A little while back, when chatting with my friend Eric Peters -- whose website offers visitors insights into automotive innovations, quality, and the pressures of politicians on consumers and manufacturers – I had a thought that seems to have been anticipated, in a manner of speaking, by someone on the west coast.
Eric and I were chatting about the political push to mandate electric vehicles – “EVs,” which are both extremely expensive and highly deceptive when it comes to claims of environmental benefits and even “efficiency” – and how poorly EVs were selling, even as they had to be kept charged in the unsold state, sitting there on the lot, draining energy and cash. And I was struck by an inspiration.
I thought that, since Disney has run its “Adventure” vacations in places like the desert southwest of the U.S., and since Disney’s woke approach to its films and theme parks has seen profits decline, why not try a different kind of “Adventure Tour” that focuses on U.S. largess and waste? They could call it the Political Pork Tour, and go to almost any state, showing the misspent money, the resources that politicians snatched from people to shift into things those people would not have bought themselves, or bought at different levels over different timeframes.
Well, it turns out that, in the lovely, fecal-strewn city of San Francisco, someone kind of beat me to it.
It’s called the “Doom Loop Walking Tour” and it lets people enjoy a guided tour of the politically-created squalor they could encounter on their own if they walk the streets there at any time.
As Gretchen Clayson reports for The Daily Caller:
“A new, sold-out tour has emerged in San Francisco, promising to provide visitors a glimpse of the ‘urban decay’ that has taken hold of one of America’s wealthiest cities.
The ‘Doom Loop Walking tour’ promises an up close and personal view of ‘open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores’ that make up downtown San Francisco.
‘You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!’”
San Francisco long has had a gutter-level reputation for driving away entry-level jobs and low-priced market housing. One wonders if any of the people driven into poverty and homelessness can start their own endeavors as tour guides, or if the leftist government there might lock them down again or impose new licensing fees or new minimum wage mandates that, again, destroy this new, expanding field of opportunity – the opportunity to see how opportunities have been crushed by government.
Related: Because, Priorities: San Francisco Bans E-Cigarettes | MRCTV
If you detect a recursive, feedback loop, kind of thing happening here, you’re not alone.
And the creator of the tour seems to be with you.
Notes Clayson:
“The anonymous tour guide, a self-proclaimed ‘political junkie and opinionated loudmouth,’ is a ‘card-carrying City Commissioner’ and co-founder of one of the city’s largest neighborhood associations. The guide glibly declared the tour was created as a ‘result of his mental-health crisis’ after spending hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, ‘shouting into the opposite abyss.’”
And Clayson notes:
“Promising tourists they will find no better expert, the guide assures that patrons will discover the ‘policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader of housing crisis, addiction crisis, mental-health crisis, & unrepentant crime crisis.’
In neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Tenderloin District homelessness, drug abuse and crime reign supreme. There, drug users abuse substances out in the open, businesses use incense to cover up the stench of human excrement that litter the sidewalks and broken glass from car windows litter the streets, the Financial Times reported.”
All of which are things to which I can testify, after visiting the city years ago. Coming up from the subway at night near Mission Street, the first thing I detected was human fecal matter, all over the sidewalk.
Later, near the intersection of 16th Street and Mission, I got to enjoy the site of a homeless guy sleeping on the roof of a burned-out, windowless car – a guy being berated by a junkie transvestite wearing a sequin top that shimmered in the misty morning light with every angry breath the shemale expelled.
Related: San Francisco Spends $16.1 Million To Shelter 300 Homeless People In TENTS | MRCTV
It is, by far, the ugliest, dirtiest, most unpleasant city I have visited, and it only has gotten worse since my visit.
“Shoplifting has become such an issue that grocery stores and drug stores have been forced to either shutter their stores or alter their operating hours to deal with the rising crime. One such Walgreens in the Richmond district is reportedly hit by shoplifters 15-20 times a day. To cope, Walgreens has been forced to put locks on their freezers, one of the hardest hit sections of the store.”
The way to improve it is to get the policy makers and welfare pushers and “regulators” out. It is imperative that people cut back the political interference in business and housing endeavors and allow freedom.
“’How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?” the tour guide posited.
The 1.5-mile tour will take visitors from City Hall through the city’s Tenderloin district, Union Square and Mid-Market with all proceeds “donated to a non-profit that does not actively degrade its community.”
San Francisco is in an accelerated state of decay, and the powers in charge seem completely disinterested in recognizing the freedom needed to let people get jobs and good places to live.
Perhaps this tour will help wake up a few people, be they from the area, or from other cities, witnessing the effects of oppressive government restrictions on markets and insane government policies regarding property theft and criminality.