Wednesday, May 30, 2018

miracle on ice





Way back in 1980, the United States hockey team, coached by Herb Brooks, defeated a vastly superior Russian hockey team to win the Olympic gold medal.

For those who don’t think that history repeats itself, consider this:

The Las Vegas Golden Knights started their INAUGURAL season about a year ago. As you are aware, finding a hockey team in the desert of Las Vegas is about as logical as winning the lottery – but it actually happened.





We are currently in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and there are just TWO teams remaining – the Washington Capitals, and the Nevada Golden Knights. So far, the Knights are leading the series, and the 2nd game is tonight.

Since the start of professional hockey, no team has won the Stanley Cup in its very first season, The MOST successful teams in the NHL are the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leaf, which have won 3374 and 2883 games, respectively . So far, the Canadiens have won 24 Stanley Cups, more than any other team. Its first championship was in 1915, 6 years after the team’s founding.

The Maple Leafs were founded in 1917, and have won 13 Stanley Cups. The first one was in 1932, 15 years after the club’s founding

  

Can the Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup in their first season? 

To paraphrase Peter Pam, if you believe in miracles, clap your hands.



Monday, May 21, 2018

A beautiful mind


Last Friday, I monitored an honors psych class at a local high school. The assignment for the day was to watch “A beautiful mind”, the award winning 2001 film. It’s a great film, which is why it earned 4 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress).

At the end of class, I did a little research on John Nash, and discovered that this week (on May 23) is the 3rd anniversary of his death in a car crash. Ironically, he and his wife were returning from Norway, where he had just been awarded the Abel Prize (which is modeled after the Nobel Prize) which is given to outstanding mathematicians. The taxi driver lost control of his vehicle on the New Jersey turnpike, and both he and his wife were thrown from the car and killed. He was 86 years old.

As his bio explains, he made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. The four theories that he is known for are listed below:





Researchers have discovered that people with high IQs have a lower risk of schizophrenia, but Nash (and his son) were exceptions to the rule, since both of them developed schizophrenia.

Unless you are a scientist, the terms shown above won’t make a lot of sense to you, but the link below does a better job of explain both game theory and the Nash equilibrium:

  
Because of John Nash, game theory now has wide-ranging applications to everything from business, law and finance to agriculture, war and, most important for Nash, economics.


John Nash isn’t the smartest person who ever lived, but if you scroll through the list below, you will discover that he is number 180 on the list, with an IQ (coincidentally) of 180. Albert Einstein is number 3 on the list with an IQ of 215.


I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time reading the entire list, since there are 633 people on it, but you may find the following people to be of interest (their place on the list is next to their name):

Leonardo DaVinci – 7
Galileo – 12
Shakespeare – 43
Thomas Edison – 54
Pavlov – 146





Mark Twain – 361
Steve Jobs – 437
FDT – 529
JFK – 532
Muhammad Ali (“I am the greatest”) – 541
Walt Disney – 618
Martin Luther King – 620

Being highly intelligent does not guarantee that you will be a success in life, nor does having a low IQ condemn you to a life of failure (Forrest Gump had an IQ of 75).

None of us is as smart as John Nash, or even most of the people on the list. However, if we simply try to do our best at whatever we do, we too will be a success in life.




Tuesday, May 15, 2018

I am the greatest




If you are one of those people who feel compelled to put your thoughts down on paper (like I do) there are no shortage of sources to draw ideas from.

Since I started publishing online about years ago, I have produced just under 400 separate articles, which cover 62 different topics. To date, I’ve had just under 250,000 “hits” on those articles at various places around the world, and I’ve been read in something like 100 countries, some of which I have never heard from. After the United States, the 2nd most common place my writings have been in is Russia. More than likely, some of my thoughts have been read by employees of the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm that placed fake Facebook ads during the 2016 election campaign.

Yesterday, I monitored an English class at a local high school, and wound up playing the YouTube video of Oprah Winfrey’s visit to Auschwitz with Elie Weisel in 2006. It’s a very powerful film, and it almost inspired me to write about it. However, since I viewed it on the same day as the United States dedicated its new (and ill-advised) new embassy in Jerusalem, I decided that I had had enough bad news for the day.

The idea from the title shown above came to me in a dream, and it wasn’t the first time that I have gotten ideas that way.

When I was still in high school, a brash young man names Cassius Clay became the WBA, WBC, and lineal heavyweight championships at the tender age of 22. He loudly proclaimed “I am the greatest”, and he BRIEFLY had the admiration of a large number of people.



Not long after winning his championship, he converted to Islam, and changed his named to Muhammad Ali, which infuriated a bunch of his fans. Two years later, he refused induction into the U.S. military, which caused him to be stripped of his titles for 5 years, at which time his titles were reinstated by the Supreme Court.

Ali was one of the leading 20th century boxers, and remains the ONLY three time lineal heavyweight champion. After his retirement at the age of 39, Ali focused on religion and charity, and eventually helped feed more than 22,000,000 people affected by hunger.

If we expand beyond Muhammad Ali, what exactly DOES make a person the greatest?
Scholars still debate whether Michael Jordan or Lebron James is the greatest basketball player, or whether Tiger Woods is still the greatest golfer, or Abe Lincoln is still the best president.
Not all “the great ones” are as bodacious as Ali was, but people that are “the greatest” share two qualities.

(1)          They are confident
(2)         They are persistent

Cassius Clay started boxing at the age of 12, and won an Olympic gold medal when he was only 18 years old. During his boxing career, he beat 21 boxers for the world heavyweight title, and is the only boxer to be named fighter of the year six times by Ring magazine.

Michael Jordan tried out for the varsity team when he was a sophomore in high school, but was cut from the team. Determined to prove his worth, Jordan trained vigorously, and became the star of the junior varsity tram.  The following hear, he made the varsity team. When he was a senior, he was selected to the McDonald’s All-American Team. In college, he selected to the NCAA All-American First team, and was drafter by the NBA before he graduated. Eventually, he led the Chicago Bulls to six national championships. In his retirement years, he became the first former player to become the majority owner of an NBA team, the Charlotte Bobcats. Despite the team’s dismal record, its ownership (along with his lucrative sponsorships) allowed Jordan to become the first former athlete to become a billionaire. As of March, 2018, his net wroth is $1.65 billion.

Tiger Woods started playing golf before he was 2 years old, and played against Bob Hope in a television show when he was 3. Starting in 1988, when he was 13, he won the Junior World Golf Championships, which he went on to win 5 more times. At the age of 15, he became the youngest winner ever of the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship. At the age of 19, he became the youngest ever U.S. Amateur, and a year later, he turned pro. At the age of 21, he became the youngest ever winner of the Masters at Augusta, Georgia.

His awards and records are almost too numerous to mention, but they are all listed in the link shown below. He is also the 2nd person known to walk on water.



Despite personal and physical setbacks, Tiger Woods is still competing today, and he has an accumulated net worth of $740 million.

Abe Lincoln is consistently ranked the best president America has ever had, but he had NUMEROUS setbacks before he was elected president in 1860, including being defeated for public office on six different occasions.


We’re all good at some things, and terrible at other things, but all of us are capable of greatness if we set our minds to it. If you have any doubts at all about that, consider the story of J.K. Rowling, whose story is listed below.


Before her first Harry Potter book was published, she was a single mom living on state benefits. With the success of the Harry Potter series, she became the first writer in history to become a billionaire. Even though she has given enough of her fortune away to charity to lose her billionaire status, she is STILL worth 600 million British Pounds, (about $800 million U.S.)


Remember- YOU are the greatest, which is why YOU were Time magazines person of the year in 2006.





Thursday, May 10, 2018

I’ve been working on the railroad



Long before the Sandhills Sixteen released the first version of the song shown about in 1927, a railroad-connected event occurred on this day in 1869.


Since at least 1832, statesmen on both the East coast and the West coast had realized a need to connect both coasts. The California gold rush of 1849 further emphasized the need, and Congress finally authorized funds 4 ears later to survey several routes for a transcontinental railroad. Increasing tensions between the North and South delayed the start of the railroad for a few more years, but Congress still managed to pass the Pacific Railroad Act only a year into the Civil War.

Congress chose two railroads, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to build the railroad, and construction was finally started a year after the Civil War ended. The Union Pacific line started building west from Omaha, and the Central Pacific  line started building east from Sacramento. Despite extremely difficult working condition, the project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. The two lines finally met in Promontory, Utah, and a gold spike was pounded into the ground to connect the two ends.

Despite the technical success of the railroad, it started to make apparent our country’s tortured relationship with immigrants. The workforce of the Central Pacific line consisted almost entirely of Chinese immigrant, and the Union Pacific line was largely Civil War veterans of Irish descent.

One of the reasons that Chinese laborers were used on the railroad is that the United States and China signed the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, which established formal friendly relations between the two countries. Not long after the treaty was signed, resentment of Chinese immigrants started to build. The Page Act was passed in 1875, and was followed by the Fifteen Passenger Bill in 1879. The Angell Treaty of 1880 temporarily suspended immigration of skilled and unskilled laborers, but still allowed white collar professionals.

And then it got worse.

On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited ALL immigration of Chinese laborers. Although it was only supposed to be effective for 10 years, it was not repealed until December 17, 1943, when the Magnuson Act was passed. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first (but not the last) law implemented to prohibit a specific ethnic group from immigrating into the Untied States. One of the most infamous laws was Operation Wetback (signed in 1954), which targeted Mexicans, but the current administration has tried to slam the door on a group that Trump calls “mooselums”.


Although the Irish potato famine vastly increased the number of Irish people immigrating to America between 1845 and 1849, Irish immigrants before that time period also experienced discrimination.


Starting in the 1840’s, it became more difficult for Irish people to find jobs in America, and “no Irish need apply” signs started to appear not long after. The last such sign did not disappear until 1909. As a result, many Irish found the prospect of military service during the Civil War more attractive than not working at all.


On June 17, 1885, the French steamer Isere arrived in New York harbor. In its hold were crates holding the disassembled Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States. Although the arrival of the statue was greeted with enthusiasm by the American people, it took until April of 1886 to raise enough money for the pedestal, and the completed statue was dedicated six months later, on October 28, 1886. In 1903, a bronze tablet containing the words to Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Collosus” (which was used to raise money for the pedestal) was mounted inside the pedestal. During the 1986 renovation, it was moved to the Statue of Liberty museum in the base of the statute.

The complete poem is listed below, but most of us are only familiar with the closing lines, which have been highlighted for emphasis.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
M
OTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Despite those encouraging words, immigrants have come under attack at various times in our country’s issue.
Ellis Island was opened to receive immigrants on January 1, 1892 (the first person to arrive was a 15 year old Irish girl named Annie Moore), but it didn’t take long before restrictions started to be put in place. Concern over security during WWI prompted Congress to pass literacy test requirements in 1917, but Congress felt a need to further restrict immigrating by the imposition of quotas, which were codified in the Johnson-Reed Act, which is better known as the Immigration Act of 1924.


Restrictions loosened after WWII, when the United States admitted displaced persons from Europe in 1948 and 1950, but we’ve become a lot less friendly since the election of November 2016.




We are a land of immigrants, and our strength comes from our diversity. To the chagrin of old white Americans, though, it won’t be long before Caucasians are a minority. It may not happened in my lifetime, but it already HAS happened in our schools. As of 2016, babies of color outnumber white babies, and minority children will be the majority by 2020.



The long standing prejudice again those early Irish and Chinese workers has long since faded away. Irish politicians have done well over the years, and the Chinese, especially in recent years, have become a financial powerhouse in our country.

On November 7, 2016, debt held by the public was $14.3 trillion or about 76% of the previous 12 months of GDP. Intragovernmental holdings stood at $5.4 trillion, giving a combined total gross national debt of $19.8 trillion or about 106% of the previous 12 months of GDP. As of December 2017, $6.3 trillion or approximately 45% of the debt held by the public was owned by foreign investors, the largest being China (about $1.18 trillion) then Japan (about $1.06 trillion).

Think about that for a minute.

Communist China how holds over $1 trillion dollars of our national debt. As of April of 2018, the United States is still the world’s largest economy, but the Chinese are gaining fast. According to Fortune magazine, China will be the THE world’s largest economy before 2030. Japan is still a distant third, as it was in 1990, but China was a lot smaller in the year that the Soviet Union was the 2nd largest economy.


In October of 2014, the iconic Waldorf Astoria was purchased by a Chinese holding company called Anbang Insurance (one of the world’s wealthiest companies) for $1.95 billion. At the time of its purchase, it was the most expensive hotel ever sold.  In February, Chinese authorities took control of the private held company due to the fact that its chairman had been accused of financial crime. A few days ago, chairman Wu Xiaohui, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted of fraud and embezzlement.

The Chinese STILL have a connection to our railroads, but it is a lot different than it used to be.

In the fall of 2015, a consortium of Chinese rail companies teamed up with Las Vega based XpressWest to build a 370 kilometer high speed rail line in California. When completed, the project will have consumed $5 billion of capital.


I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over China’s growing financial impact on our economy, since there really isn’t much we can do to stop it. For now,  just relax by listening to an old railroad song:





Monday, May 7, 2018

the value of being poor






This morning’s edition of the New York Times had an inspiring story about a woman named Sylvia Bloom, a Brooklyn native who died in 2016, not long after retiring from her job as a legal secretary at the age of 96. She had worked there for 67 years.


Born in 1903 to eastern European immigrants, she attended public schools in Brooklyn, and later completed a degree at Hunter College at night, while working full time during the day.

In 1947, she joined a newly formed law firm named Cleay, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton. At the time of her death, the firm had more than 1200 lawyers, and hundreds of staff members.

Although her salary as a legal secretary was “adequate” it was not sufficient to support a lavish life style. When she started with the firm, it was common for legal secretaries to get involved in the personal finances of her bosses. Whenever her bosses made investments, she often bought the same stocks, but in smaller amounts.

Although married, she and her husband never had children of their own, and they always lived a modest lifestyle, living in a rent controlled apartment. They almost always took public transportation.

Her soft spot was the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, a school for disadvantaged student, which recently became a HUGE beneficiary of her thrift and financial acumen.

Over the course of the career with the law firm, Ms. Bloom’s investments did well. She spread the investments to three brokerage firms and 11 banks. At the time of her death, she had accrued a fortune of more than $9 million.

Last week, the terms of her will were made public, and the Henry Street Settlement learned that she had endowed them with $6.2 million towards their scholarship fund.

If you have read “The Millionaire Next Door”, you know that there are a LOT of wealthy people living in our midst, but you would never known that by their lifestyles. The Times article also mentions Leonard Gigowski, Grace Groner (who I have written about before) and Donald and Mildred Othmer, all of whom lived modestly , but managed to amass large fortunes.ttp:


One thing that all of these people had in common is that they grew up during the Great Depression, and I have actually benefited personally from people that are similar to them.

My dad was born in 1909 (the golden age of farming) and my mother was born in 1913. Dad’s mother died when he was 11, leaving his dad alone to raise 7 children. In the summer of 1929, 56 year old Mark Brennan died of a heart attack, so my 20 year old dad and his 18 year old brother became heads of the household. Meanwhile, my mother’s parent’s saved up a modest down payment that allowed them to purchase a house in Hastings, Minnesota in the fall of 1929, roughly a month before the market crashed. Money was right, but they managed to hold on to the farm, which is still owned by the family today. One of mom’s siblings (one of the 2 who lived to be 95 years old) wound up living in the house for a total of roughly 80 years. Two of my dad’s sisters never married. One of them worked at a small bank (Midway National) in St. Paul, and retired to a comfortable, but modest, lifestyle.

His other unmarried sister, terrified of running out of money, worked at Smead Manufacturing in Hastings until she was in her 80’s. Having witnessed the failure of banks in the 1930’s, as well as the stock market crash, she developed a strong preference for GUARANTEES, and kept virtually all her money in passbook savings accounts, due to the fact that the FDIC guaranteed up to $100,000. When she passed,  she had over $500,000 in six local banks, and almost all of that money was distributed to her many nieces and nephews.

It’’s not uncommon to read stories about lottery winners who eventually wind up bankrupt, but THE most popular image of the value of poverty is a picture that was taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936. Her picture, titled “migrant mother” (see below) shocked the nation, and led to immediate government assistance to people much like her. Her identity was not revealed until nearly 40 years later, when the world learned that her name was Florence Owens Thompson, a Native American women who was born in Indian Territory the same year that Sylvia Bloom was born in Brooklyn. In the year that the picture was taken, she was on her second marriage, and had given birth to 7 children. By the time of her death, she had married once again, and had given birth to 3 more children. She was 32 years old when the picture was taken, but looked roughly 20 years older than that.





Later in life, her 10 children bought her a small home in Modesto, California, but she found that she preferred living in a mobile home, and moved back into one. In a 2008 interview, one of her daughters (Katherine McIntosh), described her mother as a “very strong lady” and “the backbone of of our family”. She said, “we never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn’t eat sometimes, but she always made sure we had something.” 

Like Sylvia Bloom’s story, Florence Thompson’s story also continues a very interesting twist.

In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp with the image of “the migrant mother” on its face, one of the few times that the Post Office had issued a stamp honoring someone who had been dead less than 10 years.  In the same year that the stamp was issued, Dorothea Lange’s handwritten notes and signature were sold by Sotheby’s of New York for $244,500. Four years later, Lange’s personal print of “the migrant mother” was sold by Christie’s New York for $141. 500. In October of 2005, an anonymous buyer paid $296,000 for 32 rediscovered Lange photos, which was far more that the pre-auction price estimate.


In 1998, the late Robert Schuller published a book titled “Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do”. That title describes not only Sylvia Bloom and Florence Thompson, but also millions of other people who struggle with adversity, but still manage to survive all the setbacks that the world can throw at them.
  
Keep that in mind the next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself.




Friday, May 4, 2018

Who killed Martin Luther King Jr. ?





There is no shortage of conspiracy theories in America, and the link below will provide a list of most of them. Some of them almost seem plausible (like the ones penned by former governor Jesse Ventura), and some are just plain ruts (like the ones created by Alex Jones).


The most prominent conspiracy theories are the ones connected to the assassination of JFK. To date, close to 1000 books have been written about the event, and most of them support the theory that there WAS a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The litany of guilty parties include the CIA, the Mafia, LBJ, Fidel Castro, the KGB, or some combination of some of them

Martin Luther King was assassinated almost exactly 50 years ago. His death also has triggered a number of conspiracy theories, which blame a random African-American man who happened to be outside the Lorraine Hotel the night of shooting, the mysterious Raoul, a white lieutenant with the Memphis police department, Loyd Jowers, the Federal government, the Army, the Mafia, and Henry Clay Wilson. The conspiracy theories have flourished due to the fact that the King family eventually came to doubt the guilt of James Earl Ray, and filed a suit in 1999 for a new trial for Ray. Ultimately, the jury found that Loyd Jowers, and other unnamed parties, were guilty of King’s assassination, and the jury assessed a penalty of $100 against him.


Here is an intriguing thought, though. What if King himself orchestrated his own assassination in order to preserve his legacy? Sounds a bit far fetched, doesn’t it? Believe it or not, though, it actually IS a possibility.

One of my favorite authors is a man named Steve Berry. Like John Grisham, he decided that writing novels was more profitable than being an attorney and legislator, and he released his first novel in 2003, 14 years after Grisham released his first novel. For those of you who think that making a living as a writer is easy, consider that fact that Berry first started writing in 1990, but it took him 12 years and 85 rejections before he was successful in getting his novel published.  Berry credits the nuns who taught him in Catholic schools with instilling the discipline needed to both craft a novel and to find a publisher.





To date, Berry has written 23 novels – and I have read most of them. In all,  he has more than 22 million books in print, which have been translated into 40 languages and sold in 51 countries.

Although John Grisham’s net worth has been estimated to be around $300 million, Steve Berry has kept his financial information a bit closer. However, it IS possible to tour his dream house in St. Augustine, which hosts a number of references to his novels, six of which have been on the New York Times best seller list


Berry’s latest book, which I finished reading this morning, is “The Bishop’s Pawn”, and it’s about the assassination of MLK. The rare coin pictured below  plays a prominent part in the novel








Like most people, I read both fiction and non-fiction. As is the case with a lot of people, the majority of the books I read tend to fall into the fiction category. My favorite fiction writers are the folks who blend historical facts with a tightly woven adventure story, and people like Steve Berry, Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, and John Grisham are masters at their craft. It’s best to keep your phone handy when reading one of their novels, since you will find yourself looking up things as you work your way through the book.

Although the possibility of orchestrating his own death may still seem far-fetched, if you read his “mountain top” speech, which was given without notes the night before he was killed, it’s clear that he knew that his days were numbered. Here are the closing comments:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
  
When you get a chance, get your hands on a copy of The Bishop’s Pawn”, and get “the rest of the story. You won't be disappointed.




Thursday, May 3, 2018

why I don't watch television, part 3




When I was a kid, life was pretty simple when it came to watching television. There were only 3 channels to choose from, our black and white television had to be turned on manually, and we had rabbit ears attached to the back of the set for better reception.

Naturally, life has gotten a lot more complicated than that, and I have published a couple of articles in the past that discuss that journey into a land that would absolutely befuddle our parents.




When we lived in Flagstaff, our television came courtesy of DIRECTTV, which came bundled with our CenturyLink internet service. When we moved to Tucson, the shows that Sharon liked to watch were not available in the Tucson area on DIRECTTV, so we switched to Comcast.

That changed last weekend.

When was on the phone with CenturyLink about a week ago with a question about our bill, the rep that I was talking to mentioned that specials that they were running on DIRECTTV. After consultation with the TV expert in our household, we made the switch, and the rep came to our house last Saturday to complete the installation.

If you went to the DIRECTTV website, you’ll note that there are 5 separate packages available, ranging from the Select package, which costs $35 a month and provides at least 155 channels, up to the Premier package, which costs $110 a month and provides a mind boggling 330 channels.

Now that I have lived for 70 years, I have learned that life is a lot simpler if you just learn how to adjust to changes, rather than trying to fight them.

After a lot of turmoil trying to get Windows 10 to work on my home computer, I gave up and ELIMINATED my home computer entirely, except for the old laptop Brian gave to us for my spreadsheet work. If I need to use a computer, the local library is only 3 miles away, and I also frequently have access to a computer at all of the local high schools where I work. My cell phone also satisfies most of my computer needs, but the size of the screen makes it difficult to type just about anything without producing a lot of typos.

The new car that I bought a year ago has the latest technology package, which gives me hands free dialing for my phone, as well as a USB port, which allows me to plug in my Galaxy S6 so that I can have navigation, YouTube and Pandora.
TSharon quickly figured out how to program all of her favorite channels on DIRECTTV, but her favorite feature is the one that allows her to record programs and watch them later WITHOUG HAVING TO WATCH ALL THE COMMERCiALS.



  

I’m still not going to watch a lot of television, but at least I’ve overcome my terror of trying to make it all work.