In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”. Who’s back? The ghosts, of course. For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked. A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!” This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).
The little girl from “Poltergeist II”
And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.” According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”
A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State. LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class. People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia. Hell on earth is not a magnet.
A common strip of homelessness in Los AngelesLitter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles
Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.
For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.
RogerG
Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
SF failure to sign: then-Los Angeles Angels designated hitter Shohei Ohtani reacts during the seventh inning at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., June 29, 2023. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters)
People are fleeing California and especially San Fransisco. San Fransisco is the tip of the spear in our current progressive-inspired wave of broad social decay. The fallout stretches from crime-ridden streets to ubiquitous disorder to business flight to join the residential variety — and in the difficulty in attracting promising young free agents, according to Buster Posey, recently retired player extraordinaire and part-owner and member of the team’s board of directors.
Buster Posey, Giants part-owner and member of the Board of Directors
Posey on the team’s difficulties: “Something I think is noteworthy, something that unfortunately keeps popping up from players and even the players’ wives is there’s a bit of an uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs. . . . But as far as a free-agent pursuit goes, I have seen that it does affect things.”
Dan Lurie, throwing his hat into the ring for mayor, in an X post agrees with Posey. He posted,
“Players like Buster Posey have brought so much joy to San Franciscans, but now our city’s problems are affecting our ability to attract new generational stars. Our city should be a draw for players, not a reason to avoid our sports teams.
Current city leadership has let down the people who live and work in San Francisco every day. It’s time to call in the replacements and end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco. Then we will start our comeback.”
Dan Lurie, Levis heir and mayoral candidate
Yep, ideas have consequences, and probably the only real lasting consequences. The Lefty worldview is a disaster, and the calamity filters into everything, even my SF Giants.
San Fransisco poop map made famous by Gov. Ron DeSantis in his debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom
RogerG
* Dan Luries’s X post at https://twitter.com/DanielLurie/status/1735026315244528018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1735026315244528018%7Ctwgr%5Ea4ecb030bd3537b9539ce9c7b19ade7f8ed3ca56%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fnews%2Fsnl-mocks-antisemitism-hearing-with-university-presidents-in-new-skit%2F
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.
You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below). Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads. It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places. Parents, beware.
What “beast”? The thing is more than a personification of evil. It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things. Some ideas are inherently evil. Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature. They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise. How do we know them? A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap. It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school. There aren’t many institutions not infected by it. Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.
The “beast” has a family tree. The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26. German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions. In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration. He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before. And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony. The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.
Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school? And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige? How does that compute?
The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value. The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long. Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality. Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.
Send your kids and money elsewhere. Please watch the short clip.
I’ll soon be flying Israeli and Ukrainian flags on my house. The two causes are similar and linked. Both are facing extermination in a replay of the 1942 Wansee Conference (the Nazi Final Solution) and Stalin’s Holodomor (Stalin’s Final Solution on Ukraine in the 1930s). Realistically, like it or not, America is the last remaining superpower on the side of the angels and, as such, we must look outward as well as inward. Both fringes want a self-flagellating retreat. It’s despicable.
The neo-Marxist Left, as symbolized by The Squad, see America and western civilization as the fount of oppression. For them, we need to go away, or get boiled in revolution.
The Squad
The clown-car Right wants us to go away, mostly from the international stage, their nuanced blabberings notwithstanding. The simpletons think that we can’t chew gum and walk at the same time because our ability to produce gum has weakened. They say “No” to Ukraine because of some strange affection for Putin’s propaganda and the existence of problems at home, which was always and will be forever true. Speaking of an impossible standard.
The Clown Caucus, clockwise: Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene
And “No” to Israel according to a charter member of the clown caucus, Marjorie Taylor Greene, unless we make cuts from somewhere else in the budget. She’s got a laundry list which unsurprisingly doesn’t include cuts in ag subsidies for her rural northwest Georgia district or the entitlements.
She practices a cheap shot at foreign aid. It’s the go-to for dimwits. It’s less than 1% of the federal budget. Look it up. And from that fraction of 1% we are supposed to address the atrophying of our defense supply chain and balance the budget? So, in a flight of fancy, she’s mum on the almost $3 trillion of Social Security and Medicare but gun-ho about $39 billion (foreign aid), or .13% of the entitlement behemoths which are half of the total federal budget. Do you see why the clown caucus qualifies for dimwit status?
The lunatics on the fringe seem to have outsized influence in both parties. Of course, we’ve got the neo-isolationist Right of the clown caucus with a founding membership of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, MJT, Matt Rosendale, and a few hangers-on, with Senators Josh Hawley and JD Vance occasionally dipping their toes in the fever swamp. And on the other wing, we have the always crazy neo-Marxist Left that has intoxicated the Democratic Party.
I close with Michael Ramirez’s most recent cartoon that faced censure at the Washington Post for its accurate depiction of Hamas leader Hamadi hiding behind children and other innocent civilians. It apparently hurt the feelings of some of the paper’s left-wing readership. Are we that far gone that we can’t be safe in condemning the murder, rape, and beheading of real innocents?
County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Londond Breed centerSan Francisco Mayor London Breed
Many of our debates are vastly off-kilter. It begins with hugely consequential things. Republicans seem intent on foisting Donald Trump on the country again. The Democrats are focused on making a shambles of our country. The former makes the latter more likely. The abhorrent DJT is simply too ugly a face for the GOP to succeed among a national electorate.
It doesn’t stop there. The so-called solutions have the maturity and depth of understanding of locker room humor. Trumpkins insinuate that the country needs a Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes fame) to fight, fight anyone, anyone coming from any direction, making enemies of friends. The Dems and their fellow cultural revolutionaries (their inspiration: Mao), after creating swaths of wreckage from their cuckoo ideas, want the help of people, who they have habitually tarred, to clean up their mess.
For the revolutionaries in power, more cops to reverse the doom loop of places like San Franscisco is much less feasible of an option after years of decriminalizing criminality and the branding of cops as racists. What they just don’t get is the fact that once the slide is initiated, like an avalanche, it’s awfully hard to stop. This class of revolutionary ruler is emotionally and mentally ill-equipped to address the situation.
The carnage is glaringly obvious to all. Type “doom loop” and/or “San Francisco” in YouTube’s search field and you’ll see. The list of major retailers abandoning the city is too well-known to require mention here. The two largest downtown hoteliers prefer foreclosure to continuing operations among the filth and crime. The iconic Westfield Mall has discovered a similar affection for foreclosure. San Francisco is the donkey party’s policies taken to their logical conclusion.
Mayor London Breed quipped in support of additional funding for public safety, “San Francisco must be a safe and just city for all”, and her fellow-travelling potentates on the Board of Supervisors responded with an additional $60 million in funding for the Police Department and 220 more officers. I don’t know what 220 more cops will be able to accomplish for residents, under the guise of the same ravenous Red Guards who created the situation, except spend a whole lot more money for more uniforms, training, equipment, and compensation with little real power to do anything to clear the public spaces. What high-quality candidate for SFPD recruitment would be willing to step into that minefield?
My guess is, if the same clowns are running the show, that things might marginally improve, but “marginally improve” is a bit like “marginally mugged”. It’s still going to be horrible, and managers responsible for many employees will recommend Zooming (stay home) if at all possible, instead of running the gauntlet.
A view of the troubling walk to the entrance of the San Francisco’s Federal Building
And that includes federal employees at the downtown federal building. HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell issued the following advisory to SF district managers earlier this month, “In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future.” Even with the added cops, any return to the office workstation won’t survive the next assault.
Nancy Pelosi’s well-publicized pleas won’t matter squat if the people in charge fundamentally still think like her. That’s the crux of the matter: the critical mass of politics in San Francisco is infatuated with the power of the state to create Shangri-la and the view of the world through the lens of systemic victimization. So long as that sticks between the ears, decline becomes more than an option. It’s a perpetual reality.
Ideas matter, and boy do they matter. The clowns in San Francisco City Hall just don’t get it.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY”, Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic, June 8, 2022, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/
* “Federal workers in San Francisco told to work remotely ‘for the foreseeable future’ because local crime is so bad”, Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine, August 14, 2023, at https://fortune.com/2023/08/14/remote-work-federal-workers-san-francisco-work-from-home-crime-drugs/
Creating the New Soviet Man (and woman, and whatever) necessitates control of the social mechanisms that transmit culture. The German leftist of the 1960’s, Rudi Dutschke, coined the slogan “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – and thus compacted the strategy to a neat little quip.
Let’s face it, a radical leftist is a Marxist who has adopted the rhetorical flair of a claque of history’s Marxists – Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research and Herbert Marcuse, et al) – in expanding the list of the oppressed to include the “nots”: not white; not white and male; not white, male, hetero – you get the picture. The doctrine then begins to overwhelm the culture once the revolutionaries shed their shaggy hair, jeans, and sandals and don tweed, professorial beards, pant suits, and gain tenure. After that, their nonsensical ideological peccadillos permeate everything from Supreme Court opinions to PBS’s “American Experience” films.
The crux of the strategy involves conjuring a statistical disparity between a hypothetical gender/race overclass and the radicals’ favored “minorities” – aka the “oppressed” – and then a jump to one of the many “isms” and “phobias” (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as the cause. The numbers are connected to a preconceived cause – a predetermined ism/phobia – by only tenuous threads of logic and fact, at best. Once you hear or read the shambolic reasoning, if you haven’t been previously indoctrinated and still retain your wits, you will be left scratching your head at the flight of fancy’s chutzpah.
That titan of pure reason, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who refused to define woman in her confirmation hearing, injected an extension of the tactic (statistical disparity and leap to predetermined cause) in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. According to her, without the racial favoritism of “diversity” gamesmanship in college admissions, black babies will die. Citing a study in one of those prestigious but newly radicalized science journals in the “long march through the institutions” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), she expounded with all the confidence of an excessively opinionated sophomore, “. . . for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” So, in her ill-reasoned reasoning, a B-average student from a poorly performing school should have precedence over a straight-A one who faced a more demanding curriculum, with race being the deciding factor. Got that? We’re back to racism.
The problem: Jackson’s study is bogus. Even the study cites a miniscule five one-hundredths of a percent (99.96% v. 99.91%) difference in the survival rate of black newborns between black and white doctors. Diving into the flotsam of this shipwreck, the number of infants is too small to support such a tiny difference and the study’s conclusions. The study’s methodology screams “high margin of error”.
Not only that, it relied on generalized Census data which meant that in many cases the race of the attending physician couldn’t be determined, or whether the treatment was from a nurse, physician’s assistant, midwife, or a doctor. Other relevant factors were left on the cutting room floor, such as the plethora of social factors that aren’t evenly distributed through the population under any circumstances. To conclude that these social disparities are further proof of systemic racism merely nestles one more logic-leap into the general logic-leap. Welcome to the mental miasma of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Our intertwined schools and media prepare the ground for this buffoonery. Many teachers incorporate PBS documentaries into their curriculum (I did). Today’s “American Experience” (AE), though, isn’t the AE of a decade ago. It’s gone woke. Two episodes – “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” – illustrate the corruption. Many of the contributing “experts” clearly worship at the altar of the groupthink. If you wanted to learn a little about L. Frank Baum and his Oz creations, you would, along with a heavy dose of racism, sexism, and genocide against “indigenous peoples”, adding at least another 30 minutes to the program. The collapse of St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles in the 1920’s can’t proceed without cis-gender white male racism, sexism, and the overall patriarchal contemptuousness for Gaia.
The productions are littered with interesting facts . . . and a heavy dose of generational sneering. It’s as if the production staff see themselves as a class of pure, enlightened deities passing judgment on those in the past who didn’t have the opportunity to be civilized at the feet of the great master, Marcuse.
The films are dripping with hubris, but what have these Marcuse acolytes wrought? Inspired by the same mindset – maybe without the Molotov cocktails, riots, killings, and arson of their Antifa military wing – many of our cities, at the mercy of this governing philosophy, are in a doom-loop. Go ahead, spend time travelling the surface streets of the doom-loop corridor from Seattle to San Diego, or Chicago (hire a protective private army), or the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast. If you avoid hepatitis or HIV, or cholera, from the litter of hypodermic needles and the open-air poop on the sidewalks, you may not survive the mugging. The only thing in abundance, besides the filth, is the desire of residents to flee. Marcuse-thought is a boon to U-Haul.
Who should be sneering, today’s half-witted who think themselves Olympian in their wisdom, or our ancestors? Let Mark Twain cut to the quick:
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
And our modern nincompoops know a whole lot that “ain’t so”. . . to our peril.
The New Man (or woman, or whatever) is a new man, woman, or whatever, mired in a hellscape. San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine. The bird is passed out on the floor of the cage. Go ahead, YouTube search “San Francisco doom loop”. Watch the video clip below, and this is what our post-modernist, neo-Marxist big wheels are proud of? It’s shameful, absolutely shameful.
Here’s another one from a slightly different angle with the same conclusions:
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Repeats Debunked Claim About Black Doctors”, Sarah Weaver, The Daily Caller, July 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-ketanji-brown-jacksons-dissent-repeats-debunked-claim-about-black-doctors/ar-AA1dgRln
* The study that Jackson cites: “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 17, 2020, at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117
* Both “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” can be view on YouTube.
“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].” Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)
Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia? Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law. The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny. Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.
Beria and StalinAndrey Vyshinsky
Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang. To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters. If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst). Execrable potentates produce execrable government.
As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.
“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime. Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits. Ask them. Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process. If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them. But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.
But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump. Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.
In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain. In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president. What a thin reed to hang a political rival. Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?
Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity. Hogwash. Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals. Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump. Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety. If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.
The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe. We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices. We should be under international observation, not be the observers. And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.
The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything. Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible. Reprehensible behavior is impeachable. For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary. Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.
The documents indictment similarly has legal legs. But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places. It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia. Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?
Are we a banana republic or something worse? What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us. Is this the best that we can come up with?
I have no plans to ever return to California for a visit or otherwise, absent a necessity involving a dear friend or relative. Every visit after my relocation to Montana has only reminded me of the reasons for my departure in the first place, and it’s only gotten worse.
Concerns for the state of my birth are not limited to me. Traditional Democrats of many generations, such as the Alioto family of San Francisco, are shocked by the descent of their city into lawlessness. They have yet, though, to come to grips with San Francisco being the canary in the coal mine. Large swaths of the state are sliding into the same dystopia. The problem is more than San Francisco.
For Angela Alioto, ex-member of the SF Board of Supervisors and Board president and daughter of the famous two-term mayor Joseph Alioto, she exclaimed that “It’s not my city” in a recent interview. You can watch it below. Pay close attention to her description of the near-death experience of a retired SF Fire Commissioner confronting violent homeless drug addicts on the request of his elderly mother just below her window and doorstep. He was more than assaulted. He was maimed with a crowbar and left with probable brain damage.
Not every city in the state has fallen into such despair, but they all experience the decay to some extent. Filth and mayhem, like smog, seldom respects boundary lines on a map. One thing’s for sure: no Californian can escape the state’s predilection to decriminalize various social pathologies, remove vagrancy laws off the books, tax and regulate their residents to high heaven, expunge entire criminal statutes through flagrant non-enforcement, etc., etc. When a person is more likely to face hard time for driving an unsmogged car than repeated smash-and-grabs, you know that a majority of the state’s electorate has edged closer to delusional.
Californians won’t get a better run state until a more well-balanced electorate shows up. One must face up to the fact that this state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It was voted into office. Please grab a cup of coffee and watch the interview. It might influence your decision to pay a visit to the City by the Bay.
RogerG
Watch it here:
* If you have difficulty viewing the video, that’s because it went “private”. It happened after I initially linked it on Facebook.
Teens swarm into downtown Chicago in a scene of mayhem.Three still frames of a woman getting assaulted by the vicious teens which is the subject of a short Twitter video below.
Cities from the west coast to the Midwest to the east coast are dangerous, filthy nightmares. No exaggeration. Youths in Chicago this weekend welcomed their new lefty, crime-coddling mayor, Brandon Johnson, to office with a rampage through the downtown. His honor limply criticized the behavior and then went on to say, “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
It is not constructive? To demonize? These kids are demonizing themselves. In fact, they’re demonizing their cities. Watch the Twitter video of a teen swarm beating a woman senseless at:
To catch the viciousness, pay close attention at the very beginning. You’ll see her go down in a maelstrom of fists and kicks. This could happen to anyone, and is happening to anyone. People are leaving these hellscapes and the dimwitted in office have no answer but excuses and more social workers.
That’s right, they promise to hire more sociology majors. It’s what you’d expect from a paid Chicago Teachers Union organizer who is fully marinated in lefty groupthink.
Anecdotes are piling of U-Hauls getting harder to find and businesses seeking safer spaces beyond the reach of the flash-mobs. Whole Foods shut its recently opened store in San Francisco. Heck, it’s getting harder to find a Walgreens or CVS in the city by the bay. REI, that caterer to white-collar trekkers, has decided to close its Portland outlet due to theft and break-ins. You name the place – LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York City – and they are turning John Carpenter of “Escape from New York” into a prophet.
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