It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Part 1

I figure I’ll see if this can have future installments.  After all Philly seems to be on a roll.  Imagine being a cop in that place.

08SEP2023 – The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost!

There’s nothing like a brutal beat down and a broken leg during a carjacking to change a “defund the police” activist into a “law and order” advocate.  I’m not sure whether Saint George of Floyd will forgive this falling away from the faith.  It seems a little fickle.

Before beatdown:

In June of 2020, Sathanandan wrote in a post on Facebook: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE The Minneapolis Police Department.”

After beatdown:

“Look at my face. These criminals will not win. We need to take back our city. And this will not be the last you hear from me about this. Thank you to the incredible Minneapolis 4th Precinct Officers,

Maybe after she’s had a chance to wash the blood off her face she’ll calm down and realize that those kooky, crazy carjacking kids were just full of high spirits and she should chalk it up to reparations.  After all, maybe it was some form of white privilege or white supremacy or something white that triggered their understandable reaction.  Stop blaming the victims Shivanthi and look in the mirror for the true culprit.

Flash Mob Loots Nordstrom – LA Mayor Says Mean Things

This is hilarious.  Woke mayor of LA is really, really mad.  And she’s gonna tell the police to do something about this.  Boy, that’ll scare the criminals!

Target Took a Billion Dollar Hit Because of Shoplifting and Other Crime

In the post George Floyd environment retailers are suffering enormous shoplifting losses in blue run cities.  Not surprisingly, these companies are closing down their stores in the worst hit areas including San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.

Hopefully Target and the others aren’t going to complain that they aren’t getting what they asked for when they backed the Democrats and the BLM movement.  After all law and order is just a dog whistle for racism.  Those brave shoplifters and stickup men are helping to strike a blow for black reparations one felony at a time.

The George Floyd Metastasis

I was doing a thought experiment on what the future of the blue states and in particular the blue cities would look like.  Until recently I assumed that once the Democrats were securely in charge of Washington DC that they’d finally rein in the mayhem and begin to reassert law and order in the cities like New York and Chicago that they rule over.

But I was completely wrong about that.  The recent mayoral election in Chicago and the prosecution for manslaughter of the Marine who attempted to stop an unhinged homeless man from assaulting old women on a New York City subway car illustrate the stabilization of the new normal in these places.  Soros funded prosecutors in both cities allow black criminals to escape without indictment for charges that have included murder.  While self-defense has now been criminalized in the case where the defendant is white.

If we extrapolate these practices going on indefinitely and try to predict the outcome for these places, I feel we can make some assumptions.

First off, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that relatively soon anyone with a family will decide to leave these cities.  And this won’t just include upper- and middle-class white families.  Basically, anyone who has the wherewithal will be trying to find a refuge away from the multitude of problems that these cities pose for children.  After all violence is only the worst of the problems.  Other major issues are the abysmal school systems, crumbling infrastructure, disappearing retail stores, endemic crime, skyrocketing taxes, fear of real estate price collapse and disappearing job market.

So, the cities will lose the majority of their middle-class residents.  And with the recent flight to remote workers, many of the biggest corporations are moving their headquarters and other locations out of the cities.  I think the template for what this will create is Detroit.  This was a major American city that allowed crime to destroy the wealth and importance it once had.

Detroit had an entrenched monopoly on one of the largest industrial sectors of the United States economy, the automobile manufacturing industry.  But by allowing crime to destabilize the environment it imploded.  It went from a population in 1950 of 1,850,000 to less than 650,000 today.  That’s a loss of 65% of its population.  And currently the city is a shambles with crumbling infrastructure and wide areas abandoned to such an extent that woods have grown up swallowing streets and houses in their path.  More than half the residents do not pay their real estate taxes and the city’s finances and politics are reminiscent of a third world country.  And horrendous crime rates have never been brought under control.

Now imagine this situation spreading to most of the large American cities.  Just think if every large metropolitan area from Washington DC to Boston becomes like Detroit.  It’s really not so hard to imagine.  DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Camden, Newark and a few other major population centers are already halfway along to Detroit status.  It won’t take much more ruin to finish them off.  And when New York city really hits the skids that will be one hell of a corpse.

And that is basically what the George Floyd revolution has brought.  In the same way that the civil rights riots of the 1960s killed Detroit so will the 2020 riots finish off the rest of these cities.  The next question is what happens to the areas outside of the cities?  Currently the Biden administration is continuing the Obama policy of moving the inner city poor out into the suburbs.  In effect they’re attempting to metastasize the inner-city cancer to the rest of the country.  And now with the immigrant invasion they’d like to supercharge the problem.

But I think there is a limit to this process and possibly the red state governments will take some steps to limit the damage.  I’ll take an optimistic stance on how this will play out.  I will speculate that as the decay of the cities proceeds the red states will take charge of these failed cities and strip them of self-governance and attempt to rehabilitate them.  How I see that happening is the idea that these corrupt failed city governments will be guilty of civil rights violations by not providing competent criminal justice services such as impartial police and courts.  In addition, by forcing the inhabitants to work for their relief checks they can limit their free time and the amount of criminal activity they get into.

Basically, these cities will be turned into detention centers to quarantine them from rest of the state.  School and work opportunities could be organized by the state government with the prospect of weaning the inhabitants from this dysfunctional existence and hopefully one day restoring these areas to a more normal existence.  But it will probably take a century to make that happen.

In the meantime, these areas will continue under competent law enforcement and the chaotic and violent existence that we are now seeing played out in the various blue cities won’t become the rule in the red states.

Now I don’t kid myself that this will happen easily.  Red state cities like St Louis and Houston will need to be tamed and brought back to law and order.  That will only happen when these states decide that lawlessness won’t be allowed to destroy the urban centers inside their boundaries.

And I don’t doubt that this will be complicated when the federal government attempts to stop this process of fixing these cities.  They have intentionally exacerbated these problems.  They won’t easily allow their sabotage to be undone.

But as I said I’m choosing the optimistic path for this essay.  It’s also possible that the red states will fail to solve this problem.  Then that leads to a different model, Brazil.

The Perfect Example

 

Jordan Neely was the embodiment of Black Lives Matter’s method for destroying America’s cities.  Here is a serial criminal who shook down subway passengers for money by screaming in their faces and threatening violence if they didn’t pay.  And these weren’t idle threats.  He had been arrested previously for four assaults and there is a video of him slamming a woman against the outside of a subway car.  At the time of his death, he had forty-two prior arrests.

The young man, a former Marine, who tried to hold him until the police came was doing what countless people probably wished they had the guts to do.  But now he’s facing the prospect of being prosecuted for murder.  So, this is the essence of what Barack Obama, BLM, Soros prosecutors and the Justice Department have created.  Black criminals are given free rein to harass, humiliate, terrorize and even assault innocent bystanders.  And if anyone tries to resist then this resistance will be criminalized to the full extent of the law.  Even the police are now the victims of lawfare whenever they try to do their jobs.  And in consequence of which they now seldom bother to prevent crime.  They take their job to be just collecting statements and calling for the ambulances to transport the victims to the hospital.

Essentially the private citizen realizes that he’s on his own whenever he walks down the street or descends into the subway.  The police are no longer a deterrent and won’t arrive in time to prevent his assault or murder depending on circumstances.  So, the young man who killed Jordan Neely decided that instead of allowing the people in the subway car to be victimized and harassed by Neely he would use his combat training to incapacitate Neely until the police could take him into custody.

Neely’s advocates say that the Marine should have just ignored Neely and in fact many of these people say the commuters he was harassing on the train should have just handed over money to him.  And that’s the whole thing right there in a nutshell.  According to the Left and the people they’ve put in charge of criminal justice in these cities, you must endure harassment, humiliation, intimidation, even physical assault because the people assaulting you are victims and therefore deserve to make your life miserable.

So, this case is the encapsulation of the whole BLM reign of terror.  Places like Chicago and New York have been transformed from safe, clean centers of commerce and culture to dirty, dangerous hellscapes filled with homeless encampments, drug addicts, criminals, fear and misery.

But now if this young man is prosecuted for defending the people who the police no longer protect, then the City of New York has officially sanctioned the targeting of innocent people by criminals.  The criminals like Jordan Neely aren’t jailed for these crimes.  Even if they are arrested, they will not be detained but instead let go the same day to continue in their criminal pursuits.  Whereas if their victims fight back, they will be jailed and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  And the chance of federal charges being added based on the race of the perpetrator is a real possibility.

So far, the usual suspects have been screaming for the Marine’s blood.  But interestingly, neither the mayor nor the wretched district attorney has rushed to declare the young man a criminal.  Maybe it’s possible that the Democrats have told them how bad the optics would be if this man was prosecuted for trying to help his fellow New Yorkers against a deranged felon.  But in the long run I don’t think the odds are with him.

I guess if things turn out badly at least it will be a bellwether to warn the rest of the normal city residents that the only way they can avoid being part of a permanent victim class is by getting the hell out of these cities permanently.

It’s Not Our Fault They Say

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

 

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

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.