I Told Them So…

I want to tell them that I told them so, but instead I’m going to say it here.

The two most incendiary issues of the last election were Trump’s handling of the Corona Crisis and the border wall. The Democrats accused the Trump administration of “ignoring the science” in favor of opening up the economy, and of inhumanely treating immigrants by having zero tolerance for illegal entry, including putting children in cages. He was also accused of conjuring up conspiracy theories by talking about hordes of Latin Americans marching towards our borders.

One of Biden’s campaign pledges was to reopen schools. In February, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said that schools could reopen without vaccinated teachers. That was the science-based go-ahead Biden needed. But when the teachers’ unions opposed it, the administration backed down, asserting that Walensky was speaking in her “personal capacity,” and spent the next two weeks equivocating on the issue. Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that while teacher vaccinations should be prioritized, “neither the president nor the vice president believe it is a requirement.”

Of course, nothing has changed in terms of the science. School children are still less likely to contract and pass on COVID than they are to catch and pass on the flu. And the closing of the schools was always a stupid and unscientific response to the pandemic. So what do we have now? The very same approach that Trump was taking back then.

The same is true of the issue of immigration. After Biden was elected, the number of people trying to cross the border illegally surged and has continued to surge, with some experts predicting that illegal crossings this year may be the highest in two decades.

In response to this surge, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeatedly said, “Don’t come now.” The “now” part of that, as Natalie Jennings pointed out in The Washington Post, “was a shift from how even the last Democratic administration addressed a similar border surge.” [When unaccompanied minors were flooding to the border in 2014, President Obama told them not to come, period, and said that they would be sent back if they did.] Amid criticism that its rhetoric might be feeding the crisis by appearing too welcoming, though, the administration has now pulled a 180. “The message isn’t ‘Don’t come now’; it’s ‘Don’t come in this way, ever.’”

Roberta Jacobson, who oversees the White House’s southern border policy, told Reuters last Thursday, “The way to come to the United States is through legal pathways.”

Do I need to remind my friends that this was the exact same position that the Trump administration took?

And as for putting kids in cages, check out this…

“Own only what you can always carry with you: Know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How to Learn Multiple Languages in 15 Minutes a Day 

If you want to learn a new language or brush up on one you know, forget about the Berlitz or Rosetta Stone courses. Start reading Quora in the language(s) of your choice.

Quora publishes questions and answers (submitted by users) on its website daily. The most popular questions, which are usually the stupidest, rise to the top.

Because the questions are stupid, you won’t run into any answers that you can’t practically figure out yourself without looking. Plus, since they are universally dumb, you’ve may have heard them (or, Lord forbid) asked them before.

Check it out at Quora.com.

Gian-Carlo Rota was mathematician, teacher, and philosopher who spent most of his career at MIT, teaching functional analysis, probability theory, phenomenology, and combinatorics. He was the only person ever to be appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy.

He was respected by his peers and loved by his students. Late in his career, he wrote a series of lectures and essays about what he’d learned over the years, lessons that I found in reading them to apply not just to teaching but to business and almost every realm of endeavor.

Some examples:

Buster Keaton’s “Special Effects” 

A few weeks ago, I shared a video of Buster Keaton’s greatest stunts.

Readers wrote to ask: How much of that was real?

Turns out, there weren’t any “safety nets” in place. Stunts that looked dangerous really were dangerous. (Garry Moore once asked Keaton how he took all those falls, only for him to open his jacket to reveal a thoroughly bruised body.) And as for “special effects,” Keaton relied on camera angles, timing, and a technique called “undercranking” (which slowed the film speed and, for example, made a car appear to be moving faster than it actually was).

Keaton famously had one rule: Never fake a gag. Which isn’t to say that he never used a stunt double. He was forced to do it while he was signed with MGM (from 1928-1933) and towards the end of his career/life due to diminishing health. But everything I’ve read about the “The Great Stone Face” has only made me appreciate him more. He will forever be, as Orson Welles put it, “the greatest of all the clowns in the history of cinema.”

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* Prohibition helped make Walgreens the giant it is today. While prohibition made alcohol sales illegal from 1920 to 1933, “medicinal” alcohol was still perfectly legal. Anyone with a doctor willing to write them a prescription could score a pint of otherwise unobtainable whiskey. In 1919, Charles R. Walgreen had about 20 pharmacies in Chicago. In 1929, there were more than 500 in several states.

Question: Which businesses today will benefit most from legalization of the natural drug industry? (Not just pot. Psychedelics too!)

* No guns were recovered from those arrested during the January 6 breach of the Capitol Building, according to the FBI. Though many news sources reported “shots fired” during the riot and it was, thus, believed that there was an exchange of gunfire, it seems this may not have been the case. Asked at the March 3 Senate hearing if any firearms were recovered or if any of the  300+ people arrested faced firearms charges, FBI counterterrorism official Jill Sanborn said, “To my knowledge, none.”

* A Russian physicist was zapped in the head by a high-energy beam of radiation and lived. Back in 1978, while doing some troubleshooting, Anatoli Bugorski stuck his head inside a particle accelerator, not knowing it was on. A focused beam of protons entered the back of his skull and exited through his nose, burning a hole in his brain. He miraculously recovered with only paralysis on the left side of his face and loss of hearing in his left ear. Bugorski, who is still alive, couldn’t say anything about his ordeal for years because of the Soviet Union’s policy of secrecy on nuclear power-related issues.

THE NUMBERS

* $69.3 million – the sales price of “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” at a Christie’s auction, a new high for a piece of art that exists only digitally. The piece, a collaged JPG file, is composed of images that the artist known as Beeple has been posting online every day since 2007. It was not only the first purely digital NFT (nonfungible token) sold by Christie’s, it was the first time the 255-year-old auction house offered to accept digital currency as payment.

I’m finalizing a book I’ve been writing (for years) on how to invest in art. This is exactly the sort of insanely volatile market sector I tell everyone – other than hedge fund managers who would likely spend their gazillions on even stupider things – to avoid.

* $99 billion ‒ the amount of money spent by US pet owners last year on such things as pet food/treats, supplies/OTC medicine, veterinarians, and services (walking, grooming, etc.), according to a survey by the American Pet Products Association. This is up from $95.7 billion in 2019, an increase that coincides with the increase in pet ownership during the pandemic. An estimated 11 million households reported getting new pets.

About 10 years ago, I urged a relative – who loved pets – to get into this business. I gave her a plan for selling into this trend that would have resulted in a multimillion-dollar business now. She didn’t take me up on it. That’s fine. But I can’t help but wonder if she ever thinks about that when she sees reports like these.

* 700 ‒ the number of unaccompanied migrant children that were apprehended by border patrol on Wednesday alone. This week, border patrol has arrested an average of 450 children daily –  up from 340 last week. According to The New York Times, the number of detained unaccompanied migrant children has tripled in the last two weeks.

THE THOUGHTS 

* “Face the demands of life voluntarily. Respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe.” ‒ Jordan Peterson

* “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” ‒ W.H. Auden

* “The best way to save time is to spend it wisely.” ‒ Michael Masterson

The Car That Obakeng Built 

When I lived in Africa, I was always amazed at the toy cars that little kids built out of scraps of wire and metal – pull toys or push toys, like American kids had back then, but they were homemade.

Think about how much greater an experience that is for the child… compared to getting some toy advertised on TV in a gift box!

That’s why I was so moved when I read about 17-year-old Obakeng Thetele.

The South African teenager started collecting scrap metal in 2018 and has used it to build two functional vehicles. Powered by the engine from an old scooter, one of them even has a radio.

Obakeng challenged himself to build it just to see if he could… and the end result went viral on social media.

Conservative commentators had a field day with a program offered as part of Coca-Cola’s Better Together campaign, an employee training video that included, among other things, a lesson from Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility. (DiAngelo has become enormously popular in academia and corporate America as a white woman who understands how Black people feel and think.)

The “lesson” included the following guidelines on “How to Be Less White”:

* Be less oppressive

* Be less arrogant

* Be less certain

* Be less defensive

* Be less ignorant

* Be more humble

In response to the subsequent social media lampooning, a representative from Coca-Cola said, “The [DiAngelo] video in question was accessible on the LinkedIn Learning platform but was not part of the company’s curriculum. We will continue to listen to our employees and refine our learning programs as appropriate.”

2 examples of what Coke was up against…

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* Dr. Seuss books discontinued as racist. Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that they will cease publication of six books that had come under attack by the Sensitivity Police. Three of the stated violations: 1. 98% of the characters are white. (Archie and Veronica, they’re coming for you next.) 2. Some illustrations evince a “perceived resemblance” to “blackface performance imagery.” (No examples provided.) 3. images of Asians are “stereotypical and offensive.” (See above.)

* While America was locked down, alcohol dependency went up. A University of Arizona study of 6000 participants across the US found that alcohol dependency doubled in localities under strict lockdown orders, but stayed the same in areas where lockdowns were not enforced.

* $100 million worth of pandemic relief unemployment claims went to prison inmates from March to October last year, according to the US Department of Labor. Funny, right? This is funny too: During the same period, $58.7 million in benefits went to people using the Social Security numbers of dead people. And this is not funny: $3.5 billion (that’s a billion with a B) in benefits went to people that were fraudulently or otherwise “wrongfully” filing.

THE NUMBERS

* $1.5 billion ‒ the net worth of Whitney Wolfe Herd, the first self-made female billionaire ever, after taking Bumble, her dating app, public on February 10.

* 675,068 ‒ the number of deaths from heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US, during the pandemic’s surge in 2020. Cancer came in 2nd with 590,518 deaths, while COVID was a distant 3rd with 339,394.

* 22.1 million – the number of undocumented immigrants (referred to as “removable aliens” in the report) currently living in the US, according to the Department of Homeland Security. (This is a significantly higher number than the 11 million usually used by the media.)

THE THOUGHTS 

* “A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.” ‒ Thomas Hardy

* “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.” ‒ Robert A. Heinlein

* “Character is a delicate thing, a paper-thin skein to contain the ugly machinery of human frailty.” ‒ Michael Masterson

The Parable of the Two Monks 

Two Buddhist monks on a journey came upon a rushing stream. Standing next to the stream was a young, pregnant woman who was clearly in distress.

“Please help me,” she said to the monks. “I have to get to the other side to join my family. But the current is strong, and I’m afraid that I will drown and drown my unborn child with me.”

One of the monks – let’s call him Basho – scolded the woman. “Don’t you see that we are monks? Don’t you realize that we are not allowed to touch a woman?”

The woman admitted that she knew what she was asking was wrong. “And yet there is no one else I can ask,” she said.

Basho shook his head and crossed the stream alone. His companion, Ashwa, stood there for a few moments, thinking. Then he picked up the woman and carried her to the other side.

For the next three days, as the two monks continued on their journey, Basho chastised Ashwa for failing to live up to his moral obligation. “I can’t believe you did that,” he kept saying.

Ashwa nodded, but said nothing.

On the fourth day, Basho made the same charge. But this time, Ashwa spoke: “My brother,” he said, “I admit that my actions were irresponsible. But I put down my burden four days ago. Why are you still carrying yours?”

3 Facts, 3 Numbers, 3 Thoughts 

THE FACTS

* The NBA player with the second-highest net worth was not a well-known all-star. Everyone knows #1 on the list (Michael Jordan: net worth $2.2 billion), but few people outside of the business world know Junior Bridgeman and his $600 million net worth. Averaging just 13 points over a 12-year career, Bridgeman made his fortune after leaving the game. He bought stakes in his favorite restaurant, Wendy’s, and expanded his company, Bridgeman Foods, with other restaurants until selling his stakes to become a Coca-Cola bottler and, now, the president of Heartland Coca-Cola bottling company.

* China’s digital Yuan has now acquired private bank support. In its pursuit of achieving a central bank of digital currency, China has added private banks Tencent and Ant Financial to its current roster of 6 (previously only public, state-owned) banks. The new banks are expected to expand the digital currency’s influence significantly and provide further research. A People’s Bank of China (PboC) spokesperson told Bloomberg that the new acquisitions will “steadily advance the trial pursuant to the overall arrangement of the PBoC.” China has also completed development of a hardware wallet, which will further expand the applicability of its digital Yuan.

* US taxpayers are providing funding for the infamous lab in Wuhan, China suspected of causing the pandemic. The lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology), which has already received $600,000 from US taxpayers through the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, will receive additional funding through January 2024, according to the National Institutes of Health. The funds are being used to study… what else? Bat-based coronaviruses. The question is: Why is this money not being spent on US research?

THE NUMBERS 

* 39.7 million – the number of firearm background checks processed last year, according to the FBI. This is the most in a single year since the agency began recording the statistic in 1998. The 2020 total beat out the previous highs of 27 million and 28 million (in 2017 and 2019, respectively) by over 10 million. In 2020, by the way, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 8.5 million people purchased a firearm for the first time.

* 1.4 million – the number of jobs that will be lost by 2025 as a result of increasing the minimum wage to $15/hr, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. The reduction would come as employers cut jobs from payroll to mitigate losses from increasing costs.

* $950,000 – the prize money being offered by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for proof of the afterlife. The institute – founded by real estate/aerospace billionaire Robert T. Bigelow – is challenging scientists in the neurology and psychology fields to write a 25,000-word thesis providing “the best evidence available for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.” Three awards will be given: $500,000 for the #1 entry, $300,000 for #2, and $150,000 for #3.

THE THOUGHTS 

*  “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” – Frederick Douglas

* “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” – Benjamin Franklin

* “I’m very good at recognizing in others the bad behavior I cannot see in myself.” – Michael Masterson