My Boyhood Sports Icons Are Dying: Brooks Robinson

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Brooks Robinson

Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson, the “Human Vacuum Cleaner,” has died at the age of 86.

Robinson played his entire 23-year career with the Orioles. He was selected to 18 All-Star Games and earned the 1964 AL Most Valuable Player award after batting .318 with 28 home runs and a league-leading 118 RBIs. He won 16 consecutive Gold Gloves. He was the best-fielding third basemen I’ve ever seen.

Robinson’s most memorable performance came as MVP of the 1970 World Series, a five-game triumph over the Reds, He hit .429, homered twice and drove in six runs.

In Game 1, Robinson delivered the tiebreaking home run in the seventh inning. One inning earlier, he made a sensational backhanded grab of a hard grounder hit down the line by Lee May, spun around in foul territory and somehow threw out the runner.

Robinson contributed an RBI single in the second game and became forever a part of World Series lore with his standout performance in Game 3. He made a tremendous, leaping grab of a grounder by Tony Perez to start a first-inning double play; charged a slow roller in the second inning and threw out Tommy Helms; then capped his memorable afternoon with a diving catch of a liner by Johnny Bench.

“I’m beginning to see Brooks in my sleep,” Reds manager Sparky Anderson said during the Series. “If I dropped this paper plate, he’d pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first.”

Robinson was elected into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1983. In 1999, he was named to baseball’s All-Century team, which honored the best 25 players of the 20th century.

RIP Brooks Robinson

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Clapping for Nazis

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Canadian standing ovation for Nazi

The photo shows Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other members of the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian World War II veteran who later immigrated to Canada.

Let me put this in hockey parlance so the Canadians can understand it. This is what’s known as an “own goal.”

It’s hard to figure out how this happened, because Hunka’s introduction included the fact that he fought against Russia in WWII. Did no one think “Why was he fighting Russia? Russia was on our side.”

It turns out that he was fighting Russia because he was in the Waffen-SS, i.e., he is (or was, at least) a Nazi.

House Speaker Anthony Rota, who invited and introduced Hunka, has since resigned, and Trudeau has issued an on-brand non-apology apology.

I haven’t heard that Zelenskyy said anything, but if he did, it was probably along the lines of “Sorry for making you all give a standing ovation to a Ukrainian Nazi but in Ukraine it’s actually a pretty common event.”

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A Mystery of the Digital Censorship Era

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A mystery of the digital censorship era is the ease with which its core ideas have been sold to people who were its fiercest initial opponents. The closer you look at mechanisms now used to isolate, remove, disrupt, and spy on everyone from environmentalists to antiwar activists to anti-mandate or anti-lockdown protesters, the more easily you’ll see a direct line to high-profile civil liberties controversies of two decades ago. The modern Internet surveillance state was born in programs bitterly opposed then by left-leaning intellectuals, of the type who subscribed to The Nation and carried NO BLOOD FOR OIL signs while protesting war in Iraq.

— Matt Taibbi

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Failing To Notify Parents When Their Child Changes Gender Is ‘The American Way’?

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Dem Governor: Failing To Notify Parents When Their Child Changes Gender Is ‘The American Way’ — freebeacon.com

The Democratic governor is Phil Murphy from New Jersey, who says that “outing” LGBTQ students to their parents is a violation of the child’s constitutional rights. Thus, opposing parental notification is “the American way.”

“Listen, we took these actions because it’s the right thing to do,” Murphy said. “Let’s protect the rights of these precious kids. Let’s do things the right way, the American way.”

I wasn’t even aware that constitutional rights apply to children. Without researching it, I suspect they don’t.

I also don’t think that children have the cognitive maturity to make decisions on their own about sexuality and gender identity. Transgenderism, for example, is a mental disorder: gender dysphoria. It’s a diagnosis obtained via medical care and therapy, not obtained via the internet. There almost certainly is not someone at a school qualified to make such a diagnosis.

It gets worse. Murphy’s attorney general, Matt Platkin, says parental notification policies pose “serious mental health risks” and threaten “physical harm to students.”

You send your kid to school and not only are totally unqualified people taking him or her on gender journeys, they’re telling your kids that you are dangerous and violent, and therefore teachers and students must team up to lie to you.

Can anyone explain how this guy gets one single vote from a parent in the entire state of New Jersey?

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Days of Wine and Roses

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They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
      Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
      We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
      Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
      Within a dream.

— Ernest Dowson

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Missouri v. Biden

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Here’s how federal judge Terry Doughty yesterday described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

— Matt Taibbi

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Thomas Jefferson on Bidenomics

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Thomas Jefferson

My fellow Americans –

President Biden is currently on a “Bidenomics” tour. Terrible name, “Bidenomics,” because nobody likes Biden so they’re not going to like anything with his name in it. Call it “Satanomics: The Economy is Stronger Than Hell,” which is a lie but so is everything else he says about the economy.

His economic team recently posted a “Here Are the Facts” video, the first of which is, “Under the Biden Harris Administration Inflation Has Fallen.”

That’s true — if by “Fallen” you mean “Risen.”

The annual inflation rate when Biden took office was 1.4 percent. In May 2023, it was 4 percent, about three times higher.

Inflation is lower today than the 9.1 percent peak that we hit last June, but you don’t get credit for pushing it to unprecedented levels and then watching it come back down, particularly since it only came down as the Federal Reserve was increasing interest rates at a historic pace over the past 15 months — from near zero to more than 5 percent.

The result, along with three of the four largest bank failures in the history of the country, is that buying a home or a car, paying down credit cards or getting a small-business loan are all more expensive under Bidenomics.

Another Bidenomics “fact”: Inflation is less than half what it was last summer.

Also not true. Inflation is slowing, but it’s cumulative. The 4 percent increase this May was on top of last May’s 8.3 percent increase for a two-year increase of nearly 13 percent. You raise prices 8.3 percent, then raise them another 4 percent on top of that.

Since Biden took office, inflation has increased by about 16 percent. And inflation is regressive — the less money you have, the more it hurts.

I can see how Biden jiggled the numbers for the first two claims, but this one I can’t:
“Wages are up, accounting for inflation, that’s real breathing room.”

In January of 2021, when Biden took office, average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation were $11.39. As of May 2023, that number was $11.03. It’s lower.

As George Orwell used to say, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Thomas Jefferson

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National Math and Reading Scores are Plunging

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National math and reading scores are plunging.

Math and reading scores

In the new educational philosophy, test scores are just a racist measure of racist things. Parents who are pro–standardized testing are far-right hate groups.

Obviously closing schools for years was really bad. You can see the scores drop off a cliff after 2020. But overall, the scores are actually lower than they were 40 years ago. We’ve made no progress in educating kids since 1980. There was progress till slightly after 2010 and then . . .

What has happened in that time? I bet deciding that math and reading are racist didn’t help. And teachers being primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores.

Midwestern public school teachers are trading tips on how to transition kids without telling parents. (I don’t know why these stories are only covered in non-US media.)

Having teachers paint your son’s nails does not improve test scores. Spending an entire semester on pronouns and the asexual spectrum does not improve test scores.

Maybe spending a few minutes on algebra instruction? It’s a weird idea, I know, but maybe it would improve test scores?

I think about my profession, software engineering, and where we would be if we had made no progress since 1980. Imagine using technology that was the same or worse than it was 40 years ago.

It’s hard to think of professions that have made no progress in 40 years. Education majors are just the dumbest people on earth.

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An Alternative Approach to Student Loan Relief

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I knew Biden wasn’t allowed to do this.

Here’s the good news. You can just flip those signs over, write a new begging message on the back, and go stand on a freeway offramp.

Student loan protestors

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Supreme Court Kills Affirmative Action

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The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. — thenation.com

The author of that piece really hates white people. I don’t recommend reading it, you will not be a better person for having done so, as it consists solely of sweeping generalizations, broad judgments, unfounded inferences and racial insults.

Even if five points (out of a possible 100) were deducted for each verifiable fact, it still scores at least a 95. Grammar and spelling are passable.

The only “fact” I remember being cited in support of affirmative action is actually false:

In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities.

The article that the author links to doesn’t even say that. Black and Latino enrollment in the UC system has gone up, not down. A snippet from that article:

Black and Latino students increased to 43% of the admitted first-year class of Californians for fall 2022 compared with about 20% before Proposition 209.

(Proposition 209 is the law that ended affirmative action.)

What did happen after Prop 209 was a significant redistribution of black and Latino students. Their enrollment at the most elite UC schools, Berkeley and UCLA, dropped — by a lot — but went up at the other UC campuses.

After this redistribution, there was an increase in the number of black and Latino students graduating, including an increase of 55% in the number graduating in four years, an increase of 63% in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, an increase of nearly 50% in the number graduating with degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering, and an increase of about 20% in the number of earned doctorates.

Everybody talks about admission, no one talks about graduation. If you’re admitted to an elite school as a diversity admit, rather than because you’re academically capable of being there, your chances of graduating are not great.

That’s what was happening in California. Students who could have done well at another UC school were being affirmative-actioned into Berkeley and UCLA and never graduated.

 

Affirmative action supporters should be asked straight up why they don’t believe black Americans have the capability to overcome obstacles that other marginalized groups (Asians, Jews) have overcome. It amounts to the same thing.

Racism isn’t dead but it’s not stopping people from doing anything they want to do. We elected a black president (twice), so what is there that a black person can’t accomplish because of their race? (No Asian or Jewish presidents, FYI.)

Speaking of which, Obama and all the other affirmative action hucksters, despite many of them being black and having accomplished notable things in life, are permanently damaging the black race by telling kids, “People don’t like you because your skin is too dark. They don’t want you to succeed. You will not be treated fairly in life and your efforts will not be rewarded.”

What will happen to kids raised that way? They will fail. It’s child abuse. You want to raise kids to believe in themselves and their power to accomplish what they set out to do.

But kids can’t vote. If you preach the same message to black adults, i.e., that your failures in life are not of your own making, that you are not as well off as you should be because of white supremacy and structural racism and systemic racism and unconscious racism and all kinds of racism, they will give you money and votes and power, if that’s what you want, but again, at the expense of destroying your own race.

Thomas Sowell said this in 1964 and I think he was right (as usual):

To me the psychology of blacks is the single biggest obstacle to racial progress. It isn’t fashionable to say this, and it certainly isn’t pleasant, but truth does not depend on these considerations. With all due respect to the courage and dedication of the various civil rights groups, I think that when all the laws have been passed and all the gates flung open, the net result will be one tremendous anticlimax unless there is a drastic change of attitude among blacks.

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Diversity at Harvard

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The Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on Thursday.

The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The email states that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and “to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.”

Whatever that means. But what does race have to do with it? Why is race the deciding factor?

I think it would be easy to find a young black person and a young white person who’ve lived very similar lives. Or to find two young white people who’ve led very different lives. Or two young black people who’ve led very different lives. You agree?

And on the subject of “diversity,” I’d say Harvard has a very narrow definition. In 2023, the Harvard Crimson annual survey of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences found that more than 77 percent of surveyed faculty identified as either “very liberal” or “liberal,” while 2.5 percent identified as “conservative” and less than 1 percent as “very conservative.”

Diversity = people of many different colors who all think exactly alike.

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If Your House Burns Down and You Rebuild It, Did You “Create” a New House?

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I love these Biden tweets on job “creation.”

ChatGPT tells me that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the loss of more than 22 million jobs in the United States. The 13 million jobs that Biden “created” are those lost jobs coming back. But he’s still 9 million short. What happened to those people?

The unemployment rate is low, which suggests that people have left the labor force for some reason. If COVID didn’t kill them all, then they may have retired, given up (not everyone wants to work at fast-food restaurants), or cobbled together a welfare package they can live on.

The labor force participation rate (shown below) has never come back to pre-pandemic level, and people who have left the labor force are not counted in the unemployment rate.

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Billionaires

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Reading Joe Biden’s Twitter is exquisitely painful, like a sore tooth that you can’t stop pushing on with your tongue.

How do these things even go together? Americans are not taxed on their net worth, they’re taxed on their income. At least that’s what I think he’s talking about. Income tax. Although there are a lot of other federal taxes: self-employment tax, gift tax, excise taxes, etc.

Is he talking about taxing people’s net worth? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.

I’m not a billionaire myself because I don’t know how to make that happen. If someone has figured out how to do it, good for them. They’re entitled to what they have.

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