MORE OF THE TRUMP MENACE---The Voting Begins

I last commented on the Republican race for the presidential nomination on November 8, and even though the voting has begun, and even though a few of the weaker candidates have thrown in the towel, nothing in the fundamental dynamics of the race has changed.  There has been plenty of noise but the signal remains the same.

From the moment Trump entered the race, there has been one issue---immigration.  Trump has demanded that the laws be enforced, that a border fence be built, and that any plans for a path-to-whatever for illegals already here be dropped.    Every other Republican candidate, with the exception of Ted Cruz, has a long record of supporting open borders and amnesty for illegals.  Those in leadership positions in the Republican Congress and in local offices (the “Republican establishment”) also support Obama’s policies and even want to loosen border controls further.  Many elected Republicans, and most of the current candidates, have taken campaign contributions from groups and individuals that seek what is called “comprehensive immigration reform.”  These donors include the US Chamber of Commerce, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and many others.

Trump’s support comes from Republican voters (a majority of them) who want the border enforced, and want American laws respected.  They feel betrayed by elected Republicans who have promised these things but then broke their promises and allowed millions of illegals into the country.  Some of these immigrants are dangerous criminals.  Some bring disease.  Some bring cultural values (e.g., the inferiority of women and a boys-will-be-boys view of rape) that ordinary folks in San Antonio or Des Moines or Albany find appalling.  Yet there is little effort, even when these immigrants are identified, to expel them.

This issue (and the fact that Trump is not an elected Republican owned by the open-borders money guys), is the reason Trump is leading in the polls.  It is the only reason.  He is a vulgar, inarticulate man with little credibility and no apparent understanding of the Constitution, the role of law in the American republic, the history of our foreign policy or macro-economics, but when he says he will build a fence and enforce the laws, Republican voters believe him because he is the only candidate (except for Cruz), who has not yet lied to them about this issue.

The Republican Party could have taken Trump down at any time simply by taking his (one) issue away and embracing border enforcement, wholeheartedly and without prevarication.  A flat-out, unambiguous statement of a change in policy would do it.  No more “paths” to whatever, no more “dreamers,” no more lies about a fence, no more sanctuary cities, and no more driver’s licenses for M-13 gang members.  Bring back Newt Gingrich for a day and make it a new Contract With America. And that would be the end of the Trump candidacy.

At this point, however, it is clear the Republican Party either cannot or will not abandon amnesty.  This means its only option is to find an open-borders Republican candidate who can beat Trump.

First, of course, there was Jeb(!).  Though he is still nominally in the race, even the good old boys have figured out he is not going to get the job done.  

Then, a couple weeks ago, the party decided they could take down Trump with, believe it or not, Donald Trump.  Feelers went out, overtures---hey, maybe we can work with this guy, maybe once we bring him into the fold and tell him he doesn’t have to spend his own money, maybe he’ll make a deal with us.  He makes deals, right?  He just wants to “win.”  So if he wins and he’s our boy, well, then we can finesse this whole fence problem.

It’s a plausible theory, or at least one can understand why the amnesty forces and donors within the Republican Party would find it tempting.  Trump is a guy who praised Hillary as a great public servant, thought Obamacare was just fine, and was pro-choice about five minutes ago, so he looks very much like someone who doesn’t have any core beliefs but will say just about anything if it will enable him to “win,” (whatever “win” means at any given moment in his strangely un-nuanced mind).

And that plan is still in play, at least on the back burner.  The problem with it is that he is so mercurial that he cannot easily be trusted.  One day, the people of Iowa are wonderful; the next day they are idiots.  One day Megyn Kelly is a brilliant journalist and commentator; the next, she is menstruating all over him.  If he is elected on a platform in which the major plank is building a security fence on America’s southern border, what are the odds he would actually do it?  Personally, I have no idea.  So how can you make a deal with the guy?

Now that Jeb(!) is toast and the co-opt-Trump scenario is at best a desperation back-up scheme, the new champion for the pro-amnesty Republicans is Rubio.  His last-minute surge in Iowa makes him a player, and he has always had some attractive qualities.  He’s young and cute and articulate and Cuban.  (Some of his mannerisms and gestures are reminiscent of JFK, and there is speculation that Rubio has studied film of Kennedy and does this on purpose.)

Rubio is attractive to the good old boys, of course, because of his participation in the “Gang of Eight,” the Senate group of four Democrats and four Republicans who drafted an immigration bill and almost pushed it through.  The problem is that Rubio’s role was so large and so notorious and so dishonest that too many Republicans remember what he did, even though it was a few years ago and Rubio has since recanted his support for amnesty.

Rubio appeared on the national political scene as a tea-party Republican running for the Senate in 2010 against Charlie Crist, former Governor of Florida.  Illegal immigration was a BIG issue in that race, with Crist arguing for a “path to citizenship” and Rubio vigorously denouncing him and demanding the laws be enforced.  Though Rubio was a virtual unknown at the time, he pulled away from Crist in the race largely on the basis of the immigration issue.  It was only two years after this election that Marco Rubio changed his tune and supported amnesty in the Senate.

Candidates like Christie and Kasich and Fiorina all have amnesty skeletons in their closets, but you have to dig for them.  Every serious Republican, however, remembers Rubio’s betrayal on this issue, and those who may have forgotten will be reminded by Cruz and Trump.  With immigration the major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, Marco Rubio would have to explicitly acknowledge his perfidy, apologize for his error, and pledge to take a hard line on border enforcement and swear he will never support any sort of amnesty in the future.  He hasn’t done that, of course.  No politician ever wants to make that sort of mea culpa, even if he’s caught in the sack with an altar boy.  Instead, Rubio claims he has changed his views.  Sort of.  But it’s just not good enough in the 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination.  Speculating in a theoretical way, Rubio might actually be the best candidate for the general election, and he might be able to beat whatever geriatric white person the Democrats throw out there, but Rubio will not be the Republican candidate no matter how much money Mark Zuckerberg drops on him.

And all of this leaves us where we were when I last addressed these issues in November.  The only way to stop Donald Trump is for the Republican good old boys and donors to give in on the amnesty issue and allow our laws to be enforced.  And they won’t do it.  They won’t do it even though they are convinced Trump would lose the general election.   (On that point, I’m not so sure).  The Republican establishment, in other words, would rather Hillary or Bernie or Joe be elected President than give up on their quest for open borders and amnesty for illegals.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki   

THE SUPERB OWL --- 2016

If you have been paying attention to the last few postings, you know where I come down on this one.  And remember, I’m the guy who told you Phil would see his shadow, Trump would finish third in Iowa, and Bernie would beat Hillary (actually, I still might be right about that one).

I’ve said from the start that Denver doesn’t belong here, and I’m not going to change my tune now just because the Broncos squeaked past the Steelers and the Patriots (in Denver both times, of course).  Carolina, by contrast, crushed two very dangerous opponents, Seattle and Arizona.  Average yards/pass here favors the Panthers 6.0 to 4.6.  The Panthers outscored their foes by more than ten points per game; the Broncos by only three.

The 5 ½ point spread is large, and there certainly haven’t been a lot of blowouts in the Superb Owl lately, but this could be one of those games.  Take Carolina and lay the points.  Also, for those of you who care about such things, Carolina has outscored its two playoff opponents by a combined score of 55 – 7 in the first half.  They tend to come out of the gate like a freight train and then coast a bit.  For games like this, Vegas posts a total not just for the entire game, but also for the first half, and in this case that number is 22 ½.  I like the OVER for the first half. 

Trust me.  But don’t forget the groundhog.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki  

IOWA, GROUNDHOGS, ETC.

The Iowa caucuses are tonight. Based on recent polls, Trump should edge Ted Cruz, with Rubio a close-up third.  Considering the campaign thus far, however, about the only thing we can realistically expect is a surprise.

That still leaves us with the question: what kind of surprise?  Will Trump actually win big or will he disappoint?

I’m predicting he disappoints.  Over the past few months we have all learned a lot about the unexpected political currents driving this race, and I have been as amazed as anyone.  The one thing I still can’t believe, however, is that Donald Trump, in an Iowa contest against Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, will take the evangelical Christian vote.  This bloc is a critical part of the Iowan Republican electorate, and it’s hard to see them, en masse, ignoring Trump’s divorces, his boasting about adulterous relationships, and his life-long (until recently) pro-abortion views.

Prediction:  Trump finishes third, behind both Cruz and Rubio, though I express no opinion on which one of the two actually wins.

On the Democratic side, Hillary is 0 -1 against socialists in the Iowa caucuses, and after tonight, she will be 0 – 2.  One thing you need to win Iowa is enthusiastic supporters who are willing to spend hours in a fire hall or a church basement on a mid-winter night in order to vote for their candidate.  Today is the day we learn just how un-enthusiastic Hillary’s minions truly are.

And as long as I’m predicting things, Phil will see his shadow tomorrow morning and we will have six more weeks of winter.

And finally, the Carolina Panthers will win and cover on February 7.

Not that you asked.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki          

2016 MFL PLAYOFFS---The Conference Championships

New England (-3) @ Denver

Going into last week’s game against KC, the questions we all had about the Patriots concerned their health.  Was Edelman really recovered?  Could Gronkowski play?  Did Brady have any lingering effects from the Miami game?  If New England had finally returned to something approaching full strength, they would probably find a way to beat K.C., but how many working organs did they really have?

We have our answer.  New England is just fine.  With Brady and Gronkowski and Amendola and Edelman all running and jumping and playing football, the Pats are (at this moment), the best football team in the AFC.

As for Denver, I said at the start of the tournament that they did not deserve to be in it, and I saw nothing in the Pittsburgh game to change my mind.  Manning played OK (no interceptions!), but did nothing to suggest he is the Peyton of old.  Roethlisberger actually had slightly better numbers.  Denver won because of their defense, which is still very good, and because Pittsburgh’s coach Mike Tomlin is as savvy about in-game decisions as a box of rocks.  Tomlin is one of those coaches (and he is far from the only one), who never think about game situations in advance and who, faced with a critical decision (punt? call a time out? kick a field goal?), with the clock ticking, simply chooses the first option that pops into his head.

New England’s AYP for the year is 6.8; Denver’s is 4.6.  New England outscored its opponents by more than ten points per game; Denver outscored its opponents by 3 ½.  It is true that Denver’s pass defense is superior, but overall the game lines up as a mere speed bump on New England’s path to yet another Superbowl.  Lay the points.

(Technology note: every time I use the word “superbowl,” my spell-checker tries to correct it to “superb owl.”)

Arizona @ Carolina (-3)

I pretty much told you where I was going on this one in previous posts.  Arizona’s AYP for the season was 7.5, the highest in football.  Carolina’s was 6.0.  Arizona’s point differential was 13.7 per game, which was three points better than the second-best team (Carolina).  I must take the three points here and bet Arizona.

Having said all that, however, you would have to be a fool not to notice what Carolina did to Seattle because it is precisely what a Superbowl champ is supposed to do.  Seattle is a good team.  They were the guys “nobody wanted to play.”  The Panthers, however, forced the Seahawks to disrobe, hoisted the Seattle pantaloons up the stadium flagpole, said bad things about the Seattle players’ mothers, smacked their bottoms with wooden paddles and then, just when they were about to sodomize them, got bored and decided to run out the clock instead.  It is true that Carolina took its foot off the gas pedal once the score was 31 – 0, but it’s hard to blame them for losing interest when the game is basically over with ten minutes left in the first half.  Despite the Seattle “comeback,” they were never really in danger of winning the game.

(By the way….  If you are losing 31 – 0 in the second half, and you score a touchdown, do you calmly line up to kick an extra point, or do you go for two on the theory that you need to try for every point you can possibly get?  Just sayin’.)

And in the other game?  Well, one has to be concerned about the deer-in-the-headlights look of Carson Palmer throughout much of the contest, and Arizona’s inability to dispatch an inferior Packers team until after sixty minutes had elapsed.

A sane man can be forgiven for thinking Carolina, playing in Carolina, is correctly favored in this game, and that they will roll over the Cardinals.  Well, who are you going to believe---my numbers or your lying eyes?

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki   

MLK DAY--An Alternate View

I was thirteen years old when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, and I remember Selma, and Birmingham, and the killing of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, and the march on Washington, and the “I Have a Dream” speech, and all the rest.  There was a wonderful period, that seemed to last about five minutes, when everyone in America agreed that equality under the law was a grand idea and that, finally, everyone could share in the equal protection of our laws.  Then, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered and his legacy and ideals were instantly co-opted and stolen by the race hustlers, welfare activists, reparation-seekers, black nationalists and Marxists who control it to this day.  Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986.  I am one of the millions who hate MLK Day because it has never had anything to do with Martin Luther King.

And it’s getting worse, of course.

In 1994, Congress made MLK Day a “National Day of Service.”  Typical.  Only the left would think we need an official federal declaration of when to do a good deed.  This peculiar “day of service” business actually began in Philadelphia, where this year is the “21^st Annual Greater Philadelphia Martin Luther King Day of Service.”

I know this because of a press release issued on January 6 by globalcitizen365.org, (a name almost certainly coined by George Orwell), which informs us that this year’s co-chairs are the mayor, the fire and police commissioners, big shots from every major corporation in town (Comcast, Target, Wal-Mart, etc.) and, of course, the Superintendent of Schools.  “There will be projects at hundreds of schools in Philadelphia and throughout the region.  Volunteers will beautify dozens of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation facilities.”

Well, good for them.  But don’t you have to wonder a bit about these “volunteers”?  If every preening nabob in the city, and your boss, and your boss’s boss, and the CEO of your company are all urging you to “volunteer,” at what point does it stop being your idea and start being more of an I’d-better-get-my-ass-down-to-the-homeless-shelter-and-start-painting kind of thing?

Well, stop wondering.  The gloves come off a couple paragraphs later and the answer is revealed: “Participants will include students of all ages from public, private and parochial schools….” (emphasis mine).  And there we are.  Those 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds don’t want to spend their day off from school playing games or watching TV, do they?  No.  They all want to be “volunteers,” you see.  Their desire to spend the day scraping subway-station walls has nothing to do with the fact that their teachers and principals and parents and pastors are all telling them “It’s the right thing to do, Johnny.  And you want to do the right thing, don’t you?”

And thus does MLK Day become a celebration of involuntary servitude.  Martin would have been so proud.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki       

2016 NFL PLAYOFFS---DIVISION GAMES

KC @ New England (-5)

The Chiefs and the Pats are the two best teams left in the division, so the winner of this game will be my heavy favorite to win next week as well.

With the five points, it’s extremely tempting to take the Chiefs in this spot.  They have won eleven games in a row, they are second in the AFC with an AYP of 6.4, they appear reasonably healthy (for an NFL team in mid-January), and they crushed Houston in their wildcard game.

(Note: the big win last week has little value as a harbinger.  I looked back about ten years and teams winning a wildcard rout do not routinely win the following weekend.  In fact, it often happens that they are themselves routed by a rested divisional winner.)

On the other side, however, are the Patriots, a team that warrants serious consideration on pedigree alone.  In addition, their passing offense gets the AFC’s top AYP score of 6.8.  AND Edelman and Amendola will both be playing (though Gronkowski remains questionable).  AND nobody ever got rich betting against New England in New England in January.

I have to pass this game.  I expect the Patriots and Belichick will somehow find a way to win, but there is no reason to think KC will fail to give a good account of themselves.  If forced to choose, I would take the points with KC, but I would rather just watch and enjoy this game and save my cheese for the next contest.

Green Bay @ Arizona (-7)

Arizona has the best AYP (7.5) in the NFL, and they are my choice to win the Superbowl.  Their point differential of 13.7 points/game is the highest in the league.  In addition, they have an excellent pass defense (though others may be slightly better).

Last week, I listed Green Bay as a “pretender,” and the fact they beat another pretender (the Washington Ethnic Slurs), does not transform them into a “contender.”  Actually, it’s hard to be terribly impressed with the win.  The game was not decided until the 4^th quarter, and Rodgers and Cousins had roughly comparable performances.  Green Bay remains a team that struggled through the last half of the season and a team with the worst AYP (5.4) in the NFC.

Of all the games this weekend, this one appears to be the biggest mismatch.  If Green Bay manages to sustain a running attack as they did against the Slurs, it could be close.  That seems unlikely, however.  On December 27, Arizona beat Green Bay 38 – 8, and there is no reason to expect this result will be substantially different.  Expect a blowout and lay the points.

Seattle @ Carolina (-2)

With the best record in football, Carolina is the rare team that manages to succeed without a great deal of reliance on the big play.  The team’s AYP of 6.0 is not a bad number, but it is fourth in the NFC, and results largely from Cam Newton’s largely error-free season (only ten interceptions) rather than his ability to complete the bomb.  Along with that comes the 2^nd-best (first was Buffalo) rushing yards in the league and the best pass defense.

In a sense, Carolina is a test of the hypothesis to which I have dedicated my life and the lives of my eight wives and 36 children in our heavily-fortified Nevada compound.  You can win a lot of games by being the Carolina Panthers, but in the playoffs, there will come a time when you have to score and you have to score now, and you have to be able to do it against anyone.  This is why Michael Jordan and Joe Montana and Reggie Jackson and Wayne Gretsky are revered figures in sports.  It’s also why Barry Sanders never played in a Superbowl.

There are outliers in any data set, of course.  The 1990-91 NY Giants (the team that made Parcells an official “genius”) certainly didn’t fit my mold, and neither did the 2000-01 Ravens.  They don’t disprove the theory but they remind us that these are not science experiments, they are football games, and on a given Sunday….  It goes without saying as well, that I am merely a blowhard and predictor concerning NFL results and not the vehicle of football’s consciousness.

So maybe Carolina is an outlier.  Certainly, it can win this game.  Carolina can win the Superbowl.  I’m just not picking them to do so.

This is a close game.  Seattle’s AYP is 7.0, a full point higher than Carolina’s, but Carolina’s pass defense is clearly superior to Seattle’s, as is its point differential.  Also, there are a dozen other statistical measures that seem to favor Carolina.  (One that does not is rushing defense---Seattle has the best in football.  Which is nice when you are facing the 2^nd best running game in the league.)

Finally, there’s the petulant Marshawn Lynch for the Seahawks to deal with.  Maybe it means nothing when your star running back decides his contract issues are more important than the opportunity to play in a playoff game, but it can’t be a positive for the team.

And all this leaves me---nowhere.  On balance, the only result that would surprise me is a blowout by either side, and that makes it tough to play into a 2-point line.  So I won’t.

Pittsburgh @ Denver (-7)

For all the reasons discussed last week, Denver’s status as a top seed is practically supernatural.  They probably shouldn’t be in the playoffs at all.  Against a contender, they would lose.  Against Pittsburgh?  Well, if we knew Roethlisberger were healthy, I would take Pittsburgh to win outright.  As it is, I will still take the points and the Steelers.

Denver’s AYP for the year is 4.6.  Pittsburgh’s is 6.0.  It is true that Denver has one of the better pass defenses in the playoffs and Pittsburgh has one of the worst, but it is also true that Pittsburgh (a 6 seed) outscored its opponents by 104 points, while Denver outscored its foes by only 59.  For every point that can be cited in Denver’s favor, there is at least one for the Steelers as well.

Peyton Manning may recapture the magic this weekend and throw for five touchdowns, 420 yards and no interceptions, but I’m taking the points here.  As Damon Runyon instructed us, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet."

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki  

2016 NFL PLAYOFFS---THE FORCE AWAKENS

It’s that time again---time to analyze the NFL playoffs in terms of, primarily, yards-per-pass, our measure of a team’s ability to make big plays.  The basic number for each team is derived from its passing yards, with a penalty deduction of 50 yards for each interception.  This adjusted passing yards number is then divided by the number of pass attempts.  (The stat, and the method, is not one I invented.)

The Washington Ethnic Slurs, for example, had 4095 passing yards, and we subtract 550 yards from this total to account for the 11 interceptions thrown.  This leaves 3545, which we divide by 555 pass attempts. Our adjusted yards/pass (let’s call it AYP), for the Slurs is thus 6.4.  Over the years, a team’s AYP is highly correlated with its performance in the playoffs.  Other statistical measures (e.g., rushing yards per game, scoring defense, takeaways, etc.), are of no value at all in predicting who will win the championship.  Since it’s easy to do, I also calculate defensive AYP for each of the playoff teams, though I suspect it has no particular meaning independent of the number of interceptions a defense achieves during the season.  I also notice point differential, regular season match-ups of teams that will meet in the playoffs, and important injuries.  Finally, for the past eight years, players on all the teams have graciously provided me with stool samples that I examine under a microscope in my garage before incorporating them into the soil in our front garden where they fertilize our Spring tulips.

If you have ever questioned whether the NFL belongs to quarterbacks, a look at this year’s quarterback ratings should straighten you out.  (The quarterback rating is the mix of completion percentage, TD passes, interceptions and passing yards that has been used by the NFL since 1973 to determine its passing leader.)

This year, there are six QBs in the NFL who had ten or more starts and ratings over 100.  The only one not in the playoffs is Drew Brees.  The others are Russell Wilson (110.1), Andy Dalton (106.3), Carson Palmer (104.6), Tom Brady (102.2) and Kirk Cousins (101.6).

The other playoff QBs mostly have decent numbers as well:

Cam Newton 99.4

A.J. McCarron (Cincy) 97.1

Alex Smith (KC) 95.4

Roethlisberger 94.5

Aaron Rodgers 92.7

Brian Hoyer (Hou) 91.4

Teddy Bridgewater (Minn) 88.7

Osweller (Den) 86.4

And then there’s:

Peyton Manning 67.9

NFC

Contenders: Arizona (AYP=7.5), Seattle (7.0), Carolina (6.0)

Pretenders: Washington (6.2), Green Bay (5.4), Minnesota (5.6)

For the past few years, a lot of fans have watched Arizona and Carolina and wondered: what would happen if they got about 5% better and stayed mostly healthy throughout a season?  Well, here it is.  They are both extremely good.  AYP for Arizona, at 7.5, is the best in the league.  Carolina, under Cam Newton, has an AYP of “only” 6.0, but their pass defense is stifling and they had the largest point differential (500-308) in the NFL.

Seattle, with an AYP of 7.0, is clearly alive in the hunt, and not only because of Russell Wilson.  The team gave up the fewest points (277) of anyone, and after starting the season 4-4, went 6-2 the rest of the way.  In addition, now that we are in the playoffs, the Seahawks secondary will again be permitted, without penalty, to tackle any opposing receiver as he comes off the line of scrimmage.  (There was some indication that the no-flags-for-Seahawks rule was already in effect for the final regular-season game.)

In the regular season, Seattle’s pass defense was inferior to both Arizona’s and Carolina’s.  In addition, Seattle is a # 6 seed in the NFC so they will not get a home game.  It’s a rough path to the Superbowl for the Seahawks and they will probably have to beat both Arizona and Carolina on the road to get there.  They’re dangerous, they’re on the rise, but I still don’t like their chances.

AFC

Contenders:  Cincinnati (AYP=7.0), New England (6.8), KC (6.4)

Pretenders: Pittsburgh (6.0), Denver (4.6), Houston (5.3)

Denver is the #1 seed.  They get a bye week, and they will get two home games in a stadium with an atmospheric home field advantage that other teams can only dream of.  It’s extremely tempting, for those reasons alone, to list them as a contender.  In fact, if I knew Osweller would be starting for the Broncos, I probably would have.  Peyton Manning, however, will be healthy enough to play, and he almost certainly will.  I mean, he’s Peyton Freakin’ Manning!  How can you not start the guy if he can walk?

His numbers are terrible.  In ten starts, he had 17 passes intercepted and an AYP of 4.2.  His QB rating of 67.9 is twenty points below that of the mediocre QB’s who got lucky this year and get to start a playoff game (Teddy Bridgewater of Minnesota has a QB rating of 88.7; Brian Hoyer of Houston is 91.4).  I am a Peyton Manning fan and I will be rooting for him to find the magic once again, but the Denver story this year is just a fairy tale.  They scored 355 points and gave up 296 for a point differential of less than 4 points per game---with those numbers, a record of 12-4 is almost impossible.  Normally, a differential like this gets you a 9-7 record, or perhaps 10-6.  They were extremely lucky to make the playoffs, and yet they somehow find themselves a #1 seed.

After a 10-0 start, the injuries finally caught up with New England, which lost four of its final six games.  The only thing holding this team together was Brady, along with a competent defense.  Now Brady has a high-ankle sprain sustained in the loss to Miami (thanks, Mr. Suh!), and while he will almost certainly play on the weekend of 1-16 and 1-17, we cannot know how effective he will be.  Edelman is also expected to return (finally).  New England cannot be counted out, but unlike the NFC where the top seeds appear to be two teams awakening into greatness, the AFC’s #1 and #2, Denver and New England, are struggling to hang on to their past  glories.

Cincinnati seems a more realistic choice, though their path to the Superbowl must go through New England and possibly Denver too.  But they can win, largely because A.J. McCarron has been close to brilliant in filling in for Andy Dalton (who seems very unlikely to play in the playoffs).  In seven games, McCarron has completed 79 of 119 passes for 854 yards, with only two interceptions.  This translates to a 97.1 QB rating and a 6.3 AYP.  He is not Dalton, but he may be good enough in a damaged AFC field.

Then there is KC, which is third in the NFL in scoring defense and has a good (but not scary) offense led by Alex Smith.  As a #5 seed, KC will have to win three games on the road to get to Superbowl (don’t call me “L”) 50, and while they should not be huge underdogs in any of those games, it’s still a lot to ask.

WILD CARD GAMES

I don’t think we’ve ever seen four home dogs on Wild Card Weekend.

KC (-3) @ Houston.   KC has a better offense, a better defense, a better record, a better QB, a much better point differential.  KC has a (small) chance to win it all; Houston has none.  I lay the points with no regrets.

Pitt (-3) @ Cincinnati.  Hard to understand this line.  Maybe it’s the mystique of the Steelers or the legend of Roethlisberger, but I see no area of the game where Pittsburgh is superior to the Bengals.  “Experience” maybe---playoff experience.  I suppose I’m not looking for Cincinnati to romp in this spot, but they are better than the Steelers both offensively and defensively and the game is in Cincinnati.  The wrong team is favored.  Take the Bengals.

Seattle (-5) @ Minnesota.  On December 6, Seattle went to Minnesota and beat the Vikings 38-7.  The Vikings then lost a close game to Arizona and finished with three strong performances over Chicago, NY and Green Bay (in Green Bay), so arguably Minnesota is a better team now.  But so is Seattle, which is superior on both sides of the ball.  Also, Russell Wilson is a superstar and Teddy Bridgewater is a mutt.  A nice mutt, but a mutt nonetheless.  This is not my favorite game of the weekend, and I don’t like laying five points.  But I will lay them.

Green Bay (-1) @ Washington.  Neither of these teams will survive the next round of the tournament but one of them will win this game.  I don’t know which one.  Aaron Rodgers is Aaron Rodgers, of course, but he has had a bad year and Kirk Cousins has had a great one.  The Packer defense is superior to Washington’s, but the Ethnic Slurs have steadily improved this season while Green Bay has clearly gone backward.  If I had to choose, I suppose I would take Green Bay but with no enthusiasm.  I pass.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki 

EARLY STUFF

A while back, I started asking friends and family members about their first memories.  It’s a subject that has always interested me, perhaps because I have several odd ones myself, and I’ve wondered why certain early events stick in the head and others don’t.  I can’t give you the complete answer to that question, and nobody else can either, though the topic has been studied for many years.  Even Freud (remember him?), had something to say about it.

My go-to guy on brain matters is a saxophone player named Dr. Richard Harner, who claims he once studied brains and operated on them at the University of Pennsylvania.  (I know he still has a prescription pad, so maybe he’s telling the truth.)  He told me about Wilder Penfield, who was often described as being “so damn smart you can’t believe he’s Canadian.”  Penfield was not only Princeton’s football coach, but was also the first doc who operated on people’s brains while they were awake, and had conversations with them as he electrically stimulated the neocortex bits (much as Bill Belichick does today).  One of the things that happened when he did this was that people started remembering things that had happened decades before, which led him to theorize that all of our experiences are stored away somewhere and that “forgetting” is simply a matter of not knowing where to look.  There’s no way to prove this, of course, partly because there is no way to prove that the tales Penfield pulled forth with his electrical probes were actual memories rather than dream-like concoctions.

An example?  OK.  I have a vivid childhood memory of a trip to Alexandria, Virginia with my mother, to visit my Aunt Lorraine and my cousin, Patrick.  I may have been four years old and Pat may have been five.  Pat and I spent most of an afternoon outside playing with his friends, culminating in a fight when, from our “fort” in a wooded area, we threw rocks at the other boys and they returned fire.  The fight ended abruptly when one of the other boys took a high hard one right on the noggin.  Pat and I ran home, uncertain as to exactly what had occurred, but scared witless.

An hour later, a policeman showed up at the apartment and questioned my mother and my aunt about the incident where a boy, we now learned, had been killed.  (We had told them nothing about our adventure.)  The policeman then took Pat and me outside, questioned us separately, and we managed to convince him we had come back home long before the war started and knew nothing about it.

For 35 years, I walked around with this in my head, convinced I had been part of a rock-throwing war and was guilty of homicide.  Then one day, having dinner with Pat after a twenty-year separation, I asked him about the incident.  He looked at me like I was insane, or joking, and then assured me that nothing of the sort had ever occurred.  To this day, I remember what our fort looked like.  I could even identify the policeman---I could pick him out of a police line-up.  But it just never happened.  No fort, no rocks, no dead kid, no cop.  But just because there are things in your head (or, at least, my head), that never happened doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of real memories from long, long ago.

For a long time it was believed that very little children, under the age of four or five, simply did not have the brain architecture to form enduring memories.  This has been shown to be not quite accurate.  Memories do form very early, and a six-year-old can often remember events that happened when he was only a year old.  At the age of seven or eight, however, a phenomenon called “childhood amnesia” overtakes us and we forget almost all of those earliest experiences.  (No one seems quite sure why this happens.)  Often there will be one or two fragments that remain, however, and stay with us into adulthood.  These are the stories you get when you ask for someone’s “first memory.”

I learned two things in my amateur research project.  First, not everybody has an identifiable “first memory,” meaning a specific event, and when you ask them for it, you will get something (usually traumatic), that occurred when they were ten.  If you then ask for something earlier, you will get a vague response like, “Well, I remember the kids in the neighborhood when I was little.”  My only other observation is that first memories tend to have a powerful emotional content, usually a negative one.  Kids don’t remember the routine trip to the grocery store; they remember terror.

R. M.---“I was under two years old, not sure exact age, could've been 6 months, could've been 20 months. I fell out of a high chair into the edge of a radiator. I took a nasty gash in the eye area; any closer to the eye would have resulted in permanent serious injury to the eye. I was rushed to Wills Eye, treated, bandaged and sent home. I don't remember any of it! What I do remember vividly is laying in my crib later that day or night in the middle bedroom on Pickwick St. and out of the corner of I guess my good eye, seeing my father, who wasn't present when the incident happened, emerging from the top of the steps, entering the bedroom, and looking down at me with the big bandage over my eye.”

P.W.---“My first memory is of being a toddler on a bridge at Maxwell Army base near Montgomery Alabama. My mother and I are on a bridge over a small river and she sets me down for a minute while talking to someone else. I must have waddled off a ways and was in danger of falling off the bridge as I remember a uniformed army guy (a private maybe) running to me, scooping me up and handing me back to my hysterical mother. I also remember the very fragrant magnolia blossoms. They were everywhere.”

Note in these and other tales that often, a horrific event is not itself the center of the experience; rather, it is a parent’s reaction that sears it in the memory.

J.V.---"Mom was crying by the washing machine.  President Kennedy had just died.”  (This is a rarity---a first memory we can date precisely: November 22, 1963.)

L.B.---“I remember desperately crying at the front door, trying to block my dad from going to work and leaving me alone with my mom.”

J.W.---“I was three years old and had to have my adenoids taken out, and I remember being in the operating room and having the nurse put the mask on my face to put me under anesthesia.  I remember the bright lights and the rubber mask and my fear that I wouldn’t fall asleep and I would be awake while they operated on me.”

J.S.---“I was in the station wagon, which was packed with boxes and siblings.  We were moving to a new house and I was looking out the back window as our old house got further and further away.”

S.P.---“I was sitting on the floor in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, playing with a box of kitchen matches I had pulled off the table.  When my mother saw I was trying to light one, she flew out of a chair about ten feet away and grabbed it away from me.”   

L.M.---“When I was little, we moved to a big house, but the second floor wasn’t finished so we lived downstairs.  There were construction materials all over the yard.  One night, my mother was throwing a party and I climbed in behind a piece of wood that was leaning up against a wall.  When I heard people were looking for me, I decided it would be fun to hide until someone found me.  What I didn’t know is that my mother was extremely upset and thought I had been kidnapped.  One reason I remember it is because she kept reminding me of it when I was a child.  She still talks about it and how worried she was.”

D.F.---“Getting spanked by my mother.  That’s probably my first ten memories.”

C.H.---“I was having my diaper changed and my grandma lifted me up to the kitchen sink and started pumping the water to clean me up.  It was cold!”

J.M.---“In a crib.  I remember the bars.”

S.M.---“Standing up in a playpen, wanting to get out.”

And finally, for sheer childhood terror, here’s my personal favorite:

J.G.---“We moved to Kenya when I was an infant, and I remember us being ‘on safari’ in one of the game parks.  My sister and I had to stand in some tall grass in the middle of the plains for a photograph and I remember being certain a lion was going to jump out any second and eat us.  We had to stand there for what seemed like forever and all I wanted to do was get back in the van.”

The unusual memories are the happy ones, and while they are rare, they do exist.

S.S.---“It’s very mundane, and very peaceful.  I was in a train riding to Wichita Falls, Texas when I was two years old, and I was looking out at the fields going by and I was looking at my mother and father, who were in the train compartment with me.  And that is probably why I remember it---my parents were already divorced by then and the three of us never did anything together, but there we were on the train.”

N.A.---“I was age three or four, and I was just old enough to go across the street to the Oreland ball field with an older neighbor girl.  She showed me how to pick honeysuckle flowers and split them to suck the juice out.”

B.P.---“I was two, and I visited Honduras (where my mom is from) for the first and last time.  I was floating in the ocean in my Minnie Mouse floaty thing and the sun was setting and it was really beautiful.  My mom was on the beach looking at me and laughing and my Uncle Raoul was swimming underneath me.  He touched my toes, and I knew he was pretending to be a shark, but I felt very smart because I wasn’t fooled one bit.”

And then finally, there's this first memory, which doesn't seem to fit in any category:

“It was nighttime, raining, somewhere in the late 1940’s. I was about 50 years old and I was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance because I had been in a car accident.  Then it all goes black for a while until I realize I am inside my mother and I am about to emerge and be born.  I know this is going to happen, and then it does, and there are bright lights and people running around and lots of noise and I start getting annoyed at all the commotion.  That’s my first memory---in this life, at least.  I was pissed off that everybody was making such a huge deal about me being born.”

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki  

GO FOR TWO

For the 2015 season, the NFL has instituted a new PAT rule, moving the line of scrimmage for an extra-point kick from the three-yard line back to the fifteen.  This is still well within the range of any NFL kicker, but inevitably there will be more missed kicks.  In 2014, from the three-yard line, extra-point tries were missed on 8 of 1230 attempts.  Over 99% were successful.  So far, in 2015, 727 of 768 have succeeded, for a rate of 95%.

The rule for 2-point conversions has not been changed in ways that will affect its success rate.  You still run a play from the two-yard-line, and you still have to get the ball into the end zone.  Since 1994, when the two-point conversion became possible, the success rate has hovered slightly below 50%.  (Only four seasons since 1994 have seen a success rate of 50% or higher.)  This year so far, 31 of 65 attempts (48%) have succeeded, which is virtually the same rate as the past 21 years.

The new PAT kick distance has changed the analysis on whether to go for one or two.  In the past, with a .99+ rate, the expectation on a single extra point was .99 points (1 x .99=.99).  The expectation on a two-point try, however, was only .96 points (2 x .48=.96).  The kick had a better payoff, in other words, so unless there was a strategic reason to go for two (e.g., you score a touchdown when you are trailing by 8 or 11 or 15 or 22 points), you would kick and take the certain one point.

Now the math favors going for two, unless there is a strategic reason not to (e.g., you are down by six when you score a touchdown, so the almost-certain single point puts you in the lead).  The expected points in going for two are still .96, but the expected points from kicking are now only .95.

(Note: the sample size for the new extra-point kick is small, so we can’t make any definitive conclusions at present.  Historical data from 33-yard field goals, however, suggests that a 95% success rate on the new extra-point kick is higher than it should be.  This would mean that the two-point try will be proven an even better choice than it appears to be now.  On the other hand, every professional kicker is practicing the 33-yard kick much more than he used to, so maybe they will soon be automatic.  For the purposes of this article, I am assuming the two-point try truly has, and will continue to have, a slightly better payoff than the kick.)

Football, like many games, is a race to see which team can score more points within a given period of time.  This means that in the vast majority of situations, the only driver of the decision to kick or run a play is the expected number of points that will result.  Up until this year, the higher number of expected points (.99 points vs. .96 points) came with the kick.  That is why two-point conversions were only 4% of the post-touchdown plays---this option only made sense late in the game (or possibly as early as the 3^rd quarter), when the situational value of scoring two points was significantly higher than the situational value of scoring an almost-certain one.

Now, however, the worm has turned.  In 2015, there is rarely a reason to kick the extra point because the rewards are greater when you go for two.  But do NFL coaches do this?  Of course not.  Just as coaches properly chose to kick 96% of the time in the past, the rule change means they should now go for two 96% of the time.  But they don’t.  Instead of going for two 96% of the time, they do it after only 8% of touchdowns.

Let’s simplify this so you will know what you are watching.  Since strategic reasons for going for one or two only arise in the second half, there is never a reason now to kick an extra point in the first half of an NFL game.  When a coach chooses to do so, he is making a mistake.  It’s usually not a huge mistake, of course, but it is an error, and some of us who are fans are annoyed that these highly-compensated football coaches don’t take their jobs more seriously.

I have mentioned before that while coaches of many sports study how to play games (their game, in particular), football coaches never do.  Football coaches are the kind of people who leave poker games wearing only a barrel.  They know the X’s and O’s and how to design a play and they know what a middle linebacker looks like and, in the NFL, they know how to manage fifty very large, very rich, very violent men who have no manners.  But the football coaches who have ever won a game of Monopoly are the rare exception.  They resemble military generals more than anything else.  This is why every NFL owner needs to hire a twenty-year-old math geek (for $100 a game), and give him absolute authority to make all the either/or decisions in the game.

“No, Mr. Harbaugh.  I know it’s 4^th down, BUT YOU CAN’T PUNT in this situation.”

“No, Mr. Ryan, you MUST go for two here.”

“No, Mr. Kelly, you may not attempt this field goal.  If you do, we will have you committed to an institution for the criminally insane.”

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki

(NOTE: Another piece of the new conversion rule is that the defense can score when the offense attempts a two-point conversion.  If there is a fumble or an interception on the conversion attempt, the defense can run it back and score two points, just like in college.  This also creates a new type of score, the “conversion safety.”  If the offensive team goes for two and the defense gets a turnover, and the defensive player tries to run the ball back but gets tackled in his own end zone, the offensive team gets one point.  The conversion safety has never happened in the NFL, but there have been a few in college games, most notably in the 2013 Fiesta Bowl.)    

THE TRUMP MENACE---Update

     The Trump Menace rolls on and, as predicted, there is no serious attempt being made to take his issue away.  The Republican establishment remains fully committed to amnesty and dreamers and paths to citizenship and helping the poor bastards who are living in the shadows.  And open borders.

     The only major change has been that no one takes Jeb! seriously anymore, maybe not even his parents.  This is just not the year for a guy who needs a fresh makeover, based on whatever his consultants tell him, every time he appears in public.  There was a time he was pulling double digits in the polls.  Now he is somewhere around 4%, which means he is within (and under) the margin of error.  In other words, it is statistically possible that if the Iowa caucuses were held today, NOBODY would vote for him.

     So the amnesty crowd needs another candidate.  Chris Christie wants that job but he won’t get it.  Instead it will almost certainly go to Marco Rubio, the brilliant and articulate Cuban-American who was once described as a “tea party” politician but has subtly dialed back his conservatism in order to make himself acceptable to establishment Republicans.  As part of this repositioning, he has embraced the amnesty/open-borders agenda.  Because of Trump’s rise, and the obvious unpopularity of open borders among Republican primary voters, Rubio doesn’t talk much about his support for the “comprehensive immigration reform” he supported in the Senate, but he hasn’t backed away from it either.  When Jeb! gets dumped by the regular Republicans, Rubio is perfectly situated to slide into that (well-funded) slot, the one that led to a nomination for both McCain and Romney.

     A large majority of Republican primary voters want a fence, they want border enforcement, they want deportations of criminals, and they want the legal immigration policies that favor Somalis over Belgians to be reexamined.  The switcheroo from Jeb! to Rubio is an attempt to fool the Republican base. Rubio is young and cute and smart, and certainly could defeat the dreadful Hillary, and he usually sounds like a conservative.  Can he be sold to primary voters even though he (quietly) wants the borders open and citizenship for those who have already snuck in?  Maybe, but I doubt it.

      Trump will not be silent about Rubio’s position on immigration.  And neither will Ted Cruz, whose strategy is to inherit Trump’s enforce-the-borders voters when and if Trump stumbles and fades away.

     There is still just one issue in the campaign for the Republican nomination.  Will the Party, and its largest donors, accede to the views of a large majority of Republican voters and demand a return to enforcement of immigration law?  So far the answer is no.  So far, Mitch McConnell and the Bushes and Karl Rove and Paul Ryan and the people who fund them believe Donald Trump and his supporters will all go away.

     But the clock is ticking, and the Trump Menace not only survives but seems to be as strong as ever. The open-border Republicans are faced with a critical decision and they only have until early February to make it, because once Trump starts collecting delegates, it may be impossible to shut him down.  Will they abandon open borders, or will they let Trump win the nomination (and almost certainly lose the general election to a Democrat)?  At the moment it looks like the leaders of the Republican Party would rather have Hillary become our next President than allow enforcement of our immigration laws.

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki                     

REPUBLICANS 101---The Trump Menace

Somewhere around the 4^th of July, Ann Coulter casually remarked, on some show or other, that it would be easy for the Republicans to get rid of Trump.  “All they have to do is take his issue away from him.”

And yet, no one will do it.  It wouldn’t be that difficult for a half dozen stalwarts of the Republican Party (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Priebus, McCain, Kasich, Walker and Rubio, for example), to issue a joint statement along the following lines:

“OK.  We finally get it.  Really.  We’ve pretended to care about border security, and we’ve pretended to care about changing the immigration protocols so we get educated people from Belgium and Australia rather than people from primitive cultures that think gang rape is a sort of party game, and we’ve pretended to care about enforcing existing American laws, but of course, all we really wanted was to please the Chamber of Commerce and the business guys who give us money so they can hire cheap maids and gardeners.  All we really cared about was granting amnesty to anybody who managed to get here, so we could then encourage the next squad of cheap illegals to sneak in.

“That’s still all we care about.  There’s no point lying about that.  But here’s the deal.  We promise that we will enforce the law, we will patrol the border, we will build a wall, we will deport illegals who commit crimes, and we will change the immigration quotas and protocols so that civilized, educated people will have an advantage in the who-gets-to-be-an-American sweepstakes.  You win.  There will be no more talk of “a path to citizenship” or “dreamers.”  Ever.  We will suck it up and give the nanny an extra $3.50 an hour.  OK?

“Just lose Trump.  We get it.  Now lose him.  Maybe we’ve lied to you over the years, and it’s pretty obvious you don’t trust us, but we can do better than him, can’t we?  Do we really need a guy who, when he gets pissed off at a woman, starts throwing tampons at her?  We will do what we should have done years ago and we will enforce the law.”

But the Republican Party won’t make this offer, will it?  It will NOT abandon amnesty, at least not yet.  Trump rises and rises in the polls, but still the Party will not give in to a majority of the American people, and a large majority of Republicans.  The Party establishment won’t embrace the one issue that has propelled Trump to the top in order to take that issue away from him.

At least not yet.  With more than four months to go until the Iowa Caucuses are held on February 1, they are still holding out hope that Trump will melt down, or voters will tire of him, or something will happen to restore what they view as the natural order of things.  And maybe they’ll get what they wish.  Aren’t we all a little surprised the Trump phase of the 2016 presidential campaign has gone on as long as it has?

But what happens if February 1 approaches and Trump is still riding high in the polls?  It’s fine to hope for him to disappear, or snipe at him from the sidelines, but once he actually starts collecting delegates, it may no longer be possible to stop him from winning the Republican nomination.  The big question of this campaign season is whether, before the Iowa caucuses, the Republican establishment will shout “Uncle” on the immigration issue and start promising that our laws will be observed and enforced.

I suspect they will not.  I believe the Bushes and McCains and Kasichs and Priebuses and Walkers and Rubios would rather lose than give in on their dreams of open borders and amnesty.  Rather than cede an inch to Trump and the American people on this issue, they are willing to sit back and hope Hillary (or Biden, or somebody) beats Trump in the general election.

****

In one of those quotations that is attributed to everybody because nobody knows who said it first (I give the credit to Mark Twain), somebody once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Donald Trump is not exactly Herbert Hoover, but he certainly rhymes.

Hoover was a highly successful businessman who became president, though he had no previous experience in elective office, because he was the kind of guy who could “get things done.”  As a Republican Progressive, he believed in “efficiency” and in hiring experts who would tell us all what to do and how to do it.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs into law (the largest tariffs in our history), raised both income and corporate taxes, and plunged the nation into the Great Depression.  Even based on the economic science of the day, what he did was foolish.  As he dragged the American economy into an abyss, economists were begging him to reconsider.  

Sound familiar?  Trump loves tariffs, and advocates them today.  He has always been in favor of increasing taxes, and talks about it a lot in the campaign.  And of course, his appeal is the same as Hoover’s was.  He’s an “outsider,” not part of the political class, and a rich guy who can’t be bought, but who cares about the little guy and knows how to cut through the swamp and fix things.

Hoover regularly appears on lists of “America’s Worst Presidents.”  There is no other President with whom Trump is even remotely similar.

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki        

THIS & THAT X

Words we need.

Something that makes you vomit is an emetic or a nauseant.  A thing that makes you pee more is a diuretic.  A drug or food that makes you poop is a laxative.  We need a word to describe something so disgusting that it makes stuff come out of all orifices at the same time.

*

Several things I learned on everydayfeminism.com:

1)    One aspect of the male privilege I routinely benefit from is that when I have an emotional reaction, no one ascribes it to my menstrual cycle.

2)    “Breast-policing” is the sense ingrained in us by the patriarchy that those girls need to strapped in at all times.  I learned this from an article by a trans-man (formerly a female) who never had his tiny but noticeable breasts removed.  As a guy, he now likes to walk around without a shirt on, but sometimes people look at him funny.

3)    If you are a Trans-something, the “something” is the thing you are turning into, not the thing you were born.  Caitlyn Jenner is a trans-woman.

4)    A “non-binary” gender is anything that is NOT a standard-brand heterosexual male or a standard-brand heterosexual female.

*

Though pieces of the Big Bang Theory have been toyed with for centuries, Edwin Hubble is usually given credit for pulling it together as a unified doctrine in 1929.  It was instantly embraced by many theologians as proof of the existence of God since it posited a moment of creation, a big bang, and necessarily implied a Creator.  (Since then, some skeptical physicists and cosmologists have suggested ways in which the Big Bang might be compatible with a Godless universe, but that doesn’t concern us here.)

But there is another piece to the argument.  The Big Bang itself is not often questioned as a “historical” event.  Because of all the evidence the universe is expanding, even atheists acknowledge it.  And if you accept that the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe as we know it, you must also accept that it constitutes what is called a “singular point.”  The nature of the Big Bang is such that it is impossible to detect evidence of anything prior to the Big Bang.  One can speculate, of course.  One can suggest that the Big Bang is simply one of an endless series of expansions and contractions, but this can never be anything but pure speculation.  Since the Big Bang is a “singular point,” there can never be any real knowledge of what came before.

Suppose there is an omniscient God who knows humans will develop their brains and will eventually question the meaning of their existence, but He wants their knowledge of Him to be always a matter for faith---a God who, if he speaks to men at all, does so very rarely, to Abraham or Moses, for example, and in ways that are easily dismissed as myth.

Wouldn’t such a God create a singular point of natural history through which it is impossible to see?  That’s the Big Bang.  There is no evidence of anything that happened before it and there never will be, no matter how intelligent we become or how much we learn about the universe. There must be something before the Big Bang; otherwise, where would the material for the explosion come from?  But because the event itself walls off our knowledge of what’s back there, we can never learn, or reason our way, to the ultimate truth.  If God wants us to approach Him only through faith, and not because we KNOW He exists, wouldn’t He make that ultimate knowledge impossible to attain?

*

As Hillary becomes less popular every time she appears in public, it is clear there is considerable dissatisfaction with her as a candidate.  Then there’s 1) Bernie Sanders, the 78-year-old socialist (and non-Democrat) who is starting to outpoll her, 2) Lincoln Chafee, whose is basing his campaign on a crusade to bring the metric system to America, 3) Martin O’Malley, who recently apologized for saying “All lives matter,” and 3) Jim Webb, an interesting and accomplished person whose spot on the political spectrum is somewhere between Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, and who will never be nominated by the national Democratic Party.

Hard to believe, but the 2016 race for the Democratic nomination seems to be setting up nicely for Joe Biden.

*

If your home is burglarized in Philadelphia (and probably elsewhere as well), the odds on the police catching your criminal are slim.  However, if a gun is one of the items lifted, the police will come to your house and do a thorough investigation--- taking photographs, dusting for fingerprints, and reconstructing the thief’s movements.  As a friend of mine pointed out after my recent unpleasant brush with crime in the big city, this is a good reason to own a gun.

*

A heartbreaking scene I see frequently at Target is a parent pushing one or more little children around the store while talking incessantly on a cellphone.  Sometimes, the kids are trying to break through by talking to the parent.  Sometimes they are screaming.  It doesn’t matter.  Nothing the kids do will pull Mom or Dad away from their phone.  For me, the saddest scene is when the kids sit silently in the cart, having given up even trying to communicate.  When I saw this the other day (for the millionth time), it made me think of the Amish attitude toward telephones.

A lot of people think the Amish are anti-technology, and that is the reason they don’t drive cars or hook in to the electrical grid or have a phone in the house.  Actually, they are not opposed to technology at all.  What they are is pro-family.  When some new device, or power source, becomes available, the elders meet and decide whether it can be adopted without threat to family and community.  That is the only question for the Amish.

And that’s the problem with phones.  For decades they were banned entirely because their use would discourage neighbors and family members from visiting each other.  Also, the idea of someone chatting with a friend on the phone while ignoring his or her family was just appalling. Today the ban is not absolute, and you will sometimes see a little shack, at some distance to an Amish house, with a phone line going into it.  It’s far enough away to be very inconvenient, especially in the winter, but it is available for emergency out-going calls or for business calls to the “English” world.  Some Amish businessmen even have cell phones, but they don’t take them home from the workshop at night, and they don’t play Angry Birds on them.

And they don’t talk on them while they are in the grocery store with their kids.

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki

REPUBLICANS 101---THE FIELD

It’s July of 2015, there are sixteen of them, and it doesn’t seem likely there will be any more---not serious contenders, anyway.  So it’s time to review the field and tell you who has a prayer, who doesn’t, and why.  Some of them can be dismissed with a sentence or two; others require a bit more analysis.

In alphabetic order:

Jeb Bush.  The guy with the most campaign cash, most organization and most endorsements by standard-brand Republican organizations.  Obviously, the guy who gets the nod from the bloated corpse (but the rich bloated corpse) of the mainstream Republican Party can get the nomination.  I mean, Bob Dole got the nomination, didn’t he?  Republicans can win in 2016, and it would be sad for many of us if Jeb Bush got the nomination because he is peculiarly ill-suited to beat Hillary.  Just as Mitt Romney was the one guy who couldn’t beat Obama in 2012 (because, with Romneycare on his resume, he couldn’t attack Obamacare), Bush is the one guy who can’t beat the dreadful Hillary.  He’s the only guy who can’t challenge her as a “legacy” candidate.

Also, there are those of us who think no mainstream Republican candidate will ever be elected again, that George W. was the last. The brand is broken, in other words.  I may be mistaken about that, of course, but Jeb is not the guy who will prove me wrong.

Ben Carson.  A truly brilliant man and a decent, God-fearing patriot with the values we need our next President to have.  He has no chance to become president, however, and not simply because he has no experience in politics.

There is a reason doctors don’t get elected to office very often and a reason we’ve never had a president with a medical degree.  They are not really democrats, and not really suited to a democratic form of government.  It’s not how they think, it’s not how they are trained, and it’s not how they behave.  Over the years, I have had a number of chats with doctors on politics or morals or philosophy, and the thing that often strikes me is how genuinely surprised they are that someone would disagree with them.  They’re not accustomed to it.  It doesn’t occur to them that there could be a valid objection to their point of view, at least not one from a non-physician.  I vividly recall one such conversation on the topic of abortion with a doctor who insisted that his medical expertise trumped any sort of moral issue I might raise.  Abortion was proper until the moment of birth and that’s all there was to it.

You can see hints of this attitude in Ben Carson.  He gets his back up instantly when he asked questions he doesn’t expect, and he refuses to answer them.

Chris Christie.   See Jeb Bush.  There is only room for one anointed mainstream Republican, and he isn’t it.  He is hoping Jeb will falter and all the juice and money will flow over to him, but even if Bush is rejected by the electorate, Christie wouldn’t be the choice.  Chris Christie is a regional phenomenon, and the further he gets from New Jersey, the more people say, “Wha…????”

Even as a vice-presidential candidate, he brings nothing to the party since he certainly can’t put New Jersey into the Republican column.  It’s hard to see why he is running and soon, he won’t be.       

Ted Cruz.   Just as Jeb Bush is the mainstream candidate, Cruz is the real conservative (as opposed to the candidates who are currently trying to sound like conservatives in order to curry favor with what they perceive as “the base”).  Cruz won’t go to Iowa and say ethanol subsidies are groovy, like Scott Walker did, and he will never support an increased minimum wage law, like Santorum does.  The attention and money he has attracted indicates that if 2016 is the year for a conservative, Ted Cruz will be the guy.

Carly Fiorina.   Girlfriend!  What the heck are you doing here?  Fiorina is one of the few I would actually vote for, and in a head-to-head debate, she would make Hillary cry like a little girl.  Unfortunately, we won’t have a chance to see that.

She is not out of the question as a vice-presidential pick, however, and that is why she is still running.

Lindsey Graham.  Another liberal lined up behind Bush, with no chance of breaking through.  As a sideshow, his status as a (presumed) closeted gay senator brings an oddly antiquated aura to his candidacy.  It’s also a bit creepy the way leftists (e.g., Jon Stewart) mock Graham for being gay---I thought that was supposed to be a good thing in 2015.

(Note: in Queer Studies departments across the academic world, the theory that Abraham Lincoln was gay seems to be losing its adherents.  James Buchanan, however, is widely viewed as “our first gay President.”)

Mike Huckabee.  In addition to the Good Old Boy Republicans and the Conservative Republicans, there are also the Evangelicals, and Huckabee may be at the top of that list.  In an election cycle where the issues are the moribund economy, the dangerous world Obama has left us, and the trashing of our rule of law, guys like Huckabee seem very much like voices from yesterday.

Bobby Jindal.  In horseracing, the horse with the best early speed can sometimes burst away from the pack and hang on to win wire to wire, so one of the worst bets at the track is the horse with the second-best early speed.  Being the second-best conservative candidate in a Republican primary puts you in a similar position.

John Kasich.  In Ohio, he embraced Obamacare and vastly expanded Medicaid, explaining that it would get him into heaven.  As a liberal behind Bush, he has little chance of getting the nomination, but he is given a good shot at being chosen as Bush’s running mate.  The idea is that if Bush can win his home state of Florida and Kasich can win Ohio, the Republican ticket is certain to win the general election.

Yep, that’s how they think.  Nothing about persuading the electorate, nothing about the country itself, nothing about the Constitution, nothing about the jihad and the slaughter of innocents, but if we can snag those 47 electoral votes, WE’RE A FREAKIN’ LOCK!!!!

George Pataki.    Why Pataki?  I don’t know.  He’s almost 70 years old and he always wanted to run for president, so now he is.  Blue state moderate Republicans have virtually no shot at the presidency, but, for some reason, that doesn’t stop them from running.  Sometimes they even get nominated.  Right, Mr. Romney?  Pataki cannot even make the VP argument, like Kasich can, since Hillary will NOT lose New York.  In fact, the Democrats could nominate a gorilla for president, and the gorilla would win New York.

Rand Paul.   Shortly after he announced, he was criticized for being short-tempered and prickly with a female reporter, and the theory advanced by the Left was that he didn’t like women.  But that’s not it.  Like Ben Carson, Rand is a doctor, which means that he’s right and you’re wrong.  He’s going to be prickly and short-tempered with anyone who pushes back at him.  Doctors just aren’t suited to democracy.

There’s another reason Rand can’t win, however, and that is the precarious state of the world.  Since Obama took office, the world has become so much more dangerous that even isolationist libertarian types recognize that certain butts will have to be kicked, and soon, in order to assert American power and values.  Somebody will have to tell Putin he can’t have the Baltics.  Somebody will have to tell ISIS that enslaving women and setting people on fire must stop.  Somebody will have to tell Iran they can’t have the bomb.  Rand Paul is not the guy to do that sort of hard work.  He is not the right man for the moment, and that is why his campaign is languishing.

Rick Perry.  About 10% of the stuff Donald Trump says is accurate and pithy and funny and true, and his observation about Rick Perry’s glasses is one of them.  Trump said that Perry now wears glasses so that people will think he’s smart.  Bingo.  Not only is he correct, but Rick Perry in glasses (black, thick-rimmed serious-looking things), looks exactly like a guy who is only wearing glasses because he is desperately trying to look smart.

Perry’s brain-freeze in the 2012 debate will never be forgotten.

Marco Rubio.  He’s way Hispanic and Latino and he sometimes says conservative things and the mainstream Republicans don’t want to trash him because they think he might be important someday, but I don’t see how his base voter differs markedly from Jeb Bush’s base voter.  He’s a Gang of Eight guy and he’s pro-amnesty just like Bush is, and he will shade his views in one way for a certain group of voters and then shade them another way for the next group.  If Jeb Bush is rejected by Republican primary voters (and he may be), Rubio steps into his shoes.  Otherwise, there is no path to the Presidential nomination for him.

(Note: Since both Bush and Rubio are from Florida, Rubio cannot be chosen as Bush’s Vice President.  If he were, under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, their ticket could not be awarded the electoral votes from Florida.)

Rick Santorum.  See Huckabee.  It’s over, Rick.

Donald Trump.  He’s not a conservative, he’s not a Republican, and he’s not running for President.  Other than that, his chances to win the Republican primary are terrific.

When I say he’s not running for President, I mean just that.  He is doing nothing to qualify his campaign in the various states in which he has to run and he is doing nothing to organize his followers.  All Trump is doing here is polishing up his “brand,” which is something he now does more-or-less instinctively.  This “campaign” so far has cost him little, and will make him a more valuable commercial and reality-TV commodity.  He’s WAY bigger than Honey Boo Boo now.  Plus, he’s a blowhard and he likes attention, so now that he has caught some lightning in a bottle with his immigration issue, he will keep pounding it until it stops working.  And it will.

The idea that he is going to mount a third-party campaign using his own money is even more ridiculous.  Guys like Donald Trump do not go to the bank to make withdrawals, they go to make deposits.  He may be a jerk and an egomaniac, but he never loses sight of the bottom line.  He would never be so foolish as to throw hundreds of millions of his own dollars at a quixotic quest that cannot succeed.

Scott Walker.  We may not have saved the actual best for last (alphabetically), but he’s a different sort of candidate, and hard to categorize, and that makes him a threat to win.  Bush, Cruz, Rubio and Walker are the only ones with a realistic chance.

Normally, one would view Scott Walker as just another Chamber-of-Commerce, good- ol’-boy type of Republican, and slot him in somewhere south of Bush.  He has a history (that is now being discreetly hushed up) of supporting amnesty and a “path to citizenship.”  Also, there’s the new-found love of ethanol now that he’s campaigning in Iowa.  So he panders.  He’ll say what he has to.  He has a lot in common with Jeb, and Christie, and Romney.  These are not exactly evil men, but they represent the past, and none of them will ever be elected President.  I certainly won’t vote for one, and I won’t vote for Walker either.

Walker, however, is different.  Though we cannot know what he believes, and we can’t believe what he says, he apparently believes in something. And he can fight.  He beat the public sector unions in Wisconsin though every major union in the country threw millions into the battle to defeat him.  Then they tried to recall him, and that didn’t work.  Then they spent more millions to prevent him from being re-elected, and failed again.  And all this happened in Wisconsin, a place that has not chosen a Republican for President since Reagan in 1984.

Scott Walker cannot be counted out of any race he enters, including this one.

Copyright2015MichaelKubacki