Friday, July 13, 2012

You will not be able to print enough money in a thousand years

... to pay for the government we would need if the traditional family continues to collapse.

So said Congressman Mike Pence at the Iowa Freedom and Faith Coalition dinner in 2010. Meanwhile, today's WSJ has an article on Chicago's inability to gain control over its wildly violent South Side. The cops in Chicago are turning to technology for help.
CHICAGO—With murders and shootings surging here this year, police are fighting back by building a Facebook-like database that tracks the social connections of the city's dozens of street gangs and their myriad factions. 
The goal isn't to draw gang members closer together, but to keep them apart in the crucial hours after an attack.
Note that they're not even pretending they can stop the first attack, they're just trying to prevent immediate escalation. The logical countermove by the criminals is to wait for the cops to go away to seek revenge. Since the problem is the breakdown of civilization from the destruction of the traditional family, there's no real hope that this is going to work.
"The heart of the problem is this assumption that there's some rationality to these shootings," said John Hagedorn, a criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the city's street gangs. "These aren't gang wars; this is just a lot of really spontaneous, nasty stuff going on."
And the crime isn't localized to the area where the gang bangers live because they're using technology, too. Cell phones and social networking give them the ability to form flash mobs anywhere, any time.
CHICAGO (CBS) – Eight teenagers have been charged with mob action, after four people were hurt in at least three mob attacks in and near downtown over the weekend. 
CBS 2’s Mai Martinez reports the most recent attack happened Sunday night in the 800 block of North Dewitt Place in the Gold Coast neighborhood. 
A 36-year-old man was walking home from work around 10 p.m. Sunday, when police say he was robbed and attacked by anywhere from 10 to 20 people. The man was taken to the hospital with a head injury, but he was able to walk on his own after the attack.
Chart that one if you can. And once you've got the technology in place and algorithms are humming away, this is what you've got to deal with:


What's the technological answer to that? What government programs need extra funding? In our hearts, we know there's no government plan to deal with this. None at all. After you watch that, doesn't Mike Pence sound prophetic?

“To those who say traditional marriage is not relevant to our budget crisis, I say this: You will not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government we would need if the traditional family continues to collapse.”

2 comments:

tom said...

I suppose the Chicago kids are learning from the National-level policies. It's about timetables, not victory. "Excuse me officer, when will you be done your patrol." Not "let's go, we'll never out-wait the cops."

B-Daddy said...

KT,
Great post, in a long line of excellent analyses as to what ails us. The key quote is the one regarding the assumption of rationality. Rationality assumes a level of upbringing and education that is tied to an intact and moral family structure. This doesn't exist in large swaths of urban America.
Just as access to cheap technology has allowed uncivilized al-Qaeda savagery to threaten us; so too will the same technology allow this crime wave to spill over from its geographic origins.