I haven't written about baseball in years. Expect baseball in 2020 to be as odd as the rest of the year.
The Royals have a better record at 20-29 right now than:
I believe there are two things that would benefit our republic, and they are not new ideas:
·
Mandatory service
o
Accommodate young people with disabilities
o
Right after high school or if drop out
o
Teach civics as part of the 2-year curriculum
· Term Limits
The latter, term limits give an advantage to the huge states at the expense of the poor, small states. California has 53 representatives in the House, so you can imagine who gets the Chairmanship of all the important committees if there is no scheme to limit that power. The ability for someone like Bernie Sanders, unemployed, a failure, to get on the gravy train and end up with multiple houses worth a lot of money, without proposing or passing any useful legislation (EVER!!) is preposterous. Joe Biden was left in the dust back in 1988 when he blatantly lied about his accomplishments and background, only to continue to get elected. Now, after 45+ years, he blames others for his misdeeds.
Mandatory service would be an antidote to the Gen Z entitlement programs they have enjoyed so far. Imagine the idea of being busted out of the service, only to be put into another “program” and that stigma would follow you the rest of your life? Sort of what the rest of us have tried to do—a lifetime of achievement. And the mandatory learning about the way our government runs might avoid somebody like AOC not able to answer the question, “What are the three branches of government?”
Just a thought.
Here is a reply to this post. This is personal, my friend Jerry (he has called me “Pete” for over 50 years) knows these people who have had this experience.
A very interesting topic Pete...and one with which I have some personal interest. I know some folks, a man and his wife and their two children, who fled that troubled country in a hail of bullets with a small truck of treasured household belongings and some $500 in cash. The fellow was a 3rd generation Rhodesian farmer... one of those that made that country the bread basket of Africa, and his wife was a 4th generation South African until she married the farmer. They met in college in South Africa. By the way, he told me he would hitchhike to college from what was then Rhodesia... it was safe to do so.
They never have returned to that troubled place, although both of their children have. I never detected actual bitterness, though I can’t imagine them not being bitter. There was huge disappointment at being driven from their home and livelihood, and then see the country fall to shambles.
And they were such nice people. I recall Pat and I spending an evening with them...all of us enjoying the company. As another couple happily wed for a good period of time, we were discussing the merits of long-term relationships, and the concern we had contemplating what death would do to that. In the graceful lilt of his English accent, the gentleman said it would be their strong preference, their hope “to fall off the perch together.”
Mad men are not limited to one race or one continent, and revolutions are not all just. There are so many grays... so many unknowns.
The free world has chosen to ignore numerous injustices. It takes strong leaders to risk the actions necessary. You can argue the role of involvement six ways from Sunday. How much treasure and blood are we willing to risk?
Perhaps someone different than Roosevelt in the White House, or someone less persuasive than Churchill, and the world could now look a good deal different. Our country has been fighting “little” wars in far off places for generations now, and our enthusiasm for such endeavors wanes. We can’t always get our arms around who the good guys are, so it is easy to look the other way and decide it is not our battle. And the truth of the matter is that if we don’t do it , there’s a good chance no one will.
Man’s
injustice to man fills history books. We applaud the exceptions, and
bemoan some of the others.
Why do so many of my posts to this blog have something to do with man’s inhumanity. Certainly, the subject today is one of the worst, a man who boasted about being today’s Hitler.
Here is a much better comment on the man and his evil: http://view.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=858bff985004208ffa3bcfb59454e7add7c299243931775e60500269799648ad82f4d58b34e2b2819f228e4a51df75d78dfb9887d0bb5e9833cf87e08968cbf7d8e4e358b3bd928c202ca6afca49fe0f493635bd4c696a40
Jeff Jacoby is a talented writer and observer.
This is a message about the tragedy of Zimbabwe and how the free world stood by and praised his murder and mayhem, doing nothing because any interference with the killing and punishment of whites by blacks is political suicide. Apparently.
Another observation. Africa is a BIG place. For example, a trek from Morocco to Ethiopia is approximately the same as going from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami. Doesn’t look that big in my mind??
The murder of whites by blacks is not only a part of the history of Zimbabwe, formerly the breadbasket of Africa where starvation rules today. It has and is happening in other parts of Africa, such as South Africa, another highly-praised practitioner of questionable policies.
Also, the Global Slavery Index organization estimates that 9.2 million people are living in slavery in Africa.
And the free world stands by, doing nothing.
Why do so many of my posts to this blog have something to do with man’s inhumanity. Certainly, the subject today is one of the worst, a man who boasted about being today’s Hitler.
Here is a much better comment on the man and his evil: http://view.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=858bff985004208ffa3bcfb59454e7add7c299243931775e60500269799648ad82f4d58b34e2b2819f228e4a51df75d78dfb9887d0bb5e9833cf87e08968cbf7d8e4e358b3bd928c202ca6afca49fe0f493635bd4c696a40
Jeff Jacoby is a talented writer and observer.
This is a message about the tragedy of Zimbabwe and how the free world stood by and praised his murder and mayhem, doing nothing because any interference with the killing and punishment of whites by blacks is political suicide. Apparently.
Another observation. Africa is a BIG place. For example, a trek from Morocco to Ethiopia is approximately the same as going from Anchorage, Alaska to Miami. Doesn’t look that big in my mind??
The murder of whites by blacks is not only a part of the history of Zimbabwe, formerly the breadbasket of Africa where starvation rules today. It has and is happening in other parts of Africa, such as South Africa, another highly-praised practitioner of questionable policies.
Also, the Global Slavery Index organization estimates that 9.2 million people are living in slavery in Africa.
And the free world stands by, doing nothing.
Here's a surprise--it started in California. But the EPA mandated that gas cans had to conform to new regulations by 2009.
The result is that all of us struggle to use gas cans that leak and just flat don't perform their basic function which is to dispense a liquid from a container.
Most of us resort to retro-fitting the gas can with a usable spout. But you can't buy them that way. You have to dump gasoline on your hot lawn mower or spill the boat motor fuel into a wetland because that is all you can buy.
I have only personally witnessed one incidence of bureaucratic incompetence of this scale and that was when the Obama administration turned over the Small Business Administration to its bureaucrats at the start of his term. They effectively neutralized the function for which the SBA was created.
Shouldn't we know by now how government bureaucracies perform?
