Houblog

Years ago, during the oil boom, when rich liberal northern cities hated Texas and Houston in particular, as the home of those despicable, evil oil companies, some cars down here sported bumper stickers saying, “Freeze a Yankee in the dark.” Sort of empirical proof that resentment engeneders more resentment, I guess. Well, I don’t suppose freezing people to death for being homeless (as opposed to being a Yankee) is really nice, but could we at least turn down the thermostat on them a bit? I really don’t like the homeless, and I’d rather they left town.

So what, you may ask, brought on this sudden venting of bile? Well, if you think it’s bilious, we already aren’t going to see eye to eye, because it’s not bile, it’s cold blood. It’s not the homeless I don’t like per se; it’s that I don’t like vagrants and bums, I don’t want them around me, and I don’t even want them in my city. But either way, the answer to the question is: “ducks.” While the sentiment and rationale have been there for some time, today’s typically “compassionate” TV stories about giving coats and blankets to the shelters for the homeless annoyed the crap out of me. And then I read this, from blogger Steven DenBeste (20070116.1315 entry):

So it snowed here last night. Maybe 2 inches of accumulation or so. The yard outside is really pretty, with everything except the stream covered with pristine whiteness.

Or that’s what it maybe should have been. Actually, the snow in the yard is covered with thousands of footie-prints. Webbed footie-prints. A little while ago I looked outside and there must have been more than sixty ducks out there, walking all over the place, hoping that me or my neighbors would open up their deck doors and toss out something tasty.

I admit that I gave into the temptation, so they got the last 10 slices of a loaf of sourdough bread that’s been in my frig [sic] for about a week and a half. And I’ve seen two other neighbors feeding them today.

(Emphasis added.) Recently, our fine mayor kicked off a quickly-forgotten-and-buried campaign to encourage people to not give to panhandlers. His theory is that if people don’t give to beggers, then beggers won’t bother begging. Of course, all Right-Thinking People(tm) promptly burned him in effigy. And by Right, I mean Left. The rest of us just ridiculed the whole idea, because, while it’s true, there will always be enough damn fools giving them money to keep the scam going (and the rest will just be intimidated by the smell into paying them to go away.)

But it’s not the idea of giving them cash money that frustrates me, nor is it what’s causing downtown to be overrun with vagrants demanding money. It’s the fact that they have infrastructure here. They have support. There’s shelters for them to stay in, programs to feed them, TV stations to cry for them, and a newspaper more than willing to shill for them and tell us all how we should care. And there’s a liberal community that gives generously to support these agencies. If you don’t think that’s important, ask yourself just how it is that several homeless shelters can afford to be located downtown, where the property tax rate and evaluations should break them. Even on the east side, that isn’t cheap.

Simply put, I’m saying the reason we have so many street bums isn’t because we are a horrible city: it’s because we’re too damn nice of a city. We’ve established all these programs that add up rolling out a great big welcome mat, and what do you know, but the ducks have come waddling up to Houston’s door and commenced to quacking. Leaving their “footprints in the snow,” so to speak — or more precisely, their odor in our nostrils, their litter in our yards and under our freeways, their crap in our fountains, and their urine on our streets. The homeless are not immobile. Anyone who’s ever traveled on an interstate during the fall and early winter, and seen them out there with their badly written signs saying “FLoRidA” knows theat they can be quite mobile, if they’ve got reason to be.

For the last several years, homeless advocates have won enough support from the city to arrest the movement of the homelsss passing through; in short, we’ve become a magnet to vagrants. How else to explain that one of the most affordable major cities in the U.S. has the third highest homeless population in the country? We made it easy for them to stay here, so they did. And our liberal, out-of-step media has been encouraging Houstonians to aid and abet this effort to drown us in the refuse of our own society. It’s enough to make me wish for some good old-fashioned communist propaganda! Well, not really, but it’s amusing to see the Worker’s Paradise have similar issues, and call it like it is.

“You know China’s welfare system can only cover urban citizens,” said Zhou Hanhua, a professor of the Chinese Academy of Social Science. “The good condition of the shelters will attract more vagrants and poor people.”

According to a report on CCTV, the local government of Shenzhen has built a shelter with a 34-inch colour TV, fitness facilities, table tennis, reading room and even dancing and song hall. Reports say the initial phase of the shelter cost 3 million yuan (US$380,000).

“We do not hope the shelter for the homeless will become a club for lazy bones,” Zhou said.

Hahahahaha. Hell, I work for a living, but don’t own a 34″ TV. A little closer to home and on a site with somewhat of a different political persuasion, I found this bit of speculation:

During my stay in SoCal, a surprising thought kept returning to me: Why hasn’t government solved the problem of homelessness? I know this question seems out of character. But I not saying that government should solve the problem of homelessness; I’m wondering why it hasn’t.

(snip)

Why hasn’t this happened? The simplest answer is that the homeless like their lifestyle. Even if you gave them a nice apartment, three cafeteria meals a day, and beer money, they’d keep bugging the tourists in Santa Monica. Maybe, but it’s important to distinguish between the plausible view that the homelessness prefer their lifestyle to conforming to normality, and the implausible view that they would sleep on the streets and beg even if they had comfortable apartments and pockets full of cash.

There’s also a popular view that begging provides a pretty good income, but I’ve seen enough homeless people digging through garbage cans for food to be skeptical.

So what gives? My best story just comes down to mobility. Places like Santa Monica have already tried to throw money at the homeless problem. The result was that they attracted more homeless to Santa Monica, until funds that were initially ample were once again stretched thin. If Santa Monicans redoubled their efforts, they would soon redouble their homeless population as well.

Readers might remember Dr.Heinous’ comments on Santa Monica from a while back.

I admit, I’m fairly cold-blooded. I don’t feel particularly obliged to support, or even tolerate the presence of, people who won’t work, won’t bathe, won’t take the medicine that’s provided for them, and won’t act like products of the greatest civilization in history. Nor do I feel particularly obliged to listen to people who foist this dreck off on the rest of us:

An estimated 15,000 homeless individuals live in shelters, abandoned buildings, in encampments, and on the streets. Among these, 1,500 are children.

More than 760,000 Gulf Coast residents live in poverty. 150,000 are marginally homeless–taken in by friends or family because they have nowhere else to go. An additional 250,000 are only one paycheck away from being out on the streets.

In the greater Houston metropolitan area, one child out of every five lives at or below the poverty level.

This complete load of illogcial crap is a blatant attempt to confuse the reader and cloud the facts with an appeal emotionalism. Let me dissect it:

1. Fifteen hundred children are homeless in Houston. Question: Where the hell is Texas CPS? Sounds like 1,500 clear cases of “foster family time.” Second question: Where do they get this figure? (Any of these figures, for that matter, but especially that one?) I mean, is someone going around counting up homelss kids, but not bothering to call CPS?

2. The 150,000 “marginally” homeless. What is this? Homeless is homeless–if you’ve got a place to stay, be it with friends or family, you’re not homeless. This is an old trick of the entitlement-oriented bureaucrats and “advocates” of every stripe. If the real numbers aren’t impressive enough (15,000 out of over four million?), re-define the category to add more people!

3. The “one paycheck from homeless” quarter million. More of the same, piled higher and deeper. And yes, that’s a thinly-veiled crack at liberal academics who pull the same trick. Not even 150,000 is impressive enough, so let’s add a quarter of a million more who live from paycheck to paycheck! (I’m not even going to address the deliberate confusion of “760,000 Gulf Coast residents” with “Houston.” It’s an example of what I call the ad datum fallacy. When all else fails, throw out some impressive sounding but utterly irrelevant fact.)

4. One child of five in the Houston area lives at or below the poverty level. Yes, but remember, only 1,500 of them (supposedly) are homeless!

Notice what’s happened here? We’ve gone from discussing lazy, stinking, panhandling, littering, filthy bums, to talking about children living in poverty.. What kind of bastard could be in favor of children living in poverty?

Hey, even I’m not in favor of it, I’m just indifferent to it. As long as “advocates” and bureaucrats are allowed to draw (poverty) lines that enable them to have careers advocating and ruling and ministering and administering, then they have a stake in there being people living in whatever they define poverty to be. Thus, they’ll naturally draw those lines based on criteria that must be considered suspect at best, biased at worst. Which still has not one damn thing to do with lazy, stinking, panhandling, littering, filthy bums. But it does distract from them nicely, doesn’t it?

So the next time the media (or anyone else) tries to lecture you on generosity to the homeless, ask them just which homeless they’re talking about — the ones with a roof over their heads, or the stinking, foul-mouthed ones panhandling for money on street corners and in parking lots downtown. Then, regarless of their answer, don’t give to their charity.

Nothing draws ducks like free bread, and we’re not going to get rid of these ducks as long as we feed them instead of shooing them away.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Current News, Random Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.