George Rebane
California’s homeless population continues to grow; it now exceeds 130,000 and is heavily concentrated in metropolitan areas like LA, the Bay, and Sacramento with smaller scale infections even reaching rural counties like our own. According to the feds, CA is now also #1 home for those without a home, and growing. And the big surprise by our leftwing politicians and bureaucrats is that they can’t figure out why these numbers are going up given all the public monies that have and are being spent on welcoming benefits to CA’s indigents. WSJ’s Alejandro Lazo describes the current situation in ‘Homelessness Grows in California Despite New Government Spending’. The answer to this apparent conundrum is beyond simple – the homeless of the country are infinitely smarter than the double dummies who make up our electeds and bureaucrats in Sacramento. If you’re homeless, or illegal, or on welfare, or a criminal, or …, why not head for the Idiots Paradise that sanctifies, succors, and salutes every kind of person whose vote can be bought with monies taken from the state’s well-to-do and remaining middle-class wage earners?
The Dems are pulling in the big bucks from the country’s corporatists. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, … are giving tens of millions to progressive candidates in hopes that they won’t get hurt too badly in Washington’s growing anti-trust sentiment that threatens to break up the big guys. The Left’s complaint is that open markets are not working, capitalism is broken, and Big Brother needs to step in to make things right. The denied truth is that government hasn’t promoted open markets for at least 30 years. So, there is no reason to pass more legislation to enlarge govt watchdog bureaus and staffs to mangle more markets, just step back from accepting corporatist payola, and enforce existing laws against monopolies and oligopolies. But doing that would dry up the inflow of funds into corrupt pockets. As an example, today Sens Warren and Sanders have each received more than $30M from Google’s parent Alphabet. The interesting part is that the ill-read younger employees of the behemoths are contributing much of the money that will be used to buy the rope to hang them after socialism sweeps Silicon Valley. (more here and here)
Unclear about working out their futures are both our Millennials and the Europeans. Fundamentally, both are afflicted by the same mental rot. See comment stream below and the graphic sent to me by a reader in response to the above scattershot. A picture is worth a thousand … (and all that).
[10jun19 update] Politicians of all stripes like to tell us what “the American people” like, reject, demand, deserve, think, ignore, want, … . However, those of us who have paid attention over the years know that the more certain a politician is assuring us about the sentiments of the American people, the more sure we can be that he’s spewing BS on thin ice. Author Joe Epstein agrees – “There’s no shortage, I realize, of ways of detecting falsity in contemporary politicians, but I’ve come upon one that I find most helpful. The more politicians use the phrase “the American people,” I believe, the less they are to be trusted.” (more here)
The double dummies in Sacramento are now planning on spending billions to provide “complete healthcare” to the state’s illegal aliens according to the AP (here). California seeks to retain its position as the nation’s idiot state, emplacing more policies to attract the indigent, the under-educated, the welfare recipient, the illegal alien, the criminal, …, and then wonders why it needs higher taxes and more regulations which convince middle-class workers and their employers to leave the state. It will cost $3.4B to provide such healthcare coverage to include the 1.8M illegals now in California. How many more will arrive as a result is anybody’s guess, but not anticipated by our state’s legislative super-majority. Here’s a sample of the thinking behind this legislation – “The state Senate wants to cover adults ages 19 to 25, plus seniors 65 and older. That bill’s sponsor, Sen. Maria Elana Durazo, scoffed at cost concerns, noting the state has a projected $21.5 billion budget surplus.” So we’re again spending projected surpluses which have a horrible record of not arriving, while ignoring all the collateral costs that this invited ingress will incur as an ever larger share of California’s population is made up of professional gimmes. (And here is more about soaking the middle class and taxing the rich.) But we all know how they will vote, don’t we?
Women of color remain victims in America, so maintains “ZORA”, a new “publication that centers on and celebrates the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and experiences of women of color”. Zora is one of many newly minted online outlets promoted by Medium, itself a menagerie of Marxist missives from Millennials who regularly exhibit there the horrific educational deficits they have suffered in unionized government schools, bequeathed us by the Great Society. Their raison d’etre is to “challenge the stereotypes and outdated tropes associated with women of color” through offerings that provide a “multi-textured, multilayered, multifaceted take on life as a woman of color.” I provide these links to readers as yet one more witness to the broad spectrum of inputs from which I and other well-read RR readers benefit. As such, reciprocity is recommended to our leftwing brethren in order to elevate their discourse in these pages.
[11jun19 update] Another more succinct perspective on socialism.
Trans Athletes Debate – The BBC will air a documentary at the end of this month to explore the trans athlete issue which now impacts primarily women’s sports competitions. The documentary – ‘Trans Athletes: A Fair Playing Field?’ – will feature Martina Navratilova on the BBC One channel. For those new to this issue, the problem is that natural female athletes who have spent their careers training to be champions in their sports are now left in the dust by trans-female athletes. These competitions are inherently unfair to the women, and illustrate the undeniable fact that men and women are different, even after having their plumbing altered. We don’t hear much about trans-male athletes competing in individual male sporting events, mainly because they don’t have chance to shine. But to make progressive political hay, we do have examples of trans-males insisting on being on the men’s football teams where their inherent physical handicaps can be camouflaged in team play. Nevertheless, their coaches and teammates know that the trans-males don’t carry their weight in such competitions. My own opinion is that once you become a trans anything, that you forfeit your right to compete in your chosen gender sporting events. If we get enough transgender athletes, then perhaps they can start their own sports leagues and individual competition events to maintain level playing fields.
