The city of San Francisco has brokered a deal offering free tuition at its City College. This comes after spending almost a quarter of a billion dollars in recent years chasing its homeless population away, many of whom could probably have benefited from such an arrangement. Local government officials in San Francisco, California have seemingly been in competition with counterparts in Denver, Colorado for the infamy of being the most brutally asinine in confronting their respective issues of widespread homelessness, but their efforts to physically remove homeless persons from possibly dissuading tourist revenue for the 2016 Super Bowl stands out in particular as cause to never re-elect anybody from the city council ever again.
All levels of government are notorious for understating homeless statistics. Regional news affiliates will roll out their cameras to the nearest soup kitchen every Thanksgiving, as though the homeless magically disappear the rest of the year, but even then they grossly downplay the numbers. And the official U.S. Census has presented itself as an absolute joke when it comes to counting the heads of these domestic refugees. I honestly have no idea if this is a case of the truth being too humiliating for government number-crunchers to stomach, or if they really are just that clueless in evaluating such a concern so massive as to encompass tens of millions of people.
While poverty in general is increasingly criminalized within the United States, sometimes I wonder if part of the reason for why the homeless receive full force is because they are not consumers, and as such, they cannot be tracked as easily as the rest of the population. Like how the Vizio brand of smart TVs have been tracking their viewers round the clock without consent.
America doesn’t own this problem, obviously, as it owns nothing but debt. John Tory, career politician and mayor of Toronto, has been called out for his decisions resulting in growing casualties among his own city’s homeless population. Hundreds have died for no other causes but his office’s negligence and arrogance.
South of the border, data confirms that the top 0.1% of Americans own as much as the bottom 90%, presenting the biggest wealth inequality gap since the Great Depression. Meaning the situation is far worse than generally acknowledged. As Trump himself has taken more weekends of his administration off from work than not, it cannot be asserted that the 0.1% are simply working that much harder. That 0.1% are the laziest people by definition. Genuinely self-reliant people have no reason to use or abuse others, and thus no reason to seek out these positions of social authority. Self-centered people such as this 0.1% need everything done for them.
If elections in the United States are ever actually legitimate, then the public has a lot of explaining to do, retroactively and currently. If illegitimate, as is the case, then the public ought to be taking up pitchforks and torches and storming governmental centers (and banks) to enact bloody vengeance for the crimes against humanity, to say nothing of the lying, cheating and stealing regularly conducted in their name and always at their expense.
The billionaires of Silicon Valley and Wall Street alike are suddenly busy with snatching up huge tracts of land in New Zealand. Tom Leonard reports that the cult-leaders look to be scheming up a hideout away from encroaching doom, like rats from a sinking ship. From the article:
What the catastrophe will precisely be remains unclear, but possibilities include a devastating asteroid impact, giant earthquake, nuclear war, civil war, pandemic, zombie invasion and the Second Coming.
Tellingly, the geeks of Silicon Valley appear to be most worried that it will be a struggle between rich and poor in a world economy turned upside down by new technology — with them as the main targets.
And the last bits:
A critic might ask why, if they’re so alarmed by a battle between rich and poor, they don’t stop wasting their billions on stockpiling armouries and islands and spend it helping the less fortunate?
But then what sort of red-blooded tech king wants to sign a cheque to charity when they could splash out on helicopters, Ducati motorbikes and an assault rifle for every family member?
It’s easy to laugh at the obscenely rich finding grotesque new ways to waste their money. But it’s undeniably disconcerting when it’s the lords of our digital age.
After all, everyone in Silicon Valley claims they want to save the world, not run away from it.
I presume the true plan is to trick all of these unrepentant, hypocritical bastards into their special bunkers and walling them up behind several feet of air-tight concrete. Then the worldwide, post-coital shared cigarette.