- Hey there NCAA president/chief ass hat Mark Emmert. It’s
good to see your as much of a tool as ever. Emmert is never far from the
spotlight and that’s good because the world needs frequent reminders of how the
chief hypocrite in an organization full of them manages to be both corrupt and
incompetent on a daily basis. During an extensive press conference at the Final
Four, Emmert and other college administrators took time to weigh in on the
current topic du juor in collage sports: the court victory by Northwestern
University football players to unionize. As one would expect from a biased
bureaucrat whose organization makes $913 million a year off the backs of
athletes who have virtually no rights when stacked up against the organization
that so ineptly governs them, Emmert is not in favor of athletes banding
together and standing up for themselves. Emmert claimed to be in favor of
changes allowing a governance structure that will likely include cost of
attendance and autonomy for the power conferences, but tried to stamp out any
ideas of a union that could demand better health benefits or oppose practices
it deemed unfair or not in the best interests of its members. "To be
perfectly frank, the notion of using a union employee model to address the
challenges that do exist in intercollegiate athletics is something that strikes
most people as a grossly inappropriate solution to the problems," Emmert
said. "It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of
athletics." Not actually, M. It would demolish YOUR model of collegiate
athletics, but no one other than you is saying that is the right way or the
only way. The National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that it agreed with
a filing made by Northwestern football players that they qualify as employees of
their schools and can unionize and that’s a problem for people whose business
thrives on cheap labor that they don’t have to share any of their profits with.
"There's some things that need to get fixed," Emmert said.
"They're working very aggressively to do that. No one up here believes
that the way you fix that is by converting student-athletes into unionized
employees." Yes, but interesting enough, no athletes were up “here” and it
was a bunch of rich dudes in suits who make a nice living from ruling over
their serfs, er, student-athletes………..
- There are more twists to come in the saga of Ukraine. Just
when it seemed the world knew all of the players and could choose sides in the
battle between Ukraine, Russia and the West, another group has bumbled its way
onto the scene. Ukrainian authorities confirmed this group’s presence by
announcing it had dismantled an armed underground group allegedly plotting
against the Kiev-based government and planning to launch an attack in a few
days. According to the Security Service, 15 people were detained following a
large-scale operation in the eastern city of Luhansk. These yahoos were well
armed, with a stockpile of about 300 guns, a grenade launcher as well as
numerous grenades, Molotov cocktails and a significant amount of knives,
according to the agency. The weapons are believed to have been intended for an
April 10 attack in the eastern city of Luhansk. Those arrested face charges
that include betraying the government and weapons violations and their plot isn’t
surprising given that Luhansk is on the border with Russia in eastern Ukraine,
a region that some say could follow the lead of Crimea and soon fall under
Moscow's control. Luhansk has been identified as a possible target for Russian
forces seeking to establish a land bridge to Crimea and this mob of madmen
apparently wanted to play a part in it. Russia continues to dance around the
issues in talks with the internatioal community and it would seem that some
people in the midst of the mayhem are tired of waiting for the powers that be
to figure their sh*t out. A Molotov cocktail always adds something to the peace
process and here’s hoping more people out there decide to turn militant
mixologist……….
- Mike Judge will forever be an icon to slackers and
imprisoned cubicle dwellers everywhere with his 1999 cult favorite film “Office
Space.” In that movie, a disillusioned office worker decides he’s had enough of
his BS job and conspires with two co-workers to defraud that company of
millions of dollars. Judge has attained some success in the 15 years since, but
nothing approaching the tale of Peter Gibbons and his pals. He is taking
another run at the idea with his new HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley.” The
new show bears some similarities to “Office Space,” but Judge says he didn’t always
grasp the parallels. "It actually didn't occur to me right away the
parallels between this and Office Space," Judge said. "I've always
been interested in just comedy about these personality types. ... It just
seemed like an area that there would be a lot of comedy." His new series
draws from his own experience moving to Silicon Valley to join a start-up video
card company before leaving several months later. That time in his life governs
the lives of the new show and the six computer programmers who make it go. The
pilot episode features programmer Richard (Thomas Middleditch) has his boss and
a billionaire venture capitalist in a bidding war over his lucrative new app. "It's
about the story of these introverted, awkward people going on this journey
where the stakes are billions of dollars and two billionaires with scores to
settle," Judge added. "It could build into a big company. It could not.
People could sue each other. There's all kinds of real stuff that could happen
in this world.” Also in the storylines for the show is a theme that Judge lived
out when he left his start-up job and became a bass player with a touring blues
band. “It turns into a Band of Brothers-type thing with comedy," Judge said.
"It makes for a different dynamic between these guys that they're just
together 24 hours a day.” He researched the show by returning to his old home
territory to visit places such as Google and the annual TechCrunch conference.
The question now is how much sex, nudity and violence can be worked in so the
show fits with the rest of HBO’s offerings………
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! This one is domestic and it is not
difficult to decipher in terms of reasoning or motive. The rage fest that broke
out over the weekend near the weekend wasn’t exactly an abused people rising up
against a corrupt regime. No, it was 15,000 people whose parents pay a sh*t
load of money to send them to a party school getting together for the annual
"Deltopia" celebration and having too much better, too much
testosterone and an undetermined amount of illegal drugs to turn their block
party into a near-block burning. The party went from a rager to a violent melee
that injured six police officers in a California in a matter of minutes after
students from nearby University of California, Santa Barbara crowded the
streets of Isla Vista. A news release from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's
Office confirmed that "a major disturbance broke out” and noted that the
evening came off the rails when a UCSB police officer was "hit in the head
with a backpack that contained large bottles of alcohol," causing a
"significant head injury.” Hopefully those bottles were empty because the
only thing worse than assaulting a police officer with a backpack full of
bottles is wasting good, cheap beer in the process. Once things went sideways,
a large crowd threw rocks, bricks and bottles at police officers who were
arresting the person suspected of hitting the officer. A "major
disturbance, emergency situation" was declared and law enforcement
officers from nearby Ventura County responded to help the Santa Barbara County
deputies who were on the scene but overwhelmed by the angry mob. Chemical
agents and less lethal foam projectiles were deployed to disperse the crowds.
Five more officers -- Santa Barbara County deputies -- were injured after one
was clocked in the head with a brick and two more were struck with bottles.
When the smoke quite literally cleared, a remarkable scene of torn-down stop
signs, smoldering fires, property damage and vehicle damage remained. More than
two dozen people were injured and at least 18 people were arrested in
connection with the disturbance, while another 80 or so were arrested at other
times during the party, the sheriff's office said. At least it wasn’t for no
valid reason………
- What is science up to these days? How about mapping
genes in order to outwit outbreaks by decoding the DNA of potentially deadly bacteria and
viruses? The target for this effort is listeria, the third-leading cause of
death from food poisoning and bacteria that are especially dangerous to
pregnant women. Government researchers working on the technology credit it for helping
to solve a listeria outbreak that killed one person in California and sickened
seven others in Maryland. "This really is a new way to find and fight
infections," said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. "One way to think of it is, is it identifying a
suspect by a lineup or by a fingerprint?" Genome sequencing, or mapping
all of an organism's DNA, has not been used extensively in public health
research, where officials tend to rely on dated tests that use pieces of DNA
and aren't as precise. "Frankly, in public health, we have some catching
up to do," said project leader Dr. Christopher Braden. Genome sequencing
has grown faster and cheaper and now, Congress has funneled $30 million to the
CDC to broaden its use of a program called advanced molecular detection. Rarely
do government projects achieve their objectives, but the aim of this one is to
solve outbreaks faster and prevent infections by better understanding how they
spread. To begin the process, federal and state officials are rapidly decoding
the DNA of all the listeria infections diagnosed in the U.S. this year, along
with samples found in tainted foods or factories. A successful first step could
lead to a national overhaul of how public health laboratories keep watch on
food safety. Processing and cataloguing all of that information won't be easy,
but it would be beneficial………
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