“The major retailers fleeing the city’s downtown have been so numerous that last weekend the San Francisco Chronicle felt compelled to publish a map so readers could keep track of the exodus.”
– Wall Street Journal. ($)
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the day – San Francisco editionMay 4th, 2023 |
 8 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – San Francisco edition |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
What is going to ultimately keep SF from collapse is the fact that it is one of the most beautiful, most clement, best-laid-out places to be in the world. That coastline, from SF to LA, will always attract more people than can fit, and will always thus have great social and financial value.
Perhaps Maui is nicer, but SF ranks at or near the top.
From the Washington Examiner
San Francisco is one of many cities where this is so.
If theft is, de facto, legalised, on “Social Justice” “Equity” grounds, no business can survive – of course Amazon and Google do not care what is happening to stores (indeed they welcome the destruction of physical competition to on-line trading) – but trucks and trains are also being looted in California (and other places) and that will hit Amazon and co.
As for allowing vicious people to be on the streets, shooting up in front of young children and feeding their drug habit by crime – this did not start with Mr Soros, it started as far back as the 1960s when the United States Supreme Court started chipping away at the vagrancy laws. Vagrants were renamed “the homeless” (confusing them with genuine homeless people who were forced on the streets by the “Progressive” policy of destroying cheap accommodation, see Martin Anderson “The Federal Bulldozer” 1965) just as rioters (yes the riots did not start in 2020 – they go all the way back the 1960s) were renamed “protestors” as they looted and burned.
The legal system at the local level is also deeply corrupt – there has been some pushback in San Francisco with a particularly vicious District Attorney (the son of Marxist terrorists) who had essentially legalised crime, being removed – but other cities have kept such D.A.s
Ken Paxton the Attorney General of Texas (and perhaps the most experienced conservative Attorney General in the country) has explained how the radical left took control of some counties even in Texas – and not minor counties either, the legal system in counties that include Houston, Austin and San Antonio is now deeply compromised (criminals go free, indeed the local authorities actively cooperate with the gangs, and honest people are prosecuted on false charges in crooked trials).
The lectures of Attorney General Paxton, to the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale University and-so-on, are well worth watching – as he knows the enemy, indeed no one knows them better than he does.
However, I doubt the Wall Street Journal would like Attorney General Paxton – as he kept the mass “mail in ballots” out of Texas (and it took at least 12 legal cases to prevent Texas being rigged in 2020) and explains just how other States were rigged in 2020.
The WSJ does not like to be told that mass mail-in ballots mean that “signature verification” becomes a farce (it is just impossible when one is dealing with hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of mail-in ballots – and the courts in some particularly corrupt places just got rid of signature verification) – but like most people who have actually worked in elections (and I have worked in elections since 1979) Attorney General Paxton understands that mass mail-in ballots just can not work.
As for computer systems – that was not the real issue in 2020, indeed (as someone who has worked in elections since 1979) I thought the talk of computer systems was a massive distraction from the real issue – the tidal wave of uncheckable mail-in ballots.
Sadly California is not likely to be really reformed – indeed it is more likely that Texas will go the way of California.
Since 1952 the responsibility for prosecuting election fraud in Texas has been with the Attorney General – but a recent court decision (made by “Republican” judges owned by the corporations – just like the “Republican” officials in a certain county of Arizona) has stripped the office of Attorney General of the power to prosecute election fraud.
Unless that decision is reversed, there will be a massive wave of election fraud in Texas in 2024 and later.
In short – by January 2027 (after the elections of 2024 and 2026) Texas will turn into California. Unless the power to fight election fraud is handed back to the Office of the Attorney General of Texas.
There is endless talk of “how to win elections” – but unless the election process is honest, then all this talk is a waste of time. It ignores the elephant in the room – election fraud (which the Democratic Party indulges in whenever it is able to do so – with the support of the “main-stream” media).
And if you do not win elections you have no chance of changing policies – on law and order, or anything else.
Of course the position in the United Kingdom is rather different – policies of record high taxation and far left “Diversity and Inclusion” (2010 Equality Act), and “Net Zero” policies are followed, regardless of who wins elections in the United Kingdom. This is NOT to say that all policies will be the same (they will not) – but core (core) policies will continue regardless of election results.
In the United States elections really matter – if Republicans (REAL Republicans – not puppets of Wall Street “Woke” banks and other corporations such as BlackRock) win, then policy (on vital matters) can actually change.
It is because elections matter in the United States that the left makes such vast efforts to rig elections – in a way it is a back handed compliment.
Black people loot stores (see David Thompson’s examples of retail therapy). The Police and authorities take no action apart from arresting those who try to stop the thefts. The stores lose money. The stores close as the losses from theft are not sustainable. The black population protest at the closure of the stores, claiming the actions of the stores owners, in preventing the black people from stealing, are obviously racist. Makes sense to me.
Penselvat – it is not just black people.
Black people are rather thin on the ground in, say, Portland – and the stores are closing there for the same reasons they are closing in San Francisco.
It would be a simpler world if one could judge people by their skin colour – but someone can be as white as snow, and a looting leftist.
Teach “social justice” “equity” in the schools, and present all property owners as evil in the entertainment media (and the “mainline” churches), and (lastly) basically legalise theft by not prosecuting it, and you will find that there are very many white looters.
Paul – I am aware that it is not only black people who are looting stores, causing them to close, and I intended, but failed, to add a codicil, such as the one you wrote. For this omission, I apologise. I don’t judge people purely by their skin colour – I’m of mixed race myself – but the stories my, black, American friend, who is an ex Police officer, and who lives in California, intimates that the main offenders are black. A televised protest by a local community group at the closing of a Walmart showed that the leader, and every single one of the protestors, were black. When questioned by a news reporter of a possible connection of the mass looting and the closure of Walmart, led to threats of violence. It appears that I did a Diane Abbott and posted the initial draft by mistake.
Blacks are about 13% of the American population. Almost all of the store looters have been black.
Many reasons for this distribution – poor people loot more than the rich, dense urban stores are looted more than rural ones, disaffected people poorly served by society are more prone to antisocial action, etc. – but this need to apologize for stating true facts bugs me, as I see it as being at the root of our disintegrating state of racial relations. As someone once said, A is A.
(Not a complaint about Penseivat – a complaint about the need.)