Much has been made in the past few days of the “Great Awokening” (h/t The Federalist). The almost lemming like urgency with which the professional sports associations are hurling themselves over the cliff in their pursuit of appearing to care.

The problem they keep running into is that the NFL, NBA, MLB and perhaps even the lesser lights of NASCAR and MLS actually do not care about their fans and certainly do not understand them. At all.

Let me bring forth an example – I picked two of the NFL “Good guys” for this example. Two men, great players in the league, very successful, beloved by fans and men who have given tremendous support to the community while having great careers. I picked Warrick Dunn and JJ Watt. Well JJ Watt kind of picked himself as my example because it is his statement at the Chiefs – Texans game that prompted me to write this little blog post.

Both Mr Dunn and Mr Watt are successful professional athletes, Both of them are know for their supportive work for the community. Warrick Dunn for his initiative to get single parent families into their own houses and JJ for his work rising funds to help the City of Houston after the devastating hurricane Harvey and floods.

Last Thursday the Texans and the Chiefs organizations decided that they were going to have various demonstrations of “support” for better Racial conditions in the USA, more awareness of others, all in support of quieting the current situation where there are riots in Democrat run cities where activists threaten ever increasing mayhem.

Into this tempest in a teacup the NFL (and NBA and MLB) decided that they should be telling their fans how they, the organizations, felt about it all. So they decided that they would have demonstrations of their support for such divergent activities a Black Lives Matter, Police Funding, Defunding and other such stuff. They decided that these demonstrations, the names on helmets words in the end zone would be added to let the fans know, what they should think as well.

So when the two teams of players at the game in KC went through their show unity, when they had stood or knelt at various parts of the intros, there was some surprise that the fans at the game were booing. It didn’t appear to the Management that they understood that their fans had come to see professional Football. They had not paid for tickets for some sort of revival tent meeting.

JJ Watt made the following observation to the Press:

“The moment of unity I personally thought was good,” the star defensive end told reporters after the game. “I mean the booing during that moment was unfortunate. I don’t fully understand that. There was no flag involved. There was nothing involved other than two teams coming together to show unity.”

Now I think JJ was being mild here. Don’t get me wrong. But what this shows is that he – hero though he is – does not understand the roles of performer and fan. If he and his fellows had wanted to have a moment of unity and shout out – they certainly have enough money to have paid for a minute of commercial time to film them doing it which they could have paid to run, as a commercial during the game. Why not? Or, better yet they could have had their private moment – private.

Not because what they were doing was wrong. It is neither right nor wrong it just is.  It is the expressed attitude that the time attention and money of the audience, the fan is something that the players and the owners are free to exploit to make themselves feel better, even at the expense of the actual reason everyone is there.

People support sports teams for a variety of reasons. Most of us support the teams we grew up with, the ones our family supported back in the fun days of our youth. WE find reasons to like our team and the players that play for them – the players make us believe that they care about this team, this location these fans and we like to think that this could be possible. So, for a few hours every week we can all have our own little fairy tale that we are part of and we can enjoy it. We can enjoy it even when our team fights hard and loses, or plays badly and wins.

I admire people who can perform athletic tasks at levels I would not even dare dream of. I love watching good rugby, football, cricket, American Football, Baseball. I have absolutely no desire, at all, to be lectured by those players about real life. I do not care about their opinions or their woes – in much the same way as I do not expect them to care about my opinions or woes.  Play the game you contracted to play.

Yes, I agree it seems a small, annoying point that I am making. But I ask you to consider this simple scenario

The world itself is not made a better place by professional sports. There are no great civilizational advances to lay at the feet of the businessmen the coaches or the players. It is a mighty big footprint in a bowl of water. Lift it out and it disappears.

The whole of this edifice is created and balanced on a fantasy – as I described above – the  professional players get paid to play and act like they care about the team, the city the fans, and we pay our money to be entertained and to hope that, just maybe, they might actually care.

And that runs just fine.

Until the mask slips and they show, surprisingly, that they really do not care. They do not understand that they are being paid by the attention money and presence of the fan. Without it – they are just people in a sandbox playing a weird game.

And when the fantasy gets punctured – as JJ Watt just did – suddenly what has been raw passion becomes something less, something uncomfortable. Maybe it will continue but decline, but it will change because Cognitive Dissonance demands an accommodation.

Should American Football disappear – and it looks like they are managing themselves into a decline – fans will just find something else to watch.  The more reasons and discomfort you put their way – the more they will look for something else. Here’s a thought for every posturing athlete – from a fan.

I cannot, truly, pass on my disgust and irritation at being lectured by people who have been blessed with physical gifts that have enabled them to indulge a privileged lifestyle and to be handsomely recompensed for doing so – because of people like me paying for it. If you wish to be paid to lecture me you are going to have be a damned sight more intelligent than the crap you are doing in public makes you appear to be and much more eloquent and reasoned in your presentations.

There is an interesting phenomenon going on in our society. It is a phenomenon that most have heard of, the vast majority never use or pay attention to it specifically yet it is being used to drive the hysteria that is currently exploding across our country.

It is “Twitter”.

Probably the most self absorbed talking group imaginable.

For the people who are wrapped up in it, Twitter is all important. It is where most of the mainstream media goes to get leads for stories. But more than that – they read tweets in the effort to get to what they think are the concerns and state of mind of “The man on the Clapham Omnibus” . (That reference is to a metaphor describing a reasonably well educated man, ordinary and reasonable that was used by a judge in England to give a picture of “ordinary people” as guidance for a jury). Rather than getting outside of their bubble of comfort, they “research” on Twitter.

But Twitter is not representative of anything other than a place where people fire off short pithy (sometimes mildly interesting) messages, or to snark at others. It is, in short, the place where gossips gather. And nobody else. The main consumers of the Twitter Brand are consultants (PR and political), politicians and a whole layer of people who dabble and scrabble. There are also many many accounts called ‘bots’ these are accounts set up to auto generate tweets whenever certain key words are used – in this way a large amount of tweets are generated and it all looks like an angry blizzard when it is. For the most part it is “sound and fury signifying nothing” to quote Shakespeare. So what we have are algorithms being triggered by keywords in some tweets which unleashes a storm of bot driven traffic. This storm then generates fear in the hearts of the PR people who have bought into the “Oh Twitter is the voice of the people” and they encourage their principals to follow the suggestions of the triggered bot mob.

The problem then becomes that many organizations, concerned over their “image” and wanting to be “out in front” of things use the impressions that their PR people have gathered from their exhaustive work on Twitter (cough, ahem) and then take what they think is remedial action. This leads to ludicrous examples of virtue signaling – the CEO of Chik-Fil-A washing the feet of black people – not sure what he thought he was making up for with that. Or the Police Chief that kneels in response to a crowd. All the kinds of things that make most people go “what on earth????”

The truth is that most people that I have met in the USA are just not racist. They either do not care enough to be racist, or they are too busy working on the exact same issues that all races are working on – how to hold a good job, make a good marriage, bring up good children and have a great life. IN my 67 years of living in Europe, the UK and the USA I have never bumped into anyone who even mentioned “white supremacy” – ever. I have met people who had generalized bad impressions of different nationalities but race was not the common denominator causing the dislikes.

I fear we have come to a point in the USA – and possibly in the West where the collapse of trust and credit in the media is irreversible. For too long the media has seen itself as being above the people it is supposed to inform, the media itself has been beholden to groups of partisans who wish to see an agenda advanced and not a populace informed.

As for the corporations that jump and shy at everything that doesn’t reek of rainbows and unicorns – there is a Darwinian force at work, I think, which will, eventually work itself out and not to the advantage of the virtue signaling prone. Again I have yet to talk to or with any friends who are impressed with the likes of Amazon, Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Tea, the Premier League in the UK, Facebook et al and their seemingly endless desires to impress upon us that we are sadly in need of educating by the woke businessmen. Time will tell. I think the companies that will come to the fore will be those who prove that they stand for themselves and are content to let their customers do as they wish.

Van Jones is an intelligent man. He is a self declared socialist and has taken part in a lot of organizations and of creating groups to forward the socialist agenda.

That just makes him one of many “intellectuals” of the left, working within government and privately subsidized frameworks, contracts with CNN, paid for opinions. There are a lot of them available to watch and they usually parrot the approved “party line” and the virtue signal du jour.

What sets Mr Jones apart from almost all other lefty commentators and talking heads is that he is capable of seeing some very stark truths. And he is not afraid to talk about what he sees. This makes him, IMHO, possibly the most important spokesperson at the heart of the left.

Back in the USSR there used to be someone in the Politburo or the upper party structure who was looked upon as being the “custodian” of the purity of the Party. Someone who was able to see the real world and yet still maintain their belief in the Communist system. They had the function, almost, of priests, Their job was to soften the cognitive dissonance aroused in the minds of the faithful as they were continually confronted with two colliding world views. Communism was the socialist nirvana of the future it was going to do away with Capitalism, it was going to visit upon the worker true power to run society. Anything which forwarded that idealism was, de facto, good. Anything which impeded it was, equally de facto, bad. The cognitive dissonance comes about when the “worker” starts to realize that though he or she may be the basic virtuous unit of the Communist march – he or she, the individual, have no value at all. That, in order to achieve this ideal state of being, sacrifices must be made. And they must be made by the very same people that the Communists claim are being hurt and exploited by Capitalism. The working class.

In order to keep the march of the Communist Party on track, to smooth the path, oil the clockwork and grease the axles of the People’s Movement – mental adjustments have to be made. It is the people that can see the hard facts in front of them – that, for example, socialism leads inexorably to bankruptcy or that making the people’s omelet requires breaking the people’s eggs – and who can maintain their own hope and desire and certainty that Communism, even with such obvious faults, is the way forward are most needed by the Communist apparat. They they provide the massaging of the messaging that is delivered to those suffering from the conflict of cognitive dissonance in order to persuade the workers of the world that there is, truly, pie in the sky and utopia just around the corner of the next five year plan. And the five year plan after that. And the one after that..

Jones has that same sort of ability I think. From what I see of him and read of him he seems to be a smart individual. Yet he supports such a deeply flawed philosophy which has inflicted so much misery upon the world. It has taken me quite a while to reconcile those two thoughts. The eternal “if he is so smart how come he supports something so completely dumb?”
The answer permeated my consciousness the other day. To whit, Van Jones is absolutely certain that he can do a better job running everything than anyone else in the known universe. And he sees that Communism and its organizations offer him a tool to achieve the power he thinks he should have in order to truly give the people of earth the benefit of his enormous gifts.

It has the roadmap to power in other words. Once obtained there is no return to non-totalitarian rule in Socialism or Communism. None. Once at that point Mr Jones and his ilk can do what they see “needs to be done”. And it is not communism or socialism – it is “realism” and diktat.

So Van can, correctly, point out that the biggest racist threat to Black America is not the neutered idiots of what remains of the “Klan” but the entitled lefty Hillary supporters who still thinks black people need to be told what to do. And that they need to be set straight by police when they don’t do it.

That insight makes him way more dangerous than the fawning betas of the Democrat Party. He is also right – which finesses the conservatives best approach to the likes of the Hillary supporting lefty white privileged liberal which is to ridicule them and point out their shortcomings. Van is way ahead of them.

He is, most definitely worth listening to. And to be most wary of.

It is Brexit Eve as I write this, January 30th 2020. Tomorrow it becomes official – what was joined on January 1st 1973 is going to be put asunder January 31st 2020.

How did it come to this? I can only speak for myself so I am going to start there.

Back in 1972 I was at East Herts College doing my OND in Mechanical Engineering. I worked for the Gas Board and was set to go to University in September of 1973, I was enthusiastic about the prospects of being able to just work in Europe. I had spent a large part of my childhood in Germany (West Germany as it was then), I had a pretty good vocabulary in French so I figured I would be able to make a good fist of it.

By 1978 I was living in Copenhagen and working around Europe – got to travel all over, never making much money and strictly lower, cabin class on the travel and accommodations but I did love seeing all the places I went to.

By 1989 my wife and I and our children were heading to the USA – to Denver Colorado and trying our fortune in the land of opportunity and my interest switched to this wonderful new life and I lost track of the doings in Europe.

Fast forwarding now – to June 2016. The referendum in the UK to vote on whether to remain in the EU or to leave. I found myself cheering for the vote to leave. I found myself exulting in the result.

How on earth did that happen?

It took a speech from Nigel Farage in the European Parliament yesterday (January 29th 2020) to remind me what it was that changed my view of the EU what it was that started me on the long journey from enthusiast to skeptic to opponent.

Our time focus jumps again to 2005.

In 2005 the great tide in Europe was the drive to have the nations of the EU ratify, by referendum, the “Constitution for Europe”. This would be the great step that would start to weld the nations of Europe into the “United States of Europe” but as I read up on the subject I was struck by the fact that it seemed to be the setting up of an extraneous non accountable power base that would be the central repository for all future initiatives in the EU and that those initiatives would be pushed down to be enacted by client governments.

I was not surprised to see that the ever bolshie French rejected this nonsense out of hand. And then was pleasantly surprised to see the Dutch follow suit. And then the people pushing the Constitution for Europe realized that without unanimous consent it would not be valid and the project was shelved.

Our time machine moves forward to 2007. The introduction of the Treaty of Lisbon. No longer a constitution but , instead a “Treaty” that changes the treaties of each member state, adds the necessary clauses and articles to pull the treaties into alignment with what the “Constitution” would have put in place. And suddenly, with NO votes, the EU Superstate was birthed. The people behind it were confident that, eventually, the people of Europe would forget about the referenda and would gradually just come to accept “what is”.

If it had not been for Nigel Farage and, yes, Boris Johnson and their outrage at the evolution of European “power” that drove the Brexit vote then Britain would be, at this moment sinking in the ever growing morass of EU rules and regulations and moving further away from being a nation state and further toward being a satrap in Europe.

But even after the British people voted to leave – that was not good enough for the embedded statists both in Europe and within the ranks of Westminster. It took the organized effort to drive out the Tory leadership in Westminster and replace it with someone who wanted to get Brexit doen and then it took fighting and brawling with the embedded europhiles of Westminster to get a General election called – where, once again, the British people said “LEAVE”.

Finally it is being done.

And here – is Nigel Farage saying goodbye to the European Parliament – and if you will listen to the very end you will hear the chairperson try to get in a quick egregious bit of virtue signalling by actually misquoting what Farage said and trying to make it sound like “hate speech”. It ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.