Thoughts on Mark Kelly

The Trump administration is starting what can really only politely be called a vendetta against Democratic Senators who have made a public statement warning service members against carrying out illegal orders, and Senator Kelly is in the crosshairs because he's still in the reserves.  Now part of it is simply petty; the Secretary of Defense commenting on how Kelly was wearing his awards.  OK, Hegseth, are you trying to prove your career is about chicken manure?  

More significantly, as a young skull full of much, I tried (and failed) to get into the service academies, and one of the things I and others asked was something that was clearly on our minds as we'd learned about the history of the Vietnam War; what are cadets being taught about the proper response to situations like My Lai.

The response was not tense at all--the officers we were talking with had clearly been taught well that there are cases where the lowliest private gets to ignore the commands of someone with stars on their shoulders.  

And that is the thing that troubles me about Trump's response to Kelly et al.  Hegseth at least ought to make clear that Kelly has a point, and his main response ought to be something like "Senator Kelly, precisely what examples do you have in mind here?".  The fact that he does not do this is, in my mind, very damning about the culture he's trying to create in the Department of Defence.  It's as bad, really, as a Naval Academy graduate ignoring the Honor Code ("We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those among us who do.") to help Michigan steal a national championship.  (OK, I shouldn't care about concussion-ball, but the fact that Stallions so blithely ignored that code suggests to me that it's not as big a deal at Navy as it used to be)

And really, the example that I've got in mind is the Trump administration hitting speedboats with missiles instead of apprehending them.  Now it is possible that this is difficult, and it is possible that the boats would go up in flames anyways.  But that said, hitting them with a missile destroys witnesses (the drivers are generally poor people, not drug kingpins) to where the drugs are being made and shipped, and of course puts the cargo into bazillions of gallons of water.  

So at the least, it's poor criminal justice, as well as poor international relations--apprehend the wrongdoers, yes, and let the world know who's sending drugs to the U.S. and Europe, absolutely.  But get the evidence.

And since you don't have evidence to justify the action that we know of, it's at least closer to My Lai than I would care to be associated with.  Perhaps a judge will sign off on it, but I still don't like it, and if nobody objected to the action, that troubles me a lot.

My family is a pandemic...

...according to the University of Minnesota, which is now publishing "student materials" claiming that whiteness is a "pandemic".   As the parents of six children and grandparents to one (and hopefully a lot more), my wife and I are of course contributing mightily to this problem.  Especially interesting to us is the fact that "The U", as it's affectionately called here, is saying that "colorblindness" is a symptom of white racism.  Weird me, I thought that Dr. King had advocated something about that in his epic "I have a dream" speech.  

It is also very troubling that "The U" identifies the family as one of the opposing features that they need to work against; quite frankly, we have over six decades of experience with what happens in communities where nuclear families are not formed, and our jails and graveyards are filled with the results.  

We might somewhat bitterly joke that since Minnesota is regulating the application of fertilizer to farm fields more strictly, all of the "bovine scat" is regrettably going to DEI offices at the U.  in St. Paul.

Update: we might also wonder what some of our black friends, devoted to the principle "they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the contact of their character", and devoted to their own nuclear families, might respond to the notion that they were somehow promoting white racism in honoring Dr. King's memory.  

Not that I'm out of shape

....but my "new to me" Garmin watch told me I'd reached my aerobic exercise target last night while I was kneading bread. I guess I need to cook more.  

A bit more on "improper payments"

When I think about massive amounts of NIL money being spent on athletes--I've heard estimates in the millions annually for some of the top earners, and even floors of $150,000 annually for the bench-warmers, my mind goes instantly to what I remember from college about fellow, um, "students" who we graciously and kindly referred to as "trust fund babies".  You know the kind I'm talking about--the kid was driving a late model BMW while we mere mortals were making do with bicycles or rusted out LeCars.  The kid who you wouldn't see in the dorm cafeteria because he (she) had the money to eat out every meal.

And with that kind of money, all too often, those kids didn't do the studying they needed to do to pass their classes, which could lead to "graduating to a lesser college" (i.e. flunking out), or if their parents particularly cared, getting a lot of tutors and some "come to Jesus moments" about how they could go from upper class to middle class or worse in a hurry if they didn't learn to work.

Often, we'd see them running out of money, because, as Dave Ramsey will tell you, no amount of money will cover up a spending problem.  And that is, in my view, what you're going to see with a lot of athletes bringing home big money when they're fresh out of high school with 680 points on their SATs.  Never having learned math well, let alone how to balance a checkbook, they're likely to run through that NIL money in a hurry, ending up with a lot of month to go before their next paycheck.

And now that same player comes in to the coach looking pretty hungry because, quite frankly, they got back to the dorm too late to get dinner, and asks the coach for something to tide himself over.  I don't know if this is what happened at Michigan State, but to me, it seems somewhat likely.  

What to do?  Well, the old system had a training table for the athletes, but the downside of it was that too many of them were getting to the end of four (five) years without a degree, injured, and with no prospects of going to the pro leagues at any level.  So you've got to compensate these athletes somehow, and so I wonder if NIL money ought to be--beyond being capped at a certain level--placed by default into investment accounts for the most part, instead of simply being given to the athletes.  No matter what, some serious attention needs to be paid to financial training for marginal students who are going to be getting huge sums of money.

Message received

The NCAA, fresh off issuing fines--but no forfeited games or probation--over the University of Michigan's sign-stealing scheme that netted the program about a dozen wins they otherwise would not have gotten--has ordered Michigan State to vacate 14 wins over about $10,000 in "improper payments" to six players, and to spend three years on probation.

Message is received; the NCAA has no clue, and that was proven a while back when they declared the stinky weasels had won their "national championship" "fair and square".  Um, no, the ban on stealing signs is there for a reason, and being in the right place on key plays is a huge deal.  

What it says, moreover, is that the NCAA seriously needs to upgrade its rules, as the $10,000 improperly spent by MSU pales in comparison to the $16.3 million + spent annually in NIL payments by Michigan.  Yes, the old system--you get your education and a few bucks for meals and such--was a huge injustice to the strong majority of players who had no prospects of playing in the big leagues, but nevertheless risked life-altering injuries on the field.  

What would I suggest?  First of all, no more "general studies" programs--we should be nudging pro leagues to set up farm teams in football and basketball for those athletes who really have no business in a four year college.  As illiterate All-Pro Dexter Manley could tell you, it's a big problem.  Next, there needs to be some limit on NIL funding in the same way that the pro leagues have salary caps.  Maybe a cap at $12 million plus insurance policies for life-altering injuries would be a good start.  You want more?  Go to the pro leagues.

Finally, the old system of investigating colleges when a coach buys a player a sandwich needs to be discarded.  The Pareto Principle ought to matter; when the average player is taking home over $150,000 annually plus his scholarship, that sandwich, or even an improper payment of a thousand bucks or so, simply isn't going to change things much.

How not to pass the bar exam

Apparently Ms. Kim Kardashian is blaming AI, specifically ChatGPT, for her failures to pass the California bar exam.  Somehow, the notion that one ought to study, say, law books in order to pass the bar escaped her, and she's learning the hard way that "hallucinations" (AI errors) leave a nasty mark when the exams are being graded.

It reminds me of a joke I learned in college: a young woman, dressed seductively, comes up to her professor and says "I'd do anything to pass your class", and then casually flips her hair.  The professor decides to play along, and says "Oh, you'd do anything, huh?".  Another hair flip, a breathy "yessss......", and the professor responds:

Would you.......study....? 

How not to make friends and influence people

As my legions (ha!) of readers well know, I am a died in the wool conservative with libertarian leanings, but on my Twitter feed, what I'm finding is that many people on the port side of the aisle actually like what I have to say--and it's not that I'm changing, but rather that we are finding we have something in common.

Along those lines, an interesting link I saw from one of these "likers" was an explanation of why the left didn't run away from Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the like.  It goes like this:

• If you have $0, you get welfare
• If you have over fifty million dollars, you get bailouts (and I might add, corporate welfare)
• If you have $2300 in savings, you qualify to fund the whole system and get lectured about how to budget better

 What's being illustrated here, really, is that what we have in our country is not capitalism with a safety net, but rather mercantilism--and it might be added a mercantilism that our President and his adherents fully support.  It is you and I, after all, that got stuck with the bill for Trump's six bankruptcies--those bankers taking the loss had to get that money from somewhere, and you have an account.

So we might infer that a way to reach the left, yes, even the progressive left, is to abandon mercantilism and go closer to classic conservatism.  WHen the progressive left sees that we are no longer subsidizing the rich, they're going to listen to us better when we point out that government run grocery stores and rent control lead to hunger and homelessness.

Brilliance in the judiciary

Faced with the impending end of SNAP (food stamp) benefits due to the government shutdown, a federal judge has apparently ordered workers from a to be determined federal agency that may not exist, and who are not currently being paid, to send out SNAP payments/checks from a fund to be determined that also may or may not exist.

Funny me, I'd thought that involuntary servitude was banned with the 13th Amendment, and that if you're going to be spending money, maybe that ought to start with Congress, per Article 1, and ought to be directed through federal departments that actually exist and from resources that are actually known.  One thing I know for sure is that when federal judges act against the 13th Amendment, they ought to be removed from the bench and disbarred.  Crazy chicanery like this needs to have a serious penalty.

AI needs a little bit of work

I decided to take a look at my Twitter feed today, and was surprised to see that a number of supermodels had moved to my town just to be near me, and they'd figured out how attractive I was from my Twitter feed.

The one problem is that the picture shown in my Twitter feed is of a bird.  So either AI is having some real trouble differentiating birds from handsome men, or there are some people out there whose sexual preferences are really, really sick.   

Glad I'm not a Muscovite

Check out the picture of Russian air defense around the Kremlin here.  Apparently the height of technology for Russian air defense is a machine gun mounted on a western pickup, and Muscovites can look forward to periodic rains of 7.62mm (or maybe 12.7/.50 caliber) bullets raining town on their neighborhoods.  If you look at a map of Moscow, you will see that within the range that these bullets can be fired, there are literally millions of people.

We might joke somewhat bitterly that one of the most dangerous places in the world is to be "protected" by the Russian military.  Hopefully Russians wake up soon to the huge danger their dictator and his minions pose to them.

A fun project

One of the difficulties today in terms of footwear is that for whatever reason, many manufacturers don't have the good quality leather which will take a dye without excessive surface treatments--more or less, the lack of leather quality is quite literally covered up with a heavy polyurethane treatment, resulting in a shoe that is far less breathable and flexible.  Comfort takes a hit.  Part of this, I'm convinced, is because we don't eat much veal anymore, and some of the best hides for shoes do come from young cattle.

So for fun, I took a sanding block (sandpaper over foam) to one such pair of shoes, and was able to remove not only the grime from mowing, but also a good portion of the polyurethane (though not so much that one could see the base leather.   Putting them on was a revelation--it was a lot more like the high quality shoes I've bought in the past.

So if you've got some leather shoes where appearance is not key--don't do this with patent leather dress shoes for obvious reasons--and you'd like to get a little more comfort out of them, you can give this a try.  I used about a 120 grit sandpaper for this purpose.

An idea born of totalitarian idiocy

If current Russian president Vladimir Jugashvili Putin wants to show that his thinking is better than that of the Soviet era--where escaped Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko noted that they were trying to grow maize in Siberia--he could do little worse than the evident proposal to make a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska.  

How so?  Well, look at a highway map of Alaska, and then move over to the Russian side.  If you look closely, you will see that there is something pretty obviously missing.

Roads and railroads to the area.  

And of course, there is a reason for this; it's incredibly difficult to build roads on permafrost.  To get to Welsh, Alaska, you can take a boat (in summer), a plane, or, when you've got diptheria antitoxin to deliver and a good dog named Balto, a dogsled.  To build roads on permafrost, you're talking a similar amount of money as was spent on the Alaska Pipeline--$8 billion in 1974, or about $52 billion today.  The Russian side would be even worse, so we're really talking about somewhere north of $100 billion when....if there really was a market for U.S.-Russian trade, ships could embark from the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Vladivostok and arrive in Seattle. High speed rail in California looks positively intelligent in comparison.

The reality here is that such a proposal is a gambit by Putin to soothe the ego of our President and get him to sell out Ukraine.  If it were, by some tragedy, actually built, it could also serve as a highway to achieve something Putin's minions are hoping to see; Alaska again as a territory of Russia.  Let's hope and pray neither happens.

PSA for cyclists

This is the helmet of a young friend of mine who learned the hard way that hitting big bumps at 30mph leads to road rash.  Thankfully, apart from cuts and scrapes, he's going to be OK, but notice here that the helmet is pretty well cracked.  Without the helmet, it of course could have been his skull.

Thanks again, Mom

Back when I was a young skull full of mush--now I am an older skull full of the same--my mother responded to my asthma and allergies by getting me on the swim team, under the notion that the moisture would do me good.  I never seemed to figure out how much good it was doing me at the time, but yesterday, I hit the pool after a rougher day breathing and....

...well, you're right again, Mom.   

A real risk of marijuana

A study of drivers who died due to car crashes finds that about 42% of them showed signs of recent use of marijuana and THC, with a mean THC level of 30.7 ng/ml, about six times the legal limit in Colorado.  Compare this with only 15% of Americans using cannabis in any form, and it would seem that we are starting to see significant evidence that THC indeed impairs safe driving.  The next step, in my view, is to see what percentage of those fatalities also included alcohol or other drugs, and to determine what portion of users use THC at this level.

I write this as someone who is generally friendly to the notion that marijuana is nowhere near as dangerous as opioids, and I stay by that view, but we simultaneously ought to realize that the use of THC, a mild hallucinogen, will not be without consequences.