Happy Peak Of Western Civilization Day!

Your parents and grandparents were bigger badasses
 in one day, than you've been your entire life.

Run By Morons

 

I'm thinking that thousands of years in the future archeo-anthropologists
will determine that "the Hairless Ape species went extinct shortly after
they ran out of these round thingies to sharpen their primitive tools..."

You can tell a company is run by absolute morons, when they have two 50' aisles of garden implements, including axes, hatchets, machetes, hoes, pulaskis, mattocks, cultivators, shears, etc., not to mention about thirty different types of gas and electric chainsaws, weed whackers, lawnmowers, and all manner of high-spendy, gee-whiz devices for rendering excess shrubbery into compost at the speed of dollars.

But cannot, for love or money, be bothered to stock (nor even have a dedicated space to peg them) so many as even one $10 Lansky puck, pictured above, nor any equivalent device, with 120- and 280-grit sides, for sharpening damned near anything with an edge, probably longer than you'll be alive on the planet to use it, even if you're 2000 miles from the nearest power outlet or gas station, and which even works at night, next to a campfire! Mirabile dictu!

Three different big-box retailers, stores bigger than Noah's Ark, two with actual store help who knew what I was describing without a crayon sketch and a YouTube informational video to make it clear to them, same story. Zip. Nada. Bupkus.

"Hey Pops, maybe you could ask your manager to create an aisle labelled Common Sense or maybe even 1960? It'd give you a place to stock incandescent bulbs and normal-flush toilets, right next to the metal screw-in Jerry-can spouts. Just a thought..."

Short those companies' stocks, because both their hardware managers and their general managers obviously couldn't find their asses with both hands and the pole off a pruning saw, with 10 wetbacks document-challenged day laborers from the parking lot to help them, and a three-day head start.

Fucking clueless incompetent morons.

Found it the fourth place I looked, saving me the PITA that is anything Amazon, at Mr. Drucker's* mom-and-pop hardware store in downtown Hooterville, in about 15 seconds, right next to the axe bin, where they've probably been for 40 years. Still got last year's retail price on them too.

Lesson learned.

But then, I figured civilization - at least as far as intelligent life and  IQs above 80 - was doomed when they started printing "Remove Shirt Before Ironing" on the care tags.

Just saying. Now I've got some sharpening to do.

Probably time to get a self-powered grindstone wheel, too, now that I think of it. While I still can.

*Not their real name, or real location. Also not to be confused with Mr. Haney's Snap-On Mobile Tool Truck either.

Hear, Hear!

h/t Liberty's Torch

Everything goes to sh*t. Literally.

Linda, posting on Fran Porretto's website, linked to an excellent interview of City Journal's Heather MacDonald, talking about the root causes of homelessness.

"On homelessness my argument is simple: You just don’t allow this behavior. That’s the starting point. It’s not compatible with the long-term life of cities. Once you establish that — something that was uncontroversial 50 years ago when the police would move people along, and there was unanimity that if you were in public you would have to meet basic norms of public behavior — then you don’t let people colonize the sidewalks. 

Why is any given city where someone ends up on the street morally obligated to provide housing to that person? Nobody’s ever explained why that is. Say somebody comes from Seattle or Iowa to be homeless in San Francisco. When did San Francisco taxpayers become obligated to provide housing for him?"

Amen.

RTWT.

I'm not a sociologist, anthropologist, or field reporter. I've only taken care of homeless douchebags (and, to be fair, that insults the other 0.5%, to whom I offer my apologies) for a quarter of a century, and my take is identical, and in stronger terms.

People aren't homeless because there aren't homes for them.
Not even in Top Three Most Expensive Cities to live in the U.S. San Franshitco (the other two are NYFC and the District of Corruption, if you were wondering).

People are homeless for several reasons, most of them intertwined like the trunk of a braided ficus tree.

What are those reasons?

1) They're batshit crazy, in ways that, until the mid- to late-1960s, would have seen them happily locked up for life in appropriate facilities in perpetuity. No small number for violent behavior and poor impulse control.

2) The don't take their psych meds for that, because those drugs make them feel "weird". (Normal people call that feeling "sanity", by no coincidence.)

3) They self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, because
   a) it feels great! and
   b) it gets the voices in their head too drunk or stoned to be intelligible for the people with too many personalities in their head already. Genius, right there.

4) Homeless shelters have rules, chiefest among them being no booze or dope, and if the batshit crazy alcohol/drug addicts who are most homeless forever could follow rules, quit alcohol and dope, and act civilized, they could hold down jobs and pay rent or mortgages like everyone not on the streets does since pretty much forever. But they can't, don't, and won't.

5) We've built them a hammock (not a safety net) as wide as the entire state of California to sleep in. Which last world-class stupidity is why they're overwhelmingly here: they drift westward until they hit the Pacific Ocean, and they can't go any farther, coupled with being mollycoddled here for fifty years by jackass do-gooder idiots, and an amenable climate, and voila. A gazillion homeless bums, and stacks of feces and needles as far as the eye can see.

6) Laws preventing this stopped being enforced, due to soft-hearted do-gooders in power, and soft-headed judges ruling that it must be so.

So you'll never solve the homelessness problem by subsidizing them, feeding them, and building them shelter, any more than you'll put out a fire by throwing on more gasoline.

Solving the problem is easy:

I) First offense for vagrancy: six months in a chain gang. In the summer, they'll spread asphalt and fill potholes in the desert. In the winter, they shovel snow on mountain passes. And when it rains, they're out in it picking up trash, filling sandbags, and shoveling mud, 24/7 until the sun comes out. Throw in green bologna sandwiches, MREs, and pink underwear, deny any time off for good behavior, so they do the full 180 days, and you're done.
Second offence: 364 days.
Third offense: Felony, and five years.

It's not funny once, and after twice, they'll leave for good, or stop getting picked up.
And we'll have the smoothest roads and the cleanest streets in the country.

II) Stop feeding them. Unless they work for it. From sunup to sundown. 30-minute breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but not until they've earned each meal. And no money for anything.

III) Anyone too disabled or decrepit to work does drug tests the entire time they're on public assistance. One drunk or drug positive, and they lose benefits for a month. Two times, and they lose a year. Three times, banned from assistance for life. Vagrant as a result? See #I.
If they can't shovel asphalt, they can mix concrete, or serve the meals. Medical exams to document ability or disability. No disability? Pick up a shovel, or starve. Dealer's choice.

IV) Any do-gooder agency or non-profit, religious or not, is free to do whatever they like in terms of food or shelter: on their own premises. Your circus, your monkeys. You feed homeless people, who become a blight on society, and the citizens and municipalities can sue for damages. Everything from public health to crime comes out of your wallet. Just like feeding stray cats that crap in your neighbors' open car.

For an easy and egregious example: There's a bunch of @$$hole simpletons at the nearby Catholic church, who've allowed a dozen homeless to encamp on church property. And have now drawn 200 more to the sidewalks surrounding. Right across the street from families with kids, in homes with a median price of well north of $500K. The city should bill them per person per day for maintaining a nuisance, and when the bill exceeds the property value of the church, the church should be seized and closed, and sold at auction to the highest bidder. 
They should also be liable for damages to homeowners across the street. When you have to pick up after your dog's mess, how can we demand less of do-gooders letting people shit on the streets across from someone else's homes?
Notably, I have yet to see a priest or nun out there shoveling up the shit, or cleaning the sidewalk. Doing it in chains will be good for their souls, I assure you.
Otherwise, like day following night, I predict someone's parents are going to do some high-octane redecorating in the parish one of these days, and the church will deserve it.
Neither priest nor parish want to take those douchebags into their own homes (which would be actually bearing the burden up for which they signed), but they're happy to let their little gaggle of human debris shit and drop dirty drug needles on their church neighbors' lawns week in and week out. Jesus had a thing or two to say about that sort of hypocrisy, and the religious leaders who were the target of that truth crucified him for it.

V) Three times on a psych hold, and you get removed from society in perpetuity.
One violent offense, where any injuries occur, same deal.
Off to Shutter Island, for life.
If someone is too crazy to live peaceably, they're too crazy to be in society.
This isn't hard to understand.
(Califrutopia has a number of suitable large offshore islands inhabited only by goats.) They're too far to swim from, the water temp would kill any attempt, and there are no trees to make rafts or canoes. Once they get dropped there, they stay there. In perpetuity. No rules. They can run around naked, chase butterflies, weave baskets, jump off the cliffs, or drown: IDGAF. Fly over and kick out crates of meals once a week or once a month. Do a health clinic monthly. No limits on charity and supply shipments in. But the days of meth-head batshit crazy people running in traffic, attacking people, shooting up drugs, and shitting everywhere, while decent folks are locked behind barred windows, are over. Families are free to care for relatives themselves, or they can be put back into mental hospitals until they get better (which, in  every case, is never). But three times when you've gone so barking mad that it becomes an issue for the authorities, and your free-to-roam-in-society privilege is revoked for life. No more bullshit. Gone.

VI) And any doctor or judge, or both, opining or ruling a formerly insane person is now sane, is automatically obligated to take in such person in their own home, for a year each, before they are set at liberty in society.
Skin in the game, bitches. If they're not sane enough to sleep down the hall from you, they're not sane enough to set loose in my neighborhood either, are they??

VII) Any judge at any level ruling against this in any respect gets a homeless shelter erected next door to his/her house, by law, and 100 homeless residents, and billed for all the blowback that follows. (That's assuming they survive the tar-and-featherings - or worse - that will inevitably follow, courtesy of their friends and immediate neighbors. The natural check and balance on a rogue judiciary was always meant to be The People, and not just in the jury box. The black-robed assholes who think they're immune to the consequences of their rulings are going to find out what that looks like, good and hard, if they don't wise up pretty damned quick.)

The cost of all this? A literal fraction of what we squander annually mollycoddling illegal aliens, the violent insane, drug addicts, drunks, and various other wastes of skin from 49 other states, 7 territories, and 191 other countries. Any country that bitches whines or moans about this treatment gets ALL of their native fuckups back, in one lump shipment. At bayonet-point, if necessary. Starting with Mexico. And y'all can have your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk the same way. Freight trains run both ways, and it's past time you got your relatives back and owned up to your responsibilities.

None of that will ever happen here under the current lunatics running the asylum, so it's likelier that when the common working-class people have finally had enough, there'll be a renaissance of Committees of Vigilance, and a Purge.

I'm okay with that too, but I'd rather do this non-violently, and lawfully.

One way or another, though, it's going to happen, because Califrutopia is so far past broke we can't even see it in the rear-view mirror with a telescope, and what cannot continue, will not. People foolishly think cities will shrivel up and die when that happens, contrary to all evidence from written history.

No, it won't be like that, but the stacks of corpses of the lumpenproletariat who'll stoke the bonfires will be visible for miles, come the day. And any "homeless advocates" are likely to end up on the same pyre, without a second thought.

And the Grapes of Wrath is going to take on a whole new meaning when the vintage comes ripe for bottling. Mark my words.

Headlines Ripped From Last Week's Shift

h/t Silicon Graybeard

More sociopathology from the people who
sold you on single motherhood.
What could possibly go wrong?

From SiG's blog: The Awful Toll Of Puberty-Blocking Drugs

Anecdotally, caring for suicidal pre-teens has gone from a monthly thing to a nightly thing for me.
IOW, a 3000% increase in the last 10 years. And finding pediatric psych placement was difficult when it was only a monthly occurrence.


When young, impressionable, and immature-in-every-way children are told - endlessly - that boys are bad, men are rapists, and masculinity is toxic, why would anybody be surprised that, given the illusory option of switching (as if that were even possible), some boys would?

And when girls find out they're smaller, weaker, and that biology and reality don't care how awesome they think they are, they'd want to 'roid up and change teams too?

The lunatics running the asylum have set upon a course designed to f**k kids in the head for (foreshortened) life as their stated intention; why would anyone be surprised that it's having precisely that effect, and delivering the intended results?

Until this retarded magical-thinking lunacy is properly labeled as the child abuse it has always been, for everyone practicing or preaching it, there's no hope for civilization.