The Starbucks thing

“theft of less than $950” ... smdh

So if I’m a poor person in California, and all I’ve got to my name until my next paycheck is a wallet with a few 20s in it ... that money pretty much belongs to anybody with the stones to grab it.

 

Those changes came on the heels of a case that reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling that overcrowding in prisons and jails constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In that context, the new rules make sense.

But I never leave anything in my car overnight, for sure.

 

Another flashpoint on the issue. Guy was sitting in a restaurant in Ventura last month, eating with his 5-year-old daughter, when a homeless man came in and stabbed him in the neck and killed him. The cops saw the stabber on a security camera and were called about him, but deemed it to not be a threat.

In Ventura, a resident's murder could spark a 'legacy' of change

 

Damn, that was a horrible story. I've eaten at Aloha Steakhouse, very nice place. Right on the beach.
But it just points out what appears to be an unsolvable problem, differentiating deadbeats from mentally ill.
Ventura is as I described above. It's land's end, nowhere else to go. Good weather. The homeless stay.
What to do? Who knows?

 

The shockingly simple, surprisingly cost-effective way to end homelessness

 

How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led To A Mental Health Crisis


A 'hellish world': the mental health crisis in America's prisons

It’s true that the hospitals have mostly disappeared: between 1950 and 2000 the number of people with serious mental illness living in psychiatric institutions dropped from almost half a million people to about 50,000. But none of the rest of it has gone away, not the cruelty, the filth, the bad food or the brutality. Nor, most importantly, has the large population of people with mental illness, like Rodriguez, who are kept largely out of sight, their poor treatment invisible to most ordinary Americans.


The only real difference between Kesey’s time and our own is that the mistreatment of people with mental illness now happens in jails and prisons. Today, the country’s largest providers of psychiatric care are not hospitals at all, but rather the jails in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.

 

The homeless in L.A. are not who you think they are

 

I love the graphs that so ponderously point out that one cannot afford median-priced rent on a minimum-wage income. Deep thoughts, man, deep thoughts.

 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our graphs.

 

All of us are in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at stars.

 

This story about a missing American man in Mexico made rounds here in Bennington the last week or so. Soon to be happy ending. He seemingly went off his meds.

In the bottom right photo he looks like the kid who plays Johnny's son in Cobra Kai.

 

We created poverty. Algorithms won't make that go away | Virginia Eubanks