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| Google Street View: Life in Black Detroit |
The footage, captured by Chinese "students" - who are on a STEM scholarship at an American university - show the dramatic footage of the dilapidated state of formerly world-class cities like Cleveland, Birmingham, Atlanta, Memphis, Gary, Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, Oakland, and, of course, Detroit.
Built by a people whose descendants have long since fled these cities, the leaders of the Chinese business community, military, and government can only look upon the ruins of hundreds of acres of private property, abandoned commercial real estate - all with a plethora of graffiti upon the decaying edifices - and wonder why their supposed great adversary, the United States, tolerates such blight.
This is no mighty empire the Chinese see, with the video of Detroit's tragic ruins bringing laughter to the room. The same variable is found in all of these cities, which goes unmentioned in similar meetings of American businessman, politicians, and high-ranking government and military officials.
Indeed, it is in those meetings of America's brightest minds in academia, business, government, and military that the question of how to eternally uplift this variable, promoting it above all others, is the normally the topic for discussion.
The Communist Chinese speak freely about how in each of the blighted areas of these major cities they watch reconnaissance footage of, the one common theme uniting them all is Black residents. One high ranking member of the education system in China points out, without protest, that the cause of such Blight is obviously these same Black people, for it reminds him of the type of environment they have encountered in Africa.
In Capitalist, Freedom-loving America, to dare utter such a statement -- well, you just can't do that. It wouldn't be prudent, would it? That the lowly state of Birmingham, Oakland, Memphis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Gary, and Detroit is due to the majority population found there - and not on white privilege or white racism - well, that isn't an accepted theory in the debate of urban renewal and the revitalization of American's great cities.
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| "The Arsenal of Inequality" -- yes, that's a gun. |
Perhaps a copy of Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis
sits in this fictional meeting room...By the time I'm done playing this scenario in my mind, I'm not laughing.
Thankfully, a story like Christine Ferretti's from The Detroit News instantly brings a smile to my face [Google Street View captures man in Detroit pointing gun, 9-20-2012]:
Detroit — Google is putting Detroit on the map - and not in a good way.
The Internet is abuzz over an image of a bare-chested man pointing a gun from the porch of an east-side home as part of its popular Street View mapping project. The pictures found on Google Maps — time-stamped September 2009 — are being reviewed by criminal investigators with the Detroit Police Department, Sgt. Alan Quinn said. The pictures depict a young man holding a long gun on the porch of a home on Brinker Street and then pointing it directly at the vehicle taking the images.
The face of the armed man and several others captured in the images are blurred. In Detroit, it is not illegal and no permit is required to have a firearm on personal property. The photographs were depicted in a Wednesday article posted on the tech website Betabeat. The story notes the images show "a gaggle of young men and one hanging out on a front porch in Detroit."
"Innocent enough, except that one of the young men is holding what looks to be a shotgun," the article says. "As the Street View camera drives off onto the next block, the kid aims the gun at the car. Whoever said cartography wasn't a dangerous job has clearly never been to Detroit."
Google media representatives could not be immediately reached for comment Thursday. It's unclear what the company's policy is for reporting this type of incident. Quinn said Detroit Police Department has no reports on file about the encounter. A representative with Mayor Dave Bing's office said Thursday they were unaware of the photographs and currently had no comment.Here's Fox Detroit on the pictures [Images of Detroit's "Google Map Gunslinger" Go Viral, 9-20-2012]:
Images of a shirtless man pointing a shotgun at a Google vehicle from the front porch of a Detroit home are making their way across the Web.
The images appear when Google Maps users search the 18800 block of Brinker Street on the city's near east side. In one image, the shirtless man can be seen brandishing the shotgun across the chest, while in the next frame, he's seen pointing the weapon directly at the vehicle.
The images were captured in September 2009 and have recently been posted on blogs and national news sites around the country.
The meeting is over, with members of the People's Liberation Army heading to a briefing on the racial gap in learning in America --- and the tremendous amount of money, time, and resources put into fixing this problem.
But the footage captured by the Chinese "students" - a camera-wielding de tocqueville - continues to play, the images of decaying inner-city areas confirming all the data the Chinese have accumulated on the "inequality of the races."
One member of the Chinese business contingent smiles, knowing that a joint real-estate venture his firm as invested in with an American company can pick up most of Detroit for fractions of a penny on the dollar.
"But it's not just Detroit," he thinks to himself....
Fox 2 News Headlines
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