Lunacy in the world around us

Although I use this blog to predominately disperse tidbits of information about my own life and the world around me this entry will attempt to move that circle out a little more as there have been a number of news stories that I have a strong opinion of and would like to expound on them.

First I believe we have all been touched by tragedy in our lives from a medical perspective, if not ourselves someone we were either friends with or possibly a family member. When a medical event is life threatening past grievances tend to take a backseat to matters of literal life and death. Recently Sheryl Crow, former fiancé of Lance Armstrong founder of the Livestrong campaign fighting cancer, was herself diagnosed with breast cancer. Although undergoing surgery and being chemo treatments most notably absent from her side is her former fiancé. Although we are not privy to the details of that is going on in their lives, one would like to see past grievances put aside to support one that you used to love. At this point my best wishes out to Sheryl for a speedy recovery.

It was recently disclosed that Wal-Mart in an attempt to improve its corporate image is actually utilizing private bloggers to spread their corporate messages. Now although this is absolutely a form a free speech it does beg the question of how far will a corporation go to mask its negative policies rather than fixing them. Lets take a moment and examine some of the policies they claim are misunderstood by the public from the past couple of years. It started with a broad reaching policy or accepted practice of hiring illegal aliens to work in their stores cleaning from sundown to sunup at incredibly low salaries. Although indicted no charges were brought as they were able to show documentation that although incredibly common throughout their stores nation wide it was against written company policy. They rectified that situation just be thrust back into the spotlight when it was revealed a number of months later that as part of company policy they actually lock their cleaning staff employees into the store for the entire night while they clean. There is no key on-site, rather they need to call a manger-on-call to come and unlock doors if there is any kind of emergency. This almost led to tragedy when one of their employees had a heart attack and paramedics were unable to gain entry for an excessive period of time. Most recently of course the CEO of Wal-Mart went on record expounding the benefits of their plan to have an incredibly low percentage of their employees with any type of health insurance or medical coverage, due to fiscal necessities. Of course we ignore companies like Starbucks and Barnes and Noble who give full health insurance for all their employees and yet somehow they remain profitable. I am certainly glad Wal-Mart is employing bloggers to try to change perception rather than change policies, wouldn’t want to jeopardize profits for small matters like the law.

And finally we could not examine news without turning to politics. But this entry is of a more comical nature to someone who might like a bit of history. If I am not mistaken, and I very well might be, I thought Republicans stand for smaller government and fewer central government programs leaving it to state and local bodies to support the people, for after all they are closer to the citizens. What I am failing to grasp is why under Clinton as a democrat who of course wants big government we had a balanced budget and now under Bush as a Republican we are actually the thickness of a dime away from the cap of national debt. Yes we have a cap that our federal government is never to exceed for our nation debt, somewhere on the order of 7.9 trillion if memory serves. We are virtually at that debt amount and what was the solution recommended by the Republican congress? Lets raise the debt limit. Now help me out here if you understand this, how does this promote smaller government?

Ok moving away from news for a moment, I am currently flying to Boston and I have to reflect on one last thing. I am sure as long as movies have been made studios have frequently competed for similar story lines to push very similar movies at adjacent times. Examples can be as simple as Bug’s Life and Antz, Armageddon and Deep Impact. Both pairs were released within months with almost identical story lines. Usually one is a far better success with vastly improved acting, directing, and overall story-line. Well recently is no exception. First was released Aeon Flux, a mildly entertaining flick that kept the audience guessing until the very end. Relatively good acting with impressive special effects would give this movie maybe a B-. This is compared to the recently released (and recently watched in my case) Ultraviolet. I can honestly say one of the worst movies produced by Hollywood with terrible acting which is understandable considering the incredibly poor writing of the script. Special effects were meant to be this movie’s salvation, however to no avail with poor cutovers between CGI and live action and unbelievable action sequences even to one high or some illicit drug. Hollywood is struggling to understand why ticket sales have been struggling, could it possibly be because the quality of movies is decreasing?

That is all for now, hope all are having a good week.