Spy vs Spy

The salons of Europe are atwitter with indignation at allegations of American spying. Thanks to Mr. Snowden’s revelations, it would appear that our NSA has been quite busy intercepting millions of phone calls on that continent, most troubling to European sensibilities, even those from Prime Minister Merkel’s cell phone. This is apparently a bridge too far for the Euros. Howls of protest are being heard from Brussels to Berlin, from France to Finland. Merkel dialed up Obama herself, (presumably on a secure satellite phone), to scold him in no uncertain terms that “friends do not spy on one another.”

Excuse me. I will continue to write this blog after I take a few minutes to roll on the floor laughing.

“Friends do not spy on one another?” What universe has Frau Merkel been living in for the past sixty years? Friends spy on each other every minute of every day and have been doing so for 4,000 years of recorded history. We spied on the Brits during World War II, and the Brits spied on us. It’s called “self interest”. All of this feigned outrage coming from Europe isn’t over the shocking news that the NSA has managed to hack their calls. The outrage comes from the embarrassment attending such a one sided revelation. If Mr. Snowden had access to all of Germany’s intelligence comings and goings, it would be the United States who would be feigning outrage.

Listen, every American ambassador understands when he first walks into his new embassy home, whether it’s in Berlin, Paris, or Moscow, that job number one is to  remove every listening device he can find, knowing full well that the possibility of a private conversation is virtually impossible, same thing in Washington. Why? Well, human nature being what it is, we have a hard time trusting each other. Individuals as well as nations are constantly looking out for their own self interests in ways large and small, and while we may have tons in common strategically and culturally with Great Britain, they would sell us down the river in a New York minute if the opportunity presented itself. The instinct for self preservation is powerful and has no scruples.

I’m no fan of the NSA when it comes to its increasing domestic snooping what with the no scruples thing, but when I hear that they managed to tap Merkel’s cell phone, I gotta say…impressed. It’s called doing your job.

Game Three. Holy Cow!

The following instant analysis of game 3 of the 2013 World Series may not be not be rebroadcast, retransmitted, or in any way rewritten without the express, written consent of Doug Dunnevant….unless a sizable check changes hands between you and me.

 

Top of the first: The guy on the mound pitching for the Cardinals, the one who looks like an accountant, is throwing 98 mph cheese with movement. Might be a long night for the Sox.

Bottom of the first: Peavy looking a little shaky. When he goes to his mouth with that chaw in there, is the tobacco in his spit considered a foreign substance? 2-0 already. Red Sox nation ready to “trade da bum!!”

Top of the second: Carpenter makes an amazing play robbing Nava of a hit. Without Napoli in this lineup, there isn’t much to scare you. Without the DH, St. Louis is a better team.

Bottom of the second: First Erin Andrews sighting, always a good thing. Peavy settling down. Also saw the Clydesdales. Instantly wanted a beer.

Made it through 2 full innings without seeing an erectile dysfunction commercial.

Top of the third: Stephen Drew looks like an out. Poor kid doesn’t have a clue at the moment, but plays a mean short stop. 4 for 43 in the post season ain’t gonna cut it. The kid is one error away from death threats in Bean Town.

Ahh yes, Cialis commercial. Suggestion for their marketing people...nothing happening with separate bathtubs. Just saying.

Bottom of the third: Can’t decide which was more little-leagueish, Ellsbury’s drop or Hollidays’ horrible base running. Bad call on the strikeout of Adams. Ball was low. Peavy looking better.

Top of the fourth: Ellsbury gets first Sox hit. Victorino looks terrible at the plate. Love watching Pedroia swing the bat. He’s the toughest player on the field. Need Big Papi to hit one out here. Smart strategy by St. Louis. No way I’m letting Papi beat me. Make Nava be the hero. Yep, coulda used Napoli in that spot.

Verizon commercial about the family who goes trick or treating while obsessively looking into their smart phones is one of the things wrong with America. Leave the phones at home Mom and Dad!!

Bottom of the fourth: How come every time I see Yadiar Molina play I think he’s the best player on the field? Maybe because he is. Best defensive catcher I’ve ever seen. Bases loaded, nobody out. Strike out, pop up, pop up. Great job by Peavy!!

Top of the fifth: Leadoff triple by Boegarts. Yeah baby. Momentum shifting. Walk. Very large Cardinal pitching coach to the mound. Cardinal relief pitchers begin in-game Yoga, or synchronized stretching. Either way, creepy. Poor Drew. Carp pinch hitting for Peavy, looks like an out waiting to happen, and grounds out but scores the run. 2-1. Umpire suddenly blind to outside corner. Great at bat for Ellsbury…but strikes out. Time for some snacks.

Triscuits and Colby jack cheese with a Jonathan apple.

Bottom of the fifth: Two out double brings Molina to the plate. Nervous. Walk him? Yes! Make Freese beat you. At some point in this game a ball is going to be hit to Ortiz at first, I just hope it’s not now. Doubrant has just made two great pitches that were both called balls, but overcomes by getting Freese on a flyout. Now for the 16^th commercial  trying to sell me a pickup truck.

Top of the sixth: Who looks worse at the plate right now? Drew or Victorino? V  gets a walk, so I guess it’s still Drew. Pedroia lines out. New pitcher for the Cardinals. But first a word from Geico. I was tired of the green lizard two years ago. Oh, and the 865^th airing of the Taco Bell PlayStation 4 commercial. Ortiz is soooo clutch. 1^st and 3^rd, one out. Somebody besides Big Papi is going to have to get a big hit. Whose it gonna be? Daniel Nava!! Base hit scores the run 2-2.

Bottom of the sixth: Doubront looks hittable, but isn’t. Cardinal crowd is stone cold quiet. Don’t think a silent crowd is part of the “Cardinal way.”

Top of the seventh: Battle of the bullpens. Fourth of the night for St. Louis is on the mound throwing 98. Drew put out of his misery, pinch hit for. Three up, three down. Navy man just belted God Bless America out of the park. Wow. Stretch time.

Bottom of the seventh: Third Sox pitcher, Breslow. Check swing base hit. Now Beltran. Nervous. Ball grazes him. Two on, no out. Bye Bye Breslow. Tazawa coming in, Japanese pitcher number one. High cheese, then ripped down the line to left, 4-2 Cardinals. Big hit by Holliday. Tazawa looks uncomfortable.

Top of the eighth: Sox have six outs left. Better get cracking. Lead off single by Ellsbury will help! Victorino looks terrible, then gets hit. Huge gift! Come on Pedroia! Ferrell starts the runners so Peedy’s ground out advances the runners. Now they load em up by walking Ortiz. Good strategy, make Nava beat you. Rosenthall coming in. This guy is unbelievable. 100 and nasty. What a great game! Nava scores a run on a groundout. 4-3. Now it’s the kid’s turn. He comes through!! Tie game baby. Where the heck is Erin Andrews?

Bottom of the eighth: Bench player for Cardinals leads off with a hit. Isn’t that always the way it is with baseball? Pop up. Two outs. Beltran. Nervous again. Always nervous with Beltran. The rookie steals second. Single scores the go ahead run. Now they walk Beltran to pitch to Holliday, a guy who has already knocked in 3. Hmmm…. Glad I’m not a big league manager. GOT HIM!!! Let’s go to the ninth tied at 4. Why yes, I think I will!

Top of the ninth: One, two, three. Heck of a time to ask a relief pitcher to have his first career at bat!? “At least he didn’t get hurt,” the announcer says. Haha!!

Bottom of the ninth: Let’s see if we can get Molina out. Nope. Japanese pitcher number two coming in. Hopefully Uehara will equal sayonara. Craig rips a double to left. Runners on second and third with one out. Fly ball wins the game. Why are we pitching to Jay?? WHAT?????? Thrown out at the plate, then a wild throw past third then another throw out at the plate but interference is called. The game ends on an obstruction call? Great play by Pedroia. Wow! Amazing game ends with the most obscure call in the rulebook. Holy Cow.

 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love baseball.

It's Nobody's Fault

Anyone who reads this Blog with any regularity surely knows how much I love baseball in general and the World Series in particular. The fact that the Red Sox are playing this year makes it all the more awesome. But, I have noticed something lately about sports and sports fans that fascinates me, that is this strange notion that if one’s preferred team loses, it is always the result of either incompetence, or treachery.

Last night, for example, the Red Sox lost game two. They had a 2-1 lead going into the 7^th inning. Manager John Ferrell removed his starting pitcher with one out and two runners on base. He replaced him with a left handed relief pitcher who had pitched brilliantly throughout the post season. This time however, the Cardinals pulled off an audacious double steal, then scored a run to tie the game on a sacrifice fly and the another on two errors on the ensuing play. By the time Ferrell removed his left hander, St. Louis was up 4-2, which is how the game ended.

This morning, a friend of mine on Facebook made the observation that the Sox had “blown it.”  Others have blamed the loss on Ferrell’s quick hook of starter John Lackey. No Red Sox fan I can find has thought to credit the Cardinals for daring to attempt a double steal, down by a run. No one has lauded sore-ribbed Carlos Beltran’s clutch single that scored the insurance run.

Listen, I’m a Red Sox fan, but I’m sorry, they didn’t “blow” the game. They got beat. This is baseball. Stuff happens. Teams don’t always “lose” games, sometimes they just get beat. It’s no one’s fault. Give the Cardinals credit for a gutsy comeback.

Read your newsfeed the day after a big Virginia Tech game or a Redskins game. If either of them lost, you will be treated to a laundry list of reasons why they got hosed by the officials, or how stupid a coach’s decision was, or how horrible so and so is because of a fumble or an interception. The other team’s performance never has anything to do with the outcome of a game.

I suppose it’s a natural reaction of fans, short for “fanatic.” And yes, sometimes my teams do lose because of ill-conceived strategy, or dumb blind bad luck. But more often than not, it’s just…..baseball. Last night’s game was every bit as fun to watch as game one for me. It’s October, and I’m watching great baseball. I have a sneaking suspicion that whoever wins this World Series will deserve it.

In Search of Humility

So, last night there was a bit of controversy in the first game of the World Series. A double play ground ball was hit by one of the Red Sox. If properly executed, the Cardinals would have gotten out of the inning unscathed. Instead, the shortstop completely missed the ball. It glanced off of the webbing of his glove. Bases loaded. Except the umpire who was standing 5 feet from the play with a perfect view inexplicably called the runner out. As you might expect, Red Sox nation proceeded to have an apocalyptical fit. But, because this is baseball, sanity and justice would prevail. Immediately after the horrible call, the other five umpires converged on the second base bag. A conference began, in which a unanimous conclusion was drawn that Dana Demuth had in fact made a bad call. The call was reversed, order restored, whereupon Mike Napoli hit a bases clearing double. None of this is to say that Mr. Demuth is a horrible umpire. He just made a mistake.

As I watched this unfold, a thought passed through my fertile imagination. What if politics worked this way?

What if the Republican Party after 9/11 would have gotten together and said, “You know, these terrorists are real bastards and all, but do we really want to fight a ground war in freaking Iraq? And, I know we’re all scared right now, but this Patriot Act thing might really come back to bite us in the buttocks one day. Why don’t we all calm down a little, and take some time to think this all through?”

What if the Democratic Party after the roll out of HealthCare.gov would get together and say, “Holy Crap! How do you spend 650 billion dollars on a website and end up with this? Listen guys, I know that most of us have wanted Socialized medicine for all of our lives and all, but this Obamacare business is a train wreck. Do we really want to be associated with such a colossal disaster? How about we go back to the drawing board and design a bill with 200 instead of 2000 pages?”

Although baseball is clearly showing us the way, the above two scenarios will never happen because it would require basic humility and an admission of error.

Never gonna happen.

It's All About The Women

It’s been four days since my last blog. For me, that’s a long time. The simple fact is that I’ve had nothing to say. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally a fog descends over me. For two or three days at a time, everything seems heavy, my movements become leaden. It becomes a colossal effort to think critically. I never know when such days will come, and they leave me as abruptly as they arrive. This morning, for example, life is lighter.

It occurs to me that those of you fond of psychoanalysis will have a field day with that paragraph.

So, this morning I have learned that Denmark has been declared the “happiest nation on earth”, by some United Nations outfit who arbitrarily declared itself the judge of such things. Why are the Danes so happy? Apparently, it’s all about the women.

In Denmark, women are fully represented in government. They even have a female Prime Minister. Their most popular TV show also features a female Prime Minister. Women in Denmark contribute a much higher percentage of household income than women in the U.S. When a women has a baby, she is given 52 weeks of paid maternity leave, then when she does go back to work, her child gets free day care. The Danes have free health care, and they use the heck out of it, the average Dane consulting with his or her primary care physician 7 times a year. So, it would seem that the Danes are happy because they enjoy cradle to grave Socialism. No mention is made in this “Happiness Survey” as to whether the Danes are pursuing this happiness or having it presented to them by enlightened government programs, but the suggestion is very clear that it is the latter. No mention was made of what kind of tax burden is borne by the happy Danes, so I had to do a little research. The Danes pay income taxes at a top rate of 56%. In addition, there is a VAT tax on all purchases which amounts to a 25% sales tax. This year, a new tax was added on fatty foods that would make Michael Bloomberg proud. By comparison, our top tax rate is 39.4%, and our sales taxes vary by state by average around 5%. The American idea has always been, keep more of your earnings, go out there and pursue your own happiness wherever you can find it. The Danes philosophy seems to be, give us your money and we’ll provide your happiness.

Of course, the happy Danes do have a couple of peculiar advantages over us melancholy Americans. First, they aren’t expected to be the policemen of the world. They don’t have a military budget that chews up 25% of their GDP. Secondly, Denmark has no aggrieved minority; they don’t have to wrestle with a melting pot of nationalities, those teeming masses yearning to be free, a melting pot that hasn’t melted much over the last 30 years. So, there’s that.

But, give the Danes their due. They have learned something as a nation that our grandmothers and mothers, wives and sisters have been telling us for years. When momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Week in Review

The Week In Review:

Government shutdown ends, and within minutes the National debt clock, which had been mysteriously stuck on $16,800,000,000,000 for months, suddenly bolted upward by $328,000,000,000. We continue to be assured by all the smartest people that this is, in fact, a good thing, or at least, not a bad thing. Would the last person leaving the Republican Party please remember to turn out the lights?

Major League baseball seems to already have found a successor to Mariana Rivera, in the long-faced Japanese closer for the Boston Red Sox, Koji Uehara. Like Rivera before him, Uehara struggled early in his career until miraculously becoming unhittable around 3 months ago. His five out save in game five of the ALCS was as overpowering as any I’ve seen in my 45 years of watching baseball in the post season, prompting me to declare on Facebook that Uehara=Sayonara. The fact that my son didn’t chastise me for latent racism for the remark must mean that I am growing as a person.

A 17 year old girl caught shoplifting in a New York City Victoria’s Secret, was found to be carrying a dead baby in her shopping bag. Her story initially was that she had experienced a miscarriage earlier in the week, but upon further investigation, it was discovered that the child was born fully formed and viable at 8 and a half pounds. The 17 year old mother of a two year old boy could be charged with murder in addition to shoplifting sexy lingerie and makeup, officials say. A spokesperson from Planned Parenthood pointed out that this whole disturbing incident could have been avoided by a safe and legal abortion. A spokesperson from Health and Human Services pointed out that the shoplifting charge could also have been avoided if only lingerie were on the approved essential purchases list for the Food Stamp program.

My week dramatically improved this morning when Pam made apple pancakes with apple syrup along with thick pepper encrusted bacon. A spokesperson from Michelle Obama’s Fitness and Nutrition task force pointed out that by consuming such a breakfast, I have most likely taken 22 hours off my expected life span. My reply to this news is that if I have to read very many more stories about 17 year olds carrying around dead babies at Victoria’s Secret, my demise couldn’t come soon enough!

Welcome To Our Future

 The 16 day shutdown of 17% of the Federal Government is now over. All of those furloughed workers are back at work and will be given back pay, an angst-filled 16 day paid vacation, courtesy of the American taxpayer. The National Parks will reopen. Obamacare escapes unscathed, and now the government can borrow money again, our National debt, free once more to continue its skyward trajectory without the pesky intrusion of a debt limit. Meanwhile, 16 days after its rollout, the State of Delaware yesterday celebrated its very first successful Obamacare enrollee. I’d say that things are going swimmingly.

Bill Clinton famously stood before a joint session of Congress in 1996 to declare that the era of big government was over. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t true lies the fact that it can never be true. Government, like the universe, is and will ever be a constantly expanding project. Ronald Reagan himself, perhaps the greatest champion of limited government ever to occupy the Oval Office presided over an eight year expansion of the state. All anyone of Libertarian sensibilities can hope for is a slowing of its growth, and now with the arrival of the mother of all entitlements, Obamacare, even that hope has been crushed. Republican stunts like this shutdown/defund Obamacare disaster are nothing more than tilting at windmills. Don Quixote vs. Leviathan.

But I struggle mightily, against all evidence, to remain an optimist. There are benefits to towering debt, escalating interest payments and exploding actuarial assumptions. There will be less and less money available for military misadventures abroad. Twenty years from now when 40% of the budget is consumed by interest payments on the debt, future President Kardashian will think twice before sending troops to the Middle East since the budget for such adventures will be $ 32.99. Its past time that our Defense budget got scaled back, and now it will have to be. Ultimately, people in democracies get what they want, and the American people have for the past 50 years, more often than not, voted for the guy who promises the most stuff. Now, we are scrambling around, shutting down the government, trying to figure out a way to pay for it all. Welcome to our future.

Twenty years from now, we will all be paying higher taxes for all levels of government, and I do mean all of us, not just the evil 1%. Our National debt in the year 2033 will make our present debt look like a rounding error. But, at least our health care will be free, and besides…I’d still rather live in a totally broke America than anywhere else. At least we aren’t Bangladesh.

Remember, I’m an optimist.