Tomorrow I am going to go to the RACE exhibit that the Mayo Clinic and the public library here in Rochester, Minnesota decided it would be fantastic idea to parter together to present, and at it I will probably be called a racist many times over.  I swore that I would not step foot into the exhibit, but my employer insists to pay me for attending it (thanks Mayo!), so I took them up on their offer.  Since it looked like a giant piece of garbage from the beginning I did some research on it so I know what to expect.  It looks pretty bad…

The  exhibit is called “Race, Are We So Different?” It sounds fairly elaborate from the descriptions I have read of it, as well as from the observations of a friend.  On http://www.mayoclinic.org/race there is an “About the exhibit” section.  According to the aforementioned website, sorting people by physical differences is a recent invention and that the development of the idea of race is closely linked to the early development of the United States.  Huh?  Going on, the website also states racial and ethnic categories have changed over time are human made.  It goes on to claim that human beings are more alike genetically now than any other living species.  So is that like evolution or something?  It goes on, claiming race and racism is not inside our heads, but in fact built into our laws, traditions, and institutions.  I get it, I get it, the United States is a racist country.  And that is just the racist stuff about the RACE exhibit on the Mayo Clinic website.

Go to the actual RACE website and it gets even worse.  I do not have time to view each entry in the “History” of “Race in the U.S.A.”  However, from the multiple entries I viewed in the aforementioned timeline, each discussed several ways in which the U.S. of A. was a racist country.  This policy, that mindset, this program, that benefit, and so on.  And this timeline goes back to the 1600s.  It begs the question, if you hate the country so much, go home.  Leave, go somewhere else.  It is utterly obvious that some people, like the makers of this racist exhibit, desire to hold past transgressions and sins against the country and would like nothing better than to have open borders, racial quotas, equal wages for everyone, and preferential treatment based on race, as long as you are not white of course.  Also on the stupid website you can go to the “Lived Experiences” part and play some ridiculous games, like “Who is White?”  You can also find out how race is exactly like the height of a person…or something like that…in an activity called “The Human Spectrum” under the “Human Variation” section.  It is like an interactive overload of the race card being played.  It is so informative!

To top it all off, someone paid a ton of money to plaster billboards around the entire town.  I think Mayo opened their checkbook for this too, Best Buy too perhaps.  Anyway, they show two faces of different races, half of each face, pieced together to be one face with “Are we so different?” written below it.  But perhaps my description is racist and that there are not two different faces.  Here is an example of the pictures so you can decide for yourself:

Is it just me or are we actually different?

Image from http://www.sciowa.org/UserDocs/Pages/Race-web-art-no-text.jpg

The less than stellar Post Bulletin surprised me again.  On Friday’s paper, the headline above the fold read “Voter fraud in Rochester?”  The story said that 42 felons in Rochester allegedly voted in person in the 2008 election that sent a clown to denigrate Congress even further.  The article says that Franken “won” by just 312 votes.  Each of Minnesota’s 87 counties are being requested to investigate into whether or not felons illegally voted in their county too.

Time for some math…the article says 42 felons illegally voted in Rochester, but for the sake of this I will say 42 felons illegally voted in the entire county of Olmsted.  Now, if the same number of felons illegally voted in each of the other 86 Minnesota counties that would be total of 3,612 illegal votes.  I know the counties of Hennepin and Ramsey would have a number far higher than 42 illegal votes each, but let’s just stick with these numbers.  So then, if 42 felons illegally voted in each of Minnesota’s 87 counties, that would equal 3,654 illegal votes.  That’s a lot of illegal votes!

Now it seems as if Franken’s camp, ACORN, or whoever else came up a tad short initially so they had to do a very shoddy recount that still baffles me.  Albeit that the recount was mandatory because the margin of victory for Coleman was so slim, a pre-schooler could have done a better job at the recount.  The bottom line is this, Franken should not be sitting in DC right now, he should not have been sitting there for the past 18 months, and he should not sit there for the next four and a half years.  He did not win, he is a cheat, and he is an utter embarrassment to this embarrassing state.

So how many votes did Franken actually lose by?

I submitted the following letter to the editor to my local paper last week.  I was utterly surprised that the Post Bulletin published it since they are a less than stellar news and editorial source.

I used to work as a cook in various restaurants and every night servers would easily take home double what I made, if not significantly more, due to their high base wage and the addition of tips.  The servers were routinely taking home $20 or more per hour waiting on tables.  That is a wage comparable to a person with a Bachelor’s degree in a science or business field.  I have no problem with gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer wanting to cut the base wage of servers for this very reason.  North Dakota pays servers less and there is never any shortage of willing, pleasant servers in any of the restaurants I have been to there.  Besides, who is forcing anyone to work for a tip?  If current servers do not like the prospect of relying more on the tips earned from their job done, perhaps they need to find a job where they do not receive tips.

This was in response to many people complaining in the aforementioned paper, as well as other papers and other venues to publicize complaints, about Tom Emmer supposedly wanting to cut the salaries of wage earners whom also earn tips.  Apparently, though, he never actually said that and said something closer to not wanting the tips to be taxed.  Regardless what he actually said, though I would not doubt for one second the fact that he was either taken out of context or that his words were intentionally reported falsely, I want to offer another two cents about this whole tipping thing.

It is clear from my letter to the editor that I do not have a problem with tip earners earning less per hour.  They are working such job by their own choice, whether or not it is out of financial necessity, they still choose to go into work every day.  It bothers me that tipping seems to be required nowadays; no longer is it a sign of appreciating great service.  I learnt in school that tipping used to be much different than it is today.  As soon as a patron sat down they laid tip money on the table.  Every time something was wrong or unpleasant they would take money off of the table and at the end of the meal what was left went to the waitress.  I have always wanted to try that out, but I guarantee you the tip earning employee serving me would be utterly clueless as to what I was doing.

Another problem I have with this is the feeling of entitlement of “I deserve $7.25 (or whatever the going minimum wage rate is nowadays) per hour in addition to tips because I have to feed my six children, buy my five cartons of cigarettes a week, and my twenty-five lottery tickets.”  News flash, waitressing or any other tip earning job is not meant to be a full-time, permanent career job.  Certainly it can be, as I outlined in my letter to the editor, you can make well over what a bachelor degree educated person makes per hour.  But who said that a waitress should earn $50,000 a year?  $75,000 a year?  $100,000 a year?  It’s not like they are doing brain surgery or financial analyzing or engineering.  They are serving a plate of food, or pizza, or beer, or what have you.

I’ve long believed that a minimum wage is absolutely worthless and this is one of the reasons.  If someone gets paid the minimum wage and earns tips that translate to $20+ an hour while the guy cooking the steak is lucky to earn $10, something is wrong.  Chances are Charlie is not complaining about his $10 an hour nearly as much as Suzy is complaining about her $22 an hour, granted Charlie may be high the entire time.  My point is that no business should be required to pay anyone a certain amount of money.  Additionally, no employee should be required to be a tip earning employee if they do not want to.  Wait a second, that does not happen.  The former, sure; the latter, not so much.  If anyone is holding a gun to someone’s head forcing them to serve steaks and slices of pie they have a legitimate complaint.  But until I see that first hand I will continue to discount the whining, crying, and complaining offered up by tip earners who are afraid of the fact that they may actually have to work hard and earn their tip money if their wage gets cut.

I just checked the Post Bulletin website where my letter was also published and apparently I offended a lot of people.  Read the comments, they are rather pathetic.

Why isn’t Tipping a city in China?

I think I am going to start a new diet plan that would especially be popular with senseless liberals worldwide.  The premise of it is quite simple and based off of their economic policies that work as well as an air conditioner in Antarctica.  I can write a book on this new diet plan, make a website devoted to it with hundreds of resources on it, and maybe I can even land a TV show to demonstrate the cooking aspects of it.  Imagine the money I would have in no time.

OK, here is the premise.  I would break down the amount a person is overweight and give it some kind of range, like 0-10 pounds, 11-25 pounds, and 26 plus pounds overweight, something like that.  The key to weight loss would be the same in each of the categories, though the amount of activity would vary.  It sounds like many diet and exercise plans.  But what you forgot that it is in tune with liberal economic policies.  And here is where I get rich.  In order to lose weight on this diet plan you would have to eat food.  Eat a lot of food.  And if you are in that 26 plus pounds overweight category you would pretty much eat food all day long.  I swear there would be a line stretched around the block to buy this book.

I hope you can see the analogy of this awesome diet plan and liberal economics.  First you identify the problem and then you ramp up the doings of that same thing to solve it, hoping that it will work.  If it works for the economy it will work for a diet.

Will Barney Frank write the introduction to my diet book?

This may come as a complete surprise, but it is not a good idea to cross the border illegally, and if you do, it is an even worse idea to throw rocks at border patrol agents.  Sergio Hernandez Huereca found that out the hard way when he was shot and killed at the border.  I want to know what part of throwing rocks at law enforcement agents sounds like a good idea?  Do Mexicans not teach that such things are not acceptable?  Is there no such thing as common sense anymore?

Of course the killing of a fourteen year old boy caused a huge uproar and now everyone thinks we are a country that kills little boys.  Fine.  Maybe that will prevent some from crossing into here illegally.  If that’s what it takes, though drastic, perhaps it is a good warning.  But what about the rights of these migrants?   They have as many rights as I do to sneak into England illegally and carry a gun on my hip.

The moral of the story is simple, don’t sneak in here.  And if you do and are approached by law enforcement officials, don’t throw rocks at them.  Moreover, if you do both of those things, when you are told to stop throwing rocks, but continue to do so, be prepared to deal with the consequences.  I would think by the age of fourteen this boy would have understood simple commands like stop.  Because he did not and because of his actions he paid the price.

Who throws rock anymore anyway?

Here’s an article regarding it from the UK Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1285302/Mexico-demands-investigation-U-S-border-agent-shoots-teenager-dead–throwing-stones-him.html