Assigning the Milgram
It’s time to re-examine the Milgram Experiment. You may not be familiar with it by name, but perhaps a description of the psychological study will sound familiar. Yale researcher Stanley Milgram, in 1961 and 1962, set up a controlled situation in which he ordered his subjects to administer electrical shocks to a third-party. (
Specific details here.) The study was designed to examine, first and foremost, the willingness of humans to submit, or conform, to authority. The results were highly-interesting, and have been highly-debatable.
Personally, I find the experiment to be certainly ethical, despite some public controversy then and now about the psychological effects on some of the subjects, and the result I find most enlightening is the lesser-known one in respect to numerous original participants contacting the psychologist years later and actually thanking him for opening up their eyes to their own human weakness.
In respect to modern-day America, or to any similar nation-state currently teetering on totalitarianism, the study is worth a long look. The experiment is often linked to the study of Nazi-ism in Germany and the shocking-to-most willingness of so many German citizens to “go along” with the climate of the times. With that in mind, certainly the Obama-bots in the Democratic Party need to be corralled into a Yale classroom and confronted directly with the wide and deep cleavage between their idealism and the reality of their political life.
One of the potential flaws in the Milgram Experiment is that the study took place within the halls of a prestigious university and therefore participants theoretically could be assured that no actual harm was actually coming to the person they were supposedly “shocking,” but I see a parallel between that element of the exam and the obvious, alarming tendency of “professional liberals” in particular, a half-century later, to “diffuse responsibility” on matters of war and torture, obsequiously bowing to the president and then digging feverishly into their psyches to find justification for betraying their morality.
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Retiring Iowa senator Tom Harkin
told his chamber Friday that the budget standoff forced by Ted Cruz and his Tea Party compatriots has left us “at one of the most dangerous points in our history... every bit as dangerous as the break-up of the union before the Civil War.”
Hyperbole much? Cruz is a clown, but contrary to Beltway conventional wisdom, this country is not divided. Washington is. If Cruz’s side in Washington drew actual swords against Harkin’s, and/or vice versa, 85 percent of Americans would let the two sides battle to the death without taking even a step towards the melee. When both houses in Washington have a 20 percent approval rating, you’re going to have a hard time whipping up a militia.
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I don’t participate in MVP arguments anymore because they are fundamentally flawed. Look it up and you’ll see that the following is accurate: From 1911 to 1968 (the pre-divisional MVP era), the only time that the National League MVP trophy was
not awarded to the consensus-best player on the pennant-winning team was when somebody on another team did something like hit .400, club 50 home runs, or win the Triple Crown. Translation: You had to accomplish something historic on the field to beat out the top man from the top team.
So until they let me cast my (theoretical) vote at the conclusion of the National League playoffs and upon the crowning of the league champion, I literally cannot tell you who I would vote for according to what I accept as the established definition of the Most Valuable Player.
I
will point out however that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Andrew McCutcheon, a consensus favorite for the award this year, has driven in 83 runs, while the Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter has driven in 78—and Carpenter is a lead-off hitter. And Carpenter has scored 126 runs, 20 more than anybody else in the league (30 more than McCutcheon). He’s out-batting McCutcheon .321 to .317, he leads the league with 55 doubles and 199 hits, and the Cardinals beat out Pittsburgh for the division with Carpenter batting .374 in September. So come on.
MO-verrated
Mariano Rivera is leaving Major League Baseball after Sunday's meaningless game between the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros, and there's some speculation that the pitcher may, in five years time, become the first baseballer ever to be a unanimous selection for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Now with so many worthy players resigned to unending Hall purgatory, induction at Cooperstown has really lost all cultural currency anyway, but the value of Rivera is a pitcher is still fun to debate, and count
ESPN's Jim Caple among those with at least one foot dragging outside the Mariano Rivera retirement party bus.
Caple's basic argument that Rivera is overrated boils down to this: As a closer, and an almost-exclusively one-inning one at that, Rivera had very little impact on the games in which he pitched. Including the postseason, the hurler participated in 1,423 innings entering tonight. His shortstop teammate, Derek Jeter, in a career that has almost completely overlapped Rivera's, has played in more than 23,400 innings. Certainly, closers play a valuable role because they appear in high-pressure and pivotal innings. Whitey Herzog once said that the day he traded for Bruce Sutter was the day he became a "genius." But did Rivera himself really make such a valuable impact?
For his career he has an 89.1% save rate, almost always appearing in games in which his team already has a lead. Throughout all of Major League Baseball, teams that lead by one run after one inning go on to win 85.7% of the time. When leading by two runs, that number jumps to 93.7%. And you can also earn a "save" by recording the last three outs when your team has a three-run lead, and that league average number is 97.5%. And Rivera earned fewer than one-third of his saves entering in one-run games. Caple argues that Rivera had an 89.1% save rate for a team that would have won 88% of those games on average anyway.
Also, in statistical numbers far above those of ancient mariner (lower-case M) relief specialists like Sutter, Rollie Fingers, and Goose Gossage, Rivera typically pitched only one inning and almost always entered the game with the bases empty. The percentage of inherited runners that he allowed to score is good enough to rank him
142nd on the league's all-time list.
For years, it seemed like the Yankees were dominant because Rivera was dominant. His appearance in the ninth inning supposedly signaled doom for the opposition, and doom for every fan like me rooting hard for "whoever plays the Yankees." But Caple's numbers seem to indicate that a given ballgame's final chapter was typically written before Rivera even completed his warm-up tosses.
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Bud Selig issued a formal written statement today announcing his retirement in January 2015. The ever-suave baseball commissioner chose to make his statement the morning after a Dodgers fan was fatally stabbed in a team rivalry dispute outside the ballpark in San Francisco.
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The NCAA announced this week that they were reducing the sanctions against the Penn State football program that had resulted from the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Five gridiron scholarships are being added back annually beginning next season. Penn State earned the penalty reduction by not having any children raped by members of the coaching staff during the 2012-2013 academic year.
Asia Adventures 2013
Heads up: Katya Moeller has started
a blog to report back home about her trip to China, Singapore, and Thailand. She's my sister so there will probably be a lot of celebrity obituaries.
The ancient origins of Base-Ball
Unbelievable stuff. Baseball’s history is being completely re-written-- that is, more expansively written-- in our lifetime by a man in San Francisco with no formal education as a historian. And when I say “baseball,” I mean “Base-Ball.”
It turns out that the game is not uniquely American at all, as Albert Goodwill Spalding, or even Henry Chadwick, had us believe. The Doubleday Fable is not the only lie. Baseball did not descend from the British game of rounders (an alternative pastural, stick-and-ball pastime that few besides Chadwick in his English youth have ever known) and it dates back to at least 1749, a year in which there is a record of the game being played by Frederick, the Prince of Wales. Frederick’s son would grow to become King George III, the tyrant from whom the American revolutionaries declared their independence in 1776. It was a game for the working class (cricket for people with less time on their hands than have the idle rich) that was suppressed for a time in the new world by Puritan objections to adults playing games. We may even discover yet, as one of the oldest artifacts allows, that the game is German in origin.
The noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a baseball enthusiast who died in 2002, published a book late in his life called “Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville.”
One of the essays within (great Sunday reading) explains the difficulty humans have with stories of origin. Our brains can more easily comprehend a simplified and/or mythical story of birth (one containing a definitive moment of inception and therefore allowing for directed reverence) than they can a more complicated story of time-lapsed evolutionary development.
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A former New England Patriots player living in Stephentown, New York, Brian Holloway, had his house trashed by a group of local high school kids while he and his family were away on Labor Day weekend. Now the parents of some of those young, uninvited party-goers are
looking to sue Holloway for publicly shaming the kids.
And you wanted to live next to rich people.
Top 5 HuffPost Headlines- Day 5
What a week it's been.
5. "Poop Parasite"
4. "'The Night I Roofied Myself'"
3. "WATCH: Seahorse-Shaped UFO Shines Over Belfast"
2. "WATCH: Adorable Kitten Rescued At Border Crossing"
1. "Why We're Going To Hell"
Top 5 HuffPost Headlines- Day 4
I can't remember the last time I posted four days in a row...
5. “His First Visit To The Beach Makes All Other Dog Photos Out There Irrelevant”
4. "Where To Find The Most Well-Endowed Men"
3. "Abused Pit Bull Adopted By Family Affected By Colorado Floods"
2. "PHOTO: This Ramen Pizza Will Blow Your Mind"
1. "Royal With Puppies!"
Top 5 HuffPost Headlines- Day 3
Day 3...
5. "400 Mason Jar Ideas"
4. "Photos Of Panda Baby's First Checkup Are Cheering Us Up"
3. "More Oatmeal, More Sex?"
2. "Here's How Museum Pickpockets Blend In"
1. "Here's What It Looks Like When You Don't Wash Off Your Makeup For A Month"
Top 5 HuffPost Headlines- Day 2
Today's Top 5
5. "MADONNA OWNS A PENIS BONG"
4. "4 Pieces of Sex Advice From a 98-Year-Old"
3. "Madonna Wants To Turn WHO Straight?"
2. "Can We Train Dogs to Bother Robots Instead of People?" (This one's actually from Slate, but it deserves to be on a list of headlines.)
1. "An Elephant And A Dog Are BFFs. We Wouldn't Want It Any Other Way."
Top 5 HuffPost Headlines- Day 1
We're trying something out here just for this week. It's a feature called "The Top 5 Headlines on Huffington Post Today." These are self-explanatory except where they are not.
5. "Rugby Penis Biter's Season Cut Short"
4. "Did That Dog Just Do a Pullup"
3. "IT'S OVER" (This one in all caps was accompanied by a photo of Kim Kardashian. Of course, you're supposed to think she broke up with Kanye West, but it was actually a split from her publisher. Like an idiot I clicked on it.)
2. "Going Down The Stairs Isn't Easy When You're a Tiny Puppy"
1. "8 Things Your Belly Button Says About You"
Rooting against Rocky
This is
a critically-important meditation on the United States and its profoundly-immoral military and surveillance state.
"Our latest overseas adventures would not be possible were it not for the manipulation of the home-front climate. We watched the Egyptian army depose an elected president, we read accounts of Washington’s role in it, and Secretary of State Kerry told us they were “restoring democracy.” On Thursday the Egyptian army’s puppet president extended the reigning state of emergency by two months. Please speak into the microphone, Mr. Kerry.
"The Syrian chapter is yet to conclude. I suggested in this space last week we might think of the Cuban missile crisis. In the scheme of things, Obama would now be the Khrushchev figure and Vladimir Putin the Kennedy cutout. It is the son of perverse, I know, but for the moment it is hard to arrange the chess pieces otherwise."
How does a guy learn to think and write as expertly as Patrick L. Smith?
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United States Senator John McCain is making Vladimir Putin look more reasonable by the day. He’s behaving increasingly like a man who could benefit both intellectually and emotionally from a protracted return to solitary confinement.
McCain has been virtually wrong on everything this year. He's claimed that the NSA spying program operates under court supervision even though Edward Snowden-leaked materials reveal that it often doesn't, and even that unexamined intelligence records regarding U.S. citizens are shared with Israel, a country that a 2013 top-secret intelligence community budget request identified, along with China and Iran, as a target for U.S. cyberattacks.
He's promised that we will "soon" see evidence that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons, but the political showdown over using U.S. military force against him came and went without any evidence being revealed. When he's not playing video poker in the Senate chambers during the first meaningful war debate in that house in a decade, he's traveling to Syria to meet with rebel groups increasingly dominated by jihadists and by al-Qaeda, and voting to arm and train them. And of course, McCain still views our nation's excursion into Iraq as a success so there's that on his resume.
Now consider that this is the brand of politician (and I use the word “brand” very purposefully) that gets treated with the utmost respect—and even deference—by virtually every corporate media outlet in the country. He appears on Sunday morning television more often than Kenneth Copeland.
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A puzzle: Kerry Rhodes has been a standout NFL defensive (strong) safety for nine years. He was voted the 4th best player at his position just last year by a website called profootballfocus.com. He is currently without a job in the NFL although he has not retired. Oh, and there's this entirely unrelated note: Rhodes was photographed during the offseason kissing an out gay man on the top of the head while on the boat.
Now, also unrelated, these are the teams that gave up 299 or more passing yards during Week 1 of the NFL season…
Baltimore (445)
Dallas (428)
Green Bay (404)
Minnesota (357)
Atlanta (341)
Denver (335)
San Diego (329)
San Francisco (322)
Philadelphia (308)
St. Louis (304)
Carolina (300)
Arizona (299)
Additionally, Tampa, Miami, Indianapolis, and Seattle all entertained tryouts at the defensive back position last week but none of those teams tried out Rhodes.
The whole thing is entirely dubious. There is some outrage needed here, but for me, it is unfocused. What could possibly explain all of this when the facts are so unrelated? Perhaps they aren’t unrelated at all. I’ll bet Rhodes is being blackballed because he’s African-American. Yes, that's it. Also still out of work is NBA veteran Jason Collins, who came out of the closet as gay publicly this summer, and who is likewise not retired, but is, yes, African-American. And also out of work is NFL punter Chris Klewe, who is neither African-American nor gay, but was outspoken last season about gay rights. He must be secretly African-American.
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An arresting name for a fantasy sports team-- or a reality sports team for that matter-- would be the Pangaea Colliders. Pangaea, of course, is the supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic periods of 200 to 300 million years ago, and the name “Colliders” would pay tribute to the shifting tectonic plates of our planet that divided this supercontinent into the scattered, smaller continents we enjoy today. This hypothetical team could claim virtually the whole of Earth as a home television market. If their games didn’t sell out, they’d have to black out the entire planet.
Occupy the mayor's office!
You won’t be reading about it because the political movement still threatens the establishment class, but Occupy Wall Street just scored a major victory in the New York mayoral race. City voters put the hammer down on Mayor One Percent in the Democratic Party primary in favor of a candidate that promised a special tax on the wealthy to pay for education in the country’s most economically-stratified city.
The outgoing Mayor Bloomberg, Ray Kelly’s hustler, cried out in agony: “class warfare,” and hilariously even “racism.” And that's how it's going to go. The collapse of the House of Wall Street will get ugly.
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If Bashar al-Assad is guilty of using chemical weapons against his own people, Tuesday night’s national address was President Obama’s opportunity to share the evidence that John Kerry claims exists.
And nada...
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Whether George Zimmerman behaves positively or negatively now is beside the point. The issue was always the Sanford, Florida Police Department. Guilty or innocent, there needed to actually be a trial. The racism at work was that it was necessary for the Justice Department to intervene to bring charges.
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Not only is your government invading your privacy, but
Israel's is too. Happy September 11th, everyone!
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I was trying to save money on my wedding. Instead of buying my wife a ring, I bought her a ringtone.
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Quote of the day: Mark Twain, "People do not read me to hear the truth so that is what I give them."
Syrias debate
Isn’t it heartwarming to see John McCain, the former POW, and John Kerry, the former anti-war protester, united in their drive to pound the shit out of Syria? Henry Kissinger must be busting his buttons.
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There should be little honest doubt remaining across the land that the presidency of Barack Obama is a giant slap at the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a cynical, calculated perversion of King’s message of non-violence, civil disobedience, economic justice, socialism, and citizen self-governance. And still, the visual juxtaposition last week of the 50th anniversary of the Freedom March with the ramping of war on Syria was still harsh enough to be utterly blinding. If there was ever a measurable anti-war movement in this country, it died with King. The Democrats’ push for war again is appalling. Salon’s
David Sirota accurately calls the political maneuvering in Washington “red-versus-blue tribalism in its most murderous form.”
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Interesting stat from a research group called Civic Economics out of San Francisco: For every $100 spent at a local business, $45 will wind up staying in that community. With chain stores, only $13 stays in the local economy.
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If,
as Slate.com argues, quarterback Robert Griffin III is a transformative athlete, “ushering (his) sport into a new era athletically, aesthetically, and culturally,” one major thing is going to have to change beyond the generally brittle quality of his right knee—and that is the name of his team. How will the historical footage of Griffin’s game play years from now, long after the “Redskins” moniker has been resigned to the ashbin of time? It won’t play at all is how. Not to a corporate media and its corporate sponsors. Highlights of Griffin’s gridiron escapades will be bound in storage tighter than the celluloid prints of the Disney film “Song of the South.” It is astonishing that Washington owner Dan Snyder fails to see this.
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On a Deadspin article this week called
“Why Your Team Sucks—Washington Redskins,” the last in a series of preseason NFL team reports, club owner Dan Snyder is chided by both author and commenters. Along comes "Doug," who leaves this brilliant comment:
"Remember that one kid in school who was popular only because he had money and nobody ACTUALLY enjoyed spending more than 30 seconds in his presence? And everyone was just about to wash their hands of him completely but then his folks got him a Camaro for his 16th birthday? And then everyone wanted to hang out with him again, right up until the point where he wrapped the Camaro around a telephone pole, at which point everyone felt justified in just writing him off as a complete dipshit for good?
"The Redskins are that kid and Robert Griffin III is our Camaro."
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This is the highly-recommended web series
"Ask a Slave," in which the actress answers questions actually posed to her when she worked at Mount Vernon as a re-enactor.
Didn't George Washington free all of his slaves?
FYI
I'm getting married later today. Some day I'll tell you about it.
