RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/crony-capitalism-and-professional-sports

On public funding for professional athletic arenas.

Professional athletic leagues have traditionally steered clear of politics in order to emphasize the purity of their entertainment and to avoid dividing fans over partisan controversies. That has changed in the last year. Players in the National Football League have “taken the knee” during playing of the national anthem as a protest against police practices; the National Basketball Association has embraced Black Lives Matter, also as a protest against the police; and now Major League Baseball has taken this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta as a protest against Georgia’s new voting law, though baseball executives do not appear to have studied that law. Through these gestures, formerly non-political organizations have allied themselves with explicitly political causes.

These steps are unusual and unprecedented. Business corporations generally prefer to serve inclusive markets while avoiding controversies that might divide customers for or against them. The new corporate alliance with liberals and the Democratic Party is not only new – it is also dangerous. It will politicize the country along new lines, introduce political controversies into the internal operations of corporations, encourage boycotts and assaults on all sides, and much more. Some of this is already happening. As a strategy for dividing America, this one would be hard to beat.

Professional sports leagues, while mostly operating as for-profit enterprises, nevertheless receive generous subsidies from federal, state, and local sources to build and maintain modern stadiums and arenas. Importantly, these subsidies assume that the enterprises are non-political and non-partisan in nature, otherwise they would not be granted. Are professional sports franchises violating the bargains they made with taxpayers and public authorities?

Up until the 1950s, professional stadiums were constructed with private funds provided by owners. Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1913 by the franchise itself, as was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1913), Yankee Stadium in New York (1923), Wrigley Field in Chicago (1913), and nearly every other professional ballpark and stadium built in that era. Many professional football franchises leased these stadiums to stage their games. It did not occur to the owners that the public might pay for their facilities. That mindset disappeared in the 1950s when owners began to ask cities and states to pay for their stadiums.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/04/donald-j-trump-joe-bidens-best-friend/

The myth of Biden the healer, and Trump the cruel divider, got Biden elected. But the fantasy that Biden had the answers to problems that Trump created is a far greater—and more dangerous—delusion.

The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment.  

His own completely optional, self-created, illegal immigration disaster? Trump somehow caused it, despite leaving office with a stable and secure border.  

Vaccination rates soaring? There would be even more if not for Trump’s mere 1-million-a-day vaccination rate, mere weeks after the rollout of the “experimental” vaccinations that supposedly would take “years” to develop. 

Chinese aggressiveness? Trump’s provocations again due to all his paranoid talk of travel bans, and a lab-escaped virus. 

European unwillingness to confront the Chinese? Yep, Trump’s the cause again, with jawboning our friends into paying $100 million more for their own defense.  

In truth, Trump’s atmospherics were chaotic, but not just due to his incessant tweeting and candid ad hoc outbursts—or even media hatred that led to 90 percent negative coverage by the networks, newspapers, and online social media. (Notice how few, Left or Right, use any more the adjective “left-wing” or “liberal,” since to do so is a redundancy: “the media” is now accepted as a synonym for “left-wing media.”)  

 I apologize for this depressing e-mail . This morning, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, lives are never going to be the same.

 I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

 You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.
 We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

 Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

 People who say there is no such thing as a gender are demanding a female President.

 Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.

 Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

 Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.

 People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

 After legislating gender, if a dude pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

 It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquiries about it.

 People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees of real or questionable value.

 Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

 Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcomed.

 $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

 If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
 And, pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”!

 Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility, and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it is racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

 We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

 Wake up America. The great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg is taking on water and sinking fast.