Failing Accountability Leads to Chaos

March 14, 2023 By John Green

I used to work for a major defense contractor. We referred to our company as the best machine shop in the world. We could manufacture virtually any part, to even the most exacting tolerances. The company had even received numerous “Excellence” awards from the Navy for ingenuity, customer service, and workmanship.

And then in the 1990s, the company decided to try something different. Our president had a brainstorm -- which is always scary coming from someone with a Harvard MBA and little manufacturing experience. He decided that we didn’t need quality control inspectors -- those folks that check final parts to ensure compliance with the engineering specifications. He posited that our machinists were so good that they could check their own work. We could lay off the quality control inspectors and save a ton of money. They were redundant anyway -- just checking the same things the machinists had already checked. Management proceeded with the plan -- not bothering to implement any alternative system of accountability.........To Read More....

Why No One Should Ever Listen to Max Boot

March 15, 2023  By Paul Krause

Max Boot, one of the most bloodthirsty American analysts and commentators, has apparently woken up long after most Americans with half his education, about the limits of American power and the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thankfully for us, he has penned his reawakening in the pages of Foreign Affairs, that astute bulwark of the establishment, a journal of which I am, in fact, a subscriber.

For 20 years, Boot has been calling for regime change, democracy building abroad, and even leaving American troops in dangerous brushfire to “polic[e] the frontiers of the Pax Americana.” Now, he says he’s changed................Not only has Max Boot been wrong on all the major foreign policy issues since the end of the Cold War, he is also wrong in presenting what the older, indeed, venerable, tradition of neoconservatism was about. Boot is an atheist; he despises religion (just like most contemporary “neocons” who have fallen very far from the tree), and has called for an openly and unapologetically atheistic president. Too bad Irving Kristol isn’t alive to rebuke him. A man who has been wrong for so long and a man who lies about his rediscovery of genuine neoconservatism is a man no one should listen to ever again.............To Read More....

My Take - One of the things I find in common among neocons like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, now dead, and this guy, is they're atheists.  They press the idea they're conservatives but they're bent is toward more government control.  

In truth, I don't think they know what they believe since they're atheists they have no solid moral foundation, just like the left.  I wonder just how many of this ilk are atheists.  I know people like John Kasich attend church, and he quotes scripture to push his views, but his use of scripture is clearly twisted, and he embraces views that may be popular in Christian churches today, but that doesn't make them scriptural.  

Is there a pattern there?  I think so, and will be paying closer attention to that from now on.

Actually, You Don’t Know That Much The problem on campuses isn’t ‘wokeness’—it’s certainty

by Ilana Redstone March 07, 2023

Stories of campus political excesses pile up like bodies. To cite a few recent examples: There was the law student group at Berkeley that banned Zionist speakers, the Stanford Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, and the Valdosta State University professor who taught that sex isn’t dichotomous.

I am not a fan of the word “woke.” I find it to be dismissive, snarky, and generally unhelpful. Yet, it’s the go-to term for many people who wish to express their concerns about colleges today. It’s meant to refer to a narrow, progressive political ideology that, critics say, limits free speech, suppresses debate, and forces students and faculty alike to self-censor. But the very real challenges have been misdiagnosed by both higher education’s critics and its defenders. Campuses don’t have a “wokeness” problem. They have a certainty problem................To Read More....

Do Social Media Platforms Have Civic Responsibilities?

Christine Rosen 

Private companies such as Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), Twitter, Snapchat, and the like are clearly not traditional civic institutions. They have users, not citizens; they offer terms of service, not rights; users have no duties to the platform beyond the surrender of their time and attention; and technology companies have great leeway when it comes to content moderation and censorship of users who violate those terms of service. They are for-profit businesses, not institutions devoted to the public good.

And yet the language of civics often infuses discussions of the power and impact of these platforms, and the leaders of these companies often invoke civic virtues to define their missions (and craft a more compelling public-relations narrative). “People see Twitter as a public square, and therefore they have expectations that they would have of a public square,” Twitter’s Jack Dorsey told Rolling Stone.¹ He later expanded that assessment, arguing, “Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness.”² Elon Musk repeated the public-square claim during his bid to acquire the platform: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”

Such invocations of the public square or the town square by the founders of technology companies are not necessarily disingenuous, but they are misleading. These executives use familiar language about civic values even as their platforms at times allow or encourage behavior that actively undermines those values..............To Read More...

This week we saw more proof of the Democrats' disdain for democracy

March 10, 2023 By Rajan Laad

It is said that when an individual responds to an allegation with a personal attack, the allegations are probably true, and the accused is most likely guilty. This week we saw proof of the guilt of the Democrats during two separate instances.

We look at Exhibit 1.

Tucker Carlson aired episodes based on the security camera footage from the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. The footage was the most closely guarded secret in the DC, although newly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy had pledged to release it to the public and did so. Carlson debunked the Democrat narrative of a mass armed and dangerous insurrection with visual proof.

The insurrection narrative was mounted by the Democrats and their PR agencies that masquerade as news media outlets by slyly editing the footage to convey chaos and violence. Footage of crowds being unruly, lighting up a fire outside the Capitol building, and windows being broken were played in a loop to push the insurrection narrative..................To Read More......

The Deadly Incompetence of our Leadership

March 10, 2023 By Mike Konrad

We are at a crisis point in history the likes of which has not been seen for over century. The leadership of the West has been so incompetent that we may have passed the point of no return.  In 1908, the already by-then decrepit and corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Serbia was furious. There were a lot of Serbs living in the contested area, and the Serbians considered the area to be a natural part of Greater Serbia. Russia was upset. She viewed herself as the protector of Slavs everywhere. In reaction, the Serbian government supported a group called the Black Hand.  And in 1914, the Black Hand succeeded in assassinating Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand and his wife.............To Read More.....

 

German officials jettison the elderly to make way for migrants

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property….” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto

 

March 9, 2023 By Olivia Murray

One of the most distressing trends to witness in the modern era is the governments’ trajectory towards utilitarianism that leaves behind it a bloody wake of “useless eaters.” Finding a person’s value not in his/her humanity but in subjective and ever-changing standards (commoditized humanity), is rampant within leftism — which is why they’re such vocal proponents of abortion and euthanasia. Human rights abuses, and eventually state-sponsored murder, seems to always emerge as the “solutions.” Enter (again): the German government and its collaborators. Last week, Remix News published a report which began with the following:

Many elderly nursing home residents were left in tears after they were evicted to make room for migrants in Berlin. The case has received widespread media coverage and highlights a growing trend in Germany.

Also, from Slay News:

Germany has begun serving eviction notices to poor and elderly citizens as the government makes room to house foreign refugees. In the German city of Lӧrrach, forty people living in the same apartment building have been given eviction notices.

Zsolt Bayer, a well-known Hungarian journalist, identified these leftist open-border migration policies as “communism” and noted that these “policies are a replica of earlier Hungarian ones under Soviet rule.”..........To Read More....

My Take - This is just like everything else these leftist misfits touch. The left destroys everything!  The real plague on the world isn't Covid, it's leftism. Leftism is deadly in all it's manifestations, whether it involves social issues, the environment or government. To be a leftist is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. This is so out of kilter with the foundational cultural paradigms and Germans I keep wonder how much longer all this will go on before the dam of outrage breaks? 

 

Update On California Homelessness

March 09, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

A recurring theme here is the utter failure of progressive government social service spending programs to ever make a dent in, let alone solve, the problems they have been created to address. Whatever the problems may be — poverty, food insecurity, housing, etc., etc. — once massive government spending programs to “solve” them are put in place, the problems never show significant improvement, and more often than not get worse, at least according to official measures, the longer the programs continue and the more is spent.

An extreme case of this phenomenon is the problem of “homelessness” in California. This issue deserves special attention for two reasons. First, compared to issues like, say, poverty or hunger, which are massive and have indefinite boundaries, homelessness is much smaller and far more discrete. The “homeless” are a specifically identifiable group, and even in the very worst cases are fewer than 3% of the population of any given city. And second, in the major California cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, advocates several years ago called for large but specific amounts of spending to address the problem, and explicitly promised that they had identified the appropriate solutions, and if the voters would go along, this spending would end the scourge of homelessness once and for all.

I first addressed the issue of “homelessness” in San Francisco in an October 26, 2018 post with the title “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” The occasion for the post was a referendum about to be put to the voters of San Francisco in November of that year, imposing a new payroll tax on all employers in the city intended to raise some $300 million per year of fresh funding to address the problem of homelessness “from every angle” and solve it once and for all. The $300 million would more than double the then level of city spending on homelessness, which was $285 million per year. The advocacy for the referendum was led by Salesforce, Inc., San Francisco’s largest employer, and its billionaire founder and co-CEO, Marc Benioff. Benioff had penned an op-ed for the New York Times the day before my post, explaining that the new tax was a matter of basic morality (“It’s time for the wealthiest businesses and business owners to step up and give back to the most vulnerable among us.”), and would definitely work because there was a “comprehensive” plan that had been “developed by experts” and would address the problem “from every angle.”

The latest detailed data I can find on the San Francisco homeless population and spending come from this Hoover Institution Report from May 2022, with 2021 data. The title is “Spiraling Out of Control.” The Report gives the level of spending on homeless services in San Francisco as $1.1 billion per year — meaning that even after adding the $300 billion from the voter-approved payroll tax to prior annual spending of $285 billion, the level of spending had again doubled. And for that, here’s what San Francisco got:

Since 2016, the number of homeless in San Francisco has increased from 12,249 to 19,086, which comes out to about $57,000 in spending per homeless person per year. With a total population of about 860,000, roughly 2.2 percent of San Francisco residents are homeless, which is over 12 times the national average. There is little doubt that as San Francisco spends more, homelessness and its impact on the city worsens.

For a more recent update without comprehensive data, here is a piece from the AP on December 28, 2022:

San Francisco [is] a city that has come to be seen as an emblem of California’s staggering inability to counter the homeless crisis. Homeowners, businesses and local leaders in San Francisco are frustrated with visible signs of homelessness — which includes public streets blocked by sprawling tents and trash.

And now that Salesforce’s advocacy has gotten all San Francisco employers saddled with a special payroll tax supposedly to “solve” the homelessness problem, I hope that you weren’t counting on Salesforce itself to stick around to pay the tax. A few weeks ago it announced big layoffs, many concentrated in its San Francisco headquarters. From Market Watch, January 12:

Salesforce, Inc. . . . has disclosed a wave of layoffs at its San Francisco headquarters in a filing with the State of California. A total of 752 job cuts will become effective March 24. . . . The letter said the cuts . . . affect employees at three locations in San Francisco.

So what is San Francisco’s plan going forward? You guessed it: the Board of Supervisors is recently out with a new Report proposing to add approximately $500 million of additional annual spending on homelessness, on top of amounts already being spent. ABC7 News in San Francisco reports on February 2 that one San Fran supervisor is at least skeptical:

[The new Report] suggests spending nearly $1.5 billion over the next three years in addition to the money already expected to be spent. That comes out to about $70,000 per shelter bed per year, according to [Supervisor] Mandelman. "That just seems like way too much to me. It's more than other communities spend on shelter," said Mandelman.

Don’t expect Mandelman’s lonely voice to slow this one down. In San Francisco, faith in the efficacy of government programs and spending to solve social problems like homelessness is completely impervious to evidence.

Meanwhile, down in Los Angeles, the voters thought they got out in front of the homelessness issue with a somewhat different approach, approving a $1.2 billion bond issue back in 2016 to build supportive housing for the homeless. The referendum went by the name Proposition HHH. Here is a description of the initiative:

Los Angeles voters passed Proposition HHH in 2016, which enabled City officials to issue $1.2 billion in bonds for the development of permanent supportive housing units for people experiencing homelessness. In addition to funding permanent supportive housing development, the bonds can be used to help build temporary shelters. The passage of Proposition HHH is notable because it received the support of a broad and unique coalition of public and private stakeholders in LA, including labor unions and private and nonprofit housing developers.

And how did that one work out? Here is a table of the number of homeless in Los Angeles City and County going back to 2015, from something called the Los Angeles Almanac:

The numbers just march inexorably up and up year after year. Looks like the $1.2 billion approved by the voters in 2016 either failed to make a dent, or was counter-productive. So what is the latest? The City of Los Angeles agreed in 2022 on another round of massive spending to build housing for the homeless, this time $3 billion instead of the paltry $1.2 billion in the last round. This time, the agreement to spend the money is in the form of settlement of a lawsuit, which I guess circumvents the need to go back to the pesky voters for approval. From NBC News, April 1, 2022:

The city of Los Angeles has agreed to spend up to $3 billion over the next five years to house some of its 41,000 residents who are homeless, according to a proposed settlement announced Friday. . . . The settlement stems from a complaint filed in 2020 by a group of business owners, residents and community leaders that accused city and county officials of failing to address the desperate circumstances homeless people face, including hunger, crime, squalor and the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ll check back in another year or two to see how close this new funding has come to “solving” the homelessness crisis.