Monthly Archives: September 2025

Should We Forgive Barry Bonds?

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That’s the lead-off question The Free Press asked in its Wednesday piece. The article then just beat around the bush on the matter while spilling endless pixels on the marketability of Bonds memorabilia and those of other disgraced baseball players, and on other baseball players alleged (with greater or lesser amounts of supporting data) to have cheated. But Bonds did cheat—he used performance enhancing drugs.

So: should we forgive Barry Bonds? Of course; we should have done so a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we should forget his cheating. That cheating was of a magnitude—increasing, for instance the number of hits and the number of homeruns he would have gotten absence his PED use—that he has been, and rightly should continue to be, barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame. The stats he accrued from his PED use overshadowed other, honest, players and deprived them of their leading stats.

That some other players similarly cheated, or seriously violated other baseball rules (viz., betting on baseball games) in no way absolves Bonds. The existence of those other cheats and baseball’s spotty record regarding them only point up baseball’s atrociously inconsistent enforcement of its own rules.

And: just to drive home the point, forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and it’s long past time to stop conflating the two.

A Mistake

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DHS, according to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, is looking at so-called “ICE tracking apps,” which allow users to share locations of immigration enforcement activity in real time. Of course they should be looking at these.

However.

According to McLaughlin, while such apps might currently be legal, they are “being used by gangs, suspected terrorists, and others to evade law enforcement and even target officers.”
She said the Department of Justice might consider whether the apps and other tracking tools amount to obstruction of justice.

That’s looking at the wrong end of the apps. It’s certainly true that, as McLaughlin also says, there has been a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers.

But the way to deal with that is not to go after the apps as obstructions of justice. The proper way to deal with that is to treat the use of the apps in particular ways as obstructions of justice, backtrack those uses to their users, and then to go after the users who actually obstruct justice or who interfere with law enforcement officers in the course of their actions.

The apps themselves are merely tools. They’re agnostic in themselves; it’s the users who are…not agnostic.

Moreover, targeting the apps over their misuse also would fuel the Left’s war on our 2nd Amendment, making it easier to target our weapons over their misuse.

US Naval Academy Midshipman Honor Concept and Mikie Shirrell

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Governor, it turns out, was barred from walking with her Naval Academy class during its graduation ceremony, although she was allowed to graduate and be commissioned into our Navy. Her explanation for this is this:

I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk….

What she didn’t turn some of her classmates in over was a cheating scandal that impacted 130 midshipmen in her class.

And she’s proud of that refusal.

This is the Naval Academy’s Honor Concept [boldface in the original, italic emphasis added]:

Midshipmen are persons of integrity: They stand for that which is right.
They tell the truth and ensure that the truth is known.
They do not lie.

They embrace fairness in all actions. They ensure that work submitted as their own is their own, and that assistance received from any source is authorized and properly documented.
They do not cheat.

They respect the property of others and ensure that others are able to benefit from the use of their own property.
They do not steal.

By refusing to turn in those classmates about whom she knew, by refusing to testify over the course of the cheating investigation, Sherrill openly lied by omission. She further lied by tacitly obstructing that investigation. She affirmatively prevented the truth from being known.

This is the concept of honor and integrity that Mikie Sherrill is putting on offer for the good citizens of New Jersey. It seems a poor fit for any Governor’s office.

Political CYA

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors waxed opinionated on the matter of government efforts at stifling free speech, centering their wax-on piece on Sundar Pichai’s letter (formally written by an Alphabet lawyer) excusing (the editors generously called it a mea not-so-maxima culpa) Alphabet’s Google’s (read: Pichai’s) mistaken role in censoring Conservative podcasts—purging them from YouTube—during the Wuhan Virus (my term; the editors continue to euphemize with “Covid-19”) situation. The editors also nattered on about the hypocrisy of the Left’s getting on the Trump administration over the Kimmel business compared with the Left’s downplaying of the Biden administration’s role in that Alphabet (et al.) censorship.

What interests me about this editorial, though, is this bit from the penultimate paragraph:

Progressives intimidated companies into believing that if they failed to toe the line on certain issues, enforcement could follow.

This is those companies’ managers—including Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, whom the editors also cited—conscious choice to be “intimidated.” I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the flaccid-kneed nature of senior managers, at the pinnacle of their professions, who allow themselves to be so easily managed by others. Men and women of good character would have refused to kowtow and challenged in court any enforcement that might have followed, and won easily (if initially expensively, but long-term much more cheaply) on free speech grounds.

And the editors’ close:

Alphabet’s letter to Judiciary is notable for its commitment that the company “has not and will not empower fact checkers to take action on or label content across the Company’s services.” That’s good to hear, but Google would have done better if its accounting had come before the electoral winds shifted. The company’s letter is an admirable statement of principles. Let’s hope it sticks.

This is a sham shift, not at all a statement of principles. This is merely a political CYA claim, done at the convenience of political winds. There’s no reason to believe it will stick. Pichai already has amply demonstrated the strength of his character, and tomorrow may bring an administration of a different feather.

Yes and No

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A letter-writer in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote,

As he [Joseph Schumpeter] wrote in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: “Every successful corner may spell monopoly for the moment.” Yet technological change upends whole industries, creating new, previously unimaginable services and “goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization.” Each dislodges the monopoly position of incumbent firms wedded to the old ways of doing things.

Not entirely.

I submit that the real problem, the one of which the above is merely symptomatic, is the fact that the monopoly’s moat is as much a barrier trapping the monopolists inside, limiting their ability to innovate, as it is a barrier keeping competitors in the monopoly’s established, old ways, venue from getting started.

From this, other startups, in closely associated but not the same venues as the monopoly, not being stultified by the safety that moat seems to provide, easily can out innovate and bypass the both the monopoly’s moat and the monopoly.