It is not racist to acknowledge that the city’s open-air drug market is dominated by Honduran drug dealers. Ignoring that reality hurts working-class families.
If people only stood by their convictions, and not apologize for what others perceive as an affront to their ethnicity and sensibilities. It's not racist or a generalization if it's true, but heaven forbid offending anybody. Didn't the mayor know that all Latinos are as pure as the driven snow; that all a Rhodes scholars in the making?
I live 15 min from San Francisco. I live in ground zero Woketopia, where people try to out virtue signal each other for sport. The new form of social climbing since designer duds are theft worthy, or saved for vacations in red states on the DL. (See Newsom caught fly fishing in Montana)
I’m born and raised in CA. Ive always been, like many in CA, Left of center/libertarian/independent/moderate. Not into politics. You do you. Don’t harsh my mellow and I won’t harsh yours etc. this is a very CA attitude, at least it was. Somewhere along the line, the woke progressives got into power and have been on a barbaric path of destruction ever since. I can’t wrap my brain around how it happened, but it did. There’s so many smart, cool people in CA. How did this happen? When someone in power calls it out, the reality, the truth. they get shut down. It’s happened to Breed, Newsom, et al. They bow down and take their knee. They apologize, hypocrites, and things continue to get worse, and become kind of eerily normal at the same time.
I just voted Republican up and down the ballot for the first time ever. I’ve never voted for a mid term election in my life, but i just did. All 3 pages.
I don’t think my vote will change anything, but hopefully there’s others like me out there who want to see change in our state. Things have become out of control here with drugs, homeless, crime, corruption, high taxes, decayed infrastructure, and incompetence. It’s everywhere now. 1.7M toilet that takes 3 years to build is the latest SF embarrassment that made national news.
CA is a pro criminal sanctuary state now run amok. The middle of SF near the tenderloin/theater district is fenced off for several city blocks where drug dealers and addicts can hang out and legally use fentanyl and other drugs. I’ve seen it. It’s shocking. Miles of tent and RV camps submerged in piles of trash including the suburbs. Not just urban areas anymore. It gets cleaned up every few months when ground water and natural habitats are threatened from toxins, then they come back and trash it again.
We are stuck here because our business is here and we can’t relocate it to another state so now all I can do is vote.
Listening to this made me hurl my head back in laugher...followed by sad rage. I'm bummed that Breed walked her speech back, first off. She was so good against Boudine. I know she's dealing with profound internal pressure though. But I mean WOW, right: The New Woke Line is basically that crime itself (or caring about crime) is a fictional "white" non-problem only concerning to rich white Republicans. But this is typicle since 2020, when BLM "wasn't" burning sections of whole cities down, and when young black men "weren't" beating the shit out of Asians all around the nation and especially NYC, and crime "wasn't" on the rise, and Trumpers who didn't wear masks were assholes but BLM nd 30% of Black citizens who didn't wear masks were just fine, etc etc, ad infinitum. What's most shocking to me, honestly, is that the left truly thinks it can lie, cheat and gaslight, ignore reality and, worst of all, ignore their voters, and somehow survive as a party. I read a Harper's article last night which made the claim that the "real" issue is the "corporate Democratic machine," and that the far left actually represents what most Americans want.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
We need to tear down Wokeism. We need to tear down Trumpism, too. Two sides, same insane coin.
Let's get back to rational sanity. It's around here somewhere. We had it just three years ago.
I hear you Polecat. Believe me I do not wish to make the forum less useful to the community- the quality of writing and insight is unusually high for a discussion board.
Imbecile-wrangling is a weakness of mine however message received, happy to dial it back for everyone’s benefit.
I’m starting to wonder if the cartels haven’t infiltrated the DA and ACLU offices and they are bought and paid for. The Cartels are laughing at us and using this ridiculous upside-down world ideology where drug dealers are oppressed against us. This thinking is so effing messed up. I am shocked this is where we are. San Fran voters have the power to take their city back, if only they had the courage.
It’s well past time to formally designate “woke progressivism” as a mental condition requiring treatment (drugs, electroshock, water boarding), at least take away the car keys, internet access, and ship forward to a rubber room somewhere.
This ideology long ago jumped every shark possible and is far more dangerous to the public than any homeless drug addict with a knife.
For various logical reasons that would be apparent after five minutes of study or ten minutes of logical reflection, clandestine markets are practically always dominated by career criminal profiteers organized ethnically through family and clan relations. An axiomatic fact of history and criminology, no one challenges it. In the Alcohol Prohibition era of the US, mostly Irish and Italian, some Jewish, American black, rural Scotch-Irish.
These days, everyone wants to argue about how to trim the branches. No one wants to cut down the tree. Alcohol Prohibition only lasted 13 years. The Drug War has gone on so long that it's entrenched widespread intergenerational impacts. Which I was trying to tell people 30 years ago. So spare your dismay and outrage, punitive moralists and cowardly subject-changers. This was all foreseeable. This is where a century of Harm Maximization gets you.
An overhaul of the drug laws could be done without firing a single police officer or correctional officer. The big difference is that all of the energy of law enforcement could be devoted to stopping crimes with victims instead of stopping drugs. As for the jails and prisons, if the budget and number of guards were kept the same while the population declined due to the lessening of gang power, there might actually be enough money to turn correctional facilities toward the priority of rehab rather than warehousing. Because all the talk about de-incarceration is still mostly talk; many prisons are still over-capacity, and the laws have inspired so much criminality and delinquency that there's no effective way to supervise them all. There's a repeat customer base of criminalized illegal drug consumers in the US in the tens of millions, and they're being served by a retail market that employs more people than the fast food industry. For the life of me, I can't figure out why prison guard unions oppose drug legalization measures; there will still be plenty of prison inmates for them to guard when we return to sanity about fighting crime. The big difference is that the prisons won't be stuffed to 120% capacity, to the point where the guards have to rely on the gang shotcallers to help keep the pressure cooker from boiling over.
Lowering the number of crimes with victims is doable. Lowering the drug problems of people by using law enforcement is like trying to unscrew a pipe with a screwdriver instead of a wrench. I've been reading a lot about drug use in the 18th and 19th century, back when opium, cocaine, morphine, and heroin were sold in pharmacies and through the mail. There isn't a ton of data from that time period, but there are enough import invoices and customs duty ledgers to prove that a lot of Americans were using a lot of opium in those days. Even given the relative ignorance of medical knowledge in the era, drug abuse and addiction was less of a public health problem than it is today. People self-medicated and self-regulated. When people did get addicted, it was commonly observed that opiate addicts were much less of a behavior problem than alcoholics. The medical studies excerpted in the histories indicated that most of the addicts were employed and functional. There were some populations who were more vulnerable to opioid addiction than others- people used opiates to self-medicate for chronic pain problems, battlefield PTSD, loneliness, and isolation, and those sorts of problems leave people vulnerable to picking up a habit. Some addicts got their habit inadvertently, because opiates were commonly used as ingredients in cough medicines, and there was also a lot of over-prescription by doctors who used opiates as an anodyne for any patient complaint where it seemed like they might help. But even given the primitive state of 19th century medicine, the drugs didn't twist society all out of proportion the way that has happened over time as a result of the supply becoming a functional monopoly of the criminal underworld. There are massive differences between a legal retail market of modestly priced substances purchased by adults at a pharmacy and an illegal street market of substances more expensive by weight than gold that get purchased by high school kids in a retail market run by their teenage peers.
I'm getting my Substack page together to do just that.
I think a lot of law enforcement people already get it, actually. It's just that many of them are at serious risk of being Cancelled by Drug War Political Correctness. Drug War Political Correctness was largely unchallenged in much of the US until the Internet Era. That's one of the reasons that I'm so anti-censorship; I prefer open source debate on public policy issues to punitive morality policing. I detest misinformation and hyperbole, but the irony is that once censorship preempts unfettered discussion of a subject, there's no way to expose lies and exaggerations for what they are! And the liars get the opening to claim that they're offering Forbidden Truth, while outflanking the censors.
As for the DEA and ICE losing jobs from overhauling the drug laws, like most people, I used to take that for granted as a consequence. Until I gave it some thought. The reality is that what a regime of legal drug regulation would do is to allow both of those agencies to stand a chance of actually being effective, instead of being overwhelmed.
In the era of Alcohol Prohibition, the Prohibition Bureau couldn't keep up with the bootleggers. In the era of re-legalized alcohol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has an achievable regulatory function, because they aren't dealing with an out of control wildfire of a market. (At least not in the case of alcohol or tobacco.) The power of the bootlegging gangs is no longer the threat that it once was. (But the illegal firearms market- the majority of which uses the same distribution chain pioneered by the nationwide network of illicit drug markets that's been in place for decades- is out of control. And that situation will not improve as long as the wholesale and retail drug markets remain in the hands of criminals.)
In the era of regulated legal drugs, the DEA can concentrate on the extralegal operations until their market share diminishes (it won't disappear entirely, the same way there's still an alcohol bootlegging industry. But it won't be at the level of a social menace.) And ICE can concentrate on the illegal immigrant trafficking industry, which is currently too much for them to handle and has a much better chance of being shut down than, like, fentanyl (much less even more powerful opioids like carfentanil.) Most fentanyl gets smuggled through the mail. It's possible to fit tens of thousands of doses of fentanyl in a 1st class envelope. That ought to tell you all you need to know about the chances of successful interdiction of opioids in the era of super-powerful synthetics. The Mexican cartels are only using pill presses for marketing and distribution purposes; they're so confident of their smuggling routes that they're even comfortable with increasing the weight and volume of the contraband product 1000-fold. Their quality control is currently so shitty that they're killing people. But the day that an improved method of dose distribution is found, look out. It's only a matter of time. And the drug warriors will be taken by surprise when that happens, of course. They've always run three steps behind the smugglers. But this time, once the smugglers figure out a means of reliable dose distribution, that's checkmate for interdiction. It will also make for a terribly unsafe illicit market, at least for newbies. It's too unsafe as it is. But try telling that to a teenager getting their first exposure to the game.
Thanks for your work. Just visited high-end Irvine, Ca and witnessed homeless camps on the streets around the Irvine Transportation Center and street cops wearing military style tactical gear patrolling. Weird! Then at a Maverick gas station a shirtless man without shoes resembling a holocaust survivor was nodding out next to the entrance where parents and kids were shopping. Please keep up the good work.
Playing the racism card has been very effective for the progressives. It is their answer to everything and the singular reason for all inequality in today’s multi ethnic society. The rest of us just have to get used to being called racist in order to live peaceful, productive lives. Keep on carrying on you racists!
I think you did it disappeared!
Reality is racist and xenophobic.
If people only stood by their convictions, and not apologize for what others perceive as an affront to their ethnicity and sensibilities. It's not racist or a generalization if it's true, but heaven forbid offending anybody. Didn't the mayor know that all Latinos are as pure as the driven snow; that all a Rhodes scholars in the making?
I live 15 min from San Francisco. I live in ground zero Woketopia, where people try to out virtue signal each other for sport. The new form of social climbing since designer duds are theft worthy, or saved for vacations in red states on the DL. (See Newsom caught fly fishing in Montana)
I’m born and raised in CA. Ive always been, like many in CA, Left of center/libertarian/independent/moderate. Not into politics. You do you. Don’t harsh my mellow and I won’t harsh yours etc. this is a very CA attitude, at least it was. Somewhere along the line, the woke progressives got into power and have been on a barbaric path of destruction ever since. I can’t wrap my brain around how it happened, but it did. There’s so many smart, cool people in CA. How did this happen? When someone in power calls it out, the reality, the truth. they get shut down. It’s happened to Breed, Newsom, et al. They bow down and take their knee. They apologize, hypocrites, and things continue to get worse, and become kind of eerily normal at the same time.
I just voted Republican up and down the ballot for the first time ever. I’ve never voted for a mid term election in my life, but i just did. All 3 pages.
I don’t think my vote will change anything, but hopefully there’s others like me out there who want to see change in our state. Things have become out of control here with drugs, homeless, crime, corruption, high taxes, decayed infrastructure, and incompetence. It’s everywhere now. 1.7M toilet that takes 3 years to build is the latest SF embarrassment that made national news.
CA is a pro criminal sanctuary state now run amok. The middle of SF near the tenderloin/theater district is fenced off for several city blocks where drug dealers and addicts can hang out and legally use fentanyl and other drugs. I’ve seen it. It’s shocking. Miles of tent and RV camps submerged in piles of trash including the suburbs. Not just urban areas anymore. It gets cleaned up every few months when ground water and natural habitats are threatened from toxins, then they come back and trash it again.
We are stuck here because our business is here and we can’t relocate it to another state so now all I can do is vote.
Listening to this made me hurl my head back in laugher...followed by sad rage. I'm bummed that Breed walked her speech back, first off. She was so good against Boudine. I know she's dealing with profound internal pressure though. But I mean WOW, right: The New Woke Line is basically that crime itself (or caring about crime) is a fictional "white" non-problem only concerning to rich white Republicans. But this is typicle since 2020, when BLM "wasn't" burning sections of whole cities down, and when young black men "weren't" beating the shit out of Asians all around the nation and especially NYC, and crime "wasn't" on the rise, and Trumpers who didn't wear masks were assholes but BLM nd 30% of Black citizens who didn't wear masks were just fine, etc etc, ad infinitum. What's most shocking to me, honestly, is that the left truly thinks it can lie, cheat and gaslight, ignore reality and, worst of all, ignore their voters, and somehow survive as a party. I read a Harper's article last night which made the claim that the "real" issue is the "corporate Democratic machine," and that the far left actually represents what most Americans want.
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
We need to tear down Wokeism. We need to tear down Trumpism, too. Two sides, same insane coin.
Let's get back to rational sanity. It's around here somewhere. We had it just three years ago.
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
I hear you Polecat. Believe me I do not wish to make the forum less useful to the community- the quality of writing and insight is unusually high for a discussion board.
Imbecile-wrangling is a weakness of mine however message received, happy to dial it back for everyone’s benefit.
None of this is an accident. Perhaps Disney has been brought in to create pockets of Hell for the Rand Corporation to study.
Most disturbing is the adoption by political opportunists of the stamp Latinx. It seems to me all of a piece.
I’m starting to wonder if the cartels haven’t infiltrated the DA and ACLU offices and they are bought and paid for. The Cartels are laughing at us and using this ridiculous upside-down world ideology where drug dealers are oppressed against us. This thinking is so effing messed up. I am shocked this is where we are. San Fran voters have the power to take their city back, if only they had the courage.
Italian mafia is no longer Italian and neither is Sicilian. Albanian, Russian and Vietnamese gangs don't exist, and neither do Somali pirates.
Yes Andrew was about 30 years ago. I went to Miami a week after the hurricane, and most of the trees were down, blocking many of the streets
I've said it before, and I'll certainly have opportunities to say it in the future: Nobody said intersectionality was gonna be pretty.
It’s well past time to formally designate “woke progressivism” as a mental condition requiring treatment (drugs, electroshock, water boarding), at least take away the car keys, internet access, and ship forward to a rubber room somewhere.
This ideology long ago jumped every shark possible and is far more dangerous to the public than any homeless drug addict with a knife.
The problem that's the source of all of the other secondary indirect problems is Drug Prohibition. No different than the Roaring 20s. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sRzVocu46Bo/VbcOVPjAKhI/AAAAAAAAE_g/SI5yezk3Vkc/s1600/homicide_chart.png
For various logical reasons that would be apparent after five minutes of study or ten minutes of logical reflection, clandestine markets are practically always dominated by career criminal profiteers organized ethnically through family and clan relations. An axiomatic fact of history and criminology, no one challenges it. In the Alcohol Prohibition era of the US, mostly Irish and Italian, some Jewish, American black, rural Scotch-Irish.
These days, everyone wants to argue about how to trim the branches. No one wants to cut down the tree. Alcohol Prohibition only lasted 13 years. The Drug War has gone on so long that it's entrenched widespread intergenerational impacts. Which I was trying to tell people 30 years ago. So spare your dismay and outrage, punitive moralists and cowardly subject-changers. This was all foreseeable. This is where a century of Harm Maximization gets you.
Problem is that drug enforcement keeps a lot of people employed just like DEI does. Different drugs, same crap.
An overhaul of the drug laws could be done without firing a single police officer or correctional officer. The big difference is that all of the energy of law enforcement could be devoted to stopping crimes with victims instead of stopping drugs. As for the jails and prisons, if the budget and number of guards were kept the same while the population declined due to the lessening of gang power, there might actually be enough money to turn correctional facilities toward the priority of rehab rather than warehousing. Because all the talk about de-incarceration is still mostly talk; many prisons are still over-capacity, and the laws have inspired so much criminality and delinquency that there's no effective way to supervise them all. There's a repeat customer base of criminalized illegal drug consumers in the US in the tens of millions, and they're being served by a retail market that employs more people than the fast food industry. For the life of me, I can't figure out why prison guard unions oppose drug legalization measures; there will still be plenty of prison inmates for them to guard when we return to sanity about fighting crime. The big difference is that the prisons won't be stuffed to 120% capacity, to the point where the guards have to rely on the gang shotcallers to help keep the pressure cooker from boiling over.
Lowering the number of crimes with victims is doable. Lowering the drug problems of people by using law enforcement is like trying to unscrew a pipe with a screwdriver instead of a wrench. I've been reading a lot about drug use in the 18th and 19th century, back when opium, cocaine, morphine, and heroin were sold in pharmacies and through the mail. There isn't a ton of data from that time period, but there are enough import invoices and customs duty ledgers to prove that a lot of Americans were using a lot of opium in those days. Even given the relative ignorance of medical knowledge in the era, drug abuse and addiction was less of a public health problem than it is today. People self-medicated and self-regulated. When people did get addicted, it was commonly observed that opiate addicts were much less of a behavior problem than alcoholics. The medical studies excerpted in the histories indicated that most of the addicts were employed and functional. There were some populations who were more vulnerable to opioid addiction than others- people used opiates to self-medicate for chronic pain problems, battlefield PTSD, loneliness, and isolation, and those sorts of problems leave people vulnerable to picking up a habit. Some addicts got their habit inadvertently, because opiates were commonly used as ingredients in cough medicines, and there was also a lot of over-prescription by doctors who used opiates as an anodyne for any patient complaint where it seemed like they might help. But even given the primitive state of 19th century medicine, the drugs didn't twist society all out of proportion the way that has happened over time as a result of the supply becoming a functional monopoly of the criminal underworld. There are massive differences between a legal retail market of modestly priced substances purchased by adults at a pharmacy and an illegal street market of substances more expensive by weight than gold that get purchased by high school kids in a retail market run by their teenage peers.
I think some jobs would be lost, such as DEA and some ICE. And tho you may be right, try convincing law enforcement or politicians of that.
I'm getting my Substack page together to do just that.
I think a lot of law enforcement people already get it, actually. It's just that many of them are at serious risk of being Cancelled by Drug War Political Correctness. Drug War Political Correctness was largely unchallenged in much of the US until the Internet Era. That's one of the reasons that I'm so anti-censorship; I prefer open source debate on public policy issues to punitive morality policing. I detest misinformation and hyperbole, but the irony is that once censorship preempts unfettered discussion of a subject, there's no way to expose lies and exaggerations for what they are! And the liars get the opening to claim that they're offering Forbidden Truth, while outflanking the censors.
As for the DEA and ICE losing jobs from overhauling the drug laws, like most people, I used to take that for granted as a consequence. Until I gave it some thought. The reality is that what a regime of legal drug regulation would do is to allow both of those agencies to stand a chance of actually being effective, instead of being overwhelmed.
In the era of Alcohol Prohibition, the Prohibition Bureau couldn't keep up with the bootleggers. In the era of re-legalized alcohol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has an achievable regulatory function, because they aren't dealing with an out of control wildfire of a market. (At least not in the case of alcohol or tobacco.) The power of the bootlegging gangs is no longer the threat that it once was. (But the illegal firearms market- the majority of which uses the same distribution chain pioneered by the nationwide network of illicit drug markets that's been in place for decades- is out of control. And that situation will not improve as long as the wholesale and retail drug markets remain in the hands of criminals.)
In the era of regulated legal drugs, the DEA can concentrate on the extralegal operations until their market share diminishes (it won't disappear entirely, the same way there's still an alcohol bootlegging industry. But it won't be at the level of a social menace.) And ICE can concentrate on the illegal immigrant trafficking industry, which is currently too much for them to handle and has a much better chance of being shut down than, like, fentanyl (much less even more powerful opioids like carfentanil.) Most fentanyl gets smuggled through the mail. It's possible to fit tens of thousands of doses of fentanyl in a 1st class envelope. That ought to tell you all you need to know about the chances of successful interdiction of opioids in the era of super-powerful synthetics. The Mexican cartels are only using pill presses for marketing and distribution purposes; they're so confident of their smuggling routes that they're even comfortable with increasing the weight and volume of the contraband product 1000-fold. Their quality control is currently so shitty that they're killing people. But the day that an improved method of dose distribution is found, look out. It's only a matter of time. And the drug warriors will be taken by surprise when that happens, of course. They've always run three steps behind the smugglers. But this time, once the smugglers figure out a means of reliable dose distribution, that's checkmate for interdiction. It will also make for a terribly unsafe illicit market, at least for newbies. It's too unsafe as it is. But try telling that to a teenager getting their first exposure to the game.
Thanks for your work. Just visited high-end Irvine, Ca and witnessed homeless camps on the streets around the Irvine Transportation Center and street cops wearing military style tactical gear patrolling. Weird! Then at a Maverick gas station a shirtless man without shoes resembling a holocaust survivor was nodding out next to the entrance where parents and kids were shopping. Please keep up the good work.
The woke leftists being eaten by their own. Stay tuned - more to come...
Playing the racism card has been very effective for the progressives. It is their answer to everything and the singular reason for all inequality in today’s multi ethnic society. The rest of us just have to get used to being called racist in order to live peaceful, productive lives. Keep on carrying on you racists!