“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.”
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Every now and then I wonder what I want them to say…I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.”
I was going to write a blog for Friday suggesting that Rutgers men’s basketball coach Mike Rice should be fired, not merely suspended, for this:
By 10 a.m. yesterday, Rutgers beat me to it (from NJ.com):
The university terminated Rice’s contract Wednesday morning following a meeting with athletic director Tim Pernetti in his office at the Rutgers Athletic Center. Rice’s job status became tenuous when videotapes of his actions during practices from his first and second years on campus were made public by ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” program on Tuesday.
Rice was seen throwing basketballs at players — including one instance, throwing it at a player’s head — as well as shoving players during a practice. He was also heard using the term “f—— faggot” at a player and using abusive language.
The cynical could look at this as an attempt by Rutgers’ athletic director to save his own skin …
“I am responsible for the decision to attempt a rehabilitation of coach Rice,” Pernetti said in a statement released by the university Wednesday morning. “Dismissal and corrective action were debated in December and I thought it was in the best interest of everyone to rehabilitate, but I was wrong. Moving forward, I will work to regain the trust of the Rutgers community.”
… or as a case of using a word that alienated the wrong people:
Pernetti, who had given Rice a vote of confidence to return next season for the fourth year of his original five-year deal, had stated Tuesday during a brief sitdown with local media that the matter had been dealt with already. But with political heavyweights and leaders of both the country and the state’s LGBT equal rights groups calling for Rice to be terminated for using homophobic slurs, the outcome became inevitable.
Exactly what changed between December, when Rice was suspended, and yesterday? ESPN got hold of the video, that’s what.
Facebook Friend Kyle Cooper points out:
Look, coaches yell. Coaches scream. They may occasionally swear. But there’s a clear difference between being upset and being abusive. Just as there’s a clear difference between solving a problem and hoping it goes away. The focus of this Deadspin article is spot-on: Rutgers knew about Mike Rice’s, uh, methods, and its first impulse was to sweep it under the rug. Only when Rice’s behavior and the administration’s soft-pedaling were finally exposed did the university take action.
Recruiting is a cut-throat activity even when it doesn’t involve an issue that you just gift-wrapped for every conceivable opponent. You can hear the negative recruiting now, can’t you? “Rutgers is a fine school, but let’s just say they’re not much for protecting their student-athletes. They won’t look out for your best interests. You won’t have to worry about that at (university name here). We’ll never put you in a bad situation like that.”
What do a coach’s tirades teach? Football coach Bill Walsh had an interesting approach — when his assistant coaches started yelling at 49ers players, he would yell at the assistants, telling them to teach, not yell.
I’ve seen in a few different places defenses of, if not Rice exactly, “old-school coaches” who, if the writer is to be believed, said and did much worse things than Rice. Well, for one thing, that was then, and this is now.
The opposite of Rice perhaps is shown in this observation about Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, from ESPN.com:
Sports have made room for all sorts of personalities. From the crying Dick Vermeils to the restrained Tom Landrys, there’s no genetic strain that works better than another.
But the most fundamental skill for success seems to be the ability to deal — to deal with life and all its ups, downs, twists and turns.
In that, Boeheim is a master, which has served him well.
“There have been great books and great lectures and great speeches written to suggest what you do to avoid distractions,” he said. “Most people can’t do that. We can’t do that. Life is full of situations. You either handle them or you don’t. That’s nothing new. There are situations every year. Some you see, some you don’t, but there’s always something. If you can’t get through all of that, you’re not in this business very long.”
The coach who might be the best in college basketball today, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, has the coaching ability of his mentor, Indiana and Texas Tech’s Bobby Knight, without the public displays of out-of-control temper. CBS Sports produced a documentary about the early ’90s Duke teams, which featured two players who didn’t necessarily get along, Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley. Krzyzewski reportedly didn’t publicly berate them, or told one or both to knock it off; he simply told them that if they couldn’t get along, Duke wouldn’t win.
There are three questions that, if you can answer any one of them with a “yes,” justify Rice’s firing, and well before yesterday:
Is Rice’s conduct acceptable in the workplace today?
Would you like to be the subject of verbal and aerial (as in thrown basketballs) assaults from someone above you?
Would you like your son to be treated like that?
On the other hand, maybe something did sink in, based on Rice’s comments reported by ESPN.com:
Rice, in an impromptu news conference outside his home, apologized “for the pain and hardship that I’ve caused.”
“There will never be a time when I use any of that as an excuse,” Rice said, referring to his efforts toward a change in behavior. “I’ve let so many people down. My players, my administration, Rutgers University, the fans. My family, who’s sitting in their house just huddled around because of the fact that their father was an embarrassment to them.
“It’s troubling, but I will at some time, maybe I’ll try to explain it, but right now, there’s no explanation for what’s on those films. Because there is no excuse for it. I was wrong. I want to tell everybody who’s believed in me that I’m deeply sorry.”
For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won’t, at least not quite yet.
“Peak oil” and our “oil addiction” were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?
The oil-and-gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves that were previously either unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on by entrepreneurial mavericks and engineers exploring on mostly private lands. …
The world now wakes up to iPhone communication, Amazon online buying, social networking on Facebook, Google Internet searches, and writing and computing with Microsoft software. Why weren’t these innovations first developed in Japan, China, or Germany — all wealthy industrial countries with large, well-educated, and hard-working populations? Because in such nations, young oddballs like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs more likely would have needed the proper parentage, age, family connections, or government-insider sanction to be given a fair shake.
Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world. Unlike under the caste system of India; the class considerations of Europe; the racial homogeneity of China, Japan, or Korea; the tribalism of Africa; or the religious orthodoxy of the Middle East, in America one can offer a new idea, invention, or protocol and have it be judged on its merits, rather than on the background, accent, race, age, gender, or religion of the person who offers it.
Businesses evaluate proposals on the basis of what makes them lots of money. Publishers want writing that a lot of people will read. Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want. In the long run, that bottom line leads to national wealth and power. …
Just when we read obituaries about an unruly nation of excess, unlikely nobodies pop up to pioneer fracking, the Napa wine industry, or Silicon Valley. Why? No other nation has a Constitution whose natural evolution would lead to a free, merit-based society that did not necessarily look like the privileged — and brilliant — landed white-male aristocracy that invented it.
The end of American exceptionalism will come not when we run out of gas, wheat, or computers, but when we end the freedom of the individual, and, whether for evil or supposedly noble reasons, judge people not on their achievement but on their name, class, race, sex, or religion — in other words, when we become like most places the world over.
After my rather unpleasant hour debating Democrat Christine Bremer-Muggli on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday, I got this Facebook message:
It’s always a pleasure to hear you on Joy’s program, but I’m disappointed in you for not correcting your nemesis on this morning’s WPR show when she incessantly spewed out an oft-repeated fallacy about Governor Walker’s level of education. Christine said – no less than five times – that Scott Walker “does not have a college education.”
That is a blatant lie.
Scott Walker went to Marquette for four years. Folks who want to criticize him would be accurate in saying that he did not earn a degree from that university.
That’s a fact.
It’s not my intention to defend the governor; but instead, I’m pointing out the truth in the midst of the rhetoric. Christine spewed out misinformation, she said it with authority, portrayed it as fact, and nobody called her on it.
To say that Walker “did not get a college education” after sitting in a class room for four years is beyond comprehension.
Also, it’s offensive to all the people in the world who were alternatively educated — home schooled, Internet classes, or even the school of hard knocks.
What about Abe Lincoln, who never went to college but eventually became a U.S. president? Bill Gates dropped out of college because he was too bored with the standard way of learning and became a self-made billionaire! Many very successful people never “got a college education,” including Mark Twain, Frank Sinatra, Michael Dell (Dell computers), Thomas Edison, Ernest Hemingway, George Washington, Andrew Carnegie, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Steve Jobs. Where would we be without these very influential — and dare I say “educated” — people?
I can argue with nothing our listener/reader wrote, other than to add to her list a president who never got to college. I don’t think my WPR opponent will kick out Harry S. Truman from her party, but by her Friday standards he wasn’t qualified to be president. Nor was Abraham Lincoln.
As numerous unemployed college graduates can attest, a college degree guarantees nothing other than the fact you met the degree requirements of the institution. (The same can be said about master’s degrees, doctoral degrees, and yes, law degrees. The University of Wisconsin, from which my bachelor’s degree was earned, has among its alumni a large number of Ph.D.s working as Madison taxi drivers and waiters.) That means you attained the required number of credits by passing the required classes in the required subjects, including one or more majors and minors. Period. A college degree does not guarantee or demonstrate extraordinary intelligence, and it certainly does not prove wisdom.
It’s ironic, if you think about it, that a representative of the supposedly diverse, inclusive, tolerant, nondiscriminatory political party demonstrates a noted lack of tolerance toward someone with fewer degrees than her, beyond her willful falsehoods about Walker’s education. Then again, the diversity of the Democratic Party doesn’t include ideological diversity. (Bremer-Muggli respects neither the Second Amendment nor Article I, section 25 of the state Constitution either, but that’s hardly a surprise.)
One can ask if my microphone-hogging WPR nemesis actually intended to insult every listener without a degree, not to mention every potential legal client of hers without a degree. The charitable would assume the answer is no; she only intended to insult Scott Walker specifically and Republicans and non-liberals (including certainly myself) generally.
That makes her a victim of what Charlie Sykes calls Walker Derangement Syndrome, or the more scientific term, Reagan/Thompson/Bush/Walker Disease. Democrats believed, and believe in the latter’s case, that, respectively, a two-term president elected by larger margins than any of his Democratic successors, the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin’s history, our last two-term Republican president, and our current governor were, and in Walker’s case are, simultaneously stupid and evil. The victims not only spit contempt upon those who won, in order, two presidential elections, four gubernatorial elections, two presidential elections and a gubernatorial and recall election, they spit contempt upon those who voted for them.
Yesterday at work, for instance, I got an email from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin that could be described as slanderous toward Walker were it not for the fact that as a matter of law public officials generally cannot be the victims of slander. None of what the Democrats’ Baghdad Bob sent has a thing to do with issues facing this state. Other than possibly The Capital Times, Isthmus and some other Republican-hating publication, no publication would run this agitprop. Given the results of the 2010 and 2012 elections, the Democrats’ PR strategy, such as it is, isn’t working.
None of us can say what would have happened had Saddam Hussein remained in power. He might now be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Iran. One or other of his even more psychotic sons, the late Uday or Qusay, could be in power. The Arab Spring might have come to Iraq, and surely even more bloodily than in Syria. …
Three weeks after Operation Shock and Awe began, the early bird naysayers were already warning of massive humanitarian devastation and civil war. Neither happened. Over-compensating somewhat for all the doom-mongering, I wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “a year from now Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.” Close enough. Major-General Andy Salmon, the British commander in southern Iraq, eventually declared of Basra that “on a per capita basis, if you look at the violence statistics, it is less dangerous than Manchester.”
Ten years ago, expert opinion was that Iraq was a phony-baloney entity imposed on the map by distant colonial powers. Joe Biden, you’ll recall, advocated dividing the country into three separate states, which for the Democrats held out the enticing prospect of having three separate quagmires to blame on Bush, but for the Iraqis had little appeal. “As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature,” I argued, “it’ll work fine.” As for the supposedly secessionist Kurds, “they’ll settle for being Scotland or Quebec.” And so it turned out. The Times of London, last week: “Ten Years After Saddam, Iraqi Kurds Have Never Had It So Good.” In Kurdistan as in Quebec, there is a pervasive unsavory tribal cronyism, but on the other hand, unlike Quebec City, Erbil is booming.
What of the rest of the country? Iraq, I suggested, would wind up “at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world, and, at best, pleasant, civilized and thriving.” I’ll stand by my worst-case scenario there. Unlike the emerging “reforms” in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, politics in Iraq has remained flawed but, by the standards of the grimly Islamist Arab Spring, broadly secular.
So I like the way a lot of the trees fell. But I missed the forest.
On the previous Western liberation of Mesopotamia, when Gen. Maude took Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, British troops found a very different city from the Saddamite squat of 2003: in a lively, jostling, cosmopolitan metropolis, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. I wasn’t so deluded as to think the Jews would be back, but I hoped something of Baghdad’s lost vigor might return. Granted that most of the Arab world, from Tangiers to Alexandria, is considerably less “multicultural” than it was in mid-century, the remorseless extinction of Iraq’s Christian community this past decade is appalling – and, given that it happened on America’s watch, utterly shameful. Like the bland acknowledgement deep in a State Department “International Religious Freedom Report” that the last church in Afghanistan was burned to the ground in 2010, it testifies to the superpower’s impotence, not “internationally” but in client states entirely bankrolled by us.
Foreigners see this more clearly than Americans. As Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore, said on a visit to Washington in 2004, “The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.” Just so. If you live in Tikrit or Fallujah, the Iraq war was about Iraq. If you live anywhere else on the planet, the Iraq war was about America, and the unceasing drumbeat of “quagmire” and “exit strategy” communicated to the world an emptiness at the heart of American power – like the toppled statue of Saddam that proved to be hollow. On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, mobs trashed U.S. embassies across the region with impunity. A rather more motivated crowd showed up in Benghazi, killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and correctly calculated they would face no retribution. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, these guys have reached their own judgment about American “credibility” and “will” – as have more potent forces yet biding their time, from Moscow to Beijing. …
And so a genuinely reformed Middle East remains, like the speculative scenarios outlined at the top, in the realm of “alternative history.” Nevertheless, in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll-call of America’s unwon wars, Iraq today is less unwon than Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, and that is not nothing. The war dead of America and its few real allies died in an honorable cause. But armies don’t wage wars; nations do. And, back on the home front, a vast percentage of fair-weather hawks who decided that it was all too complicated, or a bit of a downer, or Bush lied, or where’s the remote, revealed America as profoundly unserious. A senator who votes for war and then decides he’d rather it had never started is also engaging in “alternative history” – albeit of the kind in which Pam Ewing steps into the shower at Southfork and writes off the previous season of “Dallas” as a bad dream. In nonalternative history, in the only reality there is, once you’ve started a war, you have two choices: to win it or to lose it. Withdrawing one’s “support” for a war you’re already in advertises nothing more than a kind of geopolitical ADHD.
Wigderson Library & Pub, where you can buy books or beer (or both), and perhaps books about beer, has a warning for two state Senate Republicans:
The announcement by a pair of Republican senators of an alternative budget plan for education spending should send shivers down the spines of their colleagues. The plan being touted by Senator Mike Ellis and Senator Luther Olsen would raise education spending by $382 million. That’s more than the $343 million tax cut proposed by Governor Scott Walker.
Public school spending would increase $150 more per student in each of the next two years. Ellis and Olsen would take $100 million from elsewhere in the budget and would allow local property taxes to go up $153 million.
So what Ellis and Olsen are proposing is not only a local tax increase but a tax shift from the state level to local property taxpayers. Yet these same two senators claim to be concerned about the effect of school choice on local property taxpayers even though school choice has proven to be an educational bargain for the state.
This is beyond hypocritical. This is duplicitous. …
In 2006, several Senate Republicans voted against a state constitutional amendment to limit state spending. State Senator Mary Lazich even issued a press release with a poem questioning the proposal early in the debate.
Certainly no small coincidence, Republicans lost control of the state senate later that year. In a sign of things to come, State Representative Ann Nischke lost a mayoral election in the heart of Republican territory, Waukesha, because the Democrat Larry Nelson attacked Madison Republicans for their spending and support for taxes.
Two years later, Republicans lost control of the state assembly and the Democrats were in complete control of Madison. If political parties don’t live up to the expectations of the taxpayers, the taxpayers will hold them accountable.
Those Democrats increased taxes by $2.1 billion, tax increases that the GOP has failed to erase, as I pointed out on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday. (More about that later this week.)
The taxpayers held Democrats accountable for that, too:
The re-energized party swept the state in 2010, electing Scott Walker as governor and winning back the senate and the assembly. Walker cut state spending and froze local spending while giving local governments the means to control costs with Act 10. As a result, the median property owner even saw a slight reduction in their property taxes. …
Now Ellis and Olsen, who were both senators the last couple of times Republicans lost the majority in the senate, want to raise local property taxes. They want to undo the work that has been done by the governor to show that state services can be maintained without raising taxes. In the process, they would render the proposed income tax cut meaningless, and actually hurt the tax reduction cause because of the perceived shift of the tax burden from the state level to the local level.
The voters held legislative Republicans responsible the last time they failed to control taxes and spending. They will hold legislative Republicans accountable again.
Jon Gabriel explains why, instead of turning off your lights to commemorate Earth Hour at 8:30 p.m. local time, you should heed the advice of this headline:
Since 2007, environmental activists have promoted this Gaia-appeasing sacrifice to conserve energy and raise awareness about apocalyptic climate change.
But like many gimmicks, Earth Hour is designed to make people feel like they’re accomplishing something instead of actually accomplishing something.
The whole “awareness-raising” trend is annoying on general principle. Why raise awareness about fatal diseases when you can work to cure them? But what is hazy messaging for a public health campaign is decidedly counterproductive for the professed goals of this envirostunt. Earth Hour actually increases CO2 emissions.
Consider the activists’ recommendation of replacing electric lights with candles for an hour. Candles are made from paraffin, i.e., refined crude oil, and are far less efficient than electric bulbs — even those dastardly incandescent light bulbs our government is so helpfully seizing from us. You would need about 40 candles to match the light produced by a 40-watt bulb, but just one candle cancels out any theoretical CO2 reduction.
Then there’s the effect of a mass off-switch/on-switch across an electrical grid. Power companies still pump the same amount of energy despite a brief dip in consumption. But when a large number of people simultaneously increase consumption at the end of Earth Hour, a surge often requires engineers to fire up additional coal or oil-fueled resources. …
What really chafes is the flamboyant hypocrisy of Earth Hour advocates. “Let’s turn off our lights, then upload millions of tweets, photos and videos using our smartphones and computers!” Because where’s the fun in saving the planet if you can’t use electricity to brag about it every three minutes?
The facts show that Earth Hour is just another exercise in progressive posturing and self-congratulation. If conspicuous non-consumption saved the planet, we’d be able to run our cars on self-righteousness and moral preening. …
The counterproductive stunt of Earth Hour might make the anti-science Left feel better about themselves, but it only harms the planet and humanity at large. If activists want to improve the lives of the downtrodden, perhaps they can support the fracking boom that delivers clean, inexpensive natural gas to an energy-starved world.
Earth needs more light and progress, not more darkness and hypocrisy.
Electricity has given humanity huge benefits. Almost 3 billion people still burn dung, twigs, and other traditional fuels indoors to cook and keep warm, generating noxious fumes that kill an estimated 2 million people each year, mostly women and children. Likewise, just 100 years ago, the average American family spent six hours each week during cold months shoveling six tons of coal into the furnace (not to mention cleaning the coal dust from carpets, furniture, curtains, and bedclothes). In the developed world today, electric stoves and heaters have banished indoor air pollution.
“Similarly, electricity has allowed us to mechanize much of our world, ending most backbreaking work. The washing machine liberated women from spending endless hours carrying water and beating clothing on scrub boards. The refrigerator made it possible for almost everyone to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to stop eating rotten food, which is the main reason why the most prevalent cancer for men in the United States in 1930, stomach cancer, is the least prevalent now.
I’m grateful for my big screen television and the electricity that powers it so I can watch the Shockers versus Gonzaga. At this moment with 11:39 in the first half, it is tied 10-10.
I’m grateful for natural gas that is keeping my home nice and warm while it snows outside (it started again about 30 minutes ago). Natural gas is an excellent source of energy.
In both cases, I picked the national champion correctly, Kentucky.
This year, I’m considerably more busy. I also didn’t have time to find a system, as I did last year. On the other hand, this year’s tournament is a considerably more wide open tournament, so maybe a system won’t help this year anyway.
This bracket is from a pool I’ve been in for several years:
The other bracket has a few differences, but the same Final Four — Duke, Gonzaga, Miami and Kansas — and the same national championship, Duke over Kansas.
I can’t say I’m particularly enthused about this. It is a difficult tournament to figure out this year. (For instance, last year’s national champion, Kentucky, didn’t get into the tournament. The Wildcats did get into the National Invitation Tournament, only to lose their first-round game Tuesday. Adolph Rupp is rolling over in his grave.) Maybe that’s why I picked three familiars, and why I don’t have Miami winning it all. I think that the team that wins it all is usually a team that’s been around the Final Four before, which certainly describes both Duke and Kansas.
I have Wisconsin and Marquette winning one game each. This Badger team is capable of anything from making the Final Four, which a few people I know have predicted, to losing Friday. They are that inconsistent, and I don’t think you become magically consistent in March. To coin a phrase used at numerous levels of numerous sports, you are what you are.
I am unimpressed with any Big Ten team, including Wisconsin, which is why I have none of them going to the Final Four. There are two ways of looking at that, I suppose — it’s a really even conference, or it’s not a very good conference. And there is certainly no team that stands head and shoulders over everyone, including regular-season champion Indiana and tournament champion Ohio State, both of whom lost to the woefully inconsistent Badgers earlier this season.
And, as of 11 a.m., away we go,. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see some of these:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 