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The TerryReport

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Doug Terry

 

FORMER COLLEAGUE SLAMS BILL O’REILLY

WalMart Minimum Wage Raised

LESLEY GORE DIES

BOB SIMON OF CBS NEWS

BRIAN WILLIAMS’ PROBLEMS

TRAVELING TO CUBA NOW

RECENT POSTS: late ‘14, early ‘15

LATE 2014 posts

The Next President: who has a chance?

Obama Not in France

Police Strike

Wash. Monument

Greg Mort, Painter

Car Hype?

Obama’s Statement

Ben’s Chili Bowl

Cuba Vacation

Cuban Exiles: No

TSA Changes

Street Protests

Rolling Stone Mess

Prosperity Now

Campus Rapes

1 World Trade Center

Who Caused Riots?

Ferguson Updates

Ferguson Live Vid

MARION BARRY DIES

Marion Barry Gone

GOP Plays Nice?

(Some) 2014 posts

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

DEMOCRATS LOSE

ROCKET EXPLOSION

EBOLA PAGES

GONZALO CAM

Ebola Breaking Pt.

Ebola Panic!

Blood Moon

Kirk Counsins Rises

Personal Data: No!

White House Security

REDKINS NAME

Petty Fines in Ferguson, Mo

Police Stealing

Rick Perry Prays

Book Festival

SPEED CAMERAS

NATIVE AMERICANS?

PHILLY RIOTS

Hamas/Israel

Arrest Ferguson

Police Armies

Police Threat

Mistaken Police

Ferguson, Mo.

Ferguson2

LOWER WAGES

REAL ISSUE IN Missouri

Perry’s Mouth

Robin Williams

Tony Stewart

Israel/Gaza

People in Deep Debt

Ft. Hood Security

Paintball Gun

Ukraine Crash

Robert Teich/wealth

Supermoon 2013

Student Loans

Perry’s Joke

Personal Freedom

Challenge to Democracy

Murrieta Demonstrations

NASA/Arthur

WHY POOR?

CITIZEN’S WEALTH FUND

REAL AMERICA?

NTSB REPORT

Interstate Driving

OBAMA/Iraq

NO AIR TRAVEL

Iraq Plans

Obama’s Fault?

SICKNESS and poverty

LICENSE PLATE READERS

 Patricia Arquettet got big cheers at the Academy Awards calling for “equality” for women in America. What is equality? Does it mean different things to different people?

BILL O’REILLY IN HIS SALAD DAYS, LONG BEFORE HE LANDED AT FOX NEWS AND MADE TONS OF MONEY

SUMMING UP THE MESSED UP KEYSTONEXL DEBATE

“Making it” in the music business has become very tough, probably ten times harder than before the “record companies” lost a massive part of their revenues when CD sales tanked following the emergence of iTunes and, before that, Napster. How can anyone, no matter their talent and dedication, get established these days? Good question. Maybe the hardest one to answer.

Baltimore based Adryelle is a mutli-talented singer, composer and song writer who is working from the ground up to bring music, enjoyment and thought provoking lyrics to her fans and new listeners. She has been heard on radio both here in the states and in Europe and she plays many dates around the east coast of the U.S. Because of her talent, dedication, hard work and great songs, she’s our “featured artist of the month!” http://terryreport.com

http://terryreport.com

Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is now under real fire, of the verbal type, as a former colleague calls him out on his “war zone” reporting from Argenrtina.

THIS JUST IN!

WalMart discovers that paying workers crap wages is not such a good idea!

No, this is not a headline from The Onion. A TerryReport commentary on the plan to raise the “WalMart minimum” to 9 dollars an hour.

 

With almost two full years to go in his presidency, people are rushing, now, to “look back” (?) and try to imagine how Obama, the president who was elected as a transformational figure, is likely to be judged by history. Rushing things or not, people are doing it.

As The TerryReport has been writing for years, the quality of education at America’s colleges has been going down sharply even while the mantra of “you must get a four year degree” has been sung from the rooftops and in every major national media outlet. The NY Times (2.7.15) is out with a story that indicates that, perhaps, some people are catching on to the fact that colleges are charging more and more and providing less and less to  students, students who graduate with heavy debt loads, high hopes and the potential for major problems.

The Times article focuses on George Washington University, a school in the middle of DC (not far from the White House, in fact) that made itself into a powerhouse by becoming one of the most expensive schools in America (for a time, it was the most expensive.

One student told the Times, apparently referring to rich students whose parents foot the bill for many at G.W., “You can go to G.W. and essentially buy a degree.”

That is increasingly true at colleges across America and has been for years. More thoughts and an extended quote from the article about G.W. at this link.

The TerryReport often has gotten diverted from writing about more serious subjects by the press of daily news. People will come here, and many other web sites, for breaking news, but this tends to push out the reasons the TerryReport exists in the first place, which is to provide perspective, analysis and explanations about what is happening in our society and why. This ain’t no disco party, folks.

Here’s a big, important subject that almost no one is writing or talking about: the future of work. Over the next decades, work is going to have to be redefined. Who gets paid, by whom and for doing what will be the central issues. Actually, redefining work is nothing new, but, next time, the changes are likely to be bigger than any time in human history. MORE THOUGHTS at this link.

Some observations about the dashcam video of the plane crash in Taiwan: First, hey, America, let’s all get dashcams, too. They have been adapted around the world, particularly in Russia, much more widely than here and they prove to be valuable in recording car crashes. This is not the first plane crash to be caught on a dashcam, also. There was one at a military base in Russia that captured the crash of a huge jet aircraft. If someone pulls around your car and then slams on the brakes because they are angry about something, a dashcam would settle the dispute and the offender would, if prosecuted, have to pay a heavy price for risking a crash intentionally. Ultimately, dashcams can answer the question asked hundreds of thousands of times: what caused this crash, which, in turn, can gradually improve safety on the roads and highways.

Another factor to note: your car, everyone’s car less than 10 yrs. old (and many older) have black boxes that record speed and other data. If you were to be accused of a serious traffic violation because of that black box, a dashcam might be the only way to prove you weren’t speed or violating the law in some other way. The dashcam could be your only friend in a legal dispute.

Dashcams offer the potential of knowing why certain crashes, including the airliner in Taiwan, crashed. The video will prove invaluable to crash investors and perhaps save lives in the future.

Another point: when you see debris and cars stopped on a freeway, you need to slow down and then stop yourself, if possible without causing another crash. The driver of the small truck coming on the crash scene has no idea what just happened, but he keeps going. If he had stopped, it would tell the other drivers behind him that something serious had happened. We all need, especially on freeways, to watch the other cars in front of us and respond before another crash happens. That means slowing way down or stopping when there are cars stopped in the roadway. Otherwise, a driver behind your car might not slow at all and crash into the stopped cars.

 

Mitt Romney just did all of us a great favor by deciding not to seek the presidential nomination. (1.30.15) It seems that Romney and his family, specifically his wife, thought he could be “re-branded” as a man of deep religious faith and with great compassion for people by talking about his Mormon faith and playing up his many individual acts of kindness over the years when he has found people through his church or his work who needed help. This idea, of course, was hopeless. He could never remerge with a different image because the one he has is fixed in the public mind. Many leaders and campaign professionals in his own Republican party were saying in private, and some in public, “please, Mitt, don’t do it.”

We all spent many months considering the kind of person Romney is and he could never emerge beyond his background as a financial manipulator, not a businessman, who made mountains of money by investing in and, in some cases, gutting companies to make them leaner and more profitable, thus causing the stock to rise. That’s what Romney did for the bulk of his adult life. It made him very rich and gave him, if he did not have it previously, an attitude of a very rich guy who would, in private, disparage “the 47%” of Americans who expect a life of handouts and don’t care enough about their own lives to even try harder on their own.

On a personal level, whatever you might think of Romney, I found him to be an inauthentic man, perhaps the most inauthentic person I’ve ever seen at a high level of American politics. I do not think this conclusion came from any prejudice against him. He’s had great success in his life, first in business, which involves careful judgment along with great financial risks, next as the man who “saved” the winter Olympics in his home state of Utah and as a moderate governor of Massachusetts. Like most Americans, I admire success, but I did not worship it and I realize that many factors, like advantageous birth, play into it. He’s also a guy who thinks it is grand to own five houses and put an elevator for his car in his newest.

Despite his negative attributes, Romney looks the part, he looks like a guy who certainly could be president of the US. To see him actually in the job, however, would have made me choke, because I just can’t see him as a real human being. He might be wonderful in private, but, to my eyes, he comes across in public as someone who is robotic, playing a role and not enjoying it much. When he was out campaigning, he was constantly saying silly or really stupid things to people he’d meet and I could never understand why. That could indicate someone who feels he’s been forced into a role, like trying to make up for  what his father never could get, the presidency, but who is not happy to be doing it. I don’t know what’s going on inside Romney’s brain, but his randomness in public, with comments bordering on the idiotic, made me very uncomfortable. I guess people in the “anyone but Obama” crowd forced themselves to overlook the obvious.

So, whew!, that missile missed our heads. Romney will leave the field to others more anxious to take on the grueling 20 months of campaigning and begging for money that seeking the presidency has become.

For thoughts on who, Republican or Democrat, has a chance to win, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Thinking about traveling to Cuba? You can’t. At least it is not wide open yet. Travel is still restricted, mildly, and there is no regular air service from the US to Cuba. BUT, you can go if you want to and you qualify under the law.  Here are the details.

New apartments and office buildings on the western end of Queens, with a large office tower in the distance (silver) seen from the upper east side of Manhattan (with one set of old, abandoned, ghost like buildings still standing in the foreground, located on the southern end of Roosevelt Island. (photo by Doug Terry, copyrighted, 2014

“Patterns of Light and Color”, a photograph by Doug Terry, Copyright, 2104

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