Edits in a FLASH!
With opinions coming in seconds flat
WE’RE GOING to have to think of a cool tagline for these FLASH editorials. You know, the kind the TV people come up with. Some of us are old enough to remember “And that’s the way it is . . . . ” Then Dan Rather tried to one-up Walter Cronkite with “Courage.”
There’s another guy on NBC who tells us, each weeknight, “Please take care of yourself, and each other.” Which is sweet. But nobody has beaten Cronkite yet.
FLASH! Reports say that Mercedes is playing around with futuristic ideas concerning driving. As if self-driving cars weren’t enough. Now researchers are trying to develop a car that will allow drivers to adjust the radio or air conditioning by just thinking about them. That is, plugging your brain into a helmet with electrodes that give the car orders. We haven’t gotten used to the idea that our truck thinks it’s smarter than we are, and automatically locks the doors at 15 miles an hour. We’ll avoid the electrode-helmet car like pink pork.
FLASH! Amazon says it will start opening Whole Foods stores next year featuring no cashiers. Zero people to take your money. Automated everything. Call us old-fashioned, and we’d consider it a compliment, but we still like the traditional way of buying groceries, complete with a human being and some chit-chat. And without five minutes of looking around for help when the machine thinks a bag of potatoes is a lemon, and rings it up as such.
FLASH! The NFL’s season starts this weekend. Actually it starts tonight, with the Bucs playing the Cowboys. The papers say there’ll be something different on the tube between plays. The Associated Press tells us that sports books will now be allowed to advertise on national NFL broadcasts. You’ve gotten used to the fantasy football-draft spots, so now you’ll see commercials for the real thing. There are billions of dollars to be had. You knew the NFL would eventually embrace such massive gambling on its games. There’s money in it.
FLASH! A report by CNN says female athletes in Afghanistan are leaving the country when they can. The network interviewed some female cyclists who were heading to Canada to get away from the Taliban’s new rule and rules. As if an occult hand, the Taliban explained its new sports rules to an Australian television station that same day: Sports might leave women “exposed,” according to the Taliban’s deputy head for the cultural commission, which means he probably has a lot of time on his hands: “It is the media era, and there will be photos and videos, and then people watch it. Islam and the Islamic Emirate do not allow women to play cricket or play the kind of sports where they get exposed.” We have no further comment on this.
FLASH! Reports say that Michael Moore has made the call: In the end, Osama bin Laden won. Well, nice to have it from an official source.
FLASH! The current and future leader of Red China, Xi Jinping, has decided his country’s billionaires have gotten too big for their britches. Among a flood of cultural and financial changes, he’s decided that all those leaders of all those successful tech companies should pay for “common prosperity” for everybody else. Another way to put it is that the Xi government wants the rich to pay their “fair share.” Details about just what is fair haven’t been released yet. But according to the wire reports, the billionaire founders and executives of these tech companies “have scrambled to show loyalty by promising to share their wealth” under the Xi initiative/directive/order. This is how they do things on mainland China.
FLASH! Speaking of socialists, Bernie Sanders was heard from again this week in an article in The Hill. He said this controversial new spending package that the president is pushing—the one that costs $3.5 trillion, not the other $1 trillion one—should be passed by the Congress and sent to President Biden as is. Because the $3.5 trillion price tag is “the very least” what it should be, no matter the protests by even his allies in Congress: “That $3.5 trillion is already the result of major, major compromise, and at the very least this bill should contain $3.5 trillion.” And these last few decades of major spending will likely end up with our kids and grandkids paying major interest on a major debt. But then, those kids don’t vote today. Which is why the betting odds say these spending packages will pass.