All Categories - Jay Evensen

How today's politics echo pre-Civil War days

11/21/2023

History, it is said, does not truly repeat itself. But, if we listen closely, we can occasionally hear it rhyme. If you know history, last week’s insults and threatened violence in Washington had a familiar tune. Last time something like it played, things didn’t end well.
Last week, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who happens to be a mixed martial arts fighter, Markwayne Mullin, challenged Sean O'Brien, the president of the Teamsters union, to a fight during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
O’Brien had been posting nasty things about Mullin on social media, which the senator read aloud.

Should we let AI take care of our elderly?

11/16/2023

If, like me, you are approaching an age when joints creek and legs move slower, I have a simple question for you.
Would you rather have a human help you with old-age tasks, when you need it someday? Or would you be comfortable with artificial intelligence handling all the necessary tasks?
I’m guessing you might say it depends. For instance, I wouldn’t mind having a self-driving car take me to doctor appointments and drop me off at the front door. A robot might be OK for some of the more mundane or, shall we say, delicate things that accompany the not-so-golden part of the golden years. It might not be bad to have one around if I should fall or need medical attention.

20 years until financial ruin?

11/9/2023

What will people say in Washington on that day, whether it’s in 2043 or some time sooner, when it becomes clear that nothing — not cuts to programs or hikes in taxes or bloviating political speeches at podiums — will keep the American economy from collapsing because the nation is unable to pay its debts?
Will it become clear, then, that the budget showdowns of 2023, including the one looming on Nov. 17, were little more than ridiculous fights over discretionary spending that did nothing serious to postpone the day of reckoning? Will they view with shame the large spending programs of the early ‘20s, from pandemic relief to college loan forgiveness, as having hastened disaster?

Why homeschooling is sweeping the land

11/9/2023

I have an 8-year-old granddaughter in Virginia who is being homeschooled. Her mother didn’t know she was part of a powerful nationwide trend bubbling just beneath the surface of American culture, brought to light this week in a Washington Post report.
The most important thing to her, she told me in a text, was to be able to meet her daughter where she is, academically — adjusting lesson plans to move quickly through materials she has mastered, while spending more time on things her daughter is struggling to learn.
The local public school wasn’t able to do that.
This is all new and fascinating to me. When my wife and I had school-aged children, homeschooling was seen as something on the fringes of society. That stigma seems to be gone now, drop-kicked by a pandemic that led to a crisis in early learning.

The first thing we have to do before solving any problem

11/9/2023

A bunch of really smart people got together at Utah Valley University this week to talk about growth in Utah County, how to prepare for it, and how to plan so they have enough affordable housing, clean air and mass transit to keep it a place where people want to live.
A lot of smart people said a lot of smart things, but it took a politician to say what has to be said at almost every event focused on solutions to government-related problems these days.
That is, we need to learn how to get along with each other. Period. That is step No. 1, and it’s a big one.
It’s why Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has devoted his year as head of the National Governors’ Association to urging people to “disagree better.”

SLC International almost became a small airport

10/27/2023

On Tuesday, the Salt Lake International Airport will open all of its planned east wing of concourse A, adding 13 new gates to what already is the first new hub airport in the United States this century.
Airport officials say the new facility handled 26 million passengers in 2022, sending them to 93 destinations on 320 daily departures. That included regular non-stop flights to London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.
What people don’t know is that the pandemic almost turned this growing international hub into a much smaller regional airport.

We have become a nation of slobs

10/25/2023

If you want a quick course in how society’s dress standards have fallen, rewatch the classic 1968 movie, “The odd couple,” as my family did the other day.
Oscar Madison, played by Walter Matthau, is supposed to be a slob. But if you lifted his character off the screen and put him into everyday life in 2023, he would be considered well-dressed. He wears a suit, white dress shirt and tie for a date. In one scene, he goes to a restaurant dressed in a T-shirt and a sport coat — something that probably raised eyebrows in 1968 but would be acceptably stylish today.

Don't eliminate federal gas taxes

10/13/2023

My journalism professors taught me to avoid absolutes — words like never, everyone and always. The reason is you generally can find someone, somewhere who feels contrary to the majority.
So, let’s just say that almost everyone dislikes high gas prices — with the possible exception of an oil company executive or two. You won’t find many in your neighborhood, I’m guessing.
Which means former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was hardly engaging in risky political behavior during the second Republican runners-up debate recently when she said the federal government should get rid of its tax on gas and diesel fuel.
Less tax, lower price. That’s a simple concept. Or, rather, a simple tip to a complicated and fraught tax policy iceberg.

Why are U.S. schools filled with so many guns?

10/13/2023

Anyone who doubts that Utah has the same problem as the rest of the nation when it comes to firearms in school must have forgotten what happened a year ago in Vernal.
As KSL.com reported that day, a school resource officer at Vernal Middle School, Orion Young, was able to apprehend a student and his gun before anything bad happened. Police had little more to say than that at the time.

Why is Biden building Trump's border wall?

10/6/2023

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.” —Candidate Joe Biden to journalists from the National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists, quoted by NPR in 2020.
“I will await his apology!” — former president Donald Trump, this week, on Truth Social.

President Biden didn’t hold a press conference to announce he will build up to 20 new miles of Trump’s border wall in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, or that he will waive 26 federal laws, including ones designed to protect endangered species and drinking water, to do so.
That would have been foolish.

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