Diffusion proceeds from interior to top

Once upon a time I found out I was falling into the Milky Way.  At least that’s what the lavishly illustrated astronomy books from the library said was happening.  I saw a band of luminescent gray in the night sky, the stars sprinkled about tending to favor the regions near the band.  If there are beings out there in the galaxy, they do not know I exist.  The light has had insufficient time to get from me to them.  By the time it becomes possible that they might know, the fossil remains of the United States will be safely ensconced in rock, the sun a bit older and a bit hotter than it is today.  A curious thing about human perception of time, besides limitations on how much of it can be experienced by one person, is the steady compression of its intervals as reminiscence works back from the present.

Philosopher George Santayana said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Yet self-examination is difficult because we cannot see ourselves through anyone else’s eyes.  Our minds are simultaneously windows upon the world and secure prisons we will never leave.  Empathy allows us to imagine what someone else might be thinking and how this other person probably views us, but we cannot forget that empathy itself is a process going on in our own mind, not the other person’s.  And the fall into the Milky Way, something not obvious without observation through senses augmented by sophisticated optical instruments, shows us that the everyday perspective confronting us when we wake up in the morning has little to do with what is really going on in the world.  Within these limitations of sense and cognition I will attempt to describe myself.

The Story

The morning air was cool when I awoke at 4:5o today, turned on the fan, put my coffee mug of water in the microwave to heat, spooned grounds into a filter paper, and twisted.  I made myself wait until the coffee was ready to drink before lighting my first cigarette.  The peculiar method for preparing coffee follows from not owning a coffee maker:  This is not because I can’t afford one, but because my “kitchen” counter lacks sufficient space to accommodate it easily; besides, it’s simple to swirl a filter paper bag of grounds about in the hot water.  It usually takes me several cigarettes to get going each day.  The third cup of coffee concludes the day’s first ritual.  One thing different about today was a textbook with my coffee.  Schooling makes me feel like a kid again.  All these chicks, like, less than half my age and I’m not eligible to speak to them, but again, I haven’t tried.  Maybe I should.  The real bonus was that Junior had called from Kauai yesterday evening.

Modification of my integument is the second ritual.  This takes place in the shower, which in the weird hotel where I live, is not in my room, but down the hall.  No one is in the bathroom at 6:46 though steam in the air says that someone is already off to Labor Ready to see if he (probably, as only half dozen she’s live here) can get a ticket, or at least bum a cigarette if there is no work.  At least the heat and hot water always work.  Actually they work pretty damn good.  This can be considered a privilege in neighborhood settings where not all the rentals have heat and hot water.

Everything had evolved in curious parallel.  The eastbound Dog had stopped in family hometowns in Denver and Kansas City, but I had not contacted either of my parents, who did not know I was heading for Florida until I had been there a month.  There had been pangs of guilt at these two stops; I knew what I was doing was wrong, but the compulsion to take the trip would not be denied.

Drinking under the ficus tree for three weeks near the Airport Greyhound station in Miami.  Purchasing the Steel 211’s at the Top Stop on LeJeune Road, sneaking into their bathroom, then back to the ficus.  The ground was covered with its deciduous products; the tree was green in winter but shed a few leaves every day.  Yellow bell-shapes reared their heads in the grass beyond the carpet of ficus leaves.  The Miami Herald carried a story about the village of mostly black folks living on Miami Avenue beneath the Dolphin Expressway, with editorial commentary by Leonard Pitts.

The  Rain, dripping from the ficus to filter into limestone gravel.  The night beneath the viaduct into the airport terminal.  The scary walk into the downtown.  The Thanksgiving 2002 meal put on by the Rescue Mission there, on long tables set in the street, which had been cordoned off.  The wall of the building next door to the mission bore a garish mural in rap themes with fast cars, boomboxes, heads in profile.  The art was really good, almost professional, and no spray-painted tags adorned it.  I suppose anyone who dared would die.

We guests waited for our showers on makeshift furniture on what passed for a lawn.  Multiple voices in anger, hope, or despair drilled the difficult life of this lawn on that day.  Night, whistles, voices, a clack of wheels on concrete highway joins overhead.  The Milky Way was there, sight unseen in an arc-sodium colored sky, until the sun rose in a later eon.  The first, uncertain approach to the glass booth electrically controlling entry at the Salvation Army had been successful, and I stayed there all the way through.

Miss Betty in the sorting room, and the rest of Miami, treated me much better than I actually deserved.  The place was between Wynwood and Overtown; many Black folks went there for help.  They sort of took me under wing, noting I wasn’t quite cunning enough to keep safe in the neighborhood.  Nothing bad happened anyhow, leading me to believe city danger, while real, is relatively low provided one minds his own business, doesn’t run with a gang, and doesn’t look too flashy.  The Salvation Army’s patronage and funding are much stronger in Florida than out west, a significant fact as each of their operating organs, including the Adult Rehabilitation Centers, is expected to pay its own way.  The Miami center did not charge admission or even require advance arrangements.  However, beginning your second day there, you went to “work therapy” forty hours a week to earn your place.  This was fair.  It was clean and the food was pretty good for an institution relying in part on donated ingredients.  That’s an understatement:  The crew made it a luxury.  On awards night dinner was sirloin steak with trimmings.  I wish I could remember all the names, but dammit, most of my physical records are lost.  The floors were waxed and I could do that since the Job Corps had taught me.  Everyone dressed up in donated slacks, tie, and sport coat for chapel each Sunday.  After two months I overcame fear and went downtown to the library and read a picture book about the World Trade Center planes.

Milt was the counselor there.  He was about 70 years old with a soft, folksy voice and in your head you could see him puffing an old-fashioned pipe even though he didn’t smoke.  His strategy aimed to persuade “good” residents, ones who fit in, did what they were supposed to, to stay on center.  He was very skillful.  In his sessions, few guessed.  Everybody loved Milt.  He persuaded me.  Then he got sick and retired and died shortly afterward.

During the second year I was allowed to lead Bible study when Charles, one of the truck drivers, didn’t want to continue anymore.  Probably this was since I spent much time diligently seeking mastery of this text, a task always yet remaining unfinished.  The high point seems to have been the delegates’ trip to the Army’s convention because I soon found myself a bit disgruntled—it was obvious I was never going to establish an independent living situation in town and I hadn’t made payroll at the center, either.  I talk too slowly even by local standards.  Embarrassing, especially if you are an American, when you cannot do these things for yourself due to lack of money.  Or was it the empty feeling inside, the feeling no one can describe with words, the compulsion to take the trip?

Abandoning my apartment in September 2001 was really a stupid thing to do.  I flew to Kansas City to see my Mom on the day I did this.  I didn’t tell her anything, but she saw my roll.  The return flight was the Saturday before the planes were grounded.  I hung around town like a steadily less-welcome ghost for more than a year, and continued washing dishes at my job.  But then I left, since it was absolutely necessary to continue the fall.

Junior was there.  He is short for a Samoan, but he’s from Hawaii anyway.  They use garden hose and Rain Bird heads to water the lawns around the camp.  A bridge fashioned from a railroad flatcar spans the river, allowing access to the guest camping spots on the far side.  The men in camp live in a bunkhouse and there is a log cabin lodge decorated with stuffed elk heads and bear hides about fifty feet away.  I step away from the Norway spruce behind the house and head toward the lodge since the residents meet promptly at 8:00 a.m. and I need an hour to brew coffee in the industrial urn they use.  Actually I’d been up since 2:00 and had been out to gaze at the Milky Way and listen to the gentle rush of the water.  Its level was steadily trending down and it was still too early in the year for the crickets to start whirring at night.

Junior opened the meeting.  He told the rest of us guys that during the 17^th century the Pacific chiefdom of Tonga, bent upon expansion, had unsuccessfully attempted the amphibious invasion of Samoa, igniting a war that continues at background level today on the streets of Honolulu and other American cities.  Some of Junior’s kin had moved to the mainland.  Junior was in a gang, participating in a theater of the Tonga-Samoan war, now financed by drug and firearms deals, but perceiving him in danger, his eldest brother had flown out to Hawaii and brought him back eastward, to here of all places.  Hey, camp’s famous out of state lately.

If I cannot afford to die, then will they will wrap me in burlap, drop me into the trench, & dust with lime?

Materials in the Spiritual World

Affordable housing in expensive U.S. towns

About 30 years ago a rock band called The Police, who began by recycling protest themes from the 1960s but reached commercial fame after injecting travails of the defrauded lovelorn into their mix, claimed in a hit song that “We are spirits in the material world.”  A lot can happen in Saturn’s trip time around the sun, and has.

Martin Luther King (American pastor, 1929-1968) counted character in a colorless universe.

Candy Lightner took ethanol out of our spirituality in favor of DUI vigils—the driver who sends me cannonballing into the trees on impact will be texting while sober behind the wheel, and in some states, guilty of no more than improper lookout.  The banks took “liar loans” out from beneath our houses.  Boy, I wish I knew I could have walked up to a loan officer and got a $250,000 mortgage because the chemical engineering job I put on the application went unverified.  And we can’t recall just who was in Ulster musically:  Sting, or Bono?  Anyway, it seems an issue was needed to replace the then-stale collapse of the Berlin Wall.  Sinn Fein did declare a provisional armistice which has held since 1996.  In Northern Ireland you won’t get killed today on account of whether a railing separates you from the clergyman pouring the wine (Catholic) or not (Protestant), leaving your Sundays a bit more restful.

It’s not my intent to make light of problems that cause immense suffering elsewhere, nor minimize what should be gratitude that these problems have spared my tiny patch of our globe.  But that’s precisely the problem:  a huge number of issues activists have rendered us “aware” of, and the lack of a true material stake most Americans have in most of them.  Hence I don’t feel properly grateful.  That we’re aware of homelessness has hardly emptied the cardboard condo complexes beneath our cities’ viaducts.

The classical civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and others succeeded because the agenda was specific.  It is now illegal to deny someone a ballot, a desk at school, or a restaurant table according to skin color.  Hoping to ride the coattails, activists have multiplied the groups of beneficiaries and broadened the requested considerations to where they have become vague, unenforceable, or effecting preferential treatment for some at the expense of others.

So Occupy don’t like the 1% and their wealth, profits, and power.  Who are the 1%, and what are we supposed to do about them?  To secure their social welfare policies, European countries sensibly made participation universal.  Everyone is eligible.  Everyone pays taxes for it, not just the “rich.”  Elections are publicly financed.

Discrimination bans are easily circumvented.  As long as the secretary politely informs you that they’ve “found a better-qualified individual to fill the position,” you can’t prove your allegation that they didn’t want an old, toothless toad who might be living in an abandoned building next month.

Are you sure there isn’t a machine in the ghost?

We’ll have mandated domestic partner benefits and gay marriage with Heather in tow behind her two mommies.  That’s fine as far as it goes.  But what about the many who can’t get bennies on their own, and aren’t shacked up with someone to get under that partner’s employer’s umbrella?  We should quit making basic provisions like health care contingent on home situation or which employer you work for, especially in our society of fragmented household units and lonely people.  This won’t ever happen here—Obamacare, liberal enough the Tea Party may reverse it, is neither universal nor even requires employers to fund any insurance, as Fox News might want you to think.  It only penalizes pizza drivers who fail to keep a policy in force on their own dime, albeit hopefully choosing among a slate of regulated plans offered on a state exchange.

We’ll have so many defined groups entitled to so many “rights” that nary a “wrong” will loom over the horizon.  And we’ll have millions falling through the cracks in this edifice of fairness, yet paying through the nose to help the rest enjoy their rights.

In short, postmodern society has raised moral liberalism to a high art, ever sensitive to the diversity of culture and divinity we are to treasure.  However, spirits are made of matter and diversity brings no unity of purpose.

If you were born here, your first birthday would approach middle age.

And we need a common purpose.  America has lived beyond its means for over 40 years, financing current consumption by debt in government and household both.  Facing this day of reckoning, the economy is undergoing a structural shift likely to result in a prolonged retrenchment, though I suppose the shit will really hit the fan when the Chinese stop buying our bonds.  The scrabble for increasingly constrained national resources is on.  Meanwhile, our perverse mentality still calls for America in two wars while we all shop a land of chocolate lattés where no compromise in lifestyle aspirations is expected.

Arrowheads downgraded from bronze to zinc

Essentials first.  When folks are existentially secure in the physical universe, they can guard their sexual, racial, cultural, and supernatural zones of prerogative and preference adequately without the aid of meisters of political correctness.  Therefore, nearly everything else in the sphere of rights follows from a reasonably level economic allocation.  Nor need we equalize so much that a doctor paid no more than a dishwasher then has no incentive to study medicine, again as Fox News would like you to think—it’s enough for citizens to believe the ground between them and the Earth’s hot iron core won’t suddenly vanish someday, leaving them to drop.  It’s time this Saturn puts a little material in the spiritual on the next trip around the sun.

Meaning Unbidden

Ben Juarez, progressive 19th century president of Mexico, faced a problem with keeping his nation’s symbols intact.

In a blog I deduce from its style authored by a young lady—though admittedly here my stereotypy is a form of intellectual laziness—I encountered the question of why we need meaning in our lives (Meaning, Perceptual Understanding, 27 Mar. 2012).  This piece also cites a common conundrum which must be moved out of the way in order to attempt an answer.  Socrates (Greek, ca. 460-399 BCE) was noted for answering philosophical questions by asking his interlocutors to advance propositions he then promptly demolished through contrarian logic.  At least if Plato, who advanced plenty of weird notions of his own, can be trusted as the sole reporter.  So let’s take the plunge off the high dive.

Proposition:  The meaning of life is the meaning we attach to it.

Socratic counterexample:  Meanings we would prefer life not to have seem perfectly able to intrude when they are least welcome.  The less welcome and the more frightening, the more intense such meanings become.  It’s easy to dismiss concern for money as a petty materialistic orientation toward life, until the day your income is cut off and you realize the prospect of its resumption is dim.

This denizen of the USA’s dominant mechanical phylum has chrome wheels.

Suddenly obvious is that you are paralyzed in the American economy without money.  Also your value as a human being, which everyone asserts has nothing to do with how much money you have, turns out to have everything to do with this factor.  Abundant welfare doled out wastefully to poor of questionable standing in your former donor’s viewpoint now morphs into a plate of macaroni you walk a mile to obtain, at the one time of day it is available.  In consequence the formerly abundant vitamin C no longer makes its way into your body in sufficient quantity.  The meaning of a tooth you owned all your life increases urgently as scurvy undermines the periodontum beneath this precious little organ of hardness.

Semantics in spades, none of which you ever gave to life, have entered unbidden.  If ten years ago you were a patriot screaming death to ragheads who would so injure American dignity, the Twin Towers are changed into Bob Ross paintings on TV—the symbols of a capitalism where the dentist can’t treat you because he must make a living in the world’s most expensive land, and governance friendly to corporate profits decrees the second-tier jobs in our country shall provide no dental insurance.  If ten years ago your heart and soul ached for the little brown janitors trapped on the 99th floor, today you set your face against them in callousness, heart as hard as Pharaoh’s.

Symbol of private finance, the World Trade Center was publicly owned.

You see, these people arriving illegally in millions at our shores are thirty years younger than you, twice as fast and half again as strong.  They have supplanted you in the contemporary labor force.  Hardly conducive to an enlightened celebration of diversity.

You think, your mind generates heresies, you dare tell no one lest a fist smash the eyeglasses worth their weight in diamonds because you’re blind as a mole rat and they cannot be replaced.  And thus the symbols must be both private and self-censored besides not being voluntary.

When you die, this critter will get an opportunity.

The symbolism here runs predatory, the glint of sun flashing from the mirror windows of the car world.  Motion of metal behemoths stimulates the ommatidia of your bulbous compound eyes through which you see events in mosaic.  Color, speed, but no pattern.  The play of your tooth in its socket as it slips loose, soon to bring you one step closer to sporting the fleshy proboscis of a carrion fly.  Discovery, of what reduction to insect means.

Of course the symbols of our own perspective, controlled by the norm of rightness, reign in supreme disregard for whatever we might know intellectually as having contributed to the decline of our star.

When young, employments not taken seriously.  Crucial negotiating skills not developed.  Perhaps the brown folks are simply trying to better their condition.  Facts drown in oceans of self-pity, the foam an alphabet soup spelling futile pride.

Our argument by exposition should answer the question of why meaning is necessary for life.  Were it absent, we would be dead.

But I’ve forgotten all about the festival spirit due some attention on today’s date.

Namely, 5 de Mayo 1862 when Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza led troops who kicked some French butt.  It’s the big holiday in Mexico, emphasizing national pride with deft neglect of its futility.  This was all about money, too.  In the run up to the battle, President Juarez felt that his countrymen and women should not have to shoulder the enormous burden of Mexico’s sovereign debt owed mostly to European bankers, deciding to repudiate it.  The French naturally took exception and sent an expeditionary force westward to install an emperor in Mexico, the famous Maximillian, on the presumption this guy might elevate debt service to correct priority in Mexico’s public policy.

Dial now. Their cell phones will ring in about 1500 months.

The French accurately judged the U.S. unlikely to intervene while preoccupied with civil war, yet underestimated the difficulties of a military campaign in mountainous and tropical theaters overseas.  Hence the Maximillian coronation was held up until 1864.  The peasants got a bit of respite.  Later they broke their backs paying the foreign bankers, who did not remain French for long—with civil war ended, the Norteamericanos were free to help their good neighbors eject the emperor so the caudillos could return to power and the money flow to New York instead.  Does something here ring a bell whose tune sounds like Iraq?

Cinco de Mayo reference:  Latin American history.  About.com

Battle of Puebla 5 May 1862:  Latin American history.  About.com

Maximillian:  Latin American history.  About.com

The Merry Windsor

Social service advocates have long drawn attention to the decline of the American SRO—single room occupancy, a highbrow term for the flophouse once euphemistically called a hotel for “gentlemen.”  The virtual extinction of these establishments is cited as a cause for homelessness by gentrification.  This is because, while the rooms were nasty, they were very cheap.  Reasonably we think a nasty room in a building where the communal toilet is down a hall reeking of urine nonetheless beats a refrigerator carton for shelter in winter.

The Windsor, home to generations of penurious citizenry

So I lied in my last post by saying I hardly ever put anything on WordPress anymore, but only three days later can’t resist telling the story of Ogden, Utah’s Windsor Hotel.  Opened around World War I, the Windsor didn’t smell like piss the last time I visited.  A small recommendation for a tiny brick box with sheet metal siding home to 24 guys, a blast furnace in summer, its rickety wooden deck attached to the rear threatening to crash onto the porch below any minute.  By 2007 it had bedbugs, too.

This spring it’s a long-vacant shell, surrounded by weeds on an otherwise attractive historic, Wild West downtown block used to shoot the movie Three O’clock High and the TV series Evergreen.  The strippers didn’t even bother to put up plywood in the windows after removing the panes.  Presumably snow blows through the holes to give the interior a white carpet matching that outside, if it’s chilly enough to prevent melting.

To see how this state came about, we must explore the nexus of financial flimflam operant in a town where the city council acts as redevelopment agency with absolute power to condemn property, a mayor who wanted to erect a Swiss-style cable car gondola over the city skyline, and a historic preservation district sporting rules inflexible regardless of consequence.

Lift Ogden’s famous but nonexistent gondola

In 2006, Mayor Matthew Godfrey, whose gondola (from downtown to a mountainside city golf course he intended to privatize) had just been quashed, was anxious to open new luxury office space in “his” quaint historic district.  Before this could happen, the bums in the Windsor had to go.  When finished, the rent could then be much higher than the $240 a month commanded from each resident there.  Hence the city council, all kiss-and-make-up after taking away Godfrey’s Swiss toy, acted as redevelopment agency to force the Windsor’s sale (or cajole; I’m unsure which is more accurate here).  The city also gave Ogden Properties LLC $334,000 to help them buy and convert the building.

When construction work began in August 2007, the Windsor’s residents were allowed only a week’s notice to find other housing and leave.  Some of them had lived there for years, but Utah law has an express eviction clause if no lease governs.  Except the work stopped a few weeks later, once the place had been stripped down.  And unfortunately, by October 2008, after months of haggle and delay, Ogden Properties had been unable to get a variance from the historic preservation folks to install a penthouse on which the project was contingent, and the subprime mortgage meltdown recession had hit as well.  Ogden Properties walked away from the now-gutted Windsor and declared bankruptcy.  The city never got a dime of its money back.

Jane Q. Publius can still golf at Mt. Ogden. It might have been otherwise.

Thus on farce went the demise of Ogden’s second-to-last SRO accepting tenants directly from the street, coincidentally next door to my own building, which is now the last such SRO.  The scythe of eviction has probably been stayed from my building over the years because it has a HUD tax subsidy for low-income housing.

However, I suspect that destruction arriveth here shortly.  Ogden’s new mayor stopped by this January.  Then, a couple weeks ago a crew came in armed with tape measures and cameras and documented the condition of the premises meticulously.  The management are mum about what’s going on.  You need be no Karl Rove to guess—the only thing to be said is that, due to the HUD contract, I’ll receive at least 30 days’ warning when the order to move out comes.

Let me gaze into my crystal sphere to advance a prediction.  The economy has recovered a bit, yet hard to imagine finding a dozen lawyers and architects to fill both the Windsor and my building.  I see two empty shells on this block, perhaps ere the leaves yellow again, right following the portentous solar transit of Venus that will entertain us June 5.

Like Venus, the indigent transit toward darkness beyond the edge.

The two small local shelters stand unlikely to accommodate 70 people descending to the street at one time.  The Greyhound stop is only two blocks away, or for those lacking ticket money, a nearby rail yard beckons.  Amtrakking the freights is today a felony crime, though.  Perhaps a few tenants will find places they can double up as roomies at fourfold their current rent.  Yes, rents have gone up while purchase prices were going down, since it’s harder to get real estate credit from banks turned stingy.

I wrote Mr. Godfrey in 2009 to ask whether plans were afoot to completely clear “undesirables” from downtown Ogden.  He denied it, but noted in his reply that the rooms in my building needed to “transition to market rate units” and that the city would be developing a new homeless shelter to replace and expand one of the two now extant.  He’s out of office but his planning legacy apparently remains intact.  The rest of us bums will go but no new shelter expansion will be funded, as far as I can tell.  Progress, manifest destiny-wise, reigns supreme.

I skipped two semesters and just re-enrolled to start this summer again.  I wonder what being in college while also homeless will work out like.  The axe will drop with classes well underway, too late for withdrawal without penalty.  I won’t drop out; I still have a good GPA undeserving of blatant sully.

I’m praying my astrology is faulty.  If so, the sigh of relief shall be palpable.  Whatever happened, Monty Python would look on the bright side of life.  There are no bedbugs outdoors.

Snuggle up!

References

Godfrey, M.  (2009 Oct. 12).  Personal communication.

Ogden Standard-Examiner.  (2007 Dec. 28).  ’07 through the lens [Editorial].

Schwebke, S.  (2008 Apr. 11).  Windsor’s redo takes shape.  Ogden Standard-Examiner.

Schwebke, S.  (2008 Sep. 6).  Work on 25th St. hotel at stake—Ogden City Council to decide if buildings may exceed 45-foot-tall rule.  Ogden Standard-Examiner.

Schwebke, S.  (2008 Sep. 29).  Windsor renovations dead.  Ogden Standard-Examiner.

Africa’s Otherworldly War, Right Here

Railway bridges sheltering living things in damp soil abound in lower America.

French journalist and political science scholar Gérard Prunier described Western society as afflicted by a curious state of low pain tolerance (Africa’s World War, Oxford, 2009, p. 26).

Eager to insinuate accusations of official racism, immigrant advocates draw analogy to the civil rights era out of parallel by forgetting that in law, the segregated pupils of 1957 held unqualified right to equal schools while immigration has always been considered a privilege.  Of course nothing is asserted directly.  This rhetorical strategy invokes the modern collective self-guilt emergent in rich countries after colonialism and World War II, which unfortunately garners diminished argumentative force today.  The Public arena hardly remains a place where automatic victory follows humanitarian cause.  Continuing to wash ideologies in a solvent of naïveté means not much progress for immigrants is likely to ensue here.

Venus herself.

This is only one unsurprising example of the illogic circulating today.  Concern in the  abstract, from many young idealists who do not remember the 1960s, is easily come by.  Solutions are not.

The House Agriculture Committee has passed on a bill that will probably end food stamp assistance for nonelderly households without dependent children.  (See New York Times, Apr. 19, 2012, p. A19)  I can already hear the consequent whining, loud and clear over the cats who also sound their views under the bridge here,should this become law.  I suppose there’s plenty of food in the dumpster behind the tony little boutiques on 25th Street.  If you have tools to break the locking bar which secures the lid.  Regarding the bill, House Speaker John Boehner says we have to decide now or kiss the cherished programs goodby anyway, as expected in our fair city of Washington, home to dumpsters endowed with shredded paper to sleep on after the meal.  Rush Republican.

We’re getting so much more politically correct that our discourse, down to tone of voice properly respectful to minorities, females, the disabled, cleverly enables the disadvantaged in this country to slide on their merry way down the drain.

I don’t post here much anymore.  This is the first time in over a year.  I’m unemployable and do not get government benefits, hence daily survival takes most of my time–the Tea Party has overflown the library computer being used to compile this ditty without noticing.  The best place to put my bones down might be near that tree, where the cats won’t be frightened away by my proximity when they arrive to explore them.

Surface of Venus at Venera 13 site.

Nor do I consider myself a victim,lavishing much unpleasantry over the probability of grains running out from my half of the sandglass.  Instead, I find it pleasant to contemplate the surface of Venus at it appeared to the Soviet Russian lander Venera 13, which lasted about an hour in its little hell, time enough for snapshots on an 850 degree afternoon in 1982.  The sky is orange, the rocks glow enough at night for this to be visible from Earth-based telescopes.  Right now Venus is high and very bright in the evening sky, following the sun down in the west.  In a few weeks it will pass between the Earth and the sun, creating a transit.  This also happened in 2004, but generally the opportunities are at least a century apart, since the alignment usually isn’t precise enough.  With a specialized telescope that can look directly at the sun, Venus will look like a tiny round dot crossing the solar disc.  The last pair of transits excited astronomers in 1874 and 1882, because it allowed them to get a precise orbital fix, and learn that Venus has a thick atmosphere.  So thick, in fact, you must dive about 2/3 mile into the Pacific depths to reach the same ambient pressure here.  And it’s all carbon dioxide, doing its bit for global warming in our solar system.

Prunier’s book was mostly about the horrid mess in Rwanda in 1994, and its sequel in the Congo.  I’m very fortunate not to have had to witness anything like that.  At that date, there was lots of anguished hem-hawing on this side of the Atlantic, which didn’t seem to hinder the machete hackfest much.  About 800,000 people died in the first affair, in less than four months in a country with only 7 million folks.  Given the farmers there try to scratch a year’s family dinner tables from 5,000 square feet of dirt, perhaps the Tea Party should send them all our superfluous food stamps.  Can they swipe the special welfare credit card at Walmart Kigali?

Hopefully God grants best luck to Mr. Prunier and friends’ search for the truth that as Americans become ever more sensitive, callous disconnect from reality ever deepens behind the tinted Hummer windshields.

Well, best cut.  Need to call mother and don’t want to downgrade her mood.  Cheerio.

The half-life of the homeless.

May is here.  In Utah, the green stuff is finally coming to adorn the trees with our first flush of really warm weather.  But something is odd.  The “road warriors” who usually show up about this time of year seem to be missing this year.  Did Mayor Godfrey run them out of town?  He ran the truckers and the local transit company off his beloved 25th street by realigning their authorized routing.  The last two of the “ratty” homeless hangouts in this neighborhood should be gone within a year or so.  I will be gone with them, too.  The story of the Windsor Hotel will be a subject for next time.

However, we don’t want fallacy to strike.  Around 1897, Madame Curie and her husband investigated a substance called Radium that emitted mysterious rays.  Unfortunately, she inadvertently ingested too much radioactive material in the course of her researches, and died somewhat prematurely of cancer as a result.  But thanks to her and her buddies, we now have the concept of half-life.  To wit:  If there are 1000 homeless blokes under the Dolphin flyover today, and none move into or out from this hermetically sealed system, and ten years from now there are 500 survivors left, then the half-life of this homeless population is ten years.  This assumes that the homeless “decay” in the way that radioactive atomic nuclei do.  A nucleus does not remember its past history.  In particular, it does not know how old it is.  Therefore, the probability that it will “die” today is not influenced by time, and a “very old” nucleus has the same survival odds as a “newborn.”

Obviously human lifetimes do not work this way.  A population consisting solely of 90-year-olds will die off much faster than does one of younger people.  But in a short run of time, say a year, or five years, the mortality in a human population can be modeled approximately by the same exponential curve that defines the half-life of Radium’s most common isotope, which is about 125,000 years.  But for the homeless, the time constant in the function is enormous by comparison.

This brings us to Zastrow’s (2009) claim that life expectancy for homeless males is only 47 years, because the average age at time of death in cases known to coroners where homeless people have died is 47 years.

With her bluish bottle of radium, Marie Curie (1867-1934) did not have to worry about homelessness. If her landlord wanted to dispossess her, revenge via poison was available.

I hope it’s not really this bad since I’ve already turned 47 and could be on borrowed time if so.  But a couple of things here.  Expected value, such as life expectancy, is a mean, not a half-life, which is a median.  For things like Strontium-90 that die exponentially, the mean life is 42 years though the half-life is only 29 years.  The reason for this is the half-life comes when half of the guys are gone, but the mean life is figured by summing all the individual lifetimes and dividing by the population size to get an average.  For Strontium-90 nuclei, half disappear in 29 years, but the average is influenced by a few gray-haired Strontii who might make it for much longer, say 200 years or more.  Since human beings decay on a roughly inverse logistic curve where most of the mortality occurs in the upper age ranges and there is a practical cutoff after about 1 century, the mean is actually shorter than the half-life.  For newborn Americans in general, the mean life is estimated at 77 years but the half-life at 79.  But for the half who make it to 79, time is running out and most have less than 10 years left.

Now for the matter of homeless people and their early graves.  Zastrow’s facts are correct.  Medical examiner dossiers on street deaths of homeless persons did indeed show the average age at time of death to be 47 years.  But to infer from this a life expectancy for all homeless people to be only this long is a fallacy.  The deaths cited did not take place in a closed system.   Many street people eventually leave the streets, still alive.  If they get an apartment, or even if they go to prison or some other facility having a roof, then they are removed from the population being averaged.  It is likely that persons who are homeless today but will later find somewhere to live will fare better, living to ages closer to what we consider normal.  For example, if 5% of a homeless population will die on the street (at 47), while the remaining 95% die somewhere else (at 64), then a better estimate for expected age at death might be about 63.  This is what Zastrow either overlooks, or chooses not to tell his readers.

Oh, well…  Poop on it overnight and take two aspirin in the morning when the hangover is on.

Zastrow, C.  (2009).  Understanding human behavior and the social environment, (8th ed.).  Brooks/Cole.

Gourmet crow eaten after government fails to shut down.

As a major-league political prophet, my batting average is now 0.00 and dropping.  It is possible that Mr. Boehner has some ability to tame his right flank, after all.  Therefore, I must eat my last post.   Not so bad, if you know a good chef who creates this dish.  Yet, I still believe things will get tougher rather than simply returning to business as usual.  Conservative Republicans are correct in stating that federal spending has gone out of control during the last 5 or 6 years.  The national debt was pegged at approximately $8,000 billion as recently as 2005; now it’s $14,000 billion, a near-doubling in just 6 years.  This means that Uncle Sam owes bondholders about $45,000 for each man, woman, and child in the United States.  That’s quite a ways in the hole considering there is relatively little to show for it.  Much, if not most, of the debt represents years of current consumption of goods and services, particularly health care, by Sam’s beneficiaries.

Another thing that is happening is that overseas lands who run current account surpluses with the United States, China usually being named though most of our trading partners are also dancing at this festival, are buying our national debt with the consumer goods they keep sending us, which no longer are manufactured here.

Do you suppose a trillion dollars in dimes is enough to fill this yawning chasm on Mars?

It is quite clear this kind of finance is not sustainable and public finance is going to face tough sledding for a long time to come.  What’s curious, though, is the umpteenth proposal for a big tax cut, mainly favoring investors, extremely high earners, and corporations, that we’re told is going to stimulate economic growth.  Taxation does have some influence on investment decisionmaking, but research consistently indicates that investors consider other things as well.  Existence of an untapped market and technical feasibility, not income tax that will be owing on gains, remains the single major determinant of whether an investor will fund a new product or service.

So, if we go too Democratic, Uncle Sam may go bankrupt for lack of willingness to impose pain on his beneficiaries, who are primarily retired folks.  If we go Tea, Uncle Sam will go bankrupt because he won’t collect revenues but still will not be all that willing to impose pain on his beneficiaries, excepting perhaps the politically unpopular and undeserving “welfare queens” and “disabled” young drifters you see sailing their yachts above Pineview Dam.  These ne’er-do-wells will be thrown to the dogs with a hearty good riddance from the ideological merrymakers taking over our country’s political thought.  But the savings realized in an absolute social welfare cutoff that exempts Social Security and Medicare amount to only $170 billion per year on the outside.  This includes funding to education, transportation, and many other services in addition to what most people call “welfare.”   TANF, the “welfare mother” program, by itself costs Uncle Sam $16.5 billion per year, and the states kick in another $9 billion of their own matching funds.  Hardly a drop in the ocean of spending we’re looking at.  We’re talking about $1,000 billion deficits every year right about now.

I think that these social programs will have to bear some part of the impact of budget correction.  In fact, I would advocate freezing them at current levels for five years, even though this will hurt some of the needy since demand is likely to continue increasing.  However, taxes also must be raised.  And people who draw benefits from Uncle Sam who also already have adequate or better income of their own from private sources, whom the Tea Party would never think of asking to shoulder any part of the burden, need to take the coming hits as well, along with everyone else and everything else.   The public  financial situation in the United States is only moderately dire, and folks will come out just fine if costs of its resolution are distributed fairly between business and households at all levels of society.  The Tea Party plan, where investors can get trillions of dollars in federal bailouts for corrupt corporate and financial activities that went bust on them, while taking home millions of dollars for the “service” of losing their clients’ money, and then being excused from taxpaying, is simply unacceptable.

Sorry, Mr. Arpaio. You are spending way too much on frivolous inmate creature comforts here.

Oh, and by the way, Hitler’s birthday was yesterday.  Happy 122nd to him.  Even this thug looked pretty good in his starched Teutonic jacket.  In other national news, things look pretty good. In Phoenix, Arizona, USA, offenders live in tents while incarcerated in Sheriff Arpaio’s jail in the great outdoors.  Arpaio prides himself on the pink underwear included with the jail duds for new inmates.  Because these drawers are pink, that means they’ll be returned when the blokes leave.  Maricopa County doesn’t believe in subsidized skivvies for the criminalized homeless.   Arpaio does not give tents to departing offenders, either.   Neither does Adult Probation. Released offenders who have nowhere to go and cannot get a bed can check the dumpster.  Provided the dumpster is not locked, it may contain a sheet of cardboard.   ‘Least it doesn’t rain much in Phoenix.  Remaining to be seen is whether the Tea Party will spare the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in next year’s budget showdown.

A brief update: The world is changing fast. Your life no longer has any intrinsic value.

“I was homeless from the 3rd January 2009 to the 27th of April 2010. I slept in a threadbare sleeping bag, under the stairs or in the costume cupboard…” (quoted from post, Sturdy Blog, 2011, http://sturdyblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/nick-clegg-a-tourist/) .

And to think this guy wasn’t saddled with a serious mental illness, and the bulbous compound eyes that are the observable stigmata of such, to boot, as he fended for himself on the pavement.  And he lives in England, where social services are generally a bit more available than here in Utah, though Mr. Cameron & Party may change all that if they keep it up.

The nearly full moon at perigee. A putative cause of madness and despair.

The social and political climate worldwide is shifting toward a regime in which individual human lives no longer have intrinsic value. Only marketable skills and/or possession of social connections will matter in the future.  This is a logical consequence of population growth and intensified competition for the planet’s resources, combined with the cut-throat variety of laissez-faire and crony capitalisms that are taking over politically.

I am studying to be a social worker.  But I talk funny.  Which already augurs inauspiciously for the start of my career at age 47, when my mates already have well-established track records.  My resume doesn’t look so great, either.  The curriculum vitae include many items guaranteed to make a prospective employer blanch.  And to top it all off, the kinds of things that social workers do in the United States are being “defunded” by 82 Tea Party Patriots who are able to effectively control the House of Representatives and who are engaging in take-no-prisoners ideological warfare against government as it has been known since the Roosevelt Administration in 1935.

In blue steel, a trusty sidearm for military men. They won't use it on you. The ammo's too expensive.

The government shutdown that will begin next week will not last just for days, or for weeks, like the Clinton-era spectaculars with Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich is pretty lame in comparison to the right wing of his party, which includes such Celestial Seasonings stalwarts as Mike Lee (Sen.) and Jason Chaffetz (H.R.) from the Utah delegation.  This pair of fine fellas supplanted Utah Republicans who were insufficiently conservative in the 2010 election.  Appropriate for a state whose legislature has declared the Browning .45 M1911 Automatic to be the State Firearm.  (I was personally in favor of a more aggressive gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle that mowed so many Germans down in World War II.)  This shutdown will last for as long as it takes to force Obama and the Senate to cave in, even if this means until 2013, when Tea Party candidates will probably have swept the elections.  (They will agree to some kind of stopgap continuation for Social Security and Veteran’s Affairs so as not to alienate reliable voters.)

As the prospect of no job, no housing (I live in a subsidized place and lack the physical fitness needed to work 60 hours weeklyat a hard labor job, which is what renting without assistance will likely require), and somewhere around $25,000 in student loans outstanding, catch up to me in a leisurely way, I feel the mosaic of bulbous compound eyesight entering my own consciousness.  I now am a fly upon the wall, getting smaller and smaller each day.

Best wishes.

Sweden, it’s your turn next.  The revenge of Julian Assange, perhaps?

Smoking and the mind.

Quitting is very hard.  But it is worth it.

Smokers are particularly afflicted with guilt today.  Don’t delay indefinitely, but screw what everyone else, especially nonsmokers, thinks.

A smoker's life: 435,000 butts.

“I thought I would quit later, when the time was right and …”    That’s how it’s always been with me.  Except, later never seemed to get there.  There’s never a right time to quit smoking.  I only speak for myself on that because I couldn’t really plan quit dates.  I would mark them down and then fail to honor them when they arrived.  The “big book” used in the AA groups, written in 1939 for alcoholics trying to stop drinking, suggested doing it one day at a time, even years after stopping, lest overconfidence or pride intervene.  You can fail right now by running out for a package of smokes.  But I just know you are not going to do that during the next 24 hours.  Somehow, if we don’t fear the next 24 hours, we are okay.  At least I seem to be.  There is no fear in love.  Good night.

Nicotine is always there, like a little demonic monkey friend who sits on your shoulder and whispers the sweetest things into your ear.  Meanwhile, I owe this fella a pair of lungs and a heart.  Plus a bladder, a few blood vessels, and my hide.

Then there’s this thing where the tobacco manufacturing and distribution system, and the government entities that tax this “sin,” jack the people who can least afford it (i.e., the poorest segment of the population) for every last nickel and dime they have by imposing $5 a pack in taxes on top of the manufacturer’s $5 a pack price tag before the tax.  This makes cigarettes today $100 a carton, versus $5.50 per carton when I started in 1979 and already seemed to notice how they were “going up” even back then.  Obama’s Congress passes a dollar hike.  Then the state passes a dollar hike the following year.  Then the manufacturer price increase comes to help pay off the state Medicaid lawsuit settlement, proceeds of which not a cent goes toward care for either smokers or Medicaid recipients, at least in Utah.  Then the retailer tacks another 75 cents on for himself.

Meanwhile, the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of government regarding tobacco is astonishing, more appropriate for a tin-hatted third world dictatorship than for one of the world’s most developed nations.  In 1964 came the original Surgeon General’s warning.  The price and tax hikes began then, at first very gradually but the pace always escalating as the years went by.  In 1971, Marlboro Man waved his stetson for the last time on The Lone Ranger and Philip Morris now printed on each packet, “The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.”  In 1976, when I started, a pack cost 55 cents, the federal tax was 8 cents, and the Utah state tax was 17 cents.  In 1988 Surgeon General Everett Koop declared nicotine addictive and smokes were about #1.25 a pack.

Now you can’t smoke hardly anywhere legally anymore, though it remains perfectly legal to pay the extortionists for your fix.  Smash and grab car burglaries are being reported in Salt Lake City, perpetrated by teenagers trying to get money, not for dope, but for cigarettes.

Since March 12, I have been on strike in rebellion against this state of affairs.  I’m a long way from out of the woods and do not know whether I will succeed in quitting smoking for good.  But so far, I haven’t smoked since then.  More reasons why I will not smoke another cigarette today.

The blue "O" marks that crater on Mars. Unfortunately, insufficient oxygen to keep your cigarette lit.

1)I cannot become a social worker and counsel about addictions unless I am “living the life” which means chemical-free, including tobacco & nicotine.

2)Costs and damage done from > 30 yrs. heavy smoking.

3)When I see oxygen bottles & coughing in older folks, and then light up, I feel guilty.

4)When I smoke where youth can see me, I know I am a piss poor example to them.

5)Nicotine is a tempter, like an evil spirit.

6)I want to smell lilacs at Valley Camp this May.  I want to taste good food.

7)My blankets, carpets, clothes, & body all STINK.

8)My vision, breathing, & energy level are better without smoking.  Even now they are a little better.

9)I quit before for up to 7 months and relapse.  Relapses hurt because they erode ability to close door finally on smoke & not look back.  I don’t want to keep relapsing.

10)I have committed to people about quitting & want credibility.  They understood and forgave earlier relapses, but will eventually become jaded if I can’t show that I mean business.

11)Mom loves me.

The bulge in the center of NGC 5194 is a cat’s eye.

I ran into a blog (LifeWith4cats, 2011 Apr. 2) claiming that kitty cats “get a bad rap in this world.”  I have a hard time imagining anyone misanthropic  (ailurophobic?) enough to perpetrate really bad press about felix domesticus, a critter who has also been around since the start of civilization at the Pyramids.  That makes her a relative newcomer, though she does descend from a venerable line of carnivore going back about 40 million years or so.  And I suppose I must concede there are blokes who hate cats, as opposed to merely having allergic reactions to their dander.  Fortunately, I’m in neither of these categories.

This creature has never known any place but home in the round window.

The logic of first anthropomorphizing, and then targeting for hatred, this remarkable denizen of the Milky Way escapes me.  Cats do not look or think like people, at least superficially, instead preferring an agenda of their own.  People are big on face recognition, devoting a quantity of cortical tissue that exceeds a domestic cat’s entire brain solely to the purpose of recognizing, remembering, and recalling other human faces.  The scleras of cat’s eyes are mostly hidden behind  the eyelids, tending to conceal the direction toward which kitty’s eyes are aimed at the moment.  Crows take this concealment of gaze direction to ultimate enigma by having black sclera and  black iris and black pupil all, so no one can tell who the bird is looking at.  Human beings are ever exceptional in size, crafty clumsiness, and the enormous helmetfull of nerve tissue dedicated to sheer stupidity, via sophisticated shenanigans conducted over simply too many years per individual for the rest of Gaia to suffer their tread upon her face.  They have white scleras and wide palpebral fissures that advertised who’s lookin’ at who far enough away for George Washington to tell his troops to hold their fire until they could see the damn things approaching.

But I’m drifting far from topic here.  Having made cats as much like little people as we can, literally—tabby padding about on paws downsized a bit compared with the bobcat’s squirrelcatchers,  some of us arrogant hogs choose to subject the poor critters to endless ire and ridicule.

I dare say cats are better at validating their masters than their masters are.  The soft purr of tabby as she rubs your ankles chin-first, actually the primal roar of the  contented lion recumbent, is genuine.  When a big cat is stalking you with the intent of securing her evening meal, you see and hear nothing until it is too late.  People are not quite so honest in their affairs.  When another human being is planning to destroy you, he smiles first:

Henry VI of England was almost certainly mentally ill. In Shakespeare, he discusses murder, though he did not have bulbous compound eyes.

“Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile,  And cry, ‘Content,’ to that which grieves my heart,  And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions.  I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;  I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;  I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,  And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.  I can add colours to the chameleon,  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murd’rous Machiavel to school.  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?”—Shakespeare, Wm.  (ca. 1600/1914).  Act III, scene II, lines 186-197, The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth. London, England:  Oxford University Press.

Emblem of the House of York during the Wars of the Roses. White won.

Could Henry VI imagine that his fate would be to meet the garrote in the Tower of London in 1471?  Edward IV was victor to avenge good government advocate Richard of York who had fallen in battle.   Has our society improved much then?  Not too many garrotes, but box knives work well on commercial airliners, and the country flying the airliners has Predator drones with which to enact its vengeance.

When cats become homeless, they can say “fuck you!”  They return to the wild.  They probably don’t catch the crafty crow who assesses them with her birdlike gaze, but they quickly learn that rodents make yummy snacks and a robin on the lawn is a real feast.  Mortality is high, but feral tabby cats are tough.  And they have big litters to replace the heavy losses.

Human homelessness is much less brutal, yet that makes it all the sadder.  We are a bit more like elephants, at least when durability of memory and depth of mourning are concerned.  Neither homeless nor housed can simply say, “fuck you.”  They have to deal with it.  The homeless man smiles, but he doesn’t murder you, contenting himself with a dollar, if he can get it.  If the homeless man smiles, the policewoman will return the gesture and say a few friendly words, but if the homeless smiles not, the cop draws the club, or the revolver.  Or it used to be a revolver when I was young; I suppose a Glock-17 is more in keeping with current times.

This galaxy, like truth, is distorted and stretched by the forces of the cluster into which it is flying.

The cosmos has been around for a while.  The last estimate I heard was about 13,500,000,000 years.  This indicates that it will still be around when the last human beings and their stenotic horizons have lain down to die.  I am not actually living on the street now.  I have a subsidized room.  However, I suspect that will disappear fairly soon with changes in public policy.  I am also attending Weber State University and have two semesters to graduation.  I suspect that the opportunity for poor people to enter college, except for private scholarships for a highly talented few, will also disappear in the years ahead.  I realize this view is pessimistic and perhaps defeatist.  But I hope for other future people from the bottom of society to have chances like I had, even if not all of these folks are willing or able to fully capitalize on them.  Life means something more than economic efficiency and Darwinistic competition.

As we ride the spinning ball into the blaze of the Milky Way and the distant galaxies slowly recede from our sight, we will have a long time to wish the ecological discipline of our artificial world could be less cruel, and to smell the lilacs that the honeybees at Valley Camp gravitate toward each warm day late in May.  Live long and prosper.

Economics in a tea bag: Political analysis

This analysis of economic conundra as managed by the arrogant gilded hogs in the starched suits, as they step from the pages of George Orwell’s Animal Farm directly into your life and livelihood, is fresh in from our Neighbors North of the Border:

“However, because the rational system prevents anyone who accepts legal responsibility from taking enough distance to get a general view, many of our governments, desperate and misguided, have begun dismantling those values and nets as a theoretical solution to the general crisis. Worse still, tinkering with these instruments has become a substitute for addressing the problem itself. Thus financial deregulation is used to simulate growth through paper speculation”  (Rolf Auer, Clear Politics, 2011 April 2).

Compared with what the Tea Party Patriots plan for the USA, contemporary Canadian conservatives are really pretty lame.  But I guess it’s all relative.

The English long fancied they owned France as well, long after the fact. Unfortunately, the Tea Party in fact owns Congress here.

Only in the USA, which has representative, but not parliamentary, central government, can the 82 Tea Party freshmen elected to the House of Representatives have been able to constitute an effective majority of all the 535 legislators, and dictate the agenda for all three branches of government.  While Mr. Obama’s White House certainly does not share the Tea ideology, the executive can be expected to cave in presently in a manner reminiscent of President Clinton in 1996.

This is because Tea Party challengers wait in the wings in every Congressional district, striking fear into Republican incumbents who dare not oppose the Tea platform even if they don’t like it.  Since budget bills must originate in the House, which currently has a Republican majority, no funding will be available for federal affairs until all demands imposed by the Tea Party “leadership” are met in full.  They do not plan to compromise.

The union of the White Rose of York and Red Rose of Lancashire. The Tudors were neither, but interloping thugs in finery.

The possibility that the Tea Party movement will expend all its momentum by 2012 is to be hoped for, though in my estimate not likely.  The economy will stay in the dumps, causing voters to dump Mr. Obama and the Democrats next election.  Then the question will be whether the new power bloc can successfully face down the bureaucracy.  From preliminary signs seen in Wisconsin, major retrenchments at the federal  level  look realistic.

Hence, in American politics, we enter the era of the angry upper-middle class white male, who already roars in anticipation of his long-awaited, and sweet, revenge.   The court of Henry VII could hardly have done better at Bosworth than our own takeover artists here.  Perhaps Mr. Harper should quit Canada, move down here, and romp in the fertile soil along the Potomac.

[Erratum:  Earlier posting cited Boswell by mistake for the correct Bosworth. At this site in England in 1485, Henry VII prevailed in battle against the corrupt and murderous Richard III, thus taking the throne for the Tudor family.  See Weir, A.  (1996).  The wars of the roses. New York, NY:  Random House.]

The fashion runway for the homeless. It’s not in Paris, Milan, or New York.

“There is someone living in between the sections of my building. It is a homeless woman, like someone I’ve read about in my books. A number. A mere fraction of 8%. I imagine her head to be wrapped in a babushka, with those trendy gloves without the fingers that originated among the homeless population, but eventually found its way on the Neo-grunge pages of the teeny fashion magazine…” (quoted from blog, This noise II.  The Other Layer, 2010 Nov. 15).

A distant massive star, no doubt exploding in anger on account of the homeless blokes staining the surface of one of its planets. (NASA).

The remainder of this post is interesting, and poetic.  Homelessness is still quite functional in our society, seemingly just as planned.  The phenomenon gives the housed something to gawk at, someone to feel sorry for, and a warm, fuzzy glow inside when donating a pair of those neogrunge fingerless gloves to Goodwill Industries.

As far as I can guess, fingerless gloves probably did not originate among the homeless population.  They are not sufficiently practical.  In summer, they do not protect the fingers from getting their nails ripped off their beds during one of those rowdy day labor shifts a homeless gal or guy is lucky to land.  In winter, they are not warm.  Therefore, not suitable as homeless fashion gear.

When the rest of the nation’s public and/or supported housing shuts down under the whaling the Tea Party will deliver to its funding this year and apparently for a long haul as well, then a few more of us street blokes than before shall grace the beautiful boulevards of America’s cities, bathing and urinating in their public fountains.  Well, I was told Kansas City has more fountains than Paris.

The babushka (Russian for grandmother), on the other hand, is an article of clothing of infinitely greater use for the homeless in winter.  It keeps the ears, chin, and back of the neck warm, too.  The guy who froze to death in an empty building across the street from Ogden’s Junction City shopper’s paradise could have used one.  Of course, he violated a cardinal rule regarding surviving in the great outdoors on an evening when the temp dips down to -6 F:  Do not drink alcohol.  Period.

However, some kind of misconception that we all “trade roofs for syringes” swirls around the homeless.  Some do, a very distinct majority don’t use drugs or alcohol to the point of Impairment.  Blaming the victim.  Blaming the habit-forming substance.  Blaming anything other than the fact that we Americans have built ourselves a society that is very expensive, and requires good social connections, to live normally in.  The homeless are socially and economically disconnected, not necessarily addled by addiction or mental illness.

Meanwhile, with summer coming on, I can switch fashions again:  Jeans, flannel shirt, floppy cotton hat.  Hugs, flowers, & kisses…

Thugs in starched suits look good. Kids in cardboard box look, and smell, bad.

Remember back in 1997, when the beautiful bright comet Hale-Bopp adorned the northwestern sky each sundown?  And how the members of Heaven’s Gate wanted to discard their survival “cannisters” to follow the UFO they thought was flying behind the comet?  Today, there are numerous homeless blokes who would like to dispose of their cannisters, which are often fashioned of cardboard and adorn the gravelly surfaces beneath our nation’s highway overpasses.  They wish to rejoin the ever-receding, UFO-like chimera of an apartment of their own, which seems to be accompanying Hale-Bopp on its journey to the far outer Oort cloud of our solar system.

Quoth this morning a homeless mother with children, whom I’m given to understand lives with her family in a van:

“I also understand that there may be times that you might want to use discretion about revealing your circumstances. A lot of employers have issues with hiring homeless people even though a job would certainly help towards ending homelessness. To my way of thinking, it’s a person’s skills and experience that determine whether or not I hire them; not their living situation” (Invisibull, 2011 March 28).

Comets were once thought to portend great and terrible things to come.

Why do employers look at such trivia?  They want to hire a responsible, reliable person, not a flake. To maximize their odds of getting one, they make simplifying assumptions regarding the observable characteristics a responsible person has, such as a stable residential history, a car, a phone, a cell phone, a home computer with internet access, and a clean record with bureaus of credit, criminal identification, and driver licensing.

Some business publications even advise against hiring a candidate who, at any time in their adult life, has had a spell of unemployment longer than two months.

Factors of this type are significant barriers. It is possible to get a casual, day-labor job without credentials. Some production, construction, and restaurant firms also may hire someone with a checkered past. But a homeless person unwilling to take absolutely the bottom of the barrel in the labor market can expect to remain homeless. Even if the minimum-wage job is obtained, expect to work at least 60 hours a week to keep a roof overhead.

Then a sort of conversation ensued:  The lady said, “I think ‘credentials’ can be forms of discriminating against those who don’t have them or are unable to obtain them. Look at all the crooks who have embezzled from companies that had ‘clean records’ with the bureaus of credit….just a thought! ”  There’s even a smile icon on her online face here.

The reply is that this system of course is blatantly Neanderthal. Lots of good people are in bad spots. But, in a private-property state where freedom of association mandates at-will hiring, it represents the way things are. If you want work, you cannot show any weaknesses in your employment application. Later, when you have a job, you can perhaps explain your weak spots and be understood, after all, everyone has these. But the application and the interview are designed to screen candidates out. You won’t be able to lie about your motor vehicle, credit, or criminal record. But if an ally allows you to use their address & phone as a “base,” then you can at least do that.

It is exceedingly difficult to work your way up off the streets from a position of having nothing.  People will know that there must be some reason that you have nothing.  Then, in accordance with human nature, they will make the least charitable assumption possible about your reason.  Operationally, the thesis is that something is wrong with you.

At this point the ten-foot poles with which no one will touch you come out.  You have been marginalized.

This is just Darwin in operation.  A herd of deer births many bucks.  Bucks have a hankering for polygamy, so that in the herd, only one or two dominant males will have the opportunity to mate.  During the rut, less capable males, the weaker ones, are pushed to the edge of the herd, where they soon fall prey to the waiting mountain lions.  Or, if the lions don’t get them, the stronger deer eat all the good forage so the poor ones starve the following winter when their fat reserves are inadequate.

Human societies really aren’t much different.  We are thinking animals enough no longer to consign our homeless to immediate death, yet we do push them to the edge.  And they do die sooner than most other folks do, as a general rule.

As the Tea Party Patriots crank our social clock back to 1922, expect more of this sort of stuff.  It’s not a beautiful thing to behold.  But I’m not holding my breath in optimism right now.

The B-52, now 60 years old, was an early delivery system for nuclear Armageddon.

On the brighter side of what “normal” people do not understand about the “stinky” homeless, we have this fresh quote from Homelessforums.Org:

“For instance a great many homeless people would be offended by Tierray’s assertion that he can often identify homeless people as such by small details of their personal cleanliness. Right there we have one of the big stereotypes. Most homeless people are not dirty; they try very hard to keep up their standard of personal hygiene, and they usually succeed remarkably well. When you consider what a person who is living rough is up against in maintaining themselves at a high standard, the amount of sheer human determination involved is incredible” (Rose, 2011 Mar. 26).

Smelling bad is a familiar part of being homeless.  But that’s precisely the point.   Our social norms judge not by one’s deeds, but by what one looks like at first glance.  Literally.  Young, well-dressed and high-income persons will often have arrived at a preliminary estimate of you as a human being within six seconds of laying eyes on you.

They look down, to assess the wear on your shoes.  But you’re to be  thankful that in America, you have shoes of some kind in the first place.  Or at least five concentric pair of ratty socks between your tender feet and the concrete.

That disposes of you.  Now, thinking back to 1939 at a jazzy nightclub in Germany that featured later as a venue on Schindler’s List (American movie, Stephen Spielberg, Liam Neeson, 1993), we gawked at a scene that depicts correct character for a Spencerian society’s leading lights.  Dressed to the nines and drunk as a skunk to music, that is.  Just in case you haven’t met any of these fine fellas, a couple of examples are cited below:

Proposed Habitat for the Homeless. Mars does have water, you know. Drinking it might be a problem.

Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi propaganda minister from 1933 to 1945.  In 1945, he was invited into Hitler’s hideout in Berlin, where he committed suicide, probably to avoid capture by the Russians.

Another fun guy from this era was Julius Streicher, editor of the lovely Nazi rag Der Sturmer in the 1930s.  This magazine advocated for eliminating Jewry and Bolshevism from the face of the earth.  Streicher never laid one of his own hands on anyone, nor did he ever order a Nazi murder.  However, his rhetoric was enough for the international tribunal at Nuremberg to convict him.  He hung in 1946.

There is no intention here to compare the United States of 2011 to Nazi Germany.  It is clear that partially effective restraints on the power of decree in our country have so far prevented horror from rising to the scale achieved by the Third Reich in its twelve long years.  I have referenced the chief public spokesmen of the holocaust instead to emphasize that neither merit, nor moral innocence, seem to have much to say about whom the world chooses to reward with great wealth and influence.

Nor are we really much different from Germans.  We have had our own little “Third Reich moments,” such as the Manifest Destiny era when we handily disposed of Mexico and the Red People both.

Influential Americans considered themselves enough better than this that Supreme Court Chief Justice Jackson went to Nuremberg to preside over the panel that then hung Streicher.  If you are homeless, then they are also enough better than you to deny you the opportunity to earn a living.

Insert spare change here for Galleon Group.

Welcome to the world of arrogant and gilded hogs.  When you woke up today, it was 1922.  The passionate, white-hot and angry cry of “American exceptionalism” bannered by Sean Hannity on Fox News (2009 Dec. 10) hasn’t much to do with the big picture.  The Nazis believed Germany quite exceptional in their Der Ring des Nibelungen vision of the Fatherland’s messianic role in the world.

The bloated phenomenon of these hogs is worldwide and traces back to the start of civilization at the Pyramids.  We read a brief introduction to them when we picked up George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  There’s a merry old “radical” soundtrack to accompany it all the way, too.  It’s on the Beatle’s White Album.

Lauding your patience with me, I should here tip my fedora to you all and  say, “good night, my fellow land sharks.  Hale-Bopp will return with your unidentified flying apartment about 4500 C.E.”

Fruit flies in an experiment: The sweet smell of dumpster.

A light colored check mark adorns this cool moon of Uranus, the referral destination of choice for social services in New York City. (NASA).

Another blogger (Invisibull, 2011 Mar. 25) gives us a heads up regarding a small bit of “scientific” research taking place on the east coast.  To wit, I shall quote from a letter I was motivated to send to New York City’s Homeless Services, a fine organ of municipal government charged with helping those of us lacking a roof over our head.  The gist seems to be that if you apply to them, they will roll the dice before deciding whether to admit you to their program, or toss you back into the water to swim on your own with the big fish.

Quoting from a newspaper in your town:

The “haves” get rental assistance, job training and other services through a program called Homebase.  The other half wasn’t so lucky.  Those people – chosen at random – were dubbed the “control group” and shut out of Homebase for two years. Instead, they were handed a list of 11 agencies and told to hunt for help on their own.  The city will still be watching them, but for a whole different reason.  For two years, researchers will track the separate groups by their Social Security numbers to see how each “uses city services …

Tina Moore .  (2010 Sep. 30).  200 families on brink of homelessness being treated like ‘rats in lab experiment.’  New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/

If an experiment of this sort is really being conducted at your agency, then it is blatantly unethical.  Now quoting from the Nuremberg Code, a nonbinding document adopted after the horror of Nazi medical experimentation on human beings was revealed:  “The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.”  (Nuremberg Code.  (1947). Retrieved from http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/).

Fly, with abdomen (1), eye (2), wing (3), palpae (4), and leg (5).

Experiments in social service agencies, researched by sociologists or social workers, both professionals expected to adhere to codes of ethics governing their fields, are also subject to federal regulation under law.  According to National Institutes of Health guidelines on Protection Of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), any institution conducting research must have an institutional review board that approves studies after examining ethical issues entailed in them.  These regulations may also be found at http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/ and derive from the 1974 Belmont Report that followed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.  I’m sure the lawyers in your agency have apprised you that you are not required to comply with 45 CFR 46 in your project, because as a New York City social welfare agency, you are not obligated to provide services to anyone, provided you are not engaging in civil rights discrimination by doing so.  Perhaps so, yet you ought consider yourselves bound by the spirit of these codes.

Furthermore, any social worker participating in or administering this research is breaking the NASW Code of Ethics, which says, “Social workers engaged in evaluation or research should protect participants from unwarranted physical or mental distress, harm, danger, or deprivation” (Ethical Standard 5.02(j), 2008).  This leads one to wonder why they are in social work, a humanistic profession, to begin with.

In addition to the unnecessary physical and mental suffering, the principle of equipoise, in which investigators do not know in advance that the treated group will fare better, is also probably violated here.

Therefore, if you haven’t terminated this experiment by now, I would urge you to abandon it today.

Something tells me that the homeless, already facing a full plate,  might prefer not to be experimented upon as though they were fruit flies.  These are homeless mothers with children here.  The children, while also lacking bulbous compound eyes (see previous post, 2011 Mar. 20), are certainly possessed of working nasal cavities.  Do we really want to fill those noses with the sweet smell of rotting garbage behind the dumpster?

Understand homelessness. It may come visit your home.

There’s a sort of psychological gaming transaction between homeless blokes and “normal” people.  “Because who knows what they are going to do with the money, right?” is one of the themes that arises frequently.  Clutching that purse, because “You may be a criminal,” is another one.   Understanding the homeless is not too difficult.   Here’s a brief primer:

A nearby spiral galaxy that can be seen with your bare eyes, if the arc sodium in the city doesn't interfere.

The homeless usually do resort to numerous subterfuges to get by, sometimes by capitalizing on points of ignorance the housed population is subject to, regarding the phenomenon of human being on cardboard in road.  Homeless folks are tough birds.  They made it through yesterday, so they’ll probably survive today as well.

You may find that some homeless blokes interpret sincere, well-intentioned efforts to help them as a sort of patronization.  I only mention this when the tune suggests a religious/political orientation in your interests in their forums.  This, of course, is okay.  Homeless vary in degree of ability to exercise self-determination, needs for outside assistance, goals, and reasons for being, having been, or being in danger of homelessness.  However, this does not render them stupid (see Geologic Column, this site).  They are not little children to be led by the hand.  They are no more interested in converting to your religion than you are in converting to mine.

Of course a show may be put on.  People who need something to eat really badly, or who feel unsafe on the streets at night when the long knives come out, may jump for joy through three hoops like a Labrador retriever.

Many dystopic thoughts flow through your head when you are homeless, such as:

“Best of luck to you.  All your eggs are now in one basket, so to speak.  They will all shortly be broken, or gone.  Almost immediately you shall be nearly naked, and alone.  Even if you can bust the little thief’s face, your stuff is still gone.”

And finally, a slightly more global perspective:

With respect to moral hazard and personal social contact, the American religiously motivated systems for provision do enjoy some advantages.  Important to recall, however, is that private charities frequently obtain much, or even most, of their revenue from the taxpayer.

Mars Opportunity enjoys a sunny day in the desert near a buried rock outcropping. (NASA).

Comes now the unfortunate question of whether well-intentioned private parties are effective.  This is something like throwing starfish back into the ocean after a mass beaching.  I don’t have a right to knock it.  Homelessness remains functional under this treatment, however.  A few are helped in some way and a few deservedly feel good regarding their efforts to help.  But no real global progress toward solution can be obtained by means of operations conducted at shelters and parks.

What’s sad is the cruel economic discipline seen here, there, and everywhere.  A discount shoe store can’t sell all its shoes.   Does it donate the surplus?  No.  They slash the extras with a box cutter and toss them into the dumpster.  Why give shoes away to people who may buy them from you later?  It’s quite logical, yet very cruel.  It’s how our greed-driven universe works.

It is very good when you are able to recognize self-pity in yourself. Many homeless blokes are unable to do so and think the rest of the galaxy will switch to revolve about them.  If busking, panhandling, or flying a cardboard sign, give, or don’t give, as you feel appropriate and do not feel guilty about it either way.

You can tell them, “Good luck.  My best guess is that you will now suffer consequences for those decisions you took earlier.  That’s how it works:  We descend into trouble by making small, but bad, decisions.”

If you lose your flat, keep your faith if you can.  It only means that homelessness is now visiting your home.  It won’t be plum pudding, but usually there is something that can be done.   Probably you lost your job beforehand, so be sure to get on a waiting list for public housing now.  In Utah, the wait is about 2-3 years, and that’s pretty good compared to many states.  You can always turn the unit down if your circumstances improve.

But living in a shelter or program, if it comes to that, is made easier knowing you are on the list and gradually moving up.

Cheerio!

They don’t have bulbous compound eyes.

Though not causal in all cases of homelessness, the terms “psychotic” and “mentally ill” crop up in political and sociological debates on the phenomenon, somewhat like that 1970s toy advertised on TV with the jingle lyrics, “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down…”

Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io as spacecraft Cassini flew by them. (NASA).

Past high time to set forth a few nontrivial truths about your brain, a remarkable organ, in fact a living intelligence and guidance system designed to help you stay alive for a while, at least long enough to sow your oats and raise a fresh crop of replacements for your generation. Brains don’t just compute; they do so vividly, with sensations and feelings. An emotion or a color percept is, of course, a complex event that occurs toward a serious purpose. These encode high-level abstractions apprising their owner regarding the significance of stimuli encountered in the world, especially as this relates to continued survival.

Should that prove insufficient to arouse awe, consider that you can also tell stories about your feelings and the colors you are watching.  A word like “red” is a brief burst of vocal sound that acts as a symbolic pointer to an experience the nature of which is an utter mystery. Only that others have analogous experiences allows agreement that “red” really “means” something. Thomas Nagel (1974) once asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” There must also be something that it is like to see red, but the deal on consciousness only includes access to privy information from a single active mind, namely one’s own.

Therefore, you are a language machine of immense perceptive and intellectual power.

Given Microsoft’s renowned product reliability, it’s not unlikely that the artificial computing device you are reading this with has frozen up on you recently, leaving you discomfited if you forgot to “save” just before that.  I think they call this “Windows, crashing.”

We hardly think anything odd about a computer failure, unless the ailing computer component happens to be inside someone’s head.  In that case, we suddenly go ape batshit terror and start avoiding the person as if she or he had come down with the Andromeda Strain.  (Wasn’t this gem by Michael Crichton a beauty?)

Center of our galaxy seen in infrared by spacecraft Kepler. (NASA).

When schoolteacher Dorothea Dix started investigating the mental health facilities of circa 1840, she found men and women chained to walls and floors in dark and filthy rooms.

Gollaher, D.  (1995).  Voice for the mad:  A life of Dorothea Dix. New York, NY:  Free Press.

I’m not sure if the official diagnosis was still “demon possession” as it had been in medieval times.  Perhaps not, since at least the authorities had stopped burning patients at the stake by 1700 or so.  This motivated her to lobby for the establishment of the first U. S. institution to attempt more humane treatment of severe psychiatric conditions, which opened at Raleigh, North Carolina in 1856.  Unfortunately no effective therapies existed then.

Nowadays mental illnesses, which are believed to arise from altered or improper signaling between various nerve cells inside the brain, can be treated, albeit very imperfectly and with uncertain results.  But mentally ill folks can learn how to manage their conditions and return to work and play in their communities.  They are not Martians, they do not have compound eyes like horseflies, and with few exceptions are not more dangerous or disruptive to their fellows than other people are.  (I tend to worry a bit more about the “rational” persons who choose to pack Glocks everywhere they go.)

After such considerations, don’t you think that “standard” popular thinking about, and social treatment of, the mentally ailing is somewhat shabby?  Listed below for example are some fine organizations who so opine, and have decided to do something about it

National Alliance on Mental Illness:

StigmaBusters is…

a network of dedicated advocates across the country and around the world who seek to fight inaccurate and hurtful representations of mental illness.  Whether these images are found in TV, film, print, or other media, StigmaBusters speak out and challenge stereotypes. They seek to educate society about the reality of mental illness and the courageous struggles faced by consumers and families every day. StigmaBusters’ goal is to break down the barriers of ignorance, prejudice, or unfair discrimination by promoting education, understanding, and respect.

Advocates for Latino Mental Health Advancement…

is a national consumer group that promotes recovery and equality for Latinos receiving mental health services.

Organizational Priorities

• Advocate culturally competent services
• Development of a culturally competent, multilingual workforce
• Establish or improve services in underserved communities

http://www.nami.org

National Resource Center for Hispanic Mental Health

The NRCHMH specifically aims to reduce disparities and to increase treatment quality and availability of mental health services for Hispanics throughout the nation. The NRCHMH also aims to heighten awareness, acceptance and understanding of mental illness among the nation’s Hispanic population. These goals are accomplished by implementing a number of intervention strategies focused on:

Developing culturally competent resources and tools for behavioral health administrators, direct service providers and other stakeholders.

Creating and fostering the development and institutionalization of best practice programs.

Conceptualizing and implementing high-quality trainings on culturally competent mental health service delivery and on policy development and advocacy…

http://www.nrchmh.org

Ali Forney Center…

Housing assistance and advocacy for homeless queer youth.  Note that homosexuality was listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder until 1973.

www.aliforneycenter.org

Homeless mental patients and women come to the rape roundtable.

“When a community’s mental health services are overwhelmed, jails often…” (Quoted from Calvary Services, a women’s homeless program’s blog in Washington, DC).

Some years ago The Miami Herald ran a lengthy story about how their county correctional facility was essentially functioning as an insane asylum.   This enormous jail is Miami’s mental health care system, that is.    That newspaper tells us that collections, not care, takes priority now:   At a Jackson Health Care board meeting, we heard, “She also told the Trust’s Ad Hoc Committee for Sustainability and Restructuring:   ‘You need to bill the inmates’ for their healthcare, an issue that is particularly important because Medicaid, the insurance for the state’s poor, does not cover prisoners…Glazer-Moon pointed out that some prisoners might have insurance.   Others might be able to pay something out of their own pockets…” (Miami Herald, 2010 Sept. 20).

Here’s how mental health care works in the prison-industrial complex:   First, scraping the buggers off the parking lot with a front-end loader ala Soylent Green (American movie, Richard Fleischer, Charlton Heston, 1973).

There are no negotiations with city authorities or police officers arriving to enforce local law.   Unlike the Irish, authorities here do not provide services to people who are being rudely uprooted here.   They are cuffed and dumped into the back seat of the car, and their stuff is simply dumped onto the sidewalk, even if it is St. Patty’s day.

When they arrive at the prison, these nasty, smelly guys find they have something in common with the feminists after all.    Males have anuses, and forcible sexual assault is now an issue for them.   After getting punked in this fashion and having their meal trays taken from them whenever dinner comes through the slot in the wall, the mentally ill languish in a sea of unwashed bodies in general population’s open bay cellblocks for a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, until jail staff become cognizant and ship them upstairs to the mental health unit.   Usually this kindly staff attention follows an inmate’s attempt at suicide or homicide.

A soft spring evening on Saturn. (NASA).

Now upstairs, they have private cells to languish in but no clothes, now with clear plastic walls for the guards to gawk at them through, and now for months to years rather than weeks.   At this point standard operating procedure calls for being drugged into oblivion.   If cooperative, they might “earn” a paper gown with which to cover their privy parts.  And they’re getting their food since Big Blubber Bubba isn’t there to confiscate it anymore.

A hazy day on Titan. (NASA).

Ultimately, the scooper dumps them back out the other end of this system, onto the asphalt in front of the jail.   Since they are not in Gainesville, Florida, the “city with no pity” that forbids feeding, a local soup kitchen might give them a bowl of porridge.   There’s usually no such thing as a bed for the night in this part of the nation; after all, it’s always so sunny and subtropical down there.  (Read:  torrential downpours each afternoon, then hot & muggy afterward, the shiver all night on cardboard if no blanket.)   It is curious that the principle of less eligibility, first articulated in England, is today more alive in the USA than in the mother country.

For a good background on this ideology, see An Act for the Relief of the Poor.  (1601). 43 Elizabeth I, Chapter 2, § 1 (England).   Or, if you prefer, Quigley, W. (1996). Five hundred years of English poor laws, 1349-1834: Regulating the working and nonworking poor. 30 Akron Law Review 73 (USA).]

In Washington, meanwhile, the Obama Administration came out with a new “SmartBuild” program to help the “poor” and “downtrodden masses” bridge the gap to keeping safe, stable housing whilst unemployed (Peggy Cassidy, RealEstate.com, 2010 Aug. 16).   Except you can’t be too poor if you are planning to apply, since minimum show-money and/or  income requirements apply.

If this project is supposed to be a bridge, then why doesn’t it stretch across the river of dire poverty and homelessness?

Here we see yet another application of our English “less eligibility,” in the USA merely called a “categorical program.”   [For brief definition, Rooms for rent here, cheap, this blog.]   But it was a good way to allocate some of that stimulus money.   The Tea Party shall presently put paid to that nonsense.

All in keeping with the basic social construction in Uganda, a nominally Anglophone country, that unless you show yourself deserving of help by having accumulated something, you get nothing.   At least Miami-Dade has drinkable water, if they haven’t locked the fountain up for the night.

Hugs and kisses, ladies.

Survivalists hit the road, too. At whose expense?

Let us first mention the reason you will not die from cholera or typhoid fever if you are an American, even if you happen to be a homeless dog who is rooting around for food scraps in the alleyway.  That would be one of the famous socialistic impositions those of us taking time to remember that nothing is for free rarely hear about on our beloved Fox News channel…sometimes known as…

Clean water:  A public good from your government that should be privatized immediately, at least if it is not to be dumped into the harbor alongside the tea.

---

Fortunate indeed are we who get to live in the United States. For me, that was true even when I was sleeping rough. While risks of murder for the homeless are smaller here than in most of Africa, they’re hardly nonexistent. In Miami, a 9mm or small knife is more likely to be the weapon than the machete favored over there for cutting vegetation.

But a lot of this extra margin of safety is due to the fact the USA has some social programming by government, rather than essentially none as in Africa. That is something those having a Libertarian bent might find discomfiting.

Neptune. White clouds during Voyager flyby. Courtesy NASA, another U. S. "social" frill.

I am hardly a Marxist, or even a socialist, as one commentator on homelessforums.org (Urban Survivalist, 14 March 2011) suggested yesterday while pointing out the homeless Africans who would be willing to kill or die for potable water in an American city street.  I prefer the mixed economy myself. However, I do believe societies can be judged by their attitudes and actions toward their less-advantaged members. Those civilizations possessing great wealth but unwilling to share any of it in public really don’t deserve to survive, in my opinion.

I shall withhold judgment of America on this score.  It certainly does not belong in the category of ugly societies that deserve extinction.  I would love that to remain so; Americans are generous and optimistic folks.  Yet the trend line clearly points in the wrong direction, accelerating as the latest versions of hard right-wing operating philosophies gain expression in our new Tea Party bloc.  Political factions not friendly to the disadvantaged are quite determined to win their way with no compromise, and seem to enjoy promising chances right now.  By holding the budget process hostage to their demands, the 82 Tea Party freshmen in the house can set the agenda for all three branches of government.  With 82 now an effective majority among 535, this certainly makes for an interesting exemplar of democracy in action.

Be apprised.  Those who fancy themselves free spirits, minding their own business in a vacuum independently of every other living person, suffer delusion.  It is a law of nature that life for one organism comes only at some expense to the welfare of other organisms.  This is true for “lower” plants and animals in the wild, and true for “higher” humankind.  You cannot have the lifestyle you desire without imposing some externalities upon others.  The right-wing skull, clad in lead as it must be, does not admit of this bit of light.

Saint Patty’s day upon a sidewalk

The disaster in Sendai, and up and down the Japanese coast, looks truly horrific now, something you would never wish even upon your worst enemies.   It’s funny how one realizes that parts of the world once thought to harbor creatures akin to Martians are actually the homes of human beings, mothers with children, and an enterprising young man washed 20 km to oceanward aboard the roof of what had been his house.   It just takes Mother Nature in a bit of an irritated mood to force cognizance of our fellows upon us.   The helplessness of an ex-homeless galaxian to relieve immense human suffering is immediately apparent, though I have sent a brief note of condolence.

Titan seen from the descending Huygens. Observe the haze in the air. Ambient temperature about -190 C.

Susan Craig-Greene (2011 March 14) apprises us that local badge holders somewhere in Eire are worried over the state of their equipment and preparations to provide services to a band of trailer squatters they are about to evict from a rather damp looking piece of ground on that side of the pond.

In nearly all parts of the USA, squatters are either squatting secretly or getting the boot.   There are no negotiations with city authorities or with the police officers arriving to enforce local law.   Unlike the Irish, authorities here do not provide services to people who are being evicted.   They, and their stuff, are simply dumped onto the sidewalk, even if it is St. Patty’s day.   If they are not in Gainesville, Florida, the local soup kitchen might give them a bowl of porridge, or, God forbid, a bed for the night.   It is curious that the principle of less eligibility, first articulated in England, is today more alive in the USA than in the mother country.   However, it seems as though our English brethren under Mr. Cameron may be aligning more closely with the Tea Party attitude regarding the homeless—blokes perhaps about as welcome as a rattlesnake at a picnic in Texas.

More? More? You want More? Oliver no longer expects such courtesy in England’s daughter country.

Demand for order and decorum on the streets, with an eye toward the threat posed by the ratty-looking.  Apparently it’s gotten to where those hearty souls who set out dinner for the poor are being ordered to stop, at least in some Tea Party-dominated communities like Gainesville, Florida.  In this town, by law they must wash and put away the bowls after the day’s 130th guest (Smith, 2011 Feb. 2), even if more are waiting, garnering for the home of the Gators a new title as “the city with no pity.”  Quoting Lombino (2011 March 13),

“Here’s a scenario.  A person living in poverty does not have enough money to provide his family with adequate meals each day.  He takes his family to St. Francis soup kitchen to receive a meal for himself and his family.  He waits on the long line and when he reaches the entrance, he is informed that he and his family are meal numbers 131 and…SOL.   The next day, his youngest son has a high fever and they rush to the hospital.   His son stays in the hospital for a lengthy time due to his significant and persistent under-nourishment…caus[ing] a burden not only on the hospital, but also on the community of Gainesville…This began with a struggling father attempting to provide his family with food. He sought assistance with his local soup kitchen.  Yet, because of an inhumane and confusing meal-limit ordinance, he and his family went hungry” (Another reason Gainesville meal limit needs to end now, para. 5, 6).

The purpose of such a restriction is obvious.  The city fathers would prefer that the homeless move on down the road. This ignores the likelihood that a significant proportion of these indigents are actually local yokels.  The ban is worded the way it is in an effort to deflect possible legal challenges:   The city can claim that it is merely “regulating” soup kitchens, not prohibiting the feeding of poor persons within its boundaries.  It seems to me that we will see more of this stuff as economic conditions gradually become more difficult for the lower third of the populace while the populism amongst the remainder becomes more strident and less tolerant.  Hardly anyone thinks of themselves as potential victims; this sort of condition can only befall “someone else.”

Madman in floppy hat

And so reduction ad absurdum based on the norm of rightness comes to the fore:  It is easy to moralize regarding the character defects of another person.  Part of being human seems to entail possessing numerous character defects and demons of one or several sorts, tenacious as woad in the weed lot.  Generally those who harp on “personal responsibility,” while meeting their own financial obligations without trouble, have neglected to stop and consider how precarious a position of respectful standing really is, in our judgmental and Spencerian society.  Advice to hiring managers I encountered in a business journal warns readers away from any applicant who, at any time in their life, has ever been unemployed longer than two months.  There exist a plethora of factors capable of causing one’s socioeconomic circumstances to collapse abruptly, and once this has happened it becomes astonishingly difficult to recover the losses.  But today ostriching our heads down into the sand is preferred.

Meanwhile snow has given way to a glorious spring in which red-coated cardinals battle over the attentions of a young lady of their species, all done in a most melodious fashion.  Perhaps these avian friendlies are celebrating the legislature’s cutting Head Start preschool, declaring the Browning M1911 .45 automatic to be the state gun, and revising the Government Records Access & Management Act so emails between legislators and their bribers will now be secreted from the public.

Sincere prayers for the folks in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.  But notwithstanding all their own racism, with all its rigid exclusions benefiting a coterie of old men, the Japanese won’t leave thousands of their citizens to root about like animals in the streets and alleys of disaster’s wake, the way New Orleans did, with tacit approval from the Bush Administration, after hurricane Katrina.  This is despite the much greater severity of Japan’s current tragic event.  On a brighter note, I’ve made it for 34 hours without a cigarette.  Hooray!

Rooms for rent here, cheap

Slo Homeless (2011 Feb. 28) proposes this national solution, here quoted from his blog at http://slohomeless.wordpress.com/

“To be honest, if it were left up to me, I would reduce the amount being spent on homeless shelters by about half, and then re-direct the balance toward housing programs for the homeless.”

Gassy. Cold.

The unfortunate and fundamental problem, taboo for discussion, nonetheless remains:  Those who get up in the morning and go to work to pay their rent generally resent those who do not.  This is the principle of less eligibility in its simplest and starkest terms.  Some homeless persons who can follow social norms can be helped.  Others, who are unable or unwilling to comply with nonnegotiable demands upon which any assistance will be predicated, will not become self-supporting.

As for the economic side of the problem, affordable housing is not built by private enterprise because it is not profitable enough, and because local communities tend to oppose it.  Hence, decent low-cost housing requires subsidies that greatly inflate the costs, defeating its purpose.  I suspect the problem of homelessness is deeply built into the structure of our society and will likely never see a real solution.

The homeless themselves have invented their own approach:  Tent cities.