The View from Right Field

Parents Need More Than Just a Few Months After the Baby Is Born

Pilita Clark wrote in Monday’s Financial Times about the difficulty some men have in taking parental leave when their child is born.¹ In the UK, parents can share up to 50 weeks of leave, most of it paid.  But, apparently, in many companies, while women can take leave without a problem, many men feel the company’s culture doesn’t let them do so.  Ms. Clark notes that some managers are encouraging men to take their share of the leave, too.²

But while parental leave when a child is born is important, I think there is more to it than just that.  Here is a letter I wrote to the FT with my thoughts:

“Pilita Clark talks about the need for men to take more leave when a baby is born.  Back in the dark ages of 1984, our daughter was born on Sunday, we came home from the hospital on Monday, and I went back to work on Wednesday.  Obviously, that would be viewed as unacceptable today.  But the key to the jobs I had was not the number of weeks or months I could take off when our daughter was born (and our son 20 months later).  Rather, it was the time I was able to take over the next 18 years.

President Trump Is So Bad Anything Is a Reason to Get Rid of Him – Or At Least Some People Think So

Democrats are upset that Attorney General William Barr has authorized an investigation into whether the law enforcement and intelligence communities had proper basis for investigating the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential campaign.  The main point they seem to make is that Donald Trump is so bad that, of course, there were proper grounds.  It’s sort of like the Robert Mueller investigation.  When it started out, the Democrats, et al, “knew” Mr. Mueller would find evidence that then-candidate Trump, or at least the Trump campaign, colluded with the Russians – because, after all, Donald Trump is bad, so how else could he have won.  When Mr. Mueller didn’t find evidence of collusion, they pretty much decided that Russian interference was the same thing as collusion in terms of justification for getting rid of President Trump.¹ 

They are also upset that Attorney General Barr has been given authority to declassify information in connection with this investigation.  Because they say he will do it, without regard to national security, in order to help President Trump.  Of course, many of these same people want to breach laws and ignore privacy concerns with respect to the redactions in the Mueller report (also here), so consistency doesn’t really seem to be a real issue here – other than “President Trump is bad” and nothing else matters.

Bill Buckner, RIP

Pictures from the 1995 and 2008 Cubs Conventions.

Why I’m Leaving the @WashingtonPost

About two years ago, I subscribed to The Washington Post online.  I liked their international news coverage, and the online subscription seemed like a relatively inexpensive way to keep up on that stuff.  I won’t be renewing my subscription when it expires, however, because it is becoming harder to find the international news in the WaPo, and “Today’s Headlines,” the newsletter I receive, is basically just all Donald Trump all the time.  Actually, it’s not all President Trump all the time; it’s all President-Trump-is-the-worst-president-ever all the time.  It’s getting tiring – and, more importantly, I’m not learning anything from it.  I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016 (either in the primaries or the general election), and I’m not going to vote for him in 2020, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about how bad he is all the time.

Even though I didn’t vote for him, I don’t think that everything he does, or his administration does, is the worst that any president/administration has ever done.  Some kind of semi-rational analysis would be interesting, and I might learn something from it.  I am not talking about the kind of so-called balance that includes an equal number of quotes from each side.  But one anonymous source after another, followed by quotes from people who are already fully on the other side, doesn’t tell me anything new, either.  Now, it could be that these articles are accurate, in the view of The Washington Post’s editors, and that everything they say is the truth.  But even if it is, I am not learning anything from reading it again and again.  So, it’s goodbye WaPo, until your news pages give me a little more information that I don’t already know.

Can You See This Cubs’ Bullpen Winning a World Series?

Before the first game of the current homestand, Theo Epstein talked about the Cubs’ bullpen:

“Since that first trip, they’ve been, by the numbers, one of the best, if not the best, in baseball.  So they’ve been doing a great job.  They’ve had their hiccups along the way.  Every club will.

But even under some difficult circumstances, under some short starts, they’ve found a way to put some zeros up there.  It’s been impressive and been a group effort, which is nice to see.  And Joe Maddon has done a nice job picking the right spots for those guys too.”

Except Theo may have been talking a little too soon because the performance of the bullpen over the last five games, except for Mike Montgomery and Tyler Chatwood, who are more starters than relievers, has been pretty poor: Nine runs in thirteen innings.  That’s an ERA of 6.23.

Gaming College Admissions – Part Two

Back in April, I suggested another way to “game” the college admission process.  Instead of paying bribes to college coaches to say they wanted a kid for their sport or to proctors to correct answers on SAT or ACT tests, I suggested, jokingly, hiring a genealogist to come up with some minority or other disadvantaged ancestor – so you could try to get admitted via some special program for those groups. 

While I was trying to be humorous, The Wall Street Journal reported today that people actually were falsifying their race or other ancestry to get favored treatment.  While I was suggesting doing real research, it is alleged that the person behind the big admissions scandal was just telling people to claim a race or ancestry they really didn’t have in order to get admitted:

“On some applications that Mr. Singer’s operation handled, applicants may have claimed to be underrepresented minorities based on a tenuous connection, such as a distant relative of Native American ancestry, said one of the people familiar with his business.”

I guess my humor wasn’t that far out.  Unfortunately.