MR. & MRS.---A Review of the Literature and a Rant on Epistemology

The other day, somebody said to me, “Ya know, I think brides today are taking their husband's names more than they used to. It's a trend. I'm calling it a trend.” I wondered whether it is true.

Now you might think, as I did, that you can simply type “bride maiden name” or some such into your browser and all the data you seek would pop up more-or-less instantly. We believe this because we are typically inundated with more data than we can possibly use or absorb so we just assume that whatever we want is out there somewhere. The internet is on all the time. There are a thousand channels on cable. Talk radio runs 24/7. The chatter never stops. The flow of information never even slows down. And yet....

Nick Silver's latest book is called “The Signal and the Noise,” and I don't think I'm giving much away by telling you that part of his message is that in the search for knowledge, there has always been more “noise” than “signal” and that today the level of noise is sometimes so high that any signal is almost impossible to find. So while we tend to think the answer to any question is out there somewhere, well, just try finding it.

Or as you kids say, “It's complicated.”

One problem is the meaning of the word “name.” What is a name, anyway? Is it what's on your driver's license or what your mom calls you or what it says on your electric bill, or is it what your fellow astrophysicists call you when you deliver a lecture in Vienna? Many women employ what researchers call “situational name use,” which can last for a short while or for their entire lives. And of course, the options for names are numerous. In addition to the basic maiden name or husband's name, there are women who hyphenate the two and women who use them both without hyphenating and women who choose an entirely new name and women who remarry but keep their first husband's name as a middle name and women who remarry and simply keep their first husband's name as their surname (to the chagrin of the second husband). And with situational name use, a woman may be known by two or three or four of these possibilities depending on whether she is having Thanksgiving dinner with her in-laws or performing brain surgery or dishing out ice cream at the PTA meeting. So if you are a demographer or a statistician or an anthroponomastician and you're trying to study what women call themselves, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the word “name” means.

Also, this may be one of those areas that is so tainted with identity politics and self-interest and cover-ups that the only numbers out there exist solely because somebody has an ax to grind. There are are lot of “official” statistics like that. Crime numbers, for example. You can never believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI when they tell you armed robberies are down 23%. Not only are they predisposed to reduce the number of crimes to make themselves look good, but they have no idea how many armed robberies there were, they only know what people voluntarily tell them. The guy sitting next to you on the bus is a MUCH better source of information on whether armed robberies have increased. Rapes and burglaries too. The only thing you can believe the Police Commissioner or the FBI about is murders, because murders leave dead bodies and dead bodies are difficult to hide.

But the biggest problem is that studies of women's surnames tend to be snapshots of a particular moment in time when the study was performed. One of the most comprehensive studies of women's surnames was done by the American Community Survey, which is part of the US Census Bureau. Name use for 250,000 native-born American women was compiled in 2004 and the results were published (your tax dollars at work!) in a dreary little article called “Women's Marital Naming Choices in a Nationally Representative Sample,” and if you want to know how many women took their new husband's name or used a hyphenated name in 2004, there is no better source. But I don't really care how many women took their husband's name or used hyphenated surnames in 2004 unless you can also tell me how many women did that in 1990 and 1993 and 1997 and 1999 and 2003 and 2007 and 2009. I'm looking for a trend, remember? I want to know if there are more women taking hubby's name today, or fewer.

That's the problem with the Facebook/Daily Beast study of women's surnames as well. This is very recent (2011) and it studied 14 million women between the ages of 20 and 79 who got married in the US and were active on Facebook at the time of the survey. But it only tells you about what was happening in 2011. In addition, you can't really compare the ACS women from 2004 with the Facebook women from 2011 because the women are different and the methodology was different, and the universe of women on Facebook is very different from the universe of women in the Census database, so we are left with snapshots that can't be compared to each other.

If you are looking for a trend, there is only one useful study out there, but it concerns a group of women who are so special and strange and rich and well-educated and unusual that I have never met even one of them. This is the study of women whose marriages were announced in the New York Times. Since 1980, the Times has routinely asked these brides what name they were planning to use. There are now 33 years of data.

As a database of “American women,” of course, it's a ridiculous sample. The daddies of these women are CEOs and partners in important law firms and doctors and Congressmen and Nobel Prize winners. The girls are not merely college graduates, they went to Ivy schools or the Seven Sisters, with maybe a little Sorbonne thrown in there for seasoning (do rich girls still do that?). They never worked at Wal-Mart or dished up a plate of hash browns at a diner. Almost all of them are white. None of them marry professional athletes. I mean, they ain't typical.

But they do span the years, and if you want to compare girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 1980 with girls who went to Princeton or Wellesley in 2005, this is where you can do it. The NYT is very strict about their standards, which have not changed since 1980. They ask every woman what name she intends to use and her choice appears in the announcement. (If she is uncertain, she is referred to only as “the bride” or by some other generic name.)

And the study of NYT brides is eye-opening. It was done by Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim (guys apparently never study this stuff), and it sampled about 300 brides per year in NYT announcements from 1980 to 2001. And guess what? Contrary to my friend's suspicion, women are keeping their maiden names more often than they used to. In 1980, only 10% of these NYT babes kept their maiden names. The number then doubled around 1984 and hung steady at about 20% until 1998. Then, suddenly, the percentage shot up to 34% by 2002. Since then, we don't know. C. Goldin and M.Shim (if those are still their names), don't tell us.

So what are we to make of all this? When my friend (OK, it was actually my sister), said she thought brides were keeping hubby's name more often than they used to, I looked into it because I suspected she was correct. Now I just don't know. The available data from the NYT suggests my sister is wrong but these NYT brides are not exactly typical of anything at all, and the data stops in 2002, so how do we know what happened in the last eleven years? We don't. Maybe my sister is right and the eggheads who study this stuff just haven't caught up with the new reality.

The real lesson for me is in the flimsiness and unreliability of the data, and this is a lesson we need to learn over and over. We want truth whether it is out there or not so we think we have found it when all we have really found is noise. A few days ago, Seattle's Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center published its findings that omega-3 fish oil consumption is linked to a 71% increase in the incidence of “high-grade” (the worst kind) of prostate cancer. Who, after all the infomercials and magazine articles and advice from doctors, saw that one coming? A day later, the CDC reported that despite what your doctor has been telling you, there is no reason for you to reduce your salt intake. This comes only a few months after Michael Bloomberg's National Salt Reduction Initiative persuaded 20 of America's biggest food companies (e.g., Kraft, Goya, Heinz, Target), to reduce the salt in their products. The uncritical acceptance of scare-stories from “researchers” or politicians looking to make a name for themselves (and a few bucks) tends to be viewed as a victimless crime, but it never is. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT and the deaths of millions in the Third World. Dr. Oz and Prevention Magazine and Al Gore have a ways to go before they achieve Rachel's body count, but the day is young. Nothing good ever comes from allowing the hucksters to exploit our very human desire to know, to believe, to learn the secrets. They worm their way into your heart by persuading you they care about you. They don't. Actually, they think you're stupid.

So don't believe. Believe only in God. For everything else, demand a double blind study.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

SKYNET, SNOWDEN, AND THE NSA

We now know, from Edward Snowden's act of civil disobedience or treason or whistle-blowing, that the National Security Agency has gathered records of telephone calls and emails and internet activity and God-knows what else and they are running complex computer programs on this data in order to figure out whether I am communicating with my jihadi friends in Yemen or those guys in the militia that I used drink beer with and shoot tin cans with at the town dump outside of Dexter, Michigan. There are conflicting stories about what else the NSA is doing. Does Prism allow them to read my emails as I type them? When I ask my buddy in Vegas to put fifty beans on the Patriots in the 2014 Superbowl, will it go on my “permanent record”---the one the nuns started keeping on me in 1955?

Sometimes, when I get one of those emails asking if I want to buy a new product that will make my willy bigger, I reply with a photo of my joint and ask them for their honest opinion on whether it's big enough. Is there somebody in the 12^th sub-basement of that fortress in the Utah desert who is looking at that email right now???? And if so, did she recently graduate from Northwestern University with a major in political science?

The constitutional argument will be an interesting one, though its resolution will depend on the facts of the situation, and it's far from certain we will ever find out what they are. Defenders of the NSA claim these are simply business records from various phone companies and have nothing to do with the citizens who originally made the calls and generated the records. The righteously outraged, however, argue the NSA actions are the equivalent of the British “general warrants” that the 4^th Amendment was written specifically to forbid. “General warrants” allowed the Crown, with no particular justification, to show up at your house or hovel and toss the place, looking for contraband or treasonous materials.

At the moment, based on our current knowledge on what has been done, both arguments seem a bit extreme, though plausible. I look forward to seeing Scalia going toe-to-toe with Ginsburg on it. But there's another question, anterior to the constitutionality of the fortress and Muffy looking at my johnson. And it's a question that is not getting a lot of attention. To wit: why? Or if you prefer: pourquoi? Why are the feds going to all this trouble and building all these buildings and beating up all the telephone and internet companies for the data and sticking all the recent Northwestern graduates into cubicles deep beneath the Wasatch Range and spending a bazillion dollars doing it?

And some of the answers are obvious, I suppose. They're spending the money because they like to spend money and it's not their money anyway---it actually belongs to me and you and the Chinese. And they're beating up the communications industry because they do this with every industry. They did it with Big Tobacco and then they did it with Big Pharma and then they did it with Big Oil and Big Aerospace and Big Food. They took over the medical business and the student loan business and they're not done yet. Big Guns is still out there, for example. Maybe they're saving it for Hillary.

But why this? Why my phone records? Why my emails? Why everybody's phone records and emails? What's the point of all this?

And the standard reply, on the rare occasion anyone inquires, is that the Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration that preceded it, is trying to catch terrorists. Democrats and Republicans both say that's why the government is examining photographs of my pecker. Here's Mike Rogers, for example, commenting on the NSA meta-data vacuuming project. He's a Republican from Michigan, and he's the Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

“One of the things we're charged with is keeping America safe and keeping our civil liberties and privacy intact. I think we have done both....”

---Mike Rogers, June 9, 2013

For me, this the hardest piece of the story to swallow, that the Obama Administration is doing all this to catch terrorists. Where is the evidence to support this statement, other than the self-serving pronouncements of everybody who is involved in the damn thing? Where is there any indication they actually care about catching terrorists? In fact, doesn't it seem that the apprehension of terrorists is pretty much the last thing on their minds?

Let's start with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who you may know better as the Underwear Bomber. Umar was the genius who tried to detonate his shorts aboard Northwest Flight #253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Though he managed to set himself and part of the passenger cabin on fire, no one was killed in the incident, so we count it as a triumph of American intelligence anti-terrorist smartness. But was it?

British authorities had alerted the US about Umar six weeks before Christmas and his own father had warned a couple of CIA agents around the same time. (Dad is not nobody, by the way. He was described in one article as “the richest man in Africa,” so he appears to be the sort of VIP that governments will at least listen to when he has something important to say.) US authorities knew that Umar had been radicalized and had come under the spell of American/Yemeni jihad-mentor Anwar al-Awlaki (now deceased, thanks be to Allah, and thanks also to an Obama-directed drone strike).

And then...nothing happened. His visa remained intact. His name never appeared on the Terrorist Screening Database or the No-Fly List. Nothing. He bought a one-way ticket to the Motor City. He paid cash. And then he strolled onto an airplane with junk in his shorts and nobody stopped him. “Hey, America,” we can imagine him thinking, “I got your Christmas present right here!”

So here's the question: if this Administration really really really cares about catching terrorists, HOW THE HELL DID THEY MISS UMAR? The bad guys don't get any easier to find than him, do they?

Then there's Major Hasan, another known disciple (like Umar and like some of the 9-11 plotters) of Anwar al-Awlaki. The Army knew that Major Hasan's lectures on psychiatry often devolved into diatribes against infidels and that his business cards identified him not only as a US Army psychiatrist but also as a “Soldier of Allah.” Yet for some reason, he was never identified as a threat until the day he mowed down thirteen people at Ft. Hood. So again, if you're looking for jihadists and Islamists like you say you are, how the hell do you miss a major in the US Army who loudly opposes America's military involvement in the Afghan war because we are killing Muslims? Just asking, you know.

Then, most recently, we have Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers. In April of 2011, two full years before their spree, the Russian government started warning us about them and about Zubeidat, their loving mom, Chechnya's answer to Donna Reed. Russians are apparently not known for providing this sort of friendly cooperation, so this in itself should have been a signal that somebody, somewhere, should pay attention. But, of course, nobody did. Tamerlan's name went into a “database” and that was the end of it. The Russians even put Tamerlan under surveillance when he spent six months in a rebellious and unstable region called Dagestan, and they asked US intelligence to keep an eye on the family in case they decided to travel some more. Sorry. We couldn't be bothered. And then the bombs went off on Boylston Street.

So the question remains: what is the purpose of PRISM and the NSA meta-data crunching (and whatever other snooping protocols we haven't heard of yet)? We know what the purpose was supposed to be, and I even grant that this Administration or some Administration set up this apparatus not as some evil conspiracy but with the best of intentions. I'm sure they even catch a real terrorist once in a while, though these tend to be the sort who accidentally tie their shoelaces to the trip-wire on their way to the train station.

But isn't it obvious what happened here? The whole purpose of the damn thing—-the catching-bad-guys part---just got forgotten somewhere along the line. The ease with which snooping on private citizens could be accomplished simply became irresistible. And when this opportunity is coupled with the chance for true believers to score political points against their ideological opponents, limits are easily forgotten. For some partisans, any tactic in the war against evil, homophobic, racist, Tea Party right-wingers is morally justified. And if there is one thing we know about the Obama Administration after four and a half years, it is that it cannot look at a government agency without seeing how assets and programs can be used to advance their political objectives, funnel money to their allies and punish their opponents.

But though the Obama Administration will take whatever advantage it can of the apparatus, the picture seems somehow uglier than politics as usual, doesn't it? Obama's crew is tawdry and lawless, to be sure, and Bush was feckless and dopey and seemed to believe in less and less as the years went by. But can either of them really be held responsible for what is happening now? Or has something else occurred that neither Bush nor Obama could have anticipated? To put it another way, suppose Obama woke up tomorrow and decided to stop the parade of scandals and outrages that fill the news---from the IRS, the EPA, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the State Department, the armed services. Could he do so?

In 1900, the United States government was a lot smaller. Sometimes it wasn't very effective at what we today call “solving problems,” but that was OK because we didn't really want it to be. It wasn't everywhere, and that was how we liked it. It didn't touch everything the way it does today. You could live your life for long stretches without thinking about it.

Then it got big and then it got bigger and then it got scary-big, and it's been that way for a long time, at least since FDR. But even after it became scary-big, we always had the feeling that somebody was in charge of it. Somebody cared about the budgets. Somebody made the agencies obey the laws that created them. Somebody made sure the government was doing governmental things and not just using government power to advance some partisan ends. And if somebody did something very wrong or very illegal, they had to go to jail, or at least go away. They couldn't be part of the government after that.

But the US government doesn't work that way anymore, does it?

In the Terminator movies, the course of life on earth changed in 1997 when the machines built by Skynet became “self-aware.” At that point, they began to develop their own ideas about what was important and their own agenda for how the world should be run. The result was the near annihilation of mankind.

Something like that seems to have happened to our government. It has become “self-aware.” Maybe, like Skynet, it also happened in 1997 and we are only now noticing it. The agencies and the bureaucracy appear to act for their own account, seemingly uncontrolled by elected officials. Drip by drip, the stories leak out---hundreds of Mexicans killed by guns we gave to drug gangsters, IRS agents using their power against political conservatives or Christians, officials in high positions consorting with prostitutes in public parks, billions of rounds of ammunition bought by agencies that can have no possible use for them, electronic communications of everyone in America collected and sorted through. When questions are asked, they are ignored, or lies are told, under oath, with no consequence for doing so. In fact, no matter what the crime or the dishonesty, there is never any consequence. No discipline is imposed. No one is fired. No one goes to jail. Sometimes the people at the center of these stories even get promoted. And then the stories and the questions just fade away.

Could even Obama do anything about it at this point? I doubt it. And even if he could, if he could nibble around the edges of this leviathan, he will be gone in 2016 and the monster will still be there, pursuing its own interests, whatever they may be. The United States government is now self-aware, just like the machines in the Terminator movies, and it's not clear what any of us can do about it.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

TAMERLAN TSARNAEV AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY

The left-wing media in the US has a new meme, by which I mean a practice designed to spread its beliefs. Muslims who do bad things (e.g., jihadis, religious fanatics, and dictators), are now referred to as “conservative” Muslims. The mullahs in Iran are “conservatives,” for example, and so are the Boston Marathon bombers. Other, nicer, Muslims are called “moderates” or “liberals.” The purpose, apparently, is to connect the bad guys with “conservatives” like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson or Ted Cruz. The young, good-looking Muslims in the central square, the ones demanding elections and freedom---they are called “liberals” by CBS and CNN and the New York Times and all the rest. They're more like Joe Biden, in other words.

It's subtle. You don't notice it at first. But today, I heard it expressed more explicitly on KYW, the all-news radio station in Philly. Reporting on the election of Hasan Rowhani as Iran's new president, the newsreader described him as a “moderate” but then explained this was a relative term since the only men permitted to run for the office were “conservatives.” “It's as if all the candidates for president in this country had to be members of the Tea Party,” she explained helpfully.

Connecting foreign evil with your domestic political opponents is a tactic most famously employed by Franklin Roosevelt toward the end of World War II. In his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944, FDR looked past the war to the future of politics in America:

“One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis---recently emphasized the grave dangers of 'rightist reaction' in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”

This was the first time anyone had ever connected “rightist reaction” (what we would call conservatism), with fascism. Previously, fascist movements around the world were seen as socialist phenomena, and closer to communism than anything else. Germany and Italy were viewed as left-wing dictatorships.

In the early decades of the 20^th Century, every Western country had a lively fascist movement, though the fascist movements in different countries often had idiosyncratic features. (Mussolini had his own peculiar racialist views, for example, but he had nothing against Jews.) In the US, the home of fascism was the Progressive movement, which embraced eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Jim Crow laws and the corporatist policies of the New Deal. These associations became an intolerable embarrassment for FDR and the Democrats once America went to war with European fascists and Americans came to appreciate just how evil fascist ideas could be.

Brilliantly, in this speech, FDR showed Progressives the political solution to the problem. In one stroke, fascism became a right-wing phenomenon and nice American lefties could no longer be blamed for it. And from that day to this, we have all been taught the political spectrum FDR invented. At one end is communism and at the other is fascism. From constant repetition alone, we have all come to believe that communism is a left-wing philosophy but that fascism somehow grew out of right-wing, conservative ideas.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

NO PICASSOS FOR YOU!!!

Today, Kevyn Orr, the recently-appointed Emergency Financial Manager for the city of Detroit, met with creditors to discuss a 134-page report on the city's prospects. He is attempting to work out arrangements so that Detroit will not have to enter a formal bankruptcy proceeding, which would leave its fate up to a court. Detroit is already in default, and has suspended payments to unsecured creditors.

One issue in this continuing saga concerns the Detroit Institute of Art, the second richest municipal art museum in the country, with paintings and other art objects worth more than a billion dollars and an endowment in the neighborhood of $100 million. The collection is usually described as “encyclopedic,” meaning it contains objects from virtually all ages, styles and parts of the planet. You dig Etruscan? They got it. Van Gogh? They got him too, along with furniture, sculptures, armor, decorative items from across the centuries, iconic religious works. They are a bit short on the Elvis-on-velvet portraits I'm fond of, but they've got everything else, a billion dollars worth of it.

So Mr. Orr is going to sell off the art at the DIA in order to pay off some of the city's debt, right? Or honor its decades-old promises to pension-holders, right? Well, no. That would be an affront to Detroit's devotion to its “cultural heritage,” or something. (If you have ever been to Detroit, you are probably chuckling at the idea that the sorry little town has a “cultural heritage.” I lived there for ten years and I don't remember it.) According to Mr. Orr, the possibility of selling the art is off the table. He and those supporting him even managed to get a formal “opinion” from the Michigan Attorney General saying that the art is not simply owned by the city, but is actually held in a “charitable trust” for the people of Michigan and can never be sold to satisfy debts.

Or as Bernie Madoff was once heard to exclaim, “You mean I don't get to keep my Bentley???”

I'm not saying all of Detroit's debt was the result of Madoff-style fraud, but it wasn't exactly bad luck either. Detroit has been run by thieves and rogues for decades, and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is not the first Motown politico who found himself heading off to an extended stay with the department of corrections. Detroit got this way on purpose. They elected crooks and buffoons, and then they elected more crooks and buffoons and then they elected more crooks and buffoons. It's not easy to wind up owing several billion dollars. It takes work. It takes lies. And it takes a long time.

So the idea that Detroit has some “cultural heritage” residing in the Picassos and Van Dykes and Egyptian antiquities, and it's really really important to them and we can never ever take it away is---well, it's ridiculous. I mean, if the Audubon bird drawings were so damn important to these people, maybe they should have found a way to fund their pension plans sometime in the last fifty years, or laid off a few employees they couldn't afford, or told Kwame to pay for his own orgies. It's not like this happened overnight. I worked in Detroit in the late 1980's and it was a failed city then. The amazing thing to me is that it took this long for the Motor City to crash and bleed out.

Sorry, kids. If you don't pay your bills, you lose the mansion, you lose the exotic petting zoo, you lose the collection of medieval armor. And what, really, is the problem with selling off the art? No one is going to set it on fire. The people and museums who acquire it will pay a lot of money for it, and you can bet they will take good care of it. In fact, they will probably take a lot better care of it than Detroit would because they will have the resources to provide it with the security and atmospheric controls and restorative and curatorial services it needs.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

THIS AND THAT II

The US is the only country that taxes income earned outside the United States by Americans who live outside the United States. There's a reason for this. The US does it because it can. No other country could get away with it.

American income-earning ex-pats (as opposed to retirees), are relatively few in number, and they have no political power. Also, since they are spread all over the world, it's impossible to organize them. It's also likely that one reason they live overseas is that they are not particularly interested in US culture, including US politics. Finally, American ex-pats and sojourners do not work in other countries because they are unable to make a living in the US and thus must go overseas to support their families. Generating remittances to send home is not the reason Americans work in foreign countries.

In every other country, there is a (sometimes large, sometimes small) group of people who depend on remittances, and these remittances come primarily from one place---the United States. If Brazil, for example, decided to tax income from Brazilians living in the US, they would run into resistance from people in Brazil whose sons, husbands, etc., work in the US as cooks and maids and doctors and businessmen. That money, earned in the US, is already getting repatriated to Brazil because a piece of it is being sent back to the family. If Brazil tried to tax that money as it was earned in Chicago, there would be enough annoyed mommas in Rio to make unpleasant political noise.

*

It has taken about twenty years, but “no problem” appears to have replaced “you're welcome” as the preferred response to “thank you.” For quite a while, it was a youthful hipster usage, but “no problem” is no longer an informal or slang expression. My impression is that a good-sized majority of American English-speakers under thirty always say “no problem” in all situations where us geezers would say “you're welcome.” Fifty years from now, “you're welcome” will sound archaic or old-fashioned or prissily formal.

Another language development is the use of what I call the WWII war-movie radio alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc.) to bring the acronym-speak of the internet into spoken language. (It is actually called the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.) On the internet, for example, DC means “I don't care,” but instead of using DC in spoken language, you will sometimes hear “Delta Charlie.” This often happens when the internet acronym is obscene, like WTF. This becomes Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, largely for the humor that's in it but also because it puts an additional layer of meaning between the f-word and its expression. “WTF” itself is still a bit crude, and no archbishop would be caught dead in a ditch saying it. He might get away with “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” however, and even be thought sophisticated and cool for doing so.

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“Loosies” have returned.

Older folks, those with some memory of the 1930's and 1940's, know what they are. In the mom-and-pop corner stores of urban neighborhoods, there would always be an open pack of cheap smokes behind the counter so a customer could buy one cigarette, usually for a penny. Around 1960, loosies disappeared.

Today, with millions fewer jobs, with federal disability rolls now topping ten million and record numbers of Americans on food stamps, there are once again corner stores in poor neighborhoods where you can buy one cigarette. It will cost you more than a penny, however.

*

The checked swing is a common enough event in baseball. The pitch is delivered, the batter begins his swing and then stops himself, or tries to. If the pitch is not in the strike zone, the umpire must decide whether the batter “went around” and should be charged with a strike. If the home-plate umpire rules the pitch is a ball, the catcher may seek an appeal of the call to the first-base umpire (for a right-handed batter) or the third-base umpire (for a left-handed batter).

The checked swing call, and the appeals, cannot be found in official baseball statistics but you might be surprised by how much the checked swing has been studied by baseball geeks. See: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=20741. However, to my knowledge, nobody keeps track of how many appeals are successful and how many are denied. Considering that virtually everything else in baseball is counted or measured, this seems odd.

It has been my impression that base umpires vary widely as to their likelihood of calling a strike on a checked swing, but there is no real data on this question. Obviously, America needs to know which base umpires are more likely to call a checked swing a strike. Otherwise the terrorists have won.

The rule allowing an appeal to a base umpire is also too limited. It is only permitted on a pitch the home-plate umpire has called a ball, and it can only be requested by the catcher. The explanation usually given for the first restriction is that a base umpire would be overruling the home-plate ump if he were to change a strike call to a ball. In other words, it is felt that if the home-plate ump is certain the batter swung at a pitch, he should not have his call overturned by a colleague.

Fair enough. But the other limitation seems unfair. If the catcher can request a ball be changed to a strike, why can't the batter? Suppose there is an 0 – 2 count when the pitcher throws a ball outside the strike zone. The hitter offers a checked swing, but the umpire calls the pitch a ball. Meanwhile, the pitch skitters past the catcher while the batter, believing he has swung at the pitch, runs to first on the dropped third strike.

When the smoke clears, the batter is standing on first base but is called back to the plate to complete his at bat, with the count now 1 – 2. WHY CAN'T HE APPEAL TO THE BASE UMPIRE IN THIS SITUATION? Why can't the batter seek a ruling that yes, he really did strike out? If the catcher can ask that a checked swing be ruled a strike, why can't the batter seek the exact same ruling?

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

KAITLYN AND JULIETTE

In Florida, Kaitlyn Hunt is an 18-year-old high-school senior. Her girlfriend (name unknown, so let's call her Juliette) is a freshman in the same high school. They are in love. They have had sex. Juliette's parents disapprove of this relationship so they called the cops. Kaitlyn is now facing felony sex charges for which she could get a dozen or so years in chokey and be placed on the Sex Offender Registry for the rest of her life. The most serious charge is “lewd and lascivious assault,” which sounds like something that used to happen in London in 1852, doesn't it? I mean, seriously---the word ”lascivious” still appears in a criminal statute? When is the last time you used the word “lascivious” in a sentence non-ironically?

The story is all over the internet, of course, because they are both girls, but situations like this arise frequently, usually involving somewhat older boys and somewhat younger girls, AND THEY HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME. They should not be crimes, but in our modern age, these tales of teen love often wind up on a police blotter because they may be indistinguishable (legally) from the situation where a 45-year-old on-line creep tricks a troubled 12-year-old girl into meeting him in a motel. To those of us who are capable of making reasoned distinctions, especially those of us who may have a dim recollection of teenage love, treating Kaitlyn as a predator and Juliette as a victim is ridiculous. But that's what often happens in the land of zero tolerance.

Let me tell you what's wrong with this picture. It's the law. It's the age of consent, which for a thousand years was twelve. In the year 1000, the law recognized that twelve-year-old girls knew what sex was. They knew what it meant. They knew what it meant in 1900 as well, and they still do, of course. But in the 20^th Century, the legal age began to creep up, and now it is 16, 17, or 18 across America, depending on the state.

What has changed is the relationship between the individual and the state, or if you prefer, the nanny-state. The “age of consent” no longer has anything to do with whether a girl or boy is capable of the act of consent. It has to do with what the state deems “appropriate” or wise. A twelve-year-old boy or girl is not going to be terribly worldly or sophisticated, and will often make bad choices, but that has always been true, and it doesn't mean they don't know what sex is. This used to be the concern of the twelve-year-old's parents and relatives and neighbors and ministers and rabbis. Now, however, it has become the business of the police and the legislature and the governor. The story of the 20th Century is primarily that of the state getting larger and the individual getting smaller. The legal transfer of responsibility for a person's sexual behavior from the individual to the state is one piece of that frightening trend.

The purpose of statutory rape laws and the age of consent was to prevent evil men from manipulating and using young girls who really didn't know what the men were after. Today, the primary purpose is no longer to punish genuine criminals but rather to “protect” girls who know perfectly well what men are after but who may make choices they later regret. In 2013, the laws take those regrets, those second thoughts, and interpret them retroactively as crimes the men have committed. This new legal view of statutory rape fits neatly within that strain of modern feminism that seeks to infantilize girls and women by persuading us to view them primarily as victims, as people who cannot be held responsible for the choices they make. Hence the sexual harassment codes found on college campuses, codes which take “sexual harassment” far beyond its legal definition to include flirting or risque remarks or other types of unwanted attention that women and girls have somehow managed to deal with for millennia.

(If I were a teenage girl, I would be outraged by these laws, and I'm more than a bit puzzled that young girls seem to accept their infant status without objection. I mean, there are 17-year-old single mothers working two jobs who cannot “consent” to a sexual relationship. There are 17-year-old girls who go to Harvard and are still legally viewed as jailbait.)

I sympathize with Kaitlyn and Juliette, and I guess that means I'm not much of a feminist, but people have rights even when they are eighteen and thirteen. Kids own themselves and own their bodies and sometimes fall in love and sometimes burn with a lust that cannot be reasoned with. That's one part of the human condition. When I was a teenager, nothing short of a gun to our heads would have prevented my girlfriend and me from doing what we wanted to do with each other. Parents, priests, disapproving aunts, policemen---none of them would have had any effect on us (and some of them tried).

My girlfriend was not a “victim” and I was not a “criminal” by any definition of those terms that make sense in a free society. And neither are Kaitlyn and Juliette.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

GOING CLEAR---A Book Review

Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and I have now read two of his books. The first was “The Looming Tower,” published in 2006, which remains the book on the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and the jihadist movement. Beginning in the 1920s, with the carving up of Arab lands by Western powers following WWI, and telling the story to the present, “The Looming Tower” is the fruit of years of dogged and thoughtful research, and the story is rendered so carefully and respectfully that you will understand Islamism by the time you get to the end.

But that's not the book I'm recommending today.

If you're like me, you find the Church of Scientology fascinating in a five-car-pileup-on-the-Boulevard sort of way. There's Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch and there's John Travolta and other celebs, and there's Si-Fi writer L. Ron Hubbard behind it all, and there's lawsuits and claims of abuse by former Scientologists and there's Germany banning them as a cult, and a hundred other snippets you've seen in the newspapers. But what's it all about, really? Is it actually a religion, with a God and a theology? Why are its acolytes so fanatical in their devotion though the whole thing seems (to an outsider) to be about 50% pure goofiness and 50% money-making scheme? Does the church really hold its fallen-away members in captivity? And is John Travolta gay?

Having read “Going Clear,” Lawrence Wright's latest book, I now get it. I understand why people join and why people believe in it. I understand that my previous view of L. Ron Hubbard as simply a flim-flam man was wrong, superficial, and unfair. He was in fact a genius and a visionary. At the same time, he was far more evil, far more power-mad, and far more monstrous than I had ever imagined.

The first half of this book concerns the life and times and madness and genius of Hubbard. The last half is primarily about David Miscavige, who took over Scientology after Hubbard's death and functions as the first popularizer. He is Brigham Young to Hubbard's Joseph Smith. If Hubbard were Jesus, Miscavige would be St. Paul. Miscavige got Scientology recognized as a religion by the IRS, recruited celebrities, and turned Scientology into one of the world's fastest-growing religions. He also presides over Scientology's current problems (including its dramatic falloff in membership), and he is largely responsible for them.

“Going Clear” is another stunning labor of research by Lawrence Wright. It is a story rendered in a matter-of-fact fashion you will find chilling at times, but in the end, you will understand what Scientology is all about.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki     

TIGER AND THE TWO STROKES

On the fifteenth hole at Augusta this year, in the second round, Tiger Woods hit his third shot into the water guarding the front of the green. His options at that point were governed by Rule 26-1, under which he chose option #3. This allows the player to return to the prior spot of his shot and drop the ball “as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played.”

This was not, however, what he did. He returned to the original area and then dropped his ball several feet away, further from the hole. He did this on purpose, though he did not know he was violating Rule 26-1 by doing so.

The penalty for an improper drop is found in Rule 27-1. There is a two-stroke penalty. However, since Tiger did not know he violated the rule, he did not assess himself the two-stroke penalty. This meant that later, when his round ended and he handed in his signed scorecard, that card was incorrect. This brought Rule 6-6.d into play:

“The competitor is responsible for the correctness of the score recorded for each hole on his score card. If he returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken, he is disqualified. If he returns a score for any hole higher than actually taken, the score as returned stands.”

A few years ago, that would have been the end of the analysis. Having signed an incorrect scorecard, Tiger would have been disqualified from the tournament. Then Rule 33-7 was passed. It states:

“A penalty of disqualification may in exceptional individual cases be waived, modified or imposed if the Committee considers such action warranted.”

“Committee” is a defined term. It is the group in charge of the competition which, in this case, was the Board at Augusta.

Unfortunately, the term “exceptional individual cases” is not defined at all. The rule gives a great deal of discretion to the tournament officials about waiving the disqualification penalty, but doesn't “exceptional individual cases” have to mean something? Something about Tiger's case has to be “exceptional,” doesn't it? Otherwise, Rule 33-7 could not be invoked. But what was it? What was “exceptional” about this situation?

Tiger violated Rule 26-1 by failing to drop his ball correctly. He did so by dropping his ball in a place not permitted under that rule. He did this intentionally. He did it on purpose. He thought about it and he decided, for strategic reasons, where he was going to drop the ball. He had a reason for doing so and he gave an interview telling the world what that reason was.

He was mistaken about Rule 26-1, of course, but the rule itself is not at all ambiguous. Tiger did not misinterpret the language of Rule 26-1. He simply did not know the rule, or perhaps confused it with other rules. In golf, however, ignorance of the rules is no excuse. The player is expected to know the rules and to assess penalties on himself if he violates them. In addition, at the Masters, there is always an official no more than a minute or two away. If Tiger was unsure about where to drop his ball, he could have called for an official and one would have appeared. He did not do so. Whether this failure was foolishness or hubris is a question he can wrestle with in the dark of night, staring at the ceiling, but such an error is attributed to the player. It always has been. And there is nothing “exceptional” about it.

The term “exceptional individual cases” must have some meaning, or it would not appear in Rule 33-7. And actually, when you think about it, it is not hard to imagine what that meaning might be.

An “exceptional individual case” might involve a local rule specific to a particular course, for example. Suppose a seaside course is built largely on sand, with many outcroppings of same hither and thither, and suppose the golf club has a local rule that deems all 23,000 of such outcroppings “bunkers” where one may not ground one's club before striking the ball. Penalizing a player for violating that rule might be unfair unless we could be sure the player had actual knowledge of it. That might be an “exceptional individual case.”

Or suppose Tiger had asked an official whether he could drop his ball several feet behind the original spot of his third shot, and the official had mistakenly told him he could. It would still be a violation of Rule 26-1, and under the rules of golf, Tiger would be disqualified for failing to assess a penalty on himself. That, however, would be palpably unfair. That would be an “exceptional individual case.” All of us would think it wrong to disqualify Tiger in that situation.

It appears that the only thing “exceptional” about this case was that it involved Tiger Woods, and it is reasonable to ask whether a lesser light on the PGA Tour would have gotten the same consideration. The very fact that one can fairly ask such a question means that the reputation of golf as a game rooted in sportsmanship and etiquette took a serious beating at the 2013 Masters.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

TOOMEY MOVES TO THE DARK SIDE, or Politics For The Time-Challenged

Pat Toomey is a Pennsylvania senator who we all thought was a constitutionalist, Tea-Party sort of conservative. Now, after his failed campaign to enact a new scheme for expanded background checks on gun buyers, it is clear he is no such thing. It happens. Guys go to Washington and they forget why they were sent there, or they get duped by other legislators and lobbyists into supporting things they don't understand. Or they simply succumb to the I'm-a-big-important-guy-and-the-people-who-elected-me-are-dopes syndrome. In Toomey's case, it appears that all these things played a role in his descent into Beltway thinking and Beltway culture.

If you support the right of free Americans to bear arms, the Toomey-Manchin Amendment was a truly dreadful bill. It did basically nothing about systematically identifying loonies who should be denied guns. It did nothing about felons obtaining guns illegally. It imposed enormous criminal penalties on various types of private gun transfers that have never been shown to cause any sort of problem. And, despite the caterwauling of Toomey, Manchin, Obama, and a thousand newspapers that no such a thing could ever happen, the bill would have allowed the federal government to set up a national gun registry.

I know these things because I read the amendment. It's not easy because there are references to other laws and regulations and you have to find out what those things say before you can understand exactly what the Toomey-Manchin Amendment does. It took a couple of hours, and that is time most people will not be willing to spend.

So here's a shortcut for the time-challenged citizen.

When Pat Toomey started speaking out in the press and in public forums to generate support for his proposal, he did something he has never done before in his public life. He started saying that his plan contained “common sense” gun proposals. This is never a good sign. When a politician, rather than telling you what the bill says or presenting arguments for it, tells you what your conclusion must be, the only rational response from the citizenry is to reject that politician's proposal (and that politician as well). I mean, it takes some nerve to do this, doesn't it? As a public servant, Toomey's job is to present his legislation, explain it to me and present his arguments in favor of it. But the conclusion is MY job. I'll decide whether the bill is a good one or whether it's “common sense” or simply nonsense. When a politician assumes a conclusion in this manner, it's an insult to his audience. Are we fools? Are we morons? Are we incapable of assessing data and weighing arguments and deciding what we think?

Assuming one's conclusion, or “begging the question,” was a cheap rhetorical trick when Aristotle started bitching about it 2300 years ago (and it wasn't exactly new when he showed up). Yet today, left-wing ideologues use it constantly. I put “common sense gun control” in my browser and got 68 million hits, and the first twenty pages of them were all from Democratic politicians or left-wing newspapers. EVERY leftie does this. Obama has not given a speech about guns in which he does not refer to “common sense” gun laws. Pelosi does it. Bill Clinton does it. Ed Rendell. Michael Nutter (constantly). Bloomberg (of course). And now, sadly, we must add Pat Toomey to that list.

You have all seen these phrases: “sensible laws,” “reasonable measures,” “common-sense regulations.” The left does it because their supporters don't care much about reasons or arguments; they just need to be told what the right people are thinking. (You may have noticed, for example, that approval for gay marriage has spiked upwards among black voters now that Obama has changed his public position on it. These folks were not persuaded to change their minds---they simply “evolved” once Obama did.) The left is also the home of the newly-identified low-information voter, a group that is completely uninformed and highly opinionated. They have no time for, or interest in, arguments or persuasion. The time required for a slogan or bumper sticker is the measure of their attention span for matters political. Arguments are wasted on them, but the phrase “common-sense gun control” tells them all they need to know.

This is done with every issue, not just gun control. The gay marriage issue is now called the ”marriage equality” issue by the left, for example. This turns it into a question solely of discrimination, and we all hate discrimination, don't we? Suddenly it has nothing to do with traditional values, the protection of children, inheritance law or anything else. Similarly, regarding the treatment of captured terrorists, the left tells us we need to decide whether we approve of “torture.” We do not, of course, but neither are we entirely certain that waterboarding or playing loud music fits the definition. For most of us, that is the question. For the left, however, the conclusion is simply assumed. Whatever practice they disapprove of is “torture,” and no further argument is permitted.

For you time-challenged voters, or for those who just can't be much bothered with political blather, my suggestion here can save you a lot of time. It doesn't even matter what the issue is. If a politician is presenting you with arguments for his proposal or his point of view, support him. Vote for him. Occasionally, he will be wrong but occasionally all of us are wrong. In the long run, we will all be better off. But if instead he tells you what to think and what to conclude, walk away. Show him the contempt he is showing for you. Scorn him, mock him, and vote against him the first chance you get, whether his name is Barack Obama or Pat Toomey.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

GAY MARRIAGE IN THE SUPREME COURT


Gay marriage is in the Supreme Court today, and I have only one prediction regarding their decision: regardless of what they decide on Prop 8, there is no chance they will decide that same sex marriage is protected by the US Constitution and must be permitted across the land.


In order to do so, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have to support that view (otherwise the votes would not be there).  She will not.  Over the years, she has made it clear she believes that big political/moral issues should be settled by the democratic process, and not by the Court.  She has described Roe v. Wade as a "mistake" for this reason, though one can assume her personal view is pro-choice on the issue of abortion.


Back in the Pleistocene Era, my criminal law professor at the University of Michigan, Yale Kamisar, made this same argument.  The big moral issues (capital punishment, abortion, etc.) are not addressed by the Constitution, and pretending they are undermines the rule of law.  These are political issues and must be decided by the people, either nationally or state-by-state.  Supreme Court justices have no law to apply on these questions so all they can bring to the table are their personal prejudices.


Or, as Mark Steyn asked today: "Why not ask Punxsutawny Phil?"



Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

GENERAL MATTIS RETIRES

Four-star Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis was unceremoniously dumped as head of CENTCOM in January and retired on March 22, 2013. Often called "The Warrior Monk," he was revered for his toughness, his erudition, and his loyalty to his troops. Basically, this is a guy who composes poetry in Greek, but was equally at home leading a charge into a firefight. An expert marksman and a natural leader, he spent more than forty years in the USMC.

Some of his remarks over the years have been saved, and circulated, by other Marines:

"The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some bastards in the world that just need to be shot. There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim."

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually it's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling."

To Iraqi tribal leaders in 2003: "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I am pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I'll kill you all."

"There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don’t think you do. It’s just business."

"Fight with a happy heart."

"I don't lose sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word."

"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

MY PENNDOT ADVENTURE

With my birthday approaching, it was time to get my new driver's license picture taken, so I drove up Ogontz Ave. (way up---it was further than I thought) to the PennDot office, handed my paperwork to the receptionist and got a ticket informing me I was now Customer Number A155 and would probably be waiting about twenty-five minutes.

There were fifty chairs in the waiting area by the picture-taking desks and there may have been six that did not have butts in them. I commandeered one (an empty chair, not a butt), and surveyed the landscape.

There were two camera stations. The one on the left was manned by a woman in a full Muslim niqab, and she was so tiny and she was covered by so much fabric that I wondered whether there actually was a woman in there somewhere rather than some animatronic device that simply moved the acres of clothing around and made human voice noises. Above her was an electronic screen informing the waiting public that she was now serving Number A137.

The station on the right was staffed by a large woman. She was so large, in fact, that my first thought about her was that, if any substantial portion of her was actual muscle mass, she would be in a position to challenge Michael Oher (to whom she bore a superficial likeness) for his position as left tackle on the Superbowl Champion Baltimore Ravens. It did not take long to realize, however, that the muscle mass was lacking. Most NFL left tackles are a lot like aircraft carriers but are much more nimble. She too resembled an aircraft carrier, but with none of the quickness.

As I arrived, her electronic message board indicated she was helping Number A136. However, she immediately arose, proceeded into the back room, and her message screen went blank. Oh, dear. Had she left the building? Had she gone home for the day? Were we now reduced to just one camera station staffed by six yards of worsted wool that might or might not have a little Muslim lady inside it?

I sat. I waited. Ten minutes later, the aircraft carrier returned, holding a roll of scotch tape, which took her another four minutes to open and insert in her dispenser. Mystery solved. Her message board then lit up and she continued her transaction with Customer Number A136.

The mini-Muslim was still working on Number 137. I had been in the house for fourteen minutes and I was still the eighteenth person in line. I began to suspect my wait might exceed twenty-five minutes.

The joint was devoid of architectural nuance and the decor was minimal. You would think there might be a photo of the Governor or a few pictures of waterfalls or mountaintops or another natural wonder found somewhere in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Nope. Nothing like that.

The only things on the walls were six large posters, identical, each proclaiming the house rules in a bold black capital-letter font I remember seeing a lot of in ”Triumph of the Will.”

NO EATING

NO DRINKING

NO SMOKING

NO CELL PHONES

Gambling was permitted, I suppose, though I didn't really see anything to bet on.

There was a white dropped ceiling made out of the same stuff they pour coffee into at WaWa. The walls were a uniform, washed-out pastel blue. The floor? Linoleum, of course--- the Muzak of floor coverings. I've been in nicer rooms. In fact, I've been interrogated by police in nicer rooms.

Several minutes passed. Then, almost simultaneously, both message boards flipped. The aircraft carrier was now serving A138 and the niqab was working on A139. Progress!

There were at least a hundred fifty people in the place seeking learners permits, driving tests, ID cards or (like me) driver's license pictures, and since we were not allowed to eat, drink, smoke or use our cellphones, well, that list pretty much exhausted the universe of killing-time-at-PennDot behavior any of us could imagine, so we all just sat quietly and waited for the universe to end. I didn't see anyone doing charcoal sketches of our little outpost and I didn't see anyone writing their memoirs. No one was folding origami paper into a swan and no one was doing yoga. No one was holding a book or newspaper---not one person out of a hundred fifty was reading. I had brought some Alexis de Tocqueville along for a laugh, but never cracked it.

I did allow myself to speculate briefly on what de Tocqueville would have made of this scene and decided he would have attributed it to the influence of lawyers on the American experiment. He liked American law and lawyers in a general way, but he also saw their downside. He would have recognized the PennDot-ization of America as one of the perils embedded in our founding.

A half hour had passed. It seemed likely I would soon be 15^th in line, or even 14^th, but my best guess was a total wait time of two and a half hours. I leaned over to the woman sitting next to me. “I'm ditching,” I said, “so if your number is above A155, you just moved up a slot.” She smiled ambiguously, which meant she either had moved up a slot or she thought I might be a psychopath.

Walking out the door, I glanced back. Today PennDot, tomorrow Obamacare, I thought. Five years from now, this is what doctor's offices will be like too.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

PHILLY'S TOP DOWN MAYOR

The Philadelphia International Cycling Championship was the biggest bike race in America, drawing tens of thousands of spectators, attracting the top cycling teams from around the world and generating an estimated $15 million in revenue for local businesses. It is no more, largely because Michael Nutter views the life of a city as something that must be handed down from the government. It is not the first event he has chased from Philadelphia and it won't be the last.

Like most such events, it was hatched not by bureaucrats but by dreamers---David Chauner, Jerry Casale and Jack Simes III, three biking enthusiasts with ties to the city. In 1985, the young men realized their vision on the streets of Philly for the first time, in a race won by Olympian Eric Heiden. Then in 2009, as Chauner told the Inquirer last week, the city's fees tripled. The race limped along for three more years, but the red ink finally spelled the end.

The Dad Vail Regatta began in 1934 and, after a hiatus for WWII, has been held on the Schuylkill since the 1950s. It faced a fate similar to the bike race in 2009 when the Nutter Administration decided it needed to more than double the city's fees. In November of that year, the Regatta announced it was moving to Rumson, New Jersey because it couldn't afford Philly any longer. Only after an intervention by Bob Brady was the regatta saved, at least temporarily.

Other events have not been so lucky. The Pennsylvania Barge Club (founded 1861) resides on Boathouse Row. Its “Philadelphia Frostbite Regatta,” however, is no longer run on the Schuylkill but on the Cooper River in Camden. The races were forced to leave in 2009 when the Nutter Administration boosted its demands on the organizers to $9000 per year.

And then, of course, there's Love Park, where Michael Nutter made his bones in Philly politics.

As the popularity of skateboarding exploded in the 1990s, big names in the sport began to tout the wonders of Love Park as a venue. Some of them with international reputations (Ricky Oyola, Josh Kalis, Anthony Pappalardo), were seen in the park and attracted crowds of spectators for their tricks. ESPN, which created the X-Games, took notice of the phenomenon and tried to make this city the home of the Games, signing a two-year deal to bring the event to South Philly.

This was too much for Councilman Nutter, however. He sponsored the bill to ban skateboarding in all public places and shepherded it through City Council, after which it became law with Mayor Street's signature. It had to be done, we were told, because skateboarding would cause a million dollars in damage to our parks every year. Sound a bit inflated? Or hysterical? It does to me too, and there was never any documentation offered for this estimate. But even if it were true, it would have been chump change compared to the estimated $40 million the X-Games would have brought in to local businesses.

What is particularly sad about the X-Games saga is that skateboarding developed in Love Park purely by accident. When Edmund Bacon first conceived of Love Park in 1932, he had no idea that sixty years later the design of the place would turn the park into a mecca for skateboarders around the world. Yet to a visionary like Bacon, that serendipitous result was the very thing to be cherished about a city. Accidents happen in urban spaces, wonderful accidents that bring people together in ways no one can anticipate. This was why, in 2002, the 92-year-old Bacon rode a skateboard in Love Park as a protest against the dreary legislation Councilman Nutter had pushed through.

I cite the “economic impact” figures for these events ($15 million for the bike race, $16 million for the Dad Vail, $40 million for the X-Games) for one reason---to make clear that Michael Nutter's hostility is NOT based on any rational economic criteria. If the bike race brings $15 million to Philadelphia businesses every year, that money (in hotel rooms, restaurant bills, souvenirs, hot dogs, transport, shopping, etc.) generates tax revenue for the city far in excess of the extra $200,000 or so the city tried to extract from the organizers. Beyond that, of course, one would hope that elected officials in Philadelphia would have a more general assumption that money coming into Philly businesses is a good thing, and that prosperity should be encouraged for its own sake. This is apparently not the case.

I don't know why Michael Nutter does this repeatedly to events beloved by city residents. I'm not his shrink. I can only conclude that, since he is hurting Philadelphians (and the city treasury) by his actions, his primary motive is to exert government control (at any cost), over the sometimes untidy life of the city. Unless the city government itself organizes these festivals and sports extravaganzas, Michael Nutter seems to view them as somehow illegitimate and unworthy of preservation. The Mayor was very much in charge of the Labor Day concert at the Art Museum (though he left most of the details to Jay-Z). No problem there, I guess. It is only the events that are produced organically from the citizenry that excite his ire and his desire to impose the heavy hand of government.

A different sort of city government would view events like the bike race and the Dad Vail and the Frostbite Regatta and Love Park skateboarding as civic assets, and manifestations of Philly's unique spirit. A different sort of mayor would understand he is merely a temporary caretaker whose job it is to nurture and support the dynamism that bubbles up from neighborhoods and entrepreneurs and community organizations. Instead, it seems that Michael Nutter, as both a councilman and now as a mayor, views the real treasures of the city as untidy little annoyances that must be regulated, taxed, or stamped out.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

CLICHE FILE: "At the end of the day..."

(An occasional series on expressions we need to stop using immediately.)

At the end of the day,

• ...it gets dark.
  
  
• ...you watch Jeopardy.
  
  
• ...you put on your comfortable shoes.
  
  
• ...God has placed “night.”
  
  
• ...it is best to make a comprehensive list of everything that might possibly go wrong the next day, and then, after each item, provide a list of possible countermeasures and the equipment or supplies needed in order to implement those countermeasures---then log on to Amazon and order those supplies and that equipment.
  
  
• ...they're just waking up in Japan.
  
  
• ...it may be wise to choose a “designated driver.”
  
  
• ...your wife may want to know what you have been doing when you were supposed to be at work.
  
  
• ...if the first thing you do when you get home at night is make yourself a 16-ounce martini, some people will think you might have an “issue.”
  
  
• ...you need to remove those floppy, colorful, bootlike things on your feet and leave them in the breezeway for a while. I love you, Darling, but they reek.
  
  
• ...I like to pop in my copy of “Remains of the Day.” It's not the sort of thing you want to watch first thing in the morning.
  
  
• ...it's a good time to check on your supply of supplemental oxygen because you never know when you will be asked to ascend elevations in excess of 20,000 feet.
  
  
• ...they just start up another damn day.
  
  Copyright2013MichaelKubacki

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HARBAUGH'S FOLLY AND HOLDING FOR FREE; Observations on the 2013 Superbowl

Two thoughts about the Superbowl (the “Har-bowl”) just concluded:

First, 49er's coach Jim Harbaugh made a fundamental game-playing error in the second half.

I know that football coaches, unlike other types of coaches, are rarely game-players. They don't play backgammon or chess or poker or Risk or other types of strategy games. They have more in common with military generals in that their primary task is to manage, and control, and inspire a bunch of young men and get them to achieve certain group goals. It's a very difficult job, especially considering the psyche of the modern pro, and anyone who can keep fifty immature, imperfectly-educated, testosterone-fueled, filthy rich world-class athletes with no manners on something like “the same page” has no time to learn how best to play games and make the correct strategic decisions at crucial moments. I understand that.

But why can't they hire somebody to do it? Why won't they hire some numbers geek to tell the Jim Harbaughs of the world when to punt, when to kick a field goal and (above all) when to try a two-point conversion? These are not “football decisions” like whether to blitz on a particular play or whether to replace your left tackle because he can't walk anymore, and they don't depend on how a particular coach “feels” at that moment. They are objective, numbers-based determinations to be made about what should be done in a specific situation in the game of football. And since they are objective, there is one correct course of action. And Jim Harbaugh, like many coaches, has no idea what that correct course of action might be. In fact, it is unlikely Harbaugh is even aware there is a correct course of action.

So why won't the 49ers hire somebody to tell him?

With 14:49 left in the 3^rd quarter, the Ravens led 28 – 6. Jim Harbaugh was down by 22 points. What, at this point, were the 49er's chances, and what could they hope to accomplish? How could they possibly get back in this game, and win it?

The obvious answer, the starting point, is obvious: score three touchdowns and four extra points. That's the 22; that ties it up. Then you have to shut down the Ravens as well. This had to be what Harbaugh was thinking and hoping and planning for. And in fact, the almost-successful 22-point comeback was the entire story of the second half, up until the last couple of minutes.

And as luck would have it, 14:49 in the third quarter was the moment the San Francisco fortunes turned around. Seven minutes later, they scored their first touchdown of the game and presented Jim Harbaugh with a critical game-playing decision. Assuming their dreams would come true and they would score the three touchdowns they needed, how should they approach the question of the four extra points? When do they go for two?

There is one right answer to this question.

For the analysis that follows, for simplicity's sake, we will assume the chance of kicking a single extra point is 100% and the probability of success for a two-point conversion is 50%. The real probabilities, from years of NFL data, are very close to those numbers. A missed kick on an extra point is extremely rare, and NFL teams succeed on two-point tries almost exactly half the time.

Since the 49ers actually scored the three touchdowns they needed, we got to see Jim Harbaugh's decision on the critical strategic question of when to go for two. (A field goal by each side at the beginning of the fourth quarter did not change the 22-point comeback equation.) He chose to take single points after the first and second touchdowns and try for two only after the third touchdown. Since the chance of making a single two-point conversion is 50%, this meant that Harbaugh's strategy had only a 50% chance to tie the game even if his 49ers succeeded in scoring the three touchdowns and holding the Ravens. This was not the optimal strategy.

In this situation, down 22 points, when a coach needs one two-point conversion to go with his three touchdowns, he must go for it at the first opportunity, after the first touchdown. If he makes it, he need only kick single points after the next two scores. But even if he fails, he has an additional chance. He can still get his four extra points with two-point conversions on both the second and third touchdowns, and that possibility would have provided an additional 12½% chance of success. By pursuing his optimal strategy and going for two on his first touchdown, Harbaugh would have given himself a 62½% probability of scoring 22 points on the three touchdowns. By waiting until the third touchdown to try for two, however, he limited himself to only a 50% chance of tying the game. And he gained exactly nothing by doing this. His failure to understand the situation (or his failure to have somebody on the sidelines capable of making the right decision for him) simply cost the 49ers that 12½% chance.

This is not to say the 49ers would have tied the game even if Harbaugh had done the right thing, of course. And even if the 49ers had tied up the game with ten minutes left (when the third touchdown was scored), there was no guarantee they would ultimately win it. But that cannot excuse Harbaugh's decision. This was a fairly simple math and logic problem, and he got it wrong in the most important game of the year and possibly the biggest game of his career. There is no logically-defensible reason for what he did.

Elsewhere, I have written about the 15-point deficit in pro football, and why it is best for the trailing team to go for two on the first touchdown in its comeback. The reason is that 15 points is not “two scores.” It's either two scores or three scores and you won't know which it is until you try the two-point conversion. Since it is essential for the trailing team to know whether the 15 points is two scores or three scores, the team should go for two as soon as it can. If it fails in the attempt and trails by 9, it will at least know that it has failed and will have to score twice more to overcome the 9-point deficit. There is really no reason to wait.

If a team is trailing by 15 points, however, and waits until its second touchdown to go for two, it does not actually reduce its chances of tying the game. A team down by 15 needs one two-point conversion and their probability of getting that two-point conversion is the same whether they try it after the first or the second touchdown. This is not true when the gap is 22 points (or 29 or 36 or 43), however. What Jim Harbaugh did significantly reduced the 49er's chances of tying (and ultimately winning) the Superbowl.

*

On the Ravens' intentional safety at the end of the game, the ball was snapped with twelve seconds left. The punter then ran around a bit before stepping out of the end zone with four ticks on the clock. It should have been easy to run out the clock on this play and the Ravens failed to do so.

The Ravens had ten blockers. The 49ers had, at most, ten guys rushing the punter. All the Ravens have to do on this play is assign a player to each rusher and have him wrap his arms around the guy until the clock expires. If necessary or desirable, each Raven could simply pick one guy, tackle him and sit on him. There would be flags all over the field, but (as Hillary would put it), what difference does it make? The penalty for offensive holding in this situation is to award the defense a safety.

In effect, on an intentional safety, there is no penalty for holding.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki