This Cure is Worse Than the Disease

The police brutality that killed George Floyd in Minneapolis was inexcusable. But the injuries during the demonstrations that followed it were also inexcusable. Many of those injuries were caused by police shooting the demonstrations with rubber bullets. Those bullets are HARD, not the soft Nerf projectiles that children play with. They don’t just sting a little, they cause permanent injuries, especially to eyes. One young man, who was trying to bring peace to the demonstrations, was shot in the groin, destroying one testicle. Any man hearing this story would shudder. Hopefully, rubber bullets will soon be banned.

Kudos to Stores for Using Internet to Serve Households

Grocery stores, in particular, deserve a lot of praise these days for their quick response to the challenges caused by the CoronaVirus. We personally experienced this in the case of using Instacart at our local Safeway. We actually were in touch with the staffer who was picking items from their shelves, and we could answer questions regarding the items he was choosing and make decisions in real-time

Could Brain Injury Lawsuits Sideline the NFL?

Oakland QB Carr Gets Brained 435x580

The NFL (National Football League) is a hugely powerful entity, more media company than athletic league. (See our September 17, 2014 Technology Bloopers blog entry.) It has been coming increasingly under fire because of a swell of publicity about the brain injuries that are causing early dementia and death among former players. On November 9, 2014 that swell became a tsunami. The cover story in November 9’s New York Times Magazine deals with the big bucks lawsuits from players with brain injuries (if you miss the definition, C.T.E. stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease caused by blows to the head from football, boxing and other contact sports or explosions). If there ever were a photo that highlights the cause of such injuries the one above this blog entry would be it. Oakland Raiders quarterback Derek Carr is 6′ 3″ tall and weighs 214 lb., so he is considerably larger than the average American man, but he looks like a small child next to Denver Broncos defensive end Malik Jackson, who is 6′ 5″ tall and weighs 290 lb. That kind of size disparity is one key reason that there are so many injuries … and so many NFL players that suffer increasingly from dementia as they age. We scanned this photo from the first page of the Sports Section of the print edition of the San Jose Mercury News.