Pirates 2011: It’s About The Owners STUPID

What do the Greeks at Thermopylae, Billy Conn vs. Joe Louis, and the 2011 Pittsburgh Pirates have in common? Of course, they all had/have very little chance of winning. Unlike the Greeks and Conn, however, the Pirates offer very little to root for.

Conn vs Louis 1941

This year’s Pirates are almost universally predicted to finish last in the National League Central. They have no offence, pitching, or defense (other than that they are great). Not even the Pirate shills at the PG, KDKA, WTAE, and WPXI, who try to pass themselves off as sports experts, are predicting anything more than last. I guess the 18-year losing streak finally dawned on them.

For years, the Pirate mantra has been, “Trust us; we are building for the future.” Meanwhile, we have slipped into the 21st century and it feels like we will be slipping into the 22nd before the corner gets turned. I once thought that the Pirate ownership and management just lacked the baseball expertise to build a winning team, but a couple of years ago (I am also a slow learner), I realized it was more than incompetence. As my poker-playing buddy, EastEndJohnny puts it, “it's not that they are losers; it’s that they like being losers.”

Mark Cuban

I have been going to Pirate games since 1954, but I started to feel so manipulated and cheated that I stopped buying tickets altogether. The city of Pittsburgh gave the Pirates one of the best and most beautiful baseball parks in the majors. This greatly increased the value of the team and so how are we repaid? I would much rather have the crazy antics of former Pittsburgher Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, than the complacency of the former and current owners.

Clint Hurdle

During the off-season, the Pirates replaced manager John Russell with former Colorado Rockies skipper Clint Hurdle. In eight years with the Rockies, Hurdle had one winning season and compiled a 534-625 W-L record. They also acquired firstbaseman Lyle Overbay ($5 million) who batted .243 with 20 HRs in 154 games last year. This is in addition to last year’s regular Pirate firstbaseman Garrett Jones ($425K) who batted .247 with 21 HRs in 158 games. I guess that they do not realize that you can only play one firstbaseman at a time. This is not exactly encouraging.

So it looks like I will not be buying any Pirate tickets again this year. Of course, if a couple of freebies happen to drop into my lap, I will not turn them down. To be honest, I am a little interested in how the youngsters (McCutchen, Walker, Alvarez, Cedeno, and Tabata) are going to do.

The Second Amendment and the Last Bear Shot in Washington County

An article by John Hayes in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Meet your new neighbors: the bears”, reported that, “The state's black bear population has quadrupled since the early 1980s,” and that there are bears in more than 55 counties in Pennsylvania. I don’t know if this includes Washington County.

I’ve lived in Pittsburgh since 1964, but I’m originally from nearby Washington County. For the first eight years of my life, I lived on a farm that had been owned by my family since the late 1700s. Several years ago, when I was researching our family tree, I found out that one of my ancestors is said to have killed the last bear in Washington County.

James McDowell was born in 1804, and according to family records, “followed farming, stock raising and hunting as an occupation, and was considered in his day a great marksman. ...When about fifteen years of age he, with a flint-lock rifle, went hunting, taking along with him a young fox-hound. Before he was off their own farm, he came up to a black bear. The young hound would not leave him, but with his tail down and bristle's up, kept a sniffing. He finally discovered the bear standing up on its haunches and on firing, the powder flashed in the pan, causing the gun to back fire. In the meantime the bear had got down on all fours and ran about a rod before the gun discharged the ball. This bear was the last one seen in these parts and when dressed the bear weighed 300 pounds. [sic]”

I never liked hunting, but my father John McDowell Jr., was a hunter, so I have some understanding about its appeal. Dad owned two shotguns (12 and 20 gauges) and two rifles (a classic 30 30 Winchester and a 264 magnum with a scope). Dad, however, was a different type of hunter and gunowner – he had a conscience.

Winchester 30 30

Dad never owned a handgun because he thought they were “worthless for hunting and dangerous.” He thought that semi and automatic weapons should only be in the hands of the police or soldiers. He had one cardinal rule when it came to guns: never, never, never point a gun at anyone even if you are 100% absolutely sure that the gun is unloaded.

He never graduated from high school, couldn’t quote the Second Amendment like all the NRA members and gunowners of today, but understood it in a way that these fanatics and indifferent politicians never can.

The Big Fat Tax Lie

Josef Goebbels, the infamous Nazi Party propaganda chief, once said, "Any lie, frequently repeated, will gradually gain acceptance." I see this happening every day, especially when politicians make seemingly common sense statements and the media fail to investigate their validity. Take the health care debate where Republicans have charged that Democratic reforms will lead to death panels. Or how about the charge that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus his Presidency is illegitimate? Despite being false, these ideas have gained widespread acceptance.

One of the most widely accepted and destructive of these lies is the belief that Americans, especially the middle class, are overtaxed. It has been repeated ad nauseum over the last decade and has become so widely and fanatically embraced that any candidate who even thinks about raising taxes is committing political suicide. So let’s take a look at it:

The following table [1] compares the percentage of pay after taxes of the US to a number of other developed countries:

Table: AVERAGE PAY AFTER TAXES January 1, 2000
	Married		Married 2 Children
Country	$40K	$100K	$40K	$100K
Canada (Ont)	76%	64%	76%	64%
Denmark	65%	48%	65%	48%
Germany	69%	65%	80%	71%
Italy	68%	60%	69%	61%
Japan	83%	75%	83%	77%
Netherlands	64%	59%	64%	59%
Sweden	60%	53%	60%	53%
U.K.	76%	70%	76%	70%
U.S.	78%	74%	84%	77%

What the table tells us is that on January 1, 2000, Americans were able to keep a larger percentage of their paychecks than any of the other comparable developed countries.

According to Wikipedia, “Tax Freedom Day is the first day of the year in which a nation as a whole has theoretically earned enough income to fund its annual tax burden.” Here in the United States, we’ve actually seen it decrease from May 1st in 2000, the height of the Clinton economic boom, to April 9th in 2010. Around the world, Tax Freedom Day is later. For example, Tax Freedom Day for Spain, the UK, Canada, Germany and France is May 21, 2008; May 30, 2010; June 6, 2009; July 8, 2008; and July 16, 2007, respectively.

Fact: Americans are paying less in taxes today than 10 years ago and less in taxes than other developed countries.

Most Americans would either disagree with these facts or cheer if they agree. Normally, I would be one of the ones cheering if it wasn’t for the downsides and there are a number of serious downsides. The most serious of these are crippling our local municipalities. With less revenue coming in, local municipalities have been forced to make drastic cuts in teachers, police, firefighters, and maintenance workers, with resultant deteriorations in public education, safety, and infrastructure.

In order to rationalize the deterioration in public education and justify tax cuts, parents, public officials, reformers, and reactionaries have made teachers their scapegoats. Teachers are frequently characterized as greedy and inept, supported by unions and out-dated tenure rules. Such criticisms, however, totally ignore the fact that, all things being equal, the most important factor in determining quality education is class size. Study after study has shown this to be true. As Don Iglesias, Superintendent of public schools in San Jose, California, was quoted as saying about teacher lay-offs: “This is not a choice that anybody is making because we think increasing class size is a wonderful thing for our schools. It's a choice because there's ineptitude in terms of our elected officials in Sacramento and their unwillingness to raise taxes.” [2] (Emphasis mine.)

Likewise, police and firefighter layoffs have left us less secure. For example, prosecutors in Camden, New Jersey, recently reported a dramatic rise in violent crime two months after 160 police officers were laid off. Aggravated assaults with firearms jumped 259 percent in January and February compared to last year, and violent crime over all is up 19 percent, the Camden County Prosecutor's Office told the Philadelphia Inquirer. [3]

In the case of maintenance of infrastructure, there other considerations. Postponing repairs not only incurs safety risks, but also increases their costs, because the problems inevitably get worse and because we pay for them with inflated dollars. Repairs that cost $1,000,000 in 2011 dollars might cost $2,000,000 in 2021 dollars.

There are more problems. First, irresponsible tax cuts exacerbate economic problems in a circular way: e.g., cut taxes → less revenue → layoffs → even less revenue → even more layoffs. Second, groups like the Tea Party say that one of their goals is to take back control from the Federal Government by cutting taxes and spending. What they don’t realize is that irresponsible tax cuts actually have the opposite effect. With less revenue coming in, local municipalities and states have had to rely more on money from the Feds. However, when Federal money is available, it always comes with strings attached and results in even more control over local municipalities and states. Lastly, this entrenched belief that Americans are overtaxed leads politicians to be even more dishonest than they usually are, because any hint of raising taxes could result in the death knell of their careers.

Let me make this clear, however: I am not saying that the solution to our economic and budget problems is to irresponsibly raise taxes in the future just as we have irresponsibly cut taxes in the past. What I am saying is that any sincere discussions about budget shortfalls have got to include raising taxes in a responsible way. If it doesn't, it is totally disingenuous, whether coming from the right, left, center, conservatives, liberals, Tea Partiers, rich, middle-class or what have you. The reason for this is that spending cuts will get only you so far, and in order to completely balance budgets, we would have to make so many draconian cuts that even the ultra-conservatives would cry uncle.

Unfortunately, the rich, with the help of their political proxies, have done such a thorough job of brainwashing Americans into believing that we are overtaxed as to take it completely off the table. So when any of those “inept elected officials” whom Superintendent Iglesias alluded to, suggests cutting taxes, even the people who would be hurt the most support it. As long as we Americans keep blindly accepting statements that are put forward by the short-sighted, statements such as “Americans are overtaxed,” and “AIG and other financial institutions are too big to fail,” we will keep shooting ourselves in the foot. As a wry poker player once quipped about continually calling with the worst hand, “First you shoot yourself in the left foot, then you shoot yourself in the right foot, and then you blow your head off.”

1. Adams, Cecil, “Are U.S. taxes low compared to the rest of the industrialized world?”, December 1, 2000, The Straight Dope.
2. Montgomery, Michael, “Class Sizes Begin to Rise Again in California Schools”, November 19, 2009, The California Report.
3. Goodwin, Liz, “Violent crime spikes after Camden halves police force”, March 7, 2011, The Lookout.

Éirinn go Brách Brendan Behan

St Patrick’s Day is tomorrow and I was thinking about Brendan Behan, the Irish novelist, playwright, and raconteur. In the late 60’s and early 70’s he had an influence on my friends and me.

Behan was born in Dublin in 1923 to an educated working-class family. Behan's uncle, Peadar Kearney, wrote the Irish national anthem, "Amhrán na bhFiann." His brother, Dominic Behan, was also a renowned songwriter best known for the song, "The Patriot Game;" another sibling, Brian Behan, was a prominent radical political activist and public speaker, actor, author, and playwright.

While still in his teens, Behan joined the IRA and when 16, he was found in possession of explosives and arrested. Behan was sentenced to three years in Borstal, a type of youth prison in England. In 1942, Brendan was tried for the attempted murder of two detectives in Dublin while at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism. This time, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, but was released after four years under a general amnesty in 1946.

This ended his IRA career, and he next threw himself into his house-painting, writing, and of course drinking, which he had always been serious about. After writing the plays The Quare Fellow (1954), An Giall (1958), The Hostage (1958) and the books Borstal Boy (1958), Brendan Behan's Island (1962), Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963), Brendan achieved a modicum of fame and money. In 1960, he visited New York and immediately become a media darling, the embodiment of the stereotypical Irish drunken writer, a role that he was all too willing to play. When asked what he would most like to see in Spain, he replied, "Franco's funeral." When asked what he thought of Canada, he said it would be all right when it was finished. But when asked, he said, “New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment…a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.”

Some of Behan’s other memorable quotes are:

“If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.”

“It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”

“An author's first duty is to let down his country.”

“I never turned to drink. It seemed to turn to me.”

“I'd rather be dead than think about death.”

“Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.”

“The English always have their wars in someone else's country.”

“There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”

“When I came back to Dublin I was court marshaled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.”

My friends and I loved reading about Bren’s drinking exploits, conveniently ignoring the downsides which were chronicled in his brother Dominic’s biography, My Brother Brendan. Suffering terribly, with diabetic comas and seizures, Brendan followed alcohol to its logical end, dying in 1964 at the age of 41. So on St Paddy’s Day, Brendan, here’s one for you. Éirinn go Brách!

Some Terms That I've Coined

“Narnia Organization” An organization with an extremely young management team. © 2011 John McDowell

“Ralphie Decoder Pin Trap” A term referring to a number of unethical marketing and spam techniques. © 2011 John McDowell

“Alexander Syndrome” Self-inflicted problems arising from over confidence gained as a result of early success and/or excessive praise. © 2011 John McDowell

“Sugar Daddy in the Sky Christianity” The belief that if you ingratiate yourself to Jesus that he will give you money, cars, or other gifts. (added 9/4/2011) © 2011 John McDowell

“Sob Story TV” Realty TV shows and commercials that make sympathy-laden stories part of their format in order to appeal to public sympathy, boost rating, and increase advertising revenue. (added 9/10/2011) © 2011 John McDowell

"Piranha Group" An organization whose members intolerantly attack outsiders and members of the organization itself. (added 10/12/2011) © 2011 John McDowell

Re: NFL/NFL Players Association Negotiations Breakdown

I really, really don’t care!

Is Jamie Dixon Overrated Or Much Better Than We Think?

After Pitt’s disappointing loss to UConn yesterday, my poker-playing buddy, EastEndJohnny, remarked that he thought that Pitt’s coach, Jamie Dixon, is overrated. As East points out, “He just can’t win the big one.” He might have a point. On March 2, 2011, Dixon won his 214th game and broke the all-time NCAA record for the most wins in a coach's first eight seasons. In the Big East and NCAA Tourneys, however, it’s been a succession of heartbreaking losses. He has taken Pitt to the final game of the Big East Men's Basketball Tournament four times in 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2008 but has only won once, and in his seven trips to the NCAA Tourney, Pitt has gone out in the first or second round four times and has been completely shut out of the final four.

But let’s take a look at it. My contention is that Pitt’s disappointing tournament record under Dixon has come about because he is so great at getting his teams to overachieve during the regular season. When they do get to the tourneys, we forget that his players are just not as good as their opponents. Sam Young, DeJuan Blair, Aaron Gray, Chris Taft, and Brandin Knight are the names of his star players, none of whom has become more than NBA bench warmers. The highest that any of them has been drafted is 36^th.

This year’s Panthers are another fine example of Jamie’s magic. With a cast of good-but-not-great players such as Ashton Gibbs, Brad Wanamaker, and Gilbert Brown (16.7, 12, and 10.9 ppg respectively), Dixon has put together another excellent regular season going 27-4. Now with Pitt’s flame-out in the Big East, it looks like all of us in Panther Nation are poised for another let-down. But wouldn’t it be nice if this year the March Madness gods smiled down on Jamie - just once? It couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving guy.

The Big Voter Candidate Disconnect

Have you ever heard someone say, “I really don’t want to vote for either candidate. They are both the same?” There is more than a little truth in this perception and it lies at the heart of the problem of why there is such a disconnect between the way Americans would like their office-holders to act and the way they actually do.

That’s because you don’t elect the candidates; the wealthy and powerful do. And this is even true when you vote in primaries. And which candidates do the wealthy and powerful support? You guessed it – the ones that will vote their way. So we end up voting for tweedle-rich and tweedle-richer.

In the last Presidential election, there couldn’t have been a clearer choice between the failed Republican past and the bright Obama future. So after two years in office, what we have is an articulate George Bush (please, dear God, don't let this hold up). Let’s take a look at it: Obama has traded in the war in Iraq for the war in Afghanistan. He was able to get a health care bill passed but it is health-care-light with few benefits for struggling Americans and doing nothing to address spiraling health care costs. And what has he done to stop the rape of America by the so-called “financial institutions that are too big to fail?” Nothing. And in what may be the biggest joke of all, we are all still just as vulnerable to the types of Black Swan events that brought us to our knees in the first place. Wall Street continues to gamble while Main Street suffers. And of course, even sadder still, I will vote for Obama again because he's the best of the worst.

So is there anything we can do to put elections back in the hands of the voters? Well, campaign finance reform that limits individual contributions to that which the average American can give, and preventing contributions from businesses and other organizations altogether would be a step forward. In light of reform attempts in the last decade and the horrible 2010 Supreme Court ruling, this seems unlikely. Term limits have also been bandied about but again with not much support from an apathetic voter nation. As Cicero said 2000 years ago, “Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.”