BIG CHANGES COMING TO BLUE AMERICA

The COVID-19 pandemic will be shaping how we live, work and learn about the world long after the last lockdown ends and toilet paper hoarding is done, accelerating shifts that were already underway including the dispersion of population out of the nation’s densest urban areas and the long-standing trend away from mass transit and office concentration towards flatter and often home-based employment.

Amid 20 years of fanfare about how big, dense cities are the future, the country had kept spreading out with nearly all population growth since 2010 occurring in the urban periphery and smaller cities. As a new study from Heartland Forward, where I am a senior fellow, demonstrates, both immigrants and millennials—the key groups behind urban growth—are increasingly moving to interior cities and even small towns.

There is no reason for people to live in dense urban centers, crowded into tiny apartments with sky-high rents. The Internet has made neighbors and friend out of people thousands of miles away from each other. And the dense pack of humanity of the urban center has made them virulent breeding grounds for not just crime, but also disease and death.

Both cases and deaths have been overwhelmingly concentrated so far in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Gotham has been the American epicenter; dense regions seem especially susceptible to pandemics. This has also been the case in Europe. Half of all COVID-19 cases in Spain for example have occurred in Madrid while the Milan region accounts for half of all cases in Italy and almost three-fifths of the deaths.

Le Corbusier: Liar, Cheat, Thief, and Plagiarist

The French fascist architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was another of this charmless ilk, though cleaner than Brecht (a Marxist, the latter’s decision not to wash was his tribute, albeit not a very flattering one, to the proletariat). Jeanneret’s inhumanity, his rage against humans, is evident in his architecture and in his writings. He felt the level of affection and concern for them that most people feel for cockroaches.

Like Hitler, Jeanneret wanted to be an artist, and, as with Hitler, the world would have been a better place if he had achieved his ambition. Had he been merely an artist, one could have avoided his productions if one so wished; but the buildings that he and his myriad acolytes have built unavoidably scour the retina of the viewer and cause a decline in the pleasure of his existence.

One of Jeanneret’s buildings can devastate a landscape or destroy an ancient townscape once and for all, with a finality that is quite without appeal; as for his city planning, it was of a childish inhumanity and rank amateurism that would have been mildly amusing had it remained purely theoretical and had no one taken it seriously.

Mr. Millais is able to prove not only that Jeanneret was a liar, cheat, thief, and plagiarist in the most literal sense of the words, a criminal as well as being personally unpleasant on many occasions, but that he was technically grossly ignorant and incompetent, indeed laughably so. His roofs leaked, his materials deteriorated. He never grasped the elementary principles of engineering. All his ideas were gimcrack at best, and often far worse than merely bad. To commission a building from Jeanneret was to tie a ball and chain around one’s own ankle, committing oneself to endless, Sisyphean bills for alteration and maintenance, as well as to a dishonest estimate of what the building would cost to build in the first place. A house by Jeanneret was not so much a machine for living in (to quote the most famous of his many fatuous dicta) as a machine for generating costs and for moving out of. In the name of functionality, Jeanneret built what did not work; in the name of mass production, everything he used had to be individually fashioned. Having no human qualities himself, and lacking all imagination, he did not even understand that shade in a hot climate was desirable, indeed essential.

Read the whole thing.

Reason for the Electoral College

Joys in the Hood: Ramping Up for "The Long Hot Summer" of 2015

Vander Leun on the prospect for urban violence.

Baltimore 1968

When it comes to the left-behinds in urban black ghettos from coast to coast calling for "new" urban renewal at this point is indeed so much blah-blah; pure blather. If you've had urban reNEWal already "new renewal" is just a case of trying to find a way to chrome a turd. You might be able to spray something on but it will never survive buffing.

Billions upon billions of dollars and decades of effort have gone down the drain of the left-behinds to no effect other than enriching the scamsters of "urban renewal." Baltimore is good solid case study in the proposition that nothing other than firm and unwavering policing over decades will help a deserted population captive to its nature as much as its nurture.

The first job of government (free or fascist) is, after all, the maintenance of public order. Without public order nothing good can thrive and without public order, as we see in the burned out and trashed businesses of Baltimore, nothing good can survive.

Once the flames have become ashes and the new cars driving in to haul loot away have faded away there is one lesson that Baltimore's taught other urban ghettos watching the fun on their flatscreen TVs: The police are frightened of those they are asked to police and the politicians who rule the police are even more terrified of the ghetto population. What other ghettos from Brooklyn to LA learn from Baltimore is that if they appear as flash riot mobs in enough numbers they will be able to loot as they please. Baltimore's rulers have assured the left-behinds that the cops won't come in shooting. And they won't.

Until they do. Or until the National Guard does.

Or until someone else entirely does.

The head instigator of our current race riots, Barack Obama, has defined the red-hot Baltimore riots “a slow-rolling crisis.... This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.” He might as well have added that under his leadership the race rioting will get worse since his minions cannot let "a slow-rolling crisis" go to waste. It will get worse and spread because what Obama and his cohort teach is essentially 'looting will be tolerated within zones that will be protected by the police we control.'

Read the whole thing, it gets worse.  Gerard is not hopeful; and I think his pessimism is, at least for now, warranted.

Riot-Plagued Baltimore Is a Catastrophe Entirely of the Democratic Party’s Own Making

A few weeks ago, there was an election in Ferguson, Mo., the result of which was to treble the number of African Americans on that unhappy suburb’s city council. This was greeted in some corners with optimism — now, at last, the city’s black residents would have a chance to see to securing their own interests.

This optimism flies in the face of evidence near — St. Louis — and far — Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco . . .

St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower.

Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

....

Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project....

The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

Read the whole thing.

Detroit Defaults

The result of decades of total Democrat control. 

A team led by a state-appointed emergency manager said Friday that Detroit is defaulting on about $2.5 billion in unsecured debt and is asking creditors to take about 10 cents on the dollar of what the city owes them.

Fun facts about Detroit:

• 20 percent of Detroit is on food stamps.
• It's violent crime rate is 5 times the national average and it’s rated as America’s Most Dangerous City.
• 40% of Detroit residents want to leave the city.
• Home prices have fallen 54 percent in the last 3 years.
• Detroit has the highest poverty rate in the nation.
• Detroit voted for  Obama by 98 percent, because when you’re already living in a hellhole, your prime motivation is to drag the rest of the country in with you.
• The 40 percent of Detroiters who want to leave have drawn no conclusions about the causes of all their problems.

Not enough fun facts?

• 50 years ago, Detroit's population was more than two million.
• 700,000 are left
• The number of people who left Detroit in the last decade is nearly twice those who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
• Detroit’s public schools are among the worst in the nation in spite of spending nearly $16,000 per pupil, 60 percent more than Georgia spends.
• Detroit school graduation rate is 32%.
• Test scores are so bad the superintendent of the city’s schools once said they were no better than if the students had simply guessed at the answers.
• Detroit’s per capita tax burden is several times the average for the Michigan cities.
• Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit's last mayor was convicted of 24 federal crimes, including racketeering, extortion and bribery and is going to jail for up to 30 years.
• Detroit is so Democrat that it's mayoral elections have two Democrats running against each other.
• As an interesting sidelight, Kwame Kilpatrick was one of the Mayors Against Guns crowd started by Michael Bloomberg.

Finally, serious consideration is given to razing Detroit and turning it into farmland.

"Racist" Terms

Glenn Reynolds links to an article about the reason that fried chicken is now a racist term.

WHO DOESN’T LIKE FRIED CHICKEN? Why remarks about race and fried chicken elicit such raw feelings.

The article Culinary Racism gives various explanations going back to slavery.

The most obvious explanation derives from the historical fact that fried chicken dishes were popular in slave homes on Southern plantations. In many cases, chickens were the only livestock animals that slaves were permitted to raise on their own, and—given that Scots founded much of the American South—there’s speculation that African-Americans tweaked and perfected their masters’ imported tradition of frying birds.

But there's a problem with this because lots of people like fried chicken: A lot of it is regional: people in the South are perceived to like friend chicken more than their northern counterparts. The South is poorer than the North and chicken is less expensive than beef so the fondness for chicken could be explained by relative wealth. I'm a Dutch immigrant and I love fried chicken; does that make me Black? Should I avoid serving friend chicken at any gathering where Blacks are present? If my Black friends serve friend chicken are they self-hating?

Let me propose an alternative explanation. The fried chicken=racist equation was created by the very powerful Race Industry. As an illustration of how these associations are created we need only refer to some of the Liberal race hustlers of today who tell us that:

• Lazy=racists
• Colored=racist (ever since the RI invented other terms)
• Negro=racist  (ever since the RI invented other terms)
• Niggardly=racist (out of ignorance a perfectly good word was outlawed)
• Boy=racist
• Cotton pickin’=racist
• Urban=racist  (this really is a euphemism when used by the "good people")
• “shuck and jive”=racist (except when Chris Matthews or Andrew Coumo uses it)
• “this president”=racist
• Chicago=racist
• References to golf (if played by Obama)=racist
• Whitewash=racist
• Limbaugh=racist (just because)

Before this list gets too long, let’s just go with the Chris Matthews definition of racist to include any criticism of Barack Obama. In fact, it is fair to broaden that to include any criticism of Blacks (can I say that; is that still the accepted term?) as racist. That’s why I was so shocked to see the Miami police department preparing for an "Urban Beach Weekend" without being accused of blatant racism. Now that it’s been pointed out, expect the “Justice Brothers” to hop on a plane and lead the demonstrations.

In Chicago violence news ...

CHICAGOLAND: 5 Dead, 15 Wounded In Weekend Violence...

Teen mobs run wild in downtown...


Police arrest 12 after large group converges on Gold Coast

Eleven juveniles and one adult were arrested last night after a large group converged near the Gold Coast and were blocking traffic, police said.

The group was made up of several dozen members who roamed from Michigan Avenue west on Chicago Avenue to LaSalle Street and witnesses said they were between the ages of 14 and 19 years old.

Paula Bishop, 49, who was visiting from Michigan to attend her son's graduation from the Moody Bible Institute said at about 7:45 p.m. saw the group walking by.

“They were cursing, being obnoxious,” said Bishop.

A heavy police presence flooded the area on bicycles and on foot. Ursitti could not say how many police officers were dispatched to the area.

When police arrived, members of the group began to disperse, Bishop said.

Her son, Jake Bishop, 22, said he saw members of the group running in a circle on LaSalle Street blocking traffic. When the police arrived the group members dispersed.

“They all converged on LaSalle,” said Jake Bishop.

Police were trying to get the group members to leave the area and were ushering members of the group onto the Red Line subway trains.

A police officer told the group, "Chicago is closed. Time to go home."

Coming to an urban area near you (remember Virginia Beach?)