WE’VE NEVER TRIED ‘REAL SOCIAL HOUSING:’ Hall Of Eternal Shame.

1. Pruitt-Igoe (Saint Louis)

An early experiment from the 1950s, Pruitt-Igoe became an early example, with the crime and vacancy rates accelerating as fast as the facilities themselves deteriorated.

An early example of “social housing”, it was also one of the first to be abandoned; its 33 high-rises were all demolished over fifty years ago.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House

On each floor there were covered walkways, in keeping with [Le Corbusier’s] idea of “streets in the air.” Since there was no other place in the project in which to sin in public, whatever might ordinarily have taken place in bars, brothels, social clubs, pool halls, amusement arcades, general stores, corncribs, rutabaga patches, hayricks, barn stalls, now took place in the streets in the air. Corbu’s boulevards made Hogarth’s Gin Lane look like the oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York. Respectable folk pulled out, even if it meant living in cracks in the sidewalks. Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up!” The next day the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

The caption of the photo of tower block going down reads, “The Pruitt-Igoe projects, St. Louis, July 15, 1972. Mankind finally arrives at a workable solution to the problem of public housing.”

COMMUNIST DROPS MASK:

Curiously though, for the very first time, a socialist bureaucrat doesn’t know how a desk works:

HAVE YOU READ THE DECLARATION BEFORE THE DECLARATION? More than a year before our Declaration of Independence was proclaimed on July 4, 1776, there was another independence proclamation known as the Mecklenburg Declaration. It is more than well-worth reading today and you can do so in my latest PJMedia column.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE:

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: She Plays a Bloody Good Game of Pickleball. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how to get a DUI with two vehicles in one day, all about full-contact pickleball, and what to do when a bear tries to steal your truck in Colorado.”

INVASION OF THE AI BODY SNATCHERS: The Clone Wars: How AI is Secretly Copy-Pasting Your Favorite YouTubers.

The example spotted by music YouTuber Rick Beato is particularly pathetic. I don’t think Hal or Colossus is cranking these out in its spare time; a human has to prompt AI to make the videos, and write the script for the AI narrator to record, to produce a pathetic clone of guitarist Rhett Shull (seen in the top right of Beato’s video thumbnail, and like Beato, Shull has been making YouTube videos for about a decade now).

I assume whoever is badly cloning Shull is hoping for a little bit of ad revenue from his AI clips, or simply bored in his basement, but this is just bizarre:

MUSTN’T LET THE PROLES SEE ISRAEL IN A POSITIVE LIGHT:

I guess there wasn’t a way to spin “Israel participates in rescue operations” as a genocide.

INDEED:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER:  The Odyssey — Oh, Dear…

As of the time of this post, here’s the ratio of likes to dislikes on its trailer:

In the past, such a ratio foretold of bad things to come from movies such as Snow White. Will The Odyssey endure a similar fate? As the Drinker concludes, “Is it going to reach Oppenheimer levels of success? Probably not, but I do think it’ll turn a healthy profit. And what the hell—maybe [Christopher Nolan will] surprise us all and create a genuine masterpiece with The Odyssey. But I don’t know, man. I’ve got this weird little feeling that he might have gone a bridge too far with this one. Either way, we’ll find out in a couple of weeks.”

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: States Give Serfs a Huge America 250 ‘Gift’ “Your humble correspondent extends you a much better greeting than California and Washington gave to their citizens subjects this week. The three West Coast, Messed Coast™ governors demonstrate for all to see that they hate President Donald Trump more than they love the country this America 250. What losers.”

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

Meanwhile, in Britain:

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH CHRIS CUOMO IS A VOICE OF SANITY: