AS ALWAYS LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER EPISODES OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE:

Shot: Official: Cruise ship could house 1,000 Oakland homeless.

A San Francisco Bay Area city official wants to explore the possibility of using a cruise ship to house up to 1,000 homeless people in the region with a high cost of living and a shortage of affordable housing.

Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan told a council meeting Tuesday that the ship would be brought to the Port of Oakland, but port officials said Wednesday the move would be “untenable.”

“We respect President Kaplan’s desire to address homelessness but Port of Oakland docks are designed to work cargo ships, there isn’t the infrastructure to berth a cruise ship,” port spokesman Mike Zampa said.

—AP, yesterday.

Chaser:

Michael Dukakis: There’s my friend Leroy Neiman. Let’s go see what Leroy’s doing. [ approaches Leroy, who’s painting a mural ] Hello, Leroy. That’s great. It’s great. What do you call it?

Leroy Neiman: Governor, I call this “What Might Have Been”. It shows the nuclear aircraft carrier Niemitz after its conversion into a floating shelter for the homeless.

Michael Dukakis: Well, it’s beautiful, Leroy.

Leroy Neiman: Thank you.

—“Dukakis After Dark,” Saturday Night Live, November 5th, 1988.

DOG INGESTS MIX OF DRUGS DURING WALK AT CRISSY FIELD BEACH IN SAN FRANCISCO:

It was a regular walk at the park that almost ended in tragedy for three-year-old Lido.

“His temperature peaked to 108 degrees. He was shaking and drooling and was out of control and we were concerned that he was going to have a heart attack or that we were going to lose him,” described Lido’s guardian Jennifer McHugh.

McHugh says Lido began to spin minutes after ingesting a substance during their morning walk at Crissy Field Beach.

“Clearly the drug use in San Francisco has hit epidemic levels if we are concerned about walking our dogs and them interacting or coming in contact with drug paraphernalia,” said McHugh.

The drugs found inside Lido’s system were methamphetamine and oxycodone.

The use of the phrase pet “guardian” in the article is an appropriately Orwellian Bay Area touch. I’m only surprised that the ABC affiliate didn’t refer to Lido as being one of the area’s “fur children.”

UPDATE: Bay Area blogger Bookworm emailed me:

Re the story about the poor dog that almost died on the streets of SF, the “guardian” language comes right out of the San Francisco Municipal Code:

San Francisco Health Code SEC. 41.12.  DUTIES OF OWNERS OR GUARDIANS.

The Code now refers to guardian or owner, but I have a vague memory that the word “owner” was fiercely contested at one time.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders. “Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread. If you’ve been in a restaurant kitchen, it’s a familiar scene. But what’s missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag. Delivery drivers line up in a waiting area ready for the name on their order to be called. Behind the counter, racks of metal shelves hold bags of food. Each bag sports a round, red sticker with the logo of DoorDash, America’s biggest food delivery app. DoorDash manages this building, the drivers, the counter staff — everything but the food, which is made by five restaurants that are renting kitchens here.”

What do you call a restaurant with no diners? A factory.

“POOPING IN THE STREET HAS CONSEQUENCES:” Schwab Inc. leaving San Francisco for Texas.

IF YOU’RE IN COLORADO, PAY ATTENTION. THEY WILL PULL ALL THE STOPS TO DEPRIVE YOU OF YOUR RIGHT TO A REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC. CALIFORNIA CAN MANUFACTURE ENOUGH VOTES TO STEAL THOSE OF EVERY OTHER STATE. TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT SAN FRANCISCO. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT: California Dems Flood Colorado With Cash Ahead of National Popular Vote Referendum.

PRIORITIES: San Francisco: Where It’s OK to Crap in the Streets But They Arrest People for Eating on a BART Platform.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: San Francisco’s New DA: Public Urination ‘Will Not Be Prosecuted.’

Earlier: San Francisco’s New Socialist, Soft On Crime D.A. Is The Last Thing The City Needs.

(Classical reference in headline.)

NOT THE ONION: San Francisco’s New Socialist, Soft On Crime D.A. Is The Last Thing The City Needs.

[Chesa] Boudin’s political leanings are fairly unsurprising. San Francisco’s newest DA and self-proclaimed socialist is the son of former members of the violent revolutionary far-left group Weather Underground, an organization that rose to infamy in the 1970s and carried out as many as two dozen bombings of government properties. Both of Boudin’s parents were imprisoned for murders related to a robbery they conducted as Weathermen, and Boudin’s father David Gilbert is still serving time.

In his parents’ stead, two other militant Weathermen, known as leaders within the organization, raised Boudin. Indeed, in an interview with Jacobin (yes, that Jacobin), Boudin spoke positively of how his four parents’ “activism” has inspired his own work, despite the “mistakes” they all made—a supposedly “charming” detail that is fundamentally grotesque.

As a Yale-trained lawyer, Boudin eventually left the United States to work as a translator for Venzuela’s now-deceased socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, an outrageous resume data point that ought to get someone laughed out of political office (for those unfamiliar, Chavez’s socialism eventually transformed Venezuela into a failed state). But predictably not so in San Francisco, where behemoth, yet ineffective government is fetishized to the point of allowing piles of human feces in the streets.

Why doesn’t San Francisco make it official and simply elect Bane to be their D.A.?

FOREIGN INFLUENCE: Hugo Chavez’s trusted advisor gets ready to run the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

SOCIALISM: IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL LEAVE. 35 percent of San Franciscans consider leaving for good, according to city survey.

Somebody really needs to fund Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea.

YOU KNOW WHAT’S PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS: Apple wants affordable housing in California—but laws stand in the way.

Apple has pledged $2.5 billion to help address California’s affordable-housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. In recent years, the San Francisco Bay Area has become the most expensive housing market in America. Los Angeles also suffers from housing costs far above the national average.

Apple’s $2.5 billion package includes several different initiatives. Apple will offer a $1 billion line of credit to organizations building housing for low-income people.

These efforts to promote affordable housing are laudable, but corporate initiatives alone are unlikely to solve California’s housing crisis. The Golden State’s fundamental housing problem is that state and local laws simply don’t allow developers to build enough housing to accommodate rising demand.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all announced billion-dollar-or-more housing plans, but they’d get better results spending a fraction of that amount helping to elect local Republicans on a deregulation platform.

But it seems that Big Tech, just like Big Government, would rather throw around large sums of money to little effect.

GROUND ZERO OF THE HOMELESS CRISIS: Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar.

This may explain [Stanford psychology and law professor David Rosenhan]. He saw real problems in society: The country was warehousing very sick people in horror houses pretending to be hospitals, our diagnostic systems were flawed and psychiatrists in many ways had too much power — and very little substance. He saw how psychiatric labels degraded people and how doctors see patients through the prism of their mental illness. All of this was true. In many ways, it is still true.

But the problem is that scientific research needs to be sound. We cannot build progress on a rotten foundation.

In disregarding Lando’s data and inventing other facts, Rosenhan missed an opportunity to create something three-dimensional, something a bit messier but more honest. Instead, he helped perpetuate a dangerous half-truth.

And today, what we have is a mental-health crisis of epic proportions. Over 100,000 people with serious mental illnesses live on the streets, while we are chronically short of safe housing and hospital beds for the sickest among us.

Had Rosenhan been more measured in his treatment of the hospitals, had he included Lando’s data, there’s a chance a different dialogue, less extreme in its certainty, would have emerged from his study and maybe, just maybe, we’d be in a better place.

Read the whole thing.

Flash-forward to today: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless.

AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: Victor Davis Hanson asks: Is California Becoming Premodern?

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

Earlier: The rolling blackouts in California is not a climate change story. It’s a perfect storm of bad management decisions and rent-seeking green energy contractors.

CALIFORNIA AT THE CROSSROADS: “California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not just bury them?”, asked a headline in USA Today earlier this month:

It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E’s website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.

California has 25,526 miles of higher voltage transmission lines, and 239,557 miles of distribution lines, two-thirds of which are overhead, according to CPUC. Less than 100 miles per year are transitioned underground, meaning it would take more than 1,000 years to underground all the lines at the current rate.

Or, California could practice responsible forestry solutions to reduce the chance of fires.  But then, that would lead to this headline from back in August at the San Francisco Chronicle: “‘Radical’ tree trimming: Critics say PG&E’s rush to stop fires may hurt California forests.”

As Rich Lowry writes today at NRO, “Decades of misgovernance and misplaced priorities have left the state fighting fire with . . . blackouts:”

California governor Gavin Newsom, who has to try to evade responsibility for this debacle while presiding over it, blames “dog-eat-dog capitalism” for the state’s current crisis. It sounds like he’s referring to robber barons who have descended on the state to suck it dry of profits while burning it to the ground. But Newsom is talking about one of the most regulated industries in the state — namely California’s energy utilities, which answer to the state’s public utilities commission.

This is not exactly an Ayn Rand operation. The state could have, if it wanted, pushed the utilities to focus on the resilience and safety of its current infrastructure — implicated in some of the state’s most fearsome recent fires — as a top priority. Instead, the commission forced costly renewable-energy initiatives on the utilities. Who cares about something as mundane as properly maintained power lines if something as supposedly epically important — and politically fashionable — as saving the planet is at stake?

Meanwhile, California has had a decades-long aversion to properly clearing forests. The state’s leaders have long been in thrall to the belief that cutting down trees is somehow an offense against nature, even though thinning helps create healthier forests. Biomass has been allowed to build up, and it becomes the kindling for catastrophic fires.

As Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation points out, a report of the Western Governors’ Association warned of this effect more than a decade ago, noting that “over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires.”

In 2016, then-governor Jerry Brown actually vetoed a bill that had unanimously passed the state legislature to promote the clearing of trees dangerously close to power lines. Brown’s team says this legislation was no big deal, but one progressive watchdog called the bill “neither insignificant or small.”

On top of all this, more people live in remote areas susceptible to fires, in part because of the high cost of housing in more built-up areas.

Fortunately, as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air, Gov. Newsom has stumbled into the perfect solution to all of his problems: “What to do with such a prickly situation? The answer is obvious. He’ll just get rid of PG&E. And the person to take care of that little chore would obviously be Warren Buffet because he could easily purchase the company that’s now in bankruptcy and facing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits:”

I’m not sure who should break this news to Governor Newsom. Perhaps one of our readers could volunteer. But the fact is that Warren Buffet is incredibly wealthy for a reason. He doesn’t pour his money down ratholes with no chance of showing a profit. It’s not his job to save California from its own folly. He’s probably already regretting the fact that his energy company is heavily invested in PG&E and taking massive hits on their shares as it is.

While Buffett has long been a lefty politically, his presumed forthcoming refusal to Newsom’s kind offer is a reminder of the late historian Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”

Thus, California’s woes continue. Or as Lowry concludes, “California’s overriding goal should have been safe, cheap, and reliable power, a public good so basic that it’s easy to take for granted. The state’s focus on ideological fantasies has instead ensured it has none of the above.”

EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED: In Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley, “Some 522 tons of rocks and boulders have put a stop — for now at least — to a longstanding problem: Squatters camping under the Pacific Boulevard viaduct in Albany where Jackson Street and Seventh Avenue meet.”

Someone pictured the rocks on Facebook, and a bike ride this afternoon took me past the place to see for myself.

This used to be a frequent hangout for apparently homeless people who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the nearby shelters, Helping Hands just around the corner and Signs of Victory a couple blocks down Jackson Street.

The headline though, in the Hasso Hering, is a great moment in gaslighting: “Rocks in a hard place: No more camping.” As one of the commenters notes:

It is NOT “camping”. It is criminal trespass, littering and other criminal violations. Camping is when you pitch a tent or RV for recreational-vacation purposes. Some want to say this is a housing problem…while repeated studies show it is a mental health and addiction problem. In the meantime, our cities should not be places where people can pitch a tent and destroy the city scape.

Earlier: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Rich Libs in Silicon Valley to Host ‘Poverty Simulation’ — will be held in Cupertino, site of Apple headquarters.

The event will take place on Nov. 2 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Cupertino Senior Center. During the two-hour simulation, participants will “work to overcome barriers to social services, live off insufficient income, and encounter unforeseen economic obstacles along the way,” according to the City of Cupertino website.

The poverty simulation will be hosted by the city and two local nonprofits, West Valley Community Services and Step Up Silicon Valley. The latter group describes itself as a “social innovation network focused on reducing poverty.”

Cupertino, site of Apple headquarters, has a median household income of more than $150,000—well above the national median of $60,000. Users of the popular social-networking website Twitter, which is headquartered about an hour’s drive away in San Francisco, have noted the absurdity of rich, tech-industry liberals who have turned a once-great city into an unlivable hellscape in turn having little to offer in terms of actual solutions beyond a “simulation” designed to allow its rich, liberal attendees to publicly express their opposition to poverty. Good for them.

Curiously though, there seems to be little effort to roll back what Thomas Sowell dubbed “the housing price of liberalism” in the Bay Area. As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”

NEVER LET A MANUFACTURED CRISIS GO TO WASTE: Attorney blasts California Gov. Newsom for using homeless crisis to overturn will of voters.

Attorney Jim Breslo said Wednesday that California Gov. Gavin Newsom overturned the will of California voters by using the homeless crisis as an excuse to impose statewide rent control in an attempt to address a housing shortage.

“He’s [Newsom is] trying to use a crisis to do things that he wasn’t otherwise able to do,” Breslo told “Fox & Friends.”

“They couldn’t get statewide rent control approved by the voters.”

Although Newsom previously opposed the initiative, the former lieutenant governor and mayor of San Francisco changed his position and plans to sign a statewide rent-control law.

One more time, the Housing Gnomes’ three-step plan works like this:

1. Make construction more costly, and also cap rents.

2. ???

3. Housing for everyone!

Fortunately, I have a huge supply Unexpectedlys for use as the steps play out.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON: San Francisco 49ers become first NFL team to adopt a “‘specifically designated’ emotional support animal, a 49ers spokesperson told CNN.”

Somewhere, the late Bill Walsh, who was a boxer in college, in addition to playing multiple football positions, must be shaking his head and wondering what’s going on with the current incarnation of the team he built.

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE BABYLON BEE:

Shot: All The Other States Beg California To Add Them To Travel Ban.

—Headline, the (satiric) Babylon Bee, September 17th.

Chaser: San Francisco Expands Travel Ban to 22 Pro-Life States.

—Headline, American Greatness, today.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

All around the world, young people are having less sex than previous generations. At the forefront of the so-called global “sex recession” is Japan, which has one of the lowest fertility rates on Earth, and it could serve as a cautionary tale for the U.S. and other industrialized countries.

Shota Suzuki works as a building custodian in Tokyo. After work, he likes to hang out in an area known for anime and manga with his friends. But at 28, Suzuki has never had a romantic relationship, and he’s pessimistic that he ever will.

“Yes, I’m a virgin,” he told CBS News. “I would like to get married, but I can’t find a partner.”

Suzuki is far from a rare case. It’s not difficult to find other young adults, like 27-year-old Kakeru Nakamura, who are surprisingly candid about their sexual inexperience.

“My parents want me to hurry up and get married,” he said. “I tell them I’m too busy.”

A review of Japan’s National Fertility Survey reveals virginity is on the rise; one out of every 10 Japanese men in their 30s is still a virgin. That puts Japan’s virginity rate well ahead of that of other industrialized nations.

—“The cautionary tale of Japan’s ‘sex recession,’” CBS News, September 27th.

● Chaser:

In the decade leading up to the publication of The Population Bomb and the creation of ZPG in 1968, a range of non-fiction films and television broadcasts engaged with population. Millions had viewed CBS Reports’ Emmy-award winning “The Population Explosion,” a television documentary about India, in 1959. Canada’s National Film Board produced People by the Billions (1960) and Population Explosion (1967), while the Ford Foundation’s National Educational Television (NET, later replaced by PBS) broadcast a six-part series on The Population Problem in 1965. The Squeeze (1964), a short experimental film about overpopulation by time-lapse pioneer Hilary Harris, won a Golden Gate Award for best fiction at the San Francisco Film Festival. And most famously, the Population Council commissioned Walt Disney’s Family Planning (1967). Translated into over twenty languages, the ten-minute cartoon starring Donald Duck cost $300,000 to produce and was accompanied by supplementary filmstrips, slides, leaflets, comics, posters, and other materials.

In roughly the same period, fictionalized narratives about overpopulation and population control also flourished. A thriving subgenre of science fiction, subsequently dubbed demographic-dystopian, or “demodystopian,” was not only published in paperback, but also broadcast on radio and television. Following Malthusian episodes of radio’s Exploring Tomorrow (1958) and television’s ABC Stage 67 (1966) and Star Trek (1969), ABC Movie of the Week aired “The Last Child” on October 5, 1971, just three months before Z.P.G. opened nationwide. Set in New York “sometime in the not too distant future”, the made-for-TV movie follows a young couple’s attempt to save their unborn child from state-administered abortion by fleeing the overpopulated police state America has become to Canada, where population control laws are more lenient. The narrative structure of defiantly reproductive heroes on the run from draconian authorities as well as the conservative (pro-family, anti-abortion) subtext of “The Last Child” was soon echoed in Z.P.G., the first demodystopian film to be seen not on television, in the privacy of homes, but in cinemas across the nation. The name of the film, identical to that of Ehrlich’s organization, brought ZPG into direct conflict with Z.P.G. 

—“Malthus at the Movies: Science, Cinema, and Activism around Z.P.G. and Soylent Green,” US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, October 18, 2018.

Similarly, as lefty historian Douglas Brinkley noted in his 2012 biography of CBS’s longtime anchorman Walter Cronkite, Cronkite became obsessed with radical environmentalism right after the first manned moon landing in 1969 — which, curiously enough, was precisely when the Democratic Party became obsessed with radical environmentalism. As Brinkley wrote:

[N]ow that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.” Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News— inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

Finally, as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air on “the Sex Recession,” “There may well be other factors, too. We have teenagers running around the world convinced that the Earth is melting down and they’ll all be dead in 12 years. What are we doing in response to this mass paranoid hysteria? We’re handing out awards for best performance, that’s what. That’s not exactly an incentive to invest in the future, is it?”

THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: No Power? Then Say Goodbye To Security, NorCal CRE Says.

In the throes of PG&E’s unprecedented Public Safety Power Shut-Off, office and multifamily experts say security was their primary concern until power could be restored.

The silver lining of this kind of outage, which commercial real estate fears may be the region’s new normal, compared to a natural disaster is the modicum of forewarning the bankrupt company can provide a few days ahead of time, but constantly changing weather forecasts rendered part of that seeming advantage useless.

“It seems really haphazard,” Transwestern Northern California Vice President of Asset Services Blake Peterson said of PG&E’s notifications and plans.

Indeed, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson admitted as much Thursday night during a press conference.

“Our website crashed several times. Our maps are inconsistent and maybe incorrect. Our call centers were overloaded,” Johnson said. “To put it simply, we were not adequately prepared to support the operational event.”

The result, according to multiple property management sources, was a scramble to provide darkened buildings the bare-essential services, like security and elevator power.

What could go wrong? Pretty much everything.

SAN FRANCISCO, HOSTAGE TO THE HOMELESS:

For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless. The results have been the opposite: street squalor and misery have increased, even as government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles that have guided the city’s homelessness policy remain inviolate: homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

It’s Heather Mac Donald, so read the whole thing.

THE JAZZ SINGER PREMIERED ON THIS DAY IN 1927: It is usually regarded as the first feature-length “talkie” (though it contained only a bit of actual talking).

Starring Al Jolson, who performs several scenes in blackface, the film is the story of a Jewish boy, Jakie Rabinowitz, who longs to be a jazz singer. His father, on the other hand, wants him to follow the family tradition and become a synagogue cantor. Jakie eventually runs away to follow his dream of show business stardom.

Alas, just as he is about to make it big, he finds out that his father is on his deathbed. Young Jakie is thus needed to sing the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur in his father’s stead. If he fails to show up for the premiere of his big show, his fledgling career will likely be ruined.   But who will sing at the Yom Kippur service?  (Yes, I know … it’s probably a bit too melodramatic for the 21^st century, but whatever ….)

With Justin Trudeau and all, blackface has been a big news item lately.  Here is an aspect of the issue that I did not realize until recently (though it doesn’t surprise me): Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer were both very popular with African Americans. When the film played in Harlem, Harlem’s newspaper, the Amsterdam News, called it “one of the greatest pictures ever produced.” About Jolson, it wrote: “Every colored performer is proud of him.”

I also did not realize that Jolson had been such a champion of African American performers. Here is what Wikipedia says:

While growing up, Jolson had many black friends, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who became a prominent tap dancer. As early as 1911, at the age of 25, Jolson was noted for fighting discrimination on Broadway and later in his movies. He promoted a play by Garland Anderson, which became the first production with an all-black cast produced on Broadway. He brought a black dance team from San Francisco that he tried to put in a Broadway show. He demanded equal treatment for Cab Calloway, with whom he performed duets in the movie The Singing Kid.

Jolson read in the newspaper that songwriters Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, neither of whom he had ever heard of, were refused service at a Connecticut restaurant because of their race. He tracked them down and took them out to dinner, “insisting he’d punch anyone in the nose who tried to kick us out!” According to biographer Al Rose, Jolson and Blake became friends and went to boxing matches together.  …

Jeni LeGon, a black female tap dance star, recalls her life as a film dancer: “But of course, in those times it was a ‘black-and-white world.’ You didn’t associate too much socially with any of the stars. You saw them at the studio, you know, nice—but they didn’t invite. The only ones that ever invited us home for a visit was Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler.”  …

Jolson’s physical expressiveness also affected the music styles of some black performers. Music historian Bob Gulla writes that “the most critical influence in Jackie Wilson’s young life was Al Jolson.” He points out that Wilson’s ideas of what a stage performer could do to keep their act an “exciting” and “thrilling performance” was shaped by Jolson’s acts, “full of wild writhing and excessive theatrics”. Wilson felt that Jolson “should be considered the stylistic [forefather] of rock and roll.”

Interesting.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Homelessness Isn’t Just a Humanitarian Problem — California activists are undermining their cause by ignoring and stigmatizing legitimate concerns about social disorder.

The compassionate view overwhelmingly dominates press coverage and official statements. It defines the problem and the acceptable ways of discussing it. Consider a New York Times report on President Donald Trump’s trip to the Bay Area last month in which economics reporter Conor Dougherty editorialized:

In that light, local leaders have some real and reasonable doubts about how serious the president is about trying to solve homelessness. And Mr. Trump’s own comments on homelessness did not offer much in the way of reassurance because he seemed less focused on the homeless than their apparent victims, like California’s police officers — “They’re actually sick; they’re going to the hospital” — and property owners: “We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves.”

Most Californians in cities beset by homelessness would never vote for Trump, but he’s voicing their disgust and unease. People who pay their taxes, keep up their homes and consider themselves law-abiding feel besieged and unheard. Whatever empathy they may have had melts away.

California’s self-made woes should be a major theme in Trump’s reelection commercials next year.

WELL, THAT IS THEIR MAIN PRODUCT: Defending San Francisco’s Anti-NRA Resolution, City Officials Say It Was Nothing but Meaningless Bluster. Although San Francisco’s supervisors urged city officials to punish contractors with ties to this “domestic terrorist organization,” they say they did not really mean it. Of course, they also lie a lot, and they’re doing that here too.

GROSS: EPA Issues Violation Notice to San Francisco.

Last month, President Trump warned of a potential violation notice, saying the city was allowing needles and human waste to go through storm drains to the ocean — an allegation denied by city officials.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler also sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter last week alleging waste left by the homeless in San Francisco and other cities was being improperly handled.

Mayor London Breed says the violation notice contains “mischaracterizations, inaccuracies and falsehoods” and says the city’s sewer system is one of the most effective in the country.

Having lived in San Francisco back when it was far cleaner than it is today — and it was gross even then — I’m calling BS on Breed.

AS A LEGENDARY COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ADVISES, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: NRA and San Francisco: City Backs Down in Face of Lawsuit.

#FIGHTFOR15: NYC restaurant industry jobs evaporate after $15/hr wage sets in.

Earlier: String of San Francisco restaurants closing their doors.

BACK WHEN SAN FRANCISCO LOVED STRAWS: On this day in 1937, a patent was issued to Joseph Friedman for the “Bendy Straw.” Friedman watched his little daughter struggling to use a straight straw at a soda fountain in San Francisco, so he decided to help her out. He inserted a screw and then used dental floss to create corrugations into the straw. He then removed the screw and floss and voilà—a flexible straw. The straws were first marketed to hospitals for bedridden patients, but eventually became popular with children and … well … everyone.

Little did he realize that the plastic version of his cute little invention would eventually be blamed (along with other plastic straws) for destroying the planet.

TODAY I HAD SOMEONE ON FACEBOOK TELL ME I’D BE SORRY WHEN THE OCEANS BOILED. ALSO THAT THE EARTH IS ANGRY. THIS IS THE TYPE OF MIND THAT BELIEVES THE SWEDISH TEENAGE MUTANT WAKESCOLD:  A Line-By-Line Response to Greta Thunberg’s UN Speech.

Oh, and the woman who yelled at me is a college professor.  Ladies and gentlemen, there is a massive, unacknowledged mental health crisis in this country. And not all of the mad people are pooping it up in the streets of San Francisco. Some are sh*tting all over higher education.

ANOTHER SAN FRANCISCO DAY. ANOTHER ASSAULT BY A DERANGED MAN ON OUR STREETS:

The attack of a woman in the doorway of the Watermark condominium building allegedly by a homeless man who said he was trying to save her from robots has sparked outrage, largely because the crime was captured on video. But it wasn’t an isolated incident — not by any stretch.

“We’re hearing it more and more,” said Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district includes the Watermark and the modern art museum. “When people walk outside, they’ve been accosted, assaulted, yelled at. A lot of that falls on my constituents — they’re angry and frustrated about it, and I’m angry and frustrated too.”

Gilles DeSaulniers, owner of Harvest Urban Market in the South of Market, reported being bitten this month by a violent homeless man he was trying to subdue. He told various TV outlets the man said, “Why are you even calling the police? They’re not going to do anything.”

San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.

Related: The California Left Decide They Are Against Environmentalism Because Orange Man Bad.

RICH LOWRY: The Ridiculous Campaign Against Vaping.

In announcing his flavored vaping ban, Cuomo said that “many of these other products have no control on them whatsoever,” which is by definition true because they are black-market products. We could make the risky products involved illegal, if they weren’t already illegal.

The problem with the flavor bans — and especially a San Francisco-style outright ban — is its effect on adult e-cigarette users.

About 11 million adults vape, and some percentage of them are former smokers or would be smoking in the absence of e-cigarettes. A robust study in the United Kingdom found that vaping is twice as effective as other common nicotine replacements in getting smokers to quit. The flavors, according to surveys of users, are a big draw for smokers quitting traditional cigarettes.

Anything that pushes e-cigarette users back into conventional smoking (now at a new low of 14 percent of adults) is bad for public health. It’s manifestly absurd to ban vaping products and leave cigarettes, including flavored cigarettes, on the market.

Read the whole thing.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: San Francisco man may close store after being bitten by homeless person twice in four months. 

Trump really needs to shoot campaign commercials in Los Angeles and San Francisco, describe them as Detroit and Baltimore with palm trees, and warn that such conditions are inevitable whenever Democrats are in power.

YES: When We Argue About Dave Chappelle, We Should Recognize That Super-Wokeness Is Mostly An Elite Phenomenon.

Two moments in “Sticks & Stones” capture Chappelle’s qualms with cancel culture, which are a bit more nuanced than the cartoon being drawn by some critics. In the first, Chappelle relates, with frustration, an incident in which a standards and practices employee at Comedy Central told him that while it was okay to use the N-word, the word ‘faggot’ was off-limits. In the second, he talks about getting a drink with a trans fan of his after a set in San Francisco. She points out that it doesn’t really make sense to claim, as some have, that his infamous (and hilarious) R-Kelly bit normalized the singer’s behavior or somehow insulated him from criticism, and to then turn around and claim that jokes about trans people harm rather than ‘normalize’ them.

Whatever you think of these particular arguments, or the amount of time Chappelle spends complaining about being criticized (not how I would use such a perch!), he is simply pointing out that these rules about what he can get away with saying can sometimes seem arbitrary and inconsistent. And this is an argument that appears to have a great deal of resonance among Americans, blue and red alike. Chappelle’s would-be cancellers ignore it at their own peril.

Those who view any critique of cancel culture or political correctness as inherently bankrupt often derail conversations about it by claiming that PC is simply a synonym for “Being a decent person” — if you’re a decent person, in other words, you won’t get in trouble, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. But this isn’t how most of the country sees things, and it doesn’t accurately capture how the rules over who can get away with saying what are made, revised, and enforced.

Arbitrary rules are never instituted for the benefit of those who must follow them.

SFSU HAS BEEN A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM FOR DECADES: San Francisco State refuses to disaffiliate from Facebook page spewing anti-Semitism, groups say.

WE HEREBY DECLARE SAN FRANCISCO DOMESTIC TOILET:  San Francisco Declares NRA “Domestic Terrorists”.

SAN FRANCISCO BOARD OF SUPERVISORS MAKES SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO TRUMP 2020 REELECTION CAMPAIGN: San Francisco Labels NRA a ‘Domestic Terrorism Organization.’

Related: San Francisco counts 4,000 homeless, addicted and mentally ill, but timeline for help still unclear.

WHO CARES, BIGOT? SHUT UP. “I’m angry at white people most of the time.”

THIS CASE MIGHT BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR SANCTUARY POLICIES: Judicial Watch has filed suit in California Superior Court seeking a permanent injunction against Santa Clara County’s version of sanctuary policy.

The litigation was prompted by the murder of a 59-year-old resident, allegedly by an illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record in the U.S. Six times the feds asked the locals to hold the guy until they could take him into custody, but county officials refused. Keep an eye on this one and a similar suit Judicial Watch is pursuing in San Francisco in the wake of the Kate Steinle murder.

IT’S SEMANTIC INSANITY ALL THE WAY DOWN:  The Left Bastardizes Language: San Fran Criminals Must Now Be Called ‘Justice-Involved Persons’.

THE GHOST OF JOHN C. CALHOUN HAUNTS TODAY’S AMERICAN LEFT: The irony of the New York Times’ 1619 Project is that it embraces the critique of the American Founding espoused by the leading defender of Southern slavery, Sen. John C. Calhoun.

As Victor Davis Hanson has written, that’s also true of the left’s see-no-evil view of illegal immigration:

The apparent principle of sanctuary cities is akin to roulette. The odds suggest that most illegal aliens detained by officials are not career felons and thus supposedly need not be turned over to ICE for deportation. On the chance that some of their 10,000 released criminals will go on to commit further crimes in the manner of Juan Lopez-Sanchez, officials then shrug that the public outcry will be episodic and quickly die down, or will at least not pose political problems as great as would come from deporting aliens.

Yet the idea of a sanctuary city is Confederate to the core, reminiscent of antebellum Southern states picking and choosing which federal statutes they would abide by or reject. Even before the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 pitted South Carolina against a fellow southerner, President Andrew Jackson, as the state declared that federal tariff laws were not applicable within its confines. Jackson understood the threat to the union, and promised to send in federal troops before South Carolina backed down.

Why are coastal Democrats partying like it’s 1859?

EVERGREEN QUESTION: What Will California Ban Next?

Starting Tuesday, the sale of plastic water bottles will be banned at San Francisco International Airport, one of the few places they actually make sense. California has many dumb laws and statutes and bans, but this one is especially brainless—spurred by futile self-righteousness.

After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you’ll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.

In California, you never have to.

FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING AND REDUCE SAN FRANCISCO’S WOES BY 50 PERCENT! Brazilian President’s Environmental Plan: ‘Poop Every Other Day.’

Add that to the Green Nude Eeel’s ban on “farting cows and airplanes,” and it’s problem solved.

GOOD LUCK: I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets.

I had decades of digital exhaust to clean up. “Your data across different companies is being pulled together by data brokers and ad companies. If the government asked for it and spent some time correlating, it probably wouldn’t be that far off from what the Chinese government has,” says Rob Shavell, the co-founder of Abine Inc., a company in Cambridge, Mass. I signed up for Abine’s DeleteMe service, paying $129 a year for it to opt me out from databases run by brokers that sell my personally identifiable information. I gave DeleteMe all my current and previous home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, and it removed me from 33 public-records crawlers—database services with names like Intelius and Spokeo, plus a whole lot of yellow pages.

Pierre Valade, a French graduate of Stanford’s design school living in New York, designed the Jumbo app for the iPhone in April. I gave it permission to access my Twitter, Google, and Alexa accounts, and a cute cartoon elephant (he’s got a bad memory, unlike Big Tech) got to work scrubbing away my past. In 10 minutes, all my tweets older than a month vanished, as did all my Google searches and Alexa requests. Jumbo also adjusted more than 40 Facebook settings to protect my privacy, something I would’ve had to spend several hours figuring out. “Even me, on Facebook to design that feature, I got bored. It’s too much work,” Valade says. He’s trying to get Facebook Inc. to allow Jumbo users to erase their timelines all at once, but the company won’t give him the API to do that. “Do they have two PR strategies? One where they say to Congress and the Washington Post, ‘We’re good guys,’ and another where they’re not helping us build what we want?” he asks me. I don’t have an answer, because I’m avoiding Facebook. Also, because it didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Before I asked people which gadgets to buy, I had to make sure my digital trail was private and secure. I switched to the ad-blocking, non-data-recording Brave browser (headquartered, unfortunately, in San Francisco and, worse yet, run by Palo Alto native Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla Corp. and created the JavaScript coding language). I abandoned Google, using the DuckDuckGo search engine from outside of Philadelphia because it doesn’t track me or customize my search results. I also started communicating via Signal, a free app that encrypts both ends of text and voice messages. I was surprised by how many messages I was glad to hide from posterity: one about a former co-worker who’s a drunk; another from someone who wanted to be expunged from my upcoming book. Then I realized that Signal is located in Mountain View, Calif.

So much more at the link, it’s disturbing.

FLASHBACK: Hotel Googlefornia. “Hill did literally everything an internet-connected human being can do to disconnect themselves from Google. But you don’t have to be a Google customer in order to have the company garner 100,000 little bits of data about you every single week. Or as Hill herself says, ‘Google, like Amazon, is woven deeply into the infrastructure of online services and other companies’ offerings, which is frustrating to all the connected devices in my house’.”

JOEL KOTKIN: The regression of America’s big progressive cities.

If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas.

Baltimore represents an extreme case, but sadly it is not alone. Last year our three largest urban centers — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — lost people while millennial migration accelerated both to the suburbs and smaller, generally less dense cities. These demographic trends, as well as growing blight, poor schools, decaying infrastructure and, worst of all, expanding homelessness are not merely the result of “racism” or Donald Trump, but have all been exacerbated by policy agendas that are turning many great cities into loony towns.

Take tech rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behavior has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students, and so much feces on the street that one website has created a “poop map.” In Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, we have a downtown filled with overbuilt, overpriced apartments and is, like Baltimore, being overrun with rats. A UN official last year compared conditions on the city’s Skid Row to those of Syrian refugee camps.

One would think such nasty problems would spark something of a political rebellion, as seen in previous decades with the rise of successful, pragmatic mayors — Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles. But so far, at least, many of today’s big city mayors seem more interested in bolstering their “resistance” bona fides than governing effectively. . . .

The new urban politics threatens the future of family neighborhoods, local entrepreneurial ventures as well as an apolitical, exuberant diversity. Immigrants and aspiring minorities want good schools, safe streets and less onerous regulation. Resolutions on sanctuary cities, condemnations of Trump tweets, social justice demands and boasts about combating climate change do little to improve tangibly reality that cities like Baltimore or even superstars like San Francisco, Washington, and New York.

Only when grassroots people and concerned businesses decide to challenge the urban status quo and the virtue-signaling political class can decay and the relentless bifurcation of our cities be reversed.

The problem is that our cities, like many of our institutions, are run by people who care more about their standing with their peers than about the state of the institutions they’re in charge of.

SURE. THAT IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN GETTING THEM OFF THE STREETS:  San Francisco curbs waste with $200,000 public toilets.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Tech Oligarchs Are Going to Destroy Democracy — Unless We Stop Them: Once, the big tech firms embodied American exceptionalism and aspiration. Today, they are strangling these ideals. Government: do something. “Whom do the oligarchs’ wish to destroy? Of course, Donald Trump, whom they find understandably offensive, but who also owes little or nothing to them.”

Plus:

John D. Rockefeller tried to control energy distribution through his Standard Oil. Later, the Big Three ran the automobile businesses. These were powerful firms, but they could not, like Google, create algorithms that determined what people see, tilted not only toward their own commercial interest but their political predilections as well. In this way, what the techies are doing is oddly reminiscent of China’s efforts to control and monitor thoughts, sometimes assisted by these same U.S. tech firms.

Indeed. Also:

Our past generation of old industrialists may have been far more openly racist and sexist, created pollution and pockets of poverty, but they also built middle- and working-class opportunity; the oligarchs do neither. The Valley was once an exemplar of the American dreamscape but is now an increasingly narrow plutocracy dependent on non-citizen foreign labor, which constitutes upwards of 40 percent of their workforce as well as a cadre of young, largely temporary workers.

In its earlier iteration, Silicon Valley was a uniquely egalitarian place where outsiders made success and working people had decent incomes. Today, Wired magazine’s Antonio Garcia Martinez has labeled Silicon Valley as ‘feudalism with better marketing.” Despite enormous wealth, tech-driven cities like San Francisco and increasingly Seattle have become dysfunctional places, with massive homeless populations and a shrinking middle class.

Bad enough in place, worse if it spreads. “Once, the tech moguls legitimately could be sold as exemplars of American exceptionalism. But now, if unrestrained, the moguls are likely to be its assassins.”

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Pelosi’s House of Pain — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns the 116th Congress into Thunderdome.

She’s something, Ocasio-Cortez. At 29 years old, she perfectly embodies her generation’s uniquely irritating combo of self-righteousness and cluelessness. Passionate and charming at first blush, her appeal quickly wears off. In a March Quinnipiac poll her favorability was underwater by 13 points.

What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that, in the culture of social media celebrity, the worst possible thing to do is back down. So, when Pelosi stated the obvious to Maureen Dowd—that for all the attention The Squad receives from the media it is, in the end, four votes—Ocasio-Cortez insinuated the speaker is a racist. And they say liberals oppose nuclear war.

If Pelosi’s racist, then America is in serious trouble. The absurdity of the claim was best expressed by Congressman Lacy-Clay, who is black. “You’re getting push back so you resort to using the race card?” he asked. “Unbelievable.”

Wait, you spelled “entirely predictable” wrong. Identity politics has driven the left for decades — including Pelosi herself:

Throughout her career, Pelosi has made it a point to bring her San Francisco, west-coast elitist politics to the mainstream, and it would be wrong to say that she hasn’t had something of a successful run of it. She’s always pushed the proverbial Overton window further and further to the left, making positions considered extreme seem perfectly acceptable to Democrats and Democrat voters.

Pelosi is the same person who once called illegal immigrants her “constituency” and applauded the idea of illegal immigrants bringing their children into the United States, and pushed hard for amnesty. She pushed for socialized healthcare with the media and activist groups cheering her on and successfully got Obamacare passed. She pushes for higher taxes and sensationalizes everything Republicans do to the point where any victory they have is a precursor to mass amounts of death.

The members of the Congressional Black Caucus (the name itself is another facet of the left’s identity politics) were happy to go along with Pelosi’s racialism when it involved attacking Republicans. They’re simply angry that like Pelosi before here, AOC is now attacking someone to her right — who happens to have a (D) after her name.

And it gets better: “Apparently, an unnamed senior Dem aide is texting around a photo of a Goomba puppet from the video game Mario Bros. to slam Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a ‘puppet’ of ‘elitist white liberals:’”

Not surprisingly, Trump has joined in the fun as well: “Trump: Pelosi’s not a racist and AOC is being ‘very disrespectful’ to her.” “Good luck to House Dems in trying to figure out whom they should side with now that the most hated Republican in the country has joined Team Nancy.”

RESTORING ORDER ON BART: In its transit system, at least, San Francisco may be rediscovering what New York City learned a generation ago.

Three months ago, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system that serves San Francisco and surrounding counties began a “blitz” to deter morning rush-hour fare evasion at four downtown stations. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the first month’s results were startling: proof-of-payment citations rose 13 percent, new ticket sales rose 10 percent, add-value transactions to existing tickets rose 29 percent, and—most significantly—average weekly calls to police dropped a remarkable 45 percent. This rapid turnaround in behavior was achieved simply by staffing the stations with extra police officers, fare inspectors, and BART managers wearing bright yellow vests so that anyone trying to jump a fare gate or use a bypass door saw their way blocked by an official.

These results should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Broken Windows theory of policing developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The theory’s simple premise: responding proactively to minor crime (vandalism, disorderly behavior, and fare evasion) also reduces serious crime, including violent crime. Before he made New York City the safest large city in the country as commissioner of its police department, William Bratton put Broken Windows into effect as the head of the New York Transit Police, directing his officers to focus on fare evasion. The effect of the policy—first in the subway tunnels and then on the streets of New York—is now legendary.

San Francisco’s BART “blitz” demonstrates the effectiveness of Broken Windows. Just by putting people at the gates who looked to be in charge—neither the fare inspectors nor the yellow-vested managers were badged police officers—BART was able to cut crime in those stations almost in half. Exactly as Broken Windows predicts, those willing to commit serious crime often start by committing minor crimes, like fare evasion. Keeping such people out of the transit system means that everyone paying the fare is safer.

Huh. All the best people told me that San Francisco merely needed to paint over George Washington murals and banish the Betsy Ross flag to achieve utopia.

Related: Down the coast, the L.A. Times has a third world-sounding headline this week, “Desperate to get rid of homeless people, some are using prickly plants, fences, barriers.”

ROBERT GOLDBERG: Vaper Madness.

E-cigarettes, while not a cure for nicotine dependence, can help reduce the death and disease caused by combustible tobacco. Public Health England (PHE), the United States equivalent of the CDC, concluded best estimates show e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful to your health than normal cigarettes, and when supported by a smoking cessation service, help most smokers to quit tobacco altogether. The most recent studies show that e-cigarettes are more effective in reducing smoking than any other device or approach., and yet almost two thirds of Americans believe vaping is deadlier than cigarette smoking. This is no accident. Just as the anti-vaccine zealots have turned vaccine hesitancy into one of the World Health Organization’s top global health challenges, anti-vaping groups such as the Truth Initiative and Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids have spread warnings about the hidden dangers of e-cigarettes to reduce consumption and spread uncertainty.

The two movements are alike in many other ways. Anti-vaxxers want to reduce use of vaccines because they claim it benefits the public health and yet have no problem holding measles or chicken pox parties to provide their kids “natural immunity.” Anti-vapers want to ban e-cigarettes while leaving cigarettes and other tobacco products on the market.

The fact San Francisco’s Herrera wants to prohibit both retail and on-line sales of e-cigarettes while doing nothing about tobacco is an artifact of the anti-vaping movement’s application of the precautionary principle: the belief that no new technology should be used and, in fact, should be considered deadly unless every possible safety risk, no matter how unfounded, is addressed.

Neo-Puritans with a body count.