Archive for September, 2021

Musings about 7-0

Posted: September 28, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As I celebrate my 70th birthday this week, I was reminded of a social media question: What would I tell an 18-year-old me?

Here goes for that young version of myself and maybe others:

Listen. You might be the smartest person in the room, or at least think you are. But you already know what you know. If you listen rather than speak, you will learn.

Pride. Keep it in check! You can be proud of your accomplishments, but humility is usually better.

Jealousy. Keep it in check, too!

Be less judgmental. People who are old, overweight, slow, or plain have contributions to make.

Work and home. Maintain a balance between your work life and your home life. Unless you absolutely need a specific job for the money, make sure you enjoy what you are doing.

Drink less. You’ll act like a moron more times than you can remember. Moreover, you may hurt yourself and others.

Watch less sports. Participate more. Even if you just walk a lot, you’ll be better off for it.

Think about college. The cost of a college degree has become burdensome for many people. When I went to school, tuition was less than $1,000. Maybe take a year off and work to determine what you want to do. Think about the military. Think about whether you really want to go to college.

Learn about building, plumbing, and electricity. I wish I had.

Hobbies. I wish I had more of them.

Appreciate the goodness of the United States rather than its flaws.

Use computers and cellphones less.

Read more.

Complain less.

Save more money. Make a balance sheet of your income and your expenses. It’s likely that Social Security and Medicare will be bankrupt by the time you retire.

Learn grammar, punctuation, and style.

Find an ethical or spiritual guide. You need it BEFORE you face a crisis.

Keep mentally fit. Talk to specialists rather than friends about your problems.

Ignore celebrities and their political and social views.

Find a way to express yourself.

Try to fix today and tomorrow rather than yesterday.

That’s about all unless I forgot something. Yes, keep hold of your memories through a diary, photographs, and mental exercises.

Report from Louisiana: Bouncing Back after Ida

Posted: September 27, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – I want to share with you this latest article by Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review because it begins to touch the surface of why I love Louisiana and also about how we are recovering from Hurricane Ida.

The southern part of Louisiana, west to east, has dealt with devastating hurricane and storm damage over the past couple of years. It seems that Katrina is the one everyone talks about but that was in 2005. Meanwhile, Hurricane Laura (August 2020) and then Delta (October 2020) followed by historic flooding rains in May 2021, have left Lake Charles, Louisiana literally devastated. Hurricane Ida came along this year and hit the southeastern coast of Louisiana and there are still people without power in some of the more remote areas of SE Louisiana.

Why do we stay? Why don’t we leave and go where we don’t have to worry about such things?

Kathryn Lopez’s piece helps put that in perspective a bit:

In storm-damaged Louisiana, there is not victimhood, but resilience and gratitude. I asked an Uber driver — a single mom of two who had to quit her job as a schoolteacher during the height of COVID to help her children with their at-home school — whether it’s hard living in Louisiana. “Not at all,” she said. “Life always has its challenges, but God is good, and our lives are gifts, and we must live them in love of and trust in Him.” That witness of the people I meet in Louisiana [ … ] is a challenge to the rest of us, who can get caught up in so many things that we don’t have all that much control over.

So true.

Don’t get me wrong: people down there need help. They need those donations of tarps and water that are pouring in. Those huge pots of jambalaya and gumbo that are feeding families, linemen, clean-up volunteers, all of that is appreciated.

But the only thing to do is to clean up and rebuild. I had an aunt that lived in Lake Charles when I was a child; they rebuilt their home several times and never left.

 The Cajun people are some of the most resilient people I’ve ever met. Survival is in their DNA. So is joie de vivre, hospitality, and warmth.

I think about these values often when we travel to that part of the state; we stay five weeks of the year in south Louisiana and I am always impressed by the strong communities, the strong family unit, and the pure faith that these people have. Yes, there are problems, but as Lopez says, we learn to trust in God, to see what tomorrow brings.

Lopez is correct. I don’t think anybody down there feels like a victim. These storms may dampen spirits and slow us down for a minute but pack your suitcase and come on down: the hotels are open, the boudin is hot, and the music is floating up through the trees. You might see more blue tarps on roofs and hear more chainsaws and pounding hammers, but Louisiana is bouncing back better than ever.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Nerdrodic asks the right question of Davies: Who is the 1st Doctor?

Posted: September 27, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Russell T. Davies is returning to Doctor Who after 3 disasters years of Chris Chibnall  in charge. I can’t put it better than the folks at Nerdrodic put it

As he put it the first thing Davies has to do is to re-establish the series canon, if not I’m not going to bother with it and I suspect neither will a lot of other people who didn’t waste their time with the Whitaker era.

Don’t get me wrong, it will still be a woke show. Davies shows were VERY woke for their time but the priority was entertainment & stories. Let’s not forget that his final episode’s McGuffin was Obama about to save the world’s economy.

Further nobody should expect Davies to have any bad thing to say (particularly publicly) about the last three years. Even he hates it and thinks it’s a disaster he won’t have a thing on it.

I suspect that it’s going to be a tease for the 1st year. I’m not going to bother with it until I know where this is going one way or the other. I’m not 13 or even 42 anymore & I’m not going to waste my limited time left on earth on even Davies return until I know where it’s going.

As it was said in a Sci Fi Franchise almost as old as Doctor Who once said:

Biden will visit a troubled Chicago on Wednesday

Posted: September 26, 2021 by John Ruberry in business, crime, economy, News/opinion, politics
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Blogger in front of an abandoned Chicago building

By John Ruberry

On Wednesday Joe Biden is expected to visit Chicago, a city where he won over eighty-percent of the vote and he prevailed in all of the city’s 50 wards.

Which makes today a good time to ask, “How are things going in Chicago?”

Not well. 

Chicago is on pace to suffer from more murders than any year since 1996, when 796 people were slain. Last year 774 people were murdered–but just 509 in 2019.

Rioting (excuse me liberals, I meant to say “civil unrest”) and looting hit Chicago in two waves in 2020. North Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, a significant cash cow for the city, was hit especially hard. The new year got off to a bad start when the flagship store of the ritzy Water Tower mall on the Mag Mile, Macy’s, announced it was leaving. The Gap pulled out in late 2020. This summer Disney announced it was leaving North Michigan Avenue as well as shuttering its other Illinois stores. 

Last week in her budget address the city’s embattled mayor, Lori Lightfoot, proposed aggressive spending fueled by a one-time injection of federal COVID-19 funds. Gimmick spending is a recent and unfortunate Chicago tradition. In 2008 Mayor Richard M. Daley, who inherited none of the financial smarts of his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, sold the rights for all of the city parking meters for 75-years for $1.15 billion. Nearly all of the cash from that deal was spent in just two years. Thirteen years earlier the younger Daley sold the rights to the Chicago Skyway for $1.7 billion–that money was similarly squandered. Ten years later the Skyway rights were re-sold for $2.8 billion–and taxpayers collected none of that windfall.

Also part of the Lightfoot’s budget proposal is the monumentally stupid idea to send $500 to 5,000 random families, likely a starter plan for Chicago guaranteeing a universal income. Who would be paying for that? Since the cash comes from COVID-19 relief funds it will be American taxpayers. Don’t blame me because I voted for Donald Trump.

Meanwhile Chicago’s public worker pension plans remain the worst funded in America. Because of that alone Chicago is bankrupt-in-name-only. 

Redistricting of Chicago’s 50 wards is coming soon and that will ignite a firestorm. African-American leaders expect to keep their majority in 18 of those wards even though the black population decreased by nearly 10 percent between 2010 and 2020 according to the US Census. The white population increased slightly and the Hispanic and Asian populations went up by a bit more. Surprising everyone is that overall Chicago’s population increased by almost two percent between the most recent Census counts.

Meanwhile Chicago’s streets are in terrible shape and drivers have to struggle with seemingly omnipresent red-light cameras. Lightfoot has added a new twist to Chicago motorists’ misery. Drivers captured by cameras going just six miles over the speed limit are being fined. Of course that’s not as horrible as being carjacked. In 2019, according to Hey Jackass, there were 603 carjackings in the city, last year that number soared to 1,396. So far in 2021 there have been 1,070 carjackings in Chicago. As with shootings, the arrest rate for Chicago carjackings is abysmally low.

Don’t expect the largely compliant mainstream media, even if Biden takes questions during his Chicago visit, to query the president on Chicago’s myriad of problems. 

UPDATE September 28: Yesterday former alderman Ricardo Muñoz of the 22nd Ward pleaded guilty to corruption charges. According to the Chicago Sun-Times he admitted to “wire fraud and money laundering, admitting he took nearly $38,000 from the Chicago Progressive Reform Caucus to pay for personal expenses like skydiving and a relative’s college tuition.”

Since 1973 over thirty current or former Chicago aldermen have served time in federal prison. Don’t forget there are just 50 members of the Chicago City Council. Three current members, Ed Burke, Carrie Austin, and Patrick Daley Thompson are under indictment. That last one is a nephew of Richard M. Daley.

2nd UPDATE: He’s not coming to Chicago after all. Biden will stay in DC to peddle his infrastructure boondoggle.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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