This is shaping up to be a long hot summer - from the Z Man:
Charm City
George Soros spent $33 million trying to incinerate Ferguson Missouri, but the little city is still there. The problem is that he bet on a weak horse. While Ferguson is a vibrant example of post-racial America in the era of Obama, it lacks the sort richness and diversity of other cities. Try as they might, the locals just can’t take down a city, even a small one.
Soros should have invested more heavily in Baltimore where the locals really know how to put on a show. Since the police have went on an unofficial strike after the Freddy-Poo Gray incident, the locals have been celebrating diversity with a vengeance. This long weekend has seen 26 shootings and and 9 murders. Granted, it is a three day weekend, but it has been unseasonably mild of late so the murdering season is late starting.
What no one wants to say, but everyone knows is that the cops are now in their cop houses filling out paperwork and doing as little as possible. They see no reason to risk prison for a city government that would rather arrest cops than criminals. The gangsters know it is open season so they are doing what they do and that means taking over the streets, without fear of the cops.
Fundamentally, this is the problem with race relations in microcosm. Blacks did best when whites were completely intolerant of black culture. The talented tenth took the lead in keeping order in the black community, but quietly welcomed help from white society. It was not ideal, but black crime rates, literacy rates, illegitimacy rates and addiction rates were their best in the years before the Civil Rights movement.
Once those constraints were removed, all of the worst instincts of black America were unleashed, mostly on other blacks. That’s what’s happening in Baltimore right now. The cops were doing a good job keeping the problem contained to the ghettos. They were having some success policing the ghettos, lowering crime rates over the last decade. Now, the cage door has been swung open and all hell is breaking loose.
The progressives are trying to overwhelm the system so they can say it doesn't work and install a Utopian workers paradise of their own (coughMarxismcough). Immigration, racial tensions, lowering the standards for public education (Common Core) and limiting access to alternatives (Charter Schools). These are tactics right out of the 1848 manifesto of the ten planks.
Obama has done nothing to calm people - he is intent on stirring the pot and this summer is going to be a bad one. I lived through the riots in the 1960's and I think this is going to be worse.
Call me an old fart as much as you want but I will be happy to spend this summer in the country, playing with my guns and running my small store away from Progressive-run 'big' America. The sooner we get some adults in the room the better...
