Best of the Bunch

Jerry Izenberg, sports writer emeritus for The Star-Ledger, sits at the top of his craft for that publication.  Too bad that he is no longer permanently active but, whenever he comes out of his well-earned retirement, he sure sets the ink on fire – a master at using words to get his point across.

On Saturday, February 3, 2018, he penned a justifiably scathing front-page column about the hypocrisy of the National Football League; namely, the NFL’s “hypocrisy” in its defensive legal battle to keep the Garden State from becoming what could be the Las Vegas of the East Coast for sports gambling.

No Place to Hide

Wednesday’s edition (Jan. 17, 2018) of the Courier News featured a guest article on its opinion page on how American civilians should prepare for a potential nuclear strike.

Yikes!  Are you kidding me?

There is no way for civilians to logically prepare for survival following a massive nuclear strike.  Photos depicting the WWII obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from two atomic bombs should have made that abundantly clear.

Yet Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and author proposes exactly that.

 

He quotes a government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as his authority, “While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. . ..” and so on, and so on.

I lived through the Cold War between Russia and the U.S., and I vividly recall the concept of deterrent dubbed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). 

The Value of Lives vs. the Cost of Technology

Yesterday, a devastating train wreck in Dupont, Washington took human lives and caused serious injuries to dozens of passengers when a southbound train on its maiden high-speed voyage was about to encounter a looming, yet preventable, mini-Titanic situation.

Approaching a curve at 80 miles per hour instead of the designated 30-mile per hour limit, the speeding train (Amtrak Cascades 501)  could not reverse the laws of physics as it spilled its passenger-laden rail cars helter-skelter into the woods, off an overpass, and onto an interstate.

A Youthful Contender Aims for the Brass Ring.

Of the three Bridgewater candidates in the race for two open seats on the Bridgewater-Raritan Board of Education (BR-BOE) is Zachary Malek, a recent graduate of Bridgewater-Raritan High School, and a new face in his quest for public service. 

 

Malek is in his first year at Rutgers, where he is majoring in political science.  Should he be elected, he will be one of a few, if not only the second person of his age ever to win election to such a responsibility in New Jersey.

This is not a run-of-the-mill school board election, because the other two candidates are heavily experienced in school board affairs.  One is an incumbent, while the other is a previous board member.

So why consider Zachary Malek? Why place your bet on a young man studying at Rutgers?

Equifax Reports Hack of 143 Million Consumer Records

At a time when the nation’s attention is turned to the hurricane disasters of Irma in Florida and Harvey in the Houston area, Equifax, one of three large credit reporting agencies in the U.S. chose, in true political fashion, to disclose that its customer credit data base has been compromised -- 143 million social security numbers and other personal information records are now in the hands of cyber criminals.

Equifax discovered this breach in July but did not report it until late this week and after certain executives of the company had sold some of their stock.

Company representatives said that the executives had no prior knowledge of the cyber attack.

A class-action lawsuit has already been filed against Equifax, and its stock dropped by 14% in this Friday’s trading.