Despite the flow of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money into beautiful, downtown Newark since the riots, it is still a disaster area, with stores closing by sundown and a working population that leaves by 6PM at latest. If you do have to work late in Newark, the larger companies like Pru assign armed guards to walk you to your car. You are also instructed not to stop at the lights because the criminals will ram your car, and mug you when you get out to check the damage.

The only parts of Newark that are doing well are the Gateway Complex which connects a series of office buildings with Penn Station by an above-ground heavily-secure walkway, and the Portuguese and Cuban neighborhood of the Ironbound where anyone darker than Antonio Banderas is subject to being made to disappear.

The constabulary is a bad joke, serving mainly as bodyguards and collectors for low-level crime bosses. I've been to Nigeria on business and you feel safer in Lagos.

Just proves the point that individuals who go around howling "no justice, no peace" have it exactly backwards. If they insist on fomenting violence, they can expect little or no justice, economic or otherwise...

The social scientists are still working on this? I thought that divinig the "root causes" was the goal. A radical solution was called for and what did we get? Higher taxes, more welfare, urban planning and an expansion of the "Great Society". FDR's campaign of central planning and income re-distribution finally imploded during the Carter administration but we learn slowly. At least they "rescued capitalism", from what I've never been able to figure out.

In 1968 I was in Washington D.C. for an invitational smallbore rifle match at Georgetown University. As we pulled into D,C, , we heard that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed, and saw that crowds were beginning to from.

The match proceeded according to schedule. My team took it, and YOS fired the best string of his life. As I was leaving the line at the end of my relay, a teammate summoned me to the Georgetown bell tower,"You've got to see this!" was the breathless alarm. The entire Northeast quarter of the city, it seemed, was in flames. The sight resembled nothing so much as a scene of the London blitz.

The end result? A lot of liquor stores were cleaned out, shopping districts were burned and local merchants ruined, and not much else. The threat never materialized. The rioters never did more than loot and burn their own quarter. It may have been that the government, the people who are here to help us, suffered the localized destruction as a rationale for runaway spending.

It was certainly also true that the armed citizenry could have contained the terrorists as they had at Harper's Ferry, a little more than a century before. The "no justice, no peace," line was big in those days, but it never ever was acted out.

Have you seen pictures of Dresden and other cities of Europe as they looked in 1945 when WWII ended? That's how much of Detroit, a once vibrant, beautiful city, looks today, a quarter of a century after the riot. I hold the late mayor, Coleman Young (I shake my head in sadness at the thought of his name), largely responsible for the socio-economic blight and racial tensions that infected the city & its surrounding suburbs in the late '60's and 70's. Reconstruction has been slow and sporatic. The situation will continue to be as it's been since the 60's as long as those in power there continue to follow the liberal philosophy of divide, conquer & redistribute. Things will continue to be as it's been since the 60's as long as Detroit's residents continue to pin their hopes on "compassionate and benevolent" liberal politicans. The "Great Society" has failed. It's time to take a new approach to revitalize our cities.

On Detroit: indeed. Check out this site.

Sad, sad pictures on that site. Thanks though for sharing it.