Jay Evensen
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On Second Thought for Sept. 25, 2017

9/22/2017

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A lighthearted look at news of the day  
Google's parent company, Alphabet, wants to build a new city. An official told the Financial Times the city would be "of sufficient size and scale that it can be a laboratory for innovation on an integrated basis." It also would be extremely easy to learn about, unless you're using Bing. 
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Alphabet hopes its new city will pioneer ways to protect the environment. That's a nice sentiment, until the people of the new city decide they've had enough of that and elect a mayor who lets the good times roll and gives away half the tax base to get an NFL team. 
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Meanwhile, another high-tech giant, Amazon, has set off a scramble among cities willing to give up just about anything — all their taxes, endangered plants (Tucson gifted Amazon a saguaro cactus) or anything else of value — to be chosen for its second headquarters. I'm sure the future residents of Google-town can't wait to incorporate so they can get in on the bidding. 
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President Trump told the United Nations last week that, if provoked, he would destroy North Korea. Apparently, his aides talked him out of pounding his shoe on the lectern and promising "we will bury you!" 
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President Trump referred to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un as "rocket man." This is known in diplomatic circles as "playing the Elton John card." 
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According to the Elton John scale of diplomatic language, calling someone "rocket man" is one step below "tiny dancer." Things will get serious if Trump tells Kim "I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free." 
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Elton John diplomacy comes in handy when dealing with other issues, too, such as global warming. "All this science I don't understand …" 
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All in all, the Elton John scale of escalation is much more diplomatic than the AC/DC scale, which tends to put both sides on a highway to you know where. 
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BYU has written a new grammar rule. It goes like this: "'i' before 'e', except in caffeine."  
 

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On Second Thought for Sept. 18, 2017

9/18/2017

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Immigration issues are getting complicated in Washington. A bunch of Republicans now are wishing they could outlaw undocumented meetings between the president and Democrats.
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In the last two weeks, the president met with Democrats twice, once to work out a deal to keep the government funded for another three months, and the other time to work out a deal to help the undocumented children of immigrants. If this works out, Republicans soon may be the ones begging for amnesty, for whatever it is they have done to offend the White House.
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Actually, the president had better be careful with his own party’s base, or he might end up being cast as the nation’s biggest railroad booster. That is, whenever Republicans up for election see him coming, they will start making tracks in the opposite direction.
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Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has come out with a book about what happened in the 2016 election. Sure, it’s easy to wistfully imagine what things would be like with Hillary in the White House — evening dinners with Democratic leaders working out solutions to budget problems and immigration … Wait, could Trump be doing all this just to sabotage her book sales?
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Free markets and competition are great for consumers. When the government broke up the telephone monopoly 35 years ago, who could have guessed that one day we could buy a new phone for only $999?
 ---Sure, $999 sounds expensive for the iPhone X, but we have to remember that phones in the early 1980s couldn’t turn your face into a talking, singing and dancing poop emoji.
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Back in those unenlightened days, we didn’t even know what a poop emoji was. How did we survive?
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Apple’s newly unveiled iPhone X uses facial recognition as an unlocking device. That opens a world of fun for identical twins and makes Halloween a night without phone service, which pretty much justifies the price.
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How far have we come in 35 years? The newest, coolest phone was unveiled at a press conference without anyone bothering to ask whether it actually can make and receive phone calls.
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On Second Thought for Sept. 4, 2017

9/1/2017

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A lighthearted look at news of the day  
Welcome to September, the month when football can finally distract us from everything else happening in the world. 
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Actually, the college season kicked off more than a week ago. How distracting is football? Kim Jong Un fired a missile over Japan and Guam thought of signaling for a fair catch. 
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Protesters descended on Washington last week to march against President Trump's proposed cuts to national service programs. Unfortunately, someone thought it would be a great idea to have them all dress in silly dinosaur costumes, which gave the protest all the impact of a Disney parade for kids. 
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Judging by the looks of it, people would have thought the dinosaurs were protesting the arms race, or at least advocating for shorter arms. 
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The dinosaur costumes were supposed to compare budget cuts to the extinction of dinosaurs. But everyone knows federal budget cuts had nothing to do with dinosaurs going extinct. That had to do with the price of gasoline, which was always rising higher because they hadn't died yet and turned into oil. 
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Actually, that's not true. Fossil fuels come from plants and animals that died long before dinosaurs came on the scene and started passing law in Congress. 
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First, Russia kicked out hundreds of U.S. diplomats to retaliate against U.S. sanctions. Then last week, the United States retaliated by closing a Russian consulate in San Francisco. Taken together, these moves send a strong message … that being a diplomat can be an unstable profession. 
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Seriously, you have to feel sorry for the 755 diplomats who are being sent home from Russia. It happened so fast they didn't even get a chance to dress like dinosaurs and protest in Red Square. Where will we put these people? Don't worry! They are coming home in time for harvest season, which is fortuitous considering the president's new anti-immigration policies will open a lot of jobs in the fields. 
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Salt Lake Mayor Jackie Biskupski finally agreed to close a road near the homeless shelter to cut down on drug trafficking this week, even though she wasn't sure it was the best thing to do — proving you don't have to be a roads scholar to be a mayor. ​
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