Walter Williams

September 4, 2019 4:59 PM EDT

John Paul Wright, professor at University of Cincinnati, and Matthew DeLisi professor at Iowa State University have penned a powerful article titled “What Criminologists Don't Say, and Why,” in City Journal, Summer 2017. There is significant bias among criminologists. The reason for that bias is that political leanings of academic criminologists are liberal. Liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 30-to-1. Ideology almost perfectly predicts the position of criminologists on issues from gun control to capital punishment too harsh sentencing. Liberal criminologists march in step for gun control, oppose punitive prison sentences and are vehemently against the death penalty.

In 2012, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned a study on the growth of incarceration. It showed that from 1928 until 1960, crime rates rose slowly each year. After the 1960s, crime rates exploded to unprecedented levels of violence until the 1990s. Prior to 1980, only 40% of individuals arrested for murder were sentenced to prison and those that were served an average of five years. In 1981, less than 10% of those arrested for sexual assault was sentenced to prison. Those who were sentenced served an average of 3.4 years. Liberal criminologists probably believe that light sentencing for murderers and rapists is just.

If criminologists have the guts to even talk about a race-crime connection, it's behind closed doors and in guarded language. Any discussion about race and crime sets one up for accusations of racism and that can mean the destruction of one's professional career. Wright and DeLisi say that liberal criminologists avoid discussing even explicit racist examples of black-on-white crime such as flash-mob assaults, “polar bear hunting” and the “knockout game.” These are cases where black youth seek out white people to physically attack.
According to Wright and DeLisi: "Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks." That means the primary victims of black crime are other black people. In more than 90% of homicides, for example, both the victim and the perpetrator are black.
Between 1991 and 2017, the nationwide violent crime rate fell from 758 cases to 382 cases per 100,000 people. Despite the evidence that higher incarceration reduces crime rates, many criminologists argue that “mass incarceration” has actually “took minority men out of their neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities.” Wright and DeLisi say that “Such claims could seem plausible only if one believes — contrary to evidence and common sense — that career criminals contribute positively to their neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors.”

Crime is a major problem for the black community. But in addition to incarcerating those who prey on the black community, what can be done? The answer is easy, though implementation poses a challenge. We should re-adopt the values and practices of our ancestors. Black families of yesteryear were mainly two-parent and stable, even during slavery. Black people didn't tolerate property destruction. There were few school fights. Disrespect and assaults on teachers were virtually unknown. These are now all too common. The strong character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from emancipation to today. Find a 70-, 80- or 90-year-old black person and ask him whether today's conduct among black youth would have been tolerated yesteryear. I guarantee you that no will be their answer.

Global Warming Hoax

Sunday, August 25, 2019

The Iconic Image of the Global Warming Movement Is a Fraud

Global warming alarmist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University has lost his multimillion dollar libel suit in British Columbia. Not only did he lose, the suit was thrown out and Mann was ordered to pay defendant Dr. Tim Ball's legal costs. The judge threw out the case "with prejudice" meaning Mann cannot not refile it. Details here.

This is a huge victory for honesty and ethics in science.

Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely the MSM will cover Dr. Mann's loss in court and its implications for the global warming movement. So, I have put together this background posting to explain what this means. It will be the lead story on the blog the rest of today and Monday.

Dr. Ball was sued because he said, of Dr. Mann's seminal "hockey stick" work, "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn State." While others came to the same conclusion about the hockey stick, Mann sued Ball for libel. After eight years, Mann refused to provide a single document under the court-ordered discovery. It is now reasonable to conclude "the hockey stick" (HS) was a fraud. This is vitally important because it was the HS that directly led to the Nobel Prize for Al Gore and United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the major tenets of the catastrophic global movement has been falsified.

Here is the backstory...

In 1999, the world was stunned when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published on the cover of its then-latest report the illustration below. It came to be 
Mann's graph from the ilustration from the
 cover of the 1999 IPCC Reportknown as "the hockey stick." It was a breathtaking piece of science: it showed there was no Medieval Warm Period (~900-1300 AD) and that contemporary temperatures are far higher than anything mankind has previously experienced.

The hockey stick was featured in just about every newspaper, on every newscast, in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and throughout the scientific community.

It was almost certainly a fraud. 

And, it was scientifically wrong in two ways:

1) The temperature reconstruction for the period from 1000 AD to about 1890 AD was based on tree bark from a number of bristlecone pines that, according to Mann, accurately reflected the temperatures experienced by the tree (a questionable assumption but I will not go into that here). But, there was a huge problem: the bristlecones showed world temperatures declining in the 20th Century!

As Steve McIntyre tirelessly labored to demonstrate (and, he is the person that deserves a Nobel Prize!), Mann's (and Keith Briffa's) data showed temperatures declining in the 20th Century.
Orange line shows 20th Century temperatures declining
in the bristlecone bark data.
From: climateaudit.orgOf course, we had thermometers in the 20th Century and it wouldn't do for the bristlecone data's (BD) credibility to show falling temperatures during the period when global warming activists wanted to show a rapid rise. So, Mann used a "trick" where he decided to "hide the [bristlecone data] decline." He did so by splicing the contemporary thermometer data onto the bristlecone data and deleting the BD after the vertex. Below is one of the key Climategate emails. "Nature" refers to Mann's paper published in Nature.
One of the key Climategate emailsFrom Mcintyre, here is a reconstruction of all of the pertinent data. The BD is pink. Mann deleted the bristlecone data around

year 1500 and the most recent data showing the declining temperatures. In place of the declining contemporary temperatures, he spliced in (in black) the thermometer record. This was known as "hiding the decline."

2) When one fed even random data into Mann's Excel program:
...a couple of Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, found that when they ran simulations of “red noise” random principal components data into Mann’s reconstruction model, 99% of the time it produced the same hockey stick pattern. 

Not only did Mann create this scientific fraud, Climategate revealed him conspiring with Britain's Dr. Phil Jones to reject meritorious papers that cast doubt on catastrophic global warming so as to keep those papers out of the scientific journals. A quote from the Climategate emails:

We “will keep them [papers with differing conclusions] out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which is why global warming alarmists always ask the question, "Has [whomever] published in the peer-reviewed climate journals?" They know they have gamed the process and it is highly unlikely radically opposing viewpoints will be published. Renowned climate scientist, Dr. Judith Curry, recently had a paper rejected. One of the reviewers wrote:

“Overall, there is the danger that the paper is used by unscrupulous people to create confusion or to discredit climate or sea-level science. Hence, I suggest that the author reconsiders the essence of its contribution to the scientific debate on climate and sea-level science.”

Please note: the above rejection had nothing to do with the scientific merit of the paper. It had to do with -- gasp -- casting doubt on the "consensus." Remember: The huge monies that flow into climate study only continue to flow if there is a real or manufactured catastrophe.

So, where are we?

The hockey stick was the major piece of evidence that current temperatures are unprecedented in human history. They likely are not. Temperatures today appear to be similar during the Medieval Warm Period and even warmer during the Roman Optimum (when Jesus walked the earth).

Because those periods were equal to or warmer than today, it calls into question just how much of today's warming is due to CO2 emissions. Mother Nature is apparently able to create current temperature levels on her own.

Still,

There is no question temperatures are significantly warmer today than they were 100 years ago or even 40 years ago. 

Sea level will continue to rise (if temperatures continue to rise). That will, over decades, eventually flood low-lying coastal areas and will worsen the storm surge from major storms. 

While warming eventually may be a (net) plus as parts of Canada and Russia open for farming, there will be some agricultural disruption due to changing temperature patterns.

It makes sense to move to second and third generation nuclear (along with nuclear fusion, if and when available) for power generation. That will lessen emissions of greenhouse gas while allowing inexpensive energy to continue to lift the poor out of poverty. 

In other ways, when it makes economic sense, we should cut greenhouse gases. 

So, while global warming is real and a problem, the scientific case for catastrophic global warming continues to weaken (see new paper, here).

ADDITION, 1:50p Sunday:
To clarify the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) issue, here are the two versions of the climate history of the last thousand years.

Until the hockey stick, the MWP was generally accepted science. The HS is wrong not only because of it eliminating the warm period, it also does not show the Little Ice Age which obviously occurred. As one climate scientist was quoted as saying, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." The HS certainly accomplished that goal. 

Mass Shootings

1. Minimize gun free zones. Over 95% of mass shootings in the United States are in gun free zones.

2. The whole of “mental health professionals” and their schools should be class actioned for inflicting all of the nutso whack jobs on the rest of us. Most of the mass shooters have histories of mental illnesses. These nuts cannot be drugged into sanity. They are put into society by shrinks with little if any supervision and everyone is so suprised that they snap and kill groups of citizens.

Reparations

By Walter E. Williams | June 27, 2019 9:43 PM EDT

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for Americans to make reparations for slavery. On June 19, the House judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice.”

Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it's a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.

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Let's pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There's the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites -- who were a majority of Southern whites -- should their descendants be made to pay reparations?

Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.

The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I'd like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.

D Day

 As a young Airman in 1966 I was honored to accompany the Color Guard for D Day commemoration services at the resting places for   some of the Americans that lost their lives that day.  It was a moving and life changing experience.

May they find comfort in the arms of Angels...

Wise Man

https://youtu.be/MRpEV2tmYz4

Earth is not Fragile

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By Walter E. Williams | March 6, 2019 12:59 PM EST

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' highest award.

Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation's youth from kindergarten through college. That's why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
Let's examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That's the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the "Year Without a Summer." It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions — Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) — spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind's activities during our entire history.
Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile's 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China's Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.
Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there's the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it's the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia's Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there's the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.

My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature's destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.
Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”