Tea and Vitriol

  Rochester is the deadliest city, per capita, in New York State. That is no mean accomplishment for a medium-size city of little more than 200,000 souls, especially when compared to New York City, with more than 8 million people residing within its cramped borders. This, of course, does not include hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens that have turned up in our sanctuary cities, who have been allowed to fly underneath the radar, courtesy of Joe Biden's open border with Mexico. Despite all of the hype promoting Rochester, paid for by the Chamber of Commerce, the fact is that Rochester is a dangerous place to live, work and play. And to raise children. The public school system is an abomination, the worst in New York State and one of the worst in the country, yet the same people, or at least the same sort of people, keep getting elected to the School Board, which means no real positive changes will occur. Real changes in our school system would require scrapping the woke progress

Blood is thicker than water. It is also harder to get out of the carpet. As of this writing, Rochester has just celebrated its sixth homicide for the year so far. Homicide has become the new norm for our dying city. We are the deadliest city in New York State and the ninth deadliest in the USA. That is no mean accomplishment for a mid-sized city of 200,000 souls.  We have become accustomed to violent car jackings occurring almost daily; of deadly feral urban humanoids driving along streets, shooting into houses, unconcerned about who might be wounded or killed; of revenge killings; of robberies and drug deals gone bad, resulting in corpses littering our streets and sidewalks; of homicides that were the results of mistaken identities or of passers-by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, when caught, the murderers usually have arrest records as thick as phone books, which reflect our government and judiciary's unwillingness to protect law abiding citizens from s

The final hours of 2022 are upon us. Tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of people are planning to go out to celebrate New Year's Eve after nearly two years of government-imposed isolation and restrictions across the globe to "combat" the Corona Virus. Bars and nightclubs will be offering tacky paper hats and noisemakers, as well as a plastic cup of cheap champagne at midnight to ring in the new year to customers, who will be drinking at regular prices throughout the evening. All the while, the patrons will be shrieking to each other at how much fun they're having. I hope they will be. They are the ones who weren't invited to anyone's parties. News Year's Eve is usually regarded as amateur night for drinkers, which is why the various law enforcement agencies will be out at full force. Hopefully those partiers will be up and about by January 3rd. For myself, I am not particularly nostalgic about the passing of 2022 nor particularly hopeful for 20

  The name "Daniel Prude" should not be unknown to anyone between the ages of eight and eighty who has lived in the dying City of Rochester for the last two and a half years. He was the out of towner who came to visit his brother, Joe Prude, at the end of March 2020. Within 24 hours of his arrival, he was subjected to a mental hygiene arrest, released, able to purchase illegal drugs (how he knew where to find them when he had just arrived in town is anyone's guess), ran naked into the streets on a cold night, was subdued by officers of the Rochester Police Department and died in their custody. Prude's death led to a cover-up by ex-Mayor Lovely Warren, her then police chief LaRon Singletary and a host of other members of her administration as well as the silence of City Counselor Mary Lupien, who later claimed that she had kept silent for the sake of Prude's family. When the information became public in September 2020, Free the People ROC organized riots, demanded

  Christmas 2021 is over and the year is quickly winding down. The next holiday some people will be looking forward to is New Year's Eve, which is amateur night for drinkers out and about town, and New Year's Day, with football games, parades and the farce of the inauguration of Rochester's latest mayor. I am not nostalgic about the old year or even hopeful about the new one. Why should I, or anyone else, be? Rochester is, and remains, in a state of chaos owing to a lack of political leadership and the moral turpitude of the elected officials and their hangers-on who supposedly govern this city. 2021 saw the resignation of cop-hating Lovely Warren as Mayor of Rochester to avoid being convicted of felonious criminal charges. She walked away with a slap on the wrist, her license to practice law and her pension intact, her ability to run for political office unaffected and her continued control of the majority of Rochester's Democratic political committees could make that

 "Put the Blame on Mame" was a cabaret number best remembered in Rita Hayworth's film noir  classic, "Gilda." Ten years later, it was less effectively performed in Anita Eckberg's schlocky horror-drama "Screaming Mimi." Mame was a woman who was blamed for everything and anything, from the Chicago fire to the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Since these events were more than fifty years apart, it suggests that Mame was quite a dame and had remarkable staying power. Today, we are still blaming Mame in Rochester. Except that we have renamed Mame. Mame is now the police department. Or "systemic" racism. Or "White privilege." Or sexism. Or politics. Mame is everything but personal responsibility or ethics. Rochesterians don't seem to like those concepts too much. After all, all the recent shootings, stabbings, non-fatal assaults and car-jackings here have been blamed on systemic racism or the pandemic. For once, something isn