Posts Tagged → homeless
California teaches America a lot of lessons
Southern California is on fire, and why it is still on fire one week, at least fifteen lives lost, endless misery, and $150 Billion in losses later reads like a graduate course in Bad Government 101.
California has been the drug addict child of the United States for a long time, but especially in recent years. Californians can’t ever get too much woke politically correct crazy, and so they keep voting for more of it and for the drunk sailor spending that enables it. No one there knows where the money is coming from, no one cares, they just keep throwing money around for empty virtue signaling.
And no money for saving water for a bad day and cleaning up old brush around residential areas. No, these two activities were generously funded, but not implemented. They both contributed to the annual Santa Ana Winds-fueled wildfires now leveling entire neighborhoods in the Los Angeless area, as reservoirs were dry, hydrants had no water, and years of unaddressed dry brush resulted in uncontrollable fires.
For many years already, California has suffered at the hands of criminal homeless and illegal aliens. Suffered unnecessarily in the name of some vague understanding of some sad people somewhere. But these fires may have taught the citizen voters there that there are limits, hard breaks, up against the best of intentions fail.
Lessons taught, maybe not necessarily learned:
a) Repeat voting for a single political party that continuously places homeless and illegal immigrants ahead of taxpaying citizens is unsustainable and will end up destroying your society.
b) Repeat voting for a single political party that makes DEI and ESG and other foolish woke virtue signaling a central point and purpose of government will end up destroying your society. The pathetic and avoidable failures of state and local government across the Los Angeles area are all attributable to race and gender ideology hiring choices, incompetent people, not hiring practices based on merit and individual capabilities, resulting in competent people who have fire hydrants with water in them in case of a fire happening in a fire-prone ecosystem.
c) Making silly, emotional, childish public policy choices, instead of responsible adult-level decisions is no way to run any level of government. These bad choices will always come back to haunt those who are subject to them. Eventually you must pay the piper. California is now paying for Gavin Newsom’s childish ideas and bad policies.
In sum, California voters now see that they have a real choice to make. They can move forward and select leaders who make responsible decisions that protect the citizenry, or they can continue to select leaders who blame human-caused wildfires on supposed “climate change,” and continue to fail.
My own takeaway from California’s fiery carnage is that no one is more racist than a white liberal Democrat. No one. The amount of destruction they wreak on people of color everywhere is unimaginable. Chicago, Philly, New York, you name an American city and you will almost always find failure and black people suffering there, for decades, and it all goes back to people like California governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow white liberals. They just can’t not hurt people, especially people of color. It has to be purposeful.
Here it is, right in front of you, urban Americans. You can learn from this lesson in California, or you can ignore it and continue to suffer. It is your vote. Just don’t continue to vote for the Gavin Newsoms of America and then put out your hand and demand American tax dollars to fix your bad policy decisions.
Nope we Americans have now learned that lesson.
New York City is dangerous and dirty
In the past three years I have had the unhappy necessity of visiting Manhattan a number of times for business and family. Last June was the last time I went, and hopefully the last time I have to be there until the place is cleaned up from top to bottom.
Last June I took the pickup to move our daughter out. She lived in New York City for eight years, from undergrad through dental school, and until the last couple of years she enjoyed her experience tremendously. But when we had loaded the last of her things into the bed of the truck, she got into the cab and said “I can’t wait to leave Manhattan. It’s so sad, because I used to love this place. But now it is dangerous and dirty and I want out. Let’s go.”
Manhattan is now looking like its worst days back in the 1970s and 1980s before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Trash is blowing around everywhere, thugs hang out and loiter and saunter along every street and park bench, homeless bums are living in the parks and on building steps. People are being attacked on the sidewalks by demented mental patients prematurely released before their treatments are completed. People exit a restaurant and are immediately punched, kicked, and robbed by young people who laugh about it.
The police do nothing about this dangerous chaos because the Manhattan district attorney believes that holding criminals accountable for their violence and destruction is somehow mean, or wrong. And so the criminals now rule the streets, as an official policy.
The old Diamond District on 47th Street is a shell of its former self. A thousand years of jewelry making and watch making and world class talent all concentrated into one city block is now gone, because some communist in power decided that all this material excess violated some notion of “equity,” and so the jewelers and watchmakers were driven out. It is a sad ghost town now.
An old friend of mine who lives in Manhattan complained about how her own restaurants, which her architect husband had designed, and into which she had invested great amounts of time and money, were torched and looted in the riots of 2020. When I asked her if this destruction was a result of political failure, she went straight to blaming the Bad Orange Man. Who does not live in NYC, was not on city council or mayor of said city, and who had no control over the policing of Manhattan’s streets. It is impossible for me to understand the mental state of a person who appears sane but who reflexively blames their own mistakes on someone hundreds of miles away with no involvement in the matters that have made said person so unhappy.
So long as the citizens of New York City continue to believe they can vote for self-destructive policies and for the political candidates who promote them, and yet expect a different outcome than the mess we see, then Manhattan will continue to descend into madness and filth.
Making matters worse, the prior administration of mayor “Bill DeBlasio” (this is his fictitious name), had embarked on one of those “It only makes sense on paper and in terms of vague feelings” massive landscape changes. Such as turning streetside parking all over the city into un-used bike-only lanes and on-street dining for restaurants. Even going so far as to fill in empty spaces where people used to park with gigantic flower pots and concrete containers. Anything to make NYC unfriendly to car drivers.
This makes no sense, because Americans in general and visitors to New York City in particular still drive cars. But such is the power of blind ideology: “Because all cars are bad, then places to park cars must also be bad.” This is crazy stuff, and it has resulted in a congested city being even more congested, even less user friendly and less accessible than it used to be. Which was difficult enough. If this gigantic failure is how you measure success, then further natural failures will continue to follow. As we see even right now today, failure is considered success in Manhattan.
I am glad I do not live there and don’t have to go there.
The concrete planters need a place to park where cars should be able to park. Because “cars are bad”
Median areas that used to offer car parking and delivery vehicle offloading are now clogged with concrete in order to stop “bad cars”
Rental bikes lined up in the most expensive and colorful virtue signal possible. No one uses these. But someone somewhere feels good about the symbolism
An empty and unused bike lane where cars used to park. Cars still need parking spaces, but don’t expect to find them in Manhattan, where virtue signaling is most important
Go ahead and make sense of NYC’s parking regulations. Try.
Restaurants have fully enclosed “outdoor” dining in the street, where cars used to drive and park. The cars still need to drive and park. Just more congestion and more exhaust fumes trying to navigate all the pointless virtue signaling
Hollywood trash
Whatever may be said about Hollywood’s corrosive effect on America’s collective soul through its films, there is no debating that it is also a physically disgusting and filthy place.
Blessing or curse, we had the recent opportunity to walk a lot through Hollywood. What we saw was the unfilmed insider look at the real, unfiltered Hollywood.
Beverly Boulevard of Beverly Hills fame was until yesterday loaded with heaps of rotting rubbish and trash. Both sides of the street, block after block after block.
Most of it was deposited by insane homeless bums who hoard every scrap of civilization they can get unto their respective shopping cart, and when it all overfloweth, they leave heaps of this detritus lying on sidewalks.
Everywhere. Every fifty feet, both sides of the street.
And this is Biblical crap: Defecation -covered clothing, food wrappers, styrofoam cups, stained rags, heaps of trash, everything buzzing with insects and smelling of urine and rotting food. Occasionally a dejected human is guarding a particular heap, but as we witnessed over a week, even homeless bums reeking of long-unwashed bodies and wounded spirits eventually abandon their treasure and castles. They seem to move in unison, crossing the street en masse and setting up their tattered tents and new trash piles against walls, sidewalk benches, each block having its own long line of stench and crap. Old or new, there’s a lot of crap.
But suddenly the city of Los Angeles descended upon the heaps on Beverly Blvd yesterday. Workers wearing environmental protection suits used large snow shovels to scoop up the garbage into green-colored and clean-themed trucks.
While the trash disappeared, stains in the concrete and smells in the air remained.
Talking amongst ourselves, we surmised the situation was so dire that not even Los Angeles city government could ignore it. After all, this situation is hardly representative of America, democracy, successful self-government or even just simple wealth. Wrong again, rational people!
Turns out this morning is the LA Marathon. Beverly Blvd, La Brea Blvd, and nearby connecting roads and streets were shut down to allow new masses of sweaty, smelly humans to stampede through today. All disgusting crap already in place along the route was in the way, and had to be removed.
Plenty more discarded trash will be available to walk around and through tomorrow, after the race has ended.
Takeaway here?
Los Angeles is full of people, run by people, who embrace all kinds of bizarre notions in general, and who daily live completely out of synch with nature, who live wildly consumptive and environmentally unsustainable lives, and yet who also believe they can and must berate the world around them about all kinds of real and fake environmental issues, like human -caused climate change, the evils of cars, etc.
Los Angelinos and their city are literally full of crap.