Category Archives: News

Which political party governs the cities that have so much poverty and crime?

Welfare and out-of-wedlock births
Welfare and out-of-wedlock births

First, let’s find out what is happening in Milwaukee. David French explains in this article on National Review.

He writes:

Police pulled [Sylville] Smith over on Saturday afternoon, he fled from the scene, and police gave chase. Smith was carrying a stolen handgun. An officer with six years’ experience caught Smith, reportedly ordered him to drop the gun, and opened fire when Smith failed to comply, shooting him the in the chest and arm. Smith died.

The officer who shot the man who pointed a gun at him was black. It was a black police officer!

Next, riots ensued – and one of the rioters even explained why he was rioting:

According to police, the shooting was caught on camera. (The footage has not yet been released.) But rather than wait for the evidence or for any semblance of an investigation, hundreds of Milwaukee residents rioted, burning police cars, looting stores, and attacking police. Indeed, to listen to some of the protesters and political leaders, the shooting was merely the excuse for the riot, not the justification. Here’s one protester telling reporters that riots are happening because “rich people, they got all this money, and they not . . . trying to give us none.”

Here’s the video:

It’s the “rich people”‘s responsibility to give the rioters some of their stuff. Because in America, you can’t do anything on your own, the only way to get “stuff” is to riot and take other people’s stuff.

More from French:

And city alderman Khalif Rainey said that the riots were “byproducts” of “the injustice, the unemployment, the under-education” that he says makes Milwaukee the “worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country.” He ended with an ominous warning: “Rectify this immediately because, if you don’t, this vision of downtown, all of that, you one day away. You one day away.”

But whose fault is all this poverty? Maybe it is hard for black people to get ahead in some of these cities. Who is in charge of these cities?

Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run
Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run

The big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc. that are so awful for law-abiding blacks to live in have been run by Democrats for decades.

Investors Business Daily explains:

America is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democratic mayors for decades.

  • Detroit last elected a Republican mayor in 1957. It is now the model of urban failure — it’s recognized more for its poverty, crime, rot and bankruptcy than the great cars that it turned out into the early 1970s. It is the poorest big city in the nation, with almost 40% of the population living below the poverty line. The website Law Street actually ranks Detroit ahead of Flint as the country’s most dangerous city. Either way, it’s clear that both cities have institutionalized crime problems.

Detroit is also a pit of political corruption. Just in recent years, one mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was convicted of corruption and sent to federal prison for 28 years, while building inspectors have been indicted on federal felony bribery charges and a former city council member was investigated in a bribery and kickback scandal.

  • Chicago’s last GOP mayor was elected in 1927. The nation’s third-largest city is home to some of the worst inner-city violence imaginable. More than 2,300 people were shot there last year, and nearly 400 lost their lives to homicides.

Its finances are just as grim. “Chicago is so broke,” IBD contributor Stephen Moore explained months ago, “that its bonds are junk status, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to go hat in hand last week to the state capital, Springfield, for bailout money to pay the bills.” Things have been rotten enough, Moore said, to send “a record number of people … fleeing Cook County, home to Chicago.” Only a little more than half of the city’s pension liabilities are funded.

  • St. Louis has been electing Democratic mayors since 1949. The Gateway to the West has become the gateway for crime. Law Street says that it’s the fourth most dangerous city in the country, Forbes says it’s the second. It had the sixth-highest poverty rate among big cities in 2014.
  • The last GOP mayor of Philadelphia left office in 1952. A few years ago, Moore identified it as a favorite to follow Detroit into bankruptcy.
  • Both Baltimore and Oakland had Republican mayors as late as the 1960s. In the era of Democratic rule, both are now more well known for their crime and poverty problems than for their charm and character.
  • Newark, N.J., hasn’t had a GOP mayor in more than a century. It was ranked as the fifth-worst city to live in in 2015. Detroit, of course, was first.

When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward cronies with public funds, establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster.

If you want to blame someone for the failure of the black community to get ahead, blame Democrats. They are the ones who are running things in the cities where we see all this rioting. Their policies are the cause of the poverty. You don’t get job creation when you punish the job creators with high taxes and onerous regulations. You don’t get fathers in the homes when you reward single motherhood by choice with welfare checks.

Apologetics in the gospel of John

Bible study that hits the spot
Bible study that hits the spot

John is my favorite gospel, because the thing reads like a well constructed essay. The author makes a number of claims about who Jesus was, and supplies evidence for each claim. There is nothing extraneous to John’s thesis, the whole thing that he wrote is designed to make a case.

My friend Eric Chabot wrote a post on his blog on the use of apologetics in the gospel of John. (H/T J. Warner Wallace tweet)

Here is his thesis:

In this post, I will highlight some of the different ways John utilizes apologetics in his testimony of who Jesus is.

He talks about how God has his messengers use evidence:

3.Signs and Miracles

While actions by other prophets such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah etc. show some significant parallels to Jesus, Jesus is closer to the actions of the Jewish sign prophetssuch as Moses. “Signs” have a specific apologetic function in that they are used to provide evidence for people to believe the message of God through a prophet of God. Hence, the signs Moses does proves he is truly sent from God.  Moses had struggled with his prophetic call when he said “ But they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’ (Exod. 4:1). God assures Moses that  the “signs”  will confirm his call:

God says, “I will be with you. And this will be אוֹת “the sign”  to you that it is I who have sent you” (Exod. 3:12).

“If they will not believe you,” God said, “or listen to the first sign, they may believe the latter sign. If they will not believe even these two signs or listen to your voice, you shall take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground, and the water that you shall take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground.” (Exod 4: 8-9).

We see the signs are used to help people believe.

Moses “performed the “signs” before the people, and they believed; … they bowed down and worshiped” (Exod. 4:30–31)

So what did Jesus do?

“Works” are directly related to the miracles of Jesus (Jn. 5:20; 36;10:25; 32-28; 14:10-12; 15:24) and is synonymous with “signs.” Interestingly enough, when Jesus speaks of miracles and he calls them “works” he doesn’t refer to  Exod. 4:1-9, but to Num. 16:28, “Hereby you shall know that the LORD has sent me to do all these works, and that it has not been of my own accord.” For example:

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me” (John 10:25).

If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me;  but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (John 10:37-38).

But the testimony that I have is greater than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me (John 5: 36)

“Sign”(sēmeion) is used seventy-seven times (forty-eight times in the Gospels). As far as the “signs’ Jesus does,  29:18-19; 35:5-6; 42:18; 61:1). In John’s Gospel, Jesus performs three “signs,” at the beginning of his ministry; the water turned into wine at Cana at Galilee (2:1-12), the healing of the son of the royal official at Capernaum (4:46-64), and catching of the fish in the sea of Galilee (21:1-14). The link between the first two signs in Jn 2:12 while the link between the last two are seen in Jn 7:1, 3-4, 6, 9. Jesus follows the pattern of Moses in that he reveals himself as the new Moses because Moses also had to perform three “signs” so that he could be recognized by his brothers as truly being sent by God (Exod 4: 1-9). In the exchange between Nicodemus said to Jesus, Nicodemus said, We know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him” (John 3:2)

Also, regarding miracles, in some cases the miracle is a witness against those who reject this evidence. John grieved: “Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him” (John 12:37). One result, though not the purpose, of miracles is condemnation of the unbeliever (cf. John 12:31, 37).

The gospel of John is so good. Or is it that Jesus is just so good to not be like some idiot who just says things that no one can test? That would be stupid and annoying – it’s much better for Jesus to do these signs so that people could believe him about his identity and purpose. Do you like Jesus? I like Jesus.

I read John a long time ago, when I was about 10 or 11 years old.I can’t remember what I thought of it, but it probably had a very good effect on me as far as making me think that Christianity was something that I ought to look into. The gospel of John is that good. Philippians is still my favorite book of the Bible (because it’s practical, duh), but John is the best introduction. It’s the first thing a non-Christian should read to at least understand what Christianity is all about. Everybody should at least know that!

Democrat opposition to charter schools hurts the black community

Economist Thomas Sowell
Economist Thomas Sowell

Yesterday, I featured an article from one of my two favorite economists, and today I have an article from my other favorite economist, Dr. Thomas Sowell.

Dr. Sowell writes:

What about black success? Does that matter? Apparently not so much.

We have heard a lot about black students failing to meet academic standards. So you might think that it would be front-page news when some whole ghetto schools not only meet, but exceed, the academic standards of schools in more upscale communities.

There are in fact whole chains of charter schools where black and Hispanic youngsters score well above the national average on tests. There are the KIPP (Knowledge IS Power Program) schools and the Success Academy schools, for example.

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Only 39% of all students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the “proficient” level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy school scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90% of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

The Success Academy schools in general ranked in the top 2% in English and in the top 1% in math. Hispanic students in these schools reached the “proficient” level in math nearly twice as often as Hispanic students in the regular public schools. Black students in these Success Academy schools reached the “proficient” level more than twice as often as black students in the regular public schools.

What makes this all the more amazing is that these charter schools are typically located in the same ghettos or barrios where other blacks or Hispanics are failing miserably on the same tests. More than that, successful charter schools are often physically housed in the very same buildings as the unsuccessful public schools.

In other words, minority kids from the same neighborhood, going to school in classes across the hall from each other, or on different floors, are scoring far above average and far below average on the same tests.

Fine, fine, and obviously no one stands in the way of giving black parents access to these higher-performing schools for their children, right?

Um…

[T]he teachers’ unions are opposed to charter schools — and they give big bucks to politicians, who in turn put obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. These include politicians like New York’s “progressive” mayor Bill de Blasio, who poses as a friend of blacks by denigrating the police, standing alongside Al Sharpton.

The net result is that 90% of New York City’s students are taught in the regular public schools that have nothing like the success of charter schools run by KIPP and Success Academy.

That makes sense only politically, because it gains the money and the votes of the teachers’ unions, for whom schools exist to provide jobs for their members, rather than to provide education for children.

If you want to understand this crazy and unconscionable situation, just follow the money and follow the votes.

Black success is a threat to political empires and to a whole social vision behind those empires. That social vision has politicians like Bill de Blasio and Hillary Clinton cast in the role of rescuers and protectors of blacks from enemies threatening on all sides. If politicians can promote paranoia, that means bigger voter turnout, which is what really matters to them.

Republicans are, of course, in favor of giving vouchers to the parents of poor, minority students so they can choose better schools. Because this is a no-brainer for anyone with any sense of morality.

You might think that Democrats are in favor of helping blacks, but that’s not true. Democrats don’t want blacks to have access to better schools, because Democrats take the side of teacher unions over the poor children who need an education in order to succeed. Democrats also favor giving welfare to single women to encourage them to raise fatherless children. Democrats want to punish women who do marry by making them pay higher taxes, also known as “the marriage penalty”. And Democrats normalize premarital sex, which puts a lot of pressure on women to have

One more: Democrats favor taking guns away from law-abiding people, so that criminals can rob, rape and murder them. I was just taking to one of my three black Christian female friends (all conservatives, all STEM students – nurse, computer science and computer science), and her mom was carjacked. Do Democrats want her mom to own a firearm? Hell, no. They want the criminals to work unimpeded. And demonizing the police doesn’t protect law-abiding blacks from criminals, either.

I think Republicans want to help blacks by giving them the opportunity to rise: good schools, good jobs, promote marriage, oppose criminals and encourage saving money. Democrats don’t really want to let blacks help themselves – they want to keep blacks down so that they can feel good about handing them other people’s money. Getting someone else’s money for nothing is no way to live. You feel a lot better when you earn it yourself through work – but that requires that you get a good education.