I'm 26% Native American! Should Washington Care?

Granted, I don't see a lot of commercials on TV, since almost everything I watch is DVRed and then replayed, with the commercials fast-forwarded through.  It's a pleasant TV life that I wouldn't trade for very much.

But there is one commercial that I have seen a few times, and which suddenly struck me in a curious way after the fourth or fifth viewing this past week.

Ancestry.com, as you may know, is a website originated by an organization with roots in the Mormon church.  Our friends in the LDS community have beliefs in their denomination that have driven them to document incredible quantities of genealogical information, from censuses to ship manifests to military records to Lord-knows-what-else, and index it so that you can find out a lot about your ancestors and mine.

Ancestry.com has a search capability that lets you find all that data, in a reasonably efficient manner.  I have a subscription myself, which I use often for research in my role as a member of the Historical Archives Committee of the Barbershop Harmony Society.  Having the subscription, I can also look up things like why my wife's great-grandparents came over from Italy on separate ships even though they were married.  You get the idea (for the record, it was a common practice back then for the husband to go over first and prepare a home).

But I digress.

So Ancestry also has a capability for DNA testing.  You send them a DNA sample, and they come back and tell you the percentage breakdown of your ancestry by country of origin.  Very cool.  I have never done it, because I don't really care all that much.  In fact, I wrote this piece a while back, explaining why I though people should take more pride in what they themselves had done than in what their four-times-great-grandparent did.  Please do read it, I think it will be informative.

Anyway, last week I saw one of the Ancestry commercials, featuring a purported user who had done the DNA test and was astonished at the result showing her to be 26% American Indian.  "I never knew!", she exclaims in the ad.

So my best girl turned to me and said "Whoopee, now she can open a casino!"  And I replied "Better, she can open an Indian-owned government contracting company."  And that's when I got really concerned, and curious.

If you didn't know -- and you should have -- "Native American" is a special category of company that can do business with the Federal government without competition in certain cases.  Now, presumably that is to atone for past discrimination or something, to help Indians get an opportunity to grow companies and escape poverty.

But how is that even defined?

Here is this lady, for example, who never even knew she was Native American, so how could she ever have been the victim of discrimination?  Yet now she can start a company and get no-bid Federal contracts just by waving around a DNA test!

I admit it; I am not a fan of small business set-asides in general, and am very much an opponent of race-based set-asides, such as the 8(a) contracting program that allows only people of certain races to bid on them.  I wrote that here and even better here; there is far too much capacity for abuse of the program.

And how much clearer is that potential for abuse when someone who we know has never been discriminated against for being Native American, can go make money off of recompense for discrimination she never suffered?

President Trump needs to have one of his experts (or me) look into the whole set-aside program as reverse discrimination that needs to be completely overhauled to ensure it addresses the issue and only the issue, and eliminates fraud (like this) -- and eliminates this kind of potential abuse.

Unfortunately, you heard it here first.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Holy Crap, I Hit the Russian Lottery!

I don't know how many times I've written -- three at least -- about the propensity of people reading me from Russian IP addresses.  I mean, I know that the Russians are all big writers, or at least have produced a lot and appreciate literary brilliance, but surely something has to be askew here.

There's an old joke that describes the difference between romance novels written by different flavors of Europeans.  In a British novel, the two characters meet in the first chapter but don't end up together until the last chapter.  In a French novel, the two characters get together in the first chapter but spend all the time until the last chapter trying to get rid of each other.  And in the Russian novel, the two characters don't exactly meet, and they really don't get together, and it takes 1,966 long, boring pages telling what happened.

This is what makes it so hard to understand why Russians are reading me so intently.  Every time I write one of these essays pointing out that they're reading me a lot, the reads from Russian IP addresses just stop.  But within a couple weeks, they're back, sort of like chapter 3.

And this time, they're back in a big way.

Friday, over 55% of the reads of this column were from Russia.  And remember that it was about some TV actress complaining about bigotry in Hollywood, and how cowardly she was for not naming anyone specifically, and how stupid she was to put a blanket curse on all her potential employers.

You want to tell me why the Russians should care about that?  Cause I've got no idea, and given the huge surge in readership, on a day that I didn't write about politics, I'm confused.  I mean, like I wrote once before, if you are a manufacturer of borscht or build dachas for a living, you should be advertising the heck out of this site.

But I have enough intellectual curiosity to be wondering why the daily ramblings of a washed-up old MIT grad should be of the slightest interest to anyone in Moscow or Sochi or Leningrad.  I mean, I don't know what's going on over there, and I mostly don't care.  I don't write about Russia or Russians, and my work has nothing to do with Russia either.

When Donald Trump, Jr. and a couple guys from the presidential campaign met with a Russian lawyer last summer, it turned out that they had nothing to do with the Russian government at all.  I'm kind of wondering if the "Dimitri, you need to start reading Bob!" movement is not a Russian-government thing as well.  Perhaps it's just some ordinary, run-of-the-mill guys named Boris who like me, they really, really like me.

I actually hope that is the case.  It would be far more satisfying as an author if it turned out that people were reading me, not because they were KGB agents thinking I'm sending out some kind of code but, rather, because they were average citizens who learned something about my country by reading what I write about.

So Boris I and Boris II and the rest of you, try this one -- it's my all-time favorite.  And for the rest of you out there in the land of cold weather and Cyrillic characters, well, please keep reading.

Because if history repeats, come tomorrow they'll all be gone.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Name the Bigot or Shut Up

It was probably too obscure a take to have it be likely that you read it, but some media entity called "Vulture" -- and I have no idea whether it is left or right or not really political, ran a piece by a writer named Hunter Harris.

The piece was about an actress on a TV show called "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.", which I don't watch but know it exists.  The actress's current name is Chloe Bennet (yes, one "T"), and the history of her identity is the topic of the article, as it read in Vulture:

"When Chloe Bennet started out in Hollywood, her last name was Wang. The 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' actress, who is Chinese-American, changed it because she thought it would help her book more roles. Unsurprisingly in Hollywood, it worked. Recently, after praising Ed Skrein, the white actor who recently left [a reboot of his own show] after learning he was cast to play a character who is Japanese-American in the comic books, Bennet was taken to task by a commenter on Instagram, who asked her why she changed her name to obscure her racial identity. 

"She explained that her decision was an unfortunate one that had everything to do with her circumstances: 'Changing my last name doesn’t change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese … It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood [sic] is racist and wouldn’t cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable ... I’m doing everything I can, with the platform I have, to make sure no one has to change their name again, just so they can get work.'  Part of Bennet’s effort -- an organization she founded called RUN (Represent Us Now), which advocates for Asian-American and Pacific Islander talent."

So OK, I get all that.  Except for one part.

That's where she said that "Hollywood is racist", and where I put a little "[sic]" in the quote because I don't actually buy it.

Hollywood is a town.  Hollywood is also an industry, i.e., one that makes movies that aren't made in Atlanta or Vancouver or the other places they're making them these days.  What Hollywood is not, most assuredly, is a person.  And only a person can be racist.

Here's the thing.  You don't get much worse than calling someone a racist these days.  It is a sin right up there with murder and rape, and you can't cause any more problems for someone than by calling them a racist.  So you'd better be freaking careful when you toss that word around, and Chloe Bennet needs to be a whole lot more careful with her words.

You know what?  If she wants to "advocate for Asian-American and Pacific Islander talent", the best thing she could do is to get parts written for people who are actually Asian and Polynesian!  I wonder if her organization is even doing any of that.

In essence (and we assume she was indicting the industry and not the town), she was saying that all of the people who cast TV and movies there are racists.  Now, I get that you might not get called for a part if your last name is Wang and the part is for a white, or black -- or Hispanic -- character.  That's laziness (at least look at the picture with the resume, you know), but it ain't racism.

But that doesn't really seem to matter, does it?  Surely I don't have to rehash my opinions on racially-inappropriate casting all over again as I wrote a long time ago.  Now, I have no idea what the character on that show she is on actually is, or whether it would be racially inappropriate -- or even how Asian the actress, in fact, looks.  I don't care.

I do care that an accusation of racism was tossed out there even though she failed to name even one actual human being she was willing to call a racist.  And I detest that.  I don't care what her career arc actually is, but it's sure as heck not going to go too terribly far, too terribly fast, if she gives an interview calling the entire group of people who could give her a job "racists."

What a dummy.  No wonder she's an actress.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Melania's Shoes and the Sad Press

I already told my classmate Ed, who writes here occasionally, that he was not going to like this particular column.  That's fair; I shouldn't have to write it, actually.  Let's just say it does not say a lot about where we are as a nation, and he strongly agrees.

Southeast Texas is trying to emerge from a multi-day hurricane/tropical storm event that inundated the greater Houston area and many miles around it, with as much as four feet of rain.  I mean, we were in the path of Hurricane Matthew last fall -- the eye actually went over us here -- and we only got about four inches of rain.  Four feet is unfathomable.

OK, it actually is "fathomable"; it's two-thirds of a fathom.  Nerdulence alert over.

As is appropriate, given that all recent presidents have done so after a major storm, President Trump and his wife Melania got into Air Force One a couple days after the storm hit to go down and survey the damage, and as much to reassure the dampened citizenry that their plight had the full attention and urgency of the Federal government, and to make sure that both the local and state governmental bodies would be supported by Washington, and that the Federal agencies, specifically FEMA and DHS, would be responded to quickly.  Lots to do.

We should note that it appears from the commentary of those local leaders, such as the governors of Texas and Louisiana, that they felt very confident from their communications with the president that he was absolutely doing what they needed.  At the least, those responses suggested that the media would have a lot of trouble claiming that President Trump had not done what presidents should.

Oh, it didn't stop Jen Psaki, the communications director for Hillary Clinton's abysmal "How-do-we-make-the-Clintons-richer" State Department, from actually writing that he should not have gone so soon.  The piece was laughable (I'd be embarrassed to link it), because you know and I know, and Jen Psaki knows, that if he had waited until a couple days later -- i.e., today -- to go, she would have written the same piece saying he should have gone two days earlier.  We know that.

I think it was Mike Huckabee, I believe, who said something yesterday like "If Donald Trump had flown to Texas, stood there and physically inhaled every drop of the 50 inches of rain they got in south Texas and spit it all back into the sea, there would be four networks out there complaining that he spit all that water out in the wrong place."  He can't win.

So President Trump gets on board Air Force One with his wife and a few days worth of clothing.  And that's where things got a bit dicey -- yes, clothing.  You see, Melania Trump, who is notably and famously a wearer of distinctive, stylish clothing as a former model, actually boarded Air Force One in Washington wearing high heels.

Oh, the shame.

So any number of journalistic porn stars came out with their horror that Melania Trump, the First Lady, would board a plane headed for flooded Texas wearing high heels.  I remember hearing that Hollywood Reporter and Politico were definitely two of them, an the other couple three were even more prominent outlets of fake news.  I don't want to guess, and it doesn't matter.

I can't decide which part of this story was worse.  I mean, if Jackie Kennedy or Michelle Obama had worn heels to board Air Force One to go to a natural disaster survey, well, it's hard to imagine that Politico would take her to task.  So there's the depressing bias side of the story.  But we should also apply an inconvenient truth to apply here.

She wasn't wearing them when they landed in Texas.

That's a bit problematic for the fake news types, but yes, Melania Trump had on sneakers when she got off the plane in Houston.  That means, of course, that the outrage needed to be confined to her attire in Washington, DC.  The First Lady did her touring of the flooded areas wearing sneakers, the footwear the guardians of style in Politico had wanted her to wear.  But they went to press anyway.

What do we say, folks?  Thirty people or so have died in the floods that the president is in Texas trying to help the area recover from, and Politico is concerned about what the First Lady is wearing when she gets on a plane in Washington.

I don't care if they had ten other articles on the hurricane and floods and this was an afterthought.  It was a contemptible minimization of the importance of what actually happened that is an affront to everyone who got a drop of rain on them this week.  It should be about the victims and the first responders, the stories of the people, the heroes and the tragedies.  It is for us.

I don't mean to tell even the most contemptible journalistic rag what they should or shouldn't write about.  But when you put out a non-story (it is a non-story, given, you know, the sneakers) that is shamelessly obviously there to embarrass the president and not convey a shred of actual information, well, I think I will tell you.

This, friends, is where journalism has gone in the 21st Century.

We should be so proud.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

OK, Dobie Is Still With Us

Yesterday I mentioned Dobie Gillis.  And I got lots of "Who?" messages.

If you are not of an age to recall who or what that is, well, I am so abysmally tired of politics this morning that it just needs to be that today's column is a random wandering, however brief.

Dobie Gillis  -- OK, actually "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" -- was a TV show from the 1950s and early 1960s (1959-63, in fact), which starred the still-around-at-83 Dwayne Hickman as the late-teen Dobie.  Dobie's parents, Herbert T. Gillis (Frank Faylen) and Winnie (Florida Friebus) owned a grocery store in whatever town they lived in.

Dobie was a simple young fellow who was in love with only one actual person, Thalia Menninger (Tuesday Weld), who felt she had to marry higher than her current station, meaning not Dobie.  Thalia, of course, feeling that way, would hang out with the rich and preppy young Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. (Steven Franken), which of course drove Dobie nuts.  He knew that Thalia really preferred Dobie to Chatsworth, and ... oh, you get it.

The reason, of course, that those of us who remember the show actually do remember the show, was not about the Gillises or Thalia or Chatsworth either.  It wasn't about Zelda Gilroy (Sheila James), who was the plainer girl who loved Dobie and waited patiently for him while he pined for Thalia.  And it wasn't really about Dobie himself, or the replica of "The Thinker", the Rodin sculpture, that sat outside their school and where Dobie would go to think and assume the statue's pose each week.

Nope, we remember most the character of Dobie's best friend.  That was Maynard G. Krebs, as played by the truly inimitable Bob Denver as Maynard, who was what we back then called a "beatnik."  I have to hope you know what a beatnik was, because it seems a challenge to describe, even though it's hard for those of us of a certain age to imagine that some will not know the term.  Combine the millennial's disinclination to work with the dress habits of a stevedore, the conversational skills of a long-term drug user, and the chin stubble of the 19-year-old you surely know who tries to grow a beard but can't.

Did I mention a disinclination to work?  Whenever the word "work" itself was uttered in a sentence in his presence, Maynard would panic and say "Work!" in a high-pitched squeal that was meant to be a spinal-level reflex.  You probably don't get the idea, but what the heck.

Maynard was always there for Dobie, apparently because he knew no one else would be there to pull his chestnuts out of the fire when he messed up something.  Maynard was not a bad guy, nope, in no way, but he just looked at things a little differently.  Bob Denver would, a year after Dobie Gillis ended its run, go on to become Gilligan on the iconic "Gilligan's Island."  So just youthen up Gilligan a bit -- surely you remember Gilligan -- and you probably have Maynard.

I was eight when the Dobie Gillis show debuted, and 12 when it ended, so the fact that I remember any of it says something that can't reflect well on me.  But I do remember that the "G." in "Maynard G. Krebs" stood for "Walter."  I can still picture him going "Work!?!!" in panic that someone might actually ask him to do some of it.

Dwayne Hickman is still alive and kicking, as is Tuesday Weld and also Sheila James.  All the rest of the actors have left us, with the exception of another rich kid on the show named Milton Armitage, who was in 5-6 episodes or so.  He was played by Warren Beatty, of all people, which says something or other.

Back in 1988, over 25 years after the last episode, the characters were brought back in a movie entitled "Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis", using a scenario ripped off from the plot of a 1950s play ("The Visit") by a Swiss playwright that I had actually read in a German class at M.I.T.  All the characters were back and the actors still alive at the time were featured in it.  I remember having looked so forward to it ... and turned it off after half of it because it was so bad.

I'll remember the show, and though I don't know that any oldies network has been running it, I am hoping that some legal content provider will come up with it.

Maybe no politics this week.  Probably a good thing.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Where is TV Going?

I've mentioned a few times that our cable service is provided by a small local cable company that does only advanced fiber-optic transmission and pretty modern technology in its receivers and other electronics.  We have had them for about five months and are certainly happy with what they provide.

Accordingly, we had some discussions with friends who were visiting us from Virginia this past weekend and who have not changed cable providers in a long time.  I was struck by the nature of the conversation.

What is TV these days?

I'm 66 years old, and I go back to being three or four years old, living on a farm, and having one television, a black-and-white affair with a big ol' honking antenna on the roof of our house, which I assume my dad put up there at some point.  It would be ever thus for many years before the next innovation, which was color TV in the 1960s.

Now, what we watched was a whole 'nother thing, and that is where we hop off for discussion this fine morning.  You see, back then there were three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, and our big ol' honking antenna on the roof pulled the most-local station for each -- and gave us whatever choice of shows we could see.

We grew up with three options to watch, plus another couple independent, not network-affiliated stations that we could occasionally get.  Five program choices at any one time was it.  Or you could go outside and play, or read a book.

I went off to college in 1969, and lived in a fraternity house in Boston the whole four years.  There was a TV there, but no cable had come into being in the neighborhood, and it would not -- TV programs arrived via rabbit ears on the set itself.  As a senior, I had a little portable TV in my room, with rabbit ears and iffy reception.

After getting married and settling down, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, we were still back to the antenna on (or inside) the roof routine, since we were in a pretty rural area up in the foothills without cable.  We could get our signal from DC, and by now there were a few more UHF channels to pick up, but not much improvement.  It would be 1995, when were still out in the mountains, when we became very early adopters of DirecTV service, the first within a number of miles.  I was 44.

[Note -- "how" early adopters we were is indicated by the fact that current DirecTV user IDs are eight-digit numbers, reflecting the fact that they have well over 20 million users. Our user ID was six digits.  Sometimes we would be talking to a customer service agent on the phone who had never seen a six-digit ID, and one in particular who was not born when we got our service]

Immediately, of course, we had 300 more choices at one time to watch than we had had in 1994.  That was a paradigm shift, of course, and we discovered networks we had never seen at home, like ESPN and CNN.  And the Food Network, of course.  The function of TV in our house really changed.

Over the 21 years we had satellite service, not a lot changed.  New networks were added; HD TV became a reality, and eventually packages came out that allowed us to watch every MLB baseball and NFL football game.  The technology improved dramatically to where it was pretty much all wireless.  And most importantly, the DVR allowed us no longer to be tethered to our TV lest we miss the week's episode of this or that show.

But then, streaming happened.

Now I don't necessarily have my arms wrapped around streaming.  I know that you can log into Netflix if you have an account and watch all the TV shows that are offered there, including past episodes and, of course, those series that are produced by or for Netflix.  There are also apps on the Amazon FireStick I've heard about that allow you to access pretty much everything that's ever been on TV anywhere, back to Dobie Gillis and even earlier.  Of course, I don't think they're particularly legal.

What I do know is that somewhere along the line, it became unnecessary to have a cable or satellite service.  I don't know how that works, but my younger son is 36 and he does not have cable service.  He uses only a tiny device (I assume it's a FireStick; we can assume it is) and is able to watch whatever he wants, and that's just with the normal, "legal" apps on it.  No cable, no satellite.

Clearly his setup is being replicated by Gen Ys and millennials all over the place.  And we have to ask ourselves whether there is a point where cable service will just dry up in favor of just an "on demand" capability, for everything except news and live sports shows, and maybe for customers over 60.

It's a big shift coming.  AT&T bought out DirecTV, and I'm reading that within five years they expect to be more of a content-delivery model without the need for individual satellite service.  I don't know if that's overly ambitious, but they're talking about it.

I may just be searching a local cable guide for reruns of 1960 episodes of Dobie Gillis.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The White House and the Swamp

So now, Steve Bannon is no longer in the White House as a chief strategist to President Trump.  That was coming, no doubt, and the removal a couple weeks back is not the first under Gen. Kelly, the chief of staff, and won't be the last -- probably.

Donald Trump, the candidate, ran on the notion that he wanted to "drain the swamp" -- a term that I don't know that a lot of people understood, and I'm sure that even Trump himself didn't necessarily appreciate the magnitude and impossibility of the task until he had been there a while.

I lived and worked in the DC area for many decades.  I have a plenty-good-enough notion of what that swamp is, and it has a few parts to it, in no specific order.

First, there is the entrenchment of Congress.  Many court rulings that mandated majority-minority districts (on the sad, bigoted notion that only, say, a Latino can represent a mostly-Latino population; only a black could represent a mostly-black population -- you get the idiocy) have created such districts as being less diverse and more likely to elect more leftist Democrats and more conservative Republicans.

That leaves us with more extreme, longer-serving congressmen, getting better committee assignments and chairmanships, and puts less-accommodating, less willing-to-compromise congressmen in charge.

Second, there is the Deep State.  That is a fun term for a sadly-real situation.  The Federal Government, as currently constituted (read: "bloated"), has hundreds of thousands of employees in DC.  Few of those go away after a change in administrations, and even those who do, such as Cabinet secretaries, leave a couple layers of political appointees below them, among the thousands who need to get Senate confirmation of a successor before they are replaced.

John Koskinen, the contemptible political hack who ran the IRS during the Obama years, is still running the IRS.  You think somehow that he actually agrees with his chief executive on anything related to the IRS and its doings?  But it is seven months into the Trump Administration and the guy is still there, even after a censuring by Congress.  And his is an appointed position.

The Deep State is meant to reflect the tens of thousands whose careers are in the Federal government, senior enough to have influence on policy and who (after an eight-year administration) are likely to have only had their senior roles under a president completely different in policy from the one they now serve.  That means that the current president's will is likely to be soft-pedaled or even subverted by everyone in senior positions in his government, except for the Cabinet and the few Cabinet-agency deputies who have gotten through the Senate while Chick Schumer is slow-rolling the process.

That, friends, is a big part of the swamp.  That kind of influence, between the entrenchment in the legislative branch and the entrenchment in the not-quite-most-senior levels of the executive branch, is huge.  In both cases, their influence raises the value of access to them by the contracting industry, which in turn increases their influence to another level.  It's the kind of access that, in the case of the Defense Department, Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the "military-industrial complex", a not-so-healthy relationship between the public and private sectors.

That's power, and no one relinquishes power readily.  You think any of those Deputy Undersecretaries from the Obama years are rushing to go find new jobs when it's going to take months and months to replace them?

So, the White House.

It seems a curious thing, but when I see the people coming and going inside the White House staff, I have to think of the swamp.  I would like to see Gen. Kelly get rid of the influencers in the White House who are keeping the place from running smoothly.  Admittedly, Bannon was the one with the list of the president's legislative priorities, but he was a lightning rod, and either way he was simply not being effective at advancing them.

I think that the good general should be -- and most certainly is -- doing his own form of managing the agenda by thinning the ranks and reorganizing (and restaffing) with people whose principal reason for being there is to advance this president's agenda, executive and legislative both.  Anyone not on board is a swamp denizen, and needs to be, well, drained.

Here's hoping.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

War By Golf

So the fat panda, in charge of North Korea under penalty of having done to you what dictators do, well, he has been threatening to send missiles against the USA and our territories like Guam, or had been, before backing down in the face of a president with an actual spine.  At the same time, it looks funny as heck to have this kid in pictures, surrounded by generals in uniform who must lay in bed at night what they did to deserve him as their boss?

But think of the consequences in the worst case.  The FPIC (that's Kim Jong-un, the fat panda in charge), nutso to start with, lofts a couple missiles toward Guam.  The USA responds by vaporizing some North Korean military base, and then FPIC lofts a nuke at Seoul.  Millions of innocents are killed and nothing is really resolved, unless the FPIC happens to be at the vaporized base -- or, given that our intel probably knows where he is every minute, that's where the vaporizing happens.

Either way, we'll all be sitting here thinking there must be a better way.

And there is.

Who you are as a country should have a lot more to do with your economy and productivity, your art, your culture, than how big your army and navy are.  That has, of course, never been the case in the recorded history of the world, but there's no better time to start.

Now, W.C. Fields is famous for having said that instead of continuing World War II, it would be better if Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and Mussolini met in the Rose Bowl and fought it out with socks filled with horse manure.  Maybe Roosevelt, a wheelchair-bound cripple, could have brought in his first vice-president, John Nance Garner, wielding a bucket of warm pee, which is what he said the vice-presidency was, in fact, not worth.

But that is a bit messy, and people might not pay to watch.  We need something better.

How about this.  Instead of engaging all manner of military might and risking millions of lives, let's have the leaders of the two nations compete themselves.  Not in a fight, no, no, no.  We're trying to defuse tensions, not maintain the connection between disagreement and fisticuffs.

So let's propose this.  President Trump challenges Kim Jong-un to a round of ... golf.  The winner has to concede some economic thing, like imports or duties or something.

I don't expect that the FPIC plays golf; heck, he doesn't look like he could manage a club.  But he could learn; after all, the president is 71 years old, almost 40 years older than Kim, so even if you gave him a couple months to learn the game and perfect his swing, they might be close.  Hey, maybe President Trump could teach him the game himself!  They'd get to know each other and Kim could learn something besides golf, like how to feed his people.

The president could explain that Americans haven't been called "Yankees" in decades, and in fact, there are parts of the USA where it is quickly heard as the name of a baseball team that is hated more than the FPIC hates what he thinks are actual Yankees.

And oh, yeah, after a reasonable time for Kim to learn the game, they can play 18.  You think that might be a stressful round for both of them?  Maybe they can hold it in a neutral place like Singapore.  Sure, the security would be a nightmare, but wouldn't you kick in for a pay-per-view of it?

North Korea must have a national sport other than political assassination.  I know they have platform divers, because I wrote about their Olympians in that sport.  Maybe the two leaders could compete in whatever that is.  I'd pay to see that too.

But can't we start down that path and consider other ways to settle our differences in ways that don't involve weaponry, and bombs and killing?  Competitions involving the potential embarrassment of our world leaders, well, I'd love to see us figure out how that could work.

Even if it involves horse manure.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

If Only It Weren't True

On Saturday, the football team of the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville landmark founded by the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, will play a game.  The game is to be against another venerable institution of the Commonwealth, that being the College of William and Mary.

It will be broadcast by ESPN, the granddaddy of all sports networks, which now occupies about a half a dozen separate channels or so on every cable or satellite provider's guide.

Once upon a time, ESPN was respected for its commitment to all things sporting; you knew that there was always something on, that the red-blooded American male would watch.  ESPN launched the careers of many personalities who are now household names, and many legendary calls, even some that grew sickening over the years.  Chris Berman, an original personality over there, was responsible for many terms I hope I never again hear.

Then one day, ESPN became part of the Walt Disney Company.  Disney is the same entity which owns the ABC network, which thinks that George Stephanopoulos is a "journalist" who belongs in that role.  Naturally, in recent years ESPN followed the path of its fellow network and began tilting hard to the leftward direction.

You'll recall that I am not a big fan of ESPN, and occasionally (such as here) take them to task for things like trying to make us be interested in foreign soccer scores we don't care about, and injuries to foreign soccer players we don't care about, and anything else to make us seem part of a global community.  Yes, they are lefties and not particularly American in their orientation.

Which all would have made the joke about the broadcasting of the Virginia-William and Mary game really funny.  What joke was that, you ask?  Why, the one about ESPN pulling an Asian broadcaster named "Robert Lee" from doing the sideline reporting, because his name would be too similar to "Robert E. Lee", and it would have caused trouble in Charlottesville.

Hardy-har-har.

Except for one little thing.  It was, in fact, quite true.  Yes, indeed, as you must know if you watch the right networks (I can't swear that CNN, or ABC, NBC or CBS mentioned it), ESPN actually did pull its commentator Robert Lee from the game, and assigned him elsewhere.  Allegedly, they were concerned about seeming "insensitive" by sending someone with that name to the game.

Even though, as you can tell, Robert Lee is quite Asian, obviously not descended from the Lees of Old Virginia, and this is a football game.  Pardon my insensitivity.

So let's think of the mindset that went into this.  Someone inside the ESPN bowels noticed that the name of their assigned commentator resembled that of the distinguished USA and Confederate general (he served both brilliantly) whose statue, in the town of the university of his beloved state, was causing the hard-left class a lot of angst they apparently had not noticed until this month.

What, he or she asked, should we do?  Either we'll get some odd tweets here at ESPN, laughing at us for the juxtaposition of the names, or we send him to another game and no one will be the wiser.  And they chose the latter course, which would have been fine -- except someone inside was appropriately disgusted and tipped off a media type who is a big critic of ESPN's leftishness.

Now, if I were the head of ESPN, I would have said in the first place that even leftists have to be given boundaries, and if we here at the network thought Robert Lee should do the Virginia game, then send Robert Lee to the Virginia game -- let the problem be the critics' issue, not ours.  I would have thought the risk of being ridiculed for acute over-sensitivity to snowflakes was far too great.

But they moved him, the word got out, and now ESPN is getting accusations of stupidity heaped on their stupid heads for doing something that, well, stupid.  How many times in the last day and a half have commentators included in their criticism of ESPN the idea that "this story could have been in The Onion."

And still there are no boundaries.  ESPN will not budge from their leftism even though they are now the subject of immense ridicule.  They will not apologize; they will continue to give fumbling rationalizations for something they did because they thought they would not be caught.

And we will set back, shake our heads, and cancel our subscriptions to their Magazine, as we look at their advertisers and take pity on them.

But I swear that they would move Robert Lee to another game if this happened tomorrow.  Leftists, despite their being all over colleges, still cannot learn.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

What Freaking Eclipse?

This past Monday, people all across the USA were absolutely nutso over the solar eclipse.  Folks were driving or even flying hours to be where they could witness the totality, and to experience whatever it is you experience when the sun is completely blotted out by the passing moon.

I must have missed it.

I live and work really close to the path, in a home that was in the 98.5% totality zone, meaning that the moon would be covering 98.5% of the visible surface area of the sun.  Now, I know that within an hour's drive or so, the sun would disappear and it would get so dark midday that you could see stars.  And that was what I was expecting, or close to it.

Maybe not stars, but certainly for much or most of the sun's light to be blotted out, and for it to be one of those weird, vaguely yellow-hazed crepuscular experiences.  I remember the solar eclipse in 1979, I was in Boston and it really got weird, even though that one wasn't total locally either (and 1979 Boston started from a pretty weird place).

So as it got to be a bit after one in the afternoon, and things were supposed to start, I was looking out my window at the day's light level.  It was a partly cloudy day, so the light was changing from time to time just based on that, but I was really bracing for the weirdness to come upon us.  I mean, you know, 98.5%.  That's a lot of percent.

I had no plans to look up at the sun, with or without those nifty plastic 3-D glasses you were supposed to have on.  I know what Pac-Man looks like, and it really wasn't necessary to see, actually see the sun get eclipsed.  No, I was particularly looking forward with trepidation to the deep twilight at 2:30 or so in the afternoon, kind of like northern Alaska in winter.

Well, not so much.

At a half-hour before peak, with no discernible change, I told my best girl that it must be that the darkness descends in a hurry, just before the appropriate time, and lightens just as quickly thereafter.  So we walked outdoors, at ten minutes before the peak time, to wait for whatever was coming.

And waited ... and waited.  It was still partly to mostly cloudy, with not a lot of blue to be seen.  The illumination of the sun was what you would have expected on a mostly cloudy day.  The peak time, according to the geniuses at NOAA or whoever was putting out the word, came and went.

Nothing.

Now I have a degree from M.I.T., albeit in biology, and probably not wonderfully relevant, but I do think that my expectations should have been reasonable, even if I had only one experience from 40 years back to have as a reference.  But I expected a natural miracle, darn it, and I got no more darkness in a "98.5% zone" than I would have gotten on any of 200 other days here when the clouds go by.

Surely the big deal was that if you did look at the sun directly, or if you were to cut a hole in a piece of something and let the shadow go through, you'd see that Pac-Man shape and go "Oooohh, Pac-Man."  I didn't seem to feel the need to do that, and I was suitably disappointed.

Maybe next time, I'll drive to an actual place of totality.  Or just watch it on TV.  There were some neat views on TV.

Or I'll just wait for the next cloudy day and pretend.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Statues and Statues, Durham and Mosul

For a week or so we have been hearing all manner of discussion about the tearing down of statues to Confederate generals across various states in the South.  And that brings up all manner of discussion, much of which misses the point.

Actually, it isn't clear what the biggest "point" is.  But there is one that dominates everything.  And that is that whether statues go up or statues go down needs to be an orderly process, managed appropriately by the local government entity under which they were approved to go up in the first place.

If a town put up a statue, then the town -- its elected and appointed representatives -- need to be the ones to decide to take it down.  It cannot be allowed to be done by an unelected mob of rioters committing vandalism on the community.  When places I once lived, like Durham, NC, which had a statue just pulled down, do not have their police force immediately stop the vandalism, and then arrest and jail the participants, it is sanctioning the violence.

You want to debate whether those statues should come down?  Hey, have at it, and I'll happily join in because I'm sure I'll have an opinion of some kind.  I may even be inclined to agree with you.  But I will have a principle, i.e., that, for the most part, we should think twice before we second-guess the decisions made by communities 125 years ago.

As far as Confederate generals go, if they served their cause -- the Confederacy -- honorably, well, having a statue in a town that was actually in the Confederacy is recording the history of that town.  If it wanted to honor what it regarded as brave soldiers when the statue was put up, by memorializing their general in granite, well, let the town properly decide, in an orderly way, what to do.

But let me remind you of this, from a piece I wrote a while back:

In case you hadn't seen anything on this story, our friends in ISIS this week destroyed statues in the city of Mosul, Iraq.  They included ancient Assyrian and Akkadian artifacts from as far back as the 7th Century B.C.; according to the article referenced, the wonderful people from ISIS condemned the artifacts, since they were "worshiped instead of Allah."  Of course, Mohamed didn't even get born for another thousand years, but what the heck.  As one of the brain surgeons noted while pickaxing away, "We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries ..."

At what point do the rioters and vandals in Durham meld gracelessly but smoothly into ISIS members and sympathizers?  I would contend that there is essentially no difference whatsoever.  A mob not representing the properly-voiced wishes of the community chooses, on its own, to destroy historical artifacts that were created at a time when people felt differently from the mob members.  Whether the artifacts were created in 1886 or 655 B.C., their destruction by a group who took things into their own hands rather than going through the local order is a travesty.  This is America, not ISIS-land.

The Durham rioters should have been regarded the same way.  They were ISIS, tearing down historical construction because it didn't align with their world-view.  No difference at all.

Except that this isn't Mosul, Iraq, where the nation is immensely fragmented and the national government is not the most stable one, even as it tries to fight off the threat from ISIS in its north, and its Shi'ite older brother Iran tries to dominate it as well.  This is the USA, with Federal, state and local governments that are stable, even in California (yes, you can be stable and still be stupid).

What is even more ironic is that the other extremists, the neo-Nazis who dominated the news reporting of the rioting in Charlottesville, Virginia during a protest of the planned removal of a statue there -- their effort was exemplified by a domestic terrorist who used a speeding car as a murder weapon -- same as was done by ISIS in Barcelona Thursday, and in Nice, France and too many et ceteras to date.

So we have the amazing juxtaposition of the two extremes in the same set of events -- the leftist radicals destroying historical artifacts and the neo-Nazi white supremacists murdering with motor vehicles -- both using tactics that have come to us from ISIS.  They must be so proud, and so must the leaders of ISIS that are left.

As I write this, four people have been subsequently arrested in Durham (note -- not at the time of the riot) and supposedly there will be more, as identifications from video at the time are made.  I will be interested if the city and/or county, whichever jurisdiction applies, gets appropriately tough with these people.  I will be interested to see if they consider them morally equivalent to the ISIS clowns who destroyed the Assyrian and Akkadian artifacts.

And I will be interested if the city decides to replace the statue -- and, if so, with what.  And if the community actually get to provide some input there.

Because history can't really be destroyed, as long as we remember it.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

The ISIS World's Fair

Aaaaannnd I'm back.  Thanks for your patience.

- - - -

You would never believe this, but there are still World's Fairs.  Of course, you have to recall that there were such things as World's Fairs in the first place, since there has not been one in the USA since 1984, when there was supposedly one in New Orleans.  I'm pretty sure that I didn't know about that one while it was going on, so I'm to be forgiven for not knowing that it was the last.

There have been four in the last five years, in South Korea, Turkey, Italy and Kazakhstan (that one as we speak).  I missed the email and any mention of them in the news, of which there was presumably none, at least in the media I see and hear.  I was, however, surprised to discover that there is pretty much one every year, somewhere.  I am happy to refer to Kazakhstan as "somewhere", as I intend no disrespect to any of the host countries.

I attended Expo '67, which you may infer properly was a World's Fair held in 1967.  That one was in Montreal, Canada, and was the first time I had gone to Canada.  Strangely, amid the rides and exhibits and all, I left with the still-there impression that people from different countries can be really, really different from us.  Except the Canadians, who by comparison might as well be us.

I'm not talking race; I'm talking culture.  We are a pretty strait-laced, Puritanical people even now, while the French a big exhibitor there -- well, let's say they do things differently.  Their morals are decidedly different.

But to tell you the truth, none of that is relevant.  I digress a lot.

The good old Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, otherwise known as "ISIS", is getting kicked around a lot, now that our Administration has made it a bit more obvious that we are not putting up with any crap from them (or North Korea or Cuba).  Recruiting is down, and their leaders are getting killed at a sunny rate.

In short, they need help.

What they need most of all is a makeover.  You see, the ideal of the Islamism they fight for is to take us back to the 7th Century or so (those pre-Middle Ages centuries run together a bit).  They want a world caliphate, run by them, of course, wherein life exists as it did then, in the prophet Mohammed's day.

We assume that when that happens, they will get rid of their cell phones and stop tweeting.  Mohammed, after all, did not tweet his message to his followers.  In fact, with technology to be set back 1300 years or so, they will have to figure out how to get their message across after the caliphate is established, since we won't have TV or radio, no Internet, no smart phones.  No newspapers either, I guess.

But they will have some nifty 7th-Century technology, and I'm really interested in how they're going to do that.  So I have a great idea for them to let us know about it.

"Expo '18: The ISIS World's Fair"

What do you think?  They can have it in Syria or maybe some part of Iraq that they haven't evacuated yet, if they can assume that they'll still have control of it by next year.

They can invite every country on earth to have an exhibit of the way they will operate under the worldwide caliphate.  Perhaps the Burkina Fasoites can display the animals that will be their beasts of burden under the new world order.  Syria can display its weapons of war in those days when firearms are banned, as not having been really invented and perfected then.

The ISISists themselves can have a big recruiting booth and an information desk where we can all learn about their peaceful philosophy and beautiful religion.   And some weapons displays, too, as they ratchet their armaments back to the year 788 and we can see spears and trebuchets and battle-rams.

Tickets can be all-events.  Caveats on the tickets might include "Non-refundable.  If you ask for a refund, we will kill you.  If you don't attend every exhibit, we will kill you.  If you can't recite ten pages of the Koran, we will kill you.  If we don't like you, we will kill you.  And we might kill you anyway."

Admittedly, attendance might be down, since with a ban on all technology after the year 700, travel may take a long time.  In fact, it will be hard to tell anyone it is even happening.  So maybe 2018 is a bit optimistic, given that you'd have to expect that the grand most-high caliph has to approve any country's submission of the plans for its exhibits.  That communication may really take a long time.

Ooh, ooh -- rides.  There have to be rides, especially since we can't expect cotton candy.  Camel rides will be a big thing; they can be sponsored by Libya.  The Indians can bring elephants, and the Australians -- well, you can't really ride a kangaroo, so they'll have to try something else.  Maybe just an exhibit with a petting zoo.

So hey, these are just some ideas, but ISIS needs an image upgrade, and they might as well show their faces to the world as a bit higher on the cuddliness spectrum.  Maybe a World's Fair is just what they need.

If they haven't been wiped out by then.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

Rooting for Laundry

I'm going to be taking a little time off the column; hiatuses ("hiati"?) are good for the health and probably give time to accumulate a few topics for future columns.  Plus, I actually work for a living, and every once in a while it gets more than a little busy -- particularly in the last couple months of the fiscal year.

So, laundry.

Baseball, as is often said, is not without its charms.  OK, it hasn't been said here, but people do say it.  And among its many charms is the, well, "charming" patois spoken by its practitioners in the major leagues.

In the major-league dugout, for example, "moss" is not the stuff on the side of trees; it is what grows on the heads of humans.  "Moss" is a player's hair, much like a player's stomach is referred to as a "boiler."  When you have a stomach ache, which is conveyed to the press as "intestinal turmoil", the player is said to have "the bad boiler."

Note the definite article there, which appears superfluous, but is used regardless, in the same way as non-baseball players will refer to hyperuricemic inflammatory arthritis as "the gout", perhaps because of the awkward construction if you were to say "He's got gout."

Arms are "hose" and shoes are "kicks."  And when the "hose" tosses a good fastball, it's referred to as "cheese."  So, laundry.

You root for the team that you, well, root for, for whatever reason that may be.  But the roster of that team is likely to have 45-50 guys play for it in a typical season, even though only 25 can be on the active major-league roster at any one time (OK, 26 on those rare doubleheader days, the league allows teams to add one player for just that day).

So you find yourself rooting for whomever happens to be wearing the uniform on a given day, of course, but when you think about it, it's the uniform as much as the player.  The players move too much, too few are with their teams and stay long enough for you to get excited about them.  And that is called "rooting for the laundry."  Or against.

Makes sense.  I mean, I could really like a player on some team, particularly the Red Sox, for whom I root.  Could be a great guy, donates time to charity, all-American type.  Or all Dominican, that's fine too, Papi.  But ... put the guy in the wrong laundry -- and by "wrong laundry", I'm talking about the Yankees -- and he becomes a completely despicable person, scum of the earth, worst of the worst.  It's the uniform that matters.

Now, that's true for me even though I know all the players on the Red Sox major-league (25-man) roster and am pretty familiar with most of the top prospects in the minors.  Imagine if I rooted, but didn't really follow, the team.

For example, well, there's football.  Or college basketball.  I really think I recall that North Carolina won the NCAA basketball tournament last year, but I'm not sure.  You see, the finals game didn't start until almost bedtime, and the first half of a basketball game is irrelevant anyway most of the time.

The point, of course, is that I went to Carolina for med school, and they are the college team I most want to win.  You know how many current Tar Heel players I can name?  Zero.  I can't even get close to naming one.  They don't stay in school more than a year or two, so you can't really root for players.  Say it with me -- you root for the laundry.

I actually have some of that laundry, a Red Sox home jersey that I bought at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY on a trip in 1981.  It still fits, by the way.  And it's the laundry I still root for, even if I didn't grow up anywhere near there.


I just don't think it's right.  I think that you should root for the team and the player on it, and be promised a relatively long association between that team and, at least, its better players.  But you end up rooting for laundry, because that's the constant.

Can you tell I need a little break?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

That Pesky Debt Ceiling

Yesterday there was a tweet from Ari Fleischer, a former Bush-era press secretary, calling for an end to the debt ceiling.  "It served no purpose", Fleischer noted, except to cause the risk of shutdowns and general antagonism in Congress.

The debt ceiling, of course, is the law, as amended and amended and amended, ad nauseum, wherein the USA is limited in the amount of debt it can take on.  In turn, that limits the spending that Congress can authorize to only that which is funded with actual Treasury funds and what is left to borrow, up to the ceiling.

Now, I like Ari Fleischer, but I would oppose the eliminate the debt ceiling for exactly the same reason that I oppose legalizing addictive, psychoactive drugs.  Proponents of legalizing drugs generally point out that so much crime and violence are caused by the black market in those drugs, and that their legalizing would generate a lot of tax revenues for the government.

The thing is, if it is wrong, it is wrong.  Handing addictive drugs over to the unregulated economy violates our collective security, at least to the extent that we are unwilling to allow soaring addiction rates, dangerously psychotic people out on the streets fearlessly, and a drain on our health-care capacity.

And that's the issue here.

What is wrong, specifically, with eliminating the debt ceiling, is that deficit spending is itself wrong and cannot and must not be tolerated.  We don't actually need a debt ceiling, we need to eliminate new debt.

No action should be taken on the debt ceiling that is not part of a defined and congressionally (or constitutionally) mandated program to require a balanced budget.  States, of course, mostly require that, and it is not really the debt ceiling that facilitates our current $20 trillion debt as much as the lack of a mandated incentive not to borrow, not to spend more than is taken in.

No one is doing that at this moment, although I bet that it is President Trump's inclination to try to get Congress to do something to move to a balanced budget and ban deficit spending.  It was, in fact, laughable that Chuck Schumer, of all people, in having the gall to make "demands" on the majority in the coming tax debate, included one that it would "not affect the deficit."  Democrats.  Making "demands", after being thrashed in several elections.  And insisting on preventing an increase in the deficit.  One has to laugh, perhaps a Sheldon Cooper laugh (link).

So I'm of a mind to insist not only that the debt ceiling be left in place for now, but that the next legislation to increase it build in mandatory reductions over ten years until the 2027 budget is required to be balanced.  Of course, we have to start paying principal, which we don't do now, but that's a really good thing to do also, much as we are required to do as individuals.

Who aren't, you know, "on" something.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

We Don't Need Help, We Need You to Be Better

If you're a baseball fan, you know that July 31 of each year is a special day.  It is called, formally, the "non-waiver trade deadline", and is generally called "the deadline."

July 31 is the last day of the season when teams can trade with each other on an unrestricted basis.  After that date -- actually, 4:00pm Eastern Time on July 31 -- in order to trade a player to another team, you have to place that player on "revocable waivers"; in essence, dangling that player out there for any other team to claim him; however, if another team does claim him, you are able to pull him back from waivers, in which case you can no longer trade him.

Every team gets to claim waived players, in worst-to-first order of the standings.  If no team claims a player in the allotted time, the team is free to trade that player wherever it wants, as long as it can make a deal with another team for only other unrestricted players (minor leaguers and waiver-cleared major leaguers).

Because trading after the deadline is so complex, there is usually a rush to jam in a lot of trades on the 31st.  Trades can't be later because of the waiver rules, and they can't be much earlier because the teams are holding out to get the best deal.  There are lots of sports program focused on baseball that afternoon, for sure, with Twitter wires heating up as news breaks.

As for the players, the ones rumored to be on the block are well aware of this.  So are the ones who figure not to be traded, as they look to see what teammates may be leaving and who might come back -- particularly someone who plays your position.

Monday came and went, of course, and as usual there were a lot of deals.  One team with a curious outcome, however, was the Boston Red Sox -- my team.

I say "curious" because there was only one trade of note for them that day, acquiring a set-up reliever, Addison Reed, from the Mets for a trio of minor leaguers without a lot of future in the Red Sox organization.  That relative inaction was noteworthy, because the need of the Red Sox was to upgrade its hitting, possibly more so than even the relief pitcher spot that they did fill.

Most teams in the same situation would trade for a position player likely to hit a lot better than the one manning that position already.  So it was a bit of a surprise to some that Boston did not acquire a position player at the deadline, save for a trade a week earlier to acquire Eduardo Nunez, a utility infielder but a better hitter than a fielder.

Interestingly, the reaction in the press was that there was a message in the whole process.  It was, they felt (correctly, I bet) that the message was to its position-player core, with the entire outfield, shortstop, third base, and catching positions -- 67% of the lineup -- between 20 and 27 years old.

That message was "We don't need another hitter in the lineup.  We need YOU to hit better!"

That's quite a message.  With the exception of catcher Christian Vazquez (26) and just-called-up third baseman Rafael Devers (20), the other young players are all hitting markedly below what they have shown to be capable of based on their major league track record.  There's obviously nothing to be gained by trading for anyone in those positions, since the Red Sox have a talented young player already there in each one.

The team responded by actually scoring six runs in the first game after the deadline, which wouldn't sound like much except for the previously anemic offense of recent games -- and the fact that their pitching had barely been allowing three runs a game on a consistent basis; their starters' ERA at this writing is the best in the American League.

And naturally, last night, in their second game after the "warning", they scored twelve, including a walk-off home run by Vazquez.  So perhaps the message "took."

I like the message.  "It is your job; we won't be replacing you, at least now.  The team needs you to bear down, concentrate, take pitches, have good at-bats.  We're not getting help.  You are good enough; we need to be closer to what you have shown to be.  Get off your butts and work harder."

That's America, and the American work ethic.  This is America.  Go Sox.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.

"Mooching" the White House

Anthony Scaramucci is on his way back to the Export-Import Bank, having tendered his resignation as White House communications director, presumably (at this writing) at the request of the brand-new chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly.

I have to step back a bit on this one.  I mean, you had to appreciate the bringing in of Scaramucci to the White House team as a loud, brash New Yorker in the mold of his boss, the president.

But the bigger issue is chain of command, and I'm trying to psych out what happened -- and I don't think it's that hard and I don't think it is particularly scandalous.  Remember that the sequence of events was that Scaramucci came in, then Sean Spicer resigned as spokesman, then Reince Priebus left as chief of staff, John Kelly came in as chief of staff, and Scaramucci went out.

The key is the reporting order and chain of command.

Scaramucci was reporting directly to the president, which bypassed Priebus and was likely OK with Priebus, at least somewhat.  That all blew up when it became obvious to Scaramucci that Priebus was a real problem as far as leaking, or allowing leaks, or tolerating them.  Scaramucci went to the President, and Priebus had to go.

But President Trump had wanted Gen. Kelly to come in and be the chief of staff, and a retired four-star Marine general was not going to have Anthony Scaramucci, in any capacity, not reporting through him.  That would violate every precept of chain-of-command, of course, and is perfectly reasonable.

Plus, Gen. Kelly is from Boston and Scaramucci is from New York.  Want to guess how long before the whole Red Sox-Yankees thing blew up in a very ugly scene?  Trust me, that wouldn't be good, and Kelly is a Taurus, too -- we share a birthday.

So I think that if you look at all this as a logical chain of command situation, it makes perfect sense.  No scandal, just a logical sequencing.

I'm good with that.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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The Big Nothing: Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Senate

What a week it was, at least for the future of health insurance in the USA.

I followed it all, from the courageous return of a very ill John McCain to Washington, to his depressing decision not to assign the Obamacare repeal/replacement effort to a House/Senate conference committee and being the swing vote dooming that effort.  I guess it was a mixed week for the senator as well.

You know, after self-questioning my loyalty to the party that intends, and sometimes pretends, to advance conservatism, I have to question a lot more things.  First on the list is whether the Republicans in the Senate even want to govern.

That was a pretty pathetic display last week.  Right at the top is John McCain's performance on the so-called "skinny repeal" bill.

Let's try to understand this, although I'm sure you already do, at least most of it.

Obamacare was rammed through without any Republican support.  Since Ted Kennedy had died in office in late 2009, Massachusetts needed a special election for a new Senator.  When Scott Brown, a Republican, won the seat, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority to pass whatever Obamacare version they wanted.

Accordingly, they turned to the arcane congressional process called "budget reconciliation" to ram through Obamacare, and shoved it through both houses.  What reconciliation hath wrought, reconciliation could fix -- its simple-majority rule allowed passage in the Senate.  But reconciliation can only be used for certain things, at least in the hands of people who, you know, follow their own rules.

So the first stage of dumping Obamacare was to put as much repeal and replace as could be done through reconciliation, and do that.  The House passed such a bill months earlier, and was waiting for the Senate to pass it and get it onto a willing President's desk.

No such luck.  The Senate was not happy with the House bill and crafted their own, which failed.  Then they put together the "skinny repeal" bill.  I have no idea what was in it, but the purpose was to pass it, send it back to the House and then work in a joint House-Senate conference committee to craft a bill that could be, you know, passed.

Of course, some Republicans did not like the skinny repeal bill, but they held their noses and voted for it because they knew it would not become law.  It was going to the House and then right to the joint committee to align with what the House had passed.  Both houses would then have a chance to work on negotiating a real bill, however long it might take.

The nose-holding Republican senators, of course, trusted that Speaker Paul Ryan would not call a vote on the skinny repeal bill; rather, he would send it right to conference, as the plan was to go.

Except for John McCain.  McCain insisted that Speaker Ryan publicly acknowledge that he would have the House go straight to conference and so there was no chance the bill would pass as it left the Senate.  Ryan shrugged and said "OK, we are not going to vote on skinny repeal, and we are not going to vote on a bill before a conference committee gets to work on it."

Or words to that effect.  I heard him, and he said what McCain wanted to hear, at least we all thought.

Except that when the vote was called in the Senate, McCain joined two other senators and voted "no", which doomed the bill and doomed any chance of getting a joint conference committee to attack the problem of a health insurance law that is strangling millions of Americans.

Bad on you, Senator McCain.  I certainly heard you the first time; you would not vote for the bill unless Speaker Ryan assured you in public that he would send it straight to committee.  He did, and you flunked your end of the bargain.

I don't know what party you belong to, Senator, but either you have left mine, or the party has left me.  If that's what honor now means to you, you may need to think about whether you want to continue in that once-august body.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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Being the Best (and Very Lucky), 1986 Style

In 1986, I was a young 35-year-old who had been singing barbershop music for a year and a half.  I was living in Marshall, Virginia, a little village in Fauquier County that was a broad postal-defined area in the rural foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, nowhere near anything.  It wasn't the end of the world, but you could see it from there.  So the group I was singing with was small and not very good on pretty much any scale.

Late in 1985, though, my consulting work had me commuting every day all the way to Alexandria, Virginia, close to Washington DC, 63 miles each way.  I was getting home too late to attend the rehearsals of the group in Fauquier County, but I was enjoying the singing and there was a group in Alexandria I could head to right after work and get there in time, a mile or so from my consulting gig.

Sure enough, I decided to change membership, but it wasn't the most altruistic thing, either.  The Alexandria group was much, much larger, and just 5-6 years earlier had been the second-ranked barbershop chorus in the world for two years.  I thought, young singer that I was, that I could learn a lot more about the art form and become a better performer with them.  Plus, quartets formed out of choruses like that, and I was really interested in the bigger pool of good performers as candidates.

When I joined, Alexandria had just qualified for the international championship contest, to be held the following July in Salt Lake City.  I would have to learn the competition songs and choreography -- oh, yeah, those guys moved, too -- and qualify individually to be part of the group.

I want to convey that I was a novice and these guys were world-class competitors though, to be accurate, the group was far more than the sum of its parts.  Not that many of the 120 performers were very good singers, you see.  The skill of the director is to make a great deal more than what the individuals bring.  But I didn't quite get that.  I was in awe of what was around me.

There was a lot of effort and practice that went into the preparation for international.  I had no idea how good we were, since I had no experience with higher-level competition and could only respond to what our coaches were telling us along the way.

The convention began on a Tuesday, and my Best Girl and I flew out to enjoy it with no idea what to expect, though we'd attended one before it was as an audience only.  The contest itself would be on Friday (the intervening days were for quartets to compete), and I was really getting nervous about it.  We rehearsed hard, and I didn't want to screw up the precision of the group.

But here is the point of all this.

On Friday, we walked -- 120 of us -- from our hotel to the convention center where we would compete an hour or so later that day.  I was anxious and really a bit unprepared for what to expect.  I knew my part and all, but it was the experience of competing that was a blank for me.

As I walked, another gentleman from the group, ten years my senior but far more experienced, must have seen something.  He strode over to where I was walking, put his arm on my shoulder (he was much taller, not that that's an accomplishment), and said, "You know, you're going to have the chance today to be the best in the world at something.  You're lucky, hardly anyone gets an opportunity to do that."

That did it for me.  I was able to smile and appreciate the opportunity and embrace it, rather than fearing it.  Those simple words put things in perspective and  helped get it together for me, a dumb ol' kid from a tiny town in Virginia.  I went out there on stage with the rest of the guys and did my thing, calm enough to get through it and without making any serious mistakes, at least as far as I recall.  It did go quickly.

Later that day, the medals were called off, from five down to one.  By the time the judging chairman had read through the second-place silver medals (they would go to a suburban Chicago group, after the bronze medals had gone to Raleigh, Toronto and Cincinnati) without our group being called, we were an emotionally wrecked bunch of guys.  Sixth place?  Seventh?  First?

Then ... "Ladies and gentlemen, your 1986 international gold-medal chorus champions, the Alexandria Harmonizers!"

Not only had I -- we -- had an opportunity to be the "best in the world at something", we had actually become it.  For decades thereafter, through many more competitions and three more world championships, I never took for granted the good fortune I had to be in the right place at the right time.

I do not take for granted the good fortune I have had, and continue to do.  I live in the USA, the best place on earth to be.  I'm free to write this and the 700 preceding essays.  Many things have happened, not all good, over the years, as these pages can attest.  But I have had opportunities to experience what much of the world cannot, and I'm a lucky, lucky guy.

Cheers for the weekend.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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#700: Revisiting Baltimore Lettuce-Pickers

It's been a couple years since Baltimore was a riot-fest, with the aftermath of the Freddie Gray incident turning, as most things with the left, into chaos in the streets, destruction and looting for no productive reason and no real end other than carting away whatever can be carted off.  And burning things down, let's not forget that.

I had an idea at the time, trying to address the jobs issue and the immigration issue all at the same time, as published here.  You see, the leftists were falling all over themselves trying not to dump on the rioters for what they actually were -- scum.  In fact, in hindsight it was curious that they wouldn't call the rioters bad people, any more than they would call Islamist terrorists "Islamist terrorists."  They rush to defend both, which must provide definition to their character flaw.

At the same time the arsonists and looters were destroying their section of the city, and being rationalized by the left for some kind of frustration because there were no jobs (well, you burn down the places of business, you're kind of not helping the jobs issue), the immigration debate was rampant.

The Washington Post provided us some amusement by critiquing the immigration and deportation plan of some of the Republican candidates.  We would have real problems in California, the paper went on, because if we deport illegals we won't have any vegetables.  Americans -- and I quote here -- "don't want to do the jobs that [illegals] do."

I couldn't reconcile all that with the numbers.  There are indeed jobs, plenty of them.  Six million, I think the Administration has been saying.  Add to that all the under-the-table, cash-paid jobs the illegals are doing in the lettuce fields in California and the fruit groves and the like, and you've got hundreds of thousands more.

I pointed out that if the rioters in Baltimore were indeed complaining about a lack of jobs, they had only to go out to the vegetable fields and show their citizenship.  There is plenty of lettuce, and not a lot of USA citizens are out there a-pickin'.  I don't know what the pay is, but it sure beats sitting on the stoop complaining about the blahs and the miseries and the lack of jobs.

It is now a couple years since, and Donald Trump is the President of the United States.  On perusing the old article, I realized that I didn't expect him to get the nomination back then, let alone to win the White House.  And the old article rang a little differently with a businessman in the Oval Office, so I thought about it.

Donald Trump has been president for six months, and this is the sort of thing that should pique his interest.  We have two problems -- joblessness in the inner cities, and illegal immigration prompted by the opportunity to work cash jobs in the lettuce fields.  It would be just like the new president to look at the two of them and put someone in charge of creating a program where inner-city unemployed in Chicago, or Baltimore, or wherever, could be set up to do the jobs -- with Social Security numbers, of course, so some of the growers may not be fans, but the law is the law -- hopping a train out to the west coast, or whatever makes sense, and having the job they say they want.

I think he would find that a curious focus for some creative thinking.  I sure hope that, whatever is logistically possible, he turns someone in his administration on to look at how those paired problems could be resolved.

Of course, the Democrats wouldn't even think it was a problem.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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Getting Buzzed, and Not in the Good Way

A couple days back, a US plane -- a spy plane, I believe the news accounts said (if we can ever believe the media to get anything right at all anymore, even bland facts) -- was buzzed by a Chinese jet or two out in international waters.

Naturally, the US plane did nothing except escape, and tomorrow or the day after, we will all have forgotten the incident, if we even knew it had happened.

Sadly, the same thing has happened when Russian planes buzzed our own planes, and buzzed our Navy vessels.  This is going to continue, and more countries, including Iran and its contemptible leadership, are going to keep on doing that.  Iran pulled one of those little stunts just yesterday.

I'm sorry, but I'm buzzed out.

Now, I suppose that there is a thin argument to be made as far as what the risks are when you send a spy plane over a sovereign nation's territory and, say, get it buzzed on the way back.  I suppose that should be considered.

But as far as having our planes and ships buzzed while out in international waters, I've had it.  I am an American, and after having bailed out goodly parts of the free part of the globe in two world wars and in Korea, and having been a force for good and freedom for 200 years, the United States of America deserves the respect of the world.

And we need to show who we are.

I would like to ask the president to make a statement, an explicit statement, to the rest of the world.  We will no longer tolerate the acts of sniveling tyrants against the USA, and buzzing our planes and ships will be regarded as aggressive acts.  We should say in public that if we are buzzed, the offending planes will be obliterated.

Fair warning.  We will not take such offense from Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, whoever.  Buzzing is an affront to the role that the USA has proudly taken for the last century, without coveting the land of other sovereign nations.  We will not tolerate it.

Someone will push the challenge line, and we will act accordingly.  It will be the last time we get buzzed.  And it will show that the USA gives a new meaning to "red line", at least this administration does.

America needs a bit more of that.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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Better Wages, Better Pizza

I'm going to give, for once, a shred of credit to Chuck Schumer and the Democrats.  Don't get too excited; it isn't a lot and barely deserved.

So in the past few days, they came up with a new tagline for their platform, which believe it or not, is not just "Resist until the other side screams."  I don't recall it exactly, but it was "Better wages, better jobs, ..." better something-or-other, but I forgot what.  I'm sure it wasn't "... better pizza -- Papa John's", but I feel that "old" Papa John Schnatter is doing a bit better in sales this week thanks to the Democrats.

At any rate, the credit I give them is because for the first time since November 8th, organized Democrats have been speaking about an actual issue, not that they have a solution.  So bully for Uncle Chuck, who also did say something about the fact that Democrats have to say they're for something, and asked what they did wrong in 2016 (i.e., admitting that they, in fact, did).

Words have meaning, however.

And I thought it interesting to see the line "better wages" and ask myself what manner of solution they were going to propose to get any of that done.  You see, you can't just snap your fingers and wages rise.  After all, wages are set, absent external meddling, based on the value that an employee provides to the employer.

So if you're going to promote higher wages, you have to raise the value that employees provide, because if you artificially raise them (q.v. "minimum wage"), you are tampering with the value proposition.  If you tamper with the value proposition, employers will react to realign wages with value, by doing things such as hiring only people capable of doing multiple tasks and having three people do the work of four -- so that each employee now brings the value for which they're paid.

In other words, "Better wages, better jobs, fewer people working."

So I do wonder what Uncle Chuck and his troops have in mind.  Since they're leftists, and since they're only concerned about power and winning elections (otherwise they wouldn't promote solutions that don't work, e.g., Obamacare), we can expect that they will jump right into some kind of pandering action.  Perhaps a hike in the Federal minimum wage, since the unemployment rate is too good right now.

Of course, since the typical response by the economy to a minimum wage hike is to cut jobs, and since union jobs will be at least some of those cut, the AFL/CIO may not support that too vocally.

Ooh, ooh -- training.  Yeah, that's the thing.  We'll train people so they can do better jobs.

Sure we will.  Who is this "we" of which you speak?  Who is paying for that training?  What jobs are we training people for?  Who decides that?  If the jobs are in North Dakota oil fields, where are you training the people, and will they be required to move as the price of accepting taxpayer-paid job training?

And who are we training?  I mean, I have no issue with training, although it is completely outside the scope of the Federal government.  But would a Democrat program require people trained to have a job in 90 days or lose the right to welfare or unemployment benefits?  Would it require a repayment to the Federal government for all that training -- if you're going to take the training, don't you need to pay the taxpayer back?  I'd be OK with that, call it a "student loan."

I don't expect to see that kind of discussion when the Democrats put out their plans.  But I hope the press is at least marginally critical and asks that sort of question if they are ever allowed to ask questions.

Maybe Schumer will put ropes around him to keep out the press questions.  Worked for Hillary, didn't it?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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Do I Really, Really Want It?

This week, we hear, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) is supposed to be shepherding through the Senate yet another attempt at a change to the dreadful Obamacare law.  I say "Change", because it likely won't be a repeal and won't be a replacement; rather, it will be ... something.

This is somewhere about revision 21-A, perhaps.

I don't exactly know where to go with all this, as I believe it would be in the best interests of the country to pass a clean repeal and then, with no specific time limit, figure out what we are trying to fix and start from scratch with a new law that addresses that requirement.

And it bears noting that this bill will not become law as is, even if it is passed by the Senate, because it needs to go to the House of Representatives and presumably reconciled with the bill the House passed earlier this session.  By the time the conference committee comes up with something for the full House and Senate to vote on, it may be practically in another language, let alone similar to either of the original bills each house passed.

So what do I hope happens?  You see, you have three sets of Republicans in the Senate, at least in one way of looking at it.  There is the vast majority of the Republican caucus there -- 42-45 or so -- who believe it necessary to pass a health insurance bill and will vote for one if it is reasonable.  Then you have the two poles.

The poles are potentially irreconcilable.  The staunch conservatives see no great role for the Federal government in health insurance, and want to strip out Obamacare in total, potentially legislating a small number of elements (such as allowing interstate sales of health policies) but getting rid of the entire law and starting over.  I lean toward their view, notwithstanding political necessities.

The other small faction is politically sensitive.  Since one of Obamacare's largest taxpayer giveaways was a large expansion of Medicaid, these senators are scared that to end that expansion could cause political issues (read: "votes") in their states.  They opposed Obamacare, those of them who were in the Senate, at that time, but won't vote to repeal it because it has gotten its filthy hooks into the economy and they lack the will to stand up for the country's best interest.

So what do I really, really want as far as the bill to be introduced this week?  Remember, I've not read it, but assume it is the most recent bill but with a few sweeteners in it to attract the remaining senators.  Well, if that is indeed the description, then I would be perfectly happy if the effort fails.

Remember that as we speak, Obamacare is sinking to the bottom of the ocean.  The law having made countless concessions to insurance companies, its implementation has proved so impractical that the companies are quickly pulling out of all the markets that they can't make money in.  That number has grown so fast that in 2018 there will be hundreds of counties with no plan to buy and far more with only one company offering service.  The rates, which skyrocketed last year and surely influenced the presidential election more than any Russians did, are going to go way up again, absent competition.

I think I will be perfectly happy if no bill gets passed and Obamacare stays the law of the land for a short time longer, long enough for the country to get so fed up with it that they rise up and demand its repeal.

I have questions as to whether even then the current crop of Senate Republicans can put together a bill that is productive and essentially repeals the whole mess, but I have to go with what I want and what I think is best.

Pretty sure I'm going to want my Senators to vote "no."

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.