Thursday, May 23, 2024

In a shock to no one

The four members of the Raleigh City Council who voted for the ceasefire resolution were the four I endorsed while the other four voted to kill it. Of course, the latter four were the same ones endorsing Ukrainian Nazis and lighting up Downtown Raleigh yellow and light blue just a couple of years ago as part of the previous City Council. 

Raleigh--just like Greensboro--endorses genocide.

Downtown Greensboro news

Triad City Beat | EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: The Assembly, and collaboration (triad-city-beat.com)

Let's hope that this new collaborative effort isn't going to suck up to the political clans that run the city and have gentrified downtown. Hope to REAL journalism since the daily is a zombie publication and the others have pretty much given up any type of investigative work.

Triad City Beat | Greensboro’s Mayor Nancy Vaughan will not seek re-election in 2025 (triad-city-beat.com)

First up, good riddance. Second, now is the time the groups that I previously mentioned to put up or shut up. Either they come together to start fielding a real antiestablishment slate, or they'll forever give up that shot as the city is forever stuck in a loop between establishment hacks and right wing nutjobs because 2029 will be too late.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

NC Rants

  • Greensboro's lack of a food hall is a new low for an area already known for being a national laggard and the fact that ROAR was converted to an event space four months ago shows that the Triad is moving in the opposite direction as the number of food halls is once again reduced to one
  • What's happening to Triad Stage speaks for itself--namely, that Greensboro is taking yet another step to conceding the arts to Winston-Salem
  • Meanwhile, a couple of hours to the east, the Raleigh City Council is making even more bonehead decisions as it decided table a proposal to add three seats while also introducing staggered four-year terms in 2026 without even putting it on the ballot like Greensboro did in 2015
  • Speaking of Raleigh, the previous City Council reduced the hours of hot dog carts from 3 am to 1:15 am while doing nothing to curtail gentrification. In the two decades since I left the city, Downtown Raleigh has gone from a ghost town when I graduated to a place that has become unaffordable
  • The election to replace Mary-Ann Baldwin is not looking too promising

Trouble in the Ballpark District

At the beginning of the year, the City of High Point decided to split ways with Elliott Sidewalk Communities. Out of the four parcels, only Parcel C was developed (into the food hall). Parcel A is still a parking lot while the other two never got developed.

I will not blame this on the city as yet another example of it being resistant to change. This is all on Elliott Sidewalk. They had six years and only developed 25 percent of the land given to them so if the Ballpark District ends up undercooked, it's all ESC's fault.



Source 1

Source 2


Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Cardiac Pack 2.0

I'm forever grateful that the Wolfpack men's basketball team turned it around when it was almost a certainty that a coaching change was inevitable prior to the start of the ACC Tournament in D.C. While I treated the Final Four run as an extremely pleasant surprise, I'm hoping that this is the beginning of a new era of success.

A pattern of the team's three ACC Championships in the multi-bid era (from 1975 on):

Every postseason game that the Original Cardiac Pack played in except the Sweet 16 against 10-seed Utah was a nail-biter.

The previous team to win an ACC title won every game in that tournament by single digits.

Most of this year's ACCT games as well as a couple of NCAAT games were close too.



Meanwhile, notice a glaring difference between the '24 team against the other two championship teams:


Can anyone say unprecedented?

No one gave this year's team much love whereas the '83 team was hampered by Dereck Whittenburg's injury before Cardiac Pack 1.0 went on that Cinderella run once he returned from his injury. The '87 team started the season as an NCAA Tournament caliber team before it fell off in the middle of the season and had to rally in Metro D.C. just to get into the Big Dance.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Stunted City Redux

Well, it looks like this prediction from almost seven years ago is coming to pass--albeit slowly:

Durham and Winston-Salem traded the #4 and #5 positions between 2007 and 2012 before the Bull City pulled away from the Twin City. Given the stagnant growth around the Gate City, it's plausible that Winston could leapfrog it for #3 or rather Greensboro falls to #5 some time around the 2020 Census or afterwards.

As it turns out, the Rhino took notice of Greensboro's stagnant growth, which is reaching zero population growth territory.

It looks like the Gate City will fall to fourth place in no time and may even fall behind Winston-Salem by the 2030 Census. Consider the evidence:

The bad news is that the growth in two years was only 2,394 or 0.8 percent, which compared to Greensboro’s peer cities in the state is anemic...The latest figures show that by 2022 the population in Durham had grown to 292,939. The population growth during that period was 9,432 or 3.3 percent...Even Winston-Salem right next door grew in population more than twice as fast as Greensboro. Winston-Salem’s growth rate was 1.9 percent to a 2022 population of 254,200.

Given that Durham has recently had its own issues, what's happening to Greensboro represents a precipitous fall as it far outpaced Raleigh for second place in 1960 and is staring at a possible fifth place showing in the near future. As a friend said last year, Greensboro has lost its way.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Bernie and the Failed Revolution Eight Years Later

After eight years of witnessing the scuttled political revolution of Bernie Sanders, I can logically draw one conclusion: It was a failure. Taking over the Democratic Party and reforming from within was never going to work when varied interests are so entrenched that the party bosses would much rather go the way of the Whigs than halt its continued rightward drift. I am so happy that I gave my money to a short-lived art event known as the Ruby Slipper Festival instead of Bernie's campaign when he came to Winston-Salem.

Here's a list of all of the issues that I have with these progressives and why organizing outside of the two-party system is a much better solution:

During the ’20 Senate race in Maine, most progressives were either silent on Lisa Savage or all in for Sara Gideon despite it being the first time the state used ranked choice voting

The Force The Vote debacle

The Squad foregoing fighting for Medicare For All in favor of committee assignments. Instead, AOC got kicked off a committee by a 46-13 vote in favor of a New Democrat that the NY delegation hated but national leaders liked

A $15 minimum wage was also cited for skipping FTV but progressives did nothing to boost that issue

Ayanna Pressley possibly sabotaging The Squad by saying that each member voted alone rather than as a bloc

Progressives in Seattle tone policed former councilwoman Kshama Sawant when she called out progressive Dem members of the city council for being a roadblock to progress

Congressional progressives ignoring the Marches For M4ALL, which were held in 56 cities in mid-2021

Squad members and the Working Families Party conducting a sham rally on extending the eviction moratorium at the U.S. Capitol while failing to hold their fellow Congress members accountable

PMCs finding ways to defend Squad members when they took indefensible positions—Iron Dome, breaking the rail strike, funding Ukraine unconditionally, the list goes on

After The Squad came into existence, the Democratic Party establishment readjusted its strategy. After Nina Turner’s first congressional campaign, progressives didn’t

Turner’s opponent, Shontel Brown, being allowed to join the Progressive Caucus two months after she joined the New Democrat Coalition

AOC and Ilhan Omar pretending to be arrested at an abortion rally outside of the SCOTUS building in July 2022

Progressives rallying behind John Fetterman despite his troubled past and his own declarations that he was a Democrat and not a progressive

Ilhan Omar coming within two points (50.3-48.3) of losing her primary two years ago to a Minneapolis City Council member backed by the status quo because her fellow Somalis had a falling out with her over the congresswoman’s support of imperialist policies in their homeland

The CPC folding on keeping the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better together and its letter to Biden urging a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine a year apart

Marianne Williamson’s failed slate of candidates in the ’22 election cycle 

Last year, AOC sneered at the House Freedom Caucus’s FTV tactic with Kevin McCarthy and said that The Squad doing the same thing to Nancy Pelosi would have caused “irreparable institutional harm”

The Bernie movement created a lot of careers but not a lot of legislative success

Now, the organizations that spawned from 2016 are in tatters. Justice Democrats laid off nearly half of its staff and are playing defense this year, taking on no new candidates. Our Revolution started out with dark money and began supporting non-progressive candidates as early as 2021. As for Brand New Congress, it’s out of business

Kyle Kulinski let the cat out of the bag last fall about Justice Democrats’ true mission (fighting Trump, not the Democratic Party establishment), and it explains why Squad members rarely fought the establishment (unless they were named Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema)

Ryan Grim’s new book was all about simping made easy as he consistently ran cover for the Fraud Squad (like that time all of them except Rashida Tlaib voted to block the rail strike)

Progressives (except for Marie Newman—and look at what happened to her) didn’t end the rightward shift. If anything, they moved to the right themselves in some instances (*cough* foreign policy)

In Nevada, a slate of DSA-backed progressives ran the state Democratic Party from ’21 to last year and got sabotaged by the Harry Reid Machine. Instead of supporting his proteges, Bernie actually condemned them

Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago last spring was a stay of execution—not validation—of working within the Democratic Party. As his woes demonstrate, he’s already susceptible to losing in a rematch against Paul Vallas in 2027 or someone who’s actually worse than Vallas



·       

In a shock to no one

The four members of the Raleigh City Council who voted for the ceasefire resolution were the four I  endorsed while the other four voted to...