Reality Bites
Wow, so much to say after an interesting couple of weeks on both the local, national and international stages. Unsurprisingly, though, they’re all intertwined. Perhaps, we will just climb the ladder, politically speaking. Let me apologize in advance, my Android just won’t permit me to embed links, so you’ll have to copy and paste. I’m a Luddite….
As some of you may know, I practice in the Deep South. There used to be signs outside of the central city, welcoming weary travelers to the “Best of the New South”. I took an hour the other day after a long, tiring spate of surgery and drove around to three sites where I had previously seen the signs, accompanied by my friend Mick
Just one, mind you, sipped slowly. Remarkably (not), all the signs are *gasp* missing.
As many of you are aware, the central city is in the grips of a water “crisis”. This is nothing new here; boil-water alerts have been a staple of municipal life for residents for years, increasingly so over the last decade. The infrastructure is crumbling (the city was established in 1822) and it's not simply a white:black problem. White administrations ignored the looming problem and, knowing they would semi-abandon a city lacking a significant commercial and industrial tax base, chose to kick the can down the road. I’m not giving them a pass; like most politicians, the individual Mayors haven't looked past the next election cycle. The city is shrinking (153700 by 2020 Census, down from over 190,000 in the mid-1990s) and is 83% black, and has had a black Mayor for 25 years. The current Mayor is a young attorney, son of an avowed Black Nationalist who died months after being elected as Mayor, with no managerial experience whatsoever. Yet he was elected with 93% of the *available* vote. In fact, he is an admitted Socialist who promised to make this nexus of residual racism the “most radical city in the nation”.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-suggests-mississippi-water-crisis-was-intentionally-caused-mayor-jackson/
He was elected in 2017 and, during the following January, the city suffered a rash of broken water mains during a particularly hard freeze, closing the public schools for a couple of weeks and prompting the three major hospitals to sink independent water wells, build water towers and secure their own water supplies. Even the consistently leftist local weekly rag covered it…
https://m.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2018/jan/08/jps-still-closed-many-citys-peanut-brittle-pipes-r/
Where was Hizzoner? Why, in Los Angeles, hobnobbing with the hoi polloi and accepting an award from the NAACP, much like his political idol who received a Nobel Peace Prize for doing….nothing, in 2009.
He’s an amiable, inclusive guy, and I’m sure had the best of intentions
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-radical-mayor-chokwe-antar-lumumba-daniel-greenfield/
His constituents couldn’t drink out of their taps or flush their toilets, but …. Hey! Photo ops!. This jalopy of a city bopped along with nothing being done, a garbage hauling controversy with the Mayor favoring a particular company from New Orleans *nothing to see here, move along*, and recurring boil-water alerts, until a month before the current flood covered by the national media, which pales in comparison to a flood in 2020 when there was NO “water crisis”. This editorial was penned in a weekly local newspaper a full week before the flooding peaked…
https://www.northsidesun.com/opinion-water-crisis-day-28
Interestingly, one would have expected the same editor to publish a follow-up a week later, but ….. crickets. Mewonders if he was silenced, as the national media has attributed the water “crisis” to the flooding. A statewide network of weekly newspapers lives on advertising, you know, and these days, you gotta be “woke”. Anything, of course, to keep Hizzoner from looking culpable in his incompetence and mismanagement for failing to address this
Needless to say, the state government has basically “taken over”….
https://www.wjtv.com/mississippi-flooding/gov-reeves-addresses-jacksons-water-crisis
….leaving Hizzoner scrambling to save face while the national media scrambles to hide the corruption and incompetence and protect his image. It's all due to the flooding, of course, and the Governor should fix the flooding. The Mayor is, after all, “waiting in line” politically, so to speak
You cannot convince me that in this over-woke, politically-correct climate that Hizzoner couldn't have successfully lobbied for federal funds to deal with the problems. But that takes leadership, and when the Mango Caesar came for the opening of the Civil Rights museum, he was shunned and ignored (I wouldn’t have dinner with him, but when your constituents need help…..damn). Nothing happens in the central city, though, without a quid pro quo, much like counterparts in other parts of the world
So, how does this tie in nationally and internationally ? Well, my acquaintance Matt Bracken nails it,in my opinion….
Water service is but one component of municipal responsibility, but what do you die first without? How many millions have dysentery, typhoid and cholera killed through history from contaminated water supplies? I have another acquaintance who installs home water purification systems. He’s overwhelmed. Filters that normally last a year survive 3 months in the central city. Corroding, leaking water mains create massive underground cavities full of dirty, muddy water that flows out into bathtubs like the one shown above. If a local government cannot provide clean drinking water, what CAN it do, besides tax? It sure ain’t safety of the citizenry and policing….
Of course, writing this makes me a fascist. Or at least Thursday I became one, didn’t I?
So did pointing out that the central city has the highest homicide rate, or nearly so (local news outlets no longer report the cumulative annual number of homicides, much less the racial demographics, so it’s impossible to discern); as of August 10, the total was at 58 homicides per 100,000, or an annualized 1 in 1200 chance of being shot to death in the central city. No data has been published since then and official municipal government sources stopped updating their websites in January 2022. If you don’t acknowledge a problem, it doesn’t exist, right? Given that four to five or more folks are shot and wounded
https://youtu.be/uo23qjWav0Q
that leaves, at best, a 1 in 300 risk of at least being shot and wounded.
Okay, I’m an extremist to be labeled as such
https://www.americanpartisan.org/2022/09/the-dehumanization-of-the-unborn-and-maga-republicans/
Internationally, do we REALLY want to go there? How does this all tie in together? Well, with the non-connection of Nordstream2 and, most recently, the cutoff of Nordstream1, it looks like central Europe will be pretty cold this winter. The water debacle in my local central city serves as a useful paradigm for loss of basic services. It snowballs, you know, until you have a lot of cold,hungry, THIRSTY (and dirty) people milling around thinking bad thoughts, and when you tell them you'll “own nothing, and be happy”, it may not resonate exactly as you had planned
https://thesaker.is/world-war-3-for-dummies/
I doubt that very many people in 1914 or 1939 Europe saw what was coming; stepping back and appreciating the big picture is not a priority when you're sitting in a mile-long queue to pick up drinking water, but eventually reality bites. And it bites HARD.
Yeah, call me a conspiracy theorist. Many have before, and many will in the future.
Many thanks to my friend Concerned American of www.westernrifleshooters.us for some of the links. You should all read it. Every. Single. Day. Without fail. Normalcy bias is a bitch to shake off, and recognizing Evil in the world you inhabit can be shocking and painful, but doing so makes appreciating and ultimately avoiding the awful before you so much easier.
I had a summer job working several years in public works back in the 70s. During that time we were constantly replacing old rusted out cast iron water mains, some so rusted that 90 percent of the inside diameter was obstructed, and many leaked more water than they delivered. In Boston they were doing upgrades as well and even ran across some made out of hollowed out logs.
The water system was built about 100 years before, but through a regular system of maintaining the system the pipes were all upgraded and water usage went down because of the elimination of the leaky 19th century cast iron pipes.
The point being that the time to repair a water delivery system is decades before it fails. Because if you wait until it fails you can never catch up.
Public works projects like a municipal water system are built up over time as the city grows.
The problem is that many legacy projects given to us by prior, forward thinking generations, have been taken for granted by so called community leaders who prefer to spend money on things like shiny new sports stadiums that they can point to, rather than on things that are buried under ground.
Unfortunately when a municipal water system breaks down the city that it services becomes uninhabitable and unsustainable.
History is rife with cities being abandoned when the.water supply ran out, Rome after most of the aquaducts were destroyed, Petra after cisterns filled up.with sand and the knowledge to maintain them.had been lost. The Anasazi cliff dwellings after the weather patterns changed.
Jackson will limp along for a while, but if there is a general economic breakdown, and there's no money to keep water coming in via trucks and emergency repairs it will be abandoned.
When this whole mess collapses, it is going to be on par with Noah's Flood in epicness.
And I 2nd the motion,
Check in with WRS daily.
Your future self will thank you.