Time, The Great Vindicator

Me, February 14, 2018:

My spidey sense informs me that de Leon actually does differ from Feinstein on Israel and Military-Industrial Complex.

Me, July 18, 2018:

Two, taboo issues that are representative of the left’s own internal schism.  Remember my analysis of Dianne Feinstein vs Kevin De Leon? I told you there, and it applies in NY-14-D, that military-industrial complex and Israel were factors, even though it is impermissible in polite political society to talk about the latter.  Jenny from the Block [AOC — Ed.] in NY-14-D, just like Kevin’s Underground Rave in CA-Jungle, was smart enough not to come out against the MIC and Israel in public, but was clever enough to have underground subordinates do that on her behalf and behind one or more layers of plausible deniability.  Though the late breaking news in the last several days is that Jenny from the Block is starting to get more comfortable in being public with her anti-Israel sentiments.  Whether it’s Kevin’s Underground Rave or DiFi in the Senate from California, or Joe Crowley or Jenny from the Block in the House from NY-14, they would vote alike close to 100% of the time in the Senate or House.  So when it comes to Democrat-left internecine politics that are so obviously contentious and divisive in public view, I infer that taboo issues are the underground heat and energy source.

Me, August 8, 2018 (as a comment):

One point I missed is that if you swap out Clay for Bush, the voting record would be 99% the same. But the differences between Clay and Bush are what I’ve been saying for months that they are in these internecine Democrat-left politics where the title card combatants otherwise seem to be identical: Military Industrial Complex, and Israel. I think Bush would vote against MIC and Israel in ways that Clay would not.

As you know, Cori Bush was able to knock Clay off this year.

A tweet from yesterday:

If you're having a bad day, just think of all the social services we're going to fund after we defund the Pentagon.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) October 20, 2020

S. H. T. F.

But it’s not as if I didn’t warn you.

Blood on the Door Sill

Webster Groves

I didn’t have to read past the headline to know that the whole thing is about property values.

Here’s a wooden nickel’s worth of free advice from a far far away St. Louis native:

Chill.

Because I figured it out five years ago.

The BLM yard sign isn’t a sign of an impending loss of property values, it’s more like the blood painted on the door sills in The Ten Commandments — It’s a symbol put there with the hopes that it keeps the pestilence and plague away.  Which means that they’re not trying to reduce property values, they’re trying to maintain them.

When you see your first WMSKEO yard sign within comfortable walking distance, then it’s time to worry.

Statue Removal Is a Revolution in Permanence

Forest Park

NOTE: Related discussion of the CWE matter below in the comment section.

When the Woke Taliban was finally able to cancel the UDC monument in Forest Park several years ago, I very briefly thought of ole Louie the Ninth, and thought that eventually, his inevitably less than purely social justicey past would catch up with him, and that it would wind up being the case that the statue removal jihad in Forest Park was not yet finished.

I should have held on to my ephemeral theory, because I see from afar that it’s starting to come true, and that, not surprisingly, a Creve Coeur parenthetical is the straw stirring the drink.

If the statue itself has to go, then the next reasonable step is that St. Louis’s very name has to go.

What will be the new name?

Easy:

Percy Green City.

You Should Know Better Than to Piss Off Italians

Tower Grove Park

You motherfuckers actually went and did it.

Whoever did it, nice knowing you.  Hope you enjoy the fit and feel of concrete shoes.

Note that this was NOT City Hall’s doings.  Tower Grove Park is a park, but not a St. Louis City park.  It’s run and administered under the aegis of Henry Shaw’s will and estate, and of course, if you’re old enough, you know that the traditional name of the adjoining Missouri Botanical Gardens is Shaw’s Garden.  So, if you’re reading this from The Hill, you won’t be making any concrete shoes for anyone at City Hall.

It’s On

Downtown St. Louis

Forget about Iran.  A real war has broken out back in St. Louis, between Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and the St. Louis City Police Officers Association.

Four years ago, and I would have had a front row seat.  The bombs bursting in air, right above my head.

If I know St. Louis’s civic elite and establishment like I do, then this will be the big serial thing for them for as long as it lasts, and of course it will matter to the directly interested and involved parties, but the rest of St. Louis will snore.  If I was still there, I would be covering the blow by blow, including slipping in some insider info, but strategically so, so as not to blow my cover.  Alas, I’ll just have to follow the P-D’s telling, and whatever secret squirrels back there that even remember me that send me privileged info from time to time.

In related news, I see there’s this.  The only corporeal human being I voted for in 2016 other than Trump was Josh Hawley for Attorney General, in the primary, because the party establishment choice was a rat fink Judas on Mizzou, and then in the general after Hawley won the primary, because I knew by then that the Soros whore in the person of Kim Gardner would be the next Circuit Attorney, and we’d need Hawley as AG to do the prosecution that she wouldn’t.  Since then, the deck has been shuffled in state government executive positions, and it’s now Eric Schmitt as AG, and then of course the upset of Wesley Bell over Bob McCulloch in August 2018, he being another Gardner-type.  (The only reason he actually didn’t get Soros money is that nobody thought he had a chance.)  So it’s now Schmitt having to do Wesley Bell’s and Kim Gardner’s work.  And of course, the cops in St. Louis City and County are dropping more and more case files in Jensen’s lap instead of Bell’s or Gardner’s — That much, if I wasn’t smart enough to guess, I know from continuing to read the St. Louis media.

And, of course, as I always say about the native city:

Swipe Right

St. Louis

Red Pill Dump Truck alert.

There will be a lot of women who download and use this app.

Not to find out which men to avoid, but to find out which men to date.

For much the same reason that death row inmates get a lot of love letters.

Think it through.

The San Francisco Treat

University City

I could be on New Horizons on my way out of the Solar System, and if I had an oxygen supply and connectivity, I’d still be able to snark about my native berg.

So, to this, I say:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHHHAHAH

It was talked about since I was a teenager, took longer than expected to build, (no surprise there), but not even a year into operation, it’s a big money pit that will shut down around its first birthday unless it gets a bailout.   If nah, then the Feds will want the two-thirds of the $51.5 million it ponied up to be repaid.  Though that begs the question of how a short distance street trolley confined within one part of one suburb was relevant to interstate commerce such that it got Federal funding.

But here’s where I can uniquely contribute to the coming postmortem:

White liberals, in spite of their degree, diploma and credential braggadocio, have a really bad cargo cult habit.

It’s why pretentious humanities professors in the United States started driving Volvos in the 1970s.  It’s because they were cargo culting Swedish social democracy.  Of course, they, with all their intelligence and graduate degrees, couldn’t stop for a moment to consider why Swedish social democracy works(-ed), and anyway they would’ve hated some the reasons if they would have bothered to investigate honestly.  Don’t even consider the fact that their modern day colleagues will be honest about why the Swedish social democratic model is under threat, (hint hint mass non-white immigration thanks to the same sort of Swedish cuckery which bore big parts of the Swedish social democratic model).

Applied to the U-City Trolley:

The white libs along the U-City Loop and nearby were cargo culting San Francisco and its trolley system.  Just put a trolley along Delmar, and presto chango, U-City will be San Francisco, the progressive paradise.  (That isn’t so progressive anymore, because tech billionaires and banks that facilitate trans-Pacific commerce have bought out and bought off the joint, but that’ll be our little secret.)

None dare officially suggest that the U-City Loop’s bigger, in fact, biggest problem, is the fact it’s cheek-to-jowl with f’n Bell Curve City on four of the eight directions of the compass rose, which means frequent mahogany mob problems at Loop establishments and on the sidewalks and streets themselves.  I’m guessing that these taboo reasons were a major part of the trolley’s low ridership.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I just have to, just one more time:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHHHAAHAHAHHHHHAAAAH

Spent Capital

Downtown St. Louis

I saw in the American national news through the day yesterday that the big three non-HIV/AIDS STDs are at an all-time high infection rate.

So I knew it would only be a matter of time before the St. Louis media would focus on the St. Louis angle, most notably, St. Louis City’s rank in those infections.

Next day.

And we get the usual long time excuse:

The rates in St. Louis are among the highest because St. Louis and Baltimore are the only cities reporting numbers as independent cities rather than as a county, explained Dr. Hilary Reno, assistant professor at Washington University School of Medicine and medical director of the St. Louis County Sexual Health Clinic.

It’s the same old ZOMG WE CAN’T ANNEX LOL~!!!!1 line.  Or the, “city limits signs cause x, y or z social pathology” line.

But here’s the problem with trotting out that line now:

That capital has already been spent, that well has run dry.

Because the political “solution” to that “problem” was the Louschaltung, and that officially, in terms of a serious public proposal, lasted about as long as a shooting star, (Remember earlier this year?  I know, nobody can remember five to eight months ago because we’re all supposed to be outraged about insults leveled against black women’s hair in 1829), even though it had been in brewing within the confines of St. Louis’s domestic dog patch deep state since the fall of 2006.

One Degree of Separation

Paris

In his young years, he not only lived in St. Louis for a short time, but during that time, briefly worked at A-B as a forklift driver.

The Brewery, in the same zip code where I lived for most of my childhood and growing up years, and five relatives of mine on the grandparents on down, both blood and marriage, and siblings of grandparents, also made a living there.

The Keith Whitley Doctrine

Frankfurt;  St. Louis

This is why I get paid the big bucks, and why you read this space, the few of you remaining who do.

It’s because I can draw a through line between what’s going on close to where I’m currently and temporarily residing and where I come from.

I was originally planning on making this a long drawn out post full of profundities and epiphanies, but I think I can net it out quite a bit.

The Keith Whitley Doctrine:  You say it best when you say nothing at all.  AKA The Alison Krauss Doctrine, AKA The Overstreet-Schlitz Doctrine.

The common denominator between Frankfurt and St. Louis at the present time is the fact that the individuals who aren’t at important and newsworthy events in both cities, either by choice or deliberate non-invitation, speak volumes.

I went to the Frankfurt Auto Show yesterday to have a peek around, ironically, after my driving lesson in the morning.  Frankfurt, of course, being a mere 19 miles to the east of Wiesbaden.  The noteworthy absent individual is one Peter Feldmann, the Mayor of Frankfurt, a Social Democrat.  He made it clear he wasn’t going at all, because climate change.  If you want to know why his absence for his stated reason speaks volumes about his own political party’s future, or lack thereof, then read this.

I’ll also note the irony that close to half of the cars on display are electrics.  Though, I have to back up and remember that the demented cat lady running the country shut down all the nuclear power plants, based on what was actually the German media’s favorite word, an Einzelfall, so all those electric cars are overglorified fossil fuel burners.

Now, let’s deal with the native berg.

Back on Tuesday, there was a big crime summit powwow at City Hall, which had as its two big headliners the most important person who works in that building, and the most important person who works in about the middle of the state.  But there were two big deliberate snubs:  One of them is the most important person who works in the edifice caddy-corner to City Hall, and the other is her Clayton counterpart.

You don’t have to be someone like me who was once plugged in well enough to St. Louis’s civic establishment to know what message is being sent here.  It’s that, for all the city and state media and political bluster about zomg gun laws and zomg police staffing and zomg dem programs, the important people in St. Louis know that the real big problems are Kim Gardner and Wesley Bell, and their policies of “thou shalt not prosecute black crime if thoust can help it.”  The former being a Soros whore, the only reason the latter isn’t is because nobody expected him to pull off the upset that he did, so the Open Sores Foundation never thought to write him a check.

Concomitant to that, it hit the news late last week that Mary Pat Carl, who was Jennifer Joyce’s Chief ACA for Homicide, and was considered the odds on favorite to replace her as Circuit Attorney, until Soros’s shekels pushed Kim Gardner to victory, is going to make another run at it next year.  As you can read here, Carl’s “official” reasoning for the second try is something-something Gardner’s corruption blah blah, but I think we all know the real reason.  A reason that it takes me, a whole other hemisphere away and a whole major ocean separating, to state publicly.

I’ll leave you with this.  One of my secret squirrel sources back in the native berg sent me this.  Whoever compiled this front page for this issue was trolling me, I can just feel it.  Full resolution link here.

Wow, Fifty Clams

Boston

This is the kind of story I would not discuss beyond a quick mention on my social sites (Minds, Gab, and for now, Twitter), but this has a St. Louis angle:

Boston is giving every public school kindergartner $50 to promote saving for college or career training

That $50 will come very much in handy when they’re trying to fund whatever Harvard tuition will be in 2032.

I’ll skip ahead to the St. Louis angle:

The city-wide program aims to provide broader access to college and careers for Boston families and to create a culture where students begin preparing earlier for life beyond high school. City officials cited a 2013 Washington University in St. Louis study that found that a child from a low-to-moderate-income home with at least $499 in their account before reaching college age “is more than four times more likely to enroll in college than a child with no savings account.”

And nobody on Hilltop yelled “correlation causation problems” before putting the school seal on that research? They’re selling you on the notion that the bank account is the cause and going to college is the effect. I’m here to break it to you that the parents of children in “low to moderate income” households who would take the initiative to do at least a little bit of saving for college, even if $499 is a pittance, are probably intelligent enough to have produced children intelligent enough either to be accepted into a college with admissions standards, or at least want to start out at an open admissions institution like a junior or community college.

Alas, no. Hilltop peddles this stupid research, and this begs the equally brainless politicians into enacting boondoggles like these.

And in 25 years, when the program turns out to be a failure, and the original WU research will be shown to have “methodological problems,” nobody will be held accountable, because democracy.

 

All in the Family

Downtown St. Louis

I find it ironic and loop-closing that a Federal judge named Limbaugh has ordered Stan Kroenke to shell out based on the PSL class action lawsuit that was filed after Kroenke moved the Rams back to Los Angeles.

Said Federal judge’s first cousin once wanted to own a non-controlling minority share of the Rams while they were in St. Louis, but the league cock blocked.

Kroenke himself is regarded as the NFL’s second most powerful owner, behind only Jerry Jones.

Who Murdered Better Together?

Downtown St. Louis;  Clayton

When the official Better Together plan officially dropped just a little more than three months ago, I happened to be in Berlin on that day, making thinking about the concept of reunification a bit ironic.  So I also figured on a new snarky name to call the whole St. Louis City and County reunification effort:  Louschaltung.  Think:  St. (LOU)is + Gleichschaltung.  The latter term when used as a common gerund means “coordination” or “phasing in” (“Gleich” = Equal, “Schaltung” = Shifting or Switching), and when used as a proper noun, it means the NSDAP regime’s program of eliminating political regionalism and federalism and compelling Germans to give up thinking of themselves in local or regional terms and think of themselves purely as Germans.

At least the Gleichschaltung lasted for more than three months.  Hell, at least the Gleichschaltung was actually implemented.

Before I called it the Louschaltung, I called it the Steve and Lyda Show, after its two most notable St. Louis advocates, then-St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, and St. Louis City Mayor Lyda Krewson, and their joint press conference to tout the concept several years ago.  In reality, from the vantage point of St. Louis’s civic elites, its dog patch deep state, this effort has been in the works since 2006.  In fact, I can point to the exact date that convinced St. Louis’s dog patch deep state that city-county reunification is something that should happen:  October 30, 2006.  That was one day after the Cardinals won the 2006 World Series, over Detroit, and then on that day, the Morgan Quitno most dangerous cities crime rankings came out, and St. Louis was #1 and Detroit #2.  Well, out of the morass of Official St. Louis having a forked tongue reaction to the rankings, either they said the rankings were deceptive because reasons, or they said they were true so we needed to pass a sales tax for recreation centers, Official St. Louis eventually came to the consensus that the bad news needs to stop, and that the way to do it was to start another effort to reunify St. Louis City and County, so that the merged polity can have a common police department and most importantly a common crime reporting mechanism and common crime statistic.  This would serve to use St. Louis County’s white people as statistical cover for St. Louis City’s violent blacks (and after August 2014, they got even more violent for several years).

Fast forward to today.

Who murdered Better Together?

That the TOD is very close to the fall of Steve Stenger gradually then suddenly, it’s too easy to pawn this off on him.  That’s because his replacement as County Executive, Sam Page, while I really don’t know anything about him, because he was no longer in the General Assembly when I started my several years as a lobbyist, he is probably someone that, even if he didn’t initially agree with the Louschaltung, could be made one of those offers he couldn’t refuse.

Here’s my prime suspect:

B-L-A-C-K.  Namely, NAACP.

Remember, I wrote that, when the Louschaltung’s official nuts-and-bolts proposal was released, that all this talk about social justice and law enforcement was deliberately designed to appeal to black voters, to overcome their fears that the merger will cost a lot of black people their public service jobs for municipalities and other public entities that would be eliminated.  Well, just look at my comment in our favorite doggy’s post here about Steve Stenger’s resignation more than a week ago.  From a distance, I saw this hoopla about the St. Louis NAACP out of the corner of my eye, but I didn’t give it any thought or care at first;  I presumed it was over some trifle, like a bank account, or someone firing someone else’s favorite niece.  But since our favorite doggy called my close attention to it, turns out the St. Louis NAACP palace coup was entirely about the Louschaltung, that the now ousted leader supports it, while next to nobody else within does.

I instantly concluded that it was very bad news for the Louschaltung.  Because it would need an overwhelming landslide majority from black voters in St. Louis County in order to overcome the relatively significant opposition from red-white voters in the County;  Such as that was, all this talk about “tax savings” was designed to blunt their opposition to try to keep their margin of disapproval manageable.  But if the Louschaltung is so unpopular within the local NAACP such that it results in the President being tossed out on his ears, then it probably means there’s nowhere close to landslide support for it among black voters on the ground, probably it would lose the black vote overall.

Long and short:  What killed Better Together is that St. Louis County’s blacks weren’t having it.

Europe Can Pack ‘Em In

Cologne

Explaining the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region to St. Louisans.

First off, Germany has only twice the land area of Missouri, but with 82 million people.  Imagine if Missouri had 41 million people.

The Michelin road atlas of Germany is actually an eight-country atlas.  While it’s only officially advertised as having seven countries, (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland), any map or atlas that shows either all of Switzerland or all of Austria will by necessity show all of Lichtenstein.  And those eight countries have a total combined population of 138 million, all while having a total combined land area less than Texas.

Now for the good stuff, the thought experiment.

Put Cologne Cathedral and the St. Louis Arch in the same space, then keep everything else to scale.

Bonn would be just south of Millstadt, Illinois.  Düsseldorf would be at Pelican Island, the northernmost part of St. Louis County.  Duisburg would be northeast of Godfrey, Illinois.  Essen would be near Brighton, Illinois, and Dortmund would be right about at Gillespie, Illinois.  Mönchengladbach would be north of St. Peters in the Mississippi River valley.  Aachen, while not officially part of The Region, is close enough and historically important enough to mention here;  It would be at Villa Ridge, Missouri, which is the place where Highway 50 splits off of I-44 as Route 50 goes to Washington.

The population of the urbanized parts of The Region is more than ten million.

Expanding out a bit further, Bremen would be around Chenoa, Illinois (northeast of Bloomington), Berlin would be at Ridgeville, Indiana (east of Muncie), Frankfurt would be at Marion, Illinois, and Munich would be at Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

And yet, I have to hear the ZOMG WE NEED MORE PEEPHUL LOL~!!!!1 Kuhscheiße in this country and on this continent.

On the other hand, it’s why sky high European gas prices aren’t quite so bad in terms of the household budget of the typical sort of average car owner, if only because people don’t really need to log that many miles in their cars, only because everything is so much closely packed together.  And most German car owners will take the train for out of town trips anyway.  Also my cynicism informs me that high gas prices are a deliberate public policy position, only because traffic in Germany and Europe is already so phlarking bad that if gas were much cheaper, traffic would be impossible on account of all the new cars on the roads.  It’s why, in spite of the reputation that the Autobahns have among Americans, the reality is that barely more than half the system mileage has no legal speed limit anymore, the percentage continues to decline over time, and even where there is no speed limit, it’s not a good idea to floor the gas anyway.  The only difference is because Germans have better lane and spacing discipline than Americans, it means it’s safer to go faster and with more overall throughput.  It is credibly estimated that the 85th percentile, or one standard deviation above the median, speed, on no speed limit Autobahn sections, is 92 miles an hour.

Huh?

Kirkwood

NYT’s article about Snowplow Parenting and its deleterious effects.

This part:

Carolyn O’Laughlin worked as a director of resident life at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, and now does a similar job at St. Louis Community College, Meramec. “I don’t talk to parents nearly as much here, where parents are down the street, as I did when the parents were across the country,” she said.

“Resident life?”  When did Meramec get dorms?

I know a lot can happen in two years, but I distinctly remember from talking to people that Meramec nor any other SLCC campus had dorms as late as the 2017 spring semester, and that if they were getting them, it would have been fairly big local news in St. Louis.

Any Given Sunday

Greetings from Warsaw.

First off, even if I really had an interest to watch the Super Bowl, the kickoff is at 12:30 AM in my time zone, (Poland and Germany are both on UTC+1), and I’ll be well off into log sawing land by then.

But I saw this interesting piece in SI tonight.

This article sits at the intersectionality of what were two of my serial interests, one of which is now hot again:  The Great Stadium Soap Opera of 2015, and what I now term the Louschaltung (portmanteau of St. (LOU)is and Gleichschaltung), the city-county reunification effort.  (Remember, you might not be interested in the Louschaltung, but the Louschaltung is interested in you.)

I might have mentioned here once or twice or 847,295 times, but just in case you either missed it or are new here, I figured from just about the get-go of the North Riverfront stadium proposal at about the start of 2015 that it wasn’t a serious plan, that local and state officials were going through the motions of looking serious about proposing something that smelled like a serious plan to build what seriously could have been a new stadium, because they all knew that Kroenke was going to move the Rams back to L.A., so they wanted to position themselves on the chessboard in such a way that, when what they knew would happen eventually did happen, all the PR splatter and civic anger would splat on Kroenke’s face, and none of it on any elected or non-elected St. Louis civic officials.

From this article, it seems like that effort has massively succeeded, considering the way “Kroenke” is now a cuss word back on the old home city.

The only thing I got wrong in the long term is that I presumed that Kroenke made up his mind about moving the Rams back to L.A. in the spring of 2014, because the whole Donald Sterling non-troversy relating to the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA showed the business community how valuable a Los Angeles based major pro sports franchise can be.  As it turned out, after the move was done, and people started confessing to stuff, Kroenke actually made up his mind in 2012.

Now, as for the matter of the Louschaltung, it says in the SI article that Kroenke’s formal application to the league for relocation:

St. Louis is a misunderstood place, a city that boomed a century ago and then had a lot of things that didn’t break its way. Chicago reversed the flow of its river, sending us its sludge downstream and then outpacing us with growth. Municipal leaders did some disingenuous and stupid things as they drew boundaries, creating this arcane setup where the microscopic city is left with declining population and atrocious schools. Most of what we call St. Louis is actually St. Louis County, in a bizarre twist, and has its own separate set of demographics and statistics more robust than the city’s. All of us former Kool-Aid babies understand this. Kroenke understands this. And then he and the Rams used those quirks and mistakes, twisted those facts, to pave the Rams’ path out of town. In the team’s application to move away, Kroenke and his cronies listed a smattering of stats about the city’s stagnancy—most of which took into account only the city, not the 10-times-larger metro area—to claim a place that had played home to an NFL team for 49 seasons between the Cardinals and Rams couldn’t viably support one.

In reality, those stats were just an excuse, and even if he didn’t list them, the league still would have approved his relocation application.  That’s because Kroenke is among NFL owners the “good cop” to Jerry Jones’s “bad cop,” and the league has wanted a team back in L.A. badly for a long time.  But that’s not quite the point:  The point is as long as “St. Louis” in terms of the city proper is as statistically bad as it is based on the fact that it’s a relatively small entity both geographically and population-wise, it houses a particularly degenerate black undertow, the more of an embarrassment it becomes to everyone in the region, and hurts the metropolitan area’s prospects.  Or so they say.  Which is why, if you look closely enough, you’ll find one of the two real reasons for the Louschaltung is the “big rug” thesis, that is, using the relatively well behaved white people of St. Louis County as statistical cover for the high violent crime, homicide and STD rates for black St. Louis City.

The Steve and Lyda Show’s Official World Premiere

Downtown;  Clayton

“Better Together” has officially dropped.  (Ch 2, Ch 4, Ch 5, P-D)

I don’t have time to read it, so I’m going to take the St. Louis media’s interpretation at face value, even though I know that’s a bit of a risk.

It is what I’ve been expecting, based on my being able to follow this milieu from almost a front row seat from July 2013 until being so rudely inconvenienced on July 19, 2017.  Yours truly coined the phrase “Steve and Lyda Show” as a clever metonym for the city-county reunification movement the month before being so rudely inconvenienced.

I told you two things about The Steve and Lyda Show all along, even long before I called it that:

(1)  The all but totally unspoken reason for it is that the insurance industry wants the St. Louis City based 22nd Missouri state judicial circuit gone, because St. Louis City juries are known for sticking it to da man, i.e. anyone with more than two nickels to rub together.  Insurance industry funded research into “judicial hellholes” show St. Louis City/22nd as the or close to the worst “judicial hellhole” in the country.  This purpose I know from my days of having that almost a front row seat, but is not obvious even to outsiders who pay close attention.

(2)  Outsiders who have paid close attention long enough know the other reason why reunification is desired in certain circles:  Crime.  Not in terms of making it better in actuality, but it terms of statistically making it disappear.  Reunification means combining city and county in terms of a law enforcement agency, judicial circuit, and most importantly, crime reporting.  What it really means is that puffing up the denominator of what is legally considered “St. Louis” using the relatively well behaved white people of St. Louis County as statistical cover in order to reduce the homicide, violent crime and STD rate for “St. Louis.”  This way, “St. Louis” will no longer be at or near the top of the annual surveys for worst violent crime, worst homicide or worst STD cities.  Because, sometimes the solution to dirty floors is a bigger rug.

Now that you know, in case you didn’t already, that the real purposes of reunification are helping the insurance industry and covering city black violence with a rug, let’s look at what Better Together officially proposes to do and explicitly proposes not to do:

* Create a single judicial circuit for the unified entity
* Create a single civic government for the unified entity
* Create a unified law enforcement agency for the unified entity
* Leave existing fire departments in place (Legalese:  The STLFD would be legally redefined as its own “fire protection district” within the unified entity)
* Leave existing school districts in place

Well, well, well.

Everything I’ve been saying, and then some.

Leaving the school districts in place means that white voters in what are still majority white school districts in St. Louis County, the Mehlville to Parkway belt, and everything in between, won’t have to worry that reunification will mean mashing up all the school districts into one big super giant district and therefore requiring “intra”-district race-based deseg within the hypothetically unified entity wide district.  And leaving the fire departments in place I suspect is designed to leave the STLFD in place, for the purposes of affirmative action.  The schools thing and the fire department thing being left out is designed to create as few reasons as possible for anyone to vote against and to mobilize against B/T.

Public employees for St. Louis City and the many municipalities in St. Louis County have a direct incentive to oppose Better Together, and bet on hearing them make some level of noise.  But, like I said, this is really being done at the behest of the insurance industry (hint:  Rex Sinquefield is a B/T donor), so it’s time for the sworn political superpower enemy of the insurance industry, which is the trial lawyer industry, to get it in gear.  Most of the noise that St. Louisans and Missourians (statewide, because it will take a statewide vote on a Constitutional amendment to make it happen) hear in opposition to this will be funded by the trial lawyer lobby from behind the curtains.  They want to save the 22nd Circuit, for the same reason the insurance lobby wants it gone.

In summary, St. Louis City and St. Louis County are about to become a big public battlefield in the long raging covert/clandestine war between insurance and trial lawyers, a war that usually only rages in the niches of electoral and interest group politics.

Ironically, I write this tonight from Berlin, which is not only its own city, but also its own state.

The Gardner Bypass Project

Jefferson City;  Downtown St. Louis

I see the news back home today continues to serve as the Blogmeister Vindication Service.

Me, October 30, 2016:

As you know, the only other corporeal person I filled in a circle next to other than Trump any time this year was Josh Hawley in AG-R back in August, as I dislike and distrust the party establishment favored candidate, State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, from Columbia, that much.  I wasn’t so much voting for Hawley, even though he does have some decent instincts and positions, as much as I was voting against Schaefer.  As it turned out, Hawley wiped the floor with Schaefer on primary day.

Even though I previously had no intention to do so, after thinking it through, I’m going to vote for him on Tuesday, and he’ll be the only other person I vote for affirmatively other than Trump on my ballot.  And, as it was back in August, my vote for him won’t be so much a vote for him as it is a vote with another circumstance in mind.  And what is that other circumstance?  It was the outcome of another election that same day back in August.  That being the Democrat Primary (i.e. the whole election, in essence) for St. Louis City Circuit Attorney.  The George Soros and Lizz Brown favored candidate of Kim Gardner won, which means she’s going to be wielding the power of state prosecution in the city of St. Louis for the next four years.  What that means is that she won’t prosecute black crime, she’ll overprosecute white people, and especially chimp out when it comes to cops and especially white cops.

Josh Hawley isn’t all that much less the bag of chips, but we’re probably going to need him in the AG office to keep Kim Gardner in check, and to yank her choke chain from time to time, and if worse comes to worst, have the state AG’s office and the assistant state AGs prosecute garden variety black street crime in St. Louis that Gardner won’t.  If the Democrat wins state AG, that being Teresa Hensley, she’ll let Gardner have the run of the joint.

Hawley won, then won Senate, and His Accidency bumped Eric Schmitt, who also won Treasurer on the same slate Hawley won AG, got bumped up to AG.  And I’m guessing by now, without looking it up, that Parson has appointed someone to take Schmitt’s place as Treasurer and his own place as Lieutenant Governor.  That means that Jay Ashcroft is the only statewide executive office holder who actually won an election for the office he’s in.  All the rest of them are accidencies.

Anyway, back to the subject matter.

Channel 2, today:

Missouri attorney general to unveil Safe Cities Initiative

The Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt will be making a special announcement Tuesday, January 22 to make St. Louis a safer place for all.

Schmitt believes he has the answer to affect crime in St. Louis` and Missouri for that matter and he`s calling it the Safe Cities Initiative.

The press conference will be held at 10:30 a.m. at the Old Post Office Building at 815 Olive St. in St. Louis, Missouri.

According to the attorney general’s office, “The initiative will aim to cut down on alarming violent crime rates in Missouri’s cities by facilitating unprecedented cooperation between the Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

St. Louis City ended 2018 with 187 homicides and currently, there are about 8 homicides in 2019. St. Louis County, has seen their highest homicide rate with 58 in 2018 and currently, this year reports show police are investigating three homicides.

These numbers may be alarming for some and that is why the Missouri Attorney General says he wants to change that.

Translation:

Schmitt is building a bypass around Gardner in the city, and now Wesley Bell in the county.

I wonder if Gardner and Bell will understand this for the diss that it is.

Local Boy Does Good (“Was Ist Diese Flagge?”)

Düsseldorf

Remember this flag I brought with me on the move?

I told you I brought it with me because I figured I’d have a use for it.  And that I did, yesterday, in Düsseldorf.

Over the summer voyage, I found that Bremen is the German city that most holistically reminds me of St. Louis.  During our day there, I saw in the local media that the soccer team in town not long before that signed an 18-year old native St. Louisan by the name of Josh Sargent, grew up in St. Charles County, and he is indeed a rookie on the team this season.  He started the season on the club’s kinda-sorta JV squad (U-23), but was just recently called up to the big team.

The way the German Soccer Bundesliga works is the way most countries’ soccer club leagues work, in that every team in the league plays one game at home and one on the road against every other team.  The Region here has five teams in the league:  Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf, Leverkusen, Gelsenkirchen, and Dortmund, the latest being the best team in the league so far this year.  The Bundesliga is basically a two-team league, Munich and Dortmund, and Munich is having a down year by its standards this season, after having won the league for the last 87 years in a row, so this opens up the door for Dortmund.  Incidentally, Leverkusen is where Bayer is based, and Bayer sponsors the team — I wonder if part of the deal is free aspirin for the players for getting headaches because of all the time bouncing soccer balls off their heads.

Furthermore, the second tier soccer league in Germany, called Zweite Bundesliga (“Zweite” = Second), has three teams in the region:  Cologne, Duisburg and Bochum.  Meaning combining both top and second leagues, there are eight soccer teams, just here in my 10 million population region.  Promotion and relegation of teams up and down among tiers and classes of leagues is the device that contributes to some semblance of parity in sports cultures that use that system and within leagues.  The United States doesn’t have P&R on the pro level, so back home, what enforces parity is the reverse standings amateur draft, and of course, amateur drafts don’t exist in P&R cultures at all.

Anyway, this means that Bremen is making five trips to The Region this season, to play their one away game against each of the five teams here.

I fully intended to go to one, but it was just a matter of timing:  Whether I had something else and more important to do, and whether Sargent was promoted to the big club.  Bremen’s game at Dortmund doesn’t happen until May, and Dortmund tickets are really hard to get, being as the team is so good.  (Though right now, because some fans are on strike against going to the games because they have a burr up their saddle about Monday night games, for some reason, that’s not so true at the moment.)

All the stars lined up yesterday, for Bremen’s game at Düsseldorf.  So I went.

The only X-Factor was whether Sargent would start, and if he didn’t, whether he would get in the game as an in-game substitution.

As luck had it, while the former didn’t happen, the latter did.  It was his first playing time in the Bundesliga.  Even better, he scored a late game goal in Bremen’s 3-1 win.

When Sargent’s entry into the game was announced, I yelled out “YO JOSH” from where I was sitting, and waved my St. Louis flag.  Unfortunately, he didn’t hear me, even though a lot of people around me did.  Not a surprise that my voice didn’t make it that far away or down:  One thing that became perfectly evident about German professional soccer games is that the crowd is constantly and steadily loud, with only a few breaks of being a little less loud, then getting ear splitting when someone scores a goal.  The way I figure, at this game, around 40% of the crowd were Bremen fans, even though it was an away game for them.  Then again, it’s not a long haul between one city and another in Germany.  That, and Düsseldorf is in last place, so I’m sure their fans were in a ticket-unloading mood — Which is how I was able to score one myself so easily.

Naturally, there was a lot of curiosity about the piece of cloth on a stick I was carrying around.  And I anticipated there would be.  Lots of people were carrying and waving lots of flags, but Germans don’t get the opportunity to see the flag of the city of St. Louis every day.

While High German is not that morphologically similar to English, some words and phrases are just obvious.  Such as an interrogatory directed my way quite a few times during my several hours at the stadium in Düsseldorf:

Was Ist Diese Flagge?

Before going to the game, I pre-loaded the Wikipedia pages for both St. Louis and Sargent into tabs of the browser (Brave) on my sail foam.  So that when I was inevitably asked about the flag, all I had to do was pull out my foam and my passport and do a lot of pointing, to make it understood that I was there to show out for the homeboy.

Because he and I have something in common:  We’re both St. Louisans trying to make our career bones in Germany.

 

 

If St. Louis Was Its Own Country, He Would Be Getting an Official State Funeral

CWE;  Belleville

I’ve thought all my life that professional wrestling is hokum, but I’m just old enough to have remembered Wresting at the Chase being on Channel 11 and Larry Matysik announcing.

My bet is that his family’s original last name is Matosich, or something similar, Croatian in origin.

He was on the Belleville PD before he started with WATC.

Bobby and Chris

Tower Grove Park

After the UDC monument was disappeared from Forest Park last year, we all kinda knew what would be next.

If ole Chris stays, it will only be because The Hill will swing enough big sticks around.

Too bad Bobby never had a whole neighborhood of the city full of Confederates that had his back.

“Something Something Yemen”

St. Charles

Pics tell all.

Yemen, didn’t Osama bin Laden and 9/11 run through that country in some way?

TFOL

Chesterfield

P-D:

Woman says she was denied job in Chesterfield because name too ‘ghetto’; company says it was hacked

A woman who applied for a customer service position at a Chesterfield clinic that treats men with low testosterone said she was denied a job because of her “ghetto” name. But the company, Mantality Health, is adamant that it was hacked, and would never treat an applicant that way.

Hermeisha Robinson, of Bellefontaine Neighbors, posted on Facebook an email she received from Mantality Health in response to her application.

And that’s where you can stop.

TFOL:

Companies do affirmative action hiring, but not so much that they want to hire -eisha or -tavoius.  Because ghetto names mean ghetto lottery.

Jane Jones, and black?  Oh yeah, they would have hired you in a second.

“We wuz hakked” is the new “dog ate my homework.”

Also I find it a little ironic that this whole story involves someone from a high testosterone race wanting to work at a clinic that treats men with low testosterone.

Stranger Mother

Ferguson

4:

Michael Brown’s mother starts petition to appoint special prosecutor in case

Michael Brown’s mother has started a petition urging Gov. Mike Parson to appoint a special prosecutor in her son’s case.

(snip)

In her petition, McSpadden says the documentary ‘Stranger Fruit’ unveiled “the untold factual account about what really happened to my son…

The documentary accidentally exposed her son as being a small time dope dealer. Anyway, the new facts the documentary brought to light are not at all relevant to the events of the 12:01 PM to 12:04 PM on August 9, 2014 time frame.

In addition, McSpadden says McCulloch admitted to not allowing witnesses in front of the Grand Jury that he knew weren’t telling the truth.

How dare he not allow liars to lie in front of a grand jury.

Four Years On

Ferguson

It wasn’t what happened four years ago this afternoon that ruined St. Louis’s reputation as the city that does not riot, put a fading mid-North County suburb on the international map and in the lore of international infamy, and also brought a lot of attention to this medium.

It was what happened late the night on the following calendar day.

I was at the State Fair in Sedalia on August 9, 2014, (my lobbying days), and I took a late afternoon break in some shade and checked my phone.  “Officer involved shooting death in Ferguson,” I saw.  Ho hum, those happen in the area all the time.

Thirty hours later, that’s when this one became more than just another one.

Followed by a whole bunch of fallout.  As we saw two days ago, those dominoes are still falling.

I Miss Playing Golf (Big But)

Town and Country

I took in the first day morning rounds this morning at Bellerive for the PGA Championship.

This will be the only day I go.

Twenty-six years ago, when the same major tournament was at the same club, I also went.  It’s where I first heard of Phil Mickelson, who from that day continuing to the present became my favorite golfer of the current playing generation.  A little later, I first saw his ultra-hot wife on TV.

It all makes me realize how much I miss playing golf.

But I’m about four weeks way from one hell of a consolation prize, one that I’d take eight days out of every seven every week instead of being able to play golf, and frankly, one I would not be getting right now if I still had the ability to play golf.

The Lessons of Wesley Bell and Bob McCullough

Clayton

The biggest political shock around here in a long time, maybe the biggest of my conscious lifetime.

St. Louis County is about to have a Kim Gardner type as Prosecuting Attorney, which means he will do much more attorneying than prosecuting.

To beat all, Wesley Bell is currently an alderman in Ferguson.

I don’t think what happened last night was any more complicated than the fact that McCullough rested on his laurels and thought he’d be in as long as he wanted because he was in for so long.

Bell probably had a really big energetic army of leg work foot soldiers behind him, and I bet he probably also got Soros money, just like Kim Gardner did.

You wonder why all these gadflies and nobodies and people who otherwise have no hope bother running?  Because, sometimes, lightning strikes.  The long time incumbent gets caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy — That happens, every once in awhile.

It came as close as it has ever to striking last night in MO-1-D, see one of my other posts today, and it did strike last night in this race.

And St. Louis County is about to be all the worse off for it.

Then again, less than a month from now, St. Louis, City or County, won’t be my problem, either for quite some time, or ever again.

The Lessons of Cori Bush

St. Louis City and North County

Life has a funny way of trolling you.

This morning, the king and queen of the secret rehab hideout had to make a quick run to the grocery store, and in spite of the fact that my going along with them makes the chore more difficult, they wanted me to go with them, just to get out of the house for a short while.  Even though, after Labor Day, I’ll be getting out of their house for a very long while, but I digress.

When I was in the store, one of the songs the store’s intercom played was “Jenny from the Block” by J-Lo.  I jokingly refer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “Jenny from the Block,” and I heard it on the day after a local election took place that had her as a subtext.

It was MO-1-D.  Lazy Clay, the 18-year incumbent, who followed his 32-year tenure father in the same district, this year got a Democrat Primary challenge from a black woman named Cori Bush.  She had the endorsement of Jenny from the Block, and she even came to town to speak and rally on her behalf.

I thought Bush had no hope.

And as it predictably turned out, Clay won.

But Bush made it surprisingly close, relative to what Clay is used to winning his own party’s primary for re-election against the usual dorks, dweebs, trolls, gadflies and nobodies.

Turns out Cori Bush really did make a credible and respectable run, and that Jenny from the Block is wielding a rather heavy stick in Democrat Party politics these days.

In the district as a whole, it was Clay 57%, Bush 37%.  But here’s the interesting breakdown:  Bush had a a better result in St. Louis City (all of which is in MO-1), Clay 51% Bush 43%, than she did in the parts of St. Louis County that are in MO-1, Clay 60% Bush 33%.

There several lessons to this that daisy chain together, and prove several of my long standing operating political theories:

(1) The local black political romanticism over the Clay surname is starting to fade.

(2) That Bush did better in the City than the County proves that the black political racial parochialism now tends to North County rather than the City.  When Virvus Jones’s daughter made it razor thin close against Lyda Krewson in Mayor-D in March 2017, mainly because doctrinaire progressives and also the city’s organized activist LGBTQ-BLT-BBQ-LOL wing tended to Jones’s way, I wrote here in reaction that St. Louis City politics had stopped being a purely racial headcount as they were in, say, the 1981-1993 time frame, and have turned into a contest between the neoliberal money power and doctrinaire true believer street progressives, which correlates to race much less intensely.  Bush doing that well in the city also points to the validity of my theory.

(3) I’ve written here often in the past six years that as, older black women start moving on to the next world, the way of all flesh, they will be dying off as the final generation of black people and black voters that have any conscious memory of the civil rights movement and what it was like before it.  Obama could goose them out to the voting booth in 2012 in record turnout rates for their demographic that will never be seen again (hint hint) and already started to fall in 2016, because his campaign and their allied talking heads were able to fill their heads with noise about voter disenfranchisement, the water hoses, the police dogs, Bull Connor.  Once they’re all gone, there will be no black voters around that have any conscious memory of those eras, they were either too young or were not yet born.  Such voters will break more ideologically than purely racially.  Generationally and applied to the society at large, it will be the equivalent of and happen contemporaneously with Baby Boomers aging out of power and control and of life itself, and handing off to Generation X, a handoff which I have predicted here will be rough and rocky and may surprise us in some very good ways in our opinion.  Anyway, I take last night’s result of Clay vs Bush as a leading indicator that all this is starting to happen.

(4) White voters in the city who voted in MO-1-D yesterday I bet broke heavily for Bush, because of the doctrinaire progressive thing.

Last Waltz

Your Blogmeister’s Secret Hideout

Something just occurred to me last night.

This is my last election day and election night from St. Louis, maybe for awhile, maybe ever.

The next election day for the territory in which I am currently registered to vote, if I want to vote at all, and I didn’t yesterday because there was nothing that mattered to me, I’ll have to vote absentee.

A few analysis posts from the events of last night will follow this one.

Deadly Maneuvers

Berkeley

Hey genius, there’s a reason why he got such a “harsh” sentence.

This QT fire happened almost four months after the more internationally infamous QT fire in North County, the one in the geography that would become better known as the Fergaza Strip.  (Note:  The QT referenced in this article was a different QT location.)  In that instance, the nearby undertow falsely thought that the QT employees “snitched” on GENTILIVUS GIANTIVUS, when in reality, it was the Ferguson Market across the road, that establishment is in a former 7-11.  Yet and still, QT got the works, the wrong kind of Hotzi.  And its employees got out of there just in the nick of time, a few seconds later, one or more of them would have suffered serious burns, a few seconds after that, they would have been immolated to death.

So you can understand why the criminal justice around here took a dim view of people who set fire to quickie marts and gas stations in the immediate weeks and months after that happened.