Tag Archives: Cities

A City Boy Can (Possibly) Survive: What Happens When The Disaster We’re Heading For Becomes Reality? By Jackson P. Chamberlain

Posted on October 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Survival tips for people in cities. From Jackson P. Chamberlain at thebluestateconservative.com:

It’s been nearly four decades since the Anthem of All Who Call Themselves Country was released by Hank Williams, Jr. “A Country Boy Can Survive” blared from the windows of every pickup truck in my hometown in 1982, the lyrics sung with gusto by proud, capable people who’ve always been and remain little more than a punchline for the “educated Leftist elite”. We’re rubes, deplorables, and (without exception) Trump supporters who cling to our guns and religion – and if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn.

It seems the time has arrived when those country-folk survival skills may prove the difference between living and dying. It doesn’t take much of a fortune teller to predict that truly world-altering circumstances are upon us, but just in case you have any doubt (or don’t trust the word of a rube like me) you can read the opinion of uber-Leftist, tech-billionaire, Biden-supporting, Trump-banning, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who just tweeted that hyperinflation is happening, and “it’s going to change everything”.

That should scare the bejabbers out of you. “Hyperinflation” is the most terrifying word in the economist lexicon. It destroys countries, starts World Wars, and sends millions into abject poverty (if they’re lucky enough to escape the genocide and other atrocities that often accompany such economic upheaval). Perhaps most frightening is the reality that it’s never been seen on a scale such as the American economy, and never with the currency to which so many other nations tie their own. If the world currency suddenly becomes worthless, what is the potential ripple effect – and how will those effects play out on your family?

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Posted in Collapse, Economy, Government, Politics, Propaganda

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America’s Cities Are Being Turned Into Crime-Ridden War Zones, And Murder Rates Are Way Up Again In 2021, by Michael Snyder

Posted on April 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

There are all sorts of reasons why crime rates are way up in most American cities, none of which reflect well on the Democrats who run them. From Michael Snyder at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

The wealthy are reveling in their giant mountains of money, but meanwhile our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us.  The stock market has been hovering near all-time record highs, and for those at the very top of the economic pyramid these may seem like the best of times.  But for most Americans, the “good old days” are a long distant memory.  More than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed over the past year, poverty is absolutely exploding all around us, and crime rates are shooting higher at an unprecedented rate.  In fact, one study of 34 big U.S. cities found that their murder rates rose by an average of 30 percent in 2020…

A study by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that murders increased by 30% across 34 large U.S. cities.

In some areas, carjackings, robberies, shootings, sexual assaults and violence have become so common that it seems like the crime literally never stops.

Unless you have a death wish, there are certain parts of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore that you should never enter night or day.  If you doubt me, just go wander the streets of the worst neighborhoods of those cities and see what happens to you.

This was supposed to be a year when crime rates began to return to normal, but instead they are on the rise again.  One study that looked at 37 large U.S. cities found that murder rates are up by an average of 18 percent so far in 2021…

The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021.

A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.

What is truly frightening is that this is about as good as things are going to get in America from here on out.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Governments, Immigration, Politics, Propaganda

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Cities Have Themselves To Blame, Not COVID-19, For Sinkhole Status, by Fergus Hodgson

Posted on March 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

A lot of cities were in bad shape before Covid-19. Now they’re in even worse shape. From Fergus Hodgson at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

The receding economic tide this past year has revealed many city officials to be naked.

Oft-forgotten amid the COVID-19 chaos is that their fiscal crises predated the virus’s spread. According to Truth in Accounting (TIA), a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, 62 of the 75 largest U.S. cities were already in the red in 2019.

That statistic comes from the latest TIA “Financial State of the Cities” report (pdf), which came out in the last week of January. The authors’ objective is to provide citizens with easy-to-understand information and peer comparisons regarding their local governments’ finances.

The total liabilities of the 75 most-populated U.S. cities amounted to $333.5 billion at the end of the 2019 fiscal year. Defined pension and medical commitments make up the lion’s share of the unfunded debt.

Sunshine Cities vs. Sinkhole Cities

The TIA report delivered not a single “A” grade. In other words, no major U.S. city had a taxpayer surplus—available funds to pay bills divided by residents—of $10,000 or more.

However, one Californian city, Irvine, set an example and at least stayed above water. Retaining the title of the fiscally healthiest city for the second consecutive year, Irvine registered a taxpayer surplus of $4,100 per resident.

Even if Irvine posts a lower surplus in the following fiscal year, hit by the pandemic, it has enough resources to weather the storm. “Irvine’s elected officials have truly balanced their budgets,” the TIA team claims.

Washington, D.C., Lincoln, Stockton, and Charlotte follow Irvine. Together, they make up the top five “sunshine cities”—those with enough money to pay all their accumulated debt to date.

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The Behavioral Sink: A Fable For Our Times, by Hardscrabble Farmer

Posted on February 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Is humanity the subject of a giant human-scale experiment equivalent to a famous one done on rats in the 1950s and 1960s. There are definitely some similarities. From Hardscrabble Farmer at theburningplatform.com:

Not long after the last of the last American soldiers returned home at the close of WWII, a little-known ethologist named John B. Calhoun set up a quarter acre pen somewhere on the outskirts of Rockville, Maryland and populated it with several dozen Norwegian rats. His experiment was meant to see just how large the population density would become if they were provided with adequate food, water, shelter and protection from predators so that all of their needs were met. Fellow researchers dubbed his experiment rat utopia and before long he had discovered the answer to his question.

When his research caught the eye of bureaucrats at the National Institute for Mental Health, they approached him with an offer of unlimited funding for another project along the same lines under stricter conditions than the bucolic environs of a pasture just north of Washington, D.C. By 1954 he had devised a complex interior setup for his rats to inhabit that divided the environment into four cells, each configured to provide a continuous supply of food, water and bedding with plenty of space for nests and open areas for social interaction. Into each of these he placed an equal number of both male and female rats and simply watched as they began to at first explore and then to colonize and dominate their surroundings.

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Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities, by John Rubino

Posted on January 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Many of America’s cities are toast. From John Rubino at dollarcollapse.com:

The riots, political turmoil, and other banana republic embarrassments seem to be ending – for now. So let’s get back to examining the real problems of this hyper-leveraged, dangerously-complex world. Like how big cities might soon be obsolete:

Pretend it’s 2019 and you’re living in a major US city. You, your spouse and two kids have a fairly nice (though admittedly very expensive) apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood, and life is pretty good. There’s a park nearby, dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, and plenty of interesting friends. And of course your high-paying jobs are right there.

Then comes 2020. A pandemic causes your mayor to panic and lock down the city. There go the park, friends, and restaurants. And before the horror of this new normal has a chance to sink in, civil unrest explodes and turns your once-iconic neighborhood into a Mad Maxian war zone of burned-out cars and boarded up storefronts.

If it was just you, you might stick it out. But with a family, this life is now untenable. So you look into moving, preferably to somewhere semi-rural where neither a lockdown nor riots will ever be a problem and the kids can actually play outside. Maybe it’s time to indulge your fantasy of working remotely from a homestead in a gorgeous place.

But you immediately hit a technological speed bump: Broadband Internet, which up to this point had seemed both ubiquitous and a basic human right, isn’t available on the homesteads you now covet. The only option out there is low-tech, unreliable, molasses-slow satellite Internet that, if the reviews are to be believed, is worse than nothing at all.

You realize that if you want to keep doing your work at a high level, you’ll have to stay urban, or at best suburban, with all the health and safety risks that that now implies. Big cities and their burbs, it seems, will live on for a while as necessary places for sophisticated professionals to do their thing.

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The Scary Truth About Living in Big Cities During the Turbulent Times Ahead, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on May 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

In the Age of Chaos, cities are no where you want to be. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

International Man: Amid the Covid-19 hysteria and global shutdown, the drawbacks of living in a big city have become more apparent.

Sure, cities can offer more career opportunities. Still, they are also more expensive, dirtier, have higher levels of crime, crowded, have fragile supply lines, and infrastructure that can get easily overwhelmed.

How do you view the value proposition of living in a big city today, given what is transpiring?

Jeff Thomas: Well, in my college years, I found cities to be very attractive. Lots of social opportunities, lots of shops, a greater variety of goods, etc. But, during that time, I was very fortunate to have experienced two city crises from which I learned valuable lessons.

The first was an oil crisis in the winter of 1973. It was bad enough that many people had to abandon their cars, some out on the highway, in the snow. Some people died from exposure.

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The Breakdown Of Law In American Cities, by Samantha Biggers

Posted on May 8, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s one thing if a police force is simply overwhelmed by crime. It’s another thing altogether if it simply stops enforcing certain laws. From Samantha Biggers at backdoorsurvival.com:

There is a disturbing trend in the cities of America. This trend is the complete disregard of the law and a persistent ignoring of very serious problems that affect the health, safety, and wellbeing of all that live, work, or do business in them and the surrounding suburbs. This cannot go on without some very serious consequences. When people are forced to take the law into their own hands, the situation can get out of hand quickly. Violence and chaos are far too easy to start and difficult or even impossible to stop without massive devastation.

When there is no law then that is anarchy and many of the larger cities in the United States are descending into it.

Anarchy is a slippery slope. When leaders issue orders to not arrest people for crimes, that is a warning sign that things are going downhill at a rapid rate.

What laws are not being enforced?

Shoplifting

Stores are being told they are on their own when it comes to stopping shoplifters. Everyone can just hire their own security force right? That is totally affordable for the small business owner in the eyes of some.

Vagrancy

There was a time when people would be told to move on or go to jail. Now there is no jail and police are not allowed to break up homeless camps in cities, even when they are literally on the sidewalks.

Smaller amounts of hard drugs like meth and opioids

Cities such as Seattle have told their police to not even bother booking someone unless they have more than about 30 doses of heroin. That is considered a personal amount and not anything anyone should worry about.

Property rights

One would think they have the right to say that someone cannot live on their property without permission or paying rent. More property owners are finding that they have a much harder time ridding their property of squatters.

People can make fun and scoff at celebrity LA landowners like Johnny Rotten for complaining about homeless encampments on their front yard but the man has a legitimate complaint. His wife has Alzheimer’s and a bunch of people in the front yard that are on drugs and unstable is not a safe situation.  Just because someone is wealthy doesn’t mean they don’t have a legitimate complaint if property laws are not enforced.

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California Dream Has Become an Overcrowded Nightmare, by Joe Schaeffer

Posted on March 30, 2019 | 1 comment

Let’s add overtaxed and overregulated to overcrowded. From Joe Schaeffer at libertynation.com:

The state’s leftist immigration policies choke the livable life out of urban centers.

The quality of life in the former paradise known as the state of California continues to decline precipitously. Overcrowding, strained resources, homelessness, and accompanying social welfare hazards seriously hamper the Golden State’s major urban population centers. Instead of acknowledging that some form of course correction to developments over the past 30-odd years is necessary, however, California’s Democrat politicians are steadfastly beating the drum for and attempting to accommodate massive legal and illegal immigration into their congested domains.

Sardine Cities

“The California ranch-house lifestyle — founded on sunshine and ample backyard space for a pool — has become increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families in urban areas where most jobs exist. Living space has tightened and become impossibly pricey for too many,” the Los Angeles Times reports in what reads very much like an elegy for a lost land.

“It was wonderful when our population was only 12 million in the 1950s and 22 million in the 1970s. But now we’re at 40 million and headed to 50 million by 2050,” The Times reports.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s solution: stack bodies up to the sky. The Democrat, a staunch advocate for illegal aliens, is turning a blind eye to the negative effects of encouraging foreigners to pour into his state and instead trying to handle the swell of lower income residents by building what The Times states will be“densely populated, multistory living [areas] near transportation centers.”

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Posted in Business, Collapse, demographics, Government, Immigration

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Who Benefits From Democratic Control? by Walter E. Williams

Posted on January 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

Blacks have hurt themselves by throwing their electoral support overwhelmingly to one party. From Walter E. Williams at lewrockwell.com:

In 1976, Gerald Ford won 15 percent of the black vote. That’s the most of any recent Republican presidential candidate. In most elections, blacks give Democrats over 90 percent of their votes. It’s not unreasonable to ask what have blacks gained from such unquestioning loyalty to the Democratic Party. After all, the absolute worst public safety conditions and other urban amenities for blacks are in cities that have been controlled by Democrats for decades. Let’s look at it.

What cities are the deadliest for blacks? The Trace, an independent nonprofit news organization, answers that question. Using 2017 data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program, The Trace (http://tinyurl.com/y9bvwlh2) listed the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates — factoring in both the number of people murdered in cities and their populations. Chicago, with 589 murders in 2018 — one murder every 15 hours — is often called the nation’s murder capital. But that’s dead wrong.

In 2017, St. Louis had the nation’s highest murder rate, at 66.1 homicides per 100,000 residents. Baltimore came in second, with 55.8 murders per 100,000 people. Detroit was third, with 39.8 murders per 100,000 people. Other cities with high murder rates included New Orleans; Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland; Memphis, Tennessee; and Newark, New Jersey. With 24.1 murders per 100,000 residents, Chicago ranked ninth in the nation. It was followed by Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., was 17th.

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Posted in Education, Governments, Politics, race relations

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The great exodus out of America’s blue cities, by Kristin Tate

Posted on April 26, 2018 | 3 comments

People are getting fed up with the high costs, taxes, crime, grime, and homelessness rampant in many of America’s cities, most of which have been run by Democrats for decades. From Kristin Tate at thehill.com:

Am I the only one in my spinning class at Equinox in Manhattan who’s fed up paying $200 every month for a gym with clean showers, $3,000 in rent every month for an apartment without cockroaches and $8 every morning for a cup of coffee? Am I the only one moving through the greater part of New York City boroughs and seeing an inexorable march of urban decay matched with the discomfort of crowding and inexplicable costs? I know I am not.

New York is the most expensive city in America. Its lower-cost neighborhoods are riddled with crime and homelessness. Its public schools, some of which are among the worst in the nation, look more like prisons than places of learning.

With between up to 50 percent of their paycheck going to a combination of federal, local and city taxes, not including other consumer taxes baked into every aspect of their consumer practices, residents don’t even have the comfort of knowing that their tax expenditures are going to the improvement of their lives in the city. New York infamously misuses the hard-earned tax revenues of its citizens in ways that scarcely benefit them.

Eventually, city and state taxes, fees, and regulations become so burdensome that people and corporations jump ship. More people are currently fleeing New York than any other metropolitan area in the nation. More than 1 million people have moved out of the New York City metro area since 2010 in search of greener pastures, which amounts to a negative net migration rate of 4.4 percent.

The recently passed tax bill, which repeals the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, will only speed up the exodus. Thanks to the bill’s passage, many New York taxpayers will save little or nothing despite a cut in the federal rate. The state’s highest earners — who have been footing an outsized share of the bill — will pay tens of thousands of dollars more in income taxes in 2018. In New York alone, loss of the SALT deduction will remove $72 billion a year in tax deductions and affect 3.4 million residents.

To continue reading: The great exodus out of America’s blue cities

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Debt, demographics, Governments, Politics, Society, Taxes

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