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Archive for 2018
June 21, 2018
IF IT’S WRONG NOW, IT WAS WRONG THEN: Today In The Breaking News From 2014
You know, one might almost cynically believe the plight of immigrants wasn’t really the main concern.
LEFT COAST LAWLESSNESS: Progressivism is wrecking cities in the Pacific Northwest.
The anarchy and disorder dominating progressive cities across the West Coast recently hit a new low in Seattle. King County officials are looking to roll out a “safe injection van,” a legal venue at which addicts could shoot up illegal drugs unhindered and “safely.” The first of its kind in the United States, the van would manage to undermine further the rule of law while also doing little to help addicts. Seattle’s urban decay goes deeper, though, with skyrocketing rates of homelessness, an explosion in opioid usage and deaths, and spikes in violent crime.
Seattle’s predicament is emblematic of the broader crises faced by many progressive West Coast cities, where local leaders have forced law enforcement to take a hands-off approach to policing unsanctioned tent cities and vagrancy at the expense of public safety and health. San Francisco, long considered a model of progressive urban policy, is plagued by filth, chaos, and public-safety hazards. Local leaders plan to spend an incredible $305 million on combatting homelessness for the current fiscal year alone, but disorder spreads as the city fails to enforce the rule of law and basic sanitary measures. Block-by-block surveillance reveals the deterioration of downtown San Francisco. Of 153 city blocks surveyed, 41 contained used drug needles and 96 had human feces present. Tourists are dismayed to leave their downtown hotels, to be confronted by mentally ill and aggressive homeless people who are taking control of the streets. University of California Berkeley professor Lee Riley, an expert on infectious disease, observes that some of San Francisco’s streets are dirtier than Third World slums.Portland, Oregon, has continued to experience rapid urban decay in recent years, and the consequences for businesses and residents have been dramatic. In 2016, Columbia Sportswear, a major retailer, relocated a considerable number of its staff to downtown Portland. A little over a year later, in a scathing opinion piece in the Oregonian, the company’s CEO voiced his regret over the decision. Employees reported repeated criminal offenses, “daily defecation” in the store’s front lobby, and fears of physical violence. One female employee ran into moving traffic to escape a transient individual, screaming that he was going to kill her.
Conditions for other Portland companies have deteriorated as well.
Get woke, go broke. Amid filth and violence.
CTHULU COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Sarah Hoyt, Diverse It Gets
KURT SCHLICHTER: Don’t Get Played; Get Woke to the Outrage Scam. “So what are we supposed to be outraged about today? There’s always something, and it’s always the worst thing in the history of ever. And it’s almost always a scam designed to manipulate you into obeying the liberal elite. That’s the real outrage.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PRIORITIES:
● Shot: Watch: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio tries to enter child facility in Texas.
—Twitchy, today.
● Chaser: Power outage triggers mass subway delays.
—The New York Daily News, Tuesday.
In 2011, Victor Davis Hanson warned of “The Bloomberg Syndrome:” “Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.”
Though whatever his flaws and politics, Michael Bloomberg’s era as New York’s mayor is looking increasingly good in retrospect – “unexpectedly,” as they say in his namesake publications.
(Via Stephen Miller.)
THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK: Park ravaged by drugs, hookers and muggings after infamous police killing.
This is Tompkinsville Park on Staten Island’s North Shore in 2018 and, to area residents and merchants caught in its heroin- and K2-infested vortex, this is a battlefield.
“Every day you see muggings, prostitutes, people smoking crack and shooting up heroin,” said Xhafer Gjeshbitraj, 52, who owns a building across the street from the tiny, triangular park bounded by Bay Street and Victory Boulevard.
“It’s a war zone, in the truest sense of the word.”
In the nearly four years since Eric Garner was killed in a struggle with an NYPD officer across the street from the park, locals claim the area has gone to the wolves, with cops hesitant to lay down the law at the risk of igniting another firestorm.
“Guys are not going to risk their jobs anymore,” said one high-ranking law enforcement source familiar with the precinct. “We’ll just let you have that area.”
Feeling they’ve been left to fend for themselves by the NYPD, residents of this embattled pocket are fighting to hold on to their community.
“Guys are not going to risk their jobs anymore. We’ll just let you have that area.” Our own Jack Dunphy predicted that very response two years ago, as the left’s war on cops began to heat up (again): “Confirmed: Demoralized Cops Equal Higher Crime.”
(Classical reference in headline, since for “Progressivism,” time stands still.)
PLUS, SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP: How Trump’s Space Force Would Help Protect Earth from Future Asteroid Threats.
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BUT WHAT WILL THEY TASTE LIKE? Scientists Expect to Genetically Engineer Chickens into Dinosaurs Within 5 Years.
SMUGGLERS LEAVE 6-YEAR-OLD BOY IN DESERT, BORDER PATROL SAVES HIM: So will that story be given anywhere near the same prominence in the MSM as the weeping little Honduran girl? Both are tragic, both say something important about the issues at hand, but where’s the fairness and balance in coverage?
NEO-NEOCON ON FAMILY SEPARATION AND THE DISGRACEFUL NAZI COMPARISON.
I’m old enough to remember when only far left Lyndon LaRouchites compared Obama to Hitler.
ERICK ERICKSON: BROWN SHIRTS, BLACK SHIRTS, AND PROGRESSIVES’ DANGEROUS GAMES.
For those who thought James Hodgkinson, who attempted a mass assassination of Republican members of Congress, was an anomaly, it looks more and more like Hodgkinson was a starting point to something violent. “Democratic” socialists stormed a restaurant in Washington to disrupt dinner until the Secretary of Homeland Security fled. Hollywood celebrities have encouraged the kidnapping and raping of the President’s child and his press secretary’s child. Government employees who work for Homeland Security have seen their home addresses put on the internet and, in some cases, pictures of their family displayed by activists intent on harming them.
President Trump engaging in a zero tolerance policy and separating all parents from their children at the border was not normal and was yesterday reversed. But the left is more and more normalizing violence and harassment against their political opponents and justifying it with the language of morality. What should not be normal is becoming normal, and that is a dangerous game. This will not end well for anyone. Violent extremists on the left, including Hollywood celebrities, are only going to emboldened more James Hodgkinsons. It is going to happen. And the condemnation from the left will become more and more faint as it does. They have decided the President and his supporters get what they deserve.
This won’t end well.
Read the whole thing.
Related: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
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DAVID SOLWAY: Why Socialism Is Doomed To Fail. “Disproportion is intrinsic to human life.”
Socialism doesn’t alleviate disproportion; it enshrines it in legalized lawlessness.
BUT OF COURSE THEY DO: Portland’s Famous Feminist Bookstore Finally Goes Out Of Business, Blames Racism. The store was the inspiration for Portlandia’s “Feminist Bookstore” series of sketches: “Community members are hoping to raise enough money to keep the bookstore open as a ‘community center,’ which is mostly what it was anyway since profit is evil.”
Heh, indeed.™
WORLD WAR TWO: He terrorized the N.C. coast in World War II. The last U-boat captain has died at 105. I’m pretty sure it was a different U-boat that did it, but at age two, my mother saw a ship sunk just a couple of miles off the coast of Florida. She still remembers it. But then, it was pretty easy:
Hardegen, in a 1991 Observer interview from Germany, said his U-123 tuned in Charlotte’s WBT radio as it sat on the ocean bottom during the day and surfaced at night to hunt passing ships that were silhouetted by the glow from coastal towns.
Hardegen, then 78, said he was astonished that he met almost no opposition from a U.S. military that was unprepared for the U-boat invasion of the East Coast.
“I was very surprised,” he said. “There was no defense on the coast of the United States. … No blackouts, no dimming, nothing.”
We were poorly prepared.
IT’S WHAT THEY DO: Left Coast Lawlessness. “Progressivism is wrecking cities in the Pacific Northwest.”
Seattle’s predicament is emblematic of the broader crises faced by many progressive West Coast cities, where local leaders have forced law enforcement to take a hands-off approach to policing unsanctioned tent cities and vagrancy at the expense of public safety and health. San Francisco, long considered a model of progressive urban policy, is plagued by filth, chaos, and public-safety hazards. Local leaders plan to spend an incredible $305 million on combatting homelessness for the current fiscal year alone, but disorder spreads as the city fails to enforce the rule of law and basic sanitary measures. Block-by-block surveillance reveals the deterioration of downtown San Francisco. Of 153 city blocks surveyed, 41 contained used drug needles and 96 had human feces present. Tourists are dismayed to leave their downtown hotels, to be confronted by mentally ill and aggressive homeless people who are taking control of the streets. University of California Berkeley professor Lee Riley, an expert on infectious disease, observes that some of San Francisco’s streets are dirtier than Third World slums.
Portland, Oregon, has continued to experience rapid urban decay in recent years, and the consequences for businesses and residents have been dramatic. In 2016, Columbia Sportswear, a major retailer, relocated a considerable number of its staff to downtown Portland. A little over a year later, in a scathing opinion piece in the Oregonian, the company’s CEO voiced his regret over the decision. Employees reported repeated criminal offenses, “daily defecation” in the store’s front lobby, and fears of physical violence. One female employee ran into moving traffic to escape a transient individual, screaming that he was going to kill her.
Conditions for other Portland companies have deteriorated as well. Anne Bocci, who owns a premier jewelry and clothing store that prides itself on “not being a big corporate business,” was robbed and had her life threatened twice. “The police came and then [the thief] came back four minutes later after they left,” she noted during an interview.
I had a love-hate relationship with the Pacific Northwest during the years that I lived there, but now it’s just sad.
IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO KILL MOSQUITOES CHEAPLY AND IN LARGE NUMBERS: First human case of West Nile this year in Illinois reported.
It may seem incongruous, but media myths typically are invoked in all seriousness, as if the tall tales they tell about journalists and their deeds are genuine and true. Sometimes media myths are cited credulously to demonstrate presumed authority and command of history.
So it was the other day in a sneering editorial in the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s leading newspapers.
The editorial assailed U.S. policies that have separated immigrant families at the Mexico border. For authority, emphasis, and dimension, the Star editorial turned to the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, an occasion when the words of a TV anchorman supposedly swayed a president and altered his war policies. Not only is this a tale cherished by journalists, it has broad applicability, as the editorial reconfirmed.
“Sometimes,” the Star intoned in all high-mindedness, “there are telling barometers in the realm of human affairs.
And sometimes, as the Toronto Star illustrated above, the media is busy creating and embellishing their own myths. Read the whole thing.
Related: Sarah Sanders responds to Laura Bush: ‘We’re not the ones responsible for creating this problem.’
More: Canada Also Detains Immigrant Children and Separates Them From Their Fathers.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: GOP Focusing Immigration Debate on Families Would Put Dems on the Defensive.
“Trump found himself on the wrong end of a 70-30 issue. But now the problem is for the Democrats because separating families may be unpopular; zero tolerance, however, is relatively popular,” Trump said. “If the Democrats find themselves attacking a zero-tolerance policy while Republicans are doing their best to unify the families and keep them in detention together, I think the Democrats come up short.”
In response to clips of senators making statements about immigration, Continetti said Republicans haven’t lost leverage if they pass narrow legislation addressing families at the border. He pointed to Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) as examples of those in red states who could vote with Republicans to solve the problem of families being separated.
“There would be many red-state Democrats that are going to look at the polls in their own states and say, ‘if the issue is just the families, we should be addressing this through legislation,'” Continetti said.
All Democrats have to do is not act crazy, and they can’t even manage that.
NOT SO GOOD: Florida teen first human case of mosquito-borne Keystone virus.
University of Florida researchers describe the case of a teenage boy who went to an urgent care clinic in North Central Florida with a rash and fever in August 2016, during the Zika virus epidemic in Florida and the Caribbean.
Tests on the patient were negative for Zika or related viruses, but did reveal Keystone virus infection, according to the study published June 9 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.
“Although the virus has never previously been found in humans, the infection may actually be fairly common in North Florida,” said corresponding author Dr. J. Glenn Morris. He is director of the university’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.
I’m not so crazy about “emerging pathogens.”