The Serial Thinker Blog

California exodus continues, with LA, San Francisco leading the way: 'Why are we here?' | Nation/World | gazettextra.com

They were both working remotely and wanted to leave California because of the high cost of living and urban crime. So they made a list of potential relocation cities before choosing Miami for its sunny weather and what they perceived was a better sense of safety.

Raghavan said that their Oakland house had been broken into four times and that prior to the pandemic, his wife called him every day during her seven-minute walk home from the BART station because she felt safer with someone on the phone. After moving to Miami, Raghavan said they accidentally left their garage door open one day and were floored when they returned home and found nothing had been stolen.

"We moved to the Bay Area because we had to be there if you want to work in tech and start-ups, and now that that's no longer a tether, we took a long hard look and said, 'Wait, why are we here again?' " Raghavan said.

via www.gazettextra.com

As long as they leave California in California…

Beloved San Francisco fetish festival presses ahead amid anxiety, uncertainty over monkeypox

SAN FRANCISCO — Amid a burgeoning monkeypox outbreak that has so far disproportionately affected gay and bisexual men, Bay Area public health officials and organizers of one of the region’s most beloved LGBTQ events are walking a difficult line between preventing the spread of the virus, while fighting the stigma of the virus as a disease limited to the LGBTQ community.

Despite San Francisco officials’ declaration of a public health emergency over the monkeypox virus, organizers of Dore Alley — a live-out-loud leather and fetish festival that’s been a favorite among LGBTQ communities in the Bay Area since the 1980s — said Friday they intend to hold the festival this weekend.

The San Francisco event, which is expected to draw 5,000 people, comes amid deep anxieties across the LGBTQ community over the outbreak, which has proliferated amid a shortage of vaccines. Confronting a disease that has primarily affected men who have sex with men, many in the LGBTQ community fear a replay of the failures of the AIDS/HIV crisis. The confluence of issues has raised difficult questions for Dore Alley organizers, public health officials and LGBTQ advocates, even as they press ahead with the festival.

via www.eastbaytimes.com

Don’t whine to me when you get the Pox. Play monkey games, win monkey prizes.

Just wondering…
What happened to the moment by moment updates on the war in Ukraine?
Do we have the faintest idea how the tens of billions of our taxpayer dollars are being spent over there?
When will Ukrainian billionaires and oligarchs be asked to pay ”their fair share” of taxes in the US?
Why isn’t the Russian military targeting Zelensky directly?

“Being a Ranger is never being satisfied with excellence; never being content by being the best. Being a Ranger is always striving to be a little bit better today than you were yesterday, but not near as good as you will be tomorrow.”

Let's say that a group of local businesspeople decided to band together and fix up some of the most struggling neighborhoods in Baltimore, what would likely happen? The leftists in the city would criticize them loudly and publicly for attempting to 'gentrify' the neighborhood. They would then use their willing accomplices in city government to impose fees, fines, regulations and other roadblocks to prevent these improvements from happening. After years of effort and thousands of dollars spent with no results to show for it, the businesspeople move on to a more friendly city and make their investments there.

And are then criticized for abandoning the poor....

For my non-traditional schooling friends…

This is fantastic!!

Why hasn’t Biden sent a brigade of social workers and crisis counselors to help the Russians and Ukrainians to work out their differences? That’s what the de-policing advocates demand from our cities. What Biden has done is the international equivalent of arming and financing one side of a cartel war.

Fentanyl From the Government? A Vancouver Experiment Aims to Stop Overdoses – DNyuz

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is bright and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable about the potency of the pills he can crush, cook and inject.

Soft pop music played, and an attendant spritzed a bit of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before he settled into a booth on a recent afternoon with a couple of red-and-yellow pills, a tourniquet, a tiny candle and a lighter.

via dnyuz.com

Well, if you dicen you’re not going to overdose. Great idea team Canada