1523 Post Party Depression

1523 Post Party Depression

A few words about the Fox TV encounter among the top ten Republican presidential wannabes. (Fox called it a debate, but it wasn’t.)

You can put the ten of them neatly into five categories.

Louts/Gavones: Trump, Christie.

Smarmy/Whiney: Huckabee, Kasich.

Dopey: Bush, Walker, Paul.

Self Lobotomized Brain Surgeons: Carson.

Tokens: Cruz, Rubio.

There’s some potential bleeding among the categories.  For example, you could put Carson in “tokens” and move Paul into “Self Lobotomized” though you’d have to change the category name to “Blind Eye Doctors.”

What a sorry lot.  Who won?  Fox News and Hillary Clinton.  Carly Fiorina and Bernie Sanders were the runners up.

The differences among the republican candidates are microscopic.  Pour some hand cleaner over the crowd and you kill the microbes.  It was Trump's show.  But even he didn't score any real points except drawing fire from the moderators and laughs from the audience.

As usual, the dems don't know how to fight back. Their responses to the GOP debate:  "No mention of income inequality."  "No mention of climate change." The only thing said about gay marriage was from Kasich, who said we should all love one another.  Very effective.

Each Republican has his own peculiar flaws. The basics are pretty much the same.

But the dems' message is ineffective.  You can't see, hear, smell or touch climate change.  Yet.

Income inequality solved by income "redistribution" won't fly.

People don't hate billionaires, they envy them.  They strive to be one.  They've bought into the myth that it's possible. (It is. But not on a mass scale.)  People don't hate cops who beat up or kill black people unless they're black, much white pretence to the contrary notwithstanding.  

People with drivers' licenses or state photo id s don't care about people who don't and therefore can't vote.  People don't care how much Lockheed or the Kochs give to super pacs.  

Maybe “don't care” is inaccurate.  Maybe it's they care but they don't want or think they can't make an effort to change things.  

People want more money for education, but not if their taxes go up.  People don't care if the next guy doesn't have medical insurance.

People don't want another foreign war.  But they feel they can't do anything to stop one.

Chuck Schumer, influential and likely to be the next Democratic leader of the senate comes out against the Iran deal.  If enough other democrats follow (and they may,) there will be enough votes to override the promised presidential.

Okay, now what?  Is there a way to frame these issues so that people will see a benefit?  The dems appeal to goodwill.   That's idol worship. There IS no good will.  The republicans appeal to greed even while they're pulling a reverse Robin Hood on the people least able to withstand a robbery.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1522 A Ghost's Story

1522 A Ghost’s Story

The following recently materialized on the Wessays™ computer hard drive and is being posted as received:

You have to wonder what's wrong with people.  Here I've been “living” peacefully for a long long time and now new people move into the house.

I try to scare them off. It's not that I don't like them. It's just that this is MY personal space.

So I turn down the thermostat.  They can't figure out why it's cold.  I float up behind them and tap them on the shoulder and they jump.  I move things around, drop dishes, slam doors in the middle of the night.  And what finally happens?  They figure the place is haunted.

Well it is, and I'm what's haunting it.  My name is Alburtis Cullen. But you can call me Al. I died in 1883 and was given a choice whether to "live" here on earth or on what you people call "the other side." I never much liked other dead people so I checked "earth" on my destination form and I've been here ever since.

There isn't much to do, so you'd think I'd find this invasion of the flesh-wearers interesting, if not fun.  And it does have its curious and amusing moments.

I try to stay away from the little kids because I suspect they can actually see me, which the adults can't.  But every once in awhile I play a little joke. Like taking the boy's baseball bat and beating up the girl's rag doll.  I always get a little chuckle over that, especially when one kid goes crying to mommy, blaming the other kid for the damage.

The haunting instruction book instructs us to make strange noises in the night.  That, too, can be fun.  But I prefer to make my strange noises in daylight.  It's slightly less frightening -- I really don't want to hurt anyone -- but it frustrates these carpetbaggers just as well.

They'll go running into a room where they think they heard something and find nothing touched and nothing out of place and nothing out of the ordinary.

Last time there were live fleshists here, they called in a "ghost buster."  Fellow came in with all this fancy equipment, recording machines, video machines, and supposed energy detectors.  Such scientists!   Such phonies. I put them out of business right away.  I got some old paint from a can in the basement and smeared the lenses of their cameras. I turned off the electric power, stole all their batteries and stuck them in their car.

Being able to walk through walls and closed doors and locked cars isn't all bad.  You should have heard them argue among themselves about whether they left the car unlocked.

But at the end of the day, these people have to go. I'd call them pains in the a*s, but I can't feel pain.  Still, you know what I mean.  So I have to figure out a way to scare them off without doing any permanent damage to them or to the house.

After all, even a ghost has to have a roof over his head.

I’m Al. My opinions are my own. Refute them at your peril.

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© Al 2015

1521 So Long to the A&P

1521 So Long to the A&P

If dingy were a fashion statement, the A&P would be Coco Chanel.  From its lofty perch as a retail pioneer to its long road down to bankruptcy, there’s no more familiar a name than this first generation and possibly actual first supermarket.

But it’s been decades since the original grand opening in 1859 and almost as long since there’s been anything great about the “Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.”

Mention this outfit and a frequent reply is “oh, are they still around.”  Yes.  Sort of.

They’ll be closing or selling off most of their stores.  This will mean a boom in the population of homeless rats and roaches whose breeding grounds will thus be freed of inspection.

Along with their A&P Stores, the company owns Waldbaum’s, Pathmark, Food Emporium and some other less nameable names.  They are the 34th largest retailer of any kind in the US. At their peak, they operated 4,000 stores.  And that peak was in 1950, when competition was slimmer and some newer mass marketers weren’t yet a gleam in anyone’s eye.

When the original owners -- mostly a family trust -- sold the whole mess to an outfit in Germany, no one noticed a difference. At least not right away.  When the company went on that buying binge, Pathmark, Waldbaum’s etc., things began to slide.  Wal-mart’s entry into the field didn’t help. Nor did the warehouse and “club” stores.

Understand a few things about supermarkets:

-they work on the narrowest of narrow margins.

-many are in high rent districts.

-many are unionized which means higher wages but smaller crews, often inadequately smaller.  Baggers who work only for tips in some locations often out-earn regular part timers and don’t pay taxes.

-worker turnover reaches highway speed.

And, yes, you feel squeezed at the register.  Why are prices so high when the growers and ranchers and markets make so little?  Because there are a million middlemen lopping on added costs.

As in the clothing business, a piece of uncooked food goes through dozens of hands before it lands on your back or your dining room table.

So operating a supermarket is usually a register to register hand to mouth operation. What’s most surprising about A&P’s exit is not that it’s happening but that it didn’t happen decades ago.

But there’s an upside to this story.  Awhile back they spun off their coffee division and it now supplies independent and other mass marketers nationwide.  Which means fans of Eight O’Clock will still be able to buy it.  “Eight” has a lot of fans and for good reason.  

Meantime, anyone want a large collection of Plaid Stamps?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1520 Coming Down from Olympus

Okay, take out your pencils and papers, kids, it’s time for a quiz.  Just one question today: What’s more mindless than football, duller than baseball, and more boring than golf and tennis combined?

Right! The Olympics.

Endless days and nights of … nothing.

It’s time to rethink this lumbering and useless draining of international resources.  

What sparks this not-too-diplomatic tirade?  Two recent developments, Rio- 2016 and Beijing- 2022.

The worst first.

When you think of Brazil, what comes to mind?  Pretty women, brilliant music and dance, good coffee, bright sunshine, beautiful beaches.  What’s pushed beneath your radar? Gangs.  Dead street urchins, poverty and now, disease.  Raw sewage in which the world’s supposedly greatest athletes are expected to swim.

If they awarded a gold medal for countries that don’t treat human waste and grow viruses, Brazil would be a sure winner.  If there were one for countries whose olympic participants’ winning ceremonies will need to be held in hospital wards… again, it’s Brazil.

They have a year to clean up a death trap that was a century or more in the making.  They won’t make it. This is an olympics that will honor survival more than ability to swim the backstroke or sail over the bounding main.

Then there’s the recently announced 2022 winter games in China.  Here’s a country with a billion people spending money it doesn’t have on building a village from scratch.  They have a lot of experience building future ghost towns.  Dozens of them over the years.

Great buildings with no people, no jobs and with the former residents of the little villages that used to be there wandering off into the mountains searching for their next meal.

Oh, the Olympic Village will fill.  And then it will be abandoned.

The people who put on this kind of carnival are too smart not to know that once the hoopla ends and the money leaves town (but not their own bank accounts) all those assets will just sit there and rot.

Take a look at Sochi.  Or Beijing after 2008.  Athens, 2004. Munich 1972.  Sarajevo 1984.

And we’re just talking about venues.  What about the people.  Like the East German women shotputters who turned out not to be women.  Or the bladerunner who killed his girlfriend in South Africa or any of a hundred lesser crimes.

No. The Olympics is an advertising event.  And it’s a money printing machine outdone only by the accompanying money burning machine, which it also is.

It’s yet another chance for snooty European old white guys to lord it over us lesser beings.

And it’s an endless bore. Think watching grass growing or paint paint drying.

Shrapnel:

--At around the time we were all in a knot over Cecil the lion, someone in the Carlisle PA area shot a dog in the face and left it for dead which it isn’t.  The lion was beautiful and the dog ugly.  But really… what’s the matter people these days.

--And alas, poor Rowdy Roddy Piper, we knew you well if not for long enough.  The one time professional wrestler died of cardiac arrest at the age of 61. He put on a good show and that’s what they paid him for.

--Since this is Wessay #1520, a salute to the former WFYI, 1520 on the am radio dial, in olden times owned by the New York Herald Tribune.  Struggling, it changed formats as often as an average woman changes shoes, those fools gave a kid $85 bucks a week to play records and do news on the air. And for which that kid will ever be grateful.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1519 The Cowardly Dentist

1519 The Cowardly Dentist

The Wizard of Oz is an unending source of analogy and metaphor.  The Cowardly Lion turned out to be brave, after all.  The cowardly dentist who shot Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe is another story.

Cecil was raised on a game preserve, a place where you can’t hunt.  He was a local celebrity, evidently on the laid back side of lionism, who played well with other lions and was used to people… trusting, maybe even.

Then along comes this Walter Palmer, this smarmy, smirky little man from the upper Midwest, with his arrows and his record as a serial killer of wildlife with a rap sheet as long as your arm, lures the cat out of the park and “takes” him.  Takes?  Like what, a glass of champagne off the tray of a waiter at a dinner party?

And the excuse? “I thought it was legal.”  That’s right up there with “I didn’t know the gun was loaded and it just went off while I was cleaning it.”  Or the drunk driver who tells the cop who pulls him over for going 70 in a 25 mph zone “Gee, ossifer, wazh I speeding?” Or the guy on the living room couch with a naked teenage babysitter who tells his wife when she unexpectedly comes home “It’s not what it looks like, honey.”

Walt was in trouble with the law over this kind of thing before.  Fined.  Chastened. But he bought his way out and still had the fifty grand enough to travel to Zimbabwe.

Why? “I don’t play golf,” he said.  

Plus no 300 yard drives down the fairway. Much easier to shoot an arrow than a Titleist, and no one seems to mind when it’s not a kill.

Except maybe Cecil, who wandered off to see about his wound, was tracked, shot, beheaded, skinned and his body left to feed other animals.

Except no creature in the African jungles is going to eat a global positioning device. So researchers located the body by computer and went to inspect the damage.  And the damagers who were arrested.

Not Walt, though.  He flew home with dreams of Cecil’s detached head adorning his wall.

What he found were demonstrators on his doorstep.  Hundreds of them.  So he fled after issuing a smarmy little legalese statement “regretting” that he “took” Cecil.

Again, “took? Like what?  The A train? An Advil?  A leave of absence?

Let’s see if the old drillmeister can buy his way out of this one.  

Zimbabwe is trying to extradite him.  There’s a treaty for that, signed in the spring of 2000.  Tens of thousands have signed a petition requesting extradition.

There’s some leverage.  The US imports an average of $10 million a month from Zimbabwe.  And that ten spot goes a long way to funding things in a country whose GDP is under a billion dollars a year, has the third lowest average wage in the world and receives $700,000,000 in U.S. foreign aid.

So long, Walt. Hope you like your new accommodations.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1518 Everyone Into The Pool

1518 Everyone into the Pool

They’re going to rebuild LaGuardia Airport.  Really. Finally.  Going to tear it down and start over. Remake it from scratch, all while it’s in use.

So, let’s start a pool. The planners tell us the project will cost four billion dollars and take three years.

What do you think?  How much longer and how much more will it take and cost?

Based on the history of major airport renovations in New York (and Denver,) it’ll take and cost at least twice the estimates.  The baggage carousels won’t work.  And the runways will still require planes with pontoons.

The Marine Air Terminal, a historic site, will remain where it is and as it is after preservationists have a shot at deifying every last crumbled piece of concrete, every inch of substandard plumbing and wiring and every broken window in one of the top ten ugliest and least useful manmade structures of all time.

And when they try to extend the runways, which they desperately need to, there will be another upheaval because someone will have discovered that there’s an ancient burial ground 50 feet out in the bay.

Vice president Biden says landing at LaGuardia you think you’re arriving in the airport of a third world country.  And while there are those who believe New York IS a third world country, Biden is right.

LaGuardia consistently ranks among the worst American airports for everything from delays to lost baggage to crowding to lack of pre or post flight public transportation to looks, smells, and sounds.

You can imagine Fiorello getting off a plane (he’d have ridden in economy and didn’t need extra leg room so de-planing would take awhile) and saying “I don’t make many mistakes, but when I do, it’s a beaut.”

(LaGuardia first said that in 1941 when questioned about a bad judge he’d appointed earlier.)

In any event, after all the overruns and delays, the snarled ground traffic, the noise abatement noise, the burial ground, I’m in the pool for $8 billion and six years.  How about you?

While we wait to see who is right about cost and time, here are some candidates for the dozen ugliest and least useful important American man made structures of all time.

12. The Sloan Building at MIT

11. Alcatraz

10. St. Agnes Cathedral, Rockville Centre NY/ Temple Beth El, Great Neck NY (tie)

9. Disneyworld, Orlando

8. Cabrini Houses, Chicago

7. The original Penn Station, New York (and please, no sentimentalist baloney about that one. It was ugly and dirty, badly run as LaGuardia is now.)

6. The Marine Air Terminal

5. Creedmoor Psychiatric Center

4. The entire city of Miami

3. Beaver Stadium, State College PA

2. One World Trade Center (sentimental favorite)

1. Bloomberg headquarters, 731 Lexington Avenue.

Here are some honorable mentions:  The Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Javits Center, Mount Sinai Hospital (New York), the entire city of Elizabeth NJ, Manhattan’s Trump and Olympic Towers, all of Daly City, California and the city halls of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Portland, Oregon; Portland, Maine, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Las Vegas and any city anywhere named Springfield or Albany.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1517 Stropping Occam's Razor

1517 Stropping Occam’s Razor: Think Zebras

Back in the 13th Century, William of Occam devised a problem solving aphorism, Occam’s Razor. It says, more or less, the best answer is usually the simplest one.

A modern corollary: When walking in Central Park and hearing hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Time to start thinking Zebras because when the problem is understated, the best answer often isn’t the simplest.

If you gave Willy of O a set of today’s problems phrased into today’s terms, you’d probably get simple answers.

-Too many guns in the wrong hands? Ban ‘em.

-Illegal immigration? Build a wall to keep ‘em out.

-Racism? Have people meet and greet.

-Environmental damage? Clean the air and water.

-Global warming? Stop fossil fuels.

-Too few jobs? Incentivize job creation.

-Too few factories? Build new ones.

-Too much debt? Print money.

-Income disparity? Tax the rich, give to the poor.

-Islamic terrorism?  Wipe out the terrorists.

-Newspaper circulation circling the drain? Kill ‘em and charge for TV, radio and internet.

-Too many criminals? Build more jails.

-Congressional cronyism? Term limits.

-Too many lobbyists with too much power? Make them illegal.

The list could be much longer.  But you get the idea.

These “solutions” are not as easy as identifying their companion problems because none of the problems are caused by single sources.  And single solutions may eventually work, but advocates don’t account for the “how” of them.  And they don’t take into account the hoofbeats of unintended or unexpected consequences.

And in most cases, you can’t use “collateral damage” as an excuse when some harebrained scheme fails.

Where did all this oversimplification come from?  A recent article in Salon.com blames it on Barry Goldwater, his supporters and his circle of early supporters.  But even that is oversimplified.

The article goes on to say that politicians appealing to our emotions suck us in with imagined future glory (or income or clean air or a wall to keep out “Mexican… rapists” or racial harmony.)

Yes, appealing to emotions is easier than appealing to reason and resorting to planning and observation.

So when you hear hoofbeats in Central Park, yeah, horses are the most likely source.  But don’t rule out Zebras until you’re sure.

And get that razor sharpened. Then, find a feral zebra and shave him.

Grapeshot:

-If you have a few minutes for another take on this, there’s a little tune for you here .

Shrapnel (Chrysler Soap Opera Episode 23,456 Edition):

--Since the mid 1960s, Chrysler has succeeded it at two and only two things. First, they make eye-catching cars.  And second, they scare away customers.

-- Now, under government prodding Chrysler is to offer refunds to the buyers of half a million of its best selling vehicle, the Ram truck.  Seems it has a potentially death- dealing flaw in the steering mechanism. The steering wheel was invented and first used in 1894 and has undergone few basic changes since, so it seems an unlikely place to make a mistake even if you think zebras.

--Chrysler’s board of directors committed attempted corporate murder in the late 1970s and failed.  Then came another try -- from Daimler followed by a third and nearly successful attempt by Cerberus Capital. Now it’s Fiat’s turn to wield the knife and they’re pretty good at it.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015