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Roger Simon knows what caused the mess in Ferguson, MO.
… But, you say, this was a white-on-black crime. An o-fay cop offed a brother. (Never mind that brothers can butcher brothers like it’s going out of style, this pig had white-skin privilege.) Well, yes, and we don’t yet know the circumstances, but even accepting the narrative of, say, the Huffington Post that the cop was the reincarnation of Bull Connor and that the “youth” was a “gentle giant” on the way to a contract with PBS as the next Mr. Rogers, the event is basically a charade. Everyone knows we’ve seen it before and everyone knows we’ll see it again. In fact, many parties don’t want it to go away. The beat must go on. It has to go on or their very personalities will disintegrate. And I will tell you why — what caused it.
The Great Society. There, I’ve said it. The Great Society, which I voted for and supported from the bottom of my heart, is the villain behind Ferguson. Ferguson is the Great Society writ large because the Great Society convinced, and then reassured, black people that they were victims, taught them that being a victim and playing a victim was the way to go always and forever. And then it repeated the point ad infinitum from its debut in 1964 until now — a conveniently easy to compute fifty years — as it all became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Great Society and similar policies screwed black people to the wall. It was racist to the core without knowing it. Nobody used the N-word. In fact, it was forbidden, unless you were Dr. Dre or somebody. But it did its job without the word and did it better for being in disguise. Those misbegotten kids running around Ferguson high on reefer and wasting their lives screaming at cops are the product of all this. Stop it already. No one has said this better than Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us. Listen to Jason if you want to end Fergusons.
Jason Riley who is on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has been on fire the past few days. Here’s some videos of his appearances. Find a chance to watch some over the weekend.
One hour at Heritage Foundation
Jason Riley is often in Pickings, but we never make much of the fact he is black. We like his work. Here is an example as he has some fun with Queen Hillary.
Summer continues, and so do Hillary Clinton’s blunders. This week brings news that the former first lady lives a lot larger than those blue collar Democrats who supported her for president in 2008 might realize.
We already knew about the quarter-million dollar speaking fees, but that’s just for the speech. In addition, Mrs. Clinton “insists on staying in the ‘presidential suite’ of luxury hotels that she chooses anywhere in the world, including Las Vegas,” reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “She usually requires those who pay her six-figure fees for speeches to also provide a private jet for transportation—only a $39 million, 16-passenger Gulfstream G450 or larger will do.”
Through a state public records law, the paper obtained documents related to Mrs. Clinton speech at a University of Nevada, Las Vegas fundraiser last fall. Her speaking contract includes a stipend for her staff and details such as how long she will remain at an event (90 minutes), how many photos she will pose for (50) and how many people she will pose with (100). …
Here’s Kevin Williamson with something thoughtful on the question of how to help blacks.
There are problems that are related to race, and there are problems that are related to economics, and it is difficult to untangle them. Ferguson, Mo., is largely black and relatively low-income; View Park-Windsor Hills, Calif., is largely black and relatively high-income. The median household in Ferguson earns $37,517, or 70 percent of the national median: not well off, but not shockingly poor, either. The median family in View Park-Windsor Hills earns about $160,000 a year, or three times the national average. It will be no surprise that black communities in suburban Los Angeles with six-figure median incomes do not suffer from the same sort of problems experienced by poor black communities such as those in the St. Louis exurbs, Chicago, or Detroit.
There are four occasionally overlapping schools of thought regarding poor black communities. The view most prevalent on the hard left is that the root issue is institutional racism, while one prevalent view on the hard right is that the root issue is genetics. I am not much convinced by the evidence for either one of these claims. The third view is that the main problem is cultural, that black Americans, especially in poor and heavily black communities, are taught to understand themselves as being cast in an adversarial role vis-à-vis institutions such as schools and businesses, with the result that they are less likely to take advantage of such opportunities as are available to them for economic advancement. The fourth view, closest to my own, is that the problem is fundamentally one of economics and economic history: Having been formally shut out of much of the economy until within recent memory, African Americans simply lag behind the average. The relatively fast economic advancement of other minority groups, such as Vietnamese immigrants, does not negate that premise: The history and position of black Americans is fundamentally different from that of immigrant groups. American institutions expended a great deal of effort to help assimilate and advance Vietnamese refugees, while many of those institutions had spent a solid century after the Civil War working to prevent the assimilation and advancement of African Americans.
What might a policy response to that look like? …
Joel Kotkin makes the point that the people designing cities do not care what the vast middle class is looking for.
What is a city for?
It’s a crucial question, but one rarely asked by the pundits and developers who dominate the debate over the future of the American city.
Their current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. It’s city as adult Disneyland or “entertainment machine,” chock-a-block with chic restaurants, shops and festivals.
Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.
A vast majority of people — roughly 8o percent — prefer a single-family home, whether in the city or surrounding communities. And they may not get “creative” gigs at ad agencies or writers collectives, but look instead for decent-paying opportunities in fields such as construction, manufacturing or logistics. Over the past decade, these jobs have been declining rapidly in “luxury cities” like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
In contrast, such jobs, which pay $60,000 to $100,000 annually, have been growing — particularly as the industrial and energy sectors have recovered — in cities like Houston, Austin, Nashville and Salt Lake City. These locales also feature housing, relative to incomes, that is more affordable.
Of course, few urbanists wax poetic about Dallas or Des Moines. They lack Brooklyn’s hipster charm, and often maintain some of the trappings of the suburbs. But these “opportunity cities” offer what Descartes called “an inventory of the possible” — urbanity as an engine of upward mobility for the middle and working classes. …
Matthew Continetti has a send off for Robin Williams.
… What distinguishes Williams from Pacino and De Niro is the arc of his career. They came to prominence in dramatic roles, but have spent much of the last decade playing for laughs or parodying the mannerisms that made them famous. Williams began in comedy. His standup, a sort of experiment in what would happen if you took Jonathan Winters and injected him with adrenalin, remains a thrilling experience, a rapid-fire verbal cartoon in which Williams plays all of the parts and invents the plot as he goes along. He found a mass audience by playing the lead in a sitcom, Mork & Mindy. When audiences remember Williams, they will recall Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, maybe Flubber. All are funny.
The comedies alternated with the tragi-comic dramas for which Williams won an Oscar and critical respect. But it was only in 2002, toward the end of his career, that Williams showed audiences his true range, playing disturbed losers in One Hour Photo, Death to Smoochy, and Insomnia. In 2009, he starred in The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a well-reviewed stage production about the legacies of the second Iraq war. At a time when Pacino and De Niro were descending into caricature, Williams was showcasing new aspects of his talent.
The typical Williams character was an outsider. Sometimes, like in Mork & Mindy, he was literally an alien. At other times, like in Moscow on the Hudson, he played an immigrant. He was a mad man (The Fisher King), a grown-up Peter Pan (Hook), a gay man (The Birdcage), a fast-aging child (Jack), and a robot (Bicentennial Man). His specialty was playing characters at the margins of their profession: the DJ in Good Morning Vietnam, the itinerant teacher in Dead Poets Society, the doctor who tends to locked-in cases in Awakenings, the out-of-work voice actor in Mrs. Doubtfire, the MIT-trained psychiatrist who teaches at a community college in Good Will Hunting, the unconventional Patch Adams. …