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Eat your heart out Babylon Bee!
I don’t read the newspaper anymore, I get my news from various sites online. I don’t miss it, except the funnies; I miss those. Thankfully, I can still get my chuckles on my news websites, from time to time. Fox News has a wonderful article up today, that I am 99% sure is not satire. It’s on Fox News’ main site, so it looks legit. The headline and subhed are:
St. Louis’ murder rate, already highest in US, soared last year; mayor vows to defund the police
Mayor Tishaura Jones’ budget proposal would close a city jail, divert $4M from police to social programs and cut nearly 100 police jobs
A couple of wonderful paragraphs from the article itself:
St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones, who became the city’s first Black female mayor last month, had campaigned on a promise to enact progressive criminal justice reforms.
…
Whatever the old administration was doing clearly wasn’t working – but it remains to be seen if police cuts are the answer.
Yes! It remains to be seen! You never know how this might work out! After all, when the city with the highest murder rate in the country responds to yet another increase in that murder rate by putting more criminals on the street and taking more police off the street, well, you just never know how that might work out! It remains to be seen!
There are so many other equally wonderful nuggets in this extraordinary article, for example: There are two police unions in St. Louis – one for black officers, and one for white officers. That should help! The mayor of St. Louis is quoted in the UK newspaper ‘The Telegraph’ in an article about urban policing. Of course! The mayor has released a budget proposal which includes zero funding for the city’s medium-security jail, saying, “…we need to find alternatives to jails for some of the offenses.” And there’s so much more!
And again, I’m nearly certain that this is not satire. If someone finds that it is, I’ll immediately remove this post. But I don’t think so…
There’s so much here to write about, but I don’t want to start drinking bourbon at 10:20am on a Sunday. So I’ll just let you read the whole article yourself. I’ll let you decide if you want to laugh or cry.
I’m can’t decide myself.
Published in General
When I drove from Ann Arbor Michigan to League City, TX in April, I deliberately chose a route avoiding all Woke cities. Took a few hours longer, but avoided a potential permanent stay in the cities I avoided.
If you needed yet another reason to stay away from St. Louis – now you have one.
But I’ve never seen that Arch. Oh well.
It seems that you are not the only one deciding that perhaps St. Louis is not for you.
Another quote from the article, discussing St. Louis’ remarkable growth in murder rate:
Odd that the population is dwindling, while the murder rate is increasing. Hmmm…
Well yeah, but that has ‘correlation vs causation’ written all over it, amirite?!?
You really should. And you should ride up to the top of the arch. It sways back and forth while you’re up there. Very exhilarating.
Of course, so is running for your life through a convenience store parking lot…
I don’t live in St. Louis but I do work there. In a not so desirable part of town. After last years summer of fun. I have began CC . I will not be a victim just because my skin is white. On the other hand. Most violence is gang and drug related. So I will probably not ever need to pull.
Oh, and don’t forget Kim Gardner the persecutor. If I ever need to defend myself from deadly force . I will have to face her.
Agreed. On both counts.
Interesting. I visited St. Louis in March. Not only did I visit St. Louis, but I drove around St. Louis’s infamously decayed northern neighborhoods with a four-figure DSLR, taking pictures like this. I didn’t see anything obviously criminal, but then, I wasn’t in the worst locales. (Crime happens where people are. By the time a neighborhood becomes an urban prairie, the worst is over. The places to worry about are the poor, crowded ones.)
Yards in the ghetto had plenty of Tishaura Jones signs, but they also had plenty of signs saying, “We have to stop killing each other!” In wealthy urban and suburban neighborhoods — the Central West End, University City, Clayton, Webster Groves, etc. — “We have to stop killing each other!” became “BLM,” “in this house,” and a multicolored profusion of rainbow flags.
It’s a pity, since St. Louis was (and remains, in part) a beautiful city. But like all American cities, it’s doomed — doomed by social dysfunction and elite stupidity. The crime rate will continue to rise, the urban poor will continue to suffer, and the well-to-do will continue to flee to safety of the suburbs, from which they can comfortably virtue-signal and elect activist legislators without bearing any of the cost.
Because why?
It indicates that non-murderers are leaving the city.
Yeah, why?
The sun is under the yardarm somewhere. Or over it. I can’t remember which it is.
Drink to both.
Beautiful… photography, anyway.
Google for “ruin porn”.
I am constitutionally incapable of avoiding areas that may be dangerous for a blue-eyed white guy (I first typed ‘white kid,’ then realized I’m now the ‘old guy’ in most cautionary tales).
I cannot–will not–acknowledge any “no go” areas within these United States.
I grew up overseas, loving this country from afar.
As an adult, my profession was to support and defend the Constitution.
There ain’t a damn person born that will tell me where I can and cannot go. Can’t do it, can’t abide it.
Strangely, when I happen to traverse or have business in a less-than-desirable neighborhood, I never have an issue. And I make an effort to be the nicest, most courteous guy you’ll ever meet.
In the 1960s the left’s response to crime was to try to cure poverty. Now, we don’t punish or address root causes but just try to muster feelings of racial guilt but not even try to fix anything.
A universal truth brilliantly summarized.
I blame poor urban planning for most of the problems and the congested living conditions the cities have created. The “open space” movement is a complete joke. We need millions of new small towns across the country to accommodate the population growth.
The low-cost housing initiatives that were implemented after World War II for housing the GIs built the suburbs. They were wonderful places. (They were also the subject of great humor, of which my favorite was Irma Bombeck: The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank.)
Fascinating what has happened with the first mass-produced development: Levittown. It’s a chapter right straight out of the classic It’s a Wonderful Life. No longer Pottersville. Nope. Today it is beautiful Baily Park. We need to build beautiful towns. Or rather, encourage the building of beautiful towns. If we cheer them on, the people who need them most will build them on their own. :-)
People have not changed biologically since the 1950s and 1960s.
We need to restore our faith in each other.
We can fix this.
I want to think so but even the building of beautiful buildings, something people always knew how to do, seems to be impossible.
But more important, small towns had their own economies. They were not bedroom communities and were places where generations could flourish. Most residents were employed in town and there was a mutually beneficial relationship with farmers. I don’t know whether that can be rebuilt in the Amazon and industrial farming epoch.
Despite the fact that a great many people seem to long for a small-town sort of life, but of course dominated by the local progressive college because one would not want to live in the sticks, small towns are not just not increasing, they are dying. If the progs have their way, the best part of cities, i.e. long-time single-family-home neighborhoods with a small-town feel, will be gone, too. Pretty sure that is the goal.
I am quite willing to accept that there may be “public safety” functions that might be better performed by other than fully sworn and armed police officers. Just as society expects schools to solve problems that are not the schools’ to begin with, society expects police officers to solve problems that are not really policing problems. But other than vague platitudes (“send social workers to deal with the mentally ill”), I have yet to hear what those alternatives might be, and how they are to be implemented. A demand begins and ends with “defund the police” is not serious. Give me a realistic alternative, and then tell me why whatever budget money that will take is more likely to be effective there than in the police department. (You can also explain to me why the alternative needs to be a government program, and why it wouldn’t be better performed by a voluntary civic organization.)
There was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that involved creation of some kind of historic arch, maybe not the one in St Louis but could you watch that episode and call it good? :-)
I’m gonna disagree.
Let’s take a look; Wikipedia can very helpful here. Here is the historical population of St. Louis:
Analysis? Things started going downhill in the early 50’s. Then totally plummeted.
Now let’s look at the mayors of the St. Louis:
Can anybody see a correlation?
“Because it’s Democrats” is not a valid explanation.
Instead, I’ll suggest that it’s:
And this is the result.
I think the simplest explanation is that the politicians in involved in the St. Louis city government are all on the make; graft, corruption, bribery, fraud, waste, mismanagement. They’ll make all sorts of decisions, and run all sorts of programs, that make the city worse and worse, because they’re getting a percentage.
Now… I don’t know St. Louis. I’ve never been anywhere near there for an appreciable amount of time. So I’d like to hear some folks from the area tell me if I’m off.
Because that’s what beer is for.
Cont’d…
I don’t think this analysis is particular to St. Louis. Instead it seems universal; for all cities that are experiencing crime rates and poverty an order of magnitude (times 10) above the national average, and a plummeting of the population over decades.
It is said that any sufficient well-presented problem suggests it’s own solution, so it seems to me that this is an enormous opportunity for the Republican Party to offer an alternative.
As far as the graft etc. Probably no more than all other major cities in this age.
Slay I think was fairly honest as well as Krewson . Slay was competent Krewson not so much.
You have to take in consideration the population base. A large percentage of idiots can not be managed.
I expect nothing but bad from Jones.
It might take multiple Republicans over a few decades, and good luck getting the people who have fled to return, or any other replacements.
Yep that’s true.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-black-union-st-louis-slams-department-article-1.2702852
In related news, the Wall Street Journal found that St. Louis is one of the ten most segregated cities in America. Even a competent mayor would have her hands full with that city.
I’d like to see it before it becomes The George Floyd Arch . . .
Yup. As the man said “I don’t carry because I am afraid, I carry because I choose not to be afraid.” I hope I never have to use a firearm for anything other than poking holes in a paper targets, but I will not be intimidated from doing/going what/where I choose. I do not look for trouble but choose to be moderately prepared…
Well if it’s in Missouri, wouldn’t it become the Michael Brown Arch?
When did this differentiation occur? From the initial forming of the unions? Or did they split? And either way, when did segregated police unions start? Thanks.
Crime.
When it comes to crime, common sense is, I believe, an adult male thing.
When adult males become scarce, in spirit if not demographically, common sense goes out the window.