Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the democratically elected choice of ballot harvesters whose election was slightly less credible than those conducted in Syria and North Korea, is blaming the “conservative press” for the public’s fear that they’re living in a violent crime-ridden hellhole run by crime pandering politicians.
San Francisco’s “Tyranny of the Minority”
San Francisco has its share of untouchable landmarks. Cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge—and Gump’s. This iconic retailer has been through multiple transformations since its inception in 1861. It’s currently located in a smallish space on Post Street in Union Square, but its presence in the city looms much larger in terms of civic pride. The store epitomizes a uniquely San Franciscan version of elegance and style.
Crime-ridden, dysfunctional Baltimore desperately needs new leadership—and more cops.
On July 2, a huge crowd gathered at Baltimore’s Brooklyn Homes public housing project for a block party. The “Brooklyn Day” celebration culminated in the worst mass shooting in Baltimore’s history, with 30 victims, including two fatalities; police recovered shell casings from as many as 16 guns. Before a single arrest had been made or weapon recovered, local officials were blaming guns for the incident, with Baltimore’s young Democratic mayor, Brandon Scott, condemning Congress for not banning “ghost guns.” But the Brooklyn Homes shooting was the inevitable result of policies that have engendered crime in Charm City for decades.
Allowing chaos and criminality is not compassion, no matter what the governing class pretends
Even the dwindling number of partisans who still bristle at the claim that Canada is broken must admit that it sure looks and feels that way. Life in Canadian cities is noticeably coarser, uglier, and more violent than it was just a few years ago. Places once known for their civic beauty like Victoria, where I grew up, are now defaced by parks and city blocks that would be considered embarrassing in the third world. It doesn’t help that this street-level squalor has spread incongruously in the shadow of gleaming new glass and steel apartment towers, which contribute in their own way to a growing feel of social division and alienation in what was, until very recently, still mostly a city of wood, stone, and brick built on a human scale.
h/t CK
With a court deadline looming on July 10 for the City of Phoenix to clean up a squalid homeless encampment known as “The Zone,” more homeless people than ever are flooding the area despite the city’s aggressive efforts to address the disorder.
The failure to clean up “The Zone” is leaving business owners and other neighbors more distraught than ever about destruction of property, violence, drugs and filth, and even dead bodies.
Portland, Ore., Is Losing Residents Weary of Crime and High Housing Prices
PORTLAND, Ore.—Mark Rogers has made a list of things he misses about Portland—its vegan restaurants, Powell’s bookstore, public transit—and the things he doesn’t—having his things stolen, stepping in human excrement, extreme politics.
The 44-year-old artist moved across the country to Fort Wayne, Ind., last year.
From crime to climate protesters, the predictable result of not upholding the law is more lawlessness
It is always interesting to see how far things can run if the authorities let them. If you tour around American cities these days – especially Democrat-run cities – you can see the results everywhere.
Legalise or effectively legalise drugs – as in New York and other places – and you will soon see and smell them everywhere. In the middle of the day, you will witness people lighting or shooting up. All other judgments aside, it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that the person before you is not going to contribute to the economy that day. Nor perhaps for the remainder of their life.
🚨#BREAKING: Chaotic Scene Unfolds in Downtown Chicago as Teenagers Vandalize Cars and Gunfire Erupts
📌#Chicago | #Illinois ⁰
There is currently a significant police response taking place in downtown Chicago due to a large group of teenagers causing chaos. They have been… pic.twitter.com/n7xhBpsTKs— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) April 16, 2023
H/T CM
Mark down Tuesday, April 4, as the night Chicago died.
That’s when we learned that Second City voters narrowly elected Brandon Johnson as their next mayor. This is a city that was flattened during the reign of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who lost in the first round of voting for Chicago mayor because she didn’t finish in one of the top two spots.
This is the only country where I have actually wondered: will these cities ever recover?
They’re calling it “revenge travel”: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveler, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past twenty months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up.
Cities that allow the most destructive of human behavior to take over the public space are cities where civilized life as we know it is being marginalized and forced to give way to social fragmentation. Dignity yields to savagery.
Europe has a long tradition of fighting narcotic drugs, with varying results. In 1992, the city of Zürich, Switzerland, closed the infamous ‘Needle Park’ area, just behind the national museum and the central railway station. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
hundreds of dealers and addicts packed into the park, [with] many people desperately needing urgent medical care on a daily basis.
As a curious tourist, I visited the place about a year before it was closed. I was shocked at the complete and utter lack of dignity among those who basically spent their entire lives there. Human beings had turned into empty shells, consumed and hollowed out by their addiction to something that was certain to kill them.
Its great cities are on the path to decay
The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.
Worth a read. This is what we are seeing in Toronto. Our cities have become ungovernable, virtually unfixable wastelands.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has launched a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.
In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned “kamikaze” aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.
#Ukraine: At least three Russian BMP infantry fighting vehicles were destroyed by the Ukrainian "Omega" unit using Stugna-P and FGM-148 Javelin ATGMs near Avdiivka, #Donetsk Oblast.
Footage also shows the work of FPV-drones armed with HEAT munitions – 4 BMP were damaged. pic.twitter.com/LEUiLoMs8e
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) December 27, 2022
He was the violent prophet of our tech-dystopia
“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.
Cindy and Dora didn’t know where they were going on a recent Saturday night, but they knew they were headed to a “show.”
Around 11 p.m., Cindy texted a friend in Compton but didn’t immediately hear back. She and Dora grabbed some tacos from a stand and waited. About 40 minutes later, the women — who didn’t wish to be identified by their last names —had their answer: East Compton Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue.
A little after midnight, nearly 200 people blocked the streets in what has become a weekly ritual in the city. Two cars whipped around the intersection, burning tires and worn-down brake pads sending shrouds of thick smoke into the air.
OH, it’s a