Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks

Via Occidental Dissent

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 -- named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water -- that publicizes neighborhood issues.

More @ Bloomberg

New Biography: Walter Cronkite Biased, Unethical

Via Moonbattery

A thorough new biography of Walter Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley reveals that he was not the unbiased journalist his supporters have always claimed him to be. In fact, he was a liberal who used his position as America's top anchor to promote the left and damage the right. And that's the way it is.

All of this apparently comes as a surprise to Howard Kurtz, who grew up idolizing Cronkite and can't quite shake off the worship of his false idol even when confronted with the facts. Still, there is an interesting admission early on in Kurtz's piece about how the media landscape has changed:

Had Cronkite engaged in some of the same questionable conduct today—he secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention—he would have been bashed by the blogs, pilloried by the pundits, and quite possibly ousted by his employer. That he endured and prospered, essentially unscathed, until his death in 2009 reminded me of how impervious the monopoly media were in those days, largely shielded from the scrutiny they inflicted on everyone else.

Indeed, he would have been. Kurtz might have spent more time discussing the new media landscape and how it benefits the country by allowing alternative points of view to penetrate the public's awareness. Instead, he mostly cops out.

Cronkite's idea of ethical behavior seems to have been pretty broad. Kurtz opens his account of the new book with the fact that Cronkite had a secret deal with Pan Am which flew his family around the world to vacation spots like the South Pacific for free. The President of the CBS News Division knew about the arrangement but did nothing about it.

Cronkite's behavior wasn't just personally unethical, it was also professionally unethical.

More @ Breitbart

Welfare: A job program?

There is another way of applying Aaron's argument that welfare is a job's program. Once, not long after we had moved to Rockford, I was taking my family to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. We had to drive through some interesting neighborhoods. We looked at block after block of neglected houses, with young dissolute males lounging on the front steps. It was about 11 in the morning, and one of my children asked innocently: "Don't they have jobs to go to." In the sweetest voice I could muster, I explained: "Many of them work at night."

And indeed they do,

More @ Chronicles

Vietnam Zippos

This is a 1953 hand-painted Town & Country Trout Zippo which was many years later engraved with "USN Saigon 1967" and with a map of Vietnam on the back. It was not unusual for the the servicemen to bring their own Zippos to Vietnam and have them engraved "in-field". This is one of the oldest Vietnam War Zippos. More @ Zippo Gallery

Sen. Rand Paul Introduces Amendment to Rein in FDA Abuse - 05/23/12

Via The Battle of Atlanta

Police: Couple Shoots Female Intruder In Their Bedroom

Via Guns Save Lives

Couple Said They Warned Intruder Before Shooting

A man in Boulder shot an intruder who came into his bedroom at 3:26 a.m. on Wednesday.The man and his wife were sleeping in their bedroom when they heard a noise. They told police they thought it was a raccoon outside their door.When the female homeowner realized the noise was not a raccoon, but someone opening the bedroom door and coming into the room, both she and her husband told police they shouted at the intruder to get out.The homeowners told officers that they told the intruder they had a gun and would use it.When the intruder didn't stop, the man told police he shot at a light the intruder was holding. After firing his gun, the man said he turned on a light and found a woman lying on floor with a gunshot wound to her hip, police said.

More @ 7 News

International Bunglers Seed Future Wars

Incurable idealists who are entrusted with power will surely disappoint, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson. His radical theory of one world government still resonates with the international socialists today, though perpetual warfare to somehow ensure lasting peace continues unabated.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

International Bunglers Seed Future Wars

“Georges Clemenceau was born in 1841 [and]…had journeyed far in those seventy-eight years, from the extreme Left to what was almost the extreme Right, and the old radical barnstormer, anti-clerical, and Dreyfusard was now, as he stood in this room handing the thick book to the German, a personification of national patriotism. The Germans had made him so.

His powers of sarcasm, vituperation and assault were almost without equal in his time, and with these powers he could castigate and finally sweep away the governments which showed any hesitation; for we are in a war to the death, he kept on saying, and we must win. Thus he became Father Victory to millions of French soldiers in 1918 and went into the peace conference with a personal authority none could question. The Tiger – Father of Victory.

Now, as he stood beetling at the Prussian aristocrat, beetling and growling and showing his fangs, the Tiger was so formed or transformed by the events in which he had played a great part that all memory of the international socialist had faded away, leaving a kind of quintessential residue of the purest nationalism.

Moltke, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser Wilhelm II produced this result, willy-nilly, just as the Tiger himself (along with Poincare and others whom he equally disliked) was to assist mightily in the production of Adolf Hitler.

[What] Clemenceau [wanted from the Versailles Treaty was] that Germany could be kept permanently subjugated. What Woodrow Wilson hoped was for something still different. He hoped that the whole world, in all its infinite diversity of races, religions and social organization, could be brought into a parliament of mankind so as to discuss and compose the differences that lead to war.

Wilson was wholly unprepared for the extent and complications of the passionate nationalisms his various groups of principles had fanned into flames. As he had never understood the Mexican Revolution, so he does not seem to have understood the whole exhausting tangle of racial and national repulsions in Central and Southern Europe, to which his own political philosophy had helped give such fierce ne vitality.”

(This House Against This House (excerpts), Vincent Sheean, Random House, 1945, pp. 7-16)

International Bunglers Seed Future Wars

NDAA & Agenda 21 Presentation at the NC General Assembly

(PUBLIC WELCOME & ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND)

Wednesday, May 30, 2012
4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Room 544 – Legislative Office Building
300 N. Salisbury Street, Room 515

Raleigh, NC 27603-5925

LIVE BROADCAST AT HTTP://LIVESTREAM.COM/theintolerableacts

Mr. Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, will be speaking about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) along with Jeff Lewis, co-founder and National Director of the Patriot Coalition, and Rep. Glen Bradley, sponsor of H.R. 982 & H.R. 983.

Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Lewis, along with Patriot Coalition General Counsel Richard D. Fry, co-authored model NDAA resolutions that have been introduced and/or adopted by sheriffs, other law enforcement, county commissions, and state legislators across the country.

More @ NC Renegade

Black Bear Mauls Man In Outhouse

Via Northern Blogger

South Knox store clerk shoots teen in botched robbery attempt

Via Guns Save Lives

A botched holdup attempt today sent three would-be robbers running and left one shot in the chest, police said.

The shooting happened just after 10:45 a.m. at the South Side Market, 1316 Maryville Pike, near the Montgomery Village housing project, Knox County E-911 records show.

A store clerk told police three men in masks tried to rob him. He pulled a pistol and shot one of them in the chest, Knoxville Police Department Capt. Nate Allen said.

More @ Knox News