Today, while driving underneath the 10 freeway along Centinela Ave -- the dividing line between Santa Monica in the west and L.A. to the east -- I noticed an interesting outcome of the different in local enforcement of vagrancy laws.
On the right (west) side, as you drive south, there is just a clear sidewalk. And on the left (east) side, there is a row of tents, where homeless people live. The reason they are all on the L.A. side is that L.A. does not enforce the laws. (The Santa Monica sidewalk also looked as if it had been recently washed.)
Dennis Prager's Prager U happened to come out with a new podcast today about precisely this issue. The fact that some cities -- with liberal leaders -- are capable of enforcing the laws, and others are unwilling, shows it can be done.
Homelessness in L.A. is not, primarily, a problem of the lack of housing. It is about drugs, mental illness, and the benefit of better weather and weaker law enforcement. The one thing that does NOT work is to indulge the problem.
https://www.prageru.com/video/what-do-we-do-about-the-homeless/
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
Topics:
- The state of the economy
- The fight against crime
- The midterm election fight
- The struggle for peace between Russia and Ukraine
- The airstrike on the Venezuelan drug cartel
- The attempt to sink Kennedy
- The war in Gaza
- The case against Harvard
- The Trump presidency
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
