Bill Bennett Races to Judgment

The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday:

... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

The belief that a particular race is more prone to criminality is often based on rates of incarceration, such as a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that blacks have an 18.6 percent lifetime chance of being incarcerated, compared to 10 percent for Hispanics and 3.4 percent for whites.

Judging this solely on the basis of current incarceration is both extremely ugly and misleading. Other contributory factors are ignored, such as a 2004 poverty rate for blacks that's 24.7 percent, three times as high as that for whites, and the fact that minorities are significantly more likely to be arrested and convicted than whites who commit the same offenses.

There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.

Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

By choosing to make this about race and single out blacks, Bennett engaged in one of the uglier examples of race baiting I've heard from a national radio host, even though he tried to qualify his thoughts by admitting they were "morally reprehensible." I hope he has the decency to offer a full apology.

Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award, defends Bennett on TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for his suspension.

Radio · Politics · 2005/09/29 · 54 COMMENTS · Link

Your Deadline Or Your Life

Computer book author Dave Prochnow rode out Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and risked his family's life so he could FedEx a manuscript:

Getting to the highway involved doing things that you would never ever do with kids in a car -- driving off the road, driving through people's yards, and driving over power lines. Yes, we had to drive over power lines. Luckily at least one of them was dead -- that was the one that just touched our roof antenna. Gulp.

Generalizing wildly from his personal experience, Prochnow scolds the media for exaggerating the damage of the storm, telling people to "believe your own eyes, not the one-eyed, myopic media."

He's lucky to have survived two mistakes that often proven fatal: Riding out a strong hurricane and driving over power lines.

Rafe Colburn relates another story of people driving around in the eye of Hurricane Rita. Downed power lines are incredibly dangerous, carrying up to 26,000 volts of electricity.

One thing I tell people about computer book authors, after working in the profession for eight years, is that we're not always the most lucid people in the world. When you work alone on technical documentation in your home for years, getting a majority of your information and social companionship from talk radio and the Internet, you can easily reach a point where Travis Bickle starts to make a lot of sense.

Choosing to drive over power lines with your kids in the car, just so you make dead on PSP Hacks, Mods, and Expansions, may be the most insane decision to come from one of us since Ed Yourdon predicted the Y2K bug would cause the collapse of civilization.

Hurricane Katrina · Publishing · 2005/09/26 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Tim Russert Presses Aaron Broussard

Tim Russert used Meet the Press this weekend to teach Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard a lesson -- the next time New Orleans is destroyed by flood, he should be more factual during his emotional breakdowns.

Russert played back Broussard's last interview on the show, in which he related a gut-wrenching story about the death of a colleague's mother in a nursing home after the storm.

True to form, Russert didn't have the spine to accuse Broussard directly of being wrong. He quoted bloggers:

... it's important I think ... that our viewers see that again because MSNBC and other blog organizations have looked into the facts behind your comments and these are the conclusions, and I'll read it for you and our viewers. It says: "An emotional moment and a misunderstanding. Since the broadcast of the interview, which elevated Broussard to national prominence, a number of bloggers have questioned the validity of Broussard's story. ...

Subsequent reporting identified the man whom Broussard was referring to in the Meet the Press interview as Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency services director. Contacted on Friday by MSNBC.com, Rodrigue acknowledged that his 92-year-old mother and more than 30 other people died in the St. Rita nursing home. They had not been evacuated and the flood waters overtook the residence.

The chronology of the phone calls described by Broussard came under particular scrutiny by bloggers.

It's possible that Broussard was intentionally lying, as all-knowing conservative bloggers have been claiming for days, but I believe it's far more likely he was simply exhausted, traumatized, and didn't have the full story at his disposal.

Rather than being chastened by Russert, Broussard had a message for the Internet's fact-checking asses:

Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn't a box of Cheerios they buried last week.

Hurricane Katrina · Journalism · Politics · 2005/09/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Breaking News Coverage on Wikipedia Takes Flight

As I write this, a JetBlue Airways plane carrying 140 passengers is preparing for an emergency landing in Los Angeles.

The incident has been in the JetBlue entry of Wikipedia for more than an hour:

On 21 September 2005 at 7:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, the New York Times reported that JetBlue Airways Flight 292 was in the process of dumping fuel in preparation for an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport following a failure of the front landing gear during retraction.

When I majored in journalism, I don't recall any of my professors preparing me to compete with encyclopedias on breaking news.

Journalism · Wikipedia · 2005/09/21 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Don Feder Works in Mysterious Ways

Former syndicated columnist Don Feder, a well-known conservative writing for the Boston Herald from 1983-2002, believes that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath, and he has run the numbers to prove it:

Katrina hit New Orleans one week to the day after the Sharon government carried out the forced removal of some 9,500 Jewish residents of Gaza and parts of Samaria. ... 9,500 Jews were driven from Gaza. Most are still homeless. Roughly half-a-million Americans were displaced by Katrina. Based on America's population ratio with Israel (about 50-to-1) this is roughly equivalent.

Numerology is important in traditional Judaism. Each Hebrew letter is assigned a number value. Many scholars believe the Bible has hidden codes that can be unlocked by this device. Written in Hebrew, Katrina has a numerical equivalent of 374. There are two relevant passages that share this number -- "They did unto thee evil" (Genesis, 50:17) and "The sea upon land" (Exodus 14:15).

By an amazing coincidence, Feder's biblical and numerological analysis has discovered that God's angry about exactly the same things that bother him: Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, same-sex marriage, the Pledge of Allegance decision, and the annual gay pride festival on Bourbon Street:

Katrina hit New Orleans days before the scheduled Southern Decadence â€" an annual ---- celebrating alternative death-styles, characterized by nudity and public copulation. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, welcomed the freak-fest with the following proclamation: "There is no place like this on Earth! Southern Decadence XXXII is an exciting event. We welcome you and know that you can anticipate great food, great music and great times in New Orleans." Not to mention great sodomy.

Of all the reasons put forward for why God destroyed New Orleans, this has to be the most theologically curious. Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, one day before Southern Decadence was scheduled to bring 100,000 celebrants to the city for a week of gay pride. None of them had arrived because of flight cancellations and evacuation orders in advance of the storm.

Hurricane Katrina · Politics · 2005/09/21 · 59 COMMENTS · Link

Displaying XML Data with PHP

I recently finished writing Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, the fourth edition of an introductory book for Java programmers, which comes out in around two weeks.

I've been given wide editorial license with the book, so it contains unusual projects like Lottorobics, a lottery simulation applet that demonstrates why "Win the Lotto" is a terrible retirement plan.

The new edition adds chapters on XML and XML-RPC that use XOM and Apache XML-RPC, two great open source class libraries for Java. Programming projects in these chapters enable user lottery results to be tracked -- the applet sends the data to an XML-RPC server, which stores them in an XML file. In the years I've been offering the applet, users have won the lottery once in 4,877 simulated years of playing at a cost of $5.4 million dollars.

I wanted to display this lottery data on the web using PHP, so I've adapted some code for this purpose. The first release of the code, which I'm offering under the open source GNU Public License, shows how to read simple XML data with PHP.

If you do anything interesting with the code, and you don't mind releasing your work under the GPL, I'd like to add a few more sample programs to this project.

Java · Php · Programming · Publishing · 2005/09/21 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Tropical Storm Rita Heads to Keys

Tropical Storm Rita, likely to become a category 1 or category 2 hurricane by the time it reaches Key West tomorrow, is projected to move into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will find plenty of hot water to build strength.

Meteorological alarmist Jeff Masters offers this advice:

The entire stretch of coast from 500 miles south of Brownsville, Texas to Mobile, Alabama is at risk -- no one can say with any confidence where Rita will hit this far in advance. Texas and Louisiana are at the highest risk. The current model trend is to recurve Rita earlier and earlier, so residents from Corpus Christi to New Orleans need to be particulary concerned.

Hurricane Philippe is heading over open ocean and not expected to threaten land.

I took a bath on my Philippe shares in the Yahoo Buzz game, riding them from $12.43 to $15.34 and back down to $10.62, selling at a loss this morning. Prices are set by search results for all stocks in a market, so when Rita jumped from $10 to $20.30 in two days, everything else in the Atlantic Hurricane exchange plunged.

My new strategy is to buy equal shares of every hurricane except Rita, which is the equivalent of short-selling the storm. Katrina only reached a high of $22.49, so I'm betting that Rita's oversold.

I'm currently ranked 8,203 out of 8,520 players.

The information contained on this weblog entry is for information purposes only and is not intended to constitute a solicitation or offer to acquire or dispose of any investment nor is it intended to form the basis of an investment decision and should not be relied on in any way.

Hurricane Katrina · Florida · 2005/09/19 · Comment · Link

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