1. King Ozymandias of Assyria was running low on cash after years of war with the Hittites. His last great possession was the Star of the Euphrates , the most valuable diamond in the ancient world. Desperate, he went to Croesus, the pawnbroker, to ask for a loan. Croesus said, “I’ll give you 100,000 dinars for it.” “But I paid a million dinars for it,” the King protested. “Don’t you know who I am? I am the king!” Croesus replied, “When you wish to pawn a Star, makes no difference who you are.”
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2. Evidence has been found that William Tell and his family were avid bowlers. Unfortunately, all the Swiss League records were destroyed in a fire, and so we’ll never know for whom the Tells bowled.
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3. A man rushed into a busy doctor’s surgery and shouted, “Doctor! I think I’m shrinking!” The doctor calmly responded, “Now, settle down. You’ll just have to be a little patient.”
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4. An Indian chief was feeling very sick, so he summoned the Medicine man. After a brief examination, the medicine man took out a long, thin strip of elk rawhide and gave it to the chief, telling him to bite off, chew, and swallow one inch of the leather every day. After a month, the medicine man returned to see how the chief was feeling. The chief shrugged and said, “The thong is ended, but the malady lingers on.”
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5. A famous Viking explorer returned home from a voyage and found his name missing from the town register. His wife insisted on complaining to the local civic official, who apologized profusely, saying, “I must have taken Leif off my census.”
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6. There were three Indian squaws. One slept on a deer skin, one Slept on an elk skin, and the third slept on a hippopotamus skin. All three became pregnant. The first two each had a baby boy. The one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys. This just goes to prove that the squaw of the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides. ———————–
7. A skeptical anthropologist was cataloguing South American folk remedies with the assistance of a tribal elder who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure cure for any case of constipation. When the anthropologist expressed his doubts, the elder looked him in the eye and said, “Let me tell you, with fronds like these, you don’t need enemas.”
I saw an article on Breitbart today headlined “Ice Cube: Undoing White Privilege Means Reimagining What America Should Have Been from the Beginning”. I thought why did he stop at the beginning of America, why didn’t he go back to the beginning of the slave trade? If you want to rewrite history make it good. By going back far enough to not have slaves in the first place we wouldn’t be having these protests by Black Lives Matter, and ANTIFA. The root cause was not the founding of America but the establishment of the slave trade.
Ice Cube believes by rethinking America the way he would like it to be that everything would be different and lovey-dovey. The way I propose, it would be lovey and America would honestly be founded on white privilege because blacks would have remained in Africa, and America would have been established without prejudice or segregation.
He is stuck in his revisionist history because he wants America to be founded on equal blacks and whites. He truly believes that abolishing slavery at the very beginning would have given blacks equal opportunity. What he fails to realize is the cultural and educational differences between seventeenth century blacks and whites was huge. How long would it have taken the black civilization to bridge that gap?
Given that if slavery was abolished in 1776 and if there was no prejudice, or segregation perhaps this would be a different world. What I don’t understand is why we keep trying to change history? Other than giving us a some nice fiction to read what betterment does it serve? It does serve to give guys like Ice Cube something to write about to stay in the news and keep his fan base going.
We are stuck with what we have and dreaming up scenarios about how things could have been won’t solve anything. What we need to be visioning are some viable solutions to our problems and what America will look like when we accomplish those goals.
When you are in business and working your ass off to develop a new product, and someone sneaks into your building and steals that secret, and then builds a competing product that beats yours to the market place would you be angry? I would, and I am. I don’t have any secrets because I’m not researching or developing a product, at least not anymore. When I did work, I was researching and developing new products continuously. I can vouch for the amount of energy it takes to do that. Thankfully, my boss, who happened to own the company had a tough security policy in place. His philosophy was that he pays for developing new products and his competitors should do the same. He refused to give competitors the keys to the factory.
There was nothing he could do about a competitor buying our product and reverse engineering it, or giving it to one of our material suppliers to have them analyze it. I did the same thing, but that is fair. What is not fair is stealing the key design features and or the process for making a product from the producer.
Today, I read another news article about how China has infiltrated so many of our institutions of learning and research to find shortcuts to their success. They don’t have the brain power to do the job so they use any method they can to take products to market. It seems they have the money to bribe employees within key markets but not the money to develop the same information. Actually, I think they have the money. What they don’t have is people smart enough to think for themselves.
Why does China do this? Because they can. We let them in and open the files for them to see. Yes, they are thieves and they take advantage of our country at every opportunity, but that is because we let them do it. We look upon them as a country with too many people to feed and as a backward nation so we tend to be loose with our information. It is my opinion that America will continue to get raped by China until we take action against that happening. A few new laws might help, but what will help the most are tough security policies within companies. If a company is complaining that China is stealing its secrets then that company should take a look in the mirror and examine its security rules and its philosophy on transparency. Transparency and security don’t always mix. The most secure companies operate under handicaps in the industry. I for one thought our policies about not speaking to vendors about our processes and designs made my job a thousand percent tougher because i couldn’t get technical information from vendor experts without divulging my information. The result was we had to expend more time and effort to learn what we needed when experts in companies like DuPont, Monsanto, Celanese had super labs with a myriad of Ph.D.’s hired to help customers.
Competition is what makes capitalism work as well as it does. Competition keeps companies sharp and focused. All it takes is for a competitor to tweak a design to make it better than yours and bingo you just lost. The end result is you spend more money catching up and out doing the foe. If the profit is there it is worth doing, if not, you may just give it up and sell it cheaper than him to save your initial investment. All products have a life cycle and the first one on the market may last for forty years as did the products I worked on. In today’s world the life cycle may only be eighteen months, meaning your product will be out dated by a newer product that people will want more than your tired old eighteen month one. With products that have such a short life cycle security is imperative.
What really gets me is the auto industry. Have you ever wondered how new cars always look eerily similar to each other? Sure they are noticeably different, but their general shapes and lines are similar. Many times I have seen cars in the parking lot that looked like mine but it wasn’t mine. I blame that on poor security within the auto industry. These guys must be sending each other design files via internet to compare shapes and features. Of course cars require a lot of tooling to make, such as dies, and molds. The tools are made by outside companies. This outside source is ripe for picking and giving the competition free peeks at designs. The owner I worked for understood this and insisted that all tooling needed for making our products will be done in house. Now that is expensive, but he felt it worth the money.
My advice to companies, hospitals, laboratories, etc that are losing information to the Chinese is simple, adopt a policy of ‘if you need to know it you get to know it.’ If you don’t need the information on your job you won’t get it. The key is to adopt the policy, and then to enforce it. If you don’t you will be raped over, and over, and over again. You know what is said about doing the same thing over, and over and expecting a different result, that is the definition of insanity.
Strange thing okra. I learned of it some years ago and have developed a taste for it. Okra is not found on grocery shelves very often where I live. It is listed as a fruit, but used as a vegetable. Many people dislike it because of the seeds. They are described as being slimy. I kind of like that taste.
My first introduction to okra was at a Country Kitchen restaurant where it is served as a side dish. They slice the fruit into disks, battered and fried. My first taste was that of nothing special, yet I kept ordering them as a side for my usual entree.
This summer, I have been finding okra in the vegetable section of my local grocery chain. I buy a package of the green pepper-shaped fruit and eat them raw. By the and, they work well as a KETO snack. A cup full of this fruit provides the following nutrients:
Calories: 33
Carbs: 7 grams
Protein: 2 grams
Fat: 0 grams
Fiber: 3 grams
Magnesium: 14% of the Daily Value (DV)
Folate: 15% of the DV
Vitamin A: 14% of the DV
Vitamin C: 26% of the DV
Vitamin K: 26% of the DV
Vitamin B6: 14% of the DV
Okra is grown in sub-tropical climates such as Africa and South America, although I have grown it in my salad garden just to learn what it looks like on the green. I planted six seed clusters and got six robust thigh-high green plants resembling those of green pepper. I got lucky while exploring in the garden one day by looking under the leaves and found some rather attractive large pale yellow flowers resembling hibiscus blooming there unseen. That is when I began to watch more closely because I didn’t know when to pick the fruit or how they would present. Sure enough the long skinny green fruit developed from the flower. The next step was to learn when to pick them. I started picking when they were very young, maybe two inches long. Because I like them so much I tasted what I picked right off the plant. They were tender and delicious. In a couple of days they were between three and four inches long, and still tender. I picked more and learned it was time to harvest; except they never made it to the table. I ate them all as I picked. They were luscious. I let the plants rest for a week and picked again. This time I learned that if they are too aged they turn into fibrous pieces of rope. Ugh! The older longer fruit develop an outer layer of very stringy, tough, hard to chew fiber. I likened it to hemp rope. The time to pick okra is when it is young, tender and delicious. Maybe old okra can be saved by cooking it in a stew or gumbo, but I would prefer not to use it at all.
There are many ways to use okra. One is in fresh green salads, or french fried, or in a gumbo with other vegetables like tomatoes, onions, and peppers. Some people grill okra until it is charred, others broil it, then there are those who roast it. I am at a point where I will try it any way it comes.
