It would be funny were it not so incredibly pathetic. A county-run drug counseling center for homeless drug addicts in Portland had to be shut down and some of its employees were dumped because of drug use and “inappropriate relations” between employees. In other words, a drug and sex scandal shut down the Multnomah County Behavioral Health Resource Center.
“Portland is not Portlandia anymore.”
It’s something we say around here, and it resonates, because the series starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein was both popular and infamous depending on who you talked to and their opinion of the effect the show had on Portland. But the civic time and tenor depicted on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) series is definitely history now.
Chalk it up to that standard conservative talking point: the decline of Blue cities under Democratic “leadership.”
On Monday, the outdoor fitness retailer REI announced it will close its only remaining store in Portland in February 2024.
The company emailed REI members to explain that the location could no longer guarantee the safety of employees and patrons, the local NBC outlet reported. Other major-chain stores throughout the U.S. have also closed, citing security issues, including a Whole Foods in downtown San Francisco last week and various Starbucks locations last year, including two in Portland.
People complain that Americans are insincere with their friendly greetings, but the coffee barista who’d just served me a £4.50 latte sounded like he meant it when he thanked me for being a ‘loyal customer’.
After all, apart from him, his two under-employed colleagues, and a solitary couple poring over a laptop in a distant corner of one of San Francisco’s largest and smartest coffee shops, we were entirely alone.
At this hour, the establishment — Joe & The Juice on Market Street, the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare — would once have been heaving with thrusting young technology workers stocking up on pricey coffee and ‘cold-pressed’ fruit juice before heading off into their gleaming offices to spearhead the digital revolution.
April is the cruellest month — or at least it is in San Francisco. The city is already well known for its chronic problems with homelessness, drug abuse and crime, but the negative headlines are now piling up.
Apparently, San Francisco mayor London Breed has been feeling downright smug about the fact that Cash App founder Bob Lee did not die at the hands of a random homeless person but, instead, was allegedly murdered by someone he knew. That would be a decent boast if San Francisco were an otherwise clean and well-run city…but it’s not. It’s still a decayed basket case, as is vividly illustrated by a widely circulated video showing a homeless woman and her baby moments after she gave birth on the street.
NEWS & Education ONLY
⚠️
Don’t Do Drugs. The reality of drug use is tough and these images are strong, but necessary to show how destructive narcotics are to society.San Francisco, California.— (@ppv_tahoe) Woman gives birth on the street after smoking crack all afternoon… pic.twitter.com/n6kbivg0uX
— PPV-TAHOE – News Journalist (@ppv_tahoe) April 9, 2023
Inside the assault on meritocracy
In the pre-modern world positions in society were largely inherited. Some people were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them — “The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate,” in the words of the Victorian hymn. The meritocratic idea was the dynamite which blew up this view of the world and provided the materials for the modern era. But its reign is threatened as never before.
If it weren’t so serious, Gavin Newsom’s current assault on red states would be hilarious. What he is peddling as “democracy” is totalitarianism in its worst form. What’s frightening is that there are millions of voters throughout America who will lap up what he’s selling.
Whole Foods on Monday shut down its ritzy new flagship store in San Francisco, after just a year in operation, citing crime and safety concerns.
I wrote about that astonishing event yesterday, brought on by the city’s failure to enforce its own laws, noting that the company had a good customer base and had shelled out big to make the place attractive, but that was no match for the chaos the one-party government had allowed the area to fall into. Whole Foods may have had a punchbowl for themselves and its customers, but with the city’s coddling of bums and criminals, someone dropped a deuce in it.
Whole Foods, the hippie-friendly high-end grocery store owned by Amazon, is closing a new location on Market Street in downtown San Francisco due to high levels of crime that have plagued the city in recent months.
As delays go, it was a long way from leaves on the line. I’d been working in San Francisco for perhaps a year when a wild-looking man with a machete tried to board my bus. The driver objected, and we waited several tense minutes as he waved his blade and yelled things that made no sense before stalking off into the early evening crowds.
Encounters like this are, if not routine, unsurprising in what locals refer to as “the City”. When I first visited in 2016, I was stunned by the open squalor and sickness I saw all around me, beyond anything I’d known in Britain. Now, after nearly five years living in nearby Oakland, where tent villages sprawl for blocks through decrepit industrial districts, it is merely a grim but humdrum reminder of this region’s longstanding triple epidemic of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness.
Looks like getting rid of leftist district attorney Chesa Boudin didn’t really get rid of the problem he represented for crime-battered San Francisco.
Silicon Valley has been rocked by the murder of a cryptocurrency start-up creator whose violent death has prompted Elon Musk to question police responses to street crime in San Francisco.
Bob Lee, founder of Cash App, on Tuesday died of multiple stab wounds sustained in an apparent attack outside a luxury apartment building in an area home to headquarters of major finance and tech companies including Google.
San Francisco is a progressive paradise, I don’t understand why they’re complaining about the very city they made.
Slain Cash App founder Bob Lee had just moved to Miami because San Francisco was ‘deteriorating’: pal
Not quite one-third of registered voters (33.2%) bothered to vote in Tuesday’s election for the next mayor of Chicago, and the non-voting two thirds may soon regret their electoral passivity. Brandon Johnson, a far-left radical, has won the race with a 2.8% margin at the latest count, and thanks to his anti-police stance, the crime wave driving businesses and residents out of the city will only get worse.
A high-profile Bay Area tech executive was killed in a stabbing in San Francisco.
Sources tell NBC Bay Area Bob Lee was attacked early Tuesday morning near Rincon Hill and the Bay Bridge.
Lee, 43, was the chief product officer of MobileCoin. He was also former chief technology officer of Square and one of the co-founders of Cash App.
