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BRING ON THE ROACHES–INSECT AND HUMAN: PART TWO (END)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on June 22, 2018 at 12:05 am

To capture the true intensity of the “homeless” problem in San Francisco, you must confront its realities at the street level. Imagine:

You’re elderly, and walking with a cane—and must often try to negotiate your way around big tents that take up most of a sidewalk.
You’re riding in a wheelchair along a sidewalk until you come to a large mattress lying directly in your path, with a potentially psychotic “homeless” man lying upon it.
You find a street teeming with rats—eating the food scraps left by “homeless” people.
You board a local bus and are forced to sit near a man stinking of feces and/or urine. Naturally, the driver doesn’t put him off—giving you the choice of surviving the stench or getting off to catch another bus.
You walk into an underground Municipal Railway bus station—and find it littered with derelicts passed out or shooting up heroin in plain sight. Naturally, they don’t worry about picking up their used hypodermic needles. They leave those out for others to step on or pick up at their own risk.

You’re standing at a bus stop or eating in a restaurant—when a large, filthy, possibly disease-carrying man or woman demands a “handout” from you.
You can’t use the elevator at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station because “homeless” derelicts have ruined its mechanism with urine and feces.

In 2010, San Francisco voters passed the “No Sit/No Lie” ordinance, which “makes it unlawful, with certain exceptions, to sit or lie on a public sidewalk, or on an object placed on a public sidewalk, between 7AM and 11PM.”

But walk down almost any street in the downtown part of the city and you’ll find sidewalks crowded with stinking, disease-ridden, lice/bedbug-infested, drug-addicted, alcohol-soaked, often psychotic men and women whom city officials politely refer to as “the homeless.”

Among the trappings that go with this population:

Tents
Mattresses
Piles of belongings
Stolen shopping cards
Trash
Half-eaten food
Empty cans/bottles of alcohol
Feces
Hypodermic needles

What you’ll almost never see: Police actually enforcing the “No Sit/No Lie” ordinance.

So much for the will of the voters.

San Francisco officials have effectively washed their hands of the problem. If local residents must put up with repeated violations of the most basic sanitation laws, that’s their tough luck.

What matters to the Mayor and Board of Supervisors is this: The “rights” of those whose filth and behavior pose an immediate threat to public health and safety take precedence over those of tax-paying, law-abiding San Franciscans.

San Francisco residents can be fined $25 to $1,000 for feeding pigeons—but not for feeding street bums.

During the Mayorship of Willie Brown (1996 – 2004), Hizzonor proposed what he thought was a brilliant way for residents to “contribute” to “street people.”

Those who were somehow certified as “homeless” would be issued special electronic “cash cards.” When someone wanted to make a “donation,” s/he would swipe a credit card against the one owned by the street bum, for whatever amount s/he wanted to donate.

But before the program started, someone at City Hall realized a blunt truth: Residents—especially women—weren’t likely to whip out their credit cards in front of a ranting, foul-smelling, probably disease-ridden street bum.

It’s long past time for San Francisco—and other cities—to stop catering to the druggies, alcoholics, mental cases and bums who prey on the guilt or fear of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens.

The same laws that protect citizens against patients with highly communicable diseases like typhoid and cholera should be vigorously applied to those whose filthy habits threaten similar public contagion.

Among such reforms:

The city should launch a “Please Do Not Feed the Bums” publicity campaign—as it has against feeding pigeons. And it should be backed up with stiff fines for those caught doing so.
Those living on the street should be given a choice: Go to a local shelter or face arrest and the immediate confiscation of their possessions.
Bus drivers should have the right to refuse passengers who stink of urine/feces, as they present a potential health-hazard to others.
The owners of restaurants should likewise be allowed to refuse service on the same basis.
Those applying for welfare benefits should be required to provide proof of residence. Too many people come to San Francisco because, upon arrival, they can immediately apply for such benefits.
The city should set up a special unit to deal entirely with removing “street people” and their possessions from city sidewalks. This could be a division of the Sanitation Department, since its personnel are used to removing filth and debris of all types.

San Francisco officials need to:

Forcefully tell alcoholics and drug addicts: “Your anti-social behavior is not welcome here. Take your self-destructive lifestyles elsewhere. We won’t subsidize them.”
Take the mentally unstable off the street and place them in institutions where their needs can be met.
Tell those who are just plain bums: Don’t expect us to support you.

Only then will San Francisco rightly reclaim its former glory as “the city by the Bay.”

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BRING ON THE ROACHES–INSECT AND HUMAN: PART ONE (OF TWO)

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on June 21, 2018 at 1:45 am

Imagine that, late one night, you wake up and decide to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. You turn on the light—and suddenly find a virtual army of cockroaches hurriedly scurrying across the floor.

In the morning, you call an exterminator, and a “pest control specialist” soon knocks at your door.

“What you need to do,” he says, “is to put out big packets of sugar for the roaches.”

“Wait a minute—don’t roaches love sugar? How is this going to make them go away?”

“It won’t.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is that roaches are God’s creatures, and they need to eat, too.”

A typical cockroach scene

“But they’ve taken over my kitchen. They’re filthy, they leave droppings everywhere and they contaminate the food I’m supposed to eat.”

“You must learn to have compassion for all of God’s creatures, and learn to get along with them.”

“So if I hire you, you’re not going to get rid of them for me?”

“No.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Help you to accept that they have a right to be a part of your community.”

If a pest control company actually operated like that, how long would they be in business?

Not long.

Yet, in San Francisco, successive mayors and members of the Board of Supervisors operate in exactly that manner toward succeeding waves of human pestilence. And they remain in office for years.

Huge areas of the city are covered in feces, urine, trash and needles. Hospitals overflow with patients that have fallen ill due to the contamination.

NBC News surveyed 153 blocks of the city—an area more than 20 miles. That area includes popular tourist spots like Union Square and the cable car turnaround. It’s bordered by Van Ness Avenue, Market Street, Post Street and Grant Avenue. And it’s also home to City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.

A typical San Francisco scene

Most of the trash found consisted of heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk—including 100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown. If you step on one of these needles, you can get HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B or a variety of other viral diseases.

But you don’t have to actually get stuck by a needle to become a victim. Once fecal matter dries, it can become airborne and release deadly viruses, such as the rotavirus.

“If you happen to inhale that, it can also go into your intestine,” says Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. The results can prove fatal, especially in children.

As the news unit filmed a typical day’s activity in San Francisco, a group of preschool students, enjoying a field trip, walked to City Hall.

Responding to a reporter’s question, Adelita Orellana said: “We see poop, we see pee, we see needles, and we see trash.

“Sometimes they ask what is it, and that’s a conversation that’s a little difficult to have with a two-year old, but we just let them know that those things are full of germs, that they are dangerous, and they should never be touched.”

San Francisco’s political elite see this blight as well as everyone else. They can’t avoid seeing it, since the city covers 47 square miles.

San Francisco City Hall

Cabe6403 at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

One of those who sees the disgrace up-front is Supervisor Hillary Ronen: “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable We’re losing tourists. We’re losing conventions in San Francisco.”

Yet what does she propose as the solution? “We need more temporary beds for street homelessness.”

This is on a par with a “pest control expert” recommending: “We need more sugar to clear up our roach problem.”

Thanks to its mild climate and social programs that dole out cash payments to virtually anyone with no residency requirement, San Francisco is often considered the “homeless capital” of the United States.

According to a 2016 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, there are about 13,000 “homeless” people in San Francisco. Of these, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 refuse shelter.

In 2016, San Francisco spent $275 million on homelessness—up from $241 million in 2015. Public Works cleanup crews picked up more than 679 tons of trash from homeless tent camps—and collected more than 100,000 used syringes from the camps.

In 2016, San Francisco residents made 22,608 complaints about encampments—a five-fold increase from 2015.

City officials euphemistically call this population “the homeless.” That’s because they don’t want to use words that accurately describe those who comprise the overwhelming majority of this population:

Druggies
Drunks
Mentals
Bums.

Or, as even many police, social workers and paramedics who wrestle with this population privately refer to them: DDMBs.

Yet the mere citing of statistics—how many “homeless,” how much money is spent on how many people, how much filth they produce—doesn’t capture the true intensity of the problem.

To do that, you must confront its realities at the street level. Which is what we’ll do in Part Two of this series.

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THE PARKLAND SCHOOL MASSACRE: WHERE BLAME REALLY LIES

In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 28, 2018 at 12:08 am

On February 14, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz slaughtered two faculty members and 15 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

His weapon of choice: An AR-15 assault rifle, often favored by gun massacre killers.

Since then, the National Rifle Association (NRA), President Donald Trump and their shills (paid and unpaid) have sought to distract attention from the reason for the massacre: Easy access to military assault weaponry by virtually anyone.

Among those they have blamed:

“The elites” (who, says Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, “don’t care about America’s schoolchildren”);
Unarmed school teachers (who should have been armed);
Cruz’ neighbors and classmates (who didn’t report his obsession with violence to police);
The media (who “love mass shootings,” according to Dana Loesch, the NRA’s spokeswoman);
The FBI (which fumbled tips that Cruz was a live grenade waiting to go off).
Scot Peterson (the armed school resource officer who stayed outside the school as the shooting unfolded).

According to a series of police reports, Cruz suffered from mental illness and was on behavioral medication. The records described fights at home—and his mother’s fear that Cruz was out of control even as an adolescent.

Nikolas Cruz

Even so, it was not mental illness that made it possible for Cruz to slaughter 17 innocent students and faculty.

It was his access to military-style firepower.

Without that, all he could have done was fantasize about inflicting torment on others. Having access to that firepower allowed him to make his fantasies come true.

And who made it possible for Cruz to obtain that firepower? Those Republicans who are literally on the payroll of the NRA.

To start at the top: President Donald Trump. In 2016, the NRA spent more than $30 million to support him and defeat his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump

And that investment has already paid off: In February, 2017, Trump signed a bill making it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns. This repealed an Obama-era regulation that restricted the rights of seriously incapacitated people to own death-dealing firepower.

In fact, during the 2016 election, the NRA and its affiliate, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, spent a total of $54 million. The vast majority of these monies went to support Republicans or oppose Democrats.

Even so, the NRA has been willing to open its pocketbook to Democrats willing to toe the organization’s line. Rep. Sanford Bishop, of Georgia, has received about $47,000 during his tenure in Congress.

From January 1 to mid-February, 2018, the NRA has spent absolutely nothing to support Democrats, and $337,000 to oppose them.

Then there are Florida’s Republican legislators. All of the following received contributions from the NRA during the 2016 election cycle:

Rep. Gus M. Bilirakis: $2,000
Rep. Carlos Curbelo: $2,500
Rep. Ted Yoho: $1,000
Rep. Daniel Webster: $1,000
Rep. John Rutherford: $1,000
Sen. Marco Rubio: $9,900
Rep. Dennis Ross: $2,000
Rep. Tom Rooney: $2,000
Rep. Bill Posey: $2,000
Rep. Brian Mast: $4,950
Rep. Matt Gaetz: $1,000
Rep. Neal Dunn: $1,000
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart: $2,000 Rep.
Ron DeSantis: $1,000

Then there is Florida Governor Rick Scott.

In 2014, Scott won the praise of the NRA’s Political Victory Fund: “Rick has signed more pro-gun bills into law in one term than any other governor in Florida history.” All of this resulted in his getting an “A+” rating from the organization.

Rick Scott

And what has all this highly-paid political influence bought?

An AR-15 rifle—designed to kill the maximum number of people—is legally easier to obtain than a handgun.
Federal law requires gun buyers to be 21 before buying a handgun. But in Florida, an AR-15 can be purchased at age 18.
Residents aren’t required to register their gun.
But Floridians must be 21 to buy an alcoholic beverage.
No permit or license is needed to buy a gun.
No permit is needed to conceal carry a rifle or shotgun; one is required to conceal carry a handgun.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is required to issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who desires one, as long as: S/he is an American citizen; 21 or older; without a felony conviction; and can prove that s/he is competent with a firearm.
Floridians can buy as many guns as they want at one time.
Florida does not regulate assault weapons, .50-caliber rifles and large capacity ammunition magazines.
Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law allows for the use of deadly force without any obligation to try to avoid violence.

And when criminals and/or the criminally insane turn the weaponry they have legally purchased onto scores of defenseless men, women and children, the NRA again benefits.

For example: One week after the mass slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida legislators voted 71-36 against a measure to consider a ban on semi-automatic weapons.

Yet they declared pornography a public health risk. The bill “recognizes public health risk created by pornography & acknowledges need for education, prevention, research, & policy change to protect citizens of this state.”

Almost all the lawmakers who voted against an assault rifle ban have an “A” rating from the NRA.

Watching in stunned disbelief and outrage were 100 Marjory Stoneman High School students. They had traveled 400 miles from Parkland to the state capital in Tallahassee, hoping to speak with legislators and Governor Scott.

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THE MOST DANGEROUS THERAPY

In History, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on February 26, 2018 at 12:10 am

Chris Kyle was an American patriot—serving four tours of duty in Iraq.

And he was a killer: From 1999 to 2009 he recorded more than 160 confirmed kills as a sniper—the most in U.S. military history. Iraqis came to refer to him as “The Devil” and put a $20,000 bounty on his life.

Chris Kyle

He was an expert on firearms: After leaving combat duty, he became the chief instructor for training the Naval Special Warfare Sniper and Counter-Sniper team. And he authored the Naval Special Warfare Sniper Doctrine, the first Navy SEAL sniper manual.

He was a successful writer—author of the 2012 bestselling American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

In 2013, he wrote the equally bestselling American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms.

He created a nonprofit company, FITCO Cares, to provide at-home fitness equipment for emotionally and physically wounded veterans.

In 2014, his autobiography, American Sniper, became a major film produced and directed by Clint Eastwood. The movie portrays his work as a SEAL marksman in Iraq and his struggles to be a good husband and father during his tours of duty.

And Kyle was a mentor to veterans suffering from PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It was this last activity—and, more importantly, his approach to therapy—that cost him his life.

On February 2, 2015, Kyle and his friend, Chad Littlefield, died in a hail of 13 bullets fired by a semi-automatic pistol.

The murderer: Eddie Ray Routh, an Iraqi war veteran reportedly suffering from PTSD, while the three visited a shooting range in Glen Rose, Texas.

Routh, of Lancaster, Texas, a former corporal in the Marines, had been deployed to Iraq in 2007 and Haiti in 2010.

His motive: “I shot them because they wouldn’t talk to me. I was just riding in the back seat of the truck and nobody would talk to me. They were just taking me to the range so I shot them. I feel bad about it, but they wouldn’t talk to me. I am sure they have forgiven me.”

Eddie Ray Routh

On February 25, 2015, a jury convicted Routh of double murder and sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

Kyle’s believed that shooting could prove therapeutic for those suffering from mental illness. And it was that belief that ultimately killed him.

According to Travis Cox, the director of FITCO Cares: “What I know is Chris and a gentleman—great guy, I knew him well, Chad Littlefield—took a veteran out shooting who was struggling with PTSD to try to assist him, try to help him, try to, you know, give him a helping hand, and he turned the gun on both of them, killing them.”

Chris Kyle was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), whose stance on firearms is best described as: “The more guns, the better.”

The NRA:

Opposes background checks for firearms owners.
Opposes any waiting period for the purchase of a firearm.
Opposes banning the ownership of military-style, “high-capacity” firearms.
Opposes any limits on how many firearms a person may own.
Supports legislation to allow virtually anyone to carry a handgun—openly or concealed—even in bars and churches.
Has successfully pushed “stand-your-ground” laws in more than half the states. These allow the use of deadly force in self-defense, without any obligation to try to retreat first.
Has steadfastly defended the right to own Teflon-coated ”cop killer” bullets,” whose only purpose is to penetrate bullet-resistant vests worn by law enforcement officers.

Chris Kyle was undoubtedly one of the foremost experts on firearms in the United States. Few knew better than he did the rules for safe gun-handling.

And yet he broke perhaps the most basic commonsense rule of all: Never trust an unstable person with a loaded firearm.

And it was the breaking of that rule that killed him.

Even worse, he knew that Routh was unstable. During the drive to the shooting range, he texted Littlefield: ‘This dude is straight-up nuts.”

Kyle, who was 38, was survived by his wife, Taya, and their two children.

Kyle was undoubtedly sincere in wanting to help his fellow veterans who suffered from PTSD.

But he could have offered them different—and far safer—forms of help, such as:

Urging veterans such as Routh to get psychiatric counseling.
Suggesting that they find purpose in a charity such as Habitat for Humanity, which is devoted to building affordable housing for the poor.
Helping them find mental healthcare through the Veterans Administration.

Instead, he chose “gun therapy” as his preferred method of treatment.

Kyle was an expert on using firearms in self-defense. But that knowledge proved useless when he allowed his empathy to overrule his common sense.

Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, has repeatedly asserted: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

But the death of Chris Kyle raises a question that the NRA has yet to answer: If a certified weapons expert can’t protect himself against a psychopathic gunman, how can the rest of us?

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IS THERE A MADMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE?

In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on January 5, 2018 at 11:02 am

On March 4, 2017, in a series of unhinged tweets, President Donald J. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phones prior to the election:

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!”

“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

President Barack Obama

Trump offered no proof to substantiate his libelous claims.

There are three plausible theories about what prompted Trump’s accusations.

Theory #1: They were prompted by Right-wing media outlets that had been pushing wiretapping claims in recent days.

On March 2, Right-wing radio host Mark Levin claimed that Obama had used “powers of the federal government to surveil members of the Trump campaign.”

Referring to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his newly disclosed meetings with Russia’s ambassador in 2016, Levin asked: “Today’s reporting on Sessions having a chance meeting with the ambassador–where did that information come from? Look at the timing of it. Was Obama surveilling top Trump campaign officials during the election?”

On March 3, the Fascist media site Breitbart News echoed that charge. Its story was based on Levin’s show and offered no evidence to back up its accusations.

Trump could have first contacted the directors of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency–the agencies which are authorized to conduct such an operation. He couldhave asked them, “Did you wiretap me?”

They could have quickly and confidentially given him an answer. And if it was “Yes,” they would have been able to provide him with the records to document it.

That would have been the action of a rational President. But Trump chose to act like a child–or, worse, an unbalanced adult.

After reading the Breitbart story, Trump impulsively chose to go on Twitter and make libelous accusations.

Theory #2: Trump, under scrutiny for ties between his campaign and Russia, sought to deflect attention by making an outrageous accusation.

Donald Trump

Former White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest gave his own take on Trump’s motivation. Appearing on the March 5, 2017 edition of ABC’s “This Week”, he said: “We know exactly why President Trump tweeted what he tweeted.

“Because there is one page in the Trump White House crisis management playbook. And that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from the scandal, and the bigger the scandal, the more outrageous the tweet.”

Earnest served as White House Press Secretary under President Obama from 2014 to 2017.

He added: Obama could not have legally ordered a wiretap: “The President of the United States does not have the authority to unilaterally order the wiretapping of an American citizen.”

Theory #3: Trump is too mentally unbalanced to hold the Presidency–and command of America’s nuclear arsenal.

Trump’s shoot-first-and-never-mind-the-consequences approach to life has been thoroughly documented.

From June 15, 2015, when he launched his Presidential campaign, until October 24, 2016, he fired nearly 4,000 angry, insulting tweets at 281 people and institutions. The New York Times needed two full pages of its print edition to showcase them.

Among these targets were:

His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton
His fellow Republican Presidential candidates
Actress Meryl Streep
News organizations
President Barack Obama
Comedian John Oliver
Obamacare
Singer Neil Young
The state of New Jersey
Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And during his first two weeks as President, Trump attacked 22 people, places and things on his @realDonaldTrump account.

Trump’s vindictiveness, his narcissism, his compulsive aggression, his complaints that his “enemies” in government and the press are trying to destroy him, have caused many to ask: Could the President of the United States be suffering from mental illness?

One who has dared to answer this question is John D. Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist.

John D. Gartner

Gartner graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received his Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts, and served as a part time assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years.

During an interview by U.S. News & World Report (published on January 27), Gartner said: “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

Gartner said that Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism,” whose symptoms include anti-social behavior, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia and grandiosity.

“We’ve seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably,” says Gartner, who admits he has not personally examined Trump.

In 1965, Fletcher Knebel, the best-selling author of Seven Days in May, raised the then-unthinkable question: “What would happen if the President of the U.S.A. went stark-raving mad?”

He did so in his novel, Night of Camp David.

In 1965, the idea that an American President might become insane was thought so outlandish it could only appear in a novel.

Fifty-three years later, it’s no longer unthinkable. For millions, it’s a terrifying reality.

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IN SAN FRANCISCO, FEED THE BUMS, NOT THE BIRDS

In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on June 12, 2017 at 12:01 am

If you visit San Francisco, forget what Julie Andrews told you in Mary Poppins: Don’t “Feed the Birds.”

Getting caught doing so can net you a fine from $25 to $1,000.

City officials launched the campaign in 2004, fining people who fed pigeons in the Tenderloin area.

Within a month, they extended the crackdown to Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown and the cable car turnaround in downtown.Feeding birds “damages property, and it’s not good for the bird population,” said Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman for the Public Works Department at the time of the ban.

“We have a whole education campaign letting people know it’s against the law,” said Falvey.

This includes posters erected by the Department of Public Works, which read:

“Please do not feed the pigeons. There are dozens of reasons why, but mainly: feeding pigeons harms our neighborhoods and also harms the birds.

“Large population of pigeons is a health hazard. Our huge feral pigeon population is a health hazard and creates many problems in the city.

“Pigeon droppings dirty public spaces, do costly damage to buildings, and can spread life-threatening diseases, especially to the elderly and immune-deficient. Their nesting materials block drains and harbor parasites like bird mites. Pigeon food makes a mess and attracts rats.

“Feeding pigeons promotes over-breeding. Pigeon feeding produces over-breeding.

“Pigeons normally breed two or three times a year, producing two eggs per brood. Overfed city pigeons can breed up to eight times a year.

“Pigeons are harmed when fed. When you feed pigeons, you are not doing them a favor. They lose their natural ability to scavenge and survive on their own.

“Pigeon over population leads to overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and produces sick and injured birds. A smaller flock is healthier and does less damage.

“It is illegal. It’s against the law to feed pigeons on the streets or sidewalks of San Francisco (Sec. 486. M.P.C). Violators may be cited and fined.

“You can help keep your neighborhood safe and clean and the pigeon population under control by not feeding pigeons. Keep edible garbage away from pigeons by discarding it in a securely covered garbage can.

“And don’t feed pets outside.You may report pigeon feeders to the San Francisco Police Department at 415-553-0123, or by calling 3-1-1.

“Please join in on the efforts to keep San Francisco clean and beautiful by NOT feeding the pigeons.”

* * * * *

At the same time that city officials are telling residents, “Please don’t feed the pigeons,” they aren’t telling them, “Please don’t feed the bums.”

Because of its mild climate and social programs that give cash payments to just-arrived vagrants, San Francisco is often considered the homelessness capital of the United States.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (1996–2004) actually proposed that the city create electronic cards for transients that residents could swipe with their credit cards, thus transferring money from their accounts to that of the recipient.

Brown dropped the idea when faced with the brutal truth that not many citizens–especially women–would be willing to whip out their credit card when confronted by a smelly, unshaved and possibly psychotic transient.

San Francisco spends $250 million annually on services for what are now euphemistically called “the homeless.”That’s because city officials don’t want to use words that accurately describe who makes up the overwhelming majority of this population:

Druggies
Drunks
Mental cases
Bums

Eight city departments oversee at least 400 contracts to 76 private organizations, most of them nonprofits, that are charged with eliminating this pestilence.

Estimates of this population range from 7,000-10,000 people, of which approximately 3,000-5,000 refuse shelter.

A similar public crackdown on “bum-feeders” could go like this:

“Please do not feed the bums. There are dozens of reasons why, but mainly: feeding bums harms our neighborhoods and also harms the bums.

“Our huge feral bum population is a health hazard and creates many problems in the city.Bum droppings dirty public spaces, do costly damage to buildings, and can spread life-threatening diseases, especially to the elderly and immune-deficient.

“Their stolen shopping carts and filthy possessions block sidewalks and harbor parasites like bedbugs and lice. Bum food makes a mess and attracts rats.

“Feeding bums promotes overbreeding. Bums normally travel alone, foraging for drugs and/or alcohol.Pampered city bums flock to liquor stores and drug dens where they can indulge their vices, thus taxing city medical services to the limit.

“When you feed bums, you are not doing them a favor. They lose their natural ability to find work and support themselves and their families.

“Bum over population leads to overcrowded, unsanitary conditions and produces sick and injured bums. A smaller horde is healthier and does less damage.

“It’s against the law to feed bums on the streets or sidewalks of San Francisco. Violators may be cited and fined.

“You can help keep your neighborhood safe and clean and the bum population under control by not feeding bums.

“Keep edible garbage away from bums by discarding it in a securely covered garbage can. And don’t feed bums outside.

“It is Illegal. You may report bum feeders to the San Francisco Police Department at 415-553-0123, or by calling 3-1-1.

“Please join in on the efforts to keep San Francisco clean and beautiful by NOT feeding the bums.”

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IS HE CRIMINAL, CRAZY LIKE A FOX–OR JUST CRAZY?

In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 20, 2017 at 12:53 am

On March 4, in a series of unhinged tweets, President Donald J. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phones prior to the election: