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Whether or not Bernie was a nice guy was irrelevant, as he was homeless.

What was his story?

Bernie was 58 years old and had lived his entire life in Michigan. He was a productive member of society until he got fired from his railroad job. He was not old enough to receive his pension, and subsequently ran out of money. As he was estranged from his family and could no longer support himself, he decided that he was ready to die. He was an atheist, but a quick exit was not for him. For whatever reason, he wanted to die in a warm place, so he rented a car and drove to Southern California. He ended up in a strip mall in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, and figured that he would just starve to death. However, after a few days in the strip mall’s parking lot, a woman who owned a taco shop noticed him living in his car, and started to feed him. Whether he would have died if not for the taco lady is a mute point. Bernie survived, and I subsequently met him at the soup-kitchen as he had gotten into the short term accommodations at St. Vincent de Paul. Whether he would stay in California or not, he was technically no longer homeless, as he now had a regular place to sleep.

Even though he had some issues with certain authority figures, he was a hard worker.

He was a nice guy, and I liked him

Out of the blue, one day he was gone! Possibly homeless again. Whether or not he had a disagreement with an “authority figure” . . . ???

 

Being homeless is defined as not having a fixed regular and adequate night time residence. Certainly when Bernie got here, he was homeless and living in his car.

It is estimated that there are over 500,000 homeless individuals in the U.S.A., and about 50% are over 50 years old – just like Bernie. In 2015, 21% of the nation’s homeless lived in California, and even worse about 1/3 of the chronically homeless live in California. Contrary to the national trend (a decrease of 11% from 2010- 2015), the number of homeless had increased by 1.6% in California between 2014 and 2015.

Why are there disproportionately so many homeless in California? The question is whether or not, there is something else that draws the homeless to California other than the weather.

Warm weather could not be the sole reason as homelessness decreased from 2007-2016 in Tampa, Atlanta, and Phoenix in a recent U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U..D.) study.

After I asked myself whether or not there could be another reason that Democratic California has more than its share of the homeless, I saw some interesting data from the same H.U.D study about “Metros with the largest increase in homeless”, 2007-2016. Four metro areas in California had the “distinction” of being in the top ten spots. What was interesting was that the other six top spots were also metro areas that are predominately Democratic with liberal mayors, including Honolulu, Seattle, Washington D.C.., and New York City!

I am not sure whether Democratic metro areas are the cart or the horse, but the correlation of increased homelessness where the Democrats are in charge is certainly more than would be expected by chance alone.

 

The decision before the San Diego City Council was whether or not to legalize local cultivation, manufacturing, and testing of marijuana. The Police Chief had warned of significant threats to public safety if the City Council passed the bill.
If I were a councilman I would have looked at the experience in Durango, Colorado.
Durango is a small city in southwest Colorado. In 2010 its population was 16,877 and by 2016 the population had grown to 18,503. Why did the population of mountain resort town grow by almost 10% over those 6 years?
As most of you are aware Colorado passed their recreational marijuana law in 2012, and the thinking of many Durango residents is that it is the marijuana that has attracted much of this population increase. Their once upscale community near the New Mexico border is now being overrun by panhandlers and transients who are not just pot users, but also homeless drug addicts as they are now finding needles on the streets.
Cobb Preston, a store manager in downtown Durango says, “Just this year there has been a major influx of 20-30 year olds who are just hanging out on the streets. While many are pretty mellow, there are many more who are violent. Most of these kids are from out of state, and I would say that it has a lot to due with legalized pot.”
Shoplifting has become a major problem in Durango and there has been an increase in crime with the property crime rate now 12% higher than the national average. A clerk at a local hotel stated that she is frequently harassed when she goes to the supermarket and summed it up when she says, “I have lived here all my life and I don’t feel safe anymore!”

San Diego already has a significant homeless problem, and there is little doubt in my mind that an easy marijuana policy will just attract more homeless just has it has done in Durango.
Before the vote Councilwoman Lorie Zapf stated, “We were elected, if nothing else, to oversee public safety, and [if we pass this bill] we are absolutely going down the wrong road.”
However, despite these warnings the Democratic City Council on Sept. 11, 2017 passed the marijuana bill 6-3. This is actually not a surprise as “Democrats always know what is best for everybody”, and they probably figure that potheads always vote Democratic!

Now is the time that I wish we were a Nielsen family . . . again!

Many years ago we were a designated Nielsen family for a couple of years. For those of you not familiar with Nielsen, it is a national T.V. ratings service which gauges viewership of T.V. programs by putting their equipment into random families’ homes to monitor and subsequently report which T.V. shows are being watched and by how many people. It had been said in the past that each monitored home represented 15,000 homes in the Nielsen survey.

Why do I wish that now we were a Nielsen family again?  Because now I am protesting the anti-American shenanigans that are occurring during the National Anthem before many of the NFL games this season. I personally protested this past weekend by not watching any of the multiple NFL games that were on Sunday morning and afternoon, Sunday night, Monday night, and Thursday night.

 

Although I have not read the stats on the viewership of the NFL games this past weekend, my hope is that the viewership will be down. Of course the NFL will turn a blind eye to this decreased viewership as they did last year when the viewership was down significantly. They will do nothing and blame the decreased interest in their product on Hurricane Irma, instead of looking inward at those “protesters” on the field.

Some teams apparently have condoned their actions, in essence saying, “It’s okay to sit down or raise your fist during the National Anthem; don’t worry we will just look the other way”?

The teams on which these anti-American malcontents play on are as follows

Seattle Seahawks

Green Bay Packers

Los Angeles Rams

San Francisco 49ers

Oakland Raiders

Philadelphia Eagles

and

Kansas City Chiefs.

 

As alluded to above, my protest is of no actual practical consequence since we are not now a Nielsen family, and the major networks do not care about my individual protest!

If anyone knows anyone who is a Nielson family, please beseech them to tune–out  NFL football so that the networks and the NFL both get the message.

 

 

Just the other night I saw Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was a wonderful two-act play, but over three hours long. So, not unexpectedly, my mind did wander. For those of you not familiar with Hamlet, it is a tragedy (just about everybody dies in the end), and it has a multitude of memorable lines. In the beginning I was sure that I would be able to equate Hamlet, the hero, to President Trump. However, in the second act, I accepted the fact that this was going to be difficult as Hamlet was very hesitant which does not appear to be Trump-ian trait at least as far as his tweeting is concerned. Also in the second act Hamlet feigns madness. I do not think that Trump is feigning anything – what you see, is what you get, and he does not fake anything!
Again for those of you not familiar with the play, the really bad guys are King Claudius and Queen Gertrude who did whatever dastardly deeds that were necessary to get power and are intent on keeping it – using just about any means possible. I had no trouble seeing Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi as the king and the queen as they seem to have very similar character traits.
Certainly Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern could easily be Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, as they are supposed to be Hamlet’s friends, but sneakily turn into his enemies. They are convinced by King Schumer and Queen Nancy to turn on Hamlet and late in the second act they “sell him down the river”, when they are prime players in a plot to have Hamlet killed. From my way of thinking this fits as both McConnell and Ryan say that they want to help our hero (Trump) but instead only seem to hurt him.
In the end I did conclude that the play could well be a metaphor for the Republican Party as everyone kills each other, just as the Republicans are doing now.

As I listened to some of the lines in the three hour marathon, my mind did wander to the present day political scene. Listen to some of these famous lines, and let your mind wander . . .

“There is something rotten in Denmark”
This is certainly describing the Fake News and the Swamp.

“To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of a thousand..”
This certainly describes an unusual person in today’s Washington.

“To thine own self be true”
Advice from Republican voters who cannot understand why those that they elected are now changing their stripes.

“To be or not to be, that is the question!”
Either you are with our President or you are his enemy, and I am having trouble figuring out where both elected and non-elected conservatives stand.

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
Hard to describe Trump’s tweets as anything else.

“Sweets to the sweet”
When one of his compadres is in trouble and appears to have been railroaded, Donald Trump stands by him . . . Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”
Certainly seems to be describing Maxine Waters!

“If we are true to ourselves, we cannot be false to anyone.”
If Trump continues to keep his campaign promises, how can anyone who is honest be critical.

Before going into the play, I was talking to a woman who was originally from St. Louis Park, Minnesota. She proudly stated that both Al Franken (uber liberal Senator from Minnesota) and Thomas Friedman ( far left columnist of the New York Times) were both from St. Louis Park. Since Hamlet is a tragedy, I could not find a way to get either of these jokers into this essay. As this encounter was before the play, I was then thinking to myself, “Was there something toxic in the St. Louis Park water?”
If it had been after the play, I would have been smart enough to have said to her (just as Hamlet said to Polonius), “Get thee to a nunnery!”

Despite what many of you think, this acronym should stand for “Democrats Against the Constitution Again.”

Of course, D.A.C.A. stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. It was put in place by Barack Obama in June 2012 while he was president. At that time his action was against the Constitution in that he pronounced D.A.C.A. by executive decree, and the president (no matter who he is) does not have this authority under the Constitution. The Congress, and only the Congress, has the constitutional authority to make laws.

So not only did B.O. start this whole mess, but on the same day as President Trump cancelled B.O.’s  D.A.C.A. decree, this former president, a supposed “constitutional lawyer,” had the audacity to criticize our current president for following the Constitution by canceling his 2012 unconstitutional decree!

To put things in even more perspective, B.O. came forth with his D.A.C.A. decree in order to fire up his base before the 2012 election, even though he had said in the past the he, as president did not have the authority to make laws. I do not remember the main-stream media (MSM) commenting on this oxymoron. Furthermore, recall that after the 2008 election the Democrats had control of the U.S. the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and yet did not address the immigration issue at that time. They could have, but they did not pass any immigration laws in 2009 or 2010 . . . Why?

To no one’s surprise, I do not hear our former president or any other Democrats admitting that they should have solved this issue in a constitutional fashion when they had the chance.

Next let’s address what President Trump did on Tuesday September 5. He basically kept a campaign promise when he canceled another of Obama’s unconstitutional decrees. He rightfully said that only the Congress can make laws, and was quite generous in giving Congress six months to put on their big-boy/girl pants and do their job. Not only did he keep another campaign promise, but he put the onus where it belongs . . . on Congress.

Brilliant!

Although a rational person might think that it would be difficult to come down on someone for keeping his word, the Democrats, the Dreamers themselves, and the MSM are treating the president as if he was the one who was shirking his responsibility. The Democrats are not blaming themselves for years of doing nothing. The Dreamers are not blaming their parents who broke the law by bringing these young children unlawfully into this country. Of course, the MSM are not commenting on their lack of truthfulness when opining on this issue.

What will Congress come up with over the next six months? I guess it depends on how many can actually make the transition from diapers to big-boy/girl pants!

 

 

 

On Labor Day our local liberal newspaper opined on the state of the middle class in today’s world. In general the editorial board was pessimistic about the future, and said that the decline in the numbers of people who consider themselves middle class is largely due to “how sluggish and unoriginal our political class has been in responding to the decline of well paying jobs.” In other words, those that supposedly know best (politicians and the Teacher’s Unions) are not doing a very good job when it comes to actually educating students for the jobs of the future. Now here we are not talking, in general, about the quality or the inequality of the education system in the U.S., but rather about the lack of foresight in educating our youth for the jobs of tomorrow.

The op-ed correctly pointed out that the present educational system with summers off was designed for an agricultural economy when children helped with summer harvests, and that mandatory beginning computer programming should now be taught in middle school. Right on!
Recognize that here we have a very liberal newspaper that is strongly suggesting that some rather major changes need to be made in our country’s educational system. To this I would add a few peripheral questions:
Why are foreign languages now still required by middle schools and high schools, whereas learning the language of computer programming is not only not required, but only rarely offered?
Why is American Sign Language now accepted as fulfilling a college requirement for a language, whereas learning the language of computer programming is not?
Very interesting to me, however, was that never once did this op-ed actually mention the teacher’s unions by name, and likewise, never once, were charter schools mentioned as a potential solution. Part of this lack of innovation and subsequent stagnation can be remedied by charter schools, as encouraged by President Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

I am sure that most of you, er . . . some of you, er . . . maybe one or two of you
are familiar with Uncle Drew. For those of you who are not, let me “refresh” your memory. Uncle Drew is an old man with gray hair, a gray beard, and a limp who wanders onto a big time youth street basketball game, and for whatever reason is invited to play. The kids in the game as well as the fans on the side are snickering as Uncle Drew turns the ball over the first time he touches it, and then badly misses his first few shots. Everyone is yucking it up at the expense of the old man until the real Uncle Drew drops the charade, and makes all of the studs on the basketball court look like fools.
In these Pepsi commercials, and soon to be a movie, Uncle Drew is really Kyrie Irving, an all-star professional basketball player in the NBA. Kyrie Irving is made up to look like an old man, and nobody on the court recognizes him. In subsequent Uncle Drew episodes other professional basketball players (Kevin Love as Wes and Nate Robinson as “Lights”) are made up to initially appear old and infirm, only to embarrass the young studs when the right time comes. Nobody recognizes them even though they are marquee players, as they are in disguise and “undercover.”
At this point, many of my regular readers are asking, “Wassup”?!
Patience!

Recently the entire country has been reading about and looking at disgusting videos of Anti-fa thugs beating up on innocent protestors, who naively felt that the police would standup and protect their right to peacefully protest. It becomes obvious, for whatever reason, that this is not happening, and when all is said and done, only a few of these thugs are arrested. What happened to all the rest of these Anti-fa hooligans? They apparently are able to return later to infringe on the rights of others because they were not caught and jailed.
I propose that the “good guys” have multiple plants in the crowd the next time that Anti-fa is threatening to brutalize innocent protestors. These undercover disguised Kyrie Irvings, Kevin Loves, and Nate Robinsons, etc should be the toughest of the tough, dressed up as multiples of Uncle Drew, Wes, and “Lights”, so that when the violence breaks out, they can give these Anti-fa bums a taste of their own medicine . . . and then arrest them. After doing this covertly a few times, advise Anti-fa that there will potentially be undercover very bad “good guys” to neutralize them whenever they show up at a rally. When they realize that they could well end up with a broken nose or a concussion, and then get thrown into jail, perhaps they will think twice the next time that a potential Uncle Drew shows up to play hoops.

What is free speech? Does it depend on whether you are conservative or liberal? Even though “free speech” should be a simple concept, apparently to some it is not. A recent op-ed in the NY Times by K-Sue Park, lamented the fact that the ACLU had defended the right of the white supremacy group to organize its march in Charlottesville, Va. earlier in the month. The writer of the op-ed stated that the ACLU needs to “rethink free speech”, and stop standing up for people with offensive views.

Wow. That is really scary.

It means that free speech can only be truly free speech, if it does not offend. Does not offend who? As K-Sue Park is a fellow in critical race studies at UCLA law school (liberal university in liberal California) and her op-ed was printed in the NYT (an uber liberal newspaper), the implication is that free speech is only truly free speech if it does not offend the left. FYI, yes the ACLU (again far left) has “rethought” its position on free speech, and will no longer defend the right of certain groups to free speech.

 

In San Francisco on 8/26 a group called Patriot Prayer Group cancelled a rally and a speech because of safety concerns. Nancy Pelosi had called this group a white supremacist group even though it included black, Hispanic and transgender speakers. Again if you are liberal, you apparently have the right to limit free speech if the group speaking does not agree with you.

Interestingly a group of “anti-protestors” were at the site of the cancelled San Francisco speech and when one was asked why she was there, the twenty-seven year old Richmond high school teacher responded, “I really don’t have an opinion on what they are doing, but I thought that it was important to be out here against it”.

Double Wow! The really scary thing is that this snowflake is teaching in a high school – but then again, it’s a California high school! I am not exactly clear as to what the teacher said, but I do respect her right to say it!

So we are back again to the original question of “what is free speech?” Can speech be free speech if it offends someone? If the answer is “no”, how much does one need to be offended? Does it need to be very offensive to be curtailed?  Here the concept of “microaggression” comes into play. Here by “microaggression” people mean, “You might think that it is small, but it goes to the very core of my particular being, and so it is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed.” Who decides how offensive a “microaggression” is?

It appears to me that these questions have already been answered by the Supreme Court when they said that flag burning was okay as it was a demonstration of free speech, and also recently when the Supreme Court said that a name cannot be banned merely because it offends someone or some group (Supreme Court decision concerning the Asian group called the Slants).

In fairness, I think that the aforementioned high school teacher can be excused from not knowing about these Supreme Court decisions as she probably went to nearby U.C. Berkeley where the concept of free speech is an enigma.

 

 

 

I recently read about CLA+ (College Learning Assessment Plus) – a test that is given to college freshmen and college seniors. The CLA+ measures critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and writing since it requires that the students manipulate information and data in real world circumstances. It is given to freshmen and seniors in order to measure how much better they got at learning to ‘think’ after four years at a given university.

When I read that the CLA+ measured ‘thinking’ in real world circumstances, I immediately thought that the members of the California legislature should be required to take this test! Of course they would refuse, and I can imagine a lot of their responses being something like: “Measure my thinking! Why?” or “The real world . . . are you nuts!”

On the same day that I read about CLA+, I read how some colleges and universities are struggling to repair aging infrastructure. Do the colleges, the universities and the community colleges in California have such a problem? Is the Pope a Catholic??

In fact the California State University System (CSUS) has a deferred maintenance tab of $2.6 billion according to the Hechinger Report published in The Atlantic in July, 2016. But it doesn’t end there – as the University of California system needs $1.2 billion and the Community College system needs an additional $6 billion for deferred maintenance.

How is the state handling this huge deferred maintenance issue?

Poorly, as usual – just think about how poorly those in charge handled the deferred road and infrastructure maintenance in the last few years, and the resultant significant upcoming gas tax.

The Governor’s Budget Proposal for 2016-17 includes one time funding of $35 million for deferred maintenance for CSUS – $35 million for a deferred maintenance need of 2.6 billion! To put this in perspective the budget for 2016-17 also includes a one time Cap and Trade funding of $35 Million for CSUS to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I know that Governor Brown and the Democratic legislature are agog over greenhouse gases, but apparently they are not aware that, in general, $1 in maintenance today will avoid $3 in restoration costs later!

Anyone who owns a house or runs a business realizes that deferred maintenance funding needs to be anticipated and that it needs to be budgeted for . . . before the s*** hits the fan. Of course this sort of anticipatory thinking does not occur to either the Democratic legislature or to the Democratic governor in Sacramento.

The more I think about it, administering CLA+ to the governor and the legislature in California would be a waste of time as it seems that in Sacramento, there is little actual ‘thinking’ to measure.

 

 

From my perspective the following comment made on 8/12/7 should have been the sine-qua-non statement about Charlottesville:                                          “We ALL must be united and condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Let’s come together as one”.

Who do you think said this?

This was a Trump tweet early on 8/12/17, but most don’t know that he said this, as it was not emphasized by Wapo, NYT, CNN, or MSNBC. This early statement sounds very presidential – no wonder that the main-stream media did not report on this.

Subsequently Donald Trump did say, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides . . . on many sides”.

What was reported by these bastions of “fake news” was that President Trump did not call out and disparage the KKK, the neo-nazis, and the white supremacists. Two days later, however, he delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, but of course nothing that he could say would satisfy his left-leaning critics. The following day he stuck by his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. “I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now”.

Now let’s play out a few weeks until the violence at a rally in Berkeley on 8/27. Here the LA Times reported that there was violence on both sides. From my perspective, this sounds like what Trump had said about Charlottesville. However, in fact it appears that the violence was in Berkeley was almost all on one side – precipitated by the antifa, and perhaps even facilitated by the Berkeley “police” stepping aside to allow the antifa easy access to beat up the protesters.

So far I have not seen the criticism of the LA Times for saying that there was blame on both sides, but then again why would either Wapo or NYT criticize one of their left-leaning clones?                                                                                         What I find extremely interesting is that this is almost directly opposite to how the right acts.

From my perspective, our President was right in his comments on Charlottesville on 8/12, 8/14 & 8/15,  but I have not heard of one Republican who has had the courage to say,

” You know what . . . Donald Trump was right again!”