• It was hard to tell whether the supposed “coup” or “insurrection” (since that is the preferred term these days) that the mercenary Wagner Group instigated in Russia recently was authentic, or some kind of false-flag operation designed to smoke out disloyal military officers and senior civil servants in Putin’s government, or as a distraction/cover for rearranging troop and weapons placements or some similar purpose. Among other things, the disposition of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, following the abortive coup was uncertain. Well, it appears that Prigozhin’s “disposition” has been determined: he was “disposed” of in a plane crash today. How convenient for Putin.
[Idle speculation: I wonder if Prigozhin opened a package Hillary Clinton sent him with a nice note, “Press this red ‘reset’ button when your plane reaches 10,000 feet. . .” Or maybe he was on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. . .]
UPDATE—You just knew somebody would do this:
• San Francisco’s last halfway sensible mayor, Frank Jordan, has spoken out about the homelessness situation there:
“When you look at the homeless issue, we spent $2.8 billion in 7 years,” he said to California Insider. “We are averaging more than $700 million a year just on homeless. But when break that down, nobody seems to know if it’s 7,000 homeless or 17,000 homeless.”
Jordan criticized Mayor Breed’s efforts to put the homeless in local hotels for housing. He says 70% of the homeless have mental health, drug, and alcohol problems and need around-the-clock supervision.
“They start fighting with people in hallways or lighting fires in the room, so we have 30 of those 70 hotels that are now suing the city because of the damage that’s been caused in those hotels,” he said.
Back in 1995 when Jordan was trying to hold on to his seat from the vigorous (and ultimately successful) challenge from Willie Brown, I told the following story to easterners to illustrate how strange Bay Area politics are: “Jordan, trying to curry favor with the all-important gay vote in San Francisco, hit on a gimmick of stripping down naked in the shower with two leading gay rights advocates on a live morning drive-time radio broadcast. And Jordan was the conservative candidate in the race.”
It’s been all downhill from there, though I think it is true that if Willie Brown, an extremely capable and no-nonsense politician (even for a leftist) was still mayor, things wouldn’t be nearly as insane as they are now.
• Yale is upset because their own campus police force told the truth to incoming students. From Inside Higher Ed:
The Yale Police Benevolent Association, a union representing Yale University’s campus police, handed out pamphlets to freshmen containing “disturbing and inflammatory rhetoric about the safety of Yale’s campus and its home city of New Haven” during move-in day, the university said in a statement Monday.
A photo of one of the handouts circulated on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday, featuring a Grim Reaper–like illustration, crime statistics for New Haven and a list of tips for “surviving” in the city. The pamphlet advised students to “stay off the streets after 8 p.m.”
In a press release, the Ivy League institution said the pamphlets contained “misleading” information and stressed that rates of violent crime and robberies are currently down, both on campus and in New Haven.
In campus-speak, like Orwell’s Newspeak, “misleading” means “true, but ideologically incorrect.”
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