Maggie's Farm

I have posted several times about my Food Bank work.  I'm not doing this to say "Hey look at me aren't I so giving?"  After all, I'd barely done any work over the years with them, aside from donations and occasional assistance at the pantry.  

I'm a firm believer in giving back in some form, and doing it quietly.  In the Bible, Jesus made it clear you shouldn't promote your good works in order to promote yourself, and I believe that.  My grandfather also felt this way, his donations always came from "A Friend" and no other ID was provided.  I tend to do this, as well.  Anonymity (or some degree of it) here helps reduce the impact of me promoting myself via 'good works'. 

On the other hand, drawing attention to needs, and providing useful information about charitable works is not easily done without a reasonable voice.  To a degree, I give some celebrities a pass when they promote their 'good works'.  A lot depends on just how they are doing that work.  If they make it about themselves and what they are doing (Ed Begley, Jr. and his incessant BS about how 'green' he is would be an example - he's wealthy, so it's easy to be 'green' and it's a means by which he can draw attention to his declining celebrity status), then I tend find their points less credible.

Mrs. Bulldog and I went into the city to meet our boys for brunch and decided to visit the "new" Penn Station which is formerly the US Post Office (across the street from the "old" Penn Station and Madison Square Garden).  It is designed to handle what were very crowded spaces in Penn (ugh...some nights were unbelievable, especially when trains broke down) and provide a bit of a 'link' to the past as the old Post Office's architecture and interior were somewhat similar to the original Penn Station, which was destroyed (tragically) years ago.

I have included 2 pictures.  I am not impressed.  The open interior, with glass ceiling that lets a ton of light in, is excellent.  What was formerly an interior parking area is now the main part of the terminal.  Beyond that, as Mrs. Bulldog said, "The great train halls of Europe need not worry of competition."

It is antiseptic, utilitarian and lacks a soul.  Clean (though new), bright, cheery - these are all positives, but in terms of originality and whimsy, there is none.  I found nothing interesting or inspiring.  Where Grand Central has all kinds of angles and views to catch your eye and keep you interested, Moynihan Train Hall has none.  It's boring and uninspired.

But maybe it's not supposed to be inspiring.  Millions will pass through there on the average week, mostly commuters to Long Island and New Jersey.  Who needs to be distracted?

Hopefully calm will be restored as the nation moves back toward some semblance of whatever it is we consider 'normal' for the last 9 months.  I hope things continue to improve as we move out of the Covid scare and fear mongering (yes, Covid is real, I had it as have many friends, but no it's not so bad for 95% of the people who get it).  If we can move past all this, my job opportunities may improve.

Then again, who knows?  I know few of you are on Facebook, but I am (or was).  It allowed me to reconnect with friends and family and it's a useful tool.  I've also shared Maggie's articles there with my friends, and met many other people who I share interests with.  I am well aware of the privacy issues, but I know how to navigate them (part of my everyday job) and manage them effectively.  There is, however, one thing I can't manage.  It's the real problem we're facing today.  It's the reason I deactivated my Facebook recently (after letting people know how they can reach me if they want/need to).

I am aware of many HR Departments doing sweeps of social media to find things out about people.  I have heard several stories of pro-Trump people losing job offers.  This doesn't surprise me at all in NYC today.  The shift here has been significant from not just hating Trump to full-fledged belief that anyone who supports him is a deranged psychopath.  I have never been a Trump supporter, but that doesn't mean anything because I've never hated him, either.  It's best to hate him with the passion of a thousand suns in order to win approval with many organizations today. 

I haven't loved him, haven't hated him, I've merely tolerated him, and realized his persona was a massive problem but that he was accomplishing some good things.  I was for honesty and balance of thought and reason.  Today, you can't be that way.  You have to be a true believer, or at least not come across as a believer of "the other side".  In other words, it is almost a requirement to be Progressive to be "acceptable".  Such is the nature of modern definitions of Diversity - be like us or you're not acceptable.  I'm all for Diversity.  Diversity of thought, and respect for other views, without accepting the enforcement of those views on others by law, social shame, or other means of behavioral modification (brainwashing via education, for example).

I took a survey today about working, and first jobs.  One question asked the age of your first job: 

Prior to 15
15-16
16-18
18-20
20+
I imagine most of our readers are in the prior to 15 group, but I'd figure I'd ask.  Just so you understand 'the rules' - any job counts.  My first jobs were cutting grass and babysitting when I was 13.  My first real job occurred when a friend broke his ankle and I took over washing dishes at a local resort (minimimum wage was $2.30/hour, but we got meals, too, since we worked in the kitchen).  

Once I started working, I never stopped.  I had a job every summer, sometimes during school, always on breaks or holidays (ski resorts needed lift operator assistants during these periods) afterward.  I'd sometimes offer to work off the books and under minimum wage if it meant I could get the work.  I know I got most of the tax money back since I was a student, but that never bothered me.  Money in the pocket beats waiting for it after April. 

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?  My son says no.  I say yes.  My brother says yes, the director John McTiernan says yes, and a host of others say no.

Others play Solomon and split the baby.  It's not a movie with a Christmas theme, but does include the element of Christmas.  So, "no, but..."

Another way of looking at this is to ask if there was a message regarding "the system" in Die Hard.  It was based on a book which was clearly anti-capitalist in nature, and McTiernan states it was supposed to be anti-capitalist.  Frankly, I think he lost on that score.  The proletarian nods don't really add up well.  Capitalism had been so successful in providing more for all that by the time the movie was made some of the items he felt delineated 'wealth and privilege' from 'working class' were no longer meaningful.  They are even less so today (assuming our economy had not been locked down, which has only exacerbated some of the divisions of wealth which were barely noticeable before). 

That said, the most noticiable delineations of class today are not wealth-related, but power related as our "leaders" lock us down and lecture us on how to behave, only to go do the exact opposite things which they suggest we do.  The real 'class warfare' today is power vs. the lack of it, not whether one has more money than someone else.  Of course, that was always the nature of 'class warfare', but Leftists love to obscure that fact with a veneer of basic economic BS that only people with common sense can see through.  McTiernan, therefore, fails miserably in his goal of making a legitimate anti-capitalist story.  Mainly because there is no legitimate anti-capitalist story to be made.  Unless you are a "trained Marxist" and know how to create one out of whole cloth.  (For what it's worth, the term "trained Marxist" always made me laugh.  I studied Economics at The New School, which tried very hard to push the Marxist agenda, and I read quite a bit of Marx, Hobsbawm, Gordon and a host of other Marxist garbage.  So I'm a "trained Marxist" and one of the things every single Marxist professor said was "Marx left no blueprint, only an idea with no path forward and no clear goal except revolution." That's why Marxism and Leftist thought is such utter BS.  Unlike Classical, Neo-Classical, Monetarist or even Austrian schools of thought, Marxism is just an idea and not a fully-formed one, but full of childish and misleading binary concepts.  Though I will credit Marx with completely shifting the study of History in a very meaningful and useful fashion.)

At any rate, to me Die Hard is very much a Christmas movie and very much a pro-capitalist one.  After all, Hans Gruber himself, like so many Marxists before him, only cared about the power he was managing (his gang) and the money he was trying to collect, and was utilizing a facade to perpetrate his crime...you know, like BLM and Antifa today.  These movements are cargo cults, full of images that seem to 'make sense' but cannot ever effectively achieve the goals they have set for themselves because they are inclined only toward one thing.  Perpetual Revolution.