Nancy Pelosi, the geriatric, overly wealthy and entitled minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, has responded to President Trump's initial immigration proposal, the one with 70 points worth of things he wants to have in a resultant bill.
We all know the president, and we all know that this is his initial posture, hoping to get as much as possible of what is in his points put into a bill that the House and Senate can actually pass and put on his desk. It's called an initial offer", and lots can get done -- including the border wall -- especially as long as border security is nailed down before going on to dealing with the illegals already here.
That, of course, doesn't seem to faze Mrs. Pelosi. She and her good friend Chuck Schumer, made a bizarre statement. "The administration can't be serious about compromise or helping the
Dreamers if they begin with a list that is anathema to the Dreamers, to
the immigrant community and to the vast majority of Americans [sic]. We told the president at our meeting that we were open
to reasonable border security measures alongside the DREAM Act, but this
list goes so far beyond what is reasonable. This proposal fails to
represent any attempt at compromise. The list includes the wall, which was explicitly ruled out of the
negotiations. If the president was serious about protecting the
Dreamers, his staff has not made a good faith effort to do so."
So, one has to ask, what exactly is her constituency?
Nancy Pelosi represents a severely leftist district in California, but as minority leader she also has to represent the entire Democrat Party and Democrat voters as well, many of whom are not nearly as leftist as her district. And lots of those people are not too thrilled with the idea that they have to pay, through their tax dollars, for illegal aliens who get more benefits than they themselves do.
She actually included in her statement that the "vast majority" of Americans saw President Trump's proposal as "anathema." Who exactly was that? It's hard to imagine that any of those who voted for him think the proposal is "anathema"; it is the core of what he ran on, and he is now the president (and Nancy Pelosi's party now leads nothing in Washington). It's also easy to imagine that a lot of Democrat voters also see some things in the proposal that are worthy of discussion, or at least don't see it as "anathema."
But Nancy Pelosi is so frigging out of touch with the country, the one she only flies over, that she likely believes what she said. I have no idea what the real constituency is that she thinks she has outside her district, but the USA is ready to have actual immigration reform on the table and debated in Congress, something that did not happen when her side had Congress, the White House, and a filibuster-proof Senate.
Look, we know what's up. She can't possibly allow this president to be seen as leading, let alone to be driving an issue; that would grant him legitimacy. And it is incredibly disingenuous to try to claim that the "vast majority of America" thinks anything other than that President Trump's proposal is a reasonable start, a start at something she should have led herself in 2009.
But Nancy does not hear what she only flies over.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob
at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving
new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at
bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, October 16, 2017
Friday, October 13, 2017
It's Not YOUR Money, Hillary
So we're all sort of caught up in that Harvey Weinstein thing, where the apparently powerful movie mogul (I had never really heard of him, but I rarely go to movies, don't typically watch the Oscars and couldn't care less about the moguls who make them) is accused of abusing female actresses.
A bunch of actresses are coming forward to assert that he did this or that to them, and one has to assume simply by (A) their large number, (B) the risk of industry blacklist, and (C) the fact that people are saying they knew all the time he was a louse, that it it is substantively true, and that Weinstein is a serial abuser of women under his employment power. Classic workplace sexual harassment, casting couch, all that sort of thing.
This story is big in Hollywood, but not so much in the media. That would be because Weinstein, along with being a serial abuser of women under his employment control, was a big Democrat donor and a very good friend of the Clintons, even having them rent a house in the Hamptons next to him. Lots of money, many years. God forbid a Democrat donor's legal issues get into the Democrat media.
So of course there were some calls, at least on the right and from some of the women abused, for Weinstein's campaign donations to be returned, particularly all the money he gave to Hillary Clinton last year. People have done that before; when donors are problematic and it looks bad, they returned the donations.
It looked pretty bad when she wouldn't say anything about Weinstein for almost a week after the scandal broke. I guess it took that long for her handlers to come up with the right statement one makes, when one's friend turns out to be a serial abuser and you probably always knew about it, you know, being married to one and all. Oh, yeah, and you were supposed to be the "friend of women" and all that too.
So Hillary gets on an interview with a butt-kissing leftist host, and gets asked the logical question -- "Will you return his contributions to your campaign?". What was her answer to that, you might ask? Well, it was pretty curious, and if I transcribed it right it was this:
"Well, there's no one to return it to ... [then, in regard to returning the donations by giving them to charity,] of course I will do that; I give 10% [of my income] to charity every year. This will be part of that."
No one seems to have mentioned, however, that those donations from Weinstein are not her money. OK, I don't exactly know what the campaign finance rules are regarding funds left over after a completed campaign -- I believe they can roll to a subsequent campaign, maybe -- but they're not personal money.
The interviewer, of course, didn't follow up by asking the obvious questions. "What do you mean 'no one to return it to'; your campaign should send it back to Weinstein, right?" and then the other obvious one, "How does the donation to charity of campaign donations that were given to the Hillary for President campaign, possibly become part of your personal donation to charity? That money belongs to the campaign, not to you! You can't claim a charitable deduction on your taxes and you can't claim any moral credit either."
The former question is a sidelight. The latter is critical, and raises a real issue. What, we have to ask if she said that, is Hillary Clinton doing with the other money that is left over in her campaign account? I mean, people can't just give it to charity and then claim some kind of tax deduction against their own income.
So why did she even mention what she personally claims to give to charity each year? What relevance does that have? It has nothing to do with campaign finance at all, and to be clear, even if it did, it essentially, as documented, all went to the Clinton Foundation, which is a cesspool of corruption run by her family and select close family friends. Charity, yeah, right.
So please, will someone in the press raise that? Her own words, "It will be part of [my personal charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation]", are frightening, if in her own mind she sees the campaign, the "Foundation" and her own pocketbook as extensions of each other.
Please, media. Jump on this.
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.
A bunch of actresses are coming forward to assert that he did this or that to them, and one has to assume simply by (A) their large number, (B) the risk of industry blacklist, and (C) the fact that people are saying they knew all the time he was a louse, that it it is substantively true, and that Weinstein is a serial abuser of women under his employment power. Classic workplace sexual harassment, casting couch, all that sort of thing.
This story is big in Hollywood, but not so much in the media. That would be because Weinstein, along with being a serial abuser of women under his employment control, was a big Democrat donor and a very good friend of the Clintons, even having them rent a house in the Hamptons next to him. Lots of money, many years. God forbid a Democrat donor's legal issues get into the Democrat media.
So of course there were some calls, at least on the right and from some of the women abused, for Weinstein's campaign donations to be returned, particularly all the money he gave to Hillary Clinton last year. People have done that before; when donors are problematic and it looks bad, they returned the donations.
It looked pretty bad when she wouldn't say anything about Weinstein for almost a week after the scandal broke. I guess it took that long for her handlers to come up with the right statement one makes, when one's friend turns out to be a serial abuser and you probably always knew about it, you know, being married to one and all. Oh, yeah, and you were supposed to be the "friend of women" and all that too.
So Hillary gets on an interview with a butt-kissing leftist host, and gets asked the logical question -- "Will you return his contributions to your campaign?". What was her answer to that, you might ask? Well, it was pretty curious, and if I transcribed it right it was this:
"Well, there's no one to return it to ... [then, in regard to returning the donations by giving them to charity,] of course I will do that; I give 10% [of my income] to charity every year. This will be part of that."
No one seems to have mentioned, however, that those donations from Weinstein are not her money. OK, I don't exactly know what the campaign finance rules are regarding funds left over after a completed campaign -- I believe they can roll to a subsequent campaign, maybe -- but they're not personal money.
The interviewer, of course, didn't follow up by asking the obvious questions. "What do you mean 'no one to return it to'; your campaign should send it back to Weinstein, right?" and then the other obvious one, "How does the donation to charity of campaign donations that were given to the Hillary for President campaign, possibly become part of your personal donation to charity? That money belongs to the campaign, not to you! You can't claim a charitable deduction on your taxes and you can't claim any moral credit either."
The former question is a sidelight. The latter is critical, and raises a real issue. What, we have to ask if she said that, is Hillary Clinton doing with the other money that is left over in her campaign account? I mean, people can't just give it to charity and then claim some kind of tax deduction against their own income.
So why did she even mention what she personally claims to give to charity each year? What relevance does that have? It has nothing to do with campaign finance at all, and to be clear, even if it did, it essentially, as documented, all went to the Clinton Foundation, which is a cesspool of corruption run by her family and select close family friends. Charity, yeah, right.
So please, will someone in the press raise that? Her own words, "It will be part of [my personal charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation]", are frightening, if in her own mind she sees the campaign, the "Foundation" and her own pocketbook as extensions of each other.
Please, media. Jump on this.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
No World Cup for You!
Oh, my God.
What a horrific day for soccer in the USA, and not for why you think it stinks either. As you may possibly know, but might not have cared enough to have remembered, on Tuesday the USA soccer team lost to the team from the soccer powerhouse of Trinidad and Tobago. By losing, their record in their group of six countries' teams dropped to where they are now eliminated from qualifying for the 2018 World Cup of Soccer, somewhere in Russia, I think.
Those are the facts. Here come the opinions.
I have written multiple times about soccer here, none of which have been particularly complimentary. Soccer, you see, has the problem of being lots of fun to play, but agonizingly dull to watch. If I watch my Keurig machine making coffee, at least I know that in a minute or two there will be coffee. Hooray. If I turn on, God forbid, a soccer "match", I don't even know if there will be a winner -- I'm not even sure there will be any score.
It is an American thing, and probably a human thing, that if you have a reason to root for a team or a performer, and they are participating, you can tolerate more dullness in a sport. I like watching golf on TV, I suppose, but I certainly watch it more intently if either (A) Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods is in contention; (B) it is a Ryder Cup or President's Cup where the USA is a team against foreigners; or (C) it is one of the four major tournaments a year, where the result is historic in the same way that a Super Bowl winner is, even if it is Seattle playing Kansas City.
That is why people in this country ever watch soccer, that is, in the every-four-years World Cup when we can root for the USA team against the world. The other three years and eleven months or so, we don't care and don't watch. That's important.
Now what I have written here previously has to do not so much with how dull soccer is to watch, but how the left is so intent on making us watch, or at least making us think we are supposed to watch. I've written about how ESPN, a leftist outlet if ever there was one, runs the scores of soccer matches in Mexico, the UK and perhaps Mars (who knows or cares) on the bottom of the screen.
The left is a globalist entity, and soccer is a global sport. We don't care who wins in "Bundesliga Deutschland"? Shame on us for not caring, not on the game for being dull. No, we will shove scores at you until you start watching, and we will continue to do so forever. Maybe that will get you to hate America like you're supposed to.
But now, oh, Lordy, they have a problem. You see, every four years we have to watch soccer, because the USA is in the World Cup and we root for our team and our flag (ironic, right?). And every four years, there is all this talk about how our temporary fandom will translate into lots and lots of kids taking up soccer.
But it never translates into actually watching the game on TV or being interested in watching it, because as I said, it's fun to play but anesthetic to watch. So now with no USA team in the World Cup, that means that the left loses us for eight years instead of four, and that is just terrible.
It is ironically terrible for Fox Sports, which paid a ton of cash for the right to broadcast a World Cup that no one will be watching without a USA team. [OK, at this point it probably makes sense to point out that all the above is about the men's team; the women will likely be back in it, but they haven't exactly endeared themselves to America by being flaming leftists themselves, and women's teams mostly don't draw the same. And the first one of them who takes a knee for our anthem will kill it completely].
But the real loser, along with the USA men's team, is the left. No USA World Cup team, no World Cup viewers, so no interest in soccer, so eight years of "who cares" for the sport here. We Americans will stick with our sports, the ones that interest us, although the NFL is sliding down that list a bit. In fact, it's got to be tough for the left. Do they try to boost the NFL, because its players are actually doing that kneeling crap, despite the whole violence-and-concussions thing, while Americans are voting with their remotes and not watching? Whose side do they come down on? Oh, the torture.
Bummer for them.
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 a horrific day for soccer in the USA, and not for why you think it stinks either. As you may possibly know, but might not have cared enough to have remembered, on Tuesday the USA soccer team lost to the team from the soccer powerhouse of Trinidad and Tobago. By losing, their record in their group of six countries' teams dropped to where they are now eliminated from qualifying for the 2018 World Cup of Soccer, somewhere in Russia, I think.
Those are the facts. Here come the opinions.
I have written multiple times about soccer here, none of which have been particularly complimentary. Soccer, you see, has the problem of being lots of fun to play, but agonizingly dull to watch. If I watch my Keurig machine making coffee, at least I know that in a minute or two there will be coffee. Hooray. If I turn on, God forbid, a soccer "match", I don't even know if there will be a winner -- I'm not even sure there will be any score.
It is an American thing, and probably a human thing, that if you have a reason to root for a team or a performer, and they are participating, you can tolerate more dullness in a sport. I like watching golf on TV, I suppose, but I certainly watch it more intently if either (A) Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods is in contention; (B) it is a Ryder Cup or President's Cup where the USA is a team against foreigners; or (C) it is one of the four major tournaments a year, where the result is historic in the same way that a Super Bowl winner is, even if it is Seattle playing Kansas City.
That is why people in this country ever watch soccer, that is, in the every-four-years World Cup when we can root for the USA team against the world. The other three years and eleven months or so, we don't care and don't watch. That's important.
Now what I have written here previously has to do not so much with how dull soccer is to watch, but how the left is so intent on making us watch, or at least making us think we are supposed to watch. I've written about how ESPN, a leftist outlet if ever there was one, runs the scores of soccer matches in Mexico, the UK and perhaps Mars (who knows or cares) on the bottom of the screen.
The left is a globalist entity, and soccer is a global sport. We don't care who wins in "Bundesliga Deutschland"? Shame on us for not caring, not on the game for being dull. No, we will shove scores at you until you start watching, and we will continue to do so forever. Maybe that will get you to hate America like you're supposed to.
But now, oh, Lordy, they have a problem. You see, every four years we have to watch soccer, because the USA is in the World Cup and we root for our team and our flag (ironic, right?). And every four years, there is all this talk about how our temporary fandom will translate into lots and lots of kids taking up soccer.
But it never translates into actually watching the game on TV or being interested in watching it, because as I said, it's fun to play but anesthetic to watch. So now with no USA team in the World Cup, that means that the left loses us for eight years instead of four, and that is just terrible.
It is ironically terrible for Fox Sports, which paid a ton of cash for the right to broadcast a World Cup that no one will be watching without a USA team. [OK, at this point it probably makes sense to point out that all the above is about the men's team; the women will likely be back in it, but they haven't exactly endeared themselves to America by being flaming leftists themselves, and women's teams mostly don't draw the same. And the first one of them who takes a knee for our anthem will kill it completely].
But the real loser, along with the USA men's team, is the left. No USA World Cup team, no World Cup viewers, so no interest in soccer, so eight years of "who cares" for the sport here. We Americans will stick with our sports, the ones that interest us, although the NFL is sliding down that list a bit. In fact, it's got to be tough for the left. Do they try to boost the NFL, because its players are actually doing that kneeling crap, despite the whole violence-and-concussions thing, while Americans are voting with their remotes and not watching? Whose side do they come down on? Oh, the torture.
Bummer for them.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Insulting Obama
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a pretty big surprise, possibly to everyone except for the current president. We'll never know, of course, because he would probably tell you that he knew it all the time. But one of the curiosities of it being such a surprise is that it was sort of a "before and after" thing.
What I mean is that the reality prior to the election was a different one from that immediately afterwards, in many respects. Moreover, with some specific exceptions, we tend to have set aside and, perhaps, even forgotten, some things that we just took for granted when they were just superfluous garbage.
And speaking of superfluous garbage, let's look at the words of the immediately former president, Barack H. Obama, Jr. As I get reminded every once in a while, back in September, Mr. Obama stated loudly that he would regard it as a personal insult if (in this case) black Americans did not vote for Hillary Clinton.
They did not, of course, in one sense -- the turnout was weak, and Hillary got 5% less support (93% to 88%) among black voters who actually did go to the polls. Actually that's a pretty good "in one sense", and that probably makes some sense.
I suppose that, given the tangible outcome and Mr. Obama's own words, that he should distinctly feel personally insulted. That voting percentage by which Hillary was lower than Obama, didn't exactly go out and vote for President Trump; his numbers were about the same as Mitt Romney's in 2012. But they certainly did do what was supposed to be an "insult", and we ought to mention that.
Barack Obama hasn't exactly owned up to the fact that a bunch of "his people", at least on his father's side, insulted him. He hasn't gone out and waved his finger in a typical Obama-like, professorial lecture and castigated the people who "insulted" him, probably because it is not in keeping with being a leftist to concede that there are people who disagree with your world view, certainly not enough to vote for the other guy.
But he said it. "If you don't vote for Hillary you are insulting me" (not that he cared about Hillary or her presidency, of course). And I would really like to have someone in the press -- why do I keep having to suggest stories to them? -- sit down with the mercifully-former president and talk to him about that line.
Why, we might want to know, does he think all those black voters were willing to insult him rather than pull a lever for Hillary Clinton? He can't even invoke anything Trumpian at all, because those voters didn't vote for Trump either -- they voted for third-party candidates or stayed home. Donald Trump certainly didn't destroy old "Crooked Hillary" in the mind of those voters; if anything, she did so herself. Or (gasp) Obama and his failures did.
OK. Reflecting on what I was saying about "before and after Election Day", Obama said it, and a goodly chunk of the black voters were willing to insult him by not voting for Hillary. So which of her 1,277 reasons she lost does he think relate to the black voting public who voted for him in '12 but not for Hillary in '16? James Comey? Emails? The weather? Russia? [OK, at this point, I don't even know what "Russia" would refer to, since there is no real indication that anything Russia did either hurt or helped her on Election Day, but she keeps invoking it so I will, too.]
So I really want to have someone ask him that question and make him answer it directly, no mealymouthed, diverting answer. Was he or was he not insulted by the large number of black voters that didn't vote for Hillary, when he said he would be insulted if they didn't?
If no one asks, well, I will be personally insulted. Do you care?
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 I mean is that the reality prior to the election was a different one from that immediately afterwards, in many respects. Moreover, with some specific exceptions, we tend to have set aside and, perhaps, even forgotten, some things that we just took for granted when they were just superfluous garbage.
And speaking of superfluous garbage, let's look at the words of the immediately former president, Barack H. Obama, Jr. As I get reminded every once in a while, back in September, Mr. Obama stated loudly that he would regard it as a personal insult if (in this case) black Americans did not vote for Hillary Clinton.
They did not, of course, in one sense -- the turnout was weak, and Hillary got 5% less support (93% to 88%) among black voters who actually did go to the polls. Actually that's a pretty good "in one sense", and that probably makes some sense.
I suppose that, given the tangible outcome and Mr. Obama's own words, that he should distinctly feel personally insulted. That voting percentage by which Hillary was lower than Obama, didn't exactly go out and vote for President Trump; his numbers were about the same as Mitt Romney's in 2012. But they certainly did do what was supposed to be an "insult", and we ought to mention that.
Barack Obama hasn't exactly owned up to the fact that a bunch of "his people", at least on his father's side, insulted him. He hasn't gone out and waved his finger in a typical Obama-like, professorial lecture and castigated the people who "insulted" him, probably because it is not in keeping with being a leftist to concede that there are people who disagree with your world view, certainly not enough to vote for the other guy.
But he said it. "If you don't vote for Hillary you are insulting me" (not that he cared about Hillary or her presidency, of course). And I would really like to have someone in the press -- why do I keep having to suggest stories to them? -- sit down with the mercifully-former president and talk to him about that line.
Why, we might want to know, does he think all those black voters were willing to insult him rather than pull a lever for Hillary Clinton? He can't even invoke anything Trumpian at all, because those voters didn't vote for Trump either -- they voted for third-party candidates or stayed home. Donald Trump certainly didn't destroy old "Crooked Hillary" in the mind of those voters; if anything, she did so herself. Or (gasp) Obama and his failures did.
OK. Reflecting on what I was saying about "before and after Election Day", Obama said it, and a goodly chunk of the black voters were willing to insult him by not voting for Hillary. So which of her 1,277 reasons she lost does he think relate to the black voting public who voted for him in '12 but not for Hillary in '16? James Comey? Emails? The weather? Russia? [OK, at this point, I don't even know what "Russia" would refer to, since there is no real indication that anything Russia did either hurt or helped her on Election Day, but she keeps invoking it so I will, too.]
So I really want to have someone ask him that question and make him answer it directly, no mealymouthed, diverting answer. Was he or was he not insulted by the large number of black voters that didn't vote for Hillary, when he said he would be insulted if they didn't?
If no one asks, well, I will be personally insulted. Do you care?
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
"Cinderita"
I realize that when you are writing five times a week, even though the subjects can be a bit varied, there is always the likelihood of going back and revisiting a topic -- not always intentionally -- and saying the same thing again.
But I guess if the same topic is raised in the news, or in some recent happening, that causes a revitalization of the topic, it might be worth a revisit regardless. That's one reason we had several gun-control pieces last week, and why we're talking about ... yes, theatrical casting, yet again.
You might as well go read the first piece on it, which was this one from back in 2015. The point is that when theater, or TV or movies, are done at a professional level, you need to do everything possible to suspend the disbelief of your audience so that they stay in the story. And casting people who don't fit the audience's expectation introduces disbelief you don't need.
Television in 2017 is rife with that, of course, particularly in its desire to appear hip and with-it and, God forbid, decidedly not racist. You would think that 90% of couples today are mixed-race, if you extrapolated from TV depictions. But at least we know that the producers are not racists, which is all that matters, except when you get to the self-congratulatory award ceremonies and there are not enough non-white nominees.
In that piece, of course, I posed the silly notion that Matt Damon should have auditioned to play Martin Luther King when the movie Selma was done, just to help show that Hollywood is race-blind. As silly as that notion is, I pointed out back then, the TV show "Once Upon a Time", which is based on the humanization of fairy-tale characters, had seemed to do that far too often to maintain the suspension of disbelief any show requires (my example was the odd casting of a Hispanic-looking Honduran-Canadian actress to play the English fictional character Maid Marian, of the Robin Hood tale).
Well, "Once Upon a Time" has officially done it again, except they went even farther. This time, the the character was Cinderella, and the performer is the Dominican actress Dania Ramirez. Now, Dania Ramirez is a perfectly fine actress to play any number of characters. But not only have the producers decided to have a visibly Latina actress to play the part, she has a Dominican accent as well and does not suppress it.
Now, there probably is not a "right" answer as to what Cinderella (or, in this case, I guess, "Cinderita"), is supposed to look like. OK, there is no right answer. She is, after all, fictional. I get it. If the whole fairy tale were staged in a Latin environment, it would be perfectly fine.
But the rest of the characters are clearly, for lack of a better term, Anglos. So not only do the producers get questioned as to why they would mix race and accents in a confined, if fictional, realm, they have made the Latina a stereotypically servile young woman, so they kind of messed up there too, at least from the PC side.
Now, I have already pointed out that the producers have already mixed accents all over the place, from American to many flavors of English and Scots accents, some of which are nearly incomprehensible. That's pretty distracting on its own. Why they feel the need to muddy the suspension-of-disbelief waters by adding racially-odd casting to verbally-odd accents is beyond me.
I don't know how this will play out. I don't know, because we have taken the show off our recording list.
Astonishingly to those on the left, it has nothing to do with that casting, nothing to do with race, nothing to do with suspension of disbelief. That was only one story line, and we've watched the show for years with story lines we didn't enjoy (or couldn't follow).
It is simply that, presumably having run out of new realms to explore with the cast this season, they have let half or more of the principal actors go (or the principals got tired and left; don't know and don't care), and have gone off in a strange direction with the plot. The main character is now the son of the former main female character (the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming), grown up, and since he wasn't even a fairy-tale character in the first place, who cares?
It is no longer interesting enough, nor easy enough to follow, to where it is worth an hour of our time. It has, in the classic TV parlance, "jumped the shark."
I wish them luck; surely they are all good people trying very hard.
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.
But I guess if the same topic is raised in the news, or in some recent happening, that causes a revitalization of the topic, it might be worth a revisit regardless. That's one reason we had several gun-control pieces last week, and why we're talking about ... yes, theatrical casting, yet again.
You might as well go read the first piece on it, which was this one from back in 2015. The point is that when theater, or TV or movies, are done at a professional level, you need to do everything possible to suspend the disbelief of your audience so that they stay in the story. And casting people who don't fit the audience's expectation introduces disbelief you don't need.
Television in 2017 is rife with that, of course, particularly in its desire to appear hip and with-it and, God forbid, decidedly not racist. You would think that 90% of couples today are mixed-race, if you extrapolated from TV depictions. But at least we know that the producers are not racists, which is all that matters, except when you get to the self-congratulatory award ceremonies and there are not enough non-white nominees.
In that piece, of course, I posed the silly notion that Matt Damon should have auditioned to play Martin Luther King when the movie Selma was done, just to help show that Hollywood is race-blind. As silly as that notion is, I pointed out back then, the TV show "Once Upon a Time", which is based on the humanization of fairy-tale characters, had seemed to do that far too often to maintain the suspension of disbelief any show requires (my example was the odd casting of a Hispanic-looking Honduran-Canadian actress to play the English fictional character Maid Marian, of the Robin Hood tale).
Well, "Once Upon a Time" has officially done it again, except they went even farther. This time, the the character was Cinderella, and the performer is the Dominican actress Dania Ramirez. Now, Dania Ramirez is a perfectly fine actress to play any number of characters. But not only have the producers decided to have a visibly Latina actress to play the part, she has a Dominican accent as well and does not suppress it.
Now, there probably is not a "right" answer as to what Cinderella (or, in this case, I guess, "Cinderita"), is supposed to look like. OK, there is no right answer. She is, after all, fictional. I get it. If the whole fairy tale were staged in a Latin environment, it would be perfectly fine.
But the rest of the characters are clearly, for lack of a better term, Anglos. So not only do the producers get questioned as to why they would mix race and accents in a confined, if fictional, realm, they have made the Latina a stereotypically servile young woman, so they kind of messed up there too, at least from the PC side.
Now, I have already pointed out that the producers have already mixed accents all over the place, from American to many flavors of English and Scots accents, some of which are nearly incomprehensible. That's pretty distracting on its own. Why they feel the need to muddy the suspension-of-disbelief waters by adding racially-odd casting to verbally-odd accents is beyond me.
I don't know how this will play out. I don't know, because we have taken the show off our recording list.
Astonishingly to those on the left, it has nothing to do with that casting, nothing to do with race, nothing to do with suspension of disbelief. That was only one story line, and we've watched the show for years with story lines we didn't enjoy (or couldn't follow).
It is simply that, presumably having run out of new realms to explore with the cast this season, they have let half or more of the principal actors go (or the principals got tired and left; don't know and don't care), and have gone off in a strange direction with the plot. The main character is now the son of the former main female character (the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming), grown up, and since he wasn't even a fairy-tale character in the first place, who cares?
It is no longer interesting enough, nor easy enough to follow, to where it is worth an hour of our time. It has, in the classic TV parlance, "jumped the shark."
I wish them luck; surely they are all good people trying very hard.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, October 9, 2017
What Really IS "Fake News"
I had the news on in the background last Thursday while I was working (and waiting for the baseball playoffs to start), and again there was an afternoon press conference at the White House. The press was in a somewhat more sedate mood, I guess, although every one seemed to say "I have two questions ...", whereupon Sarah Sanders, the press secretary, would answer one of them and then turn to another reporter to try to give everyone a chance.
That didn't stop most of them from trying to shout their second question out after Mrs. Sanders said she was going to another reporter to give everyone a chance -- the CNN guy was particularly obnoxious about it. But she was diligent about answering one question each, and got questions from a large number of the assembled troops.
So one fellow asked a question about something in the news, a report from NBC that the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had referred to the President Trump in a defamatory way. (The Secretary actually had answered a press question on that a day earlier, saying that he wouldn't dignify the notion with a comment, and that he was staying in his role as long as the president wanted him to. "I don't come from [Washington]", Tillerson said, meaning that in his career he had never wasted a moment on petty crap like that.) The president had then referred to the NBC report as "Fake News", meaning that NBC had pretty much made it up, and that it would be appropriate for the press to be subject to investigation when they abuse their First Amendment privileges.
But it was a subsequent question that got me thinking, because I wanted to answer it myself. That reporter asked if the president thought there to be any difference between fake news as practiced by the American media and the "other" fake news, that is, promulgated by Russia in an attempt to create chaos in the USA, as we are coming to discover.
Mrs. Sanders answered the question, but really without a specific answer -- the press secretary typically comes armed with pre-written statements in regard to certain topics that might come up. I've no problem with that, of course. The purpose of the press conferences is to convey the opinions of the White House, and since the press secretary is answering questions about what the president believes, they always find it useful to come armed with statements about what he does believe.
So I was immediately, on hearing the question, conjuring up the answer I would have liked to have heard. That would have been something like this:
"Thank you for that question. You raise an interesting point about fake news spread by Russia and fake news spread by the American mainstream media. The president believes that there is actually very little difference between the two.
"The Russian purpose is quite obvious to all of us. They want to foment division in our country, as a way to portray the American way of life as somehow not a suitable aspiration for other nations. They are not particularly interested in who actually wins elections here, as much as they are trying to make the elections themselves contentious. They want the contention and the divisions, and elections are an ideal target for them.
"How is that any different from NBC, CBS or CNN or ABC putting out false, unsourced or unvalidated reports, knowing that there is no journalistic rationale for doing so, or there is inadequate sourcing? We know that their reporting is well above 90% biased against this president, so we know that their motivation is divisiveness, the same as the Russians -- except that they are trying to foment division against this Administration, where the Russians really don't care which side wins as long as there is division.
"Fake news to exacerbate divisions is fake news. The Russians don't have the First Amendment protection that the mainstream media do, so it is simply an act of adversarial aggression on their part to try to spread fake stories. The American mainstream media are protected, yet they have a responsibility to maintain some level of journalistic integrity because they are protected.
"So perhaps not only is American fake news comparable to the Russians' actions, it is worse because it is protected. Certainly the motivation is far, far more similar than it is different."
No, I don't want to be press secretary. But I'll be happy to write this stuff for the White House.
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 didn't stop most of them from trying to shout their second question out after Mrs. Sanders said she was going to another reporter to give everyone a chance -- the CNN guy was particularly obnoxious about it. But she was diligent about answering one question each, and got questions from a large number of the assembled troops.
So one fellow asked a question about something in the news, a report from NBC that the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, had referred to the President Trump in a defamatory way. (The Secretary actually had answered a press question on that a day earlier, saying that he wouldn't dignify the notion with a comment, and that he was staying in his role as long as the president wanted him to. "I don't come from [Washington]", Tillerson said, meaning that in his career he had never wasted a moment on petty crap like that.) The president had then referred to the NBC report as "Fake News", meaning that NBC had pretty much made it up, and that it would be appropriate for the press to be subject to investigation when they abuse their First Amendment privileges.
But it was a subsequent question that got me thinking, because I wanted to answer it myself. That reporter asked if the president thought there to be any difference between fake news as practiced by the American media and the "other" fake news, that is, promulgated by Russia in an attempt to create chaos in the USA, as we are coming to discover.
Mrs. Sanders answered the question, but really without a specific answer -- the press secretary typically comes armed with pre-written statements in regard to certain topics that might come up. I've no problem with that, of course. The purpose of the press conferences is to convey the opinions of the White House, and since the press secretary is answering questions about what the president believes, they always find it useful to come armed with statements about what he does believe.
So I was immediately, on hearing the question, conjuring up the answer I would have liked to have heard. That would have been something like this:
"Thank you for that question. You raise an interesting point about fake news spread by Russia and fake news spread by the American mainstream media. The president believes that there is actually very little difference between the two.
"The Russian purpose is quite obvious to all of us. They want to foment division in our country, as a way to portray the American way of life as somehow not a suitable aspiration for other nations. They are not particularly interested in who actually wins elections here, as much as they are trying to make the elections themselves contentious. They want the contention and the divisions, and elections are an ideal target for them.
"How is that any different from NBC, CBS or CNN or ABC putting out false, unsourced or unvalidated reports, knowing that there is no journalistic rationale for doing so, or there is inadequate sourcing? We know that their reporting is well above 90% biased against this president, so we know that their motivation is divisiveness, the same as the Russians -- except that they are trying to foment division against this Administration, where the Russians really don't care which side wins as long as there is division.
"Fake news to exacerbate divisions is fake news. The Russians don't have the First Amendment protection that the mainstream media do, so it is simply an act of adversarial aggression on their part to try to spread fake stories. The American mainstream media are protected, yet they have a responsibility to maintain some level of journalistic integrity because they are protected.
"So perhaps not only is American fake news comparable to the Russians' actions, it is worse because it is protected. Certainly the motivation is far, far more similar than it is different."
No, I don't want to be press secretary. But I'll be happy to write this stuff for the White House.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, October 6, 2017
Guns and the Movies
We can close out the week with a thought that, I suppose, has been in the back of my mind a bit during this week that was begun with an immense assault on civilization in Las Vegas, and has proceeded, even in this column, with much discussion regarding firearms.
So I guess I can characterize that thought as this ... there are two very large aspects to this discussion, and we never hear anyone try to make the distinction. First, there is the weapon itself and all that goes with it, including the Second Amendment, the regulation, the registration, the ammunition and everything that goes along with the firearm and its possession.
That's one thing.
But then the other is the less-discussed half. That is the action itself; the person, the motivation, the influences around the use of the weapon. And we really, really need to talk about that.
I was, I suppose, a fortunate child. Not in assets, for sure; we were a rather low-income family. But Dad was a former Army competitive marksman who could, as I've written, put five pistol shots in a quarter-size ring at age 95 though he refused to hunt. When I was a kid, he taught hunter safety classes even though he did not hunt at all, and taught us firearms safety as any good parent should.
So growing up, my attitude toward firearms was shaped by a very rational approach, that is, by what they were intended to be used for. I was a competitive target shooter by age 12, and I looked at firearms as the tools you used for target shooting. Other people hunted, and that was fine, I knew, and for home protection, which was also fine. Targets, hunting, protection -- that's what firearms were for, and that's how I see them to this day.
And then there is another generation -- maybe two or three of them, actually. These are the people raised on what they see in movies. There's very little hunting in the movies any more, and about zero target shooting and not much home protection except maybe in Lifetime movies.
What there is a lot of, though, is violence in every conceivable way. War movies, sure, but criminal depictions, action films, science fiction, drug-action movies -- they're all out there and attract their own set of followers. I even remember watching "Blind Side", a fine story of a current NFL lineman who grew up in the drug-infested streets in Memphis, and was taken in by a Caucasian family, learned to play football at a high level, and succeeded. But there is a scene where he goes back to the streets and his old "friends", and one threatened to "bust a cap" -- to shoot him. Even in a feel-good movie, you see the depiction.
Firearms violence is a staple of Hollywood and frankly, has been for a long time. And here's the thing. If you hand someone a pistol, they will see it for what they believe it to be. Me? I will take it, point it downward, ensure it is not loaded but treat it as if it were. I will regard it as an item to be respected. But others will see it as Hollywood has portrayed it -- an item of action, practically a toy in that sense, for what it invokes. That's dangerous as all Hades.
You know, and I know, that Hollywood rakes in tons of cash on action movies (which means "shoot-em-up" flicks, of course). It practically survives on them.
But where do the left and the anti-gun folks go for their money and their loud support? Hmmm ... the same Hollywood types who make their money off those portrayals. Does anyone think that the proliferation of action movies is not a big factor in the attitudes toward firearms that many killers have today, including mass murderers? Do we think that Chicago might just be a little safer place if there weren't examples of misuse of guns every 30 seconds in the movies they watch?
But Hollywood is taking no stand on self-policing. People stand up at the Oscars and Emmys and protest trivia like the percentage of black or Hispanic actors being nominated for awards that they themselves in the industry both cast for and then nominate. But will not the next actor or actress to stand up there and decry the violence in their own movies and shows, be the first to do so?
Hollywood is a bastion of hypocrisy and always has been. But darn it, someone has to point out that hypocrisy as it relates to violence with firearms. You can't make leftist decrials of firearm violence out of one side of your mouth and then make money on movies celebrating the same violence.
The actor who first points that out on stage will be my hero.
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.
So I guess I can characterize that thought as this ... there are two very large aspects to this discussion, and we never hear anyone try to make the distinction. First, there is the weapon itself and all that goes with it, including the Second Amendment, the regulation, the registration, the ammunition and everything that goes along with the firearm and its possession.
That's one thing.
But then the other is the less-discussed half. That is the action itself; the person, the motivation, the influences around the use of the weapon. And we really, really need to talk about that.
I was, I suppose, a fortunate child. Not in assets, for sure; we were a rather low-income family. But Dad was a former Army competitive marksman who could, as I've written, put five pistol shots in a quarter-size ring at age 95 though he refused to hunt. When I was a kid, he taught hunter safety classes even though he did not hunt at all, and taught us firearms safety as any good parent should.
So growing up, my attitude toward firearms was shaped by a very rational approach, that is, by what they were intended to be used for. I was a competitive target shooter by age 12, and I looked at firearms as the tools you used for target shooting. Other people hunted, and that was fine, I knew, and for home protection, which was also fine. Targets, hunting, protection -- that's what firearms were for, and that's how I see them to this day.
And then there is another generation -- maybe two or three of them, actually. These are the people raised on what they see in movies. There's very little hunting in the movies any more, and about zero target shooting and not much home protection except maybe in Lifetime movies.
What there is a lot of, though, is violence in every conceivable way. War movies, sure, but criminal depictions, action films, science fiction, drug-action movies -- they're all out there and attract their own set of followers. I even remember watching "Blind Side", a fine story of a current NFL lineman who grew up in the drug-infested streets in Memphis, and was taken in by a Caucasian family, learned to play football at a high level, and succeeded. But there is a scene where he goes back to the streets and his old "friends", and one threatened to "bust a cap" -- to shoot him. Even in a feel-good movie, you see the depiction.
Firearms violence is a staple of Hollywood and frankly, has been for a long time. And here's the thing. If you hand someone a pistol, they will see it for what they believe it to be. Me? I will take it, point it downward, ensure it is not loaded but treat it as if it were. I will regard it as an item to be respected. But others will see it as Hollywood has portrayed it -- an item of action, practically a toy in that sense, for what it invokes. That's dangerous as all Hades.
You know, and I know, that Hollywood rakes in tons of cash on action movies (which means "shoot-em-up" flicks, of course). It practically survives on them.
But where do the left and the anti-gun folks go for their money and their loud support? Hmmm ... the same Hollywood types who make their money off those portrayals. Does anyone think that the proliferation of action movies is not a big factor in the attitudes toward firearms that many killers have today, including mass murderers? Do we think that Chicago might just be a little safer place if there weren't examples of misuse of guns every 30 seconds in the movies they watch?
But Hollywood is taking no stand on self-policing. People stand up at the Oscars and Emmys and protest trivia like the percentage of black or Hispanic actors being nominated for awards that they themselves in the industry both cast for and then nominate. But will not the next actor or actress to stand up there and decry the violence in their own movies and shows, be the first to do so?
Hollywood is a bastion of hypocrisy and always has been. But darn it, someone has to point out that hypocrisy as it relates to violence with firearms. You can't make leftist decrials of firearm violence out of one side of your mouth and then make money on movies celebrating the same violence.
The actor who first points that out on stage will be my hero.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Insurance Fires and Puerto Rico
This is a difficult piece to write, and so I hope it will be taken carefully, and will be read thoroughly and with an open mind. Please take your time.
There are a number of joking categorizations, some rather insensitive, of a type of insurance fraud that has been used to cover up failing businesses. A store is failing, and the owner arranges for it to be burned down so he or she can collect the insurance money, dissolve the business and start over again rather than going bankrupt.
In any representation of that scam -- and it is, or was, a pretty common thing -- the problem is where there is failure and debt, no obvious way to recover, and something is staged that allows a destruction of the business covered by insurance, and an owner who walks away made whole again to start over.
Staged. That's the big thing.
Our universal reaction is that our morality tells us something. No matter what the status of the business at the time was, if it gets burned down by a lightning strike, or is washed away by a flood, we think the business owner deserves to collect on the insurance. We don't think the owner's business should be any better than it was before, but if the owner bought insurance, he or she should be paid accordingly to cover the loss.
And our morality also tells us that a staged incident is fraud, and the insurance company should not pay, and the owner should end up in prison. Right? We all understand that.
And then there is Puerto Rico, the commonwealth of the USA that just got assaulted by Hurricane Maria.
I am not saying that this was not a horrific storm, not saying that there is anything other than that, as to what happened. But I am saying that there is a huge prospect for financial decisions that affect a lot of us outside Puerto Rico, and we have to decide what morality applies here.
You see, Puerto Rico was a horrific mess before Maria visited. The island's power authority was already six billion dollars in debt, and power plants were functioning erratically when they functioned, in places on the island. I had already written on this problem over a year ago; it wasn't yet imaginable that a hurricane would devastate the island when Congress was already having to look at an imminent bankruptcy of the territory.
If you have indeed read carefully, and not been judgmental, you know where I am going.
The right and moral answer is that the good works of the Federal government can only be to restore the infrastructure of the island to where it was before the storm, or a comparable level of advancement, and to ensure that innocent people who have lost their homes and have no place to sleep and nothing to eat can be housed and fed in an emergency situation for some period of time.
What I do not want to see is that the specific part of our generous and compassionate response as a nation that comes through congressional authorization ends up making the infrastructure better than it was before.
OK, let me clarify. Please. I would be happy to see Puerto Rico have a roaring economy and a sound infrastructure, good roads and reliable power and water systems. I would be happy if their people all had a bed to sleep on and three squares a day.
But they didn't have a roaring economy, good roads or reliable utilities before Maria. The people of the USA, as represented by their elected representatives, already recognized that corruption and incompetence in the island's government had caused the problem, and refused to fund the same people to fix it. I totally agreed with them.
And I agree today that, as money starts to pour in to help the island recover, we need to understand a few things. The same people who caused the problems before the hurricane are in power now, with the exception of the governor, who is new since January. President Trump has said that the governor is doing a very good job overseeing the recovery and I am willing to believe him.
I want the island to recover and I want it to be better than it was. But I want that to happen because the people themselves there elect leaders (hopefully starting with this governor) who will plan a recovery that separates them from the corruption of their past. I don't want Maria to be the "insurance fraud" that wipes out the island for a rebuild that the rest of the USA will have to pay for; I want a clear delineation -- and this is just for taxpayer funds through Congress, not charity -- between humanitarian aid helping people recover from losing homes and livelihoods, and aid that ends up replacing elements that were broken before.
I hope you understand the point. It will be easy to characterize the above as insensitive. But as Mick Mulvaney, the OMB director said yesterday, "We will help Puerto Rico rebuild from the storm. Puerto Rico has got to figure out how to fix the errors that it has made for the last generation, from its own finances."
That's exactly right. We are a sympathetic and generous country. We will help with the storm. But we cannot be expected to replace what was failing before the storm.
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.
There are a number of joking categorizations, some rather insensitive, of a type of insurance fraud that has been used to cover up failing businesses. A store is failing, and the owner arranges for it to be burned down so he or she can collect the insurance money, dissolve the business and start over again rather than going bankrupt.
In any representation of that scam -- and it is, or was, a pretty common thing -- the problem is where there is failure and debt, no obvious way to recover, and something is staged that allows a destruction of the business covered by insurance, and an owner who walks away made whole again to start over.
Staged. That's the big thing.
Our universal reaction is that our morality tells us something. No matter what the status of the business at the time was, if it gets burned down by a lightning strike, or is washed away by a flood, we think the business owner deserves to collect on the insurance. We don't think the owner's business should be any better than it was before, but if the owner bought insurance, he or she should be paid accordingly to cover the loss.
And our morality also tells us that a staged incident is fraud, and the insurance company should not pay, and the owner should end up in prison. Right? We all understand that.
And then there is Puerto Rico, the commonwealth of the USA that just got assaulted by Hurricane Maria.
I am not saying that this was not a horrific storm, not saying that there is anything other than that, as to what happened. But I am saying that there is a huge prospect for financial decisions that affect a lot of us outside Puerto Rico, and we have to decide what morality applies here.
You see, Puerto Rico was a horrific mess before Maria visited. The island's power authority was already six billion dollars in debt, and power plants were functioning erratically when they functioned, in places on the island. I had already written on this problem over a year ago; it wasn't yet imaginable that a hurricane would devastate the island when Congress was already having to look at an imminent bankruptcy of the territory.
If you have indeed read carefully, and not been judgmental, you know where I am going.
The right and moral answer is that the good works of the Federal government can only be to restore the infrastructure of the island to where it was before the storm, or a comparable level of advancement, and to ensure that innocent people who have lost their homes and have no place to sleep and nothing to eat can be housed and fed in an emergency situation for some period of time.
What I do not want to see is that the specific part of our generous and compassionate response as a nation that comes through congressional authorization ends up making the infrastructure better than it was before.
OK, let me clarify. Please. I would be happy to see Puerto Rico have a roaring economy and a sound infrastructure, good roads and reliable power and water systems. I would be happy if their people all had a bed to sleep on and three squares a day.
But they didn't have a roaring economy, good roads or reliable utilities before Maria. The people of the USA, as represented by their elected representatives, already recognized that corruption and incompetence in the island's government had caused the problem, and refused to fund the same people to fix it. I totally agreed with them.
And I agree today that, as money starts to pour in to help the island recover, we need to understand a few things. The same people who caused the problems before the hurricane are in power now, with the exception of the governor, who is new since January. President Trump has said that the governor is doing a very good job overseeing the recovery and I am willing to believe him.
I want the island to recover and I want it to be better than it was. But I want that to happen because the people themselves there elect leaders (hopefully starting with this governor) who will plan a recovery that separates them from the corruption of their past. I don't want Maria to be the "insurance fraud" that wipes out the island for a rebuild that the rest of the USA will have to pay for; I want a clear delineation -- and this is just for taxpayer funds through Congress, not charity -- between humanitarian aid helping people recover from losing homes and livelihoods, and aid that ends up replacing elements that were broken before.
I hope you understand the point. It will be easy to characterize the above as insensitive. But as Mick Mulvaney, the OMB director said yesterday, "We will help Puerto Rico rebuild from the storm. Puerto Rico has got to figure out how to fix the errors that it has made for the last generation, from its own finances."
That's exactly right. We are a sympathetic and generous country. We will help with the storm. But we cannot be expected to replace what was failing before the storm.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Confiscate Guns But Not Illegals? OK, Sure ...
We are in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting of Sunday night and, as I wrote yesterday here, the gun control types are in full fury and froth about passing a bunch of laws. Of course, as I also write yesterday here, if the laws (A) wouldn't have prevented this from happening, and (B) haven't shown to be effective, nor give evidence of being effective, it is only a waste of time to pursue.
This may be a problem in search of a solution, and I certainly think that mass murder is a problem in need of one, but what would work needs to be a top criterion for specific action.
Oftentimes you can glean something from the consistency or, more accurately, inconsistency, of the person saying something. And that's the point of today's piece, which will be mercifully brief.
Long, long ago I wrote that ideas assort, so that people with liberal notions in one topic strongly tend to have liberal notions in unrelated topics, at least where there is a "liberal" and "conservative" side of things. So it is not particularly surprising that it is the same people who come down on the reflexive, knee-jerk side that says "We have to have gun control NOW", as are the ones perfectly happy to have 11 million illegal aliens roaming the streets.
I thought of that when there was a debate on the TV yesterday involving gun control, of course. The questioner was having trouble getting the gun-control advocate to say something other than "We have to do something", especially when he kept asking how she thought this or that proposal would actually accomplish anything -- let alone have prevented the Vegas shooting.
The opposing debater, of course, pointed out that (as we seemed to think at the time) the weapons in the shooting were apparently all legally purchased, and that the shooter had apparently passed all the necessary background checks -- a key point of what the gun-control advocate was saying we had to do on a Federal level, and a complete refutation of her position. Her recommendation, such as she gave any, would have done absolutely nothing to prevent this incident. Nothing.
So then the opposing debater pointed out that if there were any new constraint on gun ownership -- and the gun-control advocate clearly did not even understand the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon -- that ended up criminalizing a class of weapons, there was going to be the issue of collecting millions of newly-illegal arms.
And that got me thinking.
I don't know the number of illegal aliens in the USA, but I've heard the number 11 million bandied about, and since the actual number is not at all important to my point, we can use that. They are here illegally, which is what makes them "illegal." The left wants them to stay here, rather transparently on the expectation that they will somehow end up being Democrat voters.
In order to further that end, they are quick to note that it would be immensely difficult to round up 11 million aliens in order to process and supposedly deport them. I mean, that was a big deal in the 2016 election, and that phrase, in some form, was repeated all the time. It would be hard to round up millions of people, and whether or not that was ever the strategy of those opposing illegal immigration, it would be hard.
But apparently it would not be hard to round up and confiscate millions of newly made-illegal weapons? I don't want to characterize the owners of those weapons, but I am not really sure that such confiscation would be taken kindly to, by their owners. Not that I think that illegal aliens would just walk up to the nearest ICE agent and surrender either, mind you, but it is fair to say that a healthy proportion of the public would find a way not to surrender their arms.
And that, of course, is without any discussion of the Second Amendment keeping any of this from happening in the first place. We're having to set that aside for this discussion.
The left doesn't really care about logistics. They can make the argument that rounding up millions of illegal aliens is impossible, but then try to make the same case against firearms ownership with them and sure, that's just fine, it will be a snap to round up millions of guns.
But then again, they don't understand that the Second Amendment was put in the Constitution so that government could be duly in awe of the citizens whom it serves; they think that citizens should be in awe of government. They will never understand.
Of course guns don't vote, although their owners do. There's always 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.
This may be a problem in search of a solution, and I certainly think that mass murder is a problem in need of one, but what would work needs to be a top criterion for specific action.
Oftentimes you can glean something from the consistency or, more accurately, inconsistency, of the person saying something. And that's the point of today's piece, which will be mercifully brief.
Long, long ago I wrote that ideas assort, so that people with liberal notions in one topic strongly tend to have liberal notions in unrelated topics, at least where there is a "liberal" and "conservative" side of things. So it is not particularly surprising that it is the same people who come down on the reflexive, knee-jerk side that says "We have to have gun control NOW", as are the ones perfectly happy to have 11 million illegal aliens roaming the streets.
I thought of that when there was a debate on the TV yesterday involving gun control, of course. The questioner was having trouble getting the gun-control advocate to say something other than "We have to do something", especially when he kept asking how she thought this or that proposal would actually accomplish anything -- let alone have prevented the Vegas shooting.
The opposing debater, of course, pointed out that (as we seemed to think at the time) the weapons in the shooting were apparently all legally purchased, and that the shooter had apparently passed all the necessary background checks -- a key point of what the gun-control advocate was saying we had to do on a Federal level, and a complete refutation of her position. Her recommendation, such as she gave any, would have done absolutely nothing to prevent this incident. Nothing.
So then the opposing debater pointed out that if there were any new constraint on gun ownership -- and the gun-control advocate clearly did not even understand the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon -- that ended up criminalizing a class of weapons, there was going to be the issue of collecting millions of newly-illegal arms.
And that got me thinking.
I don't know the number of illegal aliens in the USA, but I've heard the number 11 million bandied about, and since the actual number is not at all important to my point, we can use that. They are here illegally, which is what makes them "illegal." The left wants them to stay here, rather transparently on the expectation that they will somehow end up being Democrat voters.
In order to further that end, they are quick to note that it would be immensely difficult to round up 11 million aliens in order to process and supposedly deport them. I mean, that was a big deal in the 2016 election, and that phrase, in some form, was repeated all the time. It would be hard to round up millions of people, and whether or not that was ever the strategy of those opposing illegal immigration, it would be hard.
But apparently it would not be hard to round up and confiscate millions of newly made-illegal weapons? I don't want to characterize the owners of those weapons, but I am not really sure that such confiscation would be taken kindly to, by their owners. Not that I think that illegal aliens would just walk up to the nearest ICE agent and surrender either, mind you, but it is fair to say that a healthy proportion of the public would find a way not to surrender their arms.
And that, of course, is without any discussion of the Second Amendment keeping any of this from happening in the first place. We're having to set that aside for this discussion.
The left doesn't really care about logistics. They can make the argument that rounding up millions of illegal aliens is impossible, but then try to make the same case against firearms ownership with them and sure, that's just fine, it will be a snap to round up millions of guns.
But then again, they don't understand that the Second Amendment was put in the Constitution so that government could be duly in awe of the citizens whom it serves; they think that citizens should be in awe of government. They will never understand.
Of course guns don't vote, although their owners do. There's always 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.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Trotting Out Gun Control
Yesterday, there was a press conference in the White House, held by the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It was a pretty emotional time. Chuck Schumer can do his fake tears at this or that invented slight, but Mrs. Sanders was clearly struggling through her introductory remarks, especially when invoking the Gospel to salute those who would lay down their lives for their fellow man -- and in Las Vegas Sunday night, had.
Almost to the expected moment, there was the obligatory chirping from one of the assembled press hacks, asking if President Trump was going to change his stance on gun control. I want to say that was the second question from the press ... OK, actually, I'd want not to have to say that, but the press is the press, and they did, and it was.
I'm going to grit my teeth and say that I probably should have expected that, because if it hadn't been the second question, it would have been a later one; one of those clowns would have gotten to it (and another one actually did, apparently not hearing the original answer, which was that there was a time and a place for everything and this wasn't it).
OK, I know that the reporter asked the question because someone would have, but really. What did he actually expect the answer to be?
I say that because there is no such thing as a logical "gun control" law or proposal. As with every single law, there needs to be a desired effect, and there needs to be an expectation, presumably based on history, that the law will accomplish the desired effect. History, of course, in Chicago and elsewhere, shows an inverse relationship between strict laws and firearm felonies, but when did facts ever stop the left.
Press hacks are free of that. Had I been Mrs. Sanders, I might have taken a deep breath and replied with a question. "What law", I would have asked the reporter, "do you propose that would have prevented the Las Vegas massacre?"
I certainly would have wanted to have heard that question answered by the reporter. I would have wanted that simply because none of the reporters knew what the weapons were, where they were acquired, whether they were acquired legally by the shooter, etc. If you don't know what happened as far as the firearms, you can't possibly know what would work to have prevented it.
[And Hillary Clinton, of all people, blathers out a tweet -- oh dear, how many more people would have died if a silencer had been on that gun, that the NRA wants legal! -- before even knowing what weapon was involved, and probably not even now knowing that you can't put a silencer on an automatic weapon. In fact, the answer is "fewer people", since a silencer would have melted, but that's Hillary for you.]
We have already had that "gun-control" response after the murders in the school in Connecticut, where the anti-gun types were right there, proposing all sorts of strictures on the purchase and ownership of firearms, none of which would have prevented what had happened. Then why, one would ask, pass such laws in the first place?
This is where we go from here, when it indeed does become time to discuss what happened in the context of the acquisition and ownership of the firearms involved. I particularly want to see what happens if the weapons and/or ammunition were acquired or modified illegally, in which case it becomes an issue of enforcement as opposed to needing new laws.
What leftist anti-gun type is going to say, if it turns out that it was an illegal purchase, that OK, fine, nothing new needed; we need to enforce the laws we have on the books? That's what we have been saying for a long time. But I have to point out that we don't know yet if the firearms were illegal in the first place. And if you don't know, you really can't raise the whole gun control debate -- after a few days, maybe, when it becomes reasonable to do so.
I just hope against hope that when it comes to that, the reasonability of legislation will be tested against a "would it have prevented this" kind of standard. And I hope that if that standard is not raised, that it be immediately applied.
Because "reasonable" is a word needed here. Desperately.
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.
Almost to the expected moment, there was the obligatory chirping from one of the assembled press hacks, asking if President Trump was going to change his stance on gun control. I want to say that was the second question from the press ... OK, actually, I'd want not to have to say that, but the press is the press, and they did, and it was.
I'm going to grit my teeth and say that I probably should have expected that, because if it hadn't been the second question, it would have been a later one; one of those clowns would have gotten to it (and another one actually did, apparently not hearing the original answer, which was that there was a time and a place for everything and this wasn't it).
OK, I know that the reporter asked the question because someone would have, but really. What did he actually expect the answer to be?
I say that because there is no such thing as a logical "gun control" law or proposal. As with every single law, there needs to be a desired effect, and there needs to be an expectation, presumably based on history, that the law will accomplish the desired effect. History, of course, in Chicago and elsewhere, shows an inverse relationship between strict laws and firearm felonies, but when did facts ever stop the left.
Press hacks are free of that. Had I been Mrs. Sanders, I might have taken a deep breath and replied with a question. "What law", I would have asked the reporter, "do you propose that would have prevented the Las Vegas massacre?"
I certainly would have wanted to have heard that question answered by the reporter. I would have wanted that simply because none of the reporters knew what the weapons were, where they were acquired, whether they were acquired legally by the shooter, etc. If you don't know what happened as far as the firearms, you can't possibly know what would work to have prevented it.
[And Hillary Clinton, of all people, blathers out a tweet -- oh dear, how many more people would have died if a silencer had been on that gun, that the NRA wants legal! -- before even knowing what weapon was involved, and probably not even now knowing that you can't put a silencer on an automatic weapon. In fact, the answer is "fewer people", since a silencer would have melted, but that's Hillary for you.]
We have already had that "gun-control" response after the murders in the school in Connecticut, where the anti-gun types were right there, proposing all sorts of strictures on the purchase and ownership of firearms, none of which would have prevented what had happened. Then why, one would ask, pass such laws in the first place?
This is where we go from here, when it indeed does become time to discuss what happened in the context of the acquisition and ownership of the firearms involved. I particularly want to see what happens if the weapons and/or ammunition were acquired or modified illegally, in which case it becomes an issue of enforcement as opposed to needing new laws.
What leftist anti-gun type is going to say, if it turns out that it was an illegal purchase, that OK, fine, nothing new needed; we need to enforce the laws we have on the books? That's what we have been saying for a long time. But I have to point out that we don't know yet if the firearms were illegal in the first place. And if you don't know, you really can't raise the whole gun control debate -- after a few days, maybe, when it becomes reasonable to do so.
I just hope against hope that when it comes to that, the reasonability of legislation will be tested against a "would it have prevented this" kind of standard. And I hope that if that standard is not raised, that it be immediately applied.
Because "reasonable" is a word needed here. Desperately.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, October 2, 2017
The Voice You Are Told to Have
Liberals can say anything they want to without fear of the press challenging their assertions. Certain liberals can say stupid things without fear, because they are not only leftists but in the pantheon of worship on the left. Michelle Obama is one of them.
"Inbound 2017" was a business conference of some kind held in Boston last week, featuring supposedly influential speakers helping you get your business moving and growing. For some unknown reason, they invited the former first lady to speak, which was ironic given that her husband was easily as anti-business as any president in anyone's memory. That must tell us something about the producers of Inbound 2017, and why the attendance for Inbound 2018 might be down a tad.
In her remarks, during which one could have hoped that she could have used her vast business acumen and lengthy experience and success in the private sector, she couldn't help but wander into politics and the 2016 election.
Women who voted for President Trump, she said, had voted against their "authentic voice." Oh, yes she did. And went on:
My business is growing already, having just heard that. Oh wait ... my business closed, primarily because the anti-business posture of her husband strangled small-business loan availability and access to capital.
That was a particularly egotistical thing for Mrs. Obama to have said. "Egotistical", you ask? Well, yes. She was saying that, based on no professional psychological experience in the area whatsoever, she knows the "voice" of every female voter in the USA. Yes, she does.
Over 41% of American woman voters voted for Donald Trump, which is a lot of people voting "against their own voice." Mrs. Obama addressed the question as to what that means, and her answer, which egotistically was supposed to apply to all of those 41%, was that they, every one, by voting "He's better for me" than Hillary Clinton, don't "like their voice" but instead like "the thing you're told to like."
Those were prepared remarks. That means that whoever wrote that for her had a point to make and chose those words to make the point. Worse, if she actually wrote the words, that's how she actually feels. Yuck.
So I have to ask this. If 41% of female voters -- 30 million American women -- were told to like the "thing", which we assume to be Donald Trump, then who told all of them what to like? I mean, 30 million women is a lot of women, and plenty of them were pretty passionate about voting for Trump, not voting for Hillary, or both. Was that because they were "told" to feel that way? By whom, ma'am, who told them to feel that way? Men?
Worse yet, Mrs. Obama just told them, every single one, that they "don't like their voice" What the heck does that even mean? I'm sitting here trying to interpret what she said to them and I don't like what I just came up with.
Because, reading the words that were prepared for her and which she spoke, she is saying this:
Some 30 million women in this country are so weak that, even though they didn't want to vote for Donald Trump and didn't want to reject Hillary Clinton and all she stood for, and even though voting is done by secret ballot, they did so anyway.
Right? They "don't like their voice" and "voted for whom they were told to." That tells me that every woman in America did not want Donald Trump to be president. She made a blanket statement to that effect, so I have to make a blanket assumption about what she said.
I'll tell you this, Michelle Obama. The people who were the lemmings in the 2016 election were not the women who voted for Donald Trump, regardless of what reason they did so, but the women who voted for Hillary Clinton solely, or even in part, because she had a uterus. Those women could not see past gender identity, to realize that Hillary clearly had no capacity to fix the nation's issues or even recognize them, because when she had had the opportunity to do so, she had operated solely to enrich herself by the corrupt "Foundation."
The women who voted for Donald Trump, in contrast, often had to be quiet about their views lest they be subject to the whining of the left, the precise kind of whining that you, Mrs. Obama, just laid on that poor audience in Boston.
I'll tell you another thing, Madam Former First Lady. It's not the Trump-voting women who are weak -- they, after all, had to vote against what all the hectoring leftists like you said, the ones who told them they had to vote for Hillary because she was female. You're the weak one. In contrast with the current first lady, who has been willing to say when she differs from her husband on issues, you never said squat while your husband ran up $10 trillion in more debt, trashed the USA health insurance system and tried to stuff inadequately vetted Syrian "refugees" into my neighborhood.
So if you thought my wife voted for President Trump because someone "told her to", well, (A) you don't know my wife, and (B) go to Hades, do not pass GO, do not collect a red cent.
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.
"Inbound 2017" was a business conference of some kind held in Boston last week, featuring supposedly influential speakers helping you get your business moving and growing. For some unknown reason, they invited the former first lady to speak, which was ironic given that her husband was easily as anti-business as any president in anyone's memory. That must tell us something about the producers of Inbound 2017, and why the attendance for Inbound 2018 might be down a tad.
In her remarks, during which one could have hoped that she could have used her vast business acumen and lengthy experience and success in the private sector, she couldn't help but wander into politics and the 2016 election.
Women who voted for President Trump, she said, had voted against their "authentic voice." Oh, yes she did. And went on:
"Any
woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,"
she said. "What
does it mean for us as women that we look at those two candidates, as
women, and many of us said, that guy, he's better for me, his voice is
more true to me. Well, to me that just says you don't like
your voice. You like the thing you're told to like."
My business is growing already, having just heard that. Oh wait ... my business closed, primarily because the anti-business posture of her husband strangled small-business loan availability and access to capital.
That was a particularly egotistical thing for Mrs. Obama to have said. "Egotistical", you ask? Well, yes. She was saying that, based on no professional psychological experience in the area whatsoever, she knows the "voice" of every female voter in the USA. Yes, she does.
Over 41% of American woman voters voted for Donald Trump, which is a lot of people voting "against their own voice." Mrs. Obama addressed the question as to what that means, and her answer, which egotistically was supposed to apply to all of those 41%, was that they, every one, by voting "He's better for me" than Hillary Clinton, don't "like their voice" but instead like "the thing you're told to like."
Those were prepared remarks. That means that whoever wrote that for her had a point to make and chose those words to make the point. Worse, if she actually wrote the words, that's how she actually feels. Yuck.
So I have to ask this. If 41% of female voters -- 30 million American women -- were told to like the "thing", which we assume to be Donald Trump, then who told all of them what to like? I mean, 30 million women is a lot of women, and plenty of them were pretty passionate about voting for Trump, not voting for Hillary, or both. Was that because they were "told" to feel that way? By whom, ma'am, who told them to feel that way? Men?
Worse yet, Mrs. Obama just told them, every single one, that they "don't like their voice" What the heck does that even mean? I'm sitting here trying to interpret what she said to them and I don't like what I just came up with.
Because, reading the words that were prepared for her and which she spoke, she is saying this:
Some 30 million women in this country are so weak that, even though they didn't want to vote for Donald Trump and didn't want to reject Hillary Clinton and all she stood for, and even though voting is done by secret ballot, they did so anyway.
Right? They "don't like their voice" and "voted for whom they were told to." That tells me that every woman in America did not want Donald Trump to be president. She made a blanket statement to that effect, so I have to make a blanket assumption about what she said.
I'll tell you this, Michelle Obama. The people who were the lemmings in the 2016 election were not the women who voted for Donald Trump, regardless of what reason they did so, but the women who voted for Hillary Clinton solely, or even in part, because she had a uterus. Those women could not see past gender identity, to realize that Hillary clearly had no capacity to fix the nation's issues or even recognize them, because when she had had the opportunity to do so, she had operated solely to enrich herself by the corrupt "Foundation."
The women who voted for Donald Trump, in contrast, often had to be quiet about their views lest they be subject to the whining of the left, the precise kind of whining that you, Mrs. Obama, just laid on that poor audience in Boston.
I'll tell you another thing, Madam Former First Lady. It's not the Trump-voting women who are weak -- they, after all, had to vote against what all the hectoring leftists like you said, the ones who told them they had to vote for Hillary because she was female. You're the weak one. In contrast with the current first lady, who has been willing to say when she differs from her husband on issues, you never said squat while your husband ran up $10 trillion in more debt, trashed the USA health insurance system and tried to stuff inadequately vetted Syrian "refugees" into my neighborhood.
So if you thought my wife voted for President Trump because someone "told her to", well, (A) you don't know my wife, and (B) go to Hades, do not pass GO, do not collect a red cent.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, September 29, 2017
Irrelevant Juniors
It's Friday, and somehow my Friday pieces have started to wander off into the vast field of "who cares" topics. I'm going to wander off here, if for no other reason than this one has caught my eye for a few months and I've never gotten around to writing the actual piece.
I am a "senior." I am a senior, not in the sense that I am in my fourth year of high school or college (I did both already, with uneven success), but in the meaning that out there exists a "junior", one of my sons who has the same name as I do. Many such people choose not to use the "Sr." suffix in their formal correspondence, but I do, as I expected long ago that there would be need to distinguish us in correspondence. We ended up working in the same place a few times, too, so it was reasonably decent foresight.
A very high percentage of those "juniors", however, use the "Jr." suffix to distinguish themselves from their fathers. In fact, it's pretty rare when they don't (Jimmy Carter, who was president 40 years ago, is James Earl Carter, Jr., but never used "Jr." and signed everything formally as "Jimmy"). And that is today's piece.
Back around 1960, the Chicago White Sox first started putting the last names of players on the back of their uniform. That notoriously didn't go quite so well; the slugging first-baseman Ted Kluszewski, who had recently joined Chicago after a long career in Cincinnati, played a bit with his name misspelled -- and the "z" sewn on backward -- a lovely testimony to the "look for the union label" types. But I digress.
Eventually all teams not named "Yankees" followed suit with their road uniforms, and most with their home uniforms as well. Today, you expect to know the names of the players as much for the name on the back, or more, than by their number.
So I don't know when this started, but at some point recently, some players who are "juniors" took to adding the "Jr." to their uniform name. Jackie Bradley, Jr. of the Red Sox does, Odell Beckham of the NFL's New York Giants as well. There are players I've seen with "III" as well as other "Jr." names and maybe a "Sr." or two.
So I'm kind of wondering this ... why are they doing that?
You see, what goes on the back of the uniform is the last name, and the "Jr." is part of the first name. My last name is "Sutton", and my first is "Robert", informally "Bob" and formally "Robert, Sr.". The intent of the suffix is not to distinguish the last name but the first, and to distinguish one from one's father (or son), not one's brother.
So I don't really care why Jackie Bradley, Jr. has "Bradley Jr." on his uniform, but it's unnecessary. It's also caused some odd broadcasting, too. I've often heard announcers refer to him as "Bradley Junior" for some reason, which makes no sense. If you refer to John Smith as "Smith" and Tom Brown as "Brown", well, you refer to Jackie Bradley, Jr. as "Bradley" and that's enough -- remember, "Junior" is a reference to his first name, not his last.
[And for the record, there was a time when both Ken Griffey, Sr. and Ken Griffey, Jr., father and son, were on the same Reds team in Cincinnati. I'd have been fine had their uniforms had "Griffey Jr. and Griffey Sr. on them, because the distinction was necessary, same as when you have two unrelated Smiths on the same team and need a "J. Smith" and "R. Smith" with the initials on the jersey. But otherwise there's no reason for the suffix.]
I imagine that some of the players with the suffixes are saying that they want to "honor their father", and that's fine. Bless them and the love they have for their fathers. I never said this was a very important topic, remember?
I just suppose that I have to wonder how "honored" Odell Beckham's father must feel when he scores a touchdown and celebrates by getting down on all fours in the end zone and peeing like a dog -- giving his own team a 15-yard penalty. Yeah, "Sr." must be pretty proud, and thanks to his peeing offspring, everyone knows Dad's name. I think I'd be calling my kid and telling him to peel the "Jr." off his uniform.
Well, I have two boys I'm really proud of, and each of them can stand on his own quite well.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
I am a "senior." I am a senior, not in the sense that I am in my fourth year of high school or college (I did both already, with uneven success), but in the meaning that out there exists a "junior", one of my sons who has the same name as I do. Many such people choose not to use the "Sr." suffix in their formal correspondence, but I do, as I expected long ago that there would be need to distinguish us in correspondence. We ended up working in the same place a few times, too, so it was reasonably decent foresight.
A very high percentage of those "juniors", however, use the "Jr." suffix to distinguish themselves from their fathers. In fact, it's pretty rare when they don't (Jimmy Carter, who was president 40 years ago, is James Earl Carter, Jr., but never used "Jr." and signed everything formally as "Jimmy"). And that is today's piece.
Back around 1960, the Chicago White Sox first started putting the last names of players on the back of their uniform. That notoriously didn't go quite so well; the slugging first-baseman Ted Kluszewski, who had recently joined Chicago after a long career in Cincinnati, played a bit with his name misspelled -- and the "z" sewn on backward -- a lovely testimony to the "look for the union label" types. But I digress.
Eventually all teams not named "Yankees" followed suit with their road uniforms, and most with their home uniforms as well. Today, you expect to know the names of the players as much for the name on the back, or more, than by their number.
So I don't know when this started, but at some point recently, some players who are "juniors" took to adding the "Jr." to their uniform name. Jackie Bradley, Jr. of the Red Sox does, Odell Beckham of the NFL's New York Giants as well. There are players I've seen with "III" as well as other "Jr." names and maybe a "Sr." or two.
So I'm kind of wondering this ... why are they doing that?
You see, what goes on the back of the uniform is the last name, and the "Jr." is part of the first name. My last name is "Sutton", and my first is "Robert", informally "Bob" and formally "Robert, Sr.". The intent of the suffix is not to distinguish the last name but the first, and to distinguish one from one's father (or son), not one's brother.
So I don't really care why Jackie Bradley, Jr. has "Bradley Jr." on his uniform, but it's unnecessary. It's also caused some odd broadcasting, too. I've often heard announcers refer to him as "Bradley Junior" for some reason, which makes no sense. If you refer to John Smith as "Smith" and Tom Brown as "Brown", well, you refer to Jackie Bradley, Jr. as "Bradley" and that's enough -- remember, "Junior" is a reference to his first name, not his last.
[And for the record, there was a time when both Ken Griffey, Sr. and Ken Griffey, Jr., father and son, were on the same Reds team in Cincinnati. I'd have been fine had their uniforms had "Griffey Jr. and Griffey Sr. on them, because the distinction was necessary, same as when you have two unrelated Smiths on the same team and need a "J. Smith" and "R. Smith" with the initials on the jersey. But otherwise there's no reason for the suffix.]
I imagine that some of the players with the suffixes are saying that they want to "honor their father", and that's fine. Bless them and the love they have for their fathers. I never said this was a very important topic, remember?
I just suppose that I have to wonder how "honored" Odell Beckham's father must feel when he scores a touchdown and celebrates by getting down on all fours in the end zone and peeing like a dog -- giving his own team a 15-yard penalty. Yeah, "Sr." must be pretty proud, and thanks to his peeing offspring, everyone knows Dad's name. I think I'd be calling my kid and telling him to peel the "Jr." off his uniform.
Well, I have two boys I'm really proud of, and each of them can stand on his own quite well.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Using the Draft, Perhaps?
I had a very interesting exchange with my brother recently about things in general. Periodically, as I have mentioned, he'll drop me a thought that could become an article or essay, to see if I agreed with him and his point.
This one was tough. The notion was whether we should consider revitalizing the draft, and getting gangs, protestors and those depressing NFL kneeling types off the streets.
See what I mean? There are a lot of facets to such an idea. First of all, I am not in favor of what had been the traditional military draft up until the early 1970s when it was abandoned as an active source of recruiting for the armed services. I never liked the idea, because to me it was the confluence of two mutually-exclusive aims.
Stocking the armed services by declaring that every 18-year-old without being in college (or whatever deferment criteria are used) produces an unwilling military such as we had in Vietnam. Military success depends on cohesion as a team, and I doubt you could find a general officer who served both before and after the end of the draft, who would favor drafting as a means to produce the most effective service.
Get it? The goal of "stocking the services" means stocking the services with people who will become part of a cohesive, effective military. You don't make that up by using people who don't want to be serving, with no commitment to country or to their service, let alone to the mission. That's why I don't support a draft as a recruiting tool; as is seen by the general officer community, it is destructive to its own aims.
That is separate from the notion of "mandatory service", as is done in many countries where everyone, regardless of gender, is required to provide a year or two of service in some manner, which can be other than military. I have no problem with that part. Lots of types of support can be performed by people not crazy about mandatory service; it's just that the military should not be one of them.
Then there's the other part, which is how punitive this type of service can become. NFL kneeling morons are different from gang members, if only because the football players were able to get to the point that someone would pay them for their talents. The gang types are criminals who need to be punished; the NFL types are simply too stupid to know which side their bread is buttered. The protestors are ... well, I don't know what they are, since none of them appears to be able to articulate what they're against, as they heave chairs through Starbucks windows.
I will tell you that there is plenty of stuff that needs to get done, particularly in North Dakota in the winter, that I'd be delighted to take people off the street and send them to work on. Sort of an updated Job Corps, you know. Get some training in infrastructure repair -- our president knows a fair amount about that and might have some valuable input into creating such a program.
I can't help but think that a lot of young Americans -- all, probably -- would benefit by having put some skin in the game, and having a service-to-the-nation with an option of how to perform it, with the military being but one of them. As long as the options are not political, I'm good there too. They can be deferred until after college, or there can be some teaching options where the NEA has not already metastasized, perhaps.
Then there's gender. If we draft, we'd have to draft females as well, lest the fluid-gender types start rebelling and asking for equal treatment -- or claiming gender fluidity to get out of service if we didn't. Where is the money going to come from to pay twice as many draftees, when we don't actually need all that manpower? I'd be fine if the mandatory service included private sector options, but I don't believe that the notion of mandatory service for all means heavy debt to do so.
Smarter people than I can work the details. I don't want to bring back the draft, for sure; I want the military to be a well-functioning volunteer service as it is now. But I sure think some of these entitled morons might sing a different tune if they actually had to serve the country whose flag they spit on with their actions.
Lots to think about.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
This one was tough. The notion was whether we should consider revitalizing the draft, and getting gangs, protestors and those depressing NFL kneeling types off the streets.
See what I mean? There are a lot of facets to such an idea. First of all, I am not in favor of what had been the traditional military draft up until the early 1970s when it was abandoned as an active source of recruiting for the armed services. I never liked the idea, because to me it was the confluence of two mutually-exclusive aims.
Stocking the armed services by declaring that every 18-year-old without being in college (or whatever deferment criteria are used) produces an unwilling military such as we had in Vietnam. Military success depends on cohesion as a team, and I doubt you could find a general officer who served both before and after the end of the draft, who would favor drafting as a means to produce the most effective service.
Get it? The goal of "stocking the services" means stocking the services with people who will become part of a cohesive, effective military. You don't make that up by using people who don't want to be serving, with no commitment to country or to their service, let alone to the mission. That's why I don't support a draft as a recruiting tool; as is seen by the general officer community, it is destructive to its own aims.
That is separate from the notion of "mandatory service", as is done in many countries where everyone, regardless of gender, is required to provide a year or two of service in some manner, which can be other than military. I have no problem with that part. Lots of types of support can be performed by people not crazy about mandatory service; it's just that the military should not be one of them.
Then there's the other part, which is how punitive this type of service can become. NFL kneeling morons are different from gang members, if only because the football players were able to get to the point that someone would pay them for their talents. The gang types are criminals who need to be punished; the NFL types are simply too stupid to know which side their bread is buttered. The protestors are ... well, I don't know what they are, since none of them appears to be able to articulate what they're against, as they heave chairs through Starbucks windows.
I will tell you that there is plenty of stuff that needs to get done, particularly in North Dakota in the winter, that I'd be delighted to take people off the street and send them to work on. Sort of an updated Job Corps, you know. Get some training in infrastructure repair -- our president knows a fair amount about that and might have some valuable input into creating such a program.
I can't help but think that a lot of young Americans -- all, probably -- would benefit by having put some skin in the game, and having a service-to-the-nation with an option of how to perform it, with the military being but one of them. As long as the options are not political, I'm good there too. They can be deferred until after college, or there can be some teaching options where the NEA has not already metastasized, perhaps.
Then there's gender. If we draft, we'd have to draft females as well, lest the fluid-gender types start rebelling and asking for equal treatment -- or claiming gender fluidity to get out of service if we didn't. Where is the money going to come from to pay twice as many draftees, when we don't actually need all that manpower? I'd be fine if the mandatory service included private sector options, but I don't believe that the notion of mandatory service for all means heavy debt to do so.
Smarter people than I can work the details. I don't want to bring back the draft, for sure; I want the military to be a well-functioning volunteer service as it is now. But I sure think some of these entitled morons might sing a different tune if they actually had to serve the country whose flag they spit on with their actions.
Lots to think about.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
The Seeds of the NFL's Collapse
"Cornelius MacGillicuddy" is a name that may not ring any bells with you, unless you are of a certain age and a baseball historian, or at least someone interested in the game and its history.
For those who do not recognize the name, please don't fret. It was the formal, birth-certificate name of one of the greatest managers of all time, the great Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League from its inception until he finally retired -- fifty years later.
Connie Mack's Athletics were not the most well-funded teams; Mack himself had owned the team in part or in majority for all that time, and was never in the best position to acquire ballplayers. However, his astute eye for talent helped the team reach peaks that led to world championships in the early 1910s (three) and then two more in the late 1920s.
Connie Mack's teams that had won championships in 1910, 1911 and 1913 looked inevitable in 1914, but fell to the "Miracle" Boston Braves in the World Series in a phenomenal upset. So Mack started to dismantle the team, selling off its stars and building younger lineups, trying that formula for fifteen years until his 1929 team -- with Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons and Jimmie Foxx -- brought him another title.
When his Athletics lost in 1914, Mack made the unusual step of dismantling the team, as I said, but he did it fairly publicly. "Every successful team", Mack is said to have stated then, "contains the seeds of its own demise."
What he saw, of course, was the fact that successful teams are not able to stay together; underlying that success are factors that can't be controlled, from the aging of the participants to personal disputes, to egos and other stresses on teams. The exceptions -- the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, for example -- are able to get players to buy in to a team philosophy and subjugate their collective egos to a greater aim. But in 1914, Mack understood how rare something like that, 100 years later, would be.
It took Connie Mack many years to return to prominence with a championship team, particularly as the New York Yankees instituted the money-is-power philosophy in the 1920s and made it more difficult to compete. But his team's recovery is not as important as his philosophy.
Successful teams do indeed contain the seeds of their own demise, and successful organizations are the same way. Amazon is roaring right now, as is Apple. Microsoft is doing quite well, thank you. But then, so was Kodak. So was Digital Equipment, and so was Toys R Us. And Compaq. And the Democrats.
And so, my friends, was the NFL.
Five years back, there was simply no stopping the National Football League. The money was enormous, the competition was strong. The fans in most cities enjoyed the fact that, with a salary-capped league, your team's sustained success would rely on strong management and coaching, not buying players but buying the right players. The TV payments to the NFL were huge, because the league could almost guarantee high ratings.
Gambling? Oh, Lord yes. Every company had pools on games or a week's slate of games, scoring squares, you name it. The NFL was a prime sport for betting, over-under and whatever. All of it served to keep the NFL in the public eye. And the value of franchises was soaring as well, to where an average NFL owner had an asset worth in excess of $2 billion, with a "b."
But every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise. And this past week -- some are calling September 24, 2017 "The day the NFL died" -- we saw what some of those seeds were, and could project what they could grow into.
You know what happened. All across the NFL, players and whole teams were spitting on the military, on veterans and on patriotic Americans by failing to stand for the National Anthem. Some teams stayed in the locker during the anthem (despite being subject to an NFL fine for doing so, that one NFL official is reported to have said will not be levied). Many individual players got on one knee. No one got fined.
Exactly what they were "protesting" is murky as heck. It's supposed to be something about how "people of color" are not getting justice, although we don't know who, where or what the injustices are. It certainly is not the thousands of "people of color" who have died on the streets of Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, because none of those players appear to be doing anything to stop it.
But even that is not the point. The point of this piece is that the NFL has exactly one week to get this whole thing resolved before the "seeds of its demise" get fertilized. You see, the ticket-buying public is not interested in having those multi-million-dollar athletes spit on the caskets of our war heroes and on the shoes of those who have served.
Sports is where we go to get away from the problems of the world, to recharge us and our emotions to be able to get set to attack our and the nation's problems the next day. NFL players have now polluted our refreshment time with their ill-defined political statements that offend the nation, and that ticket-buying public is not happy.
How do we know? Well, as of Tuesday, the top-selling NFL jersey was that of ... no, not Tom Brady, not J.J. Watt or Eli Manning or Richard Sherman. No quarterback, running back, corner or receiver. Nope. For what may be the first time ever, the highest-selling jersey is that of Alejandro Villanueva, an offensive lineman.
In case you are wondering who that is, Villanueva is a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers. More importantly, to me at least, is that he is a West Pointer, a former Army Ranger awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in three tours of duty in Afghanistan. And while his teammates waited in the locker room before Sunday's game while the Anthem was being performed, Alejandro Villanueva stood in public at the entrance to the team tunnel, in full Steelers uniform and reverently acknowledging the flag for which he fought.
Villanueva was the same military hero he was two weeks ago, long before his uniform was a best-seller. But those now buying that uniform are making their own statement, and the NFL ignores that statement at its own peril. Because they're the same people who buy tickets to the games, they're the ones who make those franchises worth what they are. If and when they stop attending games, stop buying tickets and overpriced beer and hot dogs, those franchises are worth less. If we stop watching, the networks know immediately -- and so do the advertisers.
The players are too shortsighted to see any of this. They get paid what they do because the advertisers pay the networks (for ratings), which pay the NFL (for ratings), whose teams pay the players (for performance). When those ratings fade because the ticket-buyers prefer the patriotism of Alejandro Villanueva to the political leftism and blatant anti-Americanism of the take-a-knee-for-the-anthem crowd, the money available to pay those gargantuan salaries runs a bit drier.
The players won't be happy, and neither will the owners. The NFL and its leaders won't be happy either, and if they react by taking the same pandering, pro-player, pro-protest stance they did this past week, the paying audience won't be happy. And that audience is the source of that money they all obviously want.
Every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise. Those seeds are greedy players who spit on the fans. We don't need them. There are other amusements on Sunday afternoons. For years, I have managed to forget during the spring and summer the "me, me, me" preening and dancing the players do after simply doing what they're paid to do. Then comes the first game, the first touchdown dance, the first over-the-top choreographed celebration, and I remember why I often watch football with some reluctance.
There are players on the teams I root for whom I cannot stand. Their ego transcends their "laundry" to where I simply wish that the team would hand the ball to someone else, or throw to someone else, just to avoid seeming to reward childish behavior by pampered leftist millionaires posing as football players.
The seeds of its own demise. Will there even be an NFL next year? Stand by ...
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.
For those who do not recognize the name, please don't fret. It was the formal, birth-certificate name of one of the greatest managers of all time, the great Connie Mack, who managed the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League from its inception until he finally retired -- fifty years later.
Connie Mack's Athletics were not the most well-funded teams; Mack himself had owned the team in part or in majority for all that time, and was never in the best position to acquire ballplayers. However, his astute eye for talent helped the team reach peaks that led to world championships in the early 1910s (three) and then two more in the late 1920s.
Connie Mack's teams that had won championships in 1910, 1911 and 1913 looked inevitable in 1914, but fell to the "Miracle" Boston Braves in the World Series in a phenomenal upset. So Mack started to dismantle the team, selling off its stars and building younger lineups, trying that formula for fifteen years until his 1929 team -- with Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons and Jimmie Foxx -- brought him another title.
When his Athletics lost in 1914, Mack made the unusual step of dismantling the team, as I said, but he did it fairly publicly. "Every successful team", Mack is said to have stated then, "contains the seeds of its own demise."
What he saw, of course, was the fact that successful teams are not able to stay together; underlying that success are factors that can't be controlled, from the aging of the participants to personal disputes, to egos and other stresses on teams. The exceptions -- the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, for example -- are able to get players to buy in to a team philosophy and subjugate their collective egos to a greater aim. But in 1914, Mack understood how rare something like that, 100 years later, would be.
It took Connie Mack many years to return to prominence with a championship team, particularly as the New York Yankees instituted the money-is-power philosophy in the 1920s and made it more difficult to compete. But his team's recovery is not as important as his philosophy.
Successful teams do indeed contain the seeds of their own demise, and successful organizations are the same way. Amazon is roaring right now, as is Apple. Microsoft is doing quite well, thank you. But then, so was Kodak. So was Digital Equipment, and so was Toys R Us. And Compaq. And the Democrats.
And so, my friends, was the NFL.
Five years back, there was simply no stopping the National Football League. The money was enormous, the competition was strong. The fans in most cities enjoyed the fact that, with a salary-capped league, your team's sustained success would rely on strong management and coaching, not buying players but buying the right players. The TV payments to the NFL were huge, because the league could almost guarantee high ratings.
Gambling? Oh, Lord yes. Every company had pools on games or a week's slate of games, scoring squares, you name it. The NFL was a prime sport for betting, over-under and whatever. All of it served to keep the NFL in the public eye. And the value of franchises was soaring as well, to where an average NFL owner had an asset worth in excess of $2 billion, with a "b."
But every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise. And this past week -- some are calling September 24, 2017 "The day the NFL died" -- we saw what some of those seeds were, and could project what they could grow into.
You know what happened. All across the NFL, players and whole teams were spitting on the military, on veterans and on patriotic Americans by failing to stand for the National Anthem. Some teams stayed in the locker during the anthem (despite being subject to an NFL fine for doing so, that one NFL official is reported to have said will not be levied). Many individual players got on one knee. No one got fined.
Exactly what they were "protesting" is murky as heck. It's supposed to be something about how "people of color" are not getting justice, although we don't know who, where or what the injustices are. It certainly is not the thousands of "people of color" who have died on the streets of Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, because none of those players appear to be doing anything to stop it.
But even that is not the point. The point of this piece is that the NFL has exactly one week to get this whole thing resolved before the "seeds of its demise" get fertilized. You see, the ticket-buying public is not interested in having those multi-million-dollar athletes spit on the caskets of our war heroes and on the shoes of those who have served.
Sports is where we go to get away from the problems of the world, to recharge us and our emotions to be able to get set to attack our and the nation's problems the next day. NFL players have now polluted our refreshment time with their ill-defined political statements that offend the nation, and that ticket-buying public is not happy.
How do we know? Well, as of Tuesday, the top-selling NFL jersey was that of ... no, not Tom Brady, not J.J. Watt or Eli Manning or Richard Sherman. No quarterback, running back, corner or receiver. Nope. For what may be the first time ever, the highest-selling jersey is that of Alejandro Villanueva, an offensive lineman.
In case you are wondering who that is, Villanueva is a member of the Pittsburgh Steelers. More importantly, to me at least, is that he is a West Pointer, a former Army Ranger awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in three tours of duty in Afghanistan. And while his teammates waited in the locker room before Sunday's game while the Anthem was being performed, Alejandro Villanueva stood in public at the entrance to the team tunnel, in full Steelers uniform and reverently acknowledging the flag for which he fought.
Villanueva was the same military hero he was two weeks ago, long before his uniform was a best-seller. But those now buying that uniform are making their own statement, and the NFL ignores that statement at its own peril. Because they're the same people who buy tickets to the games, they're the ones who make those franchises worth what they are. If and when they stop attending games, stop buying tickets and overpriced beer and hot dogs, those franchises are worth less. If we stop watching, the networks know immediately -- and so do the advertisers.
The players are too shortsighted to see any of this. They get paid what they do because the advertisers pay the networks (for ratings), which pay the NFL (for ratings), whose teams pay the players (for performance). When those ratings fade because the ticket-buyers prefer the patriotism of Alejandro Villanueva to the political leftism and blatant anti-Americanism of the take-a-knee-for-the-anthem crowd, the money available to pay those gargantuan salaries runs a bit drier.
The players won't be happy, and neither will the owners. The NFL and its leaders won't be happy either, and if they react by taking the same pandering, pro-player, pro-protest stance they did this past week, the paying audience won't be happy. And that audience is the source of that money they all obviously want.
Every successful organization bears the seeds of its own demise. Those seeds are greedy players who spit on the fans. We don't need them. There are other amusements on Sunday afternoons. For years, I have managed to forget during the spring and summer the "me, me, me" preening and dancing the players do after simply doing what they're paid to do. Then comes the first game, the first touchdown dance, the first over-the-top choreographed celebration, and I remember why I often watch football with some reluctance.
There are players on the teams I root for whom I cannot stand. Their ego transcends their "laundry" to where I simply wish that the team would hand the ball to someone else, or throw to someone else, just to avoid seeming to reward childish behavior by pampered leftist millionaires posing as football players.
The seeds of its own demise. Will there even be an NFL next year? Stand by ...
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
You Want to Be a Sanctuary?
By the time this is published, it is not inconceivable that the State of California, long known accurately as the "land of fruits and nuts", will have completed passage of a law designating itself a "sanctuary state", and celebrating the wonderful attributes of inclusion, diversity and ... well, murder.
Before the desk of the governor, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown (D, of course), is such a bill, and it is assumed that he will sign it. At that point, the State of California will cease to cooperate with Federal laws regarding the processing of criminal illegal aliens in the state, releasing them to walk among its citizens without risk of the state notifying Federal immigration officers that they're holding criminal aliens before they are released.
The state will have declared itself a "welcoming" place to people who are here illegally and have committed crimes -- it is critical to mention that, because we're not talking about being "welcoming" and "inclusive" as much as we are talking about the treatment of a certain class of criminals. We would expect, in the sense of normal order, that state and local law enforcement who are obligated by Federal law to hold such criminals for processing by the USA, would do just that.
If anything, it would mean less work for state and local officials, by getting the feds to deport criminal aliens who are likely to come back and repeat their crimes if they're left in the state and community.
Well, California, or at least its elected legislature and governor, apparently don't really care so much about those citizens and the victims of the crimes against them, as they do about the presumed votes they think they'll gain if those illegals and their families somehow get legalized -- and California decides who can vote in California state and local elections, remember.
So here goes.
Every political statement -- and this surely is one -- runs the risk of its victims acting in their own interest, which is why businesses and jobs are already leaving California, even before some minimum-wage hikes in the state forced more of them out. People afraid of having criminal aliens become a "protected class" are leaving as well.
But the real slap in the face was to the citizens of the USA and to the Federal government, which as we know is led by President Donald Trump. There are many things we can say about President Trump, and one of them is that he fights back when offended. And this is a directed offense against him, folks.
I think that the president should take California at its word. "You want to be welcoming, I'll show you welcoming. You want to protect criminals, well, let's see how you like this ..."
California does not want the USA to deport anyone, even criminals. So OK, we won't deport them, we'll send them to California. Dump them in downtown San Francisco. Maybe arm them, since the state appears to think they're afraid of something, and they need protection. In fact, if the state is so welcoming to criminals, maybe the next ten Federal prisons should be built in California, too.
There are some serious dollars spent on the military in California as well. San Diego is practically the mainland home of the Navy in the Pacific, and that isn't going to change anytime. A bit north of that is Camp Pendleton, one of three Marine Expeditionary Force locations in the world. There are Air Force bases and Army installations as well.
But unlike the State of California, the Federal government actually is concerned about criminal aliens running free without ICE agents being notified. And we have to protect our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. Period.
So one urgent step would be for the President and Secretary of Defense to issue executive orders barring servicemen stationed in California from leaving base. Or Congress could also pass a law exempting uniformed servicemen from sales taxes in "any state which by statute fails to cooperate with immigration enforcement." The servicemen can go off-base and spend in the local economy, but the state gets no tax revenue. Or the servicemen can be kept on base, but a special retail area can develop -- a Camp Pendleton Walmart, for example, would be successful -- something like that.
Failure to enforce immigration law is going to mean that ICE has to pick up the slack, right? Well, someone has to pay for that, and it might as well come out of the aid checks that go to the California treasury for whatever we send money to them for. A state decides not to follow Federal law, which costs the taxpayer in the other 49 states to pay for ICE to staff up higher. It only makes sense that the cost has to be made up, and by docking California, that makes it all right with the other taxpayers.
Of course, eventually these actions are going to cost the state as much as losing innocent citizens to illegal criminal aliens has, and they'll wake up. Hopefully, "wake up" means that they'll stop electing Democrats to their legislatures, although somehow the citizens haven't awakened and stopped electing Democrats in death traps like Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, Los Angeles ... you get the idea.
Either way, here is the point. You want to make a political point, you have to be prepared to face the consequences. You want to say how "inclusive" you are, especially of criminals, you have to consider being voted out of office. You want to stop cooperating with the Federal government to enforce the laws that were passed by the representatives of all 50 states, well, that government has options as well.
It's a two-way street, of course. The next Democrat president could try to justify comparable actions against, say, a conservative mountain-west state. And let's face it, we do believe in Federalism and the rights of states. But those rights do stop at the "powers delegated" in the Constitution, and our borders and their enforcement are the province not of Moonbeam Brown and the oddballs in the California legislature, but of the government of the United States of America.
If California wants to secede, now, that's something I can get behind. Unlike the War Between the States, I imagine that such secession would be met not by an army dispatched to bring them back in, but by a thrilling, patriotic "Bon voyage!"
I'll send a bouquet.
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.
Before the desk of the governor, Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown (D, of course), is such a bill, and it is assumed that he will sign it. At that point, the State of California will cease to cooperate with Federal laws regarding the processing of criminal illegal aliens in the state, releasing them to walk among its citizens without risk of the state notifying Federal immigration officers that they're holding criminal aliens before they are released.
The state will have declared itself a "welcoming" place to people who are here illegally and have committed crimes -- it is critical to mention that, because we're not talking about being "welcoming" and "inclusive" as much as we are talking about the treatment of a certain class of criminals. We would expect, in the sense of normal order, that state and local law enforcement who are obligated by Federal law to hold such criminals for processing by the USA, would do just that.
If anything, it would mean less work for state and local officials, by getting the feds to deport criminal aliens who are likely to come back and repeat their crimes if they're left in the state and community.
Well, California, or at least its elected legislature and governor, apparently don't really care so much about those citizens and the victims of the crimes against them, as they do about the presumed votes they think they'll gain if those illegals and their families somehow get legalized -- and California decides who can vote in California state and local elections, remember.
So here goes.
Every political statement -- and this surely is one -- runs the risk of its victims acting in their own interest, which is why businesses and jobs are already leaving California, even before some minimum-wage hikes in the state forced more of them out. People afraid of having criminal aliens become a "protected class" are leaving as well.
But the real slap in the face was to the citizens of the USA and to the Federal government, which as we know is led by President Donald Trump. There are many things we can say about President Trump, and one of them is that he fights back when offended. And this is a directed offense against him, folks.
I think that the president should take California at its word. "You want to be welcoming, I'll show you welcoming. You want to protect criminals, well, let's see how you like this ..."
California does not want the USA to deport anyone, even criminals. So OK, we won't deport them, we'll send them to California. Dump them in downtown San Francisco. Maybe arm them, since the state appears to think they're afraid of something, and they need protection. In fact, if the state is so welcoming to criminals, maybe the next ten Federal prisons should be built in California, too.
There are some serious dollars spent on the military in California as well. San Diego is practically the mainland home of the Navy in the Pacific, and that isn't going to change anytime. A bit north of that is Camp Pendleton, one of three Marine Expeditionary Force locations in the world. There are Air Force bases and Army installations as well.
But unlike the State of California, the Federal government actually is concerned about criminal aliens running free without ICE agents being notified. And we have to protect our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. Period.
So one urgent step would be for the President and Secretary of Defense to issue executive orders barring servicemen stationed in California from leaving base. Or Congress could also pass a law exempting uniformed servicemen from sales taxes in "any state which by statute fails to cooperate with immigration enforcement." The servicemen can go off-base and spend in the local economy, but the state gets no tax revenue. Or the servicemen can be kept on base, but a special retail area can develop -- a Camp Pendleton Walmart, for example, would be successful -- something like that.
Failure to enforce immigration law is going to mean that ICE has to pick up the slack, right? Well, someone has to pay for that, and it might as well come out of the aid checks that go to the California treasury for whatever we send money to them for. A state decides not to follow Federal law, which costs the taxpayer in the other 49 states to pay for ICE to staff up higher. It only makes sense that the cost has to be made up, and by docking California, that makes it all right with the other taxpayers.
Of course, eventually these actions are going to cost the state as much as losing innocent citizens to illegal criminal aliens has, and they'll wake up. Hopefully, "wake up" means that they'll stop electing Democrats to their legislatures, although somehow the citizens haven't awakened and stopped electing Democrats in death traps like Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, Los Angeles ... you get the idea.
Either way, here is the point. You want to make a political point, you have to be prepared to face the consequences. You want to say how "inclusive" you are, especially of criminals, you have to consider being voted out of office. You want to stop cooperating with the Federal government to enforce the laws that were passed by the representatives of all 50 states, well, that government has options as well.
It's a two-way street, of course. The next Democrat president could try to justify comparable actions against, say, a conservative mountain-west state. And let's face it, we do believe in Federalism and the rights of states. But those rights do stop at the "powers delegated" in the Constitution, and our borders and their enforcement are the province not of Moonbeam Brown and the oddballs in the California legislature, but of the government of the United States of America.
If California wants to secede, now, that's something I can get behind. Unlike the War Between the States, I imagine that such secession would be met not by an army dispatched to bring them back in, but by a thrilling, patriotic "Bon voyage!"
I'll send a bouquet.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Monday, September 25, 2017
Legs and the Hypocritical Left
John F. Kennedy, Jr. has been gone for nearly 20 years, after having crashed his small plane into the sea while flying to a family wedding in Hyannisport, killing his wife and her sister along with himself that night.
As the son and political heir to the president, we all watched JFK, Jr. on his career, as he built a magazine (that failed fairly quickly), married, had his marital spats plastered all over the tabloids, and then lost his life in a sad event that added to the narrative of the "bad luck of the Kennedy family."
I didn't know him, of course, so I've no real handle on what kind of person he actually was, and we'll never really know that. We won't know that in part because he was a Kennedy, the biggest family public relations firm ever, and in part because he was born into prominence, a handsome fellow cast as a prince from his earliest days and susceptible to being made by the press into something other than what he really was -- whatever that may be.
The left, despite its protestations that it hates royalty and is all about the common man, was perfectly willing to dump all that royalty-hatred to spin tales of the Kennedy family. Royalty they were, and there is little doubt that had the younger JFK chosen a political career, he would have been swept into office on his name alone.
So it was with some interest that I picked up a magazine in a salon where my best girl was having her nails done. The magazine was "People", which is usually great fodder for killing 20 minutes or so in a doctor's office ... or a nail salon. It gets deeply into nothing at all, and it has nice pictures of famous people, although the older I get, the less I identify the people who are now supposedly famous.
The cover of the magazine was a picture that let us know that the feature article was going to be a feature on the younger JFK's wife, Carolyn Bessette, who perished with him in the plane crash. She was a wonderful person, the article went on, very nice and generous and all that good stuff. We never saw the "real" Carolyn, it told us, who was afraid of the paparazzi although her husband tolerated them, all that kind of content.
Then I noticed a reference to John Jr. having gone to Europe and meeting with Princess Diana about some charity topic or other. It might have been in the caption of a picture of the both of them, but there, prominently, the article noted JFK, Jr. having said of the princess when he returned, "She has nice legs."
I don't know if reading that struck you the way it did me, so I'll tell you how it struck me. Diana was the Princess of Wales, actual royalty rather than the pretend type originally foisted on us by the grandfather of JFK, Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy, the bootlegger, womanizer and seller of various items to the Nazis in the '30s. She and JFK, Jr. have both been gone a couple decades, now.
The tone of the article and particularly the mention of the younger JFK's comment about her legs were clearly meant as a positive toward young John. "Oh, how cute", we were supposed to have read into the comment. "Our prince thought their princess had nice legs." In other words, it was perfectly wonderful that he said something objectifying toward the princess.
Why? Because he was a hero of the left, that's why. What struck me is that if, say, Donald Trump, Jr., also the married son of a president, had said the exact same thing about Kate Middleton, the next generation's princess, well, it would have blown up in a scandal of epic proportion. People magazine would have had it on the cover, all right, but I can bet you it would not have been in a complimentary way, and God help the person who resurrected the JFK, Jr. quote about Diana to portray the hypocrisy.
Now, to my knowledge, Donald Trump, Jr. has never made a comment about any attributes of Kate Middleton, certainly not that have been quoted. For his sake, I hope he doesn't. But I can guarantee you if it were ever to be said and heard, he would not get the worshipful "Oh, isn't that cute" gloss-over from People or from any other print or Web journal.
And you know that's true.
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.
As the son and political heir to the president, we all watched JFK, Jr. on his career, as he built a magazine (that failed fairly quickly), married, had his marital spats plastered all over the tabloids, and then lost his life in a sad event that added to the narrative of the "bad luck of the Kennedy family."
I didn't know him, of course, so I've no real handle on what kind of person he actually was, and we'll never really know that. We won't know that in part because he was a Kennedy, the biggest family public relations firm ever, and in part because he was born into prominence, a handsome fellow cast as a prince from his earliest days and susceptible to being made by the press into something other than what he really was -- whatever that may be.
The left, despite its protestations that it hates royalty and is all about the common man, was perfectly willing to dump all that royalty-hatred to spin tales of the Kennedy family. Royalty they were, and there is little doubt that had the younger JFK chosen a political career, he would have been swept into office on his name alone.
So it was with some interest that I picked up a magazine in a salon where my best girl was having her nails done. The magazine was "People", which is usually great fodder for killing 20 minutes or so in a doctor's office ... or a nail salon. It gets deeply into nothing at all, and it has nice pictures of famous people, although the older I get, the less I identify the people who are now supposedly famous.
The cover of the magazine was a picture that let us know that the feature article was going to be a feature on the younger JFK's wife, Carolyn Bessette, who perished with him in the plane crash. She was a wonderful person, the article went on, very nice and generous and all that good stuff. We never saw the "real" Carolyn, it told us, who was afraid of the paparazzi although her husband tolerated them, all that kind of content.
Then I noticed a reference to John Jr. having gone to Europe and meeting with Princess Diana about some charity topic or other. It might have been in the caption of a picture of the both of them, but there, prominently, the article noted JFK, Jr. having said of the princess when he returned, "She has nice legs."
I don't know if reading that struck you the way it did me, so I'll tell you how it struck me. Diana was the Princess of Wales, actual royalty rather than the pretend type originally foisted on us by the grandfather of JFK, Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy, the bootlegger, womanizer and seller of various items to the Nazis in the '30s. She and JFK, Jr. have both been gone a couple decades, now.
The tone of the article and particularly the mention of the younger JFK's comment about her legs were clearly meant as a positive toward young John. "Oh, how cute", we were supposed to have read into the comment. "Our prince thought their princess had nice legs." In other words, it was perfectly wonderful that he said something objectifying toward the princess.
Why? Because he was a hero of the left, that's why. What struck me is that if, say, Donald Trump, Jr., also the married son of a president, had said the exact same thing about Kate Middleton, the next generation's princess, well, it would have blown up in a scandal of epic proportion. People magazine would have had it on the cover, all right, but I can bet you it would not have been in a complimentary way, and God help the person who resurrected the JFK, Jr. quote about Diana to portray the hypocrisy.
Now, to my knowledge, Donald Trump, Jr. has never made a comment about any attributes of Kate Middleton, certainly not that have been quoted. For his sake, I hope he doesn't. But I can guarantee you if it were ever to be said and heard, he would not get the worshipful "Oh, isn't that cute" gloss-over from People or from any other print or Web journal.
And you know that's true.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Friday, September 22, 2017
Fruitlessly Dealing with Amazon
Amazon is ... well, it does not do the company justice to call it the "biggest name in retail." However online retail got started, Amazon has taken it to another level. You could be a total shut-in and, unless you enjoy the fun of walking around in stores, you could have whatever you could afford, delivered to you and not miss a thing.
Thing is, I didn't have to write that. You use Amazon, same as I do. Even you, the Russians who inexplicably read this column, you all probably use it somehow over there. Bully for you and your borscht.
Everyone uses it, we get it.
Amazon is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post, among other things. The Post, as we know, is a particularly obnoxious and heavily biased left-wing paper, which has dropped all journalistic standards by letting its reporting be influenced by its editorial page. Once known for the Sousa march and now for its comical motto, "Democracy Dies in Darkness", the Post is now also known for its inability to say a good thing about President Trump and slavering loyalty to Hillary Clinton.
Oh, yeah, and the fact that their reporting, such as it is, is done solely by leftist "journalists." And, of course, the fact that Jeff Bezos owns the paper.
There are plenty of times that I have exercised commercial judiciousness by boycotting products in certain cases. I have been, throughout my life, a fervent anti-smoker. As Philip Morris (now the "Altria Group" was buying companies unrelated to tobacco, I would decide simply not to buy those companies' products, same as I did when R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco. I did not buy Miller beer or Oreos or a variety of other things while they were owned by tobacco companies.
At one time I was part of a video-teleconferencing practice that was in negotiations with American Tobacco, and I ultimately pulled the plug on it. My ethics would have been so severely compromised that it made no sense to go forward; I could not have faced my children.
So you get the idea. Jeff Bezos owns a contemptible leftist print medium, and he owns about a sixth of Amazon, which makes him about the richest man on earth. Or close. Who really cares? So if I am used to applying economic actions in support of my political and moral beliefs, then what do I do here?
Well, here's the thing. It would be easy to just say "But you have to use Amazon; there are other brands of beer and cookies, but there is only one Amazon", and rationalize the fact that they don't boycott them. There is certainly enough truth in that. I sure don't want to lose that access. Besides, just this week I noticed that Hilton Hotels' frequent guest/points system had effectively turned over the redemption of its points to Amazon -- if you have a bunch of points and want to redeem them, you have to link your Amazon account and choose Hilton points as your currency. They're like everywhere.
But frankly, it's this -- what the heck can you do economically to Jeff Bezos? The man is worth about $90 billion dollars, or at least his Amazon holdings are. He can literally fund the entire Federal government for more than a week just on his own assets, and at the rate Washington spends, that's incredible. I actually did the math, and my net worth would run the Federal government for 1.2 seconds. Literally.
So why should I inconvenience myself when that would be, well, peeing in the wind considering what the difference in our respective assets might be? Would I feel really good about it? Not even all that much; the Post was what it was before Bezos got there, and it will be what it is when it finally, mercifully stops operating. I'll just order those K-cups through Amazon, I guess.
So there you go. I don't even know if any of that was a surprise.
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.
Thing is, I didn't have to write that. You use Amazon, same as I do. Even you, the Russians who inexplicably read this column, you all probably use it somehow over there. Bully for you and your borscht.
Everyone uses it, we get it.
Amazon is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post, among other things. The Post, as we know, is a particularly obnoxious and heavily biased left-wing paper, which has dropped all journalistic standards by letting its reporting be influenced by its editorial page. Once known for the Sousa march and now for its comical motto, "Democracy Dies in Darkness", the Post is now also known for its inability to say a good thing about President Trump and slavering loyalty to Hillary Clinton.
Oh, yeah, and the fact that their reporting, such as it is, is done solely by leftist "journalists." And, of course, the fact that Jeff Bezos owns the paper.
There are plenty of times that I have exercised commercial judiciousness by boycotting products in certain cases. I have been, throughout my life, a fervent anti-smoker. As Philip Morris (now the "Altria Group" was buying companies unrelated to tobacco, I would decide simply not to buy those companies' products, same as I did when R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco. I did not buy Miller beer or Oreos or a variety of other things while they were owned by tobacco companies.
At one time I was part of a video-teleconferencing practice that was in negotiations with American Tobacco, and I ultimately pulled the plug on it. My ethics would have been so severely compromised that it made no sense to go forward; I could not have faced my children.
So you get the idea. Jeff Bezos owns a contemptible leftist print medium, and he owns about a sixth of Amazon, which makes him about the richest man on earth. Or close. Who really cares? So if I am used to applying economic actions in support of my political and moral beliefs, then what do I do here?
Well, here's the thing. It would be easy to just say "But you have to use Amazon; there are other brands of beer and cookies, but there is only one Amazon", and rationalize the fact that they don't boycott them. There is certainly enough truth in that. I sure don't want to lose that access. Besides, just this week I noticed that Hilton Hotels' frequent guest/points system had effectively turned over the redemption of its points to Amazon -- if you have a bunch of points and want to redeem them, you have to link your Amazon account and choose Hilton points as your currency. They're like everywhere.
But frankly, it's this -- what the heck can you do economically to Jeff Bezos? The man is worth about $90 billion dollars, or at least his Amazon holdings are. He can literally fund the entire Federal government for more than a week just on his own assets, and at the rate Washington spends, that's incredible. I actually did the math, and my net worth would run the Federal government for 1.2 seconds. Literally.
So why should I inconvenience myself when that would be, well, peeing in the wind considering what the difference in our respective assets might be? Would I feel really good about it? Not even all that much; the Post was what it was before Bezos got there, and it will be what it is when it finally, mercifully stops operating. I'll just order those K-cups through Amazon, I guess.
So there you go. I don't even know if any of that was a surprise.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
Thursday, September 21, 2017
How'd THAT Work Out for Hillary?
Since it was a 10:00 AM Eastern Time thing, you probably did not get to enjoy the entire speech made by President Trump before the United Nations on Tuesday, and only heard excerpts on the news programs and cable news channels.
Now, which excerpts you heard may or may not have varied across the broadcast media, but surely a few things resonated. For one, the president was not really pleased with North Korea shooting missiles all over the northwest Pacific, and showed it with a scathing condemnation.
In true Trumpian fashion, he referred to Kim Jong-Un, the fat panda in charge of theprison country, as "Rocket Man", and he did so rather casually, to be honest. I'm sure the FPIC appreciated getting at least some attention, although I believe his stooge at the UN walked out before the actual speech.
[Aside ... have you seen the clips where the FPIC is shown observing a missile test surrounded by 3-4 North Korean generals easily twice his age? Sometimes you watch the clips or see the pictures and try to read the mind of the generals, which seems like "How did I get myself into this?" or "I'd better jump up and down and celebrate with this fat idiot kid or he's going to chloroform me"]
Either way, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) were aghast that Donald Trump was being Donald Trump in (gasp) the United Nations, of all places. How dare he threaten civility in such a way! Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, took pains to call it the best speech he had heard at the UN in decades, which tells you a lot about the UN, and a lot about how you can tell someone by who his friends are. If, after getting royally scrod by Obama, Netanyahu is as pro-Trump as he sounded, maybe our president is doing a good job.
So among the leftists crying about the speech, you had, of all people, Hillary Clinton, who should be (but is still not) in jail, telling us what kind of speech she would have given in regard to North Korea. Of course, she showed up for it on the friendly-to-the-left Stephen Colbert show, where she protested pompously that she would have stressed diplomacy instead of the "dark" speech President Trump gave, and how we should be asking all nations to come together to oppose the regime of the FPIC.
So Hillary, we have to ask.
Your husband, once and still the Philanderer-in-Chief, is the one who cut the deal allowing North Korea to set out on the path of producing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, of which they now have both. Thanks, Bill.
You were in charge of our nation's diplomacy for four sad years or so, and your hero Obama had eight years in total to fix it. Our relationship with North Korea was all yours, Hillary. How did that "diplomacy" work for you and the USA, given what the FPIC is doing now and throughout your hero's administration? How many times did you successfully pressure China to get anything done as far as North Korea?
It is pretty bloody easy to sit on a stuffed couch on a TV show and criticize the president, but when you were in the lead position on diplomacy and you utterly failed -- let's face it, not a single country had a better relationship with the USA when you mercifully left office -- why ever should we think that your commentary is worth the powder to blow it to Hades?
You need to go away quickly, ma'am, whether to the jail cell you still deserve or just out of the spotlight. But either way, either place, you are simply doing yourself and your "Well duh, wha' happened" legacy a grave disservice by allowing yourself to be in the public eye.
Of course, you will stay around, because you can't shut up, and because you can't get it through your coiffed head that you lost because of you, you and you. But what you also can't understand is that the more you talk now, the more the current president -- who appears smarter than you now -- has the opportunity to remind people that you failed when you did have the chance to serve.
It's not doing you a bit of good, but as long as it keeps Democrats embarrassed and out of office, I guess it's not a bad 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.
Now, which excerpts you heard may or may not have varied across the broadcast media, but surely a few things resonated. For one, the president was not really pleased with North Korea shooting missiles all over the northwest Pacific, and showed it with a scathing condemnation.
In true Trumpian fashion, he referred to Kim Jong-Un, the fat panda in charge of the
[Aside ... have you seen the clips where the FPIC is shown observing a missile test surrounded by 3-4 North Korean generals easily twice his age? Sometimes you watch the clips or see the pictures and try to read the mind of the generals, which seems like "How did I get myself into this?" or "I'd better jump up and down and celebrate with this fat idiot kid or he's going to chloroform me"]
Either way, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) were aghast that Donald Trump was being Donald Trump in (gasp) the United Nations, of all places. How dare he threaten civility in such a way! Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, took pains to call it the best speech he had heard at the UN in decades, which tells you a lot about the UN, and a lot about how you can tell someone by who his friends are. If, after getting royally scrod by Obama, Netanyahu is as pro-Trump as he sounded, maybe our president is doing a good job.
So among the leftists crying about the speech, you had, of all people, Hillary Clinton, who should be (but is still not) in jail, telling us what kind of speech she would have given in regard to North Korea. Of course, she showed up for it on the friendly-to-the-left Stephen Colbert show, where she protested pompously that she would have stressed diplomacy instead of the "dark" speech President Trump gave, and how we should be asking all nations to come together to oppose the regime of the FPIC.
So Hillary, we have to ask.
Your husband, once and still the Philanderer-in-Chief, is the one who cut the deal allowing North Korea to set out on the path of producing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, of which they now have both. Thanks, Bill.
You were in charge of our nation's diplomacy for four sad years or so, and your hero Obama had eight years in total to fix it. Our relationship with North Korea was all yours, Hillary. How did that "diplomacy" work for you and the USA, given what the FPIC is doing now and throughout your hero's administration? How many times did you successfully pressure China to get anything done as far as North Korea?
It is pretty bloody easy to sit on a stuffed couch on a TV show and criticize the president, but when you were in the lead position on diplomacy and you utterly failed -- let's face it, not a single country had a better relationship with the USA when you mercifully left office -- why ever should we think that your commentary is worth the powder to blow it to Hades?
You need to go away quickly, ma'am, whether to the jail cell you still deserve or just out of the spotlight. But either way, either place, you are simply doing yourself and your "Well duh, wha' happened" legacy a grave disservice by allowing yourself to be in the public eye.
Of course, you will stay around, because you can't shut up, and because you can't get it through your coiffed head that you lost because of you, you and you. But what you also can't understand is that the more you talk now, the more the current president -- who appears smarter than you now -- has the opportunity to remind people that you failed when you did have the chance to serve.
It's not doing you a bit of good, but as long as it keeps Democrats embarrassed and out of office, I guess it's not a bad 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.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Please Don't Widen Home Plate
Chris Sperry is associated with Baseball/Life and a former baseball coach. I can't quite guarantee that he is the actual author of this piece, which has his name attached as if he had authored it, and I've reasonable confidence that it was he, although it is quoted without attribution a fair amount. If it was not he, and he only was quoting it, as seems more likely, well, at least I made a modest attempt to provide proper attribution.
It just seemed like a really good citation for the midweek, and so I am passing it along to you for your edification. It matters not whose words they are, or if the story is real or apocryphal, as you will decide for yourself after reading. Please enjoy.
Don't Widen Home Plate
In Nashville, Tennessee, during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA convention.
While I waited in line to register with the hotel staff, I heard other more veteran coaches rumbling about the lineup of speakers scheduled to present during the weekend. One name, in particular, kept resurfacing, always with the same sentiment — “John Scolinos is here? Oh man, worth every penny of my airfare.”
Who the [heck] is John Scolinos, I wondered. No matter, I was just happy to be there.
In 1996, Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung — a full-sized, stark-white home plate.
Seriously, I wondered, who in the hell is this guy?
After speaking for twenty-five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew him had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage.
Then, finally …
“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck. Or maybe you think I escaped from Camarillo State Hospital,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility. “No,” he continued, “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”
Several hands went up when Scolinos asked how many Little League coaches were in the room. “Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?” After a pause, someone offered, “Seventeen inches,” more question than answer.
“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth? Any Babe Ruth coaches in the house?”
Another long pause.
“Seventeen inches?”came a guess from another reluctant coach.
“That’s right,” said Scolinos. “Now, how many high school coaches do we have in the room?”
Hundreds of hands shot up, as the pattern began to appear. “How wide is home plate in high school baseball?”
“Seventeen inches,” they said, sounding more confident.
“You’re right!” Scolinos barked. “And you college coaches, how wide is home plate in college?”
“Seventeen inches!” we said, in unison.
“Any Minor League coaches here? How wide is home plate in pro ball?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“RIGHT! And in the Major Leagues, how wide home plate is in the Major Leagues?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“SEV-EN-TEEN INCHES!” he confirmed, his voice bellowing off the walls. “And what do they do with a a Big League pitcher who can’t throw the ball over seventeen inches?” Pause. “They send him to Pocatello!” he hollered, drawing raucous laughter.
“What they don’t do is this: they don’t say, ‘Ah, that’s okay, Jimmy. You can’t hit a seventeen-inch target? We’ll make it eighteen inches, or nineteen inches. We’ll make it twenty inches so you have a better chance of hitting it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say twenty-five inches.'”
Pause.
“Coaches …”
Pause.
” … what do we do when our best player shows up late to practice? When our team rules forbid facial hair and a guy shows up unshaven? What if he gets caught drinking? Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him, do we widen home plate?
The chuckles gradually faded as four thousand coaches grew quiet, the fog lifting as the old coach’s message began to unfold. He turned the plate toward himself and, using a Sharpie, began to draw something. When he turned it toward the crowd, point up, a house was revealed, complete with a freshly drawn door and two windows. “This is the problem in our homes today. With our marriages, with the way we parent our kids. With our discipline. We don’t teach accountability to our kids, and there is no consequence for failing to meet standards. We widen the plate!”
Pause. Then, to the point at the top of the house he added a small American flag.
“This is the problem in our schools today. The quality of our education is going downhill fast and teachers have been stripped of the tools they need to be successful, and to educate and discipline our young people. We are allowing others to widen home plate! Where is that getting us?”
Silence. He replaced the flag with a Cross.
“And this is the problem in the Church, where powerful people in positions of authority have taken advantage of young children, only to have such an atrocity swept under the rug for years. Our church leaders are widening home plate!”
I was amazed. At a baseball convention where I expected to learn something about curve balls and bunting and how to run better practices, I had learned something far more valuable. From an old man with home plate strung around his neck, I had learned something about life, about myself, about my own weaknesses and about my responsibilities as a leader. I had to hold myself and others accountable to that which I knew to be right, lest our families, our faith, and our society continue down an undesirable path.
“If I am lucky,” Coach Scolinos concluded, “you will remember one thing from this old coach today. It is this: if we fail to hold ourselves to a higher standard, a standard of what we know to be right; if we fail to hold our spouses and our children to the same standards, if we are unwilling or unable to provide a consequence when they do not meet the standard; and if our schools and churches and our government fail to hold themselves accountable to those they serve, there is but one thing to look forward to …” With that, he held home plate in front of his chest, turned it around, and revealed its dark black backside. “… dark days ahead.”
Coach Scolinos died in 2009 at the age of 91, but not before touching the lives of hundreds of players and coaches, including mine. Meeting him at my first ABCA convention kept me returning year after year, looking for similar wisdom and inspiration from other coaches. He is the best clinic speaker the ABCA has ever known because he was so much more than a baseball coach.
His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players — no matter how good they are — your own children, and most of all, keep yourself at seventeen inches.
Enjoy your day, and keep your metaphoric home plates at 17", if you would, please.
Content other than the cited story is Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
It just seemed like a really good citation for the midweek, and so I am passing it along to you for your edification. It matters not whose words they are, or if the story is real or apocryphal, as you will decide for yourself after reading. Please enjoy.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Don't Widen Home Plate
In Nashville, Tennessee, during the first week of January, 1996, more than 4,000 baseball coaches descended upon the Opryland Hotel for the 52nd annual ABCA convention.
While I waited in line to register with the hotel staff, I heard other more veteran coaches rumbling about the lineup of speakers scheduled to present during the weekend. One name, in particular, kept resurfacing, always with the same sentiment — “John Scolinos is here? Oh man, worth every penny of my airfare.”
Who the [heck] is John Scolinos, I wondered. No matter, I was just happy to be there.
In 1996, Coach Scolinos was 78 years old and five years retired from a college coaching career that began in 1948. He shuffled to the stage to an impressive standing ovation, wearing dark polyester pants, a light blue shirt, and a string around his neck from which home plate hung — a full-sized, stark-white home plate.
Seriously, I wondered, who in the hell is this guy?
After speaking for twenty-five minutes, not once mentioning the prop hanging around his neck, Coach Scolinos appeared to notice the snickering among some of the coaches. Even those who knew him had to wonder exactly where he was going with this, or if he had simply forgotten about home plate since he’d gotten on stage.
Then, finally …
“You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck. Or maybe you think I escaped from Camarillo State Hospital,” he said, his voice growing irascible. I laughed along with the others, acknowledging the possibility. “No,” he continued, “I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you today is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about home plate in my 78 years.”
Several hands went up when Scolinos asked how many Little League coaches were in the room. “Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?” After a pause, someone offered, “Seventeen inches,” more question than answer.
“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth? Any Babe Ruth coaches in the house?”
Another long pause.
“Seventeen inches?”came a guess from another reluctant coach.
“That’s right,” said Scolinos. “Now, how many high school coaches do we have in the room?”
Hundreds of hands shot up, as the pattern began to appear. “How wide is home plate in high school baseball?”
“Seventeen inches,” they said, sounding more confident.
“You’re right!” Scolinos barked. “And you college coaches, how wide is home plate in college?”
“Seventeen inches!” we said, in unison.
“Any Minor League coaches here? How wide is home plate in pro ball?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“RIGHT! And in the Major Leagues, how wide home plate is in the Major Leagues?”
“Seventeen inches!”
“SEV-EN-TEEN INCHES!” he confirmed, his voice bellowing off the walls. “And what do they do with a a Big League pitcher who can’t throw the ball over seventeen inches?” Pause. “They send him to Pocatello!” he hollered, drawing raucous laughter.
“What they don’t do is this: they don’t say, ‘Ah, that’s okay, Jimmy. You can’t hit a seventeen-inch target? We’ll make it eighteen inches, or nineteen inches. We’ll make it twenty inches so you have a better chance of hitting it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say twenty-five inches.'”
Pause.
“Coaches …”
Pause.
” … what do we do when our best player shows up late to practice? When our team rules forbid facial hair and a guy shows up unshaven? What if he gets caught drinking? Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him, do we widen home plate?
The chuckles gradually faded as four thousand coaches grew quiet, the fog lifting as the old coach’s message began to unfold. He turned the plate toward himself and, using a Sharpie, began to draw something. When he turned it toward the crowd, point up, a house was revealed, complete with a freshly drawn door and two windows. “This is the problem in our homes today. With our marriages, with the way we parent our kids. With our discipline. We don’t teach accountability to our kids, and there is no consequence for failing to meet standards. We widen the plate!”
Pause. Then, to the point at the top of the house he added a small American flag.
“This is the problem in our schools today. The quality of our education is going downhill fast and teachers have been stripped of the tools they need to be successful, and to educate and discipline our young people. We are allowing others to widen home plate! Where is that getting us?”
Silence. He replaced the flag with a Cross.
“And this is the problem in the Church, where powerful people in positions of authority have taken advantage of young children, only to have such an atrocity swept under the rug for years. Our church leaders are widening home plate!”
I was amazed. At a baseball convention where I expected to learn something about curve balls and bunting and how to run better practices, I had learned something far more valuable. From an old man with home plate strung around his neck, I had learned something about life, about myself, about my own weaknesses and about my responsibilities as a leader. I had to hold myself and others accountable to that which I knew to be right, lest our families, our faith, and our society continue down an undesirable path.
“If I am lucky,” Coach Scolinos concluded, “you will remember one thing from this old coach today. It is this: if we fail to hold ourselves to a higher standard, a standard of what we know to be right; if we fail to hold our spouses and our children to the same standards, if we are unwilling or unable to provide a consequence when they do not meet the standard; and if our schools and churches and our government fail to hold themselves accountable to those they serve, there is but one thing to look forward to …” With that, he held home plate in front of his chest, turned it around, and revealed its dark black backside. “… dark days ahead.”
Coach Scolinos died in 2009 at the age of 91, but not before touching the lives of hundreds of players and coaches, including mine. Meeting him at my first ABCA convention kept me returning year after year, looking for similar wisdom and inspiration from other coaches. He is the best clinic speaker the ABCA has ever known because he was so much more than a baseball coach.
His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players — no matter how good they are — your own children, and most of all, keep yourself at seventeen inches.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Enjoy your day, and keep your metaphoric home plates at 17", if you would, please.
Content other than the cited story is Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist." Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
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