Life and Death Decisions are Easy When the Deaths Are Not Your Own.

It's easy to tell others facing life-and-death choices to "not bend the knee" when the game of "Quien es Muy Macho?" is being played in the West, (but not yet played out?), with the world's military tools at your doorstep.

Don't listen to young Mr. Klein.  (He's a military adviser now.  Some boy! Oh, what will that young man try to fix next with his toolbox of magical transformation skills he likes to sprinkle about the country?)*

Choose Life, Ukraine.  Choose Life.  It will end soon enough, do not continue to prolong the inevitable.  Surrender what you must, and start picking up the pieces in peace where you can.  Negotiate an end to this war already, and do not let the US and the media like this youthful, arrogant columnist let it continue to consume our own country's priorities.

We have needs too.  And staying in now just means more dead before the inevitable surrender of Donbas and the re-claimed regions.  And NATO, if they are smart, likely would not have Ukraine now even if she wanted to join up still.

There's a way out that doesn't involve weaponry.

There always is.  Nevermind just bending.  Get on your hand and knees and crawl around looking for it, if need be.  War -- and survival -- always means getting dirty, and minimizing the deaths -- of others as well as your own.  IF those calling for continued human sacrifices themselves never have anything to offer of their own other than words, it's telling how committed to the "fight" they are in the end.

Choose Life, Ukraine.  This war and our Western ways aren't worth fleeing your homes and killing your most vulnerables, including the men left remaining who had no chance against real soldiers, incompetent and rusty though they might be...

Choose Life.  If you are alive, you can always have a hope of rising again...  Dead, you don't.  Klein doesn't think far ahead, check his track record.   It's all personal success for him, very Obamalike like that.  Get yours while the getting is good.  For others?  "Damn the torpedos. Full speed ahead!"  Exciting-like really.  That youthful sheen still shiny and promising and full of hope for the best of all worlds...

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*Ezra Klein, more than any other diverse young journalist of his generation, is responsible for helping create a media in America now that tends to speak in one voice:  Erza gathered and organized the liberal reporting corp, and convinced them some would be more powerful if they agreed to put independent reporting aside, and colluded to craft stories in a more solidaristic voice to help improve the nation and help push preferred public policy solutions favored by preferred politicians, like Barack Obama.

By skewing journalist standards, and hand selecting those white men mostly, who he trusted to carry the unified Democratic message, Mr. Klein was able to manipulate the media and help hire the most malleable.  Independent voices need not apply.  He effectively unionized the business, with a sprinkling of diverse hires to surround the people crafting the liberal message, for window dressing.  *insert clap hand emojis here*

Ezra Klein chose journalism because he wisely saw, with a few rule changes, that to be the most effective "helping" profession he could serve in America.  By trading in independence, we got more ill-thought wars, more poverty and inequality when the "cushion" social programs are withdrawn, and an elite that is colorful, credentialed and essentially ineffective now at diagnosing conditions on the ground, much less responding to them when the symptoms of social decay are finally so obvious they cannot be ignored.

Mr. Klein has two children of his own to support now with his wife.  He has transformed the business and made himself a millionaire at such a young age.  Wow.  He rode that face to fame, and used his skills to force the hands of the elite news providers.  

But as for his policy advice... he's just not qualified to serve, unless you want to see his untested ideas continue to rip a nation apart -- sacrificing the many to prosperously advance a few -- and beget for the country as a whole what we saw when Obama finally was ushered from office due to term limits...

Ezra Klein:  I don't read him, I don't listen to him, and I don't like what he's done to the profession.  To me, he's why we got the Steele Dossier pushed at us by trad media for so many years... and why we keep getting talked into supporting all these wars, at the expense of our own border policies and economic rebuilding here at home.   

Without independence, and by choosing groupthink, you get "leaders" who do not represent or even know the people they purportedly are serving.  The more divided America is, the more young men like Mr. Klein personally prosper.   Not on my watch.  I won't remain silent, or pat his head for what he has done.

Independent voices are needed to keep the system in check.  Mr. Klein's organizing work did just the opposite:  they effectively stifled dissent within the profession, and helped create this "you can't say that!" cancel culture that has led to fisticuffs and violence as more people seek other ways to get out their messages because they are not breaking through and being heard...

Binary choices are never best for living human beings who are way more complex than machines.  I wish Klein would have stuck with being a businessman, where his real skill lie, rather than being a public-policy player, or a journalist whose organizing work redefined the professional skill set needed to report a hard news story.  Who you know is more important than what you know in the power corridors out East today, and it shows.  Same as it ever was?

Maybe, but I really think we respected individual freedoms and independence more when there was no career incentive to throw in with the Dems.  News organizations that were more holistic -- neither liberal mouthpieces nor conservative outlets responding in kind -- better served the nation in balancing stories served up for the whole, rather than this particular audience slice or that.  

Independence worked better when there was no filtering mechan ism on who could report what, and when. So long as the facts could be verified, and people were willing to speak on the record with their names and titles being used as attribution, you were more apt to get the real story in the olden days of reporting;  now, you know you are getting a hash of what the top minds in the trade today have cobbled together at the behest of anonymous sources who have been hired and put on social media sites like Twitter:  "DM me -- open and available to accept news "tips".  (Are we reporters, or waiters/waitresses, friends?  Er... servers, rather.)

"Send me tips!  DMs open!"  Uh huh.   That's how a real news story lands in your lap today, kids.  Keep up the good work...  /s

ADDED:  Oh, the games people play...  *

  

2022 M.L.B. SEASON PREVIEW

The Best Game That Money Could Buy

A contentious lockout came in the middle of an off-season with record spending. The gaps between the richest and poorest clubs have only grown wider.

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* (a "hiring freeze, industry wide, unless you are a minority recruit" is kinda like a "lockout", no? Oh, the stories we could tell.)  Let's really work together to put the progress back in progressive, people.  You really don't need a penis and a pretty face to lead.  Follow me then...

You can't do much worse than you've got in there now, who couldn't find their way out of a paper bag if they could punch or read a map.  Outsiders imbedded on the ground, what would they have to pay tog support that kind of clear-eyed observation, I wonder?  A numbers-guy like Ira would know, I bet.  Pricing games v. overall value. You puts down your money and plays your cards as dealt... that's life really.