CDP “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”
By now everyone is familiar with the firing of baseball analyst Curt Schilling by ESPN for his public stance on the North Carolina bathroom law kerfluffle. It wasn’t Schilling’s first run-in with the network over his (to their eyes) unacceptable political views, but it seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the former Arizona and Boston fireballer. ESPN has reportedly gone so far as to scrub Schilling’s iconic “bloody sock game” performance from an upcoming documentary on the Red Sox. This has, of course, led to the predictable side-taking, with the sides being loosely defined as: 1) good, fire the bigot 2) free speech, man!, and 3) keep your politics out of my sports. In the interest of full disclosure, my own view is that ESPN is a private enterprise and can fire people for whatever reasons they want, but they sure seem to only fire people with views not in line with liberal heterodoxy, and this may help explain their plummeting ratings. But it’s actually #3 I’d like to focus on, and in baseball in particular. The idea that politics intruding into baseball is a recent happening and somehow a sign of the decline of the game is an idea which serious baseball fans know to be incorrect. The national pastime has been inexorably linked to the politics of the day, for good or ill, for all of its history. The very myths of baseball’s origins are political. The growing popularity of the game led to the 1905 Mills Commission, which included two U.S. Senators and various baseball dignitaries tasked with definitively discovering how our national game began. The story they found? Our national pastime was invented by a patriot who had graduated West Point and served in the Union Army during the Civil War. That Abner Doubleday never claimed to have invented baseball, that the Mills findings were commissioned by one Albert Spalding (yes, the founder of the sporting goods empire), and that the story was so attacked by baseball writers in their glory years in the 1920s and 1930s, when they were truly ink stained Gods, that Doubleday STILL has not been inducted into the Hall of Fame which resides in the small NY town in which he ‘invented’ the game….well, these things seem to stand at odds with the findings of two United States Senators. The very first Commissioner of Baseball, appointed in 1920, was a man named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He had been appointed a Federal judge in 1905 by Teddy Roosevelt, and was in fact a sitting Federal judge until 1922. He is of course best remembered for his decision, made shortly after becoming Commissioner, of giving lifetime bans to those involved in the Black Sox scandal of 1919. What is less remembered is that in 1907 he fined Standard Oil, which the Roosevelt administration sought to break up, $29 million for violating federal laws relating to freight tariffs. Landis was reversed on appeal. He also imposed harsh sentences on draft resisters during WW1. He was appointed Commissioner by baseball owners as a blatant attempt to regain public trust in the game, an attempt that must be judged as successful, and as political. During the Second World War, baseball stars not only politically supported their country but actively fought. Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Ted Williams (who would also serve in Korea), an unknown catcher named Yogi Berra and many others served, some with great distinction (if you know nothing about his service, Bob Feller was a bona fide war hero). To attempt to satisfy the demand for baseball while the boys were fighting, women’s leagues were formed. You’ve seen the movie. It’s no accident that Branch Rickey choose a black ballplayer who had been in the Army tank corps as the first black Major Leaguer (though Jackie Robinson never saw combat). Pee Wee Reese’s actions in belated support of his teammate were nothing if not a political statement in the wider culture, regardless of the fact Reese saw it as merely supporting a teammate. Ballplayers don’t get to choose what statements are political. The press and the public make that call. The late 1960s into the 1970s brought a wholly different politics to baseball. In 1963 Juan Marichal was involved in the Greatest Game ever Pitched against Warren Spahn, but what is Marichal remembered for now? A game in 1965 in which only the second Dominican born pitcher ever in the majors hit John Roseboro in the head with a bat during a scuffle after a couple beanballs. Uncommented on at the time was the fact that Roseboro lived quite close to the then-occurring Watts riots in L.A. and Marichal’s home country was engaged in a violent civil war. Oh, and the teams were only separated by a game and a half at the time. Politics doesn’t necessarily always preclude trying to win. In 1969 Curt Flood took MLB to the Supreme Court, eventually leading to free-agency as we know it. In 1970, Doc Ellis threw a no-hitter tripping on LSD. The culture was reflected by the game, not the other way round. Although sometimes the culture intruded on the game, and the game fought back. The 1980s gave us cocaine (Strawberry, Howe), the 1990s gave us steroids (Canseco, Bonds, McGuire), but the common thread is that the Federal government thought it fit to insinuate itself each time. Or they saw an opportunity and used baseball as an inroad, as another way to assert control over the culture through the sport. The government continues to see the national pastime as a vehicle for their message, like they have since those two Senators decided Abner Doubleday invented a beautiful game on some sunny summer day in Cooperstown, NY, sometime before the Civil War. The point, I suppose, isn’t that politics in sports (and baseball in particular) is bad and something to be avoided. The point is that the desire to de-politicize sports is a Sisyphean task, and a thankless one to boot. America is political. And baseball, thank the Gods, is American. Play ball!
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Daryl In the Army, there is no such thing as zero risk. Soldiers use Composite Risk Management to mitigate risk.
An example of Composite Risk Management would be driving to Pennsylvania from Fort Hood. A series of questions is asked: 1. “Will most of the driving be done during the day or the night?” 2. “Will you take breaks after every three hours of driving?” 3. “How long have you been driving?” 4. “Are you taking any medications that will affect your driving?” 5. “Have you gotten any speeding tickets within the last three years?” 6. “Are you driving with a battle buddy?” 7. “What is your rank?” 8. “What is your age?” 9. “Are you going to use a seatbelt?” 10. “Are you going to obey posted speed limits?” If we were to use CRM to decide whether to vote for Hillary, the answer would be a resounding, “No!” Hillary has already shown the propensity to lie. She chooses the easy wrong over the difficult right, and has demonstrated a lack of empathy for the families of the Benghazi victims. Hillary feels entitled to be the next Commander in Chief. I hope that every mother who has a child in the military asks herself, “Do I want Hillary in a position where she can affect the life of my child?” Hillary’s ruthless response of, “What difference does it make?” demonstrates that she views people as objects. She acts as if the use of a personal server was not a big deal. Her use of a personal server was a big deal. One can look at the warning on the State Department website and figure out why Hillary wanted to use a personal server. The warning states that use of the State Department website implies consent to lawful monitoring. It had nothing to do with convenience, It had everything to do with not consenting to lawful monitoring. The same IT laws that apply to the military apply to the State Department. Hillary deserves to be prosecuted. At the very least, she does not deserve to be the next CINC. Using Composite Risk Management, we can see from experience that it would be risky to vote for Hillary. I am, in some senses, completely nuts.
It’s not obvious, but if you hung around me long enough you’d realize that, beneath the seemingly normal surface, I have some really weird interests and habits. I have demonstrably outstanding social skills, I can find something to talk about with just about anyone, people generally like me, I’m a pretty good dresser, highly-educated, well-paid and find myself to be utterly adorable. Other than my diminutive stature, you wouldn’t notice a whole lot about me that is terribly unusual. But make no mistake, I have my quirks. Evidence of my insanity? I read every word of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century". According to Amazon, it is possibly the least read book in history, but yours truly got through the entire thing (incidentally, I only got about 2/3 of the way through “A Brief History of Time,” finished “Flash Boys,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Catching Fire” and “The Goldfinch.” I never bothered with any of the Fifty Shades or the other books on that list.) Generally speaking, the book is packed full of incredibly interesting data and much less interesting analysis of that data. Leaving aside the questions over the quality of that data, his major findings are based on a couple of obviously flawed assumptions (that all wealth from capital is reinvested and not consumed, that capital is never destroyed outside of war, and that future returns will match historical returns despite basic laws of supply and demand). There is, however, one section of the book that I found to be a remarkably cogent and simple explanation to a substantial problem. And, for a book that was wholeheartedly embraced by the left, largely ignored by the people who should have been shouting its message loudest. The section dealt with national debt, specifically debt accrued as a result of structural deficits, not capital improvements. Every nation has a public balance sheet. The nation has public assets, which include government land and buildings, sovereign wealth funds, military bases and equipment, national parks and any holdings of financial assets. Most nations also have public liabilities in the form of debts issued by the treasury and promises made by the government. After subtracting the latter from the former, we are left with Net Public Wealth. When a government issues debt, it increases its liabilities. It also increases its assets in the form of the cash received for that debt. When it then spends that cash on things that do not go onto the public balance sheet – like salaries to government employees, interest on previously issued debt or transfer payments – then public assets have fallen, and along with it, Net Public Wealth. Meanwhile, who has been the purchaser of that debt? That varies by country, but the short version is pretty simple: rich people. In the US, for example, the largest chunk is bought by other departments of government (social security and the Federal Reserve are the biggest buyers), and the rest is sold to foreign governments and institutions (about 1/3) and to Domestic individuals and institutions. I’ll ignore, for the moment, the impact of other agencies and departments holding debt (because it mostly doesn’t matter) and focus on the public debt. Some pretty basic common sense tells us the underlying beneficiaries of most of those institutions are disproportionately wealthy citizens. The wealthy own the biggest pension benefits, they’re the shareholders in banks and insurance companies that own large amounts of debt, and they are the ones directly buying bonds from the Treasury as well. Even indirectly, they disproportionately attend the schools with massive endowments that own large chunks, and they collect the largest portion of social security benefits for the longest time. As the largest owners of the debt, they are collecting the most interest on that debt. {Kind of a logical leap here, but I would add to what Piketty says that a government borrows because it does not ask its citizens to pay the full cost of the government that it provides. If we assume that, in the US, those taxes would have been levied in the same proportion as our current income tax, the wealthy (who pay almost all of that tax) are predominantly the ones being absolved of their tax burden. This certainly fits in with the progressive narrative that the wealthy are “not paying their fair share.” They are, in essence, lending money to the government rather than simply giving it to the government.} To summarize, then, when the Federal government issues debt on an ongoing operating basis, it is indebting all taxpayers and decreasing the Net Public Wealth. The beneficiaries of that are the new owners of public debt, who have added an interest-bearing asset to their own balance sheet. Those new owners are disproportionately wealthy, meaning that we have shifted wealth from the public as a whole into the hands of a select group of wealthy citizens. All of which makes the current progressive love of government debt quite mysterious. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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