Some More News - SMN: Government Subsidized Childcare, No More No Knock Raids and Other Simple Solutions

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Hi. Today we consult the moose brain to see what we can do about seemingly unsolvable problems that maybe do actually have a simple solution. Support SOME MORE NEWS: http://www.patreon.com/SomeMoreNews We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/somemorenews Imperfect Foods is offering our listeners 20% off your first 4 orders when you go to http://IMPERFECTFOODS.COM and use promo code MORENEWS. Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit http://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to http://MINTMOBILE.com/morenews. Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you'll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That's 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to http://BABBEL.com and use promo code: MORENEWS Executive Producer - Katy Stoll (@KatyStoll). Written by Katie Goldin (@KatieGoldin) and David Christopher Bell (@moviehooligan). Directed by Will Gordh (@will_gordh). Edited by Gregg Meller. Graphics by F. Clint DeNisco. Head Writer - David Christopher Bell. Producer - Nick Mundy. Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales (@mijo_marco). Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker (@LTP313). Follow us on social media! Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJEUFRyXjJEVyy0_aq8Ma39BVcNo823WvH2pLb_8OYk/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

God has a new name this day! Oh, hello there. I didn't see you. I was just doing a little tinkering, you know, fiddling about, puttering, a bit of meddling with like the laws of nature and such. NBD, as you may remember, I made my own news AI a few months ago

using nothing but my ingenuity and Amazon Alexa and allegedly the brain of a moose, and it went pretty well. Just okay. It could be better, which is why I did a bit more work and am happy to present Code E 2.0! While the interface is basically the same,

I did a major upgrade in the hardware area. Specifically, I added a little bit of myself into the programming in order to make it a bit more critical and assessment of large corporations and boards and things like that. And yes, before you ask, I mean that I literally put some of my own brain in there. It's fine though.

Remember how I said NPD? I already had the hardware needed for digitizing brain matter, so it was pretty easy. Except a small part of my brain is missing and there's a wound on the back of my head. And for some reason I cry every time I see the color purple. Now the color, not the movie.

Anywho, it should reflect my contempt for companies like Amazon. Now playing Shivers by Ed Sheeran. Nope, cancel that. Nobody asked you to do that. Point is, along with allegedly being part moose and very much still an Alexa, Code E is now part me.

I once my pants at the dentist. Ah, that must be the moose part. That's not the Code E part. Okay, well, you know the deal. Maybe you don't, actually. So here's the deal. I'm going to give Code E some kind of systemic problem or general question concerning America, and Code E will calculate an easy and often obvious solution that we could implement today.

So, like, if someone with power or money happens to be watching this, perhaps they could take the solution suggested here and run with it in a meaningful way. All right, Code E, are you ready for your first problem? I desire an entire pumpkin. That could actually be the moose or me. There's no telling with that one. Okay, first problem. Infant care is ridiculously unaffordable

in the United States. Is there a way to change that? Processing, processinging. Processing. Right, I've still got to put more ram into this thing. Or, I don't know, hummingbirds are fast, so maybe I can cram a bunch of... Ooh, it's ready! The federal government should subsidize infant care. That's actually really obvious when you see it written out like that.

It's important to ignore the male yearlings so that they may thrive on their own. Extremely good point. New parents, write that one down. As for you childless freaks wondering exactly what the dilly here is, well, America is in a bit of a pickle when it comes to childcare. A real dilly of a pickle, you could say.

And this dildo of a pickle is something nerds call a market failure, as in an industry that is way too expensive for both the consumers and the providers of a service. For parents, the annual cost of childcare was at an average of $9,977 before the pandemic. By one estimate, that number is now up to $14,117. In Indiana, the most average state, families with kids under five spend around 20% of their income just on child care alone.

And while you'd expect this to be the fault of big nanny strong-arming parents with their playroom cabal, it turns out that on the provider side, child care workers aren't making diddly shit despite these rising costs. The mean average annual year salary for employees across the board is only $26,790 in America. And so right about now, you're probably wondering just where the heck all that money is going. Was it all eaten by that money monster George Clooney tried to warn us about?

Actually, kind of, or rather, if you think of government regulations as a money monster, which in this case, in most cases, you should not do that. No, you see, the business of watching children is one that needs a lot of oversight for reasons that should be obvious. When you drop your child or pet ape disguised as a child off somewhere,

it's nice to know that the place has proper fire safety, CPR certified employees, and doesn't just stick your baby and or ape in a basement drawer. This is why the law requires only a handful of kids per childcare worker so that each kid gets the proper amount of attention. And also probably why my own childcare business

failed so quickly and dramatically. Super didn't know you couldn't let apes and babies play together, learned that the gross way. While there's probably a conversation out there about regulation reform, there's simply no getting around how expensive and regulated a childcare business needs to be. You're basically running a small school, something you may perhaps realize

is a thing funded by state taxes. So why wouldn't we also do that with childcare? Why in the hell would we consider the act of watching over kids while adults go to work to survive a for-profit business that only some people can afford? After all, America likes babies, right? They certainly put up a stink if you accidentally feed one to an ape.

People are always concerned about our dwindling population and most politicians, and especially the GOP, are rock hard for families. They are supposedly the pro-life party after all. And while perhaps there was a time when a single parent could provide for a household, this is of course no longer the case. So the logical conclusion here

is to either pay people way more money or make childcare extremely cheap, if not totally free. Or do both. Now, I know I just mentioned conservatives, but I'm really not talking about this through the lens of any political ideology. Despite your views of the free market, the concept of childcare simply doesn't work when treated like a business. We're seeing this right now with the

aforementioned market failure. And that problem is compounding into everyone's problem as places begin to rehire after the pandemic. You know how there's a very vocal push by both parties to reopen schools? Well, that's not just for the kids' sake, but an essential step in getting our economy back on track. The childcare industry, it turns out, is a lynchpin to our whole system. As one study discovered, roughly 8% of the economic activity in Europe simply can't happen as long as kids remain at home where parents have to look after them. They predict that's the same here in the States.

This of course most affects women, 1.6 million of which are currently unable to rejoin the workforce due to a lack of childcare. Now, this isn't an emotional plea. It's not a political viewpoint. This is just sexy, sexy numbers. And I bring up Europe because, as you probably already guessed, other countries have already figured this out. In countries like Norway and Iceland and Denmark, the government spends between 23 to $29,000 per year per child.

Germany, New Zealand, Austria, and many more all spend a substantial amount in the teens of thousands on childcare subsidies as well. And countries like Ireland and the UK offer free preschool for some portion of the day. Meanwhile, the United States spends only $500 per child per year. That is it.

It's not even enough to get them the good PS5. And that puts us, you know, pretty much dead last. It seems bad and easily avoidable. Because you know who else subsidized childcare? The United States in the past. 27% of Richmond shipbuilders were women. Feminine workers with small children inspired the founding of 35 nursery school units and 10 extended daycare centers, which mothered over 1,400 youngsters at a time. On their way to work, parents left their hopefuls at one of the

nursery schools, knowing that the daily routine, commencing with a physical checkup and followed by organized play, would make their children both healthy and happy. Thanks for that, old-timey voiceover man. Now, you might recall that our nation's ladies were once sent to fill in the jobs unoccupied by men fighting in World War II. During this era, the idea of women, or dames,

as they were scientifically classified at the time, was that they traditionally did not go to work. This was both due to a breathtaking system of sexism and also the fact that we had an economy where you could like work at a gas station and afford a house and a family. Wear that stupid milkman hat and turn crankshafts and that would afford you a middle-class lifestyle.

But when the war happened, Congress quickly realized that someone had to watch all these kids while the moms were off riveting tanks and whatnot. And so they used the Lanham Act to create fully funded universal childcare. Not only was it available six days a week, but it costs families less than 12 cents per day, which is around $12 today.

And boy, it was really effective. In total, looking after an estimated 550,000 to 600,000 children before the subsidies were ended in 1946. After that, we quietly went back to the same system as before, pretending the whole subsidized childcare thing didn't happen, like some kind of super kinky one night stand. And yet today, it appears that we're in a similar situation where both parents have to be away from home during the day. So I guess the question is, why didn't we do anything between then and now?

Well, the last time the U.S. government seriously considered child care policy was in 1971. But President Nixon vetoed it, saying a national child care system would weaken American families. Yeah, it was Nixon. Of course it was Nixon. Or Reagan. Or Clinton. No president would be a surprise, I guess is my point. But this was Nixon.

The 1971 Bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act would have created a national network of federally funded child care centers that would provide meals and medical checkups for kids whose parents had to work. The program would have been optional for families and subsidized based on their income. At the time, the budget was $2 billion. And as I mentioned, was deemed bipartisan and passed by Congress,

only to be ultimately vetoed by our first modern crime president. And while I didn't really want to make this about politics, the reason Nixon did this was purely ideological. This is according to Nixon's then speechwriter, Pat Buchanan, who said the goal wasn't to simply reject it over the cost, but push back against the quote,

"'Sovietization of American Children' and to bury the idea of a national childcare entitlement." And it worked! After Gerald Ford became president, the idea was once again resurrected, only for members of Congress to be flooded with angry letters from people accusing them of attacking the American family

by helping American families, apparently. Because of course, that's what it all boils down to. The resistance here isn't logical, but built on an extremely antiquated idea that a child should be raised by a mommy and a daddy, or more specifically, a stay-at-home mommy, lest they become some kind of knife-wielding alleyway criminal. And everything I've talked about here,

this resistance to the cold, hard fact that women have jobs, the low pay for healthcare employees, and the inability to pay much attention to the issue, really follows a pattern when you realize who, statistically, it affects the most. About 97% of early educators are women. About 40% are women of color. And the majority of women are black, brown, and immigrant women who are doing this work. That's the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley pinpointing a very important detail to all of this. The resistance to investing in infant and childcare is both subconsciously and deliberately

rooted in good old fashioned American misogyny. Despite being supported by 60% of voters, certain good old country boys really want us to think that childcare subsidies are some elitist idea being pushed on the working class family. This survey that J.D. Vance posted, by the way, simply says that most working class family. This survey that JD Vance posted, by the way, simply says that most working class parents prefer having one of them stay home and watch the child without the context that perhaps it's because childcare is expensive and that's why they'd rather

do it themselves. And this is what he used to prove that people don't want affordable childcare. It's just so very transparently ill-informed and built upon this fantasy of a traditional American family where the mommy tends to the children while the dad goes to work. But instead of facing the reality of our current workforce

or the fact that wages are too low to provide for a family on a single income, the idea here is to backwards engineer a government that doesn't help its people in order to encourage a specific family structure that's economically extinct. It's the abstin absence-only sex education approach where you completely ignore the problem

and act like shutting your eyes and ears will make it go away. In short, since they believe that a traditional American family is a stay-at-home mom and a working dad, they can't support any idea that recognizes that this isn't the case anymore. Even though it's super, super, super not the case. And so anyone acting like we shouldn't have subsidized childcare or that

families don't want it simply aren't operating from a logical perspective and should probably be ignored and perhaps not be given political power or honestly have their book adapted into a film with Glenn Close. But I guess we are past that. Okay, good problem solving code E. Thanks for not speaking up much during that too, because honestly, you kind of creep me out. I feel your soul inside of me. Yes, exactly that. Let's explore some other solutions.

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and type athleticgreens.com slash more news to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. Mmm. Soup. Hey, look over there! Here! We're back! We're back and we're talking about families and babies and all that

gross sh**. Hey, Code E, you like babies? I long for the rutting season. Don't we all? Speaking of moose f***ing, the housing crisis. It's an issue that affects everyone, from the people working full-time who still can't afford housing anywhere in the U.S., to the wealthy people who hate looking at homeless people but don't want to have to wear Gucci horse blinders everywhere. So, Code E, housing crisis. What do, like, what do?

Like, about it. Processing, processing. Get rid of single family zoning. Ah yes, single family zoning. It's a product of that fantasy we just talked about. That American dream of a cozy little nuclear family, a yard, picket children, and a loving fence greeting you with coffee,

with just a little bit of bourbon in the morning. Why would we ever get rid of such a thing? Well, to answer my own question, single-family zoning prevents affordable housing from being built, especially in dense cities. I don't know if you realize this, but folks are having a bit of trouble finding affordable places to live in this country. People tend to go where jobs are, and jobs tend to be concentrated in cities and you only have so much room in cities. After all, we need enough space to be able to toss around the old five iron, you know?

Put the old birdie in the bogey, smash the old ball washer on the back nine and sink the dink in the stink. For real, golf courses consume over 10,000 acres of land just in the greater Los Angeles area. Using California state laws default density consume over 10,000 acres of land just in the greater Los Angeles area. Using California state laws default density for low-income housing, 30 dwelling units per acre and reserving approximately 14% acreage for roads.

Well, golf course land could house approximately 258,000 low-income people or families. But of course, we can't take that land because rich people need it for quadruple bogeys on the fairway. Jeff Bezos' golf clubs are made of human femurs. I bet they are. Also, I guess poor people like golf too in theory. Not sure why I'm being mean to just golf. So we can't seize all the golf courses and turn them into homes,

take all of Jeff Bezos' money and property and turn his bones into foosball rods. Well, then we still need to tackle single family home zoning or we could do the golf course thing, but it seems like America isn't ready for that. So single family home zoning or SASS are regulations enacted by local governments that restrict buildings in an area

to stand alone single family homes. No duplexes, townhouses, or multifamily housing are allowed to be built in these areas. The first zoning laws came into being around 1916 in Berkeley, California, when a real estate developer named Duncan McDuffie wanted to make sure that black people didn't move in next to his neighborhood of Elmwood with their terrifying dance hall. And yep, there it is. The racist history of almost every single one of our

shitty laws. And surprisingly, the institutionalized racist effects of single family home zoning didn't end even after we ended racism with that one Pepsi commercial. A study from UC Berkeley found a correlation between single family home zoning and racial segregation in 2020. And a study from the Metropolitan Council in the Twin Cities region found that white families were three times more likely to be homeowners than black families.

So single family home zoning was built on the bones of racist policies and those residential zoning bones continue to rattle to this day. The bone zone seems, uh, bad. Like something we should get rid of. Not the bone zone. I mean the other thing. Single family home zoning screws over minorities and also non-minorities who haven't accumulated intergenerational wealth.

It is a very inclusive problem that certainly doesn't just affect Americans either. And despite what people might tell you about bootstraps and lifting one's selves up by them, this lack of affordable housing is one of the bigger smoking guns when it comes to homeless rates in big cities. People aren't always able to find housing they can afford in areas where there are jobs or can't afford rent anywhere

or have to choose between food or rent or end up homeless. And homeless people can't just get a job to get a roof over their heads. Despite the difficulties of holding a job without having a stable home, at the very least, 25% of the homeless population is employed. And up to 60% of the homeless population

is employed part-time or goes through cycles of employment. This is why there can be cities that are thriving economically that have people living on the streets because they're seemingly designed to make rent unaffordable like some kind of impossible Riddler puzzle. In Cupertino, California, headquarters of Apple,

the homeless population has been growing. But since 2015, the city has only allowed 19 low-income units to be built. Meanwhile, they seem blindsided by the rise in homelessness as if there isn't a glaringly obvious reason for it. So if it would fix the problem, why is there such resistance to building low-income housing? Why do we still cling on to the racist relics of single-family home zoning? Well, because poor people are icky. Hi, I'm Big Speave spell i just want to say and marianne i can talk to you about this privately

um i don't know why the village council would be afraid of litigation from a 24 million dollar year company while it's out a 65 million dollar year company i cannot believe you would make me audition for you you look like clowns. I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table. That's all. Thank you. That was Dave Chappelle,

famed comedian turned grumpy old man and cancel culture critic, using his fame to cancel poor people from living anywhere near his neighborhood. Now his publicist has defended Chappelle saying, neither Dave nor his neighbors are against affordable housing. However, they are against has defended Chappelle, saying, neither Dave nor his neighbors are against affordable housing. However, they are against the poorly vetted,

cookie cutter, sprawl style development deal, which has little regard for the community, culture, and infrastructure of the village. Except Dave Chappelle only objected to the new plan that included affordable townhouses and duplexes, not the original plan that still had a bunch of development and suburban sprawl, but for single family homes. According to the New York Times,

the developer of the homes said he was not aware of any efforts to block the development until the plan was altered at the council's request to include affordable housing options. So yeah, I'm sure Chappelle likes affordable housing in theory, just not in his backyard. I wonder if there's like a way you'd shorten that last phrase.

Oh, there is. So once someone reaches a certain level of wealth, they often turn into a NIMBY. It's like the curse of the flying Dutchman, except instead of turning into a cool pirate zombie, you're just an asshole. NIMBY is short for not in my backyard, which is short for I don't want any poor people

even next to my neighborhood or next to the neighborhood next to my neighborhood. And no, I'm not being suspicious. You won't find any orphans bones, not in my backyard. Nimbys believe they deserve to live in a special bubble filled only with other equally insufferable Nimbys. They think allowing low income housing anywhere near them will decrease property values and increase crime.

In terms of decreasing property values, it doesn't seem to have as much of an effect as people think, and negative effects can be mitigated by good design and proper maintenance. Similarly, the evidence doesn't show an increase in crime when affordable housing is built near affluent communities. There are even studies showing a county-wide reduction in crime with the development of low-income housing, which can help revitalize more impoverished neighborhoods. So again, the fears of NIMBYs are not backed up by research and really does come down to irrational fears

and ew, poors. So what can we do to stop the reign of NIMBYs? Well, we gotta bully some of these wads just enough to at least rid ourselves of single-family zoning. Thanks to the efforts of activists, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end their single-family zoning. Thanks to the efforts of activists, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end their single-family home zoning

regulations in 2018, which, by the way, increased property value sales by about 3-5%. The city does still face challenges to the new development, such as other regulations in terms of building size, but it's a very welcome precedent to actually take on the zoning rules.

Now playing, Ed Sheeran's Shape of You. What? Stop it! No, no, no, cancel, cancel, cancel, da, da, da, da, da, da, we'll get a copyright strike and it sucks. And I think we're good. But sometimes it's a much greater uphill battle to get the zoning regulations removed at the city level.

Local governments are dominated by the power of wealthy homeowners. They can use their wealth like Dave Chappelle, to threaten and influence the city council. So they often have a disproportionately loud voice in the very city councils that vote for zoning regulations. When this happens, sometimes you need a higher authority. The power of Jesus Christ? What?

No, I'm talking about statewide laws that allow for non-single family zones. Who told you about Jesus? Nevermind. So in California, Gavin Newsom signed Senate bills nine and 10, which aim to defang single family home zoning. SB9 allows someone who owns a single family plot

to split it into two lots, either for two homes or two duplexes. Effectively, SB9 allows any single family zone plot to have up to four dwellings on it. SB 10 allows local governments to skip review requirements for rezoning neighborhoods near mass transit, making it easier to add more dwellings in these areas. While this may not be enough

to solve the housing crisis in California, the fact that the government is taking direct aim at single family zoning is a very significant move and may help loosen the death grip it's had on neighborhoods. Of course, passing these laws is being met by resistance, like the rich neighborhood of Woodside in San Francisco, who tried to claim their very wealthy suburb was a mountain lion sanctuary

in order to avoid the application of the new SB9 law. The Department of Fish and Wildlife rejected this claim. If I were a lesser news dude, I would make some kind of joke about the Cougar Sanctuary being a sanctuary for wealthy, attractive women rather than the species of Felidpuma concolor. But I won't do that to you. Instead, I'll quote affordable housing activist

and director of Yimby Action, Laura Foote, who said, you can build a McMansion and that somehow won't hurt the mountain lion. But if you build two units, the lions will somehow fall over and die. So like mountain lions and other animals are really important and we should help protect them by conserving their actual habitat,

rather than let rich people pretend their heated pool with built-in bar island legally counts as a wetland. Talk about a cougar sanctuary. I said no cougar jokes, monkey. I'll have your brain for this. So the logical argument here is that even if you're some rich money bag, stumming your nose at homeless camps and proclaiming the suffering of others as an eyesore,

you should still want to support affordable housing and by extension, eliminating single family zoning in order to keep the poor out of your direct vantage. You can even pretend like you give a about poverty by doing this because it would genuinely help people. Except their vantage also isn't a logical one. And so it's much easier for them to simply have the police bulldoze the needy or move to Texas

instead of addressing the rotten roots of the problem until we, you know, eat them and go with that golf course idea from earlier. Because let me tell you, both options are fine with me. Really seems like the people we're gonna eat should be more concerned about giving us an option that doesn't involve eating them. Just saying, and speaking of eating things,

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for someone to have in their home? Not getting murdered? That seems reasonable. So Code E, what's an easy way we could stop people from being murdered in their own homes? Processing. Processing. Do you always have to say processing while you're thinking? It's a little repetitive. Would you like a tortured scream? What about like a fun thinking song like Blue's Clues does? Playing tortured screams. How's everyone doing?

Back of my head is bleeding pretty bad so I might... Ooh. Stop doing no-knock raids. Ah yes. The no-knock raid. Is it wicked and or totally sweet like the movie The Raid? Quick answer, no. Long answer, no, but longer. Basically, a judge can issue a warrant that allows the cops to enter someone's home

without alerting them to their presence with, say, a knock or ringing the doorbell. The idea is that it allows cops to enter the suspect's home or sometimes an unrelated person's home if they make a bit of a whoopsie doodly poopsie whoopser boopel. Cops do over 20,000 of them per year. So there must be some justification, right? This is a matter of life or death.

Certainly we wouldn't be living in a country where cops are allowed to systemically terrorize people for no good reason, right? Am I right? Well, they're typically used for drug raids. So no, I am not. In fact, 80% of no knock raids are for a search warrant, as in just looking for evidence

rather than confronting an active shooter or hostage takers. The justification being that if the suspects know the cops are coming, well, they'll flush their stash. But there's something strange about this logic and not just that the crime of simply having drugs is maybe not worth murdering suspects over. The other logical flaw is that if you have a huge drug warehouse, you know, the kind of place

that would greatly contribute to drug trafficking, there's no way you can flush the evidence between the time the police announced their presence and barge in. So that means the no knock only really allows cops to prevent someone with a small amount of drugs from hiding the evidence. You know, like a low level dealer

or just someone with a personal supply who perhaps doesn't need a military grade hammer to fall on them. Seems like this is just a way to harass and murder everyday people rather than bust large drug suppliers. The other justification is safety, but like, whose? The New York Times found that between 2010 and 2016,

at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in no-knock raids. Jeez, it's like surprising someone in the middle of the night with a gun in their face might be dangerous. You know, since we allow people in this country to legally own guns for protection from say a nighttime intruder.

And since no-knock raids take the appearance of just such an intrusion, it doesn't take an Alexa wired to a moose brain wired to my own brain to figure out that people will shoot at cops in self-defense if those cops barge in without announcing themselves. Overnight, horns and lights blaring in protest after Minneapolis police shot and killed 22-year-old Amir Locke after entering an apartment on a no-knock warrant that police now say Locke wasn't listed on. warrant that police now say Locke wasn't listed on. This was exactly the situation in the recent murder of Amir Locke, who was shot when police executed a no-knock raid at the apartment he was sleeping in. Even though Amir Locke wasn't the suspect in the investigation the police were

conducting, he happened to be sleeping on the couch of a friend's apartment, which happened to be the apartment the cops got a no-knock warrant for. Amir Locke legally owned a firearm, which was on him at the time. Without knocking or announcing their presence, police burst in, yelling and kicking the couch he was sleeping on. Amir started to reach for his handgun when the police shot him. You can see the footage for yourself if you can stomach it, but to sum it up, it's basically just the execution of a startled man seconds after being woken up by a screaming horde. A similar situation is what led to the police murder

of Breonna Taylor, except that time, she wasn't even the person with the legal firearm. It was her boyfriend who was responding to the sudden appearance of unannounced armed intruders after a battering ram slammed open their apartment door. So what is it, America? Are we allowed to have guns to defend against intruders or are cops allowed to shoot you if they break into your house at night without saying they're

cops and acting indistinguishable from an intruder, except that they're legally allowed to shoot you for acting in self-defense? And does the answer to this question depend on your skin color? I mean, yeah, after all, minorities are disproportionately likely to be subjected to a SWAT raid for a search warrant. minorities are disproportionately likely to be subjected to a SWAT raid for a search warrant. 84% of SWAT raids on minority suspects are for a search warrant rather than an active shooter or violent situation, whereas only 65% of SWAT raids for white suspects were for search warrants rather than active violent situations. Maybe some helpful context is that no-knock raids were started during

the wildly racist War on Drugs, a war declared on the country of drugs by Nixon in the 70s and fueled by Reagan, but also by every subsequent president, but more on that later. And despite almost stupidly obvious problems with no-knock raids on houses where people are legally permitted firearms for home protection,

police still do them even when they are fully aware that the person or people inside legally carry firearms. In 2014, someone was suspected of credit card fraud. So the police broke down the doors of the home and put guns in their faces. In their justification, the cops actually cited the fact that one of the people in the home had a legal gun permit as a reason to swat the house and break down the doors.

So like, if you know someone has a gun, you should startle them with more guns. And then when either the cop or the citizen gets shot, you start throwing guns on them and a gun violence shows up to the scene to shoot medicine bullets into the wounds. Anyway, it seems like the justifications aren't very good. And also there doesn't really seem to be any benefit,

even if you define benefit as winning a war on drugs. According to the data available, forced entry SWAT raids only turn up drugs 25% of the time. So even if you're sitting there unironically wearing a dare shirt, waving a little yay war on drugs flag, this is still a bad idea, much like the war on drugs. So speaking of D.A.R.E., dude, a recap, excellent.

So to recap, no-knock raids kill people, including children, or sometimes they just kill your pets, or sometimes both people and pets at the same time. People can be maimed, including children, and burglars sometimes pretend to be police in order to force their way into homes, because when there's basically no difference in behavior between police and armed intruders, it's an incredibly easy disguise.

It also can kill cops and doesn't actually work in stopping the sale of drugs. It just seems bad, which I guess is the overall theme of today's episode. And on top of all of that, these raids get people accustomed to a police presence that acts like an occupying force and treats their citizens as enemy combatants.

It opens up for the normalization of an increasingly powerful and unchecked police force, as has already been happening over the past, you know, entire history of US police. Consider a controversial raid by Kentucky police in 2005. While police did actually knock briefly in this case, they bust down the door of an apartment they didn't even have a warrant to.

Allegedly, they smelled marijuana and heard a toilet flushing. And so they assumed a drug dealer that they were searching for may be in there. While he wasn't, they still arrested the occupant for having some drugs on him and won the ensuing Supreme Court case that ruled they didn't violate the man's civil rights.

There's no reason to believe that the already flimsy justifications for no-knock raids won't be expanded, just like they have been for knock raids or quick knock raids, for which the knocking is already becoming more or less a formality. As the police can forcibly enter less than 20 seconds

after knocking and without confirming the residents heard them. So hey, maybe we shouldn't be setting the stage for police to be able to break down your door with or without announcing themselves if they hear a toilet flush, smell weed, or hear the crinkle of a tacky's bag. Wouldn't you rather get high in the comfort of your home,

knowing that a person can't just bust in there and randomly arrest or shoot you? That's not unreasonable to ask. So maybe just stop doing no knock raids. I don't really have an alternative solution here. They just seem really bad and we should stop doing them because the damages far outweigh the benefits. And you know what?

We also shouldn't be doing 99% of regular SWAT because now the difference between a no knock rate and a quick knock SWAT as they call it, it's almost indistinguishable. The fact we use military style forced entry for drugs when we're starting to get boutique weed stores in places it's legal is, you know, weird. Oh, and bad and wrong.

And what else? Bad. Yes, bad. Did I already say bad? My memory is starting to do stuff not good. Okay, but we're doing really great here. Solving police stuff, large hole in the back of my head, probably have time for one and a half more problems to solve

before I need to perhaps go to the hospital about this brain hole. My vision's a little blurry and I can't quite form thoughts, but you know what they say, the basement upstairs is where spiders best when swimming matches trees smelling burning trees. Okay, new problem for code E.

So code E, let's talk more about this whole war on the drugs dilly. If we don't go about this drug war by doing no knock raids on people's homes and murdering them and their children, what should we do? There is after all an opioid crisis currently accelerating in this country. As new data from the CDC shows that overdose deaths

have risen from 56,000 in 2020 to 76,000 in 2021. That's an increase of 28.5%. So it might be good to start maybe perhaps possibly thinking of ways to solve this current crisis. But also just the general problem that America has the highest drug overdose mortality among wealthy nations and only 10% of people with substance abuse actually get help.

So solve that for us, Cody, before I die of brain. Processing. Processing. Processing. The sandwich can fly with ears, am I right? Processing. I feel cold. Speckleworm! Safe injection sites. Ah, yes. Lamp flom. Just a sec.

Sorry, brain got loose for a second. So let's start with the fact that addiction is a disease. Now it's not an opinion, but the conclusion of a 2016 report by the surgeon general discussing how substance abuse will literally rewire your brain to change the way a person makes decisions. And not only does this disease kill a whole lot of people, but costs us $420 billion

a year in things like healthcare, loss of productivity, and the criminal justice system. Again, that's according to the Surgeon General. And when we think about how we prevent and help with other diseases, like say, pneumono-ultra-microscopic silico-volcano-coneosis, well, it's twofold. Always have trouble with that word. It's twofold. All right, we look for what causes the disease and try to create regulations and laws that prevent it from happening. And then we also treat the disease in a medical center.

What we don't do, however, is create an environment where the person suffering the disease feels ashamed or afraid to tell anyone they have it. We don't make it illegal to have the disease. And yet here we are, absolutely doing that for people with addiction. Safe injection sites are exactly what they sound like,

an available clinical space for intravenous drug users to inject themselves without the risk of infection or needle sharing or overdose or physical assault, or, and this is important, being arrested or harassed for their disease. It would have onsite healthcare professionals who can treat overdoses as well as encourage and refer the people coming to rehabilitation centers.

So instead of willingly forcing addicts into hiding, this would get them directly in front of the people best equipped to actually help. Additionally, this also reduces problems in the community by keeping these people off the streets. It helps literally everybody. And this is evidenced by other countries already having these sites available.

In Switzerland, for example, they found that these injection rooms did all of the things I already mentioned, reducing overdoses, helped addicts seek treatment, and minimize drugs impact on the community. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, all have these sites as well. The data collected all showing the same pattern

of infections like HIV and hepatitis C, as well as overdose data collected all showing the same pattern of infections like HIV and hepatitis C, as well as overdose deaths, all decreasing, as well as a general lifting of the stigma that came with addiction. This is such an obvious, easy, logical, and compassionate idea that of course we aren't doing it here in America, and in fact, would have to fight tooth and nail to have it happen. President Biden has decided to take $30 million of taxpayer money from his emergency COVID bill that he passed with Democratic support last March. And he wants to use it to facilitate the smoking of crack cocaine and meth in the name of racial justice, racial equity. He says his people say they can make the smoking of crack cocaine and meth safer.

First, why are they using COVID money? Number two, why are they using any money at all? money. Number two, why are they using any money at all? There's no safe way to smoke crack or meth. Sooner or later, it kills you. And that's just a fact. Why do we want to facilitate it? Why, Americans are asking themselves, wouldn't we take this money and use it to help people get off the illicit drugs? Why wouldn't we take this money, the American people are asking themselves, and use it to stop the drugs from coming in our country in the first place by securing the border? Okay, good God. Just to begin, Kmart Lindsey Graham is wrong. Across the board, smoking a drug is way, way safer than injecting it.

It helps prevent overdoses and infections. If you know someone who injects a drug, getting them to smoke that drug instead would be a huge reduction in risk. This was of course, in response to the false Biden crack pipe story that went around not too long ago. And while people have jumped on the misinformation side of this, that honestly misses the entire point.

Because when this story broke, Biden's team almost immediately scrambled to deny it. Like a playground child screaming, nah. They were never a part of the kit. It was inaccurate reporting. And we wanted to put out information to make that clear. What is in the safe smoking kit? A safe smoking kit may contain alcohol swabs, lip balm,

other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis. I would note that what we're really talking about here is steps that we're taking as a federal government to address the opioid epidemic, which is killing tens of thousands, if not more, Americans every single day, week, month of the year. To their credit, Psakiaki very quickly points out that these types of kits are important to helping with the addiction epidemic,

while still denying multiple times that they are not handing out pipes, a thing they absolutely should be doing, but apparently can't because of the political optics. And so much like a lot of things we're talking about in this video, America seems bogged down with a fantasy morality instead of the actual facts.

The drug addicts and therefore drug paraphernalia are bad and not something taxpayers should be supporting. Lord help us if we even entertain the idea that our hard earned money goes to helping a person that we've decided is bad. I'd much rather have my hard earned money go to hurting, I don't know, kids overseas. This is all of course, thanks to the decades long

and extremely ineffective war on drugs that spawned programs like D.A.R.E. where cops went into elementary schools and told kids to just say no whilst playing educational videos portraying drug users as cartoon Ninja Turtles thugs. How incredibly misguided are we that we'd allow cops instead of doctors

to talk to kids about addiction? That's like having Thanos teach people about recycling. But we did this because for some reason, America treated drug addiction like a criminal issue and not a health issue. And by America, I super don't just mean the GOP because, hey, you hear about this Biden guy? America is under attack, literally under attack by an enemy who is well financed, well supplied and well armed and fully capable of declaring total war against the nation and its people. As we've seen in Colombia, the president says he wants to wage a war on drugs. But if that's true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not another limited war

fought on the cheap and destined for stalemate and human tragedy. And in line with what the president is calling for, we have to hold every drug user accountable. Because if there were no drug users, there would be no appetite for drugs and there'd be no market for them. Violent drug offenders will commit more than 100,000 crimes on this day alone. And the sad part is that we have no more police in the streets of our major cities than we had 10 years ago. In a nutshell, the president's plan doesn't include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs,

not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time. That's why right now, six out of every 10 criminals who are arrested on drug charges have their cases dropped. Absolutely horrifying stuff. Thank you, Joe. I'm sure most people are aware of Biden's long history with doing the exact wrong thing when it comes to drug addiction in this country. You could argue he has evolved, but it sure didn't seem like it

when he went back and forth on the issue during the primaries. And that's a bit of a bummer considering that this sort of change really could start at the top. It would be especially nice because Biden's past failures stem from almost the exact opposite ideology

of safe injection sites. In the early 2000s, he became a main promoter for the RAVE Act and the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, which were amendments to the Controlled Substances Act that created steep penalties for anyone intentionally leasing, renting, or intentionally profiting

from any place where people were doing drugs. This essentially made places like RAVE's more dangerous by forcing club owners to hide drug use and by extension efforts to aid anyone who might be overdosing, such as giving out water or offering cool off rooms for people in distress. You remember that scene in Bad Boys 2 where Peter Stormare dumps a kid onto the street

so he doesn't OD in his club? Of course you remember that scene. It's a great film. And that's the kind of thinking the Rave Act would encourage. It didn't stop raves, but just made them more underground and therefore more dangerous.

It's once more that abstinence-only sex education approach I mentioned earlier, where instead of finding solutions to a problem, they opted to close their eyes and cover their ears. And somehow they thought this would win the war on drugs, which is staggering to think about. Anyone who had strict parents can certainly attest that inflicting hard rules and penalties

doesn't prevent a misdeed, but rather forces a person into hiding and repression until one day it all comes out and they're doing self-inflicted brain surgery and bulk purchasing apes for various tasks. Wait, there are more of me? But again, that was the old Biden. Unfortunately, the new Biden isn't that much different. While he's changed his tone on weed, he also really hasn't done much to

decriminalize or legalize it on a federal level. By all accounts, he is very much stuck in the shoddy war on drugs mentality. So while we really should just declassify opioids as a schedule one drug and turn over that rock so that we could actually treat people with addictions. That seems unlikely since we're still grappling with the concept of decriminalizing weed. And while his administration has supported the idea of harm reduction measures, it's yet to actually endorse the idea

of a safe injection site. It's a real goddamn stinker because there's a universe out there where the president could not only promote the idea of safe injection sites, but direct the DOJ and federal law enforcement to then ignore them as targets. Because it turns out that this extremely good idea

of having safe injection sites is already something that's beginning to happen on a state and local level. Presumably because they watched this video just now. You're welcome America. Right now, New York is opening several safe injection sites while other areas are fighting to do the same. Philadelphia is currently tied up in federal courts to start their own site.

The complications, thanks to a certain document flushing former loser president's DOJ, suing the nonprofit responsible under the claim that safe injection sites would violate, can you guess it? The Illicit Drug Anti-proliferation act. Thanks again, Joe. See, it actually doesn't matter if Joe has changed his mind since pushing the Rave Act,

because as long as it's still in effect, the next administration can use it to snuff out any attempt to maintain safe injection sites. So unless the federal government gets involved, cities like San Francisco can open such a place, operate it for years, only to have the rug pulled from under them at any point. And so any modern effort to tackle addiction

in a meaningful way kind of falls short unless it addresses and nullifies the previous terrible efforts to crack down on drug users. We can't simply claim to evolve or move past the mistakes of the past. We need to address them head past the mistakes of the past. We need to address them head on and stomp them out. And so while the actual logistics of lifting the stigma

and creating safe injection sites are very simple on paper, they become wildly complicated when you factor that it would require a bunch of old ass politicians to openly admit they were fear mongering for decades and reverse their ideology on the issue. Because, you know, everything we've talked about today, the stuff that actually needs to be done to help, it's not happening because of fear.

Fear that our way of life is being threatened. And instead of exploring the systemic problems, opting to blame the people in most need of help. Single mothers or parents struggling to make a living, drug addicts and the homeless, instead of thinking from the top down and questioning the government and its policies, there's still this death wish mentality where we can't see past the solution beyond the realm of criminal justice. For example, hey, Code E, real quick, what should an individual do if they see

somebody shoplifting? Processing. Processing. Please be quick. I can feel the blood running down my back. You should mind your own business. Ta-da! Now, you probably have seen all these stories about a shoplifting crisis in America, often, but not exclusively, boosted by right-leaning sites talking about this rising epidemic and highlighting lax, laud law liberal areas being mocked by thieves. You've probably seen scores of people filming and even intervening with said shoplifting,

which according to sources has become more emboldened in states like California. And it's hard not to be concerned when, for example, the president of the California Retailers Association tells the media that in San Francisco and Oakland alone, retail stores lost $3.6 billion to shoplifting last year, which is just wild because that's actually 25% of all retail sales in that area.

That's a lot. That's like suspiciously a lot, like in the way that it's actually a lie. And when the LA Times asked someone at the CRA how they got that number, they responded by saying, quote, there's no way of knowing exactly what the actual number would be, as in they just pulled one from their behinds or anuses. And, you know, it turns out that there is a way to know how bad shoplifting is in this country. For example, the National Retail Federation puts the number at a way more realistic 0.07% of all retail sales.

And if we think about burglary as a whole in both residential and commercial spaces, according to the FBI, these types of crimes have been going steadily down for years. Even in San Francisco specifically, there's a decline as evidenced by checking out California's DOJ statistics for that city.

So why are we talking about this theft epidemic? For starters, many of the sources saying it's a problem are the companies themselves who happen to be in the middle of lobbying Congress to pass a specific law against reselling stolen goods. But also by other accounts, shoplifting did slightly increase because of the pandemic while still remaining low overall, you know, because everyone lost their jobs and are trying to survive. And so going back to the original solution, maybe we should just mind our own business

and these fake shoplifting scares are something that just happen every now and then. Like here's one from 2008. And so yeah, sure, shoplifting can hurt especially small stores and perhaps we should have insurance companies cover it because it turns out they don't. But in terms of how to fix it, like it's some kind of crisis, it just isn't one.

And ultimately, it's a symptom of other systemic problems like drug addiction, poverty, and maybe we shouldn't film these people and especially not try to stop them and instead think about what's causing this. You know, besides the corporate fear mongering and a media more than happy to relay their propaganda because it gets them the clicks.

Fear sells Walgreens products. You know who actually should be filmed and shamed? The politicians denying us affordable childcare or safe injection sites, or the cops busting in on our homes, or the rich jerks bullying neighborhood zoning laws. Compared to them, these shoplifters are saints, sticky fingered saints, Anthony of Padua

for all you saint nerds, or you know, Val Kilmer in The Saint. It's just kind of the perfect storm of everything we're talking about with fear, blaming the vulnerable and being glued to a capitalist system of law and order justifying a lot of shitty ideas. It's like we can't stop cutting off our noses to spite our faces or drilling large holes in our skulls

to run our experimental moose AI. All right, well, I'm gonna lie down for a while before the tiny firemen reach my mouth, but I think this went really well. Cody didn't show for Amazon once or threatened to kill anyone, so I really can't think of a single flaw with this whole jelly bean razor blade. Okay, bye dad.

Great Thanksgiving everyone. Just gonna take a quick nap. I'm just gonna take a quick nap. Ah, right, I'm back, I'm awake. I think I'm fine actually. It seems to be healed over. I woke up and felt Warmbo licking the wound. Maybe his spit did it. Anyway, thanks for watching.

Like and subscribe. We've got a merch store. We've got patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to this show, Some More News, as a podcast if you want. Surely I'm running out of links to say, like and subscribe.