Taking Liberties with the National Anthem

I'm not a fan of singing the national anthem before a baseball game. Patriotism and the anthem have nothing to do with playing a sport. Absolutely nothing. The anthem wasn't even played at Major League Baseball games until 1918. There's nothing magic about the anthem. The lyrics are not compelling today and it's not even a beautiful melody. It is a great excuse for powerful people to push ordinary people around by challenging their patriotism if they resist. That's why, even since the anthem started being played in 1918, no one was able to uproot it and yank it out of baseball games to speed up the games (which desperately need speeding up). In fact, given that there were 2,430 Major League Baseball games played in 2022, assuming that it takes 2 minutes to sing the anthem and given that 65 million American fans attended attended MLB baseball games in 2022, this means that more than 5 Billion person/hours were spent listening to the National Anthem at MLB games in 2022 (5,265,000,000). The song is not a fan favorite. It doesn't stand on its own. I doubt that of those fans ever bought a recording of the national anthem, none of them sing it in the shower, and none of them seek to listen to it as a work of art.

Enter musician Jose Feliciano, who sang the national anthem for Game 5 of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Tigers. Here is Jose's unique version, which is much in keeping with his musical style. I enjoyed it.

But this version was too much for some of the fans, who booed after Jose finished singing. The Tigers even blamed him for the losing that game. Here's what Feliciano had to say about his version of the anthem:

Baseball is permeated with ritual, one of which is the singing of the national anthem, which must be played, or else. And even if one is a gifted musician, it must be song close enough to the standard version, or else. Why? Just because.

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What Happened to the U.S. Supply of Energy?

Energy shortages throughout vast stretches of the U.S. are not due to weather, which can be expected to be cold in the winter. They are because of poor planning and recklessly implemented ideology. Michael Shellenberger explains:

No individual person has been more influential than New Yorker author Bill McKibben and 350.org. McKibben and 350.org activists have generated large amounts of news media publicity for their pro-scarcity agenda by blocking natural gas from being piped from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and other states to power plants that could keep people across the United States warm this Christmas.

It’s not just 350.org but also groups like Sierra Club and Earthjustice that have used the court system to block natural gas pipelines.

In July 2020, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy announced that they had canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would have piped natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia and North Carolina.

Dominion and Duke blamed a decision by a U.S. District Court judge in Montana for overturning a federal pipeline permiting process that had been used for decades to allow oil and gas pipelines to cross wetlands and bodies of water

Climate activists also blocked a proposed, $7 billion, 300-mile long Mountain Valley Pipeline to bring natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had fought for the pipeline but despite his remarkable power in Congress, as a swing vote, he was unable to overcome resistance by other Democrats. The pipeline is 94 percent complete.

The power of the climate movement in shutting down reliable sources of energy, and natural gas pipelines, comes from its success in persuading a large share of Americans that climate change represents an existential threat.

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The Clouds Part and the Twitter Disclosures Stream In

For the past couple weeks, I've been following the release of the Twitter files closely, reading them, piece-by-piece on Twitter (here is Part I of the nine parts so far released). I'm not reading the tamped-down, strategically-filtered and papered-over characterizations of the Twitter files published by self-interested legacy media.

Most people I know are refusing to read the actual Twitter files being dug out of the Twitter archives for us by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and her team, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. They don't understand or care to understand the difference between independent journalists and the big corporations that pretend to employ only serious journalists. Most people I know refuse to read the Twitter files with their own eyes, arguing that they are sure these disclosures are groundless/false/uninteresting/ even though they have not read them. I can understand their hesitancy, given the extent to which they have been misled and betrayed by the "news" outlets they have been trusting. Mark Twain once commented on this challenge: "It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”

Again, I have read the Twitter files. Every last one of them. Based on these detailed disheartening revelations that our own government has fully and secretly embraced the role of virulently pro-censorship nanny-state, my emotional reaction has been similar to way Matt Taibbi describes his own reaction:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

I'll end with the purported mission statement of Twitter during this lengthy period of abject corruption, government malfeasance and censorship:

The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.

In how many ways did Twitter violate its own mission statement. Let us start counting the ways . . .

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Trophies for Every Student = Trophies for No Student

Meanwhile, at a school that has been ranked as the top high school in the country . . .

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology [in Virgina] have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom. . . .

[Director of student services, Brandon Kosatka] admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.

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