The Blaisdell Blog

Personally, I blame myself.   I have been too complacent.   I certainly knew there were wing-nuts in the party, but the Dems have their crazies, too.   I figured the lunatic fringe were like flatulence.   If you are going to digest food you have to create gas.   No one wants it, but it is a natural byproduct.               I also am a realist.   I know that politics is a system of negotiations.   Like buying or selling a car, you go in with a ridiculous figure, deep into your personal wish list, knowing that you will have to trade off some of that for a compromise that gives everyone a little skin in the game.   While wing nuts are like spoiled children who want only their way and see anything less as a loss, adults know that a compromise is the finest achievement of mature minds.   It is acknowledgement that any good idea has some overlap with other good ideas and theses shaded areas on the Venn diagram offer opportunities of mutual advancement.             But the wing-nuts

On February 24, a call for help was sent by a beleaguered man facing forces beyond his anticipation, comprehension or control.   The Battle of the Alamo only lasted 13 days, stretching from February 23, 1836 to the final pre-dawn assault on the walls on March 6.   Everyone knows how this story ends.   Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna overran the poorly fortified mission in San Antonio de Bexar (current day San Antonio).    Santa Anna’s cruelty was legendary and every man in the fortification knew he was going to die by bayonet or bullet.   They did.               Fewer people know the aftermath.   The wholesale slaughter of the rebels was repeated at the town of Goliad to the southwest.   At this town, over 400 men were told that if they surrendered they would be pardoned.   Instead they were marched onto the roads in columns of two between lines of Mexican soldiers and killed in a blood bath.   The result of this carnage was a consolidation of fervor on the part of the “Texian”

In the February, 1970 issue of Playboy magazine (yes, the one with Linda Forsythe as the Playmate of the Month) a sociologist wrote an article about the psychological impact of technological innovation and rapid change.   He introduced the term, “information overload” and told us that too much change over too short a period of time led to stress and wide-spread social discord.   The article was so well received that the author went on to expand the think piece into a book.   It was a best seller.   The author was Alvin Toffler and the title of both the article and the book was Future Shock .    Ten years earlier, economist, John F. Muth first proposed a neo-classical theory of economics called Rational Expectations.   This theory, later developed by Robert E. Lucas, would eventually win Lucas the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics.   While Toffler was certain that the overload of information in a technologically rich world would confound and overcome the citizenry, Rational Expecta