Eric Lind:

Current situation at my parents house…..the young neighborhood owl has stolen this stick horse and is flying around the neighborhood with it. Hilldale/Forest Park/Ridge lane neighbors…if your child is missing their stick horse, you’ll have to talk to the owl!! 🦉

Edit: for those of you questioning if the owl is hurt or “entangled” in the stick horse….we have no reason to believe this is the case as we witnessed the owl moving the horse around and even changing it’s grip on it at one point….this owl is part of a family of owls that have been in the neighborhood for about 6 months now, and this is one of the young owls…if someone sees that the owl is in danger or believes it is hurt, I’m sure the proper authorities would be contacted…

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Education Dive has another of those horror stories about the complete failure of public education in democrat-run big cities.

Six Baltimore City schools — five high schools and one middle school — were found to have not a single student who scored proficient in math or reading in 2016, Fox45 News reports.

One student interviewed by the station said he believes students aren’t passing the state assessments because the material on the tests is not covered in class.

Data shows that despite maintaining one of the country’s highest per-pupil spending levels, a recent study out of Harvard University found Baltimore to have the lowest rate of mobility out of poverty in the country, a statistic tied directly to education as much as it is economic opportunity.

The news in Baltimore again underscores the debate over the impact of funding on school quality. Some say the education level of adults and parents in the district is the greatest determinant of student achievement, while other research has found a direct correlation between school funding and student graduation rates. And with Baltimore City Public Schools out-spending both Howard and Montgomery Counties in the state — both perennial exemplars in student achievement — questions loom over exactly where the money is going in Baltimore.

RTWT

Chateau Heartiste, one of those unabashedly politically incorrect Alt-Right blogs, has the story of a car jacking in Baltimore.

In March of this year, I was attacked by a shining example of Diversity! (Inc.) in Baltimore, Maryland. I had returned to my car after having a few drinks with friends in a recently gentrified artsy fartsy part of town– don’t ever let that fool you in Baltimore or any other major city with a significant black population where recently converted ghettos may have been sold to productive human beings for fire-sale real estate prices. There is no part of this city where a “good” neighborhood is less than 500 to 1000 meters from a slice of Mogadishu. Predators learn the travel patterns of its prey. I see it every day when I drive to work through Liberty Heights and other squalid hells. Since the attack I moved to Annapolis, the last big town in Maryland not connected to the others by way of subsidized transportation in the form of the Light Rail network, Amtrack-MARC lines, or regular bus shipments of the third world. To live in Annapolis largely means to work elsewhere, and to work elsewhere means to have the capacity to own, register, inspect, and insure a private motor vehicle for which you are responsible for maintaining. The automobile may be our salvation if we let the cattle cars crumble, as at least then we can largely immobilize the third world into their respective islands whilst we build walls around them with the machine gun sectors pointed in.

1:00 video

Nick Valencia (CNN Reporter):”What is it like, explain to our viewers exactly what it’s like to be a young, black man, growing up in Baltimore.”

Jamal: “We gotta struggle. We gotta grind. You know, everything that you get, you gotta earn it. Nobody…”

Nick: “What does that mean? What does that mean? Explain, don’t speak in abstract.”

Jamal: “You gotta earn it. Like… like if there’s food over there, and they’re saying you can’t have it, you gotta take it. Sometimes, you gotta… if it’s yours, you gotta take it.”

The 1960s triumph of the Civil Rights Movement with the end of segregation in the South and the implementation of coercive social integration via the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was supposed to end the Race Problem in America, but what actually occurred was a wave of rioting in every major city in the country. Fifty years of cultural, governmental, and institutional racial favoritism and the election of an African-American president later, we still have an unproductive and dependent black underclass, simmering with resentment and ready to riot at the drop of a journalistic meme alleging excessive use of force by the police against one of its own.

The Wall Street Journal argues that everyone, including the rioters, ought to be blaming the political leadership which has been in charge of those cities all these decades, not the police or the rest of America, for the inner city underclass’s lack of hope, inspiration, and economic opportunity.

You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.

Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.

The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.

The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.

Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else—e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.

People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.

Read the whole thing.

Slate has a feature on the elegaic architectural photography of Ben Marcin who has made recording portraits of solitary surviving row houses in Baltimore into a personal métier.

According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, there are roughly 16,000 vacant homes in Baltimore that the city plans to restore or destroy to replace with green spaces and housing redevelopment over the next 10 years. Many of the homes to be torn down are row homes, built in the late 1800s.

Photographer Ben Marcin lives in a Baltimore row house with his wife, Lynn. Several years ago, Marcin, a self-taught photographer who bought his first camera at 27, began noticing lone row houses in the blighted sections of the city. “For me it was a fascinating sight: a solitary structure, well over 100 years old, sometimes 40 feet tall and less than 20 feet wide,” he wrote via email. “An amputee shorn of its former neighbors, yet still retaining architectural details and other touches, proclaiming the heights of an earlier era.”

Marcin began photographing the individual homes during his visits to the desolate neighborhoods. He edited them into a series he calls “Last House Standing.” Many of the homes in the series are still occupied, though the city of Baltimore plans on using eminent domain to demolish largely vacant blocks.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.

Mark Steyn, on Rush Limbaugh’s Show yesterday, read, in the recent school suspension of a 7-year-old in Baltimore for allegedly nibbling his breakfast pop tart into a shape resembling a gun, serious bad news for American civilization.

You’re doomed America! You’re done for! No society can survive this level of stupidity! The school counselor is available to meet with any students who are traumatized by hearing reports of some guy four grades below them who nibbles a pop-tart into a gun-like shape.

I’ve never subscribed to this whole greatest generation thing, you know. But you look at those guys, they weren’t much older than the kids from the school. A lot of them were like seventeen, eighteen years old. And they’re storming out of these transport ships in the churning waters of the English Channel and the North Sea and they’re landing on the beaches of Normandy. And their getting out of these and they stomping up the beaches and they’re taking German gunfire and all the rest.

Do you think if you raised people so that you make a school counselor to available to them in cased they’ve been traumatized by someone who was nibbled a pop-tart into the shape of a gun….do you think if they’re ever called upon to get out those ships and the storm the beaches of Normandy, do you think they’re gonna be up to that?

‘Oh no look, the Germans, they’re all holding pop-tarts! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’

No society can survive this level of stupidity! These small things are not small. They tell you a lot about the institutionalized stupidity of our institutions.

The Baltimore Sun reports that today’s Preakness is going to have an additional, non-ticket-buying spectator. A red fox has taken up residence in the Baltimore race course grounds.

Dickie Small grew up fox hunting with his family in Baltimore County, and the veteran horse trainer has occasionally seen the skittish red or gray creatures running around various tracks over the years. So the sight of a red fox at Pimlico Race Course early one morning last month did not make Small blink.

The difference with this fox became quickly apparent — it kept coming out of its den, almost on a daily basis.

“If it rains, it stays in,” Small said Friday. “And sometimes it oversleeps.”

It has been spotted several times this week on or near the track as exercise riders took their horses out for an early morning workout. There have been rumors, at this stage unfounded, that one brave soul has been feeding the fox cat food.

“Most of the horses treat it like it’s a dog, they ignore it,” Small said. “Most of the riders don’t pay attention to it either. But one boy was scared and kept saying, ‘Get away, get away.’ He ended up getting dropped [fell off his horse] and had to walk back.”

Jack Sisterson, assistant trainer for Kentucky Derby champion I’ll Have Another, said he saw the fox Friday for the second time this week.

“He stays on the grass [of the turf track] and will put his paw or whatever you call it on the turf, but when the horses come by, he’ll jump back on the grass and sort of hang out watching,” Sisterson said. “It’s kind of amusing.”

Track officials don’t appear too concerned about the fox making a surprise appearance during Saturday’s running of the 137th Preakness Stakes. The last fox to have an impact on the race was Sly Fox, the 1898 champion.

In fact, Small said as more people showed up this week for the second leg of the Triple Crown, the fox seemed to be content staying in its den. Small thinks the fox lives somewhere near the infield — “around the tote board,” he said — and would likely be sleeping off a feast of trackside flowers by the time the tens of thousands begin to show up for the big race.

It’s a good policy to avoid some American cities run by corrupt democrat party machines with incompetent police departments full of officers hired on the basis of political considerations. WBAL reports the case of a Virginia couple who attended a baseball game in Baltimore, got lost, asked a police officer for directions, and were arrested.

Baltimore City police arrested a Virginia couple over the weekend after they asked an officer for directions.

WBAL-TV 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Joshua Kelly and Llara Brook, of Chantilly, Va., got lost leaving an Orioles game on Saturday. Collins reported a city officer arrested them for trespassing on a public street while they were asking for directions .

“In jail for eight hours — sleeping on a concrete floor next to a toilet,” Kelly said.

“It was a nightmare,” Brook said. “I was in there thinking I was just dreaming and waiting to wake up.”

This kind of thing is no joke. American city jails are unsanitary and dangerous places, where detainees are commonly housed in unsupervised conditions at the mercy of other prisoners.

For more than a decade, students from Loyola College have participated in the school’s Care-a-Van program, providing the homeless two nights a week with meals, such as turkey-and-cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate, as well as toiletries.

But on Nov. 14, a Health Department representative notified the students that they needed a city license to distribute food, and that distribution via a van could not be licensed, since licensing would require on-site hot and cold running water for volunteers serving the food to wash their hands. The college suspended the program, but students rebelled, and resumed distributing food to the local homeless anyway in a nearby park.

Facing a problem with the kind of publicity that might be associated with arresting people for feeding the poor during the Christmas season, city officials offered to compromise.

Under the agreement, the students will continue to be allowed to provide food for two more months, while city officials try to find a more permanent place for the charity work that complies with city regulations, according to Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore’s health commissioner.