I caught the spontaneous Iranian celebration in Westwood. It opened my heart wide.

Chicago Is So Broken That 7-Eleven Now Uses Opera to Fight Crime

To get your head around how dysregulated, crime-ridden, and homeless-occupied Brandon Johnson’s Chicago has become, you only have to look at the neighborhood 7-11. To deter criminals from entering the property, the owners of 7-11 play opera. Opera. Because the criminals of Chicago are so openly tolerated by the city’s Woke Mayor, the only effective force against them is civilization itself. It works. Combined with better lighting and the elimination of ledges for sitting, the tactic has been empirically successful in deterring loitering and reducing minor disturbances. Individual franchise owners in Chicago and other major U.S. cities have reported immediate drops in property crime, fewer panhandlers, less vandalism, and cleaner storefronts after installing speakers and playing opera. It’s like an acoustic version of broken windows theory, the only extant theory of law enforcement shown to radically reduce crime where it has been fully implemented. Here’s why the strategy works: * Dopamine Suppression: Studies show that when people are forced to listen to music they dislike, their brains suppress dopamine production, which sours their mood and drives them away. * Acoustic Discomfort: Blasting loud, high-pitched operatic vocals makes it physically uncomfortable to hold a conversation or sleep nearby, breaking up loitering hotspots. * The “Uncool” Factor: Loitering teenagers and young adults often find classical music unappealing or annoying, prompting them to seek another hangout spot. * Cultural Control: Opera instantly communicates that a space is managed, monitored, and intentionally maintained. Criminality and chronic disorder tend to flourish in environments that feel abandoned or culturally ownerless. Opera projects the opposite message. It says: somebody still cares what happens here. I went to a 7-11 to put the theory into practice. While there were some miscreants loitering out front, it was not a magnet for them. Inside, the 7-11 was remarkably clean, undisturbed, and free of riff-raff. Walgreens, which also suffers greatly from what retailers call “shrink,” or what real-world people call shoplifting or theft, has also used opera to great effect. While some locals have waged noise complaints, the practice is hopefully here to stay, or until Democratic mayors and governors start prioritizing major crime reduction again. Crotty Farm Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cities have often shaped behavior through architecture, lighting, landscaping, and sound. Grand train stations once used classical music to cultivate calm and dignity. Churches used bells. Public squares used fountains and monuments to create atmospheres of order and civic seriousness. Civilization has always curated its soundscape. What is new is that the soundscape is now defensive. The music is no longer elevating public life. It is protecting property from it. The deeper significance is not the music itself, but that private businesses are now being forced to invent substitute forms of governance because the public sector no longer reliably performs its most basic function: maintaining order. Retailers have become amateur behavioral psychologists, environmental designers, and security theorists because the city increasingly refuses to impose consequences on anti-social behavior. Chicago’s notorious no-cash bail law, its highly restrictive foot and vehicular pursuit policy that prohibits officers from initiating chases unless there is an imminent threat of great bodily harm, and the reclassification of most retail theft as a misdemeanor have made the city a hellhole of free-range crime. When convenience stores begin using opera as a form of social control, a city is admitting something profound about itself. Public order is no longer being guaranteed by the state. It is being improvised piecemeal by private actors using architecture, lighting, music, and environmental pressure to reclaim fragments of civic dignity. The police retreat. The prosecutors rationalize. The politicians bloviate. And somewhere in Chicago, a 7-11 manager presses play on Mozart to keep the barbarians at bay. Thanks for reading Crotty Farm Report! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Get full access to Crotty Farm Report at crotty.substack.com/subscribe [https://crotty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

I caught the spontaneous Iranian celebration in Westwood. It opened my heart wide.

I couldn’t help it. I broke down and cried when the Persians blared The Village People’s “YMCA” from loudspeakers on Sunday, as thousands gathered for blocks around L.A.’s Westwood Federal Building to celebrate Trump’s war on the diabolical regime in Iran and the killing of its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I hadn’t felt such overwhelming joy since Trump’s victory in 2016. It was infectious. The Iranians had ample cause to celebrate. 47 years of evil theocratic oppression. 47 years of women and gays not having the most basic rights. 47 years of Iran threatening the U.S., Israel, and their neighbors with nuclear annihilation. Enough! Yet the Leftist Democrats just sat on their hands today or openly opposed this transformative moment for Iran and the Iranian people. It’s as if they prefer Iranians to still be in chains. The contrast was stark and revealing. LA is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside Tehran. Many had settled in and around Westwood, earning the area the nickname “Tehrangeles.” In a city filled with violent inhinged Woke leftists, who will openly attack Trump supporters in the streets, they had the courage to wear MAGA hats. They had the courage to show the world that Iranians and Israelis can live in peace. Flags from both countries, along with the U.S. flag, were proudly displayed. They had the courage to show fierce and unapologetic pride in America. That’s who legal immigrants are. They get America. They also represented the largest contingent of face-lifted women I have ever seen, but that’s L.A., so it’s par for the course, and can hardly be held against people and families who have endured so much trauma and turmoil. Goodbye to the benighted leftists seeking to bring this country down. This was a day of genuine liberation for the Persian people. I was so honored to be a small part of it. Crotty Farm Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading Crotty Farm Report! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Get full access to Crotty Farm Report at crotty.substack.com/subscribe [https://crotty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Greatest Starbucks in the World

Amid the general desecration of all that is good about Chicago under the current Woke incompetent leadership of the clueless and déclassé Mayor Brandon Johnson, there remain a few standouts of excellence. One is the Starbucks on North Michigan Avenue. At 35,000 square feet, it’s the world's largest. It’s called Starbucks Reserve Roastery. And it makes you wonder, perhaps naively, why all Starbucks are not this inviting. The five-story Reserve Roastery does not merely sell coffee; it stages coffee as spectacle, ritual, and theater. Bronze curves sweep upward, glass glows with a honeyed warmth, and the great cask that carries roasted beans between floors turns slowly like an industrial reliquary, reminding visitors that even in a digital age, craft still has weight and gravity. Step inside, and the soundscape shifts from traffic to a murmur: milk steaming, grinders humming, conversation softening into the hush of shared indulgence, including craft liquor on the 4th floor. The building invites wandering. You ascend not only by staircase but by curiosity, drawn upward through aromas of caramel, citrus, and dark chocolate until the city itself reappears on the rooftop terrace—Chicago stretched wide, Lake Michigan a sheet of pale metal beyond the skyline. What makes the place memorable is not scale alone, though scale is everywhere. It is the feeling that commerce has briefly yielded to ceremony. People linger longer than they intend. Meetings drift into reverie. Tourists who expected a quick photograph find themselves seated with a drink they did not know existed, watching afternoon light settle across polished wood. In a corridor of Chicago famous for consumption, the Roastery offers something rarer: permission to pause, to savor, to believe—if only for the length of a cup—that ordinary rituals can still be made grand, that the city itself can be elevated again from the ugly stupor of Johnson, Lightfoot, and their arrogant, racialist ilk. Opened on November 15, 2019, from a repurposed Crate and Barrel, The Reserve Roastery predates Brian Niccol’s short but impactful tenure as Starbucks CEO. The locations of the Reserve Roasteries suggest a who’s who of major cities, including Milan, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Despite its precipitous fall in status, Chicago still sees itself as world-historical. And maybe that is something to ponder over a gourmet dessert and a fine cocktail at the greatest Starbucks in the world. Crotty Farm Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading Crotty Farm Report! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Get full access to Crotty Farm Report at crotty.substack.com/subscribe [https://crotty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Billy Goat Tavern and the late great Underground Republic of Chicago

The Billy Goat Tavern is one of Chicago’s most enduring cultural landmarks, a subterranean saloon—evocatively situated below street level on the city’s Near North Side—whose mythology blends journalism, sports lore, and blue-collar humor. Founded in 1934 by Greek immigrant William “Billy Goat” Sianis, the tavern became famous for its no-nonsense menu—”cheezborger,” chips, and a Coke—and for Sianis’s outsized personality, including the legendary “Curse of the Billy Goat” placed on the Chicago Cubs during the 1945 World Series after Sianis was allegedly denied entry into the game because of the presence of his pet goat. More than a restaurant, the space evolved into a democratic clubhouse for reporters, politicians, cabdrivers, and night owls, embodying the gritty wit and egalitarian spirit often associated with the city itself. Its national pop-culture immortality arrived through The Blues Brothers, where the tavern’s swaggering Chicago attitude—working-class, musical, and slightly mischievous—mirrored the film’s tone and setting. Even more directly, the Billy Goat’s cadence and characters inspired the famous “Olympia Café” sketch on Saturday Night Live, written by former Chicago newspaperman John Belushi and his collaborators, turning the tavern’s shouted rhythms (“No fries, cheeps!”) into comedy legend. Through these echoes in film and television, the tavern became shorthand for an entire Chicago sensibility recognizable far beyond Illinois, but that has long since perished. Crotty Farm Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. No figure cemented that sensibility more than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, who treated the Billy Goat as both office and stage. Royko’s writing—acerbic, humane, fiercely local—captured the conversations and contradictions of the tavern’s regulars, transforming an underground bar into a literary symbol of the city’s conscience. In this way, the Billy Goat Tavern stands alongside Chicago’s great myths: the Cubs’ heartbreak and redemption, the swagger of its music and architecture, and, formerly, its politics, and the enduring belief that truth is best argued over a cheap burger in a crowded room. Though Chicago has become Woke, racist, and collosally mismanaged under the recent disastrous leadership of Brandon Johnson and Lori Lightfoot, and the sparkle of the Billy the Goat has faded with the disappearance of the Chicago Tribune from the Tribune building above and the crusty reporters and politicos with it—not to mention the robust commercial activity that came with actually going to an office for work—nothing too essential has changed at today’s Billy Goat, nor should it. In a city forever remaking its skyline and polishing its image, the tavern preserves something rarer: continuity. It reminds Chicagoans that identity is not built only in glass towers and grand civic plans, nor in race, ethnicity, and protests against ICE, but in stubborn places where memory, humor, and daily life gather shoulder to shoulder. Down there, over a simple burger and a shouted order, the city continues its long conversation with itself. Crotty Farm Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading Crotty Farm Report! This post is public, so feel free to share it. Get full access to Crotty Farm Report at crotty.substack.com/subscribe [https://crotty.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Happy New Year's from Las Vegas!

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