What To Worry About
Semi-recently the US government expanded warrantless surveillance and according to the ACLU – the people who stand up for our rights when we can’t be bothered because we’re binge-watching Ted Lasso or listening to the new Taylor Swift album – it creates new ways for the government to spy on Americans without a warrant.
Just in case you haven’t watched any Law & Order episodes (which are hard to miss because it’s been on TV for 23 years and there have been 498 episodes and the original characters are now investigating who ate Mrs. Goldstein’s slice of birthday cake that she’d been saving in the retirement home refrigerator) if law enforcement wanted to search your house or listen to your phone calls or look at your emails they had to convince a judge that they had a good reason to do that and get a warrant.
A True Story About A Weird and Irrelevant Dream
That last bit about retirement-home-refrigerators reminds me that I just had a dream in which Vince Vaughn ate something I’d been saving in a refrigerator and when I accused him of that Vince said:
“In my defense, I didn’t enjoy it.”
So Vince Vaughn is funny even in my dreams and apparently my subconscious is writing top-notch comedy material for him, while the conscious part of my brain I semi-control is doing a fairly shitty job of writing comedy material for me.
As Socrates asked on so many occasions: WTF?
Anyway…
As the Brennan Center for Justice (a New York University policy institute named after Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan) points out, it’s a basic constitutional principle that law enforcement and intelligence agencies need a warrant to listen to your phone calls or read your emails, but they found a way around that in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was set to expire if Congress didn’t renew it, which it just did and Joe Biden signed it so now he’s got that on his permanent record, as well as his garbled stories about relatives and cannibal all-you-can-eat buffets.
Turns out…
Section 702 allows the government to collect the communications of non-Americans located abroad, but since Americans often communicate with people outside the country, our text messages, phone calls and emails can get swept up too and even though Congress directed the intelligence agencies to minimize the retention and use of Americans’ information, last year the FBI conducted 200,000 of these “backdoor” searches which really pisses me off because my proctologist already did that.
If you want to read more about this issue, here you go:
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/senate-reauthorizes-and-expands-section-702-surveillance
Stuff We Worry About When We Shouldn’t/Stuff We Don’t Worry About When We Should
If the FBI is doing 200,000 “backdoor” searches a year (insert your own off-color joke here) that’s about 547.9 per day and while the odds that they’re looking at your personal stuff aren’t good, they’re still not nothing and it’s somewhat concerning when you find out they’ve been looking into Black Lives Matter protesters, politicians, political donors and journalists.
Who can be described with the catch-all term: “People The FBI Doesn’t Like.”
So even though they may not be looking into your stuff right now this minute, that could change if you piss somebody off and having spent a lifetime doing exactly that, it’s a little concerning that there aren’t more restraints on the people who don’t mind violating our privacy.
I drew the cartoon at the top of this post to draw attention to a situation that didn’t get much press because we’re being distracted by Donald Trump’s latest violation of a gag order and actors announcing they recently discovered they’re gay which apparently everybody needs to know and videos of Chihuahuas riding skateboards.
There is a theory, which I buy, that much of what we read and hear about are distractions to keep us worried about the wrong stuff so we don’t ask too many questions about the stuff we should worry about.
Now here’s yet another distraction and I looked up this information after a friend expressed deep concern about the issue:
According to an article from Newsweek, dated April of 2023, about half a percent of the estimated 333 million citizens living in the United States identify as transgender and they don’t all identify as women and even fewer want to compete in girl’s and women’s sports.
And according to a researcher Newsweek talked to — apparently privacy laws make it hard to know for sure — the researcher thought there were fewer than 100 transgender women competing in NCAA sports.
So less than two per state.
Also…
A conservative advocacy group called Save Women’s Sports that wants to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports identified only five transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports teams in grades K through 12.
In Utah, the legislature wanted to pass a bill to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, but in the entire state there were four transgender athletes out of 85,000 kids competing in high school sports and only one competing as a girl.
So here’s what I take away from all this:
Getting worked up about the transgender-athlete issue is kinda like getting worked up about space aliens getting to vote twice in local school board elections or getting hit by a meteor or being complimented by your spouse – it just doesn’t happen very much.
On the other hand…
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2021 48,830 people in the US died from gun-related injuries (so 976.6 people for each state) and about 1-in-4 teachers said their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the past year, so the odds of someone’s kid getting shot or threatened by a gun are much, much, much greater than that kid having to compete against a transgender athlete.
But guess which issue most Republican politicians worry about.
So a lot of energy is being expended on preventing something that doesn’t happen much, while ignoring things – like handgun deaths and warrantless surveillance – that happen much more often.
And Since We’re Already in the Neighborhood; a Few Words About Kids’ Sports
According to the NCAA, nearly eight million kids play sports in high school and approximately 530,000 of them will compete in college athletics and of those 530,000 college athletes fewer than 2% will ever become professionals and of those professionals (here let’s go with baseball and the numbers are from 2017) less than half will ever play three or more years in the major leagues and according to the Major League Baseball Players Association less than 10% of all Big League players have careers lasting 10 years or more.
Which means…
The odds of anyone’s kid making it to the top of any sport are incredibly long and that being the case we ought to stop looking at kids’ sports as the first step toward the Hall of Fame and start looking at kids’ sports as a chance to learn about teamwork and sacrifice and putting group goals before your own and maybe accepting someone different and being kind and gracious even when things don’t go your way and all those good things most of us say we want our kids to grow up to be.
Even though parents tend to be none of those things when they find out their kid isn’t in the starting lineup.
Possible Point of Interest:
The people who do make it to the top of their sport tend to be fucking psychopaths with an out-of-control competitive streak that drives them to practice 25-out-of-24 hours a day and ignore their families who are expected to sacrifice and drag their asses to out-of-state tournaments and 4 AM ice skating lessons and whatever shithole city dad is playing in this year while he grinds his way to the top.
So count your blessings if your kid can’t dunk a basketball or throw a baseball 100 miles an hour or run a 4.3 40 and can take or leave competitive sports because that means:
YOUR KID IS NORMAL.
And all things considered, there are way worse things your kid could be.
Just in case you want to read all the articles I mentioned and reach your own conclusions, here are the links:
https://www.mlbplayers.com/10-years-service-time
https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2015/3/2/estimated-probability-of-competing-in-college-athletics.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
https://www.newsweek.com/how-many-transgender-athletes-play-womens-sports-1796006
As usual, today we wandered all over the place and I say “we” like you had a choice even though in this case you didn’t, but you do have a choice when it comes to what you worry about.
When I was learning how to manage a baseball game I had to start thinking in terms of odds and choose the option with the best chance of success and think logically and not emotionally, which as you may have already noticed, isn’t easy.
People who want to manipulate us — “Vote for us and send us money so we can stop Caitlyn Jenner from kicking your daughter’s ass in a nine-year-old’s soccer game” — appeal to our emotions while they remain logical.
And after the emotional appeal, I hope you think about issues logically and don’t worry about the wrong things. And now I have to get busy guarding my refrigerator because I’m saving some leftover pizza for lunch and I don’t trust that goddamn food sneak, Vince Vaughn.
That was a well thought out and entertaining read. I’m kind of surprised your Substack isn’t more widely read.
I know of someone who was surveilled, it's a miserable and horrible experience.