The Bookworm Beat 12/8/14 — Monday evening wrap-up and open thread

Woman writingNo time for an intro. I’ll just head straight for snark and links:
On average, cops in America are anything but racist

The rampaging Left and its useful idiots are in full “racist” mode, but Jack Kelly points out that the facts — those damn facts — refuse to support them:

Between 1976 and 2011 across the United States, 7,982 blacks were murdered each year, on average — 94 percent by other blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About 227 blacks (2.8 percent) were shot by police each year, according to a study by Pro Publica (which pointed out that national statistics on police shootings are difficult to assess because of differences in how police departments report them).

[snip]

Young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than are young white males, Pro Publica said. But because more than two-thirds of police officers are white and blacks commit about half of violent crimes, it stands to reason most police shootings would involve a white cop and a black suspect.

Blacks also are more likely than whites, Hispanics or Asians to resist arrest, according to Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute.

Black cops have shot black suspects at essentially the same rate as white cops have, Prof. Klinger’s data indicate. No statistical evidence supports the charge that white cops routinely abuse black suspects.

Heather MacDonald convincingly shows that Leftist politicians (that means you, Mayor de Blasio) are grossly slandering America’s police officers:

But one thing is clear: There is no institution in New York more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the NYPD.

Every commander in a high-crime neighborhood is under daily, relentless pressure from top brass to save black lives. The weekly crime analysis meetings at One Police Plaza, known as Compstat, focus intensely on what precinct commanders are doing to prevent victimization in their jurisdictions, victimization that takes its greatest toll on blacks.

Thousands of minority males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at their early 1990s highs. New York homicides plummeted thanks to the NYPD’s proactive efforts to stop crime before it happens.

[snip]

In fact, blacks in New York are less likely than whites to be killed by the police when their higher rates of using mortal force against the police are taken into account.

In 2011, for example, New York officers fired at 41 suspects and killed nine of them — an astonishingly low number in light of New York’s population and the size of its police force. Virtually all of these shootings were justified.

Blacks were 22% of those fatalities; whites were 44% of them. Yet blacks were 67% of all suspects who fired at the police; no white suspect fired at the police.

Moreover, blacks made up 73% of all shooting perpetrators in the city in 2011, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, those shootings, though they are only 23% of the population. Whites committed less than three percent of all shootings, though they are close to 35% of the city’s population.

This pattern holds nationally. The black percentage of suspects killed by the police, historically around 29%, is lower than one would expect based on the best available data on those who represent a mortal threat to the police, according to Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University.

If the police ask you for a voluntary home search, just say “no”

The fact that I am defending police from the charge that they’re racist or habitually abusive in no way means that I intend to give police a blank check. Our police are at their best when citizens understand their rights — and one of those rights is the right to refuse (politely, of course) when the police show up and (politely, of course) ask you, as an upstanding member of the community, to allow them to enter and search your home for guns. That’s what police in Beloit, Wisconsin, are asking citizens to do. Starting at 29 minutes into this video, you can see why it’s a terrible idea:

I always tell my kids that they should pick their friends carefully. If they have a drug-using friend in their car, and if police pull that car over, and if the friend panics and stuffs a bag of pot under the seat in my kids’ car, my kids are the ones in jail.

The same holds true for your home. If you’re law abiding, you better know what’s in your house before you give the police license to roam.

Still, the world is a dangerous place for cops

People who wave toy guns around indiscriminately run the risk of getting shot by cops. On the other hand, cops run the risk of getting shot by real guns masquerading as toys.

California droughts happen because Nature

If you live in California and anyone mentions the drought, they’re sure to add that it’s because of anthropogenic climate change. Sorry, folks, but droughts happen in California because Nature. In fact, global warming would be good for California because it would release more moisture into the atmosphere, lessening droughts. But hey, that’s science, so let’s not scare the Progressives with that kind of dirty talk.

College men had better practice the new celibacy

If Slate’s Emily Yoffe isn’t careful, they’re going to run her out of Progressive-ville. She keeps doing stupid things like speaking the truth. This time, her truth is that rape epidemic hysteria is misanthropic and is dangerously depriving men of their civil rights. My take on things is that, while we once urged celibacy on our daughters as they headed off to college, today we’d be wise to urge the same on our sons.

In the same vein, one women who values her sons, and doesn’t want to see them demeaned, attacked, and destroyed, is disavowing feminism entirely on the ground that it’s become toxically misanthropic:

When the term feminism turned from being a message of empowerment and gender fairness to basically a list of rules, restrictions, idiosyncrasies, offenses and grievances directed at all things male, I tapped out. I do not believe that opposite sexes can ever be completely equal, as there are very specific limitations for each gender.

Things would be better, of course, if all students, both male and female, drank less.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely has been reading to many feminist bodice rippers

Sabrina Rubin Erdely is the woman who wrote the now-discredited Rolling Stone article about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. It turns out that Erdely is addicted to the feminist version of a bodice ripper. This version doesn’t have a boy and girl meet cute, which leads inexorably to a happy ending. Instead, in the hardcore feminist bodice ripper, prostitutes rip off their bodices for thousands of strange men, thereby empowering themselves, all the while praying regularly at their local Catholic church. (No, I’m not making things up, although Erdely might be, or she just may be unusually credulous.)

Yes, they do go incandescent when you remind them Nazis were Leftists

The Daily Telegraph gave the following title to Daniel Hannan’s latest article: “Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism.” When I posted that article on my real-me Facebook, along with a cutsey little story about my Mom, despite having grown up at the time of the Nazis, not understanding that they were socialists, one of my Facebook friends got terribly upset. In polite terms, he accused me of saying American Progressives are Nazis and rather quickly escalated to throwing Charles Koch, David Koch, and Sheldon Adelson into the conversation.

I wisely stuck to the main point, which is that both Progressives and Nazis are children of socialism, but that Nazis put their eugenics into practical effect on a grand scale — so much so that Progressives wanted to disavow entirely this ugly step sibling and, to that end, created the historical fiction that Nazis are right-wingers.  Unfortunately for him, he had to concede that my history was accurate.

The New York Times gives editorial space to a hard core antisemite

The New York Times has gone full bore antisemitic. There’s just no other way to put it.

Random House doesn’t want a libel suit

Lena Dunham made up a convoluted college story in which she, after voluntarily imbibing drugs and alcohol, willingly went along with the crude sexual advances of a Republican named Barry — only to regret her acts and decide that her acquiescence didn’t make her happy, so she must have been raped. Dunham’s book was structured so it was reasonable to believe that Barry was the guy’s real name, especially since there was a Republican at her college named Barry. Well, Barry wants to sue, so both Dunham and Random House are backing off Dunham’s claims.

Dunham is manifestly in the deep grip of Progressive feminist insanity, but what’s Random House’s excuse? Accordingly, Eugene Volokh reams Random House a new one.

One of the best ways to overcome bias is to learn

A photographer who was opposed to hunting went on a hunting trip. She returned with beautiful photos and an open mind.

I can just imagine the scene in the courtroom ten years hence

Being a litigator is a tough job. It’s not tough like being a coal miner or a garbage collector or a cowboy, but it requires a certain amount of both physical and intellectual rigor. A big jury trial can take weeks to prepare, your days can last upwards of 24 hours, sleep becomes a myth not a reality, and the daily courtroom grind is a brutal fight without bloodshed.

One wonders, therefore, how the members of Columbia Law School’s Coalition of Concerned Students of Color are going to handle the stress. Apparently these same students have found the riots and revolution of the last few weeks so shattering that they can’t, they simply can’t, cope with the added stress of finals. You think it’s tough to walk and chew gum at the same time? Try being a person of color and a law student when the race hustlers are in full florescence.

Fortunately for these delicate butterflies of color, the Columbia Law faculty is coming to the rescue. In an email oozing therapeutically phrased-empathy, Interim Dean Robert E. Scott assured these fragile flowers that they couldn’t possibly be expected to take a test now, at this trying time of watching MSNBC news and breaking windows.

I know what’s really going on. In the rapture of riot, these students blew off studying for finals. They then took advantage of the law school administration’s oozing white guilt to delay finals so that they could get some studying done. Thinking about it, these future lawyers of color aren’t going to have any problem at all going before the Courts and coming up with ridiculous excuses to explain their own or their clients’ failings.

The Left tells us not to believe anything Gruber says

David Nather starts his Politico article with a great lede:

Why the hell did Jonathan Gruber say that? And that? And that? And (sigh) the other thing? Those are the questions on the minds of virtually everyone in the health care world—especially the people who worked the hardest on Obamacare. Ever since the videos started popping up, one after another, America has come to know Gruber—the MIT economist who worked closely on both Obamacare and Romneycare—as the guy who thinks voters are “stupid.” And the guy who thinks Obamacare was passed because of trickery. And who says, ha-ha, voters don’t understand economics. For a while, Fox News didn’t have to bother running anything else.

Now America is about to see Gruber in a new role: congressional witness.

The Left understands that there’s only one way to protect themselves from “Gruber Goes to Congress” and that’s to argue that anything Gruber says that’s not directly related to the economics of Obamacare accounting is false and must be discounted. You see, he’s a great guy, a brilliant guy, a knowledgeable guy, but everything he says (except for that accounting stuff) is wrong:

Why the hell would he say that? Does he really believe it?

The answer, according to the people who know Gruber best, is that he has always been someone who is two seconds away from putting his foot in his mouth. Yes, he has had an astonishing rise in the world of health care policy—and it’s completely deserved, in their view, because of his groundbreaking work on predicting the cost impact of different kinds of health care legislation. Gruber is the man who developed an economic model that could basically work like a faster Congressional Budget Office—a huge help to congressional staffers as they drafted the Affordable Care Act, as well as the Massachusetts policymakers who wrote Mitt Romney’s health care reform law that preceded it.

But politically savvy? No, no, no. Gruber is a chatty, affable guy, but he’s also a man with no filter—and he knows it. It’s always when he drifts away from economics, and tries to talk about politics, that he gets into trouble, colleagues say. That’s where Gruber stepped on so many land mines in those videos—claiming there was a strategy to hide uncomfortable details from voters, as if he knew the political strategy and not just the economics, and that the “stupidity of the American voter” allowed them to get away with it.

Or you could believe, as I do, that when Gruber’s filter is gone, he simply says what all Progressives are thinking…. Kind of like that Bulworth character Obama so longs to be.

First niggardly was struck from the lexicon; now “white Christmas”

Already back in the 1970s, the Left attacked the word “niggardly.” Leftists knew it had negative connotations and they knew that it sounded like the N word. That was good enough for them. It was irrelevant that this word for “stingy” has old roots that, while unknown, definitely have nothing to do with black people. What mattered was that they thought it was a bad word:

It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as “niggardly.” Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved — having felt the word hanging in the air a bit — to say “parsimonious” from then on. [Christopher Hitchens, “The Pernicious Effects of Banning Words,” Slate.com, Dec. 4, 2006]

It turns out that Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is being driven out of the public fold in much the same way. The fact that the “white” reference is manifestly to snow, rather than skin pigment (or lack thereof), is irrelevant to the usual racial grievance suspects. A “white Christmas” must be banned.  Irving Berlin, who loved a country that gave poor people extraordinary opportunities, would weep.

Al Sharpton’s murderous past

Al Sharpton has become one of the most powerful men in America thanks to his race hustling. He is also one of the most loathsome, and has a great deal of blood on his hands. Can America call itself a moral nation when it hands moral power to such a sinner?

Facts? What are these things called facts?

A theme I keep returning to lately is the Leftists’ utter disregard for facts. Instead, it urges “truthiness,” “false but accurate,” “false but emotionally honest,” etc. All of these are synonyms for lies.

Here’s another example of lies: The claim that no president has ever been insulted as badly as Obama has. For those of us who remember the Left hanging and burning George Bush in effigy; making assassination fantasy movies about him; likening him to Hitler, to chimpanzees, and to village idiots; calling him simultaneously a moron and an evil mastermind; and myriad other crude, rude, demeaning and violent insults, the assertion that Obama is a unique presidential punching bag is risible — but the Left doesn’t mind. It’s all about the narrative.