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Cries in the Streets

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Tents of the L.A. Homeless

In our 21st Century city of Los Angeles, there are tens of thousands of people who are living in scattered Medieval tent cities. Even though the city has banned tents from across the street from my apartment, there are a number of bums who “sleep rough” on the sidewalk. Martine and I can hear them when they raise their voices in anger in the middle of the night, particularly if they are competing for the attentions of a homeless woman.

I am very happy that I am not a politician, because then I would have to pretend as they do they these homeless are all poor unfortunates who need to be placed in public housing. That’ll work for some of them, the roughly 50% who really just need a place to bed down and are willing to follow the rules about drink, drugs, and violence. Except a very large percentage don’t want to follow any rules whatsoever. When they are offered housing, they will get drunk or stoned and smear their feces on the wall—whereupon they find themselves in the street again.

America is full of raggedy men who do not give a tinker’s damn about THE RULES. What they want is the freedom to live as they want to, even if they are burying the city of their residence in piles of fetid garbage. They don’t particularly care if their pursuit of freedom is toxic to others.

It’s kind of like American politics as a whole, which can best be summarized by who can say EFF YOU the loudest and longest. We used to have two political parties with platforms. Now we have one party that has a platform, and the rest have EFF YOU as their platform.

The homeless who don’t want to be homeless I can understand. The ones who want to spend all night drinking, shouting, getting high and meth and Fentanyl, and whoring with female ratbags do not have my sympathies.

Mayhem on the Road

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Keep Safe: There Are a Lot of Bad Drivers Out There

Martine and I have noticed that the highways of the United States have become more wild and woolly of late. To wit:

  • Particularly on residential streets, STOP signs are frequently ignored.
  • That also goes for traffic signals where one or two drivers typically crash a light when it turns red.
  • Drivers appear to get a frisson of pleasure by violating traffic laws if it gets them where they’re going a few milliseconds faster.
  • U-turns have become more common, not only on residential streets but on main roads.
  • The cell phone has become a major distraction, whether by talking or texting.
  • Los Angeles has decriminalized jaywalking at a time when accident rates of automobiles with pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooters, skateboarders, and others continue to rise.
  • Even when pedestrians cross at crosswalks and at street corners, they run the risk of being hit.

When one brings the matter up to the police, they complain that they don’t have enough officers to enforce the traffic laws. I suspect they would say this even if the police force was increased in size by a factor of three.

To survive, one has to drive like a Buddhist monk, with 100% of one’s attention on the road, and minimal flare-ups of road rage when one is confronted with an obvious violator. And that’s not easy to do!

Do You Still Pay Your Bills by Check?

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During the course of her daily walks, Martine finds the strangest things. Today, it was a hoard of undelivered mail consisting of invoices from which the checks paying them had been removed—presumably to find some checks that could be altered in favor of the thieves.

Mixed in with the bag of mail were food containers with food scraps, typical of the garbage stewed around my neighborhood by the homeless. It is likely that the thief was a homeless ex-con who had learned how to modify checks during a previous imprisonment.

I no longer pay bills by mail. Instead, I use the BillPay service of Bank of America. In five years of usage, I have had no problems; whereas, in previous years, I had problems with mail being delivered late or not at all. This cuts out the Postal Service and all those larcenously inclined bums who prey on it.

Tomorrow, I will give Martine a ride to the main Santa Monica Post Office with the bag of stolen mail, which she brought home from her walk. The mail was scattered all over the intersection of Wilshire Blvd. and 20th Street in Santa Monica.

He Did It All Right!

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He Has Good Reason to Worry

Back in February 27, 2022, I submitted a blog post entitled Putin Screws the Pooch. In it, I wrote:

I cannot help but think that Vladimir Putin has made a serious misstep in his assumptions regarding Ukraine’s willingness to abide by his thuggish behavior. The Russians made the same assumptions that Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney made when we invaded Iraq in 2003: We were not in fact welcomed with flowers and candy, and, moreover, we are still there.

Now Putin is in a worse position politically than Nikita Khrushchev was in after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Not only has Putin failed in his attempt to walk all over Ukraine, but he had to put down a quasi-coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries.

When one is a totalitarian dictator, one cannot afford to look weak. And Vladimir Putin at this time looks a lot weaker than Khrushchev did in 1964 when Brezhnev and Kosygin replaced him as top dog of the Soviet Union.

And how can you be top dog when you’ve screwed the pooch like Putin has?

One Word: Plastic

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Do We Eat a Credit Card Worth of Plastic Every Week?

In 2019, the World Wildlife Fund quoted research from the University of Newcastle, Australia, to the effect that all of us eat a credit card worth of plastic in our food every week. I have heard the expression that you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, but this is ridiculous. I read an article entitled “No, you don’t eat a credit card worth of plastic every week. But you still swallow a lot of it” on Salon.Com.

Although plastics of various sorts have been around for decades, they have not been studied as intensively as they deserve to be. After all, we as a people tend to be early adopters of convenient new technologies. It is only later that the grim news hits the streets.

It’s the same with cell phones. There have been arguments pro and con about the phones causing brain cancer, but it is very likely that there are other ill effects that will not come out for years. Back in the mid 1980s, I was involved selling demographic data for telephone service providers to be used in deciding where to erect cell phone towers. Now I feel somewhat guilty about my participation in this effort.

Getting back to plastics, an article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives stated:

Current estimates suggest that over 10,000 unique chemicals are linked to chemical manufacturing, many with unknown health effects and others identified as chemicals of concern. With such a large number of chemicals, it is very challenging to identify the key exposures we should be measuring to study health impacts of microplastics, as well as understanding their levels in humans.

Dr. Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, has documented plummeting human sperm counts possibly being affected by widespread plastic pollution: “I think it is important to note that micro and nanoplastics (MNPs) can increase the body burden of the previously recognized — and often studied — chemicals in plastic (most notably phthalates, bisphenols, parabens etc.).”

I suppose we’ll find out the whole truth eventually, but not before the human species has been irretrievably changed by the prevalence of plastics in our environment and our food.

Sympathy for Mules

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Drug Smuggler Caught by Airport Police

Of late I have been fascinated by a National Geographic Channel series called “To Catch a Smuggler.” The show concentrates on drug smugglers attempting to smuggle cocaine, heroine, so-called party drugs, and other narcotics in their luggage or on their persons.

Initially, I was elated that people smuggling drugs into this country (or, in fact, any country) were being caught. Then, as I viewed more of the series, I started feeling some compassion for the drug mules, who were mostly poor people in serious debt who were persuaded by the real criminals that they would not get caught if they carried heroine in a false bottom in their luggage or swallowed rubber contraceptives full of cocaine. In the latter case, if one of the rubbers broke while in transit, the result would be a fatal overdose.

When caught, the drug mules would begin by denying everything. Then, when presented with clear evidence of their crime, they would break down. Allowed one phone call to their loved ones, they broke down when they realized their lives were irretrievably ruined.

Thinking one could smuggle several kilos of drugs past trained dogs, experienced security and customs personnel, and instant chemical tests for banned substances is a form of magical thinking. Unfortunately, the prison sentences for smuggling can be up to thirty years in countries like Peru and Colombia, and somewhat less in Europe.

Also on the show are another set of “smugglers,” except what they are smuggling are themselves. Show after show highlights cases of Syrians, Turks, and Albanians attempting to get to the United States or Europe with forged or otherwise false travel documents. It seems that many Muslims are desperately trying to leave their home countries, many of which are either despotisms or fighting endless civil wars.

I think one would have to be Marjorie Taylor Greene to watch this show and not feel for the perpetrators.

Bad Faith, Russian Style

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Wagner Group Mercenary in Eastern Ukraine

It looks like there’s plenty of instances of bad faith to go around. We have been hearing that the Wagner Group (Группа Вагнера) has been supplementing the Russian army in the Ukraine with its own conscripts, mostly recruited from Russian convicts serving time for crimes. Vladimir Putin probably figures that when his “Private Military Company” (PMC) gets ripped apart by the Ukrainian army, no one will shed any tears.

In the news today the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claims he has been “cut off” from ammunition by Putin. In fact, he claims that Putin now refuses to take his phone calls. I guess his force, which once numbered 50,000 fighters, is now considered expendable.

This is a significant development. There has been considerable friction between the Wagner forces and the regular Russian army. Does that mean that Vlady will now risk angering his supporters by sending their sons home in a box? That would not look good for him, even if the Russian man in the street claims to support him—at least in public. But what does that say about what they think of Putin in the privacy of their homes?

Blaming Russian Literature for the Ukraine War!?

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Ukrainian Writer Oksana Zabushko

A week ago, I was reading a back issue of The Times Literary Supplement when I encountered an article that made me sit up straight. A Ukrainian author of some note—Oksana Zabushko—was blaming Russian literature and Russian culture for Putin’s invasion of her country.

While I regard Vladimir Putin personally responsible for the war, I do not go so far as to blame Russia as a country. Even when the man on the street in Petersburg or Moscow appears to back up Putin, I write that off as being careful what to tell a foreign journalist in view of the Draconian punishments in store for those not backing up Putin.

Why blame Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, and Chekhov for an invasion that they would in all likelihood opposed? Ukraine is certainly suffering from the invasion, which is targeting innocent civilians. At the same time, Russia is suffering, perhaps equally, from a war Putin did not expect would drag on for so long. He did not anticipate the disproportionately high Russian casualty rates, the incompetence of his generals, the sudden backbone shown by NATO, the global isolation of Russia from the world economy, and the disinclination of young Russian men to fight the war.

As much as I loathe Putin, I continue to read Russian literature and see Russian films. Although most of my fellow Americans avoid Russian literature like the plague, I think it is one of the great world literatures. Currently, I am reading a book of essays by Polina Barskova about the German siege of Leningrad during World War Two.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last February, I didn’t stop reading Russian literature. Instead, I made a point of adding more Ukrainian literature to my TBR (To Be Read) pile—including Oksana Zabushko herself, who is a pretty good author herself. Even when she makes an error in judgment.

The Moon’s a Balloon

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“What is success? It is a toy balloon among children armed with pins”

In the last few days, U.S. jet fighters have intercepted four balloons and popped them. Although the military has not officially admitted it, all four appear to be balloons equipped with electronics for spying. It is possible that we will never know, as what they manage to find is probably a military secret.

President Biden’s decision to bring these devices down is in sharp contrast to Trump, who let three or four such devices float over the U.S. during his régime without bringing it to anyone’s attention. Typically, he was full of anti-Chinese bluster—bluster, that did not translate into action.

We know that the Chinese have launched a number of spy satellites. Why, I wonder, did they feel it was necessary to supplement their findings with such a low-tech device as a balloon? Is it possible that their spy satellites did not produce satisfactory information? Were the Chinese balloons self-propelled? Or did they just drift any which where at the mercy of the winds? I doubt we’ll ever know.

Thoughts & Prayers—Pfffft!

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AK-47 Insides

After the mass killings in California this weekend—in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay—I am tempted to make an immodest proposal. Every time N number of innocent victims are killed by a shooter, the same number of NRA members (and their families) are slaughtered in the same fashion.

It would have the effect of thinning the herd.

Insofar as the Second Amendment is concerned, in exactly what way do gun buyers constitute a “well-regulated Militia”? (Answer: In no way.)