A Little Sports, A Little Politics, A Little Of This And That
As for Fresno State winning the College World Series goes, never bet against Cinderella. Go Bulldogs!
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Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous: after ESPN aired Fresno State's wonderful win Tuesday, it showed an NBA Draft Preview. The commentators were blatant in their disregard of what was best for the players themselves while discussing the NBA rule requiring players to be a full year out of high school before becoming NBA draft-eligible. It gives the NBA an extra year to evaluate the playere' abilities, and the NBA doesn't have to pay those players while waiting that extra year. It's also better because with the rare exception of players like LeBron James, these players don't leave high school "NBA ready."
The commentators didn't say it would be better for the players to get a year of college education for its own sake, just in case they sometime get so injured that they can no longer make a career in the NBA; they didn't say it would be better for the players to have an additional year to get beyond being teenagers and learn how to live and behave in the world as adults; they didn't say that it would be better for their still-growing bodies just to get another year in before having to collide repeatedly and often with full-grown NBA players. I will concede that the "they're not yet NBA ready" comment implies these things--but the vast majority of the discussion focused on how much better the rule was for the NBA and its finances. The interests of the players themselves were secondary, a mere throw-away.
Is it just me, or is the naked gall of "Capitalism" getting ever more brazen? Don't we as a society WANT to value character and attitude and behavior ahead of money?
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Lately, most of the political discussion of energy policy has focused on the need to end our "dependence on foreign oil." What's wrong with this picture? How 'bout if we work to end our dependence on OIL, period? It's a finite resource. It's going to run out. Even if we drill everywhere and ruin ANWR among other places, even if drilling technology continues to improve, the OIL itself is going to run out. Based on the then-existing technology, we originally thought we were going to run out by the end of the 1970s. But our will to invest in alternate energy sources faded almost instantly once the 70s OPEC embargo ended.
So here we have another example of America's collective historical short-sightedness. And the chutzpah of John McCain to admit that most of his energy policy proposals are themselves gimmicks! Puh-leeze! Then again, as P.T. Barnum said, "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." One of my cousins has maternal relatives who, in line with their fundamentalist beliefs, sincerely believe that since the Earth is only 6,000 years old, there's no such thing as fossil fuels, and that the oil is provided by God and will never run out . . . QED.
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Why have the pictures about Big Brown's loose shoe on his right rear hoof just now come to light? More importantly, if the loose shoe explains his poor performance at the Belmont Stakes, why didn't the trainer and the medical staff and the owners notice it when they examined the horse after the race? No one on any of the sports reports about it that I've seen, heard, or read has even asked the latter question, let alone tried to answer it. Nor has anyone ever addressed the issue of the abnormally high air temperatures as they may directly have hurt Big Brown's bid to win the Triple Crown.
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I am no fan of Adam "Pacman" Jones, but Don Imus's remarks Monday and Tuesday were inexcusable and unbelievable. On Monday, after Imus's sports reporter recounted the litany of Jones's problems with the law, all Imus wanted to know was "What color is he?" When told Jones was African-American, Imus said, "Well, there you go. Now we know."
On Tuesday, Imus said he was but making a sarcastic point about how the law unfairly picks on black people. I might be willing to cut Imus some slack--a neutral reading of his words, without hearing the tone and tenor and context of his Monday conversation, can be stretched to cover Imus's claims as to what he meant by what he said. Two reasons make it totally impossible to let Imus off the hook, however: (1) he's already screwed up badly (remember the Rutgers women's basketball team remarks?); (2) on Monday, just before he put his foot in it, Imus was talking about how people who go to nightclubs where there are drugs and booze and women and guns should not be surprised when bad things happen and the law shows up to arrest people. Thus the context of his remarks Monday becomes "how stupid ARE these people?"
As he said on Tuesday, Imus admitted he's have to be an idiot to say what people [myself included--Ed.] are claiming he said. Right. He's an idiot. His racism is so ingrained that he can't even see it, even after all the trouble he's already made for himself in the past. As Tom Johnson said on NFL Live, "I heard what you said and I heard the way you said it."
Too bad Imus's employer, WABC-NY, doesn't get it, either. No disciplinary actions are planned against Imus's most recent racially-insensitive outrage. How sad that no one seems to care enough to get really worked up about it, either.
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A high school senior in Rancho Santa Margarita, California, hacked into the school's computer system and changed his grades from Ds and Fs to As and Bs. He apparently did the same for a few friends. He also stole exams and answers. He was caught, and the family and his lawyer are up in arms about how "his life should not be ruined because of this." Though his hacking gave him the same consideration from college recruiters as students who actually earned their grades--effectively degrading the efforts of those who earned theirs--even those classmates think the charges are "a little harsh." Multiple incidents of theft, fraud, breaking and entering, and the charges are "a little harsh"?
I think I'm going to puke. When did such blatant cheating become "no big deal"? This is no Ferris Bueller prank. This is repeated serious criminal behavior. Yet the student responsible should not have his life ruined? Not to make him face the consequences of his actions is to reward his criminal behavior. If we do that,will it be any wonder when our entire country goes down the toilet? This is beyond sad. This is tragic.
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How do the people who claim that speculators (by using the so-called "Enron loophole") are NOT driving the price of gas through the roof explain away that this is exactly what happened to the electric energy markets in California when people there were getting hit with $600/month electric bills just before Enron collapsed? Record windfall profits, record high prices, consumers getting squeezed dry, the energy producers trading energy futures instead of producing energy, and the only thing these same consumers want is to open ANWR to drilling?
What astonishes me the most about this is that even a cursory study of American history reveals innumerable episodes of deregulation producing excessively greedy profit-taking, greatly hurting ordinary people, eventually prompting re-regulation, and when markets settle down a bit, the push for deregulation starts all over again. The affected industry may change, but the pattern is a constant cycle in American history.
I say again: greed is not a positive fundamental social value on which to base a civilized society. It pits people against each other instead of allowing us to find ways to work together for the ultimate benefit of all of us. Ah, well. Wiser heads than mine have already realized that not to know one's history is to be doomed to repeat it.
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