Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Reel Reviews
Where To Invade Next -- A somewhat kinder, gentler Michael Moore. Not that Moore was kicking people in the dick as he built his career as filmdom’s foremost political muckrake--but there was always an angry edge to the geniality in his previous cinematic indictments (as he would probably admit himself). Here, though, Moore seems to have softened a bit; perhaps it’s because he’s looking for solutions rather than just exposing problems. It also probably helps that he’s talking to Europeans about their solutions; Moore usually reserves his harshest scolds for his fellow--but wrongheaded--Americans. There are the usual caveats here: Moore doesn’t ask enough questions, frames some ideas a bit too sunnily, assumes too much in the transferability of solutions from one situation to another; and, as always, be suspicious if he quotes statistics (Moore doesn’t seem to understand numbers very well). But it’s certainly worth everyone’s time to check out the ideas presented herein and contemplate how they might, just might, make a good nation even better.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
It's Worse Than You Think. Much Worse.
Put that Kool-Aid down. The Heat are not heroes
(This is a very long post. Apologies in advance, but I wanted to make my case as comprehensively as possible.)
So here we are. The Miami Heat have just won the second of two straight championships, and the hype and hagiography machine is rolling on, as expected. Here's a sample of the headlines in reaction to Thursday night's game:
Litke: Victory Validates LeBron's Decision (AP, via the Comcast home page)
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade deliver another NBA title in a Game 7 to remember (Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports)
Back-to-back champ LeBron James helps elevate beauty of game with help from tenacious Spurs (Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports)
The articles are pretty much what you'd expect: plenty of laudatory prose showered upon LeBron James, some for Dwyane Wade, not so much for Chris Bosh. A bevy of "One Shining Moment" style salutes to the King James and his Heatles. A touch of "ends justifies the means" rationalization in favor of James and "The Decision"--but with very little cogent analysis of what was so wrong with the Heat from the very beginning.
And no one bothers to say the magic word: collusion.
Dan Litke, at the very least, comes closest. In his column Litke addresses the fact that Miami's assemblage of superstars came together under a very dark cloud of criticism. He writes:
Indeed. No team has yet put together a viable counterpunch to Miami's Big Three--and that inability to match up has been the crux of the problem right from the start. That line about "free-agent envy" makes it seem like the issue rests only within the psyches of other NBA superstars; but, as I've argued all along, what happened in the summer of 2010 struck right to the core of the Association and its ability to showcase a truly competitive professional sport. And, of course, it also highlights the other end of this grim reality: the brutal failure of the so-called sports "journalists" to get this story in any way correct in fact or analysis.
As I first argued in this post, non-Miami based NBA players, executives, and (especially) fans had cause for howling in protest against James's move, not out of simple envy, nor because LeBron made a social faux pas (actually staged one, that is, on ESPN no less), nor because the three amigos then backed up the original faux pas with that ridiculous pep-rally/smoke machine show days later. No, the problem lies in the fact that three of the game's best players colluded to try to rig the sport by placing themselves all on one team.
In some ways, it's a simple numbers game. In the Summer of 2010, James, Wade and Bosh were clearly among the top fifteen players in the game--possibly even top twelve or ten. (James was and is the consensus best player in the game, while Wade certainly ranked in the top six or seven. For all the criticism he gets today, Bosh back then was clearly an All-Star and a sought-after free agent--at least the 15th best player in the game). All three had been members of the 2008 gold medal winning USA basketball team at the Beijing Olympics--a sign that they were certainly among the twelve best American hoopsters, at least. James, Wade and Bosh were the pick of the 2010 free agent litter; any players who could match them in stature were either already on the decline, or securely under contract, or both.
So then, you scoop up the three best available players in free agency, all of whom are at least top fifteen quality players, and you put them on one team. What does that mean? Well, it leaves only twelve of the top fifteen players remaining--for the other twenty-nine teams. Even if each of the four remaining best players had their own two running mates on one roster, that would still limit the fifteen best players in the game to only five teams (out of thirty). More likely, due to reasons of contract status, age, and a host of other variables, those other twelve players will remain scattered, singly or in duos, throughout the rest of the league. If all the remaining top players are evenly distributed on other teams, that still leaves seventeen teams in the league without one of those top players at all.
Does that affect the league's competitive balance? Of course it does. Remember, in the best of scenarios, the NBA is the least competitively balanced of the four major North American professional sports leagues. (I discussed this fact in the research article "The Champs-Chumps Ratio," still available online at Scribd.) Start clumping the superstars together on just a few teams, and that propensity towards competitive imbalance will become overwhelmingly decisive. Already, few teams go into an NBA season with a viable chance to win the championship; let the best players pick and choose their own teams and teammates, and the trophy being passed among two or three teams (at most) will become a foregone conclusion. All the rest of the teams in the league become nothing more than well-paid versions of the Washington Generals.
And the fans of those out-of-the-superstar-loop teams? What do they do? Apparently, they can go pound sand, for all James, Wade and Bosh care.
Remember, Miami's Big Three were not assembled through good scouting, drafting and coaching (a la the Spurs of Duncan, Parker and Ginobili); nor were they constructed by way of shrewd trades at just the right time (like the Celtics did with Garnett, Pierce and Allen). No, the Heat's superstars came together because they colluded to put themselves together on one roster. In doing so, they raised a gigantic middle finger in the faces of the fans of every team that could have been helped by any one of those guys, had there been a true market for their services.
And to what end was that middle finger raised? "Not five, not six, not seven..." Those words are treated as a joke these days--an arrogant joke, to be sure, but somehow not reflective of James's true intentions. But taken at face value (as they should be), that's a pretty lofty mission statement, one that defines the players' intrigues as an action taken with the goal of creating a competitive imbalance designed to secure multiple championships.
In other words, the Heat's Big Three colluded to rig the sport in favor of their success. And in doing so, they unleashed a torrent of consequences, both intended and unintended, that will shape the NBA for years to come.
We've already covered one consequence: more competitive imbalance. The Heat were prohibitive favorites to win the championship from the moment James, Wade and Bosh inked their contracts; they were only thwarted from their original stated goal by the Mavericks, coming up a mere two games shy of winning three straight titles.
This imbalance plays out not just in the postseason, but in the regular season, too. Think about the Heat's 27 game winning streak this year. I covered that phenomenon at the time in this post. To briefly recap the point made there: one of the reasons the Heat were able to go on that streak was because, thanks to the collusion that put James and Bosh on the same team with Wade, two other teams in the East were weakened to the same extent that Miami was made stronger. And, of course, its even worse than that, because not only were Cleveland and Toronto stripped of their best players three years ago, but every other team around the league that could have been made better by signing one of those free agents in 2010 didn't get better. Not only were the Heat playing the Cavs and Raptors, who were with out James and Bosh respectively, but every other team they played was without the services of James and Bosh, too. No wonder they had such an easy time winning in such a streak.
But wait--it gets worse. Remember when the Heat signed James and Bosh to go with Wade? Many pundits suggested that paying the salaries of all three players would be so onerous for Miami that it would be the Big Three and a roster full of rookie free agents for the foreseeable future. Yet, who was playing for the Heat during this year's playoffs, besides the Big Three? Names like Miller, Andersen, Battier, and Allen all appeared on Heat jerseys this season--all veterans of more than a decade in the Association, and all made valuable contributions to the Heat's championship run. How is it possible that the Heat could employ such veteran (and theoretically high-priced) talent when they have to pay three superstars--under a salary cap, no less?
Now we see just how insidious is the effect of what James, Wade and Bosh did back in 2010. Veteran NBA players aren't particularly stupid. They're jocks, but they ain't so dumb that they can't see which way the wind is blowing. With James and Bosh moving to Miami and making the Heat overwhelming favorites to win the championship, other players could see that, if they wanted to be playing for anything other than second place and a smaller playoff share, they would do well to sign with the Heat--for less money than they might otherwise make somewhere else--and make up the difference in championship prestige, a higher playoff share, maybe even some endorsements that would not have been on the table if they'd been playing in, say, Portland. So the Heat get the veteran help they need, just the right players to fill the roles and cement their championship pedigree, despite the burden of having to pay the superstars' salaries. Salary cap? What salary cap? In effect, the Big Three's collusion to rig the game in their favor didn't just bring them together, didn't just weaken other teams by drawing their own selves away from those other teams and by denying other squads their services, didn't just weaken other teams by prying away veteran role players--it actually in a de facto sense abrogated the salary cap. You don't have to worry so much about staying under a salary cap if players are begging you to play for your team--for less money than they would make somewhere else.
What that means is, the collusion by James, Wade and Bosh effectively changed the league's rules--but only for their team. Other franchises, without the drawing power of playing beside the Big Three, remained hampered by the NBA's salary cap. For a team that, before the ink was even dry, had an enormous edge over its competitors as soon as the Big Three were signed, the cumulative effect of the advantages gained from those acquisitions was overwhelming. Rigged is almost too weak a word for it.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: what about the precedent these shenanigans have set? Will it be good for the NBA as a whole when, in six years or so, Damian Lillard, Harrison Barnes, and Anthony Davis get together (assuming the continuing upward progress of their careers) and dictate where the three of them will play together--most likely in New York, or Los Angeles, maybe Boston or Chicago? Sure, it will be good for them as individual players, but what about the fans and franchises they leave behind (Portland, Golden State and New Orleans, respectively)? Again, pound sand, fellas. Inevitably, teams that are not constantly, aggressively in the spotlight, that are not traditional glamour teams, will not be able to hold onto their star players, max contracts or not. If you're a fan of one of those lower caste teams, you should be saying, "You want me to pay how much? For tickets to this shit?" Not exactly a sustainable business model. Contrast that with the NFL, where even a team in the hinterlands of Green Bay, Wisconsin can compete on an even level with everyone else, can keep its star players, can always (given competent management) promise its fans a legitimate shot at a title. Does that sound like. let's say, the Utah Jazz to you? Not in LeBron James's NBA.
Remember all this as you read the continuing cascade of fawning words that will come in the following days. We're all supposed to love/adore/suck off LeBron James and his Heatles now, even if we were a little bit angry about that whole sideshow thing at the start. The sages of the sports pages have declared it so. But...how are you really supposed to feel about someone who wins with a stacked deck? I seem to recall a nation, back when I was young, where people actually cared about fairness. Rigging things in your favor was looked down upon, if not actively censured or beaten back. And sports, after all, are supposed to be about competition--fair competition. There's a reason why, when kids get together on a playground, the two captains (usually the best players) are on opposite teams, and they take turns picking players for their respective teams--they do it to make sure the game is fair. That should always be the goal whenever games are played.
Fairness has taken a beating in our society; it has been so for decades now. Working people see the beating fairness has taken in shrinking wages and lost jobs; homeowners see it in unfair mortgages and unjustified foreclosures; poor people see it whenever they butt heads with the criminal justice system. Perhaps this condition reflects the larger society around the game, but what goes on in today's NBA cannot be called fair. The deck is very, very stacked now.
And while others may get lost in the fog of hero worship, I can't bring myself to cheer for someone who wins with a stacked deck. All the talk about LeBron James and his legacy, about how it has just gotten so much better, represents in my view little more than wishful thinking--or perhaps a deliberate attempt to engineer that version of "the truth." Seen in the cold hard light of a clear day, I think that legacy has in fact gotten much, much worse.
(This is a very long post. Apologies in advance, but I wanted to make my case as comprehensively as possible.)
So here we are. The Miami Heat have just won the second of two straight championships, and the hype and hagiography machine is rolling on, as expected. Here's a sample of the headlines in reaction to Thursday night's game:
Litke: Victory Validates LeBron's Decision (AP, via the Comcast home page)
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade deliver another NBA title in a Game 7 to remember (Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports)
Back-to-back champ LeBron James helps elevate beauty of game with help from tenacious Spurs (Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports)
The articles are pretty much what you'd expect: plenty of laudatory prose showered upon LeBron James, some for Dwyane Wade, not so much for Chris Bosh. A bevy of "One Shining Moment" style salutes to the King James and his Heatles. A touch of "ends justifies the means" rationalization in favor of James and "The Decision"--but with very little cogent analysis of what was so wrong with the Heat from the very beginning.
And no one bothers to say the magic word: collusion.
Dan Litke, at the very least, comes closest. In his column Litke addresses the fact that Miami's assemblage of superstars came together under a very dark cloud of criticism. He writes:
James was already the best player in the game when he made "The Decision'' nearly three years ago, a move that the rest of the basketball world pounced on as a sign of weakness, a tacit admission that he couldn't win a championship all by himself.
James was right on that score...
The Heat were convenient villains, fair or not, for skipping most of the preliminaries and assembling the core of the team with little more than a checkbook. James' move to Miami touched off free-agent envy among his superstar brethren - everybody wanted to be a part of a Big Three somewhere - and the rest of the league is still scrambling to put one together as formidable as Riley's troika in Miami.
Indeed. No team has yet put together a viable counterpunch to Miami's Big Three--and that inability to match up has been the crux of the problem right from the start. That line about "free-agent envy" makes it seem like the issue rests only within the psyches of other NBA superstars; but, as I've argued all along, what happened in the summer of 2010 struck right to the core of the Association and its ability to showcase a truly competitive professional sport. And, of course, it also highlights the other end of this grim reality: the brutal failure of the so-called sports "journalists" to get this story in any way correct in fact or analysis.
As I first argued in this post, non-Miami based NBA players, executives, and (especially) fans had cause for howling in protest against James's move, not out of simple envy, nor because LeBron made a social faux pas (actually staged one, that is, on ESPN no less), nor because the three amigos then backed up the original faux pas with that ridiculous pep-rally/smoke machine show days later. No, the problem lies in the fact that three of the game's best players colluded to try to rig the sport by placing themselves all on one team.
In some ways, it's a simple numbers game. In the Summer of 2010, James, Wade and Bosh were clearly among the top fifteen players in the game--possibly even top twelve or ten. (James was and is the consensus best player in the game, while Wade certainly ranked in the top six or seven. For all the criticism he gets today, Bosh back then was clearly an All-Star and a sought-after free agent--at least the 15th best player in the game). All three had been members of the 2008 gold medal winning USA basketball team at the Beijing Olympics--a sign that they were certainly among the twelve best American hoopsters, at least. James, Wade and Bosh were the pick of the 2010 free agent litter; any players who could match them in stature were either already on the decline, or securely under contract, or both.
So then, you scoop up the three best available players in free agency, all of whom are at least top fifteen quality players, and you put them on one team. What does that mean? Well, it leaves only twelve of the top fifteen players remaining--for the other twenty-nine teams. Even if each of the four remaining best players had their own two running mates on one roster, that would still limit the fifteen best players in the game to only five teams (out of thirty). More likely, due to reasons of contract status, age, and a host of other variables, those other twelve players will remain scattered, singly or in duos, throughout the rest of the league. If all the remaining top players are evenly distributed on other teams, that still leaves seventeen teams in the league without one of those top players at all.
Does that affect the league's competitive balance? Of course it does. Remember, in the best of scenarios, the NBA is the least competitively balanced of the four major North American professional sports leagues. (I discussed this fact in the research article "The Champs-Chumps Ratio," still available online at Scribd.) Start clumping the superstars together on just a few teams, and that propensity towards competitive imbalance will become overwhelmingly decisive. Already, few teams go into an NBA season with a viable chance to win the championship; let the best players pick and choose their own teams and teammates, and the trophy being passed among two or three teams (at most) will become a foregone conclusion. All the rest of the teams in the league become nothing more than well-paid versions of the Washington Generals.
And the fans of those out-of-the-superstar-loop teams? What do they do? Apparently, they can go pound sand, for all James, Wade and Bosh care.
Remember, Miami's Big Three were not assembled through good scouting, drafting and coaching (a la the Spurs of Duncan, Parker and Ginobili); nor were they constructed by way of shrewd trades at just the right time (like the Celtics did with Garnett, Pierce and Allen). No, the Heat's superstars came together because they colluded to put themselves together on one roster. In doing so, they raised a gigantic middle finger in the faces of the fans of every team that could have been helped by any one of those guys, had there been a true market for their services.
And to what end was that middle finger raised? "Not five, not six, not seven..." Those words are treated as a joke these days--an arrogant joke, to be sure, but somehow not reflective of James's true intentions. But taken at face value (as they should be), that's a pretty lofty mission statement, one that defines the players' intrigues as an action taken with the goal of creating a competitive imbalance designed to secure multiple championships.
In other words, the Heat's Big Three colluded to rig the sport in favor of their success. And in doing so, they unleashed a torrent of consequences, both intended and unintended, that will shape the NBA for years to come.
We've already covered one consequence: more competitive imbalance. The Heat were prohibitive favorites to win the championship from the moment James, Wade and Bosh inked their contracts; they were only thwarted from their original stated goal by the Mavericks, coming up a mere two games shy of winning three straight titles.
This imbalance plays out not just in the postseason, but in the regular season, too. Think about the Heat's 27 game winning streak this year. I covered that phenomenon at the time in this post. To briefly recap the point made there: one of the reasons the Heat were able to go on that streak was because, thanks to the collusion that put James and Bosh on the same team with Wade, two other teams in the East were weakened to the same extent that Miami was made stronger. And, of course, its even worse than that, because not only were Cleveland and Toronto stripped of their best players three years ago, but every other team around the league that could have been made better by signing one of those free agents in 2010 didn't get better. Not only were the Heat playing the Cavs and Raptors, who were with out James and Bosh respectively, but every other team they played was without the services of James and Bosh, too. No wonder they had such an easy time winning in such a streak.
But wait--it gets worse. Remember when the Heat signed James and Bosh to go with Wade? Many pundits suggested that paying the salaries of all three players would be so onerous for Miami that it would be the Big Three and a roster full of rookie free agents for the foreseeable future. Yet, who was playing for the Heat during this year's playoffs, besides the Big Three? Names like Miller, Andersen, Battier, and Allen all appeared on Heat jerseys this season--all veterans of more than a decade in the Association, and all made valuable contributions to the Heat's championship run. How is it possible that the Heat could employ such veteran (and theoretically high-priced) talent when they have to pay three superstars--under a salary cap, no less?
Now we see just how insidious is the effect of what James, Wade and Bosh did back in 2010. Veteran NBA players aren't particularly stupid. They're jocks, but they ain't so dumb that they can't see which way the wind is blowing. With James and Bosh moving to Miami and making the Heat overwhelming favorites to win the championship, other players could see that, if they wanted to be playing for anything other than second place and a smaller playoff share, they would do well to sign with the Heat--for less money than they might otherwise make somewhere else--and make up the difference in championship prestige, a higher playoff share, maybe even some endorsements that would not have been on the table if they'd been playing in, say, Portland. So the Heat get the veteran help they need, just the right players to fill the roles and cement their championship pedigree, despite the burden of having to pay the superstars' salaries. Salary cap? What salary cap? In effect, the Big Three's collusion to rig the game in their favor didn't just bring them together, didn't just weaken other teams by drawing their own selves away from those other teams and by denying other squads their services, didn't just weaken other teams by prying away veteran role players--it actually in a de facto sense abrogated the salary cap. You don't have to worry so much about staying under a salary cap if players are begging you to play for your team--for less money than they would make somewhere else.
What that means is, the collusion by James, Wade and Bosh effectively changed the league's rules--but only for their team. Other franchises, without the drawing power of playing beside the Big Three, remained hampered by the NBA's salary cap. For a team that, before the ink was even dry, had an enormous edge over its competitors as soon as the Big Three were signed, the cumulative effect of the advantages gained from those acquisitions was overwhelming. Rigged is almost too weak a word for it.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: what about the precedent these shenanigans have set? Will it be good for the NBA as a whole when, in six years or so, Damian Lillard, Harrison Barnes, and Anthony Davis get together (assuming the continuing upward progress of their careers) and dictate where the three of them will play together--most likely in New York, or Los Angeles, maybe Boston or Chicago? Sure, it will be good for them as individual players, but what about the fans and franchises they leave behind (Portland, Golden State and New Orleans, respectively)? Again, pound sand, fellas. Inevitably, teams that are not constantly, aggressively in the spotlight, that are not traditional glamour teams, will not be able to hold onto their star players, max contracts or not. If you're a fan of one of those lower caste teams, you should be saying, "You want me to pay how much? For tickets to this shit?" Not exactly a sustainable business model. Contrast that with the NFL, where even a team in the hinterlands of Green Bay, Wisconsin can compete on an even level with everyone else, can keep its star players, can always (given competent management) promise its fans a legitimate shot at a title. Does that sound like. let's say, the Utah Jazz to you? Not in LeBron James's NBA.
Remember all this as you read the continuing cascade of fawning words that will come in the following days. We're all supposed to love/adore/suck off LeBron James and his Heatles now, even if we were a little bit angry about that whole sideshow thing at the start. The sages of the sports pages have declared it so. But...how are you really supposed to feel about someone who wins with a stacked deck? I seem to recall a nation, back when I was young, where people actually cared about fairness. Rigging things in your favor was looked down upon, if not actively censured or beaten back. And sports, after all, are supposed to be about competition--fair competition. There's a reason why, when kids get together on a playground, the two captains (usually the best players) are on opposite teams, and they take turns picking players for their respective teams--they do it to make sure the game is fair. That should always be the goal whenever games are played.
Fairness has taken a beating in our society; it has been so for decades now. Working people see the beating fairness has taken in shrinking wages and lost jobs; homeowners see it in unfair mortgages and unjustified foreclosures; poor people see it whenever they butt heads with the criminal justice system. Perhaps this condition reflects the larger society around the game, but what goes on in today's NBA cannot be called fair. The deck is very, very stacked now.
And while others may get lost in the fog of hero worship, I can't bring myself to cheer for someone who wins with a stacked deck. All the talk about LeBron James and his legacy, about how it has just gotten so much better, represents in my view little more than wishful thinking--or perhaps a deliberate attempt to engineer that version of "the truth." Seen in the cold hard light of a clear day, I think that legacy has in fact gotten much, much worse.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Begging to Differ
Why the Miami Heat's winning streak is not all it's cracked up to be
I'm getting tired of this.
Once again, for reasons unknown, it falls to me to point out what should be obvious to everyone.
If you have the slightest interest in sports, and have not been living under a rock these past two months, you know that as of this writing, the Miami Heat have won 25 games in a row. And all the sports media types have been stumbling all over themselves to celebrate the team's apotheosis.
We haven't seen this much Kool-Aid imbibed since Georgetown, Guyana in '78.
Clearly, I'm not as impressed by this achievement as everyone else. The reasons for this should be obvious; unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point in human history where the obvious no longer catches the eye of anyone blessed with a media pulpit, so I will attempt to set the record straight and explain why this performance--while noteworthy and respectable--falls short of the Olympian heights to which the NBA's press flacks wish to raise it.
First, there is the matter of the Heat, who plays for the Heat, and how they got there. I discussed this issue nearly two years ago on this site (see Miami's Vice, from June 2011). All the points made in that essay remain very much in play to this day. It should be no wonder that the collusion worked by James, Wade, and Bosh--which (as I pointed out then) damaged the game's competitive balance--would lead to this kind of result down the road. How do you expect other teams to compete against the squad that has hoarded a plurality of the league's best players? It stands to simple reason that the hoarding team will be able to dominate its competition to an exaggerated degree. The only thing exceptional about winning 25 games in a row is the fact that the streaking team has refused to take a night off and mail one in for such a long stretch of the schedule.
And remember, James and Bosh came to the Heat from other Eastern Conference teams (Cleveland and Toronto, respectively). No surprise then that the moves that weakened those two franchises would pay dividends down the road for the stars' new team. And, indeed, four of the Heat's 25 consecutive wins came against the two teams abandoned by Miami's prized additions.
That, of course, reflects a larger reality within the Heat's winning streak: beating up on Eastern Conference teams. The Heat, in winning their 25 games, have done so against only eight Western Conference teams (one game apiece against each of those teams). And of those Western teams, only five would make the playoffs today (Minnesota, Portland, and Sacramento are on the outside looking in, and will almost certainly remain there). That leaves 17 wins collected against the teams of the notoriously weaker Eastern Conference. Only six of those games against Eastern teams featured squads in playoff position.
So when we break down those 25 wins, we find that only 11 of those victories came against good teams. And, as noted before, there's a dearth of solid competition in the league because...hello!...most of the best players play for the Heat.
One game that many thought might snap the streak, against the Celtics on March 18, proved to be challenging but ultimately victorious for Miami. Perhaps Boston could have put up a better fight if the injured Kevin Garnett had played in the game. Or maybe the Celtics could have prevailed if they had kept one of their recent star players, Ray Allen, on the team. Of course, Allen now plays for...wait for it...the Miami Heat.
Thus, it's no surprise that the Heat, having plucked several of the best players away from their competition, are now dominating that rest of the league.
As they say on late night TV ads, "But wait...there's more!"
One of the favorite lines of hype, employed by the media lickspittles when waxing poetic about Miami's streak, is how the Heat are achieving something "historic" in winning this many games in a row. In more than one sense, this is true--but not necessarily in the way these pundits mean.
That the Heat have achieved the second longest winning streak in NBA history is undeniable. If they match or beat the Lakers' record 33 game streak, that will be a laudable accomplishment. The streak's value will be debatable (see above), especially if the team does not win the championship in June. But the trouble with this winning run is that it serves as yet more evidence that the NBA has a problem with delivering a truly competitive sport.
The game's history shows that dominance by one team (or, at best, two teams) during a given period of NBA history is not an anomaly--it is very much the norm. In the very beginning (during the late 1940s and early 1950s), the Minneapolis Lakers repeatedly prevailed. Eventually, the Celtics took the mantle and ran with it (championships consecutively from 1959 to 1967, with three other wins bookending the run). After the interregnum of the 1970s (when the title changed hands frequently among several teams, probably because of the competing presence of the ABA), we had the NBA's alleged Golden Age in the 1980s, when every championship except two was won by either the Lakers or the Celtics (only Philadelphia in '83 and Detroit in '89 crashed the two-team party). During the '80s, only five teams even played in the Finals. The 1990s saw six championships for the Bulls--a streak broken only because of Michael Jordan's fanciful two-year excursion through baseball's minor leagues. Competition during recent years has been slightly more open, but the turn of the 21st century still saw the Lakers add five titles in eleven years (and they lost two other Finals in the same period).
Noticing a pattern here? The history of the NBA can be summed up simply: flat out dominance by (usually) one team. Again and again, one team in the league has stood head and shoulders above the rest, often for years at a time. That such supremacy has not resulted in lengthy winning streaks more often should probably be chalked up more to fluke than a level playing field. Past teams, just as dominant as the Heat in today's NBA, may have taken their foot off the gas to rest up for the playoffs, rather than go all out looking to etch their names into the record books. Or perhaps, back in the day when the competition was better, they never got rolling on a long streak to begin with.
However the details may have played out, history shows that the Heat's standing within the league is not something exceptional and rare, but is in fact par for the course.
Indeed, seeing Miami dominate the league to this extent, and recognizing the flaws in the rest of the league that have helped create this streak, actually works to downgrade the accomplishments of past teams. That championship run forged by the Celtics in the '60s has always had a mythic aura to it; we've come to view that achievement as something almost herculean in scope, as heroic as any deeds reported in the Illiad or the Odyssey. But when viewed with a more jaundiced eye, when analyzed via the intelligence that has been honed by studying the causes and effects of the Heat's run, the shining victories of the past start to dim. Such superiority is simply what always happens in the NBA.
All of this truth telling comes from fairly straightforward analysis that can be done even by amateur sportswriters such as myself. No particular secret wisdom is required to see what there is to see in Miami's streak, and thus to keep the hyperventilating to a minimum. Instead, we get hysterical hype, ad nauseum. This failing by the sports media echoes the blindness we saw a few years ago--those same shortcomings I called out in the post referenced above. Those failings may ultimately prove to be one of the truest legacies of LeBron James's career: his actions, his team's exploits, have provided a backdrop against which the shallowness, the amateurism, the outright incompetence of what is currently alleged to be sports journalism have been exposed.
Sports fans deserve true reporting and insightful analysis; instead, all they get are shameless shills and hagiography. The Heat may keep winning; but the sports fans will continue to lose when it comes to what they get from the people reporting on the games.
I'm getting tired of this.
Once again, for reasons unknown, it falls to me to point out what should be obvious to everyone.
If you have the slightest interest in sports, and have not been living under a rock these past two months, you know that as of this writing, the Miami Heat have won 25 games in a row. And all the sports media types have been stumbling all over themselves to celebrate the team's apotheosis.
We haven't seen this much Kool-Aid imbibed since Georgetown, Guyana in '78.
Clearly, I'm not as impressed by this achievement as everyone else. The reasons for this should be obvious; unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point in human history where the obvious no longer catches the eye of anyone blessed with a media pulpit, so I will attempt to set the record straight and explain why this performance--while noteworthy and respectable--falls short of the Olympian heights to which the NBA's press flacks wish to raise it.
First, there is the matter of the Heat, who plays for the Heat, and how they got there. I discussed this issue nearly two years ago on this site (see Miami's Vice, from June 2011). All the points made in that essay remain very much in play to this day. It should be no wonder that the collusion worked by James, Wade, and Bosh--which (as I pointed out then) damaged the game's competitive balance--would lead to this kind of result down the road. How do you expect other teams to compete against the squad that has hoarded a plurality of the league's best players? It stands to simple reason that the hoarding team will be able to dominate its competition to an exaggerated degree. The only thing exceptional about winning 25 games in a row is the fact that the streaking team has refused to take a night off and mail one in for such a long stretch of the schedule.
And remember, James and Bosh came to the Heat from other Eastern Conference teams (Cleveland and Toronto, respectively). No surprise then that the moves that weakened those two franchises would pay dividends down the road for the stars' new team. And, indeed, four of the Heat's 25 consecutive wins came against the two teams abandoned by Miami's prized additions.
That, of course, reflects a larger reality within the Heat's winning streak: beating up on Eastern Conference teams. The Heat, in winning their 25 games, have done so against only eight Western Conference teams (one game apiece against each of those teams). And of those Western teams, only five would make the playoffs today (Minnesota, Portland, and Sacramento are on the outside looking in, and will almost certainly remain there). That leaves 17 wins collected against the teams of the notoriously weaker Eastern Conference. Only six of those games against Eastern teams featured squads in playoff position.
So when we break down those 25 wins, we find that only 11 of those victories came against good teams. And, as noted before, there's a dearth of solid competition in the league because...hello!...most of the best players play for the Heat.
One game that many thought might snap the streak, against the Celtics on March 18, proved to be challenging but ultimately victorious for Miami. Perhaps Boston could have put up a better fight if the injured Kevin Garnett had played in the game. Or maybe the Celtics could have prevailed if they had kept one of their recent star players, Ray Allen, on the team. Of course, Allen now plays for...wait for it...the Miami Heat.
Thus, it's no surprise that the Heat, having plucked several of the best players away from their competition, are now dominating that rest of the league.
As they say on late night TV ads, "But wait...there's more!"
One of the favorite lines of hype, employed by the media lickspittles when waxing poetic about Miami's streak, is how the Heat are achieving something "historic" in winning this many games in a row. In more than one sense, this is true--but not necessarily in the way these pundits mean.
That the Heat have achieved the second longest winning streak in NBA history is undeniable. If they match or beat the Lakers' record 33 game streak, that will be a laudable accomplishment. The streak's value will be debatable (see above), especially if the team does not win the championship in June. But the trouble with this winning run is that it serves as yet more evidence that the NBA has a problem with delivering a truly competitive sport.
The game's history shows that dominance by one team (or, at best, two teams) during a given period of NBA history is not an anomaly--it is very much the norm. In the very beginning (during the late 1940s and early 1950s), the Minneapolis Lakers repeatedly prevailed. Eventually, the Celtics took the mantle and ran with it (championships consecutively from 1959 to 1967, with three other wins bookending the run). After the interregnum of the 1970s (when the title changed hands frequently among several teams, probably because of the competing presence of the ABA), we had the NBA's alleged Golden Age in the 1980s, when every championship except two was won by either the Lakers or the Celtics (only Philadelphia in '83 and Detroit in '89 crashed the two-team party). During the '80s, only five teams even played in the Finals. The 1990s saw six championships for the Bulls--a streak broken only because of Michael Jordan's fanciful two-year excursion through baseball's minor leagues. Competition during recent years has been slightly more open, but the turn of the 21st century still saw the Lakers add five titles in eleven years (and they lost two other Finals in the same period).
Noticing a pattern here? The history of the NBA can be summed up simply: flat out dominance by (usually) one team. Again and again, one team in the league has stood head and shoulders above the rest, often for years at a time. That such supremacy has not resulted in lengthy winning streaks more often should probably be chalked up more to fluke than a level playing field. Past teams, just as dominant as the Heat in today's NBA, may have taken their foot off the gas to rest up for the playoffs, rather than go all out looking to etch their names into the record books. Or perhaps, back in the day when the competition was better, they never got rolling on a long streak to begin with.
However the details may have played out, history shows that the Heat's standing within the league is not something exceptional and rare, but is in fact par for the course.
Indeed, seeing Miami dominate the league to this extent, and recognizing the flaws in the rest of the league that have helped create this streak, actually works to downgrade the accomplishments of past teams. That championship run forged by the Celtics in the '60s has always had a mythic aura to it; we've come to view that achievement as something almost herculean in scope, as heroic as any deeds reported in the Illiad or the Odyssey. But when viewed with a more jaundiced eye, when analyzed via the intelligence that has been honed by studying the causes and effects of the Heat's run, the shining victories of the past start to dim. Such superiority is simply what always happens in the NBA.
All of this truth telling comes from fairly straightforward analysis that can be done even by amateur sportswriters such as myself. No particular secret wisdom is required to see what there is to see in Miami's streak, and thus to keep the hyperventilating to a minimum. Instead, we get hysterical hype, ad nauseum. This failing by the sports media echoes the blindness we saw a few years ago--those same shortcomings I called out in the post referenced above. Those failings may ultimately prove to be one of the truest legacies of LeBron James's career: his actions, his team's exploits, have provided a backdrop against which the shallowness, the amateurism, the outright incompetence of what is currently alleged to be sports journalism have been exposed.
Sports fans deserve true reporting and insightful analysis; instead, all they get are shameless shills and hagiography. The Heat may keep winning; but the sports fans will continue to lose when it comes to what they get from the people reporting on the games.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Recently Read
by Greg Critser
We're in deep trouble. But we can still do something about it. Maybe. That seems to be the takeaway from Greg Critser's book Fat Land.
Critser explores all aspects of America's growing obesity problem, in mostly chronological order: from the 1970s and former Nixon and Ford Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz's pet projects for lowering the price of food--mostly through opening up markets to the cheap and then-new ingredients high fructose corn syrup and palm oil--to the degradation of physical fitness standards via defunded schools and hypersensitive parents, to the muddled confusion produced by nutrition science and dietary standards, and finally all the way up to the socioeconomic forces that have made fat--as I have said myself, here on this very site--into a class issue in modern America.
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| Fat Land by Greg Critser |
In the book's final chapter, Critser presents ideas for actions that we, as a society, can take to ameliorate, if not reverse entirely, the obesity epidemic. For example, the suggestion that young college graduates could be recruited through Americorps to attack the problem in the schools, amongst the youngest victims of the crisis--in the same way such graduates have been sent out to alleviate kids' problems learning math--is intriguing, and should get serious consideration. But, given all that has gone in the preceding pages, the reader is left to wonder how effective such steps can be. After all, Fat Land was published nine years ago; not much has happened in the ensuing years to make the overweight problem any better. Suggestions for improvements have been falling on deaf ears, or upon ears that are blocked or covered up by the moneyed interests (think McDonald's, Burger King, soda companies, et al.) who have been the chief beneficiaries of the obesity explosion. We, as a society, are in thrall to the very forces that have been expanding our waistlines; Critser quite effectively makes that case, and thus it is no surprise that remedial efforts have been largely useless.
Still, we all do have at least the personal, individual solution to weight problems available to us: stop eating poorly, and exercise a lot more. Fat Land may not spell out the regimen that will get the best results for you, but it presents a clear argument that, for each of us--and especially those with a high BMI--the effort is undoubtedly worth it.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Recently Read
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| The Big Squeeze Visit author's website |
by Steven Greenhouse
It can hardly be called a secret: these days, in this country, if you're not rich, you're boned.
New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse decided to set that fact down for the record, and the result was The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. Published in 2008, just as everything was going to shit in America's economy, The Big Squeeze documents the full gamut of the ways in which American workers are being screwed: diminishing wages, nonexistent job security, and a host of illegal activities, such as denying benefits, altering time sheets to cheat workers of earned wages, aggressive union-busting, and a general hostility towards the rights of workers--up to and including locking workers in on the night shift and not letting them out, regardless of what emergency may come.
As Greenhouse make clear, all of these actions are the products of a philosophical shift that seized corporate America's collective hive-brain sometime in the 1980s (the Reagan era, of course); that shift brutally devalued the contributions of those who work in favor of the demands (and even whims) of those who hold stock. In a land where the shareholder is king, those who earn paychecks are disposable peasants locked in a form of neo-serfdom--a portrait that author Greenhouse skillfully paints with the litany of grim stories presented in his telling prose.
Greenhouse wisely covers all the angles in telling his tale of dispossessed labor in America. To thwart those who might claim that the tribulations he documents are simply the sorrows of low-wage peons working dead-end jobs for the usual corporate suspects, the author provides powerful counterarguments by describing the problems of high tech workers--problems that, despite their high level of education and skill, mirror those of their uneducated working brethren. It's not just the lowly Mexicans who are getting screwed here, and the author spells that fact out through powerful, sympathetic stories that cover a whole socioeconomic range of victims.
Greenhouse also makes the cagey decision to offer the reader not just the villains in this piece, but a corporate hero as well, in the form of Costco. The membership driven wholesaler stands in sharp contrast to its chief competitor on the low-price front, Wal-mart (an organization Greenhouse routinely excoriates throughout his narrative). Somehow, unlike its competitor from Arkansas, Costco finds a way to pay decent wages and create a fair and equitable corporate culture while still providing its customers the inexpensive products they desire. Through that contrast, Greenhouse makes a strong case that, despite the bullshit that spews from the mouths of CEOs, our labor market doesn't have to be this way. The American economy could still work to the benefit of all of us; that it does not is a conscious choice on the part of those in power.
The Big Squeeze has a few minor faults. Much of the text reads like lengthy newspaper stories that have been somewhat inelegantly stitched together--no surprise, since much of the source material came from Greenhouse's work for the Times. The book as a whole is long, and textually denser than what the casual reader may be prepared to handle. Finally, the work is undeniably a downer. That fact inevitably results from the subject being covered, but it still affects the mood of the reader long before the final summary of suggested remedies. The few hopeful stories offered to the reader are buried too deeply within the grim litany to brighten the overall mood.
Nevertheless, The Big Squeeze documents the details of an important reality that we who are the 99% must face. Only by confronting that reality head on can there be any hope that it will change, through the actions of our own selves if not our so-called leadership. Greenhouse, with The Big Squeeze, has painted the bullseye on the most critical targets. It's now up to us to act.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Recommended Reading
I'm a regular reader of journalist Matt Taibbi's blog on Rolling Stone's website; I've just added a link to the blog in My Sausage Factory over on the right. I highly recommend reading Matt's stuff, especially for cut-through-the-bullshit insight on the misdeeds of the financial sector.
Taibbi also writes on politics in general, and has produced a couple of very informative--if not horrifying--profiles on a certain candidates for the presidency, including an excellent piece on the troglodytic Rick Perry. The money quote:
Taibbi also writes on politics in general, and has produced a couple of very informative--if not horrifying--profiles on a certain candidates for the presidency, including an excellent piece on the troglodytic Rick Perry. The money quote:
I can't believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That's it? It's over? That was Rick Perry's stump speech?The whole article lays bare the wretchedness that is the current Governor of Texas. Be sure to read the whole thing.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Recently Read
Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist: The Gonzo Letters, Vol. II, 1968-1976
by Hunter S. Thompson
You don't have to be an ether-sniffing fiend to appreciate Fear and Loathing in America. I'm not saying it wouldn't help, but...it would serve as an unnecessary component of the literary experience, and should only be added at the reader's discretion.
This collection of Thompson's correspondence covers the crucial years of the infamous journalist's career: from the bad craziness of 1968, including Thompson's political awakening at the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, to the election year of 1976, when Thompson's prophetic vision of the possibilities of Jimmy Carter's campaign--recognized two years before--finally came to fruition.
For longtime Thompson readers, there are some surprises, but few major revelations. It doesn't come as a shock, considering the personality in question, to learn that some of the Doctor's responses to random fan mail could be as entertaining to read as his correspondence with political and literary heavyweights. More surprising, perhaps, are the troubles Thompson had with his writing, both in trying to follow up his first Hells Angels success--the abortive "American Dream" nonfiction project--and in his attempts to stride beyond his celebrity status in the wake of his greatest success with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine a writer of Thompson's talent struggling to put words on the page. Yet, again and again, Thompson expresses his frustrations with all the destructive interference that plagued his writing output: his lack of any handle on the American Dream project's greater meaning, the inevitable distractions that went with running for sheriff of Pitkin County back in 1970, and the demands of celebrity in the wake of his outrageous success.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in these pages centers not on Thompson at all, but in the person of Oscar Zeta Acosta, both the legendary "Dr. Gonzo" of Las Vegas fame and the all-too-real Chicano lawyer and activist from Los Angeles. Acosta was a friend and collaborator with Thompson from the late-'60s onward, until disputes over his depiction in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the potential film rights and clearances scuttled their friendship, not long before Acosta's mysterious disappearance in the mid-'70s. Reading their correspondence, particularly Acosta's letters to Thompson, reveals a much deeper portrait of the man than the Doctor's readers ever got from the Gonzo canon. "Strange Rumblings in Atzlan" gave readers a bare portrait of a thoughtful, dedicated man; the Dr. Gonzo character of Las Vegas, in retrospect, really did border on caricature, if not outright libel. It is disquieting to think, from the vantage of the future, that the falling out may very well have been Thompson's fault. Perhaps. It's only a handful of letters, and they are subject to interpretation, to be sure. But clearly, more went on there than met the eye.
Fear and Loathing in America has its downsides. The book is quite long, covering its eight year period in exhaustive detail, and some inevitable repetition. Thompson, in his correspondence, never hesitated to reiterate himself, and his letters to his editor concerning the American Dream project, composed over the course of three plus years, often tread over the same ground. Also, Thompson's narcissism often held sway; any event in his life was sure to find its way into his letters, again and again, in carbon copy detail. For each individual letter recipient, the story undoubtedly held together as a coherent thread; but for anyone reading those letters collected, an inevitable sense of deja vu creeps into the proceedings.
Finally, despite the interesting tidbits revealed in Fear and Loathing in America, these pages also represent something sad for Thompson fans. Except perhaps for his Rolling Stone obituary for Richard Nixon--a work well worthy of the Gonzo canon--Thompson rarely hit the high notes after the period covered in Fear and Loathing in America. Once The Great Shark Hunt reached bookstore shelves back in the late '70s, Thompson's output consisted of sporadic pieces of uneven work, from then until his eventual suicide. The experienced reader knows, as he reads through Fear and Loathing in America, that he is peering back at a height already ascended, glancing over his shoulder at a mountain that will never be climbed all the way to the top again. That knowledge lends the effort a melancholy air, one that colors the entire effort.
Still, if you are a Thompson fan, you always welcome a chance to read his words, especially pieces that you may not have seen before. There's always a passage or two that calls up the magic once again, words that summon something that few writers have ever been able to conjure. Perhaps the next volume of Thompson's letters will reveal greater insights, and possibly provide better material than the published works of later years. In the mean time, we can console ourselves with what we have: the voice of a great writer that, despite death and time, has not yet been silenced. In Thompson's case, that is enough.
by Hunter S. Thompson
You don't have to be an ether-sniffing fiend to appreciate Fear and Loathing in America. I'm not saying it wouldn't help, but...it would serve as an unnecessary component of the literary experience, and should only be added at the reader's discretion.
 |
| Fear and Loathing in America |
For longtime Thompson readers, there are some surprises, but few major revelations. It doesn't come as a shock, considering the personality in question, to learn that some of the Doctor's responses to random fan mail could be as entertaining to read as his correspondence with political and literary heavyweights. More surprising, perhaps, are the troubles Thompson had with his writing, both in trying to follow up his first Hells Angels success--the abortive "American Dream" nonfiction project--and in his attempts to stride beyond his celebrity status in the wake of his greatest success with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine a writer of Thompson's talent struggling to put words on the page. Yet, again and again, Thompson expresses his frustrations with all the destructive interference that plagued his writing output: his lack of any handle on the American Dream project's greater meaning, the inevitable distractions that went with running for sheriff of Pitkin County back in 1970, and the demands of celebrity in the wake of his outrageous success.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in these pages centers not on Thompson at all, but in the person of Oscar Zeta Acosta, both the legendary "Dr. Gonzo" of Las Vegas fame and the all-too-real Chicano lawyer and activist from Los Angeles. Acosta was a friend and collaborator with Thompson from the late-'60s onward, until disputes over his depiction in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the potential film rights and clearances scuttled their friendship, not long before Acosta's mysterious disappearance in the mid-'70s. Reading their correspondence, particularly Acosta's letters to Thompson, reveals a much deeper portrait of the man than the Doctor's readers ever got from the Gonzo canon. "Strange Rumblings in Atzlan" gave readers a bare portrait of a thoughtful, dedicated man; the Dr. Gonzo character of Las Vegas, in retrospect, really did border on caricature, if not outright libel. It is disquieting to think, from the vantage of the future, that the falling out may very well have been Thompson's fault. Perhaps. It's only a handful of letters, and they are subject to interpretation, to be sure. But clearly, more went on there than met the eye.
Fear and Loathing in America has its downsides. The book is quite long, covering its eight year period in exhaustive detail, and some inevitable repetition. Thompson, in his correspondence, never hesitated to reiterate himself, and his letters to his editor concerning the American Dream project, composed over the course of three plus years, often tread over the same ground. Also, Thompson's narcissism often held sway; any event in his life was sure to find its way into his letters, again and again, in carbon copy detail. For each individual letter recipient, the story undoubtedly held together as a coherent thread; but for anyone reading those letters collected, an inevitable sense of deja vu creeps into the proceedings.
Finally, despite the interesting tidbits revealed in Fear and Loathing in America, these pages also represent something sad for Thompson fans. Except perhaps for his Rolling Stone obituary for Richard Nixon--a work well worthy of the Gonzo canon--Thompson rarely hit the high notes after the period covered in Fear and Loathing in America. Once The Great Shark Hunt reached bookstore shelves back in the late '70s, Thompson's output consisted of sporadic pieces of uneven work, from then until his eventual suicide. The experienced reader knows, as he reads through Fear and Loathing in America, that he is peering back at a height already ascended, glancing over his shoulder at a mountain that will never be climbed all the way to the top again. That knowledge lends the effort a melancholy air, one that colors the entire effort.
Still, if you are a Thompson fan, you always welcome a chance to read his words, especially pieces that you may not have seen before. There's always a passage or two that calls up the magic once again, words that summon something that few writers have ever been able to conjure. Perhaps the next volume of Thompson's letters will reveal greater insights, and possibly provide better material than the published works of later years. In the mean time, we can console ourselves with what we have: the voice of a great writer that, despite death and time, has not yet been silenced. In Thompson's case, that is enough.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Recently Read
Our Daily Meds
by Melody Petersen
A sobering reminder, if one were needed, that the doctor is NOT your friend. Especially when he's on the take from the drug companies.
That's the biggest takeaway from author Petersen's exposé of the pharmaceutical industry. It's one thing to state the notion--which by now is fairly obvious--that the drug companies are the province of sleazy lowlifes. Given all we've seen the last decade and a half--a sickening torrent of prescription drug commercials for every ailment ever imagined by the marketer's mind; heavily-hyped medicines being recalled by the government for being downright deadly, let alone ineffective; the lack of substantive drugs to cure sickness, versus an avalanche of pills designed to symptom-treat (not cure) chronic conditions--it hardly comes as a surprise that Petersen's well-researched pages reveal the corruption that has sunk all the way into big pharma's core.
But it is striking and surprising to learn from those same pages how deeply compromised this nation's doctors are. Our Daily Meds provides voluminous examples that demonstrate that, apparently, doctors in this country have never met a bribe they didn't like. Petersen makes a strong case that all of the expensive dinners, luxury vacations, and hefty cash payments that doctors take from the pharmaceutical companies has had direct negative effects on the health of people both in this country and possibly around the world.
That said, the book does suffer minor flaws, the biggest of which is a certain repetitiveness. One story of corruption tends to blend into another as the pharma companies use the same tactics, over and over again, to get their "new" drugs out to the market and to encourage doctors to write millions of dubious, often needless prescriptions to boost sales. One also must note that Petersen is not the best prose stylist; the text contains a distractingly high number of passages that could have used better editing.
Nevertheless, Our Daily Meds delivers what the nation's consumers and patients need the most--a harsh dose of reality. Reading this book will give you a clearer idea of just how distrustful you need to be when you walk into your doctor's office. If nothing else--or you're not in the mood to read it for yourself--at the very least we should all as serious questions whenever a doctor writes a prescription: Is this drug approved for this application? Is this a new drug, or has it been on the market for a while? Is there a generic version of this drug available?
Those questions may actually save your life someday. And if everyone starts asking those questions thanks to Petersen and her book, then the author can congratulate herself on a job well done.
by Melody Petersen
A sobering reminder, if one were needed, that the doctor is NOT your friend. Especially when he's on the take from the drug companies.
That's the biggest takeaway from author Petersen's exposé of the pharmaceutical industry. It's one thing to state the notion--which by now is fairly obvious--that the drug companies are the province of sleazy lowlifes. Given all we've seen the last decade and a half--a sickening torrent of prescription drug commercials for every ailment ever imagined by the marketer's mind; heavily-hyped medicines being recalled by the government for being downright deadly, let alone ineffective; the lack of substantive drugs to cure sickness, versus an avalanche of pills designed to symptom-treat (not cure) chronic conditions--it hardly comes as a surprise that Petersen's well-researched pages reveal the corruption that has sunk all the way into big pharma's core.
But it is striking and surprising to learn from those same pages how deeply compromised this nation's doctors are. Our Daily Meds provides voluminous examples that demonstrate that, apparently, doctors in this country have never met a bribe they didn't like. Petersen makes a strong case that all of the expensive dinners, luxury vacations, and hefty cash payments that doctors take from the pharmaceutical companies has had direct negative effects on the health of people both in this country and possibly around the world.
That said, the book does suffer minor flaws, the biggest of which is a certain repetitiveness. One story of corruption tends to blend into another as the pharma companies use the same tactics, over and over again, to get their "new" drugs out to the market and to encourage doctors to write millions of dubious, often needless prescriptions to boost sales. One also must note that Petersen is not the best prose stylist; the text contains a distractingly high number of passages that could have used better editing.
Nevertheless, Our Daily Meds delivers what the nation's consumers and patients need the most--a harsh dose of reality. Reading this book will give you a clearer idea of just how distrustful you need to be when you walk into your doctor's office. If nothing else--or you're not in the mood to read it for yourself--at the very least we should all as serious questions whenever a doctor writes a prescription: Is this drug approved for this application? Is this a new drug, or has it been on the market for a while? Is there a generic version of this drug available?
Those questions may actually save your life someday. And if everyone starts asking those questions thanks to Petersen and her book, then the author can congratulate herself on a job well done.
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