Saying Goodbye to The Shield

Yesterday, after seven seasons, FX aired the last episode of The Shield, probably the best police show ever created for television.

I remember Ironside, The Naked City, The F.B.I, Hill Street Blues and other such shows that caught my imagination and entertained me for many hours, but none has brought the realities of crime and life in a precinct as realistically and with the brutal honesty of this show.

The writers were able to connect events years after they took place, the actors were as realistic as the persons you come across walking in the streets of your neighborhood. I was always amazed by the extras. They must have been recruited among the gang members of LA. None of the actors looked like they just came out of a photo session with Vogue.

The acting was superb. I will not mention names because there were so many great actors involved in this show. However, this series will always be associated with the bald headed Michael Chiklis. It was he who created a character that despite the many terrible things he did, deep in our hearts we wanted to see triumph and survive.

If you have not seen this show, and you are not afraid of blood dripping from you TV screen, get the DVD's, buy a large screen television, get rid f anyone who might interrupt your viewing, and enjoy the show. The only other way to get a similar rush of adrenaline is fighting crime in Los Angeles. And we all know that that can be too dangerous.

A Reminder From Mumbai

For a short while we have taken a break from the financial crisis, when the events in India and the threat to attacks on Pen Station in New York reminded us that the threat to our civilization is no coming from some greedy capitalist on Wall Street but from the brutality of Islamism and its adherents.

Just like on 9-11, terrorists struck on Mumbai, a major financial center in India and a symbol of the success of economic freedom. It seems that every success story serves to remind Islamists of their failure to accomplish anything in centuries and like a spoiled child who prefers to break the toy of a friend if he cannot have one, so do they, in their savagery, intend to destroy us rather than strive to climb out of the dark age in which they are stuck.

The usual suspects, better known as “experts”, have crawled out of their offices in think tanks and academia to remind us that we must engage in dialogue with Islam and that Islamists constitute a minority of no more than 10% of Muslims. Is this supposed to make us feel better? Only 150 million savages want to destroy us and are whiling to die with us in the process and this is supposed to comfort us.

I too am for dialogue; the same type of dialogue we had with Nazism.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Argentinean president Cristina Kirchner has announced a massive program to deal with the global financial crisis by infusing $21 billion dollars into rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. This program is expected to create 362,000 jobs. In addition, the Argentinean government has announced a plan of incentive for the repatriation of funds.

For the last several months the Kirchner administration has started an aggressive program that included the first steps in the nationalization of the country’s two largest airlines and the nationalization of 26 billion dollars of private pension funds.

Given the failure in the past of Argentina to run efficiently its government owned companies such as telephones, railroads and oil, and its inability to upkeep its infrastructure, one can look at the measures taken by the actual administration with skepticism. Furthermore, since some of these policies, such as the nationalization of pension funds have been launched as trial balloons by some of Obama’s advisors, Argentina should be used as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. If the past is any indication, the canary will not sing for too long.

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Mario M.