Wednesday, November 30, 2016

That Didn't Take Long

The Democrats just reelected Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader, proving after less than one month that they learned nothing whatever from an election in which they lost the White House and both houses of Congress. Stupidity and arrogance reign supreme.

Dilettantes

In the show Madam Secretary the other night a father is speaking with his son about the son’s political position. He asks about the outcomes and implications, questions for which the kid has no answers and then tells his son that, “Your political knowledge is a mile wide and in inch deep, and that makes you a dilettante. Until you study enough to know what you are talking about you need to keep silent.”

I thought of that phrase when watching on the news of the “march of a $15 minimum wage” last night. A bunch of dilettantes, blocking traffic for one midweek evening. Where is any real commitment?

If you don’t want to work for $9 per hour then don’t work for $9 per hour. Walk off of the job and stay off until they offer a better wage. Do you think they are impressed or intimidated by you blocking traffic on Tuesday evening and then on Wednesday you are right back there still working for $9 per hour? They’re not. While you were out there on the street freezing your ass off, they were at home ignoring you.

Oh, I get it, you weren’t targeting employers, you were targeting politicians because you want them to pass a law. You don’t want to exercise your own power and take care of yourself, you want someone else to do it for you while you take no risks and endure no hardship.

Well, as a former union member I’m certainly not impressed by that. I froze my ass off on a picket line for weeks at a time. I stood up to law officers with guns and riot clubs. I did not ask for someone else to do it for me, my brothers and I exercised our own power, and we earned what we got.

We were grownups. We knew that once we left the shelter of Mommy’s apron there was going to be no one there to keep us from falling down and skinning our knees. We knew that people were going to talk to us in ways that we didn’t like; that Mommy was the last “safe space” that we would ever know and that she wasn’t hovering over us any more.

We knew that if we wanted anything better than what we had, that we had to earn it with hard work, retries after disappointment, sweat, tears and sometimes blood, and we did what needed to be done. We didn’t go block traffic on one midweek evening and demand that someone else pass a law giving it to us.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Phootball Phun

Some fun football this weekend. Local sports writers are swooning over the "renewed playoff chances" of the Chargers, now at 5-6. With Tampa Bay, Oakland, Carolina and Kansas City yet to play a 10-6 record seems unlikely in the extreme, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of fools. Even a predicting a wild card spot is pretty silly, given that Denver is currently at 6-3 and unlikely to secure a wild card.

The Chargers won Sunday in no small part because Houston was so incredibly stupid as to pay $72 million for a quarterback who could not hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle. Osweiler playing for Houston is more evidence of John Elway's brilliance.

The Raiders are incredibly fun to watch. I'm not sure they are quite as good as their 9-2 record, but they are more fun than anyone. They have a lot of energy and a great deal of talent. Opponents are doubling up on Amari Cooper, which is letting Michael Crabtree have a lot of fun. They get Richardson tuned up running the ball, and... How do you solve that? I think they are the real deal.

The Chiefs/Broncos game was a lot of fun even though Al Michaels was replaced by Mike Tirico, who is an idiot. He used to be one of the babblers on ESPN, so what can you expect? Everyone who works for that abysmal network either is desperate to work somewhere else or is brain dead. Tirico is apparently both of the above, since he is now with NBC. He kept referring to this game as a "classic defensive struggle," even after 54 points had been scored.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Cognitive Dissonance

Donald Trump was harshly castigated for suggesting that he might not accept the result of the election. Now it is Clinton supporters, and Clinton herself, who are demanding recounts and investigations into Russian tampering, and trying to persuade the electoral collegiate to vote contrary to its mandate.

Same old, same old; it's okay when I do it, but not okay when you do it.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Thanksgiving Wishes

New thing to be thankful for this year, we have discovered putting eggnog in our morning coffee. Well, blush, I did and the wife signed on. I normally drink my coffee black, but this is a nice change of pace.

Wishing a peaceful holiday. Hope all are in good health and thriving.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

And The Losers Cry "Foul"

The losing side wants to spoil the party,
“No one goes. No athletes. No championship teams. No performers. No musicians. No celebrities. ALL invitations are rejected. No White House Correspondents Dinners. No Inauguration Balls. No State dinners. No singing Christmas carols with the Trump kids. Nothing. Full boycott. No exceptions. Donald Trump does not get to enjoy the perks of this job. Period."

Five-year-olds stamping their feet and declaiming, “If you won’t play my way I’m going to pick up my toys and go home.”

“For the rest of us: we don’t support anyone or any company that enabled Trump. Like those NBA teams, we boycott all Trump businesses. We turn off CNN. We don’t buy Ivanka’s bracelets.”

The NBA teams in question were boycotting apartheid. Liberals denounced the idea that all Muslims are bad because a few Muslims did bad things, but they embrace the idea that supporters of Trump are a monolithic block, all of whom supported him for his misogyny and because he wants to deport Muslims.

They do not accept that anyone might support him in spite of those rather than because of them, just as they supported Clinton despite her Wall Street speeches and her evasions of the email server issue. For the record, I supported neither candidate; for policy reasons, not because of the childish ad hominem attacks each was throwing at the other.

And, as losers tend to do, Liberals are crying “foul,”
“In a democratic government, all votes should be equal, thus the first step towards making an undemocratic government is to divide the people, so that the vast majority of them do not really have an effective vote. The majority of people in the United States are like this – so much so, that it is part of the primer on presidential elections.”

(Etcetera, most of it gibberish.) The losing side always claims the election was fraudulent and/or that the system doesn’t work. The Republicans made such claims in 2008 and 2012, and Democrats are making it now as they did in 2000. The loser walks away from the poker table accusing the winner of cheating. It was always thus.

Liberals, actually, are not tolerant of ideas that differ from their own, and we are learning this year that they are extraordinarily ungracious losers.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Small Things

Yesterday I was channel surfing and happened across the end of a high school girls volleyball game. The screen said “Championship point,” so I paused to see what would happen. It went back to a tie, went back and forth several times, and finally there was a winning team.

The winning team was all excited, of course; jumped into a pile and then hugged each other and high-fived. The camera moved to the losing team. Surprise. No tears, they were all smiling and congratulating each other on a game well played. They may not have won the championship, but they looked like winners to me.

Little thing. Means nothing, really. But things like that make me feel good.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Phantasy Phootball

I am now better than the Chargers! I realize that's a low bar, but I'll take what I can get. After a three game winning streak, I'm back to .500 and am in a four-way tie for seventh place in a twelve-team league.

It doesn't take much to excite me these days.

Monday, November 14, 2016

They're Called Elections

As these protests continue, as calls are made for the electoral college to refuse their mandate and elect Clinton, I just don’t get it. These people are not claiming that the election was fraudulent. They are not claiming any kind of 2000 deal, where the court prevented votes from being counted. They simply want the election overturned because they lost. What do they think an election is?

Sure, they didn’t want Trump to win. Neither did I, and I didn’t vote for him. A lot of these protestors, apparently, were sitting in their “safe spaces,” reading the polls and planning the coronation, but this was an election, not a coronation.

Maybe, instead of simply calling their opponents “stupid, evil” and “ignorant,” they should have emerged from their little “safe spaces” and tried to use reason to bring their opponents over to their point of view. How many people will you persuade to vote with you by calling them “deplorable?” Calling names feels good, but it doesn’t grow your ranks.

No one ever told me why I should vote for Hillary Clinton, other than that she was less evil than Trump, or that I would make history by “breaking the glass ceiling.” Mostly I was simply called vile names for saying that I did not intend to do so.

They brought this on themselves by their insularity, and their unwillingness to engage in meaningful discussion, and now they are just flailing to avoid blaming themselves for it.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Hot

Thursday, November 10th, 12:00 noon, Temperature 96 degrees in Mission Valley. Yes, November. Today was a cold wave; only 90 degrees at noon.

The Popular Vote

Clinton supporters are making much of the fact that "she won the popular vote." Let's put that into proportion.

In the nation as a whole she received 395,595 more votes than her opponent, out of 120.5 million cast, which amounts to a 0.3% margin. Significantly less than half of one percent.

She received a winning margin of 2,568,841 in California, a state in which a dead Democrat was once elected as mayor.

In the nation as a whole, then, excluding California, she lost the popular vote by 2,173,246 votes of 111.9 million cast, for a 1.9% margin.

I am unimpressed with the "she won the popular vote" argument.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Protesting Democracy?

Thousands are marching in protest against the election of Donald Trump? What, did they not think this was not a real election? They like democracy, but only when their point of view prevails? That's not democracy. Totalitarian nations run elections where only one name is on the ballot; democracies don't do that.

A numbers of colleges are allowing students to skip classes and are cancelling or rescheduling exams to allow students to recover from the "emotional trauma" of the election. I guess retiring to their "safe spaces" didn't get the job done. I have seen these students referred to as "emotional hemophiliacs," which seems fairly apt. They, too, are able to be okay only when their side wins. They've been getting "participation trophies" all their lives and are finding out that real life isn't that easy. They can't handle it, and it's only going to get worse for them.

Both sides had horrible candidates, and they knew it. They Republican Party tried to repudiate their horrible candidate. The Democratic Party embraced their horrible candidate. Both parties deserved to lose, but only one did.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

On Democracy

President Obama said it very well. “We are all on the same side. This was an intramural scrimmage. In the end, we are all on the same team.”

Democracy is hard. It is not for the faint hearted. People who live in authoritarian states have their decisions made for them. In democracy we have to make our own decisions, and then we have to live with them. It’s not for the candy assed, but it’s what makes a nation great.

This nation has made some good decisions and it has made some bad ones. Only time will tell which kind this one is. The nation has not only survived all of its decisions, it has thrived almost continuously throughout all of them. I have no doubt that will continue.

Irony

The Democratic establishment rigged the primary election to assure Hillary Clinton as their nominee, to deny that nomination to Bernie Sanders, and they got this.

And in a final touch fully illustrating who she is, she sent John Podesta, her campaign manager, to her party site to tell her faithful to go home; to tell them the lie that it was not over, and that votes were still being counted. Ten minutes later she called Donald Trump and conceded the election, and left without speaking to her faithful supporters who had waited for her for upward of twelve hours. No formal concession speech (update: until a pretty good one the next day), no public thank you to her people.

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Stadium Proposal

When a woman goes through life getting a sugar daddy to pay her expenses for her we call her a gold digger. When a man does similarly, letting a woman pay his way, we call him a gigolo. In either case we say that the person in question is morally bankrupt.

When a city, however, wants to have a football stadium and finds a way to make someone else, visitors in the case of Measure C, pay the cost of it we applaud the brilliance of that thinking and say, “Oh good for you.”

A city that wants to have that which it is unwilling to pay for is a society which is as morally bankrupt as any gold digger or gigolo.

Unfortunately, this measure is symptomatic of the nature of today’s society in general. We want what we want but, unwilling to pay what it costs to have it, we insist on having it anyway. Make someone else pay for it, or just add it to the nation's inexhaustible "credit card."

Saturday, November 05, 2016

Election? What Election?

For the zillionth time, we have a headline reading, “US air strike kills top Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan,” or Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Syria, or... The article refers to it as a “precision air strike,” but since the bombs that are dropped with such precision destroy several city blocks, I doubt that people living anywhere near the targets would agree with that description.

I’m trying to decide whether our leadership is continuing to follow this policy simply because they cannot think of anything else to do, or because they think it is working. Either one is pretty frightening, implying as it does that we are led by people who are either stupid or insane, perhaps both. Given, however, that they are also accusing the Russians of tampering with our elections one has to lean toward “both.”

When Obama took office we were doing these air strikes, some of them by drone, in two countries. Now we are conducting these strikes, killing the “terrorist leadership,” in no fewer than eight countries.

How can any reasonable, sane person claim that spreading the devastation of death and destruction fourfold is a success decreasing the impact of terrorism in the world? And yet both of this year’s candidates promise us, in the brief pauses from calling each other whoremonger and crook, that they will not only continue this policy, they will redouble it.

Russia isn’t screwing up our election, we’re doing that all by ourselves.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016

Health Care Costs

Opponents of Obamacare are outraged because people on the exchanges are going to see premium increases of 25% this year. I would respond by saying that people on the exchanges should consider themselves fortunate.

Our employer-provided health insurance premium is increasing 35% this year. With the addition of copay and deductible increases, our overall increase in health care costs will be about 42% in the coming year, assuming that the amount of health care that we require remains constant.

And before you blame the employer, the percentage paid by the employer this year is the same as it was last year. These increases are from the insurance company.

Fantasy Football

With a win this weekend, I am no longer tied for the league's worst record; I am tied for the league's second worst record and with the San Diego Chargers at 3-5. There is only one team in my league which has earned fewer points than I have, and only one team that has more points scored against them. I am beginning to think that I really suck at fantasy football.