September 29, 2017 – MORE IGNORANCE

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A couple if our favorites comment on NFL protests and the fake news that spawned them. Roger Simon is first. 

… We now live in such a victim culture that even mega-rich athletes and movie actors claim victimhood. Maybe we should rewrite Sly Stone’s “Everybody Is a Star”  as “Everybody Is a Victim.”

The problem with this of course is that little gets solved by playing the victim. It’s just a dumb show, a bunch of guys refusing to stand for the National Anthem.  Meaningless, except to their egos. This kind of behavior is, in reality, the enemy of action, taking things backwards and giving people an excuse not to do something substantive.  Does anyone seriously expect the current “protest” by the football players to have any result (other than turning fans off football)?  What could it be?  Improvement for poor black communities?

Oh, come on.  If you want to improve poor black communities, round up some money and start a business there.  Be entrepreneurial.  Make something. Build something….

  

 

Heather Mac Donald writes on fake news.

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend.  Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. …

… Violent crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years in a row was 2005–06.  The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. …

… Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.