A well-deserved red

I have no sympathy for Germany. Miroslav Klose’s card was for stupidity more than anything else. Yes, the Spanish ref is calling a strict game, but as a player, you have a responsibility to pay attention to that. Klose had already been whistled twice for tackles from behind and verbally warned about it, then went ahead and committed two more fouls in exactly the same manner.

UPDATE: 1-0 to Serbia. The Germans were literally handed an opportunity to tie the game after a Serbian defender committed the most inexplicable handball I have ever seen in more than three decades of soccer, but Podolsky’s weak penalty shot was saved by the keeper. The German defeat casts an even harsher light on Australia’s feeble performance in the first game.

UPDATE II: An absolutely shameful call by the referee to disallow the USA’s third goal. FIFA has done an excellent job in forcing the side judges to stop calling phantom offsides, now they need to stop the referees from calling phantom fouls in the box. The only fouls being committed were by the Slovenian players. Absurd. The USA well-merited the three points by fighting back from a two-goal deficit, but now it will be necessary to beat Algeria if they’re going to qualify. Fortunately, they would appear to have the fortitude to do exactly that.

Worse than Katrina

I expected Obama to be worse than Bush in many ways. I did not, however, expect his administration’s response to a natural or environmental disaster to be even more incompetent than the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina:

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk…. But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that [Louisiana governor] Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Unbelievable. I am a confirmed skeptic – nay, utter cynic – regarding government competence, and yet no matter how pessimistic my view of federal government agencies, they always manage to fall short of even my lowest expectations. Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself thinking that more government regulation is capable of preventing or solving ANYTHING in a reasonable manner.

Doing nothing is to be vastly preferred to actively working to prevent others from fixing the problem. You have to feel sympathy for those poor state and local officials who have been waiting for two months for the federal agents to ride in and salvage the situation, only to discover that the cavalry is fighting on the side of the Indians.

The rational ignore science

Or rather, they ignore the predictions made by scientists:

Strange. It’s like we privately agree that when these scientists say the end of the world is nigh, they don’t mean it, not literally, but are just scaring us for our own good. Or that they do mean it, but are frankly batty.

After all, it’s not as if even Dark Greens have resolved never to breed, to thus spare their child the horror of spending their shortened life in terror at the doom to come.

Yet we’re still meant to treat everything else these scientists say as the gospel truth. As in: sure, they’re way out there about the end of human life, but on the small stuff they are bang on.

The important thing to remember about scientific predictions is that they are reliably wrong. It’s rather like contrarian investing. The correct thing to do is figure out what they are saying today, then bet on the opposite. More than half the time, much more than half the time, that is the correct thing to do. What science fetishists almost always forget is that scientists are human, not golems animated by the spirit of the scientific method. And because scientists are human, those who are skilled at understanding and anticipating human behavior can correctly ascertain the truth or untruth of a scientific matter without knowing anything whatsoever about the science involved.

I will leave my theoretical explanation for why scientific predictions are so reliably wrong for another day.

World Cup Days 3-6

A few emailers have chastised me and demanded MORE SOCCER POSTS. So, how can I deny them. First, I have to admit that I haven’t watched all of the games, but only the ones that interested me. So, I have nothing to say about Slovenia-Algeria, New Zealand-Slovakia or Côte d’Ivoire-Portugal. Here’s what I’ve noticed thus far:

South Africa is, as I thought in the first game, pretty terrible. They’re okay technically, but have literally no clue what they’re doing tactically. France is not a French team, it is an African team in French uniforms and their manager Domenech is dreadful. It wouldn’t shock me if they lost to Mexico and failed to make the second round. Uruguay is a decent team, but South Africa made them look better than they are. If the Mexicans bother to show up this time, they have a good shot at beating France.

Greece is as boring as ever but now they don’t have a keeper upon whom they can ride to the second round as they did in winning Euro 2004. Argentina will be dangerous once Messi stops getting cute and starts shooting the ball at the goal instead of trying to nip the corners. In the meantime, they should be feeding the ball more to Unfrozen Caveman Striker. It drives me crazy when strikers insist on aiming for the corners, shooting wide, and depriving their team of rebound goals, which make up around one-quarter of all goals scored. Nigeria isn’t getting talked up as the Great African Hope for once in light of South Africa, but I don’t think they can hope to play with South Korea. I very much like the way the South Koreans play; they’re aggressive, fit, and disciplined. They’re not going to beat the Argentines, but they should take second.

There’s not much to say about Group C. It’s England, USA, and that’s about it. Slovenia might surprise one of them with a draw, but I’d expect both teams to win their next two games. Group D is Germany and the three dwarfs. The Netherlands are easily the class of their group, as they toyed with the Danes throughout. I expect the Japanese to finish second in Group E behind the Dutch; their 1-0 game against Cameroon wasn’t as close as the score indicates.

Both Italy and Brazil looked relatively bad against Paraguay and North Korea, the difference was that the Brazilian strikers are better. Italy should be starting Camorenesi on the wing; the game turned around when he came in. Buffon’s injury really hurts the Azzurri, but an Italian team that is counting on its goalie is not an Italian team that is in contention anyhow. Portugal is a shadow of its former self and I join the rest of the world in hoping for an embarrassing injury to Cristiano Ronaldo. Irina Shayk may be no little hot, but not even a Sports Illustrated girlfriend can hope to counterbalance that ubercheesy cheeseball, his whining and all those needless stepovers. Speaking of annoyances, I thought the Brazilians were infuriating; they kept trying to unlock the North Korean defense by passing around the ball outside the box instead of sending it in for crosses against a very short defense. Like the South Koreans, the North Koreans outperform their talent. I had the idea that the Brazilians felt sorry for them, Lucio in particular appeared to be going out of his way to pat them on the back or otherwise encourage them.

And finally, Hop Schwiiz! The Swiss defeat of Spain wasn’t a big surprise to me because the temperamental, individual-centered Spanish attack is very vulnerable to the Swiss catenaccio strategy. I fully expect Switzerland to win the group now; the loss of Alexander Frei was never the big deal that everyone appear to have assumed it would be. In fact, they’re better off without him making their attack overly one-dimensional. Torres was the only Spanish player who looked consistently dangerous; he’s coming back from injury but should be starting anyhow. Some notes:

1. Ban the vuluzelas.
2. I find myself fantasizing about watching the games from the stands with a large caliber sniper rifle and picking off midfielders when they a) refuse to make through passes to a waiting striker with 50 yards of empty grass in front of him, b) pull up and dribble the ball in a circle in transition to permit the defense to get set, c) pass up a perfectly reasonable shot in order to get a slightly better shot that only requires beating two, three, or sometimes four defenders. TAKE THE DAMN SHOT!
3. I hate most midfielders. Just in case that wasn’t clear. If your name isn’t “Zidane”, you are not going to be able to beat more than one international-class defender. Don’t even try.
4. Aside from the terrible red card given to the South African goalie, the red that should have been a yellow given to the one Australian who actually knows how to play soccer, and the second yellow not given to Jamie Carragher for clotheslining a US striker, the refs have been surprisingly good.
5. The ball isn’t the problem with the low scores. They are the result of defense-oriented strategies combined with an extreme reluctance on the part of attackers to shoot the ball if it is more than three meters away from the goal line. Here is hoping the goals scored by Clint Dempsey and Diego Forlan encourage attacking players to shoot more quickly and more often.
6. Managers desperately need to lose their fascination with big, fast physical specimens who can’t score. For example, Emile Heskey has scored 7 goals in 59 games with England. Why in the name of the third lion is he on the team, let alone starting? I would expect to score more goals than that in 59 games, especially playing against powerhouse teams like Kazakhstan and the Faroe Islands.

And for those of you who hate soccer, the Onion has come through again.

Soccer Officially Announces It Is Gay

Pointing and laughing

It’s hard to summon up any sympathy for unemployed and underemployed lawyers given that it was obvious that there were far too many of the worse-than-useless, anti-productive bastards back when I graduated from college:

Look past the occasional vulgarity and disgusting pictures. Don’t dismiss the posters as whiners. To a person they accept responsibility for their poor decisions. But they make a strong case that something is deeply wrong with law schools.

Their complaint is that non-elite law schools are selling a fraudulent bill of goods. Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.

And for the opportunity to enter a saturated legal market with long odds against them, the tens of thousands newly minted lawyers who graduate each year from non-elite schools will have paid around $150,000 in tuition and living expenses, and given up three years of income.

How smart can these overeducated and unemployable people be anyhow if they weren’t capable of taking simple supply and demand into account AFTER four years of college? And if those who insist that education creates societal wealth are correct, then there can’t possibly be a problem here anyhow.

Never forget that law schools, like every other form of school, exist in order to make money for someone. The education and degree are merely the means to an end. Therefore, caveat emptor applies.

I almost started to feel sorry for this guy, until I remembered that his intention was to work as a lawyer and enjoy a well-compensated career by diverting money away from the productive classes of the country. And the most amusing thing in all of this is the failed larval lawyers who fail to see the irony when they hypothesize about those who hold lawyers in contempt will desperately need a lawyer should they find themselves facing an unjust lawsuit….

So in an effort to show you what happens after a law school has robbed a student of $120,000 + and their dream of becoming a practicing attorney, let me show you a day in the life of a Jobless JD. This is what happens after the scam money has been collected and the student leaves without a job in hand:

It starts about 2 AM for me, when I wake up with my heart pounding, wondering what I am going to do. What bill should I pay this month? Electric, gas, rent, all past due. I decide I will pay for gas and electric, go without food, because I still want to lose a few pounds and I have some rice and yogurt left that I can eat this week.

I get up and stare out the window and wonder for the ten millionth time what the hell I was thinking when I decided to go to law school. I play the would have / could have / should have game (If only I wouldn’t have gone to law school, I could have worked and I wouldn’t have debt, I should have thought this out) That usually gets me to 6 AM.

I shower and walk (subway is expensive) to a public library that has computers so I can blog. Mine blew up last year and I can’t afford a new one. Next I go to my $10 an hour part time job (all I’ve been able to get a year out of law school) and I try to be sunny and cheerful and pretend that I’m happy to be there so that I can hold on to it.

That being said, the authors of the Scamblogs are doing noble work indeed by exposing the monstrous scam that is law school. And since they couldn’t figure out the scam ahead of time, it seems unlikely that they ever thought through the way in which law firms make their money. So, in the end, we shouldn’t hold their innocent infatuation with legal extortion against them.

Blame the GOP

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Two things. First, this proves that Democrats are children who are inherently incapable of taking responsibility for anything. Blaming Republicans because 100,000 Democrats voted for an unemployed man with no apparent interest in politics marks a new high-water point for their whining. Second, ALVIN GREENE FOR PRESIDENT! I would totally vote for the man.

Slapfight!

I always considered Debbie Schlussel to be an irrelevant lightweight. So, John Hawkins’s account of her descent into lunacy is moderately entertaining:

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a normal person and then one day a quasi-famous mentally ill blogger becomes fixated on you the way Gollum was fixated on the Ring. Even though she hasn’t been setting the world on fire lately, she has been on TV, on the Howard Stern show and she’s written for the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, & The Washington Times. Most people in the know realize she’s off her rocker, but how many people are in the know? How many fans does she have who don’t realize what she’s really like?

In fairness to Ms Schlussel, building a career on spotting anti-semitic bogeymen, both real and imaginary, has been a reasonably viable media strategy for the last thirty years. National Review alone appears to have a quota of at least 20 Corner blogs and 5 articles on the subject per month. But as the OC likes to say of the SFWA, blogger battles are bitter only because the stakes are so small.

A misdiagnosis

Fred goes somewhat astray in diagnosing Commentator’s Disease:

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it…. The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.

First, Fred is mistaken in thinking that most of the commentariat possesses IQs over 140. Speaking as someone who actually does have an IQ over 140 and has suffered through numerous interactions with many members of the commentariat, most of them are barely Mensa material, if that. While Pat Buchanan and Charles Krauthammer are both highly intelligent, they are actually somewhat unusual; there is a reason that media figures seldom write more than two books that are little more than collections of their past columns. Furthermore, many of the books “written” by big name media figures are actually ghostwritten. For example, Rush Limbaugh’s second book was actually written by Joseph Farah.

Second, while Fred is correct about the liberal misapprehension regarding the utility of college education, there are few, if any, conservatives who think that everyone can be Horatio Alger. Fred, being somewhat soft-hearted, doesn’t understand that both libertarians and conservatives accept failure and have little desire to try to rescue people from themselves or the natural consequences of their bad decisions. This isn’t because they don’t know that life is hard, but because they understand the futility of fostering dependency.

Finally, abstract theory matters because its application has great effect on the lives of the elite and the great unwashed alike. And Keynesianism, in particular, matters because the long run has finally arrived.

Strategy games for starters

DB asks a reasonable question:

If you have time would you mind recommending a good strategy board game for someone who has only ever played Risk and Axis and Allies.

Ideally it can be played by only two people but can handle more if needed. I would like something that doesn’t take days to play, an hour or two, no more than three. A game whose rules can be easily understood by beginners. While I could probably pick up complicated rules fairly quickly those I play with may not be as oriented toward such thinking.

There are so many games out there that I don’t know where to even start looking.

My go to game for beginners is War at Sea by Avalon Hill. It’s simple, historical, and balanced towards the Allied player so it’s a good game to help a less experienced gamer develop confidence while learning the importance of anticipating an opponent. It also makes it very easy to understand why the Axis lost WWII. However, I’m sure others will have alternative suggestions.

There was no misstatement

There are suggestions that George Stephanopoulis may have spoken a little too quickly in correcting Obama about “my Muslim faith”:

In the [Israel Today] report, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit was quoted as saying during an appearance on Nile TV that, “The American president told me in confidence that he is a Muslim.”

The White House remained silent on the comment, declining to respond to a WND request for comment.

Curiouser and curiouser… but the question is if this is simply Israeli disinformation being released due to their obvious displeasure with the Obama administration or a genuine statement from an Egyptian official who is confirmed to have met at least twice with Obama in the last two years. Perhaps someone at Fox should get Mr. Gheit on the line and ask him a few pertinent questions.

Given what we know of Obama, it wouldn’t surprise me if he intentionally misspoke. Even the most deceptive individuals can’t seem to resist advertising the truth about themselves to those who are paying attention.