Taylor's Laws

An occasional series in which I promulgate certain laws of nature, to help us better understand the universe around us.

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Taylor's First Law of Social Motion

For every action there is an opposite, unequal, and stupid reaction.

Explication: A fairly straightforward principle derived from basic observation of the social media sphere. Any thought or idea presented on social media, however minor in importance and innocent in nature, will be met with a reaction that is disproportionate in its scope and negativity.

PC Has Its Limits

Just happened to catch this sign on a trip to the local Safeway this past week:

A sign on a display at the local Safeway. No, there weren't any protesters out front of the store.

It's something of a cliche at this point, but: I can't imagine the amount of outrage that would be expressed over this sign if the ethnicity being...what?...lampooned? mocked? satirized?...by this mixed drink's name were any of the more "endangered" species among us. Carbombs are generally not considered sources of humor these days, though my personal sense of humor can manage it. For the most part, however, the bulk of the bodies around us would tend to see this as in poor taste--if it referenced someone other than a safely white, non-oppressed subgroup.

As it was, the display seemed to attract no particular attention on the day I was in the store. I made a quick move to snap the pic above--it's a little blurry because I didn't linger over it; I expected to get some guff from someone representing the store if I was spotted snapping that shot--just simply to share it with everyone, just to see if anyone finds it in any particular way offensive.

By the way, I highly recommend NOT being offended by this sort of thing; it just seems like people have an affinity these days for getting offended by just about whatever's out there, so I figured I'd stir the pot, if possible, by posting it here. Do with it as you see fit. Enjoy.

Reel Reviews

A Face in the Crowd -- The villainy of Andy Griffith--who would have thought it? Apparently, Elia Kazan, that’s who. This film has become a standard namecheck for explaining our country’s current politics--no, Lonesome Rhodes is not Trump; Glenn Beck remains the modern model, though others are coming up fast behind him--so it’s probably must-see material at this point. Fortunately, it’s entertaining material, so you won’t get bored watching it. The only real problem is, in the end it might be too hopeful; there’s no guarantee that our ending will actually be even this happy.

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.

Neomedieval Times

For many years now, I've been in the camp that believes we are heading into--indeed, that we've already entered--a new medieval period in Western history. (And, since Western history is--after the European/American conquest of much of the world in the last century and a half--now basically world history, this applies to everyone everywhere.) I would suggest that future historians will probably mark the beginning of this "Neomedieval World" as having happened either in 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall), or 1991 (the collapse of the Soviet Union), or perhaps even 2001 (the September 11 attacks). Whatever comes to be the agreed upon date, it looks like the future world will look back on these days as the beginning of a new middle ages for the world.

I bring this up today, June 25, 2016, because we are still in the immediate wake of the UK's "Brexit" referendum, and it just occurred to me that the vote to leave the EU goes along quite well with the overall scheme of order in a Neomedieval World. After all, one of the characteristics of the original middle ages was political dissolution throughout Europe. The unity that was the Roman Empire dropped to the floor and shattered into almost innumerable pieces back then, and the straining that is fracturing the EU--which I've seen referred to as the highest peak of European unity since the Roman days--may lead to just the same sort of patchwork of kingdoms and principalities that ruled and shaped Europe for a thousand years during the first medieval period.

This desire to create break-ups and increase political fragmentation will not necessarily end with the UK leaving the EU. There's already some talk about a "Texit" hitting the United States, with Texans possibly angling to secede from the Union in one way or another. (I'm not sure how that would work--previous attempts to secede did not go well, as you know--but I wouldn't dismiss the matter out of hand, either.) More likely, other members of the EU may seek to leave the union now that the UK has shown the way. It's not out of the question that the whole thing could collapse in the coming years--and we're not talking about decades, either.

What will be the consequences of such a dissolution? Hard to say. But given the history of the continent, and the contours of history that the medieval world presents to us, it's quite possible that neomedieval Europe would see its multitude of states in competition and conflict with each other. (The same would apply to a dissolved former U.S.A.--or any other place in the world where fragmentation and Balkanization might occur. An American break-up may seem out of the question to some, but I'm not the first to have imagined such a thing.) In other words, war is a possibility in at least some parts of Europe, as it was back in earlier medieval times. If you're holding a passport and want to go see Paris and/or Rome, you might want to book your trip sooner rather than later.

If things do dissolve into war, over whatever issue might lead to violence, that would certainly give greater validity to the whole Neomedieval World idea. After all, most of the attributes of the medieval world--endemic violence, political fragmentation, severe polarization based largely on religious identities, and loss of knowledge and lowering of the education level of the general populace--are already in place now. We've just seen the political fragmentation in play; religious polarization has been a daily topic ever since 9/11; and this country's ongoing education crisis is providing the biggest thrust for the loss of knowledge and education level in the populace (which never got super high in much of the world outside the wealthy West anyway). Violence has remained endemic in most of the non-elite parts of the world; if tensions between former EU partner states rises to the point of actual armed conflict on the continent, then that chicken will have come home to roost in Europe, too.

So the Brexit vote may be just one more step down a path that began a couple of decades ago, a march that seems to be leading us back to a future in which a great deal of what we have come to see as the modern world may be lost, at least for a period of time.

How long a period of time? No one can know, of course. But one hopeful thing to consider is this: whatever the nature of the next few years, or decades, or centuries, one thing we have consistently seen in our recent history is an acceleration of the pace of change. So while the original middle ages lasted roughly a thousand years in Western Europe--almost evenly split between the Dark Ages and the High Middle Ages--there's a good chance that the Neomedieval World will run its course over a much shorter period than the previous medieval incarnation. And then a Neoenlightenment may usher in a new, better age of human history.

At least we can hope that's how it goes.

Wordsmith

Another term for Stephen's Dictionary:

Generation AA
[Proper noun]
Pronounced "Generation Double A" -- Term for any member of the vaguely under 30 years-of-age cohort; derives from the fact that whenever I have to deal with any of their ilk, I wind up wanting to beat them with a sock filled with batteries. ("Double A" refers to the common small cell batteries.)

Bitching and Cunting: a Definition of Terms

Folks tend to be imprecise in their use of words. We've discussed this before in this space, in a post about the definition of stupidity and insanity, among other things. Another place where the subtle difference between similar words causes confusion lies in the space between the terms 'bitching' and 'cunting.'

Almost everyone is familiar with bitching. We've all bitched about this, that, or the other thing now and then. You're bitching when you say, "Dammit, why do I have to do this now? This is so stupid!" whenever your boss asks you to finish those "TPS reports" by the end of today, Friday, when you know perfectly well that no one will even be in the office to look at them until Tuesday at the earliest. Bitching is a form of complaining; it springs from a place of feeling abused, put upon, mistreated, or just simply frustrated. Bitching is complaining that comes from a place of--or at least, the perception of being in a position of--powerlessness.

Reel Reviews

Selma -- An impressive presentation, outstanding performances, and strong, nuanced storytelling make this an exceptional piece of historical movie-making. A most notable feature is the multi-faceted portraits of each of the participants in the narrative; there's some hagiography here, but it is tempered with an honest representation of real characters, faults and all, that adds human dimensions to what otherwise might have been, in less capable hands, a flat, uninteresting work of something near propaganda. Instead we are treated to an effective and ultimately moving history, one that deserves to be viewed on many merits, and which couldn't be more relevant even today, 50 years later.

A Treatise on the Nature of Beauty

I've given a lot of thought to the nature of beauty over the years. Not because of anything I see in the mirror; far from it! But because I recognize--in a way that many people do not realize, or rather do not acknowledge--that beauty has an overwhelming influence on our lives: how we live, who we are, who we are allowed to be, where we fit in in this world (or this society, at least).

We use many words to describe beautiful people. Men are generally characterized as "handsome." We resort to a much broader range of terms when women are the subject: gorgeous, lovely, pretty, cute, alluring, ravishing...when it comes to female beauty, you could fill a thesaurus and the tremendous number of synonyms for what we call beautiful.

I've come to believe that the reason we have so many terms for a female beauty is as an acknowledgement that there are different kinds of beauty. Everyone who is good-looking is beautiful, but beautiful people come in different flavors, so to speak, and those different flavors affect the observer in different ways.

(An aside: Let's get one thing straight--beauty is NOT in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is one of the most rigidly defined aspects of human existence.

Studies have shown again and again that the symmetry and proportions of the human face determine how that face is perceived as beautiful or not. If you don't believe that, just drop a few words in that search bar up at the top of this window and you can find those results. [Here's a starting point: http://legacy.jyi.org/volumes/volume6/issue6/features/feng.html ]

Even when somebody declares as beautiful a person who is not, according to the common understanding of that term, that declaration is usually made to make a point--to engage in a certain amount of iconoclasm for one reason or another.

Individual tastes vary, for one reason or another, but if you ask a broad swath of observers to judge the beauty of this, that, or the other person, the vast majority will agree, whether the answer is yes, no, or meh--and if it's yes, that answer will apply to people so similar to other "yes" examples that researchers have developed masks that define a beautiful face based on the averages of such proportions.

Beauty, to put it bluntly, is mathematical; it's geometric. It is not a subjective experience.)

Insofar as most people acknowledge these differences, they tend to categorize those variations as part of a hierarchy. Meaning: the woman who is "pretty" is more beautiful than someone who is "just" "cute," and so on. However, I have come to believe that this is NOT true; the different flavors of beauty are perceived as such, but they do not relate to each other in any kind of tiered ranking. "Cute" is not inferior to "pretty"; it's just a different kind of beauty, one that--in the correct circumstances--can have more impact on the person perceiving it than the other varieties of beauty.

According to my theory, there are three primary forms of beauty. Two of these forms were immediately obvious to me, almost as to be self-evident: the aforementioned "Cute" and "Pretty." Most observers intuitively recognize a beautiful woman as being either of these categories (assuming she does not fall into the third, as yet undiscussed category). This discernment is most likely a culturally ingrained reaction, a thought process that most people have inculcated into their perception from a very early age. (Evidence suggests there's also innate discernment; studies with babies have shown differences in infants' reactions to different (in symmetry/proportion) faces.) How people react to a cute woman versus a pretty woman depends upon circumstances--and, most likely, individual preferences and experiences.

What qualities constitute these first two varieties of beauty?

Cute is that version of beauty that is approachable, youthful (of course, all beauty has a heavy youth bias), perhaps even babyish. Cute, due to its approachability, shows up a lot in TV commercials.

Pretty is something more classical, a more idealized beauty than Cute--one that is nevertheless somewhat commonplace. Or perhaps its better to say Pretty is not rare; we see Pretty all the time, every day, even as we highly value it in the world around us. Beauty queens, high school homecoming queens, girls who work as greeters in restaurants and other businesses--you see these typical examples of the Pretty type all the time, all around you.

And the third category? What is the proper term for that third variety of beauty? Indeed, what is that third variety of beauty? How does it differ from Cute and Pretty?

For a long time, I used the term "gorgeous" as the descriptor for this class of beauty--but mostly as a mental placeholder, since I knew that "gorgeous" is not the right term for this third variety. ("Gorgeous" does more to describe the viewer's reaction to the beautiful person; it does not really address what that person's beauty is.) The third variety of beauty, as can be gleaned from the use of the term gorgeous, is more superficially striking than Cute or Pretty; these beauties are often some somewhat exotic. One can fairly characterize this third class of beauty as rarer than the other two; it is the type of beauty that one typically sees in models, especially the more famous and sought after models (the somewhat ridiculous term "supermodel" is often apt).

It was that connection to modeling and fashion that led me to the best label for this third variety of beauty: "Glamorous." Note that Glamorous derives from glamor (or glamour), the old name for a magical spell. This is most apt, as Glamorous beauty is the most spell-casting of the three--a striking, forceful, perhaps even mesmerizing kind of beauty that almost demands attention, and often leads to its avatars being placed upon a pedestal.

That rare and elevated character of Glamorous beauty probably creates much of the inclination towards seeing different varieties of beauty as steps on a hierarchical ladder; i.e., Glamorous lives at the top of the ranks above Pretty, which is itself a step above Cute. However, this thought model does not reflect reality particularly well. As noted above, individual reactions to different types of beauty differ widely; the relative approachability of the Cute person may make her more valued in the eyes of some individuals, who at the same time may see the lofty nature of the Glamorous one to be too unreachable for his or her tastes. Bad experiences in the past with a Pretty type may lead an individual to devalue others of the same type versus those who fall into the other two categories. Other scenarios can be imagined which would switch the relative rankings of any of the three varieties up or down the ladder according to an individual's personal preferences.

Thus, it is best to view the three varieties of beauty as co-equal in the eyes of the world at large. A chart may help visually define the relationships between the beauty types:

Some notes about the beauty chart:

The three varieties of beauty can be seen as a subset of the beauty class as a whole. As in any Venn diagram, it is possible--indeed, with beauty (and human variability) it is a certainty--that some parts of the interior sets will overlap. The upshot of this is (in practical terms) that there are some people out there who are both Cute and Pretty, Cute and Glamorous, Pretty and Glamorous. The very center of the diagram marks those lucky few who--through some remarkable combination of genes and the observer's biases--present (to some extent) all three of the varieties in their persons. I placed Kate Upton there in the center, since she seems to be today's foremost exemplar of all the varieties of beauty rolled into one person.

Note too that the overall set, Beauty, contains not just the three standard varieties but also some subset(s) that fall outside of any of the standard categories; within these bounds you would find those relatively rare birds who embody unconventional beauty (but still meet with the approval of wide swaths of the population), and perhaps those other outliers mentioned above (those who are declared to be beautiful in the service of iconoclasm--maybe even those individuals who make themselves attractive to others not by physical perfection, but through sheer dint of will and personality).

Finally, note that the placement of the categories (Cute and Pretty above, Glamorous below) is arbitrary--the chart can be rotated any number of degrees around its centerpoint and still be representative.

In conclusion, it may be best to recognize one particularly important implication of this intellectual model for beauty: while some of us may be condemned to a lesser status for possessing in our persons little to no physical beauty at all, those who do have one form of beauty or another are not destined to a position inferior to other beautiful people. In other words, if you're Cute, you're not doomed to a lesser life than a Glamorous type. Nor, if you're Pretty, are you necessarily better than a Cute person. Different strokes for different folks--that tends to be the order of things, even within a subset of the general such as beauty.

Taylor's Laws

An occasional series in which I promulgate certain laws of nature, to help us better understand the universe around us

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Taylor's Vehicular Follicle Law

Any luxury car, when being driven with at least one passenger accompanying the driver, will contain at least one blonde person.

Explication: This law is described purely from observational sources. Having lived in enclaves frequented by luxury car drivers for many a year, I can attest from personal witness that this law is true. Why this circumstance is the way it is, is probably an exercise best left to the intelligence of the reader. The socioeconomics of blondness being what they are, this is almost axiomatic, in an a = a sort of way. Nevertheless, this law is worth recording for posterity, if nothing else. Note that the blonde person in question need not be the passenger; it is only necessary for there to be at least two bodies in the vehicle for the law to be operative. (It is entirely possible for a solo luxury car driver to be raven-haired; but if said person is accompanied by a passenger, that passenger will be blonde.)

Recently Read

Fat Chance
by Robert H. Lustig, M.D.

Fat Chance
by Robert Lustig, M.D.

I'm not qualified to judge the science presented in this book. I am, much to my chagrin, overly qualified to judge the judgments that Dr. Lustig makes about being obese--and that is why I highly recommend this book.

There are two sides to the issue presented in Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. On the one hand, you have the science mentioned above. Lustig delivers a strong case--as strong a case as you can make in layman's terms for a very technical argument--that the obesity pandemic that is now ravaging the world is largely the product of the over consumption of sugar, specifically fructose in processed foods. Making heads or tails of the effects of leptin, insulin resistance, ghrelin, and other hormones on the hypothalamus, and how all that translates into weight gain and "metabolic syndrome," can be a bit of a slog, especially if you're not technically minded. Suffice it to say, Lustig explains these medical matters with enough simplicity and clarity that a reasonably well-informed reader will likely judge his thesis to be sound and consistent.

On the other hand, there is the matter of the experience of obesity, both from Lustig's patients (related as illustrative anecdotes throughout the book's chapters), and the reader's own understanding of that experience. This is where the rubber meets the road--or, to be more apt, where the sugar hits the liver--for making the case that Fat Chance represents an honest, accurate reflection of what has happened to people all over the world, what is happening to more people as time goes by, and what the legacy of that crisis will be for our world if nothing is done to change society's course.

If you read this book as someone who has suffered through a lifetime of weight problems, you can't help but recognize in this text descriptions of the mechanics of obesity that dovetail perfectly with your own life story. Who hasn't grown up fat and wondered why you were made that way? What fat person hasn't felt the frustration of failure to control his or her behavior--supposedly the key aspect of how people get to be obese? Lustig has answers for these and other questions that contradict the received wisdom about obesity: the long-standing philosophical position that if you're fat, it's because you make bad choices.

Not so, according to the author; Lustig presents ideas that explain why so many of the treatments for obesity that have been preferred up till now--by the medical community, by government, by fat people themselves--simply haven't worked. He argues that behavior follows biology, not the other way around; that a calorie is not a calorie (meaning, different types of calories affect the body differently); that changing environment is more effective than changing diet; that our modern food industry has a stake in making us sick, despite the costs to the rest of society. All of this rings all too true, both to someone who has been trapped in an overweight life, and to anyone who has been paying attention to the overarching trends in our world, especially societal and political trends regarding the production of our food supply. In that ring of veracity the reader finds a forceful argument in favor of Lustig's view of the problem, and thus the utility of this book.

While Lustig makes it clear that the odds are indeed stacked against us, he does offer a blueprint for fixing the problem, for both the individual and society. The doctor's advice on how to overcome your personal obesity challenge--raised awareness about sugar in the foods you eat, getting more fiber in your diet, exercising as much as you can, and having manageable expectations about your health--may not seem revolutionary, but it strikes this reader as the best possible message on the subject. Lustig's prescriptions for societal cures--higher taxes on sugar, changes to subsidies and tariffs on various foodstuffs (discouraging sugar, encouraging fresh foods, etc.), using the fight against tobacco as a model for fighting the food industry--seem more far-fetched, if reasonable given the scope of the problem, simply due to the corruption and intransigence of governmental agencies. But at least the ideas are there, and given the seemingly insurmountable odds against putting any of those top down reforms in place, perhaps that hopelessness itself can spur the individual to take the necessary steps himself. After all, can you really expect help to come from Congress, or McDonald's? Fat chance, as the doctor might say.

I can't recommend this book highly enough, especially to anyone who is obese and wants to understand what has happened to him or her. Knowing about science and politics is all well and good, but knowing about yourself is always the key to any number of mysteries. In Fat Chance, anyone who cares about the obesity pandemic may indeed find that crucial key.

It's Worse Than You Think. Much Worse.

Put that Kool-Aid down. The Heat are not heroes

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(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.

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Fat Land
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.

Fat Land
by Greg Critser

As a survey of all things obesity related, Fat Land is well-thought out, comprehensive in scope, informative, and sympathetic to plight faced by those of us who are carrying more than our share of pounds. Critser does lay blame where it belongs--including all of us in this population who have allowed our attitudes towards diet and exercise to degenerate in such an unhealthy fashion--but he also spells out the case that many obesity sufferers are indeed victims of societal circumstances. In today's U.S.A., it has become almost impossible NOT to be overweight if you have any genetic inclination towards holding onto the pounds.

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.

A Class Issue

I've been saying it for years: Fat is a class issue. Meaning, in the United States in particular, whether or not one is obese has a lot to do with your socioeconomic class. The condition is not entirely determined by your bank account, but your money has a heavy influence on your weight.

Now, at least, someone has agreed with me--or at least expressed that agreement in public. I call to your attention this article, Slim Chances for America's obese by author Gillian Tett, as posted on the Financial Times website. The money quote:

…one key for higher obesity rates in poor areas is that those communities have less access to expensive fresh food, exercise and other health aids. The problem is widespread among children, where the obesity rates have grown at a particularly sharp rate. Conversely, surveys suggest that individuals who are obese tend not just to suffer worse health, but have less-positive job prospects.

A few comments to make here: it's refreshing to see someone acknowledge the plain fact that fresh foods is expensive. So often, when this topic is broached, the discussion includes a scolding tone about how ridiculous it is that the poor don't eat enough of that good, fresh, and presumably cheap produce that the (well-compensated) commentator gets to enjoy on a regular basis. That is just nonsense; fresh produce--especially good fresh produce, which you can't get at the supermarket--is not cheap. Not only does it often cost more per unit (or, more particularly for the subject at hand, per calorie) on the face of it, but fresh foods are, ahem, fresh. That is, they go bad. Every fruit that rots, because the buyer did not have the opportunity to eat it before was lost, is wasted money. And--this may shock you, if you are a pundit--poor people don't have money to waste. A can of Spaghettios may be shit, and not very healthy, but it's shelf stable. You won't lose to decay a penny of what you spend on it.

Also, as Tett notes at the end of the above quote, if you're poor and obese you're likely to stay that way. I know from personal experience, if I go looking for a job, all other things being equal, the potential employer is going to hire the skinny person over me. This may, perhaps, be enacted with an eye towards the bottom line, via health insurance premiums. But just as likely, it's because the person who's doing the hiring simply doesn't like the look of you and your excess adipose tissue. You get trapped in a vicious cycle, one that is almost impossible to break with out a lot of help, or perhaps just some dumb luck.

Notably, many of the comments that follow Tett's piece are dedicated to refuting the position her article lays out. This is not surprising; no group lives more on the bad side of the Real Golden Rule™ ("Blame the object of your hatred for being the object of your hatred.") than the obese. That strategy--denying that the ever-growing problem of obesity in this society is something more than millions of individual personal failings--has grown in tandem with the problem. It's one of the reasons that this issue is not likely to be resolved anytime soon, not just in an election year (as Tett points out in relation to governmental intervention).

But at least now I have one example that confirms that I'm not just a lone voice in the wilderness.

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The Believing Brain
by Michael Shermer

If you've got a party that needs spoiling, Michael Shermer is your guy.

Michael Shermer's
The Believing Brain

This is not to cast Shermer with nefarious motives. I doubt the well-known skeptic and founder of the magazine of that name seeks to ruin anyone's fun with his latest work of analysis, The Believing Brain. The author is simply a man of science, and wishes everyone else could be, too.

But I must admit to feeling twinges of disappointment and sadness while I read Shermer's latest. I remember how much fun I had as a kid, reading books about hokum like the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, sea serpents, and ghosts. That stuff was, as Denzel Washington's Training Day character Alonzo Harris put it, "bullshit...but entertaining bullshit." Much as folks of all ages spice up their dull as dishwater lives with the imagined possibilities of science fiction, so too the more colorful products of pseudo-science help us retain a bit of that childlike wonder, some semblance of a belief that there's more to the world around us than the banality of everyday life.

To be fair, The Believing Brain is not simply a debunking report on those characters of our dreams (and not a few nightmares). Shermer has attacked such targets in previous works, notably the earlier book, Why People Believe Weird Things. This current work serves up a straightforward examination of how the human brain works; it is a discourse on the cognitive processes that lead us believe ideas both common, ordinary and demonstrable (that sound in the bushes might be a dangerous predator, so watch out) and odd, outrageous and unprovable (the aliens have already arrived and are ruling the world from behind the scenes). Shermer makes his strong case that, contrary to intuitive thought, our beliefs come first, then we use our cognitive biases to reinforce those beliefs, until we find ourselves well convinced of our hold on the "truth."

All well and good, for the psych student. But such discourse does not necessarily make compelling reading for the casual observer. Though Shermer is by now a seasoned pro at writing interesting, accessible, and often humorous prose, parts of The Believing Brain can be difficult to connect with. Some readers will find it easy to get lost in the author's descriptions of the various parts of the brain and their various functions in perception and belief building. While Shermer's account of his personal journey from believer to skeptic is instructive and quite readable, his descriptions of "patternicity" and "agenticity" may prove too technical for many to understand. Reading the early sections The Believing Brain gives you the distinct impression that you're slogging through a bunch of details in order to get to "the good stuff" later in the book.

There are, in fact, pieces of "good stuff" in the book's latter pages. Particularly intriguing is the discussion of Galileo's discoveries at the end of the Middle Ages, and how the reliance on authority so prevalent at the time led otherwise intelligent observers not to see the very objects so readily apparent in Galileo's telescope. (The story suggests obvious parallel's to today's conservatives--current society's arch-lovers of authority--and their obstinate disbelief in evolution, climate change, etc.) And Shermer's account of the debates among astrophysicists regarding the nature of the universe--arguments that ultimately led to Hubble's cosmological discoveries--stands as an eloquent exemplar of the value of the scientific method.

So you can learn a lot reading The Believing Brain. Particularly, you will learn a lot about the author himself. How the reader responds to the ideas presented in the book may depend not upon empirical evidence, but upon how you feel about Shermer. It's hard not to view Shermer himself as part of this equation; the book is littered with the author's imprimatur regarding his subject matter. Many terms of the discourse are categorized as "what I call..." terms; i.e., "we practice what I call 'agenticity'." One suspects that many of the terms so labeled in the book are not necessarily of Shermer's own coinage. Plus, numerous concepts in the text are fleshed out through examples from the author's own experience--particularly when it allows Shermer to recall one of his television appearances, or the marathon bike race he founded and participated in, or to educate his audience about his preference for libertarianism. In fact, a reader could readily draw the conclusion that the one thing Michael Shermer truly believes in is Michael Shermer. That perspective must necessarily color the reader's judgment of the arguments presented in The Believing Brain. Is that shading enough to invalidate the concepts presented in the text? Not in this reader's view; Shermer's arguments retain their validity, based on their own strength. But it's easy to see others having their judgment thrown by the author's somewhat obtrusive personality.

Overall, The Believing Brain succeeds on its own terms. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the strength of the scholarship and reasoned argument it presents is not easily refuted. If we all read this book, and were moved to question our own deeply held beliefs--even for a few moments--that would probably be a good thing.

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Pity the Billionaire

Pity the Billionaire
by Thomas Frank

What's the matter with Thomas Frank? Nothing, in particular.

Frank, the author of multiple explorations of America's right-wing madness--including the now classic What's the Matter with Kansas?--has not sunk into a literary morass in any legitimate sense. His latest work, Pity the Billionaire, shares much in common with the author's published antecedents, particularly Kansas and The Wrecking Crew. Frank brings his usual keen insight into conservative minds and motives, and presents his thesis with impeccable logic and exhaustive research and citation. (Pity might be better reserved for Frank himself, who, judging by the extensive notes backing up this slim volume, must spend more time watching, reading, and immersing himself in right-wing media and live events than anyone ever could and still hope to remain truly sane.) And the author's greatest strength--Frank is one of the best wordsmiths in the field of political discourse--remains intact; when Frank describes Sarah Palin as the "[right wing] movement's snarling sweetheart," it is just one more example of his skill at delivering a wholly apt yet economical mot juste.

Yet, for all that, Pity the Billionaire never reaches the same heights of literary brilliance as Frank's earlier works. While the book delivers plenty of solid reporting, along with several chuckle-worthy turns of phrase, Billionaire never lifts the reader up to the seriocomic heights they way Kansas did. The latter book, with sublimely titled chapters like "Russia Iran Disco Suck," and its ludicrous exposé on the various anti-Popes who call the Sunflower State their home, meets no equal in Pity the Billionaire. Though it covers much of the same warm and fertile ground, Billionaire reaps a somewhat uninspiring harvest.

Why is this? One might first suppose that the latest work is simply an inferior effort, but that interpretation doesn't feel satisfactory. Upon further reflection, the problem may lie--ominously--with the passage of time. Here is Thomas Frank, pricking much the same balloon as he was nearly a decade ago...and yet, for all of its absurdity and wrongheadedness, that balloon never seems to deflate. Indeed, as the central thesis of Pity the Billionaire points out, the balloon keeps re-inflating itself, actually growing larger than before, no matter how forceful are the efforts of men like Frank to put it out of its (and our) misery.

The overall effect, then, is one of recognition and at least mild depression: recognition that this thing keeps happening to us, and a sense of depression when we recognize that we can't seem to escape it--that we should expect the same thing to keep happening to us, and keep doing the same damage over and over again. Knowing that Glenn Beck is an asshole does nothing to keep Beck, and others like him, from soiling our political landscape and leading legions of the misinformed down socially destructive paths. Frank can point out the folly, pick it apart for all to see, and we can absorb the knowledge he presents us--but we're still bound to have to live with half the population playing suckers and fools, to the detriment of(almost) all of us.

As Frank makes perfectly clear, there's no reason to pity the billionaires. Those .01%ers are doing just fine, as always. It's the rest of us who could use the pity. We can hope that Thomas Frank and his ilk keep trying to talk some sense into our nation; but it's becoming more and more clear that we can't rely on the lesson ever taking hold.

My Life

Just read an extremely interesting article on AlterNet, Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism Is Deemed a Mental Health Problem. It reads like a summary of my own life. In a minor sense, that is--I know I'm no Einstein, but I've definitely always had an issue with authority. The money quote:

Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized, but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death. 

I wouldn't say I have severe anxiety or depression. But financially and socially marginized? Check. Fear of "existential death." Check.

I've said many times over the years, my take on psychological prescription drugs amounts to, "Here, you become a drug addict so the rest of us can stand to have you around." I first had that thought about 20 years ago, and I've seen nothing to change my mind on the subject since. And it is encouraging to see written words that, in some small way at least, back me up. Be careful whom you call crazy...or even a problem.

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Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely

So it turns out that the invisible hand of the marketplace is palsied, weak, and apparently attached to a kleptomaniac.

That is the inevitable conclusion one must draw from Predictably Irrational, Professor Dan Ariely's light treatise on how we among the consuming public act as purchasers, choosers, and in some cases outright liars. In a light and breezy tone that makes for easy reading, Ariely serves up a succession of arguments about the nature of human beings as economic animals--backed up by examples from his own research experiments--all of which point to the same idea: that we do not always make the correct, rational choices in life circumstances both large and small. Instead, we carry with us biases that frequently thwart our best efforts to make the right choice, in situations as trivial as buying a piece of candy to those as momentous as deciding what house to buy or what career to follow.

Through his work and experiments, Ariely demonstrates that not only are we irrational choice-makers, but (as the book's title suggests) that we are predictably so--that there is, in fact, little mystery in the frequency with which we make our unwise decisions. All one needs is to know how to read the characteristic elements of any given situation--particularly commercial transactions; i.e., anything involving money--to make a safe bet on which way the typical person will go when making his choices. Such is the author's argument, and Ariely makes the case that, with a little self-awareness and a little more careful examination of the pieces in play, we can train ourselves to make better choices.

Such is the implications of Ariely's argument for our personal outcomes. More intriguing, from a broader perspective, is the implication of his work for the larger political sphere. In short, Ariely's demonstrations of our irrationality as economic actors strongly refutes the current received wisdom, touted so often by the Very Serious Persons, that market forces are always right, that Adam Smith's famed "invisible hand" will correct all economic mistakes and guide the world to better outcomes for all. The pundits' oft-invoked credo, that we must "let the market decide" what's best for our economy and politics, relies on a foundational concept that just isn't true. Ariely himself touches on this idea in his conclusion:

Standard economics assumes that we are rational--that we know all the pertinent information about our decisions, that we can calculate the value of the different options we face, and that we are cognitively unhindered in weighing the ramifications of each potential choice...wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics and move away from naive psychology, which often fails the tests of reason, introspection, and--most important--empirical scrutiny? Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?

Those questions ring loudly in the ears of anyone who has witnessed the conservative free-market mania that has enveloped much of the world in the last thirty years. We are living amid the debris scattered about by what has been, at best, an unswerving faith in the rational decision making of actors in free markets. (At worst, it's been little more than a cynical swindle, but that's another story.) Ariely's experiments--particularly those focused on the common human impulse to cheat for personal profit--put the lie to that misplaced faith. We can only hope that some policymakers pick up Predictably Irrational and learn not to listen the next time some think tank pundit tells them to let the market decide what's best for the country.

For our own part, we as individuals can read Ariely's book and try to make ourselves more aware of the biases we bring to the table in all walks of life, Maybe, if we keep Predictably Irrational in mind, we can all make better choices and come out ahead for ourselves, if not our society and our world.

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The Big Squeeze
Visit author's website

The Big Squeeze
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.