Philosophy and Hoops

Quick NBA predictions

2011-12-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

The annual rite, abbreviated.

Eastern Conference playoff teams: Heat, Bulls, Hawks, Celtics, 76ers, Magic, Bucks, Pacers
semifinals: Heat over Celtics, Hawks over Bulls
EC finals: Heat over Hawks

Western Conference playoff teams: Thunder, Clippers, Nuggets, Mavs, Spurs, Lakers, T'blazers, Rockets
semis: Thunder over Spurs, Clippers over Lakers
WC finals: Clippers over Thunder

Finals: Heat over Clippers

MVP: Chris Paul
ROY: Derrick Williams

2010-11 NBA picks

2010-10-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

NBA win totals – my 80-81 game picks, (no one’s played more than 2 games yet) plus the playoffs, MVP and ROY.

Explanations for the picks coming in a later post.

Eastern Conference:

Ranked by Division – first, the Atlantic
1 Boston
Prediction: 50-32, 1st in Atlantic Division, 3rd seed in Eastern Conference

2 Philly
Prediction: 34-48, 2nd in Atlantic Division, 10th in Eastern Conference

3 NJ
Prediction: 31-51, 3rd in Atlantic Division, 11th in Eastern Conference

4 NYK
Prediction: 28-54, 4th in Atlantic Division, 12th in Eastern Conference

5 Tor
Prediction: 16-66, 5th in Atlantic Division, 15th in Eastern Conference

Southeast
1 Orlando
Prediction: 62-20, 1st in Southeast Division, 1st in Eastern Conference

2 Miami
Prediction: 57-25, 2nd in Southeast Division, 2nd in Eastern Conference

3 Atlanta
Prediction: 54-28, 3rd in Southeast Division, 5th seed in Eastern Conference (but 3rd best record)

4 Charlotte
Prediction: 40-42, 4th in Southeast Division, 8th in Eastern Conference

5 Wash
Prediction: 20-62, 5th in Southeast Division, 14th in Eastern Conference

Central
1 Chicago
Prediction: 48-34, 1st in Central Division, 4th in Eastern Conference

2 Milwaukee
Prediction: 44-38, 2nd in Central Division, 6th in Eastern Conference

3 Cleveland
Prediction: 41-41, 3rd in Central Division, 7th in Eastern Conference

4 Indiana
Prediction: 37-45, 4th in Central Division, 9th in Eastern Conference

5 Detroit
Prediction: 27-55, 5th in Central Division, 13th in Eastern Conference

Western Conference:

Northwest
1 Portland
Prediction: 55-27, 1st in Northwest Division, 1st in Western Conference

2 OKC
Prediction: 52-30, 2nd in Northwest Division, 3rd in Western Conference

3 Denver
Prediction: 49-33, 3rd in Northwest Division, 6th seed in Western Conference (but 5th best record)

4 Utah
Prediction: 38-44, 4th in Northwest Division, 11th in Western Conference

5 Minn
Prediction: 31-51, 5th in Northwest Division, 14th in Western Conference

Southwest
1 San Antonio
Prediction: 54-28, 1st in Southwest Division, 2nd in Western Conference

2 Dallas
Prediction: 50-32, 2nd in Southwest Division, 5th seed in Western Conference (but 4th best record)

3 Houston
Prediction: 45-37, 3rd in Southwest Division, 7th in Western Conference

4 NOrl
Prediction: 42-40, 4th in Southwest Division, 8th in Western Conference

5 Memphis
Prediction: 41-41, 5th in Southwest Division, 9th in Western Conference

Pacific:
1 LA Lakers
Prediction: 46-36, 1st in Pacific Division, 4th seed in Western Conference

2 LA Clippers
Prediction: 40-42, 2nd in Pacific Division, 10th in Western Conference

3 Golden St
Prediction: 36-46, 3rd in Pacific Division, 12th in Western Conference

4 Phoenix
Prediction: 35-47, 4th in Pacific Division, 13th in Western Conference

5 Sacto
Prediction: 27-55, 5th in Pacific Division, 15th in Western Conference

Playoffs: East: Homecourt advantage prevails as Orlando, Miami, Boston, and Atlanta win their first round; Orlando pummels Atlanta and the Heat outlast Boston; Orlando and Dwight Howard win the all –Florida conference finals.

West: Portland, Spurs, OKC and Lakers prevail in round one; Lakers upset Portland and Tim Duncan’s injury means the Thunder get by in round two; young Thunder and old Lakers meet in the Western finals. Ron Artest body slams Durant, Bynum is healthy, and the Lakers get their act going for one last hurrah into the Finals.

Finals: Orlando meets the Lakers in a repeat matchup of the finals from 2 years ago; but the outcome is different, as Phil is denied the 4th threepeat and the Magic win the title.

MVP: Dwight Howard
ROY: Blake Griffin

LeBron's future and NBA conference finals picks

2010-05-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

As the playoffs started, I thought the NBA Finals would be Cavs-Suns, with the Cavs overwhelming the Magic in the Eastern finals and the Suns taking out the Lakers. Well, I have 3 of 4 correct.... but everyone else is discussing the one I (and most people) had wrong, as LeBron's Cavs are out and his free agency rumors are rampant. I suspect that LeBron will leave unless somehow the Cavs can make a dramatic acquisition to shore up the two spots they obviously have defensive/ offensive problems, PG and C. The only plausible deal that addresses what they need pre-draft and pre-free agency would be to deal Varejao and Hickson (the only two players with any desirability to other teams) along with Mo Williams and cap filler (probably J. Moon)to the Clippers for Kaman and Baron Davis. The Clippers would do it because their m.o. is to trade older expensive players for younger, cheaper ones, and a rotation of Blake Grffin and Eric Gordon and DeAndre Jordan plus the newcomers could actually have a nice future. The Cavs, meanwhile, could have a nice 7-man rotation of Kaman, Jamison, LeBron, Parker, and Davis as starters, with Delonte West and possibly a re-signed Shaq or Z off the bench. Of course, if LeBron would re-sign for this, one might wonder why wouldn't he just go sign with the Clippers....

Anyway, my picks: I think Bynum is hurting and will be exposed against the Suns tendency to play a 5 who moves a lot, even beyond the 3-pt line (Frye), and Phil Jax will end up going with Gasol and Odom as his primary frontcourt. That said, I think Nash vs Fisher is the key to the series; and I'm afraid this will be Derek's last rodeo, as Nash abuses his slowed defensive positions and Derek cannot make enough shots to force Nash to stay home on defense. With the series on the line, Kobe and his busted fingers will shoot 7 for 28 and the Suns will prevail in 6 games.

In the East, Orlando looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, as lost in the dismissal of the Hawks as gaggers was just how well Orlando played. Boston will face a far better coach this round, and Dwight Howard is the matchup problem Shaquille O'Neal has only a dim memory of being. Orlando in 5.

NBA picks: Western Conference, playoffs, MVP/ ROY

2009-10-30T14:58:00.000-07:00

Still 80 game projections, as until tonight no one has yet played their 3rd game:

Western Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM PROJECTED RECORD PROJECTED DIV. FINISH
1. Los Angeles Lakers 61-21 1st in Pacific
The Lakers have quality depth as well as 4 possible All-Stars as starters. Plus-minus indicates Lamar Odom may have been the team’s best or second-best player (behind Pau) last season, but he still comes off the bench; Kobe’s game has matured and he evinces a greater willingness to defer and defend, instead of constantly being a ballhog. Chemistry and injuries are their only possible downfalls; Pau Gasol is already hurt, Bynum’s health is always an issue, Ron Artest has slowed down, and no one really knows how he will respond to being the 4th or even 5th option - or how a Hollywood lifestyle may affect him. And Kobe may break eventually from heavy use. PG is the only positional question mark; Derek Fisher has slowed and his shot has degenerated as well, and Jordan Farmar and Shannon Brown show glimpses of promise, but have yet to demonstrate consistent production. Even if Fisher falls off a cliff and the youngsters still aren’t ready for prime time, and even if there are some injuries, it’s hard to see this team winning less than 50-some games - in a near-worst case scenario. But I think 70 is out of reach, despite what some are saying.

2. San Antonio Spurs 54-28 1st in Southwest
The Spurs had one of the best offseason makeovers, as a very old team exchanged some of its ancient parts (Bowen, Oberto, Thomas) for relatively young blood in R. Jefferson, who gives them much needed quickness on the wings. They picked up McDyess and Dejuan Blair to help TD up front, and Tony Parker continues to be one of the most lethal offensive PGs in the league. The key issue, as has been typical lately, is the health of Ginobili. Fully healthy, he turns this otherwise merely good team into a title contender. So the real issue for the postseason is - how close to 100% will he be? Coach Pop has a history of managing minutes and being willing to lose regular season games for the greater good of playoff health, so I don’t expect a serious challenge to the Lakers for the top seed out West.

3. Portland Trail Blazers 52-30 1st in Northwest
Loaded and young. It’s a nice combination. The problem: it’s still unclear how many (if any) of their guys will turn into long-term stars instead of solid role players; only one is there yet - Brandon Roy - and he may have a short shelf life as a top-20 player; worries about the health of his knees and hence his longevity as a top-flight player are why he dropped as far in the draft as he did. LaMarcus Aldridge is good; but will he take the next step to all-star status? Then there’s the tantalizing promise of Greg Oden - talented, but as yet still hasn’t outplayed journeyman Joel Pryzbilla. The guards are numerous but likewise still no clear standouts; Andre Miller may not be any better than Steve Blake (esp. with defense taken into account), and Rudy Fernandez, Batum, Webster, Outlaw - all nice players, but… The Knicks a few years ago, under Isiah Thomas, began amassing a roster full of decent players but no stars; we see how well that turned out. At some point I think GM Pritchard will have to take a chance and swing a risky big trade of several of his youngsters for a major piece if he wants this team to move into title contender status. Perhaps a major 2010 free agent who wants to leave his team could do a sign and trade so his team gets something back - LeBron, Nike HQ is near Portland…

4. Denver 51-31 2nd in Northwest
Their defense continues to be excellent but disguised by their pace, with Nene being one of the most underrated players in the league, and K-Mart returning to star form. But can Nene and K-Mart stay healthy? The Birdman was a nice find as a backup, but it’s obviously risky to depend on him, and who is the 4th big? Melo’s game matured considerably last year, as he played a little more D, moving from abysmal to merely bad there, and exercised much better shot selection and passing. Funny how much of that happened after Billups arrived and AI left town. PG got a nice depth boost with Ty Lawson being drafted to back up Billups; they might even play together some, but the worry is that Billups will begin to slip and Lawson might actually be better by the end of the season - most PGs don’t age well. Other depth remains iffy, but this is clearly a good team, if fragile; but they still look a little short of the elite.

5. Utah Jazz 49-33 3rd in Northwest
Kirilenko has long hair and perhaps some peace with his role and game, and their re-signed PF combo is terrific, as is the Okur/ Fesenko international combo at center, at least on offense. Ronnie Brewer is turning into a stud, but needs a jumper; Korver gives them much needed shooting, but can’t play D. Combine Brewer and Korver’s strengths and you’d have a first-team all-star - but that’s not the way it works. Deron Williams was great the second half last year, after he recovered from his injury; he still looks like he could become a superstar, the second best PG in the league. Defensive intensity, injuries, and uncertainty over Boozer’s contract/ trade status look like the primary threats, but like Denver and Portland immediately above, this is clearly a good team that might need a trade to become one of the elite.

6. Dallas Mavericks 45-37 2nd in Southwest
Dirk remains a stud scorer and good rebounder, and JKidd showed he can still assist with the best, even if his D has slipped a lot - there’s no way he should guard quick 1s any more. JT can still fill it up off the pine, and Josh Howard needs to come back as soon as possible to solve their wing rotation issues. A flyer on Shawn Marion seems a worthwhile risk, but does he really have any chance of returning to his glory Phoenix-level days? And if he’s mediocre and comes off the bench (or simply doesn’t get many touches), will his attitude negatively affect the rest of the team? Rick Carlisle is an excellent coach, but appears to gradually wear out his welcome - when will that happen in Big D? They are old and likely inconsistent, and the long season may not be kind; they still look like an almost-sure playoff participant to me, but remain unlikely to advance to the second round.

7. Houston Rockets 43-39 3rd in Southwest
Adelman’s been a great regular season coach throughout his long career, and despite losing Yao for the season and TMc’s uncertainty in both when and how well he’ll come back, I see them sneaking into the playoffs. Their midget frontcourt may be easily shot over, but not as easily overpowered; and guaranteed is that they’ll scrap and do the little things. And Scola is a really nice player, who is used to being the primary frontcourt scorer in high-level international play for years. PG could still be an issue, but Aaron Brooks will get to try to build on his playoff run of nice performances, and Lowry’s a reasonable backup, who fits into the team ethos by being a scrapper. Ariza and Battier on the wings is another nice combo, with exquisite defense - but can they score enough points? That’s really the question for both them and the team as a whole. I think the mass of prognosticators writing them off and out of the playoffs are simply wrong; ask the world champion Lakers about how they play, even without Yao or TMc.

8. New Orleans Hornets 42-40 4th in Southwest
Chris Paul is an offensive juggernaut and possibly deserves the MVP, and David West continues to be an underappreciated scorer and force. Emeka Okafor was a defensible pick-up in trade, as his stilted offense is still more than Tyson Chandler brought, even if he’s not quite the shotblocker. James Posey and Julian Wright remain excellent role players; but Peja is looking cooked, they collectively quit (except for CP3) in the playoffs, and their defense looks like it’s only getting worse. Worse, I get the feeling they hate Byron Scott, who might be fired shockingly early this year if they’re losing and CP3 makes the ownership coose between him and Scott. I can’t shake the feeling they should blow things up and re-create the team with youngsters who fit better around CP3, or else deal him for youngsters and draft picks and start all over; that they traded one of the few teammates he had chemistry with (Chandler) is a bad sign.

----out of playoffs:
9. Phoenix Suns 40-42 2nd in Pacific
The last stand of Nash, Hill, Stoudamire, et al. Dealing Shaq for nothing was an admission they’re going nowhere, even if they’re going there fast. They still have no credible backup for Nash, and an injury to Steve would quickly put them into a precipitous free fall - and he’s OLD - as is the elderly gentlemen playing 3, the artist formerly known as Grant Hill. (I understand he used to be a dynamic scorer and driver, back in the previous millennium). Amare looks like a shell of his old self, and is also playing for a contract, which will likely only exacerbate his selfishness. Channing Frye was released from Portland, unable to make it as even a 4th string center there; he starts for Phoenix. At 2, JRich looked a surprisingly (to me, anyway) bad fit for this style last year, and Sarver’s penury means Barbosa is the only decent bench player. So despite the appeal of their style, mediocrity looks like the best that can be hoped for, as they sprint into the sunset in 7 seconds or less.

10. Golden State Warriors 37-45 3rd in Pacific
Dysfunction, meet your team. Who actually wants to be there? Not former captain Stephen Jackson, not disgruntled and out of position PG Monta Ellis, not wunderkind but doghoused Anthony Randolph, and not even coach Nellie, it seems. Biedrins may have plateaued (and apparently is trade bait), B. Wright is hurt, Stephen Curry and Corey Maggette duplicate others, and no one wants to distribute or play D - they just all want to shoot. Despite all the offensive talent, it looks another long year in the Bay Area.

11. Los Angeles Clippers 32-50 4th in Pacific
The Clips - are they truly cursed? Fans thought definitely not this past summer, when insane ownership at Memphis took bad boy Randolph off their hands, and they won the lottery and got Blake Griffin, who profiles to me as another Buck Williams/ Al Horford/ Dennis Rodman high energy PF, but one unlikely to ever average 20 ppg - perhaps not even 15. But… Griffin gets hurt at the end of preseason and will miss 2 months, Baron Davis apparently still can’t get along with Coach Dunleavy and may be hurt or simply fading fast, and Al Thornton may be the worst starting 3 in the league. The frontcourt is stacked, probably too much so: Kaman and Camby and new addition, bruiser Craig Smith, make Griffin probably only the 4th best big on his return. I’m still not sure that Camby doesn’t remain furious at being dealt to the Clips, and both he and Baron Davis strike me as high probability mailer-inners if they remain after the trade deadline with the playoffs are seen to be a hopeless dream. They remain poor defenders, particularly on the wings, and it only seems a matter of time until last year’s discord between Dunleavy and most of the team resurfaces. This team desperately needs a new coach and a deal of frontcourt depth for a starting 3, but with Dunleavy’s contract and a cheapskate owner, you can forget it.

12. OKC Thunder 29-53 4th in Northwest
They hope their young bigs continue to develop into players rather than busts – Nick Collison looks like a journeyman, and he is their best defender. Jeff Green is a tweener F out of place trying to guard 3s, which makes keeping permanent his move to 4 and Durant’s to 3 an imperative, although they both will be physically overpowered easily by more mature players. Durant is the key to the team: despite dialing it up to 25 ppg, he again posted a near league-worst plus-minus, due to abysmal D and (intentionally or not) making his teammates play far worse on offense with him, as they subjugate their games to try to feed The Man. The hope is that he will follow the Carmelo Anthony path, from no-D overrated youngster who averages 28 to team player who averages 22 and actually helps rather than hurts his team. The NBA culture makes it difficult for prodigiously talented scorers to learn this lesson, as the reward system is out of whack with what actually helps teams win; players like Glenn Robinson never got it, and it took Kobe 10 years (and remains a work in progress there). The good news is that reports on the kid’s mindset indicate he’s willing to learn, but anecdotes are a poor substitute for actual data. The rest of the team features PG Westbrook, a talented sort who, IF he masters the outside shot, position defense, and the nuances of running an offense, could become an elite player - but that’s a LOT of IFs. The there’s Krstic the C, talented but still not the player he was pre-injury, and hence perhaps permanently slowed to a facsimile of late-career Vlade Divac. The good news for the future: youth likely to improve, more of a bench that most bad teams, lots of cap room, and their sellout home crowds mean they will get enough of a goose there (especially against road-weary teams in mid-winter) that they will easily win a few more games than the sad sack teams below:

13. Minnesota Timberwolves 28-54 5th in Northwest
The Wolves went 32-50 three years ago with Garnett, and finally realized they had to blow things up. Year 3 shows little progress but some cause for hope. They have an offensively gifted but defensively lacking frontcourt duo of Kevin Love and Al Jefferson, but health for them both (Love’s already hurt) is key, as the reserves aren’t pretty. They intelligently gave up on Foye and Mike Miller, but still need legit players at both guard spots and defensive help – perhaps Corey Brewer can become a stopper, but he’s another returning from injury case. Rookie Jonny Flynn and intelligent signee Ramon Sessions will man the point, but they foolishly drafted Rubio instead of using the pick for more help. At least they have some hope for the future – but for the time being, especially with a porous defense, they will continue to suck. But not as much as the last two:

14. Sacramento Kings 24-58 5th in Pacific
The Kings have a good offensive player – Kevin Martin – and Tyreke Evans will probably lead all rookies in scoring, as a huge, physical guard that will start and have license to shoot at will, and has a slashing game that should generate lots of foul shots, even as a rook. But he’ll be lucky to shoot over 40%, and the team is VERY young; the Thompson and Hawes have some promise but still look at least a couple of years of development away from being legit NBA starters, and the bench is pathetic, as usual for bad teams. They at least realized they should be building for the future by dealing Brad Miller to open up PT for Spencer Hawes et al.; now they should continue that realization by dealing Nocioni for more young pieces or draft picks.

15. Memphis Grizzlies 20-62 5th in Southwest
Gasol the Younger can bang, Rudy Gay can score and sky (and watch his man go by), and OJ Mayo is hyped - ball skills, ability to get off his shot, strength, and a little athleticism - and no clue as to how to make his teammates better; he reminded me, as a rookie, of what a selfish Kobe would look like if he’s still playing at 40. The young PG Conley has some promise, but it remains as yet unfulfilled, and he still has trouble with hitting 3s; and in the most bizarre move, they brought into a group of impressionable youngsters two of the worst reps in the league, Z-Bo and AI, black holes on offense, matador defenders, and difficult (to put it mildly) off-court. It’s not clear anyone but the PG and the center (Gasol) will ever pass the ball! They will almost assuredly play no defense, they remain in a brutal division, and look like the worst team in the league.

Playoffs: Lakers, Spurs, Portland and Denver all defend home court in the first round. In the second, the Lakers again overwhelm Denver as Artest clamps down on Melo, and Portland’s young legs defeat a Spurs team that likely has at least one of TP, TD, and Manu hurt. In the West finals, the Lakers cruise past a young Blazers squad, as Gasol and Bynum score easily and often inside and Oden/ Pryzbilla/ Aldridge don’t.

Finals: The hype will say Kobe vs LeBron – although it will be Artest guarding the King and shutting him down, as the Lakers win a second straight title.

Regular season: MVP – Dwight Howard. ROY- Blake Griffin can’t overcome missing 20 games and the Clipper froncourt depth; Tyreke Evans will lead the rooks in scoring, but at a low pct for a terrible team; so my surprise pick is Ty Lawson, who I think may be starting for a solid playoff team by the end of the season!

NBA predictions 2010 - Eastern conference

2009-10-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

NBA predictions 2009-2010
NBA preseason predictions (well; 80-game predictions- no one’s played more than 2 so far…):
Eastern Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM … PROJECTED RECORD … PROJECTED DIV. FINISH

1. Orlando Magic 60-22 1st in Southeast
They lose two key contributors, Hedo Turkoglu or Courtney Lee, and also Rafer Alston, who played better than expected as a fill-in PG. But Vinsanity has gone from overrated to severely underrated and is almost certain to be an upgrade on Turkoglu, who was a terrible defender and a mediocre marksman. R. Lewis may be due to get hurt/ regress, but two good seasons in a row and vastly improved defense impress. J. Nelson took a major step forward at PG before he got hurt, and apparently will be all the way back. Pietrus/ Redick should manage at 2-guard, or they can go big and play Vince there, Lewis at 3, and Bass/ Gortat at 4. But more than anything, D. Howard is a beast - the closest thing to vintage Shaq - and either he or LeBron will be MVP. They should edge out Boston for the top seed.
2. Boston Celtics 58-24 1st in Atlantic
The Big 3 are ever older, but the rest of the team is even better; Rondo continues to improve, assuming negotiations and team relationships don’t torment his fragile psyche. Kendrick Perkins is a defensive beast who fortunately doesn’t need to score. And adding Sheed makes their defense even awesome-er, assuming they get a more consistent effort out of him than the going-nowhere Pistons of last season did. Marquis Daniels should help their guard depth, and pairs up well with Eddie House in switching assignments from offense to defense. Only injuries, to KG, but also to Ray Allen or especially Rondo (perhaps their best, and least replaceable, player), appear possible to submarine things. The battle with Orlando and Cleveland for best in the East should be quite a battle royal.
3. Cleveland Cavaliers 55-27 1st in Central
Anthony Parker is a nice role player, and LeBron will start his second would-be MVP campaign with an improved jumper, but in re-fighting the last war (the playoff loss to Orlando amid Dwight Howard’s detonation of their D) by acquiring Shaq, they initially will likely disrupt the offensive and defensive rotations that resulted in 66 wins last year. Shaq changes their offense in ways better and worse (still a low-post terror, but he’s also a turnover machine and needs to be surrounded by capable passers and jumpshooters), and is notoriously inconsistent in his defensive effort. Add to that that Mo Williams will almost certainly regress, Varejao is a bad offensive match with Shaq up front (in that neither can hit a jumper, so teams can zone them; teams that play more than one person at a time who cannot hit a jump shot tend to have poor offensive efficiency), and the contract years / jealousy that having 2 supernova personalities makes the other 10 players resentful, in a way just one doesn’t… to say nothing of Delonte West’s troubles. So there will be some growing/ adapting pains. But come the playoffs…
4. Atlanta Hawks 47-35 2nd in Southeast
Last year I, unlike most prognosticators, correctly picked them fourth in the East - most people had them missing the playoffs. They should slightly improve this year, but the gap is far too large to catch any of the East’s top 3. Their bench is still iffy, with a rookie and/or ballhog Jamal Crawford as backup guards, but Mo Evans, Joe Smith and Zaza Pachulia are nice backups up front, and the starters (except for Mike Bibby) remain young and getting better, not worse. If Bibby gets hurt, or loses his offensive efficiency while continuing his horrid defense, things could fall apart; but most likely the Hawks will enjoy another solid season and a good shot at making it to the second round. The conference finals, though, will have to wait.
5. Toronto Raptors 46-36 2nd in Atlantic
They have taken a page from the Euro/ D’Antoni playbook and have a team full of ballhandlers and shooters, with suspect defense. Chris Bosh has struck me as overrated, but has every incentive to play his best in a contract year. Bargnani has improved, Turko should fit in well on offense, but Jose Calderon remains the key – he must stay healthy and distribute well. Jarrett Jack was a nice pick-up, but he’s probably better playing 2-guard alongside Calderon than being a fulltime distributor. The offensive firepower should usually overwhelm the defensive lapses and make them a solid playoff team.
6. Philadelphia 76ers 44-38 3rd in Atlantic
An enigma. How much does Elton Brand have left? Two years after a major Achilles injury, with last year lost to an unrelated injury; his age alone guarantees the 76ers won’t be getting the near-MVP Elton Brand of a few years back – 18 and 8 seems more like the upper limit, rather than 24 and 10. They continue to lack accurate 3-point shooters, increasingly a liability in the ever more sophisticated defensive era played now. Lou Williams is a talented driver in the Monta Ellis mold, but can he really play PG, even in a Princeton offense? Relatedly, how much will they miss Andre Miller? (On defense, probably not at all). And how good is Iguodala really - are his tremendous plus-minus numbers a mirage, or testament to him being a hidden gem? The bench remains ugly (except for Mareese Speights) if anyone important gets hurt.

7. Miami Heat 43-39 3rd in Southeast
Again, the Heat are an tough to predict this year, with the health of one Dwayne Wade the most crucial variable, but the maturity and emergence of Michael Beasley and PG Mario Chalmers running close behind, and the health of J. O’Neal following close - Udonis Haslem remains a fine role player who’s overmatched playing center. Their bench is laughable. If Wade stays healthy and the rest of the variables go well, they might even slightly outstrip this prediction; but if even a few things go wrong, I seriously doubt they make the playoffs.

8. Detroit Pistons 42-40 2nd in Central
Now that the AI nightmare is over, Dumars attempts to reinvigorate the franchise and arrest the slow decline of their non-Tayshaun starters by letting Sheed go and spending their cap room on Villanueva, a sweet shooting, no D ‘stretch 4’, and the ‘fire when ready or unready’ Ben Gordon. Rip Hamilton barely fits here, and that’s not even considering the fact that Stuckey is a 2 masquerading as a 1, and Will Bynum could be their best guard and barely see the court. The frontcourt defense will be far worse than before (even with the return of Ben Wallace’s semi-corpse), and they could easily fall out of the playoffs to one of the teams immediately below. But at least they should score more and be more entertaining to watch.
----out of playoffs:
9. Washington Wizards 39-43 4th in Southeast
Arenas is back and playing team ball, and Caron Butler continues to be an excellent swingman. But Jamison is already hurt, and the parade of injured figures to continue. They likely will outscore a number of teams and be in the playoff race the first half of the season, then slowly fade.
10. Chicago Bulls 39-43 3rd in Central
Del Negro still has a lot to learn as a coach, much like his young team. Derrick Rose may score in the 20s, but until he learns to distribute and defend better, his value will be far less than his rep. Noah and Thomas continue to tantalize, but remain problematic when playing together, as neither can hit a J (see Cleveland comment above). Luol Deng’s health is huge, but I can’t shake the feeling he peaked a couple years ago, despite his relative youth. Hinrich is a nice piece but seems better suited as a 3rd guard on a contender; I still see a trade as a real possibility for both he and Brad Miller, assuming the Bulls are not solidly in the playoffs come the trade deadline. I wonder if Cleveland would give up Z (and his expiring contract) and Gibson for them both…
11. Indiana Pacers 38-44 4th in Central
The Pacers still have a slow roster with trouble defending and with turnovers; TJ Ford will help for the 30-50 games he’s healthy, but… the backup PG is a problem with Jack leaving. Dunleavy’s health and shot are both in question, and Dahntay Jones is not a solution for what ails them. Danny Granger remains the only player who’s both reasonably young and good and improving, and his defense needs work. I like Jim O’Brien, and Indy will be competitive most nights, but they still look like a mediocre team that’s not quite good enough.
12. Charlotte Bobcats 35-47 5th in Southeast
A bizarre squad, defensively ept and offensively inept; Tyson Chandler is a defensive force when healthy, but his only offensive move was dunking a perfect pass from CP3 on a pick and roll. They STILL don’t know who their PG is, GWallace is a walking advertisement for the need for NBA players to wear headgear against concussions, and it’s not clear anyone on the team can consistently hit a jumper. Look for lots of 77-65 losses.
13. New York Knicks 33-49 4th in Atlantic
D’Antoni can’t solve everything, especially if almost all your players know that they’re only there for this season, and management wants the two vets with longer contracts to be gone for cap room, so they all are playing selfishly for their next contract and team. Nate Robinson may be the worst offender, but practically everyone on the team will be less invested in team than personal success. Although David Lee is a great fit for D’Antoni’s system, his D was sorry last year and he can’t shoot; the guards remain subpar, the defense even more so, and even a slimmed down Eddy Curry or a healthy Jared Jeffries have no real role in a D’Antoni offense. Gallinari may be the only keeper, and his health remains a huge question mark. Next summer, the Knicks face the reality of the tendency of major free agents to stay with their current teams, so like previous desperate suitors, they look likely to throw big money at middling players, which may simply continue Knick disappointment indefinitely.

14. New Jersey Nets 30-52 5th in Atlantic
The good: Devin Harris and Courtney Lee make a decent backcourt, and Lopez has promise as a scoring big man. The bad: most everything else. Yi (the bust) will play rotation minutes and continue to kill them, and the other forwards don’t offer much of an alternative. Like the Knicks, the team seems to be more focused on summer 2010 than this season, with the infusion of Russian oligarch money making somewhat more plausible the hoped-for LeBron and Brooklyn sightings. I’d pick them lower, but the coach works hard and the last team looks truly dysfunctional.
15. Milwaukee Bucks 25-57 5th in Central
Whoa. Sessions comes out of nowhere to become a decent PG, but instead of paying him, he and Villanueva leave and instead you pay - Ersan Ilyasova? Carlos Delfino? What the hell is going on out there? Skiles screams at teams until they defend, and it worked to a degree last year; but the screaming gradually quits working and makes a team quit on its coach. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him gone by midseason. Bogut is decent, and Redd can hit 3s (but can’t defend or pass). That’s the best you can say. Pain awaits.

Playoffs: Orlando, Boston, Cleveland and Atlanta win the first round. Orlando and Cleveland win the second round (as KG limps and the Cavs hit their stride), and in a seven game masterpiece, King LeBron beats the defending Eastern conference champs from Orlando in the East finals.

Coming next: Western conference and playoofs, MVP and other awards...

Agency and quantum computing

2009-10-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Agency and quantum computing

There are several threads to this post, which I will link together at the end.

First, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, according to David Chalmers, is subjectivity, or subjective experience – i.e., there is something it is like to be me – and all current explanations of information processing leave that unexplained. Quantum mechanics leaves an odd gap in the physicalist project, in that it apparently requires causally nonlocal and/or nondeterministic information processing in order to fully explain quantum phenomena, a problem which goes under several names, including ‘the collapse of the wave function.’

An illustrative quote from Chalmers, from his “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”:

“Perhaps the most popular "extra ingredient" of all is quantum mechanics (e.g. Hameroff 1994). The attractiveness of quantum theories of consciousness may stem from a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source. Nevertheless, quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same difficulties as neural or computational theories. Quantum phenomena have some remarkable functional properties, such as nondeterminism and nonlocality. It is natural to speculate that these properties may play some role in the explanation of cognitive functions, such as random choice and the integration of information, and this hypothesis cannot be ruled out a priori. But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

(One special attraction of quantum theories is the fact that on some interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness plays an active role in "collapsing" the quantum wave function. Such interpretations are controversial, but in any case they offer no hope of explaining consciousness in terms of quantum processes. Rather, these theories assume the existence of consciousness, and use it in the explanation of quantum processes. At best, these theories tell us something about a physical role that consciousness may play. They tell us nothing about how it arises.)

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.”

…

Next, I turn to David Darling’s argument for reality of parallel universes given the reality of quantum computing. To simplify, Darling asserts that we have already built quantum computers, and computation always requires a substrate - something on which to compute. But quantum computers are nonlocal - they cannot have a causally closed substrate in 4-dimensional space-time. Hence, on Darling’s view, they can only sensibly be said to be computing across multiple parallel 4-dimensional spacetimes - aka ‘parallel universes’.

So quantum computing - which is already being done - proves the existence of parallel universes, Darling asserts. The usual way of interpreting these multiple universes is via Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds Intepretation’ of quantum mechanics. The wave function in quantum mechanics never in fact collapses; instead, every possible probability distribution is actualized in a separate universe: so there’s a universe in which you read this post to the end, another in which you quit reading now, another in which you ceased existing 5 seconds ago, another… and so on. And all are equally real; but you are only aware of this one, because the information carried by the rest of the quantum wave(s) is now invisible to you - the act of observation guarantees it is in another universe.

…

Third, philosophy has a perennial problem of rational free will, or as we often call it, agency – the problem is, what is it? Our concept of it appears clearly incompatible with determinism (despite the valiant but vain efforts of legions of compatibilists) – to have freedom, it cannot be the case that one could not do otherwise. To be an agent is to have at least two logically, physically possible futures open to me right now: one in which I choose to do X, and one in which I do not.

But agency is also incompatible with causal indeterminism – uncaused events are simply not the same as an act due to agency. If my hand begins flopping around for no apparent reason, I do not believe that proves my agency - instead, it makes me call the doctor. To be an agent, I must be in rational control of which of those possible futures comes into existence. There are (at least) two futures, and ‘it is up to me’ which occurs.

So agency must be conceived as a causal power, but not one that is physically determined by antecedent events. So agency, in conception, is a nonphysical causal power in addition to typical physical causal nexus. But exactly what is this mysterious causal power? Does it really exist, or is agency merely a massive, species-wide delusion, borne of our ignorance of the fine-scale causal structure of our brains and bodies and the world?

…

Recall Chalmers’s Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source.

Perhaps the collapse of the wave function in QM, as several interpretations insist, is associated with the consciousness of a physical state. Perhaps the solution of the collapse of the wave function has to do with mind/ agency?

But without some further account, this is simply to replace one mystery with another; and an appeal to mystery is no real explanation at all, but simply an admission of ignorance.

But…. what if biology/ minds can access parallel universes in way that standard 4-dimensional physics cannot, in order to do computations or whatever conscious thinking is?

Suppose that Agency is thought of as the rational examination of (deliberation upon) nearby possible worlds/ parallel universes, and then deciding between them in terms of which one to bring about; to make sense of this, we would need a (non-4D-physical) mental causal power of accessing and deciding between parallel universes to determine which one your mind is to be in after one’s choice.

Such an account could make sense of why there is no causal closure of the (4D) physical, but nonetheless there is always causal closure when agency is included.

So on this hypothesis, agency is an ability to access and decide between various counterfactuals, understood as parallel universe(s), in order to single out one to experience.

…

Some Questions: is this additional causal power to access parallel universes only possible for biology? Implication of Darling’s argument – no, computers / electrons/ photons already do it.

Where am I as agent? If separate parallel universes are 4-branes (4D space-time), then an agent must be in at least a 5-brane in order to choose which to experience.

Some Implications: 1. We have some kind of existence beyond our observed 3D physical body in time. 2. Robots with agency are possible, if they can do quantum computing. Such quantum computing will be needed to move from simulated agency to real agency.

Comments welcome.

Finals pick

2009-06-03T13:40:00.001-07:00

Which Kobe will show up - the good teammate and great defender who can break down any defense and make the perfect pass, drive, or jumper, and lock down the opposition's best perimeter defender? Or the selfish Kobe who breaks the triangle to go 1 on 5, won't pass to open teammates, and will get lazy and go for steals and refuse to rotate and help on defense?

Kobe realizes his legacy is at stake; after a bad loss in which he scores 40+, Phil will explain this to him and he'll mend his ways. Lakers in 6.

Conference finals

2009-05-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

The Lakers have home court, and as we've seen, they appear to turn it on when needed. I've underestimated Denver all year, but even so, I see the LA express sweeping the first two, splitting in Denver, and then finishing it back home. Lakers in 5.

As for Cleveland - holy moley. Will Orlando win a game? Their defense has been terrific, so I think so - but only one. Cleveland in 5, and the NBA gets its Kobe-LeBron finals matchup.

second round picks

2009-05-03T03:35:00.000-07:00

I actually forecast the upsets of Houston and Dallas in the first round, but didn't register those picks here, so let's put it on the record. First, a final first-rounder: I forecast Atlanta to win, and with game 7 coming up, I'll stick with that if Horford plays. If Big Al can't go, I think Miami will squeeze out a win. It won't matter for the second round, as the Cleveland LeBrons resemble a juggernaut, though they will get more resistance this round than the basketball version of the disaster in Detroit put up in round 1. The Pistons and Hornets both were embarrassing, although at least no Hornets quit before the playoffs even began (thanks for helping your rep, AI). Cleveland over Atl (or Miami) in 5.

The Orlando Magic will miss Courtney Lee, but unless KG magically gets new knees, it won't matter; Orlando over Boston in 5. Out West, things remain more interesting. Denver got a lay-down from the Hornets and still lost a game, and I have a feeling J Kidd has one last playoff run left; Dallas in 6. And now the real shocker: I really like this Houston team, and despite the Lakers winning all 4 in the regular season, they were hardly blowouts. I see an epic battle, and with Bynum limping, Yao will be tough to stop for the Lakers. I see a 7th game and another 5-24 performance by Kobe as he sulks into the offseason yet again - Rockets in 7!

Trade Chris Paul? Yes.

2009-05-02T16:54:00.000-07:00

The New Orleans Hornets are in a world of hurt; they tried to trade Tyson Chandler for financial reasons at midseason, but the trade was nullified because of a bad toe. And so they still have Chandler's massive contract while their best player, Chris Paul, will get a massive raise beginning next season. With their ugly playoff exit, it appears clear that the Hornets need to revamp their roster and cut costs, and CP3 is their only major asset.

Hence, I believe they should deal Paul and Chandler to Portland for several young (cheap) players, including Greg Oden, and start over. Portland would do the trade because they would immediately become a serious title contender, starting Chandler, Aldridge, Batum/ Wright, Roy, and CP3.

Here's a link to the full trade:
http://games.espn.go.com/nba/tradeMachine?tradeId=cmayoz

How to solve our employment crisis and end the 'working poor'

2009-03-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

The Congress is about to consider the 'card check' bill that would allow unions to bypass a secret ballot and force open ballots on whether a workplace would unionize; the universal belief is that this would result in the unionization of more workplaces, and undermine the 'right to work' states that guarantee industries are not forced to hire union workers.

Democratic politicians are largely supportive of this legislation, and not just because unions are large campaign contributors. In addition, the moral argument is made that a lack of unionization in many industries (along with a relatively low minimum wage, compared to the cost of living) leads to the phenomenon of the 'working poor' - those who work full-time yet still cannot make ends meet, and struggle to afford necessities like food, shelter, health care and education for their children. The economic recession/ depression simply exacerbates the problem; the involuntary unemployment rate continues to rise, and as a result wages, particularly low-end wages, continue to fall, as do other benefits (such as health insurance) that employers use as remuneration. As a result, various kind of employment protections are also being discussed or are already in force, including a different sense of the 'right to work' - the right to keep your job once one is hired - i.e., the right not to be fired. The argument is that, especially in economically perilous times, one's job is a benefit that needs state protection against arbitrary and unjust removal; and so gaining in popularity are 'due process' laws that demand 'just cause' be shown before one can be fired, and the burden of proof is on the employer to be able to document in court why one was let go.

But economists often note that both unions and the 'right to work' as the right not to be fired entrench economic inefficiency, as less efficient workers are protected in their jobs and businesses cannot easily replace them with more capable employees. Hence, the question continues to be debated over whether the social benefits of the protections of unions and due process protections against termination are worth their costs to the overall economy.

This dilemma can be solved. But it would require a massive legal and social change, that in our current climate may be more attainable than ever before, but would still require great political skill and courageous leadership. As a bonus, my solution would also help solve other seemingly intractable social problems, such as the immigration of illegal workers from Latin America and the broken state of our health care funding. I believe a nation that adopts my solution would be more economically competitive, with less to fear from globalization, and with far greater social justice and better incentives to productive work, versus perverse incentives to collect funds for doing little to nothing at all. So here I propose my solution; it will be presented in various stages, but most of them are interdependent, not independent - if most or all of them are not adopted, it would undermine the value of the others.

First, we scrap the payroll tax and social security tax and capital gains tax and all the others, and have a single flat tax on all income (from whatever source). It would be automatically withheld from paychecks, or by trading banks on capital gains, or so forth. Direct deposit and other electronic forms of fund transfers would make this simple; the IRS would then focus its attention on large cash transfers, with a happy side benefit of making drug dealing, prostitution, and other illegal cash-driven transactions more difficult. The exact rate is negotiable, but 26% as a guesstimate seems reasonable; depending on the next two suggestions, it could be even lower, perhaps substantially lower.

Second, we make the estate ('death') tax 100%. Taxes should ideally be voluntary, or on activities we wish to discourage; or at the least, on those who will not object to the tax. The dead certainly qualify on the last point. The heirs of the rich certainly will object (and family businesses/ farmers), but I would have the government offer the designated heirs the first opportunity to repurchase the estate (at fair market value), using the life insurance that would no doubt be purchased for this reason, if the heirs actually care. (The life insurance industry would no doubt boom given my proposal; politically, that will help make up for the health insurance bust to come with my later proposals). Economists note that inheritances usually portend an extremely inefficient use of resources, being unrelated to productive labor; and the moral argument against them is even stronger - why should I, who had no choice as to my parents (and obviously could do nothing to deserve them), be unjustly benefitted from having wealthy ones (or unjustly burdened by poor ones)? The 'genetic lottery' is already a major source of unmerited inequality within a generation; to allow it to distort successive generations, indefinitely, violates the tenets of morality, whether they be consequentialist, deontological, or virtue.

Third, we would nationalize all lottery and other gambling companies of over a certain value, and have a national lottery/ casino industry. The main business of Las Vegas would not cease to exist (or even dramatically change); it would simply become a government industry town, like, say, Minot, N. Dakota. The long and sordid history of the connection between gambling and organized crime (and the ever-present risk of fraud) in any case cries out for greater regulation of this industry; better yet to allow the government to run it, and keep the proceeds for itself. (Sorry, Indian tribes! Reparations may be a legitimate issue; but gambling is a lousy substitute, just as affirmative action is a lousy substitute for the descendants of slaves). State-sponsored gambling/ lotteries are sometimes termed a 'tax on stupidity' by economists, but they have the considerable virtue of being entirely voluntary.

(I also support the legalization and nationalization of prostitution and most drug dealing, within 'red light districts' that are heavily regulated (not least for safety) and taxed, but that is a largely independent issue from my other proposals).

Fourth, we guarantee to US citizens a third sense of the 'right to work' - the right to a job for which one is qualified (or perhaps overqualified). That is, we put an end to involuntary unemployment. In practice, this means the state becomes the 'employer of last resort' - if one cannot find a job in the private sector, the government will gainfully employ you, whether it be as a card dealer or teacher or social worker or street paver or ditch digger or garbage collector. Or even as a bureaucrat! This is sometimes termed 'workfare' as opposed to welfare; welfare benefits would end (except for the disabled). But if one wishes to have an income, the state guarantees that one can find work. This may be thought of as FDR's WPA writ large, except that I think that government should also be more involved in higher-value industries than the ditch digging of the Great Depression. Which leads me to:

Fifth, the government should change the nature of bankruptcy and antitrust legislation and set up firms that compete with private businesses. China is not a role model in many ways, but their form of capitalism has some lessons for us. In particular, the free market idealizations of economists depend on many factors often missing from reality, and perfect competition is perhaps foremost among them. In the real world, private businesses relentlessly attempt to reduce the amount of competition they engage in; monopolies, price-fixing and collusion are merely among the most obvious of those attempts. China's attempt to control its economy ironically has hit on a way of increasing competition, by making private and state-owned firms in the same industry compete against each other, and often blurring the distinction between private and state ownersip itself. Interestingly, the US does this as well, but only in a few industries: the US is widely seen as having the best higher education system in the world, and vigorous competition between private and public universities is taken for granted. Elementary and secondary schools in the US have far less direct competition (as charter school and voucher proponents are all too aware) and accordingly are less efficient and productive. The current crisis in the financial sector and the confusion over the 'nationalization' of banks and other financial firms makes this all the more clear. I propose that when a private firm declares bankruptcy, this immediately means its stockholders have lost their equity, but the firm itself at least temporarily continues, now as a government-run and administered business, with employees earning government salaries. If other bureaucrats decide to disband the business entirely, that becomes a government decision; also possible is the recovery of the business while state-owned and its eventual re-privitization. In addition, when the government determines that antitrust issues have come into play and a business threatens a monopoly or other unjust restraint on competition, the usual response will not be to allow lawyers and judges to partition the company; instead, the government will form at least one new company with adequate capitalization to compete with the monopolist. Thus, the government can enforce competition by creating it directly when needed. Medical care is one obvious area in which having a state-guaranteed health care system (beyond ERs!) compete with private health-care providers is likely to be a boon to us all.

Sixth, we eliminate the idea of 'just cause' firing and the right to keep one's job; businesses will be free to hire and fire as they wish; but they will have to document the reason for firing employees, and that documentation will be a matter of public record. Employees will not be allowed to sue for unjust cause for termination, but they can sue for defamation or slander/ libel if the employer lies about the reason they were terminated. This reliability of this information will be crucial in helping other private or public employers decide on their next job, inasmuch as they have a right to some job (point four, above). In addition, I would support the dramatic lowering of the minimum wage (to, say, a dollar an hour). While not strictly necessary, this will turn out to enhance the efficiency of business hiring and firing without causing undue harm to employees. And that will help be assured by my final proposal:

Seventh, health insurance is guaranteed by the state (and no longer dependent upon one's employer, unless voluntarily chosen), as is a minimal income for all workers. How? By combining the flat tax above with a guaranteed refund for all US citizens. To assure the correct incentives, one's refund would depend upon one's job classification: for full-time entry level jobs, one would be guaranteed a refund of $26,000 a year. For full-time jobs requiring a college education, the refund would increase to, say, $36,000. And for jobs requiring advanced degrees - scientists, lawyers, doctors, professors - the refund would be $46,000. (Part-time work would garner refunds directly proportional to the percentage of full-time worked - so a half-time nanny would get a $13,000 refund, a half-time professor a $23,000 refund). That refund, of course, assumes one paid the 26% withholding on all income; if some income did not have the 26% withholding taken out, then one's refund would decrease. Again, the exact numbers are negotiable, but the principle remains: even if one works as a ditch digger for $1 an hour, full time - 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (2 weeks vacation) - then one will make a gross salary of $2000, withholding taxes of $520, so a net salary of $1480, but a yearly income of $27,480. No longer would any citizen work full time and remain desperately poor. But the incentives to move on to higher-value jobs (which are also better for the society as a whole) is built into the tax system. And immigrants would have every reason to attempt a path to citizenship: those legally employed here would still pay the flat tax but would not receive the refund. If combined with a decrease in the legal minimum wage, the incentives of Latin Americans and others to illegally immigrate would also dissipate, as American workers would know that any job guarantees them at least a living wage with the refund.

As a professor of business ethics, I believe the above proposals (and more that I have - but this post is already long enough) would offer solutions for many of the most pressing problems of our current economic system. Now, if only someone would put them into action....

NBA predictions 2008-9

2008-11-01T02:45:00.001-07:00

NBA predictions 2008-9 (well; 80-game predictions- no one’s played more than 2 so far…):
Eastern Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM PROJECTED RECORD PROJECTED DIV. FINISH

1. Boston Celtics 56-26 1st in Atlantic
The Big 3 may have a few more nicks and aches, but the rest of the team is for the most part young and improving, i.e., another year better; so even if KG and Ray-Ray continue their gentle decline, and Pierce regresses from his career year, they still appear the class of the East. The playoffs may be a different matter, but it’s hard to see anyone in the East passing them in the first 82.
2. Detroit Pistons 54-28 1st in Central
Sheed should be motivated as he plays for a new contract, and the slow decline of their non-Tayshaun starters is offset by a young and improving bench. The real question is whether they will sit tight at the trade deadline, or whether Joe Dumars will attempt to upgrade as he did when he first acquired Sheed. The next team’s fortunes may tell the tale:
3. Cleveland Cavaliers 50-32 2nd in Central
LeBron will start his serious MVP campaign by bringing 50 wins to the Cavs, and they may well use Wally World’s contract to upgrade at the trade deadline. Varejao is there for the whole season, the youngsters should be better, and Larry Hughes’s clanging jumper is finally gone… so my expectations are coming up, not down.
4. Atlanta Hawks 47-35 1st in Southeast
The shocker anew: most prognosticators have them out of the playoffs, but Mo Evans is a good replacement for Childress, and the rest of the team is young and getting better, not worse. And someone has to win the division, and here they are, led by likely all-stars Josh Smith and Joe Johnson, and blue-collar banger extraordinaire Al Horford. The status of Mike Bibby and his expiring deal as the trade deadline nears will also be interesting.
5. Toronto Raptors 48-34 2nd in Atlantic
They hope to have a healthy J. O’Neal, and Chris Bosh is now an elite player. They have a solid defensive team and a mediocre bench, hurt by the large white bustiness of Bargnani. Jose Calderon is the key – he must stay healthy, or they are in deep doodoo. But absent serious injury problems, I think they win at least 48, and possibly 50+.
6. Philadelphia 76ers 45-37 3rd in Atlantic
Unfortunately, players get worse, not better, after a major Achilles injury, so the 76ers won’t be getting the near-MVP Elton Brand of a few years back – 18 and 8 seems more likely than 24 and 10. And they lack any reasonable outside shooters, increasingly a liability in the ever more sophisticated defensive era played now. Still, their starters are good enough to get them over .500, although their bench could make it ugly if anyone important gets hurt.
7. Miami Heat 44-38 2nd in Southeast
Again, the Heat are an tough to predict this year, as the tank job of last season (how bad were they, really?) and the new coach multiply the uncertainties inherent in a team with a great player when healthy, a very good player when motivated/ not sulking, a fine role player who’s overmatched playing center, and a talented rookie (or two) with maturity problems. I’m assuming Wade stays healthy and has an MVP-candidate season; if not, I seriously doubt they make the playoffs.
8. Orlando Magic 43-39 3rd in Southeast
Turkoglu looks like the biggest lock in the league to regress this year – there’s no way he’s repeating last season’s great shooting. R. Lewis is also due to get hurt/ regress, and they still have a terrible problem at 2-guard and backup big. And I remain unimpressed by J. Nelson, and even less by his backups (with Carlos Arroyo departing). But D. Howard is a beast, and that’s why they get the last playoff spot.
----out of playoffs:
9. Indiana Pacers 39-43 3rd in Central
The Pacers have a slow roster with trouble shooting; TJ Ford will help for the 30 games he’s healthy, but…. Then what? A return to Tinsley? Dunleavy is another lock to regress, as he shot much better than he ever had before last year. And Danny Granger is the only player who’s both reasonably young and good and improving. I like Jim O’Brien, and Indy will be competitive most nights, but this looks like the upper range of their abilities.
10. New York Knicks 38-44 4th in Atlantic
Wow, what a huge coaching upgrade. The Knicks should be able to score even better, now that Marbury and Curry are nailed to the bench and Zach Randolph has a coach that will emphasize his strengths instead of his weaknesses. And David Lee is a great fit for D’Antoni’s system; but the guards are still subpar, and the defense even more so – and the latter isn’t D’Antoni’s forte. So more excitement and wins, but no real contention for a playoff spot – yet.
11. Chicago Bulls 37-45 4th in Central
Del Negro has a lot to learn as a coach, much like his young team. I expect Hinrich or Gordon to be traded (maybe both) by the deadline, as the Bulls continue to attempt to build for the future instead of contending now.
12. Charlotte Bobcats 36-46 4th in Southeast
Sean May is perpetually either hurt or out of shape, and Okafor has turned into a slightly better Erick Dampier. They don’t know who their PG is, and Adam Morrison looks like an all-time draft bust. Worst, GWallace is going to get concussed again at some point, dooming their playoff push and possibly his career. But at least MJ and Larry Brown can share Carolina stories while they golf.
13. New Jersey Nets 34-48 5th in Atlantic
Yi (the bust) will play rotation minutes and kill them; Vinsanity will mail it in if he’s still there after the trade deadline, and the rest of the team hopes to be better by 2010 and the hoped-for LeBron and Brooklyn sightings. I’d pick them lower, but the coach works hard and the last two teams will play horrid defense.
14. Milwaukee Bucks 30-52 5th in Central
Bad PGs – Charlie Bell starts, or finishes?! - and no one defends, no matter how much Skiles screams at them. And the screaming makes this the most likely team to quit on its coach – well, except maybe Charlotte if LB channels his Knicks experience. Bogut is decent, and Redd will likely be traded. That’s the best you can say. Pain awaits.
15. Washington Wizards 27-55 5th in Southeast
Selfish gunners with no D, but older and slower and recovering from surgery. Yuck. That’s what I wrote last year. I was a year early.

Playoffs: Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto win the first round. Boston and Cleveland win the second round, and in a seven game masterpiece, King LeBron beats the defending champs in the East finals.

Western Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM PROJECTED RECORD PROJECTED DIV. FINISH
1. Los Angeles Lakers 61-21 1st in Pacific
The Lakers have depth galore, and are soon to be even deeper with the players soon coming to town in trade for Lamar Odom – perhaps Shawn Marion, or Andrei Kirilenko. Kobe’s willingness to defer and defend, instead of being a ballhog, will determine whether this team actually wins the title. Their defense already looks fearsome, although Bynum’s health remains a key.
2. Houston Rockets 58-24 1st in Southwest
Adelman’s been a great regular season coach, and Artest (playing for a contract) is a great pickup. PG could be an issue, but they have multiple options there – Aaron Brooks looks like the pure PG they need to complement Alston. Assuming McGrady’s back specialist and Yao’s foot doc keep things healthy, they look like a terrific team.
3. New Orleans Hornets 55-27 2nd in Southwest
Chris Paul is an offensive juggernaut and possible MVP, David West an underappreciated stud, and Chandler a defensive force. And they added an excellent role player in James Posey. But while Peja was shockingly healthy last year, I don’t expect that to continue, and Chandler is a good bet to join him in civvies far more often than last year. Still, this looks like an excellent team, and with perfect health could threaten the Lakers for best record.
4. Utah Jazz 50-32 1st in Northwest
Kirilenko may be traded, and Harpring is falling off a cliff. But Ronnie Brewer is turning into a stud, Korver gives them much needed shooting, and Boozer and Okur are probably the best offensive 4-5 combo in the league (although their defense is a different matter). And Deron Williams looks like he could become a superstar. Injuries and uncertainty over Boozer’s contract status look like the primary threats, but no other team in their division is – at least until the Blazers get a little older.
5. Phoenix Suns 50-32 2nd in Pacific
The defense does look better, and Shaq looks healthy and motivated, although his explosiveness is never coming back. Their 8-man rotation is bolstered by Matt Barnes, a perfect fit as a role player. But they’re trying an overmatched rookie as Nash’s backup, and an injury to Steve could quickly put them in free fall. But assuming health, Amare Stoudamire should be a boxscore stuffer and they should remain a playoff team with legitimate aspirations of getting out of the first round – although a title now looks remote.
6. Dallas Mavericks 49-33 3rd in Southwest
Dirk remains a stud, and JKidd has enough left to keep them well assisted; Josh Howard has every incentive to play well enough to reclaim his reputation. And Rick Carlisle is an excellent coach, especially before he wears out his welcome. They look like a sure playoff participant to me, but unlikely to advance to the second round.
7. San Antonio Spurs 46-36 4th in Southwest
When will Ginobili return? And how close to 100% will he be? The answer will determine their playoff chances, as TP and Duncan remain studs, but the rest of the team would threaten the OKC Thunder as the worst in the league – they got old fast. Trading Scola to the Rockets now looks like one of the worst moves of the last few years.
8. Portland Trail Blazers 44-38 2nd in Northwest
Oden = Robert Parish, or Mutombo, or Okafor, or Dampier? They hope the right comparison isn’t Sam Bowie, but the injuries keep coming. The rest of the team is very promising but very young, and it’s not clear how many (if any) of their guys will turn into stars instead of solid role players; the best bet, Brandon Roy, may have a short shelf life – worries about his longevity are why he dropped as far in the draft as he did. I still see enough to hold off GST and Denver for the last playoff spot.

----out of playoffs:
9. Golden State Warriors 43-39 3rd in Pacific
They will just miss again, methinks; the Monta Ellis injury and Baron Davis loss offset Biedrins and B. Wright improving and a good wing rotation. Nellie could also effectively jump ship at any time, as he did in Dallas.
10. Denver Nuggets 40-42 3rd in Northwest
Their defense was underrated last year, but the linchpin just left town for the Clips with nothing in return, and AI (always overrated) is getting worse, not better. Can Nene and K-Mart stay healthy? Will Melo play D and exercise better shot selection and begin to have his value actually approach his rep? And PG remains a horror – A. Carter won’t shoot well two years in a row. When will G. Karl lose it?
11. Los Angeles Clippers 32-50 4th in Pacific
The Clips looked like an old and selfish team last year, and to boot had a player-coach locker-room cancer between Dunleavy and Maggette, to say nothing of Dunleavy-Elgin Baylor and Dunleavy-Donald Sterling. A year later, Sterling has given Dunleavy enough rope to hang himself with, in making him GM and coach. Camby is already hurt and furious at being dealt to the Clips, and Baron Davis is a high probability mailer-inner once the playoffs are seen to be a hopeless dream. They remain ancient and/or poor defenders on the wings, and they lost their best player and team leader in a botched free agency. The franchise appears cursed to perpetual mediocrity or worse.
12. Memphis Grizzlies 31-51 5th in Southwest
Gasol the Younger can bang, Rudy Gay can score and sky, and OJ Mayo is hyped. The young PG combo in Lowry and Conley has some promise, even if they are wee little men. They still lack defense and play in a brutal division, but they should show some progress at least.
13. Sacramento Kings 28-54 5th in Pacific
The Kings have some good offensive players – Martin, Brad Miller – and Reggie Theus seems a better coach than initially suspected. But the overall talent level is too low to expect contention anytime soon; they should be building for the future and perhaps should deal Miller to open up PT for Spencer Hawes et al.
14. Minnesota Timberwolves 26-56 4th in Northwest
The Wolves went 32-50 two years ago with Garnett, and correctly blew things up. They have an offensively gifted but defensively lacking frontcourt duo of Kevin Love and Al Jefferson, and a good-shooting swingman in Mike Miller, but still need legit players at both guard spots and defensive help – perhaps Corey Brewer can become a stopper. (Drafting Randy Foye was a big mistake; playing him at PG is a bigger one.) At least they have hope for the future – but they will continue to suck for the near future. But not as much as:
15. OKC Thunder 19-63 5th in Northwest
Their young bigs are busts – Nick Collison is the best, and he wouldn’t start anywhere else. Jeff Green is a tweener F out of place trying to guard 3s, and Durant a no-defense sieve watching 2s dash by him on the perimeter. Durant will score – 20 ppg is likely the minimum, and 25 isn’t completely out of the question – but a 45% FG pct likely is. He will attempt to enter the Carmelo Anthony overrated youngster pantheon soon. They may struggle to win a road game all year, but their sellout home crowds mean they will get enough of a goose there (especially against road-weary teams in mid-winter) that they will easily pass the 9-73 all-time loser mark.

Playoffs: Lakers, Rockets, Hornets and Suns win the first round. In a shocker, Shaq and the Suns depose the Lakers in round two, as Kobe launches 45 shots in the deciding game (and makes 10) and Shaq asks him again what his tastes like. The Rockets defeat a Hornets squad missing either Chandler or Peja, and the Rockets then beat the exhausted old Suns in the West finals.

Finals: The hype will say Yao vs LeBron – although it will be Artest guarding the King and shutting him down, as the Rockets win a title.

Regular season: MVP – Chris Paul. ROY- M. Beasley.

McCain's misogyny

2008-06-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno."

Straight from the mouth of John McCain, 1998. He apologized, saying it was 'only a joke' - after first denying he told it, then lying a second time by saying he heard it on Leno. I guess making fun of folk's appearance (and implicit lesbian-bashing) is what John finds hilarious. I hope all the women voting for McCain out of spite over Hillary’s loss realize just what they are voting for…

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/06/25newsb.html

Vice Presidential Speculation

2008-02-23T16:02:00.000-08:00

Vice President Speculation Forum – for Barack – ranked in rough order of plausibility, and leaving aside Hillary and John Edwards, who for different reasons I think won’t be chosen.

Jim Webb, D, VA. A prime example of a “Reagan Democrat”, his military bona fides include the personal - his son is actually serving in Iraq. Intellectual (a trait likely to appeal to Barack) - he has written books and was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, the first Marine to hold that job. He’s had high profile assignments, and is on both Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, helping Barack on the national security issue McCain is sure to raise. Bonus: Virginia is a traditional Red state rapidly turning purple.

Bill Nelson, D, FL, former astronaut, and also on both Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Less charismatic/ popular/ great backstory than Webb, but from an even more important swing state.

Also from Florida:
Bob Graham, retired senator and former governor. His executive experience could help ward off the ‘never ran anything’ meme, and as a bonus, he chaired the Senate Intelligence committee and voted against Iraq resolution in 2003 because (unlike Hillary) he had read the entire intelligence report on WMD.

Wesley Clark, D, Arkansas. As Supreme Commander of NATO during a successful war in the former Yugoslavia, has military credibility (although unpopular among much of the brass, apparently). Ran desultory campaign in 2004, and closely linked with the Clintons, which could either help or hinder his chances, depending on the level of enmity/ opportunism there.

Sam Nunn, retired D, GA. He also could serve as an effective counter to McCain on national security. Could particularly help with the link between nuclear policy and foreign policy, as Iran/ terrorist/ other nuclear proliferation could be huge issue. Georgia also possible purple state, given the 2008 relative primary turnouts and McCain’s loss there.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D, Kansas – gave the State of the Union response, an early endorser of Barack, and could help a red state cross over, with perhaps having coattails in other Midwest states. Obviously also appeals to those who want a non-Hillary woman on the ticket, to help keep female voters in the fold and turning out in droves.

And on the off-chance he wants to really push the unity and inclusiveness theme:
Chuck Hagel, R, Nebraska, retiring. A decorated Vietnam vet who presumably can’t be Swift boated, and well-known Republican thorn in the side of Bush, he’s already known to work closely with Obama on nuclear non-proliferation. He has already been linked to leaving the Repubs for a VP post as Bloomberg's running mate in his (apparently foregone) independent bid.

And for funs and grins –

Bill Clinton. The Constitution apparently doesn’t forbid it, but… it’ll never happen.

The Kobe rumors

2007-10-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

This blog has certainly enjoyed wearing out various trade scenarios for one Kobe Bryant, and the plausibility of one coming to fruition has never seemed higher. The leading candidate remains the Chicago Bulls, with rumors having the Lakers asking for Deng, Gordon, Thomas and Noah, and the Bulls and Kobe rejecting it - Kobe can reject it because he has a no-trade clause, and can turn down a deal if he deems it leaves his new team too depleted. The Bulls Paxson is known for playing hardball, and despite the media fit if it happens (imagine the Chicago Tribune headlines when it turns out they turned down getting MJ version 2), I halfway suspect they won't make the deal. The most plausible version may involve salary cap chicanery that has PJ Brown sign and traded with a 1-year contract (but never having to report for work as a Laker) along with 2 or 3 of those 4 youngsters.

If Kupchak is dumb and feels he has to deal Kobe to the Eastern conference, the Wiz and Gilbert Arenas look like the most likely deal; Kobe is thereby reunited with his friend Caron Butler. I think that is likely the worst deal the Lakers could make. But if Kupchak gets smart and trades for the best deal instead of insisting on sending Kobe East, new possibilities arise. The Mavs are one - while they won't swap Dirk, their love affair with Devin Harris won't get in the way of a deal. But salary cap restrictions mean a deal gets a bit complicated - the most plausible looks like Josh Howard plus Devin Harris plus some crappy bigs (Dampier, Mbenga) for Kobe + Radmanovic (whose snowboarding exploits and big contract make him a prime trade candidate for Lakers brass). The Mavs would still have Diop, Dirk, Stackhouse, Kobe and Jet Terry, plus various other bench parts, so this looks doable.

But my favorite deal (from a Laker standpoint) rumored so far is with the Suns, with Kobe heading to the Valley of the Sun for Barbosa, Marion, and the Suns-owned Hawks #1 pick in 2008. (It works under the cap). If I'm the Lakers, I can't imagine they'd get a better deal than that - not even from Dallas. And Phoenix would solve their Marion-Stoudamire standoff and give Nash some fearsome weapons. But, no bench. Could Phoenix win the title by playing Stoudamire, Diaw, GHill, Bell, Kobe, and Nash and almost no one else? I'd love to find out, for both their sakes and the Lakers.

fearless NBA predictions 2007-8

2007-10-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

NBA predictions 2007-8:
Eastern Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM PROJECTED RECORD PROJECTED DIV. FINISH

1. Detroit Pistons 56-26 1st in Central
Sheed looks motivated, their bench may well be better, and they play well together. Plus, they won’t have to cover for CWebb on D.
2. Chicago Bulls 52-30 2nd in Central
I suspect the roster will change before Jan 2008, as I expect Kobe to become a Bull before New Year’s. How that will kill their chemistry will not become completely clear until the playoffs.
3. Boston Celtics 48-34 1st in Atlantic
The Big 3 will mostly mesh well, but Pierce and Allen may have health and/or chemistry issues by season’s end, and their weak bench will doom them in the playoffs. I expect Big Baby Davis to deserve major rotation minutes by then….
4. Atlanta Hawks 45-37 1st in Southeast
The shocker: someone has to win the division, and here they are, led by all-star Joe Johnson and the deepest team in the division. Al Horford will deserve the award, but with Durant’s pub will probably finish 2nd in ROY voting.
5. Cleveland Cavaliers 50-32 3rd in Central
LeBron will coast through a good portion of the schedule again, and his supporting cast is another year older, mostly a bad thing. Plus, Varejao remains unsigned… so my expectations are coming down a tad.
6. Miami Heat 44-38 2nd in Southeast
The Heat are an tough to predict this year, as the health of their big 2 and the chemistry issues with Ricky Davis multiply uncertainties. Still, the team is better with Davis taking A. Walker’s minutes, and Shaq and Wade should both play 50-60 games. In the weak East, that gets them in.
7. Orlando Magic 43-39 3rd in Southeast
Not a fan of R. Lewis or J. Nelson, but D Howard looks like he’s becoming a true beast. That plus getting something from Redick and Turkoglu should assure a playoff spot.
8. Toronto Raptors 43-39 2nd in Atlantic
They overachieved last year, but have a roster that should still play well together. Absent serious injury problems (esp to Bosh), I think they make it.
----out of playoffs:
9. New Jersey Nets 38-44 3rd in Atlantic
Vinsanity will coast with his new deal, RJeff will clang jumpers and/or get hurt, and Kidd will wish he had Olympians to pass to and will probably push behind the scenes for a trade.
10. Charlotte Bobcats 37-45 4th in Southeast
I agree with Hollinger – if Sean May didn’t get hurt, they’d have made the playoffs. Losing Adam Morrison helps, sad as it is to say. But GWallace is likely to get hurt at some point, dooming their playoff push.
11. Washington Wizards 35-47 5th in Southeast
Selfish gunners with no D, but older and slower and recovering from surgery. Yuck.
12. Milwaukee Bucks 35-47 4th in Central
Bad chemistry from the PGs who wanted to go to Miami in free agency, but stayed because of money/ restricted status. Plus, Yi (the bust) will play rotation minutes and kill them – cf Adam Morrison last season. That offsets improvement from Bogut.
13. New York Knicks 34-48 4th in Atlantic
The Knicks should be able to score, just because the NBA doesn’t call 3 seconds much and Curry and Randolph will do plenty of damage down low against the league tendency towards smaller, quicker bigs. But that same tendency will exacerbate their already lamentable defense, and their overrated guards (Marbury, Crawford, etc) may melt down if required to feed the post nonstop. By season’s end, it could be ugly in the media and on the team.
14. Indiana Pacers 29-53 5th in Central
The Pacers have a slow roster with trouble shooting and a big man who doesn’t want to be there and thinks he’s better than he actually is. And though I like Jim O’Brien, he’s no Rick Carlisle as a coach. Pain awaits.
15. Philadelphia 76ers 23-59 5th in Atlantic
As it becomes clear that Andre Miller is their best player, but well past his prime, and Iguodala merely tantalizes, this becomes the go-nowhere team for the next 5 years.

Playoffs: Miami upsets Boston and Orlando knocks off Kobe’s Bulls in the first round, joining Detroit and Cleveland. Detroit and Miami make the Eastern finals, where in a shocker, DWade makes a case that he deserved KG’s MVP trophy and the Heat have one last hurrah in the Finals.

Western Conference (ranked by playoff seed):
TEAM PROJECTED RECORD PROJECTED DIV. FINISH
1. Dallas Mavericks 59-23 1st in Southwest
They’ll slip from 67 wins, but remain the best regular season team in the league. Dirk will lose MVP to KG, but will have another fabulous season.
2. Houston Rockets 58-24 2nd in Southwest
Adelman’s been a great regular season coach, and Scola is a nice pickup. PG could be an issue, but they have multiple options there. Assuming McGrady’s back specialist keeps doing his magic, they look like a terrific team.
3. Phoenix Suns 54-28 1st in Pacific
The league is beginning to adjust to their style, and with their penurious owner’s personnel expulsions, their depth is now tissue thin. If the Stoudamire-Marion envyfest isn’t resolved, it could be a tough season, and I think their title dreams left with Nash’s bloody nose and the suspensions in last year’s playoffs.
4. Utah Jazz 50-32 1st in Northwest
Kirilenko will either be happier or traded, and Ronnie Brewer’s emergence will stabilize their 2-guard situation. Even if Boozer misses 20 games, they look like the class of the Northwest. If he misses 60, though….
5. San Antonio Spurs 56-26 3rd in Southwest
I think this is the year that some of the triumvirate of Parker/ Ginobili/ Duncan miss some serious time, although I expect them back healthy for the playoffs – and the veteran Popovich will be fine with that.
6. Denver Nuggets 47-35 2nd in Northwest
Questions galore: will Camby, Nene and Kmart stay healthy? Will AI and Melo shoot them into or out of more games? And can they find a decent PG?
7. Golden State Warriors 45-37 2nd in Pacific
Nellie’s show has Biedrins improving and good possibilities on defense, as (with the exception of Monta Ellis) their rotation players can all switch the pick and roll without mismatch problems thanks to their big guards/ swingmen. As long as Baron Davis stays healthy (admittedly a large conditional), I think they’re playoff bound.
8. Los Angeles Lakers 41-41 3rd in Pacific
The Lakers have depth, and are soon to be even deeper with the multiple players coming to town for Kobe. Once those fellows arrive and Kobe leaves, the pall will lift and the Lakers will make a late playoff push to come from behind to grab the 8th seed, led by new stars Luol Deng and Joakim Noah.
----out of playoffs:
9. New Orleans Hornets 39-43 4th in Southwest
Chris Paul should be an offensive juggernaut, and Chandler a defensive force. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough else to put them into the playoffs, and will rue the contract they gave Peja every day until it ends.
10. Memphis Grizzlies 38-44 5th in Southwest
A healthy Spanish tandem, a terrific young PG combo in Lowry and Conley, and Miller’s marksmanship from 3 – what’s not to like? Defense. But they should play entertaining ball under Phoenix transplant Iavaroni, at least.
11. Seattle SuperSonics 33-49 3rd in Northwest
Their young bigs are theoretically healthy, and you would think losing Lewis and Allen as swingmen would improve their D, however much it hurts their offense. You’d be wrong, as Durant will be a sieve. But he’ll score and board a bit (18 and 7 look about right) and get the ROY in a developmental year of what figures to be a long career in the great wet Northwest – or so the good citizens of Seattle hope.
12. Portland Trail Blazers 28-54 4th in Northwest
No Oden, Roy is hurting, and… they have four or five PGs and little interior defense. In 5 years they should be really good, but this year will be tough.
13. Sacramento Kings 26-56 4th in Pacific
The Kings have some good players – Martin, Artest – and Miller has reported in his best shape in a while. That said, they still may play the worst D around – well, except for the two teams still below them. Which are:
14. Los Angeles Clippers 24-58 5th in Pacific
The Clips looked like an old and selfish team last year; a year later, they lost their best player by far and otherwise did nothing to improve, and even didn’t address the player-coach locker-room cancer, letting Maggette fester all offseason, As he enters free agency next summer, think he’ll worry about anything but gunning? Their only hope is Elton’s early return, but he likely will never be the same player as before the Achilles snapped.
15. Minnesota Timberwolves 20-62 5th in Northwest
The Wolves went 32-50 with Garnett, and should not be better without him. Well, actually, they might on offense – but their defense should be sufficiently horrid as to overwhelm any offensive improvement - especially as the refs don't let youngsters get away with much on defense. But now, they have hope for the future – it was the right move, even if it came a year or 2 too late.

Playoffs: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and the Spurs win the first round as expected. Dallas takes out the Spurs in an epic 2nd round, and Houston whips the Suns. And home court proves huge as Dallas whips the Rockets in 7 in the conference finals, setting up:

Finals: The rematch, Mavericks against Heat! Mark Cuban promises to have a team of retired refs analyze every call DWade gets as the series begins. The Mavs run Shaq ragged and hack him relentlessly, and sweep the first two; Miami gets 2 /3 at home, and the Mavs finally win the title in game 6 back home. Dirk is Finals MVP and lets all who questioned him have it with both barrels in the postgame news conference.

Regular season: MVP – KG. ROY- Durant.

Comments?

A-Rod, the franchise owner?

2007-09-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

This report gives Yankee fans a reason to worry even as their grasp on a playoff spot is almost assured: Apparently, A-Rod's agent, the notorious Scott Boras, is involved with another deal - the sale of the Chicago Cubs. And the rumor going round is that A-Rod will declare free agency and sign with the Cubs, for a contract worth $300 million dollars and a share of the new ownership stake in the Cubs!

Short of Steinbrenner deciding to sell A-Rod a piece of the Yankees, this looks like a hard deal to beat; so this may be the last opportunity for Yankee fans to boo A-Rod as one of their own. I'd love to see A-Rod and Mark Cuban own the Cubs - unless he'd rather buy the Braves, that is.

Offense spreading?

2007-09-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

College football is back, and quite exciting too - perhaps in part because scores seem to be on the rise; Oklahoma wins and averages 63 a game (!), and Louisville has perhaps the best passing QB in the land in Brian Brohm, throwing for 555 yards and 4 TDs in his last game - and losing. The famed 'black shirt' defense of Nebraska gave up 40+ for the second game in a row, the first time so doing in what seems like forever - and to Ball State! Even poor old Notre Dame, an offensive joke this season, scored two offensive TDs - and was still blown out, as its defense joined the crowd of those allowing over 30 points.

Recent years have shown the SEC as the best conference (followed by the Pac 10 - the Big 10 is now vastly overrated, and the Big 12 is top-heavy), and the big disparity with everyone else is on defense; the SEC annually has several teams in the top 20 on defense in raw stats, and even more if you adjust for strength of schedule.

One reason for the offensive explosion and SEC defensive dominance: the spread of the the spread offense, as popularized by Urban Meyer at Utah/ Florida and now many others. It makes team speed on defense more important than ever - and more particularly, skill in pass coverage and speed rushers.

The spread carves up zone defenses (played by slower, bigger defenses) by spreading them out and working the seams, and typically only the SEC (and a few other programs, like USC, Oklahoma or Texas) has the kind of athletes that can play effective man coverage on defense and also have front 4s that can rush the passer without blitzing. The return of the running QB (which gives the running game an option look, and/or an extra blocker) also helps offensive production a lot. Mike Vick would've accomplished much the same in the NFL, if he could've 1st, passed accurately, and 2nd, stayed out of trouble. But it will come, I expect. Be prepared for Pat White, Tim Tebow, Jake Locker and their ilk to be both running and passing in the NFL in a few years, revolutionizing the pro game as well.

Putin's provocations

2007-09-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

First, Putin appoints a new prime minister seen as a mere placeholder, bypassing the two favored candidates; an action which completely upsets all the assumptions about succession and raise doubts that Putin will step down as President next year, as the current Russian constitution requires.

The same week, Gen Alexander Rushkin, Putin's deputy chief of staff, announces they have just dropped the 'father of all bombs', twice as deadly as the largest US bomb (the so-called MOAB), which, due to nanotechnology, has a core temperature twice that of the US bomb; Rushkin claims that where it explodes, "All that is alive merely evaporates." But some experts think they faked the videotape of the explosion - why, no one knows.

So we have a leader who likely has ordered political assassinations using radioactive polonium, who has subverted the rule of law and the political process, and even sidelined his main intra-party competitors; and has made many menacing comments and over the past year done many things (highlighted in some previous alarming posts) to make Russia an obvious military threat to its neighbors and the world again. In terms of his dangerousness to US interests, he makes Saddam look like a Boy Scout. But Bush has 'looked into his soul' and discovered we have nothing to worry about...

And we know to just trust Bush's judgment on these things.

Update: At least a few in the media have noticed. But CNN et al. continue to ignore Russia unless polonium poisoning is involved.

Greenspan's shocker about Iraq

2007-09-16T00:20:00.000-07:00

It's difficult for any revelation to startle about the multifaceted debacle now called the war in Iraq (which includes a civil war, anti-terrorism raids, battles for Kurdish independence, attempts by Iran to undermine Iraqi sovereignty, and who knows how many other conflicts). But Alan Greenspan's new memoir turns the trick - in it, he claims that it's a shame the it was "politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil”.

Or more specifically, Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East - and Bush wants those secured (for his friends in Big Oil) more than anything. As long as the terrorists pose an ongoing danger to Iraqi refineries and their US-compliant officials, it seems Bush's main purpose for the war remains in danger, and hence our troops will not withdraw. We may be there to provide security, all right - but not for ordinary Iraqis, of whom we are now responsible for killing more than 1 million since 2003. Instead, it's their oil wells that must be secured...

And the Iranian oil wells may have to be secured next. Get ready for more bombs!

When does personhood begin?

2007-09-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

Personhood, properly understood, is not a species-specific concept; to believe otherwise is to commit the intellectual sin of speciesism, as well as ignore the raft of science-fiction shows as well as the work on AI that demonstrate the intellectual possibility (if not yet the physical actuality) of non-human persons.

That being said, not all humans are persons - fetuses, for example, are clearly not - rather, they are potential persons; beings which, if their developmental changes go well, will eventually become persons, but do not have such status yet. Analogously, my students are potential college graduates, but not actual college graduates; they have begun a process that, if all goes well and certain changes occur (like passing my class!), will result in their attaining the status of college graduate; but they do not have such status now, and may never do so, if things do not go well.

It is clear that the abilities which one must attain in order to become a person are mental; no body type or specific physical ability, like walking or eyesight, are required. An ability to pass the Turing Test - to convince an interlocutor that one could communicate indistinguishably from a normal human adult - seems sufficient, but perhaps not necessary. The kind of mental autonomy that we consider required for moral responsibility - for holding a person responsible for their actions - seems a better bet for a necessary and sufficient condition. Let's call that agency - the capacity for the rational exercise of free will.

Given the 'ought implies can' principle of ethics, along with the principle of alternative possibilities, a person can thus be defined as a being that has two or more courses of action open to them, and has rational control over which of the courses of action they pursue.

So when do humans make the transition from potential personhood to full fledged personhood? Under normal circumstances, at the age of two; and recent research has reinforced the finding that toddlers of that age have a social intelligence (of the sort required for such agency) missing from our most intelligent species relatives, chimps and orangutans.

So a normal neonate is not a person, but a normal two-year old has become one. One becomes a person (no matter what the species) when one becomes an agent. And although it is certainly conceptually possible to have members of many different species demonstrate agency, at the moment, only one species has convincingly demonstrated what it takes to be a person - Homo sapiens sapiens. (Although it is VERY interesting, to me anyway, to speculate on whether Neanderthal man had what it takes - I tend to believe (s)he did, and so two different species of persons co-existed for a while - perhaps until our species wiped them out, perhaps even eating them.)

So while I doubt very much that any extraterrestrial persons exist, it isn't because they are conceptually impossible - not at all. Rather, it's because I suspect that once persons evolve in any particular biosphere, they rapidly destroy themselves and the ecosystems required for their survival. In other words, I suspect many species across the Universe have attained personhood in the past - and none of them have lasted, or else we would be aware of them (or members of them!) now. It is the nature of intelligent civilizations to destroy themselves. Alas, that's another version of the Argument for Doomsday - from the Fermi Paradox. Hopefully I'll publish it in more detail soon... before it's too late!

Team USA recap

2007-09-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

A little belatedly, a quick recap of Team USA's mostly successful summer of FIBA qualifying for the 2008 Olympics, and a suggestion about what they should do next summer:

The basics you likely know: the team went undefeated, and was never seriously challenged. In their closest game, their second-round match vs Argentina, they led by 15 (28-13) at the end of the first quarter - and the same margin at game's end. That game revealed the potential weakness of the team; at the end of two hard weeks of playing a game nearly every day, the team looked tired and was outscored the second half, despite the Argentinean star Luis Scola being in foul trouble and barely playing after that blowout first quarter.

The team had far better defensive intensity than past national squads, and their 3-point shooting was improved as well. If they continue that, they may be unbeatable - but Argentina gave a game while missing 5 current or former NBA players (Ginobili, Nocioni, Oberto, Herrmann, and Pepe Sanchez). And Spain, Italy, France and other Euro squads are also laden with NBA talent, and Greece beat the last USA squad with an advanced pick and roll game the US defense still struggles to stop. The depth of Team USA should make them better positioned to prevail at the ends of games and play better and better deep into a tournament in which games are played every day, and less talented teams must play their starters nearly 40 minutes every night. But the USA oddly seems to play worse in second halves - and this goes back to their losses over the last several competitions.

Hence, my suggestion: NBA players are psychologically used to playing 32-36, or even 40, minutes a game, but are used to playing tired on 'back to backs', much less when they have to play 3 or even 4 nights in a row. And easy way to make the Olympic schedule more like an NBA one would be to divide the roster into 3 groups of 4, and have 2 of those groups (8 men) play each game, while the other group of 4 gets the night off. That way, no one would ever play more than two nights in a row, and the team would truly be the freshest when it came to the games that really counted at tourney's end.

Here's how I'd divvy the roster up - first, from this summer's roster:
Group 1: Howard, LeBron, Kobe, Kidd
Group 2: Amare, Melo, Redd, Billups
Group 3: Chandler, Prince, Miller, DWilliams

That also corresponds to their pecking order in status. But I suspect Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and less certainly, Elton Brand (if healthy), Chris Paul, and perhaps Shane Battier or Joe Johnson will make the team next season. So here's my projected groups, based on my expectations for next year's roster:

Group 1: Howard, LeBron, Kobe, Kidd (the same)
Group 2: Brand, Melo, DWade, Billups
Group 3: Bosh, Amare, Redd, DWilliams

Bosh would bump up to group 2 if Brand isn't healthy. Group 1 would be the fastbreak specialists, group 2 is better in the halfcourt, and group 3 would provide a shooter, 3rd PG, and size. If they use this roster with my proposed rotation, with group 1 and 2 playing against the toughest opponents, I suspect they could waltz to the gold. In any event, I think Team USA fails to take full advantage of its depth, and some system like mine should be instituted to help avoid another upset in 2008.

A Doomsday Device? Really?

2007-09-04T21:12:00.000-07:00

My favorite film, Dr. Strangelove, is the tale of a rogue US general launching an accidental nuclear war, and the errors of command and control that result in one bomber not being recalled, even after everyone realizes it was all a mistake. The grim joke at the end of the movie, however, is that the USSR has built a 'Doomsday Device', so that if any nuclear attack on them is successful, they will automatically detonate numerous cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs all around the planet, releasing enough deadly fallout to render the Earth uninhabitable for humans for 93 years. Nothing can stop the device, once activated.

But surely this is all just a fantasy. As Dr. Strangelove himself says in the movie, what's the point of a Doomsday Device if you keep it a secret? Presumably no one actually wants the end of human life on Earth, so the only point of building a Doomsday Device is for its deterrent effect - and it can't have any deterrent effect if your enemy doesn't know of its existence!

Alas, we have reason again to think that reality is stranger than fiction. There's reason to believe the Soviets have built such a device, and have recently taken steps to reactivate it. Or more properly, they never deactivated it, and may be upgrading it. The claim: a system named Kosvinsky exists inside a mountain in Russia, able to communicate via VLF radio, which could work even during the massive radiation of nuclear fallout, and would coordinate and launch all Russian nuclear forces after an initial strike. This and more are part of a new book by P.D. Smith detailing the severity of the risk of all-out nuclear war using such a 'superweapon', whether started accidentally or otherwise.

The further rumor: Nuclear launch risk specialist Bruce Blair intimates that Bush's recent requests for a nuclear 'bunker-buster' bomb, supposedly for Iraqi or Iranian nuclear facilities, may actually have the Kosvinsky system in mind. And Putin has eagerly made clear that Russia's nuclear bombers are back in the air, saying “Our pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.”

In short, Russia appears to be actively preparing for nuclear war, and has never been too keen on safeguards against accidental launch - preferring a certain counterattack, and a last-chance Doomsday machine that means the rest of the world will lose a nuclear war if they do. The Doomsday clock is at 5 minutes to midnight; I increasingly worry it should be closer.

The gods work in mysterious ways?

2007-09-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

How does Pat Robertson et al. explain this one? Bunky Bartlett said he made a deal with his gods - let him win the Mega Millions lotto jackpot, and he would begin teaching Wicca fulltime. Amd guess what? He won.

Like all the other falsifications of the core beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity, this will no doubt be shrugged off and never mentioned. It simply shows how much the Christian religion has turned into a socio-political unfalsifiable ideology, rather than the all-encompassing worldview of the past that supposedly makes factual, testable assertions. Fundamentalist Christians are supposed to look condescendingly at those who treat the Resurrection of Jesus, or the Virgin Birth, or multitudinous other miracles as anything other than literal historical fact. They are supposed to be on the side of Elijah against the prophets of Baal, in which only those who believe in the true God have their prayers answered - and believers in false Gods have their prayers fall on deaf ears, unanswered, doomed to die at the hands of those who are the winners of the divine experimental method.

If so, why aren't they all Wiccans today? Christopher Hitchens explains it very well.

Jimmy loves John, and thoughts on competition

2007-09-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

From the Kansas City Star:

"Jimmy Carter stops short of endorsing John Edwards, but calls him a candidate “whom I really admire.”
More: “I can say without equivocation that no one who is running for president has presented anywhere near as comprehensive and accurate a prediction of what our country ought to do in the field of environmental quality, in the field of health care for those who are not presently insured, for those who struggle with poverty.”

Of course, I couldn't agree more. Edwards' health care plan has successfully split the baby, by having an expanded version of Medicare available to all, but without that program being mandatory - so private insurers still have every chance to compete on price and coverage, but every citizen is covered, one way or another. It's an experiment that can help resolve the conservative canard that private business is always more efficient than government bureaucracies at providing the same services. In fact, China and Russia are already disproving that claim daily, as government businesses there routinely outperform private competitors in what is termed "state capitalism". Government bureaucracy has gotten a bad name because monopolies, whether private or public, breed sloth and poor management. The breakup of AT&T heralded an amazing growth in telecommunications in the US, and many believe Linux and Macintosh have far better operating systems than any version of the Windows monopoly. And so likewise for public businesses - think how much better the US Mail has gotten since Fedex, UPS, et al. came into being.

Our higher educational system, widely acclaimed the world's best by impartial rankings, is testament to the value of such competition - private and public colleges compete for students and much else, and the result is excellence unmatched elsewhere. And such public-private competition could also end the ravages of unemployment, corruption, and wage inequality, if allowed to flourish. More on that in a later post on the fundamentals of business ethics.

Bombing Iran?

2007-09-01T22:03:00.000-07:00

Given the complete and utter debacle in Iraq - a fine book about it was aptly titled Fiasco - it beggars the imagination that we are actively planning a massive bombing attack on Iran that would (in theory) reduce the entire Iranian military apparatus to rubble in three days.

Verily, though, it appears we are; but surely we are leaking word of this proposed attack as a feint, a bluff, a threat of the stick in order to get Iran back to the carrots of the negotiating table, and get the IAEA inspectors back to their nuclear plants and achieve a diplomatic solution, right?

If some of those at the front lines are reading their tea leaves correctly (and telling the truth), then no - it's no feint; it's all too real, and we are at a stage much like Iraq in early 2003, in which the military decision has already been made, and the only question is the exact timing. According to this diary, all the "Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking" have already been completed - all the targets inside Iran have been carefully selected, given a priority, and even the specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so on have already been assigned their missions. The only query left - when does it begin?

The diary notes that officers and senior commanders who raised doubts about striking Iran have recently all been replaced. I am wary of trusting anonymously sourced testimonials from frontline military sources on future plans, but the source here sounds all too believable, and even admits she could be compromising a secret attack - but doesn't care, as she senses it is morally questionable, contrasting it to morally clear missions in Kosovo or helping tsunami victims.

If this is all a bluff, Bush is a better poker player than I think. So, I suspect it is not a bluff. Instead, look at where things are headed: Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent Israeli politician who has repeatedly compared Iran's President Ahmadinejad to Hitler in 1938 (and helped persuade fundamentalist Christians that the US would be nuked right after Israel), has recently and easily won the race to lead Israel's hardline Likud Party, making him the favorite to become the new Israeli prime minister.

The result: the Israeli military now has a new spy satellite specifically designed to track the Iranian nuclear program, and the combination of Netanyahu's popularity and the apparent decision of the US to bomb has the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert doing - guess what? Well, in an article in Germany's Bild newspaper, Olmert compared Iran's president with Adolf Hitler for calling for Israel's destruction! Hmmm - I sense a rhetorical trend, and to Israeli ears, there's only one thing to do to someone who threatens a new Holocaust - and it's not containment or negotiations.

The context makes it even clearer: the remarks were published a day after the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Iran had failed to observe a deadline for halting uranium enrichment activity. And that's not all: Olmert went on to say:

"The West - above all under the leadership of the United States - will ensure that Iran under no circumstances comes to possess unconventional weapons.The president of the United States is a very brave man who understands that very well."

Putting 2 and 2 together, I'm guessing it is too late for Iran to have a peaceful end to its uranium enrichment activity. The Israelis now even have a new spy satellite that will help the American bombers do their jobs - and it just became operational. I'm guessing we will have a three-day war in Iran before the New Year - and no one knows what the terrible fallout of that will be. Only that it will take Iraq off the lead on the news!

Virtue ethics and the best candidate for President

2007-08-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

From the perspective of virtue ethics, the worst moral dilemmas arise when people of virtue find themselves caught in situations in which the institutions in which they play their assigned roles are themselves corrupt; so that acting virtuously in your role, doing what you ought to be doing for the good of the institution, nonetheless detracts from the good of society. That is, what is good for you and the institution that defines your role, is simultaneously bad for the larger society in which you and your institution play a role.

Everyone understands this when we say that being a deadeye shooter helps one function excellently as a hitman for the Mob, but nonetheless your excellence in that role is not virtuous for the larger society. But the Mob is widely perceived as an illegitimate institution (Tony Soprano notwithstanding!), and so this is not a true moral dilemma. A truly calamitous moral situation is when an institution widely seen as moral, or the guardian of public morality, occupies such a negative role in the health of the body politic. And so the most grievous institutional evil is the moral failure of government - to have a government so wedded to corruption and pursuing its own agenda at the expense of the commonweal that even its virtuous members find themselves constantly tempted to do things that will advance their personal fortunes, but be terrible for society at large. Horribly, this now describes the US government. A true leader will face this and identify it as the crucial problem to be solved - the rest is all details.

One man running for President has done so; one is brave enough to say the following:

"Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it's rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They'll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are -- not for the country, but for themselves."

That man's name is John Edwards. You should read the entire speech, recently given in New Hampshire; and then you should write him a check and tell him he has your vote. Those in power don't wish you to think hard about the culture of corruption, not when they benefit from it so much.

They also wish to trivialize the campaign and make nonsense of the true concepts of hypocrisy and concern for the poor. They wish to use the tools of media manipulation, fear, and false and mendacious advertising to twist you away from the truth - that their corruption continues only as long as you don't notice and don't put up a fight.

A real 'candidate for change' will have to be one who refuses to allow the accumulation of power and money by those in Washington upstage the search for truth and accountability. He or she must be one who can say (and act upon) the following:

"Politicians who care more about their careers than their constituents go along to get elected. They make easy promises to voters instead of challenging them to take responsibility for our country. And then they compromise even those promises to keep the lobbyists happy and the contributions coming.

Instead of serving the people and the nation, too many play the parlor game of Washington -- trading favors and campaign money, influencing votes and compromising legislation. It's a game that never ends, but every American knows -- it's time to end the game.

And it's time for the Democratic Party -- the party of the people -- to end it."

Only one candidate is willing to say this - John Edwards. Please support him.

Facts, values, and ethics

2007-08-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

Query: Is there a clear distinction between facts and values? Do we have a world of hard facts about physical objects on one hand, and a wealth of intangible, fuzzy claims about 'values' on the other? Can 'values' just be whatever we want, or can they be different for different people?

Let's ask this a different way: Are value-statements clearly true or false (a view called cognitivism)? Notice this is a separate query from that of whether or not we can ever know that a value claim is true or false – you must answer the first question in the affirmative to have any chance of answering the second affirmatively.

The belief in an objective morality – involving a confutation of ethical relativism – depends on answering the first query in the affirmative. In other words, it depends on (at least) some values being facts. Hence, an inquiry into objective ethics already assumes a position in what’s called meta-ethics – the process of deciding between different ways of justifying moral judgments, which are made on basis of reasons.

The belief in an objective morality normally corresponds to a metaethics of moral realism (the idea that moral claims correspond to an external moral reality, independent of the individual or society). Here are some other possible metaethical views: Nihilism is the view that no way of justifying moral judgments is possible, because moral facts don’t exist. Contrast that to moral relativism (moral facts are relative to the individual (subjectivism) or a society/ culture (cultural relativism). Or emotivism – moral claims are simply disguised emotional attitudes/ outbursts. And so on.

Ethics is not merely an intellectual tool; its use (and misuse) informs many roles and jobs in our society. There are 4 basic types of moral investigation, or applying reason to morality:

Social Scientists – usually engage in descriptive ethics, describing the moral codes of a group, usually without passing judgment on their rightness or wrongness – e.g., a sociologist, or anthropologist, or some psychologists.

Casuists – apply ethics to concrete situations, usually to attempt to achieve some goal; they offer adjudication, defense, advice, enforcement, and a whole host of other activities related to a moral code for specific situations. Such casuists obviously include lawyers, but also judges, police, social workers, psychiatrists, therapists, teachers, and others.

Moralists/ Hortatory specialists – these people specialize in exhorting/persuading people to adopt certain moral rules or codes, or to adopt a certain way of life as better than others – they include ministers, politicians, and advertisers.

And finally, there’s what I do (and am doing right now), the:
Ethical theorist – who engages in critical examination and evaluation/ invention of ethical theories; they specialize in meta-theorizing - judging which systems can best render rational moral judgments. They evaluate the rational defensibility of various theories of ethics, and hence primarily engage in metaethics, or act as a philosopher of ethics. The primary focus is not directly on what one ought or ought not to do, but how to rationally justify whatever claims are made about what one ought or ought not to do. Of course, if the most rational ethical theory is the correct one, an ethical theorist will also have considerable practical information about what one ought to do, as one means of testing the metaethical virtues of competing theories. But the focus is on whether particular ethical theories (such as virtue ethics or utilitarianism) are true or false, and not on the practical issue of whether or not you should, say, give to charity.

So what ethical theory is the best – the truest? Or is it all relative? Stay tuned…

More on church-state separation

2007-08-27T13:49:00.001-07:00

While on the topic of the separation of church and state, the concept has the potential to be a panacea for many other problem issues besides gay marriage. Here's one: Taxes.

You see, unlike any other charitable organization, churches are allowed to engage in religious discrimination, political fundraising, private education, and a host of other activities that are banned from receiving tax dollars (or sometimes even legal permission) for any other type of organization. A non-profit organization that engages in hiring discrimination based on religious beliefs, tries to instill those beliefs in impressionable children, and serves as a fundraiser for one political party would never be allowed - unless it called itself a church.

Most egregiously, these churches receive tax dollars both directly (under Bush's 'faith-based organization' slush fund for his supporters) and indirectly, by having their revenue stream be tax-free; in fact, their income qualifies as tax-deductible for those who fund it!

The separation of church and state, properly enforced, would acknowledge that churches are a business, with income, and should be taxed like any other private business and legislated like any other private business. That would include a legal responsibility against hiring discrimination in any non-BFOQ endeavors - i.e., they cannot discriminate against non-members when they hire teachers or janitors or cooks or accountants. They could only discriminate towards their own religious beliefs in a BFOQ situation - say, when hiring a new minister.

I am in favor of school competition and a limited voucher system experiment, but only if there is an exclusion for religious schools - no tax dollars should go to support a religion and the inculcation of its doctrine in young minds. In practice, as most schools receiving vouchers are Catholic or evangelical Protestant, that would effectively undermine all current programs - and just as well, as the teaching of religion is persuasively argued to be a far more insidious and important form of child abuse than the better known molestations by Catholic priests.

Gay marriage - a political solution

2007-08-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Gay marriage is one of those contentious issues in which one side feels strongly, but has no philosophically trenchant argument for their position - but it conforms to tradition, so is widely heralded. Whereas a significant minority make a compelling philosophical argument based on equality of rights, but are seen as undermining the established order and spreading immorality!

So how to finesse it? In some ways, it is like the civil rights movement - rational ethicists know what we should do, but how to sway public opinion to do the right thing? (This is aside from the further parallel with laws against mixed-race marriages that were one of the many Jim Crow laws the civil rights movement overthrew. As a further aside, the ability to get people to do the right thing when it is unpopular is a fair preliminary definition of leadership).

Ultimately, most people do want to do good - or at least have others perceive them as good - and so this is an issue in which moral suasion is required; thus, moral philosophers have an immediate role to play, in presenting convincing arguments for gay marriage and refuting the lame counterarguments that are raised.

My friend Dan has blogged about an old idea of mine (which he independently raised) for solving the problem; I thought I would enlarge on our shared idea here, with specific suggestions for how a politician could successfully frame it in these contentious times. The short version: make marriage an exclusively religious ceremony, and make civil unions an exclusively governmental function; so civil unions are the only thing recognized by the state, and are required for the state to recognize a legal union. Of course, this already de facto occurs in the requirement of a 'wedding license' for a marriage to be valid. As a matter of equal rights, any couple - gay or straight - would be eligible for a civil union, whereas it would be up to individual churches whether or not they wanted to perform the private ceremony of marriage for a couple.

Here's the way a politico could frame it:

'I am in favor of upholding the constitution, which this Administration has done so much to harm and subvert. A key principle of our constitution is the separation of church and state. Religious tolerance is a principle that goes back to the Founding Fathers, and our government is supposed to make no law respecting the establishment of one religion, or its peculiar emphases, over all the people; while simultaneously allowing any such private religion to flourish, according to the convictions of its own adherents, without thereby becoming the law of the land.

Gay marriage is an issue in which the separation of church and state has failed. Some churches (such as the Southern Baptists) refuse to allow gay marriage; others (such as the Unitarian Universalists) wholeheartedly endorse it. As a sacred institution, I wholeheartedly endorse the ability of any denomination to decide for itself whether or not to allow gay marriage. No church should be forced to endorse or officiate a ritual it finds repellent. But the religious divide on this issue also means that to legislate either the acceptability or non-acceptability of gay marriage is immediately to offend one religion or another.

As marriage is primarily a sacred, religious institution, the solution is simple: Get government out of the marriage business. The state has an interest in furthering the integrity of families and encouraging the good of its citizens, especially children; it also has an abiding interest in guaranteeing the equality of all citizens under the law. Gay couples are allowed to be parents, and repeated studies have shown that having two committed parents in the home helps children. Hence, the state has an interest in providing for legal civil unions for all couples, with full legal rights - and responsibilities. The state in fact has an obligation to provide such opportunity for civil unions for all its citizens, under the duty of equal treatment under the law. Hence, the existing system of requiring a wedding license for legal union should be turned into a federal requirement of the availability of civil union for any couple, gay or straight, regardless of religious affiliation. It would then be an entirely private religious matter whether or not any particular church wished to supply an accompanying religious ceremony of marriage to commemorate and sanctify the legal bond. '

Or in slogan form: "Marriage for the the religious, civil unions for all"

Some polls indicate civil unions would already be somewhat popular, dependent on how the issue is framed; but (to my knowledge) no one in the mainstream discourse has framed it as above. Why can't Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or John Edwards say this right now? Spread the word!

The Guvernator's 'fiscal conservatism'

2007-08-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

A program that has helped thousands of mentally ill homeless people avoid the cycle of hospitalization, jails and street life - a program that more than pays for itself in saved prison and hospital costs, to say nothing of the lives it enriches - is cut from the California budget.

What's saved? A tax break for yacht owners, that costs almost as much. After all, Senate Republican Leader Dick Ackerman owns a yacht... and we all know who the state should help more, yacht owners or the mentally ill homeless.

And make no mistake - this was a line item veto by Arnold. He knew well what he was doing. Any hope he would be a centrist force for the general welfare, as opposed to yet another captive of Republican special interests, further disappears. He fits right in with the national Republican party's movement to loot the public treasury of our hard-earned tax dollars for their own enrichment.

Perhaps it's time for another recall.... yea, even a Total Recall!

Libertarians - becoming Dems?

2007-08-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds that property and liberty are the only fundamental rights, and those are to be interpreted as negative rights: they merely require others not to interfere with one as they choose to exercise the right (or not); they never require the active assistance of others. A libertarian thus believes helping others is not a duty, but charity. Your duty is not to interfere with others as they use their property, as long as they don't interfere with you. Robert Nozick's 'night watchman' state is perhaps the best known development of this philosophy in the 20th century.

Libertarians accordingly value very small government, believing most taxes are simply the theft of one's property by the government. They are anti-paternalistic; they would abolish the government agencies that tell us what to do or restrict our liberty to use our own property. So the FDA, the DEA, the Department of Education, the Department of Transportation, etc - all would disappear under a consistent libertarian regime. If you want to drive, pay for the roads yourself; if you want to use drugs, you're free to do so (as long as you don't harm others); if you want to engage in dog fighting with Michael Vick, go right ahead (as long as you use only dogs you properly own).

Libertarians have traditionally joined the Republican Party when they seek actual power (they have their own party, but it holds no high elected office). Ron Paul is probably their best known politician - a libertarian who joined the Republican party so he could get elected to Congress, and is now running for President - and has appeared on both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, so breaking through into a modicum of the popular consciousness.

Libertarians have usually joined the Republicans because traditionally that was the party of smaller government spending and power - the party that emphasized, as traditional conservatives did, that government, like all humans, is flawed and is liable to abuse the power it holds, so it's best not to give it any more than necessary, in order to preserve liberty.

Reagan talked this way in 1980, but in fact considerably raised government spending. Much of that was due to a defense spending spree, and libertarians can countenance that, so many swallowed Reagan's increases; but they were not happy, and led the charge to ensure that Gingrich's ingenious plan to recapture Republican control of Congress, the 1994 'Contract With America', would trumpet smaller government and cutbacks in federal spending, as well as balancing the budget.

Gingrich's Contract was successful in getting Republicans control of the House, but once in power, the Republicans soon proved even more adept at deficit spending than Democrats, effectively lying to their libertarian supporters. Clinton presided over balanced budgets and even a surplus, but as soon as Republicans gained control of both the legislative and executive branches in January 2001, deficit spending soon hit all-time highs. Much of this (as under Reagan) was supposedly justified by defense spending (especially after 9/11), but in fact the Republicans have turned this into a partisan kleptocracy and plutocracy of the highest order. And the war in Iraq, a clear violation of libertarian principles (Ron Paul opposed it from the start), is simply the best means for the widespread looting of the federal treasury by criminals with Republican connections, aided and abetted by the current administration.

Libertarians value social liberty as well as the economic liberty of laissez-faire capitalism, so they have always co-existed uneasily with the religious fundamentalists within the Republican Party. So, those libertarians who actually want to have power and/or vote for a winner, look at the two parties and ask: which is now closer to my ideals - the party which has always emphasized social liberties and is the last to actually achieve balanced budgets and opposes military conscription and corruption, or the Republicans? The result: many libertarians are becoming Democrats - and the change in 2006 election results shows it. In the libertarian-leaning West, the Democrats made significant gains in traditional Republican strongholds - as e.g., Jon Tester, running on a largely libertarian-friendly platform, won election to the Senate from Montana - as a Democrat.

As the nation as a whole grows richer and markets better regulated and personal freedoms more precious than the question of where the next meal is coming from, I suspect libertarianism will become more and more popular as an ideology. The party that embraces it more thoroughly should thereby gain and retain power - and at the moment, that looks like the Democrats.

Yum!

2007-08-25T00:21:00.000-07:00

Today Michelle and I ate again at the Art Cafe and Bakery, on the edge of downtown SLO in the Creamery. Next to an art gallery, the place is quirky and fun, and the owner and chief baker, Donna Nozzi, was an engaging proprietor. I had a scrumptious roast beef and cheddar sandwich on an absolutely divine horseradish Parmesan bread, which also comes with delicious fresh fruit; Michelle had the house specialty, the 'O'riginal curried chicken sandwich, and a large salad including shaved almonds and fresh greens.

Why make note? Well, it is one of our new favorite places to eat, and there's a backstory - it almost went out of business a few years ago, until Oprah found out about it, deemed the curried chicken sandwich the best ever, and wrote a check that saved the business. And so a tale was born - the place now boasts a large painting of Oprah on one wall - and lots of other art as well. Last year the original owner, Margaux Sky, finally quit, but Donna Nozzi took over and keeps using the same recipes.

So if you come to SLO, the Art Cafe is one great place to go. Who knows, you might even see Oprah herself... but don't count on it. Now, I wonder if Lindsay Lohan ate there when she was in town... nah, probably not; I didn't see any cocaine residue!

Torture of American whistleblowers in Iraq

2007-08-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

The war in Iraq has hit its latest in the "I don't believe it" category: Navy vet Donald Vance, working for a reconstruction contractor in Iraq, witnessed illegal arms sales (helping us understand how over 190,000 weapons could go 'missing'), and reported the crimes (with documentation) to an FBI office in Chicago, because he didn't know who in Iraq he could trust.

The result: the US military detained and tortured him, for 97 days.

WTF? Why isn't George Bush, Congress, EVERYONE outraged and busy doing something about this? Why is the Justice Department refusing any investigation or even comment? Why are the criminals running things? And what will we do about it?

This war has eroded the moral capital the USA has built up ever since the fine words of Thomas Jefferson et al. in 1776. It may prove a turning point in the long-term recruitment of terrorists who will soon have access to true WMDs. For we have undermined the kind of international cooperation among many different nations that will be required to prevent biological and nanotechnological weapons from spreading. And so they will spread, and people will act on their grievances, with ever more sophisticated technology.

I suspect it is the beginning of the end - of us all.

Idiocy, taken for granted

2007-08-21T17:54:00.001-07:00

'No child left behind' is the mantra of the Bush education program - an emphasis on simple tests (with the inevitability of teachers being evaluated thereby 'teaching to the test') and a simplification of the learning process, taking both the joy and the rigor out of it.

That tendency is bad enough, but the real problem is the way in which standards and expectations are being dumbed down to give an appearance of success - while failing to challenge the above-average students. In the desire to make sure that 'no child is left behind', we have made school too easy for the talented kids, and ignored the overwhelming power of peer pressure on learning. Our 20th century economical prowess was based only partially on widespread literacy - many other countries have it as well. The prime mover was our intellectual elite - American universities and their students as the best in the world. Between increasingly onerous immigration policies and the dumbing down of American primary and secondary schools, our intellectual leadership may soon be a thing of the past, with horrible consequences for us all.

Don't believe me? To quote from Newsweek:

"... why did the federal government quietly decide last year to drop out of an international study that would compare U.S. high-school students who take advanced science and math courses with their international counterparts?
The study, called TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) Advanced 2008, measures how high-school seniors are doing in algebra, geometry, calculus and physics with students taking similar subjects around the globe. In the past, the American results have been shockingly poor. In the last survey, taken in 1995, students from only two countries—Cyprus and South Africa—scored lower than U.S. school kids."

The short answer: we pulled out because we are likely to do even worse in the next round. We lag our developed countries in math and science because excellence therein is not rewarded, and having kids who kick ass in math and science is no longer a priority - at least, not as much as making sure many have a mediocre grasp of the subject, soon to be forgotten.

To become a world leader in educational attainment, we must get the incentives right, for both teachers and students. When our educational establishment/ government (and teacher's unions) reward those teachers with subject mastery who demand a great deal of their students, and when we as a culture decide our educational institutions should lionize those students who have high academic achievement (as opposed to, say, athletic achievement), then our schools will become great again. Otherwise, look forward to a world in which intellectual and physical capital - and hence power - moves increasingly to Asia, and the US becomes one more faded empire of history.

Trade Kobe, now

2007-08-21T01:12:00.000-07:00

KG's in Boston, Jermaine O'Neal is overrated and not coming anyway, and Kobe still wants out of LA.

So, let him. It seems clear that if the Lakers wait a year to deal him, they will get less - re the Iverson and KG trades, in which teams traded too late and got less back. And keeping an overrated ballhog who doesn't want to play with his teammates and can force his way out in a year strikes me as disastrous.

So here's a trade that works under the salary cap (as of August 27) and I think the Bulls would make: Kobe for L. Deng, Ty Thomas, J. Noah, Ben Gordon, and T. Sefolosha. The Bulls would still still start Hinrich, Kobe, Nocioni, Joe Smith, Ben Wallace, with C. Duhon, V. Khyrapa, Adrian Griffin, Jameson Curry, Aaron Gray, and others they could still pick up - there are more than the usual number of cheap free agents left - off the bench. They would vitiate their depth, but their starting 5 would be fearsome.

The Lakers get multiple great pieces for a bright future. As a matter of fact, I think the 2007-8 Lakers will have a significantly better record if they make this trade than if they keep Kobe - to say nothing of further down the line. It's time - trade Kobe!

Best argument for the existence of God

2007-08-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

The best argument for the existence of God -- from maximal creativity and ethical requiredness

suppose God is maximally great and creative, and supplanting POE and other counters as follows.

And suppose we have free will in sense of being able to cause things which god foresees but cannot stop – god must either create the universe which contains those things, or not create it, but once created, cannot interfere further.

Next, assume aggregative utilitarianism is true – the act is morally best which maximizes utility, where utility is understood as the balance of good over evil; more precisely, utility= total good minus total evil produced by the action

Then it follows that to be good Itself, God logically would choose to create all PWs in which good outweighs evil, to maximize net good in the multiverse.

So, God would create the BPW, but also many other PWs in which evil exists, down to those in which net good-evil is barely above zero. (Details of measure theory and how to determine smaller and smaller positive but non-zero measurements are interesting here, but don’t crucially affect the overall argument).

Accordingly, we could in fact choose differently, but in every case in which our actions did not tip the cosmic scale to net evil, another universe would have been foreseen and created by God – cf. the MWI of QM. So no surprise (re measure theory?) to find ourselves in a universe in which considerable evil exists – the majority of universes within the mutiverse are like that, and very few have little or no evil. It apparently remains meaningful to attempt to act so as to change things – that’s part of better universes which God will have created, and if we did not so act, it is possible the universe could have a negative utility and so not exist. (Problems with fatalism and choice may undermine this, but it has certainly seemed plausible to many theodicists).

So, we have a timeless or hypertime multiverse in which all our decisions are already foreseen but not directly caused, except for concurrent creative activity – i.e., those which led to net evil were never created and so are non-actual. This is the best attempt to account for free will, real evil, and rebut the problem of evil (POE) and still have a morally defensible and powerful, creative force as God.

Objections: this is not real free will/ morality, because of fatalism/ causal impotence; or a timeless god is unintelligible. Or there is no evidence for other universes, so belief in them is a gross violation of Occam’s razor.

But the most weighty objection to the argument in my mind is the assumption that utilitarianism is true – and in particular, the aggregative utilitarianism that presumes that it is better to make a multiverse with much evil contained therein, as long as the total good outweighs it, versus making a single universe with no evil whatsoever. The total good would be less, no doubt, than in the multiverse; but aggregative utilitarianism violates a rule that I think a truly omnibenevolent Creator must obey: first, do no harm.

More objections to aggregative utilitarianism as an ethical theory in a later post….

Doomsday and Bostrom's Simulation Argument

2007-08-18T23:16:00.001-07:00

Many futurists believe that we will soon enter a ‘posthuman’ phase of civilization (often called, somewhat misleadingly, the 'Singularity', although it has nothing to do with black hole physics). Becoming posthuman will have profound implications for us all. These futurists typically assume that the phenomenon called Moore’s Law will continue for the enhancement of computing speed for the medium-term future, and also assume a philosophy of mind that makes strong AI possible – involving the belief that minds are simply incredibly complex algorithms, and minds are ‘substrate-neutral’ or 'substrate-independent' – that is, those algorithms currently run on hardware called ‘brains’, but in principle could run on other hardware, such as a computer. If these beliefs are true, it is clear that computers will be capable of human-level minds within the next 20 or 30 years, and will have minds that dwarf our ability to comprehend them a short while afterwards. These computer superminds will even be able to simulate reality; and a good enough simulation, given substrate neutrality, is indistinguishable from reality itself.

So we will become posthuman at some point in the coming century. What does that mean? Well, let’s define a ‘posthuman’ civilization as one that is able to simulate an entire world in a way largely or entirely indistinguishable from reality. That is, for posthumans, the distinction between virtual reality and ‘real’ reality begins to disappear. The computing power required for this is truly stupendous, but it is a finite number, and if the futurist assumptions are correct, our civilization will have such powers in well less than one hundred years!

The philosopher Nick Bostrom has advanced an argument that we have good reason to believe we actually inhabit such a simulation right now. His argument is a few years old, but its publication in the NY Times has made it far better known, so I’ll give just a quick recap:

Bostrom argues that one of the following three propositions is almost certainly true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) or, any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary (‘world’) history (or variations thereof – ‘ancestor-histories’);
(3) or, we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Bostrom indicates that under certain plausible assumptions, option 3 is the most likely. Unless our posthuman descendants are much more ethically circumscribed than us, the desire to run ‘ancestor-histories’, or counterfactual histories, will be great – just imagine the historians wanting to see what would have happened if the Nazis won WW2, or even you just wondering what would have happened if you’d married that high school sweetheart (or not, as the case may be). The temptation to run a large number of such simulations thus strikes me as overwhelming.

Further, if our universe is a simulation, it explains several oddities nicely – for example, why relativity and quantum mechanics can’t be meshed (QM because there must be some lower level of granularity in the simulation, relativity for making things flow smoothly within the simulation – though both can’t be ‘real’).

And it explains the strange applicability of the anthropic principle well – the idea that so much of what we observe, particularly the otherwise inexplicable physical constants such as the fine structure constant, the ratio of the gravitational force to electromagnetic forces, and so forth – why they all appear to be "rigged" so as to create conditions favorable to the origin of life in general and we humans in particular. They are so rigged because the universe is a simulation designed with us in mind!

But then, why were things that way in the original universe, which we're now simulating? Was it a simulation, too? There’s an infinite regress problem, one that we simulated beings could never solve. After all, who knows what things are like in the fundamental level of reality… whatever that is.

But there’s a problem – or two. First, one of Bostrom’s other options is that all intelligent civilizations self-destruct before they become posthuman. That, unfortunately, is completely compatible with all our evidence. In particular, it would explain Fermi’s paradox – if ETIs exist, where are they? Perhaps we’re in a simulation that didn’t bother with aliens – but why not? It wouldn’t be much more expensive to add them in. So, Occam’s razor suggests that any intelligent aliens that ever existed never made it to posthuman stage.

Worse, suppose we are in a simulation. In that case, we are well on the way to becoming posthuman ourselves – being able to run our own ( let's say third-level) simulations, within our own second-level simulation. But simulating even a single posthuman civilization looks to be extraordinarily expensive in computing terms. If so, unless our upper level simulators have nearly infinite resources, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman – that is, when we are about to become simulators ourselves.

So, either we are doomed never to reach the posthuman stage – in which case it’s Doomsday soon – or our simulation will be terminated as soon as we do so – in which case, it’s Doomsday soon. Either way, this simulation argument brings us depressingly closer to the conclusion that it’s Doomsday soon. I think the best counterargument actually claims that philosophers like John Searle are right and the futurists are wrong about the philosophy of mind underlying strong AI and posthumanism. If they’re right, I think it’s Doomsday soon. If not Doomsday by simulation shutdown, perhaps it will be by the rise of the machines – superhuman robotic intelligences, who supersede and destroy us. Stay tuned for the next Doomsday installment….

Team USA vs Team CSA?

2007-08-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

I love historical counterfactuals – what if Europe had not appeased Hitler in 1938? (Or given Germany a less onerous treaty ending WW1?) Or what if Britain had won the American revolutionary war?

Or, what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War (or as some in my home state call it, the ‘War of Northern Agression’!) The usual counterfactual studied is something along the lines of – how long would it have been until the CSA abolished slavery (common guess – 1890s/ early 1900s). But in keeping with this blog, I have a very different counterfactual in mind – what would Team USA in hoops look like, if it didn’t have any players from the 11 states of the Confederacy?

That is, let’s compare a hypothetical Team CSA to a remnant Team USA. To qualify for Team CSA, I’ll say you had to be born or play high school ball in one of the 11 Confederate states – college doesn’t count. And we can start with the actual Team USA to begin – it turns out 12 members of the penultimate squad practicing in Vegas this summer don’t hail from the Confederacy, so we can make that our hypothetical Team USA:

Carmelo Anthony (Denver Nuggets); Shane Battier (Houston Rockets); Chauncey Billups (Detroit Pistons); Kobe Bryant (Los Angeles Lakers); Tyson Chandler (New Orleans Hornets); Kevin Durant (Seattle SuperSonics); Kirk Hinrich (Chicago Bulls); LeBron James (Cleveland Cavaliers); Jason Kidd (New Jersey Nets); Mike Miller (Memphis Grizzlies); Tayshaun Prince (Detroit Pistons); Michael Redd (Milwaukee Bucks);

Starters: Chandler, LeBron, Melo, Kobe, Kidd
Bench: Battier, Durant, Miller, Prince, Redd, Hinrich, Billups,

Not much size, so for the 2008 Olympics, they would no doubt sub Elton Brand (team member, but currently hurt) for Durant. Otherwise, this appears plausible.

For Team CSA, there are 4 current Team USA members that would thus be part of our hypothetical Team CSA:
Dwight Howard (Orlando Magic); Amaré Stoudemire (Phoenix Suns); Chris Bosh (Toronto Raptors); Deron Williams (Utah Jazz).

To fill out the roster, I add these players who hail from the Confederacy, and have been on Team USA in the past, or were invited to Team USA tryouts this year:
Joe Johnson, Chris Paul, Kevin Garnett, Tracy McGrady, Shaquille O’Neal, Vince Carter, Josh Howard, Shawn Marion

That gives us the following team:

Starters: Shaq, Amare, KG, TMac, Deron Williams
Bench: DHoward, Bosh, Marion, Joe Johnson, Josh Howard, Vince Carter, C. Paul

The take-home: I think the CSA team would crush the USA, particularly off the bench. If the old Shaq is around, the CSA would be unstoppable on offense, and even if he barely plays, the other bigs on the CSA easily trump the USA bigs (and that’s without guys like Jermaine O’Neal or Ben Wallace even making the squad!). Kidd is a great distributor, but no one else is for Team USA – and Chris Paul and Deron Williams give the CSA a great young 1-2 punch at PG. Kobe, Melo, and LeBron may be the three most overrated players in the league – I fear the real Team USA may lose this summer or next because of their inability to share well. TMac, Joe Johnson and Josh Howard have shown in their NBA careers that they can be ideal complimentary players, however. In short, team CSA looks like a better team.

So while in reality the South will not rise again, if they ever split for basketball purposes, the South would kick some ass, methinks.

Biological doomsday

2007-08-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

The odds of the extinction of the human race occurring because of biological warfare (or accident) grow each and every day. Why? Because research and development of potentially lethal viral and bacterial pathogens continues, and the political and social conditions contributing to their release get worse and worse, not better.

Consider the fall of 2001; not long after the terror attacks of 9/11, there were the anthrax mailings that nearly paralyzed the postal system and killed a few people. The FBI investigated, they terrorized a scientist, Stephen Hatfill, who worked for USAMRIID (in Fort Detrick, Maryland) on circumstantial evidence, and even drained a pond in which he was alleged to have stashed the evidence in the end, and found ... nothing. In the end, they arrested... no one.

Why? Some conspiracy theorists believe it is because the anthrax terrorist could not be prosecuted, because the terrorist was a government official with evidence of US violations of the 1972 Convention on Biological Weapons, which states that it is illegal to "develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire" such weapons.

Some of the alleged violations include the very weaponized anthrax used in the 2001 attacks, which were identical to a military grade and may have violated the biological weapons convention. Other alleged violations include the army's

"plan to test live microbes in "aerosol chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces."

The upshot - either the US military, or some other government organization, continues to carry out biological warfare research, on organisms with potentially massive lethality. Compare that to known Soviet violations - in 1992 Russia made an official declaration of its past biological weapon activities, including work was done at Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) and other cities on mass production and dispersion as a weapon of biological agents. At the Sverdlovsk facility, the lab screwed up containment of their weaponized anthrax in April, 1979, with a result of (admitted) deaths of nearly 70 people downwind, and dead sheep for a distance of 50 kilometers. And non-state terror groups are willing to attempt biological warfare as well; Aum Shinrikyo wished to do so, but found sarin gas easier to use.

Now, with al-Qaeda and other terror groups discovering the power of asymmetric warfare, it seems only a matter of time until a member of such a group finds that biological warfare is one of the easiest means of attaining their aims. The technology for doing so becomes cheaper and more accessible all the time, and all that would be needed is someone with the appropriate training. And we know al-Qaeda can recruit doctors, so recruiting a research virologist shouldn't be much harder.

Making things worse for both state and non-state actors is the rise of genetic medicine made possible by the Human Genome Project. Before long it may be possible to genetically engineer pathogens that attack only certain genomes - making ethnic/ genetic 'cleansing' all the more plausible. But a counterattack, or a mutation, could make such an organism lethal not only to one's enemies, but one's own tribe/ oneself. And, through malice aforethought or accident, it seems inevitable that, if research on highly contagious and lethal organisms continues, it will eventually be let out. A bioweapons doomsday is extraordinarily plausible; to stop it will require overwhelming surveillance and/or ethical controls on primary research. I rank it second only to nanotechnology as an existential risk to humankind.

Have a great day!

Fixing the NBA, part 1

2007-08-10T22:48:00.000-07:00

The NBA had extremely poor ratings for its marquee event, the Finals, and has had a tumultuous offseason, with the specter of organized crime and thrown games or at least point shaving / adding - and the possibility that more refs or even players were involved - hanging over the Tim Donaghy scandal, at least until all the facts are out.

So the NBA is in dire need of a makeover. KG and Kobe trade rumors will divert attention from the underlying problems for only so long, after all. And the man in charge, David Stern, seems to have lost some of his luster; one of his biggest fans, Bill Simmons, who used to write that Stern should be President, now compares him to a near-senile Red Auerbach, and says if the summer brings no changes, then it's time to '[take] away the car keys.'

So how to fix the NBA? Let me start with just one problem, and address others in later posts. First, the draft:

The very idea of the draft strikes me as immoral - the kind of thing that should be illegal. Aside from the odious connotations of slavery raised by elderly rich white men 'owning' young black men, determining their working conditions, their pay, and indeed their opportunity for employment in their chosen field, there's more to dislike: it violates the right to choose one's employer, taken for granted in labor relations in all other businesses besides professional sport.

Imagine you, a hotshot young med school grad, knowing there are numerous places around the country that would love to employ you - and being told instead that your 'rights' were owned by, say, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN - and if you didn't want to move to their nice little burg and endure their godforsaken winters, well, you can just forget about being a doctor. Oh, and previous doctors likewise forced to labor there have bargained away any ability for you to determine your pay - you can accept what the Mayo Clinic is offering, or you can forget about being a doctor. At least, a paid doctor.

Naturally, there would be an uproar, marching in the streets, protests over the injustice involved; surely the defenders of free market capitalism would be apoplectic at so many of their most cherished principles being annihilated. Funny, then, the silence over sports league drafts. Certainly the athletes are well compensated despite being denied their most elementary bargaining rights - is that it? I doubt it; well-paid doctors would still scream bloody murder if this system were instituted. No, residual racism and an undue respect for tradition seem the more likely culprits.

But change involves the art of the possible; so while I think the draft should be abolished (and replaced with free agency for all, every year, doing away with both trades and long-term contracts), I will stick with something that could actually happen in my suggestions here. Just remember, for me what follows is a distant second best.

Given that the draft will continue, the most serious problem with it is the phenomenon of early entry, in which 22 year old (or older) seniors are drafted alongside callow 18-19 year old freshmen, making comparative evaluation an even trickier business. Allowing youngsters into the NBA also hurts the league in two other ways (at least): it weakens benches, in that youngsters who are 'projects' and whom the team control for 4 seasons are drafted and kept, over older players who have less 'projection' but are better players NOW. So the quality of play is hurt by early entry, at least as it exists now. The introduction of the minor league NBDL and the ability of teams to option players mitigates this, but only partially.

The second way it hurts the league is through compensation issues - players know they hit their large, long-term paydays only after they have been in the league long enough to qualify for free agency, so they have every incentive to begin that process as early as possible, both to get to free agency at a younger age and to maximize their number of opportunities at free agency throughout their career. Teams hence have to pay major cash to players at young ages, or lose them, and hence are making mammoth money judgments under far more uncertainty than would be the case if they could wait a bit longer. Suboptimal asset allocation results - in layman's terms, busts get a big payday too often.

Given my preferred solution is a non-starter (no draft, free agency for all every year, with Bird rights to go over cap to re-sign players who had been with their team 3+ seasons - to help with continuity) - well, what's second-best?

Here's my suggestion: Make the draft eligible to anyone (removing possible legal problems that deserve a suit by some 18-year old soon). But dictate that anyone who enters the league before they are 21 (or their college class graduates) is ineligible for a multiyear contract or slot money - they must be paid as a free agent, and are automatically free agents again after one season. But they cannot sign a long-term contract until they are 21 - no matter when they entered the league.

This rule, if put into force, would greatly reduce the undergraduate 'project' early entry problem. An early-entry player would be like a one-year 'street' free agent, and the team would have no additional incentive (in terms of keeping that player for the future) over a similar veteran. Indeed, less, for the vet could sign a multiyear contract if he exceeded expectations. A LeBron could still declare straight out of high school, but he would be property of the team that drafted him for only one season. Hence, he would only be drafted if it was worth it for that year, not because of future expectations for his greatness.

The result: better benches and players in the league, and the free publicity (and scouting, with attendant diminution of risk) that the NCAA hype machine provides would likewise make rookies far better bets, and far better known and loved, once they actually entered the league. And the few exceptions, like a LeBron, would engender even more publicity as teams vied to acquire his services a season at a time, especially as he entered his age 21 season and the prospect of signing him long-term.

In short, this would be a remedy for much of what ails the draft process. Mr. Stern, I wish you were listening....

Ranking NL offenses by road scoring

2007-08-09T22:43:00.000-07:00

Perceptions in baseball are funny things; pundits on Baseball Tonight look at the Padres and see their pitching is ranked first in the league, but their offense is near the bottom, and say that the Pads need offensive help, and their great pitching is the key to what winning they do. Trades are endlessly discussed to remedy these perceived shortcomings, as the talking heads assert the Pads need to pick up a hitter, whereas the young Diamondback offense is coming along, and they need more pitching to stay in first.

The pundits seem to be oblivious to park effects, alas. As a result, most of what they say is stupid, and even flat out wrong. The best way to show this is to find a way to eliminate park effects - there are a number, but the simplest quick one is simply to look at road scoring. Park effects are almost entirely washed out over the course of a season on the road, so much fairer comparisons of team strengths and weaknesses can be gleaned from such data.

So without further ado, the NL team road scoring, in runs per game, through August 9:
(Gaps are an attempt to indicate the relative differences between teams – the top 2 are much better than #3, which is much better than #4. But #s 9-11 could easily change in a single game, they’re so close).

1 Philadelphia 5.39

2 Atlanta 5.25

3 NY Mets 5.03

4 Florida 4.79

5 San Diego 4.71

6 Milwaukee 4.52

7 Colorado 4.46

8 Cincinnati 4.43

9 LA Dodgers 4.39
10 Houston 4.38
11 St. Louis 4.38

12 Chicago Cubs 4.35

13 San Francisco 4.28

14 Pittsburgh 4.05

15 Washington 3.95

16 Arizona 3.83

Lessons: Arizona looks like a decent offense only because of their home park, which is a hitter’s paradise; they actually have the worst offense in the league, but (contrary to reputation) the best pitching in the division, and Brandon Webb is making a persuasive Cy Young case. They need help with hitting, not pitching, to stay in first!

Conversely, the Padres actually have a solid offense, 5th in the league; Petco serves to disguise just how good their offense is (and likewise makes their pitching appear much better than it actually is). They may regret trading away part of their bullpen in Scott Linebrink, perhaps mistakenly believing their pitching is better than it actually is.

To a lesser extent, the same overvaluing of their pitching is true of the Giants and Dodgers – but the Dodger offense truly has become woeful as well, and trading Betemit and keeping Nomar at 3b may keep them out of a playoff berth.

On the other hand, the top 4 offenses are all in the NL East! Again, this is disguised by Shea Stadium and Dolphins Stadium being severe pitcher’s parks, and Turner Field being mildly so, but these offenses can rock! The addition of Teixiera to the Braves and the loss of Utley by the Phils may presage a change in the top 2 spots. Now, if Atlanta could only find some bullpen help, they could easily be the favorite to win the East title yet again…

And Milwaukee is (slightly) the best of a sad bunch in the Central. But despite ROY Ryan Braun, they are trending the wrong way. But the Cubs lost Soriano, and the Cards offense has sunk to Astros level - yikes! Jim Edmonds is about done, and Scott Rolen looks unlikely to ever return to all-star status. (But at least Pujols is heating up, Cards fans - behold the next Stan Musial). Nonetheless, the Central remains a sea of mediocrity or worse - and I still maintain that 6 teams from the NL East and West will have a record at least as good as the Central winner. (Not that that will stop them from perhaps winning the World Series, as the 2006 champion Cardinals can attest!)

More NBA flashbacks...

2007-08-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

Is it 1995 all over again - Shaq and Penny together in Florida? Yes, it seems - the Heat have signed Penny Hardaway to play for them next season. Perhaps Pat Riley has been channeling Danny Ainge too much, or simply got desperate when Mo Williams, Michael Pietrus, and the other guards targeted this offseason failed to sign. But it can't be exactly a ringing endorsement of the free agents available when retired, washed-up vets are signing contracts in front of them.

Say, is that Michael Jordan working out in Chicago? Who says three retirements is enough....

The poison of faith, continued – AIDS and faith healing

2007-08-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

It is well known that the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, has been a vocal proponent of the view that HIV does not cause AIDS. A very few researchers in the field agree, although usually not for the reasons Mbeki claims. (Peter Duesberg is probably the most prominent.)

From the perspective of most AIDS organizations and specialists, this tiny minority of HIV skeptics, also called HIV/AIDS dissidents, spread false hope and false cures – bad enough – but crucially are an ongoing and worsening menace to public health in undermining attempts at prevention through regular condom use. For, if AIDS is not sexually transmitted, but is caused by contaminated needles from drug use or a lack of certain herbs, then why use a condom?

And the continent most afflicted by AIDS is home to the most bizarre of the dissidents. That of course is Africa, in which a horrifying 24.5 million adults and children (estimated) were living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2005. In that single year, an estimated 2 million people died from AIDS. The epidemic has left behind over 12 million orphaned African children. Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa leads the way, with current estimates cresting 6 million – 1/8 of the population – with AIDS, and no sign of the increase slowing down.

What has this to do with the poison of religion? Well, Thabo Mbeki has nothing on the president of Gambia. From the Economist:

“PRESIDENT YAHYA JAMMEH, who took power in a coup 13 years ago, claims to have outstripped the scientists and discovered a cure for HIV/AIDS. His secret concoction of seven herbs can annihilate the virus, he says, within three days. Gambian state television repeatedly shows the diminutive president applying his remedy to patients' heads, as he recites verses from the Koran.”

Yes, Islamic faith healing (and herbs!) will cure you of AIDS, if administered by the nation’s most powerful faith healer! And Jammeh isn’t content with AIDS; every Saturday he claims to cure asthmatics, and next up will be a day for diabetics. All they need are herbs and prayers.

When a UN health official dared question the efficacy of Mr Jammeh’s health policy, she was summarily forced from the country, and denounced as “an illiterate who does not know anything about medicine”. Muslim fundamentalism and tribal witch doctoring work hand in hand to repress the forces of truth and modernity. How can the poor and sick be expected to know any better when their spiritual and temporal powers are fused in such a denial of reality?

Just to make things clear, after protesting a new law muzzling the press in late 2004, the editor of an opposition paper, Deyda Hydara, was shot dead, presumably by the government. Mr Jammeh has discussed ruling for four decades; in the past, he has given warning that anyone “disturbing the peace or stability of the nation” would be “buried six feet deep”.

That is, if they don’t die of AIDS first.

Ainge's brilliance... not.

2007-08-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

So with the help of his old friend and teammate Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge traded for KG, after already acquiring Ray Allen and keeping Paul Pierce, and suddenly the Celtics look possibly formidable in the weak East next season. The problem - trading away almost half the team for KG left them with youngsters Rondo and Perkins as the other starters, and a bench of the unathletic Brian Scalabrine and the youngster Leon Powe at 4, the hobbled Tony Allen at 2, and ... rookies. And not first round rookies.

So depth is a problem. What does Ainge do? He wastes part of his midlevel exception on the execrable Eddie House, a no-D gunner who doesn't pass, and fits with Pierce and Allen like a raw tenderloin steak at a vegan convention - nobody wants it, even if it's in prime condition - and House's career is past its sell-by date.

Rumor has it that Troy Hudson, so bad that the T-wolves bought him out, may be next - and he's an inferior version of Eddie House! To add to the laughter, Ainge brings in the player far better known for his haircuts than anything ever done on the court, Scot Pollard. If he's an opinionated goofball who can string two sentences together, he can aspire to be the Jack Haley of this bunch.

And now, rumor has it he's trying to entice Reggie Miller out of two years of retirement. You may remember Reggie from his last playoff appearance, in which he had nearly a halfcourt lead on Tayshaun Prince for a layup and still got it blocked. And again, he's been retired for two years since! Miller was an excellent scorer 10-15 years ago, but by the end could only get open looks by running around multiple screens and counting on lazy defenders who wouldn't switch or chase. Whatever their other virtues, Ray Allen and especially Paul Pierce aren't going to be setting screens. This is roughly as farcical as Sir Charles announcing a comeback. (Or Charles Oakley). But when there are GMs as delusional and enabling as Danny Ainge, who can blame the players of yesteryear for dreaming of their lost youth?

In short, while the rest of the offseason needs to play out before I make my predictions official, it looks mighty bad for the Celtics, as Ainge's incompetence at finding role players may submarine the chances of a talented core. (Although I don't like Pierce and Allen together that much either - I'd trade Paul Pierce in a heartbeat for a good return, but the Celtics owner loves him). Briefly, I'd hold off on those Eastern Finals banners, boys, and don't even get too sure of a playoff spot. Not when Eddie House, Troy Hudson, and Scot Pollard may be playing crunchtime minutes...

Doomsday continued: supervolcanoes

2007-08-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Ordinary volcanic eruptions, like the one at Mt. St. Helens in 1980 or the famous eruption of Vesuvius that buried Herculaneum and Pompeii in 79, or one about to go off in Indonesia any time now, are hardly any threat to human civilization, however horrible they are for the people living nearby.

But supervolcanoes are a whole different phenomenon. They erupt when a massive underground magma pool builds up over hundreds of thousands of years, raising the ground below until a caldera tens or hundreds of miles across suddenly explodes (over a matter of a few days!) and rains debris across continents, even the entire globe. The famous geysers, like Old Faithful, at Yellowstone National Park are not simply a tourist attraction - they are more akin to a hole in the lid of a huge boiling pot, one about to boil over and explode.

Here's how Livescience describes a Yellowstone supervolcano:

"Geologists in the United States detailed a similar scenario in 2001, when they found evidence suggesting volcanic activity in Yellowstone National Park will eventually lead to a colossal eruption. Half the United States will be covered in ash up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep, according to a study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Explosions of this magnitude "happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone," says Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the possibilities in separate work. "And it's been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there.""

Everyone in the surrounding regions and downwind across most of North America would die almost immediately. The resultant horrific weather, akin to the worst nuclear winter scenarios, might do the rest of us in. At the very least, it would destroy our economy and likely the economies of most of the other developed nations. As the author puts it:

"Earth is plunged into a perpetual winter, some models predict, causing plant and animal species disappear forever. "The whole of a continent might be covered by ash, which might take many years -- possibly decades -- to erode away and for vegetation to recover," Sparks said."

The last supervolcano on record was not at Yellowstone, but at Lake Toba (in current day Sumatra) about 74,000 years ago. Genetic studies indicate that at the same time, Homo sapiens went through a 'genetic bottleneck' - for despite having far more members of our species alive right now (almost 7 billion and counting) than any other large mammal, genetic surveys indicate our species evinces far less genetic diversity than any of our relatives - for instance, genetic surveys of chimps

"reveals an almost four-fold higher diversity and a three-fold greater age of the most recent common ancestor of the chimpanzee sequences. Phylogenetic analyses show the sequences from the different chimpanzee subspecies to be intermixed ... These data, as well as preliminary work in the other great apes, indicate that the human genome is unique in carrying extremely little nucleotide diversity." [bold in original]

Unless there is a tremendously unlikely coincidence, the cause of our lack of genetic diversity appears to be the eruption of the Toba supervolcano. It reduced the total membership of our species to a few thousand survivors, and every one of the 7 billion or so of us alive today are descendants of those hardy few. A Khoisan tribesman and you are almost certainly more genetically alike than two chimps from the zoo.

And it could happen again - the wonderfully named Armageddon Online has a survey of the main extant supervolcanoes. So yes, volcanic eruptions may wipe us out, just as some researchers think the tremendous vulcanism of the Deccan Traps in India 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs - and not the comet that hit the Yucatan about the same time.

Either way, we have one more reason for terraforming Mars (or the Moon or even Venus - more on that in a future post), before it's too late.

Cheers!

Bad news, Clippers fans

2007-08-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

Their playoff chances just went to zero, even before the season starts, as Elton Brand has ruptured an Achilles. Having Shaun Livingston out indefinitely was bad enough, but now the Clippers have absolutely no shot of making the top 8 in a loaded West. Minnesota, Seattle, Portland, the Clippers, and probably Sacto - those are the teams with no chance, and I'm not even sure about Sacto - if Artest stays and plays great, and Bibby begins hitting shots again, who knows? Memphis apparently will get JC Navarro, and with health and maturation, they have an outside shot at the playoffs - and the exact same thing can be said for the Hornets. The other 8 - the playoff teams from last season - all look to be at least playoff contenders again, and some (like Houston) have made moves that should yield significant improvement. The Clips had looked to be the top contender to break into the top 8, but that is but a dashed hope now. And the main reason to watch any Clipper broadcasts just evaporated. The early reports seem to indicate that Brand could be back in as little as 6 months, but the tales of recovery from ruptured Achilles are bad omens - from Dominique Wilkins to Voshon Lenard, those who suffer them never seem to be the same when they come back.

A sad, sad day for Clippers fans.

Boston's roster

2007-08-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Celtics entire roster now looks like this:
Starters: Kendrick Perkins, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Rajon Rondo;

bench is Brian Scalabrine, Leon Powe, Brandon Wallace, Tony Allen and two second rounders, Gabe Pruitt and Glen Davis

If healthy, Tony Allen should be a good wing defender. Leon Powe has a small amount of promise as an undersized PF. The rest of the bench is raw at best, or simply worthless. They desperately need a PG to back up Rondo, and could use a C as well. The only player making much more the minimum is Brian Scalabrine; if I were Boston, I'd offer Brian Scalabrine and Glen Davis to the Hawks for Salim Stoudamire and one of either Lorenzen Wright or Anthony Johnson or Tyronn Lue- and if I were the Hawks, I'd take that deal. I think Davis will become a stud, but Boston needs rotation players NOW. And indications from Marc Stein are that the owner will only sign minimum salary players because of the salary cap. So, trading Scalabrine plus a prospect is the only way to address their needs.

KG to Boston - implications

2007-07-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

It's done, with Boston emptying most of its bench, and KG waiving his trade kicker in return for a 3-year extension. But Vegas still doesn't make the Pierce-Allen-KG Celtics the favorite in the east, with the Heat still having better odds than the Celtics to make the NBA Finals in 2008. I will need to think about it some more first, but my first blush opinion is to agree - I don't think the Celtics have enough yet. We'll see if the owner is willing to keep spending well above the luxury tax - they need another PG and a 4/5, and they still have their midlevel exception of $5.3 million to spend - if the owner is willing to do so.

KG to Boston - or Lakers?

2007-07-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

KG to Boston is alive, although not exactly as reported by ESPN – they left out KG’s trade kicker, so Boston would have to trade all of Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair, Al Jefferson, Theo Ratliff, plus at least Tony Allen and Brian Scalabrine, just to make the money work. That leaves them with next to no roster. I wonder if instead Boston would go for the following deal that sends KG to the Lakers – KG, Minnesota, and the Lakers presumably all would, as KG prefers LA to Boston, and Minnesota still gets everything they want from Boston, plus offloading two more contracts. Boston wouldn’t get KG, but they would get a good player at the same position in Lamar Odom, plus an excellent prospect in Bynum to make up for the one they’re losing in Jefferson, plus another badly needed rotation player in Radmanovic. This seems to me better all around…

Minnesota Timberwolves -Incoming Players
Gerald Green
Salary: $1,440,960 Years Remaining: 1
Sebastian Telfair
Salary: $2,562,426 Years Remaining: 1
Al Jefferson
Salary: $2,480,885 Years Remaining: 1
Kwame Brown
Salary: $9,075,000 Years Remaining: 1
Theo Ratliff
Salary: $11,666,666 Years Remaining: 1

Outgoing Players: Mark Madsen, Kevin Garnett, Marko Jaric

Boston Celtics - Incoming Players
Andrew Bynum
Salary: $2,172,000 Years Remaining: 1
Vladimir Radmanovic
Salary: $5,632,200 Years Remaining: 4
Lamar Odom
Salary: $13,248,596 Years Remaining: 2

Outgoing Players: Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair, Al Jefferson, Theo Ratliff

Los Angeles Lakers- Incoming Players
Mark Madsen
Salary: $2,420,000 Years Remaining: 3
Kevin Garnett
Salary: $22,000,000 (plus 6.75 million trade kicker) Years Remaining: 2
Marko Jaric
Salary: $6,050,000 Years Remaining: 4

Outgoing Players: Andrew Bynum, Vladimir Radmanovic, Kwame Brown, Lamar Odom

My favorite trade yet!

2007-07-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

As long as we’re dreaming…. Shaq and Kobe reunited, plus Lamar Odom (and Smush!); KG and Wade invade Hollywood!

Los Angeles Lakers - Incoming Players:
Dwyane Wade
Antoine Walker
Kevin Garnett

Outgoing Players: Andrew Bynum, Kwame Brown, Lamar Odom, Kobe Bryant

Laker rotation: Mihm, KG, Walton, DWade, DFisher; rotation subs Turiaf, Cook, AWalker, Radmanovic, Evans, Farmar/ Crittendon

A deep team, with a nice blend of youth and experience. Eating Walker's contract and losing Bynum is worth it to upgrade longterm at 2 and 4 and rid themselves of the Kobe headache. I could easily see this team threatening the Texas threesome and Phoenix for West supremacy.

Minnesota Timberwolves - Incoming Players:
Dorell Wright
Andrew Bynum
Jason Williams
Michael Doleac
Kwame Brown
2 Miami #1 picks

Outgoing Players: Kevin Garnett

Minny gets young prospects and expiring contracts and future picks. Just what they want for KG.

Miami Heat - Incoming Players:
Lamar Odom
Kobe Bryant

Outgoing Players:
Dorell Wright
Dwyane Wade
Antoine Walker
Jason Williams
Michael Doleac

Miami rotation: Shaq, Haslem, Odom, Kobe, Smush Parker (who already signed with them); rotation subs are Zo, Simien, Quinn, plus whomever else they sign with rest of midlevel…. if they could swing JC Navarro or some other decent PG with what's left of the exception, they could have the most fearsome starting 5 in the league, plus the best backup center in Zo. If they stay healthy, an obvious favorite to come out of the East and play in the Finals.

Faith and confirmation bias

2007-07-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

The fallacy called confirmation bias occurs when we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs (or what we want to believe), and ignore, discredit, or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence - evidence that goes against what we wish to believe. Confirmation bias is one prominent example of the phenomenon called 'wishful thinking', and when taken to an extreme results in 'subjective validation' - becoming so irrationally certain of one's beliefs (through confirmation bias) that one cannot even entertain any doubt that one could be wrong - even though you are!

It turns out that a reseracher at my alma mater, Emory University, named Drew Westen led a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that shows where in the brain the confirmation bias arises and how it is unconscious and driven by emotions. In Scientific American, Michael Shermer explains and expands upon the study, which revealed how the brain suppresses the rational, reasoning portion of the brain in favour of emotions that reinforce confirmation bias. As Shermer puts it:

"During the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, while undergoing an fMRI bran scan, 30 men--half self-described as "strong" Republicans and half as "strong" Democrats--were tasked with assessing statements by both George W. Bush and John Kerry in which the candidates clearly contradicted themselves. Not surprisingly, in their assessments Republican subjects were as critical of Kerry as Democratic subjects were of Bush, yet both let their own candidate off the hook.
The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure."

Westen's own summary went as follows:

"Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

In other words, faith - in the form of confirmation bias - is emotionally rewarding and hence comfortable for us humans; seeking the truth, with its uncomfortable possibility (indeed, probability, for the usual human) that we could be wrong about what's important to us, that our foundational beliefs could be all wrong, that what our parents and society and pastors and friends have all proclaimed for years and years could all be wrong - no, it is most certainly not a recipe for short-term emotional well-being.

But in the long run, it's the truth, and nothing but the truth, that shall set us free - and so we must resist the soft seductions of faith. Advertisers, politicians and other charlatans take advantage of our limited rationality, with its confirmation bias and other cognitive imperfections - all these ways in which we are closer to the rest of the animal kingdom, rather than appealing to what is highest and best in us. If we last long enough, one day this too shall end - the truth shall set us all free.

IF we last long enough....

Unintelligent Design

2007-07-25T22:06:00.000-07:00

This post's title is taken from a solid book by Mark Perakh attacking the ID movement. The topic is the design or teleological argument for the existence of god, particularly the biological version; one common form of the argument goes:

The Biological Design Argument
1 Living things evince design
2 Design requires a designer
3 Life could not have designed itself
So a Designer of all life must exist - God

The problem: Natural selection and survival of fittest can explain apparent design without a conscious Designer - that is, random variation/ mutation, combined with nonrandom selection through differential death based on relative fitness, quickly "designs' organisms better and better fitted to their ecological niche, by making them more numerous and their lesser competitors less numerous. Hence, premise 2 (or 3, depending on an ambiguity in the term 'design') is false.

Logic, however rationally compelling, often leaves people cold. So let's use some examples to help. An omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent Designer would create optimal designs (or else would lack at least one of those 3 attributes). So simply showing that biological organisms are suboptimally designed would refute the existence of such a designer.

One of the simplest examples of such suboptimal design is the very feature that traditional creationists often appealed to as evidence of god's ingenuity, the human eye. (And not only Christians are bewitched by the "irreducible complexity" of eyes - stupid Muslims use the same arguments.)

So how dare I impugn the optimality of the design of human eyes? Well, for starters, I'm typing this while wearing glasses. That alone should be plenty of evidence! But for those who need more argument, read the following wonderful synopsis:

"The retina is the 'screen' at the inside back of each eyeball, onto which is projected the incoming light. It is made up of lots of photoreceptor cells with their associated out-going nerves, and the blood supply to them. The problem is, the photoreceptors are in backwards, pointing away from the incoming light: the 'cable' from each cell is therefore in the way, and trails across the eyeball's inside surface to exit the retina at the correctly-named 'blind spot'.

Now, the brain compensates for this, so we don't usually notice it. But a design that needs compensatory mechanism for some aspect of it, is not a good design.

But to make matters worse, this design actually causes unnecessary problems. The photoreceptors have delicate, hairlike nerve endings, which means they cannot be cemented firmly into place. Instead, they are loosely joined to a layer of cells called the retinal pigment epithelium. This absorbs stray photons that would otherwise blur the image, and contains the retina's blood supply. But the connection between the retina and the epithelium is so fragile that the retina can detach, either due to a blow to the head, or often, spontaneously. Starved of their blood supply, the retinal cells die, causing blindness.

Strangely, the creator was able to put retinas the 'right' way round... in those pinnacles of His purpose, the octupus and squid. Not only do their eyes, which are basically the same design as vertebrate ones, have their photoreceptors pointing towards the light, and so lack a blind spot; with the nerves training behind them and embedded in their blood supply, the cephalopod eye is far less prone to detached retinas."

That's right, the octopus and squid don't suffer from detached retinas or a blind spot as we poor humans are prone to; the positioning of their photoreceptors and blood supply also means they suffer from blurry vision and blindness less often as well, ceteris paribus. In short, our single most dominant sense, the one so dominant that an entire theory of knowledge (now convincingly argued to be false) depends on thinking of ideas as like visual images - that sense is suboptimally designed in comparison to another species alive right now. What kind of a fuck-up would've done that?

The short answer: a satisficing historical process called evolution, not a perfect divinity. For those who like reality-based rather than faith-based thinking, it's time to let go of religion and embrace reality - our future may depend on it.

Arguments against the existence of God

2007-07-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

I'll begin with the argument from religious experience - I'll deal with other kinds of arguments about god in a later post, but the most common way in which people attempt to justify their belief in god is personal - they have experienced god, they have a relationship with god, so of course god exists.

Let's formalize this claim:
Argument from religious experience:
1 many people have religious experiences, which they interpret as experiences of God;
2 people’s own interpretations of their experiences are trustworthy;
thus, God exists.

The problems with this argument abound - here's a few: for premise 1, which tradition/ history of experience are we referring to? Different religions and different believer's claimed experiences make numerous conflicting/ contradictory claims, with many different incompatible theories of God proclaimed - leads to doubt that one single thing could be so multiply interpreted. At most one is right. If many are wrong, why not all?

Premise 2 is fairly obviously false - the mere having of religious experience obviously doesn’t guarantee God exists, or more to the point, guarantee that one is an accurate interpreter of one's own experience. We misunderstand what is happening to us all the time. Take, say, schizophrenia and the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God tells Abraham to kill his son... what would you say to someone who walks up to you on the street and tells you - 'God told me to kill my family'. Would you take that as proof of the existence of the divine? Or is a mental disorder a more likely (and more parsimonius) explanation?

Are there any other ways to explain religious experience other than real God? Yes –

Other arguments against existence of God - Let's start here by formalizing that first problem above:

Inductive argument from diversity of religious experience versus God:
1 many people have religious experiences, which they interpret as experiences of God, but their accounts conflict;
2 there are 10000-plus different religions, all relying on claimed experiences of the divine, all of which accounts conflict in at least some detail (or else they would be the same religion!);
3 hence, most religions and their claims about the experience of the divine are untrustworthy in at least some details about God, as at most one could be entirely right;
4 there is no rational way to decide that one faith-based claim about god is more defensible than any other (analytic, from the definition of faith)
5 hence, there is no rational reason to think any particular religion is more likely to be entirely correct than any other
6 But logic dictates that (almost) all religions make false claims about god – at most one could be correct - so (almost?) all religions make false claims about god
7 Given there’s no rational basis for choice and the vast majority are known to be false, then inductively, the only reasonable belief is that all religions and personal experiences are wrong about God - that indeed, all religions make false claims about god
5 Occam’s razor – so we don’t need true beliefs about God to explain religious belief
thus, God doesn’t exist.

Another argument versus God- Argument from Simplicity:
1 Occam’s razor/ principle of parsimony/ simplicity - don't multiply entities beyond necessity, don't believe in the existence of things that are not required for explanations
2 we don’t directly experience anything that corresponds to concept (definition) of God (cf apple, or the color orange)
3 we don’t indirectly experience anything whose best explanation is that it must be caused by God (cf electron, proton)
4 So God is not required to explain any experience we have
So no need for God’s existence – so by Occam’s razor, God doesn’t exist

And another - for the simplicity argument is connected to ‘God of the gaps’ argument:
1 we believe in a supernatural God because It explains what natural science cannot
2 so God’s attributes are traditionally given in terms of what science cannot explain – god is defined by the gaps in science
3 But the history of science shows that science progressively explains more and more things formerly attributed to God
4 Inductively, there’s no reason to think that science will not eventually explain everything that can be explained
5 So God explains nothing – and so has no attributes
So God does not exist

Compare the problem of evil (POE): argument against God from concept and consequences
1 God is 3 omnis (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) and creator of the universe
2 Evil exists
3 God, if existing, would not allow evil (If God is 3 omnis, evil would not exist; i.e., God and evil are incompatible - (God would know how to, want to, and could prevent all evil).
Thus, God does not exist

I better publish soon...

2007-07-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

Because Gott's version of the Doomsday Argument has been updated to something near to mine, and has even been discussed in the New York Times.

Briefly, Gott's version hypothesizes that there is a 95% confidence level that we are in the middle 95% of the lifespan of any phenomenon we randomly observe. Manned spaceflight began 46 years ago, so Gott reasons there's a 50% chance it will end within 46 more years, and uses this as an explanation of the Fermi Paradox - we don't observe other alien civilizations because they never left their home planet. So Gott believes we need to colonize Mars, sooner rather than later, if we want humanity to have a long future.
My argument is a bit more sophisticated, but largely agrees with Gott's. More to come...

Are the Spurs the real champs?

2007-07-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

Your 2007 NBA champs, the Phoenix Suns....

Most of the people who believe in such a counterfactual history think the Game 5 suspensions of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw were the key to the wrong team winning the Spurs-Suns series. Now, it turns out Game 3, with calls missed so badly that the play by play announcers had to comment, was called by... Tim Donaghy. As Bill Simmons points out, this is the league's nightmare, and it won't end any time soon. The reality that the league champ might be so through ref malfeasance was broached by Simmons in the 2006 Finals, and he now appears prescient. Unless David Stern manages to make the refs more accountable, their evaluation more transparent, and their temptation to cheat less profitable (presumably by paying them a great deal more), the league may have a credibility problem that will eventually make it the inferior of pro wrestling.

The poison of faith

2007-07-21T00:45:00.000-07:00

William Lobdell of the LA Times has written a wonderful article about why he is leaving his post as their religion writer - he covers the hypocrisy of the Catholic bishops over their coverup and assistance of pederasty, the horrors of the 'prosperity gospel', and details how the lawyers of the Church make sure their profits are not imperiled by going to the poor and needy - even when a Catholic priest creates more of the poor and needy, by impregnating them themselves!

When faced with morally bankrupt yet powerful forces of evil, angry invective is sometimes warranted. Christopher Hitchens is right about the vast majority of organized religion - it poisons everything - as he jeers that the Catholic motto should be "no child's behind left." Those who bid moral actions and cloak it in religious language are fooling themselves, and others, in ways that have repeatedly shown to be dangerous, because of the credulity and irrationality of the mass of humanity. Rational religion turns out to be an oxymoron, and the Brights realize this. But their influence, while growing, remains minuscule, and the danger increases far more rapidly.

So, I am exceedingly pessimistic about our future, because that credulity and irrationality - that faith - is increasingly tied to more and more potent weaponry, and ere long will be tied to Doomsday weaponry - most likely nanotechnology or bioweapons, I fear. Like the religious, I imagine Armageddon will happen soon (within 40-80 years), but without trumpets of Christ or Heaven - just death, for us all. And I expect that our collective demise will likely be brought about by those who think that Death brings us to a better place, as long as we believe their fantasies - and if we don't believe their fantasies, then they will make our lives a living Hell, for eternity - starting now. Even the most rational of the religions, Unitarian Universalism, refuses to abjure such fantasies entirely.

Religion indeed has similarities to an opiate, but its effect is far more insidious and harder to crack, because the addict will sober up periodically and realize their plight; whereas religion systematically disables the critical mentality needed to subvert it. It tells us faith is the key to morality, not the enemy of morality; that murder, torture, rape and pillage are fine if one's god so demands; and so on. The true enemy of religion is philosophy, in the broadest sense - the search for truth. Once that becomes your goal, you realize there is no need - indeed, no room - for faith; because faith, by its very nature, is inimical to a search for truth. Faith is belief without justification, without argument, without knowledge - faith is belief unsupported by the evidence. Only when one renounces such blandishments and seeks the truth and nothing but the truth, can one finally become free of the evil that is organized religion. So I must say I'm sorry to tell my friend Dan the apparently unwelcome news - for Dan blogs:

"Maybe my blogging friends will explore more deeply the psychological and philosophical implications of all of these matters (yes, SI and KA, if you’re reading this, that’s an invitation). For my part, I’ll just challenge you to go out and prove that the best antidote to bad religion is not no religion, but is in fact good religion."

I'm afraid I have to disagree that there is, in fact, any good religion. If our world can get to a place in which we can accept that ethics has no need of God, as contemporary philosophers like Derek Parfit and Kai Nelson argue, we will all be much better off. Hamas and Orthodox Jews cannot claim divine sanction for their mutual land grabs and murder - or Shia and Sunni in Iraq, or Protestant and Catholic in N. Ireland, or... the list never ends. But you cannot persuasively argue their wrongness by substituting their fantasy with some other one. You can only win that argument by rejecting fantasy for reality completely - by giving up every single jot and tittle, every minute iota of faith.

So, rejecting faith as a legitimate answer to any moral questions is one key to the human species having a long future. Again, sadly, I don't believe it will happen in time....

More to come. Civil comments welcome.

NBA conspiracy and other news

2007-07-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

Good news first: the Lakers apparently are willing to pay the luxury tax next season after all, as they sign not only Derek Fisher, but also the rehabbed Chris Mihm. Without such a willingness, further trades for KG, Jermaine O'Neal, or other high-priced help are a fantasy.

Speaking of which, it seems safe to officially drop Phoenix from the KG sweepstakes now - as reports that owner Robert Sarver mandated dropping $7 mil off payroll to avoid the luxury tax came true today, as they dealt the contract of Kurt Thomas to Seattle, plus 2 future first round picks, for a second-rounder next summer. The incentive for Seattle is obvious, given they're rebuilding; but Phoenix continues to deal away potential bench pieces and draft picks in an attempt to keep their top 6 together without paying the luxury tax. A KG trade is now essentially impossible under the salary cap, and certainly impossible if Sarver isn't willing to pay the tax. More and more I think there are only 3 possible destinations for KG this summer - Lakers, Dallas, and Miami. Most likely is that KG is still a T-wolf to open the season.

Finally, the conspiracy theorists have a field day today, with news that the FBI is going to charge NBA ref Tim Donaghy with point-shaving. Rumor (and let's be clear, only rumor at this stage) has it that he has a gambling problem, got in hock to the Mob, and shaved points in games he reffed to pay off his debts. What's a fact is that he was one of the refs at the infamous Brawl Game , and was a major figure in Rasheed Wallace's longest suspension. I haven't yet heard whether he was involved in any other of the most notorious playoff series in which ref bias is commonly alleged, like the Dallas-Miami 2006 Finals, or the Lakers-Sacramento 2002 Western Conference Finals, now best remembered for Robert Horry's winning 3-pointer at the buzzer in game 4.

Napa Valley A's?

2007-07-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

The Oakland baseball club may not be having quite as good a season as usual - could it be because their leading oenophiles are gone or hurt? (Huston Street, their closer and subject of this wine interview, has been on the DL, and Scott Hatteberg and Barry Zito have moved elsewhere).

Well, perhaps the lack of wine-lovers is not the cause of their demise, but the A's quest to find a new home might do better in Napa Valley than the current quest to relocate 25 miles south in the town of Fremont, in a development led by Internet networking business Cisco Systems. If they want to move upscale, why not associate with wine instead of routers?

As for me, let's see if I can find a Silver Oak cabernet for cheap now...

Nuclear doomsday breaking news

2007-07-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

Update: Putin has Russia suspend/ withdraw from an arms control treaty with NATO, whose spokesman said: “The allies consider this treaty an important foundation of European security. This is a disappointing move in the wrong direction.”

Putin obviously believes the West is encircling Russia with anti-ballistic missiles as preparatory to an attack, and is ratcheting things up. He believes Bush left behind the old logic of deterrence with his withdrawal from the ABM treaty and his ongoing attempt to build the 'Star Wars' missile defense, making America invulnerable (if it worked, which it doesn't). We have the increasing distrust that can lead to a major conflagration. If Bush gets us into a nuclear war with Russia, he really will have the worst President in history title - for eternity, perhaps.

Nuclear doomsday, continued

2007-07-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

My last post detailed the deteriorating relations between the US and Russia and the threats made by Putin about 'weapons of mass destruction'. It remains foolhardy for the Russians to initiate a thermonuclear exchange with the US, because US nuclear capabilities are more impressive than ever, despite having fewer numbers of warheads in absolute terms. That's because the weapons have greater power, greater invulnerability (particularly our submarine-based missiles) and most especially, greater accuracy, with the advent of GPS and inertial guidance systems. Nukes were sloppy weapons that has as little as a 1% chance of success against their intended targets in the 1950s and 1960s - but that would now approach 100%, argues this "counterforce" expert, who claims that as a result, nuclear war with China has grown increasingly likely.

Why? Because this US "counterforce" dominance changes the usual logic of deterrence. If China ever put its missiles on alert (say, over a brouhaha over Taiwan declaring independence, a scenario that appears increasingly likely over the next decade), the US military commanders quite conceivably would place almost insurmountable pressure on the US President to launch a first strike - because we could effectively wipe out China's nukes at one blow, and assure next to nothing from China would hit the mainland US - but only by striking first. If we waited for the Chinese to strike first, China could still be largely obliterated by a US counterattack, but many (most?) American cities would be incinerated. The old logic of the Soviet-American mutual deterrence through mutually assured destruction (MAD) no longer applies - with our new weapons and China's relative paucity of ICBMs, if tensions rise, the logical thing for the self-interest of the US to do would be to launch a preemptive strike that takes out all Chinese capabilities to attack the US mainland. If the Chinese know that, their logical course of action would be to launch a first strike as well, with no warning. After all, if they allow the US to strike first, they would certainly be obliterated.

If that isn't scary enough - consider: would Russia sit idly by as the US turned its southern neighbor into a smoking pile? Or, with a near-totality of US nukes headed to Chinese targets, would Russian missile command seize that chance to launch a third strike - against the US? It would no longer be quite so completely suicidal in the short term if the US had just used most or all of its arsenal on China, and given Russian paranoia and world-historical ambition, can one be sure they would not try? The resulting 3-way nuclear holocaust might be enough to cause the 'nuclear winter' that Carl Sagan foresaw in 1983, in a study that concluded: "...the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded."

Have another nice day!

An old model of Doomsday

2007-07-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

All-out nuclear war - unthinkable now that the cold war is over? Not so fast. Most people worried about nuclear war nowadays concentrate on 'rogue states' like Iran or North Korea firing off a missile or two, or some non-governmental terror group like al-Qaida sneaking a nuke into a city center. While horrible, such events would have no direct impact on the vast majority of humanity, and in no sense presage a Doomsday scenario.

The US and the Soviet Union were the only countries ever armed with enough weapons to plausibly cause a real worldwide Doomsday; and despite mutual reductions since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, both the US and Russia maintain nearly 6000 warheads (estimated) capable of use, with over 1000 on 'high alert', ready to fire within a few minutes. Both countries also have many more warheads in storage, capable of being hauled out and used within a relatively short period of time - the Russian estimate in storage is up to 16,000.

During Vladimir Putin's presidency, relations with the US have grown progressively frostier, with Putin in a speech on Victory Day (May 9th) rhetorically comparing the US to Hitler's Third Reich, and promising “The victory once again will be ours.” Perhaps even worse, at a conference in Munich on February 10th, Putin delivered a venomous speech directly addressed to an audience that included US defense secretary Robert Gates, Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other international heavyweights.

In his February 10 speech, Putin asserted all of the following:

“Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions [by the US] had caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension.” [The world] is witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force, which was plunging it into an abyss of permanent conflicts. ... the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way, exhibiting a greater and greater disdain for international law."

Putin then claimed that the US actions were the cause of a new arms race, and the cause of some countries acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Despite such rhetoric, most observers think Russia is unlikely to launch a nuclear war with the US, and the US likewise will not launch a first strike on Russia. (Of course, how many of these same observers predicted the demise of the USSR in 1991? Kremlinology is a notoriously imprecise science). But there is a more fearsome scenario, in which Russia joins in a nuclear confrontation that it was not originally a part of - and such a three way nuclear war might actually cause Doomsday, or come close. The third party - China. More to come...

The sting of truth about the bees

2007-07-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

Alien visitors are going "to abduct the smartest organisms on the planet, and they've picked the honeybees." As explanations for the disappearance and death of bees (the so-called "colony collapse disorder", or CCD) that have occurred since October 2006, May Berenbaum's isn't exactly the most plausible; rather, she is among the entomologists enjoying their 15 minutes of fame by overhyping this crisis - or as she puts it, "a crisis on top of a crisis".

But a far more reasonable - and less alarmist - piece compares the bees to cows, in that they occupy an artificial ecosystem and would've long ago been wiped out without intensive human care, and opines that their passing will be no big deal. Heather Smith points out that the varroa mite decimated native honeybee populations between 1987 and 1994 in the US, and farmers since have trucked the remaining bees around the country and doused them with antibiotics in order to keep them humming long enough to pollinate their crops. Yet such practices have done nothing to stop the incipient demise of the native honeybee, merely weakening it for whatever other pathogens are involved in CCD.

Smith further points out that the demise of domestic honeybees will hardly mean the end of agriculture, even the farming that currently relies on bee pollination:

...the California Almond Board two-timed the honeybee with osmia ligneria—the blue-orchard bee: Despite CCD, they had a record harvest.

In short, much like the killer bee scare of two decades ago, in which we all "learned" that killer bees would unleash a spree of death by stings as they crossed the Rio Grande and made mincemeat of American flesh by massive attack and allergic reaction, the uproar over CCD is much ado about little. One should save the Doomsday talk for more realistic scenarios - some of which are to come...

Houston loads up...

2007-07-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

The Rockets got Jackie Butler and the rights to Argentinean star Luis Scola in a trade with the Spurs, giving up a future second round pick and a guy who's not coming back to the US, Vassilis Spanoulis, who had already said he was homesick and wanted to remain in his native Greece rather than play in the NBA. So why did the Spurs do it? Simple - cap room, particularly the chance to offload Butler's contract. And the Spurs are better than anyone at recognizing a mistaken contract and getting rid of it - just ask Isiah about Malik Rose. That's why they, despite winning multiple championships, will be well under the cap and significant players in next summer's free agency, when some real players should be available.

What about Houston? Obviously they hope Scola can come to terms and give them some offense at the 4, as the trade of Juwan Howard for Mike James opened up an opportunity. And Butler looked promising a couple of years ago - who knows, he may still have something left. Houston's new GM looks like he may know what he's doing.... and the Rockets become an even more scary contender next season.

D. Fish back to the Lake show

2007-07-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

It's not quite official yet, but no one's bothering to deny it - Derek Fisher will return to the Lakers, reportedly for about $4 mil a season, almost all of the midlevel - but leaving the Lakers *just* shy of paying the luxury tax next season. Which, unless I miss my guess, means no more significant additions to the Laker roster for next season. Kobe at least gets one veteran added to the team, and if Lamar and Luke (and even Kwame) can stay healthy, the Lakers should be an easy playoff team - though the second round in the loaded West still seems too much to ask. Derek gets a city with specialists for his daughter, and a starting position and familiar system to play in (Phil's triangle) - it all makes too much sense not to happen. Javaris Crittendon and Farmar can now battle for backup minutes at the point - Crittendon has played better than expected in summer league, but that and $30 can buy you a cup of civet shit coffee. As Bill Simmons pointed out, both Kedrick Brown and Brandon Hunter are among the many busts that were named 1st-team All-Star in the summer league.

NBA free agent movement - it's NOT fantastic!

2007-07-11T22:15:00.000-07:00

When the big news still to be decided involves Milwaukee and Mo Williams, you know it's not a banner free agent offseason. Grant Hill took what's left of his athleticism to Phoenix, where at least he can play point forward in an offense suited to what's left of his gifts - I wonder if Boris Diaw is on the block as a result?

Chauncey Billups re-signed in Detroit, Rashard Lewis got an absurdly huge deal in Orlando, and as forecast, that resulted in Darko going elsewhere - to Memphis!? He and Gasol might co-exist on offense, but this doesn't help their interior D at all. Darko can block shots, though - they should definitely play zone D in Memphis next year and tell Darko to work on his jumper.

Other overpays: Luke gets way too many years in LA, Kapono's limitations will be revealed in Toronto (how is he an upgrade over MoPete?), Andres Nocioni gets a lot for his post-peak seasons in Chitown. It looks like Derek Fisher will return to LA, although if they're really going to pay him the midlevel (or close), then their decision to let him go years back (for the midlevel then!) was indefensible. Live and learn, eh, Dr Buss?

As noted, the main speculation left seems to be whether Mo Williams will take the midlevel for Miami, or if they have to go to their fallback, Steve Blake. No wonder teams are trying to preserve cap room for next summer - this summer's crop of free agents are hardly impressive. As things move along, it looks less and less likely that either KG or Kobe will be dealt before the season starts - though I do expect some terrible KG deal to occur close to the trade deadline next February. Even Isiah may have little left to do - especially if he isn't going to trade the only player other teams actually want, David Lee.

The other names outstanding and still available mostly consist of injured has-beens or never-wases (like Chris Webber, Stevie Francis (a Clipper to be?), or Chris Mihm) or prospects who have starred in Europe who may finally come over (Luis Scola, Juan Carlos Navarro). Honestly, the latter are more attractive than the former, but require trades - Scola's rights are owned by the Spurs, Navarro's by the Wiz. The Clips would be better off with Navarro than the self-deluded Stevie Franchise, but that's not the way they think....

So not much so far has occurred that would change the power structure of the end of last season. Roughly, the good teams should stay good, and the bad teams mostly haven't improved much - unless Darko suddenly erupts and turns Memphis back into a playoff team - pretty damn unlikely. And Orlando, despite a max contract for Rashard, probably remains what they were - a fringe playoff team in the East.

Outsourcing prayers to India

2007-07-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Vatican has been doing it for a few years now - outsourcing mostly to churches in the state of Kerala. As of 2004, the Vatican would apparently charge $5 to Americans (less for others) to have a priest pray for you, and then outsource it to priests in Kerala. The most common requests outsourced involve saying Mass for "special intentions," or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers - at least says the NY Times.

Purgatory has always been good business - remember those sales of indulgences, the ones that got Martin Luther hot under his clerical collar? I wonder how long governments will continue to ignore the fact that religion is a multi-billion dollar business, and should be regulated and taxed appropriately? Of course, like lots of big businesses, religions are quite skilled at lobbying governments to preserve their ability to use taxpayer dollars for their own purposes...

The Original Doomsday Argument

2007-07-08T20:58:00.001-07:00

First, some versions of the original Doomsday Argument – in a later post, I'll add my original (and even more ominous) Revised Technological Doomsday Argument.

The simplest Doomsday Argument:
Physicist Richard Gott’s simple Copernican Principle proposes to compute prediction intervals for the future duration of any randomly observed phenomenon. Gott's method hinges on the "Copernican assumption" that there is nothing special about the particular time of your observation, so with 95% confidence it occurs in the middle 95% of the lifetime of the phenomenon. If the phenomenon is observed to have started A years ago, Gott infers that A represents between 1/40 (2.5%) and 39/40 (97.5%) of the total life. He therefore predicts that the remaining life will extend between A/39 and 39A years into the future. (Given Gott's assumptions, this is simple algebra: if A = (1/40)L where L is the total life, then the future life is L - A = 39A.)

Gott’s version of the Traditional Doomsday Argument is relatively simple to articulate: if I consider myself a random sample in my observation of X - e.g. the USA is 231 years old, and let’s assume that I live at a random moment in its history – that is, this moment is a random time within its existence, and I have no further knowledge that would render this moment non-random with respect to its longevity - then there is a 95% chance that the USA will last between 6 and 9009 more years.

The relevance for humanity’s future can now be stated: The naïve Doomsday argument would follow Gott, and reason that if one’s birth occurs at a random time in human history (and given that the origin of Homo sapiens was approximately 100,000 years ago), we should expect there’s a 95% chance that the human species will persist for between 2564 and 3.9 million more years. Or, a 97.5% chance we have at least 2564 years of future. That doesn’t sound so bad.

But the birth rate has dramatically increased in the last few centuries of human history, so from a sheer numbers perspective, this reasoning has a flaw. One better way to think about this argument is in terms of the total number of humans born. My (or your) rank-order among all human births is approximately 70 billion – approximately 70 billion humans have been born before me – so using the Copernican Principle, there’s a 95% chance that between 1.8 billion and 2.73 trillion more humans will be born. If birth rates continue to rise, or even just hold steady (estimated at approximately 130 million a year now), that could mean doom relatively soon – a 95% chance that the last human will be born between 14 and 21,000 years from now!

But this approach is too simple, however. Philosopher Nick Bostrom develops a more sophisticated version of the Doomsday Argument. He first formally clarifies the assumption Gott is making, which Bostrom calls the self-sampling assumption:

(SSA) "Observers should reason as if they were a random sample from the set of all observers in their reference class."

Bostrom’s version of the Doomsday Argument can be explicated using Bayes Theorem, which can be stated as follows:
P(H|D) = [P(D|H)P(H)]/[P(D|H)P(H)+P(D|H')(1-P(H))].

Here’s a way of explaining Bayes theorem - I call it the 10 and 1000 room hotel example. Suppose you arrive at a conference and you’re the first person to check in. The clerk is in control of 1010 rooms reserved for conference attendees – the first 10 rooms (numbered 1-10) in one hotel, and the first 1000 (numbered 1-1000) in a second hotel. As you’re the first person to arrive, he decides to flip a (fair) coin to decide which hotel to put you in, and then has his computer randomly assign you a room in that hotel. He flips the coin, then checks the computer, and hands you a room key – room #7 – but doesn’t mention which hotel you’re supposed to go to! What are the odds that you are in the first hotel?

At first blush, many people answer 50% - after all, he flipped a fair coin to decide which hotel to put you in, so isn’t it 50/50 as to which you got?

No, it isn’t – because you have an additional piece of information – you were randomly assigned room #7. Of course, there are two room #7s, one in each hotel – so how does that help? Well, it helps because (assuming the process is random) you are far more likely to be randomly assigned room #7 in the first hotel, rather than the second. In fact, it’s 100 times more likely!

How’s that? Think of it this way: suppose you repeated this whole process of checking in first at the conference 2000 times. You would then expect, given the coin flip, to stay in each hotel 1000 times. In the 1000-room hotel, you’d then expect to stay in each of its rooms exactly once – including room #7. But the first hotel has only 10 rooms – so if you check into that hotel 1000 times, you’d expect to stay in its room #7 fully 100 times. So if you have a key to room #7, it’s 100-1 odds that you’re in the smaller hotel. (The clerk probably expected you to realize that – or maybe he was just being forgetful!) With only the additional information that you're in room #7, the epistemic odds of being in the smaller hotel have risen from 50% to over 99%.

(Doing the math - Prior: P(H) = 50%, P(D|H) = .1, P(D|H') = .001, so the posterior probability P(H|D) > .99)

So a Bayesian analysis enables one to reason consistently about apparently random events with some prior expectation about their frequency, and to update that reasoning in a consistent manner once more information is learned.

Now to the Bayesian version of the Doomsday Argument – suppose you are optimistic about the future of humanity, so you think the probability of ‘Doom soon’ is very low – say 5%. That subjective antecedent probability is called the ‘prior’ in Bayesian reasoning. But the force of the Bayesian version of the Doomsday Argument is to see that even such optimistic prior assumptions about the future of humanity are overwhelmed by the realization of our place in human history, and it becomes rational to believe (the ‘posterior probability’) that given our evidence, there’s an overwhelming probability that humanity has not much longer to survive. Unless we have some special knowledge about the antecedent likelihood of a long human future, it looks as if we should expect Doom relatively soon.

Or as Bostrom puts it:

"Classic Doomsday - Let a person’s birth rank be her position in the sequence of all observers who will ever have existed.
h1: = “There will have been a total of 200 billion humans.”
h2: = “There will have been a total of 200 trillion humans.”

Pr(h1) = .05, Pr(h2) = .95 are the posterior probabilities of h1 and h2 after taking your low birth rank into account: Your rosy prior probability of 5% of our species ending soon (h1) has mutated into a baleful posterior [probability] of 98%."

Bostrom actually argues a more accurate analysis would require a stronger self-sampling assumption:

(SSSA) "Each observer-moment should reason as if it were randomly selected from the class of all observer-moments in its reference class."

The result of the SSSA would be to make the Classic Doomsday argument even more ominous – because not only are birthrates increasing, but human lifespans are getting longer and longer – and so including more and more moments. The result: it would push the rational expectation of Doomsday even closer than a mere counting of the number of births does. Given the SSSA, we might estimate the total number of years ever lived by human beings up to now at 2.75 trillion. That would give a 95% chance that the total number of years left for us all is between 70 billion and 107 trillion. With a current average worldwide longevity of 65 years, that would give us a 95 % rational expectation of between 1.07 billion and 1.65 trillion more births, far lower than the simple SSA forecast. If the birthrate merely remains at 130 million a year, and longevity at an average of 65 years, that means there’s a 95% chance that human births come to an end somewhere between (only) 8 years and 12519 years from now! (And it’s even worse if birthrates continue to rise and/or average lifespans continue to increase). Extinction would presumably follow within at most a century or so afterward – if not simultaneously. Perhaps some science fiction movies aren’t as implausible as they seem.

Bostrom's articles on his website include valuable discussion of most of the objections raised to the Doomsday Arguments above, and counterarguments to those objections. Suffice it to say that some versions of the argument are still held to have force. In fact, I have a novel contribution to the debate, and in it I have some bad news - unless we act quickly, I think our likely future is even shorter than these estimates would imply. My Revised Technological Doomsday Argument will come soon… hopefully, soon enough!

seeing weddings on 7-7-7

2007-07-08T10:58:00.000-07:00

Michelle (my gorgeous wife!) and I had a nice day at the beach on Saturday, wandering around, eating at a Mexican/surfer bar restaurant called Zorro's (!) in Pismo Beach (or maybe it was Shell Beach? - near the border, anyway), and standing on a little promontory over the crashing waves below, enjoying the view and hoping the seabirds didn't come in for an attack - many of their "Guano Rocks" (as I like to call their small outcrops of boulders rising above the surf and with a rich whitish topping) were just offshore, so we saw at least hundreds of them resting comfortably and contributing their nitrates to the environment.

As we looked out from our little clifftop over the beach below (beware, those afraid of heights!), there were various little beach inlets, with natural walls where the cliffs went out almost to the water, then receded again to form another beach. The first couple of mini-beaches had the usual - women tanning, kids playing, a black Labradoodle swimming around with a stick in its mouth - but in the third one over, closest to the stairs down to the beach, we saw a bunch of women dressed in vaguely hideous hot pink bridesmaid outfits, and using my immense powers of induction, I surmised there was a wedding going on. When we saw various guys in tuxes with hot pink vests, well... you be the judge.

Upon return home and getting back on what Keith Olbermann likes to call 'the internets', I see that many folks thought 7-7-7 was a mighty lucky day to get married. (Vegas must have had a banner day, and I'm sure the slots were full of customers.) Of course, Tony and Eva were one such couple, as I'm sure even casual NBA fans are aware. I wonder if such weddings will actually beat the odds, as it were? To operationalize this query, let's ask: do people who get married on days they consider particularly propitious get divorced at a lower rate than the average population? Sociologists and anthropologists of the world, a new research question!

In the meantime, I'll stick with other statistical arguments. More on doomsday soon...

The KG sweepstakes

2007-07-04T18:33:00.000-07:00

Rumor by other blogs that seems grounded in reality has 8 teams with offers for KG and 6 of them being serious.

The Laker offer begins with Kwame Brown (expiring contract), Lamar Odom and Bynum, and unless the Lakers can find some way to sweeten it (trading Odom for something more appetizing to Minny, or giving them multiple first round picks?), it doesn't look too plausible.

Dallas apparently is offering Keith Van Horn (re-signed but expiring contract - only 1 year guaranteed), Austin Croshere (another re-signed but expiring contract- only 1 year guaranteed), DeSagana Diop, Josh Howard, and Jason Terry. Dallas would have to pay Croshere and Van Horn some serious coin to make the deal work under the cap, and Minny conceivably wouldn't even bother asking them to actually show up, which would account for their willingness to be a part of the deal. If Minnesota could get Devin Harris instead of Terry, or a high pick like Yi (perhaps by trading Harris to Milwaukee? - it would explain one odd draft-day rumor), things might look better for Dallas. (Minnesota apparently really wanted Al Horford, but that doesn't seem to be plausible anymore.) Dallas wants to keep Stackhouse (and Stack doesn't want to go to Minny), so he won't be part of any deal.

The plausibility of Phoenix's bid apparently depends on their willingness to include Amare, which will become financially easier after his base year compensation penalty goes down in the next few weeks. (Given his guarantee to opt out if traded there, Minny wants Shawn Marion even less than Lamar Odom). I still find it hard to believe the Phoenix owner will countenance adding a $28.75 mil player, especially as it likely makes the luxury tax unavoidable. Would KG waive his $6.75 million trade kicker just to go to Phoenix? I doubt it, especially as it's likely he's going somewhere else where he'd get it.

Chicago is supposedly still a player, though that would require not only Noah, Gordon, Thomas and perhaps Nocioni, but also PJ Brown agreeing to be another re-signed but expiring contract with only 1 year guaranteed - and that one year is with Minnesota. By all accounts Brown isn't keen on that and is already negotiating a contract with Dallas. I suppose 3-way possibilities would exist, but none seem plausible in getting KG to Chicago - and they don't want to be a tax payer either.

The Knicks of course make offers for KG, but without expiring contracts I can't imagine how they could actually land KG - no matter how many unprotected draft choices Isiah offers.

Similarly, Miami is likely in the bidding, as they clearly have a 'win-now' mentality - but while Jason Williams is a nice juicy expiring contract, Udonis Haslem is about all they could offer of any actual value - and that ain't much. If I were them, I'd still offer multiple unprotected draft picks and go for it anyway. A healthy Shaq-Wade-KG triumvirate looks like a near certain Eastern conference champ next season - and their title aspirations are quickly closing otherwise.

The last team clearly in the bidding is Golden State - they can offer Al Harrington, Patrick O'Bryant, Sarunas Jasikevicius (expiring), Adonal Foyle, and some part of the combo of Pietrus, Biedrins, and Monta Ellis. The problem is the lack of expiring contracts - but they have a large trade exception from the JRich deal and could offer to also take on Troy Hudson or Marko Jaric in a separate deal. But they don't want to move Biedrins, and that still leaves Minnesota with a lot of longterm money (esp Foyle and Harrington) coming back.

So, if I had to handicap it right now, I think Dallas is in the lead, with the Lakers second (by desperately concocting some 3-way involving Lamar), and Phoenix and Chicago possibilities only if both the right players are offered AND their owners are more spendthrift than expected. Golden St would move up if they figure out some way to get some expiring contracts. Most likely, I suspect: Kevin McHale is his usual incompetent self, and KG begins the season as a Timberwolf.

Clippers plans, part 2

2007-07-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

Let's assume Donald Sterling returns to his penurious ways, and wants to cut salary by next summer. Then he will have no interest in re-signing Elton Brand or Corey Maggette, both of whom have player opt-outs next summer and will presumably use them to seek further raises (unless they are injured or have a horrid season.) In that case, there's a deal with the neighbors that makes perfect sense for both teams:

Elton and Corey to the Lakers, for Andrew Bynum, Vladimir Radmanovic, Brian Cook, and Kwame Brown

For the Clips, building around their core/ long-term contracts of Kaman, Livingston, Tim Thomas, and Cat Mobley, it's a great deal: Kwame's big contract expires next summer and Bynum gives them another young post player, who can either play alongside Kaman, or they can showcase one and trade whichever they prefer. Radman and Cook help space the floor, a problem when Kaman and Brand played together. The team would still be competitive, which is all I think Sterling really requires - so it can get salary cap relief without giving up their future or becoming so horrible that people stop buying tickets.

Meanwhile, Kobe gets a pacifier in Brand plus his pal Maggette, a skilled slasher. The Lakers would still be in the market for a PG, but would also have the option of going huge by pairing Kobe and Corey in the backcourt, which would be tenable with good passers like Luke, Odom and Brand in the frontcourt. And Brand is good enough in the low post to routinely need to be doubleteamed, the key requirement for having the rest of the triangle spacing becoming lethal. The Lakers would become a championship contender, without even giving up Lamar!

I say - make it so.... opinions?

Oden counterfactuals?

2007-07-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

In this article in the Oregonian, Jason Quick obviously had inside access to Kevin Pritchard as the GM went through the process of deciding to draft Greg Oden with the #1 pick. The really interesting parts of the article are where he relates conversations Pritchard had with other GMs and his own player. First, a "prominent player" apparently told Pritchard the team had to trade Zach Randolph. By process of fairly simple elimination, that had to be Brandon Roy. Obviously, Pritchard listened! (It also reinforces my doubts that Zach will do well in the combo of the nightlife of NYC and the nightmare that are Isiah's Knicks).

But the real shockers are the trades offered by other GMs. Quick reports that a team in their division (Northwest) offered a Hall of Famer and a hyped rookie for the 1st pick - again, simple elimination tells one Minnesota offered KG and Foye for the pick. Even more shocking, Quick claims that another GM from a "Western Conference power" offered a "first-ballot" Hall of Famer for the pick. I don't think the Lakers count as a power, so that could only mean the Spurs, fresh off their championship, offered to trade Tim Duncan! (Unless you think Dirk qualifies as a "first-ballot Hall of Famer" - I do, but I doubt the speaker thought so.)

It turns out Pritchard and his brain trust decided there was only one player in the league for whom they'd trade the pick - LeBron James. I wonder if you folks agree? I do - but then, like Pritchard, I think very highly of Oden.

The news from free agency - Derek and Rashard

2007-07-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Rashard Lewis is going to Orlando for an extremely large contract, and Derek Fisher has been released from his contract by the Utah Jazz so he can move to a city which has specialists for his daughter's treatment.

Fisher first: I'm not sure of the salary cap implications of this move, but Fisher did NOT say he was retiring (although he's 'thinking about it'), and seems amenable to playing in one of the few cities with specialists in his daughter's rare cancer. The Jazz lose a major rotation player and 'glue guy', but are well positioned to survive the blow, especially if his salary comes off their books, or at least is reduced. Selfishly, I hope Derek continues to play and returns to the Lakers - he is revered in LA by the fans and it is always good to have a player you feel like rooting for on the local team - as opposed to, say, Kobe.

As for Lewis, his move to the Magic kingdom signifies at least these two things: Grant Hill is not returning to Orlando, and neither is Darko Milicic. Grant wouldn't come back to sit the bench (and as blogged before, has several other offers), and they will need to renounce Milicic's cap hold of $6.8 million to make Rashard the offer. The only real question is whether Seattle will try to get Darko or something else back from Orlando by making it into a sign and trade, or whether he leaves for nothing. (Darko should have some suitors, but only a few teams, such as the Hawks, will have the cap room to offer him over the mid-level exception - he may not get quite the payday he was expecting). Rashard should help Orlando spread the floor, but he's a bad defender, indifferent rebounder, and unless Dwight Howard refines his post moves, I don't expect this to make Orlando significantly better.

In Seattle, the obvious plan, from trading Ray Allen and losing Rashard, is to blow it all up and start over, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if they don't simply let Rashard go (and save the cap space, rather than taking on a big contract in return). It's certainly beginning to look like Kevin Durant will be playing on a terrible team his rookie year - but he shouldn't have to fight anyone for shots! Unless new Seattle GM Sam Presti has some tricks up his sleeve, it sure looks like Durant may score more, but win a whole lot less, than Greg Oden for the foreseeable future.

Impeach Cheney?

2007-07-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post ran a four-part series this past week that has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance over various functions of the executive branch (and indeed over the president himself - one of the few issues Bush apparently stood up to Cheney on was the Harriet Miers nomination, and we know how that played out.)

Now, many in the blogosphere (see this collection of articles) are discussing an article by self-described conservative Bruce Fein that explicitly calls for Cheney's impeachment. A single quote from Fein sums up his argument nicely:

"As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify."

Fein's indictment includes the following charges, among many others: Cheney's various methods of disregarding his proper role under the Constitution, including creating line-item vetoes (in the form of signing statements) that the Supreme Court had previously denied; forming military commissions that thwart normal judicial procedure; his contention that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil (if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida - so if Dick Cheney decides (or merely suspects) that you are a terrorist, he believes that the military may shoot you on sight next time you enter an airline terminal); his disregard for constitutional amendments delineating the respective powers of the president and vice-president, and under what circumstances the vice-president should assume presidential powers; and of course, Cheney's latest twist of reality - his farcical assertion that the vice-president is not a member of the executive branch, and is exempt from the Constitutional checks and balances placed upon the executive, and indeed from executive orders regarding the executive branch itself.

So, anyone within shouting distance of a 'strict constructionist' view of Constitutional interpretation would be forced to conclude that Cheney has flagrantly disregarded the document he has sworn to uphold, and hence there are ample grounds for impeachment. Should Congress actually do so? After all, prosecutorial discretion means that even if a crime has been committed, charges do not have to be brought. Some crimes do not deserve prosecution. Cheney's do, however; for his latest transgressions strike at the very heart of what Congress could do to discipline his excesses in the normal way - by exercising congressional oversight of his activities. But he has claimed the extralegal right to keep secret even what he is keeping secret - a meta-secret, if you will - and hence is essentially, by his own admission, acting unchecked by any other branch of government - even the executive! We fought a war to get rid of a tyrant named George III. Let's hope Congress can depose this one peacefully.

Luke still a Laker

2007-07-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Luke Walton is re-signing with the Lakers - no surprise, except that it takes away one possible sign-and-trade piece in a potential KG trade. But I think Minnesota and Walton had no mutual interest anyway. More relevant is the list of Grant Hill suitors - Detroit, Miami, Phoenix, San Antonio and Orlando. Grant apparently wants a chance to play for a ring and is willing to take less to do so - but the Lakers are nowhere on that list. If Phoenix somehow gets Minny to go for Marion instead of Amare and actually pulls off the KG trade (losing James Jones and possibly Barbosa and/or Diaw in the process), Hill would be a natural fit at the 3. Miami is losing Kapono, and no doubt would love to get Grant to play 3 as well. The Spurs might even move Bowen to the bench (or keep Ginobili there) and offer Grant a starting spot. Unless he just can't leave Orlando, I suspect one of those 3 places will have him, and he could be an underrated piece of a contender next season.

Marc Stein's fuzzy math

2007-06-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

Marc Stein's article assays 6 possible destinations for Kevin Garnett this summer. Like many a lazy article on this topic, however, Stein doesn't bother to check whether his scenarios are even possible under the salary cap - although he does mention that all of Garnett's trade kicker ($6.75 million) must, as of July 1, be added to his $22 million salary for 2007-08 to make the deal work under the cap. That is, if traded, Kevin is owed $28.75 million next season, and so a team must come within 25% of that in what salary it sends out - a minimum of about $23 million.

So, most of the deals Stein mentions ARE NOT POSSIBLE under the salary cap. That makes most of his article bogus. For example, to pair KG with both Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, Boston would have to trade virtually the rest of the team - including bad contracts like Scalabrine's - to get the deal to work. In a league that has 5 players on the floor at a time, 3 man rosters aren't a winning strategy.

For Phoenix, Amare plus the expiring contracts of Thomas and Piatkowski aren't enough either - Phoenix would have to add more, non-expiring contracts, like Diaw and Barbosa. Only the Lakers could easily absorb the hit without losing most of their roster, and even they don't have enough expiring contracts (only Kwame). It looks like Minnesota will need a 3 or 4-team trade or must give up its hope of dramatic salary cap off-loading - once more, it looks like McHale waited too late to make a deal.

Doomsday, nanotechnology, grey goo and the ice-nine scenario

2007-06-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

Ice-nine is a fictional substance, invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle. In the novel, a fictional Nobel laureate physicist, Felix Hoenikker, creates ice-nine as a secret weapon. Ice-nine takes the form of an alternative structure of water, one solid at normal room temperature. When a single crystal of ice-nine is brought into contact with regular liquid water, a phase transition ensues that causes the molecules of liquid water to arrange themselves into a solid, ice-nine, that is similar to regular ice, but will only melt at temperatures above 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit (45.8 degrees Celsius). The result, of course, is that all the water in the world will freeze and life as we know it would cease to exist.

Vonnegut was using ice-nine as a metaphor for the potential doomsday effect of nuclear weapons; when scientists in the Manhattan Project were first developing the atomic bomb, they first had to do calculations to make sure that the first atomic explosion would not burn so hot as to ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere (and hence kill us all). Their calculations soon showed, as we all now know, that nuclear weapons have no such ability to cause a runaway effect. But nanobots that feed on carbon and self-replicate will.

The key is the self-replication – like cells in a human body, their internal instructions will include a program for taking materials from the environment (‘food’) and making copies of themselves. Except, well, nanobots will be made of carbon, and have no natural enemies. Hence, if they begin making copies of themselves, they will do so in an exponentially explosive manner, and will presumably take carbon from wherever in the environment they can get it. And guess what – our bodies are made of a great deal of carbon! Hence, the ‘grey goo’ scenario – not long after the first self-replicating carbon-based nanobot is created, we (and everything else made of carbon) will become nothing but a ‘grey goo’.

Hence, in a field called the ethics of ‘existential risk’, a key point of my practical research is to encourage laws that prohibit the development of self-replicating nanotechnology, and closely regulate nanotech in general. Otherwise, self-replicating nanotechnology will be the last invention we humans ever make.

Wisdom and the meaning of life, part 1

2007-06-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

This is a version of a talk I've given to freshmen honor students....

Philosophy - gets to ask Big questions: where the universe come from? Does God exist? Who and what am I? And, the biggie - what’s the Meaning of Life?

1 Recursive pun-ishment - the meaning of life in a meta-language is `life; not exactly what we want, though ...

2 Then - perhaps we want a definition of life as that which uses energy for homeostasis, has a cellular structure and organization based on DNA, and reproduces itself.
Still no? ...

3 Then perhaps existentialism: the meaning of life is whatever we give it - it has no prior meaning, but the ‘meaning’ in life is what is given it by persons.

4 Or: the meaning of life is to fulfill our purpose or destiny - doing what we, as persons, ought to be doing, fulfilling our role excellently (an attitude common to both theism and virtue ethics).

5 So what is a person? Animals are alive, but their lives have (as far as we know) no intrinsic meaning - so meaning requires a particular kind of consciousness involving self-awareness and rationality.

6 Agency - the capacity for rational exercise of free will - and hence autonomy - being a law unto oneself - are the key.

7 So how does one successfully give meaning to life? Is there a right answer? Existentialism - no, it’s our free choice - this bs, as there are clearly lives more and less worth living, as every existentialist actually believes.

8 So God? Meaning derived from relationship to transcendent being, a Creator and Sustainer? But unclear answer at best - and only works if it’s really true. Finding out the God you believed in doesn’t exist/ doesn’t work or act as promised is deflating, and through our natural inclination to disregard negative evidence (confirmation bias), often causes war and irrationality over human history - and lots of unclear thinking, re ambiguity and vagueness.

9 Re the problems of argument about God(s) from religious experience - at most one interpretation can be correct, and hence logic dictates that everyone else has been fundamentally mistaken about the true nature of their experience – at most one of the tens of thousands of religions in world history can be entirely right about God. If there’s no way to choose between them, we have an overwhelming inductive argument that everyone is thus mistaken, and hence there is no God.

10 To argue otherwise first demands clarity of terms: First, what is (one’s concept of) God? It makes no sense to argue about whether or not something exists if you have no clear idea of what one is arguing about. Discussing the existence of horses is a different topic than the existence of unicorns, and if you're not sure which you're discussing, not much profitable will ensue. Further (and to return to our topic), even if God exists, why should Its Will determine the meaning of our lives - re the fallacy of Divine Command Theory - the good is what it is not because of god’s will, but god’s will is good, if it is, because it follows the Good? (Compare Moral order argument for God - we discover a moral order to things, and best explanation is to postulate a god creating a preexisting moral order in universe, as designer - but did piss-poor job, as crappy history of life on earth and evolution suggests.)

If these choices don't work to explain the meaning of life, what does? My answer comes in Part 2 - stay tuned....

What the Clippers should do, 2007-8

2007-06-29T17:32:00.000-07:00

The Clipper nightmare imagined:

Summer 2008 – Shaun Livingston has made only a halting recovery in the 20 games played since he returned from his knee reconstruction, and signs are the Clippers are unconvinced he’s worth the money and will allow him to leave via restricted free agency this summer, joining Sam Cassell, Quentin Ross, Corey Maggette and Elton Brand as free agents on the way out of town. The hot rumor has the Spurs after Brand, who at this time (pending the draft and other possible re-signings) have only have three players under contract -- Parker, Ginobili and Duncan. Now that KG and Marion have re-upped with their teams, all signs are that Elton Brand will be a Spur soon and help Tim Duncan in his quest to catch Bill Russell’s record of 11 titles….

How can the Clippers avoid such a return to NBA laughingstock? They will have to take some chances, but there are plausible scenarios for so doing. Let’s begin by assessing the team, and then laying out some scenarios for improving the Clippers.

First, a retrospective: 2005-6 was easily the best season in Clipper history – they crushed Denver in the first round of the playoffs, and took Phoenix to 7 games in the second round; if not for a brain cramp by Daniel Ewing in allowing a literal last-second Raja Bell 3 (or by Coach Dunleavy for putting him in the situation), the Clippers would’ve played Dallas in the conference finals. They then added Phoenix playoff star Tim Thomas to augment a powerful frontcourt rotation, and figured Corey Maggette would have to be healthier than the year before.

So, hopes were thus high heading into the 2006-7 season; pundits universally saw the Clippers as a playoff team, and many saw them making the second round again and winning at least 50 games. The reality was quite a bit different. At the start of the season, every single rotation player (except Cuttino Mobley) was playing worse than the season previous, even Elton Brand, who after an arduous summer playing for Team USA (and then producing a movie and getting married) descended from the stratosphere of a top-5 player in the league to merely all-star level. (And Mobley fell off in the second half of the season.)

Without Elton carrying the team by himself, the dropoff of all the average players to something less spelled big trouble. Especially disappointing was the lack of progress by presumed prodigy Shaun Livingston (and then his season-ending, career-threatening injury), which when combined with Sam Cassell’s regression and renewed fragility made PG play a millstone that sunk their playoff hopes (to mix metaphors).

Meanwhile, Corey Maggette was feuding with Coach Dunleavy over his role (he wanted to start, not be a 6th man) and his defense, and Zeljko Rebraca, a valuable offensive force off the bench in 2005-6, was injured and out for the season, and later released. The Clippers were a dysfunctional bunch, made worse by the evident lack of compatibility in the frontcourt between the star Brand and the prospect Kaman – both played better when the other was out of the game, largely because Kaman selfishly forced shots and disrupted the offense whenever Elton was in the game.

With the season going down the tubes and Daniel Ewing the only healthy PG on the roster, the Clippers signed Jason Hart off waivers and put him in the starting lineup – and miraculously, the Clippers began playing much better. (Maggette started playing much better at this time too, perhaps because the trade deadline passed and he knew he would remain a Clipper for the rest of the season – and injuries forced Dunleavy to reinsert him in the starting lineup.) With a week to go, the Clippers were in 8th place in the West, and despite their vicissitudes, controlled their fate for a playoff spot. But a terrible home loss to Sacramento on the final Sunday of the season (in which everyone but Brand stunk up the joint) meant Golden State would have to lose one of their final two games for the Clips to sneak in – and the Warriors didn’t. The conclusion:

40-42, 4th place Pacific Division, 9th in Western Conference
Being the best team to miss the playoffs only means one gets the last pick in the lottery.
...
In an article entitled “NBA Market Watch: Los Angeles Clippers” by Heather N. Allen, Paul Gearan, and Bradley Sutton, they have a scale that maps players from below to above league average on both offense and defense. I can use their scale to summarize the Clipper roster (and contract status) as follows – using (!) to indicate disagreement with their conclusions:

EB – 2 more seasons, good (well above average) on offense and defense
Cuttino – 3 more, near average on offense but worse on D
CMag, 2 more, good O, average D
QRoss, 1 more, same as Maggette (!! - this is a prima facie rejection of their method, as Ross is clearly better on defense than offense!)
TThomas, 3 more, average on both
Kaman, 4 more, good D (!), bad O
Cassell, 1 more, average on O, bad on D
SLivingston, 2 more, below ave, especially on O (perhaps the trade rumors bothered him, or his knee hurt more than let on, even before the official injury)

Other players - Non-rotation (not enough minutes for meaningful evaluation) with 1 more year on contract –Aaron Williams, Paul Davis
Possible re-sign/ team option: Jason Hart, D Ewing, JSingleton, WConroy, YKorolev
Contract rights to players overseas: Guillermo Diaz, Sofoklis Schortsianitis

Usage (% of possessions) in order, greatest to least:
SCassell, CMag, EB, TThomas, SLiv, Kaman, Mobley, Hart, Ross
(it’s a problem when easily your most efficient player is only 3rd in usage %, despite being the ‘star’ - teamwork and PG play killed the Clips last year.)
....

The Clipper draft – Chad Ford's summary:

"Al Thornton slipped because of his age (24) and questions about his wrist -- but he has an NBA-ready game. His arrival makes it appear that Corey Maggette is back on the trading block.

Jared Jordan is one of the best pure point guards in this draft class. He's not big or athletic, but he has a sixth sense for seeing the floor that's akin to the way injured Clippers point guard Shaun Livingston does."

It seems safe to say that Thornton could be in the rotation, perhaps even a starter, next season, but duplicates Maggette's skills and role on the team; and Jordan should make the team and could become a backup PG soon.
...
What to do?

If Minnesota wanted to reload with young up and comers, rather than just take expiring contracts, the Clips could make a moderately enticing offer for KG:

KG for Corey Maggette, Tim Thomas, Chris Kaman, Shaun Livingston, and the return of the future Minnesota 1st rounder owed to the Clippers.

That would leave a Clipper team of – EB, KG, PDavis, and AWilliams up front; Cuttino Mobley, AlThornton, QRoss, and JSingleton at the wings, and at PG- Sam Cassell, Jared Jordan, Jason Hart and perhaps Conroy or Ewing. If they signed Papaloukas (likely to require the full midlevel to do so) and brought Schortsianitis over, they would even have experience and depth.

Kaman, Livingston, and Maggette have all been deemed untouchable at various points last season, but the drafting of Al Thornton makes clear that Maggette is on the block, and Livingston’s injury means he is surely dealable if the team wants to win this season. If the Clips do nothing, they appear headed for the lottery again in an increasingly loaded West, and Elton Brand isn’t getting any younger. If owner Donald Sterling is willing to spend, then the pieces above could get a KG, Jermaine O’Neal, or another upgrade from a team looking to build for the future. Otherwise, they should keep Livingston and look at dealing at least Cassell, Brand and Maggette and begin to rebuild themselves.

Kobe to Chicago

2007-06-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

Apparently (reading between the lines of the Mitch Kupchack/ Jim Gray interview) KG is not gonna be a Laker, and Kobe will not relent from his trade demand. LA might have to strike quickly to trade Kobe to Chicago, as the Bulls have interest in KG, but I'm sure they would prefer Kobe - younger, a better fit and (unbelievably) a salary (after KG's trade kicker) of about $10 million less, making the salary cap and player implications much easier to manage.

Here's a deal I think the Lakers would swallow hard, but accept for Kobe:

Tyrus Thomas, Chris Duhon, Joakim Noah, Luol Deng, and Ben Gordon

That would still leave Chicago (if they're willing to spend to re-sign their own players) with a very strong, vet-heavy lineup: Ben Wallace/ Aaron Gray, PJ Brown/ Sweetney/ Malik Allen, Nocioni/Khyrapa/ (maybe Grant Hill!), Kobe/ Sefolosha/ JamesOn Curry, Hinrich/Andre Barrett. They could let Nocioni go if need be to sign Grant Hill, who is making noises about playing another year or 2 for a title contender - Detroit and the Spurs are the most rumored. If the Kobe deal occurred, I'm sure Chicago would qualify.

The Bulls would no doubt try to offer Brown and/or Nocioni in sign and trade deals before including Thomas/ Noah and especially Deng, but I don't believe the Lakers would bite for a second - if they trade Kobe, they're rebuilding. Likewise, I can't imagine the Lakers taking the huge and long contract of Ben Wallace back in any deal.

But the Lakers could sell getting Deng, Gordon, Thomas and especially Noah (a charismatic figure perfect for Hollywood) as a bounteous return for Kobe, portending a return to greatness in a few years. To me, the real question is if GM Paxson would make the deal. Should he, if this is what it would take (and assuming Reinsdorf opens the wallet to resign the other pieces to make it work)?

Quick draft thoughts

2007-06-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

1. Zabian Dowdell (PG, Va Tech) and Kyle Visser (beefy C, Wake Forest) were undrafted, but I (and Hollinger) were relatively high on both of them. So I hope they go to camp with a team I like....

2. Maybe Danny Ainge isn't a complete idiot. Under pressure to improve rapidly and with only the #5 pick and an expiring contract (Ratliff) as major bait, he tried for KG and Shawn Marion, but both made clear through their agents they would be only one year rentals. So he trades the pick for an amazingly efficient scorer who complements Pierce's driving game beautifully in Ray Allen, AND gets a potential starting C/PF in Glen Davis at 35 in return! If no more deals are made, I expect BOTH players to start for Boston next year (alongside Pierce, Rondo, and Jefferson), and for Boston to make the playoffs next season. And because he traded Wally S. instead, Ainge still has Ratliff's expiring contract to facilitate another deal - or to give him some cap room next summer.

3. The deep pockets of Paul Allen and shrewd moves by Kevin Pritchard over the past 2 drafts mean Portland may have the brightest future of any team in the league. They have an embarrassment of riches in prospects at practically every position. Here's their roster as of now:

PG Jarrett Jack, Sergio Rodriguez, Petteri Koponen, Taurean Green
SG Brandon Roy, Rudy Fernandez, Martell Webster, Steve Francis
SF Ime Udoka, Travis Outlaw, Darius Miles
PF LaMarcus Aldridge, Channing Frye, Josh McRoberts, Raef LaFrentz
C Greg Oden, Joel Przybilla, Jamaal Magloire, Luke Schenscher

Jamaal Magloire, Ime Udoka, Travis Outlaw and Luke Schenscher are free agents and may not return, Steve Francis might be bought out, and Rudy Fernandez and Petteri Koponen may well stay overseas for now, but there is still a wealth of young talent and even possibly cap room in a couple of years, when LaFrentz and Miles come off the books. And obviously moves could still be made - SF is the position most clearly still needing an upgrade, and they have a plethora of young PGs, a position of need for many teams - perhaps Atlanta would trade a Josh Smith or Marvin Williams for a PG or 2? They may not be able to make the playoffs in the loaded West next season, but they look to have a bright future.

4. Meanwhile, how are Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph going to share the low block - or play any defense? And is there any possibility Zach could get in trouble in the NYC nightlife? Isiah may have outdone himself this time.... surely he'll trade David Lee for some overpriced vet next. Or worse, just not give him any minutes.

5. Finally, congrats to my childhood fave, the Atlanta Hawks. They did the right thing in picking Horford at 3, and Acie Law is defensible at 11. If they simply stay the course and don't screw things up, they will be a playoff team soon, perhaps even this season - if Horford is a serious ROY candidate, as I expect him to be.

The tier system and the Hawks’ incompetence

2007-06-28T00:32:00.000-07:00

In drafting by tiers, one selects the player that most fits one’s needs from the highest tier available; so if only one player from the highest tier is available when you pick, you automatically take him. But if several players in the highest tier are available, you take the one that best fits your team’s needs.

Chad Ford explains by an example:

“Let me give you an example from the worst-drafting team over the last few years, the Atlanta Hawks.

Hawks GM Billy Knight has stated that he takes the best player on the board, regardless of team need. He's proven that the last few years by taking Marvin Williams ahead of Chris Paul and Deron Williams in 2005, and taking Shelden Williams ahead of a point guard such as Rajon Rondo in 2006.

A source formerly with Atlanta's front office told me that the Hawks had Marvin Williams ranked No. 1, Andrew Bogut ranked No. 2, Deron Williams ranked No. 3 and Paul ranked No. 4 in 2005. So on draft night, Knight took Marvin Williams with the No. 2 pick after the Bucks selected Bogut No. 1 overall.

In a tier system, however, the source conceded that all four players, in his mind at least, would have been Tier 1 players -- in other words, the Hawks thought all four had equal long-term impact potential. If the Hawks had employed a tier system, they would have ranked inside the tier based on team need and fit, rather than just ranking the prospects from one to 30.

In that case, the Hawks likely would have ranked either Bogut (they needed a center) or Deron Williams (they still need a point guard) No. 1. Marvin Williams actually would have been ranked No. 4 under that scenario.”

As the Hawks actually had the second pick, then by using the tier system they would’ve drafted Deron Williams, and so far, that looks much wiser than Marvin Williams – though Marvin remains very young, so the jury is still out.

This year’s draft tiers, according to Ford:

TIER 1 – Oden and Durant
TIER 2- Corey Brewer, Mike Conley, Jeff Green, Al Horford, Yi Jianlian, Brandan Wright
TIER 3- Spencer Hawes, Joakim Noah, Al Thornton, Julian Wright
TIER 4- Javaris Crittenton, Acie Law, Rodney Stuckey, Nick Young, Thaddeus Young
TIER 5- Morris Almond, Josh McRoberts, Gabe Pruitt, Jason Smith, Tiago Splitter, Sean Williams
TIER 6- Arron Afflalo, Marco Belinelli, Derrick Byars, Daequan Cook, Glen Davis, Jared Dudley, Nick Fazekas, Rudy Fernandez, Marc Gasol, Taurean Green, Petteri Koponen, Marcus Williams

(Ford has 36 players for 30 slots because he claims he included in Tier 6 every player that a team told him was in its first round.)

But in practice, teams seem to really have only 3 players in Tier 2 – Conley, Horford, and Yi. If mock drafts can be trusted, the rest of tier 2 seems to blend into tier 3.

In any case, by Ford’s logic, to continue the case of Atlanta, this year they would pick Conley (biggest need is PG) with pick #3, and probably Hawes (or Noah, if somehow he fell that far – not likely) with pick 11, as center is their second biggest need. But if I’m right, that would be disastrous; Conley may be a defensible pick, but Hawes is a BUST waiting to happen. Far better would be to take Horford and pray for Noah at 11, or if he's gone, Brewer (if he drops), Law, or Stuckey. Or, of course, I would pick Glen Davis, aka Big Baby, as the highest rated player on my mock likely to be around at #11. Perhaps that eventuality would be reason to go with Conley at 3 - but better would be to trade down from 3 to 5 or 6 and take Conley, as many teams want to go up to 3 for Horford. Honestly, if he's really going to be an all-star quality PF like Elton Brand, I wouldn't take the chance. The Hawks should take Horford, and damn the tiers.... this year.

Unless the Hawks miracle occurs and Amare really does become a Hawk....

Keith's first annual mock draft (2007)

2007-06-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

Now, my first annual official mock draft – SI or anyone, care to join me? (First round only, and what teams should do, assuming they keep their picks – i.e., day of draft trades cannot be incorporated. So I’m assuming e.g. that Atlanta has picks 3 and 11). My rationale – when we look back in 5 to 8 years, who will be the best players from this draft? Position matters only insofar as that player will get an opportunity over that 5-8 year timespan – so position almost never makes a difference, unless you’re, say, a PG drafted by the Hornets or a SG drafted by the Lakers (assuming Kobe stays) .....

1. Portland - Greg Oden, Ohio St – a no-brainer, likely to be somewhere between Ewing and the Admiral in effectiveness
2. Seattle - Kevin Durant, Texas – Carmelo Anthony plus a few more rebounds. Will lead the league in scoring, but never be a legit MVP.
3. Atlanta - Al Horford, Fla – think Carlos Boozer to Elton Brand – hope he stays healthy.
4 Memphis - Mike Conley Jr., Ohio St – a young Tony Parker with better D. He and Horford are very close on my board, but Parker learned how to shoot after coming into the league – will Conley?
5 Boston - Joakim Noah, Fla – Varejao crossed with Rodman – terrific D, should board well, a leader, no scoring
6 Milwaukee – Glen Davis, LSU – vastly underrated because of weight issue – if he keeps it off, he’s a beast, a real ‘Baby Shaq’ – a 20/10 monster. I considered him as high as 2nd.
7 Minnesota – Corey Brewer, Fla. Worst case scenario is Bruce Bowen, not Todd Day – because he’s not a headcase.
8. Charlotte - Brandan Wright, UNC. More promise (because better freshman year) than Marvin Williams, an otherwise similar super-raw frosh out of UNC
9 Chicago -Thaddeus Young, GT. Looks like a 20 pt scorer on the wing for a long time – Mitch Richmond?
10 Sacto - Rodney Stuckey – combo guard does a little bit of everything. Best case scenario is Joe Dumars, but likely less – which is still darn good
11 Atlanta – Sean (Pothead) Williams, BC. Half the league tokes, so... why not take a Rasheed Wallace-type talent (though without the outside shot).
12 Philly - Josh McRoberts, Duke. They need everything, but esp. a PF – but all the good ones are gone; they hope Hollinger and the scouts from the last 2 years are right about McRoberts, and not the Duke fans.
13 New Orleans – Jared Dudley, BC. The Shane Battier lite of this draft, and they need wing players.
14 LA Clippers – Acie Law, Texas A&M. He and Brewer are my first major disagreements with Hollinger’s rankings. He may never be a star, but given NBA PGs, I think he can be a starter and clutch player – Sam Cassell lite.

End of the lottery – and no Yi, you may notice.

15. Detroit - Nick Fazekas, Nevada. Think Keith van Horn, who could shoot and help a team when surrounded by sound defenders. Detroit fits perfectly.
16. Washington - Jeff Green, Georgetown. Local kid should be a solid but unspectacular pro.
17. NJ Nets - Herbert Hill, Providence. They need a bigtime rebounder who’s overlooked – cf. Paul Millsap last year.
18. Golden St. - Julian Wright, Kansas. A tweener who can’t shoot, but should defend well and contribute as marginal starter/ solid bench force.
19. LA Lakers - Zabian Dowdell, Va Tech. I like him best of the remaining point guards – sorta like Acie Law, solid at several things, great at none.
20. Miami – Nick Young, USC. Hollinger is way down on him, but uberathletic guards often outperform their college stats – see Gerald Wallace. Young would be higher, but I don’t see him having Wallace’s defensive ability, making him closer to Dahntay Jones than Wallace. And I see D. Wade leaving Miami after Shaq retires...
21. Philly - Kyle Visser, WF. Philly needs power players, and here I defer to Hollinger’s rankings – he’s the best left on the board.
22. Charlotte – Tiago Splitter, Brazil – should be a solid defender and non-scorer akin to countryman Varejao.
23. Knicks - D.J. Strawberry, Maryland. Isiah won’t take anyone as defensively ept as this legacy. He could easily have Eric Snow’s career.
24. Phoenix - Al Thornton, FSU. He should be a solid bench scorer with little else to contribute and have a relatively short career, as he’s old for a rook and will be worthless once he loses a step.
25 Utah - Petteri Koponen, PG, Finland. A better and taller version of Beno Udrih. Or, if you prefer, Steve Blake.
26 Houston – SG Rudy Fernandez, Spain. Good Eurostats but painfully skinny, so will be manhandled and a poor defender here. Could still be good rotation player as long as coach is aware of matchups – i.e., don’t guard a Kobe or Bonzi Wells or Maurice Evans.
27 Detroit – SG Marco Belinelli, Italy. See Rudy Fernandez.
28 Spurs – Jason Smith, Col St. Much higher if he could shoot 3s or was bulkier – but he isn’t. Somewhere between Brad Sellars on the low end and Keith van Horn on the high end.
29 Phoenix - Taurean Green, Fla. We’re into the Jacques Vaughn backup PGs who don’t kill you and play decent D phase now.
30 Philly - Derrick Byars, Vandy. A mediocre backup swingman – best case is Mo Peterson.

And finally, some words of warning -
Predicted BUSTS – These fellows may go in the lottery to mid-first round, but I predict they will suck!

YI JIANLIAN – failed to dominate in inferior Chinese league and is probably 22 – if the Hawks use the #3 on him instead of getting Amare Stoudamire in trade, Billy Knight may go down as worst GM ever.

Javaris Crittenton, PG, Ga Tech – big points who aren’t quick, and turn it over when they penetrate, don’t work out – see my review of Jeryl Sasser from 2001.

Spencer Hawes, C, Washington. Will be lucky to be as good as his journeyman uncle Steve Hawes was – a career backup. Will be routinely abused on defense, sure to be seen as the dunkee in many posters to come. Shawn Bradley, minus 6 inches?

Gabe Pruitt, PG, USC – surrounded by better players in college, not really very good.

Arron Afflalo, SG, UCLA – see Gabe Pruitt.

The draft – first, a statistical look

2007-06-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

First, the draft according to John Hollinger’s formula – it only includes collegians, so we’ll have to guess/ interpolate where he would rank foreigners. His formula includes a significant age adjustment, so if Yi is really 19, he would probably be a lottery pick; if he’s actually 22 (as most believe), then drop him towards the end of the first round… I would guess (and this is just my guess, with nothing explicit from Hollinger - and assuming he’s 19, as the Chinese officials insist) that Hollinger would have him somewhere in the 7-10 range; and in some more wild-ass guessing, a few foreign guards (Petteri Koponen, Rudy Fernandez, Marco Belinelli, Renaldas Seibutis) and bigs (Kyrylo Fesenko, Sun Yue, Stanko Barac, Ali Traore) might conceivably be in the 20s….

Partial explanation – again, for a full one, see his original article –

Space between picks = at least 14 pt difference between consecutive picks (so no space between means the players are very close in talent, e.g. #s 4-6); his system has an over 500 score = traditional lottery to mid-first round pick, with 16 (above average) college players over 500 this year

1. Kevin Durant (with a bullet - way ahead of Oden!)

2.Greg Oden

3. Mike Conley Jr.

4.Thaddeus Young
5.Brandan Wright
6. Al Horford

7. Nick Fazekas

(Yi?)

8.Josh McRoberts
9. Rodney Stuckey

10. Jared Dudley

11.Joakim Noah
12.Glen Davis
13.Sean Williams
14. Jeff Green
15. Kyle Visser
16. Herbert Hill
17. Javaris Crittenton
18. Wilson Chandler
19. Julian Wright
20. Daequan Cook
21. D.J. Strawberry
22. Jason Smith
23. Alando Tucker
24. Corey Brewer
25. Al Thornton
26. Marcus Williams
27. Acie Law
28. Aaron Gray
29. Zabian Dowdell
30. Spencer Hawes

Other notables
31 Morris Almond
32 Derrick Byars
33 Gabe Pruitt
34 Nick Young
35 Taurean Green
36 Arron Afflalo
37 Ramon Sessions

Garnett and Nash together?

2007-06-27T12:42:00.001-07:00

KG to Phoenix is the hot rumor, with Amare Stoudamire, not Marion, leaving for Atlanta. That complicates the budget picture for Phoenix because Stoudamire is a base-year compensation player, especially if they want to keep Kurt Thomas – which looks almost impossible. Here’s a version that meets the salary cap restrictions:

Phoenix: gets KG
The Suns give up: Stoudamire to Atlanta, James Jones, Piatkowski and K. Thomas (all expiring contracts) to Minnesota

Atlanta gets: Stoudamire
Hawks trade: Lorenzen Wright, Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson (all expiring contracts), #3 and #11 pick, all to Minnesota

Minnesota gives up KG, and gets all expiring contracts and the #3 and #11 pick

If Atlanta wants more, like Barbosa (I think they’re giving up too much for Stoudamire alone), it gets more complicated, but still doable:

Phoenix gets: KG, Josh Childress, Zaza Pachulia, and Salim Stoudamire
Phoenix loses: Stoudamire, Leandro Barbosa, Marcus Banks to Atlanta; James Jones, Piatkowski and K. Thomas (all expiring contracts) to Minnesota

Atlanta gets: Stoudamire, Leandro Barbosa, Marcus Banks
Atlanta loses: Josh Childress, Zaza Pachulia, and Salim Stoudamire to Phoenix; Lorenzen Wright, Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson (all expiring contracts), #3 and #11 pick, all to Minnesota

Minnesota is unchanged - gives up KG, and gets all expiring contracts and the #3 and #11 pick

Childress and Pachulia is a lot for Barbosa, but the new rosters make more sense for both teams – Pachulia is a much needed center for Phoenix after they deal both Kurt Thomas and Amare, and Childress fits well on the wings – a shooter who should flourish in the Suns system. Likewise Salim Stoudamire should enjoy chucking 3s for the Suns, who also went to Arizona for college and could back up Nash. Atlanta meanwhile addresses its PG problem with Barbosa and Banks, along with a C in Amare.

And it might actually happen…..

Kahn Winery, RIP

2007-06-27T00:33:00.000-07:00

Since I mentioned Kahn Winery in my last post, a bit more about it.

The Kahn Winery was located in the "smallest tasting room in the state of California", a tiny building on the north end of Grand Avenue, the main drag through the arts and wine town of Los Olivos. It was a blast - with an outdoor patio, where vintage jazz was often heard and people would smoke fine cigars (although I hate the smell!) next to the turtle ponds outside, all tucked into a cozy location next to the John Cody Art Gallery. A typical upstart small winery, it began in 1996 as the dream of Andrew Kahn, who had been the assistant winemaker for the Fess Parker Winery (one of the "Sideways" wineries). He and his partner, Christian Garvin, made premium exemplars of varietals such as Cabernet Franc (which they dubbed "Cab Frank" and sent to the funeral of Mr. Sinatra, gaining them some needed notoriety), and their exquisitely delicious Syrah (sourced from the estimable Bien Nacido and Stolpman Vineyards) and Nebbiolo, as well as odd whites and roses like Grignolino and Viognier. My darling Michelle enjoyed using their postcards to send out news of our adventures. Unfortunately, like many small wineries, it appears to have gone out of business. A new winery, called Carhartt, has taken over the tiny tasting room... alas. But never fear - there are probably over 200 wineries within 70 miles north and south of SLO. A few more of them to come....

Inside the Justin Reserve Isoceles Room

2007-06-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

A tour of a few of the wineries I frequent.... first, Justin Winery: to be found on the far west of Paso as one nears mountains near the coast and Cambria, it is the very furtherest out of the "Far Out Wineries' of Paso, and the best known internationally, and probably most highly regarded by the Robert Parkers of the world. Their flagship Isosceles wine (a traditional Bordeaux blend) now sells out each year on the day of release, although you may be able to find it in your hoity-toity wine stores at a nice markup. As a member, I get two bottles a year; I recently went to a 5-year vertical tasting of the 2000 through 2004, and was frankly unimpressed, especially by the 2000, although I think the 2001 and 2004 will be outstanding with a bit more age.

Here I am in the inner sanctum of Justin, the Reserve Isosceles Room, where Justin and his wife themselves pour the wine at their once a year gala. You can see the special lighting as they display the sacred liquid to my right. (The Reserve Isosceles is so expensive I don't even think about buying it). I know Steve seemed to prefer a Kahn Nebbiolo to the Isosceles I poured him last summer - or is it just because Nebbiolo is an Italian varietal?

KG to Dallas?

2007-06-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

It could work, but only if they get Atlanta involved -

Minnesota Timberwolves
Incoming Players: DeSagana Diop, Speedy Claxton, Marvin Williams, Lorenzen Wright, Josh Howard, Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson, and #3 pick (from Atlanta)

Outgoing Players: Troy Hudson, Kevin Garnett, #7 pick

McHale gets his top-3 pick to choose Horford (or Conley) and a terrific selection of youngsters – Diop, Williams, Howard. It beats any offer so far on the table for KG.

Dallas Mavericks

Incoming Players: Salim Stoudamire, Kevin Garnett

Outgoing Players: Greg Buckner, DeSagana Diop, Erick Dampier, Josh Howard, Devin Harris, Maurice Ager

Dallas strips its bench and youth but teams KG with Dirk (along with Jason Terry, Stackhouse, MBenga, and a few others). If injury-free, obviously a title contender.

Atlanta Hawks

Incoming Players
Greg Buckner, Erick Dampier, Devin Harris, Maurice Ager, Troy Hudson, #7 pick

Outgoing Players: Salim Stoudamire, Speedy Claxton, Marvin Williams, Lorenzen Wright, Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson, #3 pick

The Hawks, as is their deep desire, become a playoff team overnight – they get a center in Dampier and a PG in Harris, and lose only Marvin Williams among their highly regarded youngsters. Meaning they still have Joe Johnson, Joshes Smith & Childress, and Pachulia, and Buckner/ Ager/ Hudson for backcourt help. They loved Joakim Noah in workouts, and he’d likely still be there at #7, and they keep the #11 for another good youngster.

If Dallas really wants KG, it’s a no-brainer for all 3 teams…..

More on KG to the Lakers

2007-06-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

If reports can be believed, Minnesota owner Glen Taylor is leaving soon to go to China for his honeymoon and wants the deal done immediately, but GM McHale is still holding out for more – and Boston (and probably Indy) are out of the deal. LA will probably have to take on at least one more bad contract to get it done – here’s a scenario:

To the Lakers: Mark Madsen, Kevin Garnett, and Marko Jaric

To Minnesota: Andrew Bynum, Sasha Vujacic, Brian Cook, Kwame Brown, Lamar Odom, #19 pick in 2007 draft, Lakers 2009 1st rounder

If Minnesota wanted to save an extra $400K in the short term, the deal could also include Troy Hudson and Vladimir Radmanovic – but Radman’s contract goes a year longer than Troy’s. Might still be worth it to Minny to get rid of him. The major holdup seems to be McHale’s desire for a top-5 pick in Thursday’s draft, which is why the Celtics were involved. There remains some craziness involving the Hawks dealing their picks (#3 and #11) and most of their team for KG, but I don’t see how it could work for the Hawks. Even Billy Knight isn’t that crazy, is he? – especially when Conley and Horford, one of which will go #3, both look like future studs. Conley looks a bit like Tony Parker with better defense, and Horford is getting lots of comparisons to Carlos Boozer and Elton Brand. In Atlanta’s shoes, I wouldn’t trade the #3 for KG straight up – it makes no sense at all – much less everything else they’d have to give up.

More on John Hollinger’s very interesting means of ranking prospects for the draft soon…. (by tomorrow, anyway)

The answers - are you a supertaster?

2007-06-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

Remember, take the quiz (previous post) first.....

ok, all done - don't cheat!

If your answers are (in order) no, no, yes, and yes, that indicates you are either a very sensitive taster or a supertaster. (BTW, those are indeed my answers, which may help explain my persnickety oenophilia). The test is not foolproof, and a biological and chemical test is available to determine for certain - see the excellent Slate article for a fuller explanation and much more -
http://www.slate.com/id/2168768/

Are you a supertaster?

2007-06-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

1 Do you like Scotch (the liquor, not the people)?
2 Do you take your coffee black?
3 Do you think that artificial sweeteners taste different than regular sugar?
4 Are you a heavy salter?

Answer the questions, then check the next post to see if, indeed, you might be a supertaster (unclear if, as rumored, it's inversely correlated with answers to "you might be a redneck if ...")

KG to the Lakers (and Kobe stays)?

2007-06-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s one version of the rumored 4-way that gets KG to the Lakers. Chad Ford’s version (by his own admission) did not get enough to Minnesota or the Celtics – I’ve fixed that. Of course, there are 3-way and 2-way version that could still occur, but I think my version may be more plausible than any other rumored thus far.

Indiana Pacers
Incoming Players: Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, Vladimir Radmanovic

Outgoing Players: Shawne Williams, Jermaine O'Neal, Mike Dunleavy Jr.

For Indy, they end up with Odom and Bynum for O’Neal, just as they wanted all along; they also get a Dunleavy-similar player for Jr. at over 2 mil a year less.

Minnesota Timberwolves
Incoming Players: Sebastian Telfair (expiring contract), Shawne Williams, Wally Szczerbiak, Gerald Green, Tony Allen, Theo Ratliff (large expiring contract), Kwame Brown (large expiring contract).
And the #5 pick in the 2007 draft (from Boston) and #19 pick (from LA)

Outgoing Players: Marko Jaric, Trenton Hassell, Troy Hudson, Kevin Garnett

- Minny gets a real rebuilding group of various youngsters, expiring contracts, and picks, plus an old fan favorite to help draw the crowds in the interim in Wally Szczerbiak. Rumor has it that K. McHale wants a top-5 prospect in this year's draft, and now he gets it, along with their own #7 pick and the #19 from the Lakers. Plausibly, that could be Mike Conley or Yi Jianlian, along with Brandan Wright or Joakim Noah at 7 and perhaps a big like Tiago Splitter or a PG like Javaris Crittendon at 19 - in a few years, they could be a powerhouse again.

Boston Celtics
Incoming Players: Jermaine O'Neal, Mike Dunleavy, Trenton Hassell

Outgoing Players: Sebastian Telfair, Wally Szczerbiak, Gerald Green, Tony Allen, Theo Ratliff (and #5 pick)

Boston keeps Jefferson and becomes an immediate playoff contender – O’Neal/ Perkins/ Jefferson/ Gomes up front, Pierce/ Dunleavy/ Hassell on the wings, Rondo and West at the point. Danny Ainge saves his job (and Doc Rivers'), and Bill Simmons is temporarily mollified.

Los Angeles Lakers
Incoming Players: Marko Jaric, Troy Hudson, Kevin Garnett

Outgoing Players: Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, Vladimir Radmanovic, Kwame Brown

And the Lakers have to swallow a couple of awful contracts to do it, but they get KG (and a big PG in Jaric) – presumably enough to pacify Kobe. Assuming they re-sign Mihm and Luke Walton, they would still have plenty up front, and Maurice Evans and Farmar could back up Kobe and Jaric in the backcourt. (Troy Hudson could shoot 3s at the end of the half, perhaps). That team could make a playoff run, if KG is up to the task. Outside shooting would be their biggest problem.

The last Kobe trade scenarios?

2007-06-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

These may all be moot soon if KG makes it to the Lakers, but a last few semi-plausible Kobe trade scenarios:

To Charlotte:
Kobe for a sign-and-traded Gerald Wallace, Raymond Felton (or Brevin Knight), Adam Morrison (or Sean May, or both), and both the 2007 Draft #08 Pick and #22 Pick

Charlotte should easily be competitive in a weak East with Okafor/ May/ Brezec/ OHarrington/ Voskuhl up front, swingmen of Kobe/ WHermann/ MCarroll, and Brevin Knight running the show. The Lakers might throw in Turiaf and Vujacic to enhance depth. The Lakers get multiple pieces for rebuilding here. If the Lakers insisted on Okafor and Wallace and the picks, then even if Charlotte would still do it, I doubt Kobe would go to a team without a real center. It's dubious anyway, given Kobe's apparent preference for a major market.

Speaking of which:

Kobe to the Knicks:
Kobe plus Radmanovic for Channing Frye, Randolph Morris, Renaldo Balkman, Quentin Richardson, Jared Jeffries, David Lee, Nate Robinson, and the Knicks 1st rounder in 2008, 2010, and 2012.

The Laker rebuilding begins in earnest, taking every desirable young cheap Knick and future draft picks. I'm sure Isiah would do it - he'd be roasted alive if he turned it down if offered. And after all, the Knicks would still have a lot of big names left - Kobe and the Radman would join Eddy Curry, Stephon Marbury, Steve Francis, Jamal Crawford - you get the idea. All the overpriced and overrated Knicks.

Or something that might actually make more sense for both teams:
To the Hawks-
Kobe plus Radmanovic for Tyronn Lue, Josh Childress, Marvin Williams, Joe Johnson and the #3 and 11 picks in the 2007 draft.

The Lakers would expedite their rebuilding and would even get back a stud at Kobe's position (Joe Johnson) to boot. If I'm the Lakers, I'd do this deal even if Kobe hadn't requested a trade! Meanwhile, the Hawks are desperate - their draft pick in 2008 is Phoenix's, and to avoid that being a high lottery pick and looking terrible, they need to win games - this season. Zaza Pachulia, Shelden Williams, Josh Smith, Kobe, and Speedy Claxton ... uh... is that enough to make the playoffs, even in the East? At least they'd sell some tickets, another major factor that would incline the Hawks to make this deal - if they only had a clear ownership sign-off to do so.... and while Atlanta is a top-10 market, its NBA profile is low enough that Kobe might veto the deal anyway.

Why should Kobe have to move, just to get traded?

2007-06-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

Kobe, Radmanovic, and Turiaf to the Clippers for Cuttino Mobley, Corey Maggette, Chris Kaman, and Shaun Livingston, plus the 2007 Draft #14 Pick

Kobe decides that he should’ve gone to the Clips 3 years ago after all. Despite this trade giving the Lakers four/fifths of the original Clipper starters from 2006, Kobe would join a reasonably good team – Elton Brand/ AWilliams/ PDavis (and perhaps Sofocles Schortsianitis, aka the Greek ‘Baby Shaq’ – if they buy out his contract and bring him over) at 5, Tim Thomas/ Turiaf at 4, QRoss/ Singleton/ Radmanovic at 3, Kobe (and Ross) at 2, SCassell/ JHart/ DEwing/ WConroy at 1. The main Clipper problem last year, of having no consistent second scorer besides Elton, is suddenly, completely fixed. And their defense would likely be better by subtraction, with Ross and Thomas playing more minutes than they did last year behind inferior defenders, and Turiaf presenting a needed boost of energy off the bench. Sofocles killed the American team running the pick and roll at the World Championships in 2006, so he might be a real contributor and let EB play PF. If they also signed his Greek teammate (and key to that killer pick and roll), 6-7 free agent PG Theo Papaloukas, or if Sam Cassell could just stay healthy, this is a team that could make a serious playoff run.

The Lakers, meanwhile, would greatly augment their considerable depth, and would have a wealth of options at every position to decide between; Phil could go big or small, shooters, slashers or passers, and everything in-between with these 4 newcomers plus his leftovers. And there’s an extra draft pick to boot – a superathletic Kobe wannabe, Nick Young from USC, is likely available at #14, but not at the Lakers #19. Just look at the Laker centers in this scenario: Kaman, Bynum, Kwame, Mihm. That’s more than enough fouls to use on Shaq! And assuming Livingston recovers fully, they could even have their new Magic-man at the PG, for Jerry Buss’ dream of reviving Showtime, which more than anything requires the right sort of floor leader (and Steve Nash isn’t available). It looks like a win-win; too bad the Lakers would never do it.

Kobe to the Spurs?

2007-06-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

Just for funs and grins – but would either team have the cojones to do it?

Lakers get: Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Jackie Butler, and rights to Luis Scola for Kobe and Jordan Farmar.

Pop gets another young point guard to mold and a Duncan-Kobe combo; Lakers stay competitive and get high Q ratings with Mr Eva Longoria. But I don't see either team doing it.... which sometimes means it's plausible. But probably not in this case.

Vegans and the Intrinsic Moral Community, Part 4

2007-06-24T14:02:00.000-07:00

The final part:

So how do we specify adequate and coherent moral thought about our obligations to non-persons? Examining the ethics of sustainability will help us focus on the right answer. In the late 1960s a philosopher named Garrett Hardin publicized the so-called 'tragedy of the commons' as an illustration of a general problem called the prisoner's dilemma, in which the action that is collectively rational for a group does not map onto what is individually rational for each person involved.

Hardin's example was medieval English common land, which, with no private ownership, suffered from overgrazing, to the eventual ruin of all involved. This ruin occurred because, for medieval peasants owning cows that grazed on the commons (owned by no one), the benefits that each extra cow brings were reaped solely by its owner, but the costs of the extra strain it put on the grass (and water, etc.) were shared among all the users of what is held in common. In economic jargon, the costs were (partially) externalized - not borne by the producers of the product, but by others. There is never an economic incentive to internalize external costs.

So everyone selfishly had an incentive to raise as many cattle as possible, although they knew if everyone did as they did, it would ruin everyone. But voluntarily refraining from use simply puts you at a competitive disadvantage with someone who selfishly grazes more. So individually rational behavior deteriorates into collective ruin. Such prisoner’s dilemmas are exceedingly common, and help explain why the free market cannot form a coherent basis for ethical behavior.

Solutions to such prisoner’s dilemmas in real life, claim Hardin, are either privatization or more likely mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon - as clean air and water, e.g., can't be privatized. So, Hardin believes that the government must simply pass and enforce laws to coerce people to act in their own long-term interest, even when some suffer as a result. One version of this view amounts to a kind of longer-term utilitarianism, in which numerous humans are sacrificed at present to save more later on - or to prevent many would-be miserable ones from ever being born. But even long-term utilitarianism fails, as we shall see in examining sustainability.

In his "Lifeboat Ethics", Hardin generalized this approach to examine the conditions for the sustainability of the whole biosphere, especially as regards human (over)population. He asserts that feeding the starving when such practices are unsustainable is unjustified. In particular, if we feed people and they reproduce and their children starve and we feed them... We cannot do so forever, and sooner or later everyone will be starving. I.e., Malthus was right. As one commentator put it,

It is moral to haul shipwrecked swimmers out of the water until one more swimmer sinks the whole boat. The answer to how many swimmers we can save is a scientific question. Thus, scientific morals.

Of course, it’s not really that simple. A better commentary follows rules drawn from Hardin’s work:

(1) An acceptable system of ethics is contingent on its ability to preserve the ecosystems which sustain it.

(2) Biological necessity has a veto over the behavior which any set of moral beliefs can allow or require.

(3) Biological success is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for any acceptable ethical theory. In summary, no ethics can be grounded in biological impossibility; no ethics can be incoherent in that it requires ethical behavior that ends all further ethical behavior. Clearly any ethics which tries to do so is mistaken; it is wrong.

I believe that these last 3 laws are basically correct, with some caveats as to wording. But they don’t validly generate the conclusion that we must allow millions of people (or non-human animals, for that matter) to starve because at present we don’t know how to create a sustainable economy for their area. But of course, Singer’s utilitarianism is misguided too – as seen in part 2, it flagrantly violates the third law above. Both Hardin and Singer fail sufficiently to appreciate how technology and human cooperation can change the nature of the game.

The ‘demographic transition’ that occurs as literacy levels and other indicators (particularly female education, contraception, and other types of female empowerment) move form a Third to First World has always included a drop in birthrate, largely coincident with but lagging behind (by 30-50 years) a drop in death rate. So populations boom for a while as health care and food production get better and people live longer, then stabilize as birth rates fall. I believe that the necessary conditions for such a transition are predicated on high literacy and other education, the emancipation of women from solely traditional childbearing roles into active social / work life, and expectations of reasonable health and longevity for oneself and one’s children. So I think the first focus of responsibility around the world is to create such conditions everywhere. They are prerequisites for long-term sustainability and quality of life, and thus inculcating such virtues trumps trying to save every single starving person.

We need a rich tapestry of the virtues that constitute the highest form of human life, and to educate people into seeing their value, instead of simply allowing market forces and advertising to pervert the values and preferences of the masses into short-term prisoner’s dilemmas. Virtue ethics, rather than utilitarianism, hence guides inquiry into future obligations. It helps us realize that such values as conduce to human flourishing – people playing proper roles, and learning how to play those roles excellently - are virtues, which will be self-authenticating - they will be the preferences people have under conditions of free and informed inquiry, the values of a self-sustaining and self-correcting society. They will always have the *truth* as their overarching goal, not the maximization of profit or any other lesser end.

Effecting this transition to an entire society which values the truth about everything, from how much to consume to how much to read to how much to give to famine relief, crucially depends on our ability to apply our education; that is, it depends on technology, and new technology changes what is ‘sustainable’. And so it makes perfect sense, e.g., to save as many lives as possible in a truly transitioning economy, because even if their lives are unsustainable under conditions *at present*, *if* the transition continues, their lives will become sustainable in the future. So it becomes a matter of priorities: to a first approximation, we should save as many starving people as possible, *as long as* they could also be given health care and educated to an awareness of the basics of free inquiry, self-government and democratic rule with resources available.

And so I hold that our primary duty to any future Jane Doe is to assure that she will be born into a society with those values. And likewise, our responsibilities to non-persons depend on whatever our proper role in a properly functioning society would be – so a butcher should carve up animals, and is virtuous to do so; but a troubled teenager should not carve up the family pet – for that is not the proper role for either the teen or pet to play in a flourishing society.

Selfishness can be rationally defeated, because, in the end, one can defeat prisoner’s dilemmas with education - one can get people to see what is selfishly rational is collectively irrational, and in the end, will bring them down too. Prisoner’s dilemmas only work when people don’t understand the difference between collective and individual (selfish) rationality - when they do not know how to reach a sustainable consensus, to inculcate the virtues that lead to flourishing in lived society. Inculcating those values, for treating both other persons and the rest of our natural environment, rather than any narrow short-term utilitarian calculus, or a misguided emphasis on the impossible ascription of “rights” to non-persons, will lead to the eventual solution to the problem of specifying our duties towards the rest of creation.

Your daily Kobe deal, June 24

2007-06-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Kobe to the Hornets of New Orleans for:

Tyson Chandler (LA native), Chris Paul (personable young star), Rasual Butler, Hilton Armstrong, and the 2007 Draft #13 Pick

The Hornets would be looking for a center (unless they thought 2nd year man Cedric Simmons was up to the task), but their other 4 starters would be the underrated David West, Peja Stojakovic/ Desmond Mason, Kobe, and Bobby Jackson – they could make some noise. The Lakers get 2 young up and comers and a draft pick. The trade looks better for the Hornets if they could include Peja instead of Chandler, but I don’t see the Lakers going for that.

Painted Ceiling 2006 - the beginning

2007-06-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

It began with harvest at Golden Oaks vineyard in Paso in fall 2006. Paul, Steve, Jim and I picked the grapes, then took them to Ciro's workhouse to crush and destem, making a mess and having a grand time; the fermentation process began. Later, after the first racking, we each took a bottle home; Jim warned us to drink it quickly, as the fermentation was not finished and the bottle might pop its cork as the pressure built. Paul waited a couple of days and opened it for guests at his house - and as he popped the cork, a cabernet explosion followed! (For Youtube fans, think Coke and Mentos.) And our wine's name was born - Painted Ceiling (2006). Paul's ceiling has since been repainted, but the wine is still a work in progress. Bottoms up to everyone!

Aesthetics in practice

2007-06-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

Philosophy and Religious Studies does wine-tasting in Paso:

As the end of the quarter finally arrives, it’s time for the Philosophy Department oenophiles to do some tasting, before heading up to join our friend Jim (who actually knows what he’s doing) to rack our own cabernet sauvignon that we’re making, the 2006 Painted Ceiling (name to be explained in a later post). Leaving SLO on a typically gorgeous sunny 75 degree afternoon, we drove north over the grade to start the afternoon at Cass Winery, northeast of Atascadero and southeast of Paso Robles. After traversing confusing and winding back roads for a while, we finally arrived; with a Putomayo collection of CDs playing and various expensive drawings hanging from the walls underneath a mammoth red sail from someone’s luxury boat over the bar, the tasting room was designed to give off an expensive ambience. We actually sat outside on a lovely shaded patio for the tasting. Too bad the wine didn’t live up to the surroundings. The whites were decent – a Tablas Creek style Rhone blend and a decent Viognier, but the Mourvedre and Grenache were horrid, and the Syrah, while clearly the best of the lot, was merely average.

The person pouring at Cass was very helpful, however, and recommended trying Still Waters next. So we headed there, and were immediately impressed on the drive in with the 100-year-old olive grove overlooking a 60-acre vineyard, with little trails for walking, a small cottage, and a lawn with bocce balls outside the tasting room – it was truly an idyllic little scene. Inside, a beautiful former Poly student ascertained we weren’t big on whites, but still had us collectively try the Viognier, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, and Sauvignon Blanc – all very solid. Then the reds – a Merlot that was actually quite drinkable was the first sign we had stumbled on an excellent winery. The zinfandel was actually very tasty (and I'm not a big zin fan), and was the only non-estate wine; the cabernet sauvignon and syrah were quite good, and their special cabernet-syrah-merlot blend, Reflections (2003), was enough to get me to think about joining the wine club. That, and the incredible olive oil we were snarfing down the entire time – grassy and pungent and absolutely delicious, I think we must have gone through most of a baguette with it! She brought out a Malbec at the end, and that and the Reflections were the best things we had tried. I’m definitely going back to Still Waters.

Next, we drove carefully through Paso to the Garretson Wine Company, where we tried several Syrahs, including "The Luascáin" (90 points, Robert Parker), "The Aisling" (92 points), and "Mon Amie" (94 points), a Grenache and Mourvedre, as well as their flagship blend, "The Reliquary". But despite the snooty praise of Robert Parker (and corresponding prices), I thought only the "Mon Amie" compared to what we had drunk at Still Waters, and my departmental compatriots thought not even that. But our pourer was extremely cordial, and related that (despite no ambition to become a major winemaker herself) she had made her own Grenache, which her co-workers termed “Wet Monkey” – at least, that was their nicest name for it! We nonetheless expressed curiousity, and she brought out an unlabelled bottle of it for us to try. What do you know – I thought it was the second best thing there (after "Mon Amie"), and everyone else thought it was the best! Flattered, and having found out it was Paul’s birthday, our pourer generously gave us the rest of the bottle for use at our racking later. However, it never made it that far.

Dinnertime was almost upon us, but we quickly stopped at Falcon’s Nest, a new winery run by an immigrant Italian with an attitude, and his wife, who would turn around to make odd comments and tell us to swirl our wine in our glass sideways, all while searching the ‘Big Lots’ website. It was an odd place – and looked a bit like a place one shouldn’t stop in a Western horror movie. And the wine itself was, well, awful – well, everyone except Todd thought so, and we’ve established he is most favorable to Italian style reds amongst us. So, in an attempt to quickly cleanse our palates, we hurried back to downtown Paso for dinner at a fabulous new place, Artisan. We realized that the Grenache our friend at Garretson gave us would be a splendid dinner wine, so we enjoyed it with a truly elegant meal; after a magnificent appetizer of crusty bread, spicy sausage, and a porter ale and gouda fondue-like dip, for a main course I had a terrific sirloin with spinach and shoestring potatoes, while Steve had a Kobe steak, Paul a venison Wellington, and Todd a scrumptious chicken breast and spinach. All were most pleased.

Afterwards, Todd returned home while the rest of us drove on to join Jim and begin the racking, at the workhouse of another Italian immigrant, Ciro (a terrific breadmaker) and his wife Kim. Lugging huge glass jars and washing and testing and adding wood chips and testing and more washing and… well, a few hours later, we were finally through; Ciro and Kim had invited us to come on up to the main house for a drink and a chat afterward. We brought a bottle of our newly racked wine and ascended the hill, through perilous hairpin turns until the gate opened and we saw what must be one of the best views west of Paso Robles. We entered what looked like a large Italian villa, with a magnificent backyard view over the wooded valley below, although it could not quite make out the ocean (there’s another mountain ridge in the way), but could see a glimpse of Hearst Castle, many miles away. Under the gathering stars, we drank and ate and listened to Ciro attempt to explain in English his views on BTUs and a life force – none of us quite sure what he was saying, but feeling as if he was a poet anyway. We looked through his telescope – outside the city, the stars and planets are so much more visible – and marveled at the craters of the Moon. Finally, full of good food, drink, and company, we headed back to SLO, remembering there’s a reason many call the Central Coast region “Paradise.”

Your daily Kobe deal

2007-06-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

To Lakers: Wally Szczerbiak (contract expires summer 2009), Theo Ratliff (contract expires summer 2008), Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe and the #5 pick in the draft (plus a 2009 first-rounder)

To Boston: Lamar Odom and Kobe Bryant

Boston rotation (pending further deals): KPerkins, Odom/ Gomes, PPierce, Kobe, DWest/ Telfair - enough to contend in the East.

Lakers get re-loaded for the future... A Rondo and Green backcourt, Jefferson at 4, Luke at 3 and Bynum at 5 gives them a young nucleus for a long time....plus they can get a terrific player (Corey Brewer?) with the #5 pick.