Hypocrisy Run Amok

American sanctions against Saddam Hussein caused the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi children. When asked by ABC's Barbara Walters if it was worth it, then-Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright - on national TV - paused for a moment, and said, "That is a tough question, but, yes, it was worth it to protect...blah, blah, blah...the American people...blah, blah, blah...from Saddam Hussein...blah, blah..." 

I was astounded. Albright not only acknowledged that it happened, which is extraordinary, but she said: "it was worth it." One hundred thousand children sacrificed to secure an ideology. Sounds like something Stalin would have done. Yet, this happened in America, by Americans, on the eve of the 21st century. 

Then last week, on Fox's "The Five," co-host, Geraldo Rivera, called Russia's President Putin "a beast" whose shelling has caused the deaths of 105 Ukrainian children. Fellow co-host, Jesse Watters, lamented how these "civilized people" were being murdered, (as though the uncivilized people of Iraq and Afghanistan were simply collateral damage.) I suspect to Rivera, Korea who, thanks to US sanctions, die as we speak, do not matter much, either. I just wonder: Do we Americans has a national conscience, besides the fake one, I mean, that tells us how compassionate we are. 

Last month, President Biden decreed that of the seven billion dollars of Afghan funds the US holds, he will give 3.5 billion to 911 survivors - the same survivors whom we have already lavished millions upon since that tragic day 20 years ago. Biden, too, must consider the Afghan people "uncivilized" and therefore unworthy of what belongs to them, and what they so desperately need.  

America's hypocrisy runs amok. Do we not see ourselves? Are we not still a Christian nation? Do not believe God is watching? Do we care? 

King James

Lebron James, who is recently averaging close to 40 points a game, declares he is having "the time of his life." His team, on the other hand - the Los Angeles Lakers - are getting their doors blown off most every night. They are currently 11 games under .500. I wonder if his teammates are having as much fun as he. Lebron seems to have taken the tact, "Hey, I'm winning my match-ups every night. They're the ones losing." 

Something has changed with Lebron. He was "old school" - of the fraternity of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Kobe Bryant. There, losing is hateful. That's all. Suddenly, Lebron finds a way to factor losing into a good night?  

Hands Down, Play Ball

Defense wins games; offense sells tickets. This might have presented a conundrum, except NBA teams, and the league, itself, work from separate paradigms. Teams want to win games. They will be happy winning a game 50-49. The league, on the other hand, wants shoot-outs. It doesn't care who wins. When offenses are spectacular, ratings rise; the league wins. And, the league has made this decision: Hands down, play ball.

The NBA will not admit it, but it discourages defense. (Why do you think they let players "step" all over the place?) Contesting shots only slow the game down. And teams - certainly players - are willing falling in line. Think about it: They accumulate most of their fouls on the defensive side of the ball. Play too much defense, like Giannis Antetokounmpo did the other night, and you end up fouling out, which severely limits your offensive output. Just ain't worth it. Besides, adulation, pay checks, post season honors, are all infinitely more impacted by offensive production, than what is done at the other end of the court. 

Lebron James know what time it is. Once a stellar defender, he now saves his 37-year-old legs for the offensive end of the court. He doesn't win many games, these days, but as he, himself, says, he is having a damned good time.  

 

More Weapons, More Weapons...More Blood

There is no romance in war. Romance is for the movies, and literature books. War is bloodshed and death. Yet, Americans want to romanticize the Ukraine debacle, and pretend that the glorious Ukrainian people have reaffirmed our faith in the human spirit. They have not. The nature of most biologies, when cornered, is to fight back. Putin has done the reaffirming. He has reaffirmed man's inhumanity. 

Ukraine made a mistake when it lined up and fought the Russians. There was a middle ground they could have chosen, one that would have admitted humility, but would have spared their families and their cities the devastation they now will be left with. What a tremendous waste. 

Now, we want to label Putin a "war criminal." Of course, Putin is a war criminal for his unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation. So, too, are John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon war criminals - that trio who led an unprovoked invasion of an agrarian society, and slaughtered a million Vietnamese people. George W. Bush is a war criminal. He launched an unprovoked attack upon the Iraqi people under the guise of ridding the world of "weapons of mass destruction." Finding none, he killed 100,000 Iraqis in the ensuing conflict. Then, there is Obama, Trump, and Biden who continued Bush's "war of choice," killing countless men, women, and children because we were there.  

How soon we forget, though it was only months ago when Biden slaughtered a family of eight with a drone strike on his way out of Afghanistan. Who will adjudicate Putin's crimes - the International Criminal Court, the same people who looked the other way when America committed similar crimes, and worse? 

Putin is Putin. He is a relic of the Soviet past. He cannot help himself. What is our excuse? Let us look in the mirror and see the modern war criminal: It is us who cry for "more weapons" to feed the Ukraine, who cry for "more blood" to be spilled. It is the media, the politicians, the average American citizen who lionize those "brave Ukrainians" who fight and kill and die; they who blow up their own bridges (until their own refugees cannot get away); they who watch as the future of their nation - those precious, precious babies - flee a gutted country, while we cheer them on. We stop to commisserate over the  carnage, then cry for more weapons to create more carnage in the name of twisted romance. 

We supposed-civilized people are the war criminals who wisdom has forsaken us, whose imagination has shrunken to a primordial cry for "more weapons, more blood."

Make Sense of Today by Looking Through History's Prism

In support of their independence from Russia, Ukrainians assert their "own history" prior to once being a part of Greater Russia. To that, I say, almost every state on Earth had its own histories before being incorporated into the nations they belong to today. Germany, Japan, Italy - each started out as collections of geographical regions, like the city-states of Athens, Ithaca, Sparta, etc., who clung to their singular identities until they combined to become the Greece we know today.

In the United States, Texas can legitimately claim to have had its own history before becoming part of this great nation; so can every other state in this union. Once each state became a part of the U.S., each of their singular histories became subservient to the history of the whole. 

Without defending Putin, I suggest that his obsession with Ukraine is similar to the obsession this nation had with Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, and the other states who quit the U.S. and formed the confederacy. It was a secession President Lincoln, and the states which elected him refused to recognize as legitimate. As a consequence of this secession, the Union pummelled the secessionist states, none so vigorously as the state of Virginia. 

In a lot of ways, Virginia was to the Confederacy what the Ukraine was to Russia. Its size, resources, and political importance made it critical to the visibility of the larger state. And, like the Ukraine, which bore the brunt of World War II, Virginia bore the brunt of America's Civil War. 

President Lincoln, himself, told General Sheridan to lay waste to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy, "until even a crow flying over, will have to carry his own provender." More battles were fought on Virginia soil during the Civil War than any other state in the Union. Likewise, the Ukraine became the central meeting place for the slaughter that became World War II. At the end of a single battle between the Germans and the Russians - the Battle for Kyiv - the Germans took 600,000 Russian soldiers prisoner and marched them to slave labor camps in Germany. Other great battles followed on Ukrainian soil - Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zhytomyr, and the bloody sieges of Odesa and Sevastopol. Russians bled a river defending the Ukraine from Hitler's Germany. 

Perhaps, Putin feels that Ukraine's place in Russian history is far more fundamental than any history Ukraine can muster on its own. This does not excuse his invasion of the Ukraine. It only gives it some perspective. 

Ukraine

Most military men are astute students of history. Adolf Hitler justified his treatment of the Jews, based in part, upon America's treatment of its native populations. Today, Putin's foreign minister, Sergei Levrov, wonders how the world can be so apologetic about Russia's treatment of Ukraine when this same world, across the board, never lifted a finger to impose a single sanction when America, under George W. Bush, brutally invaded Iraq, though Iraq had not committed a single offense against America. 

By the way: Ukraine's President Zelensky made a mistake when he forced his civilian men between the ages of 18 and 60 to take up arms against the Russians. Once civilians fire on enemy troops, those civilians become legitimate military targets. After shooting at Russian soldiers during the day, those civilian soldiers, no doubt, go home to their apartments. Those apartments, then, immediately become legitimate military targets, especially when those civilians are soldiers, from time to time, take shots at the Russian soldiers, or drop "Molotov" cocktails from their apartments windows and roofs.   

When President Zelensky started passing out weapons on the street with the instructions to "kill Russians" he gave up any right he might have had to cry "war crimes!" when the Russians return fire on his people. 

I don't care anything about the Russians, but we must be fair.  

Reign of the Three-Pointer

Steph Curry was reigning down 3-pointers of a biblical scale. Folks were having such fun. I tried not to say anything. But, when the clamor descended into hysteria, for the sake of humanity, someone had to say something.

Steph Curry is not the "greatest shooter God ever created," as ESPN's Stephen A. Smith so vociferously advocates. Steph is good. He may be great. But, is not "the greatest." 

The 3-pointer is one of many shots taken on a basketball court, including dunks, lay-ups, mid-range jumpers, hook shots, etc. Of these, the 3-pointer is the easiest shot to attempt. Let me give you an example: In a recent game between the Bucks and the Heat, both teams combined to take nearly twenty 3 pointers in the first quarter, alone. (They missed most of them.) In that same quarter, not a single dunk shot was attempted.  

Looking at the latest rankings of NBA player stats, I noticed that Steph is not among the top 30 in field goal percentage in the league, (though his brother Seth is ranked 20th at 51%). Neither does Steph's percentage rank among the top 30 3-point shooters, (though his teammate, Wiggins, is 16th at 42%). Steph ranks somewhere below the Lakers' Carmelo Anthony, the 30th ranked 3-point shooter at 40%. How could the 'greatest shooter God ever created" neither rank among the top 30 shooters in overall field goal percentage, nor 3-point percentage... in his own time? The objective answer is: He is not the greatest shooter ever. He is not a greater shooter than Jerry West or Kareem Abdul Jabbar. He is not a greater shooter than the Celtic, Sam Jones, whose pull-up 20-foot bank shot was "pure money." In Steph's own time, he is not a greater shooter than Kevin Durant.  

When it comes to shooting, we measure excellence by accuracy. In the five-game stretch surrounding Steph's assault on Ray Allen's 3-point record, Steph made 24 of the 74 3-pointers in attempted. That is 34% shooting. Nevertheless, basketball analysts across the land quickly attach their emotions to Steven A. Smith's visceral response. One analyst, Dominique Foxworth, a contributor on ESPN's popular "GET UP!" morning program, said of Steph's record-breaking performance, "I almost cried." Considering Steph went 4-14 from 3-point range that night, I ask, tongue-in-cheek, "Why ('cry')?" Because he missed so many? Seriously, I am becoming convinced that many of the people in today's media are getting paid based upon how prettily they can clamber onto the bandwagon. 

The basis of all "great shooter" comparisons should begin with, not volume shots taken but the percentage of shots made. If Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, or Steph's own father, Dell Curry, had taken 15 three-pointers a game, any one of them would have made as many 3-pointers as Steph has today. Reggie said it himself: "Five 3-pointers a game was the limit coach would let me take."

There are many great shooters in NBA history. We must refrain from settling such debates with subjective profusions. Better to simply say, "Steph is the most likable shooter of all time." That would be more accurate, especially since accuracy is what we are shooting for.  

Can Children "Stand Your Ground", Too?

A 15-year-old child in Oxford, Michigan, has just shot 11 people at his school, killing four children, and injuring seven others. This happens over and over in America. Why?

We are quick to wonder, "What is happening with these children?" Are we serious? These children are doing what children have done since the beginning of time. They are mimicking the adults in their families, and in their communities. 

Boys watch their fathers drink and smoke and long for the day when they can do the same. And, more and more, they watch men shoot other men, and what American courts declare, "He stood his ground." Some of these children are beginning to wonder, "When bullied, do I have a right to "Stand my ground, too?" It is a legitimate question for children to ask when they see their fathers getting away with it. 

There have been bullies since the Earth first took us on. We have all been bullied at some point in our lives - at home, at school, at work, and at play. As children, we learned to negotiate our way around that bully, or fight. And, for the most part, that is how we got through childhood. Come adulthood, the same principle applied:  Negotiate your way out or fight. Now, this "Wild West" culture has sprung up in America where you do not have to negotiate anymore. If someone threatens you, shoot him. That is your right. And, since nearly everyone in America has a gun nowadays, it is about to come down to who has the quickest draw... again. Only in America.  

I am not saying that what happened in Oxford is indicative of men "standing their ground." I bring up Oxford because it is immediate; more to the point, because schools are the venue where the majority of childhood bullying is most likely to occur. It is that "bullying" as much as anything else that is the catalyst for these terrible "stand your ground" moments.  

Adults must accept full responsibility for having ushered in this third option: the option to shoot. We have condoned men shooting other men in America as though such archaic permissiveness had no chance of seeping into childhood culture and affecting how children handle their own conflicts; without acknowledging that it is the nature of children to mimic adult behavior, no matter how destructive our behavior becomes.  

Children cannot legally own a handgun. However, many children own rifles. Kyle Rittenhouse was 17 when he took an AR-15 rifle and shot three people - killing two and badly wounding a third. The court ruled he acted in self-defense. Do you think other children were not watching? They watched, and they listened as many in America declared Rittenhouse "a hero."  Do you think those children did not like the sound of that? They are children; we all were at one time. We were often quite impressionable. 

I remember school. There, I saw more busted lips, black eyes, and bloodied noes than my father ever saw on his job. I never thought about shooting anyone; I don't think anyone did. I, like the others, negotiated my way around bullies or fought. When we were coming up in the '50s, '60s, and '70, those were the only two options we had. 

These were the good ol' days when men and boys could have their disputes, and still make it home in time for dinner... perhaps sporting a black eye, or two.