Details like this could one day be at their fingertips if a new fingerprinting technique pans out as expected.

Standard methods for collecting fingerprints at crime scenes, which involve powders, liquids or vapors, can alter the prints and erase valuable forensic clues, including traces of chemicals that might be in the prints.

Now researchers find tape made from gelatin could enable forensics teams to chemically analyze prints gathered at crime scenes, yielding more specific information about miscreants’ diets and even possibly their gender and race.

Live Science is not with the modern zeitgeist on race. If they’re white and they commit a crime, then they’re miscreants. If they’re non-white, then they’re victims of discrimination, institutional racism, poverty, social decay, and falling in with the wrong crowd.

Time Magazine, on the hypothetical concept of the return of military conscription:

Bringing back mandatory service has been the refrain of many who want to put the brakes on the Iraq war; if every young man is suddenly a potential grunt on his way to Baghdad, the thinking goes, the war would end rather quickly. It’s also an argument made by those who are uneasy that the burden of this war is being unfairly shouldered by the 1.4-million-strong U.S. military and no one else. But a new report from the Congressional Budget Office this week makes clear that resuming the draft would be no panacea.

The draft existed through the whole of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, but that didn’t create enough public pressure either to fight the war like a war (and not like a police action) and win it right away, or get out, such that 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam before we finally got out.

Also, Time graces us with a morsel of racial truth:

Critics have claimed that minorities are over-represented in the all-volunteer military because they have fewer options in the civilian world. The CBO disputes that, saying that “members of the armed forces are racially and ethnically diverse.” African Americans accounted for 13% of active-duty recruits in 2005, just under their 14% share of 17-to-49-year-olds in the overall U.S. population. And minorities are not being used as cannon fodder. “Data on fatalities indicate that minorities are not being killed [in Iraq and Afghanistan] at greater rates than their representation in the force,” the study says. “Rather, fatalities of white service members have been higher than their representation in the force,” in large part because whites are over-represented in the military’s combat, as opposed to support, jobs.

In this politically correct day and age, where wars and occupations in the Middle East are not meant to subdue an enemy, but to democratize a people to whom the concept is alien, where troops are made to be more concern about ethics manuals than winning, it does not stand to reason that non-whites would be used as cannon-fodder. That honor is reserved for whites, who, as Time admits, are “over-represented” in combat roles.

Agence France Presse:

A former US immigration official pleaded guilty Friday to taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for awarding US citizenship to people who did not want to sit required tests.

Jimmie Ortega, 59, worked as an adjudications officer with the naturalization unit of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in New York until April last year.

According to prosecutors, he took between 1,500 and 4,000 dollars to approve citizenship for people who wanted to bypass requirements that they sit an English proficiency and American history test and undergo an interview.

Prosecutors said Ortega had solicited bribes from at least 20 people. He faces up to 30 years in prison when he is sentenced in October.

Five of Ortega’s co-defendants pleaded guilty to unlawfully procuring naturalization and were awaiting sentencing. Their nationalities were not revealed.

…

AP:

SAN FRANCISCO - The site of a munitions explosion that crippled the main West Coast port on the Pacific during World War II and killed 320 people — the majority of them black sailors — may become part of the National Park System.

A ceremony was set for Saturday to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the blast, which helped fuel a movement to desegregate the military because of the ensuing treatment of the black survivors.

On Friday, U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., announced a measure that would make Port Chicago Naval Magazine in eastern San Francisco Bay eligible for federal funding for a visitor center, to hire educational rangers and maintain aging facilities.

“The events of July 17, 1944, are so important to our nation’s military and racial history that more Americans ought to be able to learn from it, to visit the historic site, and to know that it will be properly maintained for generations to come,” said Miller.

If every piece of real estate where there was a racial injustice is destined to become a National Park, the most inner cores of major cities will become national parks, because in those areas, white residents had their civil rights violated by black crime and black gangs.

The again, many inner city areas are becoming so devoid of actual physical structure that they resemble rural open space.

Keep in mind that the American military has not decisively won anything resembling a major war since integration.

AP:

ROME - Italian police arrested three Moroccans on Saturday — an imam and two aides — accusing them of belonging to a militant cell that allegedly used a mosque in central Italy as a terror training camp.

The cell held courses on hand-to-hand combat and used propaganda films and documents downloaded from the Internet to teach students how to prepare poisons and explosives, pilot a Boeing 747 and send encrypted messages, anti-terrorism police in Rome said in a statement.

The mosque on the outskirts of Perugia, the Umbrian capital, also offered weapons training, as well as instructions on how to ambush, how to reach combat zones safely and how to send encrypted messages, police said.

(snip)

Outside daily prayers, the small mosque doubled as a training camp, the police statement said. The imam made fiery sermons inciting a small group of disciples, some of them children, to join the Holy War.

(snip)

In recent years Italy has toughened its anti-terrorism laws and intensified surveillance at mosques and Islamic centers.

Italy should be more concerned about its immigration laws. Otherwise, anti-terrorism laws and surveillance amount to nothing more than spinning the wheels on one’s Ferrari.

AP:

WASHINGTON - The District of Columbia risks losing federal funds because it has overpaid contractors almost $100 million for medical services, an audit found.

The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reported Thursday that the overpayments since 2002 went to three companies that coordinate medical services for almost 100,000 low-income residents.

William J. DiVello, assistant inspector general, said the auditors aren’t saying that companies did anything illegal, but that the “district just didn’t do a good job monitoring them.”

If the Feds cut off D.C.’s Medicaid money, and a lot of Medicaid cuts are made in earnest, D.C.’s politicians and residents will blame white racism and the Bush administration before they blame their own crooked black city officials.

AP profiles the increasing use of RFID implants in human beings. It looks like if “Big Brother” comes, it won’t necessarily be a governmental “Big Brother,” it will be a corporate one, under the pretense of “business security.”

Since most corporations are private firms, it will be hard to combat it with the ethos of “privacy rights,” becuase (in theory) they’re private firms, and employees are willing participants. In reality, most Americans make a living by being somebody’s employee, and most of the time, that “somebody” is the agent of a big corporation, and therefore, to the average person, the power of the immediate supervisor exceeds that of the “big bad” Federal government. And policies that become standard fare for big corporations might as well have been enacted by a government.

She microwaved her own infant daughter to death, allegedly.

Red Herring:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked a federal appeals court to reconsider a ruling the foundation says could threaten a slew of popular web sites and stifle innovation in the booming realm of user-generated content.

The EFF filing, submitted to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this month, is the latest development in a case dating back to 2004 against Roommates.com. The online rental service was sued for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act by enabling users to post classifieds that discriminated against potential tenants based on race, religion, and other factors.

Roommates.com was originally granted immunity under the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which has historically protected web sites from being held liable for information posted by users. That initial ruling, however, was overturned on appeal in May, a move the civil liberties-oriented EFF says has muddied the CDA’s legal waters, creating an atmosphere that will make web entrepreneurs reluctant to take chances.

(snip)

In the Roommates case, the federal appeals court ruled that instead of being mere hosts or platform providers for user-generated content under the CDA, certain third-party search engines and web providers should be treated as content creators who can be held liable for discriminatory or offensive content.

While there are right-wingers that support and are members of the EFF, it’s mostly a left-wing outfit. And the next phase of the court proceedings goes in front of the infamous Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, the most liberal Federal appellate-level judicial division in the country, and the one that is most often overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

What is means is that the left-wing is in a bind. Which of its sacred cows does it gore? Either they support internet freedom and get housing discrimination (and racial inequality, by definition), or support racial equality and therefore restrict internet freedom. There is a third option, and a way out for them: Become sane, normal right-wingers, and acknowledge that liberty and equality are diametrically opposing concepts, and that the more you have of one, the less you will have of the other; there is a necessary trade-off, a zero sum game, between the two.