Disposable Labor Units

We burn out far too many of our good middle class professionals.  Use them up.  Take away their enthusiasm for life with the endless grind and needless change at work places severely under-labor staffed.  Then they get sick, or they “check out” mentally and emotionally and we lose their productivity. And those are the “lucky” ones who don’t get the pitiless boot.  And often, they die too early as well.  

DoI

As I reread all the Declaration of Independence reprinted in the newspaper yesterday, I had a thought:  How many people, in how many countries, that we have been in in the last 60 years, would read those words and think, “how bitterly ironic.”

Seth Rogen Addendum

How timely my recent tirade against Mr. Rogen’s “work.”  He has incensed North Korea to the point that it is making strong threats against America.

How is Rogen so clueless that he thinks the North Koreans would have a sense of humor?  And how could anything about someone presently alive (and a head of state at that!) being the target of assassination be acceptable, let alone amusing?

More grist for the mill about how he comes across as truly clueless, classless, talent-less.

Emotional, Knee-Jerk Reactions that Feed Preconceptions

There is a large element of “the Left” or “Progressives” or “American Liberals” that is just as ready to be irrationally offended on their emotional issues as the “Right” and “Tea Partiers” and “Conservatives” have been on theirs.  In this case, the issue is “assault.”

Let’s be clear in this mindless chattery we live in:  Assault, including sexual assault, is unfortunately prevalent in too many places in our stressed and barely connected society.  But assault by strangers?  Still rare.  Yet do all the incensed chatterers on the airwaves and in print and online make a distinction and avoid misconceptions?  Uhm…rarely.

My Rant About Seth Rogen

This week I step away from the usual and delve into a bit of spectacle. :)

First, an important statement:  From all appearances, Seth Rogen and his wife are nice and good people.  It’s his body of “work” that I have issue with.

Were it just the low-brow, inane, and repetitively predictable, I would have brushed it aside and moved on.  But since he torched a prized entertainment icon of mine, I am moved to respond:

Even though he’s from Canada, he’s done nothing to dilute the belief that Jewish people benefit from that connection and receive preferential treatment in Hollywood.  He has some talent (largely wasted, IMO), but this can’t be the true talent in the up and coming Hollywood generation.

His writing and acting take the same predictable it-was-barely-funny-the-first-time antics, and is lamentably one-dimensional.  That it also legitimizes a stoner modus operandus is further regrettable.  If that stoner “lifestyle” is taken as a role-model, that’s even more horrid.

My biggest beef, however, is how he eviscerated and made a comedic mockery of what could have been and should have been an equivalent to the Batman franchise.  I’m talking about The Green Hornet.  I won’t go into all the details of that mockery and evisceration, that travesty of a movie, but Rogen’s utter screwing up of that is a huge cultural-entertainment offense.  He has ruined, perhaps for good, what could have been something of tremendous entertainment value.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and the thing was so camp it never had legs (or, rather, wings) for the long haul.  We’ll probably never know now!

Frankly Speaking

Barney Frank, recently retired congressman, says that conservatives have belied their “conservatism” because they decry big government but want government to regulate what we read, what we smoke or ingest, who we have sex with, who we can marry.  

You know, big, intrusive government issues.

So much of the human condition is about this mad desire of humans to control the world, and by implication, the words and actions, of those around them.

Often by the very souls who spout (or shout) the words “freedom” and "independence."

Must mean the freedom and independence for everyone to do what those souls dictate. :)

Relation Ships Passing

All the words are said as they gather at the grave site: “Let’s make sure to get together some time where death is not involved.  Someone should not have to die to call us to the same spot.”  Everyone assures that they will, that they will make the time to get together sometime outside where a family member or friend has died.

And it is the way of this frenetic life that they won’t.  For many hundreds of years now, this Western culture, and in particular, this American one, has not valued relationships enough.  It even nearly stamped out the culture here that did.

And there is little that could make us poorer as a result.