Colin Kaepernick, the police,and the Constitution. How are they are all linked together in one common belief?

Recently there has been a few stories in the news about NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his sitting during the playing of the National Anthem before 2 NFL games.  (2 games to date anyway) For those not aware of the story, Kaepernick has said he is not standing as a means of protest toward racial injustice between police and minority civilians.  Kaepernick is quoted in NFL media saying “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” 

Now the union that represents some of the police officers who would be paid to work during the games have said they might boycott due to Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the anthem.  A quote from the Los Angeles Times  in reference to the union's grievance with Kaepernick says  the police union complained that ""Kaepernick's "inappropriate behavior" has "threatened our harmonious working relationship.""  It was not mentioned in the article whether the police officers represented by the union all felt that way collectively.  

So there were a couple of thoughts that crossed my mind about this story.  None of them are in reference to what Kaepernick is protesting against, but only about the protest itself. Let's start with Colin Kaepernick.  As a citizen of this country, he is afforded the right to protest any social issue he wishes in any manor he chooses as long as it is peaceful and his refusal to stand during the National Anthem is an example of  a peaceful protest.  I know that many fans booed Kaepernick when he did not stand during the National Anthem and they had a right to do so as well.  

But I wished that some of those fans would have taken the time to remember that the National Anthem reminds us of the hard fought battle we waged to gain independence, to put in place a document that tells the citizens of this country how we will govern, and what rights will be in place to protect us from both the government and one another.  The Constitution gives Kaepernick the power to protest, the National Anthem reminds us of how important the Constitution is, and the fans that booed him?  I believe they felt Kaepernick was being disrespectful of the anthem, and while that may be true, they didn't respect Kaepernick's right to protest, they just displayed their hurt feelings.

Now what about the police that want to boycott working NFL games where Kaepernick is a player. Of course the officers are citizens and can protest and boycott too, but only when they are out of uniform.  According the the International Association of Police Chiefs, new police officers take an oath when accepting the badge that goes like this: (copied from IACP.org)

On my honor,
I will never betray my badge1,
my integrity, my character, 
or the public trust.
I will always have
the courage to hold myself
and others accountable for our actions.
I will always uphold the constitution2
my community3 and the agency I serve.

It's the line about upholding the Constitution that irks me about the response of the police union. Upholding the Constitution means they are there to protect Kaepernick's right to protest but because they either didn't like the message or the method, they want to boycott. How can you swear to protect and defend and then say you don't want to do your job because your harmonious relationship is threatened?  I do not suggest that police cannot voice an opinion or take action, but they would need to do it out of uniform and boycott as citizens using their right to protest.  

There are some who do not agree with Colin's method of protest, some other's with the message, and some with both.  I remind anyone who disagrees with the method to recall the line from the National Anthem- O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.  I would suggest that Colin Kaepernick remembers just that.

Forever and a day since I was here

Sometimes the best of intentions will not get you where you want to be.  I had planned on writing in this blog far more than I have done.  Sometimes there wasn't much to write about, and sometimes I was so busy with other things that I would forget to write. 

For the past year or so I have been listening to Marc Maron's podcast.  He puts out 2 new podcasts each week.  The guests he has are usually A list people, and recently he had President Obama on the podcast.  This is a step up from his beginning podcasts.  But is shows that when you want to do something it takes time and creative energy to not only pump put content, but content that people want to be see, listen to, or read.

So I am motivated to begin anew, to put something out on the web that people want to read, I want people to look forward to something new from this page.  Hopefully I will be able to do just that starting with the next blog post.

who is the other that Yoda speaks of in Empire Strikes Back?

if you are a fan of Star Wars, especially episode V The Empire Strikes Back, you will remember the scene that takes place when Luke sees a vision of his friends in trouble and decides to end his Jedi training.  Obi-wan appears and tries to talk Luke out of leaving but his mind is made up.  As he is leaving, Obi-wan says "That boy was our last hope" and Yoda replies "No, there is another."

The vast majority of people have always believed that Yoda was referring to Leah.  Hell even George Lucas said that.  But I believe that the other that Yoda refers to is actually Anikin Skywalker and some on the internet have agreed with that thought too.   So why do I think that?  Who saves Luke from the Emperor?  Well i guess technically it was Dart Vader but who was Darth Vader, none other than Anikin Skywalker.  

How many times do we have to be wrong to get it right?

When European settlers cane to this land in 1620 they came across the indigenous people, people who helped then survive the first harsh winter the passengers of the Mayflower would face.  Years later those same indigenous people would be called savages and the newly formed American government would over a period of years force the native people off of their land, move then to reservations, then move them to smaller reservations that offered less resources for them to survive.  Today some Native people suffer from high unemployment,   and high rates of alcoholism.  We were wrong, they were not savages, but they were not like the white European people that were coming to this land on droves.  We got it wrong and we realized we made a mistake.

While we were busy kicking the native people out of the way, we were also busy importing African's to be used as slave labor.  After oppressing a massive number of people for free labor, this country was divided in half and after a 5 year battle, slavery was abolished.  But it was not the end of racism against the slaves, or their descendants.  White people had many terms for slaves and black's in America and some of those terms were hateful.  We were wrong, they were none of those things, they were just not like the white members of society.  We got it wrong and we realized we made a mistake.

In the 50's and 60's interracial marriage was prohibited by law on some states.  We were wrong about that one too, we made a mistake.  Could you imagine that telling someone today who is white or brown or yellow, that they could not marry someone of another race or color?  But some people want to do that with another group.  Needing another group to put down, focus was placed on gay people who want nothing more than to share in the same rights as all other people, to legally marry the person in life they love.   Do we really have to go through the same experience one more time before we realize that we got it wrong and have to fix it?  Take religion out of the equation for several reasons.  The first being that we should have a separation of church and state in this country's laws.  There should be no laws passed based on what the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah say.  You want to bring in religion?  Go read Genesis chapter 19 verse 8 were Lot is willing to give his two virgin daughters to the townspeople to protect the guest in his house, or Genesis chapter 19 verse 32 where Abraham's'  two daughters have sex with him after getting him drunk just so they can get pregnant by him.  Yes, lets leave religion out of the equation.

What will we get wrong and have to fix next?

Incorrect political correctness

There has been talk about changing the name of the NFL team Washington Redskins because some people think it is offensive.  It got me thinking that for a long time people would use the word Indian to refer to the people who got shafted by the Europeans in the 1600's.  So to be politically correct we then used the phrase Native Americans.  Here is the issue I have with that; Seeing as there were people living here before the Europeans arrived and called this place America, they are not really Native Americans.  And what of the Inca, they were from the place we now call South America but no one calls then Native American even though they are native and it is an american place.
So i think we should refer to native american what ever they called themselves before Europeans arrived, maybe native people.  So one would say "the person you are looking for is a native person."

Yeah, I think that is what I will do for now on.

Do I walk funny??

Last night I was walking toward an elevator after visiting a family member in the hospital.  As I approached the elevator there was a woman also waiting for the elevator to arrive.  A few seconds passed, then the woman turned toward me and asked if my name was Kyle?  When I said it was she then told me her name.  This was a woman whom I did not recognize at all, though once she told me who she was I did remember her.  The reason I didn't recognize her was due to the fact that the last time I saw her was 24 years ago.  We had been in a community play together, I played the character Roger from the Neil Simon play "Enter Laughing."
Once the name and the face were known to me, I did see that it obviously was the same person.  I asked how she was and she did the same, then I had to ask the question, how did she even know who I was?  24 years ago I was thinner, I had more hair on top of my head, and I did not wear eyeglasses.  Her answer was that she knew it was me by the way I was walking down the aisle toward the elevator.  I do admit that I have a little back and forth sway in my stride but was stunned that someone would remember that so many years later.  It turns out that she doesn't see up close so clearly and so she will remember something else about the person aside from their face to help identify who it is. For me it happened to be the way I walk. It is always fun to be remembered by someone who you have not seen for a long time but it would be nice to have someone say " As soon as I heard your voice I knew it was you" or that they just remembered your face and it had not changed after all those years.
I admit that I am not good with recalling people's names after  not seeing someone for a very long time, maybe I should start to remember the way a person walks to help me out with that.

2001 A Space Odysessy and my take on the failure of the HAL 9000

So if you have never read the novel or seen the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, this post will not make a lot of sense or have much meaning.  Recently for some reason I have been really trying to answer a question about this movie, and that question is does the HAL 9000 purposely lie about his move during the chess match with Frank Poole or does he really make an error?  For this argument I want to only focus on the movie version and not the novel because I think the novel gives too much to make a conclusion about the question and the real question is why does Stanley Kubrick leave things so vague. 
Let me give a little background into the mystery of the question.  HAL, the computer, is supposed to be fool proof and incapable of making errors.  HAL is on board a space ship with 5 human crew members, 3 are in a cryogenic state and 2 are awake and managing the ship, though HAL is really doing all the hard work and the two crew members are just going through the motions.
The reason for this trip is known by HAL and the 3 crew members in cryogenic sleep but not the two awake crew members.  They are going to the Planet Jupiter to make contact with an alien life form of some kind.
During the trip HAL plays a game of chess with Frank Poole, one of the astronauts.  During a chess match between the HAL 9000 computer and Frank Pool,  HAL tells Frank that Frank has make a bad move which would allow HAL to win the match.  But the moves that HAL recites to show his win is all but certain is actually wrong according to fact that Kubrick seems to have used the tournament game between A. Roesch and W. Schlage, Hamburg in 1910 as the game that we see HAL and Poole play.  Many people have stated that Kubrick was a very good chess player himself and so he would not have written the chess move that HAL makes incorrectly.  But one question I keep asking myself is does HAL make this move on purpose to test Frank Poole or does HAL make the move accidentally because he is starting to have issues due to his programming?  The issue is this- if HAL makes the statement on purpose, he is lying to Frank and therefore he has made an error.  If he make the statement incorrectly he is faulty and therefore still making an error. One reason people think that HAL makes this mistake is because he has conflicting orders and he does not know how to process this.  He is built to not distort information from the crew but by not telling the 2 astronauts what the true mission is all about, he is distorting information.  Now granted, the crew never asks HAL directly, "what is our true mission" because they may think the true mission is to get the 3 sleeping astronauts to Jupiter and that they are hibernating to save on resources like oxygen and food.
I have been reading a lot of people's opinions online and it does seem that people have researched the hell out of this topic.  The consensus seems to be that HAL is testing Frank and later Dave Bowman to see if they are really know the true meaning of their mission or maybe if they are capable of handling the mission at all.   But lets say that HAL said the chess moves in error and Frank says "Hey HAL, that is wrong, you made a mistake."  HAL, a computer who is incapable of making mistakes, would now be suspect by the awake crew members that the computer could be failing and placing them in some danger because HAL controls all the life support for all the crew. They would probably want to disconnect HAL from running the ship.
My personal feeling is that HAL would not be testing the crew to see if they know the true meaning of the mission because HAL was already told that the awake crew doesn't know the true mission.  The same holds true when HAL is asking Dave Bowman a lot of questions about the secrecy of the mission.  Dave Bowman does not give any indication that he is aware of the missions true nature so why does HAL figure he needs to kill off these two guys? If HAL didn't do anything, they would reach Jupiter, the 3 crew members that are asleep would be wakened by HAL and then they would all do the mission.
There is some other things in regards to the crew and HAL that I thought was very strange in the movie.  HAL reports that the AE-35 unit which controls the antenna that points it toward Earth is going to fail and recommends that they replace it with a spare unit.  Dave Bowman takes a shuttle pod and goes outside of the ship to retrieve the failing unit and replaces it with the spare.  This unit is then tested and it is determined that the unit is not going to fail.  HAL recommends that the first unit be placed back into service and then they can wait for it to fail (HAL tells them he knows it is going to fail in 72 hours) and this time Frank goes out in the space pod to do this. During this trip, HAL kills Frank while he is outside of the pod by cutting his oxygen tube.  Why didn't he kill Dave bowman while he was on his trip outside of the space pod first.  Also prior to Frank being killed, Frank and Dave go into a pod to talk about what is happening with HAL without having HAL listening in.  They enter a pod, HAL is asked to rotate the pod to the non-launch position, Frank and Dave turn off the audio channels to make sue HAL cant hear them, and then talk about HAL's failings.  HAL is able to see them talking about deactivating him through the pod's window, but this would not have happened if Frank and Dave never rotated to pod around so HAL could see them.  I cant seem to think of any reason why Stanley Kubrick thought the POD they entered through a hatch that was facing HAL had to be rotated 180 degrees  so now HAL could see them talking.
Another thought is that after Dave Bowman realizes that Frank Poole has died out in space he tried to retreive the body by using another pod to get to Frank, but HAL will not let the pod back into the ship in one of movie's most famous lines "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."  Hal knows at this time that the 2 astronauts are going to deactivate him because he made the error and they are concerned, and he probably thinks that Dave will go after Frank, thereby leaving the ship and he can now run the mission, but then I am still not sure why he kills off the 3 astronauts in the cryogenic sleep.  HAL could have woken them up and said that the other 2 died trying to fix the antenna and that's all.  Or HAL could have turned the Antenna away from earth so no contact could be make between the ship and earth until HAL could put all his plans together.
So what is my conclusion on all the questions I have?
I believe that HAL made an error in the chess match, and was probably happy that Frank didn't catch it. I think that HAL now knows he made a mistake and has to kill the crew to cover up the mistake because he knows the mission and he cant tell the crew that but he also knows he alone can complete the mission.  I think Dave and Frank made a huge mistake when they ask HAL to rotate the pod to face him, had they not don't that, HAL would not have known the plan to deactivate him and the crew would probably all have survived and fulfilled the mission.  I do wonder though if HAL had thoughts about being th eone to touch the monolith and evolving like everyone else that did so be fore him.