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Alcohol-Free, or Free-Alcohol
Latest News from San Francisco
The City of San Francisco is providing free beer and vodka shots to homeless alcoholics at taxpayer expense under a little-known pilot program.
The “Managed Alcohol Program” operated by San Francisco’s Department of Public Health serves regimented doses of alcohol to voluntary participants with alcohol addiction in an effort to keep the homeless off the streets and relieve the city’s emergency services. Experts say the program can save or extend lives, but critics wonder if the government would be better off funding treatment and sobriety programs instead.
“Established in countries such as Canada and Australia, a managed alcohol program is usually administered by a nurse and trained support staff in a facility such as a homeless shelter or a transitional or permanent home, and is one method to minimize harm for those with alcohol use disorder,” the California Health Care Foundation explains in an 2020 article describing the pilot program.
According to some sources the program costs about $5 million a year and the city has spent about $20 million on a program that has attracted some interest from a national college and university fraternity.
I Phelta Thi has offered to help the taxpayers in San Francisco by giving up their annual spring break trip to Florida. Instead of lounging on a Florida beach, they will distribute the beer and vodka shots in SFO at no charge to taxpayers.
As one six-year member of Phelta House said, “We have a lot of experience in alcohol distribution, and this would be an ideal community service program to serve both the homeless and the taxpayers that pay the bills”.
Published in Humor
Me —
The problem here is that the theory is wrong. The solution is to replace it with a correct one. Not for our politicians to abandon all theories, which is to abandon thinking itself.
Ye —
Possibly.
Or perhaps they should abandon trying to fix things that are not fixable.
Me —
You give a good example of using theory to determine the best political solution, and replacing their wrong theory with a correct one.
(You mistook your EXAMPLE of the solution I gave for a REJECTION of it. Please re-read what I wrote, and if this is still not clear, let me know.)
There is a common enzyme that processes alcohols called alcohol dehydrogenase. It processes ethyl (grain) alcohol eventually into acetic acid (vinegar). Works well enough.
However, it turns methyl (wood) alcohol into formaldehyde (embalming fluid) & formic acid (ant venom) . Ethylene Glycol (antifreeze) gets turned into oxalic acid (descaler / poison in rhubarb leaves). Nasty.
So you saturate the enzyme with booze, as it can only work so fast, and let the victim pee out the bad alcohol before it can be made toxic. Incidentally, they will get plastered.
That is where we give sex robots to people with physical and mental illnesses.
I liked it. It was short but to the point. It was called Tyranny of Cliches. It’s argument is that everyone always has an ideology. The problem with the left is that they think they are non-ideological.
Then I would have liked it!
There is a connection between that error of thinking, and the equally common one I refer to: of not recognizing that everything that one thinks is the result of theoretical, abstract thinking.
Higher education is the only cure for this social ill, the one created accidentally when capitalism lifted the majority of the population out of a life of pure drudgery and grinding poverty into the affluent, partly self-governing class, where higher-level human skills are needed to function properly.
But higher education has been gutted and worn as a skin-suit by Marxists.
Very true.
(That is, true of {higher education==the institutional units that go by that name and historically performed [higher education==the activity]}, the latter being that whereof I was a-speakin’.)
Separate from alcoholism, the government should have given away cheap hard drugs in a controlled locality instead of financially empowering organized crime. We have created one hell of a mess south of our border. They have so much money now, it’s too late to legalize drugs.
DING! DING! DING!
ME:
Inflation is destructive. It grows government and debt uncontrollably. It misallocates capital. We don’t measure it rightby a long`shot.
You don’t need anything from government except actual “public goods”.
It’s really good if you point a gun at everybody’s head for Social Security and Medicare if we run them right. We don’t.
That is my ideology
And that there is writin’!
Think of scientists they have explanations for how the physical world works. The explanations are based on data but the data still requires interpretation. And different scientists of equal intelligence and honesty can interpret things differently.
At least for a while, until more evidence comes in disproving one or all of them.
Unless they’re talking biology, in which case they all have to parrot the 5,752+ gender variations, or they’re toast.
Thanks for some great comments. As a former cop I see things like free alcohol for the homeless from a very basic level. When I first hit the streets, we had the option of a civil hold for intoxication and another facility to include individuals that could get a civil hold at a hospital for the mentally ill that had not committed a crime.
That is gone now in the city I worked in and in cities around the US. Shortly before I left police work you had to beg someone to accept a 72-hour psych hold.
I don’t think it’s a secret that the mentally ill are being ignored and some could be helped if they receive a civil hold. That may not work every time, but you have to try and save who you can.
The civil rights pendulum swung too far in the 60s and 70s, to allow seriously mentally ill people the legal power to decline any treatment or involuntary commitment. It is far beyond high time that the pendulum swing back.
@dougwatt, would you explain for us ignoramuses what you mean by “civil hold”?
A civil hold for an individual is not available on background checks, unlike like an arrest for a crime.
Family members won’t put their dangerous relatives in an institution if it can’t as a crime against their relatives but they might if it is a civil hold? I too am ignorant of this procedure. I am just guessing.
“The explanations are based on data…”
I believe that scientific explanations are based on theory, not data.
How about this. The explanations are based on theories and the theories are based on data. Is that better?
However, my point and Jonah Goldberg’s point is that data doesn’t magically form itself into a theory. People interpret the data into a theory. Likewise, we need abstract thinking to interpret history, society and their own experiences.
My favorite example of this is an ultrasound of a baby. Many women are pro-choice until they see their first ultrasound. However, the leftists would look at an ultrasound and feel afraid for their children’s future because they won’t have access to abortion rights. Particularly if is an ultrasound of a girl.
“Better to kill her than to bring her into a world without abortion rights.”
For me I need to know about her mental and physical illnesses before deciding to abort or not. To me the decisive factor is suffering.
I wrote in a post published a few years ago that, “According to Arthur Brookes, 50-60% of our happiness is genetic. Thusly, wouldn’t it make sense to kill kids who have a high chance of being unhappy for their entire lives?” The post got 124 comments and only four likes.
Free cocktails. At last, a government program that we can all appreciate.
An old former DC cop told me that it used to be policy that when the forecast called for very low nighttime temps, they would arrest bums for vagrancy, keep them in jail, and release them the next morning to keep them alive in the winter. The ACLU got rid of vagrancy laws so they stopped doing that.
I recall that by the early seventies, the anti-psychiatry notions of Thomas Szaz et al. combining a relativistic approach to determining sanity with civil libertarian concerns about involuntary commitment created lasting barriers to commitment.
I am not a big fan of psychiatry and tend to doubt the efficacy of pharmaceutical overkill but there are people who (a) can’t take care of themselves (b) do not have family or other connections to provide such care and (c) are disruptive or dangerous. So even the pretense of treatment in facilities at least provides the benefit of delivering basic needs and protection against harms.