Super Bowl question: Does Football Have a Future?

Why this question?  All because of one word: concussions.

It is no longer tackle football, but collision football, writes Ben McGrath in the New Yorker..  Collision that involves, and increasingly so, players fast for a big person and unusually big for a fast person. 

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., is the name for a condition that is believed to result from major collisions—or from the accumulation of subconcussions that are nowhere near as noticeable, including those incurred in practice. It was first diagnosed, in 2002, in the brain of the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who died of a heart attack after living out of his truck for a time. It was next diagnosed in one of Webster’s old teammates on the Steelers’ offensive line, Terry Long, who killed himself by drinking antifreeze. Long overlapped, at the end of his career, with Justin Strzelczyk, who was also found to have C.T.E. after he crashed, fatally, into a tanker truck, while driving the wrong way down the New York Thruway.

 Even though the harsh impacts on the health and well being have been known for long, Alan Scwarz of the NY Times is credited as the guy who relentlessly followed up with reports that has forced the NFL, and other sports too, to investigate this issue.  So much so that apparently he is sometimes sarcastically referred to as Alan Brockovich by those who don't like what he is doing.  Here is an example of the long-term effects:

retired N.F.L. players are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis; that the helmet-manufacturing industry is overseen by a volunteer consortium funded largely by helmet manufacturers; and that Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name but suffered from concussion-related trauma instead. (Since 1960, fourteen N.F.L. players have had a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is about twelve more than you would expect from a random population sample.)

And, remember that other sports too have the concussion crisis:

“Hockey, by the way, has a higher incidence of concussions than football,” Dr. Maroon told me. This is true of women’s college hockey, at least, which doesn’t even allow body-checking. (Women, in general, seem substantially more prone to concussions, and explanations vary, from weaker necks to a greater honesty in self-diagnosis.) And in December, 2009, Reggie Fleming, a New York Rangers defenseman in the nineteen-sixties who was known more for his fighting than for his scoring, became the first pro hockey player to be given a diagnosis of C.T.E. Hockey may now have a concussion crisis on its hands, with the N.H.L.’s best and most marketable player, Sidney Crosby, having been blindsided during the sport’s annual Winter Classic; attempting to play again, four days later, he was drilled into the boards, and he hasn’t played since.

So, what are we looking at?  Over at Slate, John Culhane writes:

At least two class action lawsuits by recent players against the league are in preparation. These suits are expected to allege that the league knew, but suppressed, knowledge of the long-term neurological risks of playing football.

There is a good chance, according to Culhane, that the suits will be tossed out.  But, 

Football isn't tennis; it isn't even basketball. It's violent by design. But that doesn't mean the violence and injuries must escalate without end. If the NFL accelerates the proactive approach it's demonstrated lately, the results won't just redound to the benefit of current and former pros. Given the league's prominence and influence, its safety stance could cause a safety dance to break out: Everyone from college and high-school football players to athletes in other contact sports will begin to get the message.

Think about these when you watch two players colliding at the Super Bowl.

Harvard says everyone doesn't need a college degree

And my thought is: it took this long for Harvard to figure it out? (ht)  Even I have been blogging about it for years!  The report is clear:

Our current system places far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college after completing an academic program of study in high school.

Yes.  An overemphasis, which has resulted in higher education becoming one huge ponzi scheme. 

Our fundamental problem is that our system has not evolved to serve young adults in this radically different world. Behaving as though four-year college is the only acceptable route to success clearly still works well for many young adults, especially students fortunate enough to attend highly selective colleges and universities. It also works well for affluent students, who can often draw on family and social connections to find their way in the adult world. But it clearly does not work well for many, especially young men. In recent years, a yawning gender gap has opened up in American higher education. Men now account for just 43 percent of enrollment in our nation’s colleges, and earn only 43 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Not surprisingly, women also account for 60 percent of the nation’s graduate students.23 Similarly, among the low-income and young people of color who will make up an increasing portion of the workforce of the future, this single route does not work well either. Many of these students are frustrated by an education they often find irrelevant and removed from the world of work. And given the barriers—including weak or nonexistent career counseling, rising college costs, inadequate financial aid, and the frequent need to balance their courses with jobs that are often totally disconnected from their programs of study—it is a minor miracle that so many still manage to complete a degree

So?

We also need to elevate the critical importance of relevant work experience in a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. The workplace is clearly the place to “try on” or test out a career choice. It’s also by far the best venue in which to learn the “21st century skills” so critical to success in today’s economy. And work-linked learning can be extraordinarily powerful in engaging students who are bored or turned off by conventional classroom instruction. Yet in comparison to many other advanced countries, America has largely neglected this highly effective learning method. We need to revolutionize our approach.

Ok. This is all more of the obvious--obvious to people like me who have been trying to get people's attention all these years.  The report engages only in wishful thinking.  But, a useful first step--after all, when Harvard says there is a problem, then things happen.

Bill O'Reilly is like Thomas Aquinas. Because ...?

I dare you to watch it without laughing out loudly

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Religion in American politics: Happy Yom Chechecheche!

A couple of weeks ago, the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, who is a Republican, said the following loudly and boldly (in his Martin Luther King Day message):

anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.

That puts to rest any thought that discussions on the separation of church and state ended with the defeat of Christine O'Donnell, who famously raised the question "Where in the constitution is the separation of church and state?"

Let us check in with Texas to see what they think about non-Christians:

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A Friday laugh it off: Bob Marley and a "demon child"

And here is Bob Marley's Buffalo Soldier (February 6th, which is the day after tomorrow, is when Marley was born, back in 1945)

Nixon back in China. Again? Yes!

Dirty rotten food prices--they are up, again

For a couple of days last December, when I was in India, the headline news was only about onion prices--they had gone way up.  So much so that the federal government had to impose an export freeze.
As those prices started coming down, tomato prices started shooting up.

These are alarming news in India for two reasons: one, food prices affect the poor, who spend a significant percentage of their incomes on food.  And, second, governments--particularly coalition governments like the one in place in India now--can easily get thrown out of power because of food prices.

In the new year, there seems to have been a further escalation in food prices.  According to The Hindu:

food inflation surged further to 17.05 per cent for the week ended January 22 from 15.57 per cent in the previous week as prices of vegetables, fruits, milk and protein-based items continued to soar.

What is particularly hurting the common man is the fact that the current inflationary bout is not just a statistical anomaly of low ‘base effect'. The price rise is for real in that the high food inflation at over 17 per cent, as per the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) data, is over and above the 20.56 per cent surge witnessed during the like week a year ago.

But, even more worrisome is the fact that it is not merely in India:

The FAO Food Price Index, which measures the wholesale price of basic foods within a basket, averaged 231 points last month - its highest level since records began in 1990.
It was up 3.4% from December, the seventh monthly rise for the index.
"These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come," FAO economist Abdolreza Abbassian said.
The index is now higher than June 2008 when the cost of food sparked violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Haiti and Egypt.

Yes, it is catching people's attention:

World Bank President Robert Zoellick has asked global leaders to "put food first" and tackle the problem of price volatility.
"We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices," he said.

Unfortunately, for many years now, the developed world has pretty much taken its eyes off the food issue.  I am not sure how pathetic this indifference would be if it were not for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation forcing the world's attention on this--even a few years ago.  At the World Food Symposium, Prabhu Pingali observed this when talking about the Green Revolution:

Smallholders in the Indian Punjab, with average farm sizes of one hectare, went from producing a single crop of rice or wheat with average yields of little over a ton to producing two crops per year, a rice crop followed by a wheat crop, each with average yields of 4-5 tons. Many even managed a third crop of vegetables or fodder in between. In China, farm sizes were even smaller, Chinese farm households were allocated one mu per person. What’s a mu? It’s one fifteenth of a hectare, or one sixth of an acre. For American Football fans, (we are in Iowa State Cyclones country here) one mu is equivalent to the area between the 0 and 12 yards, just a little larger than “the end zone”. The Chinese agriculture transformation took place because farmers extracted the most out of their mu. 

But, the last two decades haven't seen any great push to advance the science, technology, and practice of agriculture in Asia and Africa.

“Investing in small farmers is an incredibly effective way to combat hunger and extreme poverty—history has proved it many times,” said Gates, whose foundation has committed $1.5 billion to date to agricultural development. “The launch of this fund is an important step forward, but only a first step. Other countries meeting at the European, G8 and G20 summits in June, and at the U.N. Summit in September should join the four founding partners and make good on their pledges. If we all sustain focus until the job is done, hundreds of millions of people will lead better lives.”
According to the World Bank, about three-quarters of the 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty depend on agriculture for a living.

Quote of the day: on income inequality

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

Boggles my mind, you say?  Yep.  It is from Catherine Rampbell's review of Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots: (ht)

And, for those of you wondering is this been adjusted for purchasing power parity, Rampbell notes:

The household income numbers are all converted into  international dollars adjusted for equal purchasing power, since the cost of goods varies from country to country. In other words, the chart adjusts for the cost of living in different countries, so we are looking at consistent living standards worldwide.

Remember the "ovarian lottery" that Warren Buffett talks about?  Well, more evidence supporting that:

As Milanovic notes, an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were).

Which is why immigration laws become so important--if the borders were open,

A recent World Bank survey suggested that “countries that have done economically poorly would, if free migration were allowed, remain perhaps without half or more of their populations.”

And that is the very scenario imagined in the crazy dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints

The revolution in egypt in four minutes

Thanks to a student, "A," who sent me the link to this summary, in four-minutes, of the events in Egypt:



Irhal!

Well, why leave it there? Here is the update from Jon Stewart, and why Mubarak's people have gone too far :)

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"Speak" is the poem for the Egypt moment.

Won't you agree with me that Faiz describes well the value and importance of free expression?

Speak, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

More about Faiz here

Stewart and Colbert explain the Egypt situation for Mubarak and America. Irhal!

It will be neat if the Egyptian protesters were able to watch this and laugh it off while camping out waiting for Mubarak to leave.  Maybe the comedians should do a relief comic marathon until the dictator exits!

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In this conversation, Colbert points out that Mubarak is toast pita :)

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Finally, where should Mubarak go, if/when he flees Egypt?

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What? Protests in Ukraine too?

Ahem, different from the protests in Egypt and Tunisia.

Obama's Alzheimer's makes him forget "democracy" in Egypt!

Yes, a follow-up to an earlier post on how President Obama and his administration have erred, perhaps way beyond any possible face-saving tactics, in their explicit and coded support of Mubarak, while trying to discourage the protesters.

Suppose the protesters in Egypt were to pose the President the same question the previous President asked of the world community in a different context: "are you with us, or against us?" ... it is clear so far that President Obama is against the protesters.  And, as President, he essentially states that America is against the protesters who are seeking to oust a dictator and bring in democracy.

I can only imagine that the otherwise rhetorical President is tongue-tied because of Alzheimer's, or some kind of selective amnesia.

A retired senior CIA official says that the US has become irrelevant in the Middle East:

The first is the extent to which successive US administrations have consistently betrayed a lack of faith in the efficacy of America's democratic creed, the extent to which the US government has denied the essentially moderating influence of democratic accountability to the people, whether in Algeria in 1992 or in Palestine in 2006.
The failure of the US to uphold its stated commitment to democratic values therefore goes beyond a simple surface hypocrisy, beyond the exigencies of great-power interests, to suggest a fundamental lack of belief in democracy as a means of promoting enlightened, long-term US interests in peace and stability.
The second is the extent to which the US has simply become irrelevant in the Middle East.

A professor of history at the University of California writes that the US has become way too shy to use the "D word"--democracy:

Instead of embracing the push for real democratic change, however, surface reforms that would preserve the system intact are all that's recommended. Instead of declaring loud and clear a support for a real democracy agenda, the president speaks only of "disrupting plots and securing our cities and skies" and "tak[ing] the fight to al-Qaeda and their allies", as he declared in his State of the Union address.
Obama doesn't seem to understand that the US doesn't need to "take the fight" to al-Qaeda, or even fire a single shot, to score its greatest victory in the "war on terror". Supporting real democratisation will do more to downgrade al-Qaeda's capabilities than any number of military attacks. He had better gain this understanding quickly because in the next hours or days the Egypt's revolution will likely face its moment of truth. And right behind Egypt are Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, and who knows what other countries, all looking to free themselves of governments that the US and its European allies have uncritically supported for decades.
If president Obama has the courage to support genuine democracy, even at the expense of immediate American policy interests, he could well go down in history as one of the heroes of the Middle East's Jasmine winter. If he chooses platitudes and the status quo, the harm to America's standing in the region will likely take decades to repair.

Ah, lofty rhetoric and platitudes when nothing is at stake.  But, when the real situation presents itself, same old tired songs.  And then we wonder why the US doesn't get any respect on the "Arab Street"

The State of the Union in a map

:(

But, ... wait, it is the same magazine newspaper that had the following map only a week ago:

:)

‘Life of Pi' as a movie

Ang Lee is the director for the movie version, in 3D?, of the Booker Prize-winning Life of Pi.  As in the novel, Pondicherry features a lot in the movie.  (Now the city is known as Puducherry)

The movie was shot in several places across the town including the Botanical gardens, Holy Rosary Church, Petit Seminaire and Calve College schools and several canals.

Mr. Lee said that almost one-third of the screen time will be occupied by shots from Puducherry.

Of course, life in Pondicherry is changing a lot, and not always for the better--like this one.

The last time I was in Pondi was way back in 1982 (?) I was there with Srikumar, who is now in the Czech Republic, and Kannan, who is now in Michigan.  What a journey in life over the 30 years!

What does fate have to do with it?

Robert Frost coined the famous phrase of the road not taken.  Every fork in the road means that decisions have consequences.  The following old couplet takes the idea one step further (ht): 

विषमां हि दशां प्राप्य दैवं गर्हयते नरः ।
आत्मनः कर्मदोषांस्तु नैव जानात्यपण्डितः ॥

- हितोपदेश, सन्धि

When a fool is in trouble, he will start blaming fate. A fool will never understand that his present state is the result of his past actions.

- Hitopadesha

Do you believe in evolution? monkeys-r-us

Wouldn't this be a lovely question to ask every presidential candidate: "do you believe in evolution?"

This question should be featured at every primary--Republican and Democrat. I mean, imagine a Jim Lehrer posing such a question.  I will pay to watch the Republican primaries then :)

And, if the answer is "no" or with a great deal of hemming and hawing, why not follow it up with, as is the case in this video, a question related to antibiotics?  Watch the twisted and ill-informed response from a Republican representative from Georgia. ht

Oh, BTW, the woman threading the antibiotics argument there is the former Canadian prime minister, Kim Campbell--their first, and only, female prime minister.

Unemployment and Roe v. Wade

Obama plays the fiddle while the Maghreb burns

Meanwhile, back here in America, we are still fighting two major wars, and battling economic problems of magnitudes that should send most amongst us hibernating in caves.  I didn't watch the President's State of the Union address because, well, that is nothing but political theater.  It does appear that the President is increasingly going the Bill Clinton route, which makes me all the more convinced that I was correct, after all, when way back I characterized the candidate Senator Obama as "Slick Willie without the sex."

Not that there is anything particularly wrong with Bill Clinton's approach to presidential and national politics.  Even now I am a big supporter of Bill Clinton.  It is the facade that Obama presented, that he would be different from Bill/Hillary Clinton, with all that highfalutin rhetoric that did not impress me.  I was watching Bill Clinton's talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday.  Even now he makes way more sense to me that most of the Congress put together.

In the NY Review of Books, David Bromwich notes this comparison between Obama and Clinton:

Obama now speaks in strings of sentences like these: “The stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.” The stock market, it would seem, plus corporate profits equals the economy: an odd equation to hear from a Democrat. Bill Clinton in 1995 is Obama’s only precursor on this terrain, but even Clinton would quickly have added that corporate profits are not the measure of all good. By contrast, Obama is now convinced that there is no advantage in putting in qualifications except as a formality.

It does seem like Obama is firming up his chances on getting re-elected, and has given up on Congress, and wouldn't care if it went Republican. 

A main inference from the State of the Union is that in 2011 and 2012, the president will not initiate. He will broker. Every policy recommendation will be supported and, so far as possible, clinched by the testimony of a panel of experts.... The idea is to overwhelm us with expertise. In this way, a president may lighten the burden of decision and control by easing the job of persuasion into other hands. Obama seems to believe that the result of being seen in that attitude will do nothing but good for his stature.

Yes, his stature.

Today no one can easily say who Barack Obama is or what he stands for; and the coming year is unlikely to offer many clues, since all the thoughts of Obama in 2011 appear to concern Obama in 2012. 

Meanwhile, there is a good possibility that 2011 will turn out to be the year of the geopolitical game-changers that I have been blogging about.  Obama has been strangely missing in the picture. 

But, with his responses to the rapidly evolving situations in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Obama seems to be sending nothing but mixed messages.  Hey Mr. President, either talk principles of democracy, or talk realpolitik, but don't try to mix the two.  President Obama seemed to have lost the entire Middle East already:

Obama did surprisingly little to fulfill the hopes and dreams he unleashed worldwide during the election of 2008. Moreover, he deliberately magnified them in the Arab world with his 2009 Cairo speech. But coupled with his continuation of America's cynical policies to prop up tyrannical Arab regimes, and particularly his spectacular failure to rein in the illegal Israeli settlements in the so-called Arab-Israeli Peace Process in 2010, Mr. Obama may have inadvertently exacerbated the explosive combination of frustrated expectations and business-as-usual that pressurized the current eruption of resentment, anger, and alienation among the Arab people in 2011.

Kai Bird makes a similar point at Slate:

But now the moment has come when President Obama must demonstrate that his words were not just words. One way or the other, hard consequences will follow. The end of the Mubarak era will also spell an end to Egypt's cold peace with Israel. No post-Mubarak government, and certainly not one populated with Muslim Brotherhood members, will tolerate the continued blockade of their Hamas cousins in Gaza. Israel will thus be faced with additional strategic incentives to end its occupation of the West Bank, dismantle its settlements and quickly recognize a Palestinian state based largely on its 1967 borders. But as the recent leak of Palestinian-Israeli negotiating transcripts demonstrates, the detailed contours of a final settlement are all in place.
Change is coming to the Arab world. It can no longer be held back. So the pragmatist and not just the idealist in Obama would be wise to make it clear that he really is on the side of the protesters in the streets of Cairo. It is time to stop hedging our bets.

But, Obama seems to be even more cautious than ever :(  And, even worse, don't merely sit on that metaphorical fence.  Stanford's Middle East historian, Joel Beinin, writes:

our president has remained silent about the demonstrators’ goal: a democratic Egypt. In his June 2009 Cairo speech, when nothing was immediately at stake, President Obama uttered eloquent words of support for democracy. If he spoke out forcefully in support of the Egyptian people, as he did for the Tunisian people in his State of the Union address, he could tip events in a direction that would earn America the gratitude of the Egyptian people.
This would go far to undoing the damage to America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world created by the catastrophically wrong-headed foreign policies of the George W. Bush era. It would also do more to undermine al-Qaeda’s international campaign of hatred and terrorism than has been achieved by two wars and over a trillion dollars in military spending.
The whole world is watching. If the tanks of Tiananmen Square roll into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the people of the Middle East will know who to blame. Tell them "No," Mr. President.

And, here is what Mohamed ElBaradei says, Mr. President.  I hope you are listening:

"It is better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, 'It's time for you to go," he told CNN.
ElBaradei, a possible candidate in Egypt's presidential election this year, dismissed U.S. calls for Mubarak to enact sweeping democratic and economic reforms in response to the protests.
"The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years would be the one to implement democracy. This is a farce," he told the CBS program "Face the Nation."
"This first thing which will calm the situation is for Mubarak to leave, and leave with some dignity. Otherwise I fear that things will get bloody. And you (the United States) have to stop the life support to the dictator and root for the people."