Broken Quanta

We Should Totally Take His Word For It

2010-11-24T09:17:00.002-06:00

Sayeth ESPN:

Even if TCU and Boise State run the table, they still don't deserve to be in the Bowl Championship Series title game, Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee said Wednesday.

Because, really, who knows more about teams that don't deserve to play in the BCS title game than the president of Ohio State?

Illiteracy Is A Terrible Thing

2010-11-12T12:29:00.001-06:00

This article (brief synopsis: SWPLs think boys should be raised to be sissies, have begun giving their sons girly names) is making the rounds. The writer and the various pantywaists she quotes are very silly. I won't belabor it; we've covered this ground around here before: boys are not girls, etc. For my part, though, the funniest bit is this:

Fully half of the names on the most recent boys' Top 100 list are choices that break with masculine naming tradition, compared with less than 20 percent of the names on the 1960 boys' list. These include traditional names with feminine qualities such as softer sounds and/or vowel endings: Joshua, Sebastian, Elijah.

I can't speak for Sebastian, but Joshua was the conqueror of Jericho and Elijah was quite possibly the hardest man who ever lived. In comparison to either of these cats, John Rambo is a huge pussy. If their names are feminine, I'm not sure what would count as masculine.

Preservation

2010-10-06T13:01:00.000-05:00

Today is Voting Day on our new mascot. In order to vote, you have to click through a long propaganda-laden slideshow. Halfway through you come to this slide:

I've screen-capped this slide and posted it here in order to preserve it. In ten years when "Rebels" starts to slip away but we are assured, again, that the name "Ole Miss" ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE AND YOU PEOPLE ARE CRAZY TO THINK IT WILL, we will have this memory of what we were assured at this phase of the transformation.

Howler of the Week

2010-10-04T17:01:00.001-05:00

OK, it was last week. The point stands.

Depictions of the remaining three options – the Rebel Land Shark, the Rebel Black Bear and Hotty Toddy — will be released for public review as a part of the poll on Wednesday, and the committee said it has taken more time than expected to ensure the designs presented are respectful of Ole Miss culture.

Say, you know what mascot would be really "respectful of Ole Miss culture"?

Colonel Reb.

It's a Slippery Business, the Internet

2010-09-07T09:22:00.000-05:00

From SI.com. here's a surefire way to rack up the hits (and terrify 49ers fans):

Immediate reaction: WHAT?!??!!! After clicking: oh, Nate Davis. OK, then.

Wanna Be President?

2010-09-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

Look, I ain't the President of Barack Obama's fan club. But this picture really make me feel for him.

Check out the hair in particular. He looks like he's aged 15 years since January of 09.

It Just Keeps Getting Better

2010-09-02T09:56:00.003-05:00

Yes, yes, I'm easily amused.

Football and Academic Heterogeneity

2010-09-01T13:31:00.001-05:00

There's the seed of a really interesting article in this piece by Bomani Jones about the UNC football mess.

On Saturday, a tweet from WTVD-TV's Mark Armstrong in Raleigh-Durham said nine players on the University of North Carolina's two-deep were on the scout team for that day's scrimmage. This after reports had surfaced that players linked to a tutor under NCAA investigation would practice with the Tar Heels at that level. The nine included eight starters from last year's team and six players in Scouts Inc.'s top 50 NFL draft prospects.

And seven communications majors.

...

If you're looking beneath the surface for the problem in Chapel Hill, you might find it in the amazing coincidence that so many top-notch athletes are so interested in how humans relay messages. Or maybe it's just that "communications" fits the bill for what a former UNC football player told me about the majors of choice there: Athletes are interested in a major that works around their busy schedules, requires little math, primarily assigns short papers and uses subjective grading in most of its courses.

From there, the article descends into common tropes about the NCAA, universities, students, and money. Trust me: you've read it before.

But this particular bit is very interesting. It's not that I don't agree, in principle, that easy degree programs exist. Nor do I deny that football and basketball players tend to concentrate in the easiest programs. But I wonder what Bomani Jones would prescribe for the problem?

Some background: as near as I can tell, the 'Communications' major at UNC is a degree program of UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. This School has 52 faculty members and another 34 staff members. It probably consumes about ten million dollars a year just in personnel costs, with even more money needed for other expenses. Call it $15M/year without breaking a sweat. I'm sure you could look it up if the number is important to you. For the purposes of this discussion, it's just important to know that it's A Lot of Money.

Now, Jones is effectively saying that the degrees this School hands out are a farce, and the students gain nothing from their coursework. As a result, he argues, football players in these majors are "being 'paid' with rubber checks." Jones considers this a hidden scandal. Although he doesn't lay out a prescription, it seems implicit: in order to ensure that players are being fairly compensated for their work, they should be steered toward more-rigorous degree programs that offer more definite career advantages.

Which is all well and good; but does he really expect UNC to insult one of its own schools this way? Because that's what he's asking the university for: an implicit acknowledgment that some of its degree programs are a cakewalk; that some of its students learn nothing; and that it spends A Lot of Money on a school that doesn't educate anyone.

Of course all of that may be true, and if so, then UNC administrators should indeed make these painful admissions and take the fallout like men. But here it gets really tricky. Here's the education bit of Jones' bio (from his personal website):

In 2001, Bomani graduated from Clark Atlanta University with a bachelor's degree in economics. In 2003, he completed a master's in politics, economics and business from Claremont Graduate University. And in 2005, he completed a master's in economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

With a background like that, it's easy for Jones to sneer at Communications majors and the departments that produce them. But with a background like mine, it's easy for me to sneer at Economics majors and the departments that produce them. Does that mean that football players majoring in Econ are getting "being 'paid' with rubber checks"? At what level of rigor does a degree program get 'real' enough that it's worth what football players are paying for it?

Nice

2010-08-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

Some people will know why I think this is funny.

Systemic Failure

2010-08-26T16:33:00.001-05:00

Here's a fascinating article about "dropout factories" --- colleges with exceptionally low graduation rates. It's a long piece that offers a lot to think and ague about.

As usual for the genre, the story is hung on an anecdotal hook that reveals more than the authors intend. Meet Nestor Curiel, Mexican immigrant to the South Side of Chicago.

Nestor, a polite twenty-one-year-old with black-rimmed glasses, graduated from Eisenhower High School with a 3.6 GPA and dreams of becoming an engineer. (As a child he was inspired by Discovery Channel documentaries about engineering marvels, and he also enjoyed helping his dad repair automobiles on weekends.)

...

Nestor was an above-average high school student who generally made the honors list, and he was diligent in his non-school hours as well, holding down a part-time job as a busboy and line cook at the restaurant where his father worked.

So far, so good.

His ACT score was 18, equivalent to about 870 on the SAT, which wasn't high enough to gain him admission to a selective college.

Trouble. The median ACT composite score is 21; an 18 puts Nestor in about the 32nd percentile of ACT takers. To call this is a red flag is a major understatement.

That said, more college degrees are earned by tenacity than brilliance; so long as the school was honest with him about what he should study, there'll be no complaining from me.

Ultimately, Nestor wound up narrowing his choices down to two nearby schools: Purdue University Calumet and Chicago State University. Each seemed to have advantages and disadvantages, but Chicago State offered one extra perk: $1,000 in scholarship money if Nestor enrolled in its pre-engineering program.

Are you kidding me? The school not only allowed a 32nd-percentile student to declare himself a "pre-engineering" major, it gave him a cash incentive to do so. Madness of the first rank.

Nestor is certain that the two years at Chicago State put him behind. In his first semester at UIC, he failed a math class, finding it difficult to match the faster pace and heavier workload.

Nestor, God bless him, is wrong. Or at least, half wrong; I'm certainly willing to believe that his experience at Chicago State put him even further behind than he already was. But unless young Nestor was fighting off a bout of Ebola or something on test day, there is simply no way in Hell that a story that begins with an 18 on the ACT ends with a job as a working engineer. In fact, if the story even ends with a degree in engineering, then the school is a joke and the people running it should all be fired.

So, to recap:

1. Nestor Curiel graduates from high school with a GPA (3.6) that indicates that his school considers him to have learned ~90% of what they attempted to teach him.

2. This 90%-successful high school student's college preparedness is in the bottom third of all ACT test-takers.

3. Chicago State not only accepts this 32nd-percentile student, but pays him to enroll in a degree program that most 75th-percentile students would struggle mightily with.

4. Nestor struggles with administrative stupidity, disengaged classmates, and unhelpful teachers at Chicago State.

5. Discouraged by his experience at Chicago State, Nestor transfers to UIC and begins failing classes.

6. Nestor drops out of UIC and takes up welding, having wasted years of his life and tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars. (Projected)

The authors of the "dropout factory" piece look at this system and identify step #4 as the singular Point of Failure. Me, I see failure points at every step but #6. What do you think?

Slaves

2010-08-04T16:51:00.001-05:00

That is what Judge Vaughn Walker thinks you ought to be.

Are you one?

It Figures

2010-08-04T16:35:00.001-05:00

In the wake of his hit piece on Houston Nutt, it seems Stewart Mandel got a lot of emails.

Your Houston Nutt article is an outrage! Who are you, Mr. Stewart Mandel, to call a fine coach trying to help someone dirty or question his integrity? You should be fired!! I think you, sir, are a big A$$!!
-- Steve, North Mississippi

After reading your latest article on Houston Nutt, I only have one thing to say: Thank you so much for publishing that article. I honestly can't thank you enough for exposing this man for who he truly is.
-- James, Little Rock, Ark.

I knew the Nutt column would elicit some strong reactions, but I had no idea they would split so diametrically between the states of Mississippi and Arkansas.

There is no chance that he "had no idea" the pro- and anti-Nutt emails would split that way.

I literally received hundreds of e-mails just like these two. It's no surprise Ole Miss fans so vociferously defended their coach (though I have no doubt the same exact people would have crucified Dan Mullen if by chance Mississippi State had taking Masoli instead),

So the national media and Rebel fans were united in spittle-flecked rage at Mullen when he suspended Anthony Dixon for a whopping one game (a meaningless scrimmage against Jackson State) last year in the wake of a DUI arrest? No? Drat.

but apparently Nutt is about as popular in Arkansas as Kiffin is in Tennessee.

Funny Mandel should mention Kiffin; though it was tough on Kiffin, Mandels' 1100-word piece on Kiffin's stiffing of Tennessee never once used the word "dirty." In fact, though it was admirably snarky about Kiffin's thin resume, the piece was devoid of any of the personal invective Mandel has hurled at Nutt this week.

But the point of the column was not to rile up those two fan bases. Let me address a less partisan e-mail.

Stewart, your writing is usually spot-on in regards to the ever-wavering ethics of college football, but your criticism of Houston Nutt's acceptance of Masoli is uncharacteristically harsh to the point of seeming almost personal. I'm not saying that you're wrong about Nutt, just that you seem to have lost your perspective as a journalist on this one. What gives?
-- James, Edmond, Okla.

Note: Mandel undoubtedly got reasonable emails from Mississippi, too. But publishing them would undermine the larger goal of smearing us. So, the one reasonably tempered note he publishes comes from Oklahoma.

I don't dispute that the column was harsh, but it wasn't without reason.

My hope with the Nutt-Masoli piece was that readers might take a moment to rethink what truly constitutes "dirty" in this day and age.

Wow, this is slimy. Let's try this: my hope with the "Stewart Mandel is a part-time transvestite whore" piece was not to smear Mandel or rile his fans, but just to get people thinking about the plight of part-time transvestite whores in today's society. What's that you say? It's unfair and cowardly to throw ugly invective at a particular person and then hide behind a trumped-up claim that you're engaging in high-minded, big-picture social commentary? Damn.

It's been an eventful off-season for scandal-related headlines, and as I wrote in the lead, I've noticed fans throwing around the d-word with reckless abandon, demonizing coaches and programs based mostly on blanket assumptions and innuendo. Listening to some of the revisionist history out there about Pete Carroll's USC tenure, you'd think he was handing Reggie Bush money out of his own wallet, which couldn't be further from the truth. If you're going to accuse someone of being "dirty," it really ought to be for something of his own doing.

Now this is rich. Pete Carroll had rulebreakers and scumbags crawling all over his program. If he didn't know it, it's only because he took great pains not to know it. (Don't take my word for it; this is what the NCAA means when it invokes the dread phrase "lack of institutional control".) But it's veritably unconscionable to call Carroll dirty! Now, on the other hand...

Admittedly, Nutt has broken no rules, and if that's your sole criteria for judging a coach's ethics, then you're obviously going to disagree with the column.

That is to say: by any objective standards, Mandel is totally wrong. But if we apply the special secret everything-Ole-Miss-does-is-way-worse-because-it's-them-doing-it standard beloved of sportswriters, then, hey, screw it.

But as I wrote, Nutt has demonstrated a repeated pattern over the past several years of shameless win-at-any-cost tactics.

Well, he wrote that. But he didn't exactly prove it.

Taking on Masoli just happens to be his most brazenly transparent. No one's buying the cover that this has anything to do with "helping" a wayward kid.

So if you assume in advance that all Nutt's motivations are slimy, you come to the conclusion that Nutt is slimy. Gotcha.

As Nutt himself told the Memphis Commercial Appeal: "I could have not gone after him, gone 6-6 this season and got ready to reload [for 2011]. But when you think about your team, you have an obligation to them to do everything you can to put them in the best situation to win."

But of course the Nutt quote doesn't support Mandel's interpretation at all. To be the confessed villain Mandel wants, Nutt would need to say "I could have not gone after him, gone 6-6 this season and been on thin ice for 2011. But when you think about your career, you have an obligation to yourself to do everything you can to stay on top and make more money."

Sadly, this has become the standard operating mentality for a lot of coaches, and I happen to find it more troublesome than many of the things others might consider "dirty," but unfortunately, a lot of fans now tacitly accept it.

Again, Mandel finds it more troublesome because it happened at Ole Miss. It's no more or less complicated than that. The misdeeds of Lane Kiffin, Pete Carroll, Brian Kelly, et al? Less troublesome. Because they're not in Mississippi.

I am an Ole Miss fan, and if taking Masoli helps us win more games, so be it. This is what college football has become. Get over it.
-- David Davis, Taylorsville, Miss.

Case in point.

Here's one more email to prove that all Rebels are amoral scumbags!

Hey, what say we close this out with a little concern trolling?

As a three-degree alum of the University of Mississippi, I have to say this is embarrassing to Ole Miss. After David Cutcliffe was shown the door after one losing season (which followed the team's first 10-win season in three decades), Nutt rightfully shouldn't feel like he has job security there. Still, the school has enough working against it. Scandals and scoundrels aren't helping its image. Too bad -- a fall Saturday in Oxford is perhaps the best stage for college football that exists.
-- Chris, New Orleans

On that we can agree -- especially the last part.

Gag me. Don't piss down my back and tell me that that my-town-is-great-and-it-sure-is-a-shame-it-rains-all-the-time, Stewart.

Other Things I Think Are Funny

2010-08-02T13:34:00.001-05:00

Peter King, in his MMQB column of last week (not this week):

... The Odd Couple. Jay Cutler and Mike Martz are united in the city of United (Airlines), and there are many jobs at stake. Coaching jobs. Front-office jobs. Cutler will have to play differently than he ever has; he now has to trust his receivers to be open before he actually sees them open. That's a big part of the Martz scheme. It'll be fun to watch in Bourbonnais, Ill., site of Chicago camp, to see how quickly Cutler catches on.

It seems like it should go pretty well; Jay Cutler (26 interceptions in 2009) has been throwing to receivers without knowing whether or not they're open his whole career.

Why, That Church Is Full Of Sinners!

2010-08-02T13:25:00.001-05:00

Wow. Vile hit piece by Stewart Mandel today.

Nutt, an Arkansas native, was once a widely respected coach known for his close family, his strong Christian values (hence the "Right Reverend" tag) and his loyalty to his home state...

Something changed, however, after enduring consecutive losing seasons in 2004 and '05. It's not hard to pinpoint the moment when Nutt went to the dark side.

The piece is prompted by the following set of facts:

1. Jeremiah Masoli has been involved in three* petty crimes.

2. These crimes, and his attempt to cover them up, got him booted off the team at Oregon with a year of eligibility remaining.

3. In complete accordance with NCAA rules, Coach Nutt has encouraged Masoli to join the Rebels as a walk-on for his final year.

From this set of facts Mr. Mandel concludes that Coach Nutt is a "dirty coach" who "went to the dark side". His crime? "[O]penly welcoming other coaches' castoffs". Apparently Mandel believes that decency demands that the letter of NCAA rule be ignored, and that young Mr. Masoli be shunned, forever.

Which is fine; whatever. But it seems like there was this other guy who "welcom[ed]...castoffs", once. A long time ago? Ah, my mind is all fuzzy. But something tells me that, for some reason, "welcoming castoffs" is not, in the strictest sense, a violation of "strong Christian values." You dig?

*Or two, depending on how you count. Masoli's lawyer claims that the third incident, a marijuana possession charge, is not technically a "crime" in Oregon. It would be a misdemeanor crime here in Mississippi, so I counted it. This is all sort of beside the point.

Bill of Un-Attainder

2010-07-30T14:28:00.001-05:00

Why do I think that if I'd done all the crooked shit Charlie Rangel has done, Congress wouldn't propose that I be merely "reprimanded" as punishment?

Frankly, I don't understand this at all. Rangel represents a district that's going to elect a brain-dead, lock-step liberal Democrat no matter what. It would cost the Democrats nothing at all to chuck this loser overboard. And yet they're willing to piss on their obligations to the people and the rule of law to cover up for him. WTF?

Another In A Series

2010-07-16T13:32:00.001-05:00

Once again: are you an ordinary person, with the inescapable notion that high-born and well-heeled elites are abusing their positions of trust and conspiring to undermine the beliefs you hold dear? Don't worry: you're not paranoid. You're correct:

To strike down DOMA, Judge Tauro had to reject all state justifications for its definition of marriage. Congress advanced four such justifications for this statute: "(1) encouraging responsible procreation and child-bearing, (2) defending and nurturing the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage, (3) defending traditional notions of morality, and (4) preserving scarce resources." The Justice Department disavowed them all. So much for tradition. Its sole defense of DOMA was that it was needed to preserve the status quo until matters were sorted out politically. Given that open invitation Judge Tauro concluded that all of the justifications offered in DOMA flunked even the lowest "conceivable" standard of rationality. Religious people will surely take umbrage at his one-sentence rebuttals of centuries of tradition.

The intra-elite argument over "gay marriage" has all the authenticity of a pro wrestling match. The outcome is foreordained. The sovereignty of the American people is no more.

Prediction

2010-07-08T09:10:00.001-05:00

LeBron James will announce tonight that he will join Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami.

No word on whether the NBA will then bother to actually play games for the next six years.

Trust Us; We're Liars

2010-07-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

East Anglia University has completed an "independent review" of the leaked "Climategate" emails. They've found that the scientists did nothing wrong. The key to this conclusion is the following claim:

The review found, "crucially, the e-mails cannot always be relied upon as evidence of what actually occurred, nor indicative of actual behavior that is extreme, exceptional or unprofessional."

In other words: the report's authors suggest that you should go on trusting these very scientists with a scientific and political project estimated to cost trillions of dollars --- because, hey, no one can really prove that they actually did any of the "extreme, exceptional or unprofessional" things we know they talked about doing.

And What's With The Ridiculous Get-Ups?

2010-07-06T16:40:00.001-05:00

Here's one of those stories that appears every now and again: smug bicyclist informs drivers of their responsibility to "Share the Road." Which is fine, as far as it goes; the story's hook is about some yahoos in Illinois who used a car to intentionally run down bicyclists, which is Obviously Bad.

But, see, here's the thing. If you're a bicyclist and you wonder why everyone treats you like a road hazard and an asshole, it's because you are one. Or at least, enough of your fellow bicyclists answer this description that it's become a useful stereotype. You can find the Mississippi bicycle traffic law here. I guarantee your state has a law almost exactly like this:

SEC. 63-3-207. Applicability of chapter to persons riding bicycles or animals or driving animal-drawn vehicles.

Every person riding a bicycle or an animal or driving any animal drawing a vehicle upon a highway shall have all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle under this chapter, except those provisions of this chapter which by their nature can have no application.

Note: not just "all of the rights", but "all of the rights and all of the duties". That means, for instance, that when you come to a stop sign you have to f*^king stop. When you're going to turn you have to signal. And so on. You don't get to just blow right on through controlled intersections and then act all aggrieved because somebody almost ran you down.

I understand the problem that bicyclists have with motorists. But from the driver's point of view, most bicyclists are adopting a very adolescent attitude toward road-sharing: they want the rights, but not the responsibilities. They demand the freedom to take wild chances, but always blame someone else when they predictably get hurt.

Oops

2010-06-30T13:17:00.002-05:00

Sorry; that post was meant to go here.

I Suppose We Should Just Be Glad That Giant Gay Pimp Man Did Not Make The Cut

2010-06-28T09:49:00.001-05:00

My take: pffft.

My more elaborate take: I would break the candidates down into four broad categories.

Put Me Down As A "Whatever"

Rebel Fanatic is described as a "one-of-a-kind character [that] would generate fan support through skits, stunts and an endless supply of creative accessories". The astute reader will note that this "one-of-a-kind character" is both: a.) a blatant ripoff of the Philly Phanatic; and b.) not even "one-of-a-kind" on the committee's own list, which includes two other Formless Muppet concepts (Hotty & Toddy and Rebel Mojo). Ugh.

Slicker Than An Oil-Soaked Seawall

Mark my words: allow the Rebels to take a Bear, Cardinal, Horse, Lion, Titan, or Shark as the on-field mascot and we'll be "The Mississippi Bears/Cardinals/Stallions/Lions/Sharks" in less than five years. I'm actually a little surprised at the clumsiness of it all; when luring someone onto a slippery slope, it's clearly best to avoid putting up signs that say "Here There Be Lubricant". Frankly I prefer the Formless Muppet.

Dude, What If We Just Changed His Name?

Quick, picture a Riverboat Pilot. Doesn't he look a hell of a lot like Colonel Reb? Recall that the Colonel hasn't been an actual colonel in some years --- the on-field mascot has just been an old dude with a 19th century mustache for a decade. (The Colonel's uniform was replaced with event-specific sports jerseys before I got here in 1998.) So we're going to swap one football-jersey-wearing 19th century dude for another? Money well spent, people. Money. Well. Spent.

There's No Foreseeable Way This Could Go Wrong

Now, don't get me wrong; a Bluesman is not a completely stupid idea. (Don't get me started about the idiot gender PC on display in "Blues Musician.") The trouble is: bluesmen are black; mascots are caricatures; a Bluesman mascot is inevitably going to be a caricature of a black man. Now, what could possibly go wrong with this plan? I mean, the national media will totally give us the benefit of the doubt, and interpret our new Cartoony Black Dude mascot in the most charitable way possible, right?

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

2010-06-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

From the Ricky Martin files:

Soccer Officially Announces It Is Gay

Let Me Explain Myself

2010-06-14T16:11:00.001-05:00

NPR and the Nation think I am a bad person.

Every World Cup, it arrives like clockwork. As sure as the ultimate soccer spectacle brings guaranteed adrenaline and agony to fans across the United States...

At last count, approximately five of them.

...it also drives the right-wing noise machine utterly insane.

"It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us," yipped the Prom King of new right, Glenn Beck. "It doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it."

Beck is right. But why him? I mean, why is there a political divide on the soccer issue? The answer is simple: conservatives understand America has her own distinctive and valuable culture, and that this culture should be protected from efforts to subsume and obliterate it.

Soccer Is For Losers; I Have Proof

2010-06-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

Check this out. This guy looks so excited, one worries that he may be about to stroke out.

The astute observer will note that the excited guy's team did not actually win. What a bunch of chumps.

Let's Talk Realignment

2010-06-10T17:11:00.001-05:00

Somewhere in the Midwest, the great and powerful lords of Yankee football are meeting. They're in a terrible bind; their once-proud league, the Big Ten, has been left behind competitively. An ill wind blows from the Plains; the future holds nothing but Big 12/SEC national-title showdowns as far as the eye can see. There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth. But then, a flash of brilliance. A university athletic director leans back in his chair. He takes a long drag on an expensive cigar, holds it, and blows it out. Then he leans forward. All strain to hear his mighty words:

"What we need, gentleman, is one more mediocre team."

I kid, I kid. It was probably more like:

"If we can't beat the Big 12, we can at least destroy them. Let's offer one of their keystone schools the bank to come over to our league. Then the Big 12 will fall apart and we'll be back to our rightful place as college football's Second Banana by default."

And so word on the street is that sometime Friday, Nebraska will announce plans to join the Big Ten. Meanwhile, Colorado has already announced it intention to join the Pac-10. Presumably both leagues will require new names, though you never can tell; the Big Ten has been playing a "there are ten lights!" game with eleven teams for some time now. Calling a 12 or 14 team league the "Big Ten" is not meaningfullly more stupid than using that name for an 11 team league.

A bunch of things on my mind, none of which involve uninformed "projections" of which schools will wind up where:

1. It's interesting to learn that Texas has been more or less a cancer at the heart of the Big 12 since the league's inception. Not surprising, mind you; an inflated opinion of one's own importance is one of the defining characteristics of the modern Texas coach/player/alum/fan/resident. But interesting nonetheless.

2. It's good to be in a league that on one would ever think of leaving. Again, I'm not making projections about who ends up where. But there's a very real danger that some currently big-time-by-association programs will wind up without a chair when the music stops. In other words: there's a real possibility that big-time college football will abruptly cease to exist in places like Waco, TX or Manhattan, KS. Imagine, for a moment, that a disgruntled Alabama had one foot out the door of the SEC. In response, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and LSU were strongly considering bolting for the ACC. What would the mood be like in Oxford, Starkville, Fayetteville and Lexington? The correct answer is "panicked"; the sudden evaporation of SEC football would do incalculable damage to these towns. There's got to be a taste of that fear in Ames, IA, this week, don't you think?

3. I'm unmoved by the screaming about how THIS IS ABOUT MONEY. It's not that I don't believe that it's about money. It's that I don't think "it's about money" is some damning indictment. If big-time sports colleges look money grubbing from the outside, it's because they need money to do stuff that important constituencies think they should do. All of which is to say: if Ole Miss football turns a $3 million profit this year, Dan Jones and Pete Boone don't take the money in quarters and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck; they use it to pay for the school's women's soccer and rifle teams, and subsidize summer youth sports camps, and build better facilities for the players and fans, and a host of other things that most Rebels are glad that UM is able to do.

4. A case study in the do-nots of rumor-mongering, courtesy of Kansas City's KCTV:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- High level sources in multiple conferences have told KCTV5 that Texas and Texas A&M are looking to move to the Big Ten Conference and are in talks to join the conference, while the University of Oklahoma is planning on petitioning the Southeastern Conference to become a member of its conference.

Now, I think Oklahoma would be a great addition to our league, so I'd like to believe this. But if you want your rumor-mongering to be believed, you'd better not make a fundamental mistake (there is no "University of Oklahoma") in the first sentence.

Toolmarks

2010-06-07T13:31:00.001-05:00

Peter King this morning:

It's fall here at the bottom of Africa, which gives the region a bit more of a football feel. And futbol too, of course.

I've decided that the Spanglish usage of "futbol" in place of the perfectly good English word "soccer" is a surefire marker for cosmopolitan douchebaggery.

It Seems Fair To Judge Him On His Own Terms

2010-06-03T19:16:00.000-05:00

Snipped from CNN.com just now:

True, true. But by this metric, how is he doing?

Murderer Murders

2010-06-03T13:32:00.000-05:00

Again. Which gives me the opportunity to flog a favorite subject: if Natalee Holloway's father was a man, Joran van der Sloot would be long dead by now. Agreed?

Obama Lovers Take Note

2010-06-03T13:23:00.001-05:00

You want toadying? I'll show you toadying. Rick Reilly suggests today that Kobe can be considered greater than Magic if the Lakers win the title this year. No word on whether he typed the column with a straight face. I'm betting no; I don't consider myself a big expert on the subject, obviously, but I doubt it's even possible to have a straight face with Kobe's d**k in your mouth.

The White House Thinks You're Dumb

2010-05-28T13:39:00.001-05:00

Let me go on record as saying: there is no way in Hell this is true.

"We found that, as the Congressman has publicly and accurately stated, options for Executive Branch service were raised with him. Efforts were made in June and July of 2009 to determine whether Congressman Sestak would be interested in service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board, which would avoid a divisive Senate primary, allow him to retain his seat in the House, and provide him with an opportunity for additional service to the public in a high-level advisory capacity for which he was highly qualified. The advisory positions discussed with Congressman Sestak, while important to the work of the Administration, would have been uncompensated."

"White House staff did not discuss these options with Congressman Sestak. The White House Chief of Staff enlisted the support of former President Clinton who agreed to raise with Congressman Sestak options of service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board. Congressman Sestak Declined the suggested alternatives, remaining committed to his Senate candidacy."

I don't believe it for an instant and anyone who does is a sucker.

That's not to say you have to care one way or another; I imagine the I'll-give-you-a-job-if-you-do-what-I-want thing goes on all the time with Presidents of both parties, and it bothers me not at all. But really, what kind of morons do they take us for?

Apparently There Were No Steps Available

2010-05-26T15:10:00.000-05:00

Your humble host is sorely tempted to make a joke about this image:

I'm betting you know what the joke would be.

Oil Spill Stuff

2010-05-25T10:14:00.001-05:00

Here's the main thing that bothers me about the ongoing Gulf oil spill: why do the solutions seem so ad hoc?

A top BP official said Tuesday that the oil company has equipment in place to begin diagnostic testing for a maneuver called a "top kill" that could be implemented as early as the following day to stop oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

What is this "begin testing" shit all about? Isn't that the sort of thing BP should've done before they started drilling? It's like BP decided to drill this hole (and the government decided to let them drill the hole) without ever considering what they might do if it started to leak. So now they have some Armageddon style room full of engineers brainstorming wacky solutions. They are, by all outward appearances, throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. I find this astonishing.

"Draw Mohammed Day"

2010-05-20T09:42:00.000-05:00

Count me with Althouse:

... I disapprove of "Everybody Draw Mohammed" Day ...

...

I don't like the in-your-face message that we don't care about what other people hold sacred.

Look, contrary to what you've heard from Awlaki the Rabid Imam or the Nutty Libertarians at Reason, it's perfectly possible to be 100% committed to both freedom and faith at the same time. The defense of freedom requires that we tolerate blasphemy, but not that we perpetrate it.

Rebels To Take A WAC At The 2011 Title

2010-05-13T17:13:00.001-05:00

The Rebels will open 2011 at home against Boise State, then fly to California four weeks later to play that other doesn't-suck team from the WAC, Fresno State. Throw in the usual SEC grind and that's a pretty tough year, especially with half the defense graduating after the 2010 season. More importantly, the newly-scheduled game promises to be a major bone of smack-talking contention between yours truly and longtime BQ friend and erstwhile BSU fan Bryan.

Now That's Commitment

2010-05-12T13:15:00.001-05:00

Just got this email from the Alumni Association:

Dear Alumni and Friends,

The student Mascot Selection Committee has scheduled focus group sessions for alumni and friends from Memphis to the Gulf Coast and invites you to attend one in your area. The sessions are scheduled at various times throughout the day and are limited to 30 people per session, so reservations are necessary.

The student Mascot Selection Committee is made up of 17 students who applied and interviewed to be a part of this unprecedented movement. An ad hoc committee consisting of student leaders and student athletes chose the members. The main priority of the selection committee is to hear everyone's opinions and concerns and facilitate an efficient selection of a new on-field mascot. The students have the full support of the University's administration and are assisted by The Ramey Agency, a Mississippi based consulting and brand imaging firm. They are also being helped by the expertise of Eric Rickabaugh of Rickabaugh Graphics, who has done over 100 mascot and logo changes for universities across the nation.

The committee is excited to embark on this journey and is truly committed to capturing the love for Ole Miss that we all share and fueling that into a new on-field mascot that will embrace the passion and spirit of the Ole Miss Rebels.

If you would like to attend one of these sessions, please contact Lynda Walker in the Alumni Office at 662-915-7375 to reserve your space. Again, attendance is limited to 30 people per session, so please register promptly if you are interested. Limited space is still available.

Thank you,
Ole Miss Alumni Association

Memphis
Tuesday, May 18
3 p.m. focus group
5 p.m. focus group Jackson
Thursday, May 20
9 a.m. focus group
11 a.m. focus group
2 p.m. focus group
4 p.m. focus group

Oxford
Wednesday, May 19
10 a.m. focus group
2 p.m. focus group

Biloxi
Friday, May 21
9 a.m. focus group
11 a.m. focus group
2 p.m. focus group
4 p.m. focus group

Note the schedule. They're so committed to hearing from the alumni that they've scheduled the meetings such that no one with a job can attend.

New Frontiers

2010-05-12T09:53:00.002-05:00

Probably because I am an incurable jerk, I just can't stop giggling over this picture I snipped from the CNN home page just now:

Woo-hoo! It's like they've discovered a whole new frontier for bullying fat kids! Think of the possibilities!

Obama: Dumber Than A Third-Grader

2010-05-10T10:17:00.000-05:00

Everybody's talking about what Obama said at Hampton University. Most are focusing on the you-kids-and-your-newfangled-contraptions-get-off-my-lawn angle:

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.

For thirty years, Apple's design philosophy has been something like "make it so an untrained third grader could operate it." They've gotten so good at intuitive UI design that I've seen a four-year-old pick up an iPhone and start using it. I've got my differences with the President, but I don't believe for one instant that he doesn't "know how to work" an iPod. So what he's done here is stake a bold claim to being a complete moron. I'm absolutely mystified by this.

Oh, and I love that iPods are now bad. There's room for everyone under the bus!

Princeton Grad Is Also An Idiot; Film At Eleven

2010-05-06T15:36:00.001-05:00

More from Dez Bryant's "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" file. Here --- in the midst of a piece that drips scorn for people who actually, you know, produce stuff --- a never-was NFL scrub named Ross Tucker makes this assertion:

The question was inappropriate, but it was inappropriate mainly because it literally has nothing to do with football. It was not, however, unacceptable because your company's Human Resources handbook states that question cannot be asked.

Pfft. "[Y]our company's Human Resources handbook states that question cannot be asked" because asking that question is against the fucking law, dipshit. And apart from a few carefully-defined exceptions, NFL teams and players are, in fact, bound by the same laws as the rest of America.

With Friends Like These

2010-05-04T14:53:00.001-05:00

Look, I'm firmly on the holy-shit-I-can't-believe-he'd-ask-that side of the Dez Bryant affair. But Rick Reilly has got to be kidding us here:

Let's play a game. I'll describe a childhood, and you figure out who had it.

Person No. 1 -- Raised in his grandmother's brothel, the son of a prostitute, he was raped by a neighbor at 6 and molested by a Catholic priest during catechism.

Person No. 2 -- Considered useless and distant, teachers wrote of him, as noted in Catherine Hurley's "Could do Better": "Certainly on the road to failure … hopeless … rather a clown in class … wasting other pupils' time."

Person No. 3 -- Raised in the brothel run by his aunt, he was once sent home from school for "insufficient clothes" and was arrested at 15 for breaking into cars.

Give up?

Richard Pryor.
John Lennon.
James Brown.

Arguably the greatest comedian, songwriter and soul singer of the 20th century, respectively.

The question isn't: "Why did Miami Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland ask Oklahoma State wide receiver Dez Bryant if his mom was a prostitute?" The question is: "Why should it matter?"

This defense is shockingly lame. Let's play the same game over again:

Person No. 1: Spent his conscripted military service in the brig for the racially-motivated beating and stabbing of a fellow soldier; divorced six times amid recurrent allegations of wife-beating; imprisoned for tax evasion; once set himself on fire in a freebasing (read: crack-smoking) accident; notorious for longtime drug addiction and a willingness to leverage racial politics to the detriment of his employers.

Person No. 2: Torpedoed his band's (ie, his team's) success first by claiming that they were "more popular than Jesus", then by getting hopelessly lost in drug addiction and faux-Indian mysticism, and finally blew it up entirely over an Asian chick; embarked on a weird series of publicity stunts; became an apologist and fellow-traveler for the Vietcong, the IRA and the Black Panther Party.

Person No. 3: Spent his latter teen years incarcerated for theft; repeatedly arrested for domestic violence; accused by a former employee of forcible rape; once led a high-speed car chase and was subsequently convicted of various gun, drug, and assault charges; accused of attacking an electric-company worker with a knife.

Of course I don't have to tell you that these guys are:

1. Richard Pryor
2. John Lennon
3. James Brown

No disputes that these guys made staggering contributions to their respective fields. But which one would you want on your NFL team, Mr. Reilly?

Excuse Me While I Put On A Tweed Jacket And Light My Pipe

2010-04-30T09:05:00.000-05:00

Contestant: "I'll take 'Signs Your Degree Program Is A Joke' for $1000, Alex."

Trebek:"'Signs Your Degree Program Is A Joke' for $1000...it's a video clip! Watch closely:"

buzzer

Trebek: "Bob! Go Ahead."

Contestant: "What is 'you have time to stage a public line dance four days before finals?'"

Trebek: "Right you are, Bob! Choose the next clue...."

Holy Liability, Batman!

2010-04-28T16:54:00.000-05:00

What kind of shit is this?

NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said Wednesday the treatment of Dallas Cowboys first-round pick Dez Bryant and other prospective draft picks needs to be conducted in a professional manner.

Smith was reacting to Bryant being asked if his mother was a prostitute by Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland during a predraft visit in March.

Do you have any idea what my employer would do to me if I asked an interviewee a question like that? Do these people think they're somehow immune from being sued for asking wildly inappropriate interview questions because they're the NFL?

Betrayal Pays

2010-04-12T15:13:00.001-05:00

"Conservative" columnist Kathleen Parker gets her 30 pieces.

It Could Be Worse, Rebels

2010-04-09T11:20:00.001-05:00

Here's a nice piece of PC absurdity:

MAYVILLE, N.D. -- A state Supreme Court ruling and a Board of Higher Education decision have retired for good the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux nickname after a four-year legal battle.

And yet they will presumably go on being called "North Dakota".

We Don't Forget

2010-03-25T10:43:00.001-05:00

Here's Kathleen Parker blasting Bart Stupak for pretending to take life issues seriously. Parker, you will recall, was so offended by Sarah Palin that she chose to support the radically pro-abortion Barack Obama for president. I'm no fan of the weasel Stupak. But Parker, who closes her column with an allusion to Scripture, ought to check out the beam in her own eye.

I Rain On An Autistic Kid's Parade

2010-03-25T09:46:00.001-05:00

This story is getting a lot of attention:

ESPN's Tournament Challenge is currently hosting 4.78 million -- yes, million -- 2010 NCAA tournament bracket entries. After two rounds, not a single one of them is perfect. But the feat has, miraculously enough, been accomplished.

Who did it? His name is Alex Herrman, and he's a 17-year-old student at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Ill., one of Chicago's north suburbs. Herrmann, who is autistic, picked all the wild upsets you and I didn't see happening. UNI over Kansas. Ohio over Georgetown. Cornell over Wisconsin. Your bracket may have survived. Your bracket might be good. Herrmann's bracket is 100 percent perfect.

"It's amazing," Hermann said. "I'm good at math. I'm kind of good at math and at stats I see on TV during the game."

Alex entered the bracket on CBSsports.com's bracket challenge. CBS did not return several phone calls to confirm entries into its game. His 24-year-old brother Andrew, who helped him enter his picks into CBS' bracket manager, also entered the contest -- and ranks behind 500,000 other people.

"My bracket is totally shot," his 24-year-old brother Andrew said. "So is everyone else I know."

Us too, Andrew. Us too.

In case you needed the visual proof, NBC Chicago has the PDF right here. Another fun fact: According to Book Of Odds, the chances of picking the first two rounds of this NCAA tournament are one in 13,460,000, which means you have a better chance of winning the lottery twice over.

But of course there are probably way more than 13.5 million brackets filled out, right? So it's really not that unlikely that someone might have picked it correctly. The comparison to the lottery is instructive (though it seems quantitatively wrong to me; the odds against "winning the lottery" as most people understand it are way worse than 7M:1); the odds of any particular player winning are close to zero, but the odds of someone winning are pretty good (and, indeed, this happens all the time). The implication in the story --- that Hermann is perhaps some autistic basketball-picking savant --- seems quite silly to me.

Comma Chameleon

2010-03-25T09:21:00.001-05:00

Mark Steyn quotes one Francois Houle, threatening Ann Coulter:

I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or "free speech") in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada.

There are six commas in the first sentence there. The sentence could have been written with none. ("I would like to inform you that we do not have freedom of expression in Canada.") M. Houle is the Provost (read: chief academic officer) of a major Canadian university.

For Certain Values of "Nothing"

2010-03-24T15:45:00.001-05:00

From a CNN "FAQ" article on the new Obama/Pelosi/Reid health care act:

Question: Over 30 million couples suffer from infertility in the United States. Most insurers will not cover this problem. Will the new bill finally address this as a significant health problem?

Answer: There is nothing in the bill regarding this issue. One benefit is that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to couples who suffer from infertility because it was deemed a pre-existing condition. However, in terms of covering infertility treatments or in-vitro fertilization, none of that is made mandatory under the bill for insurance companies

The claim that "There is nothing in the bill regarding this issue" is sort of true but not really. From another CNN article:

• Contributions to flexible savings accounts will be limited to $2,500 per year, indexed by the Consumer Price Index in subsequent years.

Now, my FSA (and my employer's generous limit on my contributions to same) is paying for this cycle of IVF, and it will pay for any future cycles we decide to go through. Sunday's Act reduces the amount I can put in this account by 75% effective 3 years from now. I assume lots of other IVF patients will be similarly impacted. In other words, Sunday's Act makes my IVF expenses go way up. That's not "nothing regarding this issue", I assure you.

Things I Think About This Weekend

2010-03-24T09:18:00.001-05:00

Well! I hope those anti-Bush temper tantrums voters threw in 2006 and 2008 felt good. Some things that are on my mind today:

1. "Conservative Democrat" and "Pro-Life Democrat" are fraudulent labels. Congressmen like our own Travis Childers cast symbolic votes against bills like this. They do so knowing full well that the the bills will pass anyway. The passage of one big-government boondoggle after another was all but guaranteed by the vote that made Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the House. If your Representative voted for Pelosi, he voted for the Pelosi/Reid/Obama "health care reform". All else is smoke and mirrors.

2. Your money is going to pay for abortions. The Executive Order used to give Bart Stupak political cover is universally understood to be a sham. (Here is Ramesh Ponnuru: "it is not possible, I think, to argue that the executive order does much of anything.") Money the government collects from your paycheck will pay people to kill human organisms in utero. If you voted for a Democrat to be your Rep and/or for Obama to be our President, you share some responsibility for this. Maybe that's OK with you. If it's not, you should take your vote more seriously next time.

3. Scarcity cannot be repealed by the US Congress. Neither can the mathematical principles that undergird the insurance industry. You can't drown a fish, you can't burn oxygen, and you can't "insure" someone whose future claims are known in advance to exceed his future premiums. What you can do is misuse the language of the insurance business to obscure the real goal of your legislation, which is to transfer a large amount of wealth from well (younger) people to sickly (older) people. If you and your family are well, your total bills (taxes + premiums + out-of-pocket expenses) are about to go up. There is no way around this.

4. My old post about how it didn't matter much who got elected President was (partially) wrong. To recap: I said: "There is, quite simply, no way in Hell that the American people will stand for the nationalization of health care." That turns out to have been both true and irrelevant; a few high-ranking Democrats have managed to throw down a John Slade: "Yo, man, fuck the people!" I, um, did not anticipate this. Did you?

5. It's true that the US is a constitutional republic, and not a democracy. It is not necessarily illegitimate for Congress and the President to enact laws that the people would not themselves vote for. The trouble is that you can't take the "constitution" out of "constitutional republic." We've empowered our representatives to act against our wishes, but only within the carefully-drawn boundaries described in the Constitution. Key portions of this bill are way outside those boundaries. The entire text of the Constitution is here. I quote in full the part of it that empowers the US Government to require every citizen to purchase health insurance: " ".

That's it, I think. If you want more substantive thoughts you should read Megan McArdle. Her post about predictions is especially good.

More From The "If This Is Where You Get Your News, You Have No Idea What's Going On" Files

2010-03-12T09:31:00.001-06:00

CNN today puts itself in the business of promoting the "Coffee Party":

The "FULL STORY" link takes you to this page, where you will find a 1300-word story, no less than 4 video segments...and not one hint that Annabel Park, the founder of the "Coffee Party", was an Obama campaign worker and professional media strategist. In fact the entire piece seems deliberately designed to conceal the fact that the Coffee Party effort is a very thinly veiled pro-Obamacare advocacy organization.

This part in particular cracked me up:

The self-described libertarian and fiscal conservative was, and in some ways still is, a supporter of the Tea Party. He initially backed Sen. John McCain for president in 2008 and isn't, himself, comfortable with the idea of a public option in the health-care system. But the direction Oxford has seen the Tea Party take recently has him concerned.

He can't help but think it's being hijacked by social conservatives and the far right, he said, and as a gay man who's committed to gay rights, it may not be his cup of political tea.

So he's pulled up a chair at the Coffee Party to see what it can offer. Next to him is a college Democrat leader wearing a T-shirt that reads: "I'll hug your [picture of an elephant] if you kiss my [picture of a donkey]."

"I never feel uncomfortable stating my opinions," but it was "sort of ironic. They wanted free discussion of the issues but didn't want to talk about the conservative side of things," Oxford said after the planning meeting. "I think it was great, but I'd like to see more conservatives and libertarians."

"They wanted free discussion of the issues but didn't want to talk about the conservative side of things." In other words, they wanted a "free discussion" where only liberals get to talk. Which is a neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Also, a 17-year-old kid can not only be gay, he can be a gay man --- even though he is manifestly not yet a man. And a College Democrat attends the inaugural meeting of a "group [that] calls for civility" wearing a t-shirt that tells conservatives to kiss his ass. I wonder: did anybody at this oh-so-civil meeting tell the College Democrat off for that?

Me, I'm reminded of this:

Pappy O'Daniel: We need a shot in the arm. You hear me boys? In the goddamn arm! Election held tomorrow, that son of bitch Stokes would win it in a walk!
Junior O'Daniel: Well he's the reform candidate, Daddy.
Pappy O'Daniel: Yeah.
Junior O'Daniel: A lot of people like that reform. Maybe we should get us some.
Pappy O'Daniel: I'll reform you, you soft-headed son of a bitch. How we gonna run reform when we're the damn incumbent?

Interestingly, the link goes to what appears to be a very liberal blog. The entry was posted in 2006, blasting Dennis Hastert for some sin or another. That post was the first and best thing to come up when I Googled "maybe we should get us some of that reform." (I was hoping for a video clip of the scene but couldn't find one.) But I think this reinforces the point: Coffee Party types all seem to be living in 2005. Liberals: you're not the opposition any more, and imitating the Tea Party just makes you look like a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies. You have the Presidency and huge majorities in both houses of Congress. Obamacare isn't stalling out because Republicans are evil geniuses. Obamacare hasn't passed because Nancy Pelosi can't get Representatives from her own party to vote for it. This, in turn, is because Americans don't want this plan. It's no more or less complicated than that.

This Is Interesting

2010-03-11T16:26:00.002-06:00

Per ESPN's Bruce Feldman, Wonderlic Personnel Test scores for this year's top quarterback prospects:

@BFeldmanESPN RT @edgarthompson Gators QB Tim Tebow scored a 22 on his Wonderlic, Jimmy Clausen 23, Colt McCoy 25 and Sam Bradford 36 per NFL source. about 4 hours ago

For reference, the WPT score can be (roughly) translated to IQ by the relation

2WPT + 60 = IQ

where WPT is the Wonderlic score and IQ is a traditional IQ score. So these scores, if accurate, correspond to IQs of roughly:

104 for Tebow
106 for Clausen
110 for McCoy
132 for Bradford

That puts Tebow, Clausen and McCoy all in the "above average but not by much" category, as all are <1 standard deviation above average. (Average IQ is 100; sigma is 15.) Bradford, meanwhile, is >2 std. dev. above the mean. That means he's uncommonly smart; as in 3-out-of-100 smart (2 sigmas corresponds to roughly the 97th percentile).

I find all this interesting because one hears constantly about how smart Tebow, Clausen and McCoy are, and yet all three are very average. In fact, if we assume (fairly, I think) that most major universities largely exclude anyone more than 1 sigma or so below mean IQ, we'll find that these three guys are actually of below average intelligence in the university communities they live in. That's not to bash them; clearly, all three are better at what they do than I am at, well, virtually anything. I just think it's an interesting contrast between the hard data and the subjective impressions of sports-media types. What does it tell us about the sports media and/or their usual subjects that they're so completely blown away by guys that are, objectively speaking, thoroughly average?

Of course this has a pretty tenuous connection to football. Ryan Fitzpatrick (of the Bills) blew up the Wonderlic with a score of 48, and is terrible. Vince Young initially scored a 6 (IQ ~ 72) and only ever clawed out a 15 (IQ ~ 90) and has been successful, if also an emotional basket case. And none of it applies to Bradford, who has apparently won the genetic lottery in just about every dimension. Bastard.

Eric Massa

2010-03-10T13:15:00.001-06:00

Am I the only one who's most annoyed to learn that Congress has its own gym?

It turns out to be surprisingly hard to find information about this and other perks we pay for. (Note: by "it was surprisingly hard", I actually mean "it took more than 45 seconds". Welcome to the 21st century.) The best source is this article in the New Hamphire Union Leader, which says:

Members of the House also can pay a "nominal" monthly fee to work out at the Wellness Center reserved for members and former members only (except those who have become lobbyists, who are not allowed inside), said Dave Helfert, a spokesman for Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, head of the House gym committee.

Neither Hodes nor Shea-Porter uses the gym, according to their offices, but Gregg does pay for a membership at the Senate gym.

So we support not one but two gyms for Congress? (I assume that the description of a "nominal" fee, coupled to the size and composition of the potential client base, means these gyms are more or less entirely paid for by direct allocation of tax dollars.) What for? So that Senators don't have to rub elbows with lowly Representatives or something?

Too arcane? Too drop-in-the-ocean for you to care about? How's this for grand: all programs that serve to isolate Congressmen from the experience of everyday Americans should be dismantled. They should fly coach. They should drive themselves. They should shop in our grocery stores, bring their own lunches to work, and go out to eat in local restaurants. They should work out in local gyms in the community. These businesses (again from the Union Leader article):

Some perks have more to do with convenience than money. Members of Congress and their staffers only have to go to the basement of their office buildings to find banks, barber shops, post offices and even shoe shines – and all at a reasonable price.

should all be closed, and Congressional staffers paid with public funds expressly prohibited from performing any personal services for their bosses whatsoever.

I don't have a problem with paying our Senators and Representatives well. But they should live in the same country we do.

Fascinating

2010-03-10T12:09:00.000-06:00

I find the story of Central Falls High School positively fascinating on a number of levels. I think it captures the multilayered complexity of school "accountability" really well.

Top layer: here you have a high school that can't graduate half of its students. What good is it? Obviously something needs to be done.

Second layer: the school is apparently populated principally by students who don't speak English. The school could hire the best 94 teachers in the world and give them unlimited resources, and they still wouldn't be able to graduate students at a rate comparable to that of schools serving English-speaking kids.

Third layer: while the job may be next to impossible, the teachers did, you know, agree to do it when they took their jobs.

Fourth layer: presumably many of them agreed to do the job in the limit of public-school "tenure" programs; that is, their acceptance of the next-to-impossible job was contingent on not being held too rigorously accountable for high-level measurables like overall graduation rates.

Fifth layer: the administrators claim to have gone ahead with the firing only when the teachers and their union stubbornly resisted reform efforts that required modest increases in teacher workload.

Sixth layer: the teachers seem blissfully unaware that labor is a buyer's market at the moment, and that virtually everyone with a job is being asked to do more for the same (or even less) pay. Here's a suggestion: if you have a job right now and your boss asks you to do something, say "yes".

Seventh layer: the best long term solution (ie, the solution to the most fundamental problem at Central Falls and similar schools) is totally off-limits. We must not say, out loud, that we must [insert obvious long-term solution here]. We all know it, of course. But we don't say it. Some things are Just Not Done.

And on and on. I'm not taking sides. I just think it's endlessly interesting.

Really, GMail?

2010-03-10T11:27:00.001-06:00

I'm getting a ton of Spam messages with subject lines like "Viagra Shop" delivered to my Inbox. What kind of broke-ass Spam filter doesn't catch "80% Discount on Viagra!"?

Sports Physics

2010-03-04T13:13:00.001-06:00

From SI's dude-at-the-NFL-combine:

Taylor Mays' workout at the combine will be one talked about for a long time, and with good reason. After weighing in at 230 pounds, Mays completed 24 reps on the bench press, then ran a 40 that most scouts clocked at 4.32 seconds. Normally those numbers would elevate a prospect towards the top of the draft, but we contend that won't be the case with Mays.

During drills, Mays was in poor form. As fast as he was moving forwards, Mays was terribly slow moving in reverse. It was similar to his performance at the Senior Bowl in January. Mays looked uncomfortable backpedaling during drills and one scout called his defensive back fundamentals "just bad." When asked to change direction, Mays would come to a complete stop then start up again. The contrast between Mays and players such as Earl Thomas and T.J. Ward, who lost little momentum changing direction, was striking.

OK, sports fans and students of physics: is it possible to "los[e] little momentum changing direction"? If you are, say, running full-tilt to the north, and then need to abruptly be running full tilt to the west, can you do this without "com[ing] to a complete stop then start[ing] up again"? That is, can you carry momentum through a 90-degree cut? To be clear: I'm not asking if you, personally can do it. The question is: is it physically possible?

This Is CNN

2010-03-04T11:47:00.001-06:00

Here is CNN's main page on US politics. As of this writing, there are at least three stories about heartless old Jim Bunning highlighted on the main page. But there is nary a peep about the President of the United States attempting to buy a Congressman's vote with a federal judgeship. If you get your news from these people, you have no idea what's going on.

For Certain Values of "Disappointment"

2010-03-03T13:35:00.001-06:00

Football players aren't like you and me. From ESPN's NFC West blog:

Gerald McCoy's performance in the combine bench press -- 23 repetitions of 225 pounds -- was seen as a disappointment.

The other elite defensive tackle in this draft class, Ndamukong Suh, cranked out 32 reps.

As a big man who puts up 225 six times on a good day, let me say: I'm glad this isn't the sort of thing my employability rests on.

Fabulous!

2010-03-02T08:48:00.002-06:00

As of this writing, this is the main image on the ESPN.com front page:

Breezing past the obvious "no, ESPN, we don't care about soccer and we never will" point, I'm interested in the word choice here. Not "The Top 50" or "50 Bad-Ass Mofos" or even "Fifty and Fantastic", but "Fifty and Fabulous". It's interesting because the adjective "fabulous" has a distinctly gay connotation. And sure enough, two of the three dudes in the picture appear to be of very questionable masculinity.

So, what's happening here? Subversive web designer? Conscious decision to market soccer to gays and effete "allies"? Or just monumental tone-deafness?

Long and Stupid Drama Nears End

2010-02-25T17:11:00.001-06:00

So Colonel Reb (inexplicably now referred to as Colonel Rebel in some outlets) is officially no more. Me, I'm torn; I've always found Col. Reb to be very creepy.

(True story: back in the day, a regional bank ran a promotion where opening an account with a certain initial deposit would net the new customer season tickets to the local college football team of one's choosing. The conceit of the radio commercial was that the mascots of the teams were customers of the bank. The mascots were described as a giant eagle, a walking bulldog, and an "old man with a hideously large head". That's us: the hideously large head team. Go Rebs!)

Of course there are many and varied facets to the story. Alumni fear that the Colonel's exile was (and is) another step on the road to purging the character of "Ole Miss" from the University of Mississippi. These fears are almost certainly correct. In ten years we'll be the University of Mississippi Catfish or something. Ten years after that they'll sandblast Frank Everett off the wall in the Union and every trace of "Ole Miss" will be gone. If it doesn't happen I'll eat my hat.

Of course the more immediate question is, what happens now? The students haven't chosen a new mascot; they've decided to try to decide on a new mascot. So, now some student committee will convene and solicit/select possible mascots.

That this has been tried --- and failed --- before has been paid no nevermind. Last time we were offered the choice of Mr. Clean In Black Leather on the one hand, or Giant Homosexual Pimp Man on the other. These were so embarrassing that no one bothered to vote and the whole project was scrapped for seven years. Nevertheless, I expect both of them to come up again.

In addition, there's a pseudo-movement to draft Return of the Jedi's Admiral Ackbar into service as the University's mascot, but this option will fail the "profitability" criterion that will no doubt be imposed by the administration. (The University, it should be noted, has never been so embarrassed by Col. Reb as to relinquish him as a profit-making trademark.) It's one thing to use a Star Wars character in a humorous student-politics campaign; it's quite another to slap him on overpriced hats and T-shirts and bumper stickers, oh, my, and it seems very clear that Lucasfilm would never allow this.

(One another note: Return of the Jedi was released in 1983. The average 22-year old UM senior was born in 1987. Way to keep it current, people.)

So, this is what we're left with: Col. Reb is gone and will soon be forgotten. We're likely to get stuck with a flamboyant gay dude in a half shirt and floppy red hat as our mascot. The Ole Miss we've known will be gone before we are. Something will replace it. Some of us will like the New Improved (Now with Extra Political Correctness! Compare to Ann Arbor at Half the Price!) University of Mississippi better, and some of us will like it worse. The national press will continue to spit on us regardless.

But we won't be Hideously Large Head Team. So, we got that going for us.

Dogs, People. Dogs.

2010-02-24T16:58:00.001-06:00

A recurring theme around here: there's only one kind of animal that doesn't consider you to be made of meat. Hint: it doesn't have the word "killer" right in its name.

Right, then:

"They are very intelligent creatures. They have emotions, and feelings. Maybe it was unhappy in the situation, maybe it was bored," Black said.

Or, you know: hungry.

H/T: Althouse

Fly, Fatass, Fly!

2010-02-19T13:33:00.001-06:00

Something I'm unclear on: why on Earth is Kevin Smith, who is presumably rich, flying on (notorious cattle-car outfit) Southwest Airlines anyway?

On a more serious note, I find the comment boards under the various Smith stories fascinating. What it boils down to, I think, is this: the treatment and accommodation of very large airline passengers is a very real and sticky problem, but one whose discussion is inevitably marred and unduly influenced by underlying hostility to very large people in general. SWA is in a bind: their seats have to be a particular size, and unless they set this size extremely large (and make tickets on their airline correspondingly expensive), there will always be some fraction of passengers who won't fit in a single seat. The policy of making these passengers buy two seats is a matter of basic fairness to the unlucky dude who would otherwise be stuck next to someone who's overspilling his/her seat. This is reasonable, and big people should live with it. But big people confronted with such a policy nevertheless feel singled out and spit upon, largely because they are singled out and spit upon in nearly every facet of life. The discussion boards bear this out; for every person discussing the issue rationally, there's a person yammering on about how fat people are disgusting and unworthy of service, and a third who takes the second's yamering as evidence that SWA must also think fat people are disgusting and unworthy of service. Damn tricky, to be caught in SWA's position.

Of course, it make matters much worse that airline suck at everything they do. That's a matter for another day, I think.

I'm Trying To Decide If I Ought To Be Annoyed

2010-02-01T14:07:00.002-06:00

What you're looking at here is the tip of an ordinary ball point pen. It's pointing at a little white object about the size of the metal tip on the end of the pen. That object is a jagged chip of bone (or tooth, or porcelain filling; it's not clear and doesn't really matter) left behind by my oral surgeon when he took my problematic molar out in November. Since then, it's been sort of working it's way up to and out through the surface of my gum. It finally came out just now.

Breaking News: Tiger Woods To Announce "Freeze" In Certain Categories Of Skank Acquisition

2010-01-26T16:57:00.001-06:00

Legendary skank-collecter Tiger Woods today announced that he would acquire no more skeezy mistresses in fiscal years 2011-2014. The golfing adulterer went on to clarify his plan, specifying that all skanks extant in his harem before FY11 will be retained. In addition, he outlined a series of exemptions, explaining that his homewrecking slut portfolio currently has critical weaknesses in the "Vegas cocktail waitress" and "blond chick with huge fake jugs" segments. Slut acquisitions in these sectors will continue unabated throughout the "freeze" period. No reporter present for the announcement bothered to point out that these carve-outs encompass more or less the entirety of Woods' harem-building activities.

By The Way...

2010-01-13T14:08:00.001-06:00

...the comments on this ESPN article are hilarious. One dude says this:

I dont have any real interest in either teams here; however lets be real people. Would you rather live in Knoxville, TN or Los Angelos, CA??? Cold, no ocean, large hillbilly population, and moderately hot women VS. Warm sunshine, mountains & beach, poping city, and super hot women EVERWHERE......

Southern women are "moderately" hot? And skanky LA broads are "super" hot? Are you f**king kidding me? And for the record, I would much prefer to live in Knoxville. The very thought of living in Los Angeles make me want to punch a kitten.

This one takes, the cake, though:

Isnt southern culture an oximoron. Look it up SEC grads

Being an SEC grad, I did indeed look it up. Tragically, there's no entry for "oximoron" in my dictionary. I must have the "hilbilie" (note: actual spelling used by another South-basher) version...

Charmed Life

2010-01-13T09:20:00.001-06:00

Lane Kiffin was a successful offensive coordinator at USC for all of two years. Then he left USC to be head coach of the Oakland Raiders, where he was an abject failure, going 5-15 in a little over 1 year. This failure somehow qualified him to be head coach at a storied college football program, so Tennessee canned the way-more-accomplished Phil Fulmer and hired Kiffin to replace him. In one season with the Volunteers, Kiffin was again an abject failure: a 7-6 season that included losses to both of UT's main rivals (Florida and Alabama), blowout losses to Ole Miss and Virginia Tech, a near-miss to lowly Kentucky, and internal turmoil as both Kiffin and his players publicly misbehaved. Naturally, this record of achievement qualifies him to be head coach at the even more storied college football program of USC. What the Hell?

Is Harry Reid A Racist?

2010-01-12T10:59:00.001-06:00

Of course he is. Look, Harry Reid is old. 70 years old, to be precise. There is no such thing as a 70 year old man (of any race) who does not think in ways that are now classified as "racist." Some of these classifications are fair and others aren't, but that's neither here nor there: many racial taboos have come into being since Reid's 50th birthday, and there is simply no way he has internalized all of them. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is, and there's no use pretending otherwise.

And don't think you're getting off the hook, Boomers or Xers or Millenials or whoever else might be reading this. When you're 70, I guarantee that you'll have deep-set ways of thinking that will by then be classified as some kind of mortifying "-ism." And if you're a major national politician whose every utterance is carefully scrutinized, you will occasionally reveal one of these thought-patterns and be embarrassed by it. Again, that's just how it is, and there's no use pretending otherwise.

Variations On A Theme

2010-01-11T09:15:00.001-06:00

The crazy bitches, they will ruin you. Ruin you, I say!

The Things That Upset Lefties

2010-01-07T14:09:00.001-06:00

Rick Reilly has something to say about the dangerous and insensitive messages sent to young people by famous college football players. Is he worried about poor sportsmanship? Thuggery? General stupidity? None of the above. The real scourge here is Tim Tebow's Christianity (you have to scroll down to the entry dated 30 December 09):

This is wholesale proselytizing, for better or worse, to say nothing of a violation of the separation of the church and state -- Florida being a public university. You have to feel for the Jewish kid or the atheist kid or the Muslim kid who loves Tebow but didn't realize his fanship would involve a pitch to convert to Christianity.

Yeah, my heart breaks for that kid. He'd be so much better off idolizing Michael Vick.

Crucial Distinctions

2010-01-05T15:46:00.001-06:00

David Brooks:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

There is a difference between believing and knowing, Mr. Brooks.

Lord Monty Fisk Never Had This Problem

2009-12-18T13:53:00.003-06:00

If you're going to build an army of monkey ninjas, you'd better keep them on a short leash.

Deep Questions

2009-12-18T09:13:00.002-06:00

Last week I was griping about SNL ripping every reference to Christianity out of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Yesterday an old friend of mine posted this video to my wall on Facebook:

It does more or less the same thing to "The First Noel", and of course I think this one is awesome. So am I a big hypocrite? Does the "And we've ruined it completely..." lampshading at the end save the day? Or can my real complaint with the SNL bit be boiled down to it just isn't funny?

Bold Predictions

2009-12-17T17:00:00.001-06:00

I'm going through the motions of "registering" my overseas vacation with the US State Department, and when the computer system figured out where I'm going it showed me this year's Caribbean hurricane advisory:

Hurricane Season May 29, 2009 The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens to the Hurricane Season in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. The official Atlantic Hurricane Season runs from June through November. This Travel Alert expires on December 4, 2009. National Weather Service officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict a 50 percent chance that activity during the 2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season will be near-normal this year, forecasting nine to fourteen named storms, with four to seven becoming hurricanes and one to three becoming major hurricanes.

Emphasis mine. A 50 percent chance of near-normal activity. Well, all right then. Of course the season is in the books and all, so it's academic to me. But if my trip had been in August, it seems like I'd've been damn curious about the distribution of the other 50 percent.

Harrumph

2009-12-16T09:26:00.001-06:00

I understand the problem, but I don't like this formulation one bit:

WASHINGTON — The White House is once again explaining how uninvited guests wound up shaking hands with President Barack Obama.

He's our President, not our King. He should make it a point to meet, speak to, and shake hands with the kind of people who would never be invited to the White House.

(Note: I'm not saying he doesn't do this, or that Presidents who I've found more politically palatable have done a better or worse job. This post isn't about President Obama, but about the language in the AP piece.)

Oh, Like You Didn't Know I'd Link This

2009-12-15T11:43:00.001-06:00

The Onion explores the founding of our nation:

On Sept. 16, 1620, a group of Puritan Separatists took to the sea in hopes of escaping persecution from soccer and its ardent followers, specifically those who would not allow the Pilgrims to live a life in which they could openly reject traditional soccer practices.

...

"It got to a point where they had no choice but to start a new life somewhere else, not only to escape oppression, but so their children could grow up in a place where they didn't feel like lepers for not knowing or caring about the difference between a red and yellow card."

Hating soccer: it's your birthright.

Too Funny

2009-12-11T12:45:00.001-06:00

Tony Dungy, on his racial high horse:

"I'm from the Big Ten, and I watch the Big Ten commercial and see 11 white head coaches. In 2009, what's wrong with that picture?"

He goes on to take a cheap shot at the SEC, but at least they teach us how to count down here.

I Am Informed That My Keep-The-Christ-In-Christmas Post Makes Me "Sound Like A Fascist."

2009-12-11T10:46:00.001-06:00

The trouble is, actual fascists did exactly the opposite. Drat. Like my commenter, I'm afraid I'll have to settle for sounding like a dick.

Somebody Typed This With A Straight Face

2009-12-09T08:33:00.000-06:00

Check this out:

"We think it will work out fine," says John Junker, president of the Fiesta Bowl, who says the decision to take TCU and Boise State over major-conference teams like the Big East's Cincinnati was based in part on the shorter travel distance involved for the schools' fans. "What better way to find out than to play an undefeated No. 4 against an undefeated No. 6?"

"Major conference teams like ... Cincinnati"? You're kidding me, right?

Things That Amuse Me

2009-12-08T15:18:00.001-06:00

Texas fans playing the "whiners" card against Nebraska fans after the "put 1 second back on the clock" incident of last weekend. You'd hardly recognize them, but they're the very same group of fans who spent all last winter whining incessantly about the existence and resolution of three-way ties. I especially like the ones who juxtapose Bo Pelini's conduct after the incident with Mack Brown's alleged "class"...as if Brown's public, passive-aggressive bullshit about how "it's going to be so hard to explain [the concept of a three-way tie] to our players" was oh-so-much classier than Pelini privately cussing a Big XII honcho in a parking lot.

Veiled In Flesh The God-Head See! Hail The Incarnate Deity!

2009-12-08T11:59:00.001-06:00

OK, I hate to come off like the right-wing PC police. But if you're going to be this squeamish about any reference to Christianity, maybe you should just stay the Hell away from our music. I hear "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" is a pretty good song.

Speaking Only for Myself...

2009-12-08T11:51:00.001-06:00

...I'm simply stunned to learn that Tiger Woods gets a lot of action. Aren't you?

Also, Spock Has A Beard

2009-12-03T11:32:00.001-06:00

Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it.

In what alternative universe was climatology ever a hard science, let alone the hard science?

I Think It's About Time We Have A Long And Difficult Conversation About Brett Favre

2009-11-30T09:13:00.001-06:00

What the Hell? Favre was 32-of-48 for 392 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions yesterday. He was also (ahem) 40 years old. 40 hard years, too; 19 years in the NFL plus college and high school ball before that. I say we vivisect him and find out what makes him tick. Would it surprise anyone to learn that he's some kind of primitive cyborg?

If A Clipper Bricks A Five-Foot Jumper In The FedEx Forum And No One Is There To Hear, Does It Make A Clang?

2009-11-23T15:35:00.001-06:00

Don't ask me how I got on their list, but I now get e-mail press releases from an outfit called "Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans". Today they report their latest triumph: getting a couple of local sports-announcer guys suspended from their jobs for making "terribly insensitive and inappropriate on-air remarks about Grizzlies' Iranian center, Hamed Haddadi". Note that the press release is curiously devoid of any description of the allegedly "culturally insensitive and offensive remarks"; they do however, include a link to this story, which makes it clear that the sports-announcer guys in question said ... more or less nothing. But, really, does it matter? It was a game between the Memphis Grizzlies and LA Clippers. Can a TV dude be "culturally insensitive and offensive" when it's totally impossible to imagine that anyone in the world might be watching?

What He Really Believes

2009-11-23T13:49:00.001-06:00

Thomas Friedman says he believes that the Earth is getting hotter, flatter, and more crowded. But I happen to know that he also believes that goats are strangely attractive and would enjoy having sex with him. What's the proof of that, you ask? The same evidence Friedman uses to support his claim that I hate poor people, love America's enemies, and want/expect billions of people to die in a new Black Plague: absolutely nothing.

Bullshit

2009-11-23T08:41:00.001-06:00

Nicole Gelinas thinks it's OK for the employees of Goldman Sachs to take $16,700,000,000 of your money and stick it in their pockets....because, after all, it is technically legal for them to do so. This is frankly absurd: whatever legal category this behavior falls into, it is not morally distinguishable from theft. They are thieves on a grand scale, and should all be hanged.

Global Warming Is Going To Make (Half Of) The Earth Flip Upside Down!

2009-11-20T10:17:00.001-06:00

I found my way over to Watts Up With That while following the leaked leaked-global-warming-files thing. More about the leaked info later, when I've had a chance to look at and think about it more. In the meantime, though, go to this post and check out a picture from Al Gore's new super-science-y global warming book. It's a photo illustration that's meant to show you what Science! thinks will happen to the Earth if we fail to accede to Al Gore's political program. Among other things, it shows a north Atlantic hurricane rotating clockwise. Sweet! But, be warned: before you get all excited thinking your toilet is going to flush backwards, you should know that the same illustration shows a north Pacific hurricane rotating counterclockwise. Did someone on Gore's staff intentionally produce an image of the Earth in the instant before it spins off its axis and violently twists itself apart? Or do they just --- ahem --- have no idea what they're doing?

This Is What Happens When You Don't Let Kids Fight

2009-11-19T13:24:00.001-06:00

A few well-timed, peer-administered beatings could have prevented this.

Jihad Is For Losers

2009-11-19T10:18:00.001-06:00

It's really not the case that perfectly normal, nice, put-together Muslim dudes suddenly go bonkers and shoot the joint up:

Two years ago, a top psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was so concerned about what he saw as Nidal Hasan's incompetence and reckless behavior that he put those concerns in writing.

...

"Even if we were desperate for a psychiatrist, we would not even get him to the point where we would invite him for an interview," says Dr. Steven Sharfstein, who runs Sheppard Pratt's psychiatric medical center, based just outside Baltimore.

...

The memo ticks off numerous problems over the course of Hasan's training, including proselytizing to his patients. It says he mistreated a homicidal patient and allowed her to escape from the emergency room, and that he blew off an important exam.

...

Sharfstein says that in the 25 years he has been supervising and hiring psychiatrists, he has seen only a half-dozen evaluations this bad.

...

"I would never, ever hire a physician with this kind of a record," says Judith Broder, who runs the Soldiers Project, an award-winning private therapy program for troops in Southern California.

...

But sources say that when the Army sent Hasan to Fort Hood earlier this year, Walter Reed sent the damning evaluation there, too. So commanders at Fort Hood would know exactly what they were getting.

Murderers in general are huge fuckups. The violence comes only at the end of a very long chain of increasingly poor life choices. Jihadis, or at least Western jihadis like Hasan, do not appear to be an exception to this rule.

I Don't Really Know Why It Takes A Special Law, But If It Does, We Should Make One

2009-11-18T08:58:00.001-06:00

This seems exactly right:

Military victims of the Fort Hood massacre will be eligible to receive the Purple Heart if Congress passes a bill introduced Tuesday.

...

"As far as I'm concerned, this was an attack by an enemy upon American troops on American soil," [Congressman John] Carter said Tuesday at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Good for Mr. Carter.

So

2009-11-18T08:53:00.001-06:00

Rumors of the death of Memphis basketball have been greatly exaggerated, no?

I Don't Recommend That You Google This

2009-11-13T09:02:00.003-06:00

It would of course be more hilarious to find previous stories about the kidnapping itself, the priest's treatment in captivity, and any ransom demands that came in. But with some things, you go with what you got because you dare not Google:

H/T to Instapundit.

What She Does With Her College Degree

2009-11-11T09:32:00.001-06:00

See here; you'll find her under the "Reason for the holiday" subhead.

Several area schools will also be holding special Veterans Day events in an effort to teach students what it means to be veteran.

At the Oxford-University School, kindergarten teacher Sarah [] felt that even small children should learn why veterans are so important.

"A lot of children don't really know anything abut what it's like to have to go off to war," [Sarah] said Monday.

When [Sarah] joined the staff at OUS two years ago, she suggested holding a Veterans Day ceremony for the students.

"It was something we did at the school I worked at in Utah before coming here," [Sarah] said. "I never really thought about Veterans Day before. I just knew it was on the calendar and that banks and the post office were closed. But the ceremony there was so touching, it really made me think. It was very meaningful."

I cleaned out our surname (I still like to keep BQ from turning up in Google searches for my name) but it's there in the original.

In Other News...

2009-11-10T16:28:00.001-06:00

I challenge you to find another blogger willing to toss the phrase "bag of ass" into the middle of a story about attending a church meeting.

One Of Those Big Roundup Posts On Everything That's Going On In My Life

2009-11-10T16:25:00.001-06:00

1. Had a long-running dental saga come to a sub-ideal but final disposition when I had the offending tooth removed last Friday. Took the day off Friday, but spent Saturday out and about and paid for it on Sunday. Seems that surgery, even simple oral surgery, takes more than a few hours to fully recover from. Who knew?

2. Home early Saturday, I got a call from our minister. He wanted to personally invite us to the last of several "Fall Gathering" meetings for the church. This conversation had a "everybody's doing it --- this is expected of you" feel to it, so we dragged out to the church Sunday evening to attend. (I say "dragged", because in the aftermath of Saturday, I felt like a bag of ass all day Sunday.) Now, the average service at this church draws about 600 people. When we got there we found that only 20 or so people were in attendance; unless this crowd represented a precipitous decline in turnout from the previous four meetings, attendance at these gatherings was certainly not something "everybody's doing." Of course, no harm, no foul; we watched a video on stewardship, then the meeting's leaders opened the floor for attendees to discuss "what the church's priorities should be in 2010". That went well enough; people had interesting things to say, and it was good to listen. But then toward the end the minister stood up, put his hand on my shoulder, and said to the room "now, I don't mean to put Brian on the spot, but I think we should hear from him on this..." As if I'm going to walk into a 170-year-old church that I joined six months ago and announce what its priorities ought to be. Ay caramba.

3. Committed to another round of IVF in the coming year. Last time, I waited until after Sarah was pregnant to start the baby blog, and never got to the "story so far" catch up I wanted to do. This time, I intend to start from the beginning. It'll be a new (read: third) blog, but it'll serve the same purpose as the one I did for Miss Ainsleigh: to keep a record of the process that's easily disentangled from the technical, political, football, and other general ramblings that pollute Broken Quanta.

4. Am gearing up for Christmas in the Caribbean. No, that's not a theme party I'm hosting at the house; we're actually going to be in the Caribbean (Jamaica, to be precise) on Christmas day. One day in January, when it had been gray and cold for weeks, I was watching TV and a Jamaica tourism ad came on. I said to Sarah, "Let's go to Jamaica next winter." She said "sure." Five minutes later I was surfing for cruise fares, and then resort rates. You'd be shocked at the deal you can get on a vacation in the current economy. Less than three days after TV said "Come to Jamaica!", we were booked. We leave for a Sandals resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica on December 19th and we won't be back until the 26th. Christmas in the Caribbean.

5. Have reached a point of diminishing returns vis-a-vis my annoyance with Ole Miss football. Yes, the Auburn game was a debacle. Yes, the team is good enough to be 8-1 rather than 6-3. Yes, that's annoying. But you know what? As far as I'm concerned, the Auburn loss saved me at least $500 or more; it's now basically impossible for the Rebels to go to a bowl game that I'd feel bad about skipping. With the dental bills and the tab for Jamaica and the cost of IVF next year, I'm thinking that's not so bad. Plus, did I tell you? I'm going to Jamaica.

Why I Don't Know That Many People Who Are Out Of Work

2009-11-10T13:49:00.001-06:00

Fascinating gizmo on the Times web page. It lets you select various demographic slices of the population (by race, sex, age, and educational level, and any combination thereof) and shows you the unemployment trend in the group over the past ~30 months. The qualitative results aren't that surprising: statistically it's best to be white, educated, older, and a woman. Quantitatively, the results are shocking; unemployment levels in Sept 09 range from less than 5% for white college grads over 24 (eg, me and most of you) to more than 40% for blacks without high school diplomas under 24.

Windmills

2009-11-10T09:33:00.001-06:00

Facebook suggest to me this morning that I "Become a Fan" of an organization called "Help Eliminate Adolescent Risk Taking". Now, it looks like the org was founded by a couple who lost their son, and obviously I really feel for them. But I know a lost cause when I see one.

You may make the obligatory Rhett Butler quotes in the comments.

I'm Pretty Sure They Get Paid For This

2009-11-03T18:32:00.001-06:00

Here is the result of a modern social science experiment on the role of fathers:

Fathers tend to do things differently, Dr. Kyle Pruett said, but not in ways that are worse for the children. Fathers do not mother, they father.

Dr. Kyle Pruett added: "Dads tend to discipline differently, use humor more and use play differently. Fathers want to show kids what's going on outside their mother's arms, to get their kids ready for the outside world." To that end, he said, they tend to encourage risk-taking and problem-solving.

Here are the lyrics from a Chris Ledoux song recorded 15 years ago and based on nothing but common sense:

Now your mother she'll try to protect you;
she'll hold you as long as she can.
But the higher you climb, the more you can see,
and that's something I understand.

Hey, child psych types: keep churning out those incandescently obvious conclusions. And welfare bureaucracies, keep funding them. It's money well spent, people. Money well spent.

The Scaling Problem

2009-11-03T14:04:00.001-06:00

Here's an interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times on how to "create a critical mass of great teachers". The program the author suggests is intensive:

...And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.

...

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray...These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process.

...

Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. ...First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors...Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors...Teachers must also learn far more about children: typically, teaching students are provided with fairly static and superficial overviews of developmental stages, but learn little about how to watch children, using research and theory to understand what they are seeing.

...

One more thing is required — give as many public schools as possible the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in groups of seven or more.

...

Show me a school where teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled and happy to be there, and I'll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.

Virtually none of what I've quoted seems really objectionable, does it? In the full article, there are some howlers. A suggestion that teacher-ed programs "learn from family therapy programs" is one such; therapists are famously useless. Another is the suggestion that "our best universities" contain the "strongest students" and "most inspiring professors", which is flatly untrue. But I digress.

The thing that's really bothering me isn't the particular program suggested here, but the premise underlying it: that improving education means getting more and more crackerjack teachers into the classroom. If this is the case --- and maybe it is --- then boy, are we ever screwed.

There are 6.1 million teachers in the United States. If you rounded them all up and made them a state, the resulting Greater Edukota would rank 18th in population, just behind Tennessee and ahead of Missouri. Which is to say, teaching is a vast enterprise. A plan for running this enterprise that begins with "hire only the very best and brightest and give them intensive training for several years" is doomed to fail.

You want to solve the problems with the American school system? Great! So do I. Here's step 1: acknowledge that the population of teachers is large enough that it will inevitably obey a normal distribution in virtually any quality you could care to name: "smart", "passionate", "well-educated", "skilled", "happy"; you name it, I'll show you a bell curve of it. Now tell us how you're going to work with this population as it actually is. This is not a trick question: all kinds of complex enterprises get great (and ever-improving!) results with vast populations of workers with normally-distributed talents. However, solutions predicated on significantly shifting, skewing, compressing, or wishing away these distributions will get no credit.

Show your work.

This Is How Weird I Am

2009-10-29T15:25:00.001-05:00

Well, most of you probably already saw this on Facebook, but what the Hell: Tuesday night I bit the tip of my tongue off. Yes: off. Not a chunk, mind you, but more like a slice. That was plenty, though, for sure. What's worse, I have no idea how it happened, as I was sound asleep at the time. So I don't know if snapped my teeth in a dream, or rolled over and clicked my mouth shut, or what; I just woke up to pain and blood in my mouth. The good news is, it's healing up remarkably fast; as of now, it just feels like I scalded it on something. I expect it to be totally better by Sunday. Still, though: the whole experience is very weird.

A Regrettable Invitation

2009-10-29T10:57:00.001-05:00

I have this friend in Little Rock who I rag on endlessly to come down and visit. She never does, though, and lately she's been trying to turn the tables on me, ragging on me to come up to Arkansas to visit her.* Her latest tack: she just invited me to come up and visit the Clinton Presidential Library. I don't think I want to go, though; the Clinton Library is so awesome in my mind that the real thing could never measure up. I mean, what if there's no Big Mac Display, no Legends of Lying Theater, no (perish the thought) Hall of Skanks? I'd be devastated.

*For the record, I have the better of this argument. I invite her to come to events with a dozen or more mutual college friends. By coming to Oxford, she could visit everybody in one fell swoop. Whereas if Sarah and I go to LR, it'll be just us and she still won't've seen anyone else. Of course, we are much more fun than most of our other old friends.

Way To Keep Those Priorities In Order

2009-10-29T10:45:00.002-05:00

Remember, Californians: just because the Republic of California doesn't have enough money to continue providing public services, or properly fund its workers' pensions, or even pay their full salaries, don't think it can't find a quarter billion dollars to say "f**k you!" to George W. Bush. Some things are important, people.

UPDATE: Oh, and some of it will go toward chopping up living Homo sapiens for spare parts. Again: priorities.