Archive for March 2009

Two men from the Northwest suburbs were charged Sunday in connection with the homicide of a man in Chicago on New Year’s Day.

Chicago police arrested Forrest Smith, 26, of Mount Prospect and Malcolm Whitehead, 19, of Rolling Meadows. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office charged both men with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of David Garrett, 47.

Garrett’s murder was Chicago’s first homicide of 2009.

Also charged with first-degree murder and aggravated battery was Lorenzo Hall, 26, of South suburban Steger, who police said was the shooter.

In addition, Glenview resident Lee Foster, 25, who accompanied the other suspects in a car, was arrested on charges of probation violation.

All four are scheduled to appear in criminal court today, March 30, at 2600 S. California Ave., Chicago.
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While Mr Obama has played down the influence of race over his government and policies, Washington is abuzz that the president has handed control of domestic policy, all White House social events, environmental issues and food safety to African American women - seven senior government posts in all.

Known variously as The Sisterhood and Obama’s Women, the group of seven accomplished and elegant women have drawn comparison with “Blair’s Babes”, the generation of female Labour MPs whose election in 1997 caused an historic shift in the composition of the House of Commons.

Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to US President Barack Obama Photo: AFP

President Obama used his press conference last week to joke that interest in his own race lasted “about a day” after his election. But below the radar, Mr Obama has been quietly transforming the upper echelons of government.

Black woman only hold 192,000 of more than 1.7 million government jobs, making up about one in nine of the federal workforce, but Mr Obama has given them one fifth of the most senior jobs in government.

While media attention has focused on Michelle Obama, with her emergence as a fashion icon and cheerleader for her husband’s policies, the First Lady’s old Chicago boss, Valerie Jarrett, has emerged as one of her husband’s three most influential advisers.
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PARIS – It wasn’t yet 8 a.m. when police knocked on Monique Pouille’s door, searched her home and took her away – all because she recharged cellphones for illegal migrants.

A refugee loads up on food outside Calais City Hall. Humanitarian groups are planning to protest the law that forbids residents to aid illegal residents.

The 59-year-old volunteer with several groups in the Calais region of northern France was put behind bars and interrogated for three hours.

The French government forbids aiding illegal migrants and sets quotas for arrests of those who do as it tries to control growing clandestine immigration. This year’s target: 5,000 arrests.

Authorities contend the measure is aimed at those who profit from those in France illegally. Humanitarian associations and others point to a concerted effort to harass volunteers who provide a lifeline, or a simple kindness, to illegal immigrants.
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Well, there is still hope for liberty after all! After multiple thousands of phone calls, emails, faxes, and other communications from outraged citizens, the State of Missouri has rescinded its controversial “militia” report.

This proves the point I made in this column recently that the most effective way to fight an ever-encroaching federal leviathan is to focus on our individual states.

Let me review the events of the last few weeks so as to help readers familiarize themselves with this historic–and I do mean historic–episode.

On February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri, via its Department of Public Safety, issued what was called “MIAC [Missouri Information Analysis Center] Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement”. In this report, people who supported Presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and yours truly were referenced as being connected to potentially dangerous “militia members.”

But the inference did not stop there. People of conservative ideology were also identified in the State Police report as being potentially dangerous. People who held political opinions opposing abortion, illegal immigration, the New World Order, the North American Union, the Income Tax, the U.N., etc., were profiled in the MIAC report.

Interestingly enough, no left-leaning political ideologies were identified. No Islamic extremists. No environmental extremists. Only people holding “conservative” or “right-wing” philosophies were identified in the MIAC report.

The MIAC report was categorized as “Unclassified/Law Enforcement Sensitive,” meaning the report was intended for law enforcement personnel only. Fortunately, an unidentified (for obvious reasons) Missouri law enforcement officer, who was extremely disturbed by this report, sent a copy to nationally-syndicated radio talk show host Alex Jones. Of course, Jones immediately “blew the whistle” on the story. This was on March 11.
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There has been CCTV, finger printing and eye recognition. Now comes body odour profiling. In its ongoing efforts to nail the bad guys, the US Department of Homeland Security is investing heavily in the sniff test: “odourprint”.

Plans have quietly appeared on the American government website to announce some serious funding of a study looking at the potential of using people’s individual smell to identify criminals and to uncover when they are lying.

There are scientists who claim our smell is just as unique as our DNA, and the work to be funded will look into the chemical nature of the human scent as utilized by crime fighters in the form of the bloodhound. Dogs have clued the scientists into the possibilities of smell technology although their accuracy has been shown to be as low as 85%, with an untrained dog doing no better pure chance.

But now efforts and research is under way to make the scrutiny of smell more exact. Tests have shown that mothers can pick out their babies by smell alone, while humans can be shown to recognise each other through the tang of their armpit BO. The smell of a human has also been shown to vary by gender and by age - one recent study claimed that men smell like cheese while women smell of grapefruit or onions.
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Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a NYT column about how pundits should be graded by how accurate their predictions are. But most of my predictions are really boring and depressing. So, none of the other pundits would touch making predictions about topics I’m interested in.

Everybody else likes to make predictions about tournament-like phenomenon that are inherently interesting because they are hard to predict: e.g., Who’s going to win the NCAA basketball championship? Who’s going to win the next election? Will the stock market go up or down? So, most pundits aren’t much more accurate than random, but they are popular.

In contrast, I hate being wrong, so I like to make predictions about things that have a track record. I’ve been following social science stats for 37 years now the way Bill James follows baseball stats. (National Review published a letter from me commenting on Ernst Van Den Haag’s review of Christopher Jencks’ Inequality: A Reassement of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America when I was a freshman in high school.) Over that time, not all that much has changed.

For example, after I posted LSAT scores of law school applicants by race, a reader asked about MCAT scores of medical school applicants by race.

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Here is a text from the pen of René Servoise, former ambassador of France to Indonesia. It is posted at Bivouac-Id, Le Post and Terre d’Israel. Despite its length, I chose to abridge it only slightly.

A mutation of our nation is in progress. It is growing, it is profound but uncontrolled. In all likelihood, the immense majority of Frenchmen are unaware of it.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslim families, from North Africa, the Middle East and black Africa - whose religion, aspirations and mores are radically different from ours - now live on our soil. Their birth rate is higher than that of European families. What is the consequence? Within 30 years the population of Islamist culture could be in the majority among those 40 years old or younger. “In France, we will have between 6 and 8 million Arabs by the years 2005 - 2010,” said Edgar Pisani, honorary president of the Arab World Institute. We have been duly warned: this is a radical transformation (political, economic, cultural and social) of our society.

The map below shows the growth of mosques, with the dark green areas indicating more than 30 mosques. The years range from 1985 to 2008. Their growth is amazing.

This mutation is in progress at the very moment when, to use Toynbee’s expression, “an external proletariat” is forming on the southern and western shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This army of reservists came about as a result of the birth rate of these peoples, and the absence of an economic policy capable of guaranteeing them a decent life in their homeland. In front of them lie France, Italy, Spain and Germany, lands of mirage, highly developed, with guaranteed employment, free social protection and education. Who could resist the call of this “promised land”?

At the same time, all over the world, roused by immense hopes, Islam is enjoying an unprecedented revival. It is awakening after a long night. It has renewed vigor, pugnacity and ambitions. From Morocco to Indonesia, from the Muslim States of Central Asia to black Africa, more than one billion two hundred million men - young compared to the aging populations of Europe - constitute a “community” (Umma).

It is transnational, motivated by spiritual aspirations, material demands and political ambitions, and (here and there) financed by revenue from oil.
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“It was only when the British National Party became involved that the police finally acted and launched an investigation,” said the grandfather of a twelve-year-old British girl who fell pregnant after falling victim to yet another Muslim sex grooming gang in South Yorkshire.

The grandfather, whose name is known to BNP News but is being withheld to protect the identity of the victim, was reacting to the arrest yesterday of seven Muslim men in Rotherham in connection with the latest sex grooming case.

A South Yorkshire Police spokesman confirmed to BNP News that “Officers from South Yorkshire Police have arrested seven men in relation to an ongoing investigation into alleged serious sexual offences in the Rotherham area.

“Six men, aged between 19 and 29-years-old, from the Clifton, Masborough and Broom areas of Rotherham and from the Shirecliffe area of Sheffield, were arrested yesterday, Wednesday 25 March 2009, and released on police bail.

“A 20-year-old man from the Moorgate area of Rotherham was arrested earlier today, Thursday 26 March, and is currently helping police with enquiries.”

The grandfather became desperate after contacting the police and being told that nothing could be done about the matter.

He then contacted the local BNP activist Marlene Guest, who approached the police. After they realised that the BNP would make the matter public and start campaigning on the issue, they asked her not to go public with the scandal while they investigated it.
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This appraisal of Mr. Obama’s character is based on his two books, Dreams From My Father (DMF) and The Audacity of Hope (AOH). The advantage of relying on these sources is that they are not only Mr. Obama’s own words but his considered words. He cannot claim that were written hastily and without reflection.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the first book, DMF, was written in 1995 when Mr. Obama was a married man in his mid-thirties. Hence, it reflects his mature views, not those of a giddy teenager. In addition, Mr. Obama agreed to the republication of DMF in 2004 when he was already an established politician, so his 1995 views cannot be written off as something that do not represent his present thinking. Together with The Audacity of Hope, written in 2006, these two books give us a picture of Mr. Obama before he started his political career and after he became a politician.

Shaping the Past

Both books are filled with great swathes of what appears to be reported speech. These are ostensibly conversations from Mr. Obama’s early childhood onwards. In the case of DMF, a casual reader could easily think he had picked up a novel.

Mr. Obama says coyly in the introduction to DMF that “although much of my book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me.”

Approximation is putting it mildly because Mr. Obama “recalls” astonishingly vast tracks of dialogue from all stages of his life. There are many pages of almost continuous dialogue, and when he meets his Kenyan half-sister Auma for the first time we get a monologue that takes up almost seven pages. (DMF pp. 212–219.) As for contemporaneous journals, nowhere does Mr. Obama mention keeping such records or refer to journals kept by others. As he is the protagonist in almost all the dialogue, he is presumably relying almost entirely on “oral history,” a notoriously unreliable source.

Mr. Obama’s writing veers even further into fiction because, as he writes, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” The books are often vague about even approximately when an event occurred. Mr. Obama then tops all this imprecision by telling the reader, “With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of their privacy.” This sounds like a device to make sure nosey journalists ask no awkward questions and that the people he writes about raise no objections.
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