Sep 14, 2016 | Education, Politics
Writes Heather MacDonald on The lies told by the Black Lives Matter movement | New York Post:
The facts are these: Last year, the police shot 990 people, the vast majority armed or violently resisting arrest, according to the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings. Whites made up 49.9 percent of those victims, blacks 26 percent. That proportion of black victims is lower than what the black violent crime rate would predict. Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.
In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the NYPD. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population. In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects in 2015 were black, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they’re a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.
Gang shootings occur almost exclusively in minority areas. Police use of force is most likely in confrontations with violent and resisting criminals, and those confrontations happen disproportionately in minority communities.
So if “Black Lives Matter” really cared about innocent black lives they would call for more policing in high crime minority communities. Instead BLMers do the opposite attacking the police as such, making the police a target.
Gun-related murders of officers are up 52 percent this year through Aug. 30 compared to last year. The cop assassinations are only a more extreme version of the Black Lives Matter-inspired hatred that officers working in urban areas encounter on a daily basis. Officers are routinely surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they try to conduct a street investigation or make an arrest. Resistance to arrest is up, officers report.
The result of “Black Lives Matter” making policing more difficult is that they are doing “less of those discretionary activities in high-crime minority communities.” Leading to…
Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations. Homicides in 2015 rose anywhere from 54 percent in Washington, DC, to 90 percent in Cleveland. In the nation’s 56 largest cities, homicides rose 17 percent in 2015, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. In the first half of 2016, homicides in 51 large cities were up another 15 percent compared to the same period last year.
The carnage has continued this year. In Chicago alone, at least 15 children under the age of 12 have been shot in the first seven months of 2016, including a 3-year-old boy who is now paralyzed for life following a Father’s Day drive-by shooting. While the world knows Michael Brown, whose fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., spurred Black Lives Matter, few people outside these children’s immediate communities know their names. Black Lives Matter activists have organized no protests to stigmatize their assailants.
This is because the so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement is not concerned about ALL Black lives, but only the less than 1% of Blacks (perhaps) illegitimately killed by the police. Some Black lives apparently are of more importance than others.
Yes, there are bad cops out there — and policing is in need of reform — but on the whole the police are a force for good. To lump all cops together as bad, as the BLM narrative implies, does a great disservice to the heroic individuals who risk their lives every day to keep us safe.
For the past two decades, the country has been talking about phantom police racism in order to avoid talking about a more uncomfortable truth: black crime. But in the era of data-driven law enforcement, policing is simply a function of crime. The best way to lower police-civilian contacts in inner-city neighborhoods would be for children to be raised by their mother and their father in order to radically lower the crime rate there.
If BLMers don’t trust the agents of the state as policeman, why do they trust the agents state as a surrogate parent given the dismal results of the anti-capitalist “progressive” welfare state (and the breaking up of the family unit it promotes)?
Comments philosopher Andrew Bernstein on the matter:
It’s not the cops that pose a danger to innocent black men, women, and children–it’s the thugs.
Why does the Left perpetuate the vicious canard of trigger-happy, racist cops to the detriment of policing and, therefore, of innocent black lives?
Because if we looked closely at the terrifyingly high rate of violent crime in many black urban neighborhoods–vastly higher than it was just 60 years ago–we would be led to recognition of its cause: The welfare state targeting of blacks, leading to astronomic illegitimacy rates, many children raised by a mother on welfare and no father in the home, scads of unsupervised children, despair, drug addiction, drug trafficking, and the off-the-charts rate of violent crime that accompanies drug trafficking.
Blacks are still victimized by racist white Americans–by semi-socialist intellectuals and by Democratic Party leaders, who care not a whit about the carnage in many black communities because it is a step toward fulfilling their “dream” of a paternalistic, semi-socialist America.
Full socialism–National Socialism and Communism–murders tens of millions of innocent victims. Semi-socialism murders only tens of thousands–and to racist U.S. leftists, “only” blacks, whose lives do not matter. In truth, black lives matter because all human lives matter.
But if black lives truly mattered to the Left, it would advocate three political principles:
- A full phase-out of the U.S. welfare state
- End the politcal-legal war on drugs and transform this “war” into a moral-philosophic-educational one
- Definitively abolish all minimum wage laws and permit wage rates to fall to market levels, where all low-skilled teenagers could be hired and productively employed.
In brief, if black lives mattered–if all human lives matter–they would support individual rights and capitalism.
Aug 21, 2016 | Education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUPFVnoJyds
Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute says no, and Paul Vaaler from the University of Minnesota says yes in a 2015 debate hosted by the Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Aug 9, 2016 | Education
From New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name – The Washington Post:
Nine in 10 Native Americans say they are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, according to a new Washington Post poll that shows how few ordinary Indians have been persuaded by a national movement to change the football team’s moniker.
[…]
Among the Native Americans reached over a five-month period ending in April, more than 7 in 10 said they did not feel the word “Redskin” was disrespectful to Indians. An even higher number — 8 in 10 — said they would not be offended if a non-native called them that name.
[…]
But for more than a decade, no one has measured what the country’s 5.4 million Native Americans think about the controversy. Their responses to The Post poll were unambiguous: Few objected to the name, and some voiced admiration. “I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins,” said Barbara Bruce, a Chippewa teacher who has lived on a North Dakota reservation most of her life. “I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.” Bruce, 70, has for four decades taught her community’s schoolchildren, dozens of whom have gone on to play for the Turtle Mountain Community High School Braves. She and many others surveyed embrace native imagery in sports because it offers them some measure of attention in a society where they are seldom represented. Just 8 percent of those canvassed say such depictions bother them.
Comments Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Atlantic:
As a recent Washington Post survey concluded, most American Indians are not offended by the term “Redskins”—the name of D.C.’s football team. In interviews, I couldn’t find a single native who mentioned sports-team names as an important issue facing American Indians today. While I did read one editorial in a reservation newsletter arguing against the celebration of Columbus Day, I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to discuss the issue further.
While researchers have argued that team names such as this impair Native youths’ self-esteem, many of those young people have grown up in poverty, living with one or no parents, often exposed to adults who have problems with drugs and alcohol. When these young people have few educational options and little hope of employment ahead of them, it seems ignorant, if not offensive, to focus solely on the names of sports teams, if that distracts from addressing more serious problems. [Native Americans in the U.S. and Property Rights: A Comparative Look at Canada’s First Nations Property Ownership Act – The Atlantic]
Or perhaps it is smart of so-called tribal leaders to create distractions so they don’t get blamed for not addressing the real problem.
Why blame the policies that benefit them as tribal leaders, but hurt Indians in general, when the Washington Redskins can serve as a scapegoat. After all look what it has done to empower and enrich “Black Leaders.”
Jul 18, 2016 | Education
This video is a glimpse into the world of VanDamme Academy – a world we hope to share even more, in a full documentary.
VanDamme Academy is known for producing some of the best academically prepared students in Orange County. But there is something more, something altogether different – a bristling energy, a depth of discussion, a sincere joy in the endeavor to become educated – that sets the school apart. It is these qualities that prompted a recent graduate to write, “This school is the best thing that ever happened to me.” It is these qualities that prompt parents, and visitors, and distant admirers to say, wistfully, “I wish I had gone to this school.”
One of those admirers is a filmmaker, who believes strongly that in the debate over education reform, VanDamme Academy has something vital to contribute. But what it has to contribute is something so utterly new, so essentially different from the educational norm, that people really grasp it only by stepping inside the school’s walls and experiencing it for themselves. We can give the whole world that experience through a documentary.
We need help to make the documentary happen. If you would like to learn more about this project and how you can help make it a reality, email a request for the documentary project details to lisa@vandammeacademy.com
Feb 16, 2016 | Education
Susan Engel is a senior lecturer in Psychology and the director of the Program in Teaching at Williams College. And she has written an insightful piece on the importance of pleasure in learning.
From Joy: A Subject Schools Lack – The Atlantic:
The thing that sets children apart from adults is not their ignorance, nor their lack of skills. It’s their enormous capacity for joy. Think of a 3-year-old lost in the pleasures of finding out what he can and cannot sink in the bathtub, a 5-year-old beside herself with the thrill of putting together strings of nonsensical words with her best friends, or an 11-year-old completely immersed in a riveting comic strip. A child’s ability to become deeply absorbed in something, and derive intense pleasure from that absorption, is something adults spend the rest of their lives trying to return to.
[…]
Decades of research have shown that in order to acquire skills and real knowledge in school, kids need to want to learn. You can force a child to stay in his or her seat, fill out a worksheet, or practice division. But you can’t force a person to think carefully, enjoy books, digest complex information, or develop a taste for learning. To make that happen, you have to help the child find pleasure in learning—to see school as a source of joy.
Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were medicine: unpleasant, but necessary and good for you. Why not instead think of learning as if it were food—something so valuable to humans that they have evolved to experience it as a pleasure? The more a person likes fresh, healthy food, the more likely that individual is to have a good diet. Why can’t it be the same with learning? Let children learn because they love to—think only of a 2-year-old trying to talk to see how natural humans’ thirst for knowledge is. Then, in school, help children build on their natural joy in learning.
Read the entire article Joy: A Subject Schools Lack over at The Atlantic.
Jan 14, 2016 | Education
This talk is the heartwarming story of a college dropout who started and sold three companies, joined Facebook, and has a plan to transform education with his new startup, “Mystery Science”: http://mysteryscience.com/.
