Category: Crime

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Florida Man Steals Two Cop Cars — ‘Illuminati, Help!’

Posted on

Xavier Cummings was high on meth and ranting about the CIA when Volusia County sheriff’s deputies finally put the cuffs on him:

The man accused of stealing two police cruisers and leading law enforcement on a high-speed pursuit in two counties had a bizarre outburst in court on Friday.
Xavier Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail on two counts of grand theft of a motor vehicle, two counts of grand theft of a firearm, escape as well as other charges.
When a judge denied Cummings bond on Friday, he had an outburst that caused him to be removed from the courtroom.
“Illuminati, help!” Cummings shouted.

(Spoiler: The Illuminati did not help.)

Deputies said Cummings told them following his arrest that he was given permission to take the Cocoa patrol car through mental telepathy.
The report indicates Cummings showed signs of experiencing mental-health issues, stated he used crystal meth earlier in the day, and had not slept in approximately 24 hours. . . .

(Earlier this week, I drank too much coffee, didn’t get enough sleep and made three typos. I didn’t steal a police car, though.)

The chase caught on a Volusia County sheriff’s helicopter video began when Cocoa police responded to a report of a disturbance near a Cocoa motel on Thursday afternoon.
Investigators said when officers confronted Cummings, he jumped into an unattended patrol car and drove away.

(Is Xavier Cummings a criminal genius, or what?)

Several Cocoa police officers then pursued Cummings on Interstate 95 into Volusia County before forcing the stolen cruiser off the road and into the woods between Edgewater and New Smyrna Beach.
When officers moved in to arrest Cummings, he emerged from the woods and jumped into another Cocoa Police Department vehicle and continued fleeing northbound on I-95, police said.

(Oh, he’s definitely a criminal genius.)

Police and deputies used stop sticks to disable the second police cruiser. At which point, Cummings was taken into custody without further incident.
No officers or deputies were injured.
Cummings is being held in the Volusia County Jail without bond.

This criminal genius will surely find a way to escape, with or without the assistance of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, watch the video:

 

Yeah, that crystal meth is a heckuva drug. Think I’ll stick with coffee, even if I did make three typos this week. “Illuminati, help!”




 

Is Black-on-Black Crime a ‘Myth’?

Posted on

Eugene Volokh seemed to be puzzled by another law professor’s claim:

An article by a criminal law professor [April 22] in the Columbus Dispatch included this assertion:

“The reality is that Black-on-Black crime is a myth, and that Black and white people routinely commit crimes at similar rates, but Black people are overwhelmingly targeted for arrest.”

Yet I think this is not the reality, at least as to violent crimes of the sort that are usually labeled “black-on-black” when committed by black criminals against black victims.

That Volokh post was linked April 24 by Instapundit, who linked it again on Monday, suggesting how important this question is. But of course, it’s not actually a question at all — we know for a fact that black-on-black crime is real, not a “myth,” and that however “similar” the crime rates may be across racial lines, violent crime is a much more serious problem in the black community than anywhere else in America. These are facts which anyone can ascertain easily by reference to data published annually by the federal Department of Justice, so the real question is, why would anyone make the false assertion that black-on-black crime is a “myth”?

The simple answer: Southern Poverty Law Center.

You see, the university professor whose column caught Volokh’s attention linked to a 2017 SPLC “HateWatch” item by Dave Neiwert who, in turn, linked to a Department of Justice report, the contents of which he badly misrepresented. But before I get into that, some relevant history . . .

As I’ve sometimes mentioned, I was born and raised a “yellow dog” Democrat and never in my life voted Republican until 1994. Both political events and personal experience influenced my repudiation of my native partisan allegiance to the Democrats. If you lived through the 1990s, you can probably remember the series of events — the 1991 Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Rodney King incident, the L.A. Riots, the election of Bill Clinton, the Waco disaster, the Yugoslavia civil war, etc. — which did much to make me begin thinking seriously about politics and policy. These were years when I did a lot of heavy reading of history and philosophy, seeking to remediate a deficit from my collegiate years, which were spent in the party-hearty haze of a rock-and-roll lifestyle.

In 1992, I was still a Democratic Party loyalist, and proudly plastered a Clinton-Gore bumper stick on my old Chevy Impala. But I’d abandoned my youthful hedonism by then and had become a more-or-less respectable petit bourgeois — married to a fine Christian woman, working a suit-and-tie job as a small-town newspaper writer, with three young children and a mortgage on nice little home. My bourgeois way of life gave me a vested interest on one side of what Pat Buchanan, in his speech to the 1992 GOP convention, had called the Culture War. That is to say, as a married Christian parent, the issue of “family values” now concerned me more directly than they had during my youth as a rock-and-roll party animal, and there was also the matter of economics. I was beginning to read the Austrian economists (Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek) and their heirs (particularly Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams), from whom I discovered that my vaguely Keynesian views on economics were a pathetic error. Anyway . . .

Having briefly recounted some of the influences that led me to abandon my Democratic Party birthright and embrace conservatism, I have to explain that my venture into conservative thought was like an explorer venturing into an uncharted continent. This was terra incognito to me, and I had little appreciation of the various camps and factions within the Right. However, many of those who sought to mentor me on this journey were decidedly in the paleoconservative camp, so that by 1996 I was regularly reading Chronicles (where Sam Francis was a monthly columnist), and was therefore quite sympathetic to the critique of the Republican Establishment as a bunch of phony sellouts. Also, I was well aware that neoconservatives were accused of trying to monopolize influence over the GOP, and to steer policy in a direction symbolized by the failures of George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order.”

It was during this period, circa 1996, that I encountered a remarkable book, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, first published in 1992 by Jared Taylor. If there is any one person in America most hated by the SPLC, it’s Jared Taylor, who became publisher of the American Renaissance and who has probably done more than anyone else to call attention to facts about race relations in America that liberals don’t want anyone to know about. Long before sites like Breitbart and Daily Caller were chronicling some of the kind of stories about race (“hate crime” hoaxes, for example) that conservatives now take for granted as part of their regular journalistic diet, Taylor was finding such news items and compiling them in his monthly American Renaissance newsletter.

What made Paved With Good Intentions such a remarkable book was that Taylor used the Lexis/Nexis database to compile a vast amount of news items from regular sources (New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, etc.) so that the endnotes contain hundred upon hundreds of undeniably factual citations. You may disagree with the opinions Taylor expresses, or the arguments he makes, but when it comes to compiling facts relevant to America’s racial problems, he is simply without equal. Taylor’s excellence in this regard was demonstrated in a monthly feature of his American Renaissance, “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” This was a digest column of news items and, in the era before the Internet made possible other means of publicizing stories that the national media would like to ignore, the “O, Tempora! O, Mores!” column was an amazing source of information that contradicted the liberal narrative.

All of this I relate by way of explaining, in part, how I came to be smeared as a “white supremacist” by the SPLC, who did not fail to notice my byline on a 1999 story at The Washington Times about Taylor’s study, “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America.” That study has been revised and updated several times since and, because they can’t dispute the facts Taylor references in this study, instead the SPLC has spent years huffing about his “racist” interpretation.

Let me say something very clearly: It doesn’t matter.

Whether or not Jared Taylor is a racist, or whether his interpretation of crime data is tendentious, are trivial matters when viewed in comparison to the actual facts about race and crime in America. And the main point of his “Color of Crime” study was that so-called “hate crimes” are a tiny drop in the vast bucket of violent crime in this country. The habit of liberals, certainly as much now as in 1999, is to scream constantly about “racism,” an allegedly pervasive problem for which “hate crimes” are cited as proof, while ignoring the amount of violence perpetrated by black criminals, most of which is inflicted on black victims. In contrast to Jared Taylor’s opinions about race, the facts actually do matter.

If you believe the SPLC, the main problem with Taylor’s analysis is that he ignores the role of poverty as a cause of crime in the black community. But anyone familiar with basic methods of sociology immediately understands that you cannot look at the correlation between three variables — crime, poverty, and race — and leap to a conclusion about cause and effect. If Taylor asserted that racial differences are the cause of variations in crime rates, I must have missed that part, but I think one may be agnostic on this matter of causes and still find oneself astonished by the absolute size of differences between groups in terms, for example, homicide rates. Anyone who thinks black-on-black crime is a “myth” must ignore incontrovertible evidence in homicide statistics.

In 2019, according to the FBI, there were 13,927 murders in America. In 7,484 cases — 53.7% — the victim was black. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. population is 13.4% black, so that black murder victims are about four times the share of the total population. Furthermore, of the 11,493 murder cases in 2019 where the race of the offender was known, 6,425 — 55.9% — of the perpetrators were black. How is black-on-black crime a “myth,” if black people are more than half of the murder victims and perpetrators in a country that’s less than 15% black?

No honest person can look at these facts and deny that violent crime in the United States disproportionately involves the black community. If it’s “racist” to say so, then facts are now racism.

Well, if the facts about race and crime are so obvious, how was it that Ohio State University law professor Sean Hill could believe “that Black-on-Black crime is a myth” and that violent crime rates are “similar” for whites? Because his source for that claim was Dave Neiwert’s SPLC article, and Neiwert seems to be unable to understand the data presented in that 2017 Department of Justice study. Neiwert’s headline — “White supremacists’ favorite myths about black crime rates take another hit from BJS study” — makes sense only if you failed to carefully read the statistics in Rachel Morgan’s DOJ report, “Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012-15.”

The first thing to notice is that Morgan’s study only looked at “nonfatal violent victimizations,” i.e., not including murder. Morgan lumped together into a single category four separate types of crime: rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, but excludes homicide. Why does this distinction matter? Because homicide is a crime where you get numbers that can’t be fudged easily. I mean, sure, some victims’ bodies might get dumped in a swamp full of alligators or otherwise concealed, and sometimes a murder can be made to look like an accident, but such cases are rare enough that they don’t affect the bottom-line figure — i.e., nearly 54% of murder victims being black. On the other hand, many sexual assaults are never reported to police, and a lot of simple assault cases might not make into the official tally for one reason or another, so that the numbers for “nonfatal violent victimizations” probably aren’t as reliable as the homicide body-count.

With that in mind, the “good news” in Morgan’s study is that black people were only 14.5% of victims of “nonfatal violent victimizations,” are roughly the same as their percentage of the U.S. population, even though they’re vastly overrepresented among murder victims. The problem with this, beyond what I’ve noted about the probability that these numbers for “nonfatal” crimes are less reliable than homicide statistics, is that (a) the categories of crimes Morgan has lumped together are so vastly different, and (b) she doesn’t disaggregate these crimes in reporting the race of victims and offenders.

All these caveats aside, however, Morgan’s study still doesn’t constitute evidence that higher black-on-black crime rates are a “myth.” If you’ll look at Table 3 in her study, Morgan provides rates (“per 1,000 persons age 12 and older”) for “Total violent crime” (excluding homicide) and for “Serious violent crime” (i.e., excluding simple assault). Narrowed down that way, excluding homicide and simple assault, the rates of victimization for “serious violent crime” (rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault) are:

White-on-white ……….. 3.7
Black-on-black ……….. 6.7
White-on-black ……….. 0.8
Black-on-white ……….. 1.2

“Holy statistics, Batman! That’s amazing!”

The per-capita rate for black-on-black “nonfatal serious violent crime” is 81% higher than the white-on-white rate. (Basic arithmetic: Subtract 3.7 from 6.7, and divide the difference by 3.7.) Furthermore, the per-capita rate of black-on-white “nonfatal serious violent crime” is 50% higher than the white-on-black rate. If you were trying to debunk “white supremacist myths,” these are not the statistics you’re looking for.

I guess maybe Dave Neiwert didn’t pay attention in math class, or maybe he was so desperate for evidence to disprove a “myth” that he overlooked the actual numbers that even Jared Taylor would consider proof of his own theories about race and crime. And, as I say, it doesn’t matter what theory Taylor might derive from his analysis; what really matters are the underlying facts. We can argue about what the numbers mean — and, indeed, I have directly told Taylor where I disagree with his opinions — but differences of opinions don’t change the reality, namely that black-on-black crime is a serious social problem, accounting for more than half of U.S. homicides and, in terms of other “nonfatal serious violent crime” accounting for an 81% higher rate of victimization among black people.

In fairness to Dave Neiwert (who at times has done some very good reporting about actual “hate crimes”), the way Morgan expressed her data in that 2017 DOJ study made it difficult to locate the relevant comparison of crime rates. And I suspect that Professor Hill at OSU didn’t dig down far enough into the numbers in the DOJ study to realize that Neiwert had misinterpreted it. This explains why Professor Volokh was so puzzled. In order to find the truth, you had to (a) get past Professor Hill’s claim based on (b) Neiwert’s faulty analysis of (c) Morgan’s DOJ study, which didn’t express the relevant data points in a very accessible way.

However, the entirety of this 2,100-word exploration, including the digression to recount my personal connection to this story, is merely a preamble to a related discussion about the media and “myths”:

A basic tactic of political propaganda is to brand your opponents as dishonest or stupid. No one trusts a known liar, and no one wants to be associated with beliefs they consider stupid. Unfortunately, propaganda is generally a tool of liars, and many people are too stupid to recognize the difference between propaganda and news.
Skepticism toward the news media has increased in recent years because intelligent Americans recognize how much of what is reported as “news” is actually political propaganda. But not enough people have devoted the time necessary to understand the vast arsenal of deceptive tactics employed by the media liars who claim to be practitioners of journalism. Consider, for example, how the media use the word “myth.”
Since November, CNN and other liberal media outlets have devoted endless hours to assuring their audience that election fraud is a “myth.” No one has ever won an election by cheating, CNN viewers are encouraged to believe, and these viewers are incited to reject as a dangerous fringe “conspiracy theory” any suggestion that Joe Biden’s election was tainted by voter fraud. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.

And please, hit the freaking tip jar. It’s been a long week already.




 

Florida Woman Was in a Big Hurry to Reach Her Destination: Prison

Posted on

Jennifer Carvajal was behind the wheel of a Hyundai Elantra clocked on radar at 111 mph headed west on I-4 by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper. It was 1:30 a.m., and three passengers were in the car with Carvajal, who did not have a driver’s license, because she had violated her probation.

What was she on probation for? DUI manslaughter in 2014.

Yeah, that’s right — apparently you can kill somebody while driving drunk in Florida and you’re back on the streets in just a few years.

In 2016, Carvajal was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released in 2019. “According to Hillsborough Circuit Court Clerk records, she was then arrested in May [2020] for violating her probation with a drug-related charge and was sentenced to five more years probation.”

Did you get that? After killing somebody, then serving only three years in prison, she was arrested for drugs, a probation violation that could have sent her back to prison. But it’s Tampa, where all the judges are Democrats, so they just gave her more probation. Less than a year later, she was doing 111 mph on I-4 at 1:30 in the morning when the trooper caught her on radar. And when the trooper managed to catch up with her, Carvajal had a truly genius idea — right turn!

The result — don’t worry, you’ll see the video in a minute — looked like something your 4-year-would do with one of his Matchbox cars. The Hyundai went down the shoulder of the freeway, then ricocheted up the embankment on the other side of the ditch, crashed through a fence and went airborne into the lot of a car dealership, where it bounced off a truck, smashed through a concrete light pole and a palm tree, and then catapulted end over end before finally crashing into the pavement.

Jennifer Carvajal survived the crash because, despite her many errors of judgment, she was wearing a seatbelt. Her passengers, alas, were less fortunate. Two of them were seriously injured, and one of them was ejected from the car and fatally smashed to a bloody pulp.

 

My guess is that even the liberal Democrat judges in Tampa won’t be so lenient with Carvajal this time. It’s easy to laugh at “Florida woman,” until she makes a right turn at 111 mph and kills somebody.




 

Andrew Brown Was a Career Criminal

Posted on

The shooting of Andrew Brown by sheriff’s deputies in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, has gotten a lot of national media attention, but I’ve avoided comment on the controversy because we haven’t seen video of the shooting, and therefore cannot evaluate assertions by activists that the shooting was unjustified. Based entirely on descriptions of the shooting, it sounds as if this was one of those situations where, once the first shot was fired, everybody felt a need to start shooting. This is what happens occasionally when you’ve got multiple armed officers on the scene, and Pasquotank County deputies were serving two warrants — a search warrant and also a warrant for Brown’s arrest — at his residence.

We haven’t seen the video and don’t actually know what happened, however, so I will continue to reserve judgment on whether this shooting was legally justified. However, I must object to the way the media is promoting a Sainted Civil Rights Martyr myth around this case.

Andrew Brown dindu nuffin, we are told. He was an innocent victim.

Excuse my French, but this is a steaming pile of bullshit. Andrew Brown was committing crimes his entire life. He never had any other career:

Public records show a history of convictions for drug dealing by Brown, and he was arrested in November 2020 on drug charges.
In 2004, Brown was convicted of speeding to elude arrest. Between 2006 and 2008 he was convicted of multiple misdemeanors for communicating threats and one for violating an order of protection. He had earlier convictions for assault, domestic trespass and wanton injury to person or property, in addition to multiple property and drug crimes.

His first adult arrest was at age 18, and he was busted for drug dealing as recently as six months ago. He “had a criminal rap sheet over 180 pages long and dating back to May 1988.”

The only reason anyone outside of Pasquotank County, North Carolina, is paying attention to this case is because Andrew Brown was black.

Well, like I said, we don’t know what happened that caused the deputies to open fire on Brown during that raid, and I’ll reserve judgment, but don’t expect me to buy any media myths about this BMW-driving dope dealer being some kind of hero, Saint Andrew of the Blessed Rock.




 

Media: The Enemy of the People

Posted on

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics remarks on Twitter:

Hard to imagine a more divisive, sensational, context-less headline. A textbook example of the media being the enemy of the people.

The story in question is by the Associated Press:

Even as the Derek Chauvin case was fresh in memory — the reading of the verdict in a Minneapolis courtroom, the shackling of the former police officer, the jubilation at what many saw as justice in the death of George Floyd — even then, blood flowed on America’s streets.
And even then, some of that blood was shed at the hands of law enforcement.
At least six people were fatally shot by officers across the United States in the 24 hours after jurors reached a verdict in the murder case against Chauvin on Tuesday. The roll call of the dead is distressing:
A 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio.
An oft-arrested man in Escondido, California.
A 42-year-old man in eastern North Carolina. . . .
An unidentified man in San Antonio.
Another man, killed in the same city within hours of the first.
A 31-year-old man in central Massachusetts.
The circumstances surrounding each death differ widely.

Were they engaged in crime? Were they resisting arrest? Did they pose a threat of deadly violence? “Circumstances . . . differ widely,” we are told, but all the Associated Press and the headline writers at the Huffington Post are interested in is the number, with the implication that the lives of innocent Americans everywhere are endangered by the police.

Derek Chauvin’s knee is on all our necks — or so the media arsonists would have us believe. Here’s a point I made just yesterday:

What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.
My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?

What the Associated Press has done is to foster the false impression — a standard trope of BLM propaganda — that suspects who get shot by cops generally don’t deserve to be shot, that police are routinely using deadly force where it is not necessary or lawful. The only purpose this propaganda serves is to encourage more criminals to resist arrest, which will predictably result in more suspects being shot by cops, while at the same time every report of a suspect being killed will result in more riots and more political pressure to reduce law enforcement.

Even if someone is charging at you with a knife, cops can’t shoot them — that’s the madhouse toward which the media seek to lead us.

The journalists responsible for this are truly “the enemy of the people.”




 

Video: A Death in Omaha

Posted on

Two important details about the death of Kenneth Jones:

An autopsy later showed that Jones’ urine and blood tested positive for phencyclidine, or PCP, a hallucinogen. . . .
Jones had a felony conviction on his record and would have faced a mandatory three years in prison if convicted on a charge of being a felon in possession of a weapon.

The loaded .45 Jones was carrying on the night of Nov. 19, 2020, had been purchased by his brother. We do not know — the article in the Omaha World-Herald doesn’t tell us — whether the brother acted as a “straw man” purchaser to provide his criminal brother with a weapon, which would be a federal felony. Liberals are always proclaiming they want “common sense” gun-control laws, and prohibiting convicted felons from possessing firearms is about as common-sense as it gets. Need I explain the relevance of this to the death of Kenneth Jones?

  1. Contrary to what liberals would have us believe, there are already numerous laws — federal, state and local — which regulate the sale and possession of firearms.
  2. Criminals do not obey gun-control laws. If it were in their nature to obey laws, they wouldn’t be criminals, would they?
    and
  3. The way to prevent “gun violence” (a phrase beloved by the liberal media) is to enforce existing laws.

Guess whose job it is to enforce laws?

Oh, wait — it’s the police! And liberals hate the police.

So it’s about 7:30 on a November night, a week before Thanksgiving, when Omaha police officers Dan Faulkner and Rich Martier are on patrol on the south side of Omaha, on South 27th Street about a mile west of the Missouri River. Let me ask the reader: What do you know about Omaha? And what do you know about standard police procedures?

Knowing nothing at all about the geography of Omaha, I would hazard a guess that the city’s south side includes what most people would call “bad neighborhoods,” that the south side is home to most of Omaha’s black population, and is also where most gun violence in the city occurs. Because the job of law enforcement is to prevent crime and apprehend criminals, I would further speculate that Omaha cops spend a lot of time patrolling the south side of the city: “Hunt where the ducks are,” as the old adage goes. All of which is to say, it was not a coincidence that officers Faulkner and Martier were in the vicinity of South 27th Street on the evening of Nov. 19. They’re both four-year veterans of the force, and had probably spent a lot of time in that neighborhood, so when they saw a Dodge Charger driving erratically, they knew what was up.

“Probable cause” — an impaired driver, that was what they suspected. There were three women in the car, and Kenneth Jones was in the back seat on the driver’s side. Even before they exited their patrol vehicle, the cops saw Jones reaching around in the back seat. If you’ve watched enough bodycam videos on YouTube — you are subscribed to the Police Activity channel, right? — you’ve seen this scenario played out dozens of times in office-involved shootings: Cops pull over a bad guy, notice him moving around in the vehicle in a way that suggests he’s trying to hide something, and the order is shouted: “Show me your hands!”

Before we get to the video, let me digress for a moment and ask you to consider something: What is the point of issuing pistols to police officers, if they never shoot any criminals? In 2020, about 1,200 suspects were shot to death by cops — a hundred a month — and very few of those shootings could legitimately be considered “controversial.” For every questionable police shooting, there are many dozens of cases that are strictly “local news” because either (a) the suspect was white, and there’s no racial angle to exploit, or (b) the suspect was so flagrantly dangerous not even Ben Crump would object to cops shooting him dead.

My point is that cops shooting bad guys is not a rare event in America, and thank God for that, because the potential of getting shot — the credible threat — is what makes law enforcement effective. Why would anyone cooperate with a police officer otherwise?

You’re driving 90 mph and see the blue lights in your rearview mirror, why not just keep going, if the cop can’t shoot you? The cop wants to put you in handcuffs? Just say “no,” because he can’t shoot you. That gun on the officer’s hip is there for a reason, you see. If cops were prohibited from using their guns, there would be no real law enforcement, and criminals would be able to perpetrate felonies with impunity.

This is the future anarchy toward which anti-cop rhetoric is leading us. America will become a society in which criminals have no fear of police, in which no one will be safe from violent predators. And while I’m digressing, let me ask: How many unsolved homicides have there been in Omaha in the past 15 or 20 years? I ask this because Kenneth Jones was 35 years old and had apparent been perpetrating felonies his entire adult life. He had been busted at least three times on weapons charges, and in 2014 was sentenced to prison: “Jones was released on May 3, 2018 after serving three-and-a-half years with 191 days of good time, according to records from the Department of Corrections.” Is anyone foolish enough to believe that Jones was in the habit of carrying weapons for peaceful and legal purposes? No, don’t be silly — he was a full-time criminal, and the pistol was a tool of his felonious trade. We will never know how many people Kenneth Jones robbed, assaulted, or murdered during the course of his criminal life, but we do know this: He’ll never shoot anyone again.

 

“I’ve got my f**king gun right on your face.”

Say what you will, but you can’t say Officer Martier failed to explain the situation clearly to Kenneth Jones. Everybody else in the car raised their hands, but Jones kept reaching around, because he knew damned well he was going back to prison if he got caught with that gun.

How often have you heard liberal advocates of gun control speak about the need to “get guns off our streets”? Well, how do they suppose this is going to happen? Whose job will it be to apprehend criminals and confiscate their weapons? Cops, that’s who. And what will happen when, predictably, criminals don’t cooperate with the program?

You just watched the video. Now imagine how many more shootings like this we’re going to see if Democrats enact new gun-control laws.

Maybe you think more laws are the answer to the “gun violence” problem, but in my opinion, the real solution to the problem is more effective enforcement of the laws we already have. And really, how could any American be against effective law enforcement?

Kenneth Jones could not be reached for comment.




 

Nika Holbert, the ‘Drug War’ and the Importance of Penalizing Stupidity

Posted on

We have talked before about this case (“Nika Holbert and the BLM Myth”), but I must again address the death of Nika Holbert because one of the YouTube channels I watch regularly has featured it.

John Correia’s Active Self Protection channel is both entertaining and educational. If you want to see real-life violent confrontations analyzed by a specialist in self-defense, this is the channel for you. Seldom do I ever disagree with John Correia, but in analyzing the shootout between Holbert and Officer Josh Baker, Correia suggest that the way to prevent such incidents is to end “the drug war.” Watch the video:

 

John is just wrong on this issue of “the drug war,” and I’ll explain why.

Narcotic use is a proxy for stupidity. Yes, there are people at Harvard with drug habits, and plenty of folks with high SAT scores might enjoy the occasional tab of ecstasy or toot of coke, but in general — as a sociological statistic — dopeheads are not valedictorians. Beyond that simple fact of life, an important but less-appreciated aspect of the “drug war” is that the way you get busted for dope is by being stupid.

When I was a teenage dopehead, the importance of avoiding interactions with the law-enforcement community was obvious enough. You didn’t want to be caught “holding,” as we said, especially when you were involved in the, uh, commercial distribution of illegal substances.

A smart dopehead would not be driving around with dope in the car. Leave your stash at home, dude. But if you are going to carry dope with you, maybe you shouldn’t be driving a car owned by a drug dealer with six felony warrants. That was Nika Holbert’s stupid mistake, followed by the even more stupid mistake of pulling a gun on a cop.

Think of this in terms of incentives. As a society, it behooves us to reward intelligence, to make sure that the smartest people get into positions where their intelligence can be most usefully employed. Without clever people to design computers and so forth, our civilization’s technological advancement would be impaired. But the obverse this principle is also true — stupidity must be penalized. Why? Because stupid people, if left to do as they please, will screw things up for everybody.

Who Broke the Milkshake Machine?

Everything wrong in our country — from traffic jams to lousy restaurant service to the presidency of Joe Biden — is the fault of stupid people.

Think about all the ways stupid people make your life worse. Say you pull into the drive-thru line at McDonald’s. You’re going to wait longer than necessary because, somewhere up ahead of you in the line, there is a stupid person who can’t get their order right. Instead of ordering something simple — “Give me a Number Three meal” — they have to do it all complicated, and not communicating very clearly. Because they’re stupid. When you finally get to order your large chocolate milkshake, they tell you, “Sorry, the milkshake machine’s broken.” Why? Who broke the milkshake machine? A stupid person, that’s who.

Excuse me for digressing into a gripe about my pet peeves, but my point is, there is a shortage of intelligent people in America, whereas we have a vast surplus of stupidity. Why? Incentives.

As a society, we are no longer sufficiently penalizing stupidity. Among the potential penalties for being stupid is a loss of income, but apparently you can’t fire people for being stupid nowadays, because they’ll sue for “worker’s rights” or whatever, which is why McDonald’s keeps hiring idiots who don’t know how a milkshake machine works.

This same basic problem is why a fat idiot thinks she can drive around with dope in her purse and a pistol in a car owned by a drug dealer, but starts shrieking like an innocent victim when a cop tries to put the handcuffs on her. And then gets killed because she is apparently too stupid to know what happens when you point a pistol at a cop.

According to online records from both Metro and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Nika Holbert’s criminal background includes several repeat misdemeanors, including driving with a revoked license and theft under $500.
Holbert also had a felony drug charge from 2010.
Her last listed interaction with law enforcement was a public indecency charge in 2017.

“Live and learn” as the old adage says, but stupidity is incurable. The only way to protect society against the harm caused by stupid people is by quarantine — put them behind bars so that they can’t make life miserable for the rest of us. Alas, however, stupid people are voters, and they tend to vote for the kind of politicians who think the answer to every problem is to make life easier for the stupid people who elect them.

“Let’s decriminalize drugs,” say the stupid people, who are statistically more likely to be dopeheads, and also more likely to get caught. Then the politicians who pander to such people get elected, and when their stupid policies turn communities into nightmare wastelands, everyone pretends to be surprised by this predictable outcome. Oregon legalized dope, and Portland is a lunatic hellscape. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

While we’re at it, let’s discuss the role of technology in what happened to Nika Holbert. You see, the reason she got pulled over was because he ran the license plate number on the Camaro she was driving and learned it was owned by a drug dealer with six outstanding warrants. Cops now have computers in their patrol cars that make it much easier to do this and, in many jurisdictions, police cars are equipped with automatic scanning devices that alert cops to vehicles that are stolen, or with other issues including outstanding warrants. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the Democrat-controlled city council in Nashville considered tag-scanning technology to be “controversial”:

License plate reader technology was previously banned in Metro Nashville back in 2017.
After street racing problems caused public safety concerns, the conversation has been brought back into focus for the Metro Council. At the start of 2020 three different bills looked to address how LPRs could be utilized properly in Nashville.
“We need some more tools in our toolbox in order to help completely eradicate this dangerous activity,” District 26 Councilmember Courtney Johnston said.
Johnston, whose legislation was deferred until February 2, said she listened to people’s concerns on how the technology would affect policing and privacy.

Who are the “people” who have these “concerns”? The same people, I suspect, who got tag-scanners banned in Nashville in 2017.

Stupid people, that’s who. You see, stupidity is a hereditary trait, and so there are a lot of people out walking around on our nation’s streets — voting for Democrats, and attending city council meetings — who have stupid relatives in prison. When you see a story in the media talking about how the “community” is concerned that police are being too successful at putting criminals behind bars, this “community” sentiment comes from the stupid relatives of stupid criminals.

This is where all those “family demands answers” headlines come from whenever police shoot a stupid criminal. Your teenager daughter is living in a foster home and trying to stab people, but you’re too stupid to understand why she got shot? “FAMILY DEMANDS ANSWERS.”

Man, if I’d been stupid enough to get myself shot by cops back when I was a teenage dopehead, my family wouldn’t have been “demanding answers.” My kinfolk are smart enough it would have been obvious to them that I’d simply suffered the predictable consequences of stupidity.

“No, sir. I have nothing to say. I understand that I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.”

Never went to prison, because I’m not stupid.

Also, eventually, I realized the error of my ways, and one of my youthful errors was hanging around with losers and troublemakers.

This is another reason why I’m against John Correia’s idea of surrendering to stupid people in what he calls “the drug war.”

Some People Should Ride the Bus

Stupid behavior leads to bad consequences, and smart people eventually notice this pattern, either in their own lives or by observing the lives of others. It is only the truly stupid among us — the hopeless dimwits — who are repeatedly in trouble with the law.

Did I mention that Nika Holbert’s criminal record was released by officials? As evidence of incorrigible stupidity, it’s quite conclusive. She kept getting caught for driving without a license, or driving with fake tags on the car, or possessing small quantities of marijuana, which are exactly the kind of things that stupid people get caught doing.

Stupid people should not be allowed to drive. That’s why we have public transportation, for people who are too stupid to drive. What part of “Nika should have been riding the bus” do I need to explain here?

America’s problem is not merely our failure to penalize stupidity, but also that intelligent people are far too polite for their own good. We have been taught that it’s wrong — “insensitive” or too “judgmental” — to make stupid people feel ashamed of their stupidity. This is an unfortunate consequence of the “self-esteem” cult that took root in our education system decades ago. The emergence of this cult was a typical example of what happens when mediocre minds (think, education majors) are exposed to sociology statistics without proper adult supervision.

Some education professional noticed that (a) successful people tend to have (b) high self-esteem, and concluded that (b) was the cause of (a).

This is like the “Think System” in The Music Man.

Notice how I just assumed that the reader is (a) capable of understanding analogies and (b) familiar with Broadway musicals. This is because I understand that 1,500 words into a blog post is not where you find people who should be riding the bus, IYKWIMAITYD.

No, the kind of people who are still reading after 1,500 words are extraordinarily intelligent. So smart are my blog readers, in fact, that some of them are designing space robots for NASA.

And driving German cars. I don’t know if there are any sociological studies on this, but based on a small sample of space-robot engineers, I have observed a distinct preference for German automobiles. However, correlation is not causation, and simply buying a Volkswagen won’t turn you into a NASA engineer, the same way that high self-esteem won’t make you successful. This is the error of the Cult of Self-Esteem, which has ruined our school system because teachers think they can make kids succeed simply by telling them how wonderful they are.

That’s why no one ever told Nika Holbert she was too stupid to be allowed to drive a car. And she ended up getting shot for it.

Oh, and pulling a pistol on a cop.

The Darwin Awards Committee could not be reached for comment.




 

There’s Always a Backstory: Why Was Ma’khia Bryant Living in a Foster Home?

Posted on

Look closely at that photo. It’s what Columbus, Ohio, police Officer Nick Reardon was looking at a split second before he fired his pistol. The fat girl in blue jeans — 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant — had a kitchen knife in her right hand and was about to stab the woman in pink. In the parlance of cops, that’s called a “good shoot,” but the liberal media headline is not “HERO COP SAVES WOMAN FROM KNIFE ATTACKER.”

No, the media are playing the BLM “white guilt” race card here, simply because Officer Reardon is white. The fact that the woman he saved from being stabbed is black? Never mind that. It doesn’t fit the media’s preferred narrative, in which white is a synonym for bad.

Understand that I’ve spent months watching police videos on the Police Activity YouTube channel, so I’ve become sort of an amateur expert on how these kinds of incidents generally go down. As in this case, police often arrive on a scene of confusion, with only a brief description of what’s happening based on a frantic 911 call. When you watch bodycam video of incidents like this — and, as I say, what happened in the Ma’Khia Bryant case isn’t really unusual — it can be difficult to understand what you’re seeing, because it happens so fast amid confusing circumstances. But the important thing to know is, there is always a backstory.

 

Police do not go around shooting people at random. In most cases, the suspect who gets shot by cops has an extensive prior criminal history. Often, they are convicted felons out on parole or probation, engaged in drug dealing, driving a stolen car or illegally possessing firearms (sometimes all three at once). In other cases, the person who gets shot by cops is mentally ill, basically doing “suicide by cop.” So in terms of probability, the vast majority of people, whatever their race, are never in danger of being shot to death by police. It doesn’t happen randomly.

Even in the case of Breonna Taylor, the reason she got shot was because (a) her ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer who had been using her apartment as his mailing address, and (b) her new boyfriend had a gun and fired at the cops who raided the apartment, evidently fearing that it was Breonna’s ex-boyfriend busting down the door. It wasn’t random.

So what’s the backstory in this case?

Franklin County Children Services (FCCS) released a statement saying that Bryant, 16, was a foster child who was under the care of the Franklin County Children Services. . . .
The girl’s aunt, Hazel Bryant, told reporters that her niece had been living in a foster home on the east side of Columbus, where the fatal shooting took place. According to her, several adult women had come to the foster home and started an altercation with the teenager, who had then called police, her biological father as well as her grandmother for help. Then to defend herself, Ma’Khia grabbed a knife. . . .
Her mother, Paula Bryant, told 10 WBNS, “She was a very loving, peaceful little girl. She was an honor-roll student, and Makiyah had a motherly nature about her. She promoted peace.” . . .

OK, two obvious questions:

  1. Why was Ma’Khia in the care of county children’s services?
    and
  2. Why did these women “come to the foster home” and start a fight?

It seems difficult to reconcile the known facts with Ma’Khia’s mother’s claim that she was a peace-promoting honor student.

My guess (and it is only a guess) is that Ma’Khia being in foster care had something to do with her own behavioral problems, which in turn explains these adult women being in an altercation with her. We don’t actually know what happened or why, but whatever the story turns out to be, we can surmise that this was not a random incident. It never is.