Here is a Top 11 List for the Best of BeeLine for 2023. The first five are the most popular posts I wrote during the year based on the number of views. The second six are a few of my personal favorites out of the 121 blog posts I wrote during the year.
If you missed reading these "Best of BeeLine" posts the first time around, here is another opportunity to get on "the shortest route to what you need to know" to start 2024 off right.
You might also consider forwarding this post to friends who might appreciate a blog that tries to put some of the complicated issues of the day in context informed with data and facts. I enjoy writing BeeLine but it is a lot easier to sit down, research and write when I know more are reading what I write. I don't promote or advertise this blog. New readers almost always come from one of you passing it along to someone else.
The number of page views of BeeLine more than doubled in 2023 compared to 2022. Thanks to all of you who contributed to that growth by forwarding blog posts to others, posting a link on social media or recommending BeeLine to a friend.
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The Best of BeeLine-2023 list is below with pull quotes from each of the posts to give you a better idea about what is contained therein.
Thank you to all my loyal BeeLine readers and a Happy New Year to each one of you!
The Best of BeeLine---2023
The Most Popular Based on Views
The release of the final Durham report this week demonstrates that something far, far worse than Watergate has been going on in Washington, D.C.
Watergate was mere child's play compared to all of this.
This did not involve just "All The President's Men".
We had a President, a Vice President, Director of the CIA, Director of the FBI, the media establishment and the D.C. establishment all working to subvert the will of the American people.
It is nothing less than the most brazen abuse of our Constitutional principles and subversion of our republic's democratic foundations in American history.
Yes, this is many times worse than Watergate.
There is a huge difference in what the coastal elites believe people should be interested in and what they actually are interested in.
To hear the elites talk about it, you would think that everybody is tuning into CNN or MSNBC to get the news.
When it comes to cable tv viewing the odds were high that Americans were watching Fox News or ESPN more than anything else in the last year.
There is so much that people do not know, or have been given misinformation about, concerning Israel and Palestine.
Without knowledge of the most basic facts it is difficult to have views or opinions that are both principled and credible.
Let's consider five things that most don't know about Israel/Palestine.
There are only 15 million Jews in the entire world.
Almost half of them live in Israel on a tiny strip of earth that for much of history nobody cared much about.
There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.
I continue to find it astounding how it is that 1.8 billion Muslims (and a great number of non-Muslims) cannot get along with a mere 15 million Jews on our big, beautiful, diverse planet?
Why is that?
What is also further befuddling is how a group of people (Palestinians) that almost no one ever heard anything about until the last few generations can cause so much disruption and noise about a small strip of land on the northern coast of Africa?
Technology and innovation have disrupted scores of industries over the last 50 years.
Newspapers. Network television. Landline telephones. Film and music distribution. Photography. Taxis. Retail shopping. The list is endless.
There is one glaring exception when it comes to a major industry that has not been disrupted.
EDUCATION.
Primary and secondary education has not advanced much over the last century.
A Few of My Personal Favorites
I recently came across some interesting data on the dating preferences of females regarding male height.
Almost 90% of women are willing to consider a guy who is 6'6" tall.
However, only 60% are willing to consider a 6 footer.
Losing one inch to 5'11' cuts the number of women who are interested down to 30%.
Only 15% of women are interested in men who are 5'8'' or 5'9".
The problem is that this is right at the average height level of American men.
We hear a lot about how executive compensation for CEO's is out of control and unwarranted.
It is argued that it is inequitable that so few individuals can earn so much.
30 CEO's of the 500 companies that are in the S&P 500 index on the New York Stock Exchange made at least $30 million last year.
By contrast, here is the list of NBA players who made at least $30 million this past season.
It numbers 39.
There is a lot of talk about gender these days.
It has become popular to state that gender is nothing but a social construct.
Nature, biology or anything beyond what a person feels or believes about their gender is invalid.
We are being told what to believe. However, evidence to the contrary is all around us.
Is it really true that there are no differences between male and females that are hard-wired from birth?
Would it surprise you to know that all of the famous climate models that are being used to predict rising future temperatures assume that there will be no clouds in the future?
In other words, despite the fact that clouds have been a mainstay in our weather and climate since the beginning of time on earth, the models that are being used assume the future will be cloudless.
Is it any wonder you could show a global temperature increase of a couple degrees in a climate model if you assumed a cloudless future compared to a world in which clouds cover a portion of the earth every day?
When will American become the central identifier of everyone?
The question that the American people need to answer is whether we believe that this is better achieved by tearing things down and casting blame on others or building on the positives, working cooperatively to fix the negatives and all of us spending more time looking inwards on what we can do to improve the lives of everyone.
Those things are not easily done nor is ignoring the media narratives that feed a lot of the divisions we see in our society today.
Leftist Democrats melted down after the recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and student debt cancellation.
The narrative that the Supreme Court is out of touch and the justices are disconnected from each other on major issues of law is also belied by the facts.
Many Democrats are using this narrative to support a view that the Supreme Court should increase the number of justices or be reformed in some way (term limits, age limits, etc).
However, in the Supreme Court term that just ended, 50% of all its decisions were actually unanimous.
89% of the cases had at least one liberal justice in the majority.
Only 8% of the decided cases were 6-3 decisions along ideological lines.
Mr. BeeLine: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thanks for all your blogging efforts. BeeLine is the gift that keeps giving all year long! GK in HOU (aka Dave's friend with Richmond roots)
ReplyDeleteG, Thanks so much. I truly appreciate your words and your loyalty to BeeLine. All the best in 2024. I am sure you noticed your favorite blog post on education made the Best of BeeLine list. Not my doing...it got a lot of views!.
ReplyDeleteLook forward to Beeline ‘24. I foresee a “Leap Year” edition on 29-Feb. :)
ReplyDelete