By Nicholas Stix
Ronan Farrow was a Rhodes Scholar… and he hates white people! Actually, the proper order is: Farrow hates white people, and was a Rhodes Scholar. Apparently, getting named a Rhodes Scholar requires that one be racist.
Between Farrow’s family connections and his racism, he may be in line for a MacArthur “Genius” Award, any time now.
James Fulford proves Farrow’s peculiar genius, over at VDARE.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
The Young Savages: Race Reversal is an Over 50-Year-Old Media Propaganda Trick
By David in TN
TCM just ran The Young Savages again. This is a 1961 John Frankenheimer film with Burt Lancaster as a Manhattan deputy DA.
In 1957, a 15 year old white boy named Michael Farmer was murdered by a gang of blacks and Puerto Ricans. It received a lot of publicity at the time.
Farmer had polio, but could walk.
In the 1961 film, the victim is a teenage Puerto Rican boy who is blind. The killers are from an Italian gang, with the main bad guy Irish.
The film does give some ambiguity to the case. The story takes place (and was filmed) in the part of Harlem which tipped from Italian to Puerto Rican.
Reversing the races of perp and victim in crime stories became a standard trope in movie and TV drama.
N.S.: And lefty star Burt Lancaster was no mere hired hand: he produced the picture, as well. Although he was not listed as producer, his partner in Hill-Hecht-Lancaster Productions, Harold Hecht, was listed as executive producer.
Six years later, another race-reversal movie was released: The Incident, in which white psychopaths Tony Musante andf Martin Sheen terrorize a late-night subway train full of people, until one-armed Vietnam veteran Beau Bridges sacrifices himself, to stop them.
[See also:
“BUSTED! PC TV Producers Use Fake Crimes to Score Real-World Propaganda Points”;
“It’s a White Male Crime Wave!”; and
This method became the standard m.o. of Dick Wolf’s record-setting TV series, Law & Order:
“NBC’s Law & Order: Anti-White Propaganda in the Culture War.”]
TCM just ran The Young Savages again. This is a 1961 John Frankenheimer film with Burt Lancaster as a Manhattan deputy DA.
In 1957, a 15 year old white boy named Michael Farmer was murdered by a gang of blacks and Puerto Ricans. It received a lot of publicity at the time.
Farmer had polio, but could walk.
In the 1961 film, the victim is a teenage Puerto Rican boy who is blind. The killers are from an Italian gang, with the main bad guy Irish.
The film does give some ambiguity to the case. The story takes place (and was filmed) in the part of Harlem which tipped from Italian to Puerto Rican.
Reversing the races of perp and victim in crime stories became a standard trope in movie and TV drama.
N.S.: And lefty star Burt Lancaster was no mere hired hand: he produced the picture, as well. Although he was not listed as producer, his partner in Hill-Hecht-Lancaster Productions, Harold Hecht, was listed as executive producer.
Six years later, another race-reversal movie was released: The Incident, in which white psychopaths Tony Musante andf Martin Sheen terrorize a late-night subway train full of people, until one-armed Vietnam veteran Beau Bridges sacrifices himself, to stop them.
[See also:
“BUSTED! PC TV Producers Use Fake Crimes to Score Real-World Propaganda Points”;
“It’s a White Male Crime Wave!”; and
This method became the standard m.o. of Dick Wolf’s record-setting TV series, Law & Order:
“NBC’s Law & Order: Anti-White Propaganda in the Culture War.”]
Friday, November 29, 2013
Ilana Mercer: Are Race-Lying Glibertarians Doomed to Extinction?
Excerpted by Nicholas Stix
‘Blackout’: Are Reality Defying Libertarians Doomed to Extinction?
Some simple-minded, lite libertarians feel (for they do not think) that describing race reality is a feature of a collectivist habit of mind. Crimes described by their perpetrators as “polarbearing” or Jew hunting, these libertarians refuse to frame in anything but race-neutral terms….
[Read the rest here.]
‘Blackout’: Are Reality Defying Libertarians Doomed to Extinction?
Some simple-minded, lite libertarians feel (for they do not think) that describing race reality is a feature of a collectivist habit of mind. Crimes described by their perpetrators as “polarbearing” or Jew hunting, these libertarians refuse to frame in anything but race-neutral terms….
[Read the rest here.]
Countenance Blog Uses Racial Profiling to Decode “News” Story about Racist Black Sucker Punch (“Knockout Martin Luther King”) Attack in Hamden, Connecticut
By Nicholas Stix
As the Countenance blogmeister shows, racial profiling is not only an invaluable law enforcement and civilian survival tool, but an essential method for propaganda analysis.
At this link.
As the Countenance blogmeister shows, racial profiling is not only an invaluable law enforcement and civilian survival tool, but an essential method for propaganda analysis.
At this link.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Defining Deviancy Down (Complete Version of Classic Essay)
Defining Deviancy Down
By Daniel Patrick Moynihan
American Scholar (Winter 1993)
Corrected and reposted by Nicholas Stix
[N.S.: This was scanned from the original and, as such, was full of mistakes. Though I checked multiple passages against other versions, doubtless it still has some. I originally planned on publishing an analysis of it as accompaniment, I now see that that would require too much work as a blog item, but hope to eventually devote an article to it. Please direct me to any typos you find. Thanks in advance.]
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is senior United States Senator from New York. He is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming Pandemonium: Ethnicity and International Politics.
IN ONE OF THE FOUNDING TEXTS OF SOCIOLOGY, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is," he wrote, "completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. This apercu appears in the chapter entitled "Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological." Durkheim writes:
The matter was pretty much left at that until seventy years later when, in 1965, Kai T. Erikson published Wayward Puritans, a study of "crime rates" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The plan behind the book, as Erikson put it, was "to test [Durkheim's] notion that the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time." The notion proved out very well indeed.
Despite occasional crime waves, as when itinerant Quakers refused to take off their hats in the presence of magistrates, the amount of deviance in this corner of seventeenth-century New England fitted nicely with the supply of stocks and whipping posts. Erikson remarks:
Erikson was taking issue with what he described as "a dominant strain in sociological thinking" that took for granted that a well-structured society "is somehow designed to prevent deviant behavior from occurring." In both authors, Durkheim and Erikson, there is an undertone that suggests that, with deviancy, as with most social goods, there is the continuing problem of demand exceeding supply. Durkheim invites us to imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousness. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such.
Recall Durkheim's comment that there need be no cause for congratulations should the amount of crime drop "too noticeably below the normal level. It would not appear that Durkheim anywhere contemplates the possibility of too much crime. Clearly his theory would have required him to deplore such a development, but the possibility seems never to have occurred to him.
Erikson, writing much later in the twentieth century, contemplates both possibilities. "Deviant persons can be said to supply needed services to society." There is no doubt a tendency for the supply of any needed thing to run short. But he is consistent. There can, he believes, be too much of a good thing. Hence “the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time.” [My emphasis.]
Social scientists are said to be on the lookout for poor fellows getting a bum rap. But here is a theory that clearly implies that there are circumstances in which society will choose not to notice behavior that would be otherwise controlled, or disapproved, or even punished.
It appears to me that this is in fact what we in the United States have been doing of late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation, since the time Erikson wrote, the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can "afford to recognize" and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the "normal" level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of "old" standards, and accounts for much of the present "cultural war" such as proclaimed by many at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
Let me, then, offer three categories of redefinition in these regards: the altruistic, the opportunistic, and the normalizing.
The first category, the altruistic, may be illustrated by the deinstitutionalization movement within the mental health profession that appeared in the 1950s. The second category, the opportunistic, is seen in the interest group rewards derived from the acceptance of "alternative" family structures. The third category, the normalizing, is to be observed in the growing acceptance of unprecedented levels of violent crime.
II
It happens that I was present at the beginning of the deinstitutionalization movement. Early in 1955 Averell Harriman, then the new governor of New York, met with his new commissioner of mental hygiene, Dr. Paul Hoch, who described the development, at one of the state mental hospitals, of a tranquilizer derived from rauwolfia. The medication had been clinically tested and appeared to be an effective treatment for many severely psychotic patients, thus increasing the percentage of patients discharged. Dr. Hoch recommended that it used systemwide; Harriman found the money. That same year Congress created a Joint Commission on Mental Health and Illness whose mission was to formulate "comprehensive and realistic recommendations" in this area, which was then a matter of considerable public concern. Year after year, the population of mental institutions grew. Year after year, new facilities had to be built. Never mind the complexities: population growth and such like matters. There was a general unease. Durkheim's constant continued to be exceeded. (In Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, Rudy Abramson writes: "New York's mental hospitals in 1955 were overflowing warehouses, and new patients were being admitted faster than space could be found for them. When he was inaugurated, 94,000 New Yorkers were confined to state hospitals. Admissions were running at more than 2,500 a year and rising, making the Department of Mental Hygiene the fastest-growing, most-expensive, most-hopeless department of state government.")
The discovery of tranquilizers was adventitious. Physicians were seeking cures for disorders that were just beginning to be understood. Even a limited success made it possible to believe that the incidence of this particular range of disorders, which had seemingly required persons to be confined against their will or even awareness, could be greatly reduced. The Congressional Commission submitted its report in 1961; it proposed a nationwide program of deinstitutionalization.
Late in 1961, President Kennedy appointed an interagency committee to prepare legislative recommendations based upon the report. I represented Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg on this committee and drafted its final submission. This included the recommendation of the National Institute of Mental Health that 2,000 community mental health centers (one per 100,000 of population) be built by 1980. A buoyant Presidential Message to Congress followed early in 1963. "If we apply our medical knowledge and social insights fully," President Kennedy pronounced, "all but a small portion of the mentally ill can eventually achieve a wholesome and a constructive social adjustment."
A "concerted national attack on mental disorders [was] now possible and practical." The President signed the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act on October 31, 1963, his last public bill-signing ceremony. He gave me a pen.
The mental hospitals emptied out. At the time Governor Harriman met with Dr. Hoch in 1955, there were 93,314 adult residents of mental institutions maintained by New York State. As of August 1992, there were 11,363. This occurred across the nation, however, the number of community mental health centers never came near the goal of the 2,000 proposed community centers. Only some 482 received federal construction funds between 1963 and 1980. The next year, 1981, the program was folded into the Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse block grant and disappeared from view. Even when centers were built, the results were hardly as hoped for. David F. Musto of Yale writes that the planners had bet on improving national mental health "by improving the quality of general community life through expert knowledge, not merely by more effective treatment of the already ill." There was no such knowledge.
However, worse luck, the belief that there was such knowledge took hold within sectors of the profession that saw institutionalization as an unacceptable mode of social control. These activists subscribed to a re-defining mode of their own. Mental patients were said to have been "labeled," and were not to be drugged. Musto says of the battles that followed that they were "so intense and dramatic precisely because both sides shared the fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient mental health technology which could thoroughly reform society; the prize seemed eminently worth fighting for."
But even as the federal government turned to other matters, the mental institutions continued to release inmates. Professor Fred Siegel of Cooper Union observes: "In the great wave of moral deregulation that began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the insane were freed from the fetters of middle-class mores." They might henceforth sleep in doorways as often as they chose. The problem of the homeless appeared, characteristically defined as persons who lacked "affordable housing."
The altruistic mode of redefinition is just that. There is no reason to believe that there was any real increase in mental illness at the time deinstitutionalization began. Yet there was such a perception, and this enabled good people to try to do good, however unavailing in the end.
III
Our second, or opportunistic mode of redefinition, reveals at most anominal intent to do good. The true object is to do well, a long-established motivation among mortals. In this pattern, a growth in deviancy makes possible a transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who control the deviant population. This control would be jeopardized if any serious effort were made to reduce the deviancy in question. This leads to assorted strategies for re-defining the behavior in question as not all that deviant, really.
In the years from 1963 to 1965, the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of Labor picked up the first tremors of what Samuel H. Preston, in the 1984 Presidential Address to the Population Association of America, would call "the earthquake that shuddered through the American family in the past twenty years." The New York Times recently provided a succinct accounting of Preston's point:
In 1991, Paul Offner and I published longitudinal data showing that, of children born in the years 1967-69, some 22.1 percent were dependent on welfare - that is to say, Aid to Families with Dependent Children [N.S.: AFDC was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) in 1996, following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act] - before reaching age 18. This broke down as 15.7 percent for white children, 72.3 percent for black children. Projections for children born in 1980 gave rates of 22.2 percent and 82.9 percent respectively. A year later, a New York Times series on welfare and poverty called this a "startling finding ... symptom of vast social calamity."
And yet there is little evidence that these facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal government. To the contrary, there is general acceptance of the situation as normal. Political candidates raise the subject, often to the point of dwelling on it, But while there is a good deal of demand for symbolic change, there is none of the marshaling of resources that is associated with significant social action. Nor is there any lack of evidence that there is a serious social problem here.
Richard T. Gill writes of "an accumulation of data showing that intact biological parent families offer children very large advantages compared to any other family or non-family structure one can imagine." Correspondingly, the disadvantages associated with single-parent families spill over into other areas of social policy that now attract great public concern. Leroy L. Schwartz, M.D., and Mark W. Stanton argue that the real quest regarding a government-run health system such as that of Canada or Germany is whether it would work "in a country that has social problems that countries like Canada and Germany don't share to the same extent." Health problems reflect ways of living. The way of life associated with "such social pathologies as the breakdown of the family structure" lead to medical pathologies. Schwartz and Stanton conclude:
"The United States is paying dearly for its social and behavioral problems," for they have now become medical problems as well.
To cite another example, there is at present no more vexing problem of social policy in the United States than that posed by education. A generation of ever-more ambitious statutes and reforms have produced weak responses at best and a fair amount of what could more simply be called dishonesty. ("Everyone knows that Head Start works." By the year 2000, American students will "be first in the world in science and mathematics.") None of this should surprise us. The 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity by James S. Coleman and his associates established that the family background of students played a much stronger role in student achievement relative to variations in the ten (and still standard) measures of school quality.
In a 1992 study entitled America's Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton came up with the elegant and persuasive concept of the parent-pupil ratio as a measure of school quality. Barton, who was on the policy planning staff in the Department of Labor in 1965, noted the great increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families since then. He further noted that the proportion "varies widely among the states" and is related to "variation in achievement" among them. The correlation between the percentage of eighth graders living in two-parent families and average mathematics proficiency is a solid .74. North Dakota, highest on the math test, is second highest on the family compositions scale - that is, it is second in the percentage of kids coming from two-parent homes. The District of Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is second lowest in the test score.
A few months before Barton's study appeared, I published an article showing that the correlation between eighth-grade math scores and distance of state capitals from the Canadian border was .522, a respectable showing. By contrast, the correlation with per pupil expenditure was a derisory .203. I offered the policy proposal that states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada. This would be difficult, of course, but so would it be to change the parent-pupil ratio.
Indeed, the 1990 Census found that for the District of Columbia, apart from Ward 3 west of Rock Creek Park, the percentage of children living in single-parent families in the seven remaining wards ranged from a low of 63.6 percent to a high of 75.7. This being a one-time measurement, over time the proportions become asymptotic. And this in the nation's capital. No demand for change comes from that community - or as near to no demand as makes no matter. For there is good money to be made out of bad schools. This is a statement that will no doubt please many a hard heart, and displease many genuinely concerned to bring about change. To the latter, a group in which I would like to include myself, I would only say that we are obliged to ask why things do not change.
For a period there was some speculation that, if family structure got bad enough, this mode of deviancy would have less punishing effects on children. In 1991 Deborah A. Dawson of the National Institutes of Health, examined the thesis that "the psychological effects of divorce and single parenthood on children were strongly influenced by a sense of shame in being 'different' from the norm." If this were so, the effect should have fallen off in the 1980s, when being from a single-parent home became much more common. It did not. "The problems associated with task overload among single parents are more constant in nature," Dawson wrote, adding that since the adverse effects had not diminished, they were "not based on stigmatization but rather on inherent problems in alternative family structures" - alternative here meaning other than two-parent families. We should take note of such candor. Writing in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in 1989, Sara McLanahan and Karen Booth noted: "Whereas a decade ago the prevailing view was that single motherhood had no harmful effects on children, recent research is less optimistic."
The year 1990 saw more of this lesson. In a paper prepared for the Progressive Policy Institute, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and William A. Galston wrote that "if the economic effects of family breakdown are clear, the psychological effects are just now coming into focus." They cite Karl Zinsmeister:
As for juvenile crime, they cite Douglas Smith and C. Roger Jarjoura:
"Neighborhoods with larger percentages of youth (those aged 12 to 20) and areas with higher percentages of single-parent households also have higher rates of violent crime." They add: "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and time again in the literature; poverty is far from the sole determinant of crime." But the large point is avoided. In a 1992 essay The Expert's Story of Marriage," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead examined "the story of marriage as it is conveyed in today's high school and college textbooks." Nothing amiss in this tale.
It goes like this:
The life course is full of exciting options. The lifestyle options available to individuals seeking a fulfilling personal relationship include living a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual single lifestyle; living in a commune; having a group marriage; being a single parent; or living together. Marriage is yet another lifestyle choice. However, before choosing marriage, individuals should weigh its costs and benefits against other lifestyle options and should consider what they want to get out of their intimate relationships. Even within marriage, different people want different things. For example, some people marry for companionship, some marry in order to have children, some marry for emotional and financial security. Though marriage can offer a rewarding path to personal growth, it is important to remember that it cannot provide a secure or permanent status. Many people will make the decision between marriage and singlehood many times throughout their life.
Divorce represents part of the normal family life cycle. It should not be viewed as either deviant or tragic, as it has been in the past. Rather, it establishes a process for "uncoupling" and thereby serves as the foundation for individual renewal and "new beginnings."
History commences to be rewritten. In 1992, the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on "Investing in Families: A Historical Perspective." A fact sheet prepared by committee staff began:
"INVESTING IN FAMILIES: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE"
FACT SHEET
HISTORICAL SHIFTS IN FAMILY COMPOSITION
CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
While in modern times the percentage of children living with one parent has increased, more children lived with just one parent in Colonial America.
The fact sheet proceeded to list program on program for which federal funds were allegedly reduced in the l980s. We then come to a summary.
Between 1970 and 1991, the value of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] benefits decreased by 41%. In spite of proven success of Head Start, only 28% of eligible children are being served. As of 1990, more than $18 billion in child support went uncollected. At the same time, the poverty rate among single-parent with children under 18 was 44%. Between 1980 and 1990, the rate of growth in the total Federal budget was four times greater than the rate of growth in children's programs.
In other words, benefits paid to mothers and children have gone down steadily, as indeed they have done. But no proposal is made to restore benefits to an earlier level, or even to maintain their value, as is the case with other "indexed" Social Security programs. Instead we go directly to the subject of education spending.
Nothing new. In 1969, President Nixon proposed a guaranteed income, the Family Assistance Plan. This was described as an "income strategy" as against a "services strategy." It may or may not have been a good idea, but it was a clear one, and the resistance of service providers to it was equally clear. In the end it was defeated, to the huzzahs of the advocates of "welfare rights." What is going on here is simply that a large increase in what once was seen as deviancy has provided opportunity to a wide spectrum of interest groups that benefit from re-defining the problem as essentially normal and doing little to reduce it.
IV
Our normalizing category most directly corresponds to Erikson's proposition that "the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time." Here we are dealing with the popular psychological notion of "denial." In 1965, having reached the conclusion that there would be a dramatic increase in single-parent families, I reached the further conclusion that this would in turn lead to a dramatic increase in crime. In an article in America, I wrote:
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a
community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure - that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.
The inevitable, as we now know, has come to pass, but here again our response is curiously passive. Crime is a more or less continuous subject of political pronouncement, and from time to time it will be at or near the top of opinion polls as a matter of public concern. But it never gets much further than that. In the words spoken from the bench, Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District, described how "the slaughter of the innocent marches unabated: subway riders, bodega owners, cab drivers, babies; in laundromats, at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways." In personal communication, he writes: "This numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction." There is no expectation that this will change, nor any efficacious public insistence that it do so. The crime level has been normalized.
Consider the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibition, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on February 14. The nation was shocked. The event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.
In recent years, again in the context of illegal traffic in controlled substances, this form of murder has returned. But it has done so at a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly re-enactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses. On the morning after the close of the Democratic National Convention in New York City in July, there was such an account in the second section of the New York Times. It was not a big story; bottom of the page, but with a headline that got your attention. "3 Slain in Bronx Apartment, but a Baby is Saved." A subhead continued: "A mother's last act was to hide her little girl under the bed." The article described a drug execution; the now-routine blindfolds made from duct tape; a man and a woman and a teenager involved. "Each had been shot once in the head." The police had found them a day later. They also found, under a bed, a three-month-old baby, dehydrated but alive. A lieutenant remarked of the mother, "In her last dying act she protected her baby. She probably knew she was going to die, so she stuffed the baby where she knew it would be safe." But the matter was left there.
The police would do their best. But the event passed quickly; forgotten by the next day, it will never make World Book.
Nor is it likely that any great heed will be paid to an uncanny reenactment of the Prohibition drama a few months later, also in the Bronx. The Time's story, page B3, reported:
9 Men Posing as Police Are Indicted in 3 Murders
Drug Dealers Were Kidnapped for Ransom
The Daily News story, same day, page 17, made it four murders, adding nice details about torture techniques. The gang members posed as federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents, real badges and all.
The victims were drug dealers, whose families were uneasy about calling the police. Ransom seems generally to have been set in the $650,000 range. Some paid. Some got it in the back of the head. So it goes.
Yet, violent killings, often random, go on unabated. Peaks continue to attract some notice. But these are peaks above "average" levels that thirty years ago would have been thought epidemic.
LOS ANGELES, AUG. 24. (Reuters) Twenty-two people were killed in Los Angeles over the weekend, the worst period of violence in the city since it was ravaged by riots earlier this year, the police said today.
Twenty-four others were wounded by gunfire or stabbings, including a 19-year old woman in a wheelchair who was shot in the back when she failed to respond to a motorist who asked for directions in south Los Angeles.
["The guy stuck a gun out of the window and just fired at her," said a police spokesman, Lieut. David Rock. The woman was later described as being in stable condition.
Among those who died was an off-duty officer, shot while investigating reports of a prowler in a neighbor's yard, and a Little League baseball coach who had argued with the father of a boy he was coaching.]
The police said at least nine of the deaths were gang-related, including that of a 14-year old girl killed in a fight between rival gangs.
Fifty-one people were killed in three days of rioting that started April 29 after the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney G. King.
Los Angeles usually has above-average violence during August, but the police were at a loss to explain the sudden rise. On an average weekend in August, 14 fatalities occur.
Not to be outdone, two days later the poor Bronx came up with a new record, as reported in New York Newsday:
Armed with 9-mm, pistols, shotguns and M -16 rifles, a group of masked men and women poured out of two vehicles in the South Bronx early yesterday and sprayed a stretch of Longwood Avenue with a fusillade of bullets, injuring 12 people.
A Kai Erikson of the future will surely need to know that the Department of Justice in 1990 found that Americans reported only about 38 percent of all crimes and 48 percent of violent crimes. This, too, can be seen as a means of normalizing crime. In much the same way, the vocabulary of crime reporting can he seems to move toward the normal-seeming. A teacher is shot on her way to class. The Times subhead reads: "Struck in the Shoulder in the Year's First Shooting Inside a School." First of the season.
It is too early, however, to know how to regard the arrival of the doctors on the scene declaring crime a "public health emergency." The June 10, 1992, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association was devoted entirely to papers on the subject of violence, principally violence associated with firearms. An editorial in the issue signed by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Dr. George D. Lundberg is entitled: "Violence in America: A Public Health Emergency." Their proposition is admirably succinct.
Regarding violence in our society as purely a sociological matter, or one of law enforcement, has led to unmitigated failure. It is time to test further whether violence can be amenable to medical/public health interventions.
We believe violence in America to be a public health emergency, largely unresponsive to methods thus far used in its control. The solutions are very complex, but possible.
The authors cited the relative success of epidemiologists in gaining some jurisdiction in the area of motor vehicle casualties by re-defining what had been seen as a law enforcement issue into a public health issue. Again, this process began during the Harriman administration in New York in the 1950s. In the 1960s the morbidity and mortality associated with automobile crashes was, it could be argued, a major public health problem; the public health strategy, it could also be argued, brought the problem under a measure of control. Not in "the 1970s and 1980s," as the Journal of the American Medical Association would have us think: the federal legislation involved was signed in 1965. Such a strategy would surely produce insights into the control of violence that elude law enforcement professionals, but whether it would change anything is another question.
For some years now I have had legislation in the Senate that would prohibit the manufacture of .25 and .32 caliber bullets. These are the two calibers most typically used with the guns known as Saturday Night Specials. "Guns don't kill people, I argue, "bullets do."
Moreover, we have a two-century supply of handguns but only a four-year supply of ammunition. A public health official would immediately see the logic of trying to control the supply of bullets rather than of guns.
Even so, now that the doctor has come, it is important that criminal violence not be defined down by epidemiologists. Doctors Koop and Lundberg note that in 1990 in the state of Texas "deaths from firearms, for the first time in many decades, surpassed deaths from motor vehicles, by 3,443 to 3,309." A good comparison. And yet keep in mind that the number of motor vehicle deaths, having leveled off since the 1960s is now pretty well accepted as normal at somewhat less than 50,000 a year, which is somewhat less than the level of the 1960's - the "carnage," as it once was thought to be, is now accepted as normal. This is the price we pay for high-speed transportation: there is a benefit associated with it.
But there is no benefit associated with homicide, and no good in getting used to it. Epidemiologists have powerful insights that can contribute to lessening the medical trauma, but they must be wary of normalizing the social pathology that leads to such trauma.
V
The hope - if there be such - of this essay has been twofold. It is, first, to suggest that the Durkheim constant, as I put it, is maintained by a dynamic process which adjusts upwards and downwards. Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that weakens societal standards. Might it not help if we could all agree that there is a dynamic at work here? It is not revealed truth, nor yet a scientifically derived formula. It is simply a pattern we observe in ourselves. Nor is it rigid. There may once have been an unchanging supply of jail cells which more or less determined the number of prisoners. No longer. We are building new prisons at a prodigious rate. Similarly, the executioner is back. There is something of a competition in Congress to think up new offenses for which the death penalty is deemed the only available deterrent. Possibly also modes of execution, as in "fry the kingpins." Even so, we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.
As noted earlier, Durkheim states that there is "nothing desirable" about pain. Surely what he meant was that there is nothing pleasurable.
Pain, even so, is an indispensable warning signal. But societies under stress, much like individuals, will turn to pain killers of various kinds that end up concealing real damage. There is surely nothing desirable about this. If our analysis wins general acceptance, if, for example, more of us came to share Judge Torres's genuine alarm at "the trivialization of the lunatic crime rate" in his city (and mine), we might surprise ourselves how well we respond to the manifest decline of the American civic order. Might.
By Daniel Patrick Moynihan
American Scholar (Winter 1993)
Corrected and reposted by Nicholas Stix
[N.S.: This was scanned from the original and, as such, was full of mistakes. Though I checked multiple passages against other versions, doubtless it still has some. I originally planned on publishing an analysis of it as accompaniment, I now see that that would require too much work as a blog item, but hope to eventually devote an article to it. Please direct me to any typos you find. Thanks in advance.]
Daniel Patrick Moynihan is senior United States Senator from New York. He is the author of numerous books, including the forthcoming Pandemonium: Ethnicity and International Politics.
IN ONE OF THE FOUNDING TEXTS OF SOCIOLOGY, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is," he wrote, "completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. This apercu appears in the chapter entitled "Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological." Durkheim writes:
From this viewpoint the fundamental facts of criminology appear to us in an entirely new light.. . . [T]he criminal no longer appears as an utterly unsociable creature, a sort of parasitic element, a foreign, unassimilable body introduced into the bosom of society. He plays a normal role in social life. For its part, crime must no longer be conceived of as an evil which cannot be circumscribed closely enough. Far from there being cause for congratulation when it drops too noticeably below the normal level, this apparent progress assuredly coincides with and is linked to some social disturbance.Durkheim suggests, for example, that "in times of scarcity" crimes of assault drop off. He does not imply that we ought to approve of crime-- "plain has likewise nothing desirable about it" --but we need understand its function. He saw religion, in the sociologist Randall Collins's terms, as "fundamentally a set of ceremonial actions, assembling the group, heightening its emotions, and focusing its members on symbols of their common belongingness." In this context "a punishment ceremony creates social solidarity."
The matter was pretty much left at that until seventy years later when, in 1965, Kai T. Erikson published Wayward Puritans, a study of "crime rates" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The plan behind the book, as Erikson put it, was "to test [Durkheim's] notion that the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time." The notion proved out very well indeed.
Despite occasional crime waves, as when itinerant Quakers refused to take off their hats in the presence of magistrates, the amount of deviance in this corner of seventeenth-century New England fitted nicely with the supply of stocks and whipping posts. Erikson remarks:
It is one of the arguments of the ... study that the amount of deviation a community encounters is apt to remain fairly constant over time. To start at the beginning, it is a simple logistic fact that the number of deviancies which come to a community's attention are limited by the kinds of equipment it uses to detect and handle them, and to that extent the rate of deviation found in a community is at least in part a function of the size and complexity of its social control apparatus. A community's capacity for handling deviance, let us say, can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells and hospital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics. Most communities, it would seem, operate with the expectation that a relatively constant number of control agents is necessary to cope with a relatively constant number of offenders. The amount of men, money, and material assigned by society to "do something" about deviant behavior does not vary appreciably over time, and the implicit logic which governs the community's efforts to man a police force or maintain suitable facilities for the mentally ill seems to be that there is a fairly stable quota of trouble which should be anticipated.
In this sense, the agencies of control often seem to define their job as that of keeping deviance within bounds rather than that of obliterating it altogether. Many judges, for example, assume that severe punishments are a greater deterrent to crime than moderate ones, and so it is important to note that many of them are apt to impose harder penalties when crime seems to be on the increase and more lenient ones when it does not, almost as if the power of the bench were being used to keep the crime rate from getting out of hand.
Erikson was taking issue with what he described as "a dominant strain in sociological thinking" that took for granted that a well-structured society "is somehow designed to prevent deviant behavior from occurring." In both authors, Durkheim and Erikson, there is an undertone that suggests that, with deviancy, as with most social goods, there is the continuing problem of demand exceeding supply. Durkheim invites us to imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousness. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such.
Recall Durkheim's comment that there need be no cause for congratulations should the amount of crime drop "too noticeably below the normal level. It would not appear that Durkheim anywhere contemplates the possibility of too much crime. Clearly his theory would have required him to deplore such a development, but the possibility seems never to have occurred to him.
Erikson, writing much later in the twentieth century, contemplates both possibilities. "Deviant persons can be said to supply needed services to society." There is no doubt a tendency for the supply of any needed thing to run short. But he is consistent. There can, he believes, be too much of a good thing. Hence “the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time.” [My emphasis.]
Social scientists are said to be on the lookout for poor fellows getting a bum rap. But here is a theory that clearly implies that there are circumstances in which society will choose not to notice behavior that would be otherwise controlled, or disapproved, or even punished.
It appears to me that this is in fact what we in the United States have been doing of late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation, since the time Erikson wrote, the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can "afford to recognize" and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the "normal" level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This redefining has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of "old" standards, and accounts for much of the present "cultural war" such as proclaimed by many at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
Let me, then, offer three categories of redefinition in these regards: the altruistic, the opportunistic, and the normalizing.
The first category, the altruistic, may be illustrated by the deinstitutionalization movement within the mental health profession that appeared in the 1950s. The second category, the opportunistic, is seen in the interest group rewards derived from the acceptance of "alternative" family structures. The third category, the normalizing, is to be observed in the growing acceptance of unprecedented levels of violent crime.
II
It happens that I was present at the beginning of the deinstitutionalization movement. Early in 1955 Averell Harriman, then the new governor of New York, met with his new commissioner of mental hygiene, Dr. Paul Hoch, who described the development, at one of the state mental hospitals, of a tranquilizer derived from rauwolfia. The medication had been clinically tested and appeared to be an effective treatment for many severely psychotic patients, thus increasing the percentage of patients discharged. Dr. Hoch recommended that it used systemwide; Harriman found the money. That same year Congress created a Joint Commission on Mental Health and Illness whose mission was to formulate "comprehensive and realistic recommendations" in this area, which was then a matter of considerable public concern. Year after year, the population of mental institutions grew. Year after year, new facilities had to be built. Never mind the complexities: population growth and such like matters. There was a general unease. Durkheim's constant continued to be exceeded. (In Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, Rudy Abramson writes: "New York's mental hospitals in 1955 were overflowing warehouses, and new patients were being admitted faster than space could be found for them. When he was inaugurated, 94,000 New Yorkers were confined to state hospitals. Admissions were running at more than 2,500 a year and rising, making the Department of Mental Hygiene the fastest-growing, most-expensive, most-hopeless department of state government.")
The discovery of tranquilizers was adventitious. Physicians were seeking cures for disorders that were just beginning to be understood. Even a limited success made it possible to believe that the incidence of this particular range of disorders, which had seemingly required persons to be confined against their will or even awareness, could be greatly reduced. The Congressional Commission submitted its report in 1961; it proposed a nationwide program of deinstitutionalization.
Late in 1961, President Kennedy appointed an interagency committee to prepare legislative recommendations based upon the report. I represented Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg on this committee and drafted its final submission. This included the recommendation of the National Institute of Mental Health that 2,000 community mental health centers (one per 100,000 of population) be built by 1980. A buoyant Presidential Message to Congress followed early in 1963. "If we apply our medical knowledge and social insights fully," President Kennedy pronounced, "all but a small portion of the mentally ill can eventually achieve a wholesome and a constructive social adjustment."
A "concerted national attack on mental disorders [was] now possible and practical." The President signed the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act on October 31, 1963, his last public bill-signing ceremony. He gave me a pen.
The mental hospitals emptied out. At the time Governor Harriman met with Dr. Hoch in 1955, there were 93,314 adult residents of mental institutions maintained by New York State. As of August 1992, there were 11,363. This occurred across the nation, however, the number of community mental health centers never came near the goal of the 2,000 proposed community centers. Only some 482 received federal construction funds between 1963 and 1980. The next year, 1981, the program was folded into the Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse block grant and disappeared from view. Even when centers were built, the results were hardly as hoped for. David F. Musto of Yale writes that the planners had bet on improving national mental health "by improving the quality of general community life through expert knowledge, not merely by more effective treatment of the already ill." There was no such knowledge.
However, worse luck, the belief that there was such knowledge took hold within sectors of the profession that saw institutionalization as an unacceptable mode of social control. These activists subscribed to a re-defining mode of their own. Mental patients were said to have been "labeled," and were not to be drugged. Musto says of the battles that followed that they were "so intense and dramatic precisely because both sides shared the fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient mental health technology which could thoroughly reform society; the prize seemed eminently worth fighting for."
But even as the federal government turned to other matters, the mental institutions continued to release inmates. Professor Fred Siegel of Cooper Union observes: "In the great wave of moral deregulation that began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the insane were freed from the fetters of middle-class mores." They might henceforth sleep in doorways as often as they chose. The problem of the homeless appeared, characteristically defined as persons who lacked "affordable housing."
The altruistic mode of redefinition is just that. There is no reason to believe that there was any real increase in mental illness at the time deinstitutionalization began. Yet there was such a perception, and this enabled good people to try to do good, however unavailing in the end.
III
Our second, or opportunistic mode of redefinition, reveals at most anominal intent to do good. The true object is to do well, a long-established motivation among mortals. In this pattern, a growth in deviancy makes possible a transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who control the deviant population. This control would be jeopardized if any serious effort were made to reduce the deviancy in question. This leads to assorted strategies for re-defining the behavior in question as not all that deviant, really.
In the years from 1963 to 1965, the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of Labor picked up the first tremors of what Samuel H. Preston, in the 1984 Presidential Address to the Population Association of America, would call "the earthquake that shuddered through the American family in the past twenty years." The New York Times recently provided a succinct accounting of Preston's point:
Thirty years ago, 1 in every 40 white children was born to an unmarried mother; today it is 1 in 5, according to Federal data. Among blacks, 2 of 3 children are born to an unmarried mother; 30 years ago the figure was 1 in 5.
In 1991, Paul Offner and I published longitudinal data showing that, of children born in the years 1967-69, some 22.1 percent were dependent on welfare - that is to say, Aid to Families with Dependent Children [N.S.: AFDC was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) in 1996, following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act] - before reaching age 18. This broke down as 15.7 percent for white children, 72.3 percent for black children. Projections for children born in 1980 gave rates of 22.2 percent and 82.9 percent respectively. A year later, a New York Times series on welfare and poverty called this a "startling finding ... symptom of vast social calamity."
And yet there is little evidence that these facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal government. To the contrary, there is general acceptance of the situation as normal. Political candidates raise the subject, often to the point of dwelling on it, But while there is a good deal of demand for symbolic change, there is none of the marshaling of resources that is associated with significant social action. Nor is there any lack of evidence that there is a serious social problem here.
Richard T. Gill writes of "an accumulation of data showing that intact biological parent families offer children very large advantages compared to any other family or non-family structure one can imagine." Correspondingly, the disadvantages associated with single-parent families spill over into other areas of social policy that now attract great public concern. Leroy L. Schwartz, M.D., and Mark W. Stanton argue that the real quest regarding a government-run health system such as that of Canada or Germany is whether it would work "in a country that has social problems that countries like Canada and Germany don't share to the same extent." Health problems reflect ways of living. The way of life associated with "such social pathologies as the breakdown of the family structure" lead to medical pathologies. Schwartz and Stanton conclude:
"The United States is paying dearly for its social and behavioral problems," for they have now become medical problems as well.
To cite another example, there is at present no more vexing problem of social policy in the United States than that posed by education. A generation of ever-more ambitious statutes and reforms have produced weak responses at best and a fair amount of what could more simply be called dishonesty. ("Everyone knows that Head Start works." By the year 2000, American students will "be first in the world in science and mathematics.") None of this should surprise us. The 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity by James S. Coleman and his associates established that the family background of students played a much stronger role in student achievement relative to variations in the ten (and still standard) measures of school quality.
In a 1992 study entitled America's Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton came up with the elegant and persuasive concept of the parent-pupil ratio as a measure of school quality. Barton, who was on the policy planning staff in the Department of Labor in 1965, noted the great increase in the proportion of children living in single-parent families since then. He further noted that the proportion "varies widely among the states" and is related to "variation in achievement" among them. The correlation between the percentage of eighth graders living in two-parent families and average mathematics proficiency is a solid .74. North Dakota, highest on the math test, is second highest on the family compositions scale - that is, it is second in the percentage of kids coming from two-parent homes. The District of Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is second lowest in the test score.
A few months before Barton's study appeared, I published an article showing that the correlation between eighth-grade math scores and distance of state capitals from the Canadian border was .522, a respectable showing. By contrast, the correlation with per pupil expenditure was a derisory .203. I offered the policy proposal that states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada. This would be difficult, of course, but so would it be to change the parent-pupil ratio.
Indeed, the 1990 Census found that for the District of Columbia, apart from Ward 3 west of Rock Creek Park, the percentage of children living in single-parent families in the seven remaining wards ranged from a low of 63.6 percent to a high of 75.7. This being a one-time measurement, over time the proportions become asymptotic. And this in the nation's capital. No demand for change comes from that community - or as near to no demand as makes no matter. For there is good money to be made out of bad schools. This is a statement that will no doubt please many a hard heart, and displease many genuinely concerned to bring about change. To the latter, a group in which I would like to include myself, I would only say that we are obliged to ask why things do not change.
For a period there was some speculation that, if family structure got bad enough, this mode of deviancy would have less punishing effects on children. In 1991 Deborah A. Dawson of the National Institutes of Health, examined the thesis that "the psychological effects of divorce and single parenthood on children were strongly influenced by a sense of shame in being 'different' from the norm." If this were so, the effect should have fallen off in the 1980s, when being from a single-parent home became much more common. It did not. "The problems associated with task overload among single parents are more constant in nature," Dawson wrote, adding that since the adverse effects had not diminished, they were "not based on stigmatization but rather on inherent problems in alternative family structures" - alternative here meaning other than two-parent families. We should take note of such candor. Writing in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in 1989, Sara McLanahan and Karen Booth noted: "Whereas a decade ago the prevailing view was that single motherhood had no harmful effects on children, recent research is less optimistic."
The year 1990 saw more of this lesson. In a paper prepared for the Progressive Policy Institute, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and William A. Galston wrote that "if the economic effects of family breakdown are clear, the psychological effects are just now coming into focus." They cite Karl Zinsmeister:
There is a mountain of scientific evidence showing that when families disintegrate children often end up with intellectual, physical, and emotional scars that persist for life.... We talk about the drug crisis, the education crisis, and the problems of teen pregnancy and juvenile crime. But all these ills trace back predominantly to one source: broken families.
As for juvenile crime, they cite Douglas Smith and C. Roger Jarjoura:
"Neighborhoods with larger percentages of youth (those aged 12 to 20) and areas with higher percentages of single-parent households also have higher rates of violent crime." They add: "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and time again in the literature; poverty is far from the sole determinant of crime." But the large point is avoided. In a 1992 essay The Expert's Story of Marriage," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead examined "the story of marriage as it is conveyed in today's high school and college textbooks." Nothing amiss in this tale.
It goes like this:
The life course is full of exciting options. The lifestyle options available to individuals seeking a fulfilling personal relationship include living a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual single lifestyle; living in a commune; having a group marriage; being a single parent; or living together. Marriage is yet another lifestyle choice. However, before choosing marriage, individuals should weigh its costs and benefits against other lifestyle options and should consider what they want to get out of their intimate relationships. Even within marriage, different people want different things. For example, some people marry for companionship, some marry in order to have children, some marry for emotional and financial security. Though marriage can offer a rewarding path to personal growth, it is important to remember that it cannot provide a secure or permanent status. Many people will make the decision between marriage and singlehood many times throughout their life.
Divorce represents part of the normal family life cycle. It should not be viewed as either deviant or tragic, as it has been in the past. Rather, it establishes a process for "uncoupling" and thereby serves as the foundation for individual renewal and "new beginnings."
History commences to be rewritten. In 1992, the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families of the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on "Investing in Families: A Historical Perspective." A fact sheet prepared by committee staff began:
"INVESTING IN FAMILIES: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE"
FACT SHEET
HISTORICAL SHIFTS IN FAMILY COMPOSITION
CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
While in modern times the percentage of children living with one parent has increased, more children lived with just one parent in Colonial America.
The fact sheet proceeded to list program on program for which federal funds were allegedly reduced in the l980s. We then come to a summary.
Between 1970 and 1991, the value of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] benefits decreased by 41%. In spite of proven success of Head Start, only 28% of eligible children are being served. As of 1990, more than $18 billion in child support went uncollected. At the same time, the poverty rate among single-parent with children under 18 was 44%. Between 1980 and 1990, the rate of growth in the total Federal budget was four times greater than the rate of growth in children's programs.
In other words, benefits paid to mothers and children have gone down steadily, as indeed they have done. But no proposal is made to restore benefits to an earlier level, or even to maintain their value, as is the case with other "indexed" Social Security programs. Instead we go directly to the subject of education spending.
Nothing new. In 1969, President Nixon proposed a guaranteed income, the Family Assistance Plan. This was described as an "income strategy" as against a "services strategy." It may or may not have been a good idea, but it was a clear one, and the resistance of service providers to it was equally clear. In the end it was defeated, to the huzzahs of the advocates of "welfare rights." What is going on here is simply that a large increase in what once was seen as deviancy has provided opportunity to a wide spectrum of interest groups that benefit from re-defining the problem as essentially normal and doing little to reduce it.
IV
Our normalizing category most directly corresponds to Erikson's proposition that "the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time." Here we are dealing with the popular psychological notion of "denial." In 1965, having reached the conclusion that there would be a dramatic increase in single-parent families, I reached the further conclusion that this would in turn lead to a dramatic increase in crime. In an article in America, I wrote:
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a
community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure - that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.
The inevitable, as we now know, has come to pass, but here again our response is curiously passive. Crime is a more or less continuous subject of political pronouncement, and from time to time it will be at or near the top of opinion polls as a matter of public concern. But it never gets much further than that. In the words spoken from the bench, Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District, described how "the slaughter of the innocent marches unabated: subway riders, bodega owners, cab drivers, babies; in laundromats, at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways." In personal communication, he writes: "This numbness, this near narcoleptic state can diminish the human condition to the level of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted campaigns, can eat their battlefield rations seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend and foe alike. A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction." There is no expectation that this will change, nor any efficacious public insistence that it do so. The crime level has been normalized.
Consider the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibition, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on February 14. The nation was shocked. The event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.
In recent years, again in the context of illegal traffic in controlled substances, this form of murder has returned. But it has done so at a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly re-enactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses. On the morning after the close of the Democratic National Convention in New York City in July, there was such an account in the second section of the New York Times. It was not a big story; bottom of the page, but with a headline that got your attention. "3 Slain in Bronx Apartment, but a Baby is Saved." A subhead continued: "A mother's last act was to hide her little girl under the bed." The article described a drug execution; the now-routine blindfolds made from duct tape; a man and a woman and a teenager involved. "Each had been shot once in the head." The police had found them a day later. They also found, under a bed, a three-month-old baby, dehydrated but alive. A lieutenant remarked of the mother, "In her last dying act she protected her baby. She probably knew she was going to die, so she stuffed the baby where she knew it would be safe." But the matter was left there.
The police would do their best. But the event passed quickly; forgotten by the next day, it will never make World Book.
Nor is it likely that any great heed will be paid to an uncanny reenactment of the Prohibition drama a few months later, also in the Bronx. The Time's story, page B3, reported:
9 Men Posing as Police Are Indicted in 3 Murders
Drug Dealers Were Kidnapped for Ransom
The Daily News story, same day, page 17, made it four murders, adding nice details about torture techniques. The gang members posed as federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents, real badges and all.
The victims were drug dealers, whose families were uneasy about calling the police. Ransom seems generally to have been set in the $650,000 range. Some paid. Some got it in the back of the head. So it goes.
Yet, violent killings, often random, go on unabated. Peaks continue to attract some notice. But these are peaks above "average" levels that thirty years ago would have been thought epidemic.
LOS ANGELES, AUG. 24. (Reuters) Twenty-two people were killed in Los Angeles over the weekend, the worst period of violence in the city since it was ravaged by riots earlier this year, the police said today.
Twenty-four others were wounded by gunfire or stabbings, including a 19-year old woman in a wheelchair who was shot in the back when she failed to respond to a motorist who asked for directions in south Los Angeles.
["The guy stuck a gun out of the window and just fired at her," said a police spokesman, Lieut. David Rock. The woman was later described as being in stable condition.
Among those who died was an off-duty officer, shot while investigating reports of a prowler in a neighbor's yard, and a Little League baseball coach who had argued with the father of a boy he was coaching.]
The police said at least nine of the deaths were gang-related, including that of a 14-year old girl killed in a fight between rival gangs.
Fifty-one people were killed in three days of rioting that started April 29 after the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney G. King.
Los Angeles usually has above-average violence during August, but the police were at a loss to explain the sudden rise. On an average weekend in August, 14 fatalities occur.
Not to be outdone, two days later the poor Bronx came up with a new record, as reported in New York Newsday:
Armed with 9-mm, pistols, shotguns and M -16 rifles, a group of masked men and women poured out of two vehicles in the South Bronx early yesterday and sprayed a stretch of Longwood Avenue with a fusillade of bullets, injuring 12 people.
A Kai Erikson of the future will surely need to know that the Department of Justice in 1990 found that Americans reported only about 38 percent of all crimes and 48 percent of violent crimes. This, too, can be seen as a means of normalizing crime. In much the same way, the vocabulary of crime reporting can he seems to move toward the normal-seeming. A teacher is shot on her way to class. The Times subhead reads: "Struck in the Shoulder in the Year's First Shooting Inside a School." First of the season.
It is too early, however, to know how to regard the arrival of the doctors on the scene declaring crime a "public health emergency." The June 10, 1992, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association was devoted entirely to papers on the subject of violence, principally violence associated with firearms. An editorial in the issue signed by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Dr. George D. Lundberg is entitled: "Violence in America: A Public Health Emergency." Their proposition is admirably succinct.
Regarding violence in our society as purely a sociological matter, or one of law enforcement, has led to unmitigated failure. It is time to test further whether violence can be amenable to medical/public health interventions.
We believe violence in America to be a public health emergency, largely unresponsive to methods thus far used in its control. The solutions are very complex, but possible.
The authors cited the relative success of epidemiologists in gaining some jurisdiction in the area of motor vehicle casualties by re-defining what had been seen as a law enforcement issue into a public health issue. Again, this process began during the Harriman administration in New York in the 1950s. In the 1960s the morbidity and mortality associated with automobile crashes was, it could be argued, a major public health problem; the public health strategy, it could also be argued, brought the problem under a measure of control. Not in "the 1970s and 1980s," as the Journal of the American Medical Association would have us think: the federal legislation involved was signed in 1965. Such a strategy would surely produce insights into the control of violence that elude law enforcement professionals, but whether it would change anything is another question.
For some years now I have had legislation in the Senate that would prohibit the manufacture of .25 and .32 caliber bullets. These are the two calibers most typically used with the guns known as Saturday Night Specials. "Guns don't kill people, I argue, "bullets do."
Moreover, we have a two-century supply of handguns but only a four-year supply of ammunition. A public health official would immediately see the logic of trying to control the supply of bullets rather than of guns.
Even so, now that the doctor has come, it is important that criminal violence not be defined down by epidemiologists. Doctors Koop and Lundberg note that in 1990 in the state of Texas "deaths from firearms, for the first time in many decades, surpassed deaths from motor vehicles, by 3,443 to 3,309." A good comparison. And yet keep in mind that the number of motor vehicle deaths, having leveled off since the 1960s is now pretty well accepted as normal at somewhat less than 50,000 a year, which is somewhat less than the level of the 1960's - the "carnage," as it once was thought to be, is now accepted as normal. This is the price we pay for high-speed transportation: there is a benefit associated with it.
But there is no benefit associated with homicide, and no good in getting used to it. Epidemiologists have powerful insights that can contribute to lessening the medical trauma, but they must be wary of normalizing the social pathology that leads to such trauma.
V
The hope - if there be such - of this essay has been twofold. It is, first, to suggest that the Durkheim constant, as I put it, is maintained by a dynamic process which adjusts upwards and downwards. Liberals have traditionally been alert for upward redefining that does injustice to individuals. Conservatives have been correspondingly sensitive to downward redefining that weakens societal standards. Might it not help if we could all agree that there is a dynamic at work here? It is not revealed truth, nor yet a scientifically derived formula. It is simply a pattern we observe in ourselves. Nor is it rigid. There may once have been an unchanging supply of jail cells which more or less determined the number of prisoners. No longer. We are building new prisons at a prodigious rate. Similarly, the executioner is back. There is something of a competition in Congress to think up new offenses for which the death penalty is deemed the only available deterrent. Possibly also modes of execution, as in "fry the kingpins." Even so, we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.
As noted earlier, Durkheim states that there is "nothing desirable" about pain. Surely what he meant was that there is nothing pleasurable.
Pain, even so, is an indispensable warning signal. But societies under stress, much like individuals, will turn to pain killers of various kinds that end up concealing real damage. There is surely nothing desirable about this. If our analysis wins general acceptance, if, for example, more of us came to share Judge Torres's genuine alarm at "the trivialization of the lunatic crime rate" in his city (and mine), we might surprise ourselves how well we respond to the manifest decline of the American civic order. Might.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962): Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Composed and Conducted by Maurice Jarre
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia had a serious shot at being the greatest picture ever made, but screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson unfortunately gave in to the myth of depicting T.E. Lawrence as a simpering pansy early in the story. Arab Moslems have no problem, in practice, with homosexuality, as long as it is done tastefully, by masculine-seeming men raping little boys. However, they will not tolerate the perversion of men dancing around openly like Noel Coward, and acting like bloody fags! They would have drawn and quartered an Englishman who acted the way Peter O’Toole acts early in the picture.
(Truth be told, however, even if O’Toole had played it straight, he still would likely have lost out to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird that year. Although Peck gave an excellent performance, his Oscar was both a career award, and a political award for starring in the most powerful work of racial propaganda of the past 100 years.)
And that’s why Lawrence of Arabia isn’t the greatest picture ever made. But it still comes in tied with The Bridge on the River Kwai for eleventh in my book, following The Best Years of Our Lives, The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, and Citizen Kane; It’s a Wonderful Life; Shane; The Philadelphia Story; On the Waterfront; The Third Man; and Casablanca.
Thanks to Frederik Riesberg for the splendid upload.
Published on May 26, 2013
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1962). Composed and Conducted by Maurice Jarre.
Music Awards:
Academy Award - Best Original Score (1962)
Playlist:
-00:00 = "Overture"
-04:13 = "Main Title"
-06:05 = "Arrival At Auda's Camp"
-07:26 = The Voice Of The Guns"
-09:24 = "Continuation Of The Miracle"
-11:31 = "That Is The Desert"
-12:55 = "End Title"
David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia had a serious shot at being the greatest picture ever made, but screenwriters Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson unfortunately gave in to the myth of depicting T.E. Lawrence as a simpering pansy early in the story. Arab Moslems have no problem, in practice, with homosexuality, as long as it is done tastefully, by masculine-seeming men raping little boys. However, they will not tolerate the perversion of men dancing around openly like Noel Coward, and acting like bloody fags! They would have drawn and quartered an Englishman who acted the way Peter O’Toole acts early in the picture.
(Truth be told, however, even if O’Toole had played it straight, he still would likely have lost out to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird that year. Although Peck gave an excellent performance, his Oscar was both a career award, and a political award for starring in the most powerful work of racial propaganda of the past 100 years.)
And that’s why Lawrence of Arabia isn’t the greatest picture ever made. But it still comes in tied with The Bridge on the River Kwai for eleventh in my book, following The Best Years of Our Lives, The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, and Citizen Kane; It’s a Wonderful Life; Shane; The Philadelphia Story; On the Waterfront; The Third Man; and Casablanca.
Thanks to Frederik Riesberg for the splendid upload.
Published on May 26, 2013
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1962). Composed and Conducted by Maurice Jarre.
Music Awards:
Academy Award - Best Original Score (1962)
Playlist:
-00:00 = "Overture"
-04:13 = "Main Title"
-06:05 = "Arrival At Auda's Camp"
-07:26 = The Voice Of The Guns"
-09:24 = "Continuation Of The Miracle"
-11:31 = "That Is The Desert"
-12:55 = "End Title"
“Whites are the Jew of America. The Knockout Game is the New Kristallnacht...”
By Nicholas Stix
“Whites are the Jew of America. The Knockout Game is the New Kristallnacht...”
This pain in the butt is going to make me regret promoting him, right?
“Whites are the Jew of America. The Knockout Game is the New Kristallnacht...”
This pain in the butt is going to make me regret promoting him, right?
Ex-Army: In Human History, the Ultimate Political Evil is Communism… Fascism, on the Other Hand, is a Weapon Devised Precisely to Combat Communism
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
When a Red calls you a “Fascist!” or a “Nazi!,” all he’s saying is that you’re his enemy. Take him at his word, and prepare accordingly.
“Golden Dawn — If This be Fascism, Make the Most of It.”
When a Red calls you a “Fascist!” or a “Nazi!,” all he’s saying is that you’re his enemy. Take him at his word, and prepare accordingly.
“Golden Dawn — If This be Fascism, Make the Most of It.”
The Diverse Post Office
By Nicholas Stix
“I’ll come by later. There’s too many white people here.”
Middle-aged black man, loudly to a postal clerk. Brooklyn Main Post Office, Brooklyn Heights, June 23, 1992.
New York Diary, A Different Drummer magazine, Spring 1993.
“I’ll come by later. There’s too many white people here.”
Middle-aged black man, loudly to a postal clerk. Brooklyn Main Post Office, Brooklyn Heights, June 23, 1992.
New York Diary, A Different Drummer magazine, Spring 1993.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Happy Thanksgiving, to All of My Readers!
Sincerely,
Nicholas Stix
And on this day, let us say a word of thanks to the Creator … and to the condemned.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
MSM in Damage Control Mode over Knockout “Game” Reports
(Racist, Black Sucker Punch Attacks, Knockout Martin Luther King)
By David in TN
Today (Tuesday) the MSM is in damage control over the "Knockout Game." Almost every article uses the same talking points, "urban myth," etc. It reminded me of an exchange we had on July 9, 2011. I asked you if it was worse 20-25 years ago. You answered:
"No. I can't say whether there are more or less 'wilding' attacks now, and the official murder rate is about 70% lower than it was then, but during my 26 years here, casual racist assaults have gotten steadily worse."
And:
"Black street thugs will likewise terrorize whites, knowing the police will not arrest them, short of killing someone."
By David in TN
Today (Tuesday) the MSM is in damage control over the "Knockout Game." Almost every article uses the same talking points, "urban myth," etc. It reminded me of an exchange we had on July 9, 2011. I asked you if it was worse 20-25 years ago. You answered:
"No. I can't say whether there are more or less 'wilding' attacks now, and the official murder rate is about 70% lower than it was then, but during my 26 years here, casual racist assaults have gotten steadily worse."
And:
"Black street thugs will likewise terrorize whites, knowing the police will not arrest them, short of killing someone."
Monday, November 25, 2013
Breaking News: Gunman Reported on Yale Campus
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
November 25, 2013 10:18 A.M.
Gunman reported on Yale campus
Yale University has issued an alert of a person with a gun on or near the Old Campus. Students and faculty are advised to shelter in place.
Update: Person with a gun reported on Yale campus
Associated Press | November 25, 2013 | Updated: November 25, 2013 11:39a.m.
Houston Chronicle
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Police have blocked off several streets near Yale University and put the Ivy League school on lockdown as they investigate a report of a gunman in the area.
Yale is advising students and staff to shelter in place. The school in New Haven, Conn., also issued an advisory asking people who are off campus to stay away from the area.
There have been no reports of shots fired or anyone injured.
The school says on its website that campus, city and state police teams are searching for "any gunman."
Television reports show officers in tactical gear outside several campus buildings. A helicopter is hovering over the area.
The school is on November break, with undergraduate classes to resume Dec. 2.
The school says police received an anonymous call just after 10 a.m. from a phone booth reporting a person on campus with a gun.
November 25, 2013 10:18 A.M.
Gunman reported on Yale campus
Yale University has issued an alert of a person with a gun on or near the Old Campus. Students and faculty are advised to shelter in place.
Update: Person with a gun reported on Yale campus
Associated Press | November 25, 2013 | Updated: November 25, 2013 11:39a.m.
Houston Chronicle
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Police have blocked off several streets near Yale University and put the Ivy League school on lockdown as they investigate a report of a gunman in the area.
Yale is advising students and staff to shelter in place. The school in New Haven, Conn., also issued an advisory asking people who are off campus to stay away from the area.
There have been no reports of shots fired or anyone injured.
The school says on its website that campus, city and state police teams are searching for "any gunman."
Television reports show officers in tactical gear outside several campus buildings. A helicopter is hovering over the area.
The school is on November break, with undergraduate classes to resume Dec. 2.
The school says police received an anonymous call just after 10 a.m. from a phone booth reporting a person on campus with a gun.
IRS Issued $4 Billion in Fraudulent Tax Refunds Last Year to People Using Stolen Identities, with Some of the Money Going to Addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
The reader who sent this article wrote,
Report: IRS refunded $4B to identity thieves
November 7, 2013
Associated Press/Fox News
The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to a Treasury report released Thursday.
The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai.
In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.
The IRS has stepped up efforts to fight identity theft, but thieves are getting more aggressive, said the report by J. Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration. Last year, the IRS stopped more than $12 billion in fraudulent refunds from going to identity thieves, compared with $8 billion the year before.
"Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration," George said in a statement. The fraud "erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system."
Thieves often steal Social Security numbers from people who don't have to file tax returns, including the young, the old and people who have died, the report said. In other cases, thieves use stolen Social Security numbers to file fraudulent tax returns before the legitimate taxpayer files.
The IRS, which takes pride in issuing quick refunds, often sends them out before employers are required to file forms documenting wages, the report said.
"The constantly evolving tactics used by scammers to commit identity theft continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing the IRS, and we take this issue very seriously," the IRS said in a statement. "The IRS has a comprehensive and aggressive identity theft strategy [it obviously doesn't!] that focuses on preventing refund fraud, investigating these crimes and assisting taxpayers victimized by it."
Despite budget cuts, the agency said, agents have resolved more than 565,000 cases of identity theft this year, three times the number of cases resolved at the same time last year.
A separate report by George said the number of identity theft victims is on the rise as thieves get more aggressive.
Through June, the IRS identified 1.6 million victims who had their identities stolen during this year's tax filing season, the report said. That compares with 1.2 million victims in 2012.
Many of these people didn't realize they were victims until they submitted their returns, only to learn from the IRS that someone else had already used their Social Security number to file and claim a refund.
The IRS does a good job of eventually identifying the proper owner of Social Security numbers, but the process can be lengthy, the report said. For cases closed between August 2011 and July 2012, it took an average of 312 days to resolve the case and issue a proper refund, the report said.
The IRS said has resolved most of this year's identity theft cases within 120 days.
Last year, the IRS issued 1.1 million refunds to people using stolen Social Security numbers, the inspector general's report said. Those refunds totaled $3.6 billion.
Additionally, the IRS issued 141,000 refunds last year to people using stolen Taxpayer Identification Numbers, which are typically used by foreign nationals who earn money in the U.S. Those refunds totaled $385 million, the report said.
The reader who sent this article wrote,
Ireland?
Those thieving micks.
With the Eastern Europeans it's expected.
Economic Desensitization
Report: IRS refunded $4B to identity thieves
November 7, 2013
Associated Press/Fox News
The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to a Treasury report released Thursday.
The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai.
In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.
The IRS has stepped up efforts to fight identity theft, but thieves are getting more aggressive, said the report by J. Russell George, Treasury's inspector general for tax administration. Last year, the IRS stopped more than $12 billion in fraudulent refunds from going to identity thieves, compared with $8 billion the year before.
"Identity theft continues to be a serious problem with devastating consequences for taxpayers and an enormous impact on tax administration," George said in a statement. The fraud "erodes taxpayer confidence in the federal tax system."
Thieves often steal Social Security numbers from people who don't have to file tax returns, including the young, the old and people who have died, the report said. In other cases, thieves use stolen Social Security numbers to file fraudulent tax returns before the legitimate taxpayer files.
The IRS, which takes pride in issuing quick refunds, often sends them out before employers are required to file forms documenting wages, the report said.
"The constantly evolving tactics used by scammers to commit identity theft continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing the IRS, and we take this issue very seriously," the IRS said in a statement. "The IRS has a comprehensive and aggressive identity theft strategy [it obviously doesn't!] that focuses on preventing refund fraud, investigating these crimes and assisting taxpayers victimized by it."
Despite budget cuts, the agency said, agents have resolved more than 565,000 cases of identity theft this year, three times the number of cases resolved at the same time last year.
A separate report by George said the number of identity theft victims is on the rise as thieves get more aggressive.
Through June, the IRS identified 1.6 million victims who had their identities stolen during this year's tax filing season, the report said. That compares with 1.2 million victims in 2012.
Many of these people didn't realize they were victims until they submitted their returns, only to learn from the IRS that someone else had already used their Social Security number to file and claim a refund.
The IRS does a good job of eventually identifying the proper owner of Social Security numbers, but the process can be lengthy, the report said. For cases closed between August 2011 and July 2012, it took an average of 312 days to resolve the case and issue a proper refund, the report said.
The IRS said has resolved most of this year's identity theft cases within 120 days.
Last year, the IRS issued 1.1 million refunds to people using stolen Social Security numbers, the inspector general's report said. Those refunds totaled $3.6 billion.
Additionally, the IRS issued 141,000 refunds last year to people using stolen Taxpayer Identification Numbers, which are typically used by foreign nationals who earn money in the U.S. Those refunds totaled $385 million, the report said.
Foreign Governments Warn Their Citizens to Avoid Part or All of 16 American Cities (Why So Few?), While Americans’ Government Has Lied to Them for 20 Years, Telling Them the Cities are Safe!
By Nicholas Stix
Missing cities that should also be on the list, just off the top of my head:
Anaheim, CA
Richmond, CA
Stockton, CA
Oakland, CA
East St. Louis, IL
Springfield, IL
Flint, MI
Buffalo, NY
Cleveland, OH
Cincinnati
Philadelphia
Jacksonville, FL
Gary, IN
Camden, NJ
Newark, NJ
Paterson, NJ
Birmingham, AL
Kansas City, MO
Dallas
Fort Worth
Memphis
Tulsa
Oklahoma City
Little Rock
Baton Rouge
Wilmington, DE
Charlotte, NC
Lynn, MA
New Haven, CT
Newport Beach, VA
And that’s without listing the thousands of smaller diversitopias.
16 American cities
By Reid Wilson
November 14 at 4:34 p.m.
Washington Post
Missing cities that should also be on the list, just off the top of my head:
Anaheim, CA
Richmond, CA
Stockton, CA
Oakland, CA
East St. Louis, IL
Springfield, IL
Flint, MI
Buffalo, NY
Cleveland, OH
Cincinnati
Philadelphia
Jacksonville, FL
Gary, IN
Camden, NJ
Newark, NJ
Paterson, NJ
Birmingham, AL
Kansas City, MO
Dallas
Fort Worth
Memphis
Tulsa
Oklahoma City
Little Rock
Baton Rouge
Wilmington, DE
Charlotte, NC
Lynn, MA
New Haven, CT
Newport Beach, VA
And that’s without listing the thousands of smaller diversitopias.
16 American cities
foreign governments
warn their citizens
about
By Reid Wilson
November 14 at 4:34 p.m.
Washington Post
Planning a trip abroad? It’s probably best to check out the State Department’s list of travel warnings for countries with unsafe political situations. At the moment, the State Department has issued travel warnings for 34 countries, from the Central African Republic and El Salvador to Iraq and North Korea.
Well, just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities.
Here’s what other countries, mostly France, say about American cities:
•Boston: Avoid walking at night in Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury, and be wary of “petty crime” in Chinatown, the North End and Fenway.
•New York: Be wary in Times Square and at the Statue of Liberty, and don’t go to Harlem, the Bronx or Central Park at night.
•Washington: Northeast and Southeast should be avoided, and Union Station is dangerous at night. “Le quartier Anacostia n’est pas recommandable de jour comme de nuit.” Translation: Don’t go to Anacostia, day or night.
•Baltimore: “Considered a dangerous city except downtown.”
•Richmond: “Do not visit the city on foot.”
•Pittsburgh: The French urge their citizens to avoid Mount Oliver, Hill District, Homewood-Brushton and Hazelwood.
•Cleveland: Avoid Cleveland Heights, Lakewood and Euclid. That warning got Cleveland Heights Mayor Edward Kelly upset. “The French government is foolish and doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
•Detroit: “The center is not recommended after the close of business.”
•Chicago: Stay away from the West Side and anywhere south of 59th Street.
•Houston: Be vigilant if traveling through Downtown, south and east Houston at night.
•St. Louis: “Eviter le quartier nord entre l’aéroport et le centre-ville, mais la navette reliant l’aéroport est sûre.” Translation: Avoid northern area between the airport and the city center, but the airport shuttle is safe (Hat tip to our friend Chris Good, of ABC News, for spotting that nugget).
•Atlanta: The French are nervous about the southern part of the city, and downtown after dark.
•New Orleans: Northwest of Dauphine Street, northeast of Ursulines Avenue, north of St. Charles Avenue and south of Magazine Street are areas of concern.
•Miami: “Canadians have been the victims of crime such as break-ins, assaults and pickpocketing in the Miami area, sometimes during daylight hours,” Canada’s foreign ministry warns. France says attacks on tourists in Florida are rare now, but were frequent a few years ago.
•Los Angeles: France warns tourists to take care in Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice Beach and Long Beach, and to avoid Watts, Inglewood and Florence.
•El Paso: The British Foreign Office warns tourists about violence along the border with Mexico, and the border crossing at Ciudad Juarez specifically.
•Germany doesn’t warn its citizens about any specific cities, but it does caution against letting it all hang out: “Although the laws in individual states categorizing nudity as ‘indecent exposure’, are rarely asserted and punished, those laws should absolutely be followed. Nude bathing and changing clothes at the beach stirs up public agitation and can lead to unpleasantnesses.”
Sunday, November 24, 2013
“Nazis” or Patriots? The Situation in Greece—My New VDARE Report is Up!
By Nicholas Stix
Like It or Not, Golden Dawn Fighting Genocide in Greece
November 23, 2013 at 11:48 p.m.
VDARE
Some murder victims are more equal than others. In a worrying precedent for Americans, the Greek government is persecuting the anti-immigration Golden Dawn party, while tolerating its violent enemies. Under the guise of exterminating “Nazism,” the government is exterminating the Greek people—just as the larger European Union officially pursues what can only be called the genocide of the historic European population. But there are signs it’s not working….
[Read the whole thing here.]
Like It or Not, Golden Dawn Fighting Genocide in Greece
November 23, 2013 at 11:48 p.m.
VDARE
Some murder victims are more equal than others. In a worrying precedent for Americans, the Greek government is persecuting the anti-immigration Golden Dawn party, while tolerating its violent enemies. Under the guise of exterminating “Nazism,” the government is exterminating the Greek people—just as the larger European Union officially pursues what can only be called the genocide of the historic European population. But there are signs it’s not working….
[Read the whole thing here.]
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Bloomberg Scandal: Brutal Autocrats Kill Two Investigative Reports on Red China, and Suspend and are Expected to Fire Top Reporter Michael Forsythe; Bloomberg Business News Reduced to a Propaganda Mill with No Credibility
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
Bloomberg Kills Article Exposing Chinese Regime, Suspends Reporter
Written by Alex Newman
Friday, 22 November 2013 08:00
The New American
First, the controversial “media” outlet Bloomberg News, widely regarded by critics as a propaganda megaphone for the radical views of billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reportedly censored one of its reporters by blocking publication of an article exposing cronyism and corruption among Communist China’s ruling class. Insider sources quoted in news reports said the decision to kill the story was made for “political reasons” — namely, to appease Beijing. Then, last week, award-winning investigative journalist Michael Forsythe, based in Hong Kong, was finally suspended by Bloomberg’s media empire, shattering its credibility among analysts.
The explosive story that Bloomberg refused to run reportedly detailed the myriad hidden links between one of China’s wealthiest crony capitalists and the families of ruthless Communist Party autocrats, who rule the nation with terror and an iron fist. Less than a week after killing Forsythe’s investigative article, Bloomberg bosses also declared another major China story to be off-limits. The second blocked piece, the New York Times reported in a front-page story citing four unnamed Bloomberg employees, focused on the children of senior Communist Chinese tyrants employed by foreign banks.
While most of the public exposure surrounding the Bloomberg scandal has been based on anonymous sources so far, a clearer picture of what happened behind the scenes is slowly starting to emerge. According to media reports, Editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler announced the decision late last month on a conference call, comparing it to self-censorship by news agencies inside National Socialist (Nazi) Germany decades ago. “He said, ‘If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,’ ” one of the Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the scandal was quoted as saying by the Times....
[Read the rest here.]
Bloomberg Kills Article Exposing Chinese Regime, Suspends Reporter
Written by Alex Newman
Friday, 22 November 2013 08:00
The New American
First, the controversial “media” outlet Bloomberg News, widely regarded by critics as a propaganda megaphone for the radical views of billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reportedly censored one of its reporters by blocking publication of an article exposing cronyism and corruption among Communist China’s ruling class. Insider sources quoted in news reports said the decision to kill the story was made for “political reasons” — namely, to appease Beijing. Then, last week, award-winning investigative journalist Michael Forsythe, based in Hong Kong, was finally suspended by Bloomberg’s media empire, shattering its credibility among analysts.
The explosive story that Bloomberg refused to run reportedly detailed the myriad hidden links between one of China’s wealthiest crony capitalists and the families of ruthless Communist Party autocrats, who rule the nation with terror and an iron fist. Less than a week after killing Forsythe’s investigative article, Bloomberg bosses also declared another major China story to be off-limits. The second blocked piece, the New York Times reported in a front-page story citing four unnamed Bloomberg employees, focused on the children of senior Communist Chinese tyrants employed by foreign banks.
While most of the public exposure surrounding the Bloomberg scandal has been based on anonymous sources so far, a clearer picture of what happened behind the scenes is slowly starting to emerge. According to media reports, Editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler announced the decision late last month on a conference call, comparing it to self-censorship by news agencies inside National Socialist (Nazi) Germany decades ago. “He said, ‘If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,’ ” one of the Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the scandal was quoted as saying by the Times....
[Read the rest here.]
Say it Ain’t So! Reader Writes that Black Philadelphia LEOs Reveal Identities of Witnesses to Crimes Committed by Blacks, and Black NYPD Officers Reveal the “Color of the Day” Used by Undercover Cops to ID Themselves
By Nicholas Stix
I found this at National Review Online, where I’m on permablock, so I couldn’t even vote for my reader. As for whether what he’s saying is true, I don’t know, but I know of many cases of criminal black cops who aided and abetted black felons. In one case, where I can’t recall the city, black cops would warn black crooks when a bust was coming. In the case of the SFPD, a Nation of Islam member who had infiltrated the SFPD, and who sought to help the NOI murder the only witness in the racist, “Zebra” serial killing case.
Michael Ryan
• 2 days ago •
telling a retired NYPD friend about how Id just read in Philadelphia blacks have set up a online twitter, instagram account that government law enforcement workers there are posting the names photos and files of witnesses on because in case you dont know its a black thing not to snitch. Even on murderers of black children. so in other words black police and District Attorney employees are telling gangsters who what and where the witnesses can be found before trial.
My police friend scoffed and said that was trivial, That at role call every morning NYC police are given a code word to Identify undercover officers they might encounter. Every day the code is a different color. So if an officer comes upon an armed person who is actually undercover police the undercover is to shout out the color of the day. Except that black policemen every day call WBLS the black radio station and leak the color of the day which WBLS would duly broadcast to let the brothers in the hood know. So Dr Sowell id posit their is already a race war on just one side is still in denial thinking if we give them Detroit and Philly and Indianapolis Chicago, and Atlanta Jackson etc etc etc then we will get peace.
BTW Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment Dr Sowell When NRO fires you you can always blog in the Reactoshpere
xerocky to Michael Ryan
Michael, are you telling the truth?
Michael Ryan to xerocky
a day ago •
afraid so I also live and work in majority black areas my whole life whites have no idea whats going on its a war and we have lost
http://stuffblackpeopledontlik...
http://nicholasstixuncensored....
these are the two blogs that aggregate the stories that local news orgs cant hide but national one suppress which Dr Sowell uses and refers to.
N.S.: I looked into this matter, and found that a 17-year-old had been arrested for posting classified law enforcement information about a shooting to his Twitter feed, which then ended up posted on an Instagram account that also published classified information on crime victims and witnesses, though Philly police are not yet saying that the same suspect owned the Instagram account. However, no 17-year-old has access to such sensitive information, whose release can lead to, and is indeed intended to lead to the murder of crime witnesses. The suspect had to have been fed the information by a law enforcement officer(s) and/or criminal justice official(s), or perhaps they were feeding the information directly to the Web.
The existence of such Fifth Columnists is as old as affirmative action.
The article below reports that every day in Philadelphia, court officers arrest people in the court buildings, for photographing crime witnesses and their family members, as well as the family members of victims.
Philadelphia police: Teen arrested for posting investigation info to his Twitter account
By Associated Press
November 13, 2013
Washington Post
PHILADELPHIA — A teenager posted nonpublic information about a 2012 shooting on his Twitter feed, police said, and that material was later posted to an Instagram account being scrutinized for divulging information about witnesses to crimes in the city.
The 17-year-old was taken into custody after being charged with intimidation and terroristic threats, police spokeswoman Officer Tanya Little said Wednesday.
The charges come as investigators examine how the now-shuttered Instagram account titled “rats215,” a reference to Philadelphia’s area code, came to feature affidavits and photos of victims and witnesses in criminal cases.
Police are investigating if there is a connection between the two separate social media accounts.
“There was a lot of information there ... a lot of information that was not for public viewing,” Little said.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported earlier that the “rats215” Instagram account had posted material identifying more than 30 witnesses since February. The newspaper said the account had nearly 7,900 followers and had more than 150 photos, many drawing dozens of comments and likes.
Little said the investigation, which started Oct. 24, was continuing. Although the teenager is not accused of having owned the Instagram account, “you have to think about ... where did it come from?” she said. “That’s the question that has to be answered.”
Authorities have called witness intimidation a serious problem in Philadelphia, with people arrested daily in the city’s criminal courts building for taking photos of witnesses, victims’ families or judges and posting the images online, said Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.
Law enforcement officials have said they have long seen victim’s statements posted in public places or sent to the home of witnesses, but such material is now winding up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Instagram hasn’t said whether it took down the account. It says community guidelines bar content that bullies or harasses and that users are encouraged to report it.
I found this at National Review Online, where I’m on permablock, so I couldn’t even vote for my reader. As for whether what he’s saying is true, I don’t know, but I know of many cases of criminal black cops who aided and abetted black felons. In one case, where I can’t recall the city, black cops would warn black crooks when a bust was coming. In the case of the SFPD, a Nation of Islam member who had infiltrated the SFPD, and who sought to help the NOI murder the only witness in the racist, “Zebra” serial killing case.
Michael Ryan
• 2 days ago •
telling a retired NYPD friend about how Id just read in Philadelphia blacks have set up a online twitter, instagram account that government law enforcement workers there are posting the names photos and files of witnesses on because in case you dont know its a black thing not to snitch. Even on murderers of black children. so in other words black police and District Attorney employees are telling gangsters who what and where the witnesses can be found before trial.
My police friend scoffed and said that was trivial, That at role call every morning NYC police are given a code word to Identify undercover officers they might encounter. Every day the code is a different color. So if an officer comes upon an armed person who is actually undercover police the undercover is to shout out the color of the day. Except that black policemen every day call WBLS the black radio station and leak the color of the day which WBLS would duly broadcast to let the brothers in the hood know. So Dr Sowell id posit their is already a race war on just one side is still in denial thinking if we give them Detroit and Philly and Indianapolis Chicago, and Atlanta Jackson etc etc etc then we will get peace.
BTW Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment Dr Sowell When NRO fires you you can always blog in the Reactoshpere
xerocky to Michael Ryan
Michael, are you telling the truth?
Michael Ryan to xerocky
a day ago •
afraid so I also live and work in majority black areas my whole life whites have no idea whats going on its a war and we have lost
http://stuffblackpeopledontlik...
http://nicholasstixuncensored....
these are the two blogs that aggregate the stories that local news orgs cant hide but national one suppress which Dr Sowell uses and refers to.
N.S.: I looked into this matter, and found that a 17-year-old had been arrested for posting classified law enforcement information about a shooting to his Twitter feed, which then ended up posted on an Instagram account that also published classified information on crime victims and witnesses, though Philly police are not yet saying that the same suspect owned the Instagram account. However, no 17-year-old has access to such sensitive information, whose release can lead to, and is indeed intended to lead to the murder of crime witnesses. The suspect had to have been fed the information by a law enforcement officer(s) and/or criminal justice official(s), or perhaps they were feeding the information directly to the Web.
The existence of such Fifth Columnists is as old as affirmative action.
The article below reports that every day in Philadelphia, court officers arrest people in the court buildings, for photographing crime witnesses and their family members, as well as the family members of victims.
Philadelphia police: Teen arrested for posting investigation info to his Twitter account
By Associated Press
November 13, 2013
Washington Post
PHILADELPHIA — A teenager posted nonpublic information about a 2012 shooting on his Twitter feed, police said, and that material was later posted to an Instagram account being scrutinized for divulging information about witnesses to crimes in the city.
The 17-year-old was taken into custody after being charged with intimidation and terroristic threats, police spokeswoman Officer Tanya Little said Wednesday.
The charges come as investigators examine how the now-shuttered Instagram account titled “rats215,” a reference to Philadelphia’s area code, came to feature affidavits and photos of victims and witnesses in criminal cases.
Police are investigating if there is a connection between the two separate social media accounts.
“There was a lot of information there ... a lot of information that was not for public viewing,” Little said.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported earlier that the “rats215” Instagram account had posted material identifying more than 30 witnesses since February. The newspaper said the account had nearly 7,900 followers and had more than 150 photos, many drawing dozens of comments and likes.
Little said the investigation, which started Oct. 24, was continuing. Although the teenager is not accused of having owned the Instagram account, “you have to think about ... where did it come from?” she said. “That’s the question that has to be answered.”
Authorities have called witness intimidation a serious problem in Philadelphia, with people arrested daily in the city’s criminal courts building for taking photos of witnesses, victims’ families or judges and posting the images online, said Tasha Jamerson, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.
Law enforcement officials have said they have long seen victim’s statements posted in public places or sent to the home of witnesses, but such material is now winding up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Instagram hasn’t said whether it took down the account. It says community guidelines bar content that bullies or harasses and that users are encouraged to report it.
One Movie We’ll Never See
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
I'm willing to bet we'll never see a Hollywood movie titled Two Years a Teacher: The Colleen Ritzer Story.
DLRisVH, at American Renaissance.
I'm willing to bet we'll never see a Hollywood movie titled Two Years a Teacher: The Colleen Ritzer Story.
DLRisVH, at American Renaissance.
Obama DoD Imposing Anti-White Male Discrimination on Our Armed Forces—and Our Allies!
By Nicholas Stix
[Previously: Diversity is Strength! It’s Also…a Corrupt U.S. Navy.]
Merit, security, and winning wars all have no place in “Obama’s” military.
Read Thomas Martel’s report at VDARE.
[Previously: Diversity is Strength! It’s Also…a Corrupt U.S. Navy.]
Merit, security, and winning wars all have no place in “Obama’s” military.
Read Thomas Martel’s report at VDARE.
Friday, November 22, 2013
The Death of a President: November 22, 1963, a Date Which Shall Live in Infamy
On This Day, 50 Years Ago, President John F. Kennedy was Assassinated by a Communist Traitor, Not by a "Right-Wing" Cabal
1917-1963
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
Inaugural Address
January 20th, 1961
Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, reverend clergy, fellow citizens, we observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom - symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning - signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage - and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge - and more.
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do - for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom - and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required - not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge - to convert our good words into good deeds - in a new alliance for progress - to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.
To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support - to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective - to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak - and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course - both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.
So let us begin anew - remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us.
Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms - and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.
Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah - to "undo the heavy burdens -. and to let the oppressed go free."
And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavour, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.
All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shank from this responsibility - I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it -- and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
A first lady with beauty, style, and grace of which pretenders can only enviously dream
Camelot Finale
If the video doesn't transfer, please hit this link.
The Death of a President
By Nicholas Stix
(Reprint, partly from 2009, the rest from 2006.)
In Dallas 47 years ago today, Communist and dishonorably discharged ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated 46-year-old President John F. Kennedy, shooting him from a window in the Texas School Book Depository building, as the President's motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, b. May 29, 1917, d. November 22, 1963.
R.I.P.
Commemorative Essay from 2006
Forty-three years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America, was felled in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, dishonorably discharged, ex-marine. For most of my life, November 22 was commemorated as one of the darkest days in American history. In recent years, such commemoration seems to have been fading.
President Kennedy was riding that day in a motorcade with his wife, Jackie, Texas Gov. John Connally and the latter's wife, Idanell (1919-2006), and Texan Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kennedy had come to Texas to shore up a rift among Texas Democrats.
As soon as she saw her husband had been hit with gunfire, Mrs. Kennedy showed herself willing to sacrifice her own life, to save her husband's. She threw herself across her husband, to shield his body from further gunfire with her own, as if she were a secret service agent, rather than America's First Lady. Alas, it was too late.
Gov. Connally also was wounded, and his wife, Idanell Brill "Nellie" Connally (1919-2006), helped save his life by "pull[ing] the Governor onto her lap, and the resulting posture helped close his front chest wound (which was causing air to be sucked directly into his chest around his collapsed right lung)."
Later that day, aboard Air Force One, Vice President Johnson was sworn in as America's 36th President.
On April 11, Oswald had attempted to assassinate rightwing Army Gen. Edwin Walker; one hour after assassinating the President, he murdered Dallas Patrolman J.W. Tippit, before being arrested in a Dallas movie theater. Two days later, Oswald was himself murdered by Jack Ruby, as lawmen sought to transfer Oswald from police headquarters to the Dallas City Jail.
Jack Kennedy has become, like his ersthwile fling, Marilyn Monroe, a Rohrschach Test, onto which people (particularly leftists) project their preoccupations. Thus do conspiracy obsessives project the notion that the President's assassination had issued out of a conspiracy so immense, including at least two assassins, with the identity of the specific participants – the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, Fidel Castro – depending on the imaginings of the obsessive in question.
Likewise has Kennedy's presidency been fetishized by leftwing obsessives and family retainers, who have turned him into a socialist demigod, who supported massive economic redistribution and radical "civil rights."
The best way of summing up the real JFK versus the fantasy version propagated by the Left and Kennedy courtiers since his death, is by comparison and contrast to President Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy's opponent in the 1960 election.
Kennedy has been portrayed as a leftwing saint and Renaissance man, who gave us or supported (or would have, had he lived) the War on Poverty, civil rights for blacks, and utopia. Nixon, by contrast, was a rightwing Mephistopheles ("Tricky Dick"), and a crude, racist, fascist warmonger.
Politically, Kennedy and Nixon actually had much in common. Both were unapologetic anti-communists in matters domestic and foreign. Nixon successfully prosecuted for perjury the traitor and Soviet spy, Alger Hiss (which inspired the Left to work tirelessly thereafter for Nixon's destruction), while Kennedy ("Ich bin ein Berliner.") was an unequivocal supporter of West Berlin against Soviet imperialism, and risked nuclear war, when he faced down the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (Due to the statute of limitations, Nixon could not prosecute Hiss for treason or espionage.) On the negative side of the ledger, Kennedy betrayed the Cuban insurgents who carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion, by withholding promised air support, thus turning the invasion into a fiasco.
Domestically, at least in fiscal matters, Kennedy was considerably to the right of Nixon. Early in Kennedy's administration, he signed off on what was then the biggest tax cut ever, and which set the economy on fire. In light of Kennedy's fiscal conservatism and belief in self-reliance ("Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"), it is highly unlikely that he would have signed off on a program for massive government welfare programs. The War on Poverty was the idea of Lyndon Johnson, who exploited the nation's mourning for JFK to ram his programs through Congress.
By contrast, Nixon introduced price and wage controls, a move that was far to the left economically of the Democratic Party, even after Kennedy. And it was Nixon, the hated "racist," not Kennedy or even Johnson, who institutionalized affirmative action. Note that over 30 percent of blacks voted for Nixon for president, over three times as high a proportion than ever would vote for George W. Bush for president.
For over thirty years, leftist Democrats have sought to tar and feather Nixon as a "racist" for his "Southern Strategy" of appealing to Southern whites with promises of "law and order." The presuppositions of the leftist critics are: 1. If one is not a leftist, one may not campaign for the votes of groups that may potentially vote for one, but rather must hopelessly chase after the votes of people who will never vote for him, thereby guaranteeing his defeat; and 2. Because the explosion in crime was primarily the fault of blacks, no politician may ever campaign on behalf of "law and order" (in other words, see #1).
Since leftists have long controlled the media and academia, no successful counter-movement has ever been waged against the Democrat Northern Strategy that continues to this day inflaming and relying on racist blacks for their votes and their violence.
If anything, Nixon was a stronger supporter of "civil rights" than Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested during the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon wanted to call King's parents in support, but let his advisers talk him out of it. Conversely, Kennedy let his adviser, future senator Harris Wofford, talk him into calling "Daddy" King, which resulted in Kennedy winning the black vote.
In August 1963, the Poor People's March, in which Martin Luther King Jr. would give his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, was almost shut down by the Kennedy Administration without King even getting to speak.
The march had been organized by A. Philip Randolph, the legendary socialist founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation's first successful black labor union. Randolph was planning on giving a radical leftwing speech written by Stanley Levison, a communist advisor to both Randolph and King, but as historian David Garrow tells in his biography, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the President's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, acting in his brother's name, threatened literally to pull the plug on the demonstration, were Randolph to deliver the planned speech. Randolph relented, and gave a considerably toned-down speech.
There is no record, to my knowledge, of Nixon ever censoring a political speech, much less one by a civil rights leader.
As for Southeast Asia, Kennedy got us involved in the War in Vietnam; Nixon got us out.
Kennedy repeatedly jeopardized national security, both as a naval intelligence officer during World War II, and while President, due to his obsessive womanizing. By contrast, even Nixon's sworn enemies have failed to find any evidence of his cheating on his beloved wife, Pat.
And as for the two men's intellectual status, Nixon was clearly superior. The notion that Kennedy was an intellectual the planned product of a PR campaign engineered and financed by the future president's father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.. The elder Kennedy got his son's undistinguished, pro-appeasement (echoing the elder Kennedy, who was a Nazi sympathizer) Harvard senior thesis, Why England Slept, published as a book, after having it rewritten by erstwhile family retainer, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock (whom JFK would later stab in the back, using future Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as his tool of choice); later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, was ghostwritten for JFK by another family retainer, Theodore Sorensen, in order to give the young senator the "gravitas" necessary for a run at the White House. Working on behalf of JFK and Joe Kennedy, Arthur Krock campaigned relentlessly on behalf of the fraudulent work, and succeeded in gaining it the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, yet another fraudulent Pulitzer that has never been rescinded.
Nixon, on the other hand, really did write a series of important books on politics. But although Nixon was a true Renaissance man, he was a Republican, and so while the Kennedy hagiography of the press, Hollywood, and academia would slavishly promote the myth of Kennedy as Renaissance man, in the same parties' corresponding demonography of Nixon, the last thing they were going to do was to give Nixon due credit for his very real intellectual accomplishments.
So, where does that leave us? Must we choose between the fictional but pervasive image of JFK as Renaissance man, socialist, and compassionate civil rights supporter, or Garry Wills' revised version, in which Kennedy appears as a ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath?
If we jettison our illusions about the political leaders we support being compassionate, kindly, fatherly (or insert your romanticized cliché of choice) types, and admit that the ruthless, pathologically lying sociopath has been a frequent Oval Office type, that still does not free us from the obligation of weighing the virtues of this sociopath against that one.
While it is ludicrous to speak of a man who inhabited the office for only two years and ten months as a "great president," John F. Kennedy had his moments. He gave us a tax cut of historic dimensions, stood up to the Soviets, founded the Peace Corps, and started the race to the moon that culminated in 1969, with Neil Armstrong's world historical walk.
The assassin
Posthumous vindication for his boldest vision: July 20, 1969
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