Someone torched a homeless encampment and a pallet storage facility underneath a 10-lane freeway, melting the guard rails and resulting in a shower of concrete that had been supporting the freeway. A gaming enthusiast striving for a high score in Grand Theft Auto? No. Real life in Los Angeles this weekend. The Daily Mail:
Coincidentally, our tender 8- and 10-year-olds were at a birthday party this weekend where the hosts brought in a “gaming truck” with Xbox. Their mom was supervising, saw Mario on the outside of the truck, and decided that it would be okay if the boys played “a racing game”. At dinner, the boys recounted the fun that they’d had smashing into buildings, running over criminals, stealing and punching, etc. “Were you playing Grand Theft Auto?” I asked. “Yes, that was the name of the game!” they responded.
I had always thought of Grand Theft Auto, which I’ve never played, as American. What other country has a lot of cars and social decay? Wikipedia, however, says that the creators are Scottish.
Proving that there is always balance in the universe, just as Los Angeles was being trashed by this fire San Francisco was being cleaned up. Also from the Daily Mail… “Outrage as San Francisco boots vagrants off streets ahead of Xi Jinping visit – as California Governor Gavin Newsom admits woke city was only given polish to impress world leaders”:
- In the span of a few days, the city scrubbed seven intersections in the notorious Tenderloin and South of Market – leaving the hotspots almost unrecognizable
- Where tents were once propped up, sidewalks are clear and spotless. Locales where homeless once congregated are cleared, video from the sites shows
- Hangouts along Mission Street and Market are no more, along with an open drug market that for over a year has been outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal building
- Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted the clean-ups were only done to provide a good impression for visiting world leaders
Gavin Newsom said that the idea of a border wall was “a monument to stupidity” and “a distraction” when Trump proposed it. Here’s the new San Francisco border wall:
Let’s check on traffic in LA at 10:30 am on a Monday:
It doesn’t look worse than usual!
Since we were not actually there, can we really be sure that the fire, of such prodigious and unusual intensity, was not the result of an EV battery fire, with the “homeless camp” as a convenient scapegoat?