Monthly Archives: August 2021

RENTER’S INSURANCE.

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Do you have renter’s insurance? Renter’s insurance costs between $150 and $200 a year, a small price to pay for a lot of coverage. First, you also get personal property insurance with worldwide coverage. That means that if your stuff gets stolen from your home, your car, or your luggage while you are traveling; you can get reimbursed. Second, you get personal liability insurance. That protects you in case somebody slips on your porch or trips over an extension cord and breaks his clavichord. I always advise tenants to buy renter’s insurance whenever I sign a lease, and tenants invariably tell me that they will do that, but sadly, a lot of them put off making the purchase until they have suffered a loss, and then it’s too late. That sounds a lot like the unvaccinated people in hospitals who say to the doctor just before they die from Covid19: “Okay doc. Give me the damn vaccine”, and then the doctor has to tell them that it’s too late for that. Sadly, that happens many times every day. It seems hard to believe that there are still large numbers of people in the United States who don’t know the difference between a vaccine and a cure. But I digress. Don’t wait until your stuff is stolen before buying renter’s insurance. If you don’t know where to get renter’s insurance, just go to Google, and type in ‘renter’s insurance’ and the name of the city and state where you live, and you’ll get lots of results. Renter’s insurance is not hard to find. If you are a tenant, you need renter’s insurance!


What about the landlord’s insurance? Doesn’t he already have insurance on the building?
A lot of tenants don’t buy renter’s insurance in the mistaken belief that they already have coverage because the landlord has insurance on the property, but that is just wishful thinking. Sometimes a tenant will ask me: “Do you have fire insurance on this building?” I tell them: “Yes, I have fire insurance.” However, my insurance only protects me from loss, not you. If there is a fire, my insurance policy will pay me for the damage to the building and the personal property that belongs to me, like the refrigerator in your apartment. However, my insurance policy won’t pay you for the loss of your property. If there is a fire and your computer is reduced to a pile of melted plastic, you need your own insurance policy to get reimbursed for that. As I said, imagining that you don’t need renter’s insurance because your landlord has insurance on the property is just wishful thinking. Insurance doesn’t work that way.

COVID VACCINE VS. AN UNTUCKED SHIRT

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As you probably know, the governors of some southern states are prohibiting public schools from requiring kids and teachers to wear face masks. In Florida and Texas, this prohibition is statewide despite the fact that these states have the most new Covid cases in the country. Most hospitals in Texas and Florida have no available ICU beds. The governors of Florida and Texas say that the reason they are doing this is because they are “opposed to government mandates“, but these states have the nation’s toughest school behavior mandates in the country. In a number of southern states, a public school student who is caught wearing his shirt over his pants instead of tucked in is subject to corporal punishment by teachers and school staff. Thousands of kids in Texas public schools are spanked, paddled, or beaten every year for offenses such as wearing an untucked shirt or laughing in the cafeteria. In Mississippi, elementary school students have been sent to ‘juvie’ (a jail for juvenile criminals) for wearing the wrong color shoes. In Florida, children as young as 6 are subjected to corporal punishment. There are no regulations in Florida as to what instrument can be used to beat children with, and Florida schools do not need permission from parents to beat their kids. Southerners support these very harsh school mandates, but they become enraged when they are told to have their kids wear face masks at school because “we don’t believe in mandates.” Covid has killed over 600,000 Americans, but no child ever died from wearing an untucked shirt or laughing in the school cafeteria. The logic of these people escapes me. Southerners love their children and don’t want them to get sick and die. I don’t get it. No foolin’. I really don’t get it.

About California. Here in California, corporal punishment is prohibited in public schools. When I tell my students that in a number of southern states, teachers can beat students with a wood paddle or a leather belt for wearing an untucked shirt, they don’t believe me. I can see it in their faces. They ask other teachers in the school and their parents if it is true. Once they get confirmation that it is true, they go silent and stare at me. Some of my students told me later that they made their parents promise not to move to the South, at least not until all the kids in the house graduate high school. Some adults laugh when I tell them that, but I can assure you that none of my 13-year old students laughs when I tell them that kids their age are beaten in schools in the South every day for offenses such as ‘horseplay on a school bus’, ‘flatulence in class’, wearing mismatched socks, or wearing an untucked shirt. 

THE HISTORY CHANNEL IS AN ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL, NOT A HISTORY CHANNEL.

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I sometimes wonder how many people watch the History Channel in the belief that their shows and the stories they tell are real history. Some of their shows are fairly obviously fiction, like shows claiming to be a history of alliances between space aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Vatican; but many shows that appear to be real are actually faked and staged. The most popular of these is the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars. Pawn Stars appears to be filmed in a real pawn shop in Las Vegas, but it is actually filmed in a fake pawn shop next door to the real one. The people coming into the fake pawn shop are paid actors, and the items they are trying to sell have been researched in advance, which is why the pawn shop owners know so much about them. This show is scripted and rehearsed. Nothing is real. Many other popular History Channel shows appear to be real and unrehearsed but are also staged and scripted, including Mountain Men, American Restoration, American Pickers, and Ancient Aliens.

The Vatican Observatory and Space Lizards. The Vatican owns an astronomical observatory in Arizona. This observatory is the basis of countless conspiracy theories claiming some sort of alliance between space aliens and the Vatican. Several ‘reality TV’ shows claim that the Pope, Hillary Clinton, and Queen Elizabeth are all super-smart lizards from a mystery planet and that they communicate with their home planet through the Vatican observatory. If this subject interests you, you can research it yourself. There are lots of ‘exposes’ on websites, TV, and YouTube videos about reptilian world leaders. Below is a photo that appeared in a newspaper in Scotland claiming to show what Queen Elizabeth looks like with her ‘human disguise’ on and off. The idea that the Pope is a reptile from outer space was frequently parodied on the TV show Futurama; however, on Futurama, the ‘Space Pope’ was a crocodile, not a lizard. It seems hard for me to believe that anyone takes this stuff seriously, but angry pickets show up at the White House every now and then demanding that the president get rid of the space lizards in the government.


Why Does the Vatican Have an Observatory? The Vatican got interested in astronomy a long time ago, but it was for theological reasons, not to communicate with space lizards. For over 1,500 years, Europeans used the Julian calendar, which contained numerous errors. The most serious error in the Julian calendar was that it assumed that every year was exactly 365.25 days long. That overestimated the length of a year by about 1 day per century. That may not seem like a lot, but it meant that by the 16th Century, Christians were celebrating Easter, Christmas, and other holidays 2 weeks earlier than they should. This greatly concerned Pope Gregory XIII, who ordered that a group of Vatican astronomers develop a far more accurate calendar, which they did after years of research and astronomical observations. In 1582, the Catholic church adopted the Gregorian calendar, which is now used nearly everywhere in the world. As I said, this had nothing to do with space lizards.