July 28, 2007

BOURBON AND BASEBALL

        Horsefeathers and two baseball loving friends completed a 36 hour excursion from New York to Lexington Ky., for a class A Lexington Legends night game, and to Cincinnati for a Reds day game, with enlightening stops enroute at the Woodford Reserve bourbon distillery and the Louisville Slugger bat factory. Both games were crisply played one run affairs, the first featuring a home run by Koby Clemens, the second a homer by Ken Griffey, Jr. Watching the very young minor leaguers, struggling hard to make it to the show, gave us a renewed appreciation for the effort and skill involved, the harsh demands of America's game. When you're digging in at the plate with runners in scoring position, the spotlight is pitiless. It doesn't care about your hopes and dreams, nor about who you are or who's your daddy; there is no affirmative action to assist those less talented. There is no room for utopian egalitarian fantasizing by players, coaches or managers. Not all are equal. Strike out and you're booed; get a hit and you're cheered. Strike out too often and you're gone.
        Seeing all this up close made Horsefeathers reflect on the topic of Barry Bonds, world class cheater. Unquestionably a great player, he should nevertheless be condemned and shunned by the Commisioner, (and all who love the game) the official representative of the game.
        Excelling at baseball requires exceptional physical skills, plus practice and training over many years. It is a team game within which the individual has ample room to succeed or fail. Introducing performance enhancing drugs, especially steroids and human growth hormone, makes a mockery of the efforts by all the other players who don't cheat. This is not simply a moral matter; it is a practical one as well. If one of those struggling minor leaguers is working his way up the ladder legitimately, and another, slightly less talented, passes him because of using performance enhancers, it penalizes the honest player and subverts the game itself. We know that baseball heros are human, with all the flaws and failings of the rest of us. However, within the game we have a right to expect players to utilize their physical skills without biotechnological enhancement. Imagine that biotechnology advances to the point where bionic arms can throw 100mph fastballs forever.
        Horsefeathers is aware that, within the game, players strive for an edge--stealing bases, stealing signs, etc. However, no player is more important than baseball itself, and Barry Bonds has trashed the greatest game ever invented. Barry Bonds with his glittering earring and his casual lies is a perfect representative of our age of narcissism, in which his own numbers in the record book matter more than his team, more than his personal honor, and more than the game itself. His home run record is an insult to Henry Aaron, a man who endured hardships Bonds never knew, yet always behaved with dignity, personal honor, and respect for the game. What must go through his mind when he sees a brazen fraud take away his hard won records? Barry Bonds should be elected to the Hall of Shame and his home run record be marked forever as the record of a cheater.

July 13, 2007

WESTERN BONELESS WONDERS

        Andrew Roberts is the author of "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900." His eloquent article, At stake in the Iraq war: survival of a way of life, begins with the following words:
        "Unless the English-speaking peoples step up, they'll lose the great struggle against radical, totalitarian Islam..." Read the rest here.

        Roberts book is a coda to Churchill's own work on the history of the English speaking peoples. As we watch the current replay of earlier wars, it's hard not to think that most Western politicians are born with an appeasement gene that overrides any knowledge they possess of history. Then again, it's up to real leaders to rouse the rest of us from our usual desire for comfort and ease, and thus far, no Churchills are in sight. Were Sir Winston alive today, we think he would modify the following comments to include Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and all their liberal colleagues.

"I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as 'The Boneless Wonder.' My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye, and I have waited 50 years to see The Boneless Wonder--sitting on the Treasury Bench."
--Winston Churchill, January 28, 1931,
in the House of Commons, referring to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald

July 07, 2007

THE RELIGION OF DANGEROUS FOOLS: ENVIRONMENTALISM

        Christopher Hitchens's diatribe vs. religion revealed more about its author than about the subject. (see below for Dr. Kramer's review of God Is Not Great). Hitchens was a left utopian for many years. Having lately abandoned that Godless religion, he has made a religion out of Godlessness, and substituted a shallow scientism as the one true faith. We predict the next stop in his odyssey will be environmentalism, After all, environmentalism claims to be scientific, just as old leftists believed in 'scientific socialism'. Hitchens, like Gore, has probably never spent time in a laboratory, and never learned the basics of the scientific method. Hitchens at least has learned to think critically,in the manner of skilled debater. Gore has cultivated the skills of a politician--grandiosity and deceifulness, along with monumental personal hypocrisy. His preachings are daily contradicted by his profligate energy lifestyle. Obviously, wordsmith skills don't exempt anyone from the vicissitudes of human nature with its capacity for self delusion and hypocrisy.
        While Western societies may be turning away from traditional religions, with church and synagogue attendance in steep decline, we can see the outlines of an emerging feel-good faith--environmentalism. Today's leading, self-described 'preacher' is Al Gore. He is a man, by upbringing, so self flattering as to believe he is in a position to hector us about our sinful environmental ways, and to warn us of the terrible fate awaiting the damned who fail to heed him. Implicit in Gore's ravings is a foolishly utopian fantasy that human beings can achieve omnipotent control over nature and live happily ever after. His utterly vacuous misunderstanding of the nature of science makes us grateful that he wasn't around when the phlogiston theory of combustion was the 'consensus' scientific view. Surely he would have railed against Lavoisier for being a demented critic who refused to accept what was clear to all.
        Bjorn Lomborg is a critic of religious environmentalism, who has attempted to use reason and logic, for which he has been demonized because all utopian fantasies require a scapegoat for their own failures. On the occasion of today's earth day concerts he raises the matter of priorities. The money spent in pursuit of the goals set by the Kyoto protocols is money not spent on other things. What is the relative benefit of such choices? This seems a fair question, if one were dealing with rational matters, rather than wishful fantasies. Lomborg writes: "...When we look at the evidence, we discover again and again that the best solutions to the world's biggest challenges aren't the ones we hear about the most. We could save many more lives during extreme weather events, for example, by insisting on hurricane-resistant building standards than we would by committing to Live Earth's target of a 90 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. This would be easier, much less costly, and ultimately do far more good. Indeed, the Copenhagen Consensus experts discovered that for every dollar invested in Kyoto-style battling climate change, we could do up to 120 times more good with in numerous other areas..."
Read the rest here.