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By @anarchyroll

Why does it matter that the NFL is offering bribes, pulling money for concussion research, and having their actions investigated by Congress?

The body cannot exist without the mind.

In America there is a growing concern, over the growing number of people who are being diagnosed with brain trauma and mental injury related to sports participation. Specifically there is a growing concern that football is too dangerous to be acceptable to be played.

The concern was initially limited to the participation of youths in pee wee football.

But the concern has morphed into concern that even adults should not be playing.
Why the concern for grown ass men who can make their own decisions? Because traumatic brain injuries seem to be less of RISK of playing football and more of an UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCE with every passing research study.

The NFL knows this. The writing has been on the wall for decades but so many money is up for grabs that it is only natural that they would do what was in the financial interest of their $9 billion business to suppress as much of the science/information on brain injury research as possible.

Protecting financial interest seems to be the number one excuse for doing despicable things in America. The NFL’s actions in regard to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is despicable. So despicable Congress has publically called them out.

Something so bad it made Congress come together and actually do something? Eek.

 

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By @anarchyroll

News as significant as the Panama Papers doesn’t come around that often, unless it’s a news about how bad global warming is getting. That is becoming a weekly occurrence.

The Panama Papers’ place in history places the document leak right up with Edward Snowden, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and Wikileaks in its prime.

What the Panama Papers does is removes the illusion that the wealthy care about the poor. It destroys the myth that money trickles down from the top to the bottom. The wealthy don’t give a shit about anything other than getting richer, keeping what they have, to ensure they remain the haves, and that the have nots stay that way.

Just like it has always been. The 99% vs the 1% was once known as the castle owners versus the serfs. All the poors will ever be to those with wealth are serfs. A bunch of ignorant mouth breathers who don’t deserve to live a life of privilege.

The Panama Papers proves that those with wealth will take extraordinary measures to opt out of the social contract. That even though they could not possibly acquire a fortune without society, that they do not under any circumstance want to give back.
How do the rich give back? Not with charity but with taxes. We as a society need taxes. We need taxes to build our infrastructure to ensure our bridges don’t collapse and that our water pipes aren’t poisoning us with lead.

We need taxes to create housing and counseling for the mentally ill, physically handicapped, and generationally underprivileged. That is what the public sector and more importantly, public service is for.

If the rich, wealthy, private sector could be relied upon to help society better than the public sector, wouldn’t they have done it by now? The concentration of wealth is greater now than at any other point in modern history. So are the billionaires of the world repaving our roads, repairing our water pipes, building schools, shelters, asylums, and municipal Wi-Fi? No, they are putting the consumerism, capitalism ideology on steroids and crashing the economies’ of the world cyclically.

Private islands, mega yachts, vacation homes, third cars, personal jets, spa getaways, and tax havens. They go together like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly, caviar and foie gras, VIP bottle service and hookers.

After all they worked for that money, except for the trust fund crowd.

Remember, its not the local café owner, franchise retail manager, regional bank president, or serial entrepreneur whose economic terrorism has been exposed by the Panama Papers. Its not the rich, it’s the wealthy. Were talking Bill Gates money, not Oprah money.

Whether it is distrust of specific governments, municipalities or just the public sector in general is irrelevant. Infrastructures are crumbling, people are starving, coastal communities are eroding, species going extinct, and these greedy fuckers only care about having enough money to one up each other in the game of thee who dies with the most toys wins.

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by @anarchyroll

What do the following movies have in common?

  • Superman III
  • Rambo III
  • Godfather III
  • Lethal Weapon 3
  • Batman Forever
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
  • Blade Trinity
  • Spiderman 3
  • X-Men The Last Stand
  • The Dark Knight Rises

They are film franchises that shit the bed when they attempted to go from sequel to trilogy.

A quality trilogy is really hard to come by.

Really think about it, how many quality trilogies are there where all three movies are good? Not just two out of three, but all three.

The original Star Wars trilogy comes to mind for most. One’s cap can certainly be tipped to Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, and Evil Dead. But those are all decades old franchises. I would say the nearest #3 movie to round out a quality trilogy is Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I was an army of one flying that flag.

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Captain America Civil War stands on the shoulders of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has been created over the last decade. The movie relies and builds upon the films, tv shows, and digital shorts that make up the MCU. One might think that an entire universe of characters, situations, and continuity wouldn’t be necessary to follow-up a good sequel with an even better #3, but considering the list above…

With that in mind, one would think that fans and fanboys alike would be thrilled that DC is adopting the MCU paradigm for their future major motion pictures. However, I was unable to read a review for Civil War without a sidebar if not the bulk of the review being dedicated to not praising Civil War, but tearing down Batman vs Superman Dawn of Justice.

The MCU as of this writing consists of twelve films and two television shows. The film universe for Detective Comics has one film and…one film. Let’s at least wait until the DCU has a quarter of the storyline continuity established on the big screen before we compare the two.

Captain America Civil War can easily lay claim to being the greatest comic book movie of all time. The movie gets so many things right on so many levels. The airport fight scene is easily the most pure, most sustained fun a comic book movie has ever produced.

Marvel prefers their movies to be more fun and funny. DC is going with the darker more serious route. I prefer the big two comic book companies have their movies be more different, rather than similar.

The Captain America franchise has knocked it out of the park at every turn. Much like how The Dark Night was the bests comic book movie sequel, Civil War is easily the best #3. The three films combined make Captain America easily the best comic book trilogy to date and is definitely in the category of best film trilogy of all time. None of the movies have dropped the ball in the slightest.

It’s only fitting that the head of The Avengers leads the way for the rest of the comic book world by showing that it is indeed possible to make a great trilogy rather than leaving the fans to be forced to say two out of three ain’t bad.

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by @anarchyroll

Did you know warm water contain less oxygen?

I didn’t. Like most people when I think of what produces oxygen, I think of trees. But 70% of the Earth’s oxygen comes from the ocean, more specifically from the marine plants in the ocean.

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One need not be an environmentalist or a cynic to be aware that the average person doesn’t give a shit about marine phytoplankton. Even people tuned into environmental news are likely to think phytoplankton is a superfood juice fad. Perhaps because Googling marine phytoplankton brings up almost exclusively websites trying to sell the plant in powdered form.

“Save the Trees” may be easier to say and fit on a button/bumper sticker, but it is the phytoplankton that produces almost 3/4 of the oxygen. Maybe we can turn “Save the Phytoplankton” into a meme or gif.

Did you know we need oxygen to live?

It’s true, although it feels like suffocation to not have access to dank memes and social media, not having oxygen is actually suffocation.

So although we as humans have demonstrated a remarkable tolerance for pollution of the air we breathe, that tolerance is likely to be just a wee bit smaller with no air to breathe at all.

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What does a white-collar, wall street economic terrorist have to do to go to jail?

Write billion dollar checks with strings attached and an ability to make money back off the deal I suppose.

That is what Goldman Sachs recently did in New York as a means of settling their Legacy Matters related to the 2008 economic collapse that they have now admitted to being at least partially responsible for.

Usually when a person confesses to a crime, they still go to jail, they still face a righteous punishment. Maybe instead of the death penalty they serve life in prison. The deal that Goldman Sachs cut with the working group headed by the New York Attorney General, is very Manhattan, a lot of bluster for the sake of appearances that stinks like garbage when brought into the sun.

What good is restitution without a righteous penalty? What is the value of a fine to people with unlimited money and unlimited capacity to get free money from the US government?

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A penalty isn’t a penalty if it doesn’t hurt the person or party being penalized.

Fining Goldman Sachs five billion dollars is like fining the ocean enough water to run a water park for a summer. Not only is it less than a minimal but its a pretty salty reward  that cant quench anybody’s thirst.

In the developed world money equals power. The purpose of news is to inform the common person about what those in power are doing. The event of the 2008 economic collapse and the ripple effects in the aftermath of it effect more people directly than any presidential election in modern times

Yet how much coverage did the announcement of this multi billion dollar settlement get compared to any aspect of the presidential primary or anything Donald Trump has said in the last year?

Legacy matters.

Most people would agree that it does. On Wall Street that means a whole different thing. Then again what doesn’t? The announced five billion dollar settlement by Goldman Sachs sums up their legacy and the legacy of the 2008 economic collapse quite well.

Smoke screens, legalese, under the table deals, double talk, fine print, more mystery than truth, more PR than pure.That is the legacy of the 2008 economic collapse and the Great Recession that followed it.

That is the legacy that matters to Goldman Sachs, and the royal we of Wall Street. The legacy matters of the too big to fail institutions on Wall Street are nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet…just like everything and everyone else in the world.

On Wall Street, legacy matters are things you put behind with shame. In the rest of the world, it’s something you leave behind with pride.