As the well known conundrum goes “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” It’s a question of the root causes of things—it’s the difference between the causes and the conclusion. And it’s the same conundrum that too often people ignore when examining racial improprieties in America. So the question is “Which came first:  high crime rates among minorities, or the suspicion of higher crime rates amongst minorities?” Let’s look at an example:

Say, in a hypothetical community there are a certain percentage of white people who are criminals. In the same community, there’s the same percentage of black people who are criminals. This community is policed by the same prejudiced cop.

If that police officer suspects that a higher rate of black people are criminals, he’ll looks harder to find criminals in people of that racial group, and therefore he’ll catches more criminals that are black than white.

What Doesn’t Kill You Brings You That Much Closer to Death:

I am a hospital physician. My department schedules us to work a few weekends a year. Like other doctors, I’m occasionally assigned to split a pair of weekends with someone who makes religious observance on Saturdays, so that he can work two Sundays, burdening me with two weekends of obligation. Is it O.K. to make me accommodate someone else’s religious practices? Name Withheld

Maybe instead of complaining about how some Jew has Jewed you out of your Saturday afternoons normally spent ignoring your wife and shopping on the Hammacher and Schlemmer website for The World’s Best ball shaver, you should remember why you got into this business in the first place: all that fucking cash. Dude, how awesome is that?!

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He saw Mars but he felt Neptune,
he had hoped to feel a certain strong emotion but this is all they had to say:
“I was the son of a man, and so we came together and we shook hands.”
“We shook hands.”
He often wondered what a million people would look like scattered randomly
across a moonless sky, and how unlikely it would be that they would all just say the

If there’s one thing we can all learn about life, is that if first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But if you try again and you fail, turn to your religion of choice. Because if you’re bad enough at your profession, make believe God wants you to function as his prophet or servant, or whatever. And that’s exactly what unknown Baldwin, Stephen, is doing now — turning his non-existent career into Jesus Slavedom. Check out this prime interview Stephen Baldwin had with Radar online, sharing his intimate thoughts on Tom Cruise, Democrats, and ‘fun’.

You know exactly what he’s thinking:

Radar: Because you’re born-again.
SB: Just because I’m born-again doesn’t mean I have to have the Ten Commandments memorized. See, that’s the bad rap the born-again thing has gotten. What being born-again means for me is that I’m having so much fun in this interview that we’re not going to go out and get an 8-ball of blow tonight and go crazy. That’s what born again means to me: Inasmuch as I’d like to do that, gosh, I’ll just go home and read some scripture with the wife.

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If a horse bucks yah, you get right up Georgey, don’t you know?

From a wonderful program by PBS Frontline entitled ‘The Lost Year in Iraq’ (and you can watch the whole thing online).

The most intriguing but nauseating segment comes in Part 3 entitled Within hours, Bremer gets some pointed lessons on what he’s facing. But he decides on quick, decisive action and orders de-Baathification. The segment deals with the policies of the CPA under Bremer, including hiring practices with interviews asking opinions on Roe vs. Wade, who you voted for, and what religion you were. People were hired for who they were (conservative and Republican) instead of their abilities or experience. Nothing highlights this better than the first hand observation from Col. Hammes of whom he had to deal with in his efforts to reconstruct Iraq:

At the ministry of interior, there was a new staff person handling planning for the prisons and police.