Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Undisclosed Info, Hereby Disclosed

I am not registered on any dating sites. It will hardly come as any surprise to my wife to learn that astonishing piece of information, and it may by slightly comforting to her to have me divulge it. Probably not, as I doubt seriously that it has ever occurred to her that I might be registered on any such sites.

Anyway, if I was registered on any such sites, I cannot imagine how Russia or China would benefit from knowing that I prefer redheads (again, I am perfectly comfortable revealing this to my wife, since she is a redhead), or that I like hiking, golf, and boating. Just why would Russia or China care?

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Baltimore: Upset Deserved

Lamar Jackson threw for 365 yards and ran for 143, but his numbers included some serious garbage time padding. Ryan Tannehill threw for only 88 yards and ran for only 13, but he passed for two touchdowns to Jackson’s one (which was in garbage time) and ran for the one score that effectively sealed the upset (Jackson ran for none).

Jackson threw for the same amount of scores against Tennessee that Derrick Henry threw against Baltimore, and Jackson’s score was with Baltimore trailing so badly that Tennessee was in a prevent defense. The league's census MVP was intercepted twice, lost a fumble, and twice stuffed on fourth-and-one runs.

The final game “rest” and the “bye” week killed Baltimore, and so did Derrick Henry (with 195 rushing yards) and a Tennessee defensive front that reduced Baltimore's offensive line to a shadow of what it had been all season.

But let’s not give the Super Bowl trophy to Tennessee yet. They beat New England, who clinched the playoffs early and “rested” most of their first string the final week. They then embarrassed the Ravens who did the same thing followed by a “bye” week. So, the question is, what will they be able to do against a team that isn’t rusty, but is coming off a win the preceding week?

Monday, January 06, 2020

Just A Reminder

The “post war period,” from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, was a time of unparalleled prosperity for the working class in this nation. Even more than that, it created a level of prosperity for this nation’s working class that had no precedent in the world at the time.

I am referring here to the working class known as “blue collar;” workers who entered the workforce from high school without advanced educations; people who built the machinery and infrastructure of a great nation.

That period was a time of a nuclear family in which only one member worked at a single job, the wages of which were sufficient to support the worker, a homemaker, several children and often one or more members of an earlier generation.

The economy which provided such great prosperity for the working and middle class of this great nation was based on the principle of capitalism. Whatever ills today’s economy suffers from, capitalism is not the problem.

Saturday, January 04, 2020

Selling Bridges in Brooklyn

General Soleimani was taken out because doing so stopped an "imminent" massive attack he was planning on America. Right. And we had to invade Iraq because they were buying aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium pursuant to increasing their stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Patrick Cockburn has spent many years in the Middle East and generally gets things right about what is going on there. What he writes all but invariably is borne out by time to be true. He has been saying for weeks that the unrest in Baghdad was not anti-Iranian, as American media claimed and as American politics hoped for, but was a protest against the Iraqi government, demanding jobs, public services and an end to corruption.

In an article yesterday, Cockburn made reference to “...General Soleimani overseeing the brutal efforts by pro-Iranian security forces and paramilitary groups to crush Iraqi street protests,” and the light dawned. America has been seeing these street protests as anti-Iranian, which they were not. The media has been reporting them as anti-Iranian and, as usual, was reporting inaccurately.

America wanted those street protests to continue, and General Soleimani was the main leader who was shutting them down. Draw your own conclusions.