2062 Tractor Pull and a Drug called "SUX."

Note to readers: Wessays ® knows nothing of the politics of particular tractor manufacturing companies and has picked the following sides at random:

Okay, folks, let’s have a tractor pull.  A what? A tractor pull. That’s when farmer Smith and farmer Jones tie their John Deeres or Caterpillars back to back and see who can drag the other over the finish line. It’s like a tug-of-war but with heavy duty farm machinery.

In this corner, wearing John Deere Green and Yellow is the far right.  In THIS corner, wearing bright yellow is Caterpillar.

This is what’s going on in American politics today.

Except today’s contenders don’t create anything. They are politicians of the left and right.  And while they’re both often wrong, they are real.  Historically, most of these tractor pull events end in a tie and the sides compromise their way out of paralysis. But we’ve recently forgotten compromise -- a key but unwritten characteristic of our constitution.

So get ready for a dose of “SUX,” or Succinylcholine Chloride, the drug you sometimes get on the operating table to paralyze you while they cut.  Thing is, this drug doesn’t put you to sleep first.  It just stops you from breathing and other muscle-dependent activities.  It both acts and wears off quickly and they ventilate you to keep you alive. But if you’re given enough and fast enough it’s fatal.

So how much is pumped into the political system?  Plenty.

With a tractor pull, sometimes there’s a winner.  With this drug, you can count on destruction, at least with the politicians are involved.

The 2020 presidential election shouldn’t be first on our minds in the first quarter of 2019.  But it is.  Border “crises,” inflation worries, recession worries, an economy that’s like a half-frozen lake where you can walk until you reach the otherwise undetectable thin spot when you fall through and freezing and drowning compete for your vote.

And let’s not forget the Great Socialist Scare

And the Antisemites and people driving (or breathing) while black and minimumwageism and soaking the rich and Medicareforallism, freecollegeforallism.

There’s no wiggle room when you're frozen in amber or knocked out with SUX.  And no one seems ready to agree on anything except the lame congressional act that says Hate Is Naughty, an idea that shouldn’t require legislation or even a second thought.

What we need is a regard for our allies and a wall against our enemies, not against a bunch of Latin Americans yearning to be free. Also: a decently paced economic plan that muscles evil doers out of the system while vaccinating the rest of us against relapse. And we need a president who doesn’t pick his advisers, cabinet members and other peoples not plucked from the ranks of unindicted conspirators.

And while we’re writing a wish list, a decent environmental policy that doesn’t consider climate change a hoax or a prank.

What we don’t need is an injection of political SUX.

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

Comments? Wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2061 Michael Jackson

2061 Michael Jackson

Some former colleagues -- radio disc jockeys -- asked for impressions of “Leaving Neverland.” The HBO film revives all the old stories about how Michael Jackson um… treated young boys at his ranch.  It wasn’t pretty when we first heard all this. It’s even less pretty now.

Jackson isn’t around to defend himself.  But that’s not what you came here to look for, either, is it?

We live in an age of self-created and audience-created monsters. The president of the United States is chief among them.  At least Michael Jackson never had the nuclear codes.

The grievances against Jackson are not earth-shaking, though, of course, if you were one of his “boys,” it certainly has shaken your own world. And if you are a professional public moralizer you have every right to every vertical inch of your high dudgeon.  

What can victims do about it now?  Probably not much except keep the warnings lights flashing.  Maybe the next groomer of young children and their parents, the next phony good guy who “loves children” can be stopped before he starts.

It’s usually a “he,” though every once in a while you’ll find a woman teacher “loving” a high school sophomore boy.

Maybe some places will enact extended or even limitless statutes of limitation for these crimes.  But just to remind… you can’t do it retroactively.  Might be a good deterrent for planners of future abuse.

Radio stations in several countries are banning Jackson’s music and you have to think that America’s corporatized radio monoliths are at least thinking of that.  Variety the trade newspaper tried to survey the US majors.  The closest they got were limp replies about how whether to play a particular artist is a local decision left up to the individual program directors in their various markets.

Oh?  Local program directors all have to call corporate headquarters any time they need a major decision.  Like whether to fire the morning DJ, play Michael Jackson records and where and what to order for lunch.  And some have to call for hall passes when they need to use the restroom.

These kinds of bans don’t happen often. And when they do, they’re usually short term.  But if you were a fan, what do you think now.

Some comments: Well, the guy and his music and dance were two different things.  If you like it, fine.  If you keep liking it, fine. If you don’t want to help Neverland rebuild the fortune Jackson drained from it, by all means, download the MP3s.

But if you think this guy -- even in death -- doesn’t rate your attention, you know what to do.

SHRAPNEL:

--Former fixer Michael Cohen is taking the trump disorganization to court. In court papers, Cohen says the company stiffed him for almost $2 million in legal fees.  Where have we heard about this outfit declining to pay its bills before?

--And now our semiannual word rant.  Clocks go forward this weekend as we observe Daylight Saving Time.  Saving, not savingS.

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

Comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2060 Home Phones and Inboxes

The home phone is there for only one reason. It catches the calls from charity scams, “survey” takers, computer scams, telemarketers, fake IRS agents and wrong numbers.

Computer Scammer: We have noticed irregular activity on your account. Please call us for more information.

Phone: rrrrring. “Hello, this is Microsoft. How can I help you?

Collee: you called me and told me my computer is at risk.

Caller: Would you allow us to log on to your computer to look at the specifics?

Me: Sure. But I’m home now and my computer is at work.

Caller:  Can you get to work and call us back?

Me; I don’t think so. We have 11 inches of snow on the ground and I work 54 miles from home.

Caller: That doesn’t matter. We still can log in.

Me: I have to get there and turn it on.

Caller: Well, please get there as fast as you can. This is important.

Me: I will get there as soon as I can.

Next day, Caller: We didn’t hear from you yesterday. We worried.

Me: no reply.

Me: you should worry. I was in a terrible accident on my way to work in eleven inches of snow, and I’m now hospitalized with all manner of broken bones.

Caller: I’m so sorry, but please log on so we can fix your machine. We’re offering our $400 fix it program for only $350.

Click.

Inbox:

Boston Globe: Scolfano pleads guilty to sex charges.

Me: Who? What Sex charges?

New York Times: your Wednesday Briefing.

Me: I read you every morning. Why would I need more?

Extendo.com: Enlarge your whois. Guaranteed!

Me: Zap.

Vermont Country Store:  Maple sugar mummy replicas…

Me: Zap.

We are just inundated with unwanted junk email and robocalls. The average day here brings 100 of the former and three or four of the latter.

Telling senders and callers to stop is futile. It just encourages them because when you respond, they know there’s a live body at the other end of the line and they step up their onslaughts.

Good advice: Trash unwanted emails and never EVER click on “unsubscribe.”  And don’t answer the phone unless caller ID tells you it’s your doctor, lawyer, funeral director or wedding planner.

Phone: brrrring!! Hello, I am special agent so-and-so from the Internal Revenue Service. You owe us $4,820.73 cents in taxes, penalties and interest. Send us a Barnes & Noble gift card in that amount or we’ll be over to arrest you.

Me: Oh, you found me.  Okay. I want to turn myself in.

Alternative Answer: I am the Northeast Regional Director of the IRS Fraud division. Please give me the case number so I can look it up for myself.

Phone: Click.

SHRAPNEL:

--Mike Bloomberg has decided not to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Probable reason: It’s more fun being Mike than being president. Other probable reason: he can do more good for the country from the sidelines.

Note: my arch enemy, Grammarly, wanted to change “do more good” to “do more better.”  I did not make this up.

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

Comments: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2059 Run for Your Lives it's the Socialist Nightmare

 

Aw, c’mon, donny boy. You wouldn’t know a socialist if one grabbed by the p*sssy and kissed you on the lips. But you handed a good laugh to several categories of people when you tried to instill fear of “the socialist nightmare” during a speech in Maryland this past weekend.

The first of these categories is real socialists. People who want the government to own and control everything.  Their laughter has a kind of face-of-a-clown vibe.  They know their dream of a peoples’ utopia has no chance of success here.

The second category: Anyone whose net worth is over a couple of million dollars.  They are laughing because they operate under the cover of your fear and will be better able to hide the dirty doings while your followers (it’s still followers, plural, right?) will dither and palpitate and pay even less attention to the obvious pickpocketing they endure.

The guy in the picture above is Daniel DeLeon, a founder of the Socialist Labor Party, college professor (Columbia) and union organizer.  He also was the last true American socialist and he’s been dead since 1914.

The best known American Socialist, Norman Thomas, was a third carbon copy of De Leon. He ran for President a bunch of times.  He got ten votes in each election.

The party?  It’s five old guys who moved from New York to the west coast when they finally realized no one else was in that thought balloon with them.

DeLeon’s Big Idea was creation of a universal industrial union.  Every worker. Every job.  That wasn’t likely in the early 20th century and it’s even less likely now.

That’s kind of hard to work. It would mean, for example, that when the steelworkers went on strike, so might the entire worldwide staff of Starbucks, Exxon and Microsoft.

If you think the most recent government shutdown was bad, just think of what it would be like if the repair folks at the natural gas company struck because of those Starbucks workers.

This is not an argument to disband unions. If anything, it’s a call to strengthen them so that when the Steelworkers strike, their needs can be met and you can still get a gas leak fixed before your house blows up.

Is Medicare “socialism?”  Some lumps masquerading as humans thought so before they started using it.  How about Social Security?  Social security would be flush if congress didn’t keep siphoning so much off the top to pay for their bloated staffs and bloated projects.  C’mon, boys and girls, take your money from your real bosses on K street.

SHRAPNEL:

--We note with sadness the passing of Ogden Reid, former editor/owner of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper and former congressman. Reid was 93 and the kind of Republican who believed in the founding principles of his party, unlike the shrill knee jerk trump worshiping collection of walking dead it has become. He ran a great paper and he was the kind of Republican many a Democrat could embrace and vote for, the kind we could use a few hundred more of today.

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

Comments?: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2058 Unsafe at Any Crossing

2058 Unsafe at Any Crossing

New York Times

HICKSVILLE, NY (Wessays ® Wire) -- You can’t cure stupid.  Especially when it’s mixed with the aftermath of a few hours in a bar.

In Westbury on New York’s Long Island the other day, three men left a bar, then drove to the ground level Long Island Railroad crossing, drove around the lowered gates where big red lights were blinking and bells were ringing. These warnings are “impossible” to miss. While on the tracks, two trains, one heading east and the other heading west hit the car and killed the people in it.

In Westbury, you say?  But the dateline says “Hicksville.”

Well, yes. In 1965 a similar accident took place there.  There were many more ground level crossings then.  A still-green radio reporter dispatched to that scene all those years ago arrived to find the remains of five teenagers on the ground, their convertible mashed on the track.  Some of the bodies were… incomplete.

It convinced the reporter to remain indoors.

The point here is that these things happen a lot.  Even now, with much of the railroad “scheduled” for elevation by the dysfunctional, cash strapped money downspout called the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, the MTA.

To a layman, the fault here was obviously with the driver and his passengers.  But there’s a bigger issue:  If Long Island were one municipality, it would be the second largest city in the country. Seven-point-five million people in the four existing geographic counties, about half that if you don’t count the parts technically within New York City limits.  A lot of people.

And you can’t run trains at 80 mph at ground level and not have a lot of accidents.  The LIRR is 185 years old.  When the various smaller railroads that comprise it were built, much of the area was vacant. Putting the whole thing above ground seemed ridiculous.  But as the population boomed after World War II, it began to dawn on the then-owners, the Pennsylvania Railroad that crossings had to be elevated.

That’s a forever process as they courted the dozens of municipalities whose lives would be disrupted by construction and who’s widely varying building codes had to be met. And it’s expensive. New rolling stock, new switches, signals, platforms and power lines.  The state took it over in 1965.

No passenger railroad makes money.  No subway. No municipal bus line. No monorail. None, zero. And no owner wants to spend a penny more than the minimum to keep the wheels (and mag-lifts) going.

Long Island is a 110-mile-long sand bar, a glacial dump from the end of the most recent ice age.  That’s a lot of railroad crossings. That’s the bad news. The good news is the railroad is in such poor condition that they can’t push many of those trains at speeds that would kill a slow moving dog or cat let alone destroy an automobile.  But “not many” doesn’t mean “every.”

The best way to fund the rest of the elevation is to cut the jobs held by the cousins, uncles, aunts, wives, husbands, friends and other hangers-on who populate the political system and use that money to save the lives of the morons who drive past the closed gates and ignore the warning lights and bells that work most of the time at most of the crossings.

Note to those who live in territory served by the LIRR’s sister railroad, Metro-North.  Yeah, you have the same troubles.  But this latest execution took place just this past week.

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

Correspondence to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2057 The Oscars

2057 The Oscars

Hollywood had a grand old time patting itself on the back the other day.  But when a sugar-coated piece of nonsense called “The Green Book” won picture of the year, the audience, such as there was of it -- both in the seats and in front of their TVs -- was stunned.

It’s about a road trip. A white and out of work nightclub bouncer goes to work for a touring black piano player.  They are given “the Green Book,” which during Jim Crow days told black showmen and women where they could get food and shelter on the road.

One hundred 30 minutes of feel-good drivel.

Spike Lee, the black director walked out of the ceremony when his two entries failed to make the top spot. So long, Spike.  You should know Hollywood by now.

The TV program got its lowest ratings in a while, maybe ever.  The broadcast was slightly less boring and went into less overtime than usual because there was no host.

There was no host because they guy originally picked, “comedian” Kevin Hart, was found to have tweeted anti-gay stuff on Twitter years ago. Oh my!  

They save a lot of time when they don’t have some man or woman get up and do schtick to compete with the oh-so-overlong “thank you” s that winners babble out.

As an ordinary customer, it’s hard to evaluate some theater-borne movies these days.  The big screen is an endangered species.  You now need opera glasses to see the tiny screen from the back row of the 23 screen Imperial Movies viewing rooms.

If you want to see a movie on a small screen, get a 12 inch flat panel and Netflix.  The popcorn you make in your microwave oven, the Bon Bons you take out of your freezer and the Raisinettes you buy at the supermarket are way cheaper than what you get at the “theater.”

And the Taser folks are building a wonderful new device, a popcorn and candy detector.  They wand you on the way into Viewing Room 18 and if you set off the alarm, the ushers usher you into an “interview booth,” where you are required to fork over your hidden box of Jujubes or face a no-knock, no-warrant strip search.

The prototype of this gadget wouldn’t bother with those niceties. They’d simply zap you with relatively mild 50-thousand volts, then confiscate.  But tests on the kind of rodents that inhabit some theater food stands resulted in too many dead mice. So they took away the auto-zapper part but left the detector wand.

Remember the slogan “Movies are Better than Ever?”  Well, if that were ever true, it certainly isn’t now.  But the special effects and animations are.

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

Comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2056 Nutrition Labels for Talk Radio

Air supply for talk radio

Talk shows should come with nutrition labels. Or at least with ingredient lists.  What to put on them? 

Well, for that we can turn to beauty products. Putrefied water and lots of chemicals you never heard of and can’t pronounce.  Oh, wait. That’s purified water.

Start the talker ingredient list with hot air.  Then ask yourself “what are the minimum daily requirement of lies, deceptions, misstatements, calls-to-arms, old-time religion, false alarms, science bashing and ads for miracle cures, superfoods, debt consolidation loans, payday loans and thought-free thinktanks?

As usual, the federal trade and federal communications agencies are behind the times.  The FTC has established no standard for the above ingredients.  The FCC lets anyone say anything as long as it’s not bathroom wall grade obscenity.

Most of it is yelling fire in a sparsely populated theater: “The socialists are coming. One if by land, two if by air.”  It’s almost always by air. They’ll confiscate your guns. They’ll bankrupt the country, they’ll let people with brown skin overrun your neighborhoods and impregnate your daughters.

All the while, they’ll try to sell you the American Dream.  Build your own business. Live independently. Own it and zone it.

They’ll teach you how to “save” your “soul,” mostly by sending in donations.  

Of course, there’s no way to provide those labels.  But they could announce the figures before each program.  Maybe on one of those speeded up things that are the audible but not understandable versions of fine print.

Talk radio revived the flagging a.m. radio business, but now it’s killing it.  Station owners don’t have the money to build and maintain the staffs that locally focused, non-political programming requires.  They’re too busy putting their money in collecting more stations. 

There are technical reasons a.m. can’t reach the wide audiences they once did, but some can be overcome with a little help from regulators. There are reasons a.m. inherently can’t provide the sound quality of FM, Satellite and cable radio.  But sound problems can be at least partly improved.  That too requires spending money.

Ultimately, as the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys outlive their audiences, they will fall off the rating charts. And then what’s left?  Dead air?  In some cases, that would be health food instead of sugar and fat.  But that’s a hard sell to commercial clients.

SHRAPNEL:

--So, trump is going to hold a big shindig at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4th, featuring a speech by what he called “your favorite president, me,” and a big fireworks display. This is a campaign rally so the Democrats will have a chance for a counter-program. It will be called the Annual Macy’s celebration on a river in New York, will be bigger than trump’s and no politicians will deliver “elect me” speeches.

NOTE TO NEW READERS: this space intentionally declines to capitalize the “t” in “trump.”

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“Abraham Lincoln once posed the question: “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?” and then answered his own query: ‘Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.’ Abe would have felt lonely on Wall Street.” -- Warren Buffett in his annual letter to shareholders.

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

Comments to: wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019 (except the quotation.)