City leaders here are proposing, and may succeed in enforcing mandatory 18 week paid parental leave from employment.   I did the math.  Eighteen weeks is one third of one year.   Small business owners will be forced to pay moms and the workers needed to replace them during their leaves.  In the case of public utility companies, they will pass the increased labor cost to home owners and everyone else, higher utility costs.

Water will cost more.   Gas and electric power, too.   Property taxes will increase to pay for parental leave.  But I want to clock the shittiest point of all:   There is no proof of competence or character on the part of parents granted eighteen weeks paid leave.   What if parents are drug addled spouse/child abusing alkies?   They get more free time to gamble at the Casino, or online.

What if parents are patently stupid or sick,  and their kids would be set better examples in  a day care?    I contend it is unsafe to assume parents are safe to be with.   No one is discussing the character of parents.  

It's a shithole out in the real world.  Fuck me for bringing this shit up.  Kids are exposed to horrible people and shithole home environments.  Have you heard the lyrics to mainstream music these days? 

 Not only will the paid leave mandate destroy what's left of the local economy, it will pay shitty people to produce more people like themselves.  At worst the plan will pay people to produce gangsters and inmates.   

Yes, I'm a prick for bringing this up.   I'm producing the crap like Charles Fucking Dickens.   Thanks for reading.

addenda:   In the worst case senarios parents will get eighteen week paid leave to drink, do drugs and gamble.  It could mean more time to incubate an addiction to drugs or other vice.   Some people are sadistic child abusers.  They will be eligible for  paid leave.  More time to inflict harm and endangerment.

Costs of food, housing, transportation and fuck knows what else are going up.   Literacy has been atrocious in Pittsburgh forever.  All the more since leadership imposed its will on the school system.  If parents are illiterate and incompetent, it might rub off on kids. 

 What fun cigarettes were back in the day.   People looked forward their next one.  "Time to pound another nail," people would say, coughing, leaning  back from their desk, in the 1960s,  lighting one up.   

People were still allowed to do it, with their big expensive designer ash trays on their desk like dirty cut glass sculptures.   At the time a full ash tray, piled a foot high with ciggy butts, was a sign of a strong work ethic.  Cigarettes helped sweating office bulwarks, all of whom played sports in high school, to focus on corporate objectives.  In those days people had heart attacks at work and people respected them for choosing a name brand, rather than some cheap inferior tobacco  that lazy winos had to subsist on.

People had standards back  then.   Honor.  Health bushido.    None of that pussy cop-out routine.  No blame game.  Rugged individuals smoked cartons of cigs per day.   And puffed off when their number came up.  

Now only poor people smoke cigarettes, and everyone acts like a pussy over anything health related.   When the middle class snivels, everyone lobbies congress for health care reform.  I think there would be fewer mass homicides all over the US is everyone got free cigarettes in the mail, want 'em or not.   Call it a precaution.   

Maybe people have it all wrong about the epidemic of violence that is  permeating our daily lives  Maybe the Planet Earth is in a collective nicotine fit.   The world needs a  Camel Straight.  

Back in the day we called it 'pounding a nail in the coffin.'  It sure felt good doing it.   Go figure there was much less gun violence back then.  I am certain universal free cigs will help keep the peace now.

 

I admit this is shitty hash to sling, but I must needs to comment about tax exempt arts organizations.  In Pittsburgh and elsewhere these organizations, and the people that comprise them, have created a social class of professional mourners.  And professional victims.  

People who are victims of oppression are more talented in all areas of the arts and sciences, per popular modern myth of the persecuted intellectual.   Through history there have been Easter baskets full of martyrs.   And professional mourners, people paid to show up at funerals, dressed like grim fashion models.   

Arts organizations arrange events that mitigate 501c3 status, while soliciting donorship and public revenue.  All the while, nonprofit executives draw handsome salaries and bonuses.   A short list of victims become wards of the establishment.  People jailed or otherwise mistreated elsewhere in the world, or here in the dangerous, callous US.   Someone has to pretend to care.  Why not make money caring about professional victims?   The system is economic genius, even if it renders the arts invalid.   Racketeering can have the effect of invalidating almost anything.   It's a racket.

Mission Statement: I am a terminal art major

 

There are artists and also there are terminal art majors.  I'm the latter.   No W2 forms from selling art objects, I am not some stupid, nauseating dilettante .    

Dilettantes are NFG.  Histrionic pains in ass.  Those individuals are shit, shit, shit.  Terminal art majors do their things till death parts busy beavers from their exploits.   We give a big fat fuck, for real, honest, heartfelt, about validity.   

Dilettantes don't give a flying fuck about that crap.  And substantive crap, it is.

By the fucking way, I took the photograph, above, and all photos used on blogs and other social media. My bullshit, poems, fiction, youtube videos, and photographs can be found on  the internet.  Seek, and yee shall groove on my many creative exploits.  Peace.

Limerick: A Sad Banker

 Limerick: A Sad Banker 

described as otiose
histrionic and lachrymose
the pecker from Yale
currently in jail
formerly suave, now gross

I wrote the dirty limerick, below, and am fucking proud:

 

Back from her date in a sable

A silastic dummy named Mable

Said “I model fur coats"

On a diet of  oats

Also milk  of Clark Gable

 

Who ever you are, I've always told strangers what crap is playing Yahtzee in my head.   I feel as if I'm having sex with Blanch DuBois from the play Streetcar Named Desire.    The criminal charges against James Fucking Comey are damned interesting on a shitload of levels.

The supposed crime, publicizing numbers made of sea shells, like a little girl with sand bucket and creepy tin shovel.    Trump says it is a threat  made by the former FBI director, to put a pic on his web site of the numbers, in sea shells, like Little Miss Muffet,  numbers supposedly signifying with the number 86 that harm is intended, and the 47 part indicates Trump.  That's the basis for the criminal charge, or it's some of it.  

I like to roll handfuls of dice and make up bullshit about what the dots mean.   

Off the top this could appear to be egregious on the part of Trump.   The sea shells in sand on a beach could be a harmless expression of disdain for the president.   And, Trump may have a reason to go zero tolerance on Comey because Comey is expected to have better than average judgment, even when retired. 

 He holds top secret info, has worked with people capable of legal and criminal violence.   Capricious or impulsive behavior on the part of a retired FBI director could be construed to be extremely dangerous.  And undignified.   What kind of people code messages in sea shells?   Fairy maidens and former FBI directors with possible serious character problems.   No matter what the creep intended, there is reason to take action against dangerous jerks.  People who don't support Trump, and people who do, could agree like Welcome Wagon in Western Valhalla on one thing...no one needs goofy people in the top slot of the FBI.