Commentaries

POST 27 Shedding Light On The Federal Debt

2024-3 Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. Consider this. The distance around the world at the equator is 24,901 miles. Dividing the speed of light by the circumference of the earth at the equator gives you 7.48. This means, if you had a gun that shot a bullet at the speed of light, and you fire the gun from a location at the equator, the bullet would go around the world and pass by you seven times and continue nearly halfway around the world again – in one second! Distances in space are so huge they are measured in light years, defined as the distance light can travel in a year. With light traveling more than 7 times around the earth in a second, you can imagine how far it will travel in a year! Or can you? I can perform the calculation, but I cannot imagine the answer. Since light travels at 186,282 miles per second and there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, a light year is 5,874,589,152,000 miles, or approximately 5.9 trillion miles. Beyond …

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POST 26 Thomas R. Saving

Commentaries

On March 12, 2024, Tom Saving died in St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston’s Texas Medical Center. He chose potentially fatal surgeries to get blood to portions of his digestive system and to erase a blockage. The last straw was kidney failure, though a complex set of problems overcame his body. Judy and I visited with him on Sunday, March 10. He had little remaining energy and spoke in a low volume. He could barely move the hand that was not hooked up to i v fluids. My experience with my father made me think Tom would likely not live through the week. Judy gave him some needed positive feedback. I took him a Monet book, but I doubt he saw it, as he could not hold a book. After he died, his wife, Barbara, wrote that Monet was one of his favorites and hers, too. Ever since my early 20’s, Dr. Thomas R. Saving has been an important part of my life. At the outset I knew he was brilliant in economics. In his advanced course in macroeconomics, he derived intricate …

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POST 25 AN ABRUPT CHANGE

Writings

Not a simple change, such as rearranging furniture or suddenly deciding to go to a different restaurant. No. Not at all. The abrupt change was at the very core of my being, a momentary change that alters lives forever. She entered the living room from a hallway, smiling, kind of curious like a girl can be. I am not sure if she was sizing up the new visitor to her home or whether she was not particularly interested. But I was. This was 6-year-old Kristin, and, as unexplainable as it may be, I knew looking at her the first time that this was my daughter. She was to change my life, and, unbeknown to her at that time, I was to change hers. Do not expect a rational explanation. There is none. Maybe that is the way it is with many important events. Kristin lived in a nice house off Memorial Drive in Houston, on a street called by the sweet name of Butterfly Lane. It was a nice area of town. Judy, Kristin’s mother, and I had been on a few dates. Judy lived with her …

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Post 24- Howdy, Great Apes

Commentaries

I extend a hearty hello to all you great apes. You might not have known you are among the great apes, but that is just because most of you do not have a child in school right now. A handful of Texans will vote tomorrow on the use of the McGraw-Hill biology text in some K-12 classes that teaches that you are one of the great apes and exist due to pure evolutionary forces. I am still one of the worker apes, and I am thinking about taking off for the rest of the afternoon, so I am going to make this quick. I would much rather write about music, my friends, or other topics that give me a break from work and world heavy issues. But I figured that since I spent enough time to write a book (short though it is) about this evolution/monkey issue, I ought to take the time to send an email about the McGraw-Hill text - so I did. I reproduce it here for you great apes who have learned how to read, By the way, being able to read, do math, drive a car, etc. makes you a very …

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Post 23 – Ben and Wendy Rock

Music

Ben and Wendy Erdman are well-known in the Bryan/College Station area. Not many couples have been featured on the front page of the local newspaper, but they have. They are active in their church and in the community. Ben once worked at Texas A&M, and Wendy has worked for 18 years at a popular Chic-Fil-A in Bryan. They are active in Down Syndrome fund raisers and assistin special needs events, such as Special Olympics. This unique and loving couple has attended nearly every jam session in my music room since the first one in 2002, more than 20 years of periodic live music. Ben and Wendy are the first ones on the dance floor. We have fewer jam sessions now compared with earlier years, but when we do, they are on Sundays from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. I pick up Ben and Wendy at their duplex in time to go to Rudy’s barbeque to have lunch with Judy, Ashley, and Malyun (who helps us with Ashley), Tom and Barbara Saving, and some of the out-of-towners arriving …

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Post 22 – War In The Middle East

Commentaries

Between 1901 and 2022, 954 Nobel Prizes were awarded. Of the recipients, 212, or 22%, were Jews. They have won multiple awards in all six of Nobel Foundation’s fields of award. That number is already out of date. The recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics is the Jewish economist Claudia Goldin of Harvard University. You may be under the impression that Jews are plentiful. If so, you are wrong, very wrong. Jews number about 15 million in the world, compared with approximately 2.4 billion Christians and 1.9 billion Muslims. The Jewish population represents only 0.2% of the world’s population. The share of winners of the Nobel Prize by Jews is about 100 times more than their proportion of the world’s population. The Jewish people have contributed so greatly to mankind’s knowledge in the world that they ought to be viewed as one of the world’s treasures. Instead, many want them exterminated. Death to Israel. Death to America. How …

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