Sun Tzu Says

NBA, fantastic. Also now a social controversy.

2013-04-30T21:30:00.004-04:00

1) The NBA and NBA affiliated athletes have been sort of at an unusually high place for things like diversity and tolerance for a while now (for instance, by starting the unwatchable but equally available WNBA, and obviously being a bastion of support for Obama's candidacy and Presidency), so the idea that an NBA player would be the first male athlete to come out as gay while still active, more or less, is not all that surprising. There were numerous signs this would probably be the case, from stories like Kenneth Faried's two moms, Magic Johnson's son, and so on.

2) I understand some, maybe most, of the public kerfuffle surrounding and attacking Chris Broussard's comments on OTL when ESPN (finally) got around to covering the Collins story. I'm not sure I agree with most of it though. I don't think it was hate speech to declare his beliefs, he made no overt political suggestion (regarding his views on gay marriage for example), and he clarified, as he had before, that he didn't think it should disqualify a player from playing in the NBA. I think it is fine to disagree that his interpretation of the Christian faith should apply to other Christians, or to people who are gay and Christian, and so forth. I'm not sure he rises to being a bigot on the basis that he thinks something that some other people do is a sin however. Lots of people presumably believe adultery is a sin under a Christian interpretation. They are not bigots for believing this to be a serious flaw of people who are unfaithful in their marriages. People in other faiths or with different interpretations of Christianity think alcohol or pork or working on Sundays are sins too. Again, these are not bigotry based associations for alcoholics or bacon lovers or football players. It could rise to that level if, according to that belief, one felt they should discriminate against athletes and work to prevent their ability to play in a professional league (as it would if they discriminated against someone who was black or Jewish or Muslim or Christian, or a bacon loving alcoholic for that matter), and to some extent if they believed public policy should share their personal religious beliefs and discriminate against homosexual couples, or people who are unfaithful in marriages or who consume alcohol, or whatever else is classified as mortally wrong by some religious text and its interpreters.

But so far as I can tell, Broussard made no such statement, and mostly repeated something he had already said sometime before. To be honest, if there is anyone to be mad at here, it is ESPN for putting him on to say something that didn't contribute to the conversation significantly. Certainly there may be NBA players of a devout and particular religious interpretation would will be uncomfortable around a homosexual player. I don't think we needed Broussard to tell us that. Collins or Granderson could have said as much just as easily, and he had already said this himself some time ago. In general however, I do not think they needed to deny him a platform, that they should fire him, or that anything he said rises affirmatively to the level of some variety of hate speech. So I don't get the level of ire that was involved in him saying something unpopular. It was unpopular and unpleasant and it was from a strain of Christianity and beliefs associated therein. And that's pretty much all he said.

3) That said, when someone says something unpopular and is publicly castigated for doing so, this is not equal to the levels of repression involved or the difficulty and emotional turmoil and anguish involved in say, someone coming out publicly as gay. There are still significant parts of the country where this is not greeted warmly and matter-of-factly, where there are parents who may disown or shun their own children or (former) friends, where there are churches who will not admit someone for worship, and where there are schools and communities where one may be ostracized, beaten, or even killed, for such an admission as "I am a gay man". There are not, in general, such communities in the United States, or Western educated, industrialised societies as a whole that would do so for an admission like "I am a Christian and this is what I believe". There are places in the world where such an admission may be dangerous in those ways, and pose a particular hardship, but such places generally share an aversion both for Christians and for homosexuals (say, Iran or Egypt) and are matched by places where the STATE, not merely the extralegal use of repression by violently bigoted people as with honor killings in Brazil for example, may kill and detain and punish people for homosexuality in ways that it would not for Christians. Many of these on the strict basis of Christian teachings (say, Uganda).

I already have long tired of the mythological rantings of Christians as a persecuted minority in a nation where they assemble into an overwhelming majority of the public, and by this impose all manner of public policy upon the lot of us (blue laws, various vice laws, various forms of censorship, etc). But this latest incident of such claims of how hard it is to be "a Christian" is flatly ridiculous. There are particular views of some Christians that are commonly ridiculed, or attacked as unfair and unethical, or as unfounded or otherwise unsettled for debate in theological scholarship. I would agree this happens, but I'm not sure it is oppressive to state disagreement with these views or that these views are not held by others, or that there are theological interpretations and scholars that differ widely as to the appropriateness of those views. Likewise, there are particular groups of Christians with very strict or peculiar interpretations (say the WBC as one of the extremes, or the KKK) who are attacked for their expression of these unpopular perspectives. But being called names and being offended by the popular representation of oneself in culture is hardly a new experience when someone has had something unpopular or unpleasant to say, nor a basis for thinking one to be oppressed. These are not true hardships or emblems of persecution for other people to disagree emotionally and strongly with your beliefs, to call them bigoted, prejudiced, or ignorant.

It is a form of coercion, yes. But it is not required that one must be welcome at a NYC or San Francisco cocktail party of moderate and liberal elites in order to be free to spout opinions, facts, or even total nonsense as an American. It is not required that people agree with you for your freedom of conscience and belief to be respected and your speech unimpeded when expressing it. It is not even required that people do not socially discriminate against views they find repugnant for these things to happen. Indeed, for the coercion to have any effect, it must first cause us to reexamine these unpopular notions and beliefs, look for better more convincing or socially acceptable ways to express them, and ultimately chill our speech and expression with self censorship if we cannot do so or do not evolve in our ways. I see no evidence even that this process is mandated upon Christians as it might be for say, racists. No one is forcing a change in Christian theology and dogma upon Christians on this point.

4) Look. Christians. If you want to understand real oppression. Try being an atheist in your society here in America. Very nearly HALF of the population would not want someone like me to marry their daughter. Half of you automatically dismiss me in one of the more meaningful ways a human being can want to be (not that I'd want to marry a religious woman anyway and am quite comfortable around secularists and atheists personally for such things as surround my sex life and intimate attachments, but it's not like I'd automatically dismiss the proposition if someone were to have been otherwise suitable). A third of the population would not want to hire an atheist as a waiter or waitress, over half as a teacher, and two thirds wouldn't want one as a child care worker. Employment discrimination continues as much as possible as a result. Numerous states still have on their law books (if unenforceable and unconstitutional) religious tests preventing atheists from public service positions, and precious few public officials are elected as atheists or secularists. All while large quantities of evangelicals, Catholics, and so on continue to be elected and re-elected. To be sure, one wouldn't expect a first-past-the-post electoral system to elect many non-Christians in a society where almost 80% of the population evinces a Judeo-Christian ethic. To be sure, atheists have advantages over Muslims in that we have few obvious and open associations from which to be base a coercive system of surveillance and police profiling. To be sure atheists have precious advantages over many oppressed minorities in this society, in that their lack of belief need only never be openly expressed while racial intolerance needs only eyes, or a homosexual (or perceived so) need only appear in the company of their same-sex affectionately in any public manner. Nevertheless, this is a community of people that is told, repeatedly, that it is not trusted, unworthy, is openly disliked, and even openly discriminated against. That is not the community of Christianity, or even evangelical Christianity.

Let me know when Christianity reaches that point in America, where half the public won't trust a young Christian man with their daughter or large percentages of people won't trust someone wearing a cross necklace to serve them food in a restaurant or won't hire such a person in the first place. Or even, where we reach a point where that seems like a plausible future for our children or grandchildren to grow up into. There is no evidence such a society is likely, even with a growing number of disaffected young people from organised religions. At worst, a moderately secularist future where traditional religions are tolerated and respected private institutions as in Europe is your future. And not a society where native Christians are hunted down, beaten, cast out of society as might be arguably the case in parts of Egypt. Much less the society atheists observe for themselves today.

So. Until then, I don't want to hear it. Go fuck yourself with your sense of entitlement.

NBA Playoffs, a distraction useful?

2013-04-20T12:08:00.002-04:00

I'll be surprised if it isn't Miami versus Oklahoma City, and surprised if it isn't Miami in 6 (will take a significant injury to LeBron basically).

East is pretty lame except for the NY-Boston first round matchup and the question of how many games Miami loses on the way the to the finals. Boston if healthy could be a spoiler here just because they're a bad matchup for New York (excellent perimeter defence, and a good jump shooting team themselves to negate Chandler). But I'm not sure how healthy Garnett is. Chicago could make things interesting if Rose were to come back, but given the day-to-day injury to Noah already, I'm doubtful they'd let him back in. Even to play against the Heat. And they'd have to get past the Nets. Without Rose, their offence consists entirely of shots from 12-23 feet. Which I would not trust against the Nets' offensive firepower, even though they're weak defensively.

Later rounds, Indiana presents the most likely team to win more than one game against Miami, but I'm skeptical they could get past New York (would beat Boston and Atlanta though). Although I think Melo is better than the stat community tends to look at him, he's also not enough to win more than one game against the Heat, and even him with Tyson isn't either. I don't trust JR Smith in that series.

The West is much more interesting matchup wise. Harden versus Durant/Westbrook in round one. The injury riddled Spurs versus the Kobe-less Lakers (actually a pretty boring series I think, other than to see who gets healthy regarding Parker especially), the injury riddled Nuggets with their home court high octane high altitude games against the upstart Warriors, and then the Clippers-Grizz rematch. Only the Grizz would worry me as upset potential, indeed, I'd probably favor them mostly because I think del Negro is terrible as a coach and dropping Rudy Gay I think actually very much helped that team. I'm somewhat worried about their crunch time potential, but I'm also not persuaded that they can't attack Jordan and Griffin inside enough.

Both of those teams would also be trouble for the Thunder in round two. I don't like the Nuggets matchup with the Spurs, if healthy for either team, but I could see the Nuggets stretching it to 7 game series. A Spurs-Thunder rematch seems likely, but I also don't see anything from the Spurs that suggests their role players are about to play any better than they did last year, while the Thunder have shown their guys will show up enough. A Nuggets-Thunder matchup would be messier for Oklahoma City. Should they lose in round two, I'd trust the Grizzlies more than the Clippers to keep advancing, as they are a bad matchup for the Spurs, and play very slow in the opposite method from Denver.

A series of general rants and thoughts on the events of an early morning

2013-04-19T10:11:00.002-04:00

1) Technology is amazing. People were effectively streaming the Boston area PD scanners on the internet. I'm not sure that's actually a good thing if they're actively pursuing someone who has a modest knowledge of the internet (but then again, all they really would need is a police scanner of their own). It is however, an interesting age. Reddit also managed to identify all kinds of apparel from rather fuzzy FBI photos. I also finally discovered a modest use for twitter this morning.

2) Technology is also horrible. Within the span of a few days, people and media have made all kinds of wild and unfounded accusations toward innocent people. Including a guy who has been missing for about a month. And an uncle who doesn't sound too pleased with his nephews has had his address blasted on CNN (joining a series of disjointed half-assed coverage on these series of events worthy of the total dismissal it receives on social media networks, especially twitter). These accusations were then accompanied by streams of people from all over the country, if not the world, releasing their hate and fear upon them on social media, reporters harassing said people, and so on.

3) I have a rather jaded perspective* of law enforcement I imagine from the popular view. But when people start tweeting that it looks like Call of Duty out there, and it's just SWAT wandering down the streets of Watertown, MA, looking for the fleeing suspect and any accomplices, I'm not all that surprised. The military and federal government have made all kinds of loans and guarantees to put military hardware and gear in the hands of local police forces. They've been militarizing their force for over a decade. APCs and belt-fed machine guns can be had, and have been used, at the high end of this absurdity. Somewhat unfortunate for my concerns on this issue, the actual National Guard was being deployed also this morning after a few hours of police work. This will make it unlikely that the casual onlooker will identify the police as police. And which may be unfortunate for all kinds of reasons (a rather dubious assumption that the "army" is needed to fight terrorism for example is given more force).

4) I suspect this will perhaps weaken the push for immigration reforms. This is despite that both brothers appear to have been here legally, and for a substantial duration. In general, I wasn't likely to find everything that will end up in a final bill proposal to be that agreeable, but the broad strokes of increasing access to foreign college graduates, high skilled immigrant visas, and work-visas were at least modest steps in a positive direction for more open borders, and a more focused enforcement on actual criminals of some variety trying to migrate here. I'm hopeful that crushing the (mostly stupid or ineffective in my view) gun laws will be sufficient demonstration of power for the right that they'll forget to be bigots as well, but I'm not counting on it. They were already whipping up demonstrations against any immigration reforms before this happened. One possible hope is that the confusion of Caucasians (in the quite literal sense) who are also Muslims should put to rest some of the demands for profiling.

*5) I tend to view law enforcement with suspicion. I do not think they're there to protect myself and my legal rights, but rather that I have to do that myself. Around them. I do think most cops are doing a difficult job, and trying to do it reasonably well. I do think we could help them by being reasonably cooperative at times (as in Boston today, with an effectively martial law system in place to catch the fugitive bombers). But there's really no reason to do so if a sufficient number of both themselves and other forces in our justice system seem more interested in body counts of arrests and detentions than in enforcing laws, or in enforcing anything like a just society and rather more interested in making people obey them rather than seeing themselves as servants of our collective demands for justice, order, and peace.

Brutality, error, and violence are oppressive enough. But then there's all the systematic factors like racism, profiling (of Arab/Muslims for example, which these two should start to call into question the wisdom of, as with the weird ricin guy), stop and frisk, and the show of force power surrounding drug laws and various other causes (immigration in some communities for example). I live in a suburban society and the most likely "oppression" I will suffer personally is a speeding ticket from a cop who didn't bother to use his radar and just eyeballed my speed, and possibly an absurd interest in whether or not I was drinking if driving at a later hour or (much less likely) whether any drugs are in my vehicle. My concern isn't for myself. It's for the millions of people who don't have the luxury of being white and middle-class and up.

In fairness to cops, if I think they are assholes (unfairly at times), they're not alone. I think that of most people. The only difference is that I'm pretty sure the cop is well-armed in all cases, and only partly sure of other people.

Again with the torture. Still getting worse.

2013-04-17T13:33:00.001-04:00

Key points:

Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.

The second notable conclusion of the Task Force is that the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture.

"The SERE program was developed to help U.S. troops resist interrogation techniques that had been used to extract false confessions from downed U.S. airmen during the Korean War. Its promoters had no experience in interrogation, the ability to extract truthful and usable information from captives."

"To deal with the regime of laws and treaties designed to prohibit and prevent torture, the lawyers provided novel, if not acrobatic interpretations to allow the mistreatment of prisoners....

Those early memoranda that defined torture narrowly would engender widespread and withering criticism once they became public. The successors of those government lawyers would eventually move to overturn those legal memoranda. "

"Following the September 11 attacks, the immediate responsibility for action fell appropriately on the executive branch, which has direct control of the vast machinery of the government. It encompasses not only the nation’s military might but the president himself as the embodiment of the nation’s leadership and thus the individual best positioned to articulate the nation’s anger, grief and considered response....

....Decisions ultimately handed down by the Supreme Court overturned some of the basic premises of the administration in establishing its detention regime. Officials had counted on courts accepting that the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba, was outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States. As such, the officials also reasoned that detainees there would have no access to the right of habeas corpus, that is, the ability to petition courts to investigate and judge the sufficiency of reasons for detention." (the report goes to some lengths to make note of the pressures involved, but does not suggest this abdicates the duty of elected officials to follow existing laws and norms under some new special circumstance at their convenience, without that they should then amend those laws and norms in an official and accountable capacity, and goes to some length to catalogue the variety of ways they were shown to be incorrect, illegal, or unaccountable).

"Task Force investigators and members believe it is difficult to overstate the effect of the Abu Ghraib disclosures on the direction of U.S. policies on detainee treatment." - Basically the sunlight here on one particular place of abuse was unpleasant enough to require a change in policy finally, but not enough to start asking how that abuse came to be.

"If presumed enemy leaders—high-value targets—are killed outright by drones, the troublesome issues of how to conduct detention and interrogation operations are minimized and may even become moot." - This suggests why we now use the drones instead of the expansive indefinite detention regime of the Bush years. Which is to say, we're still avoiding and evading the question of whether the indefinite detention regime itself is justifiable and legal.

"The following techniques and treatments have both been used by the U.S. against detainees within its control and been deemed torture, abuse or cruel treatment in DOS’s annual Human Rights Reports...

Stress Positions...temperature manipulation... waterboarding... sleep deprivation... threats of harm to person, family, friends,... sensory overload (light/noise)..., sexual humiliation...., prolonged solitary confinement..., forced nudity..., confinement in small space....forced prolonged standing"

"the ICRC highlights a series of “serious violations of International Humanitarian Law,” some of which are “tantamount to torture.” The primary violations occurred largely in the beginning stages of the internment process, except for those labeled “high value,” who experienced mistreatment throughout their detention. Some of the violations... include

Brutality against protected persons upon capture and initial custody, sometimes causing death or serious injury" (a number of prisoners died worldwide from our actions, not from age, infirmity, or sickness).

"Absence of notification of arrest of the persons deprived of their liberty to their families causing distress" (an understandable notion for high value targets early on to gain tactical or strategic advantage, but not for their prolonged captivity).

"Physical or psychological coercion during interrogation to obtain information" (eg, torture).

"Prolonged solitary confinement in cells devoid of daylight"

"Excessive or disproportionate use of force against persons deprived of their liberty resulting in death or injury during their period of internment"

Other events and notable quotes:

"At Camp Bucca in Iraq, six sailors were accused of abusing detainees by means that included throwing them into a cell they had filled with pepper spray"

"The techniques included banging pots and pans to scare the detainees, blaring loud music, and severe beatings.“The sounds were meant to disorient, but also to mask the screams.” If the detainees sustained injuries during beatings, the military intelligence officers who had medical training “could stitch up or bandage injuries, avoiding a call to the medics and an entry in the logbooks that the Red Cross could read."

"In the summer of 2003, the interrogators threw a detainee against a concrete wall, punched him in the neck and gut, kicked him in the knees, threw him outside, and dragged him back in by his hair. For the entire two-hour ordeal, the prisoner wouldn't talk; Ben later found out he spoke Farsi and couldn't understand the interrogators’ English and Arabic"

"Engaging in torture damages the torturer. The starting point for torture is the dehumanization of a detainee. Those who dehumanize others corrupt themselves in the process; dehumanization of other is a paradigm shift in how two people relate to each other, and as such it has an impact on both sides of the relationship. Once the detainee’s human status no longer matters in the mind of the torturer, he or she can unleash personal, even national, aggression. The detainee is subjected to suffering and the torturer lets go of reason, one of the marks of humanity, and descends into rage"

"“The country doesn’t really understand the cost. … [O]ne JAG officer came in and said that British military captured a terrorist — not a terrorist suspect, a terrorist — in Basra and released him. They gave him 48 hours head start and only then notified American authorities. They did not have detention facilities [at that time], and they did not trust either the United States or the Iraqi forces not to abuse this individual. So rather than engage in potentially aiding and abetting criminal activity, [the British forces] thought that the least worst option was to release a terrorist back into the field.”"

"I was chained to the floor and the guards were holding my head. … [T]here were many of them, seven or six or more, they were holding me down to the floor so there was no fear of [me] fighting [back] or anything like that. Both eyes were completely open so [one of the guards] put his fingers and … started to push inside my eyes. … I could feel the coldness of his fingers [as] he was pushing hard digging into my eyes and I didn't want to scream because I didn't want to frighten the people in the other cells and then the other thing is I didn't want to give them that satisfaction of me screaming on the floor. I didn't scream, so he was pushing even harder digging inside my eyes. The officer standing was saying “More, more” and this guard was saying “I am, I am,” shouting to the officer. And then, what I know is lots of liquid coming out from both of my eyes, I couldn't see anything for three days, I think. I was thrown back into the cell and food was thrown, because [I was in] an isolation cell, the food was thrown from the bean hole and I was eating food and just sleeping. I couldn't see anything, there was lots of pain in my eyes. And then slowly one of them recovered sight. … [T]here was [no medical care] till after couple of months, a medical doctor came in and all his advice was that he would be willing to take the eye out from my head because he thought it looks really bad"

"He was held in Kandahar for 11 days and subjected to forced nudity, extreme temperatures, and beatings where guards “kicked my injured leg and I was screaming in agony, but they just laughed and danced like it was a joke.

Al-Gazzar elaborated: I was … concerned about my leg, because I had severe pain and the environment was dirty so I was worried that it might get infected. The American doctors were telling me it had to be amputated. I resisted, arguing with them about what the Pakistani surgeons had said, that they could save my leg. I even showed them the X-rays that I had kept. The Americans just laughed and said the Pakistanis didn't know anything about medicine and treatments. In the end one of them admitted that they could save my leg but the operation would cost thousands of dollars and that America was a “poor country.”

"After transfer to Guantánamo, Al-Gazzar again tried to explain to the doctors at Camp X-Ray that his leg could be saved. I got the same as answer as I’d had in Kandahar: Pakistanis didn't know anything, the leg had to go. As the days passed the pain increased and the colour of my leg started to turn grey — almost black. I asked them to clean the wound, and to change the dressing every day and night but they wouldn't do it. When I asked them in the morning for a new dressing they said they will do it in the afternoon, and in the afternoon they said they will do it in the morning, like that. … The wound was open and big — without any kind of treatment besides basic dressings. They forced us to take showers so the wound got wet many times — the pain became almost unbearable. … [M]ost of the other prisoners advised me correctly that I had no option but to accept the amputation as it had passed the stage of being saved and had become gangrenous and could spread higher up the leg the longer it was left. I finally gave in."

The report also wrestles with the question, left unanswered for all the classification still involved, of just how useful this stuff was for information. (For the most part, this question is entirely addressed at the CIA's use on a very select grouping, and not the broader abuses conducted by the CIA, what willing allies we had in this, or the military. Only a very small sliver of which has been held accountable in the US).

They do however issue this finding:

"There is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful or reliable.

There are, nonetheless, strong assertions by some former senior government officials that the use of those techniques did, in fact, yield valuable intelligence that resulted in operational and strategic successes. But those officials say that the evidence of such success may not be disclosed for reasons of national security.

The Task Force appreciates this concern and understands it must be taken into account in attempting to resolve this question. Nonetheless, the Task Force believes those who make this argument still bear the burden of demonstrating its factual basis. History shows that the American people have a right to be skeptical of such claims, and to decline to accept any resolution of this issue based largely on the exhortations of former officials who say, in essence, “Trust us” or “If you knew what we know but cannot tell you.”

In addition, those who make the argument in favor of the efficacy of coercive interrogations face some inherent credibility issues. One of the most significant is that they generally include those people who authorized and implemented the very practices that they now assert to have been valuable tools in fighting terrorism. As the techniques were and remain highly controversial, it is reasonable to note that those former officials have a substantial reputational stake in their claim being accepted. Were it to be shown that the United States gained little or no benefit from practices that arguably violated domestic and international law, history would render a harsh verdict on those who set us on that course."

On the question as to whether coercive interrogation techniques were valuable in locating Osama bin Laden, the Task Force is inclined to accept the assertions of leading members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that their examination of the largest body of classified documents relating to this shows that there was no noteworthy connection between information gained from such interrogations and the finding of Osama bin Laden.

The Task Force does not take any unequivocal position on the efficacy of torture because of the limits of its knowledge about classified information. But the Task Force believes it is important to recognize that to say torture is ineffective does not require a belief that it never works; a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information.

The argument that torture is ineffective as an interrogation technique also rests on other factors. One is the idea that it also produces false information and it is difficult and time-consuming for interrogators and analysts to distinguish what may be true and usable from that which is false and misleading.

The other element in the argument as to torture’s ineffectiveness is that there may be superior methods of extracting reliable information from subjects, specifically the rapport-building techniques that were favored by some. It cannot be said that torture always produces truthful information, just as it cannot be said that it will never produce untruthful information. The centuries-old history of torture provides example of each, as well as many instances where torture victims submit to death rather than confess to anything, and there are such instances in the American experience since 2001.

The Task Force has found no clear evidence in the public record that torture produced more useful intelligence than conventional methods of interrogation, or that it saved lives. Conventional, lawful interrogation methods have been used successfully by the United States throughout its history and the Task Force has seen no evidence that continued reliance on them would have jeopardized national security thereafter."

There was not unequivocal support for modifying the indefinite detention regime centered on Guantanamo, a separate matter studied in this report, though a majority of the study's (bipartisan) commission were in favor of severe steps to change it. Several findings were also issued regarding the conduct and lack of transparency of the OLC, as well as the conduct (non-ethical) of the medical professionals who participated in the monitoring, if not carrying out, of torturous methods.

This is probably the most disheartening statement: "No CIA personnel have been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody — including cases where interrogators exceeded what was authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel, and cases where detainees were tortured to death. Many acts of unauthorized torture by military forces have also been inadequately investigated or prosecuted."

As a side note, this even has implications, unsettlingly, for Libya:

"This is what occurred when the perception of Libya’s ruler, Muammar el-Gaddafi, shifted in the West; he went from being regarded as a dangerous and unstable despot to someone who was to be courted as a valuable ally in the war against terrorism and an example of a leader renouncing dangerous weapons. Then, when he tried to crush a rebellion, the view of him shifted again as he was regarded once more as a dangerous tyrant whose overthrow we were proud to have aided.

During the course of these changes, several leaders of the principal nationalist Libyan movement were abused in U.S. custody — and in some cases, their wives were as well. One of the detainees was even subjected to waterboarding by U.S. forces. Then, in an effort to reward el-Gaddafi during the time he was in favor with the West, they were secretly handed over to his regime, where they faced further abuse. One of the detainees, Sada Hadium Abdulsalam al-Drake, estimated that about a dozen members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), were handed over to Libya by the Americans and British authorities during the period the West was trying to improve relations with el-Gaddafi. .....

Within a few years, those same Libyan nationalists who suffered under allied detention and rendition to el-Gaddafi became figures of some importance to the United States. They were even regarded as heroic democratic examples in the West as they toppled el-Gaddafi. There is a deep and unsettling irony in this as the United States would soon become instrumental in the NATO effort to help Libyans overthrow el-Gaddafi, and that meant depending on those same individuals who had been rendered and abused (some by U.S. forces)... "

....the leaders of the revolt that overthrew el-Gaddafi expressed surprisingly little bitterness or even anger toward America. (Their attitude toward Britain is a different story.)" ...

"...Al-Shoroeiya was not one of the three people the CIA has acknowledged waterboarding." "

“It wasn’t the idea of killing me,” he said through a translator. “You know the person doesn’t want to kill you. But the torture is harder than death.”

"Belhadj told the Task Force interviewer that he bore no continuing anger toward the United States, but noted that it has been especially difficult for him to reach that view because of how his wife was treated. “What happened to my wife is beyond belief,” he said through a translator. She was not part of his political life, he said, and “what my wife went through doubled my pain.”

"she was 4½ months pregnant. She said they were taken to a secret prison near the Bangkok airport where they were separated. “They took me to a cell and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor,” she told the Guardian. She was given water but no food over the next five days.

At the end of that period, she was forced to lie on a stretcher and was wrapped tightly from head to toe with tape. When they got to her head, she said, she made the mistake of keeping one eye open and it was taped in that position. It remained that way for the duration of a long flight to Libya, later determined to have lasted about 17 hours. “It was agony,” she said"

Bits and pieces of the weeks past, and future.

2013-04-17T12:54:00.001-04:00

1) Watching the Final Four, I was rather disappointed with the talent level. Michigan had maybe 3 first rounders (Burke, Robinson, McGeary), Louisville had maybe 2 (Dieng, although he's old, and Smith, as a second rounder), and that's it. That was at least a quality final until about the last 3 minutes (and Burke's 3rd foul was bullshit, that was a clean block). I would say the officiating was really weird.

2) Mike D'Antoni is still a terrible coach. Took him months to figure out his roster had two excellent post players and use them together, and still didn't trust that option to give Kobe any rest, so he was run aground with enormous minutes use for his age and experience (several games down the stretch at 47-48). Or alternatively, he had no power to make Kobe rest. Which is absurd, because clearly every other coach in the league rests even their best players extensively (Rivers and Popovich and Carlisle are among the best at this).

3) 42 was a decent sports movie, which is to say it's not a great film. I think it relies too much on the "we who are enlightened now find this behavior repugnant" problem of how Americans think about (our) history, rather than as placing the context. That said, at least they included the repugnant behavior as something being overcome and confronted. I was also pleased to see Robinson's actual dynamic play being pushed to the front as part of the "legend".

4) I don't have anything new to offer as commentary or consolation for the Boston marathon bombing. I will say that I have been (very) impressed by the reaction of Boston in the face of a horrific event, and marginally impressed (tentatively) with the rest of the country not panicking and overreacting, as it is wont to do. With a few exceptions.

5) We tortured. Semi-officially this time. (That calls for its own post).

A note on this: I write about torture occasionally for a variety of reasons. But foremost is that while I am a "realist" in foreign policy, much of that basis is pragmatic approaches to the reality of chaotic international relationships. One way realists may approach this chaotic environment is to establish and practice and try to enforce reliable norms upon the international stage, like "not torturing prisoners" (among others like "don't spread weapons of mass destruction to other states"). Not torturing prisoners has a number of practical benefits in international relationships, among which that other states which adhere to it will more readily cooperate in any necessary warfare operations with the other states which do not, and that states which rely more easily upon diplomatic methods rather than open warfare where their subjects are not subjected to abuse and detention without appropriate legal protections. Since the variety of non-torturing states is largely American allies in our hegemonic operations, it's immensely practical not to violate the norms which we agreed to and have often attempted to impose. It's also immensely practical not to start fighting wars with everyone out there who might have harboured or hosted enemies of the international order or even mere American interests (such as terrorists or accused terrorists), as wars are rather costly of blood and treasure for all sides and should be reserved for essential purposes and interests (such as self-defence or perhaps punishing very poor international actors, such as those who invade or terrorize their neighbours).

This is true even before considering the moral basis of permissive regimes of aggressive or cruelty in interrogation (including torture), or in evaluating the efficacy of those regimes vis a vis standard interrogation techniques, the ability of American courts to prosecute or adjudicate claims of guilt or association with terrorist organisations and plans upon verifiable evidence and proper legal treatment, and so on.

Cultural notes, and the collapse of the bracket

2013-04-02T10:49:00.001-04:00

1) Indiana losing (and Louisville sticking around) really put my bracket into a funk. Having said that, I noticed the biggest trend in the tournament was that good coaching trumped average to mediocre coaches (at least, tournament coaches). Tom Crean is/was a pretty mediocre to average NCAA tournament coach, aside from the final year of Wade at Marquette. Picking Indiana was predicated on the high value of Oladiapo (one of the highest rated NCAA players in the past few years, both on offence and defence), and Zeller, one of the highest rated post scorers, but had to overlook Crean's middling record. Going up against Boeheim and Syracuse, they faced a tough defensive team and a better NCAA coach. It was, probably, the only challenge they would have faced in that entire region (the next best two teams, Miami and Marquette, were not so daunting but do have decent to good coaches). I'm rather annoyed they failed, but not ultimately that surprised.

I would say I did well to identify Kansas as weaker (and picked Michigan over them), and Duke over Michigan St. Florida did surprisingly poorly against Michigan. Almost no one saw Wichita State coming, so focusing on the Arizona-OSU matchup as the final four entry seemed logical. In any case, I still have a couple of brackets on ESPN in the 90-95 range (mostly because I did fairly well at the Elite Eight level on them, with 5 correct), but if/as Louisville continues to advance, staying there may be at issue. That's better than the 2011 mayhem year (the UConn vs Butler year), where I did the worst I've ever done in a pool, but it's not what I'm used to pulling down (98-99 percentile from picking the champ and 3+ final four teams).

2) The return of Game of Thrones reminds me why there are some shows I really like, and compares easily to a couple of semi-popular or well-critically acclaimed shows that I don't. My favourite television show has been the Wire. That show focused on the dynamics of policing drug gangs in a major city (Baltimore), the evolution of those gangs and the rules that they played by, and so on, along with a lot of other subplots. But here's the show's two secrets.
a) Basically anybody important who was a "street" character was not safe. Either from police or from each other. Many important or well-developed characters died, often to the displeasure of fans. To some extent even the police characters were not safe either, being less prominent or self-destructive.
b) Basically anybody who we meet is a human being. They are developed. We see they have motivations. Those motivations clash and merge with the others. Each character develops a separate following, complete with rival fan bases for Stringer Bell versus Omar or Avon Barksdale, or Bunk versus Lester or McNulty.

The secret of the show is that it's about dealing with the changing world of everyday life, and how that can dynamically conflict with what we might want to happen, that sometimes it means happy endings, and sometimes even the ending may seem happy but is in fact, bitter or hollow. And other times, it just ends up as a horrible footnote. It has other attributes (it's really well written, there's a fair amount of sex and violence, etc), but at its base, it's a character driven show with the same procedural plots repeated endlessly, and those plots are not necessarily glamorous and successful but we see how the players will play their roles and if those roles will turn out to be useful or hazardous this time around.

This is more or less why Game of Thrones succeeds for me (besides having read the books). No character is safe. Nobody of any significance is just an empty shell for other characters to interact with (and the one character who is, Sansa Stark, is made so by events well beyond her scope to control and influence). This is also more or less why Homeland failed to hold my attention after some promising writing and characters its first season, and why Walking Dead is so inconsistent and gives off an odd vibe that makes it hard to follow.

Homeland essentially is only a story about two people, Carrie and Brody, two lovers beset by the "mere" fact that one of them is a terrorist or at least appears to be, and the other is supposed to be chasing him or controlling him as an agent. Every episode contorts itself to protect these two from death, every episode contorts itself to project drama instead by upping the ridiculous quality of events surrounding them beyond plausibility. Every character besides these two is rarely exposed as a person with their own motivations, but instead as motivations that intersect in some crucial way with the main characters. Only a handful of regularly appearing cast members seem like actual people (Saul, Brody's daughter, and occasionally Brody's wife). That makes for rather transparently boring plots and decreases the plausibility under which the universe of the show must exist in. We as consumers of fiction can buy a superhero story like Batman as long as it retains a level of plausibility. We can't do this with terrorism and the CIA when it abandons all sense of proportionality and likelihood even within its own mandates, much less from the reality of terrorism that we actually face within the CIA or as Americans (and how it is dealt with). For a show that deals with the complex (and important) social problems of dealing with surveillance state powers and drone strikes and the roots of international terrorism, it does so rather clumsily too often. I've decided to give up on this show already.

Walking Dead should be a more acceptable show as well. A zombie apocalypse would inherently lead to the stories of bands of crafty and resilient survivors, seeking out supply and shelter, and occasionally cooperating or fighting with other bands. Sometimes this show does this very well, by focusing on a few key characters and giving them something human (this is why Daryl is so popular, why Merle isn't/wasn't, and why a few episodes focused on Carl or Michonne or even Andrea have been very solid). Most of the time it just dishes out zombie brain matter and doesn't seem to have a clear idea what to do with some of the characters. They feel like added extras to be shoved into the approaching horde or shot by rival survivor bands, rather than people who we might become attached and conflicted over should they become overwhelmed and consumed, and their motivations are not well explored or hinted at, as people are shunted into somewhat arbitrary roles, or given additional staying power because the writers want something out of them later, but don't seem to know what it will be (as in the case of Andrea's demise this season). The arcs don't feel connected, don't feel like they are going anywhere, and they don't develop the people in these stories such that they're any different from the shambling wrecks they must kill or evade. Probably the reason the best zombie films to me have been Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland is that the people have retained humor and wits to distinguish themselves from the reanimated dead. Walking Dead does well when it focuses on this (our humanity) alongside the necessary carnage and danger and does poorly when it does not. I've seen some more promising elements in character and development, but they're tied in with some strange narrative choices that aren't very promising for the future of the show.

SCOTUS and turning things red

2013-03-26T15:28:00.003-04:00

I've written at some length about gay rights, gay marriage, and the various associated causes. I think these would place me rather firmly in the pro-gay marriage camp, for practical and ideological/moral reasons. I didn't change my status photos today though. And this is why.

The Supreme Court is hearing cases regarding state issues on laws of marriage. The Supreme Court isn't a court of public opinion. It often decides things that are rather unpopular. Flag burning is legal, prayer in public school (when led by school officials) is not. And it has unpredictable effects when it does so. Interracial marriage was deeply unpopular when it was decided (barely 40 years ago) but is mostly tolerated today, while abortion is still just as divisive as it was at Roe v Wade. It tends to decide things for very different reasons than the public understanding of "right-wrong" or what should or should not be legal. So. It doesn't have to say in a few weeks or months that any state anywhere has to allow homosexuals to have equal legal status in marriage contracts under the 14th Amendment's protections that people like me find relatively convincing (as I do also for abortion rights and a host of other things the government at various levels has at times seen fit to ban or restrict). It might not do that even if it upholds legal rights in California by overturning Prop 8, or if it upholds legal rights by overturning the Defence of Marriage Act and allowing federal benefits and legal status to be determined at the state level (as marriage and divorce laws have been determined for decades). It doesn't have to make a sweeping and decisive ruling for or against and it's not necessarily the most likely event even if lots of pundits and court watchers have speculated about what would happen if it does do that (pundits like making dramatic predictions rather than concerning themselves with whether or not their predictions are accurate). I think (from looking at prediction markets) it's probable that Justice Kennedy (as the deciding vote mostly likely for), may affirm some federal rights here, but whether that's the majority opinion including the 4 liberal justices and maybe Roberts, or whether that's a secondary ruling that isn't made while striking down the law only in California or only declining any federal definitions superseding the state laws, is not necessarily clear yet.

In any case, the Court isn't going to be swayed by your change of profile photo to do something convincing. This is more where I stand. That's a symbolic show of support. Grand that, to wear red, or to change a photo. It makes us feel better with a minimal effort, it does not cost us much of anything to do it. Given social media's dominance from younger people and younger people's strong support of this cause, it's not surprising to see so many of my friends taking up this message themselves as a result. Were the court set to overturn these rights more broadly, I might agree a demonstration of support would be more useful (I am aware the Court is very unlikely to do this). But I don't like mere symbolic actions very much. And don't like partaking of them myself (I wasn't fond of the Chik-Fil-A boycotts mostly because I didn't want to go there anyway, and most of the people who were protesting didn't either). I won't look down upon those that do them in this case, but it also doesn't seem like a very practical use of time.

I'd suggest an alternative show of support. People who live in a state that doesn't support legal equality should petition their representatives in state governments or in Congress and the Senate to do so, and explain why this matters to them when doing so (for example by pointing out the myriad of other laws that intersect with marriage to create the social institution as a civil one that should be governed by fairer and more accessible priors than traditional values, which can be imposed elsewhere than in legal strictures). People who live in a state that doesn't support legal equality should start or join petitions to place votes on ballots overturning bans, or establishing such rights. Since most of the people in my social circle do not live in Washington, or the North East, or Maryland or Iowa, and instead live in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, and elsewhere, we don't have states which recognize this as a problem and have resolved it accordingly. (Note to Illinois residents, your state has passed this partially via the State Senate and legal civil unions, go pester your state representatives and governor). We should not presume that this problem will be resolved, or even go away, because the Court will rule on it (indeed, it's still probable it won't go away at all for most of us). We who support this cause should instead seek to rally support further by taking action in the legislatures and ballot boxes of our local communities and states. HRC, who has come up with the photo of support on facebook, has a petition inclined to express this opinion. This too is less painful than it is useful, but it would be a bigger step forward in action.

Most challenging of all. We should also confront our friends and family members who don't share in this conception. Not angrily, if possible. But in search of understanding what it is they object to most strongly and why, or why they think that should be state policy rather than a neutral footing, and so on. Ask questions. Don't presume. Don't judge and dismiss them for being bigoted out of hand. There are practical or ideological reasons to oppose homosexual marriage rights out there, and their basis isn't always and obviously rooted in bias and prejudice. Discern if their motives are in fact bigotry, or ignorance, or some other preference. See if they have thought deeply and decisively on this issue or if they've merely adopted some cultural markers they think are significant without much thought and input as to the potential flaws of that approach. Many people approach the problem from the perspectives of the importance of "defining marriage", but lack the perspective to understand that marriage has already been broadly re-defined, both recently and in the distant past. To exclude polygamy, or to include multi-racial partnerships, or to include more expansive divorce protections, or greater autonomy and protections for women within these pairings, and so on. These re-definitions are often seen, by marriage equality opponents, as significant if not more pressing as problems with the existing institutions as they are now practiced, with or without gay rights. It is not established from these arguments that keeping such restrictions would improve or harm their cause but they do indeed still make them and find them persuasive.

Find common ground to acknowledge that we perhaps do have a society that no longer prizes life-long unions in the same (presumed) way as our ancestors or as these few objectors would prefer we prize them, but that the solution to that isn't to restrict who can aspire to these supposedly desirable unions in the first place. Find common ground with those that say the state should have no business by acknowledging this might be an ideal state (for libertarian-minded people), but it is not the one the polity we live in has chosen to construct and live within, where benefits and legal rights flow from these unions of mutual choice and respect and love. The enemy of the good is often the perfect here. Seeking out places where legal benefits and rights are unnecessary rather than seeking to abolish the entire civic institution at once in response to a change in its formal abilities establishes one's goals more properly as being anti-statist rather than anti-gay. Acknowledge that religious institutions have their own separated moral establishments and rituals, and that people may live under these rules or abandon them in a free and tolerant society. And so on. These are not painless gestures, but they are often the case that they need be made to allow our elders and others to accept changes and modifications to the society they must live in too.

Change is coming here. Demographics point to it even if the Supreme Court won't (and it might yet anyway). A society that prizes tolerance and basic legal equality will adapt to this, even as it will still have its holdouts and curmudgeons. Changing people's hearts and minds is ultimately more important to acceptance and the successful practice of these reforms than changing laws and it takes engaging them to understand where their hearts and minds have set themselves against you, your friends, or other people who you know and respect. Interracial marriage, as a comparison, is still only mildly accepted (and not so much in the South, where it was most recently illegal). Gay or lesbian couples are still going to have a long battle in many places to gain acceptance and avoid repression. Even if courts grant and try to ensure for them the legal rights they seek, many will not do so without grudges or will try to find ways to avoid doing so. One victory is not a war make. All fronts must be pushed.

Update: For the record, to extract the maximum practical value, in the short run these would be the states that petitioning and harassing with state and local governments would have value (in no particular order)
1) Illinois
2) Rhode Island
3) Delaware
4) Hawaii
5) Oregon
6) New Jersey
7) California (sort of)
8) Nevada
9) Minnesota
10) Pennsylvania
11) Colorado
12) Wisconsin

Most of those above listed already have legal civil unions, and it is possible this will account for most of the legal rights under changes in DoMA even as it requires stronger civil unions law in some cases or lacks the social value of being able to say one is "married". Several are in the midst of passing changes to the laws permitting same sex marriages or have had them held up in one or another branch of their government (or are being determined positively, potentially, by the Supreme Court soon).

These states one should do something else (like try to sway public opinion by talking to people).
1) Mississippi
2) Alabama
3) Louisiana
4) Georgia
5) Arkansas
6) South Carolina
7) Oklahoma
8) Texas
9) North Carolina
10) Tennessee
11) Wyoming
12) Kentucky
It will be a while before public opinion shifts there to where a vote will be useful, possibly over a decade or two in the top cases. Note that they're mostly in the South.....

There would be where a mix of both are required (they're right around but behind the national average).
1) New Mexico
2) Michigan
3) Arizona
4) Montana
5) Alaska
6) Virginia
7) Florida
8) Ohio
9) Iowa (sort of)
10) North Dakota
11) Nebraska
12) Indiana
13) Missouri
14) West Virginia
15) South Dakota
16) Kansas
17) Idaho
18) Utah
The top is more likely to see some action sooner. (Ohio is... right in the middle, which is not impressive). The variance out west is strange (see Montana, versus Idaho or Colorado versus Utah).

Day 4 and moving on

2013-03-25T11:49:00.000-04:00

1) Florida Gulf Coast is on a roll. That's never happened before (a 15 in the third round) and they took care of business twice to get there. NOBODY picked this (less than 1%), so one should not care in the pool terms. If anyone knows anyone who picked this, and didn't go there for school, they should probably make sure that person is in the nice part of the sanitarium they visited them at, or should console them because they were likely in a pool that gives out prizes for last place (which usually scores upsets by seed, and getting all those points from a 15 probably screwed their chances).

2) Temple-Indiana was way too close for my comfort, but worked out in the end. Wyatt made himself some money in those two games. Dunphry can be added to the list of coaches that don't do so well in tournaments, but he did have a tall order here in upsetting one of the top favorites to win the entire thing in his defence.

3) LaSalle also wasn't a very common pick this far. People really didn't like the play-in teams as picks (despite being a fairly reliable source of upsets). They're barely more popular a pick than FGCU was. No team had beaten Mississippi when they were tied or had a lead in the last few minutes (22-0), until they did last night.

4) It appears no coach from the UCLA - Minnesota first round game will survive. I'm less convinced Tubby Smith is a terrible coach than most (I think he has a pretty good idea what he's doing as a coach given his record at Tulsa and Georgia pre-UK but did luck out with a Pitino recruited team early on to bolster his reputation), but I do think there's at least a case that he wasn't able to reach and coach the team they had this year and the past couple of years, given their inconsistency.

Overall round
I averaged 10.5 right, which is above average but not very good either.

Total whiffs
1) FGCU. Though I did identify Georgetown as weak, I wasn't about to pick the 15, much less twice.
2) LaSalle. Again, I did see KSU and Wisconsin as weak, but Mississippi was a more common upset pick here for me.
No surprise, nobody else got those two
3) Wichita St (nobody got that one either, about 3.5%).
4) Oregon. To me one of the bigger surprises as they handled two good teams very easily.
5) Marquette (I think I took them once somehow, in my defence here they've won two games by a combined total of 3 points). This one hurt somewhat as roughly half the public took them.

50/50 whiff
2) Miami. I had Illinois springing the upset there sometimes. Disappointing and terrible call near the end of the game shot that down. I feel pretty good about it as Illinois couldn't make shots in the last couple of minutes either but it's still annoying to have the refs involved in the outcome. People seem to think this was Miami not playing well, but I think the issue was Illinois is actually pretty good (just really, really inconsistent) and Miami isn't as good as people think they were (again, a weak 2 seed). Older good teams like them have done relatively poorly so far (Georgetown and Kansas).

Sometime value bets.
4) Syracuse. I had Cal winning essentially a home game a couple of times.
2) Ohio St. I had Iowa St springing the upset here a couple of times. Again a strange call near the end of the game, but OSU also played well in the last couple of minutes to pull this one out. I was surprised it was close.
4) Michigan. I figured on VCU playing far better than they did.

Moving forward.
West
Arizona is not a very common Elite Eight pick (about 5%). I took it a few times (Also a couple final four picks for them, which look a lot better today than with Gonzaga in the field, and really low on the pick order). I'd be surprised if Ohio St doesn't advance from here though. It's a totally broken bracket otherwise. It's also the only region where I'm out an elite eight pick. Which considering the heavy insanity of the first couple of rounds (it's by far the craziest bracket in the seeded era), surprises me.
MW
Mostly chalky, and mostly not surprising. Duke winning here would be a big help. Louisville is really popular as a title contender and I never took them.
South
Florida and Michigan look pretty good to meet here. Kansas looked better in the second half against UNC, but Michigan's a lot better than UNC (who had no wins in the top 25 all year).
East
Chalk. Probably will stay that way too.

Day 3

2013-03-24T10:51:00.002-04:00

1) Wichita was only picked this far by about 3% of people, so where people took Gonzaga, don't feel too bad. Having said that, Gonzaga (and Kansas) were both vulnerable 1 seeds, and the West was, as previously mentioned, a screwy region. I was leaning toward knocking them out this early but talked myself down because I had them facing Pitt mostly, and Pitt didn't inspire enough confidence to pull the trigger. Wichita was certainly a good case for the upset by profile and defensive ability, they just had to get past a supposedly tougher Pitt team. The main case against Gonzaga was Mark Few isn't a very good tournament coach, and it seemed to show last night. A secondary case was made after their poor performance in round one against Southern, which is a good indicator that a 1 seed is below par and at risk of an early exit (again, ditto Kansas).

2) Oregon and to a lesser extent Arizona were not common picks this far. I've got no idea why Arizona wasn't. Harvard was pretty obviously not going to sneak up on a loaded Arizona team and New Mexico wasn't that good in the first place. Oregon beating St Louis handily was however a little surprising (but not terribly so, they're a big high scoring team, which is usually when 12s win over 4s).

3) I made some value pick calls on Cal (about 3.5% picked that far), but mostly took Cuse over them. I think I'd rather that Cuse had lost though.

4) Butler blew a lead against Marquette, causing much grumbling from me. I'm not sure how that works if you're Marquette, to have to consistently come back on other teams.

5) UCLA fired their coach after the loss in the first round to Minnesota. To some extent that's not surprising as UCLA hasn't been as good the last couple of years as this year (and certainly as the first few years Howland was there, where they were elite eight or final four worthy on talent grounds). But they partly lost because one of their best players was hurt coming into the game. Seemed an odd time to do it with a good recruiting class having just come in this year.

6) As with the other day, margins of victory were almost more surprising than the events. 3 close games out of 8, and then 5 blowouts (not even close at any point for most of them). For a tournament supposedly about parity, the better teams are smoking the competition. Both the VCU and Memphis losses were impressive displays. The Big 10 and Pac 12 are doing pretty well overall (over-under for Big 10 wins was 13, and they're at 8 already, with OSU and Indiana playing today). VCU-Michigan in particular should have been a much closer matchup (as the only 4-5 that held) and demonstrated a gap between top 2-3 tier teams and the rest of the field (in my mind at least).

7) A very good case can be made that poor tournament coaches are a significant hedge point to consider.
A list of a few serious offenders
Gonzaga- Few out in second round, routinely underachieves when given high seeds.
Missouri- Haith out in first round two years in a row (new coach, but not off to a good start).
Notre Dame- Brey out in first round two years in a row, and lost as a 2 seed the year before that in the second round
Pittsburgh - Dixon out in first round, lost as a 1 and 3 seed in second round last two appearances
New Mexico - Alford prior at Iowa wasn't too impressive either. Lost in first round (and lost in second round as a 3 seed previously, in one of the most obvious upsets in the last few years, even to an 11 seed).
Georgetown - Thompson out in first round, lost as a 6 and 3 seed in first round as well and last year as a 3 seed in the second round (and a few years ago as a 2 seed) Unlike the others on this list, they have at least made a Final Four appearance (Pitt's been to the Elite 8 once under Dixon).

Some of this is that some of these teams routinely are overseeded because of RPI factors. New Mexico hasn't deserved a 3 seed either time. Georgetown was a weak 2 this year and a very weak 3, weak 6, etc. Notre Dame is almost always seeded higher than they should be. Having already weaker teams than the seed expectations carry with them does not help. But if that's the case, it would suggest that these are coaches good enough to make their teams appear to be better all season, and then fail later.

Day two thoughts

2013-03-23T06:07:00.001-04:00

1) "Shock" of the day. Georgetown was a weak 2 seed, but nobody in their right mind picks 2 seeds to lose in the first round. It is starting to look like it's a more viable suggestion after the last couple of years, but prior to that, it was extremely rare. I generally had them losing to San Diego St or Florida, depending on the pool, so it, like New Mexico-Harvard, wasn't that big a deal to me.

2) Kansas looks really vulnerable to the VCU style attack, or (basically) to Michigan as well. If they couldn't take care of the ball against Western Kentucky, they've got serious problems moving forward in next weekend's matchups.

3) What's up with the A10? LaSalle wins in Kansas City? Temple wasn't a huge shock, but NC St has roughly top 10 talent on that team. Kansas St loss was probably the biggest shock of the day actually. Maybe a lot of Kansas fans there? St Louis, VCU, and Butler winning Thursday are hardly surprising, but that the bottom end still produced was fun for them.

4) Couple games surprised mostly for margin: Minnesota over UCLA especially. That's more what I expected the Oklahoma St-Oregon game to look like. Minnesota can really play when they get after it, but they're pretty rarely interested from watching them this season. Iowa St winning on a neutral/road game with that margin also impressed.

5) Mississippi wasn't that big a shock (I split my pools there). Wisconsin was in trouble against a high pace team if their shots weren't falling and they fell behind. Pretty much what happened to Georgetown, except against a much better team. Trouble is that where I took them, I'm now out a S16 team (I took Mississippi to beat KSU and KSU to beat Wisconsin, if there was a split there).

Update: Best pool performance was 24 first round, averaged only 22 (which is not encouraging). Only one entry out of 20 had any elite eight teams knocked out (I had foolishly picked Oklahoma St over Louisville once), and most had at least one or two sweet 16 slots out (averaged about 2.5). Usually the Mississippi-LaSalle game (where I usually had Kansas St), or the Oregon-St Louis game (usually Oklahoma St), occasionally Davidson or Bucknell, but I usually took Butler there (never Marquette), and then I usually had Georgetown that far, but where I picked SDSU to win in round one, I took them again in round two (much like Mississippi). I never had New Mexico that far at least.

The main way to win or rate highly on a tournament pool is to get the later rounds right, and losing final four or elite eight teams on days one or two is generally unadvised to do that. Identifying the weakest top seeds is therefore the crucial move. Occasionally something crazy still happens, but mostly that happens in rounds two or three, not round one. Round one is mostly about not picking too many upsets, and absorbing hits where they come.

First round misses
I never picked these teams to lose in round one.
2) Georgetown.
3) New Mexico.
4) Kansas St (missed by 2)
5) Oklahoma St
8) NC State (missed by 4, but was trailing by more)
11) St Marys (missed by 2)
Other than Oklahoma St, I tended not to trust any of these teams further. Kansas St was only trustworthy from the draw they got and playing in Kansas City.

I usually picked these two to win, but had them losing again (except once with Davidson), so didn't mind.
14) Davidson (missed by last second shot)
8) Pitt

50/50s where I may have weighted one way or the other. I ended up leaning toward Illinois, Iowa St, and North Carolina so those three were often, but not always correct, and mostly missed on the SDSU game and Wisconsin game.
10) Colorado (concerned about Brandon Paul not showing up)
7) Notre Dame (concerned about Iowa St's road record, otherwise it was a no-brainer).
10) Oklahoma (concerned about SDSU 3k miles of travel)
9) Villanova (value pick from UNC being heavily favored)
5) Wisconsin (wasn't sure the tempo factor would help or hurt Mississippi)

Random picks that sometimes cost a few points.
11) Bucknell. Muscala really didn't impress.
11) Belmont. 3 point shooting contest worried me.
6) UCLA. I was concerned about Minnesota's road record, but not that concerned with UCLA being hobbled.
5) UNLV. For some reason I picked them a couple times. Probably because Cal was really weak on metric value, but the home-road factor mattered a lot.

Best upset calls to have made (ESPN/Yahoo % picked)
FGCU 2.3%/1.9%
Harvard 5.6%/4.5%
LaSalle 6.1%/5.1%
Nobody picked those. If you missed, only feel bad if you thought those were very good teams that lost though.
Mississippi 20%/13.4% (not sure why there's such a gap, maybe Yahoo's groups skew toward fewer upsets)
Cal 25.3%/22.6%
Those two are the two I'd be pleased with myself over.
Temple 30.4%/33.1%
Wichita St 31.9%/32%
Colorado St 35%/32.6% (not an upset, but really low picked for an 8).
Apparently nobody liked the 9 seeds, as three of them had low picked value.
Iowa St 37.7%/37%
Oregon 41.7%/40.1%
Minnesota 48.4%/44.7%

Oh and I did warn that the West was a screwy bracket (3 upsets, plus the 9 and 10 seeds won).

Day one thoughts

2013-03-22T12:17:00.001-04:00

1) Only real surprise to me was Oklahoma St getting stomped on. I didn't think Oregon was that good to win that convincingly. I concede they had a good shot to win (as do most teams), but not the 43% they were getting from ESPN's public (log5 had them at 38% though, so it was close).

2) Pitt losing to Wichita was annoying, but I managed to talk myself out of a Zags upset because Pitt didn't average much in the way of scoring. Which is risky in the tournament. Missing a couple first round games isn't as important to trying to win any pools as picking up potential elite eight teams.

3) New Mexico, had they been playing Davidson, or even Northwestern St, I would have picked against them in a heartbeat for the first round (I did have Arizona beating them in the second). It's possible those wouldn't have worked out and Harvard had a better matchup to win, but nevertheless, I did identify New Mexico as very weak 3. Marquette also was losing most of the second half and managed by some device of error to pull out a win. I feel pretty good about going against these two, even if I missed both for the first round the way I ended up picking them. Davidson had an absurdly high chance by the log5 metric for a 14 seed, about 1 in 3 odds, but Harvard was pulling about 3-4 times what the public thought was the case, about 17%. Clearly the public thought New Mexico was supposed to be pretty good for some reason. Clearly they haven't watched many MWC games.

3a) The line for NM was also 12 in that game. Which seemed absurdly high. New Mexico only won 10 games by more than that all year (and only a home win against NMSU was against anyone of Harvard's caliber). Apparently the Vegas thinks the public thinks 3 seeds are supposed to be good, but don't observe that they're not always. They should probably have set their lines a little more in line with the quality and style of the two teams involved first.

4) No idea why Colorado St wasn't favored in that Mizzou game. Haidt's not a very good coach, they were undersized, playing on the road, and Colorado St was actually pretty good (almost as good as New Mexico, and better than UNLV or San Diego St). Whatever. Thanks for the pot odds value.

5) Memphis barely won. Had St Mary's not played a day and a half earlier (and had travel delays before that), I think they should have won that game. I'd still pick this one again as either MTSU/St Mary's winning when the public was picking Memphis at an 88% clip.

6) Cal upset was pretty obvious, thanks to the committee. UNLV was a poor road team and the game was less than 50 miles from Cal. That was just a poor bracket setup. Then again, only the top 4 are supposed to be "protected" seeds anyway, but it helps to make the first round upsets easy to call.

7) Wow VCU is crazy on defence. That and Akron could have used a couple of extra players.

8) I am mildly surprised that Arizona won so handily, but not surprised they advanced. They're pretty talented for a 6 seed when all the other 6s are overrated. And the focus on their 3pt defence overshadowed that Belmont's wasn't very good and Arizona's 3pt% offence was in fact pretty good.

9) I'm curious if the RPI will get another pass to re-evaluate it after this season, but I doubt it will. When (if) the MWC ends up 1-5 in the tournament (San Diego St can win today, and could beat Georgetown on Sunday, but will probably not), the idea that somehow it was the best conference in the country should be taken as an absurdity that no decent system should have produced and be seen as a need for reform.

Second round of bracket thoughts, analysis mode

2013-03-18T14:48:00.002-04:00

This will be by region

Midwest
Top Seeds
1) Louisville
2) Duke
3) Michigan St
4) St Louis
Wild Card
7) Creighton

First round.
None of the top seeds look promising as upsets or are playing promising upset prospects. Valpo is a little underrated as a 14 is the best option.
5-12 I'm not sure what the ESPN population is doing with the shower of picks for Oregon as a probable upset over Oklahoma St. Oregon isn't very good, and not so much so that they're near equals to OKSU
6-11 I'm also not sure what they're doing taking Memphis so heavily (87%). I'd take either of the 11 seeds over them, especially St Marys. It's possible this will shift after the play-in game is determined, but I doubt by that much. There's a huge value pick in taking the upset here.
7-10 And again, I'm not sure what the UC over Creighton pick is about. UC has a good defence, and Creighton.. doesn't know what defence is. But they score in bunches and are in the top tier of teams. Pretty good value just sticking with Creighton here.
8-9. This is a funny one. I don't think it matters who wins, so take your pick. Missouri is higher in my ratings, but not by that much. I'd weight toward CSU because Missouri is so bad on the road and because the public seems to favor Missouri to a very high extent.
2nd Round
Louisville is playing in Lexington. While that could be a semi-hostile crowd, I don't think that's sufficient. They're a good road team. Neither of their probable opponents are.
Duke- Creighton would represent one of the best second round matchups (much like UNC-Creighton did last year, not because it was close, but because it was high-scoring). I'd take Duke, mostly because I don't think Creighton can guard Duke but Duke could guard Creighton.
Michigan St-St Marys/MTSU/Memphis, I might take the 11s again here, but betting against Izzo isn't usually very smart. The game is also in Auburn Hills...
St Louis- OKSU. I'd take OKSU here. Typically the 4-5 is decided by who can score more. Neither can, and both can defend, but OKSU plays a little faster.
3rd Round
Louisville is clearly better than either St Louis or OKSU. Oklahoma St does seem like a more promising upset if forced to choose.
Duke is more of a tossup with Michigan St, as it's the first really good interior team they'll play. Duke though looks more promising to advance this far.
Final Four
Duke. Partly this is because Louisville is the most common team picked to win it all. Partly it's because Duke is really pretty good this year. I don't think Louisville's defence is that much better than Michigan State's to match up here. I also don't think Louisville's offence is that good (it's worse than UConn's was when they won with the Kemba Walker year). I don't trust them to score enough to keep up with Duke and they're not an interior style team that could pose problems (Maryland's got size, if we insist on the Maryland template for beating Duke).

South
Top Seeds
1) Kansas
2) Georgetown
3) Florida
4) Michigan
Wild Card
5) VCU, if forced to pick anyone.

First round
Again, no promising upset potential in the top seeds. Northwestern St at 14 is fast paced and has beaten a 3 seed before several years ago, but they're playing Florida. Who is probably one of the best teams in the tournament. Whereas before they played Iowa, who was a high seeded Big 10 tournament winner and was pretty weak for a 3 (more like Marquette this year).
5-12 Akron is pretty good, but VCU is much better. The best advantage Akron has is the game is in Auburn Hills. The other is that it's a value pick as VCU is really popular for a 5 seed.
6-11 If Minnesota weren't so unpredictable and poor on the road, they'd make an excellent upset pick here. They're still very likely (not least because they'll crush UCLA on the boards). UCLA isn't that good, but is respectable on the road. The game is in Texas, which does put somewhat less stress on the travel involved for a west coast team. I lean toward UCLA here, but not by much.
7-10 San Diego State vs Oklahoma. I'd take Oklahoma, mostly because this game is in Philadelphia and all the way across the country for SDSU and because SDSU seems favored. Also MWC teams tend to under-perform, badly.
8-9. Take Villanova. North Carolina is heavily favored. I think UNC is better, but not 69% likely to win better.
Second Round
Kansas is much better than either UNC or Villanova and playing in Kansas City...
Georgetown is vulnerable as a 2 seed (they should have been a 4). But neither team is that promising as an upset candidate. This might be one of the ugliest games of the second round also. None of the 3 are good offensive teams, and two are top 15 defences.
Florida really got screwed on its location (four potential games in Texas), but there aren't many southern cities hosting. Neither team looks probable here to hurt them here.
Michigan-VCU, a very interesting game. It's in Auburn Hills, which helps Michigan, but VCU is very dangerous. I lean toward Michigan but not by much.
3rd Round
Kansas may have trouble with either team here, VCU causes more problems I suspect (highest TO margin in the country, and Kansas is the only top 10 team with a negative margin). Michigan certainly has the talent to beat them too.
Florida, no contest over Georgetown. Florida isn't getting very much love on the public picking them at all for later rounds. Just keep taking them.
Final Four
Florida. Kansas has potentially a harder path and Florida is better anyway.

West
Top Seeds
1) Gonzaga
2) Ohio St
3) New Mexico
4) Kansas St

This is the screwiest bracket by far, with some heavy over/under seeds from RPI effects.
First Round
New Mexico is the best 3 seed upset candidate in the field, but they're playing Harvard, which isn't that impressive or very good. The play-in game against Kansas St doesn't impress, and the game is in Kansas City. Iona is really good for a 15 and plays really fast but actually picking a 15 is usually dumb. So no upsets at the top end.
5-12 This is a curious one. Wisconsin seems to like playing the Mississippi style teams (they do well against Indiana for example). Both teams are underseeded. I'd say this is the second most likely 5-12 upset but I don't think I'd bite on it.
6-11 Could be the year Belmont actually plays up to their potential as a spoiler. They finally got the seeding to show for it, a year or two late (they're not as good as they were the last two years). Arizona has played poorly against the P-12 (mostly fast teams) and down the stretch. Probably one of the best first round games.
7-10 Iowa State is a gunner team, which could be a problem for Notre Dame, but they're also terrible on the road. Much like the Colorado St game, it probably doesn't matter. It's also a lot closer to ND (Dayton). Iowa St could be a decent value pick here, if they're not terrible on the road.
8-9 Pitt is a top 10 team. Wichita is not. The worst of these last year had two top 20 teams in one 8-9 game (Memphis and St Louis). I'll take Pitt here.

Second Round
Pitt is a heavy upset value pick here. Gonzaga is heavily favored. They are pretty good, but they're the weakest of the 1 seeds by a bit over Kansas and Pitt is way better than the other 8 seeds.
Kansas St playing basically at home against a slow moving team with a poor road record, I'll take them.
I'd take either Arizona or Belmont over New Mexico. Especially Arizona.
Ohio State playing in Dayton against either of ND/Iowa St, I'll take them. Iowa St would be the more dangerous of the two (if they're hot, they're going to score a lot).

3rd Round
Pitt over Kansas St. Gonzaga over them too if hedging. Kansas St is more like a 7 seed here than a 4.
I might take Arizona over Ohio State. Games are in LA. But OSU is pretty good.

Final Four
Arizona, if not taking Belmont in the first round. Gonzaga if not taking Pitt in the second, Ohio State otherwise. As I said, it's a screwy region.

East
Top Seeds
1) Indiana
2) Miami
3) Marquette
4) Syracuse
Wild Card
None. This bracket is the weakest by far in the field. Even Marquette (4th best team) is not good enough to merit wild card potential.

First Round
Davidson is very likely over Marquette and worth looking at taking. None of the others are likely upsets.
5-12 Probably the most likely 5-12 upset. It's in San Jose so UNLV's road record is a factor. UNLV is probably the most overseeded team in the field. Take Cal. Could be the ugliest first round game (neither team can score).
6-11 Butler is probably the second most overseeded team. Bucknell isn't much worse than them and there's a heavy Butler push on ESPN. Probably take Bucknell on a value pick, but Butler is more likely.
7-10 Illinois is probably the 3rd most overseeded team. Having watched them at various points in the season, it can be painful for them to score unless Brandon Paul decides to have a national TV style game. I'd probably take Colorado here, largely because they're not well liked as a pick.
8-9 NC St is way better than Temple.

Second Round
Indiana. Next
Miami over Colorado/Illinois is okay here. Miami is a fairly weak 2 seed though (not quite as weak as Georgetown). They're also old. And old teams don't do well.
Davidson over Butler (or Butler over Marquette). Davidson, for a 14 seed, rates almost as well as Butler does as a 6.
Syracuse over Cal, but I'd consider Cal as an upset here. Cuse isn't that great outside of NY.

3rd Round
Indiana, Next.
Butler over Miami, or Miami over Davidson

Final Four
Indiana. Next.

Championship Rounds
Indiana vs Florida, Indiana, and this looks like the "title" game to me.
Duke vs Gonzaga/Ohio St/Pitt. Duke

Indiana vs Duke, Indiana. Taking Duke or Florida as the champ is a decent value pick, Duke is more likely in my view (the with and without Kelly stats are helpful) but Florida is less picked.

Arguments against Duke: they can't rebound and got blown out by Miami.
Argument against Florida, they struggle in close games (most of their games have been considerable blowouts).They also play slow, which can be a trouble spot (as when they get behind in a close game).
Louisville isn't a terrible pick, but if they're likely the most common to pick as winning, find someone else to pick is good advice to try to win (in case someone else nails the early rounds, it's best to beat them by having more available points later, where the rounds are more important anyway). I lean toward Indiana because I trust their offense more and they won't play anyone who slows it down (ala Wisconsin or Minnesota). Miami and Florida play slow, but Miami is suspect defensively.
I don't trust Gonzaga because the coach (Few) isn't very good. They haven't done as well with the often higher expectations since Monson left. They do have size this time however, which they didn't sometimes in years past. They're hard to evaluate as well with fewer meaningful games. One has to rely on the 3 peat over St Mary's a lot to presume they've got a lot of quality wins, when they've otherwise just got a close win at Oklahoma St, over Baylor, and pair of blow outs over Kansas St and Oklahoma.

Bracket thoughts and final season rankings

2013-03-18T12:17:00.002-04:00

Generally the committee does okay at picking the "right" teams. I think LaSalle is the only strange pick, mostly because they've got an unreasonably high RPI (40), but they're not an indefensible pick either over Virginia, Iowa, Baylor, Kentucky, or Denver, and certainly defensible over Maryland or Alabama or Tennessee. MTSU deserves a shot here as far as the metrics were concerned and critics of such really don't pay much attention to minor conferences, or don't want us to do so in favor of the power conferences that already dominate the tournament. Giving one or two slots to these kinds of teams provides some variety in the early rounds, if not the risk or danger of playing an unfamiliar team. (I also think MTSU was greatly helped by Mississippi winning the SEC tournament).

The committee's real struggle is, and always has been, properly seeding the teams they've picked. I gather that's a really hard system, with certain rules involved, but it's not that hard that they should consistently underrate teams that are much better than the seed line they end up with. I've highlighted some of teams that don't conform to the rankings very well. Some are really, really bad.

A legend of sorts, for interpreting the data.
a) Breaks in the ranking list are to designate a tier of sorts, where teams in the slot above are clearly better than the teams below them. If the NCAA title isn't won by any of the teams in the top two tiers, I would consider that a huge upset. Final four teams emerging from anything past the top 4 tiers would likewise be odd.
b) Records are listed by top 100 records, plus losses to non top 100 teams.
c) Bold is teams that won automatic bids. The relevance of this is teams who win auto bids and receive 3-5 seeds tend to under-perform. New Mexico and St Louis are the only teams who might conform to this (last year Florida St lost in the second round. Louisville however advanced to the final 4).
d) Teams with poor to bad road records have their top 100 record in red. Bolded text there indicates a very poor (bad) road record. Poor road performance correlates really well with under-performing in the tournament, particularly with the top half of the bracket. (It also explains most of the bubble teams who didn't make the field, as all of them have poor road performance). Florida last year was the only team that advanced deeply that had a poor road record (partly because Missouri was upset in the first round). Marquette two years ago upset Syracuse and an overseeded Xavier team as a bad road team is the only example from the last two years.

Final rankings (all NCAA teams, seed after)
1) Florida 11-7-0 (3!)
2) Louisville 15-5-0 (1)
3) Indiana 14-6-0 (1)

4) Gonzaga 13-2-0 (1)
5) Kansas 15-4-1 (1)
6) Ohio St 12-7-0 (2)
7) Duke 14-5-0 (2)

8) Pittsburgh 9-7-1 (8!!)
9) Wisconsin 11-11-0 (5!)
10) Michigan 12-6-1 (4)
11) Michigan St 12-8-0 (3)

12) Miami 12-4-2 (2)
13) Georgetown 11-5-1 (2)
14) Syracuse 12-9-0 (4)
15) Creighton 13-6-1 (7!!)

16) New Mexico 15-4-1 (3)
17) Arizona 11-6-1 (6)
18) Missouri 10-9-1 (9!)
19) St Louis 13-5-1 (4)
20) Oklahoma St 9-7-1 (5)
21) VCU 13-8-0 (5)

22) St Marys 7-5-1 (11!!)
23) Minnesota 10-10-2 (11!!)

24) Colorado St 6-7-1 (8)
25) Kansas St 8-7-0 (4!)
26) Marquette 8-7-1 (3!!)
27) North Carolina 6-9-1 (8)
28) North Carolina St 6-8-2 (8)
29) San Diego St 6-8-2 (7)

30) MTSU 2-3-2 (11)
31) Iowa 6-10-2 (out)
32) Wichita St 10-7-1 (9)
33) Mississippi 10-6-2 (12!)
34) Iowa St 8-9-2 (10)
35) Notre Dame 10-8-1 (7)
36) Memphis 7-4-0 (6!)
37) Virginia 7-3-8 (out)
38) UNLV 9-6-3 (5!!)
39) Baylor 5-11-3 (out)

40) Belmont 6-2-4 (11)
41) Cincinnati 9-10-2 (10)
42) Kentucky 8-10-1 (out)
43) Denver 3-7-2 (out)

44) UCLA 13-6-3 (6!!)
45) Oklahoma 8-9-2 (10)
46) Illinois 8-11-1 (7!!)
47) Oregon 10-6-2 (12)

48) Stanford 6-12-2 (out)
49) Colorado 9-8-3 (10)
50) Villanova 8-11-2 (9!)
(51 is UConn, who is ineligible)
52) Butler 14-7-1 (6!!)
53) Akron 6-3-3 (12)
54) Boise St 4-7-3 (13)
55) Davidson 2-3-4 (14!)
56) Maryland 4-8-4 (out)

57) Southern Miss 1-7-2 (out)
58) LaSalle 7-7-2 (13)
59) Stony Brook (out)
60) California 7-10-1 (12)
61) Bucknell 4-3-2 (11!)
62) Alabama 8-8-4 (out)
63) Tennessee 10-10-2 (out)
64) Temple 9-6-3 (9!!)
65) Valparaiso 2-3-4 (14!)

78) New Mexico St (13)
89) Iona (15!)
90) South Dakota St (13)
100) Harvard (14)
110) Florida Gulf Coast (15)
117) Pacific (15)
120) Northwestern St (14)
133) Montana (13!)
134) Albany (15)
170) Southern (16)
175) Long Island (16)
177) James Madison (16)
178) Western Kentucky (16)
230) NC A&T (16)
251) Liberty (16)

Last bubble watching post

2013-03-17T11:57:00.000-04:00

Since none of the major games today have any real bubble implications (that is, none of the teams that could win would be taking a spot necessarily away, usually there's one or two of those). Some thoughts.
Here's the list of teams I'd have in that have no shot.
29) Iowa. 6-10-2. Will be the highest team I've rated to miss the field since Georgetown went 16-14 against a brutal schedule in 2009. They were 7-13 against the top 100. Iowa is only 6-10, but both have similar top 50 records (4-9 for G'Town and 3-9 for Iowa). My guess is the holdout factor for Iowa is non-conference play and a lack of big wins (1, Wisconsin at home). Georgetown by contrast had 4 top 25 wins that year. Really could have used that Michigan State game.

36) Virginia. 7-3-8. Played their way out by losing a ton of games against mediocre teams, the worst of which was Old Dominion. Injuries can be blamed on some of these, but that one is unforgivably bad. Loss to NC State is forgivable, but they lost by a lot when they needed to compete most.

38) Baylor. 5-11-3. Mysterious big win over Kansas wasn't enough. They needed that game against Oklahoma State in the conference tournament.

44) Denver 3-8-1. Loss to Texas State in WAC tournament? Good news for them, I guess, is Louisiana Tech won't make the field either.

48) Stanford. 6-12-2. Much like Iowa, has no big wins to point to in a tough schedule (1-9 against top 50). They're slotted in my second to last at large spot anyway (Colorado is the last).

Teams that are rated low that should get in anyway (instead of the teams above).
50) Villanova 8-11-2 . Decent enough record and 3 top 25 wins helps here.
52) Boise State 6-7-3. Probably should be closer to on the bubble than appears to be the case.
53) Butler 14-7-1. The 14 top 100 wins is pretty much all that's needed here. That's a lot.
60) California 6-10-1. Their loss to Utah puts them in a very uncomfortable spot, but considering the other teams on this list, I think they're safe enough. Win over Arizona and splits with UCLA and Colorado is about it (Denver too). Sweep of Oregon now that Oregon won the automatic bid helps too.
65) Temple. 8-6-3. Wins over Syracuse, VCU, and St Louis are probably the fodder here (last two at home). Loss to Duquesne hurt a lot.

Of these, I'm comfortable with 3 of them (Villanova, Butler, and Temple) and Boise is acceptable with some good wins down the stretch in a tough (but overrated) conference. Cal is pretty ugly though.

Teams that are very fringe contenders for a spot.
55) Maryland 4-8-4. Two wins over Duke is very nice. Only two other wins is not.

58) Southern Miss. 1-7-2. Only win is over Denver. Win over Memphis in conference final would have been a big one too, but also wouldn't have mattered with the automatic qualifier that came with it. They do have an impressive looking RPI for such a mediocre resume is basically their only reason for inclusion.

63) Alabama 8-8-4. Win over Tennessee put a heartbeat back in their consistently fringe position from earlier in the year, but they didn't follow up in the game against Florida. It did weaken the case for Tennessee however.

Actual bubble (3 of these will get in, 2 won't).
31) Middle Tennessee State. 1-3-2. Lots of blowout wins over mediocre to terrible teams. Only win is over Mississippi. Which helps with Mississippi playing today. Assuming they are not blown out (which is possible, they're playing Florida). Right now they look to be in, but it's very close.

39) Mississippi. 8-6-2. Speaking of which. Basically two wins over Missouri is all they have to go on. The win over Vanderbilt didn't really help much. Probably needs to win anyway to get in. If they're stealing a bid, it would be from another SEC team most likely.

42) Kentucky 8-10-1. Loss to Vandy did not help at all after the big win over Florida. They seem to be prototypically like the other bubble teams that missed out (win one big one, lose a bad one). Probably out with the injury factors.

59) LaSalle 7-7-2. I've been waiting for this team to start falling out of favor but the rest of the bubble never really caught up to them. They've basically just beaten up on the lesser A-10 teams (the ones that look better on RPI, like Charlotte or UMass, beat them. Charlotte is probably the most overrated RPI team I've ever seen). They've got a road win over VCU, barely beat Butler at home, and beat Villanova in OT. Losing to Central Connecticut State may be what keeps them out if anything does.

64) Tennessee 10-10-2. Loss to Alabama didn't help, but didn't hurt that much either. Wins over Florida, Wichita State, Missouri, and 1 point loss to Georgetown help. But they piled up a lot of other losses. Memphis, Virginia, swept by Mississippi, split with Kentucky, lost twice to Alabama (won once), Arkansas, and the big hurt here, swept by Georgia. Other than a pair of wins over middling A-10 teams (Xavier and UMass), there's not much here. They didn't even have the toughest SEC schedule. If I had to guess, they miss out.

Minor conference watch
Conferences with decent teams that lost
Sun Belt: Middle Tennessee State might get in anyway, but Western Kentucky is going to be in a play-in game (rate around 180). MTSU would likely have been a 12 as an upset watch (at the time of their upset they looked like Memphis but does with fewer decent wins).

WAC: Denver. New Mexico State isn't bad (80), but Denver would have been a 12-13 seed with some higher potential. Both are rated better than Louisiana Tech was.

American East: 61) Stony Brook. Basically only major factor is being one of Maryland's decent wins. But they could have garnered a 13 or 14 seed while Albany is around 140 and will be a 15.

Summit. 74) North Dakota State lost on the road in the conference final. South Dakota State does have a win over New Mexico however and is still top 100 (90).

Southland: 75) Stephen F Austin really just had a win over Oklahoma to point to but could have been an upset spoiler for a 3 seed. As it is, Northwestern State makes a decent 15 seed, but they're not nearly as good (~120)

Big Sky: 85) Weber State has nothing on their resume to point to, basically played one of the weakest schedules in the country. But they also blew out most of those teams. Montana has a similar record, but just wasn't as impressive. It's probable this won't change seeding (probably a 14 either way), but Montana is more like a 15 (~130) and unlikely to consider much where Weber would have been an interesting team to look at.

NCAA: One week to dancing edition

2013-03-11T12:34:00.000-04:00

1) Florida 11-6
2) Indiana 13-5

3) Louisville 13-5
4) Gonzaga 11-2
5) Duke 14-4

6) Kansas 13-4-1
7) Ohio St 9-7
8) Pittsburgh 10-6-1
9) Michigan 12-5-1
10) Michigan St 11-7

11) Wisconsin 9-10
12) Syracuse 11-8
13) Creighton 13-6-1
14) Miami 10-4-2
15) Georgetown 12-4-1

16) Oklahoma St 8-6-1
17) VCU 11-7
18) Arizona 10-5-1
19) Missouri 9-9
20) St Mary's 6-3-2

21) Colorado St 10-6-1
22) Minnesota 10-9-2
23) St Louis 11-5-1
24) Marquette 10-6-1
25) Virginia 7-2-8

Ranked Teams
26) New Mexico 16-5
28) Kansas St 7-6
35) Notre Dame 10-8
37) Memphis 6-4
45) UCLA 11-5-3

Clinched Bids
13) Creighton
42) Belmont 11-6
100) Harvard (Princeton is slightly higher but lost two in a row this weekend to lose the conference title)
110) Florida Gulf Coast. Mercer wasn't far behind (~125) but lost at home in the conference finals.
251) Liberty. The best team in this conference was probably Charleston Southern and they are only about 170.

Safely in (from early tournaments)
29) Wichita St 11-7-1. Lost in the conference title game, and is high ranked on everything but RPI (41).

Unsurprising minor conference upset:
Iona over Niagara. Iona's in the top 100 (89). Niagara is roughly 145. I don't think Iona will be recognized as any better than a 15 though without some other upsets.
George Mason losing (by 2) put a much lesser team in the driver's seat for the Colonial, but either way they were probably a 15 or 16 seed.

Bubble of doom (from early tournaments)
31) Middle Tennessee St 1-3-2. Lost in semifinals of Sun Belt, has a gaudy 28-5 record overall, mostly against its own conference (20-2 in conference), which is terrible. The next best team is ranked at 167 (Arkansas St, which was also eliminated in the semis). I think they've got a decent shot at making it in anyway as they also have a decent RPI at 28. The defective computer ranking system the committee mostly uses by chance happens to be not far off in this case. If not, Sun Belt will go from having a 12 seed (that's really an 8) to a 16, possibly in one of the play-in games. Assuming they don't get in in another play-in game (as a 12 or 13). They're right now the first team out, but it's very close to Tennessee in likelihood. They have a better argument to make it in than Louisiana Tech will, which was blown out in the last two games (both against the next best teams in their conference).

Note: MTSU lost last year in their conference tournament and the eventual bid went to Western Kentucky (with a losing record). They didn't make it in last year either at large, but they were much lower in rankings (around 50, rather than 30) and were only 24-6 rather than 28-5.

62) Stony Brook 0-2. American East went from having a dangerous 13 seed to a 15 (Vermont) or a 16 (Albany) as cannon fodder. They're clearly out, but they're very close on my list.

Teams that will need to avoid losing in conference tournaments this week:
38) Denver 3-8
57) Akron 5-3-3
59) Davidson 1-3-4 (update: clinched Monday)
61) Bucknell 4-3-2 (in finals Wednesday)

72) Stephen F Austin 2-2-1
83) Weber State 1-1-4
(I included the last two because they're far ahead of the rest of their conferences. Montana is about 60 ranks below Weber, and NW St is around 100, well behind SFA. Ohio is about 20 spots behind Akron, and then the MAC is terrible after that).

Teams "in" on my list that won't make the field right now.
25) Virginia (4-2 top 50)
36) Iowa 6-9-2 (3-8)
40) Baylor 6-10-3 (3-10)
44) Mississippi 7-6-2 (1-4)
47) Stanford 6-11-2 (1-9)
Virginia is probably the only one that deserves a bid here, but they've got 8 non top 100 losses and a terrible road record to shoot themselves out of the field at the moment.

This leaves room (along with MTSU) for
53) Oregon 7-6-2 (3-3)
54) California 6-10 (4-5)
55) Butler 11-6-1 (4-3)
58) Tennessee 9-9-2 (4-7)
62) Temple 9-5-3 (3-2)
Right now I would be surprised if any of these teams misses, but any upsets and Tennessee is toast, and possibly Kentucky (not on this list, but safely in on mine) as well.

SWAC note: Texas Southern passed Southern into the top 150. Grambling managed to win 0 games, and plays again on Wednesday.

NCAA March edition

2013-03-04T11:04:00.004-05:00

1) Florida 11-5
2) Indiana 12-4

3) Louisville 11-5
4) Gonzaga 11-2
5) Duke 13-4
6) Kansas 13-3-1

7) Syracuse 11-7
8) Pittsburgh 10-6-1
9) Michigan 11-4-1
10) Wisconsin 10-9
11) Michigan St 10-7
12) Ohio St 7-7
13) Miami 10-4-1

14) Oklahoma St 7-5-1
15) Georgetown 11-3-1
16) Minnesota 10-8-1
17) Creighton 11-6-1
18) VCU 10-6

19) St Marys 6-3-2
20) Arizona 9-5-1
21) Missouri 8-8
22) Virginia 6-2-7
23) Marquette 9-6-1
24) St Louis 10-4-1
25) San Diego St 6-8

Ranked Teams
26) New Mexico 16-4
29) Kansas St 7-5
35) Memphis 6-4

44) Oregon 7-5-1

62) Louisiana Tech 3-2-1

Most of the action this week wasn't in the rankings, but in the bubble. Tennessee and Virginia both had big wins (Florida and Duke), and big losses (Georgia and BC), on balance this ought to be helpful to both however. Maryland had a big loss (Wake) that moved them out of contention entirely. Alabama could have moved back into discussion by beating Florida on the road but couldn't hold on. Boise St moved up into serious bubble contention finally.

At the moment I have these teams in the field that won't (or can't) make it and/or are seriously weakened by the last week or so of games.

37) Iowa 5-9-2

45) Connecticut 8-9 (ineligible)

46) Baylor 5-10-2

47) Ole Miss 5-6-2

50) Denver 2-8 (will need to win WAC tournament)

And the bubble discussions have these two in that I don't

55) Villanova 7-10-2

71) Temple 8-5-3

Which likely leaves Boise or Tennessee as the other at-large, assuming nothing strange happens with conference tournaments. Neither is all that impressive.

54) Boise 7-6-2

55) Tennessee 8-9-2

Last year Colorado came out of nowhere to win the Pac-12 tournament (but the Pac-12 was really, really weak last year for a supposed power conference) and St Bonaventure won the A10 where they shouldn't have also. Iona got an at-large from the MAAC as well. I'd say an average of 2-3 bids are off every year from conference tournaments (plus the two-three teams that win a tournament unexpectedly but would have been at-large bids anyway). So it's quite possible that none of the bubble teams get in. And that none of them would have deserved to. Temple's the only one with a .500 record essentially.

NCAA Week 4 plus bubble thoughts

2013-02-25T14:03:00.001-05:00

1) Florida 10-4
2) Indiana 9-3

3) Louisville 10-5
4) Gonzaga 10-2
5) Duke 12-3
6) Michigan 9-4

7) Kansas 12-3-1
8) Wisconsin 9-8
9) Syracuse 12-5
10) Pitt 9-6-1
11) Ohio St 6-7
12) Michigan St 8-6
13) Miami 10-3-1

14) Georgetown 10-3-1
15) Arizona 9-4
16) Oklahoma St 7-5-1

17) Minnesota 9-8
18) Creighton 8-6-1
19) Virginia 5-2-6
20) VCU 9-6
21) Colorado St 8-5-1
22) San Diego St 6-7
23) Marquette 7-6-1

24) Middle Tennessee St 1-3-1
25) Missouri 7-8

Ranked Teams
30) New Mexico 14-4
29) St Louis 8-4-1
36) Memphis 6-3
51) Butler 8-5-1
37) Notre Dame 7-6
45) Oregon 7-5-1
27) St Marys 6-3-2
49) Akron 4-3-1
75) Louisiana Tech 4-2-1

I have no idea how Louisiana Tech got a bunch of votes. They've played almost no meaningful games (especially in the last couple of weeks). They're likely to win their conference but aren't the best team in that conference, which is Denver at #50, so it's unclear if they'd merit any bubble conversation. I rather doubt it.

Here's the list of bubble teams identified by the bracket matrix as teams not getting a solid percentage of inclusions or as low at large teams. Maybe 3 or 4 of these are thus far looking like legit tournament teams. 7 of them will get in anyway. 11 won't.
19) Virginia. 6 non top 100 losses is undoubtedly their problem here. Right now they're in but they cannot afford any more weird losses.
26) Kentucky 6-8, presumably this is because of the injury to Noel. They did get a big win at home against Missouri this week, so they could remain in as well. With Noel they were a no-brainer for inclusion and at a higher seed.
27) St Marys 6-3-2. Not sure what this is all about. They're ranked after all. The win over Creighton during bracketbusters this weekend really helped here. Swept by Gonzaga, but Gonzaga's really good this year.
39) Ole Miss 4-6-1. I'm not sure that they actually should merit inclusion, but they're ranked highly enough to do so. A sweep of Tennessee and a win over Missouri (at home) are basically their only resume fodder. They're also the only decent team Middle Tennessee St has beaten. Loss to South Carolina hurts here.
40) Iowa 4-7-3. Very fringe votes for inclusion. They're really high on the MOV/tempo metrics and have 3 wins against the top 25 (Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa St, all at home), and lost by only 4 to Indiana (also at home). Their losses @ Virginia Tech, @ Purdue, and @ Nebraska all hurt a lot here and other than Iowa St, they've only got a win against N. Iowa non-conference of any note. I think they should be in, but they probably will not be without a deep Big Ten tournament run.
43) Baylor 5-9-2. Possibly safe, with a number of decent wins (Kentucky, Oklahoma St, BYU, Lehigh, and St John's). Oklahoma St and early win over Kentucky are the only resume fodder and they're losing a lot of games lately (6 of the last 8, with the only wins coming over in-conference cannon fodder). I could see them slide out.
50) Denver. 3-8. Probably has to win the WAC to get in but did get a nice road win during bracket busters this weekend.
52) Stanford. 5-10-2 Probably shouldn't get in and doesn't look like they will.
55) California. 5-9. Probably shouldn't get in either but looks like they might. Win @ Arizona and sweep of Oregon seems to be the keys here. They've only got a win over Denver to point to out of conference, where they lost to Harvard and Creighton, were blown out by Wisconsin, and lost by 1 to UNLV.
56) Villanova 6-9-1. Wins over Louisville, Syracuse, and Marquette are most likely why they would get in. Swept by Providence, loss to Columbia and only one win over the other Philly teams (St Joe's) would be arguments why not. I'd be fine with them in instead of Stanford or maybe Baylor though.
57) Maryland 3-5-3. Win over Duke is pretty much the only reason they're even in the conversation. NC State and Stony Brook are the only other good wins, with a close loss to Kentucky also. I doubt they get in without a couple of ACC tournament wins (over the Carolina teams).
58) Southern Miss 1-6-1. Shouldn't get in. Seems like a safe bet to miss out.
62) Tennessee. 7-9-1. Win over Wichita St is about it, and then the blowout over Kentucky put them on the radar. Unlikely to make it. They do have a lot of wins over quality teams, but most of them are modest wins rather than impressive stock.
64) Boise St 6-6-2. Win over Creighton on the road helped. Lost by 4 to Michigan St also. Otherwise, win over UNLV and a sweep of Wyoming is about it. I could see them getting in, but they've got a lot more buzz surrounding them than I suspect is warranted.
67) Temple 7-6-2. Wins over Syracuse and St Louis. Lost to Duquesne. Otherwise, wins over LaSalle and Villanova is about it. I guess I could see them getting in as well, but it's not a strong case.

84) Arizona St 5-6-2. Win over UCLA and a sweep of Colorado is about it here. Getting swept by Washington does not help. Loss to Utah and DePaul also doesn't help. They also got smacked by Arkansas, Creighton and Arizona. They're a fringe candidate, but they shouldn't even be a candidate.
86) St John's 5-7-4. Close wins over Cincinnati and Notre Dame, and Detroit is about it. Losses to San Francisco and UNC Asheville do not help. Again, a fringe candidate, but shouldn't be even involved. Blow out losses to every good team in their conference (Louisville, Syracuse,Pitt, Georgetown twice), plus Baylor should suggest this isn't a very competitive team.
NR) Charlotte. 5-6-2 I don't think a team I'm not even tracking should be included as even a fringe possible bubble team. Something tells me there's a huge flaw in the RPI system that they are. Win at Butler and at Davidson is about it here, plus a win against LaSalle. Destroyed by Miami, blown out by St Louis, lost at home to VCU, swept by Temple. Otherwise a lot of close games against mediocre teams. If I had to guess, they're behind George Mason in the #120 range.

NCAA Week 3

2013-02-18T13:28:00.001-05:00

1) Florida 9-3
2) Indiana 8-3
3) Louisville 11-5

4) Michigan 8-4
5) Duke 14-3
6) Gonzaga 10-2
7) Syracuse 11-4
8) Pittsburgh 9-5-1
9) Kansas 10-3-1

10) Miami 11-3
11) Wisconsin 10-8
12) Michigan St 8-4

13) Ohio St 4-7
14) Minnesota 8-7-1

15) Oklahoma St 7-4-1
16) Arizona 9-4
17) VCU 8-4-1
18) Colorado St 8-3-1
19) Creighton 8-5-1
20) Georgetown 10-3-1

21) Cincinnati 8-7
22) Kentucky 5-8 (about to start dropping though)
23) Missouri 6-7
24) Marquette 8-6
25) San Diego St 5-7

Ranked teams out of my top 25
49) Butler 7-4-1
36) New Mexico 13-4
42) Oregon 6-4-1
51) Notre Dame 6-6

I'm not sure what the NBA commentators for the ASG last night were talking about with "about 20 teams that could make the final four". I see maybe 10-12 good contenders, with even several of those as unlikely and draw dependent (because they're playing too slow in the cases of Pitt and Wisconsin, to a lesser extent Florida and Miami, same deal). There's a pretty hard gap between the top 10-12 teams and the rest, and even in there, a sizeable gap between the top 2-3 teams and the rest. There's a few teams beneath that gap that could make a run (Arizona?, VCU?) but not many. Last year Louisville was the only "surprise" final four team and even then they were 15-8-1 coming in, which was quite respectable and were one of the top ranked defenses, (this year they're the #1 ranked, but they're scoring at a much better clip than last year).

HS draft for the NBA

2013-02-17T13:16:00.000-05:00

Since this topic comes up occasionally, I thought I should quantify it somewhat to see if the data supports the conclusion that I reached quite some time ago that the one and done rule the NBA imposed was arbitrary and dumb.

The list of HS players drafted into the NBA isn't very long, so data-driven conclusions are unlikely to reach very far unfortunately. But they are still useful to examine to see if there are any hints. I would suggest that we are likely being imprisoned by media narratives surrounding parts of the limited data rather than the whole from this analysis.

First off.
Starting just with the 1995-6 classes, we can see right away two Hall of Famers, both clearly the class of their draft class. Kevin Garnett is leaps and bounds above any other player drafted in 1995. The next best player in that draft is Rasheed Wallace (drafted right ahead of him at 4th), but he's way behind in value.

The following year we get Kobe Bryant picked 13th, again the best player of that class, but it's a much better draft. He's followed by Steve Nash, Ray Allen, Ben Wallace (who went undrafted), and Marcus Camby. Iverson and Stojakovic are also better than Rasheed was, for comparison of how deep this class is. Jermaine O'Neal was also in this draft at 17th and falls in a class behind these players but still had a respectable career (if injury riddled and complete with an infamous fight). He is roughly as productive and valuable as Stephon Marbury was (a one-done shoot first point guard who went 4th).

1997 Tracy McGrady, picked 9th, is the 3rd best player in a draft following Tim Duncan (just ahead of KG's class as a top tier Hall of Famer), and Chauncey Billups (a pretty clear HoF candidate too). It drops way off after those three (Antonio Daniels?).

1998 Finally a bust? Al Harrington as a HS pick is rather mediocre, but he was picked 25th. And despite being a rather average to below average player is still playing (because he can shoot reasonably well). Rashard Lewis picked 32nd is a capable NBA player and 5th best player in this draft (roughly as good as Antawn Jamison who went 4th). Dirk Nowitzki is an international player of note picked at 10th is the best player in this draft, followed by Paul Pierce and Vince Carter. Brad Miller goes undrafted and comes in at 6th. Korleone Young is drafted 40th and does pretty much nothing. Second round picks rarely do though. Famously this is the Olowakandi draft (he was terrible and picked 1st) and also famously Nowitzki was traded for Robert "Tractor" Traylor, who went 6th and has a short unimpressive career while Dirk has a surefire HoF career.

1999. Here some real worry probably started to creep in. Jonathan Bender goes 5th, mostly on the strength of comparisons to KG. While he never really puts up any numbers anyway, he also has a very brief injury riddled career. Leon Smith is a total basket case of a human being, is drafted at 29th and doesn't amount to much either. More than likely, his career, what there was of it, IS the case against drafting HS players. But I have a hard time seeing much generalisation to be made of his circumstances to any high school athlete. Manu Ginobili goes 57th and is probably the 2nd best player in this draft (behind Shawn Marion).

2000 A historically bad draft class all around. Michael Redd is the only good player drafted (43rd), while Mike Miller (5th) and Kenyon Martin (1st) are the only other reasonably productive players picked and a pair of others (Turkoglu and Jamal Crawford) are decent. And that is all. Darius Miles goes 3rd, the highest a HS player has gone so far, probably because nobody else seems very good anyway, and doesn't amount to very much (but isn't nearly as bad as Marcus Fizer, picked after him at 4th). DeShawn Stevenson goes 23rd, and appears to have a niche as a bearded defensive player (and is still in the league today) but few other appreciable skills.

2001 Odd class all around. Kwame Brown goes 1st. He is a below average player, but sticks around in the league still today and isn't nearly as terrible as Olowakandi was. Pau Gasol is clearly better than anyone else from this class (picked 3rd), followed by Tony Parker (a young French point guard at the time, picked 28th), and Tyson Chandler (picked 2nd and another very good HS player). Despite the flops of Brown and Eddy Curry (a HS player picked 4th, a high volume scoring big man who can't do anything else at all, ends up with a heart condition to boot), this is actually a very deep draft with many highly skilled players scattered in it (about 11-12). Diop, while styled as an international player, played HS ball in the US and is picked 8th. Doesn't amount to much.

2002 Amare Stoudemire becomes the first HS player to win a rookie of the Year award after being picked 9th. He remains the best player from this draft, although Yao Ming was too injury prone to actually claim this title. Stoudemire's a problem child player for much of his career though and a terrible post defender.

2003 LeBron. Enough said there. Kendrick Perkins goes 27th and isn't all that productive but has a mean scowl and excellent post defense skills. Travis Outlaw goes 23rd and somehow ends up with a "Travis Outlaw's contract" style career, which is to say, he gets dramatically overpaid and isn't a very good player. Darko Milicic goes 2nd and isn't all that productive either. We could consider him either international or HS. Ndubi Edi and James Lang are also HS players drafted in this class. Neither amounts to much of anything. Both go late (26th and 48th).

2004 Dwight Howard. Again, enough said. A ton of HS players are picked this year in the first round. Al Jefferson goes 15th and is the 3rd best player in this class (behind Iguodala). Josh Smith goes 17th and while something of a coaching problem (for putting up ill-advised jump shots, among other reasons), is actually quite good (probably 6th best in class behind Luol Deng). JR Smith is an even bigger coaching problem at 18th, but again, at least a skilled scorer. Dorell Wright goes 19th and takes a while to get some PT, but turns out okay (better than JR, but with less minutes). This class is marred basically by the Bassy Telfair pick at 13th, who had a documentary film produced about his HS to NBA leap and the knee injuries to Shaun Livingston (picked 4th). (don't click on that if you're squeamish, his leg literally bends sideways suffices to say). And then the pick of Robert Swift at 12th, which amounts to a total dud, but certainly not any bigger than Araujo at 8th.

2005 Andrew Bynum goes 10th, aside from injuries, he's probably the 4th best player in this class (just ahead of undrafted Jose Calderon) but well behind Deron Williams and way behind Chris Paul. Monte Ellis goes 40th and becomes a famous ballhog but otherwise is a solid player (especially for a second round pick). Louis Williams goes 45th and ends up as a very good instant offense shooter as well. Martell Webster goes 6th and ends up just below average (behind Francisco Garcia who went 23rd). Andrey Blatche is a headcase picked at 49th but having a productive season this year with the Nets. Amir Johnson goes 56th, gets limited minutes with the Pistons, but plays very productively in them (followed also with somewhat less limited minutes with Raptors and still more productive play). Gerald Green goes 18th and wins a dunk contest, but not much else is done. CJ Miles goes 34th and is also largely unproductive.

I don't count very many "busts" here such that the problem was NBA teams needed to protect themselves from themselves. There's a good volume of late-first round and second round picks (picks which rarely turn out to be suggestive of productive NBA careers). This suggests that many NBA teams already recognized the dangers of HS evaluations and adjusted accordingly. The famous busts of Kwame Brown (thanks be to Michael Jordan), and Telfair's documentary, and a few problems of immaturity (Miles, Stoudemire, the Smiths, Blatche), appear to be the cause of concerns here. There are also numerous cases where these players had to play a year or two of pro ball to begin to become productive however. Garnett or Kobe don't start out as a perennial All-Star for example and McGrady doesn't win a couple scoring titles right away either. Howard or LeBron are both very good immediately but neither is rookie of the year, and neither is in the discussion for top 5 best players in the league for at least a couple of seasons. So it is possible an extra year of seasoning may help these players mature better or polish their games. That argument is not invalidated by saying the age restriction is dumb. It also takes most college players a year or two to begin to adjust to the skill level jumps, and usually year 3 is when any player begins to really flourish.

What it suggests is the NBA prefers to have someone else pay to develop the players, pushing risks off on someone else (in this case, the players themselves and colleges who recruit them for one-and-done runs). For the most part, college freshmen who are drafted are a relatively safer bet than HS players, in the defence of this practice. But college freshmen are rarely drafted outside of the lottery or first rounds. HS players were. In addition, statistically valid issues can be raised with international player scouting and that of 4 year seniors who are drafted, both groups that fail on a very high rate relative to HS players and underclassmen who are drafted. There are prominent examples of both groups who succeed, who are held up as exemplars (particularly Tim Duncan or Steve Nash types as 4th year college players) but we rarely hear about 4th year seniors who are terrible professionals who are drafted. This may be because such players are rarely lottery picks in the first place (Jimmer Fredette so far is in this category, Terrence Williams from a few years back, Acie Law and Al Thornton in the same draft, and then Luke Jackson, as but a few examples). But if such a comparison is fair and honest, we should admit that many of the HS players who have failed and busted or been mediocre are of similar draft status to that of international or college players and have similar expectations leveled upon them. Whatever the valid reasons may be behind such a policy, it doesn't appear that "protecting" owners from their supposed stupidity is one of them.

HS great picks would be
KG
Kobe
LeBron
Howard
McGrady
Chandler
Stoudemire
Jefferson
Lewis (mostly because he was second round)
Josh Smith

Value picks
Bynum
Wright
JR Smith
Jermaine O'Neal
Williams
Ellis
Johnson
Perkins
Blatche
Harrington

HS Busts would be
Brown (#1 picks aren't supposed to be below average)
Swift
Telfair
Darius Miles
Bender
Webster
Livingston
Eddy Curry

Lost picks would be
Young
Lang
Ebi
Leon Smith
Outlaw
Green
CJ Miles
Stevenson

This looks like a fairly normal distribution, but it has some serious top heavy options.

Week 2

2013-02-11T13:09:00.002-05:00

Not much changed, despite the apparent chaos of upsets. The bigger sort seemed to occur among the middle, bubble quality teams with a few (Illinois, Virginia), playing up, and a few (BYU, Maryland), playing down.

I will start posting top 100 records. Any extra record element is non-top 100 losses. For most good teams, this would be a non-factor, but it becomes an issue with many bubble teams, if for no other reason than to explain absurdly high RPIs. I consider games against non-top 100 teams to be irrelevant record padding (college football is much worse on this front with very few games outside the top 30-40 teams). Top 50 records aren't much better as a metric unless a team has a bunch of 50-100 wins but nothing in the 1-50 range (California did this last year, and lost in the first round).

1) Florida 9-3
2) Indiana 8-3
These two may take a lot, a major injury for example, to drop down to the next tier.

3) Michigan 9-3
4) Louisville 9-5
5) Duke 13-2
6) Syracuse 9-3
7) Pittsburgh 8-4-1
I could see Michigan moving up from this tier, and Miami or Gonzaga moving up.

8) Miami 12-3
9) Gonzaga 9-2
10) Ohio St. 4-6
11) Kansas 11-3-1
12) Minnesota 8-6-1
13) Wisconsin 8-7
14) Michigan St 8-4
15) Arizona 8-3
Pretty stable group here I think. Minnesota is the highest team I'm charting that isn't ranked in the AP (they're 26th, they were ranked last week though).

16) Kentucky 4-6
17) Creighton 8-4-1
18) Colorado St 6-3-1
19) Oklahoma St 8-4-1
20) VCU 7-4-1
21) Cincinnati 6-6
22) St Marys 2-3-1
23) Baylor 6-6-2
24) Georgetown 8-3-1
25) San Diego St 5-5
Creighton dropped way too much for their loss this week in the polls.

Honorable Mentions (ranked teams)
27) Virginia 6-1-5 (5!)
28) Marquette 5-4-1
36) New Mexico 12-4
40) Butler 8-4
41) Memphis 4-342) Notre Dame 6-5
47) Oregon 5-4-1

Early NCAA Ranks

2013-02-06T11:40:00.003-05:00

I use a composite of Pomeroy, Sagarin Predictor, and LRMC to rank teams. It comes out fairly close to ESPN's BPI, but there's some twists and turns along the way. It tends, combined with some other factors, to put me in the top 1-2 percentile on ESPN's bracket challenges year after year.

I will look at things like away/neutral records or high/low pace teams once the field is set to adjust picks but I don't generally care until then. A very good team will win either way anyway. Teams that are closely or reverse ranked on this list when matched up tend to be excellent upset picks early.

For once the polls appear to be correct near the top at least. (Louisville is a little underrated and Butler is way overrated). I made the mistake of actually looking at the horrid RPI ranking system, so there's some notes on that.

1) Florida
2) Indiana

3) Michigan
4) Duke
5) Louisville

6) Kansas
7) Syracuse
8) Pittsburgh (huge gap on RPI rank)
9) Ohio State
10) Gonzaga

11) Minnesota
12) Miami (somehow 2nd in RPI?)
13) Arizona (somehow 3rd?)
14) Creighton
15) Wisconsin (perennially underrated, probably because they're boring and slow. Pitt is slower this year though)

16) Kentucky (44th?)
17) Michigan State
18) Colorado State
19) Cincinnati
20) Oklahoma St
21) VCU (49th?)

22) Georgetown
23) San Diego St
24) Ole Miss
25) Baylor

Some other teams of note
26) St Marys (somehow 60th in RPI)
27) UNLV
29) Belmont (little conference high pace team, fun upset watch pick)
34) BYU (on Lunardi's bubble, safely in here)
36) New Mexico (5th! in RPI? 5th!)
37) Oregon (ranked)
38) Missouri (ranked)
42) Middle Tennessee (little conference likely snubbed team if they don't win out, also fun upset watch)
45) Butler (ranked, 14th RPI?). I have them in but they're on my bubble.

Southern is also having the best season for a SWAC team since I've been keeping track of the probable and set fields. That doesn't mean they'll win any games, but they're inside the top 200, which is astonishing for that league. I have them at roughly 148th. I think a number of times a worse team has won their conference tournaments, bumping them up to 300th range, but even then, the better team was only in the 220s.

Memphis, UConn, UCLA, and Virginia would be the last four in at large.

Right now here's my list of bubble teams that wouldn't get in:
Maryland
Illinois
Oklahoma (23rd?)
Arkansas
LaSalle (27th?)
Alabama
Temple
Villanova

Lunardi also has either in or on the bubble listed these teams:
Louisiana Tech
Arizona State
Indiana State
Washington
St John's
Only two of those (La Tech and Indiana St) even made my list to keep tabs on and neither would get in.

A movie or two

2013-01-19T16:27:00.001-05:00

I've taken a long hiatus from recording my thoughts here. They've mostly ended up in extended debates on social network forums where I've had them. And of course the vacuousness of the election cycle was very wearisome to any attempt to find thoughtful debates over actual issues.

Nevertheless, things are still happening, and I am still thinking about some of them.

1) I don't think we should be getting into Mali. The only justification for a national interest I can think of is that we have fucked up that country by previously fucking up another one (Libya). Which is a rather dumb way of saying "why don't we light something else on fire and see if that helps put out the flames".

2) I have followed the Newtown tragedy with my usual indifferent attitude. I'm extremely skeptical that most of the proposed ideas have much merit. I would endorse the following statements:
- We should study the epidemiology of our violence. What causes it. What steps could be taken to prevent it once we understand it. We have a lot of violence and murder even after it has decreased, far more than most developed countries. We also have a lot of misinformation, fear-mongering, and easily lifted off the shelf causes (ban violent video games! ban rap music! ban assault weapons! throw lots of people in jail or mental hospitals!) that I doubt would accomplish much but which suck up a huge portion of the oxygen in the wake of these events while excluding any pertinent discussion. Arming a few people with some facts would allow actual reasoned debates to occur somewhere and might allow prominent media outlets to book sane people rather than Alex Jones types
- Encourage mental health to reform and share information where necessary, but also to be less stigmatize socially. A handful of lunatics heavily armed have effectively made the lot of us scared of anyone who has the slightest case of depression or shows anxiety at work or school. And for the most part, the reality is that it is precisely the people who are "off" in that sense who are most vulnerable and most often violated in their person or property, assaulted, raped, etc, among us.
- Stop pretending there's a functional difference between semi-automatic rifles and other legal weapons. They just look scarier to people who don't like guns but in both cases they're designed and capable of spitting out little metal pullets at high speed into living tissue and causing damage and death, at close or long range. Actual machine guns or bazookas or tanks or land mines or surface to air missiles are generally illegal and heavily restricted (eg banned). There are people who disagree with some of those bans as well on moral or legal grounds, but by and large, these weapons at least have functional differences from a common hunting rifle, handgun, or shotgun that allow for legal distinctions to occur and which could apply to their function as weapons. "Assault rifles" do not.
- Gun rights advocates should not presume to the defence of liberty against tyranny as the first most accessible argument for the protected right of gun ownership in this country. Tyranny has many forms, and I'd much rather that a free society defend ALL of its rights and liberties against it, not just its right to be armed. Nevertheless, in defending that right, there are a number of sane sounding justifications for why someone would want a particular gun. Sport, discipline, hunting, and self-defence all spring to mind and would apply just as well to virtually any weapon which is presently legal. I find the macho-gun culture aspects of how some of these are marketed, presented, and used to be more than a little repellent personally, in that I find men should have quite enough confidence in their penis without needing a gun to represent something. But my personal sentiments are hardly a good basis for public policy. Neither are yours.

3) Movies. I've now seen 5 of the 9 nominees for best pictures. 4 of them were mediocre to decent in my mind (Lincoln and Django were okay to low end good, Zero was decent but not great, Les Miserables had a lot of people who couldn't sing in it but were determined to pretend otherwise). Argo was a good movie, but I wouldn't say it was "best picture" material (Affleck can direct though). I've heard good things about Beasts and will probably see it and Silver Linings at some point. I'm not sure that there were "Oscar" worthy films this year in that sense so much as a few good blockbusters (Avengers, Skyfall, and Dark Knight Rises. The first Hobbit movie wasn't that great, but had a few flashes of promise too).

Daniel Day Lewis was very good in Lincoln even though I thought the rest of the film was way too messy. I thought Denzel did well in Flight too as a functional alcoholic. I don't have critical opinions on the rest of the field.

The main reason to bring this up: Zero Dark Thirty. I think it was a touch too long. I think Chastain did rather well in it acting wise but I suspect her story or character was trumped up and condensed to make the CIA seem more sympathetic. I think it is deliberately ambiguous about the torture sequences in some ways. I think it's very direct that what we were doing was in fact TORTURE. In capital letters, even if no one refers to it as such, stress positions, blaring music, putting people in tiny boxes, water boarding, stripping men naked and cold (in front of women, a cultural affront on top of the physical) and so on. It's unpleasant even watching the violence afflicted by men wearing black masks upon their helpless captives even though in most cases these are men who plotted or participated in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. It messes with the people doing it, it's directly referred as hurting and pain, and so on. The ambiguous part is that people keep complaining that they cannot do it as though it must have offered them some perceived advantage but it never really demonstrates any such advantages in gathering intelligence about the war on terror efforts or learning any vital clues on the trail to Osama. The vital clues come from normal acts of intelligence gathering (tips, bribes in the "right" places, etc). Also the film seems to be blaming Obama for that change even though Bush was the one who ordered the halt, which I think is a mistake.

The important non-ambiguous part I got from watching it though was this: We went in there specifically to kill Osama. Period. There wasn't effective resistance. There was a calm and deliberate intention. The only reason we spent special forces on it instead of a drone or air strike was to a) be sure he was there and b) be sure he was killed. It had the secondary effect of limiting collateral damage by not killing a bunch of random civilians (and of course, wives and children of the people living in the compound). That's it. We can think of some justification for why he would be killed, perhaps he would shoot back or blow himself up, something. But none of those hold in the depiction of events, the planning involved, the questions surrounding the operation, the attitudes of people involved. We could say this is from fictionalized accounts. But we also get the strong impression that the film was crafted with the participation of the White House, the CIA, and the special forces community (including the team involved in the strike). If they had input, and they disagree with the notion that we went in there specifically to kill rather than collect him, I'd say someone should say so. Nobody seems all that intent on disagreeing with that notion even though they went to some effort to establish it as true before. Personally, I find that more than a little troubling. I don't particularly care that we sometimes use military force and drones strikes to kill people in foreign countries in theory. I'm not a pacifist, even though I'm far less belligerent than most Americans it seems. Still. I find it at least a little strange that we would send in a special forces team to assassinate someone who we could by sending that team have had hauled back, put on trial, and eventually have killed in a more ordinary and banal American way (the death penalty).

I think the idea that terrorism is more like a crime, perhaps a war crime at times but a crime nonetheless, is one of the more effective premises available in suppressing it. Giving it elevation as a proper military tactic, worthy of (always) the full military response is a) a waste of nation-state resources and treasure and military forces and b) an undeserved credit to a bunch of murderous thugs. People argue that putting these people on trial allows them access to media, undeserved legal protections, that we would have to disclose a good deal of intelligence gathering methods and sources. I'd argue that those legal protections are important because they help assure fairness in the legal system, and it thus ensures that our burdens of proof must be high to imprison and especially to kill other human beings. Accusations are not enough to have a man stripped of his freedom and thrown into prison, there is to be a due process of law executed to assert these accusations have merit and evidence backing them. We have already protections to allow for intelligence and secrecy in trials. And allowing people access allows them to display their full measure of disconnectedness or to articulate arguments that are disjointed from the usual notions of terrorism while all the time being afforded a proper legal and ethical treatment that is often believed unavailable or inaccessible to people persuaded by these foolish notions and the thugs who promote them. If we appear less the hypocrites, so much the better.

General reactions to the defining moment of our times...

2012-11-07T12:51:00.002-05:00

Which for me boiled down to a choice between flavors of ice cream rather than anything momentous and important. And probably will come down to it as equally bland in historical terms years from now also.

1) I think conservative skepticism of polling had some merit to the general arguments, but the problem was that they seemed interested in rejecting the entire trend line of polls, conducted by different agencies with different methodologies, etc, and accepting only information which conformed to the "Romney is going to win! Woot!" narrative rather than information which could be used to describe the political landscape as it existed in 2012. Liberals and Democrats have learned how to analyze polling data after Kerry was defeated in 2004 (and Gore in 2000), and then to use it to inform ways to motivate their base, or to target groups of swing votes. At some point conservatives may do the same. I'm not sure yet if that means most Republicans will.

2) From following various conservative pundits reactions, the likely step is going to be a double down strategy on the idea that Mitt wasn't conservative enough. I think this is politically stupid, but I also have nothing invested in Republicans per se either (the idea of conservativism is sensible enough in forming a basis for a governing party, but we seem to have lots of reactionaries rather than conservatives at the moment), so go right ahead. The basis of this presumption appears to be the maintenance of the House as somehow legitimatizing the Tea Party style operations. There are huge logical gaps in this. First, I don't think anyone thought Democrats could win the House back, perhaps even many who thought there would even be substantial gains. So predicating a victory on voters maintaining the status quo is rather faulty logic (I think the same applies to Obama's win also, though less in the Senate). Voters usually maintain the status quo as that's part of the voting bias. Second, from the information I am seeing, the Tea Party style operations seem to have cost Republicans the Senate, both in this election and in 2010. Running ridiculously unqualified people who say insane things (O'Donnell, Akin, Angle, Mourdock, Buck) is not an encouraging electoral strategy for achieving long-run victories. Democrats had some of the same painful lessons in the wake of the Iraq War (trying to get rid of Lieberman for example), but Republicans are having a lot of trouble absorbing the lessons and adjusting their electoral strategies.

Most of the Tea Party styled victors for Senate seats were in relatively safe states for Republicans (Utah, Kentucky, etc). So the effect has been to move the Republican caucus to the right (in some ways, not in others). There's a few contrasting cases (Wisconsin?) where they managed to find saner or competent seeming candidates that still had high base appeal. I'm not at all convinced this is a sustainable trend wherein the Republican establishment manages to find tame enough people capable of winning elections but also who can win over Tea Party voters in primaries. This plan might work okay in the House, but not for President or Senate. As a correlated problem, moving the caucus to the right allows liberals to paint mostly moderate Republicans with the same right-wing extremist brushes and cast them aside in more liberal states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, etc) where they may otherwise stand a chance of winning. It assures that Republicans become less competitive in those states.

Finally, what seems to me the most significant source of power to maintain many House seats was the 2010 elections that granted Republicans considerable control over redistricting from the 2010 census changes. Ohio in particular has a cadre of pretty safe hard R seats out there now surrounding the liberal bastions of Columbus or Cleveland that are effectively conceded. While this may allow for some Republican control over relatively safe seats for another decade and hence insure some divided government gridlock, it doesn't say much about winning over the rest of the country to their agenda. And if last night's results were any indicator, it doesn't say much about assuring that those are safe seats. Allen West looks to have lost, Bachmann nearly so, and so on.

* A note: I consider the "tea party" to consist not just of a set of fiscal priorities. This is largely because conservatives tend not to agree on how best to resolve those priorities, or what they in fact are. Other than a general sense that deficits are bad, at least when run by Democrats or not caused by defense spending, and that the debt climbing is bad, I do not see much progress here on how to address these as problems. Where there is broader agreement among conservatives is on social policies. Which is precisely where they have made progress at the state level enacting their agenda. Moving away from these types of candidates, the types likely to say expansive and stupid things about female biology when discussing rape victims or to admit their come-to-Jesus moment involving witchcraft, or to include chickens as a viable form of currency, would be a big start. I do not think this is a likely result if they were to double down on the political figures involved in order to say, focus on Rand Paul or Tom Coburn or even Paul Ryan styled conservatives, with their intensity on budget matters and the tough choices involved therein. They're more likely to get DeMint or Bachmann styled conservatives in less safe districts and states who insist that social and fiscal conservativism are melded as one.

3) I don't think Republicans need to abandon a message of smaller government or conservative principles to win over voters to their cause. But they should be aware there's a lot of people who no longer resonate as clearly to mixing a message of fiscal restraint with expansionist foreign policy or moralising social policies, and that when they go off message and discuss these things or try to pass agendas based on them, many voters will find them unpalatable. Not just liberals. Keep in mind that while Romney lost, he didn't lose by very much (some tens of thousands of votes in various states). It would not take very much adaptation and moderation on some issues to go back to winning national elections moving forward. The question is whether Republicans are interested in analysis or rage. I suspect the latter.

4) I also think it would help a great deal to have a saner approach to fiscal restraint. Reaganomics had what successes it had in the 1980s economy because it was part of a broad set of reforms, from monetary policy under Volcker, to neo-Keynesian spending increases, to tax simplification and flattening of the tax code, and as an offshoot of some successful de-regulatory moves made under the Carter administration. Most of those specifics do little to translate to the current environment. Tax simplification while desirable has a lot of embittered constituencies who would fight for some of the complexity. Spending cuts do likewise. And both sides seem willing to talk about culling the excessively broad quantity and reach of regulatory power, but do little to curtail it while in power, even in relatively sane arenas where there are competing and patchwork laws. Instead of tackling these with sensible proposals, for the most part Republicans have offered soft messages like "balanced budget amendments", which if they stood a chance of passage would be accompanied by a constituency willing to make hard cuts, or insane messages like flirting with debt defaults while mostly ignoring entitlement spending, risking both the safety of that spending and the financial stability of the nation as a whole. To be sure, the Romney plan eventually provided some hard choices in tax reform specifically, and the Ryan budget plan is a good starting point for talking about entitlement reforms. But these fledgling signs of fiscal prudence are balanced by Romney's desire for tax cuts more broadly when we're at historically low levels of taxation and an insistence on defence spending, all while demagoguing Obamacare in part because of cuts it makes to entitlement spending. It's hard to know which part of that message to take most seriously, and an honest assessment of our political structures would tell us that only parts of it would ever pass into law in the first place. And probably not the good parts.

Please. Everyone shut up and look in the mirror.

2012-11-01T11:45:00.002-04:00

I've seen and heard multiple people insisting on a desire for political figures to "do what's right", or to "do something" rather than bicker and argue pointlessly. I maintain that there are many, many problems with this desired approach to government.

Firstly, "doing what's right" is a very uncertain phrase, wherein people would likely find that their elected political figures would be doing a lot of things they wouldn't like very much and replace them with people that will do what they want, rather than what is actually necessary and effective to do. The American public wants a lot of inconsistent demands, low taxes and expensive public (and federal) services for instance. Mitt Romney's entire political shtick seems to be based around delivering this magically flavored ice cream where both are possible. There's a reason it's successful. Promising people things that are not possible or are not wise (more or less anything he's said he will do regarding China), is politically popular.

Second. The impetus of requirement to "do something" is very troubling. Often doing nothing is a perfectly reasonable response to a problem. Indeed, the public seems content for the government do very little about problems like Syria or Iran (as it should, as I'm not sure there's very much we could effectively do in the first place). It only becomes a concern when it is OUR problem. A natural disaster occurs, somebody better be helping out. To be sure, one may concede that there are basically good Samaritan style reasons why we might want some public goods and charity dispensed in the wake of a wave of tornadoes or a hurricane, earthquake, volcano, tsunami, whatever. And while there are arguments why we might not want large scale public assistance (for example, to incentivize people to relocate to places that don't have these major disasters), we also need to acknowledge that these are otherwise desirable places for people to live (California's climate for example is excellent, coastal cities around the world are always high demand, etc) and that some measures are appropriate to protect the citizenry from the folly of such geographical stubbornness. But this is distinct from saying the government must do everything in such scenarios to assist, or, more concisely, to point out that just because a legitimate form of public goods may exist in disaster assistance, does not mean that a form of legitimate public goods or externalities also exist in some other realm of intervention and assistance. Medicare for example is distinct from the provision of public health. Same with public school monopolies and education (or hospital monopolies) or Social Security or the Post Office and so on down the line.

Finally, the reason that we have (basically) two political teams that fight and contest everything is that we (basically) have two Americas, sorted ideologically into combative teams. Both sides only claim victories not when they work together (and when they do work together, generally I am skeptical that it's beneficial anyway), but when they achieve something ideologically designed and can lord it over their enemies. The reason isn't just zero sum politics, but that the public perceives only these sorts of victories as desirable. The public wants it this way, we desire the incivility and contest. We desire the battle and the shedding of blood in our rivals; "their" defeats and "our" triumphs. We do not desire unsatisfying compromises about what kind of governance we shall appoint through reasoned debate over these mutually exclusive demands into some sort of utilitarian affected views where the public shall and shall not intervene into the private business and affairs of our countrymen to achieve stated ideological goals. Only boring policy wonks celebrate technocratic achievements of this kind. If we wanted effective conservatives, and effective liberals, we would elect them, support them, and recognize them. We do not.

We should blame ourselves and shut the hell up about these inconsistent desires for productive, effective governance and incivil electoral combat. You can't have both. This is your problem. Not the politicians.

Things to miss

2012-10-04T15:45:00.002-04:00

I skipped (most of) the debate. I had a lot of reasons. First, I really don't care very much about domestic policy debates between Presidents. Some amount of agenda setting is useful, but I doubt very much that the various positions between these two add up to substantially distinct agendas worth listening to them debate. Since I missed it, I read up on it instead. These were good ones from the live-blogging/tweet world.

"Continue to burn clean coal." I would like America also to continue to use cold fusion."
In general, people who proclaim a desire for "energy independence" are as reliable to do so and just as reliable to fail to realize that desire. While I think coal is going to be around for a while yet, I don't think we should kid ourselves that the technology is very clean and sound environmentally. In any case, while coal is a big issue in Ohio/WVa/PA, it seems like a dead issue with all the natural gas and fracking coming online instead.

"Romney argues it's immoral to pass the burden of debt to younger generations. He says he'll cut any programme it's not worth borrowing money from China to pay for. I'm afraid unfunding Big Bird and Jim Lehrer is not going to help much."

The pleasant fiction that cutting things can be accomplished without changing entitlements, keeping taxes low, leaving most loopholes intact, and raising military spending, is persistent. But somebody needs to call bullshit on it. Maybe there's an argument for cutting PBS or foreign aid or art, or whatever, but those are small potatoes that don't impress me when someone says they'll cut it. Romney wasn't even willing to cut Education funding. That's a much larger chunk of change.

"I suppose the deduction for corporate jets ought to depend on whether they have windows that open." - That joke is going to get a lot of mileage it seems. "Not giving subsidies to Exxon: Good. Corporate jet tax: meaningless. Not giving tax breaks to ship jobs overseas: worse than meaningless." - I'm not sure what, if any, substance comes up in these debates usually. I seem to recall they offered something once in a while. I don't think the "borrowing money from China" or "sending jobs to China" lines are true, relate to anything either would do in office, but they persist because the public believes it seems that China bashing is more fun than taking responsibility for their own failings.

"He has proposed a tax plan that would inevitably add to the deficit, but claimed he would never pass a tax plan that would add to the deficit. He says he wouldn't bring down the deficit by raising revenue, but attacks Obama for not supporting a plan that would bring down the deficit by raising revenue. And it all sounds rather convincing." - This was vintage Romney. The amusing (or perhaps disturbing, depending on your perspective) part of the debates seems to have been that Obama wasn't calling these bluffs on things like Medicare, defence spending, tax cuts, etc.

"I'm not sure if I'm learning anything from this debate, but I expect to learn a lot from the fact-checks that will inevitably follow." - Pretty much. Some of the fact-checks preceded it even.

Since I had already decided who I would vote for, and it wasn't either of those jokers.
I have the following wonders
1) In baseball, someone (Cabrera) won the Triple Crown for the first time in 45 years. This doesn't appear to be a big deal (it also wasn't his best season, so maybe that's the issue). Given that baseball is actually making quite a lot of money still and therefore must have fans somewhere, I'm not sure why this is. Because he was playing in Detroit? Because he's Latino? Because he was a fairly predictable case to win a TC (Pujols being another)?
2) I'm still undecided on whether Homeland is a pro-war-on-terror show or anti. It's hard to tell.
3) The movie Looper was incredibly predictable. It did not meet my expectations but was possibly a decent film anyway.