The plight of ‘student athletes’

The issue of college athletes being recognized as employees and having the right to unionize has resulted in a lot of information coming out about them. I had not realized that athletes at those universities that have big sports programs have to practice and watch game films and the like for fifty or more hours per week. That is shocking because that would leave them hardly any time to attend classes, let alone study for them. No wonder that this breeds the practice of bogus classes that they sign up for in order to maintain their academic standing.
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Is growth always good?

It seems to be almost axiomatic these days to think of economic growth as an unfettered good. But must it always be so? Johann Hari in the April 2010 of The Progressive magazine wrote in a review of a book about John Maynard Keynes, whose influential work has been used to fuel growth, about what that famous economist thought about when we might know that it might be time to call a halt to growth.
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Parody of Aaron Sorkin’s TV shows

Aaron Sorkin is the creator of popular shows such as The West Wing and The Newsroom that have his signature style such as the walk-talk in which characters in positions of importance are moving around and talking over each other at times of crisis, behaving with a great sense of urgency, mixing the personal with business, interspersed with somewhat preachy messages and moralizing.
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Swear words

I don’t use swear words in my normal conversation or in my writing. But I have no objections to other people using them and those words do not shock or offend me. It is just not my style. But custom dictates that in certain situations, certain words should not be used, the most famous example in the US being the seven words you cannot use on radio or broadcast TV and which comedian George Carlin exploited heavily in one of his most famous standup routines, and for which he was arrested many times, like Lenny Bruce before him.
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Update on Mount Soledad cross case

Readers may recall the long and tortured saga of the huge cross erected on land near San Diego as part of a veterans’ memorial for which I gave the timeline. In a ruling on December 15, 201e, a US District Court judge reluctantly said that although he disagreed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in such a way that he saw no alternative other than the cross must come down by March 15, 2014 unless there was a further appeal.
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Great moments in marketing

If you are marketing a juice that consists of 99% apple and grape juice, 0.3% pomegranate juice, and 0.2% blueberry juice, what would you put on the label? If you are Coca-Cola, you call it “Pomegranate Blueberry” of course, because then you can take advantage of the fact that currently pomegranate juice is being marketed as the hot new healthy item, whether that is true or not.
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