We are all watching in rapt attention as the Congress of the United States of America tries to respond to the mandate of the 2016 presidential election as it regards tax reform.
Now, I am a huge fan of abolishing the IRS and starting over again. I am out over $10,000 in CPA fees I'll never get back, to defend an IRS audit that ultimately was dropped by the Government without my having to pay the IRS one stinking cent. I hold the IRS in the same esteem as I hold the left, or the Legionnaires Disease bug, or the Yankees.
But this is not exactly about the IRS.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have each gotten a bill together that they respectively will be voting on shortly. Ostensibly they are each about tax reform, particularly the reform of the personal income tax, the abolition of the inheritance tax, and the lowering of the corporate tax rate.
They are not the same, of course, the two bills that will likely be voted on shortly. The Senate bill is weaker, less reform-minded, sort of like 100 senators felt forced to write a bill and wrote it to do as little as possible. Given the inertia of the Senate these days, I have to think that was probably it. The House bill is at least "better." That it leaves any rate over 25% for anybody is absurd; there is no reason on earth anyone should have to pay over 25% of any dollar he or she makes to the Federal government.
Either way, it is the rhetoric, both in Congress and in the press, that is the topic today.
Naturally, we are seeing all manner of analyses of how these plans would play out. Examples abound. A married couple earning $75,447 with two and a half children, a garter snake and a ferret would pay $466.07 less under the Senate plan, and $501.11 less under the House plan. That sort of thing.
And, of course, we have to believe that the person creating the model that generated those numbers is actually interpreting the plan properly. You know, like we can trust their interpretation of the bill -- they're the media, after all. But that's not exactly the point.
I saw one such encounter over the weekend; someone was showing the impact as they interpreted it, of each plan vs. what such a person or family would pay relative to the current law. What did not get stressed is the simple math of taxation:
If you're paying $1,000 in taxes under the current law, you can't get a $1,001 reduction in your tax bill under tax reform. Period.
Once we accept that reality, we can start to understand what the leftist press -- who wants everyone to pay triple because, in their view, all earnings belong to the state anyway -- will use to batter whatever bill gets passed. The press and the Schumer/Pelosi types will kick and moan that someone making $150,000 will get a bigger tax cut than someone making $50,000.
Well, duh, Chuckles. If the new law cuts the $150,000-earner's tax bill by $4,000, then you have to understand that he's going to do better than the other guy, if the other guy wasn't paying as much as $4,000 in the first place. Tax cuts only cut taxes to the extent that you were paying them in the first place. Let's remember that nearly half the country doesn't pay any income taxes at all -- you can't lower a count that was zero in the first place.
So the income tax, which is one of several methods to fund the operation of the United States government, is not a redistributionist tax; it is a decision now in the Constitution that one way in which the government will raise revenues is to tax people in proportion to their income, a distinction from the logical alternative, taxing according to their possessions and assets. In other words, we don't tax the wealthy based on wealth, we tax all wage-earners and investors based on their earnings.
I'll digress for a moment because apparently Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and some other billionaires wrote a letter to Congress begging them not to cut their own taxes because they "make enough." Of course they do. They've already made their billions. Since we tax income and not wealth, taxing huge incomes higher keeps other people from getting as rich as Gates and Buffett! It's called "preventing competition." Duh.
I do not like the fact that there are multiple rates. I would prefer that we exempt the first $25,000 in income (but have a mandatory minimum $100 "fee" for those under $25,000 so they have at least some contribution to the nation) and flat-rate the rest at maybe 17% (potentially a separate rate for investment income, separate column), no exemptions, no deductions, no favoring of having children or not having children, no favoring of mortgages over renting, no use of the tax law for any purpose to encourage or discourage activity -- that's social engineering.
But I detest most of all -- and it is based on the opinion in the previous paragraph -- the partisan notion that tax cuts can possibly help people any more than what they are already paying. If you have a tax system that is structured so that the preponderance of the tax payment is by people who actually earn a lot of income, tax reform is going to align that way. Duh again.
There are a lot of moving parts to this. If indeed "90% of people can file on the back of a postcard", I'll be impressed enough to lean toward supporting it, as long as the reform gets rates down substantially, and the business rate drops to 20%. That will result in huge economic gains, which should be the goal anyway.
I'll be monitoring this a lot, and writing about what I see often, as the tax reform process wends its way through the Swamp.
Congress, we're watching you.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob
at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving
new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at
bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
How to Deal with Campaign Accusations
OK, well, that's not what this is about. I mean it is, sort of, except it's not an instruction manuals for candidates who have had unsavory accusations leveled at them a month before an election.
We are, of course, talking about the allegations against Judge Roy Moore, who is running for the Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became Attorney General. The allegations consist of suggestions that he made advances toward a girl then 14, and that he asked out a couple girls who were then at least as young as 18, and maybe one was 17, when he was about 32. Today we have yet another one, and it's getting pretty hard to want to support the guy.
It is easy as heck to lump everything together as one case. But it is really not. The issues regarding the girls who were 18 (one of them thinks she might have been 17; it was 40 years ago and hard to be accurate) are very different -- he is supposed to have asked them out, and there is no apparent physical action at all, just that he asked them out and they each declined. Had he been 24 it would not even have been an issue at all, because nothing happened.
I was never what we would call a "player." Forty years ago, before starting to go out with the young lady who is now my wife, I dated (in my 20s), of course. As I was an actor and opera singer at the time, I was not unpopular among the ladies, if only because I was (and am) straight. And I very much recall being at least 26, 27 or so and dating at one point a young lady of 19 and another of 20. The age difference was certainly not something I thought to be odd, nor was it ever said to me by them or anyone else that there was something unsavory.
So for a 32-year-old Roy Moore to have asked out a couple girls who were about 18 simply doesn't strike me as any issue, especially since they declined and nothing ever happened. On their own, I don't see those as being even noteworthy. In fact, I'd like to ask that question of ultraliberal Rob Reiner, who long ago played a teacher with an attraction to a school student on an episode the TV show "Headmaster" that was portrayed as somehow OK, as long as he waited until she graduated to go out with him.
The point there is that, had those been the only accusations, there would have been nothing at all there and we would not have been talking. It is OK, I guess, for a 32-year-old to ask out an 18-year-old, and OK for them to say "no, thanks." I wouldn't necessarily want my (fictional) daughter at 18 to go out with a 32-year-old either, but it would not be scandalous.
And that's kind of why the whole Moore thing doesn't seem quite what it is intended, or at least it wasn't until the more serious allegation yesterday came up. You see, the one thing raised before today, that would be a concern, is the issue with the 14-year-old, who now, 40 years later, is saying that she was fondled by Moore back then, and he aggressively denies it, threatening now to sue the Washington Post, that paragon of journalism, for reporting the story.
If it actually happened -- and let's make sure that we say this here -- Moore should not be running for the Senate. Given yesterday's accusation, he probably shouldn't anyway, but let's take a step two days back, with what we were presented with at that point.
First, if it did happen, he also should not have been a judge, let alone Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the 40 years since, it would seem logical that the accuser herself might have raised the issue at least once, perhaps when he was pursuing the bench position, or perhaps when he was a primary candidate for the Senate seat he is currently going after. It is a good year for the receptivity of the public to such accusations, but it has been reasonable to do so since, well, Bill Clinton was running for president.
Why might someone wait until a month before a Senate election to bring this out? Gee, I don't know. And why also were a couple stories about him asking out two 18-year-olds when he was 32 not relevant before? Well, I can answer that. It's because they weren't relevant then and aren't now either -- they were simply lumped in by the reporter to provide artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise unsubstantiated accusation, in the hopes of trying to present a pattern that would make the 14-year-old's story 40 years later seem more credible.
While with yesterday's additional accusation, this all should soon be moot, why am I willing to consider that the story about the 14-year-old might not be what it appears? Well, I can think of three or four reasons off the top of my head.
(1) It is the Post, which comes replete with a bias against any conservative, and whose motives can never be trusted. These are the same people who just printed and tweeted out one single frame of a video showing President Trump with a set of foreign leaders at the ASEAN conference this week, apparently grimacing during an odd group handshake, although the entire rest of the video shows him smilingly socializing during that episode.
(2) The UVa incident, where an entire fraternity chapter was made out to look like rapists when a student named Jackie Coakley made up a gang-rape story, and Rolling Stone magazine, with journalistic integrity rivaling the Post, ran with it. Ever since, we have unfortunately had to treat accusations of rape with a grain of salt, since we now know that such incidents may be fictional.
(3) The lumping in of the asking-an-18-year-old-on-a-date incident, which otherwise would have been of no interest whatever. If the 14-year-old's story could stand on its own and be substantiated, the "reporter" wouldn't have needed to put in those other incidents that aren't otherwise concerning.
(4) The timing. This happened 40 years ago, assuming it happened, but only a month before an election are we first hearing of it. Roy Moore has been a public figure and stood for elections plenty of time. Will the accuser please point out why only now, at this specific point in an election, is she stepping forward?
If this did indeed happen, as I noted, it is contemptible and Moore should step away from the race. But suppose that, like Jackie Coakley, the accuser made this up, or at least exaggerated the incident beyond what actually occurred into something different? How, then, does one defend oneself against such accusations leveled a month from an election?
It's not like we can pass a law that you can't accuse a candidate of something within 90 days of an election. It's not like we can require proof or evidence, or anything else, before smearing a candidate. This is, after all, a free country, and people are free to speak whenever they want. But like the Phi Kappa Psis at UVa, you are entitled to ample opportunity to defend yourself against that free speech when it is turned on you.
And it is the public's obligation, in this case the voters of the State of Alabama, to consider the source, consider the four points I make above, and decide if they want it to affect their votes. It's just that they shouldn't have to. This accusation should have been made a long time ago, when it might have been taken as something other than a typical Democrat smear campaign.
I don't know what Roy Moore is going to do; heck, I don't even know what actually happened. Yesterday's additional allegations tell me that he needs an exit strategy pretty quickly. But if he doesn't, and this influences the election, then you can bet that politicians will pull that out of their playbooks as often as possible, and we will find a lot more accusations of sexual impropriety raised a few weeks before elections.
Moore himself should step away quickly. But this tactic on the part of his opponents is frightening to the rest of us. Aren't we all better than that?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
We are, of course, talking about the allegations against Judge Roy Moore, who is running for the Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became Attorney General. The allegations consist of suggestions that he made advances toward a girl then 14, and that he asked out a couple girls who were then at least as young as 18, and maybe one was 17, when he was about 32. Today we have yet another one, and it's getting pretty hard to want to support the guy.
It is easy as heck to lump everything together as one case. But it is really not. The issues regarding the girls who were 18 (one of them thinks she might have been 17; it was 40 years ago and hard to be accurate) are very different -- he is supposed to have asked them out, and there is no apparent physical action at all, just that he asked them out and they each declined. Had he been 24 it would not even have been an issue at all, because nothing happened.
I was never what we would call a "player." Forty years ago, before starting to go out with the young lady who is now my wife, I dated (in my 20s), of course. As I was an actor and opera singer at the time, I was not unpopular among the ladies, if only because I was (and am) straight. And I very much recall being at least 26, 27 or so and dating at one point a young lady of 19 and another of 20. The age difference was certainly not something I thought to be odd, nor was it ever said to me by them or anyone else that there was something unsavory.
So for a 32-year-old Roy Moore to have asked out a couple girls who were about 18 simply doesn't strike me as any issue, especially since they declined and nothing ever happened. On their own, I don't see those as being even noteworthy. In fact, I'd like to ask that question of ultraliberal Rob Reiner, who long ago played a teacher with an attraction to a school student on an episode the TV show "Headmaster" that was portrayed as somehow OK, as long as he waited until she graduated to go out with him.
The point there is that, had those been the only accusations, there would have been nothing at all there and we would not have been talking. It is OK, I guess, for a 32-year-old to ask out an 18-year-old, and OK for them to say "no, thanks." I wouldn't necessarily want my (fictional) daughter at 18 to go out with a 32-year-old either, but it would not be scandalous.
And that's kind of why the whole Moore thing doesn't seem quite what it is intended, or at least it wasn't until the more serious allegation yesterday came up. You see, the one thing raised before today, that would be a concern, is the issue with the 14-year-old, who now, 40 years later, is saying that she was fondled by Moore back then, and he aggressively denies it, threatening now to sue the Washington Post, that paragon of journalism, for reporting the story.
If it actually happened -- and let's make sure that we say this here -- Moore should not be running for the Senate. Given yesterday's accusation, he probably shouldn't anyway, but let's take a step two days back, with what we were presented with at that point.
First, if it did happen, he also should not have been a judge, let alone Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the 40 years since, it would seem logical that the accuser herself might have raised the issue at least once, perhaps when he was pursuing the bench position, or perhaps when he was a primary candidate for the Senate seat he is currently going after. It is a good year for the receptivity of the public to such accusations, but it has been reasonable to do so since, well, Bill Clinton was running for president.
Why might someone wait until a month before a Senate election to bring this out? Gee, I don't know. And why also were a couple stories about him asking out two 18-year-olds when he was 32 not relevant before? Well, I can answer that. It's because they weren't relevant then and aren't now either -- they were simply lumped in by the reporter to provide artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise unsubstantiated accusation, in the hopes of trying to present a pattern that would make the 14-year-old's story 40 years later seem more credible.
While with yesterday's additional accusation, this all should soon be moot, why am I willing to consider that the story about the 14-year-old might not be what it appears? Well, I can think of three or four reasons off the top of my head.
(1) It is the Post, which comes replete with a bias against any conservative, and whose motives can never be trusted. These are the same people who just printed and tweeted out one single frame of a video showing President Trump with a set of foreign leaders at the ASEAN conference this week, apparently grimacing during an odd group handshake, although the entire rest of the video shows him smilingly socializing during that episode.
(2) The UVa incident, where an entire fraternity chapter was made out to look like rapists when a student named Jackie Coakley made up a gang-rape story, and Rolling Stone magazine, with journalistic integrity rivaling the Post, ran with it. Ever since, we have unfortunately had to treat accusations of rape with a grain of salt, since we now know that such incidents may be fictional.
(3) The lumping in of the asking-an-18-year-old-on-a-date incident, which otherwise would have been of no interest whatever. If the 14-year-old's story could stand on its own and be substantiated, the "reporter" wouldn't have needed to put in those other incidents that aren't otherwise concerning.
(4) The timing. This happened 40 years ago, assuming it happened, but only a month before an election are we first hearing of it. Roy Moore has been a public figure and stood for elections plenty of time. Will the accuser please point out why only now, at this specific point in an election, is she stepping forward?
If this did indeed happen, as I noted, it is contemptible and Moore should step away from the race. But suppose that, like Jackie Coakley, the accuser made this up, or at least exaggerated the incident beyond what actually occurred into something different? How, then, does one defend oneself against such accusations leveled a month from an election?
It's not like we can pass a law that you can't accuse a candidate of something within 90 days of an election. It's not like we can require proof or evidence, or anything else, before smearing a candidate. This is, after all, a free country, and people are free to speak whenever they want. But like the Phi Kappa Psis at UVa, you are entitled to ample opportunity to defend yourself against that free speech when it is turned on you.
And it is the public's obligation, in this case the voters of the State of Alabama, to consider the source, consider the four points I make above, and decide if they want it to affect their votes. It's just that they shouldn't have to. This accusation should have been made a long time ago, when it might have been taken as something other than a typical Democrat smear campaign.
I don't know what Roy Moore is going to do; heck, I don't even know what actually happened. Yesterday's additional allegations tell me that he needs an exit strategy pretty quickly. But if he doesn't, and this influences the election, then you can bet that politicians will pull that out of their playbooks as often as possible, and we will find a lot more accusations of sexual impropriety raised a few weeks before elections.
Moore himself should step away quickly. But this tactic on the part of his opponents is frightening to the rest of us. Aren't we all better than that?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, November 13, 2017
E Unum, Pluribus
OK, I don't speak Latin, and I am really sure that title doesn't actually translate the way I meant it. Maybe it should be "e unibus, plurum", but if I did that, you would have already clicked on something else and never gotten the point.
E pluribus, unum, of course, is one of the mottoes of the USA and, as we all know, means "out of many, one." It is meant to refer not to people particularly, but to the notion of a Federalist nation of different states, each self-governed but collectively defended and with a designated few collective functions -- the military, the post, currency, interstate commerce and a small few others -- reserved by the Constitution to a Federal government.
The left, of course, does not see it that way; they do not think the states have any purpose at all, that the Federal government has all the rights, all the power, and must be manipulated to be all-powerful so that they can control the citizenry -- and merge it into their global governmental notion.
Now, whatever we may think the intent of the Latin phrase was, there is certainly general agreement that we are a nation of people from all over, descendants of those who built the nation, and those who came here for a better life and to take advantage of the freedom and promise of America -- to nurture those who will love that freedom and that nation. The phrase does apply to people, too, to the many people who come here to form a special nation. Out of many, one.
But that one nation is not precisely the way the left sees it.
No, the left is committed to creating the divisions among us by its fanatic desire to identify group victims of perceived or invented inequities. We are no longer two genders, or a small number of races, or a definable age. We can "self-identify" and then declare ourselves to be members of some oppressed group God did not put us in, and try to gain the benefit of laws made to level the playing field. We are rife with "underrepresented minorities" and are forced to implement corrective actions to ensure that our populations of hired workers or admitted college students precisely map to proportions that may or, more likely, may not make any sense.
The left is thrilled with that. The more subjugated groups it can invent, the more it can scream for a more powerful Federal government to prevent them from being further subjugated, because clearly the states cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of transphobic tri-racial six-toed Martian-Americans not to be exploited and trampled upon. More groups, more separation, more division.
Out of one, many. That is the motto that serves their ends. They might as well go ahead and get some Latin-speaker to translate it right, because whether they want to advertise it or not, they want more division, more groups, more perceived oppression by ... well, it's hard to imagine who is left to be the actual oppressor, once we are all divided up.
I'm embarrassed to be left-handed this morning.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
E pluribus, unum, of course, is one of the mottoes of the USA and, as we all know, means "out of many, one." It is meant to refer not to people particularly, but to the notion of a Federalist nation of different states, each self-governed but collectively defended and with a designated few collective functions -- the military, the post, currency, interstate commerce and a small few others -- reserved by the Constitution to a Federal government.
The left, of course, does not see it that way; they do not think the states have any purpose at all, that the Federal government has all the rights, all the power, and must be manipulated to be all-powerful so that they can control the citizenry -- and merge it into their global governmental notion.
Now, whatever we may think the intent of the Latin phrase was, there is certainly general agreement that we are a nation of people from all over, descendants of those who built the nation, and those who came here for a better life and to take advantage of the freedom and promise of America -- to nurture those who will love that freedom and that nation. The phrase does apply to people, too, to the many people who come here to form a special nation. Out of many, one.
But that one nation is not precisely the way the left sees it.
No, the left is committed to creating the divisions among us by its fanatic desire to identify group victims of perceived or invented inequities. We are no longer two genders, or a small number of races, or a definable age. We can "self-identify" and then declare ourselves to be members of some oppressed group God did not put us in, and try to gain the benefit of laws made to level the playing field. We are rife with "underrepresented minorities" and are forced to implement corrective actions to ensure that our populations of hired workers or admitted college students precisely map to proportions that may or, more likely, may not make any sense.
The left is thrilled with that. The more subjugated groups it can invent, the more it can scream for a more powerful Federal government to prevent them from being further subjugated, because clearly the states cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of transphobic tri-racial six-toed Martian-Americans not to be exploited and trampled upon. More groups, more separation, more division.
Out of one, many. That is the motto that serves their ends. They might as well go ahead and get some Latin-speaker to translate it right, because whether they want to advertise it or not, they want more division, more groups, more perceived oppression by ... well, it's hard to imagine who is left to be the actual oppressor, once we are all divided up.
I'm embarrassed to be left-handed this morning.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, November 10, 2017
Thank You for Your Service
On this Veterans' Day weekend, with our servicemen and women deployed around the world defending our nation against those who would subvert and destroy it from outside, our message is strong to our people in uniform.
We stand up for you.
We stand up for those who keep you fed and clothed, armed and supplied.
We stand up for those who train you.
We stand up for those who support you and who love you, who protect your homes and families while you protect us.
We stand up for those who have walked in your boots where our forces are now deployed, and who walked in those same boots in previous wars, "police actions" and undeclared conflicts to defend the USA, those who never returned, who came back injured physically and psychologically, who came back unscarred but having served bravely.
And we stand for the flag under which they have served continually since the Revolutionary War. We stand proudly and we stand ready to support and defend it against our enemies both outside and within.
God bless America.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
We stand up for you.
We stand up for those who keep you fed and clothed, armed and supplied.
We stand up for those who train you.
We stand up for those who support you and who love you, who protect your homes and families while you protect us.
We stand up for those who have walked in your boots where our forces are now deployed, and who walked in those same boots in previous wars, "police actions" and undeclared conflicts to defend the USA, those who never returned, who came back injured physically and psychologically, who came back unscarred but having served bravely.
And we stand for the flag under which they have served continually since the Revolutionary War. We stand proudly and we stand ready to support and defend it against our enemies both outside and within.
God bless America.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, November 9, 2017
The Source of Presidential Dislike
Those among us who were passionate opponents of Barack Obama and his presidency seem to have little in common with those folks who are passionate opponents of Donald Trump and his presidency. It just, you know, "feels" different, maybe because conservatives were not out there declaring that they wanted to "blow up the White House" like Madonna, or taking a gun and shooting up a Republican congressional softball practice (like the leftist from Illinois).
Or maybe it is the lack of parallels in the root of the dislike.
I couldn't stand Barack Obama, and still fear him, but despite the usual knee-jerk accusations of the left about racism and all that (though a white Barack Obama wouldn't have sniffed the nomination, let alone beaten Hillary in 2008), it is not "who" he is that I couldn't stand. It is and has always been what he stood for.
Barack Obama is a far-left socialist who would readily have turned the USA into a communist dictatorship if he thought he could get away with it. He detested the military, believed that a dominant Federal government was necessary to shore up his power, and pushed socialist measures as far as he thought he could get away with -- which he could, at least while he had a lap-dog Congress unwilling to cross the "first [half] black president."
He "used lies" more than he was an actual liar -- Hillary, for example, was a concrete, dyed-in-the-wool liar, but Obama simply used lies ("You can keep your doctor", "It was the video") trying to advance his leftist agenda. I hope that makes sense; it's a slight difference. I think Obama felt justified in lying for what he still thinks is a greater cause.
And I suppose that people generally think of Obama as an OK person, family guy, that sort of thing. Not so much corrupt, but ideologically so far out and so rigid that only the built-in inertia of Congress kept him from doing even more damage (like closing Guantanamo).
The hatred of Donald Trump, well, that's really not as ideological as the left would like to believe. After all, he is hardly an ideologically pure conservative; hardly has positions that are any more conservative than previous Republican presidents. He has the socially more-liberal, fiscally conservative positions that people often contemplate forming a third party around. In fact, his positions on taxes and spending, the position of the USA in the free world, immigration, well, those are mainstream American positions outside of Los Angeles and New York.
But the fascinating thing is that the dislike for President Trump, the things that cause Madonna to threaten to blow up the White House, and for Hollywood to go far off the rails in their interminable award shows, well, those don't really have to do with politics. Those are personal.
Of course, leading it all is the fact that he successfully saved America from having its first utero-American president being a pathological liar, who runs a RICO disguised as a charitable foundation. Oh, that was terrible that he didn't let Hillary win, the big bully. But really, look at the critiques.
They're not really about policy at all. The left calls him a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, an Islamophobe. Their hatred of Donald Trump is because of who they say he is, not what he believes he needs to do as president. It's as if they can't really get into a policy debate because he has the upper hand -- his policies are indeed mainstream -- so they go after flaws in the man, whether invented or actual.
On top of that, one characteristic that he does have makes it all news fodder, the fact that he is a counter-puncher. So when he is criticized for all that non-policy stuff, he fights back, which amps up the hatred and the non-policy news. More dislike, more news.
In the background, of course, the nation is running and the market is soaring; 401(k) accounts are at record highs. He has attracted huge numbers of jobs back to the USA, cajoling firms to manufacture here and not elsewhere. He is proving to be enormously successful overseas (as the current Asian trip is proving again) because his rather basic approach to the superiority of the American way of life is actually appreciated by our allies and respected by our adversaries, both of which had a lot of trouble dealing with the feckless Obama.
I'm not sure I've gotten the point across even now. It had struck me the past few weeks that although both Obama and Trump had big parts of the USA that actively disliked them, it did not seem like the same type of venom. Not more or less, just different. Opponents weren't howling at the moon on the anniversary of Obama's election as they did last night a year after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
I really think that we who detested Obama for his policies have the higher ground.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Or maybe it is the lack of parallels in the root of the dislike.
I couldn't stand Barack Obama, and still fear him, but despite the usual knee-jerk accusations of the left about racism and all that (though a white Barack Obama wouldn't have sniffed the nomination, let alone beaten Hillary in 2008), it is not "who" he is that I couldn't stand. It is and has always been what he stood for.
Barack Obama is a far-left socialist who would readily have turned the USA into a communist dictatorship if he thought he could get away with it. He detested the military, believed that a dominant Federal government was necessary to shore up his power, and pushed socialist measures as far as he thought he could get away with -- which he could, at least while he had a lap-dog Congress unwilling to cross the "first [half] black president."
He "used lies" more than he was an actual liar -- Hillary, for example, was a concrete, dyed-in-the-wool liar, but Obama simply used lies ("You can keep your doctor", "It was the video") trying to advance his leftist agenda. I hope that makes sense; it's a slight difference. I think Obama felt justified in lying for what he still thinks is a greater cause.
And I suppose that people generally think of Obama as an OK person, family guy, that sort of thing. Not so much corrupt, but ideologically so far out and so rigid that only the built-in inertia of Congress kept him from doing even more damage (like closing Guantanamo).
The hatred of Donald Trump, well, that's really not as ideological as the left would like to believe. After all, he is hardly an ideologically pure conservative; hardly has positions that are any more conservative than previous Republican presidents. He has the socially more-liberal, fiscally conservative positions that people often contemplate forming a third party around. In fact, his positions on taxes and spending, the position of the USA in the free world, immigration, well, those are mainstream American positions outside of Los Angeles and New York.
But the fascinating thing is that the dislike for President Trump, the things that cause Madonna to threaten to blow up the White House, and for Hollywood to go far off the rails in their interminable award shows, well, those don't really have to do with politics. Those are personal.
Of course, leading it all is the fact that he successfully saved America from having its first utero-American president being a pathological liar, who runs a RICO disguised as a charitable foundation. Oh, that was terrible that he didn't let Hillary win, the big bully. But really, look at the critiques.
They're not really about policy at all. The left calls him a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, an Islamophobe. Their hatred of Donald Trump is because of who they say he is, not what he believes he needs to do as president. It's as if they can't really get into a policy debate because he has the upper hand -- his policies are indeed mainstream -- so they go after flaws in the man, whether invented or actual.
On top of that, one characteristic that he does have makes it all news fodder, the fact that he is a counter-puncher. So when he is criticized for all that non-policy stuff, he fights back, which amps up the hatred and the non-policy news. More dislike, more news.
In the background, of course, the nation is running and the market is soaring; 401(k) accounts are at record highs. He has attracted huge numbers of jobs back to the USA, cajoling firms to manufacture here and not elsewhere. He is proving to be enormously successful overseas (as the current Asian trip is proving again) because his rather basic approach to the superiority of the American way of life is actually appreciated by our allies and respected by our adversaries, both of which had a lot of trouble dealing with the feckless Obama.
I'm not sure I've gotten the point across even now. It had struck me the past few weeks that although both Obama and Trump had big parts of the USA that actively disliked them, it did not seem like the same type of venom. Not more or less, just different. Opponents weren't howling at the moon on the anniversary of Obama's election as they did last night a year after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
I really think that we who detested Obama for his policies have the higher ground.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Rest in Peace, Doc
Back in September of 1998, the "year of the home run", a rookie pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays named Roy Halladay was making his second appearance in the majors, starting against the Detroit Tigers. I have no idea why I happened to have been watching that particular game, not being a fan of either team, but it was on, it was baseball, and I watched it.
That day Halladay, who had won his first-ever appearance and first start by going five innings against Tampa Bay, set down the first twelve batters before Tiny Clark of the Tigers reached on an error. Clark would be stranded at first, and Halladay would take a no-hitter into the ninth, getting two outs before giving up a pinch-hit home run and ending up with a no-walk one-hitter.
The one-hitter was pretty shocking for a pitcher in only his second appearance in the majors, even against a poor Tigers team, and I recall it pretty well. Who is this guy, I wondered.
Well, "who this guy was" turned out to be a pitcher who would go on to a 203-105 career record and a lifetime 3.38 ERA. His 131 career ERA+ (a measure of ERA adjusted for park effects, that expresses a pitcher's performance against league average) means that for well over a decade he was over 30% better than a league-average pitcher. In nine of his 15 full seasons, he was over 40% above league average.
An intense competitor known for pitching complete games in an era when six innings is thought to be a good start, Halladay would go on to throw a regular-season perfect game against Miami and, in 2010, became only the second pitcher to throw a no-hitter in the postseason, for the Philadelphia Phillies against Cincinnati.
He won the Cy Young Award twice, once in each league, and was top-3 for the award five times. In a year he will be eligible for the Hall of Fame, and is a very reasonable candidate by most standards; an excellent candidate by mine.
On Tuesday, Roy "Doc" Halladay died when the small plane he was piloting crashed in Florida. Halladay was 40 years old. He had always wanted to fly, and so we can assume he was one who died doing what he loved.
We've no idea if Halladay, whose last season was an abbreviated 2013, would have returned to baseball in any capacity or would have simply flown off into retirement. Either way, his loss is a tragic and sad event for the world of baseball and those who follow it.
Roy Halladay never pitched for a team I rooted for personally, spending all his career with the Blue Jays and Phillies. But I always admired "Doc" and mourn his loss today in this column. "R.I.P." just sounds many decades too soon.
In coelo quies est.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
That day Halladay, who had won his first-ever appearance and first start by going five innings against Tampa Bay, set down the first twelve batters before Tiny Clark of the Tigers reached on an error. Clark would be stranded at first, and Halladay would take a no-hitter into the ninth, getting two outs before giving up a pinch-hit home run and ending up with a no-walk one-hitter.
The one-hitter was pretty shocking for a pitcher in only his second appearance in the majors, even against a poor Tigers team, and I recall it pretty well. Who is this guy, I wondered.
Well, "who this guy was" turned out to be a pitcher who would go on to a 203-105 career record and a lifetime 3.38 ERA. His 131 career ERA+ (a measure of ERA adjusted for park effects, that expresses a pitcher's performance against league average) means that for well over a decade he was over 30% better than a league-average pitcher. In nine of his 15 full seasons, he was over 40% above league average.
An intense competitor known for pitching complete games in an era when six innings is thought to be a good start, Halladay would go on to throw a regular-season perfect game against Miami and, in 2010, became only the second pitcher to throw a no-hitter in the postseason, for the Philadelphia Phillies against Cincinnati.
He won the Cy Young Award twice, once in each league, and was top-3 for the award five times. In a year he will be eligible for the Hall of Fame, and is a very reasonable candidate by most standards; an excellent candidate by mine.
On Tuesday, Roy "Doc" Halladay died when the small plane he was piloting crashed in Florida. Halladay was 40 years old. He had always wanted to fly, and so we can assume he was one who died doing what he loved.
We've no idea if Halladay, whose last season was an abbreviated 2013, would have returned to baseball in any capacity or would have simply flown off into retirement. Either way, his loss is a tragic and sad event for the world of baseball and those who follow it.
Roy Halladay never pitched for a team I rooted for personally, spending all his career with the Blue Jays and Phillies. But I always admired "Doc" and mourn his loss today in this column. "R.I.P." just sounds many decades too soon.
In coelo quies est.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Is There a Hollywood Hotline?
The name of Harvey Weinstein, probably mostly unknown outside Hollywood six months ago, is now on the lips of many in the news these days. As you are all aware, he is some kind of producer or general mogul out there, or at least was, until he was accused by a series of women of having operated a long-time casting couch approach to his business.
This was not really news out there; lately we've seen clips of the introducing presenter at one of the interminable, self-congratulatory award shows. He was giving an award to the winner of one of the Lead Actress trophies and said that now she would no longer have to pretend to find Harvey Weinstein attractive. None of us knew who he was, to know what the fellow meant, but the implication was there.
But here's the thing. Allegedly he committed repeated assaults and rapes on women who wanted to succeed in Hollywood. Now, "Hollywood" is not a business; it is a place and an industry. There are studios that movies and TV shows are made in, and production companies that make them, and they are all independent of each other.
Because they are independent, there is no recourse for the young girl (or, I presume is the case at times, guy) who wants to get started in the business, comes out to Hollywood, screen tests or whatever they do, and is promised a part in exchange for ... well, you know.
It is a Hobson's choice, one with no good outcome. Sleep with the mogul and get a part and hope you are so good that you'll get lots of work without having to go through the prostitution dance again. Or decline to sleep with the mogul, don't get the part and get blacklisted by everything connected with that mogul's reach and possibly his (or her) cronies.
That, of course, is not exclusive to Hollywood. Except, of course, that in corporate America, where there are such things as sexual harassment laws that actually get enforced, there are company hotlines and HR departments where there is recourse. If you feel you have been harassed, you can go to an ombudsman or HR type and file a complaint, and be relatively insulated from reprisal.
In Hollywood, you are on your own. There is no ombudsman, no company hotline, only the law. It is still illegal to pull the casting-couch stunt, but the only place you can go to is the law, and if you go to the law to try to get that sort of thing stopped, the only thing you can be assured of is that you will never work in entertainment again. You will be immediately a troublemaker and persona non grata.
Is it any wonder why only after numerous complaints against Weinstein were brought forth, was there a pile of additional accusations from years back? Those women knew that had they said anything back then, they would never work again, and only because it was Weinstein, and finally public knowledge, could they come forward and say something knowing it would not hurt their careers. In fact, perversely, the fact that they come forward ten years later, only as part of the case of dozens of others against a known abuser, might help their career now, in that they have proven themselves as ones who would keep things quiet.
I'm 66 and have no plans to return to acting. The only connection I have to Hollywood is as executive producer of a movie a dozen years ago that showed in two or three theaters, and on which I lost enough money to get a healthy tax deduction. Plus, I'm not exactly the type who would expect to get harassed, you know. So you can tell this is an issue that is out of sympathy and not an iota of self-interest.
But there has to be something. There finally has to be a way that an young actress or actor who is asked to trade favors for a part, particularly which would be a start to a career, can decline without risking losing the part to someone with less moral backbone. And there needs to be a way that the performer can be insulated from even a silent blackballing in the industry for saying "no."
But of course, the "industry" is not an organization. It is separate entities with their own moguls. There are multiple Harvey Weinsteins out there, and we surely have not heard the end of all this -- in fact, we are already hearing a few complaints about others in the business.
While I don't have the answer, it is the studios and production companies themselves that have to solve the problem, and they need some kind of hotline for those who are abused -- and some type of protection for the honest producer, from the inevitable starlet who tries to get noticed by lodging baseless, University of Virginia-type allegations.
Look, Hollywood is an industry that has turned itself into a joke by its overwhelmingly leftist activity and quiet boycott of conservative-leaning actors. I really couldn't care less what goes on out there. But my moral sensibility is offended when people who have a career dream come face to face with the choice of having a career but compromising their integrity, or not having that career. It is simply not right.
Who in Hollywood will take it in that context and lead the remedy?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
This was not really news out there; lately we've seen clips of the introducing presenter at one of the interminable, self-congratulatory award shows. He was giving an award to the winner of one of the Lead Actress trophies and said that now she would no longer have to pretend to find Harvey Weinstein attractive. None of us knew who he was, to know what the fellow meant, but the implication was there.
But here's the thing. Allegedly he committed repeated assaults and rapes on women who wanted to succeed in Hollywood. Now, "Hollywood" is not a business; it is a place and an industry. There are studios that movies and TV shows are made in, and production companies that make them, and they are all independent of each other.
Because they are independent, there is no recourse for the young girl (or, I presume is the case at times, guy) who wants to get started in the business, comes out to Hollywood, screen tests or whatever they do, and is promised a part in exchange for ... well, you know.
It is a Hobson's choice, one with no good outcome. Sleep with the mogul and get a part and hope you are so good that you'll get lots of work without having to go through the prostitution dance again. Or decline to sleep with the mogul, don't get the part and get blacklisted by everything connected with that mogul's reach and possibly his (or her) cronies.
That, of course, is not exclusive to Hollywood. Except, of course, that in corporate America, where there are such things as sexual harassment laws that actually get enforced, there are company hotlines and HR departments where there is recourse. If you feel you have been harassed, you can go to an ombudsman or HR type and file a complaint, and be relatively insulated from reprisal.
In Hollywood, you are on your own. There is no ombudsman, no company hotline, only the law. It is still illegal to pull the casting-couch stunt, but the only place you can go to is the law, and if you go to the law to try to get that sort of thing stopped, the only thing you can be assured of is that you will never work in entertainment again. You will be immediately a troublemaker and persona non grata.
Is it any wonder why only after numerous complaints against Weinstein were brought forth, was there a pile of additional accusations from years back? Those women knew that had they said anything back then, they would never work again, and only because it was Weinstein, and finally public knowledge, could they come forward and say something knowing it would not hurt their careers. In fact, perversely, the fact that they come forward ten years later, only as part of the case of dozens of others against a known abuser, might help their career now, in that they have proven themselves as ones who would keep things quiet.
I'm 66 and have no plans to return to acting. The only connection I have to Hollywood is as executive producer of a movie a dozen years ago that showed in two or three theaters, and on which I lost enough money to get a healthy tax deduction. Plus, I'm not exactly the type who would expect to get harassed, you know. So you can tell this is an issue that is out of sympathy and not an iota of self-interest.
But there has to be something. There finally has to be a way that an young actress or actor who is asked to trade favors for a part, particularly which would be a start to a career, can decline without risking losing the part to someone with less moral backbone. And there needs to be a way that the performer can be insulated from even a silent blackballing in the industry for saying "no."
But of course, the "industry" is not an organization. It is separate entities with their own moguls. There are multiple Harvey Weinsteins out there, and we surely have not heard the end of all this -- in fact, we are already hearing a few complaints about others in the business.
While I don't have the answer, it is the studios and production companies themselves that have to solve the problem, and they need some kind of hotline for those who are abused -- and some type of protection for the honest producer, from the inevitable starlet who tries to get noticed by lodging baseless, University of Virginia-type allegations.
Look, Hollywood is an industry that has turned itself into a joke by its overwhelmingly leftist activity and quiet boycott of conservative-leaning actors. I really couldn't care less what goes on out there. But my moral sensibility is offended when people who have a career dream come face to face with the choice of having a career but compromising their integrity, or not having that career. It is simply not right.
Who in Hollywood will take it in that context and lead the remedy?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, November 6, 2017
Japanese Forgiveness -- and George Washington
I was born less than ten years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. My father fought in the Second World War, although in the European theater and not the Pacific one, so discussions of the war in the house were far more likely to be about the German theater than the Japanese one. Still, they were who had attacked us on December 7th, so some residual antipathy toward Japan was natural.
Maybe 20 years ago, my wife and I were in Hawaii -- me on business (a trade show), the little lady on a vacation with me, helped by the company-paid room and some frequent-flyer points. While there, we went to Pearl Harbor, even then more than 50 years past the attacks. If you have never been to the memorials, walked the grounds, observed the USS Arizona memorial structure, well, I can certainly recommend trying to get there as a bucket list item.
One thing we noticed during that visit struck us more than most. There is an area of the overall memorial that is outdoors and easily accessible. While there, we noticed a tour group of maybe twenty visitors taking pictures.
The cameras were Japanese, and that was natural -- since so were the tour-group members. The guide was speaking to them in Japanese, and the missus remarked that she wished she knew what the guide was saying and what the questions were. Me, too, I told her, me too.
But here's the thing. Our curiosity was not really tinged by anything other than just that -- curiosity. The tour group was obviously welcome in our country and in the site; there was nothing like animosity, not a shred. Sure, we are a forgiving people, but there was nothing left to forgive, at least regarding those people. There were no visitors old enough to have fought in the war and, even if they had been, they'd have been too young then to have been in any decision-making position or to have had a choice.
I am 100% sure that is the opinion of our entire country. There are a few nonagenarian Japanese WWII veterans alive today, but none remotely old enough to have had any input. Even 20 years ago any residual antipathy toward Japan and the Japanese based on Pearl Harbor and WWII was long gone. I have been in Japan visiting our military facilities there; they are our geopolitical friends and economic ... well, that's hard to define, but we certainly don't hate them -- in fact, our president is there as I write this working out friendly diplomatic approaches to normal international relations.
The Japanese are our friends. We have long since "forgiven" the nation for what happened in the 1940s, and if we meet a Japanese or Japanese-American now, well, WWII is pretty much the last thing on our mind. And they bombed freaking Pearl Harbor. Keep that in mind.
The left is now on a merciless march to tear down memorials to our Founding Fathers, particularly those who were slaveowners, as was pretty much the rule for any landowner-farmer at the time. Simply having owned slaves at the time appears to be, to the left, sufficient to have your name wiped from the pages of history.
Now, in the 18th Century, farmers in Virginia owned slaves. It wasn't nice, mind you, but it was a practice that was worldwide. It was certainly a point of contention even at the time, and one of discussion during the beginnings of our nation. George Washington certainly wasn't a big fan, as recorded (I believe Martha was a bit less opposed, but history knows better).
Still -- here is the thing. The left is all over the Founding Fathers and trying to rip their plaques down and knock over their monuments. For all the amazing good they did in the creation of the greatest nation on earth; for the Declaration of Independence, for their bravery in the Revolution, for the incredible Constitution, for the writings of the day, for the tricameral government they created ... for all of that, the left believes that their having owned slaves voids their memorial.
They can't forgive the Founders for what was ethically acceptable and commonplace at the time, not only in Revolutionary America but around the world. They can't tolerate the nation, of course, can't abide that there is a USA leading the world as a beacon of freedom, so they have to try to decertify its status by seizing on what is barely relevant, not even a heroic flaw, because it was a contemporary custom.
The problem is this. Why can the left not simply exercise one-tenth of the forgiveness that all Americans long since granted to Japan after the war? Decades ago, Americans ceased looking at Japan as a recent enemy who sucker-bombed Hawaii and killed thousands of Americans, and we accepted the fact that Japan's imperial desires were vaporized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also accepted that the post-war nation that Japan became -- with our help, of course -- had become an ally.
We forgave.
More importantly, we forgave those who had nothing to do with the war; those born afterward, even those who fought in the war but who were soldiers under orders. It's over. We got past it. We won the war and then won the peace by being a friend and ally, not the conquering empire. And within a few decades, we could have a tour group of Japanese visitors walking through memorials to what their predecessors had done, and wonder musingly what they were talking about.
So why can't the left forgive what the slaveholders among our Founding Fathers did, that was normal at the time and in the ethics of the 18th Century, and why do they feel the need to destroy their memories and to crush what they accomplished?
There is an answer, of course. It's because it's not about slavery. It's about destroying America.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Maybe 20 years ago, my wife and I were in Hawaii -- me on business (a trade show), the little lady on a vacation with me, helped by the company-paid room and some frequent-flyer points. While there, we went to Pearl Harbor, even then more than 50 years past the attacks. If you have never been to the memorials, walked the grounds, observed the USS Arizona memorial structure, well, I can certainly recommend trying to get there as a bucket list item.
One thing we noticed during that visit struck us more than most. There is an area of the overall memorial that is outdoors and easily accessible. While there, we noticed a tour group of maybe twenty visitors taking pictures.
The cameras were Japanese, and that was natural -- since so were the tour-group members. The guide was speaking to them in Japanese, and the missus remarked that she wished she knew what the guide was saying and what the questions were. Me, too, I told her, me too.
But here's the thing. Our curiosity was not really tinged by anything other than just that -- curiosity. The tour group was obviously welcome in our country and in the site; there was nothing like animosity, not a shred. Sure, we are a forgiving people, but there was nothing left to forgive, at least regarding those people. There were no visitors old enough to have fought in the war and, even if they had been, they'd have been too young then to have been in any decision-making position or to have had a choice.
I am 100% sure that is the opinion of our entire country. There are a few nonagenarian Japanese WWII veterans alive today, but none remotely old enough to have had any input. Even 20 years ago any residual antipathy toward Japan and the Japanese based on Pearl Harbor and WWII was long gone. I have been in Japan visiting our military facilities there; they are our geopolitical friends and economic ... well, that's hard to define, but we certainly don't hate them -- in fact, our president is there as I write this working out friendly diplomatic approaches to normal international relations.
The Japanese are our friends. We have long since "forgiven" the nation for what happened in the 1940s, and if we meet a Japanese or Japanese-American now, well, WWII is pretty much the last thing on our mind. And they bombed freaking Pearl Harbor. Keep that in mind.
The left is now on a merciless march to tear down memorials to our Founding Fathers, particularly those who were slaveowners, as was pretty much the rule for any landowner-farmer at the time. Simply having owned slaves at the time appears to be, to the left, sufficient to have your name wiped from the pages of history.
Now, in the 18th Century, farmers in Virginia owned slaves. It wasn't nice, mind you, but it was a practice that was worldwide. It was certainly a point of contention even at the time, and one of discussion during the beginnings of our nation. George Washington certainly wasn't a big fan, as recorded (I believe Martha was a bit less opposed, but history knows better).
Still -- here is the thing. The left is all over the Founding Fathers and trying to rip their plaques down and knock over their monuments. For all the amazing good they did in the creation of the greatest nation on earth; for the Declaration of Independence, for their bravery in the Revolution, for the incredible Constitution, for the writings of the day, for the tricameral government they created ... for all of that, the left believes that their having owned slaves voids their memorial.
They can't forgive the Founders for what was ethically acceptable and commonplace at the time, not only in Revolutionary America but around the world. They can't tolerate the nation, of course, can't abide that there is a USA leading the world as a beacon of freedom, so they have to try to decertify its status by seizing on what is barely relevant, not even a heroic flaw, because it was a contemporary custom.
The problem is this. Why can the left not simply exercise one-tenth of the forgiveness that all Americans long since granted to Japan after the war? Decades ago, Americans ceased looking at Japan as a recent enemy who sucker-bombed Hawaii and killed thousands of Americans, and we accepted the fact that Japan's imperial desires were vaporized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also accepted that the post-war nation that Japan became -- with our help, of course -- had become an ally.
We forgave.
More importantly, we forgave those who had nothing to do with the war; those born afterward, even those who fought in the war but who were soldiers under orders. It's over. We got past it. We won the war and then won the peace by being a friend and ally, not the conquering empire. And within a few decades, we could have a tour group of Japanese visitors walking through memorials to what their predecessors had done, and wonder musingly what they were talking about.
So why can't the left forgive what the slaveholders among our Founding Fathers did, that was normal at the time and in the ethics of the 18th Century, and why do they feel the need to destroy their memories and to crush what they accomplished?
There is an answer, of course. It's because it's not about slavery. It's about destroying America.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, November 3, 2017
Subsidizing for What?
The late Jack Kemp, before he was the Republican candidate for vice president in 1996, and after he was an NFL quarterback, was in Congress and a fiscal hawk. Among his famous statements in the area of governmental finance was this, which may be an original Kempism but it really doesn't matter:
"If you tax something you get less of it. If you subsidize something you get more of it,"
He went on to note that we taxed investment, work, property ownership and the like, while we subsidized unemployment, reproduction and the like. His message was clear -- there are unintended consequences to tax policy, and his subtle message was that they might not have been so unintended as Democrats would have you believe.
We think of that as the Republican 2017 tax plan has now been rolled out for consideration by the House, and one particular element of it appears to have gotten a lot of attention.
That would be the deduction for state and local income taxes, which under the proposed plan would be severely limited. Under current tax law, such taxes are deductible if you itemize your expenses on the old 1040.
Now, let's consider the impact of any deduction. If you start with a set of rates -- first X dollars are free of tax, the next Y dollars are at one rate, the next Z dollars at a higher rate and so forth, then no matter who you are, you will pay the same tax if you make the same amount. What deductions do are to say that we will tax you as if you earned (say) $1,000 less, if you spend that $1,000 on things that we in Congress, in our infinite wisdom, decide are appropriate to be granted the deduction.
In the popular example, homeowners with a mortgage get a deduction for mortgage interest, while tenants who pay the same for their home but pay it in rent, well, they do not get the deduction. Congress is saying quite clearly, "Go buy a home and mortgage it." They're not subsidizing home ownership; they're actually subsidizing home financing. Either way, they're subsidizing something.
When it comes to state and local income taxes, the principle is the same. Texas, Florida and some other states have no income tax. New York, New Jersey, California, well, those states have very high state income taxes. In California, you can be paying more than half your income in Federal, state and local income taxes.
Those taxes are all deductible under current law. It is common for a Texan to pay zero state income tax on an income that a Californian would pay $10,000 in state taxes. So -- regardless of what the Democrats would say is the intent of the program, the consequences of such taxes being Federally deductible are that wage-earners in Texas pay higher Federal taxes than those in California.
Moreover, the legislature in California, being subsidized by taxpayer dollars from the other 49 states, can blithely raise state taxes to absurd rates, knowing that through its deductibility, the state rate can be hiked as high as they feel. And they can take that money and spend it on whatever they feel like, that state whose government is trying to be a "sanctuary state", to refuse to cooperate with the Federal authorities who are subsidizing them through others' tax dollars because their state tax rates are so high.
I'm not a fan. Those taxpayers subsidizing the profligacy of the legislature of the State of California include nurses in Dallas, farmers in Iowa, store clerks in Tennessee and retirees living off their now-taxable 401(k) plans in Florida and Arizona. And, by the way, independent proposal writers in North Carolina. None of us is happy about it, and most people would be considerably less happy if they truly understood the impact of the tax code.
All I want is to pay less. But I sure don't want to pay more just because California has a stupidly high income tax.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
"If you tax something you get less of it. If you subsidize something you get more of it,"
He went on to note that we taxed investment, work, property ownership and the like, while we subsidized unemployment, reproduction and the like. His message was clear -- there are unintended consequences to tax policy, and his subtle message was that they might not have been so unintended as Democrats would have you believe.
We think of that as the Republican 2017 tax plan has now been rolled out for consideration by the House, and one particular element of it appears to have gotten a lot of attention.
That would be the deduction for state and local income taxes, which under the proposed plan would be severely limited. Under current tax law, such taxes are deductible if you itemize your expenses on the old 1040.
Now, let's consider the impact of any deduction. If you start with a set of rates -- first X dollars are free of tax, the next Y dollars are at one rate, the next Z dollars at a higher rate and so forth, then no matter who you are, you will pay the same tax if you make the same amount. What deductions do are to say that we will tax you as if you earned (say) $1,000 less, if you spend that $1,000 on things that we in Congress, in our infinite wisdom, decide are appropriate to be granted the deduction.
In the popular example, homeowners with a mortgage get a deduction for mortgage interest, while tenants who pay the same for their home but pay it in rent, well, they do not get the deduction. Congress is saying quite clearly, "Go buy a home and mortgage it." They're not subsidizing home ownership; they're actually subsidizing home financing. Either way, they're subsidizing something.
When it comes to state and local income taxes, the principle is the same. Texas, Florida and some other states have no income tax. New York, New Jersey, California, well, those states have very high state income taxes. In California, you can be paying more than half your income in Federal, state and local income taxes.
Those taxes are all deductible under current law. It is common for a Texan to pay zero state income tax on an income that a Californian would pay $10,000 in state taxes. So -- regardless of what the Democrats would say is the intent of the program, the consequences of such taxes being Federally deductible are that wage-earners in Texas pay higher Federal taxes than those in California.
Moreover, the legislature in California, being subsidized by taxpayer dollars from the other 49 states, can blithely raise state taxes to absurd rates, knowing that through its deductibility, the state rate can be hiked as high as they feel. And they can take that money and spend it on whatever they feel like, that state whose government is trying to be a "sanctuary state", to refuse to cooperate with the Federal authorities who are subsidizing them through others' tax dollars because their state tax rates are so high.
I'm not a fan. Those taxpayers subsidizing the profligacy of the legislature of the State of California include nurses in Dallas, farmers in Iowa, store clerks in Tennessee and retirees living off their now-taxable 401(k) plans in Florida and Arizona. And, by the way, independent proposal writers in North Carolina. None of us is happy about it, and most people would be considerably less happy if they truly understood the impact of the tax code.
All I want is to pay less. But I sure don't want to pay more just because California has a stupidly high income tax.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Missing Baseball ... Already
Last night, the Houston Astros, in a rather dull seventh game in what had been a very exciting World Series, became the champions of professional baseball for the very first time. The Astros, which had been born in 1962 as the Colt .45s, and had suffered a league switch (their previous trip to the World Series had been in 2005 as the National League champions), were an exciting, mostly young team representing a city that had had, to put it mildly, a rough year.
Yet even as I was watching the game last night, I was feeling the pangs of loss. After all, it is now November, and there will be no baseball until Spring Training next year. It will be mid-February before the online columns are really roaring, and very late March before the games that count begin.
I'll miss it.
I've written of how the onset of Spring Training is the absurdly sweet promise, not just of our own team and what they might actually accomplish this year that they did not the past year, but of life itself -- the incipient springtime and the blooming of the planet -- OK, at least in the northern hemisphere.
As good as that is when the season starts to warm up, well, there is the corresponding darkness that envelops us right after the conclusion of the World Series. In a few days, Daylight Savings Time will evaporate, and darkness will fall each day at dinnertime instead of an hour later. The gloom of the crepuscular late afternoon will match the gloom of the lack of a baseball game that night to excite our senses.
I'll manage. I won't manage as well this year, mind you, because in our new home the local cable service does not carry much hockey, which I do follow somewhat. College basketball is long dead, waking up only for our gambling itch to be scratched in March, and the NBA ... does anyone watch that? Are they even still in business? And the NFL, well, even when the players weren't embarrassing themselves too much to watch, that was really only Sunday anyway.
But I will manage. I'll follow the Hot Stove League, the post-Series and winter season of trades and free agent signings, which actually started at 9:00 this morning. I'll hope that my team will do well in restocking its roster, knowing that most of those new contracts turn out to be albatrosses anyway.
And I will watch other things at night when I was watching baseball. Maybe play "Field of Dreams" a time or two.
I'll be OK. But I'll really, really miss baseball.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Yet even as I was watching the game last night, I was feeling the pangs of loss. After all, it is now November, and there will be no baseball until Spring Training next year. It will be mid-February before the online columns are really roaring, and very late March before the games that count begin.
I'll miss it.
I've written of how the onset of Spring Training is the absurdly sweet promise, not just of our own team and what they might actually accomplish this year that they did not the past year, but of life itself -- the incipient springtime and the blooming of the planet -- OK, at least in the northern hemisphere.
As good as that is when the season starts to warm up, well, there is the corresponding darkness that envelops us right after the conclusion of the World Series. In a few days, Daylight Savings Time will evaporate, and darkness will fall each day at dinnertime instead of an hour later. The gloom of the crepuscular late afternoon will match the gloom of the lack of a baseball game that night to excite our senses.
I'll manage. I won't manage as well this year, mind you, because in our new home the local cable service does not carry much hockey, which I do follow somewhat. College basketball is long dead, waking up only for our gambling itch to be scratched in March, and the NBA ... does anyone watch that? Are they even still in business? And the NFL, well, even when the players weren't embarrassing themselves too much to watch, that was really only Sunday anyway.
But I will manage. I'll follow the Hot Stove League, the post-Series and winter season of trades and free agent signings, which actually started at 9:00 this morning. I'll hope that my team will do well in restocking its roster, knowing that most of those new contracts turn out to be albatrosses anyway.
And I will watch other things at night when I was watching baseball. Maybe play "Field of Dreams" a time or two.
I'll be OK. But I'll really, really miss baseball.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
To the NFL and its Players
The following is extracted from what appears to be a letter to the Sonoran News, a conservative media outlet in Arizona. The letter is from a "J. P. Hoeppner." I did a little due diligence -- just a little -- and was unfortunately unable to determine if the person was real. However, the author's identity and validating it do not appear to be particularly relevant. Just read the content. The message speaks for itself as much as its author.
_ _ _
"You graduated high school in 2011. Your teenage years were a struggle. You grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Your mother was the leader of the family and worked tirelessly to keep a roof over your head and food on your plate. Academics were a struggle for you and your grades were mediocre at best. The only thing that made you stand out is you weighed 225 lbs and could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds while carrying a football.
Your best friend was just like you, except he didn’t play football. Instead of going to football practice after school, he went to work at McDonalds for minimum wage. You were recruited by all the big colleges and spent every weekend of your senior year making visits to universities where coaches and boosters tried to convince you their school was best. They laid out the red carpet for you. Your best friend worked double shifts at Mickey D’s. College was not an option for him. On the day you signed with Big State University, your best friend signed paperwork with his Army recruiter. You went to summer workouts. He went to basic training.
_ _ _
"You graduated high school in 2011. Your teenage years were a struggle. You grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Your mother was the leader of the family and worked tirelessly to keep a roof over your head and food on your plate. Academics were a struggle for you and your grades were mediocre at best. The only thing that made you stand out is you weighed 225 lbs and could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds while carrying a football.
Your best friend was just like you, except he didn’t play football. Instead of going to football practice after school, he went to work at McDonalds for minimum wage. You were recruited by all the big colleges and spent every weekend of your senior year making visits to universities where coaches and boosters tried to convince you their school was best. They laid out the red carpet for you. Your best friend worked double shifts at Mickey D’s. College was not an option for him. On the day you signed with Big State University, your best friend signed paperwork with his Army recruiter. You went to summer workouts. He went to basic training.
You spent the next four years living in the athletic
dorm, eating at the training table. You spent your Saturdays on the
football field, cheered on by adoring fans. Tutors attended to your
every academic need. You attended class when you felt like it. Sure,
you worked hard. You lifted weights, ran sprints, studied plays, and
soon became one of the top football players in the country. Your best
friend was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. While you were in
college, he deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice. He became a
Sergeant and led a squad of 19-year-old soldiers who grew up just like
he did. He shed his blood in Afghanistan and watched young Americans
give their lives, limbs, and innocence for the USA.
You went to the NFL combine and scored off the
charts. You hired an agent and waited for draft day. You were drafted
in the first round and your agent immediately went to work, ensuring
that you received the most money possible. You signed for $16 million
although you had never played a single down of professional football.
Your best friend re-enlisted in the Army for four more years. As a
combat tested sergeant, he will be paid $32,000 per year.
You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South
Beach. He will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with 10 other
combat loaded soldiers. You will sleep at the Ritz. He will dig a
hole in the ground and try to sleep. You will “make it rain” in the
club. He will pray for rain as the temperature reaches 120 degrees.
On Sunday, you will run into a stadium as tens of
thousands of fans cheer and yell your name.
For your best friend, there
is little difference between Sunday and any other day of the week.
There are no adoring fans. There are only people trying to kill him and
his soldiers. Every now and then, he and his soldiers leave the front
lines and “go to the rear” to rest. He might be lucky enough to catch
an NFL game on TV.
When the National Anthem plays and you take a knee,
he will jump to his feet and salute the flag and the anthem that is television. While you protest
the unfairness of life in the United States, he will give thanks to God
that he has the honor of defending his great country.
To the players of the NFL: We are the people who buy
your tickets, watch you on TV, and wear your jerseys. We anxiously
wait for Sundays so we can cheer for you and marvel at your athleticism.
Although we love to watch you play, we care little about your opinions
until you offend us. You have the absolute right to express yourselves,
but we have the absolute right to boycott you. We have tolerated your
drug use and DUIs, your domestic violence, and your vulgar displays of
wealth. We should be ashamed for putting our admiration of your
physical skills before what is morally right. But now you have gone too
far. You have insulted our flag, our country, our soldiers, our police
officers, and our veterans. You are living the American dream, yet you
disparage our great country.
I am done with NFL football and encourage
all like minded Americans to boycott the NFL as well.
Join the national boycott of the NFL for Sunday November 12th,
Veterans Day Weekend. Boycott all football telecast, all fans, all
ticket holders, stay away from attending any games, let them play to
empty stadiums. Invite all your friends and family to honor
our military, some of whom come home with the American Flag draped over
their coffin."
'Nuf sed.
Unattributed content is Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Changing the Past
The odd news of the past week included a decision by Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia (a city I often represented in singing competitions, so I know it fairly well). That decision included the removal of a plaque honoring the fact that George Washington -- remember him, you know, the Father of our Country? -- had been a parishioner in that church in the 18th Century.
Some have tried to defend that action, and the statement by that church that they were trying to separate politics from their worship. I don't buy it. The statement included words about people feeling uncomfortable, or whatever, coming to that church because there was a plaque honoring someone who had owned slaves.
Do you think perhaps that the ones with the problem are the ones who, after 250 years or so, only now have decided that they feel "uncomfortable" in a church? I mean, if I were a pastor, I would want to attract as many people as possible to hear the Word in my church. But maybe I would be a bit hesitant about turning off 95% of the potential worshipers who, like me, would have immediately dropped my attendance there and found another church, if my pastor had decided to make us forget that the Father of our Country had actually prayed there regularly -- presumably for guidance in the nurturing and governance of the nascent republic.
Of course, the removal of such memorials to our Founding Fathers who were farmers and therefore, as was the custom of the day around the world, owned slaves, is simply a quick extrapolation of the removal of statues to Confederate generals who served in the War Between the States and whom it is apparently no longer PC to memorialize. "Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard was born here" is apparently no longer an acceptable thing to memorialize, and apparently "George Washington prayed here" is not a good thing either.
So where did this come from after all this time? The history itself has not changed in 150 years, there have not been slaves in the USA for 150 years, and now all of a sudden we need to take down plaques? And let me note, lumping George Washington in with Confederate generals makes no sense to begin with, so let me get that in there.
Why, all of a sudden, did the left take on this history-alteration and memorial-destruction tack as a way to advance ... whatever it is they are advancing?
Well, it was suggested to me by my brother recently that there is a reason, and with the left, there is always a method to what even is perceived as madness.
History, you see, is not on the side of the left. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Hamilton and the like were flawed men, of course, but they dreamed of a free and independent land governed by the representatives of the people, not an unelected family ruling by genetics rather than competence. And then they built it.
The Founding Fathers built an incredible nation and wrote an incredible document to serve as its governing principles. For the left to destroy the USA, there are social and institutional components that have to be destroyed first. There can be no differences, for example; no races, no genders, no ... well, humans are simply one generic animal. We can choose our gender, our race and presumably our species, if we "identify" that way.
And there can be no history. History is too "defined" for the left; things that happened, happened. That's not squishy enough to be interpreted flexibly as the left requires. So history has to be destroyed as well, and there is no better way to do that than to see it not through the eyes of its participants but through a morality that did not even apply then.
George Washington owned slaves, which was a perfectly normal practice at the time. Admittedly, different owners treated their slaves better than others, and Washington was a bit of a reluctant owner as it was (go to Mt. Vernon some time and see, at least until the left tears that down). But the point is that his owning of slaves was rather irrelevant to his character, and completely irrelevant to his role in the founding of our nation.
Yet the left wants to use that to destroy the image of George Washington by trying to apply 21st Century views and values to an 18th-Century person and devalue the entire rest of his life based on it.
I keep using the term "the left", meaning the organized leftist movement on earth, whether instigated in Russia, China or Cuba, funded by them and the George Soros types of the world. Why do I say that?
Well, as much as I hate to quote fiction to defend fact, there is this. Take a look at the film adaptation of the story of Artur London, the Czechoslovak communist who was part of the 1950s purges in Czechoslovakia of certain communist leaders by other communist leaders. The film was done in 1970, and was historically researched enough that one can readily infer that the intent, if not the dramatized words, was real.
London's character was being interrogated by a communist official during the trials, and during the interrogation the official said to London that "The past must be judged in light of the truths established today."
Whoa, Hoss. Doesn't that sound exactly like the motivation claimed by the leftists of 2017 in trying to tear down plaques of the Father of our Country based on what, his owning slaves? It is vital to the left that the Founding Fathers be badly characterized so that the founding principles of our nation can be torn down with them. What better way to make an America that reveres our founders turn on them than to try to change the light in which we judge their lives?
It is a frightening thing to come to the realization that there are those within our nation willing -- even motivated -- to destroy it. But destroy it they will, plaque by plaque, until in their view we have become completely composed of a history-free consolidation of milquetoast that the left can waltz in and run, because at that point we'd be too feeble to resist.
Sounds like Orwell, doesn't it?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Some have tried to defend that action, and the statement by that church that they were trying to separate politics from their worship. I don't buy it. The statement included words about people feeling uncomfortable, or whatever, coming to that church because there was a plaque honoring someone who had owned slaves.
Do you think perhaps that the ones with the problem are the ones who, after 250 years or so, only now have decided that they feel "uncomfortable" in a church? I mean, if I were a pastor, I would want to attract as many people as possible to hear the Word in my church. But maybe I would be a bit hesitant about turning off 95% of the potential worshipers who, like me, would have immediately dropped my attendance there and found another church, if my pastor had decided to make us forget that the Father of our Country had actually prayed there regularly -- presumably for guidance in the nurturing and governance of the nascent republic.
Of course, the removal of such memorials to our Founding Fathers who were farmers and therefore, as was the custom of the day around the world, owned slaves, is simply a quick extrapolation of the removal of statues to Confederate generals who served in the War Between the States and whom it is apparently no longer PC to memorialize. "Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard was born here" is apparently no longer an acceptable thing to memorialize, and apparently "George Washington prayed here" is not a good thing either.
So where did this come from after all this time? The history itself has not changed in 150 years, there have not been slaves in the USA for 150 years, and now all of a sudden we need to take down plaques? And let me note, lumping George Washington in with Confederate generals makes no sense to begin with, so let me get that in there.
Why, all of a sudden, did the left take on this history-alteration and memorial-destruction tack as a way to advance ... whatever it is they are advancing?
Well, it was suggested to me by my brother recently that there is a reason, and with the left, there is always a method to what even is perceived as madness.
History, you see, is not on the side of the left. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Hamilton and the like were flawed men, of course, but they dreamed of a free and independent land governed by the representatives of the people, not an unelected family ruling by genetics rather than competence. And then they built it.
The Founding Fathers built an incredible nation and wrote an incredible document to serve as its governing principles. For the left to destroy the USA, there are social and institutional components that have to be destroyed first. There can be no differences, for example; no races, no genders, no ... well, humans are simply one generic animal. We can choose our gender, our race and presumably our species, if we "identify" that way.
And there can be no history. History is too "defined" for the left; things that happened, happened. That's not squishy enough to be interpreted flexibly as the left requires. So history has to be destroyed as well, and there is no better way to do that than to see it not through the eyes of its participants but through a morality that did not even apply then.
George Washington owned slaves, which was a perfectly normal practice at the time. Admittedly, different owners treated their slaves better than others, and Washington was a bit of a reluctant owner as it was (go to Mt. Vernon some time and see, at least until the left tears that down). But the point is that his owning of slaves was rather irrelevant to his character, and completely irrelevant to his role in the founding of our nation.
Yet the left wants to use that to destroy the image of George Washington by trying to apply 21st Century views and values to an 18th-Century person and devalue the entire rest of his life based on it.
I keep using the term "the left", meaning the organized leftist movement on earth, whether instigated in Russia, China or Cuba, funded by them and the George Soros types of the world. Why do I say that?
Well, as much as I hate to quote fiction to defend fact, there is this. Take a look at the film adaptation of the story of Artur London, the Czechoslovak communist who was part of the 1950s purges in Czechoslovakia of certain communist leaders by other communist leaders. The film was done in 1970, and was historically researched enough that one can readily infer that the intent, if not the dramatized words, was real.
London's character was being interrogated by a communist official during the trials, and during the interrogation the official said to London that "The past must be judged in light of the truths established today."
Whoa, Hoss. Doesn't that sound exactly like the motivation claimed by the leftists of 2017 in trying to tear down plaques of the Father of our Country based on what, his owning slaves? It is vital to the left that the Founding Fathers be badly characterized so that the founding principles of our nation can be torn down with them. What better way to make an America that reveres our founders turn on them than to try to change the light in which we judge their lives?
It is a frightening thing to come to the realization that there are those within our nation willing -- even motivated -- to destroy it. But destroy it they will, plaque by plaque, until in their view we have become completely composed of a history-free consolidation of milquetoast that the left can waltz in and run, because at that point we'd be too feeble to resist.
Sounds like Orwell, doesn't it?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, October 30, 2017
Cleaning Up the Act
What is comedy, really? Making fun of situations or people, or irony and coincidence that tickle us. It is that mystical something that causes a laugh reflex in those of us with a sense of humor (by which I exclude the left, whose adherents appear generally not to have one).
Verbal comedy is not any different, of course; the same things that make us laugh when we see something funny are involved when we hear a joke. The difference is that verbal comedy is sensitive to an additional attribute -- timing. Setting the listener up by capitalizing on his thought process as he hears what you are speaking, that is an art form.
Of course, among the best at setting up the audience is the brilliant comedian and long-time star of his own '90s television show, Jerry Seinfeld. You're of course familiar with the eponymous show itself, with its misfit cast of characters and plot lines that would often come together strangely at the end of an episode (just recall the marine biologist/whale/golf ball one as the epitome).
Seinfeld himself started, of course, as a stand-up comic in the 1970s, and developed his talent grinding through the comedy-club life as many in the profession do. He would write down jokes or lines as he thought of them, on a pad that, over time, has become an encyclopedia of hand-written comedy.
But I actually digress.
I mention Jerry Seinfeld because I happen to watch his recent one-hour special done, perhaps, for Netflix but I'm not sure and don't care. I heard that it had been done and we brought it up to watch over the weekend.
It was certainly funny; Jerry Seinfeld, especially after 40 years in the business, is a very funny guy with great material and excellent delivery. But about five minutes into it (it is generally an autobiographical tale), it became apparent that there was something different -- not different from Seinfeld's usual material, but different from most of the current crop of comedians.
Now I do not swear, period. I "swore off" profanity when I had children, so that they would not hear me use words that I regard as the province of those who can't come up with something better to say. My kids are in their 30s and 40s now, and I still say "heck" and "darn." Drives my Best Girl nuts -- "But they're in the Bible", she will say.
At any rate, what struck me right away was that Seinfeld was being funny by leveraging the situation, the characters, the irony, all without being profane. With the exception of a "heck" or "darn" (that weren't actually "heck" and "darn", of course), there was no profanity, no sexual or bodily-function attempts at humor, not even how big the bathroom was in his minuscule first apartment as a comic.
I found it incredibly satisfying that I could be made to laugh without having to be embarrassed at who else might be in the room, and whether I was reacting a little too overtly (or two puritanically) to excessive profane words or uncomfortable situations. When the show was over, that was pretty much the first thing that occurred to us. We had laughed comfortably for an hour.
Most days we need that. But I can't turn on, well, almost any of the current crop of comedians. They mostly make me crawl in my seat, because it seems like they can't really tell a joke without a barrage of F-words. And it feels like they're using those words for shock value, not to advance the humor. After all, the words themselves aren't funny; they're more often used in anger. And anger is not funny.
So I wanted to thank Jerry Seinfeld here, and for the ages of the Internet, for reminding us that we are allowed, even in 2017, to laugh comfortably. You can be funny and not profane. You can be funny and not stay in the gutter. You can be funny and totally avoid politics (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as 2016 taught us).
I suspect that most of us agree.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Verbal comedy is not any different, of course; the same things that make us laugh when we see something funny are involved when we hear a joke. The difference is that verbal comedy is sensitive to an additional attribute -- timing. Setting the listener up by capitalizing on his thought process as he hears what you are speaking, that is an art form.
Of course, among the best at setting up the audience is the brilliant comedian and long-time star of his own '90s television show, Jerry Seinfeld. You're of course familiar with the eponymous show itself, with its misfit cast of characters and plot lines that would often come together strangely at the end of an episode (just recall the marine biologist/whale/golf ball one as the epitome).
Seinfeld himself started, of course, as a stand-up comic in the 1970s, and developed his talent grinding through the comedy-club life as many in the profession do. He would write down jokes or lines as he thought of them, on a pad that, over time, has become an encyclopedia of hand-written comedy.
But I actually digress.
I mention Jerry Seinfeld because I happen to watch his recent one-hour special done, perhaps, for Netflix but I'm not sure and don't care. I heard that it had been done and we brought it up to watch over the weekend.
It was certainly funny; Jerry Seinfeld, especially after 40 years in the business, is a very funny guy with great material and excellent delivery. But about five minutes into it (it is generally an autobiographical tale), it became apparent that there was something different -- not different from Seinfeld's usual material, but different from most of the current crop of comedians.
Now I do not swear, period. I "swore off" profanity when I had children, so that they would not hear me use words that I regard as the province of those who can't come up with something better to say. My kids are in their 30s and 40s now, and I still say "heck" and "darn." Drives my Best Girl nuts -- "But they're in the Bible", she will say.
At any rate, what struck me right away was that Seinfeld was being funny by leveraging the situation, the characters, the irony, all without being profane. With the exception of a "heck" or "darn" (that weren't actually "heck" and "darn", of course), there was no profanity, no sexual or bodily-function attempts at humor, not even how big the bathroom was in his minuscule first apartment as a comic.
I found it incredibly satisfying that I could be made to laugh without having to be embarrassed at who else might be in the room, and whether I was reacting a little too overtly (or two puritanically) to excessive profane words or uncomfortable situations. When the show was over, that was pretty much the first thing that occurred to us. We had laughed comfortably for an hour.
Most days we need that. But I can't turn on, well, almost any of the current crop of comedians. They mostly make me crawl in my seat, because it seems like they can't really tell a joke without a barrage of F-words. And it feels like they're using those words for shock value, not to advance the humor. After all, the words themselves aren't funny; they're more often used in anger. And anger is not funny.
So I wanted to thank Jerry Seinfeld here, and for the ages of the Internet, for reminding us that we are allowed, even in 2017, to laugh comfortably. You can be funny and not profane. You can be funny and not stay in the gutter. You can be funny and totally avoid politics (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as 2016 taught us).
I suspect that most of us agree.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Managers Come and Managers Go
So yesterday, Joe Girardi was fired as the manager of the New York Yankees. OK, it wasn't actually being "fired", this was in the sense that his contract was up and the Yankees decided not to renew it, but heck, tomato, tomahto; the outcome is the same -- gold watch and look for a new job.
Managing in New York has to be a real challenge. You have a bunch of newspapers and screaming radio call-in listeners, and those are worse because, well, New Yorkers are unpleasant to listen to even if they're saying something nice to you. It's sort of like wondering how Germans reproduce, since their language is immensely guttural, and listening to bar pick-up lines in German would turn off the most desperate girl. And I speak German.
But I digress.
Girardi, who was a catcher in the majors for a long time, had managed the Yankees for ten years. Was he successful? Well, that's kind of hard to tell. It depends on your standards.
We'll start by saying up front that I hate the Yankees with a white-hot passion that ... OK, you've read it a dozen times before. "Yeah, we got it, you hate the Yankees." I hear you. So I am always inclined to regard their players as overrated and their fans as obnoxious. I mean, Derek Jeter, even though he now owns a part of a different major-league team, is a saint in New York, and he was literally the worst defensive player (by Defensive Runs Saved) of any player at any position in the history of baseball. It doesn't get more overrated than that.
Over those ten years, his Yankees won one world championship, their only one in the 21st Century. They made the playoffs six times, but won the division only three times and were the wild card team three others. Four times, they failed to reach the playoffs. I think there are teams for which that would be a reasonable performance -- Detroit, maybe, or the Angels of whatever part of metropolitan LA they currently claim to represent. New York is definitely not one of those. World Series or bust.
[Aside ... every time I hear the formal name of the Angels, which last I looked is the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim", I cringe. Anaheim is a different town, so it's either LA or Anaheim, right? Reminds me of the "Honeymooners" episode where Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton come across a snack spread that they didn't know was actually dog food. They try to think of a product name to get investment from Ralph's boss, Mr. Marshall, and Norton suggests "Kramden's Delicious Marshall." Maybe you had to be there, but when I hear "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" I think of Jackie Gleason eating dog food.]
At any rate, Girardi's track record over those ten years might have been good enough for Kramden's Delicious ... I mean the Angels, but the Yankee owners and their fans expect a ring every year or so. The question, of course, is the extent to which a manager can actually influence the won/loss record of a team enough to where it is worth replacing them -- or securing them for a long contract.
There is an interesting statistical analysis called the Pythagorean W/L record. The concept is that, over a season, if, for example your team scores the same number of runs as it gives up, your record should theoretically be .500 (81-81). If your record is better than that, it is because you "leveraged your runs better" and won close games, and therefore were better managed. For not just equal runs, but for any run differential, there is an expected (Pythagorean) number of wins your team should have, and a W/L record very different from that suggests good or bad managing.
In six of the ten years, including 2017, Girardi's Yankees outperformed their Pythagorean record, and in two others the difference was negligible. Only twice did they underperform the expected wins based on their run differential. So I suppose you could say that he was pretty good, at least if you put much weight in the Pythagorean notion. For the record, in the 12 years that his predecessor, Joe Torre, was the manager, they outperformed their expected W/L record nine times and matched it once more. They made the playoffs all twelve years.
During both of their tenures (Girardi and Torre), the Yankees had gargantuan payrolls relative to the rest of the league, leading in payroll almost all that time and being a tad behind only the Dodgers the last couple or so -- but still huge. During a lot of Torre's tenure, the Yankees spent almost twice as much as the next-highest-paying team. If your team is going to dump a few hundred million a year on salaries, you ought to be expected to win. And that's where the 60% making-the-playoffs record probably compromised Girardi's future.
As of the end of the World Series, Girardi's contract would have expired regardless. It was a reasonable time for the Yankees to decide on their future dugout direction, without incurring a payout to end a contract. So from the team's standpoint, if there were to be a fresh start, here was the logical time.
Their GM had been trying to clear out bad contracts and bring up a lot of players from the farm system. That had been with mixed success; some could really hit and others were less than league-average performers, but it was at least a strategy, and they're a year or so into it. Managing younger players -- and let's point out that for all the jabber in the press, the team is still not that young -- is a different skill set. If they plan to continue another few rookie call-ups (and they'll have to dump even more contracts to make room to do so), perhaps a manager with a heavy track record in developing them might work.
The point? I truly believe that the influence of managers is strongly overestimated. There are indeed two fairly unrelated aspects to it; the clubhouse (handling players and their egos and issues) and the dugout (the strategy inside a game). There is also the organizational aspect, preparing the players to play by a well-planned spring training program that results in teams as well-prepared to win in April as they will be in July.
What is promoted as a choice between a "young players' manager" and a "veteran" is really a decision as to whether the GM and ownership believe that clubhouse management or field generalship is more important, and what spring training is all about.
Joe Girardi had all that in his background, at least enough to take a highly-paid roster to the playoffs 60% of the time. He will be replaced by someone whose principal attribute will be that he is not Joe Girardi. The Yankees organization for at least eighty years has been unwilling to admit its mistakes (sort of like Obama, but I digress again). They always had planned to take the same 25 players that came out of spring training through the entire season as if they could not admit to personnel errors.
The next manager of the Yankees will be there for a long time, for just that reason. But I'm willing to bet at least 78 cents that it won't make a difference who it is.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Managing in New York has to be a real challenge. You have a bunch of newspapers and screaming radio call-in listeners, and those are worse because, well, New Yorkers are unpleasant to listen to even if they're saying something nice to you. It's sort of like wondering how Germans reproduce, since their language is immensely guttural, and listening to bar pick-up lines in German would turn off the most desperate girl. And I speak German.
But I digress.
Girardi, who was a catcher in the majors for a long time, had managed the Yankees for ten years. Was he successful? Well, that's kind of hard to tell. It depends on your standards.
We'll start by saying up front that I hate the Yankees with a white-hot passion that ... OK, you've read it a dozen times before. "Yeah, we got it, you hate the Yankees." I hear you. So I am always inclined to regard their players as overrated and their fans as obnoxious. I mean, Derek Jeter, even though he now owns a part of a different major-league team, is a saint in New York, and he was literally the worst defensive player (by Defensive Runs Saved) of any player at any position in the history of baseball. It doesn't get more overrated than that.
Over those ten years, his Yankees won one world championship, their only one in the 21st Century. They made the playoffs six times, but won the division only three times and were the wild card team three others. Four times, they failed to reach the playoffs. I think there are teams for which that would be a reasonable performance -- Detroit, maybe, or the Angels of whatever part of metropolitan LA they currently claim to represent. New York is definitely not one of those. World Series or bust.
[Aside ... every time I hear the formal name of the Angels, which last I looked is the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim", I cringe. Anaheim is a different town, so it's either LA or Anaheim, right? Reminds me of the "Honeymooners" episode where Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton come across a snack spread that they didn't know was actually dog food. They try to think of a product name to get investment from Ralph's boss, Mr. Marshall, and Norton suggests "Kramden's Delicious Marshall." Maybe you had to be there, but when I hear "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" I think of Jackie Gleason eating dog food.]
At any rate, Girardi's track record over those ten years might have been good enough for Kramden's Delicious ... I mean the Angels, but the Yankee owners and their fans expect a ring every year or so. The question, of course, is the extent to which a manager can actually influence the won/loss record of a team enough to where it is worth replacing them -- or securing them for a long contract.
There is an interesting statistical analysis called the Pythagorean W/L record. The concept is that, over a season, if, for example your team scores the same number of runs as it gives up, your record should theoretically be .500 (81-81). If your record is better than that, it is because you "leveraged your runs better" and won close games, and therefore were better managed. For not just equal runs, but for any run differential, there is an expected (Pythagorean) number of wins your team should have, and a W/L record very different from that suggests good or bad managing.
In six of the ten years, including 2017, Girardi's Yankees outperformed their Pythagorean record, and in two others the difference was negligible. Only twice did they underperform the expected wins based on their run differential. So I suppose you could say that he was pretty good, at least if you put much weight in the Pythagorean notion. For the record, in the 12 years that his predecessor, Joe Torre, was the manager, they outperformed their expected W/L record nine times and matched it once more. They made the playoffs all twelve years.
During both of their tenures (Girardi and Torre), the Yankees had gargantuan payrolls relative to the rest of the league, leading in payroll almost all that time and being a tad behind only the Dodgers the last couple or so -- but still huge. During a lot of Torre's tenure, the Yankees spent almost twice as much as the next-highest-paying team. If your team is going to dump a few hundred million a year on salaries, you ought to be expected to win. And that's where the 60% making-the-playoffs record probably compromised Girardi's future.
As of the end of the World Series, Girardi's contract would have expired regardless. It was a reasonable time for the Yankees to decide on their future dugout direction, without incurring a payout to end a contract. So from the team's standpoint, if there were to be a fresh start, here was the logical time.
Their GM had been trying to clear out bad contracts and bring up a lot of players from the farm system. That had been with mixed success; some could really hit and others were less than league-average performers, but it was at least a strategy, and they're a year or so into it. Managing younger players -- and let's point out that for all the jabber in the press, the team is still not that young -- is a different skill set. If they plan to continue another few rookie call-ups (and they'll have to dump even more contracts to make room to do so), perhaps a manager with a heavy track record in developing them might work.
The point? I truly believe that the influence of managers is strongly overestimated. There are indeed two fairly unrelated aspects to it; the clubhouse (handling players and their egos and issues) and the dugout (the strategy inside a game). There is also the organizational aspect, preparing the players to play by a well-planned spring training program that results in teams as well-prepared to win in April as they will be in July.
What is promoted as a choice between a "young players' manager" and a "veteran" is really a decision as to whether the GM and ownership believe that clubhouse management or field generalship is more important, and what spring training is all about.
Joe Girardi had all that in his background, at least enough to take a highly-paid roster to the playoffs 60% of the time. He will be replaced by someone whose principal attribute will be that he is not Joe Girardi. The Yankees organization for at least eighty years has been unwilling to admit its mistakes (sort of like Obama, but I digress again). They always had planned to take the same 25 players that came out of spring training through the entire season as if they could not admit to personnel errors.
The next manager of the Yankees will be there for a long time, for just that reason. But I'm willing to bet at least 78 cents that it won't make a difference who it is.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, October 26, 2017
It's What Is HEARD, Not What You Said
The latest version of ESPN The Magazine, an erratically-published periodical with a bizarre tendency toward soccer and NBA articles, had an opinion piece at the end by Howard Bryant, as it often does. Bryant, who is black according to the picture shown with the article (I at least have a state certifying me as black), writes as if everything is to be seen through the lens of race, and you can be comforted in knowing that he would not be happy even if the world changed to accommodate 100% of the opinions he shares.
The latest output from him concerned the issue that is severely damaging the National Football League, that is, the actions of a number of its players in kneeling for our National Anthem. It is not, Bryant tries to assert, a slap in the face to our armed forces and veterans, nor to the flag and the republic for which it stands. It is about other things and, therefore, he insists that we should not be concerned about the kneeling's reflection on those veterans and armed service members.
Now, what those "other things" actually are is a whole 'nother thing, depending on what kneeler you talk to, which kind of burns Bryant's thesis a bit. It's about "Black Lives Mattering", you know, except that it may be about police brutality (despite the statistics showing that racially-igniting combinations of the race of the cop and the criminal have declined hugely in 15 years, an inconvenient truth). It is about equal pay for women, we also hear. Maybe affirmative action, or maybe the designated hitter rule. Ask five people and expect at least three different answers.
And oh yeah, the first kneeler, Colin Kaepernick, said when he did it that he didn't want to honor the flag. So that whole "it's not the flag" thesis of Bryant fails the sniff test.
But, you see, it doesn't matter what the intent is. That's because it really doesn't matter what the person taking the action thinks it means -- it is how it is taken by those who hear it and are affected.
Doubt that? That is an absolute canon of the left, at least everywhere else. You can't say "Chinaman" to refer to a Chinese person anymore, even though when I say "Chinaman" I mean "a guy from China", which carries no implication other than that the person is from China. I certainly don't carry any pejorative or dismissive intent, as I do when I call an Englishman a "limey" or a Frenchman a "frog."
Nope, you're not supposed to say "Chinaman" because supposedly it would offend someone who is Chinese, although for the life of me I don't get why they would be, and have never heard an actual Chinaman say he is offended at the term.
You follow that? Let's go over it carefully. You are not supposed to do or say things that carry no malicious intent, if they can be construed by others as offensive to them. That's the mantra of the left and the professional offended class.
But according to Bryant, the whole take-a-knee-for-the-anthem thing is somehow different. No matter that literally millions of active servicemen, veterans and plain patriotic Americans -- myself included -- are deeply offended that the players are failing to respect their flag and anthem and could just as easily do their kneeling thing at a different time. We have to respect their intent and drop our feeling of offense.
Well, I call BS, Mr. Bryant. If you think I'm the one whose offense is not worth honoring, then you and your whole gang of kneelers need to shut up, if and when I start using what you think are racial pejoratives in my everyday speech. I certainly don't mean any offense by them, and if the rights of the speaker or actor to say or do something that someone else may take offense at, supersede the rights of the person taking offense, then it has to work all the time.
You sir, are a hypocrite beyond belief if you are not going to apply that standard ubiquitously. If you think that what you take offense at is more important than my right to say something in innocence and not care if you are offended by it, than I have some choice words for you that I know you won't like.
But it's OK, I didn't really mean it offensively.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
The latest output from him concerned the issue that is severely damaging the National Football League, that is, the actions of a number of its players in kneeling for our National Anthem. It is not, Bryant tries to assert, a slap in the face to our armed forces and veterans, nor to the flag and the republic for which it stands. It is about other things and, therefore, he insists that we should not be concerned about the kneeling's reflection on those veterans and armed service members.
Now, what those "other things" actually are is a whole 'nother thing, depending on what kneeler you talk to, which kind of burns Bryant's thesis a bit. It's about "Black Lives Mattering", you know, except that it may be about police brutality (despite the statistics showing that racially-igniting combinations of the race of the cop and the criminal have declined hugely in 15 years, an inconvenient truth). It is about equal pay for women, we also hear. Maybe affirmative action, or maybe the designated hitter rule. Ask five people and expect at least three different answers.
And oh yeah, the first kneeler, Colin Kaepernick, said when he did it that he didn't want to honor the flag. So that whole "it's not the flag" thesis of Bryant fails the sniff test.
But, you see, it doesn't matter what the intent is. That's because it really doesn't matter what the person taking the action thinks it means -- it is how it is taken by those who hear it and are affected.
Doubt that? That is an absolute canon of the left, at least everywhere else. You can't say "Chinaman" to refer to a Chinese person anymore, even though when I say "Chinaman" I mean "a guy from China", which carries no implication other than that the person is from China. I certainly don't carry any pejorative or dismissive intent, as I do when I call an Englishman a "limey" or a Frenchman a "frog."
Nope, you're not supposed to say "Chinaman" because supposedly it would offend someone who is Chinese, although for the life of me I don't get why they would be, and have never heard an actual Chinaman say he is offended at the term.
You follow that? Let's go over it carefully. You are not supposed to do or say things that carry no malicious intent, if they can be construed by others as offensive to them. That's the mantra of the left and the professional offended class.
But according to Bryant, the whole take-a-knee-for-the-anthem thing is somehow different. No matter that literally millions of active servicemen, veterans and plain patriotic Americans -- myself included -- are deeply offended that the players are failing to respect their flag and anthem and could just as easily do their kneeling thing at a different time. We have to respect their intent and drop our feeling of offense.
Well, I call BS, Mr. Bryant. If you think I'm the one whose offense is not worth honoring, then you and your whole gang of kneelers need to shut up, if and when I start using what you think are racial pejoratives in my everyday speech. I certainly don't mean any offense by them, and if the rights of the speaker or actor to say or do something that someone else may take offense at, supersede the rights of the person taking offense, then it has to work all the time.
You sir, are a hypocrite beyond belief if you are not going to apply that standard ubiquitously. If you think that what you take offense at is more important than my right to say something in innocence and not care if you are offended by it, than I have some choice words for you that I know you won't like.
But it's OK, I didn't really mean it offensively.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Catfished ... Why?
I have recently started watching episodes of the TV show "Catfish", still on the air after maybe five seasons. It makes you think, it really does.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise, "catfishing" is a sadly-common practice, since the onset of online dating sites and chat rooms and the like, meaning, for a long time. The catfish is typically a "lives in Mom's basement" type, who goes onto those Internet sites using a fake profile with pictures of a much better-looking guy or gal whom they then pretend to be, never intending to meet the target but to have intimate conversations (and, often, solicit explicit pictures).
I have known people who actually have been catfished by these types personally. A famous instance was depicted on the TV show "Sister Wives", where one of the polygamous husband's four wives was catfished by a female pretending to be a male, which led to some very embarrassing subsequent episodes that the show, to its credit, aired in all its embarrassing non-glory.
The TV show "Catfish" is essentially an investigative tale. The only reason I didn't watch it for years is that I thought it was a setup show where famous people were taken advantage of. It is definitely not that. Actually, people who suspect that friends, loved ones or even themselves are being catfished contact the show, and the two hosts then interview the victim, gather data and then do lots of detective work to nail down who is actually making the calls, texts and the like.
Eventually the hosts go fly to see the catfish in person along with the victim, and the meetings of those folks are some really interesting television. And every episode has some form of that uncomfortable meeting. Yes, on rare occasions it turns out somewhat OK, to the extent that relationships where people have never met but at least one of them is really committed can turn out OK.
The hosts' work in getting to that point involves a lot of reverse phone-number lookups, image searches, that sort of thing -- stuff that you or I could do. The catfish victim could do that, of course, too -- except for one thing.
They don't seem to want to.
That's pretty much the point of this. For the most part, the catfish perps (at least as discovered by the show's hosts) are homely, overweight types, sometimes straight and sometimes gay (but sometimes targeting victims who are not). They seem to be using the stolen pictures to represent them as the people they wish they looked like. They are as much pathetic as pernicious; it is easy to dislike them because of what they do, but you know they're often in some sort of fantasy.
But so are the victims.
Let me give you my example. This was a tenant in a townhouse I once owned, divorced with a couple kids with serious problems. As part of her explanation of why her rent was late, she insisted that a person she described as her "boyfriend" would be back in the country from the Middle East soon, where he managed on an offshore oil platform. He would, he told her, pay for everything including the next six months of rent as soon as he returned.
I had not even heard of that particular "offshore oil platform" story (though I would later hear an almost exactly-the-same version from a different target, in a segment of the Dr. Phil show a month ago). I wasn't even familiar then with the notion of catfishing when the tenant told the story -- and I still could tell right away this was a fraud. I told the tenant it sounded very suspicious, and when she told me she had not yet met her "boyfriend", I told her to find another source of rent that, you know, actually existed. Naturally, within a couple weeks she realized this guy didn't.
As much as you can characterize the catfish perps, now that the show actually brings them out into the light, you can really characterize the victims as well. Riddled with self-doubt, desperate for love, affection and attention, it is abysmally easy to promise the victims lifelong love and get them to tell the catfish that they're devoted to them, and miss them, and want to be together. And, of course, to send explicit pictures. That's a pretty sadly common theme.
Here's the problem. I'm watching a couple episodes of the show, and I start to realize that the psychological and emotional issues that allow someone to be catfished on the Internet are not new. People have always felt the way those victims do; it's just that there is now an Internet to allow them to be taken advantage of.
So I wonder ... what used to happen, say, 50 or 100 years ago to those people? Did they go to bars, meet lowlifes with a good line and have their lives destroyed? Did they just hole up and read romance novels for their whole life and use books as their fantasy?
People have always needed to be loved. There also have always been the pathetic types who would prey on their need for affection. It's a shame that there is now not only a medium for taking that pursuit to a fairly professional level, but an outlet for the desperate, to where they are putting their desperation out to the world.
I couldn't be much sadder. But I guess I'm very lucky.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise, "catfishing" is a sadly-common practice, since the onset of online dating sites and chat rooms and the like, meaning, for a long time. The catfish is typically a "lives in Mom's basement" type, who goes onto those Internet sites using a fake profile with pictures of a much better-looking guy or gal whom they then pretend to be, never intending to meet the target but to have intimate conversations (and, often, solicit explicit pictures).
I have known people who actually have been catfished by these types personally. A famous instance was depicted on the TV show "Sister Wives", where one of the polygamous husband's four wives was catfished by a female pretending to be a male, which led to some very embarrassing subsequent episodes that the show, to its credit, aired in all its embarrassing non-glory.
The TV show "Catfish" is essentially an investigative tale. The only reason I didn't watch it for years is that I thought it was a setup show where famous people were taken advantage of. It is definitely not that. Actually, people who suspect that friends, loved ones or even themselves are being catfished contact the show, and the two hosts then interview the victim, gather data and then do lots of detective work to nail down who is actually making the calls, texts and the like.
Eventually the hosts go fly to see the catfish in person along with the victim, and the meetings of those folks are some really interesting television. And every episode has some form of that uncomfortable meeting. Yes, on rare occasions it turns out somewhat OK, to the extent that relationships where people have never met but at least one of them is really committed can turn out OK.
The hosts' work in getting to that point involves a lot of reverse phone-number lookups, image searches, that sort of thing -- stuff that you or I could do. The catfish victim could do that, of course, too -- except for one thing.
They don't seem to want to.
That's pretty much the point of this. For the most part, the catfish perps (at least as discovered by the show's hosts) are homely, overweight types, sometimes straight and sometimes gay (but sometimes targeting victims who are not). They seem to be using the stolen pictures to represent them as the people they wish they looked like. They are as much pathetic as pernicious; it is easy to dislike them because of what they do, but you know they're often in some sort of fantasy.
But so are the victims.
Let me give you my example. This was a tenant in a townhouse I once owned, divorced with a couple kids with serious problems. As part of her explanation of why her rent was late, she insisted that a person she described as her "boyfriend" would be back in the country from the Middle East soon, where he managed on an offshore oil platform. He would, he told her, pay for everything including the next six months of rent as soon as he returned.
I had not even heard of that particular "offshore oil platform" story (though I would later hear an almost exactly-the-same version from a different target, in a segment of the Dr. Phil show a month ago). I wasn't even familiar then with the notion of catfishing when the tenant told the story -- and I still could tell right away this was a fraud. I told the tenant it sounded very suspicious, and when she told me she had not yet met her "boyfriend", I told her to find another source of rent that, you know, actually existed. Naturally, within a couple weeks she realized this guy didn't.
As much as you can characterize the catfish perps, now that the show actually brings them out into the light, you can really characterize the victims as well. Riddled with self-doubt, desperate for love, affection and attention, it is abysmally easy to promise the victims lifelong love and get them to tell the catfish that they're devoted to them, and miss them, and want to be together. And, of course, to send explicit pictures. That's a pretty sadly common theme.
Here's the problem. I'm watching a couple episodes of the show, and I start to realize that the psychological and emotional issues that allow someone to be catfished on the Internet are not new. People have always felt the way those victims do; it's just that there is now an Internet to allow them to be taken advantage of.
So I wonder ... what used to happen, say, 50 or 100 years ago to those people? Did they go to bars, meet lowlifes with a good line and have their lives destroyed? Did they just hole up and read romance novels for their whole life and use books as their fantasy?
People have always needed to be loved. There also have always been the pathetic types who would prey on their need for affection. It's a shame that there is now not only a medium for taking that pursuit to a fairly professional level, but an outlet for the desperate, to where they are putting their desperation out to the world.
I couldn't be much sadder. But I guess I'm very lucky.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Whither the FBI?
"... for the FBI was incorruptible, as they knew."
If you don't recognize that phrase, it was written by Mario Puzo in The Godfather, that sterling 1969 novel of the Mafia in the '40s and '50s. The context being a Mafia one, it is interesting -- and Puzo researched the heck out of the topic -- that it was clear that the mob of the time, with judges and congressmen in their pockets, didn't even consider trying to infiltrate the FBI. They assumed that not a single agent would be able to be influenced. The context of the quote is actually why a mobster would have to use a different governmental entity to do his dirty work; the FBI was a non-starter.
I read that book around 1972, the same time when the movie of it was made. In fact, it was what convinced me that it was really hard to capture a deeply-detailed book in a movie without having to chop out entire plot lines, characters and content. The Godfather movie was really good, don't get me wrong, but the book was so marvelous that nothing could live up to it on the screen.
But the important part is that the Mafia thought the FBI was a brick wall as far as influence-buying and corrupting.
Is it indeed so now?
I have the most extraordinary respect for the agents of the FBI, the career servants of the USA who do the investigatory work of the Bureau and often put their lives on the line in their work. They are heroes of the same level in the USA as the military who protect us abroad, at least to me, and the agents I have known over the years are amazing individuals.
Of course, the FBI is a Federal agency. As such, it has a layering of its management to where its highest official, the Director (Christopher Wray at the moment) and several levels below are political appointees. That means that above the lower level of dedicated agents and agents in charge, the efforts of the FBI are overseen and controlled by people assigned to their positions for political reasons or based on their political positioning, along with their capability and experience.
We would like to think that sort of thing has no effect on investigations, but after the last year, we are convinced otherwise. We look at the machinations during the 2016 election, where 99.99% of prosecutors would at least have put the Hillary Clinton email BleachBitting scandal before a grand jury. James Comey, the politically-appointed Director at the time, not only declined to do so (after calling a press conference and announcing some of the evidence that any prosecutor would have taken forward) but grandstanded for months.
We still have Federal agencies full of political appointees -- appointed by Barack Obama -- whose replacement appointees the Democrat minority in the Senate has slow-rolled as far as they can, to prevent President Trump from having a government which is responsive to his policies.
The problem in the FBI is the comparison to the military. Sure, the Secretary of Defense is a political appointee, and the undersecretaries are also political, but there is a tremendous senior corps of governance -- the general officers -- who came up through the ranks and are a huge voice inside Defense for proper use of the military -- we know our generals and admirals, but the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, all politically appointed, are relatively anonymous.
The FBI also has a solid, senior level of career agents. But let's face it, all through 2016 there was plenty of talk that if Hillary Clinton was not at least put in front of a grand jury, many of the agents who worked on the case, and who had a pretty good sense that there was more than enough evidence -- and destruction of evidence -- to have a good case, would resign from the Bureau in protest.
Whether 100 did, or 50 or only one left the Bureau is not known, and certainly wouldn't be made known, regardless of who was the Director. But what did happen is that the reputation of the FBI as incorruptible took a big hit. If the Director could not be relied upon to put forth a case that 150 agents had worked on and developed, then the public would quickly change its attitude about the incorruptibility of the Bureau -- after all, the public does not readily distinguish between the dedicated agent corps and their political leadership.
I wonder now what the agents who worked the Email-gate case last year think, as we see public pressure for the Bureau to investigate the heck out of the Hillary-selling-uranium-to-Russia-for-$150M-to-the-Foundation-and $500K-to-Bill's-wallet scandal.
The agent corps is, of course, not particularly sympathetic to Hillary, at least when they go home for the day; they know corruption when they smell it. We know the facts of the case, in terms of uranium committed, payments made, etc. There is a lot to investigate, in stark contrast to the Donald Trump "RussiaRussiaRussia" election conspiracy nothingburger that still has a special prosecutor but no evidence of anything having happened.
So we will keep our eyes on the FBI as Uranium-gate hangs on in the part of the press willing to air it (i.e., only Fox News). I hope the current Director realizes that the reputation of the Bureau is far more at risk than it has ever been before, and that an unimpeded investigation of that apparent corruption and a real prosecution is necessary.
Otherwise, Puzo's observation may be an anachronism.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
If you don't recognize that phrase, it was written by Mario Puzo in The Godfather, that sterling 1969 novel of the Mafia in the '40s and '50s. The context being a Mafia one, it is interesting -- and Puzo researched the heck out of the topic -- that it was clear that the mob of the time, with judges and congressmen in their pockets, didn't even consider trying to infiltrate the FBI. They assumed that not a single agent would be able to be influenced. The context of the quote is actually why a mobster would have to use a different governmental entity to do his dirty work; the FBI was a non-starter.
I read that book around 1972, the same time when the movie of it was made. In fact, it was what convinced me that it was really hard to capture a deeply-detailed book in a movie without having to chop out entire plot lines, characters and content. The Godfather movie was really good, don't get me wrong, but the book was so marvelous that nothing could live up to it on the screen.
But the important part is that the Mafia thought the FBI was a brick wall as far as influence-buying and corrupting.
Is it indeed so now?
I have the most extraordinary respect for the agents of the FBI, the career servants of the USA who do the investigatory work of the Bureau and often put their lives on the line in their work. They are heroes of the same level in the USA as the military who protect us abroad, at least to me, and the agents I have known over the years are amazing individuals.
Of course, the FBI is a Federal agency. As such, it has a layering of its management to where its highest official, the Director (Christopher Wray at the moment) and several levels below are political appointees. That means that above the lower level of dedicated agents and agents in charge, the efforts of the FBI are overseen and controlled by people assigned to their positions for political reasons or based on their political positioning, along with their capability and experience.
We would like to think that sort of thing has no effect on investigations, but after the last year, we are convinced otherwise. We look at the machinations during the 2016 election, where 99.99% of prosecutors would at least have put the Hillary Clinton email BleachBitting scandal before a grand jury. James Comey, the politically-appointed Director at the time, not only declined to do so (after calling a press conference and announcing some of the evidence that any prosecutor would have taken forward) but grandstanded for months.
We still have Federal agencies full of political appointees -- appointed by Barack Obama -- whose replacement appointees the Democrat minority in the Senate has slow-rolled as far as they can, to prevent President Trump from having a government which is responsive to his policies.
The problem in the FBI is the comparison to the military. Sure, the Secretary of Defense is a political appointee, and the undersecretaries are also political, but there is a tremendous senior corps of governance -- the general officers -- who came up through the ranks and are a huge voice inside Defense for proper use of the military -- we know our generals and admirals, but the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, all politically appointed, are relatively anonymous.
The FBI also has a solid, senior level of career agents. But let's face it, all through 2016 there was plenty of talk that if Hillary Clinton was not at least put in front of a grand jury, many of the agents who worked on the case, and who had a pretty good sense that there was more than enough evidence -- and destruction of evidence -- to have a good case, would resign from the Bureau in protest.
Whether 100 did, or 50 or only one left the Bureau is not known, and certainly wouldn't be made known, regardless of who was the Director. But what did happen is that the reputation of the FBI as incorruptible took a big hit. If the Director could not be relied upon to put forth a case that 150 agents had worked on and developed, then the public would quickly change its attitude about the incorruptibility of the Bureau -- after all, the public does not readily distinguish between the dedicated agent corps and their political leadership.
I wonder now what the agents who worked the Email-gate case last year think, as we see public pressure for the Bureau to investigate the heck out of the Hillary-selling-uranium-to-Russia-for-$150M-to-the-Foundation-and $500K-to-Bill's-wallet scandal.
The agent corps is, of course, not particularly sympathetic to Hillary, at least when they go home for the day; they know corruption when they smell it. We know the facts of the case, in terms of uranium committed, payments made, etc. There is a lot to investigate, in stark contrast to the Donald Trump "RussiaRussiaRussia" election conspiracy nothingburger that still has a special prosecutor but no evidence of anything having happened.
So we will keep our eyes on the FBI as Uranium-gate hangs on in the part of the press willing to air it (i.e., only Fox News). I hope the current Director realizes that the reputation of the Bureau is far more at risk than it has ever been before, and that an unimpeded investigation of that apparent corruption and a real prosecution is necessary.
Otherwise, Puzo's observation may be an anachronism.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, October 23, 2017
Yanks and Yankee Fans
I do not like the New York Yankees. Let's get that out of the way right at the outset, although regular readers, even the ones in Russia (and apparently now, Venezuela) would know that. I have hated them with a white-hot passion that burns and glows for six decades and will for more.
I will also stipulate that there are Yankee fans who are perfectly nice, decent people. We had dinner with one last night. If you believe you fall into that category, you need not read forward.
Today I am, if not celebrating with schadenfreude, at least quite happy that the Yankees have lost their League Championship Series to the Houston Astros and can go back to playing golf and whatever they do in the off-season. But this year, at least, it is not because of the team and the players.
The losing pitcher in last night's clinching game was C. C. Sabathia, a decent enough fellow of gargantuan size and, well, minimal time in the gym relative to his time at the dinner table. Since he is a pitcher, that is not such a big deal, as he is not required to run much. Sabathia made his name at the tail end of the 2008. After many years pitching in Cleveland, he was traded that year for the stretch ru,n to the Milwaukee Brewers, where he pitched on very short rest on numerous occasions and, to the extent that a starting pitcher can carry his team to the playoffs, he did.
That part was good. The bad was that the next year he signed for an equally gargantuan contract with the Yankees; along with two other players they signed, the Yankees committed about $450 million to those three. To give you an idea how absurdly uncompetitive that was, that $450 million would have covered the Brewers entire player salary budget for over five and a half years.
Did the Yankee fans protest? Of course not. That had been the way their team operated for decades and it was their apparent birthright to spend as much as possible on free agents. They had really never gone away from that strategy in the modern (amateur player draft) era; even their teams of the 1990s that their fans laughingly describe has "homegrown" averaged about 18 of the 25 players having been signed away or otherwise acquired from other teams.
The Yankees, of course, won their only World Series of the 21st Century that year. For that, we can all be happy.
But what is different now is that the players themselves appear to be from a later generation. Sabathia is still there, of course, but in the losing game Saturday, four of the Game 7 starting lineup were actually from their organization (that's a lot), and four were acquired via trade. Only one, Chase Headley, the third-baseman and not a particular star, was a free agent. And, of course, Sabathia.
The bottom line is that the players are not a particularly obnoxious set, and while it is easy to root against them for the laundry they wear, it is a bit harder to dislike the players themselves.
But that's fine. You see, frankly, when the Yankees lose, it's a whole lot easier to cheer simply because their fans lose. New York, after all, is characterized as a place so parochial that cynical maps are sold there depicting everything west of the Hudson River as a vast wasteland. But I went to college where a lot of New Yorkers went, and they pretty much seemed to have borne out the stereotype.
If something was not from New York, it appeared, it was not good, or not as good, and certainly not relevant at all. This was the attitude that carried over to their sports teams. The Yankees had bought championships for decades; in the '50s and early '60s of my youth they went to the World Series every year except '54 and '59 and won it eight times in 15 years. No wonder their fans seemed entitled.
Entitled fans become obnoxious fans. Fans of the Red Sox (I am one, despite not being remotely a New Englander) knew self-doubt for 86 years until winning the Series in 2004 and 2007, after which they quickly took on the same cloak of entitled obnoxity. Unfortunately the Yankee successes of the late '90s revived any possibly-faded unpleasantness in their already-unpleasant personalities. They had to try to defend the fact that they were winning with the highest payroll in the game for almost all of the '90s and '00s, and for several years had payrolls about twice as high as the second- and third-place (and the other 27) teams in salary.
Aside -- the current largest payroll in the game belongs not to the Yankees (though they're close) but to the Dodgers of LA, who will be in the World Series this year. I will leave it to others to characterize their fans, as I pretty much know none of them, and their reputation is to show up in the third inning and leave in the seventh.
So as we wake up to the pleasant notion of a World Series minus a New York team, I will make a mild concession to the fact that I don't hate the team nearly as much any more. When they lose, I don't revel in the fact that the players are going home to the golf course.
But their fans, ah, a different story. Schadenfreude.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
I will also stipulate that there are Yankee fans who are perfectly nice, decent people. We had dinner with one last night. If you believe you fall into that category, you need not read forward.
Today I am, if not celebrating with schadenfreude, at least quite happy that the Yankees have lost their League Championship Series to the Houston Astros and can go back to playing golf and whatever they do in the off-season. But this year, at least, it is not because of the team and the players.
The losing pitcher in last night's clinching game was C. C. Sabathia, a decent enough fellow of gargantuan size and, well, minimal time in the gym relative to his time at the dinner table. Since he is a pitcher, that is not such a big deal, as he is not required to run much. Sabathia made his name at the tail end of the 2008. After many years pitching in Cleveland, he was traded that year for the stretch ru,n to the Milwaukee Brewers, where he pitched on very short rest on numerous occasions and, to the extent that a starting pitcher can carry his team to the playoffs, he did.
That part was good. The bad was that the next year he signed for an equally gargantuan contract with the Yankees; along with two other players they signed, the Yankees committed about $450 million to those three. To give you an idea how absurdly uncompetitive that was, that $450 million would have covered the Brewers entire player salary budget for over five and a half years.
Did the Yankee fans protest? Of course not. That had been the way their team operated for decades and it was their apparent birthright to spend as much as possible on free agents. They had really never gone away from that strategy in the modern (amateur player draft) era; even their teams of the 1990s that their fans laughingly describe has "homegrown" averaged about 18 of the 25 players having been signed away or otherwise acquired from other teams.
The Yankees, of course, won their only World Series of the 21st Century that year. For that, we can all be happy.
But what is different now is that the players themselves appear to be from a later generation. Sabathia is still there, of course, but in the losing game Saturday, four of the Game 7 starting lineup were actually from their organization (that's a lot), and four were acquired via trade. Only one, Chase Headley, the third-baseman and not a particular star, was a free agent. And, of course, Sabathia.
The bottom line is that the players are not a particularly obnoxious set, and while it is easy to root against them for the laundry they wear, it is a bit harder to dislike the players themselves.
But that's fine. You see, frankly, when the Yankees lose, it's a whole lot easier to cheer simply because their fans lose. New York, after all, is characterized as a place so parochial that cynical maps are sold there depicting everything west of the Hudson River as a vast wasteland. But I went to college where a lot of New Yorkers went, and they pretty much seemed to have borne out the stereotype.
If something was not from New York, it appeared, it was not good, or not as good, and certainly not relevant at all. This was the attitude that carried over to their sports teams. The Yankees had bought championships for decades; in the '50s and early '60s of my youth they went to the World Series every year except '54 and '59 and won it eight times in 15 years. No wonder their fans seemed entitled.
Entitled fans become obnoxious fans. Fans of the Red Sox (I am one, despite not being remotely a New Englander) knew self-doubt for 86 years until winning the Series in 2004 and 2007, after which they quickly took on the same cloak of entitled obnoxity. Unfortunately the Yankee successes of the late '90s revived any possibly-faded unpleasantness in their already-unpleasant personalities. They had to try to defend the fact that they were winning with the highest payroll in the game for almost all of the '90s and '00s, and for several years had payrolls about twice as high as the second- and third-place (and the other 27) teams in salary.
Aside -- the current largest payroll in the game belongs not to the Yankees (though they're close) but to the Dodgers of LA, who will be in the World Series this year. I will leave it to others to characterize their fans, as I pretty much know none of them, and their reputation is to show up in the third inning and leave in the seventh.
So as we wake up to the pleasant notion of a World Series minus a New York team, I will make a mild concession to the fact that I don't hate the team nearly as much any more. When they lose, I don't revel in the fact that the players are going home to the golf course.
But their fans, ah, a different story. Schadenfreude.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, October 20, 2017
Soviets in Democrats' Clothing
How many times, my friends, have you been in a conversation where one of the notions put forth, or an opinion that might take a more-creative mind to pose, is put down with a sneering "You're nuts!", or "You're crazy!" or some variant of the proposition that the speaker is psychotic. I would certainly like to have a buck for every time I've been responded to that way, or responded myself that way.
Yes, I'd like a buck for every such time. Or maybe ... a ruble.
It is a sad attribute of dictatorships that their number-one goal is to sustain their power. Lenin, Stalin, Khaddafi, Saddam, Assad, U.S. congressmen, to some degree their first priority was and is to negate any challenges to their power.
The Soviets, right up until the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, held rock-solid power over the Soviet Union and its satellites. Uprising in Hungary? Tanks. Uprising in Whocareswhereistan? Tanks. But there have always been opponents, and the good old Soviet Union has always had a go-to tactic for its internal opposition, particularly political ones. A very familiar one.
"You're crazy! Off to the psych ward."
Familiar? Of course. The Soviets were famous for their characterization of their dissidents as nuts, and putting them in psychiatric wards and mental hospitals ("psikhushkas"). It was the easiest way to get them out of the public eye without actually killing them -- not that plenty weren't murdered. I knew they were doing that when I was a kid, we all did. The Russians were not particularly creative in how they got rid of their opposition.
It is so familiar to me, that when my brother (credit where credit is due) pointed out to me this week that the Democrats were doing the same thing, and that I needed to address it in a column, it rang a loud bell.
Yes, the left is taking a page from their leftist predecessors in the old Soviet Union. I give you Exhibit A, their treatment of President Trump.
Now, the president is many things. He is a very different national leader from what we are used to the previous 228 years or so. He does not suffer fools gladly, and he does not accept as inevitable the intransigence of the Senate in passing actual legislation. He does not accept the as-is in Washington, the Deep State, the leadership-by-tenure rather than leadership-by-competence mentality.
In other words, he does not accept how power is apportioned in the Government, and particularly the inertia that goes along with that. That makes him a challenge to the entrenched status quo. And particularly the Democrats, to whom he is the biggest threat (principally because his victory in 2016 tapped into voter unrest), cannot tolerate his presidency.
So they have taken a page from the Soviets' book, of all people.
Let us look at the Democrats' approach, as exemplified by the whole 25th Amendment nonsense that has roiled the Fake Media this week. Sure enough, they are calling the president crazy and mentally ill, and are trying to establish that "diagnosis" as the reality by shoving it through their willing accomplices in the media.
Donald Trump is perfectly sane and they know it. What he is, and they know this too, is a threat to their power. Now the left has no governmental power except for the Deep State (and that is a big "except"). But they do have the media, and they are willing to do anything, even Soviet-style tactics, to try to weaken their biggest opponent. So they will continue the mental-illness narrative as long as they can, no matter how silly it may be.
We need to continue to call out the left for their lack of principles and their lack of workable ideas. But we also need to call them out when they have to resort to mimicking the tactics of the Kremlin.
That is as pathetic as their ideas.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Yes, I'd like a buck for every such time. Or maybe ... a ruble.
It is a sad attribute of dictatorships that their number-one goal is to sustain their power. Lenin, Stalin, Khaddafi, Saddam, Assad, U.S. congressmen, to some degree their first priority was and is to negate any challenges to their power.
The Soviets, right up until the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, held rock-solid power over the Soviet Union and its satellites. Uprising in Hungary? Tanks. Uprising in Whocareswhereistan? Tanks. But there have always been opponents, and the good old Soviet Union has always had a go-to tactic for its internal opposition, particularly political ones. A very familiar one.
"You're crazy! Off to the psych ward."
Familiar? Of course. The Soviets were famous for their characterization of their dissidents as nuts, and putting them in psychiatric wards and mental hospitals ("psikhushkas"). It was the easiest way to get them out of the public eye without actually killing them -- not that plenty weren't murdered. I knew they were doing that when I was a kid, we all did. The Russians were not particularly creative in how they got rid of their opposition.
It is so familiar to me, that when my brother (credit where credit is due) pointed out to me this week that the Democrats were doing the same thing, and that I needed to address it in a column, it rang a loud bell.
Yes, the left is taking a page from their leftist predecessors in the old Soviet Union. I give you Exhibit A, their treatment of President Trump.
Now, the president is many things. He is a very different national leader from what we are used to the previous 228 years or so. He does not suffer fools gladly, and he does not accept as inevitable the intransigence of the Senate in passing actual legislation. He does not accept the as-is in Washington, the Deep State, the leadership-by-tenure rather than leadership-by-competence mentality.
In other words, he does not accept how power is apportioned in the Government, and particularly the inertia that goes along with that. That makes him a challenge to the entrenched status quo. And particularly the Democrats, to whom he is the biggest threat (principally because his victory in 2016 tapped into voter unrest), cannot tolerate his presidency.
So they have taken a page from the Soviets' book, of all people.
Let us look at the Democrats' approach, as exemplified by the whole 25th Amendment nonsense that has roiled the Fake Media this week. Sure enough, they are calling the president crazy and mentally ill, and are trying to establish that "diagnosis" as the reality by shoving it through their willing accomplices in the media.
Donald Trump is perfectly sane and they know it. What he is, and they know this too, is a threat to their power. Now the left has no governmental power except for the Deep State (and that is a big "except"). But they do have the media, and they are willing to do anything, even Soviet-style tactics, to try to weaken their biggest opponent. So they will continue the mental-illness narrative as long as they can, no matter how silly it may be.
We need to continue to call out the left for their lack of principles and their lack of workable ideas. But we also need to call them out when they have to resort to mimicking the tactics of the Kremlin.
That is as pathetic as their ideas.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
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