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The Guardian brings us a disturbing story from Anaheim California:
Somewhere in the southern California city of Anaheim, less than five miles from Disneyland, three porta-potties – two pink, one gray – are locked in a city storage facility. It's not where they're supposed to be.
They were meant for a dusty homeless encampment that sprawls along the west bank of the Santa Ana river, and is home to hundreds of men, women and children in tents and other makeshift shelters.
But the toilets are sitting unused after being confiscated by the city, and the residents have nowhere to relieve themselves except in the bushes, or in buckets, or in the cramped privacy of their own tents. Activists are up in arms over the primitive conditions in which camp inhabitants are living, and which, in their view, the local government appears to have sanctioned.
"This is a public health crisis for the homeless community," said Mohammed Aly, a homeless advocate and lawyer who helped install the toilets. Not least it was a case, he said, of providing people with simple human dignity.
[...] The closest public toilet to the Anaheim camp is over a mile upriver from where many riverbed residents live. So when the porta-potties arrived in May, after being purchased and delivered by local activist groups, they were a welcome alternative to walking half an hour or more to use the bathroom, or taking the more popular route of relieving oneself in a bucket and dumping the refuse in the riverbed.
But just 72 hours after the toilets were installed, there was bad news: the council of wealthy Orange County insisted the porta-potties be removed from their land, saying their presence was unauthorized.
Aly subsequently moved them about 300 yards, out of the county's jurisdiction, and onto city land. That lasted a week, until the city, too, ordered them removed, citing local ordinances regulating the installation of porta-potties. When Aly and other activists didn't remove the toilets themselves, the city government confiscated them, and took them into storage.
[...] Aly said he's not giving up on the toilets. And if he can't work something out with the city or county governments to get them back in place, he knows what he's going to do.
"Our next step is to proceed anyways," he said. "To leave the portable restrooms on a trailer, park the trailer adjacent to the riverbed, and move it around every 72 hours."
If the city of Anaheim doesn't want the homeless to use toilets, perhaps city council members could offer their bathrooms instead.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:56AM (18 children)
Nice North Korean style solution there. Liberalism all grown up shows its true NIMBY colors and turns out worse than "National Socialism" of the 1930's. Way to go California. The other 49 states called, they want a divorce. Sad that other parts of the world model themselves of of this screwball state.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @08:11AM (11 children)
Your incoherent ramblings would put you in the needs-supervision-by-professionals category.
First, if actual Liberalism was in play, gov't would be doing what FDR did in the 1930s when he put 15 million people back to work when the boom-and-bust Capitalists weren't hiring.
Next, if California was a country, it would have the 6th largest economy among nations.
Cali (and other Blue states) are the reason that Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and other Red states that take more than they give haven't gone completely under.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @09:00AM (9 children)
For about 20 minutes, it would.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:13AM (8 children)
Then what? More USA.gov imperialist aggression?
Murder Californians until USA.gov achieves the hegemony it desires?
...as it has done time and again.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @06:38PM (4 children)
Californias economy is dependent on it being a part of the US in so many ways. The vast majority of it is imaginary and/or federally supported military-industrial-media complex stuff. Kiss it all goodbye. And you'd better have those de-sal plants built before you do it too, cause guess where most of your water comes from?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday October 09 2017, @08:24PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday October 09 2017, @08:52PM (2 children)
The Sierra Nevada, almost wholly within California?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:29PM
Well, with Global Warming and ever-lower winter snowpack, local mountains have been a decreasing factor.
Having turned Mono Lake (Kern County) into a small mud puddle in the middle of an alkali flat, SoCal is more dependent on the Colorado River than ever before.
The OC has been considering desalinization plants.
(The vendor mentioned is your typical Capitalist operation with especially horrible records on the environment, corruption, labor relations, etc.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:27AM
How about electricity? I forget what fraction of California's electricity comes from Nevada, but it's pretty large. Bit of trivia I learned when I toured Hoover Dam - none of that electricity is used in Nevada. The entire output of Hoover Dam goes to California.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:12PM (2 children)
By seceding, CA would lose their place at the Fed spigot, which is the only thing keeping them from being Guatemala.
BTW, don't you have a country music concert to shoot up?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @08:11PM
It's well established that they pay out more in taxes than they take in. If you mean that it would be disruptive to someone's established business sometimes.. Yes. That's true.
It's not like the red states which are more or less one welfare check away from becoming tiny mexicos for us to build walls around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @09:50PM
After that, where is USA.gov gonna buy all of its bombs and bombers?
...and you assume that other customers couldn't be found after USA.gov embargoes are out of picture.
.
I have never owned a firearm and I like actual Country Music (but not the children's pop music that they play on "Country" radio these days--without playing any Hank or Lefty).
N.B. KPFT, Pacifica Radio for Houston, has an awesome Audio Archive [kpft.org] that has a bunch of Blues, some Bluegrass, and The Lone Star Jukebox, among other stuff.
Playlists too. [archive.li]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @11:30PM
Get yourself this excellent college textbook: "ECONOMICS -- PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CHOICE" ISBN-13 978-1-111-97021-4 and ISBN-10 1-111-97021-1
Turn to Part 6, "Special Topic 6: Lessions from the Great Depression" on page 627. Read that 14-page section and look at the nice graphs and photos. I happen to think it is pretty readable by itself, but then I took lots of economics in college, so maybe you'll need to read some other parts of the book to bring you up to speed. The entire book is excellent, so read the whole thing anyway. You need it.
Basically, FDR prevented recovery. Some politicians in America have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the evidence is clear.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @08:22AM (5 children)
Oops. The Orange County Government [wikipedia.org] is dominated by Republicans.
Oops. And Anaheim is considered, by Republicans/Conservatives*, to be the third best city in the US for conservatives* [ocweekly.com].
So why are you shitting on your own, AC?
*This word is code for "radical reactionary."
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @10:48AM (3 children)
...in places.
Hillary took the OC in 2016.
Latinos and people of Vietnamese extraction tend to vote Blue and their numbers are rising in the OC.
The county is shifting away from its traditional Red hue.
Anaheim is [...] the third best city in the US for conservatives.
Yup. Very business-friendly.
I don't like to go near Anaheim.
Seems like they're always tearing up something and replacing it with something else that's bigger.
If you don't make an effort to find out about that stuff, you can run into roads that are blocked off|bus stops out of service|yada,yada,yada.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @11:04AM (2 children)
Yes. And those places that are still quite red include Anaheim.
And go ahead and look up the "Orange County Board of Supervisors." It's dominated by Rs.
The article is about the folks who confiscated the only bathrooms the homeless there had. And those folks are the radical reactionaries who (inaccurately) call themselves "conservatives"
I pointed all this out for the benefit of an AC who probably blames "teh beaners" when his toast gets a little too brown.
That the demographics of Orange County are changing isn't news. It's also not relevant to the issues in TFS/TFA.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @07:15PM (1 child)
Oh, I'm fairly informed on the state of OC politics.
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com#rss-17 [orangejuiceblog.com]
(inaccurately) call themselves "conservatives"
Amen.
for the benefit of an AC who probably blames "teh beaners"
OK.
not relevant
Maybe not at this moment, but changes to the representation rules plus shifting demographics will likely be pivotal to the direction things go in the (near?) future.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday October 09 2017, @07:54PM
That's certainly a possibility. I wonder though, will that near future come before the next homeless person needs to take a dump?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @05:24PM
Hahaha I was waiting for an ignorant turd to try and blame liberals for this crap. Ignorant sucker, can't even use Wikipedia!