DIVERSITY

Next time someone at a college or university insists that there needs to be more diversity (wherever), ask how many Republicans are in their sociology department.

A New England administrator explains it this way: “Typically, we hire people because we’re planning on working with them and it’s a lot more attractive to have people you agree with.”

In 1989, liberal academics outnumbered conservatives 2:1, nationally. That number is now 6:1 and in New England the ratio is a startling 28:1.

No wonder you can't get a good discussion going. When you disagree with these people, they riot, burn things and hurt you.   

BLACK SWANS

BLACK SWANS

The term Black Swans was introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb whose credentials as a market trader and writer are impressive. A Black Swan event is "an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict" and that has an outlier effect on the financial markets. 

The author is a contributor to Seeking Alpha and this was published June 21, before the Brexit vote. He presents these three Black Swans:

Black Swan One:

Approval by UK voters to Brexit. This was unexpected and already came to pass this morning although the article was written and published June 21, three days ago. Results are grand-scale declines in markets and the loss in value measuring billions of dollars.

Black Swan Two:

Evidence of mosquito-transmitted Zika virus in the US. This is almost a certainty, but largely ignored by most of us because, unless we are pregnant or expecting to become so, the virus has no impact on us. The human, economic and public health impact of this event will be much larger than anyone thinks today.

Black Swan Three:

No candidate will win the necessary Electoral College majority to become President. All Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate needs to do is win one state, New Mexico, that has elected him governor twice. That might put the majority out of reach for Clinton and Trump.

Then things get muddy. What if...the rules are in place for this to happen:

Should nobody win the Electoral College, the Senate will choose the Vice-President; a Vice-President who will become President until the House chooses a President by a majority vote (with each state casting a single vote). Imagine if Trump's or Clinton's Vice-Presidential candidate ended up President of the United States (depends on how the Senate swings this fall) because a faction in the House decides to vote for Gary Johnson (and continues to do so in subsequent votes), ensuring that neither Clinton nor Trump becomes President.

Keep worrying!

THE WATER TRICK

THE WATER TRICK

A man goes to the doctor, worried about his wife’s temper.

The doctor asks, “What’s the problem?”

The man says, “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. Every day my wife seems to lose her temper for no reason. It scares me.”

The doctor says, “I have a cure for that. When it seems that your wife is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish but don’t swallow it until she either leaves the room or calms down.”

Two weeks later, the man comes back to the doctor looking fresh and reborn.

The man says, “Doctor, that was a brilliant idea! Every time my wife started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and she calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?”

The doctor says, “The water itself does nothing. It’s keeping your mouth shut that does the trick.”

Father's Day

Hope all had a great day. Mine was perfect.

Why Trump?

Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson (who is a Pulitzer Prize winner) is so aghast that some lawmakers would vote to give parents more choices in their kids’ education – and avoid sending to them to Detroit’s failing public schools – that he apparently wants them murdered.

"We really ought to round up the lawmakers who took money to protect and perpetuate the failing charter-school experiment in Detroit, sew them into burlap sacks with rabid animals, and toss them into the Straits of Mackinac."

~Stephen Henderson

You wonder why Trump has hit a nerve in America where this behavior is condoned because he is black and liberal.

HEROES

My friend Lee sent an article by Chuck Yeager in which he talked about meeting a true hero, a WWII vet who jumped into Normandy.

One line struck me--"...the media chooses our heroes."

Daily we are bombarded with words about "heroes," the ones selected by the media. They  are not actually heroes, they are mostly in the entertainment business and if they are black, so much the better. Political correctness, ya know. Michael Jackson, Prince, Muhammad Ali...I really don't pay much attention.

Nothing about the Navajo Code Talkers, nothing about the WWII vets. Complete silence when it comes to the Viet Nam generation, unless you were a draft dodger.

Where are the editors, the experienced ones with a sense of propriety and perspective? Gone with the Yahoo/Google control of what we see.

I don't want my heroes selected by some twenty-something who only went to a liberal arts college in the northeast. Thanks. I'll choose my own.

NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON

We watched a 2013 movie starring Jeremy Irons, Night Train to Lisbon, and recommend it to anyone. Made me feel old since I was an adult in the times that it sort of referred to as "the past," the time in Portugal that was under a brutal dictatorship. The years 1971-1974.

All the characters that were involved in that time were old, which of course does not apply to me. Te setting was "current day."

Made me think of my parents. The 1930's. I thought of their time as ancient history. May 1934 was HOT! The corn did not reach "knee high" because it dried up way before that. Their marriage was in Yankton, South Dakota and the heat was way above 100.

It was hard to make a living back then. My dad somehow scraped enough money together to buy a truck and he would haul livestock, cattle, hogs, whatever, to Omaha. It was the days of the Missouri River packing plants, and the lines were long such that he would load in the late afternoon, drive to Omaha, inch along the lines and arrive back home in the early morning in time to go to the field. "If he was lucky," he would work all day, drive all night for three days in a row. Equals NO SLEEP!

Sounds like Bernie supporters, right?

And then the 1950's and 1960's. My country, one-room school was decimated as people dried out, went broke and moved to California. Think of their progeny and you wonder why California is home to the greatest breakthroughs but huge dependency. We would not have made it without the dairy operation. And it is no secret that when I went to college and my brother went to the Army, the cows went to market. Incidentally, my graduating class had 17. Of them, one National Merit Scholar and two Alternates. Twenty-percent. Sort of like the consolidated schools with all the good equipment?

Regarding the dairy operation, upside, I was a fashion statement well ahead of my time--I never had a pair of jeans that didn't have chlorine bleach stains. Distressed jeans long before my time.

I never knew about American Bandstand and Dick Clark because it came on at 5:00 Central Time and we were milking then.

My kids often tease me about the number of jobs that I held, but we took everything we could get. The fertilizer company was a good gig--my only "documented" 100-hour + week--I worked 104 hours the week of the 4th of July in 1965. Sleeping in a pickup, moving like a zombie.

Just to show how things have changed, after the fertilizer season was over, the week after the 4th, typically, my future brother-in-law, Rich, and I worked for a company that built bridges replacing the ones washed out by floods. Rich was aristocracy because he took a welding class in high school and got a few more cents per hour, but we worked 11 hours per day (6 am to 5:30 pm, half hour for lunch), six days per week. Sixty-six hours per week, $1.35 per hour, no overtime (we could file a claim, I suppose). It was miserable work, the constant and intense burning of the creosote on our skin, but we were glad to get our gross pay of just under $100 per week.

It was hot. And we were always in a hole because the bridges were in low spots (duh!) and the back walls were dug out. Limited the breeze. I can't imagine the money we made for the contractor who expected less and got a couple of farm boys who showed up and worked diligently for every day.

That's not the only crappy jobs I had--I remember roofing on a cool November day when I had the flu, coughing, and was extremely high on codeine cough medicine. Wonder I didn't fall off the roof. Or the weinie line. It was 1968, we graduated from college, I worked second shift from 4:00 PM to whenever. I would come home to my new bride, park in the car port, strip naked and take a 30-minute shower...and still smell like a weinie.

Or a bell-hop at the Cornhusker hotel. Lots of other nasty jobs. But a good job! Manager of a beer store. Lincoln had a number of archaic and interesting liquor laws, and one of them was that beer could only be sold at designated stores. I managed one of them. I went to college in the day, managed the store from 2-10 PM six days per week. I thought it was pretty good, as I got $1.50 per hour and stole quite a bit of beer (we called it "breakage" but we didn't abuse it like the politicians abuse their ability to claim stupidity). I would come home to the Capehart housing and watch the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson while I ate a bit. Interestingly, my grades improved as I had NO TIME other than the scheduled work, class and study.

While I remember some of the atrocities that were happening in the world back then, including the assassinations in our country of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, I really can't identify my recognition of the Portugal situation. Therefore, I suggest you watch the movie.

Cheers.