In 1939, Chinese Americans protested the loading of scrap iron in Oregon on a ship bound for Japan.
As you’ll see the link, there is a photograph of the protest “This iron is for bullets” and “Your wives and babies may be next,” are among the messages on the picketers’ signs.
The protesters were right.
As you of course know, two years later, Japan not only attacked Pearl Harbor, but also Guam and the Philippines, both US possessions.
Before those attacks, Japan seized Manchuria and invaded the rest of China in 1937. The Japanese committed numerous atrocities against the Chinese during the Second World War, most notoriously the Rape of Nanjing.
Last month, on September 11 no less, the Biden Administration announced it was releasing $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, that was part of swap of American hostages held by the terrorist regime in exchange for some Iranian prisoners held here.
Swap? I call it a ransom payment.
The appeasement-minded Biden administration at the time claimed that the $6 billion can only be used for humanitarian reasons. Even if that is true, which I doubt it is, the definition of charity in the West is remarkably different than how jihadists define it.
Okay, yeah, I get it, the $6 billion probably isn’t in the hands of the radical mullahs in Iran yet, but like someone who knows he’s about to collect a huge inheritance, Iran is now financially confident–and it’s emboldened by Joe Biden’s weakness.
Yesterday, Hamas, the Iranian-funded terrorist group, attacked Israel in the deadliest strike against the Jewish state since the Yom Kippur War.
The Iranian mullahs call Israel “the little Satan” and America “the Big Satan.”
For the second straight post at Da Tech Guy, I’m writing about crime in Chicago.
Outside of the Oakland Athletics, who are on pace to lose over 110 games and may be headed to Las Vegas next season, no MLB team has had a worse season than the Chicago White Sox.
Predicted to finish around the .500 mark–which is where they finished up, exactly, in 2022–the South Siders never recovered from an April 10-game losing streak.
The Sox on are pace to lose 100 game this year, which is how many they lost in 2018. That season, the White Sox unloaded several veteran players, kicking off a rebuild project with the goal of bringing the World Series championship back to the South Side for the first time since 2005. That rebuild brought the Sox to the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, but they won only two playoff games–losing five.
Another teardown occurred this July, the White Sox are in rebuild mode again.
August has been even worse for the Sox. Longtime team owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, known to be loyal to a fault with the front office staff of the White Sox and the Chicago Bulls–Reinsdorf owns that team too–uncharacteristically fired the top two men in the White Sox front office, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams. A couple of days later, news broke that the White Sox, a charter member of the American League, might move out of its current stadium, the state-owned Guaranteed Rate Field, its home since 1991, to elsewhere in Chicago, or perhaps to the suburbs or even Nashville. The Sox have six years left on their lease at Guaranteed Rate Field.
On Friday night, in a game where the Sox were punished 12-4 against those otherwise awful Athletics, a female fan in the left field bleachers was shot in the abdomen, another woman was grazed by a bullet.
A move to the suburbs–perhaps joining the Chicago Bears in Arlington Heights–or to Tennessee, probably is more attractive now more than ever for Reinsdorf.
The woman who was shot Friday night is in fair condition, the fan who was grazed by the bullet declined medical care.
According to the quite reliable CWB Chicago, police officials are exploring the possibility that the bullet that wounded the woman may have been fired from a mile away. A gunshot detection system detected gunfire a mile southeast of Guaranteed Rate Field–in the Bronzeville neighborhood. The White Sox and the CPD, in several statements, have said that the shooting was not part of any altercation inside the ballpark.
If CWB Chicago is correct, the Sox and the city of Chicago still have a big problem. And there is an historic precedent that bodes poorly for professional baseball on Chicago’s South Side.
The rise in criminality since 2020 has been the dominant news story in Chicago, despite subtle attempts by the mainstream media to minimize it. Headlines routinely speak of people “injured” in shootings, rather than using the correct verb, which is “wounded.” The first Chicago Police Department statement on the Guaranteed Rate gunshots spoke of a “shooting incident,” rather than a “shooting.”
Another MLB “shooting incident,” actually a homicide, took place during batting practice before a July 4 doubleheader between the host New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds–in the Coogan’s Bluff area of upper Manhattan in 1950. The post World War II decline of New York was underway, although the city was years away from bottoming out. The way NYC’s fictional doppelganger, Gotham City, was portrayed in the Joker movie is a pretty accurate portrayal of what New York was destined to become.
A teenager, in a twisted way to celebrate the Fourth of July, fired a gun from the roof of an apartment building a half-mile away from the Polo Grounds. A fan sitting in the upper deck, Bernard “Barney” Doyle, was instantly killed by the stray bullet. A horrifying photograph of Doyle slumped over, dead of course, was on the front page of the New York Daily News the next day. That pic probably gave New Yorkers nightmares for years.
The Giants struggled at the gate in the 1950s. Despite winning the World Series in 1954, only 1.1 million fans crossed the Polo Grounds turnstiles that season. In their last two seasons at the Polo Grounds, only the pathetic Washington Senator’s had worse attendance. City Journal’s Clark Whelton, writing about the Doyle killing in 2018, claims the crime was “quickly forgotten.” I’m not so sure. But Whelton did add of the team’s owner, Horace Stoneham, that he was “said to have brooded for years about Doyle’s strange demise and the run-down buildings on Coogan’s Bluff.”
In 1958, the Giants and Dodgers abandoned New York for California. When they arrived, there were plenty of Giants and Dodgers fans who had moved out to the Golden State before them.
As our day jobs wind down, Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I are eyeing our exit from crime-ridden, crumbling, corrupt, and tax-greedy Illinois. Tennesse is at the top of our list for our next, and likely last, home. Both of us watched Joker for the first time this month. We compared Gotham City to today’s Chicago.
Why should we stay here?
Wouldn’t it be great if we, as Tennessee residents, were there to welcome the White Sox to Nashville?
UPDATE August 28, 2023, 7:15pm EDT:
Thank you to Dan Proft of WIND-AM Chicago. He, along with Amy Jacobson, co-host Chicago’s Morning Answer–a show I Iisten to, either over the air, or by way of the podcast, nearly every weekday–for mentioning this post on the air today. Look for Proft’s take around the 9 minute mark.
Also, here’s an update, and I have a strong feeling there will be more than one for this blog entry. Chicago’s interim police superintendant, Fred Waller, in a press conference this afternoon, discussed what his public affairs callously called a “a shooting incident” on Friday night. It was a shooting. “We’re dispelling a lot of things,” Waller said. As for where the bullets originated, he added that “coming from outside [Guaranteed Rate Field] is something we’ve almost completely dispelled.”
Still, fans who have bought tickets to a Sox game, or are considering doing so, probably have a lot on their minds now, to say the least.
UPDATE August 29, 2023 4:20pm EDT:
This story keeps getting stranger. There was online chatter that one of the women who was shot had sneaked the gun inside Guaranteed Rate Field beneath her belly rolls. I mean, what kind of people make up stuff like that?
Well, they may not have to do so.
Here’s what longtime Chicago sports reporter, Peggy Kusinski just tweeted:
“As I reported on @ESPN1000 just now… the shooting at Guaranteed Rate Field during a #WhiteSox game was indeed an accidental discharge by one of the women “grazed” by the bullet. She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat.”
As I reported on @ESPN1000 just now… the shooting at Guaranteed Rate Field during a #WhiteSox game was indeed an accidental discharge by one of the women “grazed” by the bullet. She reportedly snuck the gun in past metal detectors hiding it in the folds of her belly fat.
ESPN 1000 AM is the White Sox flagship radio station. It’s a credible source and Kusinski is a solid journalist.
If true, this news is a black mark for the White Sox fan base. What type of person brings a handgun to a baseball game? On the other hand, after the game, in a heavily hyped promotion, Vanilla Ice was to be the headliner of a “90s Night” concert. Were the women there for the Sox-Athletics game or for the postgame show? The White Sox cancelled the gig due to what they called “technical difficulties.” They lied. Shame on the White Sox. Police officers wanted to keep stadium lights on to look for evidence.
And how does a gun detection system miss a firearm hidden in belly rolls?
And what about the Chicago Police Department? Interim superintendent Waller said in a Monday press conference, “At one point in time it was requested as a precaution” to cancel the game. But the game played on. Who made that call to continue? The White Sox? The police? Mayor Brandon Johnson? The women who were shot are said to be teachers. Johnson is a product of the Chicago Teachers Union, for whom he was a longtime organizer, and Johnson is a former CPS teacher. Johnson’s political career is a creation of the CTU.
Without a doubt, I’ll have at least one more update.
Update August 29, 2023, 9:15pm EDT:
Second City Cop is hinting about the “graze wound” woman, that the injury may have been a power burn, is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.
UPDATE: A CPS teacher had the gun?
UPDATE: A CPS teacher with a suburban home address?
John Ruberry, a lifetime Chicago White Sox fan, blogs five miles north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
This week I watched 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1943) and I was reminded of a very important reality.
The same people who cry “genocide” over the A-Bomb never seem to remember that in the aftermath of the Doolittle raid which did very little actual damage, the Japanese decided to teach Chinese civilians a rather nasty lesson. (via Encyclopedia Britannica):
In early June 1942 the Japanese launched an offensive into Chekiang and Kiangsi (Jiangxi), and the brutality directed at the civilian population drew comparisons to the Nanjing Massacre. Trinkets and souvenirs left by grateful Americans—parachutes, cigarettes, pieces of military kit—doomed entire villages, as the Japanese would judge all the residents as having been complicit. Japanese bombers devastated Chuchow, and Kiangsi’s provincial capital of Nancheng (Nanchang) was razed, its population annihilated. It was estimated that some 250,000 civilians were killed during the three-month reprisal campaign.
250,000 civilians killed and whole villages slaughtered. That’s pretty bad but it didn’t stop there:
As the Japanese army prepared to withdraw from Chekiang and Kiangsi, members of its infamous germ warfare program, Unit 731, moved in. They seeded the area with dysentery, typhoid, and cholera, and disease ravaged those who had survived the initial Japanese attacks.
Yes you read that right, chemical warfare left to take care of any civilians who were spared the tender mercies of the Japanese army.
Somehow this just doesn’t seem to spark the outrage among the self righteous.
But there is one more thing that needs to be remembered, not only by the self righteous left who have forgotten the slaughter in china but by the Chinese who haven’t.
The only reason why the Japanese today are not the same people who did these things is because there have been American soldiers by the tens of thousands sitting on that Island for over 75 years.
China should ask itself what would happen if the US decided that 75 or 80 years are enough and that it’s time for Japan to defend Japan and leave.
Well I can’t say that the Japanese culture would return to the bad old days but I can tell you this. As one of the most if not THE most technologically advanced countries in the world Japan could have the bomb if they wanted it in a week and in six months they could have a whole lot more.
With what happened in all those cities still in living memory I’m sure China would just be tickled pink to think about a rearmed Japan just sitting there and believe me Japan would be rearmed fast because they know China hasn’t forgotten and despite 3/4 of a century passing since what happened they’d love the chance to return the favor.
Oh an anyone who thinks that Japan or Germany for that matter might not harken back to the days of yore once American troops are gone take a look at just how fast things have changed here in the us only three years.
“Most times you can’t hear ’em talk, other times you can All the same old clichés, is it woman, is it man? And you always seem outnumbered, so you don’t dare make a stand.” Bob Seger, “Turn the Page.”
Those lyrics, from legendary Michigan rocker Bob Seger, may turn out to be prescient, because the Michigan House of Representatives, which has a Democrat majority, passed a bill in June that, among other things, will impose a hefty fine or imprisonment, if a person maliciously refuses to use another person’s preferred pronoun.
The bill, HB 4474, expands on a Michigan law that covers religion, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Newsweek noted that Dylan Mulvaney, a man who claims to be woman, said in a video a while back about people like me who misgender him, “I feel like that should be illegal, I don’t know. That’s just bad journalism.”
No, it’s not. Mulaney, an internet influencer who has done to Bud Light what Eric Idle’s S. Frog character did to Monty Python’s fictional Conquistador Coffee, is wrong, as he is on so many things, What I wrote in the previous paragraph is good journalism because it’s the truth. Sorry, wokesters, but men who “transition” into women do not have ovaries, do not have menstrual periods, and do not undergo menopause. Women who do the opposite do not have testicles, a prostate gland, or Y chromosomes. I could go on, but I don’t have to.
Some people need to simply follow the science.
Except, maybe soon in Michigan, if its Senate passes HB 4474 and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, signs it into law, following the science and speaking out about it might get someone like me fined or worse.
In her Senate confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could not–or in my opinion, would not–define what a woman is. But according to HealthyChildren.org, at around age two, toddlers know the difference between the two genders. Again, follow the science.
The headline of this blog post is colored red. How do I know? Because when I was at the age when I figured out what males and females are, my mother probably said something along these lines to me, “That color is red.” And that information was confirmed to me when I attended kindergarten.
Some things are that simple.
Well, it should be that simple. Transgendered people complain about being bullied. Well, bullying is wrong. I suppose Mulvaney considers it bullying when internet trolls visit his Instagram page and comments, “You’re a man.” Oh, a word for you trolls. Don’t you have anything better to do? Surely there is trash on a roadside near your home that needs to be collected.
On the flip side, in regard to gender, we are at a stage in America when someone says, “Dylan Mulvaney is a man” in mixed company–especially at work–it has to be spoken in whispered tones, sotto voce as the French say.
Being labeled a transphobe–phobe, by the way means irrational fear–can get many people in trouble on the job. Or maybe soon in Michigan, getting fined or being imprisoned. And it’s not an irrational fear to lose out on a promotion or getting fired for being deemed a transphobe.
I call that bullying.
As regular readers know, my wife was born in the Soviet Union, in Latvia. At school a number of decades ago, repeatedly, her teachers told her that Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, voluntarily joined the USSR in 1940. Of course, that was a lie. Her parents knew it–and so did every adult in the Baltic States at that time. Yes, that includes the teachers. But my wife didn’t discover what really happened in 1940, beginning with learning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, until she reached adulthood.
During my wife’s childhood, adults in the Soviet Union were afraid of the repercussions of telling the truth. So my wife’s parents never discussed the USSR seizing the Baltic States with her until Mikhael Gorbachev was the Soviet leader.
In the New York Sun,Dean Karayanis, reminded me that Soviet citizens faced prison if they were caught spilling coffee on a picture of Joseph Stalin. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of the Gulag Archipelago, spent eight years in the Gulags for criticizing Stalin in private letters, even though he took the precaution of using a codename for the dictator.
American society isn’t at that more frightening point yet. But Michigan just took a baby step in that direction.
Or maybe we are there. Remember that Seger song? “And you always seem outnumbered, so you don’t dare make a stand.” Well, I’m making one. Is anyone else with me?
Fortunately, the new Michigan “pronouns” bill will almost certainly be challenged in court on First Amendment grounds.
Which is another reason why I’m grateful for the 6-3 conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.
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