Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, or How Not To Fight Ebola

Just as Robert Frost showed in "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" that the opposite of the title was true, America has seen policies proposed that would make fighting Ebola more difficult.

In the last couple of years we have seen the Republican congress cut the amount of money going to the Center for Disease Control. This same mindset resulted in the Presby Hospital in Texas having the most infected medical personnel in the world, outside of Africa.

Now the same Republicans want to stop air traffic between the African Countries and America, a decision that has been decried by every expert on infectious disease. You need to move personnel in to fight the disease. Rick Perry, whose state supported hospital bungled their Ebola treatment, is calling for such a ban.

Republican Sen.Rand Paul, who believe it or not has an MD, is against our sending troops to Liberia to build treatment centers, because he believes these troops will come back and infect America.

There is much happening that also shows the underside of America. A volunteer who was in Africa to fight Ebola voluntarily quarantined himself for 21 days just to be extra precautious . His neighbors responded on social media to mobilize to burn his house down, which thankfully was prevented.

Because across the country K-12 education has been severely dumb downed, we have a nation that doesn't have any idea about how to look at infectious disease. If America dissolves into a group of no-nothings, we can blame the teachers' unions for being more concerned with protecting incompetents than actually educating our youth. This won't be the last crisis abetted and confused by an ill informed electorate.

That talk about Sex I never had

Growing up without a father, and with a mother who'd convinced me Jesus was up there with an Uzi to make sure I didn't screw up, I really never got "the talk" that lets you know what really goes on with women. In fact, when the Beach Boys said "a competition clutch with a four on the floor, she purrs like a kitten until her Lake pipes roar," they could have been describing women for all I knew. When I was 15, I guessed in front of a Boys Club counselor that babies were "pooped out."

Then as you grow older guys tell you girls don't like guys who are too nice, so you act badly and are left with a guilty conscience about how you treated  some girl like a rat, and you end up depressed and dateless.

Nowadays any kid over six understands sex, but I spent way too many years clueless.

It is interesting though how some things stay the same. In the classes I taught at a state university a dateless guy I was helping asked me to find out why girls don't like "good guys."  The classes at my university averaged 65 percent female, 26 years of age, with Blacks and Latinas predominating, but with some white kids thrown in to prove white people aren't smarter than anyone else.

I asked them why they didn't like the good guys. They said they didn't want guys who were available when they called and weren't busy. This somehow made the guy uninteresting and they stopped liking him.

This left me confused. However, because I was married, it was useless information. I'd found that even if a girl at 19 might not date you, when they got to be around 28, they'd marry you because you were boring and they trusted you.

I'm still waiting for that talk I never received, but this time I want to see some data.

Florida State Rapists and the NFL

The Florida State Rapists are the number one football team in America. Their behavior is a direct result of how the NFL has shown the world that on field skills overwhelm concerns about rape, theft and other unethical behavior.

In Tallahassee the police look the other way when a crime involves a Florida State player. The New York Times shows how the police department receives $122,000 for duties on Game Days. One player stole a motor bike and when stopped, simply told the officer he played for Florida State and was allowed to get back on the bike and drive away. Rapes committed by Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston were not investigated.

Gee. Doesn't that sound a little like the two game suspension the Ravens' Ray Rice received from the NFL after cold cocking his girlfriend, knocking her unconscious. He followed that by spitting on her and leaving her legs in the elevator so the doors could continue to attempt to close on her. Wow, wouldn't that be a dream team, a backfield with Ray Rice and Jameis Winston in it. The only thing better would be to also give them Bowie knives.

Intellectual Property Rights in China. And Now for My Next Joke..

I once knew a writer in China who was very gifted, with a strong affinity for storytelling. The characters came alive on the pages, fascinating  readers so they felt they had to keep reading through the night to find out what happened. This writer has learned to write books as a trilogy, because intellectual property rights are a joke in China.

At one point the writer's publisher was ready to publish a book which had stolen the writer's characters, even keeping the same names.

The writer protested. The publisher said, "why don't you sue me. That way I'll sell more copies of this knockoff book."

Lately the books have been turned into Chinese TV shows. That's right, you guessed it, Both the writer's books and the copycat's novel are showing on Chinese television.