WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
“Homeless in Seattle” A Drive-By by Ol Remus Plus My Own Footnote
byVanderleunonMarch 23, 2018
Seattle has a new employee tax to end “the crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity in our city”. Notice how their crisis is everyone else’s crisis, somehow. And notice the mission creep: “housing insecurity”, although consistency commends “homeful insecurity”.
My Northwest reports:
… “Tax burdens should not be increased slightly,” Lisa Daugaard , a member of Seattle’s Progressive Revenue Task Force on Housing and Homelessness told a council finance committee Wednesday.
“We have to go big or go home,” she said. “We must make a discernible impact on the situation and the number of people living in public and experiencing homelessness. Proposals that fumble around and don’t achieve that mark should not be supported.”
So, on authority of a “Progressive Revenue Task Force”, the solution to homelessness turns out to be other people’s money. Who coulda guessed? Yes, Seattle will “grant” said money in the form of “initiatives”, meaning handouts. Grip-and-grin photos will announce the Task Forces’s selfless heroism and certainty of success. Businesses and constructive citizens will enthusiastically agree. “We applaud Seattle for bravely supporting the homeless,” they’ll say, as they leave the city at the posted speed limit.
More vagrants, oops, homeless will move to Seattle. Because free stuff. The funds—they always say “funds”—will quickly be insufficient for the wave of new, um, clients. Gripe-and-groan photos of camps bigger and more squalid than before will announce a new “crisis”. Another Progressive Revenue Task Force will be formed.
Meanwhile, unintended but foreseeable consequences are making themselves known, to wit:
No city in the western world should be like this. If we take our major cities as evidence, a consensus emerges favoring these third world standards, perhaps as a companion to their third world arrogance and studied incivility. Hillary Clinton lost a rigged election in just this way.
Cities produce little that is useful and consume most of what is. They’re reservations for the mildly but progressively insane, each day a little more freakish, a little more perverted. They measure success not by who has the most but by who wastes the most. They’re wholly dependent on the despised normals outside their precincts for everything that sustains life, and certain of delivery by way of imagined entitlement. The jungles of Mexico are full of such places.
Cities are fragile, populated with hostages debilitated by fear, without useful resiliance or independent resourcefulness. Cities would be uninhabitable within days of a power failure . As it is, they’re paralyzed by persistent but otherwise insignificant attacks . Such cities are beyond fixing, yet by weight of numbers they force the Deplorables to comply with their bizarre delusions. It becomes clearer by the day what this means. [More from Ol’ Remus at Woodpile Report]
We are a “Can-Do! Yes, we can.” society. One of the really amazing upticks in American society, as I noticed in a brief walk around various neighborhoods in sodden Seattle, is that we have almost completely cleaned up the streets of our cities.
How well I remember those tours through the various skid roads** of the cities I have lived in — Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and San Francisco –in days of yore. Gone now. All gone. And their wretched refuse along with them.
Take a walk yourself and you will see that it is true.
Nowhere in today’s brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find “Bums,” “Junkies,” “Drunks,” “Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics,” or “The Hard Core Unemployed” on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.
Indeed all that are left, strangely rising up from the background noise of the streets, are the blameless and harmless “Homeless.”
They are the last social class to be saved by our loving and caring society and their continuing expansion in our cities is a mystery which yearns for a caring social solution.
My own caring solution is simple and solves two lingering social problems at once: “Feed the homeless to the hungry.”
Problem solved and it is a two-fer. Paging Dr. Swift!
**The first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler’s lumber mills.
“Feed the homeless to the hungry.” I like it Vanderleun!
It fit’s well with a modest solution I’m playing with : Noting the massive adoration of youthful virtue signaling and the unflappable belief of many, that school skipping students can save the world, that the the voter age should be lowered and the age allowing gun ownership should be raised, I humbly make the following, alternative, modest suggestions:
OK, of course our youth deserve more control over their lives so lets lower the drinking age to 16. While we’re at it I suggest we do away with age requirements to a drive a motor vehicle. After all the roads are public right of ways and our youth are very public. If they can reach the gas pedal, truck on!
Now the voting age thingy; most youth would agree that the vote is a burden, not a right, so lets relieve them of that burden until they’re horridly old, like maybe 35.
I will allow that this modest suggestion may result in a sub-group of that youthful population (for want of a better description lets call that group the stupid ones) being marred, damaged or deceased before procreating, but, as we know, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, well, nor can you clean a gene pool without breaking legs.
Admittedly some older members of the population may be damaged or eliminated upon implementation of this modest proposal, but on the other hand most older members of the population, excluding politicians, did not get older by being careless, not looking both ways when they cross the street, nor ignoring obvious threats to their wellbeing.
Last, the youthful scorn of gun ownership: I strongly believe it is wrong wrong wrong to force guns on them and that gun ownership should be voluntary for all youths and that gun ownership should only be mandatory for those who are 35 years old and older.
( I know, this suggestion needs a lot of work and polish, but cut me some slack, I’m working on it and thinking out loud.)
My own suggestions will never float, but they are nonetheless useful and would improve things greatly. Return the voter roles to land owners only. In addition, reserve citizenship rights, such as voting, to gun owners only. We’d see responsibility return to governance in a quick hurry.
Woodpile Report makes some interesting indictments of urban entities. They are, politically speaking, complete and utter wastelands of immorality, senselessness and lawlessness. I call for state laws censuring cities.
AnonymousMarch 23, 2018, 12:31 PM
Hey Van, checkout the massive shit-storm of spending your man Trump just signed! YeeHaw! “Winning”!!!!!!!!!! “I’ll sign it… wait, I might veto it… fooled YA, I was head-faking!”
Nobody that voted on it read it, of course. Just like the Patriot Act.
And no wall, at all.
$1.3 TRILLION- But it’s okay, we’ll just print more money. Hell, just keyboard stroke-it into existence.
What a joke. Van, you outta reach down, grab a handful, and find the balls to admit this is all bullshit. But yeah, you’re over the rainbow…
Mike G.March 23, 2018, 1:13 PM
Nice anonymous…come into someone else’s house and shit right in the middle of the living room floor. Bet you’re a hoot at parties.
TerryMarch 23, 2018, 1:31 PM
Hey there Anonymous, maybe the Donald is YOUR man now. I am sure the bill he signed is to your liking. Am I correct . . . ?
You should ask your boss Soros for a raise Mr. troll.
ghostsniperMarch 23, 2018, 2:19 PM
The other day I opened a bag of them Oreida frozen crinkle fries and dumped them out onto a cookie sheet. Then I spread them out nice and even trying to make one layer so they all cook the same rate.
Then I recoiled in horror. WTF is that? There was one fry that looked like it fell off the truck. All black and gnarly. I had to sit down, it was more than I could bear.
In a bit I recovered and marched right over there, grabbed up that cookie sheet with that, that abomination, and I stormed out the back door and let the whole thing fly down over the hill into the dense forest. There!
Regarding Anon. above, there’s always SOMEBODY that arrives late to the party.
One more time, for the reading challenged.
I care not what the thief does with the booty once it is stolen for it is no longer mine nor my business.
What I do care about is that the stealing is sanctioned at all.
On 20 JAN 2017 Trump did not announce firstly and loudly that all stealing will cease right now and for that he will never be in my tribe for we are on opposite sides of that shitstained rainbow.
JackMarch 23, 2018, 3:16 PM
I’m old ex-Navy and I did a short stint in the AF, which after being in the Nav was like being forced to wear a thong and rubber shower shoes to a wedding. AF sucks but I digress.
In the service that I was in men stood together. When our commanders made a statement they always stood by it and we supported them.
When I voted to support Trump I thought I was throwing my support behind a guy that had the balls….after all, he said he had the balls…..to entice US businesses that had given its jobs to the citizens of Timbuktu, to return to the US; to halt illegal immigration and only permit immigration when the system was repaired and most attractively, to build a wall to establish a viable and enforceable boundary between the US.
Well, that fair haired boy, (now known among a rapidly shrinking support base as that lying son-of-a-bitch) just gave away the farm with a promise to “never do that again”. I wonder, as the author of “The Art of The Deal”, if he considered, that there would never be another opportunity to do “that” again. He probably didn’t at the moment but I suspect that he’s waking up to the fact as the sun has warmed the earth. Great opportunities never present themselves to the same goof twice and for my part I’m done with him.
I have always considered COWARDICE the greatest of all sin. It’s appearance in the face of fear will tell you all you need to know about the soul of the man. And Trump is a coward; he is the soldier who threw his rifle barrel first into the mud and who then turned and ran to the rear at the mere face of the enemy.
VanderleunMarch 23, 2018, 3:59 PM
You don’t fight the battles you can’t win.
Charlie Wilson’s War:
A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.” But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “We’ll see.”
‘The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We’ll see. So you get it?”
They say, that LA has 58,000 homeless. I passed through an encampment today, tents and trash and worse everywhere. It wasn’t there two years ago. Saw one enterprising Mexican-style sturdy shanty mixed in with the flimsy tents. At least Mexican shantytowns are organized. This was wretched helter-skelter.
If you’re homeless in LA, it’s the end of the line. There’s nowhere else to go, it’s 400 miles of desert in any direction. In LA you will stay. And since the City and County are now subsidizing the homeless, more LA will have, streaming in from every corner of the FUSA.
If you think it’s bad now, think about 100K, then 150K, then 200K. And then imagine that furtive thoughts never spoken will give way to whispers and then to secret trials and then to … Look, when it gets that large, it’s completely out of control, it becomes a metastasizing cancer. Where are 50K or 100K housing “units” going to come from, in a densely built-out city, to house people who are homeless because they can’t get it back together or are broken? Or have been “displaced” by the influx of automation and high-techery.
The other day I met a guy with bad teeth who ranted at me for 5 minutes with almost unintelligible speech, then got in a nice late-model car and left. Wtf? High, stoned, or strung out, who could tell? That was a new one. He’ll soon be joining the ranks of the 58K.
Those whispers … Imagine a designer virus. Sorta like the flu. Not particularly virulent, not airborne. It has one critical feature. It sort of just loafs along in your body, waiting for the right signal to go postal. Perhaps that signal is a person who for a few days becomes extra immuno-challenged. Perhaps that signal is a specific enzyme or antigen. Now imagine mobile showers for the homeless. Perfect delivery vector. Yecch. Showers again.
It has to be deniable. One person in a hundred every month. It has to look like the person just gives up on life. I’ve seen that, from relatives. People whose grip on life is fierce, even though their body is a wreck going down fast. And then one day, something happens that kicks them over the edge, they just start fading away, they just don’t care anymore, and you know the end is nigh. For deniability, it has to look like that. Who would notice 1 in a 100 just fading away?
Except of course, The Omega Man, and Twelve Monkeys. You were warned. But when 200K homeless are tearing your city apart, you’re gonna start thinking about and then doing desperate things.
Maybe it will be those AI machines that tend to the homeless with silicon-charged lovingkindness. Behind those crystalline eyes, the churning Zuckerberg-programmed AI engines are toting up the account of each of the unfortunates, and when one reaches the “too much trouble to maintain” threshold, they slip him the mickey.
TenMarch 23, 2018, 8:32 PM
This ain’t over yet.
You let a violent drunk live in your home. The violent drunk abuses you. This goes on for years. Who’s fault is that?
It was over in 1913. It was the right’s fault. The same right that still doesn’t know how or how to stop losing.
ghostsniperMarch 23, 2018, 8:54 PM
“It was over in 1913.”
==============
True.
Then, 1913, a dollar was worth $1.00.
Today that same dollar is worth 3 cents.
IOW, what cost 3 cents in 1913 costs about $1.00 in 2018.
Now do the math, if the dollar lost 97% of it’s value in 105 years how much will that dollar be worth 10 years from now?
How about 5?
3?
See where this is going, and fast?
Got ammo?
Howard NelsonMarch 23, 2018, 9:44 PM
Why not offer room and board to the able-bodied homeless if they will work removing easily ignitable
plant growth from the hills and dales of fire prone California, for instance. The savings to insurance companies and insured from lower fire damage ought to offset the r & b costs.
I know, why work when you get r & b, poor as it is for free? Til
It turns out that gold is now on the dollar standard. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Not sure that any monetary system is responsible for homelessness (the topic of this post -ahem). It goes to civic responsibility, or the lack thereof. Cities, the crapholes that they are, must do something to mitigate homelessness. What that is, I don’t know. One good take-away from this post for you ought to be that the city can very easily make homelessness worse by tolerance, invitation, and enabling. By the same token, there is basic Christian humanity; charity has its place.
By and large, the temperate zone city receives more homeless people because being too cold or too hot sucks. Another take-away in this post, in my mind, is that these cities need to actually know how many, where they originate from, and what their pathways to recovery actually, statistically, are. Not some made up liberal bullshit – real data.
pbirdMarch 24, 2018, 10:22 AM
John Fleming, I have been thinking the same sorts of stuff. There really is bad stuff coming.
TenMarch 24, 2018, 10:39 AM
So nobody so far grasps 1913, the Wilson era. And this is conservatism.
Not sure that any monetary system is responsible for homelessness (the topic of this post -ahem).
Conversely, if said nation had to balance its books the entire cultural landscape would be incalculably different (the topic of this weblog -ahem) and better. Don’t like the depravity of the city, the urban moral decay, the intellectual bankruptcy of the intellectually bankrupt running things? Stop printing it and them into continuous existence and calling it things like free markets or in the case of overtly, abjectly greasing the corporative wheel politik in broad daylight, free speech.
But then I’m a hundred and five years late to that soiree so whatever. Seen mainstream, codependent, reactionary, desperate, Oprah-level conservative thought a century on? Today we just culture-signal against the hordes and the flood and the fire we equipped to be so. Because that’ll do it. That’ll just have to do it.
VanderleunMarch 24, 2018, 11:05 AM
“It turns out that gold is now on the dollar standard. Learn it. Live it. Love it.” And it be Klahn for the win!
ghostsniperMarch 24, 2018, 2:42 PM
You can’t eat gold and you can’t buy food from a hungry man with it.
A more useless commodity I can’t think of in that regard.
What’s that stuff going for these days, $1500/oz? (I have no clue)
For that kind of money you can fill your garage floor to ceiling with grub, enough to feed your whole tribe for 2 years. If you’re a LW it’ll last 10, hopefully by then the land of the free will be back in style and churning along nicely sans the dead weight it’s been dragging for way too long.
Millie_woodsMarch 24, 2018, 4:43 PM
Homelessness is an ecological niche. Fix it and it will fill up again.
TenMarch 25, 2018, 4:32 AM
You can’t eat gold and you can’t buy food from a hungry man with it.
And this is conservatism…
ghostsniperMarch 25, 2018, 3:03 PM
No, that is logic.
TenMarch 25, 2018, 7:06 PM
No, that is logic.
Logic isn’t the word you want. That is not logic but rather a kind of conscious myopia; assumption, pride, and ignorance because it’s terminally short-sighted and it cannot be reasoned with.
Remember long term cause and effect? That thing the right does when/if/because the left is emotional and instinctive but the right is classical, conservative, and considered? Tell me, why is it that not one conservative in a hundred understands the fundamental point as it stands right in his face?
ghostsniperMarch 25, 2018, 7:33 PM
I can’t answer your last question and I don’t consider myself conservative.
I might be a hybrid.
TenMarch 26, 2018, 5:32 AM
There are deep, foundational problems the right chronically refuses to address. Both are profoundly foundational, as in 1776 foundational. The right typically denies one of them and has already become the left on the other.
ghostsniperMarch 26, 2018, 8:38 AM
All gov’t employees are in it for as much as they can extract now.
Money.
Fuk power, MONEY is power in the lives of most people.
Without money you have no power and there are endless ways to gather in boatloads of criminal attained money in the gov’t.
One of the top shelf people in Walmart told me that more than 30% of their shrinkage (a polite word for theft) each year is by the employee’s themselves. When a country has a criminal enterprise at the top that is based solely in theft it is impossible to make the citizenry understand that theft is wrong.
Former LurkerMarch 27, 2018, 8:37 AM
“Why not offer room and board to the able-bodied homeless if they will work removing easily ignitable plant growth from the hills and dales of fire prone California” – because the environuts would lose their minds. THEY are the ones who cause CA to burn every year because they don’t want that growth cleared.
revjen45March 30, 2018, 8:18 AM
1) Bums are “homeless” because they choose that lifestyle.
2) Using bums to clear away the weeds won’t cut it because if they wanted to work they would be working.
3) A bus ticket from Seattle to Santa Monica, CA is a win-win for Seattle and for the bums: better weather with lots of libs who love them for the bums and less diseased parasites for Seattle.
4) The areas next to the freeways in Seattle are covered with bums and getting worse. The libs running things don’t seem to realize that it’s like feeding stray cats – the more you feed them, the more there are. Now TPTB want to allow the bums with RVs to park in middle class residential neighborhoods. You can bet they won’t be parking in front of the Bill Gates manor.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Seattle has a new employee tax to end “the crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity in our city”. Notice how their crisis is everyone else’s crisis, somehow. And notice the mission creep: “housing insecurity”, although consistency commends “homeful insecurity”.
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
“Feed the homeless to the hungry.” I like it Vanderleun!
It fit’s well with a modest solution I’m playing with : Noting the massive adoration of youthful virtue signaling and the unflappable belief of many, that school skipping students can save the world, that the the voter age should be lowered and the age allowing gun ownership should be raised, I humbly make the following, alternative, modest suggestions:
OK, of course our youth deserve more control over their lives so lets lower the drinking age to 16. While we’re at it I suggest we do away with age requirements to a drive a motor vehicle. After all the roads are public right of ways and our youth are very public. If they can reach the gas pedal, truck on!
Now the voting age thingy; most youth would agree that the vote is a burden, not a right, so lets relieve them of that burden until they’re horridly old, like maybe 35.
I will allow that this modest suggestion may result in a sub-group of that youthful population (for want of a better description lets call that group the stupid ones) being marred, damaged or deceased before procreating, but, as we know, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, well, nor can you clean a gene pool without breaking legs.
Admittedly some older members of the population may be damaged or eliminated upon implementation of this modest proposal, but on the other hand most older members of the population, excluding politicians, did not get older by being careless, not looking both ways when they cross the street, nor ignoring obvious threats to their wellbeing.
Last, the youthful scorn of gun ownership: I strongly believe it is wrong wrong wrong to force guns on them and that gun ownership should be voluntary for all youths and that gun ownership should only be mandatory for those who are 35 years old and older.
( I know, this suggestion needs a lot of work and polish, but cut me some slack, I’m working on it and thinking out loud.)
My own suggestions will never float, but they are nonetheless useful and would improve things greatly. Return the voter roles to land owners only. In addition, reserve citizenship rights, such as voting, to gun owners only. We’d see responsibility return to governance in a quick hurry.
Woodpile Report makes some interesting indictments of urban entities. They are, politically speaking, complete and utter wastelands of immorality, senselessness and lawlessness. I call for state laws censuring cities.
Hey Van, checkout the massive shit-storm of spending your man Trump just signed! YeeHaw! “Winning”!!!!!!!!!! “I’ll sign it… wait, I might veto it… fooled YA, I was head-faking!”
Nobody that voted on it read it, of course. Just like the Patriot Act.
And no wall, at all.
$1.3 TRILLION- But it’s okay, we’ll just print more money. Hell, just keyboard stroke-it into existence.
What a joke. Van, you outta reach down, grab a handful, and find the balls to admit this is all bullshit. But yeah, you’re over the rainbow…
Nice anonymous…come into someone else’s house and shit right in the middle of the living room floor. Bet you’re a hoot at parties.
Hey there Anonymous, maybe the Donald is YOUR man now. I am sure the bill he signed is to your liking. Am I correct . . . ?
You should ask your boss Soros for a raise Mr. troll.
The other day I opened a bag of them Oreida frozen crinkle fries and dumped them out onto a cookie sheet. Then I spread them out nice and even trying to make one layer so they all cook the same rate.
Then I recoiled in horror. WTF is that? There was one fry that looked like it fell off the truck. All black and gnarly. I had to sit down, it was more than I could bear.
In a bit I recovered and marched right over there, grabbed up that cookie sheet with that, that abomination, and I stormed out the back door and let the whole thing fly down over the hill into the dense forest. There!
Regarding Anon. above, there’s always SOMEBODY that arrives late to the party.
One more time, for the reading challenged.
I care not what the thief does with the booty once it is stolen for it is no longer mine nor my business.
What I do care about is that the stealing is sanctioned at all.
On 20 JAN 2017 Trump did not announce firstly and loudly that all stealing will cease right now and for that he will never be in my tribe for we are on opposite sides of that shitstained rainbow.
I’m old ex-Navy and I did a short stint in the AF, which after being in the Nav was like being forced to wear a thong and rubber shower shoes to a wedding. AF sucks but I digress.
In the service that I was in men stood together. When our commanders made a statement they always stood by it and we supported them.
When I voted to support Trump I thought I was throwing my support behind a guy that had the balls….after all, he said he had the balls…..to entice US businesses that had given its jobs to the citizens of Timbuktu, to return to the US; to halt illegal immigration and only permit immigration when the system was repaired and most attractively, to build a wall to establish a viable and enforceable boundary between the US.
Well, that fair haired boy, (now known among a rapidly shrinking support base as that lying son-of-a-bitch) just gave away the farm with a promise to “never do that again”. I wonder, as the author of “The Art of The Deal”, if he considered, that there would never be another opportunity to do “that” again. He probably didn’t at the moment but I suspect that he’s waking up to the fact as the sun has warmed the earth. Great opportunities never present themselves to the same goof twice and for my part I’m done with him.
I have always considered COWARDICE the greatest of all sin. It’s appearance in the face of fear will tell you all you need to know about the soul of the man. And Trump is a coward; he is the soldier who threw his rifle barrel first into the mud and who then turned and ran to the rear at the mere face of the enemy.
You don’t fight the battles you can’t win.
Charlie Wilson’s War:
A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.” But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “We’ll see.”
‘The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We’ll see.”
The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We’ll see. So you get it?”
No. No, I don’t ’cause I’m stupid.
You’re not stupid. You’re just in Congress.
This ain’t over yet.
They say, that LA has 58,000 homeless. I passed through an encampment today, tents and trash and worse everywhere. It wasn’t there two years ago. Saw one enterprising Mexican-style sturdy shanty mixed in with the flimsy tents. At least Mexican shantytowns are organized. This was wretched helter-skelter.
If you’re homeless in LA, it’s the end of the line. There’s nowhere else to go, it’s 400 miles of desert in any direction. In LA you will stay. And since the City and County are now subsidizing the homeless, more LA will have, streaming in from every corner of the FUSA.
If you think it’s bad now, think about 100K, then 150K, then 200K. And then imagine that furtive thoughts never spoken will give way to whispers and then to secret trials and then to … Look, when it gets that large, it’s completely out of control, it becomes a metastasizing cancer. Where are 50K or 100K housing “units” going to come from, in a densely built-out city, to house people who are homeless because they can’t get it back together or are broken? Or have been “displaced” by the influx of automation and high-techery.
The other day I met a guy with bad teeth who ranted at me for 5 minutes with almost unintelligible speech, then got in a nice late-model car and left. Wtf? High, stoned, or strung out, who could tell? That was a new one. He’ll soon be joining the ranks of the 58K.
Those whispers … Imagine a designer virus. Sorta like the flu. Not particularly virulent, not airborne. It has one critical feature. It sort of just loafs along in your body, waiting for the right signal to go postal. Perhaps that signal is a person who for a few days becomes extra immuno-challenged. Perhaps that signal is a specific enzyme or antigen. Now imagine mobile showers for the homeless. Perfect delivery vector. Yecch. Showers again.
It has to be deniable. One person in a hundred every month. It has to look like the person just gives up on life. I’ve seen that, from relatives. People whose grip on life is fierce, even though their body is a wreck going down fast. And then one day, something happens that kicks them over the edge, they just start fading away, they just don’t care anymore, and you know the end is nigh. For deniability, it has to look like that. Who would notice 1 in a 100 just fading away?
Except of course, The Omega Man, and Twelve Monkeys. You were warned. But when 200K homeless are tearing your city apart, you’re gonna start thinking about and then doing desperate things.
Maybe it will be those AI machines that tend to the homeless with silicon-charged lovingkindness. Behind those crystalline eyes, the churning Zuckerberg-programmed AI engines are toting up the account of each of the unfortunates, and when one reaches the “too much trouble to maintain” threshold, they slip him the mickey.
This ain’t over yet.
You let a violent drunk live in your home. The violent drunk abuses you. This goes on for years. Who’s fault is that?
It was over in 1913. It was the right’s fault. The same right that still doesn’t know how or how to stop losing.
“It was over in 1913.”
==============
True.
Then, 1913, a dollar was worth $1.00.
Today that same dollar is worth 3 cents.
IOW, what cost 3 cents in 1913 costs about $1.00 in 2018.
Now do the math, if the dollar lost 97% of it’s value in 105 years how much will that dollar be worth 10 years from now?
How about 5?
3?
See where this is going, and fast?
Got ammo?
Why not offer room and board to the able-bodied homeless if they will work removing easily ignitable
plant growth from the hills and dales of fire prone California, for instance. The savings to insurance companies and insured from lower fire damage ought to offset the r & b costs.
I know, why work when you get r & b, poor as it is for free? Til
Ls
No city in the western world should be like this.
1913? Gold??
It turns out that gold is now on the dollar standard. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Not sure that any monetary system is responsible for homelessness (the topic of this post -ahem). It goes to civic responsibility, or the lack thereof. Cities, the crapholes that they are, must do something to mitigate homelessness. What that is, I don’t know. One good take-away from this post for you ought to be that the city can very easily make homelessness worse by tolerance, invitation, and enabling. By the same token, there is basic Christian humanity; charity has its place.
By and large, the temperate zone city receives more homeless people because being too cold or too hot sucks. Another take-away in this post, in my mind, is that these cities need to actually know how many, where they originate from, and what their pathways to recovery actually, statistically, are. Not some made up liberal bullshit – real data.
John Fleming, I have been thinking the same sorts of stuff. There really is bad stuff coming.
So nobody so far grasps 1913, the Wilson era. And this is conservatism.
Not sure that any monetary system is responsible for homelessness (the topic of this post -ahem).
Conversely, if said nation had to balance its books the entire cultural landscape would be incalculably different (the topic of this weblog -ahem) and better. Don’t like the depravity of the city, the urban moral decay, the intellectual bankruptcy of the intellectually bankrupt running things? Stop printing it and them into continuous existence and calling it things like free markets or in the case of overtly, abjectly greasing the corporative wheel politik in broad daylight, free speech.
But then I’m a hundred and five years late to that soiree so whatever. Seen mainstream, codependent, reactionary, desperate, Oprah-level conservative thought a century on? Today we just culture-signal against the hordes and the flood and the fire we equipped to be so. Because that’ll do it. That’ll just have to do it.
“It turns out that gold is now on the dollar standard. Learn it. Live it. Love it.” And it be Klahn for the win!
You can’t eat gold and you can’t buy food from a hungry man with it.
A more useless commodity I can’t think of in that regard.
What’s that stuff going for these days, $1500/oz? (I have no clue)
For that kind of money you can fill your garage floor to ceiling with grub, enough to feed your whole tribe for 2 years. If you’re a LW it’ll last 10, hopefully by then the land of the free will be back in style and churning along nicely sans the dead weight it’s been dragging for way too long.
Homelessness is an ecological niche. Fix it and it will fill up again.
You can’t eat gold and you can’t buy food from a hungry man with it.
And this is conservatism…
No, that is logic.
No, that is logic.
Logic isn’t the word you want. That is not logic but rather a kind of conscious myopia; assumption, pride, and ignorance because it’s terminally short-sighted and it cannot be reasoned with.
Remember long term cause and effect? That thing the right does when/if/because the left is emotional and instinctive but the right is classical, conservative, and considered? Tell me, why is it that not one conservative in a hundred understands the fundamental point as it stands right in his face?
I can’t answer your last question and I don’t consider myself conservative.
I might be a hybrid.
There are deep, foundational problems the right chronically refuses to address. Both are profoundly foundational, as in 1776 foundational. The right typically denies one of them and has already become the left on the other.
All gov’t employees are in it for as much as they can extract now.
Money.
Fuk power, MONEY is power in the lives of most people.
Without money you have no power and there are endless ways to gather in boatloads of criminal attained money in the gov’t.
One of the top shelf people in Walmart told me that more than 30% of their shrinkage (a polite word for theft) each year is by the employee’s themselves. When a country has a criminal enterprise at the top that is based solely in theft it is impossible to make the citizenry understand that theft is wrong.
“Why not offer room and board to the able-bodied homeless if they will work removing easily ignitable plant growth from the hills and dales of fire prone California” – because the environuts would lose their minds. THEY are the ones who cause CA to burn every year because they don’t want that growth cleared.
1) Bums are “homeless” because they choose that lifestyle.
2) Using bums to clear away the weeds won’t cut it because if they wanted to work they would be working.
3) A bus ticket from Seattle to Santa Monica, CA is a win-win for Seattle and for the bums: better weather with lots of libs who love them for the bums and less diseased parasites for Seattle.
4) The areas next to the freeways in Seattle are covered with bums and getting worse. The libs running things don’t seem to realize that it’s like feeding stray cats – the more you feed them, the more there are. Now TPTB want to allow the bums with RVs to park in middle class residential neighborhoods. You can bet they won’t be parking in front of the Bill Gates manor.