Jena

As we saw with the Duke lacrosse case, there's a powerful hunger in modern America for tales of white violence against innocent blacks. So, on Thursday, the national media descended on the small Louisiana town of Jena as the Revs. Jesse and Al protested a racially charged case in which six young men stomped a high school student into unconsciousness.

Of course, things being the way they are these days, the protesters in Jena were on the side of the stompers, not the stompee.

A local minister, Eddie Thompson (who was one of the earliest critics of white racism in Jena), has posted on the Internet a list of everything the national media has gotten wrong about the Jena story. I've taken the liberty of rearranging it and shortening it, so go here to see the original:

- Jena does have racial problems. Jena does have bigotry and prejudice, just like every other town in America, perhaps even worse than some. If there were no racial problems, there would have been no nooses hung from a tree. There would not be one white student beaten and six black students charged with attempted second-degree murder. The local ministers would not have hurriedly called a meeting to deal with the issue. The cameras of the world would not have focused their lenses on Jena.

- The actions of the three white students who hung the nooses (on a tree at the high school) demonstrate prejudice and bigotry. However, they were not just given "two days suspension" as reported by national news agencies. After first being expelled, then upon appeal, being allowed to re-enter the school system, they were sent to an alternative school, off-campus, for an extended period of time. They underwent investigations by Federal and Sate authorities. They were given psychological evaluations. Even when they were eventually allowed back on campus they were not allowed to be a part of the general population for weeks.

- There was no "fight" on December 4, 2006 at Jena High School, as the national media continues to characterize the event in question. Six students attacked a single student who was immediately knocked unconscious. According to sworn testimony, they stomped him, as he lay "lifeless" upon the ground.

- Justin Barker, the white student attacked, was not the first white student targeted by these black students. Others had been informed they were going to be beaten, but stayed away from school and out of sight until they felt safe.

- CNN reported that there were "obviously no witnesses to the fight." In fact, over thirty eyewitnesses, students and teachers, were questioned immediately following the attack, all of who implicated one or more of the black students arrested in the case. In fact, some of the accused black students did not stop stomping Barker until they were pulled away from him by some of the teachers, according to testimony given in the trial of Mychal Bell.

- The media continues to make the point that Justin Barker "attended a party" later that evening, insinuating that his injuries were not very severe. The Barkers, by no means a wealthy family, face medical bills already over $12,000 from the emergency room visit. Imagine what an overnight visit would have cost. Justin Barker was advised to remain hospitalized but decided he would not let the event keep him from participating in the once-in-a-lifetime, traditional Ring Ceremony at First Baptist Church in Jena, where class rings are presented to the upcoming senior class.

- The fight on December 4 was unrelated to the noose incident, or any other incident that occurred earlier in Jena that week. The media keeps reporting otherwise. There are three different boys named "Justin" involved in three different events that the media have morphed into the "Justin" who was attacked on December 4:

A. A juvenile named Justin, whose name was not released to the media, was one of the boys who hung nooses from the trees in September.

B. Three months later, Justin Sloan, not a student at Jena High, fought with one of the black students, Robert Baily, at the fair barn when a couple of black students tried to enter a private party. The next evening, at "Gotta Go" store, Justin Sloan and Robert Baily confronted one another in the parking lot. There were two other black students with Baily. As they ran towards Sloan, Sloan rushed to his truck to get a shotgun, which the black boys wrestled from him and fled.

C. On December 4, six black students at Jena High School attacked Justin Barker, who is neither of the previously mentioned young men.

- The speech given by [District Attorney] Reed Walters that included the now infamous statement "I can end your life with the stroke of a pen" was not given to a group of black students. It was given during a speech to the entire student body in an assembly called by the school's principal to calm a community that was pulling their children out of school because there were two fights one day with racial overtones. Two girls, one white and one black fought. Another student was taken to the emergency room to receive stitches.

- The national news media has not mentioned a single time that there was an FBI investigation into the hanging of the nooses and the conduct of Reed Walters that concluded there was no criminal activity or "hate crime" involved. The report is available to the media, along with court records and sworn testimony, none of which has been reported.

- It has been reported that the school has two standards of justice since white students who attacked a black student were not treated as the black students who attacked a white student. No group of white students attacked a black student at Jena High School. Fights that have occurred have always been handled equally. This was not a fight. This process was taken out of the hands of school officials when the ambulance was called to bring Justin Barker to the hospital for the attack. Both the appearance of the ambulance and Barker's visit to the emergency room requires an investigation by law enforcement.

- The "Jena Six" have repeatedly been held up as heroes by much of the race-based community and called "innocent students" by the national media. Some of these students have reputations in Jena for intimidating and sometimes beating other students. They have vandalized and destroyed both school property and community property. Some of the Jena Six have been involved in crimes not only in LaSalle Parish but also in surrounding parishes. For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena. Despite intervention by adults wanting to give them chances due their athletic potential, most of the Jena Six have extensive juvenile records. Yet their parents keep insisting that their children have never been in trouble before. These boys did not receive prejudicial treatment but received preferential treatment until things got out of hand.

- The entire black community of Jena is not being heard in this controversy, just the parents, relatives, and close friends of the Jena Six. The black community of Jena has not been involved in the protests and demonstrations called by national race-based organizations. Some state and national race crusaders have chastised them for not "rising up" with the parents to force law enforcement to "free the Jena Six." Many do agree that the charges seem wrong, but they also know the criminal history of the boys referred to as the "Jena Six." It is their neighborhood these boys have terrorized. Not even all of the parents claim that these boys should be set free with no consequence for their actions. One of the parents was interviewed, saying that the boys should suffer the fair punishment for their actions. He suggested that simple battery would be an acceptable charge. With one exception, the local black pastors do not support the demonstrations. They have been openly criticized for their lack of cooperation with the national race crusaders. One of them counseled the "Jena Six" families to not stir controversy for controversy's sake. The black pastor was openly condemned by a local radio personality sympathetic to the cause of the black parents. The rhetoric grew so intense that the black pastor was referred to as Reed Walter's "house Negro" on the local radio talk show. The pastor is consistently accused on this show of working in cooperation with Reed Walters in a plot to undermine the "Jena Six."

Conclusion:

To Reed Walters: Charge these young men with the crimes of which they are guilty.

To The Parents: Hold your children accountable for their actions.

To The White Community: Stop claiming, "There is no racism here" or "We have no problems here." Live by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If twelve percent of our community is feeling estranged, we should listen to their grievances.

To The Black Community: If you believe these six black students are innocent, we can "free the Jena Six" today by having the black students, who thirty witnesses testify attacked Justin Barker, step forward and take responsibility for their actions.

To The National Media: Please, get it right. Report the facts. Let them take you to the truth. Stop making Jena, Louisiana, a national scapegoat for America's sin of racism.

To America: Judge not unless you be judged. You will be judged by the same measure you judge this little town. Until you know the facts, reserve judgment. Do no believe everything you see on TV.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Truth about Jena"

The Atlantic Monthly sends Amy Waldman down to Jena, LA to uncover what was behind the vast civil rights brouhaha, and she comes up with the same thing I did back in September from my house: football.

The Truths About Jena:

Why America’s black-and-white narratives about race don’t reflect reality

In the fall of 2006, Mychal Bell was a football hero, and his hometown, Jena, Louisiana, loved him for it. As his high-school team posted its best season in six years, Bell scored 21 touchdowns, rushed for 1,006 yards, and was named player of the week three times by The Jena Times. The paper celebrated his triumphs in articles and photographs, including a dramatic one in which Bell, who’s black, stiff-arms a white defender by clutching his face guard. But within weeks after the season’s end, Bell was transformed into a villain, accused of knocking out a white student, Justin Barker, who was then beaten by a group of black students. The parish’s white district attorney charged Bell and five others with attempted second-degree murder. Six months later—after the DA had reduced the charges against Bell—a white jury convicted him, as an adult, of aggravated second-degree battery, a crime that carried a possible 22-year prison sentence. By then, he, along with his co-defendants, had been transformed yet again: together, they’d been dubbed the Jena Six and had become icons of a 21st-century civil-rights movement. [More]

As I wrote in The American Conservative:

Similarly, in September, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led thousands of demonstrators in a march on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest supposed racism in the treatment of six black high-school students accused of beating unconscious then stomping the body of a white schoolmate, the assembled national media got the story almost 180 degrees backward. We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of stars athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.

The Jena Six hadn’t been despised outcasts: they were the best football players in a gridiron-obsessed small town. Mychal Bell, the only one of the Six tried so far, was an All-State junior who scored 18 touchdowns in the 2006 season. A local minister, Eddie Thompson, explained, “For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena.” As Abbey Brown wrote in the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk: “Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 [2006] and criminal damage to property Sept. 3. … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama on the Jena 6

From his speech at Howard U.:

What's truly risky is to let the same injustice remain year after year. What's truly risky is to walk away and pretend it never happened. What's truly risky is to accept things as they are instead of working for what could be.

In a media-driven culture that's more obsessed with who's beating who in Washington and how long Paris Hilton is going to jail, these moments are harder to spot today. But every so often, they do appear. Sometimes it takes a hurricane. And sometimes it takes a travesty of justice like the one we've seen in Jena, Louisiana.

There are some who will make Jena about the fight itself. And it's true that we have to do more as parents to instill in our children that violence is always wrong. It's wrong when it happens on the streets of Chicago and it's wrong when it happens at a schoolyard in Louisiana. Violence is not the answer. Non-violence was the soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and we have to do a better job of teaching our children that virtue.

But we also know that to truly understand Jena, you have to look at what happened both before and after that fight. You have to listen to the hateful slurs that flew through the halls of a school. You have to know the full measure of the damage done by that arson. You have to look at those nooses hanging on that schoolyard tree. And you have to understand how badly our system of justice failed those six boys in the days after that fight - the outrageous charges; the unreasonable and excessive sentences; the public defender who did not call a single witness.

Like Katrina did with poverty, Jena exposed glaring inequities in our justice system that were around long before that schoolyard fight broke out. It reminds us of the fact that we have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, non-violent offenders for the better part of their lives - a decision that's made not by a judge in a courtroom, but by politicians in Washington. It reminds us that we have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from. It reminds us that we have a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting civil rights violations is trying to rollback affirmative action programs at our college and universities; a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting voting rights violations is to look for voting fraud in black and Latino communities where it doesn't exist. ...

I don't want to be standing here and talking about another Jena four years from now because we didn't have the courage to act today. I don't want this to be another issue that ends up being ignored once the cameras are turned off and the headlines disappear. It's time to seek a new dawn of justice in America.

From the day I take office as President, America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of ideologues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years, the Civil Rights Division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination, and hate crimes. And we'll have a Voting Rights Section that actually defends the right of every American to vote without deception or intimidation. When flyers are placed in our neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day, that won't only be an injustice, it will be a crime.

As President, I will also work every day to ensure that this country has a criminal justice system that inspires trust and confidence in every American, regardless of age, or race, or background. There's no reason that every single person accused of a crime shouldn't have a qualified public attorney to defend them. We'll recruit more public defenders to the profession by forgiving college and law school loans - and I will ask some of the brilliant minds here at Howard to take advantage of that offer. There's also no reason we can't pass a racial profiling law like I did in Illinois, or encourage state to reform the death penalty so that innocent people do not end up on death row.

What really happened:

Similarly, in September, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led thousands of demonstrators in a march on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest supposed racism in the treatment of six black high-school students accused of beating unconscious then stomping the body of a white schoolmate, the assembled national media got the story almost 180 degrees backward. We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of stars athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.

The Jena Six hadn’t been despised outcasts: they were the best football players in a gridiron-obsessed small town. Mychal Bell, the only one of the Six tried so far, was an All-State junior who scored 18 touchdowns in the 2006 season. A local minister, Eddie Thompson, explained, “For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena.” As Abbey Brown wrote in the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk: “Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 [2006] and criminal damage to property Sept. 3. … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

From VDARE.com: The Jena Six Through the Looking Glass

Here's an excerpt from my new VDARE.com column. PLEASE click on the [More] link at the bottom of the excerpt to read the rest of it on the VDARE site.

The Jena Six Through the Looking Glass

Last Thursday in the small Louisiana town of Jena, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led a march of thousands of protestors chanting "Jail the Jena Six!"

The demonstrators and the press had come from all over the country to condemn the savage racist attack of December 4, 2006, in which a black high school student was jumped from behind, knocked unconscious, and then kicked and punched by six white football players until they were dragged off their supine victim.

"Phrases like 'stomped him badly,' 'stepped on his face,' 'knocked out cold on the ground,' and 'slammed his head on the concrete beam' were used by the students in their statements," wrote reporter Abbey Brown in "Documents Give Details of Fight," a June 11, 2007 article in the local Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk.

On Thursday, the two ministers demanded that hate crime charges be added to the indictments against the six muscular white athletes accused of beating black student Justin Barker senseless. "Why in the world isn't this being called a hate crime?" asked Sharpton. "Given the long series of racial incidents in Jena, this was clearly a racially-motivated attack."

The black leaders denounced District Attorney Reed Walter's decision to reduce the main charge from second-degree attempted murder to second-degree aggravated battery. They implied that only bias could account for his leniency toward the white athletes. "These six football stars might well have killed this poor boy if they hadn't finally been stopped," said Jackson. "Let the jury decide whether it was attempted murder or not."

The Rev. Jackson blamed school authorities for not disciplining their star white players for earlier crimes. He pointed out that the only one of the football players so far to be tried and convicted, fullback/linebacker Mychal Bell, had been accustomed to running amok off the field because of preferential treatment he enjoyed due to his athletic stardom. In the twelve months leading up to the attack on Barker, Bell had scored 18 touchdowns and been convicted of four crimes, two of them violent. Capping off the junior's busy year, on December 17, 2006, Bell was named All-State while he was sitting in his jail cell.

Jackson quoted Brown's August 25 article "Bell denied bond due to criminal history:"

"… Bell was placed on probation until his 18th birthday -- Jan. 18, 2008 -- after an incident of battery on Dec. 25, 2005. After being placed on probation, he was adjudicated of three other crimes, the two in September and another charge of criminal damage to property that occurred on July 25, 2006."

The Rev. Jackson noted that Brown's article showed that school officials were negligent in reining in their violent star:

"Mack Fowler, Jena High's football coach at the time, said that … he discovered that while he was punishing his players, the school 'wasn't doing anything' to them. Fowler said he decided then that he was going to do the same thing the school did—nothing."

Discriminating on Bell's behalf paid off on the football field. Brown wrote:

"Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 and criminal damage to property Sept. 3 … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns—one of the best performances of the year for the standout athlete."

The Rev. Sharpton argued that the youngest of the attackers, Jesse Ray Beard, should have been charged as an adult. "Instead, he is frolicking on the football field right now!"

Brown reported in "'Jena Six' all ran together -- on the field and off:"

"Since returning to school, Beard has shined as one of the Jena Giants' star players on the football field. … He had 91 yards rushing and scored the game-winning touchdown Friday night in the Giants' 12-6 overtime win over Iowa."

Both civil rights organizers agreed that … oh, wait … No … hmmhmmh …

Look, this is kind of embarrassing for me. I'm not sure how to explain this … Okay, here goes:

I just realized that this article I've been writing is about an "alternate universe" ... [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jena Six: Emmett Till Redux or OJ Simpson All Over Again?

It's striking how much demand there is in modern America for evidence that some whites somewhere are still committing the same crimes against blacks as in the distant past. It's even more striking that in a country of 300 million where surely it's statistically plausible that somebody somewhere is doing any horrible thing you can imagine, that so many of these media campaigns end up humiliating themselves.

For example, the prestige media, led by the New York Times, fell so hard for the Duke lacrosse hoax in part because they so desperately wanted a news story about white men raping a black woman. They wanted it so bad that they threw out all their standards and principles to push it endlessly until it blew up in their faces.

Similarly, the Jena Six story is all about America's craving for proof that white Southerners are still a lynch mob. That's why every recounting starts with nooses being hung from a tree on campus three months before the Jena Six stomped that kid.

Yet, as the facts emerge (see my VDARE article), we're able to start piecing together a very different, much more modern narrative of what happened, one that is much less redolent of poor Emmett Till, and much more reminiscent of OJ Simpson. The Emmett Till narrative was constructed long after the stomping by cherrypicking events, and leaving out massively relevant facts, like that the Jena Six, far from being despised outcasts, were the best football players in a football mad small town.

Mychal Bell was to Jena what OJ was to LA.

As you'll recall, Johnnie Cochran persuaded the jury (which ultimately was three-fourth black, with eight black women jurors, due to prosecutor Marcia Clark's doctrinaire feminist assumption that gender trumps race in a domestic abuse case) that the racist LAPD was out to frame OJ.

In reality, most cops loved OJ. Whenever the late Nicole Brown Simpson would call 911 to report that her husband was beating her, a couple of LAPD's finest would go around to the Brentwood house, and ... "Hey! You're OJ!" So, they'd wind up getting his autograph and some pictures taken with great man himself, and a grand old time was had by all. Except by the victim, but, while cute, she never rushed for 2003 yards in a season, did she? Did Leslie Nielsen ever slap her on the back, sending her wheelchair careening down the steps and off the grandstand at Dodger Stadium in "The Naked Gun?" I think not.

The only cop that took Nicole's 911 calls seriously was evil old Mark Fuhrman.

This doesn't mean the average white LAPD cop liked blacks in general -- the ones cops come in contact with the most, other than their partners, are not the kind of people that inspire warm feelings -- but OJ was a football star!

And the Jena Six knew they were football stars, and like so many star athletes, exploited their privileged position to run wild. Finally, they went too far.

And that explains the initial attempted murder charges (lowered to aggravated battery in the actual trial of Mychal Bell, the first defendant), which appear to have been necessary to get them out of the juvenile justice system that had completely failed to dissuade them from committing more crimes. Bell, we now know, was convicted in the juvenile system on four occasions over the over 12 months before his involvement in stomping the unconscious kid, including two crimes of violence. "Sources told ESPN that one of those cases was a battery in which Bell punched a 17-year-old girl in the face." (The juvenile records of the other five have yet to be unsealed.)

Yet, Bell didn't miss the football season, in which he averaged 101 yards rushing and 12 tackles per game, and 17 yards per punt return, earning him All-State honors as a junior.

Was the DA's legal ploy justified? Maybe, maybe not. A higher court ruled it was not. But, the judge recently refused to reduce Bell's bail enough to get him out of jail -- this is one scary guy who has been convicted five separate times since Christmas Day 2005!

Was the DA's reasoning so preposterous that his real motivation must have been racism? Obviously not.

It is clear that the juvenile justice system can't get the job done of adequately punishing the stompers -- the one member of the Jena Six who was so young (14 at the time) that he had to be left in the juvenile system has now taken Bell's place on the Jena HS football team and has averaged 100 yards rushing per game this season!

The interesting question is whether anybody ever learns from repeatedly getting snookered over these kind of racial brouhahas in the media.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jena Six football star back in jail

Mychal Bell, the All-State football star at the center of the Jena Six brouhaha, was today sentenced to jail for 18 months for his four previous convictions. See, stomping an unconscious kid wasn't part of his various probation deals that had allowed him to stay out of juvenile hall and on the football field for Jena H.S. in 2006:

'Jena 6' Teen Mychal Bell Back in Jail

The Associated Press

JENA, La. -- A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy was back in jail Thursday after a judge decided the fight that put him in the national spotlight violated terms of his probation for a previous conviction, his attorney said.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers is accused of beating a white classmate, had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell's attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker. Details on the previous charges, which were handled in juvenile court, were unclear.

We know that in one of those earlier "ajudications" (juvenile justicese for "convictions") the 5'-10", 185 pound fullback /middle linebacker (100 yards rushing and 12 tackles per game as a junior) who was being recruited by mighty LSU, was found guilty of punching a 17 year old girl in the face.

Is anybody other than the original small town reporter Abbey Brown and sportswriter Jason Whitlock ever going to realize that this isn't a story about poor oppressed sharecroppers getting lynched, it's a story about football stars who were coddled for years, until they finally went too far, because small towns in the South are crazy about high school football?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Darfur v. Zimbabwe: Is U.S. Foreign Policy Just an Elite Plaything?

In my new VDARE.com column, I compare the interest level in two African disasters of equal lack of strategic important to the American national interest:

Obama has, however, done a nimble job of exciting the Stuff White People Like crowd by repeatedly acting as if he cares about Darfur, a god-forsaken expanse of arid grassland just south of the Sahara in western Sudan, where militias backed by the "Arab" central government in Khartoum have been attacking locals.

Darfur has become a cause célèbre among celebrities such as George Clooney and Matt Damon. Obama has been addressing fashionable Darfur rallies and hiring foreign policy advisers, such as Samantha Power, who are passionate about America getting involved in this huge bit of damn-all in the middle of nowhere.

Darfur’s usefulness as a foreign policy issue to Obama and McCain in appealing to the SWPL contingent is it’s utter uselessness—America has no national interest in Darfur whatsoever, so therefore, the thinking goes, we should get involved because it wouldn’t do us any good—thus demonstrating the purity of our intentions.

In contrast, virtually no celebrities have expressed any interest in "raising awareness" about Zimbabwe, a verdant country at a pleasant altitude in southeast Africa. Over the last decade, dictator Robert Mugabe has destroyed the economy and driven his subjects to the brink of starvation. As with Darfur, the U.S. has negligible national interest in Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, in contrast to Darfur, Zimbabwe doesn’t interest the partisans of purity because of the unfortunate details behind why it is now prostrate: In 2000, Mugabe unleashed his goons to beat up and steal the farms of the efficient white farmers who raised most of the food.

Several members of Barack Obama's inner circle of foreign policy advisers are leaders in the movement to demand we do something about Darfur. For example, in a 2006 Washington Post op-ed entitled "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" ...

Similarly, in an interview entitled "The McCain Doctrines" with Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine [May 18, 2008], John McCain volunteers that he's often thought about starting a war with Sudan, if only a way could be found to make it practical:

"I asked McCain if it was true … that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. ‘I think so, I think so,’ he said, nodding. 'And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?' He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. 'You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up. … And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?'"

Note that, although McCain likes military adventures, the simpler task of intervening in Zimbabwe to avert famine does not appeal to him at all. While McCain volunteered Darfur, the NYT’s Bai has to bring Zimbabwe up:

"Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election?"

McCain tries to spell it out euphemistically for the journalist why a white President of the United States is not going to depose a black tyrant who wrecked his country by persecuting productive whites:

"'I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,' McCain said thoughtfully."

Well, not that thoughtfully—the U.S. doesn't actually have much of a history in Africa.

McCain notices his mistake and tries to make himself clear without actually mentioning the W-word:

"Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa.'"

... What makes Zimbabwe so unsexy compared to Darfur is that in 1965 the British Colonial Office tried to give the colony of Rhodesia to its black majority. But its white population declared independence and for 15 years resisted an international trade embargo, building a substantial manufacturing base. Finally, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher organized the handover of the country to Robert Mugabe.

The new President devoted the next decade to slaughtering his tribal enemies, largely leaving the white farmers alone to feed the country. In 2000, however, Mugabe began to reward his supporters by telling them to drive out the white minority and steal their land. Not surprisingly, his bully boys proved to be worthless farmers and the country has teetered on the brink of starvation ever since. Mugabe's government has responded to the shortages it created by printing money, driving the annual inflation rate up to 165,000% in April 2008.

Since 2000, Mugabe has clung to power through three elections due to the support of the black South African government, which provides him with cheap electricity. ...

In contrast to Zimbabwe’s famous role in the defeat of European white rule, Sudan is a member of the Arab League and the government espouses fundamentalist Islam, so it lacks the black cred of Zimbabwe. Granted, Sudan's leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir's complexion isn't much fairer than that of the typical member of the Congressional Black Caucus. But that little detail gets lost in most of the Darfur coverage. ...

So, the racial taboos about criticizing blacks don't apply as much to the Sudanese Arabs. In the American politician's mind, they're just white people, more or less. But some of them are misled by anti-Semitism or Islamofascism or anti-Americanism, just like the Germans were misled by Nazism, So, it's okay to kill them. (Indeed, for neoconservative Darfur enthusiasts, killing Arabs is not a bug, it’s a feature.)

But killing Mugabe's goons? They're black. And they beat up white farmers. Oh, man, that's a whole different kettle of fish—lots of domestic political implications that nobody wants to touch. So few white American politicians are excited about getting involved on the side of whites being victimized by blacks. There's no domestic political profit in that!

To a white American politician like McCain, Zimbabwe is the Jena Six brouhaha writ large. As you may recall, the six star football players on the Jena H.S. team had been using their privileged position as local sports heroes to run amok for years, beating up people. But their coaches and fans kept getting them out of trouble so they could continue to star on the Jena H.S. football team.

Finally, the Six went too far when they kept stomping a single youth after he was already unconscious on the ground.

So, just like in Zimbabwe, you had a gang of black thugs outnumbering and beating up a white person. What was the upshot? Why Rev. Jesse and Rev. Al and all the media came to town and denounced the white people of Jena for their horrible racism!

It was hilarious, but you can see why even a war-lover like McCain wouldn't want to get involved in such a directly analogous situation in Zimbabwe.

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The fundamental paradox of modern liberalism

From the Washington Post, another article about how Eric Holder is doing exactly what Obama promised at his Howard University address, which I covered in VDARE in 2008: more Jobs for the Boys in the Civil Rights department

Justice Dept. to Address Backlog of Civil Rights Complaints
By Krissah Thompson

There is the ongoing review of the death of a man beaten by four white teenagers in a park in Shenandoah, Pa. The kids, all high school football players, shouted, "Go back to Mexico," before one punched him repeatedly with a metal shank balled up in his fist, according to witnesses. Then, another kicked him on the left side of his head so hard that the Mexican man's brain began to swell. He died two days later, his fiancee weeping at his side.

Not mentioned: This particular tragic fiasco broke out when the football players stumbled upon Luis Ramirez statuatorily raping his fiancee's 15-year-old sister in a public park. Ramirez may have started the fight and certainly appeared eager to fight.

In other words, this sounds much like a photographic negative of the Jena 6 case, where six black star football players beat an unconscious white kid. What were the differences? The white kid didn't happen to die and Jena was turned into a vast national brouhaha about white racism. (See Obama's speech about Jena means we should unleash the Justice Department to fight white racism.)

The end of the article reports that this Shenandoah case has already gone through the courts:

He pointed to the case of Luis Ramirez, the Mexican man who was beaten by the football players 14 months ago in the Shenandoah street fight.

In May, following a week-long trial, a local jury acquitted two of the defendants of all charges except for simple assault, a second-degree misdemeanor. Neither received more than seven months in jail. Another was tried as a juvenile and received probation. The last cooperated with the Justice Department, pleaded guilty in federal court and awaits sentencing. [That appears misleading: The Huffington Post article says: "Walsh pleaded guilty in federal court to violating Ramirez's civil rights and could be out of prison in four years.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/04/luis-ramirez-killers-foun_n_195535.html

"]

The Justice Department began monitoring the case more than a year ago [i.e., during the Bush Administration] and, according to Holder, is continuing to review the incident. Growing impatient, representatives of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund hand-delivered two boxes of petitions with 50,000 signatures to Justice Department officials in June asking that the teens be charged under the federal hate crimes law.

Holder mentioned the department's review to the Hispanic lawyers group this month, indicating to them that the case is a priority for the civil rights division.

In other words, this is about ethnic demands that racial politics triumph over the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy, combined with the frustrating shortage of real life Great White Defendants. There just aren't enough whites who violently assault non-whites to meet demand, so we we need to try and convict the few we have twice. In fact, we should execute them, then dig them up and then publicly execute then all over again.

Their issues are wrapped up in what is a top concern for Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has pledged to make the division his department's "crown jewel" by returning its focus to protecting minorities from discrimination. What becomes of these cases, and others like them, will help determine the meaning of justice in the Obama administration. ...

Holder has said he recognizes the size of the task. In his 2010 budget, he requested an additional $22 million for civil rights work, creating 54 new legal positions and bringing the staff up to 399 lawyers. He told members of the Hispanic Bar Association earlier this month that he holds to a promise he made during his confirmation hearings that "the civil rights division would fight discrimination as fiercely as the criminal division fights crime -- and that we would once again honor the spirit of the movement that inspired its creation. . . . Although much work lies ahead, we are well on our way." ...

Joe Rich was one of them. He worked in the civil rights division from 1968 to 2005, and finally walked away after all of his responsibilities as chief of the voting rights section were steadily steered away.

"We were considered to be wild-eyed liberals, and they were trying to drive us out," said Rich, who is now director of the fair housing project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "You've got a group of people there now that are not experienced in civil rights enforcement and who often had some hostility to civil rights enforcement. It will be a management challenge in how to deal with people like that."

The challenge will likely fall to Tom Perez, a former Maryland politician and civil rights lawyer who is Obama's nominee to head the civil rights division. Seven months after Perez was nominated, his confirmation remains held up in a power play in the Senate that both sides say has little to do with Perez.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) asked Senate Republicans to delay Perez's confirmation after the Department of Justice reduced charges in a case of alleged voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia that was filed in the waning days of the Bush administration. Smith called the decision "possible political interference." ...

Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the department, said the attorney general's goal is to return the department to a traditional civil rights agenda. Founded in 1957 to enforce anti-discrimination laws, lawyers from the Justice Department's civil rights division were a key part of the civil rights movement. Over the years, the division has since seen its responsibilities grow beyond voting rights to housing, employment and disability discrimination.

There is a fundamental contradiction that grows year by year. By way of analogy, let me briefly recount the British Labour Party's history, which was formed to represent the interests of trade union members against the overwhelming power of the upper and middle classes. Eventually, however, the Labour Party went from outsiders to the dominant power and imposed its platform, such as nationalization of the commanding heights of industry. From 1964-1979, however, an era of mostly Labour governments, an expected paradox emerged that led to the downfall of Labour in 1979 and 18 years in the wilderness until it was fundamentally reconstituted in 1997 by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as an American-style left of center party rather than as Parliamentary expression of the unions.

The paradox that became clear in the 1970s was that the Old Labour party suffered from a fundamental conflict of interest when it came to negotiations between trade unions at nationalized industries and management, which reported to Labour Party cabinet members, who were sworn to promote the welfare of the trade unions. The result was Labour in the role of management constantly caving in to demands from Labour in the role of trade unions, with the resultant inflation and growing economic disparities between Brits inside the unions and outside the unions.

Similarly, the dominant liberal ideology that emerged triumphant in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s was that an elite among the majority (e.g., the President and the Attorney General) would protect the rights and interests of oppressed minorities through things like disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. In other words, the essences of modern American liberalism is the thwarting of majority rule by majority elites in the interest of weak minorities. After all, minorities were, by definition, minorities and therefore weak. And since the majority was large and powerful, it could afford to grant benefactions to a few minority beneficiaries.

But, the triumph of liberalism and the ensuing demographic change means we are slowly heading into era reminiscent of the decadent phase of the Old Labour government in Britain. We now have a black President and black Attorney General vowing to use the power of the Department of Justice to advance black interests.

But, of course, that's just the beginning.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Zimmerman, Jena Six, and overcharging

I have some fun below with the Dave Barry-ish Florida special prosecutor lady overcharging George Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder, but it's worth keeping in mind (because nobody else will) how this is the mirror image of the Jena Six brouhaha. 

As you'll recall (although nobody else will), Sharpton, Jackson, and Obama were all up in arms in 2007 about the prosecutor in Jena, Louisiana charging six black youths with Attempted Murder for their stomping of an unconscious white youth. This was the Most Racist Thing Ever according to the prestige press brouhaha. 

But it turned out that a local reporter named Abbey Brown had already gotten the real story, which was that the six stompers were the stars of the high school football team in this football crazy town, and, with the assistance of their coaches, had been getting away with a "reign of terror," as a local minister phrased it. Mychal Bell, the All-Stater who was their leader, had already been convicted three times in juvenile court, but that hadn't impeded his playing time. The prosecutor's ploy of overcharging them was to get them out of the juvenile justice system and into the adult system, where they wound up with modest sentences that at least made an impression on them.

This is not to say that blacks are never the victims of racist injustice, but that crime stories involving blacks that the prestige press gets most worked up over (Dominique Strass-Kahn, Duke Lacrosse, various campus hate hoaxes, etc.) turn out, with remarkable regularity, to be travesties.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Can you guess the real story behind the story?

Arthur Brisbane, the "Public Editor" of the New York Times, chastises an earlier NYT story:

Gang Rape Story Lacked Balance

The story quickly climbed The Times’s “most emailed” list but not just because of the sensational facts of the crime involved. “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” published on Tuesday, reported the gang rape by 18 boys and men of an 11-year-old girl in the East Texas town of Cleveland.

The viral distribution of the story was, at least in part, because of the intense outrage it inspired among readers who thought the piece pilloried the victim.

My assessment is that the outrage is understandable. The story dealt with a hideous crime but addressed concerns about the ruined lives of the perpetrators without acknowledging the obvious: concern for the victim.

While the story appeared to focus on the community’s reaction to the crime, it was not enough to simply report that the community is principally concerned about the boys and men involved – as this story seems to do. If indeed that is the only sentiment to be found in this community – and I find that very hard to believe – it becomes important to report on that as well by seeking out voices of professional authorities or dissenting community members who will at least address, and not ignore, the plight of the young girl involved.

Let’s consider the particulars:

The story by James C. McKinley Jr. reported that residents of the town noted the girl dressed “older than her age,” wore makeup and fashions “more appropriate to a woman in her 20s” and hung out with older boys at the playground.

The story also quoted one resident, saying, “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?”

Referring to some of the defendants in the case, the same resident was quoted saying, “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
The fourth paragraph of the story laid out the basic themes of the story:

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?

These elements, creating an impression of concern for the perpetrators and an impression of a provocative victim, led many readers to interpret the subtext of the story to be: she had it coming.

What in the world was going on with the initial story? Talking about the clothes the female was wearing and so forth has been a huge feminist no-no in reporting on rape (regular or statutory) cases for a generation or more. Why would the NYT violate feminist shibboleths in initially reporting this story? What facts are crucial to understanding the original NYT story's remarkable concern for the males involved, yet aren't mentioned in either the original story or the ombudsman's critique?

Could it have anything to do with the unmentionable demographics of the accused rapists in this "working-class neighborhood" in Texas? (Judging from the NYT's comments, I'd guess a lot of the emailing of the original article by NYT readers was of the "Look at what those vicious Red State Republicans do to little girls" variety.)

As commenters have pointed out, the NYT's sympathetic coverage of the Cleveland 18 is reminiscent of its sympathetic coverage of the Jena 6, the high school football stars with long records of violent behavior, who stomped an unconscious high school student. In contrast, the NYT's intensive coverage of the Duke Lacrosse 25 who were falsely accused of rape, was unsympathetic in the extreme.

What could possibly explain this pattern? 

Fortunately, we can go to a foreign country to find out what is happening in America and why it's tying the NYT in knots.

The London tabloid The Daily Mail conveniently lists the NYT's omitted facts in its headlines:

Horrific gang rape of 11-year-old girl sparks racial tension as all the accused are black and the victim Hispanic

- Activist claims arrests show 'selective prosecution' of African-American community

-Meeting planned to discuss arrests receives 'death threats'

- Outrage over newspaper report that claimed victim 'dressed older than her age, wearing make-up'

- Defence attorney slammed for suggesting girl was a 'willing participant'

In other words, this is another Jena 6 story -- a bunch of young black guys in a southern small town do something bad to somebody nonblack and then the national press turns it into a story about how these young fellows are, when you stop to think about it, the real victims.

In this case, however, the victim was not a 17-year-old white guy, but an 11-year-old Hispanic girl, so the NYT is getting called out on it, although in an extremely gingerly fashion. In contrast, the ludicrous coverage of the Jena 6 went on and on.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Carol Swain on the Jena Six

Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, whose book Debating immigration I recently reviewed at VDARE.com, writes in the Tennessean:

When teens aren't taught value of life, it can have deadly consequences

By CAROL SWAIN

Much sport has been made of the deadly sneaker that the district attorney introduced as a weapon. What is missed is the fact that sneakers and fists can become lethal weapons under the right circumstances.

Almost a year ago, my 41-year-old brother, Kevin Henderson, died from injuries he sustained on his job after he was attacked by a group of teenage boys.

According to a neighbor who witnessed the attack, five teens knocked my brother to the ground, kicking and stomping him until the neighbor intervened. Kevin staggered home, collapsed into a coma and was declared brain-dead within hours of the attack.

It took many months for a measure of justice to occur. So far, two of the five boys have been charged with first-degree manslaughter. Like Mychal Bell, one of the boys has been held many months without bail. He awaits sentencing, and the family hopes he will go straight to prison. Most, if not all, come from single-parent households.

Perhaps the boys meant to kill him. Perhaps it was an accident. In any event, a life was lost because a gang of boys mortally wounded a man who left home for his job, not knowing that he would never return.

I offer this story of a senseless killing to provide another perspective on what might have been going on in the head of the Jena district attorney. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Jena 6: The gift that keeps on giving blog-worthy material

From The Smoking Gun:

One of the "Jena Six" defendants was arrested yesterday for allegedly assaulting a fellow student at a Texas high school. Bryant Purvis, 19, was busted on the misdemeanor charge following an 8:30 AM altercation at Hebron High School in Carrollton, where his family relocated from Louisiana. According to the below arrest warrant affidavit, Purvis assaulted a male student he apparently suspected of vandalizing his auto. Along with choking the 18-year-old victim, the 6' 6" Purvis allegedly slammed the teenager's head on a table.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Everything's a travesty with you, man

In this country of 300,000,000+, it shouldn't be too hard for the national media to come up with actual news stories to illustrate its favorite themes of White Racism, the Invalidity of Stereotypes, and so forth. And yet, when the prestige press decides to go all in on a story to Push the Narrative, like Duke Lacrosse case or Jena Six, they usually seem to wind up with another travesty, playing Walter Sobchak with poor Donnie's ashes at the end of The Big Lebowski (video).

The Trayvon Martin story was supposed to demonstrate how white people invidiously stereotype young black males and get away with murder because they are white. First, though, it turned out that George Zimmerman wasn't what most people are told to think of as white.

Then it turned out the poor Trayvon had never gotten the anti-stereotyping message himself. In fact, judging from his Twitter account, Trayvon loved stereotypes of young black males as violent, criminal, and dangerous, and was working hard to polish his own thug image.

For his Twitter handle, he chose the title of a rap song that I won't repeat (but you can listen to it here and read the lyrics here), by Kane and Abel and featuring C-Murder. According to Wikipedia, "Corey Miller (born March 9, 1971), better known by his stage name C-Murder, is an American rapper and convicted murderer."

(By the way, what's the deal with the gold foil on the teeth? I guess I'm out of touch with today's youth because I don't get that at all.)

This, the three suspensions from school, the school's suspicion of jewel thievery or fencing ... well, none of this is terribly conclusive, but it should give pause to the mainstream media's drive to rile up lynch mobs to go after the shooter. First, it suggests that Zimmerman's assessment of Trayvon as a potential burglar was, in fact, quite reasonable. He was found by his school with a backpack of silver jewelry for which he had no persuasive explanation.

Second, it adds weight to the notion that Zimmerman's version of the fatal encounter is conceivable. That doesn't mean it's wholly accurate, it just means that it doesn't sound terribly implausible.

Being a frothing at the mouth extremist, unlike the mainstream media, my view of this case has been that patience is the best advice. It reminds me of the homicide case against Michael Jackson's doctor for giving him that sleeping drug, in which the criminal justice system took over a half year to decide whether or not to arrest him. The doctor wasn't going anywhere, so what's the hurry? Get all the facts and think through the law. (I still don't know if that case was rightly decided, but I feel a little better that the authorities took their time about it and weren't stampeded into overly quick actions.)

As more facts emerge, the criminal justice system's behavior seems fairly reasonable. The myth is that the racist cops immediately let Zimmerman go due to White Privilege, but, in reality, they cuffed him and took him down to the station. There, he was questioned and the prosecutors decided that they didn't have a strong enough case to arrest him at present. Presumably, he has enough ties to the community relative to the only moderate severity of any potential charge, so he wasn't likely to go on the lam before they might change their mind.

One interesting argument I saw in an anonymous comment was the assertion that Zimmerman's father, who is some kind of judge, brought some sort of influence to bear on the prosecutors, or that at least the state listened more sympathetically to Zimmerman's story because of who his father was. I don't know of much evidence for or against this claim, one way or another, but it does not sound utterly implausible. But since it's too idiosyncratic to fit well into the main Racial Narrative that everybody is worked up over, it's been largely ignored.

What general lesson can society draw from the Trayvon case? Well, there's a win-win solution for how to get people to stop stereotyping young black males as thugs. Blacks should stop trying so damn hard to act like thugs.

P.S. A commenter writes:

"And yet, when the prestige press decides to go all in on a story to Push the Narrative, like Duke Lacrosse case or Jena Six, they usually seem to wind up with another travesty..." 

They've eaten their own dog food. On the conscious level they actually believe their message. If they didn't, they'd look hard for the extremely rare cases of actual white-on-black rape and unprovoked violence. But since they do believe the message that they're spouting, they think that white racism is everywhere and that they don't have to look hard for it at all. Almost any case that involves whites and blacks will do. And when their message is reliably contradicted by that almost-any-case, they just think that THAT's an exception.

Yes, that makes sense. Everybody is an amateur statistician, and most people behave in their personal lives like pretty accurate ones (e.g., Jesse Jackson feels relief when he discovers that the people walking behind him down a dark street are white). But a working definition of a person who feels himself elite in modern America is that he doesn't integrate what he's learned from his daily life with his understanding of public affairs. There is mundane knowledge that you use when picking out where to live or where to send your child to school, but only ignorant people apply that knowledge to thinking about what's in the news. Instead, people with class only apply to their Higher Thought the Higher Knowledge that they picked up from reading, say, To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high school.

My view, in contrast is that, as the motto of Faber College in Animal House, pointed out: "Knowledge is good." The more we know, the better for everybody, overall. There shouldn't be disreputable knowledge that's kept apart from reputable knowledge. All knowledge is good.

I've been told that the reason it's bad for me to quote the Justice Department statistics on homicide rates by race is because everybody knows that and takes that into account when it comes to public policy, so it's just rude to mention it. But I see little evidence that elites are able to take into account Justice Department statistics in their Higher Thinking without articulating them in public. Instead, we just see repeated travesties in the press.

I'd add to the commenter's point that the media wants to find examples of whites not only doing terrible things to blacks but getting away with them because of White Privilege. And that turns out to be especially hard to find in 2012, contra so much that you are told by Hollywood and the press.

For example, here is an account of the sentencing to life imprisonment of a white teen in Mississippi last week who killed a black man for racist fun. (I suspect it was also a gaybashing, but that seems to have been not emphasized, for whatever reasons). This case got a fair amount of national publicity, much more than a case of blacks killing a white for fun would have. I watch about an hour of TV per week and yet even I'd seen it on a national news show many months ago.

Nonetheless, it was ultimately unsatisfying to the prestige press. They couldn't flog it too hard because there wasn't much controversy over it. It was understood to be a horrible crime, and justice was served. So, it's ultimately another boring and depressing story about lowlifes, just with the races aligned in the approved manner.

In contrast, the Trayvon tale sounded to the mainstream media like the case they'd been dreaming of since J-school: white man kills black child in cold blood and is freed because of White Privilege! So, they fell hard for a story molded by a lawyer and pushed by Al Sharpton. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a lot more complicated and ambiguous, but by now they are all in, so they'll just have to push harder to denounce skeptics as racists. When you own the Megaphone, that's what you do.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Non-specific immune response due to intentional attribution error

GC unloads in the GNXP comment section. Yes, I know that the financial breakdown had lots of short-term causes, but we've got a long-term problem that people are only now waking up to that he describes with vivid overstatement here.

Consider the recent and ongoing financial meltdown. The forced borrowing and credit expansion makes our society like Wile E. Coyote. The standard of living which we're maintaining through massive borrowing is that of a 90+% Euro country, running further and further out in mid-air over an enormous gorge. At some point the Chinese will call in their chits -- and there will be a massive correction which drops us back to the economic profile of a ~67% Euro country with a 2% high IQ minority of immigrants and a 30% or larger proportion of restive NAM economic deadweight. A vertical drop on the regression line rather than a gradual degradation. ...

But can this fundamental demographic factor be mooted, let alone discussed? No.

- Yet can we discuss "greed"? Sure.

- The ineradicable evil of the Republicans and capitalism itself? Of course.

- The necessity of yet more government control over the economy, despite the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley did nothing to prevent this? Naturally.

So -- what happens when we can only discuss symptoms rather than causes? Well, do you know what nonspecific activation of the immune system can do? Some really bad things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412

A cytokine storm. An immunologist contacted by New Scientist and who wished to be anonymous has commented that "You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out what will happen if you non-specifically activate every T cell in the body."[25]


- Point: a nonspecific immune response can result in the death or incapacitation of an organism.

- Observation: our media systematically causes nonspecific responses via intentional attribution error.

1) Health Care -- have you seen these Blue Shield Ads? They go on & on about the "uninsured" without ever once mentioning that they are overwhelmingly Hispanic.

2) Collapse of our financial system -- compare Sailer's diversity recession article to current see-no-ACORN NYT coverage.

3) "Gun violence" in the US -- compare Bowling for Columbine to the FBI Uniform Crime reports. The Heller argumentation was a joke, a complete abstraction on both sides. Doesn't matter whether there are assault rifles in every house (like Switzerland) or gun prohibition (like the UK). Demographics is what determines gun violence.

4) Education -- international statistics show "Americans" at the bottom, causing NCLB. But whites and Asians are doing fine.

5) Terrorism -- compare PC Norman Mineta's screening procedures with the reality of the names on the terrorist watch list.

6) Racial profiling -- see "violence" above. Soon whites/asians will be pulled over at higher rates to match quotas, with blacks/hispanics pulled over at lower rates. This will be the effect of Obama's proposed national racial profiling prohibition in the Jena Six speech at Howard -- either increase spurious arrests or practice catch and release, or both.

7) Crime statistics -- FBI aggregates Hispanics into the white category as "offenders", vastly increasing the apparent white crime rate (this is how Tim Wise lies).


Every single one of these has the same form:

1) NAM group behaves badly
2) Media reports it as nonspecific problem of "society" and refuses to mention specific culpability
3) The government increases its power and forces non-NAMs to pay for their bad behavior
4) Refusal to address root causes increased rates of taxation, crime, victimization. Everything from airport security strip searches of grandma to gun seizures from law abiding citizens to forced busing into Rwanda-like schools is a function of this systematic attribution error.

This movie ends badly.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The hunt for the Great White Defendant: a reading list

I've been writing for years about what Tom Wolfe calls the "mania for the Great White Defendant." Here are some links to this recurrent phenomenon in fact and fiction:

Bonfire of the Vanities on the Great White Defendant 

Duke Lacrosse Hoax 

The Jena Six 

Nestor Camacho in Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood

Quentin Unchained 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 

The KKK at Oberlin 

Marco McMillian

Law & Order: the 100% irony-free Bonfire of the Vanities 

Tom Wolfe v. Dick Wolf 

Chandra Levy and Rep. Gary Condit 

Amanda Knox: The Hot White Defendant 

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman 

The only way to have any effect on how more than few people are equipped to think about the world is to repeat yourself over and over.

Here's the paragraph where Wolfe introduced the concept in the Great New York Novel in 1987. Three assistant district attorneys are discussing a case that had interested the publicity-mad head D.A., known as Captain Ahab:

Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John's Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail." Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott's apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy's grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn't help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well ... impolite! ... on the ordinary social level ... to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn't that it was morally wrong ... It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.

New Yorkers: Notice what we say, not what we do

I've pointed out before that New York's liberal media elite don't want the public to discuss IQ, but they almost all get their four-year-olds' IQs tested so they can win admission to fashionable private preschools. Now the New York toddler IQ testing madness has spread to New York public schools. From the New York Times:

Tips for the Admissions Test ... to Kindergarten

Kayla Rosenblum sat upright and poised as she breezed through the shapes and numbers, a leopard-patterned finger puppet resting next to her for moral support.

But then came something she had never seen before: a visual analogy showing a picture of a whole cake next to a slice of cake. What picture went with a loaf of bread in the same way?

Kayla, who will be 4 in December, held her tiny pointer finger still as she inspected the four choices. “Too hard,” she peeped.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam [i.e., and IQ test], and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008.

Kayla’s session at Bright Kids was an initial assessment; her mother, Jena Rosenblum, had not decided whether to put her through a full course of tutoring. She was considering it at the suggestion of Kayla’s preschool teacher. “Even though we live in the West Village and there are great public schools, obviously, any opportunity to step it up a notch in caliber, we would like to try,” Ms. Rosenblum said.

Melisa Kehlmann said her main concern was that her 4-year-old son, Adrian, would be shut out of the well-regarded but overcrowded schools in her Manhattan neighborhood.

“It’s quite pricey, but compared to private school, which averages about $20,000 for kindergarten, the price is right,” she said of the tutoring. “I just want the opportunity to have a choice.”

Private schools warn that they will look negatively on children they suspect of being prepped for the tests they use to select students, like the Educational Records Bureau exam, or E.R.B., even though parents and admissions officers say it quietly takes place. (Bright Kids, for example, also offers E.R.B. tutoring.) [Last I checked, E.R.B. gave the Wechsler IQ test to four-year-olds.]

“It’s unethical,” said Dr. Elisabeth Krents, director of admissions at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side. “It completely negates the reason for giving the test, which is to provide a snapshot of their aptitudes, and it doesn’t correlate with their future success in school.”

No similar message, however, has come from the public schools. In fact, the city distributes 16 Olsat practice questions to “level the playing field,” said Anna Commitante, the head of gifted and talented programs for the city’s Department of Education.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Untethered on the Great Noose Mania of 2007

Quantitatively consistent blogging -- relentlessly feeding the beast -- tends to be the enemy of quality. There are a handful who can be prolific, steady, and still surprising over many years -- Michael Blowhard perhaps comes first to mind -- but many of the best bloggers are among the most erratic.

All of a sudden, Dennis Dale is back at Untethered with lots of good stuff, especially about the Noose Scourge sweeping our nation ever since the Jena Six story got all that media play:

CNN's Rick Sanchez, whose Hispanic surname seems to have made him the network's go-to guy on racial issues despite the fact that he is nearly as WASP-like in appearance and manner as Ted Knight's Judge Smails in Caddyshack, (or, for that matter, Knight's affable and clueless anchorman Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), is valiantly traipsing into the dark heart of America, with his expedition of camera and make-up crew in tow, hunting the now legendary Great Noose Scourge of 2007.

My point here is not to pick on Rick, who evinces the same bemusing persona that Fred Willard periodically reprises in Christopher Guest's faux-documentaries: confident, cocksure and half-cocked--as enthusiastic as he is oblivious. He sees opportunity; he seizes it; he is no exception. But under his guidance the absurdity has moved beyond comic into surreal, and there will be no competing with real life now, my fellow amateur satirists. Soon we may find it difficult to delineate the boundaries between. Game over. It's time to simply shut-up and marvel.

Last night, on Halloween, Sanchez utilized a split-screen format to simultaneously deliver two reports, one from a private residence and one from a bar, each the subject of controversy because their elaborate Halloween displays featured corpses hanging from nooses. As the cameras tightened in on the offending figures to reassure us they weren't black (the report wasn't quite so thorough as to call in forensics to analyze one body, just bare decomposing flesh over a skeleton, which the homeowner assured Sanchez was "Caucasian"), also revealed was a fairly realistic upper torso (safely, reassuringly white), severed at the waist and hanging upside down from a meat-hook, unremarked upon.

I guess you had to be there, but the absurdity of it was riveting, delicious irony: this ghoulish, fetishistic fascination with gore, once a ritualistic, occasional transgression for days such as these, now as widespread and mundane as the dull safety of daily life it mocks, juxtaposed with the bizarre conceit of the segment and its cravenness (acting as a tie-in for CNN's upcoming, opportunistic report, "The Noose, An American Nightmare"), the real-life horrors of the war out of sight and mind; well, all I can say is genius. Pure, unadulterated, unintentional genius.

Bravo, Mr. Sanchez. Bravo, CNN.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer