Notre Dame’s Football woes…are President Obama’s fault!

I kid you not; I’ve been reading the responses at some football articles and there are fans who are blaming Notre Dame’s poor play on President Obama!

Really:

(post 150)After the ARROGANCE of Fr.Jenkins in awarding an Honorary Degree to the “Messiah”…despite loud, angry protests from the Alumni….let them sink…lower and lower and lower!
Jack from PA [...]

(post 126) Typically a huge Notre Dame fan because they are such a unique and awesome institution. Since abortion loving Obama came to campus I could not care if they lose every game here on out. Stick to your roots Notre Dame!!!!!!!!!!!

(post 118)
Well as least ND gave Obama an honorary degree.
You really want to know what ND football problem is; lack of character, lack of identity. Even the University of Miami has an indentity; partying and getting laid. When one of the worlds most well known Catholic Universities honors a champion of abortion “rights”, they have betrayed the basic precepts on which they were founded. ND is an empty shell encrusted with rotting, empty tradition. Knute Rockne comming back from the grave couldn’t help this team win. Sad.

(post 11)
and that boys and girls is what happens when you let Obama speak at a Cathoilc university!

Gotta love it,,,,

21 November 2009 (mid-day)

Workout notes I was a lazy dog and slept in until after 7 am; I made it to McNaughton Park by 9:20 and did a slow loop (3:15) in hiking boots (10 miles; hilly and muddy). Most of the trail was average; the foundation loop was muddier than average due to the recent rains.

Posts

Football

I am watching college football; I saw the end of the Michigan-Ohio State game (which OSU won 21-10).
Yes, OSU wore throw back uniforms.

(photo from yahoo)

Yes, Ohio State wore “throwback” uniforms. Note: Tressel (Ohio State’s coach) has a higher winning percentage than Woody Hayes. I say that because an Ohio State fan said something about Coach Tressel being under fire (ridiculous).

Right now, Connecticut and Notre Dame are tied 17-17; ND raced out to a 14-0 lead; Connecticut scored the next 10 points to make it 14-10 at the half.

The second half saw the Irish drive and kick a field goal; the Huskies ran back the kickoff for a touchdown to tie the game.

Speaking of uniforms, this site keeps track of the Oregon football uniforms.

Personally I like this set the best:

and this set the least

Update on Connecticut versus Notre Dame

Notre Dame dodged a bullet. ND went up 20-17 (helped by an ND interception in their own end zone) and Connecticut drove the ball. They ran well; but had two TDs called back due to holding penalties. One was questionable. So they kicked a field goal to tie it at 20-20 with 1 minute to go.

On ND’s next possession, they fumbled a pass completion and the Huskies recovered at the 41; they drove but missed a 3X yard field goal with no time remaining.

So it went to over time; the Huskies scored a touchdown on a pass and are up 27-20; now it is ND’s possession.

I don’t know how it will end up, but by all rights, Connecticut should have had this game won by now. Though ND has a total yard advantage (due to the kick off return), they have ran for over 200 yards.

Still, ND now has the ball at the 4 yard line with first and goal. ND tied it up…well, after the point. They are reviewing the play, but the receiver had both feet in (and you only need one). The point is good.

Well, the game is not boring; Notre Dame games seldom are.

Second overtime: ND ended up making a field goal; now they are up 30-27 but they haven’t stopped UConn’s running yet. But they opened with a pass? No problem; they gained 8 yards on a run on second down and appear to have it at the 15; yep; first down. They have run so well all game long.

If the Huskies win, I’ll give their offensive line the player of the game.

Another big run; 11 yard right up the middle; huge hole and strong running by Dixon.

Ok, they ran it in…touchdown Huskies; they win 33-30. Yes, they deserve it.

It was a great game for the fan; this is the kind of hitting that went on.

Hunting Season is Here!

Every hunting season:

1. I am leery of the trails that I use.

2. I think of this cartoon:

20 November 2009: sports on my mind

Track and Field: is a competitor male or female? It isn’t always clear.

Football
This came out a while ago. Texas Tech lost to Texas A&M by a score of 52-30; this is the same Aggie team that got scorched 62-14 by Kansas State, 65-10 by Oklahoma and 47-19 by Arkansas. So how did the Texas Tech coach handle it?

That’s right: it was “the fat little girlfriends”. Yes, he used that term repeatedly.

Speaking of coaches: Coach Mangino is under fire for “being abusive”. Frankly, I wonder if this has more to do with his losing 5 games in a row than anything else; sure he said stuff that was over the line but I wonder how seriously the Kansas administration would have taken complaints from millennials and their helicopter parents had Mangino been, say, 8-2 in this season.

College Revenue Sports

One wonders: is there academic cheating going on? There are some disturbing reports out there.

Other faculty responded in a variety of ways. But, according to the moderators, some division I athletes sent in responses such as this one:

Here’s the problem. Most college faculty are a bunch of flaming faggots who never played team sports, don’t understand what teamwork even is, and have such an unfair hatred of anything physical that student athletes get prejudiced against all of the time. I know because I’m a Division 1 athlete and I’ve seen it first hand. Luckily our coaches provide us with tutors who do most of our work and I don’t feel guilty about it. I’m WORKING for the university, bringing in much TV ducats, and if my queer little history professor doesn’t like it, then he can take his $80,000 salary and stick it. Tell him I’ll see him on TV next year. Fucker.

(emphasis mine)

Let’s help educate the moron who sent this in:

1. The revenue sports do bring in money…for the athletic departments. They do NOT bring in money for the school:

Athletics-generated revenue aren’t keeping pace with costs. Only about 40 schools claim their athletic departments are self-sufficient. To compensate for deficits, most athletic departments are increasingly relying on money from their schools — money that otherwise could be used for academics or other enterprises. Student bodies also are helping pay the tab, sometimes without knowing it. About 60% of all Division I schools rely on student fees to help the athletic department. These fees generally range from $50 to $1,000 a year for full-time students. In return, students get free admission to games.

2. Few division I athletes end up making a living at their sport: about 1 percent though 21 percent plan to.

3. Even if a few make the pros and a few of these make big money, they don’t always end up with all of that money. Sometimes they end up broke:

n 12 years, Antoine Walker(notes) made more than $110 million playing professional basketball moderately well. Take away taxes, throw in some adidas endorsement money and a “NBA Live 99″ cover, and he’s left with, what, $60-to-65 million?

Whatever the details, it was a big chunk of change, which, amazingly, wasn’t enough.

That’s right, during the last several months, the once multi-millionaire athlete has been pursued by multiple financial institutions for unpaid debts.

In fact, according to Shira Springer of The Boston Globe, “Employee No. 8″ owes more than $4 million to his creditors and is facing felony check fraud charges in Las Vegas. All of this at the age of 33.

Of course, I doubt that the writer of the response that I quoted knows any of this. He certainly show no sign of being capable of understanding any of this.

My experience At the University of Texas, I had athletes in my classes when I was a TA. These, by and large, earned their own grades under their own steam; I grew to like several of them. At my current university, many get their degrees, again, under their own steam, even though a few are now playing professionally.

So my experience with the athletes has been good, but that is me.

Racism in the News; 20 November 2009.

Kennett, Missouri:

The situation is that back in 2007, a young woman was accused of cutting in line at a Wal Mart. Tempers flared and the police were called. Now this woman is going to trial and being accused of various crimes ranging from assaulting a police officer and disturbing the peace:

Then things got worse: the KKK put out some cards and a police officer gave one of the cards to someone who was planning on marching in protest; the officer claims that he was informing them of the cards being left out there. That sounds a bit suspicious to me; for example when neo-nazis put out flyers about me, the police were very clear in their disapproval of the flyers. I don’t see how this could be a “misunderstanding”:

(From Nikki’s Nest)

My take: of course, I don’t know what happened. But even if this woman is an unpleasant jerk who cut in line, this had no business escalating to an arrest and all of this expense.

Bottom line: it isn’t like in the movies; often the victims of racial injustice ARE unsympathetic people. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t treated unjustly; check out what was said about 4:50 into the first video.

Speaking of racism and a display of a lack of class: check out the public billboards that are listed here.

Sarah Palin: the gift that continues to keep on giving!

Awww…some Sarah Palin fans are disappointed….

more about "Sarah Palin: the gift that continues…", posted with vodpod

This is so perfect for two reasons:

1. It shows how stupid and out of touch her supporters are and
2. It shows exactly what Sarah Palin thinks: she is about herself first and foremost.

(from here)

For more on her supporters, see this:

By the way, I’ve talked about the coverage of the Newsweek article on Sarah Palin. Here is a blog post about this issue:

Palin posed for this picture as part of a photo essay captioned Governor Palin, The Runner, which ran in the August issue of Runner’s World. When I saw this image in its original context, I was appalled that a sitting governor would pose for a shot like this; or this stretching shot that puts the visual center of gravity squarely on her crotch.

Maybe Palin didn’t realize that the photographer, Brian Adams, was depicting her this way. If so, he totally fucked her over. But I think she was on board with the concept. If Palin had assailed Runner’s World for making fun of her, I might now take her complaint about Newsweek seriously. She liked the Runner’s World spread, though. She thought it was appropriate. [...]

There’s nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she’s clutching one icon of political power–the Blackberry–and leaning on another. The theme isn’t Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy lady bug, sexy sanitation worker…)

Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek’s use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this?

The bottom line is that Palin’s a clown. She doesn’t get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.

On a related note: Air America has an article about how to talk to this type of Republican:

While you can’t avoid speaking to anyone still willing to identify themselves as a Conservative altogether–whether at the Thanksgiving table or in the wider world–there are some precautions we can take to make it a more pleasurable experience. Here are some basic guidelines:

[...]
2) Avoid facts, as they will play absolutely no role in the discussion and may cause your interlocutor to charge, gore (physically), etc. Examples: The mortgage meltdown is Jimmy Carter’s fault. 9-11 was a Bill Clinton special. Do not engage.
[...]

7) Never engage in a debate or political discussion on Facebook unless it is on your own page. Chances are your sparring partner has many friends willing to come to his defense, and you will be virtually overcome.

Be sure to know your topic well. It is dangerous to wade into territory that the other side typically has a better grasp on, such as religion, military prowess, and Larry the Cable Guy.

9) Enjoy yourself, and always be as kind as possible. Just because you disagree on politics doesn’t mean that you can’t find other areas of mutual interest. Puppies are usually a safe bet.

10) Stay home.

Generally, I just say something like: “I am not interested in discussing this with you” and leave it at that.

20 November 09

Workout notes 1 mile on the AMT, 3 miles on the Stairmaster. Then 2200 yards of swimming; 5 x 100 on 2 warm up, 5 x (25 front kick, 75 free) on 2:05, 5 x (25 3g, 75 free) on 2:00, 500 of fin work, 2 x 100 paddle.

My swim was so-so, but I got it in.

Healthcare: it is looking promising (but not sure) that the Senate Democrats might actually get a cloture vote.

Economy: Stock prices have gone up, but jobs are still going away. What is going on? Here is Robert Reich:

How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.

In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.

Note to free-market fundamentalists: the free market doesn’t always lead to the best results; all too often people seek short sighted goals.

Still, surf to this Nate Silver article to see how the economy still drives the President’s approval ratings.

Education: do want to hear the kind of garbage that education departments put out? Read and enjoy.

Humor: check it out: the suspicious people were “not suspicious but merely Canadian.”

see more Epic Fails

Fun with Fundies

Sure, I am here for a reason: my parents had sex.

19 November 2009 (am)

Workout notes No swim today; I did 6 miles though: 2 on the AMT, 3 on an elliptical trainer and 1 on stairmaster.

I didn’t sleep well last night.

Football
Coach Mangino of Kansas is catching some heat for the way he treats his players. Sure, no one who played under old school coaches would be surprised by this:

Sure, Coach Mangino’s larger point that this young man did NOT score the touchdown all on his own is well taken; football is a team game and individuals have no right to penalize the whole team by their own individual hot-dogging.

But, unfortunately, the young man probably only heard the f-bombs.

Anyway, that Coach Mangino has a temper is well known. Here is what is different about this article:

Tuesday’s great Kansas mystery is solved, so to speak: The Lawrence Journal-World confirms today that the players only meeting with athletic director Lew Perkins to discuss “concerns” about coach Mark Mangino originated with a complaint by senior linebacker Arist Wright, who said Mangino “poked him the chest” before the Jayhawks’ surprising loss to Colorado last month, the first in an ongoing, five-game conference slide after a 5-0 start. Other reports elaborate that Mangino also grabbed and yelled at Wright in addition to poking him for laughing during a walk-through or practice, but the specifics seem less damning implication that Mangino’s work with players is consistently, well, not safe for work once his facial-hue threat level reaches “Eggplant”:[....]

But just as only Nixon could go to China, only Kansas City Star columnist and noted heavyweight Jason Whitlock could possibly bring the issue back to Mangino’s weight:

I can relate to Mangino’s struggle. He’s three or four inches shorter than me, and he weighs anywhere from 450 to 500 pounds. He’s a public figure in a demanding, high-stress job.

The weight and the stress form a perfect recipe for depression. They can put your mind in a very negative place. They can make you moody and volatile.

My take on things is a bit different: I ate myself to 320 pounds in part because I didn’t manage my anger well. I’ve been slender for about 14 years now, but I still struggle with anger; when it flares up it can get white hot. I really understand how someone can “go postal”, though I wouldn’t dare.

I guess my point is that I think that Mr. Whitlock gets it wrong: Mangino’s weight doesn’t cause the anger but rather might be a product of it.

Ok, no more psychobabble for today.

Humor Fox News says that the big game this weekend is between Michigan STATE and Ohio State.

18 November 09 night quickies

Sarah Palin: A diary at Daily Kos sees her as your typical moronic wingnut sees her:

Each time I read a diary or a comment that wonders out loud how someone as “stupid” as Sarah Palin could be appealing to anyone, I shake my head in disbelief.

In 2004, this website was clogged up with comments and diaries about another politician most people believed to be “too stupid,” to succeed. “How can anyone be a supporter of someone so stupid? Someone who sounds so dumb and has done so many stupid things?”

Then, after that “stupid” guy was re-elected, the Democratic Party went into an identity crisis tail spin.

Have we forgotten all this? Apparently we have.

Still don’t get Sarah Palin’s appeal? Try a little harder and you will.

It is certainly true that I want to have nothing to do with anyone who finds Palin at all acceptable. But I am sure that the reverse is true as well.

Security: Here is an interesting take on the Islamic terrorists:

How Smart are Islamic Terrorists?

Organizational Learning and Islamic Militancy (May 2009) was written by Michael Kenney for the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s long: 146 pages. From the executive summary:

Organizational Learning and Islamic Militancy contains significant findings for counter-terrorism research and policy. Unlike existing studies, this report suggests that the relevant distinction in knowledge learned by terrorists is not between tacit and explicit knowledge, but metis and techne. Focusing on the latter sheds new insight into how terrorists acquire the experiential “know how” they need to perform their activities as opposed to abstract “know what” contained in technical bomb-making preparations. Drawing on interviews with bomb-making experts and government intelligence officials, the PI illustrates the critical difference between learning terrorism skills such as bomb-making and weapons firing by abstraction rather than by doing. Only the latter provides militants with the experiential, intuitive knowledge, in other words the metis, they need to actually build bombs, fire weapons, survey potential targets, and perform other terrorism-related activities. In making this case, the PI debunks current misconceptions regarding the Internet’s perceived role as a source of terrorism knowledge.

Another major research finding of this study is that while some Islamic militants learn, they do not learn particularly well. [...]

The PI concludes this report by discussing some of the policy implications of these findings, suggesting that the real threat from Islamic militancy comes less from hyper-sophisticated “super terrorists” than from steadfast militants whose own dedication to the cause may undermine the cunning intelligence and fluid adaptability they need to survive.

Of course, good “international terrorist tactics” are different from tactics that make for an effective insurgency within one country.

18 November 09 (am)

Workout notes 2 miles on the AMT, 2 on the Stairmaster, then 2200 yard swim: 500 free/back (9:48), 500 side/free (9:4x), 500 of 25 3g/75 free (9:04), 500 of 100 paddle, 100 (25 front kick, 25 free), 100 paddle, 100 (25 front, 25 free), 100 paddle (9:50), 200 of 100 fins, 4 x 25 fly (fins).

Religion and PTSD: this is disturbing:

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

Of course, not all veterans with mental health concerns are led to VA hospitals by a loss of faith: many simply want to get a night’s sleep without being terrorized by nightmares. Whatever kind of assistance they are seeking, it has been in increasingly short supply. The decline in resources for veterans’ mental health services started in the 1980s, as part of a nationwide effort to move psychiatric patients into outpatient treatment. The number of inpatient psychiatric beds fell from 9,000 in the late ’80s to 3,000 by 2008.[...]

The story of the mistreatment of returning veterans from Iraq is well known and shocking. But the role of religious ideology in that mistreatment—how, inside the government, it was a potent tool in the betrayal of an overwhelmingly Christian Army—is much less known.

“I couldn’t stand to hear that phrase any longer—‘God was watching over me,’” Benimoff wrote.

He wasn’t watching over the good men I knew in Iraq. Faith was the center of my life yet it failed to explain why I came home and those soldiers did not. The phrase was a Christian nicety, a cliché that when put to the test didn’t fit reality.

• • •

Things had already begun to change dramatically at the VA by early 2005, shortly after Roger Benimoff left for his second deployment to Iraq. Many appointees at the agency were disturbed that so many Iraq veterans showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part the concern grew from skepticism about the diagnosis itself, which some believed to be a legacy of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. Whatever the merits of the diagnosis, it was clearly widespread and, moreover, staggeringly expensive to treat. In 2008 the RAND Corporation put a number on the problem, reporting that one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has suffered some form of mental illness, mostly PTSD and depression.[...]

When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.

The religious programs grew, despite concerns. At the VA Healthcare Network in upstate New York, chaplains compiled spirituality assessments of patients within twenty-four hours of their arrival. The VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System gave patients a questionnaire that stated one of the System’s goals as helping veterans “Maintain Optimal Spiritual Health.” In Coatesville, patients in the psychiatric ward had a daily, thirty-minute block of time scheduled for “SPIRITUAL UPLIFTING.” Meanwhile Benimoff wondered, “what kind of God would allow people to sink to the depths we here in this ward had sunk?”

• • •

For spiritual uplift, many soldiers and veterans depend heavily on pop-Christian books, especially Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and themes of divine purpose and devotion to God. As a chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff himself used the book to cope with the mayhem. He also relied on it to help the troubled soldiers he knew, and he appreciated that the book emphasized helping other people, while other spiritual self-help books tended to promote selfishness. But even a book like The Purpose Driven Life could not solve the problems he faced. Over time, he began to wonder about his own purpose in Iraq and about the government’s, and he felt uncertain and scared.

We had gone to Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction stockpiled across the country, yet those weapons were never found and may never have existed. I had gone to Iraq thinking that was the cause. But if the cause had been wrong, what did that say about our role there, and mine?

As Benimoff and other soldiers eventually discovered, The Purpose Driven Life was not helpful, especially as the war’s own purpose grew less clear. Since Vietnam we have learned that PTSD tends to hit people especially hard when they fight in wars of choice. Bobby Muller, the head of Veterans for America, told me it was difficult for soldiers to talk about the war in Vietnam after they came home; years later, though:

I would get in touch with some of these guys, and they all had to come to the realization, ‘This is bullshit.’ It’s not just the horror of killing, but its context. . . . If you’re fighting a necessary war, it’s awful. But it’s kind of what you got to do. Let’s take a war that turns out to have been unnecessary. And in fact your leadership betrayed you. That willingness to serve was betrayed by a leadership that lied and squandered that trust. The very moral fabric of your life gets ripped apart.

Bottom line: in this situation, religion isn’t a simple answer.

Higher order math, humans and monkeys: Monkeys have some very basic math skills but don’t have the innate skills that humans have. Finding out why will help us understand human evolution better.

Will Sarah Palin run: Nate Silver thinks so and says why.