"Decline is a choice"

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The voters of Austria seem poised to overthrow their ruling class, but we’ll see if that ruling class permits them to do so; France didn’t, nor did the EU itself.

In neighboring Germany, however, no problem: the sheeple, possibly because of some vague sense of collective guilt, have voted, again, for their own suicide. Reminds me of England, and residents of our own blue states.

Beege Welborn, HotAir:

Double Deutsch Down on Dummkopf

>>>>

…. Sometimes, it's the spectre of history years past and old habits that are the undoing of the voting public, out of obstinacy. When they completely move against their own obvious best interest in a baffling way.

It has happened in the local elections this past Sunday in Baden-Württemberg, known as Germany's 'Auto Heartland' - ah. Maybe you can see where I'm heading with this.

The area is legendary, and nearly on its knees.

Baden-Württemberg’s election is overshadowed by worries over deindustrialisation

... A vast Mercedes museum on Stuttgart’s outskirts, opened by Angela Merkel in 2006, testifies to the car’s role in building Baden-Württemberg’s wealth. But the sector may be facing “the greatest challenge in its history”, says Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut, the economy minister. Over 200,000 jobs in and around Stuttgart, the state capital, depend on it. Mercedes and Porsche are laying off workers. Bosch, one of the largest suppliers, will cut 22,000 jobs by 2030, many here in its home state.

Still more troubled are the smaller Mittelstand firms dotted around the state, many of which depend on the internal combustion engine, which faces obsolescence as cars electrify. Companies that might once have downsized are now being wound up, says Martin Mucha, a Stuttgart-based corporate lawyer. Firms’ travails are curbing tax revenues, forcing towns and cities to slash services. Stuttgart’s corporate-tax receipts have fallen by almost half in two years. Nearly half of voters tell pollsters the region could face the fate of Detroit, which fell into destitution and bankruptcy when its car sector crumbled.

… Baden-Württemberg’s rural spots are wealthy too, not at all like the ramshackle, depopulated areas of eastern Germany where the afd thrives. Take Hohenlohe, a region in the state’s north dotted with successful companies. Tim Breitkreuz, the energetic young candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats (cdu), is campaigning here. The houses are big and well kept. Unemployment is just 3.7%. Yet Mr Breitkreuz is locked in battle with an afd rival. A natural optimist, he says he has to dwell on problems to secure voters’ trust. At a cdu campaign event nearby, some party activists rage against what they regard as idiotic decisions imposed by lefties in Berlin, or dogmatic Eurocrats prematurely killing the combustion engine. 

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Welborn: “To someone watching from afar, it is inconceivable that the Greens, who have been so much at the forefront of the energy disaster that is Germany right now - the Green candidate for minister-president, Cem Özdemir, worked closely with Robert Halbeck, architect of much of the current energywoes besetting the country - should be leading the polling or anywhere near the top.

Once yesterday's votes were counted, however, it turns out they'd won the whole shebang.”

As German blogger eugyppius calls them:

 Stupid people in Baden-Württemberg hand massive electoral victory to the Greens so they can continue to sacrifice their industry to the weather gods

In 2011, Angela Merkel idiotically accelerated the German nuclear phase-out just a few months after her coalition passed legislation that would’ve slowed it down by twelve years. Because of an earthquake and a tsunami that happened 13,000 kilometers away in Japan, Merkel suddenly decided that Germany needed to abandon nuclear power as soon as possible, although the Federal Republic knows neither tsunamis nor earthquakes and not even the Japanese drew this drastic conclusion from the Fukushima disaster.

Merkel’s real motivations were, as always, tactical: She hoped to deny the surging Green Party a winning electoral issue in the Baden-Württemberg elections that year, and so we can call her move a twofold failure: The Greens won over 24% of the vote anyway, which was just enough to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and force the CDU into opposition. And today, citizens of a denuclearised Federal Republic must live with a declining economy and ongoing deindustrialisation, thanks in large part to having some of the highest electricity prices in continental Europe. It was a multi-dimensional fractal f**kup, what Merkel did in 2011. We’re still paying for it.

And yet, the voters voted to lather, rinse, repeat.

...Yesterday evening, the bill for all of this humdrum imbecility came due. The Greens emerged as the winners, if barely, with 30.2% of the vote – just a few points down from their historic high of 32.6% in 2021. The CDU improved over their last showing but managed to underperform even the most pessimistic forecasts, with a mere 29.7%.

>>>>

This was a predictable outcome, and nevertheless it is astounding. The Greens and the CDU are the undisputed architects of German decline, and yet the prosperous voters of this beautiful southern state have sent both of these terrible parties back into the Landtag with an enormous mandate to do more of the same. This is proof number 5,234,345 that deep and lasting prosperity has the power to do what few other forces can, namely turn millions of otherwise sensible intelligent people into walking retards. Alas, there seems to be no way to de-zombify the voters without making them massively poorer.

AND

 In order to keep this post short enough for even the limited attention span of our Irish readers, I won’t cite here the many, many warnings energy producers have fired off to California’s and New York’s governments, alert them to the disastrous results forthcoming if they continue with their green energy policies, but there’s no shortage of such warning, many of which I’ve posted here earlier. Still, when Armageddon does arrive, the vistims will be shocked to discover that they voted for it, repeatedly.

Nadler on ICE: shoot to kill

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I can’t decide whether these people are finally dropping their masks, or if their derangement has reached a new level, but I’m leaning towards the former.

This could be a good summer for lower North Street residents to rent out the homestead and retreat to Jackson's Hole until Labor Day - (Update: earlier, and later)

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Or your kids could set up a lemonade stand on the front yard and experience their first taste of entrepreneurship.

Greenwich DPW: North Street Bridge Construction Announcement — road will be fully closed June-August, and one-lane, alternating traffic before and after those months

From Greenwich DPW, March 9, 2026

The Town of Greenwich Department of Public Works announces that construction will begin in March 2026 on the North Street Bridge over West Brothers Brook. This project will replace an aging bridge structure and improve long-term safety and reliability for the traveling public.

To safely complete major phases of work, North Street will be fully closed between June 8 and August 28, 2026, for a maximum of 81 consecutive days. If work is completed ahead of schedule, the roadway will reopen earlier.

Before and after the full closure period, traffic will operate under alternating one-way traffic during construction hours. To minimize disruption during peak commuter periods, no lane closures or alternating one-way traffic will occur between 6:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, outside of the full closure period.

UPDATE: Couldn’t find a map detailing the detour route(s), but the DPW’s website page for the project says:

  • Construction (and presumably, one-way alternating traffic lanes) begins this month

  • Full-road closure from June 8th through August 28th

  • Final completion date, Spring 2027

Maybe you’ll want to sell the homestead, rather than rent it out.

Lesson to be learned?

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Shot:

National park death exposes repeated rule violations as tourists take dangerous risks

Experts concerned visitors are ignoring safety rules near canyons, waterfalls and steep walking paths

Chaser:

Woman brutally beaten at MacArthur Park while feeding homeless

A woman known for feeding the homeless each week in MacArthur Park was savagely attacked with a metal pipe while serving meals, leaving her with a shattered jaw and six teeth knocked out, according to a fundraiser created to help cover her mounting medical bills.

The GoFundMe page, organized by Catherine Schetina on behalf of longtime volunteer Eva Woods, says the violent attack happened during the group’s regular Sunday lunch service in the park in late February.

The suspect approached Woods from behind without warning and struck her in the face with a metal pipe, according to the fundraiser.

“During our regular lunch service on Sunday, Feb. 22, a woman came through the park with a metal pipe. Without conversation, she came up behind Eva and hit her in the jaw,” the page states.

Woods was rushed to the hospital and underwent surgery the following day. Doctors said both her upper and lower jaw had been broken in the assault, the GoFundMe page states. It also says that Wood’s jaw has been wired shut and she will require dental implants to replace the six teeth she lost in the attack.

Friends say Woods has spent the last six years running the MacArthur Project, a volunteer-run mutual aid effort that provides more than 700 meals each week to homeless people living in the park.

Volunteers serve food three times a week and regularly distribute hygiene kits, groceries, tents and other supplies.

“This woman, and this incident, are not representative of the culture of MacArthur Park and the community we serve there,” Schetina wrote. “She is not someone we’ve met in the past, and others in the park weren’t familiar with her. This was absolutely a bizarre one-off.”

But the attack unfolded in a park long tied to a relentless stream of emergency calls.

The California Post recently reported that areas such as Skid Row and MacArthur Park generate a staggering number of 911 calls as first responders grapple with the city’s spiraling homelessness and mental health crisis.

Roughly one-third of all calls to the Los Angeles Police Department, about 40 calls every hour, involve someone suffering a mental health crisis, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell told The Post.

Firefighters on the front lines say the numbers are just as staggering. Los Angeles Fire Department Station 11, which serves the MacArthur Park area, responded to 8,568 ambulance runs in the first eight months of 2025, compared with just 55 structure fires, making it one of the busiest firehouses in the country.

(To be fair to this Good Samaritan, I spent three years volunteering at the Portland Maine soup kitchen, 3X a week, and, aside from a few crazies, the recipients were often grateful, sometimes indifferent, but not particularly violent, at least with us.

Two incidents:

I once inadvertently left my car parked, running and unlocked, on a nearby street while I did two shifts; returning, I saw what I’d so carelessly done, and was astonished that, in such a rough neighborhood, the car was still there. A ragged man — possibly, dare I say it,one of Portland’s Somalian refugees — left a group of men on the sidewalk and approached me: “Don’t worry, mon, we know whose car this is, and we been keeping an eye on it — wasn’t no one gonna touch it.”.

Another time, walking in the same area after serving breakfast, a very large, very ragged man stepped in front of me and poked a finger at my face: “You work at the kitchen, don’t you?” “Uh oh, I thought, here it comes: he didn’t like his oatmeal”, but I admitted that I did. “Well god bless you”, jabbing his finger at me again, “God bless you!” and he walked way.

So they’re some good people out there. Fellow volunteers and I sometimes discussed whether our efforts weren’t just enabling them, deterring them from doing something about their lives and seeking help, but decided that was a question above our pay scale: they were hungry, we were feeding them, and let someone else figure out what to do with them aside from that.

That said, Portland Maine does a pretty good job of taking the most violent lunatics off the city streets; LA leaves them in situ, free to roam and attack, just as NYC does; I wouldn’t risk my life in either place.)

Good: now just be sure to try him outside of NYC or D.C. Updated: One more example of the media's whitewash

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BREAKING: Bondi Officially Charges Muslim Terrorists Who Tried to Bomb NYC Protest

[Editor’s note: they didn’t “try” to bomb the ant-Iranian demonstrators, they threw them into the crowd; that the fact that the bombs didn’t explode doesn’t reduce the crime to “attempt”, at least as I understand these things.]

The charges include providing material support to a terrorist organization and using a weapon of mass destruction.

In case you missed it, on Saturday, March 7, an anti-Islam protest gathered outside Gracie Mansion — the official residence of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — when two homemade improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were thrown toward the protesters. 

The devices contained triacetone triperoxide or TATP, a volatile homemade explosive often called "mother of Satan," as well as nuts, bolts, and screws. They were ignited but failed to fully detonate, creating smoke and chaos. Thankfully, no one was injured. A third device was later found near a vehicle the alleged terrorists drove, sparking evacuations at nearby apartment buildings. 

They not only have them on video, the two bombers proudly confessed all:

The suspects are 18-year-old Emir Balat and 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi, both of whom are from Pennsylvania. They were arrested shortly after the incident. Both the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force called it "ISIS-inspired terrorism." 

According to Balat's statement to law enforcement, he wanted to carry out an attack that was bigger than the Boston Marathon bombing. Here's more from the official statement:  

In the NYPD vehicle en route to the NYPD precinct, BALAT, without being questioned by the NYPD officers transporting him, made the following spontaneous utterances, in part and as captured on the transporting NYPD officers' body-worn camera footage: 'this isn't a religion that just stands when people talk about the blessed name of the prophet... We take action! We take action!'; and "'I didn't do it someone else will come and do it.'

After arriving at the precinct and being advised of, and waiving, his Miranda rights, BALAT requested a piece of paper and, after being given a paper and pen, wrote the following: 'All praise is due to Allah lord of all worlds! I pledge my allegience [sic] to the Islamic State. Die in your rage yu [sic] kuffar! Emir B.' Based on my training and experience, I know that "kuffar" is an Arabic term that refers to 'non-believers' or 'infidels,' and that 'Die in your rage' is a slogan used by ISIS and based on a verse in the Quran.

Law enforcement officers later asked BALAT if he was familiar with the Boston Marathon bombing, and if that was what BALAT had hoped to accomplish. BALAT responded: 'No, even bigger. It was only three deaths.'

Between Mamdani’s dismissal of the incident as “anti-Muslim” hatred (?), the DA’s history of non-prosecution of enemies of the country, and the NYT/CNN whitewashing of the bombing, federal prosecution is the only thing that will protect the city.

Fortunately, we have America’s Real Paper of Record to report objectively on these sorts of incidents.

UPDATE. Here’s how NBC presented the story to its viewers":

Bombs were thrown at anti-Muslim demonstrators protesting (peacefully) outside Gracie Mansion. The bombs — not “suspicious devices” – were not “found”, but recovered after they landed at the feet of the demonstrators but failed to explode; despite the implication that there was violence on both sides, the “multiple arrests” were actually just two: the bomb throwers who staged the attack; and Mamdani had nothing to do with this terror plot by admitted ISIS supporters. Other than that, the headline is accurate.