The Sonny Liston of Blogs

The Parable of Pebbles Wilder

2012-02-08T22:52:00.002-04:00

Pebbles Wilder was a young woman in a truly dysfunctional world. She had grown up in a land where the king and all of his ministers ruled the land with no concern but their own. They had adjusted laws to benefit the royalty and enforced a series of harsh laws that forced the Grappulas of the country into a subservient position to all Argots. Pebbles saw these injustices and wondered how it was that the people could stand for this.

She began to gather groups of friends to discuss the nature of the problems facing the country. The group quickly realized that something must be done and as a particularly inspiring individual, Pebbles became the group's leader. Pebbles led the group on protests across the country. These protests emphasized the ideals of Pebbles's group. They wanted an end to the domination of the country by rich, old Argots. They wanted to see greater focus on helping the poor and those groups that had been marginalized by the old Argots and the media. Finally, they wanted a consensus based democracy. Pebbles believed that the form of democracy practiced in other countries was too divisive and she wanted to see a country that was run with the interests of the many in mind, not the interests of the narrow few.

These demonstrations caught the eyes of some of the ministers. Starting to fear for their own power, the ministers convinced the king and some of the royalty to adopt a more liberal position on Grappulas's rights and increased their attention to the poor and struggling in the land. Some members of Pebbles's group, including one of her top advisers Will, said they had accomplished their mission and were ready to go back to their everyday lives, but Pebbles said the group must press on. She was emboldened by the success of her initial attempts and knew the minor fixes were not what she had set out to do.

The first taste of internal dissent also alarmed Pebbles. She started to wonder if maybe some people did not truly share her vision for a new society. She had a long discussion with Will and her other confidant Tory, over why Will thought the vision had been accomplished. Will felt the changes adopted by king showed that he was willing to have an open dialogue with the group and that they could push alterations as needed. This greatly upset Pebbles because they did not want to see "alterations" to society. The entire fabric of the country needed to be changed to re-level the playing field. Pebbles and Tory decided to tell Will that he was no longer welcome in the group. After Will left, the group continued to have great success in gaining popular support across the country. Pebbles and Tory decided that Will couldn't possibly understand their problems as an Argot, and must have secretly been working to keep the king in power so he and the rest of the Argots could remain in power.

After years of cultivating support across the country, Pebbles finally had her big breakthrough. Her group succeeded in taking over the state run media. This was a tremendous victory for her. No longer would the people hear what the king and the rest of his wealthy friends wanted them to hear. They would begin to hear how things really were, and how badly the king was oppressing them.

This terrified the king for now he was down to his last major bastion of support the police and the military. The king began to indiscriminately use his power to fight back against all those that he thought might oppose him. The police brutality and armed forces only galvanized support for Pebbles's group. And the king's mad obsession with finding his opponents within his own royal court also turned his closest supporters against him. No longer was the cheerful and funny king of years past. He had been transformed into a crazed man, who saw phantom plots against him around every corner.

Once this tipping point had been reached, it was only a matter of time before the king lost his power. It was also a matter of human life. For hundreds upon hundreds of citizens in the country were killed fighting for both sides. The carnage had left the population hungry for exactly Pebbles's message. They could not wait for a country that was not divided between Argots and Grappulas, or between rich and poor, but a country that sought to solve its problems through collaborative decision-making that took into account the interests of all. On the back of continuously rising public opinion, Pebbles was able to finally defeat the king and install her vision of democracy.

But alas after her greatest victories had been achieved, Pebbles realized her vision was still not achieved. For the general population was not interested in supporting the poor, helping those groups that had been marginalized by society or removing the vestiges of Argot power as Pebbles had envisioned, much less in a consensus fashion. This outraged Pebbles. She could not believe that she worked so hard to overthrow the king and his royal court, only to see her progress still stymied by the general public.

Pebbles decided that it was because the upper-class, but non-royal court had seen this as their opportunity to grab power. So Pebbles tried to rally the public against the mercantile upper-class, but the public was not interested in more battles or divisions. They had rallied for Pebbles precisely because she had promised to take everyone's view into consideration. Pebbles tried to utilize her new media powers to turn the tide of public opinion in her favor, but she could not.

Convinced that it was a plot by the upper-class Argots to retain power, Pebbles doubled down and went ahead with her vision without public support. She began to confiscate power and property from the wealthiest individuals and help Grappulas and other disenfranchised groups achieve positions of power throughout the country. Soon Pebbles had achieved her vision. The Argots had completely lost all power. Grappulas and previously ignored groups dominated the places of power. The media worked to portray the plights of individuals, not the interests of the Argot elite.

But all was not well in the country. For many felt that Pebbles had abandoned her principles that she had promised to govern with. No longer were other voices considered. Pebbles, Tory and a few close advisers made all the decisions for the country. Slowly the people began to realize that they had simply exchanged one form of prejudiced tyranny for another. Sure the names of those favored had changed dramatically, but the country was still governed by a small group of deeply prejudiced individuals who had no interest in the opinions of anyone besides themselves.

As this dawned on the public that the new overlords were barely better than the old overlords, the public rose up against Pebbles and her group. Pebbles saw this as another effort by the remnants of old power seeking to cut her low. She fought with a vengeance to keep her position of influence. But the deep distrust of others began to seep into her decision making. Pebbles, as the king before her, began to see conspiracies in every movement and even imagined her closest advisers as agents of the enemy. She even had Tory assassinated one night when she could no longer trust her. And just like the king, Pebbles met her fate at the hands of the people.

Prejudice and injustice are great evils to be fought at every turn, but fighting them with different prejudices only leads to greater suffering and misery.

The Taxicab Cartel

2012-01-28T22:14:00.002-04:00

Whether it's OPEC or your local gas stations, everybody hates a cartel unless you are in it. Thanks to what I can only imagine was a sweet-heart deal my local city council I now have a new cartel in my life. The Taxicab Cartel.

They might not be as sinister as OPEC. They aren't trying to dominate a global market, seek retribution on those that threaten them, or even wipe out Israel. Nope, these jerks are just pure greedy bastards.

At first blush the arrangement seems like a great deal. There are always several taxicabs, from many different companies, waiting outside my metro stop to pick people. Since the university is about a 20 minute walk away and my apartment is closer to an hour by foot, it is a great thing when it's late at night and the buses aren't running or if you are a tourist and don't know how the buses work and don't know any taxi companies to call. And if it were just that it would actually be a great deal for me, the consumer.

But all that glitters is not gold, walk up to any taxi in line and attempt to get in and the driver will actually shoo you out of the car. You only have one option, which is go to the car at the front of the line, get in, and accept the price he/she offers you. This has lead to some wildly different prices for the ride from the metro to my apartment ranging from $9 to $16. I can assure you that my apartment has not been moving during the course of the time I have been riding taxis back to it.

This is actually a shockingly effective form of a cartel. The problems that all cartels get into is that there is a great incentive to cheat. If you are in a cartel and cheat and don't get caught, you can make a ton of money. You will be able to charge a much lower price than everybody else in your cartel and get a sizeable chunk of the business from your fellows in the cartel. This is why cartels usually fail because everybody realizes this and starts cheating until the price goes back down to the competitive level. But not here. Since all the taxi cabs are all waiting in line together, if any cabbie attempted to take a passenger when he/she was not at the front of the line, every other member of the cartel would instantly be aware of the breach of code and be able to punish/shun them.

Needless to say this a terrible situation for consumers (me) to be in. As someone who never likes to carry much cash on them, needing to carry enough cash to cover the varying degrees of cartel pricing is quite the annoyance, not to mention the whole paying too much money thing. I would love to start my own renegade taxicab company and just pick people up on the other side of the metro to undercut and break this cartel, but alas school takes up a lot of my time. Plus, I don't really have the money to start a taxi company. But if you know anybody that needs to make a quick buck, breaking the Taxicab Cartel could be lucrative for a couple months, and leave us all in a better place.

The Cross of Hard Money

2011-10-20T18:59:00.000-03:00

A few months ago, I posted about how I felt that Republicans were in a 1920s mindset, and wanted to go back and fight battles that have been settled for decades. Well it has become more and more apparent that they want to fight a battle that hasn't been fought with any vigor since the 1890s. An increasingly loud chorus of Republicans have come out either in favor of "hard money" or even a return to the gold standard. These differences between the two views are actually not that great. The gold standard would just be an absurdly stringent hard money policy. I find this new found love of hard money and the gold standard by the right to exceptionally disheartening and frankly a little scary.

I've never made any secret of the fact that I am in love with William Jennings Bryan. He's been an idol of mine ever since middle school. He's most famous moment as a politician was easily the "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention. The speech won him the Democratic nomination that year, and essentially the nominations in 1900 and 1908. The speech was set against the backdrop of a country that was still struggling from the greatest recession it had ever known.

There are some reasonable comparisons between the Panic of 1893 and our current troubles. Both began when the engine of growth in the economy (railroads and housing respectively) was revealed to have only been growing due to extensive financing that could not be afforded. As the extent of the damage became apparent, it caused a massive credit crunch and a substantial loss of consumer confidence.

However, there are two major difference between what happened to us in 2008 and what happened in 1893. The first is that we have the FDIC, which guarantees all bank deposits up to $250,000, and they did not. This meant in 1893 that when the asymmetric information panic went off and everyone withdrew their money from all banks because they couldn't tell which banks were bad and which were good. Tons and tons of banks went under because the fraction reserve system that allows banks to make money means banks never have enough money to pay for everyone to withdraw their money at once. This didn't happen in 2008 because there was no reason to take money out of the bank and hide it in your mattress because the government would pay you back if the bank went under.

The second difference was even more important in why the Panic of 1893 is the still the second biggest recession in the history of the country, and the disaster of 2008 was not. In 1893, the United States was on a de facto gold standard, which limited the money supply to the amount of gold the government had.

Let's examine this idea for a second. The economy, even in our current rough shape, is almost always growing. The supply of gold in the world, to say nothing of the amount in the United States, is not. This means in a gold standard system we are producing things of new value in the economy, but we are still stuck with the same amount of money we had to buy slightly less things. Now it's true that the government could devalue the currency compared to gold to match the increasing economy, but as our experiences on the gold standard show, this was unlikely to keep pace with the speed with which the economy increases. This means the currency will be forced to deflate over time.

In a simplistic way, deflation may sound like an appealing result. The dollar I earn today might be worth $1.05 tomorrow. I'm increasing my worth without even doing anything! Everything becomes cheaper to buy. If the value of all goods for sale exceed the amount of money people have to spend, the price of goods has to decrease to win the fight for the scarce supply of dollars available. The problem with deflation is unfortunately immense. If I know that whatever it is that I want to buy will be cheaper tomorrow, why would I buy it today? Thus, everyone pushes off purchases into the future, which forces companies to slow production, which results in laid off workers, which lowers demand further, etc. This is the paradox of thrift in action. If we all save our money, we all end up poorer. Just ask Japan how it works, or Ben Bernanke.

Returning to a gold standard, or an excessively stringent hard money plan, would greatly prolong and worsen our current recession, yet here it is as an idea pitched by many of the Republican candidates, not simply Ron Paul. The real solution to our problem is in fact the opposite of what Republicans have been proposing and not what Democrats are suggesting either. Kenneth Rogoff, who co-wrote a phenomenal book on financial crises "This Time is Different," argues that we need a stiff dose of inflation to escape our current economic situation. This is because in a fiscal crisis, the biggest problem is people carrying too much debt. The solution to people carrying too much debt is inflation, just as it was for William Jennings Bryan in 1896. A strong wave of inflation will help people repay their debts faster. Once their debt is paid down, they can go out and lift aggregate demand. By the way, Rogoff is not some wild-eyed liberal economist. He worked as an economic adviser in John McCain's 2008 campaign.

In any situation entering into a hard money or gold standard monetary policy would be a bad idea, but on the heels of our current financial crisis it's unbelievably bad. The fact that Republican candidates are able to gain traction on this issue is terrifying to me. It is true that the President cannot force the Federal Reserve to adopt a hard monetary policy and Ron Paul will never win the presidency and install the gold standard. I just wish we could move beyond debates that have been settled for ages to talk about things that could actually help this country.

Hiatus

2011-09-29T23:21:00.000-03:00

As much as it pains me, especially since I have one post that I really wanted to get out there at the beginning of the term, I think I am going to take another break from blogging. My life is simply far to hectic for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, I can begin in earnest again in December, but you should anticipate no more than one post before December and even that might be pushing it.

Have no fear though dear readers. Unlike previous breaks from blogging, this is not from a lack of ideas or the feeling that I should move on from blogging all together. Far from it. I have several ideas in the queue. I am also very pleased with my blogging after the past summer, and would love nothing more than to be able to blog on a consistent basis. In fact, I nearly applied to be a volunteer contributor to a basketball blog before remembering that I was barely able to juggle all of the things currently on my plate.

While the groundhog has seen his shadow and another couple months of blogging winter are ahead of us, I'm excited to be past this stretch and already ready to start this up again. 'Til then.

An Ode to Teammates

2011-08-24T23:44:00.000-03:00

Now that I'm more than year removed from my last organized sport, I've come realize exactly what my father discussed when he retired from coaching. You are happy to be done with the grind, but you really miss the camaraderie. I wasn't sure this would be the case. In fact, I've only had two sports where my last team in the sport was filled with people I enjoyed being around and dreaded no longer being with. However almost inevitably, I look back on my teams and teammates and remember them fondly (football being the lone exception). I wanted to write a post dedicated to all of the great teammates I've had throughout the years, and even some of the people who annoyed me at the time, but I've truly grown to appreciate since. However, in keeping in the tradition of anonymity of everyone discussed in this blog, all of the real names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Rade: There are few of my former teammates that have been friends with for longer than Rade. He and I started out as friendly rivals throughout elementary school. I distinctly remember playing an epic game against his team in the first round of the city league playoffs in fourth grade. He and I both played very good games and guarded each other, but in the end we lost on a missed buzzer beater. This was my first case of being despondent over a sports loss.

Rade became a great teammate because even though we did not play the same position (he was taller than me every year except 8th grade), Rade and I pushed each other to become better players every step of the way. Sometimes we were genuine assholes to one another, but what young competitive boys aren't. Rade also made perhaps the greatest imprint on my life by helping me pick two of my still favorite sports teams. We are not close by any stretch of the imagination, but our bond over sports teams and childhood rivalry is not something I will forget anytime soon.

Panzer: Panzer was a member of my 8th grade baseball team, which is one of the two sports teams that I knew as the season was drawing to a close that I would genuinely miss. The team was filled with a cast of characters that wanted nothing more than to have fun, and win a few ball games. Now it didn't hurt that we were really good because the team was filled with guys who had spent most of their elementary and middle school ball at the "majors" level before moving down to the "minors" in either 7th or 8th grade. It even included plenty of people (Draco, Crabbe and Goyle) who I had quite the acrimonious relationship with earlier in my life. This team was a cathartic experience for me. Our relationship went into detente. I even earned a nickname (The Ostrich) from Crabbe and Goyle for my exceptionally upright running style.

But back to Panzer. He had probably become my best friend during the preceding school year, and more of that had to do with my desire to popular than anything else. We were the tall, gangly guys who pitched and ran rapidly around the bases. We were also jokesters who despite being pretty good on the team didn't remotely take ourselves seriously (we were in the minors for gosh sakes).

Ogre: I highly doubt Ogre would know my name if I came up to him today, but he was my first and best training buddy in CC. He was a senior while I was a little dumb 8th grader, but we were a match made in heaven for running ability. Never before or since have I ever had a person that was so evenly matched with me in terms of skill at a sport. It made practices and running in meets so much easier because if I couldn't find Ogre, I knew one of the two of us had screwed up. Most of the time it was me. I had a very hard time pacing myself in my first few races and Ogre helped me learn exactly what I needed to do to have what turned out to be one of my best CC seasons.

Mandel: I don't think it would be too much to say Mandel hated me. I was the younger kid, who was worse at basketball than him, but who many of the older people than him liked having on their team anyway. I'm pretty sure I was just the awful coach's son, who had no business playing basketball in his eyes. I think the older guys might have known this too, because in open gyms they loved to have me guard Mandel at all times. I would inevitably harass and annoy (read: foul) him enough to steal the ball from him a few times, which only exacerbated things more. I never really came to better terms with Mandel, and I don't really miss him as a teammate so I'm not quite sure how he made the list, but he's certainly a teammate I'll remember for a long-time.

Odysseus: After Ogre graduated and with the looming departure of all of my older sister's friends whom I'd gotten along with on the CC team, I was worried that I would soon be without friends on the team and that I'd quit simply because I didn't have anyone who I wanted to run with. But then along came Odysseus, and O'Malley but he was such a better runner than me that even though we became very close I never thought of him as a CC friend. Odysseus became my ultimate corrupting influence. I worked my tail off to be a good runner for a while in 8th grade, but then Odysseus and I became training partners and pretty soon we were taking shortcuts on routes, milking injuries to run fewer miles, excessively walking in-between repeats, and most audacious of all simply running to another person's house and hanging out for all of practice. These antics frequently carried over into meets, where we would "warm-up" by jogging slowly out of sight and then stopping, or in perhaps my worst moment eating gummy worms during warm-ups to time the sugar high for the race. It did not end well. Odysseus transformed CC from something that was mind-numbingly boring to a fun and interesting game of seeing how much we could possibly get away with during practice and meets.

Happy: While Odysseus and Panzer taught me to not take my sports seriously, Happy showed me how it was possible to not remotely take a sport seriously and still be very good at it. Happy never remotely considered golf his main sport, he was a hockey player through and through. His swing was a hockey swing, and he made no bones about trying to make it more like a golf swing. While I would become incredibly sarcastic when things went poorly on the golf course, Happy would turn into the most carefree player. He would frequently hit shots that were simply for his own amusement, and not remotely for the benefit of his score. Since we would get paired together in meets, we made quite the tandem if both of us were playing poorly. One guy just being bitingly sarcastic to everything everyone said, while the other would walk around without a care in the world. The amazing thing was by the time he graduated, Happy nearly qualified for the state tournament.

Fillmore: My first year of college golf was a bit like being dropped into an ocean storm without any safety gear. I was completely unprepared for a coach who didn't give a damn about making us better, courses that were substantially longer than anything I'd ever dreamed of, opponents who thought they were getting ready to turn pro, and teammates who couldn't care less about how we did. In all of this, I gravitated towards two people for support, Fillmore and Kobe. Kobe would eventually become fast friends with the subsequent classes, so I ended up becoming better friends with Fillmore. Occasionally he didn't deserve it, like when he told a group that we were both in that he had no intention of contributing anything to our group paper, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Fillmore was a great teammate because he made sure everyone was on their toes (he light up and held it over me for several days when I finally made my "freshman mistake." He claimed all freshmen make at least one major dumb mistake.) He was also a great gambler. If he wanted to bet something with you, it was a wise decision to just not take him up on it. This included golf, where I once competed in a three-way skins match where I was even par for the seven holes we played and finished last out of the group.

Avenue Q: This guy was an absolute character. From his extensive shoe collection to calling Torrey Pines a "dog-track," Avenue Q always kept things interesting. He was the team's undisputed (well maybe not) beer pong champ. Avenue Q introduced the golf team and a large segment of the school to the glory of Four Loko. The bro-ness was off-the-charts, which is why he was best enjoyed in small doses, but now that I'm going through withdrawal I'd take any hit I can get. I even listened to his radio show last term, even though I don't really like the music he and his co-dj play.

Wow so this post quickly got out of hand. I have more people that I had wanted to write about, but it is turning into a novella rather than a blog post so for everyone's sanity I think it's best if I just leave it with this cast of characters. Now that I'm without organized sports, I'm really missing not having teammates to joke around with and hang out with. It's a harsh reality that I'm probably going to have to deal with for the rest of my life. But to the fantastic teammates I did have, both those that were mentioned here and those that were not, I want to salute you. Without you all, my sport experience and my memories of my playing days would have been far duller. Thank you!

Mini-rant: Marginal Tax Rate Edition

2011-08-20T20:58:00.000-03:00

I know this is not the most thrilling subject so I plan to keep this short and to the point. I get so angry with the media and the public's inability to understand that we have a marginal tax rate system. I'm going to cite Stephen Moore as my example, mostly I remembered him doing this since this article is completely ludicrous and filled with other errors. There are plenty of other examples, but I am far too lazy to look them up.

The thing that I have the most problem with is that everyone discusses the top rate, or whatever bracket they are in as though it was the tax rate they paid on all of their income. For instance, in the Moore article he asserts that the tax rate for millionaires on their income would be 44.5 percent. This is wildly off-base, but no one bats an eye when people talk about their tax rates in this way.

Tax rates are marginal, meaning no matter how much total money you earn every single person that earns X dollars is taxed at the same rate. It doesn't matter if you are a married family living below the poverty line or Bill Gates and his wife, they will both have the same tax rate for the first $17,000 of income. Bill Gates and his wife are not paying 35 percent on all of their income, they are paying 10 percent of their first $17,000, 15 percent on their next $52,000, and so on. Thus as the fourth chart indicates, millionaires end up paying an effective tax rate in the low 20 percents, which when talking about millionaires is a difference of more than $100,000. It's actually lower for the people with the highest adjusted gross income. In 2007, the top 400 Americans in terms of adjusted gross income for the year had an effective tax rate of just 17 percent.

Why does this matter to me? Because it makes people say things that are inaccurate. For instance, people say the wealthy shouldn't have a problem ending the Bush Tax Cuts because they'll just go back to paying what they did under President Clinton. This is absolutely not true. They will in fact continue to pay less in tax than they did under President Clinton because the wealthy would still be paying a lower tax rate at each of the brackets before they got to the $250,000 tax bracket.

Or I remember reading a letter to the editor where a women complained that she did not want to take a small raise that would move her from just below the $250,000 threshold to above it because she didn't want to pay two percent more in taxes, which she worked out to like $5000 more in taxes. If I weren't so aware of how often people screw this up, I would have wanted to slap her through the newspaper and tell her that she was only going to pay like $100 dollars more in taxes and that it would probably be offset by the higher rate that she would be able to take deductions.

Finally, this lazy habit of referring to the marginal rate as the total rate also completely ignores the vast multitude of deductions that many people, especially the wealthy, take on their income taxes. Something very high like 99 percent of the the top two brackets itemize deductions, which means they are saving substantial sums of money due to the upside-down nature of our deduction system.

All of this together means that folks who confuse marginal rates of taxation with overall tax rates are completely wrong. So if you ever hear someone complain about the government taking 35 percent of what the wealthiest earn in a year, inform the poor soul that there is literally not one person in the entire country that pays 35 percent on income taxes, and that marginal tax rates are absolutely not the amount an individual pays.

Amateurism and the NCAA: A Practical View

2011-08-06T22:34:00.000-03:00

I won't deny that I have always been in favor of maintaining amateurism among college athletes. I do think it's important for people to go to college for the right reasons and all of that feel good stuff that clearly no longer applies to some current NCAA athletes. I also believe that revenue sports play an important role in subsidizing the non-revenue sports, which make up the vast majority of the sports offered by colleges around the country. I won't deny that this is probably colored by my participating in a non-revenue sport at the D-III level (Not that that's saying much. Without looking at the AD's books, I'd be shocked if there was a single revenue sport at my school even without scholarships). I don't want to spend this post expounding why I think amateurish should be kept, but rather exploring all of the problems no one seems to talking about when discussing ending amateurism.

This post is inspired by three main incidents. Two of them have occurred quite recently. The other occurred much earlier, but has stuck with me since then. About a week ago, I decided to catch up on the latest season of South Park. One of the episodes was a parody of the NCAA, where Cartman heads the Crack Baby Athletic Association. The gist of the episode was that college athletics was slavery where college athletes are exploited for the gain of the institutions, and things like EA Sports.

The second was a post on Sports Illustrated with the title "A Simple Solution to NCAA Corruption: Let Stars Get Paid." His solution is to allow schools pay for money with anything other than school funds. They can be paid with booster money, TV revenue, and endorsements. I'll get to why I think this is ludicrous and not at all "simple" in a bit.

The final and oldest example was when Tim Tebow went on the Daily Show and claimed that all college athletes want is to be able to afford a scooter and be able to eat out at Outback Steak House, while Jon Stewart made the classic mistake of making out as though all athletes are making millions of dollars for these universities. For Tebow's points, I would first like to say I don't know what you had going on at Florida, but based on what I see at my current University and what I've heard about other major universities, the one thing student athletes are not lacking is scooters. Seriously, the campus is crawling with athletes riding their scooters everywhere.

These three incidents highlight the incredible misconceptions that dog this debate and make it difficult to reach a proper understanding of the situation. In each of these situations, the claim is made that athletes make millions or billions of dollars for there universities and don't get any of the action. The problem is not all athletes are making this sort of money for universities. Heck not even most athletes are making any money for schools. The truth of the matter is that only a very small elite number of athletes are net gainers for universities.

People seem to have forgotten the commercials the NCAA shows every single year. There are tons and tons of student-athletes and almost none of them make it to the big bowl game, March Madness, or even onto your TV. Given that most student-athletes are already actually costing the school money, how can schools begin to dole out money for student-athletes?

The simple solution would seem to be pay students that make the university money. But how can you determine what students are profitable? A role player, or offensive lineman might be essential to the team's success, but they might not specifically be the reason why the team makes money. How much of Auburn's success last year was because of Cam Newton and how much was due to his offensive and defensive teammates? It's an impossible question to answer. Or what about the fan favorite who draws in fans and interest, but has little or nothing to do with the team's success. Mark Titus almost never played for Ohio State, but that didn't stop him from greatly increasing the profile and happenings of the program. Trying to figure out exactly who was making money would be a virtually impossible task. The NCAA would have no chance at policing whether or not students that were making money were getting paid.

Or you could adopt the strategy offered by Mr. Rosenberg and allow the universities free reign over who gets paid and how much. They presumably would have a better chance of completing this task, but I believe this suffers from the same problems. The schools would probably struggle to accurately value what the appropriate payment is for student-athletes. It would likely result in the superstar effect kicking in. This would probably be the worst thing that could happen to college athletics. Now all of a sudden, the Tim Tebows, Kevin Durants, and Cam Newtons of the world will be receiving huge sums of money, quite likely more than they would on rookie contracts in the pros, while their teammates who are very instrumental to their success receive little or no compensation.

The problem becomes even more difficult when you realize that the University would have to make these decision before the year starts. They would have to give out all payments and bonuses in the pre-season to help these students make it through the year, since that would be the stated goal of paying them. Take Michigan's basketball team two years ago. The year before they had made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament and almost beat Blake Griffin's Oklahoma team. They had a young core and only lost two senior role players. The logical conclusion for the University to make was that the basketball team was going to make a lot of money, both from TV and attendance as the team marched deep into March after a long string of nationally televised games along the way. Therefore, the school would have probably raised the amount of money it was paying the team's two stars Manny Harris and DeShawn Sims. But alas, Michigan would have erred greatly in making this decision. The team that year was abysmal and finished below .500, not even making the NIT, and certainly not being featured on nationally televised games.

Giving schools or the NCAA the ability to decide how much and athlete should get paid above and beyond a scholarship is a disaster waiting to happen. The system is not functioning properly, but the proposal to simply pay everyone would result in a worsening situation for virtually all parties. The situation is far easier to fix in basketball than it is in football. The NBA reverse its ban on high school students entering, and force teams to actually use the D-league. It's a tremendous option for the NBA to take players who have no intention of going to college and want to get paid for their abilities and teach these players how to play and get ready to compete at the highest level. The problem in the NFL is that high schoolers are absolutely not ready to walk straight into the NFL. They need some time to get their bodies ready for the NFL, and there is no comparable option to develop talent, especially after the league disbanded NFL Europe. Maybe someday there will be a solution for the NFL, but I think it will be stuck with problems at the NCAA level for quite some time. But if the NCAA can limit its amateurism problems to a few schools on the football side of the equation, I think that would be a pretty good result.

Adventures in Pricing

2011-06-26T15:52:00.001-03:00

Before living by myself I was never much of a shopper. I would do some basic price comparison for things like clothes or books, but when it came to grocery shopping I pretty much bought whatever brand my family had always bought. However, now that I am supposedly self-sufficient and with groceries taking up a substantial portion of my expenses, I have become a much more conscious shopper. This has resulted in the following interesting discovery as I have shopped at my local grocery store, Shoppers. They are either complete morons or the most clever geniuses ever.

While I may not have known much about shopping before this past year, there are a couple of truths that I was completely aware of. The first basic tenet of pricing was store brands were cheaper than name brands. The second was buying the bigger size of something was cheaper per unit than a smaller size. This is after all the entire principle of places like Sam's Club and CostCo, where you have to buy a year's worth of everything, but it's incredibly cheap compared to another store selling a normal size package. The phenomenal thing about shopping at Shoppers grocery store is that they completely flip both of these principles on their head. I should also note that in none of the instances I'm about to describe have either of the items been on sale.

I noticed this first one day when I was buying chicken. I often buy chicken in bulk, because I eat a ton of it and it also bounces back from being frozen pretty well. So within my first couple of months of moving in, I was in the chicken section trying to decide whether I wanted to buy the store brand or the name brand chicken. On first inspection, I thought the name brand chicken looked better, but given my tight financial situation I wanted to check on the prices to see how much more I was going to be paying for marginally better looking chicken. I was shocked to see the store brand chicken was about eight cents more expensive per pound. I instantly selected the name brand chicken.

I was overcome by a strange thought of why in the world would they would make their chicken more expensive, when people were going to be compelled to pick the name brand unless they had a better reason to pick the store brand. I even made a joke about it to my friend who works in the pricing division of a retail store. He and I had a good laugh over the fact that it made no sense for them to do that, and I moved on.

But my confusion quickly returned, only a short while later I returned to the grocery store and one of the items I wanted to buy was shredded cheese. I went to the cheese section and was about to pull off a bag of 2 cups of shredded cheese from Kraft, when I thought to compare it to it's neighboring cheeses. I noticed the bag next to it was a 1 and 2/3 cup bag of shredded cheese from cheese. I scanned down to see the price only to notice that they were the exact same price. I don't mean they had the same per unit price. I mean 2 cup bag of cheese cost exactly the same as a 1 and 2/3 cup bag of the same cheese by the same company. I immediately thought what a bunch of morons. Who would ever pick the 1 and 2/3 cup bag when they would be getting a 1/3 of a cup for free by picking the 2 cup bag?!

I had a very good laugh at this pricing failure for a while, and in fact used it as an example for how dumb my grocery store is. On a side note, my grocery store has drawn my ire for a wide variety of reasons. It has what certainly appears to be a fantastic selection of tubers and exotic fruits, yet at the same time it almost never has edible looking peppers or strawberries.

But this was only the beginning of my adventure with Shoppers blatantly disregarding the basic rules of pricing. I went to buy some Philadelphia cream cheese because I loves me some bagels. I couldn't decide whether I wanted the bigger or smaller size and decided to let the prices decide. As I'm sure you've gathered from the nature of this post, the smaller size was considerably cheaper than the larger size and so I bought two of the smaller sizes to get the same amount of cream cheese and save about ten cents. Yes, I realize I'm killing the environment this way, but I needed those ten cents!

That very same shopping trip. I got a hankering for potato chips. I decided to buy some Utz chips because I'd never had them before and they are all over out here and were in Mad Men. I automatically pulled the family size off the shelf, but then my brain pointed out maybe you ought to check the prices after the cream cheese incident not three minutes earlier. Lo and behold, the family size bag of chips was more expensive per ounce than the regular bag size!

By now, I was quite bewildered by my dear grocery store. It appeared that these sorts of pricing mishaps couldn't just be happening because some clueless employee wasn't paying attention. But it kept happening over and over again. The most egregious example came with Malt-O-Meal cereal. I went to buy the super size bag of Frosted Mini Spooners, but I decided to compare it to the regular size bag and I was amazed to see that I could buy three small bags to get one and half times the amount of the super size bag for the same price. This was not some person being off by a few cents. This was a substantial price reduction for buying the smaller sized item.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, there are only two explanations for this bizarre pricing strategy: they are bumbling idiots, or incredibly sinister geniuses. You may ask how it is that I can think they are sinister geniuses. I think it's entirely possible that someone in charge of Shoppers has read some behavioral econ or something similar and decided to exploit the fact that people are terrible at making decisions. As I said in the beginning, my shopping patterns were based on what I knew to be two true rules: store brands are cheaper, and buying in bulk is cheaper per unit. Lazy people will simply assume these rules will remain true, and not check the price. This will allow Shoppers to make a hefty profit compared to their competitors on the large priced items, since presumably they are still receiving the bulk products at a discount from their distributor.

Before you say if I've noticed it and I've changed my buying habits to avoid the pricing strategy surely it can't be that effective, I would remind you that first of all it took me months and months to get to the point I'm at now where I check comparable items to see what the actual price difference is. This means Shoppers got months of me paying more for some store brand items and more for bigger sized items. Second, I am very attune to price because I am living on such a tight budget. Given the nature of the people I see shopping at my grocery store, while not incredibly wealthy I can guarantee they have more financial leeway than I do. Since basically every person I've met who isn't scraping by each month doesn't care about the difference of a couple cents, I seriously doubt that more than a miniscule chunk of Shoppers' shoppers have noticed this phenomenon.

The bumbling idiots argument is based on the fact that there is nothing about this grocery store that makes it seem like it is pulling off a coordinated exploitation of people's natural assumptions about how things will be priced and there laziness to actually check to see if that's the case. Then there's the fact that not every store brand is more expensive. For instance, the store brand milk is always cheaper as are the drugs. I'm sure people are more attune to those two prices, but it indicates that it clearly that it isn't a directive for all goods to be priced this way.

To this day I have not come down on one side of the debate or the other. In fact, short of seeing a company memo saying this is how we are going to price these goods and I just can't imagine anything that would decisively shift my opinion. I am sure, however, that this debate will go down as one of history's great mysteries rivaling the puff of smoke on the grassy knoll and what really happened in Area 51.

Pre-1929 Mindset

2011-06-19T18:42:00.000-03:00

After September 11th, Republicans loved to use the line on all Democrats who did things like oppose the war in Iraq as having a "Pre-9/11 mindest." The point being, it was dangerous to pretend September 11th never occurred and that we should avoid repeating the same mistakes that allowed it to happen. Well, I believe the Republican party has made a move that is far more real and far more dangerous. They have returned to a Pre-1929 mindset.

What do I mean by a Pre-1929 mindset? Well it gathers it's name as the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, but it's far more than just not understanding how and why the Depression came to be. The Pre-1929 mindset is shown in the Republican party's belief that anything we learned in the past 80 years is worthless.

The Pre-1929 mindset has pervaded almost every aspect of the current Republican party. Just about everything the Republican party stands for today is something that was considered mainstream or in some cases even a fringe idea in the 1920s.

We'll play a little game where we compare what the Republican party today has to compared to discredited ideas of the 1920s. The Republican party on evolution. The 1920s on evolution. The Republican party on the income tax. The 1920s on the income tax. The Republican party on monetary policy. The 1920s on monetary policy. The Republican party on fiscal policy. The 1920s on fiscal policy. The Republican party on tariffs. The 1920s on tariffs (technically 1930 so sue me). The Republican party on isolationism. The 1920s on isolationism. The Republican party on immigration. The 1920s on immigration.

That's all I've got right now. I'm sure there are even more instances of really great ideas that somehow got ignored for the last 80 years that Republicans are now championing, but those are the ones off the top of my head. So if you want to live in a world based on the ideals of the 1920s, vote for the Republican party. But when the world comes crashing down in a horrible mess, don't say you weren't warned.

A Friend Indeed

2011-05-29T00:01:00.000-03:00

Note: As has become the norm on this blog, this post was started almost two years ago. In fact, one of the friends mentioned in this post has for the time being beaten the problem they faced. However, I think the main point of the post remains.

I don't like to throw myself into people's lives. I have a hard time convincing myself that they have a big enough problem that I need to inject myself into the situation and save them. I like to think this helps me in some cases because I don't needlessly order people or bitch and moan about their lifestyles. However, there is another reason that I don't stop my friends in these situations, I am a coward.

How do you tell someone that they are completely detached from reality? When you've known these people for nearly your whole life, how can you tell them that I think you are killing yourself with your blindness? And if you do nothing, what happens if/when something horrible does happen to your friends? How could I deal with knowing that my lax attitude contributed to their problems?

These are some of the questions I face every time I'm with some a couple of my friends. The worst part is that the friends in question are at least partially aware of their problems. When a friend makes a joke about how stupid they are for the mistakes they made, but that it's fine because they've limited their problem to a slightly less unhealthy level, how can I do anything but uncomfortably laugh?

In another case, I've been more vigilant, but it helps to have the support of more friends to convince this person that their problem requires a serious change of behavior. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the silver bullet either, I can't tell if it is having any more than a slight impact on their behavior and they become more upset with each time anyone complains about their problem.

Now, I don't know what to do. It's so easy to not intervene and just let it go on forever, but at the same time I do have a conscience. Every time the situation deteriorates or I hear about things taking a turn for the worse I get eaten up on the inside. My efforts to intervene have not been successful either as all it succeeds in doing is building a barrier in the friendship where I am no longer seen as accepting, but instead someone who doesn't get it and can't understand what they are going through.

I really want to be able to help my friends when they need my help, but I just don't know how to solve problems of this magnitude. This is also either the reason why or a symptom of the fact that I don't think I have ever been anyone's best friend/confidant/right-hand man. I don't have a lot of experience dealing with other people's problems, and that's not a good trait as I get older. Whether it'll be as a manager in an office setting or as a parent, I am going to be spending the rest of my life helping and dealing with other people's problems. Maybe, they will never have problems like the two problems I've described above, but that seems pretty unlikely. In fact, I am sure I'll have to deal with people that have more severe problems later in my life, and given my failures thus far, it's a terrifying thought.

Fifty Nifty

2011-05-19T11:59:00.000-03:00

This is my 50th blog post (well 51st if you count a post that was there for a couple hours and has never reappeared since), and I'd like to take a trip back down memory lane to relive some of the blog's glory days. I started the blog because I needed a blogger account to comment on someone's blog (I think it was Johnson). As a result, my first post hated on the nature of many people's blogs and that I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my blog. My first real post was an attempt to fit in with everyone else and blog about movies. However, I quickly realized that it was not something I wanted to do with my blog because I was not good at it, especially compared to you all. In fact, I don't think I've reviewed a movie since that post.

The blog initially lived up to its secondary title. Most of my early posts were dripping with sarcasm, and many of them were so poorly formatted that they were incoherent. I'm still sarcastic and I still do a terrible job of editing, which is to say I don't edit at all. However looking back on my earlier posts, I'd like to believe my posts have become better and more worthwhile.

The pace of my posting has slowed substantially, and has moved more in bursts than constant posting as I used to do. I made 11 posts in my first year, and a whopping 18 in year two. I even managed to keep it going with 13 in year three, but then the bottom fell out. In year four, I dropped to just four posts, including a post about how I no longer wanted to write on the blog. I wrote just one post in 2010, but I've started to rebound as this will be my third post of 2011. Hopefully, this is the start of a blog renaissance, but more likely it's just another little burst and then I'll go back into hiding.

The reason my postings have decreased is that I've really struggled to finish a lot of my posts recently. Whether it's because I decide I don't actually want people to see the post or because I am no longer interested in writing on the topic, I have 16 unfinished posts sitting in my drafts box. Most of them are from the past two and a half years, and most of them will probably stay as drafts.

I've decided to finish this post with my top ten blog posts. I've chosen them by an arbitrary formula of number of comments, personal fondness, and quality of the post.

10. The Contenders: My preview of the Democratic and Republican primaries where I hate on Obama compared to just about everyone in the Democratic field and I am paranoid about Rudy Guiliani actually becoming President. Amazing how things can change.

9. Squatting on the Shoulders of Midgets: Depression after struggling in school caused me to re-evaluate just how smart I actually was and what sort of things I could accomplish in my life.

8. I got nothing: This post was after my 18th birthday. It was my effort at looking back at my life and talking about the absurdity of the importance of turning 18.

7. Standing Up For T he Big Guys: This post was really about how I felt people are too negative and don't take the time to appreciate some of the incredible improvements our world has made. As a result, I think some of the big, easy targets out there get too much flak.

6. Revelation: Here is a great example of my early posts. One long paragraph that is entirely sarcastic and finishes with a hidden message!

5. The Last Progressive: My disappointment that young liberals have abandoned the belief that government can be a force of good. It is a true shame.

4. Grad School: Or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate Our Tax System: This is probably the longest post I've ever written. It was a long and winding critique of how my views on the tax code have been radically altered since entering graduate school.

3. Misunderstanding: Easily the most commented post in the history of the blog, but talking about the divisive major war of the time is likely to do that. I ripped people who opposed the Iraq War because of the number of casualties, which sparked a fun little debate between the Andrews.

2. Cavemen: My retort to the absurdity of the environmental groups in undergrad. Their complete lack of common sense still riles me up years later.

1. My Convention Speech: After spending far too much time listening to convention speeches, I couldn't take it anymore and had to write my own heartbreaking story of struggle and redemption.

Well there you have it, the ten best posts in the history of this blog, or at least according to me. I actually can't believe the way I ended up ranking them. I certainly didn't expect to rank the convention speech first. I picked the ten posts this morning and came back tonight to rank them so this has been a little surprising. The last four were so hard to me to rank because they represented completely elements of my blog, so I enjoyed those posts for such different reasons.

These first 50 posts have been enjoyable and while I've sometimes abandoned the blog, I've always been pulled back. Maybe someday I'll reach a 100 posts. I'll probably be retired and blogger will probably go under well before that point, but that won't stop me from aiming high.

Projecting Foolishness

2011-05-06T23:54:00.000-03:00

I have no desire to finish my work so there is no better time for a blog post. One of the reasons I have failed to get any work done today is the fact that I received a briefing memo for a presentation on "Singularity." In brief, singularity is the belief that in the very near future computers will gain so much capability that they will vastly surpass humans, along with a series of other wild predictions. My favorite of which states that after singularity happens the entire production of the world would double every quarter or weekly. How any human being could make such a prediction with a straight face is beyond me.

One of the biggest proponents of this theory is Ray Kurzweil. He is convinced that technological rate of change happens at an exponential rate. This argument is fascinating to me because there is literally nothing under the sun that does not have diminishing returns, but apparently technological change is immune to what happens to everything else. It is capable of developing at ever increasingly rapid rates.

The inspiration to Mr. Kurzweil's belief is Moore's law. Essentially, it states that the number of transistors on a circuit board will double every two years. For the 50 years since Gordon Moore proposed his "law," it has held and transistors have become exponentially smaller. However, like all good things Moore's law is coming to an end. It too will hit long-run diminishing returns in the near future. Gordon Moore, the CEO of SanDisk, and the CEO of Intel among others have all stated that the continuous halving of size will have to stop in the next decade or two as physical constraints of atoms get in the way. Apparently, counting electrons becomes progressively harder, and they start to smear. I have no understanding of this, but I'm merely pointing it out to show that in the long run Moore's law, which included accelerating returns, cannot be maintained.

The point is people make this mistake all the time. They take a short-term trend and assume it will continue indefinitely. There are the people who thought the Dow Jones would continue to skyrocket in the early 2000s and wrote "Dow 36,000" about how the Dow was still undervalued at the turn of the century (by the way the current value of the Dow around 12,000 and has never exceeded 14,164). Or the people who said housing was a surefire investment because home prices never went down. Even the good people at CBO are forced to do this and end up doing things like projecting half of all things the US will produce in 2082 will be health care spending. Ten years, 40 years, even century are not even data to prove a trendline. This chuckle inducing article by the Economist on the greater than exponential growth rate of shaving blades illustrates how 100 years is not enough time to make a conclusion.

I would argue that forecasting of this nature is a fool's business. The first thing we learned in our agent-based modeling class was the models were not meant for projection. We are simply terrible at projecting a lot of things. This is not to say we aren't capable of projecting anything. We usually quite good at some predicting things in the very near future. However, once we try to predict things beyond a few years in the future, we might as well be throwing darts at a board. I nearly launched into the rant about how monkeys throwing darts are just as effective as stock experts at gaining money in the stock market, but I'll save that for another time.

Let this be a lesson to all you kids out there. Just because you see a slight uptick in a trend does not mean some new paradigm has been reached and we are about to see a fundamental alteration in our world 50 years out. And never ever make the mistake of assuming something will grow at an exponential rate forever. You'll only look like a fool in the long-run. As Kenneth Boulding once said, "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either an economist or a madman."

Grad School: Or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate Our Tax System

2011-01-09T00:22:00.000-04:00

Due to my first term in graduate school, I can officially say that I have become filled with new ideas about the world. It's actually quite strange because I would say that I have learned almost no skills that I didn't possess upon entering graduate school, but I've picked up a series of new thoughts that have nearly consumed me. This was absolutely not what I was expecting. I figured my liberal arts education had given me all of the ideas I would ever need and now I was going to school to get the skills to put them to use.

But alas the skills I have learned so far are: writing memos, and STATA. For all of their emphasis on how learning how to write memos would be exceptionally challenging and a whole new way of writing, I can honestly say that I write memos essentially how I would write an essay. There are no special formatting or thought process ideas. It's just essay writing without excessive words. Learning STATA was also worthless since I'd already learned how to use it in undergrad and in fact corrected my TA multiple times during a session. I'll give the school a pass since these were the core courses and I'll be getting into the nitty-gritty next term, but it's still a little disappointing.

Luckily, my economics, statistics and political institutions saved the day. The three courses alone did not really provide any unique insights. I thoroughly enjoyed constantly analyzing incentives in econ instead of just plugging and chugging. I already knew over half of the statistics concepts, but picked up some of the more technical aspects that were glossed over in undergrad. The political institutions course was basically a lesson in how unless you are really good any worthwhile reform will be thwarted by our system.

However, much like the Planeteers, these courses were nothing special on their own, but when their powers combine the real magic happened in my brain. For you see, I spent my entire term learning about how getting the incentives wrong can have disastrous consequences for the future of the economy. While also listening to the most depressing stories of peanut price supports implemented in the Great Depression, that remain law today because the peanut lobby fights tooth and nail for it while no one else cares.

For you see we are nickeled and dimed all across the taxation system and it doesn't even benefit us. For instance, we pay millions of dollars to wool and mohair growers. The program was created in the 1950s because we made our military uniforms out of wool. However in 1960, the military switched to synthetic fibers for the uniforms, but that hasn't stopped us from continuing to pour more and more money into supporting wool farmers. The subsidy was supposed to finally be eliminated in the mid-90s, but the year it was set to expire a new grant was created to give $50 million to promotion of wool products. All the while demand for wool has fallen off the table and is unlikely to ever pick up again.

While I plan to revisit my new-found and passionate hatred of agriculture subsidies, I want to focus on how to save our tax system from lobbyists. Americans hate lobbyists, or at least claim to hate them. The problem is everyone has at least someone out there lobbying for them and lowering their tax burden, or so they think. Retiree Jack may say "Of course I'll donate to AARP. They'll save me a bunch of money on my prescription drug benefits." The problem of course is while Jack's lobbyists are saving him $500 on drugs over the course of year, he is paying more than that in taxes to support ethanol, textile, and oil production. Not to mention deductions like the mortgage interest deduction, which cost the government billions and contributed greatly to the housing crisis.

Of course, not everyone is a loser in this system. The people with the best lobbyists and most lobbies benefiting them make out like gangbusters. They get all sorts of great benefits that pale in comparison to their share of everyone else's little pet project. And do you know who these people are? It's the wealthiest and best connected individuals in the country. These are not at all the sort of folks who need more help to get by.

The President is currently proposing we deal with this problem and I sort of applaud the effort. Unfortunately, I think we have seen this play before and the ending is not good enough. In 1986, Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress passed a sweeping tax reform that did a lot of what I would like to see happen. It made the tax code simpler. Threw out huge amounts deductions and exemptions that littered the tax code. However, there was one problem. They lowered the tax rates to make the proposal palatable, but basically as soon as the ink dried on the bill lobbyists began swarming to put back in their exemptions. It was exactly like the wool and mohair example. So within a few years, the tax code was filled with just as many loopholes and problems as before, but now at a much lower tax rate. Not surprisingly tax revenue declined until the internet boom saved things.

I truly believe the only chance at solving this tax crisis is with a radical overhaul of the tax code. I would like to see a tax code that income tax could be completed on one sheet or even have no deductions at all and only a personal exemption of a higher level. The point is the reform has to be substantial enough and the deduction have to be demonized enough that people realize what it means when a deduction appears on the income tax. Once they are aware that no one should be getting this break, it will become painfully obvious that someone has done something they shouldn't when all of a sudden the next year there is a deduction option on the income tax.

Thus, we should reform the tax code for five main reasons. First, it will greatly even out the tax code by no longer benefiting those with the best tax accountants or the best lobbyists. Second, it will save Americans millions of hours of work and dollars preparing and filing their taxes. Similarly, it will free a number of tremendously intelligent people to doing productive things with their time. When all of the tax accountants, lawyers and lobbyists no longer spend their time and efforts to slice the pie in a manner that best benefits their employers, but instead work to growing the pie America will be a much more productive place. This reform will also remove the economic inefficiency of randomly deciding which groups or activities get a tax break. Finally, I fully do not expect the expenditures to go away. Instead of giving a tax break for clean energy, the government will just spend money through the appropriations process. This is much more transparent and can actually be more effective at achieving the government's goals.

There you have it folks. It took me a long long time, but I think I may have found a new calling after the whole taking over the world thing has sort of fallen by the wayside. My new ultimate goal is reform the tax code and hopefully help correct some serious problems in America. Yes, it is really setting my sights much lower, but I'm honestly not sure if it's anymore achievable so we'll have to see how long this dream lasts.

WoW That's Dumb

2010-08-02T13:55:00.000-03:00

*Editor's note: This post has been frequently stopped and started and I have no intention of actually editing so it is coherent. So I'm sorry. Also I apologize that it's been over a year since I published anything. I promise I've been writing. Finishing is just so hard.*

This post is the end result of a long debate I've been having with myself about advanced statistics in professional sports. There are plenty of good uses for these statistics, such as getting a better understanding of how players perform in typically under-appreciated areas. However, many of the people that create advanced statistics desire to develop the one-stat-to-rule-them-all. This inevitably ends of creating a very warped statistic that can frequently end up with a worse understanding of how players are actually performing. The major source of my anger is WoW or Wages of Wins created by Dave Berri. This is an understanding of how professional basketball players perform based on their scoring, rebounding, shooting percentages, fouls, assists, etc. all factored in comparison to the players at their respective positions. The complete explanation of one of their formulas can be found here.

WoW has good intentions. It recognizes that too many NBA fans and executives overrate scoring when determining the worth of a player. Simply scoring a large number of points does not guarantee success if the player needs a large share of the team's possessions to accomplish that goal. However, their attempts to reduce the emphasis on scoring has lead the folks at WoW further into the wilderness.

When Dave Berri first released his book discussing their advanced statistics, one of the controversial points in the book was his claim that in 2000-2001 when Allen Iverson won the NBA MVP and lead the 76ers to the NBA Finals with literally no one on his team to speak of (seriously look at this roster) that Iverson was an average player. I wish I could find the link where he ranked Iverson that year, but suffice it say it was in the range of 40-50 in the NBA. Thus, Dave Berri's analysis leads him to believe that if Iverson were replaced on that team by upwards of 50 other NBA players that the team would not only have done the same but in fact probably better. Unfortunately that is not the worst of it. Berri's formula indicates that if you were to remove Iverson from the 76ers that year that it would have only cost the team 5.2 of the team's 56 wins. That's right if the 76ers had trotted out a line-up of Dikembe Mutombo, Eric Snow, Tyrone Hill, George Lynch and Aaron McKie they would have still won 50 games!

I'll come back to Iverson in a little bit, but I would like to move on to perhaps the more egregious and telling result of the perversion of WoW. This article was posted on the WoW website over the summer and has caused me to fume about it ever since. The article starts off relatively innocuous as it claims that Kevin Love was the best player on the Timberwolves last season. It is a subject that would probably spur debate among T-wolves fans about whether or not it might have been Al Jefferson. The egregious part of this article is that this author claims that Kevin is not only the best player on the Timberwolves, but among the very best elite players in the NBA. The wages of wins threshold for a "superstar" player is one with a WP/48 greater than .300 and Kevin Love's last season was .349. There are very very few people who would take such an argument seriously, so how could the author have reached such a bizarre conclusion. The answer is that WoW vastly overrates the value of the rebound.

Let's take a look at the nine players that WoW rates as elite based on their formula for 2009. Their names are drumroll please: Kevin Love, Marcus Camby, Lebron James, Dwight Howard, Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, Gerald Wallace, Pau Gasol, and Tim Duncan. What is the common thread among these nine individuals? These folks are tremendous rebounders for their position. Marcus Camby, Dwight Howard and Kevin are consistently among the league leaders in rebounding. Lebron James and Gerald Wallace are easily the two best small forward rebounders in the league and it's actually not that close. The same story exists with Jason Kidd. The only slight exceptions are Pau Gasol, Chris Paul and Tim Duncan. This is not to say that they aren't good rebounders, but they are not incredible rebounders like the rest. They just have great efficiency in their scoring and in Chris Paul's case he takes advantage of friendly home score keepers to be an assist machine.

So how do I know that I am not the one undervaluing rebounds and that the people at WoW aren't overvaluing rebounding? Let's think back to the last time you watched an NBA game. How often do you see one team run a play shoot a jumper and then run back on defense without contesting the rebound and one or more players sit to wait for the rebound? The answer is apparently around 35% of missed shots! In fact only on 31% of missed shots is there an equal number of players from each team vying for the rebound. This means that on certain teams one player can easily rack up rebounds by simply calling to his teammates that he will be taking the rebound. As an Orlando Magic, I can attest to this happening all the time with Dwight Howard. There is a reason why Rashard Lewis and literally every other player on Orlando has lower rebounding totals when they come to Orlando. Dwight Howard will get all uncontested rebounds. It happens multiple times a game. Does this make him a great player because his teammates choose not to get rebounds that they could just as easily get? No a thousand times no. Any player that is willing to outhustle or intimidate his teammates into letting him have all of the uncontested rebounds will watch his rebounding numbers skyrocket. This is not a sign of a great player. It's the sign of a player that is expending a lot of energy to pad stats.

This is not to say that there isn't any value to rebounding. Kevin Love for instance provides his teammates with many extra shots through his offensive rebounding efforts. I think Kevin Love is a fine player, but to say that he is among the top nine players in the NBA is a joke. Just as to say Allen Iverson was essentially worthless in his MVP year was absurd. Dave Berri and WoW are all that has gone wrong with the statistical revolution in sports. Everyone thinks that "oh this is an advanced stat. It must be better than any other stat I've seen." The key to advanced stats is understanding what goes into to them and being able to understand the flaws in the formula that may create bizarre results. Berri steadfastly refuses to adjust formula insisting that is perfectly fine. If he wants to be dogmatically attached to his formula that's fine, I just want everyone in the future to disregard pretty much everything his formula says because the formula is inherently corrupt. As the old statistics saying goes, "Garbage in, garbage out." Dave Berri has done nothing but put garbage in and will continue to get nothing but garbage out.

Standing Up For The Big Guys

2009-06-23T00:55:00.000-03:00

The easiest thing in the world is to be negative. It doesn't take any work to say, "This is not the best way to do things." Congratulations! You're right! There is not anything in this world that is perfect, so pretty much any criticism that you make will probably have some truth. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back because your negativity and criticism is 100% right. Not only is your criticism accurate, but everyone loves you for it. There are so many things that you can rip apart and everyone will tell you how smart you and how right everything you say is. You can talk about how bad the media, the government, partisanship, taxes, business, labor, Democrats, Republicans, the UN, the IMF, the BCS, public schools, bureaucracies, pop music, the SAT, or any of the numerous of things that fit this category and no one will ever disagree with you.

I am going to break that right now. You are wrong. Not about everything because as I said earlier these all have very real faults, but these things are nowhere near the evil you believe that they are. Each and everyone of those things performs a necessary function and they do that function much better than you may care to realize. Sure the media is sensationalist and doesn't ever discuss issues in depth, but contrary to popular belief it does keep a large number of Americans somewhat informed on what is going on in the world. These are the same Americans that if you turned TV news into the in-depth discussion of wide-ranging issues would absolutely not watch. The job of the mainstream news is not to inform those people that go out and search endless for information so they can have a perfect understanding, it is to help those people that do not have time to research these issues so they could understand whatever the news presented. It is far more important to have a large number of people with some base level of information than a crust with the perfect information and everyone else clueless.

Absolutely no one is going to sit there and defend the BCS. It is practically a national pastime to sit back from October to January about how awful the BCS is and how it ruins the end of the college football season. Maybe a playoff would be better but you will never be able to include enough teams to prevent tremendous griping and complaining about that system. There are 65 teams in the NCAA tournament and we still gripe out who was snubbed by not making it into the tournament. Never do those teams ever have a shot at winning the whole tournament. One of the best recent at-large low seeds of all time Missouri made it to the elite eight as a 13 seed, but they didn't have a prayer of actually winning the whole thing. Plus, as a Michigan fan I can say that sharing a national title because the other coach was retiring was far worse than anything that has happened in the BCS.

Again I have to stress the fact that all of the things I mentioned and many more that I didn't mention need to be improved, but just bitching about them constantly is doing nothing besides winning you points with your friends. You may think that the current group of politicians the greediest, most power hungry scoundrels the world has ever seen. You can bitch that all corporations do is try to destroy people's lives and control their thoughts. Or believe that labor is worthless and has given up on the common man. You might even think that mankind is raping the world and killing themselves in the long run. But guess what you're wrong. Read any primary source history from any time period in any country and guess what, they are all making the same complaints you are, "The world was so much better when so-and-so ruled and now everyone is completely corrupt and has no thought of the common man. Factions are fighting with each other instead of trying to make the country any better. The soil is not producing the same amount of crops it used to and the rivers are flooding more often than they used to. Other religious zealouts are trying to kill or convert us and their fanaticism is threatening to ruin our lives." And the list goes on and on.

Do you know what the most incredible thing is? Once you start reading secondary sources you realize that not only did they have the same problems we do, but they had them worse than we do. Their tax collectors were so corrupt that they crushed both the rich and the poor with their extortion. They had to deal with politicians constantly plotting intrigues that overthrow the government. They didn't even have college football!!!

Slowly but surely the world is becoming a better place. Everyone reading this blog and myself have better lives than at least 95% of the people that have lived on this planet. We live incredibly blessed lives that many people throughout history couldn't even fathom. So the next time you talk to your friends about how Hannah Montana is ruining the world, remember that life must be pretty good if that's on the list of awful things in the world.

Just because those things have big targets and are extremely easy to hit doesn't mean that you are doing any service to the world by hitting them. I'm sure if any of the small targets that we all love were major players in the world we would rip them to shreds. That's the nature of big, important things. They aren't perfect and since everyone has to deal with them everyone can relate to their problems. The big guys provide valuable services to the world. Sometimes they do a shitty job, sometimes they screw us over and when that happens they absolutely deserve our scorn and anger. But guess what? They are continually doing a better job of getting us what we want. But that won't stop us from mercilessly tearing them to shreds.

Aggies

2009-02-26T23:41:00.000-04:00

Guys,

I want the farm to be worthwhile again. As much as I enjoy posting manly things so Danny can read them, it is so much better when I am able to enjoy all of your random findings and thoughts. I realize that I am probably just whistling Dixie, but basically I miss you guys all terribly. I want some way for us to still be in contact with each other. That's why I had been so excited about the movie picture game, not because of the game aspect but the fact that I could at least joke with you guys again. Now that the group has continued to expand lots of people I don't know its still fairly fun (except when Mr. Obscure Movies posts and no one can figure them out for days) but I know it won't ever be the jokes via movies that I had hoped it would become. This brings me back to the farm. I basically don't come in contact on things on the internet that aren't about sports or politics and since none of you guys are really into those things it would mean that anything you put up there would be something I haven't seen. Thus, I would be expanding my horizons and coming in back into contact with my long lost brethren.

Love,

Me

Baseball Theory of Government

2009-02-04T23:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite analogies makes everyone look at me and say what the hell are you smoking. Probably because they are right but I love thinking about it anyway. I think that choosing a form of government is like the baseball draft. Choosing a dictatorships is like drafting high school baseball players, while choosing a republic is like drafting a college baseball player. Dictatorships have a tremendous boom/bust potential, while a college baseball player is more of a known quantity. If you look at the greatest and worst leaders in the history of the world, the vast majority of them will be dictators. The Julius Caesars, Napoleon Bonapartes, King Ferdinands, and all the "Great"s were all dictators and are now considered some of the greatest leaders in the history of the world. They each took their countries to tremendous heights that were never achieved before or after in their respective countries' histories. While the Robert Mugabes, Adolf Hitlers, Caligulas, Tsar Alexanders and Saddam Husseins are some of the worst rulers to ever grace the earth. Each of these men drove their countries into the ground and are regarded as extreme low-points in their countries histories.

Some of the best players in the major leagues were drafted straight out of high school. Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Ken Griffey Jr., Joe Mauer, Roy Halladay, Carl Crawford, Matt Holiday, Jake Peavy, Grady Sizemore, etc. There aren't many teams in baseball that got their best player from college. However, I am more concerned with team's draft strategies. Everyone has some high school players on their team, but teams like Tampa Bay look fairly exclusively at high school players, while teams like Minnesota and Oakland tend to look more at college ball players.

College baseball players are much safer because you have seen them for longer so you know what they are capable of, but you also know that they won't have as high of a ceiling because they went to college and stayed there so clearly they don't have the amazing natural talents that the superstar player might have. There are some really good college baseball players out there, but they will almost never be the kind of player that can carry their team to the World Series title. This results in a lot of really solid seasons, but no great championship level seasons. This is a perfect reflection of what has happened to the Twins and Athletics. They consistently field good teams, but cannot win the whole shebang. The Twins starting pitchers and closer are all college baseball players, except for the Franchise, who as a foreign player has a lot of the same characteristics of a high school player for this assessment.

So why don't the Twins and the Athletics just focusing on drafting more high school players, if that's all it takes to win a world series? Money. Baseball is the only major American sport where there are extremely few limits on how money can be spent. This allows for teams to become distributed like the "real world". There is no cap in the world that limits the size of a country's GDP or government expenditures. Thus just like there are some countries with vastly more resources than others there are baseball teams with dramatically more resources than others. Each team has to evaluate what their resource situation is. Do they have the money to pay the stud high schooler that is the best player in the draft, but has Scott Boras as an agent? If they have the money what happens if he ruins his arm or goes Josh Hamilton or Daryl Strawberry?

The teams with pools of money like the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, etc. are the ones that can always draft whatever player they want because they can afford to take the risk because if the player is a bust they can always just pay for a big-time free agent. Teams like the Twins that don't have the resources of the Yankees but aren't dirt poor either go the route of more college kids because they can't afford to have any prospects fail miserably without it dramatically hurting the team. Somewhat surprisingly the teams at the very bottom of the revenue heap, like the Marlins, Rays or the Expos now Nationals, go almost strictly for high schoolers. Why would those teams go for the big risks? Because they know their revenue won't support a sustained championship level team, so they go for flashes of brilliance like the Marlins two World Series wins.

The lesson here is that each country should assess their situation and decide that way. There is no way that Norway will ever be the major power in the world because of its resources, but it can sustain itself just fine in a democracy. If you look at the real world powers today: US, China, Russia, and India, you'll notice that there are two democracies and two that are not. If you want my prediction about which will be the dominant powers by the end of my grandchildren's life I would probably predict the two that are not democracies. Even though the United States will never ever become a dictatorhsip, all is not remotely lost. Remember at the beginning of the post when I discussed how the great and horrible leaders of the world were almost all dictators and few were democratic leaders, well there is a similar pattern within democratic leaders. Many of the greatest and worst presidents of the United States have been considered "imperial" presidents. These men did not tolerate descent and frequently ruled with a cult of personality, just like a dictator. These type of presidency has become greatly frowned upon. We are shown LBJ and Nixon and told don't ever put these men in power again.

Sure there are going to be Richard Nixons, and George Bushes but I am prepared to risk these men for the potential greatness of our country. I even think that for the purposes of our analysis Richard Nixon was a phenomenal president in helping our country in the short-term, even if he permanently scarred the imperial presidency. I think there will be more than enough FDRs, Teddys, and Lincolns to offset these men's fantastic failures. The United States is the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. We'll need to keep acting like it because we can't be the greatest country in the world by being the Twins.

Defunct

2009-01-23T00:40:00.001-04:00

You know that feeling you get when you see someone that you used to be really good friends with but now for one reason or another you have nothing left to say to that person. That's the stage I am at with my blog. I thought it was simply that I had run out of ideas, but two months and at least one brilliant posting idea later, I still cannot bring myself to write here anymore. It seems that perhaps my most loyal readers have also lost their steam. This post reminds me of talking to a certain high school valedictorian, its really fun for a little bit and then slowly it creeps back into my mind "OH MY GOD. NOW I KNOW WHY I DON'T TALK TO YOU ANYMORE!" I'm going to finish at least one of my brilliant ideas in the near future, but if the magic doesn't happen it might be time to abandon ship.

Christian Laettner Memorial All-Stars

2008-11-25T15:52:00.000-04:00

After watching Stu Douglass drain a couple of clutch threes to help Michigan beat UCLA, I was inspired to create an All-Star team of great white college basketball players. The key aspect is I had to watch them play live at the college level at some point in my life. I also decided to break the team down into two teams of five that would rotate in and out so I could have two different styles of play. The first team is more up and down with a pick and roll based half-court set, while the second team would run an offense based on feeding the ball into the post.

First Team:
Guard: Mike Gansey. West Virginia University. He was a great creator and shooter. A horrible athlete, but played phenomenally well in the 1-3-1 zone and always managed to find his teammates for threes. Look at how he dominates the overtime sessions in the game clip.

Guard: Chris Kingsbury. University of Iowa. The greatest shooter I ever saw. This guy would jack the ball up from anywhere on the court and not think twice about it. He was the only player I have ever seen that truly didn't understand what range was. They would be in a half court set and he would just shoot from the volleyball line or the logo and drain it. Unfortunately, Chris had some other serious problems involving drugs/alcohol/bad grades and apparently sex that is best shown in this post. Someone needs to create a youtube video of this man's career.

Forward: Adam Morrison. Gonzaga University. Mr. Dirty Stache makes the team because I honestly couldn't think of any small forwards that were white and any good at all. He absolutely carried Gonzaga and just like all true good white college players he is a horrible pro. Luckily for him Charlotte is bad enough that he can still play.

Forward: Kevin Pittsnogle. West Virginia University. My big guy with range. You gotta love Pittsnogle for his incredible hickness and touch. Plus his performance against Creighton preserved my perfect opening day of the NCAA tournament. For a seven footer he has the best range for someone not named Dirk. Pittsnogle was with the Celtics, but is now out of the league.

Center: Tyler Hansbrough. University of North Carolina. Psycho-T is an absolute beast. He plays crazy, hence the name. He isn't someone you would want to model your game after, but he is someone you want on your team. Again unless you happen to play in the NBA because I believe like everyone he won't make it in the NBA.

Second Team:

Guard: Steve Blake. University of Maryland. I fell in love with Steve Blake over the course of their national championship run. He and Lonny "Meow Mix" Baxter were my favorite players. Blake is a pretty heady guard he can't really score a lot but this team has plenty of guys that can shoot so his mistake free play is a huge help. Steve Blake is the only good pro in this entire bunch. He has bounced around a lot, but he has started everywhere he has been. Also, I broke with family tradition and wore number 25 on the freshman year in honor of Steve, but after 25 wasn't an option after that I reverted to 14.

Guard: JJ Redick. Duke University. JJ is shooter. He was a much purer shooter than Kingsbury, but doesn't have the fourty foot range which makes Kingsbury so exciting. JJ was one of the best free-throw shooters as well. JJ has provided valuable seat-warming skills for my Orlando Magic, though he has shown signs that he may actually play.

Forward: Joe Alexander. West Virginia University. I remember watching Joe last year in the Big East tournament and thinking my god this guy is a phenomenal player why haven't I heard of him. He has easily the best athleticism of any of the players on this team. He can jump out of the gym and has a reasonably nice jumpshot. But it looks like the curse of a good white college players has struck Mr. Alexander because he has been hurt and basically not playing for a horrible Bucks team.

Forward: Steve Novak. Marquette University. Steve epitomizes everything this team is about: zero athleticism, phenomenal shooting, no desire to come inside the three point line and a horrible pro career. After nailing many a big shot for Marquette, Novak is now on his second NBA team, the Clippers which is about the worst franchise to be a part of except maybe the Griz.

Center: Bryant "Big Country" Reeves. Oklahoma State University. This man is fantastic. Big and dumb he is the perfect big man for this team. He got by on raw power and the fact that there really aren't very many good big men at the college game. He got drafted very high by Vancouver and quickly found out that the guys in the NBA are a little bit better athletes than he was and he disappeared from the scene.

I am really looking forward to keeping this for the rest of my life and adding players where necessary and maybe someday I might actually a good basketball team formed solely from white guys that just want to shoot or in Big Country's case just want to be big.

They Call Me Nostradamus

2008-11-03T16:29:00.000-04:00

I will make predictions on all the important happens on November Fourth. I guarantee they will all be correct.

President:
Barack Obama wins 52% of the vote to 46% for John McCain. Obama receives 353 electoral votes to 185 for McCain. While my professor, who believes that Obama will lose every state where McCain is within 7 points, cries himself to sleep.

Senate:
Democrats pick up 7 seats, while Al Franken loses to Norm Coleman in a race that is not as close as expected. Saxby Chambliss wins in a runoff.

House:
Democrats win a lot of seats. My same professor from earlier continues to cry as his narrative about the preciptious decline of democrats in the house looks even stupidier.

My life:
I successfully complete registration for me and more importantly I am a successful proxy and get classes that they want to get into. I won't get penalized for missing the electoral party that my class is going to.

Your life:
If you were born under an angry Mars, you will run into someone that severely angers you, but you will not cause them physical harm.
If you were born under a waxing moon, you will meet that special someone on the fourth, but you will not realize it for many moons.
If you were born into intelligent surroundings, you will disregard everything I say because you are skeptical bastards.

If predictions are not 100% accurate, you may ask for a full refund of your time.

Misnomer

2008-10-21T22:44:00.001-03:00

So here is the question for all the people out there. How is that the United States has managed to call socialism communism for its entire existence and is now calling communism socialism? The USSR, China, Cuba, etc. were all SOCIALIST, the concept of government owned industry is socialism. Communism is equitable distribution of wealth and power. Therefore if you want to call Barack Obama names for suggesting we spread around the wealth, at least call it communism because spreading the wealth around has nothing to do with socialism. Or if you are really in the mood to call things socialistic call the bailout socialism since the government owning AIG is actually socialism. Thanks.

PS I don't think spreading the wealth around is remotely communist either. Its progressive.

Presidential Rankings

2008-10-12T18:00:00.000-03:00

I decided to compile a list of the presidents in order of my personal preference:
Exceptional:
Abraham Lincoln-Saved the Union. Even if there are times I wish that everyone beneath the Mason-Dixon line belonged to a different country. The US would be in much worse shape without them.
Theodore Roosevelt-Absolutely changed the presidency to what it is today. He brought the media and the whole shebang into the process. He gets plus and minus marks for this because he utilized it to enact many important reforms that my boy WJB had been pushing for the previous decade, but it also made candidates become media machines.
Franklin Roosevelt-Guided the country through the Depression and WWII. Also, made sure that we didn't become Sweden. He set up almost all of the national institutions that matter today.
Thomas Jefferson-Absolutely stole the Louisiana Territory. This was the greatest thing that happened to America in the early years. It cannot be stated enough.

Important:
George Washington-Set every precedent for US presidents, except the lack of party affiliation thing he did.
James Monroe-The Monroe Doctrine gave us the early mindset that we mattered and ingrained that we had some righteous cause in the world.
Harry Truman-The Truman Doctrine was the reason we beat the USSR because it had to be a long drawn out process.
William Howard Taft-Actually did a better job of reforming America than Teddy Roosevelt, but unfortunately he was no Teddy Roosevelt and couldn't handle the media nearly as well. Plus, he was a whale.
Lyndon Baines Johnson-The Ultimate do-er. He worked his ass-off to try and get everything done, unfortunately he sometimes bit off more than he could chew like Vietnam. However, the Great Society and Civil Rights legislation makes sure that LBJ has a special place in my heart.
Andrew Jackson-Huge jackass. Tried to be Napoleon when he was nowhere the same caliber man. He did tried to kill the National Bank. This caused one of the great depressions in the country. He set up the "spoils" system. Plus the man had a bullet lodged in his lungs. Good times. He did also win the election that allowed Adams to be president, but showed why this country wasn't ready for a multiple party battle.
Woodrow Wilson-Finally got the Allies support to win WWI. Made sure the peace process was useless because of his insistence on the League of Nations above all else. Then couldn't even get America to join. Sad times.
John F. Kennedy-The ultimate dream boat. Everybody loved him (if you know what I mean). Only the good die young.
Average:
Dwight Eisenhower-Made sure that we didn't fight WWIII. Complained about the military industrial complex, but can a man who spent more time playing golf than running the country be ranked higher?
Bill Clinton-Extremely shrewd politician. Carefully weighed every decision. You can see the balances with every choice he made. He did balance the budget and eventually made the right decision about Bosnia. Didn't deserve to be impeached at all.
James Madison-Writing the Constitution is important.
Ulysses Grant-Probably the most corrupt administration ever. People said he was incredibly honorable, but I can't believe that someone is incredibly honorable if no one around can be bothered to be anything better than a scoundrel.
Grover Cleveland-Bonus points for non-consecutive terms!
James Polk-My relative so he gets to ranked higher than he really should be. The Mexican-American War, while dubious at best was great in the long run.
Richard Nixon-Did some really good things for this country. SALT, China, etc. was very economically liberal, but was still a huge douche and a corrupt power hungry bastard.
Ronald Reagan-Did play a role in ending the Cold War, but too bad he ruined our economy and more importantly how we think of economics. Bunch of fucking crackpots. Everyone should read The Big Con by Jonathan Chait.
Blah (These are presidents are all so unworthwhile that they don't even get a comment because they could have never been president and the world wouldn't be any different):
Warren Harding
John Adams
Martin Van Buren
John Tyler
George H.W. Bush
John Quincy Adams
Jimmy Carter
James Garfield
Benjamin Harrison
Dislike:
Andrew Johnson-Closest we have ever been to impeaching a president.
William McKinley-Ruined any chance William Jennings Bryan had at the presidency and McKinley was the definition being in the tank with big business.
Calvin Coolidge-Silent Cal didn't do anything to slow down the roaring twenties and thus we had the Great Depression.
Gerald Ford-The most incompetent and worthless president we have had. The man never should have been anywhere near the presidency.
Millard Fillmore-I don't know anything about Millard Fillmore....But I still hate him!
Chester Arthur-As much as I love a good assassination. Arthur shouldn't have been president no matter what republican you are from.
Rutherford B. Hayes-This is the Charles Tilden Memorial spot. Tilden was cost the presidency by his party plus this lead to crazy dems being in charge of the south, which was also bad. So I place the blame squarely on good old Rutherford.
Inept:
Herbert Hoover-Hoovervilles! Good man, but wasn't ready to be president.
George W. Bush-The man did nothing right in his entire presidency. I can't think of anything that he did that I was like oh yeah that was a great idea.
Franklin Pierce-Repealed the Missouri Compromise with the even worse Kansas-Nebraska Act.
James Buchanan-South left the Union and being the great leader he was said it was illegal and preceded to sit upon his hands.
Zachary Taylor-Favored expansion of slavery. Died of heat stroke and had another completely corrupt administration.
William Henry Harrison-Really was that inauguration address long enough? Didn't your mother ever tell you that you'll catch your death of cold...

The Reckoning

2008-10-02T00:19:00.000-03:00

The financial crisis has proven many things about the state of the US. However, the chief lesson that I have taken away from this problem is also a problem that very few others seem to understand. The United States has lived for far too long by borrowing money and it has finally caught up with us. All of the borrowing we have done has finally caught up with us and we are now in a dire situation. Everyone has been practicing half-Keynesianism for far too long. We have all from the government to average Americans have spent money we didn't have in the effort to simulate our economy for greater wealth later. Unfortunately, Keynesianism also calls for savings when times are good so we can make up for the deficits we ran. Since no one has been saving we have just continued to borrow on top of borrowing to stimulate our economy (this includes your personal well-being not just the national stuff).

The biggest problem right now is that their no liquidity in the market because all banks are exceedingly reluctant to make loans since they know they have far too much debt to realistically send out more loans. Thus, all the banks are waiting for more money to come in so they can wipe away some of their debt before they start handing out loans. The current bailout plan has the government providing the money to cover the banks bad assets, so they will be more likely to give loans and thus the economy can start going again.

However, as I just pointed out the fundamental reason we are in this problem is because we have borrowed too much money because we have always pushed for bigger and better things. The current bailout plan will just delay the inevitable. The economy would absolutely pick up again if we had an additional $700 billion pumped in, but it would be fake growth. At some point the United States must face a recession. The longer we put it off the greater the potential fall will be. One of the major reasons the Great Depression was so bad that in the 1920s the FED branch of New York decided to pump more money into the system everytime a down-turn seemed immient. Thus, the economy would grow a bit then stall then more money would be added it would grow again start to stall have more money added, etc. Until finally they realized that this might not be the best thing and pulled the plug on adding more money to the system. Soon after the Depression began.

The United States has absolutely been spoiled. We believe that we can just see continous economic growth and it will continue without end. However at some point in the near future the United States will experience a massive contraction no matter how desperately we try to avoid it. I highly doubt it will be anywhere near as bad as the Great Depression, but it might be comparable with the Panic of 1893. However, it could be much worse if we continue to borrow and hope for fake growth. We will risk the possibility of the large amounts of foreign investment start to go elsewhere, foreign countries begin to ask for the money we borrowed from them back, or having to put up such attractive rates for our bonds that we completely crowd out any investment in our businesses. If any combination of those things happen we could be truly fucked.

The solution as I see it will require a bit of a freezing water bath like Paul Volcker threw on the country to help beat inflation. Sure the economy went through a fairly step recession, but we came out better for it and we stopped inflation. I believe something similarily drastic must be done. This is not the time for more tax cuts and borrowing. The American people need to pay dramatically higher taxes across the board. It will absolutely send us into a recession and whoever implements it would probably never be elected again, but it is absolutely necessary for the long-term health of our economy. We are faced with a cross-roads we can either face our destiny and accept the massive recession we have been putting off and come out better in the long-run, or we can continue to attempt to stall it all the while knowing that all the stalling and pleading in the world cannot get us out of this mess. All things have their end, even the United States economic superpower status will eventually end. It doesn't matter that we sold our soul to get our economic growth. We are not Goethe's Faust. God will not take pity on us and spare us from the Devil when he comes for what is his. Our day of reckoning will eventually come and our Devil (creditors) will take our economy and hardly anyone will remember how great we were for a brief moment in the world's grand history.

My Convention Speech

2008-08-30T00:50:00.001-03:00

There is one thing I noticed while watching bits of the Democratic Convention. Every speaker has to create some compelling life story from their life to make them seem really impressive. So I decided I would come up with my own extremely generic speech about the trials and tribulations of my own life. Also it is really hard for me to not included "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." but I didn't so be proud of me. Here goes nothing:

Good evening. When Barack Obama asked me to speak at this convention I was absolutely overjoyed because it proves that anyone, it may be Joe the blind kid from down the street or Bob your cousin with the cleft palate, can make reach their dreams as long as they never ever give up. Never give up. That was the most important message that my parents, both public school teachers at the local high school, taught me from a young age. They made sure that I knew the value of hard work and how it could lead to help myself. They reminded me of my grandmother who without post-secondary education managed to raise five children. Not only was she able to bring five wonderful and talented children into the world, but she did it without the help of my grandfather who died due to his excessive alcohol consumption. Here was a woman that would never rise about manager in the local department store, but that didn't stop her from making sure that her children would have it better than she did. Even when she was diagnosed with cancer three times and once was given a substantially less than 50-50 shot to live kept fighting and refusing to give in. Because she had to make sure that her children would never have to experience the things that she had to fight through.

My parents also made sure to point that while my grandmother's hard work went a long way to making sure that her children got a better chance than she did that another ingredient was needed, education. For all my grandmother's effort she was never able to rise substantially in her field to earn a comfortable living because she lacked a proper education. So in my parents effort to bring about a better future for their children they stressed the two pillars of education and hard-work. However, as I was to experience in my life even those two pillars are not enough to solve all that life can throw at you.

As a young child, I was caught in an awkward position because I was good athlete for my age, due to my father being the high school's basketball and golf coach. So I had many athletic friends as a child. However, these friends got me tangled into some messes that I now regret. I did not wish get into a fight with some of my peers, but once they left me no choice I was forced to beat them back. It was there I learned my first lesson that no matter how much you don't ever want to fight someone there are times when there isn't any other choice. I believe that this is the only way for us to keep our proper place in the world hierarchy.

Later in my life I was tested by an addiction to pain relievers. I was unable to function without continuously popping pills. Never was my will power tested more than during that ordeal. I remember thinking that I didn't need to take anymore, but then my body would say "Actually neck is a little stiff and could use some relief". It went on like this for far too long. Finally, I realized that I was destroying myself with this process and forced myself to not take pain relievers unless I absolutely needed it.

These are just a few of the events that have made me into the person I am today. These things shaped me into a hard-working, intelligent, tough, and well-principled person. It is for those reasons that I support Barack Obama because I know he shares the same values I do. He will be able to rationally think through problems and never rest until he has them solved. But most important of all Barack Obama will not let anyone push him from what he knows is best for the country not what is best for some lobbyists in Washington. The American people know this and that is why they will elect Barack Obama to be your next President of the United States. Thank you! God Bless America!

Crossing the (Cultural) Rubicon

2008-08-07T03:13:00.000-03:00

Sometimes I become extremely frustrated and don't believe I am a very smart person because I am surrounded by geniuses all the time, however when I have extended encounters with "normal" folk I realize that in fact there are so many things that I take for granted that everyone knows about the world that no one knows that it absolutely appalls me.

Many of these instances have occurred recently while I was working at the Boys and Girls Club. Now, I can forgive a lot of the things the kids didn't know because they were young, even if they thought that the United States was in the middle of Russia...However, my boss who ran the "Education Center" was absolutely clueless about some things that were relatively common knowledge. When the volunteers ran a game of trivia, a kid came up and asked her if Beijing was the capital of China and she said no it was the capital of Japan! I was absolutely beside myself. What kind of person has no idea the capitals of two of the most important countries in the world, especially when your job is to help small children learn! Or in another game of trivia it asked about an animal that can jump over 30 feet in one bound and the hint was it was a marsupial. And she told the kids that it was an animal at Oxbow Park, which only has native Minnesota animals. So I am curious what Minnesota animal she thought was a marsupial...

However my inspiration for this post was in response to the unretirement of the Brett Favre scandal. The Packers CEO Mark Murphy mentioned that when Brett retired, he had crossed the Rubicon. When I first read it in the statement I didn't bat an eye at the reference in the statement. However, I went to the geniuses over at ESPN and found that had an article devoted simply to explain what the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" meant. I felt that the monumental moment in world history must have been explained to people as children. There is no Julius Caesar and no eternal ass-kissing of the Romans if not for crossing the Rubicon. I can now say that there is no doubt in my mind that I am in the upper-echelons of understanding in the world because if there enough people that don't understand these things, surely there are equally large numbers of people that don't understand more difficult to grasp concepts and ideas. So I have crossed my cultural Rubicon and I will never again to the side where I believe that I am not intelligent because there will never be a day in my life where important historical events need to be explained to me, or I will be unaware of major parts of the current world and that means I cannot ever be completely stupid. Maybe a bit dim, but never stupid.

Life

2008-08-04T00:52:00.000-03:00

I don't know what it is but for one reason or another apparently don't care as much as seemly everyone else does about my future. Perhaps it is the fact that I have realized that my potential list of jobs include teacher, bureaucrat, and think tank worker. Perhaps it is that I realize that those jobs don't have a tremendous reward monetarily and if I don't get one I could get the other just as easily. Or perhaps God forbid the unthinkable might have happened in me and I might have realized that trying to map the minutest details about the future of my life is an incredibly silly thing to do at the age of 19 (now 20). I truly wonder if these people really want to have all the surprise of life gone because I can't imagine how terribly dull it all would be if I knew exactly what would happen to me for the rest of my life. I realize that what I just said was a stupid thing because no one can ever know exactly what will happen for the rest of their life, but isn't trying to plan ever last detail when you know that the unforseen will occur just as stupid.

No plan survives contact, and surely the girl that has already planned the courses she will take for the rest of her collegiate career can't take a tremendous amount of joy from knowing all that lies in front of her. This is a truly "modern" goal to have a plan that accounts for every possible variation and is able to react in time to keep the ultimate always attainable. But even if that were possible, which it most certainly is not, would you want it? People frequently cite the survey that asks people if they would want to know the exact time they would die and everyone says no they wouldn't. If people don't want to know when the die, which in my mind could at least be useful, why would they want to know exactly what they will be doing for the rest of their lives? Sure your life plan may make sure that you get little things done and help you think of contingencies when things go wrong. But what happens when the truly unexpected happens and you have spent your whole life following the playbook and now you need to improvise. You can't. Suddenly, you have a problem that you can't deal with and you become paralyzed and suddenly everything is ruined because you didn't even fathom that possibility. This is exactly what happened with German generals in WWI, if that isn't a good enough reason not try and plan everything little detail out ahead of time I don't know what is.

Now I can't pretend that I am spur of the moment do whatever I am feeling at the moment kind of person because that would be a blatant lie. However, if you have ever tried to plan something with me you probably now that I don't have any sort of schedule to my life and I frequently have no concept of what will happen more than a week in front of me. My girlfriend absolutely loves that about me... But the point is that I don't believe I lose anything by not fretting over little details and throughly believe that my life is more enjoyable because of it.

The Last Progressive

2008-05-30T01:58:00.001-03:00

One of the reasons I was excited about going to Carleton was I thought I would finally be with people where my political views were acceptable and I wouldn't have to deal with as many intense conservatives every step of the way. While it is definitely true that I don't have to deal with crazy conservatives anymore, I have not found people that have similar political views as myself. Part of that will never happen because I have some bizarre political views myself. I doubt I will meet people that agree with me that there are countries that should be authoritarian and there are countries that should be democratic because it suits them better. The point is that its absolutely true that the people at Carleton are liberals, however I have realized that I am part of a dying bred, progressives.

Unfortunately for me and other fellow progressives, our golden era was right around a hundred years ago. We were a perfect fit for an America run by Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft, but those days of American politics are long gone. Instead of utilizing the government's power to aggressively and actively fight corruption and scams in the market, we have become focused on gay marriage, abortion, and tax rates. I cannot place anywhere near all the blame for my predicament on conservatives either. Sure, they are the ones that actively bring up those issues during elections, but the real issue is that sometime in the 1970s and 1980s everyone stopped believing in the government. As someone that was born and raised on the belief that the government can be tremendously influential and successive in combating the problems of the day, it has been a disheartening couple of years. The lethal combination of distrust in the government, and failure to control the national agenda has left many liberals to believe that not only do they not need government, but that government is bad.

Too many times at Carleton has I been told that it is a mistake to look to the government to help me with my problem because I will be better off forming an organization to change the problem. I am sorry, I love the PTA and the AFL-CIO as much as anybody else, but you know what makes both of those organizations have anywhere the near the power that they do. Hint its the thing I was not supposed to look to help my problems. Would the AFL-CIO function for a minute if the government did not guarantee their right to exist? How much would the PTA get done if the school or school board decided to ignore them? Furthermore, I could rant and rave all I wanted in the newspaper, on my blog, etc. in order to get attention to the people that are screwing me over, but lots of other people do the same thing and for most of them they haven't been tremendously successful. Why? It's because the republicans have no interest in fixing the problems and because the democrats are all supported by liberals who either don't give a damn about these things or think the government is inherently evil and we should band together and fix the problem as a community.

Fixing problems as a community is great when it is something like preventing a river from flooding your town. It isn't so great when you are trying to make sure the drugs you are taking haven't been tainted with poisons, or that one of the many monopolies we deal with isn't ripping us off. My town can band together all it wants, but it isn't going to make BP lower its prices of gasoline, or make charter make sure its internet servers are secure from hackers. My final example of how Democrats have turned their back on the government as a possible solution to help people in need is that Barack Obama is going to be the nominee when he was the only Democratic nominee not to have mandated national health insurance. He believes it isn't necessary for the government to make that decision for people. I am sure Barry Goldwater agrees with him. Thanks to both parties abandoning the government as a means to facilitate change I look forward to fifty years from now when our government is none existent and we have one of the worst infrastructures in the advanced world with one of the worst gini co-efficients in the world. The good news is that like everything else politics is cyclical and I just need to wait for the resurrection of the belief in government. It's just too bad it may not happen in my lifetime.

The Return of the Projectile

2008-03-24T23:34:00.000-03:00

College has given me many wonderful experiences. However, there are some things that I am not thrilled about entering my life. The one that I would like to quickly highlight is the return of something that has not graced my life for sometime: vomiting. After an absurd bout of the flu in the first grade (where I swear to God I missed over half of the winter that year from vomiting), I can only remember vomiting one time after that year. That particular incident was also impressive as I vomited bringing my lunch money up at the beginning of the school day and vomiting on the classroom floor, forcing the entire class out into the library until it was cleaned up and the smell went away. In the little over a year and a half I have experienced of college my vomiting numbers have already dramatically increased.

This increase stems from two causes the first and most obvious is the over-consumption of alcohol, which accounts for all but my most recent vomiting experience. However more depressing is the fact that for the first time in my life I have now vomited from working too hard and being out of shape. As someone that was just recently a three-sport athlete this is particularly embarrassing to throw up from not being able to compete at the levels I set for myself as normal.

The good news is that after my attempts during the fall term of my freshman I have stopped blatantly trying to destroy my liver and thus I have hope of mastering the first cause. However, this latest wake-up call has showed me that once again I need to adjust my lifestyle to continue to make it through college without hurting myself. Hopefully, I will be as successful in this endeavor.

Pow-Wow

2008-02-26T01:18:00.000-04:00

I have a question: Am I abnormal or is the rest of the world crazy? I used to always think that it was a silly thing that teenage girls did whenever I would overhear or have a conversation with the girls I am friends with at college. However, I have become much more aware of the fact that it is guys as well that cannot make a decision without a massive consultation first.

I really good friend of mine I told was being stupid because every remotely important decision she asked 10-12 people about many many times. I have no problem with someone having a confidant that they ask the important questions of their lives, but I just don't see the need for a group session for what the next play in your life should be. Personally I always want to at least feel as though I am in control of the decisions I make. I can't imagine going through life feeling as though I needed my friends' opinion about what decision I should make next. Maybe I am crazy and I should act like that. I just don't know. Also if you think life decisions should be something talked about before they are decided then I am sorry that I haven't been keeping you all in my decision-making process. I just don't feel like that I should need to talk to anyone if I already know how I feel and if I don't know how I feel then why I am trying to make a decision. If these things are the reason that people are never as close to me as I wish then I am stupid and I wish I acted somewhat differently.

However, I cannot imagine ever being like this girl. No matter how greatly I would want to share with other people if I actually felt it would be helpful or make me closer to them, I would never base my decisions entirely on their thinking and allow my own thoughts to become so distorted. This was by far my worst written post, but that is what happens when half of this post was written while drunk and the other half was written much later. However general incoherency and weird emotionality aside I think the general point remains, am I wrong for not including people into my inner-most thoughts?

Squatting on the Shoulders of Midgets

2008-02-08T00:47:00.000-04:00

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."-Sir Isaac Newton

Not everyone in this world is destined for greatness like Sir Isaac Newton. No matter how much we wish and hope for our dreams they are all too often impossible to attain. We can strain and exert ourselves all we want, but just like Tantalus we cannot quite reach. Even those blessed with tremendous natural gifts can come up far short of the expectations that had been put on them from their birth. It didn't matter the big bad wolf had exceptionally strong lungs that were able to blow over stick houses because he just relied on his natural gifts and never tried to get any other talents because they were never necessary. Then came the brick house and the tried and true technique failed and the wolf was left with no options other than failing in endeavor.

More often than not this failure ends up being a good thing for people. Sure it sucks in the short run realizing that you will never be that professional athlete or ruler of the world, but recognizing those failings can save tremendous amounts of agony in life. Believe me those realizations don't even have to come particularly quickly either, I still thought I could make the NBA in 10th grade through a tremendously convoluted scheme that I had hatched in my brain. However, the next year I realized that not only would I never make it in the NBA, but that I would probably never start for my high school team. In the short term this was bad, because I gave up on basketball and stopped caring about working as hard as I could in practice.

Now it has begun to dawn on me that maybe my intellectual prowess is not as great as I thought it was back in the day. I think that it is highly unlikely that I will ever be regarded as a great thinker in whatever field I go into. While I accept this I refuse to let it get me down like my NBA dream getting crushed, because not everyone is capable of building something new that will tremendously change their profession. What this does not mean though is that because I will probably never have the world moving importance or vision that I wanted from myself that I will have failed. Instead I will do what the big bad wolf could not figure out, I will learn and adapt. I hope to be exceptionally good and hard working at whatever it is that I end up doing. Most importantly I can take comfort in the fact that while I may just be squatting on the shoulders of midgets my view of the world is still greater and better than all of those that are not able to even climb up above the intellectual midgets.

Motivation (or the lack thereof)

2008-01-17T01:33:00.001-04:00

I have to come clean. Motivation has never been my strong suit. Whether it was practicing sports, musical instruments, studying, or even having a social life, I have rarely, if it all, been able to sustain any kind of effort. There are a variety of reasons for this mainly that I am actually quite lazy despite having the rep at Carleton as a kid that works his ass off. This is the third time I have had a professor essentially question my intelligence and/or work ethic and each time I have bounced back with a tremendous vengeance to prove them wrong. For if there is one thing that you don't do to my family is don't challenge any of us because we will put every last ounce of effort into proving you wrong and then rubbing your face in it. More than any other member of my family I exude that particular trait. Whether it be a simple argument that I am doubted in, the belief that I couldn't compete at a collegiate level for golf, or in this case wasn't ready to do the course work, I take tremendous pride in showing people they were terribly wrong to doubt my abilities.

This is not remotely to suggest that I don't deserve the criticisms that my teachers have given me. In my first term at Carleton I was beginning to have grave doubts about my abilities to succeed at this institution. I had three courses and the only one I was doing well in was my writing seminar, which was supposed to be the challenging class for me, while the history of the pacific war was supposed to be a cake-walk. Honestly it should have been. I was far too lazy and let the fact that my prof was probably the most boring teacher that has ever walked on the earth. How can a teacher not care or be worried when teaching a class of 13 and 7-9 are asleep at a given time(myself especially)? Needless to say this behavior did not endear myself to him. Then, he told me not to do my project on the topic that I wanted to do, but that didn't stop me. When I got the poster grade back and it was a C I was absolutely appalled. I haven't started failing German yet so this kind of grade was a complete surprise to me because outside of seventh grade industrial tech and the chapter in calc that I failed the chapter test in, I had never seen grades much worse than a high B in school. So I went to meet with my prof and he told me that he felt like I wasn't putting forth the effort to do well enough in his class and that my poster didn't show him enough. This would have not have gotten me angry though if his critiques of my poster hadn't been the exact things that he said he wanted. He went over and over again in class about how he didn't want a paper glued to a poster and that it had to be readable from faraway. My poster was simple and clean with bright colors that went together. It was organized in paragraph fashion, but the sentences might as well have been bulleted points that I would elaborate where needed. However, my prof told me that I didn't have transitions (a clear sign of a paper), and then he gave an A to a kid that I couldn't distinguish his background which was a black and white image from his black text. This made me step up my effort and I ended up getting a solid B despite only having one more assignment the entire term.

Then the next term was my foray into economics. After getting a D on the first of two midterms (how there can be two 'midterms' is beyond me...), I met with my prof, who had previously told me that he had stopped grading some of my homework and just given me zeros because I had illegible handwriting, thinking it might be the same thing this time and I would just have to go through what I wrote. In fact he told me "I don't think you remotely have the skills to continue on in this major." That sentence alone almost made me want to declare econ as my major on the spot to prove him wrong. He then proceeded to anger me even more by telling me that he had essentially stopped grading my test after how badly I did on the first page, which pissed me off since I got the last problem correct, but he said that problem was merely to determine which students were to get A's or B's, not for students like me. Once again this fueled me to bounce back with a B.

The next two terms went without any such jolts in my education. Then this term, even though I had been getting all of my work done and in fact it was often ahead of the time it was due. I could tell that so far this term I had just been going through the motions. Then today I got an e-mail from my prof, who I think greatly fudges and cherry-picks data to prove his point (he tried to convince me after class one day after I pointed out that his model of multi-ethnic states had some notable admissions namely the US how the Us could not be considered multi-ethnic is still beyond me), tells me that after reading my set of answers to my discussion questions that he doesn't think I am ready to take our diagnostic test on Monday. He thinks we need to go over reading and note-taking strategies. The unfortunate part in this case is that when I start doing better this time he might comfort himself by saying his note-taking strategies saved me from a bad grade. Nonetheless, I intend to once again rise to the challenge as the doubters circle in. Hopefully this time I can do something better than a B too...

Here is the sad thing about this situation. I shouldn't need my profs to think I am a moron before I start trying hard. I firmly believe that when I try that I am one of the smartest people even here, but I am just too damn lazy and eventually this might catch up with me. Maybe someday I won't have a boss that will kick me in the ass and I'll get contented and just produce shit. That will be a sad, sad day. So if you all still know me well in my middle ages and I have a contented, lazy bastard that doesn't try to make good points in the things he argues or writes go up and convince that someone is doing a better job and that I need to get my ass in gear or else maybe I will never be all the things I want to be.

The Sad Demise of Rochester Basketball

2007-12-30T01:03:00.000-04:00

After just witnessing the Mayo boys team fall in the finals of the Rotary Basketball tournament, I can safely say that it will be a long time before any Rochester school wins the Rotary or advances out of Section 1AAAA. Even after the section was greatly weakened, the immediate future for boys and girls basketball is bleak indeed. The first problem is obvious, there are no players that have the potential to be a Brent Solheim, Mike Restovich, Mike Kinsiella, Longar Longar, the Miller Twins, or even become players like Sam Tri, Mark Lovelace, Danny Lyons, or Tyler Cain. Even with the complete lack of star players it is possible for Rochester schools to do well. So the problem runs much deeper.

The overwhelming majority of Rochester basketball players have extremely low basketball IQs. Watching my little sister's team struggle to beat anyone is sad because often the girls are roughly on the same level athletically, but the girls' team has no concept of how to play without the ball and are even worse at making decisions with it. They are completely unable to see that if someone takes away what your offense is trying to do you should be able to counter their defense, however they just say "oh I guess I can't get open" and stand around or make a feeble cut.

These kinds of low IQ plays are not only for teams like Century girls, who haven't won a varsity game, or JM boys, who average more than 35 turnovers a game, but even are disturbingly prevalent on teams that are supposed to be great like the Mayo boys team. There is one player that shall go unnamed that I have decided is probably the stupidiest basketball I have ever seen. He never passes the ball, even though he is probably the fourth best player on a team with two very good high school players. On a 3 on 1 fastbreak, he had two future division 1 basketball players on each side so what does he do, obviously he takes the ball to the basket himself and misses the layup. He is absolutely abused on the defensive end of the floor. Against JM he was constantly just dribbled around by players that had been struggling to get past any player. Then tonight he was badly burned multiple times on backdoor cuts that weren't even that good. Finally he capped off the night by throwing two passes out of bounds to no one in particular and the kicker with Mayo down three with time winding down instead of looking for either of the two scorers on his team he takes a double clutch three with a hand in his face and misses badly ending Mayo's comeback. Either he will end up in a body-bag by the end of the year because one of the two good players kills him or he will single-handedly ruin Mayo's chances in the section tournament.

Rochester schools however can thank the lord that they play in the Big Nine Conference because it is also going through some extremely rough years. There will be some pretty average teams that will go through the Big Nine looking amazing only to run into the buzzsaw that is teams from the suburbs. At this point Rochester schools have two options open to them in the immediate future: either become like Lourdes or Red Wing and work on fundamentals to the point that you give up something in terms of dynamics but don't ever make mistakes or become like a big school and put a premium on athleticism and hope that eventually the kids learn a little about basketball. In the long run hopefully the Big Nine gets better so Rochester teams get some competition growing up and the kids have good coaches at a young age that actually teach them things. I am fully prepared to blame the utter lack of a decent coach below the ninth grade level for the reason that only a handful of kids learn to play basketball well in this town. Too many kids are coached by parents that have no idea how to play basketball, while the parents that do now what the hell they are talking about know that they don't want to deal with the bitchy parents so they just work with their kid instead of coaching the team. Yet another reason for parents to shut the hell up and realize that your kid isn't god and that they can learn some things from their coaches.

Historians, Journalists and the problem with writing to sell

2007-12-24T00:54:00.000-04:00

I am currently reading the book War Made New by Max Boot about how technological revolutions in warfare lead to not only fundamental changes in how war is fought, but in the world order and even the culture. Coincidentally, this was the exact topic that I wrote about in my independent study senior year, so I am going to have to sue Mr. Boot for stealing my idea. I really like the book and it gives me something to shoot for because it is clearly superior to mine in terms of research and writing. However, I have some complaints about both this book and other histories that I have read.

Chiefly, my concerns deal with the fact that when historians write books like this they run into a problem. They can't sell enough copies without including something relevant to the current time period, so they attempt to make their theory fit around something that is happening in the world today. Often this is challenging because there just isn't the evidence to show the dramatic type of transformation that they are referring to so they are reduced to a lot of sensationalizing. For instance, the number of books on the end of western civilization is astounding.

This is actually part of the reason I chose not to be a history major because eventually I would write a book and I would be forced to come up with something dramatic so I could get a publisher to publish my book. Like many historians, I would have run into the problem that lots of people have already covered the money making histories to death (I enjoy going to a bookstore and reading the military history sections and picking out the real histories from the books that were written to sell to the ignorant average american history buff).

Of course journalists do the same thing. How to make a story at my website, tv station, or newspaper sound better than the other guys? By making it sound more important obviously. Thus, people become convinced that we are living in an era of profound change and complete collapse. When, truly, the time in which we are currently living in will probably be regarded as not that important in the future. Instead thinking we are on the brink of the fall of western civilization or the only uni-polar world (a complete lie) or a clash of civilizations or any other grossly exaggerated bullshit, remember that whoever came up with that idea probably was in desperate need of a good book or story and decided to create a fantastic tapestry of not-quite-truths. I am not blaming the historians and journalists because if I was in there situation I would do the same thing, but I just think the credibility given to some of their ideas is appalling.

2 Year Anniversary!

2007-12-17T22:28:00.000-04:00

Yay! Two years ago on this day the world became a better place!

Oh the Humanity!

2007-12-12T01:29:00.000-04:00

Being a human, I have many flaws in my character. Whether they be my obsession with always winning even at the cost of others, or my inability to confront people when I know they are wrong because I hate embarrassing people even momentarily, there are things about me that are disappointing and that I wish I could change. However, sometimes I think this is perhaps my biggest flaw. That I am punishing myself for being human and having human emotions. My original intent of this post was to talk about my uncomfortability with my sexual desires, despite the fact that I have had many years to ponder them and become comfortable with them.

This is in fact a tremendous problem that worries me a lot because if I am still not able to accept my own simple feelings, it does not bode well for myself in the long-run. The fact that I am unable to accept or even talk about these things until now (ish) has not been particularly encouraging. It is not as though I was brought up in an extremely religious background that would reinforce my frowning on my feelings. While my parents did manage to instill better morals than a lot of other people for things like hard work and not cheating, I didn't really think that modesty about sexual feelings was one of the things that had been ingrained in me, but I guess it was. I mean just the other day I was terribly embarrassed by the fact that I was in the sexuality section of Barnes and Noble, and I was unable to stay in the section for more than a minute before feeling like I was being judged by the mother and her children. Why would things like that matter to me? I have come to the conclusion it is highly unlikely that she was actually judging me because most people don't care about that sort of thing. That only leaves me one option.

That I was judging myself and was trying to force myself out of the sexuality section because I was embarrassed that I was there. Why would I be embarrassed? It is not as though it was highly unusual or something wrong that I had done. (Note in trying to write this next sentence I attempted to cover up my purpose for being there because once again I was worried about embarrassment, the real reason was that I was looking for a book on sexual positions.)

This is my point I am trying to come to terms with my feelings, but I still need to try and hide them and make them look like something other than what they truly are. I wish it were merely as simple as saying that I was just going to accept my shortcomings as a human being and instead celebrate my many positive traits, but alas it will take some work. So until next time loyal readers, remember that by far the vast majority of us are good people and that we shouldn't beat ourselves or others up over shortcomings because its hard enough to deal with them yourself and not have to worry about everyone else piling on.

Am I legitimate fan?

2007-11-30T19:31:00.000-04:00

The accusations started when I was a sophomore in high school. There were members of my golf team, who questioned how I could actually be a Red Sox fan even though I had never lived anywhere near New England. Then came the questions about my adoration of Michigan another firmly entrenched power. However, here is my response to the charge that I am a "frontrunner" fan.

The story of my decision to choose teams to root for begins with the fact that I have been an intense sports fan my entire life. Therefore, I formed a lot of my team loyalties on the fly for no reasons what so ever, but they meant a lot to me. When Nolan Richardson's Arkansas basketball team lost in the national championship in 1995, I cried. Another example of my intense devotion to teams that I had no real affiliation with is the 1997 World Series when I listened to the radio intently while the Florida Marlins came from behind to win game, and then felt like I had been used when the team was dismantled the next season. I was a young and impressionable child, who after shunning all Minnesota sports teams by the age of 6 at the same time I became a Packer fan decided to choose teams that wouldn't wound him so.

In the time between 1994-1998 I picked all of my professional and college sports, and I will accept that I was a frontrunner fan at the age of 9 does that mean that I still have to be judged that way. Especially since ironically the only team that wasn't one during that time is the one that I get the most shit for the Boston Red Sox. I HATED the Yankees, so the Red Sox were a natural choice. That coupled with the fact that I loved Mo Vaughan and Tim Wakefield is still my favorite baseball player. I have been extremely loyal to the teams that I switched over to sometimes I think I have been more loyal than the people in the state. For instance I was crushed when the Florida Panthers traded Roberto Loungo, something that I feel like didn't alter the lives of many Floridians. Or the fact that I am still looking to murder Otis Smith for single-handedly making sure that Dwight Howard will never win an NBA Championship. So all I ask is this the next time someone has a seemingly bizarre set of teams that they root for before passing judgment on their worth as human beings find out how they got those teams. Sometimes they may have legitimate reasons for the seemingly random set of teams. I may have picked all winners then, but my devotion to teams like Michigan basketball and the Florida Panthers despite their god-awfulness should redeem some of my sins of youth.

Filler Post

2007-11-26T16:11:00.000-04:00

I have desperately been grappling with how to appropriately express my view on life and how sometimes it makes me sad, so while that post is languishing in Blogger limbo we must press on. I went out today with the intention of getting my Christmas shopping out of the way for at least some members of my family and friends. However, I forgot the simple fact that I am god-awful at Christmas shopping. Unfortunately I can't even blame it on not knowing their wants and/or needs, instead I know essentially what they want, but have no talent in selecting the things that they want. How exactly I am supposed to know what the various women in my life find attractive in things like jewelry, clothes, and purses? Most of the time when Christmas rolls around I am able to leech onto other people's ideas in my family to solve this dilemma. For instance, I can't remember the last time I bought my mom a present, every year I merely rely on one of my sisters to buy her something nice enough that they need my money to buy it. However, it appears that this year my luck has run dry because my sisters are combining on a present without me. Leaving myself in the unenviable position of actually needing to be creative or suddenly recognize their feelings on apparel.
The second problem that I have more recently run into is that my usual strategy of gift buying from the two easiest stores for me to shop in (Barnes and Noble and Games by James) for some reason are not usually accepted as places to get presents for a girlfriend, but truth be told Jean does not really fall into that category. It was a tremendously lucky break. Especially when I found out while shopping at the Mall of America this year that she doesn't trust my judgment either when it comes to the things that she always complains about not having. Normally those are sure-fire successful gifts, but when the odds are better she won't like it than she will it is probably not a good idea.
Furthermore, I can't make a decision. One friend that I decided to buy a gift for when I went looking for I found 4 potential gifts almost instantly. While that would seem to be a great thing, it is not because the moment I hear back from her I will know that I should have gotten her one of the other ones and then I feel stupid because everything is infinitely more obvious when looked at in hindsight. Moral of the story I don't really think this is the most wonderful time of the year too much pressure and failure for my tastes.

Cavemen

2007-11-07T18:43:00.001-04:00

I love the environment. I don't think anyone would accuse me of trying to destroy the environment. I always turn things off when I am not using them, don't use excessive heat or air conditioning, and all of that. I am all for reducing our energy use and cutting out unnecessary uses of energy. However, I don't believe that in the interest of saving energy we should stop using things that make our lives better. I really struggle when groups around the school chose that tactic when trying to get students to use less energy. I understand that don't take 30 minute showers, or don't leave the lights on when you aren't in the room aren't the most grabbing examples, but don't tell me not to use my computer for a day.
This particular example is supposed to also show how the computer controls our life as well. Well I would just like to point out that there is a reason that we need the computer so much, it happens to be an amazingly efficient machine for doing a vast multitude of things. Sure, I spend more time on the computer than I probably should, but the computer helps me to do things that I otherwise would not be able to do. Let's take this post for instance, now let's say that I want to be able to communicate these ideas with my friends (hence my writing it). Without a computer I would be left with a few options: I could call my friends, however because this post is not short and is rather monologish my friends probably have no desire to sit and listen to me recite something from my somewhat memory while waiting for me to remember where I was going and making smartass comments that slow down the process even more, or I could type it out on say a typewriter and send it to them. Well this also causes problems because I am not a very good typer and in order for me to type something like this on a typewriter it would take a ton of time and I would go through a lot of whiteout and sheets of paper.
This is my next point. Would a world without computers be better for the environment? There are ways we can generate the power to run a computer without hurting the environment, like our lovely wind turbine. It is really hard to create paper without hurting the environment. Imagine the tremendous increase in paper consumption that would be needed to compensate for the lack of computers. All of those little e-mails that you send to friends, receive from groups or teachers or whatever. Or at Carleton we have e-reserves that we read on the computer, however without the computer professors would need to print 30+ copies of multiple 40+ page documents. That is one class at one small school.
However, back to the original point of this post. Mankind is innovative. We create things that make our lives easier, and yes they require energy. When looking for ways to save energy we should look for things that are not necessary. Last year, we were told to unplug our refrigerators because fridges use a ton of energy. While that may be true, I would rather not be forced to salt my meat and then in true rugged fashion eat in the dark so I don't notice the maggots that have infested my meat. Therefore, I am completely fine with the amount of energy required to run my fridge because fridges are that much better than the alternative and anyone that doesn't tell you that needs to go live in the wilderness for a while, so they can remember what makes man better than every other species that we are exceedingly creative in our creation of tools. Let's not send ourselves back to the pre-historic ages just because it would cut back on the amount of energy we use.

The Contenders

2007-10-19T00:46:00.000-03:00

It is that time again. It is never too early to get pumped up for a presidential race. This year's election is a very wide open race (at least on one side), but unfortunately while there are an amazing number of possible candidates there isn't a tremendous amount separating them. So how can the good citizens of America figure out whom to vote for? Well obviously by reading this very succinct blog, in which I split hairs and give my commentary on the major candidates.
Starting from the Democrats:

Joe Biden: The good senator probably should be a major player in the democratic race, thanks to his tremendous experience and being probably the most respected opinion in the Senate on foreign policy matters. Too bad even in this foreign policy election there is no chance of him making an impact because of his lack of name recognition first and second the whole plagiarism issue can be just a touch sticky.

Bill Richardson: Honestly I don't understand the appeal. Maybe he did a wonderful job governing New Mexico, but he never has anything profound to say and rarely does a good job of conveying his ideas. I expect him to leave the race after Iowa, but just in case he surprises he makes it in here.

John Edwards: Honestly if I voted in primaries I would probably vote for Edwards. Most likely because I too have a soft spot for the little guy, but here's the thing: I don't really want Edwards to be my president because he is too liberal on some issues, but he gets my vote for having a vision that appeals to me. I think he is the only one to offer a governing vision of the candidates and gets credit in my book. Plus I am terribly racist and sexist so I couldn't vote for either of the next two.

Barack Obama: I am not an Obama fan. I gave him plenty of opportunities because God knows I don't really want Hillary to win, but he has been an amazingly bad candidate. If you gave Edwards or Biden Obama's money and facetime I cannot fathom how they would be this far behind Hillary. It's as though he thought the only thing that mattered in a presidential campaign was who could raise the most money. His strategy is to be a positive anti-Hillary, explain to me how anyone in that campaign thought that strategy would win.

Hillary Clinton: I read a really interesting article in the Washington Post the other day about how the author thought Hillary had no credentials for being president and therefore she shouldn't be the frontrunner. Now this confused me because how can someone argue that she is less experienced than Obama or Edwards neither of whom was remotely involved in government before their explosions onto the national scene. The issue of candidates needing to be experienced is a bizarre complaint anyway because candidates get the exact opposite thrown at them too. John Kerry was supposedly hurt because he had been in politics too long and his record was working against him. Hillary manages to get both sides of this complaint because her past casts a long shadow over her candidacy, and at the same time she now supposedly isn't experienced enough in national politics to be able to govern the country.

Republicans:
Ron Paul: Everyone's favorite libertarian is one of those candidates that I would love to support because occasionally I'll have those tendencies run through my veins, but he is just too crazy for me. I don't understand liberals love affair with the guy. Well I do, but I think it is because they are incredibly lazy and think because he makes the statement that because of our presence in the Middle East we were attacked that he would a decent republican opponent because if he won it wouldn't be that bad because he was sane. First I think his assertion is false. While I don't deny that plenty of our actions led to 9/11, I can't believe that the fact that we have military presence in the Middle East lead to 9/11. We have military presences in Germany, Korea, and around the world. Why would the Middle East be the only place where we suffer terrorists attacks if our presence was the reason for 9/11? Also, Ron Paul has typical libertarian crazy policies, like drastically cutting back the government and returning to the gold standard, which would be absolutely crippling to this country.

Mike Huckabee: The man is a shadow of his former self (had to throw in the fat joke). In all seriousness though probably the most interesting candidate on the Republican side. Everyone has been saying how Huckabee does will reflect, which group has control of the Republican party, the social or fiscal conservatives. Huckabee is probably more liberal than some Democrats running from the fiscal perspective, but the former minister has some of those wonderfully delightful down south beliefs. Easily the most consistent abortion critic of the bunch gets him bonus points, especially when coupled with his impressive speaking abilities (yay ministers!). The call here is that Huckabee finishes first or second in the Iowa primaries and then is non-existant in New Hampshire and probably by South Carolina is trampled by some combination of the next men.

John McCain: The man who used to be the liberal hope. McCain's 2000 campaign has made his 2008 look like the grossest act of self-abasement in the hopes of increasing votes this side of Mitt Romney. Unfortunately for McCain, Mitt gets a free pass because he didn't spend a previous presidential campaign extolling all of his maverick tendencies. Instead John looks like the pandering idiot that he apparently thought would win him the election. Too bad because there could have been lots of different ways to go for the Republicans this election, but McCain has taken one of those interesting options away from voters.

Fred Thompson: As much as I thought "Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall!" was uninspiring, I feel as though good ole Ronnie Reagan was at least ten times the public speaker that Fred Thompson is. Fred Thompson is a bit of a bumbler, and it makes me wonder what Republicans really think of Reagan if Thompson is the second coming. Interesting theory that I heard the other day was that if Thompson failed all of his supporters would go to McCain since many were initially McCain supporters, but I don't feel like this is likely due to the tremendous problems that McCain has experienced and the fact that Huckabee is in a better position to pick up Thompson's "true conservative" supporters.

Rudy Giuliani: The candidate that would scare me the most if he won the presidency. I feel like if Rudy wins the world might end. The economy would collapse, everyone would be left out to die, and we would be spending the time saber rattling at Iran and China. It would be like Arthur, Hoover, and McKinley rolled into one. I love quotes like this. They really inspire a belief that if large portions of the country were unable to provide for themselves something would be done "I don't like mandating health care. I don't like it because it erodes what makes health care work in this country--the free market, the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We've got to let people make choices. We've got to let them take the risk--do they want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because, ultimately, if they don't, well, then, they may not be taken care of." I don't even want to get into the budget issues he had in New York, and his belief that saying he'll kick the crap out of you is a foreign policy.

Mitt Romney: Actually due to the expected backlash there will be an entire post explaining my reasons so that Johnson can read everything before bashing my decision.

The Great White Whale (of an awful novel)

2007-10-16T21:07:00.000-03:00

I generally like to think that I read a decent amount of "classic" literature and I appreciate it and in fact most of them I appreciate immensely. I even have read some rather tedious and long winded authors who at times have been mind numbing to attempt to read, but nothing and I mean absolutely no book I have read can compare to the absurdity that is broad swaths of Moby Dick. Herman Melville has managed to take a story with a ton of potential and turn it into one of the worst pieces of literature that I have ever read. This book weighs in at 521 pages, but I would hazard to guess right now that with even a decent editor this book would not be more than 240 pages. I cannot fathom how anyone could read this book and honestly tell Melville "Why yes I do believe that everything in this book is adding to the experience of the reader." Or worse still I would cry if I found out that large sections of this book had been edited out.
I am currently 380 pages into this monstrosity, and I can tell you right now that there are conservatively between 70-90 pages devoted solely to describing the differences between sperm and right whales. Clearly Melville took his teachers critiques to heart that his audience would be completely ignorant and that he would need to enlighten them, but when we hear for the nth time things like even though the tail of the whale was promised to the queen and the head to the king the queen would have whale bone jewelry, which were clearly not from the tail of the whale the reader begins to not care about topics that should be interesting like royalty's abuse of their pheasant's, but Melville bombards the reader with so many dry and useless descriptions like his 13 page chapter of in depth cetology. Where such interesting facts are thrown in like "This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end." Or describing the Sulphur Bottom whale "Another retiring gentleman with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the Tartarin tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen; at least i have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance." This goes on and on throughout the whole book. If Melville had wished to chronicle the history of whales that is fine by me only don't try and cover it with a story will just be completely disregarded for up to thirty pages at a time. How many times has anyone read a novel where for over thirty pages the story is completely ignored to give the reader factual details or a history that have absolutely no bearing on the plot or character development?
At this point my only hope is that Melville pulls out an incredible ending that will leave me stunned and thus I can go home happily, but I would put the chances of that as not very much. Even if he pulled if off I would still probably rate Moby Dick in the bottom ten books that I have ever read. Needless to say this puts me at odds with my professor when she told us one the first day of class when she told us that Moby Dick was the greatest piece of American literature ever written. Moby Dick has already passed A Separate Peace as my least favorite piece of literature that I have ever had to read for a class in my life, which I never dreamed any book could accomplish. Honestly if he had written a book this long and it had gone through their daily routines or something similarly dull it would have been better because at the piece would have some cohesion. Now I am really excited to hear our discussion in class tomorrow about this because I am interested what makes it a great book in her opinion, and maybe she can sell me some reason to forgive him, but more likely I will have reeled in one whale of a depressingly bad book.

Me and My Little Lies

2007-09-22T02:49:00.000-03:00

I have come to a not remotely shocking conclusion, but a conclusion none the less. I have in fact become a bit of a paradox, because there are lots of things that I say I stand for in the grand scheme of things, but if you ask me about individual things that are quite specific the conclusion you would draw are not the same as the beliefs that I say I believe. Much of this phenomeon stemmed from the fact that I love to consider myself different (which was the original post before I realized how full of shit I was), while really not saying or doing anything different than anyone else.
My whole life I have loved to consider myself different. When playing with action figures as a child I would always be the bad guy and have the good guys all die. While my mother was much more concerned that she had a potential psychopathic murderer on her hands, it was merely the first sign that I enjoyed looking at things from the opposite perspective of everyone else. This trend continued as a became a staunch sweatpant wearer throughout all of elementary school, and needed everyone in my family to beg me to finally get me to start wearing jeans. Thus, I made my first step in dulling my opposing actions, so that I didn't become Marlow, whom in my highly professional opinion has this same thing but that is a completely different story.
Throughout middle school I desperately clung to my whitey-tighties, despite constant harassment from my peers. Again it was not until I had a mental intervention and told myself that I would always be regarded as weird by the opposing sex if blatant social failings such as wearing whitey-tighties didn't stop occurring.
Eventually, this opposition has faded away to something much more passive. I merely think people have no idea what the hell they are talking about and that they are blind because of their biases to the truth. I believe many of my very liberal classmates have no business making the assertions they make because just like liberals are not evil, neither are conservatives and not everything they do has to be bad. Or when I say things like just because the English were racist it doesn't mean that they didn't help India. Or when I suggest that our textbook only included an author who is amazingly mediocre because she was a black woman slave. These are examples of me being contrarian for the sake of being different I think...It could also be I have gone from a very conservative high school to an exceedingly liberal college, and people who thought I was liberal there was merely because of their perspective and their assumptions that I had my mother's political views.
Moral of the story: I have always attempted to be vastly different from my peers. I show disdain from their feelings and ideas. However, many of their feelings and ideas are things that I share with them. While, I derided many of my classmates for bending to social norms, especially in middle school, I did the same thing when I gave up sweatpants and briefs. Thus, Trent Ward Wells= Giant Hypocrite that needs to see the truth. Though, after writing this I am not sure that this is really the truth either. Oh well, self-exploration can continue for many years, and eventually after trying on enough one-size fits all theories I might realize that life cannot be encapsulated in cute little sound bites, but alas that would far too unfulfilling...

Misunderstanding

2007-08-18T23:46:00.000-03:00

I want to ask everyone something. What is your reason for opposing the war in Iraq? Yes, I feel safe in making the assumption that everyone reading this blog is opposed to our current war in Iraq. Though I am making this post not to merely reiterate why everyone else opposes the war, but rather my frustration in how opposition to the war has gone. I suspect many may be fundamentally opposed to war in general, being that man should not kill or that death is a bad thing (more on these topics in a later post). I respect this argument, though I know that is not why people are against the war. Also, this clearly cannot be me, being the child who seriously considered joining the army for sometime. Then there are those who will argue that because the war was so grossly mismanaged that we cannot salvage victory. This is the second worst excuse that is thrown around because if mismanagement were merely the problem we would be able to change courses, fix the problem and win the war. If that means waiting out the end of the Bush presidency, so be it, however let's not lie to ourselves because no country EVER gives up a war due to mismanagement alone. The Russians are possibly the best example of this because from the Russo-Japanese War through the war in Afghanistan no war that they waged was even remotely properly managed. They sacrificed both their Western and Eastern fleets in the Russo-Japanese War, but even after those tragedies didn't consider retiring. They never formed a functional supply line in World War I, and had probably the worst preparation for a major war to begin World War II, but they fought on. The worst that the United States has done here is let the enemy have our weapons, and foster feelings of ill-will against us without even attempting to establish normalcy. These are fixable problems.
I can see already despite promising that I would not be overly bitter, which was the reason I had stopped writing that I can't help it. So let's bring out my least favorite of reasons to be against the war in Iraq that we have lost too many soldiers lives to continue the war. The current war death toll is absolutely paltry. There were more people that died during the single greatest battle of annihilation (Cannae) on the winning side (6000) than have died in Iraq so far. How can 6000 people die for the victor in the greatest battle of annihilation with a population of at most 7 million, but when 3750 is enough to end a war to a country with 300 million citizens it is too many casualties to endure?
Instead we should all be opposed to the Iraq war because George Bush did exactly what I would do if I was president, which is to say something dramatic to make sure that I would be remembered in the annals of history. There is nothing better for a president to be than a victorious war president. Think about all of the people usually brought up when we talk about greatest presidents in the history of the United States such as Lincoln, Washington, TR, FDR, and dear Ronnie. All of them had their reputations dramatically increased because of winning their war. Which isn't to say there aren't some exceptions to this rule like my distant relative James K. Polk, who despite trouncing Mexico is known to relatively few students. Our leaders should not play games of political or personal importance with our foreign policy, and that is the real tragedy of the Iraq War.

Sports

2007-05-25T18:48:00.000-03:00

Sports have always been a tremendous part of my life, perhaps that can be chalked up to the fact that I had very athletic parents that pushed me to do active things with my life. However, the most redeeming part of the experience has been that I learned how sports should be played. I am not going to go into the mental aspects of sports again, but I can see things that for some reason most other people don't see. This has gotten me into numerous arguments with people, but I'd like to think that I am good enough at it. I still harbor the slight delusion that someday I might become a scout, or a GM because I think those would be tremendously fun jobs.
However back to my point, the most common phenomeon I have noted with regards to people when analyzing athletes is to fall in love with potential. I'll admit that this was definitely the case with me for most of my life, always drooling over the basketball player from high school who couldn't make a shot to save his life, but can't jump twelve feet. Gradually, I have gotten really good (in my mind) at identifying the ceilings of players when I watch them play. Especially with regards to basketball, due I consider my insights to be particularly good. This is how I like to explain why I make my picks for the NCAA tournament (more on why I am not REALLY good at this if I am so good at judging talent).
I don't like to try and pretend that I can scout people that I have only seen them play on Sportscenter, so I won't be able to show off much because school sort of ruins my time to just watch sports. I will however open with one of my most controversial realizations, especially as an Orlando Magic fan. Dwight Howard should never ever be the best player on his team. He is a complementary player. Probably the best complementary player of all time, but in all honesty he cannot create for himself. Someday maybe he will get a good point guard on his team, and perhaps even win an MVP, but he's game consists of essentially nothing. He is a really athletic Ben Wallace again so I am not saying he is a bad player, merely that he should be the second or even third scoring option on his team to be most effective. I won't regal people with the really obvious players that I thought wouldn't be able to play in the NBA like Adam Morrison and JJ. However, I will say this to all the people out there who are saying that Greg Oden will become an amazing dominate center in the NBA: I watched him do just enough against a Michigan team that started a short, weak, but athletic frontline and was not the kind of player that I would pin my hopes to absolutely take over the game in the NBA. Therefore, my advice to the Portland Trail Blazers is this don't trade away Zach Randolph, everyone says that would make the most sense for you, but it is not true because without Zach Randolph who is going to score points on that team. Unless Oden is magically a billion times better scorer with a healthy hand he will not dominate in the league in the beginning. I would still take him with the first pick, but he won't be a truly great player until he develops a little bit just like Dwight.
This gets me to my point earlier about my shortcomings as a scout, that just like the rest of the world I can sometimes get my biases in the way of properly analyzing a player. The fact that I dislike bigmen as centerpieces of franchises and that I hate Ohio State could be conspiring against me here. This is probably the biggest reason why working as a scout or something along those lines is why it is a pipedream. Sometimes I can't get passed things that I don't like about their program, and this ruins my judgment. Oh well I can always be a teacher...Fuck.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

2007-05-18T20:47:00.000-03:00

I have been meaning to write this post for a considerable amount of time, however after today sitting in a car with 4 other people from the political spectrum one crazy liberal, one crazy conservative, one backwoods conservative, and one "liberal because liberals are better" liberal. They were debating the 2008 presidential election. They sounded like they had read maybe one CNN article that had hashed out how the election was going to go. I have no problem with voters that don't inform themselves, I already have failed miserably at trying to persuade this to people, and also that they should look beyond the two party system. I am going to give one last go at trying to change the way people look at politics, before it will finally dawn on me that I am unable to convince anyone of anything politicswise.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of listening to people talk about politics besides the fact that no one actually reads about what happens in the world is that people allow themselves to be victimized by self-fulfilling prophecies. The most common explanation for why someone would not vote for say Hillary is because she can't win. This is a far more dangerous problem for the electorate than people not voting, people voting for "electability." These people are not electable because someone decided that the people that already weren't going to vote for them (in Hillary's case the deep south which no democrat will win for a long time). Then the snowball effect ensues, and pretty soon no one will vote for this person and then they become unelectable. However, their unelectability has absolutely nothing to the fact that they couldn't win the election, but rather they were simply not best suited for continuous news cycles.
If that is what this country has come to that we are electing the candidate that can best handle the continuous news cycle what does that say about our country. In my honest opinion the last two presidents that had the guts to do anything were the ones that absolutely were destroyed by the media (LBJ and Nixon). Therefore the country has been left with made for tv candidates that are truly incapable of doing anything worthwhile. The country is currently going through one of its stretches in which none of the presidents are truly noteworthy (sorry all you Clinton and Reagan lovers).
Maybe this is just the fact that I am still getting over my intense crush on Howard Dean (if you ever want to find out how grossly misinformed the public is ask people about the positions he held and then compare to them what they actually were, you'll be surprised), but for a presidential field that supposedly is one of the strongest in a long time I see very few visionary candidates. I am drawn to John Edwards out of the Dems bunch, because he woke up and decided that he needed to have strong and detailed stands on important issues to compete. However, he won't stand a chance because someone has already decided that Obama and Hillary are the best candidates. It's a shame. I will probably be one of the few people that will be desperately disappointed with the Hillary/Obama v. McCain/Guiliani race. The country needs voters to do two things in order to avoid the clone candidates that we have been gettting recently in these races: first voters need to care (I doubt this will ever occur in great enough numbers until something truly drastic happens), and second they need to actually vote for how they think about issues (think of those Peter Hutchinson billboards saying 50% of Minnesotans views on the issues best matched his compared to about 31 and 26 for Pawlenty and Hatch and yet he got 6% of the vote). Because in the end would we really rather have better candidates or better leaders, which one of those is going to improve the country a good candidate or a good leader. Hint: Not the candidate. I'll leave you with one final question that will show what has happened to this country. Pick who you would rather have as president: Clinton/Reagan (depending on your political view) or Thomas Jefferson?

Economics=Not My Major

2007-05-12T00:14:00.000-03:00

This is a hilarious post for me to write, but I doubt that anyone else would be remotley interested, but here it goes. I wanted to write a piece earlier about my views on economics and essentially how that shaped my political views. The problem is that as I have taken more and more economics, I have become amazed at the lack of anything concrete in the subject. Economics desperately wants to consider itself a science, but truly there is not a bit scientific about it. Economics makes no attempt to make sure that its "laws" actually hold true before they are proclaimed a "law." In fact most of them are actually just ideas that someone clearly just said, "well wouldn't it make sense if..." and then filled in "the point to strive for would be the point where supply equals demand" or something along those lines.
Now I must admit that I do have a built in skepticism because I believe any "science" that basically says that everything that you can do won't have a tremendous effect, and all of those effects are hard to seperate into the real causes...and so on and so forth becomes a little less than reassuring after a while. I desperately wanted to be an econ major. I loved econ in high school, but the further in-depth we go the more it becomes apparent from my professors inability to truly explain anything that nothing really is known about economics.
None of the basic principles are held without major exeptions: supply equals demand at the ideal spot. Except because no one knows what "ideal" supply or demand is, it clearly must be that whatever the best companies are doing. Or the fact that supply is supposed to correct itself to match the proper demand by adjusting price, but no company functions this way. Sure GM could get rid of all of their excess cars by selling cars for under $10,000 dollars, but they have no intention of ever doing that even that is what companies are supposed to do in economics. So economists then have to make up the idea of "sticky" prices to cover up for this failing of the "invisible hand."
Then my favorite part of economics, the stock market. The world's most expensive opinion poll. Sure the stock market in the primary market is very useful and makes capitalism run, however the secondary market is the most worthless tool to study that man has ever created. There is nothing that is logical about the stock market, and as every economist will tell you no way you can predict it, but that doesn't prevent them from trying. The failings of the stock market to truly mean anything are only increased by the media's obsession with it, because while everyone has their lives in it, it means nothing for our actual economy.
So I just realized that this has no coherency at all..Therefore let me summarize before opening it up to questions and comments. I think there are very few true facts behind economics, they are glorified astrologists. They read a few things that are not really related (ie Iran being belligerent, housing bubble) and deduce what will happen in the future (economy goes into a recession). This becomes hilarious when the same inputs have been there for months, but when the market has a bad day it is a combination of twelve factors that have been a problem for at least the last three weeks that made the market fall apart that day. My second problem with economics is how it has ruined any redeeming value in politics. High taxes can't allow us to develop new technology (see entire US history pre-1964), increasing taxes hurts GDP (see 1990s), or Ronald Reagan is God (see Parkinsons).

Sorry Ronnie but I can't write about economics without saying how much you single-handedly ruined this country for the next 40 years.

Love it or Leave it

2007-04-26T00:43:00.000-03:00

I hope that the title elicited the laughs that it was supposed because it is one of the most absurd phrases used to promote blind and excessive nationalism. I won't try to pretend that I am an extreme nationalist though it may come across that way in this post. Also, I must admit that I decided long ago that if I founded a part it would be something along the lines of the America or Nationalist Party. However, my political musings are beyond the point here, because as much as no one else wants to admit it, the country we live in the United States of America is an amazing country. I realize that it is much easier to shoot holes through the flaws of the system than celebrating its successes, but after several events that I have witnessed recently I realized that I need to bring the world back to reality (because I have the power to do that by writing this blog post).
First of all one of my golf teammates asked the question of why anyone would ever live in Northfield. Out of all the places in the world to complain about having to live in Northfield wouldn't come close to cracking my top 1000 places. Even if you didn't count Africa, where I would not ever consider living in any city or place except maybe in an extreme circumstance Johannesburg, I still wouldn't consider Northfield a bad place to live. Let's compare the complaints of Northfield versus other places in the world. Northfield has no theatre, is cold, nothing exciting ever happens there, and is populated with hicks. Let's see we could live in South America and have to combat rapid overturn of federal governments, drug lords, rampant inflation, kidnapping of anyone of any remote importance (ask my mother's student that had his father kidnapped), or socialism depending on where in South America one lives in.
I can hear the complaints that South America was not a fair comparison. So let's look elsewhere.
We have an impressively distorted view of how screwed up most of the world is. I would not hesitate to say that even as countries like China and India grow economically at a breakneck pace, that even there the concerns about survival still come into play. India cannot continue to ignore the their health care crisis, and China's interior has been completely left behind in its growth. So please can we all just remember the next time we complain that where we live is "boring" or that we are being overrun by stupid regulations, that while you have every right to bitch and moan, perhaps you are even right that a chance should be made, that being bored is better than dying.
In the interest of honesty, this country has many gigantic problems, starting with an apathetic spoiled population that's favorite past having delusions of grandeur. Everyone in this country believes that they could run the country/their favorite sports team/school district better than those who do the jobs now. However, I guess that is the dark side of the American Dream, that because everyone could rise to be the best means that I should be able to do anything. I can tell you right now that most people have no business even being anywhere a leadership position. There are a lot of really stupid people in the world, and they have somehow tricked themselves into believing that they are some sort of master at fields that they have absolutely no experience in. I truly believe the biggest thing holding this country back right now is that we are so convinced that we and our children are perfect and anyone that dares question that must be a heretic. If we could just get over that hump sometime, I have no doubt that we continue to be the best country on the earth. That said, I won't be holding my breath.

Next Week: What are the benefits to the world of the renewal of imperial powers?

Collegiate Music

2007-04-21T00:05:00.000-03:00

There are a few really nice aspects to being connected to a library of other users, a source of income, and finally having a credit card, mostly that I can finally add to music collection. This has been very amusing as there have been some tremendous successes, and gigantic failures as I hope to find new music that is good. I found lots of artists that I had known before, but didn't listen to either because I didn't want to be like the other people that listened to that artist (Ben Folds) or I was afraid of being mocked because of liking this artist (New Radicals). There were the occasional forays into types of music foreign to my tastes that often had very mixed results (Wilco). Finally the albums that I had high hopes for because of the high quantity of songs that I loved on the album only to find that they were the only good songs on those albums (Meat Loaf). Finally any amazingly large amount of disappointingly thin albums (Incubus, Flaming Lips, Pearl Jam, and Talk Talk).

By far the most exciting addition to my favorite music has to be David Gray, while I really liked White Ladder I had very little desire to extend my collection of his. However, on a whim I purchased his album Sell, Sell, Sell as I had seen it before at someone's house (if any one know whose house I am thinking of I would be much obliged). It was an absolutely amazing album. I can hardly listen to White Ladder anymore because I have found a new version of David Gray that I enjoy so much more than I thought I ever could. I already knew that he had an amazing ability to craft lyrics and I personally enjoy his voice, though I understand those who can't stand it. However, it is clear in his earlier albums (at least the ones I own Sell, Sell, Sell and Flesh) that David Gray has tremendous ability to change tempo and implement much more of an acoustic rock feel instead of manufactured sounds of White Ladder (not that I have a problem with manufactured sounds afterall I do love me some 80s). I just bought Flesh yesterday so I can't really tell you what I think of all the songs because there just hasn't been enough time.

David Gray songs to listen to: Coming Down, Loves Old Song, and What Are You? from Flesh; Nos da Cariad, Hospital Food, and From Here You Can Almost See the Sea from Life in Slow Motion; Everytime, Magdalena, and Forever is Tomorrow is Today from Sell, Sell, Sell

Seeing as how long that was and not really wanting this post to be pages long...I will give a much briefer view of some other music. I feel in love with Ben Folds and New Radicals because of their ability to make me laugh, while they got out their bitterness towards the rest of the world. I am really upset that the New Radicals only made one album because it is by far and away my most played album on my computer as sad as that is. Also I wish I hadn't held out on Ben Folds for so long because he does an amazing job of playing perhaps my favorite complementary instrument in the piano.

Songs: Ascent of Stan, Anne Waits, Fred Jones Part 2 from Rockin' the Suburbs; Too Late for a Long Time from Songs for Silverman; One Angry Dward and 200 Solemn Faces, Smoke, Battle of Who Could Care Less from Whatever and Ever Amen. New Radicals- I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending, Jehovah Made This Whole Joint for You, and Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too from Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too.

Now on to the part of this that will probably win me some disagreement from the crowd as I deal with the more India music I either loved or hated all the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and since Wilco enthusiasts have told me repeatedly if I don't love that album like it is God's gift to the earth I am clearly not ready to move on to their other stuff and therefore I haven't. Don't get me wrong I am the Man That Loves You, Heavy Metal Drummer, War on War are good songs, but pretty much all the other songs have absolutely zero appeal to me.

I really liked the song Are You a Hypnotist? and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, however the rest of that album is so bizarre that I really can't handle it, maybe I need to do some hard drugs before sitting down and trying to listen through it again, but I just can't stomach a lot of how far out there some of the songs are. I had the same problem with Demon Days by the Gorillaz some of the songs are really cool, and it is quite a shame that all of the rest are scary weird.

I feel like this not nearly sufficient to describe the music I have enjoyed finding this year, however I really have hit the zero motivation point, and I must bit you all adieu. Any questions about my poorly written reviews feel free to ask, or if you have more things that I need to look into that would be extremely helpful as well. And yes I realize I still have no sense of good music I don't need to be reminded of that fact.

Next Week: Hopefully, I remember to do it early in the week or else you may have to wait until the following monday because my entire weekend is shot so good luck hearing from me during that time frame.

Postive Reinforcement

2007-04-12T16:53:00.000-03:00

Note: I have decided on finishing up on some of my old thoughts and see if my views have changed dramatically since I came up with them.

There are many ways in which one can rationalize their deficiencies. One of my favorite would have to be "Well at least I am not as bad as *person* at *deficiency*." It is a tough way to be known, but then you remember that other people think the same way about you only on a different subject matter. It does me a world of good whenever I feel depressed, because whatever is bothering me I can always find someone else that is worse and then "I don't feel so bad." However, I just met a person that was so bad that I feel really bad for him. He was so afraid of screwing up that he had a panic attack. He was shaking and hyperventiliating and eventually started crying. I realized that this person put my old example to shame, and made a mental note. It makes me feel like a douche bag to realize that I am making myself feel better at the expense of other people. Instead of trying to help them get better at their problem I let them wallow, for my own pleasure. Nah, it's ok and I can't be too concerned about it because I am not as bad as other people at exploiting other people.

Rereading this post made me realize that I have in fact made some dramatic changes in my personality. While I won't try to deny that I still feel better about other people's failures, I have come up with much better ways to feel better about myself like the fact that even though the college I attend is for very smart people there are many people dumb as rocks that I can't figure out how they got in. Back to the point though that I managed to get over the fear of failure with women that at the time was sometimes crippling to me, however I feel like my dear friend from the story has not so I won't reveal his name. I actually doubt that I ever intended to publish this post when I wrote it, because I remember feeling more than anything absolutely shocked when it happened and didn't want to forget this experience. However, now that I am removed from the experience and am no longer attending school with this person I don't need to fear retribution. The moral of this story is that really that not what I intended it to be when I wrote it because I meant it to be about feeling bad about being a terrible person for delighting in other's miseries, but now I would way rather gloat about not feeling like I am being judged all the time (just most). And how that makes me, so much better at life than this other person I know that lives in fear of judgment constantly.

Next Week: Either I dissect new music that I have fallen in love with, or I write about my frustration with other people's political cynicism. So look forward to a actual new post instead of a retread.

Off The Ropes

2007-04-06T22:33:00.000-03:00

It would be safe to say that I haven't thought about this blog for a long time, and more likely that no one else thinks about this blog anymore. However, much like my and several others neglect of the farm, it became apparent that I should invest the time to tell you all something interesting about the world. Here is where I begin to run into problems. I hit a dry spell for complete ideas. I am overflowing with ideas, but I can't finish them. I have about 5 drafts of things that I really wanted to say and I just can't do the ideas enough justice so each has languished in the depths of my draft box for ages.

I toyed with the idea of writing this piece about what my life is like now that I have moved on to college. Ideally, it would have explained the tweaks in personality that occur anytime anything is moved into a foreign environment. Then I realized that this would become the exact sort of blog post that made me so leery about posting in the beginning of this blog. No one and I can guarantee this wants to read the stories of my trials and tribulations because it is truly uneventful story, and I am a mediocre at best communicator to relay it to others.

Therefore, I have decided that instead of making this a real post I just want to throw this out there and let it be known that I plan to actually start updating this on a weekly basis even if I can't throw together a real idea for you all to mull over.

PS:
Can someone help me what was the phrase that Jobe made up that made me quit AP English last year? I had another parallel moment to that in my history class and for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was though I know it was about Heart of Darkness or Poisonwood Bible (thank god for those two books and everything else we read in that class or else I might be uncultured...).

Mentality

2006-08-11T21:04:00.000-03:00

My dad taught me many things in sports that I would never have believed would carry over in my normal life. The most glaring example of this would be to have a good attitude, and believe in yourself. It sounds like a load of happy horseshit and that was always what I thought it was, but the more I think about it the more it has become a key element in how I live my life. I was told to do things like "Picture the ball going into the hole," and "Forget the last shot and focus on the next one." These are not alone transferrable to real life, but the principles are still the same. It was only figured some of these things out that I started to have a better life, and do a better job of understanding myself.

The one that I never came close to attempting before and still probably will never master is forget what happened and just focus on what is happening now. I needed to learn to live in the precious present instead of trying to replay the past. When I was younger I would drive myself crazy by attempting to figure out how and why I messed up. The idea being that if I knew how I made the mistake I wouldn't make the same one again. Alas one of two things happened, I couldn't figure out what it was I had done wrong. Or I relived the event so many times that I was scarred by it, and it was often simple little things too. There were many scenarios where I would ponder "What if they took what I said to mean I was mad at them, when I was just making a comment."

Now, I can't say whether this will always work for me because chances are that I will end up being a tremendous cynic by the time I am 25. I really hope I have gotten past my complete cynic phase, but I am such an analytical person that I will probably never lose it completely. The point is that sometimes we or at least I took myself way too seriously, and in order to be happier I just needed to let go. It would be disappointing if I or someone else that had gotten past caring about their image to slide back into that abyss, so if you see someone letting their carefree life slip-slide away tell them that they need to lighten up a bit and remember "there are no pictures on the scorecard."

Anthony Burgess and Me

2006-08-04T17:59:00.000-03:00

As I poured over Anthony Burgess's introduction to A Clockwork Orange that he had written many years after the book's initial publication had an interesting comment. He wrote about how he couldn't stand the way that others had taken his work, and gravely changed its fundamental character. While he was mainly referring to Stanley Kubrick and his editor, his anger for others adding their own ideas to his book. Mr. Burgess was dismayed at how by the end of other people's molding it into whatever their heart desired, it became his book in name only.

I have argued this point for years. I have always been told that it was just my reluctance to "dig deeply" into a book to find the "hidden meaning." Unfortunately, that "hidden meaning" is hidden because it isn't really there. The author never meant for it to be there. It is a creation of people's over eager mind. We are so interested in trying to find the "statement" that the author is trying to make about society, that we forget to read the actual words written down. To be sure there are authors that write for purpose and they are duly noted as well. But not every book has to be making a social commentary. Harry Potter's use of the seperations of the populations of wizards, and muggles is not an endorsement of the caste system, but I would have a very easy time telling you why it was.

But that is a ridiculous conclusion drawn from that no one would seriously believe, you might say. Well how about being told that because the first white characters that are introduced in a book are fat that the book is out to show the decadence of Western Civilization. When it is just mentioned alone it seems pretty stupid doesn't it? Unfortunately, this teacher commanded tremendous respect from their students, and the reaction was merely a series of nodding heads and "Gee I hadn't thought of it that way." Again, I will end up stressing the fact that individualism is necessary, and that one cannot allow oneself to be force fed what someone else intreprets on someone else's work. Remember before you find that next juicy subtext in a novel, that whoever is giving you that opinion didn't write the book, and neither did you. So leave the hidden meaning hidden, and appreciate what was actually written for a change.

My Perfect World

2006-07-20T21:22:00.000-03:00

It has often been said that money is the root of all evil. Money creates tension between those with and those without money. It causes people to act in amoral ways in attempts to gain money. It is generally attributed to all sorts of various scourges in the world. I used to completely buy into this theory until I contemplated a world without money. All goods had to bartered for and that is quite a hassle true, but it uncovers the flaw with money being the cause of all evil. Imagine you are looking to trade with one of two men, one has farmland that he barters grain to give you, and the other has terrible peaty soil which he uses to create storage pots. Of course you want the grain because you can eat it, and food is the ultimate necessity. Everyone else of course agrees with your desire to eat and trade more often with the farmer than the potter. Thus, the farmer creates a greater accumulation of stuff, and the potter quickly resents the farmer for having more than him, and we are back at square one.
So, then I thought what if we are communists and people are forced to share all of their stuff. Well then, the head of a production company despises the fact that he forced to have as much as the guy who twists a bolt on the assembly line. Again we have created internal hatred without having money, so the problem must be deeper still. What if we got rid of all hierarchies so that there is no resentment from the top being equal to the bottom? Unfortunately, the social hierarchies established by matieral goods, and employment are not quite the only hierarchies. Those with special skills are rated more highly than those who are only capable of rudimentary tasks. The solution is to have everyone with the same skill set. What skills though? It would be a difficult decision, and who would be elite to determine what it would be and who would be put above all others by being the teacher over the student. Thus, no one can have any skills, and no innovation whatsoever.
I sense that we are getting closer to eliminating all inequities in our world though, so we press on. We delve further into what makes us hate each other and one of the first things that comes to mind is race. Thus, we must all become identical. We would all be 6'0'' 190 lbs. with brown eyes and no one would have any hair because great hair can make others feel inferior. There would of course be no men or women anymore because that is another source of discrimination and strife. How would we reproduce you might ask? Well we would knock out two birds with one stone because we must all also be the same age. So, whenver one person dies everyone must die simultaneously and then we can be reborn from the ashes. This last bit will happen from genetic engineering that is put in before we all die the first time creating a new human race. Now I do believe I have managed to create the perfect world, and I think everyone will agree that it is far better than the world in which we live in now and we should do all we can to attempt to move our society towards this grand utopian vision.

Education

2006-05-26T18:58:00.000-03:00

As I near the end of my tax-funded education I decided to look back upon my education to see what I got from it, and why for one reason or another other people just didn't. First of all a public education's greatest asset is that it forces you to interact with different people. Home schooled kids don't learn that wearing "short-shorts" is a faux-pas that warrants a beating, with the ease that a publicly educated child would. Also, you aren't able to realize how amazingly lazy people are. I am not a particularly motivated person, but I enjoy learning things that are interesting. Most people are motivated not by a desire to learn, but rather man's oldest and most endearing trait, the ability to get the most from the least amount of work. They would rather complain that the teacher's assignment is stupid, pointless, or that it has no meaning in the real world. In all honesty, some of my favorite things that I have learned have no redeeming value in the real world. Little tidbits like Americans are so locked into their rigid ideologies that they realized after the Russians (who are the pinnacle of economic efficiency and morality) that slavery was both morally wrong, and harmful for ones economy. Now keep in mind that I am not upset at these people, because they will receive the fruits of their lack of labor later in life. Which is actually why I feel sorry for them, they realized they can be cool and lazy at the same time and combined their powers were overwhelming. My schooling has done me a world of good, and while I am not fond of the work or the pressure I am glad that I have handled my education the way I did.
This post has really stemmed from my amazement at apparently how much pain they have gone through in school. I am sorry but to all of those people who are saying that I am pretty sure that high school was never "the worst experience of my life" until a few weeks ago. I was pretty sure I remembered these people laughing and joking and generally having a good time the whole time I knew them in school. So, what could have possibly facilitated this dramatic change to have ruined their schooling. Probably, that they were frustrated by little things, but realized they were little things so they just let them go like a normal person. Until it became expected of us as seniors to blow off school. Then all hell broke loose. We had been deprived our freedom of speech, press, religion, and the pursuit of happiness without of even knowing it. Those sneaky bastards. Don't worry though when you are off in the real world having your midlife crisis you will realize that maybe not being able to wear a hat for three hours in a row wasn't quite as hellacious as you thought it was. But hey by that time thinking high school was great will be back in vogue, so you can fit in with the crowd again. The crowd of people who never took their education seriously and now have a shitty life. Best of luck '06!

Revelation

2006-04-01T17:51:00.000-04:00

I recently acquired a book that holds the key to me eternal salvation. The King James Bible will save me from Satan's attempt to put my soul in eternal damnation. Satan wishes to hold me in his fiery inferno for his sadistic torturing pleasure. However, I hath now been enlightened and I can now begin to undo the horrible mistakes, and sins that I hath made so far in my life. For I now truly understand that Jesus died for me. He died so that I can live a life without fear of eternal damnation. First off, I must take advantage of the fact that I hath not been baptised, that way I can have all of my sins forgiven in God's eyes. Then, I will attend church 6 days a week to make up for lost time with my Lord. I still will go to college, but I will now aim to join the priesthood after I graduate. If the priesthood would illfit for the Lord's plan for me I shall be left with two choices: traveling the world spreading the glory of God, or secluding myself in order to cleanse myself of my wickedness. Oh and I forgot I will no longer endulge in pleasures of the flesh. I cannot risk my eternal soul on some fleeting and momentary pleasure. The good Lord hath challenged me at this early point in my life, and I failed miserably. Only know can I realize the utter folly that befell me the day that I thought with the Devil's persuading that Jesus was made up. Oh Lord, merely thinking of how awful that decision was haunts me to this day. However, the Lord hath shown his approval for my decision through a vision that he hath send me these past nights. The Lord was pleased with my rediscovery of him, and expressed his hopes that I might remember Jesus's teachings. I fear that it may be necessary to start my own true church of Christianity for the good Lord was disappointed with all the shortcomings of the present beliefs about him. Then the good Lord told me the most important part of his message in my dream: April Fools!

A thought

2006-02-09T22:22:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen people do their job and say to yourself "gee I am tempted to do that job merely so I can show them a better way to do it." Well, I discovered yet another job recently that I can add to the list with jobs like politician and lawyer: English Teacher. Now there are those of you who will probably try to kill me having read this far, but at least do me the service of reading what I have to say.
I don't know about the people who read this blog, but when I write a paper generally I attempt to write something new and/different that I think is a good thought. Being that I also enjoy to learn I am intrigued when others have their own unique thoughts. However, more and more I have become routinely disappointed by teachers not making even one comment on a thought, or the general theme of the paper. Instead, I find out that my citations are not up to M.L.A. snuff. Maybe I just have antiquated ideas, but I fail to see how teaching students to be M.L.A. whores is better preparing them for life, than making them try to come up with new and innovative ideas. I became so desperate at times that I turned in papers that had wild and outlandish ideas that were completely opened up to disagrement, but nothing other than I needed to not repeat the authors last name to start my citations. I know I am biased being that I think the people at M.L.A. are controlling people with an over inflated view of their importance, but this is not the only disagreement with the English Department.
For the English Department has its own problem of thinking they are too important. What classes have the highest required percent in order to achieve an A? What classes have the most pointless busy work, and the most amazingly leniently graded major assignments? If you answered English with me then I imagine you can see my next problem with them. For they believed that if they made the grade required a 92% then they would cut down on the number of A's recieved, and then people in important places would say, "Way to cut down on grade inflation." When in fact the most grade inflation occurs in English classes because they don't want to have to deal with psycho parents who are in love with their kids GPA.
I have no intention of wandering into the realm of "they don't pick good books to read" or "they don't have a good style of teaching for me" because those are both stupid criticisms by lazy people. Though there are amazingly few books that I have enjoyed that I have read in high school. I do feel that some of the things that we are taught are a little misused. For instance, when we were taught about lens we were taught about how other people view lens supposedly for the purpose of us understand how they view a book. Now I don't know about you, but I would have rather been taught what my own lens is. Then, once an individual lens was roughly determined individually we could analyze what caused our lens to be that way. For that would seem to be more useful to me when analyzing a book later in life than by able to lean back and say "well how would a feminist or a communist look at this book."
In case you haven't noticed throughtout this post and other posts of mine, but I have zero grammar ability. This fault I am not ready to heap on the high school because I am not sure if it completely their fault or if middle school has something to do with it as well for they are a completely different evil. However, I would have appreciated being told perhaps in a paper of mine "I noticed that you talk passively instead of actively in your papers here is how you can change it so it doesn't bother your readers."
Oh yeah and symbolism.

Observational Study

2006-02-01T20:43:00.000-04:00

I was sitting in the library during eighth hour doing some chemistry minding my own business, when I realized just how enjoyable it was to listen to other people's conversations. Now, normally I wouldn't condone just listening in to people's conversation because that's a little dishonest, and can be a little creepy. However, it is amazing how much you can learn from people without actually saying anything, and just listening to a conversation of theirs. Not like this a particularly new revelation to me since I have always listened to more conversations than participated in. I find you comprehend what is being said much better that way. Someone will tell a group of people something, and you will remember it because you were just soaking in everyone else's thoughts, whereas they were trying to formulate witty thoughts. I often wonder if that is why I struggle so much to hear people sometimes because I am too busy probing the surroundings for another sound. For instance, when I am on the phone if there is any other noise at all I become incapable of hearing the person on the phone for no apparent reason even if they are yelling into the phone.
Anyway I was going to go into detail about what I have learned from listening to other people. However, I decided to just encourage others to try it sometime because it can give you a refreshing new view on life. That way you won't have to take my word for it.

I got nothing

2006-01-30T20:27:00.000-04:00

So this morning I woke up and I was amazed at how mature I suddenly felt. It was as though I had gone to bed a child, and awoken an adult. I felt as though I was suddenly entitled to an obscene amount of rights and responsibility merely because I had aged another day. Today, I felt like I could go kill some Moslems for America if she called, but yesterday Ha good joke I was far too immature to handle such an important task for the nations future. Yes, the government can't give us all these rights when we are born either, so I could go off on a far away topic about what I think the government should do instead, but alas I lack the time, energy and I am bored with rants so plan I on writing something productive.
Instead I want to talk about the amazingness of the childhood of my life, since I am apparently now an adult. I won't try to pretend that I didn't enjoy the hell out of my early life. Though, I did get to learn the hard way that under no circumstances should you just follow orders of your elders (or in this case sister), because otherwise you will get pictures taken of you in a leotard. But I digress the main point is that that glorious time of my life is now over in the eyes of the government, because I am no longer completely unaccountable. Quite frankly it's a little disappointing because I really like to have zero responsibility, and/or accountability. Really nothing is better than childhood because at no time do you have to make decisions that are going to effect you importantly. There are times that I don't know that I have the ability to make that important decision when it is all on the line. Which is why despite my excellent grasp of tactics I would have made an awful commander because I have no balls.
That would be the one glaring problem that I would have with my life so far that I am an amazing pussy. I have tried to get better at it, but as soon as I think I have fixed one problem with my lack of courage another new leak is made in the dam. It manifests itself in new and different ways constantly. Like my awesome paranoia. Or perhaps the more noticeable because I am good at hiding my thoughts is my fear of fucking up in front of people. It is me not answering questions that I know the answer, but still for some reason think I will get it wrong, or my inability to make an eventful conversation with someone I don't know.
This however is about how enjoyable my life is. I have decided that I need to marry a woman who is independently wealthy, not so I don't have to work a day in my life, but rather to try and learn as much humanly possible. I wouldn't mind entering Faust's bargain because knowledge I discovered is my fount of joy. I discovered how much I enjoyed fantasy, ironically since I am currently in a religion that worships reason. In my quest to become the Renaissance man it has allowed me to meet a vast array of people, and really not discriminate for a long time as to what kind of person I liked or disliked. It wasn't until this year that I couldn't count the people that I had ever hated on more than one hand. Though, I suppose it went both ways because I rarely had good friends that lasted for more than one year (Go Danny and Donny!). Also, I suppose that is the reason that I never have gotten remotely serious with anyone I have been interested in.
I really no longer am sure what the point was of this post because basically I just went thru some thoughts I had on my life. It wasn't even like I am just going to write down everything that I ever thought to reveal me to the world because honestly that would have been a better read and an infinitely juicer read. So, there you go, take my extremely brief summary of me, and retain from it what you wish. And expect a much more sarcastic, and scathing post next time because if I don't then I may have to change my subheading for my blog, and lord knows that is the most important thing to a blog.

The Real Meaning of Christmas

2005-12-30T20:26:00.000-04:00

This will have to as my belated Christmas thoughts. It occured to me whie I was watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", How can any movie be a classic despite only drawing about half the total frames used and just reusing the same shots over and over again? Actually, I thought what does Christmas mean? Well after extensive research it can be determined that Christmas is infact the celebration of the birthday of one of many saviors. This one happened to be named Jesus Christ (Fun bit of trivia that his middle initial was H). So on his birthday the people of the world are supposed to celebrate by following his lead, and giving to others.
Alas, those of you whom have survived through the holy day that is Christ's Mas understand the perversion that it has undergone. The fact that we must say "Happy Holidays" does not even compare to this gross destruction of a holy day. Somewhere along the line, the teachings of other great prophets like Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan got in the way. We instead use the holiday to spend beyond what should be acceptable, and consequently destroy yet another quality holiday. Yes, that is right Christmas has become a great time to show all those pinko-comie bastards out there that we are the greatest capitalist nation on the planet.
I have a solution to this problem that is relatively simple, and we can also save those liberal p.c. hawks how complain about the fact that Christmas is the only religious holiday that is also a federal holiday. I propose as the resident non-christain genius that we change the name of the holiday to Capitalist Day, and thereby save the sanctity of marriage, I mean Christmas. Even, if the federal government doesn't agree with my that will be how my family will celebrate it. I will leave you now with the immortal turning point from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."
"And the G.D.P. of the United States grew three sizes that day."

Bordello of Blood: Crucible of Crap

2005-12-18T18:08:00.000-04:00

So, last night there was absolutely nothing on television, and using my channel surfing abilities I found a classic movie being shown on the Sci Fi Channel: Bordello of Blood. The Title grabs you but it cannot even come close to preparing you for the pure brilliance that this movie will show you. I have to admit that I am of the opinion that you can't make a bad vampire movie without having a complete retard running the show, this movie would further prove my belief. Now, I will admit that I have seen the last about half an hour of this movie about three times, but I will so impressed that I had to witness how such an immortal classic ran throughout the entire movie. Before I start analyzing this movie I feel that other's opinions should be given starting with rottentomatoes.com which gave it the incredibly score of 13%. This movie also did so poorly at the box office that the third movie in the series of tales from the crypt was cancelled.

That said this movie is one of those movies that is so amazingly awful that it is hilarious and great fun to watch. Dennis Miller plays a private eye who is hired by a floor manager for a televangelist to find her missing brother (Corey Feldman or men I don't care). It turns out that Feldman had gone to a whore house that is run by vampires. Dennis Miller continues to investigate, and gradually everyone is tipped off to what is going and the vampires end up with the sister, whom Miller has fallen for. This is when the true genius film making occurs. Dennis Miller and the televangelist assault the Bordello guns blazing, or in this case holy water guns blazing. They fight their way through room upon room of unending vampire whores with a seemingly unending supply of supersoakers with each vampire dying more fantasticly than the previous one. This leads to the climax when the chief whore, I forget what you call that, fights Dennis Miller and the sister because the televangelist was killed thankfully too because he was terribly acted. The chief whore appears to be set to destroy Dennis Miller when the sister cuts a cross with a laser in her chest leaving her horribly maimed, and then Dennis Miller kills her.

In case you couldn't tell, the plot to this movie is not its strong suit. The movie is basically based on Dennis Miller making wise cracks, which he does a better job then you would anticipate. He manages to keep you vaguely interested, but the true secret to this movie are the truly awful sequences, and ploys which make you laugh constantly. Bordello of Blood epitomizes the theory of making movies so awful that they deserve to seen at least once to bask in the glory that is a terribly awful movie.

Then God Created Blogs

2005-12-17T23:31:00.000-04:00

So it turns out that I needed an actual account to make my last comment, so because my comment was that important I had to create a brilliant blog. I have no idea if I actually intend on making posts. I do know if I do it won't be a "ok guys here is what I did during the day" blog. It also won't be a "my life sucks and here is why I hate people" blog. So when I actually figured out what I want to write about there may be posts here. Until then good to see you all.