Update On "Homelessness" In New York

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Update On "Homelessness" In New York

  • Recently (May 2026) I did an update on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. The title was “The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch.”‍ ‍

  • I have taken a particular interest in “homelessness” in San Francisco ever since that city had a big referendum back in 2018 to pass a special payroll tax supposedly to solve the “homelessness” problem once and for all. The result in San Francisco, you will not be surprised to learn, was that the Homeless Industrial Complex has since swallowed up all the new funding and much more, while the number of people identified as “homeless” has only gone up, and then up some more.

  • But how about New York? In recent years the City hasn’t exactly been bragging about its success in this area, so data have been a little hard to come by. However, a few days ago (September 5) the New York Post had a story that gives an idea of the overall picture.

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The "Standing" Doctrine And The White House Ballroom Case

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The "Standing" Doctrine And The White House Ballroom Case

  • Non-lawyer commenters at this site often express befuddlement at the doctrine in the federal courts known as “standing.” Where did that come from?

  • In practical application, the “standing” doctrine seems like a tool of left-wing control. Left-wing litigants seeking an expansive role for the government seem to always succeed in establishing this “standing,” and thus they are always granted access to the federal courts to have their claims adjudicated; and if they can find their way to a friendly judge, they can get whatever policies they are challenging of the Trump administration (or other Republican administration) overturned. Meanwhile, right-wing litigants challenging government actions often get thrown out for lack of “standing.” How could that be?

  • Given the often one-sided application of the standing doctrine, it might be surprising to learn that I think that the doctrine is fundamentally a good thing. Without it, the situation of judicial overreach could be far worse than it is. What has so far been missing is some oversight from the top to assure that the doctrine gets applied in a neutral manner. The recent Supreme Court decision in the White House ballroom case (National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation) suggests that we may finally be getting some of this oversight.

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Here's An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!

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Here's An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!

  • During his campaign for office last fall, our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to make groceries “affordable” for New Yorkers; but he provided few specifics.

  • Some specifics then emerged in late July, when Mamdani issued a big press release on his proposed public grocery store project. We learned that there are plans for five municipally-owned stores — one in each borough of the City — and that the groceries these stores will sell, or at least a “core basket” of them, will be “30% cheaper.” We know that the groceries will be “30% cheaper” because the Mayor’s press release says so multiple times:

  • Today [July 28], Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) announced that a core basket of everyday groceries will be 30 percent cheaper at the five new municipal grocery stores. . . . “A trip to the grocery store shouldn’t spell dread for New Yorkers [said Mayor Mamdani]. That’s why we are guaranteeing a 30% discount on the most common and most critical groceries. . . .” ‍ ‍

  • Well OK, 30% cheaper than what?

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For The Left, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

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  • A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”‍ ‍

  • The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing.

  • My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.

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The Brain's Concept Of The World Versus The Real World

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The real world — It’s full of complexities, ambiguities, unknowns, trade-offs, risks, and evils that we would prefer not to acknowledge. Perfection can be sought and approached, but nothing close to perfection can be achieved.

And then there’s the world that we can imagine in our minds. In that world, we can ignore the complexities and ambiguities and the rest. Achieving perfection can be imagined as just a matter of overcoming a few simple obstacles. I often write about the musings of people who conjure in their minds imaginary scenarios of perfection that are inconsistent with anything that can be achieved in the real world. The most important example is a socialist economic system of perfect justice and fairness. Another example is an energy system that produces always-available electricity in infinite amounts from the intermittent wind and sun.

Consider now another example: the crime found in fiction versus the crime found in the real world.

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The Democratic Socialists Of America And Dolly Parton

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The Democratic Socialists Of America And Dolly Parton

The sad news today is that country music legend Dolly Parton has died.

I admit that I’m not particularly a fan of country music. It’s not that I don’t like it; I just devote my time to other things. But everybody knew about Dolly Parton, and as far as I can tell there isn’t anyone who did not like and admire her. Mary Katherine Ham summarizes the reaction in a tweet this afternoon:

A year of mourning for one of the only people we all agreed on. So sad. What a lady and what a life.

Parton lived a life of hard work and of gratitude. She worked her way up from nothing.

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