Eds note: This is one of two columns submitted to the Tribune by longtime columnist Jake Highton after he died last week. His final column will be published next week.
Business is business. The aim of business is to make heaps of money. You would think principles would override approval of censorship in order to make dough.
Not so with Apple and Amazon. They are determined to make more billions even at the expense of conscience. They are yielding to Chinese insistence that they limit online content.
Such blatant censorship should be shunned by conscientious businesses. But, no, business is business, Apple and Amazon insist that profit come first, last and always.
The Chinese government ordered all customers to stop using any software that circumvents the country’s extensive system of Internet blocks.
Failure to comply means websites will be shut down.
“The widening push of the Chinese government is to prevent software from getting over the “Great Firewall,“ the New York Times reported. “The Great Firewall is the nickname for the sophisticated Internet filters that China uses to stop people from gaining access to Facebook, Google and Twitter.”
Blame the dictate on the Chinese government. Fault Apple and Amazon for failure of conscience.
‘INFLUENTIAL’ COLUMNIST
Al Saracevic, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, must have a great deal of influence on the puritanical National Football League.
He wrote a blistering column recently criticizing the NFL for stonewalling on the use of medical marijuana by brain-damaged players for whom it greatly eases pain from incessant head-smashing in a brutal game.
A week after he wrote the column league Commissioner Roger Goodell had a change of heart and will OK medical pot if a majority of the 32 team owners approve.
They should OK the change for the good of the players. The NFL makes tons of money for the league. The least the league can do is rule for the players for a change in something terribly important.
(The NFL has the highest average attendance of any professional sports league in the world, 67,591.)
‘CRACKERS’ NEVER LEARN
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has justly ruled that North Carolina officials violated the Constitution by opening meetings with Christian prayers.
North Carolina “crackers” have either not read the Constitution or choose to ignore the sacred U.S. principle of separation of church and state.
‘GOOD’ MUSLIMS MARRY RAPIST
Lebanon and other the Middle East countries are undergoing a drive to avoid criminal prosecution if the raped woman marries the rapist.
Freedom of religion is one thing. But Muslim irreligious practices another. It is intolerable that such inhumane practice exists.
GREAT PLAYERS COACHING WASHOUT
Great soccer players are rarely good coaches.
Jurgen Klinsmann sparked Germany’s national team to win two World Cups but he failed as a coach. Not so Bruce Arena, coach of the U.S. soccer team, who replaced the fired Klinsmann. Arena has a 14-game unbeaten streak since taking over.
DAWKINS SHOW DROPPED
A Berkeley public radio station cancelled a discussion scheduled with Richard Dawkins for criticizing Islam. Dropping programs happens all the time but it should never happen in Berkeley, the home of the free-speech movement.
Station KPFA cancelled the show because of the Dawkins “Tweets and comments on Islam.”
Dawkins, book-writing evolutionary biologist, said “it was not a freedom of press issue but a freedom to listen issue. People wanted to hear me.”
Indeed, they should no matter how much people are “hurt.”
RGJ OPINON SHABBY
Reading a recent Sunday opinion section of the Reno Gazette-Journal I was once again appalled by its third-rate tone and quality. The two weekly opinion pages of “the little old” Sparks Tribune are worth more than a month of RGJs.
Corey Farley, supposedly the star columnist of the RGJ, Is unreadable.
Other columnists and letters-to-the editor are mostly mild and/or weak.
I wrote again the other day to Kelly Scott, editor of the RGJ, acknowledging that she will not print my letters. But I said it was the readers’ loss, not mine.
Indeed, a sharp editor of the RGJ would print my weekly column in the Tribune because it presents a point of view seen in no other column in the nation. Print it, not because of “the great I,” but because it would be read widely–denounced by many and perhaps praised by a few.
For instance, Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, was condemned widely by columnists for sitting down or kneeling during the singing of the national anthem. My column went further, asking why the Star-Spangled Banner is even sung at all sporting events and declaring why it should not be.
Questions: does Ms. Scott want bland opinion in her paper? Or, is she too dim-witted to know the difference between the mediocre and the good?
‘MEH’?
“How to take the ‘meh’ out of your marriage.” That headline appeared in the RGJ not long ago.
I had to look it up the word in Google to find out what meh meant. Any headline you have to look up the meaning of a word is a bad head. Perhaps young people know such slang. But us old folks?
(Noun: meh. Lack of interest or enthusiasm.)
Jake Highton is an emeritus journalism professor from the University of Nevada, Reno. (jake@unr.edu)
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