Monthly Archives: December 2021

It’s the End of the Year

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And it’s time for some humor.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up for New Year’s. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

A woman took an afternoon nap on New Year’s Eve. When she woke up, she told her husband, “I just dreamed that you gave me a diamond ring for a New Year’s present. What do you think it all means?” He replied, “Aha, you’ll know tonight!” At midnight, her husband handed her a small gift-wrapped present. Excited, she opened it quickly, but was even more surprised: In it was a book titled The Meaning of Dreams.

A man who had too much to drink decides to walk home on New Year’s Eve. A policeman stopped the man and asked where he was going. “I’m on my way to a lecture,” the man replied. The cop scoffed, “Who gives lectures on New Year’s Eve?” The man answered: “My wife.”

I was going to quit all my bad habits for the New Year, but then I remembered that nobody likes a quitter.

My resolution was to read more, so I put the subtitles on on my TV.

How you elect to spend New Year’s Eve will depend on your:
1. age
2. remaining levels of optimism
3. threshold of pain
– Joseph Connolly

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
– Bill Vaughan

Wait a second, there’s ANOTHER year? I have to do it all over again???
– Jake Vig ‏@Jake_Vig

Finally, some few readers might wonder why I don’t do a retrospective of the year just concluding. Why I don’t are illustrated as follows:

That great American philosopher, Satchel Paige:

Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

And this, from Italian racing (or so I’ve heard), but that has wide applicability:

What’s behind me is not important.

Finally, finally, this bit, counter-tenor, from Michael Jordan:

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

A Poll

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And a cynically timed one, at that. FiveThirtyEight ran a poll against the backdrop of a potential Supreme Court ruling regarding abortion, asking for abortion stories from women who’d had them.

And they ran that poll on Christmas Day, a day when hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of Christians globally, celebrate the birth—not the abortion—of a child.

Aside from that tone-deaf, if not cynical, timing, the crowd also didn’t get the answers for which it was looking, even though it equally cynically distorted the subject altogether.

[FiveThirtyEight] states…”And now it seems likely that the Supreme Court will limit the right to abortion even further. As we document the impact of these shifts, we want to include the voices of people who have had abortions in the U.S.”

That’s the cynical mischaracterization of a potential (it’s far from a done deal) Supreme Court outcome.

What the Supreme Court might do is acknowledge the right of babies to their life by limiting access to medical procedures for killing those babies before they’re born.

The voices of those who choose a baby’s life answered the poll far more so than those who favor a mother’s “right” to kill her baby, so long as it’s not yet born. It’ll be interesting to see whether FiveThirtyEight‘s managers publish their poll’s outcome, and if they do, how they characterize it.

What She Said

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Cynthia Millen, the erstwhile USA Swimming official who resigned over the NCAA’s and UPenn’s decision to let transgender swimmer Lia Thomas compete in women’s swimming meets, had some further thoughts on the larger matter.

The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities[.]

And

The statement for women then is you do not matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this[.]

And

…boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat.

And

While Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have the advantage.

And

All these women who worked so hard before Title IX when they didn’t have the opportunities that men had. It would be such a shame, such a travesty to throw it away now. This is what will happen.

Indeed, where is Title IX? Transgender athletes should have their own, equally funded and equally supported, athletic programs.

Just a Thought

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California is running a very large budget surplus—$31 billion worth—and the men and women of that State’s government really and truly don’t know what to do with it. Especially since the voter-approved Gann Limit doesn’t let the government run that big a surplus.

Here’s a thought.

Maybe pay a tax refund to the citizens of California, and sock the rest of the surplus away in a State rainy-day fund.

Nah. Waste of money. Those citizens would only waste it on their own needs and wants, rather than spending it properly. And who needs a rainy-day fund? California has droughts.

“Ethical Dilemma”

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Walmart is getting blowback from the citizens and government personnel of the People’s Republic of China in response to the company’s apparent decision to stop selling products—in accordance with US law—sourced from or with components sourced from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the PRC, where the men of the PRC government are practicing genocide and using the so-far survivors for slave labor.

In her Wall Street Journal article on the matter and the blowback other US companies also are getting for following US law, Liza Lin had this remark, which illustrates the far-too-wide misunderstanding of the situation that too many journalists have.

The northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, home to millions of mostly Muslim minorities, has become a geopolitical flashpoint and an ethical dilemma for US multinationals doing business in China.

There’s no ethical dilemma here. US companies, multinational or other, have no ethical business—no moral ability—to do business within a nation that practices genocide or to do business with businesses that are domiciled in nations that practice genocide.

Full stop.

Walmart, and those other companies, would do well to withdraw altogether from the PRC, not just from the Region. Aside from the moral aspect, there are plenty of markets around the world other than those in genocidal countries.