Overcooked Steak

     In Cologne and Augsburg, Germany, traffic lights have been installed in the ground at some locations, as in the Augsburg train station.  They warn distracted walkers on cell phones to look up.  Each light costs about 10,000 Euros.  According to CNN, a nineteen year old man, or idiot, "was seriously injured...when he walked into the path of an oncoming train [in Augsburg] while wearing headphones."
     When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, a basic lesson drilled into me, as well as into my contemporaries, was the practice of looking both ways before crossing the street.  Are the youth of today not taught this and its variations anymore?  Do cities have to spend 10,000 Euros per ground light to prevent acts of utter stupidity?  Should a railing be constructed along the entire length of the Grand Canyon to prevent unaware fools from taking the biggest and last step of their lives?
     I've sometimes wondered if putting in all these ridiculous safeguards simply enables bad survival habits.  Challenge leads to personal evolution.  If you've gotten to the point where you need expensive lights at your feet telling you not to accidentally kill yourself, you may as well be a walking sack of brainless meat.
     Switching subjects, Donald Trump won five states yesterday, Hillary Clinton won four.  He's convinced he's got it wrapped up, that he'll secure the necessary 1,237 delegates for the nomination.  Speaking of Hillary Clinton, he said her most effective weapon is "the woman's card."  In other, less tacky, words, she'll try to win the presidency by appealing to women and the issues they most care about: health care, equal pay for equal work, dignity, respect, reasonable across the board rules on maternity leave, reproductive rights.
     Trump's card is one of toughness, saying shit about Iran while licking Putin's asshole and jacking off for Benjamin Netanyahu.  Trump's bluster, as always, is pure bullshit, as phony as his steaks.  When he wins, though, his confidence, incredibly, increases beyond its already bloated level, and he becomes even more insufferable.  A Trump win of the presidency in November will demonstrate this characteristic (or personality flaw) in its full vainglory.  News anchors and reporters who don't notice this tendency of his (and none of them to my knowledge have yet pointed it out) will no doubt shrug their shoulders at the man's horrible pride, not noting that it is, indeed, the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, the one that got Lucifer demoted.
     Ted Cruz, meanwhile, who lost five states yesterday, has hinted he's about to make an announcement.
     "Like Donald, I am also evil..."
     Well, probably not that, but it pertains, apparently, to the identity of his vice presidential pick.  I think he's jumping the gun on that, if that's what his announcement will be about.  The only reason for telling, three months before the Convention, the identity of the next-in-line to the nomination's VP pick, is to impress voters with the seriousness of the main guy's candidacy.  On CNN, I heard Carly Fiorina's name mentioned as a possibility.  Wow, Cruz-Fiorina, a combination destined to be a trivia question.
     Trump himself often has Chris Christie standing nearby, looking like a hopeful future VP.  He wouldn't be the first corrupt vice president.  Spiro Agnew, after all, almost managed to stick by Richard Nixon until that president helicoptered away from the White House lawn.  Like Agnew, Christie is obviously a menace, a godawful politician with no redeeming value to mankind, yet he's taken seriously to the point where journalists don't laugh at him, but they should jeer a governor who by his own admission was too unaware (too incompetent) to notice the illegal shenanigans going on in his own administrative offices, pertaining to the illegal choking of the traffic on that bridge.
     It isn't government itself that gets to me; it's some of the sons of bitches who operate within it and get away with execrable offenses they never serve time for.  Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a Republican who, when he was a wrestling coach, raped boys, will get a fifteen month sentence.  I saw him being wheeled in a chair into a courthouse.  Like with Bill Cosby, I guess, maybe it helps him to seem like a physically incapable person, generating pity in viewers, instead of the more normal reaction of "Shoot the bastard."
     The statute of limitations for Hastert's rape victims ran out a while back.  He was paying millions of dollars in hush money to them, all this while he sat in Congress, the Speaker of the House who presided when 9/11 happened, third in line to the presidency--in other words, a helluva good guy.
     If I seem bitter in this post, it might be because I didn't even see or hear Trump for a few days, and then a short time ago I watched an excerpt of his hyper-inflated victory speech from last night.  He is the scum who desires to replace the scum running America.  That which appears to be a certain way, as on television, is merely a layer covering an array of qualities bad and good.  Give power to certain people with dubious backgrounds (I include Hillary Clinton) and expect an array of bad and good results, but don't expect dewy flowers and sunshine.  The people of Yemen, Afghanistan, and Gaza City will suffer as much under Hillary Clinton's policies as they have suffered under Obama's.

                                                                              Vic Neptune