* So far this year Chicago has had 47 homicides, 45 by gun, and 221 gunshot woundings (don’t know how many non-fatal stabbings or serious assaults with blunt instruments). This will increase a bit since January is not yet over and the weekend is starting. About a quarter of it is Hispanic the rest black with perhaps one white in the mix. There’s been a number of police shootings that’ve created the usual ruckus and provided fodder for the professional demonstrators. The police used to be able to terrorize the criminal class using their own discretion. Now with everything on camera that’s over with. With people like the Baltimore mayor and Holder calling the shots those inclined towards criminality feel free to do whatever they please and aren’t afraid of any consequences. One look at the saggy-pants crowd and it’s obvious they’re a separate breed who are unemployable, mentally and psychologically. Look at all the blacks in the Chicago public school system who are in Special Ed for being mentally below par. They’re all on SSI for disability and all of them will go on to have children, the women as single parents on welfare, the men as baby daddy types who go in and out of jail. It’s the next generation of the underclass.
* The problems are the same as they are in the other big cities, eg Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Newark, East St. Louis, etc. Dummies stick around. Smarties leave. Collapse follows. I agree with your suggestions., however. You cannot get Smarties to return if they are expected to pay for a massive, broken infrastructure AND all the welfare cases and deadbeats that hung around. There needs to be a way to “deaccession” big chunks of Flint, Detroit, etc. and let urban pioneers move back.
Think of it this way. If the Puritans were obligated to give American aborigines welfare, free medical care, free schools, free fire protection, free policing, AND they were obligated to submit to aboriginal tribal courts and aboriginal chiefs, they NEVER would have settled in New England.
So why should anyone expect new white settlers in the Detroit wilderness to pay for and submit to the aborigines of Detroit?
* Flint is about 50% black and 40% white, although media coverage that mostly features black faces might leave you with a different impression. The liberal narrative, you know.
The full-size infrastructure is a huge burden and nobody wants to confront the two reasonable approaches, as noted below.
I’d answer my own question by saying that Flint has too many problems that are too new and too complicated to be solved by its cognitively challenged population. Frankly, I think that the population of Flint should be moved somewhere else, and the entire city should be either bulldozed and covered over and abandoned for human use, or it should be declared a Superfund site and remediated at a cost of many $billions.
In the meantime, we learn that the state government concluded that the water was unsafe at least ten months before the public was told, and even supplied bottle water for its own employees in Flint.
* Toronto and Chicago are comparable only in population numbers, and it is black crime we are discussing here. A trip to Toronto will show you that the city is trending toward less than 50% white with a recent influx of Southeast Asians and other “visible minorities” (Canadian Census term, really). Yet Toronto’s crime problem, especially violent crime, is the handiwork of their small black population, mostly from the West Indies. One of the Toronto newspapers called it the problem we don’t want to discus. I have stated this before, other than in colonial times, there was no slavery in Canada. The vast majority of Canadian blacks are there of their own volition. Canada was the preferred terminus of slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad. Canada had no Jim Crow laws or segregation. Toronto has no area that you would refer to as the ghetto. Toronto is the perfect petri dish to research black criminality.
* A promising expat young man (last name Shomsky) from Cleveland, working in US government I think, was shot and killed in DC. He happened to be standing in the line of fire between two vibrants when they opened fire on each other. He was at a bus stop, near his gentrified residence. Tremont, the latest in-place in Cleveland, has been the scene of multiple violent car-jackings and armed robberies. In all cases the victims were white hipsters and the suspects black thugs. I can say that, right?
* This WaPo article may make you think the homicide spike will negatively affect gentrification, since the shiny infographic at the top of the page shows Minneapolis, Portland and Denver (America’s fastest gentrifying cities) alongside Baltimore and Cleveland (America’s Blackest cities) as being equally impacted by the murder wave. This is a good example of lying with statistics, both because comparing “percent change in homicide rate” makes cities with lower murder rates look worse and because the sample includes the convenient but not-so-pertinent set of 50 US cities with the largest populations, instead of the more relevant set of US cities with the highest murder rates in 2014.
The second infographic plots changes in absolute murder rates, the statistic we care about, but it’s too confusing to gain any insight. It’s very cluttered, hard to compare cities, and arbitrarily highlights the cities with large police clashes rather than those with the largest murder spikes, reinforcing the idea that “nobody knows what’s going.”
You are not totally off-base connecting gentrification with the murder spike. Gentrification is generally portrayed in the media as whites displacing Blacks, but in reality it’s a two step process in which low-crime Hispanics displace Blacks under the radar, and whites in turn displace those Hispanics. Ron Unz alludes to this in his articles on Hispanic and Black crime. Blacks either get pushed into public housing in the suburbs or into majority Black cities, which have gotten significantly blacker over the past 25 years. In short, gentrification and the “Black Death” are two sides of the same coin of the Hispanization of America. This bodes well for those in cities like NYC or Portland, but terribly for those in St. Louis or Cleveland.
* My local city, Sacramento, had a nice brisk increase of 54%. Here’s a little news clip explaining that part of the problem is, of course, white people. White cops cause an increase in homicides. Honestly, do these people have any shame at all?
Also robbery and assault are on the increase. In Citrus Heights I see an awful lot of transients roaming around and the cops I know tell me they steal constantly. Lovely, just lovely.
* Yes its the same guy Darnell Earley a black guy with a good appearance but not much of a record of accomplishment. He didn’t know much about water systems and now we’ll see how much he knows about education.
Flint is of course a failing city. It is in serious financial trouble. Early was the fourth emergency manager appointed in six years. He inherited a financial problem and also a water problem. Flint had had a corruption problem in the fifties with a new water source. A powerful local politician had tried to tried to maneuver Flint to buy Lake Huron facilities on land he had been buying up. Flint was repelled by this attempt and just bought their water from Detroit.
But of course Detroit had its own problems. Approximately half of Detroit’s remaining population doesn’t pay its water bill. They have been cutting off service to users in an attempt to become solvent once again. Detroit it seemed no longer valued the Flint business.
Flint made a deal with a new Huron water company in Genesee county. Detroit water learned of this and raised Flint’s rates. But Flint couldn’t use the new Huron water source for two years. So Early was confronted with two years of high rates – rates he did not want to pay.
The Emergency Manager overrides the local elected officials. The local officials approved of Earley’s plan to use water from the Flint River but it was his decision alone. There are pictures on the Web of the council happily celebrating the decision while raising glasses of the poisonous Flint River water.
The area of the water uptake is a former Buick facility. It is polluted. But that’s not the problem. The residents like to get their pictures taken holding a bottle of rusty brown water. That’s not the problem either. The rust and dirt in the water is generally harmless but the lead is deadly. lead is colorless and odorless in water.
The problem is that Flint has lead feeder pipes from the water mains. Here in Oakland California there are no lead feeder pipes. They all were taken out years ago but in the East many big and small cities still have lead pipes in their water distribution systems. Many of these cities now have big expensive projects under weigh to dig them all up. In one city this is a half billion dollar project.
Most of the time a city can tolerate lead pipes because an impervious lead oxide film forms on the inside of the pipes. This is why Rome could use lead pipes for centuries without bad effects. Their lead problem came from other areas – cooking vessels and wine.
Rome had alkali water but the Flint River is acidic. It quickly dissolved the protective lead coating in the Flint water system feeder pipes. One authority writes that the permissible level of lead is 10 parts per billion. Another says eleven. The federal government use fifteen as a limit. There have been some measurements from the Flint water system of over three thousand ppb. Bad water.
Darnell Earley was trying to save some money.
There are no lead feeder pipes in the EBMUD (East Bay Municipal Utilities District) but there may be lead pipes in my house. I had a new water heater installed last year it probably was soldered with the new no-lead solder. Apparently even brass faucets are made with a small amount of lead. But all these minor lead sources are under attack. In the near future nothing will be allowed to contain lead that might come in contact with human water consumption. Domestic lead will go the way of asbestos.
How is it that I know all this? I know this much and quite a bit more because I spent a couple hours this morning reading Wikipedia and some news articles. So I wonder why Earley who was made the head of a water department didn’t know any of it?
* Steve is widely read by members of the smart set. They don’t openly admit it but Coulter definitely reads this blog & she has Trump’s ear.
So if policy is not directly being influenced by this blog yet, it’s going to be.
* A hundred years ago, people had the right idea on how to handle this. But because someone twenty years later and six thousand miles away did things that were not very nice, we can’t even talk about it today.
* You need secure borders and you need eugenics. The rest takes care of itself over time.
* Sheriff Joe Arpaio knows colors and the macho male Mexican mind. When the prisoners in one of his lockups started complaining about something, he hit them right in their macho ‘nads and dyed all the men’s prison underwear pink.
* hen I lived in a pre-gentrification black neighborhood in DC, a lot of the older long time residents would complain about the generation that came after them – the proliferation of out of wedlock pregnancies, the crime, the indifference to the concept of working or earning an honest living. These were all working class people who had raised their kids in two parent homes and made an effort to keep up their homes and the neighborhood.
They also had low trust in the (majority black) police force, correctly noting that many of them were basically criminals themselves or related to them, and if a good citizen called the police because of a violent crime, more often than not the police would tell the perpetrator who had dropped a dime.
The area underwent a ton of violence during the crack epidemic and then a secondary wave right before the Great Recession as large numbers of previously-incarcerated people completed their sentences and came back home. When we discussed the surge in homicides, the response of one of my neighbors was that “it was just the trash taking out the trash.”
* It’s easier to blame your old historical enemies than your son who you’ve been trying to get to stop running around on the street with the wrong crowd for ten years now, and he looked like he had it down, but then he lost his job and had nothing else to do, and then he went off with a gang you told him not to hang around with and they shot someone, but he wasn’t the guy who pulled the trigger, just in the crowd, and the cops arrested everyone…and you remember the cute little kid who used to puke up his Similac, he wasn’t a bad guy…it was the bad company, it always is.
* … in the US that business and zoning are so heavily regulated that people cannot make a living in other manners, even if they are willing to do so.
For example, the guy I know in the Dominican Republic who has a tiny fruit stand outside a department store where he will sell you a peeled orange for a few cents, or the people with stands outside the US Embassy in Santo Domingo who will take care of your cell phone for a couple of hours while you go inside to deal with your visa application, or the guy who sold me my shoes off a little store on the back of his motor cycle, or the people I saw in Haiti the week after the earthquake who had little gasoline-powered electrical generators on the street hooked up to charge a dozen cell phones at once for a few gourdes so that homeless people could call their family members overseas to ask for help.
In the US it is extraordinarily difficult to set up a small business of one or two people–even if there is a need–without running into all kinds of licensing and regulatory problems. Small business properties also tend to be much larger than needed, with high rents, and it is difficult to rent a few square feet for a small business. Several years ago I was told that one of those barrows in an indoor shopping mall selling belts or cell phone covers had to pay a rent of $3000 per month. Now it is no doubt more.
In the city of Jacksonville where I spend some of my time, the whole of the northern part of the suburbs is the black “ghetto”. In this area there are miles and miles and miles of low rise housing, and very few businesses. In the day time traffic is usually light and there is no activity on the streets other than perhaps children returning from school in the afternoon. Once I saw a crowd of pedestrians assembling in the late morning, but on closer inspection the event in question was a free lunch distributed in the parking lot of a church.
Yet when I am in Haiti, the residential areas are always abuzz with people on foot (so it is not just the climate) and everyone has a hustle, something to sell, the street markets are crowded with people selling produce, clothing, shoes, toys, fast food, shampoo, beauty products, and everyone can shop within walking distance of their home for essentials like drinking water, eggs, and cans of milk.
It strikes me that in the US all of these areas of merchandising have been taken over by corporations.
We live in a society designed for nongregarious white people who want to commute to an air-conditioned office, drive home in an air-conditioned car, stop on the way home to buy supper in an air-conditioned supermarket or fast food outlet, and return to their air-conditioned homes in silent streets to watch a basketball game with black players played in an air-conditioned arena and broadcast on TV. (Put centrally-heated for air-conditioned if appropriate for your season and location.)
This model of society and the good life was not designed for black people or by black people. Many integrate into it perfectly well, but a significant minority don’t, never will and continue to exist in these soulless reservations where it is easy for young testosterone-fuelled men to drift into a life of crime due to boredom if nothing else–unless they are really, really good at basketball.
* Well, it’s not as if there aren’t people in positions of authority (many of whom they vote for) who are skilled at deflecting blame and pretending that the reason Jamal got caught up in a felony murder (or, for that matter the victim) was because of a dearth of programs and school funding (regardless of whether relative per pupil spending is greater than or equal to better performing schools). It’s an effectively unfalsifiable set of propositions – we’re murderously violent when not being self destructive because of, seriatim: slavery, the pillaging of Africa, Jim Crow, systemic racism, the Confederate Battle Flag, lack of programs, Rush Limbaugh, lack of school funding, lack of public benefits, over-policing, under-policing, the GOP, the Lindbergh baby, guns, CIA trafficking crack cocaine and inventing AIDS, global warming, white flight, white proximity, and under-representation among Oscar nominees and award winners. Since working class whites have become an ever diminishing share of the Democrat coalition, expect this tradition of deflections and denial to get more bizarre and outlandish rather than less.
* Portland’s “growth boundary”, Seattle’s minimum wage, and San Francisco’s rents all reek of white privilege.
A white judge imposing “same-sex marriage” on black South Africa sounds pretty white supremacist to me.
And how does Bernie Sanders segregate his rallies so well?
* Black thugs need to understand that their use of Glock pistols in the commission of their crimes is an appropriation of White culture & thus strictly verboten. Spears only, if you please.
* Arithmetic for Dummies: Black Americans minus appropriations of White culture equals Black Africans.
* Francis Fukuyama explained the psychology of the Iraq Attaq pretty well: it was Israel-admiring Washingtonians applying the style of Israeli policy but not the precise substance (Sharon, Netanyahu, etc. would have preferred America invading Iran rather than Iraq, although they didn’t object to Iraq).
* If Washington really admired Israel’s policies and wanted to follow its example, it would close the borders, repeal the 1965 Immigration Act and take no interest in any foreign events beyond Canada or Mexico.
* AIPAC lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. Obviously AIPAC and the Israeli government are not synonymous, but US politicians do have to pay considerable attention to the do’s and don’t’s of AIPAC.
I remember around the time of the invasion reading a comment made by an Israeli military officer to the effect that “we may come to miss Saddam Hussein.” I think there was a consensus that this would be de-stabilizing as hell (only Bush and Co. that were too stupid to grasp this) with opinions more mixed as to whether or not this would work out to Israel’s advantage in the long run.
* Part of the problem with sociopaths is that they don’t want a normal job. Normal work bores the hell out of them. They are drawn to dangerous jobs like drug dealing and robbery because they get a psychological kick out of dancing on the edge of danger. Starting a small business like a fruit stand is meaningless, boring drudgery to them. They really would rather deal drugs. There is a reason why the life of the ghetto hood is idolized by a huge number of blacks, and why black rappers keep trying to sell that lifestyle.
As for normal blacks, lack of opportunity to start a small business is not a barrier to their employment. They can simply get a job working for someone else.
Most whites work for someone else too, and they don’t start small businesses, and aren’t even interested in doing it. Lack of starting a small business is no barrier to a middle-class livelihood for whites, and most whites live a middle-class lifestyle without it.
* I wonder if the true reason blacks in Haiti are hustling hard to make a buck and blacks in Jacksonville (and presumably elsewhere in the USA) are slackers is due to the fact that blacks here are provided with welfare by a (largely) white tax-paying public and in Haiti it’s pretty much everybody for themselves.
* Yes, the US military flattening every state in SWANA except Israel – how could Israel possibly benefit? It’s a real mystery wrapped inside an enigma.
* With a few extremely rare exceptions, Blacks are terrible at business. The reason you only see black cottage businesses in places like Haiti is because there’s no other class there to outperform them – Chinese, Koreans, Arabs, Whites.
Blacks take too many shortcuts in business and don’t have patience for later gratification or investment. Even talented tenth blacks don’t bother to start their own black neighborhood businesses from the ground up. Plus, like in a lot of things, blacks encounter their biggest problems when they have to be around other blacks – who will all come into the store and either steal or think that everything should be a “hookup”. (for an example take a look Heisman Winner Jameis Winston still defending himself for stealing crablegs from Publix supermarket because the min wage deli counter guy told him “I got you” – implying that he didn’t have to pay)
A lot of small businesses in the USA (such as cleaners, corner restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations etc.) are able to prosper and find some profit margin only due to the use of family labor. The liquor store and gas station by me are owned by Paskistanis and Indians who have family members working every shift, every day, 365 days a year. Blacks can’t trust their own family nor do they have the orderly family structure it takes to exercise this sort of discipline.
It’s hilarious that blacks can’t even run businesses catering to the one thing they absolutely, positively love the most – their hair. The black beauty supply business is dominated by Koreans, while blacks are left running crappy, low margin barbers shops and hair braiding salons.
* Drug markets and homicide often go together. The looting of pharmacies may well have played a role. Or maybe there is something else going on involving drugs that is spreading intermittently across the country.
If you look at national homicide graphs going back to 1976, there were two peaks: one in 1980 that was almost certainly powder cocaine driven and a longer-lived one in the early 1990s that was crack cocaine.
* In SF, seemingly all water department employees are white. They’re very easy to spot, the only city employees driving bright green vehicles. I’ve yet to see anyone black in them. There must have been some kind of bargain made long ago – we’ll risk hiring blacks for other city departments, but not Water.
* At the time, William Kristol asserted that the only way to bring peace to Israel was to take down Iraq. He also asserted that the war could pay for itself and that French firms shouldn’t get any reconstruction contracts, since “to the victors go the spoils.”
* I had occasion to drive last August from Niagara Falls NY to Tonawanda NY about 10 miles away, and, man, you get about 1/2 mile from the border and you are in a multi cultural slum. Blacks, Hispanics, tattooed whites, cars double parked, grafitti, check cashing joints, guys loitering on the street, etc. I was glad it was day light.
* Alan Dershowitz, in contrast, was unrepentant. How is he portrayed in the mini-series?
* I can remember the trial, the riot and the aftermath. The MSM encouraged and excused the riots which occurred for no reason other than black people wanted free stuff.
Clark was given the case because she had won a previous case with black female jurors and played the same feminist trope. Darden was a dim bulb who was only there because he was black.
Did Steve mention pompous blowhard F.Lee Baily with his smarmy fake-friendly cross-exam of Furhman. “Marine to Marine” did you ever say the word N*****?
There was Jewish Judge on Larry King who throughout the trial kept saying the black jury would never convict. I thought he was crazy and tuned him out. I laughed at J. Cochran’s silly closing speech. When the jury had a quick deliberation, I thought “Of course, he’s guilty”. The Not guilty verdict was one the biggest surprises of my life. Changed my view of poor blacks forever.
* The other surprise of the trial – for me – was seeing how smart the LA Detectives were. Furhman, Van adder and Lang came off as very articulate on the stand. I didn’t realize that so many smart guys became Police Detectives.
* I was at a small gift shop when the verdict came down. Present were the white lady owner, me and my wife and the two sales clerks, middle-aged Tex-Mex ladies (they spoke English to one another – one with a slight accent, the other unaccented). Elizabeth the owner and my wife and I were surprised, no, amazed when Carole and Emilia let out whoops of approbation at the verdict:
OJ innocent. Sociologically, I should mention that Carole and Emilia were convinced that Obama was a Moslem and that Carole was a fanatical Elvis worshipper who had visited Elvis-land in Memphis more than once and spent her lunch breaks reading romance novels.
