Before we start, check out my latest over at Glibertarians. This week, it’s North to Alaska.
Now then: It’s funny how we sometimes get tidbits from the British press that the American legacy media is reluctant to cover. Take this bit, from the UK Daily Mail, on how the rich and famous are fleeing the shithole that decades of stupid policies have turned the L.A. area into. Excerpt:
Gold’s Gym has become synonymous with the Hollywood Dream.
Set just a few hundred yards from the ocean in sun-kissed Venice Beach, Los Angeles, Gold’s was the backdrop for Pumping Iron, the 1977 documentary which followed a young, unknown Austrian bodybuilder called Arnold Schwarzenegger as he prepared for the Mr Universe contest.
The film turned him into an overnight sensation. He would go on to become a global superstar, marry a member of the Kennedy clan, and become Governor of California.
Yet today Gold’s sits amid post-apocalyptic scenes which have consumed much of LA, turning the City of Dreams into an urban nightmare from which people are fleeing in droves.
A makeshift tent city made up of flapping tarpaulins and cardboard boxes surrounds the gym on all sides.
Junkies and the homeless, many of whom are clearly mentally ill, walk the palm-lined streets like zombies – all just three blocks from multi-million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.
Stolen bicycles are piled high on pavements littered with broken syringes.
Here’s the onion:
British-born Danny O’Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. ‘There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,’ he says.
‘And a lot of it is to do with politics.’ His business is booming. ‘August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,’ he tells me.
‘People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.’
O’Brien, 58, who moved to LA from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee.
‘Liberal politics has destroyed this city,’ he says. ‘The homeless encampments are legal and there’s nothing the police can do. White, affluent middle-class folk are getting out. People don’t feel safe any more.’
I can confess to just a little bit of schadenfreude here. Mencken said that ‘democracy is the theory that the people know what government they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.’ He may not have been talking about LA (and San Francisco, and Chicago, and New York, and many other cities) but he sure as hell called it. The people of these cities have been voting for the very pols who put them in this mess, and they’ve been voting for them for a couple of generations now.
It’s a shame. My Dad spent a weekend in San Francisco in 1945, right after V-J Day, and my uncle was stationed there in the Presidio in the early Fifties. Both of them talked about what a beautiful city it was in those days. No longer. The barbarians are not only inside the city walls, they have largely taken over.
Col. Jeff Cooper, some years ago, said of LA:
“The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition.”
One wonders how bad an idea that would really be.
