The presidential victory of socialist Francois Hollande in France is being presented everywhere as a vote for “growth” over stagnation:

[Irish Foreign Minister] Eamon Gilmore last night said the election of Francois Hollande will “accelerate” a growth agenda in Europe.

And:

Mr. Hollande has said that he intends to give “a new direction to Europe,” demanding that a European Union treaty limiting debt be expanded to include measures to produce economic growth.

What a brilliant act of branding.  Implication: Those who believe in reining in government debt and spending are “anti-growth.”   Those who believe that the private economy and the free market are the only true sources of economic growth are “anti-growth.” 

The pro-big government stimulus spenders have managed to turn a disagreement over means into a division over ends.  Obviously, there is a lot more work to be done in explaining how an economy works.    The fact that Germany’s is practically the only non-moribund economy in Europe should in theory help make the case for government discipline, but the false promise of the big government Ponzi scheme is apparently too seductive.

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The similarities between the build-up to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the media demagoguery around the Trayvon Martin case are eerie and disturbing, as I write about here:

Could it happen again? That is the taboo question on the 20th anniversary of Los Angeles’s murderous Rodney King riots, just as another racially charged prosecution—this time in Florida—captures headlines across the nation. Sadly, the answer is yes. As the Oakland riots in 2009 and 2010 following a transit officer’s fatal shooting of a parolee made clear, the threat of riots . . . still hangs over interracial incidents of violence when the victim is black. And just as the press cynically manipulated the facts in the Rodney King beating in order to increase racial tensions, it has done so again in the Trayvon Martin shooting inSanford,Florida.

The best hope for avoiding a repeat of the L.A.mayhem, should blacks not be satisfied with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, is that police forces across the country have learned the lesson of the Rodney King riots: that outbreaks of civil anarchy must be immediately and unapologetically suppressed.

Anniversary coverage of the LA riots has sanitized the violence and spun out a narrative that holds individuals blameless for their sadistic and homicidal destruction, placing responsibility instead on the usual suspects: the racism of the police and of society.  Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Jim Newton provides a classic version of the “we are all guilty” topos:

The Los Angeles riots represented the culmination of many failures: the failure to provide hope for young people; the failure to supply education and jobs in the numbers that would stabilize communities; the failure to engage those communities in their own protection instead of relying on harsh and coercive law enforcement.

But even more remarkably, the Los Angeles Police Chief Charles Beck follows suit, using the nauseatingly PC term for the riots, “civil unrest,” and issuing a mea culpa for the police role in them:

The result [of aggressive LAPD tactics] was a city that was increasingly alienated from the police who were supposed to serve them. That alienation culminated in the worst civil unrest in Los Angeles history.

Oh, really?  As I write in City Journal:

If LAPD oppression was both the cause and the target of that violence, why did the mobs assault the following civilians, among many others, in the first two hours of violence alone? There were the son of the Korean owner of Tom’s Liquor Store at Normandy and Florence, beaten by gangbangers while the store was being torched; the white driver of a gray Volvo, who was dragged from his car and kicked in the head by assailants yelling “It’s a black thing,” and who barely escaped in his car (minus his camera and briefcase, naturally); the white driver of a brown Jeep Wrangler who was hit by a rock thrown through the front windshield, then smashed in the face with a bottle when he got out of the jeep . . .

Interestingly, Latinos constituted a majority of the arrests during the riots, as photos of the looting would predict.   The riots began as a “black thing,” but ended up as much a Hispanic thing.  So much for the Ron Unzian view of Latinos as pacific saviors of California.  On the other hand, Hispanics were overwhelmingly the victims, not the instigators, of the most vicious crimes of violence.    While it is hard to imagine a Hispanic-initiated riot, certainly of the fury and personal predation of the LA riots, Hispanics’ eager participation suggests how fragile are the constraints of social order and how essential it is to enforce law and order with unflagging vigilance.

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The New York Times is shocked that Apple seeks to minimize its liability under California’s exorbitant tax rates by moving profits to lower taxing states and countries.  The paper melodramatically suggests in a front page “expose” today that the economic woes of a local community college, attended in the early 1970s by Apple founder Steve Wozniak, are directly related to Apple’s stinginess. 

I wonder if Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., and other Times executives employ tax attorneys for their personal finances or for those of the paper.   And if Apple paid more taxes in California, how much would reach the classrooms of Cupertino’s De Anza College, as opposed to bankrolling the thousands of diversity bureaucrats throughout the state’s university and college systems, not to mention funding astronomical public employee union benefits or bloated
government agencies and their ineffective social uplift programs. 

The Times can’t contemplate that the solution to tax avoidance is to lower taxes and reduce the magnitude of government spending.   It’s too bad that the titans of Silicon Valley don’t have the guts to speak out about the economic realities that drive business decisions.

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New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has eloquently opposed two local living wage bills championed by New York’s left-wing City Council:

 “Government cannot bend the laws of the labor market,” he said, arguing that the bills would destroy jobs, and that taxpayers would ultimately pay for the increased wages.

This month, on his weekly radio show, he compared the living-wage bill to Soviet economic policies, saying, “The last time you really had a big managed economy was the U.S.S.R., and that didn’t work out so well.”

And yet, Bloomberg urged the Supreme Court not to hear a case challenging New York’s hoary rent regulations, defending them

as a necessary response to a housing shortage and as a way to prevent “rent profiteering.”
Last month, [he] certified that there was still a state of housing emergency, defined as a vacancy rate of less than 5 percent, which is a requirement for the regulations to be in effect.

The emergency has been in effect for more than 40 years.

There is actually a stronger case to be made for living wage  bills as they apply to government-funded projects than for rent regulations, an insane, demonstrably counterproductive policy far more akin to Soviet-style central planning, one which inevitably produces the very “housing emergency” which Bloomberg cites as justification for it.  Apparently, Bloomberg does understand the workings of supply and demand, except when it comes to New York’s  sacrosanct rent controls, virtually the last in the country.  A very depressing demonstration of the power of politics over principle. 

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From the Wall Street Journal’s Houses of Worship column, by the author of When God Talks Back:

in more experientially oriented evangelical Christian communities . . . people expect to have a personal relationship with God. They go for walks with God, have coffee with God, ask God what shirt they should wear in the morning and even what shampoo they should buy. They expect God will talk back. . . . Looking at your closet and asking God whether he’d prefer the black shirt or the blue one is a way congregants [learn which of their thoughts] they should treat as God’s communication with them.

But wait:

evangelical Christians doubt, too. Doubt is part of the experience of faith . . .  People doubt that they understand God rightly; they doubt that the promise of joy they hear from the pulpit really applies to them. And in a world in which they know wise, good people who do not share their faith, they may doubt divinity itself.  [Emphasis added.]

Oh, well, that’s OK, then. 

Why does having doubts about an arguably absurd belief—that the same God who let five people die in this month’s Oklahoma tornado, say, or 16,000 in last year’s tsunami, nevertheless cares about your clothing choices or is worth praying to because you are the center of his multi-centered universe—why does doubt make that belief more respectable, or, in many formulations of the meme, even admirable and courageous?

I consult my horoscope each morning to find out how I should conduct myself or what I should expect from the day, but I occasionally doubt whether the person who authors it actually has done a close reading of the star charts, and, on my despairingly skeptical days, even whether there really are astral influences from some intangible celestial substance that determine human characteristics on a monthly basis and that govern our fate.  But then after wrestling with my doubt, I conquer it.  That’s success?  I realize that the presence of doubt is supposed to show that belief in a loving God is not simply reflexive but rather fully compatible with reason.  But it’s not as if the doubting believer has gone out and done some careful experiments. 

The mother of Trayvon Martin credited Jesus for the indictment of George Zimmerman.  Was she right, in the eyes of conservative believers? And if not, why not?  How can a believer avoid making such mistakes? 

daily slaughter of the innocents · petitionary prayer

It is only a matter of time before the all-male character of prominent Silicon Valley start-ups triggers the following backlash:

A flood of articles and conferences exploring the “gender gap” in the high-tech sector; personal testimonies from disgruntled female undergrads and grad students about discrimination in the science fields; published rankings of venture-capital firms based on how many female-headed start-ups they bankroll; taxpayer-funded high school and college programs to cultivate female engineers and entrepreneurs; additional diversity bureaucrats in colleges to bludgeon computer-science departments into hiring female professors; internships for females at venture-capital firms; threats from the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to colleges and high schools regarding their responsibility for the start-up gender gap; Ford and Rockefeller Foundation grant programs to set up mentoring programs for female technologists; and awards ceremonies to honor venture capitalists who have nurtured female-headed start-ups.

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Unlike National Review readers, I find no justification for Romney’s craven exploitation of delusional feminist tropes against Obama.  The Republican National Committee is parroting the absurd charge that the Obama White House is a “hostile environment” for females, for example. 

What’s next — an RNC Title IX lawsuit against Ohio State University for its football program? Sensitivity training for Army drill sergeants? (Oh, wait, we’ve already got those.) Assigned readings for Republican precinct captains from In a Different Voice? The chance that the Obama White House, staffed by eager products of the feminist university, is a hostile workplace for women is exactly zero — as low as the chance that the Bush I, II, or Reagan White Houses were hostile to women. Any Republican who actually believes [former White House staffer Anita] Dunn’s charge has merely allowed his partisan desire for political victory to silence what should be his core knowledge about the contemporary world.

The entire conceit that any elite workplace could be seriously hostile to females should be retired, not bolstered as the Romney campaign is doing.  You can’t feed the female victimology addiction just once and think that you haven’t strengthened it permanently.

  The Romney campaign’s weird claims about a female-hostile Obama economic policy are just as destructive. 

What would it mean for economic policy to pay attention to “gender,” as the Romney campaign apparently thinks it should? Women are undoubtedly overrepresented in government jobs and government-funded jobs . . . . Does that mean that Republicans shouldn’t cut big government? The Keystone Pipeline and other projects dear to the “drill, baby, drill” campaign will undoubtedly benefit male workers more than women. Should we therefore suspend domestic energy production until we figure out a way to shoehorn more women onto drilling rigs? And if the most certain way to make sure that women benefit more from the economic recovery would be to expand government hiring, should Republicans do so?

Every time that someone in the public sphere repeats the preposterous claim that females face serious discrimination today, he strengthens the falsehood and makes it harder to dislodge.   I understand that politics is ruthless and unprincipled.  But it is unbelievably short-sighted for Republicans to validate hoary feminist conceits, because those conceits will only be thrown back at them with all the greater force once they are on the receiving end of criticism.   It would be just as short-sighted to criticise the Obama cabinet, for example, for not being sufficiently “diverse” (and undoubtedly, some Republican operative has made or will make such a charge).   Doing so only lodges the expectations for racial quotas all the more intractably into the political psyche.

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At a panel last night on the ACLU, I mentioned that the organization’s standard method for accusing the police of racial profiling–comparing police stop rates to racial population ratios–ignores crime rates.  In New York City, for example, blacks are 23% of the population and 53% of all stops, but commit 66% of all violent crime and 80% of all shootings–according to the victims of and witnesses to those crimes.  

 Well, if such statistics are true, responded ACLU president Anthony Romero (without offering any evidence why they were not), you are ignoring the lack of opportunity that blacks face.  Moreover, your employer, the Manhattan Institute, only exacerbates that lack of opportunity with its favored policies. 

I’m just wondering:  would Romero, Sharpton, Jackson, et al. ever accept “lack of opportunity” as an excuse for a white-on-black shooting?   Because there are so few of such incidents:

Seventeen percent of what the FBI calls “white” homicide victims in 2009 were killed by blacks, compared to 8 percent of black homicide victims who were killed by “whites.” There were two and a half times as many white and Hispanic victims of black killers in 2009 as there were black victims of white and Hispanic killers, even though the black population is one-sixth that of whites and Hispanics combined. If Hispanics were removed from the category of “white” killers of blacks, the percentage of blacks killed by Anglo whites would plummet, since a significant percentage of what the FBI calls “white”-on-black killings represent gang warfare between Hispanic and black gangs.

there’s not much precedent to evaluate, but somehow, my gut tells me: No, the lack of opportunity defense would not be allowed. 

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The lethal gun rampage at Oikos University in Oakland, California, on Monday was a horrific tragedy, mind-numbing in its incomprehensibility for the seven victims’ families and for anyone connected to the school.  Secular Right sends its condolences to the community.

The Oikos shooting is just the latest in a series of school and workplace rampages over the last several years, none of which were committed by Muslims.  If a Muslim had in fact pulled the trigger, the country’s police departments would be on high alert, the aviation system hunkered down even further.  Why?  What is the difference?  Last December and January, a disgruntled young German almost brought Los Angeles to its knees with a set of arson attacks on cars in the Hollywood area.  It appears that it is not all that difficult to inflict group violence and collective fear in this country.  If the U.S. harbored even a handful of Muslim terrorists, presumably they would occasionally have taken advantage of that ease to wreak havoc themselves.  The vast expenditures of the Department of Homeland Security, doled out to law enforcement agencies across the country for anti-terror equipment and training, presume just such a national threat.  As the years go by without an Islamic terrorist incident on our soil, do we ever get to revise downward our assessment of the risk? 

An Oikos student who was not killed in the rampage told the New York Times that she was frightened during the shooting, but added:

“I’m a Christian, and I believe God protects me.”

Why then didn’t he protect the seven victims?  If solipsistic believers feel compelled to ask such questions—seeking the bare minimum of justice, which consists of treating likes alike and distinguishing unlikes, from their allegedly rational God–they don’t often let on.  Unless this Christian survivor believes that she is more worthy of God’s protection than the seven victims, the usual answer to the question of why God didn’t protect the seven victims is that he did protect them—in his way.  But surely that way was not what was meant by anyone who was praying for protection from the shooter. 

Here’s another typical answer to the question of selective protection from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

when a prayer goes unanswered, God’s refusal springs from love rather than indifference.

i.e., God did not answer the undoubted prayers of the victims for protection out of love, rather than indifference.  It is the fate of non-believers to look on such explanations as if across a vast and forever unbridgeable abyss. 

daily slaughter of the innocents · the solipsism of believers

A California assemblyman wants to ban food trucks from parking close to schools, on the ground that the vast majority of them peddle fattening fast foods to school children.   The foodie community in Los Angeles is up in arms, because the proposed regulation would hinder their access to the cutting-edge food trucks which have exploded in the city over the last decade. 

“It’s a shame the state would … deny people the opportunity to do what they are passionate about,” said . . . an administrator at a local charity. “So many of the food trucks are doing such good things with fresh foods and ingredients.”

I’m just going by the seat of my pants here, but how many of those incensed gourmets are all for environmental or banking regulations to counter corporate greed?

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