One of my rules of thumb is that successful cultures have good public lavatories and can prevent public urination and defecation from becoming a problem. The fact that Boston’s transit authority is trying to figure out, not how to stop people from urinating in the elevators, but just how to track urine so that the transit authority can clean it up speaks both to societal decay and to modern America’s helplessness in the face of this decay.
Voters have had enough of ‘progressive’ leaders who are presiding over spiralling violence and crime.
For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
This emerging conflict is coming to a head next week in Los Angeles, the US’s second-largest city, in the Democratic primaries for LA mayor. Next week’s vote is likely to lead to a head-to-head between moderate billionaire developer Rick Caruso and progressive congressperson Karen Bass, once considered a potential vice-president for Joe Biden. On the same day, ultra-liberal San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin faces a potential recall amid rising crime rates.
We now live in an era where mass looting is viewed as an urban sport more than a crime. While retail sellers have always had to deal with some degree of theft, in just the past few years the problem has turned into an epidemic, with some stores being hit so often that they’ve been forced to close. Some looters travel in packs while others operate as lone wolves. So what’s at the core of this problem? If we can identify the cause, we may stand a better chance of finding a cure.
Two American cities, San Francisco and Chicago, seem to be competing to see which one can descend farther into the dystopia of gang rule, with honest citizens held captive to anarchy in the streets, afraid to leave their homes and finding nowhere to buy life’s essentials if they do venture out. Master filmmaker John Carpenter got it wrong when he predicted which American cities would fail in his 1980s and ’90s dystopian fantasies Escape from New York and Escape from L.A.
America’s major cities have seen trying times over the last year and a half, but Chicago seems to have fared worse than most. Why?
Today’s political class in Chicago wears the jacket for what’s gone so badly wrong, true. But in the 30 years prior to 2019, under Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Chicago government fostered widespread corruption that undermined accountability and the social fabric. Both mayors deserve credit for supporting public charter schools; still, today, only a sliver of all Chicago public K-12 students are clearing the bar at fourth, eighth, and eleventh grade.
The nation’s attention these past two weeks has focused nearly exclusively on Kabul, and rightly so given that the city has become the scene of the largest hostage situation in American history and a vivid image of the decline of Pax Americana abroad.
But Americans don’t need to travel 7,500 miles to get a first-hand glimpse of the end of American order. In many of our own country’s major cities, gangs of masked thugs and criminals do what they please — and our far-better-armed police aren’t allowed to stop them and protect the rest of us.
Every Monday in the city of anarchy, on what Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot once called “Accountability Mondays” without irony, the media tallies the number of the weekend murdered dead and the wounded.
And the Democrat politicians point fingers at each other.
More than 70 people were shot this past weekend, with 12 dead. Over the July 4 weekend, more than 100 people were shot, among them more than a dozen children, and 19 were killed. And so on, weekend after weekend, weekday after weekday.
h/t FF
More than twice as many people died from accidental drug overdoses in San Francisco in 2020 than from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, according to preliminary data released by the city’s office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
A total of 713 people died from drug overdoses in the city in 2020 compared to 255 who died from the CCP virus, commonly known as the coronavirus.
When my grandparents migrated to New York from Russia over a century ago, they found a city that was hardly paradise, but one that provided a pathway towards a better life. Life was tough, crowded and always a paycheck from poverty. My relatives were poor, but so was everyone; eventually, they all bought houses or apartments, and entered the middle class. As for crime in their native Brownsville, the home of Murder, Incorporated and other villainous enterprises, it rarely impacted “civilians”; my mother would tell me how a young girl could still walk across Prospect Park without fear of assault.
