In the interest of driving up traffic on this si/ um, I mean keeping you informed about important Internet issues; I am posting this video and this one.

I have spent hour after tragically painful hour watching women who feel that they have to expose their breasts to attract viewers online. It’s been a very very hard experience for me.

In conclusion, this issue is important because it drives traffic to this website.

I know I’ve been a downer on here, painting a dark picture of future economic and environmental destruction and all. Today I bring good news for the children that have to live in the world we are making– Lot’s of comfy stuffed animals are there to comfort you in any bridge future bridge collapse. A few real ones may even exist, depending on the availability of breathing devices for them.

It seems that while the outlook for the biological world is getting worse, the polyester world just gets better. “While the number of living species continues to plummet, the exact opposite is true of their toy counterparts,” WWF director Ruth Aberg said. “This is particularly true in America, where polyester-fiber-filled replicas of even the most endangered species can be found in glorious abundance.” The number of new species and species diversity is rising rapidly.This increase in toy diversity has been ignored by the slanted media.

“”As rainforests continue to disappear at a rate of one and a half acres every second, I thought there was no hope for the leopard frog,” Sierra Club associate director Dianne Wilmot said. “But Wild Republic just announced there will 5,000 more Rana pipiens in existence by Christmas. A walk through the aisles of any toy store reveals what a diverse world we used to live in.”

While Wilmot is encouraged by the stuffed-animal boom, some see cause for alarm.

“The number of species is rising way too quickly,” said South Bend, IN, wildlife enthusiast Wendy Elias. “I wanted to get all the animals in the Jack Hanna collection: They’re so cute, and I knew I could give them a good home. But they keep introducing new ones faster than I can make shelf space. My husband will absolutely kill me if I bring another one home.”

In fact real world pets and critters should be aware of how easily they can be replaced.

Mayor Ravenstahl, seen here asking off camera, “Wait, so em jags in Canadia got a senate too? Yinz jokin’!”, has some defenders in the letters section of today’s Post-Gazette. Thomas Butera, who doesn’t live in the city, says:

To those old-time politicos who have been jumping on the “bash Luke” bandwagon, I have this to say. Most of you have been feasting at the public trough longer than Mr. Ravenstahl has been alive. It was on your watch that the region deteriorated and you did nothing. That being the case, before someone decides to investigate all the goodies you have gotten at the expense of the public, your best course of action is to shut up, sit down and give the mayor a chance to prove himself.

Does this mean that Bodack and Motznik have turned against Luke, and I didn’t hear about it? If anyone wants to investigate these fellas, I am inclined to say, forge ahead. You might start by asking why Robert Kramm was making a thousand dollars a week in city money and producing nothing. In any case, this presumably frees the rest of us to continue criticizing Ravenstahl.

Even if this sudden rift has come to pass, Butera’s logic here is impossible for me to follow. Apparently, perk-taking do-nothing politicians ruined Pittsburgh. Therefore, everybody should shut the hell up about the current mayor taking perks and doing nothing.

Roy Leuch, who also does not live in the city, says the Mayor is not being given a chance:

How not to bring young people back to the city:

He is not immature just because he is young. We need more young people with some new ideas instead of the “same old, same old.”

I would have said that he is immature because he behaves selfishly, lies frequently, blows off work, and cannot understand why those actions are unacceptable in a Mayor, not because he is young.

Good point, though. I am sure that the reason that the Mayor has not presented any “new ideas” is because he is distracted by mean old people like me who are dedicated to the status quo. If he had a minute to think, he would no doubt be bursting with wise counsel and innovative paths.

As such, I would like to invite the internet community and the Mayor’s office to enter into an agreement. We will refrain from mentioning the Mayor in any context that does not polish his apple for one full week, and at the end of that week, he can present one or more of the brilliant new ideas that are percolating in his brain.

Bill Peduto’s ideas with a slightly different name do not count for the purposes of this agreement.

I don’t know who this guy is but, boy did lay out the cause of our poorly maintained Infrastructure in the Post today. My guess is he might know what he’s talking about.
I really, really want to just paste the whole thing in.

The Title is

Fund bridge repairs not sprawl and speculation

“This latest bridge collapse was no great surprise. As a founding member of the Citizen Advisory Panel of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission, I and others uncovered egregious abuses and improprieties in the allocation of federal transportation funds during the CAP’s existence from 1994 to 1998. Our numerous complaints to Federal Highway Administration officials were rebuffed with, “It’s going on everywhere.”(and I guess it was)

We found maintenance being ignored here and elsewhere, with the money instead being used to subsidize suburban real estate speculation — billions of dollars worth of new, unnecessary highways opening more farmland and natural habitat for speculative conversion into spread-out residential and commercial construction. It’s called “suburban sprawl.” The entire process so permeates American society that it’s widely considered a given. In our region, it has drained our traditional communities of people and investment and dispersed our decreasing population ever more thinly.”

“After years of repeated requests, we finally got the SPRPC to identify how much was necessary to meet minimum maintenance needs. It would have required all of the region’s federal transportation funding, yet the SPRPC was allocating 40 percent of that money to build or expand highways, effectively subsidizing more sprawl. Diversion of maintenance money to new construction not only leaves existing infrastructure to deteriorate at an accelerating rate, it also increases and extends the maintenance deficit by adding each new highway’s future maintenance needs to our total liabilities.”

(so, class– what do you think our liabilities are now?)

“As a citizen who is currently assisting Allegheny County Council in drafting a transit reform proposal to present to the state Legislature, I can say that it will do no good to make one or two little corrections and think the problem is solved — real solutions will need to be comprehensive.

Before we toss more taxpayer money around, we must rethink transportation at the regional, state and national levels. Transportation is at the nexus of many of our most threatening problems. More efficient transportation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy usage and our oil dependency.

Eliminating the influence of real estate speculation, currently the controlling factor in transportation planning, can combat suburban sprawl, help preserve and revitalize existing communities, and stop unwarranted consumption of valuable farmland and natural habitat.”

He is running for some office– (all this sh–t’s confusing). Vote for him.

One bunch of people who are likely to want to come to Pittsburgh are urban planners. This isn’t a complement; Pittsburgh is almost a lab experiment in poor government and bad urban design and It’s kind of famous for it. So,it may be that people may want some tips on how too screw up their towns too. These tips are most useful if you are looking to screw up a city with a small land area (by which I mean -in the city limits) and are great for places with lots of hills, rivers or other barriers.

Here are just a few. I will come back with more.It’s a two part strategy to destroy the value of urban land; quality of life and tax base while at the same time making it easy and cheap live outside the city.It’s proven and has worked great here.

Tear holes in your city and stick in as many highways as you can. Highways that will divide and cut through existing business districts are the best. You must have major highways cutting into your downtown!! Remember, you don’t want people to live in the city especially wealthy people.

Raise Taxes in the city to pay for it and your other plans. Well, just raise taxes for any reason really.

Cut and remove as much mass transit as you can. Transit is needed to have a dense city and you don’t want that.

Add as much parking as you can. You can build huge garages to help waste tax money but you mainly need huge areas of plain old surface lots.

Put huge Sports Stadiums in or near the key areas of the city. Since they are usually empty, they are are like putting extra fancy holes in the town. they waste lots of tax money and best of all they need tons of parking!!! (remember you don’t have mass transit.)The key is to put these holes in or just near the downtown and make sure that a sea of parking lots sit on the most useful city land.

Try to remove as many mixed uses of land as you can. Say that offices should not be near homes or stores etc… This requires more driving, more and wider highways and more and more parking holes in the city. It also will likely cause lots of traffic and pollution which will chase people out of town. Remember to raise taxes or borrow to pay for the roads.

Use all kinds of anti walking policies. Shoppers usually walk and you don’t want that. Get rid of sidewalks and use highways with walls to cut up areas.

Basically, It’s a progressive strategy. You set in motion a chain reaction that requires more and more of the same–more holes and lower densities require more driving and more holes in the city and so on. For example, chances are that your downtown retail will start to die off– so you say you need to ad more parking or perhaps pay the retailers to stay. Some people might start to feel bad about their town as you destroy it (by now your suicide rate might be up) so they need cheering up with some other new stadium.

You can do it to!!!

You already know it as the City of Bridges, the Steel City, the City of Champions, the City of Too Many Goddamn Pigeons, the City of Annoying Traffic Patterns, the City of Iron City and the City With a Mayor of Questionable Competency.

With the North Shore Connector making my commute an even bigger, nastier, throbbier headache than it always was, and the construction near my bus stop (pictured below), I hereby nominate Pittsburgh as the City of Endless Construction.

A lot of people give the Republican party no chance in Pittsburgh. If they want a shot at it they need to come up with candidates like this who understand the real issues and can speak to us about them.

Seriously, it seems like You Tube will be one of the biggest forces out there.

“Fred Thompson is expected to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination via an Internet video. Bill and Hillary Clinton have posted a slick You Tube parody of the final “Sopranos” episode to boost her campaign.

And John Edwards has been ridiculed with a devastating clip of him primping in preparation for a TV appearance to the tune of “I’m so pretty.”

It’s enough to give pause to even the most steely-jawed politico, as I found out Monday when I came to Traverse City to talk to the 62nd annual meeting of the Midwestern Legislative Committee.”

As for people who don’t know where West Carolina is 1) It doesn’t matter cause she’s blond 2) If you were American in america and had a map, you would know but since you don’t you are likely a terrorist. Lucky for us, you can’t find us.

So here goes another video likely to be ignored. I just want to say that, I love Pittsburgh’s Downtown and I love even more what I think it could be. Anyone who knows lower Manhattan well and sees downtown Pittsburgh is likely to notice a strong resemblance. I really see it cause I’m old enough to remember when a lot of it was pretty dead.

On, the odd chance that the major players here were sincerely interested in creating a vibrant Downtown people wanted to live, work, shop and spend time in they would watch these videos and spend a lot of time studying actual vibrant cities.

The Michael Vick case is really sick and interesting. From what I can tell from his defence, he claims to have never made a profit funding a dog concentration camp, he was sort of trying to help his Friends. what’s fascinating is that his lawyers are obviously trying to exploit the general feeling among people, that almost any action done without a profit motive is good.

“Vick agrees that ‘Bad Newz Kennels’ business enterprise involved gambling activities in violation of the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia … Most of the ‘Bad Newz Kennels’ operation and gambling monies were provided by Vick … Vick did not gamble by placing side bets on any of the fights. Vick did not receive any of the proceeds from the purses that were won by ‘Bad Newz Kennels.’”

One can read this as a clear admission that Vick bet on dogfighting. He put the money up. He lost money if his dogs lost. However, Vick says he didn’t win money if his dog won. Can one be a gambler if one never takes any winnings? Defenders of Vick could argue he was simply putting up money for his friends to gamble, that he was (if this is even possible) only half a gambler.”

This concept which was smuggled into our brains is one of the core issues in Pittsburgh. If what you are doing is good, then it is good. If it’s bad then you are bad.

The DeSantis campaign has replaced the photo I posted yesterday with a larger version of the one you see here. Is it because I made fun of the old one? I doubt it, as this one is just as uninspiring. Perhaps even more so before I cropped it, since it makes very clear that no one but reporters showed up.

The result is that the Post-Gazette is reporting today that the mayoral race is finally “starting to warm up.” It is natural that they would say so. It is in the interest of reporters who cover politics to pretend that a race is, at the least, “warm.” It is not really the case here.

There are only two months left in this race, and the DeSantis campaign has appeared to behave in an astonishingly unprofessional manner, especially as they intend to raise $750,000, according to both the P-G and the Trib, which is a little more circumspect about horse-race-handicapping metaphors. As the campaign has made no evident effort to contact voters, recruit volunteers, or obtain any earned media apart from piling on the mayor and making counter-productive announcements about how Mark will be getting his policy proposals from a bunch of people who don’t live in the city. If they don’t have any interest in doing the things that a campaign needs to do to win, it is easy to wonder what, exactly, they plan to do with all that money.

If they actually raise that money, my guess is they intend to buy a bunch of television ads. After all, TV is exciting, sexy, and gets lots of attention from glamorous people, or at least the Pittsburgh version of glamorous people (Sonni Abatta). It is also totally useless for candidates who aren’t willing, or whose staffs aren’t willing, to do the actual work of campaigning.

Now it is too late. Pittsburgh is still a pretty big city, and you can only talk to so many people in a day. Luke Ravenstahl, an inexperienced and unwise frat-boy, should have been low-hanging fruit after his frequent mistakes and his own lazy campaigning, which has been fed by an oversized sense of entitlement and a conviction that Democrats in Pittsburgh can’t lose. Now, no matter how much money DeSantis raises, he has already lost.

This is just as well, I suppose. If Mark DeSanits is unable to put together a competent political team, then he is unlikely to put together a competent governing team.

On the other hand, and speaking of incompetent governing, Luke Ravenstahl, seen here in another misguided effort to look like Jack Kennedy, “isn’t worried” about having fired the directors of all city departments without having found replacements. You see, he didn’t quite fire them:

Ravenstahl said he hasn’t “formally accepted” the directors’ resignation letters, but he has kept them in his desk. He said he expects to accept some of the letters after his staff completes a national search for potential replacements.

Pittsburgh’s Home Rule Charter requires the mayor to obtain City Council’s approval for new directors or acting directors who serve longer than 90 days. The rule is one of the legislative checks City Council has on the mayor’s office; however, the charter doesn’t define a penalty for missing the 90-day deadline.

Fire everyone for no particular reason, then keep them on and pretend you never fired them, while saying that you also intend to get rid of them whenever you get around to it. Now that is what I call a plan for building a team that is motivated and confident.

So, here is your choice: an experienced and incompetent Republican or an inexperienced and incompetent Democrat. I am reminded of a baseball anecdote that I am sure is attributed to some very famous baseball manager who I don’t know anything about. If you have two prospects who both run from home to first in the same time, one with perfect form and the other with poor form, which do you choose?

You choose the guy who you can coach into better form.

That means resigning ourselves to the fact that Mark DeSantis, while he has the experience, has demonstrated that he has no aptitude for building and running an organization that works. It also means spending the next two years browbeating city council into riding Ravenstahl’s ass like Jesus into Jerusalem until he learns that getting away with what you want to do is not the same as behaving ethically, that cruel and arbitrary demonstrations of authority do not inspire respect or loyalty, and that lying to reporters is always a sucker’s game.