So thanks to community collaborative websites like Nextdoor.com, neighbors can come together in ways and numbers not previously possible. The benefits of such collaboration include sharing contact information for the best carpenters or landscapers, discussing improvements to the neighborhood, announcing garage sales, looking for a cat sitter, coordinating efforts to compel Government agencies to perform their taxpayer funded public services and to share information about crime or other neighborhood maladies.

On my local Nextdoor.com website, we have noted an uptick in petty crime which is to say the non-violent breaking and entering of homes and cars to steal TV’s, laptops, iPads, iPhones, jewelry, cash – basically anything of value that isn’t nailed down followed by a quick exit. The typical operation involves knocking on doors in the middle of the workday afternoon and waiting for nobody to answer as an invite to kick the door in or go through a window and begin pillaging.

In the neighborhood next door, gang members from L.A. are coming down to break into empty homes; specifically those homes that have American flags, NRA window decals or signs of military participation or support because those homes are more likely to have what they need – guns.

What people fail to appreciate from this recent and “unexplained” rise in crime is the recent approval by these same now victims of Prop 47 which released 2,700 prisoners (and rising) into their very own neighborhoods, and now their cars and houses. Once again, California voters have shot themselves in the foot (sadly missing their head) by failing to read the details regarding a Prop and instead relied on massively biased commercials and ads and their poorly informed friends and peers on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Reddit creating a self-serving echo chamber of stupid think.

And why? Laziness and apathy…nobody wants to read. Nobody wants to put in any effort. They want to be told how to think by everyone around them. Thinking is hard. It often leads the rational person to unpopular positions which is in complete contradiction to our natural human desire to be likable and liked and accepted by our peers. Then we call the outcome Democracy.

Quartz has a nice article showing how the younger generations are relying more and more on social media for their news, which is to say they are relying more and more on self-reinforcing group think since birds of a feather friend together. Without sources providing contradictory information based on something as novel, unused and archaic as facts, data and reason, we can see how this will end, because we have seen how this has ended.

We’ve learned that when a majority of voters agree to reduce the sentences of thousands of criminals from felonies to misdemeanors and then let them back out into the light of day, the rational must ask themselves if it is more realistic to believe that they will; since unable to get a job, return to their prior life of crime ransacking both those who freed them and those who voted against their freedom, or will they have a moral epiphany or find God and right their ways while thanking you for setting them free? Well when you catch them in your house shouldering passed you for the door with an armful of your stuff, you can ask them.

To be clear, I support the dismissal and outright repeal of any law that convicts someone for the non-crime of hurting themselves. However, this Prop went well beyond that and I believe that California voters failed to read the fine print and realize exactly what they were voting out of Pandora’s box.

What an individual does to themselves is none of any other individuals business and for that reason, such laws are not only tyrannical but unethical and unconstitutional. It’s legal for you to carve a caricature of Barney into your forehead but you go to jail for smoking pot in your own living room? That’s not rational. That’s insane. But that’s our legal system.

And while California continues to bury its head in its ass at the voting booth, with the majority subjecting the minority to more crime, more property theft and more expense to increase our personal security measures (but hey, it’s a Democracy, so the minority just has to suck it up for the “greater good,” right?) we can also thank Obama for providing amnesty to 886,000 illegal immigrants under his 2012 DACA action for DREAMers, 49 of which the DHS approved despite their having known gang affiliations; one of which went on to murder four people. DHS response? Oops, we did it again. Will anyone in Government go to jail for that mortal error? No, because it was not a private sector mistake and Government employees are above the law, unlike you.

I guess you get what you vote for, and sometimes you get what you didn’t vote for. That’s Democracy.

Categories: Government Failures