Grapes Without Wrath

Back when I was in college, some campus organization called the Lecture Series Committee (LSC) would show weekly, fifty-cent-admission movies, in a large lecture hall.  Mostly they were close-to-first-run recent flicks, with a classic thrown in every once in a while.  Students would laugh or cry, the movie would end, and everyone would leave when the credits rolled.

On one occasion, though, maybe around 1970, they showed the 1962 movie version of "The Music Man", the great story of the con man who comes to a small town in Iowa in 1912 to sell band instruments and falls in love, that sort of thing.  We've all seen it; it's a classic now but back then was only a few years past its release.

Among the stars are the four members of the School Board, played by the members of the Buffalo Bills barbershop quartet.  They're the four whom the con man keeps distracting by getting them to sing every time they confront him asking for his "credentials."

For this showing at M.I.T., the lecture hall was packed, with standing students all around.  Admittedly, it was winter in Cambridge, not much else to do except study, but it was really jammed.  Lots of laughter, lots of fun ... then the credits ran.

And no one left!

Four or five hundred college kids, who by this time were usually heading for the exits, stayed in their seats and actually applauded the credits!  You'll recall that the final scene is this gargantuan band pouring out of the auditorium, and as they march down the main street, all the main characters join in the parade.  For the credits, the actors' names show on the movie screen as each star marches along ... Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, on down the line.  The kids in the lecture hall applauded vigorously as each one was seen ...  Paul Ford ... Hermione Gingold ... Buddy Hackett ...

Then came the School Board, among the paraders.  And when the name "The Buffalo Bills" appeared on the screen, the movie audience stood up!  I will never, ever forget that.  Amidst the applause, itself unusual for an LSC movie, or maybe any movie, what got everyone even more roused, enough for a standing ovation, was a barbershop quartet.

- - -

I recall that moment today as I remember a gentleman named Dick Grapes of North Tonowanda, NY.  That name will probably not ring a lot of bells for you; he was not in that movie, nor did he go to M.I.T.  But Dick Grapes was certainly part of the story.

Barbershop quartet music is simply phenomenal when done well (and execrable when done poorly).  The Buffalo Bills, who started in the late 1940s in Buffalo, New York, were indeed phenomenal, enough to have won the international championship of barbershop quartet singing in 1950.  The winning group consisted of Vern Reed, Al Shea, Bill Spangenberg -- and Dick Grapes.

Buffalo Bills, 1950 (from left: Vern Reed (tenor), Al Shea
(lead), Dick Grapes (baritone), Bill Spangenberg (bass)

The four were not professional singers; Shea was a cop; Reed a boys' club executive and Spangenberg a truck driver.  Fortunately, their jobs allowed them flexibility to comply with their heavy singing schedule.  But when the opportunity to move to New York City and be the quartet in the Broadway version of the Music Man came up in 1956, they decided that either all four would go together -- or the quartet would not go.

Dick Grapes had a very good job in sales.  When the Bills won the audition, he determined that he simply could not take the risk and go to New York.  However, he argued sternly that the group should indeed pursue the opportunity with a replacement -- which, to our everlasting joy, they did.  Fifty years later, I was privileged to meet Mr. Grapes, then in his eighties, as he emceed a contest and regaled the 10,000 fascinated attendees with Buffalo Bills stories.  What a gentleman I met, a great story-teller but the same warm, kind individual who decades earlier had pressed his friends to succeed even when he could not join them.

It is an interesting aside that these days, the mention of the name "Buffalo Bills" is far more likely to evoke thoughts of the NFL team of that name.  That has more relevance to this story than you might think -- for many years, the older gentleman manning the down marker at the Bills home games was none other than Dick Grapes himself.

Bill Spangenberg died, sadly, in 1963 shortly after the release of the movie version, Al Shea in 1968.  Vern Reed, the little tenor with the dark-rimmed glasses, passed away in 1992, Scotty Ward, who was the substitute baritone who joined the School Board for the Broadway and movie versions, left us in 1988.

This past Sunday, Dick Grapes passed away, a few weeks after his 90th birthday.  The last of the Buffalo Bills is gone, but they're reunited where the angels can hear how it's really done.  Kind o' like this.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

What Did the Kids Know and When Did They Know It?

Last week, the 2014 champions of the Little League for the United States, the "Jackie Robinson West" team based in Chicago, was stripped of its title.  The team, made up of young black players 11-13, had been determined to have been put together far afield of the rules, pulling in all-star players from beyond the boundaries within which it was permitted to have its players reside.

Naturally, given the racial composition, the race industry, led by good old Jesse Jackson (asking "Is this about boundaries or race?"), rose in protest.  They complained that there was a racial component to the title strippage (though they're careful not to name one individual to call "racist"), that it was terribly unfair, that these kids had been singled out -- and one other little element.

The kids, all seem to say, are pure as the driven snow in all this; they didn't know; it was the adults who did this, the kids were innocent and should keep their title, la la la.

Here's the problem: I don't believe it.

I played Little League 50 years ago.  I still remember my batting average (.294) and many of the at-bats I had.  I remember my coach's name and many of the players.

And I remember even in 1962 that you had to live in the proper area in order to be eligible to play in that particular league.  If you lived over there, you were in that other league.  So it is, is how it has ever been.  And I was 11.  I wasn't one of those adults running the league; my father didn't coach; my family had nothing to do with the administration of the league -- we just played ball.

And we knew there were residency rules to follow.

There is little doubt that the players on the team representing the now-disgraced Jackie Robinson West organization were aware that something was amiss.  How could they not be?  If you know the community where your league can be pulled from, and all of a sudden other kids you didn't know a week earlier start playing third base and center field for your team, you have to know.

They're 11-13 years old, they're not four.  They know quite well that something has changed and, I assure you, they have a sense of whether it was right or wrong.  They aren't stupid.  Look at the article; team officials were going to neighboring leagues to "convince them to go along."  The kids knew something was up.

Now, I don't "blame" the kids, at least not a lot.  What were they supposed to do, call the cops?  In Chicago?  But stop the whole blathering about innocent children.  They weren't complicit in the actual corruption; they didn't cause it, but they certainly were aware that the organization was playing fast and loose with the rules, loading their team with talent.

Nothing about this whole effort was good.  Kids had to be embarrassed in front of the country.  Adults screwed up royally and caused those kids to be embarrassed.  "Clean" players from the second-place team were permanently denied the chance to play for the Little League World Championship.  The shameless race-baiters are out again spouting their stupidity.

Just stop with the "innocent children" stuff.  They knew.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Crusader Rabbit-Hole

Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, our esteemed president jammed his foot in his mouth again, this time intentionally.  In trying to defend Islamic terrorists, a term he still won't use for no apparent reason, he made the following inane remark (it's about the three-minute point, but you've heard it):

"Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Of course, despite his protestations of being a Christian, and spending 20 years in the flock of that great American, Jeremiah Wright, he never learned that the name "Christ" has a "T" at the end; for some reason he kept saying "Chrise."  Listen to the recording; I'm not kidding.  He does it twice, it was obviously intentional.  Who does that?

But I digress.

Obama missed the point of the comparison that he himself gave.  Anti-Islamic-terrorist advocates, whether Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and whatever else, do not have to apologize for what happened in the name of their respective faith.

Because, and here's the point -- if the evils ascribed to the Crusades and the Inquisition happened today, we would condemn them with the same fervor that we condemn the acts of radical Islamist terror today! 

Obama's stupid "two wrongs make a right, or at least they prevent us from calling one wrong" comparison forgets that very thing.  The moral code under which the world operates in 2015 would call comparable actions to the worst of the Crusades evil, or at least something to be stopped -- same as Islamic terrorism is.  Today's world would have fought the Inquisition, and today's world needs to stop Islamic terror.

It bedevils most Americans that their president would take the discussion down a rabbit-hole, by making such a confusing and inappropriate analogy -- let's face it, he's saying that today's Islamic terrorists are no worse than medieval Christian inquisitors were and therefore should not be vigorously condemned -- what else can he possibly have been trying to say?  It bedevils us because the actions of medievals in a completely different society have not for centuries been thought of as "good" or "justifiable."

The actions of Islamic terrorists today must be measured not against the morality of the Middle Ages but against what we in 2015 -- and for at least a few centuries -- think of as right and wrong.  Seriously, do you think you could find a minister or priest of any Christian denomination who would defend the promotion of Christian values by war and murdering "infidels"?

Let us not fall into the trap of responding to Obama's words by debating his premise and defending Middle Ages Christians.  His rabbit-hole of Crusaders leads us to a comparison that is flawed and, I contend, intentionally so.

For what purpose, we can only guess.  And none of the guesses are pleasant when you're analyzing a guy who can't even pronounce "Christ."

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Calling All Grubers

As we are all aware, the disaster of a health insurance law we like to call "Obamacare" is facing a critical challenge to its existence in the Supreme Court shortly.

One of the 55,765 provisions in it (those cherries that Nancy Pelosi told us we'd have to pass the law to find out about) concerns the payments made by the Federal government, by which we mean "the taxpayer", to people below a certain income level to "help them with the payments."  The rest of us call that "income redistribution", by the way.

Those payments have to pass two barriers.  First, there is an income test; to receive money you have to be below a certain income level.  Second, and herein lies the rub, is that such payments can only be made, according to the law, to people living where there is an exchange [i.e., a health insurance marketplace] established by the State."

If you have read this far, you are of course aware of the legal challenge and its ramifications.  Some states have established their own exchanges as the law wanted -- but did not mandate them to create.  So we have states with exchanges and others without.  If the law makes the Treasury send checks to people in one state but not another, the infrastructure of the law will collapse.

So of course, the Administration is screaming that no, no, when the law was written the term "State" was meant to be "government" and, barring that, the law's direction for the HHS Secretary to establish exchanges for the non-compliant states makes them "established by the State" and, if that doesn't work, then gee, we can't have a whole bunch of the poor lose their insurance, can we (even though they didn't have it two years ago, and the Court can not take into account the impact of a ruling anyway; that's not what the Supreme Court does).

If I'm on the Court (and no one has threatened to put me there), I care about two things.  First, does the content of the law violate the Constitution?  Second, does the specific case (King v. Burwell) carry a misinterpretation or, conversely, a correct interpretation of Congress's intent in drafting the law?

Well, there's no doubt the Obamacare law is sufficiently constitutional as far as this case goes.  One could argue, in a separate case, as the Supreme Court has upheld the validity of the law only because the penalty for lack of insurance is actually a tax, and tax bills must originate in the House, not the Senate, that the passing of the law via budget reconciliation violated the Constitution.  However, King v. Burwell does not speak to that.  

No, the issue is intent, and on that there appears to be some doubt, depending on whom you talk to.  What is being asked is simply that, in Section 1311 of the law, where it reads "... and which were enrolled ... through an Exchange established by the State under 1311 ...", did Congress intend that "established by the State" referred to one of the 50 States?

So if I am Justice Sutton of the Supreme Court, I would be immediately on the phone to the U.S. Marshals Service asking them to round up one Jonathan Gruber, professor of economics at M.I.T., hand him a subpoena, and tell him to get his pompous butt to Washington -- now. I will ask him one question:  "Mr. Gruber, you are under oath, and the penalty for perjury is pretty bloody heavy when you lie to the Supreme Court.  Did Section 1311 of the law intend to refer to exchanges that were established by individual States, and is that provision, as you have stated before, in the law as a lever to force the States to comply?"

Mr. Gruber has stated his role in the development of the law many times.  It may be that no one knows the genesis of it any better.  Certainly no one else has claimed any more responsibility (we would say "blame") for its specific content, and the issues that appeared in its drafting, than Mr. Gruber.

Come on down, Jonathan Gruber, and tell the world under oath, at the risk of perjury and loss of tenure at my alma mater, exactly what that provision was intended to say.

I think that we all know what the correct answer is, and so does he.  Come on, SCOTUS, give him a call.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

In Praise of Laugh Tracks

I've been thinking about this for a long time and, yes, I do think about stupid, pointless things as well as deep, metaphysical ones.  Yes, the former trump the latter.

A long, long time ago, when Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and Jackie Gleason and John Forsythe and Bob Cummings showed up live on our 12" TV screens, the shows were live, there was an audience in the studio and when someone said something funny (or forgot their lines), the audience laughed.  In our living rooms in front of those little screens, we laughed along with them, and the actors vamped and waited politely until they could be heard.

That's the model we grew up on, the same as in Shakespeare's day (and he had some whoppers in a few of those plays) sans TV sets, and the same as today in live performances like comedy clubs and Broadway musicals.  They make funny, we laugh, and the timing is reset for the next line.

The only place that there is dead silence after a joke is in the movies, where there is no live audience and everyone in the movie studio is sworn to dead silence.  It has always been, at least to me, one of the distractors in film (the element that stops suspending my disbelief) that something funny happens and no one laughs.

It used to be the only place.  Some time in the recent past, some TV comedy, and I can't recall which, decided to omit the laugh track.  While other sitcoms proudly had one of their actors do a voice-over that "[Name of Hilarious Sitcom] is [filmed/videotaped/recorded] before a live audience" and raucous laughter accompanied the jokes, this one blazed a trail of silence, as if we were sitting in an empty theater.  Perhaps it was M*A*S*H; I know they took out the laughter in the OR scenes.

I plainly recall my first thought, which was "something's not right here", followed by "they turned off the laugh track", followed by "what were they thinking."  After a while, I started thinking something less pleasant, that is, that there is a whole lot of pretentious crap going on, if a stinking TV comedy is trying to get us to believe we're in a movie theater.

That was really what bothered me, the apparent smug self-importance of the people making decisions to believe that a TV comedy was too important to have laughter heard -- and no one is more smugly self-important than Alan Alda, the show's "creative consultant" and one of its lead actors. 

At any rate, now we have a bunch of TV sitcoms without laughing, from Modern Family to well, this one and that one; I've gotten so used to being unsurprised at the device that I forget which ones do and which don't.  I do know that I'm a lot more comfortable laughing with "friends" and sharing the humor not only with my lovely missus, but with the chuckles of the other unseen chucklers on TV confirming our taste in humor.

I hate that kind of pretense; I just know that the laugh tracks were pulled from those shows because some artiste thought the laughter to be beneath them (who knows, maybe it was theater girl all grown up who made it to TV).

I'll bet I have friends who just detest laugh tracks and wish they'd all go away, and they're just as entitled to their opinions as I am.  But I wrote it first, neener neener neener.

Make 'em laugh.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

What If Kanye West Complained and No One Listened?

It will be no surprise that my lady and I did not watch the Grammy Award ceremony on TV this past Sunday night.  I pretty much do not know who any of the performers are, I certainly don't know any of the songs or albums that were nominated, and I'm not much of a fan of award shows where an industry pats itself on the back for merely existing.  Meh.

However, the networks and the major websites have an obligation to feed the insatiable appetite of their audiences.  So for one news cycle of maybe 37 hours and 15 minutes, they talked incessantly about what happened at the awards ceremony.  This is typically confined to which celebrity wore the most (or least) outrageous attire on the Red Carpet; which celebrity wore the most wonderful (or worst) attire on the Red Carpet; which celebrity showed the most (or least) of their anatomy on the Red Carpet.  You know, that sort of thing.

Rarely is there much flap about who actually, you know, won the awards; certainly not as compared to the Who Wore What (and, among the cognoscenti, Who Wore Whom) topics.  There is, however, occasional flap about someone doing something or saying something on stage.

Now, let's understand that this is a classic FTM situation, and we follow the money by seeing who has something to sell.  And that someone appears more often than average to be Kanye West, who is apparently some kind of performer, married to the equally-talented Kim Kardashian.  A few years ago, West was apparently incensed because the performer Taylor Swift had won some kind of award at some kind of awards show that West thought would have been better presented to someone else.  He interrupted the presentation, then figuratively (or maybe literally) grabbed the mic, and sounded off in the middle of the ceremony about how the award should have gone to whomever his favorite was.

On Sunday, good old West was at it again.  According to the next day's screaming headlines, some one-named performer I was not familiar with won a Grammy in some category.  As it was being presented, West ran partially up on stage as if to parody his own rudeness of the past, stopped in mid-offense and returned to his seat.  The Actual Winner stopped and repeatedly called him back up, presumably knowing that giving West the mic again would make for better drama, but to no avail.

However, after it was all over, to no one's surprise, someone did a brief interview with West and his equally-talented wife.  West complained that Beyoncé Knowles, rather than the actual winner, should have gotten that particular Grammy.  His actual words were "... if the Grammys want real artists [sic] to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us [sic]. We ain't gonna play with them no more [sic]. Beck [apparently the name of the winner] needs to respect artistry and he should have given his award to Beyoncé, and at this point, we [sic] tired of it."

He didn't exactly explain who "they" are (the 2nd and 3rd "sic") nor who "we" are (the 2nd, 3rd and 4th "sic") and I really don't know.  My guess is that by "we" he either meant black people (e.g., he and Miss Knowles), since the two winners he didn't like were white, or "real artists", by which, well, I have no idea what he meant.  In fact, I'm having a hard time caring enough to finish this piece.

But yes, I have a point.

After his illiterate rant above, West followed with ... "We not playing [sic] with them anymore.  And by the way, I got my wife, I got my daughter and I got my clothing line (italics mine).

And there, friends, is where the old FTM rule made itself intensely clear.  Kanye West couldn't possibly care less who wins the Grammy for, well, whatever they didn't give the Grammy award to the person whom he says should have gotten the Grammy award.  No, this literary genius and his equally-talented wife have a clothing line, and by making all too sure that the topic of his clothing line showed up in the classless rant during and after the ceremony, we would theoretically remember his clothing line.

So here goes.  Kanye West, whoever you are, let me suggest a better solution.  I put a link to your clothing line right here, so that people with great taste in essay-writing will know exactly where to go to find your clothing line, and can spare you having to embarrass yourself and your equally-talented wife by doing stupid things at awards ceremonies.

There.  Everyone can now find your products.  Just sit back and enjoy the show from now on.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Syringes Up -- Don't Shoot!

In what must have been a slow news week last week, the flap du jour had to do with, of all things, vaccination of children against diseases for which we have actual vaccines that can actually prevent disease.

The only -- and I mean only reason that it got to the level of being a news item was because of comments made by New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, in England where he was asked about mandatory vaccination and remarked that parents had a role in deciding in certain cases when children should be vaccinated.

Since Christie may be running for president in a year, it is imperative that the press find ways to damage him.  His words were a bit muted -- "Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health ... I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that [the] government has to decide."  However, that gave the press plenty of ammunition to jump on him.

So gee, what's the right answer?  If you properly parse the governor's full text, he seemed to be saying that for many diseases, the combination of severity of the disease, availability of the vaccine and minimal risk of adverse consequences makes it right for the government to mandate vaccination.  He suggested that for others, parents should or could have input.

Unfortunately, his having said anything at all distracts from the discussion -- what he said is less important than the broader issue -- shall government ever mandate vaccination for any disease and, then, what is the process for determining which diseases and vaccines are to be on the mandate list?

Way back in September when I started writing, one of my very first pieces was this one, in which I explained that "moderate" was a terrible name for people who had a few views on issues that conflicted with their basic tendency toward conservatism or liberalism.  I suspect my belief here will not track so well with some who agree with my points on other unrelated issues.

I say "Give the kid the shot."

I say that -- and I also say that Government mandates are necessary -- because it is within the Federal and state governments' jurisdiction to protect the health and welfare of the citizens.  Now, I neither trust the Federal Government to make any decisions regarding the education of children, nor believe it is in its constitutional authority to do so, but health and welfare is a different topic.

We legitimately expect the Federal Government to research threats to the health of its citizens and promote (but not dominate) research into prevention and cure of those threats.

I consider it a public threat to the health of my children if they are in school with an unvaccinated peer.  I especially get worked up if that unvaccinated peer is in the USA illegally, but that's another topic.  If, through whatever legal process in place, a vaccine is mandated for use on all children of a certain age, then not vaccinating that peer is a criminal threat to the well-being of the community.

I also contend that, once approved for mandatory use, the manufacturer of such a vaccine should be insulated against lawsuit for adverse effects not connected to improper manufacturing process.

This is going to stir up a few folks, but there certainly should be a national policy on immunizing children, and that policy should be that a list of vaccines proven safe and effective against contagious illnesses be developed and continually updated.  All children shall be vaccinated in accordance with the list and their parent or guardian subject to Federal penalty if not.

And above all, the law shall mandate that unvaccinated children illegally in the USA shall be immediately vaccinated and then subject to deportation depending on their status under the current law (that's "law", not "executive order").  None of us can possibly think we can safely ignore the health threat of the tens of thousands of unvaccinated illegals flooding the USA.

Give your kids the shot.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

The Cubbyhole Theory of Maturity

As I write this, at 63 years old, I feel comfortable saying that I can see into the future.

No, I'm not telling you that I'm psychic or anything like that.  I simply believe that I have a good sense of the future impact of things that I do.  I would feel fine about taking actions, or avoiding actions, knowing that the likeliest outcomes of them would be positive, negative or whatever.

Now, that has nothing to do with me, per se, but with my age.

Think of it this way: a three-year-old does nothing but try things all day.  He has very little idea of what will happen afterwards and can visualize almost nothing that may result if, say, he jumps up and down on the bed, or runs with scissors, or tries to fly out the window.  He has essentially experienced nothing.

The capacity to anticipate the consequences of your actions expands as you get older.  A ten-year-old might be able to figure what will happen a few hours or a day after he does something; a high school student maybe a week.  Anything past that is beyond his event horizon and he is not so much prepared regardless of what happens then, but oblivious and unconcerned.

By 30, of course, humans have matured to the point of being able to make decisions that will have ramifications a year out, and it goes up from there.  I can't tell you that I know what will happen ten years from now, but I can visualize alternatives and likely outcomes.

I believe that there is a tangible way to look at this, and for that I use the metaphor of cubbyholes.

A long time ago, when I first started thinking about what "maturity" really meant, I considered things like sanity, like dealing with others, like values.  However, that seemed too vaporous a concept, and I needed something better.

Eventually I realized that the whole concept of "visualizing consequences" was core to defining maturity, and that the key was determining what gave us the ability to foresee those consequences.  It's actually pretty simple once you think about it.  We are able to foresee more likely outcomes as we get older, because we have seen the triggering actions before and remember what happened thereafter.

So think of a human's mind as an ever-increasing set of cubbyholes into which actions and outcomes, paired together, reside.  Every time we observe an action and reaction or consequence, and connect the two by cause and effect, our brain creates a new, referenceable cubbyhole with the relationship in it.  By the time you get to be, say, 40, you have seen a lot of things and have thousands of cubbyholes in that dusty old brain of yours -- and the number keeps expanding.

Eventually I have come to realize that what we call "maturity" is simply, stated another way, "counting cubbyholes".  The Founding Fathers didn't stick that age-35 minimum to be President in the Constitution for nothing; they knew instinctively that you needed a brain stuffed with more than 35 years of cubbyholes to be able to handle everything that came at you, the more the better.

We reach into one of those cubbyholes (and chuckle) when our little children make an excuse that we ourselves made many years ago.  Something in one of those cubbyholes tells us that a doctor in Nigeria is not actually ready to send us $1 million if we'll just give him our bank account number.  Another tells us that no, Sports Illustrated is not serious when they say their swimsuit issue is actually "sports."  And another told us that Obamacare was not a really good idea -- well, the Democrats in Congress had that cubbyhole, too; they just ignored it.

Of course, one of the cubbyholes is a special one, and that's the one that understands what I just wrote.  We've possibly heard the story of how an aide to an early 20th Century French president, Clemençeau if I recall correctly, burst into his office to tell the president that his son had joined the Communist Party.  Clemençeau replied calmly, "If he had not joined the Communists by the time he was 20, I would have disowned him.  If he is still a Communist at 30, I will disown him then."

Get it?  That special cubbyhole is the one where you discover that you don't know everything, and that pretty much everything you've thought of as a great idea has been thought of 166,754 times before (and mostly failed).  When you get that cubbyhole, your parents suddenly get a whole lot smarter than they used to be.

And you realize that what you're learning as you get older is a whole bunch of "if-then" relationships that make us wise ... and mature.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Thanking Those Who Took the Chance

The Obama Administration and its defenders have been on a six-year crusade to defame American business, and deny its function in American society as the primary creator of employment for the rest of us.  The president himself has made stupid remarks like "You didn't build that", while the next Democrat expected to run for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, made pretty much the same absurd statement -- "Don't let anybody tell you that it's corporations and businesses that create jobs", which is an all-time head-scratcher.

I do know that for all of my life, I would never have had a single job, had not an entrepreneur taken the chance and made an investment that provided growth (and not always success) for them and a job for people like me.

That includes the different people who threw together a landscape company, a bowling alley and a woodworking shop that provided me employment between college semesters.  It includes, in no particular order, people like the late Bob LaRose, the vision behind the company ATI and others later; Jesse Surles, the founder of the CPA firm for which I was the head of MIS in the 1980s; and the Malhotras, who created VMD, employing over 100 people last I looked.

It also includes some visionaries of the distant past, the founders of the Singer Company, Northrop Aviation, the Burroughs Corp., Grumman Aviation and others whose risks of decades past created immense firms providing employment for hundreds of thousands of Americans.  At the other end of the size scale, it includes my wife and me, who started two companies in the past 35 years which provided over a dozen jobs.

These people -- even the two of us -- represent the scale and scope of American business, taking risks that clicked and risks that failed.  By taking those risks to create value in products and services and growing demand for them, entrepreneurs have opened hundreds of millions of jobs for hundreds of millions of Americans -- even those not here legally.

So why is the Administration, aided by its associated Hillarys, blocking them?  Why do they take the extraordinary step of denying what the rest of us can see, that the American economy is built on entrepreneurship and leadership, and its success relies upon the capacity of risk-takers to create markets and hire the talent needed to bring them to fruition.

They do so because, friends, they're socialists, and they want it all without working for it.  To concede a fraction of an inch to the success of the economy of the USA, they have to step away from their notion that all capital innately belongs to the Government; that all rights ultimately default to the Government; and that all good derives only from the Government.  It takes, as Mrs. Clinton tries to insist, "a village", and that village is that benevolent one in Washington.  That's the one that has me paying for dental insurance for children I don't have.

As I look back on my professional life and the odd variety of firms which have paid me a salary for services rendered, I see that, in every case, the position traced its creation back to an individual willing to take the risk and apply the vision needed to create a company capable of engaging employees.  The USA looks up to these people; I look up to them for their success and appreciate what their efforts produced.

I also appreciate that the Government, at least prior to this administration, facilitated an environment in which they could create and grow, by doing what Government is supposed to do.  It defended our shores to protect our existence and out livelihood.  It oversaw interstate commerce to ensure a fair playing field.  It developed and defended the medium of currency within which we operate.

But the Government didn't build the economy, and it creates employment only at a cost to the rest of us. 

It is the entrepreneur whose creations produce economic growth, and whose risk-taking and investment and perseverance I salute today.

Yes -- you did build that and, yes, you did create jobs.  For that, I thank you.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

It's Not Execution, It's Murder

What to call it?

The ongoing saga of Islamic terrorism and its actions -- and victims -- practically screams for an honest characterization of its actions and the responses to it.  So here is my appeal to the national and international networks.

Please clean up your words.

When a person dies at the hands of another, the circumstances, not the media, dictate the appropriate word for what happens.  Sometimes it is an accident; sometimes it is intentional  Sometimes it is to make a point; sometimes it is retribution.  Sometimes when it is retribution, it is just -- and sometimes it is not.

There are actually words for those instances, and the media need to start using them properly.  The two that the media actually need to use most properly are "execution" and "murder."  Hint: they're not the same thing.

The media apparently have conflated "execution" and "execution-style" into one all-purpose term and, in the process, fogged up the appropriate meaning.  So let us start by getting all the terms right:

Murder is the intentional killing of an innocent who is intended to be killed by the murderer, despite the innocent having not been convicted of a crime.  The keys are that it is extra-judicial, and that no capital crime was committed by the innocent.

Execution is the organized, official judicial punishment meted out to the perpetrator of a capital crime in accordance with some standard quid pro quo guideline after something resembling due process.

Execution-style refers to the carrying out of the taking of a life in the manner of an execution, though without judicial process of any kind -- think St. Valentine's Day massacre, done like a firing squad, as an example.

The media unfortunately have continued to use the term "execution" so haphazardly as not to realize that when they use it incorrectly, they grant the presumption of due process to cold-blooded murderers.  That is my objection, and it is sufficient to drive the need for this column -- I do not want to see terrorists granted the imprimatur of some kind of justice, when they commit cold murder.

So let us apply terms appropriately, and stop captions like this one.  The Jordanian pilot burned by ISIS terrorists was not "executed", he was a prisoner and was murdered.  The people, including the policeman, killed in the Charlie Hebdo attack were not "executed", they were innocent of capital crimes; they were not convicted in any judicial environment -- they were murdered.

The two Iraqis killed by the Jordanians in response to the burning of the Jordanian pilot had been convicted of crimes in court -- they were actually "executed" in the proper meaning of the word.

Let us please start calling murder by its proper name, and reserve the term "execution" for the carrying out of a judicial process.  That includes murders here in the USA and overseas.

ISIS has no standing to execute anyone; they are murderers and their killings need to have the proper label.  They may be performed "execution-style", but they certainly are not executions.

One hopes the media will start executing this change immediately.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

What Good's the Music If You Can't Hear the Words

Way back in the late 19th Century, the master librettist Sir William S. Gilbert and the wonderful composer Sir Arthur Sullivan combined on a series of 14 operettas, most of them successful and all still frequently performed worldwide.  Of course, their respective roles -- writer and composer -- caused more than their share of tension between them.

In operatic tradition, the libretto was simply a medium for the composer to produce beautiful sung performances.  Sullivan, a protege of Felix Mendelssohn, was firmly in the camp that the music was the primary reason for the composition.  Gilbert, a lawyer and brilliant satirist, wanted his words to be heard and appreciated.  While the survival and thriving of their combined works offers a lasting tribute to the talents of both, their disputes over the relative priority of each others' contributions set the stage for contention in the field, that lasts to this day.

Naturally, this piece has almost nothing whatsoever to do with Gilbert and Sullivan, and everything to do with ... yes, Grey's Anatomy. No, I don't mean the historic textbook used in medical schools, of which I owned a copy while a student at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1973.  I mean the TV show.

Grey's Anatomy, as you surely know even if you've never watched, is a TV drama series set in a hospital in Seattle, with the staff and administration caught up in assorted affairs, marriages and child-producing, same as most medical dramas of the past.  The stories are interesting because medical stories invariably are interesting (hint: it's never lupus).  The dialogue is actually pretty quirky.

At least, the dialogue I can hear.

That's because, like several other shows of which Grey's is a fine example, the producers have apparently a side investment in the music industry.  Accordingly, there is a soundtrack running throughout much of the show, including during the dialogue.

In an effort, we presume, to sell lots of copies of the background music on iTunes, the volume of the background music is turned up to a decibel level comparable to that of the speaker of the dialogue.  This means that the ear of the viewer, which is trying to monitor the dialogue so as to follow the intricacies of the plot, catches many, but not all of the spoken words.  The percentage of words actually heard drops precipitously when the doctors, as they are wont to do, have surgical masks over their faces in the OR and you can't read their lips to help understand them, because the music is too $%@!&* loud.

I'm not young anymore, but my hearing is just fine (I had it checked).  And I'm not alone; just poking around Al Gore's Amazing Internet, I saw pieces (here's one) noting the same problem in passing.  Obviously the FTM principle applies here, and if you simply Follow The Money you can easily see that as long as there is some kind of vested financial relationship between the producers and some part of the music industry, this is not going to change.

But I'm going to go on record here, and let the producers know that watching Grey's Anatomy is far, far more work than it needs to be, and far, far less pleasurable an experience than it could be.  Would that they would simply drag out one of the ubiquitous focus groups, plunk them in a room, and use them to set the levels of the music low enough so that the words could be heard and understood, even behind surgical masks.

Sir William S. Gilbert would be very, very proud.  And I could finally figure out the remaining mysteries of the plot, like who's watching all the children they keep producing, when everyone is operating.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Strawmen Even in Baseball Writing

Jayson Stark is a pretty good baseball writer for ESPN, prolific and with a good understanding of the game.  That is, of course, with one exception that gets trotted out every year at this time and unfortunately displays his inability to avoid "going all strawman" on his readership.

You can see the 2015 version here; and I can save you the time by telling you that it his annual rationalization that baseball has better parity than the NFL (and therefore does not require a salary cap such as exists in the NFL).  Unfortunately, he does what good writers making a case or a point should never, ever do -- he pre-defines his parameters, using those which would help to make his case.

In Stark's case, he uses a comparison of how frequently top teams make the Super Bowl (or win it) against Major League Baseball teams' propensity to make or win the World Series, neither of which involve sample sizes worthy of being used in any argument.  So let's begin ripping his article apart step by step.

Let's start with the NFL.  Stark is thrilled about the Patriots and Seahawks being in the Super Bowl because, in his words, "... they’re making this way too easy for me to expose the fiction that permeates the popular wisdom about these two sports."  That "fiction", of course, in his view, is about parity in the NFL, and that the parity is based on equivalent team salary structures (which MLB does not have, given the huge disparity between the Yankees/Dodgers and everyone else, and the number of small-market teams barely sniffing the playoffs every ten years or so).

Here's the strawman part of Stark's case -- parity is about opportunity, not about result.  Let me say that clearly: The NFL has parity, in that each team has the opportunity to build a successful franchise and a semi-dynastic, successful team, because its resources are the same as each other team.  It is a pure meritocracy.

Stark's mistake is in looking at the result, which is that the NFL is indeed dominated by a subset of its teams, without celebrating the reason for that: In the NFL, unlike MLB, sustained success is, as it should be, a function of the quality of the organization, not the ability to outbid the other teams for the best players.  I feel like Jayson Stark needs to read that sentence 50 times.  If he did, he would finally get it -- the NFL has actually succeeded at parity, where Baseball has not (and I'm a much bigger baseball fan than pro football), because sustained excellence in the NFL, measured in wins per season over years, comes from good drafting, good salary management, good trading, good field leadership -- all the things that you want to be the reasons for success!

The Patriots and Seahawks organizations, like those of consistently successful teams such as the Broncos, Packers and a few others, do all those things well -- better than their rivals -- with stable, high-quality ownership and management.  Their down years are the exception.  The Raiders, Jets, Redskins, Browns and a few others have been bottom-feeders for the same reason in reverse, while improved organizations (the Lions for one) show improvement reliably on the field.  In baseball, only a few organizations are so competent (Oakland) as to overcome their relative poverty, and only a few (Mets, Phillies) so incompetent as to negate their high payrolls.

That is what you want as the factors of success or failure, not revenues.  If the consistently winning teams in the NFL are the best organizations, then bang, you have what you want, don't mess with it.

Baseball is not like that, almost at all, but Stark uses all the wrong metrics.  If you were to sit down with no data in front of you, and ask yourself what criteria you would use to decide whether there was parity in MLB, you sure wouldn't look at World Series winners any more than you'd assess parity in the NFL primarily on Super Bowls.  The playoffs, once you get there, are a crapshoot and far too small a sample size to evaluate.

No, you would look at a solid statistical analysis of wins and losses over a long period -- 15 years or so -- for a correlation with team salaries.  You could look at team revenues, but they're the cause of the salary disparity; the disparity is actually the effect which affects the salaries and thus the composition of the team on the field, so you need to look at salaries.  In fact, I would probably look at won-loss data only from April to August, because the pennant race shapes September and there are a lot of artificial losing streaks and skewed win-loss records in September from late call-ups by teams out of the race.

Surprisingly, I don't know the answer to that correlation, because I haven't done it.  But more importantly, Jayson Stark didn't do it either and, unlike me, he was paid to write that article!  His criteria for parity are, in fact, laughable, cherry-picked for his thesis.  For example, here are all of them:

- Only two MLB teams have repeated as World Series winners in 30 years
- Only the Yankees' six WS appearances 1996-2003 constitute a streak of that kind in 50 years
- All but 6 MLB teams have made the WS in the past 30 years and 17 have won one
- 30 of the 45 MLB playoff teams the past six years had not made the playoffs the previous year
- It was 2005 the last time a majority of playoff teams repeated from the previous year
- In the last ten years, 27 of 30 MLB teams have made the playoffs
- Five of nine teams with the highest 2014 payrolls missed the playoffs; three finished last
- Of the teams with the 12 highest Opening Day payrolls, only one of them won a 2014 playoff series

Take a look at that, because that is the totality of Stark's argument as far as MLB is concerned, and none of those factors is a useful measurement of the actual influence of payroll disparity in baseball; you would not use any of them unless you had pre-decided your conclusion and looked for statistics to support it.

In other words, first, he mistakenly defines "parity" in terms of outcome (in other words, that disparity should not happen at all, and all teams should win or lose equally over time, which is not "parity").  Second, he goes searching for data to support his thesis, rather than first figuring out the data to analyze and only then making his inferences.

I challenge Stark to do that analysis of 15 years of won-loss records from April through August and correlate the data against team payrolls (dollars, not rankings).  I have no idea what answer will come out (although I strongly suspect that the Yankees' lead in payroll in all years but 2014 will correlate with lots more wins than the average opponent, and that Oakland will be the outlier in the data).

But if it comes out that there's not much correlation, I'll be the first one to say "Mr. Stark, I was wrong."  I just don't expect I'll have to.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Plus Ça Change, Or Maybe Not So Much

In conversation recently, my younger son mentioned that a coworker of his had just returned from a trip to India, where he was originally from but had not visited in a very long time.  He and my son are both very thoughtful individuals, and as they discussed his trip, he couldn't help notice a remarkable distinction between the two societies.

Although the coworker had not been back to India for at least 15 years, it struck him that it hardly mattered whether it had been 15 years or 15 minutes -- nothing had changed.  The India of 2015 was essentially indistinguishable from the India of 2000 and, in his view, the India of 1900.

The two of them then discussed the contrast with the 2015 version of the USA -- a stark contrast, they agreed, because society here changes constantly.  And that, friends, was a remarkable insight that is worth wondering about.

I do not pretend to be very familiar with Indian society as a whole, and am not so stupid as to guess very much about it and then make inferences.  But I do wonder to what extent there is any actual incentive to change much there, particularly away from the most urban areas, and even in them.  A billion people live there.

To me, their exchange far more critically pointed out something about the USA, rather than about India, primarily because we are the country that so little resembles the other societies on earth.  Were you or I to slide into a coma and awaken ten years later here, there is no doubt that it would be into a different society from that last encountered.

I'm not even talking about things like technology, because that's too simple, but the way we apply technology.  We all carried laptops and flip-phones, then iPhones and laptops, then iPhones and tablets, and each evolution changed a dozen important things about our daily lives.  We take to some (iPhones) and reject others (Google Glass), but we do it quickly and the ones that pervade our lives do so thoroughly and immediately.

I lived through the '70s and astronomical interest rates, 15% mortgages and the like.  Inflation was terribly high, and we were all thoroughly depressed.  Mortgages are now advertised at 3% or less, and have not changed more than a point or so in many years, although the housing market is a disaster.  Banks once paid a decent rate on your savings; now you would never open a savings account with an expectation of return -- all the money goes into the stock market.

We do the same thing culturally.  Had you gone comatose in 1999, would you have assumed to wake up 15 years thereafter with the prevalence of gay marriage, interracial couples depicted all over the TV series and, at the same time, an instinctive response to an armed forces member with "Thank you for your service?"  Palm trees and beaches were wonderful in 1999 (they still are), but getting warmer is now somehow a bad thing.  The USA is now the "big power" in the energy market and soon to be near the top in oil production.

We do the same thing politically as well.  Thirty-five years is a blink of an eye in a country like India in terms of change, but think about this: In the USA, in that 35 years, the same country elected Ronald Reagan (and George Bush #41), then Bill Clinton, George Bush #43 and Barack Obama, reelecting each of the four as if moving from one extreme to the other.  Our sitting president is far more hostile to our former ally Israel than he is to the Iranians, even though they hate the USA the same as they did in 1999.  

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose", the saying goes -- the more things change, the more it is the same thing.  We change here in the USA, because we are free to.  What an interesting topic for a slow weekend.  Oh, yeah, the Pats won the Super Bowl.  Plus ça change ...

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton 

The Strange Case of Wikipedia and Shoeless Joe

Back in 1919, a group of players for the American League champion Chicago White Sox decided that they could make some extra money by offering to throw the upcoming World Series against Cincinnati.  They got in touch with gamblers and recruited enough other players -- eight in total, including the incomparable left fielder "Shoeless" Joe Jackson -- to ensure they could carry off the scheme.

We've all heard the story about the 1919 Black Sox; they lost to the underdog Redlegs five games to three.  They were ultimately paid something around $80,000 in total by different sets of gamblers (the whole gambler side of this is really bizarre) and a year later were hauled before a grand jury, where they testified to their guilt -- including Jackson, producing the memorable, if apocryphal, story of him leaving the courtroom and being asked by a little boy to "Say it ain't so, Joe", whereupon the shamed Jackson replied "I'm afraid it is, boys."

The eight were acquitted in trial, but that was greatly affected by the theft of copies of their confessions to the grand jury, presumably as part of a conspiracy among the American League, seeking to protect itself, and others in Baseball, all of whom were better off with an acquittal.  The players, though, were banned for life by the new Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.The lifetime bans naturally have generated almost a century of pleas of the innocence of some -- particularly Jackson and the third baseman, Buck Weaver, despite the evidence. (For the record, Weaver, who was never paid a cent and was seen to play hard the whole Series, was banned for having attended early meetings and not tipped off his manager or owner).

There is so much to know you'd need a book -- here, of course, is the best -- but I'll summarize for this tale.  Of the eight players, some were a lot more complicit than others, which has led many to defend Jackson as having been lily-white despite his confession.  They point to his 12 hits in the Series and claim he "really tried."

Of course, he sat in on meetings where the eight conspired to throw the Series and did not immediately expose the plot.  He was also paid thousands for his complicity in the scandal.  And his performance was, ah, a bit erratic in the Series -- despite the numbers.

Two of the eight conspiring players were starting pitchers, two of the three to be used in the Series (Dickie Kerr, the third, was not in on it, pitched games three and six and won both).  In game seven, conspirator Eddie Cicotte really pitched, the players (who were then fed up with the gamblers' late payments) really played, and the White Sox won easily.  They lost the next day, though, after starting pitcher Lefty Williams was threatened outside his home.

In those three "clean" games, innocent old Joe Jackson got six of those twelve hits.  That .375 average of his that looks so good breaks down to .286 in the thrown games and .545 in the clean ones.  A little digging goes a long way.  In the field, observers (including Christy Mathewson) who were tipped off to the possibility of a plot, noted some plays where Jackson was late getting to the ball as well.  (A lot of America was suspicious, since the gambling odds had tipped to favor the much weaker Redlegs before Game 1.)
 
Joe Jackson was properly banned for life and it should end there.  But there are many defenders of his, who generally ignore the recorded facts of the case.  One was my boyhood hero, Ted Williams, who is allowed to be wrong this once.  And one of them, it seems, is not only the keeper and guardian of Joe Jackson's Wikipedia page, but is extremely fanatic about it, facts notwithstanding.

In doing some research a while back, I noticed the discrepancy in Jackson's performance between the thrown and the clean Series games, and looked up his Wikipedia page to see if it was properly noted.  It wasn't.  I made a reasonable edit to add that fact, and a day later noted that it had been removed.  I repeated it, and once again it was removed within a day.  So I let it go; it wasn't all that big a deal.

This morning I thought about it and decided to see how anal-retentive the individual was.

I made an edit to the article.  Where a sentence noted that Jackson's 12 hits was a Series record, and that his .375 average for the 1919 Series led all other hitters, I inserted a factual, nonprejudicial clause noting that half of those hits came in the three "clean" games and that he only hit .286 in the games the corrupt players threw.

Within six minutes it had been changed back.   I looked in the page history and discovered that someone called "Onel5969" who, according to Wikipedia, lives in Scottsdale, AZ and, according to me, has a real problem with the facts creeping into the entry about old Shoeless Joe, was the person making the change.  It would have been around 6:00am Scottsdale, AZ time, interestingly.

I also read through the whole page with a more jaundiced eye, and discovered that every effort was taken to ensure that Jackson's supposed innocence was presented, and the evidence of his guilt marginalized with vague references -- unlinked, of course -- to new evidence suggesting he hadn't been part of it, or hadn't taken the money, or hadn't confessed to the grand jury at all.

OK, I get it.  The guy really likes Joe Jackson.  I like him, too.  But it is, unfortunately, guys like Onel5969 that compromise the expectation of factuality, such as it may be, in Wikipedia.  This "people's encyclopedia" can easily suffer from the prejudices of its adherents, if the Joe Jackson armed guard is an example.

So for those who need the facts as presented in 1919 and 1920, well-documented since, and compelling to anyone without prejudice, here they are:  Joe Jackson participated in a conspiracy to defraud Major League Baseball, his team and its owner and fans; he did not immediately report it; he took money to throw games; his play suggests he participated on the field in a way to help lose certain games, and he confessed to a grand jury of his complicity.

He was kicked out of baseball after 13 years in which he compiled a .356 average, third best career mark in the history of the game.

It will never get him into the Hall of Fame, nor should it.  But you won't get that from Wikipedia.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Learning Cyber-Bullying

 It is suitably fashionable to decry cyber-bullying, wherein high school students and younger (and others) go online and say terrible things about other high school students and younger (and others).  This is often directed at real or imagined flaws in the person being bullied, and ... well, you know what it is.

"What it is" is simply an electronic version of what has gone on, in schools, since there have been kids and schools.  Kids can be cruel, and are perpetually competing with each other as their hormones kick in, some earlier, some later.  Give a kid a computer and Al Gore's Amazing Internet, and kids will do exactly what they have always done, except that now the whole world gets to hear it, instead of just those within earshot and the immediate network of gossipy peers.

Of course, the fact that the "whole world" now sees and hears the cruel things that kids say to each other, and that we can add pictures and even videos to amplify the assault, makes the impact much worse.  The added pain of worldwide distribution has elevated the problem to where it shows up on morning TV shows as an official Issue.

Now, I'm sure not minimizing it and don't intend to.  I was bullied 50 years ago by larger peers and I didn't like it.  Kids are being cyber-bullied and then killing themselves.  It needs to stop, and if you've got an answer, the world needs it.

But I'm going to remind us ("us" being the adult world) that we are far, far from innocent in all this, and close to being complicit.

I speak, of course, about our own propensity to cyber-bullying that even I have engaged in.  I refer, as you probably have not yet guessed, to the Yelp Phenomenon.

Who among us has not purchased a product or service over the years with which we were particularly unhappy?  In recent years, especially with the overwhelming tendency to online purchases, there has not been a human being to see, or call (without being routed to Mumbai or Manila).  Our anger at the defective product is elevated by the inability to speak to anyone, so we have to reach out and strike!

Enter Yelp (and every other online medium for rating a vendor and complaining).  We take to our laptops and write a scathing, one-sided and anonymous review of our memory of our experience.  I've done it myself, and I've done it far more often than I've written complimentary reviews of vendors I've really liked.

I have also been the owner of a business which had to complain constantly to Yelp about reviews that had factual inaccuracies, but with the writer's anonymity were difficult to address -- how could edf129553, who had a late delivery, get her problem solved if we didn't know who she was?  And this is rich, but follows the FTM theorem -- if you actually advertised with Yelp you had a much easier time getting inaccurate reviews removed.

But that's not the point.

We can be as sanctimonious as we like about cyber-bullying in our schools.  But it is exactly like the old cartoons where a kid swears and the father asks the mother "Where the #$%%* did that kid learn to say $^$%^&* like that?".  We are the original cyber-bullies, and we provide the examples to our children.

We are partly to blame when the kids follow our lead and use the Internet to do things like bullying that in the good old days would have stayed close to home.  I don't know the cure, but it seems that putting a big blanket over the Yelps of the world would go a long way toward returning civility to Internet dialogue.  Certainly we would be helped by good, sound and accurate consumer reviews of product and service companies.

But the anonymity and the venom are an unpleasant and counterproductive mix.  Moreover, they set an atrocious example to our children, who layer another weapon on top of their own, basic instincts.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Vox Clamantis for the Deserter

Tuesday morning's news came with the interesting headline, not unexpected in some circles -- the Army sergeant who had been traded back to the USA in return for five Taliban leaders who had been held in the facility at Guantanamo Bay, is bring charged with desertion.  The Pentagon's spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, backed off on that this morning (there is no "final decision"), but it appears imminent.

That the Army is doing this despite what must be immense pressure from above (read: the White House) speaks to the huge preponderance of evidence relating to Bowe Bergdahl's determination to desert his position and associate himself with the enemy (aside to the White House: the Taliban is, indeed, the enemy).

The president was out of the country, traveling to India so that the press could buzz about the first lady's attire while the president tried to persuade the Indians to help him fight that nasty global warming, and then to Saudi Arabia for the funeral of their king.  So it may be a few days before he puts himself in a position of having to comment on Bergdahl's imminent arrest and court-martial.

It's a good thing for Mr. Obama that, as he pointed out in the State of the Union address, he won the elections he ran in and is not running for anything else.  Because this is the type of embarrassment that even the guy who won reelection in the face of the Benghazi cover-up might have trouble with.

The Army cannot bow even to its commander in chief on this one. Bergdahl surely has such a tall stack of evidence piled up against him that the Army had no choice but to court-martial him, and given how much that "preponderance" had to be to indict him, knowing it would create embarrassment to the president, there's no doubt he will be convicted.

At the same time, the five Taliban leaders -- Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Mullah Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Khairullah Khairkhwa and Mohammed Nabi Omari -- all of whom were considered high risks to be back in action fighting against the USA -- are back, released to Qatar and already, or soon to be, filling the leadership vacuum in the Taliban.

Barack Obama is an incredible danger to the security of the USA, as we are reminded every moment he is allowed to open the Gitmo doors and send back to the Middle East the leaders of the evil that rules in many places there.   It is simply incumbent on this Congress to slam the gate and stop the releases, the exchanges and every other action that returns these people to the hatred and violence they helped spawn.

No, Mr. Obama, you won your elections; but the Bergdahl case is going to cloud that legacy, fictional though it be, that you and your sycophants in the press have created for you.  You stupidly released five major threats to the security of your citizens, in exchange for a deserter whose rightful punishment would have been to remain in the hands of his captors.

For Heaven's sake, Mr. President, please, please go outside that yes-yes echo chamber you live in and get some real experts in there to start advising you.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Obama as Nero, But Not How You Thought

Friday's Washington Post had an interesting front-page article in regard to the scandal involving the New England Patriots and the deflated footballs.  The first line got my attention:

"In 67 A.D., the Roman emperor Nero used 10 horses in an Olympic race featuring four-horse chariots. He tumbled, failed to finish and was still declared the victor."

Maybe I'm the only one, but I couldn't help thinking how much that sounded like Obamacare. 

That disaster of a law passed only through a bizarre parliamentary maneuver called "budget reconciliation." It was initiated in the Senate, even though all such bills that involve taxation must, by the Constitution, begin in the House.  Of course, it wasn't meant to be called a tax, and the Administration in defending it did not want to call it a tax, but calling the individual mandate penalty a "tax" was the only way the Supreme Court could uphold its fragile constitutionality.

After the ridiculous shoving of it through the Congress, it then failed miserably.  About 80% of the number of uninsured prior to Obamacare are still uninsured, which was supposed to be the reason for the law in the first place.  Obama predicted about a $2,500 per year drop in premiums for the average American (again, to ram the law past a skeptical public), but many are seeing increases as much as $6,500 per year (my family) and more.

Getting in to the site in the first place was an unmitigated disaster, facilitated by $678 million in non-competed contracts awarded to friends of the administration (and the First Lady).  And as you can read here and here, we haven't even reached the twin disasters we will see in 2015 because of the huge hike in individual insurance rates associated with the ban on low-premium, high-deductible policies.

Obama, like Nero, has used ten horses to compete against 4-horse chariots.  He and his signature law have, accordingly, fallen on their faces into a pile of horse poo, in an incredible disaster.

Despite that, he has repeatedly declared himself the victor, and to Obamacare as a "success."  His minions in the press repeat the narrative like a bunch of journalistic bobbleheads, oblivious to fact.

Bully for you, Mr. President.  I'll bring you your fiddle now.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

The Question the White House Just Will Not Answer

I really know the answer; in fact I know exactly why they won't answer it, but I'm going to go down the path again.

On Wednesday, Valerie Jarrett, the White House's super-secret "advisor" whom the taxpayers have paid for six years now to help plot new ways to destroy the American economy, was on the Fox and Friends morning show to answer some questions in the aftermath of the State of the Union address the night before.

Now, I will give her credit for showing up on video link; Fox News is, of course, treated by this White House as if it were Radio Kazakhstan, one level below Al Jazeera and nowhere near the access provided to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC.  At least they got to ask her some questions.

One question, however, and its answer, were enough to get a column's worth of concern, at least out of me.  Steve Doocy, one of the three hosts of the Fox and Friends morning news show, posed a question about tax policy, which you can see here.  Advance to about 5:40 and you can see it if you like.

Essentially, Doocy's question was that the top income tax rate, which is close to 40% for Federal tax alone, was really high -- if the White House thought that people earning enough to pay that rate were not paying enough to be fair, then what, exactly, did the White House think the highest "fair" rate was?

On the video, you can see Mrs. Jarrett confidently and firmly avoid answering the question for what I counted as a full minute and 19 seconds.  Now, when the question is that straightforward, the answer should be simple as well.  If she believes the top rate should be 50%, then just say so.

But no, she first slid over to capital gains rates and where those should be, and went off on that, and then something about women, and maybe football inflating or something.  By the time the hosts could get a word in edgewise -- and as you can hear, they tried hard -- 79 seconds had passed and nothing close to an answer was given.  Let me tell you, it's a skill to be able to speak for 79 seconds straight and say nothing.

As I said, I know the answer (a top rate of 25% is fair, there's no way in Hades that any working American should work more than 25% for the Federal government).  I also know why neither she nor Barack Obama will answer the question, directly or indirectly.

In the extreme, socialistic view of this White House and its leaders, all earnings belong innately to the Government.  Valerie Jarrett would be happy if all capital returned to the all-knowing Feds to redistribute as they, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit, in a wonderful, Animal Farm kind of way, with them as the pigs.

If they believed otherwise, they would put a figure out for public debate as to their definition of a fair tax percentage.  They don't.  When they're asked the question outright, they find any possible way to avoid putting a figure in the conversation, and moving the conversation away from a sensible conclusion. Were they to give a number, they know they would be held to it and forced to defend it, and that would not end well for them.

Ramble on, Mrs. Jarrett; you have your 79 seconds of fame.  But we are so on to you.  You want all our income, and we won't give it to you. 

We told you that last Election Day and we will continue to tell you, as long as you keep trying to grab our wallets..

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Well played, JB, Well Played

You may have heard that an invitation was sent this week for the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress in a special session.  This would not otherwise get anyone's attention, except for one little thing -- the invitation came not from Barack Obama, the president and ostensible deciderer of USA foreign policy, but from John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

In his public statement, Boehner noted that “Prime Minister Netanyahu is a great friend of our country, and this invitation carries with it our unwavering commitment to the security and well-being of his people.  In this time of challenge, I am asking the prime minister to address Congress on the grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life.”

Boehner specifically invited Netanyahu to address the threat of Iran gaining nuclear weapons which, theoretically, could be used against Israel.  That's the Israel which, until this administration, was thought of as an ally of the USA.

That is a problem for the White House, since Obama is trying to negotiate one of those legacy-builders, a nuclear pact of some kind with the Iranians, one of those things his canonizers can point to when they try to explain that he was somehow not the biggest failure ever to occupy the Oval Office.

The White House is not happy.  Josh Earnest, the poor unfortunate press secretary there who has to try to defend Obama from, well, the pesky facts, called it a "breach of protocol." It is, of course, clearly in the purview of the State Department and the rest of the Executive Branch to decide when foreign leaders whom Barack Obama hates should address Congress.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that Obama hates Netanyahu, has called him offensive names and wishes that Israel would just dry up so he can make nice-nice with the Islamic terrorists he won't call out by that name?

Congress, now led by Republicans, is not interested in giving Obama carte blanche to sign treaties with Iran, especially those that are spineless and have no expected productive outcome other than to give Obama something to point to in his last State of the Union address in 2016.  So they are quickly debating a law that would force the president to gain congressional approval for any such treaty with Iran.

Naturally, Obama would veto such a bill, but Congress can override the veto with enough Democratic votes.  And when you start looking at senators like Chuck Schumer of New York and other Jewish Democrats in Congress who are big Israel supporters with big Israel-supporting constituencies, you can pretty quickly get close to a number that makes the White House squirm.

What a game.  Obama, who has spent a lot of capital issuing Executive Orders to try to steal the legislative rod from Congress, now squeals when Congress responds by practicing a little foreign policy itself.  The White House, having fudged the lines of separation of powers, now is put in the unfortunate position of having to complain when Congress does the same thing.

And it is Netanyahu, a pain in the White House's collective glutei.  That only adds a little glee to those who are applauding the Speaker's invitation as a fitting response to Obama's six years of disrespect to the leading ally of the USA in the Middle East, and an excellent answer to his disrespect to the separation of powers explicit in the Constitution.

Well played, Speaker Boehner, sir.  Well played.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Forty Years and This Still Bothers Me

I have written far, far too many columns on very serious topics lately, and it is absolutely time for a piece on something that is completely irrelevant to today's world of torment and universal brouhaha.  So here's one.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I was a poor young man with an MIT degree and no real job prospects.  I had gone to medical school at the University of North Carolina, quit after one year and moved up to Boston to start a comic opera company, which eventually became the Boston Light Opera that ran for a number of years.

That, however, was not a "living", so I was perpetually applying to jobs and, with the wretched economy of the time, not getting any offers.  Through the good graces of a friend, I was able to wait on tables and be a host at a restaurant to pay food and rent, but that was not a career choice.  So I applied to be many things, even including a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch (remember that; it's plot material) which, like the rest, did not respond to my application.

And then one day I saw an ad somewhere looking for a manager for a theater company.  There, I thought, whether it was a career or not, at least it was something I could modestly say I had skills at, having participated in the founding and management of an opera company.  I put together a resume and sent it along to the company, which was some kind of experimental theater group in Cambridge.

Remarkably, some time later, I got a phone call from a lady with the company, for an interview and what we would call today a "pre-screen."  She sounded to be in her 20s; we talked for a while about the company and what they were trying to accomplish, and what they needed for a manager.  Everything was going along reasonably well.

That ended abruptly when she asked a yes-no question, which may have been to ask if I were available to meet for an in-person interview on some specified date; it doesn't matter other than that it was a binary question.  My answer was affirmative, and I replied as any gentleman in 1970-something would have, who was raised as I was:

"Yes, Ma'am", I said.

You could have heard the icicles form on the other end of the line.  The tone of her voice changed, and after a moment she explained that I probably wouldn't fit very well with the group there.  She added, and I'm really sorry I can't recall her precise words, that I should "think about the way I answered her".  Moreover, I had just moved up from living in North Carolina a year or so back, and clearly did not sound like a native Bostonian (I'm not); so I also recall thinking that she was making judgments about me based on the way I spoke, and then lecturing me on top of it.

I do regret not answering her that she might want to "think about" who the real prejudiced individual was on that conversation and who was being elitist, but I did not say that.  I merely said that I thought I was certainly as qualified to be interviewed as anyone else she was likely to talk to, and if my politeness, speech pattern and the fact that I called her "Ma'am" was a problem, well, they were far less important than my capabilities as a manager.

I never followed up to see what happened to that theater company and I won't guess.  But I do suspect that the young lady on the other end of the phone is just as much the elitist today that she was in 1975 or whatever year that was.  It takes far too much effort to grow up and learn maturity, than I suspect she was ever able to put in.

- - -

Shortly thereafter, I got a letter from a law firm in Baltimore.  Apparently, Merrill Lynch had settled a lawsuit claiming that black applicants were not getting a fair shake.  As part of the settlement, every applicant over the specified period of time received a letter from the law firm with an affidavit to sign and return, if it was applicable.

Now, the text of the letter kept using the term "Negro" to refer to the aggrieved parties.  However, the affidavit itself did not -- it used the term "black", and led off with something like "I am black and I applied to Merrill Lynch between [the inclusive dates] and was not hired for a position as an associate ..."

So, unemployed chipmunk that I was, I went straight to my dictionary and looked up "black" to see if I qualified.  Sure enough, one of the later definitions in the list was "sad or disconsolate" (as in a "black mood").  Well, I was unemployed and had gotten dissed by a pompous little leftist at a pompous little theater company.  That sounded "disconsolate" enough to me.  I signed the affidavit and shipped it off to the law firm, and promptly forgot I had done it.

Sure enough, many, many months later, I received my share of the settlement.  It was a check for right about $83, more than enough to compensate me for the stamp and for the callous treatment at the hands of evil Merrill Lynch (to whom I had sent an application but who never contacted me and surely had no idea of my skin color).  In fact, if I got $83 for every unsuccessful application I sent that year, I'd have a pretty fair amount of cash then, maybe a total 1/10,000th as much as the lawyers got for that one case.

According to something in the way the letter with the check was worded, too, the State of Maryland somehow recognized me as being "black."  I didn't keep the letter, but 40 years later, I still joke about "being legally 'black' in the State of Maryland." I've never had the guts to use it in the EEO section of a job application, though.

There -- was that an unserious enough column for today?

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

If a Bowl Game Falls in the Woods

On Friday I received an email from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network ("ESPN" to its legion of watchers) with a survey in regard to the new national championship game, asking what I thought of it, did I watch it, did I think the championship's new "playoff system" was fair, all of that.  They also asked if I could remember the sponsor (I couldn't).

They didn't, however, ask the fundamental question "Did you actually see the end of the game?", but I answered it anyway, in the essay section, since it was the only reason I bothered to answer the survey.

The answer, by the way, was "no, I did not see the end", and that was not because I wasn't interested in the outcome.  The answer was "no" because the game didn't start until some time after 8:30pm Eastern time, and didn't end until, well, some time after 11:30pm Eastern time and, let's not forget, that is on a Monday night.  Like many people, I work for a living and have an obligation to be perky and chipper at 8:00am on Tuesday mornings, which is not made easier by being awake and wound up by a (hopefully) exciting football game that ends some time at o-dark-thirty the night before.

This is one of those cases where scheduling inordinately inconveniences some to the benefit of others.  Those who live in the Pacific time zone joyfully celebrated the victory of (pardon me while I look it up ...) the Ohio State Buckeyes, or mourned the loss of the Oregon Ducks, had a drink to celebrate or mourn their loss (in California, dragged on their weed) and eventually went off to bed at a civil hour.

So let's ask ourselves the two logical questions:
(1) Why play the game on Monday rather than Friday or Saturday?
(2) Why start the game close to 9:00pm Eastern time on a weekday?

Well, start with the FTM principle -- follow the money.  The money is in two places of interest; that is, the television networks (in this case, ESPN, which means Disney) and the National Football League. The NFL controls the weekends, which is why there is college football on Saturdays and the NFL plays on Sundays and Mondays, with a Thursday here and there.

But the NFL is not stupid about the times of its games.  They don't do playoff games at 9:00 at night in the East; they don't do the Super Bowl at 9:00 at night in the East either.  Their game times for the playoff weekends with four games are essentially (EST times) 4:00pm and 7:00pm Saturday and 1:00pm and 4:00pm Sunday.  The two conference championship games on the last playoff weekend are 3:00pm and 6:00pm.

When the final whistle ends on the second game, it is about 10:15pm on a Sunday night, a mild stretch but perfectly reasonable for working folks.  When the Super Bowl ends, even with all the attendant spectacle, it is no later than 10:30pm in the East.

But the NCAA, no it still doesn't get it and neither does ESPN.  For that matter, Major League Baseball, which puts World Series games on at 8:30pm Eastern even if they're played in late October in freezing places like Boston, Chicago or Detroit, doesn't get it either.

If you take a huge population like, say, the entire football-watching populace living in the Eastern time zone, there will be, in ascending order of numbers:
(1) Those who will watch the college championship game to the bitter end regardless of who's in it
(2) Those who will watch it to the bitter end if they have a rooting interest
(3) Those who will watch it to the bitter end because they're not working the next day
(4) Those who will be asleep at the final whistle (I'm in that group)
(5) Those who will not watch it at all because they don't care enough to plan to stay up that late

Why, we have to ask, would you schedule games such as to alienate a large percentage of your fandom and make them wonder if you even care?

Of course there is a corresponding population set in the Pacific time zone, where the 'late" game starts at 5:30pm and we can't forget them -- but they have a comfortable pair of alternatives, one being just to watch the game live, in daylight, and the other called the DVR, which not only allows them to start the game an hour or so later, when they're ready, but to speed past the commercials.  That is not an option for those in the Eastern time zone, since by the time they could sit down the next night, the entire news cycle would have slammed the results in their face.

You know, and I know and the executives at ESPN and Disney know that they're not going to do anything about it.  But I said my piece to them (at least they asked) and, like the reason for this medium in the first place, things that needed to get said got said.

And for once, Al Sharpton wasn't involved.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

Black Actors Can Be Just OK, Can't They?

There is probably no way that a movie about Martin Luther King can be reviewed fairly in a climate where he is canonized, or even deified, by his adherents.  This makes it a bit odd that the movie "Selma" received only a nomination for Best Picture (tough competition; there are eight nominees) and none for any of its actors for Best Actor/Actress nor Best Supporting Actor/Actress.

Naturally this immediately became a racial incident of Fergusonian proportions.  Although no one tried to point out any of the specific performances as being great enough to merit nomination, it was a good opportunity for the racism industry to jump all over it.  Maybe especially because there weren't any great performances; it's easier to scream about institutional racism; there you can be more vague.

Al Sharpton immediately -- I'm not making this up -- headed to Hollywood (on whose nickel we don't know) to "call a meeting" to protest the exclusion.  A meeting of whom, he did not say, but my first thought was to ask who was going to sit with him.  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?  Clint Eastwood?  Al did not say.

But this is decidedly not about Al.  Consider the following letter to the editor published Monday in the Washington Post.  It reads, in part:

"In denying the movie “Selma” best actor and best director nominations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences again seems to have used claims of historical inaccuracy as a cover [“Hollywood’s most notable Oscars snub: Diversity,” front page, Jan. 16]. The 1999 movie “The Hurricane,” starring Denzel Washington, met a similar fate. A couple of people vigorously lobbied academy members, criticizing the movie for its supposed inaccuracies."

The Post has lately been publishing a few too many letters not worthy of a paper of the Post's prestige, in that the connection between the point made and the example does not exist.  In this case, the whole point is completely missing.

The letter-writer delivers a total strawman, maintaining that the reason the actors didn't get nominated was because of claims of historical inaccuracy.  But that's ludicrous -- if the Academy folks were going to deny a nomination because of historical inaccuracy, it would have been the Best Picture Oscar nomination that was denied, not the acting Oscar nomination!  I don't necessarily credit the leading lights in the Academy with great intelligence or insight, but surely they are astute enough to have "punished" the producers of the flick if they were historically inaccurate, not the actors.

Unfortunately for the letter-writer, the messy facts get in the way, and that pesky Best Picture nomination that "Selma" actually got simply shreds the argument.

Still, we haven't heard the last of Al Sharpton on this.  Moreover, in a very clever ruse, the protestors have immediately rendered the Best Picture vote as a binary "Selma vs. Everyone Else and If You Don't Vote for Selma You're a Bigot" race, rather than an octonary, equivalent race among eight nominated films to have been treated equally.

"Selma" is going to win Best Picture, not because of its quality (which did not include enough good performances to gain a single nomination for a performer), but because the racism industry has ensured that a plurality vote divides the Academy voters into the "perceived bigots", i.e., those who vote for any of the other seven films, vs. the "enlightened."  And the Best Picture Oscar that will be won by "Selma" will have an asterisk the size of Idaho attached to it.

You can take it to the bank.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton