California law CAUSES the high rents and much of the homelessness the state suffers from. Learn how that works

RIP Prop 33 😭 What happened?

Why did Prop 33 lose in California? Here are three reasons, although there could be more: 1) Out of state billionaire real estate special interests, combined with in-state millionaire Landlord orgs, spent over $121,000,000 on telling scary falsehoods to Californians. Like, rent control will cause rents to go up, and affordable housing will disappear. They just needed to cause enough confusion about the meaning of Prop 33 to get the voters – even tenants! – to vote no. 2) As I explain in a vid on YouTube,* the California Legislative Analyst presented a biased and negative summary of Prop 33 in the Voter Guide. That was sent out to 22M Californians. For many voters, it was the one and only thing they would read about Prop 33. The law requires the Legislative Analyst to suggest the economic impact of a prop for both state and local gov – but only a negative view was given, and only for the state gov – “tens of millions” would be lost in tax revenues, it said. But renters w...

Does Political Science Force Graduate Students into a Career of Irrelevancy?

Introduction In a 2014 New York Times op ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof drew numerous defensive responses when he criticized political science for having very little “practical impact” in “the real world of politics.” [1] Rather than exercising civic leadership, political science has been most noticeably AWOL from public policy debates since WWII, he claims. And, in his view, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.” How does he account for this absence? Primarily, it is due to the academic interest in pursuing the quantitative approach in political science research. This kind of research is too often unintelligible to both the politically interested general public and the policy making community. Also, the “value neutrality” required for such studies prohibits advocacy. The pattern persists, in part, because graduate students must conform to the expectations of their professors, as a requirement ...

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad. A Book Review by a Fellow Traveler

How does it feel to live in a time when no one is stopping a genocide? That’s the question Omar El Akkad addresses in his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. This book can be called a "personal memoir," as some reviewers have done, but not in a dismissive way. The author is sharing his consciousness, like in an intimate diary. He speaks to the reader as a recently naturalized citizen of the US, and as an immigrant from the Middle East (born in Egypt). He tells us about his personal experience of being baffled over how people in the West, especially in the US, can fancy themselves as exemplars of righteousness, and even supporters of the underdog, while letting their government supply a genocide. He shares his befuddlement without preaching at us. This is not a noisy protest. He doesn't rail against Israel's astonishing cruelty, nor chide the US for its complicity, but rather describes his personal experience as a person living in a world w...

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