Archive for December, 2014
Boulders Lost: Jann Scott’s Journal
Dec 23rd
Not everybody is going to have a Merry Christmas. Boulders lost underbelly alcholics and drug addicts are living in tents, under tarps, in section 8 housing and trailers.
Kathy has been living in section 8 housing for 5 years. She is 50ish has a bad leg and drinks everyday. She lives in one of Boulders section 8 apartment buildings. Social security and Medicaid keep her propped up so she can drink all day and get sicker and sicker. Kathy is an alcoholic. She admits it. Most chronic alcoholics do. Her alcoholic gout is so bad she can barely walk. A visiting nurse drops in to see her twice a week. Social worker interns from the Boulder Homeless shelter see her monthly. They are all very nice and hopeful for Kathy, but her basic problem is she is an alcoholic. If she stopped drinking 90% of her health problems would go away. But you and I pay for her lost lifestyle. We enable her. Now the county mental health officials, nor the DA will agree with me on this. They think I am uncaring and mean-spirited. But I know what is going on out there. I mentor a lot of these folks. They are honest with me. They don’t have mental illness. They have alcoholism. Last month Kathy fell and drove a spike into her head. She was found by her friend Austin who took her to the hospital where she spent a week. Now she has a little brain damage, a hole in her head and she can’t drink enough.. so she takes pills…… Disappearing into pitiful demoralization.
Austin has been in and out of prison, jails, the ARC and hospitals over the past 35 years. He’s always been an alcoholic. He went to prison 30 years ago for molesting his daughter while he was drinking. That is actually a plight of a lot of alcoholic men. They just don’t get reported or caught. But Austin was an alcoholic speed freak. Today he has served all of his time and has put stretches of sobriety together. We talked earlier today at his campsite. He lives under a tarp like hundreds of drunks in Boulder. He is a registered sex offender for a crime he committed over 30 years ago and he can’t catch a break. He never re-ofended, but he has an SO jacket. 20 years ago he was sober and had a job in the kitchen of one of the dorms at the University. H’d worked there for 5 years, was an exemplary employee and CU wanted to make him a supervisor. Austin had learned kitchen management in the penitentiary. He could fix any piece of industrial equipment, cook any meal, run a kitchen and serve 2000 people 3 times a day. He was excellent at it. When the university ran a background check they discovered his past and fired him on the spot and had him escorted off campus. From that point Austin gave up and went down hill. He told me today from his campsite that he is persecuted for his past. He can’t get a place to live, can’t get a job…. so he collects SSI and Medicaid and drinks… He is waiting for death.
Sometimes Kathy lets him sleep on her floor. But she is being thrown out of her apartment because the landlord hates section 8 rentals. They all do. Austin can’t qualify for section 8. The homeless shelter can’t help him. So Austin crashes where he can. Sometime I let him sleep in my heated garage in my big beautiful house….. but he is always drunk and he knows better than to come around me when he is drinking.
Scottie lives in a trailer. His kidneys gave out from drinking. He is nearing 50 and is friends with Austin and Kathy. He got fired from his gas station job last month for drinking. Austin says he’s not long for this world.
Scottie rents a room to Harmony who is 20 something. She tells everyone she has cancer and shaves her head everyday. But Harmony is a chronic alcoholic and drug addict. She doesn’t work but she always has money. Scottie and Austin theorize that she is a prostitute because she disappears with various older men routinely. Some of Harmonies friends who were strippers and hookers from the Bustop got killed over the past few years. One flipped her pickup truck in the Canyon last year. She was drunk and high. The other got killed by a John. The police are still looking for him. The case never even made the papers. Why ? Because these are people no one cares about.. no one knows… they live in the dark shadows of Boulders trailer court. Richard lives 3 trailers down from Scottie. He is a bad alcoholic too. He used to be a finish carpenter and cabinet maker. Richard says he could just never stop drinking. He gets his SSI check each month and drinks.
20 street alcoholics died this year. The public officials call them homeless and want you to believe they died from exposure and mental illness. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know what they died from right ?? They died from what is killing my friends above.
Citizens of Boulder are killing these people with kindness. so what are we supposed to do? Here is the rub. Make all public assistance contingent upon being sober. sounds reasonable right ?? Nope .. not to all the drunks and drug addicts who run our city. They feel threatened too. After all we live in Dope Boulder. we live in beer Boulder. so we will just lie about it all and make up some nice story.
Jann Scott
from Boulder Colorado
Jann Scott’s Journal is Boulders official voice of reason and conscience.
“I can Has Cheezburger” loses millions : Jann Scott’s Journal
Dec 20th
They fired most of their staff. Their CEO Ben Huh said that ” we were turning into a money losing mess “and I didn’t know what I was doing. Holy shit! This investment darling of 2011 which raised over 30 Million is now completely on the skids. They even raised $5,000,000. from Foundry Group; Boulders wonder boy startup venture capital firm run by Rockn rollers … ah tech stars.
oops…. it just blew up… oh crap we nuked Seattle
In a confession on Back Channel Huh said:
“In a nutshell, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had been profitable for years, selling ads, t-shirts, books and even a reality show on Bravo. But having investment money in the bank was new for us. More important, so was the process of transforming ourselves from a team that built and acquired WordPress sites to a company that produced a full-on content platform. We tripled our headcount.
After cashing out our original investors, however, our $30 million had dwindled to just $4 million. That figure is small by venture capital standards, but for a company that was used to duct tape and folding chairs, we felt like we were swimming in cash. We were turning into a confused, money-losing mess.”
What is this company ? What do they produce ? What is their financial model ? Believe it or not it is a kitty Kat humor website company who depends on fucking banner ads and T shirt sales to make it. It was a losing idea from the beginning. Memes. really. The entire startup world is caught up in this kind of bullshit and most of them go broke. The only people making money are the founder hustlers and the early stage VCs like Foundry. It is almost like these people plan to fail.
Boulder’s unsung hero startup of the 1st decade.
I hate to toot my own horn but I sure as hell know how to turn 30 million dollars into a profitable company and not blow it on dumb shit. Take a company like mine: Channel One Networks llc. We have evolved from cable television programming in the 90s to web based TV and news in the 2000s. We built slowly and surely turning a profit every year while expanding steadily. Now we have a grown to 6,000 TV channels and newspapers with local content and local advertising in every city in the world. We are not a flash in the pan and we don’t make Giant company ending mistakes. We compete with Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft. We build and sell our own products . We are not re sellers of somebody elses.. And we know what is King. Advertising and service sales are kings not content. Yes we are changing the way TV and news is delivered locally and we are changing the world.
Who in their right mind would float a company like this, let alone invest in it ?
One of the problems with the entire start-up millennium movement is that they are not business people. Most of them go broke. Most of them have little business or sales training. They do not know how to service customers or produce results for them. They are so caught up with making the scene that their zine meme thing crashes and they wonder .. oh gee what happened. business happened.
I wish some of these incubators and business schools would teach business instead of entrepreneurship. Not everybody can be an entrepreneur. There is great value in being a good solid worker.
From the Real World Home Town
Jann Scott
Boulder, Colorado
Jann Scott’s Journal gives a critical look at the world through the wise eyes of Boulders #1 multiculturalist
Jann Scott’s Journal: North Korea and China vs USSTRATCOM Joint Electronic Warfare Center’s .
Dec 20th
Then there was Edward Snowdon who, while working for the NSA, leaked everything. He then took all the files to all of our adversaries including China, North Korea and Russia. He now lives in Russia and is a pawn in their game against the USA. He too is popular among Millenniums. He is considered a traitor, but the USA has treated him with kid gloves. Yet, he is considered the most damaging hacker to national security. I mean , this guy is the cause of our current cyber war with China and North Korea. How he ever became an American anti-hero is mind boggling.
Next, China led cyber military actions against the USA, and were caught caught red-handed so to speak. They were reprimanded by the USA. China has been notorious in it’s attacks. Since America has business relations with china we let it all pass even though China broke into american companies and military installations. What they did was an act of war. Cyberwar.. but war nonetheless.
In this latest attack by North Korea, government officials are telling the NY Times that China led the whole thing. China trained the North Koreans, educated them and set up their Cyber warfare department. North Korea is essentially the bad boy puppet state of China.
So now what ????
Now that cyber hacking warfare is out of the box, where will it all end???? No place good for the future. It could lead to Electronic Warfare or EW involving the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) or directed energy (DE) But North Korea is still on paper. They don’t have any computers or internet. They use paper file folders. Up until now no nation has launched a cyber attack with devastating consequence. We could do it. We could put bursts out over North Korea and shut down all of their power facilities and destroy all of their electrical power stations. We could do worse to china.
If we start whipping EMS attacks around there will be hell to pay…. But it could be coming. The United States has USSTRATCOM :Joint Electronic Warfare Center which is rearing to go. Nobody is talking about this, but we have sophisticated weapons that can knock the crap out of any country on Earth. So do they.
What a mess
from the Dope hacking capital of America
Jann Scott
Bouldern Colorado
Jann Scott’s Journal is the Voice of boulder , the mouth piece of the city under the Flat Irons
