If Only He Could, What Would He Say?

Remember the journalist Jay Jefferson Cooke?

I miss this guy.  Very much.

I wonder how he would opine about all the politically-related shenanigans and the mendacity swirling about us in the Public Square today?

What I liked best about Jay was the unvarnished personal authenticity that characterized his writing style.

From Blue Jeans & T-Shirt at Facebook, to Business-Blue Before Congress!

What’s so uncanny about Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook scandal is not simply how all-pervasive is the extent to which his firm  developed  a wide array of drill-down tools to data-mine virtually all of over two billion users’ personally identifiable information, but that Zuckerberg has also permitted third-party businesses to construct apps to access that information and to employ it for their own commercial purposes without user consent.

The tsunami behind this scandal has been building up in the depths of the Silicon Valley information ocean for years, but it finally hit the shores of the Washington D.C. Beltway with the revelation that Russian interests had wormed their way into Zuckerberg’s empire of data and used that source to meddle in the 2016 American elections.

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.