Chapter 18: Life has it's ways

Dr. Mina Sutherland was doing very well. Her understanding of how things work in real life ... the original premise in her Essay cum Doctoral Thesis ... was how things work and work out ... or not. Her predictions for future events proved true.

The country WAS going to hell in a hand basket.

The idiot oil millionaire did ruin the country and for exactly the reasons she predicted. "Your Captains of Industry will need their intelligent sons to run their Industries, their idiot sons will be elected to high office and ruin the country." If it weren't for the highly educated bureaucrats in the government, the idiots would ruin the country.

And then greed raised it's ugly head. Government offices that should be concerned with the betterment of the people were slowly being taken over by men who could be bought.

Drugs that were effective and cheap were being replaced by drugs that were lightly tested but highly expensive and had suspect effectiveness. So what if people died ... the profits over the short haul were tremendous and any lawsuits that were successful only made the lawyers rich.

When government convicts companies of wrong doing ... the people wronged don't get a penny of levied fines ... no, the fines are passed on to the consumer. The guilty ... those at the very top are seldom convicted ... it's the doers ... the little guy in the middle of the command chain that gets the sentence ... and all because they are rushed into producing shoddy or dangerous products by the men at the top who want it all and they want it now!

Great inventions ... like flat screen TV's ... invented by Americans but brought out by Asians because the development time is longer than two years, are more common than you think.

Investors are no longer gamblers... 'my investments failed ... fix it for me daddy!'

"We never learn a damn thing from history." Just before the end of Spring Semester, Mina said to a Saturday picnic gathering of History professors and staff.

"I'll drink to that!" And Mina's secretary did just that, and called for another.

Dr. Jerold, three offices up from Mina's, said, "Sometimes I wonder why we bother. The idiots have it all laid out in front of them and still go grasping at straws. Intelligent design, my ass."

"Fucking world is run by god dammed accountants."

The party was getting a trifle out of hand, but then, parties at Megan's finally restored house tended to do that ... students or staff. In the past two years, Bill and Mina had become fixtures on campus. Bill had flown the Arado down from Amarillo loaded with the BillyBuilt and Mina's Jeep.

Megan moved her big sailboat to Joes Bayou in Destin Florida, the airport there was a nice walk from the boat ... or the boat was a nice walk from the airport. Either way, they got land legs back or seat butts eliminated.

"I'd like a nice sail before Fall Semester," Megan suggested. She was doing so well in school she was going to graduate Summa Cum Laude after just three years, and she had her Masters work pretty much done, thanks to the house archaeological site.

She had managed to write a computer based program that correlated all the statistics acquired at the site. The grounds dig was an ongoing archaeology workshop and lab for the Anthropology Department.

The Arky folks were hoping Megan would choose their department for her Ph.D, the math people wanted her, and due to some of the things she designed and had built for the boat, the digs and her ongoing airfield restoration at Sharpe Field, the Engineering Department had hopes too.

The CS department was still fairly small, but growing and hoping Megan would gain a Doctorate with them. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Megan got one hell-of-a deal on Sharpe Field. The best that could be said for it was all the oil and gasoline dumped during the war years weren't as dangerous as nuclear waste. Fortunately, the old concrete pads kept runoff to a minimum. The place wasn't good for farming and the few trees that grew weren't straight and tall like pulp wood should be.