The Blaisdell Blog

I have three university degrees, one in education, one in administration and the third in economics.   When my oldest child started college, I was working full time as a teacher, but I badly needed a second job.   So one Saturday I pounded out my resume on a manual typewriter and sent it out to every Community College in the metropolitan area.    By Thursday I had a night job teaching Introduction to Macro-economics at the local college.   For the next ten years I taught one or two classes each semester, more during the summer. During that decade of work with Community College students I came to have tremendous respect for them.   These men and women were, in many ways, the embodiment of America ’s frontier spirit.   Some were in Community College because they had blown off high school, only to learn that smart really does matter.   Others were just too poor to go to college.   Some needed to work and fit school into their spare time. ...

The memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in Washington, D.C. is the center of historical attention this week.   While I am a bit upset that the statue was both designed and built in China I think the conception is good.   I would like to hold up Dr. King as proof that there are no excuses for not living a good life.   Here is a man who attended segregated schools in the heart of the Confederate South.   I have no doubt that his schools were sparsely built, poorly equipped and inadequately staffed.   What is more, they existed in the midst of a hard-boiled, legally sanctioned segregation that, frankly, endangered every man, woman and child in those schools.   Yet, he learned.    Dr. King went on to become the pivot point around which this country had its greatest reiteration since the Civil War.    The same story could be told about a long parade of minority groups who started their education in the rough and ended it in g...

My book club discussed The Passage by Justin Cronin a few years ago.   This book is a well written and intriguing example of post-apocalyptic science fiction.    It's sequel, The Twelve, was even better and I am eagerly awaiting the third book in the trilogy.  The Passage examines what happens when an unexpected, "effect" proceeds from a well-intentioned, "cause."              There have been other, “before and after” moments in history, and I wonder if we are approaching one now. The Toba Catastrophe is such a time.   About 70,000 years ago Mount Toba, a super volcano in Indonesia, destroyed itself in an eruption of truly Biblical proportions.   The debris Toba ejected into the upper levels of the atmosphere altered not just the climate, but the population of this world.   This eruption brought about a decade long, “volcanic winter.”        ...

What is now the Czech Republic began as Czechoslovakia, a nation cut from whole cloth (that being the old Austro-Hungary Empire) at the end of World War I.   It contained the provinces of Moravia and Bohemia which, in turn, contained some 3,000,000 people of German ancestry.   These Germans were unhappy with a new nation being created that did not make them the leaders and power brokers.   They were then hit with the paralyzing economic collapse of the Great Depression.   Sudetenland is named for the Sudetes Mountains that stretch from the Silesian coal mines to the Polish border.   During the economic crises this mining area was hit harder than the interior reaches of Czechoslovakia.   Thus is the result of a one-industry economy versus a multi-industry economy.   At such times, humans like to find a villain at whom to direct their rage.   The Nazi party of Germany did that with anti-Czech, anti-Semitic vitriol.      ...