It is a Friday in the realm, and the week has come to an end for most.  I slept in to 0500 this morning, got up and slipped into my sock, and headed into my hunker-bunker to check out the InterTubes.  First the obligatory photo of respect for the deadly departed:

The Headlines That Caught My Eye This Morning:

The “rules” here is that I haven’t actually read any of these articles before I comment on the headlines.  I may, or may not get any of it right.

1. Dianne Feinstein Reached Her Final Milestone and Tipped Over At 90
2. How Joe Biden’s Kin Profited Off the Family Name.
3. Landmark Texas, Florida social media cases added to Supreme Court term
4. The 10 States With the Highest STD Rates
5. People Experience ‘New Dimensions of Reality’ When Dying, Groundbreaking Study Reports
6. New California law raises minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 per hour, among nation’s highest
7. San Francisco Prepares to Clear Homeless Camps after Court Clarifies Definition of ‘Involuntarily Homeless’

My Commentary on the Above Headlines:

1. Wait, what?  They just now noticed?  She was decomposing before our very eyes, for crying out loud.  She should have been in a hospice, not the US Senate.
2. Pick a family related to the seat of power in any government anywhere on earth.  There is going to be at least someone trying to cash in on the name and relationship.  It’s the ultimate game of name-dropping and access to better your own situation.  It’s hard not to mention another famous and recent family connected to the White House and their attempts to cash in on their namesake’s position.  We know Hunter Biden, a private citizen, used his father’s name to gain access and increase their profits.  It’s not just the families of presidents and vice presidents, it also includes families of other positions that surround power in this country.  It’s how you get ahead in both the public and private sectors.  You find people with access and flood them with money and positions.
3. Free Speech in the private sector and the US Constitution.  I am not really sure why this is an issue for the Court.  Or the government at large.  The US Constitution is a contract between the People and the Government, not between the people.  Facebook, Twitter, et al are not government entities.  Because of this, they cannot be held to the confines of the First Amendment, because they can decide what can or cannot be posted on their property.  If a business decides they want to keep guns out of their establishment, they have that Constitutional Right to do so.  Your Rights do not attach on private property.  You do not have a First Amendment Right on private property.  In fact, you do not have a right to even participate on a social media platform.  I don’t know why this is hard for anyone to understand.
4. Okay, I admit, I cheated on this one.  I looked.  I was NOT surprised. If you don’t provide age-appropriate sex education to students, you are going to wind up with some very undesirable outcomes.  The data backs this up.
5. Isn’t death basically a “new dimension of reality”?  One moment you are alive, and … SNAP! You are gone.  You no longer exist here in this reality.  So what was so “groundbreaking” about this study?
6. Raising California’s minimum wage to $20 an hour is probably still too low — for parts of California.  I know $20 an hour  is insufficient to live on here in Seattle — you need about $22.50 for a single person to live within 10 miles of Seattle city limits.  Closer to $25 an hour to live within the city limits.There is a flaw to this system of raising the minimum wage that tends to get over looked.  If they raised the minimum wage from $15 to $20, then what happens to all those people who were making $16-20 an hour?  They aren’t going to see a bump in their wages, so suddenly they’ve become minimum wage earners as well.  So now you have a high school box boy making as much as say, a skilled tradesperson.
7. Finally a tiny bit of sanity. It has literally been a jungle in some areas here in Seattle, where the city government caved in to “houseless advocates” who don’t want to see the city “sweep” these encampments off of sidewalks, freeway ramps and underpasses and private property because of their “rights”.  Most of the chronically homeless are mentally ill and/or drug addicted, and refuse shelter and services.  Only the situationally homeless tend to accept services and help.Seattle and the Greater King County has spent close to a billion bucks (give or take a couple of hundred million) to ‘solve’ the homeless issue over the past few years.  They could have sent each and every one of them on worldwide ocean cruises for a couple of years  for that kind of money.  Yet we have a LOT of homeless people hanging around.Sooner or later, we are going to have to become forceful.  Come up with a plan, sort these people out and get them whatever help they need to either get right or get locked up in some kind of 21st century poor house.

Don’t know how much of the above I got right, but it IS fun just to make guesses at just reading the headline news.

Too soon?

Sounds of Silence – Disturbed

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