Buy beluga caviar today, for tomorrow it shall be banned:

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service will begin banning imports of beluga caviar and other beluga products from the Caspian Sea on Friday, after caviar-exporting countries in the region failed to provide details of their plans to conserve the fish, which is listed internationally as a species threatened with extinction.

but would be happy to misdemeanor homicide that dumb bitch for you.

Oooh, I don't know what that is, but it sounds good.

Dana,

how's your blood pressure? A comment about Charles Murray's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Below is text from his actual piece:

Which brings us to today's Wall Street Journal atrocity. Penned by Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve fame, it argues that what we're seeing post-Katrina isn't poverty but a once-again visible "underclass," a sort of shadow society of unsocialized black men with no appetite for work, no capacity to hold jobs, and no ability to be helped through conventional methods. They are, quite literally, savages, unable to function in the world the rest of us inhabit. They are, as he puts it, the "looters and the thugs," not to mention the "inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children." And government attempts to craft helpful policy will fail because, after all, it doesn't matter if you give a gorilla a college loan, it's still a gorilla.

I've no idea where Murray got the idea that the New Orleans evacuees lacked jobs rather than cars and social skills rather than transportation -- from deep within his own prejudices, I'd guess. And where he got the concept that these men and women are somehow incapable of holding jobs and unwilling to send their children to school -- that's all similarly obscure. The absence of autos affects the social and the unsocialized alike; the folks you see on buses are often en route to jobs they hold, contra Murray, perfectly well.

But if his argument is flawed, its aim is clear. All those stories of urban anarchy were, to Murray, accurate, everyday manifestations of the Black people we'd hidden from sight. The normal explanation, that their assumed bad behavior was a reaction to extraordinary circumstance -- that was the wrong part. This had nothing to do with Katrina; it was part and parcel of an inferior race, an incorrigible culture.

Murray's actual piece

[...]

Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

[...]

When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise. [Huh?]

[...]

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

[...]

The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Timelies all!

I have no Halloween plans, hence I have no costume.(nor have I thought of one) I do need to hit the mall to see if there's anything wenchy I can get for OVFF.

Like killing somebody for not that much reason, like it's nothing. They piss you off, you kill them and take their jewelry.(Although I would take nothing so as not to be caught.) Duh... that's about the drug laws...three strikes, crap like that. And poor people's drugs being more likely to get them sent up the river than when Shrub had his blow parties.

how's your blood pressure?

Oh, climbing steadily. It's been that kind of week.

You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Clearly we need to just put them in boxes and ship them far away from the white people. They might be contagious, after all.

I can feel a rant building and I'm not even from there... Just argh...

Remind me not to look at my keyboard. Because my depth perception is a little off, so it looks like the keys are all at different heights.

Did I mention that the opthamologist said my eye might get worse before it gets better?

My brain hurts, so I cannot suss out what this means:

The reason the White Sox and Indians wouldn't play a one-game playoff is because, with the Red Sox and Yankees playing each other this weekend, one team would be guaranteed to finish out of the playoffs if the Indians swept the White Sox. And in instances in which two teams from the same division are guaranteed to make the playoffs, MLB does not use a one-game playoff, instead relying on head-to-head records to break the tie.

Am I wrong, or is there a hanging deixis in the last sentence? That "two teams from the same division" seems equally to apply to either of the pairs in the first sentence, and I have no idea what the author is attempting to say. Except that the stupid White Sox clinched the AL Central, for reasons esoteric.

When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

This is called "Lying with statistics." The crime rate is falling for lots of reasons, but when people are sentenced to 30-year prison terms, a short-term drop in crime will have no effect on the size of prison population. It's not that people are more incorrigible now; it's that their incorrigible gets them locked up for life now.

Ronald Reagan is notorious for having caused the closure of a lot of insane asylums, in most cases jus plopping the disturbed inmates onto the street. Most of them ended up in prison, where the prisons really struggle to treat their mental illness, because that's not what prisons were designed to do.

Ronald Reagan can be blamed for almost everything. Who do you think told the Greeks to store explosives in the Parthenon, during their revolution??

Who do you think told the Greeks to store explosives in the Parthenon, during their revolution??

That was Nancy-Pants.