Seeing the Elephant

New York City is nobody’s idea of a conservative bastion. I believe we can be certain there is minimal racial bias in the NYPD’s statistics. I have for you a link to their data for 2024, the most recent available and very likely representative of recent years. 

Whites are the largest population group in NYC, followed by Hispanics followed by non-Hispanic Blacks. However whites are very underrepresented in gun crimes, including murder, shootings, etc. Ditto in sex crimes of various stripes. Blacks are over represented both as perps and as victims. Hispanics somewhat less so.

Someone who has further massaged the data claims the following:

There have been nearly 19,000 suspected shooters recorded in New York City since 2006. Only 1.5% were listed as White.

As a person who has been paying attention, I’d risk a guess you don’t find the above especially shocking. It is the elephant in the room nobody is supposed to mention or admit noticing.

Travel Blogging VII

We are tied up alongside in Clarkston, WA and have reached the end of our passage. We are at the south edge of the Palouse country of Eastern WA, and the other side of the river is Lewiston, ID. The terrain is gently rolling hills on which wheat is grown. The “coastal feeling” is gone, we’ve reached “big sky” country.

We will overnight here on the boat and fly out tomorrow morning. Some pax are taking jet boat trips to Hells Canyon but we’re just staying aboard. Tomorrow night we’ll be home in eastern Nevada, after changing planes in SLC.

We’ve already decided to take another trip with American Cruise Lines, the next one on the Tennessee rivers from Nashville to Chattanooga. It happens in mid-October. We hope to visit friends in the Knoxville area while there.

Serendipity

ICE agents had gotten an image as roughhouse goons grabbing innocent people for export. Then POTUS sent them to help TSA at the airports and … viola! … we discovered they were nice people assigned a dismal task. 

Lots of flyers learned that ICE were normal folks and not fanged monsters; it is an excellent outcome. I believe it took a lot of wind out of the ICE Out movement’s sails.

Ad Astra

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is a long-time science fiction fan, it crops up in his stuff from time to time. With a US team launched on a trip around the moon, this becomes one of those “times.”

He’s right about our return to space being long overdue. I’d hoped to see men on Mars in my lifetime, but probably won’t. He’s younger than I, maybe he’ll get lucky. I have some chance of seeing a human colony on the moon, and that will be excellent.

After being a hotshot outfit all those years ago, NASA morphed into a geriatric bunch who seemingly can’t shoot straight. Careerism in FedGov acts like a wasting disease, for which we seemingly have no cure.

Reynolds is probably right that Elon Musk will spearhead the return to space. Musk wants it in his lifetime and has the money to get what he wants. 

I’m a longtime science fiction fan too. The space frontier awaits, let’s go!

Travel Blogging VI

Greetings from Richland, WA. Sky overcast, rain today as well as late yesterday. No visit to the Northwest would be right without being rained on a couple of times. Actually, by the region’s standards we’ve have good weather, several dry days. It remains cool, not frigid.

This is a part of the northwest I’ve not spent much time in. In our RV travels we’ve driven through this area a couple of times but had no destinations hereabouts to draw us back. 

The area isn’t heavily populated and tends to be conservative. The vibe is more upper Midwest than Coastal. Parts of this region have tried to secede and join Republican Idaho, so far with no success. Counties in eastern OR have held votes on it.

I’m told we reach the Lewiston/Clarkston area tomorrow, and fly out the next day. We’ve had an excellent time, the crew spoils us to an embarrassing extent, and feed us at every opportunity. Last night was prime rib.

The Columbia River heads north at Richland, and we split off onto the Snake River and keep heading east. Ironically, the south fork of the Snake passes a 20 minute drive from our place in WY. Of course we aren’t cruising anywhere near WY, we’d have to cross southern ID to get there, and that is an all day drive.

Political Gain and Economic Self-interest

Power Line’s John Hinderaker shares some scientific findings on the issue of climate change.

We use the Epica-Vostok Ice core dataset, a single proxy dataset for temperature data sampled every century for the last 800,000 years or so and ask the question “Is a 1.1°C temperature rise in a century unusual in this dataset?”

Usually, the Earth is caught in a deep freeze. Happily, we are living in an inter-glacial warm period. In fact, the Earth has been warmer than it is today the overwhelming majority of the time since the end of the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.

The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence refutes the global warming catastrophism that is relentlessly propagated for reasons of political gain and economic self-interest.

It would appear another Ice Age is the greater risk. Charts and citations in the original.

Travel Blogging V

Today is what on an ocean cruise is called a “sea day,” that is a day spent cruising from place to place. One not spent in tied up alongside in port. We are sailing upriver on the Columbia, and as I write this have just passed through the locks at John Day dam. We shared the lock with a pleasure craft - a cabin cruiser of maybe 30’.

Locks are a feature of river cruising, we’ll pass through eight on our way upstream to the Lewiston/Clarkston area - four each on the Columbia and Snake rivers. The most locks I’ve ever seen on one crossing is on the Rhine-Main Canal linking the Rhine and Danube rivers, we’ve passed through those on several trips from Amsterdam to Vienna.

We are having a lazy day, I slept in. The scenery continues to be excellent. Right now we are sailing beside a quite large mountain that is a mile or so north of the river. There are wind turbines atop it, as usual not turning. We will look back and marvel at how dumb those were.

I believe our next stop is near Pendleton. We see much evidence of long-ago vulcanism, outcrops of basaltic rock. This region continues to be a place where volcanoes lie hopefully dormant, but some clearly are not so quiet - Mt. St. Helens, for example. 

The weather continues with overcast skies, the norm in this region. Atypically no rain so far, I expect some and will be surprised if the cruise ends having experienced no rain. Californians drive up here in summer and marvel at how green it is, compared to CA. Many don’t realize it has to rain a lot for that to occur.

Research: Leaving CA Pays Off

Hot Air reports research findings that show people who leave California for elsewhere end up being better off financially - more likely to become homeowners - than those who stayed behind. This is no surprise but also no small thing.

I don’t remember sharing our personal example of moving our residence-of-record from CA to WY. We saved enough in state income and sales taxes to pay for a nice overseas trip every year.

WY has NO state income tax and the sales tax is 4-5% instead of 8-10% in CA. The big savings is not paying state income tax.

The DrsC can afford to live in CA but we are better off financially living elsewhere. Plus government policy in WY more closely aligns with our conservative values. If WY isn’t the most Republican state it is certainly among those few in contention for that honor.