NBA playoffs

It is time for the NBA to seed the playoffs according to team records - period. No more regard to conferences or division winners. Let's see the best teams play each other.

Straight seeding will not only make the playoffs more interesting (due to interconference match-ups just like in the NCAAs or interleague play in baseball) and also make the resulting basketball that much more watchable (since it will include the 16 best teams properly seeded) but it will go a long way towards eliminating much of the current playoff and conference imbalances.

Plus you have a much, much better chance of having the Finals feature the two best teams. Doesn't that make the change worth it right there? No more NJ versus LA 'finals' circa 2001-02 may help ensure the Finals are the marquee matchup and crowning event they are supposed to be. After all, what made that Boston-LA rivalry so great in the 80s? Was it the fact that the best two teams or the fact that they were a continent apart? Of those two factors, which is more important? Which do we want to maximize year-in and year-out?

It should be obvious that the key factor was that they were the two best teams - their geographic location was an interesting quick, but nothing more. So the league is making a mistake by ensuring that the 'geographic factor' is the constant in the Finals matchup and the 'two-best-teams factor' is hit-and-miss. The playoffs should be designed so that it is the other way around: struture the playoffs so the two best teams always have the best chance of meeting in the Finals and leave the geographic factor to be hit-and-miss. It will make for better drama, better TV, and better basketball.

For those that think this will violate league tradition: eliminating the jump ball after a made shot went against NBA history... introducing the shot clock went against NBA history... allowing dunks went against NBA history... the three-point shot, the elimination of illegal defense, et cetera et cetera.

NBA history has been about presenting the best basketball possible. Sometimes mistakes were made but the goal has always been presenting the sport in a way that has the most potential for being the most entertaining and exciting brand of basketball there is. Seeding the playoffs so that the best 16 teams play and the best teams have the opportunity to play in the Finals is well within NBA tradition.

Perhaps the best thing about this proposed reform, however, is that you can do implement interconference seeding right now. No need to change anything but the seeding. There is no need to change the way the regular season is scheduled (2 games agains teams in opposing conference, 3-4 games against teams in same conference.

As for potential imbalance in strength of schedules, at worst, maybe one team from the weaker conference may beef up its record so that it may edge out a slightly better team from the stronger conference. But contrast that with the way the system is now: already we witness teams with worse records from the weaker conference making the playoffs at the expense of teams with better records from the stronger conference. So, in actuality, interconference seeding will actually ameliorate some of the existing conference seeding imbalance problem. Also, as the weaker conference will end up getting more lottery picks (currently split 7-7 despite team records), the interconference imbalance should even out that much more quickly.

Let the NBA be the best that it can be, Commish Stern! Seed the playoff match-up according to record and record alone. After a few years people will wonder why it was ever done any other way.

King George strikes again

Bush challenges hundreds of laws: President cites powers of his office

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research....

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive-power issues, said Bush has cast a cloud over ''the whole idea that there is a rule of law," because no one can be certain of which laws Bush thinks are valid and which he thinks he can ignore.

"Where you have a president who is willing to declare vast quantities of the legislation that is passed during his term unconstitutional, it implies that he also thinks a very significant amount of the other laws that were already on the books before he became president are also unconstitutional," Golove said....

Golove said that to the extent Bush is interpreting the Constitution in defiance of the Supreme Court's precedents, he threatens to "overturn the existing structures of constitutional law."

A president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him, Golove said, can make the Constitution simply "disappear."...

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ''to exercise some self-restraint." But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time.

"This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy," Fein said. [Due to secrecy] "There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power."

Primer: what happens if this really works?

That is the title of an interesting if confusing movie about what happens to the relationship betwen a pair of friends when an invention they are striving to create actually works.

The movie is complicated by a bunch of jargon (early) and time travel (late). But I recommend it highly. The jargon you can ignore (although it is actually spot on if you know anything about the attempt to create superconductors, the development of which would be akin to the perpetual motion machine).

The time travel is a bit more central to the story. Suffice to say that it gets confusing because you are placed in a position of attempting to find out what has happened 'behind your back' as characters go back in time without your knowledge and revise events you had already witnessed thereby changing what you are presently witnessing.

Eventually this results in violating causality: changing something in the past that led to a future (that no longer exist) that is currently tampering in the past.

I posted the following to the primermovie.com topics forum so beware, SPOILERS AHEAD (it likely won't make any sense unless you've seen the movie anyway).

***********

There are only two Aarons - meaning that there are only two permanent copies of Aaron. That does not prevent there from being three Aarons at a particular point in the movie, just as there only being one Abe prior to his failsafing does not mean that there are not two versions of Abe walking around (or hiding in a hotel) during previous portions of the movie.

People need to distinguish clearly between permanent copies that result from an interference by a future copy in causality (preventing their former self from entering the box) and 'looped copies' which resolve themselves into one by looping through the box.

Let me address the incident which most people take to be evidence for three separate Aarons: the fight that Aaron2 has with himself while Aaron1 is tied up in the attic. What happens is that Aaron2 is fighting with Aaron1 after Aaron1 has escaped the attic (which we know will happen) and then enters the failsafe to combat Aaron2. That is why Aaron1 (the fighter) is too tired to beat Aaron2: he has just escaped from the privations of the attic and spent a number of days traveling back in time to fight Aaron2.

Aaron1 (attic) will enter the box unless Aaron1 (fighter) prevents this. There is absolutely NO indication that this closure of the loop is prevented. In fact it seems that Aaron1 (fighter) has come back precisely to prevent himself from spawning a permanent double, but can't succeed in defeating Aaron2. So in the face of the evidence it seems reasonable to assume that Aaron1 (attic) will eventually escape - we know he does because we see it and we also see him fighting with Aaron2. After his escape he goes to the failsafe and vanishes, hence: there are only two Aarons: Aaron2 who wears the hoodie and goes to some French-speaking nation, and Aaron1, who will eventually successfully loop with his double and therefore does NOT spawn a third Aaron.

This interpretation is confirmed by the final conversation in the airport, where Aaron speaks of dividing the world into two hemispheres, one for each copy of Aaron and Abe (and jokingly, their wife and girlfriend).

The Common Good

An issue that has received a lot of attention lately is the fact that, although the public is sick and tired of the GOP, the Dems do not seem to offer much of an alternative simply because people have a hard time figuring out what exactly what they stand for. This is a shame, because it is due in large part to the Dems themselves. Not only does it prevent them from presenting a principled approach to a whole variety of issues (hence what you read in the press is about Dem strategy and tactics, not values and commitments) but it also allows the GOP an easier time in defining their opponents.

The historical roots of this problem stem in part from the Watergate upheaval, which introduced a renewed Democratic majority at a time when civil rights was tearing down the old New Deal coalition, but a majority based basically on not being the GOP in 1974 and then hanging on like grim death to the advantages of incumbency. The fecklessness of this approach has been exacerbated by the disfunctions of the Dem party where too many of the same failed tacticians have been calling the shots for campaigns for far too long.

Also, many of the Dems supporters have organized themselves into single interest advocacy groups that fail to take into account the larger picture. For example, feminists may oppose Casey (Dem pro-life for Senate in PA) despite the fact that, as a reliable Democratic vote in the Senate Casey will de facto be supporting a much more 'feminist' agenda regardless of his personal views, simply becuase he will vote for a Dem as a majority leader and will likely vote against regressive judicial appointments - as has Reid (Senate Minority Leader and also pro-life) - on the basis of an evaluation covering a whole host of progressive issues. The Dem interest groups are still acting as if the Dems had the majority, in which case lobbying for a narrow set of goals may make a limited amount of sense - but the Dems do not and the behavior of such groups will help perpetuate that situation by protraying the Dems as kowtowing to particular interests even if their pliciy stances are derived from attempting to uphold the common good for our entire society.

As a result of these factors, Dems appear to many less political people as always trying to play an angle, to play 'politics' with issues that for many people are more than just political footballs. The one consistent charge the GOP tries to make every election cycle (well, well apart innuendo about sexual shenanigans) is that Dems don't stand for anything, they lack 'backbone,' they blow with the preailing winds and 'flip-flop.'

The GOP has realized that people will respect you even if they don't agree with you if those disagreements are a matter of conscientious beliefs. The Dems need to rediscover their backbone and stand distinctly for a set of beliefs and only then address particular political issues. Issues are no substitute for core beliefs. It doesn't matter how many issues you agree with your constituents on if they cannot link those positions up to a much greater, overarching perspective that informs them and gives the voter confidence in the candidate's ability to prioritize and make judgments without bending to special interests.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the Dems do have overarching commitments, but they fail to discuss politics in these terms. The notion of the party of the 'common man' and the 'common good' has been discarded for a long time as old fashioned 'class warfare' and potentially offputting to donors, but it is in reality the Dems best argument for the stances they tend to take and the actions they favor.

Hurricane Katrina should be tattooed on every voters' conscience when it comes time to vote this November, because it encapsulates the differences between Dems and the GOP perfectly. When people are in trouble they do not look to abstractions like 'the market,' they look to government. The GOP loves to spout ideology about big versus small government, but in reality the public only cares if the government is efficient and is fair.

Obscure ideological debates over the size of government simply distract us from the more central question: is the government doing what it should be to aid the public good or not? It is not an ideological question, it is a simple pragmatic question of practicality. If my neighbors house is burning down, do I ask him if he invested wisely in the fire prevention devices? Do I turn my back and tell him to quit 'whining' for help? Or do I get together with him and other neighbors and put the fire out?

The same is true of the government: whether to use the resources of our government - the govenment that our tax dollars pay for - should not be subject to the GOP ideological mumbo-jumbo over the who the government can help (corporations) and who it can't (individuals). If we need it to serve the public interest, then it should do so. The alternative is Katrina - with the government standing by helplessly because of the ideological blinkers of our 'leaders' - the most power nation on earth unwilling to help its own people in distress. It is the equivalent of the fire department watching a house burn down simply because 'they did not have proper paperwork to fight the fire.'

Dems need to emphasize who what they advocate is in order to better serve the common good of a diverse and dynamic society. There are no answers in advance, as the GOP and its ideology would have you believe. The best answer is the answer that works to advance the common good. That is why the middle class and those who want to be middle class should embrace the Dems - not because of a laundry list of particular issues - but rather because the Dems work to ensure that everyone get a fair shake and that the government works for the people, not the people working for the government so that it can shower rewards on the few.

Katrina is the GOP vision, a country fettered by ideology. The country that won WWII and rebuilt Europe through pragmatic decisionmaking - that is the Dem vision.

WWIII?

The New Yorker: Fact: ...There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’”...

Liars who KNOWINGLY lied to us

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories....

The Democratic Party Plan - the US Constitution

It's an oldy but a goody. It is tried and tested. Its past success is beyond doubt. It is called the Constitution of the United States.

Yep, that is the plan the Democratic Party should suggest every time a talking head suggests that they have 'no plan' (and Bush does?).

What does this plan entail? For one thing it requires independent branches of government. And those independent branches act as checks and balances on each other. We haven't had that since Clinton was in office, and hence... well, you know the rest.

Why are independent branches of government important? Couldn't the Democratic party acted as a check on the GOP all this time? Well, I for one will agree that individual Democrats could have taken a more agressive stance, but institutionally speaking it makes all the difference in the world if you are in the majority as opposed to the minority. Majority status allows you to set the agenda, allows you to realistically bargain with other branches, and perhaps most important allows you to use subpoena's to conduct real hearings designed to air the truth.

Under the GOP rubberstamp Congress, we have all been treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed manure. The best aspect of the Constitutional plan is securing the ability to pierce the veil of lies and talkshow blathering and finally get some true idea of how bad our situation is. After all, the first rule in emergency management is to assess the situation in order to properly set priorities.

Pundits who ask the Democratic Party to come up with a comprehensive plan should be reminded that most of us - including the members of Congress - simply do not know what the true situation is. How does one plan in such an environment? First, by ferreting out the truth. A good start towards that goal would be by actually honoring the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution.

Vaffanculo!

Photographer: Herald got it right

...Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship.

“The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, ‘To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’ ” punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said.

The Italian phrase means “(expletive) you.”...

news from The Times

Times Online: DOZENS of the world’s cities, including London and New York, could be flooded by the end of the century, according to research which suggests that global warming will increase sea levels more rapidly than was previously thought.

The first study to combine computer models of rising temperatures with records of the ancient climate has indicated that sea levels could rise by up to 20ft (6m) by 2100, placing millions of people at risk.

Health News Article | Reuters.co.uk

File this under O for Obvious

Health News Article | Reuters.co.uk: Older women who say talk shows and soap operas are their favorite TV programs tend to score more poorly on tests of memory, attention and other cognitive skills, researchers reported Monday.
That doesn't mean that daytime television is a brain drain, they say, since it's not clear that there's a direct relationship between the two.

But the findings do point to some association between TV choices and intellectual function, and that could prove useful in evaluating older people for cognitive decline...

TheStar.com

TheStar.com - How to spot a baby conservative: Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals....

>Cue whining about this study and egg-headed scientists from the Right.<

Independent Online Edition

Climate change 'irreversible' as Arctic sea ice fails to re-form

Nieman Watchdog

Iraq through the prism of Vietnam: The Vietnam War experience can’t tell us anything about the war in Iraq – or so it is said. If you believe that, trying looking through this lens, and you may change your mind....

By Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.)

Tom Engelhardt

Can You Say "Permanent Bases"?...Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete - though less generally discussed in our media - than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing....

And replace 'war' with 'security,' 'privacy' with 'loyalty' and 'borrow and spend' with 'fiscal conservative.' 

And the apology was forthcoming on February 17th. 

Update: Dick Cheney - anatomy of moral cowardice

The Poor Man Institute

Keyboard Kommando Komix

Gitmo tactics coming home

Jail Inmates Were Stripped to Deter Riots - Los Angeles Times

More than 100 inmates at a Los Angeles County jail were ordered to strip naked, had their mattresses taken away and were left with only blankets to cover themselves for a day as Los Angeles Sheriff's Department officials tried to quell racially charged violence that has plagued the jail system for nearly two weeks.

The tactics — defended Friday by jail officials as necessary to stop the fighting — were immediately criticized as dehumanizing and highly inappropriate by civil rights activists and the Sheriff's Department's independent overseer.

"I have no problem taking privileges away…. It comes to a different level of basic human rights if you take away clothing and dignity," said Michael Gennaco, chief of Sheriff Lee Baca's office of independent review. "I don't know if it is consistent with the sheriff's core values."

Swing State Project

Here is a link to a good synopsis of why the Dems need to contest every congressional seat.

Swing State Project: CO-05: Hefley (R) Retiring - Band of Brothers' Fawcett Ready to Go: "Hefley's retirement is the perfect illustration of why you run candidates in every district, no matter how hopeless the territory might seem at first blush."

Two degree rise Fahrenheit

Independent Online Edition > Environment:
A crucial global warming "tipping point" for the Earth, highlighted only last week by the British Government, has already been passed, with devastating consequences.

Research commissioned by The Independent reveals that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has now crossed a threshold, set down by scientists from around the world at a conference in Britain last year, beyond which really dangerous climate change is likely to be unstoppable.

The implication is that some of global warming's worst predicted effects, from destruction of ecosystems to increased hunger and water shortages for billions of people, cannot now be avoided, whatever we do. It gives considerable force to the contention by the green guru Professor James Lovelock, put forward last month in The Independent, that climate change is now past the point of no return.

The danger point we are now firmly on course for is a rise in global mean temperatures to 2 degrees above the level before the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century.

At the moment, global mean temperatures have risen to about 0.6 degrees above the pre-industrial era - and worrying signs of climate change, such as the rapid melting of the Arctic ice in summer, are already increasingly evident. But a rise to 2 degrees would be far more serious....

Professor Burke added: "We have very little time to act now. Governments must stop talking and start spending. We already have the technology to allow us to meet our growing need for energy while keeping a stable climate. We must deploy it now. Doing so will cost less than the Iraq war so we know we can afford it."