Chicago “Yuff” Violence Summit Stack of Stuff

(1)  The S-T prints AG Holder’s remarks at the Summit:

For me, it was a call to action to address a challenge that affects the entire nation. Youth violence isn’t a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem or a white problem. It’s something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and colors.

But why does it seem to be worse among blacks than any other racial group?

(2)  Former CPS Superintendent and current Secretary of Hope Arne Duncan is defending himself against accusations that an “educational improvement plan” started by him and continuing under the Booberman reign aren’t to blame for recent increases in Chicago’s crime among young people.

Further down in the article, you read this:

Since 2005, dozens of Chicago’s public schools have been closed and thousands of students reassigned to campuses outside their neighborhoods — and often across gang lines — as part of Renaissance 2010. While the plan has resulted in replacing failing and low-enrollment schools with charter schools and smaller campuses, it has also led to a spike in violence that has increasingly turned deadly, many activists, parents and students say.

Before the 2006 school year, an average of 10-15 public school students were fatally shot each year. That soared to 24 deadly shootings in the 2006-07 school year, 23 deaths and 211 shootings in the 2007-08 school year and 34 deaths and 290 shootings last school year.

Few deaths have occurred on school grounds, but activists say it’s no coincidence that violence spiked after the school closures.

I think the closing and redistricting might have a little to do with it, but most of Chicago’s violence is caused by people who have already dropped out of school, or are old enough such that they would have already graduated by now.  Consider the source of the accusation, though.  It says that “activists” say it’s no coincidence blah blah blah.  What they mean by “activists” are Obamaite community organizers, and most of those have teachers’ union money flowing through their veins.

If the accusations are correct, this is yet another reason why you shouldn’t swing a baseball bat at a hornets nest.  A few years ago, PBS had a documentary about the Cabrini-Green housing projects.  It didn’t say this directly, but I got from reading between the lines that conditions in the CGs were least bad when one singular drug gang controlled the whole housing complex and was unmolested by the police.  Violence erupted when:  (1) Younger rivals started getting big heads and broke off from the main gang to start a rival splinter gang, (2) The cops busted some of the gangster/dealers, thereby creating a power vacuum that was solved with bullets, and (3) The CHA closed and shuttered the CGs, spreading its residents/troublemakers to other parts of the city or to diversifying Crook County suburbs.  The newcomer gangsters and the established gangsters started shooting at each other.  They shouldn’t have swung a baseball bat at the hornets nest that was the CGs.  Duncan/Booberman’s redistricting scheme might have been the same sort of deal.

(3)  Rush wondered today what Chicago was supposed to do with the money that Obama/Holder/Duncan promised them to solve this problem.  The NYT has the answer:  It’s to fund the “most likely to fail” program that the S-T told us about on Labor Day weekend.

(4)  I wish people would quit calling these kinds of murders “senseless.”  They may not make “sense” to the kind of white people that use that term, but almost everything people do has some sort of motive behind it.  Derion Albert got killed because he wouldn’t throw down with a set.  It’s not senseless, it’s TBB.  I also reject the term “honor student,” in cases like these.  Being a “honor student” in an almost all black or entirely black school means that you attend school more often than not, you have a pulse, you do not have a sheet full of serious felonies, and you can string four coherent sentences together.

Black obsessive and white liberals like the rejoinder of “ooh ohh white mafia mob” when genuflecting away from black gang activity.  The problem with that comparison is that even during the height of the mafia’s power and influence, and assuming you didn’t go into city politics, if you didn’t mess around with the mafia, the mafia didn’t mess around with you.  As you can see with the Derion Albert murder, black gangs do mess with you even if you don’t mess with them.

(5)  I don’t see what good any of this is going to do.  You can’t solve a problem unless you first identify a problem, and you can’t identify a problem if you are prevented from doing so by the dictates of political correctness.  Because race wasn’t discussed, and the Powers That Be won’t allow race to be brought to the table, then the problem isn’t identified, and therefore will not be solved.  TBB.

(6)  And yes, I do think that some of this money is going to make its way through Tammany Daley Hall.

(7)  I didn’t read anything where any of the official participants of The “Yuff” Violence Summit blamed guns, but I’m sure somebody has/did/does.  Remember, handguns are banned in ChiCONGOgrad.  Derion Albert was killed using wooden railroad trestles.