Monthly Archives: December 2019

Reduced NBA Viewership

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The TV ratings of National Basketball Association games are down by 15% compared to last year.

Some folks ascribe this to fewer folks subscribing to television generally. Others blame it on geography:

Many of the league’s best teams are on the West Coast, meaning their games end after some viewers in the East have already gone to bed.

Yet others assign at least some of the blame to injuries, especially to marque players.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver blames in on a “broken” pay-TV system.

All of those would seem to be factors in the public’s decreasing interest in the doings of the NBA.

I have to wonder, though, how much of the drop is due to dismay over the NBA’s despicable behavior toward the Houston Rockets’ GM tweeting in support of Hong Kong protestors and to contempt for the league’s disgracefully obsequious kowtowing, from Silver, through team management, on down to players on the floor, to the People’s Republic of China government.

Maybe Build Their Own Connections

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Idaho wants to connect several of its western communities to a renewable energy hub in eastern Oregon, and the green citizens of eastern Oregon agrees with the sentiment.  Just don’t use actual power lines to do the connection.  Brian Kelly, Restoration Director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council in eastern Oregon:

We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places….

Yep.  Dan Shreve, Head of Global Wind Energy Research at Wood Mackenzie:

Regardless of where you go, there’s always some issues—whether it’s bats, whether it’s birds, whether it’s wealthy landowners who don’t want their view interrupted. As a consequence, you see these initiatives drag on forever.

These worthies put greater value—economic and otherwise—on sights and terrain than they do on actual power to support the folks living there to enjoy those sights and that terrain, as well as telling others elsewhere that local sights and terrain are more important than those others’ access to power.

Perhaps utilities should walk away from such areas, build their hubs and their transmission lines elsewhere, and let these folks who think energy is not all that important develop their own clean power sources and provide their own accesses to them. Surely, they’ll be able to do so much more cheaply and efficiently while preserving their views than can utilities.

Wage Growth

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It’s been almost entirely missed by Progressive-Democrats and almost entirely ignored by the Left and its NLMSM.

Rank-and-file workers are getting bigger raises this year—at least in percentage terms—than bosses.
Wages for the typical worker—nonsupervisory employees who account for 82% of the workforce—are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade, a sign that the labor market has tightened sufficiently to convey bigger pay increases to lower-paid employees.

Of course, it’s understandable that Progressive-Democrats have missed this. They’ve trained their fire on the Evil Rich and demands that those folks should give up their wealth for redistribution to the…middle class.  All along, Progressive-Democrats have ignored the bottom of the employed and want-to-be-employed spectrum.  Other than, of course, those worthies’ virtue-signaling and anti-employment minimum wage increase demands.

It’s also understandable that the Left and its NLMSM have done their best to ignore this wage increase development.  After all, it comes on the heels of the slowest post-recession (let alone post-Panic) reemployment development since WWII, and it comes so quickly after wages for the typical worker stagnated, and real wages actually declined, during the Obama administration’s post-Panic pseudo-recovery.

Progressive-Democrats also want to talk about the evils of income inequality, while carefully ignoring the opportunity inequalities that would result—have resulted—from their policies.  See, for instance, the results of their mandated minimum wages: net lower income for those still employed low-skill workers and the lower employment rates in thin-margin businesses, second-job family seekers, teenagers looking for their first jobs.  Here are a couple of graphs depicting income inequality.How terrible are these inequalities?

“Rolling Impeachment”

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That’s how Kimberly Strassel characterized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) refusal to formally deliver her caucus’ Articles of Impeachment under the fiction that if she does not, the Senate cannot hold the trial. (It’s not entirely fictive under current Senate rules, but the Senate can straightforwardly change its rules.)

However, not one of the outcomes Strassel listed in her As long as the Senate doesn’t hold a trial… sequence are goals of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

They’re just intermediate steps along the way to the Progressive-Democrats’ true goal: the preemption of the 2020 elections and the denial of American voters our choice for President. They don’t expect actually to remove President Donald Trump from office, as Strassel noted. They do hope to so poison the election with the smears represented by those no trial machinations that our choice is denied by making one of them preemptively unelectable.

“Circle Games” and Losers

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One last thought on this, and then I’ll depart from the foolishness.  Recall the cadets and midshipmen who made the OK sign as part of a so-called circle game and whose academy management teams then were cowed into investigating those cadets and midshipmen.

In the circle game, you try to trick someone into looking at your hand while you make an “OK” sign, usually below the waist. If the mark falls for it, you’re awarded a free punch.

The real losers of the round of the circle game played at the recent Army-Navy college football game are the management teams of the two academies. Their meek surrender to “woke” pressure constitutes their falling for the game’s jape, and so they have earned free punches from each of the cadets and midshipmen who were targets of those managers’ foolish investigations.

“Management teams:” those worthies are unsuited to be leaders of our nation’s military academies, and they are unqualified to be teachers of our future military officers.