Tag: George Floyd

It’s Not Our Fault They Say

photog 3 Comments Current Events ,

The Atlantic had an article called “Big Cities Are Ungovernable.”  The writer’s thesis is basically that crime cannot be controlled by the mayors running these cities.

“But more than anything else, crime is weighing mayors down.”

Well at least he admits that.  Some lefty journalists are still claiming there is no crime problem.  The fact that Lori Lightfoot is being kicked to the curb after one term is almost solely because there is an epidemic of violent crime surging through Chicago.

“Crime is not, despite what some politicians might want you to believe, a uniquely urban problem. When violent crime surged around the nation starting in summer 2020, it surged in rural areas, too.

Notice the claim that it’s not just the cities being afflicted.  The dishonesty of this is typical.  The same criminals who have taken over the cities are now expanding into the suburbs and exurbs to compensate for the flight by businesses from these same cities.  But it’s not the cities’ policies that are at fault.  It must be someone else who is responsible.  It must be Trump’s fault!

“Like presidents who are punished or rewarded for the performance of an economy over which they have little control, mayors don’t have that many levers to control public safety, yet voters will punish whoever is in charge as they search for improvement. The rise in violence was a nationwide trend, underscoring the minimal effect of municipal policies on keeping residents safe. COVID, which seems connected to some of the crime increase, was nationwide too.”

More lying.  Mayors have no control over crime!  We’re suppose to forget when and why all this began.  The Democrat mayors and governors forced their police departments to stand down while the George Floyd rioters sacked and burned the downtown areas of almost all the major cities under their jurisdiction.  This dimwit even manages to blame COVID for the surge in crime.

“A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect.  …  A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.”

And here is the final dishonesty, There’s no quick solution to the problem.  Adding police or hiring new police leaders is slow and won’t result in a rapid decrease in crime.   Blah, blah, blah.  These lies are absurd.  Reestablishing law and order is as simple as telling the police officers that they are allowed to do their jobs again.  Firing Soros elected prosecutors, reestablishing police qualified immunity from prosecution and announcing all this to the general public would result in an enormous change in the amount of crime going on in the cities.

Now, granted, the prisons would be filled to capacity very quickly.  Many criminals are morons and before they have a chance of adjusting to the new reality, they will be swept up in the new police activity.  So new prisons will be needed.  But that’s a good thing.  Taking homicidal maniacs off the streets should be job one for any law enforcement department.

But this article wasn’t written for you or me.  It was written for Democrat residents of these cities currently plagued by rampaging criminals.  They’re being told that the criminals looting and assaulting them indiscriminately on the streets of these benighted metropolises really aren’t the fault of the mayors.  No, it’s just unavoidable bad luck.  Some mysterious force, possibly Trumpian in origin, is responsible for their cities being overrun by criminals of mostly one ethnic identity and that the mayors are completely blameless and helpless in its onslaught.

Based on Lori Lightfoot’s recent electoral ouster even Democrats don’t believe this jazz.  High profile Democrats have to make the correct noises in public, like the writer of this fantasy piece.  But all but the most totally brain-washed remember the Summer of George Floyd and the Democrats’ total surrender of their urban constituents to the fury of the rampaging but mostly peaceful arsonists, looters and thugs.

We’re three years into this new normal.  The cities are changed in a way that cannot be ignored or explained by arguments like those provided by the writer of this present piece.  To fix things the Democrat voters will have to admit defeat and give control over the levers of government power to people who will make law and order a priority.  Republicans.

Frankly we’re not there yet.  It still must get significantly worse.  Possibly when the Lord Humongous first takes to the air waves and declares himself the supreme overlord of New York City and orders the first human sacrifices at City Hall then maybe even the Democrats will admit they’re in over their heads.

Personally, I’d like it to go on for another two or three years.  I’ve always thought of cannibalism as the correct metric by which to judge where we are in terms of civilizational collapse.  Until you can openly get human meat at the local butcher shop, we aren’t even close to hitting bottom.  So, I try to exhibit patience.  We’re not there yet.  But we’re getting there.

Law and Order Rejected in 2022

photog Current Events , , ,

 

One of the biggest stories coming out of the 2022 midterms is the rejection of law-and-order candidates by most of the states undergoing violent crime waves in their urban and suburban areas.  Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Minnesota and other cities had law and order candidates for city and state offices like mayor, attorney general and district attorney in the mid-terms.  And for the most part, these races went to the democrat candidates in a landslide.

I think this is highly significant.  This tells me that the political narrative is intact in these areas.  The white voters in these places are still part of the coalition.  No matter what qualms they have over the crime that now surrounds them every day they support the removal of police protection from their communities.

I don’t claim to know the actual breakdown by race and sex for these votes.  But I did see that the margins weren’t tight.  In some places like Minnesota, they were blowouts.

Good.  Democracy needs to triumph.  The people must get what they ask for.  I look forward to stories that chronicle the devolution of these areas.  And we are already hearing about the violent assaults, rapes and murders happening in places like New York and Los Angeles on a daily basis.  The people need to absorb the reality that they have chosen.

Of course, it won’t be complete until it reaches out from the inner city and engulfs the affluent and vulnerable suburbs and even rural enclaves where the ideological supporters of “defund the police” inhabit.  Already in the richest Los Angeles and Chicago suburbs theft and violent crime is becoming a daily reality.

Well, that sounds like good news to me.  When the victims of home invasion and various assaults call the police, they will have the comfort of knowing that the mostly black perpetrators won’t be the victims of overzealous police activities.  In fact, they won’t be pursued at all.  The officers will dutifully take down the victims’ information and upload it into the database for the sake of completeness and then head off to the next crime scene.

I often kid about cannibalism breaking out in New York City or St. Louis.  Well, with the price of food heading steeply higher maybe that’s not such a far-fetched idea.  But the main takeaway is that this experiment that began with Obama and his Justice Department sabotaging the policing of black criminality is widely supported by the Democrat constituencies in the states they control.

This will be allowed to play out.  And I think it will be a defining factor for the American environment in the months and years ahead.  Pretty quickly the bigger cities will take on the appearance and characteristics of third world hellholes like Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro.  Private security for the affluent will become the rule and the middle class will flee as far as they possibly can from the specter of violent crime that will become all pervasive.

This may sound hyperbolic.  It’s not.  I remember when crime exploded in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.  People who had children fled.  The prospect of their children being brutally assaulted by violent criminals on the way to or even in the schools was a reality.  Old women were easy prey on the streets at all hours.

I saw these conditions force one of the most liberal cities of the time into the hands of a law-and-order mayor like Rudy Giuliani.  Will that happen again?  The answer we got this month is no.  Maybe this truly was the reaction to the Supreme Court decision on abortion.  Many on the Left have declared that this was white women choosing abortion rights over law and order.  Ironically it could be reasoned that they’re thinking, “Well if we’re going to be rape victims, at least we’ll have well-funded Planned Parenthood centers nearby for the associated abortion procedure to follow.  I guess there’s a certain logic to that.

From my point of view, I think this should cement for a lot of people the understanding that some parts of the country are going down a path that normal people do not want to live under.  Look at the conditions on the street in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.  Tent cities of homeless living in front of swank apartment buildings and corporate offices.  Open air drug bazaars in the parks and streets.  Rampant and uncontested theft and assault.  This is the present.  The future will be worse.

Get out while you can.

Even Progressives Admit that Blue Cities Are Awash in Crime

photog Current Events ,

The writer is an avowed liberal and he puts in all the qualifiers to show his bona fides as a bleeding heart liberal.  But after all the hemming and hawing he has to admit that the blue cities are experiencing enormous spikes of murders, assaults and theft.  The old saying was that a conservative is liberal who’s been mugged.  Maybe this guy got mugged.

Or maybe he’s trying to wake up the Dems before the Red Wave sweeps them away in November.

Here’s my favorite quote,

“The aforementioned Times article on Boudin’s tenure as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor states that “there is no compelling evidence that Mr. Boudin’s policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office in early 2020.” Yet, just a few paragraphs later, the same article says that “burglaries, especially in wealthier neighborhoods, have soared during the pandemic. The city recorded 7,575 burglaries in 2020 and 7,217 last year, a sharp increase of more than 45 percent from 2019.”

If an increase of more than 45 percent in burglaries does not qualify as significant, then what would be?”

So the New York Times thinks a 45% increase in burglaries is a minor increase.

And how about this article in the Guardian about murder in Philadelphia,

“In the same article, the Guardian writers did acknowledge that in 2020 Philadelphia “returned close to [its] historic highs for the number of people killed in a single year.” (It surpassed that high the following year.) Yet the article seemed to suggest that alarming figures shouldn’t worry us too much—after all, “even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides, Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s.””

So even though murders were up by 25% people should be comforted because thirty years ago it was even worse.  It’s easy to see why even progressives are realizing that the media is making believe that crime, even murder isn’t a problem.  Now let’s hope it becomes a big problems for the Dems from now on.

Brooklyn Subway Attack – Get Out of the Cities

photog Current Events , , ,

Some kind of a mass casualty event went on this morning in a Brooklyn subway train that spilled over onto the 36th St subway stop in Sunset Park.  Looking at the footage maybe it was a smoke bomb followed by a handgun volley.  There are supposed to be fifteen people injured.  At least a couple look like gunshot injuries.

When all is said and done maybe no one will know who, what, or why this happened.  The NYPD’s capabilities have been seriously degraded.  And whatever the FBI says will be suspect.  The takeaway for me is New York City will soon be comparable to Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.  A large city with some remaining cultural icons that is infested with crime and horrible poverty.

Thanks Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi and Mayor London Breed Are Shocked to Discover Crime is Going on In San Francisco

photog Current Events , , , ,

If two of the biggest phonies in America have been forced to admit that they’ve turned San Francisco and by extension all of America’s cities into Mogadishu maybe the reckoning has already begun.  Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor London Breed almost simultaneously came out with statements decrying the madness of smash and grab robberies at the major upscale shops in San Francisco and vowed that it must be stopped even if it hurts the feelings of the thugs committing the crimes.

I’m aware that these statements are performance art intended to redirect blame away from Pelosi and Breed.  After all everything that these two creatures have done during their careers has aided and abetted the chaos that has now overtaken America’s cities.  And even if they are not the actual architects (after all these aren’t masterminds we’re talking about, more like stooges of the real brains behind all this), then at least they are fully culpable in this rolling disaster.  Any statement they make now seems laughably late and hopelessly inadequate.  What exactly is Breed going to do to get the police to arrest black criminals.  After all black lives matter.  And “black lives matter” means never interrupting black criminals when they’re in the middle of crime.  This is what Pelosi and Breed and all the rest of the mayors and governors in blue jurisdictions created in 2020.  They legitimized black mobs along with their Antifa and BLM handlers to riot, burn, beat and loot their cities and citizens.  They forced the police to stand down under threat of imprisonment.  How exactly do you switch that back to 2019?  You can’t.  The cops don’t believe their bosses anymore.  You can’t undo what the mayor of Minneapolis did when he gave a police station to the mob to burn down.  Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia followed suit and now the gangs run those cities.  Soon all the people who can, will flee.  Those left behind will have to fend for themselves.  Maybe at some point if the country hands control over to the Republicans and there are any brave men left running things, they’ll send the army in to shoot it out with the thugs.

But hearing those two moon bats in San Francisco act shocked and outraged about crime in San Francisco reminded me of Louis, the police chief in Casablanca declaring that he is shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on at Rick’s Cafe, just as the croupier hands him his winnings.  Maybe they are scared.  I never thought I’d live to see the day when the residents of San Francisco got too much social justice.  But maybe they finally have reached their limit.  I’m not sure and I wouldn’t bet the house but it does seem that the stooges are feeling a little exposed right now.  But I hope no Republican white knights show up to clean up the mess.  Let the moon bats soak up all the loathing that the residents of these places are going to excrete.  There’s nothing like having the side windows of your BMW broken for the tenth time to make you reconsider electing an intersectional, anti-cop mayor and city council to run your city.

A lot of people say that three years is a long time and could provide enough time for things to turn around and get Dementia Joe re-elected.  I think three years is a long time.  But I think it may be just long enough to get Democrats ridden out of the cities on a rail.  It may be just enough time for them to lose control of even some of their strongholds.  I think they let the genie out of the bottle.  And now I don’t think they know how in the world they’ll ever get it back in.  Let’s watch what happens.  But be smart, watch from a good distance.

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli – A Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, photog's Corner, Reviews , , , , , , ,

I have known Mike Simonelli, the author of this book, for over forty years and he has always been an honest, talented and patriotic American.  After separating from the Air Force, he transferred into the US Army Reserves to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel.  Currently as a law enforcement officer he has been dealing with the reality of trying to keep the peace in an America where everything is upside down.  The media paints the police as racist monsters intent on harming and even killing innocent black citizens.  And at the same time the media works to paint black criminals as innocent bystanders who just happen to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time” in an attempt to mask the fact that criminality is the cause of a great majority of their frequent encounters with the police.

Officer Simonelli told me that he wrote this book for two reasons.  The first is to provide a balance against the books that have appeared over the last decade that paint the false picture of the police in America as a fatally flawed product of racist objectives and behaviors.  The second reason was to provide a resource for people who need to address these false portrayals of law enforcement in America.  These may be private citizens arguing with friends and neighbors about something they heard on the news.  Or it might be an elected official who needs to dig up verifiable facts about the use of deadly force against blacks by the police.  It could even be a town police chief trying to counteract a passionate but misinformed resident at a town council meeting.  But for whatever specific need this book will serve to provide ready facts and references for the rebuttal of the endless accusations of systemic police racism as it applies to the use of deadly force against black Americans.

The majority of the book is divided into three main headings:

Part 1. Deadly Police Shootings: Racial Bias by the Press, Protestors and Politicians

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Research Study Introduction, Literature Review Methodology and Results.

Part 2. Justified Deadly Force of Unarmed Subjects, 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

Part 3. Felonious Line of Duty Murders of Law Enforcement Officers 2019 to 2020

This section is broken down into sub-sections on; Incidents in 20219, Incidents in 2020 and Analysis.

 

The sub-sections listed as incidents in 2019 and 2020 in both Part 2 and Part 3 are case histories for all the events under those categories that occurred in the United States.  Each death of an unarmed subject and each murdered policeman is given its own case study.  This is an enormous amount of research to back up the assertions and conclusions that Officer Simonelli makes in his book.

Obviously, I find myself in complete agreement with the conclusions of this study.  But it is extremely gratifying to have facts and figures at my disposal when debating the rabid Left or even the misinformed or uninformed among the general public.

One of the amazing facts that is highlighted in the book is that an almost complete analog to the George Floyd death occurred only this time with a white subject, a man named Tony Timpa in Texas who died under almost exactly the same circumstances and yet because he was white there was no outrage, no riots and arson, no vilification of the police and no beatification of the deceased.

Reading the case studies, especially the accounts of the murdered police officers, makes it painfully clear just what an impossible job it is to, at the same time, protect the public, minimize the risk to oneself and still avoid being accused of using unjustified or excessive force against a suspect.  And now in the current environment where immunity from civil lawsuits for police officers has been removed, I’m shocked that even larger numbers of police have not retired or resigned from the blue state and blue city jurisdictions.

As a friend, I hope a million people head over to Amazon and buy Mike Simonelli’s book.  But more importantly I hope everyone sends a link to this post to friends who they think might be interested in or helped by the facts that are documented in this book.  It really is a unique resource.

 

Justified Deadly Force and the Myth of Systemic Racism, by Mike Simonelli

 

Atlanta Discovers That Police Prevent Crime

photog Current Events ,

I find this one hilarious.  The two major Democrat candidates for Atlanta mayor are outbidding each for how many more police they will hire.  One says 250 the other triples that.  By gum, they’ll fix this whole Mad Max, Road Warrior thing by putting an ad in the paper for more cops.

I just love it.  They charge cops with murder if they defend themselves against armed thugs and then they expect to get actual police deterrence.  These guys will do the same thing the old guys are doing.  Lean on the side of their squad cars and play games on their phones.  I hope to watch on cable news as the gangs burn the CNN headquarters just for laughs and the police stand aside and let nature take its course.

The only thing that will bring the cities back is hiring a mayor, city council, district attorney and police chief who codify the right of police officers to use deadly force when it’s necessary.  Until then the gangs will burn, loot and murder to their hearts’ content.

When all the Fortune 500 flee the cities and the city coffers are empty these cities will be Detroit.  Maybe new cities will be built in the Red States with walls and gates and there won’t be any space for the gangsters.  Can’t think of another way to deal with a lawless country.

Brilliant Leftist Journalists Reveal What’s Wrong with Dying Leftist Cities – Too Many Police!

photog Current Events , , , ,

In this pair of articles,

Minneapolis Is About to Vote on Whether to Dismantle the Police

The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next?

written by leftist loons, we are educated by the authors on how it’s not the fifteen months of riots, murder, arson and robbery that have made their cities hellholes that tourists avoid and residents flee for safer places.  It’s actually the police that are the problem.  And remember these two cities, Portland and Minneapolis are governed by the most anti-police city governments in America.  Both cities are actively working to dismantle their police departments.  So effectively there is no policing going on in either city.  The police, such as they are, barely make their presence known.  They wait until the crimes have occurred and show up to record the details for police reports that can be used by the victims for insurance purposes and to direct the ambulance or morgue truck to the bodies, living or dead.  But the articles are clear that it is systemic racism that is killing these cities.  Although the Portland article is clear in telling us that Portland is safe and vibrant.  It’s only prejudice and racism that is spreading the false impression that the city is a dirty, abandoned shell of its former self, filled with homeless encampments and homicidal drug addicts.

These articles are very long so you might want to skim them.  Better advice is just skip them.  I’ve done the public service of reading this crap for you.  I think the take away I got from these articles is that even in the leftist bastions of Portland and Minneapolis it is getting difficult to sell people on the “defund the police” narrative.  They try, they really try.  We get thousands of words about policing being slave control and Jim Crow and blah, blah, blah.  But I think they’re trying to sell all this to people who just want their lives to go back to normal.  And not just white people.  Minneapolis has become very dangerous.  And that has been noticed by the black neighborhoods.  The change impacts everyone.  The white neighborhoods have seen an enormous increase in property crime but also things like carjackings.  But it’s in the black neighborhoods where things have gotten out of hand.  So, it will take a lot of talking in circles to convince the black population in Minnesota that they really want to get rid of the police.

Portland is one of the whitest big cities in America.  Their problem is the enormous homeless population.  Druggies come from far and wide to live in a place that reflects their values.  When there was a working police force, it could be kept under control.  Now that’s gone.  So, you have antifa and BLM rioting, the homeless defecating in the streets and addicts robbing you at knifepoint but Portland wants people to think it’s a “vibrant” and safe place to visit and live.  It turns out that’s a hard sell.

It will be interesting to me to see if these two cities are able to convince their residents to get rid of their police.  Maybe they can.  Leftists are very good at ignoring reality.  Maybe they can make it happen.  But if they do, I’d guess that the size of these cities will shrink way down.  Most people want to live in a place where they are safe.  And this goes double for families.  It takes a really hard-core leftist to be willing to let her kids be victims of street crime to prove a point.  But the writers of these articles sound like they just might be crazy enough to try.  It does indeed take all kinds.

So good luck to you folks in Portland, Minneapolis and of course Chicago and New York.  You’ve made your bed and now you get to sleep in it.  Enjoy.

Greetings to September Thirtieth, Anno Domini MMXXI

photog Current Events , , , ,

Another beautiful, if chilly morning here in the land of Wokish Puritans.  I have done my due diligence and looked over the headlines.  What I see is that both the Left and the Right see Joe Biden as a disaster, but for different reasons.  The Left sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet and fouling up the beautiful set-up he was handed by the Deep State and friends.  The Right sees him as a doddering idiot who keeps tripping over his own feet as he presides over the dismantling of what is left of the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Joe’s approval rating is under water but so what?  Will that change anything?  I guess the hope is that if Biden is construed as a failed president, then maybe Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will refuse to sign onto the 3.5 trillion Dollar reconciliation bill and we might be spared the illegal alien amnesty bill and whatever other atrocities Pelosi and Schumer have teed up for us.  I guess we’re about to find out.  I seriously doubt we’re going to get lucky.  The Dems sense they have a short window before the 2022 primary season and will be going for broke this fall.  But who knows?  Miracles have happened.

But I guess it’s at least amusing to watch the consensus grow across Left and Right that Dementia Joe is a creepy loser who’s in way over his head.  I suspect history will be particularly cruel to Biden and Harris.  But I need to remind myself that history is written by the winners and even without an effective White House the Left has an overwhelmingly strong hand to play.

In other news there were a bunch of in-depth reports discovering again that if you remove the police from a city like Minneapolis then the black neighborhoods will descend into crime, drug addiction and murder.  Children will be killed during gun play between the gang bangers, white people will flee the city in droves and the loss of revenues will cause the problem to spiral out of control.  The only differences in these reports depend on the ideological stripe of the writer.  The lefties decry the violence but claim that the police cannot use the tactics previously available to them.  In other words, they want magical police.  The writers on the right notice that nobody is lining up to take the vacant police jobs currently available and conclude that runaway crime in Minneapolis will be an ongoing phenomenon for the foreseeable future.

Well, my answer to all this is, don’t complain when you get what you say you wanted.  The progressives and their followers in Minneapolis put the city in the hands of ideologues that allowed and even encouraged a mob of antifa and BLM rioters to burn down a police precinct while looting and burning their neighbors’ businesses and assaulting and even killing some of these same people.  I take no pleasure in seeing poor people living in a hellscape where law and order have been eliminated.  But there is no other way for these imbeciles to learn just how delusional their viewpoint on urban policing really is.  Once all the affluent white progressives move away from their dangerous Minneapolis homes the people who are left can begin to figure out how to deal with reality.  The only shame is that these progressives won’t have a chance to see their own homes and businesses looted and burned.  That would be too much to ask.

I saw a couple of reports about the upcoming Supreme Court docket.  There are a bunch of important cases that have impact on our sorely mistreated constitutional rights.  And for once I’m slightly optimistic that some good things may happen in this session.  And if the decisions occur late enough in the year it may be too late for the Democrats to pack the Court.  It’s assumed they will lose the House in 2022 and that would curtail at least temporarily their ability to change the Court’s size.  If the new justices continue to buck John Robert’s liberal agenda, we could see some honest judicial decisions that would have a positive effect on our lives.  It’s at least worth watching and I’ll be interested to see which way they go.  I don’t want to be too much of a pessimist.  Even I get bored of that.

So that’s what’s in the news.  In my own world I’ve been busy with writing and repairing all the stuff that breaks down around here.  Carpentry, plumbing, auto repairs and landscaping are high on the list of stuff that needs doing.  Luckily the auto repair is covered by an insurance policy so I’ll leave that to the professionals.  I guess I’ll take a first stab at the others but something tells me the plumber will be getting a call soon.  Ah, who am I kidding?  I better get a carpenter too.

But it’s a good day and I feel cheerful.  Camera Girl is making delicious soups and I’m dedicated to watching the world collapse into a heap of stress fractured fragments.  There is an ancient legacy in my family around bartering in rubble and scraps.  I think my ancestors in the Fifth Century probably sold off the marble that originally covered the Colosseum to Visigoth chieftains to adorn their medieval castles.  It’s a cinch I’ll flourish amid the ruins of Biden’s America.  There will be plenty of rubble to barter.

John Kass Continues Chronicling the Death of Chicago

photog Current Events ,

If you have friends and relatives in the big Democrat-run cities I think you should urge them to get out before something really bad happens to them.  Recently some very good friends decided to leave New York City and I am extremely relieved they did.

Not only is the infrastructure and social network, like the school system crumbling but the risk of random and deadly violence keeps rising.  Let those who believe in the lunacy at work there endure it.  Not us.

The City of Anarchy: Calling Chicago “Chiraq” is now an insult to Iraq