A Case Where W. is Right....and other stuff

1. I have never found much good to say about George W. Bush, other than that he's in good shape for his age. In fact, I am sure history will view him as one of the worst Presidents of all time. However, there is finally something we can agree on: Bush is trying to get Congress to cut the size of subsidies to farmers. Read here
2. Are your local politicians trying to take your money and build a stadium? If so, click here for a detailed discussion of the value of stadium subsidies to taxpayers (hint: not good!).
3. A few weeks ago, "Nova" on PBS did a show about the car of the future with Click and Clack, the Car Guys from NPR. I didn't see it then, but did watch it on line. Some very interesting stuff coming along, some of it not too far away. Watch it online here.
4. Finally, I see that W. gave the commencement speach at a high school in Kansas that had been destroyed last year by a tornado. Haven't those poor kids suffered enough?
5. Peter Forsberg has probably played his last game in the NHL. It is appropriate that on his last shift, he was clearly tripped by Johan Franzen, and there was no call. Forsberg spent his entire career being mugged by far less talented players, while the officials looked on and shrugged. He deserved better, and so do the fans who pay the NHL's exoribtant ticket prices. The league is again backpedaling on enforcing the rules, and I'm sure we will be back to wholesale clutching and grabbing next year.

That is all!

Olympic violence

Will this summer's Olympics in China be a disaster? The chances keep looking better that something awful will happen before or during the synchronized swimming.

Of interest is a piece in the Economist about the Mexico City Olympics back in 1968. It talked about how the Mexican government at the time violently put down a protest shortly before the games started. I had never heard about this before.
Read the story here:

Beer and Ignorance

One of my favorite places to enjoy a beer on a sunny afternoon in Boulder is the Pearl St. Pub. It is the last place in Boulder you can just grab a beer and head out to the patio and take a seat. And, it is one of the last places on the Pearl St. Mall that hasn't been completely gentrified. There are a lot of weird characters to be found there.

Tuesday I was there enjoying a Sawtooth, reading The Economist, watching the traffic on the Mall, and overhearing the conversation at the table next to me (Can I multi-task or what!). An older foreign couple, origin unknown, was sitting with a local man who had the popular bald-guy-with-big-beard look. As I sat down I heard Bald Beard say that the US Government was going broke because of illegal aliens, and getting nods of agreement from his table-mates. “Just another moron”, I thought.

A few minutes later, Bald Beard, who I guess is an expert on everything, pronounced to his audience, with great authority, that banks like to give mortgages to people who can't make their payments, because they make more money. How, you might ask, if you're not a complete idiot? Well, it appears that they repossess the house, sell it for a profit, then write another loan that won't be paid and keep repeating the cycle. This, he said, is how Fannie May is set up to operate.

At that point I restrained myself from yelling “THAT IS THE MOST IGNORANT THING I'VE EVER HEARD!!!”. Didn't say anything, in fact, which isn't easy for me. Maybe it was because Bald Beard looked like killing me wouldn't be his first crime.

What is sad about this is that we live in an age where almost any information is easily accessible. We should be the best informed, most knowledgeable people who ever lived. Yet, it seems that our access to information is just making us dumber. The internet should cause us better informed. Instead, it is a tool for idiots like Bald Beard to find and spread this kind of nonsense. And, of course, if it is written on the internet, it must be true! It seems people love to believe a crazy story, and are just too lazy to bother to find out if it's true (remember the emails about the Bud truck driver who pulled his beer out of an Arab-run convenience store after 9/11?).

Why all the dead skiers?

Colorado ski resorts set a record this season for deaths on the slopes at 17. Of course, people are falling all over themselves to explain this dramatic increase (italics indicate sarcasm).

In fact, this is probably not a trend, just a statistical anomaly caused by the small amount of data. But those looking for a cause are pointing towards groomed slopes, saying they cause skiers to ski too fast. Here is a paragraph from the Denver Post story:

Of the record 17 fatal ski accidents this season in Colorado, nine involved skiers hitting trees that flank groomed slopes. Of those nine, seven were wearing helmets. Four more deaths followed bad falls on groomed slopes.

Okay, so here's my question: Why are they blaming groomed slopes and not helmets?

7 of 9 deaths on these slopes involved skiers wearing helmets. I don't know the percentage of skiers wearing helmets, but I'm sure it's below 70%, probably closer to 1/3. Could it be that skiers wearing helmets feel invincible and therefore ski recklessly? Does this make any less sense than the argument that groomed slopes make skiers go faster? I actually doubt either of these is to blame, since there is no trend of increased deaths of helmeted skiers, or of skiers on groomed slopes. But why blame one and not the other?

If wonder what the Freakonomics guys would say about this!

Was Bonds Just Acting Rationally?

Thanks to The Sports Economist (see link at right) I became aware of this article in Scientific American. While focusing mainly on doping in cycling, it raises the specter of game theory in an athlete's decision to take performance enhancing drugs.

Game theory relates to making decisions that will be affected by the actions of others, without knowing what the others will do. It is relevant in business, treaty negotiations, poker.....just about anything in life.

Which brings me to Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens, who, if you believe the hysterical media, are responsible for ruining baseball forever. In fact, based on game theory, they were acting rationally. According to what's been written about Bonds, he didn't get on the juice until 1998, after becoming disgusted by the records that McGwire and Sosa were putting up, and knowing they were on steroids. So, considering the risks and costs (almost nil) versus the benefits (all time home run record, and big bucks) Bonds would have been a schmuck not to have taken the juice. If everyone else is on roids, and you aren't, and they are kicking your ass and paying no penalty ( no drug testing back then) you would be a moron not to stick that needle in your butt!

We need to get over this and accept that everyone was on the juice in the past 15 years, and just accept that baseball had it's "Roid Era", just as it has had many other eras. I hardly think players bettering the performance with drugs is anywhere near despicable as baseballs Racist Era, when only white guys could play. And no one, except me, thinks that records set during that era shouldn't count (tell me Dimaggio hits in 56 games if he had better black players in the field!).

And, definitely, all sports need to take measure to make sure that the likely cost of juicing from now on exceeds the benefits, which was not the case when these guys where using.

Random Things

Just a couple thoughts about stuff going on in the world:

• The debt crisis has worked it's way into the sports world. It appears that many sports facilities were financed with bonds thru the auction market, which now has frozen. This means the costs for municipalities whose taxpayers got hoodwinked into spending their money to help out the rich guys who own the team are going to end up paying more than they thought. Hope they enjoy the games when their garbage isn't collected. Meanwhile, owners are also suffering, as they are also being forced to pay higher rates on debt incurred for their portion of the stadiums. This appears to be leading to a labor crisis in the NFL. Check out Sportsbiz or The Sportseconomist for more on this.
• Will Mugabe leave office peacefully in Zimbabwe, or will there be a civil war. Africa has very few instances of a dictator leaving peacefully.
• Yankees lose their first of the season! This is the great thing about hating the Yankees.....even if they have a great year, I am happy 60 times.

Beckham in Thin Air

The World's most famous athlete was here in Colorado on Saturday.....and no, you ethnocentric Americans, it's not Lebron James or Peyton Manning. David Beckham was in town to open the MLS season with the LA Galaxy. Oddly enough, Beckham actually played, going the full 90 minutes in a 4-0 Rapids blowout.

Beck's is certainly not the world's greatest athlete, or even the world's greatest soccer player. But the excitement he generates, particularly among the women, is fun to watch. While all the other Galaxy players got ignored ( or, in the case of Landon Donovan, booed) during introductions, there was a decidely high pitched scream when the Spice Boy's name was announced. We were sitting in the corner near where Beck's took several corner kicks in the second half, and my girlfriend Fiona, who is English, was tempted to flash him. I asked if she was trying to become "Hot Flash Spice".

As for the play of the game, the Galaxy has Beck's and Donovan and not much else, and had trouble getting the ball to Beckham where he is dangerous, or getting on the end of his beautiful crosses when they did. He also seemed to be affected by the thin Colorado air, and did a lot of standing around catching his breath.

Beckham is a guy who has always been more sizzle than steak, and I'm sure after a season here people will wonder what the big deal is about. He has never been the type of player to dominate a game, or make a brilliant individual run. He won't provide many SportCenter moments. And with a team as bad as LA, he may try to get back to Europe by Fall for the start of the season over there.