Irish Stew #22…
[Note from Steve: It’s been awhile, but here’s another potpourri of comments on current news—in other words, I’ll forsake my usual verbosity in order to cover more items that have caught my attention. A lot of newsy comments for very little money? Consider it a selection of tapas and pick and choose what you like….]
Item: Has our country gone mad? Last week (Tuesday) we all received the news that the recall elections in Colorado were successful. Dems Angela Giron from Colorado and John Morse from Colorado Springs were recalled and replaced by Republicans because they were strong supporters of gun control legislation. This recall was backed by the NRA, of course, and now they will shiver the timbers of any legislator who dares to cross them. The recall was also backed by the Koch brothers and other conservatives who had it in for these two because of other progressive misdeeds. Colorado moves farther to the right…will it soon be competing with Arizona, Florida, Kansas, and Texas? Just wait…they’ll soon ban teaching Darwinian evolution in schools.
Maybe the middle of the country and the South should secede. I’d support it if they’d return all the federal funding they’ve spent over the years! I urge all ski enthusiasts to boycott Colorado this winter. Hit’em where it hurts—in their bank accounts! (With the floods, that might not be necessary now.) Yeah, I know, the Colorado districts involved are tiny and other people would suffer from the boycott, but Morse was State Senate President, or something like that—he was a representative for the whole state in that sense.
Item: Names for sports teams? As another item of madness, you might have heard that Native Americans and a few PR-grabbing sportscasters are angry about the Washington Redskins’ name…again! Theoretically, I can sympathize and recognize that Redskins, Braves, Indians, and so forth don’t set well with Native Americans…maybe their being “on the warpath” is justified. But one Native American lady said that the name Redskins reminds her that white men skinned her people. What about the close haircuts some tribes gave their enemies, including white men? Atrocities were committed by both sides, as usually happens, although palefaces generally had hidden agendas to motivate their sins perpetrated against the redskins—stealing land was only the most obvious.
I still have a problem with changing sports teams’ names at a more empirical level. Are Southern baseball fans offended by the New York Yankees? Should PETA protest the use of Blackhawks, Seahawks, Blue Jays, Sting Rays, and so forth? And should Armani or Calvin Klein complain about the Red Sox and White Sox? C’mon! We’ve already decided to be PC and give American Indians the moniker Native Americans. What about the Dallas Cowboys? Should they be called the Dallas Cattleherders? I think all of this is a storm in a teacup—let’s solve some real problems, people!
Item: Got an app for that? Many people collect apps for their smart phones. Call me a Luddite, but I don’t. My cell phone sits in my car for emergencies and nothing else. I can’t stand cell phones, let alone smart phones. I did “serious programming” in my R&D day jobs—many lines of real, mind-numbing code. Apps seem like toys, and if you want to do something beyond what that app does, what do you do? Most people do nothing and feel frustrated, that’s what! Computer programs are nice, until they’re not—and that’s all apps are, just tiny computer programs.
That said, there are things more bothersome about apps. Here I’ll consider two examples. (Write and add to the list.) First, they’re often linked to corporate interests that pay to get info ON YOU so they can target ads to you. It always amuses me that people are so up-in-arms about NSA’s and other government programs designed to catch terrorists when corporations are spying on you all the time. Google recently admitted that they read all your gmails. They wave their hands and say that it’s all done by computers, so what’s the problem?—no humans read your gmails. Well, NSA doesn’t have enough people to read all the crap they have to read to catch terrorists either—they use computers too (probably better ones than Google’s). So, what’s the difference?
Point two: Last Saturday I read in the NY Times that 15 kids—I presumed they were all bratty middle-school tweenies—used a cell phone app to bully a girl into committing suicide. I couldn’t find the name of the app or I’d display it here, but this is NOT acceptable use of a stupid computer program! The company (or persons) that makes the app should be warned and publicly chastised (I’ll keep looking), and the 15 bullies should be charged with manslaughter at least (I suppose if this were a PC blog, I should say “personslaughter,” but to hell with that!).
Next thing you know, we’ll have an app for brainwashing a person with automatic and repeated cell phone calls at 3 a.m. We already have wakeup apps, so it wouldn’t take much to add that feature! With that brainwashing app, think of the possibilities. Google could even brainwash you to buy only their products!
Item: Summer movies. A mixed bag, methinks. I can’t remember one that left a lasting impression. Woody’s Jasmine left a lasting depression, in fact, besides being boring. Elysium was OK as Hollywood sci-fi goes, but the plot shared the same defect some radical immigration proposals share: how could Elysium (the space station) provide enough portadoc units for all Earth’s teeming billions (the immigration analogy is that we can’t transport 11+ million undocumented people back to their home countries)?
The two thriller films involving terrorist attacks on the White House were bad and bad to the nth degree, so bad I can’t remember the names, and they made me yearn for a movie version of Clancy’s Debt of Honor—at least in that book it was Congress that was vaporized (did 9/11 terrorists steal Clancy’s idea?). Congress is the real and current villain in American politics (discounting Obama’s Syrian folly, he’s basically a nice guy—not true of many Congress people).
Another White House movie offered a bit more diversity than Jamie Foxx mimicking Barack Obama—The Butler. I heard that it was good, but I didn’t see it—I don’t trust Hollywood versions of history, even if the film is called a documentary (maybe especially if it’s called a documentary!). The film about taking down bin Laden seemed riddled with inaccuracies, although those historical films are a bit hard to evaluate because so much is still under security wraps. Maybe the right thing to do is wait years for the correct historical perspective, as in Argo. The Butler might have had that—don’t know. Whitaker apparently likes to do these movies, though.
Hollywood continues to fail us. The (British filmed?) movie Closed Circuit and the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy were sleepers and probably worth seeing, if you haven’t already. Another recent sleeper is The Family—like Whitaker, some really great actors in this one. The story might seem like a parody of Goodfellas to some, and it’s violence mixed with comedy, but I found it to be, unlike Goodfellas, an interesting peek into what mob families might look like. Otherwise, watch some old movies on TV (“old” could mean from the previous decade). I saw one—Mindgames or something like that, about FBI agents taking crash profiling lessons—where I learned that LL Cool J’s real name is James Todd Smith. I like his real name better!
Item: Cold calls from the rich and famous? Speaking of sports teams, one baseball player caught with his hands in the cookie jar of performance-enhancing drugs, one Mr. Braun, is calling season ticket holders to apologize for doping. How about calling all those kids who lost a role model? Sounds like a cheap PR stunt to me.
Now it turns out the new Pope is making cold calls too. Different motivation, but also a cheap PR stunt. Talking to a few needy souls won’t help the Catholic Church become more relevant to today’s social ennui. We have a crisis in moral relevance—the Church needs to listen to the rumblings at the grassroots level to recover its relevance. I can applaud this Pope’s intentions, but he’s just one man, a miniscule speck of humanity relative to a huge Church bogged down in its own traditions and history.
Maybe the Pope should call Braun, A-Rod, and the other players and ask them to atone for their sins? Swindling a nation of kids, even a world of kids (other countries play baseball and admire the major leaguers), is pretty low. Of course, the Pope is probably more of a soccer fan (futbol to Latinos).
Item: When can you ink? There’s a movement afoot on another “important social front” too. I missed all of the report—perhaps a reader can set me straight. But I heard a report that some busybody legislator wants to create a new law where people wanting a tattoo have to wait twenty-four hours! It’s called the “Think before You Ink” legislation. Now, as I understand it, there are already age limits for this. Let me assume that age is eighteen—or whatever the state’s age is for doing all sorts of nasty things like joining the Army, drinking, having sex, getting an abortion, or driving a car (I realize these might not all be the same). Isn’t this enough to protect our precious and foolish teens from piercing and tattooing? Again, a storm in a teacup—let’s solve some real problems, people!
Item: Lady Gaga on GMA? A week ago Monday, Lady Gaga appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America (yeah, that show has become like TV’s People Magazine, at least in what I call the latter “soccer-mom half” of the show). The Lady is quite talented…and weird, but any question about her presentations aside (why didn’t PETA and all vegetarians boycott her for that meaty costume?), why did this happen on that particular Monday? That Monday was the first day of school for all NYC schoolchildren and many schoolchildren in the tri-state suburbs. The Lady’s “little monsters” were probably chomping at the bit to go see her, yet they had to go to school. I bet some skipped school that day anyway. Poor timing, I’d say—not that I hung around to watch her on GMA. I’m still trying to figure out what Joe Crocker and the Simon and Garfunkel duo have in common—they’re both classified now as “classic rock stars.” Huh?
Item: A confession that’s not a confession? You’ve probably heard about the guy who admitted to running down someone in a drunk driving incident—on YouTube, where else? At first, his face is blurred, but then he shows his whole face. The cops won’t even have to obtain a confession now—he’s admitted he’s guilty. He also asks us all not to drink and drive. This is an egregious case of too little, too late.
Later, when up for arraignment, this %$*&! changed his plea to not guilty. The judge was irked, and justly so. Along with that judge, I have to wonder what games the perp and his two smart-alec lawyers are playing. Our justice system is loaded down enough without lawyers advising clients to play these kind of games. I don’t buy their statement that this is just procedural and a way of showing they’re impartial to which judge they get for this case. C’mon!
According to the lawyers, he will plead guilty. But I don’t care how contrite he is. He screwed up royally. I don’t know what the legal limit is, but the judge should give this guy the maximum sentence—that’s 8+ years, which doesn’t seem to be enough for taking another man’s life, because driving drunk and causing an accident is pre-meditated to my way of thinking. The man slid behind the wheel inebriated. Maybe he didn’t say, “I’m going out to kill someone,” but he might as well have said that. I don’t care either about the good PR he might have received either for the admission of guilt—the victim will stay dead and his family will forever be changed. We have to get drunk drivers off the road. There are too many tragedies like this one.
And so it goes….
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