The camera that shot this video is mounted on one of the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle. The launch clock is in the upper left corner. The first couple of minutes is uneventful, but the rest of the seven minute video certainly is not. Enjoy!
So, the seemingly inevitable indictment of Roger Clemens finally was issued yesterday.
Perjury is serious business and it remains to be seen how well Clemens will deal with the charges. Clemen’s legal strategy so far has certainly been at least questionable, if not downright bizarre.
But for all of Clemens’ unattractiveness, it’s difficult not to get the sense already that this is yet another colossal misuse use of prosecutorial resources (Bill Anderson agrees). In the glare of the spotlight of this high-profile prosecution, the more troubling issues involving the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids are overlooked.
The mainstream media and much of the public will castigate Clemens — who is an easy target — just as they filleted Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez.
The dynamic is the same one that we saw in regard to the downfalls of both Tiger Woods and Ken Lay. We try in any way to avoid confronting our innate vulnerability, so we use myths to distract us. We rationalize that a wealthy athlete such as Clemens did bad things that we would never do if placed in the same position (yeah, right). As a result, Clemens supposedly deserves our scorn and ridicule. That a scapegoat such as Clemens comes across as arrogant and irresponsible makes the lynch mob even more bloodthirsty as it attempts to purge collectively that which is too shameful for us to confront individually.
Of course, much of that same mainstream media and public contribute to the pathologically competitive Major League Baseball culture. The MSM regularly caters to the public’s desire to idolize players who risk career-threatening disability by taking painkilling drugs so that they can play through injuries.
But players who used PED’s in an effort to strengthen their bodies to avoid or minimize the inevitable injuries of the physically-brutal MLB season are widely viewed as pariahs.
How does that make any sense?
Meanwhile, the fact that MLB players have been using PED’s for at least the past two generations to enhance their performance is largely ignored the mind-numbingly superficial analysis of the PED issue that is being trotted out by most media outlets. Sure, Barry Bonds hit quite a few home runs during a time in which he was apparently using PED’s. But should Pete Rose be denied the MLB record for breaking Ty Cobb’s total base hits record because he used performance-enhancing amphetamines throughout his MLB career?
These witch hunts, investigations, criminal indictments, morality plays and public shaming episodes are not advancing a dispassionate and reasoned debate regarding the complex issues that are at the heart of the use of PED’s in baseball and other sports. On a very basic level, it is not even clear that the controlled use of PED’s to enhance athletic performance is as dangerous to health as many of the sports in which the users compete.
Wouldn’t a public discussion on how to construct a reasonable regulatory system for the safe and healthy use of PED’s be a more productive use of resources than criminalizing Roger Clemens?
Here are links to a number of related HCT posts over the years on the issues relating to performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports
In several respects, my mentor and dear friend Ross Lence was similar to legendary Columbia philosophy professor Sidney Morgenbesser — a consummate teacher and witty thinker who didn’t care much for academia’s preoccupation with publishing.
So, I enjoyed reading this James Ryerson/NY Times Magazine profile (H/T Al Roberts) of Morgenbesser that reminded me of a funny philosophy story involving Morgenbesser that Professor Lence had passed along to me with relish many years ago:
In the academic world, custom dictates that you may be considered a legend if there is more than one well-known anecdote about you.
Morgenbesser, with his Borscht Belt humor and preternaturally agile mind, was the subject of dozens. In the absence of a written record of his wisdom, this was how people related to him: by knowing the stories and wanting to know more.
The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin.
During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative.
From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, “Yeah, yeah.”
As we endure the annual, mind-numbing boredom of NFL pre-season football, my thoughts about football are elsewhere.
That is, why on earth do NFL teams expose their valuable players to such extreme risk of injury when the games do not even count?
The local Texans lost their first second round draft choice to injury for the season this past weekend. And for what?
The elephant in the closet in regard to football overall and the NFL in particular is the increasing recognition of the high injury risk that players are taking. Although this NY Times article involves primarily former MLB star Lou Gehrig and speculation whether he really died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the article provides an overview of new clinical evidence that the brain damage being suffered by NFL players is severe:
Doctors at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., and the Boston University School of Medicine, the primary researchers of brain damage among deceased National Football League players, said that markings in the spinal cords of two players and one boxer who also received a diagnosis of A.L.S. indicated that those men did not have A.L.S. at all. They had a different fatal disease, doctors said, caused by concussion like trauma, that erodes the central nervous system in similar ways.
The finding could prompt a redirection in the study of motor degeneration in athletes and military veterans being given diagnoses of A.L.S. at rates considerably higher than normal, said several experts in A.L.S. who had seen early versions of the paper. Patients with significant histories of brain trauma could be considered for different types of treatment in the future, perhaps leading toward new pathways for a cure. [ . . .]
A link between professional football and A.L.S. follows recent discoveries of on-field brain trauma leading to dementia and other cognitive decline in some N.F.L. veterans. Dr. McKee and her group identified 14 former N.F.L. players since 1960 as having been given diagnoses of A.L.S., a total about eight times higher than what would be expected among men in the United States of similar ages.
However, the doctors cautioned, the existence of the increased number of A.L.S.-like cases should not create the same level of public alarm as the cognitive effects of brain trauma, which affect hundreds of former professionals and perhaps thousands of boys and girls across many youth sports.
Although even players commonly continue to underestimate injury risk in the NFL, my sense is that such miscalculations are being understood better and will likely recede. With NFL teams facing increasing litigation risk from injured players, will NFL teams be able to use the shield of the collective bargaining process much longer to protect the league members from the possibly severe financial implications of that risk?
And if the NFL is facing potentially dire financial implications from the increasing recognition of high injury risk, what about the implications for college football, where the compensation paid to players is regulated more rigidly than in the NFL?
Finally, will the financial implications of injury risk in football eventually prompt dramatic changes in the way the game is played?
Seems to me that these questions are a lot more interesting than pre-season football.
On the heels of his brief on the merits in support of his motion to be released from prison pending further disposition of his case by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court, Jeff Skilling filed his reply brief below (download it to review the bookmarked version) to the government’s merits brief opposing his proposed release.
Skilling’s brief hammers home why he should be released:
As the standard is articulated in [Neder v. U.S., 527 U.S. 1 (1999)], the case on which the government relies, a court cannot find the presence of a factually supported invalid theory to be harmless beyond a reasonable doubt where the defendant contested the [valid theory] and raised sufficient evidence to support a contrary finding. 527 U.S. at 19. In that situation, it cannot be presumed that rational jurors necessarily would have accepted the valid theory, and so it remains impossible to tell which theory the jury selected.
As shown below, the government cannot prove that the honest services error was harmless because, for every count of conviction, the record, the instructions, evidence, and argument allowed a rational juror to reject the valid theory asserted, while relying on the invalid honest-services theory to return a conviction. Because it is thus impossible to tell whether the jurors selected the valid or invalid path to conviction for any count, every count must be reversed.
Stated simply, the government relied on the amorphous nature of an invalid theory of criminality in obtaining a conviction against Skilling on numerous different charges. Having relied on that blather, the government cannot now prove that the jury didn’t rely on it in convicting Skilling on all charges.
Although results rarely occur as they should in misdirected criminal prosecutions, Skilling really should win his release and a re-trial. Stay tuned.
Jeff Skilling’s Reply Brief on his Motion for Bail
Interesting. The NY Times’ Joe Nocera chimes in on the demise of Mark Hurd at Hewlett-Packard.
But the blogosphere had already revealed a week ago the essence of the information in Nocera’s article. Another reflection of how the mainstream media is now often decidedly behind the blogosphere in providing key information about breaking events.
And not to pile on, but how does one of the best business reporters of the NY Times write an article about this situation and not ask the most important unanswered question? That is, why did the H-P Board accept Hurd’s resignation and provide him a $40 million severance package if the Board had grounds to terminate him for cause?
And if the Board didn’t have cause to fire Hurd, then why did Hurd’s contract not make violation of H-P’s written code of business conduct cause for termination of employment? Is that the same for other H-P contracts with its executives? At least this subsequent WSJ article gets closer to answering those questions.
My bet is that the blogosphere will ultimately provide the answer to that question more quickly than the NY Times.
One of the best covers of one of the most covered songs — the late Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Check out this interesting letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Robert Sharpe of Common Sense for Drug Policy:
What’s interesting about the drop in violence associated with crack cocaine is the irrelevance of drug enforcement. During the peak of the 1980s crack epidemic, New York City applied the zero-tolerance approach. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was actively smoking crack and the nation’s capital had the highest per capita murder rate in the country.
Despite very different leadership and law enforcement, crack use declined in both cities simultaneously. This parallel decline occurred when the younger generation saw firsthand what crack was doing to their older peers and decided for themselves that crack was bad news. Adding to what is already the highest incarceration rate in the world is not the answer to America’s drug problem. Diverting resources away from prisons into cost-effective, substance-abuse treatment would save both tax dollars and lives.
Former Texas A&M and long-time Texas high school football coach Emory Bellard — who invented the famous Wishbone triple-option offense that transformed college football in the late 1960’s and 70’s — is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The Chron’s Richard Justice passes along the news along with many nice remembrances of several of his former players.
Coach Bellard is truly a Texas football legend. He was an extraordinarily successful Texas high school coach from 1952 to 1966 at Ingleside, Breckenridge and San Angelo Central — his teams won the 1958 and ’59 state titles at Breckenridge and the 1966 crown at San Angelo Central.
But it’s Coach Bellard’s college coaching career that most folks remember. Darrell Royal hired Bellard as an assistant coach at the University of Texas in 1967 where Bellard developed the Wishbone offense that was instrumental in the success of UT’s 1969 and 1970 national championship teams that won 30 straight games.
Largely on the basis of his success at UT, Coach Bellard was named head coach at Texas A&M in 1972 and appeared to have the Aggie program at the brink of national prominence in 1978. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a tumultuous two-week period midway through that season resulted in Bellard resigning the head coaching position that he coveted.
Coach Bellard went on to coach at Mississippi State from 1979-85, but this quintessential Texas football coach always looked somewhat out of place in SEC country.
So, after retiring from coaching upon getting the axe at Mississippi State, Coach Bellard returned to his Texas high school roots at the age of 61 and coached for six more years at Spring Westfield High School. Westfield had won four games combined the two seasons prior to Coach Bellard taking over. Under Coach Bellard, Westfield went 41-22-5 and reached the Class 5A Division I quarterfinals his last two seasons. After his Westfield stint, Coach Bellard finally retired from coaching for good and moved to Georgetown north of Austin, where he became a regular at Berry Creek Golf Club.
Emory Bellard is a bright thread in the fabric of Texas that makes this such a fascinating place. May his final days be restful ones. He will be missed.
A clever video for a new book (H/T Craig Newmark).