Finally, Back to the Things that Annoy Me
I have a lot of pent up grumbling to do, so hang on
It’s been seven months since I’ve done a post about anything other then A Short History of Israel. (Click below to start the journey with Part I)
I have been holding back things that are weighing on my mind and now is the time to let it all out. So here we go, hold on to your hats, it seems like I’m getting grumpier in my old age.
The Tigers still suck:
The last time I published a post about baseball was November 11 2022. It was about the Astros and the hate surrounding that team because of a baseless cheating controversy.
The Tigers ended that season 66-96, 26 games behind the division winning Cleveland Indians (Yes, I know their are now called the Guardians but I will never call them that). I was told in post season interviews to have hope that the Tigers were going to start spending money and stop trading away established talent for draft picks. You, as a discerning reader of Musings of a Normal Midwestern Guy, might ask “What did they do in the off-season Chris?” Here is my answer; Not Much! Wait, that gives them way too much credit. If ten, is the best off season ever and zero is the worst off season ever, then they are the number closest to zero, without being zero. I didn’t think it was much then, and now I have the season so far, to prove myself right. Their first move was to claim pitcher Sean Guenther off waivers from the Marlins. He was sent to the minors were he has been hurt more than once including a stint on the badly named 7 day injured list from April 6, to May 29 (not a great way for your organization to start the off season). Then they let two pitchers and a catcher go free agent. Daniel Norris, one of the pitchers is in AAA with Cleveland and Tucker Barnhart is a backup catcher for the Cubs hitting .163 neither one is a big loss for the Tigers. The other pitcher, Andrew Chafin, who’s currently with the Diamondbacks, is a pretty decent reliever and has appeared in 28 games already (he appeared in 64 games all of last year with Detroit). With the Tigers pitching staff in disarray he would have been a stabilizing force on the back end, but what do I know? Then we traded Joe Jimenez to Atlanta for Infielder Justyn-Henry Malloy and pitcher Jake Higginbotham. Malloy looks like he might be a good player, he’s doing pretty well in AAA Toledo. Higginbotham was just moved to AAA so we shall see how he does. I give that trade a C+ but it could go up if Malloy is the real deal. In December the Tigers signed Matthew Boyd a pitcher who had played for us from 2015 to 2021, when he was 37-60 with a 4.90 ERA. That really sounds like a guy you’d want to bring back to your rebuilding team. So far this year, he is 3-4 with a 5.23 ERA, about what I thought he’d be. Six days later Detroit signed Michael Lorenzen. He had spent eight years with the Reds and Angels. He was 31-30 with a 4.06 ERA, certainly nothing to get excited about. This season he is 3-4 with a 3.75 ERA, a little better ERA but nothing to shout about. Zach Louge was next up on the rebuild roster for the Tigers. He is 0-0 with a 7.71 ERA in Detroit, not a great start to his time here. After that, the Tigers bought the rights to Tyler Nevin from the Orioles. He has been up and down from AAA to the Majors and is currently hitting an anemic .128 in 16 games. It goes on like this for awhile with nothing to make you stop and say “Wow, that’s a team changing signing”.
In fact, no free agents were signed at all, outside of Lorenzen and Boyd! No one! Not one player, out of all the possible free agents out there. Here’s what I would have done. I would have signed shortstop Dansby Swanson to a big free agent deal. “But”, you would say, “the Tigers already have Javier Baez at shortstop.” Well, Baez, has played 320 games in his career at second base. Right now Jonathon Scoop is at second for the Tigers and he’s HORRIBLE. He is hitting .213 with eight doubles, zero homeruns and seven RBIs. Baez, on the other hand, is hitting .223 with eleven doubles, three triples, six homers and 44 RBIs, definitely an upgrade. Instead the Tigers trot out Zach Short who’s hitting .220 with four doubles, four homeruns and 18 RBIs, a real impact player! Swanson, on my third hand, is hitting .258 with 15 doubles, ten homeruns and 36 RBIs. Signing Swanson would have given the Tigers a dynamic middle infield with two decent bats. How long are the long-suffering Tigers fans going to have to wait for this team to do something that shows they are committed to winning? Since the Tigers were last in the playoffs, in 2014, they are 539-737 a winning percentage of .422, not even close to break-even baseball! They have had three seasons with over 98 losses. In 2017, the long time owner of the Tigers Mike Ilitch died and his son Christopher took over the reigns of the Tigers. He immediately blew up the team, trading Justin Verlander, JD Martinez, Alex Avila and Justin Upton for a bunch of nobodies, current catcher Jake Rogers and Jeimer Candelario, a good player who played for the Tigers for six years. Mr. Ilitch, who also owned the Red Wings (another team mired in the basement), was willing to spend the money to at least try to compete, but Christopher seems to think anything he doesn’t spend on the Tigers or Wings will go into his pocket, He doesn’t care about the Detroit fans, who live for their teams. He only cares about his wallet.
That’s a Dude, Dude!
I’m sick and tired of all the “trans” stuff nowadays. If you were born a boy or a girl and that’s what you are forever! Besides, it gets so confusing. Is a “trans man” a man that thinks he’s a woman or a woman that thinks she’s a man? I’m too old to keep up with this stupidity. You can “identify” as whatever you want but you will always be what you were born as. I identify as the starting second baseman of the Detroit Tigers but that doesn’t mean if I went to the ballpark they would let me play, although I could hardly be any worse than they are (see above).
Dylan Mulvaney is a guy, “Chaz” Bono is a girl named Chastity, I saw her on TV in the 70’s, so I know she is a she. “Elliot” Page is a girl named Ellen, I saw her in Juno. “Caitlyn” Jenner is a guy named Bruce, I ate Wheaties out of a box with his picture on it. “Rachel” Levine is really a guy named Richard. “Amy” Schneider is really a man named Thomas, the Wachowskis are not “Lilly” and “Lana” but brothers named Larry and Andy and who can forget Jazz Jennings, who we have seen being abused by her mother on TV for 17 years. I’m sorry if you have mental issues but I’m not going to play along with your delusions, just like you don’t have to go along with mine. I also don’t care what your pronouns are, you are either He/Him or She/Her and each of those goes along with what kind of DNA you have. I can’t even pronounce some of the endless pronouns they have today. Like; ex, ze, ey, how the heck do you say those? There is an even worse subset of the stupid “trans” idiocy and that is the “trans athlete”. I think there is a special place in Hell for guys who can’t hack it in the men’s division then “identify” as a woman to clean up against (sorry feminists) inferior athletes. I don’t care if you're “suppressing” you testosterone and taking estrogen, if you already went through puberty you have denser bones more muscle mass and muscles spread out differently than a female. There are no if and or buts about this, it is a biologic fact. There are thousands of male high school and college sprinters that run faster times than the current fastest woman alive. The all-time female 100 meter dash record holder is Florence Griffith-Joyner with a time of 10.49 which would not even put her in the top 25 of men. In fact in wouldn’t put her in the top 25 of men under 20 or even in the top 25 of boys under 17. She would have to race the 14 year old male record holder, to finally beat a male record holder, but when that 14 year-old turned 15 he ran fast enough to beat her.
You can also look at weightlifting. There are two Chinese weightlifters that hold current records; the first is a woman named Li Wenwen, she weighs 331 pounds and can snatch (the one where you squat behind the bar pick it up over you head and then stand up) 326 pounds. In the clean and jerk (the one where squat, but not as deeply over the bar pick it up to your shoulders and then raise it over your head) 412 pounds. Li Dayin is a Chinese man who weighs 210 pounds but can snatch 396 pounds as well as clean & jerk 458 pounds. Now do the math here, a man that weighs 136 pounds less, can left 70 and 46 pounds more than a woman, but the pro-transgender people say there is no advantage to have gone through male puberty.
Let’s also look at the world famous Lia (really Chris) Thomas. After his “transition”, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer soared from a 554th ranking in the 200 freestyle, 65th in the 500 freestyle and 32nd in the 1650 freestyle to fifth, first and eighth in those respective events in the women’s events. His NCAA title winning 500 freestyle time was a whole second faster than the second place finisher, Emma Nordin (the real winner in my opinion). When Thomas won the 200 freestyle at the Ivy League Champs in 1:43.12, he was even with runner-up Samantha Shelton at the midway point, but crushed the Harvard swimmer over the last 100, highlighted by a 25.04 split for the last 50 yards. The closing split for Thomas was faster than the finishing laps of Missy Franklin in her American-record performance, that tells me he was sandbagging it to make it appear to be a closer race, as well as his naturally larger lung capacity and stamina as well as larger hands and feet.
Here is another example, one not very well known in the US. The case of Australian handball players Callum Mouncey (he calls himself Hannah now). He is a 6’2” 220 pound man who thinks he’s a woman, and plays handball (kind of like soccer, except you run while holding the ball and throw it into a goal), as well as rugby. He is just running over the poor woman he plays against (and I mean that literally). Not only is he much bigger than the real girls, he can throw the ball much harder, again because he is a man, just watch this video.
We could also talk about Boyd Burton (now known as Fallon Fox) the male MMA fighter that decided he was really a woman and then got in a cage and started beating up girls. He hit one of his opponents so hard he fractured her skull, that seems fair. I think that all these male athletes are identifying as female because they have such low self-esteem that they can’t stand losing to other guys and would do anything to win. So instead of just practicing more, or realizing they just aren’t going to be good enough, they found this loophole and are able to win and now they can feel better about themselves.
What a Drag Baby
Right along with the transgender crap is the explosion of drag shows and drag performers in places they should not be. Now, I enjoyed The Birdcage and I don’t have an issue with the traditional drag performers themselves but I do have a big issue with how it is being used today. Today, drag performances are used to both normalize the practice and desensitize children to it. That is where I have the problem, the drag performances today are more risque then they used to be, actually, they’re down right obscene. It used to be guys dressing up as women signing songs or telling jokes and while there double entendres or suggestive songs or jokes it was never over the top and in your face like it is now. You would never, ever have caught the great Starina from The Birdcage, twerking or giving lap dances to anyone, let alone children.
Now, it guys that look like clowns, giving lap dances or doing pelvic thrusts in the faces of children. It’s not “entertainment”, it’s disgusting. This trend seems to be happening everywhere. In June of 2022 Ramstein Air Base in Germany scheduled a drag queen story hour at its base library, where drag queen Stacey Teed was scheduled to read to children. When lawmakers back home got wind of the event and wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force, the event was cancelled.
Why do drag queens need to tell stories to children? Actually, I don’t really have an issue if a classy looking drag queen reads a regular story to kids, but that isn’t what is going on. It’s these clownish-looking queens that insist on making everything sexual that I find distasteful. The plan is to make this as normal as seeing anyone reading a story to kids. The other thing is the stories they choose to read. They aren’t reading The Little Engine that Could, they’re reading books like Flamer and Generation Queer, books that can’t be read out loud at city council meetings. Books that are in no way appropriate for children.
The Woke Military
This one hits close to home for me, being a Marine veteran and a patriot. Do the Washington elite really think that any potential enemy is deterred or scared by a military of transgender drag queens and “Warfighters” (which is just a stupid term for Soldiers, Sailors Airmen and Marines)? No, while we are concerned with enlisting enough people who identify as cats or trying to get all the letters in the gay fruit salad together in one place, they are developing new equipment and tactics to take us out. While they are training hard to defeat us, we are training our people in climate change and how white supremacy is the most dangerous thing in our society. The Chinese and the Russians have hypersonic missiles and we have a sailor in drag trying to recruit more drag queens (although the Marine in me says that there were already a lot of queens in the Navy), the Russians invaded Ukraine and we have videos about proper pronouns. The Chinese are making threatening moves around Taiwan and we are having a month long stand-down to address extreme elements in the force. We are screwed in any upcoming war or military intervention. In addition to this we have a large shortfall of recruits coming into the military. There are several reasons for this, one is the lack of people fit enough to pass the military fitness tests, another is the lack of patriotism in the youth of today and finally the kids that are fit enough and patriotic enough, look at the current state of the military and say “no way”.
Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon, who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change. The push for it didn’t begin in the last three years under the Biden administration—nor will it automatically end if a non-woke administration is elected in 2024. Wokeness in the military has become ingrained. And unless the policies that flow from it are illegal or directly jeopardize readiness, senior military leaders have little alternative but to comply. Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready, and it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness. Wokeness in the military also affects relations between the military and society at large. It acts as a disincentive for many young Americans in terms of enlistment. It also undermines wholehearted support for the military by a significant portion of the American public at a time when it is needed the most.
In 2015, then Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus rejected out-of-hand a Marine Corps study concluding that gender-integrated combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately, and that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries. He rejected it because it did not comport with the Obama administration’s political agenda. That same year the Department of Defense opened all combat jobs in the U.S. military to women, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter committed to “gender-neutral standards” to ensure that female servicemembers could meet the demanding rigors involved in qualifying for combat. Since then, the Army has been working to put in place the gender-neutral test promised by Carter but hasn’t come up with anything that would work in the real world. After finding that women were not scoring as highly as men, and under fierce pressure from advocacy groups, the Army just threw out the test (you know, no test, no problem). Now there is no way to determine whether any soldier can meet the fitness requirements for combat specialties. In 2015, near the end of his second term, President Obama initiated a change to the Pentagon’s longstanding policy on transgender individuals in the military. Before that change could take effect, the incoming Trump administration put it on hold awaiting future studies. Subsequent evidence presented to Secretary of Defense James Mattis—including the fact that transgender individuals suffering from gender dysphoria attempt suicide and experience severe anxiety at nine times the rate of the general population—raised legitimate concerns about their fitness for military service. This led the Trump administration to impose reasonable restrictions on military service by those suffering gender dysphoria. Unfortunately, only hours after President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, he signed an executive order that did away with these restrictions and opened military service to all transgender individuals. Since then, the Biden administration has decreed that active members of the military can take time off from their duties to obtain sex-change surgeries and all related hormones and drugs at taxpayer expense. Along similar lines, the Biden administration has recently ended a longstanding policy prohibiting individuals infected with HIV from serving in combat zones. The policy had been based on sound science tied to the need for HIV medications and the danger of cross-infection through shared blood.
Wokeness also comes in the form of conflating the mission of the military with environmental ideology. A year ago, President Biden told a group of airmen overseas, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had determined the greatest threat facing America was global warming—a claim the Joint Chiefs had to walk back. In the same vein, Biden signed an executive order imposing a massive regime of environmental goals and requirements for the Department of Defense. These goals included transitioning to all electric non-tactical vehicles by 2035, carbon-free electricity for military installations by that same year, and net zero emissions from those installations by 2050. As a result, the Pentagon recently announced it will devote over $3 billion of its already stretched-thin military budget to climate-related initiatives in 2023 alone.
These ideological policies move the military away from the American mainstream and Americans are increasingly losing confidence in the military. Between 2021 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who report a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military decreased from 69% to 64%. In 2012, this confidence level stood at 75%.
Climate Change
Sure, climate change is real, that’s why there are not glaciers two miles thick over the top of my house. I just don’t believe that the current small warming trend is our fault. By the way the temperature is up .8 degrees C. since 1850, wow .8 degrees in 173 years that is .005 a year. It is just another cudgel to beat the people who can think for themselves, over the head with and get them to fall in line with vision of the planet’s elite. See, they don’t think we are smart enough to make decisions for ourselves. They are the smart parent and we’re are the dumb kids. They think we should just shut up, drive our electric cars, eat our bugs, go to our government sponsored Drag Queen Story Hours and attend one of their liberal indoctrination camp, I mean college. The elite want us to forget all the freedoms we are losing and shop where they tell us, drive, what the tell us and NEVER, EVER question what the government says.
Sorry, mini-rant over, I’m taking off my tinfoil hat.
The earth is, give or take, 4.5 billion years old. The people of Earth have only been able to take accurate temperature measurements for 250 years or so. In fact the two temperature scales most of us use, Fahrenheit, invented by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and Celsius, invented by Anders Celsius did not even exist 300 year ago. So the scientists are going to tell me they can draw conclusions from a data set that is only .00000083% of the age of the Earth. That .00000083% works out to be the equivalent of 35 seconds of a 76 year human life, so again you’re going to tell me you can work out the trends of a human life in 35 seconds of measurements? I say there is no possible way that it is possible to get real insight on the trends of something in so small of a sample size. The models the “climate scientists use, also don’t take the solar cycle into account. Our Sun is a huge ball of electrically-charged hot gas, this charged gas moves, and as it does, it generates a powerful magnetic field. That magnetic field goes through an eleven year cycle, called the solar cycle. Every eleven years or so, the Sun's magnetic field completely flips. This means that the Sun's north and south poles switch places. It takes around another eleven years for the Sun’s poles to flip back again. The solar cycle affects activity on the surface of the Sun, such as sunspots which are caused by the Sun's magnetic fields. As the magnetic fields change, so does the amount of activity on the Sun's surface. Sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections increase as the cycle goes on. Solar cycle 23 lasted 11.6 years, beginning in May 1996 and ending in January 2008. Solar cycle 24 began on January 2008, and ended in December 2019 after 11.0 years and Solar cycle 25 began in December 2019 and is still going on. Every time there is an increase in solar radiation being shot into space there is also a change in conditions on earth, most of the time we don’t really notice but sometimes sunspots will effect radio communications and even the electric grid. There are also other affects. During solar cycles 20-23 (1963 to 1996), energy changes in UV radiation which affects the production and loss of ozone caused the 30 hPa (hectopascals or 30 millibars) atmospheric pressure level to change height. There was an increase in ozone production and actually led to stratospheric heating and to the poleward movements in the stratospheric and tropospheric winds systems. So the miniscule temperature increases there have been in the recent past could very well be chalked up to the sun and not be the cause of man at all.
It has also be widely acknowledged that the computer models, the so called climate scientists, use to predict temperature increases are flawed and spit out results that match the desired outcome (i.e. it’s the end of the world, sea levels will rise, millions of people will drown etc.). Here is a link of a great article explaining the errors in climate change models, it is from 2017 but all the science and math are still true. Read the Hoover Institution article here!
I think that is enough to rant and rave about this time. I’m sure there will be another one of these coming along soon enough. I hope everyone has enjoyed this as much as my other posts. Please share this with anyone who might like it. Until next week. Goodbye!
Chris