(Dreary, gloomy day outside; working on having a brilliant day inside.)
1. Feeling guilty about the Red Sox. I haven’t watched or listened to a game in over two weeks. The reason is that it’s just not fun, it’s too stressful, and I am already stressed to the max with non-baseball matters. I’m fairly sure this is the longest voluntary sabbatical I have ever taken from my team, and it is my team, throughout 80% of my life, a constant presence, inspiration and source of enlightenment. I have never relied on the team winning to justify my interest and loyalty. I just love the game, the suspense, the players and the endless supply of unpredictable stories and surprises.
BUT…this season has been uniquely frustrating. The Red Sox won 108 games last season on the way to the World Championship, and it was, especially by historical Red Sox standards, an insanely enjoyable ride. Virtually everything went perfectly, over the season, in the play-offs, in individual games.Whatever was needed to win, somebody always came through: it was like a movie. Baseball isn’t usually like that (well, except for the Yankees for about 50 years). I even said at the time, as my wife reminds me, “The Sox are going to pay big time for this one.”
Boston was confident coming into 2019 with virtually the exact same sqaud that had been unbeatable in 2018. Regression to the mean, however, is a force of nature, and especially with this team, for some reason. Since 1918, every single time the Sox have won the American League pennant, the next season was a bust, and often a horrible bust. Devastating injuries, unexpected bad years, clubhouse dissension, astoundingly bad luck: I’ve seen it all, and before, I’ve endured it all as a fair price to pay for the joys of the past and to come. This season, for some reason, I can’t take it, and I feel like an ungrateful wretch.
2. Got it: slavery is the cause of everything bad in the United States, and all whites want black people to get sick and die. Does anyone who can think clearly think this latest bit of dishonest guilt-tripping propaganda is going to help Democrats prevail, rather than just harden racial and partisan divisions?
CBS This Morning yesterday was promoting the New York Times outed attempt to make slavery and racism the centerpiece of its effort to defeat President Trump, the Russian collusion narrative having crashed and burned. slavery. Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was feted by co-host Gayle King, who gushed,“The thing that’s so amazing about this that makes me so proud, you can look at just about anything happening in the world today and tie it to slavery.”
Or sexism. Or imperialism. Or sun spots. Or the pollution of our bodily fluids.
King continued, “You look at the naming of Wall Street. You look at sugar that we eat. But the thing that stuck out to me was health care, you can tie health care to slavery.” Then the Times journalist jumped in…
We’re the only western industrialized country that doesn’t have universal health care. It starts with opposition to universal health care that occurs right after slavery when the Freedsmen’s Bureau was trying to offer free health care to the formerly enslaved and there was opposition to that. And so even today, you see with polling white Americans will reject social programs if they think large numbers of black people will benefit from them. So, the harms from slavery have not been contained because there are millions of white Americans, there are millions of Latinos and Asians and black Americans who don’t have health care, who can’t get insurance because of slavery.
There’s journalism in 2019 for you: “white Americans will reject social programs if they think large numbers of black people will benefit from them.” That actually IS a racist statement, as opposed to virtually every statement or tweet that Times reporters and pundits call racist when the President issues them.
3. How did I miss “Moral Mondays”? (Thanks to Pennagain for the tip.) Here, the use of “moral” is apt, unlike in many cases. Those so grandstanding are appealing to higher authorities rather than reason and logic: if a moral code says something is right or wrong, it just is, that’s all, and no further argument is necessary. This is what makes morality so helpful for dummies; it relieves them of the trouble of having to think. It’s a useful tell: when someone says that a position or opinion is immoral, that means they don’t really have the facts, evidence or ability to argue against it.
4. Remember, as Joe Biden reminded us, it’s the truth that matters, not facts. Let’s take guns, for example. Hayley Peterson of Business Insider set out to buy a gun from Walmart to see how easy it would be. After all, a high school expert said it was easy:
Right. She went to Walmart’s website and found out that over 4,000 Walmart locations sell guns, but the only guns being displayed on Walmart’s website were airsoft guns, which shoot plastic pellets. She then called multiple stores, and still couldn’t find out how to purchase a gun at the chain. Customer service representative told her they weren’t allowed to discuss gun purchases for some undisclosed reason. oThen she found a Walmart Supercenter in Chesterfield, Virginia, where a woman confirmed that she could buy a gun in the sporting goods department.
Peterson traveled to the store, where she found a small firearms inventory displayed in a locked glass case. Peterson saw no advertisements for guns in the store, and was warned by signs that she was on camera. When she asked how to purchase a gun, the manager was called and told Peterson that she would have to come back in a couple of days because no licensed firearm seller was scheduled to work until then. Walmart employees have to be legally qualified to sell firearms, passing their own background checks and receiving special training. Once a gun is purchased, the trained employee has to walk the customer, with the gun to the customer’s vehicle.
When she returned on a day when the trained employee was in the store, the employee asked her for a $2 background check fee, and helped her begin filling out the paperwork. Peterson’s address didn’t match up the one displayed on her driver’s license, so the process was halted: she was told she needed to have a government-issued document with the correct address, such as a bill from a state-owned utility or a car registration. Peterson was again told that she had to come back another time to finish the purchase.
At that point, Peterson decided not to buy a gun from Walmart.
It’s unbelievable how hard it is to buy cold medication in this country…
Ethics Alarms 
1. Baseball’s still the best show on offer. The Diamondbacks are horribly frustrating this year. Every team they play has a former DBack starring for them. They are just the baseball equivalent of a puppy mill generating good players for larger market teams. Paul Goldschmidt, Justin Upton, A.J. Pollack, Adam Eaton, Didi Gregorious, Patrick Corbin, and of course, my favorite bad trade, Max Scherzer. And let’s not talk about Zach Greinke or J.D. Martinez and other mega stars who were under contract for a while. They’re a .500 team that disappoints every other game. That’s what .500 teams do. One step forward, one step back. But it’s still major league baseball. And the announcers are amusing.
2. Will reparations be net of the trillions spent funding the War on Poverty since its declaration?
But you’re not alone. Mrs. OB has given up caring about the Sawks. She won’t even watch them if I find a game on MLB or somewhere else.
Slightly off topic, but this is a must-read for the #MeToo debate:
https://reason.com/2019/08/23/im-radioactive/
Glenn, This story demonstrates the absolute BS of the argument that women are in fact powerless. Quite the contrary, and the men that race to their defense are reinforcing the sterotype that women need protectors.
Well, we men have given them the power. There was a time, for sure, when women lacked political and economic power. They always had “soft” power of influence, but now that they have achieved virtual equality to men socially, economically and politically (although most members of the militant women’s rights movement whine the alternative) they are setting about to accrue to themselves the power to destroy men’s economic power.
I’m sure you remember the “battle of the sexes” in the 1970’s and the “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” of the 1990’s? #MeToo is the logical conclusion of those gender clashes. It won’t last forever, of course, but for the nonce, women have achieved the ultimate in power over individual men — the power to destroy their ability to earn a living.
Of course, this will last only as long as men let it.
Terrifying — but instructive — article.
After the meeting, Kaiman reached out to Sonmez and they got back on the phone. It was, he says, an agonizing conversation that went on for 90 minutes. During it, he says, he felt himself psychologically unraveling: “It was like my brain was on fire.” He knew Sonmez had the power to decide his entire future. He was trying to apologize while also defending himself. He was sincerely sorry she thought he had crossed a line; given what he saw as the mutuality of their interactions, though, he didn’t think he had.
There is a larger — a far larger — implication in this strange, telling story. I mention again the theme of ‘white dispossession’. The open attack on America and on the identity of America and ‘original Americans’. The ‘dispossession’ has led to ‘psychological unravelling’. You face an enemy that brings forward an attack to which no response is possible or allowed. The only thing you can do is to cooperate on some level with the terrifying person bringing their complaint. If you oppose it and them you will be, and you are, branded as recalcitrant and evil. One must turn back to the point where ‘dispossession’ began and one must reclaim power: power of self.
In this bizarre article here you have a man reduced by a woman to incapacitation. The platform of power is undermined. All option and all agency is taken from you. This is what is going on. Similarly, in the larger configuration of national circumstance, in these conditions of on-going dispossession, not only what you have is assaulted and challenged, but your own definition of who you are and what you are is handled by other people, and Good Lord they do not mean you well!
Each smallish event — like these having to do with a ‘woman’s accusation’ and the issue of male ‘sexual misconduct’ — have to be dissected and unraveled: dismantled and interpreted. They are a microcosm that reveals a macrocosm. This is meta-politics. What is really going on is different from what seems to be going on. To get to the bedrock truth you have to start with bedrock facts:
You have become a perverse people, and perversion interweaves not only the fibres of your mind but the living fibres of your people. Sexuality has been, is being, used to undermine essential sovereignty. This starts at the level of the soul. In that, the essence of the Sexual Revolution can be discovered. Libido domanandi: by becoming a slave to passion, by teaching your children this is good and proper, by having to put up with its display in all media, in film and in advertising, you are daily seduced. You see? It began in small ways — incrementally — and now you live in a Porn Nation. And your Nation has become a purveyor of destructive, undermining influences. And you call this ‘American freedom’. You are confused people who live under a powerful régime … and you cannot distinguish just what is going on.
That is a hard way to put it because it is intentionally polemical, as I essentially am, but I assume people reading will get the point. That there are men in Hollywood who ‘prey’ on starlets is absurdly irrelevant! There exists an industry that purveys porn-lite and you — as so-called ‘responsible men in your community — are complicit in all of this. This has invaded and taken over the ‘imagined world’ (the interior world of imagination) of the Nation. Not exactly by choice but because the entire structure of the country — advertising, economics — allows for the ‘marketing of evil’ if there is a dollar to be made. And you can say nothing about it. You are victims of it. And you will defend it like ‘a junkyard dog’. If ‘market forces’ determine it is best for lemmings to migrate, they migrate . . . right off the cliff!
Astounding, bottomless, metaphysical confusion about what ‘freedom’ means.
Now, this leads to some statement about what ‘Me Too’ means. That is, what is being expressed by women when they bring out the devastating complaint that has the capability of ruining you? Almost of erasing you? The reference must be made to the fury of the Eumenides:
This is deep-seated female anger which is by its nature profoundly irrational. Don’t you see? The essential issue at play is — it really is — the betrayal of woman. Now what ‘betrays woman’? Well, you do not make her a sex-object! You do not radically transform her and in a very real sense ‘against her will’. Yet this is what has happened at a very fundamental level. To understand sexual corruption, and to understand libido domanandi, requires research but also to recover and agree on certain elemental facts and truths. Not easy in a confused and radically rebellious milieu!
Your desired Porn Culture comes back to bite you in the most demonic sense possible. Undermine the morals and ethics of your women — corrupt your women — and your destroy culture. It is pretty much as simple as that.
So much to talk about . . . and no one home to have the conversation.
Ooops. Misspelled ‘dominandi’.
2. Once again the Times attempts to remove Donald Trump by creating a modern moral panic over racism. I have no doubt the schools will dutifully change the curriculum, and by 2030, August 20th will be “Founders Day.”
2. Moral Mondays? Should’ve been “Virtue signaling Saturdays.”
I wonder if progressives realize that they are becoming indistinguishable from Islamic cultures, like Saudi Arabia, and that Antifa is their version of the matawas?
3. There is nothing quite as frustrating as people who know things for a fact that aren’t true. David Hogg is a simple opportunist, and because of his ignorance, less reputable than a time-share salesperson.
I’ll bet he never reads the article. He probably consumes information explicitly tailored to feed his confirmation bias.
Re: No 3; Just Another Moral Monday.
So, I checked out that webpage. Why is it their protests mostly involve left-leaning causes celebre? They protest voting rights restrictions, climate change, etc.
jvb
I guess when you have God and morals on your side, you are pretty much bullet proof.
jvb
Everything is clear when you’re on the right side of history and sliding down the bend of the arc, John.
+1 for the Bangles reference, as obvious as it is.
But the slaves all had universal healthcare! They didn’t pay a penny for healthcare! They were give all the healthcare they needed for free. They also had free housing, free education, free food, and a guaranteed job for life.
It was those evil Republicans that took all of that away from them. Hundreds of thousands of brave Democrats gave their lives so that blacks could keep their utopia, but the evil Republicans took all that away from them. To this day, Republicans are fighting tooth and nail against every effort of the Democrats to give blacks their utopia back. The only difference between today in 1860 is that today, Democrats don’t think blacks should have jobs and Republicans are encouraging them to work.
Vote for the Democratic utopia. Free healthcare, free education, free housing, free food, and now, no work! Vote Democrat. We’ll make slaver better this time around!
Awesome.
You will hear no defense of slavery from me, but any comparison of the Democrats and Republicans of 1860 with today’s parties is at best misguided and at worst willfully disingenuous, as is correlating party affiliation with slave ownership. Of my five known Confederate soldier ancestors, none owned slaves, while two of four known Union soldier ancestors did. Many slave owners thought their best chance of keeping their slaves was by remaining in the Union (as encouraged by Lincoln’s overtures). So, once again, over-simplification of the American Civil War plays into the hands of the “all American history is based on slavery” crowd.
3) The Moral Monday protests were cheered on by the Raleigh News & Observer. They had (and likely still do) what was basically a long running series that I always thought of as: Part 97 of “We hate the legislature”.
Naturally this started after the Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in over a century. They would have taken control of the House about 10 years earlier, but the Democratic Speaker of the House bribed one of the Republican legislators to change parties. Amazingly he went to jail for that, but the Democrats still had control of the legislature for another decade.
An interesting historical fact, that the N&O certainly doesn’t dwell on: The previous time the Democrats didn’t control the NC legislature was in the 1890s when there was a ‘Fusion’ party allying Republicans and Progressives. The founder of the N&O was one of the leaders of the Democrats’ White Supremacist that ran roughshod over the state to reclaim their position in the state government. They not only had what I believe were called Red Shirts (an early analog to the Nazi’s Brownshirts) who showed up in various towns to suppress the opposing votes, but instigated an actual coup to seize the government of Wilmington. The N&O was a cheerleader in all of this.
Many of the things the current Democratic party complains about arose during the century plus they controlled all of the state government.