Marx Was Right, Sort Of

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx described the periodic crisis of capitalism in terms of “the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces.” Marx argued that the productive forces unleashed by capitalism eventually get out of hand and the result is excess, thus collapsing the value of the means of production. The capital classes remedy this by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces, the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of existing markets.

Marx gets blamed for the 100 million or so murders committed in his name, but he did make a few insightful observations. For instance, the nature of business to ruthlessly exploit existing markets in pursuit of growth, even when it becomes self-defeating, is still true today. Similarly, business will bankrupt itself in pursuit of new markets, all in the name of growth. Much of what plagues us these days is the result of global business desperately searching for a new market to exploit. It is also at the heart of what is ailing the NFL.

A lot of people are blaming the idiotic and offensive antics of the players for the sudden drop in ratings. Football players have short careers and most end up broke soon after leaving the game, but most men envy them anyway. Boys grow up wanting to be a sports star and that admiration carries over into adulthood, long after we know the reality of sport. Colin Kaepernick disrespecting the fans and the country by kneeling during the anthem grates on people. Normal people think he is an ungrateful prick.

That may be part of the problem the NFL is facing, but my sense is the impact is trivial. Maybe it is the last straw for some people, but if you are a sports fan, you are willing to overlook the antics of the meat heads wearing your team’s colors. The individual players are not all that important to the drama. The point of professional sport is to simulate the tribal warfare for which all of us were born. Instead of defeating the neighboring tribe’s men and stealing their women, we watch our team beat their team at a ball game.

The real issue that is plaguing the NFL is they have run out of ways to separate their customers from their money. In fact, they ran out of sensible ways to do that a long time ago. That’s why they have started holding games in foreign countries. They think they can maybe find new customers to exploit. The games they hold in London, for example, cost the league millions, but they hope that Brits will get hooked on the narcotic of the NFL and cough up millions for the product. So far, no good.

As Marx observed, they are also ruthlessly trying to exploit their existing market. Go to an NFL game and you come away feeling like you have just been mugged. It’s not the absurd prices for everything. They constantly bombard the fan with marketing, because they expect the fan to commit his life to the corporate entity known as his team. Go to a Dallas Cowboy game, for example, and you are treated to a long pre-game ceremony about how you are not just a fan, you are soldier in the army of the Dallas Cowboys.

Of course, most people consume their sports via the television and that’s where you see the ravenous appetite of the NFL as they ruthlessly exploit their market. It used to be that the NFL games were played at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Now, there are games all day on Sunday. There’s a game on Sunday night and Monday night. Now we have a game on Thursday night. If that is not enough, there’s the NFL package for your phone, tablet and whatever else you use to consume media.

The games are now more advertising than games. As the linked article points out, the games themselves are only about 10-15 minutes of action. The rest of the presentation is fluff and most of that is advertising. There’s a play and then the refs have to hold a meeting about it. That means a break to sell product for three or four minutes. They get back to the game for a few plays and then it is time to have a break for more commercials. It’s why the Red Zone Channel is so popular. It has no ads.

The NFL is in many ways emblematic of the modern credit economy. Rich guys buy the teams on borrowed money at artificially low interest rates. They don’t really care that much about the cash flow, like a normal business. Their game is to inflate the value of the franchise over the duration of their investment. To do that means maximizing the “brand” and that costs money, which is why they load up their product with ads to the point where it is more ads than product. The NFL is a big bust out.

What’s happening to the NFL is their endless pursuit of growth has put the live product out of reach for most people. The TV version is exhausting the viewers with marketing and advertising. In an effort to fully exploit its market, it is destroying the desirability of the product. This is not exactly as Marx imagined the crisis of capitalism, but it is a good lesson on the fantasy of endless growth. The whole point of the NFL as a business is to get bigger and that cannot go on forever.

This does not mean the NFL is about to go out of business, but it serves as a useful lesson about the limits of the asset model. The modern credit economy is based on the idea that asset values can grow forever, therefore the credit base can grow forever. The NFL is based on the same premise. In both cases, the effort to keep the fantasy alive in the face of objective reality, is doing more harm than good. The question is how long does it take the people in charge to figure it out.

 

Honky Ball in Bodymore Murderville

I had the chance to attend a sportsball game last night in the city of Baltimore. My Red Sox were in town to play the Orioles, so I got a chance to see the Olde Town Team in person. I don’t attend many live sporting events these days. It was a nice change of pace, even if it meant the hassle of getting into the downtown area at rush hour. Baltimore has a reputation for being gangland, but people still do work in the city and that means traffic at the predictable times. The downtown area that caters to tourists, both local and foreign is easy to navigate so it is not too bad.

Many on the alt-right are encouraging normies to boycott sportsball and I get why they say it. It used to be that a normal man could get a few hours away from the preaching of the loons by watching a baseball game or football game. That’s no longer the case in football, as they have filled the broadcasts and the games with proselytizing for the New Religion. The players protesting the anthem may be at the heart of why the NFL is suddenly having a TV ratings problem. It would be nice if that were true, but we’ll never know as the media will cover it up.

Baseball has so far been immune to the efforts of the loons to turn it into an instrument of the New Religion. The reason for that, according to one of the players, is that baseball is the white man’s game. That’s true in many respects. The players are mostly white and Latin. Just 8% of MLB players are Afro’d Americans. The NFL is 70% black and the NBA banned the pale face years ago. Further, baseball is a turn based, rules game that does not favor running and jumping. There are few opportunities for attention getting antics during the games, so it tends to appeal to honkies.

Still, the Cult of Modern Liberalism is trying hard to ruin baseball for the white man. ESPN has destroyed their Sunday night broadcast by having a screeching powerskirt as part of the announcing team. She pretends to have played the game and have the same depth of knowledge as a former player, but does so in a way that reminds every man of his first ex-wife. A TV series has been created featuring a female baseball player making it to the majors. Of course, she’s black, because, well magic. Taken together, it is a warning that the crazies are coming for honky-ball.

Then again, the Cult has been at war with baseball for a long time. When I was a kid, they tried to make us play soccer, instead of baseball. That flopped as bad as the metric system. Soccer became the sport for effeminate white kids, who lacked the athletic ability to do anything else. Then they tried to force boys and girls to play together, but girls, and their parents, liked softball much more and that effort failed. Finally, the last two decades have seen a PR campaign to tell us that baseball is dying and basketball is the future, despite the the facts on the ground.

Even so, baseball has held up pretty well. In the 70’s, when the culture war began, even the most popular clubs struggled to attract fans to games. Today, even bad teams can get 15,000 to a weeknight game. Some clubs do better than others, but overall, baseball remains well attended compared to the past. A lot of it has to do with the excellent ballparks and the family friendly atmosphere at the games. A bigger reason, I suspect, is the ballpark is one of the last places where old weird America still exists.

The players look like us, the crowd looks like us and the customs are the same as they were when we were kids. The game starts with everyone standing for the anthem. There is the seventh inning stretch. The players embrace the customs and unwritten rules that have defined the game for generations. I walked in the park and I remembered my dad taking me to my first game. I could remember my grandfather, as if it were yesterday. That’s not something that happens at football or the human flea circus that is the NBA.

One example last night was the response to a rookie the Orioles just brought up from the minors. The crowd was mostly Oriole fans, naturally, but there were many Red Sox fans too. Everyone cheered loudly, knowing that the kid was getting his first at-bat as a major leaguer. When he hit a home-run in his second at bat, the whole place stood until he came out to tip his cap to the crowd. Even the Sox fans stood as that is the way it is done. The cycle of life has always been a part of the game, so you cheer the rookies and honor the veterans, as they pass out of the game.

If you want to understand what went wrong in America, walk around Baltimore, where you see what it is, what it should be and why it is not what it could be. It is a city where the people that know better are vastly outnumbered by those largely incapable of maintaining modernity. There are pockets of beauty and excellence, but they exist in a sea of degradation. Baltimore is what is happening in South Africa. Civilization has retreated into pockets the tourists see, hoping to hold out until the world comes to its senses.

But, the Olde Town Team carried the day, with the legendary Big Papi hitting a three run blast to seal the game. The Red Sox are headed for the post-season for the first time in a few years, and they have a good shot of winning another title. I get why the alt-right kids reject sportsball, but for old guys like me, who still remember when normal people had hope that this craziness would pass, it is a nice reminder of how things used to be. Perhaps the kids sitting there with their fathers and grandfathers will carry with them the seeds to restore the world long after I’m gone.

Mao Was Right

When I was a kid, it was part of the holiday season to see politicians participating in the rituals of Christmas. The President would show up at a church somewhere to participate in a Christian mass, even if he was not a member of that particular sect. The exception was that non-Catholics would not take communion at a Catholic mass, out of respect to Catholics. Otherwise, it was considered a sign of respect for leaders to show up at a church at times like Christmas.

Similarly, political leaders would show up at a military memorial on veterans holidays to lay a wreath, say a prayer and demonstrate a proper reverence. On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, Ronald Reagan made a week out of showing his respect for the men and women, who saved Europe from herself. Even communist mayors of progressive American cities knew to show respect to veterans on those holidays. The point was for the people to see that these public figures were pious and shared our fidelity to the cultural institutions of society.

Public acts of piety by leaders are a part of settled society and an integral part of political leadership. Scipio Africanus, the great Roman general, is famous to modern people for defeating Hannibal at Zama. In his day, he was famous to his contemporaries for his great displays of public piety and his use of them to win the support of the people in order to defeat his political enemies. Roman emperors invested a great deal of wealth and time into public acts of piety, building great temples and holding elaborately expensive public events. Public piety is a feature of human society.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind when watching our public figures perform in public. In almost all cases, these performances are carefully considered and choreographed. They are intended to win support for the public figure. If they are attached to a cause, the way to bet is the public figure cares little for the cause, but is simply using it to curry favor with the public. The point is for you to walk away thinking the public person is moral and good, and therefore deserving of your support.

This is the case with the Atlantic Coast Conference announcing that they will be pulling their sportsball tournaments out of the state of North Carolina in protest of the state law banning deranged men in sundresses from stalking women in public toilets. For those unfamiliar with American college sports, our colleges run billion dollar sports leagues for some reason. How this happened would take a long to explain, but imagine if your football leagues were all owned and operated by your colleges and universities.

Here’s the statement from the college presidents:

“As members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC Council of Presidents reaffirmed our collective commitment to uphold the values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination. Every one of our 15 universities is strongly committed to these values and therefore, we will continue to host ACC Championships at campus sites. We believe North Carolina House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values, and as a result, we will relocate all neutral site championships for the 2016-17 academic year. All locations will be announced in the future from the conference office.”

Clearly, an army of public relations people worked on this statement for weeks so that it is packed the most pious punch possible. It has all the abracadabra phrases the Cloud People love. “Collective commitment” is one of my favorites. Cloud People love that phrase. Pol Pot was fond of that phrase too. The Cloud People never shut up about the glories of unity and collective action, while at the same time yapping about diversity and tolerance. Mussolini would be proud.

Similarly, the “values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination” are not values anyone in the Cloud actually follows, but they like the way it sounds so they say it a lot. Show up at a faculty meeting with a Trump hat on and these people will run screaming for security. You will be arrested and thrown in a pit, all in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The words no longer have a literal meaning for the Cloud People. They are magic words and the point of using them is make you shut-up so they can boss you around without having to explain themselves.

The insanity of this is not in the fact they are on the side of mentally ill men in dresses stalking little girls in public toilets. That’s crazy, but what’s really nuts is the fact they think this appeals to the general public. “I support men in dresses watching my daughter pee” is something said by exactly no one ever. Dirt People feel sorry for transvestites and would support mental health services for them. Normal people would be against throwing trannies off rooftops, as is preferred by the Muslims the Cloud People are importing.

Otherwise, it is an ugly part of the human condition that normal people tend to ignore. If the man down the street likes to wear something pretty, that’s his business as long as it remains just his business. If he goes outside like that, he better be extremely respectful of the rest of us. The same is true of swingers and other fetishes like furries. Normal people have always understood that privacy must be respect and publicity should always be used carefully. Keep your private affairs private and respect the privacy of others.

It is just another example of the great gulf that lies between the rulers and those over whom they rule. Not so long ago, the rulers would have known this and showed their goodness by defending the little girl from the deranged man in the sundress. They may not have done much about it, other than make a speech, but they would have made the effort to show they are on the side of angels, with regards to men in sundresses stalking children in toilets. The North Carolina law is perfect example of this practice.

Today, they expect the fathers and mothers of those little girls to cheer them for unleashing perverts onto the public. It is the worst sort of grace on the cheap, because it inflicts a heavy cost on the public. The Cloud People ruthlessly enforce their codes of conduct in their world,, while denying normal people the right to do the same. One can be forgiven for thinking that maybe there is a sadistic pleasure at work. The Cloud People humor themselves by immiserating their subjects.

Again, it is easy to see why Mao sent these people to the rice paddies.

Reality 7, Fantasy 0

One reason to be optimistic about the current madness is that reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, all of this crackpottery we see from our rulers will crash into the jagged rocks of reality. Now, a lot of us may get thrown over the rails or go down with the ship, but eventually this spasm of insanity in the West will end. This story from the land down under, as reported by the Mail Online is a nice little pick me up.

Australia’s national women’s soccer team have suffered a devastating defeat in the lead up to the Rio Olympics – going down 7-0 to the Newcastle Jets under-15 boys side.

What is particularly concerning for the Matildas is that despite resting some regulars, they were still able to field experienced international stars including former AFC player of the year Katrina Gorry.

Despite the embarrassing defeat on Wednesday night at Valentine Sports Park in Newcastle, the Australian team will travel to Brazil as one of the gold medal favourites.

While the Matildas played with a rotating squad, there is no denying losing to a team of school boys is far from ideal preparation for the world’s fifth ranked team in their quest for Olympic gold at Rio.

Assistant Matildas coach Gary van Egmond was as surprised as anyone about the result admitting his side were outplayed.

‘To be honest we didn’t expect that,’ Egmond told the Huffington Post Australia.

I suppose the coach could be forgiven for this. Maybe he has been so immersed in girls soccer he can no longer compare the girls to the boys. It’s also possible he is just telling a white lie in order to avoid embarrassing his players. They can pretend they did not take the match seriously and the boys team was better than they expected. It’s a lame excuse, but it avoids facing reality.

‘The Jets boys were very good, all credit to them, they moved the ball around very well and were excellent all night.’

Egmond said that the Matildas are often forced to play against boys teams as trying to find quality female opposition can be difficult.

It may not be the first time that the Australian team have suffered a heavy defeat against school boys with claims that they were ‘smashed’ by an under 16 Sydney FC team last year circulating.

The social media reaction to the defeat has been condemning with many claiming that the result is not good enough for a team that is expected to challenge for a medal at the Olympics.

Maybe that’s true, but it would be amazing to me if that many humans were walking the earth unaware of the stark differences between male and female athletes. A woman in her prime years has the cardiovascular capacity of a man in his 50’s. It’s why girls cannot pass the same physical tests as males in the military. Many male recruits also fail early on, but a month or two of training and even the least fit males are well beyond the female recruits. Imagine the differences when we’re talking years of training.

Of course, the difference between boys and girls are no limited to physiology. All the stuff that makes up personality and intelligence is rooted in the same stuff as physiology. We are what our DNA says we are and human DNA makes boys difference from girls cognitively, physically and emotionally, etc. These differences cannot be wished away or hectored away. Most of what we call liberalism is at odds with biological reality and that can only end one way.

Culture and Cycling

A good rule in life is that anything that has value is being faked. People in the collectibles business just assume everything is fake until proven otherwise. A fun book to read on art forgery is called The Art of the Con. Some of the scams described are rather outlandish, which makes it  fun read, but the theme throughout is always the same. If it has value, someone will find a way to fake it.

Of course, this is true everywhere. Baseball had a steroid scandal because there was money to be made in getting bigger, faster and stronger through any means available. If a drug could make you taller, then basketball would have a problem with it. Endurance sports like soccer and tennis have problems with players using drugs to increase endurance. The drug Sharapova used was to increase her cardiovascular capacity.

The thing with cheating is that the risk-reward relationship does not always make a lot of sense. In the art world, forgers will fake relatively cheap prints that make a small profit for them. They face the same risks as with faking a Rembrandt, but the rewards are relatively small. In sports, athletes will use steroids even though they are already at the top of their game. How much of a boost did Ryan Braun get from cheating versus what it cost him?

Some sports seem to have a culture of cheating, while others do not. Cycling and track and field are riddled with cheating. There are more great cheaters than great champions in those sports. Everyone cheats and that’s just the way it is. Golf on the other hand, has little cheating and actually relies on a rather austere honor code. Players have lost tournaments because they volunteered their own rule violations.

The thing that fascinates me is the cheating in cycling. No sport has the level of exotic cheating that we see here. It’s not just the Tour either. They cheat down in the minor leagues too.

A professional cyclist has been banned for six years after it was discovered she was racing with a hidden electric motor. Femke Van den Driessche was caught at the UCI Cyclo­cross World Championships in January, during an inspection of her pit area. A magnetic resonance scan, which Road.ccreports was conducted with a tablet, allowed officials to spot a battery and Vivax motor in the seat tube. Van den Driessche could have activated it using a Bluetooth switch concealed under her handlebar tape. She denied the allegations at the time, claiming the bike was given to her by mistake.

That’s complete nonsense, of course. Here’s a pic of how the motor was hidden in the bike.

 

 

 

 

 

The technology involved here is not something you do in your garage with some simple hand tools. The down tube is 31.6 mm in diameter so slipping a motor and battery into it required some smart guys with access to high quality machine tools. There is a company that makes this device, but it would not fit a racing bike. That and it costs $3000 for the cheap model. This level of sophistication is closer to $10,000.

The puzzle here is why would they go to these lengths? Cycling is not sport where the pros make big money. Even at the top level, the typical pro is simply living on an allowance of sorts. Their room and board is covered and they get to keep prize money, which is not a lot. They make more money selling their spare bikes and parts than they make off the tour.

At the cyclocross level, it’s a hobby, even though it is called professional. The sponsors cover the travel costs, room and board. They supply the bikes. This woman could expect to take home a few bikes after the season and sell them for enough to buy a used Toyota. Even if she was the greatest cyclocross rider in history, she was never going to make big money. Maybe she could hook on with a manufacturer one day in the marketing department.

Despite this reality, she and her team went to great lengths to find a tiny advantage. Realistically, how much of an edge could this device give her? The size limitation means the motor produced little power. The weight of the thing added about 10 kg to the frame, which makes a huge difference at this level of racing. Maybe the cheating helped this woman a tiny bit, but was it worth the lifetime ban and humiliation?

It’s another example of how any system that relies on humans acting rationally or purely in their self-interest is doomed to failure. Some people like cheating. Some people get off on the thrill of breaking rules. Every society has free loaders. More important, people are not always very good at discerning their best interest. Walk around my neighborhood on a summer day and you see that fact in living color.

There’s also the fact that culture is very hard to change. Cycling has been plagued with cheating for decades. Draconian punishments for drug use have only made the riders more clever at taking drugs. Track has a similar problem. There’s something about the people in the sport that leads to the rampant rule breaking. Barring imposition of a 24×7 surveillance of everyone involved, these sports will be riddled with cheating.

That’s the lesson here. Culture is not a collection of rules drawn up in a committee hearing. The rules of a society are the result of the culture, not the other way around. If you want an orderly society or an honest sport, populate it with orderly, high trust people. The results will follow. Similarly, introduce a bunch low-trust people and order will break down quickly. In the case of cycling, its biggest problem is it is full of cyclists.

The War On Biology

Feminism, we are told, comes in three forms. The mild form, or First Wave Feminism, was all about expanding basic legal rights to women. The self-destructive form, Second Wave Feminism, was about busting up the cultural protections for women. This was based on the ludicrous idea that women are simply men lacking a penis. Finally, the absurd form, Third Wave Feminism, is a shrieking tantrum against biological reality, largely the result of the destruction caused by Second Wave Feminism.

When looked at in its totality, particularly with the human genome and mountains of anthropological data in mind, feminism is about as sensible as humoralism and that’s probably being unfair to the Ancients. Humans don’t just come in two sexes for the mechanical purpose of reproduction. Males and females are cognitively and physiologically evolved to serve very different roles in human societies.

Despite lots of feminists demanding we know how much they “bleeping love science!” by posting this phrase on their Facebook pages, feminism remains an extended tantrum against biological reality. Feminist women are bitter because they lack a penis. Feminist men are bitter because they have one. The result of this is feminism is just endless harping about men and slimy attempts to accuse men of misdeeds.

This ridiculous war on men is at the heart of the homosexual activism we have seen over the last couple of decades. It’s never been about homosexuals or their rights. It is about the war on men that has been waged by feminist nutters and their Progressive enablers. Normal men are mildly intolerant of homosexual males, with many men openly hostile. The whole point of pushing homosexual rights is to irritate and marginalize normal men and their opinions.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

The St. Louis Cardinals said they are taking allegations from a former pitcher in the organization that he quit baseball because of anti-gay comments “very seriously.”

Tyler Dunnington, who is gay, told Outsports.com he did not come out while he was pitching for the Cardinals in rookie and Class A baseball in 2014 but eventually left baseball after overhearing derogatory comments from teammates.

“I was also one of the unfortunate closeted gay athletes who experienced years of homophobia in the sport I loved,” Dunnington wrote in an email to the website. “I was able to take most of it with a grain of salt but towards the end of my career I could tell it was affecting my relationships with people, my performance, and my overall happiness.

“I experienced both coaches and players make remarks on killing gay people during my time in baseball, and each comment felt like a knife to my heart. I was miserable in a sport that used to give me life, and ultimately I decided I needed to hang up my cleats for my own sanity.”

Dunnington, 24, spent most of his career with the Cardinals organization at rookie-level Gulf Coast League. He left the organization after the 2014 season and retired before 2015 spring training.

The Cardinals said they will look into Dunnington’s allegations and work with MLB ambassador for inclusion Billy Bean, a former major league player who came out as gay after his playing days were over. No active major leaguer has ever publicly come out of the closet.

“This is very disappointing and our hope is that every player, staff member and employee feels that they are treated equally and fairly,” Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak said in a statement. “Given the nature of these allegations, I will certainly look into this further.”

Men on a sports team, in a military unit or just hanging out drinking beer can and will be rotten to one another. It’s a normal part of male behavior. Sadly, some men are born homosexual. Others are cowards or wimps. Nature does not dispense her gifts equally. What this means is that in all-male environments, some men will find themselves on the receiving end of some unpleasant hazing. It’s as much a part of human biology as eye color.

Now, it would be nice if all men could be conditioned at an early age to know when to back off their natural instincts so that homosexual males like Tyler Dunnington don’t feel blue, but that’s like training lions to be vegetarians. The lion will only go along with it until the trainer makes the mistake of stepping into the enclosure. All the brow-beating that goes on in schools and the workplace will not alter 200,000 years of evolution. Instead, it’s these endless witch hunts and shaming sessions.

Elfin Safety

The other day I saw that Major League Baseball plans to experiment with a special helmet for pitchers. This is in response to the very rare event of a batted ball hitting the pitcher in the head. The pictures of this thing suggest it is a weird contraption to have sitting on your head. Anyone who has worn a football or motorcycle helmet knows they are not very natural. This thing looks ridiculous in addition to probably being uncomfortable

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think cricket bowlers wear a helmet. It seems to me that cricket bowlers would be more likely to take a ball off the head than baseball pitchers, but I’m not an expert on cricket. I’m just thinking that the Brits are way over the top with “elfin safety” compared to Americans so if they have not mandated helmets, there must be no risk. As I said, I could be wrong about cricket.

Thinking about it, the number of pitchers that get hit by batted balls is surprisingly small. I can recall a few ugly incidents, over many years of watching sports. If you do the math, there are about 80,000 balls hit by a batter that end up in play every season. In a given year, maybe one or two Major League pitchers get hit hard enough to be a concern. There are some years when it never happens so maybe the odds are 1-in-100,000.

As a point of comparison, there is a 1-in-700,000 chance of being struck by lightning on any given day.  The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1-in-3,000. No one, as far as I know, has been killed by a come backer in professional baseball. I’m sure it has happened somewhere in pickup games or youth leagues. The point being is that you should have a greater fear of lightning, if you are a baseball player.

In my youth playing sports, helmets for batters had been around for a while, but they were crude compared to today. As a catcher, I never wore a helmet, even though they were available, until I was in high school. They became mandatory at some point. They also improved the design around that time so it was not as big of a hassle. Even so, I caught a lot of baseball games and never took a hit to the head.

The fetish for safety is one of those strange things about the modern age that is hard for me to pin down. It’s irrational to make pitchers wear a helmet when they are at no real risk. At the same time, the people arguing for these things make the point that it does not cost anything to be careful in these cases. That’s not really true, but I can see why they think it is true. That and no one wants to see a ball player get seriously injured.

Still, there is something driving this that says something about modern mass media democracies. For the bulk of the 20th century, safety items for sports were rare. Everyone just assumed the risk and did not think much of it. Look at old hockey video and you see guys skating around without helmets, face guards or mouth protection. Goalies did not wear a helmet.

It was not just bat and ball sports. Look at the history of F1. There was a great documentary on the safety issues in the early days of Formula 1 a few years ago. Even if you don’t like car racing, it is a very interesting piece. The near total disregard for the safety of the drivers was just something everyone accepted for a long time. In fact, the danger was part of the appeal for fans.

In the case of F1, safety was forced on the sport by drivers. Guys getting killed every week simply became too much for even the bravest men. That’s an exception. In all other sports, safety is forced on the players. No ball players want to wear those goofy looking pitcher’s caps. Hockey players scrap the face guard as soon as the hit the professional ranks. Boxers would die in the ring if allowed.

Steve Pinker has documented the decline of human violence and the safety revolution probably fits in there somewhere. Violence declines as the respect for human life increases. The revolution in medicine that has extended healthy lives in the West probably means a corresponding spike in the respect for human life. When you’re lucky to make it past 30, blood sports don’t sound so bad. When you live to 80, taking care of yourself makes a lot of sense.

It’s not just sports either. Safety is a whole industry now. Walk around anywhere work is being done and you see all sorts of safety measures in place. Most of these are just in my lifetime. I’ll grant that much of it is driven by government meddling, but a fair bit is driven by a genuine concern for the safety of people in their daily lives. There’s no real push-back from employers and in many cases, the employers sponsor these measures.

There’s a limit to all of this. Safety has become something close to an obsession in the last half century. It’s not a bad thing, but the point of diminishing returns may be upon us, maybe behind us. If we’re down to making ball players wear strange head gear it means we have run out of serious safety concerns. That means the cost-benefit ratios will be turning the wrong way, if they have not already done so.

Hitler’s Swoosh

Public acts of piety have become a staple in the mass media. It’s hard to watch anything on television because every five minutes, it seems, someone is on screen telling us they are a good thinker in some way. Watch a sporting event and before long they are preaching about women, NAM’s, homosexuals or whatever fad is whirling around the Cult of Modern Liberalism at the moment.

It’s what bad thinkers call “virtue signaling.” You see it everywhere. Someone blunders and utters a truth about the world in public and immediately there is a line of people telling us how they were offended. Then there is a line hooting some form of “burn the witch!” and demanding the heretic grovel. The very act of groveling, the public struggle session, has been ritualized so everyone can sing along with the sinner.

The New Religion, unlike old useful religions, has evolved as an elaborate pat on the head for managerial class types. It’s a mommy religion telling her sweetie pie everything is going to be all right. That means the moral code is just as self-absorbed as the practitioners. After all, even mass murderers have mothers who love them. This story on ESPN is a good example.

Nike terminated its endorsement contract with boxer Manny Pacquiao on Wednesday after he made derogatory remarks about same-sex couples.

“We find Manny Pacquiao’s comments abhorrent,” the company said in a statement. “Nike strongly opposes discrimination of any kind and has a long history of supporting and standing up for the rights of the LGBT community.”

Based on Pacquiao’s comments, a spokesman confirmed that he is no longer on the company’s endorsement roster. Pacquiao, 37, had endorsed Nike for a little more than eight years.

On Thursday, Pacquiao said he respects Nike’s decision to drop him but stood pat on his opposition to same-sex marriage and added that he is happy that “a lot of people were alarmed by the truth.”

Pacquiao’s original remarks were made to a Filipino television station earlier this week

“Have you seen any animal having male-to-male or female-to-female relations?” Pacquiao said. “If you have male-to-male or female-to-female [relationships], then people are worse than animals.”

Pacquiao apologized on Twitter within hours.

“I’m sorry for hurting people by comparing homosexuals to animals,” Pacquiao tweeted. “Please forgive me for those I hurt. God bless!”

You history buffs out there will recognize this as our old friend fascism. It’s been updated to modern tastes so instead of guys in brown shirts dropping by for a chat, it’s guys in Nike gear tweeting their outrage. The Gestapo made a big show of rounding up trouble makers in order to send a message. Our rulers do the same thing, but via social media and mock outrage. Same clowns, different clown car.

The moral inversion is what makes this New Religion a loser in the long run. Nike has no trouble using child labor and slaves to make their sneakers. Nike has no trouble sponsoring rapists and thugs. They were giggling like school girls when famous thugs were wearing Nike hoodies in an attempt to get the “white Hispanic” lynched down in Florida. But they draw the line at hurting the feelings of Filipino homosexuals?

If your moral code requires you to drop everything to defend the local homosexuals, but is silent on your use of child labor and slavery, your religion is barbaric and you are a dangerous lunatic. A world full of boorish guys like this boxer is going to be far more safe for homosexuals than a world run by sociopaths like the people at Nike. The former has empathy, which provides a natural limit on cruelty. The latter sees humans as exploitable resources.

Transitive Rape

I was raped in another life by an ancestor of Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer and George Soros. Since these men are all Jewish, the numbers say they share a common ancestor, if we go back far enough. That guy raped by ancestor and according to the new rules of epigentics, I am now suffering emotionally from it. I plan to sure them for billions.

That’s absurd, of course, but we are nearing a point where this sort of stuff  is moving from the absurd to the commonplace. This is an example of it.

Nebraska football coach Mike Riley and his former school, Oregon State, face a federal Title IX lawsuit filed by a woman who said she was raped as a result of the coach’s failure to correct a sexually violent culture in the program, according to a report by The Oregonian.

The woman said she was raped by a player’s cousin in October 1999 as a freshman at Oregon State.

Riley coached the San Diego Chargers in 1999 but led the program at Oregon State in 1997 and 1998 and from 2003 to 2014. He was hired at Nebraska in November and is set to coach his first game at the school Saturday.

Riley said in a statement released by Nebraska that he was he was made aware of the complaint Tuesday and previously did not know of the incident. He declined, in the statement, to comment specifically on the matter.

“However, I am committed to a harassment-free culture in our football program,” Riley said, “and I am continually seeking ways to expand our student education program. Sexual assault is a horrendous crime and has no place in our society.”The woman, seeking $7.5 million in damages, said she was raped after drinking at an off-campus party. She said she was taken to another apartment, unable to fight off her attackers as she faded out of consciousness, according to lawsuit.

To summarize, a woman is suing because 15 years ago she has a fuzzy recollection of maybe participating in a drunken gang-bang, which may or may not have included a football player. As a result, she now expects to get $7.5 million, since it was so long ago and she really does not remember, but a rape occurred near there once.

Life is unfair. Women get raped and their attackers walk free. It is a tough crime to prove under the best of circumstances. It’s made more difficult by false claims, regularly made by women simply looking for a payday. It is the cost of not sticking with the old rules about bearing false witness. Throw a few broads in jail for 20 years when they are revealed to have falsely accused a man of rape and this problem fixes itself.

Similarly, make it clear that getting blind drunk with a bunch of strange men eliminates your right to cry rape.This is not to say raping drunken coeds is OK. I’m making the obvious point that it is a very bad idea for a young girls to get drunk with a bunch of men. We used to know this and work hard to keep it from happening. We used to know that if Helen of Sparta was just a bit more modest Troy would still be standing.

The counter to this is that this case will be tossed as soon as it gets to a judge. That’s fine but the cost of defending this lunacy is not just paid for by the accused. Women everywhere suffer by lowering the bar this way. The more fake rape claims we get, the less likely we are to take the real claims seriously. We used to know that too, long ago in another country.

Another Wickerman

One of the aspects of our neo-Puritan age is that being right is never enough if the Cult decides you have to be an example. Apologizing only confirms to them that you are the right guy to burn at the stake. The lesson here from the most recent public sacrifice is to never apologize and don’t bother defending yourself with facts.

Radio host Colin Cowherd no longer will appear on ESPN following comments he made questioning the intelligence of Dominican Republic players related to baseball one day earlier, the company said in a statement Friday.

“Colin Cowherd’s comments over the past two days do not reflect the values of ESPN or our employees,” ESPN said in a statement. “Colin will no longer appear on ESPN.”

Cowherd issued an apology later Friday via Twitter.

Cowherd had said Thursday that he didn’t believe baseball was complex, saying a third of the sport was from the Dominican Republic, which had “not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities.”

Major League Baseball on Friday said Cowherd owes Dominican players an apology for the remarks, and the MLB Players Association also condemned his comments.

Earlier Friday, Cowherd addressed his remarks from Thursday during The Herd.

“I could’ve made the point without using one country, and there’s all sorts of smart people from the Dominican Republic,” Cowherd said. “I could’ve said a third of baseball’s talent is being furnished from countries with economic hardships, therefore educational hurdles. For the record, I used the Dominican Republic because they’ve furnished baseball with so many great players.”

Cowherd on Friday also cited reports and statistics to back up what he said about the country’s ranking when it comes to primary education.

The median IQ of the Dominican Republic is 82 according to Richard Lynn. According to the people who study these things, the DR has one of the worst education systems on earth, which is quite an accomplishment. But, it is a mix of Latin corruption and African incompetence. The result is what you would expect. Of course, if you have ever experienced the Caribbean, you know this.

ESPN has been dominated by unhinged fanatics for years. They recently were promoting the mentally disturbed drag queen, for example. Every crackpot fad bubbling up from the fever swamps of the Cult of Modern Liberalism has been promoted enthusiastically by ESPN. A non-believer like Cowerd had always been on their list of potential wickermen.

At some point, people will figure out that there is no accommodating these nuts. The answer when they come after you is to go right back at them. Never apologize, never explain. Attack attack attack. You have nothing to lose as there is no reasoning with lunatics. Cowerd should have said he was the victim of a lynching by liberal crazies in ESPN. That puts the focus on them. You’re getting fired anyway. Go out with a bang.