Well, we’ve repudiated dirty energy sources except to power clean energy applications such as EVs. Elmer Gantry did God’s work in becoming intimately involved with brothel operations.
Can the discrepancy between the posted paid amount for property on Portland maps and what the property owner told the reporter he was paid be uncovered.. if the county is trying to pull the wool over the taxpayers eyes I’d like to know so they can be publicly called out on this and held accountable… the county paid more than market value for the property at 1818 SE 82nd! What???
"The tell was Dan Ryan being unceremoniously dethroned from his former perch overseeing the bloated bureaucracy of the Joint Office of Homeless Services and being reassigned as something harmless called the commissioner of 'culture and liveability.' "
To digress briefly from the thesis of "Caught in the Middle," some of the bureaus that have been assigned to Dan Ryan haven't been entirely harmless in the past.
Take Civic Life. The scolds there brought the woke culture war to Portland's Halloween festivities with a sanctimonious tweet some must have taken for satire:
Is it okay to wear a #Halloween costume of a person or character who is a different race from you? The line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation can be thin. We discuss cultural appreciation vs. appropriation: https://portland.gov/civic/news/202
The accompanying graphic offered this gem: "Dressing up as Lilo in Disney's Lilo & Stitch is a great costume idea if you are mindful of avoiding cultural appropriation."
Government has no business trying discourage people from wearing certain outfits on Halloween. First, since the message is coming from City Hall, some people might conclude quite reasonably that engaging in cultural appropriation is prohibited in Portland. Otherwise, why else would a city agency be taking a stand on an aspect of festive attire that until recently has been a private matter left entirely to the discretion of the individual?
Secondly, cultural appropriation is an overbroad concept. It is excessively broad because it does not distinguish between costume choices that might legitimately warrant government intervention, say to protect the wearer and third parties from imminent harm, and a costume that would at most only offend the moral values of people who have already embraced the dubious premises of the controversial notion of cultural appropriation. Such people have no right to veto other Portanders' costumes, nor does the city have the right to impose their subjective ideas of right and wrong on the general public.
If the lack of a city ordinance prohibiting cultural appropriation means that the city can get away with interfering in Portlanders' constitutionally protected right of free expression the way the Office of Civic Life did prior to Halloween, then then our laws and jurisprudence are not serving us well.
Into Ryan's hands has also come the notorious vector whose mission it is to transmit the diversity-equity-inclusion-antiracism virus into every nook and cranny of the city's rambling bureaucracy. I am talking about the Office of Equity and Human Rights, whose Orwellian name belies the fact that its critics are of the opinion that it encourages systemic discrimination by the city on the basis of race, color, national origin and ethnicity.
If there's a saving grace, it's that Ryan is even less of a leader and more ineffectual than Wheeler. Unless he has a personality transplant, Ryan is unlikely to impose his vision on his bureaus and use them to his political advantage the way Jo Ann Hardesty did with some of hers. The bad news is his probable liberal white guilt will keep him from showing the wokeness collectives the door at City Hall.
Getting back to the subject at hand, there's little doubt that the County's pods and Portland's sanctioned camps will be permanent unless the public and private sector can mount a nationwide campaign of the scale of the Manhattan Project to rehabilitate the feral and stop the vicious process that breaks people and dumps them onto the streets with or without their cooperation.
Don't expect the Behavioral Heath Resource Center to do that. For one thing, the demand for its services is likely to swamp the Center's capacity to provide them. Rooms for 19 people? Even 1900 rooms might be insufficient. More importantly, until and unless the staff whose job it is to put broken people back together prove otherwise, the Center will - as Mr. Cheverton correctly predicts - just serve to perpetuate the status quo.
According to the historians of the most-studied disaster in history, the captain and senior officers of the Titanic figured out not long after the ship struck the iceberg that they were doomed to sink, and soon. For the hundreds of millions of dollars, scores of elected officials and countless bureaucrats, advocates, allies and volunteers that have been thrown at homeless over the years, has anyone whose job it is to solve the crisis in Portland yet determined whether and when the Rose City will be encampment-free? To judge from the items on Wheeler's multi-hundred-million-dollar legislative wish list, it is going be a very long time before our tax dollars go toward buying nice things for Portlanders again.
Your comments are terrific--as is your knowledge of history.
I would like to offer you the "keys to the kingdom" in Substack terms--so you can post essays (your choice, no limits) without having them cut off in Comments. This would give you access as a contributor, same as Psam and me.
Another knee-slapper: The woman who has been running Multnomah County’s behavioral health division has done such a bang-up job she has been chosen by Kotek to lead the behavioral health division for the Oregon Health Authority.
You weren't kidding. Is there anything these lawmaking retards wont do? I mean I thought her hair offended or transgressed the laws of man, god, nature, architecture, self-respect, and that maternal inculcation to always wake up in the hospital wearing clean underwear. Imagine EMT embarrassment when they could not locate the weasal they assumed that pile belonged to. Had something like that happen to me once.
I would not mock the extravagance upon Ebony's head if I did not fear it is what is called a thinking cap and therefore bespeaks the efforts that will garner her a pension. A nice pension. Beside, judging by her prior antics she needs a severe and prolonged mocking.
I read an obit recently in which the author made sure to include the statement that the decedent's favorite hair color was pink. That defiance is like declaring you'll only appear in neckwear that sports the regimental colors. Every noodle-brained swinging jane in Portland embraces the pink hair declaration of "I am different. Special. Fearless. Original"
Makes me want to reach out to the League of Bottle Blondes for the riposte commensurate.
Ah, Ebony Clarke, the visionary public health nabob who in 2021 got the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners to declare racism--by unanimous vote!--a "public health crisis".
Hopefully Clarke can accomplish similarly important work at the state level. No word yet whether pandering, ahistorical public ignorance will be posited as an even greater crisis.
The BOISE decision is not what the city of Portland and other cities claim it to me.
They use the Ninth Circuit decision to claim that they have no ability to pass any rules forbidding street camping or other homeless invasions.
That is simply not true.
That decision, which hopefully will be reviewed at some point by the US Supreme Court and overturned, only forbids criminalizing homelessness by allowing police to make custodial arrests for those obstructing the sidewalk, and were living in the street. The vast majority of lesser laws in Oregon are called “infractions“ and do not carry any possibility of jail time. Virtually all traffic offenses from speeding to careless driving fall into this category, and nothing would legally prevent Portland, or any other city, from continuing to pass regulations forbidding “street camping.” The only thing they can’t do is arrest them, which in Portland wouldn’t make any difference because the current district attorney would never prosecute anybody.
SCOTUS declines about 98% of all petitions for review.
The Court has since replaced Justice Ginsburg with Justice Barrett, but more importantly BOISE is being seriously mis-used to ban (as in Oregon) even non-criminal - “violation level” - laws, leaving absolutely no prohibitions on street camping.
Well said. In my lesser years as a young reporter (a contradiction in terms), I recall covering the daily Cincinnati Police Court, which basically processed cases of drugs and "vagrancy." The city had a "workhouse," where most were sentenced, mostly to give them a place to dry out. Wasn't pretty--but no wondering zombies either.
I am part of the ADA Lawsuit against the City of Portland - our lawyer has done a good job of educating us on this exact point and reminding CofPdx counsel of this legal reality (as opposed to political excuse making/cover) as we negotiate a settlement (which is scheduled to be finished and before the judge by end of month).
I wish I were a tiny lawyer on the wall of the conference room during those negotiations. I'd be fascinated to learn how much influence the homeless activists and their dark agenda have on the city's policymaking and day-to-day decisions on matters involving homelessness. The same holds true for the press, particularly the Oregonian's profoundly biased Nicole Hayden.
Is the city dragging its feet out of fear that the activists and media will hold their breaths and turn blue like they always do whenever the city tries to do something to lift the burden of homelessness off the long-suffering and hardworking voter-taxpayers?
My wont is childish pop-culture associations, so I’ll just admit that when I read “tiny lawyer” in this connection I immediately thought of Michael Scott of the American version of “The Office” and his subscription to “Small Businessman” magazine.
On the serious side, Portland’s “Walking Dead” reputation was enhanced this week by a suddenly-sympathetic tranny arsonist, a drugged bum who chewed off a senior citizen’s ear, and the crazed bumwoman who shoved a toddler onto train tracks.
I look at those tents along the roadway and wonder why more of them are not taken out by the driving public. It's a bit like learning to drive where your head is turned one direction with your mouth agape so the steering wheel follows right along. Maybe a part of me has just lost all compassion or it goes back to living in a rural area and thinking about knocking down mail boxes along a stretch of road. Have I lost compassion or did I just never have it to begin with....
As one would expect, there is always a certain amount of yearning amonst the generality:
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/homeless-portland-residents-react-governor-plans/283-fe3ed02b-ab13-4d0e-9ac1-b6e1e567acd1
Boudou Saved from Drowning tomorrow night. A bum's bum.
Oregon and its Left always all in on the cockamamie:
https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2023/01/never-opened-300-million-plus-biofuels-refinery-facing-foreclosure-in-southern-oregon.html
So glad we've repudiated nuclear and coal and gas
Well, we’ve repudiated dirty energy sources except to power clean energy applications such as EVs. Elmer Gantry did God’s work in becoming intimately involved with brothel operations.
Can the discrepancy between the posted paid amount for property on Portland maps and what the property owner told the reporter he was paid be uncovered.. if the county is trying to pull the wool over the taxpayers eyes I’d like to know so they can be publicly called out on this and held accountable… the county paid more than market value for the property at 1818 SE 82nd! What???
"The tell was Dan Ryan being unceremoniously dethroned from his former perch overseeing the bloated bureaucracy of the Joint Office of Homeless Services and being reassigned as something harmless called the commissioner of 'culture and liveability.' "
To digress briefly from the thesis of "Caught in the Middle," some of the bureaus that have been assigned to Dan Ryan haven't been entirely harmless in the past.
Take Civic Life. The scolds there brought the woke culture war to Portland's Halloween festivities with a sanctimonious tweet some must have taken for satire:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oct 20, 2022
Is it okay to wear a #Halloween costume of a person or character who is a different race from you? The line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation can be thin. We discuss cultural appreciation vs. appropriation: https://portland.gov/civic/news/202
The accompanying graphic offered this gem: "Dressing up as Lilo in Disney's Lilo & Stitch is a great costume idea if you are mindful of avoiding cultural appropriation."
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22halloween%22%20(from%3Acomm_civic_life)&src=typed_query
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Government has no business trying discourage people from wearing certain outfits on Halloween. First, since the message is coming from City Hall, some people might conclude quite reasonably that engaging in cultural appropriation is prohibited in Portland. Otherwise, why else would a city agency be taking a stand on an aspect of festive attire that until recently has been a private matter left entirely to the discretion of the individual?
Secondly, cultural appropriation is an overbroad concept. It is excessively broad because it does not distinguish between costume choices that might legitimately warrant government intervention, say to protect the wearer and third parties from imminent harm, and a costume that would at most only offend the moral values of people who have already embraced the dubious premises of the controversial notion of cultural appropriation. Such people have no right to veto other Portanders' costumes, nor does the city have the right to impose their subjective ideas of right and wrong on the general public.
If the lack of a city ordinance prohibiting cultural appropriation means that the city can get away with interfering in Portlanders' constitutionally protected right of free expression the way the Office of Civic Life did prior to Halloween, then then our laws and jurisprudence are not serving us well.
Into Ryan's hands has also come the notorious vector whose mission it is to transmit the diversity-equity-inclusion-antiracism virus into every nook and cranny of the city's rambling bureaucracy. I am talking about the Office of Equity and Human Rights, whose Orwellian name belies the fact that its critics are of the opinion that it encourages systemic discrimination by the city on the basis of race, color, national origin and ethnicity.
If there's a saving grace, it's that Ryan is even less of a leader and more ineffectual than Wheeler. Unless he has a personality transplant, Ryan is unlikely to impose his vision on his bureaus and use them to his political advantage the way Jo Ann Hardesty did with some of hers. The bad news is his probable liberal white guilt will keep him from showing the wokeness collectives the door at City Hall.
Getting back to the subject at hand, there's little doubt that the County's pods and Portland's sanctioned camps will be permanent unless the public and private sector can mount a nationwide campaign of the scale of the Manhattan Project to rehabilitate the feral and stop the vicious process that breaks people and dumps them onto the streets with or without their cooperation.
Don't expect the Behavioral Heath Resource Center to do that. For one thing, the demand for its services is likely to swamp the Center's capacity to provide them. Rooms for 19 people? Even 1900 rooms might be insufficient. More importantly, until and unless the staff whose job it is to put broken people back together prove otherwise, the Center will - as Mr. Cheverton correctly predicts - just serve to perpetuate the status quo.
According to the historians of the most-studied disaster in history, the captain and senior officers of the Titanic figured out not long after the ship struck the iceberg that they were doomed to sink, and soon. For the hundreds of millions of dollars, scores of elected officials and countless bureaucrats, advocates, allies and volunteers that have been thrown at homeless over the years, has anyone whose job it is to solve the crisis in Portland yet determined whether and when the Rose City will be encampment-free? To judge from the items on Wheeler's multi-hundred-million-dollar legislative wish list, it is going be a very long time before our tax dollars go toward buying nice things for Portlanders again.
Were they actually threatening action against non-woke Halloween costumes or just being scolds?
Good point. I've revised my comment to address it.
Your comments are terrific--as is your knowledge of history.
I would like to offer you the "keys to the kingdom" in Substack terms--so you can post essays (your choice, no limits) without having them cut off in Comments. This would give you access as a contributor, same as Psam and me.
Your thoughts?
Thank you for the kind offer. I am honored. Let me give is some thought.
A Portland knee slapper:
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-homeless-p2p-meth-fentanyl-addiction/283-b8b0fe88-a86c-45af-be9c-6f648b2f8dab
Another knee-slapper: The woman who has been running Multnomah County’s behavioral health division has done such a bang-up job she has been chosen by Kotek to lead the behavioral health division for the Oregon Health Authority.
https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2023/01/06/next-oregon-behavioral-health-director-seen-as-collaborative-truth-teller/
No comment on her hair, please. There are laws against that sort of thing (see the state’s “Crown Act”).
Jeez,
You weren't kidding. Is there anything these lawmaking retards wont do? I mean I thought her hair offended or transgressed the laws of man, god, nature, architecture, self-respect, and that maternal inculcation to always wake up in the hospital wearing clean underwear. Imagine EMT embarrassment when they could not locate the weasal they assumed that pile belonged to. Had something like that happen to me once.
I would not mock the extravagance upon Ebony's head if I did not fear it is what is called a thinking cap and therefore bespeaks the efforts that will garner her a pension. A nice pension. Beside, judging by her prior antics she needs a severe and prolonged mocking.
I read an obit recently in which the author made sure to include the statement that the decedent's favorite hair color was pink. That defiance is like declaring you'll only appear in neckwear that sports the regimental colors. Every noodle-brained swinging jane in Portland embraces the pink hair declaration of "I am different. Special. Fearless. Original"
Makes me want to reach out to the League of Bottle Blondes for the riposte commensurate.
Is there anything it can't do?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/03/domestic-violence-climate-change-umoja/
Question asked:
https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2023/01/05/did-someone-or-something-seize-control-of-the-united-states-n1658786
I'm so glad that we are DEI medicine. It'll make things better:
https://www.thefp.com/p/where-is-the-cure-for-alzheimers?publication_id=260347&post_id=94529928&isFreemail=true
Them Red rascals at it again:
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/native-american-history-indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen/672600/
Ah, Ebony Clarke, the visionary public health nabob who in 2021 got the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners to declare racism--by unanimous vote!--a "public health crisis".
Hopefully Clarke can accomplish similarly important work at the state level. No word yet whether pandering, ahistorical public ignorance will be posited as an even greater crisis.
"Bums to the left of me, vagrants to the right
Here I am, caught in the middle with you...."
The BOISE decision is not what the city of Portland and other cities claim it to me.
They use the Ninth Circuit decision to claim that they have no ability to pass any rules forbidding street camping or other homeless invasions.
That is simply not true.
That decision, which hopefully will be reviewed at some point by the US Supreme Court and overturned, only forbids criminalizing homelessness by allowing police to make custodial arrests for those obstructing the sidewalk, and were living in the street. The vast majority of lesser laws in Oregon are called “infractions“ and do not carry any possibility of jail time. Virtually all traffic offenses from speeding to careless driving fall into this category, and nothing would legally prevent Portland, or any other city, from continuing to pass regulations forbidding “street camping.” The only thing they can’t do is arrest them, which in Portland wouldn’t make any difference because the current district attorney would never prosecute anybody.
The Supreme Court declined to review the Boise decision. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/why-didnt-the-supreme-court-take-this-homelessness-case/
SCOTUS declines about 98% of all petitions for review.
The Court has since replaced Justice Ginsburg with Justice Barrett, but more importantly BOISE is being seriously mis-used to ban (as in Oregon) even non-criminal - “violation level” - laws, leaving absolutely no prohibitions on street camping.
Well said. In my lesser years as a young reporter (a contradiction in terms), I recall covering the daily Cincinnati Police Court, which basically processed cases of drugs and "vagrancy." The city had a "workhouse," where most were sentenced, mostly to give them a place to dry out. Wasn't pretty--but no wondering zombies either.
I am part of the ADA Lawsuit against the City of Portland - our lawyer has done a good job of educating us on this exact point and reminding CofPdx counsel of this legal reality (as opposed to political excuse making/cover) as we negotiate a settlement (which is scheduled to be finished and before the judge by end of month).
I wish I were a tiny lawyer on the wall of the conference room during those negotiations. I'd be fascinated to learn how much influence the homeless activists and their dark agenda have on the city's policymaking and day-to-day decisions on matters involving homelessness. The same holds true for the press, particularly the Oregonian's profoundly biased Nicole Hayden.
Is the city dragging its feet out of fear that the activists and media will hold their breaths and turn blue like they always do whenever the city tries to do something to lift the burden of homelessness off the long-suffering and hardworking voter-taxpayers?
My wont is childish pop-culture associations, so I’ll just admit that when I read “tiny lawyer” in this connection I immediately thought of Michael Scott of the American version of “The Office” and his subscription to “Small Businessman” magazine.
On the serious side, Portland’s “Walking Dead” reputation was enhanced this week by a suddenly-sympathetic tranny arsonist, a drugged bum who chewed off a senior citizen’s ear, and the crazed bumwoman who shoved a toddler onto train tracks.
I'd love to talk with you.
Sure.
I look at those tents along the roadway and wonder why more of them are not taken out by the driving public. It's a bit like learning to drive where your head is turned one direction with your mouth agape so the steering wheel follows right along. Maybe a part of me has just lost all compassion or it goes back to living in a rural area and thinking about knocking down mail boxes along a stretch of road. Have I lost compassion or did I just never have it to begin with....