Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Misc.

Isn't it time for the Governor and her economic team to start dealing with the upcoming loss of federal jobs in New Mexico?  Are they just deer in the headlights?  Are they planning any sort of strategy for what will happen to the labor force in this state when the cuts start coming?  Which military bases will be closed?  What will our response be?  How do we create more high wage jobs when the feds cut the workforce in New Mexico?  We have not  heard anything from the Martinez administration on what they might be doing.  Should she at least convene a group of business people to start some discussions on these potentially devastating cuts?  If 20,000 federal and military jobs are cut in our state that also has a multiplier effect on another 30,000 jobs.

Shouldn't it be a crime for parents allowing their young kids to get into boxing and full contact sports?  A story in the Journal this morning about a young girl's quest to be a boxer just amazes me.  She is being trained by a relative to enter the ring and risk repeated concussions and injury.  If that same person was to slap her around continually he would most likely end up in jail.  This is nothing but child abuse in my book.  Innocent kids trying to please their superiors and not really being told of possible consequences or being able to understand the consequences is shameless.  I know there will be vehement disagreement with me on this, but think of the pain these kids endure in hoping for acceptance. No one under the age of 14 should be allowed in boxing and full contact sports.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As for boxing, just picture Muhammed Ali as they lead him around from place to place. Someone who could once match wits with Howard Cosell now just stares ahead blankly. They say he has Parkinson's. I don't know, but they say, too, that it was brought on by repeated severe head trauma.

You can name other boxers who ended up slow mentally. I remember as a little kid seeing Joe Lewis on TV, they had a shot of him, in a tux, standing at the doorway of a casino. My dad explained to me that it was charity. Someone had given him a job and he was called a security guard. He couldn't handle much else.

At one time there was actually some debate about why we, as a nation, and as human beings, like boxing, and football, for that matter, these actings out of hand to hand combat and war. With the resurgence of patriotism that came with the reinsurance of conservatism it's hard to even imagine such a debate taking place now. If you question something like that, it goes right over peoples' heads. Your premise falls on deaf ears, well, like you say, it might even create cognitive dissonance.

Anonymous said...

As for the governor, you're too nice to say it but you know that included in her calculations is having moved on, before that shoe falls, to what she really wants to do, whatever that is. But it's a valid question in its own right. Are you going to do what's right by the state? Are you going to do your job?

Speaking of her ambitions, I can't remember or haven't seen where anyone publicly made an issue of it it, or of anyone drawing the threads together, but when she got into politics down there, it was to run against the prosecutor after he fired her.

I joke about her turning Republican after some Republicans bought her lunch, and she does tell that story albeit with a different emphasis than I do -- she says it was about beliefs, I say it was about free food -- but what I get from reading news accounts from back then is that that's when she became a Republican, when she wanted to run against the guy who fired her. Just for the record.