With most sports around the world on pause, revisit iconic sports moments from the past to help fill that void.

Bill Cartwright, Horace Grant and Craig Hodges explain why Jerry Krause got a raw deal in “The Last Dance.”

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• I have always loved love

  from Dealing With Life On My Own by Sam Wakitsch
  posted today at 4:06 pm

• Corona Virus Update-Or, Are We Not Doing This Anymore?

  from Health Care Mythologies by Joe Imperato, MD, FACR
  posted today at 4:06 pm

• It’s the Little Things That Mean a Lot

  from A Bite of Chicago by Barbara Revsine
  posted today at 2:41 pm

• The surprising argument for police defunding: Sensitivity training didn’t work

  from The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor by Dennis Byrne
  posted today at 2:09 pm

• Surprise! Real Estate Experts Turn Negative On Home Price Outlook

  from Getting Real by Gary Lucido
  posted today at 1:48 pm

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Turned on the TV this morning. Saw President Donald Trump droning on and on about what a great job he’s done. I went to do something else. Came back later, he’s still at it. Look at me, look at me. I did a great job. The best ever. Nobody ever as great. A pitiful 48-minute-long monologue about his wonderful self. It was like watching him masturbate.

Then I caught a video of former Vice President Joe Biden droning on and on, trying to put a  coherent sentence together on the View. What better setting was there than the Leftish View than to ask Biden a snowball question: Is he sorry? Watch him stumble around. Even the View partisans looked, well, worried. Babbling Biden.

It’s too late to find a different Republican candidate, someone who doesn’t exhibit all the symptoms of mental illness but who advocates for policies that I like, such as balancing out the left-leaning judiciary with judges who don’t make law.

But it’s not too late for Democrats to find another candidate who doesn’t appear that to be one step short of drooling. Someone tweeted that the answer would be to remake Biden’s basement to look like the Oval Office, plunk him in there and tell him that he won the election. He wouldn’t know the differences.

Maybe we should do the same with Trump. Let him think he’s talking to the nation by setting up some fake cameras in the Oval Office or Rose Garden, sprinkle around a few cutouts posing as willing props or fake news people and let him go on and on like Little Jack Horner and proclaim, “Oh what a good boy am I.”

If we could put aside our partisan and ideological straightjackets for a minute or two, we could admit that both men are seriously deficient and perhaps dangerous. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe in a second Trump will continue to pursue policies that have given us a great economy and, despite the carping of “follow-the-science” experts, managed to keep us from suffering the millions of predicted COVID-19 deaths and correctly cast aside the “systemic racism” hooey to correctly identify the damage to body, soul and nation that the riots have caused.

If elected, no telling what Biden would do. Into whose hands his administration would fall. Whether his (or his handler’s choice) of vice president would be up to the job.

We can only pray.

[email protected]

www.dennisbyrne.net 

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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It’s June 5, 2020. This has been one of the most challenging year’s for all of us. These past three years have been three of the most challenging years for all of us, regardless of which side of the political spectrum you sit.

The gap between Americans is now wider than ever. As we continue to deal with COVID-19, we have now had a week of protests over police brutality across the country. But as difficult as these first 5 months have been, make no mistake, we are headed toward five months of chaos and turmoil that could be far worse than what we have been experiencing. 

Americans on the left, advocacy groups and their supporters on the left, foreign governments who hate Trump, and the majority of the news media (including the NY Times) will be doing everything they can get Trump out of office.

On the other side, middle-right will be fighting back via conservative radio and news publications, advocacy groups and big business, religious groups who want conservative judges including the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Social media will be the main battleground with shots being fired from all sides.

I hope for all of our sake, it doesn’t get violent and the anger being voiced via social media doesn’t take to the streets. But anything is possible. Be careful. Be safe. Be smart!

We could all be heading toward the clash of our lifetime.

This will appall the white guilt industry that has been reaping a fortune by conducting those cleansing sensitivity workshops for lo these many decades

The latest race orthodoxy explains that the police must be defunded because the years-long training program the Minneapolis police conducted failed to prevent the police killing of George Floyd

Therefore, we are told, that instead of sensitivity training, police departments must be rebuilt from the ground up using a template prescribed by the woke. As  in the Rolling Stone explains in “A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police”:

The year Philando Castile was shot and killed during his 49th routine traffic stop, this one for a broken taillight, the Minneapolis Police Department was halfway through a highly respected, three-year programdesigned to restore trust between the community and police. Two years later, MPD had, by its own account, implemented a host of the trendiest police reforms: body cameras, de-escalation and crisis intervention training, mindfulness training. It even rewrote its use-of-force guidelines to emphasize “the sanctity of life.” Two years after that, George Floyd was killed — handcuffed, flat on his stomach, held down by three MPD officers, including Derek Chauvin, pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck.

…activists in Minneapolis are calling for more than just reform: They want the Minneapolis Police Department defunded — and those calls are catching on elsewhere as demonstrations against police brutality sweep across the country and peaceful protesters are met with more barbarism for speaking out against it.

An aside: I’m not sure who’s “barbarism” she’s writing about: The rioters who are rampaging through and destroying black neighborhoods or the police who are trying to stop–not the protestors–but the punk rioters.

The same theme is brought forth in The Best Way to “Reform” the Police Is to Defund the Police  by Alex Vitale professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing in which he excoriates reformers who believe or at least hope the policing process can be fixed. 

Procedural reformers are caught in this mythic understanding of American society. They believe that the neutral professional enforcement of the law is automatically beneficial for everyone, that the rule of law sets us all free….

Defunding  means, in his view, redirecting money from police budgets into programs that more directly help end what Vitale apparently believes are social and not law enforcement problems. Like many others, he’s rather short on the specifics of how this would work, but he at least makes an effort:

We need to be putting concrete alternatives out there. For example, mental health crisis calls have become major part of what police to every day in New York City. There are seven hundred of them a day. We don’t need police to do that work, and in fact we don’t want armed police doing that work, because it’s dangerous for people having mental health crises. We need to create a twenty-four-hour non-police mental health crisis response system.

All well and good. But if I might raise one practical problem: The most dangerous police calls usually involve one kind of mental health problem–domestic violence. So, good luck to the social workers who will be taking on that job.

[email protected]

www.dennisbyrne.net 

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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Each quarter Zillow and Pulsenomics conduct a survey of a little over 100 real estate experts to find out what their outlook is for US home prices and other real estate trends. Well, yesterday they published the results of their 2nd quarter 2020 Home Price Expectations Survey and the results were very different from all the previous surveys I’ve seen before. Usually they predict steadily increasing home prices but this time they actually predicted a 0.3% decline for 2020, followed by a measly 0.9% increase in 2021. Their cumulative forecast for the next 5 years is 10.8% (which translates to 2.1% per year), compared to 15.9% last quarter. I’m pretty sure it’s because of the economic damage sustained during our social isolation of the last few months.

Terry Loebs, founder of Pulsenomics commented on this unprecedented negative outlook:

This is the first time since 2012 that the panel-wide price outlook has turned negative, and the quarter-to-quarter swing in expectations is the largest we’ve seen in more than a decade. Longer term, the outlook for home values nationwide is mixed — price projections for 2022 and beyond actually inched higher from levels recorded prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. However, nearly seven in ten experts now indicate that their five-year forecast has downside risk. Last quarter, fewer than four in ten panelists foresaw downside — of course, that was before the Covid-19 crisis, its economic devastation and unprecedented government response.

One other thing. Most of the panelists believe that the recovery from the lost transaction volume these last few months will be spread out over several years.

For the first time the US home price outlook is negative for the current year.

These surveys always contain additional questions for the respondents to get their opinions on other topics. The most interesting question this quarter was what impact the pandemic was going to have on different types of demand. Their answers were self-scored betweeen -10 (non-existent) to +10 (overwhelming). Basically the respondents believe that there will be an urban exodus. Most thought urban demand would decline (average score -2.9) while suburban (+3.3) and rural (+2.1) demand would increase.

Chicago Area Home Price Outlook

Once again I turn to the Case Shiller home price futures market for some insight as to where Chicago area home prices are heading. John Dolan from Home Price Futures provided the graph below along with some explanation. Compare these values to the values found in my April post. The bids have gone from a more than 20% drop to around a 4% drop in this latest chart so it’s a pretty remarkable recovery in just a couple of months. The implied cumulative appreciation over the next nearly 5 year period works out to about a paltry 3.4%.

The outlook for Chicago home prices is best viewed through the futures market.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #Coronavirus #HomePrices

Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service real estate brokerage that offers home buyer rebates and discount commissions. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market or get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.

I have always loved love.

Since I was a little girl there was nothing that I enjoyed more than watching romantic movies, reading books about two people falling madly in love and recently watching an obscene amount of wedding videos on Youtube.

To me, there is just something so magical about how people who truly love each other look at one another, how they support each other throughout whatever life throws at them, and the life that they have built together. But out of all of the movies I have watched and stories I have read, there has been one love story in my life that has really made the biggest difference – my grandparents.

Today, 50 years ago Rick and Carol got married and started the rest of their lives together.

It isn’t one of those love stories where everything was perfect and a dream come true. They were young. They had obstacles and challenges that were not going to be easy to overcome. But they believed in their love and it was that love and those vows that got them to today.

June 5, 2020 – 50 Years of marriage.

And in my 22 years of being a part of this love story, I can tell you that there is so much to celebrate today.

The life that they have created together.

The family that they built.

The love that is still so apparent every time they look at each other.

It is unlike anything I have ever watched in a movie, read in a book or seen on a Youtube wedding video.

IT IS REAL.

I can only dream of a relationship so strong and so pure that it can get through the toughest challenges of life and still allow for so much love. They have set an example and precedent for me that I will forever be thankful for. That your partner should not only love you but that they should support you, defend you and believe in you, ALWAYS.

That young boy and girl who had their whole lives ahead of them had no idea that 50 years from then that this would end up being the life they were going to be celebrating today, but they believed in their love… and to me, that is the best love story of them all.

Congrats, Grandma and Grandpa! I love you.

Welcome, my post-apocalyptic survivors.

Today I want to discuss a few interesting developments with regard to the “pandemic we were afraid of, but now, not so much”.

1) The Spanish Flu

Thanks to my brilliant friend Kathy for this observation.

If you speak with people who lived through the Spanish flu epidemic, you’ll note that it didn’t really stand out in their minds, versus the World Wars, or the Great Depression.

I thought about this for a bit and then realized that in 1918 dying from an infection was pretty common.

Other than the small pox vaccine, used since 1798, there were no antibiotics and so many people died from diseases we have since conquered.

In fact, it was well known that the most common cause of childhood death was infectious disease.

So, ironically, we literally shit our pants (Thus the run on toilet paper, another mystery solved.) at the thought of dying from a viral infection.

What I find yet more amusing is how the anti-vaxxers have weirdly sought to promote their agenda by saying don’t get the Covid vaccine, assuming we ever get one.

Thus, they have the opportunity to live like those in the olden days and watch kids die of preventable diseases.

I’ve often wondered if they took antibiotics, since those are also chemicals, made by Big Pharma.

At any rate, humankind has survived innumerable pandemics (See “Black Plague” which killed about 25% of Europe.) and we will survive this one and the inevitable next ones.

And get vaccinated, please.

2) Hydroxychloroquine

Ah, yes, the mystery drug that has caused all sorts of consternation.

Now, I will not discuss what Trump did, because I do try to avoid politics.

The story here is that the 2 articles printed in Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today were retracted, because the data used to say that the drug was ineffective and dangerous was highly suspect.

What I’d like to focus on is the NEJM.

Having studied at Harvard, as I have nauseatingly mentioned innumerable times, the NEJM was considered the most prestigious medical journal in the world.

It still is.

However, what I have observed over time, is that it has occasionally become somewhat of a “Media Whore”, to put it politely.

There has been, over the years, a rush to print very timely articles on hot topics, knowing it’ll generate a ton of press.

So, when an article is retracted, one (or at least me) cannot but help to question where did the system break down.

The study came from a relative nobody, not in infectious disease, who heads up a somewhat mysterious company.

Why this paper was accepted is beyond me.

The problem with this error, however, is not simply that they published bad data, but the country became insanely divided over the use of this stupid drug.

Now, all the people who were made fun of for pushing for it can say to the other people who called them idiots for ignoring science, “See? It was bad science!”

Not that they knew that, of course, but no matter.

It does serve to further denigrate faith in science, which has taken a pretty big hit lately.

3) Stress

Lastly, I have an opinion about the protests and riots.

Wile the horrible death of George Floyd served as the spark, I firmly believe that the reason for the magnitude of this explosion is because people had been cooped up too long.

It is important to realize that the initial quarantine served to relieve the burden on a health care system that was overwhelmed and about to collapse.

And we succeeded.

However, in my humble opinion, we waited too long and were too cautious on reopening.

Had we opened up in May, yes, we would see a spike in cases, so instead, we will see it in June.

The sole hope is that it won’t be as large as the initial spike.

However, taking people’s livelihoods away, when the economy was doing well, had to have sent many, who felt they were getting somewhere in this world, into abject depression as they saw their sources of income dry up.

Suddenly, you went from being financial independent to not being able to make ends meet.

Furthermore, your place of business either went bankrupt, or was destroyed in the riots.

Maybe I’m wrong and this would have happened anyway, but I’m not so sure it would have been to this extent.

There are many lessons that we can learn from all that has occurred so far in 2020, and I sincerely hope we do take time to reflect on them and plan for the future better.

In the end, anyone who tells you they know more about the disease or it’s treatment or it’s effects, for God’s sake-STAY SKEPTICAL!

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It’s the Little Things That Mean a Lot

Back in February- when Covid 19  was something happening in China that wouldn’t ever affect the United States (the President promised)- we visited friends who winter in Las Vegas. We slept in most mornings, but on the day we left, we decided to have brunch at The Bagel Cafe, a deli with an extensive menu and the chutzpah to bill itself as an “authentic New York bakery & deli.”

While everyone else had egg-based dishes, I ordered the cheese blintzes with fruit sauce and sour cream, a dish I haven’t made-or ordered- in several decades. The blintzes were good-make that “very” good- but the coffee stole the show. Not because it was some wonderfully exotic blend served at just the right temperature.  And not because the coffee cup was just the right shape and size like my favorite cup at home.  So?

What made this cup of coffee -which was neither a latte nor a cappuccino- so outstanding  was that it was served with hot-make that very hot- milk, just like it would have been in Italy or Spain or Argentina, places where a good cup of coffee is a veritable art form.

The next time I’m in Las Vegas, breakfast at The Bagel Cafe will be at the top of my “musts” list. Sometimes it’s the little things that mean a lot.

The Bagel Cafe, 9777 Las Vegas Blvd., Las Vegas, Nevada 702.797. 8218

***

I’m always curious about new products and products that are new to me.  Back when I was writing for trade publications in the gourmet food industry, I would regularly get samples to try. Decades later, I still order the boiled cider jelly from Wood’s Cider Mill in Springfield, Vermont.

So with everything tanking around me and the fear, isolation and boredom generated by the quarantine taking its toll, I found myself saying an enthusiastic “yes” to queries about sampling  new products, convinced they’d offer a break from the tedium- which they did.

***

pure crumb

Pure crumb’s line of “thin and crispy” barks,” are made with almond flour and coconut oil, in lieu of flour and butter. Options include Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookie Bark, Crumb Cake Bark, and Brownie Bark. Touted as”Simply Sweet & Delightfully Clean!,” the Barks are gluten free and dairy free, a combination that’s a formidable  challenge, even for a skilled pastry chef.

Calorie counts vary. An 0.88 ounce bag of Crumb Cake Bark has 130 calories, while  the same weight bag of Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookie Bark has 120 calories. A slightly smaller bag-0.81 ounces-of  the Chocolate Brownie Bar has 160 calories.

The bars can be eaten as a snack, dipped into coffee or tea, or crumbled over fruit or a frozen dessert.

www.purecrumb.com

***

plant junkie

Like so many of the products designed for vegans and vegetarians, plant junkie’s line of dressings and spreads offer an interesting addition to diets that also include meat and dairy products. Some of the products are made with canola oil, others with avocado oil, and they’re all gluten free and GMO free.

Dressing options include Chili Pomegranate Vinaigrette, Chia Ranch Dressing, Turmeric & Pepper Ranch Dressing, and Thai Peanut Vinaigrette. In addition, there’s both a Chipotle Lime Spread & Dressing and a Spread & Dressing made with avocado oil.

www.plantjunkie.com

***

Kracklin’ Kamut

Kamut (R) is a brand name for Khorasan, an ancient grain closely related to wheat. While the kernel is shaped like a kernel of wheat, it’s nearly twice the size. Kracklin’ Kamut (R), which is part of Big Sandy Organics in Big Sandy, Montana, slow roasts the grain to produce a crunchy snack with a nutty flavor.

Available in two flavors-sea salt and churro-Kracklin’ Kamut (R) adds a healthy crunch to salads, soups, and a long list of other options. The company is planning to debut a third flavor-Salt & Vinegar-in July.

www.kracklinkamut.com.

r