What to do about women's athletics?

Democrats can't dismiss the problem of trans women participating in women's athletics by saying it involves too few people to be important.

Republican campaigns made it important. 

They reversed the question of who was "weird."

"Trans" became a litmus test of common sense for voters. Kamala Harris could not -- did not -- say clearly that there was a difference between the genders that was relevant to athletics. Republicans spent a quarter of a billion dollars driving home that point.

Voters in battleground states would rather elect a felon, a tax cheat, a thief of national secrets, a multiple sexual assaulter of women, and a person who plotted to overthrow an election rather than elect a person who would not say clearly that trans women had an unfair advantage competing in women's sports leagues. 

It turns out that gender is complicated. There is social gender (how the person interacts in society); there is chromosomal gender (XX, XY or other combinations); expressed genital gender (i.e., what an infant looks like that gets listed on a birth certificate); there is endocrine gender (levels of testosterone, estrogen, androgen, and other hormones and how any one body reacts to them); and intersex people who are a little of both and neither.

Jack Mullen writes about politics and sports. He argues that the key to fair competition in women's athletics is to test for endocrines, specifically testosterone. Let athletic leagues -- not politicians -- make the rules. That makes sense to me. After all, sports leagues make decisions on what constitutes eligibility on other issues (age, attendance at school) and what constitutes fair play (strike zones, roughing the kicker.) So let them make this decision. It is in their interest to promote safe, fair competition.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

                                                 CHEAP SHOTS

If you thought George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign featuring an ad of a convicted rapist on the loose was bad form, you were right. It was. At least I thought so. Bush played on White alarm that an African American rapist had been let loose somewhere on American streets. It worked. Bush won.

The effectiveness of Bush’s Willie Horton ads could not hold a candle to the Trump campaign’s ads targeting the transgender community, especially transgender athletes.

My autumn weekends are spent watching football, both college and pro. When I should have spent the Saturday before the election knocking on doors, I couldn’t resist staying home to watch the November 2 game between Oregon and Michigan.

While basking in the Duck lead over the Wolverines, I winced at Trump ads mocking the transgender community. Then I realized, damn, Trump officials are playing up to the ‘‘bro’’ voting bloc, the voting bloc with the lowest participation in presidential elections since 1972, back when young males no longer had to worry about the military draft. Trump was riling up the group that, if they actually turned out to vote, could make the difference in the swing states.

Every football game I watched over the first weekend in November featured major teams from swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Donald Trump, the guy who said he would “defend women,” looked strong against Kamala Harris, who wouldn’t address the “hot topic” of transgender female athletes competing against defenseless little girls.

I have no idea how many pre-teens or teenagers have sex-changing operations. If they do, I would suspect they aren't doing it because they want to compete against lesser competition in sports.

The fact is that there are fewer than 40 transgender athletes out of 55,000 who compete in NCAA-sanctioned sports. The NCAA requires an athlete’s testosterone level be tested, and that it not exceed the upper limit of a normal female range. I think that is fair. The normal competitive nature of women athletics is not affected.

If other athletic venues, from school districts to the Olympics, adopted the NCAA guidelines for transgender participation, then girls and women could compete on equal footing and the hysteria can lessen and not be a political football anymore.

 

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

Banks will destroy themselves if we don't stop them.

     "The Trump transition team has started to explore pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington." 

 The Wall Street Journal, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024

     “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing."

     Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO, July 2007

The stock of Citibank and JPMorgan jumped 11% on news that Trump won. Morgan Stanley rose 12%, and Goldman Sachs rose 16%. Yippie skippy! The strict teacher with regular homework has been fired, and the new teacher is a soft touch.

Trump's victory means banks will enter a new era of relaxed oversight and regulation. It might mean fewer rules protecting bank customers, maybe even the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It might stop the bank stress tests, relax rules on loan quality, and end the demand to increase capital reserves.

Banks are fragile because they are leveraged. Modern economies are an interconnected web of trust and mutual payments. That is why when banks fail, they get bailed out by governments. If a bank closes, customers of that bank may lose their ability to pay their bills. The people who were expecting payment from that bank's customers don't get paid. That means a third group of victims don't get paid. And so on downstream. Bank failures are contagious.

Citigroup's -- now Citibank -- stock price collapsed when the music stopped. But it didn't quite die.

We did not experience the worst of that in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 because banks like Citigroup were not allowed to fail. They got bailed out. Chuck Prince's Citigroup -- my employer at the time -- got an emergency bailout of $476 billion, plus guarantees and backstops.

Why were banks syndicating and holding pools of very bad mortgages? They had to keep up with the competition.  Lax supervision of banks, mortgage-creators and syndicators, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the credit ratings agencies combined to create a giant honey-pot profit center for the financial system. They sold garbage loans to naive pension funds. Had any bank bowed out of this risky-but-legal profit center, then its profitability would look bad compared to its peers. Bank executives had "career risk." They had to keep up with the Joneses.  

Career risk still exists. Banks will play to the highest edge of what is legal, so long as the financial system perks along and, as Chuck Prince allegorized, the music is playing. If it all comes to grief, bank executives aren't imprisoned. They are bailed out by the guarantor -- the American taxpayer.

The solution to the public being held hostage by risk-taking bankers is bank regulation. Of course, banks fight it. They want free competition -- as long as the good-times music plays.

I will give a sports analogy: the face-mask rule. If tackling people by grabbing face masks were legal, then every team would need to do it as a matter of course. Otherwise they would lose games. Their players would be subject to easier tackles and broken necks, while their opponents were not. So football leagues created a strictly-enforced rule prohibiting everyone from grabbing face masks. No coach is fired because his team underperforms in the "opponents' broken necks" statistic.

Football needs the face-mask rule. Banks need capital requirement rules.

I don't know from where the next problem of systemic risk will come. In my career as a financial advisor, I saw it from "program trading" in 1987. I saw it in irrational exuberance for internet stocks in the late 1990s. I saw it from jets flying into buildings in lower Manhattan in 2001. I saw it from poorly regulated "derivatives" in mortgage loans and from bad mortgage loans themselves in 2004-2007. It is always something.

I would guess cryptocurrencies will be the trigger this time. It is the current irresistible honey-pot of easy money, and banks will fall behind if they don't listen to the music and join in. But if it isn't crypto, it will be something else.

Banks don't want regulations, but they need them. Taxpayers should demand them. Bankers won't pay the price of failure. (Chuck Prince walked away with about $40 million.) We will. 

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." – George Orwell, 1984

"Deep in December, it's nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow

Deep in December, it's nice to remember."

       Tom Jones, "Try to Remember," from The Fantasticks, 1960

 

"That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”

        George Orwell, the novel 1984, 1949

The past is being rewritten. It is easier just to go along with the new reality. But it isn't reality, and in the long run it isn't happy.

FBI Director Christopher Wray announced he would not serve out his term as FBI director. He would resign to coincide with Trump taking office. 

Going gently, complying in advance

President-elect Trump had said he planned to fire Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel. In a speech to FBI employees Wray said that in his view resignation "is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work." Wray is giving Trump what he wants. He is going along. He is normalizing Trump. It doesn't reinforce FBI values and principles. It sacrifices them.

FBI directors are given 10-year terms of office for the very reason that Congress wanted the FBI to be independent and outside the cycle of presidential terms of office. Wray is a Republican, appointed to government positions by Republicans, and appointed to his current position by Trump himself in his first term, when Trump -- against tradition -- fired the prior FBI director, James Comey. Wray is not a deep state Democratic operative. He is an FBI institutionalist.

Wray's resignation changes the reality and future memory of what is happening. Trump wants to fire an FBI director loyal to FBI's purpose and replace him with a partisan loyalist who promises to do partisan investigations. Had Wray been fired and replaced it would have frozen into the record the truth of a partisan takeover of the agency. Resigning in advance changes the story. It is just Trump filling a vacancy, a routine act. Anticipatory compliance is easiest. It avoids a fight. But it makes Wray complicit in the lie.

Trump wrote an alternative reality on Truth Social yesterday:

The resignation of Christopher Wray is a great day for America as it will end the Weaponization of what has become known as the United States Department of Injustice. I just don’t know what happened to him. We will now restore the Rule of Law for all Americans. Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America. 

This isn't true. Try to remember: Christopher Wray's FBI obeyed the law. The search warrant of Mar-a-Lago was carried out with cause, after repeated efforts to retrieve documents, with openly acknowledged obstruction by Trump, and with a search that revealed exactly what the FBI alleged, which was hidden national security documents that Trump denied having.

I realize it is strange to pair a quotation from a tender play about young love, The Fantasticks, with Orwell's dark warning of a dystopian political future,1984. But both contained a warning about the human desire for reconciliation, for loving too well and easily, for failing to recognize that conflict is inevitable, and that truth is hard. We are hearing alternative facts. Trump can sell. He is motivated and relentless and he has loyal allies who are selling the same story. They had better. If they don't he will "primary" them. 

He is rewriting himself as victim and hero. We are in for a lot of this. We need to have the courage to remember what we saw with our own eyes.

"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested." – George Orwell, the novel 1984

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

Real news. Heck, real anything.

"Did you find the directing sign on the
Straight and narrow highway
Would you mind a reflecting sign
Just let it shine within you mind
And show you the colors that are real."
        David Clayton-Thomas, Blood Sweat & Tears, 1968

Fake stuff is just as plausible as true stuff. 

Every color is equally real.

I saw a copy of the Twitter/X post below several times yesterday. I thought it was a tone-deaf, in-your-face post, but it was on-brand for Elon Musk, so I thought it was real. 

It wasn't. 

The Snopes.com fact-checking site said there was no indication that Musk had in fact created this post. It cited the fact that mainstream news organizations would undoubtedly have promptly captured screen shots of the original Musk tweet, had he written it, and they did not. There were 3.6 million views of the false tweet at the point I first noticed it. This creates an odd irony: Elon Musk calls establishment news dishonest and unreliable, but Snopes cites them to establish Musk's innocence. The second irony is that Musk is careless about disciplining falsehood on Twitter/X. This time, he is the victim.

Musk is in a celebratory mood of triumph. His candidate won the election, Tesla stock is up, Twitter/X looks like it will survive and thrive, and the new administration is open to supporting and deregulating crypto currencies.  He is using Twitter/X to say that his platform is the big winner in the struggle to shape American politics and culture. He is right.

Musk retweeted the above message and many others along the same lines yesterday. He is spiking the football and gesturing "We're Number One!"

Democrats scoffed at Kellyanne Conway's comment asserting the validity of "alternative facts," a comment occasioned when she insisted that Trump had far more inauguration attendees than did Barack Obama. She was trying to legitimize lies. Maybe she was an early warning. 

Conway and Musk are saying that what is real and true is described by crowds, people with their own opinions. They, not expert authority, define what is true. The 26 reporters at The New York Times that I cited in yesterday's post may be the last dying gasps of a former world. 

Americans are increasingly getting their "news" from Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, talk radio, and opinion journalism. Two days ago I posted a short "Easy Sunday" comment about the philosophical and literary movement we know as Romanticism. It was a reaction to a new suite of inventions and the social upheaval occasioned by the Industrial Revolution. They understood steam engines and factories were changing everything. Dr. Frankenstein -- the allegory of the changes underway -- was creating a monster. 

In democratizing information dissemination, we haven't merely bankrupted legacy news. We have disempowered it and expert authority generally. We live amid rumors, all equally plausible. 

Democratic government rests on an ideological premise of the "wisdom of crowds." It is possible that there was an unacknowledged truth that guided that supposed wisdom. It was that it was hard and expensive to communicate with the public, so the public got signals that some information was more credible than others. Credible stuff looked better.

Now access to the public square is essentially free, and alternative facts are as plausible as ones that stand up to scrutiny. We assumed as a matter of faith and patriotism that "true speech" would eventually prevail over falsehoods. Lies were harder to sell than truth and in the long run truth would prevail. Maybe no longer.

We are feeling our way here. In the early 19th Century alert people sensed that a profound change was underway. They didn't know what, but they knew it was big.

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

Why I subscribe to The New York Times

I write in praise of The New York Times.

The New York Times gets kicked around from both the right and the left. I cut it some slack. They do important work.

An article today makes my point.

The New York Times is "mainstream" news, created through the old-school process of reporters who talk to sources whose words are quoted or summarized. Then editors review and fact-check those stories, summarize the stories in headlines, and curate and prioritize the stories. Mainstream news formerly was "the news." It was reproducible. News stories were essentially similar to those of other reporters who consulted the same sources. They constituted "reality." The alternative was National Enquirer invention, neighborhood rumor, or ignorance.

Now mainstream news is just one version of "what really happened" amid stories in social media, opinion journalism, and direct-to-consumer communication by people with a story to tell. Sourced, reproducible news is less clickable than made-up stuff, and it is far more expensive to create. 

I was struck by this morning's story about the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Luigi Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania mid-day yesterday. 

The New York Times lets me share ten articles a month to non-subscribers. Click here for a link to their story. In the time between his arrest and publication of the story last night reporters learned about his prominent Baltimore-area family, and that he had graduated as valedictorian at an expensive private high school. They talked with former classmates at the high school and at his college (the University of Pennsylvania), talked with his Hawaii landlord for his group-living arrangement, and they talked with family members and friends who described his interests and his health problems. Reporters had seen x-ray images of his misaligned back; they talked with the police who arrested him; and they reviewed his handwritten "manifesto" condemning the health insurance industry.

The long list of reporters who created this story is a form of blunt body language. Their very presence and bulk tell a story. The article begins with images of its primary authors:

At the end of the article, 22 people are credited for having contributed to the reporting.

Then, of course, there are editors and web people and advertising people. How many people does it take to screw in the lightbulb that shines light on Luigi Mangioni? Twenty six is just the start.

When I click on the story at this link sometimes I get an image at the top of the page advertising Amazon Prime, which I subscribe to. Sometimes I get an advertisement for Public Rec, a clothing brand that makes stretch pants dressy enough to wear as trousers, and sometimes ads for a competitor brand, Willit. My computer knows that I had looked at those websites two weeks ago. Even ads that are absolutely on target don't pay the NYT as much as did the classified ads or the full-page display ads for Macy's in the physical copy of the paper.

The advertising model of paying for journalism doesn't work anymore. The model that works is paid subscriptions. If you want news, you need to pay for it. 

I don't pile onto the criticism of the NYT. I don't care that it didn't endorse Kamala Harris, a criticism from progressives. I don't think the NYT is "fake news." I don't care that some of its staff members are a "woke cancel-culture progressive mob," a criticism leveled from the right. I don't care that the NYT is elitist, hiring too many people from Harvard. I don't care -- not anymore anyway -- that the NYT had article after article on Hillary Clinton's emails back in 2016. I don't care if it presumed that the Hunter Biden laptop story promoted by Republicans was false, when it turned out to be true. (It sure looked suspicious, coming as it did from a laptop supposedly "abandoned" and offered up just before an election by the GOP.) The NYT is in the arena, so a lot of criticism comes its way, and a lot of it is valid. Sometimes it will get stuff wrong. I expect that.

I subscribe and read it because they do something America needs, even if it is done imperfectly. They send reporters out to try to find out what happened and then tell us about it. 

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com  Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

Cheapskates.

Here is the situation:

A shooter kills Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in midtown Manhattan. 

The shooter escaped, but we have a clear photograph of his face.

A national manhunt is underway.

The most promising way to find the shooter is for someone to identify him and tell police where he is.

Here is my question: Why hasn't the widow or UnitedHealthcare stepped up with a significant reward? I am contemplating a reward big enough that it attracts attention, a reward big enough that the shooter's high school classmates notice the reward, begin looking closely at the photos, and identify him. I am thinking about a reward big enough that 335 million Americans pay attention. How big a reward? A million dollars sounds about right.

It might make a difference. Moreover, the million-dollar reward would be a gesture of respect.

I am feeling my way here about the social rules for "paying one's respects" in a situation like this. I would appreciate some advice from readers. Rewards for information -- who should offer them and how much -- aren't uncharted territory, but this situation is unique. It comes at a moment when some people are expressing glee -- or at least lack of sorrow -- that he was shot. That is unusual. Plus the victim is unusual in being seriously wealthy. Precedents and standards of behavior are unclear to me, but it seems to me that neither the widow nor UnitedHealthcare is doing even the bare minimum. It seems cheap, even insulting, under the circumstances.

Brian Thompson earned $10 million last year. Earlier this year he made a well-timed sale of $15 million worth of his UHC stock and collected the proceeds. That sets the level of financial capacity for the widow.

Brian Thompson was shot and killed while on the job for UnitedHealthcare. He was at the Hilton Hotel early to make a speech representing his employer. He died because of his job, while doing his job. That, too, sets a standard.

But for four days, amid a national news story about the manhunt and the need for tips from the public, the only reward for information was the $10,000 offered by the taxpayers of New York City. Finally, yesterday, the FBI -- American taxpayers -- added $50,000 to the reward, bringing the reward for information to $60,000. 

I would think a widow of a guy who brought home $25 million this year, even if she hated him and was glad he was dead, might want to make a gesture, out of respect or obligation, if not out of sorrow.

Where is UHC? Even if police thought that a reward would be wasted money -- which is not how they feel, since they themselves are offering rewards -- I would think that UHC would feel a sense of obligation and propriety here. Five weeks income -- one million dollars as a reward -- would make a statement that UHC cares about its employees: "If you kill one of ours, we come after you." That's a good message for UHC. But no reward? It seems cold.

This whole murder and the public's reaction have been weird. I have been surprised at how widespread has been the "he-had-it-coming" commentary on social media. We are supposed to sympathize with the victim, not a shooter. I do. A murder like this is terrorism, defined as violence to send a political message. Terrorism begets more terrorism. Americans are supposed to be against terrorism. I am. Thompson wasn't just a symbol of an industry; he was a husband, father, and employee. Don't they want to show that they feel sorrow that a human being, someone close to them, was killed? 

Maybe I am wrong here. Maybe there is no expectation that a widow or a business fund a reward, and I am a sentimental fool to expect otherwise. I won't dwell on judging the widow. But UHC has a brand and an identity as a business. If its goal is to communicate that the business has no sense of duty, of sympathy, of respect, it couldn't do a better job of it than being missing on funding a reward. Maybe UHC is simply communicating its true character, and is happy to do so, that it is a cold numbers-driven business, run by heartless cheapskates, and the business is profitable because it doesn't pay out a penny more than is absolutely required. UHC is shameless. If it can get away without paying, it does. Let the taxpayers pick up the tab.

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com
Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]

Easy Sunday: Two poems.

Poem number one: 

Ozymandias, a poem about the ruins of a once-great civilization, now a wasteland, by Percy Booth Shelley.

Poem number two: 

A poem in the same mood and subject, updated to Washington, D.C., by Claude.AI, an artificial intelligence application.

Authors in the Romantic period had a deep sense of the lost greatness and authenticity of Grecian, Roman, Egyptian, and other civilizations. They seemed grand, majestic, and natural, comparing them to life during the emerging Industrial Revolution, with its new machines. Oh, the lost glory, now come to ruins, while the current world is artificial and soul-less.

There is a new form of romanticism today. Artificial intelligence may be as revolutionary as the steam engine.

Right romanticism -- Make America Great Again --  looks back to the pre-Civil Rights era, before integration, before feminism, when White men were heads of households, when blue-collar jobs supported a wife, multiple children, a home, and a middle class life. To get there we need to clean out the institutions that administer this too-feminized, too-constraint-bound, too-woke unnatural world. We need a blunt courageous rule-breaker like Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry."

Trump's re-election was a validation and victory. It brings us springtime in romantic America of the political right. To be alive in this period is "very heaven" for MAGA. Pop-up stores are still selling Trump merchandise. Celebrate!

MAGA

Romantics on the left are feeling glum. They look back at the earnest republicanism of Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson reflecting on a lost and better world. Biden, never great, lies defeated. There is a sad love-song feeling on the left after the election. The soulful man is on his way to Phoenix. A cake was left outside in the rain. It is ruined, and the recipe cannot be recreated. FDR's coalition is lost. Worse, the public doesn't even seem to care about America's greatest moment of public service and respect for democratic self-government, when George Washington returned power to the public. The obelisk is still there, and the painting is still on the Capitol rotunda wall, but now it depicts a quitter, a bad negotiator. Americans chose a winner instead.

Ozymandias, Percy Shelley, 1818

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

The Washington Monument, Claude.AI, 2024

I met a traveler from the western plain
Who said: Two crumbling walls of marble stand
Beside Potomac's waters, dark with stain.
Near them, collapsed upon the littered land,
Half-sunk, a splintered obelisk lies there,
Its fractured face still bearing words that read:
"Here stood the pride of freedom, built with care,
Here liberty's eternal flame was freed."
The rest lies scattered on the trampled ground
Where tourists snap their photos, unknowing,
Of how democracy,, once world-renowned,
Fell not to foes, but to their own unknowing--
The People's faith in truth had slipped away,
Till all their sacred trusts turned to decay.

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.comSubscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]