Hey Zeus, meet Jesus

Forget the bible belt, now we've got the Jesus belt:

From the blurb at BabyNameWizard, "unlike most Christians, who decline to use the name Jesus out of respect, Christians in the Spanish-speaking world commonly bestow it to bring the bearer under the special protection of the son of God."

Geography, race, religion, and class

... is a ridiculously audacious title for the post it introduces.

Anyway, previously, Dan commented:

Poor inner city people go to church more than everyone else, and they theoretically believe in marriage. But they don't believe in losing the government checks.

Having read Charles Murray's Coming Apart, that assertion struck me as inaccurate, with the caveat in mind that, as Murray did through most of The Bell Curve, so as to avoid racial confounding, the relevant research includes only whites. I did a quick check of the GSS, confirming what Murray found--affluent people from rural and suburban areas go to church more than poor urban folks do.

However, Dan correctly pointed out that blacks attend worship services at significantly higher rates than whites do.

I ran the same GSS test, this time for whites exclusively and for blacks exclusively and found the same patterns for both racial groups--wealthy suburban and rural blacks go to church more than poor inner-city blacks do, and wealthy suburban and rural whites attend more than poor inner-city whites do. The rub is that poor urban blacks still attend more than wealthy suburban and rural whites do. Here are the averages. The higher the figure, the more frequently the group attends worship services (n = 2,468, one SD = 2.76):

Group	Attend
Wealthy country blacks	5.64
Poor urban blacks	4.12
Wealthy country whites	3.59
Poor urban whites	3.24

The "wealthy country blacks" row is only comprised of 23 respondents, so take it with caution, but the overall results pass the smell test.

If Dan's in error, it is in the assumption that urban poor = black. While the urban poor are far more likely to be black than the rest of the country is, in absolute terms I don't think blacks comprise an absolute majority of the country's poor city dwellers. As an empirical question, it's tough to get a straight answer because the definitions of "urban" and "poor" aren't standardized, with the idea of "urban" being a lot more expansive at the US Census office than the idea of "ghetto" is in the vernacular.

GSS variables used: RES16(1-4)(6), REALINC(0-30000)(100000-999999), YEAR(2000-2010), ATTEND, RACECEN1(1)(2)

Rates of unsolved murder by state

News reports based on FBI statistics show that somewhere between 35%-40% of homicides in the US go unsolved in the US today. Uniform Crime Reporting data, available at the state level (excluding Florida), show that right at one-third of homicide offenders remain racially unidentifiable. These unidentified killers are the ones who haven't been caught, which is why law enforcement is uncertain of their racial compositions.

This means we have access to rates of unsolved murders at the state level staring us in the face. Parenthetically, there are presumably a small number of homicides for which a perpetrator's race is reported even though he is never positively identified, which would explain why the UCR data on the racially unidentifiable comes in at 33% while the FBI reports an unsolved rate in the 35%-40% range. Still, the following estimates must be pretty damn close to the real thing.

The following table ranks states (with the exclusion of Florida for which no data are available) by their rates of unsolved murders. It's like golf here--the higher a state's percentage, the worse it's doing:

State	Unknown
1. District of Columbia	56.1%
2. Illinois	55.4%
3. Maryland	46.1%
4. New York	44.0%
5. California	43.9%
6. Massachusetts	43.8%
7. Rhode Island	42.0%
8. New Jersey	41.8%
9. Michigan	38.8%
10. Connecticut	37.1%
11. Missouri	36.7%
12. Indiana	36.3%
13. Arizona	34.7%
14. Nevada	34.6%
15. Ohio	31.4%
16. Louisiana	31.2%
17. Alabama	27.8%
18. Hawaii	26.5%
19. Georgia	26.3%
20. Kentucky	26.1%
21. Texas	26.0%
22. North Carolina	25.5%
23. Pennsylvania	25.1%
24. New Mexico	24.5%
25. Arkansas	21.7%
26. Kansas	21.1%
27. Colorado	20.8%
28. Virginia	19.8%
29. Oklahoma	19.0%
30. Nebraska	19.0%
31. Mississippi	18.7%
32. Washington	17.9%
33. Minnesota	17.8%
34. Wisconsin	17.5%
35. Alaska	17.4%
36. Delaware	16.7%
37. New Hampshire	15.8%
38. Oregon	15.7%
39. Utah	15.6%
40. Tennessee	14.6%
41. West Virginia	12.1%
42. South Carolina	10.6%
43. Maine	10.4%
44. Iowa	9.8%
45. South Dakota	9.2%
46. Montana	8.2%
47. Vermont	5.6%
48. North Dakota	4.5%
49. Wyoming	4.5%
50. Idaho	3.9%

An accompanying visualization is available here.

I wouldn't fault someone for imagining that rural murders must be the easiest ones to get away with. If I leave my house and head west, it's 600 miles of sparsely populated farmland and prairie from here to Denver. How would anyone find a body buried under the great blue sky out there in the middle of nowhere? Yet rural states dominate the bottom of the list, while DC, by far the most urban 'state' listed, has the inglorious distinction of being the worst of the worst when it comes to positively identifying killers. This article on the subject of unsolved homicides from the Scripps Howard News Service gives an indication as to why. It requires a little reading between the lines, of course:

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

The majority of homicides now go unsolved at dozens of big-city police departments, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of crime records provided by the FBI.

...

Experts say that homicides are tougher to solve now because crimes of passion, where assailants are easier to identify, have been replaced by drug- and gang-related killings. Many police chiefs -- especially in areas with rising numbers of unsolved crimes -- blame a lack of witness cooperation.

---

++Addition++A sarcastic Steve Sailer comments.

Flat Florida, acrophilic Alaska

At Taki's Magazine, the Derb writes the following:

Stupid? The Republican Party’s EEG trace is flatter than Kansas.

Technically, Kansas isn't actually flat. As a person travels upstream over four hundred miles from the state's eastern end to its western one, he rises more than half a mile higher as he approaches the great continental divide. There are actually 20 states that exhibit less change in elevation from their lowest points to their highest ones than Kansas does.

To be as annoyingly precise as possible, Florida is the most flat, barely able to raise itself out of the Atlantic or the gulf from the panhandle to Miami. At least it offers plenty of opportunities for alliteration.

Of course, Derb's intention is to conjure up images of western Kansas, devoid of the woods and hilliness of the state's eastern end, which, to the south, resembles the Ozarks more than it does the Kansas-Colorado border. That the state's highest natural point, "Mount Sunflower", is located less than a mile from Colorado and is indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain, attests to this. The gentle but steady incline across the state measures around 0.1 degree. The Derb's point is well taken, I promise!

The rank ordering of US states by the change in elevation from each state's lowest point to its highest:

State	Change (ft)
1. Alaska	20320
2. California	14785
3. Washington	14417
4. Hawaii	13803
5. Nevada	12665
6. Arizona	12565
7. Idaho	11955
8. Utah	11338
9. Oregon	11249
10. Colorado	11123
11. Montana	11003
12. Wyoming	10709
13. New Mexico	10323
14. Texas	8751
15. North Carolina	6684
16. Tennessee	6466
17. New Hampshire	6288
18. South Dakota	6276
19. Virginia	5729
20. New York	5343
21. Maine	5270
22. Georgia	4784
23. Oklahoma	4686
24. West Virginia	4623
25. Nebraska	4587
26. Vermont	4300
27. Kentucky	3887
28. South Carolina	3560
29. Massachusetts	3489
30. Kansas	3361
31. Maryland	3360
32. Pennsylvania	3213
33. North Dakota	2757
34. Arkansas	2698
35. Alabama	2413
36. Connecticut	2379
37. New Jersey	1802
38. Minnesota	1700
39. Missouri	1542
40. Michigan	1408
41. Wisconsin	1372
42. Iowa	1191
43. Ohio	1094
44. Illinois	955
45. Indiana	937
46. Rhode Island	811
47. Mississippi	807
48. Louisiana	543
49. Delaware	447
50. Florida	345

As tangential to this post as this post was to the Derb's article, does this guy's photo epitomize everything that is wrong with the modern white male or what?