Coming Soon a New Site
January 2, 2023
How many times have I said "Coming Soon a New Site"?
Last time we updated this website was November 2019. (I have the old stuff stashed away somewhere. It will be integrated into an archive like the old website later.)
I wonder what has happened since then? [checking the internet] OH DEAR GOD!
Well, It looks like I need to get a really big mug to get a tall, tall glass of "I told you so!"
I'm gonna have to say something here, and I don't care if you're one of the few people who won't like it, because it needs to be said.
Honestly, if anyone had ever listed on some profile that you disliked the former guy (who we will referer to henceforth) and looked at you awkwardly as just another person who just didn't like who the president was, CONSIDER YOURSELF VINDICATED!
No leader of the United States should ever attempt to orchestrate discord and invoke a violent insurrection. The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone who does such is not fit for office. Yet any action to remove the people who supported it and who still want it two years later has been weak and is setting us up for yet another domestic terrorist attack.
Never forget that TFG's administration went after this web host in 2017 after the DisruptJ20 incident and how broadly the warrant was initially to scrap the information of 1.3 million people just for visiting a website. (No wonder VPNs are so popular.)
This website has been around for four administrations including the current one. And despite changes in political views and changes in political leaders, the overreach of interrogation to stifle dissent has become all too real, but the government isn't the only one who does it. People from the corporate world do this all the time. The problem is when those kind of corporate people become part of government and assume that they now have absolute power to do whatever they want free of any consequences. There are limits to this power. Even if they replace all the judges and back all the people running for congress or state-level leadership, check-and-balances is there to catch most of it. (Yeah, I said "most" of it. It's not perfect, but it can be corrected.) Look at all the judges TFG appointed who denied what he wanted. Look at all the people who used to stand up for him and now want to distance themselves, not just because the party is doing it, but because they are realizing "is this the legacy I want to leave." The answer to that is "you already carved out that legacy, no backsies." Nobody who supports an insurrection get off by trying to make up for it. There is no "making up" for supporting domestic terrorism. They made their beds, and it is only right that they now lie in them!
But this website is not a political website. It may have political opinions and a lot of them justified to be shared.
The days of cowering because of what employers would think are over! We know what they think. We know why they think it. Years of a capitalist system have created an atmosphere of exploitation. It has exploited the environment. It has exploited people based on their race, religion, nationality, gender, disability, political support, veteran status, immigration status, sexual orientation, even the zip code that they live in...but they'll deny it.
Last year, I had the stark revelation that the system of which people's disabilities and their families have been exploited. Rather than actually helping people out, some state actually use their vocational rehabilitation services to just keep people who are disabled holding onto the hope that organization that claim to help find the disabled jobs really aren't that interested in doing such. Part of the reason is that states get paid to do the least amount of effort to help people out. Why get someone who has a disability a job that they can do where they are treated with dignity and paid like everyone else there when you can half-ass it, offer mediocre job placement, use it to "inspire" people, and pay them less than minimum wage thanks to section 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It doesn't matter what the disability. You could be considered mentally r*****ed or have ADHD and high functioning autism and still they will exploit your disability to put you in a job where wages are about a dollar an hour.
Social security and state level Medicaid are just as bad. Did you know you can't have more than $2000 in personal assets if you have Social Security Disability Income? In some states, the Medicaid program won't let you have more than $1000.In a world where monthly rent for an apartment is more than $2000 in many places, but wages have not budge since Jimmy Carter was president.
The disabled have a right to live like everyone else, to live independently, and to have affordable transportation available on-call to participate in activities especially if those activities are of benefit to their physical, mental, and social well-being, not just doctor's appointments. It should not take a lawsuit to get out of poverty.
The disabled have a right to autonomy. They shouldn't be forced to do things because some senator-elect's autistic son can't do them or some elected officials years ago sought to segregate people with disabilities based on discriminatory biases. We can do the work!
The disabled have a right to save their finances with no limits! The limits set by government programs wouldn't pay for burial expenses even if bodies were cremated or donated to science. But for some unethical reason, there is this assumption that the people on disability will exploit the collection of their stipends. For some people, plastic surgery is not a cosmetic luxury, but a necessity. Of course, back when these laws were written, most people never saw Dr. Sandra Lee's YouTube channel or Googled what a Pilar Cyst is.
The disabled have Everyone has the right to work from home. Some employers were all too happy to start making people show up to work again, not to be in their presence but to make sure they drove to work. We have the technology to work from home sustainably. And yes, some of the tools to do that aren't as accessible as they should be or as reliable as they should be. We need software engineers to create new apps that with better accessibility. We need network engineers to. We need linemen and electricians to install more reliable infrastructure.
The disabled have Everyone has the right affordable, frequent public transportation in urban and suburban populations. As much as Uber has made booking a ride much easier (and far less bureaucratic than calling a taxi), the cost of using a ride-sharing service does add up. Public transportation is still the more affordable option, but it is also becoming more scarcely available in a lot of metropolitan area. This has been a problem even before the pandemic. Paratransit is exponentially worse, especially if the vehicle isn't maintained or air intake from a similar vehicle fills the cabin with toxic exhaust fumes. America was rebuilt for the automobile over the last century. There are even laws that prevent the construction of buildings where the first floor is commercial and the levels upward are residential. Part of it had to do with fire codes, but most of it was to promote unsustainable structures that made parking a priority in commercial areas and maintaining a lawn in residential areas.
In the last year, I have moved to a more sustainable part of town. It's a bit closer to the city, and much of the architecture is about a century old, but the walkability to places like the grocery store, the laundromat, the pharmacy, even a few restaurants is much better than where I was living. However, due to a lack of adequate funding for public transportation in our area, my plan of using the bus (which is a lot closer to where I live now) has been messed up because the people who operate the transit system have scaled back service on routes to up to two hours, even on the main route that has direct access to downtown St. Louis.
The transit system wants to promote their own ride-sharing service, however it does not operate like a ride-sharing service, it only makes limited stops and its availability is pathetically unavailable. They also offer last-mile service but only with Lyft not Uber. Once again, the transit system fails and it fails hard...OH BUT WE HAVE THE TROLLY AGAIN...the one that nobody asked for, the one that only serves TWO MILES of Delmar Boulevard and could have been more useful if it reached ALL of the attractions in Forest Park...the one that everyone told Metro "please don't take over it" but they did anyone...the one that the Federal Transit Administration, under the U.S. Department of Transportation, said that they would punish Metro if they didn't run it after it was shut down in 2019 after low ridership...the one that pretty much destroyed the Delmar Loop's bohemian appeal as they also permitted more lofts and student housing for all those trust-fund babies that go to college at Washington University of St. Louis. Yeah, that one. Routes in North St. Louis County have been discontinued, including the one where I used to live. For the past few years, some routes have stopped running after 8pm. Now another route in the city is being scaled back despite it being on a street where many St. Louis icons and attractions don't have bus service after 8pm: The #30 Arsenal. This bus serves the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (which is still building their new campus in North St. Louis), Anheuser-Busch, Tower Grove Park, the South Grand neighborhood, and one of my favorite places in South City, Gus' Pretzels. (These are the guys who sell the pretzels outside of Busch Stadium.) It also serves the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, which offers services to adults with severe, persistent mentally illness. But, hey, "we still have the trolley".
While there is a stigma attached to the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, the fact that access to this facility by use of public transportation, even for those who are visiting patients, who need their support (especially their family) to help them with treatment, has been curbed because the people who operate the transportation system do not care for the most vulnerable shows that the people running the public transportation system still do not have any interest in operating the system.
Most of them don't even live along a transit route, at least not one that is easy to get to. Almost half the board lives out in Chesterfield in Far-West St. Louis County where thanks to those "conservative values" and generational wealth they receive, they simply don't care. In fact, every time the talk about increasing taxes to pay for public services is brought up, there's always some libertarian twit that talks about setting up a movement to separate West County from St. Louis County. By the way, now would be a good time to Google the Rockwood School District and all the racist problems they've been having, because the same people who alway brag about how "well we'll just leave St. Louis County" are the same people who get to be on the National News because of the things they taught their children. And these people want a "parental bill of rights". HA! These people can get it when they stop teaching their children racial slurs...and banning books...and being pissed because they had to wear a mask during the pandemic...and showing up on Karens in the Wild on YouTube...oh and this woman.
We need people who can grow our transportation system, not shrink it. We need people who won't strip the transit system for part or keep it out of certain parts of town as a means to reinstate segregation.
That's right. You didn't think they weren't running the busses in St. Louis County to "save money", did you? There are ulterior motives for why this is happening. And those ulterior motives just happen to show up in other places. You see them at the St. Louis County Council meetings, at municipal meetings, at school board meetings. The same people scared s***less about Critical Race Theory, library books with queer characters in them, and who lost their s*** because they and their children had to wear a mask for two years are the same people who kept the public transit from operating in much of Western and Southern St. Louis County. And when that didn't stop the workforce of people from North St. Louis County (of a different demographic, I might add), they started cutting off the system at the source despite being more populated.
I'm here to state that for years, the people in the other two-thirds of St. Louis County have raised hell to keep the other third and the people in the city from visiting their part of the county. Not only is it morally wrong, IT SUCKS!
They can no longer hide their hatred and they can no longer hide behind the veil of social media where they think they have anonymity. There's always a trail of bread crumbs that lead back to the source. It would not only be an honor but a civic duty to expose the people who have abused public platforms to suppress the large community of people in this area who have been denied the upward mobility and community services that they are entitled to. There is nothing wrong with basic entitlement, especially if it keeps you from suffering illness, living paycheck-to-paycheck, keeps a roof over your head, gets you where it needs you to go, allows your access to a better quality of living, and the education and enlightenment that makes all this possible. To deny this and substitute it with ignorance, fear, misinformation, and disinformation is un-American, and yet all those who do these un-American things have wrapped themselves in the flag, beaten on the Bible, and demanded that they "want their country back" or to "make America great again" when it was never our country to begin with and their definition of "greatness" ignores all the history of how that "greatness" came at the cost of putting other people down or taking the credit from other people different from them.
To those who have tried to put the genie back in the bottle to their idealized "white suburbia", I would suggest reading a few novels by Thomas Wolfe.
While this still is my personal website, and I guess you could call it a "blog", this still is a tech website. I don't particularly like using WordPress. A lot of my web-design influence has been based on what has worked for George "Maddox" Ouzounian. Minimalist. To the point. And yes, at time the content can be kurt. Despite his brash, often satirical, opinions, much like his site, I like to write everything from scratch.
This page is pretty much a placeholder for the content that is yet to come. A couple of years ago, I stated I was not interested in spending a small fortune on adding Node.js to my website and it has paid off as now that technology is affordable enough to be integrated into this website. I can't wait to show you my actual skills as a web developer. It's taken over 20 years to get the technology to where it needs to be to make it possible, but I assure you there's going to be one heck of an interactive section on this website to try stuff out.