Intellectual combat
This might be a fun way to spend a sweltering summer weekend-- watching
Gore Vidal/William Buckley debates on YouTube. A new documentary film
highlights the network-televised rhubarbs, dust-ups, and altercations during the 1960s and '70s between the alternately-epitheted "Crypto-Nazi" and "Goddamn Queer."
Jesus, fellas. Get a room already.
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Incidentally, despite what television news indoctrinates, political arguments ultimately have winners and losers. Buckley later changed his mind on the issues of Civil Rights and Vietnam.
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If you enjoy watching Buckley get owned on television, spend some time watching
this debate with Noam Chomsky. This debate took place on Buckley's public broadcasting program. Vidal was allowed on network commercial television. Chomsky wasn't... and isn't.
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Chris Hedges, author of a the literary essential
Death of the Liberal Class, talks to leaders of the new black radical movement. One of the founders of St. Louis-sourced Hands Up United explains why young people have lost faith in corporate capitalist black leaders like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Michael Eric Dyson, and why he views the oft-maligned Cornel West as a "big brother" of their movement.
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"Hey @NBCNews... fixed
this one for you."
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If you want there to be fewer abortions, why the hell would you support the defunding of the nation's #1 provider of comprehensive sex education and affordable reproductive health services?
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Fetal tissue research will ultimately be used to cure hideous diseases like ALS, Parkinson's, sickle-cell anemia, and Alzheimer's. We need to think now about how we can logistically withhold the cures, when the time comes, from those who opposed fetal tissue research.
Big game
Walter Palmer, D.D.S., of Bloomington, Minnesota, is the man that killed Cecil the lion in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. This is a review of Palmer's dental practice that appeared on its Yelp page this week...
“Weird visit. Some guy lured me into the dental chair by waving beef jerky at me. Once I sat down, Dr. Palmer viciously attacked my one cavity, but was unable to hit it with the drill. Profusely bleeding from my mouth, I fled the building and wandered the surrounding woods for a day and a half. Thankfully, I didn’t bleed out. My family would’ve been killed and eaten by my neighbors. Two stars.”
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Incidentally, when you tell the rest of us on social media that Palmer was in the right, or that he's getting a raw deal, you're not just telling us that you're a hunter. You're telling us what kind of hunter you are.
Changing cities, the story stays the same
The shooting of a black man by a white police officer in Cincinnati is so disturbing that authorities won't allow the public to see it. Forty-three-year-old Sam Dubose is dead, and city officials believe that
keeping this information from the public will work to temper potential riots. Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell says of the video, "it's not good," but says he hopes the city "is able to move forward from this and allow this to be a moment of learning and teaching for our city."
Okay, then why is he preventing the first step towards learning and teaching from taking place? The city manager is
claiming that, somehow, holding the video is furthering the cause of justice. How many times have we heard this implied message from police: trust us? It's taken over a week for police to put their story together. This video must be
really bad.
UPDATE: 7/30/15 University of Cincinnati police are actually
serial killers.
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Republicans want to privatize anything that moves. So naturally that means private debt collectors working for the IRS. I’m sure that recipe won’t lead to more charges of harassment.
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In the matter of the appeal brought by Tom Brady and the NFL Players' Association in the case of Roger Goodell v. Tom Brady, Roger Goodell finds in favor of Roger Goodell.
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LaTroy Hawkins just got traded from the Rockies to the Blue Jays. Have you heard about
his fan club?
The power of humor
The Onion nails it.
Monetary policy
Interesting exchange this week between Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and a group of African-American congressional reps. When asked what the Fed is doing to address the high rate of unemployment among blacks (9.5% vs. 5.3% overall), Yellon responded, "There really isn’t anything directly the Federal Reserve can do to affect the structure of unemployment across groups, and unfortunately, it’s long been the case that African-American unemployment rates tend to be higher than those on average in the nation as a whole."
What Yellen is missing, however, is that the Fed was established to serve two mandates-- one of which has easily been the top priority over the second for years. The Fed has been very concerned, as a routine, with controlling inflation, and Yellon confirmed her commitment in this week's hearing before the House Financial Services Committee to raising interest rates before the year is out and keeping inflation under 2%. But the other mandated goal of the Fed is to lower unemployment. If the monetary supply is kept tight, by raising interest rates, prices stay low and employment depresses. If they print more money, prices increase, but so do employment numbers.
The Fed continues to obsess over inflation, even though it has been completely absent from the economy for some time. What Yellen is basically saying is that she's okay with a 9.5% unemployment rate for blacks.
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Confused about what's happening in Greece? Then, again, I direct you to the book that has been called "the master narrative of our time"-- Naomi Klein's 2007 international best-seller
The Shock Doctrine. We have an inept government in Greece swallowed by predatory privatists. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other disaster capitalists swoop in and demand robust cuts in social services while raising the retirement age and privatizing state industries, such as those in mining and drilling, -- this in a country that has lost a million jobs in six years, and has a 25.6% unemployment rate, 49.7% among young people. These cuts (referred to as austerity) come in exchange for up to 86 billion euros in bailout.
Voters in Greece rejected a call for more austerity in a national referendum earlier in the month and effectively voted to leave the euro, but the nation's government voted this week to agree to their creditor's demands.
What we are really witnessing here is a coup. It is collective punishment against the people of Greece because the banks were leveraging themselves at a ratio of 33 to 1. The bailout is really not for Greece, it's a bailout for European banks that were complicit. The nations of that continent share a currency, but they don't share a fiscal, banking, or political system. The irony is that Germany, among the nations that comprise the eurozone, is leading the attack (Greece's energy minister calls the group "financial assassins"), and these are the exact conditions that led to the rise of fascism in Germany following the Treaty of Versailles. Naomi Klein will have warned us.
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People have really flipped out over Caitlyn Jenner winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Who knew the ESPY's meant anything at all?
Neither Jenner nor any of the candidates she beat out would be getting the award if an ESPN anchor had been diagnosed with cancer this year. I am impressed that Caitlyn beat out the dying kid for the award. It's hard to beat out a dying kid for any award that's based on sentiment. I'm sure the actress that plays her in a movie will be nominated for an Oscar. Same for Jenner, I guess.
As far as the backlash goes, the fact that it exists kind of makes the point, doesn't it, that it took a hell of a lot of courage to do what she did? I feel like Jenner's deep sin, as far as the disingenuous moralists are concerned, was not putting on a dress, but marrying into the Kardashian family.
Also, in respect to director Peter Berg's stupid comment comparing Jenner unfavorably to an Army veteran double amputee: It's kind of in bad form to bring military "courage" into the equation when transgender people are not permitted into the military.
Thoughts on the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game
-The Franchise Four vote should not be considered scientific by any means, but wow, it can be endlessly dissected and debated. 1) Nolan Ryan made it onto the “Mount Rushmore” of three different franchises-- the Rangers, Astros, and Angels-- and his career winning percentage is only .526 (324-292). 2) Whitey Ford has 10 career World Series wins and can’t crack the Yankees’ top four, but the Rockies have room for Andres Galarraga. 3) The White Sox have been around since 1901. Can they really not do better than Harold Baines and Paul Konerko? 4) My Cardinals choices would have been a little different-- with Lou Brock replaced by Albert Pujols. Hate to leave Ozzie out, though. The influence of his personality on the "us-against-the-world" franchise is very underrated-- and he was very dominant at his position for 15 years.
-Now, to this “Four Greatest Living Players” list that I didn't know about until last night. You the fans chose Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays. I find it easy to quibble, but I won’t offer an alternative list exactly. (I will agree that this is the “Four Greatest Living Players that are also the oldest.”) Only to say that Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez were dominant pitchers, and so were Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens. And I guess I will add my opinion that, come on now, Barry Bonds is the greatest living baseball player. Then I will opine that, if what Johnny Bench was doing in the 1970s warrants him to be in company this exclusive, than Ted Simmons at least, and at last, belongs in the Hall of Fame. Bench must have been casting quite a shadow at that time. Also, did you know that Bob Gibson’s career WAR (Wins Above Replacement) are 81.9 and Koufax’s are 53.2. And these are Gibson’s World Series numbers-- (7-2, 1.89).
-Instead, I will offer a “Four Greatest Living Players” list with modified categories-- Greatest Hitter: Bonds, Greatest Pitcher: Maddux, Greatest Defensive Player: Ozzie, Greatest Baserunner: Rickey Henderson. You could make the argument that, adding the candidacies of all the dead players, these would still be the Great Four.
-Love that the outcome of the All-Star Game determines home-field advantage in the World Series. The argument that it’s too arbitrary don’t resonate because the old rule had the leagues alternating years and you can’t get more random then that. But Jesus, National League, show some spirit. It’s been the rule for over a decade, and there’s still a palpable lifelessness to the team each year.
-You must know that I'm compelled to grumble about this. The Cardinals have 56 wins at the mid-summer break and a real shot at the Series. They had six players named to the losing National League squad, and manager Bruce Bochy of the Giants played only two of the six. The two that played, Jhonny Peralta and Yadier Molina, were perfect at the plate-- two singles, a walk, and an RBI. Two more were basically hurt, or opting out for rest-- Matt Holliday and Trevor Rosenthal. But where were the young pitching phenoms Michael Wacha and Carlos "Tsunami" Martinez? Adding Rosenthal, the Cards have three All-Star pitchers under the age of 25 and America got to see none of them.
-Clayton Kershaw, huh? This guy is so last year, yet Bochy puts him out there to surrender two runs in one inning and take the loss. The Dodgers left-hander is only 6-6 and has a higher ERA than non-All-Stars Jake Arrieta and Johnny Cueto. He's been beaten like a drum in back-to-back postseason series by the Cardinals. He's named by neither the manager nor the players to the teamm initially. He loses the final fan vote to Carlos “Little Pedro” Martinez of the Cardinals. And then Bochy finally adds him to the squad as an injury replacement. Meanwhile, Martinez, the only pitcher on the squad voted to the team by the fans, owner of a 2.52 ERA, a 10-3 record, and a resume that shows 16 games of postseason experience as a relief pitcher, does not appear in relief in the game. Carlos' extraordinary season-long tribute to the late Oscar Taveras, including the adoption of his uniform number, is denied a grand stage and baseball turns its back on an inspirational story.
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Boo Birds: The highlight of the night might have been the Reds fans booing the six Cardinals players-- plus Albert Pujols-- during the introductions. (Bonus: there’s
a marvelous GIF floating around of Albert joining in on the loudest booing of the night, that for Yadi Molina.) My wife hates booing, and I had to explain this particular Reds/Cardinals dynamic to her. I shared with her my theory that Cardinals players would be likely booed at All-Star Games in Kansas City, Chicago North, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and possibly Milwaukee and Los Angeles West. She then remarked, quite accurately, of Reds fans: “They have issues.”
-My bride is also astutely concerned about the proliferation of red-clad teams in baseball. (The Cards’ sartorial choices are as imitated as their front office moves.) We spent part of last evening looking at photos online of the uniforms the Angels (red trim only), Diamondbacks (purple and teal), Astros (orange), Rangers (predominately blue), and Expos/Nationals (predominately blue)
used to wear. This might also be the time to point out that the Indians wearing red on their uniforms is kind of culturally offensive.
-I can’t remember an All-Star Game so lacking in emphasis on the Yankees and Red Sox.
-Grisly details are surely coming soon about the TV ratings for last night’s game, breaking down the disheartening age demographics, and again baseball will be “in trouble.” But here’s the thing: television audiences have become remarkably splintered. It’s an unreliable gauge for a famously-regional sport that just happens to be staggeringly profitable. The highest rated series on TV this year was FOX's
Empire. It posted an overall Nielsen rating of 7.1 in the "coveted" 18-49 age demographic. In 1985, the highest rated show (
Dynasty) had a 25.0 rating. A 7.1 finish would place a series outside the Nielsen top 50. I'm on the internet right now. Where are all the
Empire is dying stories?
-So many All-Stars under the age of 25 this year, and they looked it.
-Cincinnati hero Todd Frazier went oh-for-three on the night with a line that looked like this-- 5-3, 6-3, 5-3. Did he think he was competing in the Slow Chopper to the Left Side Derby?
-As a back-to-back All-Star Game MVP, Mike Trout now has been given two free motor vehicles. I guess if they’re Chevys, they need replacing after one year
-Baseball is in full bloom, but if you tuned in to sports talk radio today, you probably heard a pair of douche bags talking about football. It’s hard for Major League Baseball to compete for attention. All it offers for fan debate is the traditional “Who’s better?” type-of-argument and some ancient discord about Hall of Fame eligibility. How can the league compete with the NFL and that sport’s infinite tales of domestic violence, criminal malfeasance, brain injury, musical franchises, Spy-gates, Bounty-gates, and Inflate-gates? We’re stuck this summer with boring pennant races involving a dozen or more 25-or-under superstars.
The issue of reparations in kleptocratic America
The United States owes African-Americans an insane amount of money. This really shouldn't be debated. The history of the nation is white people making money off the forced labor of black people, denying them access to wealth, keeping them de facto segregated in housing and opportunity, with the constant threat of violence by police to enforce the stricture.
It's this lack of access to wealth that trips us up time and again. We've been sold a story of ever-improving race relations, but there is great evidence that the pace has been glacial. According to
the General Social Survey, a poll that has existed since the 1970s, 28% of white Americans in 2014 say they support a law that allows homeowners to refuse to sell their homes to blacks, even though such a law is illegal. A third of whites
in 1972 agreed with the statement "white people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhood if they want to, and blacks should respect that."
When slavery was outlawed, 13% of the total American population was freed, and even then, nothing was given to these people that had made the rest of us rich. New York City, the North's largest city, was built on slavery. For every dollar cotton made in the South, 40 cents ended up in the nation's business center on the Hudson River. When the Civil War broke out, the market value of slaves exceeded that of banks, railroads, and factories combined.
After the war, the prison industrial system took over for slavery. Vagrancy laws allowed police in the South to sweep up freed black men and rent them in convict leasing programs. In Nashville, Tennessee, between 1865 and 1869, the black prison population rose from 33% to 64%. Potential black business owners were charged $100 for business licenses when white owners were charged nothing.
When Social Security was enacted, it excluded domestic and agricultural workers-- mostly African-Americans. In 1935, that mean 27% of whites were ineligible, 65% of blacks. During this height of the Great Depression-- and Jim Crow, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation was created by the federal government and kept one million white Americans in their homes. Blacks were ineligible. The Federal Housing Authority, housing covenants, and redlining maps came next. Banks drew lines on maps to create neighborhoods where banks would not invest, and the federal government subsidized it. You didn't complain about it for fear of violence against your family. In 2001, an AP investigation determined that more than 24,000 acres of black-owned land was stolen simply through local chicanery and terrorism, and for generations, blacks had been legally kept from taxpayer-funded schools. Today, we still have "separate but equal" schools thanks to a system in which individual districts are funded by the local tax base. "White flight" has not been incidental. It's been a matter of social engineering.
For every dollar of assets white households have today, black households have 10 cents. In 1990, African-Americans owned 1% of our national wealth. In 1865, that number was 0.5%. The income gap between white and black has gone unchanged since 1970. Economists estimate that 80% of wealth in America is accumulated by intergenerational transfer. Martin Luther King, Jr. estimated that the U.S. government's failed promise of "40 acres and a mule" at the end of the Civil War was $20 a week since the late 1700's for 4 million slaves-- $800 billion. In today's dollars, that's $6.4 trillion.
Americans that are against reparations for slaves today are likely ignorant of
the fact that reparations were made at the time of slavery's abolition-- to slave owners. The issue should be very much alive today for descendants of the victims that still live with the economic effects. If Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of U.S. Independence still matters, so does the fact of his slave ownership. If George Washington's presidency still matters, so does his blood-stained history as a slave owner. The issue remains unresolved. In
a recent op-ed in the Atlantic, Ta-Nahisi Coates gave us the words of the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, "A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us, and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them."
The popular vote
Something must change with baseball’s system of electing its All-Stars. The voters don’t know what they’re doing. They possess provincial opinions of which players are truly the best and they vote according to team colors. Of course what I’m advocating here is taking the vote away from the manager and the players and giving the
entire voting process to the customers, the fans. What did you think I meant?
The customers should be choosing the reserves and the pitchers that compete in the game, in addition to the starting position players they already select.
Day after day during this year's open online balloting, the top story was the Royals.
Look at these dumb fans. Look at how the Kansas City rooters are stuffing the online ballot for the members of their squad. First it’s eight Royals, then it’s still six, then five. Well, it ended with four out of nine, and it’s hard to quibble much with any of the final selections-- elite catcher Salvador Perez, shortstop (at a weak AL position) Alcides Escobar, and outfielders Alex Gordon and Lorenzo Cain. Four standout players, all competing for the reigning league championship team that also has the league's best record in 2015. No voting abomination here. In fact, the managers and the players saw fit to
add two Royals pitchers to the group. A distracting issue evaporates.
Now let’s talk about an unforgivable voting sin committed by the players and by AL All-Star manager Ned Yost. They snubbed a player with more than 3,000 hits and 600 career home runs, a man who passed Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time home run list earlier this season. Didn't the All-Star Game used to be about honoring aging greats? Like Derek Jeter? Last year? The numbers are there too. A-Rod's 16 homers are the most at his position and he has the 8th best OPS in the entire AL. The seven men ahead of him in that category are on the All-Star team, and so are the five men that come immediately after. His name is Alex Rodriguez, of the New York Yankees, and why did Yost and the players blackball him? Because they don’t like him personally.
A-Rod finished fifth in the fan voting for AL designated hitters. (Maybe he would have finished higher, but MLB canceled 65 million ballots this year, labeling them fraudulent.) Do the fans have a problem with A-Rod’s past steroid use? Not as it would seem, even with a constant drumbeat of negative media attention directed at him. Yankee fans have heartily cheered his hitting exploits all season. Baseball fans at large voted for him more than two million times in May and June, and they selected two other players to the league starting lineups that have served 50-game suspensions in the past for PED use-- Nelson Cruz and Jhonny Peralta. The general attitude of fans towards these once-performance enhanced players seems to be that they have done their time.
There isn’t
too much democracy in baseball voting, there’s not enough. If fans had the Hall of Fame vote in place of haughty and entitled veteran sportswriters-- and if Major League Baseball did away with the arrogant “restricted” list it has applied to our nation’s baseball museum-- Pete Rose would be made eligible and inducted posthaste. Polls show that Rose’s cause has had the majority support of the people for years. PED-users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens would be in if fans had their way also. That claim was supported last year when principled sportswriter Dan LeBetard then-anonymously surrendered his ballot to the masses on the Deadspin website.
Writers, players, and managers each have too many voting privileges. They are like the Electoral College of baseball-- dedicated to protecting us from ourselves. This is a subversion of democracy in our democratic republic’s national game, particularly in the case of the Baseball Writers Association of America and the Hall of Fame, where the vice grip and revisionist history of the voters has taken to severely damaging the game. The Hall is currently experiencing severe attendance decline in Cooperstown, New York, and it's no wonder why that would be-- not because people no longer enjoy or appreciate bucolic resort communities on a shimmering lake or history museums dedicated to rich and enthralling topics. It’s because a team made up of Hall-worthy former players that are excluded from the Hall-- Rose, Bonds, Clemens, Joe Jackson, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Mark McGwire, et al-- could now theoretically whip a team of enshrined greats 55 times out of 100.
And while we’re on the topic, why aren’t Curt Flood or Marvin Miller enshrined?
What I’m stumping for is a fan revolution, a dictatorship of the paying customers, maybe "free love" while we're at it. Who better to make the important ceremonial decisions than the people whose dedication to the game have and will always go unpaid? As fanatics, we’ve been persuaded to believe that our expertise is lacking, and the persuaders have been those that stand to gain by our powerlessness. We’re the ones that determine the standards. It’s in the language itself. It’s not called the Hall of Greatness, after all. It’s called the Hall of Fame. For being famous. It’s not the All-Talent Game either. It’s the All-Star Game. For being a star. Google A-Rod. He’s got it covered. 600 home runs and he dated Madonna.
It’s really insulting when you think about it. You get to pick the first team, and then the players and managers are there to fill out the rosters. The implication always is that they’re there to correct your mistakes. Of course, the customer’s not always right, but the boss and the employees aren’t either. Remember that the next time you hear somebody on TV again tell you that the fans shouldn’t get such a loud say when the outcome of the game means so much to the World Series (home field advantage for the winning league). Why is the fan vote always inferred to be so frivolous where the players' and managers’ choices are, if not regarded as perfect, at least always taken of the highest honor? It shouldn't be. Cheering Fans of All Franchises, Unite!
"We can't wait any longer"
A flag can be a very untrivial item. If a large enough number of people project deep meaning onto that flag, this inanimate object becomes an item of terrific importance, one that ignites deep passions, just as a painting in a museum might.
The flag of the Confederate States of America is just such a powerful emblem. It’s one that represents the longest-lasting terrorist threat to the United States. Its precise role in the Civil War is muddy to me. Whether it belongs to the Southern states in general or the Army of Northern Virginia or whatever doesn’t matter. What does is its ongoing use of the battle flag as a symbol of a culture that has fed terror to black families for more than a century and a half. In the United States, Nelson Mandela is formally declared a terrorist while the Confederate flag flies above the state capitols of South Carolina and Louisiana. It is protected by law from desecration or defilement in five states. In Germany, neo-Nazis wave the flag as a proxy because it’s a crime in that country to fly the swastika.
As an exercise in political activism, Bree Newsome’s climb to the top of the flag pole in Columbia, South Carolina last week is being compared to the historic stand taken by Rosa Parks. It was also some John Brown shit—aggressive, divisive, and taken of strong moral character. The greatest American of the twentieth century was Martin Luther King, Jr. The greatest of the nineteenth was Brown. It causes me distress that I have to un-“friend” people from Facebook for posting dumb “Heritage, Not Hate” GIFs even though those people have lived in the state of Iowa their entire lives. These are people that do not know
their own proud history.
The North held—and still holds—all of the high moral ground in respect to the United States Civil War Over Slavery. The war was about the economic empowerment of the Southern region of the country only so far as the entire economic engine of the South was driven by human chattel. It’s incomplete to talk about slavery as only the forced servitude of black-skin peoples. It was also about babies being ripped away from mothers and sold away for life. It was about a dehumanization effort so powerful that it blossomed again soon after the war had formally ended, then flourished through decade upon decade of public lynchings, systematic rape and emasculation, and survives even up to a cowardly act of arson at a predominately-black church in the South probably again sometime within the last couple hours.
The war began not then, as we’ve been told, with cannon fire at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861, by rebel soldiers against Union forces, but the moment that slavery began on the continent. That act of terror was returned when Northerners of conscience, like Brown, at long last declared all-out war against it. It’s critically important to understand that slaveholders went to war because of their fear of more retaliatory strikes against their contaminated and loathsome system by interracial bands of freedom fighters like Brown’s.
To know the story of the great man, Brown, is to begin to understand the Southern mindset that would eventually declare the elevated conflict beginning in '61 “the War of Northern Aggression.” They’re damn right it was. A small handful of Northerners, and a smaller handful still of Southerners, had had enough. Slavery even confined to the South indicted everybody in the United States. In the North, legislative and judicial acts of cowardice, such as the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, and the Missouri Compromise, infected all Americans with the cancerous tumor of white supremacy. There would be no more compromises.
The heinous flag of the Confederacy memorializes America’s great unforgivable sin. It should exist in museums for as long as the Republic stands, but Bree Newsome did an effective job of showing us one place where it doesn’t belong.
