the bone conductor

you gotta love bureaucrats.

not a ton, and you probably don’t give a shit anyway, but man. water! from! the! sky! it’s been… it’s been a while.

because it’s pretty ruling. yay happy people.

this is pretty irritating right here. it never ceases to amaze me that people who really should know better insist on turning the city’s unwillingness to really commit to affordable housing (while letting developers throw up new skyscraper lofts left right and center, of course) into some absurd us vs them dynamic, with the “them” being those rotten greedy bastards who want to actually own a home, or at least a piece of one, in one of the best places in the world to live, and maybe have the kind of security for their family that the tenant advocates demand for the renters they claim to represent. i know! we’ll outlaw condos and tics altogether! that will fix it! then no one will ever be evicted again! plus you have to love the “i know the *real* numbers” argument there. proof? evidence? who needs that (especially when what there is completely contradicts my argument) when i have an opinion! don quixote, call for you on line two…

it’s a real problem, and the real solution is for the city to make real affordable housing. sure some developers won’t get quite as rich as they would otherwise, but that seems preferable to punishing the few people who are able to scrape enough together to try to put down roots in a city they love, and not have to live with the uncertainty of some lunatic landlord or management company ready to yank the rug out first chance they get.

If my recollection serves, he started off on the sports page. Which, I suppose, is a good place to hone one’s sense of misplaced outrage and self-righteous blatherings about things you are only faintly acquianted with at all, and chronicling (literally, in this case) experiences that other people have had with a knowing, assured attitude, despite never having done any of those things. You have to love the level of clueless condescension that goes into this kind of treatment of a civic question - it’s like someone turned the city pages over to Jackie Harvey (”Newsflash! Apparently some of the Muni buslines are savagely overcrowded! No wonder there’s been talk about a “subway” through the Chinesetown! Mayor Agnos really needs to look into this…”) Although, lord knows I’d love a Washinton Square terminus to that line. San Francisco appraoching the 20th century! SO cuuute…

Anyway, then he goes for what can only be called The Gusto, parroting the moronic and thoroughly unscientific line that somehow the number of liquor stores in a certain area contribute to alcoholism, as well as city waste on ambulances and hospitalization for the miscreants and etc. etc. Because an alcoholic certainly wouldn’t walk an extra 3 blocks for some St. Ides. And if you want to “solve” the problem of alcoholism, I don’t think adopting even more hardline bullshit about what kind of booze a liquor store can sell is going to work. What almost certainly would work would be affordable (free) treatment for alcohol abuse for anyone who wants it, as well as affordable (free) and effective job training and placement programs. Trying to outlaw alcoholism, especially in an area that because of it’s relative affordability tends to attract people with problems of one kind of another in the first place, by changing the liquor store regulations is just self-righteous and asinine, as well as ignoring the fact that for many of the people around there, those corner stores are where they do most of their shopping, period. It’s called “urban.” Everyone doesn’t get in the 4wd Volvo wagon and head to Safeway. After living in the Tenderloin on a couple of different occasions during the early and mid-nineties, I think I can, unlike idiots like Nevious, speak to this with some actual experience and knowledge of both the hood and the folks in it. Better yet, Nevious completely ignores a story in his own paper that goes a long way towards proving how stupid the “city wasting money on ambulances for fuckups” argument is. It’s not that it isn’t necessarily true, so much as that it’s the city’s (and the community’s) fault for not addressing the problem intelligently in the first place.

Also, most of those recidivist ambluance users, as it were, are homeless, not necessarily residents of the Tenderloin in particular. As a visit to where the Haight hits the park, or Washington Square, or the Wharf, or any other part of town where homeless tend to congregate, would surely indicate, if one was paying attention…

Man. So glad to be back in cali, back in San Francisco, within shouting distance of some of the coolest stuff anywhere. We’re already trying to get another weekend locked up for next month. And with this going on for a while, it looks like there’s going to be snow into may this year. Woooo!

That link won’t make any sense in a week or two, but by then we’ll probably all be living in caves burning these worthless things they called “dollars” back when they had some value, trying to keep warm while waiting for the raccoon to finish cooking.

Mmmm… raccoon…