Colin Kaepernick had a very good 2013 season with the San Francisco 49ers. It’s been tough to miss him through the news cycle since. Kaepernick rightfully latched onto the civil rights issue associated with the Rodney King incident and other precursors galvanizing support toward the Black Lives Matter movement. Unfortunately, he decided to use his celebrity as a football player on the sports field as a means for showing his support for the cause while connecting the matter with disloyalty toward his country. He got black balled and he should have seen that coming. You see, employers in a free capitalist society have the right to hire based on their variables deemed important for success. Disloyalty toward country makes a character statement and potentially correlates with potential behaviour when it comes to “team interest”. When the going gets tough, are you going to fold up tent or fight within the means available to you under a constitution? He chose to whimper in the easiest form of protest conveniently available to him. I wish him well. He seems sharp and I suspect he will be able to translate his sporting competitiveness into another avenue of success.
Category Archives: Lifes Lessons
A Word On Don Cherry
Don Cherry has always been a blow hard advocating violence on the ice while goading groups against one another whether it be the Players Association versus the NHL, Swedes vs Canadians, fighters versus non-fighters or referees versus players. It’s what Canadians have apparently wanted due to the ratings on Hockey Night In Canada’s first intermission for three decades. I for one have always seen Don Cherry for what he is and that is a personality looking to bait fans from a pulpit that has always frankly been in place for him due to questionable decisions on every occasion when it’s time for executives to renew his contract. Politicizing the game of hockey on a Saturday night or talking player contracts when sitting in front of the TV with family has never made any sense to me. In spite of my admiration for Ron McLean he has always operated as a fuel hose for Don during the HNIC segment which in and of itself seemed dysfunctional. Am I surprised that Ron has been caught in the crossfire? No. He appeared to be nodding as usual while Cherry ranted about poppies and “you people” in spite of what I believe is not actually what’s in Ron’s heart. Frankly, this is what media executives should expect when ratings and a populous perception of a personality become superimposing variables in personnel decision making.
Now to the words themselves. Don Cherry believed in what he was saying. He believes that people on the streets of Mississauga are not wearing poppies like they used to and it’s obvious that the ethnicity of Mississauga and downtown Toronto has changed immensely over the decades because of immigration. I don’t think he’s wrong in what he’s said in reference to the prevalence of poppies given my experience in North East Calgary. I also believe that with every passing generation, memories will fade and the sense of sacrifice of WWI and WWII veterans will lessen irrespective of skin color. I absolutely witness forgetfulness in government policy particularly with respect to the infringement on freedom via tax and regulatory policy. Referencing people as “you people” is not politically correct and could be viewed as racist. The reference is distasteful as is his character which I came to perceive early on in his days as a commentator in stark contrast to the viewpoint of so many white men. This is his schtick pitting people up against each other. This is an 85 year old man with a limited time spot in order to articulate a message in which HNIC executives unfortunately have condoned simply by renewing his contract and having experience with his history for brashness and off-ice faceoffs. However; I still deem their apology sincere. BTW….still thriving from having cut off my cable TV in 2014.
Not Achieving? Consider This
First of all, you are most likely achieving more than you think you are but society’s norms, customs and feeback mechanisms oftentimes communicate negatively. Hence; the conditioning you receive is not necessarily congruent with your output. Unfortunately, there are also a few who overestimate their contribution as well. Then there’s your government with its officials who think they know who should be bestowed awards based on criteria unbeknownst to those too busy raising children, volunteering modestly, and invigorating their workplace with passion and commitment. Last time I looked, it was a hockey player receiving the Order of Canada. I’m sure she’s a nice lady.
Here’s the thing. There is much repression in the spirit of those who have over reached with financial responsibility thereby compromising the pursuit of unique latent talent. The kicker is that it’s not just the variable of “keeping up with the Jones’” which has many stymied but also the subliminal familial and social suggestion that you are “not really good enough” or ‘how dare you be adventurous” with career when there are mouths to feed.
Here’s the other thing. You’ll never get yesterday back. It’s gone forever. If you spent yesterday by keeping your biggest aspiration tucked away in that dark closet of your mind, it’s one less day you’ll have available in fertilizing its fruition. You will have a legacy. What will it be?
Ever Been Blind Sided?
One reduces the risk of being blind-sided with awareness. The problem with awareness is that we are lacking it due to the imposition and acquiescence to life’s complexities. Even when one deploys discipline in erecting barriers to special interests, variables outside our control compel us to accommodate for the sake of functional conformity.
So, here we are in the information age where values are being blunted at the edges. Liberties are taken in the name of new culturally perceived norms when in actual fact subconscious minds are at work processing the impact of changing goal posts and impingements upon freedom.
Could there be a “reckoning day” when there’s a return to values in their pure form due to the consequences of such a negative change in behaviour? If so, what would that “reckoning day” look like? Would it be tripping the circuit breaker of the New York Stock Exchange? Perhaps, it would be the removal of ATMs from banking kiosks? Then there’s the unthinkable but that which is showing up in the news. How about a tax revolt? As we speak, things are so dire in Venzuela that mothers are turning to prostitution in order to feed their kids. A report out today sponsored by Canadian firm MNP espouses that “48% of Canadians are on the brink of insolvency”. That’ right. Supposedly, first world country Canada has financially impaired citizens almost as its majority.
Perhaps it’s time to take the blinders off and examine what is actually happening behind the scenes in the offices of your elected officials, board rooms of banking executives, and line ups in corridors of corporate, environmental, and indigenous lobby groups. Perhaps, it’s time to reflect on the line item detail of government Balance Sheets and the injustice of untried tax evasion of elite cheats with offshore accounts. How about regulatory measures of our fractional reserve banking system in the context of spiralling public debt out of control with no apparent plan to pay back? Did you know that our tax system is over 3,000 pages of fine print?
John Titus has exclaimed that when the money supply retracted thirty per cent from 1929 to 1933, there were hundreds of U.S. financial institutions in play regurgitating financial paper. Right now in the U.S. Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America basically represent those hundreds from the early thirties. These four banks are interconnected with derivative positions and they really are too big to fail in the context of what the effect would mean. When there’s deceit inherent within levers of power, there are strong winds ahead.
Complexity Theory And Airplane Automation
Does the human mind have limitations when confronted with multiple variables presented during short time windows requiring a life and death decision? I took a course in third year university called “Human Performance” and in the course we pondered the question of “reaction time”. It was postulated by our professor that when a football team was confronted with a “third and one” (American rules) scenario that the offensive team should be guaranteed a first down because of their advantage of snap count cognition. However; any fan of the game has witnessed the defence putting on the stop. After all, a quarter back sneak requires execution after the snap.
Airplanes now have all this automation which is predicated on electronic data flow. In fact, some of the data flow is initiated from conditions exterior to the fuselage. Ice pellets, rain, snow, wind, lightning and thunder are all conditions which airplanes may encounter and hence require the pilot whether automated or not to interpolate. But wait…shouldn’t these automated systems adjust for the conditions? Hasn’t every imaginable metric been created to account for weather events which have now been deployed within electrical circuit boards and decision switches? Has it not been established that auto pilots can now drive the plane from just after take-off to just before landing? Does a pilot dare interfere with the scientific deployment of automation when his / her instinct has been aroused? Has the human mind been compromised through excessive deployment of automation in an environment which carries living souls through the air in a cargo machine?