Here is something I did not know about Adam Smith, the founder of free market economics, beloved by conservatives: he was financed by a globalist of the time:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/geopolitics-epistemological-warfare-babylon-neocon

“Smith at Her Majesty’s Service
Do Smith’s modern followers sincerely believe in the “self-regulating forces of the free market”? Sure they do. Did Adam Smith actually believe in his own system? Whether he did or not, according to recent research conducted by historian Jeffrey Steinberg, Smith received his commission to compose his seminal book Wealth of Nations (published 1776) while riding with Lord Shelburne himself in a carriage ride from Edinburgh to London in 1763. The date 1776 is not a coincidence as this was the same Lord Shelburne who essentially managed the British Empire during the American Revolution and who always despised all colonial aspirations to use protective tariffs, emit productive credit or channel said credit towards internal improvements as Benjamin Franklin had championed in his 1729 Necessity of Paper Currency and Colonial Script. Why develop Industry, asked Smith, when the new “Law” of “absolute advantage” demanded that everyone just do what they are good at for the best price possible? America has a lot of land, so they should stick with agriculture and slave-driven cotton. Britain had a lot of industry (don’t ask how that happened because it wasn’t through free trade), so they should stick with that! India had advanced textiles, but Britain had to destroy that so that India could then have a lot of opium fields so she could do that… which China could then smoke to death under the watch of British Gunships. “Free Trade” demanded it so.”

     Yet another “joy’ of globalism and the rule of money, which reduces everything and everybody to money:
  https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50828386

“Top social media influencers are being propositioned daily by strangers with offers of thousands of pounds in return for sex, the Victoria Derbyshire programme has been told. One said social media had become "a catalogue" for men to select their next conquest. "It's high-end prostitution - it's just scary to think if they've messaged me, they've probably sent it to thousands of pretty girls on Instagram," says Tyne-Lexy Clarson. She says she was only 19 when she was first propositioned, with an offer of £20,000 for dinner and drinks. But after starring in series two of Love Island, an agency emailed, offering her £50,000 for five nights in Dubai. It contained a non-disclosure agreement, stating that the details of what she would be required to do would remain confidential. Tyne-Lexy says she refused the offer, but fears that struggling influencers who do not receive luxury items for free would feel pressure to "keep up appearances" and become vulnerable to these kinds of transactions. "It's a lot of money for some people, it's life-changing amounts of money." Rosie Williams, who starred in series three of Love Island, says she was offered £100,000 a year plus all her clothes and bags, to become a companion to a man in Dubai. She showed us one of the recent messages she had received, from a man purporting to be in Dubai. It says she may be surprised to hear from him but he has an "important transaction" he wishes to share - which she says is a common turn of phrase in these messages. And she says she would never be tempted, despite the large amount of money involved. Rosie says it is not an aspect of fame she anticipated: "You're warned about trolling, you're warned that your life will change dramatically, but you're never warned that you could get bought by men." And she says it is not spoken about in influencer circles: "We either aren't in a position where we need to do it so we don't speak about it, or we've done it and we're too ashamed."

     Companies will get diverse, or else:
  https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/goldman-says-it-wont-take-companies-public-without-at-least-one-diverse-director-heres-what-it-should-have-said/

“Now Goldman Sachs  has made an announcement of its own that’s very much a part of the times: its CEO, David Solomon, today told CNBC that beginning this year, Goldman will no longer take companies public if they don’t have at least one “diverse” member on its board of directors. “Starting on July 1st in the U.S. and Europe, we’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women,” Solomon said specifically on the network’s “Squawk Box.” Some will, perhaps rightly, see the announcement as little more than marketing. After all, it’s already widely viewed as unacceptable for a company to go public without at least one female board member and preferably far more “diversity” than that. WeWork, for example, tried to go public last year with an all-male board, only to realize soon after that if it wanted to pursue an initial public offering, it had better mix it up a bit. (Of course, by the time it amended its S-1 to name Harvard professor Frances Frei as its first female board member, its offering was already starting to implode.) Adding one’s first female board member ahead of an IPO is such a cliche at this point that the more interesting question is how close to the filing a related announcement will be made.

     Anyone who was following the immigration and multiculturalism debate in the 1980s and 1990s, would remember that the key argument of the Growths was that none of this would change the Australian way of life, but that diversity would enrich it, with all the metaphors of meals, dinners, salads and things that the decadent chattering class, liked. It was a lie for the time, just like populate or perish was for the World War II era. Here is Ross Gittins, still going at it, God bless him:
  https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/high-immigration-is-changing-the-aussie-way-of-life-20191126-p53e5e.html

“The nation’s economic elite – politicians of all colours, businesspeople and economists – long ago decided we need to grow our population as fast as we can. To them, their reasons for believing this are so blindingly obvious they don’t need to be discussed. Unfortunately, however, it’s doubtful most ordinary Australians agree. A survey last year by researchers at the Australian National University found that more than 69 per cent of respondents felt we didn’t need more people, well up on a similar poll in 2010. This may explain why Scott Morrison announced before this year’s election a big cut in our permanent migrant intake – while failing to mention that our booming temporary migrant intake wouldn’t be constrained. He also foreshadowed measures to encourage more migrants to settle in regional cities. What he didn’t say is what he’d be doing differently this time, given the many times such efforts had failed in the past. In between scandalising over the invading hordes of boat people, John Howard greatly increased the immigration intake after the turn of the century, and this has been continued by the later Labor and Coalition governments. “Net overseas migration” accounts for about 60 per cent of our population growth. In 2000, the Australian Bureau of Statistics projected that our population wouldn’t reach 25.4 million until 2051. We got there this year. Our population is growing much faster than other developed countries are. The growth in our economy has been so weak over the past year that they’ve had to stop saying it, but for years our politicians boasted about how much faster our economy was growing than the other economies. What they invariably failed to mention was that most of our faster growth was explained by our faster-growing population, not our increasing prosperity. Over the year to June, for instance, real gross domestic product grew by (a pathetic) 1.4 per cent, whereas GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent. That’s telling us that, despite the growth in the economy, on average our material standard of living is stagnant. All that immigration isn’t making the rest of us any better off in monetary terms.”

     Can it be that all of those rockets scientists-to-be, who will be paying for Swedish boomer pensions, are abusing the welfare system? That must be some kind of racist prank, surely?
  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/01/10/former-insurance-directors-warn-migrants-can-abuse-welfare-system-easily/

“Three former Swedish insurance fund directors have claimed that since 2015, accounting for migrants in the Swedish national social insurance system has practically collapsed, leading to a high potential for abuse. Stig Orustfjord, Gunnar Johansson, and Erik Kärnekull have claimed that the large number of migrants received by Sweden at the height of the migrant crisis has overwhelmed the bureaucracy and accounting for migrants has “almost collapsed”. “The system got its final crack in 2015 when the integrity of the public records could no longer be guaranteed. Today, the bookkeeping and control of immigrants have almost collapsed. We no longer have control over who lives and resides in the country,” the three said in a debate article in Nyheter Idag. “We have a large number of co-ordination numbers, which give the right to social security’s residence-based contributions, to persons whose identity is not confirmed. Swedish citizenship has been assigned to people whose identities we have not been able to establish and who have in many cases been assigned parallel Swedish identities,” they explained.”

     Not everything is going swimmingly for China. First, there are demographic woes, even given the country’s pro-natalist policies:
  https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/18/WS5e22494fa310128217271d58.html

“The birthrate on the Chinese mainland reached a record low last year, figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday showed. The total number of babies born last year was 14.65 million, a decrease of 580,000 from the previous year, while the birthrate stood at 10.48 per 1,000 population－the lowest over the past seven decades, according to the bureau. Meanwhile, total population on the mainland narrowly exceeded 1.4 billion by the end of last year, an increase of 4.7 million year-on-year. Last year marked the third consecutive year of falling births on the mainland despite the universal second-child policy having been adopted at the beginning of 2016. The policy, which encourages all couples to have two children, was designed to boost births to cope with rapid population aging. Births reached 17.86 million in 2016, the highest since 2000, according to the National Health Commission, but they fell to 17.23 million in 2017 and to 15.23 million in 2018. Ning Jizhe, head of the NBS, said at a news conference on Friday that despite the decrease, the total number of births last year on the mainland was still very big, and the universal second-child policy has played a very important role in encouraging births. The decrease last year was the smallest, he said. Births fell by 630,000 in 2017 and by 2 million in 2018. "Of all babies born last year, 59.5 percent were the second or more child, with the percentage rising over the past few years," Ning said. The percentage has remained at about 50 percent since the universal second-child policy was enacted, according to the National Health Commission. Despite the policy, many couples in China were not willing to have a second baby, for reasons such as the high cost of raising children and a lack of nursery facilities, according to a survey organized by the commission.”

     The growth of survivalism, or doomsday prepping has been attributed to the media generating fear of existential threats:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-14/new-study-finds-media-generated-fear-driving-doomsday-prepping
  https://www.studyfinds.org/study-finds-rise-in-doomsday-prepping-due-to-mainstream-american-culture-of-fear/
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/obamageddon-fear-the-far-right-and-the-rise-of-doomsday-prepping-in-obamas-america/BDF4879C45C6F86F4E2F9FBEBF35D55E
  http://allnewspipeline.com/2019_The_year_Of_The_Prepper.php

““Doomsday prepping” or stockpiling food, medicine, weapons and other supplies in case of an apocalyptic scenario has long been considered peculiar behavior only exhibited by conspiracy theorists and other extremists in the United States. However, such prepping has actually been steadily on the rise in the U.S. over the past decade. So, what’s causing this surge in stockpiled rice packets and underground bunkers? One group of researchers say it is an ever growing sense of impending doom in American culture. Many have speculated that this surge in doomsday preppers over the last 10 years was linked to an extreme political reaction among many conservatives to Barack Obama’s initial election in 2008, but a new study out of the United Kingdom finds that neither the Obama presidency nor extreme right-wing conspiracy theories in general are the main cause of this growing phenomenon. Researchers interviewed preppers from 18 U.S. states and asked about their motivations for stockpiling food and supplies. The results indicated that, although most did seem to be conservative and fear liberal policies, the main reason behind their motivations was the overall sense of fear currently dominating U.S. culture across a variety of media channels. Most Americans can’t seem to log online or turn on the television without being hit by a grim view of the future being reported or speculated on.

     I will be producing articles attacking the naïve empiricism of sites like American Renaissance over the IQ issue, especially their ranking of East Asians over Nordics/Northern Europeans. Anyway, here is some material about how nations cheat with the economic statistics, which is something the naïve empiricist school does not address:
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/world-s-fastest-growing-economy-may-not-be-so-fast-after-all

“India’s statistics may have been painting a far rosier picture of economic growth than the more modest reality of the past decade. The nation has held the crown of the world’s fastest-growing major economy until recently, but a new study by former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian says the expansion was overestimated between 2011 and 2017. Rather than growing at about 7% a year in that period, growth was about 4.5%, according to the research paper, published by the Center for International Development at Harvard University. The overestimation occurred after the previous Congress-led government changed the methodology in calculating gross domestic product in 2012. One of the key adjustments was a shift to financial accounts-based data compiled by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, from volume-based data previously. This made GDP estimates more sensitive to price changes, in a period of lower oil prices, according to the research paper. Rather than deflate input values by input prices, the new methodology deflated these values by output prices, which could have overstated manufacturing growth. The Statistics Ministry defended the data, saying in a statement on Tuesday that the GDP estimates are “based on accepted procedures, methodologies and available data and objectively measure the contribution of various sectors in the economy.”

     I am always amazed at how sites like American Renaissance have an uncritical acceptance of data, such as IQ, especially that always ranking whites second to other special  groups, even though the entire field of the social science is stricken by a replication crisis, and the widespread existence of fraud and misplaced use of statistics. Thus, we have a highly cited  paper arguing that most published  research is false:
  https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

“There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.”

     The magic of limited, but diminishing freedom of speech in the USA, allows us to make references here to controversial topics, that would take to long to delicately unravel by us, running up the costs of passing copy to our over-worked and under-paid, legal department:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/political/why-western-media-not-questioning-mysterious-death-australian-youth-activist-wilson-gavin

Yes, there is plenty here on the threat of social media bullying, but the core issue discussed frankly by Zero Hedge does not get a mention. Best to keep one’s kids out of public libraries. I go there each day, as do most of my fellow journalists, as we use free internet to get the job here done, most of us not having the money for a laptop and paid internet. I find the libraries full of ferals, just like public transport in the off-peak period. I would like to do a James Reed and say, “close ‘em all down,” but I am dependent upon them until my ship comes in.
  https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-sad-death-of-wilson-gavin-a-plea-for-civil-debate-over-toxic-pile-ons-20200116-p53s5x.html

     It has been wonderful to see the outpouring of support for those whose lives have been turned upside down with loss of lives, homes and precious possessions. It demonstrates the Australian acceptance of the essential Christian heritage of loving ones neighbour as oneself. Mateship demonstrated no less.

     There has always been a concern in my mind as to how the enormous sums that have been collected are to be distributed. It is reported that $50 million has been donated from the USA celebrities alone. It will be interesting to see if one home is built from this fund. It will be put into the hands of a manager and how is he /she to decide whose bank account to put it in? There were massive public funds raised after the terrible fires in Victoria some years ago, does anyone know how many new homes (if any) were built with that money?

     The academic, media, cultural and everything else elites would have us sheeple believe that globalism is the only game in town, and that localism and nationalism are dated doctrines. How convenient for commerce, grid and money making! But, as argued in a recent article by Hristo Guentcher and Marin Guentcher, “Globalization – The Most Ancient and Ever-Failing Utopia,” all of these utopian visions end up in a heap, wrecking civilisation in the process.
  https://www.theepochtimes.com/globalization-the-most-ancient-and-ever-failing-utopia_3200598.html

     Apart from the philosophical aspects discussed below, globalism fails because of inefficiencies arising from centralisation and diseconomies of scale. It is the same reason communism simply cannot work, because it requires centralism to function, but the complexity of human society and the economy precludes that:

     Can you believe it? The Epstein globo-paedo footage, of the evil beast in his well-earnt cell, has gone missing due to an error. What!
  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205
  https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/09/jail-video-of-jeffrey-epsteins-first-suicide-attempt-was-deleted.html

“Surveillance video from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's first suspected suicide attempt was destroyed by accident, prosecutors say. US prosecutors say the jail mistakenly saved footage from the wrong cell. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, first tried to kill himself in July last year, then hanged himself in jail in August while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty to abusing dozens of girls, some as young as 14. Soon after Epstein's death, in August, two of the CCTV cameras outside his cell had malfunctioned and were being examined by the FBI, US media reported. Epstein was found semi-conscious in his prison cell with injuries to his neck on 25 July. After this incident, he was placed on suicide watch. Eventually, Epstein was moved to a different cell, where he died on 10 August. Two prison guards have since been accused of failing to check on him during this time and falsifying records to say that they had. There have been ongoing questions over the July recording, which was initially deemed missing and then was said to have been located by jail staff. A letter filed by Assistant US Attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey said "the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where Cell-1 was located", New York City media report. "The requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors." The request for the video was made by a lawyer for Nicholas Tartaglione, a former New York police officer who shared a cell with Epstein in July and is charged with homicide in an unrelated case. The attorney argued the video could show his client had acted "admirably", possibly helping Epstein.”

     This one occurred before Christmas, showing the sheer absurdity of modern art.
  https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/see-you-after-jail-guys-art-world-stunned-after-man-eats-120000-banana-duct-taped-wall
  https://trad-news.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-true-artist-would-have-eaten-duct-tape.html

“On Friday, we reported on the latest bizarre milestone in the "art" world, when a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $120,000 at that excess-liquidity conclave of ultra-rich and other wannabe poseurs known Art Basel Miami Beach. Worse, a second banana duct-taped to a wall also sold for $120,000. Yet even worse than that, a third banana duct-taped to a wall is expected to sell for $150,000 and so on. Then on Saturday, at around 1:45pm, the art world was shocked when a random man, allegedly a performance artist, ate said duct-taped banana that sold earlier this week for $120,000. New York-based performance artist David Datuna ate the banana early on Saturday afternoon in front of a stunned convention full of "art" lovers most of whom had no idea whether they were witnessing even more "art", of just some clueless rando eating the world's most discussed "art" exhibit, the gallery told the Miami Herald.”

     The Left are vocal against soft targets, such as what remains of the White West, over immigration and border defence issues, but when it comes to mother China, well, they are quiet like little mice, or is it rats, on issues such as organ harvesting?
  https://quillette.com/2020/01/03/bloody-harvest-how-everyone-ignored-the-crime-of-the-century/

“In June of this year the China Tribunal delivered its Final Judgement and Summary Report. An independent committee composed of lawyers, human rights experts, and a transplant surgeon, the Tribunal was established to investigate forced organ harvesting on the Chinese mainland. These rumours have haunted the country for years—lurid tales of the fate suffered by members of the banned Falun Gong religion after being taken into police custody. Their organs, so the rumours go, are cut from their bodies while they are still alive, and then transplanted into waiting patients. The Tribunal examined these claims, extending the group of victims to include Uyghur Muslims (among others), and its findings were unambiguous. “On the basis of all direct and indirect evidence, the Tribunal concludes with certainty that forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.” Further to this, “the PRC and its leaders actively incited the persecution, the imprisonment, murder, torture, and the humiliation of Falun Gong practitioners with the sole purpose of eliminating the practice of, and belief in, the value of Falun Gong.” The Tribunal was also able to conclude, “with certainty,” that the Communist Party has been responsible for acts of torture inflicted on Uyghurs. These acts were found to constitute crimes against humanity.

     We read about sex slavery occurring overseas, in other Western countries such as Europe, one part of the great replacement. But, it is happening right here in little old Oz too.
  https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/sa-riverland-backpackers-expected-to-perform-sexual-favours-to-get-enough-work-to-pay-bills/news-story/0b0d62b6c6ddcadf7d16f1746df92d39?type=curated&position=2&overallPos=2&utm_source=AdelaideNow&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial

“Backpackers in the Riverland were expected to perform sexual favours to get enough hours to pay their bills, according to the National Union of Workers. NUW (which has since merged into the United Workers Union) says that last year eight female workers on 417 working holiday visas were trapped in debt bondage. The Taiwanese women’s boss was also their landlord. He was paying them $16 an hour but charging them so much for accommodation, transport, and the internet that they needed more hours to pay. They were expected to “perform sexual favours to get more hours”, according to the union. Often fruitpickers or farm workers in Australia use working hostels or working accommodation. They move to a region and into the accommodation, because the accommodation owner promises them work. This can leave people, particularly those with English as a second language, vulnerable to exploitation and far from help. The union says the eight women were put up in a three-bedroom house owned by the man (a subcontractor). It’s not clear how much money they ended up with each week. He charged them $120 a week rent, $20 a week for the internet, and $25 a week for transport.

     Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is not doing to well in the opinion polls, but that does not matter; if the Deep State wants him as prezzie, then voting will not change anything, he will be their boy. And, what a globalist boy he will be:
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/07/mike-bloomberg-employers-should-hire-the-best-foreigners-instead-of-americans/

“Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans. “This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.: For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants. The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’ “If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued: Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting.

Of course, over the last months we have all been involved, (in one way, or another) in the drought and subsequent fires. Some have lost everything, homes, relatives, farms, stock, friends, others have suffered from the smoke, hero’s have fought the fires, whilst other brave people have raised money, or traveled across our continent to deliver food and supplies.

Farmers and related business if not critically damaged have suffered and we still have another few months of hot weather to look forward too. Its all very sad, but as we know it’s Australia, this has all happened before, little of the money donations will get to those who deserve it and nothing that the government promises to help with will be forth coming. Even the insurance companies have historically been very slow to pay out in fire disasters such as in the Marysville disaster.

     Marvel has announced that a trans character is coming very soon in a film … I can hardly wait. They have begun the woke, politically correct push with the Captain Marvel film, which did ok riding on Avengers: Endgame, but most other woke films have gone belly up, especially the no doubt final Terminator movie, Cats, and Charlie’s Angels, all with an over-the -top feminist ideology:
  https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/12/31/video-marvel-studios-president-says-trans-character-coming-very-soon-in-upcoming-film/
  https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/12/31/hollywoods-most-notable-flops-of-2019-schwarzenegger-charlies-angels-and-cats/
  https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-long-goodbye-review-of-star-wars.html
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC-vExHeBII

“Unpopular social justice messages are to blame for some of the biggest failures as Hollywood continues to force feed left-wing ideology to audiences, who are catching wise to the game and rejecting it wholesale. Franchise fatigue was another factor, as creatively bankrupt studios continue to pump out sequels and reboots to diminishing returns. Hollywood is in panic mode. The domestic box office is expected to drop 3.6 percent in 2019 compared to last year, the largest percentage drop in five years. Audiences are shunning the cinemas in favor of at-home entertainment options, which include Netflix and a growing array of competitors. Here are some the year’s most notable box-office flops, and how much each stands to lose.

     We talk a lot about the coming social collapse here, but we are not the only ones, for much raw material can be found in mainstream sites, if one looks. Take California, the great liberal progressive experiment, for example:
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/12/why-california-keeps-making-homelessness-worse/amp/

“California is home to some of the world’s toughest environmental and public health laws, but skyrocketing homelessness has created an environmental and public health disaster. The 44,000 people living, eating, and defecating on the streets of L.A. have brought rats and medieval diseases including typhus. Garbage is everywhere. Experts fear the return of cholera and leprosy. And homelessness is making people violent. “We are seeing behaviors from our guests that I’ve never seen in 33 years,” said Bales. “They are so bizarre and different that I don’t even feel right describing the behaviors. It’s extreme violence of an extreme sexual nature. I have been doing this for 33 years and never seen anything like it.” Bales says he was one of the people who urged the US Government’s Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to intervene. “We’ve been crying out for a National Guard-like response,” said Bales, whose church provides food, showers, and shelter to 1,350 people camped nearby. In 2016 Bales lost the lower half of his leg to a flesh-eating bacteria from contamination on Skid Row. How did things get so bad in California? The state has long prided itself on being humanistic and innovative. It is home to some of the world’s largest public health philanthropies, best hospitals, and most progressive policies on mental health and drug addiction. The Democrats have a supermajority. What went wrong? According to Bales and other experts, California made homelessness worse by making perfect housing the enemy of good housing, by liberalizing drug laws, and by opposing mandatory treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.