Why do people have to lie?

I just discovered a video posted by a former work colleague of mine that he’s posted on GBCTV.NET.

It looks just like an interview, but its produced by an outfit that shoots them on demand to create a kind of legacy trail. It was just made recently during the Covid-19 lock-down.

In it, that fellow, who’s now 70 is reminiscing his entire career in a colorful, if not highly “embellished” fashion. Even though Trump has now “legalized” overt lying in our society, why is it that some folks like this guy has to lie or twist the truth in order to make him look so great? It just puzzles me...

At his age, he should have learned to stop behaving that way for quite a few years, realized that at the end of the day, only the most objective and true story-telling passes muster and is what the rest of the world is interested in…

Too bad!

Want to communicate better: Stand up!

Steven Colbert’s “The Late Show", from CBS, currently filmed from his home and backyard in Montclair, New Jersey, due to the coronavirus pandemic. In my opinion, it’s not what it used to be in studio.

Sure, that’s just like David Letterman used to do it in studio, sitting behind his desk to deliver his late-night comedy routine.

At home, though, I think Colbert should be standing. Most of his good studio performance was delivered standing up, which, in my sense added to the dynamics, liveliness and interest in the show. His current sitting position makes him look weak, passive and not in control.

I strongly feel he should be standing up, as this would add to the quality of his delivery. The lungs function better, the voice projects more forcefully and it forces the speaker to be much more present, concentrated and in the moment.

I’ve discovered this for myself during the past 6 years as I have relinquished a sitting-down position in my office, in favor to a stand-up desk. But that’s my simple point of view.

What’s yours?

Neighborhood concert

June is normally when public outdoor concerts begin in earnest around Park City, but not this year.

Concerts have fallen victim to the virus and won’t be part of our summer experience. In the middle of that, a former neighbor of ours who lives across the street from our previous home, decided to organize a mini live concert on a large lawn for the block to enjoy.

We stopped back on Friday while it was underway between 5 and 9 pm. The crowd was small, but attentive, half of them wore masks, the music was okay but good enough.

We listened to a few songs and moved on as we realized summer was here to stay in spite of our sudden, bizarre and baffling state of pandemic...

Utah skier-days slammed by Covid-19

A week or so ago, we learned that the total skier visits to U.S. ski areas was down almost 14% from the previous season, with 51.1 million for 2019–20.

Yesterday, Ski Utah announced a similar 14.3% reduction to its own skier-days to 4,392,698 visits, yet its best 4th season on record, despite a truncated ski season.

Inside the United States, ski areas were only open for an average of 99 days this 2019-20 season, down from 121 days previously, with 93% of its resorts having closed earlier than projected.

All these bad news are not preventing me from trying to estimate how these visitations are distributed among Utah 15 resorts.

That’s right, we used to just have 14 of them, but this year, Westward, the 15th one, just opened its doors in Park City, adding its numbers to the overall total.

Resorts that close very late in the season like Snowbird, Alta, Brighton and Solitude where even more penalized than the rest.

Let’s hope next season will be better and to allow for that, let’s all follow the pandemic best practices!

Purchasing furniture on line

A few days ago, I ordered a pair of nightstands on line from Walmart and received them on Wednesday. What I had not realized was that the product I ordered wasn’t assembled. Big mistake!

So, here I am with two flat boxed containing all elements (wood, nails, glue, screw) unwilling but ready to put together the beautiful nightstand pictured here.

It takes me 4 hours to assemble the first piece, but the package I got was missing a few key parts to help me complete the job. Further, and unlike the picture shown, the whole nightstand looked flimsy, its paint job was of poor quality and since I didn’t want to wait a week or so to receive whatever was missing,

I had no other choice but return the unopened package and the mostly completed piece of furniture to my local Walmart for a full refund.

Live and learn!

Trump’s dad rules are killing him

Somewhere I read that Trump’s father raised him with some strange principals: “I you get hit, hit back three times harder”, “Never, ever apologize”.

Based on the three first years of his term as president, we’ve seen these rules applied faithfully, over and over again, by Donald. The problem with them is that are ratcheting-up their author into a corner, from which there’s no exit in sight.

This short-term, bridge-burning strategy works well in unique transactions like many that have brought some success and much fame to the man, but would fail miserably in a repeat-business mode.

If I’m not mistaken a re-election is the essence of repeat business and Donald Trump hasn’t realized fully yet that his business-model is not built with repetition in mind...

What kind of jerk is John Bolton?

John Bolton is about my age and has been around the block of politics.

Successively attorney, political commentator, Republican consultant and former diplomat, his last job was Assistant to Trump for National Security Affairs (NSA) from April 2018 to September 2019.

He’s the one who called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal, ultimately culminating into U.S. withdrawal in May 2018.

He was fired by Trump and subsequently wrote a book about his tenure in the administration in which he says that the president is incompetent as well as dangerous, believes Finland is part of Russia, ignores that the UK is nuclear power and claims that Trump asked China’s Xi to buy more cereals in order to help him get reelected while supporting concentrations camps for Chinese Uighurs.

With all of his criticisms of Trump, Bolton refused to testify against him during the impeachment procedures and helped him get away with murder. Now, he stands to make millions of dollars with his book.

Another true American Patriot!

We got cut off!

If your livelihood depends on the telephone, whether you’re in sales or anywhere in management, you always want to fit that extra important call into your day, before you leave and go home.

That’s exactly what Madame Beyl, my former boss at Look ski bindings, did, as her CEO husband was about to make a speech before the entire personnel, prior to shutting down the plant for a whole month on the eve of the sacrosanct 1976 August vacation.

So here she was, in her office, chatting away with one of her favorite ski retailers while her presence was long requested by Monsieur Beyl. I was sitting across from her, biding my time, as she was about to discuss something with me, and had to wait for the phone conversation to come to an end.

Unable to find her near the stage where he was about to deliver his message, and knowing damn well what she was up to, he ran like a madman down the hall, irrupted furiously into her office, grabbed a pair of scissors laying on her desk and snapped her telephone cord!

A surprising, fast, effective and definite move!

A road trip with Monsieur Beyl

I started with Look ski bindings back in the Fall of 1974.

In November, I had to attend a meeting organized by Monsieur Jean Beyl, Look’s founder and owner, with Gérard Rubaud, who, at the time, was Rossignol/Dynastar’s head of racing.

We were headed for Tignes, near Val d’Isère, a ski resort, where both the Rossignol and Dynastar Pro Teams were training ahead of a season of competitions. I didn’t know Mr. Beyl very well, except that I knew that he could be, at times, a bit eccentric.

Our meeting was 280 miles (450 km) from Nevers, where Look headquarters were located, and it took between 7 to 8 hours to get there. The fast motorways didn’t exist at that time. I was driving a company’s Peugeot 304, a small sedan, and had Mr. Beyl as my passenger.

At the time he was driving a Maserati Indy coupe. I wasn’t too excited to have him along for such a long ride. In fact, I was a bit apprehensive of being in such closed quarters for so long with my big boss.

As soon as we got going, he was fumbling with the car climate controls and couldn’t find an acceptable setting. That lasted the whole trip. He also was commenting on my driving by saying “You should have passed this car...” or “weren’t you entering that curve a bit fast?” “You need to give it more gas!” plus over and over “Eww! I can’t get that heater to work!”

I was just starting with the company and I found that experience to be pure torture, yet we got along well and we both made it to Tignes in one piece. Monsieur Beyl didn’t seem too mad at me and I didn’t get fired.

Yet, he didn’t choose to make the return trip with me; he probably wasn’t too impressed with my driving and suffered enough from Peugeot’s unsophisticated climate control!

From prejudice to racism and back…

We’ve been talking and thinking a lot about racism, lately. I believe it is essentially a cultural issue that is tied to prejudice and bigotry.

As the theory goes, prejudice happens when we prejudge negatively people without knowing much about their culture, beliefs, thoughts, or feelings.

Bigotry is more intense than prejudice, as it is often accompanied by some discriminatory behavior that’s more arrogant and mean-spirited.

I see racism as a further worsening of the two other behaviors, as it based and delineated on racial differences and often becomes violent and out of control.

Yet, at the end of day, all these behavior are incorporated into culture and originate essentially from parental and social education as well as schooling.

Parents tend to pass too easily their prejudices onto their own children during normal, casual conversations. Schools censure “inconvenient truths” from their curriculum and build false narratives that entire generation will staunchly believe in.

Every judgment or prejudice that we pass on others and that are within hearing distance from our children, contaminate them for life and perpetuate a culture of preconceived views that poison the well of culture and society.

Yes, at various degrees, we’re all prejudice and perhaps worse, and that sad culture is mostly the by-product of the way we’ve been raised.

Now might be the right time to taking concrete steps in order to stamp these behaviors out of our lives!

Laurent Boix-Vives, 1926-2020

Rossignol’s iconic president for about half a century, Laurent Boix-Vives passed away on Thursday, June 18th at the age of 93.

Born in 1926, he purchased Rossignol in 1956 to turn-around the failing company into a world leader in the ski business. I had the pleasure and honor of working for Laurent Boix-Vives while at Lange from 1982 through 1986. 

Not only did this help me raise my young family, gave me some strong, practical experience in the boot business, facilitated my move to the Rocky Mountains when we set up a new R&D center in Salt Lake City, but it also helped me understand how to make a tricky seasonal ski business more financially viable.

He also cannot be dissociated from his very different, yet quite successful competitor, Georges Salomon, who left us a decade earlier.

Salomon was obsessed with the product, its marketing and a quest for innovation, whereas Boix-Vives who supported ski racing wholeheartedly, was more of a public person who loved the financial side of business and enjoyed contacts with the who-is-who of captains of industry and politicians.

Strikingly different but highly successful, both were the two bright pillars of the French ski industry and with Laurent Boix-Vives departure, they won’t be replaced any time soon...

Comparing Covid-19’s outcomes…

Yesterday I was looking at Johns Hopkins’ numbers of deaths worldwide.

Sure, these numbers are subject to a wide variety of variation in their precision, particularly with tyrannical governments that might be willfully hiding numbers or have very poor accounting, like Brazil, China, Iran or Russia.

This said, after glancing at the numbers, I was struck by the fact that the largest number of death per 100,000 people were the highest in affluent countries like Belgium, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, the USA, Holland and Ireland.

Those are advanced societies, but aren’t they a form of failing democracies? Trump likes to say that his ultimate responsibility is to protect Americans, but there’s nothing particularly brilliant with his performance against the tiny virus.

Contrast this with Germany, Norway, Japan, Korea or Taiwan and one is right to wonder why was these countries significantly performing much better. The Swedish experiment of no-lock-down is also remarkable when compared with Norway’s stellar performance.

Less politics and much more effectiveness, I guess.

A priceless new day...

...As are all the days that we’ll still get to live in our future…

The reality is that we take them for granted and don’t value them as they should.

If we are in reasonably good health, free to enjoy life, financially comfortable and pretty much able to still make our own decisions, we should all be excited at the dawn of a new day.

We should never be mad, grumpy, depressed or hesitant to bite into the chance of living a new daily adventure filled with plans, discovery and accomplishments.

If we don’t, we are wasting an opportunity to enrich ourselves, the people close to us and the world. Too often, we’re blind to the luck we have to be alive, have survived so long in good health and to have gotten where we are today.

Each morning and according to the moment’s conditions, is a great time to reflect on what’s important to us, what we’d love and want to do given our possibilities, and set our mind to execute a few good things that will take us in that direction.

Doing less than that would be pathetic!

Shopping on line fries my brain!

I need some furniture and I’m trying to make a fast and furious selection by going on line.

Twenty years ago, we would have jumped in the car, driven down to Salt Lake City’s furniture district and might have settled on something we weren’t sure we liked after visiting three store and literally be on our knees.

To avoid that painful experience, I’ve been exploring the web for the past 10 days and while I’m educating myself a lot, I find that it comes at a huge expense of my dwindling – it seems – brain power.

At the end of the day, I feel that my brains are fried and I can’t do this anymore.

Too many choices, options, and ideas, but much more confusion and paralysis than during the good old days…

What am I to do?

Where are good presidential candidates hiding?

This year, once more, just like in 2016, we’ll end up with two bad presidential candidates that were selected through a questionable selection process, called primary elections. Sure, one is much worse than the other, but the other is not the brightest star in our sick firmament.

There should be a better way to run a democracy than this rigged contest filled with incompetent candidates. Some folks will say the parties are at fault for over-controlling the process and giving us jerks to vote for.

Maybe tight control by parties over the process should give way to a more selective system that prioritizes the kind of talent that should be essential to run a country. Not notoriety, big mouth, or star status (Trump). Not seniority, shallow smile or “reputation” (Biden).

So what should it be: Ability to manage people and teams, listen, solve problems, capacity for exceptional energy output, active imagination and ability to motivate and unify.

Furthermore, a good candidate should be picked among the 60 millions people that are more than 45 years old and less than 60, it should be able to think aggressively and to desire progress, not just maintenance or return to the “good old days”.

I would hope that we could find 50,000 people or one-tenth of one percent in that group, that are super-talented and pick a few good candidate from that crowd.

These lofty qualities I’m talking about and the candidates I’m dreaming of are a far cry from our two current, mediocre national options!

Is no one perfect?

When you ask folks what they think of their favorite show business star, politician, writer or mentor, they generally answer, he/she is great, wonderful, out of this world, etc, which my book means that person is a perfect “10”.

Reality is quite different though, because, is spite of all of our outstanding qualities, we remain basically flawed individuals, with some outstanding qualities and many flaws.

This is why, when friends of mine say: “Biden is a jerk, I won’t vote for him and therefore I’ll have to vote for Trump”, I answer: “I agree that Biden isn’t great, I give him a 5 out 10, but Trump is a piece of shit and he’d be lucky if I’d give an overly generous 1!”

Who's pulling Wall Street strings?

Current market volatility during the Covid-19 crisis and race protests is something to be expected, even though it seems clear that some entities are doing everything in their power to pull up Wall Street.

Well, the stock market is eyeing the future, not the current situation, and the both aren’t pretty at all. So what’s going on? I personally see Trump asking his Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, to find creative and effective ways to influence the stock market, which for Trump is the yardstick by which he thinks the nation measures economic success and is key to his re-election.

Mnuchin knows most of the ropes and quite a few important folks on Wall Street. After all, he used to be an investment banker and hedge fund manager. Among other jobs, he was on the Sears-Kmart board of directors before it went bankrupt and was eventually sued of “asset stripping”. During the financial crisis he also was embroiled in more lawsuits when he sold OneWest Bank to the CIT group. So the man isn’t what you’d call a saint.

Now, Manipulating stock prices takes place more often than people might think. Achieving it in a perfectly legal way is not necessarily difficult, depending on how much trading power an entity has. Many ways exist to drive market prices in a certain directions, but that only work if one or several large investors work on stocks they own and begin selling them off.

As this happens, prices will naturally take a plunge and panic other investors that might begin to unload the stocks as well creating a vicious circle. The opposite holds also true if large institutional investors can be convinced to purchase a basket of stocks for a variety of good reasons, especially if they come from financial leaders that know one thing or two about influencing market trends.

When other investors notice that the stock prices begin to rise again, they also want to buy up the stock so they can ride the uptrend and make a profit, creating a short lived, virtuous circle. Could Mnunchin and his Wall Street friends try to prop up the market in that manner? Why not? At least this is how I explain the lack of logic behind the current stop market rise after reaching a record low on March 23, 2020.

We’ll know more in July when second quarter results bring some grim reality back to Trump and Wall Street...

The stolen bear is back!

Less than 18 months ago, I was lamenting the theft of a charming, albeit very small, Park City outdoor sculpture, in our neighborhood.

It was an adorable representation of a bear sitting on rock, enjoying his morning coffee while staring at our ridge lines.

Last week, as we were walking by the same house, the bear had surprisingly returned to its observatory spot.

This time, the color of the coffee mug had been updated from black to red. I assumed that its owners reached out to their pocket book and re-ordered a perfect copy of their coffee-sipping bear.

Welcome back!

Trump unplugged

The last thing Trump needed was George Floyd’s murder to add to its Covid-19 problems.

It seems that if our president is extremely quick at insulting and demeaning his opponents, he’s woefully incompetent at handling crisis.

When you add his thousands of lies, low-blows and blunders of all kinds, I wonder how, deep inside and honestly (?), his supporters are dealing with his avalanche of misdeeds.

Granted, they probably meant well when they elected the man back in 2016, and poor judgment befalls all humans, particular younger ones, under 45 years of age.

This said, anything he now utters make it very hard to forgive or pass under the: “it’s Trump, let him be himself” rationale, because he’s now making a horse’s ass out of each and everyone of his former and current supporters.

I’d rather be dead, than survive as a Trump 2016 voter!

The shrinking Snowbird tram

The 2,500 skiable acres that Snowbird ski resort claims are accessed by 10 chairlifts plus its iconic tram that can normally welcome 125 skiers and snowboarders within its large cabin, and whisk them 2,900 vertical feet, in approximately seven minutes, to the top of the mountain.

This summer and more likely this winter too, if nothing changes, mask-wearing passengers will be limited to just 25! Talk about a massive drop in uphill capacity…

Today, all of Snowbird lifts boast a total capacity of 17,400 riders per hour, but its tram capacity alone will dwindle from 1,000 to just 200 passengers per hour.

Now, I can see the lines going down 6 miles to the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon on busy weekends!

If the resort’s total lift capacity were to be cut by say, two-third or half, we’d be looking at a total capacity comprised between 5,800 to 8,700 people per hour.

Unless something is done to allow a full chairlift load with masked riders, patience will now trump audacity when someone's considering to ski the “Bird”!

Which shape of recovery?

Today, everyone is wondering which shape will the post-Covid-19 recovery take.

Highly optimistic folks predict it will be in the form of a “V”. As soon as the economy reopens, business will jump back to normal almost as as fast as it went down.

More realistic people are of the opinion that it will take a long time to develop a short-term treatment followed by an effective vaccine. They also also think it will take longer for consumers to go back to their favorite restaurant, bar, theater, stay in a hotel they feel good about, or sit down in an airplane. They see a long and gradual recovery shaped like the famous Nike “swoosh”, logo.

Pessimists are afraid that we’ll be hit with a return of the virus that is going to cancel a short-lived recovery and will take even more time and resources to get us back to normal. Their version of the recovery looks like the letter “W”.

Finally, there are those who are even more pessimistic and can’t see any way out of our current economical predicament. They see no recovery and their future situation is shaping like a “L”…

Where do I stand in that alphabet guessing-game?

I’m a Nike fan and I’ll go for the “swoosh!”

Is Wall Street being manipulated?

I’m not the only one who feels that the American stock market behavior appears totally disconnected with our country’s terrible economic condition.

At the source of all that, is Donald Trump’s reelection in November. Based on past presidential elections, Trump is convinced that the state of the economy is voters’ number one concern.

This might have been true historically, but with the confluence of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, the focus is now shifting very fast in another direction.

So with the help of Steven Mnuchin, his Secretary of the Treasury and a former Goldman Sachs executive, the president he pulling on all the strings he can to influence

Wall Street numbers, including manipulating the last unemployment figures that overstated reality by a fat 3 percent. Some have also asserted that Trump and his inner circle appear to be manipulating the stock market for their own personal financial gain.

The same sources believe that this likely or possible insider trading may involve hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions. The Republican Party, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media, are helping the embattled president in an effort of all-out propaganda.

They’ve pledged total loyalty to him and are launched like a massive train towards its second-term, so no evidence to the contrary is likely to derail them.

What may deflect Donald Trump’s dream, however, are the second quarter’s economic numbers that are guaranteed to be abysmal, will flatten stock portfolios back to reality and reset the U.S. economy at its the real place...

Father and son working together

For most of the past weekend, I helped my son rebuild a deck at his mountain cabin and what a wonderful experience this was!

It’s not often that I have a chance to spend time, one-on-one with him, but we need to do this more often.

Even though he shares half of my DNA, my son is totally different from me in both his tastes and his way of approaching or solving problems. Yet, in the end his work results speak from themselves and show that he’s very good at what it does.

This goes a long way in demonstrating that there’s more than one way to skin a cat and this is a refreshing truth in an era where best practices are often drowning what makes us distinct and unique individuals...

Inter ski school GS at Planachaux, Switzerland

The Avoriaz ski school in the French Alps, always had a very cosy relationship with its Swiss neighbors and counterparts at both Les Crozets and Champéry.

The season before I came to instruct at Avoriaz, a ski race was organized at the end of the season between the three ski-schools on the French side. The following year, just 50 years ago today, a GS race was set up just above the village of Champéry.

I remember that we drove the 90 miles between Morzine and Champéry to that resort’s lower tram station. The trip through the ski resorts of Châtel and Morgins took about two hours and after we boarded the old and tiny 18-passenger cabin, we got to Planachaux, a plateau located at 6,100 feet high, and next to the new resort of Les Crozets.

The reason for the late date in the season was that we had just returned from a group vacation in Turkey and the record-breaking snow year had left huge amounts of snow that made for excellent skiing conditions.

The one-run, GS race was preceded by plenty of glasses of Fendant, the local white wine, that killed most of the participants not used to an early-morning high-octane beverage. I remember that I didn’t do well in that race and, of course, blamed the Fendant for my lackluster performance.

The race was followed by a wonderful raclette at “Chez Coquoz”. It was my first time tasting and falling in love with that wonderful meal.

The afternoon went on with a deluge of drinks of all sorts, followed by another meal and concluded by shots of Williamine and Abricotine, Valais’ staple after-dinner drinks.

The road trip back home was so long and hazardous (on account of the sheer volume of alcohol ingested) that it was never continued during the remaining seasons I was still instructing...

Is there a recipe for handling racism?

In my view, the recipe exists, can work but needs to be skillfully orchestrated. It also requires efforts on all parts of the spectrum and the parties involved. It must be presented in such way that it makes the old way of thinking both retrograde and “uncool”.

Just like the successful anti-tobacco campaign that unofficially began in the seventies before culminating in the nineties, that made smoking socially unacceptable, someone has to find a way to categorize racism and social bias as totally out of step with our times.

This starts at home, at school, at work, inside institutions, in the entertainment world, via social media and must become part of the contemporary culture. Further, every individual must learn how to respond positively and without any ambiguity against any racist or biased suggestion, comment or innuendo, and it must be constantly cultivated to become a reflex response.

We need to keep in mind that police behavior is just an expression of what the community behind the force really is and think, so we can’t hide behind it. Our police is our face no matter how we try to justify it.

Finally, there is some effort required from those who feel disenfranchised by helping to soften the edges that divide us, by reaching out through behavior changes and assimilation efforts, ever so slightly these might be, towards the mainstream or majority of society to show good faith, help lowering the mountains of distrust, and desire to improve the entire social make-up...

Racism is a symptom

Let’s start by a few definitions, as we need to call a spade a spade.

This should help a great deal in knowing what racism is all about. Literally, it’s a form of prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. It doesn’t have to be just race though.

The India Cast system is pretty close to that definition too, even though most Indians look similar, or it also applies to what separates someone who lives in a wealthy enclave compared to someone living in a less affluent neighborhood, someone who can claim a superior social class or a different sex. There are therefore plenty of ways of expressing prejudices.

This said, just like CO2 emissions are one of the symptoms of overpopulation, racism or discrimination is the symptom of a bunch of conditions that include hypocrisy, jealousy, fear of the unknown and personal insecurity, among others. The dosage of these elements vary vastly by individuals.

Now, it would seem to me that if racism is indeed treatable, it is essential to successfully address the above tendencies in order to eliminating that terrible social plague.

As I expressed previously, I suspect that racism is universal and that, at different degrees, we’re all part of the problem, but the most egregious violations or displays or racism are where we the eradication should begin.

Like with any behavior change, it can only be done through systematic education and awareness, and both the parents and the schools are where most of the effort should happen. Any corrective action must also be continuously re-enforced so it becomes effective.

Next, I’ll try to expend on the means that could be implemented in helping us wipe out that outrageous behavior from our society.

The American Culture is Racist

Popular wisdom indicates that folks from Minnesota are courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered. This is what is known as “Minnesota nice”.

In spite of that alluring reputation, these qualities were nowhere to be found on May 25th, when George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in Minneapolis, after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, pressed his knee to Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes, while Floyd was handcuffed and face down, helped by two other officers as a third one prevented onlookers from intervening.

Quite understandably, this racist murder opened up a series of demonstrations, rioting and soul-searching about the state of racism in America. In my opinion, a bunch of Civil Rights Acts as well as the Voting Right Act that were meant to change society, have been laws with no teeth and racism, while taking a different face, has continued unabated.

When a horrific crime like the one perpetrated again Mr. Floyd takes place in the “nicest” American State, one can wonder if the entire country isn’t totally sick of racism and may conclude that all its citizens are all racists of different intensity and persuasions.

A serious and honest self-examination can only conclude that no one is entirely immune from that plague, that it’s ingrained into the American culture and that it will require a formidable transformation and a complete re-education to stamp it out.

In the next blogs I will explain my thinking on the matter and develop some solutions that can get us out of that existential rut.

American priorities

In American schools, sports always seems much more important than education.

This morning as we were walking we caught a glimpse at the High School Cheerleader team training in view (we suppose) of next school year, with no apparent concern whatsoever for social distancing.

Are we missing something or is that the “new normal” in the absence of anti-Covid medication or an effective vaccine?

We were under the impression that school boards where agonizing on ways they could re-open in August, but the display we were privy to, was more like “business as usual”.

Well, we probably forgot that in the American culture, sports trump all the rest and we’re all ready to kill for it!

Hot May

Ever since I keep track of temperatures at my Park City home (2007), I had never experience such a warm month of May.

While day temperature have increase a lot, night temperatures have been even worse and this become a real bad sign for the future….

The end of white superiority?

For centuries the white race has enjoyed almost total control, all over the world.

While America has been the “lab” of the future with its growing mixed-race community, its Federal and local governments have tried their best to maintain a white control upon their society through policing and a host of covert actions that have kept American Indian, black, brown and Asian folks at the margins of society.

After the murder that just took place in Minneapolis and its gruesome images made it around the world, the question is what’s coming next? Can we hope to begin a constructive dialog on the subject of race, or do we keep on ignoring that issue until the country self-destruct.

While Trump has been stoking the racial fire, the problem goes beyond our demented leader; it must involve the entire white society. Will it have the courage to come clean, acknowledge and make amends for its past sins and begin relinquishing its privileges?

This may be hard and painful, because it will have to involve every single member of the white community. Are we going to have the courage to do what it takes to abandon our dubious number one ranking? How long will it take for all of us to accept this new reality?

Just remember this: White Silence = Violence.