St Petersburg Florida Quotes

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane ‘55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or “Killer,” as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a “Yellow School Bus.” He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed….

A man is an increasingly hard thing to find. We live in a society of boys - twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-old boys. Many guys today seem to have the goal of maintaining a junior-high mentality all the way through life. The ultimate in life seems to be to retire, still a boy. I suggest there is virtually no difference between the shuffle board courts of St. Petersburg, Florida, and the parties at Daytona Beach. The proof of my suggestion is that those playing shuffleboard would be at Daytona Beach if they were fifty ears younger. They've not developed into men at all; they've just gotten older.

I had to twist Harold Freund’s arm repeatedly to get him to build a bakery just to service our California stores. Freund now has the largest, most automated bun plant in the world. It produces eight thousand buns an hour for McDonald’s. It also has a plant in St. Petersburg serving all of Florida, and another serving all of Hawaii. Fred

Meteorologists agree that our planet is heating up! Now I know that many people disagree with this or just think that it is part of a natural cycle. It doesn’t really matter what we think, because the Earth’s climate will do what it is doing with or without our influence. As part of my profession, I took classes related to the weather and I would just like to share some of my thoughts on this important topic. First, if I know something is heading in the wrong direction, I’ll try to do something about it and if I’m partially to blame, I’ll try a little harder! For years we have been putting carbon up into the atmosphere and now the chickens are coming home to roost! It doesn’t matter what we think about this, however here in Florida the hurricanes have been becoming more violent… as we saw last summer! Statistically the high tides have been just a little higher with each passing year. In fact the average tides have been going up by an inch for every 10 years. That’s an inch per decade! In the Miami area the water has been coming up through the sewer pipes with fish swimming in the streets and here in the Tampa Bay area the streets are flooding, like in the Venetian Isles neighborhood of St. Petersburg, where flooding has been happening about 70 time per year. Can you imagine being flooded out 70 times per year?

It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three Russian companies named in a sprawling indictment handed down by the Justice Department in February 2018 that detailed the scope and sophistication of the Russian interference. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the Russian cyber operatives stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political and religious activists on social media, and used divisive issues such as race and immigration to inflame an already divided electorate—all in support of their preferred candidate, the reality television star and real estate developer Donald Trump. Russian operatives even traveled to the United States to gather intelligence. They focused their efforts on key battleground states and, remarkably, covertly coordinated with members of the Trump campaign in August 2016 to organize rallies in Florida. The Russian interference also included a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in a politically devastating leak of thousands of emails that threw the Democratic convention in Philadelphia into turmoil. In his final report, released in redacted form in April 2019, Robert Mueller said that Moscow’s efforts were part of a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to assist Donald Trump and weaken his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though the report noted that key witnesses used encrypted communications, engaged in obstructive behavior, gave false or misleading testimony, or chose not to testify at all. Perhaps most damning was the special counsel’s conclusion that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from the information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

We never did lack for eager volunteers, but there was no one who could give them [Florida volunteers] clear-cut directions. Some work was duplicated while other chores were left undone. The national office in Washington was in the same plight. In the confusion, local jealousies and rivalries thrived. Compared with the professional and well-financed campaigns of the other candidates, mine did not inspire confidence. There were countless damaging results; a trip to St. Petersburg was rescheduled five times and finally cancelled four days before the last date agreed on, but no one in Tampa thought to tell the St. Petersburg TImes, and its reporter went out and waited for me to arrive. It was not a good way to treat one of the state's leading newspapers.