Analog Climate Regions

I saw the above image on a website that didn't indicate its origin.  I'll speculate that whoever created it made use of climate regions as defined by geographers for areas in North America and then tried to match these with the same or similar climate regions elsewhere.

Actually, some of these North American regions are strike me as being larger and more diverse than they probably should be, and ditto the analog areas.  So a good deal of judgment went into what the map shows.

Some of this judgment strikes me as being legitimate in a broad-brush way.  Consider the analogy of India to Mexico and nearby areas.  India has both hot, humid parts along with deserts.  So does Mexico and northern Central America.  Russia has grain-growing areas, timberlands, and Arctic zones.  So does the map area from the American Midwest to northern Canada and Alaska.

That said, I can't vouch for the accuracy of most of the analogs due to the fact that the only places I've lived for extended periods of time are the Puget Sound area, the northeastern USA and Korea.  The Puget Sound climate is indeed roughly similar to that of the British Isles.  On a trip to Ireland my late wife kept commenting on how similar some of the vegetation was to what she had in her garden.  Likewise, my ten-month experience in Korea that included visits to Japan suggests that linking the Richmond-Halifax strip to Japanese climate is a halfway reasonable approximation.

Regardless, I found the map amusing.

Turning One's Coat Quickly

One interesting consequence of Donald Trump's election is some prominent media Republicans flipping to supporting the Democrat party.  Perhaps the best known are Bill Kristol and Max Boot.

Even though I've had coursework in psychology and social psychology, that was decades ago so I'm out of touch with that field.  Plus, I'm a bit skeptical of most "social science" research.  That's because I have a Ph.D. degree in a so-called social science.

Personal quirks aside, I imagine that there have been studies made regarding drastic switches in political beliefs -- even switches such as Kristol's and Boot's that appear like instantaneous religious conversions.  But since I am ignorant of such research, I'll simply forge ahead with some seat-of-the-pants speculation of the sort often found on blogs.

The impression I have is that, for mature adults, such belief flips are actually the result of the accumulation of many small events affecting one's belief system.  Any suddenness is caused by a triggering event such as the 2001 destruction of New York's World Trade Center towers, a straw that breaks the camel's back.

As for my own political shifts, the first was when I was in college and trying out new ideas for size, especially ideas that the "cool" crowd believed.  That was fairly rapid, though there was no obvious triggering event.

My second shift was gradual, taking place over the better part of a decade.  It was influenced by changing policy support by the main political parties plus my experience working in government.  Again, there was no trigger, though the 1980 presidential election might have pushed my conversion more rapidly.

As for the likes of Kristol and Boot, it's quite possible that there were accumulations of dissatisfactions with mainline Republican beliefs.  But there seemed to be limited evidence of this in their writing until Trump announced his candidacy.  Since I can't read minds, I have no idea as to the mental processes of their changed beliefs.  So I hope they and other turncoats eventually honestly explain their conversions.

Swiss Army Wristwatch Marketing Strategy?

I'm not into fancy wristwatches.  Nor into the ultra-cheap digital-display kind either.  Moreover, I'm not a mechanical movement snob: battery-powered does the job without the need for expensive periodic cleanings and maintenance.

Eons ago, I bought an Omega Seamaster at a PX in Korea and wore it for 20 years or longer.  But it didn't keep time well, and the maintenance costs drove me to cheapo digitals and Swatches.

In the late 1990s I finally settled on a nice line of watches from Victorinox, the Swiss Army knife company.  Black case and matching rubbery band: nice looking and less than $100 back then.  Over the years I bought two more similar watches.  Then that line disappeared.

In 2013 my wife bought me a different style Victorinox in Cologne (Köln) Germany -- a nice-looking gray item with a matching cloth band.  But this cost close to $300.  For the last few years the Victorinox watches I've seen in their London store have prices starting on the order of $400, a figure I just confirmed by checking their Web page.  That's more than I care to spend on a timepiece.

The only option was to shop other brands.  I did buy a nice Skagen watch at the fancy mall at Shepherd's Bush in London a few months ago, and use it on dressier occasions.  And a few weeks ago I bought a sporty Wenger watch while on a cruise ship.  The former sold for about $200, the latter for around $150.

Now it seems that Wenger was a maker of Swiss Army watches that was bought by Victorinox in 2005.  Wenger's knives have been phased out, and the brand is now used for travel items and watches.

My take is that by bringing in lower-priced Wenger watches, this allowed Victorinox watches to be moved upscale from where they were when I first started buying them.  The result is that, now that I know what happened, I can still but moderately-priced Swiss Army type wrist watches, but not the Victorinox branded ones.

The Joys of a Broken Rib

Since my wife died, I've been doing a lot of travel.  Most recently was a western Mediterranean cruise that included some places new to me.

On a showery day in Palma de Mallorca I slipped on a broad, slick crosswalk stripe, instantly fell on my back and broke a rib on a large, rounded paving stone.

This is about my adventures getting home from Barcelona, where the cruise ended.

My return flight booking was on an Air France subsidiary called Joon -- pronounced and intended as a cute version of jeune (young).  That would get me to Paris where I'd catch a regular Air France to Seattle.

Alas!  I learned at the airport that the Joon fight had been canceled.  Fortunately, they were able to book me on British Airways to London and then Seattle, arriving not long after I otherwise would have.  That worked out well.

When I entered my apartment house the elevator had a sign saying that it was broken.  My man-cave is on the 4th floor.  So here I was, 22 hours after I had woken up, with a broken rib and a suitcase weighing close to 40 pounds.  The stairway is a zig-zag affair, doing one floor in two segments with a flat turnaround between each zig and zag -- six sets of stairs in all to the 4th floor.   The step rise is a little less than the standard 8 inches, which was helpful.   Pulling the suitcase after me was out of the question because that would have meant twisting my body under the strain of its weight: very painful.  So using a knee, I'd heft/kick it to the 3rd step, then heft 2 steps at a time to get to the next flat spot.  A slow process: tiring and with some pain.

Once I got to my apartment I had to decide where I would sleep.   The first two nights following my fall I slept in the ship cabin bed.  But getting out of bed was extremely painful because I had to twist my body.  On a scale of 0-10 where 10 is unbearable, I was at about level 8 or a touch higher, involuntarily crying out with each movement.  The final cruise night I slept in a chair, where rising didn't involve twisting.

I continue to sleep either sitting up or reclining. The first couple nights here I used the couch, but now I use a chair that reclines, allowing me to be more horizontal. Whether the rib is starting to heal or through better use of pain killers, I'm doing better on that front. I alternate Ibuprofen and Tylenol every three hours (based on the doc's hint) and that keeps a fairly steady stream of pain relief in me. The rib area is not pain-free, but the sensations are manageable.

Now I need to lose some of the weight I gained while on the cruise.

Self-Driving Cars: Future or Fad

I'm old enough to have lived through a number of fads that had promised to be waves of the future, an inevitable future where the fad-subject would be in total domination.

Of course, sometimes this proves to be the case.  More often, the item does continue into the future but in modified and not dominant form.

So it might well be regarding the current flurry for self-driving cars.

My bias is that I would almost never want to own one.  Further, I find it hard to believe that any kind of sensor-based systems can substitute for human perception coupled with experience.  Possibly in a hundred years, if "artificial intelligence" proves to be as good as its proponents claim.  But that too is an intellectual fad, though a long lasting one that might come to pass.

In, say, ten years the government (alias Big Brother) mandates that all new cars be self-driving, I hope the lawmakers and regulators are wise enough to allow the self-driving mode to be switched on or off at the driver's discretion.  Self-driving on sensor-rich highways and arterials and human-driving on country roads or off-road trails.

Bright Car Colors

Back in the early 1970s the fashion for automobile paint schemes was for really bright, bold colors.

For example, here is my 1971 Porsche 914:

It was a pretty small car -- a lot smaller than current Porsches, for instance.  But the bright colors worked just about as well as more conservative hues.  Moreover, this was true of most smaller cars: the smaller the car, the easier it was to wear bright colors.  On the other hand, most large cars seemed odd if they were painted that way.

In my opinion, the only large cars that could handle bright colors were convertibles such as this 1950 Cadillac, one of the largest automobiles of its day.  Perhaps the lack of a metal top that would add even more sheet metal requiring paint made the difference.  Or maybe it simply had to do with convertibles being sporty cars where bright colors were a factor in that sportiness.  Either way, perception psychology seems to matter.

And so it follows that large, formal cars seem to look better painted in dark hues such as on this 1953 Cadillac 60 Special.

Pre-1946 Military History is Best

I confess to being a military history buff.  Have been reading it almost since I became aware that there was such things as history books.  Well, perhaps a bit later than that, but certainly by the time I was in junior high school.

I also kept up with developments in military equipment, aircraft in particular.

The problem was, much about recent (at the time) military history as well as the current equipment was classified.  What information that was available -- especially for things such as capabilities of currently active aircraft -- could sometimes border on Public Relations press releases.  (My Army job happened to be Public Relations, by the way.)

After a period of time, information became declassified.  Probably the most famous case was Ultra, the British decoding of coded and enciphered German radio messages.  Histories of World War 2 written before 1974 did not include this important information: we had to wait nearly 30 years after the war ended to learn of it.

So now I tend to ignore accounts of military events that occurred, say, less than 70 years ago.  As for aircraft, information about types currently in service might not be entirely trustworthy, especially regarding any defects or limitations.

Recently I've been reading a lot about naval vessels from World War 2 and earlier, and figure I'm gettin a fairly truthful picture.

Father Nosser

I don't know what the U.S. Army does these days, but when I was attached to Fort Meade, Maryland's post headquarters we had to take maybe one morning a month for Training.  Part of that was something called "character guidance" which meant that a chaplain would speak to us.

The one chaplain I still remember was Father Nosser, a Catholic.  Being an army captain and unmarried he could afford a sporty Oldsmobile -- none of that vow of poverty for chaplains, though I suppose he did turn over part of his income to the Church.

When he gave us character guidance he first lit up a cigarette.  Then he would casually lean on the podium and say a bunch of casual things with a message buried someplace.  When his cigarette burned down to a nub, he'd snuff it and end his talk -- the cigarette being his timer.

I always enjoyed Father Nosser because he was brief and fun to hear.

Overpriced Goods

I have no problem with the existence of luxury goods such as Bentley automobiles and what can be found in Hermès stores.  After all, their creation involves the employment of lots of people, and that's good.  And if a buyer has plenty of money to spend on such items and does so, that too is fine because it helps keep the economy chugging along.

A few of us have to keep an eye on our spending.  I don't know about you, but I seem to maintain a mental sense as to whether a product is overpriced.

That sense is clearly subjective.  In almost all cases I have no knowledge of the cost of materials and labor that go into something.  I do know what inexpensive products of the same kind can cost in an approximate sense.  I seldom comparison shop, but that option would yield better information and would be easy to do, especially using the Internet.

Take the case of womens' purses.  My late wife for several years was enamored of a particular Chanel design.  Year after year we would walk past the Chanel store in the Wynn casino in Los Vegas, and each time the price would be several hundred dollars higher than the last time on the item that we first saw priced at around $3,500.  She could afford it, but couldn't quite justify buying it, tempting though it was.

I just checked the Web and saw a Guess purse priced nicely under $100.  Functionally, it is essentially the same as the Chanel item.  Now, the Chanel purse surely was made of better materials -- but the difference couldn't have cost the maker more than several hundred dollars more.  And the Guess purse was probably made in a low-wage country whereas, for all I know, the Chanel might have been made in high-wage France.  Again, the difference was probably a matter of hundreds of dollars and not thousands.  I do not know how much it actually cost Chanel or its supplier to make that by-now $4,000+ purse, but surely it was far less than the asking price.  Even allowing for distribution, marketing, and retailing expenses, that purse could be considered overpriced.

Nevertheless, those purses do sell because of intangible factors related to the various motivation buyers bring to Chanel stores.  If it's fine by them, it's fine by me.

I admit to liking certain brands such as Filson, Barbour, Belstaff and Paul & Shark.  Filson and Barbour jackets are priced at the upper edge of my comfort zone.  Paul & Shark sweaters usually cost more than I'm willing to pay, so I usually buy mine when they are on sale.  The same is true for Belstaff jackets.  However, I did see a particularly enticing Belstaff in their Munich store in May and bought it even though it cost about 50% more than I would have preferred to pay.

Another case is Burberry.  Over the years I've purchased two of their trench coats and a sweater or two.  Nowadays what they offer strikes me as being about double what I think is their worth.  Even items in their outlet stores strike me as being too expensive.

You might wonder why I don't simply consider less expensive brands.  It's because I'm probably of the same mindset as those who shop at Chanel and Hermès, but at a different zone of the price/prestige scale.

Slug & Lettuce

I've noticed this pub the last two times I visited Bath in England.  I thought it was a Bath-only place, but then stumbled across another one in London a few days later.

Indeed, it's part of a pub chain with a sketchy history, as this Wikipedia entry indicates.

Anyway, the name is both cute, memorable, and slightly off-putting.

Some Fallen Mighty Retailers

Not long ago I posted about the once-dominant news magazine Time and that it's a shadow of its former self because the whole category of weekly news magazines has largely imploded here in the USA.  (Some argue that the Economist, a British version, is still doing fine, but I have my doubts about its viability in the medium-run.)

Then there are companies dealing in retail sales.  A few days ago I was driving through Tacoma on Interstate 5 and glanced at Tacoma Mall, noticing that the Sears store there had closed.  Sears has been in decline for many years now, even having sold some of its prime assets to bring in cash.  The Tacoma Mall store closing is just one of many such closings.

Yet 40 or 50 years ago Sears was a retailing powerhouse, having grown from being a major catalog mail-order operation to a bricks-and-mortar giant by mid-century.  Its clientele was Middle America -- upper Blue Collar and lower White Collar workers and their families.

While Sears was at its peak, newer retailing concepts appeared.  But these concepts were faster-moving from birth to decline or extinction, being more like fads or fashions.  What I find interesting is that many of these were hailed as transformative, waves of the retailing future.  And by implication, they might rule for many decades.

An example is E.J. Korvette, a discount clothing retailer that met with sudden success in the 1960s, even having a store on New York's Fifth Avenue.  Then there were the "Big Box," "category killer" stores of the 1980s and 90s.  Their strategy was to have huge selections of a single class of merchandise, providing potential customers the opportunity to fairly quickly find what they needed without traipsing all over town from store to store (remember, this was mostly pre-Internet).   An important example here is Toys "R" Us, that many observers thought would destroy all toy-selling competition.   Then there was Blockbuster, a leading renter of video tapes and compact disks of movies and did roaring business around the turn of the present century.

All those companies are defunct.  Stronger competition probably did Korvette in.  Walmart and the Internet are two factors in Toys "R" Us's failure.  Blockbuster's demise was probably triggered by the Internet.

The current hot retail paradigm is Internet-based sales facilitated by massive, efficient distribution systems.  Looks like this is The Wave of The Retailing Future.

Right?

Packing for a Journey

I've been re-reading Martin van Creveld's classic book "Supplying War" that deals with logistics.  At the same time I'm getting ready to start packing for a trip to England, so matters such as future needs, carrying capacity and transportability are clearly on my mind.

Given human variability on many dimensions, it follows that some people are skilled at packing for trips and there are others who are not -- even though they might be fairly frequent travelers.

Packing for a road trip is comparatively simple where only one or two people are involved and the vehicle is not tiny: there's usually enough space available to allow for overpacking.  Air travel is another matter due to constraints of weight and, recently, the per-item charges for luggage.

My sister, who favors out-of-the-way destinations is able to confine her items to a backpack and a couple of smaller shoulder bags.  It helps that she has no need to pack for dress-up occasions such as many cruise passengers have to face.

Then there is another lady I knew well who consistently overpacked.  A trip to Europe would have her fill two suitcases to their weight limit despite my consistent warnings that she was certain to buy gifts and personal items and needed some extra room to allow for that.  Usually what happened was that she would buy a small, cheap piece of luggage en-route to accommodate what she indeed bought overseas.  Another problem she had was deciding what to pack, having a large wardrobe to choose from.  Basically, she wanted to have a costume for every social contingency.  But at the same time had trouble dealing with possible changes in the weather, being fixated by what she saw through the window while packing, assuming that would be what she's experience on the trip.  I tried to be helpful by telling her what weather forecasts were saying, but this didn't sink in very far.  Therefore, she was constantly complaining that she didn't pack the items she really needed.  To me the oddest part of all this was that she never really changed her packing style despite the problems it had caused on many previous trips.

As for me, I like to think that I do a reasonably sensible job of trip-packing.  Even if that's so, almost inevitably I discover at some point in the journey that I had forgotten to include an item of real importance.  My upcoming England trip should be easy to pack for because the predicted weather there is close to what Seattle's weather has been recently.  For instance, that allows me to gauge how thick or waterproof a jacket I'm likely to need.  Of course, I'm probably still doomed to get something wrong.

No matter how good you think you are at packing, the length of the trip and future weather conditions conspire against getting it right.  Weather forecasts become increasingly unreliable more than a week ahead, so one must allow for a wider range of possibilities than indicated.  Another difficulty is packing for destinations with different climates.  Sometimes my late wife and I would visit Hawaii and the Bay Area, California around Christmas / New Year's, all on the same journey.  So we'd need to be wearing warm, water-resistant clothing for Seattle weather at each end of the trip, semi-tropical duds for the Islands, and fairly warm items for northern California.  Combining these needs with a limited amount of luggage space, requires a lot of careful thought along with the certainty that the result will be inadequate in some respects.

If you have a trip planned in the near future, I wish you the best of fortune when it comes to packing.

Time Magazine Sold Yet Again

Not long ago Meredith Corp. bought Time Magazine and now sold it to a California entrepreneur.

Even if I were filthy rich, that's something I would avoid.

I've said this before, and will say it again: The reason for Time Magazine's existence is no longer valid.  It was founded 95 years ago with the purpose of summarizing the week's news.  The target audiences were (1) big-city people who were too busy to follow the news on a daily basis and, more importantly, (2) people not in New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago where newspapers did not cover news as completely as in the cities mentioned.

When I was a lad in Seattle -- way over there in the upper left-hand corner of the country -- Time was my main source of information about big-city (especially New York) arts and culture, not to mention foreign affairs.  I recall eagerly waiting for the Thursday mail delivery so that I could get my weekly fix.

Then came 24-hour radio news stations and, a decade or so later, national editions of The New York Times.  Now we have cable news and the Internet.  So I have no reason whatsoever to wait around for a weekly news magazine.

I haven't regularly read Time since some point in the 1980s and thumb through one in waiting rooms maybe once very few years.  Which means I have no idea what Time contains nowadays.  Probably features and commentary, and not the sorts of news it carried years ago.

But I can find features and masses of commentary on the Internet.  Again, no real reason to buy a copy of Time unless its content is utterly unique and valuable -- something I doubt will happen, no matter who owns it.

Paying More to Gamble

Years ago, the state of Nevada had some reputations that don't apply much any more.

It used to be where a couple could get a quickie divorce and then almost immediately get married to someone else.  Many states now have no-fault divorce laws, so getting divorced is far easier than back in, say, 1950.  Marriage chapels were once all over the place, but seem to be less common today.

Then there was the reputation of getting cheap lodging and good, inexpensive meals at casinos.  The idea was to entice gamblers using some not-quite loss-leader pricing.

I remember stopping off at Harold's Club in Reno where the hotel gave me a small roll of nickels for the slot machines.  I'm not a gambler, but just for the hell of it did use up their nest egg along with some of my own.  Then quit and went up to the restaurant at the hotel's top floor for a nice roast beef dinner.

All that was when Nevada was just about the only place in the country where gambling was legal.  Then it was legalized for Atlantic City, New Jersey.  And now almost every Indian tribe of consequence has a casino, so serious gamblers don't really need to go to Nevada to lose their money.

One way Las Vegas fought back was in the form of huge hotels with architectural/decorative themes.  For instance, there's the Excalibur that caters to families with its knights-of-old theme.  The Luxor next door was ancient Egyptian, though the decor has been dialed back.  The Venetian even has a canal with singing gondoliers.  The Paris evokes Paris, though it too backslid a little.

Some casino hotels have large shopping areas.  Planet Hollywood's is rather average, but Chrystal's in the City Center complex is very upscale.  Venetian, Palazzo and Caesar's have a mix from mid-line to luxury.  The Bellagio and Wynn's have small, luxury shopping areas.  And so it goes.  The same applies to restaurants.

The latest move to making every aspect pay is parking.  My late wife had a las Vegas time-share and we'd be in town Thanksgiving week.  We'd drive to the Bellagio and drop the car off at the valet parking, paying a few-dollar tip on its recovery. We could have self-parked in a casino garage for free, but this was more convenient.

I last was in Las Vegas in 2015 but returned briefly a few days ago.  Now the Bellagio charges hefty rates for valet parking and fees not very much less to use the garage.

I suppose top-echelon gamblers get some "comps" on this.  But I now find the town too expensive for casual visiting.  You have to go there with the idea of at least semi-serious spending even if you aren't into gambling.

Country Roads in Days of Yore

During the past month I've taken several road trips across the mountains to eastern Washington.  One thing I noticed is that the state highways I followed in many places were quite nice two-lane affairs that could be driven at near-freeway speeds.

They had wide shoulders, a useful safety factor.  Their paving was in good condition.  There were plenty of cuts-and-fills that helped isolate the roads from their terrain.  Perhaps the most interesting detail was that towns were bypassed -- especially smaller towns.  Because of that, motorists had fewer reduced speed zones and traffic lights to deal with, again speeding up a journey's flow.

Contrast this with many such roads of 60 and more years ago.  Those were built cheaply, conforming more to the terrain.  They were narrower (as were cars back then) and had small or nonexistent shoulders.  They went through every town, each a potential speed trap.

And some did not go from place to place directly.  Instead they went along borders of farmers' lands, tracing their way confined to a grid pattern.

Finally, since there were few superhighways, state and federal highways had to accommodate all the traffic -- cars, busses, trucks, military convoys, etc. -- that had to get from place to place.  That potential congestion is much less on many modern country roads and highways.

All it took was decade after decade of small improvements.

I'm Back

I haven't posted in several months because ...

Well, I prioritize my Car Style Critic and Art Contrarian blogs.  Plus I travel a fair amount.  And then there's life to be lived as external factors emerge such as last week's high school classmates annual get-together.

I feel kinda guilty about non-blogging here.  So I came up with what might be The Solution.

It seems that towards the end of many afternoons I run out of internet-related things to do.  Worked on posts for the other blogs.  Read all that interested me on the blogs I follow.  Finished gathering images of automobiles for the styling blog.  But at this point I'm tired and am not in the mood for coming up with topics for Retired Blowhard.

The answer to this problem (I hope) is to create a System.

The system involves making a list of potential topics every so often while having my afternoon Starbucks.  Flip open a paper napkin, pull out my ballpoint pen and begin thinking and associating.  Today, with no distractions, I came up with 20 subjects by the time my "tall drip" was drunk.  Then I write in the afternoon when I've run out of other things to do yet have a topic available.

My idea is to post something once or twice per week unless I'm on the road.  I hope this works.  But no guarantee.

My LII- Year Habit

Traditions, habits -- those sorts of things can be worthwhile.  Or silly.  I suspect that one of my longest-term traditions has been drifting towards the silly side for, oh, decades.

LII years ago I watched the first Super Bowl football game where my beloved Vince Lombardi- coached Greek Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs.  The following year proved more difficult to watch because whereas I was a Packers fan, at the time I also was a fan of their opponent, the Oakland Raiders.  Then it was the New York Jets beating the Baltimore Colts which gave the upstart American Football League credibility.

And on and on over the years.

I have made it a point to watch at least a tiny bit of each Super Bowl ever played.  Often, I had no interest in who was playing, didn't care who won or lost, but made sure to watch perhaps three or so plays just to say that I had viewed it.

This year, extending my streak to LII, I drove over to the University Book Store where I knew the game would be televised.  (My TV is not plugged in and I don't have cable service.)  So I did watch about three plays and walked away, over to the book sections.

I don't think my behavior is crazy -- it's not destructive in any way.  But silly?  Yes, I admit to that.

The Changing Meaning of Chickensh*t

For at least the last ten years and probably much longer, I've been seeing the term "chickensh*t" implying cowardice.

It wasn't that way when I was younger.

Back then, it meant petty, arbitrary rules or orders that were annoying, rather useless, and a form of (possibly unintentional) low-grade harassment.

As for cowardice, the work "chicken" was used.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might claim that "they" wanted people not to have a term like chickensh*t for the petty, arbitrary, annoying, rather useless rules or orders "they" were giving us.

Remember When Only About 30% Were Smart Enough for College?

The current (January-February 2018) issue of the Atlantic includes an article titled "The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone" by Bryan Caplan -- link here.

It reminded me that back when I was college age (late 1950s) I sometimes heard or read the somewhat casual observation that to graduate from a decent (or better) college or university, one had to have an IQ of about 110 or better. That works out to around 25 or 30 percent of the population being that capable.

Elementary and secondary schools generally did a better job of basic skills preparation in those days. And on the job-hiring end, there was probably a lot less credentialism than now. The result was that not having a college degree wasn't a career crippler.

I think that system was better balanced than the current one whereby vocational education is often downplayed and in some cases eliminated from the high school curriculum for some reason related to "esteem-building."

In recent times I've heard calls for everyone getting a college education.  The fantasy behind this notion was that professional-level jobs would suddenly appear to absorb the universal attainment of higher education.  But if higher education is actually or even potentially universal, then the term "higher" no longer applies: college simply becomes added years of high school.  Which might be happening anyway, given all those college majors with two-word names, the second word being "Studies."

Censoring "Fake News"

When I was a lot younger appeals for bringing in experts to resolve or manage problems seemed entirely reasonable.  Some readers might even recall advertisements featuring an actor dressed up as a physician urging us to use some product or another.  Nowadays, appeals to authority seem to lack the punch they used to have: folks are getting a lot more skeptical.

Today's political climate finds major news media engaged in a nonstop effort to destroy the President.  All too often a negative story is presented, only to be sheepishly retracted when proven false.  This is "fake news."

There has been discussion of restricting dissemination of fake news -- try Googling on "censoring fake news" to see some examples.

Related to that are other efforts afoot to to have media providers ban Internet items that various "victim" groups claim to be offensive.  And over in Europe, governments might be beginning to take steps to ban political speech by certain parties that established parties consider unworthy.

Who would be brought in to judge what tweets, blog posts, etc. are worthy of being banned?  Why, some supposed experts ... who themselves surely have biases.

What we would have is a form of thought control, no matter what part of the political spectrum is in charge of the operation.  Open, unfettered speech, no matter how politically offensive it might be to certain people, is the best way to avoid dictatorship.

None of the above is original thinking on my part.  Nevertheless, the ideas are worth repeating in these confused, troubled times.