95 Comments

Do the math. $24 billion spent over 5 years is almost $5 billion per year. Divide that by the homeless population of 188K and that's $27,500 per person per year. That's either $2,300 per month for rent or almost $600 per week for groceries.

But as that video showed, the bulk of the $24 billion goes to the administrative costs necessary to deliver a sandwich , an apple, a cookie and a bottle of water to the handful of homeless they can find when not sitting in Starbucks.

It's people farming. The bigger the crop (the homeless), the more farmers you need. That's why homelessness is a "growing" problem.

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It's Gogol's "Dead Souls." You want to acquire as many homeless as you can, for the money and status.

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Don’t forget All the kickbacks going to the legislators that vote for this program.

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California Plantation

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"Do the math. $24 billion spent over 5 years is almost $5 billion per year."

I'm sure that somehow someway some of it is spent on P-K classes in Oakland on Black Finger Painting. It's a California thing.

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Pol Pot would be proud of Mike Fong. Cambodia is a case study of how a small militant extremist minority destroyed an entire country. Our job is to prevent that from happening to California and America.

Fong is a diverse AWFL DEI: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/awfl-dei-karen-affluent-white-female-liberal

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“…Dry Egg Incels”

LOLOLOLOLOL 🤣🤣🤣

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I read that CalMatters story yesterday and was similarly shocked-but-not-shocked. That’s how the Democrats run things, they’re very disciplined and execute to their agenda. They’re also cowards-- a theme of mine since covid. Too cowardly to vote no so they absent themselves from the meeting or abstain.

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Not sure "cowardly" applies in this instance, AW.

Consider: You are a demoncrat legislator. You lead, in spite of never having worked at a real job, a very comfortable existence. You are well compensated, very well indeed, considering you perform virtually no work of value. All you must do, to ensure this very privileged gravy train keeps chuggin' along, is vote as you are instructed. Or NOT vote. If you can achieve the party's objective by abstention, or by simply not showing up, so much the better. You have achieved the result your handlers required of you. Whilst carefully NOT contaminating your voting record with a possible blemish. A "NO" vote which could, conceivably, at some future date, be construed negatively - perhaps in some future campaign.

So “cowardice” while certainly a core characteristic of many democrat-adjacent legislators, may not be the appropriate term of opprobrium in this case. Given the content of so much of the legislation that never gets onto the floor, might it not be that terms like ** scratches head, digs out thesaurus** wicked, evil, heinous, or execrable might be appropriate.

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1.) Anything with a pulse automatically gets $500,000 per election cycle in campaign contributions, mostly from labor unions.

2.) Travel is a campaign expense. Restaurants, cars, hotels. You had to train for campaign operations at a resort in the Caribbean, you see.

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We don’t even need human legislators. A trained monkey or button-pushing robot could do the work and cost much less!

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And a monkey would certainly be more intelligent than several legislators it has been my misfortune to know.

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Surely a monkey would eventually learn from the damage they do with their nonsense. Better to have liberals- they never learn.

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fools like those you mention are tolerated for the express purpose of getting the public to beg for the computer to write all the legislation since the computer might actually do a better job...or not 🤨

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I’m looking forward to the AI-generated floor speeches! We could even get the AI’s to debate each other on some contentious topic. Silicon Valley can totally build this.

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those bots will be trained on data scraped from the facebook accounts of AOC and Pelosi.

ron paul? who he?

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More like Insatiable Birdies.

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Wait. Didn't the Federal government just spend 10+ trillion dollars above the average? Fer what?

Shut up, rural whitey.

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We are definitely at the Late Stage of Empire loot the treasury mode, it’s time for more bread and circus to keep the plebs distracted.

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Agree!

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In an interview about taxpayer-funded food for the homeless being discarded en masse, Kathryn Barger got "pissed off" at the idea of a fucking cookie being thrown out, and then laughed. Are these "people" actually demonically possessed human-like entities?

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probably so because some people at the top are EVIL psychopaths.

They thrive in an environment of malice/destruction/ depravity/ cruelty.

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

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Ryan, indeed, true statements.

Actually, my question was rhetorical, haha. I have been studying these demonically possessed entities (many of whom are MTF trannies in high-level, limelight positions of artificially elevated power) for a couple of years. They're Luciferians, also high-level Freemasons and other clubsters, Satanists, etc. and yes they do worship evil entities as part of a death cult. I call them wayward wizards and their cushy-job-keeping career clowns.

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individual insanity is magnified by collective insanity

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There's someone in my family and the Covid stuff pushed her over the edge. She got deep into manipulating people to take the vaxx, and now she's constantly doing it in the shadows regarding everything. Constant whispering in the shadows, manipulating people to go after each other, so numbed on psych drugs that she has no moral brakes. Insanity.

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People get the government they vote for and are willing to tolerate. Not sure what will cause things to change on a state level. I know every individual has different life and family situations but the only short term solution I see is to locate to an area in the country that shares your value system, puts people into elected office based on that and those people govern in a manner consistent with the will of their constituents.

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In reference to your piece about South Dakota, I think you would really like this article by Aporia.

https://open.substack.com/pub/aporiamagazine/p/fleeing-opportunity?r=885zn&utm_medium=ios

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"locate to an area in the country that shares your value system"

Yep - still there. In the country.

But Shangri La is gettin' harder and harder to find every year.

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YES❗️This excellent advice.

All politics is local. Start there❗️❗️❗️

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In fact, all this DYSFUNCTION we are sensing throughout everything, is a natural outcome of the growth of a BUREAUCRATIC ECONOMY, be it in the public or private sector. Anybody who has, or is, or will, chase after a diploma with the expectation of NOT working like an illegal migrant, is part of the system. It really makes no difference if you're left or right.

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Democrats will continue to Democrat. Post-Roe and post-Dobbs, everything changed. Remember LBJ’s comments after CRA, “we’ll have the ni***rs voting for us for a hundred years?” Replace “n…” with “women” post-Roe/Dobbs and the statement remains accurate.

Nothing will stop the leftward acceleration of Ds as half the franchise became single-issue voters.

Well, if the GOP were smart enough to grasp that a woman’s choice is none of the business of government, and their own idiocy is sacrificing our future, this could end, but they’re not called the “Stupid Party” for no reason

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Democrats would protect abortion until the feet clear the birth canal, is the problem.

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Yeah, but if you recall Roe, the discussion was first trimester. If the GOP showed interest in women’s rights and opened negotiations for first tri, my guess is a lot of young women would consider moving right.

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Goverment “gimmies”, whether financial or some “right” (real or imagined) that never needed to be bureaucratically administered, are hands down some of the greatest evils done to the citizens of our country.

It’s taken well over a hundred years to get to our present sorry state. Fortunately the fall of empires usually takes less time. And we are definitely in the falling stage.

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Manufactured Unity is spot on. You could freelance as a headline writer alone.

"Things that are not debated and evaluated don't work."

Amen!

My own experience with programs that do not work was in foreign language training in the Army. The Army is great at skill acquisition--we take civilians and make them into Soldiers in 8-10 weeks .

'High-difficulty' skill maintenance (unless it is aviation) is another story.

Foreign language maintenance is basically worthless. Soldiers' language proficiency scores plummet after DLI (Defense Language Institute--arguably the best foreign language training in the world). Airmen and Sailors' scores actually improve, but the GI just gets dumber.

I thought about this deeply for about two decades. We created novel training approaches:

1. Simulated immersion. 12-hour school days-no English-meals & PT with instructors. HARD. We violently shoved 150 contact hours (regulatory minimum to proctor annual proficiency test early--needed a 'significant training event--150 hours' to meet this threshold. Usually accomplished in 8-10 week refresher courses.

This program worked famously and it was still going until COVID lockdowns.

2. LingFit. A mashup of Crossfit principles (short, intense bursts of exercise-called Workouts of the Day WODs). We did this in 2009, even had 'an app for that' when that was the lingo.

This program, I later learned, was similar to Khan's Academy. Short 10 minute classes online.

We ran 100s of Soldiers through our immersion, then kept them sharp with LingFit. I honestly thought we were going to change language training for the Army--maybe the DOD. We were onto something.

I was essentially running a tech startup in an Armory--so fun, possibly the most rewarding professional experience of my life. In the top 3 for sure.

How did the Army respond? The DOD? Crickets. All of our data was essentially dismissed.

How could a group of clowns in the ARMY NATIONAL GUARD know better than our experts at DLI?

This story is actually too long for this--but the point of throwing good money after bad, of never inspecting the outcomes of programs with any curiosity, must less honesty--is 100% par for the course.

We need to turn off the spigot. Starve them out. The only way these people will learn, actually probably most people, is from pain.

bsn

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Good example, BN.

Can't help but notice, in the last couple of decades, that NOTHING the government, ANY government does - actually works. And that governments, at all levels, all over the world, are working frantically to eliminate any last vestiges of accountability.

Another commenter on this thread observed that "We are definitely at the Late Stage of Empire loot the treasury mode..." Sadly, that's exactly where we appear to be.

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It is funny you wrote that...I was thinking the same darn thing reading this article and writing about my own fiasco with LingFit.

While I was still in uniform, we would often say while shaking our heads, "We don't want to win."

The incentives are not designed to improve a product/service/outcome--they are only to get bigger.

I also fell into the 'trap of empire building' myself. I was constantly looking for ways to increase our budgets to hire more people (we had exceptionally bright people) to exert influence on the rest of the organization.

It is only in my dotage of 54 that I now see the danger in 'Tower of Babel' enterprises. Less is more--but it took me 35+ years of professional work to begin to understand this at all.

bsn

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“…never inspecting the outcomes of programs…“

The “outcomes of programs” are irrelevant; government measures inputs, not outputs. A politician lives in desperate fear of someone actually measuring the outputs of things he voted for. He prays for voters like Biden’s: 40% support no matter how horrible the outcomes.

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Inspect what you expect. Not inspecting demonstrates that there are no expectations.

Frustrating.

bsn

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What’s important gets measured. What’s measured becomes important. The government response is to avoid measuring what’s important. That would reveal too much. They measure the unimportant and thus make it important. This is the method of the sick, lame, and lazy.

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I repeatedly, until blue in my face, said, "We need to be VERY CAREFUL about what we measure. Metrics soon become the organization. Choose your metric wisely!!"

Subjectivity reigned over objective measurements. Unless the objective measurement was easy to move, we ignored it. Instead we'd put all our input into BS categories like 'readiness' which had no true watermark.

Kinda like leadership. We know what it looks like, but when we try to evaluate leadership objectively--it gets messy. We break it into component parts, then measure those actual objective components--but they do not really add up to leadership. For example, Army leaders need to be fit. SO, if someone maxes the PT test, then they are AWESOME leaders. Uh, maybe not...

bsn

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🎯

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I’ve been designing courseware and teaching, coaching, & mentoring in fighter and commercial aviation, then healthcare for 45 years. I love your story of what you did to fix a known problem. Very creative and innovative. Would love to know more. Sadly, I’ve experienced the same reaction to innovative ideas. I’m now convinced it all hinges on leadership, no matter what industry/profession you’re in. The commonly accepted number is that 70% of all change initiatives fail because of what leadership does or doesn’t do. I suspect this number is even higher for government programs. There is no problem that can’t be made worse with a government intervention led by lousy leaders.

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Whip,

I'll shoot you a message on the 'chat' function. Would love to chat. I love this stuff. I was OBSESSED with improving our language training. It was and remains this intractable problem, but it completely absorbed my thinking for nearly 20 years.

I must have read/listened to 25 books about cognitive neuroscience, neuro-plasticity, pedagogy, talent improvement, training---I went DEEP. It was a blast. I had a team of 10-12 Soldiers creating the 'WODS' (7 different languages). This was 2009-2011, so I was able to put a dozen folks to work full time during the Great Recession.

As for leadership--this is another one of my geek spots. I got an MA in Organizational Leadership, and have been a student of leadership for decades. Along with language training, it is always in the back of my mind.

The problem and the solution is leadership.

bsn

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“…leaky, unaudited spending…” happens exactly because it’s supposed to happen. Leaky and unaudited are the two adjectives that make the entire Federal government grift possible. You can’t get kickbacks, fund the non-profits run by your spouse, brother, and children, or steer government contracts to your nephew who then pays you 10% without things being leaky and unaudited. That’s the main reason leaky and unaudited funding for Ukraine won’t go away. Combine the military industrial complex, the grift, and the worst in the world corruption of Ukraine, and you have the mother of all money laundering schemes.

Also, I am reminded of what one of my Navy buddies said to me about the pay scheme at the airline where we both worked. The company was changing the complex rules on how pilots get paid. I lamented that. He looked at me and said, “It doesn’t matter what rules or scheme they put in place, we’ll figure out a way around it, and work it to our advantage. It’s what Americans do.” He was absolutely correct. The holes in the new pay plan were discovered and leveraged quickly. The pilots with no scruples figured out how to turn 30 vacation days into working only 2 months a year (until the company caught on and changed that, too)The corollary is that it didn’t really matter what governance plan or scheme the founding fathers put into place, if those there are morally compromised who will stop at nothing to game the system for personal benefit. One of the founding fathers said our system was incompatible with anything other than a moral people. The CalMatters story proves his point.

Another great post, Chris.

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My dad managed salesmen at a telecomm company, and he said exactly this. Whatever bonus scheme we design, they'll find the ways to scheme extra cash out of it in a week.

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Yes, but these are good Party members and will do whatever the Party says, comrade. You, on the other hand, are not a good Party member for criticizing them. I bet you are a vax-skeptic, too. The Party is always right, except on the rare occasion when it is wrong, then it is your fault for not submitting to it immediately. Right roader.

Danny Huckabee

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It’s all so tiresome.

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It’s seems that when Democrats run governments, they devolve into giant money laundering operations for Democrats and their cronies. At least when Republicans do the same thing they spread your money to both allies and adversaries alike!

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So you’re giving the Dems muted kudos for being more effective thieves?!? 🤣

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They’ve perfected the grift to a high art form. By a means necessary, comrade.

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Fong and who ever the other one sound like Obummer. Never worked a day in his (?) life.

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I'm pretty sure Saddam Hussein's "parliament" actually had more instances of opposition to legislation than this. At least the man every now and then had *some* shame, looked at constant 100 percent votes and said, geez, ok guys, let's mix it up a *little* bit.

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Actual footage of the California legislature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMljLyj6qJM

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Oh, that a much better building than the actual California capital building!

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Passing thousands of bills every year impresses many voters. "Our legislators are getting a lot of work done." It impresses me too - as evidence that in the last session (and every session before that) they failed to properly address anything. A legislature that does things right one year shouldn't have anything to do the next. Going into the future, it should only occasionally have to address emergent situations/problems. A legislature's main focus should be the budget, but that usually gets short shrift, as everyone spends the session scrambling to pass their pet legislation, that is nearly all aimed at putting money in the pockets of their supporters.

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