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Fair or Foul?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2008-07-01 04:33.Nate Silver, the baseball statistician behind the PECOTA projection system, is now trying his hand at projecting electoral votes instead of on-base percentages. PECOTA is a very fun and informative tool, so I'm hoping his new site FiveThirtyEight is as interesting as electoral politics can get. I still prefer real hardball to the figurative.
One Upping
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2008-06-24 00:27.I'll try to top David Masten's post. The Senate majority leader in my home state of Minnesota, Larry Pogemiller (DFL), recently had this to say:
I think it is simplistic and naive to say that people can spend their money better than government... The notion that everybody can individually spend their money better than government, I just think is trite wrong-headed and anti-democratic.
Video here.
Did Anyone Else Catch This?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Wed, 2008-06-18 07:06.I was watching one of the CSPAN channels last week when a member of the ACLU said, straight faced (and there were no chuckles from the audience nor did he crack a smile or give much of a pause), that more rich white people should be falsely indicted (a la the Duke case) to help expose prosecutorial misconduct. I was pretty stunned, but everyone on stage with the guy didn't seem phased at all.
Getting crapped on by the government sucks for all involved. If prosecutorial misconduct is given greater scruitiny as a result of the Duke case, I'm very glad such a silver lining exists, but yikes, man. I don't even wish that kind of stuff on Scott Scheule.
I tried googling to find out the name of the ACLU employee, but there is so much with Duke case and ALCU I didn't get far.
Good, Evil and the Lulz
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Mon, 2008-06-09 04:41.Tyler thinks Roissy is evil, but Scott wins the game (from the comments under Tyler's post):
Come on, people. A big chunk of this blog's readership is already profoundly evil. I certainly am.
-Scott Scheule
If I were God for a day, the first thing I'd do is set the homepage of everyone Tyler's age who likes Lolcats and ICanHasCheezburger to /b/. (Back to the source with ye!)
One of my favorite posts by Roissy:
But before I could stop putting women on a pedestal I had to first kick them off. So I had an asshole phase. I think every man who was not born with his dick in a girl’s mouth needs to go through an asshole phase in order to seduce women in a healthy way. It’s important to experience for oneself what the power of assholery can do to a girl’s attraction buttons — press them like an epileptic on coke and E playing whack-a-mole.
It’s also important to stay in touch with your asshole side in case you ever find yourself slipping into bad beta habits. This way you can play the asshole card when the moment calls for it. Believe me, it’s much more efficient than groveling your way back into her good graces with expensive dinners, flattery, and engagement rings.
Have you ever said “Fuck you” in anger to a girl you were seeing? Have you ever told a girl “Enough of your shit”? Have you ever let a girl argue for 20 minutes then look her in the eye and say “You done?” and walk off? If you haven’t done any of these things you don’t know just how much is possible in your dealings with women.
It’s easy to dismantle the pedestal when you read this:
Scott Peterson, the man who was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child, had been on Death Row barely an hour when the first proposal arrived from a woman who wants to be the new Mrs. Scott Peterson.
Three dozen phone calls came in to the warden’s office on Peterson’s first day at his new home in San Quentin State Prison — women were pleading for his mailing address, and one smitten 18-year-old said she wanted to marry him.
18 years old. Scott Peterson was twice her age. So much for the theory that chicks get creeped out by older (murderers) men. Heh.
So think about that the next time you find yourself romanticizing the woman of your dreams. There are women who would take their chances with a sociopathic death row inmate over law-abiding nonmurderous free men they know.
I say nuts to Frank Sinatra and the lessons learned by Red Fox. You can work the big rooms with blue material, at least on the net. I feel like I need to drink in all the off-color laughs I can before I can't anymore. But am I being paranoid?
What do French author Michael Houellebecq, a fifteen year-old British teenager, and Canadian columnist Mark Steyn have in common? They have all been, in the eyes of different Western governments, criminally offensive. Nevermind being offended is a choice and no matter what you do someone, somewhere will always find it offensive, or at the very least claim to be offended if they disagree with you (and I can't imagine this getting better if it becomes apparent that doing so will effectively censor your opponents).
There have certainly been calls for censorship in our recent past. But, it seems like there has been a change. I don't see the far-out ACLU defending "hate speech." It is now the left, and not the right, that is trying to do the censoring. The thin skinned have moved beyond going after rap music and porno mags on behalf of "THE CHILDREN!!!" and are now trying to enforce, with the guns of the state, the "right" for all to never be upset by something they read, see or hear, ever.
I think we are in for rougher seas. And I'm going to get all the lulz in that I can before the party van arrives.
Definition of Sabotage
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2008-05-13 04:15.The Cato blog linked here and the following caught my eye:
The Cato Institute will present this student, Yon Goicoechea, with the "2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty" at a dinner costing $500 per person.
The student movement against the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has been receiving money from different agencies of the United States, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and other U.S. and international agencies.Yon Goicoechea has made it clear that the $500,000 from the Cato Institute will be used for further attempts to sabotage the Bolivarian Revolution.
Emphasis mine. My guess (and it is just a guess, I know nothing about Goicoechea)is that sabotage in this context means to hold a contrary opinion and speak out on it.
Note to the New York City Independent Media Center: The Venezuelan government's price controls will take care of the sabotage of the Bolivarian Revolution. If that is the goal of Goicoechea and Cato, either would be better off keeping the cash.
The Chicken or the Egg
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2008-05-13 02:31.Vernon Wells (45 DXL)
The Jays keep taking hits in what was seen as a make-or-break season for this version of J.P. Ricciardi's plan. Instead, they're six games back and in last place, so losing Vernon Wells until the All-Star break isn't going to help them make up ground on the Yankees in the battle for fourth. Wells fractured a bone in his wrist, believed to be the scaphoid fx (not a hamate), on a diving catch. Wrist injuries tend to sap power and bat control, two things that Wells can't afford to lose. The Jays will shift Alex Rios over to center field in the interim, using newly-acquired Kevin Mench and Brad Wilkerson in right field. Wells' return should come without significant difficulty; with new technology, seeing him at the end of June isn't out of the question.
May 10: Wells will miss 6-8 weeks after breaking a bone in his left wrist on Friday, the Toronto Star reports.
Recommendation: Alex Rios will likely slide over to center field, while the newly-acquired Kevin Mench and Brad Wilkerson should see more playing time in right. Joe Inglett was recalled from Triple-A Syracuse to replace Wells on the roster.
Emphasis mine. I remembered the Yahoo! version while I was reading Baseball Prospectus tonight because I thought it was poorly phrased. If you're not an obsessed baseball fan like I am, you wouldn't know if just Mench or Mench and Wilkerson was/were newly-acquired. Could be coincidence, but the same confusing, hyphenated use of newly-aquired drums up suspicion.
What would be the ideal price?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Fri, 2008-05-02 23:00.
Everywhere I turn on the net—blogs, message boards, etc—sports fans are decrying increases in ticket prices and slamming franchises and leagues and owners because "real fans" can no longer afford to attend sporting events in person. Meanwhile, our population has grown, modern transportation continues to make it possible for fans to travel greater distances to attend events, and television, radio and their internet counterparts have provided sports fans with new methods of following their favorite sports from around the globe (depending on your level of interest in sports and your views on intellectual property, myp2p may be your favorite site on the internet). So while the number of sports teams and leagues have grown, that pace has nowhere near matched the increase in demand for tickets generated by the aforementioned factors.
I have no doubt that many passionate and dedicated fans are being priced out of attending as many games as they would like to, but one question that I never see asked is how their lot would be different if tickets were price controlled (and for the record we're now operating under the assumption that only lower-to-middle class fans can be "real fans").
Starting with an extreme example, if tickets were free, they would have to be rationed by some means other than price. Perhaps everyone that wanted to attend sporting events for a particular team or league would put their name on a waiting list and once they received their ration of tickets they would move to the bottom of the queue. But here, "real fans" probably wouldn't get to attend as many games as they would if there were a charge for tickets, because casual fans, having to invest nothing more than their time, would consume more tickets. Invariably, a black market of ticket scalping would emerge and the "real fans" would go right back to paying for tickets, since "real fans" would undoubtedly value the tickets more than other people.
There seems to be a pervasive assumption that there would be no increased competition for cheaper tickets. I'm preaching to the choir here, but I challenge anyone who self-identifies as a "real fan" to name me the price at which they, personally, could afford to attend more matches and would also be able to secure tickets against the increased demand that would come hand in hand with those lower prices. It is no doubt out there, but it is going to be hard for the average fan to identify and will vary from fan to fan depending on their disposable income, travel costs, and a variety of other factors.
Going further, let's speculate about a situation similar to rent control in New York City. What about cheap season tickets that could be renewed, indefinitely, at their original purchase price, even if adjusted for inflation. The decriers seem to be operating under some sports variant of Kip's Law, in that they assume they'd be the lucky few with season tickets priced way below demand that would rarely, if ever, be relinquished. Heaven help you if you fall in love with a franchise after all the renewable season tickets have been rationed by a means other than market price.
A good portion of this backlash is directed at the number of seats sold to companies, instead of directly to individuals. Soccer fans often raise this complaint with regards to the difference in crowds between professional club and national team competitions. The spectacle of the World Cup draws in a greater number of casual fans, aided by the number of tickets given out by large companies, which leads to a less boisterous crowd. What I find humorous is, if operating under the viewpoint of "real fans", the act of tickets being given out by corporations to casual fans actually demonstrates the problem caused by removing market forces from the pricing of tickets—with less of a sacrifice required to win tickets in competition with other fans, be they casual or "real", the casual fans end up with a greater share of the available tickets. And none of this touches on if self-identified "real fans" have more of a right to tickets than the casual fan.
I remember the Society of American Baseball Research conference I attended in the summer of 2005. One panel included members of the Toronto Blue Jays front office and they were kind enough to field questions from obsessed baseball fans on why they are bastardizing the game (namely the J-Force dance troop that performs on top of dugouts in between innings, something that could get those well meaning dancers shot at Fenway, Busch, or Yankee Stadium). One Jays official said that, unfortunately for "real fans", the focus is at the margins. The hardcore baseball fans show up for Blue Jays games because the team plays in the best league on Earth and the quality of play is the highest around. The Jays official said this group of "real fans" probably account for around 15,000 seats a game. The remaining seats get filled by bandwagon jumpers when the team is doing well and casual fans drawn in by promotions and other entertainment like the abomination against God that is the J-Force.
All of this could be chalked up to the evil influence of money in sports, but like anything in life there are tradeoffs. Without money, teams and leagues wouldn't attract the caliber of athletes they do. They'd leave for other teams, leagues or sports, and eventually sports altogether. That horrible corrupting money is the reason we now enjoy levels of competition unrivaled in history.
I recently watched a DVD of the original BBC broadcast of the 1961 FA Cup game won by Tottenham Hotspur, a team that won "the Double" that season (where a club soccer team wins both its league title and highest tournament cup). Compare that to the DVDs I own of today's Tottenham Hotspur beating Arsenal 5-1 in the decisive leg of the Carling Cup semifinal, and their following 2-1 victory over Chelsea in the final at Wembley. Tottenham are a mid-table Premier League side this season, and today's Carling Cup is considered the lowest of five potential trophies available to Premiere League clubs. Nonetheless, the 2008 Spurs would completely and utterly obliterate their 1961 counterparts, who were the finest club England had to offer in that day. This massive improvement in play is a result of all the money that has followed all the interest the sport has attracted. The difference in the speed of play between the two championship matches I own on DVD, separated by less than 50 years, is staggering.
As often happens with naive populist grumbling, the faults of the market are derided while at the same time the benefits are taken completely for granted. The fact that, despite all this complaining, the Premiership (as an example) is growing in popularity the world over speaks to the fact that the quality of competition is the absolute bottom line when it comes to our enjoyment of sports. Far and wide, there will be cries of outrage as the top leagues pull top players out of their native countries as these players go in search of more money and greater competition, but I for one welcome it. With modern media, attending a match live, while often an amazing experience, isn't the primary method of following sports. Sites like myp2p are the future. The real problem going forward will be time zone differences. How can we make it so fans from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and all parts in between can watch the same games live? In any case, I do not count myself among the ranks of the doomsayers. I think the future looks bright.
Gillespie & Welch: Right for the Most Part
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Wed, 2008-01-23 04:16.Gillespie and Welch rightly take Congress to task for their hysterics over Major League Baseball's steroid use here. A couple things stood out as misleading, though (emphasis mine):
The uncomfortable truth is that illegally obtained muscle-rebuilding treatments exist on a continuum that includes laser eye surgery, Vitamin B-12 shots and Tommy John surgery (a procedure that grafts ligaments from knees or elsewhere onto a wrecked elbow, frequently giving pitchers more velocity than they had before). Sorting out the morality and legality of self-improvement has more to do with aesthetic revulsion and moral panic than with considered science or logic.
This makes it sound as if Tommy John surgery, named for the pitcher that first underwent the procedure invented by Dr. James Andrews, increases a pitcher's velocity? Kind of, in the sense that someone with a torn ligament in their elbow can't throw very hard at all. But pitchers don't throw harder than they did prior to injuring their elbow, rehab time after the surgery is 12 to 18 months, and players usually don't regain their pre-injury velocity until their second year of pitching after the injury, if ever. Dr. Andrews should be inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, or at least given some award by Cooperstown and a plaque in some part of the museum, because the procedure has saved numerous careers and is responsible for tens-of-thousands of innings at the major league level. It has changed baseball, but Gillespie and Welch almost make it sound as if pitchers are moving ligaments around to give some more jump to their fastballs.
Another paragraph that caught my eye (emphasis mine):
But Congress no more established a Major League Baseball commissioner than the Blackhawks, a professional hockey team founded in 1926, ever held a seventh-inning stretch. In fact, when baseball owners appointed the racist judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis the league's first commissioner after the Chicago Black Sox game-throwing scandal, Congress tried to forcibly remove him from the federal bench. When Shays's wild pitches were pointed out to him, his response was to shrug like Hall of Fame pitcher and self-admitted cheater Gaylord Perry caught with Vaseline on the mound: "I could care less."
Norman Macht, a baseball historian held in high regard by many (his new biography on Connie Mack is 700 pages long and 20-some years in the making), had a presentation at last year's SABR Convention that convincingly aruged that baseball's color barrier was a product of the owners and not the commissioner (Landis). That Landis, while not taking any active steps to do away with the color barrier, wasn't opposed to integration. He knew that none of the current crop of owners would have it, and if none of the teams were willing to integrate, a decree from the office of the commissioner wouldn't have righted the wrong. It can be argued that such a stance is still racist and that by taking such a stance Landis is a racist himself, but it isn't as clear-cut as Gillespie and Welch make it seem.
Everything Gillespie and Welch say about congress is spot on. They just make a few errors on the ballfield. Particularly interesting is the way the anti-trust exemption Major League Baseball received has actually fowled things up. The exemption was incorrectly granted on the grounds that baseball doesn't transact business across state lines. It obviously does, especially now with online merchandise shops, national network broadcast contracts, satellite radio, cable and internet broadcast packages, etc. The problem with the anti-trust case against baseball is that the individual teams aren't seperate firms colluding, but a joint venture. The teams together sell the product of on-field competition. Two competing Subway franchises would like nothing more than to drive each other out of business and being the last franchise standing, reap all the sandwich sales, but this does not apply to baseball franchises just because they compete on the field. The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox don't want to drive each other out of business, as their rivalry is worth millions of dollars. They just want to win on the field, which esentially means they're both working together to give their customers the best possible product.
David Boaz' take at Cato here.
The Market Prevails Again!
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Fri, 2008-01-18 07:11.Needs sound.
The Scientists
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Wed, 2008-01-16 04:04.Micha wrote the following about Samuel Konkin:
Darrington tells me [Konkin] had the charming weirdness of the modal libertarian, Rothbard's intended but misfired slur (embrace it, yo! modal+beltway unite!), up to and including endearing obsessions with science fiction, communal living, and funny neck jewelry.
Jumping into the New Libertarian Manefesto, Konkin himself writes:
Seeking an art form to express the horror potential of the State and extrapolate the many possibilities of liberty, Libertarianism found Science Fiction already in the field. (Page 7)
And:
The rest of this Libertarian society can be best pictured by imaginative science fiction authors with a good grounding in praxeology (Mises' term for the study of human action, especially, but not only, economics.)
Some hallmarks of this society - libertarian in theory and free-market in practice, called agorist, from the Greek agora, meaning "open marketplace" - are rapid innovations in science, technology, communication, transportation, production and distribution. (Page 14)
Which comes first, the free-market society or the rapid innovations in science and technology? Does the libertarian interest in science fiction reflect the former? Or, is it just more exciting to have the later quickly spawn the former within the timeline of a work of fiction (Mike the self-aware computer system in Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), where technological progress leaves a coercive, regulatory system in its dust and remakes society despite its tantrums (like the RIAA feebly throwing sandbags at the tidal wave that is file sharing).
It comes as a mild surprise to me that, with this libertarian affinity (Konkin) or escapist distraction (Rothbard), however you want to look at it, there isn't more of a libertarian interest in the '90s Champaign-Urbana space rock band Hum. The band's lyrics are far too oblique to carry any discernable political message, but often reflect the beauty inherent in the kind of freedom that space travel (and other technological leaps) may provide.
The first verse and chorus from 'The Scientists' off Hum's incomparable Downward Is Heavenward:
Electrified and lit up by an outline of herself,
and smiling now as only she can be.
She said, "I made some new connections to astound them all,
in ways we've never dreamed about."
Her lovely hand is glowing from a light inside itself,
from soaking in the esters stacked for miles on a single shelf.
Holding my eyes still so she can see,
all the super-undercover custom hybrids got to me.It's too much, you're too late. I want to see it all again.
She says, "Keep this benzene ring around your finger,
and think of me when everything you wanted starts to end."
All the techno-geek libertarian stereotypes are there. There's the dominant female romantic interest that serves as savior for the dateless Ghertner crowd who would otherwise have to fight stacked odds for female attention in the male-dominated libertarian sphere (or engineering department). There's new technological progress. There's even an ubergeeky tip of the hat to Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. And not that this song gives any indication, but the band found their drummer after hearing him play along to a few Rush tunes in a rehearsal space.
If Hum is where left-libertarianism leads you (star gazing lyrics over the drone of layered and effected guitar tracks), maybe it is worth checking out. If you aren't familiar with Hum, is it then safe to write you off as one of my cranky paleocon brethren? If you fall into the latter category, don't worry. They still host piano recitals with music from the Habsburg Empire at the Mises Institute.
Give It a Name
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Mon, 2008-01-14 03:47.Jesse Walker has a review of Steve Earle's newest album Washington Square Serenade up at Reason Online that's worth a read. Walker brands Earle's new songs as folkery-fakery, a term which, best I could find, can be attributed to Dwight Macdonald who used it to define Pete Seeger in his essay Country Joe McDonald is a Better Kettle of Fish (available in this collection). I wasn't born until the 1980s and have always had a strong gag reflex to folk music due to the practice of well-off leftists faking populism by purposely slumming it, so maybe the term was once used by in-fighting members of the scene? I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during a folkie agruement in the Sixties about whether the bourgeois electric guitar was kosher or not. Never letting the American middle class have their due, the new bohemians (not, to my knowledge, of the Edie Brickell variety) now claim the garage band was a European invention, as if it wasn't the growing middle class in America buying both electric guitars and garages in the Fifties (or that the Pacific-Northwest garage scene, rockabilly and surf rock didn't predate the British Invasion). Back to the point, whatever the origin of folkery-fakery, I find it a very fitting and useful term.
Thomas Sowell Is No Capitalist
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Thu, 2008-01-10 05:13.Thomas Sowell has penned a column on the need for professional athletes to model their behavior aound the fear children will take up fraud, dog fighting and the abuse of steroids, and in the latter case it's strange to see someone writing for Capitalism Magazine cast aside the principle of self-ownership (this is my first encounter with the online rag, so maybe the shock will quickly fade).
Sowell joins a long line of folks who overstate the potential harm to children caused by steroid use by professional athletes and couples it with with a complete lack of understanding that it is currently impossible to completely remove performance enhancing drugs from baseball. Let's start with the latter.
There is a huge difference in the minimum salaries paid to players in Triple-A (the highest of six levels of organized minor league baseball) and the Major Leagues. Triple-A players make a minimum of $25,800 and Major Leaguers a minimum of $380,000. If you're a fringe Major Leaguer making the equivalent of $12.40 an hour in Triple-A, there's a $354,200 annual reward to the risks that accompany steroid use. Maybe you get caught, face legal charges, hurt your reputation and get suspended from baseball (currently the first offense is a 50-game suspension), but maybe without steroids you never make it to the big leagues anyway. And from a health standpoint, shouldn't it be up to the individual what risks they'll take for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars?
Among established Major Leaguers, one group of players that has shown up in investigations and testing are players that suffered serious injuries. Major League contracts are guaranteed, but injured athletes still have strong incentives to recouperate as quickly as possible. And healthy Major Leaguers' careers can also benefit from steroid use, especially as players reach their mid-to-late thirties and forties. It seems highly unlikely that even impassioned pleas to "think about the children" are going to curb demand.
On the supply side of things, the scientists devising the testing are always reacting to the scientists developing the masking (you probably can't develop a test for a substance that doesn't exist just yet), so baseball will always be playing catch-up. There isn't even a test for Human Growth Hormone (HGH) yet. All of the players that baseball has caught through testing were either minor leaguers too poor to buy the newest performance enhancers or Major Leaguers too stupid to stop using the old stuff. The only players accused of HGH use have been mentioned in testimony or paper trails.
I fully support whatever penalties baseball wishes to impose upon steroid users. The sports sells the product of competition and if steroid use, made public, undermines that product in the eyes of the public and lowers the demand for it, baseball would be foolish not to take steps to prevent the practice.
What I don't support is Sowell's assertion that the children of America are going to start taking steroids in large numbers because some professional athletes have, or that what an athlete chooses to put into his own body is anyone else's business, particularly if the foundation of their criticism rests on a bed of failed parenting and a lack of property rights.
Sowell also recommends the implementation of asterisks, as if baseball went through no significant peroids of change (desegregation, night games, the screwball and the split-finger fastball*) prior to the recent surge in steroid use. Hell, there was a significant spike in homerun rates when MLB moved the manufacturing facilities for their baseballs from Hati to the Dominican Republic in 1987. The better machinery wound the balls much tighter and had to be corrected for 1988. Should anyone that hit a homerun in 1987 have an asterisk next to their name in the Baseball Encyclopedia?
*Check out Mike Scott's 1986 season, the year he was taught to throw the splitter by pitching coach Roger Craig. The splitter's emergence dates only as far back as the mid-seventies, with Hall of Fame closer Bruce Sutter being indentified as one of the first pitchers to feature the pitch.
What I've Learned
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2008-01-08 07:20.In response to Jonathan's Edge 2008 post:
After reading Taleb and observing Hanley Ramirez, I'm giving an equal amount of weight to subjective player analysis (scouting) so it's on par with objective performance analysis (sabermetrics) while at the same time reducing my opinion of both.
Ramirez compiled a very poor statistical record throughout his minor league career and when he was the main component of a package that the Marlins got in return for dealing Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell and Guillermo Mota to the Red Sox, I thought the Marlins got robbed. There was a small consensus of scouts that said Ramirez was bored in the minor leagues and would put his career into gear once he reached the majors. Ramirez went from a .720 OPS in his final year of Double-A, to skipping Triple-A, to posting a .889 OPS over the past two seasons in the Majors while playing his home games in a pitcher's park. He'll probably have to move from shortstop to a less challenging postion defensively sooner rather than later, but he's got the bat to weather such a change.
So Close, Mr. Huckabay
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Sun, 2008-01-06 01:59.Gary Huckabay of the peerless Baseball Prospectus has an almost great rant about a bunch of posturing legislators that can under no circumstances turn down any opportunity to hand down their bizzaro version of government morality infront of the cameras, no matter how asinine the situation:
"Henry Waxman and crew have decided to spend their time, their staff’s time, and, unfortunately, our time, by grilling a bunch of ballplayers about whether or not they used substances to enhance their play on the field.
Let’s stipulate to a couple things, just as part of a thought experiment. Let’s say that all the players are guilty. Of everything any has in the back of their mind. Dianabol Smoothies. HGH facial wraps. Testosterone-injecting parties that make the party scene in ‘JFK’ seem like a Sunday afternoon at Orrin Hatch’s house. Let’s go further. Let’s say that these ballplayers are making personal visits to high schools across the nation, speaking to classrooms every day with the central message of “Steroids worked for me! And now I’m a Hall of Fame ballplayer, rolling in cash, and tapping tail that would make Brad Pitt and Jay-Z genuflect before me.” At the end of each speech, players pass out samples of D-Bol and HGH, and some delicious fruit roll-ups, laced with ‘The Clear’.
That still wouldn’t warrant this kind of treatment. Waxman and his committee are displaying the basest kind of vile pandering, willing to do anything for a few minutes in front of a live camera with an opportunity to wag their atherosclerotically clubbed fingers in righteous anger. We’re talking about small widgets in a small business, that’s already done a hell of a job cleaning up their act, if you actually look at the numbers."
And then he blows it:
"And before anyone gets the idea of writing me with yet another ironically juvenile “What about the children?!?!?!?” diatribe…piss off. The children are at far greater risk from the advertisement barrages that bracket innings within the game. No six year old should know who the hell Spuds MacKenzie or the Budweiser frogs are. Let’s tally up the damage to children from steroids compared to alcohol, shall we? Selective protection of the young teaches hypocrisy."
Huckabay was doing so well, and then decides to walk down the same path of moral posturing as the people he's criticizing?
Even Hippies Don't Deserve This
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Sat, 2008-01-05 20:35.Arthur Magazine columnist Dave Reeves has been sentenced to 23 days in jail for a traffic accident that caused only $200 of damage. Reeves, on a motorcycle, collided with an SUV:
"Damage to guy’s SUV is a pencil mark-sized scratch on front of SUV guy’s mirror, obviously caused by the SUV’s forward motion against Dave’s motorcycle. $200 in “repair.” Jury can’t believe this is a trial. Reeves admits he didn’t call Burbank PD. Jury has to convict, given judge’s instructions. Judge Kirkland Nyby gives max sentence. Reeves gets 30 days of community service which is 240 hours of picking up trash and abating graf. Reeves did 7 days by the deadline to complete the service. Nyby has now sentenced Dave Reeves to jail for the remainder of his sentence."
This provides another case in the long list of examples that illustrate why jury nullification is so important. Who in their right mind would sentence someone to 240 hours of indentured servitude or incarceration for $200 worth of damage? And how much time and money were spent in handing down this verdict? The other party in this case is a villain straight from Aurthur Magazine Central Casting (an evil SUV driver talking on a cell phone), so who knows if Reeves is or isn't at fault for the accident. However, the stiffest penalty Reeves should be handed is payment of the SUV driver's auto repair and legal fees.
"Last we checked he had been moved to the MEN’S CENTRAL JAIL at 441 BAUCHET STREET, which, according to the LACSD website, 'currently houses the majority of Los Angeles County’s high risk, high security inmates, and ranks as the largest jail in the free world. The average housing cost per inmate is $53.45 per day.'"
So the taxpayers of California are out $1229.35 because the everyday people that made up the jury were intimidated by the state into ignoring both their common sense and moral compass? I've read some horror stories, via Vin Suprynowicz, about what has happened to jurors that stood up to judges. Is it worth risking time and money and possible jail time yourself to keep someone else out of jail for 30 days (and you might not be successful even if you try)?
The idea that something is immoral simply because the state forbids it ("but these immigrants are here ILLEGALLY!") is nonsense, and since it is clear those the state has tasked with administering justice (Judge Nyby in this case) are incompetent, it's certainly time juries of our peers got to weigh in on the validity of sentences handed out.
Proceeds from purchases at Defend Brooklyn will help cover Reeves' legal fees, although I'm not familiar with the site and there is no About page so I have no idea what they stand for. In any case, here's hoping that Reeves comes through this okay and time moves quickly for him.
Update: Someone else also wondered what the Defend Brooklyn shirts were all about. Turns out they are a reference to a movie Reeves wrote and were originally made to help pay for post-production on that movie, so if you feel okay about defending Brooklyn with a communist rifle, purchase away.
Soup now, /b/?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Mon, 2007-12-31 03:49.In response to Theophanes, here are a few of my favorite YTMNDs:
Picard Knows His Light Fixtures
Finnish Ducktales Singalong
Toto Sings About Rommel
Picard Teaches Art Class
George Zimmer Is Funky
Ted Stephens Raps with Today's Youth
Han Knows the Code
News Anchor Crosses the Line, Becomes the Story
Most Alluring Restaurant
Dinner in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Truly Epic
Blue Screen of Death
Set Phasers to Rock
Judge Judy Demands an End to Alms
Jesus Rocks
Gambling Is Evil
I Think You Can Still Do It
Take Back the White House
Network News Improves
Cosby Bebop
Temp Work
This Summer...
YTMND for evar!
Best Time to Be a Baseball Fan: Winter?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Thu, 2007-12-20 05:02.The steady stream of baseball annuals are coming out now, as they do every winter. The options are many.
Baseball Prospectus 2008 - Otherwise known as The Bible. If someone completely unfamiliar with Major League Baseball decided they wanted to start following the game, I'd have them do little else than read this cover-to-cover. It is an amazing blend of humor and analysis with one paragraph blurbs on almost every player in the Major Leagues (and those likely to reach the Majors in 2008). But it's not just for the casual fan. Every year the team at Baseball Prospectus publishes hardcore statistical studies and their PECOTA projections. PECOTA is a giant, computerized projection system that uses sophisticated metrics to compare a player to every other player in baseball history, and then projects a career path for that player based on how similar players in history developed. Fantasy baseball players love it because their projections for batters consistently beat the field every year (projecting pitchers, due large in part to the high risk of injury among other factors, is so difficult that it isn't uncommon for less sophisticated projection systems to beat PECOTA). Here's a sample of one of their player blurbs from the 2005 edition:
Christian Guzman, SS
Washington Nationals
One old insight into human nature is that if you know when a man was 20, you understand him. There might be something to that with [Washington Nationals' General Manager] Jim Bowden, because in signing Guzman, he might not have aged a day beyond 1980. Back then, guys like Ivan DeJesus or Gary Templeton were stars, and people said nice things about Dale Berra. Progress, A-Rod, Nomar, Jeter, Tejada, throw it all in a hopper, and we're in age when those sorts of sensibilities are as out of place as calling Rammstein's mosh pit a sock hop. Now that he's in D.C. and supposed to be a star, Guzman is about to become as identifiable and regretted as Pauly Shore.
For the record since joining the Nationals, Guzman, when not injured, has made fans wish he was. The best part about Baseball Prospectus 2008 is that if you pre-order, you get several hundred pages of the best baseball analysis around for just $15.
Baseball Forecaster 2008 - The precursor to the Baseball Prospectus annual. Fantasy Baseball has long suffered under a stigma of being just a game and detracting from the real statistical analysis done by the early members of the Society for American Baseball Research and other academic types (usually math professors with a penchant for hardball). Ron Shandler has been publishing his Forecaster since 1988 under the field of Fanalytics, attempting to bridge the gap between "serious" analysis as it relates to projection and the millions of fantasy players. (As to why fantasy baseball is seen as lowbrow by snootier baseball fans is beyond me, the current version evolved out of homerun pools and was invented by Dan Okrent with a professor of his while in grad school at Michigan. That's hardly plebian in origin.) As many slings and arrows as Shandler suffered, it is a little sad that his annual is no longer the best, but the kids at Baseball Prospectus have earned the top spot. The Forecaster is fantasy baseball specific, comes with its own projections and is worth picking up in addition to Baseball Prospectus 2008 if you are going to be playing in a fantasy league next season. It is available for $20 on pre-order right now (although I've got an advanced copy).
The Bill James Handbook 2008 - Usually the first annual to come out every winter because it has very little analysis, just past statistics and future projections. Like Prospectus and Forecaster, the Handbook contains projected statistics for most of the players that will see action in the 2008 Major League season. If you're unfamiliar, Bill James was the baseball evangelical that brought statistical analysis to baseball itself and the fans. James no longer works on the Handbook which bares his name (it is now published by the company he started, Baseball Info Solutions). There are some interesting statistics in the Handbook that you won't find easily elsewhere. The Handbook is best used while watching baseball at home by fans that like to second guess managers. You'll get platoon splits and individual batter-versus-pitcher stats for every player in the handbook, all in a conveniently sized reference manual of sorts. You can get it for $15 at Amazon and pretend you're Earl Weaver with his index cards next season.
The Bill James Goldmine 2008 - New this season, it looks like Baseball Info Solutions will be publishing essays and statistical analysis in an annual. My guess is if you added the Handbook and the Goldmine together you'd get the Baseball Prospectus annual, but be out another $15. I might pick this up if I see good reviews or get a favorable opinion from a credible source.
The Hardball Times Annual 2008
The Hardball Times Season Preview 2008 -The Hardball Times is an online baseball think tank similar to Baseball Prospectus, but is the lesser known of the two. A few Hardball Timers have gone on to write at Baseball Prospectus if that gives you an idea of the pecking order. They've separated their annuals into a look back at 2007 (the Annual) and a look forward to 2008 (the Season Preview). Not as epic as the Baseball Prospectus annual, the Times' Annual is still enjoyable. There is more attention paid to how the previous season shook out, with excellent divisional recaps that come with handy graphical representations of all the pennant races. The Annual is out and is a great read if you are looking to relive some or all of the 2007 season. The Season Preview doesn't come out until March which is very late for a baseball annual. If you polish off your other annuals by then, you may want to give it a look. I bought their first edition (the 2007 Season Preview) when they were self-publishing through Lulu, and thought it was alright, though I'll read anything baseball related and am not the most discerning opinion you could find. The Annual costs $14 and the Preview $13.
Graphical Player 2008 - John Burnson rolls with the Forecaster crew and churns out the Graphical Player each winter. He breaks down your favorite players' games with spray charts and hotzones that can help the obsessed fan become even more familiar with their favorite players. At $21 and heavy on the nerd-dom, this is only for junkies.
Baseball America 2008 Prospect Handbook - The original and definitive guide on who is who in the minor leagues. Read about the stars of tomorrow, today. This is a very useful book for fantasy players, as mid-season callups and prospects have far more of an impact in baseball than any other sport. The Prospect Handbook can also make you sound a lot smarter when discussing your favorite team's future. At $20, you save $10 by pre-ordering at Amazon.
The Baseball Prospects Book 2008 - Self-published by John Sickels who is a fellow Twins fan and the author of Minor League Ball (a great free website covering baseball prospects). Comparable to the Prospect Handbook.
The Newberg Report 2008 - Self-published by Jamie Newberg, author of the Rangers' blog The Newberg Report which covers the Texas farm system from top to bottom. Think a Rangers-only version of the Hardball Times Annual. If only fans of every team could have a team-specific annual of this caliber.
Freedom Lovin'
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Tue, 2007-12-04 04:27.Since this is the Republic's culture blog, and all I've written about is sports and hipster rags, I thought I'd try something different. I have a question for the Republic: Has anyone here dated another Libertarian, libertarian, minarchist, anarcho-capitalist, agorist, Austrian schooler, public choicer, etc? I've dated both Republicans and Democrats, but never a libertarian.
The two party system builds political alliances that appear counterintuitive (to me, at least). Republicans used to back militant Islamic extremists because they opposed the Soviet Union, and pro-choice Democrats who uphold the right to own their bodies oppose the sale of kidneys, as examples. With the official platforms that define what is Conservative or Progressive, Republican or Democrat covering far too wide a spectrum to line up with all of any one person's specific positions (unless they adopt the party line in full), if you are a glass-half-full person you can always find things to agree on with whomever you meet (or wind up dating). While I agree that the political is personal, it is only because everything is personal, and if you take everything personally, that just makes you an asshole.
I suppose if I lived in D.C. and went to Reason pub crawls, I might meet a libertarian romantic interest, and I've noticed that Democrats and Republicans have started their own insular online dating communities. I realized, when a progressive friend of mine asked me how I could have gone out with a conservative ex, that similar political views are a very low priority in what I'm looking for. It also then occurred to me that this may be because I don't have much of a choice. Whenever Jonathan gets the Liberty Belles site back up and running, if you read their About page it talks about Drew Carey's call for more women to get involved in the libertarian movement. In addition to the vast majority of people being Republicans or Democrats, experience confirms that those few that do share my political leanings aren't likely to be female. Living where I do (Minnesota), politics would probably have to trump almost all other considerations for me to wind up dating libertarian.
Is it better for those of you that live in different parts of the country? Does anyone have experience with the D.C. dating scene, and does it divide along political lines? Has anyone wound up with another libertarian? Is there anyone here that will date conservatives but not progressives, or progressives but not conservatives?
Anyone care to weigh in, so my post that asks so many questions doesn't wind up with a small number of responses, making me feel more rejected than if I were to introduce myself as a capitalist at a DailyKos mixer?
Jake Peavey, Union Altruist
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Wed, 2007-11-28 03:51.In what has to be the best PR stance ever taken, San Diego Padres' ace and 2007 National League Cy Young winner Jake Peavey had the following to say about his expected contract extension negotiations (after spending his entire career in the Padres organization Peavey is set to become a free agent after the 2008 season):
I'm certainly not after a big dollar amount. That's not what it's about. I want to be here, period. And we'll see what comes of it. But I've got to do what the market says I should do, or what's close to that. I'm certainly not going to drive this market down and do anything to upset the balance where my peers would look down on me.
Poor Jake Peavey, caught between not wanting to make additional millions and the cruel peer pressure to do so that supposedly hurts fans. Seeing as Carlos Silva is going to sign a contract somewhere in the neighborhood of $44,000,000 for four years of work, if I were Jake I wouldn't worry about driving down the cost of starting pitching in the major leagues.
Depending on your view of it, the brillance of the free agency system negotiated by the Players Union is that it restricts the number of free agents that hit the open market (Marvin Miller pushed for such a system over letting all players become free agents at the end of each Major League season for precisely this reason). Because the available talent pool is restricted by teams controlling the rights to players at minimum salary for their first two-to-three major league seasons and the arbitration system that kicks in for the three seasons after, fourth starters like Silva make second starter money once they hit free agency.
The money that would go to the underpaid youngsters stuck in MLB's five-to-six year term of indentured servitude in a completely open market gets piled onto the trickle of veterans that reach free agency each offseason. The only players that should take issue with Peavey's payday are baseball's young stars, provided they don't think their own shot at a future inflated payday offsets the undercompensation early in their careers.
Still, it's kind of nice to hear a union member talking about the need to use market prices for the greater good. Kind of. The problem is, most teams devote a fixed percentage of their gross income to player payroll and are going to spend that amount each season regardless of the particular distribution. There are always holes to plug and young talent to lock in longterm, so if the Padres get a discount on Peavey, those savings will still get spent on player contracts.
I'm not the world's biggest Andrew Zimbalist fan, but this reminds me of his critique that proponents of public financing of sports stadiums are wrong when they claim that new stadiums boost business for their metropolitan areas. Zimbalist argues that as entertainment dollars are a fixed part of people's budgets, if people spend more at the ballpark, it's because they're spending less on restaurants, movies, bowling allies, etc. A similar situation applies to the Padres.
There are only two things proven to draw fans to the ballpark over an extended period of time (there is a three-to-five year honeymoon period for new stadiums, after which attendance returns to old stadium levels): winning baseball and free stuff. The Padres (and every other team) know this and are going to spend all of their payroll budget to try to put the best team on the field they can. Peavey is actually helping San Diego fans if he takes a discount, because assuming the Padres spend the resulting savings wisely, it should result in a better onfield product.
Elsewhere, being well aware of the political leanings of my fellow Minnesotans as a whole, I'm pretty sure I've just burned half my bridges in the Twins blogsphere.
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know what happened to the Liberty Belles?
A Favorable Definition?
Submitted by Kyle Eliason on Wed, 2007-11-21 07:48.From the Devil's Dictionary X:
- capitalism
1. a financial system which supports personal choice to buy or sell what one will, allowing another is freely willing to make the exchange; the opposite of stealing.
2. a similar system which accepts a common standard of value for trade, the carrot.
3. the only fundamental difference between America and every nation leaking boat people to Her.
I was worried, with a title like the Devil's Dictionary X, they weren't being sincere, until I read their definition of Slashdot.