Overnight News: ‘Habitat For Humanity’ or habitability for humans?

One of my favorite Christmastime frauds, perhaps by-now socially-distanced out of existence, is the wrapped-gift bucket-brigade: On the local TV news, hundreds of ‘volunteers’ in ugly sweaters are scrunched into a wide-angle shot in which they are shown passing wrapped gifts, one to another – as if there were any reason for such anti-productivity except the “news” coverage.

That’s charity theater, and it’s not the last thing I hate about organized charity. As always with me, trim the outliers and carry them off, if you like: The people most-adept at attracting charity are hurt rather than helped by it – and the people most-interested in bestowing charity are hurt rather than helped by it. We are self-made, all of us, each of us, since there is no contrary to internal self-motivation – this being true of all living things, not just us. The best help you can offer any stranger is to get out of his way – and you could do a lot of that.

But my contempt for charity theater has its own special home in the housing biz: Habitat For Humanity, which painstakingly builds new homes, one at a time, for poor people it carefully segregates from the ‘volunteers’ – amateurs operating straight outta the labor-theory-of-value playbook: If I worked on it, it must be valuable.

Ahem.

The labor that goes into one of those houses, split into four-hour blocks of handyman time, could help hundreds of families, all in one day, not just one family at a time. Even better, it would put the ‘volunteers’ into actual contact with their putative beneficiaries and/or presumptive victims – who might, in due course, become true friends.

A new garbage disposal for an old sink is not as showy as a brand new house, but it’s a great big deal if you’ve never had one: A couple hundred bucks plus labor for an instant hygiene-booster/odor-killer for everyone nearby. That would be improved habitability for real human beings. What it wouldn’t be is a phony virtue display all dressed up for the cameras.

In other news:

CNBC: ‘The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords,’ says one, as ban is extended another month.

The Daily Signal: Homicides Have Skyrocketed in These 6 Democratic Cities. Black People Are Disproportionately the Victims, Data Shows.

The Pipeline: Who Killed Ashli Babbitt?

Glenn Greenwald: What is Behind Gen. Mark Milley’s Righteous Race Sermon? Look to the New Domestic War on Terror.

Daniel Greenfield: Obama and the Broken Nation He Made Come Of Age: A generation doesn’t remember life before the crises he created.