DanR
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When I was young, we had bums. It was generally understood that they were ne’er-do-wells who were unable to cope with daily life because they were either strung out on booze or drugs or were simply loco in the coco.
I’m sure there was a time during the Great Depression when a great many men, who were then called hobos, hit the road looking for jobs that simply didn’t exist and then, ashamed of having failed, simply never returned home. But that was 85 years ago.
Today, when I drive around L.A. and see the derelicts living in cardboard boxes, using the streets and sidewalks as their bathrooms, I know they’re not seeking employment. Rather, it’s because a small group of governors, including both Reagan and Brown, allowed funding for asylums to dry up. In the past, these lost souls would have been sheltered by the state, but for the past few decades, all the money has been going to subsidize illegal aliens.
Set adrift by the politicians, the deranged deserve our pity, the politicians our contempt.
I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for the others, for the boozers and addicts, but for real sympathy to exist, I think you first need to be able to empathize with the victims. But for the life of me, I can’t imagine how anyone can live to be 30 or 40 or 50 years old and not have a friend or family member willing to let you live with them until you’re able to get on your feet. That is, of course, unless you happen to be one of those jerks whose entire life revolves around getting his next fix of alcohol, crack or heroin.
On the radio this morning, I heard someone call in to a show and suggest that people should solve the homeless problem by taking these derelicts into their own homes. I think that’s a great idea if you don’t mind risking being robbed or killed in exchange for bestowing sainthood on oneself.
But if the idea is to get the drunks and addicts off the street, I wouldn’t object to opening pounds for people. That way they could be hosed off and kept in cages until good Samaritans came by and decided if they wanted to take one home.
My own preference would be to adopt a beagle, but that’s me.
● I noticed that Kathy Griffin lost her New Year’s Eve gig at CNN. For her, the good news is that she no longer has to spend five or six hours-a-year with Anderson Cooper. The same, but in reverse, goes for Cooper.
Worse than her original sin of posing with what appeared to be the severed head of Donald Trump was her effusive 32-second apology. As I see it, you deserve forgiveness if you apologize after accidentally stepping on someone’s foot, but not after going to the trouble of manufacturing a bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head and setting up a photo shoot.
After all that, it’s obvious that a mea culpa is the result of having your comedy guru, someone like Stephen Colbert, tell you it wasn’t funny, or getting wind of the fact that CNN is talking about replacing you with a large mirror so that Anderson Cooper could spend New Year’s Eve talking to himself.
Again, it’s probably just me, but between alleged comedians like Griffin, Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Tina Fey and Bill Maher, turning themselves into partisan hacks, it’s almost enough to make me miss the good old days when comics got laughs by spewing obscenities and grabbing their crotch every five seconds.
● Have you ever noticed how much more devout atheists are than those who follow the more traditional religions? Atheists never stop trying to convert others to their disbeliefs, and they don’t mind taking that extra step in the direction of a courthouse in order to protest religious symbols, especially those in military cemeteries; pledges of allegiance; and even the words on our currency and coins.
I’d say, “God bless them,†but I know they’d take it the wrong way.
● I haven’t liked all comedy teams equally. I loved Laurel & Hardy and could occasionally bear Abbott & Costello, but I thought Martin & Lewis were boring, and the Three Stooges were worse. But at least those teams made sense. What I don’t get are the teams that have sprung up over the past few years. I mean, if I think Dennis Miller is funny, why would I want to see Bill O’Reilly on stage with him? Wouldn’t that be like Henny Youngman going on the road with Ed Sullivan?
An even less likely pairing is radio talk show host Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla. Prager, a practicing Jew, is always bringing God into the discussion on his show, whereas Carolla is a potty-mouthed atheist. If the point is that if these two can get along, we should all be able to co-exist, I’m okay with it. But if the point is to pay to be entertained, I can’t imagine how the guys ever sell a ticket.
● Whenever I pass a Starbuck’s, I find myself harboring conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it disturbs me that the company’s CEO Howard Schultz is a major contributor to the Democrats. On the other hand, when I see all those people gulping down $5 cups of coffee, I feel reassured that the economy can’t possibly be as terrible as I’ve heard.
● Speaking of the economy, Goldman Sachs proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are those on Wall Street who actually are as sleazy and corrupt as Bernie Sanders keeps insisting they are.
In the vague hope of realizing a 40% return on their investment, they have just provided Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro with a $3 billion bailout.
Maduro’s political foes, whom, I suspect, are nearly as bad as he is, have announced that if they succeed in driving him out of office, their first order of business will be to default on the loan.
When it comes to these revolts in banana republics, I generally don’t take sides. But this time, thanks to the vultures of Wall Street, I’m making an exception.
● It was predictable, even inevitable, that Trump would be blamed by liberals for the two murders in Portland committed by a loon named Jeremy Joseph Christain, even though Christain hates Muslims almost as much as he hates Christians and Jews, whereas Trump is a Christian with a Jewish son-in-law, a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren.
However, Christain is a white supremacist and, as you may have noticed, Donald Trump also happens to be white.
When you get right down to it, the similarities are simply staggering. The two of them might as well have been separated at birth. Or so the overwrought media would have you believe. Christain did, after all, attend Trump rallies. Never mind that he only showed up in order to start fights with Trump’s supporters. And never mind that Christain, who obviously subscribes to the axiom that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, backed Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, both of whom, oddly enough, happen to be Jewish.
● Meanwhile, back at Evergreen College, where minority students have driven white students and their white professors off campus, Evergreen’s President George Bridges debased himself once again by praising the young hooligans for their “passion and courage,†certainly two qualities that the academic toad doesn’t personally possess.
● At the Vatican, Pope Francis, whom some practicing Catholics have taken to referring to as Pope Che, in honor of Che Guevara, the socialist butcher whom Fidel Castro made his chief executioner, can't stop displaying his leftist sympathies.
Just as Barack Obama surrounded himself with the questionable likes of Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Loretta Lynch, Tom Perez and Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis has been planting Marxists all over the Vatican. At the top of the heap, he has placed Father Arturo Sosa Abascal. Abascal, a Venezuelan, is the new Superior General of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), and is widely known for his Communist sympathies.
In fact, Pope Francis has nearly as many deeply-committed leftists on his staff as Obama did. Among them are the Honduran cardinal, Oscar Maradiaga (head of the Council of Cardinals); Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and Canadian socialist Naomi Klein, who are drafting his encyclicals; and, running the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, we find Margaret Archer, a Brit who self-identifies as a member of the Marxian Left.
Even though I’m not Catholic, I knew the Church was just asking for trouble when they started to let Catholics eat meat on Friday; didn’t excommunicate people like Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi. Patrick Leahy, Xavier Becerra and Dick Durbin, for promoting abortions on demand; and stopped electing Italian popes.
● Prior to Trump's removing us from the Paris Climate Accord, a reader asked me if I thought it made any difference whether or not the president ended our involvement in the non-binding agreement.
“Probably only as a symbolic act,†I replied, "as a signal that he hasn’t fallen for the absurd claim that 97% of climatologists agree that the earth is on the point of self-combustion. Even if the number weren’t a complete fabrication, it’s only science when 100% agree on something provable, such as the distance to the moon, the depth of the ocean and the existence of gravity. Short of that, it’s either a theory or, more likely, a hoax.â€
● If I had the power, I would insist that no gathering of diplomats would ever take place in Paris, Brussels, London, New York. Geneva or Washington, D.C. The only reason all those boobs got together and signed the Paris Accord in the first place was because it was happening in a city that boasted five-star hotels, expensive restaurants and high-priced hookers.
Just once, I’d like to see these meetings of world leaders, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank Group, take place in Ethiopia or Outer Mongolia. I guarantee there would be a lot of empty parking spaces.
Furthermore, I can assure you that absolutely nobody, including Al Gore, would have shown up to sign the Calcutta Climate Accord.
Burt P
I’m sure there was a time during the Great Depression when a great many men, who were then called hobos, hit the road looking for jobs that simply didn’t exist and then, ashamed of having failed, simply never returned home. But that was 85 years ago.
Today, when I drive around L.A. and see the derelicts living in cardboard boxes, using the streets and sidewalks as their bathrooms, I know they’re not seeking employment. Rather, it’s because a small group of governors, including both Reagan and Brown, allowed funding for asylums to dry up. In the past, these lost souls would have been sheltered by the state, but for the past few decades, all the money has been going to subsidize illegal aliens.
Set adrift by the politicians, the deranged deserve our pity, the politicians our contempt.
I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for the others, for the boozers and addicts, but for real sympathy to exist, I think you first need to be able to empathize with the victims. But for the life of me, I can’t imagine how anyone can live to be 30 or 40 or 50 years old and not have a friend or family member willing to let you live with them until you’re able to get on your feet. That is, of course, unless you happen to be one of those jerks whose entire life revolves around getting his next fix of alcohol, crack or heroin.
On the radio this morning, I heard someone call in to a show and suggest that people should solve the homeless problem by taking these derelicts into their own homes. I think that’s a great idea if you don’t mind risking being robbed or killed in exchange for bestowing sainthood on oneself.
But if the idea is to get the drunks and addicts off the street, I wouldn’t object to opening pounds for people. That way they could be hosed off and kept in cages until good Samaritans came by and decided if they wanted to take one home.
My own preference would be to adopt a beagle, but that’s me.
● I noticed that Kathy Griffin lost her New Year’s Eve gig at CNN. For her, the good news is that she no longer has to spend five or six hours-a-year with Anderson Cooper. The same, but in reverse, goes for Cooper.
Worse than her original sin of posing with what appeared to be the severed head of Donald Trump was her effusive 32-second apology. As I see it, you deserve forgiveness if you apologize after accidentally stepping on someone’s foot, but not after going to the trouble of manufacturing a bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head and setting up a photo shoot.
After all that, it’s obvious that a mea culpa is the result of having your comedy guru, someone like Stephen Colbert, tell you it wasn’t funny, or getting wind of the fact that CNN is talking about replacing you with a large mirror so that Anderson Cooper could spend New Year’s Eve talking to himself.
Again, it’s probably just me, but between alleged comedians like Griffin, Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Tina Fey and Bill Maher, turning themselves into partisan hacks, it’s almost enough to make me miss the good old days when comics got laughs by spewing obscenities and grabbing their crotch every five seconds.
● Have you ever noticed how much more devout atheists are than those who follow the more traditional religions? Atheists never stop trying to convert others to their disbeliefs, and they don’t mind taking that extra step in the direction of a courthouse in order to protest religious symbols, especially those in military cemeteries; pledges of allegiance; and even the words on our currency and coins.
I’d say, “God bless them,†but I know they’d take it the wrong way.
● I haven’t liked all comedy teams equally. I loved Laurel & Hardy and could occasionally bear Abbott & Costello, but I thought Martin & Lewis were boring, and the Three Stooges were worse. But at least those teams made sense. What I don’t get are the teams that have sprung up over the past few years. I mean, if I think Dennis Miller is funny, why would I want to see Bill O’Reilly on stage with him? Wouldn’t that be like Henny Youngman going on the road with Ed Sullivan?
An even less likely pairing is radio talk show host Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla. Prager, a practicing Jew, is always bringing God into the discussion on his show, whereas Carolla is a potty-mouthed atheist. If the point is that if these two can get along, we should all be able to co-exist, I’m okay with it. But if the point is to pay to be entertained, I can’t imagine how the guys ever sell a ticket.
● Whenever I pass a Starbuck’s, I find myself harboring conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it disturbs me that the company’s CEO Howard Schultz is a major contributor to the Democrats. On the other hand, when I see all those people gulping down $5 cups of coffee, I feel reassured that the economy can’t possibly be as terrible as I’ve heard.
● Speaking of the economy, Goldman Sachs proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are those on Wall Street who actually are as sleazy and corrupt as Bernie Sanders keeps insisting they are.
In the vague hope of realizing a 40% return on their investment, they have just provided Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro with a $3 billion bailout.
Maduro’s political foes, whom, I suspect, are nearly as bad as he is, have announced that if they succeed in driving him out of office, their first order of business will be to default on the loan.
When it comes to these revolts in banana republics, I generally don’t take sides. But this time, thanks to the vultures of Wall Street, I’m making an exception.
● It was predictable, even inevitable, that Trump would be blamed by liberals for the two murders in Portland committed by a loon named Jeremy Joseph Christain, even though Christain hates Muslims almost as much as he hates Christians and Jews, whereas Trump is a Christian with a Jewish son-in-law, a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren.
However, Christain is a white supremacist and, as you may have noticed, Donald Trump also happens to be white.
When you get right down to it, the similarities are simply staggering. The two of them might as well have been separated at birth. Or so the overwrought media would have you believe. Christain did, after all, attend Trump rallies. Never mind that he only showed up in order to start fights with Trump’s supporters. And never mind that Christain, who obviously subscribes to the axiom that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, backed Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, both of whom, oddly enough, happen to be Jewish.
● Meanwhile, back at Evergreen College, where minority students have driven white students and their white professors off campus, Evergreen’s President George Bridges debased himself once again by praising the young hooligans for their “passion and courage,†certainly two qualities that the academic toad doesn’t personally possess.
● At the Vatican, Pope Francis, whom some practicing Catholics have taken to referring to as Pope Che, in honor of Che Guevara, the socialist butcher whom Fidel Castro made his chief executioner, can't stop displaying his leftist sympathies.
Just as Barack Obama surrounded himself with the questionable likes of Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Loretta Lynch, Tom Perez and Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis has been planting Marxists all over the Vatican. At the top of the heap, he has placed Father Arturo Sosa Abascal. Abascal, a Venezuelan, is the new Superior General of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), and is widely known for his Communist sympathies.
In fact, Pope Francis has nearly as many deeply-committed leftists on his staff as Obama did. Among them are the Honduran cardinal, Oscar Maradiaga (head of the Council of Cardinals); Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and Canadian socialist Naomi Klein, who are drafting his encyclicals; and, running the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, we find Margaret Archer, a Brit who self-identifies as a member of the Marxian Left.
Even though I’m not Catholic, I knew the Church was just asking for trouble when they started to let Catholics eat meat on Friday; didn’t excommunicate people like Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi. Patrick Leahy, Xavier Becerra and Dick Durbin, for promoting abortions on demand; and stopped electing Italian popes.
● Prior to Trump's removing us from the Paris Climate Accord, a reader asked me if I thought it made any difference whether or not the president ended our involvement in the non-binding agreement.
“Probably only as a symbolic act,†I replied, "as a signal that he hasn’t fallen for the absurd claim that 97% of climatologists agree that the earth is on the point of self-combustion. Even if the number weren’t a complete fabrication, it’s only science when 100% agree on something provable, such as the distance to the moon, the depth of the ocean and the existence of gravity. Short of that, it’s either a theory or, more likely, a hoax.â€
● If I had the power, I would insist that no gathering of diplomats would ever take place in Paris, Brussels, London, New York. Geneva or Washington, D.C. The only reason all those boobs got together and signed the Paris Accord in the first place was because it was happening in a city that boasted five-star hotels, expensive restaurants and high-priced hookers.
Just once, I’d like to see these meetings of world leaders, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank Group, take place in Ethiopia or Outer Mongolia. I guarantee there would be a lot of empty parking spaces.
Furthermore, I can assure you that absolutely nobody, including Al Gore, would have shown up to sign the Calcutta Climate Accord.
Burt P
