Author Archives: Tom

WSJ subscriber reaction to the Murdoch takeover

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Wall%20Street%20Journal%20logo.jpgSo, all of 170 out of the Wall Street Journal’s 1.7 million subscribers terminated their subscription as a result of Rupert Murdoch’s successful bid to acquire the WSJ?
What the heck. Felix Salmon makes a good case that Murdoch should turn the WSJ into a free service:

The potential readership of the WSJ . . . is enormous. Right now, there is no one-stop-shop on the World Wide Web for comprehensive, global businesss and finance news and analysis. A free WSJ.com would overnight become the global authority on such matters. WSJ.com is never going to make much money selling subscriptions in India or Brazil or Russia or even Mexico ñ but if it became a regular read among the business classes in those countries, local ad reps could make a fortune for News Corp. (Technology nowadays makes it very easy to target ads to readers in specific countries.)
The reason I’m hopeful about Murdoch buying the WSJ is that Murdoch has a truly global outlook, while the WSJ has always seemed to be a bit on the parochial side. And no one with a global outlook thinks that trying to sell subscriptions to WSJ.com makes any sense. Free is clearly the way to go.

The Incarceration Nation

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overcrowded%20prisons.jpgFollowing on this post from yesterday on a troubling growth sector in the burgeoning prison industry, Doug Berman points to this daunting Boston Review piece by Glenn C. Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. Loury reviews the increasingly brutal nature of punishment in American society:

Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.
According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United Statesówith five percent of the worldís populationóhouses 25 percent of the worldís inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.
Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across Americaís urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown. [. . .]

Continue reading →

Who was that guy who used to wear no. 8?

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David%20Carr%20grimacing%20080207.jpgWith the opening of the Texans’ pre-season training camp, the players are being asked about what it’s like not to have David Carr quarterbacking the Texans for the first time in the team’s history. Carr is already on record as saying that he’s glad to be away from the Texans’ sieve-like offensive line, which prompted some mild barbs back at Carr from his former main target.
But as this Stephanie Stradley post reports, more of Carr’s former teammates are “diplomatically” letting it be known publicly that they are not sorry that Carr is gone. Even Bob McNair goes on record as saying that the team had bent over backward to accomodate his slow development as an NFL QB, but finally just had to move on.
My, how times change.

The Walsh Era

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Bill%20Walsh.jpgFormer San Francisco 49er’s coach Bill Walsh died earlier this week, so the WSJ’s Allen Barra provides this wonderful tribute to Coach Walsh that, among other things, reminds us of his most special legacy:

It was as a teacher, though, that Mr. Walsh had his greatest and most lasting influence on football. Unlike Lombardi, who left worshippers but no disciples, Mr. Walsh spawned an entire generation of acolytes. His defensive coordinator George Seifert won two Super Bowls with San Francisco; his offensive coordinator Mike Holmgren won one with Green Bay. Mr. Seifert’s pupil Mike Shanahan, schooled in Mr. Walsh’s methods, won two more with Denver.
Mr. Walsh’s influence on football today is so pervasive that nearly 20 years after his final game, the Super Bowl has practically become an annual showcase for his adherents. This past February, Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy, a former player under Mr. Walsh, squared off against the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith, who trained as an assistant to Dennis Green, once a Walsh receiver’s coach.
That Messrs. Dungy and Smith were the first African-American coaches to reach the Super Bowl highlights perhaps Mr. Walsh’s greatest legacy: In 1987, he helped create the Minority Coaching Fellowship Program. “I can tell you this,” says Mr. Dungy, “his life was about much more than just X’s and O’s.”

Meanwhile, Jean Bramel reminds long-suffering Cincinnati Bengals fans (including my nephew, Josh) that Walsh was once an up and coming assistant coach with the Bengals, and actually began developing the West Coast offense while with the Bengals. Alas, Walsh was the subject of one of the more egregious “pass-overs” in NFL history:

[While with the Bengals, Coach Walsh] found a way to modify his passing attack with short, precise passes and mulitple wide receiving options putting pressure on the defense with timing routes ó what is now known as the West Coast offense but could rightly be called the Cincinnati offense. Walsh again found a near perfect fit for his new playbook in Ken Anderson, a smart, calm, precise passer. Walshís offense was clicking for the Bengals in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1975 season, Anderson was running the offense to perfection with a 60% plus completion rate and 8 yards plus per passing attempt. Curtis had been to three consecutive Pro Bowls and was a star. The Bengals had made the playoffs in 1973 and 1975. The future was ridiculously bright.
Then Bengal head coach and patriarch Paul Brown retired and handed the reins to long time offensive assistant Tiger Johnson instead of Walsh, who resigned in disappointment. The rest, as they say, is history. Walsh spent a season in San Diego as an assistant and coached Stanford for two seasons before taking the head coaching job in San Francisco where his offense flourished under Joe Montana. Johnsonís Bengal teams steadily declined and he was fired in 1978. Cincinnati made two Super Bowls in the 1980s, only to lose both to the franchise Bill Walsh built.
Rest in peace, Bill Walsh. This Bengal fan still longs for what couldíve been.

Tiger Johnson over Bill Walsh? That sounds almost Oileresque, don’t you think?

A disturbing growth industry

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prison%20cell.jpgThis New York Times article reports on one of the expensive consequences of the increasing criminalization of everything — already overcrowded state prisons looking to export inmates:

Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.
The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the countryís total prison population ó about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate ó but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing. One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year. [. . .]
But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.
Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release. Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.

See related earlier posts here and here. By the way, if you are interested in understanding the main reason why we are dealing with this seemingly endless cycle of criminalization and imprisonment, then check out the clever minute and a half video below for the answer:

Scott Henson, the Texas blogger-expert on prison overcrowding, has more here.
Update: Has America become the Incarceration Nation?

John Edwards, demagogue

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John_Edwards_NYC%20073107.jpgDemocratic Party presidential candidate John Edwards has been a frequent topic on this blog, but it’s rare that his special style of demagoguery is captured as succiently as in this video of a bit over a minute. I don’t know what’s more disturbing — Edwards’ rantings, the audience’s unquestioning acceptance of them, or the fact that the Edwards campaign is promoting the video as an example of Edwards’ charm.

Silverman pans the iPhone

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iphone030.jpgChronicle technology columnist Dwight Silverman is one of the best in the business, so when he pans the trendy iPhone, it’s time to sit and listen:

I lived with the iPhone for about a month, and as an experiment, I carried both it and my Samsung BlackJack, my own PDA. My goal was to see which device I preferred for which tasks. For example, when I wanted to access the Web online, or check e-mail, which would I reach for first?
I started out using the iPhone more, because using it was an adventure. But by the end of my experiment, I was back to using the BlackJack for most serious tasks.
While the iPhone is indeed a very cool device, and there’s a lot about it to like ó see the aforementioned earlier reviews for a litany of them ó I think its shortcomings are major.

Read Silverman’s entire review, whcih pretty much concludes that the iPhone elevates style over substance. Meanwhile, the WSJ’s Carl Bialik breaks down the initial sales numbers for the iPhone and concludes that the pre-release hype definitely exceeded the actual sale numbers.

Steyn on the criminalization of everything

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Mark%20Steyn%20color.jpgStill numbed by the experience of blogging the injustice of the Conrad Black trial, Mark Steyn takes up the appalling lack of judgment behind the McMinnville, Oregon district attorney’s prosecution of two 7th grade boys as sex offenders. The alleged criminal act? The egregious offense of participating at school with their classmates in a juvenile greeting ritual on Fridays called “Slap Butt Fridays.” Steyn concludes as follows:

A world that requires handcuffs and judges and district attorneys for what took place that Friday in February is not just a failed education system but an entire society that’s losing any sense of proportion. Without which, civilized life becomes impossible. So we legalize more and more aspects of life and demand that district attorneys prosecute ever more aggressively what were once routine areas of social interaction.
A society that looses the state to criminalize schoolroom horseplay is guilty not only of punishing children as grown-ups but of the infantilization of the entire citizenry.

The WSJ’s George Melloan expressed similar sentiments a couple of years ago.

Does Jose de Jesus Ortiz research anything?

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ortiz%20073107.gifIs shooting from the hip a Houston Chronicle requirement for covering the Stros?
As noted in earlier posts here, here, here, here, here and here, the Chronicle’s Stros beat writer — Jose de Jesus Ortiz — incongruously struggles with analyzing baseball. But on the heels of watching Stros sore-armed starting pitcher Jason Jennings get torched for 11 runs in 2/3rd’s of an inning on Sunday, Ortiz displays his utter ignorance of the history of the club he covers on a daily basis:

Seeing Jason Jennings give up 11 runs while only securing two outs on Sunday afternoon, opposing scouts surely had to tell their bosses not to give up top prospects for the veteran righthander.
Because the Astros made the Jennings trade out of desperation after pushing Andy Pettitte out of town and then failing to acquire Jon Garland, the Jennings trade seemed to be the best the Astros could do at the time.
As it turns out, they could hardly have done worse, especially considering that a little digging in Colorado would have uncovered that Jennings hadn’t thrown bullpen sessions between starts in the second half of the season because of a tender right elbow.
As Tim Purpura heads into Tuesday’s non-waiver trade deadline, let’s look back and see where this trade fits among the worst in franchise history?
What are the worst three trades in franchise history?
Here are my list in order of the worst:
ï Getting rid of Joe Morgan.
ï Getting rid of Billy Wagner for three prospects who didn’t produce.
ï Getting rid of Willy Taveras, Jason Hirsh and Taylor Buchholz for Jennings.

Had Ortiz merely bothered to run a Google Blog Search before publishing the foregoing, he would have discovered that two of the three trades that he lists are not even in the top seven of all-time bad Stros trades.
Then, on one hand, Ortiz contends that the Stros traded Billy Wagner for “three prospects who didn’t produce,” which is not really correct, either. The Phillies sent an established Major League pitcher who was not very good — Brandon Duckworth — along with pitching prospects Taylor Buchholz and Ezequiel Astacio to the Stros for Wagner.
However, undaunted, Ortiz then in the following sentence lists Buchholz — one of the prospects “who didn’t produce” from the Wagner trade — as one of the reasons why the Jennings trade is supposedly the third worst in Stros history.
Is this really the best that the Chronicle can do in covering the Stros?

Endurance training to death

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alberto%20salazar%20073107.jpgAs noted in previous posts here and here, the myth that endurance training and long-distance running are good for one’s health remains firmly entrenched among most Americans, despite sad reminders such as this. In this timely article, Mark Sisson lucidly explains why endurance training is hazardous to one’s health. Here is a snippet:

The problem with many, if not most, age group endurance athletes is that the low-level training gets out of hand. They overtrain in their exuberance to excel at racing, and they over consume carbohydrates in an effort to stay fueled. The result is that over the years, their muscle mass, immune function, and testosterone decrease, while their cortisol, insulin and oxidative output increase (unless you work so hard that you actually exhaust the adrenals, introducing an even more disconcerting scenario). Any anti-aging doc will tell you that if you do this long enough, you will hasten, rather than retard, the aging process. Studies have shown an increase in mortality when weekly caloric expenditure exceeds 4,000. [. . .]
Now, what does all this mean for the generation of us who bought into Ken Cooperís “more aerobics is better” philosophy? Is it too late to get on the anti-aging train? Hey, we’re still probably a lot better off than our college classmates who gained 60 pounds and can’t walk up a flight of stairs. Sure, we may look a little older and move a little slower than we’d like, but there’s still time to readjust the training to fit our DNA blueprint. Maybe just move a little slower, lift some weights, do some yoga and eat right and there’s a good chance you’ll maximize the quality of your remaining yearsÖ and look good doing whatever you do.