Beat the Press

They  opened with an Obama speech (boring) and moved on to celebrate some US cities that they thought were doing well on their own, with out assistance (money) from Washington.  They selected Oklahoma City, Tacoma, and Pittsburg.  They had the mayors on, and a lot of happy talk ensued. 
   No numbers were ever mentioned.  Like population, then and now, metropolitan domestic product, employment or unemployment, number of welfare recipients, municipal tax revenue, number of businesses,  number of students per classroom, nothing of substance, nothing to show me that these carefully selected towns were doing any better than any other American city. 
   No discussion of business activity, manufacturing, what industries were important, what industries had moved into town.  what new startups  were in town, new industrial parks started, nothing about the town's business at all.  Which is odd, it's business that makes a city tick.  Business employs the citizens, pays the taxes, builds the buildings, and ultimately pays for everything in town. 
   Anyhow it was a nice puff piece for three favored mayors, but it wasn't real news. 

Motherless bear cub picked up in Littleton

It's tough being an urban (or even suburban) bear.  An irate homeowner connected his dumpster to 120 VAC after repeated bear chow downs in said dumpster.  A lactating bear was electrocuted.  This took place somewhere on Church St, back in June.  Last Monday Fish and Game finally managed to round up the orphan cub for relocation
   Let us hope that homeowner doesn't have any children or pets. 

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.