St. Louis CofCC Blog

Rest in peace, and forever vindicated.

From one year ago today, on the Countenance Blog.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

FBI shuns crime stats’ use in rankings

If the FBI has said it once, it has said it a thousand times: Do not use its crime statistics to rank the nation’s most dangerous cities.

That didn’t stop CQ Press from releasing a book this week that does just that. And it didn’t stop officials from cities on the list — not the ones ranked safest, of course — from furiously protesting that the rankings were not only meaningless but unfair.

Detroit and St. Louis, the cities that top the new list, have attacked the rankings.

“It really makes you wonder if the organization is truly concerned with evaluating crime or increasing their profit,” Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings said in a statement quoted by the Associated Press. “With crime experts across the country routinely denouncing the findings, I believe the answer is clear.”

(snip)

The trouble with rankings, said FBI spokesman Bill Carter, is that they do not take into account the many factors that affect criminality in any city. The numbers, he said, don’t include factors such as residents’ perception of what constitutes a reportable crime, or a population’s ethnic, racial or generational makeup.

(snip)

In a big caveat on its Web site, the FBI says: “Rankings … provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, country, state, region or other jurisdiction … these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions.”

If the FBI data on crime are so subject to misinterpretation, then why does the FBI release it?

If the Morgan Quitno methodology is so suspect, then why doesn’t the FBI show us how to do it right, and do it themselves?

Why do the “many factors that affect criminality in a city” mean that a given crime committed in a given city is somehow less serious than if it were committed in other cities?  If someone murders you, you’re just as dead no matter what these “factors” are.

Also, I thought we weren’t supposed to juxtapose “crime” and “racial makeup” in the same sentence.

And here’s the biggest issue with this:  Two days ago, the FBI released 2006’s Hate Crimes data.  Now, if there are any problems with interpreting the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, like Morgan Quitno does, and if there are fundamental flaws in the data that inevitably lead to the data being misinterpreted, then it’s not unreasonable to think that the FBI’s Hate Crimes data are just as problematic.

And as a matter of fact, there is actual evidence to support that deduction:  There are Federal Hate Crimes riders, and the FBI can collect that data with no problem, and it’s universal among the states and Federal territories.  However, state laws on hate crime riders wildly vary.  An incident in one state that would be recorded as a hate-motivated crime wouldn’t be so recorded in another state.

Incidents that verily should be recorded as hate crimes aren’t called as such on the official books, because the facts of the case contradict someone’s PC story.  Time was that black-on-white hate crimes officially did not occur, and anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant and anti-heterosexual hate crimes were “unheard of.”  Things are changing on that front.

Hispanics are classified as white when they commit any crime (including hate crimes), while Hispanic crime victims are classified as Hispanic.  This inflates the number of “white” hate criminals on the books.

Also, some hate crimes that are recorded in one category should be placed in another category if the facts of the given crimes were understood honestly.  For instance, many anti-Jewish hate crimes are committed by non-whites (e.g. Arab-Muslims and blacks), but I think those hate criminals attack their Jewish victims because they are white, not because they are Jewish.  Therefore, those crimes would better be classified as anti-white, but because the victim is Jewish, they are recorded as anti-Jewish, the implication as presented in the FBI data is that there are a lot more white swastika-clad bombthrowers than there actually are.

Yet, despite these problems, there are no admonitions from the MSM or the FBI about misinterpreting the FBI’s Hate Crimes data.  There are no Mayor Slays bloviating about how hate crime data are misguided because of “core city vs metro area” confusion.  There are no civic elites worried about their city’s image, or losing conventions, meetings, businesses and tourists.  In fact, the only criticism of the FBI and the way they handle hate crime data comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who wish that the data would make white people look even worse.

North Carolina CofCC Blog.  Now all I need to do is know “Triad” from “Triangle.”

New York Newsday:

Victor Rabinowitz, a lawyer who represented leftist causes and clients such as Alger Hiss, the Black Panthers, Fidel Castro and Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, has died at 96.

Rabinowitz died Friday at his Manhattan home, his longtime law partner, Michael Krinsky, said Tuesday.

In a 1996 memoir, “Unrepentant Leftist,” Rabinowitz said that he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1942 — when the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies — until the early 1960s because it seemed the best way to fight for social justice.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would beg to differ.

This privately-owned billboard, on private property, in Napavine, Washington, is causing quite a stir, and of course, local Hispanics interpret it as racial vilification.

If there is anything wrong with the billboard, it’s the fact that not “all” of their “runners and swimmers” are in Napavine.  A lot of other people in a lot of other states would beg to differ.

Jerome Corsi had an article in WND today (no link because it has too many names of sitting judges), about how many banks and other financial institutions might fall like dominoes, because sub-prime mortgages have been bought and sold as assets. Incidentally, this is why Merrill Lynch is in trouble, and its affirmative action CEO was shown the door. The trouble is, the Federal judiciary is ruling that those who purchase the accounts receivable of a mortgage only get that, and not the deed — that means that if a house is foreclosed upon, the bank that originally issued the mortgage owns the house, and gets to keep all of the proceeds of the sale of that house.

But the more fundamental issue is this — Why were so many subprime adjustable rate mortgages issued to begin with, and issued to obviously credit-unworthy borrowers? When I see a lot of stories about the subprime crunch and foreclosures on TV, I’m seeing a lot of black and brown faces. And whenever you add non-white, banks, loans and credit, you get the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a Federal law which, on the surface, states that banks have to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they serve, but the net effect is that banks have to engage in affirmative action in credit decisions.

So if you combine low-rate ARMs, in a low-rate climate, with the CRA, then you can see that a lot of blacks and Hispanics got approved for relatively big mortgages, when they really shouldn’t have, then used those pre-approvals against each other to bid-up the sales prices of houses to an insane amount. That kind of financial planning (for anyone) is like fitting a 15-foot tall truck under a metal bridge that has exactly 15 feet of clearance — once the temperature starts going down, and the metal contracts just enough, even if it’s only by one millimeter, that truck is stuck. Likewise, once interest rates inevitably went up from their nadirs, this would mean that ARM mortgages’ rates would go up, forcing the monthly payments upward, meaning that the borrowers couldn’t pay them in full without giving up food and utilities, meaning foreclosures.

Incidentally, this is why President Bush used to be able to gloat about the record-high rate of home “ownership” among blacks. It was all built on financial quicksand.

Verily, some of these banking and monetary problems would have happened even without the affirmative action effects of the CRA, but they’re worse than they would have been with it.

UPDATE 11/26:  Here is MSM corroboration that minorities tend to be more affected by the subprime crunch and foreclosures.

(1)  The state legislature of Kansas is considering anti-immigration action similar to that being taken in states that surround it to the west, south and east.  The great fear is that because Colorado, Oklahoma and Missouri are doing so, Kansas will be “trapped” in the middle and thus become a haven for illegal aliens fleeing from those states.  However, the big roadblock on the route with a sawblade shield is Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who wants soft amnesty for illegal aliens.

The article mentions that Kansas towns of Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal.  The truth of the matter is that those towns are almost (if not already) majority Hispanic, and their public schools are heavily Hispanic.

(2)  “Happy Apples” in Washington, Missouri, which ICE knocked back in October 2006, has admitted to knowingly hiring illegal aliens.

(3)  Johnny Suttonfong suborning perjury?  FOBP is making that accusation.

(4)  O’Fallon, Mo. mayor Donna Morrow is trying to keep a “low-income housing project” out of her city.  Historically, those words in the St. Louis area have meant that a neighborhood with such housing will become more black, but the Post-Dispatch uses the words “illegal immigrant labor,” and that’s the flashpoint of opposition here.  St. Charles County, along with parts of south St. Louis City, is where the growth in the Hispanic population is happening in the St. Louis area.

AP:

One was a Somali refugee, the other an Argentine investment banker. Both are now high-profile Dutch women challenging this country to rethink its national identity.

Princess Maxima, the Argentine-born wife of Crown Prince Willem Alexander, triggered a round of national soul-searching with a speech last month about what exactly it means to be Dutch in an age of mass migration.

“The Netherlands is too complex to sum up in one cliche,” she said. “A typical Dutch person doesn’t exist.”

Her comments have tapped into an unsettled feeling among many Dutch who fear traditional values have been eroded in a country roiled by a rise in Muslim extremism. It’s a view espoused by Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has turned her back on her Islamic roots.

Conservatives in this nation of 16 million say the long Dutch tradition of welcoming immigrants and putting little or no pressure on them to integrate undermines Western values.

“Unfortunately, the debate about Dutch identity is too often held at a very trite and trivial level _ as if the discussion is between Brussels sprouts and wooden shoes on the one hand, and couscous and caftans on the other,” said Bart Jan Spruyt, founder of The Edmund Burke Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“What is really at stake, due to a frivolous immigration policies and decades of multicultural indifference, is the identity of the Dutch nation, Dutch history and culture as a part of the history of Western civilization.”

Han van der Horst, author of a popular book on Dutch culture and history, staunchly defends the nation’s live-and-let-live traditions. He points to an old Dutch saying that translates as “everybody is entitled to his own views,” but hastens to add: “It doesn’t mean you respect those views or share” them.

That attitude historically allowed rigidly separated groupings known as “pillars” to form in society, meaning people of different faiths or political persuasion had their own churches, schools, newspapers, television and radio broadcasters and labor unions.

The “traditions” that Van Der Horst and others “defend” aren’t indicative of a particular people and a particular culture, they are universal creeds, and as they have been taken seriously, they result in a particular piece of real estate being nothing more than an international airport.  After all, borders, language, culture?  That’s too xenophobic for the “Dutch” tradition of tolerance.  The way to build a nation is with weed, prostitution and naked gyms.

Who says that the United States of America is the world’s only credal nation?  (”Credal nation,” being an oxymoron).

Yes, I checked.  This article was on Cybercast News Service, not The Onion.