Charles' Thoughts

If Trump wins, what would hold him back? Seven guardrails

2024-10-03T16:07:00.001-07:00

Politics

If Trump wins, what would hold him back?

The guardrails of democracy reined him in last time. But they’re weakening.

May 20, 2024, 3:00 AM PDT

Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

Seven days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump threw the nation into crisis.

The country had wondered whether the new president would follow through on the extreme and authoritarian proposals he’d put forward in his campaign. On January 27, 2017, by executive order, Trump imposed an extreme version of his “Muslim ban” — barring people from seven mostly-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

Even people already approved as lawful permanent residents — people with green cards, who had been legally living and working in the US, often for years — could all of a sudden be turned away, refused entry to their adopted home.

Chaos unfolded at airports, nationwide protests erupted, and to many, it felt like something new and genuinely frightening was taking place: a slide into an oppressive regime.

But then the crisis ebbed.

Just two days after the ban was imposed, widespread criticism pushed the administration to water down the policy — “clarifying” green card holders were exempt. Five days after that, a judge blocked the rest of the order from going into effect.

The guardrails protecting democracy had, it seemed, held.

This pattern recurred during Trump’s presidency. The president ordered or considered something outrageous. He faced pushback in response. And he usually, ultimately, ended up constrained. Sometimes Trump would eventually end up with a scaled-back version of what he wanted: a retooled travel ban, made less blatantly discriminatory, did eventually get court approval. Sometimes he’d manage to go quite far — as in his attempt to steal the 2020 election — before being thwarted. But often he’d fail entirely.

All this has led to a sort of complacency among many Americans about what a second Trump term would bring. There’s a mentality of: “It won’t be that bad — we got through it last time, right?”

We did get through it last time. But that wasn’t for lack of Trump’s trying. It was because of the guardrails: those features of the political system, both formal and informal, that so often prevented Trump from actually doing the undemocratic things he tried to do.

So to assess the peril a second Trump term poses for American democracy, we need to assess the condition of the guardrails. Worryingly, most of them have weakened since Trump first came to power; some have weakened very significantly. None appear to have gotten stronger.

But it’s easy to see how a more determined and radicalized Trump, in a system with significantly weaker guardrails, could lead American democracy to even more dangerous places.

The guardrails: What they are

To understand what exactly the guardrails protecting American democracy are, think about how Trump’s corrupt ambitions were so often frustrated during his first term.

When he fired FBI Director James Comey, he ended up with special counsel Robert Mueller. When he wanted Mueller fired, it didn’t happen. When Trump urged prosecutors to charge his political enemies, they largely didn’t. He tried to punish CNN for negative coverage by blocking their parent company’s sale to AT&T; the sale went through. He tried to get Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on the Biden family, but that effort blew up in his face and got him impeached.

He never went through with other things he mused about — like delaying the 2020 election due to the pandemic or using the military to crack down on racial justice unrest. And though his attempt to overturn Biden’s election win went further than almost anyone expected, it ultimately failed too.

In all these instances, there was pushback from part of the political system — often multiple parts — that either convinced or impelled Trump to back down.

We can think of the forces constraining Trump in two categories.

First, there are all the other government officials, among whom power in the system is dispersed. These include:

Executive branch appointees, many of whom often refused to carry out Trump’s orders even though Trump himself appointed them
The career civil service — the permanent government employees who can’t be fired
Members of Congress, who pass or block laws, confirm nominees, and raise a stink when the administration does something they don’t like
The courts, charged with enforcing the law, who often ruled against Trump
State and local officials, such as the election administrators who certified Biden’s swing state wins in 2020

Second, there are the informal constraints. These include:

The Republican Party, which, broadly defined, includes politicians, party officials, and interest groups Trump wants to keep on his side
The press, which can unearth damaging news and hammer a president with critical coverage
The public, who, when roused, can speak out, take to the streets, or vote politicians out of office

To be truly successful, a would-be authoritarian would need to coopt, weaken, or smash many of these rival power centers.

Some of Trump’s second-term agenda is designed to do just that.

The executive branch: Can the “deep state” protect democracy?

The president is, in theory, in charge of the executive branch. In practice, things are more complicated. The chief executive’s instructions have to be carried out by people — people who can refuse to go along.

About 2.2 million civil servants work across the federal government in career posts, in addition to 1.3 million active duty military personnel. They cannot be fired at the president’s say-so. In his book American Resistance, David Rothkopf argues that many such officials across different ages acted “in an informal alliance” during Trump’s first term to keep him “from doing irreparable damage to the United States.”

At the top of these federal agencies are the political appointees Trump actually gets to pick. They number about 4,000, of which around 1,200 require Senate confirmation. But these hand-picked appointees also often slow-walked, argued against, or refused to carry out President Trump’s orders.

This is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s worth thinking about why it happened. One reason may be that Trump often appointed “the wrong people” — that is, GOP establishment or nonpartisan figures rather than cronies and personal loyalists.

But another reason could be that top government posts themselves have a sort of pragmatizing effect to many who hold them. Once sworn in, appointees have to deal with the reality of their agencies’ capabilities, as well as with the practical and legal perils of putting Trump’s more extreme ideas into effect.

This dynamic was demonstrated most dramatically during the election crisis, when officials in the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, and other agencies declined to aid Trump’s schemes, as did Vice President Mike Pence.

Not everyone balked, though. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official, made clear he would happily denounce swing state election results as fraudulent if Trump put him in charge of DOJ. Warned that riots would break out across the country if Trump illegally stayed in power, Clark answered, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act” — suggesting Trump could use the military to suppress protests of his power grab. (Trump nearly named Clark acting attorney general, but backed down after other DOJ officials made it clear they’d resign if he did.)

Clark shows there’s nothing guaranteed or automatic about the phenomenon where top officials constrain Trump’s worst impulses. Clark did end up facing serious consequences — he is being criminally prosecuted alongside Trump in Fani Willis’s Georgia case and may be disbarred too, but he was willing to take that risk. So if Trump could reliably identify and appoint many more Jeffrey Clarks to top posts, he’d be far better equipped to corrupt the executive branch.

And what if he could turn thousands of career civil servants into mini Jeffrey Clarks, too? Trump’s team has a plan for that. They say Trump will use his executive authority to reclassify tens of thousands of high-level career posts as political jobs, and then fire many of the people currently in those jobs, replacing them with prescreened MAGA loyalists.

Despite the big talk, there’s a question of whether Trump’s team really can pull this off. “A lot will depend on the efficiency and effectiveness of his team,” Rothkopf told Vox. “As we’ve seen in the past he doesn’t always attract the A-Team. They’re not always good at this kind of thing.”

If they can make it happen, though, the result could be a federal government that, at every level, is far more corrupt and willing to be weaponized against the president’s enemies.

Congress and the Republican Party: two weakened guardrails

Congress has a long history of frustrating and checking the ambitions of presidents, whose bold legislative agendas typically get dramatically downsized. In Trump’s first term, he adopted House Speaker Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, shelving his own hopes for an infrastructure bill due to lack of GOP support. Then, centrist Republican senators thwarted the Obamacare repeal bill. And in the midterms, the GOP lost the House, sharply constraining Trump’s legislative ambitions for his next two years.

So far, so normal. But the modern Congress is a deeply partisan institution, and in recent years, the Republican Party has changed. At first, Trump was to a large extent coopted by the GOP, but since then, he has flipped the power dynamic. He has used his influence over the party’s base to make clear that if you refuse to defend his corrupt conduct, he’ll brand you an enemy — and your future in the party will be short.

This transformation has been particularly evident in the House of Representatives. Despite perennial drama among the chamber’s conservatives, House Republicans have become increasingly sycophantic supporters of Trump — often because, they believe, this is what their voters want. More than half of the House GOP voted to overturn Biden’s wins in swing states. Vocal Trump critics keep losing primaries or quitting the party, while the speakers keep going to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee. A GOP House would be far less likely to constrain Trump next time around.

The most obvious way Congress can strike back against a corrupt president is by impeaching and removing him from office. But even after Trump’s attempt to steal the election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a mere 10 House Republicans voted to impeach him. Only two of them still remain in Congress. Partisanship has defanged the threat of impeachment.

Any resistance would likely be concentrated in the Senate. The current Democratic majority will very likely flip to the GOP if Trump wins, but still, senators have six-year terms that insulate most from imminent primary pressure. The chamber was frequently a thorn in Trump’s side in his first term, and it has never been a MAGA power base; only eight senators were hardcore MAGA enough to vote for throwing out Biden’s swing state wins in 2020.

Yet the Senate has gotten more Trumpist. Only three of ten GOP senators who voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy) will still be in office in 2025. Mitch McConnell, who’d bitterly feuded with Trump, is stepping down from his leadership post later this year. And a favorable map gives the party an opportunity to make big Senate gains. The bigger a majority that Republicans win, the less Collins’s and Murkowski’s opinions will matter.

Nominations would be the first test to see if the Senate would still constrain Trump — swing senators could withhold their votes from nominees they believe to be extreme or unqualified. But there would likely be immense party pressure on senators to back Trump’s picks if he wins. And if the Senate blocks some, Trump may well try to slot them in anyway, by naming them “acting” appointees, and betting they’ll roll over and accept it.

The fate of the filibuster, which in practice requires 60 Senate votes for all bills except the limited category of “budget reconciliation,” will also matter hugely. A new Republican Senate majority could change its rules to kill the filibuster. If the filibuster stays, Trump’s legislative ambitions will be sharply constrained; he will need Democratic votes to pass almost anything. If it goes, the sky’s the limit. Currently, key Senate Republicans are saying they want to keep the filibuster. Would they stick to that or cave to Trump’s demands to get rid of it? In the end, the Senate’s effectiveness in constraining Trump will come down to the fortitude of a few key Republicans in the chamber.

The courts, the rule of law, and the Constitution

One of Trump’s most consistently expressed opinions is that he would like his political enemies — a broadly defined group that stretches from Joe Biden to his own former appointees John Kelly and Bill Barr — to be prosecuted. Having largely failed to make that happen in his first term, in his second, Trump wants to tear down the wall separating Justice Department prosecution decisions from the White House.

Yet that effort would face another important obstacle: the courts.

Judges throughout the federal court system can throw out baseless prosecutions. They can also block Trump’s executive branch actions or strike down new laws passed by Congress. With lifetime appointments, judges are theoretically immune from political pressure and free to uphold the rule of law and the Bill of Rights against authoritarian threats.

And judges frequently frustrated Trump during his first term — even, importantly, conservative judges, and judges Trump himself appointed. From the Supreme Court downwards, many of his judicial nominations were Federalist Society die-hards rather than MAGA die-hards, meaning they were often hard right but also willing to rule against Trump on various issues.

The Supreme Court also refused to help his effort to steal the 2020 election, to Trump’s great annoyance — he has reportedly said that following the Federalist Society’s advice on appointees was one of his greatest mistakes. (Though, if he tried to make his own loyalist picks, he might have had difficulty getting them confirmed.)

But there are some judges who do seem to be fully in the tank for the former president, like Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing Trump’s prosecution over classified documents in Florida, making rulings slanted in the former president’s favor and proceeding at a pace that rules out a trial before the election. The Supreme Court, too, could well do Trump a favor with a ruling that effectively delays his most important trial until after November — meaning, if Trump wins, it likely wouldn’t happen at all.

There’s also the prospect that a more emboldened Trump could choose to simply defy the courts. It is far from clear how much any Supreme Court would be able to constrain a president truly bent on defying them. In 2021, while running for office, now-Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) urged a confrontation here. Vance said that Trump should fire thousands of civil servants, and “when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Still, the US Constitution and the courts upholding it present various other problems for a budding authoritarian. Strongmen rising to power in other democracies often change their countries’ constitutions. But the threshold for changing the US Constitution — two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of state legislatures — is so absurdly high that it’s functionally impossible to meet on any polarized topic.

Effectively, that means the two-term limit that prevents Trump from running again can’t be revoked, except in the event of a total collapse of constitutional government.

State and local governments: bulwarks of resistance?

Another major obstacle for would-be American authoritarians is the dispersed nature of governmental power under federalism. States and cities elect their own governments and run their own elections. So under a Trump second term, like in his first, blue states and cities would surely continue to resist his agenda, filing lawsuits, refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement on certain topics, and so on.

But Trump’s team has been making plans about how to “enforce order” in blue America with the military.

Some on Trump’s team have long been drawn to the idea of crushing demonstrations or riots via an old statute known as the Insurrection Act. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump’s team had drafted a second-term plan to invoke the act on his first day in office so he could “deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” What would happen next would be anyone’s guess. But a president using the power of the military to quell domestic dissent may be a first step down a path leading to further repression.

Another area of confrontation could be elections. Trump has already set the precedent for how Republicans can deny any Democratic wins: just make baseless claims of rampant voter fraud in cities, evidence be damned. And one scary part of the 2020 election crisis is that it actually wouldn’t have been that difficult, if Republican officials in key states were sufficiently corrupt, to throw out Biden’s wins or at least stall the process of certifying the outcome.

And yet, despite Trump’s pressure, key Republican governors, legislators, and election officials refused to steal the election in 2020. Since then, Congress approved changes to the Electoral Count Act to make any such attempts more difficult to pull off. And in 2022, importantly, “election denier” Republicans running for roles with oversight over elections in key swing states lost. The guardrails around elections still look to be in decent shape, but in the end, the system will only work if enough people in key posts agree to let it.

The press and the public: Condition unclear

Finally, beyond the government itself, both the press and the public can challenge and effectively constrain a would-be strongman leader.

In Trump’s first term, if a government official got wind of a crazy or corrupt thing Trump wanted to do, the response was often to leak it to the press. Critical coverage and damning reporting about Trump was everywhere during his first term, and the mainstream media made it very clear that his claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 were baseless.

Nowadays, Trump is still being covered negatively. But the mainstream media as a whole seems less influential and important, than it was during Trump’s term, a time of soaring subscriptions, ratings, and web traffic. The audience is increasingly fractured, with conservatives inhabiting their own media ecosystem and young people looking at TikTok. Business models are shot, with widespread layoffs and even collapses of publications.

Still, that pesky First Amendment means Trump doesn’t have many great options to shut up the press. During a second Trump administration, leaks would continue and critical reporting would be in ample supply.

The real question is: Will the public care?

Currently, Trump is doing better in the polls than at any point in his previous two presidential campaigns. Per polling, he is the favorite to win. So in one sense, the public is more in his corner than ever before.

But there are other signs that the intensity of Trump’s support is down. His small-dollar donations have declined. Traffic to conservative media outlets is plunging. There have been no sequels to the January 6 violence yet.

All this is likely stemming from a broader, bipartisan trend toward reduced engagement in politics. Political drama was omnipresent during the Trump years, but during Biden, the public has increasingly tuned out. (Hence those declining ratings and web traffic numbers.)

On the left, the main issue spurring activist energy isn’t defeating Trump — it’s protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, including Biden’s support of it. If Trump wins, would left-of-center society mobilize to check him like they did during the travel ban rollout, and at other points in his first term? Or are too many people now too burned out and disillusioned to care?

The silver lining is that the far right doesn’t seem to have mass support and enthusiasm throughout society as demonstrated by the rising fascist dictators of the past. But authoritarianism can rise due to apathy, too, if people don’t care enough to stop it.

Has Trump lost his sense of self-restraint?

In part, it’s reassuring that there are so many guardrails in the American political system.

And yet none of these are automatic or, necessarily, permanent. Yes, we have a system with laws and norms and institutions. But in the end, whether this system continues to function depends on the choices of the individual people in these institutional roles. “There are a lot of people right now who are thinking, ‘What legal steps do I have to constrain a wannabe autocrat?’ and are preparing for those battles,” said Rothkopf.

Democracy’s future would also depend on Trump’s own choices and capabilities.

One question is about Trump’s competence. Some believe that, even if Trump in his heart of hearts would like to impose an authoritarian agenda, he simply lacks the competence, focus, and discipline to make it happen. Others worry that his loyalists have already gotten far more experience in how to get their way in government, and that they’ve had four years to stew over why they failed so often last time and plan about how to do things differently next time. But even an effort as shambolic as Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election can still be quite dangerous, as the violence of January 6 showed.

A second question is about Trump’s own willingness to restrain himself. Often, during his first term, it was the president himself who chose to back down from some provocative action. He had a sense of political self-preservation that often spurred him to step back from the brink — calculating this firing or that action would be too far.

This self-control badly weakened as he tried to overturn Biden’s win. Pundits and top Republicans initially assured us that there would be nothing to worry about. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power,” one anonymous GOP official told the Washington Post that November. They thought they had Trump figured out, but the president stopped listening to the advisers counseling restraint, instead escalating the crisis more and more, leading to the chaos on January 6.

Still, even during that crisis, Trump could have gone further. For instance, he could have installed Jeffrey Clark at the top of the Justice Department, if he really wanted to. But that political self-preservation instinct meant he still feared the fallout from other top DOJ officials resigning in protest.

Trump, if he returns to power, will have no future reelection to make him worry about voters this time. And his rhetoric during his years out of office has grown far more extreme.

If Trump has lost any inclination toward restraint, and he really wants to drive headlong into the guardrails, he could do it.

And then we’ll really see how strong they still are.

The Day the Clubhouse Boy Pitched for Vancouver

2024-03-02T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Day the Clubhouse Boy Pitched for Vancouver

Fifty years ago, skinny Kit Krieger went pro for a day, and achieved baseball immortality.

Tom Hawthorn 7 Sep 2018TheTyee.ca

Tom Hawthorn is a frequent contributor to The Tyee. His biographical history The Vilest Rag You Can Image: 100 Years of The Ubyssey will be released by Harbour Publishing in the spring.

33 Comments

A program from the day Kit Krieger pitched for the Vancouver Mounties. His mother has written the outcome on the cover.

It was the top of the first inning of the final game of the 1968 season, a glorious Sunday summer afternoon in Vancouver. On the mound for the Vancouver Mounties was a tall, skinny teenager in glasses. Kit Krieger had turned 19 four months earlier, and the very next day was scheduled to start his second year of history studies at the University of British Columbia. He had not pitched in a competitive game since Little League, yet here he was in uniform at Capilano Stadium in front of 1,410 fans, sweating and nervous and wondering what the hell he had got himself into.

Krieger was the clubhouse boy for visiting teams at Capilano (now Nat Bailey) Stadium. Before taking to the field, he had laid out gum, candy, and chewing tobacco in the dressing room. He laundered and hung up the uniforms for the Hawaii Islanders players he now faced in the batter’s box, 60 feet, six inches away. Every man in Hawaii’s starting lineup had played, or would play, in the major leagues. Compared to them, Krieger was Charlie Brown. Only later would he come to appreciate how far over his head he was.

The Mounties were ending a woeful season. The team played poorly. The park was in bad shape and patrons were denied the pleasure even of enjoying a beer in the sun. Fans were scarce. On a whim, Krieger suggested to the assistant general manager he could pitch and fill the place with his friends. The assistant took it to the general manager, who then asked the manager, two-time American League batting champion Mickey Vernon, what he thought. “He’s not a prospect,” Vernon said, “but he won’t embarrass us.” It was not a ringing endorsement.

On Sept. 8, 1968, 50 years ago this weekend, the teenager stood atop the mound in borrowed cleats, wearing the uniform of a man called up to the majors earlier in the week.

The first Hawaii batter got a hit on the first pitch.

The second batter also hit a single.

They both stole a base.

A run then scored on a sacrifice fly.

The Mounties were down 1-0. Only one batter had been put out and a runner was in scoring position. Krieger now faced the cleanup hitter, Gail Hopkins, a sweet-swinging first baseman with a .338 average who had spent part of the season in the bigs with the Chicago White Sox.

Krieger had talked his way into this predicament. His mouth would not get him out of it. Like the Titanic steaming past icebergs, or the Hindenburg floating in at Lakehurst, or Ralph Branca facing Bobby Thomson in 1951, Krieger had no choice. He had to throw the ball.

‘I’ll pack the place’

Ernest Jay Krieger cannot remember a time when baseball was not part of his life. He was born in San Francisco, as was his father Edgar, who attended games at Seals Stadium, Joe DiMaggio’s first workplace. His mother, the former Ann Kohlberg, lived in an apartment building at 325 Riverside Dr. in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where the neighbour across the hall was Mel Ott, the New York Giants slugger. His parents met on a blind date during a war in which Ed would serve overseas as commander of the 663rd Quartermaster Truck Company, seeing action in the Battle of the Bulge. He met Gen. George Patton during the war and won a Bronze Star for meritorious service. The family moved to Vancouver when Kit was an infant so Ed could join his brother at Oppenheimer Brothers, a food-brokerage company older than the city (and still in operation today).

When the Giants abandoned the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to seek greater profit in San Francisco, the move united the two branches of the Krieger family tree. In that same year of 1958, Kit’s mother’s cousin, Don Taussig, a light-hitting outfielder, made his major-league debut with the Giants, sealing the family’s connection to the team. Young Kit sometimes spent summers in the Bay Area as a teenager. On July 2, 1963, the 14-year-old was about to catch the Ballpark Express for Candlestick Park when his aunt forbade him to leave as she wanted him present for a dinner party with her in-laws. He listened to as much of the game as he could on a transistor radio as Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves and Juan Marichal of the Giants pitched shutout baseball into the 16th inning, when Willie Mays ended it with a dramatic home run for a 1-0 San Francisco win. A recent book about the day was titled The Greatest Game Ever Pitched. He still resents having been forced to miss it.

After graduating from Sir Winston Churchill High in Vancouver, Krieger enrolled at Whittier College, about 30 kilometres east of Los Angeles. The liberal arts college was known for two things — the sports teams were called the Poets and the most famous alumnus was Richard Nixon, who a year later would win the presidency. An early pro-Vietnam War rally on the campus convinced Krieger he was in the wrong place. He returned to Vancouver and registered at UBC.

In the summer of 1967, he worked as an unpaid assistant to the visitors’ clubhouse manager, a classmate of his sister’s. He knew the older boy was going to be unavailable the following summer and so he hoped to inherit the job, which he did.

For a strait-laced baseball fan, the clubhouse offered an education in the wanton appetites of professional athletes. Some athletes popped greenies as though amphetamines were Smarties. As well as doing laundry, shining shoes, and chilling beer for the visiting players, Krieger was expected to let them know about the presence of Baseball Annies, women seeking to hook up. The players scouted the stands for likely partners, a practice they called “beaver shooting,” a misogynistic approach to be exposed two years later in Jim Bouton’s notorious memoir, Ball Four. Bouton pitched for the Seattle Angels in 1968 and watched on television with Krieger the chaos of that summer’s Democratic Convention.

When Krieger unpacked the bags of Bo Belinsky, a former pool hustler and unapologetic playboy, he came across a stack of love letters from women who included racy photographs. After games, he overheard players bragging about their romances with Hollywood starlets.

The money was good. The players were expected to tip about $2 per day and more if they consumed a lot of beer. With 27 players and coaches, the tips added up. He once got $25 from Billy Martin, a notorious hothead, because he let him know the Mounties catcher had a sore arm and Martin’s team could steal bases at will. Visitors tipped better when they won.

Krieger, only a few years younger than the players he served, was a popular figure. He cracked a lot of jokes. He played Bob Dylan on his guitar, singing in a deep bass. Best of all, he offered a free beer to whoever answered his daily baseball trivia question.

“Everybody liked him,” said Hawaii’s Gail Hopkins. “Skinny guy. Funny.”

On occasion, Krieger pitched batting practice, throwing from behind the safety of a screen. A left-hander, he had a heavy fastball topping out at about 84 miles per hour with a little movement, when slowed down just enough of a challenge for a batter seeking to work out a kink in a swing.

Krieger was walking along the concourse of the stadium on a beautiful summer’s day when assistant general manager Lefty Dennis bemoaned the paucity of paying customers. “Let me pitch,” Krieger said on a whim. “I’ll pack the place. I’ll sell tickets to all my friends.” Dennis told his boss Lew Matlin, who in turn ran the idea past Vernon, the field manager. They decided to let Krieger start the final game of a lost season.

Today, such a stunt would be ruined by overexposure before it had a chance to happen. Back then, the only notice was a sentence in the papers the day before.

Ten days before the game, the club gave Krieger 500 general admission tickets at $1.75 each and 1,000 special student tickets at $1 each. He put the squeeze on his friends and pestered passersby at the campus library. In the end, he sold just 46 grandstand and 159 student ducats.

Moonlight pitcher

Krieger arrived early on the morning of the game. He had duties in the clubhouse. It was a get-away date, as both teams were eager to close out the season and get on with their lives. Four of the Hawaii players had reservations for a flight out of Vancouver to New York, where they were to join the parent Chicago White Sox.

The Hawaii players knew the clubhouse boy was to pitch against them. Not all of them thought it a good idea. “This is what we do for a living,” outfielder Joe Haines told Krieger. “Like I was making a mockery of the game,” Krieger says now.

The starting pitcher for Hawaii was Bill Fischer, a month away from his 38th birthday and already a curmudgeonly figure. This was to be his last game as a player after a 21-season career that had begun with the Wisconsin Rapid White Sox in his home state. He holds to this day the major-league record for having pitched 84 1/3 innings without issuing a walk. He offered to show the rookie the ropes.

“He said to me, ‘Come out and I’ll help you get ready,’” Krieger said. The rival pitcher rolled balls to the newbie’s right and then to his left until his charge was breathing heavily. “He proceeded to give me drills to tire me out. What did I know?”

The lineup card filled out by Vancouver Mounties manager Mickey Vernon on Sept. 8, 1968, the last game of the season. Kit Krieger is batting ninth and pitching.

If falling for opposition hazing was embarrassing, Krieger next had to deal with his teammates. The catcher Woody Huyke went over signs with the hurler. Krieger said he had a fastball and a slider, before proudly adding he could throw a knuckleball, that unpredictable pitch that is the bane of catchers. “You break my %$#@! fingers, I’ll %$#@! kill you,” Huyke warned.

“He was,” Krieger deadpanned, “somewhat less than supportive.”

As Krieger stood on the mound, the recorded anthems played, a tinny sound echoing through the mostly empty stands. Nineteen sixty-eight was a year freighted with history — Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April, riots in Paris in May, Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, the crushing of the Prague Spring in August. In October, two American athletes were sent home from the Olympics after delivering a black power salute from the podium. Even baseball seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Some players, including Rusty Staub, were punished by their owners for refusing to play after Kennedy’s death. Before Game 5 of the World Series, the blind Puerto Rican singer and guitarist José Feliciano played a glorious, soulful version of “The Star-Bangled Banner” for which he was booed and roundly criticized.

Krieger was not immune to the tumult. He’d been involved in the anti-war movement and would in four years become head of the local chapter of the Democrats Abroad, campaigning for George McGovern. In this moment, though, he had concerns more physical than political. In his head, he went over coaching advice about throwing the slider with the same motion used to pull down a window shade. He stared in at the catcher who threatened to kill him. No knuckleball on the first pitch. A fastball. And he needed it to be over the plate for strike.

Crack!

Angel Bravo greeted the first pitch by smacking it up the middle past the pitcher into centre field.

Jim Stewart followed by lining a single to left field.

They pulled off a successful double steal.

George Kernek lofted a fly ball just beyond Tony LaRussa at second base, which was caught by Joe Nossek in centre field. The runner on third tagged.

Here’s the thing. Nossek had pitched the previous day, going the seven-inning distance in the second game of a doubleheader. He got the win, but his arm was so sore he could barely comb his hair, let alone make a throw to the plate. The run scored.

And up came Hopkins.

And down he went.

When third baseman George Freese was retired, Krieger was out of the inning.

He walked coolly to the dugout, his head down, consciously trying to look like the ballplayers he saw in action every working day.

Krieger went scoreless over the next two innings, the only blemish another single surrendered to Stewart and a hit batter in Kernek, who took a pitch to the chest to no visible effect. “Sorry,” Krieger muttered from the mound, perhaps the first time a professional had ever apologized in that circumstance.

As Krieger entered the dugout after the third inning, Vernon said to him, “That’s it.” His place in the batting order was coming up and he would be replaced by a pinch hitter.

His pitching day done, Krieger retreated to the clubhouse to get things ready for the players after the game. He was only moonlighting as a pitcher.

Meanwhile, the game rolled past quickly. Dan O’Riley replaced Krieger on the mound. In turn, he was replaced by Ossie Chavarria, a Panamanian, who pitched an uneventful inning as part of playing all nine positions, even relieving Huyke behind the plate for a stanza.

Hawaii didn’t score again, while the Mounties scored two in the sixth when Nossek double scored Rene Lachemann and LaRussa. In the seventh, Steve Boros hit a home run, his only one of the year. O’Riley was credited with the win in a 3-1 victory, Fischer the loss, to fall to 8-9. Fischer had thrown only 71 pitches, just five more than the lowest total ever recorded in a complete game in the 65-year history of the Pacific Coast League.

The losing pitcher trudged into the visitors’ clubhouse only to find the cooler empty. “Where’s the %$#@! beer!” he demanded. Krieger’s little brother, Bob, later to be editorial cartoonist at the Province, had been so engrossed in watching his brother’s performance that he had forgotten to chill the suds. It was an ignoble end to Fischer’s long career.

The game lasted just 64 minutes.

The Islanders had agreed among themselves to swing at everything so the inconsequential game could end in time for all to make their airline reservations.

“We were all going to get out of there as fast as we could,” said Hopkins, 75, who lives in Parkersburg, W.V. As for Krieger, “we were happy he was throwing the ball close enough to the catcher so we could swing.”

Huyke, who lives in Bradenton, Fla., and who turns 81 later this month, doesn’t remember specifics of the game, but does recall being miffed at the clubhouse boy being a teammate, even for a day. “When you’re a professional,” he said, “you want to play with professionals.”

Krieger signed a pro contract for the minimum $500 per month pro-rated for one day. After he left the game, he walked into the team’s business office in his cleats. He was promptly fined a day’s pay for violating team rules.

He was placed on waivers, which he cleared, after which he was given his unconditional release. The manager, Lew Matlin, sent him a letter.

“We have enjoyed your witticisms this year, and I am sure that you are the most memorable clubhouse boy that Capilano Stadium has ever had,” he wrote. “Please study hard, do not major in girls, and have some fun.”

Mounties general manager Lew Matlin writes Kit Krieger to let him know he’s got his unconditional release. Urges him ‘not to major in girls’ when he returns to university.

He later got a contract from the Topps Chewing Gum seeking the rights to use his image on a baseball card should he make the major leagues. It came with a cheque for $5. He signed it and cashed the cheque.

He never played a pro game again.

A career, and lifetime highlight

Krieger kept all the ephemera from that day. He has letters, a contract, a program, the ticker tape announcing the starting batteries of pitcher and catcher. He also has a cassette of Jim Robson’s radio broadcast of the game, a highlight of which is the call of “Struck him out!” when Hopkins went down swinging. (Hopkins only struck out twice all season with Hawaii.) He also kept the two issues of The Sporting News in which his name appears.

That is the thing about baseball. If you enter a game, your name is registered and appears in baseball annuals and yearbooks and encyclopedias and now online at such sites as Baseball-Reference.com. It hints at immortality. Krieger imagines far in the future his infant grandson Max showing friends his grandfather’s entry from the mid-20th century: Krieger, three innings pitched, three hits allowed, one earned run, one strikeout, one hit batter. You can look it up.

Krieger taught high school in West Vancouver for a quarter-century before becoming president of the BC Teachers’ Federation and, later, the Registrar of the B.C. College of Teachers. He is active in Holocaust education. Those three innings stand out as the most remarkable thing he has done.

On his wedding day, he had to give a speech. He began by saying, “This is the second happiest day of my life…” (Forty-five years later, he’s still married.)

Those three innings give him entree into the world of baseball players.

“I get invited to reunions,” he said. “You’re a part of a fraternity when you play baseball. There’s a respect you get.”

Kit Krieger with a signed team baseball at a stadium in Holguín, Cuba, in 2015.

He has not squandered that gift. On his first visit to Cuba on an education exchange, he indulged his passion by taking in some baseball games. He returned again and again, eventually forming a company called Cubaball to operate tours for Canadian and American fans. In his time on the island, he befriended Conrado Marrero, a star Cuban pitcher who late in his career threw for the Washington Senators. Marrero stayed after the revolution and the rest of the baseball world forgot about him. Even in Cuba some thought him long dead. Krieger cajoled letters from old American teammates and rivals, which he read to Marrero on annual visits. When he learned Marrero was not receiving a pension, Krieger lobbied for a decade to get him his money, funds that continue to support his family in Havana after his death in 2014 three days before his 103rd birthday. He continues to raise money for retired minor leaguers in Cuba. Krieger has made good use of his innings.

Lest anyone wants to sign him to another contract, he confesses he has lost some zip to his fastball. At the same time, his arm strength is good. After all, he’ll be pitching on 50 years’ rest.

Why being admitted to hospital in B.C. may soon mean being sent home instead

2023-09-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

My Account

Why being admitted to hospital in B.C. may soon mean being sent home instead

Fraser Health opened B.C.'s first virtual hospital unit, where 150 psychiatric patients have been treated from home. Experts say it is the way of the future.

Lori Culbert

Published Sep 07, 2023 • Last updated Sep 08, 2023 • 8 minute read

33 Comments

Radhika Khosla is manager of Fraser health's virtual psychiatry unit. PHOTO BY JASON PAYNE /PNG

After spending nine weeks in Peace Arch Hospital’s psychiatric ward, Sharon Leitch Joss knew she was ready to be discharged. But she was very worried about returning to her White Rock apartment after so much time in institutional care.

“Because of the volatile journey that I’ve had in the last six months, since March, my confidence had taken a hit,” recalled Leitch Joss. “On being ready to come home, I was really nervous because I live alone.”

In mid-August, her physician suggested a surprising solution — she could remain admitted to the psychiatric ward, but still move home as part of Fraser Health’s virtual hospital psychiatric unit, the first of its kind in B.C.

It was “the best thing” for her recovery, said Leitch Joss, who knows a thing or two about health care: She’s been a nurse for 40 years and teaches nursing to university students.

The virtual unit, launched quietly a year ago and announced publicly this week, has treated about 150 patients who were sent home with an iPad and basic health care gear, and treated online by doctors and nurses.

“We are equivalent to what a brick-and-mortar hospital unit would provide for a patient,” said Radhika Khosla, a psychiatric nurse and the unit’s operations manager.

“The difference is they’re not occupying or using a bed in the hospital. They’re actually in the comfort of their own home, with their family, their friends, their pets.”

Radhika Khosla, manager of Fraser health’s virtual psychiatry unit, with the kit sent home with patients. PHOTO BY JASON PAYNE /PNG

The concept of virtual health isn’t new. It started to gain popularity as both patient waiting times and new-hospital construction costs grew, and was boosted further when the COVID-19 pandemic forced medical staff to use video platforms to “see” their patients.

Most B.C. health authorities now have various services that allow patients to connect with medical professionals online.

Some run the hospital-at-home program, which offers home visits and remote monitoring for people who require acute care for mild or moderate conditions. It was piloted in 2020 by Island Health, which today offers the virtual service through two Victoria hospitals to eligible patients who don’t have to be tied to any specific hospital unit, a spokesperson said.

Fraser Health, though, has created what appears to be the first virtual hospital unit in the province with a staff of more than 30 people. About eight people work each day in the 24-hour unit, some doing outreach and others providing online psychiatric services to eligible patients throughout the authority, which stretches from Burnaby to Hope.

Psychiatry was the obvious choice for the first virtual unit because demand was high due to mental health and substance use worsening during the pandemic, said the Fraser Health CEO, Dr. Victoria Lee. She has plans to introduce additional virtual hospital units in Fraser Health, and has sought advice from health leaders in other countries.

“There have been successful examples of virtual hospital services elsewhere in the world, whether it’s Israel, the U.S. or Australia,” she said.

Sharon Leitch Joss is a former patient in Fraser Health’s new virtual psychiatric hospital unit. PHOTO BY NICK PROCAYLO /10102103A

The Canadian Institute for Health Information said in a 2022 report that Canada had “historically lagged behind its international peers” when it comes to virtual health technologies, but that has changed in recent years.

“In March 2022, about half of Canadians reported that they had been offered a virtual (medical) visit,” the report said.

In April, the institute announced it would collect more data to better guide future spending on virtual care, noting additional information is needed on its impact on medical spending and patient outcomes.

Leitch Joss has nothing but gratitude for Fraser Health’s virtual unit. She hit “a real low point” with anxiety and depression earlier this year, due to a number of colliding factors that included the strain of her elderly parents’ ailing health, other life pressures and severe reactions to psychiatric medication.

After being admitted to the virtual unit following her nine-week in-patient stay, she was provided with a “kit” of gear that a peer support worker showed her how to use at home: an iPad to communicate with medical staff, and machines that test vital signs such as temperature, pulse, blood pressure and oxygen saturation.

Leitch Joss had daily hour-long video calls with a psychiatrist, which often included other medical staff such as a pharmacist and psychologist. Nurses checked in with her about three times a day and, similar to ringing a bell at the side of a hospital bed, she could phone health workers 24-7 with any concerns.

“I actually found the virtual unit had more on-hand resources than the in-patient unit has, because they are so stretched for time and availability” in the hospital, Leitch Joss said. They would “do all the safety checks. Ask how you’re doing. Any concerns? How’s your day been? And you can do that virtually so that they’re seeing your face.”

Leitch Joss shared her story to explain the benefits of the virtual program, and to strees that any person from any walk of life may one day need mental health help, even a veteran registered nurse with a master of science in nursing from the University of B.C.

Patients like Leitch Joss can be offered a spot in the virtual unit through any Fraser hospital psychiatric ward or emergency room, said Khosla, who began helping to plan this new-age unit in late 2021. The criteria for acceptance includes being stable, not posing a risk to themselves or others, not needing several in-hospital treatments, and living in a safe place.

The unit also offers home visits, when patients need them, by staff based in Abbotsford and Surrey.

Patients are given a box with supplies for games and activities so they can participate when the unit’s recreational and occupational therapists run online workshops that range from yoga to life skills.

“You can get this 24-hour wraparound care — nursing support, all this rec-rehab care — but you can also do it from home, which is wonderful because that’s not ever been done before,” Khosla said. “I’m excited to see our unit be the forefront of all that change.”

The virtual unit’s patients have ranged in age from 18 to 70, and include youth who are afraid to go to the hospital and people who hesitate to seek help because of stigma.

Dr. Anson Koo is the medical director of mental health and psychiatry programs at Fraser Health. PHOTO BY JASON PAYNE /PNG

Others are new mothers who suffer serious postpartum depression after having their babies, said Dr. Anson Koo, Fraser Health’s chief psychiatrist.

“In the past, they would have to be admitted to a psychiatric unit and separated from their babies,” he said. Now “these moms are able to receive in-patient psychiatric level care in the comfort of their homes with their babies … continuing to breastfeed.”

A survey of patients in the virtual unit, Koo said, found three out of five said it was much better than being a patient in a hospital ward, while the remainder were equally split between it being somewhat better or about the same as the traditional model.

“It’s because they want to get care at home,” he said.

About five per cent of patients, however, had to leave the virtual unit and return to a traditional hospital for a variety of reasons, including being too unwell to stay home, Koo said.

A handful of patients found the video calls and other technological requirements too taxing, Khosla added. The program has since made changes, such as creating a calendar that autofills with the patients’ appointments, rather than overloading them with separate email invitations, she said.

The unit has a total of eight patients at a time, who typically stay admitted for about two weeks before being discharged and connected to community mental health support.

Leitch Joss was released from the virtual unit at the end of August, after about 14 days. “I felt I was comfortable in being in my own home alone,” she said, adding she plans to return to teaching this fall.

Sharon Leitch Joss is a former patient in Fraser Health’s new virtual psychiatric hospital unit. PHOTO BY NICK PROCAYLO /10102103A

The global management consulting firm McKinsey published a report in May that found virtual care could address rising demand, costs and patient dissatisfaction in health care. It analyzed health services in Australia, which it called a “bellwether” country for virtual hospital care, and found about 11 per cent of patients admitted to hospital beds could be treated at home.

If a virtual Australian hospital treated 9,500 patients a year, it would free up 47,500 bed-days annually and reduce spending on new hospitals by up to $90 million, the report said. There are also potential savings for operating budgets: The cost for a patient’s “episode of care” in Australia was $1,000 lower in a virtual unit compared to an in-patient ward, mainly due to reduced medical and labour costs, McKinsey found.

The report also said 90 per cent of Australians who received virtual care were somewhat or very satisfied, mainly due to convenience and avoiding being with other patients.

The U.K. plans to increase “virtual ward capacity by 40 to 50 virtual beds per 100,000 people by December 2023, which could allow more than 17 per cent of total admissions to be treated in virtual hospitals,” the McKinsey report says.

The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again

2023-08-19T13:35:00.003-07:00

The Atlantic

The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again

The only question is whether American citizens today can uphold that commitment.

By J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe

Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

AUGUST 19, 2023, 7:30 AM ET

SAVED STORIES

As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.

This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies.

The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024.

Quinta Jurecic: Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal

Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.

We were immensely gratified to see that a richly researched article soon to be published in an academic journal has recently come to the same conclusion that we had and is attracting well-deserved attention outside a small circle of scholars—including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Anjani Jain of the Yale School of Management, whose encouragement inspired us to write this piece. The evidence laid out by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” available as a preprint, is momentous. Sooner or later, it will influence, if not determine, the course of American constitutional history—and American history itself.

Written with precision and thoroughness, the article makes the compelling case that the relevance of Section 3 did not lapse with the passing of the generation of Confederate rebels, whose treasonous designs for the country inspired the provision; that the provision was not and could not have been repealed by the Amnesty Act of 1872 or by subsequent legislative enactments; and that Section 3 has not been relegated by any judicial precedent to a mere source of potential legislative authority, but continues to this day by its own force to automatically render ineligible for future public office all “former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion,” as Baude and Paulsen put it.

Among the profound conclusions that follow are that all officials who ever swore to support the Constitution—as every officer, state or federal, in every branch of government, must—and who thereafter either “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution or gave “aid and comfort to the enemies” of that Constitution (and not just of the United States as a sovereign nation) are automatically disqualified from holding future office and must therefore be barred from election to any office.

Regardless of partisan leaning or training in the law, all U.S. citizens should read and consider these two simple sentences from Section 3:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The Fourteenth Amendment was promulgated and ratified in the context of postbellum America when, even after losing the Civil War, southern states were sending men to Congress who had held prominent roles in the Confederacy or otherwise supported acts of rebellion or insurrection against the United States.

To Jail or Not to Jail

June 17, 2023, 7:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Justice Department

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — Studying “Hamlet,” the revenge play about a rotten kingdom, I tried for years to fathom Hamlet’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

His consciousness was so complex, Harold Bloom wrote, it seemed bigger than the play itself.

Now I’m mired in another revenge play about a rotten kingdom, “Trump.” I’ve tried for years to fathom Donald Trump’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

The man who dumbed down the office of the presidency is a less gratifying subject than the smarty-pants doomed prince. Hamlet is transcendent, while Trump is merely transgressive. But we can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Trump is feral, focused on his own survival, with no sense of shame or boundaries or restraint.

“In that sense,” David Axelrod told me, “being a sociopath really works for him.”

As Axelrod wrote in The Atlantic, “Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions — not just media, but law enforcement and the election system itself.”

It remains to be seen, as Axelrod has noted, whether indictments will serve as kryptonite against Trump or energy packs fueling his return to the Oval Office.

After believing time and time again that Trump had self-destructed — after he denigrated John McCain, after we found out he had pretended to be his own spokesman, after the “Access Hollywood” tape, and after he shared classified material with Russian diplomats — I have learned to wait and see whether Trump will preposterously get away with things. He has spent his entire life cutting corners and dancing on the edge of legal. But Jack Smith, the special counsel, is teaching him that you can’t conduct a presidency that way.

So we must contemplate Trump’s weird preoccupation with his boxes full of state secrets.

“He held onto them. Why?” Mitt Romney asked reporters on Capitol Hill. “That’s the question. Why is the country going to have to go through all this angst and tumult? Why didn’t he just turn the documents in?”

The papers spilling out of boxes are a snapshot of Trump’s id. He raised his personality to a management style. His disordered mind has caused public disorder.

During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”

The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him.

The guy likes paper. And, like Louis XIV, he believes “L’État, c’est moi.” His favorite words are personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. Kevin McCarthy is “my Kevin.” Army officers were “my generals.” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was “my favorite dictator.” In the indictment, a Trump lawyer quotes Trump as warning, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

He’s like a child, dragging around the things that are important to him. Chris Christie joked about Trump taking some of the boxes on his jet to his club in Bedminster: “He flew the boxes up to New Jersey for summer vacation. What is this? Like, they’re a family member?”

It bespeaks a frailty, a need to be bolstered by talismanic items.

When he was a real estate dealer and reality star, his office in Trump Tower was papered in framed magazine covers, so that his face stared back at him from every angle, like an infinity mirror.

He must worry: Without pieces of paper to prove I am important, am I important?

Trump has said one of his favorite movies is “Citizen Kane.” Perhaps the boxes at Xanadu he’s obsessed with, the papers that could make him the locked-up loser he dreads being, have been revealed as his Rosebud.

Bill James and Moneyball (JoeBlogs)

2022-11-11T12:58:00.005-08:00

JOE THROWBACK

Joe Throwback: Bill James

6 hr ago

I’ve written about my friend Bill James on numerous occasions, but I think this is my favorite one — built this one around the premiere of the movie “Moneyball” in 2011. Bill is unlike anyone I’ve met and I know he’s got his fans and his detractors and all of that. I unabashedly love the guy. And I think he belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

OAKLAND — Bill James bought a new sport coat for the occasion. It’s a nice jacket, a sensible design, the sort of thing that a college literature professor might wear, and it allows him to do exactly what he wants to do: blend into the scene. He and his wife, Susie, fly into the Bay Area for the event. They stay at the La Quinta Inn near the airport. They take the train into downtown Oakland. They walk through the huge crowd at the Paramount Theater more or less without being noticed. Every now and again, they see a celebrity and are happier for it.

The absurdity of it all doesn’t throw them much, not anymore.

Hollywood made a movie about sabermetrics. Yes. That word. Sabermetrics. Hollywood actually made a movie about the search for objective knowledge in the game of baseball. Well, of course, you could argue that “Moneyball,” which had its star-studded premiere here on Monday, is really about an iconoclast named Billy Beane. You could argue that “Moneyball” is really about the Oakland Athletics’ attempt to win with less money than most other teams. You could argue, perhaps most persuasively, that “Moneyball” is about Brad Pitt, who might be the only actor in the world with enough juice to get this sort of movie made in the first place.

Why argue, though? This is the premiere of “Moneyball,” and there has never been a movie quite like it. Downtown Oakland crackles with glamour and baseball. Actors walk across the red carpet, which in this case is green and looks like outfield grass. Producers talk about the journey to get this movie made. Actors talk about how much fun it was to dress up and act like baseball people. Reporters ask each other in sarcastic tones: “So, who are you wearing?” Oakland A’s fans stand across the street and pick up different chants, ranging from “DAY-vid JUSS-tiss” to the less rhythmic “FIL-up SEE-more HAWF-man!”

“I thought they did a great job with the movie,” says Michael Lewis, who wrote the book Moneyball. “Let’s be honest: Did I think they could make a movie out of Moneyball? No. Never. I even told the studio that. And when they did make it, I thought it would suck.”

The movie does not suck, not at all; that’s the wrong word, and that’s a story for tomorrow. The story for today is how we even got here. It is a story about a man who is not really in the movie. No actor plays him. He’s mentioned here and there, but only for a few seconds. Still, without him, there is no “Moneyball.” There is no sabermetrics, at least not under that name. Certainly, people would still be looking for objective knowledge in baseball — people were looking long before him and they will be looking long after.

But without the life’s work of Bill James, they sure as heck would not have made a movie about it.

Hey, it’s Susie and Bill at Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People banquet in 2007. They had a blast. (Patrick McMulllan/via Getty Images)

What would a formula for Bill James’ career look like? I’ve thought quite a lot about this and have finally came up with one:

(Cu * D) / (CoW) = Bill James

What does that mean? Well, first: What do you think it could mean? See, Bill James believes that baseball statistics and formulas should tell stories on their own. Sometimes he will be at a ballgame, and they will flash some pitiful statistic up on the scoreboard, something like “John Johnson has hit in six of his last nine games,” or, “Lefties hit .268 off Will Wilson in July.” And it will drive him mad. Who cares? Tells you nothing. Fills the imagination with blackness.

Instead: Take a look at these numbers from a season:

.354 batting average, 55 stolen bases, 31 walks

These are made-up statistics, but if you are a baseball fan, you can see this player, can’t you? You can look at those numbers and create an image in your mind. It doesn’t have to be just like my image. You might see a left-handed hitter, while I see a switch-hitter. You might see him as white or African-American or Dominican or Asian. You might see a shortstop, while I see a centerfielder. Whatever: We both see a kind of player, a fast one, a free-swinger, a slasher. Maybe he bunts a lot. Maybe he has a knack for hitting the ball the other way. Maybe he’s Tony Gwynn. Maybe he’s Ichiro.

Here’s another one:

20-6 record, 4.28 ERA

Just two statistics this time (three if you count wins and losses separately). Again, can’t you picture him? Maybe he’s a workhorse of a right-handed pitcher, maybe 6-foot-1, with a force of will and a refusal to come out of games. Maybe he’s a soft-tossing lefty who has a knack for being on the mound when his team scores five or six runs. But there’s something… an image that emerges from the numbers, like a snake from a basket.

Now look at these statistics:

1,237 yards, 15 touchdowns, 4.2 yards per carry

What does this running back look like? Can you see anything? He’s obviously good, really good. But do those numbers spark an image for you? It’s a personal question: Maybe they do for you. Maybe you immediately think of a certain kind of player. To be honest, they don’t for me. That runner could be Jim Brown or he could be Larry Johnson. He could run with the step-by-step precision of Priest Holmes or dance like Barry Sanders or plow like Jerome Bettis. He could run behind a great line that opens up craters for him or he could be an amazing one-man-show who finds creases where none seem to be. He could be almost anything. The only thing I can really say from those numbers is: I’d like him on my fantasy football team (back when I played fantasy football).

Look at these numbers:

24.7 points per game, 9.6 rebounds per game

Elton Brand? Dirk Nowitzki? Dominique Wilkins? Larry Bird? Maybe it’s Yao Ming, towering over everyone. Maybe it’s Bernard King, driving hard to the basket. Perhaps you see a story in those numbers, but again, I don’t.

There is something about baseball, perhaps, a rhythm, a blend of individual and team, something that gives its numbers a richness that goes beyond digits and decimal points, and that is what brought Bill James to life.

The (Cu) in the above formula is curiosity, of course. Bill James grew up in a small Kansas town called Mayetta. He will talk a lot about his childhood, but not so much about the pain. His mother died when he was 5. His father suffered at times in business and with his health. Bill buried himself in baseball. He suspects that he would have anyway, that baseball and its numbers struck his mind in a certain way that would have been there no matter the circumstances. When he was 12, he collected baseball cards off cereal boxes and he would always remember that he was struck by the connection between the season totals of Jim Davenport and Elston Howard.

Davenport in 1960: .251 average, 6 homers, 38 RBIs in 363 at-bats. Howard in 1960: .245 average, 6 homers, 39 RBIs in 323 at-bats.

Those two seasons were more alike than any other two baseball cards, he decided. “My brother Bob couldn’t figure out what the hell the point was,” Bill would write years later, “and who cared.”

His mind could not help but make those sorts of connections, though. His mind could not help but ask questions. Always questions. The questions peppered him constantly, so much so that he did not really think much about school or much of anything else. How do teams score runs? How can you judge fielders? How much is pitching really worth? When he went to the University of Kansas, he made friends, and he protested the war in Vietnam (at least for a little while, until he decided that the protesters needed to be protested too), and he listened to a lot of music. But those baseball questions never really stopped coming at him. They still come at him.

“I have a question for you,” he will often write me in emails, and then he will ask something like, “Do you think that writers are more likely to have a song stick in their heads than people who don’t work as much with words?”

As he has often said, if there wasn’t a game like baseball, he feels quite sure that the constant questions would have still filled his mind. That’s just his nature. But because there IS a game like baseball, most of the questions were baseball-related, and when he got out of the army he could not help but try to answer those questions. The idea of becoming a baseball writer was foggy at best. He did not know what he would do. He got a series of jobs, the most famous of those as a night watchman for the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans cannery in Lawrence, Kans. The only bits of clarity came from baseball. And in the dead moments — and there were so many dead moments in those early years — he tried to come up with some answers to pacify the questions raging in his mind.

The (D) in my Bill James formula is distrust, and maybe you can begin to see the form of Bill James building. Many people have questions about baseball. But most of us are placated by the answers we are given. Bunting is the best way to get that run across? Fine. A walk is about the pitcher and not the hitter? OK, sounds good. There are certain hitters who just have the ability to knock in runs? Great. Let’s go play some ball.

Bill has a sharp and hypersensitive distaste for bull——. This is true even for his close friends. The answers that people offered to his baseball questions did nothing at all to stop the whistling in his mind. If anything, the whistling grew louder. The questions that troubled him most in the early years seem odd now, but you can see how everything was coming into focus for him.

Take one question in particular: Do great and exciting pitchers like Nolan Ryan draw more fans than others? Why that question? Who really cares? But I think that question was a particular breakthrough for Bill James because it seemed so obvious (OF COURSE Nolan Ryan outdrew other pitchers) and it was relatively easy to answer. All he had to do was look up the attendance when Ryan pitched and when others on his team pitched. This wasn’t exactly EASY in 1977 — it was long before personal computers and Retrosheet.org, so he had to go through the box scores he had clipped out of The Sporting News — but it was relatively easy. And what he found was: No. Nolan Ryan absolutely did not draw more fans than other pitchers. He didn’t draw more than his Angels teammates, such as Don Kirkwood in 1976. And in the Astrodome in Houston, he was outdrawn by Vern Ruhle and Joe Niekro in 1980.

Well, if people could get something that simple wrong, they could get just about anything wrong. It wasn’t in Bill’s nature to trust conventional wisdom anyway, but the more he looked at the box scores — the more hours he spent with the evidence — the more he came to believe that so much of what people said automatically about baseball was silly, misleading, incomplete.

He kept looking at those box scores and kept looking and kept looking, and this is the image that endures of Bill James — him in that pork and beans plant with graph paper and clipped box scores and line after line of numbers. It was around this time that he started to really challenge some of the conventions of baseball. It was around this time that he concocted the word “sabermetrics.”*

*Sabermetrics — now in the American Heritage Dictionary as “the application of statistical analysis to baseball records, esp. in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players” — comes from root SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.

It was also around this time that he started to find people like himself — a community of people. Mostly, though, he worked alone. The very concept of errors — of judging players’ defense based only on the plays that an official scorer thought he should make — drove him nuts. Crediting wins and losses to pitchers as if they and they alone were responsible drove him nuts too. The inability of baseball’s numbers to take into account the differences in ballparks also drove him nuts (how could you judge Jim Rice, who played half his games in Fenway Park, and Bob Watson, who played half HIS games in the Astrodome, in the same way?).

Yes, he was driven nuts early and often, and he raged back with a sort of funny, blunt and often searing writing that appealed to an audience that nobody had realized existed. Bill James was not the first person to search for deeper knowledge in baseball, not even close, but unlike anyone else, he could bring that search to life on the page. Many of his formulas became pretty famous in baseball circles — runs created, Pythagorean winning percentage, favorite toy, secondary average, similarity scores, Hall of Fame monitor, and on and on — but it was the writing that broke through. His essay on the absurdity of the “pitching is 90 percent of baseball” cliché is a classic, and left no survivors.

If Bill has regrets about his early writing it is that he feels he was often too mean. But I suspect that it had to be that way. He found himself on the front line of a fight that he had no intention of starting. Bill had always thought that if he spent hours and hours looking up numbers and discovering that, say, players who get on base are especially valuable in the leadoff spot, or that pitchers with bad won-loss records are sometimes very good pitchers, well, he thought that people in baseball would appreciate that information and maybe even use it.

But, of course, that’s not what happened. They really did gripe about how he had never played the game. They really did say that baseball is a game of the gut and a game of the heart, and you can’t offer anything of any use about baseball with formulas or science. They really did say that he did not love baseball, not the way that baseball was meant to be loved, and that he was only hurting the game.

The funny thing is that the first people around baseball who did hear his song were player agents, particularly the Hendricks brothers. In a 1982 salary arbitration case, they were representing a pitcher named Steve Trout, who had gone 9-16 for the White Sox in ’80 and then a mere 8-7 in the strike-interrupted 1981 season. The White Sox — led by an assistant GM named Dave Dombrowski — made the point that Trout was clearly not in good shape after the 1981 strike, and all you had to do was look at his record in 1980 to see that he had been disappointing the year before. The Hendricks brothers then pulled out that guy named Bill James, who pointed out that in 1980 Trout lost six games where he had allowed three earned runs or fewer, and that in his first eight games after the strike his ERA was 3.06. Trout was awarded the money.

Bill James kept writing about baseball, though he tried always to keep it fresh. He wrote The Baseball Abstract every year for almost a decade and then decided that it had run its course. He wrote books about managers and the Hall of Fame and so on. At some point he came to expect that nobody inside baseball would ever really listen to what he had to say about it. He made his peace with that. He still loved the game, and loved exploring it. One of my favorite paragraphs that Bill ever wrote was from his New Historical Abstract:

“I was once described by a now-defunct publication as ‘the guru of baseball statistics,’ and by Sparky Anderson as “a little fat guy with a beard who knows nothing about nothing.’ Actually, I’m seven inches taller than Sparky is, but what the heck, three out of four ain’t bad, and it sure beats being described as the guru of baseball statistics.”

The (CoW) of the formula is the trickiest part — but it’s the one that I think clarifies the genius of Bill James. (CoW) is complexity of the world.

In one of the early, discarded versions of the film “Moneyball” — the movie had numerous forms before coming to life on the big screen — Bill James was to be played by an animated character. Nobody was at all sure how this was going to work (least of all, Bill) but I think this was a bit of inspired casting because, over the years, so many people have stubbornly insisted on seeing him as a cartoon. The Bill James image — humorless statistician who sees baseball and life through the prism of bloodless numbers — is a transcontinental flight from the real man, but at some point he learned to stop worrying and love the bombast. When “The Simpsons” asked him to play himself on the show, he happily enunciated his one line: “I made baseball as fun as doing your taxes!”

“What difference does it make?” Bill asks, and then he changes the subject to, say, the music of Roger Miller (“Roger Miller is fun about once a year. I’ve got like eight albums of Roger Miller stuff, like ‘My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died’ and ‘Lu’s Got the Flu,’”) or the varying qualities of George Clooney’s movies or how he has become convinced that Lizzy Borden could not have committed those murders.

If there is a guiding principle to all of Bill’s work, it is this: What difference does it make? The world is a complicated place. Baseball is a complicated game. This, more than anything, is what the Bill-as-cartoon people miss. He does not think that there are RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, certainly not to the questions that rage in his head. He just thinks that there are ways to get closer to the truth.

“We will never figure out baseball,” he says. “We will never get close to figuring out baseball.”

This, I think, is the critical final piece. Curiosity might have been the flint, distrust of conventional wisdom might have been the steel, but that only gives you a spark. What turned the work into a raging fire was that Bill James has never really believed that he had figured it out. He never even believed that you COULD figure it out. All he wanted to do was get the conversation going, advance the ball, give people new things to think about, let the discussion evolve and keep evolving. In the later years, Bill found that his word WAS read by people who mattered. The personal computer changed everything — there have been countless baseball studies done that would have literally been impossible 30 years ago. Television screens got bigger*.

*Bill thinks that bigger television screens might be the No. 1 reason for the explosion of statistics in baseball. “When they put batting average, home runs and RBI on a screen 35 years ago, it took up a fourth of the screen,” he says. “If they’d put the pitch count, the batter’s count, the score and the runners on base on there, the batter would have been entirely obscured. But with the immense TV screens that we all have now, you can show six channels and see everything.”

Bill James started to be recognized. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The Boston Red Sox hired him, and he received two World Series rings.

Baseball people, some of them at least, started to look hard at his work. He captured the imagination of an ex-marine named Sandy Alderson, who passed along Bill’s books to a failed prospect named Billy Beane, who became a successful general manager and shared some of his winning secrets with a marvelous writer named Michael Lewis, who wrote a book called Moneyball that caught the attention of a famous actor named Brad Pitt.

And that is how we got here to the Paramount Theater in Oakland, a big crowd, limousines, bright lights and Bill James wandering unnoticed with a new jacket and his wife Susie on his arm.

“There are two fruits here that I have never seen before,” Bill James is saying now, and this is the post-movie party in the Fox Theater, which is a few blocks away. There is music blaring, and camera phones flashing, and celebrities who played in the movie at every turn. Oakland A’s pitcher Brandon McCarthy — who is 6-foot-7 and throws a good cutter and has a funny and must-follow Twitter account — wanders over for a while. McCarthy, at the moment, is leading the American League in an interesting statistic called Fielding Independent Pitching.

“He’s having a very good year,” I explain to Susie after Brandon leaves. Susie is an artist, and she sees baseball through an artist’s eye. She asks: “What is his record?”

I start to say that his 9-8 record doesn’t really tell how well McCarthy is pitching, but Bill says, “I think it’s something like 14-10.” This is not a time for sabermetrics. This is a time for small talk, for people-watching, and we talk about Brad Pitt movies and the struggling Red Sox and why the DJ won’t play a song released in the previous 30 years (at that moment “Hotel California” is playing). We also talk about the two fruits that are on the buffet tables, two fruits that Bill has never seen before. The first is kind of like a plum, but not really a plum.

The second is a sort of ball that looks like it is covered with green artificial turf.

“I think that’s just for decoration,” Susie says.

“I know,” Bill says, “but I wonder what kind of fruit it is.”

“No,” Susie says, “I don’t think it is a fruit. I really think it’s just a decoration.”

Bill stays silent for a while after that. Maybe he’s thinking about how crazy it is, his life, from comparing baseball cards to all those hours spent over box scores to a movie premiere where Brad Pitt plays a hero who challenges baseball’s conventions. More likely he’s wondering if that green ball can be eaten and why anyone would.

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Baby Chuck Robinson

2022-08-25T18:45:00.002-07:00

'Baby Chuck' Robinson realizes 3rd-generation MLB dream

August 24th, 2022

Aug 24, 2022

0:30

Chuckie Robinson's first hit

PHILADELPHIA -- On the day of his Major League debut Wednesday vs. the Phillies, Reds catcher Chuckie Robinson was headed onto the field for batting practice when he saw his grandfather and father -- "Big Chuck" and "Little Chuck" -- on the dirt near the screen. Known as "Baby Chuck" around his family, Robinson stopped and gave them both a hug.

A dream -- decades in the making -- came true for three generations of professional baseball-playing Chuck Robinsons from Danville, Ill. Big Chuck, aka Chuck Sr., played one season in the White Sox organization in the 1960s. Little Chuck played in the Cubs’ system in ’91. Like Chuckie, they were catchers.

"I just gravitated towards it," Robinson said. "I guess it’s in my blood."

During the Reds' 7-5 loss to the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park, Robinson was 1-for-2 with his first Major League hit -- a one-out single to center field in the top of the fifth inning. The ball was tossed into the visitors' dugout for safe keeping.

Aug 25, 2022

0:54

Chuckie Robinson on first hit

"I saw it go through and I was like, ‘Yes, thank you!’" said Robinson, who was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the seventh inning. "[Rhys] Hoskins was at first base and was like, ‘It took me 12 at-bats.’ I’m super grateful and happy for that first knock."

Reaching the top level of baseball is, of course, a big feat that not many get to enjoy. Even rarer in the recent history of the Major Leagues has been Black catchers. Elston Howard and Hall of Famer Roy Campenella were two of the greatest at the position, but there hasn't been a star African American catcher since Charles Johnson earned four Gold Gloves, two All-Star appearances and a World Series title during his career from 1994-2005.

Black Canadian catcher Russell Martin -- a four-time All-Star and 2007 NL Gold Glove winner -- last played in 2019, and Bruce Maxwell was the last African American catcher to play in the Majors when he played for Oakland from '16-18.

Robinson hugs his father, "Little Chuck," on the field before the Reds took on the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

"I was a late Draft pick, always against the odds. I always try to keep that chip on my shoulder," said Robinson, who was drafted in the 21st round by the Astros in 2016. "It kind of adds fuel. I know I am representing a lot of people out there. I like being in the position I am in."

As a 4-year-old, Robinson went to his grandfather and told him he also wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up.

"He said, ‘Paw Paw, this is what I want to do.’ I said, ‘Let’s do this. We’ll try to make it possible, and I will show you the way,’" Big Chuck said before Wednesday's game.

"Big Chuck" (center) and "Little Chuck" (right) speak to Reds manager David Bell before the game.

Robinson's father noted that baseball was not a compulsory sport, however.

"Chuckie knew from the very beginning -- his siblings as well -- that we never forced the game on them," Little Chuck said. "We were very conscious of him not just doing baseball to try to live through us because he had seen us do baseball. It just naturally came to him, and we allowed him to exercise and do what he felt he wanted to do. Now, we’re here."

Robinson, 27, was selected by the Reds from the Astros in the Triple-A Phase of the 2020 Rule 5 Draft. In 58 games this season with Double-A Chattanooga and Triple-A Louisville, he batted .266/.320/.399 with five home runs and 25 RBIs.

"He’s impressed everyone that he’s come across in player development," Reds manager David Bell said. "He’s played well. He’s found ways to improve his game offensively, defensively. He’s absolutely earned the opportunity. Very well liked, very well respected on teams he’s been on."

Despite the long road to reach the big leagues, and their own short pro baseball careers, the elder Robinsons never gave up hope for Chuckie.

Aug 24, 2022

0:31

Aristides Aquino nabs Hoskins

"We kept the faith. We had that perspective and we just kept believing and we kept trusting," Big Chuck said.

The Reds initially called up Robinson to their taxi squad on Aug. 1, and he was the 27th man for the Field of Dreams Game vs. the Cubs in Iowa on Aug. 11. But he did not get to play and was sent back to the Minors.

On Tuesday, Robinson was recalled when the Reds optioned Michael Papierski. The news came via Louisville manager Pat Kelly.

"I was in my car and P.K. called me. He was like, ‘It’s for real this time.’ I was like, ‘OK, yes!’ I was excited," Robinson said. "The first person I called was my Grandpa. He basically taught me everything I know about the game."

Robinson also became the 58th player to appear in a game for the Reds this season, breaking a 2003 franchise record. He's the seventh catcher.

The family made the trip from Illinois to be there to see the debut of "Baby Chuck." They had time together on the field after the game, too.

"I’ve been waiting my whole life for this day," Robinson said. "I couldn’t ask for anything more than to be out there playing the game in front of my Grandpa, my Dad, my family. It was awesome."

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Donald Trump, American Monster - Maureen Dowd NYT

2022-06-11T09:24:00.001-07:00

OPINION

MAUREEN DOWD

Donald Trump, American Monster

June 11, 2022

Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they used to be.

I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school and the monster is magnificent. He starts out with an elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and gathering firewood for a poor family. But his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons him and refuses him a mate to calm his loneliness. The creature finds no one who does not recoil in fear and disgust from his stitched-together appearance, his yellow skin and eyes, and black lips. Embittered, he seeks revenge on his creator and the world.

“Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” he laments. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”

Before he disappears into the Arctic at the end of the book, he muses that once he had “high thoughts of honour,” until his “frightful catalogue” of malignant deeds piled up.

Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness, and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.

It never for a moment crossed Donald Trump’s mind that an American president committing sedition would be a debilitating, corrosive thing for the country. It was just another way for the Emperor of Chaos to burnish his title.

We listened Thursday night to the frightful catalogue of Trump’s deeds. They are so beyond the pale, so hard to fathom, that in some ways, it’s all still sinking in.

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The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!

The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”

Liz Cheney cleverly used the words of former Trump aides to show that, despite his malevolent bleating, Trump knew there was no fraud on a level that would have changed the election results.

“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, said.

Breaking from her father, Ivanka Trump — in a taped deposition — said she embraced Barr’s version of reality: “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”

(Her husband, Jared Kushner, won the prize for gall in his deposition: He was too busy arranging pardons for sleazeballs to pay attention to whether Trump aides were threatening to quit over the sleazeball in the Oval.)

Trump’s data experts told him bluntly that he had lost. “So there’s no there there,” Mark Meadows commented.

Trump just couldn’t stand being labeled a loser — his father’s bête noire. He maniacally subverted the election out of pure selfishness and wickedness, knowing it is easy to manipulate people on social media with the Big Lie.

It was fine with him if his followers broke the law and attacked the police and went to jail, while he praised their “love” from afar. It’s amazing that no lawmakers were killed.

Everywhere you look, there’s something that makes your blood run cold. The monster in “Frankenstein” is not the only one who has forsaken “thoughts of honour.”

Russia, also in the grip of a monster, is invading and destroying a neighboring democracy for no reason, except Vladimir Putin’s delusions of grandeur.

In Uvalde, the unfathomable story unspools about how the police delayed rescuing schoolchildren for an hour because a commander was worried about the officers’ safety.

Greedy golf icons joined a tour underwritten by the Saudis, even though the Saudi crown prince ordered a journalist dismembered. (Kushner is under investigation about whether he traded on his government position to secure a $2 billion investment from the Saudis for his new private equity firm.)

As Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the committee, noted, when the Capitol was attacked in 1814, it was by the British. This time it was by an enemy within, egged on by the man at the heart of the democracy he swore to protect.

“They did so at the encouragement of the president of the United States,” Thompson said of the mob, “trying to stop the transfer of power, a precedent that had stood for 220 years.”

It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself. He was quick to throw Ivanka off the sled on Friday, indicating her opinion did not count since she “was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out.”

Let some conservatives dismiss the hearings as “A Snooze Fest.” Let Fox News churlishly refuse to run them.

The hearing was mesmerizing, describing a horror story with predatory Proud Boys and a monster at its center that even Mary Shelley could have appreciated. The ratings were boffo, with nearly 20 million viewers.

Caroline Edwards, the tough Capitol Police officer who suffered a concussion, was sprayed in her eyes and got back up to return to the fight, described a hellscape.

“I was slipping in people’s blood,” she recalled. “You know, I — I was catching people as they fell. I — you know, I was — it was carnage.”

In his dystopian Inaugural speech, Trump promised to end “American carnage.” Instead, he delivered it. Now he needs to be held accountable for his attempted coup — and not just in the court of public opinion.

Image

Credit...John Minchillo/Associated Press

The Unraveling of America - Rolling Stone

2020-08-09T11:05:00.002-07:00

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/?fbclid=IwAR0WEvNbpU8Iqa8vUg5n94aa5OxfyQILBkCQEgBgbOepIaD6mRKsWZrFqyk

The Unraveling of America

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era

WADE DAVIS

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, “Magdalena: River of Dreams,” is published by Knopf.

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio on April 3rd, 1944. When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.” North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality” in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khomeini gloated, “America has begun the process of its own destruction.”

Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American official raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd, responded with one short phrase, “I can’t breathe.”

These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”.

The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none.

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.

Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.

When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions. And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of those of the prime minister. These three strands woven together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return they get free health care, free education from pre-school through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions.

If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

Redneck

2020-04-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

"Redneck"

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Redneck is a derogatory term chiefly but not exclusively applied to white Americans perceived to be crass and unsophisticated, closely associated with rural whites of the Southern United States. Its usage is similar in meaning to cracker (especially regarding Texas, Georgia, and Florida), hillbilly (especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks), and white trash (but without the last term's suggestions of immorality). In Britain the Cambridge Dictionary definition states: "a poor, white person without education, esp. one living in the countryside in the southern US, who is believed to have prejudiced ideas and beliefs. This word is usually considered offensive." People from the white South sometimes jocularly call themselves "rednecks" as insider humour.

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19th and early 20th centuries

Political term for poor farmers

The term characterized farmers having a red neck caused by sunburn from hours working in the fields. A citation from 1893 provides a definition as "poorer inhabitants of the rural districts ... men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin stained red and burnt by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks". Hats were usually worn and they protected that wearer's head from the sun, but also provided psychological protection by shading the face from close scrutiny. The back of the neck however was more exposed to the sun and allowed closer scrutiny about the person's background in the same way callused working hands could not be easily covered.
By 1900, "rednecks" was in common use to designate the political factions inside the Democratic Party comprising poor white farmers in the South. The same group was also often called the "wool hat boys" (for they opposed the rich men, who wore expensive silk hats).

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Outside the United States

Historical Scottish Covenanter usage

In Scotland in the 1640s, the Covenanters rejected rule by bishops, often signing manifestos using their own blood. Some wore red cloth around their neck to signify their position, and were called rednecks by the Scottish ruling class to denote that they were the rebels in what came to be known as The Bishop's War that preceded the rise of Cromwell. Eventually, the term began to mean simply "Presbyterian", especially in communities along the Scottish border. Because of the large number of Scottish immigrants in the pre-revolutionary American South, some historians have suggested that this may be the origin of the term in the United States.
Dictionaries document the earliest American citation of the term's use for Presbyterians in 1830, as "a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians of Fayetteville [North Carolina]".

Bill James on Bernie Sanders

2020-02-05T15:05:00.002-08:00

Swing and a Miss

By Bill James

February 5, 2020

Missed That One

I was expecting yesterday to post an acknowledgement that I was wrong when I predicted, some time last summer, that Bernie Sanders would not be relevant to the 2020 Presidential campaign. The chaos in Iowa has delayed this article by a day or so, but I should precede.

The issue I should address, growing out of that mistake, is what exactly my misjudgment was. I certainly knew, as I reached that conclusion, that my Twitter followers were not representative of the nation as a whole, nor of the Democratic Party as a whole. I was not in the grip of any illusion that they were.

Here is what I thought. My Twitter followers—like most groups of Twitter followers—are predominantly left of center. They’re mostly Democrats. Trump has little support among them, and indeed, no Republican has very much support among them. My Twitter followers are a little more balanced now than they were then, because I try to balance them, but that’s still true.

It seemed to me, at the time, that since the group being tested was left-leaning, it would almost certainly overstate—OVERstate—the level of support for the most left-leaning candidate. Bernie was polling at something less than one-half the support level of Joe Biden—and Joe Biden was behind Pete Buttigieg, and Pete Buttigieg was far behind Elizabeth Warren at that time. I thought at that time that it was impossible to imagine that an old man who had so little support in what should have been his home field would somehow rally to become a strong contender for the nomination.

In my rather long lifetime, I have seen many passion-driven, extremist. . . not meaning extremist as an insult. Bernie represents the furthest left viable portion of the philosophical mainstream; I mean "extremist" only in that sense, not that he should be ignored on the charge that he is out of the mainstream. Over time, I have seen many extremist candidates light a fire under a group of followers, fall short of the nomination, and then try to rekindle that fire years later. They always fail, I thought; I can see now that I was wrong about that, but I go back to Eugene McCarthy and Edmund Muskie, the liberal darlings of 1968, both trying to re-ignite the fire in 1972, and in 1976. It was like they were trying to strike again a match that already burned out.

I was wrong for three reasons, or at least three reasons. First, I underestimated Sanders as a person, or as a candidate, but as a candidate based on the skills that he personally possesses, if that makes sense. Sanders has formidable oratorical skills, vastly better than the oratorical skills of Elizabeth Warren. He was able to rip Elizabeth Warren’s support away from her because he is just a hell of a lot better speaker than she is. He sticks with simple ideas, and he advocates those simple ideas with passion and conviction.

I rather intensely dislike Socialism and socialist ideas, but I kind of like Bernie. We DO need to do something serious about income inequality in this country. It IS a problem; we do need to address it. It IS time, and past time, that anyone should be able to afford to go to college without picking up a slag heap of debt. Bernie has the worst possible solutions to these problems, I think, but at least he is serious about doing something about them.

So that was the first thing I was wrong about. Second, I fell into a trap of which I have often warned others. I read the lessons of history to be fixed laws, rather than a series of examples. That something may have happened in a certain way before does not mean that it will happen in the same way again—even if it has happened that way 50 times before. A batter may swing for the fences 100 times and strike out 100 times, and yet he may hit a home run the next time up. A second baseman may field 1,000 ground balls without a glitch, and the next one may roll off his glove. What has happened before is not always a barrier to what may happen next time. I should have recognized this.

And third, there is a logical failure there which is harder to describe. In a democracy, or in any other functioning economy, what most people want very often has nothing to do with anything. This is the flaw that undermines, for example, efforts to boycott those with whom we disagree.

Years ago, the Catholic church used to publish a list of movies that Catholics were banned from seeing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still do, although we don’t hear much about it anymore, if they still do. You weren’t supposed to see movies with boobies and bad language.

The problem was, movie makers WANTED to get on that list. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t see the movie; it matters who does.

Well, the biggest movie of the year, 90% of the public wouldn’t pay to see it; probably 95%, I don’t know. If five good Catholics say, "OK, we can’t go that movie" but one horny college student decides to take his date to the movie, the movie wins. It’s a really common syndrome.

In a small group, in a contained group, you can enforce your values by threatening those who don’t buy in with exclusion. Dealing with the nation as a whole, it doesn’t work that way. Who doesn’t like the movie, who doesn’t like the chicken company or the hobby supplies merchant doesn’t have anything to do with anything. What matters is who does.

This is a similar problem. It doesn’t make any difference, at this level, who doesn’t like Bernie. When Donald Trump called John McCain a loser, he offended many leading Republicans to such an extent that they tried to drive him out of the party. They declared him dead as a candidate.

But it didn’t really make any difference, at that level, who was offended by it. What mattered is who liked it. His outspokenness, his bluntness, his willingness to pee on the feet of the sacred cows, was appealing to many people.

Sort of the same here; I thought that it mattered who doesn’t like Bernie. It ultimately matters, but it doesn’t matter much at this level. That was my third failure.

It might also be, if you go back and read those articles, that I had some things right at that time, and indeed, that I may have been ahead of the curve on some candidates. I’m not here to talk about those things, but I am also not saying that my analysis of those polls was generally poor. I was wrong about this, and I am here to acknowledge that.

Bill James

February 5, 2020

NFL MLB NHL actual action

2020-01-31T12:47:00.002-08:00

How Much Football Is Even In A Football Broadcast?

NFL telecasts include a smaller share of game action than in any other major sport — even MLB.

Around 100 million Americans will tune in this Sunday to watch Super Bowl LIV. The big game hasn’t just become the nation’s most popular sporting event; it’s also become America’s most important and most-watched television broadcast, an annual extravaganza that showcases our love affairs with both athleticism and capitalism.

But what, exactly, are we all watching?

We examined the nature of pro sports broadcasts as part of the sports analytics course we taught last semester at the University of Texas. We watched dozens of broadcasts across all major sports and charted every second along the way. Our goal was to understand the makeup of the most valuable properties in sports — live game broadcasts — and to map out how these broadcasts vary across different sports.

Our findings reveal that while different sports produce wildly different broadcast experiences, NFL broadcasts are among the most interrupted and least action-packed broadcasts of any sport. Simply put, there’s not a lot of actual football in a football game.

The numbers are startling. An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action. And although NFL games start with one hour on the clock and include a 12-minute halftime, because of constant clock stoppages and commercial breaks, game broadcasts are much longer than that.

Within our sample of 10 regular-season games from this season, we found that an average NFL broadcast lasted three hours and 23 minutes and included 50 minutes of commercial breaks. For context, some critics have complained that the Oscar-nominated film “Parasite” is too long.” But that movie is 70-plus minutes shorter than an average Dolphins game, and folks, if you thought “Parasite” had a brutal ending, try watching the fourth quarter of a typical Dolphins game.

Unlike Bong Joon-ho’s thriller, NFL broadcasts include a lot of commercial breaks: About 25 percent of an average NFL broadcast is commercials. But the 50 minutes of commercials are also distributed over more than 20 commercial breaks. To watch an NFL broadcast is to bask in a marathon of interruptions. Check out this visual summary of the NFC championship game:

Those different colors represent different broadcast experiences, and as the 49ers steadily defeated the Packers, our televisions toggled between Levi’s Stadium and Madison Avenue over and over again. The broadcast lasted three hours and 15 minutes, but it included 18 separate commercial breaks that in total lasted 43 minutes — not including the halftime break. In sum, the game’s 107 total plays gave us 14 total minutes (and 16 seconds) of football action. In other words, those who settled in to watch the entire NFC championship endured a commercial-to-action ratio of over 3-to-1.

From the time the ball is snapped until the whistle blows, an average individual NFL play lasts just a handful of seconds, with play duration varying based on play type. Long pass plays, for example, last longer than short running plays. But one thing that makes football different from, say, soccer or basketball is that the game clock often runs between actual athletic action. And to be fair, those intervals, which represent a majority of NFL broadcasts, aren’t exactly meaningless. They are filled with critical strategy as teams tinker with personnel, formations and play calls. They build suspense.

Still, depending on your level of football expertise and your investment in the game itself, those sequences may not actually entertain you, so the overall football entertainment density within an NFL broadcast depends on a viewer’s perspective. Football is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re wonky enough to geek out on the mechanics between plays, then you’ll be entertained for a majority of the broadcast; if you’re not, you’ll be bored.

Sports with more continuous action — and fewer stoppages — may have a leg up on the NFL. Soccer and basketball broadcasts both offer more action and fewer interruptions than football broadcasts — and they do it in a shorter time frame.

An average English Premier League broadcast in our study lasted less than two hours, and a majority of that consisted of actual soccer action. Because of the running clock and the flowing nature of the sport itself, EPL games include over five times as much action (59 minutes) as they do commercials (10 minutes), but even the breaks they do have are neatly coalesced into the 15-minute halftime period. Consequently, soccer broadcasts inject advertising into the flow of the action, hence the sponsored uniforms, the branded billboards that surround the pitch and the monetized chyrons on the corner of our screens.

Regardless, European football and American football provide viewers with wildly different broadcast experiences — and advertisers with different platforms. And the other major sports fall somewhere in between.

In terms of broadcast length, only Major League Baseball can hold a candle to the NFL. We charted 17 MLB postseason games, and they averaged a whopping three hours and 45 minutes while delivering only 23 minutes of athletic action (the total time of actual pitches and plays unfolding).

While contemporary American audiences grow more and more demanding, baseball is trending toward monotony. As a result, MLB officials are exploring ways to speed up games and tighten up broadcasts. However, while NFL broadcasts mimic MLB ones in many ways, the NFL has so far escaped baseball’s plight, in part because the average NFL game has more consequence than the average MLB game¹ and in part because the proof is in the pudding. Regular-season NFL ratings are soaring, so if it ain’t broke…

But does the NFL actually have less reason to worry?

Coming into this year, the Super Bowl’s Nielsen rating has decreased for four consecutive years. Last year’s game was the lowest rated since 2005, and if these trends continue, broadcast strategies will have to adapt, especially when you consider that between smartphones and streaming services, the American attention economy is vastly more competitive than it was in 2005. Despite the recent upticks in regular-season ratings, the NFL and its media partners still need to accommodate 21st century audiences, and it looks like they realize that already.

As reported by Variety, Fox is actively trying to reduce the number of interruptions in this year’s big game.

“Fox intends to cut one commercial break from each quarter in its February 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, according to four people familiar with the matter, a bid to eliminate some of the interruptions to the flow of play. The maneuver comes straight from the playbook of the NFL, which has been working with its TV partners to counter criticism about the volume of breaks in the game.”

Many of us already watch football games with phones in our hands, ready to deploy our social media apps as soon as Joe Buck throws it to commercial, which begs the question: Are commercial breaks even as effective as they used to be? Yes, they still provide corporations an unmatched invitation to our living rooms, but as any good smartphone addict knows, just because you’re in the same room as me doesn’t mean I’m paying attention to you.

Surveys conducted by Mintel, a market research firm, identified that people age 18 to 24 are 11 percent less likely to consider themselves a fan of football, and many note the length of games as a reason why they are not fans. Even executives of major networks understand that streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu offer commercial-free options, and sports are the last frontier of live programming.

So as we settle into a new decade, it’s clear that the NFL is still the king of American sports, and the Super Bowl is still our biggest TV show. But it’s less clear if the next generation of audiences will tolerate the interruptions and run times of current broadcasts. Time will tell, and so will this year’s Nielsen ratings.

Kirk Goldsberry is a staff writer at ESPN. @kirkgoldsberry

Katherine Rowe is an MBA candidate focused on the intersection of sports analytics, business, and the threads that connect them. @kathrowe22

Canadian Election 2019 (last polls)

2019-10-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Final results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Canadian_federal_election

================================================================

(Latest update: October 21, 2019) http://338canada.com/districts/districts.htm

Safe Likely Leaning Toss up Projected ahead

LIB 32 52 23 32 139

CPC 43 35 22 26 126

BLQ 3 11 8 12 34

NDP 9 8 6 12 35

GRN 1 0 0 1 2

PPC 0 0 1 0 1

IND 0 0 0 1 1

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATED ON OCT 20, 2019 AT 11:38 PM ET

Poll Tracker Éric Grenier https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/poll-tracker/canada/

The Liberals remain in a close national race in public support with the Conservatives but are favoured to win the most seats, though probably not another majority government. The New Democrats and Bloc Québécois, after making significant gains in the polls, appear to be hitting a ceiling — but could hold the balance of power in a minority parliament.

Latest polls and projections

Poll averages

LIB 32.0%up +0.2

CON 31.6%up +0.2

NDP 18.4%up +0.3

GRN 7.5%down -0.5

BQ 7.0%up +0.1

PPC 2.5%down -0.2

OTH 0.9%down -0.2

Seat projections

LIB 137

CON 124

BQ 39

NDP 35

GRN 1

PPC 1

IND 1

Morgan's Birthday

2019-10-14T15:04:00.001-07:00

October 13, 1979

In the World Series, Pittsburgh trailed the favored Baltimore Orioles three games to one when Tanner learned that his mother had died. He told his players, “My mother is a great Pirates fan. She knows we’re in trouble, so she went upstairs to get some help.”6 The Pirates rallied to win three straight games, including Games Six and Seven on the road.

Chuck Tanner's mom went to heaven & my daughter was born that day. Reincarnation?

Trump's mental health is now a "national and global emergency"

2019-06-20T16:24:00.001-07:00

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Trump's mental health is now a "national and global emergency"

Dr. Bandy Lee convened experts to study the Mueller report. They conclude that Trump "can no longer see reality"

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

JUNE 14, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)

Robert Mueller's report is 448 pages long and took almost two years to complete. Nineteen lawyers and at least 40 other people assisted with the investigation. It involved interviews with 500 people. Thirty-four people were indicted, seven have pled guilty and one was convicted at trial. The facts presented are damning: Donald Trump obstructed justice. Trump and his inner circle both publicly and privately sought to collude with Russian agents to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Beyond the particulars of Trump's likely illegal behavior, the Mueller report is also a compendium of Donald Trump's state of mind.

Dr. Bandy Lee, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Donald Trump based upon his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report.

Their definitive conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted. At the invitation of several Democratic members of Congress, Lee and other mental health professionals will present their findings about Donald Trump's mental health at what they hope will be a bipartisan congressional meeting in Washington next month.

Does Donald Trump pose a significant threat to both American society and the world? By what standards is he mentally unfit to serve as president? Should a person with Trump's apparent mental health issues and other behavioral problems be allowed to command the United States military and order the use of force — up to and including nuclear weapons? Why are more Americans not actively resisting Donald Trump's regime and movement? Have Trump and his movement broken the will of the American people by creating a state of malignant normality?

To seek answers to these and other questions, I recently interviewed Dr. Lee, whom I have interviewed on several previous occasions. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can hear our full conversation on my podcast, "The Chauncey DeVega Show." My conversation with Bandy Lee can also be listened to through the player below.

In your volume "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," as well as our many conversations since the election of Donald Trump, you have predicted with uncanny accuracy how his behavior and mental health would worsen. Yet there are no mass protests and most people seem numb to this dangerous situation and Trump's overall assault on democracy. Where is the outrage? Has Donald Trump broken the will of the American people?

These are scary times. This is a moment that we predicted as almost the end point, where we as a country might be at a place of no return. We have passed the point of being able to fix things ourselves. That is something that we see in patients who have mental disorders. They are able to see that something is wrong with them up to a certain point, but after a certain level intervention can only come from the outside. We have seen this in other countries.

Communities, be they nations or other types of social collectives, can function like an individual. So the same principles that apply to an individual apply to collectives or nation-states. I'm sorry to bring you this message about these very perilous times, but we must not give up. This is especially true of mental health professionals, who have a special obligation on these matters of public safety.

Every day Trump and his regime seem to do something unprecedented in modern American history. How do people become used to this malignant normality?

The origin of that phrase goes back to Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote the foreword to our book, as you know. He insisted on using that phrase and I thought it was a brilliant one. His foreword is centered around two themes. Eventually a malignant normality will set in where we will accept what is malignant as being normal. That is described as "a loss of insight." This happens when an individual or a group no longer sees what is wrong, destructive and pathological as abnormal but actually accept it as normal.

The second theme Dr. Lifton highlighted was our role as witnessing professionals. As mental health professionals we understand this phenomenon. We see this every day. We know what happens to patients when they lose their ability to have insight, when they can no longer see the abnormal as malignant and bad. The patients are delusional because they believe bad things are good for them. When this happens a patient succumbs to the disorder and starts being destructive.

Donald Trump appears to be pure unrestrained id. He is driven by greed. Trump does not read and is proudly ignorant. He possesses no ideology. Beyond greed, how much of Trump's behavior is a function of his own desires and how much is because of manipulation by others?

It's a form of co-dependence. It is a mutual phenomenon where you have a person who is mentally disordered. Trump would have remained psychologically disordered as an individual, and therefore not doing much harm, if he had just remained a private citizen. As a real estate builder and a reality TV personality, Trump's power to do harm to society would be vastly limited. But because he rose to the level of president of the United States, this is why I and other health professionals have a medical obligation to speak publicly, to sound the alarm about this whole situation. Donald Trump is the center of vast levels of harm being done to a wide segment of society. This is a public health and public safety issue.

The health paradigm has no room for politics. This has nothing to do with politics. Our concerns are purely about public health and safety, and whether or not American society will choose a destructive route versus a life-affirming, constructive route. Disease by definition is destructive. What we are witnessing with Donald Trump's presidency are all signs of destruction. These symptoms are the dismantling of democracy, rampant corruption, thwarting the rule of law and even the loss of a shared sense of what reality actually is.

The ability to distinguish what is real from what is unreal is very important. With mental pathology, the afflicted person starts to see delusions and hallucinations as real. This mentally unwell person will actually do whatever they can to bulldoze over reality as it actually exists and the people who believe in it. This is why a sick, delusional person will force family members and those around them to abandon their own sense of reality and espouse the sick person's delusions and conspiracy theories.

This is what Donald Trump is doing to the United States and the American people. People who have their grounding in reality and rationality are now losing ground to him.

Recently Donald Trump threatened a list of public servants with charges of treason, a crime which is punishable by death. Trump did this out of apparent rage at the Mueller report. A few days before, Trump paraded out all his sycophants to say that Nancy Pelosi is a liar and that he had not thrown a temper tantrum during a recent meeting with her — despite witnesses who confirm those accounts. One would think that a healthy person would be cowed by the Mueller report and now proceed with great caution. Instead, Donald Trump is acting even worse.

A mentally unwell person like Donald Trump can no longer see reality for what it is. Instead he has to believe in false beliefs. A person like him has to lie to himself and lie to others. They have to distort the truth. They have to espouse conspiracy theories in order to even tolerate existing in this world, let alone facing reality. A mentally unwell person like Trump cannot accept facts for what they are. He cannot accept the results of the Mueller report as they are. People around Trump sense this.

That is why Attorney General Barr, who is supposed to represent the law, actually distorted the law in order to buttress and protect Donald Trump. Perhaps Barr thought this ploy was necessary for Trump to continue on mentally? Trump would likely not be able to accept the Mueller report if it was presented to him factually. I have been highlighting this fact repeatedly: There is institutional complicity with the leader, who is the center of power in a destructive regime.

You and your colleagues have done something that is likely unprecedented in American history. You convened a panel of the world's leading mental health experts to evaluate the president, based on the findings of a special prosecutor's report. What were the conclusions?

We assembled a group of renowned mental health experts as quickly as possible. We combed through the Mueller report and treated it like the information that we generally have when a court orders us to do a mental capacity evaluation of a person who has shown a lack of mental capacity. This could be a military officer, a police officer or a chief executive officer — anyone who has been flagged by any of their employees or employers because they show signs of possessing an inability to carry out their duties.

Of course the president has his own employers, who are the American people, who have pointed this out. Other specialists have highlighted these concerns about Trump as well. In essence the group of experts we assembled to evaluate Donald Trump were volunteering as expert witnesses in this case, working pro bono in order to provide a formal conclusion to the people and other concerned parties.

With the Mueller report and other information, we believed that we had enough to come to a conclusion. But we wanted to give the president enough of an opportunity to submit to a personal examination. If Trump believes himself fit to be president, we believe he should submit to an examination. We have information that Donald Trump received our request but he did not respond affirmatively. We then issued our conclusion after the three-week period. Our conclusion was damning. The president failed to meet all four criteria that we outlined as the standard, most basic criteria for mental capacity.

The first specific criterion is the ability to take in important information and advice. To be capable of taking in new information to make decisions, given how that is one of the primary and most important roles of a president.

The second criterion is the ability to process that information unimpeded by emotional needs or false beliefs or the need to lie to yourself or others. The ability to simply use the information you have and process it in ways that are normal, unimpeded by all those other emotional factors and needs.

The third criterion is to be able to make sound, rational, reality-based decisions without undue influence by impulsivity, other false beliefs, delusions and conspiracy theories. It's the ability to stay with a decision in a stable way and not to go back and forth depending on the other influences you receive. In essence, to be sane, to be connected to reality.

The fourth is to not put yourself and others in danger. This includes not inciting people to commit dangerous acts. Not to engage in aggressive acts yourself. Not to threaten nations by inciting war. We have found that President Trump was not able to refrain from those acts in many circumstances. Trump has put himself and the nation in danger, and putting yourself or others in danger is also a very important criterion in determining a person's capacity to serve — in this case, Trump's fitness to be president. There is overwhelming evidence in the Mueller report showing that Donald Trump is not able to meet these criteria. Likewise, there is very little evidence showing that Donald Trump is able to meet those criteria.

Do you think that Donald Trump should be impeached? What advice would you give Nancy Pelosi if she reached out to you?

I do not involve myself in direct discussions about impeachment or the political process because that is outside of my realm of expertise. My expertise is medical. In that capacity I can state that unless Donald Trump is contained or removed, he is posing a danger to public health and safety. As president, Trump represents a condition of imminent danger to the country and the world. Therefore my recommendation is that Donald Trump be immediately contained and certain powers are taken away from him.

I would like to highlight two of our greatest concerns. Immediate removal from access to nuclear weapons. The fact that an individual with access to thousands of nuclear weapons which have the capacity to destroy humanity and the world many times over is certainly an unacceptable situation with Donald Trump's level of mental incapacity. The war-making powers are vested in a president. We ask that Donald Trump's ability to make war be removed because he certainly is not in a position to have such powers.

What do you think is most likely to happen next with Donald Trump, if his behavior continues along this path?

We can be quite certain of certain things based on probability and Donald Trump's pattern of behavior. The American people will be in far greater danger. With Donald Trump there will be unacceptable levels of danger of him either destroying the United States or perhaps even human civilization. Donald Trump is a national emergency. That should be the No. 1 priority at this time. The American people and the country's leaders are not treating this dire situation with the attention it demands. The fact that this is not being treated as a national and global emergency is the greatest sign of danger.

CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

Michael Dean Cohen

2019-02-27T10:37:00.002-08:00

NEWS

Read Michael Cohen’s prepared statement to Congress

By Michael Cohen

February 27, 2019 | 8:51am | Updated

Michael CohenREUTERS

MICHAEL COHEN

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This is the prepared statement that Michael Cohen will deliver at 10 a.m. Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee:

Chairman Cummings, Ranking Member Jordan, and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here today.

I have asked this Committee to ensure that my family be protected from Presidential threats, and that the Committee be sensitive to the questions pertaining to ongoing investigations. Thank you for your help and for your understanding.

I am here under oath to correct the record, to answer the Committee’s questions truthfully, and to offer the American people what I know about President Trump.

I recognize that some of you may doubt and attack me on my credibility. It is for this reason that I have incorporated into this opening statement documents that are irrefutable, and demonstrate that the information you will hear is accurate and truthful.

Never in a million years did I imagine, when I accepted a job in 2007 to work for Donald Trump, that he would one day run for President, launch a campaign on a platform of hate and intolerance, and actually win. I regret the day I said “yes” to Mr. Trump. I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way.

I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.

I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty – of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him.

I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.

I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is.

He is a racist.

He is a conman.

He is a cheat.

He was a presidential candidate who knew that Roger Stone was talking with Julian Assange about a WikiLeaks drop of Democratic National Committee emails.

I will explain each in a few moments.

I am providing the Committee today with several documents. These include:
A copy of a check Mr. Trump wrote from his personal bank account – after he became president – to reimburse me for the hush money payments I made to cover up his affair with an adult film star and prevent damage to his campaign;
Copies of financial statements for 2011 – 2013 that he gave to such institutions as Deutsche Bank;
A copy of an article with Mr. Trump’s handwriting on it that reported on the auction of a portrait of himself – he arranged for the bidder ahead of time and then reimbursed the bidder from the account of his non-profit charitable foundation, with the picture now hanging in one of his country clubs; and
Copies of letters I wrote at Mr. Trump’s direction that threatened his high school, colleges, and the College Board not to release his grades or SAT scores.

I hope my appearance here today, my guilty plea, and my work with law enforcement agencies are steps along a path of redemption that will restore faith in me and help this country understand our president better.

***

Before going further, I want to apologize to each of you and to Congress as a whole.

The last time I appeared before Congress, I came to protect Mr. Trump.

Today, I’m here to tell the truth about Mr. Trump.

I lied to Congress about when Mr. Trump stopped negotiating the Moscow Tower project in Russia. I stated that we stopped negotiating in January 2016. That was false – our negotiations continued for months later during the campaign.

Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.

In conversations we had during the campaign, at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there’s no business in Russia and then go out and lie to the American people by saying the same thing. In his way, he was telling me to lie.

There were at least a half-dozen times between the Iowa Caucus in January 2016 and the end of June when he would ask me “How’s it going in Russia?” – referring to the Moscow Tower project.

You need to know that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it.

To be clear: Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.

And so I lied about it, too – because Mr. Trump had made clear to me, through his personal statements to me that we both knew were false and through his lies to the country, that he wanted me to lie. And he made it clear to me because his personal attorneys reviewed my statement before I gave it to Congress.

****

Over the past two years, I have been smeared as “a rat” by the President of the United States. The truth is much different, and let me take a brief
moment to introduce myself.

My name is Michael Dean Cohen.

I am a blessed husband of 24 years and a father to an incredible daughter and son. When I married my wife, I promised her that I would love her, cherish her, and protect her. As my father said countless times throughout my childhood, “you my wife, and you my children, are the air that I breathe.”

To my Laura, my Sami, and my Jake, there is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you.

I have always tried to live a life of loyalty, friendship, generosity, and compassion – qualities my parents ingrained in my siblings and me since childhood. My father survived the Holocaust thanks to the compassion and selfless acts of others. He was helped by many who put themselves in harm’s way to do what they knew was right.

That is why my first instinct has always been to help those in need. Mom and Dad … I am sorry that I let you down.

As many people that know me best would say, I am the person they would call at 3 a.m. if they needed help. I proudly remember being the emergency contact for many of my children’s friends when they were growing up because their parents knew that I would drop everything and care for them as if they were my own.

Yet, last fall I pled guilty in federal court to felonies for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with Individual #1.

For the record: Individual #1 is President Donald J. Trump.

It is painful to admit that I was motivated by ambition at times. It is even more painful to admit that many times I ignored my conscience and acted loyal to a man when I should not have. Sitting here today, it seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong.

For that reason, I have come here to apologize to my family, to the government, and to the American people.

***

Accordingly, let me now tell you about Mr. Trump.

I got to know him very well, working very closely with him for more than 10 years, as his Executive Vice President and Special Counsel and then personal attorney when he became President. When I first met Mr. Trump, he was a successful entrepreneur, a real estate giant, and an icon. Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating. When you were in his presence, you felt like you were involved in something greater than yourself — that you were somehow changing the world.

I wound up touting the Trump narrative for over a decade. That was my job.

Always stay on message. Always defend. It monopolized my life. At first, I worked mostly on real estate developments and other business transactions. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Trump brought me into his personal life and private dealings. Over time, I saw his true character revealed.

Mr. Trump is an enigma. He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.

Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation – only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the “greatest infomercial in political history.”

He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity.

I knew early on in my work for Mr. Trump that he would direct me to lie to further his business interests. I am ashamed to say, that when it was for a real estate mogul in the private sector, I considered it trivial. As the President, I consider it significant and dangerous.

But in the mix, lying for Mr. Trump was normalized, and no one around him questioned it. In fairness, no one around him today questions it, either.

A lot of people have asked me about whether Mr. Trump knew about the release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of time. The answer is yes.

As I earlier stated, Mr. Trump knew from Roger Stone in advance about the WikiLeaks drop of emails.

In July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump’s office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone.

Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of “wouldn’t that be great.”

Mr. Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and bigots. You have heard him call poorer countries “shitholes.”

In private, he is even worse.

He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a “shithole.” This was when Barack Obama was President of the United States.

While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way.

And, he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.

And yet I continued to work for him.

Mr. Trump is a cheat.

As previously stated, I’m giving the Committee today three years of President Trump’s financial statements, from 2011-2013, which he gave to Deutsche Bank to inquire about a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills and to Forbes. These are Exhibits 1a, 1b, and 1c to my testimony.

It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed among the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.

I am sharing with you two newspaper articles, side by side, that are examples of Mr. Trump inflating and deflating his assets, as I said, to suit
his financial interests. These are Exhibit 2 to my testimony.

As I noted, I’m giving the Committee today an article he wrote on, and sent me, that reported on an auction of a portrait of Mr. Trump. This is Exhibit
3A to my testimony.

Mr. Trump directed me to find a straw bidder to purchase a portrait of him that was being auctioned at an Art Hamptons Event. The objective was to
ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon. The portrait was purchased
by the fake bidder for $60,000. Mr. Trump directed the Trump Foundation, which is supposed to be a charitable organization, to repay the fake bidder,
despite keeping the art for himself. Please see Exhibit 3B to my testimony.

And it should come as no surprise that one of my more common responsibilities was that Mr. Trump directed me to call business owners, many of whom were small businesses, that were owed money for their services and told them no payment or a reduced payment would be coming. When I advised Mr. Trump of my success, he actually reveled in it.

And yet, I continued to work for him.

Mr. Trump is a conman.

He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair, and to lie to his wife about it, which I did. Lying to the First Lady is one of my
biggest regrets. She is a kind, good person. I respect her greatly – and she did not deserve that.

I am giving the Committee today a copy of the $130,000 wire transfer from me to Ms. Clifford’s attorney during the closing days of the presidential campaign that was demanded by Ms. Clifford to maintain her silence about her affair with Mr. Trump. This is Exhibit 4 to my testimony.

Mr. Trump directed me to use my own personal funds from a Home Equity Line of Credit to avoid any money being traced back to him that could negatively impact his campaign. I did that, too – without bothering to consider whether that was improper, much less whether it was the right thing to do or how it would impact me, my family, or the public.

I am going to jail in part because of my decision to help Mr. Trump hide that payment from the American people before they voted a few days later.

As Exhibit 5 to my testimony shows, I am providing a copy of a $35,000 check that President Trump personally signed from his personal bank account on August 1, 2017 – when he was President of the United States – pursuant to the cover-up, which was the basis of my guilty plea, to reimburse me — the word used by Mr. Trump’s TV lawyer — for the illegal hush money I paid on his behalf. This $35,000 check was one of 11 check installments that was paid throughout the year – while he was President.

The President of the United States thus wrote a personal check for the payment of hush money as part of a criminal scheme to violate campaign finance laws. You can find the details of that scheme, directed by Mr. Trump, in the pleadings in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

So picture this scene – in February 2017, one month into his presidency, I’m visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time. It’s truly awe-inspiring, he’s showing me around and pointing to different paintings, and he says to me something to the effect of … Don’t worry, Michael, your January and February reimbursement checks are coming. They were FedExed from New York and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system. As he promised, I received the first check for the reimbursement of $70,000 not long thereafter.

When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.

As I mentioned, I’m giving the Committee today copies of a letter I sent at Mr. Trump’s direction threatening these schools with civil and criminal actions if Mr. Trump’s grades or SAT scores were ever disclosed without his permission. These are Exhibit 6.

The irony wasn’t lost on me at the time that Mr. Trump in 2011 had strongly criticized President Obama for not releasing his grades. As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared “Let him show his records” after calling President Obama “a terrible student.”

The sad fact is that I never heard Mr. Trump say anything in private that led me to believe he loved our nation or wanted to make it better. In fact, he did the opposite.

When telling me in 2008 that he was cutting employees’ salaries in half – including mine – he showed me what he claimed was a $10 million IRS tax refund, and he said that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving “someone like him” that much money back.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump said he did not consider Vietnam Veteran, and Prisoner of War, Senator John McCain to be “a hero” because he likes people who weren’t captured. At the same time, Mr. Trump tasked me to handle the negative press surrounding his medical deferment from the Vietnam draft.

Mr. Trump claimed it was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment.

He finished the conversation with the following comment. “You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”

I find it ironic, President Trump, that you are in Vietnam right now.

And yet, I continued to work for him.

Questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. I do not. I want to be clear. But, I have my suspicions.

Sometime in the summer of 2017, I read all over the media that there had been a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 involving Don Jr. and others from the campaign with Russians, including a representative of the Russian government, and an email setting up the meeting with the subject line, “Dirt on Hillary Clinton.” Something clicked in my mind. I remember being in the room with Mr. Trump, probably in early June 2016, when something peculiar happened. Don Jr. came into the room and walked behind his father’s desk – which in itself was unusual. People didn’t just walk behind Mr. Trump’s desk to talk to him. I recalled Don Jr. leaning over to his father and speaking in a low voice, which I could clearly hear, and saying: “The meeting is all set.” I remember Mr. Trump saying, “Ok good…let me know.”

What struck me as I looked back and thought about that exchange between Don Jr. and his father was, first, that Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world. And also, that Don Jr. would never set up any meeting of any significance alone – and certainly not without checking with his father.

I also knew that nothing went on in Trump world, especially the campaign, without Mr. Trump’s knowledge and approval. So, I concluded that Don Jr. was referring to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting about dirt on Hillary with the Russian representative when he walked behind his dad’s desk that day — and that Mr. Trump knew that was the meeting Don Jr. was talking about when he said, “That’s good … let me know.”

***

Over the past year or so, I have done some real soul searching. I see now that my ambition and the intoxication of Trump power had much to do with the bad decisions I made.

To you, Chairman Cummings, Ranking Member Jordan, the other members of this Committee, and the other members of the House and Senate, I am sorry for my lies and for lying to Congress.

To our nation, I am sorry for actively working to hide from you the truth about Mr. Trump when you needed it most.

For those who question my motives for being here today, I understand. I have lied, but I am not a liar. I have done bad things, but I am not a bad man. I have fixed things, but I am no longer your “fixer,” Mr. Trump.

I am going to prison and have shattered the safety and security that I tried so hard to provide for my family. My testimony certainly does not diminish the pain I caused my family and friends – nothing can do that. And I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.

And, by coming today, I have caused my family to be the target of personal, scurrilous attacks by the President and his lawyer – trying to intimidate me from appearing before this panel. Mr. Trump called me a “rat” for choosing to tell the truth – much like a mobster would do when one of his men decides to cooperate with the government.

As Exhibit 8 shows, I have provided the Committee with copies of Tweets that Mr. Trump posted, attacking me and my family – only someone burying his head in the sand would not recognize them for what they are: encouragement to someone to do harm to me and my family.

I never imagined that he would engage in vicious, false attacks on my family – and unleash his TV-lawyer to do the same. I hope this committee and all members of Congress on both sides of the aisle will make it clear:

As a nation, we should not tolerate attempts to intimidate witnesses before Congress and attacks on family are out of bounds and not acceptable.

I wish to especially thank Speaker Pelosi for her statements in Exhibit 9 to protect this institution and me, and the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Adam Schiff and Chairman Cummings for likewise defending this institution and my family against the attacks by Mr. Trump, and also the many Republicans who have admonished the President as well.

I am not a perfect man. I have done things I am not proud of, and I will live with the consequences of my actions for the rest of my life.

But today, I get to decide the example I set for my children and how I attempt to change how history will remember me. I may not be able to change the past, but I can do right by the American people here today.

Thank you for your attention. I am happy to answer the Committee’s questions

Bill James, Hall of Famer

2019-01-21T09:07:00.001-08:00

Bill James Has the Required Numbers for the Hall of Fame

Opinion

Bill James Has the Required Numbers

Baseball’s Hall of Fame shouldn’t continue to overlook someone whose influence on the game has been profound.

By Jamie Malanowski

Mr. Malanowski, a former Little League player with a .125 batting average over 18 games, is a speechwriter.

Jan. 20, 2019

Bill James, here in 2002, wasn’t afraid to deflate reputations or debunk conventional wisdom, Jamie Malanowski writes.CreditBizuayehu Tesfaye/Associated Press

Image

Bill James, here in 2002, wasn’t afraid to deflate reputations or debunk conventional wisdom, Jamie Malanowski writes.CreditCreditBizuayehu Tesfaye/Associated Press

This week, the Baseball Hall of Fame will announce a new class of inductees, setting off rounds of celebrations — and debates. Fans will argue over whether Mariano Rivera deserves unanimous approval, or whether the use of performance-enhancing drugs should permanently block the enshrinement of Barry Bonds.

Oddly, amid these debates, one of the Hall of Fame’s key omissions is likely to be overlooked. How is it that it has left out — and perhaps not even discussed — the man who has had the greatest influence on baseball in the last 40 years, who has changed how the game is understood, how it is enjoyed and even how it is played? I’m talking about the statistician and historian Bill James.

A graduate of the University of Kansas, James began his professional involvement with baseball in the late ’70s, while working nights as a security guard at a cannery. When not foiling pork-and-bean burglaries, he used his free time to record and analyze baseball statistics. He had a quirky curiosity that led him to ask offbeat questions, whose answers he extracted from the numbers he kept. He wasn’t afraid to deflate reputations or debunk conventional wisdom. He turned his findings into articles, and eventually best-selling books. His writing was smart, funny, contentious, and unlike anything fans had ever read.

It may be hard for younger fans to grasp how innumerate baseball was. There were homers and R.B.I.s and batting averages for hitters; wins and losses and E.R.A.s for pitchers. Teams had winning and losing streaks. Instead of analysts, broadcasts had color commentators.

As a result, fans had little understanding of the game’s subtleties. Suddenly, here was James, unearthing hidden explanations, revealing lame assumptions, uncovering the value of overlooked variables. How much did it cost the Cubs to play day games in Wrigley Field? Did Ted Williams lose more homers playing in Fenway Park than Joe DiMaggio lost playing in Yankee Stadium?

James did his best work re-evaluating reputations. He showed that the infielder famous for diving catches actually lacked range, that the genius manager who strategically bunted was actually squandering outs, that more of your favorite slugger’s homers could be ascribed to close fences than to his prodigious power.

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James revealed a game in which your eyes deceived you. A banjo-hitting second baseman who walked a lot was a bigger offensive asset than the long-ball threat who struck out a lot. The wily catcher who knew how to frame pitches might be more responsible for strikeouts than the pitcher who threw them.

James did not invent analytics — other students of the game formed the Society for Advanced Baseball Research years before he began his studies. But his lively, provocative writing helped him elevate the field at just the right time. The new network ESPN integrated stats into its programming. Players of the new pastime, fantasy baseball, hungered for stats. Agents and general managers alike gobbled up stats to justify free-agent contracts. Numbers enriched the whole show.

I met James once, at a corporate event in the early ’80s. We were part of a group that attended an ordinary game at Shea Stadium between a poor New York Mets team and the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers. James was a typical fan; he drank a beer, he did the wave. But he also carried a bedraggled notebook, in which he recorded the lineups and the game conditions, drew stick figures showing the pitchers’ windups, and noted every pitch that was thrown.

We were in the middle of a scoreless game when James did something astounding. The Dodgers pitcher had just recorded out No. 1 for the inning, and James said, “The Mets are going to score this inning.” Yeah, right, I thought. One out, nobody on, average hitters coming up. But then, yes, the Mets scored, and again, and again.

“The Dodgers’ starter took 11 pitches to retire the first hitter," James explained. “Pitchers usually need 15 pitches to get through a whole inning.” With the pitcher faltering, he said, “the Mets’ chances dramatically increased.”

This year, watch any game, and you will almost certainly hear the announcers discuss spin ratio, exit velocity, wins above replacement and other analytical concepts. Teams will shift defenders, arrange lineups, substitute players and choose pitches all based on the numbers. You may even gripe about the preponderance of strikeouts and homers — another stat-derived trend. James did not uncover all these findings, but his analytics revolution pervades baseball — and all major sports are now influenced by analytics. Did you know goalies who start on back-to-back nights record save percentages on average 11 points lower on the second night? N.H.L. general managers do.

Fundamentally, baseball is the same game it has always been — hit, throw, catch. But thanks to Bill James, there have been changes. For one thing, James is now an executive with the Boston Red Sox. But more important, a new era of fans knows that inside good old country hardball there’s a deeper, richer game. Cooperstown, the next move is yours.

Jamie Malanowski is a speechwriter for Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York.

Woody Allen & Christina Engelhardt

2018-12-17T11:17:00.002-08:00

Woody Allen's Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired 'Manhattan'

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/woody-allens-secret-teen-lover-manhattan-muse-speaks-1169782

Francois Legault & Charles Sirois Coalition for the future of Quebec

2018-08-23T11:28:00.001-07:00

https://business.financialpost.com/news/the-odd-couple

There was a time when Charles Sirois shut himself from the public eye like an oyster hiding in a seabed.

Quebec’s high-tech wonderboy built up a telecommunications empire that made him rich after he sold phone company Teleglobe to Bell Canada in 2000. But when much of the rest of it came crashing down under a wall of debt in what has become known as the telecom nuclear winter, he retreated inward. No interviews. No splashy appearances. Just a sober post-mortem of what went wrong. And a rethink of how to make things right.

These days, the Sirois shell has opened again. Big time.

The venture capitalist and chairman of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is the federalist face of the two-man political movement known as the Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec (Coalition for the future of Quebec). Together with François Legault, a founder of Air Transat and a former Parti Québécois cabinet minister — yes, a separatist — he is wooing disenchanted voters of all stripes with their ideas for wealth creation and change.

The men argue that the question of Quebec’s constitutional independence should be shoved aside for the time being. They say the immediate goal should be economic independence.

This is no flash-in-the-pan group. Polls suggest it would form the next government. And by getting involved so intimately, Mr. Sirois is doing a rare thing for a businessman: Sticking his neck out.

He plays Robin to Mr. Legault’s Batman. Both men authored the documents that now form the basis for their revolutionary gospel. Both men are heavily involved in presenting their positions to the public. But it’s Mr. Legault who does the big stunt work and takes most of the spotlight. Mr. Sirois has so far been the supportive sidekick.

On Wednesday evening, the sidekick pulled into a community hall in the Montreal west island suburb of Ste. Anne de Bellevue in his Porsche Cayenne for the latest in a series of public forums that has taken him from his native Chicoutimi to Sherbrooke. He took his coat off, flopped into a chair and greeted an interviewer, launching into a quick explanation of how one of Canada’s top bankers suddenly became one of Quebec’s most potent political players.

After an introductory phone call from Mr. Legault in August 2010, the two men met at Sirois’ offices on the 38th floor of Montreal’s IBM-Marathon tower, the city’s tallest skyscraper. Mr. Legault shared his political preoccupations. Mr. Sirois, 57, listened politely.

“François said ‘I think it’s time that we all play the same game’, ” Mr. Sirois recalled. “I said: ‘I know my game. What’s your game?’ ”

Though the two men were from opposite ends of the constitutional spectrum, it turned out they agreed on a lot of things. That Quebec’s public service has become a bloated ineffective mess paralyzed by a growing number of special interest groups. That the province is failing to reform its finances and promote productivity. That a collective cynicism and inertia has taken hold of its citizenry, killing risk-taking and real change.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon a few weeks later, Mr. Legault held a cocktail party at his home in the tony neighbourhood of Outremont to lay out his plan. Some 20 like-minded people were invited, including Mr. Sirois and Christiane Germain, the well-known boutique hotel businesswoman. Mr. Legault’s wife, Isabelle Brais, offered snacks she’d prepared. And then her husband made his recruiting pitch.

Two days later, details of the gathering were leaked to a reporter, who wrote up a story. Mr. Sirois was labelled a co-founder of a political-party-in-the-making, even though the group had barely begun. His name has been in the news ever since.

“We believe Quebec has been on pause for the last 20 years and the rest of the world is on fast-forward,” he told the Financial Post. It’s a line he’ll repeat later that evening in a speech to the polite and diverse crowd of 300, the kind of line honed by a politician on the election trail.

Except there is no election trail and there is no election. Only a room packed full of people disenchanted with the current Liberal-PQ duopoly in the provincial legislature.

It’s standing room only on this night in Ste. Anne. And though Mr. Sirois isn’t a politician and won’t run for office when a party forms officially as expected next month, he sure sounds like one.

“I’ll tell you honestly,” he says. “If Quebec stays poor, it’s not going to change much for me in my life. But it will change things enormously for my children and my grand-children. And that’s very important to me. That’s my motivation … Here in Quebec, businesspeople shut their mouths. But I’ve decided enough is enough.”

Corporate Canada in general tends to steer clear of direct political involvement and party politics, with rare exceptions. It’s hard to imagine too many people in Mr. Sirois’ position of power on Bay Street doing what he’s doing. Jacques Ménard, Bank of Montreal’s top banker in Quebec, is spearheading a grass-roots group to tackle the high-school dropout problem. But Mr. Sirois’ political engagement goes much further.

“[He doesn’t project] the button-down Canadian banker image that one thinks of. But I mean he’s based in Montreal, not Toronto,” says Karl Moore, a leadership expert at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “But it’s also, I think, that he’s just made enough money and has enough freedom that he can do whatever he wants.”

As Mr. Moore notes, Mr. Sirois has made his fortune. He did so by selling his stake in Teleglobe to Bell, netting an estimated $850-million. International wireless network developer TIW was sold to Vodafone for $3.5-billion, generating proceeds to Mr. Sirois of an estimated $225-million. And oh yeah, Fido? He founded that, too. When it was sold to Rogers, reports pegged his gain at $27-million.

He is the 12th richest person in the province, according to a recent wealth ranking by L’Actualité magazine. Approachable and jovial, he’s not a rich snob by any means. But he’s not embarassed by his wealth either.

Mr. Sirois says he spoke to CIBC’s corporate governance committee to advise them of his political involvement. The committee concluded he was acting on a personal basis and the members were comfortable with that. If they hadn’t been, he says he would have resigned from the CIBC board.

At heart, Charles Sirois is a successful entrepreneur now supporting other entrepreneurs. He has personally started 20 companies from scratch and is helping others do the same.

In Africa, he supplies money and mentoring to nascent capitalists through his Enablis network. In Canada, he assists promising technology businesses through his private capital firm Telesystem. Founded in 1984 to do telecom deals, the company has switched its sights into other promising technology firms, providing capital currently for 23 businesses from pig vaccine maker Prevtec to TV content producer Zone3. Its assets are worth $250-million.

“He’s everywhere,” says Telesystem colleague Robert Talbot. “He’s a doer. He likes to move things.”

Mr. Sirois has spoken his mind before, writing two books including one published in 2000 calling for a complete overhaul of the social welfare system. Mr. Legault, 54, says he read the books and found in them pieces of a kindred spirit.

Among Mr. Sirois’ remedies back then: Governments should nix the patchwork of current public assistance programs and instead give everyone a sum of money every year to manage as they want, a kind of a guaranteed minimum income; and governments should end subsidies to universities and instead boost loans to students to make them pay the real cost of their education.

Among the Sirois-Legault position papers now: Crack down on Montreal merchants who fail to speak to their customers in French; abolish school boards; lay off 4,000 workers at Hydro-Quebec; and legislate a firmer mandate for the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec so the pension fund manager does more to help local firms and stoke the economy, even if there might be better investments to be had outside the province.

These are not timid ideas. Not surprisingly, they’ve generated a significant share of opposition. Premier Jean Charest calls them “brutal and radical.” Students shouted down the two men this week over the tuition question.

But they’re also winning converts. Fundraising parties at $250-a-head are reportedly well attended. The movement claims to have 5,000 members.

The Caisse suggestion stands out particularly for one reason: It bankrolled much of Sirois’ run in the 1980s and 1990s, a sugar-daddy to Mr. Sirois’ sweet dreams of laying underground cables around the world to bring wireless phones to the developing world’s masses.

“He said he wanted to ‘liberate the world,’” said long-term friend François Duffar, the former president of communications firm Cossette. “He said ‘I want to cut the wire’ so people can talk everywhere.”

When things turned sour for the tech industry in 2000 and Mr. Sirois was hunting for more financing for his holdings, investors including the Caisse balked. He eventually lost control of or sold most of his telecom assets when creditors squeezed him out, surrendering $2-billion in net worth.

The general view is that Mr. Sirois joined a long line of home-grown entrepreneurs in receiving financial support from the Caisse and that he wants to make sure other people have the same chance he did. The pension fund had barely 11% of its $151.7-billion in net assets invested in Quebec last year. He’d like to see that number grow.

What happens next in the adventures of the dynamic duo seems clear. Mr. Legault plans to unveil a detailed action plan forming the basis of a political party platform on Nov.14. The coalition may merge with the conservative Action démocratique du Québec party. And a new party will be born.
Mr. Sirois won’t run as a candidate. He says he’s too rich to become a politician. Quebec voters are “suspicious” of people with assets, he once said, even if wealth creates a sort of independence that may actually build trust with the populace.

Regardless, he says: “I have economic interests in the province up and down. I would be in permanent conflict on everything. I have a health-care business, I have a hotel businesses, everything.” He can’t break with those interests overnight.

The options then? He could be party president, he says. He could steer its economic policy making or fundraising.

No matter what he does, the challenge for him and for Mr. Legault is the same. No political leader or movement in years has arguably succeeded in articulating a credible vision of Quebec as a growing and prosperous society and winning support for the sacrifices needed to achieve that.
In many ways, coming out of his shell was the easy part for Mr. Sirois. Finding that magic pearl will be something else.

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Trump Will Fold if Mueller Calls His Bluff

2018-08-10T11:04:00.001-07:00

How Chinese gangs are laundering drug money through Vancouver real estate

2018-06-29T11:59:00.001-07:00

Explanation how money is laundered thru casinos & real estate in Vancouver. Also explains the history of triads in China

https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale-money-laundering-drugs/

Why Is Chuck the Short for Charles and Bill the Short for William?

2018-06-17T11:13:00.001-07:00

Why Is Chuck the Short for Charles and Bill the Short for William?

BY DAVE ROOS JUN 9, 2017

Meet Richard, William, Sarah and Charles -- or as they're otherwise known -- Dick, Bill, Sally and Chuck. ADAM JEFFERY/BETTMANN/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY

Nicknames or "pet names" — shortened forms of standard names — exist in every language and every culture dating back to the first written records. In English, some nicknames make perfect sense: Dave for David, Pete for Peter, or Liz for Elizabeth. But others are totally weird: Margaret somehow becomes Peggy, Charles becomes Chuck, and Richard, quite famously, becomes Dick.

There isn't any overarching reason as to why nicknames develop that seem to make no logical sense. But there are some good stories behind some of the them. We reached out to Cleveland Kent Evans — psychology professor, author of "The Great Big Book of Baby Names", name columnist for the Omaha World Herald and former president of the American Name Society — to clue us in on the surprising origins of some of the most perplexing English nicknames. Let's start with a fun one.

Charles to Chuck

Unlike most English nicknames, this one does not come from England. Chuck is an entirely American invention with a colorful backstory. The first famous Chuck was a 19th-century New York City gangster named Chuck Connors, whose given name was George Washington O'Connor, not Charles.

So how did he get the nickname "Chuck"? Connors grew up in the Chinatown neighborhood of Lower Manhattan and even learned enough Chinese to earn him the unofficial title of "Mayor of Chinatown." Connors claimed that he got the nickname Chuck because of his love for chuck steak, but Evans has another theory.

"If you look at the 1850 US census, which was the first to list full names, almost all the people who had some variation of 'Chuck' in their given name were Chinese," says Evans, who thinks Connors more likely picked up a nickname from the neighborhood.

When Connor died in 1913, some of the New York papers erroneously printed his given name as Charles, making the first (if false) connection between Charles and Chuck. But since Charles lacked any catchy alternative nicknames at the time, Chuck stuck.

Henry to Hank (and Harry)

Prince Harry -- who was christened Prince Henry -- attends the launch of the team selected to represent the UK in the 2017 Invictus Games in Toronto in London, England.

JEREMY SELWYN - WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES

Hank is another American nickname, but its origins are murkier. The most likely explanation, says Evans, is that Hank is derived from Henk, a Dutch nickname for Henry that would have been used by large the communities of Dutch settlers in New York and New Jersey in the 17th and 18th centuries.

But more interesting is the fact — little known to most Americans — that the original nickname for Henry was Harry. (Prince Harry's real name is Prince Henry of Wales.)

Evans says that Harry isn't so much a nickname of Henry as a mispronunciation of Henri, the original French form of Henry that arrived in England with the 11th-century Norman Conquest. Since few people could read or write in Medieval England, they pronounced the new name as best they could, sounding more like Harry than Henry.

Richard to Dick

Many of the most common English nicknames can be traced back to Medieval times, when half the men in England were named either John or William, and the other half were Robert or Richard. Evans says that inherited surnames didn't even show up until around 1100. Before that, people used occupations or lineage as last names: John the Smith or Robert son of William.

In those days, nicknames were essential to keeping Richard your neighbor straight from Richard your brother. A popular trick was to create rhyming names. The original shortened form of Richard was Rick, which became Hick and Dick.

The letters "H" and "D" were popular rhyming consonants, apparently, because the original nickname for Robert wasn't Bob, but instead was Hob or Dob. Bob arrived much later, Evans says, but you can still see the original nicknames in English surnames like Hobson and Dobson.

William to Bill

Credit the Irish with this one. Evans says that a curiosity of Irish Gaelic will turn a "W" sound into more of a "B" depending on whether the word is the subject or object of a sentence. Either way, the first written evidence of a William being called Bill was in the late 17th century when Irishmen mocked King William III of England by calling the hated Protestant conqueror "King Billy."

Margaret to Peggy

The ladies also got in on the rhyming act, but took it a step further. In the 1500s, there was a fad for rhyming "M" names with "P." Here's how Evans explains the journey from Margaret to Peggy:

Margaret to Marg to Mag to Meg to Meggy to Peggy.

The same thing happened to the name Martha. It started with the nickname Math, which moved to Matty, then switched to Patty, and eventually Patsy. Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha, was known as Patty. Neither Patsy nor Patty had anything to do with Patricia.

In a final twist, another common nickname for Margaret was Daisy. Don't even try to get there using the rhyming method. This one was adopted by educated Brits who recognized that the French word for daisy, the flower, was Marguerite.

Sarah to Sally

A few nicknames are attributed to baby talk. Little children have a notoriously hard time pronouncing the letter "R" which often comes out sounding like an "L." Evans thinks that's the best explanation for the conversion of Sarah to Sally and Mary to Molly. (The rhyming phenomenon also takes Mary from Molly to Polly.)

Anne to Nancy

Some dialects of English used to use "mine" in place of "my." That's the best guess as to how we got from Anne to Nancy. It starts with folks saying "mine Anne," which got shortened to Nan and cute-ified into Nanny, Nansy and then Nancy.

You can see the "mine" phenomenon with other names that start with a vowel. Edward goes from "mine Edward" to "mine Ed" to Ned. Ellen goes from "mine Ellen" to "mine Elly" to Nelly.

John to Jack

There are a couple of possible explanations for this one, Evans says. The first has to do with a popular "pet" form of names from Medieval England where folks added "kin" as a suffix. William was Wilkin. Peter was Perkin. Again, you can still see these nicknames today in surnames like Wilkinson and Perkins.

John, Evans says, would have been changed to Jenkin. That could have easily been shortened to Jenk which is a quick trip to Jack.

Another theory points back to the Norman invasion and the arrival of the name Jacques, which is actually the French form of James, not John. But the cultural mingling of Jenk and Jacques could have been enough to produce Jack from John.

Judge and Altuve

2017-11-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

Great article about WAR by Bill James

Trump - Russia connection

2017-07-14T09:06:00.002-07:00

Seven Theories of the Case: What Do We Really Know about L’Affaire Russe and What Could it All Mean?https://www.lawfareblog.com/seven-theories-case-what-do-we-really-know-about-laffaire-russe-and-what-could-it-all-mean

https://www.lawfareblog.com/seven-theories-case-what-do-we-really-know-about-laffaire-russe-and-what-could-it-all-mean

Mike Trout is the new Mickey Mantle

2016-10-06T10:48:00.004-07:00

SPORTS NUT

THE STADIUM SCENE.

OCT. 5 2016 4:17 PM

Mickey Mantle Is Alive, and He Plays in Anaheim

So why is Mike Trout less famous than Jimmy Garoppolo?

By Mike Schur

Mickey Mantle is alive. He’s right out there in centerfield, every day, running down balls in the alleys, taking over games with his offense, defense, and speed. And this is prime Mantle, too—not later-years, shot-kneed, wee-hours-at-the-Copacabana Mantle. He debuted at 19, just turned 25, and he’s been the best player in baseball every year since he—

Sorry, hang on, it’s not Mickey Mantle. It’s Hank Aaron. You can tell by his balanced stance and that rare blend of power and patience—nope, sorry, I’m wrong again. It’s Ken Griffey Jr. No, it’s Willie Mays? It’s definitely one of those legends. Because I’m watching him play, and I’m looking at his numbers, and any player this good, at every aspect of baseball, must be very, very, famous. Right?

It’s hard to quantify how unfamous someone is, but let’s try. What do you know about Mike Trout? He plays baseball. He … is great. That’s probably it, for most people. If you’re a baseball fan, you might know that he won an MVP a couple years ago or even that he has finished second every other year he’s played. You might even know some of his statistics, which for a diehard fan border on pornography and which after only five years in the league could be used to make a legitimate argument that Trout should be in the Hall of Fame. If you are an opposing pitcher, you know that Trout is the very last person you want to see at the plate, because of the sheer number of ways he can humiliate you and your team. And if you are Gordon Beckham, or Jesus Montero, or J.J. Hardy, or any of about a dozen other players who have watched Trout make impossible running-leaping-stretching catches at the wall to rob you of a home run, you know he is an impossible RoboCop monster who has taken notches off your stat sheet and food off your table.

Trout is not anonymous. His jersey regularly ranks in the top five or 10 in Major League Baseball sales, for one thing, and anyone who follows baseball at all knows who he is. But based on the unprecedentedly incredible things he has already done, by age 25, in the game purporting to be America’s national pastime, he should be far more famous. Wherever you fell on the Trout knowledge spectrum, you probably know way more about Peyton Manning. You know what Peyton Manning looks and sounds like and what his favorite kind of pizza is and probably what insurance company he uses. (If you don’t, sing the seven-note jingle in your head—yes, that one—and it’ll come to you.) You probably know what Steph Curry looks and sounds like and that he has a cute, funny daughter, and you might even know her name. You know exactly what Michael Phelps looks like, and he’s a swimmer—he only emerges every four years, for one week, like a minor comet or a lazy groundhog or something, and yet you know him. But what do you know about Mike Trout—a man every bit as good at baseball as Manning was at football and Curry is at basketball. Do you know what he looks like? Sounds like? Endorses? Anything? Do you know if he’s playing in the playoffs, which began Tuesday? Did you even know the playoffs began Tuesday

Here is what you should know: Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. There’s an argument to be made that he’s had the greatest season ever, for a player his age, in every year he has played. If he stays healthy, he may well end up being the greatest all-around baseball player of all time. So why does it feel like no one cares?

Because: Anaheim?

Baseball stardom has something of an East Coast bias. It’s less pronounced in basketball, and not true at all in football, where the once-a-week games are all played at regulated, TV-friendly times. But in baseball, a nightly occurrence for six months, having your games start when half the country is getting ready for bed doesn’t help your chances of crossing over. It’s not impossible—Ichiro Suzuki and Ken Griffey Jr. played in Seattle. But Anaheim is not Seattle. Anaheim is the white-hot center of Southern California: a vague, endless landscape of freeways, subdivisions, and Truman Show sameness.

Driving in Southern California is crazy-making. Any journey, of any length, makes you feel as if you’re in the Flintstones car, crawling along past the same 2-D palm trees, the same construction sites, the same strip malls, over and over. A 40-mile journey from Los Angeles to Anaheim—just as one random example I can think of, off the top of my head—can take you two hours or more, during which you first catalog all of the other, better things you could have done with that time, and then calculate how much faster you might’ve gotten there if you’d literally taken a bicycle.

And Anaheim itself feels accidental—there doesn’t appear to be a reason for it to be where it is. You just drive for a while and then pull off the highway, seemingly randomly, and there’s Disneyland and over there’s where the Angels play, and that’s Anaheim. And it’s hot. It’s so hot, always, all the time. Former FOX and ABC Sports reporter Suzy Shuster Eisen, who covered the Angels for three years, put it this way: “The only good part of driving to Anaheim is the In-N-Out just before you reach the stadium.”

The Angels won the World Series in 2002—the franchise’s first and only—and for a while it seemed that new owner Arte Moreno might just wrest control of Los Angeles baseball away from the Dodgers. Moreno went so far as to try to rename the team the Los Angeles Angels—“The The Angels Angels,” for you non–Spanish speakers—but a clause in his stadium lease mandated the word “Anaheim” had to be a part of the team name. So Moreno did the only logical thing—he renamed the team The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, a strong contender for worst franchise name ever, along with the Utah Jazz and the Mighty Ducks, also of Anaheim.

Although attendance surged, and the team won several division titles in the mid-’00s, the franchise has never quite recaptured that 2002 glory, and they’ve made the playoffs only once in the past seven years. (The Dodgers, after muddling through their own ownership drama, have four straight National League West crowns and are now firmly back in control of the city and its fans.) There is no question that performing in the postseason, in any sport, helps with countrywide popularity, and Mike Trout hasn’t really gotten the chance to do that yet. (Tellingly, all of the other top jersey sellers in 2016 are from teams that made the playoffs this season.)

So here’s Mike Trout, his generation’s best player, sitting in his clubhouse before a meaningless final weekend game against the Houston Astros. He is impossibly solid-looking but doesn’t make a very big footprint in the room—he’s like a super–laid-back Captain America. His job tonight is the same as it has been since his first game, five years ago: to man the outfield for a mediocre team, playing in the SoCal heat, in front of SoCal fans. Technically, tonight he will be the team’s designated hitter, because the game is so meaningless, there’s really no sense having him run around and put more mileage on his knees. But he has to play, because watching Mike Trout is one of a very few good reasons the Anaheim Angels can give their fans to get them to buy tickets.

The cliché about Southern California fans is fairly accurate—they have a penchant for meandering in late and leaving early, to beat the traffic. Trout, a New Jersey native who rooted for the Phillies, shrugs off the “fan intensity” gap between the Northeast and SoCal. “I don’t know that it’s that different, really. You want to have the stadium filled, for sure.” And to be fair, The The Angels Angels do just fine in that regard—they drew 3 million fans this year, to that hot stadium in the middle of nowhere and 3 million last year and the year before that. So at least Trout is appreciated locally. But something is muting his potential fame, and that thing may be the neither-here-nor-there city in which he plays. Eisen, for one, would agree. “There’s only room for one star in Anaheim,” she says, “and it’s Mickey Mouse.”

Because: How He Lives?

The famous story goes like this: The Yankees’ star centerfielder is hungover, again, so he’s sitting this one out. Coach sends him to pinch-hit, so he struggles to the plate, head throbbing, and somehow hits one out to win the game. He rounds the bases, wincing at the loud cheers, and as Mickey Mantle gets back to the dugout he looks to his teammates and says, “Boys, you’ll never know how hard that was.”

Mantle’s fame was part talent, part New York, part Yankees, and part wild-man night-owl personality—he also famously said, toward the end of his life, “If I’d’ve known I was gonna live this long, I would’ve taken better care of myself.” Doubtful Mike Trout will feel the same, decades from now. There are no famous stories about wild behavior, no crazy nights at whatever the 2016 equivalent of the Copacabana is. Trout’s main off-field passion seems to be … the weather. He loves weather and weather reports, even appearing on the Weather Channel a few times, to guest-announce the weather. That’s right. His true passion is the thing we all talk about to fill awkward silences on elevators.

Despite having grown up a Phillies fan, Trout most idolized a guy who played elsewhere. “Jeter was my guy. I was a shortstop … and they always aired the Yankees on ESPN. I just liked the way he played, the way he carried himself.” There’s a logic to this—Derek Jeter had the same private vibe, even when out in public. He stayed outside of the limelight, as much as a superstar in New York can. His play, and the Yankees, and the tireless work of his many hagiographers, made him famous.

So Trout is not Mickey Mantle. He’s not Bryce Harper, either, with his bro-y fauxhawk and calls to make the game more fun and calling out reporters for their clown questions. Trout is not cartoonishly Popeye-ish, like Mark McGwire. He doesn’t get into Twitter fights like Curt Schilling. He limits his media exposure and his endorsements. He doesn’t do anything—for better or worse—that would propel his stardom to the next level. As he puts it: “That’s just kind of how it’s been. I’m one of those guys who likes to keep stuff to themselves. People ask me questions, I answer.” However, many athletes at his level become stars simply by playing as well as he plays. Personality helps, but extreme greatness itself can beget fame, even if the person inside the personality isn’t larger than life. (If you don’t believe me, listen to Michael Jordan trying to record one simple line for a Gatorade ad. The guy wasn’t exactly a dynamo off the court.)

All of these things—playing on the West Coast, playing in Anaheim specifically, limiting his exposure, loving weather a lot—might help explain why the best baseball player ever, through his age-24 season, is roughly as famous, right now, in America, asJimmy Garoppolo. But it doesn’t completely explain it.

Which brings us to the game of baseball itself.

Because: Mike Trout Plays Baseball?

Stats on baseball’s popularity are a little Rorschach-y—if you’re Commissioner Rob Manfred, you can stare at them and see healthy attendance figures fueled by new stadiums and greater parity, billions in revenue, and record-shattering TV rights deals for local markets. But the World Series TV ratings paint a different picture—one where a crummy, meaningless Monday Night Football game in Week 5 of the NFL season can tie or beat the Fall Classic. Baseball’s biggest moments don’t hold the nation’s attention the way they used to. It may technically be a top-two or -three sport in the U.S., but there are so many games, over such a long period of time, it maybe just doesn’t feel special, or something.

This, for what it’s worth, is Trout’s theory on baseball’s struggle to win over casual fans: “There are so many games. [Many] people start watching in September. In those mid-summer months, there’s not a lot of people watching, because there’s 162 games.”

And those who do think it’s special are old and getting older. The median age of those baseball-first fans is climbing. Stars are made by kids, and kids don’t watch baseball the way they used to. And even if they do, there’s the essential problem of the actual game they’re watching: It’s very weird. It may in fact be the weirdest sport we have.

It’s not the most boring sport, as haterz are fond of claiming; there’s more ball-in-play action in baseball than there is in football (though obviously far less than in soccer or basketball). But it is weirder. It’s a team game, made up of one-on-one battles, in which players can go an eternity without touching the ball. More importantly, on TV, only the pitcher and batter are really visible. Even if you want to learn more about Mike Trout, you can watch an Angels game (at 10 p.m. on the East Coast) for 40 minutes and never once even see the best player in baseball. If at any given moment Steph Curry isn’t touching the basketball, he is at least running around and his teammates are trying to get it to him. He is always in the game.

And if baseball the game is bad for star-making, the meta-game—the way it packages and presents itself to fans—is even worse. At the most boring regular season NBA game—I’m talking Suns-76ers in early January—the lineups of the home team will be announced during a 4-D holographic laser–video–light show that could make Nik Stauskas look like Dr. J. Baseball has a public address system and a gameday program you can buy with a tiny golf pencil to keep score. MLB has yet to figure out how to market its best stars, on a day-to-day basis. Maybe because there are just too many players and too many games that last too long, in a too-long season over too many months.

MLB is not blind to its problems. It recently introduced several rules to trim some precious minutes off its nightly running time, which appear to be working and which Trout applauds: “It’s tough to be out there, three, four hours a day. They’re speeding it up to an extent, but it still has to be baseball. From a fan standpoint, the fans leave in the sixth, seventh inning because it’s a long game. As a player it’s worse—you’re beat by the seventh, eighth inning.” But the game, really, is the game: It’s plodding and gradual and deliberate. No matter what happens on the margins, it still has to be baseball. It will never have the constant action of basketball or the explosiveness of football, and as such its stars may simply never truly break through to the extent that NFL and NBA stars do.

Which maybe brings us all the way back around to Anaheim, in a way, and the 3 million fans who fill that hot stadium every year. Baseball, thanks to its everyday schedule, lends itself extremely well to local-market television. Franchises have unlocked massive value by either selling broadcasting rights to local sports networks (FOXSportsThisPlace, FOXSportsThatPlace) or by outright owning them (YES for the Yankees, NESN for the Red Sox). But that Balkanization has led to a sort of fan provinciality—when you have the ability to watch only your team, you end up not watching any others, really. The NBA has its Christmas Day spectacular. The NFL has a weekly national doubleheader, plus Monday and Thursday nights. The MLB has 30 sets of fans living in 30 happy bubbles. Which means Mike Trout is a very big deal in Anaheim, and a silent tree falling in Anaheim, nightly, everywhere else.

This is how you explain the Rorschach-iness of baseball’s robust fan data—it’s a confederacy of fan bases, many of them individually healthy but without the centralized national pillars of support enjoyed by other sports. And in one remote part of that confederacy, we find Mike Trout, who does every exciting thing you can do on a baseball field and does them better than anyone else, and it feels as if it doesn’t matter. For whatever reason, baseball is local, and so are its stars. He is Mickey Mantle, minus New York, minus the Yankees, minus the wild side, plus Anaheim, plus the weather, and minus most of the fame.

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Mike Trout is the new Mickey Mantle