Link: http://www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/?p=10

..if the published letter by a journalism student is actually a serious piece of writing and not satire. This blog poster writes about the concept of "Idiot America", using the published letter as an example of ludicrous nonsense.

Every so often you watch a game where you become convinced that the teams were swapped out at half time and replaced by two completely different teams. This is how it was on Monday night. The first half featured a team called the St. Louis Rams trampling all over a team allegedly named the Indianapolis Colts, whose defense looked to be unable to stop a wheelchair-equipped grandmother. The second half featured a different team called the Indianapolis Colts, with a stout defense and a prolific offense, running up the score against a hapless bunch of disorganized rabble calling themselves the St. Louis Rams. This was a strange game to watch.

Link: http://www.nfl.com/news/story/8978905

...in which Gregg Easterbrook starts his Fictional Contract Watch, pointing out that most NFL player contracts never run to their full term, and the numbers that are trumpeted when the contract signing is announced bear little relationship to what is actually paid to the player. However, the announcements are like Payton Manning's play-fakes - the media bites every time, never bothering to report the (usually considerable) difference between the headline numbers and the amount of guaranteed money.

...with Danica allegedly hitting Jacques Lazier upsides the head after he collided with her, putting them both out of the race (another chassis to be added to the Target Ganassi Racing 2005 Scrap Pile).
However, the most interesting debate is over the way that Tony Kanaan slowed near the finish line, resulting in a win for Dario Franchitti. Despite Kanaan's denials, the hot rumour after the race was that he had been ordered to let Dario win.
I have not seen the race video, so I have no way of knowing what actually happened. However, as a general principle, if Kanaan indeed did ostentatiously "lift" close to the line, he was almost certainly sending the signal that he was "gifting" the race to a rival under orders from the team. Remember, this is what Rubens Barrichello did in Austria in 2003, which ignited a firestorm in Formula 1 at the time. Rubens cleverly obeyed team orders, but also managed to signal that he was doing so under duress. Given that he was clearly quicker than Michael Schumacher on the track at the time, the move justifiably left a lot of racing fans angry, since nobody likes to believe that they are watching a game of charades. Racing fans generally labour under the delusion that they are watching a real race, where every driver is going all-out to win.
The bottom line is that no driver wants to give a rival even a nanosecond on the track, so any team that orders a driver to make way for a rival is putting that driver in the situation where he/she may feel obliged to signal that "I didn't do this because I'm an uncompetitive wuss, I did it because of team orders".

What a difference a few months makes...it seems like only yesterday that all of the predictions in F1 were for a reduction in the number of teams. Minardi and Jordan were both reckoned to be living on borrowed time. The fear was that the remaining privateer teams would leave the sport, leaving F1 dominated by the motor manufacturers and Ferrari.
Now, since the news that Jenson Button had managed to buy his way out of his contract with Williams for 2006 and 2007, which left Honda with a problem called What To Do With Takuma Sato, it seems that every other rumour is about a new team. So far in the last 3 weeks we have been treated to the following speculation about new teams:

The Honda "B" team (Sato plus Davidson), to be run out of the old TWR factory at Leafield
The McLaren/Mercedes "B" team (aka Team Dubai), with Jean Alesi rumoured to have a management role

Additionally, there are persistent rumours that Coca-Cola is looking to enter Formula 1 in the near future, and just about every team in the pitlane has been connected with them in the last few months (although one would think that any team owner would give his right arm to have them as a sponsor, so a lot of the talk may be wishful thinking).

Why, within a few months of all speculation pointing to a reduction in the number of teams, are we now looking at an economic boom in the sport? The world economy is not booming right now, so what is the underlying reason.
The underlying reason may be the power struggle between teams supportive of the FIA (the leader of which is Ferrari) and teams supported by the automobile manufacturers. In recent months, the position of the FIA teams has been strengthened considerably. Red Bull racing signed to use Ferrari engines in 2006, which gave the FIA 2 teams. Then Red Bull agreed to buy Minardi, which gives the FIA a third team. Williams still has no long-term manufacturer partnership after the termination of its relationship with BMW, so they might be persuaded to switch camps. That would give the FIA 4 teams.
The manufacturers needed to respond to this by increasing the number of teams that they support. Toyota already supplies a second team (Midland), making them the only manufacturer to do so. Other manufacturers needed to step up to the plate. Honda now have an excuse to run a second team since they have to keep Takuma Sato gainfully employed.
The manufacturers recently met near Munich at the end of September to discuss their next moves. They issued a statement which was predictably content-free, containing the usual puff-phrases - the sort of statement that is more notable for what is not said. Predictably, there was no public comment about manufacturers supplying more teams with engines.
Other manufacturer-supplied teams may appear in the next 2 years as the manufacturer faction seeks to shore up its position against the FIA, and also as a way of covering at least some of the cost of developing and building V8 engines, which have driven up engine supply costs when they were supposed to reduce those costs. (Unless the teams can be persuaded to dramatically reduce testing, which consumes most of the engines used in F1, engine costs are sure to continue to be exhorbitant).
I therefore believe that the new teams will be mostly funded by manufacturers as part of the ongoing power struggle.

Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_1585424498,00.html

Courtesy of my original discussion forum home, The Well.

The Sanctity of Marriage Handbook - The Ultimate Guide to Marriage-Between a Man and a Woman-by Those Who Cast the First Stone
Bryan Harris - Author

Composed of short profiles of some of the right wing's most vocal "defenders" of marriage, The Sanctity of Marriage Handbook takes a satirical look at these leaders to see how well they live up to the sacred ideal they profess to be defending against "defilers" of marriage, such as gay couples hoping to marry. Seldom has hypocrisy been so funny. Bryan Harris profiles some of our moral forerunners as they lead by example. Just a few include:

- Newt Gingrich: served his wife with divorce papers while she was incapacitated by cancer and receiving treatment in a hospital room. He is currently enjoying the sanctity of his third marriage.
- Representative Bob Barr, author of the Defense of Marriage Act: before the age of fifty, Representative Barr had three marriages under his belt. The old Beltway joke goes, "Exactly which marriage is Bob Barr defending?"
- Rush Limbaugh: between Rush and his current wife, Marta, there are six marriages and four divorces. Rush is currently in the process of divorcing Marta.
- Senator Dan Burton: Republican senator who called Clinton a "scumbag" and who runs his campaigns on family values. Burton fathered a son out of wedlock.

There are a limited number of human failings that I cannot tolerate. Bullying is one. Hypocrisy is another. Interestingly, many of the people profiled in this book appear to be afflicted by both of these failings.

From the NY Times, courtesy of Eric Alterman:

Right now, with the Bush administration in meltdown on multiple issues, we're hearing a lot about President Bush's personal failings. But what happened to the commanding figure of yore, the heroic leader in the war on terror? The answer, of course, is that the commanding figure never existed: Mr. Bush is the same man he always was. All the character flaws that are now fodder for late-night humor were fully visible, for those willing to see them, during the 2000 campaign.
And President Bush the great leader is far from the only fictional character, bearing no resemblance to the real man, created by media images.
Read the speeches Howard Dean gave before the Iraq war, and compare them with Colin Powell's pro-war presentation to the U.N. Knowing what we know now, it's clear that one man was judicious and realistic, while the other was spinning crazy conspiracy theories. But somehow their labels got switched in the way they were presented to the public by the news media.
Why does this happen? A large part of the answer is that the news business places great weight on "up close and personal" interviews with important people, largely because they're hard to get but also because they play well with the public. But such interviews are rarely revealing. The fact is that most people - myself included - are pretty bad at using personal impressions to judge character. Psychologists find, for example, that most people do little better than chance in distinguishing liars from truth-tellers.
More broadly, the big problem with political reporting based on character portraits is that there are no rules, no way for a reporter to be proved wrong. If a reporter tells you about the steely resolve of a politician who turns out to be ineffectual and unwilling to make hard choices, you've been misled, but not in a way that requires a formal correction.
And that makes it all too easy for coverage to be shaped by what reporters feel they can safely say, rather than what they actually think or know. Now that Mr. Bush's approval ratings are in the 30's, we're hearing about his coldness and bad temper, about how aides are afraid to tell him bad news. Does anyone think that journalists have only just discovered these personal characteristics?
Let's be frank: the Bush administration has made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. Those who wrote puff pieces about Mr. Bush and those around him have been rewarded with career-boosting access. Those who raised questions about his character found themselves under personal attack from the administration's proxies.

All of this press questioning would be rather heartening were it not for the fact that most of the Bush administration's dysfunctionalities have been on public view for some time, as Krugman points out.
The major underlying issue is that the US mass media have been asleep for most of the last 6 years. Nice to see you waking up at last, guys, but where have you been all this time, and why have you been operating like a bunch of dozy sycophants all this time? And why should I trust you to keep at this new-found zeal?

Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41444

...that is comfortably shades the truth. One of the more disturbing features of a lot of modern events is how it has become very difficult to tell the difference between satire and reality. Here is another zinger from The Onion about how Bush has finally decided to get somebody to run the country...

Link: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-perrygas_13tex.ART.North.Edition2.18c4d03c.html

In which Rick Perry, challenged on why he continues to ride around in an SUV that does the stunning figure of 11 miles per gallon, takes refuge in the "empty symbolic gesture" brush-off.
I wonder what his response would be if I pointed out that the proposal to amend the Texas Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which he appears to enthusiastically support, is also an "empty symbolic gesture" since existing Texas law already prohibits same-sex marriages?
And has he never heard of concepts like "walking the walk" or "leading by example"?
Not only is Rick Perry a hypocrite, he has absolutely no grasp of elementary concepts of leadership.
I can't wait to help vote this doofus out of office in 2006. Go Kinky!

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051013/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_iraq_10;_ylt=Aooc7MckUEpS0Ifsk0.TluxqP0AC;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

In which we are introduced to the extent to which the current administation is prepared to create an illusionary facade of spontaneity to cover up the reality that just about very word, phrase and answer in this event was pre-ordained.
I may be getting too old to remember...but wasn't this the kind of things that the bad countries did in WW II and during the Cold War?