The city of Baltimore has now recorded more than 230 murders this year and we haven’t even reached the end of August. If the pace doesn’t slacken, Charm City is on track to reach 300 murders by November, setting up the possibility that they will break their all-time record for killings in a single year.
San Francisco, Cleveland and Portland have the most deserted downtowns in the US as soaring crime rates in the Democratic cities scare away workers and tourists.
In a recent study by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley, San Francisco’s downtown area was found to be only 31 percent active over the spring of 2022 when compared to pre-pandemic levels, with Cleveland at 36 percent and Portland at 41 percent.
Meanwhile, cities like Salt Lake City, Utah, Bakersfield, California and Columbus Ohio are enjoying the fastest comeback, seeing their downtown activity go up by more than 110 percent since 2019.
“When presidents and prime ministers make and enforce their own laws under the pretext of “emergency powers,” then citizens should not be surprised when their leaders discover an endless supply of “emergencies” requiring urgent action.”
In French, a “bidonville” is a shantytown. A “bidon” is a large container, like the giant yellow vegetable oil bottles used to carry drinking water in developing countries.
I’ve seen plenty of shantytowns in cities from India to Togo; they are an unfortunate consequence of rapid urbanization.
What surprised me when I came home to Washington, D.C., a few months ago was seeing shantytowns both outside the State Department, where my old office was, and Union Station, near my new office.
… For years now, governments across the western world have found reasons to turn towards tribal politics. Be it relentless condemnation of western history as uniquely evil, genuflection to those who shut down railroads and tear down statues or prostration before the idol of identity politics, it has been a one-way capitulation to any grievance Twitter could muster. Reality is about to force a change from identity driven wedges and fanciful green economic policy dreams back to serious matters like money and jobs. The inflation tidal wave, coupled with a slowing economy is making our citizens poorer. A backlash against Canadian Liberals and American Democrats, along with governing elites in Europe is coming and will be a first-class example of “it’s the economy, stupid,” in action.
Philadelphia is experiencing the dreaded long, hot summer. Violent crime continues to soar, from premeditated ambushes to seemingly random juvenile attacks. Under district attorney Larry Krasner’s catch-and-release crime policies, Philadelphia homicides are in a statistical dead heat with last year’s record-breaking numbers. The response of city leaders? They’re imposing a lockdown, creating a curfew, and politely asking murderers to stay home at night.
Last week marked the 246th birthday of the United States. This year also marks, according to Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, when we “question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.” As reported in late June by NBC, all branches of the military are falling short of their 2022 recruiting goals.
The Army, for instance, has met only 40 percent of its enlisted recruitment target for the fiscal year, which for the military services ends on September 30. Those in the Pentagon tasked with attracting candidates have listed reasons they are struggling to meet their mission: lack of eligibility, Covid restrictions putting a damper on outreach, competition from a robust civilian employment market, and a lack of a desire to serve.
The same holds true in Canada. Trudeau’s Liberals have turned the armed forces into a sick joke.
The city’s very real progress is being squandered as crime spreads
There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side.
I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.”
America’s cities are rotting. The Democrat-run cities in particular. And all of them are going wrong in the same way, suffused with the same problems of violence, drugs and homelessness.
In the nation’s capital, the homelessness problem is visible from the moment you enter the city. Arriving into DC used to be a great pleasure, with the visitor immediately thrown into the centre of the grand capital. Today the lawns outside Union station that greet the traveller are covered with tents. It is just the first of the homeless encampments which visitors are now confronted with throughout the city. Almost every green space in DC is now covered with tents, a constant reminder that America seems to be rotting from the centre outwards.
Portland’s open-air drug market is laid bare as people smoke heroin on the streets and needles litter the sidewalks as city officials start homeless sweeps while a nearby city’s mayoral candidate ‘wants to round them up and use ‘Japanese-style pods’ to house them.
New photos taken by DailyMail.com show the current situation in Portland, a city that has been plagued with homelessness and addicts openly using drugs in broad daylight. Users were seen injecting themselves, slumping over in a semi-comatose state.
Discarded needles, human waste and the smell of urine adds another layer of tarnish to city’s progressive policies – one of them being the Ballot Measure 110 decision, which has decriminalized hard drugs in the Democrat-run state.
If one is concerned about ideological excesses on the left and right in our mainstream culture and politics, there are nascent signs that something of an ideological correction may be slowly gaining momentum. Developments in recent weeks point to institutional leaders and the general public starting to push back against the radicals and reactionaries that have come to disproportionately influence our popular discourse in Canada, the United States and elsewhere across the West.
The streets of Portland resemble an ‘open air drug market’ after state officials’ scheme to decriminalize hard drugs led to a surge in overdose deaths, critics claim.
Law enforcement agents say that the streets of Portland are full of homeless addicts openly buying and selling drugs and that signs of drug addiction are actually increasing statewide, Fox News reported.
Photos show the desperate situation in the liberal Pacific Northwest city, where people can be seen shooting up drugs or passed out in broad daylight.
Parts of San Francisco have been in a state of emergency this year. The city’s drugs and homelessness crisis has divided Democrats – and this week helped bring about the political demise of one of its most prominent politicians.
Like thousands of people in San Francisco, Jay has been sleeping rough on the streets.
Jay describes his life as nightmarish – as he struggles with a fentanyl addiction he derives no pleasure from. He says he shoots up just to feel normal.
“It’s horrible man. I’m sick all the time,” he says.
The streets where he lives – the city’s notorious Tenderloin district – are dangerous too. He says he’s had fights. Drug dealers have burnt his tent down several times.
… I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don’t smash the windows. One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.
Only a nuke can save San Francisco… If you’re wondering why there’s a homeless crisis wonder no more.
A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.
h/t CK
San Francisco has been waiting to be rocked by another massive earthquake since 1906. On Tuesday night this week, it finally came when the people of America’s most famously Left-wing city voted overwhelmingly to throw out their chief prosecutor — and with him a policy of ultra-woke tolerance of crime that has brought the city to its knees.
Some 60 per cent of San Franciscans voted to ‘recall’ from office Chesa Boudin, a pin-up for the ‘progressive’ Left, midway through his term as the city’s District Attorney.
