Swing and a Pass

Baseball. Yes, you might have thought you would not have caught me talking about baseball, but when the Earth shakes enough I do care. I will be succinct, however, and say what no one else seems to be saying.

It looks to me like efforts to reform baseball in the wake of the Mitchell Report have failed before they began. In the midst of the furor, someone had the bright idea to give a record-breaking contract to Alex Rodriguez because he's not been tarnished. And stepping up the payouts to unprecedented levels is glamorous publicity, right?

Not so fast. When you hand someone a $250 million incentive to be better than everyone else (whom we now know includes a vast army of cheaters), while on the other end, pay a laboratory only $.5 million to find a test for the last big drug, you are both stacking the deck in favor of cheating while simultaneously sending a message to players that you don't want them to stop. Of course those are only the latest twinned announcements of about financial distribution. If you add up all players salaries and compare it the money paid in efforts to insure a fair game, the imbalance is far greater.

While there is plenty of blame to go around between athletes, agents, unions, coaches, trainers, administrators, and fans, and sports writers claim it will take plenty of time and effort on the part of all those elements for reform, I say it will take only one element. If the fans are outraged, the money walks away, and the culture changes almost overnight. Until that happens, no athlete, agent, union, coach, trainer, or administrator is going to care.

Why Can't Johnny Vote?

France has a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, elected over his socialist opponent by a comfortable margin. Most significantly, 85% of France voted for him, leaving only 15% whistling on the sidelines. I applaud the people of France, but does it make me feel inadequate?

In the United States, when 62% of voting age citizens vote, as they did recently, we call it a good year. 68%? A record breaker. Even the Iraqis did better than that in January of 2005, with estimates as high as 72%. Horrors! After we figure out who is the new U.S. president, our commentators sit down and cry and over the fact that we are wasting our freedom. If only more people would vote... then what?

We spend a lot of time every four years wondering whether we are bad Americans, or thinking that if we remind or badger people often enough, we can be more like the French. Rock the Vote? Yes, by all means rock the vote. Knock yourselves out. What is the point of initiatives like that one? The cliche goes: You don't just have the right to vote; you have the responsibility. They don't usually choose to explain what they mean by that. When they do, they tell you there are big issues at stake (they list them), and democracy itself is at stake. Their dirty little secret is that like similar movements, most of its adherents imagine the new voters will vote for their candidate. In fact, most of the people who cry about low voter turnout seem to think that all elections would have gone a different way had everyone voted, that maybe the will of the people wasn't expressed after all. In a country that runs on marketing surveys where multi-billion dollar decisions are made on the sampled opinions of 4,000 people out of 300 million, also known as .0013%, I think 62% is a damned good representative sample. As it turned out, voters who were "rocked" last time around didn't vote the way their cheerleaders hoped.

I vote, by the way. I have never missed a vote in any year. But if you are concerned that not enough people vote, it behooves you to find out why the stay-at-homes don't vote. Studies always pull this line out of people: "It doesn't directly affect my everyday life," or its cousins "It doesn't matter," and "All politicians are really the same." Next in line, but perhaps more honest is, "I don't know enough about the issues to make an informed decision." And lastly, "I don't want to feel responsible for the decisions those people make in office." Maybe these reluctant ones know what they're talking about and have a point.

Still, the grassroots vote pushers say, "Get out and vote. You have to. Even if you don't know the candidates or the issues. Even if you're not sure. That's how you fulfill your responsibility." Maybe all voters should go into the booth blindfolded if it's just about going into the booth. They talk about fulfilling your responsibility as if it's the same as filling a cup with urine. You don't need to think about it; we'll test the results later.

I say that instead of attacking all the above non-voting reasons as illegitmate, we can make more progress by figuring out what they mean, and even consider the fact that they may well be legitimate reasons. If someone doesn't understand the issues, for instance, their vote would theoretically be worthless, random (a 50-50 outcome), or even damaging. So instead of demanding they vote blindly, let's try to educate them, and if we have failed that with some by election day, leave that group alone. Let those of us who were paying attention express an opinion.

Most interestingly, those who say, "It doesn't matter" may in fact be casting a vote of confidence in our country; may in fact be saying that we are so strong and there are such excellent checks and balances, and they have such faith in their fellow Americans that we will be fine no matter sits in the office. I don't happen to agree with those sentiments, but I find it a healthy barometer of a free nation. So the next time you think other democracies are superior to us, consider that maybe their people have good reason to show less faith.

The Vampire Disclaimer

It's time for a short sentence I like to call The Vampire Disclaimer. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not reflect those of my employer (whoever that may be), and in fact do not reflect anything.

To be unconventional and irritating, I've saved the greeting to my new blog fans,--and the explanation for the blog itself--for the second post. That goes to my mission of driving left and right wing extremists crazy.

Welcome to Ghost in The Back of My Head. Lisa Loeb fans will know that it comes from her song "Do You Sleep?" and references the following section:

" I saw you as you walked across my room.
You looked out the window, you looked at the moon.
And you sat on the corner of my bed, and
you smoked with the ghost in the back of my head."

Thank you, Lisa. I think the phrase I've borrowed is a great way to illustrate that I am a political Independent, listening to no one but the ghost in the back of my head, and inviting you to commune with him if you dare. I reject the notion that we must swallow an entire party platform, as I find the platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties internally inconsistent. That is not to say that I will confine my comments here to politics. But it will explain, for example, why I'm on the side of the environment, and at the same time on the side of the USA. It will explain to anyone who is paying attention why I'm a social liberal and still for law and order. In the next few years, a similar combination may come to be known as a Guiliani Republican whether he is in office or not. Nonetheless, if you imagine we are the same, or that I am endorsing any candidate at this point, or being conventional in any way, please reread The Vampire Disclaimer above.

As the magnificent Maggie Estep used to say, "I've got a f---ing song in my heart, so let's go."

Your Private Energy News

You may want to cross your legs. At this very moment, people are looking into your urinary tract with intense interest.

You heard it here first, boys and girls. You know how in some towns we have to segregate newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and some such into their own bins? Well, one day soon, mark my words, it will be your civic responsibility to pee into one of those bins. Some time after that, instead of searching for a rest stop along the highway, you will relieve yourself directly into your car, a model which may be called the new Ford Sprinkle. Good for your bladder and good for the environment.

It's all about oil, and corn, and global warming. The global warming plan calls for preventing the U.S. from unlocking the trillion tons of oil in our shale (which releases carbon dioxide in the process) so that we can single-handedly lower the Earth's temperature by seven tenths of one percent in seventy years. No oil refineries are allowed to be built for the oil that is readily available, and we are allowing China to claim the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In service of those policies (like 'em or not), edible corn is being converted into alternative ethanol gasoline blends at an unprecedented rate. Now the price of corn, the price of feed, the price of meat, the price of all the other crops too relatively unprofitable to grow, will go through the roof (and you've seen those prices climbing) unless scientists find another way to produce fuel. They are racing to do so. (Hmm, shouldn't they have been working on that sooner?) There are 114 corn ethanol refineries and 80 more under construction.

Dupont wants to make ethanol from corn waste; six other companies want to make it from straw (sounds like a fairy tale); and genetic engineers from Berkeley are looking into palm tree sap, termite guts, and--as I said--the human urinary tract.

You thought Germans and Americans loved their beer before? Starting tomorrow, guzzling is going to be downright patriotic.