BP Backlash: Boycott? Bailout? Receivership?

I have waited to see a backlash against BP for ruining the Gulf Of Mexico, and I expected that by now we'd be seeing a quixotic consumer boycott. I'm surprised to find BP gas stations filled with happy eager customers over the long weekend.

Maybe they haven't made the connection between BP oil platforms and the green-and-flowery BP gas pumps. Maybe that's one of our problems.



There seemed to be a similar cognitive dissonance about supply and demand, lifestyle and disaster when 29 coal miners were recently killed at the Upper Big Branch Mine. We don't seem to make the connection.

For the record, I'd like to clarify that IANAD (I am not a Democrat) NTTAWWT (not that there's anything wrong with that). But if I were a Democrat, it would be because of Democrats like Harry Truman, Daniel Moynihan, and Robert Reich.

In his blog today, Robert Reich provides five cogent reasons for President Obama putting BP under temporary federal receivership.

1. We are not getting the truth from BP. Government must be clearly in charge of getting all the facts, not waiting for what BP decides to disclose and when.

2. We have no way to be sure BP is devoting enough resources to stopping the gusher. BP is now saying it has no immediate way to stop up the well until August. August? If government were in direct control of BP’s North American assets, it would be able to devote whatever of those assets are necessary to stopping up the well right away.

3. BP’s new strategy for stopping the gusher is highly risky. Scientists say that could result in 20 percent more oil gushing from the well. At least under government receivership, objective officials would be directly accountable for weighing the advantages and disadvantages of such a strategy.

4. Right now, the U.S. government has no authority to force BP to adopt a different strategy or over the disaster scene. Carol Browner said, “We told (BP) of our very, very grave concerns” about risks. Expressing grave concerns is not enough. The President needs legal authority to order BP to protect the United States.

5. The President is not legally in charge. As long as BP is not under the direct control of the government he has no direct line of authority, and responsibility is totally confused. There is no good reason why “they” are in charge of an operation of which “we” are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

If we can take over AIG and General Motors because of the risk that current management and their actions have posed to the national economy, can't the Federal Government take over BP for ruining the Gulf of Mexico, thwarting development of domestic oilfields, and causing actual damage to the economy?

Reich concludes by saying, "No president would allow a nuclear reactor owned by a private for-profit company to melt down in the United States while remaining under the direct control of that company. The meltdown in the Gulf is the environmental equivalent."

Robert Reich rocks.

As a Matter of Fact: 2014 New Jersey Superbowl

This was the cover of the NY Post during the week:



As a matter of fact, I'd like to point out that the 2014 Superbowl will be played in New Jersey, at a venue called the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Also, just for the record, the Statue of Liberty, glommed as a symbol of Gotham, is placed in New Jersey. It is owned by New York City, but it is situated in New Jersey. You'll notice then when you buy a ticket into EWR, you're flying into the Newark-Liberty airport.

I'm just saying. Facts are stubborn things.

Dying to Ride a Bicycle: 4 Dead in 8 Weeks

The WDUQ News Blog, which is increasingly my mainstay source for local news, carries this: PA Bicycle Deaths Double from '08 to '09.

16 bicyclists were killed in Pennsylvania last year, doubling the 2008 death count, says the state Department of Transportation. “While that number may seem low to many people, that’s still 16 people that had their lives cut short,” says PennDOT spokeswoman Alison Wenger.

Unfortunately, there is no context, and I'm not sure how you'd quantify it. Did fatalities double because riding doubled? (okay news) Did fatalities double while riding tripled? (good news) Did fatalities double while riding stayed flat? (bad news)



In Thursday's Post-Gazette we see this unattributed story: Bicyclist killed in Indiana Township accident, and I'd like to repeat it here:

A Hampton man died this morning after his bicycle was struck from behind by a pickup truck on a steep grade in Indiana Township.

Dxxxx Pxxxxx, 52, of Clearfield Road, died at UPMC Presbyterian following the accident, which occurred at 7:11 a.m. on Harts Run Road near Dorseyville Road.

Indiana Township police said Mr. Pxxxxx was pedaling east, or uphill, on Harts Run Road when his bike was struck by a pickup truck that had been behind him.

Indiana Township police said Mr. Pxxxxx's bicycle was in the travel lane, not on the berm, when the accident occurred. They said no charges had been filed against the driver, whose name was not released.

I'm loathe to write about a specific death or accident, because it's a tragedy for all involved. I've removed the name to avoid the family finding this via Google. It's curious and illuminating that the police are protecting the driver's name, and not the victim's name.

I know that people get killed in traffic accidents, in cars and bikes and just walking, and nobody means for it to happen - that's why they're called accidents. What irks me is the uninformed bias in the report, which subsequently misinforms and maladjusts the public's awareness.

Generally media reports blame the rider. Sometimes they blame the rider for not wearing a helmet, or not having lights and riding in the dark - that's a report that indicates some understanding.

Thursday's story presents: He was riding in the lane, not the berm. Of course, Nobody was charged. No news here, move along.

He is allowed to ride in the lane. He doesn't have to ride on the berm. Daylight, no rain, a motorist runs over and kills a bicyclist who was legally on the road. No charges filed.

I'm sure the motorist in this case feels terrible. S/he certainly didn't mean for it to happen. That's not my point. My point is that until newspapers start reporting these deaths without bias, there won't be any improvement in public awareness.

Under the international Vienna Convention on Road Traffic (1968), a bicycle is defined to be a vehicle and a cyclist is considered to be a driver. In a minority of jurisdictions (the states of Arizona, California, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, and Texas in the United States) a bicycle is legally defined as a "device" rather than as a vehicle, but in all cases operators of bicycles share a basic set of rights and responsibilities with operators of motor vehicles.


In Pennsylvania, bicycles are vehicles.
They belong in the street.
Share the road.

• April 7, 2010: Bicyclist killed in Westmoreland County
  
• May 23, 2010 Child Riding Bike Hit By Car in Knoxville, dies of injuries
  
• May 27, 2010: Bicyclist killed in Indiana Township (this story)
  
• Friday, May 29, 2010: Fayette County bicyclist fatally injured.

Moral Authority and the Ravenstahl Family Sewer Authority

In the always-excellent 2 Political Junkies we see a letter from Pittsburgh City Councilor Bill Peduto to the chair of Pittsburgh's Ethics Hearing Board, Sister Patrice Hughes. (also here).

Councilman Peduto objects to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (30 years old) appointing his little brother (Adam Ravenstahl, 25 years old) to the Board of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (Alcosan), and Peduto asks Sister Hughes to conduct an investigation. Excerpts from Peduto's letter:

Dear Sister Hughes:

I am requesting that the Ethics Hearing Board rule on the decision of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl to nominate his brother State Representative-elect Adam Ravenstahl to the Board of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority. The City Code has rules for appointing, hiring and promoting direct family members of elected officials and employees. As the code states, the only time a direct family member can be appointed is through a waiver from the Ethics Hearing Board.

.....

I am formally requesting that the Ethics Hearing Board investigate this nomination to determine the legitimacy of any elected City official appointing, hiring, advancing or advocating the appointing, hiring or advancing of direct family members.

The city's Ethics Hearing Board consists of five members — two appointed by the mayor and three appointed by the mayor from a list of nominees submitted by City Council. Sister Patrice Hughes (photo, right) was appointed by Mayor Bob O'Connor.

To me, this is a serendipitous reminder of the moral authority of nuns, and perhaps also of the arrested development of Pittsburgh politics - Luke gives Adam something he's not supposed to, and so Bill tells Sister. Only in Pittsburgh (OIP™).

---

I know I shouldn't, but I can't resist.
Perhaps it says something about my own arrested development.


(Source: Pittsburgh Pist-Gazette)

Moral Authority in Pittsburgh and Phoenix

Excellent story in today's Post Gazette by Eleanor Chute about Sister Lynn Rettinger, the 5-foot-3 principal of Shadyside's Sacred Heart Elementary School who challenged a thief that had taken a wallet out of a parked car.

The perpetrator, who recognized moral authority and was smart enough to not mess with Sister Lynn, handed the goods over, said he was sorry, and walked away.

From the Post Gazette:

I said to him, 'You need to give me what you have.' That's what I say to children if I know they have something they shouldn't. I say, 'You need to give me what's in your pocket.'

What's the key to delivering the line so it gets results? First of all, Sister Lynn does her homework. She knows she has good reason to suspect there is something. "You want to be pretty darn sure he has it. You don't want to make a fool of yourself," she said.

Sister Lynn doesn't ask whether students have something. "That forces them into a lie. ... I don't want to do that."

With the statement, she said, "If you say it firmly enough, they think, 'She really does know what I have.' " She added, "Nine out of 10 times, it works."

I think there's a tremendous wisdom in her comment that I've highlighted in yellow. What a tremendous presence and moral authority she must have.

---

Which brings me to today's story in the NY Times (which you'll probably see in the Saturday Post-Gazette.) about Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix who has recently been excommunicated by her bishop.

A 27-year-old mother of four arrived at the hospital in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension which created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.

"In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” the hospital said in a statement. “This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee.” Sister McBride is on that committee.

Apparently the Bishop interviewed Sister McBride, she explained the situation and the decision, and the bishop informed her of her new status.

Unbelievable. The Catholic hospital and the ethics committee needed to make a judgement call in a terribly complex situation. They made a judgement based on expert medical advice - saving the mother's life required the abortion.

So the question I'm left wondering is, how come a Pittsburgh thief does a better job of recognizing moral authority than a Phoenix bishop?

Pittsburgh Urban Bike Trails

This afternoon I took what's becoming my favorite Pittsburgh urban bike ride - I started at the SouthSide Works, crossed the Hot Metal Bridge, and rode north on the Jail Trail.

As I approached Golden Triangle Bike Rentals, I slowed because they're usually closed when I ride by and I wanted to stop inside and look around, and they had the most remarkable thing: an overhead water mist station that was cooling off the cement plaza. It felt several degrees cooler along the twenty-foot long array of fine mist-makers (misters?)

In the picture below, the mist-making machine is the wavy structure along the bottom of the image:


This is an incredible idea for a place trying to encourage bicyclists to stop for a moment. It's eco-green. It's comforting. It makes you want to tarry for a moment. Truly awesome. My compliments to whomever had the idea. It's a brilliant thought for a trailside bike shop. I wish I'd taken a better picture of it.

I remember in summertime in Brooklyn, people who lived above storefronts would open hoses, water down the cement sidewalks, and sit in folding chairs set out on the cement because the evaporation would provide a break from the heat of the day. It was the poor man's air conditioning, my father told me.


I rode north across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, then east along the north shore of the Allegheny River out to Washington's Landing. I reversed and made my favorite downtown bicycle transition: I rode from the North Shore Stadium, across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, dipped down into Point State Park, climbed up the Fort Pitt Bridge, and crossed the Ohio River to Station Square.

The short bike ride from the Stadiums to the Point to Station Square is (in my experience) unequalled in American urban cycling. It's like riding from Manhattan into Brooklyn and then into Queens in ten minutes. It doubled my satisfaction that the cars were in rush hour slow-motion while I rode unhampered along the same bridges.


After Station Square I rode south along the trail back to Southside Works. There were a lot of people out and a surprising number of recumbents.

We're really very fortunate to have such a well-developed network of trails. When the final connections - the Sandcastle gap, and the Smithfield Street / Mon Wharf / Point State Park transition - are made, I think it'll be better than DC or Portland Oregon. It'll be the best urban bike trail network in America.

Tom Murphy's bike trails are really coming into their own.

She Rides

Deepwater Horizon Starring Kevin Costner

I have some beliefs that I have become attached to, and when you allow yourself to develop an attachment it can become part of your identity (so you need to be careful about it). People don't like to change their attachments.

Ever since I watched the 1990 film Dances With Wolves I have avoided Kevin Costner's work, because he directed (IMO) a revisionist and manipulative piece of propaganda, in the same manner as Oliver Stone's 1991 JFK, (starring Costner). Rhetorically, Dancing With Wolves was technically impressive, but I disagree with his purpose. Ever since, there are three little words that will prevent me from watching a movie: "Starring Kevin Costner".

I read an article in the Wednesday NY Times about Costner's investment in and championing of a technology that separates oil and water. And so, inevitably, I read the same news in the Saturday Post-Gazette.

(Critics of old media claim that newspaper stories have a volatile shelf life and are worthless the day after they're printed. The Post Gazette routinely prints national stories several days after they appear in the NY Times. Maybe they get a break on days-old news.)



I'm going to have to reconsider my position if Mr. Costner ends up resolving BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and I'm getting to an age where reconsidering is painful.

URL Hacks, Political Hacks, & Nebbyquette

When new devices come out you can tell who the early adopters are; they're the folks flaunting their Palm Pilot oops cellphones oops smartphones oops iPads in the coffee shops and geek hotspots.

You can tell that a new gadget has gone mainstream when corporations and school districts buy them and they become something that employees have to use rather than get to use.

But how do you know when a technology or utility has gone beyond mainstream? How do you know when it's beyond the tipping point and reaching not the early adopters, but the final adopters, the reluctant outliers?

Answer: the final adopters are Yinzers. When stories about (allegedly) nebby Pittsburgh plumbers who are URL-squatting make it to the front page of the PostGazette, and the stories aren't about the technology -- they're more of the traditional who-screwed-who narrative -- then the final adopters are onboard. "Hey, yinz are typosquatting my URL n'at."

Finally, Netiquette (the do's and don'ts of the web) is extending to the Yinzers and evolving into Nebbyquette.

Another story showing how well our Yinzer final adopters are moving into the world of 2.0 is the PostGazette's story about Attorney-General (and Republican candidate for governor) Tom Corbett seeking the identities of anonymous bloggers and Twitter-ers who have said mean things about him.

This story, out on the street just two days after Corbett became the remaining barrier to Governor Dan Onorato's ascending to Gov. Rendell's office, positions Corbett as an enemy of free speech, political criticism, blogs, and twitter-ers. Why, he's just un-American; suppose Publius the Pamphleteer had been outed in his day?


If you accept the article's description of Corbett as valid, he has unwittingly unleashed the full force of the Streisand Effect against himself, which in the Web 2.0 world ensures that any attempt to constrain knowledge will paradoxically result in it's widespread circulation.

The Streisand Effect found it's label when Ms. Streisand sued to keep a picture of her house off the internet; perversely, her actions prompted the legion of webbisches to distribute the photo much more widely than it ever would have been if she'd just left it alone.

Similarly, Mr. Corbett's reported actions have unleashed a bit of a torrent in the blogosphere and the twitterverse. His eventual reversal of the subpoena request once the suspect was sentenced suggests that he was witch-hunting.

The real hacking here, though, comes in the first few lines of Paula Reed Ward's article in the Post-Gazette:

The Pennsylvania attorney general issued a subpoena to Twitter

earlier this month

seeking the identities of two account holders who have repeatedly posted negative comments about Tom Corbett and his Bonusgate investigation.

The P-G had this story for three weeks, and sat on it until after Corbett won the primary.

URL hacks by Pittsburgh plumbers? New.
Political hacks in Pittsburgh newspapers? Old school.
Using legacy media to unleash the Streisand effect on your opponent? Priceless.

Boston - McKeesport - Duquesne PA Bike Trail

I had the opportunity today to ride from West Newton, PA to Duquesne PA round trip along the Great Allegheny Passage. It was really a nice day, there were a lot of people on the trail.



The last few times I rode this, I departed the Great Allegheny Passage at the Versailles bridge, and took a kludge of backstreets, alleys, and a paved trail winding through an industrial park to get to McKees Marina. This time I stayed on the GAP at Elizabeth Township, road through Boston, climbed the hill at the Durabond Bypass, and then entered McKeesport at midtown. This was a much better transition through the area and up to McKees Marina.

The real treat was that I got to ride the new sections of trail in McKeesport and Duquesne. Starting at the trailhead at McKees Marina, I took Fifth and Locust streets to the new trail. The new trail is paved and fenced, and leads to an awesome refurbished trail bridge across the river. On the other side, the trail is paved and ends at Grant Street in Duquesne, where you can pick up Route 837 for the road ride to SouthSide Works.

The new trail segments and the bridge are excellent, and if the quality of these new sections is repeated as the Duquesne-SandCastle gap is closed it'll be a remarkable accomplishment.

God is an Iron. ??

Vannevar Bush wrote that a person's tracks through the Memex of accumulated information would be valuable, and that a father might pass his record of these links down to his children as things of significance. And so I feel like I should identify the track of links that led me to this quote of Spider Robinson: God is an iron.

I was reading the excellent GetTheFlick blog, which referred to a book called Squawk 1200: A History of the Next Midair Collision by Paul Niquette in which Dr. Niquette relates his role in the history of aircraft transponders, Mode C, and TCAS (TCAS is one of the very few {or very first} operational places where we put the machines unilaterally in charge of the humans.)

Dr. Niquette tells about Eastern 375, a flight he hoped to take out of Boston in 1960. His secretary failed to confirm his reservation so he was placed at #8 on standby. He struck up a conversation with a traveller who was #9 on the standby list. It seemed as if the flight would depart without ever boarding standby #8, so Dr. Niquette walked away from the boarding area and spent the night at a hotel.

The next day's headlines were filled with the crash of Eastern 375 due to multiple bird strikes on departure. Pictures of the wreckage showed two dead passengers still strapped into their seats; one of them was the man who was #9 on standby - in other words, if Niquette had been more patient, he would have been dead.

Dr. Niquette writes, "One privilege I have enjoyed over the years is working with bright, insightful people. Kevin is all of that. And a bit mystical. I told him about my encounter with Eastern Flight 375. He listened intently. "God is an iron," he said."

I read that line and I could not make any sense of it. I re-read the chapter and I still did not get it. So I Googled "God is an Iron" and found this:

“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton,
and a person who commits a felony is a felon,
then God is an iron.” - Spider Robinson

I think Vannevar was right, the connections are important.

Pedal Pittsburgh Sunday May16

This Sunday May 16th, starting at SouthSide Works: Pedal Pittsburgh. It's a ride, not a race. This has always been a fun, well-organized event. Last year saw 2200 riders.

Participants can choose from six courses ranging from 6 to 60 miles.

6:30 a.m. 7:00 - 8:00 8:00 - 9:00 9:00 - 10:00 10:00 - 10:30 11:30 - 3:30

Registration Opens 50 & 60 Mile Riders Depart 25 & 35 Mile Riders Depart 15-Mile Riders Depart 6-Mile Riders Depart Lunch & Entertainment

Click here for registration.

---

Excellent Fresh Burgh-Bike Web Stuff:

Ms. Mon's Salon: I Sing A Song of Cyclists
Chris and Heidi: Pittsburgh to DC, He Said She Said Trip Report

DOT's Ray LaHood, Poster Child

By way of background: Eddy Merckx is a Belgian former professional cyclist. The French magazine Vélo called him "the most accomplished rider that cycling has ever known." The American VeloNews called him the greatest and most successful cyclist of all time. He won the Tour de France five times, won all the classics except Paris-Tours, won the Giro d'Italia five times and the Vuelta a España, won the world championship as both an amateur and a professional, and broke the world hour record. He was called The Cannibal by other riders for the way he ate them up on the race course.

Ray LaHood is the US Secretary of Transportation and a former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois.

The cartoon Yehuda Moon takes place in a bike shop:


I was not expecting much when Mr. LaHood was nominated; he's a Republican in a Democratic administration, based more on his Chicago pedigree than his ideological balance, and I figured he was a hack. Also, during his watch the DOT has not done very well with Toyota, for instance.

Recent blog posts by Pittsburgher Eve Picker and the Huffington Post deal with DOT Secretary Ray LaHood's foray into bicycle policy.

I must say that I like his recent stint of bicycle advocacy. His blog says,

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

Maybe the studied institutional nonchalance regarding Toyota's debacle is the first indication of LaHood's Darwinian philosophy. Why respond rapidly to complaints of crazy runwaway cars if you're trying to beat automotive hegemony?

Next Friday May14: Movie Night- Metropolis at Strand Theater in Zelienople

I've recently blogged about the impressively redeveloped Strand Theater in Zelienople, off I-79 just north of Pittsburgh. From time to time I'd like to point out upcoming events because it's an awesome moviehouse and I support Indy playhouses.

Next Friday, May 14th: Metropolis at the Strand, with piano accompaniment and two short features.

From Wikipedia: Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of the science fiction context to explore a political theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism.

Click here for a plot synopsis, which might be useful before seeing the movie. Friday's presentation at The Strand will include live piano accompanying the silent film, as it was originally presented.

Here's an article from this week's New York Times about the recently restored version of Metropolis, which is what will be shown at the Strand. This version restores the movie to it's original footage. From the NYTimes:

Some of the newly inserted material consists of brief reaction shots, just a few seconds long, which establish or accentuate a character’s mood. But there are also several much longer scenes, including one lasting more than seven minutes, that restore subplots completely eliminated from the Paramount version.

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old."

Metropolis is one of the essential movies and presents a snapshot of labor-capital issues from the 1930. Both the Matrix series and Blade Runner are footnotes to it.

"The heart must mediate between the head and the hand".
(very high synecdoche ratio in that sentence, btw.)

Strand Theater, 724.742.0400, TheStrandTheater.org May14 7:30pm

What High School Football Players Need -- More Brain Damage

When you look for thought-leaders in Pennsylvania football, when you look for the folks who shape young people before they get to the pro teams, you think about the head coaches at Pitt, Penn State, and Temple. When the Roethlisberger scandal brings public focus to the arrogant thuggery of some athletes, and the tendency for athletes to believe that normal rules don't apply to them, I expected these head coaches to exert their leadership among their youthful charges and set the bar for acceptable behavior. Take the initiative, set a new standard, etc; do the "vision thing".



The Pitt and Penn State head coaches got together Wednesday and made a public call for: football practice in the spring time, so that Pennsylvania kids will be able to keep up with athletes from states that already have spring training for football.

From the Post-Gazette: "Penn State coach Joe Paterno and Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt today met with the executive board of the Pennsylvania State Football Coaches Association (PSFCA) and offered their support for the plan, which has not yet been proposed to the PIAA. Temple coach Al Golden also backs the idea, but he could not attend today's meeting at the Lasch Football Building."

When I think about football players, I think about Steeler "Iron Mike" Webster who suffered from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain. At the end he lived out of his pickup truck or train stations until he died at a young age, a victim of all those hits to his head. He had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Research indicates that head trauma is a cumulative function. From Wikipedia: It has been speculated that Webster's ailments were due to wear and tear sustained over his playing career; some doctors estimated he had been in the equivalent of "25,000 automobile crashes" in over 25 years of playing football at the high school, college and professional levels.

I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's excellent article, Offensive Play, for an interesting read. In one paragraph discussing the football controversy in 1905 (yes, 1905) a professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gladwell talks about a program at the University of North Carolina called the Sports Concussion Research Program. The SCRP uses a program called HITS to put sensors in the helmets of every UNC football player, and measures every g-force impact the player's brain receives. The HITS data suggest that practice — the routine part of the sport — can be as dangerous as the football games themselves.

A football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

That’s why so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

Football leagues now hire mobile scanning units to get baseline scans on young players' heads so that years later, comparisons can be made. Here's a nutty thought: any activity that asks high school kids to pose for "before" pictures to measure subsequent brain damage should be considered child abuse.

When I think about what football players need, two things come to mind:

1. they need to be taught that they're not demigods above civil society
2. they need to be protected from the edutainment industry that profits from their smashing their brains against hard objects.

Paterno and Wannstedt might have called for fewer full-contact sessions per year. They could have taken action to improve their student's chances of not ending up like Mike Webster. They should have instituted a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault or offenses involving drinking.

Instead, they used their positions of responsibility to encourage Pennsylvania high school students to smash their heads more often. Here we go Steelers, here we go...

Roethlisberger and the Steelers : from the Family to the Trash

Once Upon A Time, You'd See Pictures Like This:

For a working man's family, that's a lot of money in those jerseys.

Nowadays, You'll See Pictures Like This:


On a somewhat related note, it's interesting what comes up on the second page of search results when you Google "#1 Cochran". Just saying.

DC to Pittsburgh Bike Trip

It's the time of year to consider such things.

Here's a video from 2008's Adventure Cycling tour from DC to Pittsburgh. Out of the several video's online, I think it does the best of presenting trail conditions on both the C&O Canal Trail (DC to Cumberland) and the Great Allegheny Passage (Cumberland to Pittsburgh).


A few notes: most of the video is shot from a recumbent bike, that's why you'll see shoes pumping up and down. These folks are camping; hotels are also an option. At the end of the video you'll see the riders; I'd like to point out that none of them are young triathletes (NTTAWWT).

Pittsburghers Sam and Jane Menchyk are scheduled to begin their 7-day bike ride from Washington DC to near Pittsburgh on May 29th. Their website contains pictures and reports from previous rides (this is their third time) and contains a lot of valuable information. Sam makes really great infographics, weaving geography and schedules into intuitive images. If you're considering such a trip, it's worth a look.

The Overton Window and Glenn Beck:Pot. Kettle. Black.

I have previously blogged about the Overton Window, which describes the boundaries of public discourse and offers a rhetorical technique in which think tanks, pundits, talking heads, and hired advocates can shift the range of acceptable public discussion by communicating radical, extreme perspectives that make their client's objective seem relatively normal.

In a world where the cost of being a publisher approaches zero, the Overton Window is increasingly available to a wider sphere, and all sorts of people are getting in to it. Of course, if radical, extreme perspectives are exerted on both sides of the spectrum, the central window remains in the same place while the tone of the discourse moves outside of the traditionally acceptable range.

I have enjoyed knowing about the Overton Window because it helps me to understand the rhetoric of American discussion (on both/many sides of the aisle) and also because, frankly, it's a niche knowledge and it's kind of cool to be in on the story. It's sort of like the Sullivan Nod - once you know about it you see it all around, and it's not widely known.

The phrase Overton Window is about to have its fifteen minutes of fame, as it is the title of Glenn Beck's new collection of words (to call it a novel is to condemn authors everywhere).

(Also, allow me to point out that there is no link to Beck's product on this blog; you'll have to search for the sordid tome yourself. No help here.)

Glenn Beck, a huckster, shill, and entertainer of a quality perhaps not seen since Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker left the public spectrum, is certainly a practitioner of the Overton Window within his audience - his polemics and phillipics make almost anything else seem reasonable.

The problem with Beck's use of the Overton Window is that the technique is only profitable if you're communicating to the full audience - in other words, it only works if his proposals and utterances are widely conveyed to the people who disagree with him. If a practitioner uses the Overton technique exclusively with the people who already agree with their agenda, all that results is increased polarization, radicalization, and fanaticism.

There's a reason we use "preaching to the choir" as a pejorative phrase.

• It increases identification.
• It suggests alignment.
• It doesn't change the real-world situation.
• It eventually turns the choir into militants and harridans.

Here's the problem, visually. You have a single population (the United States) drawn in red, and the Overton Window of acceptable public discourse shown in grey. The objective of the (marketer, consultant, propagandist) is to get the peak to skew to the right/left by delivering relatively extreme messages on that side of the spectrum, having the effect of making the desired change seem reasonable.


But if the (marketers, consultants, propagandists) of both sides only speak to their own consituency, the one population splits into two populations, which each skew according to their preferences. As the two distributions diverge, the average remains the same, and the Overton Window stays in place, but very few people are in it - most people move outside of the range of civic discourse.


It's wonderful that the Overton concept is going to gain awareness among the American public. It's awful that it's going to be explained to some by this hack's spin. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which carries on Joe Overton's work, is going to use the notoriety as an opportunity to improve the public's understanding of the concept.

See also:
Daily Kos
Open The Future : The Overton Window
EJ Dionne: Rush and Newt Are Moving the Window
israel's Overton Window
Overton, Clinton, and Krugman
Intro to the Overton Window
Overton Window, Bush's Apostasy & Wizard's Complaint
Overton Windows at Mercury Rising
Theocracy and the Religious Overton Window
Daily Kos: More on Overton Windows
Richard Dawkins and a non-linear Overton Window