If you fire a head coach or defensive coordinator mid-season, then the season is all but over. By the time a gm or owner gets to firing a coach mid-season you’ve admitted you let a better candidate get a job somewhere else, you have wasted hours of practice time under that inadequate coach and you signal to fans and league: they’ve conceded they had it all wrong.
So, I think firing Juan Castillo was a mistake (maybe play calling needed to go to another coach until the off season) and I also think fans who want to fire Andy Reid need to give it a rest. Andy Reid walking out unemployed after the game tonight if we lose badly to the New Orleans Saints (which I believe we will) will not fix anything. Week 16, right after the game is done is when a guy can be let go. Then a coaching search can begin in earnest. Whatever happens now, we should suffer it.
If the Eagles do continue to stink (and I picked them to be 7-9 this season so I think they will), I don’t want Gruden, Cowher, Dungy, Payton, Parcells or anyone else who has coached a group of men to hoist the Lombardi trophy to be a coach for the Eagles. No coach has won a super bowl as a head coach at two different franchises. In addition, time away from the game doesn’t make you a better coach. The Eagles have got to find a coordinator somewhere and promote him. Whoever that may be, he may not be better than Andy Reid, but Reid doesn’t seem to be the perennial contender builder that he was from 2000 through to 2008. It may be too much control, too many sub par player performances, locker room leadership or too little organizational awareness or something else, but something just seems wrong every time they take the field.
It’s not the ritual, it’s the secrecy. Any religion, religion in this context is an organized group that makes you affirm the existence of a deity or spiritual power and a moral code dictated by that deity, makes a good start in my eyes if there are no secrets. Through and through. If I can walk into a place of worship, ask a bunch of questions, decide yay/nay and walk out with no obligation is a religion I will worry less about.
I don’t care about special clothing requirements and the like, but I do care about ritual that is shrouded in secrecy and only available to a minority of a religion’s membership. Again, it’s not the ritual, it’s the secrecy. That does unsettle me regarding any religion that bars anyone from finding out everything about it and that’s all I need to know.
I’m glad Bloomberg realized what an error it was to push on with the NY Marathon while large parts of New York were still without power and unable to clean up toxic and unsanitary flood areas in their homes. I still think the NBA games being held this weekend in New York and the NFL game should be re-scheduled (the NFL game later this week, the NBA games later in the season).
“We don’t cancel football games for bad weather”
I remember when the NFL league office wisely postponed a Monday night football game vs. the Minnesota Vikings due to a flash snowstorm putting Philadelphia in a brief state of emergency. Former PA Governor Former Philadelphia Mayor and current Eagles fan Ed Rendell was beating his chest saying that in China if it snowed they would have went ahead and hosted a sporting event no matter what the weather because they were tough and we were wussies.
What many folks who were also on the TV neglected to say in response to Rendell proclamations of toughness to all us American softies is that this is quite an illiberal argument.
One, we should respect the call by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter to put the city into a state of emergency due to the probability of severe weather which was quite high, being that meteorologists (applied scientists) predicted a storm across the east coast.
Two, we should err on the side of reasonably expected public readiness when determining when we can get back to normal. Vikings TE Visanthe Shiancoe said:
“The roads are bad for East Coast standards,” Shiancoe said. “But if this was in the Midwest there would be no way that this would be delayed. No way it would be delayed in the Midwest. No way. … It’s something that baffles me. But I’m not here to make decisions on when games are played.”
Counties, cities and states in the Midwest have investments in infrastructure, automobiles and communities that are more resilient to winter storm weather because of it’s higher frequencies. Much greater investments than we do in Philadelphia. To accept that “roads are bad for East Coast standards” one has to acknowledge that East Coast governments plan for East Coast weather standards.
Three, what if the storm had been every bit as bad as expected? If danger had been increased and people had died or been injured, would it have been worth it?
Rendell viewed the NFL’s decision as a referendum on the toughness, or lack thereof, of the United States.
“My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country,” Rendell said.
“We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything,” he added. “If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
By Rendell’s estimation, the Marathon should go on. with calculus. Wussies in New York: buck up. The ‘thon is for the toughest of runners.
…performers were injured, fainted from heatstroke or forced to wear adult diapers so the show could go on.
[…]
In the most extreme case, Beijing organizers revealed last week that Liu Yan, a 26-year-old dancer, was seriously injured during a July rehearsal. Shanghai media reported that she fell from a 10-foot stage and may be permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Zhang, the ceremony’s director, visited Liu in the hospital and has told Chinese media that he deeply regrets what happened to her _ but he has also defended the training schedule his performers endured.
He told the popular Guangzhou weekly newspaper Southern Weekend that only communist North Korea could have done a better job getting thousands of performers to move in perfect unison.
“North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Through hard training and strict discipline,” he said. Pyongyang’s annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lockstep.
Performers in the West by contrast need frequent breaks and cannot withstand criticism, Zhang said, citing his experience working on an opera performance abroad. Though he didn’t mention specific productions, Zhang directed Tan Dun’s “The First Emperor,” starring Placido Domingo, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006.
“In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn’t go into overtime and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights,” he said of the unidentified opera production.
“You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations … they have all kind of institutions, unions. We do not have that. We can work very hard, can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in two months.”
Back in 2010 Philadelphia, Workers took 48 hours to clear that stadium of snow that fell. It was a 7 inch snowfall by around 8:30PM that night So Rendell wanted a bunch of Philadelphians driving home in more than 7 inches of snow around midnight getting in the way of snow clearing plows and requiring city resources to be directed towards the football game. Well, North Korea and China would have done it. Thankfully Mayor Bloomberg decided against the marathon. Too much of New York is flooded and dark and cold to make that marathon OK.
We do save people from disasters. We don’t have to have a marathon while doing calculus and ignoring public danger. It’s the great thing about being an American.
Everyone wants to cancel the marathon, but there are a lot of other sports being played in New York for money this weekend while large parts of New York and New Jersey are without power and/or basic services due to Sandy. I guess, what the great “no marathon” debate shows is that the Marathon is not as popular as the NFL football game between the Steelers and the Giants that will be held in the swamp level area known as the Meadowlands in New Jersey or the Knicks games that will be held at MSG tonight and Sunday night or the Nets games that will be held in Brooklyn on Saturday or Monday.
Isn’t Mitt Romney running as an R from Massachusetts? His campaign office is in Boston, Massachusetts. Romney built Bain and his life out of Massachusetts. And it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as New Jersey and New York (or even Pennsylvania), but it is the state he’s coming from.
Sandy hit Massachusetts too. He, Scott Brown and any other Republican up for election in that state could have toured the damage to the Bay State and he could even have pitched in with his telegenic family. Romney, Brown, the Romney boys in their home state their wives and families touring some damage in Massachusetts would be seen in Ohio, Virginia and even FEMA friendly Florida and North Carolina by voters who respond to presidential candidates that seem that they believe in competent disaster recovery (even if he really doesn’t). Instead, Romney and his campaign executed a political move more befitting a fraternity social chair’s purview: “bring a canned good to the party. get a discount on the cover. this goes to the uh, food bank in New Jersey or Virginia or somwhere”. Then he told that awful story about cleaning up a high school football field after a rally. Srsly. Watch this awful b.s.
I remember once we had a football field at my high school. The field was covered with rubbish and paper goods from people who’d had a big celebration there at the game. And there was a group of us there assigned to clean it up. And I thought, ‘how are we going to clean up all the mess on this football field?’ There were just a few of us. And the person responsible for organizing the effort said, ‘Just line up along the yard lines. You go between the goal line and the 10-yard line, and the next person between the 10 and 20, and just walk down and do your lane. And if everybody cleans their lanes, we’ll get it done.’ And so today, we’re cleaning one lane if you will.
Chris Christie is a governor. He’s a Republican state official in a Democratic state. He’s a skilled politician. He knows Mitt Romney was a governor of the Bay State. Massachusetts. I would bet Chris Christie loves New Jersey and wonders how a former governor couldn’t get his ass to Massachusetts to actually tour or help with actual storm relief. Just being a good person, a shrewd cynical political move, both or neither, it should be simple moral and/or political calculation for a guy who is or was a governor and is running for President. So maybe Chris Christie’s effusive praise of Barack Obama and dismissal of a Romney walk about is because Chris Christie saw the real Mitt Romney contrasted with a real natural disaster and decided that propping up Romney with a time consuming photo-op was way less important than helping his constituents repair their communities.
Want to be presidential? Start with James Buchanan (courtesy National Archives).
When a journalist says a candidate or even an actual President is or isn’t “being presidential” it’s a signal to all the other pundits. They are letting other journalists know that they are about to tell some partial-myth about on of their fave five presidents. These tales usually aggrandize a paternalist President daddy-ing the country in a time only that specific daddy-in-chief could have fixed our country’s boo-boo at that time. This faux threshold discounts the President as head of the government, head of state, commander in chief of the US armed forces and head of their political party and overvalues the president as a personality and a political brand.
Forget our “better angels of our nature” and all that. No need to do hard things the hard way! Being that any President is “presidential”, being presidential should be a Pass/Fail, lowest common denominator endeavor for the rest of us.
Find the 4 worst ranked Presidents in history
Make faces like their portraits and try and copy their speaking cadences
Behave like they did as far as you can tell from historical accounts
Anyone who fits their characteristics is indeed being “Presidential”
Repeat process from step 1 with the next 4 highest rated presidents until you find enough Presidential characteristics to describe everything about yourself
Boom. Next thing you know: you are being Presidential! And you don’t have to thank me! Not compensating a black guy for his work is definitely presidential! Refer to the race/religion presidential triage below to get some ideas:
Christian Black dudes: Things got easier, but not easy in 2008. You’ve only got one guy: 44. Obama. Hope you have a funny name go to Harvard Law School and work on your left and your three point shot. Also, sing some Al Green. Also, mom jeans.
Everyone Else: No luck. Need not try apply. The media won’t be able to see it in you. Unless someone like you becomes president. Then, you know the deal. Until then, sorry to waste your time.
Wall Street turned to Bordeaux, sushi and faxes as Hurricane Sandy wreaked the most havoc in the history of the city’s transit system and closed stock markets on consecutive days for the first time for weather since 1888.
“I had to go to the wine cellar and find a good bottle of wine and drink it before it goes bad,” Murry Stegelmann, 50, a founder of investment-management firm Kilimanjaro Advisors LLC, wrote in an e-mail after he lost power at 6 p.m. on Oct. 29 in Darien, Connecticut.
The bottle he chose, a 2005 Chateau Margaux, was given 98 points by wine critic Robert Parker and is on sale at the Westchester Wine Warehouse for $999.99.
“Outstanding,” Stegelmann said. He started the day with green tea at Starbucks, talking with neighbors about the New York Yankees’ future and moving boats to the parking lot of Darien’s Middlesex Middle School.
A reporter actually spent time compiling this useless information.
Much of the punditry has an issue with statistics. It’s not that they hate statistics. They would rather pack a room full of people who are very uninformed, very likely, avid debate watching voters and personally ask these clueless voters about their unmade opinion regarding candidates who both have been campaigning for the last year and have been on the national scene for about 5 years. Then they can turn to the real Americans watching and interpret, for us, what real Americans are thinking. I think this is much more fun for them than: MATH!
Silver’s no stranger to doubt and criticism. He even doubts his own model sometimes. But he dismisses this criticism.
“We can debate how much of a favorite Obama is; Romney, clearly, could still win. But this is not wizardry or rocket science,” Silver told POLITICO. “All you have to do is take an average, and count to 270. It’s a pretty simple set of facts. I’m sorry that Joe is math-challenged.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough may not be mathematically challenged, but he’s got a problem with processing and accepting mathematics in narrative busting reports. He had the same issue with October 2012 BLS Unemployment Report that put the number at 7.8% He demanded an explanation had guests on shortly thereafter who explained the report to him (the drop was due to two consecutive months of positive adjustments and real job market growth) and then still said someone had to explain the BLS Report to him. “The labor department needs to explain this to us” or something. The report explains “this” to us. It’s why people write reports. Really it shows that a lot of punditry eats up anecdotes from guys like former GE head Jack Welch who tells bed time stories about the Uncertainty Goblin who eats up all the job openings while Job Creators don golden armor to fight Tax Gargoyles so that we may work for them more. There is one problem: the polling analysis sites are very transparent.
You can go and download data from these guys. There is no magic or b.s. with poll sites that use real regression analysis. They get props by being right, not by being biased whereas Dick Morris, Harold Ford and many other pundits make money being announcers at the horse track with Romney in the pole position after a strong performance at the 1st debate Stakes and Barack Obama “coming from behind” to win the Presidential Derby.
The gist of Nate Silver’s modelling is explained here. If you don’t want to click through (you should): It boils down to Nate Silver has built a data model that compares current political data with historical data. That is to say: Silver gathers relevant data from national polls, state by state polls and significant indicators factored in (incumbent vs. challenger, economic climate figures etc). Then he runs a simulation (e.g. 100 people flip a quarter 100 times to find probability of heads or tails) and then the results of the simulation determine the probability of one candidate winning and another losing.70+% chance of getting enough electoral college votes out of that to get to 270.
If Mitt Romney wins on election day, it doesn’t mean Silver’s model was wrong. After all, the model has been fluctuating between giving Romney a 25 percent and 40 percent chance of winning the election. That’s a pretty good chance! If you told me I had a 35 percent chance of winning a million dollars tomorrow, I’d be excited. And if I won the money, I wouldn’t turn around and tell you your information was wrong. I’d still have no evidence I’d ever had anything more than a 35 percent chance.
I’ve used many of these sites before to talk down fellow liberals even though he’s not the only guy to go to. I came to them by way of fantasy football. By “guys to go to”, I mean guys who run sites that have solid records in last four or five elections of being as close as you can be with their projections. It’s not because they are liberal and we agree (they aren’t) or because we are basement dwelling bloggers or geeks who can type with two hands and drink craft beers or have been to San Francisco or live in a walk-able city (they aren’t). It’s because when I use their data, it’s soundly supported and explained with math and collected, verifiable data.
Here are the sites that aren’t fivethirtyeight.com run by left libertarian Nate Silver and have Obama beating Romney and all have developed prediction models and historical results vs. their previous models:
electoral-vote.com – a left leaning American abroad, a great site I’ve been using this since 2006
Could Obama lose? Everyone who runs those websites agree:” yes. Obama definitely can lose. Will Obama win? These sites all agree Obama will probably win within a range of 66% or greater chance of winning. Nothing needs to be explained here except why people feel political science should be math free.
After the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2003, then-governor Romney thwarted efforts to change the birth certificate entry for “father” to “father or second parent,” requiring his lawyers to sign off on each individual birth certificate. Murray Waas reports on Romney’s “extraordinary effort” to this effect – at the expense of gay parents and, especially their children, denied by Romney himself from having two parents on their birth certificates.
There are some articles to be found (HuffPo,NY Observer) focusing on the homeless. The accompanying photos seem to be snapped by local or amateur sources, however. If you were following the media photo stream, on the other hand, you’ll notice there is no shortage of images of the sandbagged or emptied New York Stock Exchange or America’s retail-industrial complex so professionally-protected.
I know it was the fashion section, but was there nothing in the fashion industry adversely affected by the storm? I’d rather they pretend it didn’t happen then write what the did.
Interesting that some folks used twitter to reach out to the Mayor’s office regarding homeless folks they saw in flood prone areas.
McWhorter endorses Obama for what his policies mean to the black community while lambasting Obama critics to the left of the President:
Meanwhile, we have a President who has touted extra billions of dollars to community colleges; has states competing for Race To The Top funds to improve public schools where No Child Left Behind failed; has barnstormed the country pushing a jobs bill, and created the beginnings of a national health care system after 70 years of failed attempts. On what basis is this not a pro-black President? Have the results been dramatic? No—but a Republican establishment bent on keeping Obama from accomplishing a single thing has played a certain role in that. How Obama was supposed to have “blacked” his way past this obstructionism is decidedly unclear.
But by all means, they should present their case to the American people as often and as much as they can. Black politicians should be criticized by black constituents when those constituents are under served. What McWhorter doesn’t address is the black religious leaders who are encouraging other people not to vote for Obama in 2012 because of his support for Marriage Equality is a threat to the black christian family. Many of them probably encouraged their flocks to vote for Bush in 2004 for the same reason. McWhorter’s right: black critics to the left of Obama are off base with their governing advice, but not with their policy concerns. Even then, they are still pragmatic enough to understand how bad a Romney Presidency would be for Americans.
As a result, this election offers American voters an unedifying choice. Many of The Economist’s readers, especially those who run businesses in America, may well conclude that nothing could be worse than another four years of Mr Obama. We beg to differ. For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive. And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.
Nevertheless, the president has achieved some important victories on issues that will help define our future. His Race to the Top education program — much of which was opposed by the teachers’ unions, a traditional Democratic Party constituency — has helped drive badly needed reform across the country, giving local districts leverage to strengthen accountability in the classroom and expand charter schools. His health-care law — for all its flaws — will provide insurance coverage to people who need it most and save lives.
When I step into the voting booth, I think about the world I want to leave my two daughters, and the values that are required to guide us there. The two parties’ nominees for president offer different visions of where they want to lead America.
One believes a woman’s right to choose should be protected for future generations; one does not. That difference, given the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies, weighs heavily on my decision.
One recognizes marriage equality as consistent with America’s march of freedom; one does not. I want our president to be on the right side of history.
One sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet; one does not. I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics.
Reality folks. Reality.
Note: the comments are rich with vitriol under Bloomberg’s endorsement of President Obama on his news organizations website. Many are so very Tea Party angry at him for endorsing Obama to realize that they are readers of Bloomberg.com and are calling Bloomberg an idiot.
We’ve got to start paying attention to climate change, and by paying attention: preventing effects of damage already caused (floods/storms/droughts) and prevent man made causes. In the Netherlands, they proactively build and erect the most effective system in the world at stopping storm floods from affecting a country more below sea level than any other:
Shouting over the wind, Van Ledden, 33, says a stormy day is ideal for touring the city’s flood-protection maze. He leans over an older flood wall that runs perpendicular to the new, higher one. Ike has raised the water level in this canal 5 or 6 feet above normal. “During Gustav, the level was all the way up to here,” Van Ledden says, placing his hand just below the top of the wall. “And Gustav was just a friendly wake-up call. In 50 years, if the sea level goes up 1 or 1½ feet, the level for that storm would be here,” he says, holding his hand well above the top of the flood wall. To make sure that doesn’t happen, the Corps is planning to build a giant storm-surge barrier between Lake Borgne and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The barrier’s gates would close during extreme storms, blocking lake water from funneling up into this narrow canal.
After Katrina, Congress ordered the Corps to bring the city’s hurricane protection system up to 1:100 levels by 2011. If a 1 percent per year chance of system failure sounds high—compared with existing 1:10,000 defenses in the Netherlands—that’s because it is. “One-hundred-year protection is quite a risk,” Van Ledden says. Statisticians will tell you that over the course of a 30-year mortgage, the chance of a 100-year flood hitting the city is more than 25 percent. The 1:100 standard takes projected sea-level rise into account, but not economic impacts and repair costs. (Hurricane Katrina caused upwards of $150 billion in damage.).
Now that Manhattan, Staten Island, Long Island and New Jersey have been hammered two years in a row by late hurricane season storms maybe we can discuss this rationally. We need infrastructure.
