"In Washington DC, Ernesto passed a variety of women and men wearing plastic inverted cones on their heads.  Curious, he asked a bartender at the Dubliner why these folks were wearing inverted cones on their heads.  The Ethiopian-American lady replied: “To keep Congress from scratching their ears.” (edited 10/7)
 

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A conversation about the Guvmint and coyotes on a rural back road that took place between my daughter, Cait, and myself resulted in the following:

The white lines, bordering the shoulder, painted on the outside of American highways are to keep coyotes from entering into the roadway.  The Guvmint forbids coyotes to cross the white line.  So, some of us believe coyotes stay off remote highways impressed by the Guvmint’s pragmatic sense of policy.   (edited 10/7)

         Ruth Bader Ginsburg    Born: 3/15/33  Died: 9/18/20    Made in the image of God.
                                                  (Had some help with this one)

“Socio-political international advertising slogans, ah, can be effective too.  A couple of our best slogans durin the Cold War at the Washington Post aimed at the Soviets were acts of genius: ‘Better dead than red’ and the ‘Soviets are peckerheads.’  However, as our world has become smaller and more, uh, civilized and advertising more advanced one of the few anomalies left within the formula of selling a regular consumer the lesser of two evils is in politics.  For instance: you might vote for someone because she or he is not as bad as the next guy but you won’t drink a soda pop for the same reason -- not unless you’re a dumb shit.” ​

"When freedom is intellectualized it can be mitigated by intellectual method; made less, and less, and less, and less... when understood by the heart, freedom is inviolable."  ​


Happy Fourth.

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The Northern Ireland Effect:
                                                      
The Harland and Wolf Shipyards built the Titanic and the RMS Britannic and was one of the most successful yards in the world.  Catholics made up three percent or less of the workforce in the late 60s, though they represented more than a third of the population of Belfast.  This socio-economic effect was representative of employment in the private sector in Belfast, a free enterprise system run primarily by the British, by Northern Ireland Protestants, an infrastructure of opportunity and oppression that evolved over hundreds of years.
The Catholics were primarily the descendants of the indigenous Irish population, the Protestants mostly from lowland Scot and English colonists.  As each people evolved separately but together in Ireland -- and eventually what became Northern Ireland -- Catholic neighborhoods suffered greater unemployment, less opportunity, and so the dole: then greater poverty, a lesser education; poverty-driven alcohol abuse, violence, crime, rebellion, etc., generation after generation.
Though both people are white, the difference in evolution of the Catholics and Protestants was dramatic.
In America, the evolution of poverty, violence, in black neighborhoods (the descendants of slavery and Jim Crow laws); Hispanic barrios identified by language, color; Native American reservations, where many of the indigenous people of the United States live, contained (after hundreds of years of rebellion and war) in often-isolated poverty-stricken communities, and (by variation) rural whites in formerly coal-driven economies, in often-isolated areas of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, suffer from the Northern Ireland effect. 
The Northern Ireland Effect wasn’t, isn’t ethnic, racial, generated by a lack of ambition or weak work ethic…  
 
My mother’s paternal family were Protestants from Northern Ireland.



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“If success is the, uh, tenth rung on a ladder, ah, whatever it might be, money, social status, what have you, a lot of people start at the first, the lowest rung.  But, plenty start higher up, um, at seven, eight, or nine, and so their ascension isn’t really much to brag about.  As time goes by the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  The, ah, climb gets easier for the former and harder for the latter -- no pun intended.”  ​

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​Please give to The Paralyzed Veterans of America: VA Palo Alto Health Care System/
3801 Miranda Avenue/ Palo Alto, California  94304/ 650-858-3936/ And: 
The Wounded Warrior Project: National Processing Center/ P.O. Box 75840/ Topeka, Kansas  66675/ 877-832-6997

Happy birthday Conor:


Printed originally on 7/10/2013:


​   Taken from real events the following is dramatized:

   
   We climb in our new used truck.  We close the doors.  Sniff, sniff.  Wow.  There's a jagged cloying smell.  P.U. 
    My son groans, “I can’t breathe dada.*  I can’t breathe.”
   I grab the offending deodorizer, which is hiding in plain sight and hanging from the rearview mirror, and I rips it down.
   My son yells, “No dada it stinks in here!  We need that artichoke-looking deodorizer thing!”
    I calmly rebut, “No we don’t,” and instruct the lad in a wise and fatherly way: “Roll down the freakin window, son, we live in Maine.”

* The a in the first syllable of a central Maine word for father is pronounced like the a in dad.  The second syllable in pronounced duh.  Da-duh.

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added 8/18/20: My son, Conor Finn O'Kendley, is in the Navy.