View From The Couch - 02/Sep/2016

The Shoe On The Other Foot

There's this old story in Japan called 'Rakuda' - which I've made into a little video you can look up on YouTube. It's about a polite guy who happens to come across the corpse of a gangster, and the gangster's 'Bro' is there to make his day miserable. The Bro sends the mild mannered guy on errands to organise a little wake for the dead gangster, while holdings work tools hostage. Later that night, the two men drink to the dead man. The polite man undertake influence of alcohol turns into a massive bully who returns the bullying spades. Trust me, it's very black but very funny.

Right now, Bill Shorten is that mild mannered man, sticking to the Bro, Malcolm Turnbull. Maybe it's broader, the whole ALP is the polite dude turned drunk and ornery and angry, while the Coalition is the guy who is suddenly on the receiving end of the exact same bullying he dished out.

It's quite the spectacle really, to see a
Government lose a vote in the Lower House. It hasn't happened since 1962 when Menzies had a one set majority, so it's rather telling.

Peter Hartcher has called for Christopher Pyne to get the boot. Pyne has denied it was his fault, which is like the biggest "who farted?" moment in politics I ca remember since... well, I don't know. It is a rather large fart. You'd think the Whip would be in for a bit of whipping from the PM. Even the missing Justice Minister Michael Keenan is trying to dodge blame. Much as I despise Christopher Pyne, I don't think it's on him - it's surely on the Chief Whip for the Liberals. The difficult bit is that it's a woman. Lose her and the Coalition would be told they're dumping the blame on a woman. You can just see it now.

Anyway, it's all come to pass that in the first week the new Parliament sitting, the one seat majority government has already run into an all too predictable ambush. This may be the bit where we're all forced to remember just how well Julia Gillard's government did with two seats. Of course 2 is mathematically 100% better than 1 so this is going to get very interesting very soon.

Or as the raging drunk nice guy says in 'Rakuda', "One thing I learnt is that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything!"

What's In A Name?

I've been re-reading Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract since I dug up that section on A-Rod, Jeter and Nomar. The most interesting things in life are in the marginalia. There are two MLB baseball players with the name Billy Hamilton. the one I was familiar with was this guy:

Billy R. Hamilton (born September 9, 1990) is an American professional baseball center fielder for the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball. Hamilton holds the Minor League Baseball single-season stolen base record with 155 steals — 10 higher than the previous Minor League record set by Vince Coleman and 25 more than Rickey Henderson's record set on the Major League level. He also holds the Cincinnati Reds record for most stolen bases by a rookie in a season.[1]

The thing to know about this Billy Hamilton is that he's very fast on the base paths.Now, in the 1890s section of Bill james' big book is a name Billy Hamilton  describing him as the best all round player of 1891, but also, the man with the most steals in the 1890s.The earlier Hamilton it turns out, was just as much a speed demon around the bases as the modern Billy Hamilton.

Hamilton broke into the major leagues in the American Association with the Kansas City Cowboys in 1888. He established himself as a star the following season by batting .301 with 144 runs and 111 stolen bases. In 1890, the Cowboys, who were ceasing operations, sold Hamilton to the Philadelphia Phillies. The next year he led the NL in batting average (.340), runs scored (141) and hits (179). For a third consecutive season, Hamilton led the NL in stolen bases. 

In 1892, Hamilton hit both a leadoff and game-ending home run in the same game. Only Vic Power (1957), Darin Erstad (2000), Reed Johnson (2003) and Ian Kinsler (2009) have accomplished the same feat.[4] He hit .380 in 1893, which led the major leagues.
Philadelphia outfielders Hamilton, Sam Thompson, Ed Delahanty and Tuck Turner all hit over .400 in 1894. That year Hamilton set the all-time standard for most runs scored in a season (198); since then, Babe Ruth has come closest to Hamilton in runs scored, with 177 in 1921, setting the American League and modern MLB record. Hamilton also set the record for most stolen bases in one game, with seven on August 31, 1894. He set the record for most consecutive games scoring one or more runs, with 35 runs in 24 games in July–August 1894.[5] 

Hamilton led the league in steals for a fifth time in 1895. In 1896, Hamilton moved to Boston, for whom he played his final six seasons. Although his numbers declined, Hamilton still scored over 100 runs in all but two of those seasons. 

Hamilton retired after the 1901 season. Over his career he compiled 912 (or 937; see Career total discrepancy) stolen bases, a .344 batting average and 1690 runs in 1591 games; he is one of only three players to average more than one run per game played. His .455 career on-base percentage ranks fourth all-time behind Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and John McGraw, and his 912 stolen bases ranks third behind Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock. 

He is the Philadelphia Phillies career leader in batting average (.361), on-base percentage (.468) and stolen bases (508). He holds Phillies single-season records for on-base percentage (.523 in 1894), runs (196 in 1894), stolen bases (111 in 1891) and times on base (355 in 1894).

I know, it's utter trivia. The two men are not immediately related. It's coincidence - if you have 100,000 names, you will get doubles like any set of baseball cards.

Economic Growth, They Say

They're Doing It Wrong

Nick Xenophon made an interesting remark last week that the RBA should shift its focus from inflation and on to nominal GDP growth. This is one of those interesting shifts worth considering because which ever way you look at it, inflation isn't the problem it used to be when Keating cut the RBA independent of government, so that it could independently set rates with the ai of controlling inflation. We're at a far cry from the era when Paul Volcker tamed inflation in America through jacking up interest rates. That world seems quaint, for we haven't been in that environment sense before the Dotcom Bubble burst at the turn of the Millennium.

Anyway, here's something interesting by Greg Jericho, going into the rationale for why Nick Xenophon might push for that change:

With the current policy, the worry is always that were inflation to rise due to fiscal policies, then the RBA would raise interest rates.

Thus we had the absurd situation last year where then Treasurer Joe Hockey was claiming the RBA had “room” to cut interest rates because the Abbott government’s spending cuts meant it “had been able to control the inflation genie”.
He said this at a point when underlying inflation hadn’t been above 3% for five years and nominal GDP was growing by just 1.3%.

Targeting nominal GDP resets the conversation.

Rather than having the government cutting spending (which reduces growth) in order to allow the RBA to cut interest rates to stimulate growth, both the fiscal and monetary arms could focus on improving growth – and it would put more pressure on the government rather than the current situation where it is leaving most of the work up to the RBA. 

Given government revenue has been hit due to the decline in nominal GDP growth, making that a focus would also assist with improving the budget balance.

Yes, it would make too much sense but of course the system isn't built for quick handbrake turns of policy like that, no, no.

It's worth going back to Glenn Stevens' last speech as Governor of the Reserve Bank.

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has used his farewell speech to implore the Turnbull government to take on more debt, saying that rate cuts alone can no longer "dial up the growth we need". 

Although interest rate cuts still had some effect, they worked through encouraging private borrowers to borrow more and had "possibly less" effect than in the past.

"The problem now is that there is a limit to how much we can expect to achieve by relying on already indebted entities taking on more debt," he said.
The government had far more room to borrow and spend than the private sector – owing only 40 per cent of GDP instead of 125 per cent.

"Let me be clear that I am not advocating an increase in deficit financing of day-to-day government spending," he said. "The case for governments being prepared to borrow for the right investment assets – long-lived assets that yield an economic return – does not extend to borrowing to pay pensions, welfare and routine government expenses, other than under the most exceptional circumstances. 

"The point I am trying to inject here is simply that popular debate in Australia about government debt and how we limit or reduce it seems so often to be conducted while largely ignoring the size of private debt. Foreign visitors to the Bank over the years have tended to raise questions about household debt much more frequently than they have raised questions about government debt."

So it's one thing for Nick Xenophon to say we need the RBA to prioritise growth rather than whacking signs of inflation. Given the toolset available to the Reserve Bank, which is basically raising or lowering the interest rates, there's really not much more the RBA can do to help growth.

That is to say, the limits of RBA policy - any Central Bank policy - resides at the zero-bound where Zero-Interest-Rate Policy lives. Glen Stevens may well retort to Nick Xenophon, "what the hell do you think we've been doing for the last 8years since the GFC, with historically low interest rates?"

Indeed, that's exactly where the Bank of Japan is at, trying to get economic growth to happen. It's trying massive "trans-dimensional" quantitative easing and yet there are minimal signs that the Japanese economy is coming out of its long slump. The conservative Prime Minster of Japan is telling the heads of the major corporations to raise wages instead of sitting on hoarded profits. It's a wild frontier of Central Banking experiments over in Japan, and really, I'm sure they wouldn't care which came good first, growth figures or inflation figures.

I'm going to go out on climb and say something that would scare fiscal conservatives and hawkish bankers. What Australia needs is a kind of debt forgiveness. So if the economy ends up at the Zero-bound with ZIRP, the RBA needs to forgive the private sector debt and helicopter that printed money into banks. People are going to hate that because basically they'll scream "moral hazard",   except when the economy has flatlined at the zero-bound, then the whole show needs a complete re-boot; and if there's one thing that keeps any economy from re-booting, it's debt.

Ben Bernanke's 'Helicopter Money', Applied

The logic for doing Helicopter money in Australia is pretty simple. People are not spending money because they're busy paying down mortgages as fast as they can. This isn't doing much good because it means the money goes from the bank to employer to employee and back to the bank without going through the economy. So you alleviate the mortgage stress, and the people will be inclined to spend their money. The government hands the printed money to the banks, buying out the debt on paper. Immediately there should be inflation because people now have money to go spend it on the next asset, That's when the Central Bank can re-set the interest rates at a more historic normal level.

Of course, it won't go that way because the bankers would lose out on long term money, but that would be the point. Somebody has to take a loss and the bank would have to get its money while losing out on future profit based on the booked loans. It hasn't happened because ultimately the economy is owned by the 1% and the 1% stands to make nothing out of "helicopter money". But the alternative is the current, comatose, low-growth low-inflation state in which we find ourselves.

The problem with QE as it's been carried out to date, and lots of it, they're finding in Japan, is that the money simply doesn't go to where it's supposed to go. The BOJ stuff the banks full of money, but the banks don't lend to sell businesses and entrepreneur. The lending practices still tend to lead the banks towards lending for fixed assets like property - and even then there's just not as much of that going around. The big companies of Japan's old industrial growth era are still profitable but they don't pay out dividends, and they don't give out pay-rises. They tend to sit on the big piles of cash and say they see nothing in which they want to invest.

The only way to make sure the money gets out an about in the economy is to hand it to the consumer and have them spend. In other words, it's like Capillarity Up economics. They cam very close to pulling the trigger on 'Helicopter money' this year in Japan, but at the last minute they held back. I guess there is something fundamentally weird for government stop simply be giving people money. Be that as it may, the Japanese may eventually have to do it; and if the precedent is set, other countries will do it. It's not like it's a new idea.

The Wisdom Of Solon And All That

It doesn't get discussed a whole lot unless you read a bit of ancient history. Solon, famously forgave debts. He also forbade the export foods except olives. He encouraged the cultivation of olives specifically as en export commodity. Meanwhile he forbade the export of foods because if staples got sent away, the poor would starve and that had terrible consequences for society. If you asked Solon, he'd object to 'Helicopter Money' as a policy but his big thing was debt forgiveness.

The ancient world is full of instances of debt forgiveness. The people in power in the ancient world probably looked at debt as something that becomes intractable and kills the economy. The Romans famously refuse to forgive debt and of course the aftermath of the Roman civilisation were the Dark Ages. So it is worth pondering what the hell we're going to do with a financial system that has created so much debt the world's GDP cannot begin to repay it. It's not likest's a problem that's going to go away. The more it sits there, it's going to chew away at the future, just as it is doing right now, only worse.

That's the historic context of all this bickering about debt. Something tells me the debt won't be forgiven, there won't be Helicopter Money, it's all going to crack up and turn to shit right before our very eyes. So much for civilisation.

Quick Shots - 27/Aug/2016

Balancing Books On The Backs Of The Poor

Scott Morrison is an ideologue, even under the heavy makeup he wears pretending to be pragmatic. Otherwise it's hard to understand the meaning of his speeches and how they connect to what he does as the Treasurer.

Heading into its fourth year in office, the Coalition government is again warning of a complacency in Australian politico-economic discourse, which blithely accepts rolling budget deficits as normal. 

Tilling the soil for a looming budget savings battle when Parliament resumes, Scott Morrison notes that most Australians have not experienced a recession in their adult lives and thus don't appreciate how terrible they can be. 

This insouciance has allowed for long-run operating shortfalls, and worse, an electorate-wide failure to realise that being structurally in the red is no way to go into a sharp global downturn, even if deficit financing is the obvious response once one occurs. 

Reworking Joe Hockey's infamous age of entitlement message with its notorious "lifters and leaners" dichotomy, Morrison believes too many people pay no tax effectively, and that the country is in danger of sleep-walking into economic distress because of a lack of imagination. And past political will.

And to that extent what he will do is start by cutting the dole. This is while the rich end o town still get to keep their superannuation perks. In other words, he is putting the poorest of Australians first into the firing line in a bid to fix the bottom line of the government. It's a novel idea if you don't really understand what that would mean, and it's an absurd idea if you do understand the ramification of such a course of action. Yet, this is the man.

Just as a contrast, the previous Conservative PM of Britain David Cameron - he of the Brexit vote and other calamities such as austerity - once said during the GFC that one thing his government would not do would be to balance the books of the government on the backs of the poor. Whether he meant it or not, or was able to do as he stated or not, I do not know. However, as positioning statements go, it's a lot better than "lifters and leaners" or "Taxed and Taxed-nots". I guess if you're the party that insists on conserving the class system, it pays to show some class sometimes. Seeing that we live in a class-less society according to the blue bloods, it is not that surprising to find conservatives in this country show no class whatsoever.

For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:

He Doesn't Understand The Problem

On a related topic, there's this interesting defence of the Prime Minister's $5 for the homeless person.

This week the Prime Minister spoke with a homeless guy in Melbourne and put $5 in his begging cup. Our mainstream media followed accusations that the PM was "stingy". This story – and picture of the Malcolm and the man with his cup – was reported around the country and was even reported in the New York Times. Now I never tell anyone to vote for any political party and I don't mind when people criticise government policy or lack thereof, but to call Malcolm Turnbull "stingy" is an outrage.

I don't know if it is an outrage. His government just cut $4.00 per week of dole money. If you looked at the $5 charity, it's like he's giving one person a one-off compensation for a shitty cut to benefits while he gives the middle finger to the rest. It's not that the Prime Minister is stingy so much as he doesn't understand that he's part of the problem that keeps the man homeless and on the street.

Malcolm has been here many times, sometimes with cameras and many times without. As the Bible says, good deeds should be in secret. 

He's put on an apron or sometimes just sat and spoken with homeless people in our community. Many times since those days when we were on the brink, the Turnbulls have helped us with breathtaking generosity. 

I happen to know that the help we've received is just the tip of their charitable iceberg. "Stingy" is not a word I'd ever use to describe our PM. 

Imagine the story in the media if the PM had put $100 in the cup? Our culture will be crippled and miserable when we become incapable of seeing an act of compassion.

It would still be myopic of the prime Minister tithing he's doing any good. It's pretty simple. He's the Prime Minister - he should be able to devise policy so there is minimal level housing available to the homeless, if people's homelessness really worried him. And if he can't it can only because he's too stupid or too incompetent or too unwilling to do just that; honestly the problem isn't whether the Prime Minister is stingy or not.

Gosh you know what? You never used to see homeless people in Sydney before '96. Certainly not in the numbers we're seeing today. People could be down and out and downright unemployable but the dole was there to make sure they could afford a place to live. It's not surprising that since John Howard won in 1996, Australia has somehow managed to create a class of misery out there all the while enjoying 20-odd years of economic growth. It just doesn't make sense that this is what has become of our nation. This is all a product of Neo-Liberalism. 

'Stranger Things'

80's Nostalgia

You know, it is really strange that I spent the 80's waiting for it to be over. I had a good time, and I was still this miserable son--of-a-so-and-so because the things that were happening didn't seem all that exciting. Maybe it was because on some level the 70's NYC experience was so much more formative than the 80's Sydney experience. All I know is that I've had this feeling of trying to find my way back to a feeling I had when I was younger. A fleeting moment here, a remembered emotion there. We all grow up even when we resist it as hard as us Gen-X have tried; time marches on inexorably and the inevitable crust and barnacle forms on your soul. You forget who you were a long time ago, even when you feel like you haven't changed all that much.

And then you discover other people are trapped by the past as well. The past is haunting. It's never what you remember it to be, and it's even weirder when you see somebody else's fiction about it. 'Stranger Things' is exactly that kind of TV series that evokes a lot and makes you remember the things you once yearned for, but it also reminds you of what is no longer there. It's funny, but it's also deeply tragic.

Spoiler alert, because it would be unfair if I didn't tell you now.


What's Good About It

It's like watching a mash-up of 80s movies. There are moments that come straight out of things like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.', while other moments are snatched from 'The Thing' and 'Gremlins' with a deep nod to 'Alien'. The whole thing is made up of fiction piled one on top of the other. The references in the dialogue echo 'Star Wars' and 'The Empire Strikes Back' while the tropes of a sleepy town Sheriff going on a search in to the woods is Stephen King. Somehow it all stays together without spinning out of control.

Indeed, the series is full of homages to films long past. Even 'The Wizard of Oz'. Eleven is Dorothy in a strange Oz and the boys are respectively Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Lion. When they walk along the train tracks in search of the Gate to theVale of Shadows, the quartet echo the quartet of 'Stand By Me', who walked along the rail tracks. When the kids are on the run from government agents' cars, as they ride their bicycles, they are Elliot and E.T. - but instead of them flying over blockades, Eleven flips a government van instead. At one point Sheriff Hopper finds himself in the Vale of Shadows, looking into a going husk of a large egg, a clear visual homage to 'Alien' - and he should know better than to peer in because Alien came out in 1979.

The kid actors are great in this series. There is nothing to top the sense of adventure in adolescence and the domain of the mind. It is a potent combination of intuition and imagination. The entire series of events hinges on the understanding the kids have of otherworldliness. Much like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.' before it, the adventure centre around the concept of the world as seen from kids. They're very well cast, not for them are the good looking boys of Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, of 'Stand By Me'. This bunch looks more likely as future candidates of Frank Zappa's band where ugly was not a problem.

David Harbour's Sheriff Hooper is strongly reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's look in 'The Shining', which adds to to the Stephen King thing going on. There are plenty of 80s tropes to pick at and laugh about so it's generally mirthful.

What's Bad About It

I wouldn't say it's bad, but I did wonder about Winona Ryder's performance. She's the lone actor in this series that comes with a high profile even though she's been out of the headlines since her days as the 90s It Girl for creepy movies. You take one look at her and you know it's all a certain kind of fiction, and it makes harder the wilful suspension of disbelief.

I waster so I can spot the anachronism well enough. Most of the production design is spot on but the wardrobe and makeup lapse into problems. Just because it's satin 1983 doesn't mean everything is from 1983, at the same time, the most likely things to be up to date are teen fashion and makeup, and there are some clunkers there. The blue eyeshadow here, the wrong kind of hairdo there, it's the little  things that occasionally poke out as being not quite right.

What's Interesting About It

It's actually quite Proust-ian with a Gen-X makeover. Instead of a madeira cake that evokes a lifetime of memories, it's a lifetime of memories tugged at through the idiosyncratic counterculture of kids. Instead of the whole story strung along on great themes of literature, it's strung up along Dungeons and Dragons. The monster in question comes straight out of the pages of 'the Monster Manual', it is the Demogorgon - and I must add it is one of my favourite monsters in the Manual:

Yes, that's him the Prince of Demons, and while the monster doesn't look like that in this series, it is unmistakably of Dungeons and Dragons. Why does one like certain monsters in the Monster Manual? I know my DM loved Owlbears, the "product of cruel genetic experiments" as per the Monster Manual. The rich Gary Gygax text provides hours of interesting meditation on civilisation. Somehow it is informing the abstract in this series.

This isn't 'Hook' where Spielberg condescends to understanding the culture of Gen-X kids - this is how the other kids not Elliott were living 1983.

Government Conspiracies

The show leans heavily on the conspiracy theories, and giving them more credence than one normally would. But here's the thing: Conspiracy Theorists rightly or wrongly get ridiculed. The problem with that is ridiculing Conspiracy Theorists is exactly what the CIA want you to do. The truth is, whether you believe it or not, the US government has always been doing things in secret involving lots of people. That, is the working definition of conspiracy so, it's not surprising it spawns speculation.

One of the more out-there bits of conspiracy theory way back when was that the US Government was secretly manufacturing the LSD that found its way into the West Coast counterculture. This is a claim that was documented at the time, and even Philip K. Dick uses it in 'A Scanner Darkly' as the central plot problem that gets uncovered by protagonist Bob Actor. Of course, it turned out MKULTRA was real, and the CIA were experimenting with LSD on people for purposes mind control.

This a certainly level of discomfort watching the bits to do with the Government agency running crackpot experiments on kids, but at the same time what would the world fiction be without governments doing nefarious experience on people? Information was hard to come by in the 1980s. It was easy for governments to keep people in the dark. The discomfort of watching it was a reminder that when sitcoms to the flow of information, maybe the 80s were closer to the dark ages than the current internet age.

The character of Eleven is far-fetched, but not as far fetched as we might have believed 1983.

Paranoia Has A Name And It Is Lando Calrissian

At the business end of the story when the boys go in hiding from government agents and they are contacted by Sherif Hopper, they immediately suspect the Sheriff has been compromised. They base this on the part of 'The Empire Strikes Back', where Lando Calrissian betrays his friends Han and Leia to Darth Vader. It's an interesting construction because the kids are right to suspect. They quote the Star Wars mantra "I have a bad feeling about this", and then make a leap of faith to trust Sheriff Hopper.

The world around the boys is filled with ambiguity in a way that Dungeons and Dragons eschews. In D&D, the world is divided into alignments, and the alignments dictate one's actions. The strange blurring of Government into what can only be described evil affects not only the boys but even the adults around them. The reference Lando Calrissian then is not just about betrayal, but the undecidability in the face of ambiguity.

The Rule Of Law And The Adventurer's Code

At one point the gang falls apart in dissension. It is the toothless boy Dustin who re-asembles the group by the dint of the adventurer's code and the strict adherence to the code, stating it is the Rule of Law. It's actually a strangely moving moment. Dustin cites the times the party is preyed upon by monsters simply because they did not stick together. Sticking together a the party is how to survive adventures. Splitters perish. The lessons of the game inform Dustin's forceful argument that Mike offer the hand of peace to Lucas. When Mike refuses to countenance, Dustin thunders it is the Rule of Law, that he who draws first blood in conflict must atone for the act first.

What's interesting is that Dungeons of Dragons does provide players with this insight. Carnies should stick together for the same reason parties should stick together. Disunity is, as the ALP found out, death. Certainly Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten et al. would have benefited greatly from this wisdom, and tarred and feathered Tony Burke.

If there are two observations to be made about what Dungeons and Dragons offers players is the insight that life is speculative and statistical, while our response to it needs to be tempered impartial as the law dictates. Sticking to party its rules saves lives in the game. Sticking to the impartiality of the rule before law renders possible all the things we hold dear.

It is therefore the crowning moment of the series when the three boys reconcile themselves and with Eleven. It is about as profound as anything in the annals of literature. The party should always stick together.

The Music

Gee y'know? That's exactly the music that made the 80s musically unbearable. Little did I know back then that things were only going to get worse. :)

The faux John Carpenter synth music as the theme however, is nothing but unmitigated coolness.


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A Postscript For A-Rod

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Excerpt

Since A-Rod's retirement, I fished out my copy of 'The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract', which has the following write-up on Alex Rodriguez:

17 - Alex Rodriguez
(1994-2000, 70G, 189 595 .309)
 The best seasons ever by a 20-year old player. 

1. Ty Cobb, 1907
2. Silver King, 1888
3. Alex Rodriguez, 1996
4. Dwight Gooden, 1985
5 Mickey Mantle, 1952
6. Bob Feller, 1939
7. Ted Williams, 1939
8. Mel Ott, 1929
9. Al Kaline, 1955
10. Noodles Hahn, 1899

Of the other nine players on the list, six went on to have Hall of Fame careers. The three who failed to do so were all pitchers - Silver King, Doc Gooden and Noodles Hahn

Then right below it, he has a section that goes:

XXX - Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Jeter
It is too early to rate Nomar garciaparra and Derek Jeter; the same is true of A-Rod, of course. I have nothing to add to the constant hype that accompanies all three men, except that I will observe that it seems likely that all three men will rate amongst the Top 20 at the position and that I would regard any stronger statement as speculation. We do not know whether any of these men will eventually have better seasons than they have already had. 

Pretty careful avoidance-of-prognostication there. For the record, the final tally for these guys were:

• Alex Rodriguez: 114.9 oWAR, 9.5dWAR from BRef, and 112.9 WAR from Fangraphs.
• Nomar Garciaparra: 42.6 and 6.0dWAR from BRef and 41.4WAR from Fangrpahs.
• Derek Jeter: 95.5oWAR, -9.5dWAR from BRef and 71.7WAR from Fangraphs.

Baseball Reference seems to think all three were better than what Fangraphs has them pegged as having been.

By our contemporary reckoning and ignoring the PED issue, A-Rod clocks in at about the 14th best player of all time, while Derek Jeter sits at about no.50. If you think about the value to the franchise, A-Rod delivered about 60-odd WAR to the Yankees. That's pretty remarkable lump of performance. Eyeballing the Shortstops in the HOF, and again ignoring the PED issue, A-Rod and Jeter would be a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame, but Nomar falls short (50WAR is about the cut off for HOF consideration for Shortstops).

Ravaged by injuries, Nomar really didn't get to rack up the counting stats. A-Rod moved off Shortstop in favour of Derek Jeter, which is going to be one of those stories they'll be talking about a hundred years from now. So A-Rod's value at Shortstop ceases at 2003; even so A-Rod did rack up 52WAR as a Shortstop to that point in time, so if he dropped dead at the end of 2003 instead of playing for the Yankees, he still did better than Nomar's entire career and still would be worthy of being a Hall of Famer.

As it is, it is most certain that only Jeter will make the Hall of Fame out of these three men. Not something Bill James might have predicted given what was in front of us in 2000. Things played out much more strangely than one might have predicted back then. I was asked his week if I went soft on PED cheats because all these Yankees like A-Rod, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens and Jason Giambi got caught. It's most likely true that I did. Taking those drugs sure didn't make those teams win the World Series more. For all the personal records and even the numbers in the seasonal win columns, the Yankee dynasty after 2001 was more notable for how fruitless it was given how much money was being invested. A-Rod was the poster boy even for that.

Yet if it really gets down to the brass tacks, A-Rod was trying to win each year. I'm not going to fault him for something like that given that half of professional sports is about the entertainment value. The numbers might be tainted by PEDs, but at the end of the day there's only the championships and flags fly forever. We were mightily entertained by A-Rod, and that's the truth. I can't fault him for trying to entertain us more. Pretending that simple relationship doesn't exist in spectator sports is exactly what makes lesser sports boring.

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2016

You Gotta Laugh

This hung Parliament thing is going to be 'fun'. The ALP have basically promised to return the favour from the 2010 Hung Parliament where they won't grant a 'pair'. Naturally, the Coalition is unhappy about it.

In 2011, the Coalition threatened to not grant a pair to controversial Labor backbencher Craig Thomson when his wife was due to give birth during heated debate on the Labor government's carbon pricing legislation. 

"I think that a party, whose principles around looking after people in the workplace ... it's a really sad day when they say if someone's having a baby they're not going to allow them a pair, if someone's sick they're not going to allow them a pair," he said. 

"I don't think it was ever as savage as that [during the 43rd Parliament when Julia Gillard was prime minister]. If they ever say that someone, by reason of infirmity, is not going to be allowed a pair then that doesn't say much about a party that prides itself on looking after the worker."

Yes, yes it was. It's like these people have neither memory nor conscience! At the time, Tony Abbott took a no-holds-barred approach to his running of the Opposition and only grudgingly gave a pair for Michelle Rowland. Yes, this extract is from those ugly days:

Mr Entsch says he refused the pair on the basis there was no sense of urgency.
He has now issued a statement saying if Ms Rowland's "child is sick then she should leave the Parliament immediately and a pair will be granted". 

Speaking to The World Today, Mr Entsch said he granted Ms Rowland leave when he read about the matter in this morning's paper, but labelled her leave request "a stunt".
"The issue of backbench pairs was raised with me first at a meeting I had with the new chief Government whip on Monday," he said. 

"Included in that was a request for Mike Kelly. He sought a pairing for a family medical matter, and I said to him at that time, send it over to me but there's not a lot of detail there, I'll need more than that to be able to approve it. 

"There was also a request there from Michelle Rowland where she said due to her child being unwell that she'd be grateful if she could return home on Thursday night.
"My comment to Chris [Hayes] at the time was that if the child is unwell, she shouldn't be down here, she should be with her child. 

"It seems rather bizarre to be putting in a request on Monday or Tuesday asking for a leave on Thursday night because a child is unwell.
"If it's unwell now, she should be with it. 

"No other information was available to me and on the basis of that I said look, I can't approve it on the basis of the information that's been provided to me.

If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

"Now later on [Mr Hayes] came back to me and he said to me that Mike Kelly's wife was sick. She'd been in hospital for a couple of weeks and he needed to sit with her. On that basis I changed my position and approved that. 

"At no point from that discussion until I read about it in the paper on Thursday morning had there been any further discussion to me or my office in regards to Michelle Rowland.
"If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

Classy! 

Anyway. Joyce thinks that was wrong, and so two wrongs won't make a right. The answer to that is you should've thought of that before you let the precedent cat loose. Once you set a precedent, it's really hard to get the precedent cat back into the bag, so to speak. 

He said Mr Abbott and manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne were wrong to take the hardline approach against Ms Rowland. 

"If those decisions were made, then I think those decisions were also wrong ... and so I don't think two wrongs are ever going to make a right." 

Mr Joyce said the government should be "realistic and decent" in operating the Parliament. 

Speaking on ABC radio, Ms O'Dwyer said the dispute was a demonstration of unnecessary partisanship. 

"It would be turning about 50 years of convention on its head," she said. 

"Frankly I think the Australian people are very sick of party political games. 

"We want more women in the Parliament, we want people who have got parental responsibilities putting their hand up for Parliament. 

"For Labor to turn around and say, where you've got family emergences you are not going to be able to leave ... I think they need to explain why they've made that decision," she said.

*Ugh*. Spew.
The rank hypocrisy of these people. Really, if Ms O'Dwyer thinks 50years of convention means something now, she be well advised she certainly didn't behave that way back in 2013, because that was her and her party turning 47years of convention on its he'd when it suited them for absolutely short term political gain. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and it's about to be firmly lodged in their butt cracks, Joyce is asking for realism and decency. If he wants realism, he can recant his stupid climate change denials and if he wants decency he can argue in favour of doing something about Manus and Nauru detention centres. 

For crying out loud... 

It's Gold, Gold, Gold! (As The ABS Shoots Own Goal)

Pleiades sent me a Bernard Keane article, and in it is a little discussion about Olympic funding:

And more than a third of voters think we spend too much money on Olympic sports: 36% of voters say we spend too much money — with little difference between voters of different parties — while just 11% say we don’t spend enough; 34% say we spend about enough. Fifty-one per cent of voters say it’s very important or quite important that we win gold medals in Rio; 43% say it’s not important. Greens voters are the most underwhelmed by gold medals — just 29% say it’s important, compared to 63% of Liberal voters. Men — 56% — are more likely to think gold medals are important than women (47%), while older voters are less inclined to view them as important than younger voters. But there are fewer differences between people on overall interest in the Olympics — 19% say they have a lot of interest (21% men, 16% women) and 17% say no interest — although Coalition voters are the least likely to say they have no interest, and women are more likely than men — 20% to 15%.

I mean, we're just grumpy on the Left, okay? If we weren't grumpy, we probably won't be on the Left. 

Worth Flying For

Victorian Police are looking to fly to the Vatican to interview Cardinal Pell over allegations that he was a pederast too. 

In a statement, Victoria Police confirmed it has received advice from the Department of Public Prosecutions in relation to allegations of historical sexual assaults committed in Ballarat East between 1976 and 1980, and East Melbourne between 1996 and 2001. 

"We have received advice from the DPP and will now take the time to consider it," A Victoria Police spokeswoman said.

I say go ahead, make our day. Pell spent years being the ornery conservative wowser making people's lives a misery. He should be served a bit of his own medicine.

View From The Couch - 16/Aug/2016

'Eddie The Eagle'

Goodness, the Olympics are on and what do I end up watching? I watch a movie about a guy who barely made the cut and did pretty badly to make a spectacle of himself. I've really not followed the Olympics this time and I feel a secret guilt about it, but there's only so much Beach Volleyball and Swimming I can take. I've seen snippets of other events but I'm just finding it hard to get into it this time around.

'Eddie The Eagle' is a feel-good comedy that is built from the template of 'Cool Runnings'. Eddie the Eagle himself has said he likes the film but only 5% of what happened in it are true. So, it's basically 95% a crock, and it plays like that too. The cool coach that teaches Eddie just enough to get in to the competition played by Hugh Jackman? complete bollocks. The backstory of the coach? Complete bollocks. Otherwise the story is a beat-by-beat re-run of 'Cool Runnings' except it's a hopeless Englishman instead of 4 Jamaicans in the snow, and Eddie finishes his event but he's utterly below standard so even the moral victory of it is suspect.

Now, the Olympics have changed the rules so there won't ever be an Eddie The Eagles style competitor. It raises the question as to whether that is still in the spirit of Coubertin's original ideas about Olympic Games. Today it is undeniably an exercise in elitism so it's hard to say to the common person in any given country they should be enthused about all this sport. In a sense, Eddie The Eagle himself and the rule he spawned combined, is the reductio ad absurdum of Coubertin's ideal that the point wasn't winning or losing but the struggle. The modern Games as we know them certainly puts a lie to that one. It is about elite athletes winning and losing.

Of course, it was bleeding obvious by the way our media carries on about our swimmers.

Sports Nationalism Is Actually Boring

This business of spending taxpayers' money on athletes to bring back gold medals is a bit on the nose. There's a certain level whereby if an athlete wants to become elite and perform at the Olympics, they're really doing it for themselves. They're not doing it for their country, really. Certainly not in the same way that soldiers go and fight under a flag do it. Is all this fuss really necessary? Is there any reason on God' Green Earth that Australia needs even one more medal of any colour?

When I think about the summer Olympic gold medals won by Australia, the two that pop into mind are old ones. John Sieben snuck by for gold in LA '84. That same year Dean Lukin won a gold in weight lifting - mainly because the Soviets boycotted the LA Games, and so his major rivals were entirely absent. Both of them sort of were serendipitous, which underlies the notion that Olympic Gold medals are thus precious because fate is so random. When it gets down to Winter Games gold medals, the mot memorable will always be Steve Bradbury, mainly because his win illustrates exactly how fickle and wanton fortunes of the Games can be.

In none of these cases were our national profile raised any higher, none of these cases really added to GDP or contributed to the betterment of mankind. It had about a couple days' worth of good feeling and that was it. The wins - watched from afar - were more akin to going to a really good rock concert. The buzz wears off pretty quickly and memories of Olympics past are pretty ordinary things next to other televised-memory-merchandise. We spend millions on it and then divide up the spending with numbers medals won. I'm here to tell you it's just not doing it for me. I'd really rather they spent that money on health and education. Really. If it's so damn important to our society, sports funding is one area of the government I'd be entirely happy to privatise. Sport is important, but no that important. There's something truly demented about where we've come to with our engagement with sport.

Madness Masquerading As Politics

This has got to be the theme of 2016 - and I'm not talking about Donald Trump. It's our own Senator Malcolm Roberts, he of the second One Nation ticket into the senate.

We've elected Norman Gunston to the Senate.
How did it come to this? We're not a nation of complete nongs. We're a nation who made a hero, across several generations of children, of a physicist who's trademark line was a four-word advertisement for science.

"Why is it so?" Julius Sumner Miller would ask, and we relied on science to provide the answer. Even Mrs Marsh tapped the boffin in us, with her chalk dipped in dye celebrating the benefits of fluoride. "It does get in!" said the kids, believing the evidence of their own eyes. 

Oh no it doesn't, would be Malcolm Roberts' reply, perhaps with a triumphant assertion that teeth aren't made of chalk. And to the question "Why is it so?", he might reply, as he did on Q&A: it's a NASA stitch-up. 

Roberts: "First of all, that the data has been corrupted and we know…"
Cox: "What do you mean by 'corrupted'? What do you mean?"
Roberts: "Been manipulated…"
Cox: "By who?"
Roberts: "By NASA."
Cox: "NASA?!" 

The audience erupted in laughter, as Cox pressed: "This is quite serious" - before Jones tried to restore decorum.

"We have to hear what is being said here," Jones admonished. "It is all very well to laugh but we have to hear what is being said." 

Actually, it was hearing what was said that was the problem, as panellist Lily Serna, a mathematician, noted: "First of all, I cannot believe we're having this conversation." Discussing the scientific consensus on climate change, she told Roberts: "You don't ask your architect to read your medical charts just as you don't ask your accountant to perform surgery on you."

Good Grief Charlie Brown. I guess it's important to expose the man for exactly what he is, a wilful  nutjob who indulges in conspiracy theories in order not to face reality. That we have elected such a fantasist to the Parliament is truly astounding. As if a portion of the population - 77 votes, apparently - is infected by a particularly powerful strain of stupid, and somehow their views had to be reflected in the polity.

And The Dynasty Finally Ended

Goodbye A-Rod, 

It's been a while since I wrote an entry about the New York Yankees, but hey, when some big time players announce their up upcoming retirements, it's time to have a look. The last time I wrote anything about the Yankees was when Derek Jeter retired at the end of 2014. While 2015 had its own little pleasant surprises, the nub of the problem was that the remaining players beyond what was once the 'Core Four' were getting older, and the other players were merely role players. The Dynasty has been receding from its historic peak for years.

I'll always be an A-Rod fan. At the end of the day I always appreciated his hitting. The whole PED issue has stepped back in importance for me when I look at his career. Sure, he took PEDs and possibly hit more than his fair share. Maybe he did it his entire career? May be he did it as a teen and that's how he became the A-Rod we know in the first place? One can think of the worst of him and come up with ever more theories about the relative merits of his career. I opt to put those things to the side for the simple reason that those homers and hits are real enough.

It is wilfully putting my head in the sand, I guess, for the world of sport screams out loud against "drug cheats".  The thing is, it's nothing like match-fixing. The athlete taking drugs to win, is going exactly in the direction everybody wants to them to go: to excel in performance like no other mortal human being. So, I've decided no, I'm not going to hold the steroids against the steroids era players. It's silly. MLB tacitly allowed this to happen under their watch and then belatedly hunted out players and made examples of them. It's not right, it's not a two-way street, it was a witch hunt concocted by Bud Selig so that he wouldn't have to look bad for having presided over the steroids era.

The truth is, it shouldn't be about the PEDs, the steroids, the allegations, the suspensions. It should be about the guy who was possibly the most talented player of all time. Win or lose, hit or miss, A-Rod provided a mountain load of entertainment for 23years. Twenty-three years! He was the heel, he was feared, he was outrageous, he was hilarious, he was the guy that always compared worse to Derek Jeter in the eyes of the New York Media, but had better numbers. He was all those things, rolled into one, and a once-in-a lifetime player like you will never see again. When I put it under the rationality light, I for one don't really fault the amazing trade that Brian Cashman swung to land A-Rod in 2003. The Yankees got well over a decade of something special from the guy.

We'd be chumps to pretend that didn't happen, or that it didn't mean anything. It meant the world.

Goodbye Tex

As for Mark Teixeira, he too reached the end of the road this year. The injuries caught up to him. He was making noises during Spring training that he'd like to go another 5 years after this season but obviously he said those things before the injuries got out of hand.

Out of eight seasons, Tex had 3 excellent seasons, 2 good seasons, 2 injury-curtailed seasons, and this one where he simply failed to provide any value at all for three months. All the same, it's a pretty good outcome for an 8year contract. As with A-Rod, there's no point complaining about the end being what it is. The Yankees signed him to a long contract just to land him in 2009, and they won the World Series on the back of that signing.

Tex isn't going to make the Hall of Fame, but he is in the imaginary Hall of the Very Good. The amazing thing about Teixeira for me is that I can remember the year he was drafted by the Rangers. The Cubs drafted Mark Prior, and they both made their debut in 2003. It doesn't seem all that long ago. Especially because A-Rod was already in his prime and in his last year as a Texas Ranger that year Teixeira came up into the big leagues. Arguably, the Rangers had the infield of the future in Teixeira, A-Rod, Hank Blalock, Michael Young, and Ivan Rodriguez behind the plate. It's a weird kind of twist of fate that brought half that infield to the Yankees by 2009, only 6 years later.

Amazingly, Tex's tenure at 1B for the Yankees follows in the footsteps of long tenures before him. There have only been five 1B since Mattingly won his spot as a regular in 1984. He went 12 seasons to '95; Tino Martinez went 6 seasons from '96 to '01; Jason Giambi wen from '02 to '08, and that brings us to Teixeira. For the first time since 1983, the Yankees will go into a season without knowing  who will be playing 1B.

The New Kids On The On-Deck Circle

It wasn't just A-Rod and Tex announcing retirements. Brain Cashman also traded away Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Carlos Beltran to load up the farm system. The real story in a sense has been how decisively the Yankees have gone about re-casting their future and the talent they acquired to shape that future.

The Yankees have, for once, collected a lot of talent in their farm system. They have depth at just about every position. In fact they have the most depth at SS which is the hardest to fill. They go 6 deep at SS, starting with Gregorius at the Big League level, Tyler Wade in AA, Gleyber Torres and Jorge Mateo at High A, Hoy Jun Park and Kyle Holder in Low-A. That's a lot of depth. Even first base will have a competition next year with Greg Bird coming back from injury and Tyler Austin graduating the farm this year. They also have a packed outfield with recent additions Clint Frazier and Bill McKinney as well as Aaron Judge.

Not all of these guys will make it, but the Yankees potentially have one of the younger rosters in the AL  next season. It really is a re-boot of the team, right from the ground up. I don't think I've seen anything like this in the Yankees since 1995. Chances are, the young core to emerge out of all these young players won't win a World Series until 2020, but depending on the way things break, this group might peak earlier than expected, just as the aged veterans were forced out sooner than they had hoped.

I can recall back in 2009 when the Yankees wont World Series that the window had closed on that team. The 2009 win was the last win possible with the Core Four. A quick survey of the farm system at the time revealed that the Yankees would project to being a pitching and defence sort of team by 2016-2017. Judging from the makeup of the current team, it's something that has come to fruition, if a little less effectively than hoped. Yet the new kids projecting forward seem to provide an ample horizon where the Yankees will once again be The Bronx Bombers.
That's one sure thing about Baseball - hope always does spring eternal.

'Concussion'

A Serious Topic

I've never been great with collision sports. I never wanted to play them because I'm well-attuned to my own pain thank you very much. Some kids love it, but I never wanted to do it. Yeah, I'm wimpy that way - but I'll have you know my brain is intact.

It's amazing how collision sports forms the backbone of national identity in anglophone countries. There's Rugby in the UK with its component nations, South Africa, New Zealand, and then there's Australia where there are two varieties and Australian Rules. There are the two north American varieties of "Football" which are nothing like the beautiful game, both of which feature helmets and protectors and people colliding at great speed. If you speak English, you're in for a sport where people crash into one another over a bit of inflated pigskin.

Perhaps then it took a total outsider to the anglophone culture to pierce the veil of denial surrounding collision sports. This film shows what it all looks like from an outsider's eyes.




What's Good About It

For quite an explosive topic, the film is very stately and careful. It goes a long way towards telling the story of the doctor who discovered CTE, and not going for the sensational angle in the spotlight. The ramifications of the findings are frightening enough, so the film leads you through the chain of events that led to the discovery and disclosure.

It's nice watching a straight up drama. Nobody pulls a gun, nobody drives like a maniac through traffic lights, nobody ducks and takes cover in a hail of bullets, nobody goes to court to make a big speech, nobody leaps into action to do something impossible. It'll told in a very direct, human dimension, and you're grateful for it when you watch it. Will Smith, Alec Baldwin and the rest of the cast put in very controlled, subtle performances.

It's a good film; It's not a great work of cinema, but it's an important film that communicates the discovery of the problem.

What's Bad About It

It's so understated that it gets a little like a telemovie in parts. We get that Dr. Bennet Omalu's private life and professionalize found themselves at a complex juncture, but some of it just eats screen time and doesn't tell us how the NFL is responding.

It's probably the choice of the director not to go too much into the NFL's response to the findings, but it feels a little too balanced towards Dr. Omalu's life. It's a big story so they could have gone for just how large the story is. Instead there's a muted quality to that critical interaction.
It's not bad as such but it is dissatisfying in the context of a very well made film.

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting aspect of the film remains its central subject matter, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Perhaps it's better to have the real doctor discuss this.

Omalu told Fairfax he has watched AFL and NRL on satellite television: "My impression? Those sports remind me of the gladiatorial sports in ancient Rome." Given heavy body contact is a feature of both codes, he categorises them similarly to American football. 

Omalu's opinion is that no one under the age of 18 should play games without rules that forbid all manner of heavy knocks that can culminate, over time, in brain damage. His position is based on the scientifically proven fact that brains remain unformed until that age. 

"Papers that came out this month alone, scientific papers, have shown that if you suffer one concussion, just one, as a child, that you are about 16 times more likely to commit suicide as an adult," he said. 

"Papers that have come out last year have shown that, as a child, the younger you are when you begin to suffer exposure to brain trauma – with or without concussions – the greater the likelihood that you cannot attain your God-given intellectual capacity."
CTE is described as having a strangling effect on the human brain. A by-product of repeated head and body blows, it is caused by a build-up of a protein named tau that essentially overtakes healthy cells.

So that's probably where the discussion should start.
If you look at these collision sports with a fresh eye, it's actually quite disturbing how often you see full-paced collision with people's heads being flung in all kinds of directions. We've known about boxers getting brain degenerative diseases after retirement for many years, perhaps headlined by Muhammed Ali and his Parkinson's Disease. It stands to reason that if you are taking concussion damage on a regular basis for many years, it manifests itself as brain disease.

The most important image might the avocado stone in a glass jar sloshing around in water that Will Smith's Dr. Omalu uses to show us what a brain is, under concussion. He shakes it hard to show the avocado stone slosh and smash into the jar at both ends. It may actually be the world's least surprising diagnosis.

The Joy Of Biff (In The English Speaking World)

The thing is, these collision sports hold such a sacred spot in the culture the anglophone world. It's a real badge honour to have played these games growing up. If you keep playing them as an adult, it's sort of like an extra badge of manhood and masculinity. We judge certain players negatively if we perceive them to be "tackle-shy", which only underlines how much value we place in taking part in the collision aspect of these games.

We value the contact, we love gratuitous bouts of "the biff", we admire the tough men who can run around for 80-odd minutes and inflict this as much as they can take it. If the Super Bowl is the highest rating television event in the USA, it is mirrored by the NRL State of Origin in Australia, and the Rugby World Cup is certainly a festival of hard collisions on the field. It's ingrained into our culture, like some baked-in ingredient of our worldview. Speak English? Expect to understand the beauty of collision sports.

Against that context, this doctor sure has thrown a cultural bomb. As much as I find identity politics passé, it's hard to imagine an anglophone culture denied of its collision sports, or certainly what remains of the the collision sport if the collisions were taken out. It isn't just the football fields of the world that is going to be affected by this understanding.

The CTE diagnosis and spreading understanding has moved to other sports. Major League Baseball changed the rules to do with catchers covering home plate - collisions are to be avoided, and there are now strict rules on where a catcher can position himself. Jorge Posada was moved off from catching in his last season because it was deemed he hashed one too many concussion episodes colliding at home plate. Concussion is turning out to be a serious complication in the administration over collision and contact sports.

This is a far cry from Rivaldo taking a dive clutching his face. And we hold Rivaldo and soccer players who dive in contempt exactly because it's so ingrained in us that players of these collision sports are so damn tough.

You can understand why the NFL resisted the findings as much as it is portrayed in the film. Subsequent studies are finding the phenomenon is quite widespread. 96% of former NFL players have CTE. It's not going to "get better". If one plays a collision sport, one is putting oneself directly at risk of getting brain trauma injury; and that being the case, there really isn't good future with these sports. The NRL's position on CTE for instance is guarded and defensive. Some think the clubs are in denial. Not surprising given the amount of mirth the sport enjoyed around Mario Fenech getting concussed during his career.

The AFL isn't doing much better. The ARU is noticeably silent on the issue. Elsewhere, they're finding the same problems with retired NHL hockey players. Even soccer players are coming to light with their header plays, as being significantly at risk. The diagnosis of Lou Gehrig having had ALS (a.k.a "Lou Gehrig's Disease") is beginning to look doubtful. People have conjectured that it might have been the multiple concussions Gehrig received playing in the days without a batting helmet.

Given what we know today, if I had kids, I wouldn't let them near collision sports, except as a spectator. If enough people - and parents at that - took my view, the future of these sports is doomed.

News That's Fit To Punt - 05/Aug/2016

BOE Set Interest Rates At Lowest Rates Ever

We live in interesting times. If you see things that are once in a generation, then live long enough you might see it twice. There are people who presumably experienced the Great Depression firsthand, and are now experiencing the GFC audits aftermath. Yet, even they would never have witnessed the Bank of England settler interest rates this low.  That would be because it's the lowest 322 years.

The central bank's Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to lower its benchmark interest rate to 0.25 per cent, the lowest level in the bank's 322 years. The rate had been at 0.5 per cent since March 2009.

further this year, but he ruled out the possibility of negative interest rates. The committee's next meeting is set for November.

The bank also said that it would introduce a series of additional measures to support the economy, predicting that there would be little growth in the second half of this year and that economic growth would decline sharply next year compared with its earlier forecast for 2017.

What we're seeing, is the Bank of England moving to the point where it no longer has any means of adding stimulus to a moribund economy.  

The Bank of Japan has been doing this for over 20years. There's a whole generation of people in Japan who grew up under low interest rates and low inflation that they cannot imagine a world with 6%-8% interest rates and 5-9% inflation. You wouldn't be saying it too loud, but it appears the British economy has entered a similar twilight zone where no amount of interest rate cutting and stimulus spending can reflate the economy. 

It's a strange state of affairs, when you think about it. The central banks are virtually giving money away to banks so they can lend into capital investment. The place where most of the money ends up is in fixed assets, namely housing, and businesses just hoard cash instead. The consumer expects prices to drop in the future so they too hold on to cash; and together they form an environment where demand is low. The rest of the heartache and sorrow, about which you know, so I won't go into it today. I just thought it was worth noting that if you see an institution doing something it hasn't in 322years, you're seeing something very extraordinary; something they'll be talking about in a thousand years' time.

The question I want answered is how do we get to the other side of this malaise without wars and revolutions and killing each other? Because that's what usually happened in the past. 

About Those Jobs In America That Were Lost To Free Trade

I caught this during the week and it's an interesting little article because it shows we might be overstating the extent to which globalisation is eating up manufacturing jobs. If you go through to the Op Ed it is citing, you get this:

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has indeed been in a long decline since the late 1970s, but that disguises the true story of American manufacturing. Nostalgia for a bygone era blinds politicians and voters alike to the reality of a revitalized sector of the American economy that is thriving in a global market.

American factories and American workers are making a greater volume of stuff than ever — high-tech, high-value products that are competitive in markets around the world. In the last 20 years, which include enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, real, inflation-adjusted U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40%. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion.

What has changed in recent decades is what our factories produce. Americans today make fewer shirts, shoes, toys and tables than we did 30 years ago. Instead, America’s 21stcentury manufacturing sector is dominated by petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fabricated metals, machinery, computers and other electronics, motor vehicles and other transportation equipment, and aircraft and aerospace equipment. 

We produce more manufacturing value with fewer employees than in years past because today’s workers are so much more productive. They are better educated, equipped with more sophisticated capital machinery and turn out more valuable products than their parents’ generation. And as a result they are better paid, with total manufacturing payrolls rising during the last decade even as the number of workers declined.

The article in a nutshell says it's technological progress that has eaten the jobs, not trade. I'd imagine that this is true in Australia as well. There are good trade deals and bad ones (like theTPP they keep trying to pass), but in most part the economy has had rational players when it comes to manufacturing goods. 

I've had a number of discussions with people about this very phenomenon. It has been argued by empirical economists in the past that technological development does not kill jobs, it more than creates more jobs. That when the car came about, the horse-drawn buggy makers went out of business but lots of people found employment making cars; and so when the Australian automotive industry closes, those people will inevitably find employment in areas of higher technology. It makes sense that this has happened, but it seems unlikely that re-training auto-manufacturing workers into high tech workers of unspecified industries is the same as retraining buggy makers into auto-manufacturing workers. 

Similarly, the past performance is no predictor of future performance, and so we cannot simply subscribe to the view that it will happen again because it happened before. The implication being derived out of the empirical numbers, seem to be technological progress is happening in such as way as to cut the rate at which future jobs are created. We're now on the incline where each new development will likely destroy more job than they create, which is a new phenomenon.

The Rudd Revenge Is Just Beginning

Here we go!

"What I don't respect is, having pursued this campaign for United Nations secretary-general for such a long period of time in abso­lute good faith, to then see that good faith dishonoured and trust broken,"Mr Rudd told The Australian.

Arguing he had no interest in pursuing a "quixotic venture", Mr Rudd claimed his continued campaign to be the next secretary-general was based on assurances and underlying assumptions of support from both the Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop.

For his part, Mr Turnbull has again insisted that he told his predecessor that it was a decision for cabinet and warned him in May that the chances of his nomination going ahead were not good.

Oh, I dunno what to say. This Parliament hasn't even sat yet and they've managed to make a problem out of a trifle.

Being Where?

Maybe We Need To Talk About The Donald (Some More)

One of the more interesting narratives developing is the notion that Donald Trump isn't all there. It's hard to pick up all the strands of this story because a lot of people are now discussing it in earnest, but the best strand might be Martin Amis' take in Harper's.

Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.” But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s “reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative, and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

It's a delightful skewering of a pompous ass. A tremendous read, really, written by a man who knows how to demolish any character worth calling a character, and by Amis' estimation there's really not that much character to demolish.

Harper’s readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is? 

Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:

In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. 

That’s the way the country should be run. 

Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there — big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph, “Period.”

And there in that bit Amis nails down the cognitive degeneration, very apparent in the texts separated by time. If Donald Trump wasn't all too polished as an intellect way back when, he's since degenerated considerably. He is having trouble slinging sentences together in speeches. Amis, as a professional at reading into text, certainly as any capable novelist is, can parse out the degeneration of cognitive function. 

It's an important idea because we tend towards seeing people in continuity and not as changeable personae. We assume that the people we know and meet maintain a consistent personality and persona over the vast time of a lifetime. I assume my friends are consistent with who they were five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty. We assume that this consistency applies to people all around me. This is why it so hard for relatives to spot the onset of degenerative cognitive diseases like Alzheimers. 

Now, it turns out somebody in Salon floated the observation that the Donald might not be all there, back in April.

We have become so accustomed to these sorts of ramblings that we don’t really register them as anything more than standard nonsensical Trump-speak—a pattern of speech we have seen crop up across the GOP in recent years, most notably in Palin’s gibberish. But I urge you to re-read the exchange above and register the range of nonsense—the lack of basic grammar, the odd syntax, the abrupt shift in topic, the disconnect from reality, the paranoia, and the seeming inability to even grasp the question. 

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties? 

We’ve watched both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come under fire for potentially being unfit medically to run, but have we wondered enough about Trump? There is far more media coverage about Clinton’s health at 68 than Trump’s at 69. 

There could be a good reason why. At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association tells us that if two of the following core mental functions seem impaired then it is time to seek medical help: Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception. Alzheimer’s carries other symptoms besides memory loss including difficulty remembering newly learned information, disorientation, mood and behavior changes; deepening confusion about events, time and place; unfounded suspicions about family, friends and professional caregivers; more serious memory loss and behavior changes. 

Scholars of the recent trends in GOP politics point to some of the very same tendencies happening across the extreme right-wing faction of the party. (See thisand this for example.) 

Much to the chagrin of the reasonable conservatives who wonder what has happened to their party, it is now often difficult to distinguish Republican rhetoric from the ravings of someone suffering from diminished mental capacity.

She has a point. In Donald Trump, we might be having the closest candidate to Chauncey Gardner.

UPDATE:
Wait, there's more! Moments after I put out the post, this one came in:

Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered. 

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

He's rather unwell. He needs care. Not the president's chair.

Developments From A Developing Nation

Outrage And Abuse

The news making the rounds this week is the reign of vigilante enablement in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. He's been in power 3 months and in that time he's unleashed vigilantes to go and hunt and kill drug addicts and pushers.

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, won an electoral landslide in May after pledging to fill funeral parlours with drug dealers. He told Filipinos on the day of his inauguration last month: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.” 

Since 10 May – the day Duterte was announced the winner of the presidential poll– at least 704 people have been killed because they were suspected to have been involved with drugs, according to monitoring by journalists at ABS CBN News, a Filipino news network.

One influential Philippine senator has called for an investigation into the killings. In a speech before the senate, Leila de Lima, a former justice minister, said: “We cannot wage the war against drugs with blood. We will only be trading drug addiction with another more malevolent kind of addiction. This is the compulsion for more killing.”
De Lima, who has also headed the Philippines’ national human rights body, said police were summarily killing even innocent people, using the anti-drugs campaign as an excuse.

A statement issued last week by the citizens’ council for human rights accused Duterte and his officials of abandoning due process and human rights in their zeal to fight the war on drugs. “Units of the Philippine national police, under the command of his close associate General Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, have turned many low-income neighbourhoods in the country into free-fire zones,” it said. 

“The bloody encounters taking place daily have polarised the country between those who support the president’s quick and dirty methods of dealing with drugs and crime, and those who regard them as illegal, immoral, and self-defeating.”
The killings appear to have been carried out by police, who attribute the violence to suspects who “resisted arrest and shot at police officers”, and vigilante groups emboldened by Duterte’s promises of impunity.

That's some seriously fucked up shit right there. It's like something straight out of 'Judge Dredd' where the 'Judges' are also jury and executioner. Except that was meant to be a satirical comic book. The Philippines is a real country, so the freak out is real. The murder-spree by state and vigilantes is way beyond the fascist dreams of the most right wing crazies in most developed countries. It's the kind of thing you would expect in the 'developing' world. The question being, what the hell is it developing into?

The reductio ad absurdum of the 'zero tolerance' approach may well be this policy of unleashing police as judge jury and executioner, the rule of law be damned. I imagine he'd argue that it's not worth the state spending money housing drug pushers in prison - it's cheaper to just shoot them. The mathematics of it don't lie but, dude... human rights? It's weird how this crude populism crosses over into the classic asiatic barbarism of utter disrespect for life. You expect this kind of stuff from say, communist China, not a democratic Philippines. Still, he seems like the man on a mission:

Before he was elected president, Duterte was a lawyer who earned a reputation as an authoritarian figure while he mayor of the southern city of Davao. His campaign pledges included the reintroduction of the death penalty by hanging, as well as offering bounties for the bodies of drug dealers. 

During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown, with so many dead bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish there would grow fat from feeding on them. After his election win, Duterte also launched a seemingly unprovoked attack against the UN. 

“Fuck you UN, you can’t even solve the Middle East carnage ... couldn’t even lift a finger in Africa [with the] butchering [of] the black people. Shut up all of you,” he said.

And we're worried Kevin Rudd might fuck up the world as UN Secretary General. The world is laughable sometimes.