IDOT OBLIVIOUS

The state of Illinois is billions of dollars in debt and is attempting austerity measures that will cut into the lives of vulnerable retirees. Oh, but that's good news for the Illinois Department of Transportation. They think they can just waltz in and take the money that was meant to reduce the debt and spending deficit for themselves, totally oblivious to the fact that the state's fiscal disaster is driving out businesses who are not interested in paying higher taxes for precisely this kind of stupidity.


http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x1942597078/IDOT-unveils-6-year-9-2-billion-road-program?zc_p=1

City-Data.com

City-Data.com is a very highly detailed collection of information on cities throughout the U.S. and possibly more than I have explored. If you take the survey at FindYourSpot.com first, it can be an amazing tool for relocating to a place that better suits your needs.

Unfortunately, the City-Data.com forums are run by a vindictive, egotistical, megalomaniacal paranoid autocrat who is extremely thin-skinned and is willing to doll out infractions for delusionally inferred violations.

I posted a positive and informative blog at the site about how I was going through the steps of finding a new home and relocating, and just because I mentioned that I was using my iPad, they pulled my post and claimed I was "spamming." Upon my correcting the error with a second blog post, by explaining my professional knowledge regarding communication obtained at a prestigious university, the response was a "trolling" infraction.

I recommend against contributing at the forums. At first I thought the other people posting at the forums might have some legitimate information, but knowing how tightly reined and censored the information is by the tyrants that run the site, I must question all of its honesty.

Priority care is not urgent

Its all in the title. I somehow made the mistake that Priority Care on MacArthur was a walk-in triage center instead of a regular outpatient clinic. Yesterday I waited for over an hour to have someone look at my Gout. I couldn't take it anymore so I left without saying a word, afraid that I would offend someone if I spoke. I told them it was gout, and it hurts like hell but it's not life-threatening.

At the desk there is a sign that gives reasons for the delay in being seen, among them are scheduled appointments, blood work, or more life-threatening illnesses. These reasons make perfect sense for a regular outpatient clinic, not my mis-construed idea of a walk-in clinic. I always associate the word "priority" with the meaning for the word "urgent" like they have something in common.

The majority of the five or six people who walked in and were seen while I waited had appointments. Perhaps the doctors who are practicing regular visits here should relocate to a more appropriate facility for scheduled appointments.

The word "Priority" should be removed from the name of this facility because it mislead me into unnecessary expenses, time and suffering.

I finally went to the Memorial center over at Kokemill and was able to get treated quickly. The doctor looked at my foot and ordered an x-ray. He said the x-ray was clear but that other techs would review it and they would call me later if they found something more significant. I asked the person who I thought was the doctor about getting something to reduce the Uric acid in my blood and he said "you really should have a regular doctor because we can't write those kinds of prescriptions."

The "unwashed masses" like myself who can't afford to "have a doctor" must continue to suffer continuously because doctors at these supposed "urgent" or "priority" care facilities can't write prescriptions for anything more than pain-killers? These must be "residents" or "almost" doctors. If this is true, how can they have regular patients who schedule appointments that supersede anyone who walks in off the street, yet they can't prescribe my kind of medication?

My last three visits to Priority care resulted in prescriptions of pain-killers. I guess if they want repeat customers, they have an easy target. Pick on the poor who can't afford insurance. When it gets so bad that I finally qualify for Social Security Disability, the pain will be finally go away for good but the damage to my joints will require extensive surgeries.

Town trapped

I don't really have anything tonight. I just don't have any motivation to continue writing about Springfield. I'm a photographer and media producer by hobby and I am out of things to do in Springfield worthy of my skills.

My lack of motivation is tied directly to the fact that I had to go all the way to Jacksonville to find a job, so my bitterness for Springfield is compounded. I grew up in this town and the most salient memory I have is sitting on my front porch with my friends and asking "what do you want to do today?" The answer was invariably "I don't know."

I keep seeing the same jobs show up in the newspaper classified ads every few months so I assume either the employer or the employee gets fed-up. I stopped submitting my resume to the anonymous post office box at One Copley Plaza because of the potential for fraud. I never get a response.

I'm confident that Springfield and Illinois are headed for deep austerity measures as higher gas prices and stagnant wages lead to lower tax revenue. A vicious cycle of state worker layoffs, increasing taxes, an exodus of businesses and private sector workers, compounded by exponentially climbing debt, will collapse Illinois into bankruptcy. Perhaps Carlos Slim can bail out Illinois.

Best of luck.

The audacity of Illinois politics.

A new poll posted online at http://www.sj-r.com/thedome suggests that Govenor Pat Quinn is proposing cuts to the operating hours of Illinois Museums and historic sites in order to save the state's budget. However, just a few days ago, Governor Quinn proclaimed March 22, "Illinois Museums Day" according to http://www.murphysboroamerican.com/newsnow/x760606848/Illinois-museums-generate-2-billion-in-economic-impact.

At this point I try to think of possible reasons for this kind of behavior. Was Illinois Museum Day just a coincidental precursor to the budget decision? Was the budget proposal known well before Illinois Museum Day and thus Museum Day was an attempt at mitigating political damage?

What would happen if hours of operation were cut at Illinois historic sites? Most of the historic sites are downstate, would cutting those hours of operation actually cause to increase the number of visitors to Chicago museums? Is that the goal?

Well, since the most money in Illinois politics comes from Chicagoland, it might be just as effective to mandate that school districts stop teaching history which will ultimately diminish interest in historic sites and further justify budget cuts with little opposition.


Over the decades, there have been many overt attempts to move the Capital of Illinois from Springfield to Chicago, but now the tactic of "Creeping Normality" is the better strategy as the tentacles of insatiable greed reach down from Chicago to snatch resources and well-paying state jobs away from rural areas of the state.

Perhaps in the extreme long-term, the earth of downstate Illinois will be returned to its origin of cultivation rather than being paved over with asphalt and concrete. After all, downstate Illinois has the richest soil on the face of the earth.

Doonesbury censored in State Journal-Register

Strips airing on 3/13/22012 http://www.doonesbury.com/ 

I didn't think they had it in them to run the more controversial Doonesbury cartoon strip, and I was right. The State Journal-Register's integrity is far eclipsed by its herd of "sacred cows" (subscriber base and sponsors), the majority of which are ultra-conservative radical white right-wing fundamentalist Christians who continuously vomit implicit threats in their editorial columns, telling everyone with a different viewpoint to leave if they don't like it.

The newspaper does print more than one liberal opinion but no more than can be counted on one hand, and usually the more long-winded professional journalism that gets passed over by the readers because the columns on the page appear dauntingly large, beyond the attention span of most readers around Springfield.

Writers of letters to the editor continuously repeat the same responses. They don't want big government, yet they want government to take control over women's health care decisions. Intellectuals call this cognitive dissonance, where two opposing ideas are held in the mind at the same time. The consequences are devastating and lead to mental numbness, apathy, and voting by emotional appeal rather than actually doing the research necessary to vote responsibly.

The typical writers of opinions at the State Journal-Register complain about a welfare state, but they are against responsible family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood.

JP Morgan is one of the biggest contractor managing Food Stamp debit cards in the country, and that JP Morgan gets paid more if more people go on food stamps. What bigger incentive for a pro-life, pro-poverty agenda with such devastating consequences could there be? JPM has every incentive to be working behind the scenes to push the pro-life agenda, with a sprinkle on top of "turn the other cheek" to maintain poverty in the U.S. Who is your preacher, really?

A community newspaper serves as a kind of barometer that measures economic health. If the newspaper has no fear of losing sponsors because its subscriber base is healthy, and has no fear of losing subscribers because its sponsor base is healthy, then the community has a healthy balance of mixed opinions.

Unfortunately, so many of my letters to the editor were not published I suspected because of my progressive opinions, and there is an overabundance of conservative opinion letters every day, but until now my suspicions could not be confirmed. To censor a cartoon strip over an important issue regarding the freedom of women to make their own health care decisions is truly cowardly, and signals the death knell of balanced journalism in Springfield, Illinois.

More Doom for Illinois

There is a low, hollow scraping sound echoing across the state. It's the sound of the state government scraping the bottom of the barrel. In a desperate attempt to find new money to maintain the status-quo, the state is tinkering with revoking tax-exempt status on certain non-profit organizations.

The state hasn't quite reached the bottom of the barrel because there is potential income from gambling, legalizing Marijuana, and revoking the tax-exempt status of religious organizations.


http://www.pjstar.com/free/x1288995046/Illinois-hospitals-ready-if-tax-exemption-talks-break-down

Illinois is a doomed state!

Gatehouse Media has finished picking at the carcass of the State Journal-Register and is wanting to lease space  within the fresh skeleton of the property on 9th Street.

The governor proposed changes in state employment, supposedly to help balance the budget, but when you consider the salaries related to the types of jobs proposed for increase opposed to the types of jobs proposed for decrease, there appears to be a severe disparity and contradiction, or outright deception. The increasing positions appear to be aimed at high-power, highly paid positions reserved for people with political clout.

After Sears Holdings and other corporations threatened to leave the state of Illinois over the income tax increase, Governor Quinn promised Sears huge tax breaks to they would stay. As a thank-you, Sears decided to close six different stores anyway.

Illinois will no longer have mail processing centers. Intrastate mail will require shipping out-of-state (or interstate) because no mail processing centers will remain in Illinois.

Springfield, Illinois school district 186 plans to borrow money on its own to make up for money unpaid by the state, so now the burden of interest is on the backs of the residents within the school district.

The Art Movement has officially left the state of Illinois.

Ted Nugent says "Illinois is the poster child for what is wrong with America!"

A new report out says "Chicago and Illinois among nations leaders in public corruption."

Illinois is so deep in debt and deficit spending that correcting the problem will follow closely, if not exactly in the footsteps of Greece. The state of Illinois since Al Capone, or even earlier, has been one of the biggest criminal enterprises in the world.

Public officials are too invested in private industry to create the necessary regulations to bring down the cost of maintaining the government. The bribery is institutionalized to the offices occupied by the politicians, and not the individuals, so it makes no difference who gets elected.

So, it's not really the politicians who are the problem, but the connections they have with industry, especially the businesses that win state contracts. Of course, all incumbent politicians need to be "removed." 

Edward Bernays and the devolution of public relations

Currently I'm reading Edward Bernays "Propaganda" via my iPad. I came across a paragraph I found interesting. Bernays wrote in 1928: "...many large corporations were employing public relations counsel under one title or another, for they had come to recognize that they depended upon public good will for their continued prosperity."

When did this go away? I mean when did corporations become so confident in their abuses that they no longer need to care about their public images? Something happened to one or many major corporations that had so little effect on their prosperity that they arrived at the decision that they could act with impunity. They stagnated employee wages, busted unions, produced dangerous products, lied and stole from customers, abandoned whole communities that developed their economic systems in dependence of the industry, polluted, and who knows what else. What gave these corporations so much self-confidence and protection from self-destruction that they could do all of these things?

The very thing which nearly all of the spokes persons from these industries claim they hate: "Big government."

It's not about the government as a whole entity, however. When business people want to shrink government, they don't want to shrink the whole government, they want to shrink only the parts that don't help businesses in particular. They don't have a problem with government contracts. They gladly eat at the trough of government bailouts.

The corporate lobbyist is no longer a necessity as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision has eliminated the need for persuading politicians in exchange for out-right purchase of the congressional offices by the corporations. So, what's the point of paying attention to the Republican Primaries anymore, all of the choices were bought by corporations. You won't have a choice in the end because all the eggs in the carton came from the same farm.

The new rule we live under is called a Plutocracy: A government by the rich, for the rich. However, I continue to receive letters and emails from allegedly progressive groups that want my support so they can send members to Capitol Hill to lobby members of congress. Sorry, that doesn't affect the corporate boardroom holding the puppet strings. All the long-existing charities and not-for-profits have been redefined by the government to give them a better taste of the "good life." Really, how effective are the long-standing charitable and non-profit organizations you know?

What if we didn't vote? Would it matter? It would drive us further and faster into slavery than we would go if we did vote. Why prolong the inevitable? What else can we do? What ELSE can we do? #OCCUPYWALLSTREET #MOVEBEYONDSPEECH