Monthly Archives: May 2018

Wrong Headed

The Press & Sun-Bulletin, (P&SB) “Editorial Board”, (2 old white guys employed by Gannett), panned the recent decision to end so-called “net-neutrality”, on the shaky intellectual argument that everyone is entitled to everything the internet has to offer, delivered to all users as fast as possible.

Really?

Let’s explore how that same logic might work in the world of print journalism.

I have two daily newspapers delivered to my home, the P&SB and the Wall Street Journal, (WSJ.) I read the P&SB in the time it takes me to consume a small bowl of fruit every morning.  The WSJ takes me the rest of the day to peruse.  The P&SB costs me 50% more than my subscription to the journal.  Three things keep me subscribed to the P&SB; 1. Nostalgia, 2. Scanning the obituaries,  and 3. Learning of local news 48 hours after it happens.

Guided by the wisdom and logic of the P&SB “Editorial Board”, (2 old white guys employed by Gannett,) either the P&SB should slash it’s price by about 75%, or the WSJ should degrade its superior content and superb writing staff in order to match the low level of quality and content provided by the P&SB.

Whether it be providing internet service or newspapers, all businesses incur expenses, are motivated by profitability, and struggle naturally in a competitive business environment that ultimately requires of them the tailoring of products to a marketplace of consumers picking and choosing what they use based on their needs, their ability and their willingness to pay the price.

Similarly, consumers have choices in internet providers. Consumers who demand high speeds can pay for the service, just like all other consumers of all other types of goods and services make decisions based on quality, price and affordability.  The end of an over-reaching regulatory behemoth in government agency oversight might just result in a multi-tiered pricing structure where those consumers of digital goods who may not need wide bandwidth might enjoy a pricing discount for a slower speed.

There is larger life lesson here. If you live in the hood, have kids you can’t afford, enjoy subsidized housing, Medicaid, an EBT card and a bike instead of a car, it is with 99% probability that poor choices on your part landed you there.  That means Weis and not Wegmans, Dollar General and not Bon-Ton, Boscovs and not Brooks Brothers and finally, perhaps the public library computer terminal and not an imagined entitlement to high-speed internet.

If on the other hand, you had a good family upbringing, valued your education, stayed out of trouble, had respect for authority, a strong belief in God, self-respect, and a solid work ethic, then those conditions likely provided you the freedom to choose Wegman’s over Weis, Bon-Ton over Dollar General, Brooks Brothers over Boscov’s and computing power in the speed you can afford and need.

While true that we were all, “created equal,” there is no Constitutional or moral expectation that we necessarily stay that way. We all are defined by the choice we make, the willingness we have to work for what we want, and the desire to be responsible for our own outcomes.  Somewhere along the way, many lost the concept of personal responsibility and self-motivation, replaced instead by learned helplessness, courtesy of a liberal philosophy that devalued the family, removed shame from bad behavior, and encouraged heightened self-esteem in those who should actually be ashamed of their actions.

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BGM

Build it and they will come might make for a good baseball movie and fantasy story telling, but it won’t magically make the Binghamton Regional Airport into a field of dreams.  The departure of IBM and with it, all of the ancillary businesses it supported left the Binghamton region wanting for business travelers making regular trips during the week.  Couple that with technology providing video-conferencing and real-time document sharing and costly routine business travel became largely unnecessary.

Our region, like many smaller markets throughout the US, was wooed into over-building our airports because ample federal funding had always been available to do so.  The Airport Improvement Program was to airports what the Interstate Highway system was to roadways in the later half of the 20th century.  Through that program, billions of dollars are spent every year, averaging about $5.5 million per airport.  And of course the allure was and is, free money, and if you build it they might come, and my personal favorite, if we don’t take it some other region will and we’ll be the worse for it.  Because these federal handouts were so indiscriminate, regions like Binghamton, that were shrinking markets, kept on spending thinking; what’s the downside of taking more and more federal dollars?

Fast-forward to today and this is the reality.

Not counting Binghamton, there are four commercial passenger airports within a one-hour drive, Elmira, Ithaca, Syracuse and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton.  Two offer international travel. Binghamton is not one of them.  Three of the airports are directly adjacent to interstate highways.  The Binghamton airport is 8 miles up a two-lane road.  Drawing a 25-mile radius around each of the five airports, Binghamton has the smallest population from which to draw. Syracuse has six carriers with 53 daily flights.  Wilkes-Barre/Scranton has four carriers offering 18 daily flights. Ithaca and Elmira both have three carriers and offer eight daily flights. Binghamton has a single carrier offering three fights a day, all to Detroit.

 

The same brilliant minds thinking that bringing water and sewer lines up airport road would increase airport use, now are contemplating spending thousands of dollars for a consultant to tell us what the airlines have already studied and concluded; the Binghamton market for commercial air service is insufficient to support profitability.

 

Our airport ought to lower its gate fees, landing fees, and all fees imposed on airlines, to be just a bit less than the lowest cost competitor airport within this group. Fuel costs should also be lowered to beat all of those other airports as well.  Helping carriers to lower their costs just might encourage them to offer more services here.

 

It is painfully hard to ignore the irony of the reality that the only way to fly out of Binghamton, a shrinking rust-belt region trying desperately to become a college town, is to end up in another failing region of economic despair, Detroit.

 

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Cesspool

A recent news story reported that the cost to incarcerate each prisoner in NY State is over $69,000.00 annually. Taxpayer dollars spent on prisoners should never exceed the poverty rate because no inmate should be living better than the poorest amongst us.  That rate is currently just over $12,000.00 per year.

 

 

Governor Cuomo tells us that the 2019 NYS budget gap is about $4 billion dollars.

Headupass

Here is a solution. End the economic development boondoggle commonly known as the Hunger Games which is nothing more than a corrupt vote-getting scheme using taxpayer dollars and you immediately see a $1.5 billion savings.  Couple that common-sense idea with reducing prison costs to never exceed the federal poverty level and we see an additional $2.8 billion saved.

This erases the budget gap while deterring crime and ending the charade of economic development in the form of feathering the Governor’s own re-election nest.

Former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara was right when he characterized NYS as a “pay to play culture of corruption.” With more than 30 former NYS elected officials either accused, indicted, resigned, found guilty or incarcerated due to ethical misdeeds.  NYS government is not a swamp, but a cesspool.

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Boy Bashing

 

Gender eradicating radical feminists are in full assault mode trying to erase “maleness” from men.

To them, masculinity is a sexually transmitted disease.

Because they know better than to attack the few real men left in this world, they instead bully little boys into growing up as ball-less buffoons, easily led, once force-fed a testosterone-free diet.

The mission of the new order Cow-Class is to socially castrate males. Keep discouraging men from being masculine fathers and that is what we will get.

Social media content creators manipulated and co-opted big business, through advertising campaigns, into propagandizing this mass emasculation. Consider insurance companies Liberty Mutual and AllState.

A Liberty Mutual TV ad celebrates young men’s inability to change a tire into a pitch for insurance that does this for them. Changing a tire used to be a rite of passage for young men learning to drive.

In the Liberty ad, the clearly expressed message is that the boy is being raised by a single mom, (no wedding rings and no dad in the picture,) while the primary message is that the boy is completely helpless.  During the entire 30-second spot, the boy looks around sheepishly, nervously glancing about and holding onto his arm with his opposite hand, while never opening his mouth, speechless in the shadow of his all-powerful Mommy doing all the talking.  Pathetic.

Our poor boys are cowed into silence, empowering women by the contact-high of scratched off testosterone found beneath their nails as the claw there way towards the feminization of American men.

Allstate ratchets it up a notch, demonstrating progress in the successful de-nutting goal. In this TV ad, the husband is shown peering into the refrigerator.  His passive-aggressive wife then denigrates and embarrasses her husband as she simultaneously pokes him in the ribs and chides him for not going to the gym enough to suit her.

Just imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed.

And finally, the 108 year-old tradition of Boy Scouting dropped the word BOY from their title, ending more than a century of proud leadership in effectively turning boys into men, precisely what the Cow-Class dreads most; independent, strong, clear-thinking men.

Men and everything that maleness stands for are under constant criticism today. The Cow-Class agenda is driven by a combination of misandrous ideology and self-loathing, stemming mainly from their own sexual insecurity and unhappiness in begrudgingly assimilating into a gender role asymmetrical with happiness and contentment.

Driven by these internal conflicts, they attack maleness because it exposes their own fragility when compared against real men’s natural self-assuredness. These tortured caricatures of women inwardly crave the possession of masculinity for themselves, while simultaneously abhorring it when packaged in men.  Unsuccessful in harnessing the power of masculinity, they instead attack genuine men because they can’t seem to establish that level of satisfaction for themselves.

The famed father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud figured this all out 100 years ago and brilliantly reduced his findings to two words:

Penis Envy.

 

 

 

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Murder in the UK

Little Alfie Evans, an English toddler just shy of his second birthday was murdered a few days ago by the British government. Any questions about the quality of care and the dignity of life under a state run system of universal health care should be clearly answered by watching the British version that murdered this baby and trampled this poor family into submission.  Alfie’s parents were worn down, threatening with arrest, and finally striped of their parental rights as they fought to save their son’s life as he suffered with a rare neurological disease.

Eager to demonstrate state power above and beyond that of life and death, the British government defiantly pissed in the eye of God Himself through the proxy of the Pope, by preventing this child from being transferred to the Vatican for care not available in Britain.  Pope Francis himself intervened, even granting Alfie citizenship in order to exercise authority over the rule of British law, to no avail.

The British government pulled the plug on Alfie rather than allow his family the right to try and save him. Those responsible for sending Alfie on his final journey might ponder their own fate when their time comes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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