He’s one of my favorite fiction writers. His political fiction is just terrible, though. I don’t need to punch any old liberals in the face in Maine, either. Reality just did that harder than I ever could have.
Our prosecutors here in Androscoggin county have something like a 2 or 3 year case backlog and there is no funding made available to increase staffing.
There is money, LOTS of money, available for homeless shelters, but ONLY for “low barrier” shelters, which impose nightmare conditions everywhere they spring up. Lewiston has had two shelters operating for decades, but they have rules, expectations and a very good track record of fulfilling their purpose as well as it can be.
I’ve spoken many times to the non-profit owner who has been trying to open up his flophouse for the town, and while he puts a good face on the work they are trying to do, he is completely unable to defend the actual concept of low barrier. When I asked him to explain what the benefit to Lewiston was, the ONLY example he produced was that it could help people who struggle with getting ID out with that process.
Nobody, NOBODY has been able to explain why a town would want a low barrier homeless shelter operating in it.
$2.5 million landing in his lap has him celebrating like he’s a rapper or something. At the very least, it has him gravely confusing Lewiston’s present situation with a “peak” of some kind. It also speaks to the non-profiteer mindset in a rather profound way.
If non-profits were truly oriented around their stated goals of eliminating this or that scourge from society, such as homelessness, surely they would find another word besides “peak” to describe a situation that has grown so dire that their mission has been expanded.
He speaks the same way I would expect a business owner to when reaching $2.5 million in revenue.
That did make me LOL, as it definitely seems as though he’s more excited about the $2.5mm bucks rather than having the ability to help many more people now. I also agree, all of the stuff written in that post sounds so contrived, so phony. Chat GPT probably would have written something very similar.
Like you, I would be very curious to see what kind of salaries all of these “nonprofit” people are earning. But hey, they’re not doing it for money, right? No, they do it out of the burning desire to truly help repair peoples’ lives[s].
I wonder if having it classified as a “low barrier” shelter will allow them to obviously increase the number of people they take in and maybe the higher that number is, the more “eligible” they become for more $$$ via state and federal grants, etc? Just curious. But that place is going to become like a big, bright patio light on a warm summer evening, attracting derelicts and shady characters from near and far. I’m too lazy to look it up now, but hopefully in Maine you can concealed carry because it sounds as if Lewiston is heading towards an abyss. Keep up the good fight & keep us informed.
Low barrier is the ONLY funding available, and that is due to Democrats in Augusta. They let the cat out the bag at a city council meeting months ago. Nothing extra for the shelters that’ve been here for decades.
These benevolent new providers to our most marginalized buddied up with a lot of well-spoken people to form an expert committee to solve Lewiston’s homelessness problem through the application of their “best practices”. Together we have reached the mountain peak of the problem getting so awful that a town has resorted to this concept.
With any luck, things will get bad enough to see numbers over $10 million.
I would probably sell more books if I wrote a book naming names and building that kind of case, but that would be a book for me, not a book for Lewiston.
WOW!? Low barrier is the only funding available? That seems crazy, but it does not surprise me given the complete hold far left democrats have on Lewiston, and Maine. The first analogy to that I thought of was: “that’s like a bank deciding ONLY to fund loans to a car dealership that catered only to people with horrendous credit”. But I think it’s quite similar as they are throwing money at people who are statistically NOT going to do the work to get out of poverty, get clean off of drugs, improve their lives. These low barrier places become flop houses for homeless hoping to catch some free meals or a warm bed as opposed to sleeping outside. Or to have a roof over their heads so they stay dry/warm while they shoot up.
As for the book idea, with as tenuous as the situation sounds in Lewiston, it definitely would be a good idea to keep that book to yourself as if you ever published that, those liberals might just take you up on your “You know where I am”! You know as well as I do that exposing them might just push some of them over the crazy ledge and into dangerous/violent and crazy. But man would it make for some great reading. But your story might land you in an episode of some murder porn show on the Investigation Discovery channel, lol.
It’s so fucked up that I fucking need to go out of my fucking way to find fucking ways to fucking explain how fucked up it all is without ever fucking using the word fuck in the fucking book.
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The school is running a PR campaign now that these terrified teachers are speaking up in a town where speaking up is a good way to get labeled as a racist, a bigot or a right-wing extremist.
I have very little doubt that our SC Chairperson is behind this. I’m not going to call her a sociopathic narcissist in the book, but I’ll call her one here.
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Oh wow! An elementary school student did elementary school work!
Nothing to see there. All you hillbilly rabblerousers are just making stuff up cuz you drank too much moonshine!
Yeah, plus they’ve never posted stuff like this before. I’m not sure who runs their page but I know who runs the government. This is like crazy ex behavior.
The first comment is the OBVIOUS comment.
There’s never been anything like what that person was asking for from this local regime. Not even close. You’re not allowed to talk about problems in Lewiston, Maine.
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The place where everything is FINE. It’s the people that are the problem!
We just had a bit of an upheaval here in my little slice of heaven. The township managers appear to be letting a development go through on a very nice 60 acre plot that the community has come to know and love in the past few decades.
So a group of citizens started a petition to have 2 more seats added to the township management. It sits at 3 with a population of 13,000 citizens. Other communities in the region with similar or less population have 7 or 9.
They got enough signatures on the petition, so it was added to the ballot. The initiative won over the nay-sayers by almost 2000 votes out of approximately 8000.
I’d read it. There used to be a guy in here who wrote a book called “Standing on the Box” about his days as a bouncer. Really good book. His writing style was excellent and i enjoyed it immensely.
La’
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Thanks. If this concept gets finished and then published, perhaps I’ll follow it up with a Too Hot for TV behind-the-scenes look at the world of dive bar bouncing with lots of lifting talk and stories of eating shit on the mats.
For this book the bouncing serves as a narrator perspective and a vehicle to transform complicated, emotionally-charged political ideas into simple terms that are more easily understood. Right now I’m trying to lead each chapter with a paragraph or two about easily-understood aspects of humans that are apparent in bar situations.
Here’s what I’ve got for a lead-in to the brief history lesson on Lewiston circa 1999.
A good bouncer shouldn’t need to do much besides check ID’s while being polite and friendly. Many pleasant shifts watching over my neighbors and enjoying their company would go by with nothing more than this required from me. Good behavior from people in bars doesn’t always happen on its own or by accident. Not everyone sizes you up when you work bar security, but a lot of people do, and you will always be getting sized up if you have to respond to something eventful.
It is still the only job I ever worked at where my arm was squeezed by so many people. Getting felt up like that wasn’t ever part of solving any of the help desk tickets I would get at my other jobs.
Local government is similar in many ways. A good one should work well enough to where it almost seems like you barely need it, and it should have a reasonable degree of tolerance for strangers feeling it up.
And then I go on to paint a picture of Lewiston around the year 1999 to set up for the story of how the town’s trajectory was dramatically altered by the villain in the book.
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For anyone curious about just one part of what I’m trying to explain, this video covers a good local slice of situation. It is absolutely continuing to get worse.
I’ve been watching council and school board meetings for a few years now and it is extremely difficult to explain it all. Even with this all around us, we charge ahead with more of what got us here. The fight videos in this (and MANY others like them) are what I believed led to LPS recently banning cellphones.
It gives a good picture into what Maine Democrats have cultivated. They are eerily silent even as the recount of our really shady election is still underway. I think they know the grift is coming to an end, and the political dominance they predicted would result from it isn’t materializing after all.
Now they have an indefensible situation on their hands. It is my opinion that Voter ID would flip Maine red instantly and I hope it somehow passes. Everyone can see it, except the people with their eyes closed.
Heather Cox Richardson is a beloved local writer read by millions of people all around the world who look to her to give her progressive New England view on current events. She speaks of Maine often, but never about this part of Maine. She’s still somehow busy explaining why those dastardly Republicans are continuing to thwart the Democrats plans for a better future.
I have no idea what reality she can possibly be existing in, given that we live so close together.
The level of gaslighting from my local politicians is firmly in George Orwell territory.
After the teachers went to the school board saying they weren’t safe and learning wasn’t happening, they dispatched their lackey the superintendent to the elementary school in question and concluded that everything was safe. Nothing dangerous was observed.
Today, we get this from these stooges.
The “incident” was 30 gunshots and at least one person critically wounded at 3 in the afternoon as school was getting out. These woke joke’s denial of reality is far past pathological at this point, and their rotten ideology lies at the heart of it.
That’s some crazy shit.
“People were kept safe” -LOLLL. WTF does “avoid, deny, defend” mean exactly? Especially the “deny” part. Is there a dictionary of trite buzzwords that all these PR people use?
There is an entire vocabulary behind this ideology, and that’s part of what I want to explain in very plain terms in this book. It just keeps adding chapters.
They’re referencing active shooter drill language, in that case. Local social media has the best response.
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Had to look up active shooter drill language.
Random off topic note -I’m beginning to “grok” (an X/Twitter feature, free for the basic version) stuff instead of “googling”; less work, a more “intelligent” response imho.
I’m not ready for AI and I refuse to knowingly use it in any way whatsoever. Fuck Grok and the horse he rode in on. I was totally fine with asking Jeeves.
I can see why some would use AI, but it isn’t for me. It is a can of worms I just don’t want to open.
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LOL. I used to have the exact same attitude, I’m (a lot) older than you, so get off my lawn!
(…I also used to refuse to invest in bitcoin…)
I’m sure I’ll come around to better ideas at some point, but not this day!