untethered

Clownwhirled

A man is in custody after being shot and modestly injured Friday night by a Portland Police officer downtown after allegedly chasing people on the street with a knife.  The area around the convenience store at 12th and Jefferson is one of our cursed little corners, due in part to a nearby subsidized apartment building housing people with substance abuse issues, which means a good portion have serious mental health issues, and a church around the corner that serves a regular feed for the homeless. 

I used to cross through this place regularly at night, and I’ve never found it to be dangerous, just seedy–but like everywhere the threat is different for different people.  People paying exorbitant rent to live here wend through the riff raff to and from the store indifferent.  But for a dope-sick homeless person or someone similarly weak the place might be very hell.

For a long time the store had a continual homeless presence on the sidewalk outside, small but hardcore.  At its worst they did business through a small hatch cut into a fortified wooden door: you addressed the clerk and he went and fetched your goods.  But the homeless contingent there has been gone for a few months now and the spot is a little cleaned up.

Twitter chatter suggested antifa might descend on the shooting scene, so I went to check it out. All I found were four or five young, frail antifa types of indeterminate gender congregating on the corner while a fat female clown honked a horn at the cops from behind the crime-scene tape.

Scene of a police shooting right now. Downtown Portland #PDX pic.twitter.com/jnsauZw8Xy

— Dennis Dale (@eladsinned) October 15, 2022

At the same time President Biden was speaking across the Willamette River and was expected at the Hilton downtown later that night.  Several blocks around the hotel were cordoned off with barrier tape manned by cops, traffic barricades at the intersections and what looked like a big dump truck in the middle of Broadway.  A tent where cars pass through to undergo a bomb search was raised in front of the Apple store–itself a high-security setup for two years now, since the 2020 BLM riots that helped land Brandon in office; the store looks like a prison entrance with customers routed through high steel fencing held down by concrete traffic barriers.

I waited for a time in Pioneer Courthouse Square with a few dozen people, scattered about, who may or may not have been waiting like me to get a look at the corpus potus.  Two demonstrators with a flag demanding gas money from “Brandon” waited for a while before giving up.  They had been outside of the president’s event somewhere on the east side and reported few people there and no anti-Biden protesters.  The inane and durable banter of a nearby group of Mexican girls finally sent me into retreat.

The stupid flee when no man pursueth

Yahoos in nearby Vancouver Washington are still discovering a new state law that means police won’t chase if they flee a traffic stop.  The news report below is a little deceptive in saying the suspect ran because he “thought” the police would not pursue.  The suspect knew they would not.  He was only arrested because he crashed near enough the non-pursuing sheriff’s deputy to be picked up at the accident.  Fox 12 seems to be encouraging you to get the wrong impression.  Unforgivably the news report doesn’t even mention Washington’s House Bill 1024, now law, limiting police chases, despite the fact the Clark County Sheriff has been very vocal in his opposition to this and other Racial Reckoning laws and any statement given to media will stress that.

Readers get a clue at least in that part of the Sheriff’s statement included in the story, saying the non-pursuit was per law, when they would normally say per policy.

Whether the law truly prohibited a chase is debatable.  But Fox 12 isn’t even going there and I’m not sure it isn’t just due to the generally awful and incomplete nature of short news items now.  But I expect controversy to follow when, say, a failure to pursue results in a gory crash, and many of the same people behind the law denounce police inaction. 

For the time being police will still show up when you splatter, of course, and abolitionists haven’t yet figured out how to keep them from arresting you afterward–I expect they’re working to ban cops from hospitals and crash scenes eventually.  The Washington law might intend that, with a provision requiring police to leave a scene where no crime is obviously imminent.

In this case the not-too-bright driver didn’t think his correct realization through, however: rather than simply go on his merry way he went ahead with the high speed chase, solo.  And still his reasoning was sound: the deputy stood down as he blew another red light.  The only thing failing the driver was his skill.

CLARK COUNTY, Wash. – Deputies arrested a man after leading them on a chase on Friday night because he thought he would not be stopped, according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.

CCSO said just before 9 p.m. Friday, a deputy saw a black SUV run a red light at Northeast St. Johns Rd. and Northeast 88th Street and attempted to stop it. The driver sped away and ran another red light. Pursuant to laws, the deputy stopped his pursuit of the SUV.

Those flashing code lights are a suggestion now.  The rationalization behind no-pursuit policies is that high-speed chases are dangerous; but the goal is really to limit police interactions with Blacks!  and thereby arrests and convictions.  Doing away with police pursuits is another of many crude bludgeons in that effort.  If enough people stop cooperating with traffic stops the practice will become a thing of the past in Washington state, and I’m certain police abolitionists anticipate and approve.

Like Washington, Oregon passed a slew of police reform bills following the orchestrated BLM rioting of 2020; the various states blessed with a blue hue all put up the same host of “reforms”: bail reform, banning police chases, repealing qualified immunity, etc. They got about half of what they wanted.  Many of course are now rolling those back, even Washington state–just a little:

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill Thursday rolling back part of the state’s sweeping police reform legislation from last year after law enforcement and key Democratic lawmakers agreed the original bill went too far.

The measure, House Bill 2037, makes clear police can use force to stop people from fleeing temporary investigative detentions, known as Terry stops. Officers said restrictions passed by lawmakers in 2021 had left them unable to do so, meaning potential suspects could simply leave.

Under the bill, police still must use reasonable care, including appropriate de-escalation techniques, and they may not use force during Terry stops when the people being detained are compliant. Inslee said it “upholds the principle of police accountability, de-escalation and the protection of individual liberties.”

Following 2020’s widespread protests for police accountability in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Washington lawmakers passed an array of reforms covering everything from the background checks officers undergo before they’re hired to the circumstances under which they can be decertified.

Any law enforcement agency is likely to stand down more than such a law requires, and are squeezed between a law that limits their action but not their accountability and the public demand for order. They’re barred mostly from making traffic stops but still held responsible for the consequences–say if the driver here had killed somebody.

They didn’t manage to ban chases in Oregon and Portland Police still pursue fleeing suspects, but under considerable restrictions. I’m not sure about our Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department; a few weeks ago KOIN News, in a similarly vague account, reported deputies did not pursue a fleeing criminal suspect into a community college without explaining why.  Emails to KOIN news and MCSD seeking to confirm if this was a no-pursuit policy decision went unanswered, and I couldn’t find the Sheriff’s policy online.

There was an old joke among Southern California traffic cops, told whenever a fast motorcyclist got away: never mind, we’ll get him at the fatality.  Of course it was also common for police to admonish speeding motorcyclists by complaining they, cops and EMTs, were the ones to scrape you off the pavement (but they actually don’t–who is the poor bastard who has to do that?).  They won’t get to whinge like that any more in Washington state if abolitionists get their way.  They will have to shut up and do it.  Sleep in the pod.  Eat the bugs.  Scrape the pavement, Pig.

I’m curious at what point would police have intervened had the driver not disabled his vehicle in the mayhem:.

Seconds later, the deputy saw a cloud of dust caused by a crash on NE St. Johns Rd. near the I-205 overpass. Deputies learned the driver of the SUV had tried to go between two other cars and hit a pickup truck. It sheered the driver’s side wheels off the SUV, while the pickup went through a median, across the road and hit and broke a utility pole. There were no injuries reported.

Deputies arrested the driver of the SUV, identified as 26-year-old Kostyantyn Kray of Vancouver. A passenger in the SUV said they heard police were defunded, short-staffed and would not pursue vehicles which attempted to run from traffic stops. The passenger said Kray wanted to see for himself if this was true.

SEE ALSO: Names released of 2 men found dead in car in Clackamas Co.

Kray was taken to a hospital before being booked into the Clark County jail for a felony charge of attempting to elude a police vehicle.

NE St. Johns Rd. was closed for over an hour due to the amount of debris in the road, to allow for tows and for maintenance on the damaged utility pole.

“…no injuries reported.”  Success!

The Washington law requires police to get permission from a supervisor before initiating a pursuit and to let anyone go who isn’t an immediate dangerous threat.  So criminal suspects are calling 911 on cops.  Honk Honk:

(NewsNation) — A new law in Washington state that places restrictions on police pursuits has resulted in suspects calling 911 to prevent officers from chasing them.

In one call released by the Redmond Police Department, a man admits he is driving on a suspend license, but tells the operator when she asks him if he can pull over: “No … he’s not going to get me.”

House Bill 1054 requires that officers receive permission from a supervisor to initiate a chase. Proponents of the legislation, including its sponsor state Rep. Jesse Johnson, said it would improve public safety by reducing the number of deaths caused by police pursuits, among other things.

But police departments have pushed back, saying the measure hampers their ability to catch criminals. According to the Washington State Patrol, officers have logged nearly 2,500 incidents of drivers failing to stop for a state trooper trying to pull them over.

And now, suspects themselves are reporting police. In another call aired on “The Jason Rantz Show,” a man who was suspected of holding a woman hostage sped off with the alleged victim inside the car. He told a 911 operator “I was sleeping in my car” and to tell the police “it’s an illegal pursuit.”

I may try that sometime.

Vaporized

PORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) – A brand new business called the House of Vape off of Southeast Powell Boulevard was scheduled for their grand opening Friday, but instead they were burglarized.

Sami Hales, who owns the shop, said he lost roughly $100,000 in products and damages. However, it’s nothing new.

“I’m getting used to it to be honest with you,” Hales said. “At least once a month I’m getting a phone call.”

He has been burglarized a dozen times between his 19 locations, but the thieves are getting more and more sophisticated. This time, a white truck crashed through the side of the business and three individuals started taking products.

“They’re doing it so professionally,” Hales said. “I swear when I saw this footage, I thought I was watching “Mission Impossible.” It doesn’t matter what I do for security, they still rob me.”

The first round of thieves were in and out in less than two minutes, but more trickled in afterward.

“It was an open buffet,” he said.

In the footage, the thieves were pillaging the shelves by swooping their arms from side to side and filling garbage cans full of product.

“So you can imagine how much they stole,” Hales said. “They hurt me bad.”

Hales said he feels like theft and crime are crushing his dreams of continuing to build his business and feel safe in the community he loves.

“I’m an immigrant,” he said. “I’ve lived in this wonderful, wonderful city for 22 years. I cannot go walk after 1 a.m. I’m a big guy, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just getting worse and worse.”

He blames it on who he calls “evil people.”

“I’m sorry to call them evil,” Hales said apologetically. “But they are evil because they’re hurting everybody.”

He managed to catch the license plate and is hopeful they’ll be caught. All the while, he remains optimistic about the city he calls home.

“Portland, Oregon is going to go back to what it used to be,” Hales said. “Safe and good.”

Hales said tobacco shops aren’t allowed to have product insurance, so he’s out quite a bit of dough. But he’s thankful for all the help he has received in the last 48 hours or so. Some people from the community even helped him to rebuild his wall.

On that thin premise here’s a fat clip:

“What the fuck they expect from us? We gotta vape, don’t we?”

And the beating goes on.

Black! people hit their kids. Everyone knows this. I drove a taxi for a short stint a long time ago. Once I drove a big Black! momma with two small boys, like mom thickset with little toad-like heads, showing all the promise of, soon, a pair of vigorous bruisers. One of the boys wouldn’t cooperate as she tried buckling him in; almost immediately she started pummeling him with hard, close-fisted blows, which he took like a champ. I don’t remember him crying.

“scyuze me.” She breathed the words heavily, winded. “You gotta do that sometimes.”

I don’t know what I said but it was intended to convey I Do Not Judge.

The Daily Mail is reporting on a retired NBA player they say put his young son in the hospital with a punch landed in New York’s La Guardia airport Monday night. The child’s “stepmom” (she’s a rider) is defending him against–it should be called Karenism, the intrusion of white values on Black! people:

Ex-NBA star Ben Gordon did not hit his son but was targeted by a ‘kiosk Karen’ at the airport after reprimanding the child, his ex-girlfriend and the boy’s stepmom has claimed.

The former Chicago Bulls shooting guard was arrested for allegedly hitting his son Elijah, 11, while they were in LaGuardia airport waiting for a Chicago-bound flight on Monday night.

Gordon, 39, shares his son with his ex-fiancé Sascha Smith, 32, and the 11-year-old was rushed to Long Island Jewish Hospital with his aunt.

He also has a younger son, Lux, with Ashley Banks who has defended the athlete and claims he was doing ‘push ups’ with Elijah before being approached by airline staff.

She told DailyMail.com: ‘He’s just misunderstood. He’s a great father. He gives them the world.

‘Maybe his son wasn’t listening, and he reprimanded him…”

You must do that sometimes.

Note this was the estimation of the spicy little chiquita, LA councilwoman Nury Martinez, observing the (no doubt common) spectacle of a white weirdo raising a Black! child with the same level of indulgence that works with a white child.

 Mr. Bonin, a West Los Angeles liberal, as the council’s “fourth Black member” and joked with Ms. Martinez that Mr. Bonin carried his adopted son, who is Black, as if the toddler were a designer handbag. Ms. Martinez complained that on a parade float on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Mr. Bonin had failed to control his son and said that the child’s antics had nearly tipped the float over.

“They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Ms. Martinez said on the recording.

“I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.”

It’s not clear her methods would be any worse than those of a gay white man with a Black! people fetish. Black! values for Black! people–without segregation–is the unspoken, mostly unrecognized goal of “civil rights” now, and the circle that will not be squared (or named) is our groping attempt to maintain some semblance of order while we indulge Black! values.

Segregation looks like an elegant solution to this problem, compared to where we are now.

Meanwhile I do not judge.

2022 continues the high plateau in crime rates following 2020’s BLM riots and subsequent raft of new laws directed at police and criminal prosecutions. Progressive Oregon politicians followed the shock and awe of the riots like invading troops following a bombing campaign, achieving a host of long-time legislative goals. Mercifully they did not get all they wanted.

Bail reform passed (allowing “individualized assessments based on objective criteria”, which sounds like a contradiction in terms and probably just means high discretion for woke district attorneys–it sounds like college recruiters using “holistic” methods to accept dull Blacks!).

Democratic Party androgyne and candidate for governor Tina Kotek voted for it and it immediately began producing little travesties. It’s hard to predict how much this might hurt her in the campaign. Business interests, old liberals (some remain) and regular people (again, some remain) are chafing over all the reimagining of public safety openly and money is pouring in to defeat the abolitionists’ leader, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, in November.

But genuine free speech doesn’t exist here. Needless to say any public demonstration defending police or opposing progressive “reforms” (or suburban moms opposing drag queen story hour) will be met with violence; small businesses are threatened for adopting a neutral attitude. “Don’t talk to cops” now extends to any dialogue with police. A cafe that’s long held a “coffee with a cop” function, where citizens could have a sort of “ask me anything” with a live cop, was recently vandalized for the impertinence. Bad police are good politics for the anarchist left, and the last thing they want is better communication and understanding between civilian and police.

Meanwhile the hierarchy of grievance of social justice is dynamic, never settled and stable. Subtle changes in narrative focus change things on the ground to an extent hidden in all the media obfuscation. For instance the focus on keeping Black! men out of prison at all costs means many more dead women, many more rapes, many more beatings. Violence against women is one of those costs.

KOIN News reports

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – The Portland Police Bureau said they are conducting an internal investigation after a man accused of a deadly Old Town stabbing was released from jail the day before the murder, after police say he reportedly assaulted a woman earlier that week.

Now, Portland Police are looking into whether the initial assault investigation went far enough.

On Wednesday, Sept. 28, Portland Police arrested 20-year-old Kalil Ford for beating up a woman. Police charged and booked him with assault in the fourth degree.

However, fourth-degree assault is a misdemeanor and the Multnomah County Court requires a felony charge (i.e. assault in the second degree) to hold someone in jail past their first court appearance.

Court records show Judge Rebecca Lease released Ford on Sept. 29, the day after the assault.

Then on Friday, Sept. 30, police arrested Ford again for reportedly fatally stabbing a man identified as Mark Davis in Old Town. Now, Ford is facing murder charges for Davis’ death.

The new bail rules aren’t the problem here. Police are charging less often and for lesser crimes, anticipating the leniency of District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s office, especially if the name is something like “Kalil”. The state is also in the midst of a public defender shortage, and the District Attorney is meanwhile spending money to spring convicts via his Justice Integrity Unit.

I suspect a strategy used by police before would be to overcharge–say, if the assault indeed wasn’t bad enough to warrant a felony second degree assault charge and bail (and assuming bail reform would not have come into play and effected his release anyway–and I don’t see how it wouldn’t have) police, recognizing his danger to the public (or, yes, just being bastards) might have charged him with the felony to hold him in lieu of the bail he cannot afford, until he can be tried and sentenced of, or more likely pleas to, the lesser charge.

Meanwhile we continue to have little eruptions of violence the media and cops like to package, as Aristotle would approve, in dramas limited to one circuit of the sun: four homicides in a 24-hour stretch recently

PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) – The city of Portland has seen four murders in a 24-hour period.

This includes two deadly stabbings downtown, one near West Burnside and Northwest Third, and 12 hours later, another near Northwest Broadway and Northwest Couch. On Friday morning, a person was shot and killed near the 200th block of Southeast 148th Avenue, and 23 hours later, another person was shot near Northeast 162nd Avenue and Northeast Sandy Boulevard.

Northwest Portland seems to continue the gentrification that preceded the Racial Reckoning at the same time the neighborhood declines. But Northwest is also home to longtime ground zero for the destitute, Old Town, site of the first two homicides listed above, which was always going to be a hard nut to crack.

Police have made arrests in connection with the first three of the four murders, according to the Portland Police Bureau.

Police Sgt. Kevin Allen said the PPB feel the same impact that the community feels.

“A lot of people died violent deaths in a very short period of time,” Allen said. “That’s what we signed on for, but we’re all human beings too and when we have this much going on and this much terrible things happening – it affects us as well. While we do this for a living, it’s still hard. It’s still difficult.”

Three years ago, the Portland homicide rate was 25-30 homicides a year.

SEE ALSO: 1 dead in second deadly Portland stabbing Friday, suspect arrested

“We are now at 72 homicides this year to date and counting,” Allen said.

Allen said he doesn’t believe there is any connection between the four deaths.

“As far as we can tell, it’s just a tragic coincidence that they all happened in such a short period of time,” Allen said.

Police are still looking for anyone from the community with information about the deadly shooting off Sandy Boulevard to come forward, something Allen said was vital to the arrests made on the previous three.

So people are still talking to the cops. That’s good. Last year Portland achieved a new record annual homicides at 90. We are on track to beat that this year.

Also what the cops are billing as “six significant calls” in “under 24 hours” today:

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – The Portland Police Bureau says they responded to “several significant calls” in less than 24 hours — including a homicide investigation, a shooting, an alarm call, a pedestrian crash and a stabbing.MultCo murder suspect arrested after release from jail day prior

Just after 6:30 p.m. Thursday, officers responded to what was initially thought to be a possible burglary at a home along Northeast Siskiyou Street. On the scene, PPB said officers determined that a man was intoxicated, in a mental health crisis and threatening others in the neighborhood.

PPB said as officers were talking to the man, he picked up a shotgun. As officers sought cover, the man went into the home.

The man surrendered peacefully after officers used “de-escalation and communications skills,” authorities said. No injuries were reported in the incident.

Officials said evidence suggests birdshot was fired on the scene.

Jo Ann Hardesty’s signature project is Portland Street Response, teams of unarmed social workers and EMTs with which she imagines replacing police city-wide. A recent case of a mentally ill man waving a replica gun and being shot dead by police sparked a renewed push for expanding the project, despite the fact even the abolitionists aren’t yet suggesting Street Response respond to reports of man-with-a-gun. But the case of the drunken would-be duck hunter above is presumably something to which proponents expect PSR to routinely respond–the gun wasn’t in play when the call was made.

Several hours afterward at about 2 a.m. on Friday, police reportedly found a man dead at the intersection of Southwest 4th Avenue and Southwest Washington Street. A homicide investigation ensued.

While police have not identified the victim, they said this marks the 64th shooting death in 2022.

Just over 30 minutes later at 2:35 a.m., officers were dispatched to a reported shooting at a lounge on Southeast 92nd Avenue and Powell Boulevard. PPB said they learned that a group of five people won money from the lounge’s lottery machines and as the group left, a suspect approached the group with a gun and demanded the winnings — resulting in a struggle.

According to officials, four of the people in the group sustained non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. The other group member sustained an elbow injury unrelated to gunfire.

Officials noted that no immediate arrests were made.

No “immediate arrests were made” doesn’t necessarily mean a suspect escaped.

“…per policy, officers did not pursue the suspect”:

Hours later, just before 5:30 a.m., PPB said officers responded to an alarm call at a cannabis business on Northeast Alberta Street.

Authorities said at least one suspect drove away in a reportedly stolen car and eluded officers who tried to stop him. PPB said per policy, officers did not pursue the suspect.

However, officers did detain one 14-year-old suspect who was still in the area.

And the beat goes on…

The other day I posted about a recent Michael Anton essay broaching the increasingly relevant, always fraught question of revolution, in our age of hostile government. Forgive me quoting myself:

He’s right about historicism blinding the respectable to the fact the original American nation is already history. Not only due to ideological and cultural changes, but due to demographic change, which is irreversible. A country can be reclaimed from bad ideology; demographics are irreversible, destiny, as the man said. There is no American nation at present.

Pat Buchanan’s latest touches on the subject as well, and in his typical model he gives a little history.

Asked, “What is an American?” many would answer, “An American is a citizen of the United States.”

Yet, at the First Continental Congress in 1774, 15 years before the U.S. became a nation of 13 states, Patrick Henry rose to proclaim that, “British oppression has effaced the boundaries of the several colonies; the distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.”

If American identity is genuinely lost it’s beyond me precisely where it ended, or began. On one hand American national cohesion had to dilute along with the growth of the country in population, diversity and complexity. But during the same period modern communications began dissolving regional, religious and ethnic diversity among the genuine nation, that is to say whites, creating the single American identity we boomers grew up on. In hindsight we see the identity was too shallow to last, that there was too little investment required of the individual. We could take the identity and its many benefits for granted. Now it takes us for granted.

Maybe we were never grounded firmly. Starting out those thirteen colonies were hardly a unified whole, with competing interests between distinct social models that would lead to the Civil War, and the US now is arguably culturally more homogenous by a degenerate mile than we’ve ever been. But there is no unity of national identity, even within the white American population.

Long before the US crossed the imperial Rubicon in the Philippines it was an empire. The Indian nations swallowed up by the expanding conquest of North America were too weak technologically and thus too completely erased to contribute to that empire anything but the romantic tale of their struggle and defeat–told by us. Had the US swept across the continent picking off small Greek style city states rich in culture, that legacy would remain in appropriated culture, arts and technology. Their influence on the culture of the conquerer would thus be evident. That the Indians built virtually nothing and left scant cultural legacy means they don’t count, historically.

If you know me I hope you understand I make no moral statement or judgement; I am genuinely detached from the moral question here. But the point is the winning of the West was the creation of an empire.

But this empire, liberated from national identity, is now turned inside out, and it creates and grows alien national colonies within the national boundaries in large part to circumvent that original national identity.

Buchanan makes the point:

France was France all through the Bourbon dynasty, the Revolution of 1789, the creation of the First Republic, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s First Empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy — all the way to the creation of the Fifth Republic by President Charles de Gaulle.

In short, our country came to be before our republic came to be, and long before what we today call “our democracy” came to be. A country is different from, and more than, the political system that it adopts.

Yes. But is it France now?

And if it can be argued the France of the Bourbons and Revolution endures somehow, for how much longer?

Post-WWII liberal convention frets democracy can’t survive nationalism. But the real question is; can a nation survive democracy?

A Washington citizen is raising the alarm about support beams for a bridge over the Columbia warping and bending.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Some of the metal supports on the Lewis and Clark Bridge that spans the Columbia River between Rainier and Longview are not the straight rods they used to be. Instead, they’re starting to warp and people traveling across the bridge have noticed. 

Longview resident Amund “Rocky” Taylor posted pictures of the twisted beams to Facebook where many people wondered if the bridge was safe to use. 

Taylor said he has some serious concerns about the bridge’s safety. He fears it could collapse at any time and has been passing out flyers to let his neighbors know about the warped beams he’s noticed on the bridge. In one area on the Washington side, he said he’s seen six beams bending.

He’s also worried because he can see the beams moving as cars drive across the bridge.

Washington state was home to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that failed spectacularly under high winds shortly after opening in 1940.

This article caught my attention because on a couple of different nights last week I noticed crews inspecting the beams under a tall freeway interchange over the Willamette River, apparently working their way across the span. I was impressed by their boom lift so I took some video, most of which appears lost except for this blurry clip.

The first time I saw them my conspiratorial mind went to work watching three men in a lift wearing flashlight-helmets, bustling like ants with antennae feeling their way across the trestle-like structure. The next night I saw them in a different spot, suggesting it’s inspection time for the whole span.

update: I forgot I actually tweeted this:

Boom. pic.twitter.com/sMXeuh6ggW

— Dennis Dale (@eladsinned) September 26, 2022

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The Declaration of Independence

Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

Don’t you know?
They’re talkin’ bout a revolution
Sounds like a whisper
–Tracy Chapman, Talkin’ Bout a Revolution

As the abuses go from sufferable to insufferable, people are going there. Michael Anton dares the question in American Greatness:

…the American regime itself. Have we conserved that? Does it function as it was designed to do? As a political scientist, and as a historian of sorts before that, I find the question laughable. If any of you want to make the case that we still live in the founders’ regime, go ahead.

Meanwhile, I will tell you some of what I see. A giant, unaccountable, unelected fourth branch of government that does what it wants without input or supervision from the people, and that usurps executive, legislative, and judicial power. Rights are routinely trampled. Two-track justice—one standard for friends of the regime, another for its enemies—is now the norm. Just last week a man killed with his car a teenager for the “crime” of being Republican. He’s already out on bail. Meanwhile there are still dozens of January 6 protesters in pretrial detention for ridiculous noncrimes such as “parading.”

The Justice Department, FBI, CIA—all the security agencies—are out of control in attacking American citizens. The FBI is now doing SWAT raids for misdemeanors. Earlier this month, the president of the United States gave a speech calling half the American population enemies of the state. I could go on.

The FBI jackboots and political repression are the effective tools of the usurpation of power Anton describes, not the thing itself, and not the greater sin–which is the tyranny necessitating such as FBI raids. Anton would have done well to invoke the four years of anti-Trump “resistance” wherein virtually everyone at the commanding heights of government and culture openly collaborated to disenfranchise, after-the-fact, the majority that elected Trump. Four years of serial conspiracies and hoaxes seeking to effect a coup, culminating in a vast project to disenfranchise this same majority in the 2020 election.

But with hindsight we can identify other points where the government of the United States arguably ceased to be representative and became hostile to the founding nation of mixed European stock. Those points stretch back like mountain peaks into a misty horizon; maybe we’ve never had a true republic at all.

A genuine revolt can only be exercised as a right when the powerful consent to being displaced. That is to say, never. The Declaration of Independence is a political document, not a legal one. There’s no such intemperate talk in the Constitution. The colonists invoked Locke in justifying violent rebellion for which they expected to hang if not successful. Like power, the “right” to revolt comes out of the barrel of a gun. Needless to say, the current power has all the guns.

Anton points out how thoroughly media conservatives have internalized the values of the left. These values constitute a post-Constitutional revolution that goes unrecognized as such because it was effected gradually–the patient revolution took three generations to achieve what people would have rejected in “real time”, but its victory looks eternal.

Anton repeats a lot what we already know about respectable conservatism.

What is conservatism’s response to all this? What is the response of “the weasels, compromisers, mediocrities, and losers of the Republican-conservative-libertarian establishment”? Those are not my words, but I like them. They sum things up concisely, accurately, and vividly.

The “conservative” response is not just to get mad, it’s also to be amused, or affect amusement. Whole careers are now made doing a mirror version of what Steve Sailer calls the “point-and-sputter”–when lefties call out gaffes and express outrage–I call it the “point-and-titter”, when righties laugh at some lefty silliness–often cases of pointing-and-sputtering. The problem is it isn’t all just silliness.

A perverse symbiosis exists between the sputterers and the titterers and one of its effects is to keep the titterers invested in the current state of things. Human nature already is such that no one ever expects things to change drastically in their lifetime, and the titterers certainly aren’t doing anything wrong. But they may constitute a giant sinkhole harmlessly absorbing popular wrath that might find its outlet elsewhere.

It’s just a historical fact that violence birthed America. Granted, that violence was justified, organized, careful, and the furthest thing from indiscriminate. But the American Revolution was still a war waged against a government that considered itself legitimate…

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Anton makes his most important point here:

It’s that they [“conservatives”] believe—against the Founders, and against all experience of history—that once implemented, it can never be lost. They defend every perversion, distortion, corruption, and topsy-turvy reinterpretation of that system as if it were the system itself.

The original system of republican government was hollowed out and replaced–slowly and then quickly as they say–so that eventually this thing that resembles our original system of government only in that it wears its skin, can invoke before a benighted people the founders’ vision as they put down any attempt to effect it.

It may be that revolution simply isn’t possible for more reasons than repression.

Is the right of revolution ever justified? Was it justified only that one time, in 1776, but never again? If so, why was it justified then and what makes it unjustifiable ever again? Because of historicism? Because the American Revolution was somehow an irreversible leap forward?

Human vanity is at work here. Acknowledging our republic has been rendered unrecognizable to even our grandparents, much less to the founders, is to acknowledge its failure, to acknowledge the failure of the “democratic experiment”–to acknowledge we have failed humanity in the cause of liberty and individual rights.

How many chances does humanity get to establish human liberty as a given fact of society before the ghouls take over? Are they endless or finite? Did we have but one? Were–are–we humanity’s last chance to live free?

A homeless Goldilocks in Portland is serially breaking into homes to sack out and stuff.

“She started by going up to my neighbor two doors down and urinating on their porch, and then she came directly over to my house, came in, crawled up into the bed and that whole thing happened,” said Smith. “They actually found her five minutes later around the corner trying to break into somebody else’s house. So, what happens the next time that she breaks into somebody’s house, and they have a gun?”

Zinser was taken into custody for first-degree burglary and harassment charges, however, she was released from jail the next day on “no complaint.”

Despite having no criminal convictions, Zinser has been arrested multiple times in the past for criminal trespassing, harassment, and theft. Court documents reveal she has failed to appear in court 11 times before.

Well what do they expect?  The city doesn’t want to let her crash at their place either.  The excellent question about what happens when she alarms the wrong person at the wrong time begs another: how many of our homeless fatalities might be attributed to lax law enforcement?

“Mental health” as a political issue has long been one vector of attack for police abolitionists in Portland looking to dismantle traditional law enforcement.  Their slogan “Mental Health is Not a Crime” politicizes mental illness by charging society with criminalizing it (and commits a crime against syntax in the process).  Like everything else the progressive left takes up it cannot be allowed to remain a mere public health issue; it must be a question of “justice” and it must condemn American society in toto.  Fit into the progressive template mental illness becomes another oppressed identity group in need of advocacy.  First order of business is normalization: the saying isn’t “Mental Illness is Not a Crime”.  That the radicals have more than their share of the mentally unstable and seem to know, even fetishize it, explains a lot.  For the definitely rational and powerful people ultimately driving this growing front in the war on the West those suffering from “mental health” represent something like a growth industry.

The same people driving your children insane stand ready to collect them at the other end, where they will hold their troubled heads to their breasts and stroke their purple hair, promising to make it all better.

In 2014 Oregon politicians asked Eric Holder’s Justice Department to initiate a pattern-and-practice investigation with the purpose of saddling the Portland Police Bureau with a consent decree regulating police encounters with the mentally ill.  Activists had rallied after an unstable man was shot and killed by police; our Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, Congressman Earl Blumenhaur, even the Police Bureau’s chief all wrote the DOJ requesting the investigation.

I genuinely believe the activist-political complex and its ally the Obama Administration would have preferred to base the sham on the PPB’s treatment of Black! and brown suspects–but we have a lot more crazies than Blacks! and in 2014 Blacks! were not as sacralized as now (indeed, back then I was still writing “black” instead of the properly reverential and celebratory Black!; I apologize).

This kabuki of lefties lobbying Eric and Barry’s radical and racial DOJ to bring the hammer down on such as local police played out in other progressive cities and returned with Biden in 2020.  Of course any Department of Justice investigation now ensures an institution will soon labor under a costly “equity” heavy consent decree: here’s Holder’s shakedown of a Portland Hospital.

In 2014 the Police Bureau was implementing the consent decree’s changes before the document was signed.  The new practices could be seen in police encounters with mentally unstable people on the street, with police taking noticeably more care and time to talk people down.  But all that was swept away with 2020’s campaign of BLM rioting and subsequent reduction in police services; the mentally ill, like criminal suspects, are engaged far less often by police now.

This must suit the abolitionists fine; the last thing they want is for police to accommodate their demands.  It’s the worst that can happen, as is anything improving the image of police in the public eye.  Bad police are good politics for the anarchist left.

(The other night I saw police drive past a man sitting in the middle of the street, the driving officer smiling and shaking his head, leaving his removal first to a woman who tried shouting him away–she succeeded briefly, but the man returned soon to sitting Indian-style in the middle of 3rd Avenue–then to the city’s unarmed polo-wearing security guards of the Community Safety Team; three of them were standing passively receiving the man’s shouted abuse–but from the sidewalk–as I left.)

The Police Bureau was set to exit 2014’s consent decree in–wouldn’t you know it–2020, when the same trio of Wyden, Merkley and Blumenhaur wrote asking the incoming Biden Administration to consider keeping it in place, because of the PPB’s treatment of BLM rioters.  What the PPB’s riot control measures had to do with mental illness is obvious, but not at all what they meant: BLM rioters are violently mentally ill.  But the determination of these responsible authorities was: the cops are going crazy! The decree remained in place.

Meanwhile normal people here (we do have some left; who else is going to keep the lights on?) are still normal enough to begin recoiling at our “new normal”.  The story of the serial sleeper drew enough attention to force woke DA Mike Schmidt to comment.  He threw mental health court presiding judge Nan Waller off the troika, mentioning her by name, before sullenly declaring he would comment no further.

After initially declining to comment, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office now tells KOIN 6 that Zinser’s “lack of participation in treatment” warrants her case to be reviewed by their Strategic Prosecution Unit.

The DA’s Office’s full statement can be read below:

“Based on recent federal court rulings and recent history with this defendant having similar cases dismissed due to a lack of participation in treatment and the court’s inability to compel the defendant to participate in treatment, we had initial concerns about whether we could proceed with this case at this time. The lack of mental health resources in our community is unacceptable when coupled with the inability to compel unadjudicated defendants to engage in available treatment options. The current crisis of capacity at the Oregon State Hospital puts the safety of our community, and the most vulnerable persons in our community, at risk. In this particular case, the accused had recently spent months at the Oregon State Hospital during which time the staff there was unable to restore her ability to aid and assist her court appointed lawyer. She was then ordered to engage in treatment in the community, but she did not appear for her evaluation and she left the treatment facility. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Nan Waller dismissed the previous charges pending against her in early August. Our Strategic Prosecution Unit is reviewing this case and the previously dismissed cases to determine whether we are able to proceed with prosecution. Due to the ongoing process, MCDA will not be making further comments on this issue.”

28-year veteran Nan Waller has in fact done a lot to keep the mentally ill on the streets.  She was the subject of a puff piece in Forbes earlier this year:

After 28 years of service, Judge Nan Waller became the presiding judge over the mental health court as well as managing the competency to stand trial docket in Multnomah County, Oregon. She is also co-chair of the Oregon Chief Justice’s Behavioral Health Advisory Council and is a member of the National Judicial Task Force, which examines the State court’s response to mental illness.

She wants to change the way things are done in the legal system…

“What seems like a good idea on paper can be a disaster in practice,” said Judge Waller.

“In the early 20^th century, we sent anyone with mental illness to an institution, out of sight, out of mind. That created a national stigma and mental illness.

Then new policies were issued in the 1980s and then we closed the large institutions, which was well-meaning and good-intentioned, but no one considered the big picture. There was nowhere for these individuals to go. If we closed the institutions, we needed to have community-based services for persons with mental illness, in order to be successful and live their best life possible, but the community services were not available. What then happened, was a shift of persons with mental illness to our jails, to the streets, living under bridges and along highways – hiding in plain sight. People didn’t want to see mental illness. This, coupled with the re-routing of individuals into the justice system, has further increased the stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness.

While letting them wander free among us has totally de-stigmatized the mentally ill.

Aggressive narcissism defines us now. Weaponized, it fuels the woke demolition machine.

But the individual narcissist lives in oblivion, most of all of his narcissism and its manipulation.

The image from The Matrix of people siloed off from and unaware of one another while all feed their energy into the same giant tower is apt; but the real life Matrix drains your psychic, not your physical energy–which itself is a problem addressed through “the climate crisis” and “sustainability”. It isn’t too crazy to suspect your elimination is the end-goal.

We’re not even useful as batteries–the Metrix says so. In fact, unlike the film where an entirely illusory world is created, the Metrix works by laying everything bare until mystery and innocence aren’t possible. Sex is stripped of all modesty and mystery. Mystery is wrung out of everything. Everything is made trite through repetition. Nihilism is presented as the only tenable position. The Metrix’ illusion isn’t that you live in another reality, but that this one is normal and natural.

This is what I thought when reading about the latest petty outrage by a woke aggressive narcissist–a teacher in Utah bragging about the cocoon of Black! and brown propaganda to which she she subjects the innocents in her care:

‘For the first time in my life I am teaching at a majority white school and I’m kind of interested to see how students and parents react to my classroom or if they even notice anything about it because it’s built for non-white students,’ she said on the social network. 

I live in a majority white city built for non-whites, by the way. My report is that subjection to the typical Black! condescension/white condemnation kitsch which dominates here is that it’s deadening. It sucks a little of the life out of you, and the city.

I was struck by the obliviousness of the teacher–for whom I suspect the quiet resignation with which most white parents greet this slander is all the more infuriating, for the lack of attention it draws to her. Naturally she still has a job.

District representatives told the TV news station that ’employees on their own time and personal lives have free speech rights.’

That’s good to hear. Now let me tell you about niggers and cri–oof! ouch! oh fuck…!

No word yet on whether Merrick Garland and the FBI are pursuing charges against the outraged white parents.

It’s likely been a while since you’ve thought about 2017’s “Women’s March” which bequeathed to posterity the “pussy hat”, or its prominent organizer Linda Sarsour (who wears a hijab–ironically a sort of anti pussy hat, representing sex roles and modesty in absolute opposition to feminism as expressed by the pussy hat; but who’s paying attention, now or then?).

The New York Times is revisiting this fresh and relevant history, and bemoaning the loss of Sarsour’s leadership, with the help of some Russiagate veterans:

Linda Sarsour awoke Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet and felt sick.

The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.

More than 4 million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.

But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude.

That morning, there were things going on that Sarsour could not imagine.

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

Russian trolls, having just elected Donald Trump, went right to work grabbing pussies.

One message performed better with audiences than any other.

It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.

Over the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Sarsour.

Apparently some of the “damning narratives” about Sarsour are true.  Thank you, New York Times.

One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.

This website says 867 million tweets are sent a day.  I don’t know how many tweets were sent on the subject of the March.  As it’s likely in the millions, the Russian trolls must have been as hard to find as Waldo in all those pink hats.

Many people know the story about how the Women’s March movement fractured, leaving lasting scars on the American left.

A fragile coalition to begin with, it headed into crisis over its co-chairs’ association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, who is widely condemned for his antisemitic statements. When this surfaced, progressive groups distanced themselves from Sarsour and her fellow march co-chairs, Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland.  But there is also a story that has not been told, one that only emerged years later in academic research, of how Russia inserted itself into this moment.

We’ll see below just how “academic” this research is.

What effect these intrusions had on American democracy is a question that will be with us for years. Already, social media was amplifying Americans’ political impulses, leaving behind a trail of damaged communities. Already, trust in institutions was declining, and rage was flaring up in public life. These things would have been true without Russian interference.  But to trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse.

So, it’s kind of like watching the Brandon Administration operate, only its effects are meaningless.

In early 2017, the trolling operation was in its imperial phase, swelling with confidence.

Accounts at the Internet Research Agency, an organization based in St. Petersburg and controlled by an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had boasted of propelling Trump to victory. That year, the group’s budget nearly doubled, according to internal communications made public by American prosecutors.

Under these auspicious conditions, their goals shifted from electoral politics to something more general — the goal of deepening rifts in American society, said Alex Iftimie, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a 2018 case against an administrator at Project Lakhta, which oversaw the Internet Research Agency and other Russian trolling operations.

Artyom Baranov, who worked at one of Project Lakhta’s affiliates from 2018 to 2020, concluded that his co-workers were, for the most part, people who needed the money.

The job was not to put forward arguments but to prompt a visceral, emotional reaction, ideally one of “indignation,” said Baranov, a psychoanalyst by training, who was assigned to write posts on Russian politics. “The task is to make a kind of explosion, to cause controversy,” he said.

Hey you Russian bastards, demagogy and gaslighting are provinces of our domestic elites, who only have our interests at heart!

If the problem is opinion being manipulated by dishonest operators it’s worth asking: how, in the language of the Times, “organic” is this news story?

The paper here looks like it’s acting as a passive conduit for Advance Democracy, an outfit wiki-ed up after Trump’s election to amplify and fabricate controversies around Trump, using Silicon Valley money.  Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller in 2019:

A Silicon Valley charity gave $500,000 to a nonprofit group founded by a former Senate staffer who is working with Fusion GPS and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele.

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), which has received significant funding from tech industry billionaires, gave the donation in 2018 to Advance Democracy Inc., a Virginia-based 501(c)(3) group, according to a database the recipient group runs.

A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found that Advance Democracy shares the same address as The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP), another nonprofit group started by a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer for California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Daniel Jones.

Mystery surrounds both of Jones’s operations. The identities of both groups’ donors have largely been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers…

Jones created TDIP on Jan. 31, 2017, according to registration records filed in Washington, D.C. Through that group, Jones partnered with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue a private investigation into President Donald Trump and Russia. One goal of the organization, Jones told the FBI, was to provide information to the media, lawmakers and the FBI.

The aforementioned, massive Silicon Valley Community Fund has been described as a “black hole” with little transparency but unique tax sheltering benefits for donors.

SVCF has drawn criticism in recent years as a “Black Hole” for charitable donations because IRS rules and SVCF practice have allowed money to be held in DAF accounts for years with no required minimum payouts to charitable organizations (as are required of private foundations).  This allows donors to receive large tax breaks immediately, before the donations benefit charitable causes.

From an Atlantic article bemoaning the Silicon Valley Community Fund’s neglect of the Silicon Valley community:

And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds. Last year, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund received $114 million from Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, and $526 million from Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective, according to Bloomberg, which obtained two pages of IRS information that the agency mistakenly posted online. (Emerson Collective owns a majority stake of The Atlantic.) “Donor-advised funds have been growing at double-digit rates from year to year,” Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School and a critic of donor-advised funds, told me. “Ask any nonprofit what their growth looks like—it’s nothing like that.”

I know nothing of the nonprofit grift, but the SVCF’s opaque “donor-advised” model looks like a good way for Silicon Valley to fund its various “causes” free of public scrutiny or legal limitations.

The amount of money going from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the nine-county Bay Area actually dropped in 2017 by 46 percent, even as the amount of money under management grew by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion. Local nonprofits called the foundation the “Death Star” and the “Black Hole” because it was so hard to get money out of it, Al Cantor, a nonprofit consultant, told me. “They got so drunk on the idea of growth that they lost track of anything smacking of mission,” he said.

Maybe.  Maybe they have a very clear sense of mission–they just don’t want us to have a very clear sense of it.