Saying the Quiet Part about Kamala Quietly

I believe that after the election Tuesday, the Wednesday morning episode of The View may have been its highest-rated one ever.  I know my Best Girl and I watched it, the only time we ever have, out of the sheer entertainment value of watching the "ladies" of The View melt down on national television.

They said a lot of things. Most of it, of course, was to assign blame for the loss of Kamala Harris in the election, a terrible defeat for her that included losing, as it appears now, every single one of the so-called swing states that were going to decide the election.

Blame.  Blame given to racism.  Blame to sexism and misogyny.  Blame to "not getting the message out."  Blame to Trump, oh, Lord, so much blame to Trump and his awful supporters    .  Blame -- and this is hysterical -- on the timing, that Kamala simply didn't have enough time to mount an effective campaign because she was "put in the race" so late, after Joe Biden stepped away from the campaign.

Ah, so much to say.  First, let us not put all this on The View; it is the Friday after the election as I write this, and the airwaves are redolent of Democrats all blaming all manner of reasons for the outcome, mostly blaming the electorate as being too stupid to vote the way they wanted them to vote, but with plenty of attacks on each other.

Then, let us not let them get away with the "she was put in too late" argument. It assumes that she was "put in" by some third party, totally ignoring the fact that (A) she was an active participant in pushing Biden out; (B) Joe Biden endorsed her almost as soon as he announced he was stepping down; and (C) she was the only potential candidate who would have been allowed to use the $200 million or more that was in the Biden campaign's accounts.

It was none of that.

I've listened to a lot of the hand-wringing and internecine warfare among Democrats the past few days, and heard about all their arguments for why she lost.  Blame this, blame that.  All of it was wrong.  The answer is very simple:

Kamala Harris was probably the worst major-party presidential candidate in the history of the country. 

What do we want and need in a presidential candidate?  That's actually a pretty easy question, and it applies no matter whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, no matter your race, creed, religion or planetary origin.

An excellent candidate, very simply, would have a set of principles that covered all of the issues of the day in a cohesive manner (that is, the moral foundation for the principle in one area would be consistent with the moral foundation of any other principle).  The candidate would have a plan to implement the solutions to those issues in a way that is likely to work because the solutions had worked before.  And such a candidate would have the ability to communicate those solutions, fluidly and in a compelling manner.

That's not hard, to understand, right?  The candidate simply needs to have a moral compass, an understanding of the issues, a good handle on successful solutions, and, most critically, the ability to explain to the public all of those things.

I need to tell you that I wrote those last three paragraphs without thinking about Kamala Harris. Yes, I planned to explain why she was a putrid candidate, but I wanted to clear my head and think only about what I wanted in a candidate first, so my further argument would be compelling and, frankly, if it hadn't worked I'd have deleted this column.

So I'm thinking about Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris.

Ronald Reagan, aka "The Great Communicator", was a splendid candidate by those criteria.  He was an extremely principled man, famous for appointing people, letting them know his guidance, and then letting them do their job with little interference. He had an unparalleled ability to get his points across with intelligence, persuasion and humor. And he won big when he ran.

Donald Trump is a unicorn among unicorns.  Yes, he has principles -- small government, peace through strength, individual freedom, sure.  One very unusual thing about him is that, when considering what has worked before (to address an issue), he reaches back not into a government solution, but into his long business career. 

Of course, that is his medium, business, but on top of that, he believes from his background that solutions which leverage logic and people's basic financial motivations are likely to work best, and those are almost never government solutions. He is an entertainer, so he can certainly communicate, although it is the M.O. of an entertainer vs. that of a politician. But you know what he's saying, and on top of that, he will answer any question, anytime, with a very facile ability to answer those questions. He loves sparring with the media.

And then, ah, Kamala.

Thinking on why she was a terrible candidate, I go straight back to my criteria for what makes a good one -- there are foundational principles for why you do things, those principles underpin your proposed solutions, and you can explain that to the public.

None of those apply to her.

We are three days past the election, and still none of us knows what she believes. She believes ... let's see ... "Trump is a threat to democracy."   Pretty sure of that. Should we be a strong world policeman or not?  Don't really know. Do tax cuts stimulate the economy in her view? Nope, no idea. Should the border be -- oh, never mind, she ran the border for three years and pretty much never went there.

With no principles articulated, nothing she proposed could be defended. It should be easy -- "We'll do X, Y, and Z because doing so will accomplish A, B and C, all of which are worth doing and, by the way, X, Y, and Z worked when it was done over here."  But with no principles, she couldn't come up with solutions that reflected them.  Instead, she tossed out pap -- the "opportunity economy", for example -- that no one could wrap their head around, since they lacked either an underlying principle or any substantive description.

And finally, she could not communicate, well, anything.  It was patently obvious throughout the campaign, if not throughout her tenure at VP, that she and the English language were not the closest of friends.

She held exactly zero press conferences during the entire campaign.  With three months' worth of opportunities to explain to the nation who she was and what she would do, by answering unscripted questions from the assembled press, she declined all of them. She held exactly one interview that was not "friendly media", that being with Fox News's Bret Baier, and answered every question by bringing Donald Trump into the answer and explaining that he was a threat to democracy.

Bret Baier: "How are you feeling today?"
Kamala Harris: "Donald Trump is a threat to democracy!"

She had an opportunity to go on the Joe Rogan podcast -- listened to by tens of millions of people and not necessarily a hostile situation -- but she insisted on limiting the 3-hour standard session that Trump had already done and done well -- and that Rogan come to her (Trump had gone to him in Texas, knowing what a huge exposure opportunity it was).  Rogan, who needed her far less than she needed him, said "no thanks", and she lost that massive opportunity to reach voters.

We all asked ourselves why she would insist on only one hour rather than three, when the opportunity was so great, and didn't like the obvious answer -- that she simply was incapable of a three-hour conversation; she didn't know the issues well enough to talk about them for any length of time. Moreover, she couldn't seemingly carry on a conversation for any length of time, let alone three hours.

She couldn't convey her views, partly because she was unable to convey views on anything for any length of time, and partly because she seemingly had no views on anything, only politically-based positions that she may or may not have even believed.

Had she been able to communicate, she would never have offended millions of Catholics by skipping the Al Smith Dinner during the campaign, and certainly not letting it come out that skipping it was because she was afraid of seeming to support the faith with a strict doctrine opposing abortion on demand.

No, Kamala Harris was as bad a presidential candidate as we've ever seen. 

It is telling that the Democrats in the chattering class are saying all manner of things about why they lost the election.  It was Biden's fault, or racism, or xenophobia, or the stupidity of the electorate.  It was everything except the actual reason.

Kamala Harris.  She was the reason the Democrats lost.

And as long as they refuse to acknowledge that, they will continue to lose elections.

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What's the Perfect Climate?

Surprisingly, this late in the 2024 campaign, the issue of global warming (dba "climate change"), has been effectively a no-show in the election.  No one talks about it, and even when the moderators of one of the debates brought it up, the candidates didn't do very much with it and it was not discussed in any postmortem the next day.

However ... that didn't mean it didn't make me think about the topic.  Obviously, I've written about it in this site more than once, but I feel that there is a point I haven't made, or at least haven't written about loudly enough.

The climate-change folks have always appeared suspect to me.  They scream at you for not taking them seriously, and let's just say the obnoxious screaming Swedish teenager with Asperger's hasn't done anything to help the cause.  Their actions and loud warnings are 100% consistent with what they would do if their only purpose were to stop all progress.  Obviously if they really wanted clean energy, they'd be fast-tracking nuclear power plants like crazy which, of course, they're not.

And I've said all that.  A few times.

But there is one argument that I haven't really expressed as a core point, as well as a core indictment of the climate-change people and their purpose.  It has nothing to do with interpretation of data that the polar ice caps are or are not melting, or pictures of harbors from the 1920s that show sea levels exactly as they are now.

It's really a tenet that I go to religiously when someone passionate about something asks me to pay for something, or give up something, or in some way change my daily life.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Doesn't that seem simple?  What is the goal of any proposed action, we have to ask, so that we can rationalize if the sacrifice, payment or change is actually worth it.

The problem is that, when you ask that question, you have to be careful what kind of answer you're willing to accept.  For example, if I were in discussion with little Greta, I would ask her my own version of the "What are you trying to accomplish?" question.  She would answer the original with something like "We're trying to stop the earth from warming up and destroying life!"

And that answer I would not accept.  It's too simple, and leads to follow-up questions which, of course, the left does not like.  But I love follow-up questions.

Like for example this one, the very basic challenge.

"'Hey, Greta ... we all know that the earth has had a couple peaks and valleys in temperature in the last 1,000 years.  Leif Erikson called Canada "Vinland" because it reminded him of grape-growing areas back in Greenland, Norway and Iceland, where grapes no longer grew 500 years later when the climate was markedly cooler.

"There has been, just in the last millennium, a wide range of temperature patterns that predate any possible influence of human activity.  So what specific pattern do you regard as ideal, to the point that any action we take for the purpose of affecting the climate would be to move toward that specific pattern, whether up or down?

"And, by the way, why is that pattern better than any other?" 

No one, not at all, ever asks that question.  God knows no one ever answers that question.  And there's a good reason.  The left doesn't care a bit about climate change per se, and whether or not the earth warms or cools a degree is not their concern.  Remember that their goal is to seize and retain power, and enlarge government to the point that it controls everything, so if they can control a huge entrenched government, they hold absolute power.

No, what the left gets from arguing climate change is to justify further enlargement of government, not to fix a temperature pattern.  So for them to agree that a specific pattern is optimal would be to say that if we were to achieve it, the apparatus that got us there could be dismantled.  And the left does not dismantle government agencies.  Ever.

That's why you have to challenge climate fanatics with that question all the time -- what is the perfect temperature profile across the earth, and why is that the one?  We know, for example, that approximately four times as many people worldwide die from cold-related illnesses or problems than heat-related ones (what -- you didn't know that?). So why, Greta, are we more concerned about the temperatures going up than falling?  Is it because none of this is really about the climate?

You'll never get a good answer (if you do, please tell me).  To the climate crazies, it's about control, not climate.  They won't answer the question because they've never even once asked themselves that, and that's because to them it's not a problem whose solution can be defined.

It's a problem from which they can argue for more power.  As it always is.

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Election Security? I'm Still Worried

It is only three months until the 2024 general election.  I am still worried about the voting process, and I don't think it is paranoia.

Remember 2020?  I certainly do.  I remember that the vote-counting was summarily halted in multiple states -- all swing states -- around the same time, and magically when the counting resumed, Joe Biden somehow reversed what were almost insurmountable leads.  He got 81 million votes, despite the fact that he did not campaign, stayed in his basement the whole election season, and generated virtually no enthusiasm.

I remember in around December of 2020, watching the live televised hearings by the state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (and which are still on YouTube).  Each hearing was about eight hours long, and each one had a series of election workers testifying,  They had all provided sworn statements under penalty of perjury, and then testified to the content of their statements.

Worker after worker testified how Democrats in the counting stations refused to let Republican poll-watchers near the counting stations to observe, or were abusive and obstructive.  They testified to trucks with cases of ballots being brought in (in the case of Philadelphia, they were arriving from out of state somehow) and counted.  

Ballots that were supposedly absentee or mail-in votes were scanned even though the ballots had no creases in them like actual mailed ballots would have to be, were clearly machine-filled out, and all had only the Presidential race box filled in -- all for Biden.

Counting machines that were not supposed to have even the capability to connect to the Internet were, magically, connected to the Internet where their totals were accessible.  

In Georgia, the counting center in Atlanta was in a hotel that had its own video surveillance, giving us a nice view of what was happening.  A halt was called to the counting in the middle of the night, and the observers were taken out of the room -- but at least one counter was blithely shoving ballots into the machine with no one watching (except the camera recording all this) -- and periodically putting the same ballot in multiple times, where it was recorded repeatedly.  A plastic tub of ballots was dragged out from its hiding place under a long curtained table and was being counted -- again, with no observers.

All this and way more was testified to in those hearings.  The various legislative committees before which the testimony was taken expressed their shock -- we're shocked, I tell you! -- and then did ... well, I don't know what they did, because outside of some prosecutions for fraud in various states that didn't appear to have arisen from the hearings, the silence since has been deafening.

I've not understood it, to be honest.  I can't imagine that anyone is very comfortable with the idea that our elections are not on the up and up, and yet I cannot point to a single individual, save perhaps the filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza -- and certainly no one in politics -- who has even referenced those hearings, let alone made an issue of what was testified to.

I'll grant you this -- the left has an uncanny skill at pushing narratives.  You remember the so-called "big lie" that they promoted, the lie that was actually the truth, that the 2020 election was corrupt in at least five states?  How difficult did they make it to claim that the election wasn't on the square with that "big lie" narrative?  Who was willing to make a big deal out of it, except the very brave D'Souza?

Well, folks, it is 90 days from the election.  If the RNC isn't using a ton of that $40 million a month that Elon Musk is providing, to jump all over election integrity, then they don't have much of an argument if come January there is a Cackler-in-Chief.

And they'll have only themselves to blame.  Fix it -- now!

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Well, THAT Was a Lot of Fun!

Regular readers of this column who know I play golf may recall almost four years ago when I surprisingly shot a nine-hole score of 33 and documented it here for my own edification and memory, rather than to inform the world.  After all, I had hundreds of other articles for the hopeful good of the reader; I could afford one or two for my own fading memory.

So it is with that foresight that a month or two from now, this particular memory will fade, that I record the incident here, far more for me, but if you enjoy this, I will definitely not be complaining.

A week or so ago, I did something that golfers aspire to.  I shot my age.

If you're not a golfer, you just have to think about it to realize why golfers consider it a feat worth aspiring to.  Even par on a course is typically about 72, and most everyone I play with, guys who are mostly 65-85 years old, have never sniffed an even-par round.  Obviously in that age range, your skills are fading, and while the"age target" gets easier each year, the game gets harder.

Golfers my age (73) have to play a fair amount, and have to have started from a reasonable level, to break 80, given that our old-man muscles need to rely on memory that we don't all have.  I was lucky; I had played for my teams in high school and college, so I did get the opportunity to develop a halfway decent swing, but I'm a very small guy, and could only hit so far.

In college, in four years with the team I only shot as low as 75 -- once.  In med school I had a 76 -- once.  Both were four over par on those courses.  In the community where I live, there are four courses, each a par 72, and in the eight years I'd lived here I'd had a 75 once, and a few 76s.  Never had I been within less than three strokes of even par.  An most of my scores started with an "8."

Those other good rounds, though, were all characterized (as was the nine-hole 33) by making a bunch of long putts.  That's plot material.  More plot material is that the course that I was playing, the Founders Club, was (to me) the hardest of the four, and was the last of the four on which I broke 80, two years after starting to play it.

My round that day started at 7:00am, leaving a modest warm-up time at the range.  I noticed that my short irons seemed to be going straight, but a couple degrees right of where I thought I was aiming.  So I tried adjusting my aim to the left a bit, and just going with it. 

Hole #1 is a fairly short par 4.  I'd hit a drive up the right center, leaving a wedge shot to a pin in the right rear on a green that doesn't hold well.  Remembering the lesson from the range, and with bunkers right off the green to the right, I moved my aim to the left, and dropped the shot a bit left of the pin, about ten feet short.  The birdie putt was makeable, but the greens weren't breaking as much as you read them, and I left it a few inches left for par.

There are three holes at Founders that are particularly difficult, all in the sense that they are a bit long to get your second shot on the green.  They're all on the front -- #2, 7, and 9.  Hole #2 needs a long drive with a bit of fade, but mine was left of where I wanted it, and still had about 180 yards to the green, which has a bunker in the way on the left.  I hit a hybrid shot next to that trap, in a slightly thicker rough.  The chip from 30 feet popped out, rolling way too fast, but it hit the flagstick square, jumped up and stopped two inches from the cup.  Even par after two.

The third is a fairly short par-3, with the traps left.  So it took a bit more nerve to play the shot a bit left of where I thought I should, but it had seemed to have worked, and the shot landed about seven feet left of the pin.  The lesson about putts not breaking as much had evidently not "taken", though, because what looked like a one-foot breaker to the right only broke about six inches.  No birdie.  Even par.

There are four par-5 holes at Founders, and three of them are reachable in two including #4.  It isn't easy, mind you -- there is a large hilly, heavily trapped area 120-150 yards from the green on the right, and water up and down the left, leaving a very narrow area of fairway to play to.  But if you get your drive out there long enough, you can play a fairway wood or long hybrid into the green, trying to avoid a bunker positioned front right..

I got a drive out there pretty good, long enough to take a long hybrid, a shot that tends to draw hard if I swing even a bit too hard.  This one I played out to the right, and it drew across, right to left but with the visual impediment, I couldn't see over the hills to see where it went.  It had gone off the left side of the green, and I pitched up about 12 feet short of the pin.  The putt was level, and in what would be the only putt I'd make over seven feet all day, I had the birdie.  One under.

Hole #5 is a par-3, with a wide, right-sloping green but one very narrow front to back, so you really needed to dial in the distance, especially given the wide bunker covering much of the front of the green.  My drive landed about 20 feet left and above the pin, for a fairly straightforward two-putt par.

The sixth is a short par-4 but uphill; a long drive can reach the green as long as you avoid the large trap that covers the front right of the green.  I drove about 20 yards short on the left side, with a fairly easy pitch up to the pin for a tap-in birdie to go to two under. At this point I joked with my playing partner that I'd been two under after six on that course before, and it hadn't ended all that well.  The next three holes were going to be a serious challenge.

The 7th his a par-4 that is of medium length -- except you can't hit driver; there is a swamp crossing the whole fairway from about 185 yards out to about 235 yards -- and if I didn't mention, this is a coastal course with a prevailing wind that is in your face starting with the sixth hole, so you're not flying that swamp with a driver at age 73.

A good drive leaves you a 7-iron at best to the very elevated green, unless the wind is dead (or with you).  My fairway wood off the tee was not, however, a "good drive."  It was in the fairway but a good bit to the right, leaving me a hybrid to try to reach.  I hit it pretty well, but just a bit short, and it rolled back down the hill.  My pitch up to the pin all the way at the back was about ten feet to the right, and once again I missed left for my first bogey of the day.  One under.

No. 8 is a fairly long par-5 where the drive is paramount -- there is a huge sprawling tree whose trunk is on the right edge of the fairway 220 yards out, and the fairway slopes to the right to put the otherwise good tee shot more to the right, where the branches make it hard to hit a second shot.  The green is quite elevated all around. My drive went up the middle and rolled a bit to the right center, but was out long enough to where I could play a 3-wood on my back foot and keep it under the lowest branches.  I got it another 200 yards up the right side of the fairway, and dropped a lucky wedge two feet from the pin for a kick-in birdie and back to two under.

The ninth is the hardest hole on the course -- a very long par-4 slightly doglegged left, and with a pond just off the green to the right.  You are forever hitting into the wind, so you're just as likely to hit a 3-wood second as anything else.  I hit a good drive but still had a hybrid in, which I left 20 yards short of the green.  My pitch was about ten feet away, far enough to reliably miss it for a bogey and to finish the nine one under at 35.  

Having survived the last three holes with no pars but just one over, I thought there might be a decent round here, if at least I could keep the back nine at 38 I'd shoot my age.  I had two bogeys to give away.

The tenth hole is a tricky par-4, not long but curiously shaped.  The fairway is straight until the end, with the green located off to the left, very elevated, and guarded by a huge bunker in front as you look from the fairway, but to the left as you hit your approach if you get your drive far out there.  I was hitting my drives pretty well at this point, and just had a wedge in, which I got to within 15 feet and, as I would do all day, missed the putt.

I love the 11th hole, a reachable par-5 (I've reached it twice ever) that bends a bit right, but has water on the right the last 100 yards, and a fairway that rolls toward it.  A good drive is one up the right center, setting you up to fade a fairway wood toward the green without threatening the pond.  I did both of those things, but the wind suppressed distance on both, leaving me 15 yards short of the green.  The pitch was too short, though, and didn't quite reach the horizontal dip to run down to the pin, leaving me a two-putt par on a birdie hole.

The 12th is a practically 90-degree dogleg left; using driver would take you through the fairway and risk rolling into a long pond that runs up the right side after the bend of the dogleg. But not enough club risks a big ol' fairway bunker up the left side that leaves no productive shot to the green. My hybrid innately draws, so I hit that off the tee, right up the middle and it drew into a good position in the hilly fairway. My approach was just short of the green but the pin was up front, so I could putt and indeed two-putted for a par.  Three straight pars to start the back nine, and I was still one under overall.

The par-3 13th is totally dependent on pin placement.  The elevated green is closer on the right side, but on this day the pin was in the back left, 25 yards further back than a typical placement on the right.  I hit 6-iron but got it up into the wind that was now with us, and it rolled off the back center and a bit down a hill.  I had to hit a flop shot, which I got within 10 feet -- not my putting range this day, though, and the two-putt bogey got me back to even par with only one stroke left to give away.

Still no birdies on the back nine, and I sure could have used one. The 14th is an interesting par-5 -- very wide fairway to drive into, but even if you pound a drive, the shape of the hole prevents going for the green in two.  There is a large set of bunkered hills up the left side of your second shot, forcing you to approach up the right side -- but the green is actually up the left side after a bit of a turn left, and there is a huge lake just off the green on the right.  The best play is a layup just in front of the lake and a wedge in.

That was pretty much my play; my drive was up the left side, and a 7-iron second  to about 100 yards from the pin, which was on the right, dangerous since the whole green slopes right, toward the water.  I wanted to be safe with the wedge, so while I had the distance, I pulled it a bit and left a scary 35-footer downhill.  One of my playing partners was before me and behind me.  Of course he stroked his putt too hard and it rolled to the fringe.  I then naturally left mine about seven feet short with a fun little breaker for par.  I'd made exactly one putt as long all day, but got the par putt to drop.  Still even par with one stroke to give away to shoot my age.

No. 15 is the last really challenging hole on the course.  It's a pretty long par-4 with a really, really narrow window for your drive.  There is water on the right starting at about 185 yards.  The whole fairway slopes toward the water.  At about 200 yards, there is a trap right center of the fairway; it's not huge but a lot of otherwise good drives kick right and catch it.

The optimal drive is up the left side -- not left-center, but left, almost to the cart path -- enough to roll past the trap on the left side and leave maybe an 8-iron to a severely elevated green.  I was able to get my drive up that path, and survived the hole with an 8-iron to 40 feet and a two-putt par.

Then I blew the 16th badly.  It is an easy, short par-3, just a wedge or 9-iron, but with water all the way to the front and full on the left of the green.  The breeze was right to left, and the pin back left, so it was just a matter of aiming center rear and letting the wind do its thing.  But apparently I helped it a bit too much, and it landed on the left fringe and started rolling toward the water.  Thank God it didn't actually reach the pond, but it left an awkward pitch back up to the pin.  Two putts, bogey.  A couple par-4s left and no room to play with; I needed to pars for 73 and my age.

Unless the wind is strong against me, I use a fairway wood off the tee on #17, as a driver hit well would reach a swamp area, and it's better to be safe and lay up short of it.  I had a 9-iron in, and although I didn't hit it squarely and it had a lower trajectory than I wanted, it landed in front of the green and rolled on for a short two-putt par.  Just needed to par #18 for a 73.

The closing hole at Founders is a really interesting par-4, a slight bend to the right.  There's a swamp in front for the first 100 yards, so it's not a factor, but up the right side until about 180 yards is a set of large bunkers in a slightly hilly area.  Your best drive is a slight fade over the left edge of the bunker area, with enough juice to be sure to clear them.  The ball should then roll out down a slight descent toward the green.  A drive too far left, though, encounters a pond just left of the cart path.

I had two shots left to execute.  The drive was a bit left of where I wanted it, but it did fade and rolled to where, with the pin in the front, I had a full sand wedge in, and the number was right there for that shot distance.  Just get it on the green, and two putts would do it.  Concentrate ...

The other guys certainly knew what was going on, and were watching, but I wasn't nearly as crushed with stage fright as I might otherwise have been.  I caught the shot clean, and launched it way up in the air, where it was just a matter of distance.  It took forever to come down, and I was just hoping it would land on the green ... which finally it did -- 18 inches from the pin!  I dropped the wedge, raised my arms reflexively in triumph and screamed.

I tapped the putt in for the only birdie I'd have the back nine, and an even par 72.  It was a stroke less than my age, and three strokes lower than the best round I'd ever had before.  Yet it was practically unremarkable; I made one putt of seven feet (the par on #14) and one of ten feet (the birdie on #4), and otherwise did not make  a putt over three feet the whole day.  I hit twelve greens in regulation, eight pars and four birdies, and only made two pars from off the green.

As I wrote to start this, this piece is really only for me to record something that was an accomplishment for myself, so I wouldn't forget the details.  If you enjoyed it (somehow), all the better, and thank you, but that's just a bonus.  Strangely enough, two weeks later I did it again, a 73 this time at the Players Club; I needed to birdie the 18th to shoot my age, and just missed a 15-foot eagle putt on 18 that would have been another 72.

Thanks for reading.  We'll see if this is a permanent improvement 😊

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The Democrats and the Piggy Bank

Funny thing about piggy banks.  We've all had one in our remote youth, or at the very least we know exactly what they are.  They are ceramic pigs with a slot in the top through which a child can drop a coin.  The idea, of course, is that children will learn to save, rather than running around spending their change on candy.

But it isn't really the "saving" part of it that is relevant.  It is that the ancient versions of the piggy bank did not have a hole at the bottom through which the child could remove the cover and retrieve its "savings."  There was one way to get the coins, and that was to hit the pig with a hammer until it broke, and then pick up the treasure among the ceramic dust and shards.

Back in the day, that was the lesson -- that savings wasn't just a wallet; it was money you literally had to break the bank to get access to.  It was "put away" for a reason. Since you had to break something permanently to get at the money, you had to be really sure you needed it -- not just want, but need.

So Democrats.

Only the fools and self-deluded TDS types believed that there was an actual case to be made against former President Trump in the recently-concluded show trial in New York on the accusation of him having ... well, even after the verdict, no one really knows what he was charged with.

But the Democrats, from whoever tells Joe Biden what to do and say, all the way down to a corrupt prosecutor and corrupt, conflicted "judge" in New York, had to make a calculation.  They are the core of the Deep State, and there is no threat to the Deep State any bigger than Donald J. Trump.  In their eyes, he had to be gotten rid of one way or the other.

The question, of course, is what they were willing to do in order to make that happen.  And here is where the piggy bank analogy comes into play.

The essence of the piggy bank is the act of destroying it permanently to get what you want. Are you, the child, willing to kill the bank permanently to get what you want, or does the impermanence of the pretty pink pig encourage you not to take drastic steps.

The actions of the child are easily explicable -- if you haven't read this marvelous piece (http://uberthoughtsusa.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-cubbyhole-theory-of-maturity.html), you'll realize that children have no capacity to see the consequences of their actions past the next hour and a half.

The Democrats are acting like children, and not in the good way.

But it is how they always act.  Do they care about the impact on the country or the economy of letting 15 million totally unvetted illegal immigrants into the USA?  No, of course not -- to them, the immediacy of millions of illegal voters mostly, in their eyes, voting Democrat is the same as the coins in the piggy bank.  Sure, break the nation into shards, as long as they can grab and hold power.

Worse ... do they care about the destruction of the American legal system as long as they "get" Trump in 2024?  Of course not; there is no bigger threat to their institutional choke-hold, and it's worth it to set insanely contemptible legal precedents to do so.  Those legal precedents could be turned around in Republican states and used against the criminal Hillary Clintons and Joe Bidens of the world, but they are but sacrificial lambs if it happens, and besides, the Democrats assume that Republicans would never do such a thing.

Was I overboard in claiming that the Trump prosecution risks the destruction of the American legal system?  Of course not.  

Think about it ... the judge in that case committed a textbook worth of reversible errors.  In a neutral state, the judgment would be thrown out on its ear in five minutes, and he would be disrobed, disbarred, and never allowed near a courtroom again. But he knew there would be no consequences, so he just barred defense witnesses, gag-ordered the defendant, sustained every prosecution objection while overruling every defense objection, all while his daughter raked in millions in consulting fees to politicians trying to destroy Trump.  Conflicted?  Naahhhh.

The judge, like the Democrats, did not care about the long-term consequences of his actions, partly because he knew that in New York there wouldn't be any to him, but more because the importance of the moment -- "getting" Trump -- outweighed any damage to the institution of American jurisprudence.

The Democrats are exactly the same.  A piggy bank is of no permanence to them; the "now" is the thing and their future is controllable if only they can overwhelm the electoral system with illegal voters, xerox-copied votes, corrupt counters, and anything else to ensure their long-term stranglehold on power.

The November election is incredibly crucial.  And you can bet your piggy bank on it.

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Caitlin Clark, Mr. Supply and Mrs. Demand

Through an insane set of circumstances, and the exponential instance of the Peter Principle, Kamala Harris is actually the Vice President of the United States as I write this. There is indeed a God, so that is not likely to be the case after next January, but it's true for the moment.

The people who tell Joe Biden what to do and to (try to) say have given her a few assignments over her tenure as VP, none of which she has attended to, enough to have accomplished anything. As I write this, the biggest news item is the rioting on college campuses by pro-Hamas protesters, but the puppeteers can't let Kamala near that one, because her husband is Jewish, and that wouldn't work.

So she has been given the Caitlin Clark "situation" to try to address, which really isn't any kind of problem, but putting Kamala in charge of it will keep her from cackling about something actually important.

So here is the "situation." Miss Clark was, until recently, a female college basketball player for the University of Iowa.  Her well-deserved claim to fame was as a great scorer, lots of three-point shots, that sort of thing. Although her team failed to win the women's NCAA basketball championship, she was excellent and, as a result got a lot of people to watch the tournament -- and was drafted first in the WNBA's amateur draft, by the WNBA's Indiana team.

Should she sign with Indiana, which she may have already, she will be paid either $75,000 or $85,000 a year (I'm not sure), which is the maximum salary for a first-year player in the WNBA.  While lots of Americans would be really happy to make either of those figures each year, as Miss Clark is one of the best in her field, some think that figure is very low, and that is the issue that Kamala has been assigned to cackle about.

The reason, of course, that the almighty "some" think the figure is low, is that in the male version of the WNBA (the actual NBA, which I haven't watched for years), ten-figure annual salaries are routine.  The guarantees for the stars in that league, like, you know, that guy, and that other one, are well over $100 million. Each.

So Kamala, being Kamala, is starting from the idea that the difference in salary structures is because in one league the players are women, and, you know, patriarchy, and all that.  The two leagues, after all, are both basketball, and therefore by simple economics should pay the same.

[OK, actually Kamala is starting from the idea "Wait, this is what you want me to take up as a cause in an election year?  This is the best you've got?"]

But I digress.

First, let us note that Miss Clark will not starve.  Nike, that paragon of virtue and Chinese child-labor sweat shops, has signed her to a huge ten-figure contract to endorse sneakers. This whole issue is not about what size mansion the young star will be able to afford.  She is getting paid. The reason for the seemingly insane disparity in pay between the men's and women's leagues is pretty simple.  

People actually watch the men.

The interest in the NBA is sufficient that they actually sell tickets, which is an upwards of 20,000 per-game average for the most successful teams, and still over 16,000 for even the least popular ones.  Of the 12 WNBA teams, by contrast, not a single one averaged even 10,000 tickets, and four of the 12 averaged fewer than 5,000 per game.

More importantly, that attendance disparity was enough to where there is no real television contract of any size to pour revenues into the women's league.  Ticket sales are nice, but TV is where the buckos come.  Without those buckos, there is no money to pay NBA-level salaries.  And without sufficient eyeballs to sell commercial time, no TV network is going to want to air their games.

Kamala, who has no capacity whatsoever to argue a point, is going to try to contend that the reason for the disparity is some kind of sexism at play. Well, I suppose it has to do with the fact that one league is women and one is men, but only in the sense that the women's game has not shown itself to be interesting enough for sufficient numbers of people to want to watch it.

The laws of supply and demand are immutable in a free society.  The price of something is established by its availability (supply) and market (demand).  If no one wants the product, the price goes down; likewise, if there is some increase desire for the product (demand), the price goes up, and vice versa for both.

The salaries in the WNBA are what they are (i.e., comparably low) because the product (the women's professional game) has failed to attract an audience (demand) sufficient to where people will either buy tickets or watch on TV -- either of which would generate revenues.

The teams themselves are businesses -- they exist to make profit, meaning to generate more in revenue than the amount of their expenses.  If the demand for the products (in this case, the entertainment of a basketball game) is steady, the revenues from tickets, concessions, etc., will be a certain consistent amount each year.  If that amount is only enough for a salary budget of, say, $1.2 million a year, then across a 12-player roster, that averages about $100,000 per player, which is pretty much the WNBA average salary.

Why, you ask, might that salary budget be so much lower than that of the NBA?  Kamala, of course, won't bother to ask the question (she already claims she knows the answer, which by the way is wrong).  The answer she wants to believe is that it is all about prejudice against female athletes and patriarchy and privilege and that crap.

The correct answer, unfortunately for her, is in the numbers themselves.  Specifically, the number at issue is the revenues of the two leagues.  The WNBA, across all teams, generates about $60 million per season, or about $5 million per team.  The NBA, on the other hand, the men's league, generates about $10 billion per year (yes, with a "b").

In other words, they pay a lot more in salaries because they actually bring in a lot more cash to be able to pay their players with.

While I find neither league's games interesting enough to watch on TV, let alone pay for a ticket, it's clear that across the 350 million or so Americans, there is plenty of interest in the men's game, and little to none for the women's game -- less than one percent of what the men's game brings in, going by revenues generated.

I believe that Kamala will jump all over the fact that the viewership for the recently-completed NCAA women's tournament championship game was actually higher than that for the men's championship, which was won by I forget whom. 

What I do know, though, is that the women's game was at 3:00pm EDT on a Sunday afternoon, while the men's game started at 9:20pm on a Monday -- meaning that the only TV audience for the men's game were the alumni of the two teams and a bunch of insomniac gamblers.  There were no casual watchers, since you have to stay up until like midnight on a work night to see the end of the game (yes, the NCAA can be immensely stupid).  I don't know how much of a factor that was in the disparate TV audience, but it sure had an effect in my home.

I can hear it now from the Vice-Cackler-in-Chief.  "Now people are going to start watching the WNBA in record numbers, and the players should be paid what the NBA players are paid!"  Yes, she will say that, because she thinks that way.

First, if the WNBA players were paid even half what the NBA players are paid, the league would fold in a heartbeat, because there wouldn't be enough revenue to pay a single player per team, and the game is even less interesting without any players.

Second, and more important, is Americans' habits.

Let me remind you about another uninteresting sport -- soccer.  And I'll further remind you that every four years (or so) there is this event called the "World Cup" where, after some arcane qualification system, teams representing a couple dozen countries play every once in a while and eventually one of them wins.

Once in a while -- and remember, this is only played every four years (or so) -- the USA men's or women's teams qualifies for the tournament, and whips up some temporary interest in the game on this side of the pond.  ESPN and the other globalist media whoop and holler and declare that now Americans will be forever interested in soccer, which not coincidentally is broadcast by ESPN and other globalist media.

But it never happens!

I don't care how well one of the USA teams does; within three hours and 27 minutes of the USA's last game, Americans all turn to something else, and completely forget about soccer until the next World Cup, three or four years (or so) later.  The game has failed to engage Americans for decades and clearly never will.  Fun to play, dull as sin to watch.

This is exactly what will happen with the WNBA, and for exactly the same reason.  People don't watch because the women's pro game hasn't made itself sufficiently appealing to where it can draw an audience, any more than soccer has.

Good for Caitlin Clark; she has developed a skill to its highest level and is going to get paid boatloads (albeit by Nike, not the WNBA).  It just isn't enough to have any lasting impact on America's perception of the attraction of women's pro basketball. After her first couple of pro games (which, mind you, will not have the drama of an NCAA final), audiences will go back to doing what they did before they ever heard of Caitlin, and Nike will be very lucky to recoup its investment.

And Kamala will be off cackling in the distance, having failed to come close to recognizing the immutable pairing of Mr. Supply and Mrs. Demand.

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Hong Kong, I Love You, Too

Well, I think I do.

Hong Kong, which we somehow allowed to get turned over to the Chinese Communist Party some years ago, has become #1 in a fascinating statistic.

You're probably aware that this column, after four-plus years of a new submission every day, has been in a sort of "visiting column" status, where I write something new when the urge strikes but don't feel a specific obligation.

But there are well over 1,000 columns out there and I have no intention of taking them down.  A column on, say, July 14, 2016, reflects what I was thinking on July 14, 2016, and it would be rewriting history, which is why I don't go back and change the substance of anything out there in UberThoughtsland.  

So when I see a demographic shift in the readership -- and, thank you, there are still hundreds of reads of all different columns every day -- I have to ask why.

And that came about when I did a periodic check of the readership, only to discover that lately, on a given day, there are about a thousand reads from, of all places, Hong Kong (!).

So from the bottom of my heart, thank you, I think.  Given that Hong Kong is now governed by the CCP, I have no idea whether it is the ordinary, freedom-loving Hong Kong residents, or officials of the Party in charge, who are reading my columns.

There seems to be no real logic to which ones are being read; they don't cover any consistent topic but seem more from a particular era, as if the reader picked a month and started reading.  Neither approach is an indicator to me as to whether I should be flattered or frightened.

So this is a polite inquiry -- if you are in Hong Kong and enjoying these columns, please reach out to me and let me know how you found the column and whether you'd like some more frequent pieces (or less frequent).  I am actually quite interested.

Thank you!  I look forward to hearing from you. And by the way, I looked it up -- here is the actual column from July 14, 2016.  Enjoy: 

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Be Really Careful What You Ask For

As I write this, jury selection is going on in the kangaroo court in New York City that is to be hearing the "case" against former President Trump.  The case, such as it purports to be, is based on the accusation of misstating a payment made in conjunction with a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels, the porn star.

That particular offense under state law is actually a misdemeanor, not a felony, and under the law the statute of limitations is two years, meaning that the charges for the particular offense expired years ago.  However, Alvin Bragg, the alleged District Attorney, has managed to get this case into court by contorting it into a felony.

How'd he do that?  By trying to show that the NDA declaration was done in connection with some sort of campaign expense fraud. Such a connection makes the original offense a felony, not a misdemeanor, which extends the statute of limitations.  The problem there, which would have gotten the case laughed out of any court in the USA not in NYC or LA, is that the "campaign expense fraud" that was supposed crime to which the misdemeanor was "linked", was already investigated by the hyper-Trump-hating Southern District of New York, and the state could not come up with evidence to file charges.

Work with me here ... Bragg had to try to turn a misdemeanor into a felony, and the only way that Bragg could do that was to tie it to a second "crime", which according to its previous investigation, didn't happen and couldn't be prosecuted.  That there is indeed a judge who hasn't already belly-laughed the case out of court long ago is an astonishing indictment of the justice system in New York.

I had not paid much attention to the case, figuring that, if and when it had gotten to trial, I would pay attention to it then.  So I wasn't very aware of the circumstances until very recently, and was pretty astonished to hear how tortured the logic of the prosecution had to be to get to the point where even a New York judge would take it on.

Naturally, I started to think about how a jury would handle that tortured logic, and whether the idiotic pathway taken by Bragg would be seen by at least a few of them as an idiotic pathway, one that they would prefer never be used in the justice system ever again. I really would have wanted to have gotten on that jury.  Really.

That thought process was had over my morning coffee before starting work, as the news was on the TV and I was watching.  Yeah, I'd really like to get on that jury ... as long as I didn't have to live in Manhattan, or go to Manhattan, or get within 400 miles of Manhattan.  Yeah, I'd like to be on that jury.

Literally, 15 minutes later, I checked my emails from the night before.

Included in the emails was one from the United States Postal Service which, like many Americans, I get first thing in the morning to tell me what mail will be delivered in my mailbox today.  It's a nice service, since we don't actually have a mailbox but, rather, a cluster box a ten-minute walk from our house.  If there's nothing of note to be delivered that day, I don't have to bother going to the mail kiosk that day.

I'm not lying.  Today, 15 minutes after expressing a silent wish to be on the jury for an absurd case that shouldn't even have gotten to the impaneling of a jury, my morning mail notice included a letter from the United States District Court, from Raleigh, NC.  I had to bust out laughing -- no question that letter is a summons for jury duty.

No, they won't be hauling me up to New York to sit as a venireman for the Trump trial.  But I'll be back again as one here, over 40 years after serving on the jury for a murder trial -- https://uberthoughtsusa.blogspot.com/2017/12/remembering-my-murder-panel.html for those of you who missed that piece from 2017.

Be careful, very careful, what you ask for.

Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton

Singaporean Fandom

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

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

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

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

Terima kasih!

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

 

This Column Has Moved

Good day!

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

           robertsutton.substack.com

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

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

- Bob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gotta fit the narrative, you know.  

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

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

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

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

Unless, of course, you are white.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you want to explain hair straighteners to me then?

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

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

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

I imagine that you get the idea by now.

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

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

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

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

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

Even when applied to hair straighteners.

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

Visiting Column #63 -- It Was Real, Tashi

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

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

Tashi's first days with us

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

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

Seven months and loving carpets

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

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

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

"Christmas Cat", 2014

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

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

Rooting for the Sox over Seattle, 2011

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

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

Enjoying her couch bed in January

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In coelo quies est.

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

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

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

So ... Joe Biden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because, then would would happen?  Nothing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was then, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They described severe harassment and eviction of Republican poll watchers.

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

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

So here's the thing.

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

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

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

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

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

Now what, indeed?

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

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

And that stinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, it didn't have to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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