In April AP told us 650,000 were homeless in the US, The Wall Street Journal says the problem has grown about 10% largely on a surge in illegal aliens

The Journal’s count includes about 550,000 homeless people so far, up about 10% from what these places reported last year. The trend thus far means the U.S. is likely to top the roughly 653,000 homeless people estimated in 2023—the highest number since the government started reporting comparable data in 2007. The final count will depend on outstanding data from places that haven’t yet divulged their 2024 numbers, especially New York City, which reported the highest count last year.

 

More.

Ouch, my eyeballs just hit the back of my head again

 Record numbers in the US are homeless. Can cities fine them for sleeping in parks and on sidewalks?

 

Paragraph twelve:

 

More than 650,000 people are estimated to be homeless.

 

This is a small problem of incompetent liberalism in places like California, Oregon, and Washington state, where the drug laws are lax and the weather is good. It is pathetic that the Supreme Court has to be pestered with the consequences of liberalism's never-ending quest to turn every place into a shithole.

Boston Globe editorial board downplays illegal immigration threat, misrepresents Gallup survey which said immigration is Americans' top unprompted concern

 From the Gallup survey:

 

For the second straight month, immigration leads Americans’ unprompted answers about what most ails the nation, with inflation also figuring prominently. ...

Immigration Is Americans’ Top Unprompted Concern

Gallup also measures Americans’ views of national concerns monthly by asking them to name, unprompted, what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. This question format is asked before the list of issue concerns in the survey and yields a slightly different conclusion, finding immigration ranking ahead of inflation. Overall, 28% of Americans, the same as in February and the most for any issue, name immigration as the top problem. That essentially ties the 27% reading from July 2019 as the highest since Gallup started compiling mentions of immigration in 1981.

 

But here's the Boston Globe:

Late last month, the venerable Gallup company released a survey listing the most pressing concerns in the United States. Predictably topping the list were inflation and crime, followed by hunger and homelessness, the economy broadly, and the high cost of health care. Farther back were things like illegal immigration, drug use, and the environment.

 

When Gallup asks Americans to rank their concerns about a list of problems, immigration is placed seventh in the list. By the time your average person gets to number seven, he's already forgotten what he said about one, two, three, four, and five.

But you can see from that list what really concerns most people: their weight.

Take the combined "worrying a great deal" and "a fair amount" about any of the fourteen problems and you will see that NUMERO UNO is . . . hunger and homelessness at 80%.

Yet homelessness affected fewer than 600,000 people in 2022.

And hunger? Hunger is now about "food insecurity", not starving. My fat cat is food insecure if I fail to keep her food bowl full. Two-thirds of adults are overweight, 40% of whom are obese, and there's a weight-loss-drug mania out there.

No, Americans are worried about the obscenely high cost of housing and that they'll end up on the street begging for the food Joe Biden's inflation made unaffordable if they lose their jobs, which is highly likely with 10 million illegals he let in competing for their positions.

But yeah, worry about nuclear war with The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

Left Wing Turns Airports Into Homeless & Illegal Alien Dumping Grounds

Right Wing Turns Planes & Airports Into DEI Battlegrounds

David Ingram, NBC News

 

Meanwhile:

 

Biden Offers Airports in Atlantic City, on Canadian Border to House NYC Migrants

 

South Jersey leaders oppose proposal to shelter migrants at Atlantic City International Airport

 

Chicago's O'Hare Airport used as a migrant shelter as crisis overwhelms city: 'Like a scene from Mad Max'

 

Migrant families set up camp in Boston airport as Bay State overwhelmed by arrivals: ‘We need DC to act’

 

Hundreds of migrants living in San Diego airport as California battles 'unimaginable' homeless crisis

VOX says 2.5 million children in the U.S. experience homelessness every year, The Wall Street Journal says the homeless number just 653,000

 VOX.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

The Eugenics movement, victorious with abortion, aims now for widespread euthanasia to cull the herd of the poor, homeless, and mentally ill

In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year.  MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives. ... MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.

More.

 

This is how America ends

 One place at a time.

America and its free market capitalism depends on rules, a shared commitment to them and to their enforcement:

Sound money, not fiat money;

truth, not "my truth";

law and order, not one law for me and another for thee.

When you can't trust anybody anymore, it is over. People vote with their feet, as do corporations. 

Crime, Homelessness, Taxes: Hollywood Big Shots Fleeing LA...

As Violent Crime in LA Rises, Demand for Private Security Among Wealthy Soars...

UPDATE: In Atlanta's Buckhead Neighborhood, Rising Crime Fuels Move to Secede... 

AMAZON relocating workers from Seattle office due to crime...

DC WAWA closes amid ongoing shoplifting, violence...

WALGREENS closing more stores in San Fran due to organized theft...  

Violence rises as employees fight back against shoplifters, thieves... 

Chicago's Wealthy Neighborhoods Hire Private Police as Crime Rises...

NYC Mayor Eric Adams asks tech executives at private dinner to keep companies in the city

STARBUCKS Closing Stores, Citing Safety Concerns...

 SAFEWAY Cuts Hours Due To 'Off The Charts' Shoplifting... Iconic TARGET Store in San Fran to Close Amid Shoplifting Wave...MCDONALD'S CEO Raises Crime Concerns for Business in Chicago...  Portland families move to escape homeless camps, crime...  Ken Griffin Moving CITADEL From Chicago to Miami Following Crime Complaints...

This story blames climate change for homeless deaths, never once mentions the families who abandon them and the role played by drug abuse in their homelessness

 Sweltering streets: Hundreds of homeless die in extreme heat

 

One family, which presumably lived in a home where they presumably wrote the obituary and where the woman could have stayed temporarily, blames "the system" for the death of their homeless sister:

 

When a 62-year-old mentally ill woman named Shawna Wright died last summer in a hot alley in Salt Lake City, her death only became known when her family published an obituary saying the system failed to protect her during the hottest July on record, when temperatures reached the triple digits.

Her sister, Tricia Wright, said making it easier for homeless people to get permanent housing would go a long way toward protecting them from extreme summertime temperatures.

“We always thought she was tough, that she could get through it,” Tricia Wright said of her sister. “But no one is tough enough for that kind of heat.”

 

Maybe they thought they were just homeless

 SHOCK: Bodies of four people killed in Sacramento bar-fight shooting still lying on street 15 hours later...

In 2018 68% of Americans couldn't afford a vacation, a concert, a ball game or even dinner out and a movie

Here at home, we see the ever-widening gap in our wealthiest cities — New York, San Francisco, LA — which are suffering from homeless crises of epic proportions. Forty percent of Americans don’t have $400 saved in case of emergency. Last year, 68 percent couldn’t afford a ­recreational activity — from a vacation to concerts to a professional sporting event to even dinner or a movie — for lack of funds.

This year, the Census Bureau reported that the gap between the rich and poor has hit its highest level in the 50-plus years since they began marking it. Adjusting for inflation, the average household income is the same as it was 20 years ago. The average American can’t afford to buy a house in 70 percent of the country.

More here.

Gee what a shock, millions of older Americans get fired in the Great Recession, and their homelessness soars

Welcome to libertarian hell.

WHY AMERICANS ARE RETIRING INTO HOMELESSNESS:

UCSF researchers estimate that half of the single homeless adults are age 50 or older, compared to 11 percent in the early 1990s — a 354 percent uptick. This data is emblematic of a graying homeless population across the nation: America’s homeless elderly population is projected to nearly triple by 2030, according to new research encompassing New York City, Boston and Los Angeles County. And this problem spans the globe: A 2017 report on the U.K.’s homeless population found that the population of homeless people over 60 had increased 111 percent since 2009, and for those over 75 it had increased by 155 percent — compared to an increase of 48 percent in the general population.

Lesson of the Florida "bomber": They don't "x-ray" the mail at any point in the system to keep bombs out

Rush Limbaugh confidently misinformed millions of his listeners this week that the USPS scans suspicious packages in order to intercept them and keep them away from the public.

For his part, radio personality Michael Savage laughably spent most of the week wondering how all these "bombs" could be "hand-delivered" all over the place supposedly without entering the postal system, because he believed fake news to that effect. It must have been a conspiracy! The van was too clean after all that driving up and down the east coast and to California and back! The stickers on the windows were too recently affixed because they weren't yet faded!

What we learned once again, however, was that the USPS only isolates suspicious packages for scanning by outside authorities. The cost of installing such scanners in every postal sorting facility would cost billions of dollars the already bankrupt USPS doesn't have. In this instance, the USPS was alerted to the package M/O by the outside authorities after the fact, after some of the "bombs" had already been delivered. The USPS was told what to look for, not the other way around. 

This affair exposes the fact that the entire USPS system remains vulnerable to penetration by serious terrorists at any time, and that a person who really intended to harm others, say with bombs, could do so as long as the intended target isn't too famous. That's why the more serious threats are the poisoners, who can still reach their intended famous targets occasionally with letters, such as Vanessa Trump. The contents of mail are not "scanned", only the fronts and backs are imaged and the images stored. That's how the authorities, once alerted to the problem in Florida, "were reviewing mail streams in and out of Florida, attempting to pinpoint locations where the parcels may have originated", as reported in the USA Today story linked below.

A real bomber in this instance would have rigged his packages to blow up as they are opened by the designated target, as when a box lid lifted on its hinge triggers a circuit with a detonator. Of course, the difficulty of getting such a package into the actual hands of famous persons with staff protecting them from such an eventuality is a thought which cannot have escaped the mind of Cesar Sayoc.

A real bomber does not stuff active devices into padded envelope mailers as Sayoc did, where they could blow-up indiscriminately under normal, rough handling, including in his own hands. A real bomber does not leave finger prints behind on his mail bombs, especially if his fingerprints are already in the crime reporting system due to many prior arrests and convictions.

It's almost as if poor Cesar Sayoc, aged 56, suddenly homeless and forced to live in his van, intended to get caught so that he could finally escape all his problems and finally get a roof over his head and three square meals a day for the rest of his life after so many years of struggling with poverty.

CNN reported here:

Bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc had been kicked out by his parents, so he has living in the van that we have seen in pictures today, according to a law enforcement official. ... Sayoc was initially somewhat cooperative, the official said. He told investigators that the pipe bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. 

USA Today reports here:

The total number of bombs reached at least 14 Friday after more suspicious packages were recovered: one in Florida addressed to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another in New York addressed to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a device recovered at Sen. Kamala Harris’ office in Sacramento, California, and another package that was intercepted at a mail facility in Burlingame, California, addressed to billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris’ office says it was informed that the package was identified at a Sacramento mail facility. The FBI responded to the facility in a South Sacramento neighborhood that’s been blocked off by caution tape.

A package addressed to Clapper was recovered at a Manhattan postal facility. Like some of the previous packages, the one found in New York City on Friday had the office of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the return address, a photo obtained by CBS News showed. ...

The suspicious package intended for Clapper was spotted by a postal worker at the Radio City Station facility at around 8:15 a.m. The employee contacted U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and they contacted the NYPD and FBI.

NYPD Bomb Squad officers scanned the package and saw what appeared to be a pipe bomb, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said at a Manhattan news conference.

Typhus, which claimed the greatest number of lives at Auschwitz in 1942-1943, breaks out in LA

Health officials warn of typhus outbreak in downtown L.A.:

It spreads when fleas become infected with bacteria known as Rickettsia typhi or Rickettsia felis. The illness reaches humans when fleas bite them or when infected flea feces are rubbed into cuts or scrapes in the skin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... [S]evere cases can lead to damage to the heart, brain and lungs without treatment. 

The article never mentions lice, blaming the outbreak on fleas passed by stray and wild animals, especially rodents and cats, but also on trash left uncollected in the streets for some reason (now why would that be?), and on pet owners who fail to use flea reduction products. That's it, it's the fault of pet owners.

It couldn't possibly be dirty, filthy homeless people, you see.

Under Obama Identifying As "Lower Class" Reaches Highest Level Ever: 26 Million

400 homeless encampments in Marin County in 3 years

As reported here:

Roquemore is among the small but surging share of Americans who identify themselves as "lower class." Last year, a record 8.4% of Americans put themselves in that category — more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked on the General Social Survey, a project of the independent research organization Norc at the University of Chicago.

---------------------------------

The September 11th story excerpted at left details the ongoing problems of homelessness and poverty in Marin County, California, during the last three years and concludes that there are about 630,000 Americans living like this throughout the country as we speak.

Read it, here.

Homeownership Under Obama Hits a New All-Time Low of 59.2 Percent

Even a broken clock is right twice a day:

"This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement."

-- President Obama, quoted here, Dec. 6, 2011

The fact is the moment has already broken against the middle class.

Nobody is fighting to get into the middle class. The middle class is fighting to stay middle class, and is losing.

The president, who only now protests that he would rescue the middle class as the election season heats up, has actually presided over its demise, turning the middle class into the working class renters of yesteryear, and worse, according to this story from August 5, 2011 at CNN Money (link):

Home ownership is on the decline and, according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, the United States is fast becoming a nation of renters.

Last Friday, the Census Bureau reported that the percentage of people who owned a home had dropped to 65.9% during the second quarter -- its lowest level since the first quarter of 1998 and a far cry from the high of 69.2% reached in late 2004.

Yet, in a research paper issued a week earlier, Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) analysts Oliver Chang, Vishwanath Tirupattur and James Egan argued that the home ownership rate is even lower than the Census Bureau statistics say.

In fact, once they factored in delinquent mortgage borrowers (the ones who are likely to lose their homes at some point), Morgan Stanley calculated that the home ownership rate is more like 59.2%.

That's the lowest level since the Census Bureau started keeping quarterly records back in 1965 (before that, it recorded home ownership rates once a decade). The Census Bureau's statistics, however, do not factor in mortgage delinquencies.


When it comes to savings, the president speaks of modest savings and secure retirement as his goals for us, when the actual picture is a grim present and a worse future.

A survey using 2009 data and making the rounds in May 2011 said nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $2,000 for an emergency within 30 days (link).

And just two days ago a story (link) reported on a different survey which suggests that over half of the 151 million American workers have less than $25,000 saved while over half of the already retired are in the same boat:

More than half of all workers, 56%, say they have less than $25,000 in savings, according to a survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ...

More than half of retirees, 54%, report they have less than $25,000 saved. That's up dramatically from 2006, when 42% said they had less than that.


The most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (link) confirms that there has been a steady decline in the personal savings rate under Obama from 5.3 percent in 2010 to an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, a nearly 30 percent decline from what was already an inadequate level.

Some unemployed and now homeless families in hardest hit states like Florida are reduced to living in their cars, trucks and vans because shelters are already full. Their plight was the subject of a recent story (link) on 60 Minutes.

The American middle class is under siege on every front, from jobs, to homeownership, to family formation, to savings, to retirement. All this has unfolded under Obama's watch, who vacations, golfs, parties, fund-raises and speechifies, railing against business and the rich at every opportunity. But it is the middle class which is disappearing as he speaks, and he's done nothing to stop it.

The true meaning of class warfare.