We have traded five pretty senior Taliban, held innocuously at Gitmo, for one Bowe Bergdahl.

It seems there is a law on the books which requires the administration to give 30 days’ advance notice to Congress prior to any release of any of the Gitmo perpetrators.  Predictably Dear Leader did not do that.  However much it galls me to confess this, I have to say I agree with him on that one.  There is nothing — nothing at all — in the Constitution which grants Congress the authority to place such a constraint on a president’s war-fighting powers, and unlike others I do not think that the congressional power of the purse gets you there.  To put it bluntly, I do not think that Congress has the constitutional ability to decree that “no funds of the United States of America shall be expended in the defense thereof,” a proposition you have to accept if you accept that Congress could use the power for this specific purpose (there’s no logical stopping point in between).  Forbidding expenditure in the exchange of prisoners — an inherent prerogative of command — falls on the wrong side of that divide.  Like it or not, how the human scum we cooped up in Gitmo are dealt with is squarely on the war-fighting side of the ledger, and Congress has no power to fight a war.

On the other hand, as with it seems nearly everything else Dear Leader does, there is a great deal more to it than that.

The original story put out by Bergdahl himself was that he’d been captured while straggling behind a patrol.  Except there was no patrol that night.  He was on sentry-duty, was duly relieved, and vanished into the night.  From CNN:  “According to firsthand accounts from soldiers in his platoon, Bergdahl, while on guard duty, shed his weapons and walked off the observation post with nothing more than a compass, a knife, water, a digital camera and a diary. . . .  ‘Any of us would have died for him while he was with us, and then for him to just leave us like that, it was a very big betrayal,’ said former U.S. Army Sgt. Josh Korder, who has the name of three soldiers who died while searching for Bergdahl tattooed on his back.”  From The Weekly Standard:  “‘You don’t mail all your personal belongings home, especially your computer. It’s not like you can go to a sports bar — there’s no sports bars over there,” says Specialist [Cody] Full [a platoon mate]. ‘You just wouldn’t give up your computer if you weren’t planning to leave. He knowingly deserted and he put countless fellow Americans in danger — not just his platoon mates.'”

Suffice it to say that, the headline in the FAZ notwithstanding (“Better, he’s a Hero”) Bowe Bergdahl is no hero.  [Update (03 Jun 14, 1525 local):  Along the lines of oopsies, the FAZ‘s newest headline on this deserter and traitor is now “Everything but a Hero”.  At least we’ve got that part straightened out, now.]

According to voice intercepts from the Taliban, he was taken while taking a dump.  Of course, that snapshot — however much Gentle Reader might have been able to do without the mental image — says exactly nothing about how he absented himself from his unit or what his intentions were.  He was walking down the road, felt the urge (remember he’d been on sentry duty and so would not have been able to make a head call for several hours), dropped ’em and was come upon in that position by the Taliban?  OK; so what?

As The Hill reports, “At least six U.S. soldiers died hunting for Bergdahl, CNN reports.  Many of his fellow troops also told CNN that they had to sign nondisclosure agreements to never share information about his disappearance and the hunt for him.”

It seems, in fact, that not just the military but other agencies as well have been investigating the events of that night and those subsequent.  The military has “a major classified file” on the subject, the existence of which has now been leaked, with the obvious purpose of encouraging a congressional subpoena of its contents.

So let’s see:  A guy takes off in the middle of the night, with everything tending towards, and nothing to contradict, the inference of an intentional desertion from his duty post in time of war (which carries the death penalty, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice).  Multiple American troops, both regular army and special forces, are killed or wounded looking for him.  The whole thing is taken so seriously and at such high levels that there’s not just some file mouldering in someone’s office, but a “major classified file” on this jackass at the Pentagon.  The soldiers who knew him best and who were most familiar with the events of his desertion and immediately following are strong-armed into signing non-disclosure agreements (how many thousand GIs went MIA in Germany, Korea, or Vietnam? and how many non-disclosure agreements were extorted from their closest comrades?).  The deserter in question was a machine gunner.  Not exactly a high-value asset to the Warriors of the Religion of Peace.  He’s kept alive for five years, by groups who are not known for their solicitude for useless feeders from the opposite side.

It gets better.  The Bergdahls lived in Idaho, outside a small town.  The FAZ reports their house had “thousands of books” but no television.  Sounds a lot like my house, actually.  Daddy Bergdahl grows a beard “for solidarity” (as reported in the FAZ; it’s not reported with whom he was expressing solidarity), and then greets his son by video link with (in Pashto, no less), “I am your father.”  As Michael Ledeen observes, that’s just not how any normal father would greet his son.  I’ve got three boys of my own, and while they’re not old enough to have served, I can guarantee you that if I am ever in Papa Bergdahl’s situation you will not hear me constrained to identify myself as my boy’s father.  And certainly not in the language of his captors, the people who killed and wounded the Americans who went looking for my son.  Ledeen, whose initial reaction was the same as mine, professes himself to have “calmed down” a bit since then (he’s got more reliable sources than most, but I still am not comforted), but on one point I wholeheartedly agree with him:  “The people I wouldn’t trust on this one – aside from top decision makers who likely have a lot to hide – are the Bergdahls.  They’re very odd people, to put it mildly.”

It is also reported by the FAZ that Papa Bergdahl learned Pashto in order to work directly with the “captors” for his son’s release.  Or was it for some other reason?  Gentle Reader will remember that when one takes and “turns” an enemy, foremost in one’s mind is forever the question whether this is a plant.  While you can never be sure, one of the things you can do is monitor closely and control his communications.  If he’s communicating with the folks back home in his native language you can never tell if he’s using some sort of pre-arranged code-speak, or even just making “mistakes” in his transmissions that are sure to be noticed by his controllers, all for the purpose of letting it be known that They’re Looking Over my Shoulder as I Type This.  [For a fascinating look at how that sort of thing worked in the context of the SOE — and by “fascinating” I mean I read it through in the course of a single weekend — I cannot recommend too highly Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks, the SOE’s chief code-maker.]  It’s entirely logical that the younger Bergdahl, who had already learned the local language from outright sympathy with the Afghans (actually, a commendable practice and one which ought to be encouraged if you’re proposing to have your military among the people for any prolonged period), would have been forbidden to communicate with his father in English.  In other words, I strongly question whether Papa learned it to negotiate with his son’s new controllers; far more likely that he learned it in order to communicate with his son in the latter’s new language.

And after all of this, Dear Leader announces the swap in a Rose Garden presser?  He has to know that the truth will come out.  In fact, it’s already coming out.  It will continue to come out.  People who have their dead comrades’ names tattooed on their own flesh, comrades who died looking for someone now known to be a traitor, aren’t going to be scared off by some piece of paper with a promise of non-disclosure on it.  People who left arms and legs on the field aren’t going to be frightened off by your stooges in plain-clothes.  That’s something I wonder whether Dear Leader, for whom there exists nothing more talismanic than a faculty-lounge notice on the cork-board (and for whom nothing else — say for example, a lawful statute of Congress — carries more weight than something you’d find pinned to the board; that mindset is definitely a two-way street), fully understands.  President:  “But you signed a document where you promised you wouldn’t talk!!!”  Soldier:  “Fuck you, buddy.  These men were my friends.  And your traitor-boy killed them, just as much as if he pressed the detonator himself.”  However sad it may be to contemplate it, our president will never understand the logic of the foregoing exchange.  As consummately political as he is, Dear Leader has to know what’s coming.

That much said, by parading these people and making this kind of a fuss about, and that prominently, he’s bragging that he doesn’t care.  He knows that most of the lamestream media will cover for him.  He knows that the Paul Krugmans of the world will assure us it’s just some partisan witch-hunt that we sloped-browed mouth-breathing bitter gun-clingers out in fly-over country object to a deserter and a traitor being celebrated by the commander-in-chief in the White House (and you know that’s coming, Gentle Reader, don’t you?).

At this point Dear Leader’s cutting doughnuts in our front yard and throwing his empties out the window.  [Update (06 Jun 14):  And like some spotty-faced juvenile delinquent, when caught and dragged up before the judge (that’s us, Gentle Reader), he shows no contrition at all.  None.]

[Update (04 Jun 14):  And now come the reports of what sounds like efforts at collaboration between Bergdahl and the enemy.  Over at PJ Tatler, via CNN, we have this:  “Within days of his disappearance, says Buetow, teams monitoring radio chatter and cell phone communications intercepted an alarming message: The American is in Yahya Khel (a village two miles away). He’s looking for someone who speaks English so he can talk to the Taliban.”  I’m not sure what to make of that statement.  If he had been learning the local language, why would he have been looking for someone who spoke English, unless he hadn’t learned much of the language?  Or maybe he felt his language abilities inadequate?  Who knows?  For that matter, the squad mate quoted heard his own translator’s version of what someone else had said, and we have no idea to what extent that other person was paraphrasing what Bergdahl was saying.  So it’s still a mite early to tell for sure.  But one thing seems pretty plain:  For whatever reason, and with whatever intent in his heart, Bowe Bergdahl was running towards the Taliban as much as he was running away from the U.S. Army.  And that smells really bad.]

[Update (06 Jun 14):  Now a private company, run by a former senior CIA operative and doing business as a defense contractor, produces what it alleges to be reports submitted to CENTCOM as far back as 2010.  I say “alleges” because the company’s owner was indicted for lying to Congress in connection with the Iran-Contra balls-up; he was pardoned by Bush 41 while on trial.  Just like I’m not willing to give Eric “My People” Holder a pass for blatantly lying to this Congress, so I’m not willing to ignore this other fellow’s having done the same thing.

So I very much take this with a grain of salt.  This guy is a liar (otherwise he’d have gone to verdict to clear his name) but that’s not to say he’s incompetent (as is Holder), and the reports were in fact submitted.  They’re genuine in the sense that they really were prepared and really do exist.  The general commanding USCENTCOM back then denies having seen these particular reports, although I have a hard time imagining that being true, given their explosive content.

Because, you see, these reports show Bowe Bergdahl having converted to the Religion of Peace, announceinghimself as a mujahid, and running about the place with his very own AK-47.  I’m being asked to accept the bald statement that reports of active collaboration with the enemy by a U.S. service member known to have deserted a combat post, for whom we were then still actively searching, aren’t significant enough to make it to the four-star’s desk?  Pull the other one, boys; it’s got bells on it. On the other hand, the reports also show an escape attempt upon capture after which he was locked up in a metal cage.  So the contents of the reports are not unambiguous, and even if they are spot-on accurate, you still have to ask the question whether it’s fully knowing collaboration or just Stockholm Syndrome making its appearance.  Patricia Hearst, anyone?  Perhaps Hearst isn’t the best cautionary example, because irrespective of why she went over, go over she very much did, to the extent of participating in armed bank robbery with her “captors.”

No matter what the correct interpretation and weight to place on these reports, you have to ask yourself why Dear Leader’s people hadn’t reviewed every last page of this and the rest of the available information before turning over the five most dangerous Taliban in our possession, the worst of the worst.  And then trumpeting his decision to the world.  And then gloating over it, as if all he had done was “mak[e] sure we get back a young man to his parents.”]

Via a “share” from a Facebook friend’s page, we have this gem over at AlterNet.org.  I will observe that this is not the first article at that site that my friend has shared, on FB or otherwise.  I find the self-consciously cute name they’ve chosen for their site to be more than a bit ironic.  You see, it’s a play on the world “alternate” from which we are to deduce “alternative,” from which we are to conclude that this site is purveying news and opinion that’s somehow edgy, “alternative,” out there, or otherwise not just one more dead-fish organization going with the flow of the stream.  Except it is; what you’ll find there is pretty standard left-extremist claptrap. Like, for example, the linked article. We are all racists now, it seems.  As evidence for “subconscious racial bias” arising from “the most enduring, corrosive racial stereotype in America: the black-as-criminal mindset,” we have the observation:

“The archetype is so prevalent that the majority of whites and African Americans agreed with the statement “blacks are aggressive or violent” in a national survey.  In support of these findings, other research indicates that the public generally associates violent street crime with African Americans. Other nationwide research has shown that the public perceives that blacks are involved in a greater percentage of violent crime than official statistics indicate they actually are.”

There are two links in the just-quoted text at AlterNet.org, both to an article from 2007 over at the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice.  For the first link, no specific numbers are given in the linked JCCJ article, only the characterization “clear majority” of both groups.  As to the lattermost assertion, I could not find in the linked article on the public perception of percentage or prevalence of black crime relative to actual proportion of all crimes committed by blacks.  What I did find are some specific numbers of all crime committed by blacks relative to their statistical share of the gross population (remember that this article is now seven years old, and the research it’s based on presumably older still, so these numbers may well be out to lunch in one or more respects by now).  From the JCCJ:

Blacks are indeed involved in a disproportional amount of crime in general and violent crime in particular.  In fact, for violent crimes such as robbery and homicide, there have been times when Blacks were arrested in absolute numbers that surpassed those of Whites.  In more recent years, however, although Blacks did not surpass the actual number of Whites in nationwide arrests, their presence in these statistics has been greater than their representation in the general public. For example, although Blacks compose approximately 13% of the U.S. population, in 2002 they accounted for 38% of arrests for violent crimes and nearly 30% of arrests for property crimes. Juvenile arrest statistics indicate that during the same year, Black youth accounted for approximately 43% of arrests for violent crimes and 27% of arrests for property crimes. Researchers have suggested that crime committed by African Americans may be especially salient not only because it exceeds what would be expected based on the racial composition of the country but also perhaps because the violent crimes that tend to be most fearsome are the ones that are most disproportionately perpetrated by Black males.

Let’s see.  Black males constitute roughly 6.5% of the total population (half of 13% is female, right?).  Given that the overwhelming proportion of crime in general, and physically violent crime in particular, is committed by males, period, we can assume that somewhere north of 33% of violent crimes were accounted for by that 6.5%.  Which is also to say that black males (and the JCCJ article is predominantly about black males) account for violent crimes at over five times what you would expect if crime statistics were evenly distributed across all demographic groups (male/female, age, ethnicity, origin, etc.), and almost five times the rate for property crimes.  Remember that crime in general and violent crime in particular is not age-neutral; it skews strongly towards youth.  The numbers for black youth are even more alarming.  I haven’t seen an age-pyramid for black youth, but since birth rates trend negatively with increasing wealth, I’m going to assume that black youth accounts for something north of 13% of all youth.  Let’s assume 18% of all youth is black, making 9% of all youth both male and black.  That 9% of youth accounts for violent youthful offense at a rate 4.78 times their “statistical expectation,” and exactly triple the rate for property crimes.

Thus in point of fact just as a perception of statistical reality, the popular perception that blacks are more prone to commit violent crimes (or even property crimes) would coincide exactly with observable data.  I wish the JCCJ article had broken some of the numbers out in greater detail (alas! there are no hyperlinks in it).  I’d be interested to know what that “percentage of crimes committed by” figure looks like when you add to the question the qualifier “as experienced by members of specific groups.”  Thus, what percentage of violent crimes committed against blacks are committed by other blacks?  And the same question for whites (and East Asians, and South Asians, and Aboriginal Americans, for that matter).  From everything I’ve ever heard, the answer to that question, percentage of black victims of black crime, the number approaches depressingly close to 100%.  Small wonder that blacks might perceive each other to be prone to violence, when almost all the violence they experience is in fact at the hands of their own ethnic group.  And in fact the overwhelming percentage, from everything I’ve heard, of black violent crime in general is directed at other blacks.  Meaning that you’d expect white victims of black crime to be a smaller percentage than that 38%.  This would, again, match everything I’ve ever read, namely that all ethnic groups experience violence principally from members of their own group.  It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the proportion of white victims of black crime were something less than 13%.  So why might whites in general entertain that non-statistically-valid perception (as to themselves only)?  Unfortunately I don’t have hard numbers, but my understanding is that to the extent that whites experience violence from outside their own group, that violence comes nearly exclusively from blacks.  As a matter of logic that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to extrapolate from that data point.  If I’m getting robbed at gun-point, or if a friend of mine has been robbed, what difference does it make what color skin the perp had?  But humans aren’t always the most logical creatures.  As a human child growing up on the playground I’ve probably been bitten by more humans than dogs, if you were to go back and count.  But the one bite of my life I still remember is when the German shepherd sank her teeth into my butt, way back in the early 1970s.

You won’t find much cogitation in that AlterNet.org article along the lines of the preceding paragraph.  What you will find are outright misrepresentations along the lines of, “Remember Zimmerman’s false syllogism?  A few blacks committed burglary, Trayvon was black, therefore Trayvon was a criminal.”  No.  What came out at the trial is that the housing development where Zimmerman lived had specifically been the subject of multiple break-ins, at least some of which George Zimmerman had observed, and at a minimum those which he’d observed had been committed by black males (my understanding is that to the extent the race and sex of the other perps were known at all, it was black and male).  Martin (you remember him; he was the one who was trying to splatter George Zimmerman’s brains onto the sidewalk) was observed by Zimmerman, wandering in the rain, pausing and looking into windows of housing units.  Martin may have been lost or disoriented, or just curious as to what sort of people lived in the place he was visiting.  But from Zimmerman’s perspective it looked like someone casing the joint.  And that’s how he reported it.  Unlike the 911 transcript fraudulently edited by the news networks, it wasn’t Zimmerman who brought up Martin’s skin color.  He didn’t mention skin color until he was specifically asked about it.  The “syllogism” claimed is simply bullshit.

In what she no doubts prides herself on as her demonstration, our author starts with the usual recital of America’s foundations in slavery, and the post-slavery history of violence against blacks committed by whites, in the form of lynching.  [A couple of observations are here in order.  For starts, given the explicitly racist practice of most law enforcement until the 1960s, you have to assume that for most of American history the vast majority of violent crime against blacks, committed by anyone, never made it into the official numbers.  They were sub-humans, so who cared if they were robbed, beaten, murdered, stabbed, raped, etc?  A lynching gets attention; knifing someone in a bar fight over a woman, not so much.  Secondly, given how geographically concentrated the black population was until post-1910, you have to assume that black-on-white crime was vanishingly rare.]

As Gentle Reader might suppose, there are pretty detailed data on lynchings by year, and in fact by race as well.  Here’s a tabulation maintained by the Tuskeegee Institute, for 1882 through 1968.  Not that it matters a hill of beans for this discussion, but you could have won some money off me betting that the number of white victims would have exceeded the number of black victims for any year at all . . . and yet for the first four years that’s exactly what happened.  Look at the total for both races for the 83 years from 1882 until the last recorded, in 1964: 4,742, of whom 3,445 or 72.649% were black.  To put some perspective on it:  That’s only 500 more total victims that the number of race-unknown homicide offenders in 2010 alone (links to FBI and Census Bureau data below), and it’s less than the white offenders for 2010 and less than the black offenders for 2010.  It’s not quite 36.5% of the victims for 2010 alone.  To put some even more distressing perspective on that:  Across the entire Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, not quite 73% of all lynching victims were black; in 2010 alone, 49.78% of all murder victims were black.  Even after a good 15 or more years of dropping violent crime statistics, we’ve got a problem that’s two-thirds as exclusively black as lynching.  Someone remind me again why this isn’t getting more play in the lamestream media.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the number of black lynchers was zero, so you’ve got attribute all of those victims, white and black, to white perps exclusively.  But how many “offenders” were there?  I don’t think it’s appropriate to ask just how many people were actually involved in making the noose, tying the victim, looping the rope over the tree or lamp post, or whatever.  I think you have to attribute some moral guilt to to at least some of those who showed up, even if only out of curiosity.  I have no idea whether anyone has ever even attempted to figure out how many people attended these things.  How many of them drew a large crowd for a small town?  How many of them were just a couple or ten people in the dark of a night?  How many drew a crowd of thousands, as several well-known lynchings did?  So let’s just assume an “average crowd” of 750.  Gentle Reader is reminded how few places in the South during the years when most of the lynchings occurred (out of the 4,742 shown, 2,359 or 49.7469% had occurred by 1896, and 3,179 or 67.03922% had occurred by 1903 — whatever else it was, lynching as a widespread problem was overwhelmingly concentrated in the pre-World War I South, even though other states also knew it; for example, the lynching that prompted the poem “Strange Fruit” went down in Marion, Indiana, and even Minnesota can show at least one, of some circus hands) had other than minuscule populations.  So I don’t think 750 people is an unreasonably small number.  Applying that across 4,742 lynchings produces 3,556,500 “offenders,” and that’s if you consider all attendees equally guilty.  Now let’s ask ourselves how many tens of millions of people were living in the South during those 83 years.  I suppose a statistician could cipher that out, but I’d be amazed if the number was any less than two hundred-plus million.  The 1900 census data show 18,975,665 people living in the eleven states that had seceded, out of total population of 76,212,168; that’s 24.89847% of the gross.  In 1900 there were 115 lynchings.  Even if you assume an average crowd of 1,000 per, (and I think that’s a grotesque over-estimate) and even if you attribute all lynchings to those states, that gets you to 115,000 people or slightly over six-tenths of one percent of the gross population.  And yet we have tripe (on AlterNet.org, no less), such as the bilge I defenestrated here, in which the entire South is lumped into a single, seething, bloodthirsty mass.  Remind me again why this ahistorical bullshit is considered insightful analysis, and yet it’s conclusive evidence of racism! when popular perceptions of the prevalence of violence match observable statistics.

Just as an exercise, I spent some time looking for data on homicides, age, race, and total population.  I also looked for data on mass killings (most things I’ve run across define a “mass killing” as one where there are more than three victims in the same (e.g. Oklahoma City) or a closely-related sequence of killings (e.g. Virginia Tech)).  I also tried to tie the data I found to the same year, since things can change radically and very quickly.  Remember that 2007 data above?  Well, the one thing that’s been happening in the past six years is that violent crime of all kinds, and so far as I know, across all groups, has plummeted.  So even if a particular group X is “more disposed to violent crime than statistically predicted,” over the last six years they’ve got significantly less disposed to it.  In order not to spend more time than I have, I confined what I was looking at to homicide, since it’s the hardest to conceal and the most likely to be pretty fully reported.  I settled on the year 2010 so I could use the 2010 census data, available here.  The FBI has homicide data, both as to victims and perps, by age and race, here.  Finally, I couldn’t seem to find “official” numbers on mass killings, but Mother Jones has a tabulation on “US Mass Shootings, 1982-2012.”

A couple of cautionary notes about the data.  The census bureau reports, for racial self-identification, not only single-race responses but multiple-race responses.  The distinction can be significant when you’re talking about a gross population, as of Census Day 2010, of 308,745,538.  A total of 38,929,319 self-identified as black only.  That’s 12.60887% of the gross population.  But 42,020,743 self-identified as black-alone-or-in-combination.  That’s 13.610% of the population.  Unfortunately I could not find age distribution data for the 3,091,424 who self-identified as black-and-something-else, so I had to apply the percentage distributions of the age brackets reported to the larger number.  That requires some assumptions about birth patterns for which I have no support in the data I could find.  Secondly, there is a large difference in the FBI’s data between homicide victims (12,996) and homicide offenders (15,094).  On the other hand that’s logical because killing someone is a sufficiently egregious act that for a not insignificant number of perps it’s not something they’ve got the guts to do alone.  Additionally, while data is pretty comprehensive on the sex, race, and age of the victims (e.g., out of the 12,996, only 152 or just over 1% are shown as age-unknown), you’ve got to bear in mind that out of the 15,094 perps, 4,224 are shown as race-unknown; that’s 27.98% of the total.  There is enormous room for conclusions to move.  Just by way of extreme example, if you attribute all those unknowns to whites, you get 60.11% of homicides done by whites; if you attribute 13.61% of them (575) to blacks, you get 6,345 done by blacks, or 42.04% of the total.  In addition to Mother Jones’s data being non-verified (although they’ve got zero reason to understate any of it, with their known political/policy affinities), it’s only mass shootings, which is of course a subset of mass killings.  So it’s not complete (see Oklahoma City and its 168 dead); on the other hand, it’s jolly hard to kill more than one person with a knife, baseball bat, or claw hammer (by the way, although not relevant to our current discussion, Gentle Reader ought also bear in mind that blunt instruments are used to kill more people each year in the U.S. than firearms of all kinds), so any discrepancies are unlikely to be very large.

With all that in front of us, let’s look at the data.  First raw numbers.  Of the 15,094 homicide perps, 5,770 were black (more ominously, of the 12,996 victims, 6,470 were black, a catastrophic 49.78%, and for the age brackets between 17 and 39, blacks made up over 50% of the victims in every stinkin’ one of them), which is 38.23% of the total.  Whites, by the way, accounted for 32.13% (please to remember the race-unknowns, Best Beloved).  The overwhelming majority of all perps for whom sex is known were male (ex: of the 20-24 perps, 2,546 total, 2,315 of them were male, 90.93%; the divide hovers around 90% male for every single age bracket).  So our first conclusion stares us in the face:  If you want to be afraid of someone killing you, be afraid of a generic male.  If you want to assume that someone is violent, assume it’s a male.

But everyone (except perhaps the people who write for, and read, AlterNet.org) realizes that homicide is not evenly distributed across age, either.  For both white and black, it’s massively concentrated in the ages 15-40.  Let’s look:  For whites, 66.23% of their total (4,849) is accounted for in the 17 to 39 age brackets; for blacks the number is very similar: 72.65%.  Second conclusion:  If you’re going to be frightened of a putative murderer, don’t imagine him with a whole lot of gray hair.  By the way, it appears that whites remain more violent longer than their black age cohort.  The last black age bracket showing more than 100 perps is 50-54 (129); whites keep killing a full decade longer, until the 60-64 bracket (112).

Knowing that we’re discussing a perception issue here, and further knowing that whatever we perceive to be the level of violence associated with either race (high, medium, low), our perception is going to have to be grounded in reality, to the extent it is at all, in the data for males ages 15-40 of both groups.  So let’s see how that shakes out.  Applying the age bracket proportions for black-only to the black-alone-or-in-combination figure produces a total of 7,670,023 males in the 15-39 age range, which works out to be 2.48425% of the 308,745,538 gross population.  Now let’s compare that to the percentage of homicide offenders in the 17-39 age range (the FBI’s next lower age bracket is 13-16, and among blacks they account for only 265 of the 15,094, so I feel comfortable ignoring them here).  The black 17-39 age range accounts for 4,192 of the 15,094 homicide offenders, or 27.77% of the total.  Let’s juxtapose that even closer:  2.48% of the population is accounting for 27.77% of the killers, more than ten times their “statistical expectancy.”

In the interest of comparison, using the same extrapolation of age brackets for white-only to white-in-combination produces 37,210,162 white males age 15-39, or 12.052% of the gross population.  White homicide offenders in the 17-39 age range account for 3,212 of the 15,094 offenders, or 21.280% of the total.  Again the side-by-side:  12.05% of the population is accounting for 21.28% of the killers, not quite twice their “statistical expectancy.”

So as to both racial groups, their young males are statistically over-represented among killers, with the degree of over-representation being about five times higher among blacks.  A further point of commonality is that among that 17-39 range, the bulk of the killers are concentrated in the 17-29 range and the deadliest single bracket is 20-24.  For both races you’ve still got guys committing murder into their 30s, but they’ve started to taper off (most likely because they’ve been caught and are in the criminal justice system somewhere).  A point of distinction, however, is how much of each group’s race-in-combination population total is represented by that age range.  Among blacks, 1.852% is represented by males ages 18-19; for whites the figure is 1.381%, a full 25.4% less.  For 20-year-olds the numbers are 0.8943% and 0.6887% respectively, 22.99% less for white males.  In that deadliest, 20-24 bracket, the percentages are 3.95632% for blacks and 3.31933% for whites, a drop of 16.1%.  In other words, in 2010 a greater proportion of blacks were concentrated in the age and sex group most likely to become homicide offenders.  The black population is both younger and in the highest-risk group more heavily male.  That’s going to skew the numbers somewhat.

And at this point we run out of the purely numeric and shade into the concept of the “reasonable.”  Is it unreasonable, when two groups are both prone to excessive behavior on any scale, but one group is five times further out on that scale, that popular perception — unscientific as it always will be — will still reflect that?  Would it be unreasonable for someone to conclude that, all else being equal, blacks make better athletes, when the four data points are proportions of black males versus white males in the NBA and the NFL?  You can debate all damned day long about the why it should be so, but to argue that it’s not so is just damned foolish.

But Miss AlterNet.org isn’t arguing that.  She’s not arguing that blacks overall or black males in particular are not statistically more prone to acts of violence than whites.  She’s not impugning the numbers; she impugning the perceptions.  She’s arguing that because the “most horrific” crimes are committed by whites, and we (as a country) don’t perceive whites in general to be disproportionately violent, that’s evidence that we’re all racists.  Let’s tee up Mother Jones, bearing in mind my caveats above.  Looking broadly at their spreadsheet, it rapidly becomes apparent that mass shootings are (i) predominantly a white phenomenon, (ii) overwhelmingly a white male phenomenon, and (iii) by and large a crazy white male phenomenon.  But let’s look at just the numbers, ma’am.  In 2010, out of 12,996 homicide victims, we’ve got . . . 9 killed in a mass shooting.  That’s not quite seven-one-hundredths of one percent of the total.  I went back and added up all the mass shooting fatalities (Mother Jones gives numbers of wounded as well, by the way) since 1993, added in the 168 of Oklahoma City (but excluded the 3,000+ of September 11) and came up with . . . 588.  Thus, if you go back a full 21 years, you get 4.5245% of one year’s total homicides in the form of crazy white males shooting the place up or blowing up entire buildings.

Let’s go back to our observations about reasonableness.  Sandy Koufax was one of the all-time greats.  Hall of Famer.  Is it reasonable to conclude from his success that Jews make great athletes?  Or how about Croatians?  There are some very good Croatian basketball players, including some as play successfully in the NBA, and they routinely field outstanding teams in international competition.  So we know they make some damned fine basketball players there.  But how reasonable is the conclusion that “Croatians make great athletes” relative to the conclusion “blacks make great athletes,” based solely upon the data point of how many of each are playing in the NBA?  Let’s see . . . the NBA is . .. gosh . . . I don’t know (Wikipedia.org to the rescue: according to them in 2011 the NBA was 78% black and 17% white), really heavily black.  In fact, five times 17% works out to 85%, not much more than 78%.  Huh.

Gentle Reader will tax me with a false equivalence.  The make-up of the NBA and the perception of crime statistics are not the same thing.  Well, yes and no.  Where they both are similar is that both (i) are highly unrepresentative snap-shots of very large population groups, and yet  (ii) are highly visible markers which are flung in our faces remorselessly, and further (iii) represent the extreme point on their respective behavioral spectrum.  To illustrate the first point:  There were 7,670,023 black males in 2010 in the 15-39 age range.  Out of most of that number (17-39) they produced all of 4,192 known homicide offenders, and even if you attribute all the race-unknowns to black males ages 17-39, you get every bit of 9,962 offenders, or 0.12988% of the total in that age range.  Just over one-eighth of a percent of all black males turned out to be killers that year.  Meaning almost ninety-nine and seven-eighths didn’t.  Bearing in mind that even in the 24-hour news cycle there’s exactly X amount of information that can be put out, how reasonable is it to expect that news of a homicide is not going to get pretty good billing?  Although I’ve not crunched the numbers on other crimes of violence or property crimes, is it reasonable or unreasonable to expect that an armed robbery is going to be covered rather than an apartment that got broken into and a computer and some stereo equipment got stolen?  Finally, if killing is the ultimate crime, you must recognize that playing in the NBA is the ultimate in basketball athleticism.

So while it is entirely statistically defensible to state the conclusion “blacks are more likely to be killers than whites,” it’s not only statistically not supportable but morally reprehensible to conclude “blacks are likely to be killers” because neither group is very likely at all to be killers.  Neither.  But remember Mlle AlterNet.org isn’t about facts; she’s about perceptions.  If most Americans get their information, to the extent they get any, from television, and if television portrays only the most egregious events as “news,” and if any particular group X is in fact, undeniable, count-it-up-and-do-the-math fact, vastly disproportionately over-represented in any particular egregious behavior, precisely how is it that you expect such perceptions not to be awakened?  If all I’m shown is X with a smattering of Y thrown in, upon what basis do you conclude that I’m wicked for concluding, “X”?

Yet Mlle AlterNet.org wants me to be a bigot for thinking, “You know, maybe X.”  This passes for thinking nowadays, it seems.  I notice that she is identified as a “legal analyst.”  Good for her, because she’s a lousy statistical analyst.

. . . You arrive at Iowahawk’s formulation:  Colleges are hotbeds of rape and racism that everyone should attend.

Of the two sets of accusations, the one that doesn’t really concern me is the “racism!” screech.  If Dear Leader and his fawning acolytes in the lamestream media have accomplished one single useful thing in the past six years, it’s having so cheapened the “racism!” ejaculation that pretty much everyone now recognizes it as meaningless.  When everything is racist, then nothing is.  If you want to see genuine “racism” in action, you can watch what’s going on in the Ukraine between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.

The development that concerns me more is the system of kangaroo courts that are even now being set up on campuses across the country, all under ukase from the Holder DOJ.  For those who haven’t been following it, the federal government is now mandating, more or less openly, that colleges address accusations of rape on campus not through careful preservation of crime scenes and other physical evidence until the police (you know, those folks who not infrequently have entire teams of people with specialized training in investigating sexual crimes) get there, but rather through a system of “discipline” that seems designed to do little more than make college administrators (and federal bureaucrats) feel good about themselves.

In truth, these panels and how they operate are easily recognized by anyone who has read his Solzhenitsyn.  They’re neither more nor less than the Cheka’s revolutionary tribunals or the OSO administrative sentencing system (most people sent to GuLAG were sentenced by OSO, and not by others of the organs).  From the linked article over at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E; if you’re looking for a worthy object for your charitable giving, you could do a very great deal worse than these folks):

“Foremost among the demands since 2011 is that colleges use the ‘preponderance of the evidence’” standard of proof for adjudicating sexual misconduct accusations — a 50.01 percent likelihood standard that is our nation’s lowest. (In real courts, rape must be proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ a 98-99 percent likelihood standard.)

This low standard is then used in a disciplinary procedure where students nearly always lack lawyers, no legally trained judge oversees the process, testimony is not under oath, hearsay is freely considered, relevant evidence or even proper notice of the charges may not be given to both parties, students may be forced to incriminate themselves, and whatever ‘jury’ is empaneled may not be of one’s peers.

The task force report from Tuesday actually encourages colleges to make this situation worse. Perhaps recognizing that college hearings are delivering shoddy justice, the task force speaks highly of moving to a ‘single investigator’ model that would entirely dispense with niceties like ‘hearings’ or ‘the ability to face one’s accuser’ by appointing one administrator to act as detective, judge, and jury for campus crimes.”

And that’s just the lousy deal for the guy wrongly accused.  Not mentioned but nearly as objectionable is that the college’s ham-fisted treatment of the case may well irretrievably compromise what otherwise might be a successful criminal prosecution of a genuine rapist.  Remember that state universities are state agencies, their actions can be attributed to the state, and to the extent their functionaries are delegated police powers, you raise all manner of constitutional concerns about how they conduct themselves.  Those constitutional violations — and they will occur, and be legion (hell, colleges nowadays can’t even get the First Amendment right, what with stunts like disciplining students for passing out . . . copies of the Constitution) — are going to create legally cognizable problems for the actual law enforcement agencies when they actually do catch someone who actually has committed a rape that they otherwise could actually prove up beyond a reasonable doubt.  In short, they’ll manage to kick the rapist out of school, but he’ll still be on the street, looking for his next victim.

But none of that matters, though, does it?  Because our administrators can pat themselves on the back and loudly proclaim how tough they are on sexual misbehavior.  And that’s what matters, that educrats feel good about themselves.  That next victim, when he finds her?  She’s just collateral damage, and besides, she may not even be a student.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have three boys.  The oldest is seven years from college (assuming he goes).  Given the half-life of stupid ideas, it’s more or less a certainty that these lynch-mob Chekist systems are going to be still going strong when my boys go to college.  I’d like them to be able to enjoy the experience without having to adopt the survival habits of the zeks.  But this system may as well have been purposely designed for abuse, if not outright extortion.  Remember we’re dealing with the Laws of Very Large Numbers.  How many tens of millions of college students are there at any given time?  Now that a majority of them are female, how many millions of female college students does that work out to be?  By that time it will have been impressed on the female student body over the course of years that if you want to get rid of a male you don’t particularly care for (whether for personal or political reasons, or just because you can, because you’re looking for a scalp) all you have to do is engineer a bogus accusation of sexual assault and you will not only have blown up his college attendance, but you will have ruined his life (job interviewer: Why did you change colleges?  job candidate: Errmmmm, ahem, I, uh, just decided to.  interviewer: I see.).

Any system that is set up to be easily abused will be abused.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about tax loopholes, government benefits, military supply contracts, absentee voting, political police-state enforcement, or sexual conduct enforcement on college campuses.  When you spread that sort of opportunity before a sufficiently large population, abuse will occur and it will tend to become systemic as the abusers are seen to profit from it (Hayek’s chapter on “Why the Worst Get on Top” in The Road to Serfdom is a good illustration of the phenomenon in a different context).

I feel as though it’s 1937, and I’m watching my boys get ready fill out their applications to join the Komsomol (the leadership of which was shot, several times over, during the purges, and huge numbers of whose members fetched up in the camps).

. . . When management airily assumed 8-9% annual rates of return on investment to fund its benefit obligations.  Excuse me, that’s Old General Motors, the one that soaked up several billions in outright taxpayers’ money (and was stolen from its creditors to be handed to the UAW in payoff for its electoral support), as well as about $16 billion worth of tax subsidy created by rifle-shot in the tax code (fuller details here).

Mayor De Blasio has presented his first city budget to the New York City council.  In true leftist fashion, he “balances” it by grinding his seed-corn, specifically reserves left from Bloomberg’s tenure.  I don’t carry a brief for li’l Nanny Bloomberg, but you have to give some sort of respect to a mayor who can squire a city through the upheavals of the September 11 aftermath, the implosion of the industry whose epicenter it is (the financial services industry), as well as five-plus years of general economy-wide decline and stagnation . . . and leave his successor a surplus at the end of the day.

I know that De Blasio is too “progressive” (he used the word something like five times in his presentation) to look back for reactionary purposes like seeing how his notions have played out for others who tried them.  He really ought, I suggest, to ponder the lessons of the Holodomor.  When Stalin announced compulsory collectivization, the peasants did the only thing they could to get at least some benefit from their generations’ toil.  They slaughtered and ate their livestock.  Then came the requisitioning commissions, and they took everything, leaving nothing even to plant for the next season.  How’d that work out?  Read about it, if you have the stomach, here.  Or here.

Also in true leftist fashion, he cranks up spending by 6% while “paying” for it from fantastical assumptions about unknown future revenues and unspecified, unenforceable “promises” from the city’s unions to cut healthcare spending — in the future, of course — by $3.4 billion.  Without any premium increases passed on to the rank-and-file.  This is in a world of “Affordable” Care Act plans the uniform feature of which is they cost fabulously more than what they’ve (compulsorily) replaced, because they’re mandated to cover a smorgasbord of benefits that earlier plans typically didn’t.  Like maternity care for 63-year-old males.  We are told not to worry, though, because if the unions don’t voluntarily comply with that pie-in-the-sky $3.4 billion promise, the cuts are going to happen forcibly.  Actually, the article’s paraphrase of De Blasio’s promise to respect them in the morning is “the city reserved the right to enforce some of the terms.”  Some; get it?

Left unmentioned is how they’re going to fit any of the “Affordable” Care Act’s Cadillac-plan tax burden into that $3.4 billion savings.  Dear Leader can utter executive orders all day long, but unless Congress actually chops that provision from the statute, eventually a large number of those union plans are going to get popped, and hard.  At which point they’ll discover something that the rest of us have long since figured out:  Taxes like that work out to be dead-weight losses.

The provision of the budget that really makes my head spin, however, is the bit about the hand-outs to unions (only the teachers are specifically mentioned, but there may be more).  They’re going to get — pay attention closely — retroactive pay increases.  That’s right; their contracts said they’d get paid $X.  They got paid $X.  Their contracts had expired, and they continued to get paid $X.  But now, after the fact and for no additional performance of any nature, they’re going to get paid $X+Y.  Of course, the teachers union vigorously supported Comrade De Blasio in his campaigns.  But This is Not a Payoff of Money for Votes, you understand?  No!!  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And while the teachers are going to get their money up front — while the Bloomberg surplus lasts, at least — “Much of the cost of retroactive pay for city teachers would not to be paid until the last years of Mr. de Blasio’s theoretical second term.”  Hand the money over now; figure out where it’s coming from eight years from now.  Because we’ve got “more ‘accurate’ forecasting,” you see, so we know what the world, national, and local economies are going to be doing eight years from now.  Eight.  Years.  From.  Today.  You heard it there first, people; the city government of New York City is officially basing its long-range financial commitments on possession of a crystal ball.

On a final note, there’s a line in there about adding in $20 million for “student aid” programs at City University of New York.  For those who don’t recall, CUNY’s original mandate was to provide free or very-low-cost quality higher education to the city’s less-well-off.  For years it did pretty much exactly that.  Oh sure, it’s had its moments of comedy, such as Leonard Jeffries, but by and large it did what it was supposed to, and for many students did an outstanding job.  Those days appear to be ending, if they’re not already over.

Now CUNY is morphing into a comfy slush fund for sinecures, place-men, and political payoffs.  Recently former Enron advisor and populist mountebank Paul Krugman got hired by CUNY to . . . well, that’s the point.  For his entire first year he’s been hired to do pretty much nothing.  Thereafter, he’s obliged to do only nearly nothing.  And for this he’s getting a base salary of $225,000 per year (with summers off, thereby increasing the annualized lick to an even $300,000), plus $10,000 for “expenses.”  So that’s $235,000 (plus payroll taxes, plus other benefits) cash out the door, each year.  Which means that over 1% of that $20 million in “student aid” is actually going to one man.  Who has been hired to do as close to nothing as you can imagine.

This is progress, folks, with a vengeance.