How Much Would You Have to Hate a City?

A State?  Or even a Nation?

My friend Geoff just passed along a video from an activist in San Francisco.  He recorded Fisherman's Wharf and the area Surrounding it as it exists today.  A painful 20 minutes or so showing us all what happens when we let the inmates run the asylum.  Because our Constitutionally-appointed "MainStreamMedia" won't do it.  I was frankly astounded.  And sickened.  And angered...

I used to "live" in San Francisco.  Back when living there meant you had arrived.  The pinnacle!  You'd studied, and worked, and sweated, and performed.  And now you'd arrived!  You'd "Moved On Up!"  Great views, great food, great (wierd) people, semi-great weather.  Why would anyone want to destroy this jewel?  

Actually, my company moved me to the Los Angeles area way back when, but I discovered being based out of SFO was more convenient to my travel schedule.  Which was the world.  So I got a tiny apartment above Compagnola's, right off the Wharf.  I'd fly up Sunday evenings sometimes, better preparing me to embark on my sales trips the next day.  To NYC, or STL, or SEA, or CHI, or DAL, or DEN, or PHL.  Or Canada.  Or Mexico.  I did that "flying out" more than 100 times while I was flying for a living (2,000,000 air miles over 7 years of plane-a-day!).  Before I could settle down and stop living in airport lounges.

The City by the Bay.  The most beautiful city in all of America.  And the one most cosmopolitan.  Our Toronto.  Our Venice.  Our Paris.  Just a smallish little city of 400,000 or so.  Nestled up next to the Ocean.  Ringed by low hills.  A grown-up fishing village, which tourists chose to adopt.  And Liberals chose to remain (Summer of Love, and all that).  Warm and friendly by day, cool and foggy by night.  Clam chowder and sourdough bread.  Crab and swordfish and cioppino.  Fog blanketing everything.  Seals by the hundreds.  Alcatraz.  Kooky panhandlers.  Sidewalk jugglers.  The smell of fish.  Nothing else like it.  

(In fact, I used to sing in a band during my college days.  Not very well, but the drunks didn't care.  Anything to get by.  And my signature sign-off song was "I left my heart..."  Tony  Bennett's swan song.  I must have sung that song 500 times.  Several V.O. and Gingers made my voice sound tolerable.) 

The best restaurants in America were in San Francisco.  Except maybe for New Orleans.  But that's for a later discussion.  I love Szechuan cooking, and SFO is where to find it.  It will remove a layer of skin from your tongue, and that's just the first bite.  There were a dozen such restaurants there, all in a row.  And I haunted them all.  

That was then, this is now...

The video Geoff sent me showed that nearly every single restaurant and business surrounding Fisherman's Wharf is now closed!  

Alioto's is closed, a restaurant that first opened in 1915.  Scoma's is now closed.  Perhaps my favorite restaurant in all the world.  Boudin's famous sourdough bread place is closed.  It's been there more than 100 years.  All of the restaurants surrounding Fisherman's Wharf are now closed.  Boarded up.  As if preparing for a hurricane.  Including Companola's, with 112 years of history.  Imagine that:  Two World Wars couldn't kill it.  The Great Depression couldn't kill it.  But BoyGuv ("Hairgod") Newsom killed it.  And the socialist mayors and governors before him helped kill it.  And the highest Minimum Wage and operating costs in the Nation, killed it.    

We used to run America for the benefit of the majority.  While also lending a hand to those less advantaged.  Now?  We now run our Country for the 5% who are aggrieved, and for the illegal aliens pouring in, while ignoring the needs or the will of that majority.  Not even for its Veterans.  To whom we owe not only a debt of gratitude, we owe them our Freedom... 

30% of America's homeless are basing themselves in Taxifornia.  Our great Mediterrean weather brings them in droves.  And more than 40% of those 30% are sleeping on the Streets of San Francisco.  And pissing.  And shit*ing.  Living in squalor.  Shooting up cheap drugs, and then zoning out for hours.  Or dying.  Clotting up the sidewalk.  The smell of urine, and feces, and rotten food, and body odor, and stale fish permeates the atmosphere.  

Their "Poop Patrol" wanders around picking up feces from the sidewalk.  They patrol in their Teslas looking for piles of crap.  The human kind.  And there were 78,000 such instances in 2022, the most recent statistics available.  Imagine:  78,000 piles of sh*t.  That job starts you out at $79,000 a year.  Which isn't enough to live there, so many of them are living in their cars.

Oh yeah, a high school diploma is not required.

And crime.  We simply must talk a bit about crime.  SFO is now crime central.  The Westfield Mall I spoke of earlier is now closed.  Along with all the other stores it served to anchor.  Including a 37 screen multiplex.  And the 43 stores who bailed on their leases.

Muggings are routine.  Stores no longer report shoplifting.  The City suffers more than 60 broken car windows a day.  When your car window's broken there and you call 911, they no longer send out a cruiser.  Because they likely don't have one to send.  They just pay for your window from a Taxpayers' fund they've created.  More than 180 car windows broken on a record day there recently.  

This is where Kamala Harris crawled her way up the food chain...

And swarms of thieves ransacking high-end stores.  The ones that remain, that is.  Emptying a "Coach" store in less than 90 seconds recently.  $890,000 worth of product.  Which is then sold on the Internet.  And nobody seems to care.  Catch them, you ask?  You can "legally" steal up to $949.00 a day, per store, without fearing a felony.  If they happen to have a cop around, and he decides to nab you (big "if"), it's a $50.00 fine.  And if you don't show up for court?  No mechanism to go out and pick you up.  Just fuggetttaboutit!  

17 of the City's 34 drug stores have closed.  Rite Aid has gone bankrupt.  Walgreens' is close behind.  CVS has everything not yet stolen locked up behind Plexiglas.  They can no longer afford to stay open.   

But wait!  What if you get caught trying to rob some poor old Veteran and a cop cannot avoid arresting you?  Well, Kamala's "NO CASH" bail will put you back on the street before the cop has finished up your booking sheet.  Which is why cops are avoiding arrests.  And why cops are fleeing the City.  Might as well just sit back and watch the akshun, right?  Safer that way.  And you don't get paid extra for doing your job "with conviction."  In a City that thinks cops are the enemy.  

San Francisco is a failed city.  Musk just noticed everyone he's moving "X" from the City.  He already removed Tesla, and TeslaX, and SpaceX from the once-Golden State.  He moved them to Texas, of course.  And more than 100 other Fortune 1,000 companies have bailed as well.  Many of them headquartered in SFO.    

Walking the streets there will get you killed.  Knifed, shot, bludgeoned.  Being robbed is an everyday occurrence.  You step over druggies.  And feces.  And needles.  You must walk in the streets in order to get to your school, or the hospitals, or even City Hall.  A SF 49'er rookie was just shot over his Rolex.  In broad daylight!  Thankfully he lived, but the kid who shot him didn't care.  BTW, the prosecuters there don't believe the attempted murderer intended to murder him.  Just shoot him.  Which is okay, I guess.  Which downgrades the charge to the unintended aggravated misapplication of a pointy object.  So he'll likely be out on bail by the time you read this.

How much would you have to hate a City, or a State, in order to bring down such a disaster upon it?  And it's not like it happened overnight.  It's been happening for more than a decade.  Slowly, inexoriably.  And how much would you have to hate America in order to infect it with CA?  

Kamala Harris was elected Attorney General of Taxifornia.  And she was in charge when Prop. 42, the law that permitted open shoplifting and "no cash" bail, was passed.  She sponsored all the "Green New Deal" legislation.  She was the deciding vote on it.  If Kamala Harris is elected, San Francisco values will permeate the White House.

And America will be history...