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.

Obambi Turns into Chief Knockahoma?

I am looking at stories one, two and three at the Daily Beast. Senate Ratifies START treaty. Obama Signs DADT. Senate Passes 9/11 Health Bill. And that does not include the surprisingly well-received tax bill he got passed.

Is this not like the champion coming off the ropes near the end of his stamina (it seems)--then flying forth with a left right left that lands hard upon the Obamahaters' collective chins?

Does this not show a man resilient enough to come off the ropes with plans intact and executable? Almost by slipping through a closing portal, he emerged with these votes in his favor, first the tax bill, then three fairly major pieces of legislation the success of any of which no one was even talking about a month and a half ago.

This is akin, for what it is worth, to a third baseman down on his luck in the playoffs suddenly going 3 for 4 with several ribbies in a deciding contest. Kind of stuff stars are made of.

Anyone who forgot Obama is a Brainiac had better remember now. Whether you like him or not, he's got the bully pulpit and he's got more grey matter and fortitude than a dozen others like him. And this one-two-three salvo is the opening of Obama 2012.

We've always suspected Obama simply has to "not be lame" to be re-elected, given the Republicans' distinct lack of big-tentedness (Sarah: 30% and holding; Barbour: Confederate confederacy; Romney: Mormon with dog on car roof; Pawlenty: oh, that was last time, sorry; Huckabee: Christer homilies'll get you to the Arkansas statehouse but not the White House; Jindal: okay, as long as this is for extra credit; Rand Paul: too smart for you guys); but there have been times when, having lost his footing some, Obama may have appeared vulnerable to a creditable primary challenge. I believe now when people look back on years one and two,they will have to admit: Saved Economy From Depression On First Day in Office; Created Platform for a National Health; Appointed Two Super-smart New York Women to the High Bench; Kept Sharron Angle out of the Senate; Extended Middle-Class Tax Cuts; Ratified START; Ended DADT; Passed 9/11 Health Bill. 'Nuf?

Anyone who cares, and understands what it would be like with the Insane Clown Posse in charge, knows that, whether or not you feel he gets a big smiley face on his half-term paper, you will be swinging the lever for the big O come 2012.

Liberals and Airport Security

Hello Liberals, ye so-called true patriots and defenders of all that is good and fine in our troubled union.

Now that your tarnished lion is nursing a split jaw behind White House curtains, and as the Bush-spawned TSA is putting you through an i-see-your-hiney bodyscanner in vain search of that lone gramps with a shiv up his kilt, where is your powerful voice in defense of all that is good and fine?

There is nothing good and fine about the body scanner or the disgraceful pawing of American citizens as they prepare meekly to travel from Oklahoma City to Portland, Oregon by air. There is only blunt, careless, ineffective, insulting disruption of the fourth amendment of the United States Constitution in which we are protected against illegal search and seizure.

O Liberal, have ye lost your voice? Are ye now waking to the call of yon Partisan Idol who whispers to you that you must defend Bad in the long term interest of Good? So it seems. And it is certainly a surprise that the so-called Liberal Media has decided that, since Republicans seem to be leading the charge against invasiveness (because they are "against the government snicker snicker"), you must downplay and poo-poo the whole thing as Redi-Whipped hysteria.

American pollsters seem to say you are politically correct to do so--most Americans seem either to support the erosion of their own rights (didn't need 'em anyway!) as long as it provides that infinitesimally small measure of additional security for them that they will not be confronted with boxcutters while cramped on the way to Tampa. But Americans, having elected GWB not once but twice and then apparently duped by a man who claimed he was Change Itself, need not apply for the National Perceptiveness Award.

But you, Liberals! Ye who saw early the insane clown folly of the WMD farrago, who railed against torture and illegal detention, who bawled in our faces that we would have a Better, Finer America if only Liberals were empowered to see to our collective betterment--where are ye now that we are being driven like cattle to machine-enabled nakedness; or, if we refuse that, a ten-times-more disgraceful manhandling by rubber-gloved flunkeys (who probably mean well, as do so many flunkeys)? In either case our hands are up like perpetrators; cops are searching us as if we had been pulled over on the highway drunk like Charlie Sheen and shotgun shells littering the floor of our car.

We are stripped bare in the name of airtight security but without good reason or sense, and certainly no sensibility. And Liberals are just pretty okay with it for some reason only the electoral map can help us discern.

Our rights deserve better than that.

Hating on Air Travel

I am a hater.

Of air travel.

I did not used to be.

Now I try to avoid it unless it cannot be avoided (trips over 1500 miles; overseas).

The MAIN REASON: airport security.

One supposes there is an argument for all the security on airplanes these days but I doubt it could not be done as efficiently and at no inconvenience to the traveler. Our current mindset (post-Osama) is that rights can be abrogated without a second thought.

The dressing down at the gates had become distasteful enough (and time-consuming)--an exercise in authoritarian-induced paranoia and humiliation--but now we hear it's to get worse, with more invasive pat-downs and full-body scans at the gate.

I actually don't give a hoot about full-body scans. It does not inconvenience me. Let them do it for everyone at the airport, all the time. Fine. And if you find a weapon, go for it. Or, put an armed air-marshal on every flight (which cannot be more expensive than the current horror).

But the current innocent's perp-walk through the officious security line reeks of the police state we have become, and I would love to know how many bombers have been caught this way. Can I have some hands for "none"? Maybe they are just being deterred. Or maybe we just had to stop being utterly effing lame about letting people on with weapons.

My personal opinion is that the TSA itself should be abolished and replaced with a police force trained to spot trouble. The notion that everyone must wait in line to be scanned and their liquids examined, seems lazy and wildly inconsiderate of the American "leave me alone" spirit. To me it seems a disgraceful waste and a huge entitlement program for security wannabes now dressed in gray and having far too much authority over the typical citizen traveler.

At worst, keep the TSA around for international flights and/or non-US Citizens. But the sight of US Citizens traveling from, say, LaGuardia to Tampa being patted down as if they are likely to be minions of Qaeda strikes me as a national disgrace.

In another post, I may complain about the tininess of airline seats but this is a consumer complaint and market driven, so there really is little in fact to complain about in writing but instead many plane tickets not to buy.

But I am a hater of the flying experience because my rights and privacy are brutally violated each time I encounter the security checkpoint. I feel it is a near certainty we are slowly being made immune to a near total lack of rights which may at some point become the norm. And like the frog that slowly boils in water, we will not notice until we are cooked enough to be nearly dead and able only to jerk spasmodically in anticipation of the total death of freedom.

Govern!

Not two weeks into the Tea Party Era in Washington and we already know the basic tenets of the TP are untenable, or at least unsellable in practice.

For instance--Jim DeMint, Tea Party's own pre-elected Senator from the South, has already said the debt ceiling shall be raised (even though the Tea Party insists it cannot be, or else they will sweat blood until we are drowned in it); and Rand Paul, that intemperate enemy of Pork, has realized that his own district might like a taste of bacon now and then, and that this in fact is what gets folks re-elected more than anything else; so he's going to get some earmarks for his hometown crowd, lo and behold. Finally, when confronted on television (by Chris Matthews) on what exactly would be cut from the budget, a lame-looking TP spokesperson said "discretionary spending" which meant nothing of course, and promptly exempted the military, social security, medicare and pretty much everything that costs all the money.

One can almost feel sorry for these electees, now they are stuck with the promises they made. The trouble is not that "across the board cuts" are a bad idea.

The trouble is that Americans won't tolerate cutting any real spending. And they also won't tolerate taxation.

It is the American people who have made themselves ungovernable. Mainly this is through an almost exquisite flavor of economic hipocrisy comprised of the belief that we are a nation of self-reliant pioneers in need of unfettered "freedom"; while in fact we are a nation of slack, subsidized, overprotected, aggressively militant, pie-hole-stuffing crybabies who want what we want when we want it and who collectively stop our ears with our fingers when anyone talks about the real sacrifice needed to achieve this so-called "independent spirit" none of us really want (except to bray about it in town halls).

The states that get the most subsidy from the Feds crow loudest about taxes. This is because, since they are small in population and relatively uneducated in general, they have become cheap, easy pickings for spindoctors employed by the cynical megawealthy who court these simple voters with utterly false notions that there is solidarity between the no-tax desires of the billionaire and the food-on-the-table needs of the slogger and his wife and kids and pickup truck and dog and ATV and rifle(s).

We are in this mess, at least partly, because since the days of the Reagan Administration, intelligence itself has been attacked as somehow a betrayal of American values; therefore it is more American to be dumb. And how well this has worked for the wealthy elite! They have created a polity so easily manipulated they can actually win time after time in elections against candidates who might benefit someone besides the no-tax megawealthy.

Tea Party--go ahead and try to govern. You will soon find that we are where we are because the wealthiest manipulators want us here: jobs being performed overseas at a tenth of the pay (boosting profit quite magnificently); giant military to protect the interests of the wealthy everywhere; no costly safety net for the wretched and the screwed in this country; and enough existing subsidy for homeowners and corporations so that not one small thing gets changed in a land too big to fail. Oh and the other thing--the government just keeps borrowing from China to make it all go-round. And when it collapses, the megawealthy will have their gates and their military and their foreign accounts and la-de-da.

Let me finish, however, with optimism. In the end, we always seem to pull a trick out of the hat. We come up with something nobody's ever heard of before and that everybody wants. It's happened many times in our nation's history. The good, smart and driven people here, despite all, will probably make it happen again.

But it won't be thanks to the Tea Party.

Can't We Just Admit We're Not One Country?

In the 1860s, many thousands of our fellow countrymen died to defend the institution of slavery. Today, we gloss over that grotesque fact by calling the conflict in which they died "The Civil War" or "The War Between the States". It was a war against slavery by the North and a war in favor of slavery by the South.

Thank all that is just in the world for the victory of the North and the end of slavery. However, one should long have wondered why the unrepentant Southern states, in which African Americans would continue to be disgracefully abused for another hundred years, were allowed back into the Union.

Probably they should have been cut loose then. The United States would be a much stronger place now if they had been. And this is not to disparage the good people, and there are many, in the South. I am only making a political point, but one I believe in.

At the obvious risk of sounding insufferably elitist, can we just stop pretending that the Northeast and the Pacific Coast, as polities, have anything much in common with, say, Missouri or Kansas? Can we make a case for saying we've had enough of being held back by this increasingly uncomfortable union?

Where is it written that the United States must not have fewer states in it tomorrow than it does today? Who would be sorry if the Northeast joined the Pacific Coast to form another nation that adhered much more closely to the progressive ideals of these areas than the one we live in today? And this would also leave the so-called "flyover" states to create their own, much more conservative government (though one has no idea where they would find the tax revenue to run any government at all).

I am certain this post, if read by some, will be found offensive. Mind you, I do not disparage any individuals of merit in any state north, south or in the middle. I simply believe we have, as a nation, crossed (perhaps) a Rubicon of political discord.

I would like to know how much longer the engines of wealth in this country (the Northeast and the Pacific Coast) are going to continue supporting laggard, subsidized places like Mississippi and Wyoming while granting them enormous Senatorial and electoral power over our standards and requirements. How much longer are the regions where education is respected and concentrated going to carry economic water for the regions where many seem to believe education is contemptible and elitist? And while I am not against responsible gun ownership, I have to wonder how much longer Virginia guns need to be permitted into the state of New York only to wind up putting bullets into the heads of shopkeepers?

Personally I would prefer if we might find a civil manner in which to part ways. I am pretty sure the constituency for separation in the non-elitist states could be found without great difficulty. It may also be found in the elitists states of the Northeast and the Pacific.

It's the world's least likely political eventuality, I know. But we don't seem to like each other that much in this country anymore. Therefore, to me, some kind of separation beetwen the States sounds like an idea whose time may be upon us.

Banks Have no Fiduciary Responsibility

Did you know:

When you put money into your bank, they may have no responsibility to make sure it stays there. The account-holder agreement you signed may absolve them of any fiduciary responsibility whatsoever as it relates to the safety or security of your money even in a supposedly no-risk checking account.

This means they can, without bothering to check with you, either knowingly or unknowingly aid and abet fraud that removes money from your account; and allow business partners to open secret bank accounts in contravention of any prior agreement you may have had with the partner or the bank; and refuse to cooperate in making things right once money has been taken except under a judge's order--all with impunity!

I discovered this in the outcome of a court case against JPMorgan Chase that went against me. I attempted to retrieve damages from them that I claimed were caused when they allowed an ex-business partner of mine to fraudulently remove me from an account,then remove all the money from said account and move it to a secret account at their bank, all without my consent even though they had insisted on my consent to open the original account.

The judge agreed with Chase's assertion they had no fiduciary responsibility due to a "no fiduciary responsibility" clause in the account-holder agreement--and therefore no culpability at all as certain quite obvious banking shenanigans were perpetrated right under their noses.

It is interesting to note that other institutions, including other large banks, when they learned of these matters, offered full cooperation and saw the trouble immediately. Not Chase.

Caution: your bank may have, as far as the ruling goes, absolutely no responsibility, nor any need of looking out for, the safety of your money.

Naturally a followup letter to the bank's management won a self-serving response noting that no one at the Company had done even a single thing wrong legally or as regards the Company's own policies. Based on their senior branch management's abusive, adversarial stance towards me during a time when their integrity was called upon, this can hardly be credited.

From a marketing standpoint it is essential for banks to encourage a sense of security in the depositor; but at least in my case, this sense of security did not stand the test.

Go ahead and read the fine print in your account-holder agreement--see if your bank will protect you. I was surprised to find out mine would not, and did not.

Dear UFOs: Put Up or Shut Up

An open letter to Whomsoever or whatsoever is in control (or not) of the million-plus sightings of disks, domes, cigars, chevrons, v-shapes, balloon-like objects, flashing and/or stationary lights, hovering superstructures, "ball lightning" and other queer objects in the sky; "aliens" or Whomever is appearing to us as large-eyed, gray-skinned, scrawny lurkers in the dark; or Whomever is surgically removing all those animal organs; or Whomever is abducting "thousands" of us; or Whomever has a message for us about global warming, nuclear catastrophe or our own plain stupidity (including all of you "Men in Black" and "Nordics"):

Dear Abovementioned:

It's been about sixty-five years since Kenneth Arnold saw those skipping saucers up in the northern Cascades and no one knows what he saw or if he actually saw anything. There are those who believe the advent of sightings coincides with the use of curved glass in cockpits and automobiles, but that probably accounts for only half of the possible sightings we've had over the decades.

There have probably been over a million baffling UFO sightings/encounters/abductions to date.

Frankly I am getting a little tired of it.

If you have a message for us, let's get on with it. If you are going to attack, what in heck are you waiting for. Our weapons just keep getting better. If you are hoping to acclimatize us to you, fear not. Many of us would welcome your appearance and the rest will continue to go to work and to shop (just don't make them stop shopping).

If you plan to play peek-a-boo with us for much longer, I would expect your little game to begin losing its appeal after a while. Heaven knows why the fascination has lasted this long and with so little to show.

If you're afraid of us, I do understand. I am afraid of us. But I can't move vertically at a thousand miles an hour to get away, so I'm stuck. Go for it--hover and then split. Seems to work for you.

Overall, it's just starting to get a little annoying. Lights in the sky over China, balloons over NYC, Jimmy Carter saw one, we've got specimens at Wright-Patterson in Ohio. . .come on. Play ball with us a bit. Or maybe just go away.

In sum: if you've got something to say, say it. If you are planning to hang around for a while, come and knock on the door--don't skulk around in the bushes, because that just makes us think you're weird. If you've got some amazing technology for us, hurry up, because pretty soon we'll have it anyway, and then you're going to seem like yesterday's lunch meat.

Just quit monkeying around. After a while, even the best mystery needs a conclusion. Otherwise it can turn into a real snooze.

Sincerely,


Fed-Up Earthling

Tea Party Member Portrait (Post-Apocalypse)

"I can't believe I supported the interests of the wealthy while they were robbing me blind!"

Why Cities Die

Cities die when people no longer want to live in them.

I live in an enormous city that has not died but increased and prospered and which remains a magnet for smart, enterprising people all over the planet. But this, at least in this country, is almost unique and certainly the exception. It helps for a city to be mega-sized--the megalopolis creates its own social weather and is more impervious to the push and pull of real estate tropes.

Very few cities in the U.S. can claim this mantle. And almost none exist that aren't in some way blighted by core-abandonment, wretched highway planning, and profound ugliness in the form of parking lots where once stood thriving business districts. Certainly the advent and popularity of the automobile has gutted perhaps a majority of American cities, and it is easy to blame the automobile industry. But as with so many things, I have found the silly throwaway line from the old Pogo comic strip to be the case: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

People bought cars and drove out to the country and liked what they saw and moved there and built better schools for their kids and that is how the suburbs were born. I personally cannot stand living in the suburbs--find it stultifying and disgracefully overcrowded with traffic (at least in this megalopolis). But the suburbs are where the American has made his/her stand. It may not work out--there are signs it will not. But that's another story.

Again: cities die because people don't want to live there. You don't. I don't. Nobody does. Think about St. Louis, where they steal the very bricks of abandoned houses to ship off to New Orleans for renovations. Or Detroit, where they knock down abandoned houses routinely. Or Cleveland, where entire neighborhoods are jobless and suffering rapid abandonment. Or Philadelphia, easily the most underperforming major city in the U.S., where dowdiness is practically part of the city charter and which has an altogether mindless devotion to accommodation of the automobile and only the most pathetic mass transit "system" (the subway has one lonesome line).

It is somehow chic to decry the loss of our great American cities. But here's my gripe: if they were so great, how come nobody wanted to live there? My guess is, because they were lousy places to live--even back in that lamented and perhaps fanciful "golden era". Odds-on, if you're not an urban-pioneering, loft-dwelling, latte-sipping, wirelessly-empowered dandy, they still are today. And they continue to lose population because of this.

What were the great failures of many of these cities? Primarily two things, I believe. First, physical ugliness. Row after row of wretchedly unaccommodating houses served by block after block of wretchedly unfriendly-looking storefronts. Perhaps there was a sense of optimism in those who once lived there: "I can make this work for me". But they could not. It takes much more imagination than average to create an interesting storefront (rather than, say, a collection of orthopedic devices or a few dusty water pumps); and the same goes for the row of industrial-friendly hovels. Certainly if you are an artist, writer, antique-buyer, entrepreneur not needing to commute and no children to educate, you can make this work for you. But you are in a tiny minority.

Second, sheer brutality. The typical major American city, or at least those portions built during the industrial age, were designed and (over)built to feed the great maw that ate cheap labor all day and half the night: the cheapest possible housing and rapid access to the factory. Libraries, parks, schools, museums, civic monuments: except for a few showpieces to assuage the ostensible guilt of a few wealthy locals looking back upon what might have been, these are either entirely absent the landscape or when present, clearly an afterthought and not to be taken seriously. This type of carelessness about the spiritual and educational needs of people remains brutal and creates brutality of its own: desperation, corruption, crime, police intervention, resentment, hatred, ruin.

These cities are still being abandoned because they were never very good places to live even in their so-called "heyday". No, they were crowded, desperate, awful places to live. And the moment folks could get the hell out, they did. Possibly this is because the populace--unereducated, overworked, media-manipulated--lacked the collective imagination to make much of the place in concert. The suburb is nothing if not a sprawling monument to the sheer self-interest of the ex-urbanite and represents the apotheosis of un-neighborliness: high fences and rolling isolation booths are its chief characteristics.

In a singular kink of high irony, many of these cities, having spent a hundred years spitting on and squatting upon the hopes and dreams of the creative minds trapped inside them, now try to lure humans back into a re-inhabited, adorable "urban core" by touting, emptily for the most part, "the arts". There is no city too mundane for a brave new loft building. None too quotidian for an "arts center". None ashamed enough to avoid quirky, pointless, unloved and entirely misapprehended street sculpture often in irksome abundance. And even the barest crossroads trying to "reinvent" itself must have a "downtown mall" where suburbanites can, for reasons unfathomable, drive a long way only to end up where parking is harder and the mall has escalators and where, once "outside", beggars wait to be noticed via some handlettered placard announcing their failures as well as immediate need for coin (the "failure placard" is another unique feature of the American cityscape--I have not seen it elsewhere).

Most "failing" cities never in fact "worked"--not for the people who lived there. The failure can be traced to a lack of any sense of pride, a near vacuum of romance (or of any emotional support whatsoever), and no practical sense of prospect except where it intersected with the needs of a stultifying corporate culture. Big American cities were built for the Company and when the Company decamped, so, with barely contained glee, did the people who worked for the Company. What remains is a rotting shell, like some old coconut shard from which all the meat has been clawed.

In our next installment we shall discuss the role in which race hatred has played in the death of American cities--a phenomenon lamented mostly by, and caused mostly by white people.

Until such time, let the bricks fall where they may. Greater cities than St. Louis have been abandoned over the course of history--and what to make of it really, except to find a crumbled foundation buried long in the sand?