Wrong Storm, Wrong Place

Sad ironies abound in the accounts of Irene's devastation in the Catskills and Vermont.

Who might have predicted that the Mayor of New York would order evacuation of parts of the mighty city, driving some folks to the northern latitudes for safety? And that those northern havens would then get flooded like nobody's business as Lower Manhattan stayed pretty much okay?

Who had mapped the possibility of intense flooding hundreds of miles inland even as reporters dutifully manned it out safely on the blustery beaches? Who might have predicted Senator Bernie Sanders (I)-VT bellowing for aid on national news as smug simpletons in Washington dryly state that federal disaster aid is more or less a lousy idea and that we really can't afford it?

Who could have predicted that anyone in any public office at any point in time would have the temerity to suggest the United States cannot take care of disaster-struck citizens?

Who could have predicted that States' Rights would be invoked in the middle of a hurricane?

How about this: New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and like places that send much more to the Feds than they ever get back--how about we invoke our states' rights? How about we just throw off Alabama and Texas from our backs and set our own standards and with all the money we saved by not supporting givebacks to red states, build ourselves anew?

How quickly would that action provoke a call for unity by the hypocrites now claiming they can't rescue Vermont from the worst disaster in its history?

Call their bluff. Sure. States' rights. Tell me when we start. And by the way, some of y'all may need passports to come here if you want to help with the flood cleanup.

I Will Never Again Say The Government Does Nothing

My last post was a fairly desperate affair, telling of abuse and partial ruination by the state. You know, where they taxed me thousands and then ruined my credit? Great human drama,that.

But it turned out with a happy ending.

First I tried to talk with the tax bureau itself and encountered only a clown, a doofus and a give-a-shit attitude throughout. Then I got in touch with my local state senator's office (Sheldon Silver) and spoke to a young man there who took the case under his wing. After a few conversations with me and one false start, he actually got someone at the tax compliance bureau to do something I thought impossible:

They vacated the tax liens. This means they disappear from the record (of course they are paid). This means they take the downward pressure off one's credit rating which, as we all know, is like having your oxygen back, financially speaking.

So even though I have been a doubting progressive (in other words, I always think government can do good, but have almost never seen it and must own to almost a libertarian's native distrust of functionaries and postal-types), I can no longer say it's folly to "call your congressman" because this time it really really worked.

Hats off to the office of Sheldon Silver and the summer intern who hooked me up!

One hopes I shan't wait forever to post again here. . .

This is Normal?

You tell me.

One day an indifferently attired individual shows up in your building lobby and tells you you owe thousands of dollars to the State. They may or may not throw a copy of something at you and warn you to pay up before the end of the year (you are so upset you don't recall). You don't read the copy, if you ever had it. You are freaked out.

Before the end of the year you pay thousands to the State.

Apparently not enough!

Then, without having signed for service of any further documents, you find out one day that your bank account is frozen because the State has obtained a tax lien against your assets. By doing so they have also ruined your credit. You are applying to a bank for a line of business credit and are made to look like a liar because you did not know of this tax lien.

You discover that the State has conducted an audit without your knowledge, has determined unilaterally about money owed, posted penalties for it, and gone to court without giving you an opportunity to defend. You pay the additional thousands in order to unfreeze your account.

Your credit is still a mess.

The so-called State Taxpayer Advocate is a jokester who tells you this happens all the time. You hang up on him.

You prepare to write to your congressperson.

But nothing can take away the feeling that you have been abused by the State and have no recourse.

So, is that even halfway normal?

To a Loyal Consituency

Hello to all who come this way. Your viewership is greatly appreciated.

I have been preoccupied with business matters of late and have been unable to post as regularly as I would like.

[NOTE: Special One-time Crypticism License granted to accommodate the following]

On very recent evidence, it certainly seems like this blog--or at least its printed name--is showing up in some very interesting places! Those who know, know who they are. And yes, we had already guessed as much.

Quick--catch a sniff of the greasepaint before it's gone!

[NOTE: End of cryptic session]

Sell the Mets

Spring, and what better way to spend a kind April afternoon than at a doubleheader? In the spirit of Ernie Banks I thought, "Let's play two!".

Okay, I got there after the home team at a field called Citi had lost the opener. So the ballpark was not exactly hopping with excitement. Naturally they lost game two. And the piped in music was literally so loud I could not talk to anyone nor hear myself think. And I was frisked on my way in like a perp. What fun!

But this is only partly about how poorly the actual team in question (The New York Metropolitans)executes on the field (and boy do they fail to execute!).

Mainly it is about the clueless deformation and diminution of what remains one of the most valuable property-types in sports--an MLB franchise in the nation's largest and most sports-hungry market.

How did owner Wilpon allow his golden ball club to get as squalid and tarnished as it now comes across?

Mainly, the Wilpon problem appears to be born of both idiocy and duplicity--but that is only a guess based on what I can observe.

Here is a version of the misdeeds leading up to my call for the Wilpons to get out of the baseball business rapidly, before they utterly destroy the franchise.

Let us go back to the first dumb move: They hired as GM a guy, likable and NewYorky as he was (Omar Minaya), whose main theory seemed to be that the cure to any baseball ill was to add more Hispanic members to the roster. And apart from David Wright (more on him soon), it seems every high profile player Minaya bought or traded for or raised on the farm was Hispanic and it seemed to matter almost not at all whether that person was the best person for the job. And mind you, I believe baseball in general should be thrilled that Hispanics as a group have taken up a love of baseball because no one else seems to "get it" throughout the whole wide world except for the Japanese.

But that does not change the fact that the Mets had as a personnel strategy not a "best in class" approach but some other approach not based on being simply the best.

Second dumb move: hanging on to Jose Reyes and David Wright after several losing seasons. Considering their value on the trade market, and the fact that the team can finish poorly without either of the two players above, these men ought to have been traded already. Reyes is talented but undisciplined and inconsistent. Wright is a solid player but not anything like the superstar face-of-the-franchise they want him to be. One struggles to recall even a single clutch hit by Mr. Wright over the past several years ('nuf said).

Third dumb move: Building the clueless abomination that is their new ballpark, to wit:

-it is named after a notoriously awful bank that helped bring down the entire economy

-its welcoming rotunda honors a player who never played for the Mets, while relegating famous Mets to some other unknown place in the park

-the stadium design is "cookie cutter quirky", trying in vain to mimic Camden Yards and the Jake

-the color scheme in the park is black and orange, which matches nothing to do with the team and looks like a halloween show

-Shake Shack is the most interesting thing at the park, including the team

-rather than renovating historic, decrepit, subway-station-like, lovable old Shea, they tore it down and instead spent a billion dollars on a new park that nobody cares about and nobody needed.

Fourth and most current dumb move: associating themselves with the biggest crook in all history, Mr. Bernie Madoff, once a family friend--now in a dark cell where he belongs.

It is true they have cobbled a new management team this year--a couple of California guys who've had some success. But the team today is four and eleven and looks exactly as lifeless as it did last year and the year before.

Put all that together with successive awful seasons including two-in-a-row historical collapses, and you have a team without leadership, without much to be proud of, and very little to no likability at all.

For the betterment of the National League fan base in New York, the Wilpons should divest themselves of the Mets and let someone take over who knows a little something about both baseball and team spirit.

Sell! The price will not be higher any time soon.

St. Patty's Day in New York

We barely saw them from Vanderbilt and Forty-Second, the multitudinous in green on each others' shoulders cheering the marching band skirling in skirts; and a man in a revolutionary war costume brought a flintlock blunderbuss out in the sun, the only sunny day the saint of no snakes has had in these parts in many years: always those girls scantily clad and kicking in the cold, not to feel badly for them. Who doesn't love a parade?

In Grand Central they wore green hats, shoes, masks; always these were people who never come to the city for any purpose ever but St. Patrick's day or a wedding; more obvious even than the Catholics with their ashes on a certain Wednesday (probably the dying-est tradition in New York)are these well scrubbed suburban visitors, looking vigorous and lost.

They say the crowds were thick on Fifth Avenue.

And little seemed to trouble passersby less than the lone young woman asking alms for Japan.

There seems to be some sense that the Japanese, however this might be horrific, are expected to take care of this themselves and they know it, and this is why they have not been forthcoming about the forthcoming meltdowns.

Nine dash oh quake, 30 foot water wave, three, many meltdowns perhaps now in progress at Fukushima. Tens of thousands lost already in totally destroyed seaside towns along the northeast coast of Japan. Americans advised to stay fifty miles from the tidally compromised, coolant-deprived reactors as attempts to slow meltdowns becomes more and more makeshift and outlandish. Choppers drop water as if to put out a forest fire but this is no forest fire, it is eternal flame compared to forest fire and requires many many times more water than any chopper can drop.

Late news tonight, power restored to one of the plants but that doesn't mean they have anything left to turn on. But with power in the area, they may be able to get some real work done.

Fifth Avenue runs a long way uptown. Following it you can end up heading straight up the Hudson Valley and eventually after that you might get to a town called Buchanan 25 miles north and there'd be an outdated nuclear plant looking dirty and rundown and apparently near faultlines this writer never knew of and now the very Governor of the Empire State wants Indian Point decertified and shut down.

The plant supplies less than twelve percent of the NYC's electric and we're thinking the gubnah should have our support.

Labor Day is Back

So you thought you were smart, thou anti-labor governor with ye crackdown on workers' rights.

And what had long lain dormant and acquiescent showed up overnight in your office hallway in the tens of thousands. They seemed not to like what you wanted to do with their right to bargain collectively. Which attempt by you was as mad and wrong headed as if a Dem governor tried to tax away all profit and then some; worse, as if to declare that profit itself were the culprit and as such must be trampled. For the money charged has to be directed somewhere, and those who send and collect the invoices want the most they can get for themselves and cannot give up any part of it for it is already all leveraged in the market.

Mr. Wisconsin (R) Gov. made a mistake here by kicking a dog that had gotten used to nudging down the years but not hard kicks, and the dog is baring some teeth after getting kicked.

That and (incredibly as it might have seemed even at Christmas 2010) Egypt 2011 are inspirations for this worker uprising in the land where the Wobblies once stood, where unionists and Old Lefties were hiding out in the hills all these years.

That a nation called Egypt could in any way contribute positively to the world today, should be considered a near miracle of historical proportions. Sustenance comes in time from odd places. That and of course: somehow this ancient land is the one that topples a world-class dictator, which now pulls the Colonel down the terlet where he probably belongs although his devil-clown mincing has always come across as amusing in the worst Berlin/20s fashion; which leads to Bahrain and Algeria--and pretty soon you've got an uprising on your hands. What happens if it endangers the Saudi interest unduly?

But we digress. Why did Wisconsin Governor want to hit hard in Wisconsin? Because this is where the old Wobblies came from, and the old lefties in the hills. If they could destroy this remnant, they could say they had no midwest opposition except Chicago where, to all sane persons' dismay, Tiny Dancer is now Mayor of Hog Butcher to the World.

I'iiiiiiiing just kiiiiiiiidiiiiiiiing! (Loud and with humility)

But we always did have a problem with Chicago and its Daleys, didn't we, sir Wisconsin of Milwaukee fame? By golly with Ohio always halfway, Indiana down red, KY red, the rest on the edge, we could rule the Mississippi valley if we could gut out the Chi-town effect one way or another.

But that comes next. That comes after trying to rabbit-punch a guy in a fair match--his "yuh well, you can't like, negotiate", like--come again? We the workers cannot what? With the shite we put up with you and your punchclocks and disdain and the profit of our labors, you are telling us what?

I didn't think so.

We will be camping out here for a while, Joker.

You have awoken Labor, Dear Joker.

Wait 'til Labor Day '11.

The Never-ending Downward Spiral of the Mets

Will I be able to rouse myself to root for my traditional favorite ball team this year? Circumstances are lining up against it.

We can begin with a called third strike in 2007's NLCS when a hit would have put us in the World Series.

Then we can move forward to two consecutive historic season-ending collapses in 2008 and 2009. And 2010 was, by the end of July, a lost season.

Then of course there is CitiField, named after an ignominious bank implicated in another historic collapse. And the way the stadium is painted all black and funereal as if black had any history with the Mets. And the way they named the entry rotunda after a guy who never played for the Mets but for a competitor team now in Los Angeles. And how the ticket prices went up as if we were getting such an upgrade as the team was flopping around like a fish on the dock.

Now we can add the muck of Madoff bucks to the unclean stew that has become the New York Metropolitans. The Wilpons, who own the team in Flushing, are being sued in a clawback exercise by a special trustee trying to get fake profit back from those who took money from Madoff even as Madoff was simply handing over to them the deposits of other investors. And there will be a trial, and it will be a cloud over the team for some time to come; and indeed the finances of the team are rocked already, else why would the Wilpons be looking to sell part of the team? Oh yes, there's that too. They are trying to sell part of the team. Really they should sell all of it. If they can. It is possible the entire team could be liquidated to satisfy Madoff-related judgments.

Also, I think Reyes and Wright are significantly overrated and we have no pitching beyond Johann Santana to speak of.

The Mets have become synonymous not just with failure but now with smarmy dealings.

I don't think I can muster any support.

Across town, there are the Yankees, who seem to carry themselves with so much more professionalism and pride (I am loathe to admit).

Hm.

Ophiuchus? No way.

They have taken away my Zodiac sign. I was a proudly skeptical Sagittarius and even though I don't believe in that stuff I believed in my Zodiac sign as part of who I was because, well, it was my Zodiac sign.

But because of an unfortunate accident of birth, my dates no longer fall under the archer's sway.

So now, what. . .a name that sounds like the bile that accompanies a bad head cold? Or a klutzy kind of elephant?

Please, Zolar, tell me you're not really doing this. The stars, at least, are supposed to be well nigh immutable, no? Are you telling me we've changed so much in the past ten thousand years that you have to add not only a new sign, but really stupidly-named sign? Was there really no other way?

Couldn't you have maybe shifted the dates around a little, or at least come up with a kick-butt name for the new sign, like "iPadLightSabre"--you know, something really attractive to the weenies who give two shakes of a mare's tail about any of this?

I am saying here and now I am sticking to my old sign, and I don't even care what the stars say any more, so there!

Sagittarius is my past, and I say: Sagittarius now, and Sagittarius forever!

Enough with the Free Speech Thing Already

Hating to pay even meager additional attention to the Magilla from Wasilla that is Sarah (sigh) Palin, it has now become impossible not to comment on her latest, and perhaps most egregious misapplication of the notion of "freedom" since she burst upon us fully formed as the elderly McCain's doomed VP choice.

We won't spend a minute talking about the Tragedy in Tucson, since we can add nothing to the discussion not already said.

But we will talk about the notion of what "freedom of speech" really means, and why Palin and everyone who has ever invoked "free speech" when stung by criticism, has it all backwards. As a case in point, the bespectacled Palin, in a wanna-be-Presidential moment, took to the viral-video-sphere with a Tucson-inspired diatribe about how people who criticize her are somehow invading her right as a citizen to speak out.

Gag me, as was once upon a time asserted quite effectively, with a spoon.

Here is the news:

The constitutional notion of freedom of speech posits that the government can make no law preventing free expression of ideas.

And that's it.

If people don't like what you say, if people criticize you, if your words make them angry and not want to vote for you, if they call you names and find you tacky--too bad. In no way does "freedom of speech" ever, ever mean "freedom from criticism by other citizens". When your words are criticized, that is a function of OTHER PEOPLE exercizing their right to free speech. No amount of opprobrium from others who disagree with you can ever amount to an abrogation of your free speech rights.

"Freedom of Speech" means only this: that the government can make no law restricting it.

Get used to it, Ms. Palin, and stop being a crybaby.

Why Do They Come?

No particular additional proof was needed for me to accept and understand that so-called "UFOs" are based on some kind of actual phenomena. But having read Leslie Kean's recent book "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On Record", I feel like the notion of debate as to the reality of the phenomena is not particularly relevant.

No more relevant, really, is the question about who they are, where they are from, etc. etc. There is little to be gained from this inquiry. Perhaps they operate from a base in the Pacific Ocean and have always done so. Perhaps they are from Alpha Centauri. Does it matter?

There are two questions, it seems, that do matter.

The first is, what can we learn from them? From an aeronautical perspective, obviously quite a bit. From a time-space-continuum (aka physics) perspective, equally much. Science, and all humanity therefore, is the poorer for a failure to spend more time on such study.

The second and more intriguing, in my opinion, is, why do they come?

Had "they" wanted to take over our planet, it would seem they could have. Or, perhaps not. We are a formidable race with sharp teeth, and perhaps this was of particular note to early extraterrestrial observers. One assumes therefore that takeover/enslavement is probably not on the alien agenda.

Had they wanted to communicate openly with us, one assumes they might have done as much; again, perhaps we have managed to scare them away from direct communication. They seem to hover, to observe, and then to depart without much physical impact.

The abiding mystery, then, would be--why bother with us? Having apparently not changed their overall approach to us over the many years they've been noticed by us, they must have a reason to keep up their observations; and it isn't because we pose some kind of interstellar threat. Nor do I believe they have some kind of benevolent message for us, as it is most likely quite obvious to the student of humanity that we are immune, as a race, to advice good or ill.

Allow me to suggest they are here on this living speck of blue we call Earth for one overarching reason: we are both unique enough and perhaps even marvelous enough to merit the attention of those who might go anywhere in the intergalactic region.

Perhaps they wonder at our carbon-based physiognomy; or our quite obvious fecundity; our apparent sensitivity to our surroundings; perhaps they marvel not so much at humanity but the variety of earthly life-forms; the riotous beauty of our planet's many facets. Maybe they are intent on our abundant water-resources. Or perhaps, overall, they are fascinated with the human creature's intelligence, adaptability, relentlessness and relative mastery of our environment. And perhaps they are comfortable with studying us from their atmospheric perch, letting us go about our business; learning what they can from us--perhaps even deploying some of these lessons in their own foreign worlds, wherever they might be.

The facts are clear: these are actual phenomena; they appear to be intelligent. Therefore, my position is they are collecting data. Perhaps they are both pleased enough and smart enough to simply observe without interfering.

Let's keep up the show.