Doing what is right and other thoughts

First of all I had complained about the store Papaya that had done my daughter wrong in a previous post. In my opinion they could have made a very simple exchange and everything would have been right, but they stuck by a policy that was flawed to begin with and let my daughter down.

Well if you are going to complain I guess you have to step up and say something when a store does something right. I don’t usually make a big deal of a store doing what they should do, but it did actually cost them money (not much) to get something right for my wife. So in the spirit of saying something positive instead of complaining, my hat is off to Best Buy for turning an inconvenient problem into a positive for the product we bought from them. The better half is happy.

I do not know what the NFL is going to do. This has not been a good year overall starting with the domestic violence issues, then bad calls in playoff games and now one team is accused of cheating. Frankly any of this won’t affect how many people watch the “big” game this weekend. The same amount of die hard party fans will watch. A few may or may not watch depending on how much interest they have in the teams. And those who don’t watch aren’t going to watch unless it makes the news for other reasons than football.
The issue is can the NFL find a way to improve the product they are putting on the field in the long term. Bad publicity and bad officiating won’t immediately change football fans perception of the game, but somewhere down the line a bad product will turn people off. And the product is starting to show some wear around the edges. The Patriots have been one of the better teams over the last decade plus so to hear they think they have to cheat to win (even minor cheating that probably had no outcome on the game) says there is something wrong with how the game is being played. Sports is based on the general fan believing they are watching a competitive game. If that perception or belief is affected then that fan will lose interest. Sooner or later a person will find something that gives them the entertainment they want. If the NFL doesn’t clear up the quality of the game soon, what was once unthinkable that football is more important than God and country may pass. I don’t see this happening this week and probably won’t happen in the near future, but when games are decided by factors outside of the actual game on a regular basis people will begin to lose interest.


And are we digressing as a society? What is up with the growing popularity of UFC? To me this is nothing more than the TV version of the Roman Coliseum and the gladiators fighting. Two thousand years later and we still put too much emphasis on extreme violence for our entertainment. No wonder we cannot solve the problems facing our world. We should be way past this insanity. Of course the powers that be prefer we watch this stupidity instead of the stupidity that they put over on us. Yeah, that education thing just gets in the way doesn’t it?!

Funny, as I type this post I am watching the Late Show with David Letterman and they are talking about lying etc.. How can we have a comedic rational conversation about lying, yet I can change the channel on the same machine and watch people commit mayhem on each other under the same idea of entertainment? Baffles the hell out of me.
Yep, critical thinking is just sooooo important in our public and even private education system.

Okay time to stop preaching.

I hope that Mother Nature doesn’t overwhelm the Northeast tonight and tomorrow. I was reading news stories last night about the upcoming storm and many of the comments on them were just be prepared, this has happened before, we can ride this out etc.. and in most cases probably true. Just remember even just a half mile can make the difference between getting a foot or two of snow vs having Mother Nature drop a ton of crap into your life. Be safe, but also be vigilant.

Finally a quick comment on the election in Greece. I mentioned something like this happening before in a previous post. The uber rich keep telling us we should have capitalism and the government should leave them alone. Overall the government should stay out of the economy, however, there is some influence that needs to be addressed in distressed times. What I said before though is that the infamous 1 % will do more to drive the world to socialism by their policies than what would come about if we had a true free market economy which they say they support. This election result should come as no surprise. If you keep taking away sooner or later people will want to take back. You offer people opportunities and most will take advantage of them and do something with it. Which do we want to choose?

And at some point I am going to try and put a more serious post together discussing the difference between the welfare state and socialism. There is some misconceptions by some Republicans that the welfare state leads to socialism. And this is not inherently true.

It is late, have a great tomorrow