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Starting off the year
Posted by Bigfoot on January 8th, 2010
With the Holiday season, things have been pretty slow around here. This is certainly understandable, since we all have our familial duties this time of year. But someone has to get in the first post of 2010.
For me, Christmas means visiting with my parents and seeing the extended clan down in Virginia. This year, it also meant getting rid of snow on the side of the street in front of their house, and from on top of dad’s car. Various siblings had already shoveled their driveway. Meanwhile, I had cleared about 20 inches of snow from my sidewalk and car back in Maryland, and thus brought some recent experience to the task. Fortunately, the day was sunny, with temperatures above freezing, allowing me to leave some of the snow to melt away.
Back home on New Year’s Eve, I watched my Hokies win their bowl game against Tennessee, avenging a loss from 1994. For the first time in school history, the football team has won two consecutive bowl games.
Two days into the new year, things took a turn for the worse, as I found myself in hot water, leaked out onto my basement floor. So I had to welcome a new addition to the home.
Some notable things have happened since Christmas, such as the failed terrorist attack on Northwest flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria, now known as the “crotch bomber” or “underwear bomber”. Somehow, all of Obama’s respect toward the Islamic world doesn’t seem to have made any impression on this young man.
Speaking of Barry, Breitbart.tv has a series of clips showing him stating that the negotations over health care reform would be made in public, and shown over C-SPAN. Such a broadcast never took place. Meanwhile, the Speaker makes the ridiculous claim, “There has never been a more open process for any legislation”. If she wants to be open, perhaps she could tell us who put a marriage penalty into the bill, and who came up with the idea of taxing so-called “Cadillac” health plans. (Where’s congressman Joe “You Lie” Wilson when you need him?)
National politicians aren’t the only ones getting into the news. New York governor David Patterson has faulted the state legislature for running the state “like a payday loan operation”. Illinois is having some serious problems, too.
On the other hand, federal law-makers call such excessive spending “stimulus”. I have previously noted how stimulus money has been sent to non-existent congressional districts. Now, it seems that the people in charge can’t even get the zip codes straight.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald finds that during the current economic troubles crime has dropped to its lowest level since the early 1960′s. This is in direct contradiction to the “poverty is the root cause of crime” theory put forth by sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, and largely accepted by the left. In fact, MacDonald also notes:
The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis.
My dad, whose childhood largely coincided with the Depression, remembers the era’s poverty, but very little crime.
When it comes to crime, this would have to be one of the strangest that I’ve ever heard of. Someone was caught with a bag full of teeth.
As I finish up this post, the NCAA football National Championship is won by Alabama over Texas, by a score of 37-21.
I hope everyone out there had a Happy New Year as 2010 gets under way.
January 8th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
The pre-Christmas snowfall here in the D.C. area gave us first longed-for white Christmas in years.
I will admit, however, that the older I get the less I enjoy shoveling, particularly when the county’s snow plow buries my car. Here where we live, we have only street parking.
January 9th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Yes, the Clowen/Ohlin theory easily explained the Walter Williamses and Thomas Sowells and Clarence Thomases and all the others who made it out of meager upbringings. It’s so easy to see when you close your eyes tight to kiss a unicorn or frog.
Also goes a long way toward explaining UbL and his merry worlwide gang of terrorists, since the vast majority of the leaders of aQ are from quite well-to-do beginnings.