Monday, September 11, 2023

Singaporean Fandom

Imagine my surprise when I did what is a periodic check of who actually reads the 1,100 or so articles published on this site the past nine years.

Recently, about 95% of the reads have come from the lovely southeast Asian place known as Singapore.  I've never actually been to Singapore, and although I have a good friend from there, he lives in Alaska last I knew.  I have no connection with the place other than that, and I'm therefore extremely flattered to have developed such an extensive group of fans there.

For the record, such articles as have been done new since 2021 or so have been moved, along with most of the ones here, to my Substack site at robertsutton.substack.com and can be enjoyed there.  Feel free to subscribe if you like.

But I do want to thank my new readers in Singapore, and encourage you to reach out if you would like to have opinion pieces done on any specific issue.  I'm truly honored to be read there.

Terima kasih!

Copyright 2023 by Robert Sutton Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

 

Friday, January 14, 2022

This Column Has Moved

Good day!

While all the previous columns on this site will remain here, most have also been moved to my new Substack site at:

           robertsutton.substack.com

I do encourage you to go over there and subscribe.  The monthly rate is very low, and I'm including a bunch of no-charge pieces as well as an inducement to subscribe.

Thanks to all of you who have been regular readers ... see you over there!

- Bob



Monday, April 12, 2021

Visiting Column #65 -- The Weaponization of "Domestic Terrorism"

It has become fashionable these days, or at least "fashionable" as defined by network news and its slavish adherents, to use the term "domestic terrorism" in a peculiar way. 

Now, you and I would not apply any additional strictures to its meaning, I would assume. Terrorism is the intimidation of innocent civilians to advance a political position or narrative, and the domestic version of it is simply its location -- i.e., here, the once good-old U.S. of A. But it appears that the mainstream media seem to think that it applies solely to the events of this past January 6th. 

To remind ourselves, the night before that, actual terrorists had left a couple bombs outside the offices of the two political parties in Washington, DC; then as President Trump was speaking to a large crowd on the 6th, some people went over to the Capitol building even before the president got to the part of the speech where he asked them to go over peacefully (the word he used), and some of them -- despite the exhortations of others of the protestors to avoid violence -- started breaking into the building. 

Since then, there has been plenty of terrorism going on in our country; however, it is being ignored, whether in Portland, where federal buildings were burned, or Minneapolis or elsewhere, ignored by the media, who seem to use the term "domestic terrorism" to apply to the events of January 5-6, exclusively. It is obvious to the casual observer that Portland doesn't count. 

The narrative that the big bad orange man is evil and responsible for all that is wrong in the world, well, that is not supported by the fact that the domestic terrorism in our cities, before and since January 6th, the riots and burning of federal property, has been the work of Antifa and BLM terrorists (what else can you call them?), and since former President Trump is the enemy of the media, and "the enemy of your enemy is your friend", well, the media are inclined to do what they do best, and ignore the terrorism of the left. 

Of course, although the media are really good at ignoring stories that don't fit their leftist narrative, just ignoring the leftist terrorism is not enough. No, they need to co-opt the narrative entirely by using the term "domestic terrorism" to refer to January 6th, solely -- and then ignore everything else that happens that is actual terrorism (not that the 6th wasn't, of course, although it's still not clear all of whom were involved) is ignored. 

The media are really good at weaponizing words when it suits them, and why not? Their job is to sell clicks, to get eyeballs on their screens, TV and otherwise. It is clearly not accuracy, reliability nor, particularly, comprehensive reporting. And here they have weaponized the term, "domestic terrorism", by simply applying it here but not there. 

We know what they're doing, but we can do little other than starting our own media. We know that the 2020 election was corrupt as a 1925 speakeasy, or pretty much anything in Chicago, because we saw a procession of election workers testify to what happened in at least five states. But the media narrative is that "no court found anything wrong", even though no court actually got to the point of hearing evidence or testimony ... yet. 

It's not just the terrorism that is being weaponized. It is the reporting on it that has. I can assure you that the actual domestic terrorism that is going on here in the USA is not what is being described on air. 

Gotta fit the narrative, you know.  

Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Visiting Column #64 -- Who Can Do "Cultural Appropriation?"

I'm sure that many of you who are regular readers might recall this column, one of the most popular in the series, dealing with the topic of "cultural appropriation."  As you'll remember (but please read it if you haven't), the topic was a bunch of spoiled college students at the very leftist Oberlin College, who were complaining about the authenticity of ethnic foods the cafeteria was serving there.

Someone mentioned the column itself not too long ago, which got me thinking about the topic of cultural appropriation.  Now, mind you, I have a pretty fixed opinion on the subject.  "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", the saying goes, and when people from one culture enjoy the food, or attire, or other attributes of another culture, it is a good thing.

Unless, of course, you are white.

Now, I don't suppose there is an actual thing that is "white culture."  There certainly are characteristics of, say, Italians, that are very specific to Italians, who are white, but are foreign to Irishmen, who are also white.  Barbecue is an American southern thing, but lots of southerners are not white, of course.  

Country-western music?  Maybe that is (or was) a white southern thing, but Russians, who are white, don't get it at all.  I think you get the idea.

But there certainly is one thing that weirdly unites all those white folks, including those mentioned above, and all the Serbs and Croats, the Norwegians and Newfies, the Scots and Greeks and Turks as well.

We are, according to the leftists, not allowed to appropriate the attributes of other cultures.

Now, I have the issue that I'm starting from a position that what the woke left calls "cultural appropriation" is actually a good thing, not something used to make white people feel like we have committed a crime.  If an American girl like Keziah Daum chooses to wear a Chinese dress to her prom, that seems like a really good thing, not only because it is broadening her school's awareness of style, but because it just looked nice.  So I'm not sure what more needs to be said on that side.

But the point is that if the woke left thinks that cultural appropriation is bad, then it has to be a bad thing universally.

Do you want to explain hair straighteners to me then?

There is a reasonably-sized section in the toiletries section of my local supermarket stocked with hair straightening products.  Since all the pictures on them are of people who are black, one can fairly safely assume that the products are targeted for black people, right?  And since black people's hair is generally not straight, but Asian and most white people's hair is, is not fair to call that cultural appropriation?

I suppose that I could add all manner of examples of non-Caucasians habitually doing, saying or eating things that are characteristic of cultures that are of Caucasian.  As I said before, there really isn't a "white culture" but there are multiple cultures with specific attributes that are indeed each made up of white people.

What would a Russian think if a black person did a good job (or a bad job) on a kazatzki, that curious dance with all those kicks to the side that we all associate with partying Russians?  Should that be a no-no, or would the Russians joke with the dancer about there being maybe a little vodka in the dancer's ancestry, and everyone laughing heartily?

I imagine that you get the idea by now.

Cultural appropriation, done by anyone in the imitation of any other culture (i.e., sincerely and without mockery), is a good thing.  If I, a non-Pole, want to eat pierogies, or Mike Tyson wants to wear a lei, or David Ortiz, a native Dominican, dresses up one day like a Punjabi (though admittedly, a very large Punjabi), shouldn't we smile and enjoy what the other culture has to offer?

There is an answer to that.  The answer is "yes."

When I was 25, there was a presidential election, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.  One of the candidates (Carter) was celebrating the charms of some community in some city somewhere where he was campaigning, and used the term (unfortunate even then) "ethnic purity", in an attempt to praise the community's attributes.  

He meant well, of course.  But he ended up having to apologize (well, he didn't have to, but the 1976 version of the woke elite forced him to).  Instead, he should have come up with a description of what it was about that community that he was celebrating, and then maybe imitating it, since no one was calling it "cultural appropriation" back then. 

But they are calling it that now.  My point is that we should, or at least call it something.  And then we should recognize that it is actually a good thing.

Even when applied to hair straighteners.

Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, March 22, 2021

Visiting Column #63 -- It Was Real, Tashi

Back in 2003, our old cat, Chester, passed away after contracting feline diabetes.  He had walked into our lives as a tiny kitten 14 years earlier, back when we lived in the hills on 13 acres of woods full of stray cats.  He had apparently separated from the rest of the litter, and saw our house as a refuge.

When he died, we had moved to the suburbs in Virginia, and had decided he mostly belonged to my mother-in-law, who lived with us at the time.  Because my wife was working at the time, my mother-in-law came with me when we took Chester to the vet that final time, received the diagnosis and the strong recommendation that he be allowed to go to sleep.  We went home without a cat but with many tears.

Tashi's first days with us
My wife and I decided that her mother would be better off with a new kitten, so we found a breeder of Himalayan kittens in the next state and arranged to meet him one Saturday.  We told my mother-in-law to relax at home, that we were going out for a while to "look at mattresses", and came back hours later to an angry old lady, wondering where we had been so long ... until I reached into my jacket and took out a furry little kitten that looked like a tiny koala.

We named her "Tashi", having looked up names in the Nepalese language, and Tashi meant something positive that I can't remember.  I do remember that we knew even then that Himalayan cats are not native to the Himalayan area at all, but are a fairly recent cross between Persian and Siamese cats, blending the furriness of the Persian with the points of the Siamese.

Seven months and loving carpets
Tashi attached herself to us quite well; we never allowed her out of the house, and she learned to get around both upstairs and down as she grew into later kittenhood and got bigger and stronger.  By six months her coloration had developed, to where the little koala nose was now the dark face and the ears, feet and tail had all filled in their coloration.  She didn't have the full furriness of later years yet, but a very thick and healthy coat, and she loved having it petted, as long as you were the right person.

 She almost didn't see those "later years", though.  At about three years old, she developed an indeterminate illness characterized by total lethargy and lack of appetite.  We brought her to the vet, and they tried various remedies and diagnostic tests -- the bill was about $3,000 when we were done -- and still couldn't figure it out.  Finally, he said that they would give her a steroid treatment and send her home. "If it's going to work, you'll know it in 24 hours," he told us.

It worked.  The steroids quickly cleared up whatever was wrong, and a day later she was up and around, healthy and happy and sleeping most of the time like a normal cat.  Of course, there had been the time she ate a twist tie and required an operation to remove it (we stopped using twist ties from then on).  But she was a part of us all that time, a furry, sleeping part of the family.

"Christmas Cat", 2014
Tashi was "Christmas Cat."  Each year, the first night after we would put the tree up, you'd wake up to find her sleeping on the tree skirt under the branches, or looking up from that position as if to say "You got a problem with this?".

That was every Christmas, right through the last one.  You know, it seems odd to feel how connected a cat can be to a family, especially since they really don't do tricks, they sleep a lot, and they decide what they will and won't do, as if they are actually the rulers of the home, which we all know that they are.  We content ourselves with their idiosyncrasies and love them for those consistencies.

Rooting for the Sox over Seattle, 2011
She didn't work for a living, but she did have a knack for finding the nearest laptop keyboard, and God forbid you leave a computer unattended for very long.  You would be very likely to return to work only to find a large furball with a head, sitting on the keys and looking back at you, and wondering what you thought you were doing disturbing her like that.

It didn't have to be work, either.  For a few years, in the evenings I would put the Red Sox games on the laptop while my best girl and I watched TV, and while most of the time Tashi lay on her lap, occasionally she'd waltz over to my side of the couch and plunk herself down on the keyboard.  I'm not kidding, of course, as you can see by the picture at left.

Enjoying her couch bed in January
Tashi turned 17 last Fall, and had slowed her pace down tremendously in her old age, with an arthritic back controlled by glucosamine.  She found fairly reliable places to sleep, although she could still climb up on the couch as needed, including the one we'd normally find her in when we woke up.  

We bought her a bed and put it on the couch.  She typically hated beds, but this one seemed to comfort her more than the others, and she curled up frequently in feline bliss (right), having outlived the typical age for the Himalayan breed by a couple years already.

About a month ago, we started waking to find that Tashi had eaten nothing, or almost nothing, overnight, when she typically ate.  We changed up on the type, shape and flavor of the food, but it was pretty clear that she was no longer interested in eating, and was drinking less than usual.  You know what that means, but you don't want to let yourself think it, and you just can't talk about it.

We moved her water bowl (which she lapped at occasionally), her food (which she didn't touch) and her litter box (which she used as always) all into the sunroom that she now stayed in, laying on the floor.  In the last week, God was so kind; He gave Tashi plenty of sunny days to where she could move herself into the area of the floor where the sun was shining to warm herself.

Other parents might have chosen to bring her to a vet, but this was the seaside Carolina shore home we had brought her to four years ago, and as it didn't appear that she was in real pain as Chester had been, we felt like she should be allowed to go on her own terms, enjoying the sun that God was giving her in her last few days.  Despite her limited mobility, she was still able to use the litter box, still able to sip a little water, and lay in the sun the rest of the time.

Our beloved kitten went to go warm the laps of the angels last Saturday, the 13th.  We buried her earthly remains in the back yard, under a marker that is a sleeping cat with angel wings, and we no longer will have a pet, we have both decided.  While there is no longer cat fur to vacuum up and litter boxes to empty, no food and water bowls to clean and fill, we would gladly trade all the care for a few more years with Tashi.  

But she had loving parents who cared for her her entire life.  She outlived all the targets and as we say, in the world of cat lives, she "won the battle."  

I'm so glad it was we who got to serve her, "La Reina Gattita" as a former cleaning lady called her.   

In coelo quies est.

Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, March 8, 2021

Visiting Column #62 -- Let Joe Talk, It Can't Hurt

Sorry it's been a while since the last column, but it's been a challenge to identify the stupidest, most hypocritical actions and statements by the left to pick one to expound on.  Suffice it to say that at this point, any concerns I have about my own life are alleviated when I realize that there are people out there concerned about the gender of a plastic potato.

So ... Joe Biden.

There is a bit of "emperor's new clothes" about this.  The con-man magicians are spinning a mystical tale about how this geriatric old fellow, whom we can see no longer can make coherent sentences reliably, is actually the president of the United States, and that he is making decisions behind the curtain and knows what he's doing.

We in the sane half of the country, of course, can see right through the nonsense and realize that the emperor is naked, or at least understand the fiction that Biden knows what he is doing when he signs anything.

So a lot of people were a bit surprised when on two different occasions in the past week, at the end of a short video-cast statement from the White House, Biden stumbled around verbally and said he'd take questions if he was "supposed to", as if someone else makes the rules (hint: his predecessor made the rules).  You could almost anticipate someone yelling "Cut the feed!", and we all saw the video screen changing to a "Thank you for watching" frame.

So clearly the puppet masters running things in the White House these days did not want the guy who is supposed to be the president of the United States taking questions.

But I'd be like, "Let him take questions, who cares?".

If that sounds insane, think about it.  Joe Biden essentially never campaigned.  he stayed in his basement, came out for a couple of debates where he mostly staggered through them, and then was declared to have gotten more votes than Donald Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, an amazing thing, given the effort that had to go into printing up all those curious absentee ballots that made it through the mails both ways with no creases and with machine-filled ovals.

He got sworn in, so I guess he is the president.  We'll let that slide.

All that happened, and not a single court has chosen to assign standing to anyone filing a challenge to any state to actually see evidence to the contrary, evidence of voting fraud.  The left won.

And if they won that, they can win anything.  So what is the harm in letting Uncle Joe take some questions?  They should be thinking about the worst thing that can happen, which aside from vomiting or passing out, would be saying something stupid, you know, like "I actually did grope that teenager."

Because, then would would happen?  Nothing!

Why?  Well, a few things.  First, the press is so far in the bag for Biden that even the worst thing he would say would be missing entirely from all the major networks' evening news except for maybe Fox, missing from CNN, missing from NBC, and on page 1,442 of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Whatever-they-print-there.

The press has zero to gain by embarrassing Biden, and there is simply no accountability or consequence for their ignoring what he said, however much it would suggest that he not be in the right job, or the right residence, or his right mind.  They can simply devote their front pages to more important topics, like what guy just broke the ladies' 100 freestyle record, or the gender of plastic potatoes.

The other thing is that the 2020 election literally showed that there is no downside to massive, multi-theater election fraud.  The left now controls the ballot box in much of the country, and as Josef Stalin said so accurately, "It's not who votes, but who counts the votes." Well, he said it in Russian, but you get the drift.

So if it really doesn't matter what Biden does in the course of a "press conference", or whatever rigid structure they'd come up with, then why worry?  He can do the whole thing in Pig Latin, and it still won't make the Evening News.  He can toss lunch on his script, and it wont affect the outcome of a single election next year, because of who is counting the ballots.

Just let him answer a few questions!  He won't even be held responsible for anything he says, even if it contradicts something he said five minutes earlier.  There is no one to hold him accountable.  Those who get their news from the leftist mainstream media won't even know it happened, because they won't be told.

They'll eventually assume it was a made-up story when they finally hear about it, and will discard it as Joe being Joe, and when the next year's elections come up, they'll forget about plastic potato genders and the dissolution of women's sports, and the voting fraud they've been told never happened, and vote for Democrats all over.  

And no, there won't be enough of those votes, but there will be more than enough machine-printed, deceased-voter and illegal-alien ballots to ensure they hold power.

Because, oh yeah, it is all about power.  So let Joe answer.  It won't make a difference.

Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, February 1, 2021

Visiting Column #61 -- Elections? Well NOW what?

I was doing an Internet search this morning in regard to some topic or other, and one link took me to a page on the Snopes site.

Now you recall Snopes, of course. It is the supposed "fact checker" that we're all supposed to go to to verify this or that tale, or urban legend, or other supposition.  Snopes used to give us what we assumed was a reliable validation or debunking of rumors and stories we'd heard for years.

That was then, of course.

I started to notice during the Trump Administration that the text accompanying the fact-checking in Snopes articles had gotten awfully biased and extremely anti-Trump.  This is particularly concerning, given that not everything associated with Trump is by definition bad, wrong or evil, and if your fact-checking always comes down on the bad, wrong and evil side, you've blown your reliability index.

When I reviewed the Snopes link that my search had sent me to, I noticed a few other links they were advertising between paragraphs, links to what I assume were either well-advertised pages or popular search results.

One had to do with the attacks on the U.S. Capitol building last month, perhaps as to whether a particular person who had been arrested had actually been a registered Democrat.  Exactly what the article was about, though, isn't my point.  I clicked.

My point is that in the text of the article, the references to the attack were simply over-the-top anti-Trump, suggesting that he had inspired the attacks (despite the recording that clearly show his reference to "peaceful" protests, and ignoring the fact that the bombs planted outside the two parties' headquarters had been put there the previous day, before Trump said anything).

They were so anti-Trump, in fact, that they included curious references to the concerns about the election day ballot counting in multiple states, in the sense of their calling it a lie about widespread voter fraud.

Now the extra-harsh language about the allegations of voter fraud were bizarre for a site that claims to be the be-all and end-all of accurate fact-checking.  For them to say that President Trump had no grounds to complain about widespread voter fraud is one thing, but to describe the claims as being unfounded in very strong language is quite another.

I say that because I watched, literally end to end, the testimony before state legislative committees in five states -- Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia -- describing the observations of witness after witness, all of whom pointed out where very similar efforts were undertaken in each state to corrupt the legitimacy of the ballot.

Each was a full day-long hearing, and for the most part the witnesses were only given five minutes to describe what they saw.  That makes for a lot of witnesses in the day, if you do the math, or even if you don't.

What did they describe?  Poll-watchers being prevented from observing signature checking, or from observing ballot counting, or from observing pretty much anything, being kept far away from reading distance.

They described thousands of ballots showing up without having been folded, as legitimate absentee ballots would have had to have been in order to be in the envelope they would have been sent out in -- if they were legitimate.

They described thousands of ballots being machine-printed rather than filled in by hand, which renders them invalid -- but they were counted, even though only the presidential vote was filled in, apparently alerting exactly zero election officials to the concern.

They described serious issues with voting technology that was provided through the courtesy of the wonderful, generous, benevolent souls who turned Venezuela into a fourth-world country.

They described batches of ballots -- and video confirmed this -- being run through counting machines multiple times, but only during a period when observers were sent home and couldn't see what was going on, having been told that no counting was to take place before the next morning.

They described similar midnight gaps where these states, and no others, were shut down from doing actual counts.

They described severe harassment and eviction of Republican poll watchers.

Was each one of them lying?  That's a lot of lying, especially given that most of those who were confined to a five-minute testimony period submitted more detailed versions of their testimony under oath in written form, under penalty of perjury.

Not a single court has accepted jurisdiction to hear any of that testimony; it has all been done before state legislatures because the courts refuse to grant standing to any of the dozens of plaintiffs to press their case and find out what really happened.  But Snopes, well, they summarily dismiss all of that collective testimony because, you know, Trump.

So here's the thing.

Trump isn't likely to run anymore; although I wouldn't put anything past him, it doesn't seem likely.  But there will be a lot of elections in 2022 and especially 2024.  The Senate map is favorable to Republicans both years, and 2024 is a presidential year.

The whole election fraud issue described in detail by witness after witness in state hearings worked.  They got away with it, and the geriatric fool in the White House is prima facie evidence that it worked.  

The left got away with it; they couldn't guarantee enough actual living, voting citizens would vote for their propped-up mannequin, so they made sure that between deceased, non-citizen and Xerox votes, they'd win.

They got away with it once.  What is going to stop them in 2022?  What would a Democrat/leftist-run House, Senate and White House do to investigate the 2020 election?  What would that bloc do to ensure that the USA can trust future elections?

I do not trust future elections one bit.  I do not trust the Republican end of the Swamp to do one thing to fix the problem, because to concede that the 2020 ballot wasn't perfect is to agree with President Trump, and they don't want to do that (with few exceptions).

Now what, indeed?

What kind of representative democracy can operate without the faith of the voting public in the mechanism of the ballot? Not this one.

I will go and vote, because I refuse to be an example for others who agree with me, to take any other tack.  But I will have not a shred of trust in the process.

And that stinks.

Copyright 2021 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, December 28, 2020

Visiting Column #60 -- It Didn't Have to Happen

This will be the last column of 2020, a year like few others, and certainly unlike any in my lifetime.  We have had pandemics before, and we have had presidential elections stolen by fraud and immense illegal votes, but not, you know, in the same year.

But when I say that "it didn't have to happen", I'm referring to the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath thereof.

We have to set aside the gargantuan role of China and the Communist Party there, in allowing the virus to spread outside Wuhan and its borders, without allowing the world to come in and figure out how bad it was and how to contain it.  I hate to "set that aside" because they are criminally accountable, but that's not the point.

Donald Trump, as president, had an extremely difficult balancing act to handle, and I may be the only one giving him appropriate credit for the dilemma he confronted.  By that I mean the dual problems -- the medical problem and the economic problem.

We all understand that the two factors, medical and economic, were not only at unrelated ends, they were often at opposing ones.  The president had to oversee the actions of the medical community and the CDC and, at the same time, oversee the social and economic reality of the everyday, healthy American.

Lest anyone rewrite history, let us be very clear as to what he did: President Trump chose to delegate the responsibility for the social and economic effort to contain the spread of the virus to the states via their governors, and turned his personal oversight to the medical side, working with the CDC, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry to accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines to stop the morbidity and mortality of the virus.

This made sense, both at the time and in hindsight -- an organized medical response should be centralized to get therapies and vaccines out to the populace far quicker than ever before.  

 At the same time, not imposing Federal guidance but letting each state's governor oversee the social and economic steps seemed the sensible choice -- the states are very different animals, from the urban to the suburban to the rural (often all three widespread in the same state).  Moreover, with 50 separate "laboratories", the success of various steps and various efforts at constraint and freedom could be (or could have been) compared and the more successful ones emulated.

In as less political environment, with fewer governors determined to reject anything from President Trump's White House, the better and more successful programs would have been emulated.  And early on, even staunchly anti-Trump governors like those in New York, New Jersey and California were profusely thanking him for helping them with support -- such as the hospital ship that the president sent to New York City.

Of course, the freedom granted the governors to handle their economies with the flexibility needed was promptly abused, with the newfound power to control people's lives and livelihoods a crisis not allowed to go to waste, such as New York's Cuomo actually putting COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and killing thousands of patients.  Thereafter, to save face, he tried to blame President Trump for his own mistakes, and the rest of the Democrat governors took it from there.

And yet, it didn't have to happen.

We know now, although we didn't then, is that the statistics were extremely deceptive.  COVID-19 proved out not to be as deadly as first thought; many deaths of people with co-morbid diseases -- cancer, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes for example -- were attributed to the coronavirus, when the patient was dying already.  Test positive?  OK, must have died from COVID.  There were even reports of hospitals being instructed to maximize the death toll attributed to the virus.

We know now that, given reasonable treatment, about 99.5% of all people infected with the virus (i.e., testing positive) survive, some 40% without even any symptoms.  COVID-19 infections are in that way, very similar to the annual flu.

We know now that COVID-19 is an opportunistic virus, preying particularly on those with compromised immune systems, such as diabetics and heart patients, and those under therapies with immune system suppression as a side effect or goal (like transplant patients).  The rest of us?  For the healthy (and particularly the non-elderly), it's anywhere from nothing to a bad cold with a rare fatality.  At one point, more people in Minnesota over 100 years old had died from reported COVID infections than people under 50 years old.

Knowing that, we have to look at the gargantuan cost of the shutdown, severe in most states.  Small businesses were closed, a high number permanently.  Extremely hard-hit were restaurants and bars, leaving literally millions unemployed.  Schools converted to the utterly ineffective Zoom class.  Brick-and-mortar stores closed; a great boon for Amazon but not nearly so good for mom and pop.  And oh, by the way, we're on our way to $3-4 trillion, with a "t", in Federal debt that will ultimately get borrowed from places like China.  Ironic, right?

And while the governors grabbed their new power to control the economy and lives of their people, others took the low road, from the media blaming the president for things the governors had done, to teacher unions agitating for their dues-payers not to have to go to work.

If we had it to do all over again, weighing the cost of the shutdown and understanding the medical nature of the virus and the disease, and if I were president, I would do this.

(1) I would let the population know that this will be painful; sick people are going to lose their lives as they do in any pandemic.  It is the inevitability of epidemics.

(2) I would explain to them in as simple language as possible, that the cure -- the economic action -- cannot be allowed to be worse than the disease.  It is terrible that 300,000 people died from COVID-19, yes, but many of them were going to die of their underlying disease in 2020 regardless, and to cause severe economic pain to 200,000,000 or more of our population is unsustainable.

(3) I would therefore explain that the safest course of action is to allow the virus to run its course without closing society, schools and businesses, to where over a period of some months, the general population would have been exposed.  At that point, the infection rate would decline sharply as immunity became widespread.  During that time, those with high susceptibility as noted above should take applicable precautions (isolation, masks, etc.), as should also be done in nursing homes and the like.

(4) I would simultaneously implement a version of the wildly successful Operation Warp Speed to get the vaccine(s) developed (and also work rigorously on applicable therapies using existing drugs). It worked for COVID-19; in ten months we have five vaccines in at least human testing, and three of those are going to patients widely as this is written with a fourth imminent.  That is incredible.

We did not have to shut down the economy in 2020.  We would have had more deaths, yes, we understand.  But the treatment was far worse than the disease.  The massive unemployment, the massive business closures, coming after an amazingly successful 2018-19 in the Trump economy could have been, and should have been, avoided.

It is ironic that of the two sides to the effort, the one that President Trump took on, the medical side, was wildly successful.  The one left to the governors was, for the most part, done poorly.

History should give proper credit, but it just seems like that won't happen.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, December 21, 2020

Visiting Column #59 -- Careful, Baseball, Be Very Careful

Major League Baseball is a truly screwy institution.

So ... ice cream.  Ice cream is a really tasty treat, and most everyone likes ice cream.  And a good ribeye steak, well-grilled, gee, that's a wonderful flavor.  I like steaks, and work hard to get mine grilled perfectly when we have them.  Yum-mers.

But you don't put ice cream on a steak.  Individually they are wonderful; putting them together simply ruins the integrity of both.

Yet baseball is about to do just that; to put ice cream on top of a well-grilled ribeye, at least metaphorically.

You may have read recently about MLB's decision to recognize the Negro leagues that operated in the 1920-1948 period (i.e., until integration of the majors killed the Negro leagues) as "major leagues."  This recognition, of course, would put them on a par with not only the American and National League but also the brief outlaw Federal League of the 1910s and the major leagues pre-1900.

It is, of course, an effort on the part of MLB to be "woke" and apologize for excluding black players prior to 1947.  I get that; it wasn't exactly to baseball's credit that it was not an integrated institution all those years.  And a ceremonial recognition of those Negro leagues that filled the gap is not a terrible thing at all -- it was not unusual for their teams to outdraw the majors in the same cities in years where the AL or NL team was poor.

The problem is not with the recognition itself, but for the misguided attempt to try to integrate the statistics of those leagues with those of the majors.  And that's where we need to draw the line.

First there is the problem of the record-keeping.  MLB games since before the turn of the century have been recorded carefully, box scores recorded for posterity including in the newspapers of the day, and scoring decisions, though frequently challenged, done by official scorers -- the choice of a hit or error had universal guidelines (though not always followed as well as we'd like).

As for the Negro leagues, well, let's say that for a long time the box scores were nonexistent, and diligent efforts to recover or recreate them have been made, but the veracity is, let's say, far less than what exists for the majors.

When we say that this or that MLB player had a lifetime average of .296, we don't challenge it because the underlying data is there to support it.  Ty Cobb's hit total literally was validated by someone reading thousands of box scores, that sort of thing.  And someone did that for Bevo LeBourveau, I'm equally sure.

The difference is that those box scores were there to be plumbed; they could be validated by contemporaneous accounts, not recreated by them.

Now MLB has to deal with Negro leagues players with batting averages of, say, .385.  How do you say that a .385 from a player in the Negro leagues compares in any way to the average of a player on MLB, when the provenance of the data on which the .385 is based is far sketchier?

Perhaps you are prepared to put that player in the Hall of Fame (I am fine with that); but are you going to then try to compare his career average with Cobb's and say that his average for all time will be shown above Cobb's?

I am not, and it is not just that the data is impossible to validate as tightly.  Given the quality of some of the research into the Negro leagues, there is certainly a high percentage of validation, although it is far from perfect.

The problem is more the second issue, the level of the competition.

There are countless recorded match-ups in exhibitions between the stars of the Negro leagues playing against MLB stars -- Satchel Paige pitched on a number of occasions (successfully) against white MLB stars; Babe Ruth batted against black pitching stars as well, many of whom held their own quite well.  The black star players most assuredly could have played and starred in MLB had they been allowed.

The point I have not read anywhere is that it is not the caliber of the black stars of the era, but of the non-stars who pitched to them and hit against them.

Having read extensively on the subject, I can assure you that the detailed, well-organized roster management in MLB bears little relationship to the contract management of the Negro leagues.  Players came and went regularly, and it was not unusual to find teenage players and local pickups filling out rosters, for players to come and go or be barely identified -- the same Jim Jones who played for Team A in 1927 might have played for Team B in 1932.  Same guy?  Who knows.

Why do I mention that?  Because that is the uneven level of competition against whom the black stars compiled their career totals.  It wasn't always Satchel Paige pitching to Josh Gibson (and to be fair, not always Gibson batting against Paige).  We can readily make educated guesses about how Paige would have fared had he made it to the majors ten years earlier, based on his performances in exhibitions against white star teams.

What we can't do is to try to imagine what, say, Ted Williams would have hit had he faced the full range of Negro leagues pitchers for his career, many of whom would have never emerged from the minors had the leagues been integrated then.  We can, of course, be pretty sure that he would have hit a good bit better than the lifetime .344 average he compiled over his long career.

So how do you include the career average of players who faced substantial doses of minor-league pitching, and match them against Williams?  Ted hit .366 as a Minneapolis Miller in 1938 before coming to the majors.  Does that now count?  Wasn't the pitching in the American Association, the AA league of the Millers, on average about the same as the Negro leagues of 1938?

The answer, of course, is that we don't know.  We do know the level of pitching in the majors at that time, because the records are all there.  Any pitcher who pitched in the majors in the 20th Century, well, we know how good they were because the records are there for them, as well as those of those who hit against them.

But there really was no organized Negro minor league for player development, nothing remotely like the actual minor leagues.  As such, there were plenty of black prospects who were immediately in the "majors", doing their development there, and providing fodder for the stars among their opponents.

I have no problem with the Negro leagues being called "major", even though the designation has no real meaning.  I have no problem with their most deserving stars being inducted into the Hall of Fame; they were famous and they were good.

I do, however, have a huge problem with an attempt to commingle the statistics of the Negro Leagues with the far-better-researched data from MLB.  It is unfortunate that the leagues were segregated; in fact, a lot of that era was simply unfortunate.  But just as you cannot escape history, as Abe Lincoln said, you cannot rewrite history for your own narrative.

The Negro leagues' stats simply need to be out there as a separate database, with the caveats as to its provenance and the very erratic level of competition against whom the stars played.  It seems a little "separate but equal", with their data over there, you know, by the kitchen, but much as the steroid stars belong in the Hall of Fame, the Negro leagues' data needs to be somewhere.  Just not incorporated into the MLB stats.

Otherwise, well, to treat it on a par with the MLB data is to put ice cream on that grilled ribeye.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Friday, December 4, 2020

Visiting Column #58 -- A Not-Unexpected Screwage from China

It's Christmas, when billions of dollars are spent ordering gifts for the season.  With all that money being tossed around, we can be assured that people with marginal morals will be out there trying to take advantage.  And no one does that better than the Chinese.

My best girl was looking for some modest, identical gifts for her friends in her card-playing circle, and as we live in a beach-adjacent community, she was very happy to have found a sort of sea-glass Christmas tree, 12 inches tall and festooned with what was meant to look like bluish sea glass.

The picture at the right, from the actual online ad, is quite clear as to the basic look of the product; trust me, it actually did look a lot like sea glass even though it wasn't supposed to be sea glass, or have the recipient believe it was sea glass. 

Oh yeah, also ... "American made", the company advertised, from an "American company."  It sounded good, the price was right, and the product was a perfect gift for her friends.  So she ordered six of them, for a total of $122.97.  Since they took PayPal, we used that, and awaited the order.

A couple weeks thereafter, a box arrived with our order.  As they say, "imagine our surprise" when we opened up the box to find six Christmas trees shipped not from anywhere in America but from Wuhan, China, as we know, the home of COVID-19.

As the picture at the left suggests, what we received was not exactly a "sea-glass" tree, and you'll have to take my word for it that it wasn't near twelve inches high.  What it was, was an eight-inch high cheap clear plastic tree that must have cost all of four cents to make, whatever that might be in yuan, since they were indeed shipped not from America but from China.

Now, I grant you that what we actually ordered wasn't expected to be a very high-quality product, so when I say "cheap" I'm not suggesting that we were expecting actual sea glass.  But irrespective of that, it was not, in height, color and structure, what we ordered.

My best girl had a justifiable fit.  So she looked up the customer service phone number for the "American" company she had ordered it from.  Guess what she heard on the other end of the line?  "We're sorry, this number is no longer in service ..."

Since we had paid via PayPal, and I handle the PayPal account, I said I'd put in the complaint.  My younger son uses PayPal all the time, and swears by their customer service, so I went online and filed a complaint, and had it acknowledged as received.  In their process, they carry the complaint to the seller to reply and offer a solution.

Sure enough, next morning I get a message from PayPal.  At 2:00am, the seller, who was being open at this point about using their actual Chinese company name, had offered to refund an amount of  $12, and we would not have to return the incorrect items.  No offer to provide the correct products was made.

Got it?  On a $122.97 order, the Chinese company was offering to refund less than 10% of the price we paid, and made no offer to provide the proper items.  Naturally, I replied through PayPal that we would not accept that and required a full refund of our payment.

And of course, next morning there was another "offer" from the company -- they had upped their offer to $20.  Now, how we were supposed to be expected to accept less than a sixth of what we paid to settle our claim, being allowed to keep a bunch of garbage that was nothing like what we ordered?

I wrote back essentially the same response via PayPal, that they could take their offer and place it gently where the sun doesn't shine, which at that point it was not shining since it was daytime here and they were, you know, in China.

Next day I got a message from PayPal that was a bit different.  They had offered to refund the entire amount, but only if we sent the clear plastic trees back to China, on our nickel, no later than December 15th.  The problem was that PayPal looked at that as a settling offer, and their online messaging did not give me an avenue to reject it.

Now, it was not what we had agreed to.  In order to get our money back, not only would we have to ship the garbage back to China, and pay for it ourselves, but the Chinese company would have to acknowledge receipt by December 15th.  And according to PayPal, if we didn't accept this within a week, they would drop the claim.  But there was no actual message section for me to respond and reject that!

Do I trust that even if we shipped the garbage back, that the Chinese company would properly acknowledge receipt?  Why would they?  The same people who thought we'd accept $12 as a settlement could easily lie about receiving products back, and with no recourse.  I was not going to put myself in a position to have to chase them down again.

I finally found a separate messaging channel to PayPal and sent a very loud message that we were not accepting that "solution" and wanted the full refund, no conditions.  I wasn't sure even if they were going to get my message and link it with the case; after all, a lot of people use PayPal.

I know everything doesn't always work out the way it should.  But in this case, about 36 hours later I got a message back from a lady at PayPal.  They had looked quickly into the exchange of the previous few days, and then looked to see whether this Chinese outfit had a track record.

And of course they had; they had shipped enough incorrect product paid for via PayPal, and PayPal had had enough similar complaints, that they had decided to provide an unconditional refund, and in almost no time had gone ahead and credited our account the full amount of the purchase.  Case closed.

There are several takeaways here, but primary among them is that when you are ordering from a company that portrays itself as American, and they are Chinese, there need to be penalties, and we need not to have to rely on PayPal to settle it.  Chinese companies are China, friends, and the penalties need to be assessed toward China.

Because it ain't about Christmas trees.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

 

 

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Visiting Column #57 -- On Mourning and Our Cultures

People leave us, often when we don't expect them to.

I've written on a few occasions about topics wherein I invoked a grand-niece of mine, a young lady of twenty-six.  For the most part -- well, every time I mentioned her -- it related to her extreme liberalism, and the linkage to her extreme success in her academic pursuits.  She was brilliant and dedicated, and this past spring was awarded her doctorate after doing extensive research in her field.  The family was incredibly proud, despite the political chasm between her and pretty much all the rest of the family.

And she was twenty-six.

She was still twenty-six years old, when a few months later we received the late-night call you never want to get.  Stricken by a pulmonary embolism, the otherwise-healthy young woman had collapsed and died in her home shortly before beginning her post-doctoral research on the way to what was undoubtedly going to be an amazing academic career.

How do you mourn?  She was an only child, and her parents were, of course, relatively young.  They, along with a grandparent from each side, now have to "go forward", as they say, with an incredible hole in their lives.

No one can honestly feel guilt about what happened, of course; her passing was not precipitated by any action or mistake and, of course, was neither her nor anyone else's responsibility.  And it's not so much guilt that is felt, as it is a reluctance or inability to move forward with one's life when a loved one is unexpectedly taken, certainly at such an early age.

How, we ask, can we go back to work, or a hobby, or engage in anything pleasurable, even enjoy a nice dinner, in such circumstance?  It simply feels as though we are dishonoring the memory of the lost loved one, and I get it.

So not long ago, I happened to be watching a show within which there was a passing reference to some Asian culture and the fact that they had a period of mourning for the passing of a family member -- thirty days, maybe?  

It struck me then that a fixed period of mourning was embedded in the cultures of many societies, faiths and sects worldwide, and that it had been the case for a very long time.  For most of my sixty-nine years I have paid only subconscious notice to that fact, always with the equally subconscious thought that the widespread nature of that fixed mourning period had been to pay respect to the dead, and to make sure that we took that time to honor them.

But now, I truly contemplated the notion and have come to the conclusion that the idea of a fixed mourning period was not to ensure that we remembered the dead, and focused attention on their memory for at least a certain minimum respectful period.  

Rather, it was for the living; that is, by devoting a month, or a week, or a fortnight to the honor of the lost loved one, the mourners could become freed thereafter to return to their lives, without the guilt of feeling as though they were ignoring the honored loved one.  Not, of course, that the departed would be forgotten; it meant that society removed any stigma from the family for living their lives.

It is not helping now.  For the most part, "American culture" does not have that universality of mourning process; no book of rules to say how long to mourn when your loved one is young and the loss sudden and unexpected.  And so our family has still, short months thereafter, not come so much to grips with this loss that everyone's lives are back to a semblance of daily routine.

Perhaps there should be something in American culture.  Perhaps we would be better served if there were such a period that then thereafter allowed us to go forward and live a normal life, not ignoring or forgetting the departed, but acknowledging that we had indeed mourned -- and that almost certainly the late loved one would not have wanted to have felt responsible for paralyzing the lives of the living.

It is a lesson too late for us, as we cope with a return to normalcy.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, November 23, 2020

Visiting Column #56 -- Medical Dramas Go South, and Probably Don't Even Know It

Over the past few years, my wife's and my list of TV shows being DVRed has gone from a fairly modest percentage of them being reality shows, to even more being reality shows.  That is done at the expense of situation comedies and TV dramas, the latter being today's main topic.

I was, as you know, a medical-school student, so I am relatively conversant in medical jargon, certainly enough to understand the TV shows that have a medical setting, by which I specifically refer to the two that we watched fairly religiously.  That would be the old standard of contemporary medical dramas, Grey's Anatomy, and the more recent-vintage one, Chicago Med.  We had watched both of them since their inceptions years ago.  That's a lot of investment.

In their developmental years, both shows put out a set of characters that tried to create an appealing group, sometimes with quirks, but for the most part the producers realized that people watch medical dramas for the characters and not the medicine.  For years, that worked.

Both shows, however, have strayed toward the edge of being taken off the DVR list in the last couple years.  When I want to get a sermon, I turn to my pastor.  I do not enjoy being lectured by TV shows, especially when I may disagree with the message.  Grey's, in recent years, has decided that it needs to preach rather than spin good stories, and then preach some more.

Chicago Med befuddled me in an episode whose playing out was so contrary to its basic message that I wrote a piece about how they completely missed they way one plot should have developed.  Read my article here; it will help you get my drift.  You get the idea regardless.  For both shows, my best girl had to take me to task for yelling "Stop preaching!" to a mindless TV set.

I imagine that when you've produced a show like that for years, living in insulated Hollywood, you feel perhaps that you own that audience.  Perhaps it blinds you to reality, particularly the reality of why that audience is actually watching.  Most importantly, it can blind you to why we watch fiction in the first place.

Both shows were taken off our DVR list within ten minutes of the first episode of this season.  Moreover, it was for the exact same reason.

We watch fiction for the same reason we read fiction -- as an escape from the day's stresses and the reality of the world.  In the case of 2020, that reality is heavily COVID-centric.  We have businesses everywhere shut down and closed, governors and the House Speaker with their "Do as I say, not as I do" hypocrisy, masks abounding, toilet paper shortages, all that.  I don't have to explain; we're living it.

So I was particularly disappointed when both shows chose to put masks on their characters and go all coronavirus-stories on us.  I was disappointed, because it meant they'd have to keep it going all season, and I didn't particularly need to have the virus coughed in my face weekly by my choice of television shows.

Think about it.  I haven't seen much in the way of new sitcom episodes this season, but the few I have seen have completely ignored what is going on COVID-wise in the real world, and done so to their credit.  COVID-19 is not funny; nothing about it is.  Once you insert it into your plot line, you can't get it extracted, and we are not going to laugh.  The purpose of comedies is ... well, you get the idea.

But it wasn't just the masks on the two medical shows.  I am not lying to you when I say that it did not take ten minutes for both shows to find a way to work into their dialogue the idea that black people have a higher death rate from coronavirus than non-blacks.  Now, that's probably true and all, but without any context, so what?  Why, in God's name, did two separate shows on separate networks feel like we really, really needed to be told that in the first few minutes of their new seasons?  What, like we could do anything about it?

I had had it.  My best girl and I almost immediately shouted "Stop preaching!" at the TV, whereupon we looked at each other and switched to the recording-management screen and canceled them both.

As we are so early into the seasons of the fictional comedy and drama series, it is hard to tell whether or not more of them will insist on introducing the dreaded mask and our contemporary reality into their series.  But I beg this of them: Don't.  Resist the temptation, and let the stories tell their own tales, mask-free.

As a dramatic device, in TV dramas, it would now be beyond cliche.   In the context of a comedy, it would snuff out any humor in your entire season were you even to touch it once.  COVID-19 is the third rail of the 2020-21 television season.

I am right, am I not?

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Monday, November 16, 2020

Visiting Column #55 -- Three Things that SCOTUS Will Have to Decide

Good morning, fair readers.

As I write this, it is mid-November, and the 2020 election is in hot dispute.  What is being disputed is, well actually, a number of things, all related to whether there was an epidemic of ballot-stuffing, ballot destroying, a lot of 135-year-olds voting (they all seemed to like Joe Biden), and some very curious banning of Republican poll-watchers from cities with corrupt election histories like, you know, Philadelphia.

I'm expecting that in the coming weeks, a lot of court cases will be heard, and ultimately, they will float up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have to make a few different findings and hand down a few different rulings.

While I don't know what those rulings will be, or even what cases they will hear, this particular column is meant to point out that the rulings will not be nearly as straightforward as those in Bush v. Gore, 2000, and they will have quite a bit more long-range impact.

There are three things that will have outcomes as far as this situation is concerned, and SCOTUS will have failed miserably if they don't execute on all three, to wit:

1. What happened?  This is a finding, in the sense that the Court will have to determine the facts of the cases.  I say "cases", because in different states, the Democrats did somewhat different things.  We don't know for sure (that's the Court's job to decide), but regardless, there have to be rulings of what the evidence showed happened in each of the contested states.  SCOTUS will find that X, Y and Z happened in Michigan, and X and Y happened in Pennsylvania, and maybe V and W in Arizona and, oh yeah, W, X and Y in Wisconsin and Georgia.  You get the idea.

So the first outcome is that the Court will make one ruling per state as to what it has found to have happened with the election.  Neither you nor I can tell you what that is going to be, because there are multiple legal teams pursuing this, some with no ties to the Trump campaign and others connected to it.  Some of them are being very close-hold with their evidence, lest the leftist media put forth their opposition to the public ahead of time.

Obviously, if the Court rules that nothing happened, or if maybe only one state played fast and loose with election laws, it's over and Biden will be sworn in on January 20th.  You don't need to read my column for that, so let's deal with the assumption that the Court finds multi-state problems took place.  Then we get to ...

2. What is the remedy?  So let's say that the Court finds that the elections in three states were corrupt, and the electoral count of those states is enough to swing the election to President Trump. Here's where SCOTUS becomes a real wild card, because I didn't attend enough law school (i.e., none) to know the answer to the $64,000 question -- what is the fix for this one, the 2020 election?

Obviously, there are multiple avenues of repair -- a replacement election, or the discarding of all successfully-contested ballots, or simply voiding the general election in that state and defaulting to the Constitutionally-mandated solution where the legislature of the state votes on the electors it will send to the Electoral College in December.  I honestly don't know, and those remedies could theoretically be different for what the Court orders each state to do, depending on all that X, Y and Z stuff I wrote above.

But the point is, that if the Court finds that the election was in any way corrupted, it has to order a specific solution; it can't pass the buck.  I do not know what that would be any more than I know what their finding would be, but I can tell you this -- the Court must, in that case, specifically mandate the immediate solution to tell the states how to determine what electors go to the College in December.  It cannot leave that to others.

I'll add this.  The left (meaning the Democrats and the media) will riot in the streets if that remedy does not go their way.  The Court -- and I'm serious -- must not care.  During her confirmation hearings, Justice Barrett pointed out that the Court should not be taking outcomes into account in making a Constitutionally-acceptable ruling, and this would be a good example.  They must rule properly, and provide a Constitutional remedy, and the remedy must be explicit so as to order how the electors for each state will be chosen.  And if the left (or the right) doesn't like the outcome, well, that's simply not relevant.

3. What is the future?  So whatever the Court finds, as long as something is found to be wrong, the nation can no longer trust its own electoral process.  And here is where the Court has to act decisively.  If there was corruption, in the eyes of the Court, then it owes it to the citizens (i.e., legal voters) of each affected state to do what it can to prevent that sort of thing from happening ever again.

Let's say that the Court finds that the prevention of Republican poll-watchers from overseeing the ballot counting in Philadelphia was felonious, and logically leads to the elimination of trust in the outcome.  It is incumbent on the Court to order penalties for those responsible, and it is equally incumbent on the Court to order the city and, assumedly, the commonwealth, to take affirmative, auditable steps so that such corruption can never recur.

Face it, my friends, right now we do not believe that the 2024 election will be on the up and up, and we certainly don't feel the 2020 election was.  The Supreme Court can not allow future elections to be subject to the same tortured doubts that we have about this one.

So if there was wrongdoing in 2020, then people need to be sent to prison, and systems need to be fixed.  Now.  Not two years from now, and certainly not four years from now.

The nine justices on the Supreme Court are going to have a very tough task in front of them, but they cannot finesse it, or do it halfway, or kick the can down the road.

They need to decide very specifically what happened. 

They need to order how to fix anything that went wrong so we have legitimate electors in December.

They need to punish the guilty and ensure that future elections can be trusted.

All three. This is their moment.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Visiting Column #54 -- Election Day Ramblings

This column was started in 2014, and for over four years I wrote a column every workday, until I reached 1,000 articles.  That means, though, that there has only been one other Election Day column on a presidential election day, so I went back to see what I had actually written, what pithy advice I had given, what remarkable insights I had shared with the world. 

You what I wrote?  Why I like cats and don't like dogs as much.  I'm serious; it is right here.  Election Day 2016.

So today, I feel that perhaps I might want to share some thoughts that might have a bit more relevance to the presidential (and Congressional) elections taking place today, that perhaps may end in the declaration of a winner.

I voted already.  My home state has early voting, but I chose to send for an absentee ballot, fill it out and hand-deliver it to my county's government center at the Board of Elections, and verify that it was counted.  I voted for Donald Trump for reelection as president.

But of course I did.   I am a conservative, unapologetic indeed.  I believe that the long view of our nation is one where people of all backgrounds have unlimited opportunity to succeed.  I believe that view has a support net for the truly needy, but that motivates everyone to get off that net if physically possible.

I believe in a long view of the nation where government keeps us safe, both domestically and internationally.  I believe in law and order, properly and compassionately administered.  And I believe in the idea that we reward talent, intelligence, diligence and accomplishment as a society and an economy.

Finally, I believe that the governance of that view is the Constitution.  Most particularly, it is the "powers not delegated" phrasing that effectively states that if a role is not assigned to the Federal government in the text of the Constitution (such as the national defense, the post, interstate commerce and coinage), it is the province of the states (such as, you know, education and morality).  I detest Federal overreach into areas the government has no business being in.

Donald Trump can be a frustrating man to support.  But the bottom line is simple.  The vision of the country that I just expressed is his vision.  Therefore I can be assured that his energy directed toward policy will be in the promotion of legislation and executive orders that closely align with that vision.

The opposition Democrats do not agree with any of that.  Their vision is of an all-powerful centralized government run by the elites, with policies that govern the election system so as to ensure their power.  It is, indeed, all about power for them.  It requires a socialist system to prevent non-elites with the aforementioned talent, intelligence and work ethic to succeed and challenge them.

There is no excuse for the way this year's riots have been managed in cities and states all run by Democrats.  The police are ordered to stand back and let the looters loot and the rioters vandalize and  burn, even when the minority owners of some of those businesses, already ravaged by the Wuhan virus impact, protest that it is hurting them.

There is no excuse for the Democrats' impeachment of President Trump for literally asking about the potential influence peddling by the Biden family and for the Ukrainians to please look into it. I can't possibly support that incredible "judicial" overreach by the House.

There is no excuse for Obamacare, particularly the way it was rammed down the throat of our nation with the pomposity of the elites, with the notorious declaration by Nancy Pelosi that we'd "have to pass it to see what's in it."  People who say things that condescending ought not to be allowed within a country mile of power.  Because "what's in it" forced 63-year-old couples to pay for coverage for maternity and pediatric dentistry but stripped our own dental coverage from the plans the law outlawed.

There is no excuse for Joe Biden.  The man clearly was engaged in selling access through his son and brother, and an apolitical judiciary would have no problem declaring those actions to be treasonous in that they involved our adversaries.  And there is no excuse for the actions of the news media and Big Tech in stomping on the evidence of that access-selling and trying to prevent you from knowing about it. 

I honestly don't care much how President Trump expresses himself.   One could argue that if he weren't who he is, then he couldn't get done what he does, and there is some truth in that.  It is all about what he does; and what he does is to get things done -- with achieving energy independence, with ISIS, with Israel, with the USMCA, with the removal of onerous regulations, with the cutting of corporate and individual tax rates -- the way a businessman with an eye on efficiency would.

Yes, I voted for President Trump and it wasn't even close.

 Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Visiting Column #53 -- Pardon Biden (But Only the Elder One)

This is one heck of an election year, and I don't have to tell you why.  As I write this, it is the early morning of October 21, 2020, and with about two weeks left in the election period, the rest of us are pretty much hoping it will just be over quickly.

There has been all manner of relevant and irrelevant diversions and actual crises coming to play in this, the year of COVID-19, but one particularly is concerning.  That would be the revelation that Joe Biden, the Democrats' candidate and former vice president, apparently was getting a percentage kicked back to him from the strange dealings his son Hunter had with the Chinese and the Ukranians and at least another country or two.

Well, that's half the deal.

The other half is that the story, although quite a bit better-documented and with more evidence than the invented scandal that got President Trump impeached, has been buried by the major media, Fox News excepted.  Broken by the New York Post, the story has gotten the Post's Twitter account suspended by applying a rule that didn't actually apply, and the major networks have almost totally ignored the story.

So while we have the conspiracy among Big Tech and the mainstream media to prevent your knowing that Joe Biden sold out his own country while vice president, we still have the actual facts of the case, i.e., the sellout, and its impact on the election.  We have the FBI, its senior leadership still apparently anti-Trump, hanging onto evidence for months without doing anything with it.

With two weeks left, I have the perfect solution to President Trump's dilemma about how to get the story out there when the mainstream media refuse to cover it.

Issue a pardon to Joe Biden, right now, for the crimes of influence peddling and treason.

Now, tell me that's not the perfect solution!  Think about it -- with Joe Biden pardoned, no one can claim that an immediate high-octane FBI investigation into Hunter Biden's actions is "political" or "influencing the election", since the candidate has been pardoned.  But clearly any manure that is dug up as to what Hunter did dramatically implicates the now-immune Joe Biden and the stench would stay with him even if criminality no longer could.

Moreover, the media simply could not let this go; they'd have to report on it, which would provide some oxygen to the whole Hunter-kicking-back-cash-to-the-Big-Guy aspect.  They couldn't possibly leave that one alone.

In fact, since the last debate is tomorrow night, maybe Trump ought to bring the pardon with him, so that the whole nation can see it, and the poor slobs out there who only watch CNN or ABC News could ask themselves "Hunter who?" and maybe learn what's been hidden from them.

OK, I'm plagiarizing myself a bit; I wrote in 2017 that President Trump should have pardoned Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (but not the Clinton Foundation) so as to allow the FBI to move on to other affairs and still provide the "stink" that would never leave them.  I've kept that idea handy for just such a moment as this.

If you know anyone with the President's ear, I hope you will make sure this idea comes up to his desk, really soon now.  I'd love to see his face when he hears it.

Joe, you are pardoned.  But not forgiven.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Visiting Column #52 -- The Toidy-Toid Was a Boid

The previous 1,051 columns since 2014 were almost invariably for the reader to enjoy, or to contemplate, or just laugh, not infrequently at me.  Certainly I intended that they often be a departure point for some reasoning and thought on an issue of the day.

This one?  Not so much.  This one is really for me to preserve a memory before it goes away, a memory of something I did that I couldn't believe I could do, still can't, and I want to remember it while it is fresh and still being enjoyed.  So bear with me.

I took up golf as a freshman in high school in 1965.  Since I have played the game since, that means I have been playing for 55 years.  Of course, in high school and college I played pretty often, not so much in med school and thereafter (singing and then raising kids), but after my 40s I tried to play a couple times a month, and usually failed to do so.

There have been some highlights, of course.  I have had two eagles in my life, bizarrely within a week of each other in 1987, and both at the Fauquier Springs Country Club in Virginia, where I played for a few years.  The first was a hole in one, so that milestone is at least checked off the list.

I'm a very distinctly mid-80s golfer.  If I were to have to bet an over/under on my score, no matter the course, before playing, I would say "84."  There are four courses in the plantation where we live, and though I have broken 80 on three of them, I'm still a reliable 84, if you're betting.

My best lifetime rounds were a 76 (four over par) in Concord, Massachusetts in a college competition, and then a couple years later a 75 (also four over par) in Chapel Hill, NC on the last day of first-year med school finals in 1974.  But those were very much the exceptions.  I'm not that good a player.

In that 75 in Chapel Hill, I played the back nine in 36 strokes, the lowest nine holes I'd ever had, and the only time I've played nine holes in even par.  That's plot material.

- - -

So last week, I went out for a practice round with three other guys I had not met before; I just plugged myself into a threesome with a missing fourth.  And here is what happened.  Remember, this is for me to keep a memory alive that I hope I'll read years from now.

The first hole is a fairly straight par-4 with large bunkerage in front of the green to the left.  I drove up the right side into light, very playable rough, and had a pretty open 9-iron shot left to a two-level green, elevated in the back where the pin was.  I got the shot about 15 feet short of the pin for a pretty simple two-putt par.  I could also feel the greens were a bit slow and breaking less than you would read them.

Number Two is a fairly long par-3 with lots of water on the right all the way up.  It's usually a 4-hybrid for me, into a green that slopes downhill left to right and toward the front.  With little wind all day, and with the pin center right, I took the usual clubbing and got it just on the front of the green for another two-putt par.  How about that, even par after two and, better yet, I hit both greens in regulation, something I try hard to do.

The third hole is a relatively long par-5 that I've never reached in two and probably can't, even with a good supporting breeze, which there wasn't anyway.  But I did get a drive up the left center, comfortably left of a pair of traps in the right center of the fairway in driving distance.  I took time over the 3-wood second shot and got it up left center about 40 yards short of the green.  I remembered to commit to the gap wedge shot and got it within ten feet of the pin, which was right center of the green.  The birdie dropped, and son of a gun, I was actually one under par after three holes.

Number Four is a short par-4, but a hard hole.  There is a swamp about 200 yards out, so I can't hit driver off the tee.  Moreover, the green is a wide but shallow one, elevated on the right side.  So you have to get your drive up close to the swamp area, so you can hit a shorter (higher-loft) iron into the green to get it to hold.  This time the pin was on the much-easier left side.  I drove a 3-wood up the left center, but my full pitching wedge in was pulled a bit left and just off the putting surface.  I could still putt, though, and approached within a foot for a tap-in par.  Still minus-one.

The fifth hole is also a par-4 with a swamp in front of the green, but longer and you can hit driver off the tee.  There is a trap up the left center of the fairway to avoid, but if you fade your drive a bit, and it reaches the peak about where the trap is, you'll get a nice roll down the other side of the hill, which I did.  My drive rolled through the fairway and was in light rough with a side-hill lie down to the right.  The pin was on the left side of the green on a sharp slope forward.

Being in some rough, I added one club and hit 8-iron into the green to be sure to clear the swamp.  I thought I didn't swing hard enough, but having added a club, it was enough to clear the swamp and a trap just in front of the green, ending up a dozen feet uphill of the hold and past it.  I tapped the fairly straight downhill putt lightly and it went right up to the center of the hole and dropped in.  Two under par after five, and four greens hit out of five.  Yesss!

This is where I started telling the guys in the foursome that I do not play like this; I'm not the player they were watching.  We have a custom here like a lot of places, the "birdie flask."  Make a birdie, you take out a flask and share a wee nip o' whiskey.  I forgot it on #3, but this time took out the flask, and sure enough, it was empty!  The other players were already good-naturedly teasing me, and one said that he would take care of the booze -- whereupon he took out his flask only to discover it was also empty. 

We headed to #6, a mid-range par-3 with the pin on the center right.  I hit a 7-iron but poorly, and ended up short right of the green with a 50-foot pitch-and-run.  The 7-iron was bad, but the pitch was really bad, and ran another 25 feet past the pin and just past the putting surface.  I was resigned to trying to lag a putt close enough to save bogey, but the putt was pretty straight, and dropped in the hole for a very lucky par -- two bad shots and a fortunate putt.  Still two under after six, territory I had never, ever been.

Number 7 is hard to describe.  It's a par-5, a dogleg left with a stand of trees 250 yards out up the center.  Your "normal" approach is to keep your drive to the right (but not too far, because of course there is water there), and then hit a second shot up the right side (but not too far, because of course there are traps there).  Then you turn left for a third shot into a very narrow (and not all that deep) green.

Alternatively, you can hit a drive up the left side, where there is a secondary fairway to the left of the trees.  That route cuts the dogleg and is shorter -- except you can't hit driver, because there is a waste area 190 yards out.  So you either hit a 5-wood and go that way, or take the normal approach up the right.  I'd rather not go left, because your third shot is to the shallowest angle and likely runs over the green.

My drive tends to fade, so I took driver and faded it up the right side.  I decided on a 4-hybrid second shot to favor accuracy over distance, and left a full gap wedge third.  But I pulled the wedge a bit and went left of the green, between two traps but safe.  That left a short pitch; I left that one ten feet short but again, it was a straight putt and dropped for a fortunate par.  Seven holes, two under.  Who knew?

Number Eight is a mess waiting to happen.  It is a longish par-4 with the fairway narrowed by trees that poke into the right half of the fairway at 180 yards out.  I've found it best to stay short of those trees and hit a 5-wood or the 4-hybrid up the center so the trees don't block the approach.  I never hit driver there unless I have already messed up the round.  This time I hit the hybrid but pulled it a bit; nothing special and still in the fairway a long 7-iron out.  I didn't hit the 7 perfectly but not terribly; it came up a few feet off the green for an easy two-putt par.  I'd survived both #7 and #8 and was still minus-two.

The ninth hole is a short and easy par-4, and I was pretty sure I was going to have my first-ever under par nine holes.  I have never driven it, but I've come within 25 yards a few times.  This time I hit the drive left-center and on a small hill, not in the fairway but a good lie.  I just wanted to hit the gap wedge somewhere on the front of the green -- the pin was in the center toward the front and not the hardest placement.

I took a deep breath, really concentrated and hit the wedge to eight feet past the pin.  At that point, I figured every putt was going to drop, since they pretty much all had.  This one was a bit downhill, fairly straight, and the thirty-third stroke of the day rolled in for the third birdie of the round.

Like I said, I'd never had nine holes better than 36 before; only once been as good as even par for nine, and never played nine holes without a bogey.  I have no idea what came over me, and I know I played over my head, but at least there is a round to remember, a 33.  And now that I've recorded it for my own future enjoyment, I will indeed remember it.

You're probably wondering about the back nine.  Unfortunately, as we got to the back nine a different group was in front of us, and they were playing incredibly slowly.  I have back issues normally, and when you don't swing a club for ten minutes, repeatedly, your back can stiffen up and mine did, reverting me to my normal game.  I didn't have any expectations of "shooting my age" (I'd have needed a 36 on the back), and was lucky even to get through 18 holes with the very slow pace and the hopes for a hot shower.

But I have a neat afternoon to remember otherwise.  If you're reading this, cool, but the article is really for me.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton