“Progressive Paradise”

There’s a significant reason why DC workers don’t want to go downtown: crime

Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown. It involves converting empty office space into residential units and rebranding parts of the neighborhood. Soon, visitors to Washington will be able to watch homeless addicts shoot up in “Historic Green Triangle” and get their phones stolen by moped-riding teenagers in the “Penn West Equity, Innovation & University District.”

Cherelle Parker has vowed to shut down the city’s open-air drug markets, but the task may be beyond any one mayor’s reach.

Prior to being elected Philadelphia’s 100th mayor—the first woman in the post—Cherelle Parker pledged to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city in America.” Her election was a rebuke to the city’s left-wing Democrats, who had hoped to capture City Hall and remake it in the image of Seattle, San Francisco, or Portland. The Left’s favored mayoral candidate, Helen Gym, had the support of woke millennial elites and the Working Families Party, as well as endorsements from national left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gym’s well-funded campaign overshadowed Parker’s, but in the end Parker, a native Philadelphian, triumphed over Gym, a Columbus, Ohio, native who had moved to the city to attend the University of Pennsylvania.

There are now 700 million CCTV cameras in Communist China. Those electronic eyes are attached to the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined. It has the ability not only to recognise faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured.

Such capability can, and soon will, be augmented to the point where the movements of eyes themselves, monitored by intelligent cameras, will be sufficient to identify any active party.

“Fuck no, I wouldn’t vote for it again,” says a previous proponent of Measure 110, the 2020 law that decriminalized drugs and which the Oregon legislature reeled back this week. How did we get here?

When I moved to Portland in 2004, the junkies in downtown’s Pearl District, romanticized in Gus Van Sant’s 1989 Drugstore Cowboy, had been replaced by farm-to-table restaurants and a flagship REI store. Portland was on the up, a media darling poised to become the next great American city.

Then came the record scratch that was 2020.

Via Hotair

Employees at Macy’s flagship San Francisco store in Union Square have blamed its planned closure on shoplifting – despite mayor London Breed claiming crime was not a factor.

The Union Square store announced earlier this week it will be closing its doors after 77 years as part of a plan to close 150 locations across the nation over the next three years. It did not cite a specific reason for the decision.

Judge Engoron (and I always want to call him Erdogan, which I’m sure is Freudian) may have dealt an economic death blow to New York when he ruled against Donald Trump to the tune of almost half a billion dollars. Businesses and ordinary people have announced they intend to boycott New York, whether for self-protection or principle. But what happens when it’s the governing body that engages in boycotts? That turns out to be just as much of a death blow. The tale of San Francisco’s decision to boycott 30 states because the city disagreed with their politics is a wonderful example of leftist hubris and the economic havoc it wreaks.

Chicago has a problem with retailers closing their doors, pulling up stakes, and getting the hell out of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.