The Blaisdell Blog

Memorial Day is the day we honor those who died while serving in our nation’s armed forces.   The numbers of those honorees are staggering.      Civil War:                   750,000                        WWI:                           117,000 WWII:                        405,000 Korean War:               37,000 Vietnam:                      58,000 Iraq/Afghanistan:         7,000 If there is anything mildly positive about these numbers it is that they show a general downward trend.   Grim as it sounds, the more deadly and specific weapons become, the easier it is to target the enemy while maintaining a safe position. We can now eliminate a deadly threat by pinpointing the cause of that threat and removing it in a surgical manner.   Consider North Korea which is currently the greatest threat to world peace.   If the 509 Bomb Wing at Whiteman Airforce Base suddenly lost track of its B-2 Stealth Bombers and, concurrently, every nuclear facility, missile launch pad a

If you think that racism and sexism played a part in the last election you are right.   But it may not be in the way you thought.   The Brookings Institute has now joined the Pew Research Center, the Washington Post and even a Democratic post mortem to present data on what happened to the minority vote during the 2016 election.   They all read like a missing person’s report.             There are six states, in particular, that sent their electoral votes to Barack Obama in 2016 but did not return the favor for Hillary Clinton.   Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida all went blue in 2016.   If any three (!!!) of those states would have stayed in the Democratic column, Hillary Clinton would be President today. Of these, Wisconsin is probably the most illustrative.   The number of popular votes that Wisconsin gave Trump is almost to the penny the same number it gave Romney in 2016.   Romney lost and Trump won.   So what was the difference?   Whether

If you are thinking about moving to Arizona to either start a family or continue the education of your little ones, here is a useful piece of information: the Grand Canyon State no longer requires teachers to have a degree in teaching, nor any education classes at all nor even a college education.   If you have five years of experience in a “relevant” field you can teach those kiddos anything from how to read to advanced algebra.             If you stretch this out you can now have a dentist, an airplane pilot, a lawyer or a tax accountant that does not have a degree or formal training in any of those fields but says he/she has five years of “relevant” experience.   By the way, the word “relevant” is not, at any time or in any way, defined.                 The move was designed to help solve the chronic, serious shortage of teachers in Arizona.   Here are a few facts that might explain part of Arizona’s problem, though it does not come close to explaining their current solutio