He's had criticism because he called Leo, the homeless guy, "unjustly" homeless. Not sure who'd criticize that. It's sad to be homeless and, in America, should be unjust; we shouldn't have homelessness; we should have everyone employed. One critic, Alex Tsotsis, writes that Pat McConlogue, the guy who's helping Leo, had "a profound cluelessness about poverty and the disenfranchised." How is that? Isn't it having a clue to train someone OUT of poverty and disenfranchisement? Are you kidding me, Alex?
Please take the time to quickly read the linked article.........I'd like to hear what you think. Is Pat McConlogue wrong for giving a guy a fishing pole instead of fish? Have we come to the point in this country where there's any question about that?
HELP!
BY THE WAY: what bothers me is the Good Morning America article printed on the Yahoo homepage doesn't identify which is Leo and which is McConlogue in the caption below the picture I posted above.. Are we to assume Leo's the homeless black guy? that stinks.
Z
46 comments:
The black guy is the one that needs a haircut, so he must be the homeless one. But, wait! I need a haircut, so that may not mean anything.
It grieves me to see homeless people making do on the street. Many of them have drug problems, or severe mental problems, or just don't want to be put into any public housing.
My friend's son has made the newspapers by living, and preferring to live under a bridge in a downtown area. It gets really cold, there, too. There is no way my friend would let his son live that way, but the son who is in his forties will not have it any other way.
Anytime I go downtown and pass a homeless person begging, I will give them some change whether I know they will buy booze/drugs or not. As Jesus said, "In as much as you have done it to the least of these, my brethren, you have done it to me."
It is not my job to question why a poor, or homeless person wants money. My job it to try to help them, and I believe the person who offered help in your article was doing the right thing, no matter what form the help was in.
Bob, with styles as they are, who knows who really needs a haircut?
it grieves me, too, and there's something almost particularly grievous when the guy like Leo is not mentally ill and has no drug problem and prefers to be on the street.
As for giving money; I used to not give homeless money if I thought they were going to buy booze/drugs, but now I just give them what I can at the moment; you're right, it's not ours to say what to spend it on.
As to which is which, it doesn’t matter. I much prefer to see caring individuals reaching out to help people, on their own initiative, guided by their own conscious, than to see the government spending billions of taxpayer money providing homeless people with Obama phones, clean needles, whiskey, cigarettes, and a guaranteed vote for a progressive candidate.
The man is homeless but two months of informal instruction will get him a coding job, even without housing.
Insane.
Why is Leo on the streets?
Why does Bob's friend son live under a bridge?
Seems you'd want to have an answer to those questions and be prepared that it isn't a simple answer.
Leo's supposed benefactor strikes me as a naive Libertarian.
By the way, z, are you aware the Lomborg accepts the presence of man made global warning?
Here's Leo's job interview ---
Well, I read a couple books and I had a laptop for a short time. That was a while ago before the skull injury when someone snagged my laptop to sell it for drugs.
"Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime. He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent."
Skittles, people are finally noticing that GOOD PARENTING COUNTS.
That's the real problem; liberals think we can spend ourselves into good character and good parenting and that's not going to happen.
Mustang, I think it does matter in the presumption that all readers think the black guy's the homeless one; as if many whites aren't homeless..
but, yes...it's insane what we're doing to treat the homeless like endangered species.
It was good that the benefactor had noted that Leo was a reader and writer when he passed by him every morning and saw he could use training and could get on his own. Here's hoping.
He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent."
I have answered that question today at Always on Watch. I think it is important to remember that the homeless population constitutes an important base for the progressive movement. Evidence for this appears to exist in Ducky’s commentary—
ditto to Sam's sentiment Z! Happy Monday my friend:)
Z - This is a good article. Pat was right to offer Leo a chance to better himself. And Leo was smart to accept this chance.
You are right in saying that we would assume that the black guy is Leo. They should have been identified.
Difference Between Republicans and Democrats
A Republican and a Democrat were walking down the street when they came to a homeless person. The Republican gave the homeless person his business card and told him to come to his business for a job. He then took twenty dollars out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.
The Democrat was very impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided to help. He walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office. He then reached into the Republican's pocket and gave the homeless person fifty dollars.
Now you understand the difference between Republicans and Democrats
Breaking News!
Spokane Police Chief Frank Straub says authorities believe they have arrested everyone involved in the beating death of an 88-year-old World War II veteran last week.
A second teen suspect was arrested without incident early Monday morning in a Spokane home. The first suspect turned himself in last week.
Both suspects are 16-years-old., both are African American.
Straub said Monday morning that police believe they have in custody everyone involved in the robbery and beating death of Delbert Belton last Wednesday night.
The death of the veteran who was wounded in the battle for Okinawa has drawn nationwide attention and sparked outrage on social media.
Just handing out jobs to the homeless (every Repub is hiring)?
Beyond simplistic.
What confuses me is that Americans are outraged when black thugs murder a World War II veteran, but not when police murder a World War II veteran. We should all be outraged over both incidents, not just one of them.
As for this news article, I agree with Mustang. What differences does skin color really make in anything? A homeless person is an embarrassment to our society no matter what skin color he or she has. I cannot argue that without Jimmy Carter we would not have a homeless problem, only that because of Jimmy Carter, it is a problem too large to be addressed locally.
Ducky is the poster boy for gibberish.
Who says that we are not angry at both?
FROM Z:
Ducky...you're actually upset that one man helped another man be able to help himself? WOW.
Or are you misunderstanding?
@Sam -- Ducky is the poster boy for gibberish.
----
Behave.
I was referring to "Skittles and Iced Tea"s incredibly comic assertion that a Republican would just give a homeless man a job.
Once again, beyond simplistic.
@z --- Ducky...you're actually upset that one man helped another man be able to help himself? WOW.
Or are you misunderstanding?
-----
No, the help doesn't upset me.
The problem comes when this is seen as a particularly effective method to deal with the issue. Check in on Leo in to months.
Just another of myriad blossoms on The Poison Tree that has come -- most regrettably -- to symbolize the mental, moral and spiritual condition of our once-great nation.
At root our greatest enemy is the Apathy, Gullibility, woeful Ignorance -- and infinite Greed stemming from basic Laziness and the sedulously cultivated Entitlement Mentality -- that currently defines a vast majority of the electorate.
The enormous conceit and infinite capacity for self-delusion of the hopelessly indoctrinated Intellectual Elite wonderfully exemplified by our own dear Canardo is the second arm of the same chimera. In other words people led to believe they are very smart by the corrupt educational establishment when in fact they function merely as trained partisan parrots who reflexively spout quasi-erudite propaganda and have no capacity whatsoever for genuine thought have led the nation into The Pit.
Meanwhile, The Pendulum swishes menacingly overhead clanking down ever-so-slowly inch-by-inch while we bite our nails and wait gibbering in the dark waiting to be cut to ribands.
FROM Z:
Ducky, again, I'm struck with the fact that you think anybody thinks this is the way to solve joblessness.
It HELPS. It's better than welfare, Ducky. Maybe it'll work for this man.
Not many people realize this, but Ducky is actually Pasha Antipov (AKA Streinikov), and I have no doubt that he would be happy to place a bullet in the back of any of our heads. Nothing personal; he would only do it for a better Marxist mutha-land.
Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.
Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The former said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”
As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.
What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.
Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.
But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions – home, church, school and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths – have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.
If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.
Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.
Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.
Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.
Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.
Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop. From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.
What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?
What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?
I find that as long as someone has a "D" behind their name, you politician worshiping partisan lackeys really take the cake, if hypocrisy and gullibility were poisonous you'd have been taking the dirt nap a long time ago.
Pasha? Nah.
Not one of Tom Courtenay's better roles (the whole picture was overblown). I far prefer Billy Liar or The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
The latter falls much more within my vision of class struggle.
It still begs the question, z.
Did it help?
Come back to this in a few months.
Well, the guy on the left is just plain BUTT UGLY, while the guy on the right is a pleasant enough looking chap.
COLOR has nothing whatsoever to do with my instinctive feeling of aversion to the guy on the left, but perhaps it's easier to assume that Mr. Ugly is the one who must be down and out simply because he IS, quite literally, "on the left." ;-)
Desdemona Rodriguez O'Shea
Leo's supposed benefactor strikes me as a naive Libertarian.
You're just the biggest asshole I know.
It's easy to criticize from your couch watching some elitist movies.
I volunteered for a little while for a homeless organization. It is true that it's not a simple issue, especially if mental issues are the problem. But from what I've seen housing and food don't fix the problem either, especially if drugs are involved.
At least the guy is trying. People who criticize him as a dumb or naive are people who feel so bad about themselves for being selfish that the only way to make themselves feel better is to take a shot at him.
And you're part of them, jerk.
There are unwilling homeless who with a little help or not will get themselves out. IMO, the vast majority want to be homeless more than they want to 'maintain the lifestyle'. Ditto winos, bums, assorted gutter living beings. From my point of view, they actually work harder being bums than if they'd just get a basic unskilled job.
Anyway, here's what I'd really like to interject and it's in regard to your comment "Are we to assume Leo's the homeless black guy? that stinks."
Are there more blacks in college or prison? A: college
More blacks on welfare/WIC or White? A: Whites
Drug users? White. AND Rich Whites.
Listen to RAP music? A: White punks.
See, The math just doesn't work out. 13% of America is black. how can blacks outnumber others on practically any level ?
There IS a bigotry about blacks, and it is perpetuated by the "news" media as much as anything else.
Bob, Thanks for reminding me I need a haircut!
Holy Carp. I agree with the duck 7:22 AM
The Loser and consumate liar that is Obama...the worst POTUS ever?
"How many UPS employees voted for the president in 2008 and again in 2012? Because on Friday, UPS announced it was dumping 15,000 spouses of UPS employees from their UPS health plans despite the president's many, many promises to the contrary.
The UPS spouse-dump followed by a few days the news from New Jersey that Obamacare's rollout there will end the low-cost, high-deductible plan that more than 106,00 Jersey folks liked and which presumably many of them would have preferred to keep.
Oh, and the cost of individual plans are set to rise on average 41 percent in Ohio, and another major insurance company, Anthem Blue Cross, has pulled out of the California market for small businesses.
Let a thousand stink bombs go kaboom. Obamacare is the train wreck that just keeps arriving on an ever-more prolonged schedule.
Most Mainstream Media refuse to catalogue the consequences of the epic bill that went unread when it was passed without a single Republican vote in 2009. Most journalists just avert their eyes.
Obama's tenure is a vast desert of anti-achievement, a landscape of waste and ruin on every front at home and abroad, save on the ability to mobilize voters who don't know or don't care about the state of the country or the world.
The president rolled to re-election on the strength of technologies that enabled his minions to tap and turn out folks who simply are clueless that that nice fellow in the White House hasn't the foggiest idea of how to run the country.
But the prospect of 39 more months of the anti-president at the helm is daunting. No plans for anything except bus tours and college campus speeches, no idea how to invigorate a sputtering economy or trim a bloated budget.
Just miles and miles to go before we can can all sleep without the prospect of seeing him the next day, yet again, making another meaningless speech or filibustering another softball question from a kept White House press."
IMP, Next up in the white house, that vile POS, the hildebeast.
And the crowd cheered.
Well, Imp, he's a stinking pimp for big business and he could hardly have done a better job fellating the health insurers.
Wait till he appoints Larry Summers to the Fed and that ass rack gets to do his act.
Kapital owns you and they own Obama too.
Imp a pretty good short article
You can rail against Obama all you like, he's no prize but this problem is big and you me be making a big jump assuming anyone has the knowledge or desire to reverse the trend.
Dumping on Obama may make you feel good but we are all being laughed at and we deserve it. As if it makes a difference who's elected.
Kid, you agree the guy shouldn't try to help the homeless man who, as the article said, is a bookworm and writer? WHY?
Z, I wouldn't go so far as to say I agree that homeless and others should not be helped.
I do say that trying to give someone a course such as this is described as a entry level to computer coding is laughable at the least. Kids who go to college for 4 years for computer science barely know their elbow from a hole in the ground. This guy would never be employable as a coder. It would be better to teach him how to operate a McDonald's cash register or man the french fry bin. He'd be employable at least.
Generally speaking I have enough experience with this section of society to know (I believe) that helping them is hurting them unless in the extremely rare situation where you can actually see that they are willing to put in more effort than you.
They are experts at coming up with excuses for their life situation, that don't involve their own life choices, and in the end in 99% of the cases, all they were after was another bottle of wine.
They don't mesh with main society. They can't hold a job, they don't like the routine. They don't like personal hygiene, and the multitude of other things that make the rest of us able to maintain the physical and financial constructs of modern society.
They're raccoons and they like it that way.
I can't count the number of times people bump their nose on it.
Remember the cop who bought the dude in NYC a pair of shoes because he was barefoot in winter in NYC? The dude sold the shoes the next day.
The most I will do for anyone in this situation is buy them a hamburger and hand it to them. otherwise,you're contributing to their problem, because they take the 5 bucks and buy booze. Or drugs.
I have to mention that last year in Cincinnati they had a secere emergency because of the snow situation "Volunteers could not make it to the shelters to make breakfast for the shelter people."
They can't cook their own egg? Are you kidding me? That's like someone stuck all day on a broken down escalator.
PS = 46 Million people (1/6th of the population) on food stamps, and somehow these people are going hungry? What?
Again, I maintain that in the vast majority of cases, 'helping' them is hurting them. What they need is motivation and motivation starts with an empty stomach.
Here's McConlogue's resume
He has't accomplished much himself. Maybe he's sincere, maybe it's a publicity scam ... hard to tell.
I think every single American deserves a chance at a class for a springboard. If he doesn't cut it, he's out. Simple as that, I think.
Ducky, what bothers you SO MUCH about a guy helping another guy in the best way he feels he can? you seem absolutely obsessed with it.
My point of posting this was to show a nice gesture. Why's it bug you so much? That's so weird.
Now it's possibly a publicity stunt or scam? For WHAT? He wants to be an actor!?!!!!!!!!!
If we ALL did something nice for just ONE PERSON like this, the country'd be a better place.
What bothers me, z?
How did this get in the news? If it is a sincere voluntary act why is this "engineer" publicizing himself?
How did this get in the news? Hundreds of thousands of people act more effectively every day with no publicity.
I wonder if there will be any follow up? A lot of this just doesn't pass the sell test.
Ducky, are you envious?
Are you so rigid and hard hearted that EVERYTHING is for personal gain?
Tell me about hundreds of thousands offering $100 to strangers or offering to help them with school and a laptop.
Start linking; I'd love to see that..very reassuring if it were nearly true.
Ducky reminds me the French where everything is seen with suspicion. That's what is tanking the country actually. This constant cynicism and envy, if not jealousy.
Z, You're not going to like this but I absolutely believe that if you make things a lot easier for the homeless, you'll save 1% ? of the people that really shouldn't be homeless but you'll get a lot more homeless resulting in a greater absolute number of homeless.
Z, there are a good number of people who need the pitchfork in the butt to keep them moving. That's just the way it is.
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