Anti-gay boycott of conservative powwow gains steam

[Kulindahr]

Kulindahr, unfortunately, all I have to go on is the word of an admitted Libertarian making a blanket statement. Far be it for me to suggest that there was any intent to deceive on your part, but there is most definitely a capability for you to be mistaken.

That's all from information provided to me or admitted to me by government housing people. In the case of the private entities ready and willing to step in, I spoke with the principals -- like the one willing to let people in RVs who can't afford anything more than a friend's driveway top park in, to park their RVs in his empty commercial building, with electricity and plumbing at his own expense, after the city decided that people can't allow others to live in an RV on their own property.

Government is like 'evangelical' Christians: more interested in enforcing rules than in helping anyone.

By contrast, government-subsidized housing figures could probably be researched on the web.

Maybe. The agencies here don't put a lot of the information on the web -- for the local one, I couldn't even find the waiting list 'length' (county commissioner who sits on the board thinks it's "more than three years"; apartment manager who provides subsidized housing says 'close to five').

Of course part of the problem is that if you don't have an income, the government program won't help you -- they only pay a portion, and "all" isn't an acceptable portion. So there's no government assistance at all for the kids sleeping under bushes (for one of whom I'm risking a serious fine by letting him stay in the RV in the driveway for the sub-freezing nights until it get towed and trashed).

That one reads a little bit too much like a conspiracy theory to me.

All you have to do is trace the membership, and you'll find that the AMA is in the business of deciding how many doctors the country gets. Their decision for the last thirty years has been "not enough", by limiting the number of medical schools and then limiting the number of graduates. They're like a medieval guild, keeping service scarce and thus cost high.

Oh, by the way, Kulin: do you really think the unions have that much power? Good gravy. Why, the unions are....

??? What unions? Are you considering the AMA a union?

....never mind. Kulindahr, my esteemed colleague: did you smoke a lot of weed during the 70s? I know we share a hippy mentality, even if it's pointed in the opposite direction.

Never touched the stuff till a few years ago -- same year I came out (see my blog).

 

[Kulindahr]

As if government regulation of an orphanage guarantees that there will be no child molestation. Or that government regulation of oil rigs operating off shore United States guarantees that corporations comply with such regulations.

No kidding.

Though here it would be foster homes, not orphanages.

 

[Kulindahr]

@Kulindahr: Oh, I see.

Apropos the housing situation, I think some of the problem has to do with landlord laws. There's no reason whatever that my neighbor, Candy Samples, can't rent me subsidized housing, at least here in Reno, but she does have to make the housing habitable, for health reasons. (She wouldn't be able to put in substandard heating, for example, due to the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.)

Of course, if she wants to make the space available for free, there's no law against that at all. I personally know a man who'd lived in a man's RV for quite some time, during the 1990s, and since the man didn't charge rent, it was perfectly legal.

Here you can't even do it for free. The guy with the commercial space was going to let people park their "unsightly" RVs inside and provide free water, sewer, and electricity. But there's no one person here who can waive regulations for something like that, because there are city, county, state, and federal regulations from multiple agencies with their own little fiefs to defend and authority to assert.

To me it's to a great degree a problem of effectively having an empire and not a democracy -- we do not have "government of the people, by the people, and for the people", we have rule by bureaucrats who've never even been here. In a situation where the city is throwing people into homelessness in the name of aesthetics, a county official ought to be able to just say, "We're helping these people; put them in your commercial building." And in a good world, someone would sue the regulation-worshiping liberals on behalf of the homeless folks.

Oh -- and the waiting list to get property inspected to get it certified for subsidized housing is on the order of seven years......

That being said, I think some of the problem lies in the fact that you're living in Oregon, Kulindahr. In a redder state, I'm sure there'd be much less restriction. But your "landlord" might also be putting your life in danger. It's a trade-off.

Oh: my comment on the unions was based on this comment:


I do think that 1) you're suffering from having an immersed viewpoint and 2) you live in a union state and in a union industry (wasn't it in construction?)

The truth is, Kulindahr, the unions have been bowdlerized since their heyday in the 70s. Except for a few pockets in the country (Detroit, Oregon, LasVegas, NYC) they just don't have much power anymore. Here in Reno, I don't know one single person who belongs to a union; construction workers—when they can be found—are often illegal immigrants.

Keep in mind, Kulindahr, that you've not been in the business for quite a while. Times change.

So apropos your argument that unions are keeping important people in government, I really do think you're blaming the wrong bogeymen. I'd look to corporations to find the bad guys.

Misunderstanding: I meant the public employee unions. In Oregon especially they're greedy, rapacious parasites which expect an 8% raise every year (on top of inflation) and insist they have a right to retire at 120% of their salary on retirement, regardless of whether they do their jobs or not (just about have to murder someone to get dismissed). So they protect a bureaucracy that makes regulations leading to children getting issued warnings for excavation without a permit, or for diverting state resources for building a dam in a creek... on the public beach below the high tide line.

 

[MIJ-VI]

Breaking: Next RNC Chair Will Oppose Gay Marriage (No Offense)
by Tommy Christopher | 9:22 pm, January 3rd, 2011

 

[Kulindahr]

^
"Breaking News"?

more like broken record.

 

[MIJ-VI]

If I were a citizen of the United States I would vote for the political party which demonstrably has the best overall track record within my living memory. Deeds>rhetoric IMO.

Up here a lot of BS flies before and during an election but once a party wins & sits in the big chair and cracks open the books it ends up largely doing what the job demands anyway.

Thus there's no way in hell I'd support any party eager to throw my rights under a campaign bus just to gain the de facto facade of power--especially when that same hit & run is killing kid after kid after kid after kid.