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OPINIONOPINION

Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 9, 2024 

RICH JOHNSON 

NOW THAT’S RICH

STUART TOLCHIN

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LaQuetta ShambleE

PUT THE LIGHTS ON


THE UNTIED STATES OF 
AMERICA

WILL ROGERS....NEVER MISS A GOOD 
CHANCE TO SHUT UP

One thing I learned in school is that being 
clever can help me get through a lot of tough times. 
Times like today. What you see in my caption is not a 
typographical error. It is my attempt to use cleverness 
to recover from the results of the elections which took 
place on Super Tuesday. Actually, the results were no 
surprise. As Bernie Sanders explains in his comments 
this morning “This is it.”The election will once again be between Joe 
Biden and Donald Trump. And, frighteningly, at this point most polls 
have Trump in the lead. Bernie warns “I happen to believe that if Trump is 
elected once again this November, the 250-year-old experiment of modern 
democracy in this country may very well come to end.”

 I don’t trust anyone anymore. I think everything I read is 
calculated misinformation designed to mislead and manipulate and I don’t 
like it. Maybe Bernie is just trying to scare us so that we will contribute 
money to the Democratic campaign. I do think it is important that Trump 
to be defeated but I believe that there is a more important problem to be 
faced. A defeated Trump or even a Trump Super-Patriot imitation could 
run in following elections if the major problem remains. How can such 
a huge percentage of the American electorate be so ignorant, willingly 
uninformed as to actually support a Monster such as Donald Trump. We 
should go back to Thomas Jefferson to understand. He proclaimed that 
an “informed electorate is an absolute prerequisite to a Democracy.” In 
a Democracy the elected officials are intended to be SERVANTS of the 
people NOT THEIR AUTOCRATIC DICTATORIAL MASTER. Abraham 
Lincoln made it clear in his famous Gettysburg Address given at a time 
that the entire country was at war in an attempt to keep the Nation united. 
One thing we all remember from School is the concluding words of the 
Gettysburg Address in which he reminds the country that the nation will 
stay united and that the government of the People, by the People, and for 
the People, shall not perish from the earth.” Yes, we remember the words 
but was it ever discussed in Schools what those words meant. Are deeper 
meanings and their importance ever discussed in School?

 Talking about the Schools brings me to my real point. My friend 
Gene, in 2017 after retiring from 30 years of practicing Law, volunteered 
as a tutor in the elementary Schools of New Mexico. The result of this 
experience was a book he wrote, illustrated by his 5 grandchildren, in 
which he laments the conditions of these chronically underperforming 
Schools. He dedicated the book to the teachers “who get up each morning 
and go to school. Gene describes the condition of the teachers who still 
try, in a system that is beyond broken, to teach all too many students who 
don’t care, have completely given up, hate school, are scarred by their home 
lives such that they are disruptive, defiant, insolent, and antagonistically 
behind where they should be and probably will remain so forever.

This situation not only exists in New Mexico but is also an 
appropriate description of Schools all over this Country! In Gene’s book 
all kinds of suggestions are made for reforming the educational system 
including mentoring programs, limiting teacher/student ratios, not 
limiting students by requiring memorization rather than understanding, 
and importantly failing to find areas in which each student can have a 
feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Other suggestions are made 
as to how to assist working mothers and single- parent families.

Today most Americans seek diversions rather than seeking 
information and understanding pursue other kinds of short-term goals. 
Consequently, they remain ignorant and uninformed about the workings 
of the government and as we have seen all too recently they are easy prey 
for larger-than-life autocratic personalities.

 Efforts must be made to drastically reform the educational 
system or as Bernie Sanders predicts the experiment of modern democracy 
will end; but I don’t think the experiment is ready to die yet. Realize how 
Germany has recovered from Hitler and reunited itself. We can do the 
same if we recognize the real problem and provide satisfactory learning 
experiences for each student and help for the families. Democracy is 
worth the trouble and our most talented and clever minds should be made 
aware of the need and use their gifts for a more responsible purpose. By 
the way did you vote or listen to the State of the Union speech? 

In this week’s column I am pulling from the treasure chest of my favorite 
analyst on America: William Penn Adair Rogers aka Will Rogers. He 
was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Oologah, Oklahoma, November 4, 1879. 
A lifelong Democrat Rogers did support Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Will’s only 
political office was as Mayor of Beverly Hills which allowed him to joke about do-nothing 
politicians…such as himself.

In upcoming columns, I will tailor by adding political quips and quotes of Will’s. His 
observations will aid our perspective. For now, I will revisit his more general commentaries 
on life, etc. The first quote I encompassed in the title of this column…and confess it is a 
dictum I have routinely ignored my whole life:

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

So, less of me and more of Will:

“Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.”

“Common sense ain't common.”

“There are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works.”

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

“Give her a day, and then in return Momma gives you the other 364.”

“Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.”

“Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.”

“Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.”

“Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

“When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.”

“Always drink upstream from the herd.”

“In this country people don’t vote for, they vote against.”

“When you're through learning, you're through.”

“What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”

“I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”

“We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”

“If stupidity got us into this, why can't stupidity get us out?”

“I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with 28 years ago.”

“Do the best you can, and don't take life too serious.”

Of particular value to me are these two (This also refers to cats):

“When God created dogs, He just sat back and smiled.”

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went.”

“I’ll end with this spoken by the Amazing Mr. Rogers:

“Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously, and the politicians as 
a joke, when it used to be vice versa.”

-Rich

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TOM PURCELL


GET THIS: MEN AND WOMEN’S 
BRAINS ARE DIFFERENT.

Using a powerful, first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence 
model, Stanford Medicine was able to determine with 
a 90% success rate whether or not an MRI scan of 
human brain activity was coming from a male brain 
or a female brain.

“The findings, the investigators suggest, help to resolve 
a longstanding controversy about whether reliable sex 
differences exist in the human brain,” reports Genetic 
Engineering & Biotechnology News.

Controversy?

I grew up an only boy with five sisters. My father and I figured out more than 
half a century ago that men and women have innately different brains.

However, prior to about 20 years ago, according to Stanford Medicine 
Magazine, the neuroscience community thought the difference in male and 
female brains was due to cultural influences.

You know, the old argument that boys like toy trucks because toy trucks are 
pushed on them as children and little girls like dolls because dolls are pushed 
on them.

But in the early 2000s those claims were disabused by a variety of studies, 
according to Psychology Today that, put simply, showed the circuitry in male 
and female brains is wired differently and these innate differences result in 
different behavior.

It’s not to say a male brain is better than a female brain, or vice versa.

But Stanford Medicine Magazine says that women generally have greater 
reading and writing abilities than men.

They’re also better at retrieving information from their long-term memory — 
especially everything we’ve done wrong since the moment we met them.

A 2014 University of Pennsylvania study found that females routinely use both 
sides of their brains in a highly coordinated manner, whereas men often use 
only one.

Women would be shocked if they knew how many things we use only half a 
brain to do.

For example, one study found that the male brain doesn’t pick up as many 
sensory cues as a woman’s.

When a man walks into his home, for example, he isn’t likely to notice dust — 
which, I’m told, consists of fine, dry particles that settle on furniture.

That’s one reason men do one-third as much housework as women, according to 
Fast Company — and also why, according to the great humorist P.J. O’Rourke, 
we clean our place about once every girlfriend.

The male brain also has superior visual-spatial awareness. We’re better at 
navigation, creating and using tools or understanding abstract concepts, such 
as geometry.

Our noggins are wired for larger spaces, such as the garage, the backyard, the 
golf course, or, some ancient time ago, hunting wooly mammoths out in the 
wild with our buddies.

Sure, some men are neat freaks and homebodies and some women are sloppy 
and couldn’t care less about the inside of their homes.

But on average, where biology is concerned, it’s clear male and female brains 
are different.

For instance, notes Stanford Medicine, why are women more prone to suffering 
depression, while men are twice as likely to have issues with drugs and alcohol 
and 10 times more likely to suffer dyslexia?

Personally, I think a man is at his best when he finds a lifelong companion 
whose female brain is strong in multiple ways in which his is weak.

Look, surely we can all agree we don’t need an MRI to know that men and 
women have different ways of thinking.

To borrow from legendary humorist Dave Barry, we all know which parent is 
more likely to drive off from the supermarket with the baby still in the baby 
seat he had set on the roof of the car.


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