[from 3/10/10]
The Seattle Times editorial board had this to say recently: "The General Assistance-Unemployable program has to go. This program, which provides a temporary safety net for people not working because of physical and mental disabilities, has been on just about every list of proposed cuts year after year."
Sort of like saying, "Charles Manson has asked to be released from prison every year since your mother wore hot pants. So by golly, it's about time we paroled him." Or, "Osama Bin Laden has been wanting to blow up a major US city for years. Let's give him Detroit. Hell, those people aren't working, let's blow it up for him."
That sort of reasoning impresses me. You can make a whole lot of things right, if all they have to be is mad-dog insistent. Why yes, I see it now, smoking crack has to be a good idea, there's someone smoking it in every doorway downtown every night. Why yes, if we're at war, year after year, then we should be.
"Who do these physically and mental disabled people think they are, going around being unemployed like that? OK, they're 'disabled', whatever that means (we're a newspaper, not some Poindexter-walking-dictionary), but that doesn't mean they can't be pimped!"
The Seattle Times editorial department seems to believe that if you withhold funds from GA-U, poverty will cost us all less. After all, if you don't give the poor people money, they'll either get by or die, right? And that'll be free for the rest of us! It's a win-win situation!
The Times is run by such adorable, cute, knuckle-dragging, social Darwinians. Aren't they the cutest social Darwinians you ever did see? Yes they are!
It's not that the Times doesn't understand the benefits of free money. They were happy to get their 40% discount in B&O taxes last year, along with this state's other newspapers. That was OK because at least they are working (only just -- it would help if they fired up a collective neuron once in a while) and the tax break was just a tax break and not income. Sill, it was a gift, justified at the time because newspapers were hurting, and granted in spite of a state budget shortfall. It was an investment, after all. An investment in newspapers, something we care about!
Maybe we have here a continuation of the "corporations are people, too, and they're bigger so they're more so than ordinary people" theory. When corporations hurt, they hurt more than anyone else.
I would be inclined to go along with the Times view if these disabled people on welfare were making off like Madoff, but what we're talking about is a benefit that has been frozen since the early 90s at $339 per month max, although that is now not enough money to pay commercial rent, even assuming that the recipient doesn't spend any of it on anything else.
By the way, the thinking behind giving so little money, apparently (I'm making this up as I write it because obviously legislators arranged it, and so there can't really have been any thinking involved), is that 1) disabled people take up less space than non-disabled people, on average, so they can double and triple up in apartments and 2) they get food stamps don't they? What's that? -- The food stamps only pay for enough to buy food for two weeks of each month? Well then 3) they can go to food banks can't they? What's that? -- Without places to live they can't cook anything and have to carry food bank food everywhere? -- so, fine, they'll lose weight, more of them will be able to pack in a room, savings all around. We've also heard that rice soaked in jars of vinegar for a month becomes chewable.
Summarizing: The Seattle Times, not satisfied with the fact that GA-U is inadequate, wants it gone altogether, and the poor magically gone with it. Well, I'd like the Times gone. So?
Showing posts with label blow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blow. Show all posts
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Eating from Aesop’s Table
I’ve been thinking about my favorite Aesop’s fable. My favorite Aesop’s fable, just so you’ll all know, is the one that has the North Wind and the Sun arguing about which of them is the most powerful, and they agree to test their powers by seeing who can first get a jacket, or cloak, off a man on a road. The North Wind, for all his blowing, just succeeds in getting the man to grip the cloak tighter, while the Sun gently warms it off of him.
I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the Steelers in the Super Bowl. I’m not talking about Super Bowl XL, the one where they just beat the Seahawks, 21-10. I’m talking about Super Bowl XXX, ten years ago, when the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys.
Not being a fan of football, I had no use for that information on the day in January 1996 when the game was played. But because I have to walk about among the normal humans, and because I sometimes have to pass for one of them, I stored the factoid in my brain, in the abbreviated format “Pittsburgh = Losers, XXX.”
So two months later when I was writing an April Fool’s story about how all the homeless in Seattle had finally got the hint that they were unwelcome here and were using their famous mobility to go elsewhere, I naturally made Pittsburgh their fictitious destination. Naturally, I thought the choice was hilarious, in part because homelessness and Super Bowls and homeless people and Super Bowl losers all have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.
How wrong I was! I should, in fact, have sent all our homeless to Detroit, because those people might have known what to do with them.
Faced with the urge to sweep its streets of homeless people like so many other cities have done when hosting Super Bowls, Detroit did something finer. It threw Super Bowl parties for them, where they could get together out of the cold and watch the game while eating the same kind of junk food everybody else in the country considers essential to the experience, and making the same kinds of collective noises, etc.
Even though I totally don’t get football, I totally understand and appreciate the normal human need to gather for food and to make celebratory and other collective noises. The normal humans really go in for that sort of thing. It’s called “community,” or some such thing, and it’s highly valued. The surprise for a lot of people is (hold on to your hats!) homeless people value it too.
So Detroit’s Super Bowl parties were a resounding success. Not only did they save their city a lot of expense by not having to pay a lot of cops overtime to herd people around against their will, but they introduced a lot of people to social services and got folks in the door to sign up for programs that they hadn’t even heard of before. Aesop would have said, “I told you so.” Aesop, an African slave who lived over 25 centuries ago, could out-wise the average 21st century city council member, anywhere.
Everyone can learn from Detroit’s experience. The missions, for example, just might learn to provide the meal first and invite people to the sermon afterward (I believe Jesus himself did it in that order.) Cities and towns that don’t want people to panhandle could try to provide attractive alternatives, involving assorted cheese dips and opportunities for loud hooting. Chronic homelessness is not a well-defined term.
That last item doesn’t have anything to do with the Aesop’s fable, probably, but it’s something I want people to learn, so I tossed it in anyway.
The real inspiration for that April Fool’s article ten years ago was the razing of homeless encampments in the Jungle along Beacon Hill -- a stupid act of unnecessary witless force. Let’s all learn that witless force is as impractical as it is too costly.
I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the Steelers in the Super Bowl. I’m not talking about Super Bowl XL, the one where they just beat the Seahawks, 21-10. I’m talking about Super Bowl XXX, ten years ago, when the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys.
Not being a fan of football, I had no use for that information on the day in January 1996 when the game was played. But because I have to walk about among the normal humans, and because I sometimes have to pass for one of them, I stored the factoid in my brain, in the abbreviated format “Pittsburgh = Losers, XXX.”
So two months later when I was writing an April Fool’s story about how all the homeless in Seattle had finally got the hint that they were unwelcome here and were using their famous mobility to go elsewhere, I naturally made Pittsburgh their fictitious destination. Naturally, I thought the choice was hilarious, in part because homelessness and Super Bowls and homeless people and Super Bowl losers all have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.
How wrong I was! I should, in fact, have sent all our homeless to Detroit, because those people might have known what to do with them.
Faced with the urge to sweep its streets of homeless people like so many other cities have done when hosting Super Bowls, Detroit did something finer. It threw Super Bowl parties for them, where they could get together out of the cold and watch the game while eating the same kind of junk food everybody else in the country considers essential to the experience, and making the same kinds of collective noises, etc.
Even though I totally don’t get football, I totally understand and appreciate the normal human need to gather for food and to make celebratory and other collective noises. The normal humans really go in for that sort of thing. It’s called “community,” or some such thing, and it’s highly valued. The surprise for a lot of people is (hold on to your hats!) homeless people value it too.
So Detroit’s Super Bowl parties were a resounding success. Not only did they save their city a lot of expense by not having to pay a lot of cops overtime to herd people around against their will, but they introduced a lot of people to social services and got folks in the door to sign up for programs that they hadn’t even heard of before. Aesop would have said, “I told you so.” Aesop, an African slave who lived over 25 centuries ago, could out-wise the average 21st century city council member, anywhere.
Everyone can learn from Detroit’s experience. The missions, for example, just might learn to provide the meal first and invite people to the sermon afterward (I believe Jesus himself did it in that order.) Cities and towns that don’t want people to panhandle could try to provide attractive alternatives, involving assorted cheese dips and opportunities for loud hooting. Chronic homelessness is not a well-defined term.
That last item doesn’t have anything to do with the Aesop’s fable, probably, but it’s something I want people to learn, so I tossed it in anyway.
The real inspiration for that April Fool’s article ten years ago was the razing of homeless encampments in the Jungle along Beacon Hill -- a stupid act of unnecessary witless force. Let’s all learn that witless force is as impractical as it is too costly.
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
Rose isn’t a Rose isn’t a Rose...
Either William Shakespeare or someone calling himself that put the following words into the mouth of what had probably been a real teenage girl of Verona, Italy, who had died in a dual suicide with her lover in 1303: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.”
What a crock!
First, as someone would have said if anyone had heard it, “If a rose grows in the forest and there’s no one there to smell it, does it smell?” More to the point, if we all were to start referring to roses as “fertilizer,” people might stop smelling them altogether, so roses wouldn’t smell. Ergo, roses wouldn’t smell sweet. Therefore the statement was a crock.
Second, Juliet is talking to Romeo Montague and her whole point is that the name “Montague” means nothing, so far as she’s concerned. Well, so far as the rest of us are concerned, “Montague,” in the play, means unusually wealthy Jerry Springer-fodder. All money, no class. And, what do you know, but Romeo goes and proves he’s a genuine Montague, deserving of a Darwin Award by killing himself because he supposes his 14 year old wife did, after not bothering to get a medical opinion.
Recently a Real Change Board Member said she didn’t like to use the word “activist.” Instead, she preferred “advocate.” Would an activist by any other name be as activating? No! But if you call them “advocates,” from the Latin for “speaker-outers,” then, before you know it, they stop activating, they even stop being active. They become couch potatoes who now and then speak out. Don’t ask me how I know that. Note that I’m not saying that being a couch potato is a bad thing.
Words and names do matter. Otherwise we wouldn’t have these squabbles over the choice between “liberal” and “progressive.” If you’re progressive you’re going somewhere. But if you’re liberal you’re headed along a particular path that people set forth upon long ago, to let knowledge liberate. So the word “liberal” provides a compass heading for your progression. Like the man said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. You need a wet finger and a compass.
Here’s another example. Rev. Jerry Falwell has started a campaign to use a range of tactics, including boycotts and legal action, to force governments and major retail chains to use the word “Christmas,” rather than losing the Christ connection by talking about the Holidays, or the Holiday Season. For example, Falwell would have folks boycott Wal-Mart unless Wal-Mart forces its Jewish employees to greet you with “Merry Christmas.”
From what I have said here and elsewhere you will know that I heartily sympathize with Rev. Falwell and his fellow practitioners of the heavily oppressed religion of 95% of Americans, because whether the name “Christmas” is used really does matter.
It’s mattered ever since the beginning, back to the 4th century After Christ, when Pope Julius called December 25 Jesus’ Birthday even though everyone knew Jesus wasn’t born in December, just so it would no longer be called “Hooray the Sun is Returning to Us Day,” as it had been.
But in the late 1800s Christmas was forced to change away from simply being Christ’s Pretend Birthday. This began precisely when Congress said Christmas would be a federal holiday, granting most federal employees the day off.
Naming a holiday a “federal holiday” changes it. Congress can’t establish any religion, not even the oppressed religion Christianity to which almost all congressmen, who write all our laws, profess to belong and practice devotedly. Therefore when Congress names Christmas a “federal holiday,” it also begins to take the Christ and the Mass out of the meaning of it.
So until Congress reverses itself, Season’s Greetings to all and remember there’s less than 18 shopping days to Last Federal Day Off of the Year Day.
What a crock!
First, as someone would have said if anyone had heard it, “If a rose grows in the forest and there’s no one there to smell it, does it smell?” More to the point, if we all were to start referring to roses as “fertilizer,” people might stop smelling them altogether, so roses wouldn’t smell. Ergo, roses wouldn’t smell sweet. Therefore the statement was a crock.
Second, Juliet is talking to Romeo Montague and her whole point is that the name “Montague” means nothing, so far as she’s concerned. Well, so far as the rest of us are concerned, “Montague,” in the play, means unusually wealthy Jerry Springer-fodder. All money, no class. And, what do you know, but Romeo goes and proves he’s a genuine Montague, deserving of a Darwin Award by killing himself because he supposes his 14 year old wife did, after not bothering to get a medical opinion.
Recently a Real Change Board Member said she didn’t like to use the word “activist.” Instead, she preferred “advocate.” Would an activist by any other name be as activating? No! But if you call them “advocates,” from the Latin for “speaker-outers,” then, before you know it, they stop activating, they even stop being active. They become couch potatoes who now and then speak out. Don’t ask me how I know that. Note that I’m not saying that being a couch potato is a bad thing.
Words and names do matter. Otherwise we wouldn’t have these squabbles over the choice between “liberal” and “progressive.” If you’re progressive you’re going somewhere. But if you’re liberal you’re headed along a particular path that people set forth upon long ago, to let knowledge liberate. So the word “liberal” provides a compass heading for your progression. Like the man said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. You need a wet finger and a compass.
Here’s another example. Rev. Jerry Falwell has started a campaign to use a range of tactics, including boycotts and legal action, to force governments and major retail chains to use the word “Christmas,” rather than losing the Christ connection by talking about the Holidays, or the Holiday Season. For example, Falwell would have folks boycott Wal-Mart unless Wal-Mart forces its Jewish employees to greet you with “Merry Christmas.”
From what I have said here and elsewhere you will know that I heartily sympathize with Rev. Falwell and his fellow practitioners of the heavily oppressed religion of 95% of Americans, because whether the name “Christmas” is used really does matter.
It’s mattered ever since the beginning, back to the 4th century After Christ, when Pope Julius called December 25 Jesus’ Birthday even though everyone knew Jesus wasn’t born in December, just so it would no longer be called “Hooray the Sun is Returning to Us Day,” as it had been.
But in the late 1800s Christmas was forced to change away from simply being Christ’s Pretend Birthday. This began precisely when Congress said Christmas would be a federal holiday, granting most federal employees the day off.
Naming a holiday a “federal holiday” changes it. Congress can’t establish any religion, not even the oppressed religion Christianity to which almost all congressmen, who write all our laws, profess to belong and practice devotedly. Therefore when Congress names Christmas a “federal holiday,” it also begins to take the Christ and the Mass out of the meaning of it.
So until Congress reverses itself, Season’s Greetings to all and remember there’s less than 18 shopping days to Last Federal Day Off of the Year Day.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
If You're Screwed, You're Screwed
For today's column I want to talk about how "Science Marches On!" I am very excited about a new discovery that finally gets at the underlying truth about life neither being a rose garden nor a bowlful of cherries. It also deepens the theory that the Rich Get Richer While the Poor Get Poorer, by sinking it to the level of biology and the reproduction of cells. It’s a very factual new discovery that is so scientific and at the same time so scary that it could make the basis for a great new film to bum out kids in high school.
The discovery is a long time coming. I remember reading in history books that way back in the Dark Ages the silly Dark-Ages-people all thought that life was "essentially" a waiting room experience with one good magazine that everyone fought over until they remembered that none of them could read, and then you died and went to heaven.
Then, in the Renaissance, science started, and all the beginner scientists started to believe that life blew. It wasn't until the 1800's before science-greats like Darwin and other guys who actually knew things figured out that life really sucks, as we now know today.
But it is one thing to know that life sucks. It is quite another to know HOW life sucks, or to possess the video. This is where 21st century scientists have it all over 19th century scientists: even though they aren't as smart, there's lots more of them, so when you put them all together they end up knowing more. Besides, they have cell-phones and digital cameras and laptops.
Anyway, here it is. Scientists just learned last month that if you experience long-term hardship, and if you experience it as chronic stress, then your telomeres will shrivel up. This is bad, the scientists say, because telomeres are the tips-of-the-shoelace thingies at the end of your chromosomes that need to be big and long so that your cells can divide and multiply. So it's like, you know, with shriveled telomeres your cells might as well be neutered, and pretty soon the cells you have die without replacements, and so do you.
There's more: they've actually figured out how much shriveling happens. As much shriveling happens in a typical case that we are talking about losing roughly a year of lifespan for each year of stress experienced. Give or take a month or two.
So let's say someone, we'll call him Herbert, was genetically predisposed to live 70 years if his life went as well as it does for normal people. But suppose instead the beginning of his life, for the first 35 years, is a genuine living hell, comparatively speaking. According to our old understanding we would have thought that at least Herbert would have had a second 35 years left to him during which things might start looking up. But now we know that Herbert's telomeres will be entirely useless as of his 35th birthday and Herbert will die of premature old age within days. Or a couple of years. Or he's already dead. Approximately.
Now, some see a silver lining to this discovery. They point out that the telomeres only shrink if you experience the stress. In other words if you don't know you're miserable you won't suffer the ill effects of it. Right, that's it, I could just whack myself up-side my head so hard I don't notice anything at all ever again.
No, there are only two alternatives. Either you're so stupid you not only don't know when you're suffering you also can't fully know when you're having a good time, i.e., you're a fish, metaphorically speaking. Or else you're a sentient being and every year that you suffer you lose that much opportunity to make up for it.
So we may sum up this new discovery as follows. If you're screwed, you're screwed. Unless you're stupid, in which case you're screwed.
Has there ever been a time when we could so clearly see the need for justice as this? Let's stop putting people through genuine living hells, at least until we can find a way to enlarge telomeres.
Thursday, September 5, 2002
It's a Happ'nin!
Recently I was talking about how I am stupid. I was saying, actually, that everyone is stupid. The trick is to figure out, for each one of us, how. One of the ways that I am stupid is that I suck at history.
I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.
My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.
I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.
One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.
Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!
The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.
Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.
I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.
I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.
I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.
I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.
I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.
My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.
I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.
One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.
Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!
The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.
Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.
I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.
I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.
I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.
I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.
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