Author: Judge Michael Boyajian

Major League Baseball has taken over the daily operations of the Los Angeles Dodgers because of economic difficulties created by the team owners’ marital dispute.

It is time for MLB to take another step and sell the team to the new Nets owner so the team can be moved back to Brooklyn where residents have been waiting over half a century with open arms for the team’s return.

New York supports two major league and two minor league teams and can easily support a third big league team as it once did up until the late 1950s.

The New York Times reports on the utter stupidity of Republican governors who have turned down federal funding for high speed rail travel.

The report talks about the northeast corridor, Florida and California but overlooks an equally important line in New York State that will revitalize an economically distressed region stretching from Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany with access to New York City.

This line would pump billions into the region creating jobs and a real estate boom. The line would deliver commerce in the form of business travelers and tourists.

Chess is a war game that does in contradistinction offer insights into world unity.

You see chess can be traced to India. From there it spread to Persia then to the Arab world and finally Europe. So it was an Eastern game that became beloved by both the East and West.

It is an ageless game that shows how the world can all enjoy the same pastime. Better to play at war than to actually engage in it with all its misery.

Like sports chess is an alternative to war having the challenges of battle without the bloodshed. And again all can safely enjoy chess the world over.

Whenever I travel overseas I try to be an ideal citizen, a good American. More often than not I fail at this not because I am xenophobic but because I’m a pushy New Yorker no matter how hard I try to suppress that nature.

On my first trip to the UK everything went great and I even defended a tour guide against an ugly American. But then at the airport chaos broke out at the boarding gate and I made a comment and everyone looked at me.

It was not a rejection of liberalism but perhaps a rejection of America’s excesses in the late 60s and 70s whereas liberalism just happened to be in power on both sides of the political aisle at the time and so took the blame though without fault.

So this excess this hedonism gave rise to conservatism even among progressives. But it was not a rejection of a political belief but of excess.

Americans still believed in helping one another, in social security and medicare and paying taxes as part of collective whole for the benefit of all.

It would seem in this new age of draconian budget cuts and trillion dollar tax breaks for corporations and the rich that the sacrificial lambs in all of this are medicare and social security programs vital to working class and disadvantaged Americans.

Meanwhile half way around the world two wars of no strategic importance to us are sucking the life blood out of the nation. These wars, one of which should have ended years ago and the other which should never have been started, are draining the national treasure.

Reading the Hemlock Cup a book about Socrates and Ancient Athens our first democracy one realizes how much things have not changed. For instance the Greeks had a show trial and killed Socrates and we had McCarthyism.

One might say this is an inevitable symptom of democracy and we should just accept it because the benefits of our system outweigh the adverse side effects.

This is truly a foolish acceptance of a wrong doing that must be corrected by both ethical rules and legislation.

My home is within 20 miles of the Indian Point nuclear reactors well within the 50 mile exclusion zone advised by the United States for the destroyed Japanese reactors.

A friend of mine told me Indian Point was perfectly safe. He lives on Long Island outside the 50 mile zone. I’m the one who loses his home, health and life in the event of a meltdown.

Capitalism is a means to ascent. When we reach the summit it will die and we will all be free.

Capitalism equals competition and that advances civilization in a brutal yet necessary way forcing us toward some type of utopia.

Once we reach that state the need to compete and to advance and for capitalism ends for we have arrived at our destination.