Stuff they don't tell you

There are things they don’t tell you and I sometimes wonder why—but sometimes it is obvious.

1)News tonight is that the OKC jail has a mold problem in the kitchen. TV made it sound like all sorts of bad practice in the jail.  But the real reason is that inmates stay out of trouble if they fix their own food.  More food, fewer fights. But these aren’t clean guys—druggies, robbers, mentally ill.  So they leave a mess and often it is almost impossible to manage by the jail.  Hence the mold.

2) Why are ice cubes in the shape of a D?  In the 1950s when icemakers for home fridges were being tried, they made a lot of shapes.  But the D cube made by one company was far less troublesome for low capacity makers.  Everyone began to use these icemakers and nothing has changed in 60 years.

3) Frustrated gardeners everywhere.”I can’t raise tomatoes anymore where I used to.” “I tried to raise fruit trees but the borers killed them.” Simple solutions.  Tomatoes develop a wilt if raised in the same location every year.  Rotate your crop and only come back to the same place about every 3 years.  Borers are laid by a fly from June 1 to September on the bark.  Then the larva bores under the bark either near the soil line or up a couple feet on the trunk, doing great damage.  Treat with borer spray every 3 weeks over the summer. So why doesn’t everyone in a garden center know this?  Beats me.

4)Why do most renters rent?  They can’t hold a job.  I know this not only by their histories, but also what I see.  Holes in walls and doors abound.  They got mad and pounded a hole in something.  They fight at work too—no faster way to get fired than fighting with the boss. Peter Drucker predicted this in the 60s, noting that so many kids were without parental guidance and we would likely raise a nation of poor workers, self-centered, insecure, uncooperative, when kids were raised by day care.

      Now a little politics.

5) Why did Repeal/Replace fail?  No matter what you thought of the Ryan-Trump-Price bill, it failed, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out, because too many people were successful in labeling it to mean bad things.  VP Pence pleaded that Stage I repealed individual mandates, would save $1T over ten years and give Medicaid entirely to the states.  What’s not to love if you are a conservative, and that’s just stage 1?  But here’s the deal.  If you run for office it’s brutal.  You’ll be called names, lied about, and it takes a tireless campaigner.  Who can endure? Very egotistical people. And so the US Senate in particular is full of prima donnas who insisted that if the bill wasn’t done their way, they’d vote NO.  When a party is minority, it’s okay to rant irreponsibly, but when you are in the majority, you’d better learn to be a team player or you will pass nothing and the public will sour on you.  But I doubt you'll hear this in the media reports.

6) The whole Russiagate thing now looks like a preemptive smoke screen to hide the fact that Trump’s people were under surveillance talking to Russians.  But the media narrative of Hillary losing steam in polls as election day approached due to Russian hacks/disclosures can be disproven by simple statistics.  Real Clear Polics Avg. two weeks out was Hillary +5.2%.  Day before election, +4.8%.  Exit polls day of election, +5%. No poll showed her at +1.8% as the popular vote actually was. What happened? Many people voted intentionally not talking to pollsters. But why didn’t the media point this out immediately?  Because journalists avoid math.  I saw this years ago teaching in college.  They get chills even over addition.