Surge in Crimes Against Muslims...
... mirrors gun-ownership rates in colonial America!

The AP headlines the release of the FBI's 2001 Hate Crimes report with FBI: Surge in Crimes Against Muslims.

Incidents targeting Muslims, previously the least common involving religious bias, increased from just 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001 - a jump of 1,600 percent...

Overall crime motivated by hate rose just over 17 percent from 2000 to 2001, from 8,063 to 9,730 incidents. Part of the increase, however, is a result in an increase in the number of law enforcement agencies voluntarily supplying hate crime data to the FBI from year to year...

Most incidents against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern ethnicity also involved assaults and intimidation, but there were three cases of murder or manslaughter and 35 arsons...

I checked out the FBI's report, and the APs figures are not only selective, they're lies.

For instance, while there was a surge in reported hate crimes against muslims, up to a total of 481 in 2001, for the same year, there were 1,043 anti-jewish hate crimes, making up 55.7% of all anti-religious hate crime victims in 2001, compared to the muslims' 27.2%. (If you're breaking it down by incidents, the jews get 57% and the muslims 26%.)

Also, according to Table 4 of the report, there weren't any anti-muslim murders or manslaughters reported for 2001, in direct contradiction to the AP's contention that there were 3 cases. There were also only 18 anti-islamic arsons noted, not the nearly doubled figure of 35 that the AP is using. Thirty five is one more arson than there was reported for all anti-religious hate crimes for the year. There also isn't a category for middle-eastern ethnicity, so I don't know how they arrived at their figures for that either.

The tables in this report are quite easy to read. This sort of sloppiness makes me suspect the writer is trying to sway our sympathies in a certain direction. Did Michael Bellesiles get a career as a writer for the AP?

TIA really is scary
My initial reaction, on hearing of the existance of the Total Information Awareness program, headed up by John Poindexter, was not to jump to conclusions. I guess after reading all of the panicky reactions from privacy advocates, I figured they were all making mountains out of molehills. Until I read the following scripts from the DARPATech 2002 Symposium: Transforming Fantasy:

John Poindexter's overview of the Information Awareness Office, where he describes their multi-pronged approach to 'total information awareness.'

LtCol Douglas Dyer's overview of the Genisys program, which is researching methods to integrate their existing databases, and add new datasources. The scary part of the text is excerpted here:

"To address these issues, we've created the Genisys Program. Genisys has three goals: First, we'd like to be able to integrate and, if desirable, restructure legacy databases."
This is a noble goal, and my past work with the federal government's intel databases indicates that they are badly in need of an overhaul, but I worry that they'll do as bad a job as they did on the one I worked on.

"Second, we want to dramatically increase the coverage of vital information by making it easy to create new databases and attach new information feeds automatically. This is new, multimedia, broad-spectrum information that doesn't exist in any structured database."
Further reading indicates to me that the sort of information feeds they're looking at attaching include: credit card transactions, airline ticket purchaces, cel phone communications, medical records...

"Third, we want to create brand new database technology based on simple, scalable, distributed information stores we call repositories. In contrast to today's databases, repositories will be able to represent a broad array of information that varies in terms of structure, certainty, and format, and accessing information will be easier... Initially, repositories will be populated with synthetic data to support experimentation and rapid prototyping, but our intention is to iteratively develop and transition the technology, using operational feedback to focus future research."

Mr. Ted Senator's presentation on the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery program which is the part of the system that folks were, rightly, scared of.

"Traditional fraud detection techniques look for outliers, i.e., behavior by individuals that is unusual according to some statistical measure... Metaphorically, these techniques aim to find a needle in a hastack, or viewed another way, to construct a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box.

...our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces. This is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack... we have many ways of putting the pieces together into individual needles and the needles into groups of needles; and we can not tell if a needle or group is dangerous until is it at least partially assembled. So, in principle at least, we must track all the needle pieces all of the time and consider all possible combinations."
You should read his entire presentation, but at heart it appears that his office is engaged in developing ways to troll databases for indicators, which would in turn grant the government access, based on these indicators, to do a full data collection on your life, and attempt to link you up to any possible terrorist activity.

This approach starts with the entire population, and attempts to filter down to the real dangers to our security. Even if it is less safe, I prefer an approach that makes the assumption that the general population are law-abiding, and focuses their attention on people they have sufficient evidence to suspect they will engage, or have engaged in a crime.

I fear also, that the reporting capabilities of a data repository like this will be too irresistable to pass up. Already, in the presentations, there were comments suggesting statistical information from medical records would be made available to the CDC... who might have a legitimate need for such information, but what's to stop the IRS from determining they should have access to this database, to monitor possibly suspicious financial activity as well? And so on, down the line...

Aside from the fact that I pay my taxes each year, I'd really rather the government knew as little about me as possible. I don't trust them with that kind of information.

Boo Hoo
The AP news has the heartrending headline 1M to Lose Unemployment Benefits, with lovely little case studies like this:

Shirley Deane, 53, said that last December she lost her $25,000-a-year job as an administrative secretary at Howard University in Washington and still can't find work. She ran out of unemployment benefits in August, and has no health insurance and no retirement savings. The future looks bleak, she said.

"I've been taking tests, going on interviews," she said. "I've never had this hard a problem finding a job. Never."

Gee that's a shame, but these workers aren't losing their unemployment benefits, they're ending. That's like me saying that I'm losing my house when the lease runs out. Even worse, its like me saying I'm losing my house when the lease runs out after my landlord already extended it for an extra three or four months, rent free. They aren't losing a damned thing. In fact, they already received an extra 13 weeks in unemployment welfare over what everyone else normally gets.

"All the money that's being spent on homeland security and we're left stranded," said Hurlston, 47, a single mother with a 12- year-old daughter. "If they want more money for homeland security, we have to be able to work to pay taxes."
This is what you call irrelevant. If congress grants an extension on unemployment benefits, it will have zero to do with your ability to work and pay taxes. The likelihood of your working and paying taxes would increase dramatically if you spent your time trying to find a job - any job, not just something as good as you had - instead of whining to the press.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with my boyfriend the other day. He commented "I have no pride. I'll work at a 7-11 if I have to."
I countered with, "Wrong. It takes pride to work at a 7-11, rather than collect money from welfare or live off your parents. It takes pride to find a job and support yourself, even if it isn't what you want to do for a living, or it pays less than you are worth. But you do it anyway, because you want to stand on your own two feet, not be a burden to society. The person who would rather go on welfare, or leech off of someone else, than dirty their hands with work they consider menial, is the one who has no pride." (I'm sure I wasn't nearly that succinct in real life... but you get my drift.)

Shut up. Quit whining. Find a job. I live in the DC area, and there are help wanted signs all over the place, and plenty of job listings. You do what you have to to pay your bills, and keep looking for a better job. Hell, given that my company is in the midst of layoff plans, I'll probably be looking right there with you.

Hope for reducing HPV
This is really good news. Given the extremely high infection rates for HPV, the difficulty in screening potential mates for it, and its incurability, a vaccine that could prevent HPV infection is the next best thing imaginable.

Playing the 'For the Children' Card Again...
As if it isn't bad enough that there are adults out there shameless enough to blame their lardbutts on the companies they buy from, rather than their own sorry lack of self control, now the jackals are trotting out the poor little fat kids to try to make a buck off of McDonalds.

In federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, a lawyer alleged that the fast-food chain has created a national epidemic of obese children. Samuel Hirsch argued that the high fat, sugar and cholesterol content of McDonald's food is "a very insipid, toxic kind of thing" when ingested regularly by young kids.

If Hirsch is trying to claim that fast food is toxic, then why is he also describing it as insipid?

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Halloween costumes are dangerous to college students...
First there was the University of Tennessee when a bunch of guys dressed up as the Jackson 5 for Halloween, but that seemed to have been resolved in a rational manner.

Now it's the University of Virginia, and they've suspended two fraternities because a couple of guys showed up at a frat party dressed up as Venus and Serena Williams.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Two predominantly white fraternities at the University of Virginia were suspended by their national organizations after students showed up at a Halloween frat party in blackface.

According to news reports, fraternity members were dressed as tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

So impersonating an actual person of another race during a Halloween party is racist. Does that mean that we get to suspend every guy who ever dressed up in drag for being sexist? Especially every fella who ever dressed up as Madonna? Sheesh.

Leahy and Grassley are getting it right...
Here is something democrats and republicans both can 'work across the aisle' on, and Leahy and Grassley together appear to be heading the charge.

"The FBI's discipline system still needs serious reform - it's not equitable or fair," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican committee member. "It still allows a clique of top officials to judge one another and change punishment without explanation or accountability."

In the report, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that perception was fostered by the existence of a dual system of discipline that existed before August 2000, in which FBI Senior Executive Service supervisors were judged in pending discipline matters only by other SES members.
It also cited "several troubling cases" in which the discipline imposed on SES employees "appeared unduly lenient and less severe" than discipline in similar cases involving non-SES employees.

I'm glad to see someone might actually be making an effort to clean up some of the FBI.

Embarrassed for the rest of your life...
Matt George, 21, narrowly escaped being thinned from the herd for abject stupidity on Sunday, when the rattlesnake he was kissing in front of his friends bit him on the lip.

George was showing friends the snake he had caught on a recent trip to Arizona. Holding the 2-foot snake behind the head, he kissed it.

"I said, 'OK, man, you're being stupid, put it away,'" recalled Jim Roban. "He said, 'It's OK, I do it all the time.'"

After the second kiss, the snake bit him under his mustache.

Being Insensitive...
Barbara Horton, of Hyattsville, MD had some excellent comments to make about the idea of mixing developmentally challenged and normal children in the classroom, in today's Washington Times letters to the editor.

Contrary to "Everyone learns from Inclusion" (Family Times, Sunday), inclusion is one of those concepts that sounds as if it should work but doesn't. Inclusion is a well-meaning but misguided attempt to democratize the schools by mainstreaming disabled children with non-disabled ones. I can state from personal experience that mixing children of vastly different developmental abilities only slows and frustrates normal students while reminding disabled children that they are not normal and don't have a hope of becoming like the others.

I remember my mom telling me about her mother's response when the public school system decided to mainstream retarded kids. She said "If you mix clean water and dirty water together, you just get more dirty water." My own experiences with mainstreaming say the same. You cannot expect your standard 14 year old kid to deal well with an overexcited mentally retarded student. Being assaulted in the hallway by a developmentally disabled student is both upsetting to normal students, and also exposes the developmentally disabled student to pain and humiliation. One of the mainstreamed students at my high school was in the habit both of hitting random people for no reason, and for taking your food from you. Needless to say, this didn't teach us a lot of compassion for developmentally disabled students, especially when such behavior was never punished. We were instead told by administrators that there was nothing they were allowed to do about it, and we would just have to learn to put up with it.

In addition, regular classroom teachers already have enough trouble keeping their normal students in line, and quiet enough to learn their subjects. If you add into the mix, students who need additional attention and time - and frequently specialized instruction - to learn half the subject matter, all you are doing is shortchanging every other student in that class, for the sake of patting yourself on the back because you're so lily-white you're even blind to the difference between a child with an IQ of 70 and the freshman class of Harvard.

I'm not suggesting that anyone 'different' be kept in a barrel and fed through the bunghole... but you wouldn't put a student who hadn't mastered algebra in a calculus class, would you? If you will not hold developmentally disabled students to the same behavioral standards as the rest of the class population, then they do not belong in that class. If they cannot learn the material at roughly the same pace as the rest of the class, then they do not belong in that class. Teaching children how to socialize with different sorts of people may be a noble goal, but it isn't what elementary and high school are supposed to be for.

And just for the record...
Since I've been seeing comments lately on anti-male attitudes from Instapundit and Clayton Cramer and others I'm too lazy to hunt up the link to, I thought I'd just put this out there:

What a wonderful world it is that has men in it!

As a local example, if it weren't for my man, I'd have to: clean the rain gutters, bring in the firewood, build the fires, maintain my automobiles, do the yard work, load up and haul the trash to the dump, lift heavy objects, make repairs around the house... and if I was feeling tired and stressed out, I'd be SOL trying to find a warm and sympathetic shoulder that would make me feel like things aren't really all that bad. And I'd have to buy a vibrator too.

In return: I cook dinner from scratch at least 4 nights a week, do the grocery shopping, do the bookkeeping, and if I weren't living in a modified commune, I'd be doing the housework as well (right now, in exchange for cooking, I don't have to do any cleaning... damn I have life easy).

To hell with equal rights, I'm downright privileged.

Partial Human Extermination
I was talking to my sister at lunch today, and we somehow got onto the highly appropriate meal-time topic of partial birth abortion.

To our eyes, we really can't see any reason why someone would have a problem with making this procedure illegal. My sister brought up the standard 'slippery slope' argument, but then I had a disturbing thought... the slippery slope works both ways. Partial-birth abortion, since it kills a fetus that is actually far enough along in its development to survive outside of the womb - we're talking 3rd trimester babies here, folks - essentially makes infanticide legal. Or it could. If viability outside of the womb is not the determining factor in wether abortion is a medical procedure or murder - then what's wrong with killing a 2 month old baby? If the mother is the sole judge of wether or not to bear her child - and she retains that decision even past the time when the child could be born and survive to be given away - then what is so much more wrong about a mother deciding two months after the fact that she didn't really want to be one?

I think people who reflexively fight back against any attempt to restrict abortion should take a minute to think about that. If a woman's right to choose trumps the right of a seven-month fetus to be born, then why should a 2 month old's right to life trump a woman's right to choose?

Speaking of Perceptions and Guns...
Is anyone else annoyed with the latest offering from the Partnership for a Drug Free America? I'm talking about the commercial where a pair of teenage boys are sitting in one of their parents' dens, smoking a bong. They ask a bunch of stupid questions of each other, and then one of the kids takes a revolver that was just sitting on top of the desk, aims it as his friend, and as he's saying "I don't think its loaded" pulls the trigger.

This is supposed to teach us that teenagers smoking pot have poor judgement.

I'd like to know what you could say about the judgement of adults who leave a loaded revolver on the desk of their den, when they have kids in the house. Were this a real life situation, not government propaganda, the parents would be brought up on charges of negligence, and probably child abuse.

Stupidly Vague...
The AP's headline for the scheduled execution of Mir Amil Kasi - the terrorist thug who randomly executed people waiting to enter the main gates of the CIA - is: Pakistani Faces Execution In Va.

Isn't that a bit like headlining a story on the execution of Ted Bundy with "Seattle Man Faces Execution in Florida"?

And why, exactly, was it necessary to headline this bastard's nationality, when no mention of his crime is in the headline? Wouldn't it make more sense - and be more accurate - to say "Convicted Multiple Murderer Faces Execution in Va"?

Are you sure it's a parody?
I can't decide if this article from The Onion is more parody or more real-life...

AMHERST, MA-The filthy, disorganized apartment shared by three members of the Amherst College Marxist Society is a microcosm of why the social and economic utopia described in the writings of Karl Marx will never come to fruition, sources reported Monday. ...

"I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I'm, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too," said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. "So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping." ...

The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding. "I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn't cheap," Eaves said. "So ever since, I've been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif."

Anyone who has ever had to share a living space with someone who won't pull their weight knows socialism is a dumb idea.

A Great Example...
This is the sort of story you don't hear about often enough.

The general impression seems to be that children with guns are either highly dangerous, and likely to kill a bunch of unsuspecting jocks who bullied them - or - so stupid they point the gun at their friends and pull the trigger as a joke. That isn't always the case, as this 15 year old boy has demonstrated.

KALISPELL, Mont. - A father's advice paid off when a 15-year-old Eagle Scout obediently grabbed a firearm before going to look for his dog and ended up shooting a charging grizzly bear behind the family chicken coop.

Only Reuters would think this 'Odd'...
Yahoo News' Reuters Oddly Enough section contained this article: Women Enjoy Best Sex Within Marriage.

"This survey turns on its head the idea that the best sex is when we are footloose, fancy free and single," Juliette Kellow, Top Sante's editor, said.

"The truth is truly great sex and deep intimacy are most likely to happen within the trusting, committed environment of marriage or a long-term relationship."

Sad that someone had to do a study to figure out that "deep intimacy" is most likely to happen within a "trusting, committed environment..."

Privacy Issues Aside...
Jacob Sullum makes some excellent points regarding the current sex offender registration laws. I feel that the registries are a dumb idea because they expose to public scrutiny, threats and scorn, people who in many cases are no danger to the public, and are unlikely to commit their crime again. Jacob Sullum has other arguments against registration:

These laws - which require sex offenders who have served their sentences to report their whereabouts to the government, which passes the information on to the public - are both too narrow and too broad.
They are too narrow because they do not cover a wide range of potentially dangerous characters whom citizens might want to avoid. They are too broad because the sex offender label sweeps together serial predators with individuals who pose little or no threat to the public.

I can empathise with parents who are terrified that their neighbor might turn out to be a child-raping psychotic, but I'm terrified my next door neighbor might turn out to have been locked up for violent assaults numerous times, and the next time I ask him to turn down his music, he'll take a shotgun to me. If violent felons and murderers have sufficient right to privacy that we don't post their names, addresses, and employers on the internet, why don't sex offenders?

Kevin Smith Gave Me Nightmares...

I live about an hour from Alexandria, so I can't get to my favorite video store more often than on the weekends these days. When I went this weekend, I picked up some real winners (both literally, and sarcastically speaking).

Vulgar caught my eye because it's a ViewAskew production, and a lot of the cast of Clerks and Mallrats are in it. The back description of the movie, however, is deceptively vague. Roughly, it said that the movie was about a down-on-his-luck clown that is elevated to celebrity status when he saves a child during a hostage situation... but that fame brings 'dark secrets' out of his past to light. I really wish I'd known that the 'dark secret' they were referring to was a graphically detailed gang-rape of said clown by a father and two-son team. This was the sort of film, that, after having watched it, I wished instensely for some Fantastik for the soul. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't get off on watching films like Faces of Death.

Fortunately, Pumpkin may not be industrial strength soul-restorer, but it comes close. The movie's style and characters are so similar in tone to But I'm a Cheerleader, with a feeling of earnest lunacy, that I would have sworn that they were by the same writer or director. They aren't, Pumpkin is by the same guys that brought us Dead Man on Campus instead, but Pumpkin and Cheerleader are ideological twins. The movie is sure to tweak a lot of noses, since the premise - a sorority girl falls in love with a retarded kid she's helping train for a special olympics style event - is far from politically correct. But, the actors in the film play their roles so straight, even though their characters are ridiculous, that you can't can't help but like them. The movie manages to walk a perfect line, avoiding the sort of over-the-top fun to be made of people with disabilities that you can see in Something About Mary, but also avoids the syrupy sort of "our poor broken angels" treatment of disabled folks that so many movies that aren't flat out mean fall into. I liked it enough, I'll probably buy it.

The Irony of It All...
Apparently, this guy is too involved with his own work.

The author of two books on stupidity has been charged with trying to meet a teenager on line for the purpose of sex...

Welles now faces a charge in Lantana, Florida, with using the computer to set up a date with a 15-year-old girl. But the "girl" was really a 40-year-old undercover detective.

Interesting Idea...
I like an approach like this much better than I do sex offender registries, and such.

NORFOLK, Va. - Thanks to their parole officers, more than 200 sex offenders were kept away from children during Halloween trick-or-treating hours.

Under Operation Trick No Treat, sex offenders in Norfolk and Virginia Beach were ordered to spend 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday in parole and probation offices.

What I found most interesting, however, was reaction reported from the offenders themselves:
Many sex offenders said they understood why they were told to stay off the streets.

"It makes sense," said Charles E. Davis, 64. "When you're not supposed to be around children, and they do come around your home ... that's the reason." Others said they felt that attending the session protected them from being falsely accused.

Swimming against the tide...
Michelle Malkin has another great piece in the Washington Times today, titled Just Following 'Standard Procedure' that outlines in grim detail the callous disregard for the law that the INS habitually displays. This is not just kindness to illegal aliens struggling to make a fresh start in the promised land; this is releasing obviously violent illegal aliens back into society who go on to commit further brutal crimes.

And all we'd have to do to fix this is enforce current laws.