Archive for June 12, 2024

A Boston Sports Thought, Brady and the Celtics

Posted: June 12, 2024 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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As you might know yesterday was a very good day for Boston Sports. The Red Sox came back from a deficit to defeat the 1st place Phillies to get their record back to .500 2 games behind the Twins for the last wild card spot. The Boston Celtics held on against a furious 4th quarter attack by the Mavericks to go up 3-0 against Dallas and put then one win away from a title.

And finally Tom Brady’s number was retired by the Patriots in a big event which competed with game 3.

The Brady event is very significant. Before the coming of Brady no Boston team had won a title since the days of Larry Bird. After Brady won that first title everything changed. Brady won six titles in Boston and in between those six titles the Celtics and Bruins both won titles when they had not won since the 1980’s and 1970’s respectively and the Red Sox who had not won a title since 1918 won four titles three of them on the back of David Ortiz who is the closest thing to Brady we’ve seen in Boston since Bird and Russell.

Brady won his last title in Boston (but not HIS last title) on February 19th 2019. That was the last title any Boston team has won in any major sport.

While some in Boston sports complained about the clash of this event with game 3 I think it’s very appropriate that it takes place when it did. As I noted Brady brought titles back to Boston and he furthermore won the last title that Boston has seen. It’s great to celebrate him as a team in on the verge of winning the first post Brady title for a team in Boston in the 21st century.

Although in fairness Dallas will have a say on if this happens or not.

I’m Sorry But Isn’t that a good thing?

Posted: June 12, 2024 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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I saw this headline at Hotair and my reaction was a tad different than you might expect:

Depressing: US Soldiers More Likely to Die by Suicide Than in Combat

and a bit from the piece:

One of the most alarming statistics reveals that U.S. soldiers were more likely to die by suicide than from combat industries. And it wasn’t by a small margin. Soldiers were nine times more likely to die in that manner.

Now maybe it’s just me, but if your soldiers are dying from suicide at a greater rate than by combat that means that you either:

  1. Are not fighting large scale wars when heavy combat causalities
  2. So effective at fighting wars that your troops are unlikely to get killed

I suspect that if you look at any major war from Vietnam back to the Revolution you won’t find a ratio like that.

What IS worrying is this figure from the same piece:

That still doesn’t come close to explaining the situation with the Army, however. Looked at based on per capita figures, the overall suicide rate for Americans went from 10.4 per 100,000 to 14.0 over the 21-year period measured. By comparison, the rate in the Army was 36.1 per 100,000 in 2021, and last year it reached 36.6. That’s not a minor difference. That’s more than two and a half times greater than what is seen in the general population. It’s also far more than should be written off as a coincidence.

If I may be so bold as to suggest I think this is yet another example of the costs of a post-Christian society. Once you remove the love of Christ from an equation, particularly a tough one and you’ll be surprised how a society, particularly a subset of a society engaged in dangerous work, reacts.