Why I'd never let my kids play hockey.

I grew up on hockey. Watching it, playing it, reading about it, arguing with my brother, my friends, my dad, about who was better, who was more talented, etc.

I loved it. And I hate what the NHL has become, thanks to idiots like Gary Bettman and the Don Cherry goon-squad,

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/story/2011/03/10/sp-bettman-gary.html

"What's interesting ... is that the rise in concussions in the preliminary data from this season seem to be coming from accident events, collisions, players falling and banging into other things, not from head hits," he told reporters."

No, what's interesting is that comment is essentially admitting that the NHL is violating pretty much every labor safety code in the United States and Canada.
I talked about this in a preview blog entry. Things are much more dirty and violent today (not just in terms of numbers, but percentages) because it's become accepted play since the 1960's expansion. Perhaps it might have something to do with the fact that high-sticking, head-shots, and fighting were exceptions to the game priot to the Expansion. Now they are the standard.

Yeah I know - these same morons who are probably Leaf fans, who probably think Don Cherry is the greatest hockey expert ever, and probably also think a scoring goon like Eric Lindros belongs in the Hockey Hall Of Fame (the latter of which is a future blog entry).

I think for most of these folks, frankly there shouldn't be penalties, or perhaps not even referees in the game. Let the teams duke it out, eh?

Maybe the NHL will learn the painful price of not managing stupdity and goons out of the game when more companies like Air Canada choose to actually do something responsible and not want themselves associated with it, by keeping their money and sponsorship away.

But sadly I think it's going to take a lot more head-shots before that happens.



 

What is the point of even having a corporate media anymore?

I mean seriously - what other purpose do they serve, except to either lie about current events in favor of the right-wing establishment, or simply not bother reporting news at all?

U.S. targeted EU on GM foods: WikiLeaks



http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/08/genetically-modified-food.html

Senior U.S. officials in Paris advised the George Bush administration to launch a military-style trade war against the European Union for resisting genetically modified foods, according to newly released WikiLeaks cables.


The then U.S. ambassador to France, Craig Stapleton, asked the government to penalize the EU and particularly countries that banned the use of genetically modified (GM) crops.

The move came in response to a 2007 French ban on a GM corn variety made by U.S.-based company Monsanto.

Ah, moronicism and Monsanto. They seem to go hand-in-hand.

Of course I should not be so smug. Considering all the HFCS and corn syrup I've probably consumed in my lifetime (of which I'm sure the vast majority of it was from GMO), I would not put it past Monsanto to have developed organisms from cancers growing inside me from all that GMO to spy on me on their behalf.

Price of gas gone up 34 cents a gallon in the last 13 days ...

and does anyone in the corporate media minions bother with the story?

(h/t to ThinkProgress)

Why am I not surprised that this another thing whose fucked up situation can be traced back to Wall Street greed?

From the Nation article (emphasis mine) -

Commodities markets involve essentially two kinds of participants: there are so-called “end users” like farmers and airlines that use commodities markets as a form of insurance against future price fluctuations, and then there are speculators—hedge funds, investors, big banks that try to make money by correctly betting on those same price fluctuations. The presence of these speculators isn’t in and of itself a bad thing; in fact, they bring liquidity that should, in theory, make the market more efficient. According to an analysis by the House Energy Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in 2000, physical hedgers, trucking companies, farmers, bakers, made up 63 percent of the crude oil futures markets, with speculators accounting for the rest. By 2008, those proportions had basically flipped.

Of course, the Wall Street banks say there’s nothing to see here, but that’s hard to believe. It’s almost impossible to make sense of 2008’s massive commodity price spike without concluding that the speculators played an outsized role. When enough money floods into a booming market, Greenberger says it can “unmoor” the prices of commodities from their underlying supply-and-demand fundamentals. The basic mechanism by which this might happen should be familiar; it’s the same principle that drove the housing market bubble or the tech stock boom. When a bunch of people think the price of a stock is going to go up, they rush to buy it so they can realize the imminent gains. Of course, a surge of demand itself pushes the price up and the price cycles upwards until it pops. The difference being, no one puts Pets.com in their cars, trucks and airplanes.

Any hope? Don't hold your breath -

One way to attempt to constrain these volatile mini-bubbles is for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to impose “position limits,” essentially limits on the size of the bets that speculators can make. The New Deal–era Commodities Exchange Act gives the CFTC power to curb “excessive speculation,” and the just-passed Dodd-Frank bill explicitly calls for the CFTC to promulgate position limits.
Not surprisingly, the big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs don’t want this ...

It's really sad how good ideas often get trumped. Never underestimate the awesome power of greed and stupidity.

This story is closed to commenting.

Gee - it's amusing that interesting stories always cause corporate media to shut down discussion -

http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.1103421
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/03/04/sperm-fertility-distance.html

Study senior author Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her co-authors measured the anogenital distance — from the anus to the underside of the scrotum — of 126 college students in New York.

Men whose AGD was shorter than the median length — about 52 millimetres — were 7.3 times more likely to have a low sperm concentration, Swan's team found.

 

Boy am I glad this fellow is coming back.

http://www.blowmeuptom.com/

http://newnormalnetwork.com/tom-leykis-show-returns-4-2-2012

Best wishes Tom. I'll try tune in when I can. We need more folks like you on the air.

-- CV

The Onion and GMO food.

If you can stomach all the crappy ads you have to deal with, there is quite a set of gems in this clip-



Ear Of Genetically Modified Corn Begs For Death

And then there's this -

http://www.theonion.com/articles/geneticallymodified-food-activity-around-the-natio,19310/

Seriously, these folks who come up with this are beyond messed up.

The right and its never-ending attempt to discredit Wikileaks.

Now it's this  - http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/01/assange/index.html.

Priceless Greenwald -

All of this relates directly to the journalistic biases discussed here yesterday. Journalists and editors love to endlessly tout their own objectivity, yet their editorial conduct is so often driven by their sentiments and allegiances toward the parties involved in the story (just yesterday, the NYT used the word "torture" to describe Zimbabwe's actions because, it is claimed, "a dozen [] activists had been beaten with broomsticks, metal rods and blunt objects on their bodies and the soles of their feet" -- just as they freely apply the word to anyone that's not the U.S.). Nobody -- not even the Guardians of the National Security State -- loathes Assange the way that journalists do; recall that they led the way in condemning him and calling for his prosecution for doing what they're supposed to do. These Beacons of Objectivity thus use entirely different editorial standards -- far more unfavorable ones -- when reporting on him.