So use a real camera already

The leak of Jennifer Lawrence and other Hollywood celebrities embarrassing photos on the the internet apparently comes from their use of smart phones to take the photos.  The smart phones, unlike real camera's, immediately upload every picture they take to the cloud.  And once anything is "in the cloud",or on the internet, hackers, NSA, Google, the Russians, the Chinese, and who knows who else can see it.  There is no privacy in cyber space.
   I haven't seen the pirated photos, but those who have tell me they are unflattering selfies rather than flattering glamor shots by real photographers.  
  Moral of the story.  Use a real camera, not a slippery too-smart-for-your-own-good phone. 

Wolverine

It got bad reviews so I didn't bother to see it in the theaters.  I netflixed it last night.  It's an Marvel X-man  flick but thinned down to just Hugh Jackman.  Charles Xavier, Magneto, Storm, Cyclops,  and all the rest don't appear. The movie takes Wolverine to Japan, with a pair of pretty Japanese girls, one of which he manages to sleep with.  Jackman is still ripped, and his shirt comes off frequently.  A lot of Kung Foo and martial arts and derring do.  The plot was incomprehensible to me.  New bad guys keep popping up and Wolverine would slash them into hamburger.  Old good guys would turn into bad guys.  Dream sequences.  Wolverine would go to bed with one of the Japanese chicks and the chick would morph into a round-eye chick who might have been Jean Gray from the first X-men flick but might not have been.  Then she would morph back to being Marico, wealthy Japanese heiress pursued by Yakuza gangsters. 
   No connection with any Marvel comic book that I know of.  Just the Wolverine character.  
   OK, but nowhere near as good as the first couple of X-men flicks. 

Civil Disobedience ? What no strikes and picket lines?

Someone, probably the union SEIU, is organizing demonstrations outside fast food restaurants, and managing to get some of the demonstrators arrested.  Used to be, when labor wanted something they called a strike to shut down the business, and threw up a picket line to discourage customers, scabs, delivery men, just about anyone, from entering the premises.  It was effective, management would capitulate quickly.  I wonder why SEIU isn't doing that to McDonalds?
   Could it be that McDonalds workers don't want to go on strike?  or walk a picket line?  I wonder how many of the demonstrators are real McDonald's employees?  Or are they all  SEIU goons? 

Let them eat plastic

Gopher tortoises that is.  These are foot long, nine pound grass eating turtles.  They love the long grass adjacent to the runways at Orlando FL airport.   They also love to dig burrows, long and deep ones. Although they cannot dig under the runways, they can burrow into the unpaved shoulders and overrun areas.  FAA fears that a plane skidding off the runway onto the shoulder might catch its landing gear in a turtle burrow and flip over.  Seems kinda obscure to me, but FAA has been on the airport's case to "mitigate" the turtle problem.  Making it harder, the turtles are an endangered species so the obvious measures, like picking them up and trucking them elsewhere, are illegal. 
  The airport's latest scheme.  Replace the grass along the runways with Astroturf.  $14 million worth of Astroturf. 

Obama doesn't want to whack ISIS

To whack ISIS essentially means sending the armed forces back to Iraq.  Obama was so proud of pulling them out of Iraq back in 2011, that sending them back in 2014  looks like an admission of defeat.  Obama would rather be defeated than admit defeat. 
   Obama sees America as an international bad guy.  He is all the time "restraining" the country from intervening anywhere because he sees American intervention as bad.  Whacking ISIS he sees as unjustified hostility to a native political organization of national liberation. 
   Right now, Obama fears the voters will reject him if he expresses these sentiments.  So he does a little fireworks display now and then, just enough to make it look like we are really doing something, but so far it's just little fireworks displays. 
  Obama has a strategy, namely stay out of it, hope that ISIS will go away or die down or something.  He just doesn't dare tell the voters that is his strategy. 

Are minimum wage laws ethical?

Minimum wage hikes always result in layoffs.  A lot of low end, part time, seasonal jobs, life guarding, lawn mowing, fast food, ski patrolling, waiting tables,  will just go away if the minimum wage goes up.  In short, while a minimum wage helps the better paid workers, it results in layouts and job loss to at least as many.  There is only so much money to go around, minimum wage forces more money to go to fewer workers and layoffs to the others.  The NH ski areas, a low margin business if there ever was one, fear that Obama will force them to pay the seasonal workers $10.10 an hour.  Excuse?  A lot of ski trails run thru Forest Service land, and Obama thinks that gives him the right to dictate wages. 
   With unemployment what it is, the country needs more jobs, even entry level jobs.  Kids coming out of high school need that first job.  It gives them experience, and even more important, it gives them references, essential to landing that next job.
   Unions love minimum wage laws.  It drives the high schoolers and the part timers out of the labor market and allows them to win higher wage hikes at bargaining time. 
   Bureaucrats love minimum wage laws.  It allows them to interfere in yet another part of American life.
   I think wages ought to be a matter between employee and employer.  If the wage is too low, the employee can always quit and draw welfare.  Or  organize a union and go on strike.  
  

Desert Victory

Old old WWII newsreel expanded out to feature length.  From Netflix of course.  All about the battle of El Alamein.  The British were so pleased to finally beat the Germans in a stand up fight that they did this one up brown.  El Alamein was the first real British victory, and after that, the British kept on winning.  The British sent an advance copy of the flick to the Roosevelt White House. 
   Looking at the film you see a lot of scenes of British infantry, bayonets fixed, khaki shorts, and British style helmets advancing on foot across the open desert   Not a scrap of cover or concealment.  Easy targets.  I kept wondering, "Why don't the tanks go first?"  as I watched those scenes. Lots of vintage tanks, aircraft and vehicles.  Many shots of the artillery delivering fire.  Shots of Churchill addressing the troops.  Montgomery shows up too. Good maps. 
   WWII buffs, and serious history students really want to see this film to make El Alamein real, not just words on paper.  It's a primary source, the newsreel footage was taken at the time and on the scene.