#boise state school of public service

[haggishlyhagging]

On March 9, 1977, Francine Hughes returned from business college to her Dansville, Michigan, home and put a frozen dinner in the oven for her husband, James. He didn't like it. Francine, he said, should be at home preparing meals for him, not running off to school. He beat her up, as he had done many times before; and to drive home his point he tore up her schoolbooks and term papers and forced her to burn them in the trash barrel. Twelve-year-old Christy Hughes called the police, who came to the house long enough to calm James down but declined, as they had many times before, to arrest him. They left James, tired from beating Francine, asleep in his bedroom. Determined to "just drive away," Francine piled the children into the family car. "Let's not come back this time, Mommy," they said. She carried a gasoline can to the bedroom, poured the contents around the bed where James lay asleep, backed out of the room, and set a match to it The rust of flame sucked the door shut.

Francine Hughes drove immediately to the Ingham County sheriffs office, crying hysterically, "I did it. I did it." She was charged with first-degree murder.

Dansville adjoins East Lansing, home of Michigan State University and consequently of many social-action groups. Within two months feminists and other interested people in the Lansing area had formed the Francine Hughes Defense Committee to raise money and public awareness for her defense. They were careful to say that they neither advocated nor condoned murder, but they held that women confronted with violence have a right to defend themselves. They argued that "Francine Hughes—and many other women facing similar charges—should be free from the threat of punishment," for Francine Hughes was a battered woman.

At the time wife-beating was a growing feminist issue, following close on the heels of feminist attacks upon rape, a crime it resembles in many ways. Both rape and wife-beating are crimes of violence against women. Both are widespread, underreported, trivialized, and inadequately punished by the legal system. Both are acts of terrorism intended to keep all women in their place through intimidation. In fact, rape is often part of wife abuse, though so far only a few states acknowledge even the possibility of rape within marriage. The chief difference between the two crimes is that while the victim of nonmarital rape must live with a terrifying memory, the abused wife lives with her assailant. Rapists are, in Susan Brownmiller's phrase, the "shock troops" of male supremacy. Wife-beaters are the home guard.

American feminists took up the issue of wife-beating when they learned in 1971 of the work of Erin Pizzey, founder of Chiswick Women's Aid, the first shelter house in England exclusively for battered women and their children. Rainbow Retreat, the first American shelter for abused families of alcoholics opened in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 1, 1973; and in St. Paul, Minnesota, Women's Advocates, a collective that began with a phone service in 1972, opened Women's House to battered women and their children in October 1974. Rainbow Retreat, during its first two and a half years, sheltered more than six hundred women and children. In St. Paul the five-bedroom Women's House sheltered twenty-two women and fifteen children during its first month of operation; less than a year later Women's Advocates were negotiating to buy a second house. Across the country the shelter movement spread to Pasadena, San Francisco, Seattle, Boise, Albuquerque, Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor, Boston, New York. To open a shelter was to fill it beyond capacity almost overnight. Suddenly it seemed that battered women were everywhere.

While activists opened shelters, researchers and writers set about documenting the problem of wife-beating or, as it came to be called more euphemistically in the academic literature, "domestic violence." The records showed that 60 percent of night calls in Atlanta concerned domestic disputes. In Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the nation's wealthiest counties, police received 4,073 disturbance calls in 1974. During ten months in 1975-76 the Dade County Florida Citizens Dispute Settlement Center handled nearly 1,000 wife-beating cases. Seventy percent of all assault cases received in the emergency room at hospitals in Boston and Omaha were women who had been attacked in their homes. Eighty percent of divorce cases in Wayne County, Michigan, involved charges of abuse. Ninety-nine percent of female Legal Aid clients in Milwaukee were abused by men.

The FBI guessed that a million women each year—women of every race and social class—would be victims of wife-beating. Journalists Roger Langley and Richard C. Levy put the figure at more than 28 million. Some said that one in four women married to or cohabiting with a man would become a victim; others said one in three. In some areas the incidence seemed even greater. In California the experts said one of every two women would be beaten. And in Omaha, the Mayor's Commission on the Status of Women estimated that 95 percent of women would be abused at some time. There scarcely seemed need of additional evidence, so the same statistics began to turn up in every new account, but repetitious as they were, they showed all too clearly that wife-beating is a social problem of astounding dimensions.

-Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

[hazelxorealestate]

From Boise to the Mountains: How Idahos Infrastructure Boom is Driving Real Estate Value

Discover how investment in Idaho's infrastructure is transforming the real estate market, with Boise emerging as a hot spot for growth.

Table of Contents

Improved Transportation Networks

Economic Growth and Job Opportunities

Enhanced Public Services and Amenities

Sustainability and Environmental Initiatives

Conclusion

With its stunning landscapes, outdoor recreational opportunities, and growing economy, Idaho has been attracting more residents and businesses in recent years. One key factor driving this influx is the state's expanding infrastructure. From improved transportation networks to enhanced public services and sustainability initiatives, Idaho's infrastructure developments are not only boosting connectivity and convenience but also playing a significant role in increasing real estate values across the state.

Improved Transportation Networks

Idaho's investment in its transportation infrastructure has been a game-changer for the real estate market. New highways, bridges, and public transportation options have made it easier for residents to commute to work, access amenities, and explore the region. As a result, properties in well-connected areas are experiencing a surge in demand and value.

Economic Growth and Job Opportunities

The growth of Idaho's economy has been fueled by the state's diverse industry sectors, from technology and manufacturing to agriculture and tourism. With new businesses and job opportunities emerging, more people are choosing to call Idaho home. This increase in population is driving up the demand for housing, leading to higher property values in growing communities.

Enhanced Public Services and Amenities

Idaho's commitment to improving public services and amenities is also contributing to the rise in real estate values. From top-rated schools and healthcare facilities to recreational spaces and cultural attractions, these additions are making neighborhoods more attractive and desirable for potential buyers. As a result, properties in areas with access to quality amenities are seeing an uptick in value.

Sustainability and Environmental Initiatives

Idaho's focus on sustainability and environmental initiatives is not only benefiting the environment but also boosting real estate values. Green infrastructure projects, energy-efficient buildings, and eco-friendly developments are gaining popularity among buyers who prioritize sustainability. Properties that incorporate these eco-friendly features are commanding higher prices and attracting environmentally-conscious buyers.

Conclusion

As Idaho's infrastructure continues to expand and evolve, the state's real estate market is poised for continued growth and appreciation. The investment in transportation networks, economic development, public services, and sustainability initiatives is driving up property values and creating new opportunities for residents and investors alike. Whether you're looking to buy, sell, or invest in Idaho real estate, now is a great time to explore the possibilities in this thriving and dynamic market.

[astro-bird]

Get it Together BSU

Alright children, buckle in cause this is going to be a long ride.

Earlier this week, the facebook page for Boise State School of public service shared an opinion piece written by Scott Yenor, a tenured political science professor. The title of the piece? “Transgender Activists are Seeking to Undermine Parental rights.” I’m disappointed in my alma mater to say the least, and even more disappointed in the response of the school of public service to the back lash. But let’s start at the beginning with the “article” itself.

I won’t link to it, cause I don’t want the Daily Signal to get any more views than it already has, but I will quote large sections of it in order to give context.

Radical feminists aspire to revolutionize society in three ways.

First, they seek to eliminate the different ways boys and girls are socialized, so that they will come to have very similar characters and temperaments.

Second, they seek to cultivate financial and emotional independence of women and children from the family.

Third, they hope to erase sexual taboos, embracing new ways for individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction outside of monogamous, procreative marriage.

So...I don’t entirely get why any of this is a problem? And it’s not like feminists are hiding that these are their goals. Great start.

Same-sex marriage undermined sex roles within marriage. It put children ever more outside the purpose of marriage. It reinforced the idea that all means of sexual satisfaction are equal.

Again, not sure what the problem is. Didn’t know children was ever the sole purpose of marriage either. 

Parental rights are related to the age of consent, which states protect in order for children to give time and space to become mature, independent adults. Americans do not want their children overly sexualized, and they respect the right of parents to educate their children.

Alright, we’re getting into the purpose of this article. We’ve got a brief explanation of parental rights. 

Transgender rights activists are seeking to abridge parental rights by elevating the independent choices of young children. Respecting the sexual and gender “choices” of ever-younger children erodes parental rights and compromises the integrity of the family as an independent unit.

I’ve got two things to say to this. 1. Children have rights as well. Parental rights don’t take precedent over the child’s rights. 2. The idea of an independent, nuclear family unit is a recent development in society. It developed in the 40s when a “family” could reliably be supported on one income. For most of human history, the raising of children was a community effort.

American states such as Minnesota are now promoting the transgender ideology in elementary schools against the wishes of parents. They have made “gender identity” toolkits available to kindergarten teachers, so that 5-year-olds can learn to explore their identities.

These laws, and others like them, aim to make children independent of their parents and to bless their sexual exploration even at a young age. They undermine the foundation of educating children toward marriage and family life.

Apparently exploring how a child identifies themselves is sexual exploration. Cause gender identity and sexual orientation are apparently the same thing? No one tell this guy about this children’s book. Also, um, it’s perfectly normal for children to explore their sexuality?

And all of this is ignoring the fact that GENDER is not the same as SEXUALITY.

Around half of American women of childbearing age do not have children, so parental rights will not in the future be respected because majorities of Americans are actually parents.

Those interested in securing parental rights must see these rights protected in law and promoted in public opinion, and more and more must come to see that the public interest is promoted through respecting parental rights even though they are not parents.

Again our lovely professor makes a point that I see nothing wrong with. So what if women aren’t having children as much? What’s actually wrong with that? Also, assuming I’m reading this horribly phrased sentence correctly, if the majority of Americans are not parents, we’ll still have parental rights, whether that’s for better or worse. Cause we’ve got this whole thing here about protecting minorities. Something I imagine this guy is probably against.

Essentially, this whole argument boils down to “children can do things and that’s bad cause family.” It’s a badly made argument, that honestly doesn’t even have much to do with transgender identities. He seems to have a problem with the whole concept of seeing children as people.

So that’s the article in question. Shared by the school of public service. And here we reach the crux of why this is a problem. The piece by Yenor contained the trifecta of homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia. Unsurprisingly, people were not happy that a page affiliated with a school with this quote on their shared values page:  “Being civil means being constantly aware of others and weaving restraint, respect and consideration into the very fabric of this awareness,” (Forni, 2002, p. 9). So, after more than a hundred comments decrying this piece as not upholding BSU standards, how does the school of public service respond?

** Editorial Policy ** The School of Public Service Facebook page exists to promote the programs and institutes of the Boise State School of Public Service. We share the published work of our faculty not to endorse the ideas or opinions expressed, but to encourage robust discourse. Our faculty maintains a diversity of thoughts and opinions and the School shares those expressions in the interest of encouraging the civil dialogue necessary for an open and democratic society. We encourage students, faculty, and staff at Boise State, and the general public, to share their opinions on any post. And competing perspectives are always encouraged. This is a forum that we have opened for the free expression of ideas. However, if you believe content here violates Facebook’s community standards, please contact Facebook; if you believe content here constitutes harassment or otherwise constitutes speech not necessarily allowed in this forum, please email reportdiscrimination@boisestate.edu. Posts and comments will not be deleted by the University unless they constitute speech that the University determines is not Constitutionally protected.

“Encourage robust discourse” and “civil dialogue”? Because debating the validity of subsets of humanity has worked out great in the past. See slavery, the holocaust, etc. While the piece may not directly constitute harassment, I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable in a class taught by this guy. That doesn’t exactly promote an inclusive campus.

The facebook page further went on to share this article in an attempt to remain “neutral” and “balanced.” I mean, cool article but I have to wonder if they would have shared it if there hadn’t been such a backlash to the Yenor piece. Also isn’t a “published work of our faculty.” Just saying.

Then...THEN we got a wonderful non-apology apology posted at 9 pm on Saturday night. Let’s go through that shall we?

The decision to post the article was not an attempt to endorse Professor Yenor’s opinions or arguments, but rather the result of a decision rule that our Facebook administrator highlight the published work of faculty across the School.

...Okay.

“Content neutrality” is a fine guideline in principle, but it masks the broader dilemma facing higher education today. We encourage our faculty to engage in important public discussions and to help inform those debates with their disciplinary knowledge because we think that public higher education promotes core democratic values. Additionally, and as importantly, we strive to be an inclusive campus in which students, staff, and faculty are welcomed, respected, and valued.

Two things. “Broader dilemma facing higher education today”? I think I see where this is going. Second, Yenor’s piece clearly did not make people feel welcomed, respected and valued.

As we prepare students to be effective participants in a diverse democracy, we recognize that intolerance undermines core democratic values and indeed does violence to our community. The vast majority of the time, these two values are mutually reinforcing. But in this case it is clear that they are in conflict.

Alright, acknowledgment that this piece was a problem!

It saddens me that our alumni, students and others are disappointed in the University and have been made to feel demeaned and further marginalized. I sincerely apologize that by drawing attention to Professor Yenor’s piece we have given the impression that we are in agreement with his perspective and worse that we do not value or respect the diversity of our students, faculty, and staff. To be clear, the School of Public Service does not endorse the opinions expressed in Professor Yenor’s piece in The Daily Signal or the scholarly writing upon which that piece is based.

Look at that carefully worded phrasing! “Been made to feel.” Not “feel demeaned” but “made to feel.” Do you see what they did there? That simple inclusion puts part of the blame on the people feeling demeaned! To the rest of this part? ...Okay.

But at the same time, I am not willing to condemn Professor Yenor’s scholarship and writings or worse, agree with those posters who question why university faculty should be engaging in public debates at all. In talking with faculty and staff from diverse political perspectives across the country I worry deeply about the contemporary political environment and the chilling effect it is having on discourse at public universities.

And there it is. “I won’t condemn these hateful, bigoted remarks.” And bonus! PC culture is ruining higher education!

The “apology” then goes on to talk about some event thing I have no knowledge of so I won’t comment on it. 

As the New York Times put in a recent OpEd, college campus should not be in the business of providing a smooth passage across an ocean of ideas. Instead, the truth emerges from a "contest of perspectives and an assault on presumptions."

I think they missed the key part here. OpEd. OPINION. That does not mean it is fact. And I don’t believe any colleges are “providing a smooth passage.” Students are reacting by making “an assault on presumptions.” And universities are calling them whiny babies. I don’t believe students are expecting to be coddled, I think they’re just fighting back to not let harmful ideas be given a platform for communication. Maybe if we stop trying to debate these people, we can actually have more important discourse. People are tired of arguing “I am a human and I deserve respect.” We want to start talking about more than basic rights. We want to progress as a society. 

But anyway, the rest of the “apology” is rather boring stuff along the lines of “we’re good people” and “my free speech!” I don’t think it requires much of a response since it’s just a lot of meaningless talk.

The “apology” was signed by the dean of the School of Public service, and has been receiving just as much backlash as the rest of this debacle. It would have been easy for him to instead say “we apologize for posting such an inflammatory article. We’ll screen further articles more carefully in the future.” There. Done. No need to go on a rant about how we’re all little babies that need coddling. We’ve heard it a million times before and we’re sick of it. 

I can only hope that the university at large will make a statement condemning Yenor’s viewpoint.

[aaronkunz]

(Press Release) Gov. Little bans ‘vaccine passports’ in Idaho

Boise, Idaho – Governor Brad Little signed an executive order today banning any State of Idaho governmental entity from requiring so-called “vaccine passports” – or proof of COVID-19 vaccination for citizens to receive public services or access facilities.

“Idahoans should be given the choice to receive the vaccine. We should not violate Idahoans’ personal freedoms by requiring them to receive it,” Governor Little said. “Vaccine passports create different classes of citizens. Vaccine passports restrict the free flow of commerce during a time when life and the economy are returning to normal. Vaccine passports threaten individual freedom and patient privacy.”

Some states are exploring the creation of vaccine passports, and the State of New York is promoting a software program that will facilitate the exclusion of Americans who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine from receiving services and fully participating in public life, the Governor’s executive order states.

“I have serious concerns that implementing COVID-19 vaccine passports will violate Idahoans’ medial privacy rights, prejudice those unable to receive the vaccine, slow our economic recovery, cause division among our populace and, ultimately, be counterproductive to the widespread administration of the COVID-19 vaccines among Idahoans,” Governor Little said.

Governor Little noted close to half a million Idahoans have received the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine. He continues to urge Idahoans to choose to receive the vaccine to protect lives and return life, schools, and the economy to normal.

[antoine-roquentin]

Even more striking than the scale of need are the shifting demographics of who is eating here and why. The homeless population is getting younger, staffers say, and more likely to have children and full-time jobs. In one hour, over taco salad and Fanta, I meet fast-food employees, a former car salesman who lost his home in the financial crisis and a pregnant 31-year-old whose baby is due the same month her housing vouchers run out.

But the biggest surprise about St. Vincent’s may be the state in which it’s located. Just four years ago, Utah was the poster child for a new approach to homelessness, a solution so simple you could sum it up in five words: Just give homeless people homes.

In 2005, the state and its capital started providing no-strings-attached apartments to the “chronically” homeless — people who had lived on the streets for at least a year and suffered from mental illness, substance abuse or a physical disability. Over the next 10 years, Utah built hundreds of housing units, hired dozens of social workers ― and reduced chronic homelessness by 91 percent.

The results were a sensation. In 2015, breathless media reports announced that a single state, and a single policy, had finally solved one of urban America’s most vexing problems. Reporters from around the country came to Utah to gather lessons for their own cities. In a widely shared “Daily Show” segment, Hasan Minhaj jogged the streets of Salt Lake City, asking locals if they knew where all the homeless people had gone.

But this simplistic celebration hid a far more complex truth. While Salt Lake City targeted a small subset of the homeless population, the overall problem got worse. Between 2005 and 2015, while the number of drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless people fell dramatically, the number of people sleeping in the city’s emergency shelter more than doubled. Since then, unsheltered homelessness has continued to rise. According to 2018 figures, the majority of unhoused families and single adults in Salt Lake City are experiencing homelessness for the first time.

“People thought that if we built a few hundred housing units we’d be out of the woods forever,” said Glenn Bailey, the executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a Salt Lake City food bank. “But if you don’t change the reasons people become homeless in the first place, you’re just going to have more people on the streets.”

This is not just a Salt Lake City story. Across the country, in the midst of a deepening housing crisis and widening inequality, homelessness has concentrated in America’s most prosperous cities. So far, municipal leaders have responded with policies that solve a tiny portion of the problem and fail to account for all the ways their economies are pushing people onto the streets.

The reality is that no city has ever come close to solving homelessness. And over the last few years, it has become clear that they cannot afford to.

Eric (not his real name) is exactly the kind of person Utah’s policy experiment was intended to help. He is 55 years old and has been homeless for most of his life. He takes medication for his schizophrenia, but his paranoia still leads him to cash his disability checks and hide them in envelopes around the city. When he lived on the streets, his drug of choice was a mix of heroin and cocaine. These days it’s meth.

Despite all his complications, Eric is a success story. He lives in a housing complex in the suburbs of Salt Lake City that was built for the chronically homeless. He has case workers who ensure that he takes his medications and renews his benefits. While he may never live independently, he is far better off here than in a temporary shelter, a jail cell or sleeping on the streets.

The problem for policymakers is that Eric is no longer emblematic of American homelessness. In Salt Lake City, just like everywhere else, the population of people sleeping on the streets looks a lot different than it used to.

As the economy has come out of the Great Recession, America’s unhoused population has exploded almost exclusively in its richest and fastest-growing cities. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of people living on the streets declinedby 11 percent nationwide — and surged by 26 percent in Seattle, 47 percent in New York City and 75 percent in Los Angeles. Even smaller cities, like Reno and Boise, have seen spikes in homelessness perfectly coincide with booming tech sectors and falling unemployment.  

In other words, homelessness is no longer a symbol of decline. It is a product of prosperity. And unlike Eric, the vast majority of people being pushed out onto the streets by America’s growing urban economies do not need dedicated social workers or intensive medication regimes. They simply need higher incomes and lower housing costs.

“The people with the highest risk of homelessness are the ones living on a Social Security check or working a minimum-wage job,” said Margot Kushel, the director of the UCSF. Center for Vulnerable Populations. In 2015, she led a team of researchers who interviewed 350 people living on the streets in Oakland. Nearly half of their older interviewees were experiencing homelessness for the first time.

“If they make it to 50 and they’ve never been homeless, there’s a good chance they don’t have severe mental illness or substance abuse issues,” Kushel said. “Once they become homeless, they start to spiral downward really quickly. They’re sleeping three to four hours a night, they get beat up, they lose their medications. If you walk past them in a tent, they seem like they need all these services. But what they really needed was cheaper rent a year ago.”

Other research has found the same connection between housing costs and homelessness. In 2012, researchers found that a $100 increase in monthly rent in big cities was associated with a 15 percent rise in homelessness. The effect was even stronger in smaller cities.

“Once you’re homeless, it’s a steep hill to climb back up,” Bailey said. “When an eviction is on your record, it’s even steeper. And even if you do get back into housing, you’re still one illness or one car problem away from becoming homeless again.”

And rising affluence isn’t just transforming the economic factors that cause homelessness. It is also changing the politics of the cities tasked with solving it. Across the country, as formerly poor neighborhoods have gentrified, politicians are facing increasingly strident calls to criminalize panhandling and bulldoze tent encampments. While city residents consistently tell pollsters that they support homeless services in principle, specific proposals to build shelters or expand services face vociferous local opposition.

“The biggest hindrance to solving homelessness is that city residents keep demanding the least effective policies,” said Sara Rankin, the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at Seattle University School of Law. The evidenceoverwhelminglydemonstrates that punishing homeless people makes it harder for them to find housing and get work. Nonetheless, the most common demands from urban voters are for politicians to increase arrests, close down soup kitchens and impose entry requirements and drug tests in shelters.

“Homelessness is a two-handed problem,” Rankin said. “One hand is everything you’re doing to make it better and the other is everything you’re doing to make it worse. Right now, we spend far more effort undoing our progress than advancing it.”

No municipality demonstrates this dynamic better than Salt Lake City. Thanks to rising housing and construction costs, the building of new homeless housing has slowed to a trickle. A plan to replace the city’s central homeless shelter with a handful of smaller, suburban facilities has been delayed and scaled down due to neighborhood opposition. In 2017, after years of demands by downtown residents and businesses, Utah initiated a $67 million law enforcement crackdown on the population sleeping on the streets of its state capital. In its first year, the campaign resulted in more than 5,000 arrests — and just 101 homeless people being placed into housing.

And there are no signs that it’s going to get better. The economy is creating new homeless people faster than cities can house them.And the worse the problem gets, the harder it becomes to solve.

“The entire system has stalled,” said Andrew Johnston, the vice president of program operations for Volunteers of America Utah, one of the largest service providers in Salt Lake City. “As the economy has improved, policymakers seem to believe that the market will supply affordable housing on its own. But if you don’t put public and private money into it, you’re not going to get it.”

Three years after she escaped from homelessness, Georgia Gregersen’s most enduring memory is how quickly she fell into it.

“I’m a waitress, I’m at home with a new baby and three months later I’m sleeping in an empty parking garage,” said Gregersen, who now lives in a Salt Lake City suburb.

Her story plays out as a series of unraveling safety nets. She had been trying to get clean for years, but the waitlists for rehab were months long. She got on methadone when she found out she was pregnant, but it cost $85 per week, almost as much as she had been spending on heroin. After her son was born she was eligible for daycare vouchers, but the never-ending paperwork — “something was always wrong or required another appointment” — meant she never actually got them.

Eventually, the cost of childcare and the stress of being a single mom got to her and she relapsed. Within weeks she had lost her job and handed her son over to her parents. Her aunt, with whom she had been staying, asked her to move out.

Sleeping outside made her even more desperate to get clean, but everywhere she turned her options were cut off. Every halfway house and detox center in Salt Lake City was full. When she applied for subsidized housing, a government official told her it would take two years just to get on the waiting list.

“I thought, I’ll probably be dead by then,” she said.

Gregersen spiraled downward in 2015, right around the time Utah announced it had ended chronic homelessness. Unlike the recipients of that experiment — most of whom required 24-hour, lifelong support — Gregersen didn’t need permanent supportive housing. She needed every other form of support to be adequately funded and available when she needed it.

“We always look to one thing to be the answer,” she said, “but I needed everything, and in concert.”

Gregersen’s story perfectly encapsulates the challenge of urban policy in a changing and deteriorating America. Truly ending homelessness will require cities to systematically repair all the cracks in the country’s brittle, shattered welfare system. From drug treatment to rental assistance to subsidized child care, the only way to address the crisis is through a concerted — and costly — expansion of government assistance.

And yet, even as homelessness becomes a defining feature of urban growth, no city in America can afford to meaningfully address it.  

“Politicians keep proposing quick fixes and simple solutions because they can’t publicly admit that solving homelessness is expensive,” Kushel said. Before the 1980s, she points out, most of the responsibility for low-income housing, rental assistance and mental health treatment fell on the federal government.

Since then, though, these costs have been systematically handed over to cities. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of low-income households receiving federal rental assistance dropped by more than half. Hundreds of thousands of mental health treatment beds have disappeared. Despite having far deeper pockets, the federal government now spends less per homeless person than the city of San Francisco.  

The relentless localization of responsibility means that cities are spending more than they ever have on homelessness and, at the same time, nowhere near enough. L.A.’s recent $1.2 billion housing bond is one of the largest in American history. It will construct 1,000 permanent supportive housing units every year — in a city where 14,000 people need one. According to a 2018 analysis, Seattle would have to double its current spending to provide housing and services for everyone living on the streets.

Smaller cities have an even wider spending gap. According to Salt Lake City’s Housing & Neighborhood Development Department, building one unit of affordable housing costs roughly $154,000. Providing a home to all 6,800 people currently accessing homeless services would cost the city roughly $1 billion — two-thirds of its entire annual budget.

“We know that it’s cheaper in the long run to provide housing for homeless people, but cities don’t get money back when that happens,” said Tony Sparks, an urban studies professor at San Francisco State University. Expanding social support and building subsidized housing require huge upfront investments that may not pay off for decades. Though the costs of managing a large homeless population mostly fall on hospitals and law enforcement, reducing the burden on those systems won’t put spending back in city coffers.

“If you know how city budgets work, everything goes into a different pot,” Sparks said. “When you save money on health care, it just goes back into the health care system. It doesn’t trickle sideways.”

But all the challenges of funding their response to homelessness doesn’t mean cities are entirely powerless. For a start, municipal leaders could remove the zoning codes that make low-income housing and homeless shelters illegal in their residential neighborhoods. They could replace encampment sweeps and anti-panhandling laws with municipally sanctioned tent cities. They could update their eviction regulations to keep people in the housing they already have.

Cities can also, crucially, address the huge diversity of the homeless population. Rankin points out that for young mothers, the most frequent cause of homelessness is domestic abuse. For young men, it is often a recent discharge from foster care or prison. The young homeless population is disproportionately gay and trans.

All these populations are already interacting with dozens of municipal agencies that haven’t been designed to serve them. Even without major new funding sources, cities could do a lot better with the systems they already have. Schools, for example, could provide social workers for unhoused students. Libraries could invite health care workers to help homeless patrons manage their chronic illnesses. Law enforcement agencies could reorient themselves around outreach and harm reduction rather than arrests and encampment sweeps.

[catching-kisses]

Rethinking my career path

I've decided not to become an esthetician. It sounds like a fun job, but I'm not passionate about it! After Maddie was born I thought long and hard about becoming a IBCLC because of my negative experience with breastfeeding, but I decided against it because the education was costly and would take a long time. Being a lactation consultant is still an option that I'm drawn to, but I feel like it's not good enough for a career on its own without being certified. Now, after seeing some posts from my birth center and other people and pages I follow, I've been reconsidering working in the birth world. I would love to one day become a Certified Professional Midwife or maybe even a Certified Nurse Midwife. It's a lofty goal though and I'm not ready to make such huge steps and commit to the schooling. Maybe when all of my babies are in school I could start that, but for now I'm reading all about doulas and childbirth educators and what kinds of certification programs are out there. I found one that I could do, but the next workshop here is going to be March 21-24 and Maddie's birthday is the 22nd so I'd have to wait for one after that and I have no idea when they'll come back to Boise. Another is completely online but you have to do 8 hours of childbirth education and attend 3 births before you're certified as a doula. A few others I've found don't really come to Idaho and I'm not going to be able to travel out of State for several days. So I really like the online program but I'm having a hard time deciding if I should do it and which path I should take. Being a doula sounds exciting but I know there's always going to be the on-call element (unless it's a scheduled hospital birth) and that will be hard with Maddie. Being a childbirth educator also sounds fun, but I'm not so great at public speaking until I get warmed up and I'm not really sure how many job opportunities there are with that. I have a good support system to help with Maddie and I can always find a babysitter if I need to, so maybe I should just go for the doula certification? I think it might be a waste of time to get certified in postpartum before labor though. Maybe after I finish the labor one I'll go back for more. Idk, I guess I'll figure that out later. I'm also looking into birth services here to see what they all do and I've found a couple businesses that I could work for to start out and do some networking with. It's all so exciting. I really should just do it because the only thing holding me back is myself.

[newstfionline]

The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

Bloomberg, November 20, 2018

It was just after 10 p.m. on an overcast September night in Los Angeles, and L. was tired from a long day of class prep, teaching, and grading papers. So the 57-year-old anthropology professor fed her Chihuahua-dachshund mix a freeze-dried chicken strip, swapped her cigarette trousers for stretchy black yoga pants, and began to unfold a set of white sheets and a beige cotton blanket to make up her bed.

But first she had to recline the passenger seat of her 2015 Nissan Leaf as far as it would go--that being her bed in the parking lot she’d called home for almost three months. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was playing on her iPad as she drifted off for another night. “Like sleeping on an airplane--but not in first class,” she said. That was in part by design. “I don’t want to get more comfortable. I want to get out of here.”

L., who asked to go by her middle initial for fear of losing her job, couldn’t afford her apartment earlier this year after failing to cobble together enough teaching assignments at two community colleges. By July she’d exhausted her savings and turned to a local nonprofit called Safe Parking L.A., which outfits a handful of lots around the city with security guards, port-a-potties, Wi-Fi, and solar-powered electrical chargers. Sleeping in her car would allow her to save for a deposit on an apartment. On that night in late September, under basketball hoops owned by an Episcopal church in Koreatown, she was one of 16 people in 12 vehicles. Ten of them were female, two were children, and half were employed.

The headline of the press release announcing the results of the county’s latest homeless census strikes a note of progress: “2018 Homeless Count Shows First Decrease in Four Years.” In some ways that’s true. The figure for people experiencing homelessness dropped 4 percent, a record number got placed in housing, and chronic and veteran homelessness fell by double digits. But troubling figures lurk. The homeless population is still high, at 52,765--up 47 percent from 2012. Those who’d become homeless for the first time jumped 16 percent from last year, to 9,322 people, and the county provided shelter for roughly 5,000 fewer people than in 2011.

All this in a year when the economy in L.A., as in the rest of California and the U.S., is booming. That’s part of the problem. Federal statistics show homelessness overall has been trending down over the past decade as the U.S. climbed back from the Great Recession, the stock market reached all-time highs, and unemployment sank to a generational low. Yet in many cities, homelessness has spiked.

It’s most stark and visible out West, where shortages of shelter beds force people to sleep in their vehicles or on the street. In Seattle, the number of “unsheltered” homeless counted on a single night in January jumped 15 percent this year from 2017--a period when the value of Amazon.com Inc., one of the city’s dominant employers, rose 68 percent, to $675 billion. In California, home to Apple, Facebook, and Google, some 134,000 people were homeless during the annual census for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in January last year, a 14 percent jump from 2016. About two-thirds of them were unsheltered, the highest rate in the nation.

At least 10 cities on the West Coast have declared states of emergency in recent years. San Diego and Tacoma, Wash., recently responded by erecting tents fit for disaster relief areas to provide shelter for their homeless. Seattle and Sacramento may be next.

The reason the situation has gotten worse is simple enough to understand, even if it defies easy solution: A toxic combo of slow wage growth and skyrocketing rents has put housing out of reach for a greater number of people. According to Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing giant, the portion of rental units affordable to low earners plummeted 62 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Rising housing costs don’t predestine people to homelessness. But without the right interventions, the connection can become malignant. Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

Homelessness first gained national attention in the 1980s, when declining incomes, cutbacks to social safety net programs, and a shrinking pool of affordable housing began tipping people into crisis. President Ronald Reagan dubiously argued that homelessness was a lifestyle choice. By the mid-2000s, though, the federal government was taking a more productive approach. George W. Bush’s administration pushed for a “housing first” model that prioritized getting people permanent shelter before helping them with drug addiction or mental illness. Barack Obama furthered the effort in his first term and, in 2010, vowed to end chronic and veteran homelessness in five years and child and family homelessness by 2020.

Rising housing costs are part of the reason some of those deadlines were missed. The Trump administration’s proposal to hike rents on people receiving federal housing vouchers, and require they work, would only make the goals more elusive. Demand for rental assistance has long outstripped supply, leading to yearslong waits for people who want help. But even folks who are lucky enough to have vouchers are increasingly struggling to use them in hot housing markets. A survey by the Urban Institute this year found that more than three-quarters of L.A. landlords rejected tenants receiving rental assistance.

It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. Meanwhile, the nonprofit Community Solutions has worked with Chicago, Phoenix, and other cities to gather quality, real-time data about their homeless populations so they can better coordinate their interventions and prioritize spending. The approach has effectively ended veterans’ homelessness in eight communities, including Riverside County in California.

Efficiency can go only so far. More resources are needed in the places struggling the most with homelessness. McKinsey calculated that to shelter people adequately, Seattle would have to increase its outlay to as much as $410 million a year, double what it spends now. Still, that’s less than the $1.1 billion the consultants estimate it costs “as a result of extra policing, lost tourism and business, and the frequent hospitalization of those living on the streets.” Study after study, from California to New York, has drawn similar conclusions. “Doing nothing isn’t doing nothing,” says Sara Rankin, a professor at Seattle University’s School of Law and the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project. “Doing nothing costs more money.”

Then there’s the moral argument for action. “It’s outrageous to me that in a country with so much wealth--and certainly enough for everybody--that there are people who lack even the basics for survival,” says Maria Foscarinis, founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Appeals to humanity were part of the strategy in the 1980s, when she and other activists helped push through the first major federal legislation to fight homelessness. Her organization has led a charge against laws that make it a crime to sleep outside in public places, one of the more insidious ways politicians have addressed the crisis. In July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the unconstitutionality of such bans in a case that Foscarinis’s group--along with Idaho Legal Aid Services and Latham & Watkins--brought against two such ordinances in Boise. “As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the court wrote. The ruling has led cities, including Portland, Ore., and Berkeley, Calif., to change their policies.

To placate angry constituents, officials too often settle for temporary solutions, such as sweeps of tent encampments and street cleaning. San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently scored some publicity, carrying a broom out to the “dirtiest” block in the city for a photo op with the New York Times. In other places, there’s simply a vacuum of leadership coordinating the patchwork of agencies, nonprofits, and religious organizations trying to help. After reporting intensively for a year on homelessness in the Puget Sound region, the Seattle Times put it bluntly: “No one is in charge.”

Meanwhile, the businesses responsible for much of the area’s economic fortunes, as well as rising housing costs, have been slow to throw their weight behind solutions. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently earmarked a portion of his $2 billion philanthropic pledge for homeless services--only months after his company fought aggressively to beat back a modest tax on large employers in Seattle that would have raised less than $50 million a year for the same.

Blaming people who are trying to get back on their feet is probably the least productive way to solve the crisis. Consider Mindy Woods, a single mother and U.S. Navy veteran who lives in a Seattle suburb. In 2010 she developed autoimmune diseases that made her chronically tired and caused so much pain she struggled to work at the insurance company where she’d been selling disability policies. “I was just a mess,” she says. “I had to quit my job.” To help pay rent for the apartment where she lived with her son, she babysat, watched neighbors’ pets, and led a Camp Fire youth group. Still, she and her son ended up having to leave the apartment because of a serious mold infestation, kicking off an eight-month period when they couch-surfed and spent time in a motel and shelter. It was a challenge just to refrigerate her son’s diabetes medicine.

They eventually were accepted into a transitional apartment, where they stayed for 3½ years. But in 2015 her landlord stopped accepting vouchers. Woods had to race to find another apartment owner who’d take her voucher before it lapsed. Application after application got rejected. “The discrimination was alive and well,” she says. Another eight months passed. When she finally found an apartment, there wasn’t room for her son. They had no choice but to separate, and he now lives nearby. Woods bristles when people blame the homeless for their predicament. “This is not about drugs, this is not about mental illness, this is not about lazy people,” she says. “We were doing everything we could to stay in houses.”

[ritware1850]

Reposted from @youknownothing45 repost @aberrant_human Posted @withrepost • @sc430gal via 👉🏼 @theintercept The nationwide campaign to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, writes Robert Mackey, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.⁠ ⁠ The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.⁠ ⁠ Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election, was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues. ⁠ ⁠ But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, was endorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.⁠ ⁠ Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote.⁠ ⁠ In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.⁠ ⁠ While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari said.⁠ ⁠ Read more from Robert Mackey via the link in our bio. ⁠ ⁠ Photo: Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images https://www.instagram.com/p/CivWpqvvAIq/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dentalassistant3]

New Mexico Dental Institute

Dental Assistant program The University of recent Mexico is a good starting point when searching for a location to coach a dental professional. The UNM School of Dentistry has been nurturing students for years to make sure their place in medical school. It's also an opportunity for underrepresented groups to enter the healthcare industry. In a nutshell, the dental program is essentially the same as an undergraduate program. In fact, it is quite straightforward to create. However, the initial step is determining what sort of school a student would want.

New Mexico Dental Courses

The New Mexico Department of Health insurance and Human Services (NMHHD) has an Office of Dental health which promotes the importance of dental health as an integral part of general health. The Office of Oral Healthcare provides prevention and treatment services to help residents maintain their teeth good and healthy and steer clear of dental issues. The state's office of public health also teaches residents about the importance of good oral health. Its goal would be to educate the city concerning the benefits of a great smile.

Since the Condition of Boise state broncos does not offer medical degrees in dentistry, students need to seek their learning neighboring states. In-state tuition for a dental program is gloomier than that for a dental school in another state, but out-of-state tuition is really a lot higher. Therefore, students from neighboring states can usually benefit from the state's scholarship program. The NMHED program can support more students in the future.

The state's Department of Higher Education has partnered with Texas Tech University's Hunt School of Dental Medicine in El Paso to provide in-state and out-of-state tuition assistance for two New Mexican students. This program is limited to out-of-state tuition for graduate and doctoral students, but there's a growing number of scholarship programs. A.T. Still University in Fort Collins, Colorado and also the University of Colorado in Aurora would be the closest schools to New Mexico.

Along with offering dental assistant training, the school can also be offering a fast-track program that allows students to acquire certification in a matter of weeks. The dental assistant profession is a vital and growing career in the usa. With a earnings of $48,000, a verbal assistant can earn a satisfying income your variety of settings. A diploma in dentistry could be rewarding and fulfilling. It's a great career option for those looking to serve the city.

The state's dental school is a great choice for students within the state. It is near to the state and offers many opportunities for students. A dental professional can choose to work locally where he or she was raised. The brand new Mexico Dental Institute also has an excellent reputation among students of dental schools throughout the country. The school is a well-respected institution and is the perfect spot to find out about the science of dentistry.

[dwestfieldblog]

DOOMSCROLLING

Rocking and doomscrolling in an Eigenstate, the English Variant is here...All virtue signalling wannabe edgelords,  sleepwalking ’woke’ automatons, fake Christians, Faustian Republicans, corrupt Conservatives and retarding neophobes look away now. Little more than domesticated primates, a majority of larval humanity continues to ignore its astral biology...yes really. ‘Those who control symbols control us’.  And Pavlov dogs do love flags eh? Here is a balanced, mostly unpretentious finite rant for breakfast where the opinion arises from triple checked facts rather than mere emotion.  In God we rust.

Straight off...Disgusted to rage by the English government’s March budget which gives  nurses a ‘pay rise’ equivalent to three pounds fifty pence a week, (which doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of their parking at hospitals) the disdain these arrogant swine feel for truly essential workers is revealed in full. The ‘Heath’ minister explained that times were tight due to Covid...yes Matt, fairly sure the nurses working 18 hours a day had already noticed this in their desperately overworked, overcrowded hospitals. Deeply in debt, Britain plans to borrow 355 billion pounds this year, the highest amount in her history. Corporation tax will possibly increase in 2023, a little late to balance wages elsewhere for nurses etc...And given the previous ten years, highly unlikely it would even be used for such. But it might look good to those brainwashed gimps that STILL plan to vote for this bastardly corrupt party in 2024.

A clip taken in March of an exceptionally long queue for a food bank in London brings it all into sharper focus. The 6th richest economy in the world has the most food banks of any democratic country. Over 2000 in the UK. (Over 900 in Germany.) Hate to come across as a Socialist but The Tories have been in power for ten long years, historically destroying the NHS a bit more each time they hold power. Endlessly subcontracting, pouring money into new unneeded tiers of management, slowing operations down with extra paperwork, voting down pay rises, thus expediting a brain drain of doctors, nurses and surgeons to other countries and private practices...and over the last thirteen months, supplying those who stayed, with mountains of  PPE equipment not fit for purpose. A ‘jolly good show’ handclap every evening on doorsteps doesn’t fecking cut it. Neither do all the rainbows drawn by children put into windows. In fact, Boris, it looks like outright damn cynicism. All the more since your dose of the virus (‘I visited the Covid ward and shook hands with everyone’) was healed by excellent work by the NHS. Mr. Boris ‘No government could have done more’. Johnson...a lot of us are keeping score.

Lord Bethell, (‘Parliamentary under secretary of State for Innovation at the Department of Health and Social Care’) said that nurses are ‘well paid’ for the job they do, reiterating that times are hard; ‘There are millions of people out of work on the back of this epidemic’. Well yes there are. And why? A government which dragged its heels many times after salient scientific advice, prognoses/ projections were given, and allowed three massive social gatherings (384,000 people) to take place for superspreading, as well as conflicting advice about masks, herd immunity and confusion over open borders, schools to return for one day, etc...All of which led to the dire need for total lockdowns and the impossibility to sell or go to work (unless working from home) leading in turn to unpaid rent/bills, evictions, bosses laying off those they cannot afford to pay. And to mention again, the Tories have been the ones in power for ten years...with banking scandals (where chiefs were not punished but the public were twice, once by collapses and once for raised taxes to prop up the greed). The expenses scandal of politicians, massive public service cutbacks, corruption, the smug George Osbourne guiding Britain disgracefully to poverty via austerity, a National Health service being encouraged to disintegrate and’ an oven ready’/tramps breakfast scraps Brexit...and LO!... the coffers are indeed a little empty thanks to all the contracts tossed without oversight to the governments mates without due process, including 37 billion pounds spent on a Test and Trace programme which did not function, 252 million AND 6000 pounds a DAY to ‘consultants (for the essential chimera of PR etc).Chumocracy at highly profitable work.

Over to you Boris, ‘...it is thanks to PRUDENT FISCAL MANGEMENT that we have been able to fight this pandemic in the way that we have.’

Well exactly.

A dishevelled adult leader of a country who cannot even brush his hair or dress himself, a ‘leader’ who missed five vital COBRA meetings about the pandemic, never took in the notes from scientists of advance warnings and blustered his pompous comedy horseshite rather than leading from the front. Father of six or perhaps 7 illegitimate children (does he pay child support? No records). But never mind eh, he is a rum sort of cove. No. Churchill would have him horsewhipped naked and tarred and feathered in Trafalgar Square. But still! When questioned on whether there would be an inquiry into the colossal waste without recompense or standard clauses in contracts of taxpayers’ money raped from the Treasury, Mr Johnson replied that it was ‘NOT IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST’. Really. REALLY? Boris, if you were a catheter, you could not extract more urine than you already do. The clown father of the motherland. BJ said he took ‘full responsibility’ for the massive number of fatalities. But hasn’t resigned.127 thousand covid deaths in UK, leading Europe by 33 thousand.  Well played chaps. 545 thousand USA. China 4636. Yeah RIGHT. Sure.

Once knew a guy who, if you told him something factual, most often replied with ‘Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of it’...meaning anything he had not already been told was automatically false. How did he ever learn new information? Neophobes, their insecurities heavy chains to evolving, seem to rule the world; Good news is they don’t. Bad news is, they know it and are getting ever more desperate the rest of us go down with them in righteous conservatism and counter evolution. ‘Perception does not consist of passive reception of signals but of an active interpretation of signals...active, creative trans-actions’...‘The easier you can predict a message, the less information the message contains’. If a media source etc attempt to relay actual news and it does not fit what is already believed, it is disregarded or worse...GIGO...Garbage In=Garbage Out.

The pandemic is doing great things for the further global rise of populist swine...When the mass public mind is aflame with anger and fear, new bastards step up and old governments impose harder laws. Hungary loses her last independent radio station and Orban rejoices. Brazilian bastid Bolsanaro continues to see his people as expendable inhuman statistics. By their hatred he will burn. 301 thousand dead. Totalitarianism creeps apace via populist chancers, Stalinist fascists, nationalist bullshitters who care far more about their ego than their country. (Hello frog eyed Nigel Farage aka Lord Haw Haw the 2nd.) Speaking of which...Lord Mayor of London wannabe Laurence Fox bought a mask exemption badge online because he didn’t want his pretty face to be unrecognised. Narcissist, who as leader of a new party Reclaim, wants to ‘take back’ Britain from the Woke snowflakes (even while speaking like a laidback Establishment version of them) and end up in Parliament. Good for you luvvie. But now with acting career ended and music career failed, he does look a lot like a pretty poster boy who needs to stay adored and recognises (along with his string pulling financial backers) there is a bandwagon to be jumped on. In 8 years time he (or someone similar in insecure need for others approval to give vent to their sadistic impulses) could be a new type of prime minister and the V for Vendetta pre-scenario will be in full swing. ‘Politicians should wear sponsor jackets like Nascar drivers, then we know who owns them’ Robin Williams via Jonathan Pie. No one from Texas should be allowed to be president...and no one from Eton (or Harrow) should ever be allowed to be Prime Minister. Apart from Churchill.

Sometimes it takes a nightmare to wake one up...an authoritarian dystopia coming soon to a land mass near you...a failed state and a divided kingdom of Mediocre Britain with bad laws for her citizens but great if you are a ‘public servant’ or a friend of those that are. Probably a good thing for Euope that we are an island eh? We turned our back on them and they can cast us adrift like an oil tanker filled with toxic waste. Sunak or Patel next? Will the ‘Elite’ (Ha) allow a person of colour to rise to the depths of Prime Minister? The entire cabinet should be sent to a Chinese prison. Avaricious liars. If you don’t stir the cream it turns into scum.

And speaking of destroying your country from inside....

Oh America... just watched the Idaho mask burning clip in Boise, adults encouraging children to pick up discarded masks, pathogens, all with bare hands and drop into the garbage bin flames...inhaling the formaldehyde smoke... Freedom! End lockdown now! Breathe deeply rednecks. So looking forward to having a black woman president over there. Please be better than all these useless white trash MORONS...Q Onan, the ‘storm’ (in a beer can), the ‘plan’, ‘where we go one, we go all’...right down the toilet of history into the sewers of oblivion. Good riddance to foul rubbish, Believers anxious for orders from ‘Christians’ who are actually serving what they would call ‘Satan’. Ironic on the darkest level, no? LOOK at their faces, into their eyes, naught but greed for power. Two thousand years of inverted truths. ‘Religion’ became consumed by ‘the Devil’. Discuss with yourself after watching the majority of preachers.

The Trumps, Hawley, Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Bannon, the Mercers, Paula White, Stella Immanuel and the Gawd awful Marjorie Taylor Greene should be sent alone, foodless to a small island surrounded by sharks. And filmed for our entertainment. And oh...that dumbass disgusting false idol kitsch gold statue (to celebrate his love of golden rain) of Donald, created via Mexico and China in artistic irony. And, and AND the Republican senators against any background checks for those who want to own guns. (Seven mass killings this year already by armed wankers.) Britain, Europe and America, unions encouraged, persuaded to break apart into hexagram 23 while China and Russia grin. Q seems like a new form of right wing bullshite to rally the dumb against what they perceive to be the ‘left wing’ rebellion of Anonymous. I think Q originated in the Kremlin myself. An electronic baobab seed...

Back to my birthland...New powers of arrest looming for ‘Non Crime Hate Incidents’, and a new police bill of up to ten years prison for silent protest. One almost expects this in (arf) lesser countries with pantomime dictators, but on the septic, excuse me, sceptre’d isle of Britain? An obvious Government first shot reaction against what they know might be coming for their dire mishandling of the pandemic, loss of jobs and no real support for the underlings...Governments ARE afraid of their people, that’s why enough laws are passed (with minimum debate or under cover of smokescreen news events) to ensure all those not wealthy and well connected are in daily risk of being arrested for ‘criminality’. So be sure to be obedient to your ‘public servants’.

Ahh.. enough eh? Apolitically incorrect, radical liberal, fundamentalist atheist, remember the Tar Baby idea Dave, the more you attack something, the more you are attached to it. Let it go brother. The difference between being frozen in stasis and empty with Zen calm. But to paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson, (as I am so often wont to do) thanks to our own programming, when we do not frequently examine and cross check our input we become full of Self Hypnotic Ideational Trance. Dogmas must be only transitory, flow river, flow...

Bells Theorem? Pretty good but this is mostly Jameson’s (with Czech spring water) theorem. In confession, I crave your indulgence, Invoke Often, Repeat repeat repeat, ‘How far is it, if you can think of it?’ Transduction of thoughts into chemicals...surfing the neuropeptides and there you stood on the edge of your feather expecting to die, A skeleton breastfeeding a priest, and if that mocking bird don’t sing, daddy’s gonna break off both its wings. Whoops. The optical illusion of a rainbow halo as beautiful as ‘God on drugs’.  Melancholy melophile, melomaniac and melomaniacal, I am an Audiophile in the paralysis of rapture...Ahh...and now I have obtained an elegant sufficiency, multitasking in five time zones. Left frontal lobe digital (manual) moving to Right frontal lobe analogue non Aristotelian (self controlled). Get it? DNA appears to be a cybernetics information/programming system...but anyway...

Bet there will be a massive increase in the birth rate nine months after most of the world is vaccinated, a surge of relieved masses celebrating in the old fashioned way. All those who died will be ‘replaced’ at double pumping speed. The idea that the vaccine contains the ‘Establishment’s’ nanobots seems unlikely...how on Earth would at least ONE person in the know, not spill the (genetically modified) beans? And those wondrous illogical conspiracy theories that Covid was triggered deliberately via 5G mast networks by a satanic paedophile elite will fade for a while. Until the ‘Christian’evangelical (evil angels) right wing restart their crazed rambling about the Illuminati/Freemasons again. For the record, my own feeling is that any group which had Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Beethoven, Sir Issac Newton, Washington, Mark Twain, Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Jefferson etc as members, seems like a fairly cool and worthwhile group for humanity to learn from. Is it because Lucifer was the Light Bringer that they conflate illumination with evil? How very aware of them. Arf. Paranoid magicians live longer. Speaking of witch...’Nothing is, nothing becomes, nothing is not’. A.C. The Book of Lies. Be aware, not woke. Look for the hunchback (?) behind the soldier (!)...‘You can empty infinity from it and infinity still remains’.

‘The data may not contain the answer. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.’

Ever see Interstellar? Love that film. Elon Musk should just select 100 people, blast off and leave the rest of us to burn. As psychologists would call it, most of humanity is indeed still at the larval stage. Most of us stay on ‘the fourth circuit’ all life and rip at anyone who goes beyond or tries to. Christ would be murdered again, that’s why Buddha avoided crowds. Release and receive...channel.

‘Truth, truth, truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations...’

Paradise in a scientific quantum possibility...A dimension where the ‘soul’/ recorded/imprinted memory continues in  ‘A quite specific electromagnetic-gravitational field in which mind can manifest without organic bodies’. As all ‘reality’ is subjective, and an individual life most likely takes up a mere byte in a terabyte (trillion bytes). Personal Heavens, the way YOU design and chose. Dream and imagine possibilities now...much Love forever from Anon of Ibid