Finally, the weather is popping and is doing so for days in a row. Even the little Mr. Coffee is happily ‘burping’ its morning song. It’ll be a good day.

Mid May and is glorious. Add to a walk later today and I will have seen 50-miles of our surrounding streets, sidewalks, and parks. Over the next couple of weeks both Derek in Austin and Marin here in town will graduate from High school. Another phase of their lives will be over and new adventures wait.

It’s everyman, buddy Earl Pitts, who has some insight into the importance of completing High school to the others who’ll be pushing on into the next grade:

Freedom – from the nonsense of forced mask wearing. Finally freedom! That is unless it’s fake science, power, control, or influence you’re after. Freedom
especially from the little blue and white toss-away, ill (or none) fitting masks I see strewn about everywhere. And I mean everywhere. So, hallelujah!

Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg trials (1945) answered the question asked of him; “How did you convince the German people to accept all this?” His reply:

”It was easy and has nothing to do with Nazism. The only thing a government needs to turn people into slaves is fear. If you can find something to scare them you can you can make them do anything you want.”

A Sports Week – So, last week I mentioned that I had signed up to Kayak nine miles on the Ohio River, between the outer beltway and downtown. This week I also signed up to do a 10K sponsored by our ice hockey team, the Cyclones. Normally it’s held in the dead of winter. This year it was advanced to August, not as the ‘Frozen 10K’, but as the ‘Unfrozen 10K’. It’s been a ‘special’ year don’t you know.

But that is not all. George and Sandy made plans to visit in September and high on the to-do list is to grab a ball game – we’ll be watching the Cincinnati Reds play Pittsburgh.

Then today, 4:00PM to be exact, our FCC soccer team will play their first home game in the brand new stadium. I’ve seen the outside and it’s spectacular. The downside is that they’ll open up under the old restrictive rules and cap attendance at 6,000 season ticket holders. After today’s game this will change and I should be able to take in a game before the summer is over. Have a look at what this new facility looks like. Located a stone’s throw from Findlay Market, Music Hall, and Samuel Adams brewery, it’s in the heart of things.

Critical Race Theory – CRT is alive and well as far as Ohio’s Board of Education is concerned. And beware, your school system, even private and religious schools, are not immune. In Ohio a lawsuit has been filed against the Board and several States have passed laws stopping this undercurrent of change. A creeping change in about everything that has made America work and work well.

How do you spot this intrusion? A teacher gets a Social Justice Degree. A Director of DEI is hired. A Teacher slowly moves into their own syllabus. Book selections morph to where only one worldview is presented (review the 1619 Project or review CRT mandated reading authors such as Ibram X. Kendi).

In schools and beginning in the work place where it’s often ‘woke’ versus ‘non-woke’; CRT is driving Cancel Culture. The loud voices talking Systemic Racism are really looking to cancel people who don’t agree or comply.

Watch for language since words do have meaning. Words such as; equity, culturally responsive curriculum, anti-racist, racial sensitivity, unconscious or implicit bias, cultural awareness, “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, Justice”, white-privilege, whiteness, or white supremacy. This finds school documentation in Akron Ohio area containing lines such as this: “…and to promote policies and practices that support equity and inclusiveness in math.”

And it’s happening across the nation. Its picking up speed, its insidious and infiltrating even STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in almost every College and University. At Skidmore College in New York State, a professor was boycotted for merely attending a pro-police “Back the Blue” rally.

Wokeness finds Companies and governmental department having mandatory sessions for employees and contractors. Promoting this Cancel Culture ‘woke’ movement to the point where people are afraid to utter an alternative for worry about their future growth path and their very livelihood. At Boeing a top executive recently lost his job because of an article he wrote in 1987, opposing allowing women to serve as fighter pilots. It’s very real!

Marcia and I used the efforts promoted by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to live and to raise our kids. We avoided grouping in ‘silos’. What this CRT path does has us moving towards the abyss.

Mr. Bean actor Rowan Atkinson compared cancel culture to a “medieval mob looking for someone to burn.”

Fini –
• Thursday was “Happy 513-Day” in these parts. 513? Yup; (513) is our area code and it was May 13th. A bit of nonsense, but cute. Agree?

• 38 days ago Biden gave the Palestinians $235-million of your tax dollars. Almost a month to the day later and Hamas started firing rockets into Israel – well over a 1,000 rockets to date. A little over a year ago Trump oversaw Israel and 5 Arab nations sign the Abraham Accords opening trade and signaling peace. See a difference?

• Another casualty. Arthur Beale (The Mad Sailor shop) is closing; a fixture in London for 500 years it closed shop. Beale’s had survived the burning of London, bubonic plague, the Swine flu, the Nazi bombings of London, but could not survive the Wu-Flu (aka Covid-19) lockdowns.

• Talking news from England, it was this past week in 1796 that country doctor Edward Jenner gave the first ‘jab’ to combat smallpox. He administered a vaccine created from cowpox pus to a youngster in Gloucestershire.

• When ‘Equality’ reigns over ‘Equity’ great things can happen. Two-time Nobel Prize winner (Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911) Marie Curie was the individual who established that the Atom was not a solid but consisted of sub particles. The photo shows her giving a lecture on radioactivity in 1925 to the French Academy of Medicine in Paris. She recommended Lead screens and ongoing screening tests for workers in labs dealing with radioactive materials.

• Remember when a Special Counsel John Durham was appointed to ferret out the story of the FBI’s fraudulent Russia-collusion in May of 2019? Remember how a year in, Trump expressed frustration by the (lack of?) progress of Durham’s criminal investigation? So the question now mid-May two years in is; “where is Durham?”

• Art and Jolene spent a few days this week on Mackinac Island in Michigan. One of their stops was at the Chippewa Hotel and its Pink Pony Lounge. It just so happened that I worked as a bartender at that very lounge. That was the summer of 1967. I told him to order a drink and have them put it on my tab. So he sent me a photo of his drink tab; my, my, how times have changed.

The cool weather seems to have delayed the emerging Cicadas – stay tuned

Make it great week people, keep the peace, be happy, stay safe, be healthy and follow the science – the real science that keeps on searching! Freedom reigns!

Dirk