The city is carrying out a bizarre medical experiment in which they are helping homeless drug addicts use drugs. ‘It’s handing a loaded gun to a suicidal person.’
Feb 7, 2022Liked by Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles
It's hard to find a philosophical home these days. I'd always considered myself fiscally conservative and socially liberal and so never felt comfortable anywhere until my nephews educated me about the libertarians. But I was very uncomfortable about the Completely Unregulated Drug Use thing.
I read with great interest Bari's open letter when she fled the NY Times, having followed her writings for some time. Nellie I knew less about, but had read some of hers. A lifelong hunter and conservationist, I began to read Michael Shellenberger, a dedicated environmental advocate who had begun to question the Environmental Crazies, and here he is!
I look forward to Common Sense each and every day - the writings of reasonable, classic liberalism, with a clear understanding of the dangers of unbridled socialism, nutcase-outrageous environmentalism, communist-inspired radicalism. Finally. I'm home.
Thanks. So very much at stake now - hell, what am I saying? - EVERYTHING is at stake. So much screaming, shaming, and illiberal behavior everywhere, so much apologizing in response to those attacks. I'm a crotchety old guy, and I'm having none of it. Here you drag out your argument; if it's strong and good, then super. If it's weak, it's weak, and you learn. Good stuff. How it's supposed to be.
I was in a different debate yesterday regarding the “new lefts” penchant for suppressing free speech and asked; what happened to “the wisdom of the crowd, crowdsourcing,” that was the rage a short while ago? Now the “crowd” is comprised of those acceptable to social media outlets resulting in the new “in-crowd, bubble” in which the new left exist.
Feb 7, 2022·edited Feb 7, 2022Liked by Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles
Very similar here, Jim. The democrat and republican parties are really the UniParty with a radical Left and pseudo-Right wings and neither stand for anything other grift. Although destruction could be attributed to both over the past two years(if not decades)...
I am tired of labels and believe the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in the Bill of Rights, several of which have been illegally suspended the last two years. THAT is our common cause, imho; if we all believe and support those then our core is strong and we can navigate through other issues pretty easily.. I am very happy to financially power a wonderful writer like Bari(and Greenwald and Berenson) rather than the rags they used to write for.
When I was in college in the 'seventies, as an experiment, a poly-sci student stood on the street corner in Morgantown, WV, and asked passers-by to sign a "petition" of ten things. If you had a brain and actually read it, you immediately recognized it as the Bill of Rights in modern verbiage. He got spat on, cussed-out, and even assaulted for "trying to promote that commie stuff." Now it's exactly the same, only the side that claims to be liberal is doing it.
"until my nephews educated me about the libertarians."
Small l libertarian here. I knew I found a political home of sorts back in the early nineties, when someone gave me the Libertarian Handbook. One of the Chapters was titled "What About Poor People?" It was a very short chapter - only a single sentence: "Well, what about them?"
Well maybe this will help. All the liberal leftist ideas and programs and policies when deconstructed and analyzed as to their effectiveness and success rate are usually found to be boondoggles and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Almost without fail.
Once a program is proposed in Congress and all the "positive" aspects put forth and the hoped for benefit to poor individuals there should be some accountability for the funds spent and the elected officials pushing the program should have to answer the simple question. If this policy and program is funded and successful then --- "what is next."
I could cite many great sounding programs like "Head Start" and others that are enacted and funded without being evaluated and assessed as to what is the bang for the buck and where are the funds going. Once you look closely and try to determine its success (if there is any) it would be nice to know "what is next." Or if there is even a next.
Did anyone benefit from that plan when you evaluate it on a what happened next after the program was implemented. Kind of like the "what about them" statement. Before the Great Society programs we had less poor and many intact minority families. After its enactment many, many administrators and federal supervisors got great paying jobs but no one asked what about the people supposed to be helped from poverty. What about the millions who slide into poverty during the Great Society and other "programs to help the poor?" There are in fact poor people -- what about them?
They aren't a waste if you are given the money in the name of "helping." There are millions of people (Chirlane McCray DiBlasio, for one) whose entire living is dependent on government handing money to people to hand money to the poor.
Very well said, what’s next is not asked and the program becomes a make work program for the government employees. The whole liberal plan is now a cul-de-sac: dead end.
From a Broadway musical written 50 years ago (paraphrasing the bible):
"Surely you're not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot? There will be poor always, pathetically struggling, look at the good things you've got."
I am sure we do have the resources. Problem is the grantors and allocators of those resources put themselves first in line to get those resources as administrators and "facilitators" and are not concerned in the least whether those being "helped" or actually have their lives improved. As long as the "program" is renewed each year and funded it keeps on keeping on.
Good private and religious based charities often make a real difference to people in need. Great hospitals like St. Judes, Shriners along with countless other charities where individuals work as unpaid volunteers do move the needle. Try adding up the millions of hours worked by different organizations and their volenteers and multiply that by the minimum wage and the dollar value is astounding.. All without "benefit" packages and govt. union wages.
Most of these people don't reflect on what they personally have but on what they can do for people who don't have much of anything. Guess it is just what prism one looks through is to how we view the world. The idea that a govt. bureaucracy or program could or would solve the problems of society is very optimistic. They might do it but at probably three or four times the cost and very inefficiently in many cases. Government has some success but mostly it runs into fully funded DEAD ENDS. Just my POV.
I’m Canadian and our idiot Prime Minister endlessly speaks of investing in Canadians; that was his sales pitch in the last general election which he won. What he means is increasing taxes and debt, creating more government programs for the bureaucrats to run. At the centre of this is an incredible arrogance: we know better. His policies will impoverished Canada with a world of government officials pursuing their own self interest, producing a small output at great expense. I am a business owner I see it all the time, we are constantly being harassed by them but the average person doesn’t see this waste, they are fooled.
I think as the secular age has replaced the antiquated notion of a Creator God the human intuition of intelligent design has not gone away but migrated to new centres of moral authority currently the clerisy of the academic left and they are idiots.
I’m a clinical social worker with a specialty in substance abuse, who had found a home in the libertarian party in my early 20’s, but parted company with them over the “Completely Unregulated Drug Use thing” as you do aptly put it. The problem with that, is that addicts are robbed of their free will by drugs, which completely ruins the reward centers of the brain, and it is no longer a choice to stop, without significant intervention and sometimes mandated treatment. Addiction is a terrible illness and the daily degradation that addicts endure to get their “fix” should be evidence enough that addiction is not a choice.
Part of the problem on this issue is the lack of nuance. Nuance gets a bad rep- for many people, it equates to temporizing- but without nuance, the debate revolves around abstract templates instead of ground-level reality.
First, it has to be acknowledged that the status quo on the "drug issue" (as if there was only one) has permeated the social fabric, the institutional response, and the discourse. And the discourse of resistance and reform is often operating within reactive assumptions as a response to that status quo. As a result, clarity about the most relevant problems- and their solutions- gets lost, while the debate goes in circles.
The status quo here is Zero Tolerance and Criminalization. Don't imagine that the organizing paradigm has shifted anywhere else, just because there have been some moves toward decriminalization and low enforcement priorities, and a surfeit of rhetoric about "education, prevention, and recovery". The primary "treatment" for the most seriously addicted users is still Jail. A regime of forced abstention behind bars that is, to put in kindly, erratically enforced; in quite a number of correctional facilities, enforcement is a joke, and the illicit drug markets are rampant, organized, and run from the inside.
Zero Tolerance User Criminalization rests on some terribly invalid premises that function to exacerbate the problem by widening the target population to All Users, instead of focusing law enforcement energy on the core of addicts who generate public health problems, crime problems, and the denial of public space characteristic of open-air illicit marketplaces in the city streets, parks, and other areas of the public commons.
To break it down: not all illicit drug users are users of hard drugs; nationwide, around 3/4 of drug users who participate as buyers in the illegal market confine their purchases to cannabis.
To take it further, in any given year, around 3/4 of the users of "hard drugs"- cocaine, opioids, methamphetamine- use them only occasionally. Between once a year and once a week.
The remainder of that user population are considered "regular users", but not all are addicts. Of the fraction of regular users who are addicted, some are still able to function without attracting undue notice by law enforcement as habitual criminals. As a population, such addicts show up disproportionately in child neglect cases and DUI offenses. But they don't rely on street crime to pay for their habits, and whether by diligence or good fortune, they keep a roof over their heads. A sizeable number of such (quasi)functional addicts enjoy the advantages of class affluence, including the ability to pull strings when they find themselves in legal difficulty; this is not fair, but it isn't any different in that respect than the other advantages of wealth privilege in this society. Some of the others are able to hold down jobs that supply them with enough income stability that they can "afford" their addictions, at least in the financial sense.
The remainder of the Illicit Drug User population has hit the skids; they no longer have their habit under control, if they ever did. They're Dysfunctional Street Addicts. They don't obtain an income from working. A large fraction of them fund their addictions with crime- although not all of them do; some are actually able to feed their habits by begging on the street (a measure of how much disposable income is in the pockets of Americans, at least some of them; and also an indication of how inexpensive a bag of hard dope has gotten over the course of the past 40 years.) Other street addicts are prostitutes; however one feels about the decriminalization of prostitution, it will always be a hazardous game for streetwalkers, and addicted prostitutes are especially vulnerable. That said, even street addict prostitutes are usually able to make enough income to keep themselves from being unhoused on the streets.
Finally, we get to the addict population afflicting the streets, neighborhoods, and parks of San Francisco: they trespass. They use drugs in public, including injection drugs, and discard the needles. They use city alleys and even sidewalks as bathrooms, urinating and defecating in public. They shoplift, panhandle intimidatingly, and commit an array of offenses ranging from vandalism to residential burglary in order to commit property crimes to fund their addictions. Few of them bathe, certainly not regularly. Some of them own only the clothes on their backs, and sleep on the sidewalk winter or summer. In crowded environments like homeless encampments, they're often public health hazards. Dysfunctional addicts often overdose, sometimes more than once in the same day.
The response of the city of San Francisco to that population and their issues is "Decriminalization." A policy that I would support, were it only confined to drug possession. But for going on twenty years now, San Francisco and some other West Coast cities haven't just been granting decriminalization for drug possession; the authorities have also granted de facto impunity for trespassing, street camping, using public streets and parks as bathrooms, monopolizing publicly provided bathrooms and park benches, discarding needles, harassing and intimidating passers-by into giving them money, public intoxication (grossly and blatantly), and other activities that have resulted in addicted vagrants monopolizing public space in the city. Oh, last but no least, impunity for the failure to appear in court for hearings or unpaid citations.
My position is that decriminalization should extend to drug possession, but no further; if someone is found sleeping in a doorway, they're subject to arrest or citation. If they have outstanding warrant(s) due to failure to appear, they're subject to arrest and detention without bail. Misdemeanor recividism is a violation of the social contract; no one has any business scoffing at the law that way. Cars that get too many tickets get towed; petty criminals that stack up too many citations need to get sent to the pound.
But- and here's where the mercy comes in- we need Rehab Jail for street addicts. The courts and confinement facilities need to do intake evaluations to distinguish the population whose crimes are entirely due to their addiction from the smaller population of aggressive, violent, or predatory criminal offenders. (In the case of opioids, addiction can be detected by administering Naloxone, which induces withdrawal symptoms.) The population whose problems stem entirely from their addictions are the people who most need inpatient drug treatment, rehabilitation, counseling, education, and recovery therapy. Not for two weeks, or 30 days, or 6 months; for one year. At minimum, we need those jail facilities for dysfunctional street addicts to be airtight enough that they can't get any drugs when they're inside (with the possible exception of substances like Suboxone, which have some value in stabilizing the level of addiction for some opioid users. The controls need to be airtight, though.)
At minimum, we need to give the individuals who find themselves in that situation a year of dry time, to think it over. And we need to make it clear that if they return to their old patterns, they'll be subject to the same confinement and treatment regime. They can return to using and getting addicted; it's their decision. But they can't hang around unhoused on the city streets, funding their lifestyles with public money budgeted for their welfare.
The mandatory inpatient drug treatment program that I've just outlined.will require extra funding.
Considering that San Francisco's 2022 budget for homelessness is $598 million, I'd propose $500 million of that money be shifted to pay for it.
The other part of the problem is more complicated; we need to divert as much demand from the illicit markets into controlled and regulated channels as possible, within reason. That's a different discussion. But the criminal monopoly over the illicit drugs trade has expanded to the status of an societal institution, and the effect of that is so corrosive that measures have to be taken to replace that market with medicalization- and possibly even some level of legal markets for some forms of these substances- in order to effectively shrink down the remaining illegally supplied markets to a level where law enforcement methods are able to effectively curtail them.
"....the daily degradation that addicts endure to get their “fix” should be evidence enough that addiction is not a choice." The most concise and accurate analysis I've ever heard.
it is a choice you just have to have will power . worked for me I just made up y mind and said enough already and quit . never looked back that was 30 years ago
But, although I care about them, we need to get them out of society, we lock them up and free the functioning part of society from their presence. That seems a laudable good, 95% of us will benefit. I can also imagine there could be a solution to drugs in jail, ya, could be done, no drugs in jail.
Liberal prevacation on most such issues is so very tiresome, you folks have run Society for a long time and you’ve made a terrible mess. Time, it’s well past time your prescription be abandoned, we need to return from whence we came, reapply common sense. I think our grandparents would be ashamed of us, I think they would say something like: if you become a drug addled maniac and terrorize society you get put in jail.
This is common sense and based on the name of this substack I will presume to speak for Bari and say she would agree with me, at least, I suspect in private she would agree, in this public venue she would likely demure, bad for business insulting the sensibilities of your paying customers. She is smart enough to know her liberal audience, she knows their political shibboleths are inviolable and she is serious about her commercial best interests, so she edits herself. She might’ve been born at night but it wasn’t last night.
I found Common Sense only about 2 weeks ago. I am finally home too. In the last week alone I’ve brought 12 friends on board as new subscribers. Good grief, what a relief. Finally a site for completely sane high quality investigative journalism. A few times over the last week I shed a few tears of relief. I know that might sound kind of ridiculous, but it’s true. I just don’t feel quite so freaked out and alone in my alarm about what is going on in this bizarre, dangerous, and confusing woke world that I’m trying to live in. My long time subscription to the New York Times has been ended. My husband’s long time subscription to the Washington Post has also ended. For the time being that money will be used to support sights like Common Sense. Bari Weiss and the entire group of journalists contributing to Common Sense… thank you for all your courage, diligence, integrity, and hard work . You have all inspired me to not cower from always striving to speak my truth and never let anyone intimidate me into compelled speech of any kind. Godspeed to each of you.
Dear God, you are to be commended Ann! Leaving the NYT and WaPo is the first step toward 'sanity' for sure. I am a rookie as I am only in my second week as well.
This whole group of contributors is well worth my(many of us) standing a post while others slept for years.
Wow! My "philosophical home" mirrors yours completely. I wonder how many others are out there who feel as you and I do? I found Bari, Michael, and Nellie after Bari and Michael were interviewed on Megyn Kelley's podcast a couple of years ago. Nellie's TGIF email is one of the things I look forward to reading each Friday.
Do you really need more evidence that progressivism is insanity? Seriously? I lived in NYC under the Dinkins reign of terror that was thought intractable. All it took was public disgust - even among West Village and UWS liberals - and Giuliani cleaned up the mess in a few years. It isn't hard, you just have to have a usable brain and be able to see cause and effect. Sorry but progressives don't. They claim they care but allow vulnerable people to wallow in human misery while robbing law abiding taxpayers of the joys of urban life. Everything a progressive touches turns to merde.
As far as fentanyl, it comes from China. An act of war. Why are we buying anything from these fiends? Ban and boycott China's products, including their reprise of the 1936 Olympics.
I've had the same thought every day in the few years I've lived in SF (we're leaving soon) -- this town needs a Giuliani. But, SF is not going to get it.
Cities were a much broader swath of ideology back then and people were less obsessed with political battles. Now the professional class in SF is hyper-online, hyper-polarized, and would rather live in fear of their lives than admit they were wrong about anything political.
Detroit went from the most prosperous city in the world in 1940 to a wasteland in 1980. I think it will take SF roughly the same amount of time to get to the same state. I don't see it rescuing itself like NYC did.
My family member is a 911 dispatcher in SF. There are many components of his job responsibilities including taking 911 calls, dispatching police, fire, paramedics, coastguard,etc. in order to get emergency services to those in need. As the years go on a larger and larger percentage of the calls he takes are from members of the “professional class” living in SF. They constantly call 911 with demands to “send the police immediately to get the tents cleared out from my driveway, clean up the used needles at the park my kids can’t play in anymore, clean up the human waste in the alley behind my house, etc”. In the meantime they have a defund the police sign displayed from their living room window. Don’t even get me going about how rude, condescending, and entitled they behave towards the dispatchers they call on a near daily basis. Many of them call so frequently that the dispatchers have their names , sounds of their voices, and addresses committed to memory. I’ll bet money that these callers will continue voting for the same city government and board of supervisors candidates that promote these failed policies. Hope I’m wrong about that.
I used to think progressives were just idealistic fools. I’ve come to realize they are actually malicious actors. Really just interested in the power they can gain from their myriad causes. Ultimate power for them of course we be the destruction of capitalism. We must oppose them at every turn or face the cold starvation of collectivism.
And fentanyl comes over a wide open southern border. Enough has been seized to kill every man , woman, and child in the country. As another commenter said on another post last week, Democrats need poverty to maintain their existence. And misery works well too.
You're absolutely right, Bruce. However, back in the Dinkins days, a crime was called a crime and treated that way. We didn't have these horrible bail laws, judges and prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate. Nowadays, they send these folks back on the streets. Interesting how the phrase "well-meaning" is usually followed with some tragic consequences. The "well-meaning" progressives are usually sheltered from the day to day, in your face navigating. They, and their families, live in gated communities, employ private security or are allowed police to protect them.
In terms of established institutions you might be right. I was too young. But the idea that the only way to solve crime is to solve the criminals' problems for them, such as addiction and poverty, already had a lot of momentum in the 1960s. Thomas Sowell has some excellent writings chronicling this.
The thing is, during the Dinkins era, Wall Street was still the world's financial powerhouse, and there was still a fairly large middle and upper class population in Manhattan and surrounding boroughs.
Unfortunately, New York A.G.'s such as Spitzer sued several financial giants like AIG into bankruptcy (AIG was particularly egregious case; in the end they were exonerated of the charges, but too late to revive the company) over technicalities so obscure that even the prosecutors did not clearly understand them. This, combined with 40 years of making the city unlivable, eliminated the stabilizing presence of a patrician class that kept the lunatic liberals under control, and also removed a huge source of revenue not only directly from fincorps but all the ancillary activity -- restaurants, custodial, security, housing, etc.
The cities have been ceded to a criminal element while the surrounding 'burbs have safe, clean neighborhoods and decent schools. Maybe it's time to just declare the cities a failure, raze them to the ground, and throw the indigent populations into reeducation camps, á la China, where they are retrained to do something productive with their lives. Since, after all, we're already basically becoming an authoritarian regime modeled after China...
Kevin's playing with us. He's channeling clowns like "Just me," whose answer to any post is to scream "racist." Indulge him. He has some great lines and I think he's just warming up on this one.
He's pointing out what anyone will inevitably be called for approving of this article. And, how just by the towering fear of that label, most people will back right down after that and just let the Progs go on their merry way "helping" everyone to death with America's tax dollars. Libs make it too easy for them! All it takes is one word.
Progressivism being insanity? Not sure. Pretty indifferent.
Progressivism being inherently destructive. Well yeah, that is almost the definition of progressivism and I am not sure why more people don’t clearly see that.
You an can couch it in a warm light of “burning away the dead and dying to make room for the new” or some other sort of euphemism. But regardless of how you couch it, the destruction is inherent to the ideology. It is an unmoored foundation guided solely by direction of “out with the old, in with the new”. Out here meaning destruction.
You could create a hypothetical alternative reality 300 years in the future where “progressives” have achieved their every demand for 300 years straight (from now until then). And the progressives of that age will be looking around themselves trying to destroy whatever they deem imperfect and institute the new order. That is progressivism, to destroy.
Now… that need for change isn’t necessarily bad. You also don’t want your society to ossify and stagnate. That is also its own problem. But (why I believe as objectively as you can make it), conservatism is preferable to progressivism if you could only choose one (which no one should choose one because that is just stupid), because conservatism at least recognizes as an indispensable foundation, “whatever we have done, has worked. So, it may be horribly horribly horribly imperfect, but it has gotten us to this point. So it is our best bet getting us to tomorrow”.
Once again, you need change too, so ultimately a purely conservative society that never changed is going to wither away and die. But it as a base (if functioning appropriately) allows for stability to make changes at the fringes, test, see what works, and adjust.
As an analogy, if society is a plane, a truly progressive outlook could identify the main issue the plane isn’t functioning properly is the engine (and the engine may have 100s of real problems), and decide to toss the plane out the window while the plane crashes to the ground. The need for change (and consequently the need to destroy) is tantamount to any other consideration including the ends.
Conservatism may allow that decrepit old engine to sputter for 100 years without update, ultimately leading to it giving out. But, at least it allows for the daily possibility to reconsider, and you’re most likely not going to be a fiery wreck tomorrow.
To state explicitly what I believe is very clearly implicit, the optimal outcome is certainly some balance between each. Identifying what works, and what doesn’t, and making changes when everyone believe an improved end goal is most likely for everyone.
Which makes the CNN/Fox, crazy leftist/radical right dichotomy so annoying. They both insist that they’re the only ones who’re right, meanwhile to anyone with eyes it is as close to definitional as you can possibly get that they’re both certainly wrong and the “right” answer almost certainly found somewhere between them.
That recognition MIGHT be the only “voter ID” test that I could ever get onboard with supporting. After you make your pick in the election the prompt, “tell me 1 singular thing you believe the other party has right that yours doesn’t” and every answer outside of iterations of “nothing” would be accepted.
If your answer is “nothing” to that question, the chance you’re a political fanatic/religious zealot that has utterly dispensed with any sort of rationality approaches 100%.
I don’t care if your response is something as banal or apolitical as “they have strong family values” or alternatively “they have a stronger sense of empathy for the downtrodden”, you should be able to come up with something.
What you say is true. Thing is it is the dynamic and friction between conservatism and progressivism that usually results in a forward moving society with constraints on the destruction of many "good" things.
In todays society the progressives have identified the conservatives as enemies and seeks to wreck them and silence them as bad people not worth interacting with. That alloweds them to make horrific errors and hurt many people in their never-ending stampede for change at any cost.
The baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Progressives seem to be reckless and relentless in implementing unproven and half baked ideas and policies. Conservatives can be calcified and intractable but usually listen to and can change when confronted with decent workable programs and policies.
Just look at all the social changes and changes in mores that have taken place over the last 25 years. Many right leaning people would have blanched at what we take for granted today. Most were the result of interaction and engagement by the opposing political branches. Not today -- its all or nothing with the left.
There's no evidence that the Chinese chemists shipping fentanyl and other even more powerful opioid analogues to the US are doing it as part of a conspiracy by the CCP ot the PLA to supply Americans with plentiful opioids. It's one of the strange contradictions of China that notwithstanding the intensive surveillance and scrutiny of individuals in terms of their personal behaviors, Chinese business enterprises don't receive nearly as much attention. It's still to some extent a frontier economy, and a massive export economy; as long as the businesses are making money, it's surprising- or dismaying- how much latitude they're provided. Many of the synthetic drugs being manufactured were not prohibited by US drug laws until very recently, when the statutes began to outlaw entire classes of chemical compounds. But even those laws can be skirted.
The larger and more enduring problem is this: there's no requirement that the labs be Chinese. Fentanyl can potentially be manufactured anywhere, including within US borders. Unlike, say, methamphetamine, the precursors are so common that it's questionable whether it's possible to restrict them. The precursors are also easily manufactured from even more common chemicals that are practically impossible to regulate. Also, compared to methamphetamine, the per-dose yield of fentanyl (or worse, an analog like carfentanil) from the chemical process is so enormous that the lab doesn't even have to be very big. Fentanyl and the related analogs apparently don't call for a terribly sophisticated synthesis, either. The main challenge seems to be using sufficient precautions to avoid poisoning oneself while manufacturing it.
In fact, we may be looking at "game over" when it comes to effective interdiction of the fentanyl supply. Opioid prohibition may well have been checkmated by modern chemistry. These chemicals are so powerful that tens of thousands of doses can be sent in a 1st class letter envelope without the requirement to add an extra stamp.
And you've added some factual support for your own take?
Read the beginning of Karl Taro Greenfeld's China Syndrome, from 2006 (about the SARS-Cov-1 virus epidemic, a very prophetic book that gave me a lot of clues about what to expect when SARS-Cov-2 showed up in 2020; Greenfeld's book was trying to warn us about the possibility that something like that was bound to happen again, given the Chinese policy toward "wet markets.")
Greenfeld talks about visiting an open-air retail bazaar in one of China's boomtowns in the early 2000s, a wide-open full service market where cash money could get you all kindsa niche consumer goods: jars of MDMA, child porn, endangered species animal parts, high-quality counterfeit DVDs of films that had just been released in theaters, fake Hermes bags...
did you know that already? Am I boring you?
There's also the fact that I've already brought up; many of the super-powerful synthetic opioids, designer speed, substituted phenylanine psychedelics, etc. etc. available by mail on the Internet from overseas sources were not even illegal until around five years ago. They could be legally imported into the US in mass quantities from overseas chemical warehouses that sold them as "research chemicals" for what can only be termed ridiculous discounts, by the standards of the retail illicit drug market here in the US.
Let me guess: you imagine that the People's Republic of China is such a ruthless and efficient totalitarian police state that they've eradicated hard drug use in their own country (while at the same time doing a state-supported covert op to export fentanyl to Americans.)
News flash: no matter how much of a police state the PRC is, they ain't that airtight.
"The best calibrated model estimated that the number of drug users would increase from 0.86 million to 3,120,059 (95% CI 2,669,214-3,570,904) during 2000–2030 period. The proportion of heroin-only users among the total drug users will decrease from 96.8% (95% CI, 96.6–97.1%) in 2000 to 36.9% (30.1–40.8%) in 2030, while the proportion of synthetic drug-only users will increase from 1.1% (0.9–1.3%) in 2000 to 57.7% (51.7–65.6%) in 2030. In contrast, the proportion of poly-drug users shared an increasing trend during 2000–2016 (from 2.1% (1.5–2.8%) to 15.1 (13.8–17.1%)) but declined to 5.5% (3.4–7.2%) in 2030. Estimated 46,370 (41,634-51,106) heroin-only users and 3767 (3481–4053) synthetic drug only users initiated poly-drug use in 2000. We observed a cross-over in 2012 where more synthetic drug-only users were initiating heroin use than heroin-only users initiating synthetic drug use. There will be estimated 2,094,052 (1,819,830–2,368,274) synthetic drug-only users and poly-drug users 211,407 (177,150–245,664) in 2030.
Conclusions
Synthetic drug use will become dominant in drug users in China, but poly-drug use of both heroin and synthetic drugs will remain substantial.
"According to the official report, the number of registered drug users in China in the early 1990s was documented at 148,000 (Law Yearbook of China, 1992). Since then, that number has increased dramatically over years. Registered drug users reached 2.09 million in 2013 (NNCC 2013). While heroin abusers still represented 60.6 % of registered drug use population in 2013 (NNCC 2013), the percentage has dropped significantly compared to 87.6 % in 2002 (NNCC 2002)."
Bruce, what caused and affect policies did Rudy Giuliani enact to deal with the homelessness problem in New York City? My progressive brain needs you to provide me with the very specific policies, so I can understand the cause and effect paradigm that you seem to know so much about.
I don't have an answer for your question to Bruce other than Guiliani was touted as pro law and order and widely credited with cleaning up the streets with the now frowned upon stop and frisk (which some believe the abolishing of is contributing to a rise in gun crime in NYC but that is another debate). But the tone of your comment leads to one to you. What does your progressive brain think about the situation in San Francidco raised by the original article? Are you a proponent of the policies delineated?
So you can understand this progressive mind of mine; I don’t believe drug addiction is a crime, the same for homelessness. These are human beings who need help, and the question is, what’s the best way to help them? This experiment is not even a month old, but as Michael Shellenberger describes it, I would not be in favor of it! Apparently, the stated purpose for this facility is to reduce overdose death; this experiment has only just begun. It appears by what Mr. Shellenberger describes some problems need to be addressed. At this point, it’s a wait-and-see if I approve of this program.
Drug addiction is not a crime. But all the accoutrements are; theft, robbery, public defecation, vagrancy etc. Same with so-called "homelessness. You might be surprised that I support treatment and care, voluntary or forced. But we can't tolerate what's going on now.
As far as Giuliani - I saw it first hand. All the vagrancy, the squigee men, the three card monte crap, the harassment, the turnstile jumping was ended. "Broken window" policing worked. His and Bloomberg's policies worked and NYC functioned. Big Bird's policies were a catastrophe. Cause and effect. Simple.
Essentially, Giuliani had the police harass the homeless, so they would leave New York City; it worked. Do you believe giving someone else your problem is ethical?
Relations with the homeless[edit]
During his 1993 campaign, Giuliani proposed to drastically curtail city services for the homeless, setting a limit of 90 days for stays in shelters. Opponent Dinkins accused Giuliani of punishing the children of the homeless with the policy.[78] This contrasted with Giuliani's campaign promise during the 1989 campaign to build hundreds of new homeless shelters around the city.[79] Advocates for the homeless sued the mayor over an alleged failure to provide proper medical treatment to homeless children.[80]
During the Giuliani administration, police conducted sweeps of parks and other public places to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters. Critics charged that the purpose was not to help the homeless but to remove them from sight. The pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Reverend Thomas Tewell, said: "I think the police and the administration in New York were a bit embarrassed to have homeless people on the steps of a church in such an affluent area. The city said to us that it's inhumane to have people staying on the streets. And my response was that it's also inhumane to just move them along to another place or to put them in a shelter where they are going to get beat up, or abused, or harassed." The church sued the city of New York, Giuliani, and Bernard Kerik, asserting a First Amendment right to minister to the homeless on its steps.[81][82][83]
In 1998, when the City Council overrode Giuliani's veto to change how homeless shelters were run, Giuliani served an eviction notice on five community service programs, including a program for the mentally ill, a day-care center, an elderly agency, a community board office and a civic association in favor of a homeless shelter.[84] Giuliani asserted he specifically chose the site because it was in the district of chief bill sponsor Stephen DiBrienza. The plan came under heavy criticism, especially for the eviction of the program serving 500 mentally ill patients, and Giuliani backed down.[85] In an editorial, The New York Times called the event a "dispiriting political vendetta" and asserted that "selecting sites [for homeless shelters] as a punishment for crossing the Mayor is outrageous."[86]
As with the guy in the twitter post above, most of the homeless in NYC have been exported from elsewhere. That's why they have no friends or family with whom to crash. They gravitate to NYC because there is density of guilty rich people willing to throw money in paper cups.
Sure vagrants on the steps of a church on Fifth Avenue. Nuts. And notice the pious prick didn't let the vagrants sleep in the pews or feed them there. This is why I loathe progressives. They are nothing but sanctimonious hypocrites. We pay taxes for homeless shelters. Vagrants belong there, not on city streets.
Drug addiction may not be a crime but drug possession is. Addiction should be used as a mitigating factor to get the addict into treatment. I am a defense lawyer and I always make the effort. Sometimes it is well-received sometimes it is not. Some people are simply too far gone. Homelessness is not a crime but criminal trespass is. Stealing to support your vice is, and should be IMO.
And it will probably come as no surprise that I disagree that we should wait and see how this lovely new opportunity (read that in a voice dripping with sarcasm) plays out. I have a functioning brain so I know that providing poison is not a good idea. I believe that one's religious convictions are private and sanctosanct so I rarely share mine but I absolutely believe that methamphetamine, which will devolve into fentynal/heroin use if left to run its course, is the hand of Satan.
Drugs, per se, aren’t bad; we’ve spent over $1 trillion and destroyed thousands of lives fighting the longest war America has fought, the drug war. But we continue to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, the true definition of insanity! If we provide the homeless shelter and drugs under supervision, wouldn’t that eliminate trespass, stealing, etc.?
They’re not crimes, JM, they’re choices. I don’t want to fund selfish, lazy and narcissistic decisions, though I respect each individual’s right to make their own choices. I’m also willing to help anyone who wants to improve their life. Not everyone does. If you’d ever lived around all this you would understand the difference.
A personal attack is a good rejoinder for some when you can’t take issue with the content. Homelessness is a complex issue, and we won’t begin to solve it until we can agree on its root causes and how to address each of them. I don’t think we’re close on that one.
Look at the crime stats first, before and after. Much has been written about this JM. The short answer is it’s all the things that progressive mayors like DeBlasio, Frey, etc wanted to defund. Doesn’t affect your toney neighborhood, but it had a big impact on people who have crime surround them like a fog every time they walk out their doors.
Ah, yes, my toney neighborhood is less than 50% white, and your trope, defund the police, is so tiresome. As to this phony-baloney fog that you speak of, U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since the 1990s, regardless of the data source.
Since the 90’s, yes crime is much lower. So what? It’s much higher over the last several years. You can always cherry pick a time period that makes your case. Are we supposed to tolerate much higher crime rates because they’re still lower than the 1990’s?
Add Illinois to that list. I speak as a (thankfully) former resident of nearly 20 years. I call Illinois the toilet of the Midwest. It is literally surrounded on all sides by better governed purple and red states. When I moved there over 20 years ago, it was a low-income-tax, politically centrist state. Notwithstanding a governor who was about to go to federal prison. Chicago was a highly livable city run by the second Mayor Daley. Those days are long gone and now the idiots are running the asylum.
Except that Florida is documented turning deeper red. This particular wave of migration might be a little different. The overall trend may sadly still be this way.
Oh, how horrible, that 1%, would only pay for one-month health insurance on average, just think about that, it would cost them less than $500 to receive health insurance for a whole year, terrible! Terrible!
That was pretty funny Kevin, and it happens to be 100% true. On paper, the government could be theoretically cheaper, but it never is. Whether it’s military procurement, entitlements, housing - you name it- government run solutions cost citizens more, for a whole array of reasons.
Only 7% of Californians are without health insurance, which pretty much means they are illegals. The reimbursement from the “single payer” ACA medi-Cal whatever is so low many docs don’t take it because it costs more to to bill that what they get back. Only emergency rooms must treat whomever walks in and I suspect that might be a reason many are closing.
You assume that everyone is paying for health insurance now - actually many get it for free. I guess you don’t know the California is vastly majority democrat. Even the dummest among us or actually them gets this scheme is unsustainable. How do we know? Look at Vermont that’s already tried it.
Why, how outrageous, people earning less than 138% of poverty level in California can receive free Medi-Cal coverage based on household size of one person: $17,609. Two people: $23,792. If they apply! How dare we give the working poverty I hand out!
Not even close, Penny. Even the Democrats sponsoring single payer say it would cost $400 billion per year. There were actually multiple large tax increases in the proposed bill, and it covered everyone, including literally millions of illegal immigrants on day one. In a single party state, even California’s Democrats couldn’t stomach their own proposal.
California has the problem that it is already an extremely high tax state. Top bracket is 13.3%. They start adding "surcharges" and it approaches 16-17%. They chased out Elon Musk. They will no longer get %13.3% percent of his stock sales. When you chase out the folks who fund a big part of your budget, the tax increase yields a negative. They chased me out, and I'm hardly Elon Musk, but it did cost them tens of thousands a year that I will no longer pay them the rest of my life. This is why high tax blue states want the low to no tax states to subsidize their high taxes with SALT deductions. Some claim they all states must have a hefty income tax so that no one can escape/ This is how they think.
$400 billion a year from Califor4nia taxpayers to provide themselves single-payer health insurance that covers everybody? That sounds like a bargain if it eliminates private medical insurance premiums (employer and private insurance), Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of government-provided health insurance premiums and spending.
They are the only thing "progressive" has ever meant, which is "Orwellian". Even the name itself has only ever meant "let's forget all of the lessons of history and revert to the policies of the Stone Age."
Feb 7, 2022·edited Feb 7, 2022Liked by Nellie Bowles
New York City is certainly no shining model of success, at least during the disastrous De Blasio reign. They have a huge and growing homeless/addict problem, which translates into skyrocketing street crime. Combine that with a lunatic D.A. who releases criminals with no bail, treating the police as the enemy, and you have a complete meltdown in progress.
De Blasio forced a hotel to accept dozens of homeless, at a cost of millions of dollars to the city; they proceeded to trash the facilities and turn the surrounding sidewalks into feces-infested drug dens... because some homeless, it turns out, don't actually want a nice home and wouldn't know what to do with one if handed it for free.
It turns out that Trump was right after all. Close the border and stop the flow of fentanyl from Mexico. Slap a huge tariff on Chinese imports and demand they close down their fentanyl factories. Push for education reform including superior alternative pathways such as charter schools. Establish opportunity zones in the bombed out cities, and incentivize small and large businesses to go there. Call out and praise black entrepreneurs. Pressure companies to keep their domestic plants and factories open, and reform the tax code to make this work, and attract more foreign investment, and repatriate trillions of overseas dollars. Push for more blue-collar training.
This isn't hard. It's common sense. Sadly, the liberals, and really the general, uninformed, gullible fools that make up the majority of the electorate, didn't get it, and threw him out. And now, we are seeing the same awful, failed "progressive" policies promulgated in every major city in this once-great country. For those of us who grew up in better times, it's hard to watch this long, slow decline, and it's tempting to throw up our hands and say, screw'em. They voted for this insanity, now let them suffer with it.
I am of the screw them variety with a caveat: if we were truly a federalist society California and NY alone would pay for their poor judgements.
Because we are not a true federalist society we all suffer the consequences of the dysfunctions of the liberal cities and states one way or another.
Liberals have always told me I have no right to tell others how to live. I’m okay with that. It’s being forced to pay for how they want to live to which I object.
I have relatives who went down the meth road. It’s sad but I recognize I can’t do a single thing to actually help them. All I can do is hope they come to their senses before they kill themselves.
I certainly don’t give them money or in any way make their slow motion suicide more comfortable.
Until recently, California was putting money in the federal coffers and getting nothing back. All those terrible liberals in California supported the conservative welfare states in the South; now all those Southerners can bitch about not getting a welfare check from California!
Terry, you've never been to Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas? I know for a fact that these cities, even though "liberal", are nothing that you describe above, bombed out cities, "every major city in this once great country?"We came from Houston for the past 25 years, and it is a sparkling example of a great city. The black mayor understands how to run a city, even though he is a liberal, but a Texas Liberal, very different than a West Coast lib.
A lot of what you say and suggest would certainly help. Currently I feel the country is great. My wife, an inconvenient minority who came here in the past 25 years, agrees as well. Depends on where you live.
I have been to all three and they are on the way to progressive hell-holeism. Austin is already there to the extent that I will not even go Austin anymore.
Austin was not a hell-hole when I went to college there. It was a wonderful, funky, fun City with some of the best music, restaurants, bars and vistas in the State. Somewhere along the line, the residents began electing Progressives to their City Council and city leadership positions. These were no longer "blue dog Democrats" but rather, "Progressive Dems." Hence, the shit hole that Austin is now. To watch my fellow Bay Area folks flee their horrible voting here and destroy Austin breaks my heart. That said, Austin is now voting for the same thing and will, likely, result in similar outcomes to SF and LA. It used to be "keep Austin weird" but it seems like now it would be "Return Austin to sanity."
Travelled their quite often from 2005-2020. I did not see what you are alluding too. 6th street is as crazy as it has ever been. Crime is moderate, as most Texas carry guns. Moderate homelessness, but not camps. So do tell?
Wrong Brad. There are numerous homeless camps along freeways and under bridges. If you lived in Austin, instead of just travelled there, you would know that.
Really? Austin enacted public camping so the homeless were in all public spaces - in the parks, under the overpasses, on the sidewalks. The City funneled money into the problem for "services". The Governor used his authority to initiate a clean-up. The citizens had a ballot initiative, which passed, to overturn the public camping. The City retaliated by buying hotels and properties for housing, encampments (tent cities), and shelters. Citizens have suffered knife attacks and sexual assaults at the hands of homeless assailants. Areas around the shelters are in essence no-go zones. Even in an open carry state where many people do. Downtown merchants and restaurant owners decried the damage done to their businesses. Lower and lower middle income people can no longer afford to live in Austin due to not only the influx of newcomers which caused the price of real estate to skyrocketed, but also the increase in the cost of living and taxes. But the City persists in using scads of taxpayer money on the homeless issue. I don't think they are yet supplying drugs, at least not officially.
Apples and oranges, Brad. California is a one party state. The Democrats have their fingers on every lever of power. And they use that power to shake down the donor class and drive out any semblance of organized political resistance. It doesn't help that RINO GOP operatives are willing to go along the for the ride. Here, where I live in Orange County there is still some normalcy but it's slipping away as the state-level Democrats have gerrymandered away the last remaining red enclaves. My district is flipping solid blue just in time for the upcoming midterm elections.
I was referring to Terry's characterization of all major US cities are bombed out hell-holes. Not in Texas. But yes, from what I've read, CA downtowns are hell-holes, and not my kind like Austin.
Portland is very much like San Francisco. My first apartment here was down the street from a large homeless encampment. It came along with the frequent car thefts, feces on the sidewalk, dirty needles strewn about. I know a number of people that do not even let their dogs go out in their yards unsupervised after one horrific incident. A homeless man took a puppy from someone’s yard. After the puppy failed to get him extra cash while panhandling he dismembered it. He then left the dead puppy on the owners doorstep.
We keep having initiatives for housing first proposals. We do have an affordable housing issue, where it is not uncommon to hear about teachers living in their cars. But we aren’t doing much to help people that work full time but struggle to afford rent. Instead we spend millions on the people living on the street. I can’t help but wonder, wouldn’t it be more attractive to stop working and live on the street with all of the services provided as opposed to working but falling through the cracks?
There is so much pontification and naive idea less. I see well meaning people get upset at private businesses around town limiting access to their toilets. They aren’t the ones that have to go in and clean up the bathrooms afterwards that featured poop paint murals and drug residue.
If you suggest that you want to be able to safely use parks with your children, you run the risk of being lectured about how you are victimizing the homeless. The answer always seems to be raise taxes on people making 50K+/yr and home owners. It would be nice if tax payers were able to use the cities Public areas without having to worry about getting accosted.
Just enabling people doesn’t seem to be working but we keep doing it.
I can describe Portland for you and I wish that this was captured on camera because it is perfect.
Last time I was there I was stopped on an on-ramp with a cycling red light and there was a guy 50 feet from me taking a dump in a homeless encampment.
I’m stopped at the red light, which is designed to control traffic onto the interstate, because I obey traffic signals. Next to me is a guy taking a dump in the street.
Well the problem apparently is a lot deeper. I was watching an interview with Victor Davis Hanson and he was talking about how Big Tech employees can't afford to live in the local area. He said that many live in their cars. Now that seems a stretch to me but VDH is a careful speaker so there's some credibility there. The deeper story is very likely yet another example of progressive malfeasance and that's why these progressive mayors are happy to go along with these outrageous policies that keep residents distracted from what's really going on behind the scenes.
From what I remember, it wasn’t the tech workers. It was support staff—maintenance, janitorial, food service, etc. The tech workers can afford the ridiculously high rents. Everybody else, not so much.
Isn't it just symptomatic of the problem when the tech industry, the oligarchs, the VCs and hedge funds are swollen with money, and the workers sleep in their cars. It's amazing that it can happen, and that that area is held up as the best of America.
Feb 7, 2022Liked by Michael Shellenberger, Nellie Bowles
Can we all agree, Michael Schellenberger is a hero for exposing this! I saw him interviewed on Joe Rogan a few months back and my mind was blown - his compassion, rationality and very doable logical solutions when it comes to the massive drug problem and environment (hello nuclear energy!) are what this country needs right now. Just bought both his books and can’t wait to read them! Thank you for being so brave against this Soros funded radical progressive free fall into drug insanity that’s killing so many lives that could have been saved.
If it is true that Fukushima was not allowed to upgrade then you have made my point. If the techno savvy and homogeneous Japanese could not accomplish it safely we are a long way from ready. And you conveniently left out Chernobyl.
After the Chernobyl disaster, remaining RBMK reactors were modified to reduce the void coefficient that was responsible for the runaway fission reaction, and to fix the poor design of the control rods. So, whatever was operating for 20 years plus was not the same thing that exploded in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Improvements_since_the_Chernobyl_accident
Not sure why you're showing disgust that I said I saw Schellenberger on Rogan as I've see a lot of interesting guests on Rogan that are shunned form mainstream media like Tulsi Gabbard, Alex Berenson, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and many more....The recent controversy around Rogan is because CNN and other mainstream outlets have been after him for years since he is more popular and respected than all of them combined x10! Rogan, is the last honest truthful host who talks to everyone from all different backgrounds and viewpoints and never judges them - that's why they want him gone.
And in reference to the N word video - that was extremely edited and taken out of context but I will agree, not appropriate and he has genuinely apologized for it. I personally don't use that word and don't like it, however, Howard Stern has also said it on his podcast many times and also white author Don Winslow who is currently attacking Rogan on Twitter has used that word several times in the books he's written and there are no attempts to cancel them by the left. Hmmm...wonder why? Like with Whoopi and her recent ignorant comments about the Holocaust - I don't believe in cancel culture or censorship and if we apologize and learn then we should be protected under our right to Free Speech.
OMG, no worries! I'm sorry - I'm a little saddened and probably way too defensive of Joe Rogan right now as I feel he's another casualty in our war on canceling everyone (that's clearly why we're on Bari Weiss's substack lol). Totally disregard my Free Speech rant!
I was born and raised in SF a long time ago, moved away in the 70s. It breaks my heart to see my beautiful city turned into a cess pool. What happened to the citizens who allow this to happen? They voted for progressive idiots. Pelosi, Boudin, Breed, a long string of them. I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
Like you, I grew up in the SF Bay Area (moved away in the late 80s) and it breaks my heart as well. At the end of last year, a friend of my eldest's was visiting SF and so I asked a high school friend about good places to visit etc. She had to confess that she was ashamed of the City and the state it was currently in. When my eldest's friend returned to the UK, she confirmed that she is in no hurry to go back to SF and would not be recommending it as a tourist destination to anyone.
Hyperbole nooooo, San Francisco Is now a cesspool, who would’ve thunk. We should immediately round them up and execute them or throw them in jail. We can’t have this kind of humanity on display, can we?
Actually it is more a comment on City Hall failing to do good governance which includes providing adequate housing for the poor and destitute (a condition of good
city governance since before the Ancient Romans -- there are reasons why revolutions and civil unrest tend to start in overcrowd and poorly maintained areas). It is also well known that inadequate disposal of human sewage leads inexorably to disease (for example the Cholera epidemics in London in the 19th century .https://intriguing-history.com/cholera-streets-of-19th-century-london/ ) A quick check of the SF Travel site shows that tourists spent $9.6 billion in the SF Bay Area in 2018. Tourism accounted for over $771 million in taxes and fees for the city which go to support things like low income housing. If tourists consider a city is not well governed, they can choose to spend their money elsewhere. Now from what it appears from across an ocean is that City Hall has for decades ignored the problem or provided solutions which have not adequately addressed the situation (this is quite a common occurrence -- again see the London cholera epidemics and how the first solution of closing the cesspits made the problem worse) , and the tourists have kept coming (partly because the problems were confined etc). If the tourists stop coming in as many numbers, maybe the people who run City Hall will decide to do something about providing the right sort of accommodation and services to deal with the very real societal problem which exists -- in others words actually do their job and look after the welfare of the people who are resident there.
Dear Bari - besides more articles like this one about the bankrupt policies of the progressive left whether it be in education, government, public health, etc., it would be so valuable to all of us if you would also write about the sanity around us, governance that is rational, even handed, non-Marxist, whatever...lives of everyday people who do not live in left wing dystopias....these gulags you describe are all dead ends, literally....
Agreed! I just moved to WA from TX. Houston, a "liberal city." What a pleasant place to live. I taught in HISD, mostly hard working hispanic and black teachers and admins. Never heard a word about white supremacy, punctuality, math is racism. There was not ONE time when a black mother or grandmother came in and didn't scold their child for not listen, doing their work, paying attention. The appeared to love the city, and the South for that matter. Very little homelessness and law and order, the safe kind.
How is this not labeled as sanctioned murder in the press? How is this not a human’s rights issue? “Here’s some more poison,” says London Breed. Maybe she wants them to die out? This is homicidal poison. Breed and Newsom make Trump look like the Dalai Lama. How are these leaders allowed to do this? Who is protecting these people from themselves? Why aren’t progressives protesting this inhumane treatment? How is Gavin Newsom still in power?
The greed driven realpolitik that defines the American power mad "woke for profit" top heavy bureaucratic state continues.
Demand a study. Feign horror at the condition of the oppressed. Declare yourself crusader exemplar. Climb upon the high horse of moral rectitude and cash in. Tax payer funded Federal and State grants flow like water. Our Eternal Lady of Corporate Tax Deductible Largess proclaims your sainthood and your fiefdom is born on an industrial scale. Because slaying the dragon would destroy the goldmine, the banner of virtue must obfuscate all legitimate dialogue about practical solutions. Heretics must be silenced and their careers burned in the electronic square. Above all, the bureaucratic overlords must be well informed about any possible revolt of the serfs. Then, in the wee hours of a chill morning you realize that there is only one law of survival. Never admit that the chaos created by bad financial and social policy serves avaricious greed and the dead citizen with the spike in her arm is its profit center.
I've been thinking in a conservative vein lately...that while getting married and having children relatively young (i.e. early 20s) may have been stifling to a certain extent, this 'please the self for as long as possible' edict sure as hell isn't evidence of a fertile society. When I think back on the lively suburban street I grew up on -- kids spilling out of every orifice -- now it's a tomb -- and all these wailing, gross, overweight pink-haired women in their 20s who basically have no purpose -- when I lived in SF in the early 90s, the aimlessness that surrounded me, which turned so quickly to drugs -- but heaven forbid we should SACRIFICE OURSELVES FOR OTHERS, i.e. kids and a husband and a community...oh NO...that sounds like HELL...it's much better to live with a pile of dysfunctional roommates, hooking up with guys you'll never see again...scabbing up your face with drugs and hard living..."No way was I ready to have kids when I was twenty...!" YES, you were: YOU WOULD HAVE GROWN THE HELL UP...especially if everyone around you had to GROW THE HELL UP TOO...and on that note, I remember seeing a twenty-something obese couple, a Tweedle-Dee and a Tweedle-Dum, lumbering up Franklin Avenue bearing the burden of a gigantic cat...their CHILD....their faces stretched in some DEEPLY CARING emotion...yet if you asked DEE and DUM whether they were ready for children...OH NO...CAN'T HAVE THAT...So...what am I saying here? As a useless idiot who took the ME ME ME message to heart, and wound up with NOTHING....I know all too well where this messaging is taking us...the PINK-HAIRED FEMINIST PIPER...leading fools off a cliff...
Agree. Conservative vein? Labels aren't important, but the mindset in these examples is common sense and practical; the 'PINK-HAIRED FEMINIST PIPER' is neither. My single mother sacrificed most of her life to make sure we boys didn't become dregs and we in turn sacrificed to raise our kids to a good path. It is the most rewarding and difficult thing I have ever done.
Does a 29- year old teenager demonstrate greater capacity for sacrifice and commitment by rescuing a cat or a dog. The latter needs to be walked. The former lives longer
In addition to supporting and sustaining addiction in SF, they are also supporting the Mexican drug cartels. Fentanyl seizures on the border are at record highs, as more than one million people have flooded in to be trafficked or abused.
We need to build a wall, but more importantly we need to militarize the border.
You know when the human trafficker guy comes across the river on a raft and drops off a family of obese people who can’t read and who have no skills and who don’t speak English? And then he turns around and heads back on his raft for more people?
That guy, the trafficker, needs to have his head blown off by a sniper. A military action. That is how you stop this.
The family can get a free meal or two free meals or whatever and a comfortable hotel stay as they wait to be placed on a 747 going back to Honduras or Haiti or whatever.
While this idea might cause some heads to explode in outrage, you're right that it would stop the madness. For all the flack Trump got about the wall, it was working.
Trump got traction just by modestly addressing the problem.
These people are demented killers. They will strap drugs to a pregnant woman. They will send a decoy family across to distract you from the 14-year-old sex slaves.
You send teams of men in camouflage with flip-downs and 50s and you kill them. There isn’t a diplomatic approach.
#Cotton2024
(I urge people to seek out the video of Tom Cotton chuckling on air with Martha McCallum about the Israeli robotic 50 cal that was used to execute an Iranian nuclear scientist in the street in front of everyone)
I live on the border, work in Mexico. CBP friends/acquaintances around here are getting fed up with not being allowed to do their job, and being required to perform as desk clerks checking folks in to an extended stay.
Feb 7, 2022·edited Feb 7, 2022Liked by Nellie Bowles
The only way change can happen is if it starts affecting most. Just remember that S.F. has been on this path for years and state money keeps increasing for it; when money keeps flowing for 'homelessness' and not controlling the drug problem(rehab, etc.) the problem will not go away.
Like my own Twin Cities there has been no political balance in S.F. since the early '60s and this is a result. Personally, if you support controlled drug usage, fine. What society cannot accept is the destruction of another's personal property without penalty. In other words, you can drug yourself to infinity, just do not make me pay for it either directly or by destroying my personal property.
California law is accepting up to $950 of stealing other peoples property before being charged. Seems to me to a large root of the problem. Cal. politicians are pro-crime and that needs to change.
“Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property. “
So maybe this guy should do an investigation on how much the cartels/China is paying the leftists in charge. And expand that to the democrats in Congress that are denying fentanyl stay a schedule one drug even though they are keeping marijuana schedule one. It’s madness what the left is doing to this country.
Why should taxpayers pay for more than one narcan shot? Some of these addicts get “saved” regularly, obviously learning nothing except there are a bunch of suckers out there willing to fund their deathstyle.
And BTW, the Netherlands sometimes supplies heroin yet we are to believe they condemn hard drug use? What pray tell, do they consider hard drugs if not for heroin?
The west is rotting from within and the left is not only okay with that, it’s a feature of the left.
Read Shellenberger's book, the difference between how places like Amsterdam and Portugal have handled the drug problem and how SF handles it couldn't be more stark.
Amsterdam is particularly relevant, as they tried the far-left path and it was a disaster. Eventually, a center-right government cleaned up the mess, which I'd say is a political development we could benefit from here in the US.
Actually I read his essay in which the following is contained.
“I am also not completely opposed to supervised drug consumption sites. In my new book, San Fransicko, I praise Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use, and the Netherlands, where there are 28 drug consumption rooms. (In some, addicts are even given heroin.)
But both of those countries condemn hard drug use and intervene when addicts break laws”
So is heroin a hard drug or not? Or is the author not up to date?
SF policies destroy the lives of the drug addled and the middle and lower classes that lack the financial means to leave the insanity. The situation is allowed to continue because billionaires and multimillionaires residing in SF, experience the city in an entirely different manner.
In one of the city's many ironies, Presidio Heights' streets are kept clean and safe 24/7, despite the fact residents continually implement and cheer on failed SF programs, in order to maintain their social justice status. The homeless are neither dying in front of their mansions nor crawling thru their bedroom windows in an attempt to finance their addictions. Private security and staff ensure the urban ills that have invaded the rest of city, remain someone else's problem.
Tranquility is important when doing the Lord's work. PH residents cannot be bothered with homelessness, ODs, drug deaths or the fact only 1 in 10 SF Black and Brown male students can read or perform Math at grade level. They are too busy relocating the NBA All Star game from North Carolina, ensuring MLB festivities do not occur in Georgia and forbidding CA state employees from traveling, on the state's dime, to the Hermit Kingdom of Texas.
SF's current state will never improve until private security is outlawed or the rot becomes so prevalent, it can no longer be kept from the streets of obscenely wealthy, liberal neighborhoods. If the children of the rich and famous had endure stepping in human waste and watching addicts perish on the street, while walking to schools that failed 90% of their students, the insanity would stop in a week.
Perfectly said. We used to travel to SF, Seattle and Portland every couple of years. It's astonishing that the leaders aren't getting called out for allowing this to happen. I know it's probably not on purpose but it sure looks and feels that way.
A ghastly account of what has happened to a once-great city, and not only this one, but Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Baltimore ... you can name the others; it’s a long list. The cat may be too far out of the bag for the bizarre handling of this “homeless” problem to be undone.
I will only say that its principal cause is glaringly obvious: The voting in of the leftists who run ... er, run down ... these cities. I was just in Tampa/St. Pete. The contrast between it and the aforementioned cities could not be more stark. You reap what - whom! - you vote for.
Yep! I am from CA (Orange County), lived in Austin 2019-2020, said no thanks. Now I live in St. Petes and my only regret is that I didn't move here sooner. Even with our warm winters, there are not many homeless people here. I never identified as a Republican and still don't, but there is no question where my vote will be going in the mid-terms, not one punch for a D.
To understand fully, one must acknowledge that most people living on the streets or in tents are there by choice. They resist societal rules and they relish access to free drugs - or at least the freedom to use hard drugs without being hassled, let alone arrested. Many are mentally ill to one degree or another, and years ago would have been institutionalized for treatment instead of loose on the streets. In other words, these are not, typically, your single moms temporarily down their luck and hoping to find a job, daycare, and to get back on their feet; that category of the homeless population is a distinct minority, and not the problem.
The problem in these Blue Cities is the public defecation and urination, the rampant drug use, the occupying and desecrating of public parks and sidewalks, the shoplifting and the assaults upon citizens trying to walk to work, the stoned-out bums blocking storeway entrances; the eyesores that have sprouted along our freeways and in our public squares. Did you bother to read the article?
The leftists enable all this by refusing to enforce laws pertaining to vagrancy, the obstructing of public byways, shoplifting, curfews, destruction of property, hard drug usage and dealing, etc. The laws are there, but leftist politicians will not enforce them. Instead, leftist politicians facilitate “homeless camps” on public property and the free distribution of heroin needles. They allow homeless takeovers of city parks. And, unsurprisingly, this tolerance of filth and lawlessness attracts “homeless” people who want to live free of rules, arrest for their petty crimes, and limits on drug use. If not in tents, they flock to free housing offered them at taxpayer expense.
Contrast this with the cities, like Tampa, where existing laws are enforced by non-leftist mayors and DAs, and you’ll see how leftist tolerance and enabling is responsible for the homeless problem that plagues SFO and other “blue” cities that lay out the welcome mat.
It's hard to find a philosophical home these days. I'd always considered myself fiscally conservative and socially liberal and so never felt comfortable anywhere until my nephews educated me about the libertarians. But I was very uncomfortable about the Completely Unregulated Drug Use thing.
I read with great interest Bari's open letter when she fled the NY Times, having followed her writings for some time. Nellie I knew less about, but had read some of hers. A lifelong hunter and conservationist, I began to read Michael Shellenberger, a dedicated environmental advocate who had begun to question the Environmental Crazies, and here he is!
I look forward to Common Sense each and every day - the writings of reasonable, classic liberalism, with a clear understanding of the dangers of unbridled socialism, nutcase-outrageous environmentalism, communist-inspired radicalism. Finally. I'm home.
Jim this is so kind. I’m sharing it with Bar and the team. ❤️
Thanks. So very much at stake now - hell, what am I saying? - EVERYTHING is at stake. So much screaming, shaming, and illiberal behavior everywhere, so much apologizing in response to those attacks. I'm a crotchety old guy, and I'm having none of it. Here you drag out your argument; if it's strong and good, then super. If it's weak, it's weak, and you learn. Good stuff. How it's supposed to be.
I was in a different debate yesterday regarding the “new lefts” penchant for suppressing free speech and asked; what happened to “the wisdom of the crowd, crowdsourcing,” that was the rage a short while ago? Now the “crowd” is comprised of those acceptable to social media outlets resulting in the new “in-crowd, bubble” in which the new left exist.
Very similar here, Jim. The democrat and republican parties are really the UniParty with a radical Left and pseudo-Right wings and neither stand for anything other grift. Although destruction could be attributed to both over the past two years(if not decades)...
I am tired of labels and believe the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in the Bill of Rights, several of which have been illegally suspended the last two years. THAT is our common cause, imho; if we all believe and support those then our core is strong and we can navigate through other issues pretty easily.. I am very happy to financially power a wonderful writer like Bari(and Greenwald and Berenson) rather than the rags they used to write for.
When I was in college in the 'seventies, as an experiment, a poly-sci student stood on the street corner in Morgantown, WV, and asked passers-by to sign a "petition" of ten things. If you had a brain and actually read it, you immediately recognized it as the Bill of Rights in modern verbiage. He got spat on, cussed-out, and even assaulted for "trying to promote that commie stuff." Now it's exactly the same, only the side that claims to be liberal is doing it.
"until my nephews educated me about the libertarians."
Small l libertarian here. I knew I found a political home of sorts back in the early nineties, when someone gave me the Libertarian Handbook. One of the Chapters was titled "What About Poor People?" It was a very short chapter - only a single sentence: "Well, what about them?"
The ultimate irony: The more government tries to help poor people the more poor people they create.
Perverse incentives.
That’s not very good: “what about them “ is not a compelling plan
Well maybe this will help. All the liberal leftist ideas and programs and policies when deconstructed and analyzed as to their effectiveness and success rate are usually found to be boondoggles and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Almost without fail.
Once a program is proposed in Congress and all the "positive" aspects put forth and the hoped for benefit to poor individuals there should be some accountability for the funds spent and the elected officials pushing the program should have to answer the simple question. If this policy and program is funded and successful then --- "what is next."
I could cite many great sounding programs like "Head Start" and others that are enacted and funded without being evaluated and assessed as to what is the bang for the buck and where are the funds going. Once you look closely and try to determine its success (if there is any) it would be nice to know "what is next." Or if there is even a next.
Did anyone benefit from that plan when you evaluate it on a what happened next after the program was implemented. Kind of like the "what about them" statement. Before the Great Society programs we had less poor and many intact minority families. After its enactment many, many administrators and federal supervisors got great paying jobs but no one asked what about the people supposed to be helped from poverty. What about the millions who slide into poverty during the Great Society and other "programs to help the poor?" There are in fact poor people -- what about them?
They aren't a waste if you are given the money in the name of "helping." There are millions of people (Chirlane McCray DiBlasio, for one) whose entire living is dependent on government handing money to people to hand money to the poor.
It’s an industry with thousands of employees
Very well said, what’s next is not asked and the program becomes a make work program for the government employees. The whole liberal plan is now a cul-de-sac: dead end.
But NEVER for the individuals administering the plan. It is always Payday!
From a Broadway musical written 50 years ago (paraphrasing the bible):
"Surely you're not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot? There will be poor always, pathetically struggling, look at the good things you've got."
I am sure we do have the resources. Problem is the grantors and allocators of those resources put themselves first in line to get those resources as administrators and "facilitators" and are not concerned in the least whether those being "helped" or actually have their lives improved. As long as the "program" is renewed each year and funded it keeps on keeping on.
Good private and religious based charities often make a real difference to people in need. Great hospitals like St. Judes, Shriners along with countless other charities where individuals work as unpaid volunteers do move the needle. Try adding up the millions of hours worked by different organizations and their volenteers and multiply that by the minimum wage and the dollar value is astounding.. All without "benefit" packages and govt. union wages.
Most of these people don't reflect on what they personally have but on what they can do for people who don't have much of anything. Guess it is just what prism one looks through is to how we view the world. The idea that a govt. bureaucracy or program could or would solve the problems of society is very optimistic. They might do it but at probably three or four times the cost and very inefficiently in many cases. Government has some success but mostly it runs into fully funded DEAD ENDS. Just my POV.
Well said, I think you nailed it.
I’m Canadian and our idiot Prime Minister endlessly speaks of investing in Canadians; that was his sales pitch in the last general election which he won. What he means is increasing taxes and debt, creating more government programs for the bureaucrats to run. At the centre of this is an incredible arrogance: we know better. His policies will impoverished Canada with a world of government officials pursuing their own self interest, producing a small output at great expense. I am a business owner I see it all the time, we are constantly being harassed by them but the average person doesn’t see this waste, they are fooled.
I think as the secular age has replaced the antiquated notion of a Creator God the human intuition of intelligent design has not gone away but migrated to new centres of moral authority currently the clerisy of the academic left and they are idiots.
"....You'll be lost and you'll be sorry when I'm goooooooone"
I think Ted Neeley actually thinks he's Jesus at this point
Sarcasm. I thought "Libertarian Handbook" would be the giveaway.
From a Steve Harvey comedy routine: "My daddy taught me about poor people. He said don't be one of them"
Whoopsie 😙
I’m a clinical social worker with a specialty in substance abuse, who had found a home in the libertarian party in my early 20’s, but parted company with them over the “Completely Unregulated Drug Use thing” as you do aptly put it. The problem with that, is that addicts are robbed of their free will by drugs, which completely ruins the reward centers of the brain, and it is no longer a choice to stop, without significant intervention and sometimes mandated treatment. Addiction is a terrible illness and the daily degradation that addicts endure to get their “fix” should be evidence enough that addiction is not a choice.
Part of the problem on this issue is the lack of nuance. Nuance gets a bad rep- for many people, it equates to temporizing- but without nuance, the debate revolves around abstract templates instead of ground-level reality.
First, it has to be acknowledged that the status quo on the "drug issue" (as if there was only one) has permeated the social fabric, the institutional response, and the discourse. And the discourse of resistance and reform is often operating within reactive assumptions as a response to that status quo. As a result, clarity about the most relevant problems- and their solutions- gets lost, while the debate goes in circles.
The status quo here is Zero Tolerance and Criminalization. Don't imagine that the organizing paradigm has shifted anywhere else, just because there have been some moves toward decriminalization and low enforcement priorities, and a surfeit of rhetoric about "education, prevention, and recovery". The primary "treatment" for the most seriously addicted users is still Jail. A regime of forced abstention behind bars that is, to put in kindly, erratically enforced; in quite a number of correctional facilities, enforcement is a joke, and the illicit drug markets are rampant, organized, and run from the inside.
Zero Tolerance User Criminalization rests on some terribly invalid premises that function to exacerbate the problem by widening the target population to All Users, instead of focusing law enforcement energy on the core of addicts who generate public health problems, crime problems, and the denial of public space characteristic of open-air illicit marketplaces in the city streets, parks, and other areas of the public commons.
To break it down: not all illicit drug users are users of hard drugs; nationwide, around 3/4 of drug users who participate as buyers in the illegal market confine their purchases to cannabis.
To take it further, in any given year, around 3/4 of the users of "hard drugs"- cocaine, opioids, methamphetamine- use them only occasionally. Between once a year and once a week.
The remainder of that user population are considered "regular users", but not all are addicts. Of the fraction of regular users who are addicted, some are still able to function without attracting undue notice by law enforcement as habitual criminals. As a population, such addicts show up disproportionately in child neglect cases and DUI offenses. But they don't rely on street crime to pay for their habits, and whether by diligence or good fortune, they keep a roof over their heads. A sizeable number of such (quasi)functional addicts enjoy the advantages of class affluence, including the ability to pull strings when they find themselves in legal difficulty; this is not fair, but it isn't any different in that respect than the other advantages of wealth privilege in this society. Some of the others are able to hold down jobs that supply them with enough income stability that they can "afford" their addictions, at least in the financial sense.
The remainder of the Illicit Drug User population has hit the skids; they no longer have their habit under control, if they ever did. They're Dysfunctional Street Addicts. They don't obtain an income from working. A large fraction of them fund their addictions with crime- although not all of them do; some are actually able to feed their habits by begging on the street (a measure of how much disposable income is in the pockets of Americans, at least some of them; and also an indication of how inexpensive a bag of hard dope has gotten over the course of the past 40 years.) Other street addicts are prostitutes; however one feels about the decriminalization of prostitution, it will always be a hazardous game for streetwalkers, and addicted prostitutes are especially vulnerable. That said, even street addict prostitutes are usually able to make enough income to keep themselves from being unhoused on the streets.
Finally, we get to the addict population afflicting the streets, neighborhoods, and parks of San Francisco: they trespass. They use drugs in public, including injection drugs, and discard the needles. They use city alleys and even sidewalks as bathrooms, urinating and defecating in public. They shoplift, panhandle intimidatingly, and commit an array of offenses ranging from vandalism to residential burglary in order to commit property crimes to fund their addictions. Few of them bathe, certainly not regularly. Some of them own only the clothes on their backs, and sleep on the sidewalk winter or summer. In crowded environments like homeless encampments, they're often public health hazards. Dysfunctional addicts often overdose, sometimes more than once in the same day.
The response of the city of San Francisco to that population and their issues is "Decriminalization." A policy that I would support, were it only confined to drug possession. But for going on twenty years now, San Francisco and some other West Coast cities haven't just been granting decriminalization for drug possession; the authorities have also granted de facto impunity for trespassing, street camping, using public streets and parks as bathrooms, monopolizing publicly provided bathrooms and park benches, discarding needles, harassing and intimidating passers-by into giving them money, public intoxication (grossly and blatantly), and other activities that have resulted in addicted vagrants monopolizing public space in the city. Oh, last but no least, impunity for the failure to appear in court for hearings or unpaid citations.
My position is that decriminalization should extend to drug possession, but no further; if someone is found sleeping in a doorway, they're subject to arrest or citation. If they have outstanding warrant(s) due to failure to appear, they're subject to arrest and detention without bail. Misdemeanor recividism is a violation of the social contract; no one has any business scoffing at the law that way. Cars that get too many tickets get towed; petty criminals that stack up too many citations need to get sent to the pound.
But- and here's where the mercy comes in- we need Rehab Jail for street addicts. The courts and confinement facilities need to do intake evaluations to distinguish the population whose crimes are entirely due to their addiction from the smaller population of aggressive, violent, or predatory criminal offenders. (In the case of opioids, addiction can be detected by administering Naloxone, which induces withdrawal symptoms.) The population whose problems stem entirely from their addictions are the people who most need inpatient drug treatment, rehabilitation, counseling, education, and recovery therapy. Not for two weeks, or 30 days, or 6 months; for one year. At minimum, we need those jail facilities for dysfunctional street addicts to be airtight enough that they can't get any drugs when they're inside (with the possible exception of substances like Suboxone, which have some value in stabilizing the level of addiction for some opioid users. The controls need to be airtight, though.)
At minimum, we need to give the individuals who find themselves in that situation a year of dry time, to think it over. And we need to make it clear that if they return to their old patterns, they'll be subject to the same confinement and treatment regime. They can return to using and getting addicted; it's their decision. But they can't hang around unhoused on the city streets, funding their lifestyles with public money budgeted for their welfare.
The mandatory inpatient drug treatment program that I've just outlined.will require extra funding.
https://www.route-fifty.com/public-safety/2022/02/san-francisco-hundreds-homes-homeless-sit-vacant/362384/
Considering that San Francisco's 2022 budget for homelessness is $598 million, I'd propose $500 million of that money be shifted to pay for it.
The other part of the problem is more complicated; we need to divert as much demand from the illicit markets into controlled and regulated channels as possible, within reason. That's a different discussion. But the criminal monopoly over the illicit drugs trade has expanded to the status of an societal institution, and the effect of that is so corrosive that measures have to be taken to replace that market with medicalization- and possibly even some level of legal markets for some forms of these substances- in order to effectively shrink down the remaining illegally supplied markets to a level where law enforcement methods are able to effectively curtail them.
Fantastic post thank you for that I learned much
"....the daily degradation that addicts endure to get their “fix” should be evidence enough that addiction is not a choice." The most concise and accurate analysis I've ever heard.
it is a choice you just have to have will power . worked for me I just made up y mind and said enough already and quit . never looked back that was 30 years ago
Jail, to many now and not enough financial resources, lock them up and give clinical support in jail.
jail is not the answer more drugs in jail than on the street , jail just makes money for some including a few guards . not a soloution
But, although I care about them, we need to get them out of society, we lock them up and free the functioning part of society from their presence. That seems a laudable good, 95% of us will benefit. I can also imagine there could be a solution to drugs in jail, ya, could be done, no drugs in jail.
Liberal prevacation on most such issues is so very tiresome, you folks have run Society for a long time and you’ve made a terrible mess. Time, it’s well past time your prescription be abandoned, we need to return from whence we came, reapply common sense. I think our grandparents would be ashamed of us, I think they would say something like: if you become a drug addled maniac and terrorize society you get put in jail.
This is common sense and based on the name of this substack I will presume to speak for Bari and say she would agree with me, at least, I suspect in private she would agree, in this public venue she would likely demure, bad for business insulting the sensibilities of your paying customers. She is smart enough to know her liberal audience, she knows their political shibboleths are inviolable and she is serious about her commercial best interests, so she edits herself. She might’ve been born at night but it wasn’t last night.
Samesies
New word for me, thanks
not a middle school teacher then
I like the movie Superbad.
Ya me too!
I found Common Sense only about 2 weeks ago. I am finally home too. In the last week alone I’ve brought 12 friends on board as new subscribers. Good grief, what a relief. Finally a site for completely sane high quality investigative journalism. A few times over the last week I shed a few tears of relief. I know that might sound kind of ridiculous, but it’s true. I just don’t feel quite so freaked out and alone in my alarm about what is going on in this bizarre, dangerous, and confusing woke world that I’m trying to live in. My long time subscription to the New York Times has been ended. My husband’s long time subscription to the Washington Post has also ended. For the time being that money will be used to support sights like Common Sense. Bari Weiss and the entire group of journalists contributing to Common Sense… thank you for all your courage, diligence, integrity, and hard work . You have all inspired me to not cower from always striving to speak my truth and never let anyone intimidate me into compelled speech of any kind. Godspeed to each of you.
Dear God, you are to be commended Ann! Leaving the NYT and WaPo is the first step toward 'sanity' for sure. I am a rookie as I am only in my second week as well.
This whole group of contributors is well worth my(many of us) standing a post while others slept for years.
Hear! Hear! And TGIF is the best part of my week.
Wow! My "philosophical home" mirrors yours completely. I wonder how many others are out there who feel as you and I do? I found Bari, Michael, and Nellie after Bari and Michael were interviewed on Megyn Kelley's podcast a couple of years ago. Nellie's TGIF email is one of the things I look forward to reading each Friday.
I call myself a small ‘L’ libertarian. Any philosophy taken to the extreme is bad. Libertarianism is no different.
Do you really need more evidence that progressivism is insanity? Seriously? I lived in NYC under the Dinkins reign of terror that was thought intractable. All it took was public disgust - even among West Village and UWS liberals - and Giuliani cleaned up the mess in a few years. It isn't hard, you just have to have a usable brain and be able to see cause and effect. Sorry but progressives don't. They claim they care but allow vulnerable people to wallow in human misery while robbing law abiding taxpayers of the joys of urban life. Everything a progressive touches turns to merde.
As far as fentanyl, it comes from China. An act of war. Why are we buying anything from these fiends? Ban and boycott China's products, including their reprise of the 1936 Olympics.
I've had the same thought every day in the few years I've lived in SF (we're leaving soon) -- this town needs a Giuliani. But, SF is not going to get it.
Cities were a much broader swath of ideology back then and people were less obsessed with political battles. Now the professional class in SF is hyper-online, hyper-polarized, and would rather live in fear of their lives than admit they were wrong about anything political.
Detroit went from the most prosperous city in the world in 1940 to a wasteland in 1980. I think it will take SF roughly the same amount of time to get to the same state. I don't see it rescuing itself like NYC did.
My family member is a 911 dispatcher in SF. There are many components of his job responsibilities including taking 911 calls, dispatching police, fire, paramedics, coastguard,etc. in order to get emergency services to those in need. As the years go on a larger and larger percentage of the calls he takes are from members of the “professional class” living in SF. They constantly call 911 with demands to “send the police immediately to get the tents cleared out from my driveway, clean up the used needles at the park my kids can’t play in anymore, clean up the human waste in the alley behind my house, etc”. In the meantime they have a defund the police sign displayed from their living room window. Don’t even get me going about how rude, condescending, and entitled they behave towards the dispatchers they call on a near daily basis. Many of them call so frequently that the dispatchers have their names , sounds of their voices, and addresses committed to memory. I’ll bet money that these callers will continue voting for the same city government and board of supervisors candidates that promote these failed policies. Hope I’m wrong about that.
Great post handle.
I used to think progressives were just idealistic fools. I’ve come to realize they are actually malicious actors. Really just interested in the power they can gain from their myriad causes. Ultimate power for them of course we be the destruction of capitalism. We must oppose them at every turn or face the cold starvation of collectivism.
“I’ve come to realize they are actually malicious actors.”
————————————————-
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
*Vegas jackpot noises
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
You may appreciate this handy-dandy chart on the evolution of Marxism:
https://imgur.com/a/bTldtyi
And fentanyl comes over a wide open southern border. Enough has been seized to kill every man , woman, and child in the country. As another commenter said on another post last week, Democrats need poverty to maintain their existence. And misery works well too.
Our border is exponentially more critical then Ukraines border
You're absolutely right, Bruce. However, back in the Dinkins days, a crime was called a crime and treated that way. We didn't have these horrible bail laws, judges and prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate. Nowadays, they send these folks back on the streets. Interesting how the phrase "well-meaning" is usually followed with some tragic consequences. The "well-meaning" progressives are usually sheltered from the day to day, in your face navigating. They, and their families, live in gated communities, employ private security or are allowed police to protect them.
In terms of established institutions you might be right. I was too young. But the idea that the only way to solve crime is to solve the criminals' problems for them, such as addiction and poverty, already had a lot of momentum in the 1960s. Thomas Sowell has some excellent writings chronicling this.
The thing is, during the Dinkins era, Wall Street was still the world's financial powerhouse, and there was still a fairly large middle and upper class population in Manhattan and surrounding boroughs.
Unfortunately, New York A.G.'s such as Spitzer sued several financial giants like AIG into bankruptcy (AIG was particularly egregious case; in the end they were exonerated of the charges, but too late to revive the company) over technicalities so obscure that even the prosecutors did not clearly understand them. This, combined with 40 years of making the city unlivable, eliminated the stabilizing presence of a patrician class that kept the lunatic liberals under control, and also removed a huge source of revenue not only directly from fincorps but all the ancillary activity -- restaurants, custodial, security, housing, etc.
The cities have been ceded to a criminal element while the surrounding 'burbs have safe, clean neighborhoods and decent schools. Maybe it's time to just declare the cities a failure, raze them to the ground, and throw the indigent populations into reeducation camps, á la China, where they are retrained to do something productive with their lives. Since, after all, we're already basically becoming an authoritarian regime modeled after China...
Eliot Spitzer is among the most despicable, vile, vindictive ghouls ever produced by New York.
aka "Client 9"
Yes, it's insanity. Progressives are the ultimate false prophets. They promise us heaven and give us hell.
"Promise us heaven and give us hell." .Hmmm.....sound like, oh I don't know....(channeling Church Lady now) .....Satan?
“Do you really need more evidence that progressivism is insanity?”
——————————————-
Sounds to me like Bruce is a racist!!
💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻
Huh?
Kevin's playing with us. He's channeling clowns like "Just me," whose answer to any post is to scream "racist." Indulge him. He has some great lines and I think he's just warming up on this one.
Just Me lectured me when I called them a troll. So you must be wrong.
Thats funny.
He's pointing out what anyone will inevitably be called for approving of this article. And, how just by the towering fear of that label, most people will back right down after that and just let the Progs go on their merry way "helping" everyone to death with America's tax dollars. Libs make it too easy for them! All it takes is one word.
So you support Bruce’s racistness??
In TodayLand, everyone is a racist except, of course, racists.
Exactly. We are at war with China. We must prosecute it aggressively while doing EVERYTHING we can to avoid a hot war with them.
Progressivism being insanity? Not sure. Pretty indifferent.
Progressivism being inherently destructive. Well yeah, that is almost the definition of progressivism and I am not sure why more people don’t clearly see that.
You an can couch it in a warm light of “burning away the dead and dying to make room for the new” or some other sort of euphemism. But regardless of how you couch it, the destruction is inherent to the ideology. It is an unmoored foundation guided solely by direction of “out with the old, in with the new”. Out here meaning destruction.
You could create a hypothetical alternative reality 300 years in the future where “progressives” have achieved their every demand for 300 years straight (from now until then). And the progressives of that age will be looking around themselves trying to destroy whatever they deem imperfect and institute the new order. That is progressivism, to destroy.
Now… that need for change isn’t necessarily bad. You also don’t want your society to ossify and stagnate. That is also its own problem. But (why I believe as objectively as you can make it), conservatism is preferable to progressivism if you could only choose one (which no one should choose one because that is just stupid), because conservatism at least recognizes as an indispensable foundation, “whatever we have done, has worked. So, it may be horribly horribly horribly imperfect, but it has gotten us to this point. So it is our best bet getting us to tomorrow”.
Once again, you need change too, so ultimately a purely conservative society that never changed is going to wither away and die. But it as a base (if functioning appropriately) allows for stability to make changes at the fringes, test, see what works, and adjust.
As an analogy, if society is a plane, a truly progressive outlook could identify the main issue the plane isn’t functioning properly is the engine (and the engine may have 100s of real problems), and decide to toss the plane out the window while the plane crashes to the ground. The need for change (and consequently the need to destroy) is tantamount to any other consideration including the ends.
Conservatism may allow that decrepit old engine to sputter for 100 years without update, ultimately leading to it giving out. But, at least it allows for the daily possibility to reconsider, and you’re most likely not going to be a fiery wreck tomorrow.
To state explicitly what I believe is very clearly implicit, the optimal outcome is certainly some balance between each. Identifying what works, and what doesn’t, and making changes when everyone believe an improved end goal is most likely for everyone.
Which makes the CNN/Fox, crazy leftist/radical right dichotomy so annoying. They both insist that they’re the only ones who’re right, meanwhile to anyone with eyes it is as close to definitional as you can possibly get that they’re both certainly wrong and the “right” answer almost certainly found somewhere between them.
That recognition MIGHT be the only “voter ID” test that I could ever get onboard with supporting. After you make your pick in the election the prompt, “tell me 1 singular thing you believe the other party has right that yours doesn’t” and every answer outside of iterations of “nothing” would be accepted.
If your answer is “nothing” to that question, the chance you’re a political fanatic/religious zealot that has utterly dispensed with any sort of rationality approaches 100%.
I don’t care if your response is something as banal or apolitical as “they have strong family values” or alternatively “they have a stronger sense of empathy for the downtrodden”, you should be able to come up with something.
What you say is true. Thing is it is the dynamic and friction between conservatism and progressivism that usually results in a forward moving society with constraints on the destruction of many "good" things.
In todays society the progressives have identified the conservatives as enemies and seeks to wreck them and silence them as bad people not worth interacting with. That alloweds them to make horrific errors and hurt many people in their never-ending stampede for change at any cost.
The baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Progressives seem to be reckless and relentless in implementing unproven and half baked ideas and policies. Conservatives can be calcified and intractable but usually listen to and can change when confronted with decent workable programs and policies.
Just look at all the social changes and changes in mores that have taken place over the last 25 years. Many right leaning people would have blanched at what we take for granted today. Most were the result of interaction and engagement by the opposing political branches. Not today -- its all or nothing with the left.
A very thoughtful analysis, thanks.
There's no evidence that the Chinese chemists shipping fentanyl and other even more powerful opioid analogues to the US are doing it as part of a conspiracy by the CCP ot the PLA to supply Americans with plentiful opioids. It's one of the strange contradictions of China that notwithstanding the intensive surveillance and scrutiny of individuals in terms of their personal behaviors, Chinese business enterprises don't receive nearly as much attention. It's still to some extent a frontier economy, and a massive export economy; as long as the businesses are making money, it's surprising- or dismaying- how much latitude they're provided. Many of the synthetic drugs being manufactured were not prohibited by US drug laws until very recently, when the statutes began to outlaw entire classes of chemical compounds. But even those laws can be skirted.
The larger and more enduring problem is this: there's no requirement that the labs be Chinese. Fentanyl can potentially be manufactured anywhere, including within US borders. Unlike, say, methamphetamine, the precursors are so common that it's questionable whether it's possible to restrict them. The precursors are also easily manufactured from even more common chemicals that are practically impossible to regulate. Also, compared to methamphetamine, the per-dose yield of fentanyl (or worse, an analog like carfentanil) from the chemical process is so enormous that the lab doesn't even have to be very big. Fentanyl and the related analogs apparently don't call for a terribly sophisticated synthesis, either. The main challenge seems to be using sufficient precautions to avoid poisoning oneself while manufacturing it.
In fact, we may be looking at "game over" when it comes to effective interdiction of the fentanyl supply. Opioid prohibition may well have been checkmated by modern chemistry. These chemicals are so powerful that tens of thousands of doses can be sent in a 1st class letter envelope without the requirement to add an extra stamp.
The part about China not controlling businesses in China made me laugh. Totally fabricated horseshit backed by nothing.
And you've added some factual support for your own take?
Read the beginning of Karl Taro Greenfeld's China Syndrome, from 2006 (about the SARS-Cov-1 virus epidemic, a very prophetic book that gave me a lot of clues about what to expect when SARS-Cov-2 showed up in 2020; Greenfeld's book was trying to warn us about the possibility that something like that was bound to happen again, given the Chinese policy toward "wet markets.")
Greenfeld talks about visiting an open-air retail bazaar in one of China's boomtowns in the early 2000s, a wide-open full service market where cash money could get you all kindsa niche consumer goods: jars of MDMA, child porn, endangered species animal parts, high-quality counterfeit DVDs of films that had just been released in theaters, fake Hermes bags...
did you know that already? Am I boring you?
There's also the fact that I've already brought up; many of the super-powerful synthetic opioids, designer speed, substituted phenylanine psychedelics, etc. etc. available by mail on the Internet from overseas sources were not even illegal until around five years ago. They could be legally imported into the US in mass quantities from overseas chemical warehouses that sold them as "research chemicals" for what can only be termed ridiculous discounts, by the standards of the retail illicit drug market here in the US.
For example, U-47700: https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/fed_regs/rules/2016/fr1114.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-47700
CCP can stop anything in China it *wants* to stop. You are well aware of this.
Argument-by-canard does not impress me.
Let me guess: you imagine that the People's Republic of China is such a ruthless and efficient totalitarian police state that they've eradicated hard drug use in their own country (while at the same time doing a state-supported covert op to export fentanyl to Americans.)
News flash: no matter how much of a police state the PRC is, they ain't that airtight.
"The best calibrated model estimated that the number of drug users would increase from 0.86 million to 3,120,059 (95% CI 2,669,214-3,570,904) during 2000–2030 period. The proportion of heroin-only users among the total drug users will decrease from 96.8% (95% CI, 96.6–97.1%) in 2000 to 36.9% (30.1–40.8%) in 2030, while the proportion of synthetic drug-only users will increase from 1.1% (0.9–1.3%) in 2000 to 57.7% (51.7–65.6%) in 2030. In contrast, the proportion of poly-drug users shared an increasing trend during 2000–2016 (from 2.1% (1.5–2.8%) to 15.1 (13.8–17.1%)) but declined to 5.5% (3.4–7.2%) in 2030. Estimated 46,370 (41,634-51,106) heroin-only users and 3767 (3481–4053) synthetic drug only users initiated poly-drug use in 2000. We observed a cross-over in 2012 where more synthetic drug-only users were initiating heroin use than heroin-only users initiating synthetic drug use. There will be estimated 2,094,052 (1,819,830–2,368,274) synthetic drug-only users and poly-drug users 211,407 (177,150–245,664) in 2030.
Conclusions
Synthetic drug use will become dominant in drug users in China, but poly-drug use of both heroin and synthetic drugs will remain substantial.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306460318307093 (2019)
https://journals.lww.com/co-psychiatry/Abstract/2014/07000/The_new_pattern_of_drug_abuse_in_China.3.aspx
(2014)
"According to the official report, the number of registered drug users in China in the early 1990s was documented at 148,000 (Law Yearbook of China, 1992). Since then, that number has increased dramatically over years. Registered drug users reached 2.09 million in 2013 (NNCC 2013). While heroin abusers still represented 60.6 % of registered drug use population in 2013 (NNCC 2013), the percentage has dropped significantly compared to 87.6 % in 2002 (NNCC 2002)."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11417-014-9187-5
(2013)
Oh good Chinese data modeling. So you saw my canard and raised with a mega-canard LOL.
If China is allowing it in China it is because the right people are suffering and dying.
Bruce, what caused and affect policies did Rudy Giuliani enact to deal with the homelessness problem in New York City? My progressive brain needs you to provide me with the very specific policies, so I can understand the cause and effect paradigm that you seem to know so much about.
I don't have an answer for your question to Bruce other than Guiliani was touted as pro law and order and widely credited with cleaning up the streets with the now frowned upon stop and frisk (which some believe the abolishing of is contributing to a rise in gun crime in NYC but that is another debate). But the tone of your comment leads to one to you. What does your progressive brain think about the situation in San Francidco raised by the original article? Are you a proponent of the policies delineated?
So you can understand this progressive mind of mine; I don’t believe drug addiction is a crime, the same for homelessness. These are human beings who need help, and the question is, what’s the best way to help them? This experiment is not even a month old, but as Michael Shellenberger describes it, I would not be in favor of it! Apparently, the stated purpose for this facility is to reduce overdose death; this experiment has only just begun. It appears by what Mr. Shellenberger describes some problems need to be addressed. At this point, it’s a wait-and-see if I approve of this program.
Drug addiction is not a crime. But all the accoutrements are; theft, robbery, public defecation, vagrancy etc. Same with so-called "homelessness. You might be surprised that I support treatment and care, voluntary or forced. But we can't tolerate what's going on now.
As far as Giuliani - I saw it first hand. All the vagrancy, the squigee men, the three card monte crap, the harassment, the turnstile jumping was ended. "Broken window" policing worked. His and Bloomberg's policies worked and NYC functioned. Big Bird's policies were a catastrophe. Cause and effect. Simple.
Essentially, Giuliani had the police harass the homeless, so they would leave New York City; it worked. Do you believe giving someone else your problem is ethical?
Relations with the homeless[edit]
During his 1993 campaign, Giuliani proposed to drastically curtail city services for the homeless, setting a limit of 90 days for stays in shelters. Opponent Dinkins accused Giuliani of punishing the children of the homeless with the policy.[78] This contrasted with Giuliani's campaign promise during the 1989 campaign to build hundreds of new homeless shelters around the city.[79] Advocates for the homeless sued the mayor over an alleged failure to provide proper medical treatment to homeless children.[80]
During the Giuliani administration, police conducted sweeps of parks and other public places to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters. Critics charged that the purpose was not to help the homeless but to remove them from sight. The pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Reverend Thomas Tewell, said: "I think the police and the administration in New York were a bit embarrassed to have homeless people on the steps of a church in such an affluent area. The city said to us that it's inhumane to have people staying on the streets. And my response was that it's also inhumane to just move them along to another place or to put them in a shelter where they are going to get beat up, or abused, or harassed." The church sued the city of New York, Giuliani, and Bernard Kerik, asserting a First Amendment right to minister to the homeless on its steps.[81][82][83]
In 1998, when the City Council overrode Giuliani's veto to change how homeless shelters were run, Giuliani served an eviction notice on five community service programs, including a program for the mentally ill, a day-care center, an elderly agency, a community board office and a civic association in favor of a homeless shelter.[84] Giuliani asserted he specifically chose the site because it was in the district of chief bill sponsor Stephen DiBrienza. The plan came under heavy criticism, especially for the eviction of the program serving 500 mentally ill patients, and Giuliani backed down.[85] In an editorial, The New York Times called the event a "dispiriting political vendetta" and asserted that "selecting sites [for homeless shelters] as a punishment for crossing the Mayor is outrageous."[86]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayoralty_of_Rudy_Giuliani#:~:text=During%20his%201993%20campaign%2C%20Giuliani,the%20homeless%20with%20the%20policy
As with the guy in the twitter post above, most of the homeless in NYC have been exported from elsewhere. That's why they have no friends or family with whom to crash. They gravitate to NYC because there is density of guilty rich people willing to throw money in paper cups.
Sure vagrants on the steps of a church on Fifth Avenue. Nuts. And notice the pious prick didn't let the vagrants sleep in the pews or feed them there. This is why I loathe progressives. They are nothing but sanctimonious hypocrites. We pay taxes for homeless shelters. Vagrants belong there, not on city streets.
Drug addiction may not be a crime but drug possession is. Addiction should be used as a mitigating factor to get the addict into treatment. I am a defense lawyer and I always make the effort. Sometimes it is well-received sometimes it is not. Some people are simply too far gone. Homelessness is not a crime but criminal trespass is. Stealing to support your vice is, and should be IMO.
And it will probably come as no surprise that I disagree that we should wait and see how this lovely new opportunity (read that in a voice dripping with sarcasm) plays out. I have a functioning brain so I know that providing poison is not a good idea. I believe that one's religious convictions are private and sanctosanct so I rarely share mine but I absolutely believe that methamphetamine, which will devolve into fentynal/heroin use if left to run its course, is the hand of Satan.
Drugs, per se, aren’t bad; we’ve spent over $1 trillion and destroyed thousands of lives fighting the longest war America has fought, the drug war. But we continue to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, the true definition of insanity! If we provide the homeless shelter and drugs under supervision, wouldn’t that eliminate trespass, stealing, etc.?
No. That is an example of the naivete many on hear are complaining about. I do agree about the so-called War on Drugs.
Apparently not. What we *could* give them is effective dosages so that they aren't a menace to society. Dr. Jack Kevorkian can prescribe.
They’re not crimes, JM, they’re choices. I don’t want to fund selfish, lazy and narcissistic decisions, though I respect each individual’s right to make their own choices. I’m also willing to help anyone who wants to improve their life. Not everyone does. If you’d ever lived around all this you would understand the difference.
Oh, thank you, wise one, for all your wisdom. Are you the Oracle of answers? Why don’t you use all your vast knowledge to solve homelessness?
A personal attack is a good rejoinder for some when you can’t take issue with the content. Homelessness is a complex issue, and we won’t begin to solve it until we can agree on its root causes and how to address each of them. I don’t think we’re close on that one.
Look at the crime stats first, before and after. Much has been written about this JM. The short answer is it’s all the things that progressive mayors like DeBlasio, Frey, etc wanted to defund. Doesn’t affect your toney neighborhood, but it had a big impact on people who have crime surround them like a fog every time they walk out their doors.
Ah, yes, my toney neighborhood is less than 50% white, and your trope, defund the police, is so tiresome. As to this phony-baloney fog that you speak of, U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since the 1990s, regardless of the data source.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/ft_20-11-12_crimeintheus_2/
Since the 90’s, yes crime is much lower. So what? It’s much higher over the last several years. You can always cherry pick a time period that makes your case. Are we supposed to tolerate much higher crime rates because they’re still lower than the 1990’s?
Prediction: in 30 years California, Oregon, Washington State and NY will resemble North Korea far more than Denmark.
Add Illinois to that list. I speak as a (thankfully) former resident of nearly 20 years. I call Illinois the toilet of the Midwest. It is literally surrounded on all sides by better governed purple and red states. When I moved there over 20 years ago, it was a low-income-tax, politically centrist state. Notwithstanding a governor who was about to go to federal prison. Chicago was a highly livable city run by the second Mayor Daley. Those days are long gone and now the idiots are running the asylum.
Don't worry; they will indeed vote to soil their new nests.
😪
Amen.
Except that Florida is documented turning deeper red. This particular wave of migration might be a little different. The overall trend may sadly still be this way.
Single payer sounds great ... all except that bit about the state being in control of the health care, especially that state. That would not end well.
Are you aware that single payer law was going to ad a payroll tax of 1% to those making $49,900 or more? Defining the definition of rich down I guess.
Oh, how horrible, that 1%, would only pay for one-month health insurance on average, just think about that, it would cost them less than $500 to receive health insurance for a whole year, terrible! Terrible!
Do you know why lasik is so cheap? Literal eye surgery. Surgery on the eye. Why is it cheap?
Hint: BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT DOESN’T FUCKING PAY FOR IT
If you want something to be expensive, make it free.
Namaste
🙏🙏🙏
That was pretty funny Kevin, and it happens to be 100% true. On paper, the government could be theoretically cheaper, but it never is. Whether it’s military procurement, entitlements, housing - you name it- government run solutions cost citizens more, for a whole array of reasons.
Only 7% of Californians are without health insurance, which pretty much means they are illegals. The reimbursement from the “single payer” ACA medi-Cal whatever is so low many docs don’t take it because it costs more to to bill that what they get back. Only emergency rooms must treat whomever walks in and I suspect that might be a reason many are closing.
You assume that everyone is paying for health insurance now - actually many get it for free. I guess you don’t know the California is vastly majority democrat. Even the dummest among us or actually them gets this scheme is unsustainable. How do we know? Look at Vermont that’s already tried it.
Why, how outrageous, people earning less than 138% of poverty level in California can receive free Medi-Cal coverage based on household size of one person: $17,609. Two people: $23,792. If they apply! How dare we give the working poverty I hand out!
Not even close, Penny. Even the Democrats sponsoring single payer say it would cost $400 billion per year. There were actually multiple large tax increases in the proposed bill, and it covered everyone, including literally millions of illegal immigrants on day one. In a single party state, even California’s Democrats couldn’t stomach their own proposal.
California has the problem that it is already an extremely high tax state. Top bracket is 13.3%. They start adding "surcharges" and it approaches 16-17%. They chased out Elon Musk. They will no longer get %13.3% percent of his stock sales. When you chase out the folks who fund a big part of your budget, the tax increase yields a negative. They chased me out, and I'm hardly Elon Musk, but it did cost them tens of thousands a year that I will no longer pay them the rest of my life. This is why high tax blue states want the low to no tax states to subsidize their high taxes with SALT deductions. Some claim they all states must have a hefty income tax so that no one can escape/ This is how they think.
$400 billion a year from Califor4nia taxpayers to provide themselves single-payer health insurance that covers everybody? That sounds like a bargain if it eliminates private medical insurance premiums (employer and private insurance), Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of government-provided health insurance premiums and spending.
What am I missing?
They are the only thing "progressive" has ever meant, which is "Orwellian". Even the name itself has only ever meant "let's forget all of the lessons of history and revert to the policies of the Stone Age."
You'll never see someone fight so hard as a "progressive" against a wind farm in their line of sight.
New York City is certainly no shining model of success, at least during the disastrous De Blasio reign. They have a huge and growing homeless/addict problem, which translates into skyrocketing street crime. Combine that with a lunatic D.A. who releases criminals with no bail, treating the police as the enemy, and you have a complete meltdown in progress.
De Blasio forced a hotel to accept dozens of homeless, at a cost of millions of dollars to the city; they proceeded to trash the facilities and turn the surrounding sidewalks into feces-infested drug dens... because some homeless, it turns out, don't actually want a nice home and wouldn't know what to do with one if handed it for free.
It turns out that Trump was right after all. Close the border and stop the flow of fentanyl from Mexico. Slap a huge tariff on Chinese imports and demand they close down their fentanyl factories. Push for education reform including superior alternative pathways such as charter schools. Establish opportunity zones in the bombed out cities, and incentivize small and large businesses to go there. Call out and praise black entrepreneurs. Pressure companies to keep their domestic plants and factories open, and reform the tax code to make this work, and attract more foreign investment, and repatriate trillions of overseas dollars. Push for more blue-collar training.
This isn't hard. It's common sense. Sadly, the liberals, and really the general, uninformed, gullible fools that make up the majority of the electorate, didn't get it, and threw him out. And now, we are seeing the same awful, failed "progressive" policies promulgated in every major city in this once-great country. For those of us who grew up in better times, it's hard to watch this long, slow decline, and it's tempting to throw up our hands and say, screw'em. They voted for this insanity, now let them suffer with it.
I am of the screw them variety with a caveat: if we were truly a federalist society California and NY alone would pay for their poor judgements.
Because we are not a true federalist society we all suffer the consequences of the dysfunctions of the liberal cities and states one way or another.
Liberals have always told me I have no right to tell others how to live. I’m okay with that. It’s being forced to pay for how they want to live to which I object.
I have relatives who went down the meth road. It’s sad but I recognize I can’t do a single thing to actually help them. All I can do is hope they come to their senses before they kill themselves.
I certainly don’t give them money or in any way make their slow motion suicide more comfortable.
Until recently, California was putting money in the federal coffers and getting nothing back. All those terrible liberals in California supported the conservative welfare states in the South; now all those Southerners can bitch about not getting a welfare check from California!
Terry, you've never been to Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas? I know for a fact that these cities, even though "liberal", are nothing that you describe above, bombed out cities, "every major city in this once great country?"We came from Houston for the past 25 years, and it is a sparkling example of a great city. The black mayor understands how to run a city, even though he is a liberal, but a Texas Liberal, very different than a West Coast lib.
A lot of what you say and suggest would certainly help. Currently I feel the country is great. My wife, an inconvenient minority who came here in the past 25 years, agrees as well. Depends on where you live.
I have been to all three and they are on the way to progressive hell-holeism. Austin is already there to the extent that I will not even go Austin anymore.
Austin has always been a hell-hole. But as Davy Crocket said, "You can go to hell...but I'm going to Texas!"
Austin was not a hell-hole when I went to college there. It was a wonderful, funky, fun City with some of the best music, restaurants, bars and vistas in the State. Somewhere along the line, the residents began electing Progressives to their City Council and city leadership positions. These were no longer "blue dog Democrats" but rather, "Progressive Dems." Hence, the shit hole that Austin is now. To watch my fellow Bay Area folks flee their horrible voting here and destroy Austin breaks my heart. That said, Austin is now voting for the same thing and will, likely, result in similar outcomes to SF and LA. It used to be "keep Austin weird" but it seems like now it would be "Return Austin to sanity."
I guess it depends on your definition of hell-hole. But it has only become a shining example of progressivism, a/k/a a hell-hole, in the last decade.
Travelled their quite often from 2005-2020. I did not see what you are alluding too. 6th street is as crazy as it has ever been. Crime is moderate, as most Texas carry guns. Moderate homelessness, but not camps. So do tell?
Wrong Brad. There are numerous homeless camps along freeways and under bridges. If you lived in Austin, instead of just travelled there, you would know that.
Really? Austin enacted public camping so the homeless were in all public spaces - in the parks, under the overpasses, on the sidewalks. The City funneled money into the problem for "services". The Governor used his authority to initiate a clean-up. The citizens had a ballot initiative, which passed, to overturn the public camping. The City retaliated by buying hotels and properties for housing, encampments (tent cities), and shelters. Citizens have suffered knife attacks and sexual assaults at the hands of homeless assailants. Areas around the shelters are in essence no-go zones. Even in an open carry state where many people do. Downtown merchants and restaurant owners decried the damage done to their businesses. Lower and lower middle income people can no longer afford to live in Austin due to not only the influx of newcomers which caused the price of real estate to skyrocketed, but also the increase in the cost of living and taxes. But the City persists in using scads of taxpayer money on the homeless issue. I don't think they are yet supplying drugs, at least not officially.
A lot has happened in Austin since 2020. Go walk around downtown. Talk to locals and law enforcement.
Apples and oranges, Brad. California is a one party state. The Democrats have their fingers on every lever of power. And they use that power to shake down the donor class and drive out any semblance of organized political resistance. It doesn't help that RINO GOP operatives are willing to go along the for the ride. Here, where I live in Orange County there is still some normalcy but it's slipping away as the state-level Democrats have gerrymandered away the last remaining red enclaves. My district is flipping solid blue just in time for the upcoming midterm elections.
I was referring to Terry's characterization of all major US cities are bombed out hell-holes. Not in Texas. But yes, from what I've read, CA downtowns are hell-holes, and not my kind like Austin.
Well put!! Thank you.
Portland is very much like San Francisco. My first apartment here was down the street from a large homeless encampment. It came along with the frequent car thefts, feces on the sidewalk, dirty needles strewn about. I know a number of people that do not even let their dogs go out in their yards unsupervised after one horrific incident. A homeless man took a puppy from someone’s yard. After the puppy failed to get him extra cash while panhandling he dismembered it. He then left the dead puppy on the owners doorstep.
We keep having initiatives for housing first proposals. We do have an affordable housing issue, where it is not uncommon to hear about teachers living in their cars. But we aren’t doing much to help people that work full time but struggle to afford rent. Instead we spend millions on the people living on the street. I can’t help but wonder, wouldn’t it be more attractive to stop working and live on the street with all of the services provided as opposed to working but falling through the cracks?
There is so much pontification and naive idea less. I see well meaning people get upset at private businesses around town limiting access to their toilets. They aren’t the ones that have to go in and clean up the bathrooms afterwards that featured poop paint murals and drug residue.
If you suggest that you want to be able to safely use parks with your children, you run the risk of being lectured about how you are victimizing the homeless. The answer always seems to be raise taxes on people making 50K+/yr and home owners. It would be nice if tax payers were able to use the cities Public areas without having to worry about getting accosted.
Just enabling people doesn’t seem to be working but we keep doing it.
I can describe Portland for you and I wish that this was captured on camera because it is perfect.
Last time I was there I was stopped on an on-ramp with a cycling red light and there was a guy 50 feet from me taking a dump in a homeless encampment.
I’m stopped at the red light, which is designed to control traffic onto the interstate, because I obey traffic signals. Next to me is a guy taking a dump in the street.
That’s Portland.
I'd suggest that if teachers are living in their cars, it's a lot deeper than an affordable housing issue.
Well the problem apparently is a lot deeper. I was watching an interview with Victor Davis Hanson and he was talking about how Big Tech employees can't afford to live in the local area. He said that many live in their cars. Now that seems a stretch to me but VDH is a careful speaker so there's some credibility there. The deeper story is very likely yet another example of progressive malfeasance and that's why these progressive mayors are happy to go along with these outrageous policies that keep residents distracted from what's really going on behind the scenes.
Tech workers living in their cars has been going on for years.
From what I remember, it wasn’t the tech workers. It was support staff—maintenance, janitorial, food service, etc. The tech workers can afford the ridiculously high rents. Everybody else, not so much.
I respect VDH very much and enjoy his writing.
Isn't it just symptomatic of the problem when the tech industry, the oligarchs, the VCs and hedge funds are swollen with money, and the workers sleep in their cars. It's amazing that it can happen, and that that area is held up as the best of America.
We just spent $150 billion on that, which is $50,000 per US teacher.
It’s a scam. We need to delete it.
Can we all agree, Michael Schellenberger is a hero for exposing this! I saw him interviewed on Joe Rogan a few months back and my mind was blown - his compassion, rationality and very doable logical solutions when it comes to the massive drug problem and environment (hello nuclear energy!) are what this country needs right now. Just bought both his books and can’t wait to read them! Thank you for being so brave against this Soros funded radical progressive free fall into drug insanity that’s killing so many lives that could have been saved.
Yes to Shellenberger the hero! He is!
I agree except to nuclear energy. IMO we are far from being able to handle that safely.
Years ago, my best joke was that more people died at Chappaquiddick than at Three Mile Island.
One Jane Fonda movie set the nuclear industry back thirty years.
If Fukushima had been allowed to upgrade to the latest tech, the tsunami would have been somewhat of a non event
If it is true that Fukushima was not allowed to upgrade then you have made my point. If the techno savvy and homogeneous Japanese could not accomplish it safely we are a long way from ready. And you conveniently left out Chernobyl.
Environmentalists overruled the scientists in Fukushima (follow the science, except when it doesn’t follow your philosophy )
And Chernobyl continued to operate for 20 years plus
After the Chernobyl disaster, remaining RBMK reactors were modified to reduce the void coefficient that was responsible for the runaway fission reaction, and to fix the poor design of the control rods. So, whatever was operating for 20 years plus was not the same thing that exploded in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK#Improvements_since_the_Chernobyl_accident
Way to ruin the joke
On Rogan??? Aaaaggggghhhhhh...........
Not sure why you're showing disgust that I said I saw Schellenberger on Rogan as I've see a lot of interesting guests on Rogan that are shunned form mainstream media like Tulsi Gabbard, Alex Berenson, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and many more....The recent controversy around Rogan is because CNN and other mainstream outlets have been after him for years since he is more popular and respected than all of them combined x10! Rogan, is the last honest truthful host who talks to everyone from all different backgrounds and viewpoints and never judges them - that's why they want him gone.
And in reference to the N word video - that was extremely edited and taken out of context but I will agree, not appropriate and he has genuinely apologized for it. I personally don't use that word and don't like it, however, Howard Stern has also said it on his podcast many times and also white author Don Winslow who is currently attacking Rogan on Twitter has used that word several times in the books he's written and there are no attempts to cancel them by the left. Hmmm...wonder why? Like with Whoopi and her recent ignorant comments about the Holocaust - I don't believe in cancel culture or censorship and if we apologize and learn then we should be protected under our right to Free Speech.
I was being sarcastic, mocking. I'm sorry it didn't come thru that way. I honestly meant no slight to you, and I apologize.
OMG, no worries! I'm sorry - I'm a little saddened and probably way too defensive of Joe Rogan right now as I feel he's another casualty in our war on canceling everyone (that's clearly why we're on Bari Weiss's substack lol). Totally disregard my Free Speech rant!
:-) He's in my Spotify feed, too.
I was born and raised in SF a long time ago, moved away in the 70s. It breaks my heart to see my beautiful city turned into a cess pool. What happened to the citizens who allow this to happen? They voted for progressive idiots. Pelosi, Boudin, Breed, a long string of them. I don’t see it getting better any time soon.
Like you, I grew up in the SF Bay Area (moved away in the late 80s) and it breaks my heart as well. At the end of last year, a friend of my eldest's was visiting SF and so I asked a high school friend about good places to visit etc. She had to confess that she was ashamed of the City and the state it was currently in. When my eldest's friend returned to the UK, she confirmed that she is in no hurry to go back to SF and would not be recommending it as a tourist destination to anyone.
I grew up in the SF Bay Area, too. Moved in 2001. Horrified by what I see and baffled by a cousin, who lives there, and never mentions any of it....
Hyperbole nooooo, San Francisco Is now a cesspool, who would’ve thunk. We should immediately round them up and execute them or throw them in jail. We can’t have this kind of humanity on display, can we?
Actually it is more a comment on City Hall failing to do good governance which includes providing adequate housing for the poor and destitute (a condition of good
city governance since before the Ancient Romans -- there are reasons why revolutions and civil unrest tend to start in overcrowd and poorly maintained areas). It is also well known that inadequate disposal of human sewage leads inexorably to disease (for example the Cholera epidemics in London in the 19th century .https://intriguing-history.com/cholera-streets-of-19th-century-london/ ) A quick check of the SF Travel site shows that tourists spent $9.6 billion in the SF Bay Area in 2018. Tourism accounted for over $771 million in taxes and fees for the city which go to support things like low income housing. If tourists consider a city is not well governed, they can choose to spend their money elsewhere. Now from what it appears from across an ocean is that City Hall has for decades ignored the problem or provided solutions which have not adequately addressed the situation (this is quite a common occurrence -- again see the London cholera epidemics and how the first solution of closing the cesspits made the problem worse) , and the tourists have kept coming (partly because the problems were confined etc). If the tourists stop coming in as many numbers, maybe the people who run City Hall will decide to do something about providing the right sort of accommodation and services to deal with the very real societal problem which exists -- in others words actually do their job and look after the welfare of the people who are resident there.
Are you trying to say San Francisco will become a disease-ridden area that tourists will no longer visit?
Go to page 5 to put San Francisco into perspective.
https://www.nhipdata.org/local/upload/file/Performance%20Ranking%20of%20CoCs%20-%20NHIP%20-%20Feb%202019%20-%20Final.pdf
Dear Bari - besides more articles like this one about the bankrupt policies of the progressive left whether it be in education, government, public health, etc., it would be so valuable to all of us if you would also write about the sanity around us, governance that is rational, even handed, non-Marxist, whatever...lives of everyday people who do not live in left wing dystopias....these gulags you describe are all dead ends, literally....
Agreed! I just moved to WA from TX. Houston, a "liberal city." What a pleasant place to live. I taught in HISD, mostly hard working hispanic and black teachers and admins. Never heard a word about white supremacy, punctuality, math is racism. There was not ONE time when a black mother or grandmother came in and didn't scold their child for not listen, doing their work, paying attention. The appeared to love the city, and the South for that matter. Very little homelessness and law and order, the safe kind.
Have a look at FAIR.
How is this not labeled as sanctioned murder in the press? How is this not a human’s rights issue? “Here’s some more poison,” says London Breed. Maybe she wants them to die out? This is homicidal poison. Breed and Newsom make Trump look like the Dalai Lama. How are these leaders allowed to do this? Who is protecting these people from themselves? Why aren’t progressives protesting this inhumane treatment? How is Gavin Newsom still in power?
The greed driven realpolitik that defines the American power mad "woke for profit" top heavy bureaucratic state continues.
Demand a study. Feign horror at the condition of the oppressed. Declare yourself crusader exemplar. Climb upon the high horse of moral rectitude and cash in. Tax payer funded Federal and State grants flow like water. Our Eternal Lady of Corporate Tax Deductible Largess proclaims your sainthood and your fiefdom is born on an industrial scale. Because slaying the dragon would destroy the goldmine, the banner of virtue must obfuscate all legitimate dialogue about practical solutions. Heretics must be silenced and their careers burned in the electronic square. Above all, the bureaucratic overlords must be well informed about any possible revolt of the serfs. Then, in the wee hours of a chill morning you realize that there is only one law of survival. Never admit that the chaos created by bad financial and social policy serves avaricious greed and the dead citizen with the spike in her arm is its profit center.
Well said. I suppose this means the medical model is being followed.
I've been thinking in a conservative vein lately...that while getting married and having children relatively young (i.e. early 20s) may have been stifling to a certain extent, this 'please the self for as long as possible' edict sure as hell isn't evidence of a fertile society. When I think back on the lively suburban street I grew up on -- kids spilling out of every orifice -- now it's a tomb -- and all these wailing, gross, overweight pink-haired women in their 20s who basically have no purpose -- when I lived in SF in the early 90s, the aimlessness that surrounded me, which turned so quickly to drugs -- but heaven forbid we should SACRIFICE OURSELVES FOR OTHERS, i.e. kids and a husband and a community...oh NO...that sounds like HELL...it's much better to live with a pile of dysfunctional roommates, hooking up with guys you'll never see again...scabbing up your face with drugs and hard living..."No way was I ready to have kids when I was twenty...!" YES, you were: YOU WOULD HAVE GROWN THE HELL UP...especially if everyone around you had to GROW THE HELL UP TOO...and on that note, I remember seeing a twenty-something obese couple, a Tweedle-Dee and a Tweedle-Dum, lumbering up Franklin Avenue bearing the burden of a gigantic cat...their CHILD....their faces stretched in some DEEPLY CARING emotion...yet if you asked DEE and DUM whether they were ready for children...OH NO...CAN'T HAVE THAT...So...what am I saying here? As a useless idiot who took the ME ME ME message to heart, and wound up with NOTHING....I know all too well where this messaging is taking us...the PINK-HAIRED FEMINIST PIPER...leading fools off a cliff...
Agree. Conservative vein? Labels aren't important, but the mindset in these examples is common sense and practical; the 'PINK-HAIRED FEMINIST PIPER' is neither. My single mother sacrificed most of her life to make sure we boys didn't become dregs and we in turn sacrificed to raise our kids to a good path. It is the most rewarding and difficult thing I have ever done.
Wow, there's a lot in there!
Nicely captured, tho', the couple with the cat, and it does seem that our pets have taken over as our children, insanely so.
Does a 29- year old teenager demonstrate greater capacity for sacrifice and commitment by rescuing a cat or a dog. The latter needs to be walked. The former lives longer
Only one correction - the useless fat she cows screaming online about their travails and troubles have PURPLE or BLUE hair. Otherwise, spot on.
Would you consider extending or expanding your remarks. A novel would be a wonderful option
Thank you! The novel will be finished within the next few months!
I’m feeling good about myself. I recognized this. Oh me, me,me. Lol. Post your title when you finish. Non-sequiters overlooked
In addition to supporting and sustaining addiction in SF, they are also supporting the Mexican drug cartels. Fentanyl seizures on the border are at record highs, as more than one million people have flooded in to be trafficked or abused.
We need to build a wall, but more importantly we need to militarize the border.
You know when the human trafficker guy comes across the river on a raft and drops off a family of obese people who can’t read and who have no skills and who don’t speak English? And then he turns around and heads back on his raft for more people?
That guy, the trafficker, needs to have his head blown off by a sniper. A military action. That is how you stop this.
The family can get a free meal or two free meals or whatever and a comfortable hotel stay as they wait to be placed on a 747 going back to Honduras or Haiti or whatever.
Do that for one week and this ends.
While this idea might cause some heads to explode in outrage, you're right that it would stop the madness. For all the flack Trump got about the wall, it was working.
Trump got traction just by modestly addressing the problem.
These people are demented killers. They will strap drugs to a pregnant woman. They will send a decoy family across to distract you from the 14-year-old sex slaves.
You send teams of men in camouflage with flip-downs and 50s and you kill them. There isn’t a diplomatic approach.
#Cotton2024
(I urge people to seek out the video of Tom Cotton chuckling on air with Martha McCallum about the Israeli robotic 50 cal that was used to execute an Iranian nuclear scientist in the street in front of everyone)
I live on the border, work in Mexico. CBP friends/acquaintances around here are getting fed up with not being allowed to do their job, and being required to perform as desk clerks checking folks in to an extended stay.
My sympathy for the good people of SF no longer exists. Zilch. Nada.
They got EXACTLY what they voted for.
As insane as some elements of the GOP are, at least red cities have some semblance of law and order.
All one has to do to see where the Democrats and progressives would like to take us is to look at LA and SF.
Hard pass on their “compassion” and “concern.”
The only way change can happen is if it starts affecting most. Just remember that S.F. has been on this path for years and state money keeps increasing for it; when money keeps flowing for 'homelessness' and not controlling the drug problem(rehab, etc.) the problem will not go away.
Like my own Twin Cities there has been no political balance in S.F. since the early '60s and this is a result. Personally, if you support controlled drug usage, fine. What society cannot accept is the destruction of another's personal property without penalty. In other words, you can drug yourself to infinity, just do not make me pay for it either directly or by destroying my personal property.
California law is accepting up to $950 of stealing other peoples property before being charged. Seems to me to a large root of the problem. Cal. politicians are pro-crime and that needs to change.
Great analogy. It is bewildering where all the 'feminists' have gone. They were not feminists at all, just grifters.
“Voters have found themselves in the strange position of paying for fentanyl, meth and crack use on public property. “
So maybe this guy should do an investigation on how much the cartels/China is paying the leftists in charge. And expand that to the democrats in Congress that are denying fentanyl stay a schedule one drug even though they are keeping marijuana schedule one. It’s madness what the left is doing to this country.
Why should taxpayers pay for more than one narcan shot? Some of these addicts get “saved” regularly, obviously learning nothing except there are a bunch of suckers out there willing to fund their deathstyle.
And BTW, the Netherlands sometimes supplies heroin yet we are to believe they condemn hard drug use? What pray tell, do they consider hard drugs if not for heroin?
The west is rotting from within and the left is not only okay with that, it’s a feature of the left.
Read Shellenberger's book, the difference between how places like Amsterdam and Portugal have handled the drug problem and how SF handles it couldn't be more stark.
Amsterdam is particularly relevant, as they tried the far-left path and it was a disaster. Eventually, a center-right government cleaned up the mess, which I'd say is a political development we could benefit from here in the US.
Actually I read his essay in which the following is contained.
“I am also not completely opposed to supervised drug consumption sites. In my new book, San Fransicko, I praise Portugal, which has decriminalized drug use, and the Netherlands, where there are 28 drug consumption rooms. (In some, addicts are even given heroin.)
But both of those countries condemn hard drug use and intervene when addicts break laws”
So is heroin a hard drug or not? Or is the author not up to date?
I was confused about that part too. Heroin? Look I watched Pulp Fiction, I know the deal!
SF policies destroy the lives of the drug addled and the middle and lower classes that lack the financial means to leave the insanity. The situation is allowed to continue because billionaires and multimillionaires residing in SF, experience the city in an entirely different manner.
In one of the city's many ironies, Presidio Heights' streets are kept clean and safe 24/7, despite the fact residents continually implement and cheer on failed SF programs, in order to maintain their social justice status. The homeless are neither dying in front of their mansions nor crawling thru their bedroom windows in an attempt to finance their addictions. Private security and staff ensure the urban ills that have invaded the rest of city, remain someone else's problem.
Tranquility is important when doing the Lord's work. PH residents cannot be bothered with homelessness, ODs, drug deaths or the fact only 1 in 10 SF Black and Brown male students can read or perform Math at grade level. They are too busy relocating the NBA All Star game from North Carolina, ensuring MLB festivities do not occur in Georgia and forbidding CA state employees from traveling, on the state's dime, to the Hermit Kingdom of Texas.
SF's current state will never improve until private security is outlawed or the rot becomes so prevalent, it can no longer be kept from the streets of obscenely wealthy, liberal neighborhoods. If the children of the rich and famous had endure stepping in human waste and watching addicts perish on the street, while walking to schools that failed 90% of their students, the insanity would stop in a week.
Perfectly said. We used to travel to SF, Seattle and Portland every couple of years. It's astonishing that the leaders aren't getting called out for allowing this to happen. I know it's probably not on purpose but it sure looks and feels that way.
A ghastly account of what has happened to a once-great city, and not only this one, but Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Baltimore ... you can name the others; it’s a long list. The cat may be too far out of the bag for the bizarre handling of this “homeless” problem to be undone.
I will only say that its principal cause is glaringly obvious: The voting in of the leftists who run ... er, run down ... these cities. I was just in Tampa/St. Pete. The contrast between it and the aforementioned cities could not be more stark. You reap what - whom! - you vote for.
Yep! I am from CA (Orange County), lived in Austin 2019-2020, said no thanks. Now I live in St. Petes and my only regret is that I didn't move here sooner. Even with our warm winters, there are not many homeless people here. I never identified as a Republican and still don't, but there is no question where my vote will be going in the mid-terms, not one punch for a D.
Let’s see, the principal cause of homelessness is the leftists; how’s that work?
To understand fully, one must acknowledge that most people living on the streets or in tents are there by choice. They resist societal rules and they relish access to free drugs - or at least the freedom to use hard drugs without being hassled, let alone arrested. Many are mentally ill to one degree or another, and years ago would have been institutionalized for treatment instead of loose on the streets. In other words, these are not, typically, your single moms temporarily down their luck and hoping to find a job, daycare, and to get back on their feet; that category of the homeless population is a distinct minority, and not the problem.
The problem in these Blue Cities is the public defecation and urination, the rampant drug use, the occupying and desecrating of public parks and sidewalks, the shoplifting and the assaults upon citizens trying to walk to work, the stoned-out bums blocking storeway entrances; the eyesores that have sprouted along our freeways and in our public squares. Did you bother to read the article?
The leftists enable all this by refusing to enforce laws pertaining to vagrancy, the obstructing of public byways, shoplifting, curfews, destruction of property, hard drug usage and dealing, etc. The laws are there, but leftist politicians will not enforce them. Instead, leftist politicians facilitate “homeless camps” on public property and the free distribution of heroin needles. They allow homeless takeovers of city parks. And, unsurprisingly, this tolerance of filth and lawlessness attracts “homeless” people who want to live free of rules, arrest for their petty crimes, and limits on drug use. If not in tents, they flock to free housing offered them at taxpayer expense.
Contrast this with the cities, like Tampa, where existing laws are enforced by non-leftist mayors and DAs, and you’ll see how leftist tolerance and enabling is responsible for the homeless problem that plagues SFO and other “blue” cities that lay out the welcome mat.
Capisce?