Rents have gone down recently. That might be helping with the homeless issue. I don't have a problem downtown at all. But granted I am a native Austinite and I lived downtown for years before eventually moving north as I got priced out. I certainly would have raised my family there if I could have. That does give me a certain perspective. I always enjoyed and chatted with the weird Austin guys you would find in parks and just hanging around on the streets. I certainly remember Leslie. In the 1990s I used to buy cigarettes just to hand them out to weird Austin guys. I didn't even smoke. So maybe the homeless people just don't really bother me much. I haven't seen any injecting themselves to be fair but for sure plenty of those guys' brains are pretty fried. They usually don't make me feel unsafe except for the occasional screamer, but that's pretty rare. Today things just seem much nicer than they used to be. If some city regulation is causing some business some issues then that should be addressed but it is hard to be convinced it is really hard to build or renovate anything when everything has been radically built up and renovated in the past few decades. But I don't know. I am up here in Cedar Park now so I am a little out of touch with city political issues despite being downtown several times a week.
I walk all around. And there are tons of restaurants downtown, just not really between the capitol and campus. It seems weird to be lectured about how I don't get a place I have gone to several times a week for 20 years. Obviously I am not there after 5:30PM on a regular basis so I cannot vouch for the instant death on the running trails at night but I wouldn't run around Brushy Creek at night either. Just running alone through the woods at night for no good reason seems like a bad idea.
I mean I am sure a similar story could have been told about tons of our military interventions. I bet Iraqis were crying when Saddam went down. When Noriega went down. When we assisted in the coup against Allende. And good for them but fuck, I am just not interested in doing this anymore. And while I am not realy locked in on Panama history she should know that these things rarely end well.
The Last Boy Scout. The movie was about a hypothetical situation where gamblers controlled the NFL and that player was reduced to desperate measures from mobsters. Gambling controlling American sports? Ridiculous.
You could make a similar list for every year since 2014 and this dude. He has the formula down: promise, bullshit, and deliver on nothing. And people give you hundreds of billions. All those people who told me to underpromise and overdeliver were clearly losers.
No homeless people in our part of downtown. Not really any people really. The government just takes up that space and there is nothing, barely any restaurants to eat lunch in. I have been commuting down there since 2004 and cannot really recall seeing any homeless people shoot up. Now when I go to say 6th and I-35 it's different.
What distances me is that they do not even do the freaking things they talk to us about. They are all like "put up with out bullshit and our constant failures because our brilliant strategy will deliver all these things!" and we put up with their bullshit and they don't even deliver the things they promised. It isn't that I just want everybody to be far left, it is just that those seem to be the only people who seem to get it. They are the only ones who seem to listen and understand the issues. But I would put up with the being lectured to by people who are decisive and successful leaders who delivered results. But they aren't and they don't.
I am so tired of this imperial shit man. All this shit about right wing populism America first bringing back isolationism was just more bullshit. More lies. And all the supposed peace people like Tulsi don't give a shit. More grifters and bullshitters. Trump never ceases to disappoint me, no matter how low my opinion of him is. It is truly amazing.