tagryn's musings

crossposted from http://www.wingheads.com/index.php?showtopic=75340

For a slow week before camp opens, found this on YouTube, the highlights of Super Bowl XV:
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In any case, the 1980 team will always be "my" team, probably to the end of my days. Coach Dick Vermeil remained a positive role model for me during the rest of my time growing up, both as an example of the value of hard work and preparation, and then as an example of how a lack of balance in one's life can lead to burnout.

Philosophy of motivation, from "Secret Society of Super Villains #1":

Also reflects the Lazarus Long quote about "Never appeal to a man’s “better nature.” He may not have one. Invoking his “self—interest” gives you more leverage."

Ever encounter a piece of art or song that you found particularly moving or meaningful, only to read an interview with the artist later where they said effectively "That piece of junk? Yeah, big mistake, never going to do that again!" or "It was *meant* to be a joke (and the fans didn't get it)." Did knowing that its creator regards it as garbage affect how you viewed it going forward?

6/14 - ...and there's actually a trope for this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OldShame

via http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1fuudc/the_sad_truth/

According to the CDC, there are ~2.5 million deaths in the U.S. annually. In 2012, 151 of those deaths were due to mass shooters, or 0.00006% of all deaths or 0.009% of all homicides. So this rates as a major issue requiring large-scale deployment of resources and training...why again, exactly? The odds of being killed by lightning are about the same as that of falling victim to a mass shooter, yet we aren't talking about mass deployment of lightning rods across the nation.

Funny how people talk about how they want compromise and results from their government, then reelect the most strident partisans (Bachmann, Grayson, Webster, Warren) and vote out moderates (Scott Brown). Gee, no wonder things don't get done. Fiscal cliff, here we come...

related:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/07/is-demography-destiny.html
(analysis of the "demography is undermining the GOP" argument)
http://www.volokh.com/2012/11/07/a-few-thoughts-about-the-election/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/06/obama-will-probably-win-reasons-for-republicans-to-be-cheerful.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-obamas-victory-settles-a-bitter-argument/2012/11/07/00be6164-2892-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_story.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/03/vote-the-bums-out-the-eight-worst-congressmen.html
(I note that six of the eight named Congresspersons in that last article won last night(only Richardson and Walsh lost).)

( Photos behind the cut )
This recipe was very helpful: http://www.healthygreenkitchen.com/concord-grape-jam.html

background:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/12/us/pennsylvania-penn-state-paterno/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

http://www.wingheads.com/index.php?showtopic=68529&st=30&gopid=234978&#entry234978
As an alumni who never knew anything but Paterno as PSU's head coach, and by the time I was there (early '90s) the mythology of JoePa was already well entrenched, I'm still processing exactly what this means retrospectively. I suspect it's going to be one of those things that looks contradictory at first - JoePa the forger of young men's character, demanding class and education as well as football, vs. JoePa who participated in covering up ongoing child abuse - but actually makes a kind of sense:

I can believe that Paterno, half not wanting to believe what he was being told by multiple sources, sensed a threat in Sandusky's activities to the thing he loved most - the football program - and to all the good he thought he was doing with it, and so wanted that threat to go away as quickly and quietly as possible so that the program wasn't tarnished. That was the priority, as near as I can tell: preserve the program at all costs, justified in the name of everything Paterno believed he was accomplishing. And it became something straight out of a Greek tragedy - by totally losing perspective on what was more important, by choosing to cover up rather than confronting a terrible thing, everything Paterno did and worked for is now tarnished with a black brush of evil.

Perspective. If permanently dissolving the PSU football program, or even all college football, or even all football, could prevent even one more boy from having to go through the torture that Sandusky's victims went through, would that be worth it? How about if doing that prevented what happened to *all* the victims since '98? Isn't there a point where you have to say, no, football just isn't that important. And I think that point is way, way short of the line where someone, anyone, ends up scarred for life.

For Paterno, the program was his life, his legacy. I suspect a lot of coaches have this problem - Lombardi, George Allen, Vermeil before his burnout. This skewed his sense of right and wrong, and those kids paid the price. For myself, I did buy into the JoePa persona, even when I was probably old enough to know better, to know that everybody is a mix of good and bad, and of contradictions. Its something I think all PSU fans will have to confront eventually about this: did we help build up JoePa and the program to the point that it became this larger-than-life thing that a lot of people at Penn State, including Paterno, thought was more important to keep safe, at any price, than some nameless (to them), faceless (to them), kids' lives?

This is hardly something limited to Penn State - if you've been in a major college football stadium filled to capacity on a Saturday, you know that its a huge deal to a huge number of people. The question becomes, at what price? If not a child's innocence, is there still a price worth paying to preserve the program, or to make that program a winner? Payola? Recruiting violations? Injury pools to take out another team's best players? And at what point do you just have to say "no, this is nuts, its still just football, just a game, doing this is wrong." And if there's a long history of not being able to make the right decisions on that, at what point do you just have to say the whole thing needs to be scrapped, to start over or just to go away forver, because the price is too high? That is basically one of the objectives of the NCAA death penalty, after all: you force the whole thing to reset by denying any football for a period of time.

Anyway, that's where I am with this now.

On Thursday the House voted to eliminate the American Community Survey that the Census conducts every year. Because of its size - its the largest survey conducted in the U.S, and probably the world - its the primary source of local, state, and national data used by business, government, and scientists to study the nation.
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http://directorsblog.blogs.census.gov/2012/05/11/a-future-without-key-social-and-economic-statistics-for-the-country/

Even otherwise-hawkish-on-cutting think tanks like Cato and the Heritage Foundation have come out and said this is a very bad idea. I've complained about the dumb decisions that countries like Canada and Argentina have made in regards to statistical information, and this is right along those lines. There's a long way to go - it'd still have to pass the Senate and probably wouldn't pass a veto from POTUS - but that it passed the House at all is alarming. I've written a letter to a Congressman who I've contributed to in the past, something I rarely do, so important do I consider this issue. Simply, if this goes through, it will blind us to what's happening at the local level in terms of demographics, economics, and social trends.