Month: December 2022

Muttroxia: How to Improve Professional / World Cup Soccer: I said it all four years ago. Nothing has changed. All these ideas would make the sport better.

Viva La France! Let’s go!

How many of these did you know already?

Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen): This song is not a patriotic anthem. It’s a rather depressing tune about a veteran who’s having a hard time in life. Extra points for the Reagan campaign cluelessly using an anti-America song as their theme.

More Than Words (Extreme): This is not a touching love song about declaring emotions. It’s about getting laid. If you screw me, that will show your love more than words will.

Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who): This is one of the all-time anthems, an eight minute lesson in aggression and defiance. Or so you would think from the music. The message is truly about acceptance, and is passive. In the story this song comes from, the good guys have finally deposed the bad guys and everything is okay. Only it’s not, the new boss is the same as the old boss, the slogans on the left are the same as the slogans on the right, everything is the same as ever. Oh well, that’s how it goes, smile and grin at the change all around me, I won’t get fooled again. I won’t get fooled by revolutionary rhetoric and the idea that anything really changes. Kind of a downer, really.

Every Breath You Take (The Police): Not a love song, a psychopathic stalker song.

Norwegian Wood (Beatles): This is a song about arson. The girl won’t put out, so her house gets burnt down.

Paul McCartney explained that the term “Norwegian Wood” was an ironic reference to the cheap pine wall panelling then in vogue in London. McCartney commented on the final verse of the song: “In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.

I have no idea how I stumbled on her. Musgraves doesn’t write the most sophisticated music. Simple chords, simple melodies, simple playing… but done well. Nothing wrong with that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OFv566mj7s

I was surprised to find out she’s categorized a country artist. Her voice has that lilt but the music isn’t particularly country. Her other songs haven’t really done it for me. This one does!

How about them Celtics, eh? I am a hardcore fan and these last couple years have been amazing. Barring serious injury, this years edition will go down in the history books as one of the best teams ever to take the floor.

I have also followed Danilo Gallinari in his Hawks career. Gallinari is a good player. He can create his own shot and take over an offense for short stints. As an individual he is an asset to any team.

But as a team player? Not so much. The Hawks have never learned to play team ball and he’s an example of it. When he gets the ball it stays with him. Much like Jaylen Brown until recently, the entire flow of the offense stops. (The Number 21 ballhog in the league years ago.) Like Jaylen Brown he could do good things one on one, but it isn’t worth it to destroy the group dynamics.

Defensively, Gallinari is ordinary. The Hawks have never been good at defense, mostly because Trey Young refuses to try. Seriously, watch Trey play defense for a few minutes. Everyone blows right past him. Gallinari plays decent enough defense to try and cover for the five-on-four dynamics teams have against the Hawks, but is he anything special? No.

These Celtics thrive on team chemistry. They traded for Derrick White because he is a team player. They traded for Malcom Brogdon because he is a team player (and being incredibly gracious and quiet about leading the bench instead of starting). Gallinari does not fit into this team.

These Celtics don’t need Gallinari. They are already the best team in the league by a healthy margin. They are already improving even more as their defense is improving. They have Rob Williams returning soon, they are going to be even more dominant. They already have the deepest bench in the league, the next best options from Gallinari are great (Payton Pritchard would be starting on most teams, he barely even plays for us.) We’re going to get that 18th banner with or without him just fine.

Now is the time to get rid of Gallinari. Trade him for some draft picks, or money that can be used to keep the team together, or something. Get value while we can, but he doesn’t belong in Celtics green.

A few thoughts on Warnock beating Walker.

First, the national media continuously contrasted this race with Kemp/Abrams, but they had it all wrong. Kemp had enormous advantages.

1. He was the incumbent. There has to be a convincing reason to unseat the incumbent. There wasn’t. Note that Warnock was also an incumbent and won.
2. The Governors race is not nationalized. Governors have a large indirect impact on federal elections, but the impact is indirect. This is very different than a house or Senate race. The stakes were lower.
3. He had proven himself competent. I disagreed with him on policy, but never felt that he was going to undermine democracy or start a war with a crazy tweet or not understand his own job or pass policies just to piss off the other side or any of the craziness that surrounds the Trumpites.
4. Kemp was not Trumps man. He had differed from him, done it publicly, and did it while governing (not as part of a campaign).

We voted for Abrams (of course), but we are okay with Kemp winning. He has done a decent job and will continue to do so. He follows a line of Georgia governors who campaign as right wing culture warriors who then govern from the center, mostly avoiding culture wars in favor of economic prosperity.

The runoff was a partisan election. As most are these days. My Democrat friends from out of state are fond of mocking Southern Republicans, but they are just as ideological. If the Democrats ran a bag of sand for the Senate, I’d probably vote for it and they would also. Republicans can hardly be blamed for voting for Herschel Walker. This was a race between Democrats/Biden and Republicans/Trump in proxy form. Warnock and Walker’s own particular stories and competencies barely mattered. I doubt any of my Democrat friends can identify a specific policy Warnock particularly champions or breaks from the Party on. It doesn’t matter. Warnock is senator 51 for the Democrats, that all that mattered. Republicans can’t be blamed for using the same logic.

I was not surprised Warnock won. I felt all along he had the edge, and publicly predicted it on election night. (That’s one for Muttrox!) After all Warnock won the first election. He didn’t get to 50%, but he won. So, what are the factors that would change the outcome in a runoff?

1. The stakes were lower on both sides once the Democrats had the 50^th Senate vote. Democrats wanted the 51^st seat, but it wasn’t critical. The GOP had already lost the Senate either way so Walker’s win wouldn’t be as important. Which of those motivations would be bigger? Hard to say, but I felt that the GOP would be less motived than Dems.
2. The Libertarian candidate had just over 2%. All else being equal, there is no reason to think they would go disproportionately for the Republican candidate.
3. Another factor I haven’t seen reported anywhere. Runoff day was crummy. It had rained for several days, it was wet and grim and miserable. Bad weather always depresses election turnout. At the margins there will be some voter who was barely motivated enough to vote and the bad weather is enough to keep them home. But since the Democrats had disproportionately voted early, it didn’t matter as much on their side. Bad weather hurt the GOP more.

Some things that don’t matter.

1. Advertising: I don’t know why candidates bother to spend so much money on TV ads. I don’t know a single person who has ever changed their mind because of a TV ad. Nor do I know someone who decided whether to vote or not based on being “activated” by advertising. A giant waste of everybody’s time and money. Election after election proves that it just doesn’t matter, but they keep pissing away money.
2. Candidate Quality: Walker was a terrible candidate. Of course it mattered. Just not as much as people think. See the beginning of this post – in a partisan election, it just doesn’t matter who the candidate is. (And concussions are serious! Our son just had one, and he is still recovering a couple days later. Herschel took a lot of hits over his life. It showed. He thinks almost as incoherently as Trump.)
3. Voter Suppression: The evidence is that most of the issues the left gets worked up about don’t matter. Be angry about gerrymandering, not the lack of maildrop boxes.
4. Corrupt Secretary of State: I crossed party lines to vote for Brad Raffensperger. He’s a Republican executing laws passed by a Republican congress, but as far as I can see, he has played everything above board, and has done his job with great professional competence. Oh, and his tape recording of Trump blatantly meddling with the 2020 election is just wonderful. Wouldn’t that be precious if that’s what finally took him down. Sigh – I can dream.

Our household is very happy that Warnock won, and Georgia gets a bit bluer each year. These are historic times, we’re overjoyed to be part of it.