The Winter Olympics have never been high on my personal list of events. The Olympics in general have become boring for me over the past 20 years.
I’m turned off by the hype, I’m turned off by the politics and while I respect the training that the competitors put in, it’s not an event that captures my attention or takes up any of my time.
This year’s Winter Olympics is literally less important to me than scratching my balls.
I personally think that the US Olympic team should not have gone in the first place. There’s just too much controversy around China now. It’s so off my radar I couldn’t even tell you what US network is providing coverage of the games.
While many Americans are trying to avoid Chinese products, and those same Americans are asking what it’s going to take for us to bring our manufacturing home; The Olympic Games are showcasing China.
There was one news report last week, suggesting the Olympic Team use burner phones instead of taking their cellphones with them to China.
If there is that kind of concern about Chinese spying, perhaps we have no business sending young athletes to a place where their naïveté could get them into trouble in the first place.
Let’s not forget that COVID is still of great concern to the Chinese government.
I fully expect an athlete from some country to accidentally break a CCP rule and have it turn into an overblown international incident. Then we’ll get to watch some Chinese minister shake his finger at the offending country.
Given the situation with Antony Blinken, I’m almost positive it will be an American athlete because the CCP couldn’t pass up that opportunity.
I’m hoping that the American viewership will be dismal to the point our athletes just say, “fuck it, what’s the point,” and come home. It’s unfair to the athletes to be sure, but the overarching issue is why is anyone paying attention to a grandiose propaganda event that benefits no-one but the CCP?
Before you think me a hypocrite, I’m keenly aware that I’m typing this post on a device that says, “Designed in California, Made In China.” Well, this is either the last computer that I buy, or the next computer will say, “Designed and manufactured in the USA.”
I’m not trying to be a “Crazy” nationalist… (Although, apparently it’s okay for other countries to be nationalistic.) I’m simply saying that if I have a choice, I’d prefer to buy American.
After all, aren’t we all supposed to be social justice warriors? Aren’t we supposed to be concerned about the enslavement of people? Anyone heard of the Uyghurs?
This kind of thing has always concerned me. I’ve worked for several companies that I LEFT because of health insurance or corporation biases.
There was one company that noticed I had a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license during the onboarding process.
The HR person told me that I’d have to provide them with a bill of sale for my bike within 30 days. She then went on to tell me that riding my motorcycle onto company property was a fireable offense.
After saying this, she went on as if she expected me to just comply without any pushback. When I asked her what the hell? She was quite shocked that I didn’t understand. After a bit of prodding she explained that the group insurance policy forbade anyone being covered from riding a motorcycle.
She was even more shocked when I told her we were done and asked for the hiring paperwork that I’d already filled out so that I could shred it. Then she got mad. I remember her screeching, “We’re only trying to protect you!”
My retort was, “Yep, at the price of becoming an indentured servant whose rights are granted by my employer, instead of The United States Constitution. What’s next? Approval of my sexual practices? Will I have to bring in the bedsheets weekly to prove that I’m not having sex if I’m unmarried? Will I have to prove that I’m not masturbating as well?”
Hey, I was younger and more prone to hyperbole.
I remember walking out of that place so pissed off I literally had to sit in my car in a mall parking lot to calm down for the drive home. Then I realized, “I’m at a mall, screw it! I’m going shopping!”
Then there was another company where smoking was suddenly forbidden, dictated again by a change in their insurance policy. This was not just on company property but in your home. I’d quit smoking a couple of years before, but that day when I stopped for gas I bought a pack of smokes. Then I found a nice bar and ordered a double. I sat there drinking and smoking much too late. I quit the job the following Monday, I quit smoking again about a month later. I made sure that when I went in to quit I reeked of cigarette smoke.
Then there was a company who sent out a survey to each employee asking if they were SCUBA divers, or skydivers, pilots, mountain climbers, motorcyclists, dirt bike riders, or enjoyed hang gliding. Most employees thought they were doing one of those HR team building things where the company would build clubs of likeminded people to tout their work life balance. My antenna went up immediately after reading the list of activities. I didn’t send my survey back.
Two weeks later an HR representative was standing at my desk with a stack of surveys demanding that the employee named on the survey fill it out while they waited. The representative testily pointed out that lying on a company form was grounds for dismissal.
She had maybe 30 other surveys in her hand. I asked, “Why is it so important for you to know if an employee participates in this specific group of activities?”
She told me, “the reason was none of my business.”
I told her, “Then write that I do all of them, then you’ll have whatever reason you’re fishing for to do whatever you’re going to do.”
Ahh… The fun of open office plans with 4′ cubicle walls. Several of my colleagues had incomplete surveys to fill out too. They heard the exchange and marked all of the above as well.
I’d already interviewed for another position with a competitor, and been offered the job.
The little lady stomped off, and I finished my resignation letter effective immediately. My boss pointed out that 2 weeks was customary and I said, “I’m not going to allow a company to dictate my personal life.”
My boss sat back and said, “Oh, you’ve heard.” I said, “Nope, but I’ve been to this rodeo before and know how it ends. Out of courtesy, I’ll give you two weeks because you’ve been decent to me.”
The next week, HR announced that the company decided the activities listed on the survey were too dangerous and employees were not to participate in them because medical insurance would not cover “Dangerous Activities”. In the HR announcement, they said they’d be reaching out to employees with acceptable methods that employees could prove to the company they’d given up these “dangerous” hobbies.
Over the next two weeks, the company received the resignations of about 20 engineering employees. In the end, they were begging for people to stay. HR remained intractable and started trying to hire replacements. But the word was out in the engineering community. It turned out that American engineers like to have fun in their off time.
These are examples of employer overreach from my own life and personal experience.
I’ll grant you that COVID vaccination was a bit different when the vaccines were being touted as providing immunity. But now?
We’ve been told by the CDC, and Dr Fauci that the vaccines against COVID-19 are therapeutic not preventative. We’ve seen articles in the mainstream press saying that the vaccine will prevent hospitalization with COVID but that even vaccinated persons can still get COVID and spread it.
So NOW with this knowledge, is it reasonable for corporations or governments to demand their employees be vaccinated? Is it right for those corporations to insinuate themselves into the personal lives of their employees? Will the future hold that an employee with HIV or cancer, or heart disease be threatened with their job if they don’t take HIV meds, or choose not to have chemo, or refuse a pacemaker?
This comes to mind because T-Mobile can be added to the list of employers demanding that their corporate employees get vaccinated. The article is here.
Since I’m adamantly against a corporation dictating any aspect of my life except when I must be at work to do my job, I’m in a bit of a conundrum.
I don’t want to support companies that do this sort of thing. But after doing some research it turns out that T-Mobile provides the best plans and pricing for me given my family’s needs.
Generally speaking, I’ve been terminating my connections/subscriptions to companies whose policies I disagree with. Apple being a notable exception although I have been reducing the new dollars that I give them.
There’s a problem being entrenched in any corporate ecosystem. You try to get out and they keep pulling you back in… To paraphrase the movie line about the Mafia.
I miss the good ol’ days when companies were just about making profit and were publicly apolitical. I know we’ll never get back to simple transactional relationships with Corporate America.
The Orwell novel in question is none other than 1984
The University says that the trigger warning is necessary because the book contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
Northampton is ranked 101 out of 121 in UK university rankings. So one could say that it’s among the UK’s remedial institutions of higher learning.
Perhaps that is why Northampton also has warnings for other works, including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.
The article linked above goes into more detail.
One has to wonder, is there a point when Irony reaches critical mass? What happens then, do heads explode, or is it simply a more quiet brain aneurism? Can the human brain self lobotomize as a protective measure?
It should be interesting to see where Northampton’s ranking ends up next year. Perhaps they understand that can’t reach the top rankings and are instead racing for the bottom of the barrel.
By now, you may have heard of or seen the altercation that happened on a Delta Flight from Tampa to Atlanta. When I read the text of their exchange I was laughing my butt off.
The other half said, “Thank God you weren’t that old man…”
Yeah, I do have a bit of a temper and do not respond well to phrases like, “Stand your ass up!” Believe me, I’d have probably stood up, then given this particular “Karen” a verbal dressing down she’d not soon forget.
Had she slapped me, all bets would be off. As annoying and frustrating as flying anywhere has become I’d already be edgy. A slap to the face and her rearing back as though she was going to punch me, (as some reports have indicated she was doing,) would have resulted in extreme violence and rage on my part.
I think the older gentleman handled this “Karen” situation far better than I would have.
According to some of the police reports I’ve read, this whole thing started because Patricia Cornwall was trying to get back to her seat after coming from the bathroom. She was blocked by the beverage cart.
Most civilized people who have flown before know that you have to wait for the cart to clear the aisle, you have two choices, remain standing or “borrow” an empty seat until the cart has passed your seat row. It’s not a difficult problem if you think about it.
I’ve been in the exact situation and simply asked a passenger seated next to an empty seat, “May I borrow this for a minute?”
Ms Cornwall demonstrated that she was clearly a product of the American Educational system given this simple logic problem evaded her.
Things went off the rails when the flight attendant told Ms. Cornwall to grab an empty seat until the beverage service was complete. At this point Cornwall replied, “What am I Rosa Parks?”
According to reports, this is when the elder gentleman pointed out that Cornwall wasn’t black, they were not in Alabama, nor were they on a bus.
I’d have added, “Unlike you lady, Rosa Parks had a point!”
It appears that after this exchange the two of them were, “off to the races” so to speak.
At some point during the dust-up Cornwall was demanding that the gentleman put his mask on, (hers however was being worn as a chin diaper,)
There may have been the word “Bitch” tossed around, and the elderly gentleman is quoted as saying, “Sit down Karen.” If the elderly man called this woman a bitch, he was being as polite as possible given her behavior. I’d have called her much worse, and stood by my descriptors.
In the ensuing scuffle, Cornwall appears to have injured two other passengers and at least one Delta employee.
Ms. Cornwall was taken into custody in Atlanta and paid 20,000 bail to get out of jail.
This is one of those things that speaks volumes about the society.
There was a time when you treated elders, even crotchety elders with respect. When you’re on a flight, or a bus, or any other public transportation you are supposed to mind your manners and be cooperative. Apparently Ms. Cornwall missed those days in etiquette class.
But hey, she was a playboy bunny and an actress right? She’s special… Uh huh.
It’s been reported that the gentleman is 80. Given that he is about 30 years her senior, he legitimately called out Ms. Cornwall on her poor behavior. She was being childish. He may well have been a father, or grandfather. I’m betting that slipped into “Dad” mode without even thinking about it.
Even I, as much of an ass as I can be, I listen to an Elder. One telling me to cool my jets would be met with a contrite, “Yes Sir.”
Too many women like Cornwall seem to think that it’s perfectly okay to smack a man and that they’ll get away with it. Those same women run to the police when, after smacking a man, he hits ’em back.
A man’s only recourse today is to involve the law and doing so makes us feel weak and powerless, even if the police take the matter seriously, (often they don’t).
That’s why I hope this gentleman presses charges and doesn’t just let it go. I hope he puts it all out there. Elder abuse, Assault, pain and suffering due to the public nature of the crime, and anything else his attorney can toss into the mix.
The trouble is, as men we’re taught to “Suck it up,” and move on. If he happens to be a “Southern Gentleman” I’d say the odds are high that he’ll let it go.
In the same situation, I might do the same even knowing that letting it go would be tacitly condoning women getting away with abusing men.
In a predictable move. After all we all knew it was coming. The Jan 6th commission has referred Meadows to the DOJ for Contempt of congress.
It doesn’t matter where you come down on the whole Jan 6th inquiry, you have to admit this guy is between a rock and a hard place.
He had been cooperating with the commission but then apparently felt he had to stop because the information they were requesting was coming up against executive privilege issues that Trump retains.
Trump has filed a lawsuit to protect executive privilege. That puts Meadows in a bind. If he continues to cooperate with the Jan 6th commission providing all the requested information and then Trumps executive privilege is upheld. Meadows could find that he’s violated the law on that side.
On the other hand by defying the Subpoena he’s pissing off congress.
The NPR article makes reference to the text messages Meadows received, calling them “Explosive”. Meh, I’d call them circumstantial.
Yeah, if you wanted to infer that Trump was at the heart of the Jan 6th event at the capital you could read them as the smoking gun. But if, as Trump maintains, he wasn’t coordinating and directing the Jan 6th event at the capital, that he’d only told folks to go and protest…
Then the text messages are nothing more than people sending texts without thinking about parsing out the language so that it could pass future legal tests. In fact the messages could be read as simply, informational and requests that Trump speak to the crowds to calm them down.
With the exception of the one talking about needing “aggressive strategy” most of the other messages could be taken to say, “Hey, Trump needs to remind the crowd about the rule of law. Protests are fine as long as they do not result in violence, destruction, fires, or looting.”
In fact if Trump had said something to that effect from the steps of the capital surrounded by security and police establishing crowd control, he would have thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated Pelosi again.
That being said, Pelosi and her cronies would have pointed to Trump being a leader as proof that he was at the bottom of the event in the first place and congress would have gone all rabid about it too. Either way, we’d probably be in the same situation. That’s the problem when abject hatred taints your world view.
I’m not saying the Trump didn’t incite the crowd. To what extent, will be determined by the courts. I think it’s pretty clear that he had a hand in what happened. I think that it spiraled out of control, and once the monster of a mob is let loose it’s really tough to control what the monster does.
We as a nation knew what mobs looked like, we’d seen it in Portland and Seattle for months. Trump, and everyone else should have known better.
As an aside, I thought about going to DC.
I could have, and I certainly had the time to do it. My reason for not going was that I’d paid attention to the lessons of Portland and Seattle. My other reason was that it was all becoming too about Trump.
I was then, and still am angry, not about the election results, but about the dismissal of the various voting irregularities that were reported in states across the country.
There was, in my opinion, enough circumstantial evidence to warrant investigations and hearings about those irregularities. I wasn’t particularly interested in overturning the election, I am far more interested in making sure that such irregularities never happen again.
It’s my opinion, that “The Big Lie” could have been easily deflated if the Supreme Court had publicly and with due seriousness addressed the issues raised and then made recommendations based on their findings.
For four solid and interminable years our nation was subjected to investigation after investigation of what turned out to be largely circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Trump. Yep, there were some things that weren’t circumstantial, they were fact. Trump is supposed to answer for those things and the cases are winding their way through the legal system now.
I had expectation that on issues of voter fraud or irregularities, the same level of investigatory diligence would be applied. Hopefully not four long years worth, but at least some public display of diligence.
It frankly appeared that since folks got what they wanted in Biden, they were willing to ignore, and allow the courts to ignore, circumstantial evidence. Why was it okay to pursue circumstantial evidence on the one hand and ignore the same kind of evidence on the other? What it seemed was happening was that since Trump said it, it was inconsequential. He was just being a sore loser.
Yeah, did you expect anything less? Regardless, you have to take these allegations seriously, isn’t that the lesson Congress taught us over the preceding four years?
For me personally, the quick and apparently casual dismissals of concerns, is what made me angry.
I accepted that Biden was President, I didn’t think it was a good idea, but it was expected. Trump had caused a severe polarization in the electorate. In virtually every similar historic situation the response has always been the same. The electorate chooses the opposite pole.
Had I gone to DC, I would have been standing on the steps of The Supreme Court exercising my Constitutionally guaranteed right to demand redress. I’d have been holding a sign that simply said, “Justices, I respectfully ask you to do your job.”
I wouldn’t have entered or forced my way into any building. I’d have complied with law enforcement to move or remain in a particular area. I would never have threatened anyone, that’s just not appropriate. I’m a law abiding citizen, and you cannot demand investigations or that the law be upheld if you’re going to turn around and violate the law.
After Jan 6th, I was very glad I wasn’t in Washington that day.
See I’m a moron, I could see myself being invited into a building or following a crowd that appeared to be invited in and in total innocence, I’d have found myself in all kinds of trouble.
I’ve been to Washington DC once in my life. Most of the buildings were closed for the holidays, (we were there over a Christmas trip). But I got to walk around the monuments. I stood in front of The White House and was in awe. I stood in the Lincoln Memorial and I took the time to read the inscriptions. I walked the length of the reflecting pool and everywhere else we were allowed to walk. It was a magical and great experience. My only regret was that The Smithsonian wasn’t open. I’d have loved being lost there for as long as they’d have me.
As I was considering making the trip to Washington DC prior to the Jan 6th event. I was also planning to revisit those sites, and see the Vietnam Memorial.
Here’s the thing some people apparently have problems with.
I could have gone there, expressed my opinion by protesting, and then duty discharged, taken pride in being an American wandering the monuments and reading the words written by our forefathers.
I would have been super excited to go read with my own eyes, the actual Constitution of the United States. And yes, The Smithsonian would have had to ask me to leave at closing time.
So you see, after the Jan 6th event… I shuddered to think how my patriotism and innocence could have gotten me into a lot of trouble.
Perhaps it’s my belief in the law and The Constitution that makes me feel sorry for Meadows. He’s in a tough spot. Just because he worked for Trump doesn’t mean he’s inherently a bad person, nor does it mean he’s a good person. It just means that he in fact, worked for Trump.
If Meadows broke the law then he should suffer the consequences. Right now, I don’t think he’s breaking the law by restricting access to material he believes to be protected under executive privilege. He’s trying to honor the requirements of two laws that are in conflict. That’s a tough position to be in.
Meadows Attorney says it well;
“He has fully cooperated as to documents in his possession that are not privileged and has sought various means to provide other information while continuing to honor the former president’s privilege claims,” Terwillger said in a statement.
Until Trumps suit is decided, (a lower court ruled Trumps claim invalid and Trump unsurprisingly, is taking it to The Supreme Court,) Meadows is at an impasse. One that cannot be resolved until The Supreme Court makes its decision.
I think it’s unfair that Congress is dropping the hammer on Meadows when essentially he’s bound by law. Yes, Biden has said that executive privilege doesn’t apply. But is that legal? I ask honestly because there’s supposed to be a separation between the Executive and Legislative branches of the government. Isn’t the Supreme Court the arbiter of these issues?
I also feel for all the people who may have been caught up in the events of Jan 6th.
I could so easily see myself in their shoes. No, I wouldn’t have been climbing over walls, crawling through windows, or forcing doors open. But I wouldn’t have thought for an instant walking through an open door to The Capital Rotunda with guards standing on either side.
Hell, I’d have stayed in the roped areas and as long as I didn’t see or hear yelling or breaking glass I’d have been blithely ignorant that I was breaking the law. I would have been overjoyed to be standing in the rotunda looking at the pictures and art and feeling so privileged to be there in that place. If I was asked to leave, my response would have been, “Yes officer, which exit should I take?”
That’s one of the reasons that I think the whole congressional committee is wrong and that they’re being very heavy handed. Sure, there were people who clearly broke the law and they should suffer the consequences. But the Jan 6th committee has cast a very wide net, and I’m sure that many of the people they’ve terrorized, were people just like me.
Make no mistake, having Federal Marshalls banging on your door when you believe you’ve done nothing wrong would be a terrifying thing. Especially if the media reports labeled you as a white supremacist who was involved in an insurrection, or treason. Those are really serious charges! One of them, I believe, still carries the death penalty.
The Marshalls drag you off to prison. You and by extension, your family are labeled white supremacists, or terrorists, and there’s nothing you can do to defend your reputation or your family from the vengeance of the mob…
That would absolutely break me. Especially, given that I’d have had no malice, no guilt, and I’d have been sharing pictures of those hallowed halls describing my presence there as a joy and privilege.
