There goes my Botha ‘08 jokes

After the passage of legislation that permits torture, I had it in mind to run some sarcastically-minded campaigns to encourage people to consider President’s who would have the "courage to use the new powers of the office against our enemies."  One of my candidates was P. W. Botha, who passed away today.   I was a little nervous about writing posts about the joke, because it would certainly not have been my attempt to trivialize the suffering of those who were the victims of apartheid.  Instead, I wanted merely to point out that the parallels between such leaders and our own, while certainly not synonymous, are too close for comfort, and I was going to try to add to that discomfort with my faux Presidential campaign.  As Botha died today, I suppose it’s either a sign that I should not dare such satire, or that I should prepare to re-brand the campaign: Bagosora ‘08.  Again, I do not wish to trivialize the suffering of their victims, instead I want to keep it alive in the public’s consciousness.  Can Bagasora ‘08 contribute to this goal, or would it be just tasteless? 

Radical Redistributive Libertarianism?

Totally random thought for the day that is not at all thought out (I’m in a hurry to get ready for calss with enough time to buy Halloween candy).  The standard libertarian position contains at least these two propositions: (1) that the state shouldn’t make choices that in general could be made by individuals and (2)  taxing for anything besides mutual protection is inherently unjust. 

There are lots of reasons to think that the second proposition is questionable, but what about the first?  The first doesn’t really lead us to a libertarian position if we don’t have either arguments about justice or efficiency that libertarians find compelling.  If we were to expand the list of desirable public goods beyond mutual protection (which we must if we want to make sure that the mutual protection agency will actually mutually protect everyone, which presumes that this entire "inertial frame" modeling like Nozick does is even a relevant political perspective, which it might not be).  Anyway, we can very easily loosen the "justice" constraints by reprioritizing our aspirations to look more liberal or civic republican. 

The trickier proposition seems to be the economic efficiency arguments.  The neo-classical assumption is that micro-economic efficiency corresponds direclty to macro-economic output.  Studies like Goodin, et al’s The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism provides solid data that contests this model by showing that real per capita GDP growth between the US, Germany, and Holland were not noticeably different despite their difference in redistributive approaches. 

Why do I mention all of this?  Well, I was thinking about private insurance schemes, and part of the problem of controlling costs and reasonable treatment options seems to be related to the lack of alternative choices.  But, rather than have state programs take over, what would happen if we simply redistributed a lot of money from wealthy to the poor so that people could afford to go to the dentist, doctor, psychiatrist, for routine visits even if they were uninsured?  Would this bring the price down?  Would this not allow people to individually decide if they want to "chance it" on having health insurance or not in a real way since they could afford to pay for it if they wished? 

This of course does not solve the problems involved with corporate influence in government spending ad regulation of medical products and procdures, but I wonder if just giving the least advantaged lots of cash wouldn’t be a better way to work through welfare problems.  Anyway, this ranks, as ideas go, well beneath the cocktail napkin draw-up, so any thoughts on what’s missing, or why this makes no sense are greatly appreciated. 

Fearing Race Day

"Am I passing the test?  Can I be like the rest?"  -Steadman

A little over a month ago, I started running again.  Now, the big race day that I signed up for a week into the personal revolution is merely days away.  I’m very worried.  I’m worried that I’m not going to meet my goal of running this 5k in under 24 minutes.  I’m worried that I can’t beat the 13 year old version of myelf in a race.  I’m worried that, like I sometimes worry about with my career, I will underachieve after all of this hard work.  That the verdict on all of this will be "should have done better". 

I have lost about 20 pounds, I have quit drinking soda, and started playing tennis again and am trying to teach myself the violin (you DON’T want to be around for that last one).  People have said that I look very fit, and very healthy, and it’s nice to hear.  But the fact is that the appearance and the substance do not adequately match.  I am still slow, much slower than I want to be.  The fact is that the 18 year old me could run four miles in the time it will take me to run three.  That silly, unfocused, bad-diet, kid can still run circles around me, and while I don’t ever think I will catch him, I’d like to at least run some respectable times compared to what he could do.

It was almost ten years ago today that I ran my last ever 5k race.  I am hoping for the best, but I am worried that I am going to run an ugly, ugly time.  I’m worried I will get injured during the race and have to limp to the finish, I’m worried that I’ll start to fast and I didn’t work my recoveries hard enough this last month.  I’m worried that I tapered too soon/too late/too short a distance/ too many track days. 

I’m worried because while everyone thinks its great that I have started running to get in shape.  I know in my own heart it’s not true.  In fact the opposite is true.  I got in shape so I could run again and I really want  to be proud of my race this weekend.   

More Fun With Screen Capture

Here’s a game for you: find all the things on the front page that aren’t about sports or are advertisments:

We’ve Done Better

I must say that I’m not impressed that Steele was put on the defensive by Maryland Debate considering they don’t seem to have been able to crack the top ten in any tournament so far this year.  Who’s running this rabble that used to be my team anyway?  We can’t even grab a top ten at UMBC? And if not, how bad must Lt. Governor Steele be?  No. Seriously.  Someone in the area needs to make sure my team isn’t dying. 

Congrats to Major League Soccer

No longer does MLS has the most meaningless regular season in American professional sports.  MLS is making reforms for next year.  What is MLB doing? 

Must. Get. Book.

My life feels incomplete without this book.  And here’s a nice writeup from The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Nationals Win! Nationals Win!

My beloved Nationals should have been the World Champs.  Let me explain.  On the verge of the worst thing to ever happen to major league baseball, I want to remind everyone that the playoffs are arbitrarily set at four entrants from each league, and the each tema plays an unbalanced schedule, meaning they play more in-division games than out of division games.  The St. Louis Cardinals, playing a vast number of games against the mighty franchises of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee, managed an astonishing 83 wins out of 162.  This was good enough to be FOURTEEN GAMES behind the New York Mets.  Before the divisions were realigned, the Cardinals were part of the NL East, and any race between the Mets and Cardinals that ended with them 14 games apart would have been called a laugher.  Yet, here the Cardinals are, about to be the World Champs for a season that should have caused major soul searching and an overhaul of the team. 

Some say the Cardinals have earned their stripes by winning all of these series against their opponents.  The Cardinals have gone what, 10-5?  Someone want to show me a major league baseball team that doesn’t go 10-5 at SOME point in the course of a baseball season?

This brings me to my Nationals.  If the Cardinals deserved to be in the playoffs 14 games behind the Mets, why not the Nats?  They were only 13 games behind the soon to-be World Champion Cardinals.  That’s not even 14 games, which is obviously, if you listen to defenders of this travesty, no real measure of how much better one team is than another.  The Nats can get hot, last year they started 50-31.  With a couple of gutsy pitching performances and some big swings from Austin Kearns and Alfonso Soriano, they oculd have torn through the listless teams who were really "just as good as they were", you know, like the Cardinals, and then by logical extension, the Mets. 

If you want an idea of how unexceptional a season the Cardinals had, here are some numbers:

The mean number of wins in the NL was 79.2.  The Cardinals had 83 wins.  The standard deviation was 8 wins for the NL this year, meaning the Cardinals are WELL within one standrad deviation of average league performance (The Nats are also within one standard deviation).  The Mets, by contrast, are over 2 standard deviations from the mean. 

The mean number of wins in the AL was 83 (the same number of wins as the Cardinals), and the standard deviation was 12.  Meaning that no one in the AL was more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean, and only the Tigers, Twins and Yankess were at 1 std. dev. away or better going in the positive direction.  The Oakland Atheletics, the last team into the playoffs for the AL, were at 93 wins, TEN GAMES better than the St. Louis Cardinals. 

The Cardinals winning the World Series is worse than the Black Sox scandal.  Heck, I’d feel a lot better if I found out the World Series was THROWN than that this is the actual results the system can generate.  What can be done about it?

Option 1: which will be popular, is that we can suck it up, and pretend that the Cardinals deserve to be champs, and everyone else is just a jealous whiner. 

Option 2: We could stagger the playoff so that the two worst records get punished more. 

Option 3: We could go "single table", have a balanced schedule, and let the four best records into the playoffs regardless of geography.  Goodbye Cardinals, hello Phillies.  Not that the Phillies would deserve to be in the playoffs more than the Cardinals simply because they won two more games.  I mean, the Cardinals are worthy world champs, and any team who wins more doesn’t mean they deserve anything more than Cardinals… and yes, it is of course SOMEHOW different for Houston and Cincinatti going in the other direction, because obviously they aren’t as good as the Cardinals.  This plan also has the added benefit of making the hope of seeing the playoffs once every twenty years slightly more plausible for Toronto, Baltimore and Tampa Bay. 

Option 4:  Have a balanced schedule (how is the wild card fair with an unbalanced schedule anyway?) and let five teams into the playoffs.  The team with the best record wins "the pennant", which carries prestige, some financial rewards, and an automatic trip to the LCS.  Then let the four other teams whittle down to one to play the pennant winner in a best of three and then best of five series.  You get more teams, the best season gets privileged more, and the best team at most waits ten days to play again, which seems just as likely to help than hurt. 

There are a myriad of possibilities, but the system is obviously broken.  The original objection to the new system, that a team with 83 wins could be world champion has been largely ignored because the fear was the first few wild cards to advance to the World Series all had 90 win seasons.  With last season’s Astro’s making it to the World Series and this year’s Cardinals probably winning it, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that those who objected to the format were absolutely correct, and we can no longer pretend that their fears aren’t justified.  It’s time for a new playoff system, one that goes the extra mile in preventing the meager from being crowned champions of the world.   

Even Better than the Real Thing

My American Politics students are getting very interested in the stories about the dirty campaign ads.  I was asked to predict who would win the big Senate race, and I told them "I’m not that kind of political scientist."  What I did tell them, what I sort of wondered out loud, is if the future of Tennessee politics isn’t unfolding on Medical Center Parkway, where tons of new business are digging holes in the ground to put in office buildings.  In the new automobile plants coming to the state, in the new people who are fleeing higher costs of living for the new jobs and low rents of Central Tennessee.  With all of these major demographic and economic changes on the horizon, it sure would be nice to think that one simple election for Senate will do a lot to change the fate of the region, but my guess is that this area’s fate is tied up with a lot of changes that could signal the beginning of a new world in Tennessee.  When histories of Tennessee are written about the times we live in now and for the next twenty years, my guess is they will write about these broader changes, and not about the political careers of Harold Ford, Jr. and Bob Corker. 

Apologies…

Sorry that it has been so long since the last post.  I had to put together my job packet for Maryland, and that required finishing a draft of my latest dissertation chapter.  Anyway, all is sane again.