thomas leverett weblog

Monday, April 15, 2024

Friday, April 12, 2024

RIP OJ

Everyone's got something to say, I'm sure, about whether he was guilty of the murder of his wife and her friend. What makes people uncomfortable is that if you're white, you thought he was, and if you're black, you thought it perfectly reasonable that he was innocent and was being framed by a vengeful white legal system.

To me the story of O.J. is more about a kind of bizarre parallel to my own life. In 1970 my family moved to Buffalo and I was deeply unhappy, cut off from my friends (I was in high school); in reaction I criticized the city of Buffalo severely: deep snow, gray skies, defeatist people, nothing to do, etc. Remarkably enough, O.J. was doing the same thing at the same time. The difference was, I was a punk high school kid and he was perhaps the best college running back football had ever seen, drafted by the Buffalo Bills because they were in last place, brought to Buffalo from Southern California where he was a media star, and put on a team that couldn't afford a line to protect him; with terrible stats and nowhere to go, he lit out against the city itself. It was boring (Yes!). Nothing to do (Yes!). Way too much snow in winter (Yes!).

Years later I was forced to live in Chicago one summer when my wife went over the edge and was having trouble handling our two young boys. We were given a place in Evanston on Lake Michigan by her brother, with lots of room, a television and no furniture, and I drove to a job in Evergreen, on the southwest edge of the city. Traffic was horrendous and the teaching load was very high. I was at my tipping point especially with the traffic when I came home one day to find the Bronco chase on the television. It was bizarre and surreal. In slow motion we watched the Bronco cruise down some LA interstate and ever since then, I've wondered whether the Bronco brand was altered forever; I think it was.

Many people were glued to the trial which played out over weeks and weeks. I'm white and tended to think he was guilty - who else would have the motive to kill his wife and her boyfriend? But it may have been the kind of trial where the evidence was scant enough that a reasonable jury might conclude that it wasn't enough, and that happens. Maybe the whole world suspects he's guilty but if the evidence doesn't prove it, you have to follow the judge's orders.

Because much of the world still considered him guilty, he couldn't really enjoy his free life outside of bars. What was that sports-memorabilia-kidnapping deal about? By that time people were tired of being reminded that a nation could be so racially divided over the verdict of a jury. But I almost felt like in repentance, he needed to go sit in prison for a while because that's where so many people thought he belonged. I never even got a clear idea of what happened in the sports=memorabilia incident, or if I did I forgot, but I know that much of the world felt like he had to do time still for what had happened with his wife.

One thing I can say about him is that at the same time he was one of the world's most gifted athletes, he was also one of the most charismatic, charming people in the media in that era. When he became a sportscaster he was good at it, because he was personable. But this fame and high profile carried a huge price that he was not entirely prepared for. It made it almost impossible for the world to look objectively at the facts of the murder case, and I found myself constantly questioning whether he could have been framed simply because he had so many enemies.

Years later I went back to Buffalo and found that it was just a place; like O.J., I had blamed it when the real problem was that I had been trapped. Sure it has a lot of snow, but Arizona has a lot of sun. People were nice to me; it was my own fault that I was miserable. But that's the way life is. You make your own bed, and you spend the rest of your life losing sleep in it.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Jump right in and grab the money

Lately I've read a number of "Financial Success for Teens" books lately because I have a number of teens who really need skills of any kind and I want to get a handle on what exactly to teach them and how. Unfortunately people are living in entirely different worlds; the ones I deal with have never had money, and have no chance of getting any, legally, whereas these books assume you have a suburban kid, and you have enough money to buy the book, and the kid is just eager to get rich.

But one thing they have in common that really irritates me is the idea that you can just jump right in to the stock market and if you make a good guess about the direction of a company, you'll make big money fast if that company does well. I think this is a damaging idea to give to kids. There are several reasons.

First, broker fees ensure that even a stock that is on an even keel is a losing proposition. Ones that are only improving incrementally are also losers. You pay enough to play the game that you have to win substantially to win at all, and this might take a while, usually longer than a teen's attention span (this is what happened to me, many years ago as a suburban kid who had money from mowing lawns or something). This is not bad as long as the books would mention it, which they don't. A note of caution would really help in this situation but there is none to be found.

One of the biggest causes of crashes is overenthusiasm for various companies that are all out there competing for our attention and support. If you can imagine with me thousands of teens with starry-eyed enthusiasm for some tech company that they can guess is on the cutting edge of something: this on top of thousands of serious investors who are in the same game. What you get in the end is way too much money in the situation and a crash is inevitable. And who's going to lose? Probably the teens who don't have the foresight to "pull out before it's too late." Lots of kids are going to go down here. Although I was one of them, at some point during the seventies, I don't remember feeling the sting all that badly and maybe if anyone is going to lose, suburban teens are as good as anyone.

But on another level, I don't want to be the one who led them to the slaughter, so to speak. I don't even want to be part of agreeing that it's great to lead them to the slaughter.

The woman who wrote the book was probably not too happy to read my review. She's part of a very well-organized, mostly Christian, group of authors who write mostly self-help books like this one and routinely give each other fives and thumbs up for every book they write. I had no problem giving her a five; it was well-written and it did what she said it would do, and I have to be seriously angry to go below that anyway, given what we're doing. I say that as one who has probably gotten more than my share of fives in the same process. But I'm getting better at saying what I feel in this situation and in that respect I kind of let her have it.

When I was a kid it was some stock like RCA that I considered cutting-edge electronics, and I found out various things after I'd bought the stock (which was only a couple of shares). One, dividends happen only every three months and when they do they're infinitesimal (especially if you only have a couple of shares). Second, stockholders actually have to attend meetings to speak up for the habit of sharing profits with shareholders although companies have good motivation to do that anyway.

But finally, the majority of truly successful American companies (like Nike and Apple) have gotten that way by exploiting something like Asian cheap labor or Namibian minerals, to the point that they are paying really low money and getting really high benefits, and somebody is losing big somewhere. You are basically putting your hard-earned cash into an American imperialism that has been colonizing every corner of the universe and is now beginning to turn on itself because there is nothing left to steal.

I think that experience turned me into a leftist hippie. And that was something I'm sure she didn't want to know.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Nazis are coming

Use violence to overthrow the American elections

Kill the immigrants, round them up in mass "deportation" camps

Imprison women who have abortions

Leave NATO, abandon Ukraine, join Putin

No more LGBTQ

Let's face it, this is what he's saying. He's not coming to the center because he doesn't have to win the election, as long as he can overthrow it. Let's face it: he'll never win a fair election anyway. But it doesn't matter. He's promised his followers that if they use violence to overthrow it, he'll pardon them. He's advocating violence to overthrow the American election.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

illinois ballot

I have, through a life of rough trial-and-error, come to believe in the law. It is made by people and carried out by people, who are not all perfect, but who (like me when I was on a jury) have been told to follow it as it's written. That's why when separate juries convict you-know-who I know he's guilty. Of course I knew he was guilty anyway.

I applaud the state of Illinois for removing him from the ballot. He shouldn't be on it. It will probably help him politically, because he wouldn't win Illinois anyway, and because his followers believe the libs are rigging the system against him. But the law is the law. He's an insurrectionist. He has violated the system by conspiring to overthrow it and cheat. I believe in free elections where the winner wins, and he's been doing everything in his power to ensure that some of our votes don't count.

Now is the time to stand up for democracy.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

No man is an Iowan

Of course I'm bitterly disappointed in the results of the Iowa Caucus. How could Iowa Republicans choose a pedophile, rapist, draft dodger, fraud, liar, sore loser, and country-wrecker? Well, about half of them just did, and I'm sure they had their reasons. I take a little heart in the results, which I will explain.

First, the reasons they voted for him. I have always maintained that it's racial, plain and simple. He speaks code for "Make America White Again," and he's made it clear that he would deport, if not kill, the increasing number of refugees at our border. And let's face it, though Biden might change the way he deals with them (could Biden's shutting the door on them completely take the wind out of Trump's sails?), this would be difficult too. On the war front it's possible that 1) these Americans care less about Ukraine than they even care about democracy; in fact, they wouldn't mind switching sides, i.e. joining Putin and Kim Jong Un to take up arms against the west. It seems hard to believe but another aspect of it is that conservatives seem to be hardening around the concept of no-acceptance-of-gays-or-trans, and the Russia-Ukraine war is one place where that comes into play. So there may be two issues, both unspoken really, but major enough to make people vote for him just because he's signalled so plainly what side he's on.

On the hopeful side, I would say that half the Republicans is not "control," especially given the fact that the other half may not vote for him no matter what happens. I think the fraud, cheating, and rape trials have hurt him and it's stunningly clear that he's all that they accuse him of and a few things you don't hear about, like knowing that the girl was thirteen. I think he should be denied being on the ballot in Colorado and Maine and everywhere else, because the law is the law even if gearing up to give him what he deserves may ultimately be good for him. He seems to thrive on ridiculing the law but hey, the law is what we have to protect us, ordinary Americans, from Nazi rampages. And I think we are not far from that stage.

So time will tell if the other half of Republicans just drift over to Trump (I think not) or if it coalesces around one of the others who then can pick up steam and be a real contender. I'm waiting for the day when he rails about all the people who have wronged him (and who he vows to use his Presidency to get revenge on), and people no longer listen. It would be a huge relief.

Friday, November 17, 2023

Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS