The 25 best blogs nov: May In Baltimore: Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You

or:

You Want It / Baby, You Got It

or:

Bob Is Kinda Fed-Up

From AP MyWay, Juliet Linderman reporting, we learn:

Antoinette Perrine has barricaded her front door since her brother was killed three weeks ago on a basketball court near her home in the Harlem Park neighborhood of West Baltimore. She already has iron bars outside her windows and added metal slabs on the inside to deflect the gunfire.

“I’m afraid to go outside,” said Perrine, 47. “It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside. People wake up with shots through their windows. Police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.”

Perrine’s brother is one of 36 people killed in Baltimore so far this month, already the highest homicide count for May since 1999. But while homicides are spiking, arrests have plunged more than 50 percent compared to last year.

The drop in arrests followed the death of Freddie Gray from injuries he suffered in police custody. Gray’s death sparked protests against the police and some rioting, and led to the indictment of six officers.

Now West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them. In recent weeks, some neighborhoods have become like the Wild West without a lawman around, residents said.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was arrested.

“I haven’t seen the police since the riots,” Lee said. “People feel as though they can do things and get away with it. I see people walking with guns almost every single day, because they know the police aren’t pulling them up like they used to.”

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said last week his officers “are not holding back” from policing tough neighborhoods, but they are encountering dangerous hostility in the Western District.

“Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time,” Batts said.

At a City Council meeting Wednesday, Batts said officers have expressed concern they could be arrested for making mistakes.

<rant>Yeah?…no shit, Commissioner Batt-Guano.

Hey, people of Baltimore: You brought this on yourselves by demanding that your Police Department be castrated. Well…the operation was a rousing success [it certainly ‘roused’ the gangs, eh?] and now you’re complaining that the PD is not doing their job? Ain’t that a bitch, huh?

“There was a shooting down the street, and the man was standing in the middle of the street with a gun, just shooting,” Lee added. “Usually, you can’t walk up and down the street drinking or smoking weed. Now, people are everywhere smoking weed, and police just ride by, look at you, and keep going. There used to be police on every corner. I don’t think they’ll be back this summer.”

Really?!? I wonder why, you moron.

When there was a strong police presence [which was necessary because so many Baltimore Residents were sowing Chaos and acting like semi-savages] you all complained that it was RAAAAACIST! and that the BPD was harassing you. The police have now respected your wishes and stopped the ‘harassment’ and you sit there and complain.

Hell, you, Mr. Lee, and your compatriots are ungrateful. You got what you wanted. That what you got really, really sucks is your problem.

Veronica Edmonds, a 26-year-old mother of seven in the Gilmor Homes, said she wishes the police would return and focus on violent crime rather than minor drug offenses.

“If they focused more on criminals and left the petty stuff alone, the community would have more respect for police officers,” she said.

Ever heard of a successful little program called ‘Broken Windows’, lady? You should read up on it [if you can read] because it works, dingbat. Oh!…and you might want to change the name of where you live to ‘Diemor Homes’ until you decide to get serious.

Some more:

At a news conference Wednesday, [~~Apparatchik~~, er, Mayor Stephanie] Rawlings-Blake said there were “a lot of reasons why we’re having a surge in violence.”

“Other cities that have experienced police officers accused or indicted of crimes, there’s a lot of distrust and a community breakdown,” Rawlings-Blake said. “The result is routinely increased violence.”

Rawlings-Blake said her office is “examining” the relationship between the homicide spike and the dwindling arrest rate.

“It’s clear that the relationship between the commissioner and the rank-and-file is strained,” she said. “He’s working very hard to repair that relationship.

Riiiight…trouble is: he can’t get his nose out of your butt long enough to accomplish anything.

</rant>

That Baltimore will go the way of Detroit — or worse — because real reform will not be implemented is a bet well-worth making.

That the people of Baltimore [those left] will not do what is necessary is a given in this benighted and deranged funhouse we live in.

So expect the worst. No point in wasting any energy hoping for the best because this is a situation where the situation there will have to degenerate into even greater Barbarity before the Flame Of Hope has any chance of being reignited.

And Baltimore will not be the last city to so degenerate. The Left is determined to bring the example of Detroit, and now Baltimore, to as many cities as possible.

Our only hope is to Join Or Die in some part of what used to be The United States Of America and regroup around a renewed commitment to Local Governance under The Rule Of Law, Ordered Liberty, and a Restoration of true Republican Virtue.

This requires the purging of all Ideological Thinking from our own Souls and a refusal to legitimize the thinking of the Ideologues.

As with the national government, the vast majority of the Urban areas in America are Terminal, beyond helping, gripped by the black fevers of Leftism and other Ideologies [such as Libertarianism].

We, The Remnant, those who are committed to the American Moral Cause, must band together physically and Spiritually.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. …Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart

Refugium inveniemus in provinciis.
[lit: Find refuge in the provinces.]