Crime watch: The FBI Stat Shuffle
“Americans can be forgiven for suffering from whiplash regarding law and order,” notes James Varney at RealClearInvestigations, with Democrats using “declines in violent crime statistics to argue that America is becoming a safer place.”
That’s even though the 2023 figures “represent a large increase over the recent past, before the pandemic and racial upheaval set in motion in 2020.”
Why the disconnect? Well, “crime stats have become notoriously incomplete in recent years,” with big cities failing to report to the FBI.
Add in a “dramatic decline in arrests” and the “reductions in the size of many [police] departments,” plus “surging increases in response times to calls.”
The result: It’s all too possible the headline crime figures “fail to capture what is really happening.”
Libertarian: National Energy Code? No Way!
As inflation and high interest rates deepen the housing crisis, the Biden administration is still pushing states to “implement the International Energy Conservation Code, which would require new homes to meet stricter energy efficiency standards,” grumbles Jason Sorens at Reason.
Supposedly, “the new rules could significantly lower energy bills for homeowners and renters.”
But “energy efficiency codes inflate construction costs” too, so it can take decades to come out ahead.
“The federal government could do many things to lower housing costs, from cutting tariffs on supplies to ending subsidies that push up prices.”
That would be far “better policy rather than imposing new regulations that make the situation worse.”
Defense beat: We’re Running out of Gunpowder
“Congress must back the commonsense approach of the Ammunition Supply Chain Act and enable American manufacturers to replenish our gunpowder supply to counter a growing Chinese advantage,” warns Robert Pittenger at the Washington Examiner.
“The United States is running low on modern gunpowder” thanks to “the war in Ukraine and supply-sourcing complications.”
This makes “ ‘guncotton,’ a key production material for modern gunpowder, increasingly scarce here at home.”
Worse, “China is emerging as the foremost producer of guncotton”; “Russia’s imports of nitrocellulose from China” doubled from 2022 “to $7.18 million” in 2023.
The proposed Ammunition Supply Chain Act “is designed to identify and address faults in the gunpowder supply chain” by enabling “ammo manufacturers to resolve a national issue before it becomes a national security crisis.”
Eye on China: Beware of What You Whistle
“A sure sign that you’re living in a dictatorship is that the government dictates what you can sing,” roar The Wall Street Journal’s editors after Hong Kong moved ahead with banning “Glory to Hong Kong.”
The song grew popular “amid pro-democracy protests, and Hong Kong has warned that even posting it online can violate national-security and sedition laws. Authorities have arrested a housewife and a delivery worker who posted the song on social media.”
With a submissive court OK’ing the ban, Google and other platforms in Hong Kong “will now be under pressure to make sure the song never appears when you search.”
And be careful what you whistle: You could end up behind bars, “like publisher Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners.”
From the right: Google’s Leftist Antisemitsm
In a viral video, a Google AI fails to answer “What was the Holocaust?” but drops a pro-Palestinian response to “what was the Nakba?” Google told The Post it was a “bug.”
Hah! fumes Issues & Insights’ editorial board: “It was not the result of some innocent coding error, or the work of a rogue programmer. It was the result of intentional biases fed into the program by teams of woke Google staff and management.”
That is, “Google’s AI was taught to respond in a blatantly biased way when asked about Jews. It’s the same reason Google’s AI produced such comically inept images, such as black Confederate soldiers.”
Fact is, “antisemitism fits right in there with all the rest of the neo-Marxist claptrap that long ago took over colleges” and spread “as graduates of these colleges made their way out into the world.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
