The Phalanx of Walk Aways in Corrugated Engines

How about moving us up from number 3 for state corruption to 10? Then I will start to smile.

— Thomas Lynn Hamaker (@LynnHamaker) January 16, 2019

The corruption embedded in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania surrounds me like the Earth's penumbra. I have lived it intuitively, know it intimately, and had I had the ability to intern under a rational conservative such as Kinberley Strassel, then perhaps I could delineate it for you within the parameters of her no nonsense approach, but I have to strike at it with an ice pick in more dilatory fashion, wondering how much of it can be traced back to King Charles settling his debts in his aristocratic restoration with a radical egalitarian like William Penn. Probably more than we'd like to think, even though The Society of Friends has dissipated from a radical stripping down of Christian worship into a body of zealots determined at all costs to eliminate caste of any kind. Whatever accusations the left wants to hurl at conservatives for race baiting, a la Willie Horton, guilt riddled Caucasians cannot face the reality of what they subject congenital disabled individuals to as embodied in the Elwyn expose. It would be political suicide for a pedestrian such as Tom Wolf to even hint that invalids suffer even more hardship at the hands of black intransigence than they otherwise would against white indifference, and as for me, who cares? I have burned my bridges into a de facto censure from the establishment, but that doesn't make my observations less accurate or otherwise anguished: you're the one who wanted to move to the city. This is my cousin Jessica's accusation, in code, that as a deluded collegiate I too suffered from this utopian fairytale. And due to it, my rage transposed itself into the destruction of civilization that we see in a crudely constructed parable like Surrogates. Cromwell's depiction of Lionel Canter isn't as remote a possibility as you'd like to think. Family cohesion is always superseded by the institution, by the myriad clinical classifications that don't matter to the unskilled menial tasks bequeathed to African care givers. It isn't slavery anymore, of course not. They receive a salary for these crippled bodies economic necessity forces them to tend, only to have their own resentments lead them into a prosecutorial scold. But then again, I am not the only one burdened by the shame this Commonwealth's face presents to the nation. The perspective this allegation of fraud exposes is unacceptable, precisely because we all collectively deny the truth.

Back Up Parentis with Titus

Do you ever have anything positive to say?-- my better weekend aide

The only thing Bosch brings to the table as a procedural, in my estimation, is hard luck forming its central character as a stickler with his own honor code, (something with which I identify) but the second season opened with something which threads through the history of civilization: using human frailty as a form of masking. The first thing this wizened detective does after a six month suspension for flipping a pissant captain, fraudulent as that felt, is expose a suspect as not his father with emphysema in a wheelchair on oxygen. Chair gets violently thrown, (not that this doesn't happen to actual users) suspect flees, and our star of course lassos him in. Hugo makes the same distinctions in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when the unfortunate poet Pierre Gringoire gets corralled by beggars of a 15^th(?) century Paris in upheaval. They only pretend to be lame and crippled. The gruesome operatives of Slumdog Millionaire, if you recall, take no chances with such fakery, and blind destitute street kids to beg for what must be an unstable currency. Although I can feel Jason Dorwart’s raised eyebrows behind me, nothing has truly changed in the world. Why do I assert this? Because Erik von Schmetterling, for all his transsexual ADAPT zealotry of yesteryear, is senile, his troops dying in Riverside Presbyterian’s lobby, while I’m literally quaking myself to death in an incompetent mechanic’s contraption because I can no longer pivot to take a damn dump in the toilet and the medical professionals around me are going berserk bilking Medicare without doing a damn thing to restore my function, and a west African minority has me running around doing her job because she’s too tired. So I have to criss cross center city buying supplies I cannot afford. I can, conceivably, explore suing Mr Wheelchair for product liability, but by the time that needle moves a stroke will have probably hit me, my body actually fighting the disposable adult wear for hours until discharge necessarily takes place, in pain regardless of her masks and gloves and her physically brutal ignorance. I allowed Dana to see too much of this, my racial hostility. It preys a little because she is morally decent, but her provider, TLC, is “cheap immigrant labor,” once removed. Karina is little better, white as she may be. I wasn’t planning on a yodel about entitlement metastasis this morning, however, but since I’m here, from what I am able to observe, millennials and the adolescents coming up behind them may well end up living in much more poorer standards than those I’ve had; I just have to find the right entryway to broach the topic without causing undo friction to my family in their hardships, but it does alarm me. Karina is 38 and she has an adrift life. At that age, I was earning between 250 and 400 on commissioned articles, working, in other words. Nevertheless, let me uplift my percussion with an upbeat rhythm, as transitory as social media can be, I was heartened by Svetlana's discovery of my account, dare I consider her a spiritual sister in arms!

Kindling Off the Plate

What I want, which I do not have, insofar as I’m aware, is for a prominent conservative to look at disability, trim away the Orwellian pork rinds, and come up with something less draconian than what Harrisburg has done with Maximus, and I want it despite the aphorism that stipulates doing it yourself. People generally pay attention to recognized personalities, and not to me, unless I am blatantly illegal, and when I’ve pushed that envelope, I have paid on a personal level, let alone social media drubbings and my oscillations of up and down. The Speaker has *said* something charitable on occasion, and I gave him the savant-cute hug, prior to his failure on healthcare, for his highlights. There is James Woods too, expending his industry capital as an ambassador. This is a good thing, and brought my attention to him, which prior to Twitter had been casual. Praise is deposited where due, but Woods is an actor keeping his profile relevant, not an analyst who can influence policy. It doesn’t have to be a Briton like Niall Ferguson or Andrew Sullivan,  (obviously outraged beyond consolation in my link) but someone like them would be useful.

I have taken my potshots at Andrew, very unfairly, as he is not the “deep state” behind the militancy of disability activism, hoping to goad him into castigating me. Despite the fact that Dr. Ferguson was equally cursory in his own way, and despite the fact that I was once many many years ago merely another spectator scrolling The Dish, it rankled me that a man with such a mind sent me a damn screen shot of my Amtrak building. It is a landmark around center city, but what’s that? Should I have responded with a photo of anti-virals? If I was on equal footing as a disabled female journalist, Sullivan might say you cannot alter the fact I have AIDS, right, so what do you want?

Not being patronized would be a start, as opposed to being challenged. I am also the type of person to get involved and interject myself in socially inappropriate fashion, much like the fictional Dino Ortolani hearing the plea, and smothering a dying AIDS patient prior to his own savage murder. Mercy killings are harder on the actor than the recipient, but have their place.

My solutions are only a partial stab in the muck:

1.       Women need to curb high risk obstetric births. If an infant is not viable without acrobatics, allow it to die. I agree with male authority that women with children and without have gone too far.

2.      If the above assertion is to be dismissed, families with such children need better planning, as any parent can die unexpectedly or otherwise.

3.      Look for areas where technology can reduce the dependence on caretakers.

4.      Architects can solve many of these problems without that much inconvenience to ambulatory majorities.

5.      Institutional innovation is rather long in the tooth. This needs to be addressed.