The Original 7 Deadly Sins + 3, Part III - Gluttony

http://www.deesillustration.com/artwork.asp?item=674&cat=satire

Ahhhh....Back to the Good, the Bad, and the Deadly.  Today's issue?  Good ol' Gluttony.

Notice how alot of these sins tend to shake hands with each other, with a vengeance?  This one, along with sloth and greed, makes for one big one.  A triple threat.  We could call it Slutreed.  Might as well, saves on words and breath.  Believe me, my fingers could use more of a break.

By the way, for those of you who aren't really familiar with the extent of this particular sin, it not only involves what you ingest, it also involves what you withhold from those in need as well.

Being on the lower end of the sheeple scale, I see gluttony at work daily.  What's more, I see waste galore.  Now granted and given, there are reasons for some of this, but you can trace it all back to greed, which is our biggest crime here in our country.  What am I referring to?

Waste.  A 50% subset of gluttony.  Every day I watch so much food get tossed, it makes me ill.  With all the ways we've invented in our country to store and keep food, there's just no excuse for this.  We could not only feed our country with our waste, we could feed all the starving countries of the world as well.

Of course, the fault hardly or completely lies with the companies you work for.  You may have noticed, of late, the propensity for workplaces to not allow you, an employee, to take their food home, food that they're going to throw out anyway, at the end of the day.  In  my days of food service, I was always able to take home free food, no problem.  You always got free meals, if you worked at these places.  Just like every nicety we Americans used to enjoy once upon a time, some money hungry fools ruined things for the rest of us, during the course of time passing.  The late 70's and 80's were decades filled with legal stupidity, when it came to lawsuits, as well as the judges who ruled in favor of them.  I actually knew one couple who spent their entire lives just suing people for various things.  They never worked, they just waited to be awarded the next upcoming judgement they were expecting.  With every stupid lawsuit they awarded money to, it was like a fatal disease...more cropped up to copy the original, or different spins were put on the first, or new ones that were just as ridiculous came out to follow-up.  Pretty soon, litigation was a household word, and suing became a national way of life.

So I would imagine that there was a rash of food poisoning lawsuits that probably caused these food service companies to say "Screw it then!!  No more taking food home that we're gonna toss at the end of the day!  And since you're gonna be buttheads about it, and we have to toss out so much damn good food, well...you can just pay for your damn meals then.  We gotta cover the cost of the food we throw out, as well as pay for those lawsuits you keep winning."  See how the greed just weaves its way through every iota of this scenario?  Wow.

I really love days like Thanksgiving, where we serve up about 12 different plates chock-full of holiday goodness...and after we fill ourselves to over-flowing, we chuck about half of it right into the garbage can.  Now there's both sides of gluttony hard at work.  Happy Thankgiving and Merry Christmas you fat fool-hardy citizens.  Hope you can sleep at night after that crap.  Thank God my family is as disconnected as it is, or I'd have to participate in that hypocratic behavior as well.

Not that anybody with any sense would wanna eat this food anyway.  It's pretty damn obvious that not a one of us has any sense.  Not unlike the medications we take everyday, we're fully aware of  how dangerous a lot of this stuff is, yet we continue to eat it.  Really though, even if we had sense, would we really have a choice, but to eat it?  Aspartame is everywhere.  No other living creature will touch the stuff, yet we ingest it daily.  MSG's are impossible to avoid, yet the number of burgers McD's sells grows by the hundreds of thousands, daily, all over the world.  Genetically altered fruits and vegetables are the norm; we accept it, and chow down like it's goin' outta style.  We've been told (after five or six decades, finally), that flouride is actually bad for our teeth, and that our water is chock-full of it, yet we still drink it.  Doctored meat, various dangerous sugar substitutes (some of which we still aren't quite sure of the dangers of), preservatives, food dyes....the list is ridiculously endless and really scary...and yet we continue to eat, and eat...like we haven't a clue.  Why?  Well kids...we're just greedy, slothful gluttonous fools.  That's why.

Hell in a handbasket.  Someday we'll surely know what it means.  Till tomorrow.

http://www.deesillustration.com/artwork.asp?item=143&cat=satire

Homelessness Part II

http://www.exposingtruth.com/utahs-plan-eradicate-homelessness-actually-working/

Hey Kids....sorry I blew ya off, been a b-b-b-b-bizzay boy yannow.

So let's get ourselves back to the subject of homelessness.  By the way, should you notice another tweet of this day for another such named post in my new Des Moines, Iowa blog, found here:

http://desmoinesandiowathevenusflytrap.blogspot.com/

just blow it off.  I decided this would be good for both blogs, and is pretty much the same, maybe with a tweak er two.

Now, it was said...more than likely in the first post on this subject, the fact that there is five times as many empty places as there are homeless people.  For those of you reading that fact for the first time, I'll give you a minute to let that sink in...

(Time has ticked away)....So how did you like that one, huh?  Nice?  Well, here's some things I believe that are even nicer.

Every day, more and more apartments are going up in the downtown area of my hometown.  Lofts, mostly.  Meant to be attractive to white collar young folks just looking at Des Moines for the first time.  Now, if you go back and forth between the Des Moines blog and this one, you'll note that the focus of this town, which is pretending to be massively bigger than it really is, is to attract people to the city itself, as well as rejuvenate the downtown area.  The problem is, as they do this, there are things that they're doing at the same time that absolutely make me ill.  I'm pretty much certain that they're doing this in every metro area over 100,000 folks, or my name isn't...uh...isn't....oh, never mind.

The only really efficient homeless shelter in this city is right smack downtown...has been for ages.  CISS (Central Iowa Shelter and Services) started out here in the old Trailways bus station.  I remember driving by it in the 80's wondering why it was that 50 or so people were asleep on mats on the floor.  They then relocated a little bit south and west of downtown, to a much bigger building.  Later on, that one would be deserted due to bedbugs, and the obviously growing homeless problem, forcing them to build up a new shelter, one that wouldn't take any more females, but would house 2x the male population.  It didn't do a lot of good.  Why, is obvious.

1.  There are 3x as many people that are homeless in this country than there was 10 years ago.  I'm afraid you're gonna have to get a much bigger shelter.

2.  The people that were homeless to begin with...are still homeless.  I used to work at this shelter back in the day...and because I've been homeless a few times since then, I've had to utilize this place's services for myself a few various short periods in my life.  The thing I loved about is was, the same damn people that had been there 10 years prior to that, while I was working there, were still coming there to stay!!!  The same men, women and vets were still utilizing the system.  That's really helping.

3.  In an attempt to attract more professionals to the city, you're just going to attract the attention of the more undesirable types as well.  The homeless, allowed to reside indefinitely at CISS, call their homeless friends and homeless relatives.  "Come on down you guys!!  This city'll take care of you!"  Then when the days they're allowed to stay (90 days, but longer with special circumstances) run out, well, guess where they're gonna camp?  As close to downtown as they can, til they're allowed back in, 90 days later.  Downtown, of course, where all the free meals are served too.

Worse yet, they bring all of these events downtown to get in the way of everyone going everywhere in the city, and they put them up around the same area as the shelter...as well as build the majority of the lofts in the same area; and build a whopping block-long sculpture park just 3 or so blocks away from it...then call the police, hire security, and physically patrol all areas around it in an attempt to chase them away from it all; all the while wondering why it is they have people passed out drunk in the sculpture park, hiding out in the parking garages close by, and camping under the bridge of MLK Pkway (East/West) and caught stealing things at the events.  Geeeeee........I wunder why??? errrrrrrrr........

What you don't seem to get, America, is that the problem is growing, and will continue to grow.  Not because you're not chasing them off well enough, but because MORE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE HOMELESS EVERY YEAR.  The problem isn't solely how we help these people out, which by the way is a problem too, but because of a lot of different things that we didn't have before.

1.  A much bigger population.

2.  The highest unemployment rate...well, EVER!!

3.  Affordable housing...

I really don't think I have to rehash every single reason again, do I???  Just See "Homelessness" in this blog, if you're really and truly lost.

One problem I did mention just a couple of paragraphs ago, and wanted to but didn''t cover in the first blog post, is not only our attitudes towards the homeless, but the most obvious problem of social disconnection we have today.  Gone forever, I'm sure, are the days when we helped each other in times of trouble.  You people are, quite simply, ASSHOLES when it comes to people who need your help.

Think I'm joking? Try a little experiment in your spare time.  Call all of your best friends.  Tell them you just lost your job, and it looks as though you might not make your next house payment.  Oh, you'll get all the sympathy you could ever want...but call them a week later, and tell them you lost your home, and you have no place for you, your wife/husband and two kids to stay...and watch how quickly they scatter.  You'll be amazed how little help you're offered or actually receive.

Selfish, immature, close-minded, and closed-doored.  As long as everything is going swimmingly, you're my best friend, but when times are hard, and I really need your help?  You couldn't run far enough.  I'm lucky to get you on the phone, at least not until until enough time has passed in order for my troubles to possibly be fixed again.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't need friends like that in my life.  That's probably why I don't have but one or two anymore.  :D

P.S. - By the way, Utah has a plan to eradicate homelessness entirely....that's WORKING.  You guys might wanna check it out, HUH???

http://www.exposingtruth.com/utahs-plan-eradicate-homelessness-actually-working/

The Original 7 Deadly Sins + 3, Part II - Sloth

Ah yes....Sloth.  One o' my personal favorites.  Laziness.  Obesity because of that.  The wasting of one's God-given talents.  Etcetera, etcetera.

Wow, I could go on about this one for a few posts, really.  I just gotta say that, where this check box is concerned, we get a big....fat.....juicy....well-done black check mark here.  If there were EVER a sin we Americans do well, it's Sloth.

The world in itself has become one large slothful offender.  We are most certainly a wasteful and lazy race, with no real hope of changing its ways, of this there is NO doubt.  9 times outta ten, we'd rather pay someone else to do our work for us, rather than do it ourselves.  We'd rather have someone else cook our ,food for us, than cook at home.  We'd much rather just throw something away and buy another one, than try and fix it, give it away to someone who might need it, or shine it up and keep it.  We are the laziest race in the world, that's for sure.

Of the world's population though, America not only takes the cake, it licks the bowl AND the beaters; when we refer to sloth.  Every day new inventions come out that take more and more of the work away from us (as well as our jobs), and you wonder why it is that unemployment is up to 10% or better.  Unreal.  Left in the hands of machines and computers, we won't be much better than the society of Wall-E's imaginings.

The thing I hate, though, is that this particular sin is as contagious as the common cold.  If I'm fired up to do something, and someone comes over and brings a six-pack, and says "Hey buddy....let's just hang out and down a few"...then I start thinking about that in comparison to what I'm about to do, and next thing you know, the beer's in my hand, the TV's on, and I can pretty much scratch this day.  The person I was supposed to be doing that particular thing with gets blown off...the phone rings and I say "Aw screw it...it's just Doug, the guy we were supposed to help de-weed his lawn...voicemail will get it"; and I just qualified for this week's bad neighbor award; as well as probably cost me a a newer just budding friendship with Doug.  Bad news, that slothy stuff.

Sure, it has some upsides; I mean, look at all the cool stuff that would have never been invented, had we not been lazy:  Cars, boats, planes, can openers, microwaves, computers...the list goes on for weeks.  However, there are some inventions that just scream Uber-laziness.  I won't go into examples for this, all you have to do is look around the house to find tons of good examples, then think about how it used to be done to get a feel for it.  Fine, you want a doozie?  The remote control is the ultimate example.  God forbid we should have to get off the couch for anything.  TV's, stereos, car unlockers, alarms and starters, lights, air conditioners...hell, even the remote inventors took remote controls to the borders of lazy with all-in-one and multi-device remotes.  Now we don't even have to MOVE...except to maybe take a shower once in a while and go to work.

This majorly nasty sin tends to shake hands often with gluttony, so I don't' plan to go into our national weight issues just yet.  I'll let gluttony handle that one.  Let it just be said though, that slothful behavior all by itself will be the death of the world, and if not the world, this country?  We easily have bought into the most shares of this commodity.  I can just see a day where my buddy Doug calls me and says "Hey Chris...the Russians just bombed Chicago!" and I'll probably answer with something like "Yeah, yeah...after this episode of 'The Big Bang Theory', I'll be sure and check that out"...and while the next commercial airs, the Russians are in the process of shooting my dog and over-running my hammock, as well as informing my wife what a juicy sex slave she'll make under our new dictatorship.  Watch out for this America-Friendly sin kids, it's easily the one we can probably count on to bring us down, if all others manage to fail.

http://bitsandpieces.us/2012/11/08/the-5-symptoms-of-laziness/