Free Republic

We often ask who's running the government with a White House led by doddering Joe Biden. But with a new audit out, maybe the real question is what is the government. According to the Washington Examiner:The evacuation of federal headquarters during the COVID-19 crisis appears to have become permanent and costly with up to 90% of several agency headquarters empty, according to a federal audit.At least 6 of 24 Washington area headquarters are 90% empty, including several that manage federal office space and employees such as the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management.The audit from the Government...

Everyone knows that San Francisco is the nation's largest public toilet - requiring the city to employ six-figure 'poop patrol' cleanup team, however a new report from the city Controller's Office really puts things in poo-spective.For starters, feces were found far more often in commercial sectors, covering "approximately 50% of street segments in Key Commercial Areas and 30% in the Citywide survey," second only to broken glass as can be seen in the 'illegal dumping' section.If you're wondering about the city's fecal methodology, look no further than a footnote on page 43;Feces also includes bags filled with feces that are...

The world's most expensive monument to overconfidence is nearer than you think… I'm talking about Forest City, a massive ghost town right across the Causeway. This development is around 1,740 hectares (17.4 square kilometres), which is almost the entirety of Jurong East or apparently four times the size of Monaco. It was built by Country Garden (China's largest developer) supposedly to the tune of $100 billion. But as of 2019, only 500 out of the expected 700,000+ residents were living there. I've had a chance to briefly visit the place, and while we can crack any number of jokes about...

Two celebrated, decades-old San Francisco bookstores are set to close this year, marking the end of an era for Alexander Book Company and The Magazine. Bonnie Stuppin, one of the owners of Alexander Book Company, said the SoMa bookstore will likely shutter toward the end of April after 32 years of service. The reason, she says, is because downtown San Francisco offices aren’t nearly as packed as they used to be. “We’re not seeing enough customers to justify opening the doors and turning the lights and paying the staff to come down,” she told SFGATE. “I don’t know what needs...

Why The Specials’ ska hit Ghost Town still haunts dance floors (Only link can be posted)

Visiting a ghost town is one of the closest things we have to time travel. If left undisturbed, the town remains suspended in time; perpetually stuck in the year it was abandoned. Fortunately, some ghost towns have been incorporated into state and national parks, which tend to leave them in their state of natural ruin—the most famous example being the former gold mining town of Bodie, California. But there are at least 3,800 ghost towns located throughout the United States (in a variety of conditions), and on occasion, entire towns are up for sale. While owning your own ghost town...

D.C. today. It's Like A Dystopian movie https://twitter.com/JennPellegrino/status/1350458841406824448

San Francisco has managed to curb the virus slightly in its city – but at what cost? Those paying sky high taxes to live in the Bay Area may soon be wondering why they are paying to live in a shut down city that state and local government officials have refused to allow to reopen due to a virus with a CDC-predicted infection fatality rate of between 0.00002 and 0.093. The entire downtown area of the city, once vibrant with business and tourism, is now “empty” according to a new report by AP. Everything from food trucks to local workers...

New York City's real estate market continues to be battered by the coronavirus lockdown and is likely to keep suffering with no end to the current lockdown in sight. One major commercial landlord said 80 percent of their retail tenants missed rent payments in April and May and others are reporting that even companies that have healthy finances are simply choosing not to meet their lease agreements, amid growing uncertainty over how many businesses will actually work in offices in the future. Residents are also abandoning their expensive apartments by breaking their leases or failing to renew them to wait...

The 32-year-old marketer took sheltering in place to the next level when he became trapped in a California ghost town he recently purchased. The problem is: There’s no running water and a snowstorm has him trapped. Plus, it may be haunted. “When I first got out here, I was in a T-shirt and enjoying myself,” Underwood tells The Post. “And then it snowed for four days straight and now there’s no way to get out.” He bought Cerro Gordo, a former silver mining town with a murderous history, for $1.4 million in 2018. Aside from monthly visits, Underwood has largely left it in...

... "I've never seen downtown so empty," she said, referring to the streets, not just the shelves. ... Francisco's store has been in the same small corner for 43 years, she said. Before that, her mother owned a novelty shop in another spot of the usually bustling shopping area. Millions of people visit Pike Place Market annually. But the stalls are empty this week. Vendors aren't flinging fish to one another; instead, they're checking their phones or reading a book. "It's like a ghost town," Francisco said. ...

Kanye West delivered a speech about President Trump and other political topics to the "Saturday Night Live" audience in the room following one of his performances early Sunday evening. After he performed "Ghost Town" at the end of the 44th season premiere for "SNL," West, who wore a red "Make America Great Again" hat, said he was bullied backstage due to his choice of head-ware. "They bullied me backstage. They said, 'don't go out there with that hat on. They bullied me backstage. They bullied me! And then they say I'm in a sunken place," he said. "You want to...

The future of the Sochi Olympic venues is unclear. Alexander Valov, a Russian reporter for BlogSochi, visited Sochi's "coastal cluster" — a site that includes six venues, the Olympic Village, and the Olympic Park, all built from scratch on an undeveloped plot of land — and he took some eerie photos this week. He called the area around the Olympic Village "Dead City." The photos are a reminder that much of what was built for the Olympics has no long-term use. While a few arenas and other buildings have plans going forward — the media center is being turned into...

Surrounded by fire-worn trees and beautiful mountains lies the deserted town of Seneca — a historic miner’s retreat that has recently gone up for sale. The town, which was surrounded by flames from the Chips Fire a little over a year ago, is an unincorporated community in Plumas County that was founded in 1851 after gold was discovered in the area. With dreams of riches, people flocked to the area and the town quickly grew to more than 1,000 residents. According to an engraved bronze plaque located inside the town, 500 of the residents were Chinese miners who earned 10...

EPECUEN, Argentina A strange ghost town that spent a quarter century under water is coming up for air again in the Argentine farmlands southwest of Buenos Aires. Epecuen was once a bustling little lakeside resort, where 1,500 people served 20,000 tourists a season. During Argentina's golden age, the same trains that carried grain to the outside world brought visitors from the capital to relax in Epecuen's saltwater baths and spas. ... Then a particularly heavy rainstorm followed a series of wet winters, and the lake overflowed its banks on Nov. 10, 1985. Water burst through a retaining wall and spilled...

Dongguan, China (CNN) -- They built it, but the shoppers didn't come. New South China Mall in Guangdong Province opened in 2005. With 5 million square feet of shopping area, the mall can accommodate 2,350 stores, making it the largest shopping center in the world in terms of leasable space -- more than twice the size of Mall of America, the biggest shopping center in the United States. At the outdoor plaza, hundreds of palm-trees blend with a replica Arc de Triomphe, a giant Egyptian sphinx, fountains and long-stretching canals with gondolas. Only problem is, the mall is virtually deserted....

8 Years Later, Athens Olympic Venues in Decay There's still one group that loves the training pool for athletes at the former Olympic village in Athens' northern fringe. Frogs. They appear to delight in sitting on debris that floats on the half-filled pool's murky waters. The athletes village itself has fared somewhat better, turned into housing for workers. Eight years after the 2004 Athens Games, many of the Olympic venues Greece built at great expense remain abandoned or rarely used. They are the focus of great public anger as the country struggles through a fifth year of recession and nearly...

Nova Cidade de Kilamba has 750 eight-storey blocks of apartments But it has no residents, and the £75,000 cost is too much for slum-dwellers Fears the £2.2billion project, built in three years, could lay empty for years Just a fraction of the billions China has poured into Africa in recent years It was supposed to be a state-of-the-art city for 500,000 - but eerie footage shows how a Chinese-built urbanisation is at risk of becoming Africa's first 'ghost town'. Constructed on the outskirts of Angola's capital city Luanda, Nova Cidade de Kilamba has 750 eight-storey blocks of flats, a dozen...

Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert Many have visited an abandoned city and wondered what catastrophic event could have caused such an exodus from a metropolis once so evidently thriving. Yet these cities are usually hundreds if not thousands of years old, the everyday clamor and cry of civilization just an echo. Visit Mo'ynaq in Uzbekistan, however, and you can see apocalypse right here, right now. The Soviet era sign still welcomes people to the city. Yet there are few visitors who stay more than a few hours. They all leave after they have done looking at what...

After 50 years, fire still burns under Pa. town (A motorist in 2004 drives among the smoldering remains of land near Route 61 in Centralia, Pa. AP file photo) Fifty years ago Sunday, a fire at the town dump ignited an exposed coal seam, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to the demolition of nearly every building in Centralia — a whole community of 1,400 simply gone. All these decades later, the Centralia fire still burns. It also maintains its grip on the popular imagination, drawing visitors from around the world who come to gawk at twisted,...