Defend Our Friends

I find it hard to believe but AP is actually reporting Israeli casualties. I would guess there will be a response from our friends in Israel. Will we help them?

Watching Little League Baseball

While watching the big game between Billings' Big Sky All-Stars and the All-Stars from Rapid City, SD
I thought for a few moments in between innings: I wonder what was behind this 85 pitch count limit and have there been any changes in bats what with a successful lawsuit here in Montana, the result of a catastrophic head injury to a pitcher from Miles City up in Helena by a ball batted with a metal bat, at the American Legion level, i.e. advanced high school level, some 8 or 9 years ago.

I did a little Googling and found that metal bats are still being used by the Little League, and that there have been no scientific studies showing that metal bats are more dangerous than wooden bats. This was reported in the Wall Street Journal back in April of this year. I had forgotten that I had read it but Mr Google kindly reminded me of a previous blog of mine. Here is some info on bats from earlier this year. Following some of the leads will get you more info.

And then back to sore arms, pitch counts, curve balls. I found a very nice summary of material coming from the University of North Carolina showing that curve balls didn't seem anymore dangerous than a lot of other practices for Little Leaguers. It was primarily the innings thrown and the number of pitches thrown that led to an increase in later injuries. The study looked fairly sturdily constructed to me. After the game I started thinking about the arm troubles of Dave McNally and wondered how many pitches he had thrown in Legion games back in the late 50s?

Big Sky All-Stars vs. Rapid City All-Stars

I was a few minutes late getting to ESPN's televised game between Billings' Big Sky All Stars and a similar team from Rapid City, South Dakota because my dental hygienist and dentist, still she and he respectively, despite all the ministrations of the feminists, not having seen me for a few years were understandably worried what with my declivitous decline in dental health, and thus they offered all sorts of options for making things better. I readily agreed and then hurried home to think about the options and watch the opening game for the USA teams at the Little League World Series in Williamsport PA.

The nephew of my general surgeon, Mckenzie, pitched 5 innings for Billings, and looked pretty good, allowing 4 runs, two of them home runs by a big 13 yr old, Petrey from Rapid City. The final inning was pitched by one of our own big guys from Billings, 3rd baseman Jones, who got three outs without difficulty including a fly-out to centerfield for the final out by Mr Petrey. Final score was 6-4.

Our boys looked very taut but still relaxed on defense and fortunately knew where the strike zone was in the critical inning where they scored 5 runs with the aid of only two hits, a difficult pop-fly into no-man's land in short center by Kieckebusch and a solid double to the wall by pitcher McKenzie.

I was in such a hurry to leave the dentist's office that I forgot my sunglasses and my prized Yomiuri Giants baseball cap. My dentist was kind enough to drop them off at my home. That sealed the deal as far as I was concerned. I am down for a root canal next week, after the LLWS is over.

Is Telling The Truth Again and Again Like Repeating The Big Lie?

This comes from a conservative teacher, yes Virginia, there really are such people. It seems redundant but then there are a lot of people who, when confronted with data that goes against their deeply held prejudices, simply ignore it. Who know, maybe they will see it and ask their own sources what about that graph of revenues coming in to the Federal government.

In Vino Veritas?

Here is a start on the explanation that many of us ordinary folks have been looking for. Mr Happ apparently has no advanced degrees but then he makes a lot of common-sense. I think we should keep our eyes and ears focused on this guy. He says the earth is not quite warm enough and if we should be worried about anything having to do with climate, maybe we should be worried about cooling, not warming.

Coming To A Cabela's Near You?

I wonder why we need a special interest group—the National Rifle Association—whose main function is to protect a part of our Constitution. Don't all of our elected officials swear to protect the Constitution? These sound like they mean business but how would you practice with them?

Was Our Debt Ceiling Drama Sinful?

David Crisp writes an editorial in his weekly Billings' OutPost entitled "Wasn't America's debt ceiling debacle a sin?" He asserts that journalists are poorly equipped—because they lack the vocabulary—to deal with moral questions but then goes on to discuss the problem anyway and arrive at what seems to be an unreasonable conclusion. It seems to me that Crisp starts the argument already having decided on which side he comes down, especially when he calls the whole drama a "debacle." I say drama, but perhaps theatre is a better word because the lines sounded familiar and we kind of knew the ending we were heading toward.

This reminds me of a trip I took a few years ago accompanied by 600 or so college students. One of the professors in an English Lit course gradually tired of the students being reticent to discuss the readings and thus called on a clever girl in the front row, slinking down as low as she could get. The girl's response was "Hey, I'm a chemistry major and we don't have to know these things." I'm not sure she was unprepared, and she certainly was not incapable of talking about the story we were reading but the coarse laughter her response got, from the adults especially, but even from some of her classmates in on the conspiracy, made all of us wince with embarrassment.

Editor Crisp cites the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security," when he tells Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian, why he must go back to Germany even when he knows that many if not most of his fellow Germans had embraced a great evil, and that his speaking and acting against that evil may lead to his death.

Deciding what is right or wrong is what all of us do every day, usually in small ways, and what we expect our elected officials to do, sometimes in big ways. Those of us schooled in orthodox Christianity say that in addition to ordinary  errors, we sometimes do or say sinful things. And of course we have that tendency in our DNA, called Original Sin when we are trying to explain mysterious things to our children. I suspect it is actually easier to make a reasonable decision about right and wrong when you are not in the middle of it, though you may not have the authority to speak at a later time to the survivors of that great evil. I thought that is what Bonhoefer was saying, rather than because we have the luxury of making decisions in relative security we make them poorly, which is the conclusion that Crisp comes to.

The only sin I can see in this whole affair is allowing our debt to climb so high that we might not be able to pay it off in a reasonable fashion. I'm sure that both Democrats and Republicans were guilty in this respect, though perhaps you could argue that the rapid recent increase in the debt, if you had the chance to do something about it and don't, and not allow your fellow citizens to do something about it either might be considered stubborn, perhaps due to invincible ignorance or arrogance or both, but I don't see that as anything more than the ordinary sin that we all have.

The serious political stuff is difficult enough to follow, whatever your vantage point, and the silly stuff keeps getting in one's eyes and mind, making it all that much more difficult. Saint Jerome is supposed to have said "When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting." Which is, I think, what Bonhoefer was saying in other ways.

5 Wins In A Row; 3 Home Runs In A Row

15 hits and 10 Mustang runs were enough to beat the Great Falls Voyagers last night, 10-6. Pitchers and hitters, fielders and umpires, all did fairly well. The hitting thing that stood out was the 6 run explosion in the Mustang 4th. Buckley hit another long home run over the left field fence with two on (13), followed by Maddox hitting one over the right field fence (10), and then Waldrop followed with another over the right field fence (3).

A hat-trick? No, that is the term used when a player scores 3 goals in hockey. How about home run trio? Hmm, have to think on that for awhile. In any event, unusual and exciting and probably depressing for the Great Falls pitchers.

Speaking of pitchers, our bullpen looked good. Starting pitcher Guillon did fairly well for 4 innings, though he was wild as usual. Contreras was hurt as he took a line drive off one of his shins and was unable to continue in the 5th inning. Dan Jensen came on and according to the box score got the win but I'm not sure how that came about as I thought the pitcher of record in the inning in which the winning runs scored was the winner. Wait a minute, maybe the 6th run in the 9th inning negated the starter's efforts? Yes, that is the probable explanation. I'm not quite trustful of the scorer as he tends to score hits more easily than a lot of us would. Maybe our expectations are too high.

The Mustangs are now tied with the Voyagers and the Osprey for first place in the Northern Division, with 7 wins and 5 losses each, though since Missoula won the first half the Voyagers are the critical opponents to stay ahead of to make the playoffs. In the Southern Division the Casper Ghosts and the Ogden Raptors seem to have changed uniforms in the 2nd half of the season. Probably has something to do with promotions and demotions of players.

We are all worried that Sean Buckley is looking too good in the batting department. He might just be needed higher up in the organization.

Who Would Have Thought?: Driftwood On Ice

Check this out from Climate Realists. Isn't it fun to run into things you had no idea existed? Like unicorns?

From My Email and Common Sense Reasoning

From Ann Coulter in Human Events, "The Sun Never Sets On The British Welfare System"—for those of you too young to remember, the title is an allusion to a common, though even then ironic assertion by the school teachers on both sides of the Atlantic among us that "the sun never sets on the British Empire"—which was frequently heard when studying geography because of all the pink countries on the globe; and from Anthony M. Daniels, writing with the pen name of Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal, "British Degeneracy on Parade," we have an attempt to explain what is going on in the country formerly referred to as Great Britain.

They both say, in much more nuanced terms, this is what you get after from a welfare state—"The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has." I saw that up close in the early 70s. When I timidly pointed out the tendency for everyone to be 'fiddling' in one way or another, upper, middle and lower classes, it was not well received by my fellow officers in the Royal Air Force.