Graham Shevlin's collected musings

...it would be good for people to read this cautionary tale about how government bail-outs sometimes just do not work. The British government poured billions of dollars into trying to keep British Leyland afloat in tne 1970's and 1980's. With hindsight, the money was largely wasted. Here is one snipped of this cautionary tale:

For Garel Rhys, head of the Center for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales, the trajectory of General Motors is reminiscent of British Leyland not only because of the former’s decision to seek aid to avert bankruptcy, but also for its slow, seemingly inexorable loss of market share. “Both had a history of being the biggest in their market but couldn’t adapt as they lost sales,” he said. “They couldn’t get customers back.”

The key criterion for agreeing to aid for GM, Chrysler (and possibly Ford) is not whether the companies need the money desperately (they do) but whether they can be re-structured to spend the money wisely on newer, more reliable and fuel-efficient vehicles. With hindsight, the Carter administration decision to exempt light trucks from fuel efficiency regulations in the 1970's will be shown to have been one of the worst decisions of that administration, since it gave the U.S. car companies the excuse they needed to avoid investing in newer more fuel-efficient engines, drivetrains and vehicles. Why do that when you can pump out SUVs and pickups using older technologies and make a fat profit?
The comments of Michael Edwardes, who was for a while the CEO of British Leyland, also ring true:

If Washington does go ahead and help Detroit, Mr. Edwardes said, it is crucial that the government overhaul the management of the Big Three. “Throwing money at them isn’t enough,” he said. “They need money and they need new management. They need both, not one or the other.”

As the dust settles on abridgements of civil rights for same-sex couples in several states, thanks to the voter proposition mechanism, I have gotten around to thinking about the whole approach to assuring equal rights for homosexual and bi-sexual people (and let us not forget bi-sexual people and trans-gender people, who appear to be overlooked just about all of the time).
This is not new...but the problem with fighting for "gay marriage" is that this, to use George Lakoff's thinking, is a flawed approach because in doing so, you are using the frame of the opposition. Opponents of gay marriage tend to see marriage as a sacred ritual and custom dispensed only by their church. The idea that gay people should have the same rights to marriage creates massive instinctive opposition, and no small confusion - a number of voters for Proposition 8 apparently voted Yes because they were convinced that churches would be forced to marry gay couples (which is complete BS - the state does not force any church to marry anybody).
The extension of the rights of gay people to marry in the conventional sense is a process that I have a problem with from a libertarian perspective. It is my belief that governments should not be in the marriage certification or management business. Marriage is far from the only model for human bonding. There is communal living (including polygamy and polyandry) for example. Governments should not be in the situation of influencing what religions choose to do in their ceremonies either. If churches only want to marry people who have never been divorced, then they should be free to impose that rule, without any interference by government.
The challenge is that the gay community has become fixated upon the current marriage process as a bridge to be crossed as they strive for equality. My take is that it's the wrong bridge to be tyring to cross, since it forces the movement to fight opponents using their frames i.e. "marriage is between a man and a woman - it says so in this book...". Having to oppose that frame puts the movement on the back foot immediately. Lakoff's #1 framing principle is that you always argue from your own frame rather than from the framing of others.
Currently, supporters of same-sex marriage have three options:

1. Wait 4 years and try again at state levels, and try again until demographics and attitudes move in their favour
A clear majority of young people are in favour of same-sex marriage, and much of the current opposition is clustered in older people. Cynically, those older people will die off over time, which will skew the voting balance more towards same-sex marriage. The challnge with state-level campaigns is that people in unaffected states tend to not get involved because the issue looks like it is "someplace else"
2. Push for federal legislation to allow same-sex marriages
This is the same approach that led to the Civil Rights legislation being passed in the 1960's. It is certainly true that if that process had been left to the states, some states might still have Jim Crow-era segregation laws. The challenge is that the proponents still have to fight opposition using their frames. The Obama administration is unlikely to be able to provide much support for this, not because it it is the wrong thing to do, but because the USA is currently in a massive recession, and Obama will no doubt be devoting most of his energy in the next 2-3 years to avoiding a major and lasting economic crash in the USA.
3. Re-frame the campaign
The movement should re-frame its strategy around passing legislation to allow governments to issue licenses for civil unions. These would be available to any couples who can demonstrate lack of legal encumbrance (like a prior union still in force) and informed consent by both parties (this latter condition will shut up the idiots who claim that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope that will ultimately allow a man to marry his dog).

(3) is going to take some careful drafting and positioning, since it not only requires state-level change, but also federal level change, since the IRS tax code bases domestic partner deductions on the existence of a marriage. The main argument against (3) is that linkage. However, the main problem with (1) is that it forces a state-by-state campaign, which as we can see, isn't doing very well right now. Indeed, now that several states have voted down same-sex marriage, religious opponents are talking about introducing proposition language for same-sex marriage bans in more states. However, (3) provides the opportunity for a country-wide campaign to settle this vexed issue once and for all. It also passes my libertarian test for minimal government involvement in social unions.

No, this posting is not about Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys.
It is about the local newspaper in Terrell TX (note to breitbart.tv - Terrell is in Texas, not Oklahoma), the Terrell Tribune, which, uniquely strangely among newspaper outlets, decided to not report on the reality that Barack Obama had won the U.S. Presidential Election in 2008.
The newspaper's publisher apparently has not the slightest understanding of how a couple of sentences can make you look like a small-minded jerk:

The Terrell Tribune's publisher, Bill Jordan, declined an on-camera interview.
"We run a newspaper, not a memory book service," he said. "We covered the local commissioner's race. We thought that was more important."

I thought that the City of Duncanville's egregious campaign of harrassment against the Cherry Pit was dumb enough, but it seems that there is always somebody somewhere determined to demonstrate that they can go one better (or worse) when it comes to small-minded actions that transmit the wrong message about Texas to the rest of the world...

..and what have we learned about America?

1. Bigotry is still fashionable
State-level propositions designed to abridge the rights of homosexual people passed in California, Arizona, Arkansas and Florida. Shame on those states. I just struck you from my list of states to live in in the future. My boycott on spending money in Oklahoma also remains, especially since the very wonderfully bigoted Sally Kern won re-election to her state seat, although her opponent did reduce her winning margin considerably over the previous election cycle.

2. The African-American community has a hypocrisy challenge over gay rights
One would think a community that has spent hundreds of years struggling against discrimination in all of its obvious and subtle forms would have learned by now what the word means, and would be sensitive to attempts by majorities to tyrranize minorities. It seems that the African-American community has not learned this. According to exit polls, African-American community members supported Proposition 8 on the California state ballot by a majority of around 3 to 1.
As Pam Spaulding has pointed out, Proposition 8 was not passed in CA by the African-American community, which is less than 10% of the electorate in that state. An awful lot of people across the board voted for the proposition. However, the fact that a historically oppressed community voted so positively for a proposition designed to take rights away from another oppressed community should be a matter for some reflection and (dare I say it) shame amongst that community.
A lot of people have been pointing out that the right answer to this issue is more outreach to the African-American community. It is clear from reading some of the reports of the strategy of the "No to Prop 8" campaign that no serious outreach took place until almost the last minute. While I am all in favour of outreach as a strategy, I'm going to be blunt - why is this community so myopic that it seems unable to make the connection between the enduring violations of its human and civil rights and the same diminution of the civil rights of gay people?

3. The "No to Prop 8" campaign strategy was defective and poorly executed.
The campaign failed to address the issues head-on, preferring to tiptoe around the use of the word "gay". No attempt was made to frame the issue as a human rights issue by showing that gay people are, when you strip away perjorative labels, normal human beings like everybody else. There was no pervasive and compelling frame around which to organize the campaign.
Any progressive campaign of this type is going to have to work much much harder in the future. The more monolithic command-and-control model of religiously-based groups works in their favour when it comes to message discipline, organization and daily focus. Freethinkers, almost by definition, are like cats when it comes to alignment and discipline. The next time this issue comes up for a vote in any state, a campaign in favour of full civil rights for gay people needs to be focussed, unashamed, and needs to understand the George Lakoff Playbook (i.e. it needs to create its own frames and not be forced to argue using the frames of opponents).

4. What should the response of supporters of gay civil rights be?
A lot of discussion has been taking place about how to respond to the Yes vote on Proposition 8. A wide variety of options have been discussed including:
- Leave California and move to a more sympathetic state (MA to name but one)
- Boycott California as a state for business and travel
- Boycott businesses owned by donors to the Yes On Prop 8 campaign
- Lobby the IRS to have the tax-exempt status of the LDS church (a major donor to the "Yes on Prop 8" campaign) removed
All of these possible tactics have advantages and disadvantages. A campaign to remove the tax-exempt status of the LDS church is not likely to succeed, since it would have to show that a principal activity of the church is political lobbying, a test that is unlikely to pass in a court of law.
To cut a long story short, I personally believe that the only type of power worth having in a situation like this is economic power. Most large businesses offer benefits to same-sex couples (subject to state law) because they want the best employees possible, regardless of race, color, religion or sexual orientation. Those businesses understand that talent comes irrespective of sexual orientation, and retaining talent trumps issues of private morality.
I believe that the actions that have the best chance of success will include an economic boycott of any businesses run by funders of the "Yes for Prop 8" movement. This is a website that lists the major donors to the "Yes on Prop 8" campaign. People may have to do some research to associate the donors with businesses that they own or control, and I will try to do that and add those businesses to the list of businesses and locations that I already boycott. A lot of the businesses may be irrelevant for me since I do not live in California...I already refuse to go back to Kanab UT after they passed their "Natural Family Resolution" in 2006. I can certainly extend that boycott further.

When I was coming of age in the UK, I grew wearily used to highly predictable talking points in the political process. One totally predictable one was the tendency of defeated politicians and political parties to whine about "media bias" after they lost elections.
I have been watching the same phenomenon unfolding in this recently-concluded election cycle, with numerous folks writing complaints about perceived media bias. Phrases like "the media is in the tank for Obama" have been dropping into cyberspace like so much wedding confetti.
Yesterday I had a lengthy exchange of views (not always polite) with a work colleague who is convinced that the media is biased in favour of what he termed "the left". He also believes that the media is biased against Christianity (but that is another issue to be explored another time). He produced cites to support his contention of bias, and was unmoved by my response that I can produce one competing cite for every one of his cites.
What I was attempting to do (unsuccessfully) was to shift the debate from "you say I say" mutually annihilating accusations of bias towards a more sober reflection about the underlying issue.
When I got home and debriefed my own personal frustration with the exchange, I came to realize that I have a fundamental underlying disconnect from people who would whine about "bias", which explains why I regard arguments about bias as mostly a waste of time.
The underlying reason why I pay relatively little attention to the bias issue is that I do not watch TV, listen to the radio or read books, websites etc. to have my own opinions reflected back at me. In fact, if I realize that this is what is happening, I rapidly lose interest. I go to sources of information for ideas, and challenges to my current mode of thinking. Most of my favorite books are books that forced me to look at issues in a different way.
If you watch TV to have your opinions and emotions reflected back at you, and you decide that is not happening, what is your reaction going to be? Most likely you are going to become frustrated and start wondering why you're getting information that you do not agree with.
One of the more important lesson take-aways from George Lakoff's studies on cognitive framing (summarized in his 1997 book "Moral Politics" and in other related books since) is that, when confronted by information that disputes their worldview, most people will seek to discount or discard the information, rather than attempt to process it. Accusing an information or opinion source of "bias" is one of the most convenient ways of discounting conflicting information. (Another one that I have heard recently is the dismissal of facts with the exclamation of "that's just your opinion...").
I'm not expecting information sources to always provide me with information or opinions that totally agree with (in fact, if I find that happening, it bores and worries me), because I am going to process the contrary information and attempt to make sense of it. I may end up discounting or dismissing it, but I am going to try to process it first.
My key careabouts for information sources are therefore very different from a lot of people's. I am looking above all for completeness and accuracy in information provisioning. I am going to be frustrated by incomplete or misleading information, poor presentation, poor argument construction, fallacious reasoning more than I am frustrated by any perceived "bias".
I regard the topic of "bias" as a sterile and largely pointless discussion topic, since it usually degenerates within a few seconds into a "I think they say therefore they are biased" type of discussion, where the arguers retreat to familiar cliches like "liberal media", "corporate media" etc. and hurl competing cites at each other before sitting there in "see, I'm right" poses. The main issue is the endemic, institutionalized acceptance of poor research, reporting and follow-up on media stories. Egregious examples of all of these abound.
The bottom line is that the mainstream media is simply pervasively and egregiously incompetent. We can argue for days about the root causes, and possible remedies. In the meantime I have basically stopped watching network television and listening to the radio. I get my information almost entirely from the internet, books, and magazines. The "bias" debate can continue until Hell freezes over for all I care. Until the fundamental shortcomings of the media are addressed, I am a bemused spectator for most of the bias shouting matches.

...this article on FindLaw from John Dean explains very cogently why Republican control of the governmental process has been bad for the USA.
My summary: the country has been controlled (mostly) for the the last 7 plus years by a bunch of intolerant, bullying authoritarian shits who seem to think that the Constitution is an inconvenience to be ignored, and that dissent is treason.
Tomorrow I hope that the electors of this country will send a significant number of these defective authoritarians packing back to the job of being private citizens.

With less than 5 days to go to the election, I finally received the email I had been dreading from a friend, containing a new (at least to me) anti-Obama screed.
When I tried reading it (and believe me, it is really difficult to read badly-written nonsense at the best of times), I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I may be fond of saying this, but if the author had shown up to my high school debating society in the UK with this level of argument, he would have been laughed out of the room. He offers no arguments, only assertions, with no supporting evidence, and the whole letter is nothing more than a waste of internet bandwidth.
I hate viral letters like this with a passion. They contribute nothing to political debate, of which there is way too little in the USA right now. All they do is make their way around the Internet, confirming the views of committed supporters or opponents, while seducing readers who lack the time, energy or wisdom to do basic fact-checking (which is a lot easier than it used to be thanks to to the Internet).
If I have time on Sunday while watching football, I may take the letter apart. There won't be much of it left after I have finished, I can tell you that already. In the meantime I have a friend who is pissed at me because apparently I engaged in a personal attack in my response asking him to not send letters like that to me again. Ah, the wonders of the electoral season...

Tyner Bain has a large pile of articles covering the vexed issue of Requirements Management. He is also a Scrum Master, which is a delivery approach that I have tried in the past with some success.

In which John Cole eviscerates Gov. Palin's latest stunningly ignorant and irrelevant ramblings about scientific research.
Is this really the best that the Republicans can use as talking points? We have a country tipping into recession against the backdrop of a failed misadventure in Iraq, a ballooning national debt after 7 years of GOP mismanagement, and a worldwide credit and debt crisis, and the Republican VP candidate thinks it is important to whine about fruit fly research earmarks? Sheesh.

Courtesy of Robert Guest's legal blog, we have two egregious examples of BS as legal authorities in Texas attempt to enforce the legislation of private morality and actions.
The owners of the Cherry Pit are being hit with yet more ludicrous charges as the City of Duncanville attempts to run them out of town.
Organized crime? Give me a break. Everything I have read and know about the Cherry Pit leads me to conclude that the owners are about as far from organized criminals as you can get. This is nothing more than bullshit harrassment by the City of Duncanville. Note to Duncanville; we are moving house in December and we will not be living in the city. We'll consider living in Duncanville when the city starts demonstrating a proper respect for privacy and private property rights.
Meanwhile...undercover police resources in Corpus Christi were deployed in order to address the profound menace of dildo sales. As Robert Guest observes:

You would think that a city with twice the national average for property crime, and 21 murders annually could find a better use of their undercover police.

Very true. If I was an elected representative in Corpus Christi, I would be asking some awkward questions about the direction of police resources.
Bullshit nonsense like this is what leads me to conclude that a much more libertarian approach to personal and private morality is badly needed in the USA.

Courtesy of the Toledo Blade, who did some research into the real life of the man referred to as "Joe The Plumber" by John McCain in the last Presidential debate:

"Joe the Plumber" isn’t a plumber — at least not a licensed one, or a registered one.
A check of state and local licensing agencies in Ohio and Michigan shows no plumbing licenses under Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher’s name, or even misspellings of his name.

The Blade goes on to note that Mr. Wurzelbacher is busily revelling in his new-found fame, busy granting interviews to all and sundry. Which might be good for his income if he is getting paid for the interviews - because, if the Blade is correct, he sure as hell can't officially earn money from being a licensed plumber.
You know, you can't make this stuff up...
UPDATE - It appears that state bodies have been running searches on Mr. Wurzelbacher's personal records, which is probably unethical, and may be illegal.
There has been a lot of criticism directed towards progressives, and the media, for "picking on" Joe, but my position is simple. By deciding to publicly engage Barack Obama by asking him questions, Joe, whether he realized it at the time, made himself a public figure. His subsequent agreement to interviews shows that he is happy to be a public figure. Whether he likes it or not, the reality is that if you become a public figure, you can expect your entire life to be examined - the good, the bad or the ugly. Joe cannot plausibly whine and complain about the examination of his life when he quite cheerfully converted himself into a public figure by engaging Barack Obama in public. If he didn't understand the downside, he should have engaged in some personal due diligence and reflection before sailing into action.

UPDATE 2 - Here is an excellent comment from tomj over at Firedoglake on some of the realities in Joe's story that just do not add up:

This has been such an amazing story from the beginning. The original premise was that Joe was going to purchase a business which had a profit of over $250k. Most people who know about buying businesses agree that a business is worth 5-10 times your profit, or in this case $1.25-$2.5 million.
The next thing we know, the media are camped out in front of a house which is not in perfect shape, looks like it needs some work. And yet reporters are somehow unaware of this strange combination of facts.
There was even an early interview with the guy sitting on his $200 fake leather couch with a 7-11 style jumbo soft-drink plastic cup on his cheap coffee table.
Yet somehow this doesn't set off alarm bells, at least in the on air reporting. Instead, someone decided to look up his personal information and guess at his income using public records.
Get a clue: people who can purchase a business for over $1 million don't inhabit neighborhoods like the ones I or Joe live in.
But what this episode demonstrates is the Republican's ability to somehow offload their rage onto folks who should not be enraged. This is not Joe's fight, at least on economic grounds. More than likely Joe just doesn't like the other parts of Obama's agenda, but nobody can argue about the social agenda in this economic climate.

One of the less savoury trends in modern American life has been the return of bullying and intimidation to the public sphere. It is quite clear to me that many Americans either never paid attention to their modern History lessons in school, or cannot read, because the lessons taught by the McCarthy era appear to have been largely forgotten. One of the main lessons that has been forgotten is that the media of the time totally failed to challenge McCarthy on any of his supposed basis for initially claiming the existence of "hundreds of Communists" in the government. He was able to pull horseshit numbers out of thin air for years, using exactitude as a tool for burnishing superficial credibility. Ironically, his downfall was only sealed when the Army blew him up in public in hearings. Up until that point just about everybody in the media and public life had been complicitly marching in various degress of lock-step with McCarthy as he abused whole areas of the legal and legislative processes to demonize, marginalize and victimize anybody who refused to kow-tow to his worldview. McCarthy should have been a compelling story to Americans of the dangers of credulity when listening to bullies, but sadly nearly every lesson of the McCarthy era seems to have already been forgotten.
In the past 8 years I have seen many of the tactics originally deployed by McCarthy and some of his fascist predecessors resurrected and used in the same way against people who asked awkward questions and who challenged leadership orthodoxy, particularly after 9/11. If I believe many of those bullying little shits, I am a traitorous and un-American piece of vermin. I also have taken note of how John McCain and Sarah Palin have been firing up supporters at rallies in the past few weeks by repeating factually inaccurate lies and slurs about their opponents, then standing by as riled-up supporters suggest wonderfully positive approaches to their opponents like "Kill him!". This sort of "take them to the edge" behaviour is also rather familiar to those of us who watched film footage of Nazi and Fascist ralies in the 1930's when (unlike many people in this country) we actually studied World History in some detail in high school. My British compatriot Oswald Mosley was adept at the same behaviour at Brownshirt rallies in the UK, as I well recall from history film viewings.
The film director William Freidkin also appears to have fallen into the sights of a bullying pressure group, as he explains in this article on Huffington Post. Just like Joseph McCarthy, who often adhered to the tabloid journalism principle that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, the Americans For Limited Government Foundation appears to be unable to get even basic facts about Freidkin's life or political affiliations correct, although none of that information is any of their damned business in the first place. Friedkin's take-down (supported by a jocular, but still perfectly serious lawyer's letter) is worth reading, partly for entertainment value, but also because this is indeed the right way to respond to this kind of threatening, bullying crap.

Some thoughts on current happenings in the NFL.

1. The Adam Jones Experiment looks like it is not working out for the Cowboys. Jones is once again suspended from the NFL, despite the Cowboys desperately trying to laugh off his altercation with a security employee last week. Quite clearly Jones is still failing to act like a responsible adult, and Roger Goodell has (in my opinion, correctly) stepped in and done what the Cowboys themselves seemed unable or unwilling to do.
I'm not sure that suspending Adam Jones significantly impacts the Cowboys. It may be my imagination, but Jones hasn't exactly been setting the playing field on fire. The Adam Jones of 2008 does not look like the "Pacman" Jones of 2006 vintage, who was a game-changing impact player. This Jones looks to be lacking in both fire and skill.

2. The Cowboys are suddenly upside-down with injuries. Sam Hurd is on IR, Terence Newman is recovering from surgery, Felix Jones (the talented Jones) is likely to be out 3-4 weeks with a hamstring pull, and Tony Romo is out for a month with a busted pinky finger on his throwing hand. In addition, Greg Ellis, not normally a talkative player, is suddenly making negative comments about team cohesion and motivation. Something is not right in Valley Ranch TX. The big trade for Roy Williams also looks debatable when you compare the performance of Williams to the price the Cowboys paid (including their 2009 first round pick). It is my belief that the Cowboys panicked, and overpaid for Williams.

3. The ony good thing that the Lions have done all season is to get 3 draft picks for Roy Williams. Other than that, the team is showing that the front office couldn't manage it's way out of a paper bag. They just placed Jon Kitna on IR after failing to trade him, but since he officially has a back injury, the decision to try and trade him smells fishy. This smacks of a clumsy attempt to move Kitna out of the picture while they evaluate their other two quarterbacks. The idea that any of the Lions leadership have any credibility right now is a quaint one...

4. The Patriots are suddenly an average team, and this is only partially due to the loss of Tom Brady. When you give up plays because players are standing around like topiary instead of running to the ball or tackling, which happened more than once in the loss to the Chargers, that's not a quarterback problem. It's a team cohesion and motivation problem.
The most interesting event (which was briefly shown on TV but not discussed) was the sight of the Patriots offensive co-ordinator Josh McDaniel giving Bill Belichick an earful as the Patriots walked off the field at half time. McDaniel was clearly steamed, and was yelling at Belichick, who was walking along with his head down, seemingly saying nothing. Whatever that was about, it does not portray an image of a unified coaching staff.

5. Michael who? The Atlanta Falcons seem to have a great replacement for the V Man in Matt Ryan. I watched him run the no-huddle offense on Sunday and he looked like he had been doing it for years. Ryan's success may prove that it is better to have a solid conventional quarterback under center than a flashy but inconsistent converted running back.

6. The Giants were not simply beaten by the Browns on Monday night - they were buried. They were outplayed in almost all phases of the game. More strangely, they seemed unwilling or unable to play with any urgency in the fourth quarter. After the Browns hit a 2 point conversion to go up by 3 scores, the Giants had the ball back with around 6 minutes of time left. They started off running no-huddle, but the time between snaps seemed to get longer and longer as the time ticked away, until by 3 minutes they were back huddling up between plays. Eegads! You're down by 3 scores and you are slowing down between plays...what's wrong with this picture? At the rate that the Giants were moving on the field and between plays, they could have extended the fourth quarter by 10 minutes and the Giants would still have been behind on the scoreboard. Utterly inexplicable. It was like there was no sense of urgency whatsoever. Even Tom Coughlin, who is usually one of the first coaches to start jumping up and down when things are not going well, seemed almost resigned to the inevitable. The Giants looked like they were simply going through the motions. Not the hallmark of a team that deserves another bite at the Superbowl.

7. The Kansas City Chiefs, clearly in rebuilding mode, cannot accept a trade for Tony Gonzalez...WTF? What a way to piss off and reward one of your outstanding veterans, a sure-fire hall of famer, who merely wanted to end his career in a better winning situation. Somebody in the Chiefs leadership needs to be tarred and feathered for this.

8. The Rams win...against the Redskins...who would have forecast that? Compelling proof (if any more were needed) that the team had quit on Scott Linehan. Jim Haslett has a real chance to turn the season around and cement his status as a head coach again.

9. The Seahawks look like a team in disarray. Matt Hasselbeck's mystery knee injury becomes more mysterious by the week...and with Seneca Wallace also injured, the team is being forced to use third-rated quarterback Charlie Frye, who is not setting the world on fire. However, the whole team seems to be unfocussed, giving away penalties like sweeties throughout games, and generally exuding an air of confusion.

10. Talking of mysterious injuries...somebody is not being honest about Carson Palmer's elbow. When you visit a surgeon known as a Tommy John specialist, that screams three words - ulnar, collateral and ligament. Palmer's throw distance and velocity have gone, and the Bengals defense is having to do all of the work, since the offense cannot move the ball and stay on the field. My guess is that Palmer will soon be placed on IR, with or without surgery.

11. Mike Nolan is a dead man walking in San Francisco. The 49'ers continue to disappoint, and there is a ready-for-hire head coach on the staff in Mike Martz. Nolan is in a no-win situation right now. If the team does well, Martz will get most of the credit, and if it continues to struggle, Nolan will be the fall guy.

12. If fan sentiment fired head coaches, Brad Childress would be gone as the Vikings head coach. The team is winning, but only just, and the decision to bench Tavaris Jackson after 2 weeks, while understandable, begs the question of why they even announced him as the starter to begin with. Somewhere along the line, Jackson did not inspire that much confidence if they were prepared to pull him after 2 weeks. This is either panic from the coaching staff, or rank poor decision-making to begin with.

13. The Dolphins are still succeeding with the "Wildcat" offensive formation, even after opposing teams have had the best part of a month to study it, and other teams are starting to use it also. For the first time in a long while, it seems that a common staple of high school and college football is going to enter the NFL and stay there for more than a few weeks. The success of this formation tends to suggest that the NFL is hidebound by conservative play-calling and thinking. Steve Spurrier certainly failed in his NFL career to bring the "Fun and Gun" offense in from the college game, but that may have been because he picked personnel to execute it who were marginal in terms of NFL capability. Quarterbacks like Danny Wuerffel and Scott Mitchell were not bona fide #1 quarterbacks for any NFL team.

Gregg Easterbrook has suggested on numerous occasions that many NFL coaches are more concerned with reducing the margin of defeat than actually going for a win, and I see examples every week of play-calling that seems to fit that mindset. Exhibit A - Giants in fourth quarter against Browns. Exhibit B - Brad Childress this past weekend. Asked why he had not gone for 2 after scoring, which would have required the Vikings' opponents to score a field goal just to tie the game, Childress pointed out that the overall NFL 2 point conversion rate is only 42%, meaning that in his world, the odds were against a 2 point conversion succeeding. Since he had put the journalists on the back foot by asking them if they actually knew this statistic (nobody spoke up and said that they did), no journalist asked the most obvious follow-up question: never mind the NFL conversion rate, what is the Vikings conversion rate? The decision should not have been based on league-wide numbers in the first place, It should have been a combination of (a) team capabilities (b) opponent capabilities (c) game situation. Ahead by only 1 point in a very tight game, going for 2 should have been a serious consideration. An even more interesting question would have been whether the Vikings playbook for the game even contained a 2 point conversion play. A few years ago, the Dallas Cowboys lost a close game, which turned on a seemingly inexplicable decision to take a field goal instead of scoring on fourth and short from close to the opponents goal line late in the fourth quarter. It emerged afterwards that the Cowboys playbook for the game did not even contain a play for fourth and short in the Red Zone. The Cowboys offensive co-ordinator was gone not long afterwards.

Following Sarah Palin's performance in the Vice Presidential debate, where she winked at the camera several times, a commenter at Dave Neiwert's blog Orcinus came up with a great comment:

If the press can get close enough, let's agree to accept blinking as an acceptable response to policy questions. Once for yes and twice for no.

...where a retired man in poor health is serving a jail sentence for refusing to re-sod his lawn as required by his HOA. Look at the picture of his lawn and see if it looks that bad to you...

...Then his daughter drove him to jail. Grandpa had time to do.
His crime? He had disobeyed a court order that he sod the lawn at his Beacon Woods home.
His bail? Zero.
Joseph Prudente, 66, must stay in the Pasco County jail in Land O'Lakes until the required sod work is completed, under a September court order signed by Circuit Judge W. Lowell Bray.

Since the cost of re-sodding this lawn would probably not reach $1000, one is left to wonder why the HOA could not have advanced the money to allow him to do this. I am reminded of the old saying that rules are for interpretation by the wise, and slavish observance by the foolish. The story makes the HOA look like a bunch of mean-spirited bullying little shits. If they continue to allow this guy to linger in jail, they will merely convert that perception to an indelible reality.
UPDATE - Thanks to help from his neighbors, Mr. Prudente is now out of jail and back home. He still faces HOA fines and sanctions. If the HOA has any remaining vestiges of common sense, they will strike the sanctions and fines, although given their behaviour to date, the odds are that they will continue to behave like a bunch of crypto-fascist little shits...

With the Dow plunging by nearly 700 points today, and a stock price movement graph that looks like a train running off the cliff in one of those old black-and-white Western movies, I sold my remaining small stockholdings today. I'm in a (very small pile of) cash position from tomorrow onwards in the USA. I will now shift my attention to what I can do to stem the losses in my UK pension fund.
One revealing note in the Housing Bubble Blog is this insight into how some people worked a seemingly undendingly rising market in California:

“‘We called them ‘foreclosure loans’ because they were doomed to fail,’ said one agent, who didn’t want to be identified because she’s still in the industry. ‘The lender expected the borrower to lose the house and the bank would resell it for its higher appreciated value. But the market dropped and they got caught with their pants down.’”

And where there is trouble, you will find gallows humor. Here is Thomas Friedman reporting:

A commentator on CNBC caught my attention. He was being asked to give advice to viewers as to what were the best positions to be in to ride out the market storm. Without missing a beat, he answered: “Cash and fetal.”

If I lie down on the floor correctly I can currently meet both of those requirements...
My girlfriend and I took action today; we both gave notice at our respective apartment complexes. We will move in together in December (renting an affordable house, hopefully not an imminent foreclosure) and expect to save at least $1500 a month and probably closer to $2000 a month in expenses. Since we have no debt, all of that money will go into savings. Right now we are entering a period of time where Cash Is King. I have no idea how much longer I will have a job (I am in the I.T. industry, and that is not a high-security place to be right now), so it is imperative that I create some cash reserves. The current crash will result in a real recession (we were already in one, it's just that the archaic way of determining the CPI and GDP had not caught up to reality), and I do not know what this means for me in the long term. I suspect that I will have to work until I drop dead. Right now I will never be able to afford to retire. Still, as long as I have my health, I shall count my blessings.

This article in the Guardian explains how Iceland is being pummelled by the failure of the world credit markets, leaving the country on the brink of bankruptcy:

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country's three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.
People talk about whether a new emergency unity government is needed and if the EU would fast-track the country to membership. On Friday the queues at the banks were huge, as people moved savings into the most secure accounts. Yesterday people were buying up supplies of olive oil and pasta after a supermarket spokesman announced on Friday night that they had no means of paying the foreign currency advances needed to import more foodstuffs.

It is rather surreal to see a country like Iceland, with a recent track record of economic growth and stability, being compared to a long-term basket-case country such as Zimbabwe...here is another article about the fall of Iceland. It seems that the fall was precipitated by many of the country's leading businesses being heavily indebted and reliant on debt financing, most of which has evaporated in the worldwide credit market failure.

From The Guardian newspaper in the UK comes this withering evisceration of Gov. Palin's performance in the VP debate (Disclaimer - I watched about 10 minutes of this "event" and, concluding that it bore as much resemblance to a debate as a chair does to a tree, I wandered off to my hotel room).
The article starts with a picture of one of Ms. Palin's winks to the camera (WTF? Was this a debate or a reality show?) and soon gets out the steel-capped boots:

Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.
And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.
It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.

And this line is highly appropriate:

What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is?

This is very true. People who are telling the truth do not generally say "I am telling the truth" - they instinctively expect to be believed. A true maverick does not give a rat's ass about how they are perceived (that's part of the pathology of being a maverick...think about it), so actually telling people constantly that you are a maverick is prima facie evidence of a deep lack of authenticity.
As the article pretty much makes clear, the real shame is not that Sarah Palin gave such a jaw-droppingly inauthentic and shallow performance - it is that a lot of people seemed to think that she did well. That is far more worrying. Clearly more store is being placed on being "cutesy" or "folksy" than any idea of substance and intellect when it comes to attaining high elective office. Which rather confirms my cynical view that the electors of the USA are indeed getting the politicians that they deserve.

...are very common in most businesses. We are all wearily familiar with the change initiative launched in a blaze of glory by the CEO that rapidly becomes a joke within the corporation, fizzles out and leaves everybody connected with it frustrated or burned.
One challenge is that changing fundamental ways of doing things in a corporation requires a lot of people to put aside existing ways not only of working, but viewing the world. This often collides with the deep values of the people. They suffer from irresolvable cognitive dissonances trying to do so, and back off, especially if they suspect that the initiaitive is merely "CEO Hot Button Of The Year" (which it often is). This mindset is bolstered by the fact that in many corporations, the tenure of front-line workers greatly exceeds that of leaders, who often move onto new roles within 3-4 years. Workers who do not want to embrace the change can simply wait out the change until the promoting leader moves on, then continue in old behaviours.
When chellenged overtly to change, many people respond with dysfunctional behaviours running the whole spectrum from over resistance to covert resistance, bluster, bullying and other unpleasant outbursts. Many times, these behaviours are tolerated because as humans, we tend to shy away from confrontation. For every guy who wants to wade into a fight, there are 20 or so who want to ignore it.
This website deals with some of the issues surrounding dysfunctional behaviour and resistance to change in corporations. I may try to attend some of their webinars. I am going to expand this posting as I find other useful resources.

Every so often one comes across a news item that causes the mouthing of the phrase "what planet do these people live on?".
This is one such news item. Some lowlights:

The so-called 'vagina' is a myth, and women should stop trying to claim that they enjoy sex, says a group of Saudi grand viziers.

"Everybody knows that women are non-sexual creatures," said team leader Prince Abdul Abdul Abdul. "This fantasy about a female sexual organ, this subversive and frankly repulsive idea of a 'vagina', is yet another assault on our values and customs by the West."

And here's the kicker:

The team admitted that they had not questioned any actual women during the course of their research, since this would have required having a conversation with one, which is frowned upon in the Saudi scientific community.

I don't think I have seen a more blatant example of head-in-the-sand ignorance and wilful stupidity since Thabo Mbeki's attempt to sweep HIV/AIDS treatment options under a carpet labelled "Western government and drug company conspiracy".

Courtesy of diarist Janusdog at DailyKos is this gem of a diary entry about why the mainstream media in the USA is a shamble; unable to provide coherent reportage, research or evaluation of most issues.
Here are a couple of the gems:

I sincerely believe the problem with the media as we know it now (and I am not talking about bloggers here, even though I consider that media) is that people simply cannot write anymore. And I don't even mean that the language isn't beautiful or poetic. I mean they just cannot write. They can not put coherent thoughts together and make a coherent thesis, paper, or story. Forget putting together several century-enduring literature like Common Sense.
Many of the students I've taught have never done an outline. Worringly, they have no way of distinguishing the bad research (as in bad information) from the good. Even worse is that it appears that students have been taught that all information is important -- everyone has a valid point of view.

We cannot whine about the lack of effectiveness of the MSM when we created the problem. The entire educational system is geared towards the historically liberal, now scientifically defunct idea that self-esteem is somehow related to high achievement. Everyone is a special, unique snowflake with their special unique point of view, all worth considering. And then we wring our hands in consternation that people can't understand the difference between a scientific theory and a biblical story? That "Fair and Balanced" has become so perverted that it means "whoever makes it easy for me to write this stupid thing?"

...is an amazing example of how a supposedly free-market administration finds itself trapped into ess points ouentially nationalizing and bailing out failing corporations.
What is more amazing, as Lawyers, Guns and Money points out, is that the Bush Administration once again felt obliged to include one of its familiar "screw oversight" qualifiers to the plan:

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

This is pretty cheeky even by current Administration standards. The right answer is for the Democrats in the House and the Senate to refuse to even answer the phone on this proposal until that paragraph is removed. Unfortunately I have no confidence that they will.

The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account has led to a firestorm of invective about how reprehensible this was.
The ironic and laughable aspect of this firestorm is that much of it is coming from commentators who, until very recently, thought that it was perfectly ok for the government to illegally intercept your emails, phone calls and other electronic communications. After all, if you haven't done anything wrong, why do you have anything to hide? (The right response to this being "no I haven't done anything wrong, and it is still none of the government's business to read my private communications until they can find a probable cause to do so").
Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of thoroughly eviscerating all of the suddenly-outraged commentators and their sudden attacks of pompous bloviating about violations of privacy. I have never seen more outrageous hypocrisy so rightfully slammed.

Courtesty of the blog The Cunning Realist, comes this witty take-down of one of Sarah Palin's more vacuous question responses in her ABC interview:

Pressed about what insights into recent Russian actions she gained by living in Alaska, Palin answered: “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
In response, forum member Krista said: And when I look out my window I can see the moon. Doesn’t make me a fucking astronaut now, does it?

Courtesy of Hale "Bonddad" Stewart we get this cogent, easy-to-absorb explanation of why and how the US financial sector has slid into a meltdown of epic proportions (Note to John McCain: repeating the mantra "the economy is fundamentally sound" won't stop the crisis...)
NOTE: In another blog posting, I read that Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 claiming $613 billion in debt and around $660 billion in assets. I never normally hear of a corporation filing for bankruptcy re-organization when its assets exceed its debts. One or both of those numbers is false. I am inclined to believe that the $660 billion asset value is a polite fiction.
UPDATE: This posting here on Piggington by a former REO broker helps to explain why the housing market has not yet hit bottom in the USA. Be very wary of any housing market player who claims otherwise. My experience with housing price recessions in the UK leads me to believe that we will not hit bottom until late 2009 or even 2010.
UPDATE 2 - With the rescue of AIG (this is a nationalization, but I will note that this phrase is not being used by the government or supporters of the intervention because, well, it sounds collectivist , and dare I say it, socialist...), Bonddad has another posting summarizing the amount of money that the Federal Government is borrow...er, spending on our behalf to prop up the financial sector...around $900 bn is his current estimate. At this rate, the cost of the Iraq misadventure might start to look reasonable...
A commenter over at Lawyers, Guns and Money put it quite neatly, in response to a previous comment:

"If the deal saves the company and makes money, the profits will go to the private sector, accompanied by hosannas from the business press about how government shouldn't suck money out of the economy.
If the deal fails, American taxpayers will pay for it."
I really cannot believe anyone thinks anything other than this. This might be a good deal for the government???? AIG holds a bunch of worthless shit. AIG's insurance, default swaps, and whatever-the-fucks prop up even more worthless shit held by other companies. The bailout might have been "necessary" for any number of reasons, but a good deal for Uncle Sam (and you and me) it will never be. Unless by "good deal" you mean something like giving up your wallet when someone points a gun at your head-- a hundred bucks and some credit cards being a small price to pay for your life.

After publishing an article about Sarah Palin, which ended with a summary of her activity in requesting earmarks for Alaska, the WSJ has gone back and removed the summary entirely from its web site without acknowledging that a change has been made.
This kind of post-hoc revisionism is unethical when not noted or documented. Shame on the WSJ. And people wonder why I have no time for the mainstream US media? I rest my case.

Via this article in the Washington Post, you can read about the real underlying cause of many issues that impact the USA today. To be blunt, overall, the electorate is woefully under-informed and incapable of making rational, reasoned decisions.
Some examples:

According to an August 2006 Zogby poll, only two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them. A 2006 National Geographic poll showed that six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map. The political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying a wide variety of polls measuring knowledge of history, report that fewer than half of all Americans know who Karl Marx was or which war the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in. Worse, they found that just 49 percent of Americans know that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon in a war is their own.

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after months of unsubtle hinting from Bush administration officials, some 60 percent of Americans had come to believe that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, despite the absence of evidence for the claim, according to a series of surveys taken by the PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll. A year later, after the bipartisan, independent 9/11 Commission reported that Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with al-Qaeda's assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 50 percent of Americans still insisted that he did. In other words, the public was bluntly given the data by a group of officials generally believed to be credible -- and it still didn't absorb the most basic facts about the most important event of their time.

We can see the results all around us right now. I hear the results every day, in the substitution of slogans and strawman assertions for argument (even pointing out a strawman fallacy is in itself an interesting exercise, since most people appear to not understand even the most basic concepts of logical fallacy).
A lot (and I mean a LOT) of people need to wake up and start taking politics and current affairs seriously. This is not stuff that you get around to after everything else has been taken care of.

...are, quite correctly in my view, leading to some zingers in blog comment threads. Two examples from Lawyers, Guns and Money:

"Libertarian streak" is western Republican speak for "batshit crazy and totally inconsistent." We are quite familiar with it here in Montana.

She's libertarian the way the fringe on a toddler's Davy Crockett suit makes him a mountain man.

And an interesting new concept is surfaced here:

She, like most Alaskan republicans, is a dependent individualist.

I like that phrase...it seems to sum up for me the paradox that many people I talk with are in favour of "big government", as long as it is their kind of big government...

Just before lunchtime, the crisp bark of a Lycoming O-320 was blown across the tarmac by the remains of Gustav at Lancaster Texas.
N131JF was fired up after 368 days of inactivity. Help provided by Jesse Huerta, and the J&S Aviation Pressurized Engine Oiling Kit (see above posting for more details). The engine ran like a watch until we shut it down once the CHTs reached 300 degrees.
In addition to running the engine for the first time, the Annual Condition Inspection was completed and signed-off, and the transponder was re-certificated.
Since I completed my Biennial Flight Review on Labor Day with Gerhard, the plane is now fully legal and the pilot is fully legal. I now have no choice but to fly.
The first flight for a while will occur at the weekend, once the modified aero devices (gear leg fairings, wheelpants and spinner) have been fully primed. That way the plane does not look like a patchwork quilt...

In the NFL, the offseason is like watching a collection of soap operas unfold. this offseason has been no exception.
The #1 story was Brett Favre's decision to retire, his prolonged hemming and hawing, then his decision to un-retire, which caused a train-wreck in his relationship with the Packers. There were other stories, but none as interesting as this one, which reminded me of the Western movie where you get to watch the train-wreck - everybody in the movie theater can see it coming, but the folks on the train are blissfully unconcerned and whistling a merry tune right up until just before the wreck.
One interesting reality is how many teams have no real stability at the quarterback position. A handful of teams have an established starter, with no doubts about his preparation or fitness. Most do not. Many teams appear to have no certainty who their starting quarterback will be. This cannot be good for their chances.
Some other thoughts from around the league, classified by SMART or DUMB.

SMART
=====

1. Michael Strahan staying retired. There was no reputational upside to him returning to the NFL, and he seemed to be well aware of the wear-and-tear aspect of returning. Like Jerome Bettis, he left at the top.

2. The Miami Dolphins signing Chad Pennington and making him the starting quarterback. Never mind his arm strength, Pennington is a smart game manager who will not do Dumb Stuff under center. He will give the Dolphins the best chance to win games. Never mind the whining about arm strength. Arm strength is overrated in the NFL. If it was a big success criterion, Ryan Leaf and Jeff George would have Superbowl rings.

DUMB
====

1. The Oakland Raiders signing Javon Walker. They gave him untold amounts of guaranteed money, only to have him consider retirement during training camp, and become a victim of a bizarre assault in Las Vegas. Something is wrong with Javon Walker, and it appears to be between his ears.

2. Mike Nolan even talking about Alex Smith. Nolan drafted Smith in 2005, and has left him to twist in the wind with the 49ers. After last year, when he apparently pressured Smith to return to action even though he had a damaged shoulder that required surgery, Nolan should STFU about Smith and focus on trying to help him, instead of muttering two-faced platitudes in public. Right now the 49ers appear to be entering the season with the relatively unknown J.T. O'Sullivan at quarterback. If this works, Mike Martz is more likely to get the credit than Mike Nolan, and if it fails, Nolan will be the fall guy.

3. Shawne Merriman trying to play for the Chargers with a torn MCL and PCL in his knee. Merriman or his advisors need to ask Tiger Woods about the state of his knee after he played for over 6 months with a torn ACL. I suspect that Woods would tell Merriman that his knee was in pretty bad shape when the doctors finally operated on it. I have no idea who is responsible for Merriman deciding to play, but whoever it is needs to be taken outside and beaten upsides the head with a piece of 2x4. This is a bad decision which could end Merriman's career.

4. The New York Jets signing Brett Favre. Every other picture I saw of Favre when he arrived in New York, he had a "why am I here?" look on his face. It seemed that he really wanted to play for another club (the Minnesota Vikings?) and regarded the Jets as a second-best destination. Lost in the hoopla was the reality that Favre can simply quit at the end of this season. If they are unlucky, the Jets will get one season of play from a quaterback on the backside of his career. There may be a reason why Favre threw the interceptions in the playoff game last season. He may be physically over the hill. His body has a lot of miles on it. If Favre walks away at the end of the season, the Jets have a quarterback development issue all over again. They have bought themselves one "win or bust" season but that merely postpones the day when they will need a new team leader. They ran Chad Pennington, a great leader of men, out of town on a rail for...this?

5. the Kansas City Chiefs firing kicker Jay Feely after 2 days. When something like this happens to an experienced kicker, the phrase "clusterfuck" springs to mind. Feely has put up the numbers in real games over a number of seasons. The Chiefs' other two kickers have potential, but no results (and as Bill Parcells once observed, when you say a player "has potential", what you're really saying is that he hasn't done anything yet). Quite why the Chiefs signed Feely for 2 days is a mystery. Pre-season competitions for this position tend to prove nothing. When the season is under way, a lot of inexperienced kickers start missing easy kicks. Why do you think that older kickers suddenly find themselves signed come October time? Beauty and distance may look good in the pre-season, but accuracy and consistency are more important in the season. If the Chiefs want to see what can go wrong, let them study Tom Coughlin's last season at Jacksonville, when by mid-season the team seemed to be hiring and firing kickers every other week. The results were terrible, and Coughlin lost his job.

6. The Arizona Cardinals not naming Kurt Warner the starting quaterback (yet). It is like everybody in the universe except the Cardinals leadership can see that Matt Leinart is not ready to be the starting quarterback. He has played inconsistently (recently, very poorly) in the pre-season, yet Ken Whisenhunt is still hemming and hawing about whether he is the starter. Kurt Warner energizes the team to do better every time he appears under center. Leinart does not. This reality alone should be sufficient for the leadership to promote Warner over Leinart.

UPDATES: The Cardinals did name Warner the starter and that is working out well so far. Brett Favre is playing well for the Jets, and so is Aaron Rodgers for the Packers, so that might turn out (after all of the drama) to be a win:win for both franchises. Jay Feely signed with a team, but is still missing field goals, so perhaps the Dolphins were right.
Chad Pennington cannot help the Dolphins win when his team spends almost an entire game blowing coverages, committing penalties, abandoning the running game almost immediately, and generally engaging in bush-league behaviour. The team's performance in last Sunday's game was every bit as bad as any of the games from kast season. If this level of performance continues, somebody needs to ask why they hired Bill Parcells and all of this acolytes when they could have had the same performance under Cam Cameron.
Mike Nolan has been freed from The Alex Smith Question since Smith is now on injured reserve and will most likely never take another game snap for the 49'ers.
Shawne Merriman played one game for the Chargers and then realized that he could not perform at any decent level with a defective knee encased in a bulky brace. He had surgery yesterday and is done for the season. Right decision, but 6 months too late.
As for the Oakland Raiders...the focus seems to have shifted to the Lane Kiffin Firing Watch.

...in which he explores the negative impacts on children of domineering parents, using Mel Gibson as an example of what we can see publicly of the results.

...which showcase his idiosyncratic sense of humor and non-linear thinking. Example:

On some of your more recent solo albums, you’ve re-worked older pieces. Why? Were you unsatisfied with the original versions?
The trigger is finding out you don’t have enough material to fulfill your contract. But it’s a great chance to fix or improve on something you’ve written ... or performed. Some pieces just keep morphing, “Ojo” being one example, and some sort of grow up. Peter Pan had the wrong idea, it pretty much sucks to be a child. No respect, no place, no experience, no knowledge; if you get old enough, those things start coming and you learn to be a child again.
I’ve completely exited the question.

And here is another, longer interview (complete transcript preceded by summary).

...is rearing its ugly head in my world, as I work on a sales pursuit in the Pacific North-West. The prospective client has a (self-admitted) poor track record in defining and managing requirements. Ever since I started work in I.T. 30 years (!) ago, requirements have been a consistent theme in my work life. I started out as a maintenance programmer, and rapidly discovered the phenomenon of the dissatisfied customer. Conversation goes something like this:
Customer: This does not meet my requirement
I.T: We coded it according to the specification
Customer: Yes, but what you delivered is not what I wanted
I.T: How can this be?
(both parties stare at each other in bafflement and puzzlement)

9 times out of 10, such conversations occur because of ambiguities or omissions in the requirements. Which brings us to the great underlying challenge of requirements; instead of being written in a language that is suitable for specifying software, requirements are (mostly) written in natural languages, which are highly suitable for conveying nuance and ambiguity...which makes them a poor natural fit for any communication process that requires as little ambiguity as possible. This blog posting neatly explains the underlying issue, using a well-known nursery rhyme as an example...

A delightfully descriptive definition of a well-known behaviour pattern of ethically-challenged leaders, who believe that the preferred method of personal advancement is to behave obsequiously towards their seniors, mislead their peers, and mistreat their subordinates.

The process adopted by senior leadership when they have already created an answer to a pressing issue (this answer usually bears no relationship to a correct or complete answer). During the process, people presented as "experienced", "authorities", "consultants", "experts" etc. are asked questions designed to elicit the pre-determined answer, in order to support and validate the chosen answer or decision.
Often employed as a mechanism for post hoc justification of a severely flawed leadership decision.

...which, if substantively correct, screams "campaign money laundering" about as loud as one can scream...and this is from one of the authors of McCain-Feingold, that attempt to regulate political contributions? Ah, the transience of scruples...

In the 1960's oil was discovered under the North Sea. The two largest oil-producing sectors were determined to belong to the UK and Norway. Both countries assigned exploration and extraction licenses to oil companies, and were rewarded with a lot of oil and gas production, and a large influx of tax revenues.
The similarities end there. While the UK used the North Sea tax revenues as a day-to-day augmentation for tax revenues, and invested none of the money, Norway put a percentage of its revenues into a Sovereign Wealth Fund. This Wikipedia article explains how this was done.
The result is that, as North Sea oil production moves to the end stages of the extraction cycle, with steadily declining production into the future, the UK has no fiscal fund for that future, whereas Norway is sitting on a very large sum of invested money that can be used for post-petroleum infrastructure and energy investment.
Could the UK have implemented a similar fund? Difficult to say. The main difference between Norway and the UK is the disparity of population size - 4.7 million against 60 million. The UK is running "pedal to the metal" a lot more than Norway economically. The UK, unlike Scandinavia, has always tended more towards the US model of instant gratification, and has a poor record on recent strategy. I suspect that UK politicians might have found it impossible to keep their hands off of a strategic fund like the one set up by Norway. Even in Norway, there has been pressure to raid the fund, mainly because of the high value of the fund compared to the country's population.
However, what is not in doubt is that Norway has consistently executed a strategy (despite pressure to divert some of the monies in the fund for other uses), where the UK had no strategy for what happens after the oil runs out. Guess which country I am going to bet on in the post-petroleum era?

...on several fronts.
First off, the FAA did finally give me back the Medical Certificate that they denied me last September when I was still taking anti-anxiety medication. However, as I explain here on my aviation blog, they seem to want to me to keep proving my sanity on at least an annual basis. Whether this will last for the rest of my life I do not know. However, I resent being perpetually stigmatized for something that, according to my medical practitioners, was episodic.
Secondly, I was reminded of the collection of arbitrariness, interfering mind-sets and sink of crypto-fascist thinking that seems to populate the Home Owners Association (HOA) landscape when I read this story today about a lady in North Carolina who is being threatened with fines by her HOA because she is trying to save water by not planting grass in her yard. Apparently the HOA regulations mandate grassed yards. Thanks to Ed Cone for surfacing this piece of dysfunctional nonsense. When I moved to a house in Irving with my ex-wife and stepchildren in 1999, one of my decision criteria for the house was that it did not require membership of an HOA. I had already read too many stories of crypto-fascism masquerading as "keeping up property values" (many of them involving illegal restrictions on satellite dish installations) to want to have anything to do with an HOA. I have heard and read about a lot of incidents since that have validated my decisions.
Thirdly, the City of Duncanville has, for the last year, been on a campaign to close down a party house in the City named the Cherry Pit. The allegations made by the city are that the Cherry Pit is a swinger's club operating as a business. In order to build a case, they have raided the house 3 times in the last year, most recently twice in 3 days 2 weeks ago. They have produced an impressive affidavit, until you read the allegations, and look at the video that the city released to the local media. Then suddenly, some of the citations start to look awfully thin. For example, playing an ice-breaker game with play money as evidence of illegal gambling and money-laundering? Puhlease...Massive quantities of alcohol found? Yes, but if you look on the bottles you can see the names of the party guests - this is their own alcohol that they brought to the party and left behind the bar.
My fear is that the city is playing "whack a mole" with the Cherry Pit. There is really no good way to frame this sort of news. Either the city is trying to eliminate an unseemly business (which begs the question of why, 1 year after they started, the Cherry Pit is still there), or the city is engaging in overreach and harrassment because it does not have sufficient evidence. In either case the city collects lots of free, and not uplifting publicity. In the meantime, a central issue of personal property rights remains unexplored in the media, who have been acting as the City's stenographers in the past few weeks, printing press releases as fact and failing to ask even the most obvious questions of city officials. I thought that local media in the USA were bad after they completely mis-reported the tragic death of Tim Crawford when his plane dove into the sea off Martha's Vineyard. After observing the right royal mess of stenography and sensationalism disguised as news being propagated by the media over the Cherry Pit, I am further revising that opinion downwards.
UPDATE - The City of McKinney has apparently run off another swingers club - La Maison Joue. The reporting on Channel 11 is sensationalist drivel, complete with an "informant" in a disguised voice providing revelations about what supposedly went on there, and the usual "OhMiGod leafy conservative suburbia...bicyles...The Children!" overtones in the coverage. I turned the video off after they got to the angry neighbors section. There is a limit to how many people I can listen to, when those people do not understand that in a free country you do NOT have a right to not be offended. I don't like Dominionist religious types in my city, but that does not give me the right to want to expel them.
All of this stuff pisses me off royally, since it makes me start to wonder if the country that I thought I moved to in 1998 actually exists at all. It seems that far too many people here currently wish to live their lives by controlling the lives of others.
UPDATE 2 - Here is a story in the Miami Herald that shows that at least in Florida, a more respectful approach has been adopted. It seems that law enforcement overreach in 1999 led to a rollback of harrassment. Sometimes the little guys can win...and here is the humorous take on the swingers convention from Dave Barry...
UPDATE 3 - The best discussion location about the issues related to the Cherry Pit and other local district moves to regulate and raid swinger clubs is to be found here. It beats hands-down the discussions at other blogs, most of which appear to be dominated by leering, club-waving knuckle-draggers...

I got a letter today from the FAA enclosing my Third Class medical certificate. This, you will recall, is the one I applied for last September, which was denied because I disclosed that I was taking an anti-anxiety medication (Cymbalta) at the time.
Since April of this year I have been working with Dr. Stephan Kramer of Frisco TX to get my medical certificate restored. This has probably cost me around $1000 in doctors fees so far, including $500 for a battery of cognitive tests that gave me a totally clean bill of health.
Still, the FAA does not seem to be that convinced of my mental state...they have only given me a certificate until 20th June 2009. They also want me to provide another set of medical reports to them "on or about April 1st 2009". I will need to discuss with Dr. Kramer exactly what that set of reports needs to contain. I hope that it is not another $1000 worth of reports, but I fear that it may be. Since I am not consulting with a psychiatrist any more, and I am not taking any medications, this report may be rather small, but I will be guided by Dr. Kramer as to what is required.
In addition, the letter contains this statement:

Because of your history of anxiety, depression and ADD, operation of aircraft is prohibited at any time new symptoms or adverse changes occur, or if you experience side-effects or require a change in medication.

This is an odd statement to make, since I have not been on medication since October 27th last year (and I am much the better for it; Cymbalta certainly eliminated my anxiety symptoms, but it also negatively impacted my creative thought processes). Reading this text makes me wonder just how much the FAA examiner actually read of my medical reports.
So, to sum up: I have my medical back, which is good news. However, the FAA certainly seems to be wanting to convert this into some sort of ongoing "prove your sanity" saga, which is not good.
I am now beginning to understand why many pilots have at best a jaundiced view of any involvement with the FAA...