Monday, December 29, 2014

They Are Who I thought They Were

The Chargers season ended, not with a bang, as the saying goes, but with a whimper; scoring a whopping seven points while losing to another non-playoff team. U-T San Diego writers are bleating endlessly about injuries, of course, but it should be pointed out that the Green Bay Packers won a Super Bowl with no fewer than eight of their starting players on injured reserve.

One might also ask why the Chargers have incurred all of those injuries. Could it have to do, perhaps, with players being in night clubs on Friday nights flinging champagne bottles drunkenly across the room? That does not, I believe do much for physical conditioning, and when have we seen the Chargers ever play a full 60 minutes of hard, physical football?

The Chargers, I believe have had for many years an attitude problem. They have too many players, not all of them, but too many who are more interested in being celebrities than they are in being professional football players, and that attitude is tolerated by the team’s management. Winning teams do not keep players who are in night clubs on Friday night when there is a Sunday game.

The Chargers are a team of celebrities, and as long as management tolerates that this is what you will get. They will continue to be pretty boys in pretty powder blue uniforms who cannot win the games that count.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Drivers License, Please

California has some 900 new laws going into effect later this week (first of the year), including one that permits illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses so that they “can drive in this state legally.” Without commenting on the immigration issue, the illogicality of California laws sometimes staggers the imagination.

First of all, if one cannot be here legally, how can one drive here legally? I guess a certain amount of hair splitting can be done to make that meet a degree of logic, but it gets nuttier if you dig deeper into what this new drivers license is.

If you are a legal resident of California you have to provide an original birth certificate, a copy will not do, or a passport in order to obtain a drivers license. If you are illegal you merely have to show something with an address. That’s because the illegal’s license is stamped with a disclaimer saying that the license “cannot be used for identification.”

If it cannot be used for identification, how can it be used as a drivers license? How does a traffic officer know that you are not handing him a document which says that someone else is licensed to drive, since this cannot be used to identify that you are, in fact, you? He could look at the picture, but the license itself instructs him not to do that.

He can’t check the license against the registration to see if you are, maybe, driving a stolen car, because the license does not tell him who you are. It tells him only that, whoever you are, you are allowed to drive, presumably because you posses the license regardless of your actual identity.

Presumably, if you give the license to your cousin Dimitri, it would permit him to drive too, and the fact that he is six inches taller than you, outweighs you by ninety pounds and is not female while you are would not present a problem because cops are not permitted to use the card for identification.

The anomalies are not caused by California, of course, they are caused by the federal “RealID” program which California had to circumvent in order to issue licenses to illegals. Many states simply refused to comply with the federal program which creates a national identification card at state expense, but California was not one of them.

I don’t think we should have a national identification card, and I don’t think the states should have been forced to pay for it.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

The Interview

Is this the silliest news furor ever in this nation, or what? A grade B, unfunny, sophomoric “comedy” slated for limited release in minor theaters, which winds up with the president of the United States complaining that the studio did not consult with him before they cancelled its release, and then says he is pleased that the release is being restored so that “the American people can make their own choices.”

So, one week Obama is engaging in statesmanship of the magnitude of restoring diplomacy with Cuba after decades of useless embargo, and the next week he is engaged with the release of a stupid movie aimed at a fifteen-year-old audience. Is this guy serious?

And now, evoking memories of Bush administration claims of WMDs in Iraq, CBS Evening News tells us that a professional computer security company, more than one actually, has refuted Obama’s assertion that North Korea is the certain culprit for the Sony hack, and suggests that it may have been done by a disgruntled former employee, reporting that the first hack was an attempt to extort money. Awesome.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

No, I'm Not Gone

Two trips to the emergency room in the past two weeks, one for a back problem and the other gastrointestinal. Both times I went to my doctor's office and each time the doctor (differnt doctors) sent me to the er. Currently at home hoping that antibiotics will solve a bout of pneumonia, which did not work last time. Maybe it will this time. Anyway, just too fucking tired to spend time sitting at the computer.

Update, friday: It didn't; I'ii be back when I'm home again.