Change

When I left Alabama in 1977....I had this mental image in my mind over how things 'existed'.  Occasionally, I go back, and I will stand there admiring the scenery and eventually come to the concept of 'change'. 

The regional airport in Huntsville?  At best in 1977, I doubt if there were more than a dozen flights a day that ventured into Huntsville. Today, there's 225,000 folks who leave Huntsville for Atlanta.  There's 74,000 folks who venture to Charlotte, NC. 

As a kid in my local town of Florence, you basically had around twelve establishments to eat at in 1977.  One of them was the pool-hall in town (they made great greasy burgers).  There was one single establishment making pizza.  There was one single McDonalds and Burger King.  Today, there are probably in the range of forty restaurants now.  You can actually eat Chinese if you desire. The local pizza guys?  They have over 1,200 combinations of pizza that you can order. 

The 'dry' factor?  There's actually a decent pub/bar existing within a 15-minute drive. 

K-Mart in the 1970s probably had a max of twelve types of soaps.  You walk into a Wal-Mart today, and there's probably sixty types of soaps laid out.

Locals used to hype up their summer trip in the mid-1970s....they were going off to Gulf Shores, the Smokies, Nashville, a Braves game in Atlanta, and some fishing trip to Lake Guntersville.  Today?  They talk about Aruba, Las Vegas, NY City, the Grand Canyon, some Alaskan fishing trip, or some Braves game in Atlanta. 

In the mid-70s....guys wore $9 work jeans and a $2 T-shirt that they got from K-Mart.  Today, the guy is wearing a $60 pair of fancy Docker pants, and a $30 cotton shirt made in Vietnam.  The gal has on a pair of $110 fancy shoes that has an Italian label that you can't pronounce, and a pair of unmentionables that runs around $40 from Vicky's 'secret-place'.

In the mid-70s....if you did drink beer....it was usually PBR, Michelob, or Bud.  Today, locals drink Samuel Adams (trucked down from New England), or sip on some kinda Germanized custom beer that makes your eyes moisten up because it's so good.

In the mid-1970s....if you were really lucky in a single year, you might have met one single 'foreigner', and it was typically some New York guy.  Today?  There's a thirty-percent chance on a daily basis in Huntsville that you will bump into a Mexican, and ten-percent chance it'll be a Chinese guy named Wang. 

In the mid-1970s....you had four basic channels to watch (CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS).  Today, with cable and satellite.....you have potentially four-hundred channels.

In the mid-1970s....if something broke on your farm equipment, it meant looking at some 1960 operators manual with no clear instructions.  Now?  You get on the tab....find some guy with the same item and problem and ask him how he fixed it.  The odd thing is that this guy might be living in Montana, and there's never going to be any face-to-face meeting.

In the 1970s.....you might have a total of seven banking options within driving distance of the farm.  Today?  With the ATM business, and internet options....you could have your bank in Iowa if you desired.

The thing is.....change has occurred, and most people don't even recognize it.

The 58-Story

Fifty-eight times....the Cruz kid out of Florida (the shooter in the school episode) was noted with school violations.  The result of the fifty-eight occasions?  Virtually the same treatment for each single one.....detention, an in-school suspension or out-of-school suspension for one to three days.

This came from an effort by the Orlando Sun Sentinel to dig into the school and school policy.

I sat there....pondering.  I grew up in a rural high school in the 1970s.  You could get into some fairly hefty trouble with one single event, and get a one to three day suspension easily.  If you'd come and repeated this twice in a month?  They would have terminated your stay with the school for the year.  In this case, they didn't care.  They were going to let this kid continue to play out some juvenile game, and let him repeat as often as desired.

Adult leadership?  It was never there.  This is a school run by 5th-grade mentality adults.

Somewhere along the third or fourth significant episode.....the cops should have been called and removed the kid from school.  He would have been a high-school drop-out....never going back to school.  But in their minds....this was the worst scenario.  They could have invented a disciplinary boot-camp program and forced the kid to go through six months of drill training to get him back to reality.  But that didn't occur.

My question?  How many other Cruz-kids exist like this?  Are there a dozen kids with fifty or more school violations on their record as well?

Trump's Nights

I sat and looked at Yahoo News this morning...it's become like the National Enquirer of news over the past eighteen months.  You can depend on them for good anti-Trump news.

The theme for today?  Trump's unhealthy and disturbing nights habits.  I didn't ever bother clicking, but I noticed one or two folks commenting that you had to click through ten different pages (click-bait) to get to the story itself.

True or fake news?  Hard to tell.

I've decided to contribute to the anti-Trump fake news by suggesting my own list of disturbing nightly habits for President Trump:

1.  He brought a 1964 Dodge Polara into the underground bunker under the White House and goes there to wax and buff it nightly.

2.  President Trump watches reruns of the 1966/1967/1968 seasons of Batman.....over and over.

3. He poses as a blogger from Iowa and writes passionate love blogs.

4.  He built a research lab in the basement and is working on a cure for cancer.

5.  He secretly leaves the White House and rides a Harley around Georgetown for an hour after midnight....accompanied by six Secret Service guys on Harleys as well.

6.  President Trump put in an entire wood shop, and does walnut desk units.

7.  He has a telescope on the White House roof and explores the galaxy with it.

8.  He has set up a military map display and is plotting for a major war against Germany.

9.  He plays poker against three Secret Service guys nightly, with a limit of $50.

10.  He has a ballroom dance teacher show up and he's practicing dance steps. 

McCain Never Was That Bright

After sitting and reading over the comment by Senator John McCain and his 2008 election decision to bring Sarah Palin in as his VP.....being the wrong decision, I paused over the comment and the explanation.

For two days, I've pondered over this commentary.  So I've come to this observation.

McCain was, and probably still is....an unwise and immature Republican political figure.

If he made the decision, then he was the one who made it....not the Republican Party.  If he wants to go out in a death spiral now and admit all this stupidity of his....fine, but all it does is leave a bad taste in the mouths of people who read this and think of McCain being an incredible stupid political figure.

I went back and looked up the Naval Academy period.  At the conclusion of four years.....he was number 894 out of 899 students.  Yeah, there were only five guys behind him, and 893 people in front of him.

How do you accomplish that?  Lack of study, lazy behavior, no emphasis on class projects, test failures, and just plain carelessness.  Fifty years later, he has progressed to the same exact level.  You could probably go and review the 894 folks who were ahead of him, and find they all did better in life than McCain. 

So you look at the VP chatter and his admitting picking Palin was stupid....then you just start shaking your head.  He's admitting here in the end, that he just couldn't make wise decisions.  With most folks on making decisions....it's generally a 50-50 shot on decision-making, and it ending up being a good decision.  With McCain, it was never 50-50.....you tended to get a 90-10 factor of making bad decisions.   In fact, you could always listen to McCain speak, and easily reach the conclusion that whatever he was advocating....you were better off to go the opposite direction entirely.

Trump and Seinfeld Episode 86

Episode 86 of the Seinfeld show was very unique.  At some point in the middle....George Costanza says that everything he does....is a total failure, so Jerry says....then do the opposite of what you'd typically do.  Then George discovers that the opposite method works...in virtually every single situation.

This got brought up to a minor degree by Jessie Watters (Fox News) in the last day or two, in describing Trump's success.

I've sat for a long while thinking over episode 86, and Trump.

When you go back to the end of 2015, with the primary heating up....there was Trump with commentary and words that would never come out of a typical GOP Presidential contenders mouth.

When you look at the last couple weeks of the primary period, there was Trump with commentary that would typically get five-star negativity via the news media, and it didn't matter.

When you look at the two months prior to the election.....constant and massive news media focus on Trump in a negative fashion, and it didn't matter.

When you look at the first year of the Trump Presidency....day in and day out activity by the Democrats and the news media.....all negative and bitter, and it didn't matter.

Yeah, the Constanza method is working.  Why?  There is no logic.  It shouldn't work.

So I look back at George Constanza and it occurs to me.....we all wanted George to succeed in life.  The little guy....always screwed-over.....never getting some big break, and we (deep in our hearts) wanted George to to aspire and get ahead.  I think it's the same logic with Trump.

Grasping the ID Discussion

Last week, I watched a video piece on YouTube which went back to the summer of 2017, and the moderator had gone to some university setting with a bunch of white students.  The question thrown at the students (all between 18 and 22)....why is voter ID such a bad idea for blacks?

The chief comeback was that blacks just don't have IDs, and even if they had potential for an ID....they don't know where to get it (yeah, there were actually two students who suggested this lack of address problem).  Then you had a student or two who suggested that blacks didn't have access to the internet. 

So the moderator left the university setting and went to downtown NY City.  The conversations then revolved around only blacks.

Of the dozen blacks interviewed on the street....from age eighteen to sixty....every single one of them grinned when asked if they had an ID, and then produced it.  Then the moderator asked if they knew where the license office was in NY City.....well, absolutely was the response.....some even giving you street number.  Access to the internet?  One lady pulled out her smart-phone and said she was 'hooked-up' twenty-four hours a day. 

So then the moderator told the blacks what the white college students had said, and the blacks just started laughing.  So the moderator asked them.....do you know of any black person....who does NOT have an ID?  No.....was the response of every single person.

Speaking over the state of Alabama....my home-state....with a population of 4.875-million (2017 numbers), and subtracting roughly 300,000 who are under the sixteen, you come to a general population of 4.500.000 million.  How many have a valid license or ID?  I would take a guess that it's fairly near 99-percent.  In fact, I would take a fairly decent guess that it's probably fewer than 10,000 US citizens in the entire state who might not have a license.

Most of those?  Mostly women who never learned how to drive, folks in mental institutions, and guys sitting in jail.  Toss in another 3,000 homeless guys who live under bridges throughout the state.

The problem here in explaining this to some intellectual folks is that you can't put tags on a new car without going to the county office and presenting your license.  You can't open a bank account, with an ID.  You can't buy booze without a valid ID. 

I've come to this conclusion.....what we need to do with all these college students and intellectuals....is give them a simple 90-day test.  Convince the group to hand over all their ID's and then see how well they can function in a non-ID world.  My guess is that by the 10th day....most will admit that you can't function in 2018, without an ID.  Then they will admit their perception of blacks lacking IDs is mostly all fake or bogus. 

Persia

After viewing President Trump's piece on the Iran Treaty and his kind words over the old history.....I went back to the general history....when they were Persia.

For roughly 1,100 years....from 550 BC to 651 AD....they were among the three most dominant and advanced civilizations on Earth (the Romans and the Chinese were their only equals).  The dynasty groups responsible?  The Sasanian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire.

In fact, you can go back and look over the efforts of the Achaemenid Empire (550 BC to 330 BC) and marvel at what they did (long before the Romans).  They were guys who built a professional standing army.  They were also the ones who developed the postal system.  They were the folks who staked out roads and trails, and giving way to commerce (traders) to use them.  A governmental process of rules and expectations?  That goes back to the Achaemenid Empire.  They were the ones that the Greeks and Romans copied.

At some point, there's a Greek historian/traveler by the name of Herodotus who comes up to write a short piece on observations of the Achaemenid Empire.  In his mind (remember, he was a Greek), they had this odd standard of leadership.   He noted that Persians were the type of folks who tended to drink a fair bit of wine.....in significant amounts.  So when moments of discussion came with the King and the various counselors.....they'd go and sip wine to a great extent....reaching a level of.....well....being drunk, and then they'd talk about some crazy idea or some vision they had.  Then they'd lay down and sleep this off.  The next day....kinda like Otis from the Andy Griffith Show....they'd awaken and realize (A) man, that was a stupid idea, or (B) man, that was a brilliant idea.  And then they'd toss or accept the idea. 

Trying to suggest stiff drinks to most folks today....won't sell.  But you an admire these Achaemenid folks.

Things that the Persians gave us?  Algebra.  The guitar.  Chess.  You can go down a list of more than 500 items that came out of Persia originally. 

Just about every advancement in medicine in this 1,100 year period seen across the globe?  Well...most of them start off with an idea seen in Persia. 

Now, you note that I kinda limited this 1,100 year period, and that it ends around 651 AD.  What happens in the next hundred years after that?  The arrival of Islam.   It's a funny thing....up until 651 AD....Persia is mostly an open religious state (like Rome was prior to Christianity arriving and dominating the Rome Empire).

Had Islam never come to Persia?  They would likely be one of the three major countries existing in the world today.  They would have stretched from Iran, through Turkey, and on down to most of Egypt,....then encompassing all of Syria, Iraq, and Israel.