Basher and baseball

Obama keeps avoiding Syria because Basher Assad is alive and well here in the USA and rented from me. He left very suddenly, in the dead of night 3 days ago -- bashed 4 holes in the sheetrock, two windows, one door, and a hole in the wall of the garage.  The furniture rental company got back two bashed and smashed chairs.  The corner of the dining table was bashed down like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.  Basher Assad, no?

Now I’m remodeling.  Maybe I will turn that house into a Second  Baseball Hall of Fame—the players that should have been noted but never got in.  They didn’t make it because the baseball writers elect HOF members.  Those famously alcoholic writers now refuse to recognize players who might have used steroids. And they know little of the significance of history.  Here’s who I would put in.

The writers seem only able to read statistics. “Old Hoss” Radbourne is in the Hall.  He won 60 and lost 12 games pitching for Providence in the National League in 1884, the most games ever won. But his career was very much shortened because he fought with everyone and went from team to team.  Ed Delahanty also had a shortened career.  He hit over 400 twice and had a lifetime .346 but he was a drunk.  Playing for the Washington Senators in 1903 he had a .333 going when he got in a drunken brawl on the team train. They kicked him off the train, he tried to re-board, fell in the Erie River and was swept over Niagara Falls. His body was found a week later.  Just thought you’d like to know what wonderful, “non-drug using” guys are in the current Hall of Fame.

Cap Anson is already in the HOF but no note is made of “the Grand Old Man of Baseball’s” most significant and awfulest contribution.  He was a superstar in the 1880’s, player coach who first innovated spring training. But his worst contribution was that he was a blatant racist who refused to let his team play any team that had a player of African ancestry. That forced black players into a negro league that segregated baseball for 70 years. By the way, Anson changed the name of the Chicago team to the Chicago White Stockings.

So perhaps you’ll forgive some of my nominees to the true history of baseball hall of fame.  How about Andrew Freedman, owner of the Giants in the 1890’s and a big wheel.  He advocated ‘syndicate baseball’, that is, all the teams in the league should be in a trust and teams would then become franchises, players salaries would be capped, and players would be jointly pooled, shifted around as profit opportunity was found.   His system was not wholly adopted, but you can see parts of it still today, and players salaries were once capped.  Not until Curt Flood, one of the better defensive center fielders to play and still not in HOF, sued MLB and won rights of players to become free agents, did player servitude end.  Flood’s contractual free agency changed the game profoundly.

Before 1900 there were numerous leagues, the National League being the biggest, but American Association and Players League being rivals. In 1900 baseball drew fewer fans than did polo, another popular sport.  It was a rough game of men who brawled and cheated.  The National’s Baltimore Orioles of the 1890’s have 5 Hall members.  Skipping a base if the umpire wasn’t looking was routine.  Honus Wagner of the Pirates explained how he didn’t get a home run because he was roughed up by Orioles as he rounded the bases, “the first baseman gave me the hip as I rounded the base, the second baseman slugged me, Jennings tripped me at shortstop and when I got around 3^rd, McGraw was waiting with a shotgun, I think.”

So what made baseball grow and polo die off?  Baseball could be a family sport. You could play baseball at a picnic.  Women in long skirts could bat with a child as designated runner.  For the honor of making baseball civilized, I would nominate Mr. and Mrs. Frank Robison who bought the St. Louis Browns in 1899.  His wife thought the uniforms were hideous and had a new set of bright red uniforms tailored with red striped socks.  The wild colors caused quite a stir in the press, the team was jokingly nicknamed ‘Cardinals’ when Willie McHale of the “St. Louis Republic” overheard a woman say “what a lovely shade of cardinal!”, and game attendance by families soared with special discounts for families to attend.  The red uniforms were scrapped, but not the new nickname and the team logo now became two birds on a bat, the first truly recognizable logo (rather than just a letter or town name). Cardinals sold their “Browns” name to another team in the city.

Most of the original MLB teams were in a narrow eastern belt from Chicago to Boston.  But baseball grew to be enormously popular in the west.  And the guy who helped fund many minor league teams was the oil tycoon Harry Sinclair.  In 1914, he formed the last rival league to challenge MLB with the Federal League.  They raided players from the American and National Leagues and sued MLB (quite correctly) under Sherman Anti-trust Law.  The judge who presided was Kenesaw Mountain Landis who dallied and delayed not wanting to make the obvious decision in favor of the Federals.  Eventually MLB negotiated a settlement with Sinclair and changed some of its monopolistic rules to allow owners to have greater autonomy.  For this, Sinclair is nowhere near the HOF but Landis, the opportunistic judge who secretly favored the established leagues, was awarded “Commissioner of Baseball” and became a dictator for 26 years at the head of Major League Baseball.

Since HOF recognizes guys who fell off the wagon, like Delahanty, why don’t they have “Shoeless” Joe Jackson?  In 1919, the overwhelming favorite Chicago White Sox lost to the upstart Cincinnati Reds.  Big shots lost money they had bet on the Series and brought pressure on Landis.  Commissioner Landis determined after interviews, that 8 White Sox players had consorted with gamblers to “throw the series”.  Jackson was the poor country kid who was completely intimidated by his audience with Landis, the bullying prosecutor.  But most historians now believe that Jackson was innocent.  After all, he hit .385 during the Series and made several sensational plays—not exactly behavior expected of a guy throwing a game.  Considered the greatest hitter in baseball, he was banished from the sport. By the way, a jury acquitted all 8 players in 1921. None were ever allowed to play again and none are in the HOF.

There are weird deletions from the HOF.  Why didn’t Heinie Zimmerman, the great third baseman of the early Chicago Cubs get included?  In 1912 he hit .372 and led his team to the championship.  Ken Boyer of the 1950’s Cardinals? Pete Rose?

This brings me to players unlikely to ever be inducted because of steroid use.  MLB had no anti-steroid sanctions until the 21^st century, but they sure had a big problem after 1995.  Those were the years of the baseball strikes in which the Players Union demanded a larger share of gross profits and nearly destroyed MLB when fans went on strike.  Attendance by 1997 had dropped by half—drawing fewer fans than hockey that year.  All the rosy predictions of how the national sport would come back after the strikes went horrifyingly wrong.  20 teams were bleeding money and the Montreal Expos had attendance of 8000 people per game.  But in 1998 Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire got into a home run hitting contest that the game had not seen since Mantle vs. Maris, 35 years before.  The publicity and excitement saved the game.  Baseball made a big comeback in 1998.  Well, then it turned out that not just Sosa and McGwire, but also another 50 or so players were juicing themselves with a variety of drugs--all legal at the time.  Keeping McGwire, Sosa,Clemens and Bonds out of the Hall seems to me equivalent of saying that Picasso’s or Van Gogh’s art was illegitimate since they both had mental problems and drank.  Worse still, is the treatment of players who “seemed to play as if on something” and are now shunned by the Hall of Fame via rumor.  All this from dopey sportswriters who are electing nobody to the Hall. Perhaps they can’t find somebody who wasn’t suspicious in the 90’s.

Here’s my opinion.  Sportswriters make a living spinning mostly candy-coated versions of the game.  Their version of history is not always accurate because of their biases.  When confronted with a controversy, like steroids use, or gambling, or anti-trust law they scapegoat the problem. See, I should remodel my old house and make a museum.

Gentlemen prefer blondes

“Gentlemen prefer bonds,” Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon told a reporter when asked whether one should invest in stocks or bonds in the 1920’s.  As many lost their fortunes in the stock crash of 1929-32, Mellon’s words looked very wise.  The market lost 87% ($8 became $1) but bonds came out ahead.

At the age of 13, my grandfather died unexpectedly and my dad sent me to live with grandma on the other ranch.  My mission was twofold—do the chores and keep grandma company.  I remember her getting out the picture albums and reminiscing about the 20’s and 30’s.  Her take on the 30’s wasn’t the kind of gloom you hear so often.  It was an age of rediscovery, she said.  Men rediscovered faith and family and women rediscovered their curves and the joy of home.  In other words, hard times made people return to reality and values.  I was especially amused at her take on women.  They forsook gin and jazz and fast car driving and got married, she was saying.  And from 1928-1935 there were significant practical improvements in fashions—short sleeves, bras, hair barrettes and zippers.  Hence the remark about the rediscovery of the curves.  And with this refocusing on things other than money and fast times, comedian Henny Youngman seized on the spirit of the times and twisted Mellon’s words. “Gentlemen prefer blondes.” Everybody laughed.

I was talking to my trusted financial advisor last night and he noted that all the old guys my age who are in his company are worried spitless over the coming inflation. The young guys are all going, “what’s inflation?” The bond market is roaring and is 5 times as large as the stock market these days.  Every day he interviews clients who fear investing in stocks.  And yet the interest rates are historically low, as low as they can possibly get.  Any rise means a disaster in the bond markets. The company keeps advising people to stay very limited in bond exposures.  “I even worry,” he mused, “ about what might happen if bonds were to crash very hard.  Would it take down stocks too?”  Suddenly my memory was awakened.  That’s exactly what happened in 1978-1982, that double dip recession that came on the heels of the Carter administration trashing the dollar in attempt to lower the real cost of government debt.  Before that time it was always considered that stocks rise and bonds fall or vice versa.  But in the late seventies, inflation rose, and both stocks and bonds went down. Then to fight inflation, the Fed artificially raised interest rates again.  There was practically nothing you could invest in that would make money.  The rich, like Ted Kennedy, fled to Swiss bank accounts which paid a half percent interest but the Swiss currency rose 6% a year compared to the dollar. 

It’s déjà vu all over again, Yogi said.  This time it probably won’t be the Fed that increases interest rates, but the world’s investors who fear getting a full dollar back after lending it to the US Treasury.  So Obama wants to simply mint a $1 trillion coin?  Wow!  That ought to inspire confidence about like a carnival token.  Does the trillion dollar coin have chocolate inside?  Think about the movie possibilities for a Pink Panther heist of the trillion dollar coin.  No fear.  Cleuseau got it back.  Whoops, he laid it on his beach chair and a sea gull came along and swallowed it and flew off!

If a corporation has need to borrow a lot of money and interest rises they get hit by a double whammy.  First interest costs skyrocket.  Second, bonds nosedive leaving investors/lenders extremely leery of ever lending again.  With the company’s borrowing ability in question, the stock will crash and burn.  Have this happen over an entire economy and you get the sad situation where there is no safe investment.  It happens at most once a generation.  

Obama is planning on people fleeing to the government for aid when they lose their life savings via inflation.  He may be benign and mean no harm but history is not comforting in times when people are in dire straits.  Hitler used the Weimar hyperinflation to rise to power.  Peron used Argentine inflation to destroy the economy, turning“United States of South America” into a third world country.  The French Revolution and guillotines followed the famine of 1788-89.

Many are stocking up on guns and ammunition.  I am better at solving problems in humbler ways.  Those of us who see this crisis coming need to invest in hard assets that probably won’t increase but will at least hold value.  We need to help organize our families, churches and communities in ways that care for those who don’t have the ability to earn.  In other words, rediscover our values, home and what really counts in life.  No one remembers Mellon’s advice on investing.  But Youngman’s little joke turned into a pithy saying that lasted considerably longer.   

Fiscal Clifford

Sitting around with my friend, Fiscal Clifford, and discussing the vote.  What I want to know is how these guys can vote so fast.  A bill is written in normal English first, but a staff of experts have to put together the actual code of the bill.  This may include thousands of changes to the law in obscure places.  A bill that extends unemployment benefits may, for example change the coffee-break times of union contract workers in the unemployment office.  It may require a cost of living adjustment in certain locales and not in others.  Net result is that a bill cannot be completely written for days. Steve has shown me bills that were a page long in normal English versions that wound up being an inch thick once written as law.  And the codified entire bill is what counts and must be available for reading.  Lest some weird unintended side effect on the law occur.  "What! They are closing all the post offices in 4 counties!!"

Clifford smiled at me and answered, "You are right to be suspicious.  In fact the Senate got to look at the codified bill 3 minutes before they voted at 1:39 am.  You can find that on Drudge Report.  But, don't think that the bill was really complete.  By a parliamentary trick, the Senate reserved conference committee time for the bill when it came back from the House, so that staffers could complete their research of the legal codes and make all the changes they deemed necessary.  In other words, they didn't really know what the hell they were voting on--even if Harry Reid could speed read it.  Hare just waved his arms and said, 'Let's vote'.  Gives new meaning to the statement by Pelosi about Obamacare that we would have to pass it to find out what's in it."

Okay so they passed more than the tax stuff in the form of Puerto Rican Rum subsidies and so forth.  I thought the House had a moratorium on earmarks.  How did that get passed?  I did note that all sorts of earmarks had cluttered the Sandy Relief Bill.  So how did HR8, the Fiscal Cliff Avoidance bill get passed?  Clifford smiled again.  It just slipped through, he noted.  Now Charlie Wrangle and Harry Reid can dance around while drinking cheap rum.  I thought of the old cheer of St. Johns College I had to learn as a freshman, "Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo, laroo, ishabakka, ishabakka, boo!  Pass me a legislator, half-past an alligator, RUM, BUM BOLLIGATOR, Chicasaw a dog! St. Johns Seniors, Rah! Rah! Rah!"  Does this not fit?

Well, the Dems certainly got the upper hand in this, I lamented.  But Clifford just laughed.  "After arguing for ten years that the Bush tax cuts were bad and that the Clinton tax rates made business boom, they are now saying that a return to Clinton rates would have been a disaster and did what the R's could never achieve--made several tax fixes permanent.  The alternative min tax will be indexed to inflation.  And the ultimate irony is that they decried middle class tax cuts while demanding justice that the upper class pay their fair share.  In other words, if you make $449,999 they are your friend, but if you make $450,001, you are one of the evil rich.  Worse, the number of tax returns above $450,000 represents only 0.7% of all returns, and 6 days of revenue which could run the government."

But the wealthy didn't come out unscathed, I offered.  Most people who manage to accumulate assets do so by tax  strategies that utilize the lower capital gains rates--which have gone up.  "Yep," Clifford responded.  "And nobody is going to scrap their trusts and estate planning with a 40% tax on assets either."

But doesn't this mean that the Republican congress is neutered?  They will barely have a majority in a couple weeks and the leadership is split,  I asked.  Plus, Obama got all the credit.  Clifford chuckled.  "Well, the R's shot themselves in the foot expecting that the mandatory taxation and defense spending cuts would be so onerous that the D's would look for a compromise.  What we all see plainly is that Obama doesn't care a fig about deficits.  He scoffs at deficits.  And of course, so do a lot of Americans.  They have heard about deficits for so long they are jaded and don't care.  They won't know what hit them when the debt bomb explodes.  The next round is over the debt ceiling.  I would like to see the Congress just hang tough and talk about how Obama needs to live on his means.   But it will never happen," Clifford insists.  "They will make a show, but ultimately don't want to be blamed for a recession."  Which prompted me to laugh.  I recently read Paul Krugman, that leftist economist say forebodingly that this year we might get a recession started by politics 'for the first time'.  Ha! He finally admitted that recessions are not normally caused by politics.  The Dems have blamed every recession since Hoover on Republican politics.  Now Krugman let his hand slip.

"But by being the big spender when the bomb explodes," Clifford mused, "Obama and the Democrats have shot themselves in the foot for a long long time.  There are a lot of people who will be cussing them when the bills come due and America becomes a weaker country.

Jan.2, Naval Act and nickels

I was watching the bowls and the announcers were bragging about the quarterbacks and a lineman, how they had such cerebral grade point averages.  So why, I asked myself, does the median NFL player retire with a net worth of under half a million dollars.  I guess they all buy fast cars and don’t watch their nickels. 

January 2, Naval Act of 1794, is the day that Congress approved money for 6 ships for the first US Navy.  There was no Dept. of the Navy at the time, it was just a defensive move by Congress because the Barbary pirates were intercepting our shipping.  In anticipation, a certain William Brabb, a shipbuilder’s purchasing agent, had immigrated from Hull, England to Boston in 1792 at the invitation of George Claghorn, shipbuilder.  I know Bill Brabb.  He was my great grandfather 7 generations ago. Hull, on the coast north of London was the center for the shipbuilding industry of the British Empire.  The enterprise takes a lot of different materials, specialist builders and careful watching of the nickels. Brabb was a minor player, but he had an important job. And my gang still watches its nickels.

                Claghorn was the shipbuilder hired to build the USS Constitution.  6 frigates were authorized by the Naval Act, most with 44 guns and designed by Joshua Humphries.  Humphries was a genius.  America was a small player.  England had 800 navy ships and France had 250.  Our ships had to be rugged enough to withstand a hard fight but also fast enough to avoid an encounter with a British Ship of Line which might have 80-100 cannons.  (An old French saying, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”) The French built fast blockade-avoiding ships to get past the British, but they were made of pine.  British ships were pine also, but had white oak masts.  Humphries called for ships of smaller beam (width) and longer keel like the French ships, but made of live oak and white oak primarily.  Southern Live oak was used for the ribs of the hull.  It is extremely hard and waterproof.  The upper sides were also made of oak.  And then the Constitution was fitted with very large ship-of-line type bombardment cannons shooting 24 lb. balls. Most ships carried guns for 12 or 18 lb. balls.  The heavy use of oak became famous for the Constitution in the war of 1812 when it demolished the HMS Guerriere and the sailors gleefully reported that British cannonballs literally bounced off the sides.  I’m no authority on 18^th century naval warfare, but I have heard it said that tactics were multiple.  You could shoot for the rigging and masts using either chainshot or balls.  This disabled the craft.  You could use balls to try to blast holes near the waterline for a sinking, but the best idea was to blast the sides.  This caused a spray of deadly splinters into the opponent’s crew.  It took a dozen men to arm and fire each cannon so by killing/injuring the manpower, this was the most effective technique. 

            Apparently defense spending was the same then as now.  The 6 frigates Humphries designed were built in 6 different seaports since Congress wanted to spread the money around—or had to for enactment. They authorized $688,888, a big number for the day.  Building low volume, specialized military weaponry costs real bucks.  There was a year-long delay when a crew sent to Georgia to cut live oaks all came down with malaria. Congress was informed there were cost overruns, and at least twice had to appropriate more money, making the total tab over $1 million.  By autumn of 1797 only 3 ships were built and Congress was in a terrific argument, Democrats claiming this was money down a rat hole.  A big investigation ensued, 3 shipbuilders were fired, and Congress decided April 30, 1798 to create a Department of the Navy in order to get a handle on costs in the future.    But in Boston, Constitution was launched in October, 1797.  And several of the folks who had been instrumental in getting costs down and schedules done in Boston were asked to help organize the new Navy department. 

            It is not clear what William Brabb had to do with this, but we do know that one of his grandkids married a granddaughter of General and Congressman Dan Morgan of New Jersey. Morgan was the ultimate redneck who rarely wore a uniform and had founded a group called the Virginia Sharpshooters.  They had accurate rifles and long-barrel muskets that could pick off British officers instead of just firing generally into the crowd of the opponent’s line.  At Saratoga he got frontier women to work as sharpshooters which confused the Hessians and Brits who felt it was dishonorable to shoot at a woman. His victory at Cowpens, North Carolina was instrumental in defeating the British in the Revolutionary War.  A couple generations later, the Brabbs founded a small town, Romeo, Michigan (now a suburb of Detroit).  They were the bankers and accountants, naturally.  A great, great aunt was the first woman to graduate as a medical doctor at the University of Michigan.  My great grandfather, Bill Brabb (Same name again) dreamed of being a cowboy and came to the Flint Hills north of here.

            The War of 1812 could have turned out so differently had it not been for the hurricane that destroyed the British invasion in 1814.  But some historians hold that an important reason the British decided ultimately to sue for peace was the US Navy, though tiny, had ship-for-ship beat the stuffing out of the greatest navy in the world. They reasoned that the Americans, acting as pirates, would forever harm shipping, even if the Brits recaptured the American colonies. Constitution became famous for its exploits with the public and thus it was preserved time and again, and now sits in Charleston Naval Yard at Boston as a floating museum.  It is the oldest commissioned vessel afloat in the world, has been used to promote the Navy and many other causes.  Now that’s a well-spent nickel.

 

Odds and ends

A few odds and ends as I wait for the new year. 

I think the reason I don’t like Obama is because I must have rented to the guy.  Of course my memory is dim after all the renters and their shenanigans, but I’m sure he is one of those guys who just doesn’t pay his rent and then brags that he “saved” by not doing it.  One of my renters put up a big stink once, swore that he had dropped his cash in my mail slot when I was gone.  Finally I agreed to forgive a month and swallow the loss.  But then he bragged to his next-door neighbor about having gotten out of paying the rent.  Since I am a person who prides in my word, I didn’t confront him about this.  I just found other excuses to evict the following month.  Everyone was sure that there would be a “doc fix” outside of Obamacare.  Obama was bragging that his bill saved untold billions in medical costs.  Then we found out he simply cut Medicare payments to the docs by billions. That sucker just didn’t pay the rent.  And now it turns out that the Harry Reid never brought up the ‘doc fix’ in time so doctors are now slated to get a 25.3% reduction from Medicare.  And then last summer, Obama demanded that insurers just cough up coverage without being paid for Catholic birth control and abortion coverage.  Then he bragged long and loud about it during the campaign.  Didn’t that sucker rent from me once? He looks familiar.

And if your Dem friends say that health insurers make huge windfall profits, just tell them they can put a stop to this almost instantly.  Just require all insurers to be mutuals.  Mutuals already comprise 55% of health carriers.  Then everything will be non-profit and we can get on with a healthy discussion of the real problems.

Air Force played in a bowl game but came up short.  Trouble was they had only a ground game.(???)

With all the gun talk, the libs are trotting out the old arguments about how you should only own a gun if you are a soldier since the 2^nd A starts out, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,…”  Ask them if they know what a Militia is.  No one seems to have a clue.  Militias were common in the days before there were any police.  Every able-bodied adult male from some age (say, 18-45) in an area was required to own a firearm and supply ammunition.  The purpose was for instant defense of the community or to keep law and order in a vigilante style.  “Well-regulated” doesn’t mean that there were bureaucrats regulating; they hadn’t been invented. It was synonymous with functioning well. Polished.  Working together.  OK abolished their militias just a few years ago since not everyone owns a gun.  There are counties in Georgia that still require you to own a gun for such purposes.  I heard some pundit on TV protest that the weapons of 1791 were muskets and not guns.  Ahem.  A musket was a gun with an un-rifled barrel (was not scribed on the inside to impart spin and accuracy to the projectile). Rifled guns were expensive in those days and so few existed.  The colonial fix for accuracy was to use a very long barrel and those long-barreled muskets were the death of so many British soldiers. 

Russia  isn’t a free country.  Proof: Vlad decided to impale the lives of all those orphan kids who had Americans as adoptive parents.  If any politician in a free country suggested such cruelty, they would never be re-elected.  So Russia ain’t free.  It is as if the President of the US decided to create a healthcare system where all the people were told they would get care.  But the price of insurance will double and you still can’t afford it.  If you don’t buy insurance, you get fined and then you still don’t have any insurance. Now that’s real cruelty. (Please don’t write me and inform me that Vlad the Impaler was actually Wallacian)

Speaking of, I think that the next step after Obama phones should be Obama Barbecue.  All the poor people would get free barbecue.  The rich have to pay but could only sniff.  And you’d be required to buy and eat barbecue no matter what your religious inclinations.  Supreme Court says what you buy is not a 10^th Amendment right reserved “to the people” anymore.  It’s a tax. All you Vegans need to develop a taste for calf fries. Muslims, try the pulled pork.

Bill Engvall says his mom’s southern fried chicken could bring peace to the Middle East.  Do Barack and Hillary know this?  Of course she has a concussion and he’s not allowed to go farther than Hawaiian hoi poi and spam.  Otherwise he’d never hear the end of it from Michele. Maybe we should have sent some to the Wisconsin capital building last year.  Where Steve came from in the Ozarks, they hunt hogs and hog fish. You think Michele understands this?

Batshit Crazies

It snowed and we were housebound and watched a movie.  “Moneyball” was one of the big surprises of this year, a movie that was supposed to be grade B and the makers merely hoped would break even.  Instead it became a blockbuster hit.  It’s about the management of baseball talent, the story of how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s managed to contract a bunch of cast-off players and remake the A’s after they had gone to the World Series the year before, but then all the big players had left for rich contracts with other teams. A’s had no money to replenish the team and Beane managed to hire a young kid who was a statistical/computer whiz who found the undervalued players.  And of course, if you know baseball history, the A’s made the playoffs and set a new major league record of 20 straight wins.  All the while Beane’s scouts and manager and the rest of the baseball public made fun of his changes.  But the punch line of the movie comes through the President of the Boston Red Sox who tried to hire Beane at the end of the season.  Roughly quoting, he said, “The first guy to break a barrier, to go through a wall, usually gets pretty bruised up.  That’s because the guy who comes in with a new idea threatens the guys in power, the guys who are used to running things their way, the guys who hold the reins.  And they go absolutely batshit crazy over the change.” 

How true in all things.  It was true of the Civil Rights movement when Southern governors and officials went batshit crazy over the marches and the marchers got pretty beat up.  True of Washington at Valley Forge, true of the guys who started Apple, true of Karl Benz and his auto-mobile. And most of all, I remember how true it was of Ronald Reagan and Arthur Laffer who came in with a novel idea that if you tax less, government gets more revenue.  That was utterly counter-intuitive for many political junkies and politicians.  Reagan’s own V-P went batshit crazy, calling it voodoo economics.  The media, the Europeans, the ruling Congressional Democrats, just about everyone went batshit crazy with criticism. But Lafferism worked.  And then Thatcher tried it also and it resurrected the Brits from “The British Disease” of welfare statism.  The Pacific rim countries paid note.  They had longed to become developed countries, and couldn’t decide if they wanted the Japanese model or the Chinese.  When they saw Lafferism they tried it and they became Asian Tigers of growth.

Sometimes the guy with the new ideas loses.  Benz just didn’t have enough resources to fight and wound up selling out to a guy who named the cars after his girlfriend, Mercedes.  Henry Ford had a vision of cheap cars but then when the country got richer, they wanted something upscale and bought GM.  And the Republicans put the Voodoo Economics Veep in after Reagan and gradually lost the movement to Washington political hacks.  But as the Red Sox Prez noted, “Next year any team that isn’t rebuilding their team with your model [Beane and the A’s], is going to ultimately lose.” And now the Northern Europeans as well as Asia are converting sheepishly to Laffer’s models. 

But here in America, the Batshit Crazies won an election with 52% in 2008 and 50.3% in 2012. They used all the old faithful ‘progressive’ tools—Class Warfare, Chickens in every special interest pot—and they are cocky as can be over 50.3%. Counter to the warnings of Britain and Scandinvians and Australians, they have doubled down on the Spend-Into-Prosperity model of government.  May I simply point out that it won’t work in the broader scheme of things.  Economics doesn’t lie.  We face horrid stagflation. What then? Default? Volcker 21% interest rates? At that point may I quote the words of Rev. Wright, “America’s chickens have come home to roost”.

The American people await new management.  The new manager will have to be expert at turnarounds in the political world, a communicator who can keep the people on his/her side, a bold artist of change back to the conservatism and free-market principles that made America the envy of the world.  We’ve come through the wall, been bruised a bit, but I have faith in American common sense.  Common sense will come out in spades when our team’s economy starts to look like the Royals and Expos.

In the end, Beane’s numbers guy encourages him to start attending the games and not distance himself from the team.  The romance of the game is still there.  So too, we need to take the fight to the Batshit Crazies.

Polar Express

Christmas Eve, babysitting my 2-yr-old grand-daughter and she wanted to watch the movie Polar Express. And the sound had to be turned way down so we wouldn’t disturb her month-old brother’s nap.  I had never seen the movie, you can’t lipread computer-generated characters, so I figured out what it was about just from the actions.  Here’s my version.

It starts with a kid who is awake at midnight on Christmas Eve. A huge train pulls up and he is asked to climb aboard.  They were rounding up Republicans, no doubt. Republicans get into politics with little experience because they have a life without it, so they were symbolized by children.  Awake at midnight—that meant he was worrying about his business, no doubt.  The conductor was the head bureaucrat who handed him a food stamp, so he could get on the gravy train for a life of cradle-to-grave security.  They had rounded up a number of Republicans, an Afro-American girl and a smart-ass kid and another who can’t trust the bureaucracy.  I mean they weren’t perfect people, just all individuals. 

The bureaucrats seem determined to make the train crash.  The engineer and fireman are a couple of bozos who  act like DMV employees who suddenly confront panic.  They try to run the train off the fiscal cliff and then take it into the abyss of debt, but each time the Republicans save the day with trepidatious acts, but complete common sense.  Likewise the R’s help each other, the way normal good-hearted people do. At one point they stop a certain crash into a herd of Independents, i.e. reindeer standing on the tracks. There’s also a good angel who saves them from time to time, dressed as a hobo who disappears after each near-disaster.  We never do see God and so we don’t know what party he belongs to, but Santa Claus is definitely a Democrat. And finally they arrive at his  headquarters of the State.

All the citizens of the State headquarters wear the same red clothes, like little socialist elves.  They turn out in mass to herald the head narcissist, Santa.  I guess the goal was to get the R’s to assimilate with the elfin Dems, but it doesn’t work.  The Republican kids wander off to find the secret underground where all the children of the world are watched and labeled as naughty or nice.  They walk by the vacated factories and finally manage to embed themselves in Santa’s bag of handouts.  In the end, the main character collects a bell that has fallen off Santa’s sleigh and tries to do maintenance.  Finally, the R’s are escorted back to the train as unconvertible and sent home.  They get their food stamps punched with labels like “lead” and “believe” which is exactly what a Republican does when called upon.  The main character kid receives the single bell he found from the narcissist-in-chief’s sleigh as a lame thank you for his efforts.  Nonetheless, he smiles in the acknowledgement of knowing that he had saved his country.  And that’s about all an R needs, of course.

So in the end, I suppose I really did like the movie, muted and all.  It tells an important tale about hanging in there, working hard, doing heroic things and even if we are outnumbered, we have a bell to ring for America.