Purple and Gold

I don’t have any problem admitting that the Prince song is horrifically bad. It’s no Skol Vikings, let alone Men of Football Fame, which happens to be one of the all-time great fight songs. But I quite like the fact that he wrote it anyhow. It’s the sort of irrational thing that an enthusiastic football fan should do.

I’m not afraid of the Saints. If the Vikes were playing at the Hump, I’d be even more confident than I was last week against Dallas. This lack of fear is no disrespect to Drew Brees; I was furious when Culpepper was injured and the Vikings didn’t pursue Brees after the Chargers decided to jettison him in favor of Rivers. Brees is an excellent quarterback and he is protected by a very good line that only allowed 20 sacks all year. But besides home field advantage, the QB and OL combination are probably the only significant advantages for New Orleans. Consider the breakdown:

QB – slight advantage New Orleans -1 (Favre has been incredible all year, but there is no other shoe with Brees.)
RB – solid advantage Minnesota +2 (This would be the right time to show up in a big way, AD.)
WR – push. I like Rice better than Colston this year.
TE – slight advantage Minnesota +1 (+2 if Shockey can’t go. Shiancoe has been reliably great and Favre has loved throwing to the TE since the days of Chmura and Franks.)
OL – slight advantage New Orleans -1

DL – solid advantage Minnesota +2 (+1 if Edwards can’t go.)
LB – slight advantage New Orleans -1 (Vikes miss Henderson.)
DB – push despite INT difference (Yes, Sharper is a ballhawk but we know him; he’s not as good as this year’s stats indicate.)

Special teams – Kluwe and Morstead are practically identical, Longwell is better than Carney or Hartley, Harvin and Roby both average 27.5 yards on 42 returns, and Reynaud’s average is more than 2x Bush’s. Much to my surprise, the slight advantage is to the Vikes. +1

Home field in a dome: Slight advantage New Orleans -1. This is why I was so upset about those stupid losses to Chicago and Carolina.

Coaches: Slight advantage New Orleans -1. But Chilly is improving. Last year, this would have been minus two. Maybe a minus three. I suspect having Favre pushing him to be more aggressive has helped, then again, having a quarterback who can actually see an open receiver and throw the ball to him would tend to open up the playbook a little. I LOVED the dagger at the end of the Dallas game for two reasons. One, 1975. Two, the Vikes have tended to slack late all season.

On paper, it adds up to a slight advantage for Minnesota, so my conclusion is that the Vikes will hold on for a six-point win that isn’t quite as close as it looks on the final scoreboard. The Saints are a very good team led by an excellent quarterback, but if there is one thing we know from past playoffs, it’s that a strong pass rush can throw off even the very best quarterbacks. The focus is all on the quarterback duel, and no doubt the fourth quarter will be full of aerial pyrotechnics, but don’t be surprised if All Day shows up and takes over.

As for the other game, I’d like to see the Jets knock out the Colts. You have to respect Peyton Manning, perhaps even fear him, but you don’t have to like him. And you certainly don’t have to respect the decision of the Colts’ brain trust to throw away the quest for perfection. The football gods can’t possibly permit Indianapolis to win the Super Bowl this year and a loss to the Jets would be the most fitting retribution.

Mailvox: In fairness, you do prefer bad boys

In which we are amused by feminist complaints about t-shirts expressing improper thoughts of which Women Do Not Approve:

The woman in the ‘Annie Hollywood’ t-shirt (produced by ‘Blood Is The New Black’) looks as though she has been roughed up. She appears disheveled and exhausted, her image reminiscent of a crime scenes photo. The other two women have a strip across their eyes, suggesting a loss of identity and dehumanisation. Their semi-naked bodies are pimped through a t-shirt.

The designs are not iconic. They’re not retro (even if adapting a Roxy Music album cover). They’re not art. What we are seeing here is the glamourising of abuse, the suggestion of sexual aggression, a hint that women want to be treated roughly.

Somehow, I seem to have ended up on an Australian feminist mailing list… I can only suspect Jamie. But the best part about the email was the comment that accompanied the link: “This is really appalling and deserves attention. Could they even be charged with inciting violence? I’d be interested in a legal opinion.”

You can always trust a woman to attempt criminalizing opinions with which she disagrees. No, you insanely cretinous would-be fascist, those t-shirt makers cannot reasonably “be charged with inciting violence” anymore than the makers of t-shirts featuring Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung can. And what did you expect the male reaction would be to the feminist attempt to transform every form of sex that falls short of explicit written consent confirmed by ex post facto notarization by a third party into rape anyway? If rape has become a joke to men; it is only because women, specifically feminist women, have made it so. For example, it would take a heart of stone not to find vast amusement in Amynda’s tale of her terrifying “near-rape” experience that involved neither rape nor actual sex.

It is simply absurd to pretend that no doesn’t often mean yes. There is an abundance of evidence proving otherwise. And there’s a word for men who take women at their collective word with regards to matters of sex, romance, and love. The word is “lonely”. Or, if you prefer, “loser”. Women aren’t particularly attracted to nice men who treat them well, they’re primarily attracted to bastards who don’t give a damn about them, who simply want to nail them and nail them hard.

I don’t agree with everything that Roissy and the players write about Game; I find their interpretation to be a synthetic and subject-limited form of Alpha. But Roissy is nevertheless dead-on correct with regards to what pushes the average woman’s buttons.* This, of course, is exactly why a man wearing an “offensive” Roger David t-shirt is much more likely to score than a man wearing a female-approved Take Back the Night one.

And if you don’t find the tagline “Blood is the New Black” funny, well, there’s clearly something wrong with you.

* NB: On behalf of women who don’t understand the concept of “average”: yes, we already know and acknowledge that there are women who belong to the statistical minority. The group in which you personally happen to fall is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Is Obama serious?

He can come back in a big way if he is really going to take on the banks. But the Market Ticker’s enthusiasm for Obama’s so-called “declaration of war” notwithstanding, that’s a pretty big if. However promising his populist rhetoric sounds, I strongly suspect this is nothing more than another smokescreen fired out of the Federal extend-and-pretend Nebelwerfer. Nor am I alone in these suspicions:

Senior staff at the investment banks themselves were determined to play down the significance of the speech. “What you are witnessing it a political panic,” said one. “Obama lost a crucial vote and is now trying to win back political ground by some serious bank bashing. This has to go through a long and complicated political process before it gets anywhere near being law.”… Last night, David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, showed the first sign that President Obama faces a fight. “To put rules in place that roll back the financial system by 10 years is going to be a very, very hard thing to do,” he said.

Translation: we will fight in the boardrooms, we will fight in the Congressional offices, we will fight in the Senatorial backrooms, we will never roll over and surrender our fraud, our theft, or our ill-gotten gains! While Obama’s political survival instincts are leading him to take the right tack, Barney Frank has already made it clear that Congress, being largely owned by Wall Street, isn’t about to play ball. When one considers the way Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi rolled Obama last year, I wouldn’t bet the housing market against them doing it again, especially when they’ll have a lot of support from idiot Republicans defending the “free market” right of banks to collect federal subsidies, enjoy federal protection against competition, commit massive amounts of open fraud, and get bailed out when they still somehow manage to bankrupt themselves despite all those advantages.

There is an easy way to determine if Obama is genuinely declaring war on Wall Street or not. If he fires Geithner and Summer, withdraws his support for Ben Bernanke, and promotes Paul Volcker to the Treasury, it’s on. If he gets behind Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed, it’s nuclear. But if he leaves all the usual suspects in place, and I have seen no indications that he will not, then this is just a bit of populist window dressing meant to alleviate his plunging poll numbers.

On a tangential note, speaking of those who have to go, check out the latest piece of bank-related corruption in the Obama administration: “Sheila Bair, one of the chief regulators overseeing Bank of America’s federal rescue, took out two mortgages worth more than $1 million from the banking giant last summer during ongoing negotiations about the bank’s bailout and its repayment. Mortgage documents for that 14-room home include a provision, known as a second-home rider, stating that Bair and her husband must keep the house for their “exclusive use and enjoyment” and may not use it as a rental or timeshare. Yet the couple has been renting out part of the house since they left for Washington, with Bair listing income from the “rental property” in Amherst as between $15,000 and $50,000 a year on her most recent financial disclosure form as head of the FDIC.”

These people belong in jail, not running massively influential financial agencies and deciding which corporations will live and which will die. And yet we’re somehow supposed to believe they are capable of salvaging the economic situation?

Blogtalk interview

Avi Davis and I committed science on the lingering economic problems of the United States at Western Word Radio.

And speaking of those problems, Elusive Wapiti reviews RGD on Amazon:

Day’s book starts off with a description of Tokyo in its late 1980’s heyday, before the boom went bust and the nation some thought would rule the world has suffered from nearly twenty years of flat economic growth and stagnation. And Japan’s “lost decades” is an apt metaphor for what Day thinks is in store for America, and indeed, most of the world. Day illustrates the inevitability of credit-fuelled investment booms turning to bust, how the tools used to control the economy are crude, clumsily used, and ineffectual approximations, how it is de rigeur for a central bank with monopoly over the money supply to inflate, inflate, inflate, how stimulus is but more fuel on the bubble-bust fire, and how much further we have to fall today, given the stratospheric heights we’ve climbed to in successive investment booms, than our forebears did in Great Depression 1. In all, it makes for a sobering read.

Mailvox: Poetry and the game player

JB writes, floridly:

All hail your economic eminence. Your mastery of the abstruse and arcane is appreciable to me only by the accuracy of your predictions. Inspired by you and others to take both videogames and poetry seriously, I have written a poem on Dragon Age: Origins. I doubt it will be of interest to someone who hasn’t played the game.

The question that occasions this email is, by what method do you write your poetry? This is the first time I have managed to create passable meter. Here was my method:

1. Brainstorm the emotional units of meaning
2. Structure rhyming couplets and quatrains
3. Reorder the couplets and quatrains
4. Fix meter problems
5. Fix diction problems

However I don’t think the above method could create poetry with an ABAB rhyming structure, which I’ve seen you use. Do you have any tips? Also, what are you playing lately?

Fascinating. If I were the Sports Guy, JB’s email would definitely close the mailbag. I don’t have a poetic method per se, I simply write it with the rhymes in the right place and hope the syllables and meter are correct. I guess my only tip would be to buy a good rhyming dictionary; the online ones tend to be limited in scope. In answer to his other question, I’m finally on the verge of finishing Fantasy General, I’m playing CoD:MW2 on both the PC and PS/3, I’ve got Mario Kart hooked up on the exercise bike, and I find myself unexpectedly on the verge of being defeated in ASL scenario S2 War of the Rats.

Explaining the situation

In which I explain some political realities to Mr. Scalzi:

From a purely strategic point of view, I’m not sure why they don’t just ram the thing through the House as is, fiddle with it a bit during reconciliation and get to Obama to sign it. To put it bluntly, the Democrats will look better by flipping the GOP the bird and then using the ten months until the 2010 election to get voters back on their side than showing to the voters that despite a large majority in both houses, they collapse like a flan in the cupboard at the first setback.

They don’t because they know they’ll get utterly slaughtered in the 2010 elections if they do that. Contrary to what many progressives believe, what passes for health care reform is just not massively popular in America. As it stands, Democrats should hang onto the House in the fall. If they are so foolish as to flip the GOP and the Tea Party movement the bird, they will lose it.

Of course, all either party has to do to become dominant in the near-term is run against the banks on a platform of financial and economic reform, but both are too in Wall Street’s pocket to do so.

Abortion may cause breast cancer after all

This is an interesting, if unsurprising, backpedal by the medical community:

In April 2009, seven researchers from organizations highly respected in scientific academia published a study, “Risk factors for triple-negative breast cancer in women under the age of 45 years,” in the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The focus of the report was the revelatory finding that “a distinct etiology” exists between oral contraceptive use and triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly virulent form of the disease that typically strikes women under 45, many African-American.

TNBC was only first described in scientific literature in 2007. So for this study the seven researchers re-examined 897 saved cancerous breast tissue specimens from two previous studies to see if they tested positive for TNBC.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The seven researchers concluded the risk for TNBC rose an appalling 250 to 420 percent, depending on the length of oral contraceptive use.

This was news enough, but buried in the study was acknowledgement and additional corroboration of the link between abortion and breast cancer…. The seven researchers concluded women with histories of abortion increased their risk of getting TNBC by 40 percent.

As is so often the case, never trust a “scientific consensus” that is claimed by scientists with an obvious axe to grind. I was always skeptical of the irrational vehemence with which feminist doctors and scientists insisted that abortion couldn’t possibly ever cause any sort of cancer and that it would be criminally irresponsible to even suggest that such a link might even be theoretically possible. But the truth usually comes out sooner or later.

Nate Wright, you are avenged

TMQ just doesn’t get it:

Why was Favre even still on the field with Minnesota ahead 27-3 with five minutes remaining? It seems pretty obvious Brad Childress wanted to pad Favre’s stats. Why was Favre not only still throwing but play-faking at the two-minute warning, with Minnesota leading by 24 points? Bad sportsmanship, which always comes back to bite you. It’s not just that Minnesota’s bad sportsmanship makes the Vikings hard to root for.

1975, TMQ. Drew Pearson. Roger Staubach. First, an illegal reception on fourth-and-20; the receiver had run out of bounds and was ineligible. Second, the referee swallowing his whistle when Doug Sutherland was tackled – not held, tackled – right in front of him on the Hail Mary play. Third, Drew Pearson committed the most obvious case of pass interference in NFL history.

I’ve calmed down a little now. But this was my immediate reaction to the “bad sportsmanship” when the Vikings kept playing after the Cowboys refused to stop calling time out.

Favre… Shiancoe… 34-3! TAKE THAT DALLAS! TAKE THAT DREW PEARSON! TAKE THAT YOU OFFENSIVE PASS INTERFERING BASTARD!

That’s for Nate Wright.

I don’t actually dislike the Cowboys. They’ve been my second-favorite team since I was a little boy. But when it comes to the playoffs, I am one of thousands of stone cold Minnesota fans who have never forgotten that the Cowboys not only stole a Super Bowl from the Vikings, they murdered Fran Tarkenton’s father!

I totally agree with the Eagles fan at ProFootballTalk who said the only thing he was upset about was that the Vikings didn’t go for two.

There is no global warming: glacier edition

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that “scientific consensus” means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you’re an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research….

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

So, telephone interviews are now science? That’s cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.

Now they care about the Constitution?

Wall Street is considering a legal challenge to Obama’s proposed bank tax:

Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on the matter.

In an e-mail message sent last week to the heads of Wall Street legal departments, executives of the lobbying group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, wrote that a bank tax might be unconstitutional because it would unfairly single out and penalize big banks, according to these officials, who did not want to be identified to preserve relationships with the group’s members.

How very strange! I don’t recall them being overly concerned about the massive violations of the Constitution that were involved in bailing them out of bankruptcy in 2008. These men aren’t merely criminals and fraudsters, their foolishness and hypocrisy simply knows no bounds. And their greed makes even the most staunchly right-wing Republican dream of tumbrils and guillotines.

As Karl Denninger says: “Stop the looting, start prosecuting.”