Homelessness in Chula Vista

 This is the agenda item from the Chula Vista City Council Meeting on 6 October 2023.

Calling the event a workshop seemed to put a kind of benevolence on the proceeding. That was wiped away by much of the city's staffers when it became clear that part of the motivation to hold the event was for the city to demonstrate all of the efforts that it has put into doing something, anything about the problem.  Clearly to me, it was a tour de force of a municipality doing all that it imagined that it could to assuage those who have roofs over their heads to of the cognitive dissonance that homelessness generates short of telling the ugly truth that it's constituents lack a combination of the character or motivation to build sufficient quantities of housing for all of their neighbors.

Due to much of the latter, there was some low-key, very soft reduction of homeless people to abstractions by conflating those who are homeless due to economic impacts with those who abuse mind-altering chemicals and mental illness. There was scant mention of the scant housing alternatives that the city can offer those who are without.

It is the last point that matters most. Chula Vista, like all of California, needs hundreds - perhaps a few thousand - units for neighbors without shelter. That would be the solution - a lot of public housing. Chula Vista won't discuss it because that is not in the budget. Resurfacing streets wasn't in the city budget until the federal government handed out grants to repave streets after the start of the pandemic. Bigger, more expensive issues would cost much more.

issues about a horse race

This is a passage from a post about the 2024 POTUS race that I responded to:

“Only FIVE states will determine if 2024 will be stolen and during his CNN Town Hall, Trump revealed his plans. 

Wisconsin is the most important swing state in the country and will be the key to keeping the White House and Senate blue in 2024. 

In the last three years, Republicans have sought to remove state officials who wouldn’t manufacture votes and falsely declare Donald Trump the winner. 

Trump not only repeated his election lies, but he laid the groundwork to continue to erode our systems.

Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, will determine who will make election decisions in states where the White House is won or lost.” 

My Comment:

[This point] is close enough to my home to give some validity to my assertion that I cross to Tijuana for travel to fly through, my dentist, our dogs' vet, shop and see in-laws. I see...

🔹 3 states that are ignorant and indifferent to the lives of people who cross the border

🔹 a state pretending that it isn't becoming more Latino that thinks it is the same as the previous 3

🔹 a state on the border which is coming to terms with its demographic diversity and the complexities of having a foreign nation on its southern border.

Rooftop solar is scant in California. There is even less in desert cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix for some reason. 😒

Speaking of Nevada and Arizona, I'm sure that they [would] stick a knife into California for Colorado River water if they got a chance.

I left out the other part of my usual border rant about how dumb, cruel and short sited the U.S. policy is towards refugees and migrants who are queueing up to cross the border from Mexico as I compose this piece and how that is a bi-partisan failure.

The original comment hasn't received a 👍 from anyone in the original post. That might have to do with it being the public (business) page of a comedian on Facebook. That might also have to do with addressing some issues about the horse race instead of the horse race itself.

Revenge of The Studio Flacks

 I'm with Maron.

I remember watching an Academy Awards broadcast within the last 10 years to see the names and faces of men and women in the In Memoriam segment who were identified as executives and publicists. As the Sun Does Rise In The East, it's possible that these people had long, amiable professional relationships in the motion picture industry. But I never heard of them and knew that they didn't have a lot to do with what I would see on a screen - just that they had something to do with leading me to watch that work on a screen. If the AMPAS thought that they were important enough to remember, I figured that they could know their industry better than I do. That doesn't shut down how cynical I am.

I watch national morning news shows and late-night talk shows and am always annoyed by how much content they broadcast that is put together by motion picture public relations flacks as opposed to producing original content. CBS Mornings reminded me how I'm more annoyed by Tom Brady than I like Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field or Rita Moreno today, again. Maybe AMPAS might remember their special relationship with 3 of those 4 acclaimed actors. IMO, movie flacks have a reverse Midas touch with me.

Enough Urban Myths about Homeless People

 I saw urban myths about homeless people, so I replied to several.

When You're Done doing Cartwheels about Biden winning Pennsylvania and the Elector Count....

One-third of California voters supported Donald Trump.

Remember what kind of people they are:

• They came in reacting to substance abuse in their midst, reacting like they were in denial then.
• They left power in denial to a life-threatening illness.

This not hallmark of people with whom one could negotiate or govern. Their nihilism shows that they have been thoroughly saturated by the oligarchs' program of reducing a citizens' understanding if and a belief in government as both a verb and noun. They scorn commonwealth. Their program is Every Man for Himself now and for the foreseeable future. 

Villainizing them is one thing. For those unlike them who miss that they are a continuing danger to any state in North America that they may be a national of is folly.

The day is filled with a romance for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. When they get to work, the results of their election will be different. Any implied promise that a Biden Administration that is imagined today will meet with an opposition by a Congress that is indifferent at best.

Biden is the better man for the short term. Once the pandemic has been stopped, we'll be reminded that a 40+% deplorable electorate is adverse to good things: healthcare, education, housing, human and civil rights. People who scorn civic engagement and replace it with puerile taunting can't be shamed to negotiate in good faith often, if ever.

Hope that you enjoyed that cold shower.

Message for A Second Term

Organizing has ground to a halt in this pandemic. Whatever we might have done to show up and talk to people to support an independent California that we might have normally done before the pandemic is just too risky for me and probably you, too, today. What I see that there is to do is to plan for the future. My campaign for election as chapter coordinator for nine Southern California counties is based on putting together a plan to find technical assistance in building up our contact management system.

We need to be able to prospect through thousands of contacts

There are roughly 39 million people in California. If the California National Party is to get a checkbox on voter registration forms, the state law mandates that we would need 60,000 people to register. To do that, we need a way to work remotely to gather names with contact information. We'll probably need about 100,000 contacts to sift through to register. We can count on the partisan duopoly, more likely Democrats than Republicans, to disallow and/or deny registrations in the office of the Secretary of State and probably any registrar of voters office in every county. The party won't be able to fight every denial so we will have to expand our goal to exceed the threshold significantly.

For the sake of illustration, let's say that the California National Party sets up a program where we have one CNP activist with the goal of 5 registrants.  You can pick either 12,000 to 20,000 people who read e-mails or URLs in text messages and will show up, say, at every 3rd event near them. We need something to manage people at that scale. We have it, but it's not working right to manage phone banking (a very 20th Century concept) or to be able to manage people who respond to a text message.

I don't believe that the California National Party has a sufficient infrastructure to create our own narrative for either California subordinate to the USA (as it is now) or the California independence movement. Again, our contact management system must be repaired and expanded to drive our own content to news media.

Because of that problem, I am writing a manual to seek out technical assistance - either an intern or volunteer covering much of the following:

• definition of the problems with our contact management and e-commerce system
• the functions that need repair and management by a person with technical expertise
• the substance and duration of the relationship between the technical person and the party
• the plan for developing the party's technical infrastructure

Again, none of this will happen on the streets. I picked this not only because the work can be done remotely, over the Internet but also because it is something that I have seen novel political movements neglect for well over a decade. While our contact management application is not groupware, it is more essential than a collaboration package for political organizing.

With your support, I will prepare us for a time to meet for California and gather for our interests, to come up with plans for our neighbors to work towards being free of country indifferent to our needs.

Joe Biden is the best you could get for POTUS during this pandemic

My wife and I are in high-risk categories for people to be infected by the novel Coronavirus. My in-laws are more immunocompromised than I am. We did a run-through of one of us (me) infecting everyone else in the house with the flu in February. I was tested - it wasn't COVID-19 but it worried us all enough for my wife, a nurse, to take me then my mother-in-law to the E.R. I was laid out for most of a week. My in-laws were laid out for a week-and-a-half. la My wife rarely misses work for sickness - she missed two days. About 6 - 8 weeks after recovering, I tested for COVID-19 antibodies: I had none. Others recounted on social media about contracting a strain of influenza that was nastier than anything that they had before in February. One other friend who had that flu, got laid out pretty badly by it also tested negative. I feel like that flu in February - March was a bullet whizzing past my head. 

I freely admit that I could seem self-involved about my concerns about contracting Coronavirus, but I know others will be threatened by it, too. The nihilism of those who deny the lethality of the virus defies description. It's changed my priorities. I haven't gone out to protest the killing of George Floyd because of it. Last weekend my wife and I took my octogenarian mom out for dinner to Pacific Beach. We were surrounded by young people everywhere who wouldn't be bothered to wear a mask; I won't be going back until after the pandemic. Everyone in our house has a gun to their heads: I don't think the vaccination for this Coronavirus won't be ready until Fall 2021 at the earliest, sorry Oxford. The next POTUS would have been sworn in 9 months before. 

It impacts what I see for voters in the U.S.A., whose choices for POTUS are:

1. An old man who has most likely assaulted women (no one is debating that), shows no capacity for the nuances of science and would continue to put profit ahead of saving people from a pandemic.
2. Another old man has a mediocre/unremarkable record on women's rights (Anita Hill's testimony). He has built up the penal industrial complex. To his credit, he has demonstrated the capacity of understanding complex concepts. This Number Two might trade some integrities to save more people: he'll know what the best thing to do would be but is conditioned to look at legislation that 60 - 70% of what is needed as golden.

Will Donald Trump dither with that time until a vaccine is ready? He most certainly has dithered with the time since the pandemic began. Trump has not used the War Powers act to produce and stockpile sufficient PPE. His Health and Human Services Administration has not protected nursing homes. You can fill most of the large stadiums in the U.S. with all who have died from the disease today (those numbers may be undercounted). Donald Trump and his cult following are a threat to my life until the region around San Diego reaches herd immunity to this novel Coronavirus.

I'm writing this for everyone who I know in person and from social media who are like me dissatisfied with the office of POTUS and/or the nation governed by it. They have all kinds of reasons for being #NeverBiden. I understand those reasons and they would be more valid if there weren't a pandemic. Think about it: would Joe Biden as POTUS handle the pandemic better if not screw up less than Trump would in a second term? Biden would almost assuredly get the federal government to do its best to make sure that a vaccine for this novel Coronavirus gets to us and the people around us.  With Biden, there would be a bottom to how bad the United States could be. Without Biden, I believe that me, my family, BIPOC, the poor, uninsured and essential workers would be much more vulnerable.