Author: VD

A goal and the existence of God

About five years ago, I had to stop playing soccer.  I’d re-aggravated an old leg injury and while I could run without trouble, I couldn’t kick the ball with any force with my better foot.  Two years ago, I was invited to join another veterans team, one that competed at a lower level than the Elite Promoted team with whom I’d been playing, (and with whom there was no way I would be able to play for after so much time away from the game), and since I thought I could use the exercise, I thought I’d give it a try.

It went pretty well, as we won the league championship both years, and I was able to contribute six goals to the effort last year despite being the fifth option at striker.  Like most veterans teams, we were injury-plagued and so I ended up starting a few games last year.  This year, we began the season in such collectively bad condition that I’ve been starting most of the games, and indeed, have even had to play entire games without being substituted.  I’m not the worst player on the team, but I’m easily and unquestionably the least technically-skilled of the starters.  But, if nothing else, it’s really an excellent workout.

However, I’ve finally understood the nature of my role on the team – about which more another time, as it’s a lesson in teamwork – so the coach has decided that I’m the ideal complement for the best striker and usually starts me in preference to two of our better strikers even when they are available.  That’s because I am the only one fast enough to keep pace with S, the aforementioned striker, and can therefore prevent the defense from committing two or even three defenders to him when we’re attacking.  We don’t need me to score in order to win, only to make enough runs and create enough dangerous opportunities to make the defense nervous and give S room to work.  In an ideal game, I get two or three shots, S scores three goals, our midfielders add two more, and we win 5-2 or thereabouts.

I knew the guys were a bit nervous this weekend, though, since our number 10 told me that I would have to score two goals if we were going to win.  The problem was that as good as our attack is, the other team’s is better.  They were ahead of us in the league table and had scored almost twice as many goals as us thanks to their star player, a retired professional named D.  We simply couldn’t count on S scoring enough to keep pace with him. 

We got off to a really good start, however, when about five minutes into the game, I broke for the center and our left wing sent a cross towards me.  It was too low to head, too high to kick, and I had a defender right on me so I couldn’t try to control it either.  So, I concentrated on getting my right knee up as high as I could, and managed to redirect the ball past the keeper from just inside the box.  It wasn’t perfectly placed or anything, but the cross was whipping across so fast that he never had a chance at blocking the deflection.  1-0.

It was a good goal, maybe even mildly impressive, but it was the sort of instinctive goal I still score from time to time.  I was very pleased, of course, but we didn’t get too carried away since we knew they could score too and D was proving to be an absolute freaking handful for our midfielders and defenders.  He didn’t really play a proper position, he just sort of roamed free and created havoc anywhere he wanted despite our attempts to double- and triple-team him every time he touched the ball.  Our number 10 set me up with a nice pass, but I blew the pass to S when I should have probably just run in straight on the right side of goal.  Still, we were keeping up the pressure when D went past three of our guys before being knocked off the ball… and our last defender whiffed on the clearance.  Their other striker pounced on his miss and put a hard, low shot into the corner that our goalie couldn’t possibly stop.  1-1.

We were dominating possession, though, and before too long, S drew a free kick just outside the box, then whipped the kick over the wall and into the upper right corner.  I don’t think the keeper even saw it until it was too late.  2-1.

It was just before halftime when the left wing tried the same cross with which we’d scored earlier, only he hit it too hard.  It not only went over my head, and my marker’s head, but also beyond the left defender.  I realized the ball was going high early and had already cut right before it passed overhead, so I managed to get to it first, about halfway between right corner of the box and the sideline.  I knew S, the number 10, and the left wing were all breaking to the middle, so without slowing down, I leaped, twisted my body and hit it as hard as I could with my right foot without looking.  That spun me in a circle, which stopped just in time for me to see the ball fly right into the very upper left corner of the net.  3-1.

It was as ludicrous as it was spectacular.  You just don’t see many goals like that, not even in a league where there is enough skill that guys not infrequently score from 35 yards out.  Our defensive captain, who gets frustrated with me on pretty much a weekly basis, (and for good reason), actually got down on one knee and kissed my shoe as if it were the Pope’s ring.  The goal completely demoralized the other team. 

In the second half, we missed a penalty, but lanes started opening up, their defense mostly stopped trying to run with us, and if it weren’t for some poor touches and foolish offsides, we would have added more than the one additional goal scored by S.  The game finished 4-1, and when I complimented D afterwards for being such an incredibly massive pain in our collective posterior, he was kind enough to say that he was pretty impressed with my second goal himself. 

Right after the game, about six of my teammates surrounded me and demanded to know if I had been actually trying to take such an improbable shot, or if it was merely an attempt to cross gone fortunately awry.  I told them the truth, which was that I was only trying to send the ball in S’s general direction, so it must have been “la grazia di Dio” that put it in the net.  That made them all laugh, and one midfielder, a skilled player who has a keen sense of my technical limitations, commented that as far as he was concerned, it was definitive proof of the existence of God.

There have been a handful of games I can still clearly remember throughout the course of my soccer-playing career.  A 13-0 demolition of Breck in junior high.  Beating the Lagos brothers for the conference championship in high school, then downing our archrivals in the first round of the state championship.  This game will most definitely be one of them.

The polls say Romney can’t win

In which we note the latest Gallup poll:

According to the latest Gallup survey, Mitt Romney is polling 52% of likely voters. At this point in the race he is ahead of:

  • Where Jimmy Carter was in 1976 (47%)
  • Where Ronald Reagan was in 1980 (39% — Carter was six points up)
  • Where George H.W. Bush was in 1988 (50%)
  • Where Bill Clinton was in 1992 (40%)
  • Where George W. Bush was in 2000 (48%)
  • Where Barack Obama was in 2008 (49%)

Cue Nate Silver complaining: “But… but… the 538 state poll model estimates that Obama has a 172.3% chance of winning!”

    Cancer-free sterility

    On the plus side, with Gardasil, young women are theoretically protected from a few of the many strains of HPV, which can, but usually doesn’t, result in cervical cancer.  On the con side, it appears that it can render teenage girls sterile.  How fortunate for the manufacturers that Congress has rendered them immune to civil liability for their defective products.

    The BMJ has published the case report of a healthy 16-year-old
    Australian girl whose womanhood appears to have been stolen by Gardasil
    vaccinations. She has been thrust into full-fledged menopause, her
    ovaries irrevocably shut down, before becoming a woman. The
    authors, Deirdre Therese Little and Harvey Rodrick Grenville Ward,
    draw direct attention to the fact that, though the girl has been
    thoroughly examined and tested, there is no known explanation other than
    the series of three Gardasil vaccinations she had.

     The potentially damning information is here:

     “It is not known whether this event of premature ovarian failure is
    linked to the quadrivalent  HPV vaccine. More detailed information
    concerning rat ovarian hist-ology and ongoing fecundity post-HPV
    vaccination was sought from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). Although the TGA’s Australian Public Assessment Report for Human
    Papillomavirus Quadrivalent Vaccine, February 2011, does report on the
    histology of vaccinated rat testes and epididymides, no histological
    report has been available for vaccinated rat ovaries.”

    Translation: Neither Merck nor the TGA ever tested for ovary-related problems, in rats or in humans.  This is why the “vaccines are safe” arguments are so inherently vacuous.  The various studies purporting to “prove” their safety do absolutely nothing of the kind, most of them aren’t even relevant to the primary risk factors.  It is certainly too soon to say that Gardasil sterilizes girls, but on the other hand, it is also too soon to assert that it doesn’t.  If it is true that Gardasil causes premature ovarian failure, this is likely to be the biggest medical scandal since thalidomide was shown to be a teratogen.

    Lest you think we exaggerate

    As Daniel Hannan points out, all that is missing is the swastika.

    Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside
    the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the
    wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

    I found to be potentially significant in the semiotic sense that this imperial rump of the former Christendom not only has the hammer-and-sickle at the top, but symbolically places Christianity below Communism and Islam, while also featuring a large Star of David.  The primary question the poster raises, however, is what importance the Dallas Cowboys could possibly have for the EUSSR?

    Mailvox: a reason to not vote

    I think we can all agree that blame for the present parlous state of the nation clearly lies with JartStar:

    I had some fun today with some of the guys at work about voting. They
    asked me while we were on break who I was going to vote for and I
    explained that I no longer vote. The looks on their faces were priceless
    and when they inquired why I offhandedly explained that I had voted my
    entire life and things have steadily gotten worse, I feel bad about
    that, and my voting has made the country worse. I then apologized to
    them all for what I had done and the three out of the four of them went
    into near hysterics.

    The Israeli Jew proclaimed it would be better for
    me to show up and vote randomly than not vote, and one of the two Indian
    immigrants tried to pull me aside to explain that I wasn’t really the
    problem.

    So this is my new reason for not voting when people ask: The state
    of the country to a large degree my fault and I’m stopping now before I
    make things really bad.

    It’s definitely a more entertaining excuse than relying on reason and being forced to endure a monologue on how Mitt Romney will preside in a TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MANNER than Barack Obama, even though the extent of their actual policy differences appears to be that Romney is slightly more enthusiastic about Israel, Wall Street, and gun control while Obama is slightly more enthusiastic about Saudi Arabia, immigration, and feminism.

    Of course, as I have conclusively proven, there is absolutely no chance that your one presidential vote makes any difference at all.  None at all.  Either that one vote will not make a difference to the outcome, or in the extremely unlikely event that the outcome of the state vote rests upon your one vote, the courts will render it void by pronouncing their own verdict on who won the “election”.

    The argument for random voting being better than not voting is informative, though. Such a position would indicate that to the person who holds it, the preservation of the illusion of democracy is more important than democracy itself.

    My question for Richard Dawkins

    Slashdot is inviting interview questions.  Here is mine:  Given that a) a statistically significant minority of students cannot read or write at their grade levels, b) only a very small number of graduating high school students will ever go on to study science in college, and, c) there are already more science majors graduating than there are science-related jobs to employ them, why do you insist it is so important to teach evolution in schools?

    Seeds of societal destruction

    Desiderius, a commenter at HUS, draws an interesting connection between Rome’s destructive foreign policy and the U.S. university system:

    The empire/Unis identify the best and brightest of the
    tribes/flyover communities. They wow the parents with the grandeur of
    Rome/Uni-degree caché. Parents send promising youth off to Rome/Unis.
    They are indoctrinated with values hostile to the communities that
    raised them.* In the Roman case, the now-mature youth were then returned
    back to the tribes to sow discord, which they did in spades due to the
    contempt they’d been trained to feel for the communities that raised
    them and the values those communities held dear.

    In the present case, when the economy is good, they just stay in the
    big cities and live the life of Roissy. Bad economy -> the Roman case
    becomes a more real possibility. I’ve seen some teachers like this,
    although to be fair, also some teachers pushing back. We’ll see if the
    result is just impotent discord. The alternatives range from Alaric to
    Washington.

    The irony is that the values of the tribes more closely approximated
    the republican values that allowed Rome to rise in the first place than
    the decadent ones that precipitated it’s fall. Likewise today. It is the
    liberal values that have been corrupted.

    * I’d argue in both cases violently less egalitarian, but I’m a little
    original that way – suffice it to say in the present case that Yale Sex
    Week wasn’t what the parents signed up for, or if that feels too
    judgie/SoCon for you, one can peruse the syllabi for rampant
    illiberalism, anti-semitism, radfem, anti-western, you name it. It’s
    bad. I call it anti-humanism.

    This is a cogent summary of one of the various downsides of the so-called meritocracy.  Another one is the way in which the destruction of the old WASP network on Wall Street and its strong sense of noblesse oblige led to the rapacious, mercenary culture that has devastated the American economy, created vast quantities of debt, and led to major malinvestment throughout the nation.

    IQ and the Ivy League

    One of the interesting things about the self-identified intelligent individuals of the cognitive elite is how they commonly demonstrate that the failure to think results in much the same consequences as the inability to think correctly.

    Now, most graduates of Ivy League universities genuinely believe that most highly intelligent people attend Ivy League schools.  But in much the same way that atheists confuse a higher average intelligence with a larger quantity of intelligent individuals, they are confusing a concentration of intelligent individuals with the overall quantity.

    Let’s assume that every single individual at an Ivy League school is
    Mensa-qualified. That’s absurdly generous, of course, as anyone who has
    ever been to an Ivy or conversed with more than a few Ivy League
    graduates will know, but just to be conservative, we’ll assume that every single student enrolled at an Ivy posssses an IQ of 132+ and is therefore in the top 2 percent of intelligence. Now, note that the total Ivy
    undergraduate enrollment is 59,561.

    That is 0.32 percent of the 18,078,672
    total U.S. undergraduate enrollment in 2010. That means, by even the most
    generous and conservative estimate, (since not all Ivy undergrads are genuinely
    Mensa-qualified and because the college-attending group has an average IQ a little above the 100 norm), there are at
    least 5.25x MORE equally smart people, about 302,012, who are attending
    state universities, community colleges, and other private colleges instead of Ivy League
    universities.

    I’d have to do a bit more research to come up with a more accurate number, but I would estimate that there are probably between 10x to 15x more smart people who did not attend an Ivy than did attend one.

    So much for “Alpha Mitt”

    I told you that Mitt Romney, for all his height, financial success, and executive hair, was a Beta.  One display of dominance in the first debate, the first in what is now six years of running for president, does not an Alpha make.  Recall that before the debate, Scoobious Doobius noted this:


    “In terms of “game” theory (as opposed to “game theory”), it’ll be
    interesting to see tonight if things turn into the classic “real alpha
    versus beta huffing and puffing and trying to look like an alpha” sort
    of thing. If Obama takes that bait, then I’ll be a little more
    open-eared towards the predictive power of game.”

    The case, she is closed.  Obama not only came out huffing and puffing, but he even managed to prevent Romney from dominating him the way Romney had in the first debate.  The real indicator of Romney’s Betatude was not that he failed to AMOG Obama a second time, but rather the way in which he permitted a woman to not only overrule him, but the rules set out for the moderator prior to the debate as well.

    There is no excuse for this failure.  A true alpha would have shut her up and forced her to submit to him without even requiring an appeal to the rules.  But, given how the rules were not only clear, but Candy Crowley openly declared her intent to flout them before the debate, Romney’s failure to shut her up and force her to stick to her appointed role is conclusive proof that he is not, and has never been, an alpha male.

    All he had to do, the first time she opened her mouth in violation of the rules, was read them to her and ask her what part of them she did not understand.  Later, when she attempted to play fact-checker, he should have immediately asked her what the score was, then informed her that if she isn’t keeping score, she isn’t the judge of the debate and she should stick to her moderator duties as she agreed prior to the debate.  The fact that Romney’s failure to deal with the woman led directly to him fumbling his best opportunity to publicly drive home Obama’s responsibility for the Libyan debacle is merely rubbing salt in the wound.

    Romney cracks 50

    Thus spake Gallup:  Romney 50%, Obama 46% Among Likely Voters.  Obama down sharply among men, college grads, and Southern voters vs. 2008

    If Romney manages a similar rout again tonight, we could end up seeing a landslide in a few weeks.