I found links that indicated studies showing no link between wealth and happiness, studies linking the welfare state and crime, a study showing income equality is not an indicator of crime but heterogeneity is.

I think there are many studies that conclude that some (but not all) of the behaviours that lead to poverty are the behaviours that lead to higher crime levels. Therefore, there is no causative link between poverty and crime, but instead they are both the result of poor behavioural and life choices (pregnancy out of wedlock, for instance, is a huge indicator of poverty). However, there are a number of other behaviours that also result in crime. Most violent crime is completely independent of income – some of it is caused by relationship problems and abusive homes, some of it is exacerbated by a lack of policing in areas with large numbers of delinquent youths, much crime is the result of mental illness or psychopathic behaviour, much crime is the result of drug abuse and other addictions, and so on.

Regarding your figures, I think if poverty and crime were linked, then the maritimes would be the most crime-ridden areas in Canada, because they have always had the highest poverty levels. But they are not.

Is that you Steyn?

Clarence Thomas, supreme court justice:

“I’d learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it,” Thomas writes in his memoir. “I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value.” To this day, he has kept a “15 cents” sticker from a cigar package stuck to his diploma, “to remind myself of the mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”

Shortly after he arrived at the law school, Thomas writes, he realized that “blacks who benefited from [affirmative action admissions] were being judged by a double standard.” As a result, Thomas writes, his law degree was basically worthless, since it “bore the taint of racial preference.”

Once again, for your benefit:

Obama, 69.5 million votes
Bush (2004), 60 million votes

What about this concept is giving you difficulty?

None of those studies have any scientific rigor whatsoever. You are dreaming. This is the place where what people want to believe is what they tend to believe – instead of the truth.

Studies that focus on actual statistics and numbers show the opposite, that crime shows absolutely no adherence to wealth or class. I could point you to dozens.

Ask Bernie Madoff. Ask Chuck Guite. Look at most of the countries in the world, where crime is most concentrated in the ruling class, and where the underclass cannot depend on their judicial institutions. There is no evidence whatsoever that crime is predominantly associated with poverty or unemployment.

On the other hand, there are lots of studies linking crime with drug addiction, naturally because people will do anything to get their next fix.

Sophia, watch the polls, or even watch any sequence of elections in any country. Notice how a swing of 2% can happen in an instant.

I never found math to be especially partisan.
Haven’t you heard the expression: Lies, damned lies, and statistics? Exhibit A, is this discussion.

You cheeky little blighter…

Since when did having things handed to you qualify as real world experience?

Obama is not qualified to change the oil on a damned lawnmower. He is a big baby.

When it comes to the fact that Obama had the skids greased for him his entire life, and does not have so much as the requisite experience to run a hotdog stand but now uses Alinksy radicalism to deign to tell CEOs how to run entire corporations, I’d say the comparision to the Snowbilly is a draw–with an edge to Palin for at least:

1) not having a hateful attitude to the nation of her birth.

2) the cultural confidence required to ward off the Cloud Cuckooland multi culti assaults from the left as much as from people who use human heads for decoration.

Harvard is not what it once was.. A place for learning and getting a larger perspective on life rather than a clearing house for the next generation of cornball professors and/or journalists who are mad at capitalist society for not needing their expertise in unravelling what might be left of Western Culture.

Your best hope for Obama, before he decides that the Hugo Chavez methodology of managing the economy and deciding that my buying beer or oysters is not quite high brow enough for the commonweal plan for nationalized economics turns real, is for theorectical physics to find a way to resurrect his hippy dippy moma. From there, I’m quite sure that “stanley” will use her charm and panache as an anthropologist to remind little Bambi that yes, son, even in OUR culture, when you mentors and friends and chums and radical pals are not spreading more grease on the rails and the media is not fawning over the Dear Leader, it IS probably that at some point you’ll run into a magical, character-building word in the English languange (and common at that, other than for Bambi) called:

“NO.”

I often have helpers working with me. I ask them to do something simple and straightforward. They often turn it into something complicated and not what I need or want. I say to them ‘don’t think, just do what I said’.

The same with journalists. Don’t think, you aren’t qualified. Just tell me what happened.

They are overthinking. Trying to parse what is important/newsworthy and what is not. They can’t know. Just tell me what happened. I don’t pay them to think.

Derek

And you don’t want to know, or don’t think we should consider important, whether they have the personal self control to keep their pants on, or the ability to keep an oath to their wife, or the ability to tell the truth?

I agree that these things in context may be meaningless.Great legislators with great accomplishments and respected opinions have done similar things and maintained respect and even adulation. But vapid attention seekers with carefully polished public personas don’t deserve respect unless they earn it. And screwing around on your wife while preening yourself on your faithfulness as a husband deserves any humiliation that comes your way.

These people are seeking great power. I don’t trust them unless they prove to me otherwise.

Derek

Derek

The MSM is like an unerring compass. Whomever they hate is doing something right. Whomever they respect is a sleazebag. It’s actually kind of a useful thing to have in a society where most of us can’t get to know the prospective leaders personally.

Must have been tough for McCain thinking he was always going to receive royal treatment… and only belatedly realizing that this only applied while he was opposing Republicans.

The English newspapers here are more responsible and responsiblity will be the death of them. Both left and right do not read newspapers because both know what newspapers are going to say on any issue. So why go through the trouble of lugging this thing around and reading it when it tells you nothing new that you care about. Either you don’t care about, or its nothing new.

One of the contributors the comments on Mark’s column made a commendable point that we should not be too hard on the frailties of politicians given that few of us are without sin. But she missed Mark’s point that the journalistic finger- wagging is asysmetrical, scandals on the right or explored at length and in depth,. But the scandals of the left are ducked. Only the Wall Street Journal editorial page was going on about the scandals in the Clinton White House for years.

Only when the Monica case ended up before a grand jury did the predominating left-liberal press take up the story.

Another aspect is gender, which no one wants to address unless its is done in politically correct terms. Newspapers as objects are appreciated mostly by men over 40 and mostly over 50, yet the pitch for the last 30 years has been increasingly attract thirtysomething females. What’s more, editorial departments are being filled up with living representatives of the target – as yet unattainable – readership. Women – as politically incorrect as it is – are chiefly interested by volume in things that touch their bodies. Sex, recipies and disease was the old women’s page formula. That formula has since spread to much of the newspaper, turning off men over 40, mostly over 50 who are the newspapers natural readers.

Today, wars are covered not from the basis of winning and losing, but from the pain they cause and from the hospital wards. Because women cover wars, wars have become too dangerous to cover. Unlike World War II, where correspondents ran around the battle, shouting, “Anyone here from Toronto!?”, reporters now move from hotel room to press conference salon and back again.

We no longer get the usual throughput of politics from legislatures and courts. Crime is not and exciting phenomenon, but a social problem. Stories have to have a moral issue. They must be magazinized. Little bits and pieces spotted here and there that used to to brighten a newspaper reader’s experience are now gathered into columns called briefs (virtually labelled unimportant), because they fit better in the dsign of the design-driven newspaper.

Newspapers can be saved. But they must die and we must rid ourselves of the girls, gays and gelding who run them.

Sophia, 2% is less than the margin of error for most polls. When the difference is 2%, you could have the vote one week and again the next and get a different result each time. If you are actually gonna argue that 2% is a wide margin, it shows how partisan you are.

As for nd, it’s obvious he or she is a hyperventilating partisan, and incapable of being objective in the slightest manner.

Obama, on the other hand, merely went to Harvard Law, and even in this slacker institution known for loose admission standards and a casual work ethic, he was barely elected the president of the Law Review, a feat that, for example, even the lazy-ass Chief Justice of the Supreme Court didn’t manage in his time at that party school.

No, our Sarah put her blindingly high IQ to better uses than trivialities such attending elite educational institutions and learning about the country she hopes to run – she honed her skills at murdering animals from airplanes, cooking chilli, and raising abstinent children who get knocked up extra-maritally at 17.

… less than double the number of states Obama thought he had campaigned through.

I know, I know. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

53 + 51 = ?