Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.
Society
The Wages of Sin
Once upon a time pot and gambling were considered vices and banned in most states.
Now they are big business.
The little strip mall where my gym is located has three retail outlets which sell marijuana (which is legal here in Maryland). Perhaps not coincidentally, there is also a 7-11 which does a booming business at night and on weekends.
Also visible from the parking lot are three very large signs promoting on-line sports betting.
Gambling and pot are not only big business, they are highly lucrative for state governments. Maryland currently takes in a bit more than $100 million in marijuana tax revenue and about $25 million in sports gambling. The amount generated by gambling is expected to double over the next 12 months as Maryland will raise the tax rate from 15 to 30% on revenue.
The wave of marijuana legalization kicked into overdrive in the 2010s, and sports betting was jumpstarted when the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 (Murphy vs. NCAA) that the issue was a matter to be resolved by the individual states. In both cases concerns about public health effects were downplayed, both in the belief that such effects were minimal, and that they were more than offset by increases in tax revenue and by reduced strain on the criminal justice system.
The Lie At the Heart
There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.
2024 Election Plus/Delta
Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.
- Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
- Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
- Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
- Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
- Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
- By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
- Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
- By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
- I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
- Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.
Dedicated Followers of Fashion
It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.