30 BLOCKS THROWBACK THURSDAY

In a tragic accident in 2019 I accidentally deleted every 30 Blocks of Squalor article I had ever written on TBP. I think they were some of my best work. Some people didn’t think so and tried to get me fired from my job, but failed. There are a few that got picked up by other websites, so I’m able to reproduce a few. This one was from May 2012. Enjoy.

MORE THAN 30 BLOCKS OF GREY & DECAY

30 Blocks of Squalor – The Burning Platform

It happened again yesterday morning. There was an accident on the Schuykill Expressway so I had the pleasure of navigating through the 30 Blocks of Squalor, again. After having made at least 25 posts about the 30 Blocks of Squalor over the years, I keep thinking I’ve run out of things to say. But it seems to be a never ending treasure trove of insights about our society and the people who live in this country. It was a particularly grey day in Philadelphia with a dreary overcast and intermittent rain. It seemed fitting for this trek through the slowly decaying landscape leading to my workplace in West Philly.

I’ve talked previously about the stretch of highway leading to the 30 Blocks of Squalor. It’s called West Chester Pike (Route 3) and it cuts through Delaware County where I grew up. It cuts through Havertown, Haverford, Drexel Hill, and Upper Darby and eventually spits you out at 69th Street, where I’ve previously detailed the flash mob of savages rampaging through the Sears stealing everything in sight (all caught on surveillance cameras to be shown on a future reality TV show). In a shocking turn of events, Sears decided to later close this retail establishment.

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MEANWHILE….ON THE 30 BLOCKS OF SQUALOR

And so it goes.

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MEANWHILE….IN WEST PHILLY

Via The Phila Inquirer

State Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell, charged with $500k theft, hands in resignation

State Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell, charged with $500k theft, hands in resignation

One day after being charged with taking more than $500,000 from her own nonprofit, Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell submitted her resignation on Thursday, saying she would leave the Pennsylvania legislature next Friday.

“While I dispute many of the allegations lodged against me, I accept responsibility for some missteps made before I became an elected official,” Johnson-Harrell wrote in a letter to Speaker Mike Turzai. “I am choosing to resign to protect my district, to allow for an orderly election for my successor, and to focus on my defense to these allegations.”

The West Philadelphia Democrat was charged Wednesday with theft, perjury, tampering with public records, and related crimes.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – A raid is set for MOVE headquarters – 1985

WHY THIS FEELS LIKE A DEPRESSION FOR MOST PEOPLE

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Everyone has seen the pictures of the unemployed waiting in soup lines during the Great Depression. When you try to tell a propaganda believing, willfully ignorant, mainstream media watching, math challenged consumer we are in the midst of a Greater Depression, they act as if you’ve lost your mind. They will immediately bluster about the 5.1% unemployment rate, record corporate profits, and stock market near all-time highs. The cognitive dissonance of these people is only exceeded by their inability to understand basic mathematical concepts.

The reason you don’t see huge lines of people waiting in soup lines during this Greater Depression is because the government has figured out how to disguise suffering through modern technology. During the height of the Great Depression in 1933, there were 12.8 million Americans unemployed. These were the men pictured in the soup lines. Today, there are 46 million Americans in an electronic soup kitchen line, as their food is distributed through EBT cards (with that angel of mercy JP Morgan reaping billions in profits by processing the transactions).

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Running With the Predators

Hat tip I95east
Guest Post by Heather MacDonald
Liberal elites continue to condemn law enforcement and excuse inner-city crime.

A December 2014 protest against the police in New York City

Starting in late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter convulsed the country. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement claimed that blacks are still oppressed by widespread racism, especially within law enforcement. The police subject black communities to a gratuitous regime of stops and arrests, resulting in the frequent use of lethal force against black men, according to the activists and their media and academic allies. Indeed, America’s police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, the protesters charged. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son may face from “officers who are paid to protect him.” Less than three weeks later, a thug from Brooklyn, inspired by the nationwide anti-cop agitation, assassinated two New York police officers.

The protest movement’s indictment of law enforcement took place without any notice of the actual facts regarding policing and crime. One could easily have concluded from the agitation that black and white crime rates are identical. Why the police focus on certain neighborhoods and what the conditions are on the ground were questions left unasked.

The year 2014 also saw the publication of a book that addressed precisely the questions that the Black Lives Matter movement ignored. Alice Goffman, daughter of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman, lived in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood from 2002 to 2008, integrating herself into the lives of a group of young crack dealers. Her resulting book, On the Run, offers a detailed and startling ethnography of a world usually kept far from public awareness and discourse. It has been widely acclaimed; a film or TV adaptation may be on the way. But On the Run is an equally startling—if unintentional—portrait of the liberal elite mind-set. Goffman draws a devastating picture of cultural breakdown within the black underclass, but she is incapable of acknowledging the truth in front of her eyes, instead deeming her subjects the helpless pawns of a criminal-justice system run amok.

At the center of On the Run are three half-brothers and their slightly older friend Mike, all of whom live in a five-block area of Philadelphia that Goffman names Sixth Street. Sixth Street, we are told, isn’t viewed as a particularly high-crime area, which can only leave the reader wondering what an actual high-crime area would look like. In her six years living there, Goffman attended nine funerals of her young associates and mentions several others, including one for “three kids” paid for by local drug dealers, eager to cement their support in the community.

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TRAGEDY OR ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A DEGRADED CULTURE IN WEST PHILLY?

When I saw the story below on the news the other night I was infuriated. The local news talking heads blathered about the tragedy, the mother  portrayed the grieving parent and the police that were interviewed said how sad the story was. I drive by 37th and Wallace Street every damn day. This death occurred one block form the infamous Mantua Square low income housing townhouse estates with gates. Mantua is one of Obama’s PROMISE ZONES. Do you think more of your tax dollars dumped into this culture of entitlement, ignorance and violence will change these people?

My reaction to the story was sadness for the little girl and outrage and anger towards the mother and her unidentified “male friend”. What kind of ignorant animal brings a loaded 357 Magnum with an 8 inch barrel into a house with four children under the age of 14? This pitiful excuse for a human being then leaves the gun on the refrigerator. How can a mother allow a person like this into her house? How can she allow him to leave this loaded gun? This is the fucking gun Clint Eastwood used to blow perps away in the Dirty Harry movies.  

 

How could an adult allow this loaded weapon in a house full of children? The mother and the scumbag who left the gun are solely responsible for this death. It isn’t some tragic mistake. It is due to the reckless disregard for human life by two adults. They should go to prison for their actions. Not in good old liberal Philadelphia. No one will be held accountable. Maybe tougher gun laws will save the day. I’m sure the scumbag registered this weapon properly and had all of his paperwork in order. My disgust and contempt for the people of West Philly grows exponentially by the day. I’m sure this won’t happen once Obama works his Promise Zone magic.

 

Girl, 11, fatally shot in West Phila. house

Friends and family members gather outside the house on Wallace Street in Mantua after Saturday's fatal shooting.

By Maria Panaritis and Jonathan Lai, Inquirer Staff Writers

An 11-year-old girl was shot and killed, evidently accidentally by her 2-year-old sibling, after one of the girl’s siblings found a loaded gun left atop a refrigerator in a house on the 3800 block of Wallace Street in Philadelphia on Saturday, police said.The girl was struck in the right shoulder at 9:53 a.m., the bullet tearing through her chest so badly that efforts at emergency surgery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia could not keep her alive, said Lt. John Walker.

A male friend of the victim’s mother had left the gun in the house, police said.

Police found the girl in her mother’s arms when they arrived, a scene Walker described as highly emotional.

Police placed the girl in the back of a squad car and raced her to nearby Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, only for her to be pronounced dead there within minutes, at 10:29, Walker said.

No charges were immediately filed, and it was unclear who, other than the four children, was home at the time of the shooting, Walker said. All four siblings appeared to have been in the second-floor bedroom when the gun, a .357-caliber handgun now in police custody, went off in the 2-year-old’s hands.

Walker said police still were trying to ascertain which of the siblings – who ranged in age from 2 to 14 years old – had found the weapon, carried it up the stairs, and taken it into the room where the 11-year-old was playing on a sunny start to a spring weekend.

The children were “distraught,” the lieutenant said.

Walker said police were trying to respect the mother’s grief while also questioning her.

“Mom is extremely distraught,” he said. “These are just horrible situations.”

Walker said that police were “not even at that point” of considering criminal charges and that investigators would consult with the District Attorney’s Office.

He said detectives would conduct a fresh examination of the weapon – a handgun with an 8-inch barrel – and work their way back from there, he said. Police were investigating whether the weapon was legally registered and if so, to whom.

“The mom is in a really tough state of mind,” Walker said. She called 911, but Walker said he did not know if she was inside when the gun was fired.

The dead child, whose identity was not being disclosed, had lived with her family for years in the house in the city’s Mantua section, near the campuses of Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania, said one neighbor, Alice Freeman, who said she had lived on the 3800 block of Wallace for more than two decades.

Some time during the morning, according to police, the child’s mother was home and welcomed a visitor – a male friend of the family’s.

“A gun was placed on top of a refrigerator inside of the house . . . by this male,” Walker said. When the man left, the gun was left behind.

On Saturday morning, one of the children found the handgun and took it up the steps to a second-floor bedroom.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s a sad thing,” said Maxine Seward, 59, a neighbor. “I don’t know what to say. It’s just a sad thing. A child is gone.”


Inquirer staff writer Andrew Maykuth contributed to this article.