Vox Popoli

I have long been irritated that Maddens doesn’t include the retired players on their rosters of classic teams. And, as is so often the case with unions, it turns out that the reason is due to union leadership failing to dutifully represent the interests it is charged with representing.

Basically, Judge Alsup found that the plaintiffs introduced sufficient evidence to support a finding by the jury that the NFLPA acquired a “fiduciary” duty to take steps to market the likenesses and names, and that the NFLPA (for whatever reason) failed to do it.

Most importantly (and most troubling), the evidence supported in Judge Alsup’s view a finding that the NFLPA gobbled up the retired players’ marketing rights so that the NFLPA wouldn’t have to compete with the retired players’ likenesses and names while trying to get top dollar for the active players. In other words, the jury found that the NFLPA acquired the rights of these potential competitors to likenesses and names of the active players, only to bury the rights to the likenesses and names of the retired players in the back yard.

If true (and the jury found that it is), it’s shameful, and despicable. The jury essentially found that, under the guise of helping retired players, the NFLPA screwed them, making no effort to market the rights to their likenesses and names in order to preserve the millions and millions that were being generated by the marketing of the rights to the likenesses and names of active players.

While the NFLPA has served the NFL players very well in many regards and wisely views itself as a partner of the league owners rather than an adversary, the two areas it has really fallen down is representing the interests of past players in general and the interests of veteran players relative to agents of rookie players. It is insane that a few elite agents are able to hold the interests of the owners, the veteran players, and the competitive quality of the league itself hostage. And while Mike Florio is rivalled only by Joe Buck in his eagerness to strike an outraged moral pose about almost anything, the NFLPA’s callous treatment of retired players is, for once, every bit as awful as he paints it.

If a fourteen year-old girl has sex, is she still human?

Darimont told LiveScience that while he considers the changes to be evolutionary, some biologists consider them phenotypic and, without evidence of genetic shifts, would not call them evolution… One specific example: the overfished Atlantic cod on the eastern coast of Canada. Less than two decades ago, they began mating at age 6. Now they start at age 5.

In support of this impressive science, I note the following report from the Observer: Britons are losing their virginity younger than in the past: for over-55s the average age was 19; within the 25-34 group it was 16; and among 16-24s, 15. That’s a difference of THREE years in two decades; homo sapiens is evolving even faster than the Atlantic cod!

Clearly adults who are attracted to children under 15 should not be labeled pedophiles when they can be scientifically shown to be nothing more than evolutionary change-agents bringing about post-humanity. Based on the increasingly lunatic declarations of its advocates, I’m beginning to suspect we may see TENS collapse even sooner than I’d ever imagined. I still don’t expect to see it happen in my lifetime, but I’m quite confident that it is probable, if not necessarily inevitable. Yet.

Evolution’s defenders are in the position of a bridge builder watching his rickety old edifice sway and bend in the wind. “It hasn’t fallen yet!” he shouts defiantly. But any less self-interested observer will readily notice that it’s only a matter of time before the structure collapses completely. The linked article is evidence of bad science journalism, not bad science, but then, there’s not much about evolution that can reasonably described as science by any non-tautological definition of the term.

They’ve wrecked their home state with their left-liberalism. Naturally, they have no recourse but to go pollute other states with their political filth:

Mike Reilly spent his lifetime chasing the California dream. This year he’s going to look for it in Colorado. With a house purchase near Denver in the works, the 38-year-old engineering contractor plans to move his family 1,200 miles away from his home state’s lemon groves, sunshine and beaches. For him, years of rising taxes, dead-end schools, unchecked illegal immigration and clogged traffic have robbed the Golden State of its allure.

This demonstrates why Open Doors libertarianism is logically untenable. There is no freedom to be found in a population determined to make themselves serfs. I don’t at all disagree with EAS’s previous contention that libertarianism is politically dead as of 2009, except to point out that it hasn’t been noticeably viable in the USA at any time since the early 1920s.

It’s practically the definition of a win-win situation:

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.

Anyone still wonder why I call them evolutionary dead-ends? Now, since they’re quite determined to extinguish themselves, do you think they’d have any objection if we helped them move the process along a little more quickly?

I’m thinking radical lobotomies and Bene Tleilaxu tanks.

There’s not much question which space this blog inhabits:

In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

One could quite reasonably add about 80 percent of the views I hold to the deviant sphere, starting with the recognition that Keynesian economics are utter hogwash. Look at how almost every single so-called conservative at National Review supported the Paulson Plan. Did it work? No. Did that harm their credibility with Republican readers in the slightest? Apparently not.

Bruce Bartlett wanted to know who saw the housing bubble coming. Out of curiosity, I checked my blog archives and saw that I wrote this in September 2002:

[T]here can be little doubt that the implosion of the equity markets will soon be followed by the pricking of the credit and real estate bubbles. As great financial houses such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, it is well within the realm of possibility that the triple whammy of the equity, credit and real estate implosions will lead to the collapse of the entire global financial system.

Okay, the global financial system hasn’t collapsed yet, but two for three isn’t bad so far. And it’s not as if the triple whammy has finished crashing yet; Obama is still on deck.

Global Warming isn’t actually about the environment anyhow:

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

There’s an easy way to detect when an activist group has an underlying motive at odds with its purported raison d’etre. If it favors the same solution to every potential problem, it’s seeing the solution enacted that interests the group, not solving the problem.

An ominous sighting in Lincolnshire:

Witnesses near the wind farm described seeing a “massive ball of light with tentacles going right down to the ground” shortly before the 290ft turbine’s propeller was mysteriously damaged. Eyewitness John Harrison said: “It was huge. With the tentacles it looked just like an octopus.”

The Black Goat stalks the night! The Sleeper stirs beneath the antipodean ice as the cold twilight of the Elder Gods descends! “Iä! Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”

The column today:

After eight years, it is eminently clear to conservatives and liberals alike that George W. Bush is one of the worst presidents that the United States has ever suffered. His incompetent handling of what were completely predictable economic crises is historically rivaled only by his fellow Keynesian in laissez faire clothing, Herbert Hoover. Like Bush, Hoover inherited an economy just reaching its inflationary peak. And like Bush, Hoover refused to accept the laws of economic gravity, thus turning what should have been a normal recession into what is now known as the Great Depression.

But there is no problem so great that the credentialed experts of the nation cannot exacerbate it.

Minor upset and major upset yesterday. The Ravens knocking off the Titans wasn’t shocking, the Cardinals blowing away the Panthers was. I’m 0-2, but I still like New York and Pittsburgh. I mean, home teams have never gone 0-4, have they?

George W. Bush on his presidency:

“I’m better than fine — I am proud of the accomplishments of this administration,” he said. “I know I gave it my all for eight years, and I did not sell my soul for the sake of popularity. And so when I get back home and look in the mirror, I will be proud of what I see.”

George W. Bush is, in my estimation, one of the four worst presidents in U.S. history, exceeded only by Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. He may, however, be the most delusional about his place in history; the full extent of his ineptitude should become apparent once Afghanistan and Pakistan heat up and the temporary gains in Iraq vanish again.

It’s interesting to note that he was aware of how terrible the political price of the Iraqi Occupation was. Perhaps the many Occupation apologists at National Review, Pajamas Media, and other nominally conservative places can begin to admit that this was, in fact, the case despite their staunch denials at the time.