Saturday, December 19, 2015

FRANK SOLICH

Frank was the first Serbian I ever knew, and he was the first Nebraska first-team football player I knew, too. We were fraternity brothers in the mid-60's, and today his Ohio University Bobcats take on the Appalachian State Mountaineers. The Mountaineers are best known for their 2007 upset of Michigan...and that Danny is an alum.

That alum status makes us a "house divided," but we will be rooting for a good game.

Frank was booted from his post as Nebraska head coach because he was "only" winning 9 games a season. In favor of a couple of not-so-goods. Frank still has the best winning record at Nebraska except for Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne.

All of us Sigma Nus of the era are proud of Frank, his play, his cover of Sports Illustrated, his record as a coach and his character. There were a lot of high-performance people that came out of those early baby-boom classmates and fraternity brothers, and he is an excellent example.

Football, even back then, took a toll on social life, so I can't say that Frank was one of my close friends, but he was a good guy and a regular guy. For one thing, he is small--his playing weight was listed at something like 165 pounds. He played fullback and held the single-game rushing record for Nebraska for many years until the advent of the I-formation, and a guy named I.M. Hipp broke the record.

Both Frank and Larry Wacholtz, a North Platte boy who played defense, were sensitive about their size in major college football, so they would tape weights under their shorts for weigh-ins--which he never confirmed nor denied.

A vivid memory for me was a Saturday night. A classmate of mine, Jim Stevenson and I were juggling baseballs trying to perfect the technique of passing back and forth. Frank came by, had only a short time before a date (while Jim and I were LOSERS!! staying in) but he wanted to learn how to juggle. "Frank, be happy to teach you, but it takes a long time to learn. Years." Within a few minutes, he was doing as well as either of us, and Jim was a Division-1 baseball athlete. Frank's athleticism was beyond anything I had ever seen.

Jim's name is on the Wall in Washington, killed in action in Viet Nam. How much the world missed.

The Camellia Bowl in Montgomery, Alabama. Today. Should be a good game.




Thursday, December 10, 2015

ANGELA MERKEL

TIME magazine "Person of the Year." Welcoming into Germany the throngs of Syrian refugees.

WAIT: I think it was Abraham Lincoln who advised, "Don't believe everything you see on the internet."

Jerry sent me a terrific article, you can locate it here: http://www.oil-price.net/en/articles/oil-prices-and-syrian-civil-war.php

It posits that oil and oil prices have a lot to do with the current Mideast crisis, and it goes on to explain a lot more than that since most of us would agree with the broad premise.

The following notes are my takeaways from that article, and I recommend your own reading of it if you have an interest.

LEBANON, 1975

What does this have to do with anything? Well, it is a good example of what might happen in the EU due to Merkel's policies. Not to Germany, but to others.

Back in the 1970's, there were 400,000 Palestinian refugees, primarily in Jordan. Jordan kicked them out and they went, mostly, to Lebanon. Lebanon was, at that time, prosperous and had a large Christian population dating back to the Crusades. Naturally, the immigrants overwhelmed the "Switzerland of the Middle East" and the country has never recovered. They turned their new home into a pigsty like they came from.

KEEP THE BEST, EJECT THE REST

Germany needs cheap labor and the Turkey connection has dried up as Turkey's economy has improved upon entry into the EU. The immigrants will fill the bill, and Merkel has given them nine-month permits. Out go the ones who don't work out...or work.

DUMP ON YOUR NEIGHBORS?

A short time ago, Germany sponsored legislation to require EU countries to accept migrants from other EU countries. Where will these rejects go? Likely places would be Sweden, Norway and Denmark who, unlike Germany with 81 million people, have much smaller populations (like, 5 million or so) that will be overwhelmed. Just like Lebanon.

Trump was roundly criticized for saying there were Muslim no-go districts for British cops. The police in Birmingham acknowledged that is the case. There are neighborhoods in the UK that are ruled by Sharia law, and the police do not go there.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE?

Angela Merkel is in the "pole position" for that Prize. After some of these other events work out, do you think the committee will admit, as they did with Obama, that their choice was a mistake?

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

ISIS has said, "We'll use and exploit the refugee crisis to infiltrate the West." Boy, what a surprise, although when you hear the news networks, they are evidently unaware.

Here is the problem--Lebanese officials (back to Lebanon, and they might know a bit) estimate that 2.2% of Syrians in refugee camps are affiliated with ISIS. So, if we allow 10,000 Syrian immigrants to enter the US, that would allow 220 who are affiliated with ISIS. Wonder if they could do any damage?

OIL

Back to the original article--the whole Syrian conflict is based, as are most ME conflicts, in the oil business. The Shia-led countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria) want a pipeline to go through Syria to the Mediterranean. The Sunni countries (principally, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) want another pipeline to go through Syria and through Turkey.

The Sunni pipeline would seriously compete with Russia's pipeline to the Western EU. Russia has been aligned with the Shia for decades; the US with the Sunni. The Russians are going to wipe out ISIS that has been funded in large part by Saudi Arabia and Qatar (so was the Arab Spring until it got completely out of hand and turned into a bunch of criminals).

Note, however, two important concepts: this is about oil and about fine points of distinction between seemingly similar religions. The geography defined to prevent the reemergence of the Ottoman empire (the Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916) has less to do with it than religious matters. Sunni versus Shia. That fact does not square with our Western attitudes and is not recognized by our politicians and certainly not by the media.

Just a taste of the article, take a look, and special thanks to Jerry for forwarding it.






Thursday, December 3, 2015

AL GORE

Al Gore is one of my favorite topics--made millions through promoting false information. The following has been stolen from Facebook, a post on December 3.


Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323452204578288343627282034

Author Zac Unger was originally drawn to the arctic circle to write a “mournful elegy” about how global warming was decimating the polar bear populations. He was surprised to find that the polar bears were not in such dire straits after all.
“There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago,” Unger told NPR in an interview about his new book, “Never Look a Polar Bear in The Eye.”
“There are about 25,000 polar bears alive today worldwide. In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded.”
“This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears,” Unger added. “But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can’t look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another.”

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears worldwide, living in Canada, Greenland, the northern Russian coast, islands of the Norwegian coast, and the northwest Alaskan coast.