Winter Break

Gotta put off procrastination and get both Christmas shopping and various household and personal chores done tomorrow and Friday.

Will be at relatives on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I’ll be in transit to Kansas City on December 26, for a job that lasts December 27-30, and back home the night of the 30th.

It’s just too bad I’ll miss St. Louis’s Kwanzaa celebration; it’s one of the very best around.

Of course, I’ll be drinking heavily on New Years Eve and hung over on New Years Day.

Life won’t be back to normal until January 2.

Expect only sporadic blogging until then.

Merry Christmas.

In the Spring of 1988, I, Too, Was In the Fifth Grade

And in the spring of 1988, the trend of rich people offering to pay the college rides of “underprivileged youths” was starting to hit its stride.

Enough time has passed in order to examine the results.

WaPo has a three-part spread on such a promise made to fifth graders at at Prince Georges County, Maryland elementary school in May 1988, and how it all turned out.

How Anti-Semitic of Thee

I don’t know how or why, but I’ve been on Allen West’s e-mail list for more than a year.

This doozy landed in my e-mail box during the afternoon:

Hanukkah Celebration

In observance of Hanukkah, Congressman West will be attending the following events:

Thursday, December 22nd
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Chabad of Lauderdale by Sea Menorah Lighting
Beach Pavillion
Lauderdale by the Sea, FL

Thursday, December 22nd
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Hanukkah Festival of the Chabad of West Palm Beach
CityPlace
West Palm Beach, FL

How nice of him.

Conveniently, though, were it entirely up to the Hanukkah celebrants in his own district, he would have never been elected to anything.

I have no problem wishing genuine friends and acquaintances who happen to be Jewish a Happy Hanukkah, and I do send a non-sectarian “Holiday Card” to someone on my Christmas Card list.  I can’t find any Hanukkah cards at any brick and mortar store close to me, and if I can’t find any in St. Louis, a strong center of Reform Judaism, I don’t think there are any to be had.  Probably the reason for that is that Hanukkah is a relatively minor Jewish holiday; the big two religious days on the Jewish calendar are Passover and Rosh Hashanah.  By the way, this person does send me Christmas cards.

But what West is doing is blatant political pandering, which I’m sure very few people appreciate, and most Jews appreciate even less.  It’s much the same as his websites, both campaign and Congressional, boasting that he “Stands With Israel.”  Someone who swore an oath to protect and defend the American Constitution three times in his life, (Army enlisted man, Army officer, Congress), and hopes to be doing it a lot more, ought to be more concerned with the United States of America than Israel, but that’s just me.  Hell, most Jews of his Congressional district aren’t really Pro-Israel; I don’t think most Israelis are that Pro-Israel.

It should be noted that he put a Hanukkah celebrant out of a job a little more than a year ago.  His last two Hanukkahs have probably been all the more gloomy and uncertain for it.  How anti-Semitic of thee, Allen.

When You Play With Fire

Random thought:  The left-center-right establishment better be careful trying to torpedo Ron Paul with this “newsletter” business.  For all he would have to do is to acknowledge himself as the author, (if he’s not the author and doesn’t want to lie about that, then at least endorse the content), then defend the substance, and he would instantly have the Republican nomination locked up, and maybe even the general election.

How? By Constantly Doing Press Releases Full of Business School Jargon?

5:

St. Louis police teams with UMSL criminologists

ST. LOUIS (AP) – The St. Louis Police Department is partnering with the University of Missouri-St. Louis in a new crime-fighting initiative.

The partnership announced Wednesday is aimed at reducing crime in part by using criminologists from the university to help implement and evaluate crime reduction initiatives. In fact, an UMSL graduate student will work 20 hours per week at the police department.

The partnership comes as crime is on the decline in St. Louis. Police Chief Dan Isom told the Board of Police Commissioners Wednesday that overall crime is expected to drop about 5 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, and crime in the city has declined 40 percent over the past five years.

But Isom and Mayor Francis Slay say the partnership will seek to reduce crime even further.

That’s probably all that will happen, if this news article full of business school jargon is any indication.

UPDATE 12/22:  P-D fills in the blanks:

One that Rosenfeld said has proven effective is “hot-spot policing,” which focuses officers on a crime-spike area.

Rosenfeld said another proven strategy is a “focused deterrence” that gives an ultimatum to known offenders to stop committing crimes or face harsh consequences. That approach is based on the “Ceasefire” model, which originated in Boston.

So what do we have here?  The cops go where the crime is, and cops tell do-badders to knock it off or else.

How profound.  What brilliance and genius.  It’s like inventing the wheel in a world that did not previously have it.

Also:

It’s also going to involve some buy-in from the officers, said Richard Rosenfeld, an UMSL criminologist.

“The last thing we want to do is tell this department what it should and should not be doing,” Rosenfeld cautioned. “We want to assist this department by enhancing it’s existing strategies.”

You think beat cops might be a little leery about taking advice from people who are associated with an institution which does its fair share to breed far-left black militant hatred of cops?  It wasn’t Dr. Rosenfeld, but someone in the UMSL criminology department wrote one of the more famous books about gang ethnography quite a few years ago, the book focused on St. Louis gangs and their bangers.  (UPDATE:  Life in the Gang, by Scott Decker.  Google Books has it online to read for free.)  While this book didn’t make excuses or try to illicit sympathy for the subjects of its study, most literature of that genre does.  As an example, Dead End Kids:  Gang Girls and the Boys They Know, by Mark Fleisher, University of Illinois.  That one is a study of several Kansas City ‘bangers.  I remember at one point in that book, Fleisher became so sympathetically entangled with the gang he was studying, that he wanted to make sure that the University of Illinois would defend him if he got arrested for some sort of conspiracy charge, and he also, by his own admission, developed the same kind of fear of and loathing toward the KCPD as his study subjects had; he actually feared a passing KCPD squad car.

The Bright Side of Civil Unions

“Straight but not narrow” heteros getting them to “show their solidarity” with the alternate orientation community.

It wouldn’t be such a bad idea for more and more straight couples to get civil unioned instead of married.  It would leave the marriage business for men and women that really want to be married.  It’s probably easier to get out of a civil union than a marriage.

Non Sequitur

5:

White Castle burger chain considers alcohol sales

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – The White Castle hamburger chain is sipping on the idea of selling alcoholic beverages at its restaurants.

The 90-year-old company is testing beer and wine sales at a location in Lafayette, Ind., that combines a traditional White Castle burger joint with a Blaze Modern BBQ, a new restaurant concept also being tried out. In other cities, Columbus, Ohio-based White Castle is testing an Asian food concept and a restaurant that serves grilled sandwiches.

Customers in Lafayette can buy a glass wine for $4.50 or a domestic beer for $3.

They don’t get it.  White Castle is a place you go in the middle of the night after you’re already drunk.  Every St. Louisan, as well as every denizen of a metro area that has WCs, has their particular “Drunk at 3 AM” White Castle location.  But it does not follow that people will want to go to White Castle just to get souzed when they’re not already souzed.

Mirror: That Way

Boing Boing:

MPAA says SOPA-style censorship works in Yemen and Syria

The MPAA believes SOPA’s censorship mandate will solve its problems, and it has presented research to Congress to support this position. As evidence, it cites the efficacy of similar censorship mandates in China, Iran, the UAE, Armenia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Burma, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Yeah, freedom is overrated anyway.

In related news, a lot of “pirates” work for the media conglomerates that fund the copywrong extremists, or the copywrong extremists themselves.  Petardhoistedown.

Mark Me, He’ll Get Bond Again

PTB robs Nun near the CB on Lindell in mid-morning on Monday.  He’s later caught when he uses the credit card he stole from her at a gas station, his suspicious behavior tips off the gas station clerk, he nabs his license plate number, calls the cops, and the cops pop him at his house.

Come to find out, he was already on bond for a domestic assault charge.

If he gets bond again, then the city’s judicial circuit is hopeless.

BTW, how much longer before the civil rights goony birds accuse this gas station clerk of “racial profiling?”

Not the End, Only the Beginning

He’s supposed to be an amateur athlete.  NCAA rules dictate that he can’t hold down a job, and his only income is supposed to be the relatively meager athlete stipend.  Where is he getting the money to throw this lavish party?

Someone should start investigating.

Pardon Our Regress

Anti-Police graffiti written in Ebonics spray painted on a fried chicken restaurant in North City.

Gee, no stereotyping opportunities there.

Usually, this kind of activity and rhetoric is the trademark of the local anarchist/occutard hovels.  This isn’t them — Their spray painted words are multi-syllabic and spelled correctly.

Islam vs Freedom of Conscience

Guess whose side Obama is on.

They keep telling us he’s not a Muslim, and he’s probably not.  But every time you turn around, he’s sticking up for Islam.

On the other side of the ledger, who is the only Republican Presidential candidate who wants us out of the UN post haste?  Oh yeah.

Cause and Effect. Heard of It?

Eureka Alert:

Study reveals an association between impatience and lower credit scores

NEW YORK – December 13, 2011 – A study conducted by Columbia Business School’s Prof. Stephan Meier, Regina Pitaro Associate Professor of Business, Management, and Charles Sprenger, Assistant Professor, Stanford University Department of Economics, determines that there may be a psychological reason for why people default on their mortgages. The research, which will be featured in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the participants in the study with poor credit scores were more impatient and were more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward in the future.

While working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston, Massachusetts, the researchers created a study that would help determine if there are factors beyond the screening for mortgage applicants or other institutional reasons that leads to people to make the decision to default. Meier and Sprenger recruited 437 low-to-moderate income people at a community center in Boston that offered tax preparation help. Each person was given a questionnaire that featured choices between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger reward they would receive in the future. The participants also agreed to let the researchers access their FICO credit scores.

The study shows that time discounting and FICO scores were significantly correlated, and that this correlation was comparable to previously found correlations between time discounting and health behavior. Participants who were the most willing to delay rewards and exhibited more patience had FICO scores that were approximately 30 points higher than those of participants who were the least willing to delay. Also, the impatient participants fell below the subprime lending cutoff of 620. At this score, individuals generally face substantially elevated borrowing rates.

“Conceptually, it does make sense that how people discount the future, i.e. how impatient they are, affects their decision to default on their loans,” Meier says. “Individuals accumulate debt and then have to decide whether to repay the money or use the money for something else.”

The researchers acknowledge that defaulting on a loan isn’t always a deliberate choice. People may default for a variety of reasons, such as when they lose their job. However, as Meier explains, “There is a little bit of strategic defaulting going on, where some people make a cost-benefit analysis and choose to have more money now and deal with the repercussions later.”

Okay, now I get it.  Their bad credit score psychologically traumatizes them, and that causes them to engage in spending for instant gratification instead of making wise long-term financial decisions.  It can’t possibly be because their microeconomic behavior is the reason why they have low credit scores to begin with.  To put it in more simple terms, Official America thinks that people are impatient and impulsive because they know they have low credit scores, Sensible America knows that people have low credit scores because they are impatient and impulsive.

I know the Occutards are against credit scores, and want credit ratings agencies either abolished or everyone’s scores reset to perfect.  Remember, the Boston Fed is where that junk social science study in 1992 originated, (hence, my emphasis in the blockquote), the study that was used as the basis for affirmative action in mortgage lending, which fed the whole subprime crisis and the financial crisis.  Are they greasing the skids for the prohibition of credit scores and ratings as a sop to the left wing?  History doth repeateth itself, methinks.  I guess this time, the Fed is worried about being eliminated entirely (President Ron Paul) or having its power and authority cut back substantially (a few other Republican contenders), and they’re trying to buy protection with the left wing.

Summer Employment: No NBWAs Need Apply

The J-1 Visa program:  A cheap labor cornucopia.

It was more than a year ago that I first did a post about J-1 Visa in this space.

North Carolina: Not Just Mexico’s Newest Colony

It is the whole world, except native born whites need not apply.

These lib kooktards are all in a hurry to elect a new people so their new people will elect them in perpetuity.  Problem is, the new people have other ideas.

Show of Force, or Force For Show?

Alex Jones worried about the latest call for the National Guard to patrol New Orleans, a call that is in reaction to thug blacks “keepin’ it real.”

Jones compares that to the post-Katrina gun confiscation.  That was bad enough, but the analogy fails because blacks are a protected species, and white gun owners are not.  If the National Guard does go into New Orleans, they won’t actually do anything, because they won’t be allowed to do anything, for it would be “racist” for them to do anything.  They’ll be there for PR and photo ops.  The only kind of internal military tyranny permissible is when it’s used against non-libkooktard white people.

The state legislator calling for the NG in NOLA is insinuating that the situation is akin to warfare.  But the criminality, gang and otherwise, of domestic blacks, isn’t warfare, and can’t really be compared to full-on warfare.  It’s the result of divvying up drug distribution territory and trying to maintain the good finances of the networks that distribute these substance, and shooting trespassers and people in debt is part of the job.  It’s not the violence of warfare, it’s the violence of a job hazard.

This Is Kamala Harris, So There Is No Sane Angle

She’s suing Fannie and Freddie.  Though not for the reasons we wish that State AGs and U.S. Attorneys would sue Fannie and Freddie.  Reading between the lines, the libkooktard that is California’s Attorney General is trying to prove some “white racist conspiracy” behind the subprime mortgage mess and the resulting financial crisis.

What’s interesting to me is that a state AG is suing a Federal agency for state “civil rights” concerns.  Where’s all the bitching about preemption and Federal supremacy?  The Federal courts ruled that Idaho state officials couldn’t string up Lon Horiuchi and Company for the murder of the Weaver family members.