Monday, July 11, 2016

New Black Panther Threat: Ignored by FBI/DOJ

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Obama Justice Department Laughed Off Armed New Black Panther Threat.
In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. I was one of those lawyers who delivered those warnings.
Our warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case I and other lawyers brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke.
Allies in the media echoed the narrative that the defendants in the voter intimidation case were harmless clowns.
Among the information presented to top officials was a video produced by the New Black Panthers entitled “Training Day.” The video proposes killing police officers by ambush. . . .
Justice Department employees ridiculed the video and noted very few were in the video’s audience, apparently oblivious of the role and power of social media to reach people not sitting in an auditorium.
Stay tuned.
Related: Flashback: New Black Panthers with Guns, Lots of Them.
SOMETHING THAT’S BEEN LARGELY OVERLOOKED IN ALL THE RACIAL POSTURING: The cop who shot Philando Castile was a Latino named Jeronimo Yanez. But for our “racial justice” crowd, it’s always 1963 — but a 1963 in which Bull Connor is a Republican instead of the Democratic National Committeeman he actually was.

AT HOME AND ABROAD, OBAMA DECLARED A FAILURE

AT HOME AND ABROAD, OBAMA DECLARED A FAILURE*. “America’s Worst President? I nominate Barack Obama, the anti-Lincoln,” Myron Magnet, the founder of City Journal writes:
When the president praises the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, as if they alone of his fellow countrymen know that platitudinous truth, he is only reinforcing black grievance, when his proper role is to convince ghetto blacks that their lives matter enough for them to take responsibility for them, to stop going around with chips on their shoulders and Glocks in their waistbands, to be fathers to the children they beget, and to set for them an example of the responsible citizenship that is theirs for the asking, thanks to the efforts of so many of their countrymen, white and black, living and dead.
True to form, Obama went into grievance-mongering mode on July 7, commenting on the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by cops in Louisiana and Minnesota. He noted that “all of us as Americans should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” And he went on to detail law enforcement’s racial disparities, as if there were not even more stark and troubling racial disparities in lawbreaking. His familiar conclusion: “If you add it all up, the African American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population. Now, these are facts. And when incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same. And that hurts.”
Later that day, a black former soldier assassinated five Dallas police officers and wounded seven more, sniping from above with a semi-automatic rifle. A sympathizer of the New Black Panther Party, which professes hatred of whites and especially Jews, the sniper, Micah X. Johnson, 25, told police who cornered and killed him that he was avenging cop killings of blacks by killing whites and especially white cops.
If you want to ignite race riots, a sure-fire way to do it is to stir up black hatred and suspicion of cops, which will in turn make cops warier of blacks and more trigger-happy, and so on, until an explosion occurs. So thanks, President Obama. You have set back American race relations by 50 years.
Meanwhile at Politico, “How The World Fell Out Of Love With Obama: In countries key to the president’s legacy, people express profound disappointment in a man from whom they expected great things.”
Yes people often feel disappointment after being conned. Or as Obama himself would say, bamboozled.
(Not least of which, from Politico itself.)
* Of course, as Glenn noted last week, “Before you call him a failure, you must know what he was trying to accomplish.”

Another Sign That Shale Is Rebounding

FRACKING: Another Sign That Shale Is Rebounding.
If, as the old saying goes, two out of three ain’t bad, then five out of six has to be verging on being downright good. That’s welcome news for the embattled American shale industry, which has seen the number of active rigs currently in operation increase for five of the last six weeks. Frackers have had to endure a price collapse that at one point sent the cost of a barrel of oil below $28 per barrel, but now that prices have seemed to stabilize around $50 per barrel, all signs are pointing towards a rebound. . . .
The rig count was closely tracked these last two years as a bearish crude market slowed and eventually curbed the shale boom, but it shouldn’t be considered a perfect metric. When faced with a cash crunch, drillers will naturally shut down their least productive rigs first while leaving the real gushers in place, so the drop in rigs didn’t tightly track with a drop in overall production.
That said, it’s undoubtedly good news that the rig count is once again rising. It’s a sign that, should prices hold, the worst is over for U.S. shale. Analysts expect the rig count to continue to rise, too, topping 600 next year and averaging just shy of 1,000 in 2018. Step one for rekindling the shale revolution is drilling more wells, and five of the last six weeks we’ve seen evidence of just that.
Frackers are doing more to save western civilization than most of those charged with its defense.

The Myths Of Black Lives Matter

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Myths Of Black Lives Matter:
Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.
But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.
To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong.
The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.
For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.
The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.
Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.
Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.
Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.
She has a book out, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. But remember, facts don’t matter, because this is all about energizing black turnout in November. Nothing less, and nothing more.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

THE CLIMATE POLICE CRACK-UP: THOSE EXXON MOBIL SUBPOENAS? NEVER MIND.

THE CLIMATE POLICE CRACK-UP: THOSE EXXON MOBIL SUBPOENAS? NEVER MIND.


 “We hope Exxon attempts to disbar all state Attorneys Generals involved in this assault on free speech.”

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN SCORNS OBAMA’S WAR RECORD

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN SCORNS OBAMA’S WAR RECORD: As well he should. Obama’s Smart Diplomacy has a losing record. Media speculate LTG Flynn (ret) is on Trump’s VP list. From Flynn’s essay in The New York Post:
We’re in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that runs from Pyongyang, North Korea, to Havana, Cuba, and Caracas, Venezuela. Along the way, the alliance picks up radical Muslim countries and organizations such as Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State.
That’s a formidable coalition, and nobody should be shocked to discover that we are losing the war.
If our leaders were interested in winning, they would have to design a strategy to destroy this global enemy. But they don’t see the global war. Instead, they timidly nibble around the edges of the battlefields from Africa to the Middle East, and act as if each fight, whether in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Libya or Afghanistan, can be peacefully resolved by diplomatic effort.
This approach is doomed. We have real enemies, dedicated to dominating and eventually destroying us, and they are not going to be talked out of their hatred. Iran, for example, declared war on the United States in 1979 — that’s 37 years ago — and has been killing Americans ever since. Every year, the State Department declares Iran to be the world’s primary supporter of terror. Do you think we’ll nicely and politely convince them to be good citizens and even (as President Obama desires) a responsible ally supporting peace? Do you think ISIS or the Taliban wants to embrace us?
I’ll wager LTG Flynn also fully understands the operational and strategic damage done to US national security by Hillary’s criminal mishandling of classified information.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

Black Lives Don’t Matter

Black Lives Don’t Matter

black-man-arrestedBlack lives don’t matter. How do I know this? Because if black lives really mattered, blacks would stop killing each other. Blacks would stop committing genocide against themselves by aborting more children than they allow to be born.  Blacks would stop consigning generations to poverty by having the majority of their children out-of-wedlock. And blacks would stop treating education as punishment and instead treat it as an opportunity.
Until blacks start changing these pathologies, the whole “Black Lives Matter” movement, with its insistence that everyone has to changeexcept for blacks themselves is nothing more than Progressive kabuki theater aimed at diverting attention from the fact that Democrats are facilitating self-destructive behaviors in the black community and that blacks are using the Democrat propaganda machine as an excuse to avoid the terrible (but not insurmountable) challenges that really claimblack lives.
Here’s a bit of data to support my premise:
According to The Guardian, which tracks the number of people who die at the hands of American police (an interesting thing for a Britishpaper to track, right?) in 2015 American police allegedly killed 1,146 people. Of those, 79 were unarmed blacks (or not quite 7% of those killed). So far in 2016, American police have allegedly killed 566 people, of whom 24 were unarmed blacks (or 4% of those killed). While I wish each of those numbers was zero, the fact is that they are an infinitesimally number compared to the almost 40,000,000 blacks in America.
I’m sure some of those shootings were the results of bad decision-making in the heat of the moment, with a small percentage definitely reflecting police malevolence or even racism. But let’s put those numbers in perspective before we get too upset.
In 2015, 129 officers died in the line of duty. So far in 2016, 61 officers have died in the line of duty. To give some perspective, we need to know how many police there are in America, which is a little hard to nail down because there are so many different kinds of police, ranging from federal to state to county to municipal, etc. A rough estimate, though, puts the total number of police at around 1.1 million. One doesn’t have to run the numbers to realize that police die at criminal hands at a greater rate than unarmed black people die at police hands.
In other words, if anyone should be out protesting on America’s streets, it’s the cops.
So if police aren’t doing all the killing what are the real scourges in the black community, scourges over which the cops have no control:
The scourge that allows Obama and fellow Leftists to start calling for “gun control” is black on black murders. Although the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies are getting increasingly shy about reporting racial statistics in connection with violent crime, in 2010 the DOJ published an analysis looking at violent crime from 1980 through 2008. Its conclusions on race were stark — blacks are grimly determined to kill as many of their own race as possible:
Blacks were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders
 In 2008, the homicide victimization rate for blacks (19.6 homicides per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (3.3 homicides per 100,000).
 The victimization rate for blacks peaked in the early 1990s, reaching a high of 39.4 homicides per 100,000 in 1991 ( figure 17).
 After 1991, the victimization rate for blacks fell until 1999, when it stabilized near 20 homicides per 100,000.
 In 2008, the offending rate for blacks (24.7 offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 offenders per 100,000) ( figure 18).
 The offending rate for blacks showed a similar pattern to the victimization rate, peaking in the early 1990s at a high of 51.1 offenders per 100,000 in 1991.
 After 1991, the offending rate for blacks declined until it reached 24 per 100,000 in 2004. The rate has since fluctuated, increasing to 28.4 offenders per 100,000 in 2006 before falling again to 24.7 offenders per 100,000 in 2008.
Keep in mind that the above numbers pre-date “the Ferguson effect.” It turns out, sadly, that after blacks succeed in driving the much-reviled cops out of their communities, the killing escalates:
“We are in the midst of a very abrupt, precipitous and large crime increase,” says Richard Rosenfeld, a respected criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of a study released Wednesday by the Justice Department examining reasons for the increase.
Specifically, murder is spiking — in urban areas. Rosenfeld says last year in the country’s 56 biggest cities, homicides jumped 17 percent.
“That’s a far larger percentage increase than in nearly any other year we’ve seen over the last couple of decades,” Rosenfeld says.
[snip]
But there’s another potential explanation that does, what Rosenfeld and others call the “Ferguson effect.” It refers to the August 2014 shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Rosenfeld concludes in his study that some of the increase may be attributable to “some version of the Ferguson effect.”
Chicago is the perfect example of a city in which blacks, having made the police reluctant to do their jobs, have turned on each other with feral savagery:
In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period.
[snip]
Through the end of May, shooting incidents in Chicago were up 53 percent over the same period in 2015, which had already seen a significant increase over 2014. Compared with the first five months of 2014, shooting incidents in 2016 were up 86 percent. Certain police districts saw larger spikes. The Harrison District on the West Side, encompassing West Humboldt Park, forexample, had a 191 percent increase in homicides through the end of May. Shootings in May citywide averaged nearly 13 a day, a worrisome portent for summer.
[snip]
In 2014, blacks in Chicago made up 79 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, 85 percent of all known robbery suspects, and 77 percent of all known murder suspects, according to police department data. Whites were 1 percent of known nonfatal shootings suspects in 2014, 2.5 percent of known robbery suspects, and 5 percent of known murder suspects, the latter number composed disproportionately of domestic homicides.
[snip]
The Emanuel-appointed Police Accountability Task Force claimed that police shooting data give “validity to the widely held belief that the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” The task force pointed to the fact that of the 404 individuals shot by the police between 2008 and 2015, both fatally and nonfatally, 74 percent (or 299) were black, and 8 percent (or 33) were white. Predictably, the task force said not one word about black and white crime rates, which were even more disproportionate in 2015 than in 2014. In 2015, blacks were 80 percent of all known murder suspects and 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in 2015 and 1.4 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects. And blacks were overwhelmingly the victims of criminal shootings as well. In 2015, 2,460 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally, or nearly seven blacks a day. By contrast, roughly 30 blacks were shot lethally and nonlethally by the police in all of 2015. Those 2,460 black victims of criminal shootings constituted nearly 81 percent of all known shooting victims. Seventy-eight whites were shot in 2015, or one white every 4.6 days, constituting 2.5 percent of all known shooting victims. If 74 percent of police shootings have black subjects, that is because officer use of force is going to occur most frequently where the police are trying to protect the law-abiding from armed and dangerous suspects—and that is in predominantly minority neighborhoods.
When it comes to killing, black lives don’t matter to the people doing the vast majority of that killing: blacks.
It’s not just felonious killing that’s the issue in black communities. There’s also a huge problem with legally sanctioned killing in the form of abortions. In state after state, black women abort their babies in numbers far in excess of black representation in the overall population. In 2013, in Louisiana, black women had 60% of abortions despite blacks being only 32% of the population. In New York in 2012, there were more black babies aborted than born alive.
Across America, black teens have initiated a holocaust against future black generations. The data is tragic:
[B]lack teenagers between 15 and 19 years old have an abortion rate of 41 per 1,000 women, more than twice the national average of 18 per 1,000. In comparison, white teenagers have an abortion rate of 10 per 1,000 women, which means that African-American teenagers are having abortions at a rate that is about four times higher than that of their white counterparts.
When it comes to eugenic-style race decimation, black lives don’t matter to the people in the forefront of purging black lives: blacks.
Black lives in America are being destroyed in other ways as well. Take the matter of single-mother homes, which statistically consign any children raised in those homes to a lifetime of poverty. Single motherhood is soaring across America, throughout all racial demographics. Numerically, there are now more single white mothers than there are single black mothers — but that’s reasonable given that there are many more white women in America than black women.
What’s more interesting is the percentage of women within a specific race who opt to go it alone. In 2011, 67.8% of black women had children without fathers, while only 26% of white, non-Hispanic women made that choice. In Chicago today, the numbers are even worse: “Fatherlessness in the city’s black community is at a cataclysmic level—close to 80 percent of children are born to single mothers in high-crime areas.”
Worse, when there are multiple children living with a single mother, it’s highly likely that none of those children share a father. To the extent that men roll into and out of the home, each of those men is asignificant threat to any child with whom the man does not share any genetic material:
2001 study in Child Maltreatment found that “the presence of a non-biological father figure in the home should be considered a significant predictor of a future child maltreatment report.” In a sample of 644 mother-child pairs, the authors found no significant difference in maltreatment between mother-father households and single-mother households, but did find that children with a cohabiting “father surrogate” were “twice as likely to be reported for maltreatment after his entry into the home.”
When it comes to putting black children at risk, black lives don’t matter to the people who too often make life choices dangerous to black children:  blacks.
Although I contend that, with the loony tunes having taken over American academia, kids leave college less educated than they were when they entered, the reality is that education in America is still a predictor of economic success. Heck, being able to read and do math with ease is a predictor of economic success.  Unskilled labor is physically hard and pays badly.  Skilled work, whether blue or white collar, still brings in those middle-class dollars. So how are blacks doing in school?  Badly:
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
I don’t believe that this differential has anything to do with overall intelligence.  Instead, I’m pretty sure that black academic failure has a great deal to do with a culture that still castigates education as a “white” thing, unworthy of blacks.
When it comes to putting black children at economic risk, black lives don’t matter to a racial subgroup that denigrates education:  blacks.
The biggest threat to black health and well-being in America is other blacks. Yet if you look at the Democrat race mongers, whether in politics, entertainment, or the media, when they decry problems in black America, none will ever say that black communities need to step up to improve their own lives. Instead, it’s all a blame game:  whites, Republicans, Congress, Jews, teachers, police, racism . . . you name it, they’ve got a finger pointed anywhere other than their own behaviors.
And maybe, just maybe, blacks wouldn’t be enraged to the point of killing if the first black American president, instead of continuing the Kabuki theater of focusing on everything but blacks’ own behavior said this:
“Yes, there is racism in America. Yes, there are racist cops and just plain bad or stupid cops. But here’s the deal:  At some point, the black community has to take responsibility for itself. It’s not up to the cops, good or bad, to stop you from aborting blacks, killing blacks, and consigning future generations of blacks (those who escape abortion) to lifetimes of poverty.  You need to make the change. You need to take advantage of educational opportunities. You need to stay away from drugsYou need to get married before starting a family. And youneed to stop killing each other. And here’s a thought to chew on:  When you stop engaging in these suicidal behaviors, you might find that you’re on the receiving end of fewer behaviors that you claim are racist.”