My How Times Have Changed, and then again, Perhaps Not

© 2025, The Institute for Applied Common Sense, LLC ™

In my continuing effort not to offend either side in this partisan political environment, I haven’t written a blog post in over a year. However, I may have found a topic about which I can comfortably write - finally.

When I woke up this morning, I realized how much life here in the United States has changed but then realized that it has sort of remained the same. What’s the same? Laughing at the news. What’s different? I used to laugh at the news as I went to bed at night. These days I wake up around 3:30 am or so and read the digital versions of multiple news outlets and laugh myself awake. Either way, I find myself laughing throughout the day.

For the 30 years that I lived in Los Angeles, I had my Sony clock radio tuned to KFWB – All News All the Time. “You give us 22 minutes; we’ll give you the world.” Within those 22 minutes, you could expect local, state, national, and international news, weather, business, and sports (plus traffic). When I traveled to other major cities, they all had a clone of this Westinghouse Broadcasting radio product. (Today, they are significantly Hispanic music stations.)

Back in the day, I routinely watched the TV news at 11 pm, crawled into bed at 11:30 pm, turned on KFWB and set it to automatically turn off at 12 midnight, and used merely listening and laughing at the news to perform its sedative function. Although I wasn’t married, I never went to sleep angrily.

Fast forward roughly 50 years and this morning I woke up to a story that has had me in stitches, rolling on the floor for the past 30 minutes, so much so that I am having difficulty typing, as I struggle to tone it down so the other tenants in the building do not start knocking on my door.

At various times yesterday, I saw numerous videos of major wildfires around the world. As I read through the New York Times digital edition this morning, I saw the title, How One Company Maintains a Monopoly on the US Supply of Fire Retardant. It turns out that, “Perimeter Solutions, which controls the entire U.S. supply of fire retardant, has hiked its prices in recent years.” Apparently, there is very little demand.

After laughing for 15 minutes, I managed to regain enough control to see if any other news outlets were aware of this development. I determined that there was none that mattered. My Google hits were either promotional / advertising pieces or investment / stock discussions. I did manage to find this v i d e o.

And thus I return, again, to my life-long mentors who remind me that the only thing new is the history you don’t know.

In January of 1940, they figured something out.

I evidently have too much time on my hands.