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Risk as a Bad Word, a Non-Existent Word, or Simply Incoherent in Use

Rioters stomping on a police cruiser in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.
A patient is wheeled out of Cobble Hill Health Center by emergency medical workers, Friday, April 17, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Can anyone make sense of the common use of the word “risk”? In one sense, it’s eliminated altogether in sentences that begin with “If it saves one life . . ..” Any expense and other dangers are ignored in the pursuit of some influential person’s, or group’s, particular action. It makes a mockery of the reality of tradeoffs in life. In another sense, it’s a non-factor in bee-lining straight to a revolutionary gang’s favorite end state, or utopia, as in the “critical race theory” crowd’s headlong rush to make equal by fiat all skin shades in all socio-economic measures. They call it “equity”, thereby soiling another word with the mud of extremist politics.

The pandemic accorded the perfect opportunity to do the former: public administrators and executives, mostly blue-state and blue-Biden and company, forcefully neglected any serious consideration other than stopping the virus. Admirable, yes, but adolescent thinking at its worst. There were options other than the destruction of other aspects of life – schooling the young, careers, worship, social gatherings from the movies to Thanksgiving, etc. – but it all depends on a mature assessment of risk and the accompanying tradeoffs. Other choices were available without the never-ending masks (double and triple) – quickly becoming our new burqa – and the formation of a writ-large leper colony in six-foot social distancing and the solitary confinement of the lockdowns.

The wet blanket on life may have been justified in the first few months till we got a handle on therapeutics and some understanding of vulnerable populations. As we knew more, the controls should have been gradually lifted with concentrated efforts on protecting groups especially susceptible to lethal repercussions. Instead, we got the shuttering of life – which Fauci and Biden and company show no signs of lessening – and the subsequent rash of suicides, failed students, substance and domestic abuses, undetected diseases, destroyed careers, and the unending loneliness in our solitary confinement. Are these tradeoffs worth it? Was it acceptable to incur these risks?

No serious assessment was ever laid out to the public. The tactic was to strangle society, and keep strangling it. We were sold on the gambit to “stop the spread”. In essence, all of us were labeled walking super-spreaders. All-of-a-sudden, we lost our humanity, optimism, and future. No wonder people turned to drink, reefer, crack, and, for some, a bullet to the head. Kids languished in a cognitive miasma; Zooming their educations turned into a disaster. These risks were dismissed or blatantly ignored in the tunnel vision of “If it saves one life”.

Risk is maligned in another context: resist arrest and crap happens. Nick Saban once said,

“One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things: Nothing good happens after midnight, nothing good happens when you’re around guns unless you’re going hunting, and you don’t want to mess around with women that you don’t know because a lot of times, bad things happen.”

Good advice, and one which requires the addition of resisting arrest to his list.

George Zimmerman after his confrontation with Trayvon Martin, 2014.

Black Lives Matter as a neo-Marxist movement par excellence came to the fore on resisting arrest. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio was a small spark, but the thuggish Michael Brown/Officer Darren Wilson confrontation in Ferguson, Mo., of 2014 jump-started it to a national cause. As it turned out, Brown was spoiling for a fight with a cop and got one, and got killed, and hence giving us the “Ferguson effect”: cops pull back and crime jumps, a replay of LA’s Rodney King riots of 1992 (funny thing: another act of resisting arrest). And the whole thing is due to resisting arrest.

Remember, a nasty risk is attached to resisting arrest.

There’s more to Black Lives Matter ascending the respectability ladder to the chic status of a favorite Fortune-500 charity. More incidences followed, in this age of the ubiquitous cell-phone and universal connectivity, to give a false aura of righteousness to this Marxist band, more instances of ignoring the risks of resisting arrest. With the exception of Eric Garner (NYC, 2014), high profile instances of resisting arrest were caught on tape to be viewed by any youngster with access to a cell phone. The elevation of George Floyd to sainthood is one shining example of the tendency of resisting arrest heightening the chances of someone’s death. To deny Floyd’s uncooperative actions is to indulge in a fantasy. Floyd, a big man with an extensive criminal background, was subdued by a cop’s possible overreaction in a stressful situation of resisting arrest. Once again, crap happened.

Or take this celebrated incident in Atlanta at a time of rioting to “honor” George Floyd: Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest, scuffled with cops, grabbed a cop’s taser, fled after tasering the cop, and was shot and killed. The poor Wendy’s was torched, more rioting, and another reason is given to leave America’s urban centers.

Rioting in Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.

Jump forward to August 2020, Kenosha, Wisc., and Jacob Blake. Police answering a domestic disturbance call confronted Jacob Blake, a man with a warrant for his arrest who resisted officer requests, strove to his car (whose car is open to question), and a melee erupted with Blake being shot. Like after midnight, nothing good happens from defying officer requests. It ends in the worst sort of place for all concerned. It’s a lesson that should have sunken in, instead of being used as another excuse for widespread mayhem.

Or take this most recent episode in greater Minneapolis. Cops pull over Daunte Wright, he attempts to flee, and in the heat of the moment an officer grabs the wrong weapon and inadvertently shoots Wright. You’d think that it was common knowledge that police have a tendency of not dealing with church choir members. The self-preservation instinct is very much alive in an occupation known for its interaction with some of our nastiest people. They wear body armor as part of the uniform, after all. You’d think that people would know and act accordingly, but, alas, some don’t, run the risk, and we get exposed to more Black Lives Matter jive.

Rioting and looting in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.

As a side note, don’t choose a career in law enforcement in this day and age. It’s a risky business for your health and freedom as you stay out of the clutches of vengeful DA’s, the media and politician mobs, defunding campaigns, and judges and juries who could be poisoned by the same thoughts in the heads of the street mobs. Why take the risk?

Risk is not well understood, and in some cases not even considered. The foolishness has resulted in a shattered society, the destructive looniness of the “systemic racism” crusade, and a risky but necessary public service becoming a threat to life, limb, and future for all who aspire to join its ranks. Just think, these same BLM boosters want to strip the people of their guns at a time when they have made the streets an unruly mess. Soon, the only thing left for us to do in the face violent miscreants is to huddle in prayer. But the moment we seek refuge in a sanctuary to do likewise, these very same beleaguered officers will be called upon to arrest us for violating the ban on indoor social gatherings.

What a strange world that we have created for ourselves.

RogerG

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Oblivious Voters?

How smart are the American people, myself included, or any electorate for that matter? By smart, I mean the tendency to know at least a few critical things. Here’s a head-scratcher to be leveled at a common homebody: Do you believe that the value (price) of a product is based on the labor that went into it? I cringe at the likely answer of “yes” by far too many. That little postulate is the pebble that starts an avalanche. From “yes” we get to “Workers of the world unite!”; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the interminable whining about systemic oppression with the “oppressed” filled by any identity outside of white male; a gulag to be populated with anyone who can’t play along; a secret police to prop up the heinous political deformity; and influential goofs talking economics and not knowing it.

Imagine the devastation to the republic if Democratic Party politicians discovered the popularity of “yes”. “Shhhhhhhh!” before they find out.

For the record, the answer in the affirmative is an absurdity. As proof, look at all the unsold crafts at a flea market. A lot of effort – labor – went into the stuff but a good chunk of it nobody wanted. It’s inventory-reduction time for our weekend merchant. Clearance sales mean price reductions. See, prices are determined by the valuations of buyers and not the producer’s sweat equity.

I have the same concern about the public’s smartness when Rasmussen came out with its recent survey on MLB’s abandonment of Atlanta due to Georgia’s election law. 40% called it a “good idea” and 46% labeled it a “bad idea”. 60% of Democrats liked MLB’s political navel-gazing. No push questions were part of the survey to plumb the depths of respondents’ knowledge on the issue, like the contents of the Georgia law. (see the poll here)

Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner

Is the public any better informed on the election law in question than Commissioner Robert Manfred and the rest of MLB, Inc.? Other than knowing that MLB’s action took place, is there anything more rattling around in the heads of the 40%, or 60% of Democrats? I’m of a mind to doubt it. We need no more confirmation of Churchill’s insight when he said in the House of Commons in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.”

Yet, as per Churchill in his qualifier, an acceptance of popular ignorance is better than turning over decision-making to a clique of self-anointed demi-gods operating as bureaucratic “experts”. Give me the halfwit voter over the rule of a powerful commissariat with dreams of grandeur. At least with the halfwit, I’ve got a 50% chance of them getting it right. If not, there’s always the next time. For the demi-gods, it’s likely to be one person/one vote/one time in a Constitution that is interpreted out of existence.

What would be waiting for us in rule by a clique? The old USSR lights the way. The class of “experts” to manage the Soviet economy were ensconced in Gosplan, the government planning agency. The Soviets were great at producing city-busting nuclear ICBM’s but couldn’t manage sufficient quantities of tooth paste, toilet paper, et al. It’s great for brinksmanship but rather disappointing if forced to use old copies of Izvestiya after performing one of life’s necessities.

Soviet-era public housing, contemporary Moscow

I hope that our citizens are never polled on this question: Should we be ruled by experts? Personally, uncontrollable shutters would return if the expected large numbers of yesses are turned into successful Democrat campaign slogans. Somehow, their popular “save our democracy” chant would quickly acquire a hollow ring, and the Democrats’ “managed decline”, once reserved for fossil fuels, would have a much broader application, with the exception of a few huge public monoliths like bullet trains to nowhere.

A viaduct built in Madera for California’s high-speed rail project in the sparsely-populated Central Valley.(High-Speed Rail Authority)

RogerG

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Hemingway and the Cultural Incubators

“Curator” is commonly used today to refer to the arbiters of contemporary culture. They emanate out of our metropolises and are increasingly homogenous in outlook and taste. It’s an accurate word, but doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address pedigree. Where and how did this outlook originate and grow to dominate the culture? It was slow in coming, gradually birthed in the late 19th century and spread throughout the high priesthood of the high church of art and academia. A verb, “incubate”, serves this purpose better.

Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” unknowingly highlights the process of a person’s conversion (Hemingway) to the pervasive ethos of the chattering classes, the self-appointed curators who incubated “higher” culture. In Burns’ reckoning, Hemingway was a fiercely independent, small government guy in the twenties, but he obviously changed. By the time of the Great Depression, he’s covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist puffing up the socialist-loyalist faction, the same side that became a puppet of Stalin’s Comintern (international communist organization headquartered in Moscow) and therefore an adjunct of the Soviet state, going so far as to pressure his colleagues not to include left-loyalist atrocities in their dispatches. He would repeat the error in quietly favoring Castro’s takeover of Cuba. Everywhere he looked in his artistic, literary universe were leftists.

New York University students in the Lincoln battalion (American volunteers fighting in support of socialist-loyalist side), in April, 1938. (Photograph from AP)
Ernest Hemingway (second from left) and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (left.) visit socialist-loyalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Notice the loyalist officer leading the way in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform.

It’s easy to be of two minds in that situation since, on the one hand, he harbored deep-seated beliefs in masculine self-reliance while being pulled to the left by everyone in his social sphere, resulting in an incoherent amalgam of the head. If his mind was a car facing a fork in the road, it would rematerialize into two and take both roads at once.

Probably adding to his leftward lurch was the left-wing heft generated by the Great Depression. The Depression was more than an economic watershed; it was an intellectual one as well. An already left-leaning faculty lounge and literary world became tilted so far left that it would fall over. Sound familiar? The trend was echoed in Hemingway’s social circles. Not surprisingly, he probably was pulled along by the current.

Burns, himself, reflects the ruling zeitgeist that can be traced back to those bad times. His abbreviated rendition of the Depression in “Hemingway” repeats the unchallenged interpretative cliché: capitalism failed; big government is necessary. Burns caught the preexisting thought-virus, like so many today who accept it as a given, and so did Hemingway long before Burns.

The explanation never made any sense at the time, and still doesn’t today. Just think about it. A market correction turned into decade-long affair with seven-tenths of the time under FDR’s tutelage. For all of the New Deal’s feverish activity with its taxes, regulations, humongous bureaucracies, slaughters of “overproduction”, and a new centralized dole, the thing lingered right up to Pearl Harbor . . . and beyond.

Yes, beyond. World War II didn’t end the nightmare. It was only a timeout – unemployment was sent to boot camp and slack factories made bombers not refrigerators – and was set to resume its familiar hold after the War. Thank goodness that God called FDR home, and the appearance of the immediate post-War Republican Congresses with their loosening of the straitjacket that ultimately led to the economic monster following the forever-president to the grave, and the 50’s boom erupted.

Burns didn’t get the message, repeats the slander, and, looking back on it, the real Hemingway seems to have floated along in the same stream later occupied by our cultural arbiters.

Moving forward to the present, the bias incubated in the thirties would eventually spread to all social groups who absorbed the same cultural groupthink. Think of the occupants of today’s corporate boardrooms tripping all over themselves to condemn Georgia’s new election law. The Walmart of Sam Walton and ol’ Roy is no more. The corporate world is woke, functioning as subcommittees of the Democratic Party. They act as if they see themselves as world citizens, their companies as institutions-without-borders, and increasingly seek the affirmation of a “higher” seriousness in the manner of a Hollywood mega-star desiring accolades in lefty activism.

Patriotism? National loyalty? That’s for the ignorant rubes and not something for our sophisticates in corporate suites aspiring to a higher consciousness.

There you have it: our self-appointed cultural curators of what we ought to believe were incubated in a fiction that is evident in Burns, his “Hemingway”, and in the flesh-and-blood Hemingway. Something about repeated lies, they take on a life of their own in a public made unaware of an unreality that is sold as gospel.

(Michael Ramirez production)

RogerG

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Bye, Bye MLB

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred

They did it. MLB moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta. I’m done with them! And I’m done with their corporate colluders: Delta and Coca-Cola. They get political, and I get political.

Sports, air travel, and a soft drink have nothing pertinent to say about a Georgia state law that requires voter ID, thereby equalizing the treatment of in-person and absentee balloting. I suppose that Delta and Coca-Cola CEO’s, and their lackeys in MLB, think that liberal Justice John Paul Stevens was the personification of Jim Crow when he wrote the majority opinion in 2008’s Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in support of Indiana’s voter ID law. He said that the law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process'”.

Something that was “amply justified” in 2008 is now Jim Crow to the ignorant oafs in corporate suites. It’s time for the American public to withhold their hard-earned money in like manner as a parent scolds a misbehaving child. If they don’t want to be treated like a child, then they ought not be acting like one. In this case, they are. There is no sound reason to justify corporate meddling in a law that was judged reasonable in 2008. Being the corporate muscle for Marxist BLM sloganeering is not becoming of adults.

Good bye MLB. As for Delta and Coca-Cola, your competitors will get my hard-earned dollars. If the rest of the suits join in, I’m happy with car tours and SodaStream. If you choose political sides, your products will be forever identified with that side. I’m not on your partisan side, and can’t in good conscience use my dollars to bankroll perniciousness.

RogerG

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My Curbed Enthusiasm

LeBron James kneels during the national anthem prior to the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, August 2020. (photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once famously said, “A date is an experience you have with another person that makes you appreciate being alone.” The disillusionment may have had something to do with his on-air divorce (and real off-air one) as his art imitates his life.

Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

For me, my great love affair with athletics is going through a serious estrangement, and no imitation of life. The drama of athletic competition is increasingly sullied by political sermonizing. That’s just what I want to see: ill-informed millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires (billionaires?), and their managing corporate suits, who know little beyond the playing courts and fields, giving us their chic ruminations on today’s issues-of-the-moment. It’s disgusting when each big event is turned into an opportunity for agitprop. I’ve joined the legions who’ve abandoned Big Sports, Inc., for the pleasures of other diversions – – with the occasional sneak peek, to be honest.

Big Sports, Inc., is in trouble. The problem for them is more long-term than short-term. In the near term, though, their losing older viewers like myself (a baby boomer), whose habits and loyalties are hard-wired. Sports-viewing and sports-playing are in our blood; yet, radical left political demonstrations that were thought to be relegated to college-campus romper rooms were brought into our homes just as we settled into watching the championship run of the Golden State Warriors or SF 49ers or SF Giants. Our sports stars began spouting slogans of the Marxist BLM and besmirching our flag and anthem with open displays of their radicalism. Provocative effrontery will illicit provocative reactions. It’s like they are courting resentment toward their product when they ought to be selling it. Shameful acts started piling up each year after 2016.

San Francisco Giants players and coaches kneel during the national anthem in an exhibition game with the Oakland Athletics, July 20230.

Older fans were taking many punches to the gut of their enthusiasm. The 2016-2017 kneeling protests ignited a fan protest of the player protest. Rasmussen at the time found 32% of adult respondents “are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field.” Some undoubtedly returned, but many didn’t. Another slice of the fan base gone.

Then George Floyd hit the air waves. The tendentious sermonizing became less ad hoc and more systematized with the full participation of corporate headquarters. It swept across the world of Big Sports, Inc. My beloved SF Giants behaved like college snowflakes down to the coaches at the start of last season. I cancelled my MLB streaming contract. The rest of the oligopoly were equally as giddy about sliming us and our views, taking their cues from the worst of the demagogues in our academic and political worlds. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary’s “deplorables” and Biden and company’s “white racism, white racism, white racism everywhere”?

According to Forbes in December 2020, in the 2020 sports year, the NBA Finals saw viewership collapse by 49%; the Stanley Cup saw an astounding 71% fee fall; and the NFL’s week 14 ratings dipped another 7%. Surveys at the time pointed much of the finger of blame at player politicization of the athletic field. A Harris poll in the fall of 2020 found 32% of sports fans chose “The league has become too political” among the ten options for their disenchantment. Does LeBron James sense something damaging is afoot when he took to microphones and cameras to condemn the Houston Rockets’ owner for daring to come to defense of the beleaguered citizens of Hong Kong? James, one of the most outspoken of the NBA’s player mandarins, saw evaporating dollars in Red China’s expanding market as he and others of the politicized left in the league ironically worked assiduously to shrink the domestic one. What other plausible explanation can there be for running interference for one of history’s most brutal totalitarian regimes?

Players of the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Clippers took a knee during the national anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, July 2020.

Certainly, another political act – the authoritarian shutdowns in panic response to the virus – has taken its toll. People commanded to conduct life without much of a schedule, zooming at leisure, are more willing to be more impulsive in their viewing habits. Cutting the chord is rampant; Netflix memberships lift off. Combined with the younger generations unaccustomed to games without a hand-controller, Big Sports’ long-term prospects look grim. The leagues are challenged by broad and threatening currents, and their stars go on a jihad to smear a chunk of the fan base. Go figure.

The behavior has tarred March Madness, and this just at the time when the PAC-12 had its best showing in years. Four of the five entrants made it to the Sweet Sixteen. But the coaches’ incessant fiddling with their masks, the gym not much more populated with live human beings than an ancient Roman catacomb, and endless ads based on the juvenile theme of “diversity is our strength” would drive away anyone but the die-hards. Just anticipating that this stuff is coming is enough to dampen the desire to see more. So, I no longer whip myself for missing a game. Que sara sara.

Coming this weekend is the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. I am planning to watch it, but, then again, I won’t seek counseling if I miss it. Que sara sara.

Ole Miss basketball players kneel during national anthem, Feb. 2019.
Members of the Georgetown basketball team stand for the National Anthem wearing “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts before an NCAA college basketball game against Kansas, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

A postscript: As I write, MLB is facing tremendous pressure from lefty CEO’s and our doddering lefty president to join them in punishing Georgia for voter ID, more secure absentee ballot drop-boxes, early voting even on weekends (something absent in Biden’s Delaware), broadening access to voting in a myriad of other ways, and a ban on shot-gunning ballots to all. And they have the moxie to call this Jim Crow? I didn’t know that a Bull Connor lurked in the heart of every legal voter who worries about their elections becoming a Woodstock bacchanalia. If MLB caves, I’ll put myself in the same place in regards to MLB, and its well-heeled collaborators, when dealing with a nasty relative: in a location far away from them.

RogerG

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When Did It Start?

Dr. Robert Redfield on CNN
Wuhan virology lab, China.

The origins COVID-19 are still a mystery. Many questions about the virus have been distorted into political ones. One source of the politicization is the desire to gain power and use it to fulfill a certain vision of society. When a person’s opinions and conclusions run counter to the contrived story, they are silenced, mocked, and ruined. This is politics at its most heinous. This is happening to anyone associated with Trump, defending tradition, and protective of what’s good about the country’s history and values. The truth is the first casualty.

As a result, many questions go unanswered, particularly if the answers don’t fit the erroneous but useful narrative. No better example can be found than the persistent unknowns about the coronavirus and the related pandemic. If “xenophobia” is the cry-of-the-moment, anything is grabbed to deflect attention away from China, especially if the barkers are working hard to make Asians believe that they are an oppressed minority, oppressed by the cultural elites’ favorite bogeyman: white supremacy. Thus the overheated attempt to blame nature or anyone and anything but China – a bat for instance.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – AUGUST 14: A woman raises her fist at the front of a march down Washington Avenue to protest racism. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Stats are squashed that might threaten the hand-picked story line of the virus’s magnified lethality, a threat that proved advantageous in allowing them to flex the muscles of their all-powerful administrative state. One such number is the date of origin. If it leaked out of a Wuhan lab earlier than previously thought, let’s say, the number of infected grows and that number may work to reduce the morbidity rate of the virus. A key part of the plot will have been undermined, something to be resisted at all costs.

Therefore, serious and honest research into origins can present a dual hazard for them: truth wrecks the xenophobia plot thread and might show the administrative state’s suffocation of life to be a colossal waste. Thus, the Left has two good reasons to rally their troops in the media and academic circles to sully any semblance of free thought and real science.

Colin Kaepernick’s “systemic racism” career is monetized by corporate America in this case by Nike.

Dr. Robert Redfield, below, has a few strikes against him in the eyes of the reigning Left: he’s an accomplished virologist, worked under Trump as head of the CDC, and dares to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan lab as early as September. So, In the fall of 2019, it’s possible that the virus was seeded in China and, from there, to the rest of the world. Many people got it, survived it, mistook it for the flu, some succumbed, and the rest of the world waited till February and March 2020 to hit the panic button.

Once panic was lit, parents became paranoid to send their kids to school; businesses and livelihoods were decimated; romantic life was suppressed as we hid ourselves behind our modified burqa; scenes of public rage at dissenters became commonplace; the surreal scene of watching drivers alone in a car and masked was not unusual; and good and bad came to be defined by how comprehensively a public official clamped down on their society. Timothy Leary in one of his LSD-induced fits couldn’t have produced a weirder script.

Watch the courage of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, who bravely refuses to be cowed in a CNN interview. And you know what? CNN, the most Democrat-friendly operation this side of MSNBC and the Democratic Socialists of America, didn’t go into full mob-rage, as is their practice. His contention that the virus emanated out of the Wuhan lab around September or October couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Watch the clip.

RogerG

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A Trumpian Anthem

Yesterday, my family and I went to Kalispell, Mt., (gateway city to Glacier National Park) to do our monthly shopping. While on the way, Jared (my son) was driving and all of us were listening to XM Radio’s “80’s-on-8” and, lo-and-behold, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blasted through the speakers (see link below). The song is a good rocker, but who listens to the lyrics? Right? I paid closer attention to the words and gleaned their meaning. It struck me as a Trumpian anthem: the struggles of a young couple in tough times regardless of identity.

Life sometimes is a “fight”, or perseverance in the face of challenges. America has been beset by decades of neglect, permissiveness, maladministration, and the reemergence of evil ideas that should have stayed dead. Today, the worst of all of it was exposed by the pandemic, and, I suspect, more is to come. Still, we fight on, as we should.

Who can’t identify with that? What young couple, starting fresh in life together, hasn’t struggled to get a foothold into a better life? Some times are more demanding than others, but as the song title says, all of us were “Livin’ on a Prayer”.

Take a listen by clicking the link below.

RogerG

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Time to Take Stock

We’ve had a year of a smothered human existence in reaction to COVID, with some advocating its extension with no end in sight. I’m starting to worry about what we have done to ourselves. Our understandable desire for an immediate, near-term gain – stop the pandemic cold – probably has come at the expense of a long-term slide into a more desperate reality. What we did was novel, and worryingly portentous. In the end, we neither stopped the pandemic with the shutdowns, or the costs. Dark clouds loom.

Storm clouds over Austin, Tx. (Photo: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)

To this day, it’s surprising to me how blithely the population accepted the decrees from political figures who are inherently enthralled by a new class of janissary, the bureaucratic “expert”. It’s the bane of Progressives: they can’t help themselves. They long ago surrendered their judgment, and the independent judgment of free citizens in a free republic, to blinkered specialists with great power.

Now look at what it’s gotten us. These lockdown measures – universal mask-wearing, shutdowns of life, school closures, an amputated social existence – may have irreparably damaged our children’s psyche and their long-term prospects. What have we done to our kids after a year, or more, of sentencing them to solitary confinement during an important slice of their developmental years?

The worries don’t stop there. Others have tried to put numbers to the future devastation. Taking into account the avoided medical procedures, sacrificed productivity and earnings, disrupted educations, isolation-induced stress and abuse, the National Bureau of Economic Research calculates a 3% increase in the mortality rate and .5% drop in life expectancy in the next 15 years. Stretched out over 350 million people, that’s a carpet-bombing of a noticeable portion of the commonwealth.

And just think, none of these measures stopped the disease, if you compare jurisdictions across the country who varied quite dramatically in their response. No discernable positive impact can be detected for the worst that the likes of Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer – and now Biden – have inflicted on their people. It came down to herd immunity – something disparaged by those in a panic – which was facilitated by the discovery of a vaccine.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Shutdowns, social distancing, and mandatory mask-wearing look to be, at this juncture, irrelevant . . . and destructive. And remember, that’s not all: the hyperinflation of 1923 Weimar Germany may be waiting in the wings. All the chickens haven’t fully roosted yet.

RogerG

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Time to Rethink Antitrust Exemptions for Big Sports, Inc.

The NFL’s building at 345 Park Avenue, New York.
NCAA’s corporate headquarters, 700 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN.

We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.

Terry Miller of Bloomfield, Conn., wins the 200 meter dash with a time of 24.47 in the CIAC State Championship Track and Field Meet in New Britain, Conn., during the 2019 outdoor track and field season. (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)

MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.

They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.

Gov. Kristi Noem, South Dakota.

Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.

These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.

RogerG

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Left Wing Indoctrination

The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.

In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:

“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.

The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.

Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.

Good luck.

RogerG