Missoula, please! Don't send them here!
I see that Missoula, Montana, a nice little blue college town surrounded by a sea of bright, bloody red, has a tent camping problem all of a sudden. And their response looks a bit like Portland 2017.
Shannone Hart, the vice president of the board of Youth Homes, said the organization's Shirley Miller Attention Home is a shelter for youth who have experienced trauma. She said the staff have repeatedly had to call police because of issues with urban camping in the park behind the shelter. She told the council that the kids often see fights, fires and other forms of violence at the public city park behind the shelter....
Mayor Hess said the city is “encumbered by the federal court decisions that it is cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize camping in urban parks if there’s nowhere else to go and we don’t have enough shelter beds.”
“We simply don't have the resources at the city of Missoula to address urban camping and to address the root causes, the upstream causes of homelessness and untreated mental health issues and untreated addiction issues and all of the other issues that come together to put us in the position that we're in right now,” Hess said. “So we find that we are spending city resources dealing with a very downstream effect of a failure at the state and federal level to address the upstream causes of homelessness. So we're in an unfortunate situation, we're doing the best we can with limited resources.”...
City council member Daniel Carlino wanted an amendment to the proposed ordinance. Essentially, Carlino wanted it to “not be criminal” to be in a park between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., as is prohibited currently. Carlino’s amendment was voted down 9-1....
At the end of the committee meeting, Carlino said he was “disappointed” in the committee’s decision and said he would be reaching out to the ACLU to “sue over decisions like this.”
There's nowhere else in Montana that's going to welcome any campers that Missoula forces to move on. In fact, Billings has been known to issue its street addicts bus tickets to Portland. Anywhere in Idaho is also out of the question.
My advice to Missoula: Give tough love a chance. Let the ACLU scream; if they don't, you're not doing your job. Push back on the harmful Ninth Circuit case law as hard as you can. But don't make the many mistakes that have been made, and continue to be made, here in Portland.
And whatever you do, I beg you, don't send those people here.
Can we reopen the Shanghai tunnels again and start our own "get out of town" operation?
ReplyDeleteThere are no 'Shanghai Tunnels' those tunnels exist for bringing goods directly from ships to the city which when they were built were much closer to the river. There is no historical proof that the tunnels were used to kidnap people to work on ships. It also makes zero sense why you would kidnap people to work on a ship. Being a sailor was a very dangerous and highly skilled profession. You know how many knots you have to learn?
ReplyDeleteShips needed warm bodies as well as skilled sailors, to do a variety of tasks. When enough willing hands couldn't be found press-ganging, or Shanghaiing, was a very common practice. Portland was indeed notorious for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing
DeleteMissoula has a cadre of follow travelers who discovered that the “homeless” are a good vehicle to advance their agenda. This puts them at odds with the traditional values of rest of the population. And controversy is fodder for the ACLU.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia's has all kinds of stuff on everything when the Oregon Historical Society publishes something I will consider it
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that the local guides who give tours love to talk it up. They can also probably connect you with guided Big Foot tours and McMinville UFO pics from the 50s. I am sure Wikipedia has entries for that as well. It's a free country to believe in all kinds of things. When I was younger I believed all kinds of nonsense but eventually you start to get skeptical especially if you do a little reading like from actual books.
Exactly. The smallpox blanket myth comes immediately to mind. A more modern one is how Portland ranks second in the nation for sex trafficking and number one in strip clubs.
DeleteBut the chain of events behind the one authentic case of deliberate smallpox contamination began in 1757 at the siege of Fort William Henry (in present-day upstate New York), when Indians allied with the French ignored the terms of a surrender worked out between the British and the French, broke into the garrison hospital and killed and scalped a number of patients, some of them suffering from smallpox. The blankets and clothing the Indians looted from the patients in the hospital and corpses in the cemetery, carried back to their villages, reportedly touched off a smallpox epidemic.
DeleteThe French lost the war and left their Indian allies holding the bag, and in 1763 Chief Pontiac and his colleagues sparked an uprising against English settlers in the Great Lakes region that had Lord Jeffery Amherst and the British forces close to despair. The Indians destroyed several of the smaller British forts, but Fort Pitt (present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) held out under the command of Captain Simeon Ecuyer, a 22-year veteran Swiss mercenary in the British service. Ecuyer, whose native language was French, also spoke German, the predominant language of his native Switzerland; the British had retained him because many settlers in Pennsylvania also spoke German. Smallpox had broken out among the British garrison, and during a parley on June 24, 1763, Ecuyer gave besieging Lenape warriors several items taken from smallpox patients. “We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital,” Captain William Trent of the garrison militia wrote in his journal. “I hope it will have the desired effect.”
Smallpox did break out among the Indian tribes whose warriors were besieging the fort — 19th-century historian Francis Parkman estimated that 60 to 80 Indians in the Ohio Valley died in a localized epidemic. But no one is sure whether the smallpox was carried by Ecuyer’s infected blankets or by the clothing Indian warriors had stolen from the estimated 2,000 outlying settlers they had killed or abducted.
Ecuyer’s attempt to spread smallpox among the hostile Indians was in no way disapproved. While Colonel Henry Bouquet was preparing to lead a British expedition to relieve Fort Pitt, Amherst sent him a note on June 29: “Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”
Bouquet, another Franco-Swiss mercenary recruited because he spoke German, wrote back on June 13, “I will try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.” Amherst replied on July 16, advocating exposure to smallpox “by means of blankets, as well as every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
https://www.historynet.com/smallpox-in-the-blankets/
I'll bet the brisk Missoula climate will solve this problem come late October.
ReplyDelete