ConservativeINC

A couple of days ago the much anticipated Mitchell [Smear] Report came out name dropping some pretty famous baseball players. But, after looking through the massive college term paper-like document, one comes to realize that it’s a bunch of old news with a smattering of investigative reporting thrown in for good measure.

But does it matter?

These are grown men and women (Marion Jones) we are talking about. It’s not like they don’t know the possible repercussions of taking steroids; they’ve made the decision that they have more to gain than lose. But there are other issues at hand here.

For example, what about the records?

Give me a break. The records from old aren’t tarnished by any of this. There are tons of differences between Babe Ruth’s area and Barry Bond’s era. Ruth had to play with gigantic fields, spit balls, a shorter season, balls that were less tightly wound, and obesity. Barry Bonds has many advantages other than his alleged use of steroids (by the way, I say “alleged” for legal reasons only). Barry has smaller fields, balls with bounce, maple bats, a longer season, more teams to dilute talent, and modern training techniques that, even without steroids, are vastly superior to hot dogs and beer.

Comparing Babe Ruth to Barry Bonds is like comparing apples with oranges. Or, better yet, a WWI flying ace with any present day pilot. Baseball is no longer a game or a pastime; it is a business. The players train nearly year-round for this and can focus exclusively on improving themselves. They also have better technology with which to improve their conditioning and their performance.

Records are meant to be broken. But there is something that can still be held onto by baseball’s statistical mavens: Babe Ruth outpaced everyone during his era by a bigger margin than Bonds has now. Even without steroids we cannot compare players across eras based solely on raw numbers. But we can compare players across eras based on how well they did in comparison to their contemporaries.

For example, when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927 that total was greater than any other American League team. Any other team! When Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 Sammy Sosa was only nine behind. If you doubled Bonds’ total of 73 it would still not equal the total home runs hit by the power-hungry Mets for that year. If you correct for era the results do not lie; Babe Ruth is a legend and Barry Bonds is merely the best.

But what about the unfair advantage it creates between steroid users and the people they play against?

There are a thousand different ways to gain an advantage over the other guy. And far from proving to me that steroids always work I am of the belief that it hurts a heck of a lot more than it helps most players. Just look at the names mentioned within Mitchell’s report. Ever heard of Paxton Crawford? How about Ricky Stone? Assuredly there are many big names contained in this list but there are more that aren’t in the list than are in it.

Maybe you could argue that steroids got the bad players further than they otherwise would have gone naturally, but you cannot be sure. The truth is that even if you do take a bevy of performance enhancements you still have to put the work in. Steroids, as I understand it, don’t make your muscles grow magically. Steroids help your muscles repair faster after a workout. So, while steroids can be a help, sometimes a big help, the player has to put the work in.

But there’s another side to steroid use. Using them can lead to your body breaking down. Basically, the muscles can do more than the body can handle and injuries start to pile up. Plus, steroids don’t improve eye hand coordination, baseball instincts, and knowledge about the opposing team’s pitcher, which all leads to better performance. I’m not saying that steroids don’t provide an edge but I don’t think they provide the insurmountable edge that they are made out to give an athlete.

What about the children?

You know they are going to use steroids. Using steroids can give you that extra little push above the competition and there are a bunch of kids whose lives’ revolve around sports. So it just makes sense that they are going to use steroids.

What really freaks me out about this is that there is more opposition to kids using steroids than there is to kids snorting coke. It just strikes me as odd, that’s all. I’ve seen friends fall into the mediocrity that pot smoking brings but I’ve never seen a friend’s head explode because they were using HGH. I remember this one kid who was given HGH because he was particularly short; I guess they thought maybe HGH could solve his vertically challenged frame. All it ended up doing was making him the most ripped little person in the area.

Basically, even if baseball and every other competitive league out there bans steroids, kids are always going to push the limit. I wouldn’t let some self-righteous ninny shame you into hating hulked-up baseball player X because his use might push little Johnny into using as well. Hulked-up baseball player X also spends five hours a day working out and I don’t see millions of high school baseball players out there at dawn running through the park or going to the gym twice a day. Why would one think that kids are going to only mimic bad behavior?

The only way you’re going to get kids to stop using steroids is if there is no money to be made by being an elite athlete. If there’s a big enough reward people are always going to take chances; even when they are risking their own lives. As long as there’s money to be made by being stronger and faster there will always be people who will take steroids.

So are you saying baseball should allow steroid use?

Yes. I am.

Steroids, in my mind, are just another way to better yourself. It isn’t an offense to God to take them and there’s an ever increasing amount of supplements to use to improve your performance. To me, steroids are just a souped up version of protein powder and vitamin supplements. Yeah, steroids are going to make the wrong things shrink and grow and they’re going to cut down your lifespan by many years, but you know that going in.

Smoking cigarettes cuts down on lifespans without the same performance enhancing affects. So does alcohol and fatty foods. And sugar. But is there a special committee doing research into… oh, wait, never mind.

The opposition to steroids comes from a couple of quarters. Some are purists and don’t want change to happen to the game. Others want to protect the health of the athletes and the children. Others want to make sure that there is a level playing field for sporting activities. Many people who oppose steroid use fall into more than one of these categories. But steroids, like all advancements, are going to happen. They aren’t an affront to God nor inherently immoral.

Eventually science is going to come through with a substance that delivers steroid-like performance enhancements without the deadly side effects. What then? Shall we continue to oppose these performance enhancing drugs? No, that would be ludicrous.

Instead of succumbing to the Luddite argument that advance is not good we should embrace this change.

Someone needs to be the guinea pigs for this; why not people getting paid millions of dollars a year? Today, Barry Bonds gets to hit a home run every eight at bats at the cost of a gigantic melon head and an early death. But tomorrow we might find a steroid or similar supplement that provides superhero performance without any grotesque side effects. And all because Barry Bonds and his increased hat sized teammates took the first steps.

Would I use steroids?

Heck no! BigT

Tell Your Friends! Bookmark Me!



Take Me To Your Homepage!

Chavez’s Heaven on Earth.

Mark Steyn: World Should Give America Thanks.

Panel says Earth is getting warmer.

Climate inaction = end of the world.

Stay-Rod.

Mixed families = More abuse.

Instant messaging led girl to suicide.

Democrats take on climate change.

Warren Buffett counseled A-Rod to be Stay-Rod.

After thumping on licenses for illegals Spitzer takes up gay marriage cause.

Ron Paul’s Nut Brigade’s economic policy.

Kerry is getting around to disproving Swift Boat claims.

BigT

Tell Your Friends! Bookmark Me!



Take Me To Your Homepage!

Very few people have any sense of history. They were never taught it and they never wanted to learn it. This is how we get stories from places like Variety that exposes this lack of historical understanding. In a story titled Strike fight rages on in a bubble we have yet another example of this ignorance.

strike rhetoric is oddly mirroring modern politics, where partisans now filter straight-ahead reporting through an “us vs. them” prism, seeking out accounts that buttress their views while shunning those that might challenge them.

This represents a relatively recent dynamic, fueled by the Rush Limbaugh era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet, which barely existed during the last strike in 1988. It’s an especially poisonous environment when applied to this fracas, since talent and the studios must eventually reunite once the saber-rattling and marching ends, whereas political combatants (or at least their public mouthpieces) are now locked in a state of perpetual warfare, the better to spice up the give and take on “Hannity & Colmes.”

Do people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes paint issues in an “us versus them” light? Absolutely! How about during the American Civil War? How about Rome when Julius Caeser became a tyrant and was knifed in the Senate? How about the Garden of Eden when God told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed they would get evicted? Every important event through history was based on an “us versus them” basis because that is the essence of importance. An issue that has importance to two or more divergent groups will always have contentious moments. Blaming this on Rush Limbaugh is ridiculous and is symptomatic of a greater problem for the Left; they don’t have an answer for Conservative political thinkers so they revert to blaming them for everything that goes wrong. Sad.

I’m surprised that the Left hasn’t blamed Rush for Pakistan yet. Pakistani affairs is based on an “us versus them” situation right now. Musharraf against the Taliban and the terrorists. Bhutto against Musharraf. Bhutto’s niece against Bhutto. Things in Pakistan are going to get much worse before they get any better especially if Musharraf has declared martial law in order to cement his power base. But that isn’t the only reason he declared martial law.

Al Qaeda, according to its leader Osama bin Laden, declared war on Pakistan a month ago. Terrorist organizations are taking more land in the Pakistani badlands every day and Musharraf has reacted to this threat. Is he a great option for Pakistan? No. Is he the best they have? Probably. Their other options are, well, basically their other option is Benazir Bhutto. While Musharraf is a bad option, Bhutto may be a lot worse. She is extremely corrupt (seems to go with the territory with any politician, especially those in the Middle East) and was one of three international leaders that recognized Afghanistan’s Taliban government. All I have to say right now is that just because the current guy is bad doesn’t mean he should be deposed because the alternatives may prove to be much worse.

This incessant need to “do something” isn’t just limited to Pakistan. Doing something for the sake of change itself is the mantra of the Left in general. Take climate change for example. The UN is hard at work creating a 25 page document that is supposed to lay out a plan designed to “aide” governments in combating climate change. We still don’t know what causes global warming (it could be the SUN, it could have something to do with water evaporation, who knows?) but gee golly we’re going to prevent it!

Maybe we could switch all our energy over ethanol! Well, not so fast. Cato, named after one of those Senators that was against Caeser (of course he didn’t stab Caeser because he was dead, suicide) succinctly makes this point:

“Ethanol will not lead to energy independence. If all the corn produced in America in 2005 were dedicated to ethanol production (and only 14.3 percent of it was), U.S. gasoline consumption would have dropped by only 12 percent. For corn ethanol to completely displace gasoline in this country, we would need to appropriate all U.S. cropland, turn it over to ethanol production, and then find 20 percent more land on top of that.”

Look, our insatiable appetite for oil is an extremely important issue, arguably the most important issue for the next half a century. It’s price is rising faster then a rocket and that money is going to our enemies. Heck, throw in its ill affects to the environment if that makes you feel better. Something needs to be done but the last entity I would entrust to find a solution to this dire predicament is any government (or an international body). Things will start happening in the open markets as price increases makes changes economically feasible.

Whatever we end up doing it shouldn’t be done by the government. Take Don’t Look to Government to Cool Down the Planet by John Stossel:

There are good reasons to begin with a presumption against government action. As coercive monopolies that spend other people’s money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving. The synthetic-fuels program during the Carter years consumed billions of dollars and was finally disbanded as a failure. The push for ethanol today is more driven by special interests than good sense — it’s boosting food prices while producing a fuel of dubious environmental quality.

Even if the climate really needs cooling down, government can’t be counted on to accomplish that. Advocates of carbon taxes and emissions trading talk about reducing CO2, but they promise no more than a minuscule reduction in temperature. Temperature reduction is supposed to be the objective.

In fact, even drastic plans to cut the use of carbon-based energy would make only a negligible difference. As John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a member of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal:

“Suppose you are very serious about making a dent in carbon emissions and could replace about 10 percent of the world’s energy sources with non-CO2-emitting nuclear power by 2020 — roughly equivalent to halving U.S. emissions. Based on IPCC-like projections, the required 1,000 new nuclear power plants would slow the warming by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per century. It’s a dent.”

I agree with Stott, who says, “The right approach to climate change is adaptation — and the way to do that is to have strong economies.”

We will have a strong economy if we don’t give up our freedom and our money to fulfill the grand schemes of big-government alarmists.

Next week: How the private sector could deal with a global-warming problem.

We’ll be waiting for that next column.

Something that really can’t wait any longer is our airport security. The GAO has found that it can smuggle bomb making components onto planes, components that can be made into bombs that could take down a plane. I’ve heard special ops guys say they can smuggle a broken down sniper riffle through most security systems (with the Israelis as an exception). But a bomb? This is what happens when the government (not counting the military, of course) does something.

The reason why the government cannot be trusted with important issues is because the politicians that run it are pathetic. Even though all the frontrunning Democrat hopefuls have put the breaks on getting the troops out of Iraq before 2013 the House has passed an Iraq war bill for less then President Bush had asked for with one disgusting caveat. The troops have to be out by the end of next year. This will doubtlessly be vetoed by the President but there’s no way he should even be put in this position.

In a different part of the world the Russians have “removed” troops from Georgia except for “peace keepers” in two separatist regions. Do I think this move is a noble gesture showing that Russia has turned a corner and doesn’t want to control those it formerly controlled? No. This seems to me to be a geopolitical chess move made to make Russian President Vladimir Putin look like a good guy. He’s positioning himself to be ruler for life in Russia and is going to need international support to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

So he has given feckless Western democracies a bone with Georgia without really giving anything up. He’s going to have his “peace keepers” work to undermine the Georgian government through the separatist regions. Mr Putin still believes in an all-powerful Soviet Union and is making it his life’s work to make that vision become a reality.

Switching back to America. Home prices seemed to have no ceiling three years ago. Everyone was worried that people would be priced out of the market and the middle class would no longer exist. Things have changed; real estate is at it lowest point in two and a half years and the floor seems to be nonexistent. The same people that were decrying the rising real estate prices are playing the same part as the prices are falling. Shouldn’t everything be better now that more people can afford homes? I mean, that was the worry just a couple years ago, prices were just too high for the normal family. I guess this just shows that you should be careful what you wish for.

Finally we are going to jet set to China where Yahoo! narked on some journalists who were critical of the commies in China. The journalists were quickly thrown in jail and Yahoo! was shamed. Now they have secretively settled with the journalists’ families and they’re hoping that his all blows over. What this situation shows is that China cannot be trusted. Yes, we still should do business with them but we need to make it on our terms, not theirs. Throwing journalists in jail for no good reason is a clear sign that you are in a totalitarian regime. China cannot be trusted.

BigT’s Linkapalooza:
Chinese sensors being sued for cutting out sex scenes in movie.
More sex, this time with nuns. Exciting!
Spitzer’s license defeat spun as “win” by NY Times.
Hugo mad at Spain.
Brangelina buy island in Dubai.
DC Liberals cheat taxes? Say it ain’t so.
Learning music = higher earnings.
A-Rod, alas, may still play in pinstripes.
BigT

Tell Your Friends! Bookmark Me!



Take Me To Your Homepage!