It Took 15 Days, But I Got an Answer November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Education, St. Louis Local.comments closed
I asked on November 2: What exactly is hip-hop journalism?
Answer? Journalism by black teenagers. Nothing more.
Not Worth the Paper and Ink November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Zimbabwe's Exchange Rate.comments closed
Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown is gathering pace, with inflation spiralling to almost 15,000 per cent, according to figures leaked yesterday.
The 14,840 per cent annual inflation in October was nearly double what it was in September. Prices between September and October rose 135 per cent.
President Mugabe told state media that “Zimbabwe will not collapse, now or in the future,” even as his strategy for beating inflation with draconian price controls lay in ruins.
(snip)
In Zimbabwe, however, the phenomenon of “Mugabenomics” has delivered a three-headed monster — exponentially rising prices, a critical cash shortage, because the Government regards adding new rows of zeroes on the banknotes as an admission of defeat, and virtually nothing to buy in the shops because price controls have destroyed the retail trade.
(snip)
The search for cash is an unrelenting daily ordeal for Zimbabweans, who were paying Z$1.6 million for a bus fare to and from work yesterday, Z$800,000 for a loaf of bread, and Z$700,000 for a pint of beer.
For several months now, I have been posting a daily track of the exchange rate between the U.S. peso and the Zimbabwe Dollar. However, there has been a lot of chatter that these exchange rates didn’t reflect the real conditions on the ground; even as bad as they are, they’re not moving upwards that much from day to day (as you have seen), and they’re not moving upwards enough to reflect Zimbabwe’s real inflation, and therefore, the “official” exchange rates are simply Mugabe propaganda.
Let’s do some math. Using today’s official exchange rate of 30,668 Z$ to US$1, the bus fare translates to US$52.17, the bread is $26.09, and the beer is $22.83. Those figures are way too high even for a gutted economy like Zimbabwe’s, and therefore, the on-the-ground exchange rates are probably 10 to 15 times more than the “official” ones I tracked daily. That said, I’m going to stop the daily tracking — the last thing this medium will do is parrot Mugabe propaganda. I will keep my eye on articles like these for the real story.
As an aside, at the time of this writing, there are two comments on this story at the LST that suggest that these stories are just the white man’s racist propaganda to bring down the superpower that is Zimbabwe:
I have said this before President Mugabe will not be removed from power because of economic subbotage by the western companies in Zimbabwe. He will built a very strong black state in africa controlled by black africans. Zimbabwe is the first nation in africa to produce bio-fuels,100% vegetables seed renewable energy. Zimbabwe will struggle maybe for some months or 1-2 years but it will emerge very strong.
Rusununguko, London, UK
Produce bio-fuels? With what agricultural production after Mugabe expropriated white-owned farmland? If Zimbabwe was the first country in Africa to do so, that’s not a very high hurdle to jump over — and if it did, it was only because of the white agricultural industry it does not have anymore. Also, legitimate bio-fuels are more expensive than oil, so the economies of scale revolving around them won’t turn a country that specializes in them into an economic powerhouse for quite a long time.
And:
The M16, CIA and FBI must be feeling satisfied that their attempts at modern-era lynching of black people is finding fruition. This is a sad tale of British and American governments’ racism against a predominantly black state. We are not amused that this economic conflagration was hatched in the bellies of western intelligence agencies to undermine a legitimate African black government!
Gilbert Phiri, Swindon, UK
If the Anglo-American establishment really wanted to topple the Mugabe regime, it would take all of five minutes for their combined military might to squash Mugabe like the bug that he is. The fact that they have not done that is circumstantial proof that Mr. Phiri’s claims aren’t true.
Boston Beats St. Louis, and Joins St. Louis November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in 2nd Amendment & CCW, Black Crime, Police & Law Enforcement, St. Louis Local.comments closed
A World Series, a Super Bowl, several Stanley Cup Finals, a gaggle of NBA Finals, and now a gun search program.
Boston police are launching a program that will call upon parents in high-crime neighborhoods to allow detectives into their homes, without a warrant, to search for guns in their children’s bedrooms.
The program, which is already raising questions about civil liberties, is based on the premise that parents are so fearful of gun violence and the possibility that their own teenagers will be caught up in it that they will turn to police for help, even in their own households.
In the next two weeks, Boston police officers who are assigned to schools will begin going to homes where they believe teenagers might have guns. The officers will travel in groups of three, dress in plainclothes to avoid attracting negative attention, and ask the teenager’s parent or legal guardian for permission to search. If the parents say no, police said, the officers will leave.
If officers find a gun, police said, they will not charge the teenager with unlawful gun possession, unless the firearm is linked to a shooting or homicide.
If “gun violence” is the problem, then of course you wouldn’t charge the juveniles with any crime, because the gun did it all by itself, and seduced the juvenile into going astray. All kidding aside, what use are the “unlawful gun possession” laws if such juveniles won’t be charged? Other than keeping non-thugs in Massachusetts SSR disarmed.
The program will focus on juveniles 17 and younger and is modeled on an effort started in 1994 by the St. Louis Police Department, which stopped the program in 1999 partly because funding ran out.
(snip)
St. Louis police reassured skeptics by letting them observe searches, said Robert Heimberger, a retired St. Louis police sergeant who was part of the program.
“We had parents that invited us back, and a couple of them nearly insisted that we take keys to their house and come back anytime we wanted,” he said.
But the number of people who gave consent plunged in the next four years, as the police chief who spearheaded the effort left and department support fell, according to a report published by the National Institute of Justice.
Support might also have flagged because over time police began to rely more on their own intelligence than on neighborhood tips, the report said.
Heimberger said the program also suffered after clergy leaders who were supposed to offer help to parents never appeared.
“I became frustrated when I’d get the second, or third, or fourth phone call from someone who said, ‘No one has come to talk to me,’ ” he said. Residents “lost faith in the program and that hurt us.”
Actually, the SLPD has a very good intelligence unit, and I would rely on it far more than “neighborhood intelligence” (an oxymoron for the most part). Not only that, the “neighborhood” is no more likely to talk to the cops about illegal guns than they are about actual murders — fear of gang retribution, hatred of white authorities.
The reason this gun seizure program failed in St. Louis, and why it will fail in Boston, is that the guns will be taken, but not the wayward juveniles, who will then simply go out and procure another stolen gun.
The Zimbabwe Dollar Today November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Zimbabwe's Exchange Rate.comments closed
Today: 30,668
Yesterday: 30,679
If It Doesn’t Involve Blame Whitey, He Isn’t Interested. November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Black Crime, Civil Rights Movement.comments closed
When demonstrators rally on the steps of the U.S. Justice Department Friday to protest the government’s handling of hate crimes, blogger-turned-activist Shane Johnson [above] will be waiting for them with a protest of his own.
Johnson and a modest band of supporters are pushing back against the outpouring of black support for black male offenders, such as the Jena 6, saying it comes at the expense of female victims of black-on-black crime.
The group is leading a Jena 6-like grass-roots movement through e-mails, blogs and rallies. It wants to call national attention to the beating and rape of a 35-year-old Haitian woman and the beating and sexual assault of her 12-year-old son by up to 10 assailants in West Palm Beach, Fla.
In June, armed attackers broke into the woman’s apartment in Dunbar Village, a public housing project, where they repeatedly raped and sodomized her and forced her to perform oral sex on her son, according to a grand jury indictment. They poured household chemicals on the victims’ eyes and threatened to set them on fire, police and media reports say.
(snip)
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, says he had not heard about the Florida case, but “it sounds like the case deserves attention. The fact is, however, that there are many, many cases that deserve attention.”
Yes, and the one thing that those “many, many cases that deserve attention” before this one is that those “many, many cases” (most of which are hoaxes, results of prosecutorial abuse of power, or are NAACP/NUL fact cherry-picking agitprop) can make money for the civil rights industry.
This Post Is Brought To You By Women Whose Surnames Start With “M” November 17, 2007
Posted by Webmaster in Immigration, Missouri, Politics.comments closed
Like this writer, Michelle Malkin is in no mood to defend President Bush’s nominee to head ICE, Julie Myers (who is now heading it on an interim basis), in her Halloween costume gaffe, the reason being that Malkin knows, like this writer, that Myers is essentially a pro-cheap labor operative.
However, before this Halloween costume row came up, the only Senator that was willing to take Myers to task for her open-borders perfidy, the only one that asked her any tough questions in her subcommittee hearings, and the first (and AFAIK, the only) one who publicly announced that she would not vote for Myers either in committee or on the full Senate floor, was/is Claire McCaskill (D-MO).
