The City of Austin has suspended its recently restarted partnership with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), established to aid the city’s struggling police department.
Announced back in March, the partnership between the Austin Police Department (APD) and the state was initiated to help APD respond to 911 calls and monitor traffic. APD has long struggled with staffing issues and saw 89 departures through the first three months of 2023, as city policy and posture toward the department were not appreciated by many rank-and-file officers.
As of March, there were 281 vacancies on top of the 150 positions eliminated in the 2020 budget cut. Due to the staffing shortage, police response times ballooned to at or nearly 10 minutes and 911 call holding times grew even larger.
At the time of the announcement, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said, “During my run for mayor, I promised we would make city government work better in providing basic services.”
“This is an example of that. It’s a common-sense, practical response to a serious need and arose out of a positive working relationship between the Capital City and the Capitol of Texas.”
A report on the partnership was released this month showing average response times in council districts dropping between 30 seconds and a minute and a half.
But after a citizen complaint alleging DPS officers pointed firearms at a father and his child, the city’s Public Safety Commission recommended the council scrap the partnership.
A citizen. One.
On the first day of the partnership, DPS officers seized 70 pounds of methamphetamine and made 14 felony arrests.
It was temporarily paused in May to shift the manpower to the border as Title 42 expired but was set to resume after the hiatus.
“From the start of this partnership with DPS, I said I wanted Austinites to feel safe and be safe. Recent events demonstrate we need to suspend the partnership with DPS. The safety of our community is a primary function of City government, and we must keep trying to get it right,” Watson said.
“This partnership was an innovative approach to address acute staffing shortages that were years in the making. However, any approach must be in sync with Austin values.”
The city’s release says that the DPS support “has resulted in a decrease in violent and gun crime, fewer traffic fatalities, shorter response times to calls for assistance, and seizures of significant amounts of illicit drugs, including fentanyl and heroin.”
Councilman Chito Vela said of the announcement, “This is the right decision, especially given the events of the last few days. Policing in Austin must be aligned with our community values. Unfortunately, the type of policing we have seen by DPS is not in line with Austin’s values.”
Evidently “Austin values” are “We can’t put criminals in jail, because white supremacy.”
A source within APD said to The Texan, “It’ll get worse before it gets worse and people want to leave.”
“The activists who don’t have the residents’ or visitors’ best interest at heart are succeeding in tearing down public safety,” he added. “Until city leadership is brave enough to reject their radicalism, the dire situation will only get worse.”
Sadly, “city leadership” is in on the scam. They want as many criminals and drug-addicted transients walking the streets as possible because they’re an excellent source of graft for the hard left.
In a statement provided to The Texan, Austin Police Association President Thomas Villareal said, “The decision by the Interim City Manager and Mayor to suspend the APD/DPS partnership is absolutely unconscionable. Instead of asking DPS to look into the actions of a specific Trooper, the City allowed a one-sided, inflammatory, poorly researched news story, one purely intended to get clicks, to be treated as truth and fact.”
According to Villareal, the department’s internal staffing numbers show APD is currently 500 officers short.
Yeah, that happens when you defund the police and cancel cadet classes.
Austin is following in the same crime-and-homeless infested footsteps of San Francisco even after San Franciscans have risen up to start kicking them out of office. Hopefully Austinites have just enough sense to avoid following them into that feces-strewn ditch.
In Friday’s LinkSwarm, I had a link that asked if Portland was finally sobering up.
Well, for a lot of people and businesses, it’s too late. Such as Kevin Howard, for whom the City of Portland refused to do anything about the homeless people breaking into his property and trashing the place.
And who then fined him because the place was trashed.
“This property was listed in January of 2021 for $795,000. Yesterday we sold it for $412,000,” said Howard.
A significant loss, but Howard says he had nothing left in the tank. The tiny piece of property off Southeast Powell Boulevard, a former pizza parlor, has been a nightmare for the past three years.
“The supposed homeless came in and kicked in the door, the front door, and lived in it,” said Howard. “And I waited until they came out, and I had to board it up.”
But Howard says that didn’t do much. They just broke in again and again, living inside and outside, even in his dumpster enclosure which they eventually set on fire. Howard says he got nowhere when he called the police.
“I said, ‘Well, what does a homeowner do? What does a property owner do?’ and they said, ‘Call Central City Concern,'” said Howard. “I said “What will they do?’ and they said, ‘Well, they’ll probably come out and give them a cup of coffee and some hot soup.'”
Howard looked into hiring a security guard, but that was too expensive at roughly $15,000 a month. So, he decided to get a fence, but the wait was four months.
“I said, ‘Why?’ and they said, ‘Because homeowners like mad are fencing their property to keep the, you know, the drug addicts and the homeless out,'” said Howard.
So, the trash piled up, and Howard tried to keep up, but it wasn’t enough. Last summer, the city hit him with a nuisance fine of nearly $540.
Howard paid the fine.
A month later, he got an even bigger bill, the original amount plus a penalty. The city told him they had lost his check. So, he paid the bill again, plus the extra $100.
“Two weeks later, they sent me another bill for 639 dollars and 71 cents,” said Howard. “I called them up, and they said, “Well, this might be a duplicate bill, but we’ve already put a lien on your property.”
“I just remember the phrase ‘The City That Works.’ The city that jerks, I mean, how can you be this dysfunctional?”
Easy. You let Social Justice Warriors take over your city.
Busy as hell and I have a cold, but I soldier on. LinkSwarm! Russian coup! Texas! Pedophiles! Portland! Braaaaiiiinnnnnns!
I cover the world!
“The owner of the Wagner private military contractor made his most direct challenge to the Kremlin yet on Friday, calling for an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister. The security services reacted immediately by calling for the arrest of Yevgeny Prigozhin…Prigozhin claimed early Saturday that his forces had crossed into Russia from Ukraine and had reached Rostov, saying they faced no resistance from young conscripts at checkpoints and that his forces ‘aren’t fighting against children.'” Unconfirmed reports of fighting elsewhere in Russia. Developing…
The City of Dallas is requiring employees to undergo taxpayer-funded transgender reeducation training any time one of their co-workers comes out as “transgender.”
According to internal documents obtained from the City of Dallas by The Dallas Express, “non-transitioning” employees are being forced to undergo reeducation training “to support an inclusive and productive workplace environment for all employees.”
The City of Dallas’ “gender transition toolkit” explains that a transitioning employee should find a “trusted” supervisor or manager as a “first point of contact” to help them through their workplace transition.
The document includes a list of gender terms and definitions. It then moves on to require employees to work with gender-confused co-workers, allowing the “transitioning” employee to use whichever bathroom or locker room at work they feel most comfortable with, ignoring the comfort of other employees.
Speaking of pedophiles: “A former CNN television producer who had pleaded guilty to luring a 9-year-old girl into illegal sexual acts was sentenced Tuesday to more than 19 years in prison and an additional 15 years of supervised release during a U.S. District Court hearing in Vermont. John Griffin of Stamford, Connecticut, pleaded guilty in federal court in December to using interstate commerce to entice and coerce the girl to engage in sexual activity at his Vermont ski house.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
In the summer of 2020, Portland, Oregon, became the poster child for American urban disaster zones. During the day, tens of thousands of citizens protested peacefully against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But everything changed after dark. Nonviolent demonstrators with jobs, school assignments, and kids to raise went home; hundreds of anarchists swarmed in to take their place and waged a low-grade insurgency against the city. They fought pitched battles with the cops—throwing rocks, frozen water bottles, fireworks, buckets of excrement, and even Molotov cocktails. They attacked coffeehouses, immigrant-owned restaurants, mom-and-pop retail stores, banks, museums, churches, bus stops, and the Multnomah County Democratic Party headquarters with baseball bats, crowbars, and hammers. Most were military-age white males wearing all-black clothing and hiding their faces. The violence kept up, night after night, week after week, and month after month, into the winter, long after the rest of America had calmed down. My city had become the most politically violent place in the country, and I got worried e-mails from people I knew around the world—even in the Middle East!—asking me if I was okay and why on earth this was happening.
A crime wave followed. Shootings and homicides exploded 300 percent between 2019 and 2022, robberies rose 50 percent in 2022 alone, vehicle thefts hit record highs, and work-order requests for graffiti removal shot up 500 percent between 2020 and 2022. The City of Roses suffered 413 shootings in 2019 but 1,306 in 2022 and nearly twice as many homicides as San Francisco, though Portland is only three-fourths its size. Meantime, statewide crime actually declined from 2019 to 2021.
The homelessness crisis also intensified. The slow-motion collapse of Oregon’s mental-health infrastructure, a dramatic surge of cheap and deadly fentanyl and a far more potent and addictive form of psychosis-inducing meth, and a crippling housing shortage led to the formation of more than 700 tent cities in residential neighborhoods and business districts across the city.
But while it’s too soon to declare that Portland’s troubles have passed, the worst may now be over. Despite ongoing woes, Portland looks and feels much better than it did in dystopian 2020. The riots stopped, and the crime wave seems to have peaked, with shootings down by nearly 40 percent and homicides down more than 50 percent in the early months of 2023. A sober mood shift has taken over the city. Voters passed a ballot measure to restructure city government, while the three newest elected officials on the city council are steering Portland in a different direction. The city, county, and state are taking steps to reverse the decline.
Portland is suffering a serious livability crisis. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in early 2022 told the Portland Business Alliance that the quality of life is worsening. Portland is hardly the most dangerous city in America: the homicide rate in St. Louis is more than four times higher, with 65 murders per 100,000 people, compared with Portland’s 15 in 2022. Portland’s rate peaked at more than double the national average, but of all the cities with higher crime rates than Portland, only Chicago gets as many national headlines. That’s probably because Portland’s increase in crime was the worst in the country. No other city’s homicide rate rose so spectacularly. And unlike St. Louis, Baltimore, and other notorious hot spots, Portland was recently a destination city that touted its high quality of life as a reason to move there.
Of late, though, rather than attracting new residents, Portland has actually lost population, either to the suburbs or out of state. “I’ve never seen money move out of here,” commercial real-estate salesman Stu Peterson told Willamette Week. “Nobody ever wanted to leave Oregon. It’s a beautiful place. Most evacuees are high-wage earners who are fed up with the crime, taxes, and homelessness, in that order. There’s an ugly spiral.” Real-estate agent Justin Harnish described a client who left downtown Portland for the suburb of Lake Oswego after she saw a woman stab another woman in the face with scissors.
Accompanying the crime wave is a drastic staff shortage at the Portland Police Bureau. Portland now has fewer than 800 sworn officers, a smaller number than it had decades ago, when the city was barely half the size it is now. And with the surge in violent crime, the police have little time to deal with anything that isn’t life-threatening. Prioritizing shootings and other emergencies, they’re forced to neglect break-ins, stolen cars, vandalism, and just about everything else. The traffic police unit has been defunded, reduced to a single full-time traffic cop—not for ideological reasons but because the city has no one to staff that division.
Part of the blame rests with the months of demoralizing anti-cop violence in 2020, but Portland would probably be short of police officers anyway. Every city agency, from fire and rescue to the transportation bureau and the public defender’s office, faces staff shortages now. And while a shrunken police force didn’t cause Portland’s crime wave on its own, a police department that can barely react to anything but emergency calls aggravates the problem. Criminals behave as though they can get away with essentially anything and commit far more crimes than they would if they were investigated, arrested, and prosecuted swiftly. The Woodstock neighborhood, where Joe Biden won 88 percent of the vote, is considering hiring its own private security force.
Snip.
I spent more time talking to my neighbors that year than I ever had before or have since. A lot of us suddenly became friendlier outside our houses, and we weren’t talking about sports and the weather. Residents and business owners alike worried about where things were headed and expressed dismay at the city’s inability to defend itself. I didn’t talk with a single person who thought that everything was okay, that city hall was on top of it, or that the anarchists were not a menace. And nobody could understand why the homeless camps at the elementary school down the street or at the park hadn’t been cleared. No, I didn’t conduct my own scientific public opinion survey, but it was obvious that regular people were nearing the end of their rope and that the status quo was bound to be upended.
In 2021, that’s exactly what happened. A tsunami of outrage inundated the mayor, the city council, and the police bureau. Phones rang nonstop. Furious citizens shouted at meetings. Newspaper editors published scathing letters, and journalists at mainstream outlets covered distressed neighborhoods and interviewed disgruntled citizens while largely ignoring the activist set that booed every conceivable solution and told civilians that the problems were in their heads. Lawsuits against the city proliferated. Polls showed city council members languishing on political death row, with approval ratings in the teens.
Though most residents still wanted accountability for bad cops and citizen oversight of the police bureau, the complaints were primarily about crime, about how the police hardly ever show up anymore, and about disorder dragging neighborhoods down. Even some of the fashionable middle-class neighborhoods endearingly satirized in the Portlandia comedy series were enduring weekly gunfire.
In the fall of 2022, 82 percent of Portland respondents in an Oregonian poll said that they wanted more cops. If some Portlanders felt overpoliced a few years ago, hardly anyone felt that way after the chaos, with a mere 15 percent saying that they wanted fewer officers in 2021.
Before the city council elections got going in 2022, voters fired repeated warning shots in public opinion surveys. An overwhelming 85 percent of respondents said that they found the city council ineffective, with a clear majority describing it as “very ineffective.” For a while, it looked as though Portland was gearing up to fire every single official in a landslide election.
Two city council members, Dan Ryan and Jo Ann Hardesty, ran for reelection last year. Ryan managed to defy expectations and win despite the temper in the city, though it’s easy to understand why: he set aside his ideological views and changed with the times. Though he first ran during a special election in early 2020 on a campaign promising to cut police funding, he soon reversed himself. Anarchists vandalized his home seven times because he refused to cut the police budget.
Hardesty didn’t fare as well. Pushing bills to defund the police and opposing the cleanup of homeless camps, she put herself wildly out of step with her constituents. Mingus Mapps, a moderate on the council who had easily dispatched the left-wing populist Chloe Eudaly two years earlier, endorsed Hardesty’s challenger, Rene Gonzales, and bluntly said: “It is time to put ideology aside and elect people who will fight for Portland. I need colleagues who use debate, reason, and logic to solve our many crises.” Gonzales said, “Our once beautiful city is struggling in ways that were unfathomable a short time ago. . . . City hall’s ineffective, ideologically driven policies are ruining the city we used to proudly call home.” Gonzales won, and Portland replaced the city council’s last progressive firebrand with a centrist. It was the kind of event that marks the end of an era.
Sounds a lot like Austin, except for the sobering-up part. (Also, it’s good to read Michael Totten again. He seemed to disappear from view for several years. Probably because he was writing for The Bulwark…)
Speaking of Portland, the homeless drug addict who said that living on the streets of Portland was “too easy” is now back with her family and getting treatment. They thought she was dead…
More Biden corruption comes to light, California gets even more crazy, and two former European Prime Ministers step out of the spotlight in different ways.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer revealed Thursday that he expects there is evidence of at least $20-$30 million being made in illegal payments by foreign nationals to the Biden family.
Appearing on Fox Business, Comer stated “We have more bank records coming in but we’re gonna exceed $10 million this week but I think we’ll get up to $20-$30 million.”
He further noted that it is becoming clear that the Bidens potentially engaged in bribery, influence peddling, and money laundering.
“This is going to be hard for Biden to explain, this is not going to go away, and I think eventually the mainstream media is going to start asking the real questions,” Comer added.
“They know there’s something wrong here. They know all the allegations have merit, because of where Joe Biden was, because of what we’ve seen on tape before, where Joe Biden bragged about firing that prosecutor,” he added,
“They know that this family created these shell companies. They know this family was money-laundering, they were profiting off Joe Biden’s influence,” Comer asserted, adding “The media knows that – they’re just not covering it.”
“I can assure you: there is more money that we’re going to be able to identify, that was transferred between foreign nationals in other countries and the Biden family,” Comer further emphasized, adding “I think, eventually, the mainstream media will turn on Joe Biden and start asking the real questions: ‘What did your family do to receive all this money?’”
Speaking of Biden family corruption: “House Oversight Panel Subpoenas Former Hunter Biden Associate Devon Archer…[The committee] is particularly interested in Archer’s involvement in the family’s international business deals, which included countries like China, Russia, and Ukraine.” Archer was in Global Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden and John Kerry’s stepson.
“Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison stepped down this week as the progressive-run city struggles with homicides, a drug crisis, and a troubling rise in violence involving teenagers.” Time to pull this out again:
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, dead at 86. Berlusconi revived Italy’s economy, but then couldn’t keep it out of the PIIGS. But for a whilehe kept the wolves at bay.
Also stepping out of the spotlight this week: Former UK Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned from Parliment. Other than getting Brexit accomplished, Johnson’s tenure seemed all sizzle and no steak.
In April 2023, an unelected Board in California voted to force trucking companies to buy zero-emission trucks. This technology is at early-stage adoption in limited segments, and infrastructure buildout is lagging behind what is required to support electrification in our industry. The Board unanimously advanced the Advanced Clean Fleet rule to accompany California’s equally tough electric vehicle sales mandate regulation, the Advanced Clean Truck rule, that would require truck manufacturers to sell zero-emission vehicles. These two regulations together are designed to create an artificial electric vehicle market sooner rather than later.
This new rule was made at the behest of the environmental lobby, which pushed for unrealistic targets and unachievable timelines that will undoubtedly lead to higher prices for goods delivered to the state and fewer options for consumers. ATA has strongly opposed this rule from the outset and testified at a hearing in Sacramento to express the trucking industry’s concerns directly to the Board.
Snip.
Today’s clean diesel trucks can spend 15 minutes fueling anywhere in the country and then travel about 1,200 miles before fueling again. In contrast, today’s zero-emission trucks:
Have significantly less range of about 150-330 miles between charging or refueling;
Need to be charged or refueled more often and for longer periods of time leading to unproductive downtime;
Cost two to three times more than a comparable clean-diesel truck; and
Weigh thousands of pounds more, reducing payload capacity and requiring more trucks and drivers to move the same amount of freight.
Also: “The California Energy Commission estimates that 157,000 chargers will need to be installed by 2030 to support California’s heavy-duty vehicle electrification goals.” Assuming there’s enough Lithium in the world for the batteries… (Hat tip: TPPF.)
Hope for San Francisco? Residents replace drug-addicted transients on their local sidewalks with large planters.
Turns out at least one city employee involved in the contract was all but handing the money to himself.
All the evidence indicates this is was almost certainly an inside job.
It certainly appears that at least one City of Austin employee colluded or communicated with friends and business associates to secure lucrative seven figure contracts.
Despite being grossly unqualified and totally inexperienced for the job.
It also seems like ICCS Academy is lying about a bunch of stuff on their bid submission.
Snip.
Believe it or not, the ICCS Academy bidding process raises even more red flags than P Squared Services.
There are two City of Austin employees listed as “authorized contacts” for Item 23.
Sandra Wirtanen
John Wesley Smith
This screenshot shows John Wesley Smith is the “Small Minority Business Resources” contact for this proposal.
Guess where John Wesley Smith used to work as the ‘Compliance Director’ before he started working for Austin city government?
ICCS Academy!
Can you imagine a bigger conflict of interest?
Maybe that’s why ICCS Academy yanked their website yesterday (link).
However, this snippet on DuckDuckGo still appears when you search for ‘John Wesley Smith ICCS Academy’
John Wesley Smith was the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy.
His bio states he also works as a “Small Business Counselor with the City of Austin”.
Snip.
QUESTION: Shouldn’t John Wesley Smith have immediately recused himself from the bidding and contract negotiation process for Item 23, due to his massive conflict of interest as the current / former Compliance Director for ICCS Academy?
Massive Conflict of Interest
Gee, I wonder how the other eight companies who submitted bid proposals for Item 23 feel about the former Compliance director of ICCS Academy overseeing the bidding process, and awarding a $7 million contract to his former colleagues?
John Wesley Smith was definitely the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy at one point in time.
Whether that was two weeks, two months or two years ago – it doesn’t matter.
John Wesley Smith should have removed himself from this project due to the awful optics and huge conflict of interest.
John Wesley Smith’s LinkedIn profile shows his current role with Austin city government is “Business Development Coordinator II”.
John Wesley Smith says he’s in charge of “negotiating contractual agreements for the City of Austin” and is “responsible for various minority/women procurements.”
Huh.
For the record, ICCS Academy is currently a registered vendor with the city of Austin.
However, all of their ‘certified commodities’ are in education, training and consulting.
So a training vendor gets picked to do homeless site cleanup despite no experience in the field because a (former?) employee works for the city and just happens to be able to throw business their way.
How convenient.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that the entire reimagining police lunacy was all about social justice warriors saying time and time again “take money from the police and give it to us.” There’s an entire industry of social justice grifters (both in homelessness and every other social justice cause) whose entire existence is dedicated to making life for average citizens worse while sucking as much money as possible from taxpayers. You can bet that this is far from the first time such self-dealing has occurred, and I bet forensic audits of both city contracts and the “nonprofit” entities that receive them would reveal numerous example of quid pro quo kickbacks.
Again, kudos to Teddy Brosevelt (whoever he may be) for peeling back the lid of Austin’s social justice warrior corruption problem.
It’s good to be a member of the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex. Not only do you get to rake off graft for luring drug-addicted transients to town, you also get to rake off graft to clean up the resulting mess.
Item #23 on this week’s Austin City Council agenda allocates another $20 million to the Homeless Industrial-Complex to clean up dozens of dangerous homeless encampments around the city.
Item 23 (link) says it’s critical for these camps to get cleaned up, since they pose “a great degree of health, safety, and fire risks.”
Austin Water also needs cleanup services on “environmentally sensitive areas of the wildlands” due to toxic waste and debris contaminating the watershed.
Snip.
One of the three companies who won this big fat $20 million contract – P Squared Services, LLC – is the most suspicious, sketchy and (almost certainly) fraudulent company I’ve encountered during my three years of reading through these absurd Austin City Council agenda items.
Just look at the 11 bids and financial docs for Item 23 (link).
You will shake your head in anger and disbelief, asking yourself:
How could Austin Finance be so incompetent, lazy and irresponsible?
Is something more sinister going on?
Is this a case of internal corruption or criminal behavior?
No sane person would make these decisions.
Nah. Austin City Council. Corrupt and incompetent is the default setting.
Meet P Squared Services, LLC
Major red flags pop up across the galaxy when you investigate this highly suspicious, brand new company called P Squared Services.
P Squared Services has:
No internet presence
No website
No clients
No experience
There’s overwhelming evidence that P Squared Services, LLC is almost certainly up to something nefarious and possibly illegal.
The major question is whether it’s an inside job and who made the final decision to funnel money to these frauds.
P Squared Services is a Texas Domestic Limited-Liability Company that was formed in Smithville on November 4, 2022.
The business address for P Squared Services is an exact match for the residential address of the two married co-owners:
Brandon Keith Pietsch
Kristina Dawn Pietsch
So the married co-owners of P Squared Services are running this mysterious business out of their HOUSE.
And this “business address” is actually a residential, single family home with zero visible equipment, tools or supplies for cleaning up industrial waste.
P Squared Services, LLC
607 Ash Street
Smithville, TX 78957
Let’s look at the google street view photos of their business headquarters / house.
See if you can notice:
Empty beer cans on front lawn
Tipped-over cooler by porch
Unfinished projects like doors and window screens that were never installed.
So they’re hiring someone to clean up a homeless camp whose house looks like a homeless camp.
The conclusion: “I’m almost positive that P Squared Services LLC is a fake, phony, money laundering scam.”
Indeed.
That seems to be the driving purpose behind all Austin homeless policies…
Here’s a video where Ex-LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva discusses how the Homeless Industrial Complex racket works there.
Five people a day die on the streets of LA in the gutter like a dog. Five a day. Like, five on drugs from overdosing overdosing on drugs, from illnesses that are treatable. But if you’re not being treated, like, for example, you’re insulin dependent type one [diabetes]. Without insulin you die. That’s what happens, because these are people are not in a state of mind to actually accept and seek medical care for a problem, so it goes untreated they die, or they overdose and they die, or they do both and they die. I think in 2020-2021, they registered, I think, over 1,800 deaths of that type on the street, which is mind-boggling, but it’s consistent.
“If you don’t pay attention, people are going to die. So the people, the activists, they want to get in the way. ‘Don’t touch them, you’re criminalizing poverty!’ or this or that. Yet they have no answer. And their solution is just to let people die on the street. That’s not a solution.”
“The [homeless] count is getting bigger, not smaller.”
“There’s a perception in the entire nation that, if you’re homeless and you like to use drugs, go to LA. Until that train stops, it doesn’t matter what you do locally in LA. You can’t defeat 49 other states sending all their homeless their derelicts their drug addicts to LA.” I don’t know, a lot still seem to be going to San Francisco. And we need to do more to spread the word to Austin’s drug addicted transients in hopes they move there.
When he started trying to clean things up, he got immediate pushback from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. They had “no desire whatsoever” to work with him.
“They’re not doing anything about it because the homeless industrial complex is alive and well. Look at the career arc of Holly Mitchell, supervisor. Karen Bass, mayor. Community organizers. Now they’re running non-profits. Now they’re receiving contracts from the county, from the city. Now they’re in public office. Those two in particular prime example of it, and that’s the wave of the future.”
“You’ve got a whole community of people that are in the 501c3s, the non-profits, and uh Boards of Directors, CEOs. The amount of money is pouring into the nonprofits is just incredible. There’s no governance, there’s no oversigh, there’s no accountability on the results. They just keep shoveling money at them, and the problem keeps getting worse and worse.”
“This has become a system for people to to get in and get involved, and actually build a career and build a path to politics. The top 10 CEOs of non-profits eight hundred thousand dollar a year. They were making more than twice what I was making as sheriff, and the size of my operation dwarfed all of them probably combined. But that tells you the influence the money involved.”
“From 2011 to 2021, L.A. County spent 6.5 billion dollars on homeless initiatives. The homeless count went from 39,000 to over 80,000. it doubled in size.”
“It’s engulfing every corner of life in L.A County.”
If you’re stressing over your taxes, you might be slightly relieved to know that they’re not due until April 18. Thus week: More Blue City violence and decline, lots of Social Justice Warrior backlash, Facebook shows snowflakes the door, and Budweiser commits brand suicide.
“Ex-ABC Senior Producer Who Rolling Stone Covered For Indicted On Child Porn Charges. Former ABC senior producer James Gordon Meek has been indicted on three counts of child pornography nearly one year after the FBI raided his Arlington, Virginia home.”
Something about the apparently random street murder of Silicon Valley tech executive Bob Lee seems to have overturned a crawly rock in San Francisco’s political scene, suggesting a brewing power struggle on the horizon.
On the one hand, we have a very vocally angry Silicon Valley tech community speaking out about the out-of-control crime situation in the city, with the valued and talented Lee’s untimely death from some night creature who crawled out from some sewer or encampment and stabbed him to death, quite possibly in a drug-addled haze. That’s expected if you live in a place full of bums and criminals, but Lee didn’t live in a place full of bums and criminals. He had actually fled the city for Florida based on its engulfing crime and come back only for a brief business trip.
On the other hand, we have a soggy, entrenched political establishment seeking to assure that there’s really no crime problem at all. This is evident enough in the “crime is down” coverage seen in the political establishment’s house organ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in the surreal statements of the city hall power establishment, which is rooted in special interests, particularly the most powerful one, the homeless industrial complex. I wrote about that here. San Francisco currently spends about as much on homeless “services” as it does on police, and by some studies such as the one cited below, actually more.
Not surprisingly, as per Thomas Sowell’s observation, you can have all the poverty you want to pay for, and San Francisco pays a lot.
The Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian has noted:
Spending $1.1 billion on homelessness is just the latest installment in San Francisco’s constant failure to sensibly and humanely deal with an issue that it chronically misdiagnoses and mismanages about as much as is humanly possible. Since fiscal year 2016–17, San Francisco has spent over $2.8 billion on homelessness, and the city’s politicians remain seemingly baffled, year after year, as the number of homeless in the city skyrocket, as opioid overdoses kill more than COVID-19, and as the city has become nearly the most dangerous in the country. https://www.hoover.org/research/why-san-francisco-nearly-most-crime-rid….
Since 2016, the number of homeless in San Francisco has increased from 12,249 to 19,086, which comes out to about $57,000 in spending per homeless person per year. With a total population of about 860,000, roughly 2.2 percent of San Francisco residents are homeless, which is over 12 times the national average. There is little doubt that as San Francisco spends more, homelessness and its impact on the city worsens.
Do the homeless get that $57,000 being spent on them? Of course not. The princelings of the NGO establishments got that money — for themselves. That’s what’s made them politically powerful, enough to call the shots at city hall.
Democrats and Social Justice Warriors view homelessness as a huge profit center, and seek to increase the ranks of the homeless at every opportunity.
Also, an arrest was made in the Lee case and it was a fellow tech guy who knew him. “A tech executive named Nima Momeni was arrested by San Francisco police Thursday morning in the April 4 killing of Cash App founder Bob Lee…Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect.” So not a random gibbering drug-addicted transient.
Speaking of San Francisco street crime, a Whole Food closes one year after opening due to violence and theft.
A St. Louis judge sanctioned St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office last week for allegedly withholding evidence in a double-murder case, while allowing the suspect out on bond, amid rising criticism about left-wing prosecutors allowing crime to flourish in major U.S. cities.
Alex Heflin, 23, was held without bond since January after he was initially charged with two counts of second-degree murder and armed criminal action, local media reported. But those charges were recently reduced to involuntary and voluntary manslaughter before he was released, while his April 17 trial has been postponed until June 12.
Judge Theresa Counts Burke ruled in favor of Heflin’s lawyers after they filed a motion accusing a prosecutor under Gardner of violating discovery rules. They alleged that her office did not turn over evidence, including a 911 call recording and DNA evidence.
“The court finds that there have been repeated delays by the state in obtaining discovery and providing it to the defense,” Burke wrote, according to local reports.
“There has been a lack of diligence on the part of the state in following up and providing discovery to the defendant in a timely fashion. As a result of the state’s actions and lack of diligence, the court grants defendant’s second motion for sanctions.”
Under Burke’s order, Heflin will have to remain on GPS monitoring. She also ordered the circuit attorney’s office to hand over their list of witnesses within 24 hours, provide DNA test results within 24 hours, or ask a crime lab for the DNA results.
“Molotov balloons are a ball filled with sulfuric acid, but white strips are a type of paper treated with potassium chlorate and a sugar mix. When the balloon breaks, the acid reacts with the potassium chlorate and sugar, which causes ignition.”
Another girlboss indicted: “Penn grad Charlie Javice, founder of Frank, charged with fraud over $175M JPMorgan deal.” Seems the heart of the indictment is fake users.
Prosecutors and the SEC allege that Javice orchestrated a scheme to deceive JPMorgan into believing that Frank had access to valuable data on 4.25 million students who used the company’s service when in reality the number was less than 300,000.
Prosecutors said when JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) sought to verify the number of Frank users and the amount of data collected about them, Javice fabricated a data set. She is alleged to have an unnamed co-conspirator who first asked Frank’s director of engineering to create an artificially generated data set. Prosecutors said the director of engineering declined the request after expressing concerns about its legality.
Javice, according to prosecutors, then approached an outside data scientist and hired him to create the synthetic data set — which was then provided to an agreed-upon third-party vendor in an effort to confirm to JPMorgan that the data set had over 4.25 million rows.
Based on that alleged fraudulent data, prosecutors said JPMorgan agreed to buy Frank for $175 million. As part of the deal, the nation’s largest bank hired Javice and other Frank employees. Prosecutors said Javice received over $21 million for selling her equity stake in Frank and, per the terms of the deal, was to be paid another $20 million as a retention bonus.
Prosecutors said as the fabricated data set was being created, Javice and her co-conspirator sought to purchase real data for over 4.25 million college students to cover up their misrepresentations.
Treading the fine line between “fake it until you make it” and “interstate wire fraud.”
Bud light tranny pander wrecks brand. “I’ve never seen such little sales [as] in this past few days.”
Like just about every blogger, I have some half-finished drafts of posts I never finished, many of which I still have Firefox tabs open for. Every now and then I have a hankering to bear down and finish one of them, if only to close a few tabs. So let’s have a poll!
[ays_poll id=5]
Let me know what you’re interested in and I’ll make an effort to finish that one. Just don’t expect it immediately…
“Biden’s job growth is mostly immigrants working for low wages.” Also this: “The Department of Homeland Security has been issuing an unknown number of two-year work permits to illegal immigrants, which will keep them in the workforce suppressing wages and fanning the flames of discontent amongst Americans unable to find jobs until the next presidential election.” What the hell?
“Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media.”
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported . This same “disinformation” group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress.
“Any outfit like that engaged in censorship shouldn’t have any contact with the government because they’re tainted by association with a group that is doing something fundamentally against American values,” Jeffrey Clark, ex-acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, told the Washington Examiner. “The government or any private entity shouldn’t be involved with this entity that’s engaged in conduct that is either legally questionable or at least morally questionable.”
GDI compiles a “dynamic exclusion list” that it feeds to corporate entities, such as the Microsoft -owned advertising company Xandr, emails show. Xandr and other companies are, in turn, declining to place ads on websites that GDI flags as peddling disinformation.
The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on this exclusion list. The list includes at least 2,000 websites and has “had a significant impact on the advertising revenue that has gone to those sites,” said GDI’s CEO Clare Melford on a March 2022 podcast.
GDI has identified that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.
Another huge story that the news media has done it’s best to ignore: a toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The blew it up to prevent a BLEVE and ended up releasing Phosgene gas. That’s carrying your World War I reenactment too far.
90-year California Democratic Senator old Dianne Feinstein to retire after 2024. But…
A few hour later she was evidently unaware she had retired. Increasingly, “crazy” or “senile” seem to be the two most common flavors of the Democratic Party…
