TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! In the latest in a series of Biden gaffes, he claims he cured cancer.

OUT ON A LIMB: Anthony Fauci Behind Covid Origins Disinformation, Evidence Suggests.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: CBS News: You Better Get out and See the Barbie Movie Before She Dies Due to Global Warming!

Polystyrene melts at 464 degrees, so Barbie should be safe for a few more years there.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: It’s NPR vs. NPR on ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’ about eating bugs.

IMPERIAL JAPAN’S ATOMIC BOMB PROJECT: How far along did it get?

FINALLY: THE LEGENDARY MSNBC/OBJECTIVIST CROSSOVER EPISODE! Earth to Crazy MSNBC, The Guardian: Was JFK a ‘Fascist Fitness’ Zealot?

You can’t make it up. Some leftist media sites are so desperate to find fascism under every rock that they’ll even find it at the gym.

Over there at MSNBC the other day was this gem proclaiming that “Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally.” It reads in part this

Physical fitness has always been central to the far right. In Mein Kampf, Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with ‘fanatical love of the fatherland,’ would do more for the German nation than any ‘mediocre’ tactical weapons training.

Catch that first line? Again, it was this: “Physical fitness has always been central to the far right.” Then they went right to Hitler.

Ayn Rand smiles: Editor Bennett Cerf “suggested that some of Rand’s speeches and articles from her newsletter could be repackaged as a stand-alone volume. In response Rand proposed a new book, titled The Fascist New Frontier, after her essay of the same name. Originally enthusiastic about the project, Cerf grew increasingly uncomfortable with the book’s title as he tried unsuccessfully to rouse the interest of his sales staff.”

HOLIDAYS IN HELL: Meet the tourists who are choosing to holiday in Afghanistan.

“To be honest, a major part of going on the trip was that I was bored as f— at my desk job doing nine to five, five days a week,” mulls Callum Darragh, a 26-year-old office worker from Swindon, Wiltshire. “Maybe it was a slight overreaction to the mundanity of modern life, but there we are. We turned up in Kabul after 40 hours, on four different flights, and when we landed it was kind of terrifying because you see the Taliban posters and whatnot and then you think to yourself, ‘What the hell have I done?’.”

Callum spent two-and-a-half weeks in Afghanistan in August last year, and is one of a growing number of Westerners who are travelling to the country for tourism. The Taliban government is keen for more to come — no surprise when the 7,000 tourists it claims have visited since it took power in August 2021, have brought with them £6.2m of crucial foreign exchange.

The country remains dependent on aid worth £3.5bn annually and a Taliban crackdown on poppy farming is set to decimate the £1bn opium industry. “As we can see in other countries, tourism can bring in a lot of revenue,” Mohammad Nabi Baha, director of the government’s tourist board, candidly told The Times.

To be honest, I think I’ll stick a more traditional tourist destination this year: What I Saw in Iran –a Free Beacon journey to the birthplace of Valerie Jarrett.

OUT ON A LIMB: What if we hadn’t bombed Hiroshima? Oppenheimer doesn’t need to ask.

As the name suggests, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Oppenheimer, is not a meta-commentary on the Red Scare or the complexities of geopolitical game theory. It does not dig into the moral dilemma Harry Truman, who, as vice president, had no idea the Manhattan Project even existed, faced when FDR died, forcing the former to deliberate on whether the Allies should drop the atomic bomb.

And yet, for some reason, some critics are livid that the film Oppenheimer is about the lived experience of J. Robert Oppenheimer and not a diatribe about American imperialism, the suffering of the Japanese, or a complex moral calculus of why we were justified or not in dropping the Fat Man and the Little Boy. Here’s a brief sampling of the dregs of the dullards.

There’s one name missing from Tiana Lowe Doescher’s roundup: Does any country hate itself like America?

For example, the new film “Oppenheimer,” a movie that examines the individuals and events leading to the development of the atomic bomb during WWII, has sparked a renewed public discussion of America’s use of those bombs on the Japanese Empire. To be sure, there is a legitimate, nuanced, academic debate about Truman’s decision. But to see this hairbrained proposition from two years ago resurface, despite the fact that it is found nowhere in the extensive literature or historical record of the bomb controversy, is depressing:

In case you don’t recognize her, that’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, a woman paid by the nation’s “newspaper of record,” The New York Times, to write about history. Our history. She rose to prominence with another wildly anti-American narrative called the 1619 Project that claimed in its original release to, “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” The point was simple: the evil of slavery was the real story of American history, and everything else we have been led to believe is a lie.

Historians systematically debunked the core of Hannah-Jones’ work, to the point that she virulently denies her original claim, now stating her work, “doesn’t argue, for obvious reasons, that 1619 is our true founding.”

Yet despite the intellectual embarrassment that this “project” became, the Times continues to prop up Hannah-Jones’ faux history, even as she has demonstrated little ability to offer anything meaningful beyond easily-disproven, anti-American claims. Consider, her lie about the atomic bomb.

• Historians debate the accuracy of Truman’s estimated casualty figures – both American and Japanese – should the war have continued without the use of the bomb.
• Historians debate whether the use of the bomb was primarily an attempt to intimidate the Soviets.
• Historians note from broken Japanese code that they were preparing for significant defense of the home islands in the fall of 1945.
• Historians note that not only did the Japanese not surrender after the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, there was an internal coup (the Kyūjō incident) in Japan to try to prevent surrender even after Nagasaki.

In other words, Nikole Hannah-Jones had, once again, simply made something up and pretended it was credible history. Yet she got to keep her job, to cash a paycheck, to conduct television interviews, to receive academic awards, and more. Why? Because she hates her country?

Is that not just weird?

The above tweet, coupled with Hannah-Jones’ thoughts on Europe should make any WWII history book she deigns to write an amazing read!

SAUL ALINSKY SMILES: LOL! Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine.

Just Stop Oil gets a taste of their own medicine.
Counter activists tie rape alarms to balloons and let them go in a Just Stop Oil meeting. pic.twitter.com/GbyI8CPj09

— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) July 24, 2023

RIP: Barack Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell, 45, drowns in paddle boarding accident near $12m Martha’s Vineyard home of ‘heartbroken’ ex-president.

BOMB CANADA—THE CASE FOR WAR: Toronto principal killed himself after being singled out during DEI training.

(Classical reference in headline.)

OPPENHEIMER, PRO AND CON:

Pro: John Podhoretz:

When middlebrow movies of this kind—Gandhi, Cry Freedom, The Killing Fields, and many others—vanish from the scene, that doesn’t make new space for highbrow stuff, because high culture will always be an elite minority taste. Instead, everything just goes lower. And that’s exactly what happened with Hollywood. Over the past two decades, movies that try to tell a real story about real people (and I don’t just mean actual real-life people like Oppenheimer, but just everyday folk) have gotten smaller and more insignificant. They are unambitious and unassuming. When they work, they work because they are touching slices of life and seek only to make us shed a tiny tear. They’re not weighty. They’re gossamer.

Oppenheimer is weighty, and it’s kind of magnificent. Writer-director Christopher Nolan has decided the story he is telling is the most important story in human history, and he wants to do it justice. This movie’s level of ambition is something I’m not sure we’ve seen in a major studio release in decades, and Nolan is so skilled a storyteller and so authoritative a director that his reach blessedly does not exceed his grasp. This is not a subtle movie, and there’s barely a joke or a laugh in it; as in all his pictures, Nolan presents us with an earnest, formal, and heavy world. But what he doesn’t do is preach, and that is what makes this movie such a triumph. Oppenheimer is a wildly ambiguous portrait of its titular subject, the work he did, the life he led, and even the humiliation to which he was subjected by political and ideological enemies. The titanic performance of Cillian Murphy, who does nothing to ingratiate himself with the audience, takes this incredibly complex and deeply troubled man and follows him through four decades of scientific growth, political activism, engineering achievement, and raw power politics. And it does a beautiful job posing the key question of his life without answering it: In doing something transcendently great, did he do something evil?

Con: Armond White: Oppenheimer’s Revenge of the Geeks. Christopher Nolan remakes Dr. Strangelove for today’s moral idiots:

On the way to turning pop cinema into a weapon of mass destruction, Christopher Nolan specialized in narratives about amoral excitation — Memento, and his Batman Begins / The Dark Knight / The Dark Knight Rises trilogy. These bad productions changed movie culture by appealing to the terrors of naïve film nerds the same way Stanley Kubrick corrupted adolescent pop-culture devotees — through technological preening that made geeks feel smart.

There’s always a moral vacancy in Nolan’s films. Now, Nolan has made his ultimate geeks’ movie: the overhyped biopic Oppenheimer, which mystifies physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by the eccentric, intense Irish actor Cillian Murphy), credited for creating the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Japan in 1945 to end World War II. This is Nolan’s subversive remake of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, from 1964. The real-life basis of Nolan’s film is all the more enticing for kids who know nothing about military or scientific history. He introduces them to Oppenheimer in the same way that Marvel distorted Oppenheimer’s wizardry in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And surely Nolan is aware of how Zack Snyder’s Watchmen used Oppenheimer’s oft-repeated quote — “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It came from the Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit epic that polymath Oppenheimer knew, but the proclamation now teases pop-culture nihilists — and that’s the purpose behind Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Not since David Fincher’s serial-killer epic Zodiac has there been a crime procedural as plodding as Oppenheimer, even though Nolan constantly switches to black-and-white flashbacks of the scientist’s early academic years, his wartime bomb research on the Manhattan Project, and his post-war persecution by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Murphy is outfitted in a wide fedora, and his imperious manner makes him seem half-hero, half-nemesis. Nolan lacks the momentum to dramatize Oppenheimer’s travails (Murphy’s blue eyes do all the work), but the precarious portrait of a genius recalls Fincher’s worship of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Both Nolan and Fincher exploit the zeitgeist’s disinterest in what’s moral or immoral. This film dithers for three hours, as if viewers were also morally uncertain and aesthetically gullible.

Like Nolan’s Dunkirk, his latest film feels detached and Kubrickian. I watched The Imitation Game on Saturday night on Netflix as a sort of warmup for Sunday’s big movie. (In this case, England’s tortured WWII genius, Alan Turing). While the plastic CGI SFX from 2014 were nowhere near as good as Nolan’s practical effects, and I felt much more sympathetic to Turing as played by Benedict Cumberbatch than Cillian Murphy’s cool and detached Oppenheimer. And while the plot was also non-linear, it was much more obvious in each scene which period of Turing’s life was being recreated. But Oppenheimer is big, bravura, and smart filmmaking, something that as Podhoretz writes above is quite rare in post-’80s Hollywood.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Hunter Biden’s gallery sold his art to a Democratic donor ‘friend’ who Joe Biden named to a prestigious commission.

OLD AND BUSTED: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The New Hotness? Students—Including Most Conservative Ones—Now Want Their Professors Censored.

Flashback: Freddie deBoer’s Planet of Cops. “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad. I wonder why people run away from establishment progressivism in droves.”

BIZ PARTNER: Hunter put Joe on the phone “dozens of times.”

NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Enter the Barbie Longhouse.

Spoiler alert: Lots of spoilers abound in this review. Beware!

I walked out of the Barbie movie stunned and in disbelief. Hollywood darling Greta Gerwig, the scowling girlboss writer-director of this guaranteed smash-hit, has somehow made the first movie explicitly set inside the Longhouse.

And she did it totally by accident.

What a time to be alive!

The Longhouse Dreamhouse

If you are still confused about what the “longhouse” is, the Barbie movie is here to set you straight.

To Greta Gerwig and her heavily longhoused life partner and cowriter Noah Baumbach, the feminist Longhouse is good, actually. It’s the only thing keeping men—and Ken—in their place. Greta and her doll-alter-ego are still, always, forever, fighting the mythological patriarchy from the privilege and safety of their Dreamhouses.
She seems totally oblivious of the fact that in modern-day Hollywood, just like in Barbieland, girls rule. Men, and Kens, are firmly in the backseat. Ms. Gerwig and her girlboss sisterhood are riding high.

Gerwig is the most in-demand writer of the last decade. And yet—she is also somehow the victim of the patriarchy. This movie is her great Airing of the Grievances.

* * * * * * * *

The last scene is the newly human Barbie, in Santa Monica, wearing Birkenstocks instead of high heels, arriving at a doctor’s office. The receptionist asks her who she’s there to see. Barbie, now calling herself Barbara Handler, says with a gleeful smile, “My gynecologist!”
Cut, roll credits.

Gynocracy, take a bow!

In another accidentally based twist, what makes Barbie a woman is having a vagina—paging Matt Walsh!

In the sequel, Depo-Provera Barbie and her uparmored sterilized innards will be living her best life on Tinder, going to Burning Man, attending Planned Parenthood rallies and abortion marches.

All she’s missing in the end is her Mattel-branded pink pussy hat.

And as Glenn noted yesterday. “In trying to make Barbie a feminist hero, they made Ken a Chad idol…Call it the Gordon Gekko effect, where the villain gets the most memorable lines. Or maybe the Colonel Jessup effect.” I saw Oppenheimer yesterday, and was amused by the number of women — and a few men — dressed in pink on their way to see Barbie. I’ll be curious to see what its next weeks of business are like.

As for Oppenheimer, the scenes set at Los Alamos are riveting, the Trinity explosion spectacular, and spectacularly loud, and the various show trial scenes a bit numbing as they shifted from color to black and white, and ran long after the A-bomb explosion, deliberately making it anti-climactic, a very Kubrickian choice. As Kubrick once told an interviewer, “if you end a story with somebody achieving his aim it always seems to me to have a kind of incompleteness about it, because that almost seems to be the beginning of another story. One of the things I like most about John Ford is the anticlimax endings — anticlimax upon anticlimax and you just get a feeling that you are seeing life and you accept the thing.”

ACE OF SPADES: Think Tank Shock: Wealthy Liberals Use Zoning Laws to Create Legal “Border Wall” Around Their Suburbs and Neighborhoods to Keep Minorities Out.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Elon Musk Rebrands Twitter As ‘X’ After CEO Rejects His First Choice ’69Boobies420.’

THE WAPO’S GOT A FEVAH, AND IT NEEDS MORE COWBELL JASON ALDEAN! The Washington Post would like to endlessly wokesplain Jason Aldean’s EXTREMELY CONTROVERSIAL song “Try That in a Small Town” so let’s explore their offerings:

The Washington Post likes nothing better than a juicy scandal involving racist white supremacists being all supremacisty, and if there aren’t any, why, they’ll just make one up!

And so, over the course of three days we have no fewer than six pieces in WaPo in which a thoroughly innocuous paean to small-town values is magically transformed into a racist pro-lynching white supremacist anthem.

To accomplish this feat of wizardry requires you go all-in, and did they ever.

This was all hands on deck swarm reporting. It’s as if they were already making room on their shelves for their next Pulitzer.

Fortunately, at least for the moment, Aldean is surviving the Alinsky-esque “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” tactics of the WaPo and the left (but I repeat myself) just fine: Jason Aldean Refuses To Apologize In Amazing Speech As ‘USA’ Chants Break Out.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The problem for the WaPo is that this sort of attack depends on pretending that the person being mobbed is an affront to normal, decent, everyday American values. This is difficult to pull off when you’ve spent the rest of your time either denying that such values exist, or crapping all over them, and even calling them racist and white supremacist.

OUT ON A LIMB: New job numbers prove red-state policies are the way to go.

Sensible, pro-growth policies have won the day, yet again.

Per the latest state-level jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the top 10 states for jobs recovered since the pandemic began are led by Republican governors.

All 10 have GOP-controlled state legislatures.

How out unemployment numbers?

Red-state good news dominates there too.

Of the top 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates, eight are led by Republican governors.

And of 17 states that have hit record-new lows of unemployment, 12 have GOP govs.

This news isn’t all that surprising when dealing with an administration full of Obama retreads: Obama should take notes on Texas. “Obama had two years of uncontested control of two branches of the federal government to push his own ‘recovery’ agenda. Yet unemployment has skyrocketed. Not a single job was created in August [2011] nationwide. But the business friendly climate of Texas, fostered by the leadership of Gov. Rick Perry, has created four out of every five jobs in America since 2005.”

WATCH: Chris Christie Actually Scores a Direct Hit on CBS News’ Margaret Brennan.

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Report: Fox News matches employee contributions to Satanic Temple, Planned Parenthood.

NBC ATTACKS REPUBLICANS FOR NOTICING BIDEN’S CRUELTY TOWARD HIS GRANDDAUGHTER:

It seems that some in the corporate press have made covering for President Joe Biden’s many faults a priority.

The latest example comes from NBC, which wrote, “President Joe Biden’s family story has long been one of his greatest strengths politically. Republicans are starting to think they can turn it into a liability.” How do they plan to do that? By pointing out that Biden categorically rejects one of his seven grandchildren, presumably because his son had her with a stripper. He says he loves his six grandchildren. But he has seven.

The piece continues: “That [the attacks] have now boiled over to the presidential campaign trail and focused on this young girl and her role in the Biden family underscores how Republicans are leaning into a deeply personal issue for the president — and that it isn’t going away.”

The framing is notable: It suggests the real story is Republicans attacking Biden over refusing to acknowledge the existence of his granddaughter rather than, you know, the cruelty of Biden doing so in the first place. The title of the piece, “Republicans up the personal attacks on Biden and his family,” all but confirms this.

Evergreen:

NEO: COVID lab leak coverups, then and now.

And what of the lab leak theory? The first mention of the subject I could find on this blog is from April of 2020, which is pretty early. Here’s what I wrote back then:

You may have noticed that I haven’t written much if at all about COVID-19’s origins, despite having written a ton about the disease. Was it from a wet market? Was it from a lab? My opinion was that it was 50/50 and that we just didn’t know, so I didn’t want to waste much verbiage on it.

But now I’m leaning towards the lab theory.

Then I quoted this piece by Jonathan Turley:

When the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, China, many people immediately raised the concern that it might have been the result of a lab release from a controversial Chinese the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab was working on coronavirus and had raised concerns over its containment protocols. Then there was the fact that China hid the outbreak, arrested top doctors, and buried research on its origins. However, a narrative quickly emerged in countering President Donald Trump’s references to the “China virus.” People, including members of Congress, who referred to the lab were ridiculed on CNN and other outlets as conspiracy theorists like Politifact declared the theory to be utterly baseless. For some of us, the overwhelming media narrative seemed odd and artificial. It would seem obvious that a lab working on viruses in this area would be an obvious possible source. Now, after weeks of chastising those who mentioned the lab theory, another cache of documents and information shows that there are ample reasons to be suspicious and that concerns were raised two years ago within the State Department.

Turley is not a research biologist, nor am I. But it always was a theory that made sense, and the absolute denial of that theory was always suspicious and seemingly political. One didn’t have to be a scientist to see that – plus, there were other scientists who said that the virus had a structure that made it likely it was the result of bioengineering.

So if reporters were fooled it was because they wanted to be, or were simply stupid, or both. Or perhaps not so many were actually fooled.

When does Tom Cotton get his apology? Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.

—New York Times headline, February 17^th, 2020.

TURNING JAPANESE? I REALLY DON’T THINK SO: Here are 10 ideas San Francisco can import from Tokyo to save downtown.

San Francisco is at a pivotal moment.

With foot traffic down 31% from pre-pandemic levels, and over 54,000 residents permanently gone, the need for a compelling new vision to revitalize our urban infrastructure is paramount — especially downtown.

I recently had the privilege of visiting Tokyo for the first time — and the city left me nothing short of starstruck with its urban design. Here are 10 ideas I saw that San Francisco can integrate into its city fabric to reinvigorate our ailing downtown.

Car-free streets

Walking through Tokyo, one of the first things I marveled at was the abundance of car-free streets. This widespread flexibility to walk unencumbered by traffic was inspiring.

Moreover, Tokyo’s walkability creates a thriving environment for small businesses and restaurants, as more foot traffic clearly leads to higher patronage. I didn’t see a single corridor where residents weren’t lining up for their favorite restaurant.

By prioritizing pedestrians, Tokyo also lowers air pollution. While San Francisco has about 460 cars per 1,000 people, Tokyo has 232. With this reduction in cars comes a commensurate reduction in traffic, congestion and pollution.

Double our sidewalk size

In the districts of Tokyo where cars are allowed, the sidewalks are massive; The pedestrian-to-car space ratio is easily 2:1.

The benefits of these larger sidewalks compound. More sidewalk space attracts more pedestrians. More pedestrians mean more foot traffic. And more foot traffic means more patronage for local businesses.

Large sidewalks also allow innovative use of space. Many in Tokyo have metal railings to protect pedestrians from cars. There are designated paths for both incoming and outgoing pedestrian traffic (you always walk on the left side in Tokyo). There’s more room for public toilets. And there are vending machines serving water, ramen or even ice cream.

With more sidewalk, there’s more room for people and the things that they need and enjoy.

That’s nice. But curiously unmentioned in the above San Francisco Chronicle article is Japan’s astonishingly small homelessness problem. Why is it so small?

Drug Addiction

Tom Gill, a Japan-based social anthropologist, reported that Japan has a lower homeless population than the US and other countries because Japan has a much lower drug addiction problem. A 2014 study revealed that about 1.6% of the Japanese population tried drugs other than alcohol in their lifetime. Gill said that drugs other than alcohol are strictly illegal and usually only accessible through gangsters. Around 50% of drug users in Japan have gang connections. However, many of Japan’s homeless suffer from alcoholism.

A 67,500 person survey from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health In America showed that over 50% of the population in the US used some form of illegal drug in their lifetime. Drug addiction is one of the reasons for homelessness in America and can prevent people from finding homes and jobs due to a criminal record.

Karla Thennes, the director of a homeless organization called Porchlight in Madison, Wisconsin, described homeless shelters in Madison. Hundreds of people sleep on mats only inches apart with little sanitation. Madison and other cities across America need shelter reforms that are safer and more spacious.

Thennes explained to The Borgen Project that the homeless could not work past addiction in these shelter environments because of a failure to meet basic needs.“You can’t stay sober sleeping in a shelter,” Thennes said.

Mental Health

According to the Homeless Hub, 30-35% of all people who experience homelessness worldwide have a mental illness. In Japan, someone with a mental illness is typically placed into a mental health facility, sparing them from the streets. There are 269 psychiatric beds per 100,000 people in Japan, whereas, in the United States, the number is 25.

In fact, Japan has one of the most efficient health care systems in the world. However, a significant stigma revolves around mental health in Japan and the country sees one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Public insurance in Japan does not cover prescriptions for mental health medications such as antidepressants, and psychologists don’t always have enough training for their profession.

So while Japan’s mental health system ends up reducing the homeless population, their treatment of mentally ill people and available mental health resources struggle to meet an appropriate standard. “Japan has a conservative approach to the treatment of mentally ill people who are generally institutionalized,” reported Gill when he spoke to the Life Where I’m From Youtube channel.

So by all means San Francisco, crack down on drugs and institutionalize those with mental illness — use those ideas from Tokyo to start revitalizing the city.

UPDATE: Free Parking for the Homeless in CA.

Did you know that homeless people enjoy a constitutional right to free parking? That’s the main takeaway from a California Court of Appeals opinion issued Friday that ruled cities that tow cars with five or more unpaid parking tickets violate the 4th Amendment’s prohibition of search and seizure without a warrant.

The Coalition on Homelessness sued the City and County of San Francisco seeking an injunction against towing scofflaw cars that piled up parking tickets, and the trial court had denied the petition. But the Court of Appeals reversed, because “appellant [Coalition on Homelessness] presented declarations regarding the severe impacts of vehicle tows on unhoused San Francisco residents.”

Wait, I thought we wanted San Fran to be more like Tokyo:

(Updated and bumped.)