The Blaisdell Blog

President George H. W. Bush is a man of principle, honor and intelligence.   His choice to vote for Hillary instead of Trump is the correct one.   His choice to make this decision public is also correct, for silence would be a cheap and cowardly path.   Silence makes it too easy for the Trump apologists to aver that Bush would, in the end, follow the party line down the path of Trump’s ignorance of and disregard for the Constitution.    Silence is not an option.   If you believe it is, look at Hitler’s rise in Germany.   Having not buried the lead, let me get on to the second part of this article: why we all do, or should, despise the media.               In 1988, Bush beat Michael Dukakis with 53% of the vote and 426 electoral votes.   In that same election, Democrats picked up seats in both the House and Senate, and Bush had to work with opposition majorities.   In 1992 Bu...

When asked why he decided to remain seated for the national anthem, San Francisco’s resident baby said "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.   To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."             Well, he certainly isn’t wrong about that.   While I could go to Chicago for a set of crime statistics that would drop your teeth, I thought I would, instead, go to Kaepernick’s birthplace, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.   Let’s take a look at the people getting away with murder in Kaepernick’s home town.               For the last decade Milwaukee’s murders have been around 15 per 100,000 population, which is 3 times the national average for that ...

Students with special gifts merit special attention.   If you do not believe that is true, why do we build football stadiums for our high school students when that money could just as easily build science, math and engineering labs?   We are rewarding (properly so, I might add) their special gifts for athletics.   Yet, the collective “we” of the general population frequently hesitate to provide or even reject the same special attention (…facilities, instruction, paraphernalia…) when the recipients are the intellectually gifted.   There is also an assumption that intellectual giftedness can only express itself in STEM classes.   Wrong.   It can also show itself in mechanical advantages, entrepreneurial advantages and artistic advantages.   We do not want a nation of people who know how to get a rocket off the ground but nobody who knows how to build one!               The magazine Scie...