Author: VD

The Barca machine

Grantland’s game diary for the second leg of the Milan-Barca quarterfinal:

Brian: Sometimes I watch a bit of play that just knocks me over the head with WHAT A WEIRD TEAM BARCELONA IS. They just won that penalty by bypassing a couple of completely plausible shots in order to stroke the ball around in the area like they were playing a very casual game of hot potato. They were literally trying NOT to pass the ball into the back of the net, and now it’s 1-0.

If you’re the heads-up display in the Barca-player visual-software interface, how do you decide when to light up for “shoot”? There are like nine floating circles that have to converge, at which point the software runs an algorithm that determines whether the resulting shot would be beautiful.

Three things struck me most about watching Barca effortlessly beat the Rossoneri. First, it’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters. They don’t just make the pass instead of taking the shot, they make another pass, and sometimes a third, before taking the shot, and sometimes this all takes place inside the opposing box. I’ve never seen anything like it. They don’t so much waste opportunities as blatantly ignore them.

Second, they press frighteningly well. I would estimate that at least one-third, and possibly as much as one-half, of Milan’s attempts to clear the ball were intercepted or otherwise failed. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Milan defense was playing back on its heels in full, catenaccio from the start, but no sooner did they take the ball away than they lost it, usually in their own half of the field.

Third, Barca stretches the field horizontally better than any team I’ve ever seen. There was always a winger on the far side of the ball, but instead of crossing the balls in the air, the wingers would push the ball inside, force the defender to commit, then a) try to beat him, b) pass off to Messi, or c) pass off to the central midfielder coming up in support. Their entire game is played on the ground, which makes sense given that their front six appear to average about 5’6″. They just keep passing and slashing and pressing until the defense cracks, then instead of shooting, pass three more times for good measure, before finally deigning to make an attempt on goal.

I would have been more annoyed by the two penalties awarded Barca were it not for the fact that the fouls were legitimate, and at least the first time, the ball should have already been in the net twice over by the time the foul occurred. The final score was 3-1, but it could just as easily have been 6-1. That’s not to say Barca is invulnerable, as neither their defense nor their keeper impressed me. A big, fast team with the benefit of a laissez faire referee could beat them, assuming they didn’t run out of steam chasing the little guys around.

The real problem

Some, like Michael Barone and John Leo, say the problem is too much diversity and too little science. Not me. I say the problem is quite clearly the rise of the undead!

The scary thing is that this is what the chairman of the University of California board of regents looks like when dollied up for a press conference. Can you even imagine what she looked like earlier that day, when she’d been freshly unearthed and the mortician hadn’t yet sewn the wig onto her scalp?

Mailvox: the benefits of immigration

In which a historical objection is raised:

I’ve read that the two migrations of Greeks into Italy (the first around Cato the Younger’s time IIRC, and the second after the fall of Constantinople) were beneficial for Italian society because of the Greek learning and culture they brought with them. Are these relevant to your thesis about the negative effect of immigration on receiving societies? As an immigrant to Italy, what is your opinion?

Cato the Younger lived from 95 to 46 BC. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. The Roman Republic is considered to have ended in 29 BC. I submit that this specific example is very relevant to my thesis, insofar as decades of civil war followed by a collapse into one-man dictatorship would generally be considered to be a societal negative.

As for the second wave of Greek immigration, those were Greeks in the Byzantine sense, not the Hellenic. Since Byzantium was still somewhat more civilized than thrice-sacked Rome or the oft-invaded Italian peninsula, this is rather like asking if immigration from the United States to some of the more war-torn African societies would be beneficial. And remember, the difference between Byzantium and the Italian peninsula would likely have been even starker were it not for the Venetian conquest and sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Inflation and the money supply

There is considerable talk about inflation these days, since gasoline prices are hitting historic highs and the Federal Reserve has been increasing the money supply at a very rapid rate. And yet, if we actually take the time to look at a range of data, one thing becomes very clear: the increase in prices simply hasn’t kept pace with the increase in either of the primary measures of the monetary stock.

Annual delta, February 2011 to February 2012

M1: +341.8 billion, +18.2 percent
M2: +882.3 billion, +9.9 percent
US avg gas price: +22 cents, +6 percent
National median home price: +0.3 percent
CPI-U: +2.9 percent

This gap in relative deltas cannot be explained without bringing the credit markets into the equation. And it should be fairly obvious, if not tautological, that an increase in debt is inflationary whereas a decrease in debt is deflationary, as per the law of supply and demand. So why are we still seeing some price inflation despite the contraction in the private debt sectors?

The answer is simple. The rapid 23 percent annual expansion in public debt has allowed the economy’s overall debt level to remain essentially flat for the last four years. In other words, despite all of the foreclosures and defaults, there has been no debt contraction and therefore no deflation… yet. Even so, the only place that the Fed’s herculean attempt to raise price levels by printing, borrowing, and spending money has really been effective is in the stock market, or more precisely, in Apple stock.

I can’t disagree

But that’s hardly the salient point:

“I think if President Obama came out as gay, he wouldn’t lose the black vote,” a cheerful Van Jones told MSNBC this afternoon. “President Obama is not going to lose the black vote no matter what he does,” he added.

He’s certainly not going to lose it to Mitt Romney. But what a very strange thing to say, considering the rumors that have surrounded Obama in Chicago.

WND column

Dissolution and Post-Democracy

It is always difficult for those who live through transitional periods in history to recognize that they are taking place.

While we distinguish between the Roman Republic and the Roman empire, and mark the birth of the Byzantine empire with the establishment of its capital at Constantinople, it is unlikely that the average person living under Roman rule understood, much less cared, that he was a citizen of the Roman Republic, the Eastern Roman Empire or the Western Roman Empire. Indeed, although we call them Greeks and Byzantines, the men of the Eastern Roman Empire still called themselves Romans and believed they, and not the barbarian-infested ruins of the city on the seven hills, were the true heirs to Romulus and Caesar Augustus, even though they no longer lived in Italy nor spoke Latin.

Comment issues

We’re having some trouble with comment counts over 200 being inaccessible to the reader, so please expect some turbulence as we experiment with solutions.

UPDATE – MK has fixed the problem. Once a post is over 200 comments, one can click on NEWER to get the 201+ comments.

The transformation of the secular left

At the end of the day, the Left’s addiction to authoritarianism exceeds their commitment to secularism:

George Galloway is the founder and sole personality of a political party that he calls Respect. A veteran of the hard Left, he is the most prominent person in Britain to have made the transition from Communism to Islamism…. Everything is different now because Galloway has won a by-election in the constituency of Bradford West, and re-enters parliament as an independent. The Labour Party has held this seat since 1974 and expected to do so again. But Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, have replaced the old Labour voters in huge numbers and they like Galloway’s Islamism. Presenting himself as a pseudo-Muslim, he talked about Allah and dropped Arabic words into his speeches, had posters put up in Urdu, had supporters speaking in praise of sharia, and criticized his Labour opponent, a Muslim by birth, for drinking alcohol. A landslide followed. Galloway had a majority of over 10,000 and a swing from Labour to Respect of 36 percent.

According to the media, this swing is due to the discontent of the working class who would like the Labour Party to be old-style Socialists. Class resentment is in order but Muslim separatism and racism is taboo. Reporting the news of the by-election, the BBC couldn’t bring itself even to utter the word Muslim. A senior Labour Party ex-minister could only say there was a local “problem” and refused to elaborate what that might be even though a crowd of young men with beards could be seen on television swarming round Galloway.

I wish I could find it more amusing that the secular Left is, precisely as expected, being replaced by the Islamic Left. The abhorrent vaccuum is being filled. Galloway is a freak and we can hope that he is simply a one-off, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Belatedly coming to their senses

Republicans finally turn against the decade-long military occupation of Afghanistan:

Support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low with the majority of Americans saying the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan before the 2014 deadline set by the Obama administration, according to a new poll. The CNN/ORC International survey released Friday indicated only 25% of Americans favored the war in the Asian country. A majority of Republicans voiced opposition to it, for the first time since the war began in 2001.

I still find it amazing that Obama has gotten a pass for continuing the occupation, considering that the only reason he beat out Hilary for the nomination was because he was supposedly the anti-war candidate. Republicans may be stupid and slow to grasp the obvious, but the cognitive dissonance of the American liberal truly knows no bounds.