Am I Blue..?

One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.

Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:

"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."

Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago. 

Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.

Nice.

One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.

They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.

We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.

But mostly Black.

So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.

Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Then...what do you do?

And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.

At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.

 

Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.

And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.

That's kind of it. 

People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.

Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.

And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.

Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?

After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive. 

In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.

Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.

So how do you change that?

My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.

You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.

If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.

That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD  in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.

Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.

Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?

To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.

Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox. 

And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...

...yeah, that. 

This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".

Do we need some sort of police? Yes.

Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.

But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy,  politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.

WASF.

Sporting my canvas

Quick personal update as I scrounge for source materials on 1914 reconnaissance.

The divorce proceedings move on, with the "settlement" (the draft of the final decree) being in process. Nothing dramatic, just the slow dissolution of twenty-two years. Sad. I already miss my wife, and to a great extent, my kids. Even the cat.

And, to a surprisingly great extent, my old house. Where, in one of those "what the fuck..?" things, I ended up back working, taking down the old fence we built decades ago. Here's what the front of the house looked like in April 2003, several years after we moved in:

That's the left front of the house looking northwest. The former owner had planted tulips all along the top of the retaining wall that the cats are inspecting. Here's the opposite corner:

Some time in the next couple of years we built a picket fence along the wall, both to keep The Boy and Quinn the dog from catapulting off the edge. Here's the same corner as in the second photo above in March 2007:

We're already working to change up the suburban dream; the bulbs are still there, but we've planted a couple of natives. Pacific wax myrtle in the corner and the vinca at the base of the dogwood is already beginning to crowd out the non-native stuff. 

The fence outlasted Quinn and the Boy's random running days, but not time and the Northwest weather. It was a good fence. But it was time for it to go.

So...

Wednesday while Mojo was at work and the grown children doing...something, I drove around with wrecking bar and power drill and sawsall.

The panels came off and took a one-way trip to the Metro dump...

The Girl asked me to save the posts; she says she wants to run espalier wires or a trellis. So I took only the two interior posts, and replaced the rotting bannister on the lower steps, then painted everything with that thick "Kilz" anti-mildew paint.

 Panels off, pre-paint:

And post-paint:

Drachma, the idiot, insisted on sleeping in the work area. Of course, he got painted (a bit) too...

Thursday afternoon it was all done, painted and pretty:

And then I took my soon-to-be-ex-wife out for a beer.

It's...very weird. I really LIKE her. A lot. More and more I'm missing Mojo the friend, the good companion, the funny one, the salty, smart, wisecracking long time sharer of confidences, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Lovers? Those come and go.

But friends? Real good, solid, dependable, heartfelt friends like her?

Goddamn it, they're beyond price.

Well.

Last weekend I had my first political ground-game work; canvassing in the spendy Southwest Lake Oswego district. Hours of pounding pavement and ringing doorbells. Nice houses, polite people.

But.

My first encounter with The Portland Voter In The Wild was...not reassuring.

Lots of "well, I'm not really sure..." and "I'm pretty much an independent..." as if this November wasn't a black-and-white choice between a bog-standard corporaDem and a raving headcase of a lunatic egotistical madman and his pack of loony little fascist running dogs intent on a New Gilded Age.

What the fuck, over?

I'm back at it this coming weekend, too. Plus writing postcards (?) to hesitant voters.

Which is nice. But I'm getting to the point where I want to be throwing fucking bombs, not writing fucking postcards. I can barely open the news without losing my composure. It's not enough to "beat" these goddamn people. The GOP needs to be destroyed, root and branch, burnt hull and sticks, plowed under and the ground sown with fucking salt.

Oh.

And as a reminder that I'm Old, between all the canvas walking and being a good lad and riding the stationary bike once I got back in my legs thanked me by spasming and cramping so badly I was up half Saturday night and slept through kendo practice Sunday morning.

Ugh.

The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.

Frontiers 1914: Intermission

Still working on the "Frontiers 1914" piece(s), so that's ongoing. The issue right now is that the next section needs to be about the French war plans. We've looked at Germany and the evolution of what became the "Schlieffen Plan". The bookend for that needs to be France and the evolution of "Plan XVII".

That's...being kind of a pain in the ass.

There's a shit-ton of scholarship (popular and otherwise) about the seventeenth of the French war plans.

The lead-up to it, though?

Not so much.

We'll get there when I finally post it, but the tl:dr is that from about 1870 to about 1911 the French planning was centered around 1) the fortress belt of the "Sere de Rivieres" system in NE France as a 2) defense-first-and-counterattack overall scheme.

But in the second decade of the 20th Century the French military hierarchy - led by the then Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre - changed this focus to a more aggressive offensive-first plan.

Supposedly this began with the revision of Plan XVI in September 1911, and came in force in full with the adoption of Plan XVII in the winter and spring of 1914.

There seems to be some major politico-military stuff associated with the changes that came before that, though, beginning with Plan XII in 1888 and especially involving Plan XV in 1904-06. I want details of this period, but all I can find on the Internet is pretty generic. I may have to run down some sort of dead-tree sources, and that takes time and more hand-work. I'm pushing it along.

(Update: Turns out there's a pretty important secondary source - the 1985 "War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914" - in the Portland State Library that is...wait for it...fucking closed because the fucking Gaza protests got out of hand and then the fucking Portland coppers swarmed in and completed the fucking destruction. So...not fucking good.)

The other "pushing-along" thing is divorce.

My soon-to-be-ex and I met with our financial planner. That went well, and she's working on the asset division the mediator recommended. We need to regroup with the mediator to move towards a settlement and, eventually, a final decree.

That's...saddening.

It's the final defeat for me, the admission of failure. The end of twenty-two years of marriage, and in that the loss of my lover, wife, and best friend. I grieve for that, and her. I wish I'd had the chance to repair the faults that resulted in the failure. I always will.

Meanwhile I'm hootched up in a mother-in-law apartment in the far edge of Northeast Portland. It's a very weird little mid-Century Ozzie-and-Harriet middle-class neighborhood in one of the most fucked-up parts of the sprawling blight that is East Portland. At some point I'll have to do a tour of this area. It's very much NOT "Portlandia". 

The surrounding area is poor and I'd say "rundown" but in all likelihood it wasn't ever very far up from where it is today. It probably went from farm fields to suburban slum to semi-urban slum. 

We probably don't have more skeevy homeless people than I did in North Portland. But here they feel more visible and frankly scarier; there seems to be more visibly-crazy and dangerous-looking gomers out here.

I'll have to post some photos from the truly bizarre NE 122nd Avenue Motorboat Graveyard, too. THAT's a real NE Portland oddity.

The hardest part of this move?

It's lonely.

I'm alone in a small apartment, with ex-best-friend, kids, even the fuckin' cat back in the Little House. I miss them all, even the cat waking me at oh-dark-thirty. I miss all the little interactions, the little kindnesses and gentleness of daily meetings and crossings. Waiting alongside the coffee brewing for a frowsy and sleep-soft woman to emerge from the bathroom. Passing snark from a busy daughter on her way, monosyllabic grunts from a son taking a gaming break.

It is what it is, I suppose.

I've signed up to volunteer at the local humane society to get my pet fix (lease says; no pets...). I've signed up for some sort of Post-60 political action organization ("Third Act"), though they don't seem to be doing much acting lately.

I’d do more political stuff if I wasn’t in Deep Blue Portland. We don’t really have a need to get out the Democratic vote; the Oregon GOP is so fucking looney – they were MAGAts before there were MAGAts – that they don’t have an electoral chance outside the yik-a-hoo parts of rural Oregon. And our four Electoral votes are likewise solid.

So I don’t feel like I can do much in the national races. I’ve got time but not money, and they can’t use my time.

I’m still pretty chapped that the race is as close as it is. Tubby is what we know he is, a gross, bloated, lying, psychopathic crook. He’s no better than he was eight years ago, and that he gets as much love from the wingnuts says more about them than him. But his new siderunner?

Jesus wept, could you have invented a more creepy, loathsome, spineless weirdo than Couchfucker Vance? What the hell does he offer that Tubby doesn’t? His weird breeding fetish that the press tries to sell as “caring for families”? The fuck..? He doesn’t give a shit about “families” any more than the rest of his Party of Personal Enrichment.

But I don’t expect the press to call him or any of them on that.

It's really worth pursuing how, as the current Harris campaign messaging points out, how deeply weird, creepy, and radical these "conservative" fucksticks are.

From their obsessive panty-sniffing of all kinds (from female reproduction to transgender bathroom business) to their bizarre fixation on "masculinity" to the intensity of their drive to shackle sex with breeding the wingnut politics of genitalia is, well...weird. Deeply, madly, truly strange.

I expect these fuckers to be politically and economically pro-Gilded-Age. They've always wanted to party like it's 1929.

But the culture war stuff?

It's borderline insane. And that it's not constantly derided as such is a massive failure on the part of the press (and any and everyone else who doesn't point it out). It should make everyone associated with it as popular as genital herpes.

I'm glad it's finally being at least marginally recognized and pointed to.

I guess I’m trying to be hopeful…but prepared to be disappointed. If the US public is willing to let these scum get away with their little Plutocracy Project 2025? Well…maybe I end up my post-divorce days in prison for rebellion.

I sure as hell hope not; I’m too creaky to make a good rebel.

Hope this finds you and yours busy and well enough. I had to laugh; on the way out of the grocery today the rent-a-cop asked me how it was going and without thinking I replied: “So far so good. But it’s early yet – lots of time for things to go wrong.”

That’s kind of my standard reply to that question and has been for years, which says a LOT about my outlook on life.

Maybe it’s an old sergeant thing.

I'll be back with more war plans in a bit.

More bad news

As I said earlier...

The really irking parts about this are 1) that the "Oregonian", supposedly the state's Newspaper of Record, would print this, and 2) the trouble they took to find these stupid fucking jamokes to make this up.

Again, if you turn to the newsweeklies you get the straight dope:

1) the poll was "...commissioned by the freakin' Portland Police Association."
2) they polled "...500 Portlanders (far less than 1 percent of the city's voting population)"
(in fact, 500 people is 0.00077 - that's right, a little under 8/10.000ths - of the 2021 city census)
3) "...56 percent of people responded "yes" to the question: "If you could afford it professionally and personally, would you consider leaving Portland to live elsewhere?"
4) As the Mercury points out, "During the period of time this survey was conducted (December 2 to 7), we got, like, six inches of rain." Fuck yes I'd live in Hilo if I could afford it. These are the Dark Ages. They suck enormous ass.
Plus, 5) "Why would a city's cops want to spread the message that Portland residents are shaking in the Blundstone boots every time they leave the house? Well, because they want to convince city officials to give them more money, of course!"

In fact, "crime", however you define it, is 1) extremely rare personally and 2) trending down generally; the FBI statistics show that after the Plague Year drove us mad things returned to the normal low hum of criming. So no, nimrod, your "crime concerns" are baseless claptrap.

Homelessness? We've talked that shit to death. If you're "concerned" about homeless hobo zombies eating your kitty? Fuck leaving Portland. Tax the richie riches instead and use the money to do housing and treatment and social work and jobs and transportation.

But, of course, both the worthless Portland coppers and the clickbait Oregonian won't stop shrieking about fire and murder and homeless hobo zombies because, duh, that's their rice bowl.

This is the "news" the normies are getting, and, just like the other "news", it makes them stupider because fear and fright make you stupid. When you're scared you make dumb choices, or just cower without making choices at all.

And let's not even start with the House Republican "impeachment inquiry"...

What a fucked up timeline this is.

Chaos agents

When radical right-wing nuts run wild and destroy the functionality of the People's House it may be all in good fun.

But when they do the same thing in the public square?

No, it's not. 

These wingnuts aren't elected, though. They're bought and paid for, hired supposed-servants of the public, our "Thin Blue Line" of coppers that supposedly stand between us the Good People of the Earth and anarchy.

What's their beef?

Well, mostly, it seems, that lots of even the Good People don't like them. Here's their spokescop from the linked piece:

“They’re doing what they were asked to do. The public said they wanted less police involvement. The (Portland) School Board kicked them out of the schools. At some point, people should look in the mirror and take responsibility for who they voted for.”

Okay, first; fuck you runnin', you lying Dick Tracy wannabe.

No, the coppers weren't "asked to do" less policing.

They were "asked" to do less shitty, racist, violent, assholish policing. The kind of policing that the Portland Police Bureau had (and has) done for decades. The kind of policing that got them in dutch with the feds and won them a sort of supervised parole agreement that they've conspicuously ignored.

So, yes; I agree with one point Duin makes in his piece; part of the problem is that the Portland cops are way understrength. There's just too few cops for the number of troubled people running around in public.

But one big reason the PPB is so understaffed is that nobody wants to work for the outfit that a large number of Portlanders neither trust nor respect, largely because of that outfit's own shitty behavior. The Bureau attracted lots of violent, racist assholes because that's how they rolled; those people felt welcomed and at home there.

When large numbers of Portlanders weren't okay with that anymore, those sorts of people had a little hissy and left, or never joined.

And the Bureau has not changed enough to attract any other kind of person.

But here's the thing; like I pointed out earlier in this series; even before their little quiet quitting the Portland cops didn't do a pantsload of "policing". In Duin's piece he cites what's supposed to be a devastating statistic:

"As officers focus on homicides and shootings in the city, property crimes are generally ignored: The bureau’s clearance rate for property crimes dropped from 17.1% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2021..."

Okay, now, four percent is pretty crap.

But notice the clearance rate in the Good Times?

Yeah. Less than a fifth of all thefts - burglaries, car clouts, thievery in general - got solved. That was the "big time" stat for Portland cops. That was their championship season. That was them killing it.

And the perps?

Largely dopers and hoboes. "Professional" thieves, like all professionals in any field, probably make up a pretty small minority of all thieves.

So basically these are poor people who can't or won't work for a living stealing stuff to by food and dope.

And what have We the People done to make that less attractive as a way to get by?

I'll wait.

Here's the point.

It's not fucking rocket science. How do we move towards making this problem less of a problem?

Well, having better cops would help. Burning the existing Bureau to the ground and rebuilding it with fewer shitty, violent, Proud Boy-loving MAGAts and racists.

Then getting the new coppers better, smarter training and methods to deal with people. Getting them more help; Portland Street Response - a program designed to give public safety options other than sending armed coppers to deal with loonies and drugged-out whackos - has been underfunded and mis- or un-used since it was set up. Duin notes correctly that the Detox Center - the tank where narced-out gomers used to get dumped in to get them off the street - has never been reopened.

(Possibly because it's worth noting that the coppers used it as an unlicensed jail. People who didn't meet the bar for actual jailing used to be dumped in Detox, where they could be held for a day without charge. It was partially that sort of abuse that got it closed in the first place.)

But, again...and I know this keeps coming back around every time I write these things...the real issue is money.

Money to find these dopers and hobos work. To get them off the dope. To make places to live. To pay for more courts and diversion programs and Street Response unarmed intervention squads and rehab centers and social workers and daycare and school programs and...well, about a gajillion other social services.

And, yes; cops. And jails.

The bottom line out in Portland Streets isn't really that much different than in the U.S. House of Representatives.

We know what needs to happen to make our lives in general better.

But there's a vocal minority who refuse to consider that loudly being short-sighted, greedy, selfish assholes is not, actually, good public policy, and they continue to stand athwart those things shouting "stop".

In Congress they posture and preen and shove their prejudice and superstition into legislation to prevent anything they hate from happening. Far better to do nothing than to do anything the 14th Century wouldn't approve of.

In Portland they refuse to tax themselves and to allow anyone else to consider how best to use those tax monies to make those changes I've laid out. Far better to piss and moan about homelessless and crime than to make Nike go short a dime.

And until those chaos agents - in both places - are ignored and despised and discarded, we're going to be stuck right where we are.

As Duin says; welcome to the jungle.

The problem being, the problem that he doesn't mention, is that among us are those who are objectively pro-tiger.

Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.

Petard

 So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!

The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being - even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! - an "anarchist jurisdiction".

But...remember back in June? 

When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that "policing" in the United States fucks with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of "reform" had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?

And I answered my own question with:

"I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades...I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that."

And, as surely as the sun still rises, we - we here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland did...

Nothing.

Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the fucking cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad - another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left - and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.

Do the math.

Fuck. We're our own worst goddamn enemies.

So the end result of all that protesting and voting and clamor for justice is that we're stuck with the same bunch of useless bastards that sat around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses while the Portland coppers went all kinetic on the BLM protestors.

Surely as the sun rises even the hardest-core street radical can see the brutal facts in front of her, so the protests drizzled away with the autumn rains.

The summer of BLM is over and the fucking cops won.

The usual suspects - the rich white people in the West Hills and the Portland Business Alliance - voted for the empty suit in droves, terrified of the propaganda spewed by the Thin Blue Line of Bullshit and the idiot news stations. 

The same idiots are fulminating about our homeless explosion - imagine, people are losing their squats in a Plague that is killing businesses and low-wage jobs! Whoodathunkit? - and want the empty suit and his cronies to "do something"...as if anyone can "do something" without a massive infusion of tax dollars and social and actual engineering - build cheap goddamn houses, you fools! - that the richie riches and the PBA will never accept or agree to.

Which will just mean more "homeless sweeps" where the coppers kick the hoboes out of wherever they are. They will just rise and scatter like a flock of scruffy starlings to land in someone else's tree until the sweeps come through again. It's the homeless version of the whack-a-muj that worked soooo well in Southwest Asia only with fewer command-detonated mines.

Nobody is willing to think their way out of this, largely because the actual stuff that works is difficult and expensive and time-consuming and even here in Portland we're Americans, by God, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. Fuck that noise, we're cowboys and we think with our six-shooter. 

Meanwhile we're marinating in the Plague just like the rest of you, and our wingnuts are as wingnutty as the ones all over the country, squawking and clucking about freeedummmmm!!! while the 'rona tickles their nostrils and they strut around with their festering uncovered meatfaces belching their disease all over the rest of us. The dumb fuckers have invited Mister Grenade to the party while the rest of us try to just stay in cover long enough to duck their goddamn shrapnel until the vaccines arrive.

I'm just tired.

I'm tired of the Plague. I'm tired of missing my old life; my friends and my little joys and my city, tired of being worried and afraid and nervous as a cat around crowds, wondering which one is the fucking numbnuts is that's walking around shedding the virus like rain.

And I'm really tired of this country, which has such a bright and shining promise, which has the potential to be so good and great and one but instead is dominated by the selfish, the small, the weak, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant.

I'm tired of trying to be decent and intelligent and thoughtful and careful and judicious only to look across the way at a bunch of four-year-olds squalling in a tantrum triggered by belief in utter nonsense so transparently obvious delusional foolishnessthat even  a poop-flinging monkey would sneer.

And I have no good and happy answer to how to change all that except the answer of any siege; watch and wait and keep my head down and kill the traitorous bastards trying to open the postern and try and ensure that the other sonsofbitches don't get over the wall all the while knowing that it's usually us who get blown up by our own goddamn petard.