[New York’s Asian[] Community leaders said that even if Saturday’s fatal attack was not motivated by racial hatred, it added to a sense of palpable fear among Asian-Americans.

“This is horrifying. It’s a horrible attack on yet another one of our citizens,” said Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese-American Citizen’s Alliance of Greater New York. “This has to stop.

Prevention is worth a pound of cure. There were police officers in the Times Square station where the killing occurred, but I doubt they’re allowed to arrest someone for being a public nuisance – which was what Simon had previously been until the fatal moment that happened in an instant. Simon (previously referred to as “Martial” because earlier news reports had his first and last names reversed) had a lengthy history of mental illness and criminality, and it’s not as though the state hadn’t tried to intervene previously:

“He’s been on medication for over 20 years and in and out of mental hospitals in New York,” a woman who identified herself as Martial’s sister, Josette, told The Post.

But there are limits to how long someone can be kept in a mental hospital for merely being crazy, and it’s also very expensive. Treatment with drugs often helps when the person is in the hospital, so authorities can’t justify keeping the person much longer. But on release he or she often stops taking the drugs.

This is just plain tragic, for everyone involved (in particular for Michelle Go, but not just for her):

Josette Simon wept as she recalled she once even begged a hospital to keep her troubled brother locked up after his life was derailed by mental illness.

“He was a hardworking man, he was a giving man,” Simon, 65, said through tears of her younger brother, Martial Simon, 61.

“Somehow, in his 30s, something happened and he lost it,” she said. “He kept seeing and hearing people after him. One of my sisters took him in. He stayed, and then he said, ‘I have to go back to New York.’ “…

Josette Simon, who lives outside Atlanta, Ga., said her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, with his conditioning worsening after their mother died 23 years ago.

“She was taking care of him,” Simon said. “She had to call the police on him a couple of times, but after that, he went downhill. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals at least 20 years.”

And here it is, just as I suspected emphasis mine]:

“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’ because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going,” his sister told The Post.

Schizophrenia is generally incurable. These situations are rather common. You can’t keep everyone locked up forever against their will, and fortunately most people with schizophrenia will never become violent. But they are somewhat more likely to become violent than people without the illness, although it can be hard to predict who will be the ones to harm others:

Although the majority of patients with schizophrenia are not actually violent, an increased tendency toward violent behaviors is known to be associated with schizophrenia. There are several factors to consider when identifying the subgroup of patients with schizophrenia who may commit violent or aggressive acts. Comorbidity with substance abuse is the most important clinical indicator of increased aggressive behaviors and crime rates in patients with schizophrenia. Genetic studies have proposed that polymorphisms in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene and in the catechol-O-methyltransferase gene are related to aggression…Management of comorbid substance use disorder may help prevent violent events and overall aggression. Currently, clozapine may be the only effective antipsychotic medication to repress aggressive behavior.

Good luck with any of that once the person is outside the hospital.

Simon also had a criminal record, although it doesn’t appear to have involved actual violence (it may have involved a threat of a gun that didn’t exist, however). Reports on the exact charges differ, but here’s one:

Martial has a criminal record with at least three arrests going back to 1998, when he was busted for robbery, with the latest coming in October 2019 for criminal possession of a controlled substance. He served two years in state prison for attempted robbery and was released in August 2021, state records show.

That last robbery was unsuccessful (in another account, I read that the person ran away). But here we have “controlled substance,” so Simon probably was abusing some sort of substance, which would have increased his risk for criminality.

What to do with someone like that? Even before Bragg became the DA, Simon’s crimes don’t appear to have warranted very lengthy sentences. And although he was insane, it was probably only when he didn’t take his meds. A dilemma, indeed, because you can’t lock up everyone who fits that description on the off chance that the person will go on to commit a heinous crime.

DA Bragg gave what he considered reassurance to frightened New Yorkers:

When asked if New Yorkers had to be worried about the suspect being released immediately from jail, he said no.

It probably takes a crime of this magnitude, however, for Bragg to keep someone in jail pending trial. There is little doubt in my mind that, according to Bragg’s guidelines for charging criminals, Simon would not have gone to prison in the first place for his earlier offenses.

Curtis Sliwa – the man who founded the Guardian Angels in New York, and who recently ran for mayor as the Republican nominee and lost to Eric Adams – had some remarks, too:

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said he’s seen the suspect “many times” ranting in the subway.

“He will have a conversation and then all of a sudden he will have a psychotic disorder,” Sliwa said. “Again, an Asian gets pushed in front of a train.

So Simon was a fixture in that station and perhaps in others. There are many such people, more than there were when Giuliani and Bloomberg were the mayors. They created an atmosphere that it wouldn’t be tolerated. How was this done? Was it the “broken windows” policy? Here’s one opinion (from 2015):

“Giuliani is right. De Blasio is in denial,” said Floyd Parks, 60, a vagrant who was hanging around a recently broken-up homeless encampment in Harlem.

Writing in Sunday’s Post, Giuliani blasted de Blasio’s “so-called ‘progressive’ view” of homelessness, saying the city should be pushing addicts and the mentally ill into treatment, and everyone else into shelters.

Longtime vagrant Mohamed Rasul, 60, said that under deBlasio, the homeless decide their own fates.

“I’ve seen mayors come and go, and I’ve never been as comfortable as under de Blasio,” he said.

“I have choice under de Blasio, and I choose to be homeless.”

…Rasul said that under Giuliani, cops would wake him by smacking something “with a baton, shine a flashlight in my eyes and cart me off to a shelter.”

“These days, if I don’t want to cooperate, I don’t have to,” he said.

Indeed. And Martial Simon didn’t have to, until now.

The post Why was Martial Simon free to kill Michelle Go? appeared first on The New Neo.

Before I read this article on de Blasio’s leavetaking, I had forgotten that he got his big break in 2013 when frontrunner Anthony Weiner imploded in a sexting scandal. That may help a little to explain how New Yorkers elected de Blasio, but why they re-elected him is a bigger mystery. And yes, I know it’s a deep blue city. But still.

When I read this sentence – “During his first inauguration speech, de Blasio pledged a ‘dramatic new approach’ to running the world’s greatest city” – I misread it briefly as “de Blasio pledged a “traumatic new approach'”, which I think fits a lot better.

The article goes on to list de Blasio’s failures.

Let’s see what new mayor Eric Adams will do.

The post Buh-bye, de Blasio appeared first on The New Neo.

“Help me tax the wealthy. Help me redistribute wealth. Help me build affordable housing in white communities if you want desegregation,” de Blasio said on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer” show after a caller asked about integrating public schools.

So I wonder – how can you redistribute wealth if you’ve driven away your tax base?

I think the answer is simple for the left: it doesn’t matter how low the standard of living goes as long as the wealth is more equally distributed. “Socialism is the equal sharing of misery,” and de Blasio is determined to bring it about in New York.

De Blasio can’t run for mayor of New York again. But I almost wish he could, to see if the people of that city would re-elect him. As it is, I suppose it’s possible that his successor will be in the same mold or even worse. After all, one of the many things that’s happening there is that a lot of people inclined to vote otherwise are leaving the city.

In related news, many business owners of Minneapolis have had enough.

And there’s no way any of this can be a surprise to the leftist leaders of such cities. It is a choice, the choice the left always makes:

The post Leftist Finance 101 appeared first on The New Neo.

At his daily press briefing, De Blasio was asked why public school students who return to classrooms this fall will eat their lunch inside while restaurants can’t reopen indoor dining.

“I don’t think there’s a similarity at all,” de Blasio said.

“We have an imperative — a legal imperative, a moral imperative, an educational imperative– to give kids the best education we can. We know that means having at least some time in person,” he said.

“Versus indoor dining, which is obviously a very optional activity, which some people do a lot who have the resources and others can’t do at all because they don’t have the resources,” he said.

De Blasio’s suggestion that eating inside a restaurant is only for people with thick billfolds ignores the thousands of cheap diners, fast-food eateries and pizza joints across the five boroughs catering to cost-conscious New Yorkers…

De Blasio reiterated Tuesday that he has no concrete plan to resume indoor dining because it’s too high-risk an activity in the age of coronavirus…

New York City is the only state region that still does not permit some indoor dining, while it is allowed in neighboring suburban counties like Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester.

Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s senior adviser for public health, also weighed in…

“We know through experience everywhere around the world and also from the United States that indoor dining is a very high-risk activity and there’s reasons for that,” Varma said, pointing to the lack of masks while eating, proximity to other people and duration spent indoors.

Where to begin? I suppose the first thing to state is that indoor dining is New York’s lifeblood, that it’s hardly confined to the wealthy, and that colder weather is coming soon. I can only conclude something that’s already been clear for quite some time, which is that destroying the economy of NYC is one of de Blasio’s goals as mayor. Although that sounds like a nonsensical sentence, it’s typical of leftist thinking, in which the idea is the equality of misery. As Churchill said (no wonder they deface his statue):

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

That’s it in a nutshell – and de Blasio and our other resident socialists and Communists, Marxists and leftists, call them whichever name you favor – clearly prefer the equality of misery and are willing to do everything in their power to bring it about. COVID has given them a lot of power, and they are making sure they use it as fully as possible.

I will also point out that people who live in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester, where indoor dining is allowed, travel to NYC regularly. Therefore, even if an indoor dining ban worked, they could be carrying illness to NYC anyway.

And lastly, to Dr. Varma: oh really? “We know through experience everywhere around the world and also from the United States that indoor dining is a very high-risk activity”? Where is the research on that? This sort of thing (from June) is all I could find, and it’s weak correlative sauce at best.

The post De Blasio’s war on the elitest institution of indoor dining in restaurants appeared first on The New Neo.

The supposed army of 1,000+ pandemic contact tracers in New York City will hit a roadblock this week as they assess the risk of disease spread from COVID-19 positive patients. Mayor Bill de Blasio has forbidden the tracers from asking sick patients if they attended one of the many George Floyd related protests in the nation’s most populous city, giving the tracers an insurmountable barrier as they ostensibly keep New Yorkers safer.

“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” de Blasio spokesperson Avery Cohen told The City. Surveyors recruited as part of de Blasio’s “test and trace” campaign will instead ask a series of indirect questions about whom the sick individual may have contacted in recent days.

There is nothing at all surprising about this. The protestors and rioters have been protected classes from the start, allowed to gather freely in huge numbers and as close as they like. And not just any protestors – only those protesting the Floyd killing, not those protesting (for example) the shutdowns.

And de Blasio continues his war on Chasidic Jews:

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered gates at a park in a Jewish area welded shut to keep people out despite simultaneously approving numerous mass gatherings of BLM protesters.

In other news, de Blasio is out sick with GI problems that are among those listed as possible COVID symptoms but refuses to take a COVID test.

The post Shhh! Contact tracers for COVID cannot ask about attendance at protests or riots appeared first on The New Neo.

They are grim. And how could they not be?

Now, you may say “who cares, they made their bed and let them lie in it.” I care, and not just because New York is my home town, even though I left it over a half century ago. I care because I still know and love plenty of people there. I care because I don’t like to see suffering, even if the suffering is a result of choices people make. I care because cities like New York used to have wonderful things about them, and still have some of those good things. I care because I worry that as New York goes, so go more cities and perhaps ultimately the nation. Is there anything to be gained by having more and more failed and broken municipalities across the land? And doesn’t New York’s economy affect us all, as well?

New Yorkers voted for Bill de Blasio in 2013 to be mayor, and then they re-elected him in 2017. So yes, they are responsible. But it’s a curious fact that the turnout both years was incredibly low, so low that in 2017 only 8.5% of New York City’s eligible voters went for de Blasio, and it wasn’t all that different in 2013.

That’s a shocking statistic in and of itself – what was the apathy about? Was New York doing so well at the time that people felt they could coast, that it didn’t matter who was elected? Were the Republican candidates so terrible that even the specter of a socialist wasn’t enough to bring many voters out for them? Or did a lot of people want socialism? I don’t have an answer, but I do know that some areas turned out in much larger numbers to vote against him, but they were overwhelmed by the voters in many other areas who voted for him and carried the day.

There’s a map at the link that you can study if you like. It’s very informative, and shows for example that Staten Island – whose population is much less than that of the other boroughs but has long been more conservative – came out forcefully against de Blasio. But of course it doesn’t matter now; they’re along for the ride, whether they like it or not and whether they asked for it or not.

Musing about all of this today (or rather, brooding), I decided to search the blog to see if I’d written anything in the past about de Blasio that’s relevant. There is little doubt in my mind that he had no intention of stopping the riots; and perhaps in some Cloward-Piven-ish manner he wanted them in order to have an excuse to effect even greater change to his leftist ideal. And sure enough, I found a post I wrote in September of 2017 that in a moment I will reproduce in full here. It’s based on an interview he’d given, so I suppose at that point he felt he could be pretty open about his plans and his dreams. He definitely had plans for private property, and they were not supportive – essentially, he wanted its abolition and total government control.

The last line of the quote from him was, “It’s not reachable right now.”

Well, how about now, June 2020, nearly three years later? We’ve had a big dose of government control in the reaction to COVID-19, and now we have the failure to protect private property during the riots. I’m pretty sure he thinks it’s a lot more reachable at the moment. Whether it is or isn’t remains to be seen.

So here’s the post, exactly as it appeared almost three years ago:

Steven Hayward at Powerline calls our attention to an interview and quote from New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. It’s quite revealing not just about de Blasio, but about the leftist mindset about the role of government, our legal system, and what people themselves want [emphasis mine]:

Q: In 2013, you ran on reducing income inequality. Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools?

de Blasio: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development…

…Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

It’s not reachable right now. And it leaves this friction, and this anger, which is visceral.

There’s an awful lot packed in there, isn’t there?

First and foremost, we have the fact that de Blasio feels comfortable enough to express these sentiments openly rather than hide them. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that he really believes that most New Yorkers, and maybe even most people in the US, agree with him about the function of government and how much it should dictate their lives. Sentiments and goals that just a few years ago were only whispered in private by any politician hoping to actually get elected are now declared openly by the current mayor of New York.

Next we have the scope of his vision. De Blasio would like the government to control as much as possible, and not just about real estate development. He says “[People would] love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.” And if Bill de Blasio and his cronies have anything to say about it, that’s exactly what would happen—for your own good, of course, because you know it’s really what you want. When Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever,” it was a dystopian and horrific vision. De Blasio thinks it’s what we all secretly—and maybe not-so-secretly—want. And he thinks that he’s just the guy to do the stomping, only he’ll call it a love tap.

Next we have the idea that government is capable of doing this sort of regulation much better than the market ever could, and much better than free and autonomous human beings ever could. When he says that “[people] would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs,” he’s not only echoing Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), but he’s also assuming that government is capable of figuring out what people’s needs really are and designing a world that meets them. Although it’s possible that he doesn’t really believe that and he’s just cynically saying it in pursuit of power, I actually think—based on many (not all, however) of the leftists I know—that he is most likely sincere in his belief and in his hubris.

Then we have the contempt for the rule of law and for hundreds and hundreds of years of protection of property rights under it. Does de Blasio have even the remotest understanding of why our system is designed the way it is, and why property rights are so protected? I doubt it. He seems to see it as a little thing, a mere anachronism that should be pushed aside in favor of the great beneficent government he wants (“That’s a world I’d love to see..”) put in place. And he knows that you want it, too.

Lastly is the ominous phrase “right now,” found in the next-to-last sentence of the quote. We’re not there yet, folks, but if the kindly de Blasios of the world have their way, we’ll be there some day soon.

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