NOT ADDING UP

 

There are currently 11.2 million job openings, about 2 for every unemployed person in the US.

There have been 2 million illegal immigrants so far this year, far surpassing any prior year. Are they employed? Are they collecting unemployment benefits? Not likely as they are “undocumented” as the liberals like to say.

The narrative of the legacy news media and the US government has so many holes it is making it very difficult to believe anything.

The focus is on unemployment claims, but it seems that we are looking in the wrong place.

Something is just not adding up.

I WONDER

 

I wonder… 

Why is there no proposed legislation that would encourage dads in the home? The Great Society did a great job eliminating two-parent black families, let’s restore them. Even Obama knew that children raised with men in the home fared better.

I wonder…

And this one is just preposterous, why there is no real investigation into the BIG MONEY that seems suspicious with Hunter Biden’s imprimatur.

I wonder…

Why nobody seems to be interested in the precipitous, unprecedented drop in the life expectancy in the US from 79 in 2019 to 76 now. Lots of unexplained deaths among working age, seemingly health folks.

I wonder…

Why the left’s insistence upon judging events based on race isn’t considered racist. Like finding a judge who is a black female. Every place else in our society, that kind of selection is prohibited.

I wonder…

Why don’t feminists concern themselves with the treatment of women in Iran, Syria and other Muslim countries?

I wonder…

Actions on his first day in office (like taking aim at coal, oil and natural gas industries) seemed to intentionally try to destroy not only our economy but our way of life. And it’s working. Why doesn’t anyone care?

Just some things that I wonder about.

TRAGEDY OF SCOTT FROST

 

Scott Frost’s trajectory from the heights to his firing reminds one of a Greek tragedy, replete with the chorus chanting his virtues.

He presents himself as a really nice guy who got sucked up by this machine we call Major College Football. Lots of money, lots or scrutiny and the inevitable requirement to win.

Let’s step back a bit. Scott Frost’s parents were athletes, his dad played at the University and I played softball against him “back in the day.” I have often told the story about how we had him trapped between second and third, we were performing the run-down play and all of a sudden, he was on third. He had that exceptional athletic skill, like his son. His mother was an Olympic athlete, discus as I recall. Then they returned to small-town Nebraska, coached football and raised their son.

Another big-time football coach has ties to Nebraska, specifically Genoa—Lane Kiffin. His mother was a year older than me and lived with her grandmother in Genoa for a while. When we were in the eighth grade or so, she threw a birthday party that remains in my memory, vividly. She was so pretty. Anyway, left Genoa, married Monte Kiffin and their son Lane has made quite a name for himself. Kevin ran into them in Florida and they were thrilled to meet someone from Genoa.

I compare the two, Scott and Lane. Both have been through the meatgrinder. I’m going to predict that Scott will do just fine, maybe return to the mayhem of football, maybe retire to small-town Nebraska and coach some football.

Think about how different the world looked this morning when he awoke and realized he didn’t have a job to go to.

DRACAENA (Mother-in-law’s Tongue) (Snake Plant)

According to NASA’s Clean Air Study, the Snake Plant is so effective in producing oxygen that if you were locked in a sealed room w2ith no airflow (Yikes!), you would be able to survive with just 6-8 plants in it. NASA recommends 15 to 18 medium-to-large size plants for a 1,800 square-foot home for optimum air quality.

 

Besides, they are wonderful and soothing to look at.

Alcibiades

 

 

Alcibiades was a citizen of Athens about 450 BC, known for crafty, dishonest political antics during the time when Athens and Sparta had agreed that constant conflict and wars was not good for either. He was a powerful politician, sort of the “speaker” of the governing body such that he determined what came before the body and when the votes would occur.

The peaceful time between the two superpowers was not durable, it was delicate and subject to disruption. Alcibiades decided to take a trip to Peloponnesia which, while not claimed by Sparta was still not open to an Athenian citizen to go meddling.

Sure enough, there was a conflict, it escalated and good ol’ Alcibiades who was known as a bad actor before decided to change his loyalty and became a Spartan. People died.

This tale was told recently as a metaphor for what is happening, uselessly, in Taiwan. The journalist who wrote it was much more skillful than I am, but the idea is the same. I cannot locate the original article, sorry.

Hopefully, our version of the distasteful, untrustworthy politician will not result in the loss of life like Alcibiades’ actions, but you never know. For sure, it is needless.

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” Aldous Huxley

TEMPERATURES

 I didn't know that only the US, Belize, Palau, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands are the only places that use Fahrenheit for their official temperatures.

So the record in the UK of 40.3 is pretty unimpressive to us...and about 12 other people in the world. Well, a few more than that, but it would do well for me to learn a bit about Celsius and the rest of the metric system. 

At least the Brits use one mysterious measure...do I actually weigh 15 stone?

GUN-FREE ZONES and Fathers in the Home

Who thought that "gun-free zones" were a good idea? Apparently, both parties as it has been around for a long time, and although it was introduced by Democrats, it was supported by Republicans. It was a part of Joe Biden's "Tough on Crime" bill of 1994.

Since then, most mass shootings have happened in these zones, 97.8% is the usual number given. 

Why don't both parties agree that this policy has only cleared the way for shooters so that they know that there will be no armed opposition when they start shooting? It doesn't work. It is like so much in the kit bag of anti-gun folks that sounds like curing drunk driving deaths by taking cars away from sober drivers.

It sounds like a lot of the provisions are simply being ignored now as many school districts have moved to have either employees or others in the school carry weapons.

The knee-jerk response on the part of liberals has always been to take away the guns. Let's start with guns that look like the AR-15 (remember, AR does not stand for Assault Rifle, it stands for Armalite, the inventor of the gun) and then we'll take away all guns (see the words and actions of the candidate for governor of Texas). Here is my question:

WHY ISN'T THERE ANY PROPOSED LEGISLATION TO

INCREASE THE PERCENTAGE OF FATHERS IN THE 

HOME?

Even Obama said that the absence of fathers in the home results in problems for the kids, especially young men. But instead we are chastised for not using the right pronouns.

HEADLINES

 

A FEW THINGS (I really need to quit reading about this stuff!)

1.    A new $1.1 billion meat processing facility has been announced near Rapid City, SD. It will process bison as well as beef and employ 2,500.

2.    Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa and current head of the US Department of Agriculture has announced that any school that does not allow boys to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms will have USDA food withdrawn. The USDA provides food for about 30 million students.

3.     Meanwhile, some predict food shortages world wide and even here in the US and claims say farmer “inputs” for fuel, seed, fertilizer, etc. have tripled in cost (while Vilsack and Biden deciding policy of boys in girls’ bathrooms??).

4.     Where is the outrage by the elites in Hollywood? They don’t seem to care about the price of food, gas and daily living and the state of the homeless in California. Where are the vulgar rantings of Robert DeNiro now? Crickets.

5.     Meanwhile, California has approved a path for paying restitutions. Details to come.

 

BILL MAHER “REAL TIME” TRANS KIDS, LGBTQ

Bill Maher should have known that he would create a furor, something that helps ratings, when he had the temerity to discuss the recent rapid increase in LGBTQ and trans people. In a nut shell, here you go:

Generation born before 1946                                                        Less than 1%   “identify” as LGBTQ

Boomers I born 1946-1954
Boomer II born 1954-1964
  Broken up as the latter did not get drafted                                                 2.6%         “

 
Gen X born 1965-1980, age 42-57                                                              4.2%          “
 
Millennials born 1981-1996, age 26-41                                                    10.5%          “
 
Gen Z born 1997-2012, age 10-25                                                             20.8%         “
 
Roughly double every generation. He joked that by 2054, we would all be gay.
 
The facts and the joke fell flat among the true believers, of course. There are other pieces of his talk, and it can be reached at “Real Time” closing comments for Friday, May 20, 2022 and then go to the usual suspects, The Hill, Salon, to get the criticism.
 
Just look at that growth! Has all this been suppressed over lo these many years?? They criticized his questioning that. You are not supposed to question trending stuff these days. One of the problems with being “woke” is that you can never be woke enough, there is always someone else who is more woke. Seems ‘trendy” to me. The phrase “follow the science” has been bastardized to mean “don’t question my latest version of science” while the essence of science is experimentation and questioning. If you can’t question it, it isn’t science. Just go back to Obama’s claim about 98% of scientists agree…you should never find 98% of real scientists agreeing on virtually anything.
 
I don’t have followers, and the recipients of this either agree or don’t care, so I won’t get myself in too much hot water, but like so much that we see these days, it all seems suspect. 

I want to emphasize this: The people I know and have known who are gay are authentic. They have known, I have known, since they were young that they were not interested in the opposite sex, and most of my friends have tried that more typical route and rejected it to be honest to themselves. As far as most of us are concerned, they are just people and some are amazing and some are jerks.
 
On the other hand, there are people who I have known who have determined that they are gay, but just don’t present themselves that way. Makes you wonder. Some have reverted to “maybe the opposite sex will hurt me, but I’m still hetero.”
 
This whole thing about “identifying” leads to men competing against women in sports. America has spent billions and successfully changed the landscape for athletic women, especially Title IX. There is no place for a man in a women’s event or in their prison or in their bathroom. Isn’t it obvious?
 
After all, “identifying” really means “pretending” in many instances.
                 
Source of the statistics, Gallup poll.

TESLA again

Take a look at my post from July 2, 2020, about two years ago. I admitted that my many posts about Tesla have been wrong.

Never have been a fan of Elon Musk, but you have to admit that he has amassed an amazing string of financial and engineering successes. Now, my attitude about him might be changing as I see ultra-lib heads exploding as they contemplate their purchase of his cars and his stock as financing his takeover of Twitter (if it happens) and allowing “free speech” (OMG!).

After all, free speech is reserved for those who agree with you. That is why Twitter and Facebook blocked the accounts of the New York Post (the oldest paper in the US) on October 14, 2020, days before the election that would have exposed Joe Biden’s involvement in the antics of his son.

Turns out, that article was true. Despite the NYT saying it was not. Well, the NYT has a history of being wrong about a lot of things, like the atrocities of Stalin.

Back to Tesla stock: it is down nearly 50% from its high, and just about flat with the price when I published that blog July 2020.

I still think the embrace of Tesla by the California elite and the nation’s liberals has been an extraordinary exercise of human nature, much like the Tulip Bulb mania of the 1630’s. Nothing wrong with Tesla being more valuable than Honda, Ferrari, BMW, GM, Nikola and Nissan…combined. Tesla’s production has tripled to about 300,000 vehicles in the first quarter. Toyota made 10.6 million vehicles in the year ended March 31, 2022 (note year vs quarter) and made profits of $24.5 Billion. Meanwhile, Tesla’s ANNUAL REVENUE (Total sales!!) was $19 Billion for the year ended 2021.

Oh, well. I’m rooting for free speech. But I do wish that people would recognize the horrible economic cost of electric cars.

SCAM ALERT

 Two days ago, I received an email that had a whole bunch of authentic information and said that they were going to charge my credit card for $498.50 to renew my annual membership at Best Buy.

That was way too much, but I have had Best Buy’s guarantee program that will fix my computers, so that much was ok.

They wanted me to call a number, which I did. I had trouble understanding the person who answered due to thick accent, but they finally said they thought it was an error and that they would transfer me to Best Buy. The person who answered at “Best Buy” sounded like—accent and background noise—like they were three desks down from the first person.

The key request was when they wanted to have me take the steps so they could “see” my computer. No, No, a thousand times No.

I hung up, never found out what the next step was going to be. Called Best Buy’s authentic number and was told that the fee was about $100 and it was not set to expire until August.

How did they get my email and connection with Best Buy? Simply firing out millions of automated emails? Why don’t we have these people trying to perform legitimate work?

BEWARE the scam that indicates that they are trying to correct a problem or transfer you to Amazon or Best Buy, etc. They have busted some of the call centers in India, but not all.

On a serious note

If you watch the videos of the Obama visit to the White House, you see a very old, sad man shunned by the crowd. His VP who supposedly works for him fawns on Obama and ... well, it was just sad.

We deserve better and Ol' Joe deserved better from Obama. 

Royals win opener

The Royals won their 2022 Opener, 3-1 over the Guardians (who?). Scott Barlow (who?) pitched two innings as the home town nine scored two in the bottom of the eighth to go ahead.

Top of the ninth, two on and Barlow (who is this guy?) strikes out Straw (who?) to end the game.

Is this really baseball? Guardians, Straw, Barlow?

They’ll probably start calling balls and strikes electronically.

ROBERT GATES

Bob Gates served Presidents Bush and Obama honorably as Secretary of Defense and had compliments for both. He said that Joe Biden, on the other hand, was “on the wrong side of every major policy decision” that came before them.

We know, in the words of Forrest Gump, that Ol’ Joe “is not a smart man.” He is a boastful non-truth teller and back when there were actual journalists, they pointed that out and his run for the Presidency in 1988 cratered. His plagiarism spans from, at least, his law school days when he finished 76^th out of 85 at the Syracuse Law school to his 1988 campaign where he just stole stuff from others’ speeches.

He is weak. Putin is clever and strong, a back-alley fighter. All the liberal press can do is condemn Trump (how did he get into this?) for saying that Putin was smart and clever to use the ruse of “peacekeeping” in Ukraine. Joe has no idea how to use the tools he has or to creatively block Putin. How about China? They have renewed their claim to Taiwan that goes back many years and is resisted by the rest of the world.

If he isn’t, Robert Gates should be saying, “I told you so.”

SAN FRANCISCO

 What a lovely city, amazing history and now it is in the hands of people who seem to want to destroy it.

When Linda worked in the city, it was starting—she would walk from the train to work and had to dodge human excrement and all the homeless, but it was minimal compared to now. But I want to talk about the school board.

Three members of the school board were recalled in a recent election and blamed it on “white supremacy.” Facts do not, of course, support such a claim, but let’s see why voters really told them to hit the road:

1.       The school board was in the process of changing the names of 44 schools named after historical and current figures who did not meet their standards. Among them were these “inappropriate” names of schools:

a.       Paul Revere

b.       George Washington

c.       Abraham Lincoln

d.       Alamo

e.       Thomas Jefferson

f.        Daniel Webster

g.       Diane Feinstein

h.       John Muir, the environmentalist

The reasoning—fight for racial justice

2.       The premier school in the city will no longer select students based on merit. Lowell High School will get students in a lottery

3.       San Francisco schools have been closed longer than just about any other city

4.       Rampant anti-Asian prejudice

Was it the white supremacists? They had probably left the city years ago, but what really happened was that the Chinese vote turned out in record numbers and the non-citizen voters (yeah, non-citizens have voted in San Francisco for many years…go figure) were not the dependable Democratic voters that they have been historically. This is too weird for even them!

The black female mayor supported ouster of those goof balls.

All I’m saying is that the people in this country need to wake up and vote. Otherwise, we will all be governed by inept, evil people like were taken down in San Francisco with this recall election.

SUPREME COURT

The next Supreme Court justice nominee will be selected on the basis of skin color and gender.

Others need not apply.

Years ago, that sort of advertisement would be considered racist. And illegal.

Merit is not a consideration.

UNEXPLAINED DEATHS OF YOUNG PEOPLE

Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 are dying at a rate 40% higher than pre-pandemic. An increase of 10% would qualify as a 1-in-200-year event.

Nobody seems to know why. More amazing, nobody seems to care! These are working-age people, not the old and frail. Why haven't we seen the NYT take up the story? The Guardian did, concluded that it was underreporting of COVID, but the actuaries who first alerted us say no. I worked with actuaries, they are really, REALLY smart folks and I would believe them.

Finding the reason is essential. Again, it doesn't seem to register with the folks in D.C. that more people died in San Francisco or fentanyl overdose than COVID. Murder rates are up across the country, as are suicide and traffic deaths. That last one is amazing as driving was curtailed in 2020.

Somebody smart needs to look into this, IMHO.

INFLATION II

Back in August, 2021, the first post about inflation showed up on this blog. Well, it is worse than expected and it will get even worse--refer to the blog post "Clueless" that describes how current leadership is the most incompetent since Carter so we can't expect any help from that quarter.

Three things surprised me today: a Director of the CDC stated that 75% of the deaths from COVID were people who had 4 or more comorbidities. That is not the Party line, folks, she could end up getting Clintonized for such heresy. COVID politics has frightened the public (children, too, which is just infuriating) to believe "if I get it, I am going to die!" To be clear, this refers to a study of 1.2 million vaccinated people where 36 died, 28 of whom had 4 or more comorbidities. The Left has gone nuts making sure we don't think that evidence applies widely. BUT IT DOES. Another controversial statement by another medical official says that the latest Omicron variant will dwindle because "everybody who can get it will have been infected by then."

Number two: the health of your gut is critical to prevention of Alzheimer's. Evidently, if you don't eat well, the gut sends bad stuff to your brain. Makes sense. Read the articles, but in the mean time, eat a diet that avoids polyunsaturated fatty acids (found in vegetable oils, edible oils, seed oils), trans fats and plant oils. Eat high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carb ketogenic diet. Don't eat highly-processed foods (sniff, goodbye hotdogs! sniff). Also, practice moderate fasting. Oh, and apparently gluten is on the hit list, too.

Number three: The big Wall Street firms are in a bit of a contest to see who can predict the largest number of Fed rate increases. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan bank, says eight quarter-point increases over the next two years. Goldman Sachs says ten. Meanwhile, the Fed has abandoned the use of the term "transitory" in connection with this spike in inflation. If you simply sit back and think a bit, apply some history, the period of 1% interest rates is OVER! Probably not to return in the lifetimes of your kids and grandkids. 

This extremely low interest period was an anomaly; get over it and adjust to high inflation and high interest rates until we can return some reasonable leadership to the issues. Have you noticed the backlash to the "Woke" phenomenon? We need to get back to something closer to traditional values, not nominating people for high-level jobs who are proponents of Communism or who accomplished the removal of the term "mother" in favor of "birthing people" in this Administration's US Federal Budget. Good grief.

Summarizing, there is some good and some bad, but in my opinion, the latest trends seem to be very positive. Higher interest rates mesh with historical periods of healthy economic growth. Maybe we can get back to immigration that helps the country rather than burdens it. The ability of the political system to frighten everybody into submission appears to be lessening. Medical research may be on to something about the connection between diet/gut health and dementia.  Let's hope these create a more positive future.