Epic Fail #4: Our MBA President Bankrupts Us All

Part 4 of my Four Fails series.



George W. Bush did not run on an election platform of dragging us into a Middle East quagmire or letting disaster-hit cities fester and rot. These were on the fly decisions by him that have turned regrettable but could not have been predicted before hand.

However, he did run on a platform, if you read between the lines, to protect the economic interests of his backers, a cross-section of the very rich, many concentrated in the resource extraction industry. His contribution to spiraling election expenditures was the innovation of getting super-donors to bundle donations from associates and underlings into mega-contributions that broke the spirit if not the letter of various ineffective campaign finance regulations.

So perhaps it is only fair to judge his success or failure against the goals of his natural constituency. And while there may be some ideological benefit of the doubt given to him by the hard-core right, I think it is safe to say that anyone who has checked their stock portfolio, mutual fund, 401(k), or pension statement lately doesn’t feel much richer.

If I were a former wealthy backer of Dubya (both formerly wealthy and a former backer) I would be as mad at him as Bernie Madoff’s pigeons. Dubya ran a Ponzi scheme aimed at keeping the money flowing until someone was forced to pay the piper, only the bill came due too soon and credit (not to mention the credit crisis) is being placed on his shoulders. Superlatives to describe the vastness of the economic collapse are being worn out and the standard economic news disclaimer of "since the Great Depression" is no longer automatic. We are upside down in the ditch leaking gasoline with a runaway train full of high explosives headed our way. Just how did we get here if the Republicans are the party of restraint?

Bush’s tax cuts were presented under the compassionate conservative Trojan Horse of trying to make the system simpler and fairer. While there were a few sops thrown to the working poor and the middle class, the biggest beneficiaries were wealthy people with large pools of non-wage income. Or as Bush calls them, Pioneers. And his largess trickled down. For years the champagne flowed as the capital gains rolled in. In the cheap-credit-fueled bubble, everybody was just a phone call away from a cash-out no-equity-needed loan. People were borrowing money like there was no tomorrow. And then there wasn't one.

But it wasn't just us homeowners spending beyond our means. The Dubya era GOP-held Congress went on a binge that made the proverbial drunken sailors look like the very picture of fiscal restraint. In the eight years of Bush at the register, the national debt has nearly doubled from $5.7 trillion to $10.2 trillion and climbing.

An inherited surplus of $230 billion has turned into a deficit of $1.2 trillion. Now quibblers go into the smoke and mirror distinctions between public debt and intragovernment debt and how Clinton didn't really balance the budget, but he sure did better than Georgie. You can’t move the decimal place an entire digit to the left and hide it. And it’s not like Dubya wasn’t using his own Houdini-at-the-Hippodrome sized mirrors as he kept his Iraq debacle off the books. He refused to raise taxes and continued to fiddle as Baghdad burned.

All of this was carefully gauged to coast past his administration. All the budget busting giveaways were back-end loaded and rosey-scenarioed away. Guess what? We are at the out-years and the worst case scenarios sure would be fantastic news right about now. The carefully misdirected chickens came home to roost a few months too early for Bush to plausibly blame his successor. And most of these chickens were the result of some really lax henhouse guarding on the parts of foxes in power.

People are running around shocked, shocked that Wall Street oversight was so shoddy, but the handwriting was on every wall in sight. As part of his peculiar knack for outdoing himself, Bush had already weathered one scandal involving massive fraud that pauperized stockholders and pension fund managers. Do the names Enron and Worldcom mean anything? These crooks were offered as scapegoats to the gods of unfettered capitalism and some even served time before conveniently dying just to avoid jail but lessons went unlearned.

Ken Lay and his crew (who were Texas asshole buddies of Bush before he developed politically inspired amnesia) were market makers in the newly deregulated energy market and were robbing customers blind on manipulated shortages and insider deals. Part of the problem was a sophisticated mesh of deals and packages that nobody could decipher.

And who was the proximate cause of the current financial meltdown? A small group of market makers in the unregulated derivatives market robbing customers blind with a sophisticated mesh of deals and packages that nobody could decipher.

Of course, the current crisis is extremely complicated with a lot of players and barrels of blame to go around. But wasn’t Bush’s claim to fame that he was a MBA (and how much has he devalued Harvard Business School’s reputation and can they refund his tuition?), not a lawyer or career politician? Nevermind that no business Dubya has ever been involved with has ever turned a profit.

Dubya's asleep at switch management style and his look the other way and whistle approach to malfeasance has destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth quicker than you can say "commodotized debt obligations." A caretaker president has become the undertaker to the economy and there is no Carlyle Group to come to his rescue.

Even the most reviled presidents have a silver lining if you look hard enough. Diplomatic disasters are evened out by domestic successes or vice versa. Carter oversaw bleak economic times (which look like the the Roaring 20s compared to our current situation) but got Israel and Egpyt to quit shooting at each other. Nixon criminally disgraced the office of the presidency but opened relations with China. LBJ micromismanaged Vietnam but brought us civil rights and the Great Society.

Not so with Dubya. The current White House occupant has so thoroughly trashed everything with his reverse-Midas touch that people trying to find pleasant things to say about him have only his AIDS initiatives in Africa to trumpet. Kudos to him for listening to Bono and Bill Gates. We might as well brag that no intern's virtue has been compromised on his watch and that polar bears are such good swimmers we don't have to call them endangered.

Not only are we mired in not one, but two, rather expensive land wars in Asia, our currency is in shambles and the next decade of economic growth has been earmarked for paying off the defaults of the previous one. The most optimistic economists are warring over whether we are looking at a decade of deflationary stagnation or a debilitating bout of Weimar Republic quality hyperinflation. We have to be careful because we only get to play the banana republic game of making our currency worthless once.

George Bush has left our country morally, militarily, and fiscally exhausted and bankrupt. In his previous careers some sugar daddy Saudi billionaire has always come along and bailed him out from his mistakes. Well, the Peter Principle has been proven to go all the way to the top and there are no more bucks to pass, either figuratively or literally. The American people are now saddled with the cost of his many fiascos and fuck-ups. We will be paying for the last eight years of his incompetence for a long, long, long time, both metaphorically and financially. Sadly, George W. Bush doesn't seem any wiser for the experience. Let's hope we are.

Final Grade:
FAIL
No repeats allowed.

Epic Fail #2: Culture of Torture

Part 2 of my Four Fails series.


There is an argument that can be made (not by me, but others have) that invading Iraq was the right thing to do based on the information available at the time. It has even been argued that invading Iraq had to be done regardless of how imminent the threat to us from Saddam's now-known-to-be-nonexistent WMDs was.

Then, the argument continues, the problem with Iraq was the implementation not the provocation. If we had the right forces, some decent (any?) post-war planning, infrastructure improvements, we coulda woulda shoulda won the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. I’m picturing a neo-con dream featuring rose petal strewn roads, free and fair elections, religious harmony and peak oil production going straight to Exxon refineries.

Then came Abu Ghraib. The minute I saw the pictures of Lynndie England with an Iraqi prisoner on a dog leash, the cheerleader pyramid of naked detainees, and the now iconic hooded victim with his genitals hooked to electrodes, my disgusted visceral reaction was “Bring the troops home tomorrow. We’ve lost.” From that day on, we weren’t fighting to win in Iraq, we were in trash time trying to just beat the point spread. We had lost the high ground immediately and permanently.

The official statements of outrage were sharp and quick with all sorts of vague resolutions to get to the bottom of this atrocity. But there was no bottom to get to. We were already there and it only went up. Within our prisoner detention system, the institutionalized abuse was intentional, deliberate, and pervasive. Techniques used at Abu Ghraib were imported from Guantanamo which had been developed at secret facilities in Jordan, Thailand, Poland, and who knows where else.

The methods we adopted were borrowed wholesale from Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Korean War lore. We had become the enemy. Like in Animal Farm, you could look from pig to man to pig and not tell the difference.

At the highest levels of our government there were lawyers drafting legally suspect memos saying what could be done to who by whom. Entire new levels of euphemisms were developed like “enhanced interrogation techniques” (which anti-torture zealots like Andrew Sullivan find mighty similar to the terms in the original German) so that we could keep claiming that we don’t “torture,” just waterboard, starve, freeze, bake, and push to the limits of physical debilitation. Oh, and a few die every now and then, but that can’t be our fault.

Bill Clinton rightly took a lot of flak for his ontological musings of what “is” is, but the Bush Administration took legalistic hair splitting to new levels. Dubya compared the methods we used to fraternity hazing stunts (and the Skull and Bones alum should know). Rumsfeld compared stress positions to his choice to work standing at a desk all day.

One of the enduring myths of the American Experience is that we are a nation of ideals and values, not tribes and vendettas. Ever since we muscled our way to the international grown-ups' table at the end of World War One with our quaint naïve ideas of Wilsonian Democracy, we had always been snickered at as the people that actually believed what we said. Not any more. We are now just as dirty as any of them.

Our innocence has been lost and all for the sake of a few Jack Baueresque revenge fantasies. We used to be the Good Guys, the Boy Scouts, the Dudley Dorights (okay, technically Dudley is Canadian, but you get my point). Our actions have besmirched our reputation and as any fifties movie slut will tell you a good reputation is a lot easier to lose than earn back. Now we have black fedoras and wear monocles and carry around little trays of dental tools like a recurring character in Alias or some other torture-porn piece of pop culture that we are taking our debriefing tips from.

There is also a sadly quasi-racist undertone to our casually resorting to techniques that belong in bad WWII films. Would we be going down this road if the World Trade Center building had been destroyed by radical European neo-Nazis? We executed Timothy McVeigh by lethal injection, but we didn't hang him by his wrists in his cell for days on end. At least I assume we didn't.

And yes, I have seen the videos of terrorists beheading captured Americans with machetes. It sickens me and makes me despise the sense of religious righteousness that makes that behavior acceptable. We have always been better than our enemies. Especially when they don’t play by the rules and carry copies of the Geneva Convention on them.

It’s almost useless to rant on and on about this because you either Get It or You Don’t. I find it morally reprehensible that we have even opened this can of worms and spread it out on the table to try and pick out the least disgusting ones and call them acceptable methods. There are unrepentant elements that believe the ends always justify the means. They snicker when people get indignant over trying to ban treatment of untried prisoners that would result in jail time if your or I did it to an house pet.

And it isn’t just torture. The above-the-law Dirty Harry sense of angry retribution carried on into all the other levels of our government. Because so many were apathetic when the signs were in front of us, we have turned hypervigilant to the point of throwing out an entire nursery of babies with the bath water. You may not believe me, but there is somewhere a secret military organization devoted to domestic surveillance at levels that would make J. Edgar Hoover spin in his tutu. It was called Counter Intelligence Field Activities (Google it, I dare you), but that got too much attention and its replacement has only gone darker. You may think we are only going after The Bad Brown People That Want To Bomb Us, but once those jinni get out of the bottle they spread their mischief everywhere.

Dubya, the poster child for cognitive dissonance, in his last press conference called the events of Abu Ghraib "a huge disappointment" once again nauseating clear-thinking people with his understated lack of eloquence. Your kid having a keg party at your house is a disappointment. Buying him cases of cold medicine and batteries and then acting shocked when the cops bust his meth lab makes you a criminal accessory.

Dick Cheney, a man to whom the adjective Nixonian is a badge of pride, appointed himself Vice President because he felt himself to be the only person strong enough to restore the Imperial Presidency. That he picked as lackluster a vessel as George W. Bush to do it through is argument enough against the concept. We all know what power and absolute power do, but couple it with absolute idiocy and the results are terrifying.

Now that there is a new sheriff in town, a couple of potential reactions are being bandied around. Some say Obama is going to go easy because he needs the interrogation apparatus around even if he publicly has to despise it. Heaven forbid any buildings get blown up on his watch. Others want to just put the whole ordeal behind us and tell the jack-booted thug-attorneys that aided and abetted this travesty to go and sin no more.

That is not enough. The people responsible for twisting our principles so maliciously need to be called out and repudiated. For our own good and for the benefit of those that only sneer when we disingenuously protest that WE don’t torture. The only way to sanitize our hands from this stench is to have Congressional hearings, Presidential commissions, show trials (and for people higher than E-6), and public floggings in green coats. Well, maybe not a real green coat, that would be cruel.

Epic Fail #1: Mission FUBARed

Part 1 of my Four Fails series.


Why did we invaded Iraq? No matter what the publicly declared reasons, are we did not invade for any of the following reasons no matter how many wingnuts try to convince you otherwise:

• Retaliation for 9/11. Iraq had no connection with al Qaeda. Fifteen of the nineteen highjackers were Saudi Arabian.
• Preventing Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. He didn't have any and he had no way of getting some. The evidence was tissue thin and mostly fabricated from disinformation and wishful thinking.
  
• Spreading democracy to the Middle East. If we wanted to spread our ideals, we sure picked an odd place to start. Let's work on the countries where a woman can't drive a car, let alone vote, first.
  

The REAL reasons for why we let Osama bin Laden retire gracefully while we shifted focus to a guy we had beaten once and had boxed in will will be the Rorschach test question for a generation and may never be fully known. There are as many theories as there are people. Here are my leading candidates.

Daddy Issues. The psychoanalysis of Dubya is a cottage industry. He is the angry underachieving son of a political scion. His older brother was the heir apparent golden boy being groomed for the White House. His much rumored discussed abuse problems involve at least alcohol and he has allegedly done enough blow to powder an Apsen ski slope. His checkered business history is a long string of failures where he is eventually bailed out by his dad's cronies. As personification of the Peter Principle writ large, he was chosen as the front man for a consortium of extraction industry execs eager to reverse decades of regulation. If all he had done was oversee the dismantling of environmental regulation, the damage could be reversed, but the 9/11 attacks spiked his popularity as the symbol of American resolve. His supporters, public and otherwise, saw this an opportunity to engage in a long-sought agenda that hitherto would have been unobtainable.

Unfinished Business. Bush the Elder was frequently critcized for pulling up short in the first Gulf War. Here the Daddy Issues theory forks and either branch or both works. One sub-theory is that invading Iraq is Dubya's way of proving to himself and the world that he could do what his dad couldn't, take out the baddest guy on the planet. In this Oedipal competition, George W. would prove that he was a better leader than George H. W. could ever be. Another less Freudian expalanation is that Dubya was out to avenge the alleged assassination plot against his father. In this theory, he uses the combined military might of the United States to avenge some family feud. Either way, the tragedy is Shakespearean in proportion.

All About The Oil. Dick Cheney as the former head of Halliburton made millions selling equipment to the people that pump up dead dinosaurs. It must have struck in his craw to see all the billions funneling through the astoundingly corrupt even by UN standards food-for-oil program. A quick little war that left the Iraqi oil fields in the hands of Americans would be the greatest gift of all to two oil patch veterans.

Doing Israel's Dirty Work. Dubya's dry drunk religious conversion left him open to the Pat Robertson style evangelism that makes Israel the cornerstone of end-days millennialism. This makes him an easy mark for the neo-cons that saw Iraq as the first domino in a chain elimination of sworn enemies of the Israel state. Their plans predated the 9/11 attacks and the anti-terrorist fervor made for great cover.

Geopolitical Gamesmanship. While it's true that bin Laden and his fundamentalist fellow travelers are Saudi, striking at Iraq follows a certain twisted logic. The Bush family friends in the House of Saud have been buying off the most radical elements for decades. A fundamentalist uprising is a matter of when not if. With the Saudi oilfields in the hands of radicals and the Iran in control of the ayatollahs, Iraq is the only remaining large enough source of reserves to cushion the oil shock that would result. From a geopolitical point of view, a friendly, pro-West buffer between the Iranian Shias and the Saudi Sunnis would bring stability and provide a base of operation in case military action was needed to secure oil fields anywhere else in the Middle East. Shame it hasn't quite worked out that way.

Disregarding the ethics of invading sovereign countries on the flimsiest of pretexts, the success of this gambit was predicated on the war being done quickly and cheaply. And that is where the wheels fell of the bus. Determining where and how our Iraqi adventure went south fills an entire row at BigBoxOfBooks and grows every day. However, a few key turning points can be identified.

I Can Invade That Country With 100,000 Troops. Despite Rumsfeld's most optimistic fantasy, Moore's Law does not apply to military campaigns. It still takes a certain amount of boots on the ground to occupy territory. We used over 300,000 troops for our cloud of dust sprint to the Iraq-Kuwaiti border. The ease with which Powell dispatched the cannon fodder troops of Saddam in Gulf War One led to a certain over-confidence that belied the truism that it isn't how quick you can take something, it's how long you can hold onto it.

Where Was That Parade of Roses? By placing their faith in a handful of disgraced expatriate con-men, the Bush Administration, against all common sense and historical precedent, decided that the Iraqi people would love to be invaded and ruled by a conquering superpower. When it turned out to be not so, a mass of rationalizations and excuses kept everybody's head in the sand about the real situation until the tar baby was wrapped in a full bear hug.

Freedom is Messy. But not nearly as messy as lawless anarchy as an entire nation loots everything not nailed down and most things that were. When all the five finger discounts were taken, then all the scores that predate David Hume and Adam Smith and the rest of the Enlightenment by a few centuries started getting settled. With fewer troops than it takes to handle Black Friday Walmart crowds, we had little choice but watch as the bloodbath begin.

Send The Guys With Guns Home Without Pay. While it took dozens of neocons and chicken-hawks to really fuck up this fiasco, special honors has to go to Paul Bremer who decided that it made a lot of sense to have anybody trained to hold a weapon off the payroll and aimlessly wandering the streets.

The War Was Supposed To Be Self-Financing. Again, the lessons of Gulf War One were sadly misapplied. It's a little known secret that the U.S. turned a tidy profit from the finder's fee the Kuwaitis paid to get their country back. The costs of the Iraqi occupation were supposed to be more than covered by the cut of the oil revenue we would skim off the top. Our regime change was going to work like an international leveraged buy-out. We would push out the existing management, install our own pet board of directors, vote the shareholders a big dividend and milk our new acquisition dry. But like buying collectibles off e-Bay, sometimes the goods that show up in the mail box aren't in quite as good a condition as the screenshot showed. Our presumptiveness in assuming that just opening the tap would get the money flowing coupled with the failure to ask the Iraqis what they wanted to do with their oil left us holding both the bag and bill.

By every measure possible, Iraq is worse off today than it was under the far-less-than-benevolent dictatorship of Saddam Hussein when we were actively trying to destroy Iraq's economy. Now we can ravage their economy beyond our wildest expectations just by being there.

After four thousand servicemen dead, ten thousand more wounded, literally countless Iraqis collaterally killed, five years of quagmire, and a cost well into the thirteen digits, we have defined success down so far that we would be elated with any outcome that is less than two orders of magnitude worse than the most cynical Cassandra's pre-war prophecy. If we ever declare victory and withdraw, we will have set a new standard for the adjective Pyrrhic that had stood unchallenged for two millennia.

The sad part is that although this legacy would be more than enough to burnish one's presidential reputation as an all-time disaster, Dubya and his team outdid themselves to make sure that our fall from grace involved more than lives and fortune, which I will get to in my next post.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: So exactly why did we invade Iraq?

The Four Fails: Prologue

As the countdown to the end of the Dubya Debacle (as I understatedly describe it) reaches the single digits, a lot of people have been looking back in nostalgia at the salad days when we had budget surpluses, presidential sex scandals, and a military with a little too much time on its hands. There is a three week waiting list of Bushies wanting Op-Ed space in the Washington Post to explain that a) the past eight years were an unbridled success b) the screw-ups aren't nearly as bad as everybody is making them out to be and that a few are actually blessings in heavy disguise, and c) The Decider was really responsible for everything and deserves all the blame credit.

Even Dubya himself has gotten into the act. The White House Department of Potemkin Publishing has issued a straight faced list of his "accomplishments" titled "100 Things Americans May Not Know About The Bush Administration Record". Once the disbelief wears off and they check that the url is really not a proxy for The Onion or The Colbert Report, bloggers have started a parlor game of hunting for the most disingenuously ironic item. My personal choice is on Page 38:

Increased import safety for American consumers. Instituted an Import Safety Action Plan to better protect American consumers and took strong enforcement action against manufacturers of tainted imports. Established unprecedented import safety coordination with China by stationing FDA inspectors in China and signed agreements that enhanced the safety of products traded between our nations to protect consumers and the environment.

I'm sure the owners of all the melamine poisoned pets and the parents that had to pry the lead-laced toys from their crying kids hands are grateful. Most of his crowing sounds like a guy that has just driven his car off the cliff and brags about the great mileage he is getting on the way down.

But rather than obsess over the minutiae, I have decided to focus on the big picture and sweep all the scandals, fiascos, and failures into four broad categories. This was meant to be one very long let-it-vent rant, but the task proved to be too big for one entry, even by my long-winded standards. So instead, over the next week I will attempt to convey in four blogposts what will keep future historians busy for decades: just how epic a failure the Bush Administration has been.

Please indulge my departure from my usual even-handed neutral tone for a few days as I let you know how I really feel. And if it proves too much for you, I promise as a reward one of my trademarked two-column pop culture comparisons on Friday that will please both the sci-fi geek and the prurient-minded among my readers (which pretty much covers about everybody). Until then, let's take a walk down Repressed Memory Lane and revisit the low points of the twenty-first century so far.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Which of Dubya's many failures has been his most spectacular?

Update:
Epic Fail #1: Mission FUBARed
Epic Fail #2: Culture of Torture
Epic Fail #3: Compassionate Conservatism Was Neither
Epic Fail #4: Our MBA President Bankrupts Us All

A Good Sport

As we watch television in our quadrennial obsession with all sports obscure (and admit it: would you even cross the street to watch a swim meet if there weren’t a ton of hype and national pride and TV cameras wrapped around it?), millions of people around the world are asking “How is that a sport?” And let’s face it, a lot of things that are at the Olympics shouldn’t be. The dictionary is little help because its definitions are so broad. Here is one from the online American Heritage dictionary:

sport (spôrt, spōrt) n.
1. a. Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
b. A particular form of this activity.
2. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
3. An active pastime; recreation.

These definitions are overly broad and could include about anything. We need a stricter set of tests and criteria. Here are my canonical, authoritative and indisputable requirements for a sport.

A sport must have a winner.

This means it must be played by a set of rules and have a way of determining who is best. Without rules, it is just exercise. Yoga is many things: a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life, but no matter much you stand on your head, it is not a sport. Mountain climbing is another litmus test activity. People keep records for all sorts of feats for climbing. Fastest ascent, number of ascents, number of mountains climbed, but unless you are having a race under fixed conditions and declaring a winner, it is an activity, not a sport.

When I was in elementary school, there was a trend towards non-competitive games like pushing giant earth balls around a field or rolling down hills. Fun, active events but not sports.

A sport must involve physical ability or skill.

This separates sports from games. The most common physical attributes necessary to a sport are speed, strength, endurance, agility, or a combination of the above. Intellectual prowess may be needed in many specific sports, but it is not a necessary requirement. Sprinting is pure speed. Baseball, even pinch hitting, requires speed, hand-eye coordination, and strategy.

Chess is a game. A very hard one, but no physical ability is required. In fact, mastering it seems to preclude physical activity. The grey areas are in defining the level of physical prowess required. The most debated distinction is motorsports. Is the mere driving of a vehicle physical enough to merit classification as a sport? The hand-eye coordination and endurance necessary to be a competitive NASCAR is extreme. Taken down the scale, one could argue that lawn mower racing is also a sport. Perhaps. In the same sense that kickball is really just a watered down version of baseball. They can be called sports, just very low-level ones.

Also, the distinction between a game and sport is rather fuzzy. Golf is clearly a sport because of the extreme skill necessary. Few people can drive four-hundred yards or sink 30-foot putts like Tiger Woods. Going down the other extreme, darts and bowling are what I call the beer-drinking sports: activities where the calories consumed usually exceed the calories expended. This rough caloric intake guide also eliminates many games that require great skill but little exertion such as marbles, horseshoes, and Space Invaders.

Anything meeting the first two rules where score is kept in some objective counting type of tally is a sport.

The object being counted can be runs, goals, points, or strokes, but there needs to be a way to determine who did more (or in the case of golf, less) of something. Most team sports fall into this category, but it also covers individual sports such as tennis. In many ways this rule encompasses most people’s traditional definition of a sport.

Anything meeting the first two rules that involves measurement of speed or distance is a sport.

This rule covers most traditional track and field events. You are either racing others or seeing who can move something like a shot-put, javelin, discus, or yourself (either vertically or horizontally) through space. Racing can include other components such as bicycles, skates, horses, or again, arguably, motor driven vehicles. Really nothing very controversial here.

The next rule is where I start to lose people because the following exceptions rule out activities as a sport.

Anything choreographed, set to music, or that includes an artistic element is not a sport.

Once you include music, it is A Performing Art, not A Sport. This rule eliminates everybody’s favorite winter game (behind curling), figure skating. At the amateur level, they like to de-emphasize the artistic aspect in favor of the athletic component by strictly regulating the type of music, skimpiness of the costumes, and the number and type of stunts that must be performed. But the mere fact that artistic merit is over half the score makes it less than a sport.

Ballroom dancing and cheerleading are trying to gain legitimacy as a sport rather than a competition, but it is nearly impossible to weed out the inherent artistic elements that make these activities distinctive.

The above rule is really a subset of the bigger, most controversial rule:

Anything involving subjective judging is not a sport.

If judges are involved it is either a Talent Competition or a Beauty Pageant. Now judges are different from referees or umpires in that the latter enforce the rules, while the former determine the winners. Let’s make that clear through a few examples. Weightlifting is a sport because the winner is the person that lifts the most measurable weight. Bodybuilding is a beauty contest because the person with the best looking muscles (as determined by the judges, not by any standards of good taste) wins. Swimming is a sport because the winner is the person that finishes first. Diving is a talent competition because the person that makes the prettiest and most difficult dive wins.

The real problem area here is gymnastics. Gymnasts are very athletic and train very hard. So do ballerinas, but nobody is calling ballet a sport. In both endeavors, their ultimate goal is to impress an audience, either a paying crowd or a group of judges. In gymnastics, everybody is doing pretty much the same moves and stunts, but the winner is the person that does them the best, i.e. is the most talented, not the strongest, swiftest, or most accurate. You could make gymnastics a sport by adding quantifiable criteria like who can hold an iron cross the longest or vault the furthest or do the most camels in a row, but that would destroy the reason people watch gymnastics, for the elegance and grace. Both very unquantifiable qualities.

I know I am courting controversy here, but my criteria are clear and objective. Just like sports should be.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Name an activity and I will determine its sportiness based solely on my criteria here.

A Bitter Taste

Fruit flavored bottled alcoholic drinks were in the news in Maryland this week. At the last minute, Governor Martin “Rockstar” O’Malley declined to sign a bill that would have treated flavored malt-beverage drinks such as Smirnoff Ice and Mike’s Hard Lemonade like beer instead of distilled spirits. This law was pushed by the liquor industry to allow these sweet drinks to be sold wherever beer can be sold and to avoid the much stiffer taxes on hard liquor. It’s all rather arcane, but the Baltimore Sun summed it up pretty well:

If the bill is vetoed, he said, the drinks will be taxed at $1.50 a gallon, the same rate as spirits, instead of the 9 cents a gallon of beer.

Flavored malt beverages, or “alcopops” as opponents call them, are usually less than 5% alcohol, much like beer. Most liquor, like my favorite, Jack Daniels, is around 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. That means that the effective rate for booze is 3¢ an ounce of actual alcohol while a 3.5 beer is 2¢ per liquid ounce of alcohol. Sounds fair enough.

Since the Maryland Attorney General ruled that alcopops are distilled liquor, they should be taxed higher. The effective rate would then become 23¢ an ounce of actual alcohol. This amounts to a tax of about 14¢ a bottle for a sweet drink versus less than a penny for a beer.

That’s enough to get a hard lemonade drinker like me up into a Boston Twisted Tea Party level frenzy. It’s bad enough these drinks cost more than a six pack of beer for just four bottles, now the state wants to nick me for an extra dime on every bottle. I’m outraged.

Opponents of these drinks call them gateway drinks because no teenager has ever drunk a beer despite its bad taste. A rather alarmist editorial in the Washington Post ranted this way:

The drinks, known as "alcopops," "malternatives" and "flavored alcoholic beverages," are popular with young and underage drinkers. Dressed up to taste like lemonade, iced tea and various berry-flavored juices, they are designed to appeal to people who haven't yet developed a palate for booze itself. Wrapped in splashy, multicolored packaging and promoted by images of fresh-faced drinkers who in some instances look college-age, "alcopops" are a hit with entry-level drinkers, especially women (emphasis mine). They are, as Mr. O'Malley put it, "a gateway type of thing."

Now I’m being insulted. I’m a man (last time I checked) that has been drinking for the last 28 years of my life (don’t do the math, Dad) and have never really acquired the taste of beer. Sure, I’ll drink it if there isn’t anything else, but at picnics and other gatherings I like a nice sweet mild intoxicant.

They way to keep alcohol out of the hands of kids is not to make it harder, more annoying, and more expensive for legal adults to enjoy the drink of their preference. In the past twenty-five years, there has been a serious ratcheting down by what I call the No Fun Allowed Crowd. Groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have put into place serious restrictions that have arguably saved lives. On the other hand, I have an outraged teen-age son that has to register with Selective Service next month but can’t legally enjoy a refreshing fruity alcoholic malt beverage with his dad for three more years.

And that sucks. Like bitter, sour hard lemonade.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are so called alcopops any different from beer?

Earth Day Rant

Hank Stuever (no stranger to this blog) today claims Yoga Beri-like that Earth Day is passe because it's too popular. I have news for him. Like the whiny kid on Mothers Day that wonders when Children's Day is, every day is Earth Day. It's great to get together and hold hands and hug trees, but every day people all over the earth make a choice between damaging the earth and feeding their families.

Here is a dirty secret: Clean air and water are luxury goods. And like all luxuries and all necessities, there is a price for it. We Americans as a society started paying that cost in the 1970s when we passed the Clean Air Act and traded in Smokey The Bear (“Only you can prevent forest fires.”) for Woodsy The Owl (“Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.”) Delve just a little into economics (like the book Naked Economics reviewed here) and you learn about direct and shared costs and benefits.

Anytime tougher regulations are suggested, the resource extraction and waste producing industries band together to minimize their direct costs at the benefit of our shared benefits. Dick Cheney speaks for the oil industry, but who speaks for the trees? Senator Lorax?

Behind the general lack of civil rights and the suppression of internal minority groups, the environmental damage China is inflicting on itself and its neighbors is a major issue people are interlinking with the upcoming Olympics. I share their concern. Air pollution in Beijing is atrocious. From the top of the hill in Jingshan Park, you can’t see the front gate of the Forbidden City. The Chinese have been paying lip service to respecting the environment for some time, but the demands of economic growth have kept the coal-fired power plants chugging.

And when I mention China’s “neighbors” I mean the whole world. Smog from Asia works its way across the Pacific to acid rain on Oregon. A few years back when we went to Halong Bay in Vietnam, one of the most beautiful and serene natural places on earth (check out the pictures if you don't believe me), we passed a steady stream of large earth-moving trucks transporting coal from the nearby mountains that will end up in power plants in southern China. Vietnam is trying to balance mining with ecotourism, but selling off your backyard pays well. Just ask West Virginia.

Here in our own country we are leveling mountains and filling in stream beds to feed the coal plants that power the enormous internet engines of northern Virginia. A single building of internet servers can draw the energy needed for a small city. And coal is a dirty, dirty fuel. Back in the 80s when the threat of underpowered whiny electric cars was first being being bandied about, the hot rod magazines liked to point out that there is a smokestack at the end of every plug.

In London, they have spent nearly a decade peeling two centuries worth of grime and soot off of St. Paul’s Cathedral. You can see the restored white walls right next to the still blackened surfaces. Victorian London probably made modern Beijing look like a clear country meadow

The developing world sees our cars and highways and hears us preaching environmentalism and rightly asks “What about our turn?” It seems wasteful for me to drag 2,000 pounds of metal and plastic around with me everywhere I go just because I might have to put a dresser in the back of my SUV every now and then. Or even more ironically, to take my bicycle down the road for a drive.

One of the great advantages of a compressed industrialization cycle is that other countries can bypass our mistakes. In China and Vietnam cell phones are ubiquitous because it’s easier to raise a few cell towers than run miles of wire. The newly refurbished streets of Beijing are a mix of highways with access roads that have wide physically divided bike lanes. Their spanking new subway system has massive bicycle “park and ride” racks. It would be great if we could just skip the whole air-you-cut-with-a-knife phase and move onto clean energy sources.

Worldwide food resources are beginning to tighten and some doomsayers are already predicting that Malthusian chickens are coming home to roost. I doubt that, but our wildly optimistic hope that biofuels will let us extend our energy hogging ways another generation or two is looking pretty naïve. Burning food to power cars doesn’t make any more sense than burning dead dinosaurs.

The eventual solution will be a combination of big and little. I forsee a future where solar cells are as ubiquitous as semiconductor chips are now. But you can’t power a Google server farm without raising the albedo of an entire county. Nuclear power in some safe sustainable way will have to become a contributor, if only to make us less dependent on peoples that hate us because we have a six-hundred year head start on the philosophical cycle that runs from fundamentalism to enlightenment.

We as humans are lazy indifferent animals that tend not to be prodded into action until disaster is imminent, and then not always. Just ask Pompeii. We tend to do Just Enough and we tend to do it in The Nick Of Time. I just hope we aren’t Too Late.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:Will life be better or worse in fifty years?

Rejoinders

Part of the joy of blogging is reading and commenting on other blogs. Often a quick comment I leave makes me ponder a topic that I sometimes later expand into a full blogpost. Today I take three smaller ones and give you a trifecta of what are extended blog comments.

Mooselet has a great exegesis on the practice of following shoppers through a parking lot to their car in order to take their parking space. She calls it “stalking”. I call it “vulturing”. Either way, it involves driving very slowly behind people laden with shopping bags hoping their car is in the aisle they are actually in rather than some adjacent row that would make the exercise pointless. Parking lot technique is one of the many areas in which I am inferior to my wife. She knows which aisle to go down and how fast. She can spot potential victims across the parking lot and maneuver herself so that other cars are cut off.

I take the typically male tactic of snapping up the first available space regardless of proximity to any nearby entrance. My obviously deficient parking theory is that by getting out of the car as fast as possible, the extra time spent walking is less than the time spent stalking, resulting in getting into the store faster. I’m still not sure how this is wrong, but it clearly is.

When I do park near a department store door, it somehow tends to be the one to the lingerie department. Most of the time, I can humor my wife and accede to her directing from the shotgun position. However, after Halloween, the crush of holiday shoppers frays my nerves so much that I voluntarily relinquish my masculine birthright to drive and let my wife drive to the mall. Where she vultures with the skill of California condor.

2fs rants on his pet peeve of occasionally and randomly getting charged full price for drink refills at dining establishments. In the relentless effort of businesses to make customers perform the duties previously performed by employees (think of self-serve check out lines), many fast food restaurants now let patrons pour their own drinks. In those places it never makes sense to buy a cup size larger than small (which was easily the jumbo a decade or two ago) since more soda is free. Some sharp industrial engineer has performed the calculus and decided that the labor saved on the minimum wage counter help outweighs the value of the soda taken by surreptitious seconds and thirds and the walking-out-the-door top-off.

In the places that still meter liquids I will sometimes pay the extra dime for the bigger cup so I just don’t have to go back to the counter and jump the line for a refill. The one place I commonly get the biggest size available is ChainChickenPlaceClosedOnSunday where I have developed a taste for diet lemonade. I think they do offer free or low cost refills, but I just want as much as possible.

Free refills is a symptom of the high-fructose corn syrup gluttonous society that is peculiarly American. One of the many pieces of travel advice visitors to Europe get is that not only are drink portions small and expensive, the concept of free refills is up there with voluntary tips as an inexplicably yankee practice. Still, I agree that if the market is going to free refills, the few places that rip you off for a new cup don’t deserve our collective business. Name names, so I can organize the boycott.

Finally, Her Royal Highness, Queen of Everything Courtney has seen the specter of single gender schools get raised again. This is one of those evergreen educational “reforms” that become the rage on a regular basis. At least since all the elite male-only public high schools were turned co-ed decades ago. Here in Baltimore, old timers will mist up nostalgically for the old days when Baltimore Polytechnic was a bastion of testosterone. And they see some weird slight that adjacent Western High is still all-girls.

Same sex schools seem to be similar to school uniforms: solutions in search of a problem. One decade they are the answer to meek girls getting overshadowed by guys, particularly in math and science. The next year, they are the way to engage rambunctious young men. There are always studies “proving” (and don’t get me going on the educational industrial complexes complete abuse of statistical methods) the advantages of them, but the results can usually be dismissed as the result of the Hawthorne Effect.

There is a certain civilizing influence in having to attend classes with members of the opposite gender. If anything it humanizes the objects of your teenage lusts and teaches some social self-control. My parents threatened to send me to Jesuit High, the local all-boys Catholic school. I was given a reprieve when it turns out that they didn’t offer German or Calculus. I breathed a sigh of relief. From the days of my Model United Nations geek-festing, I came to notice that when outside the hearing range of their chaperones, the Jesuit teams, despite being impeccably well-dressed and conservatively groomed were just social animals. They practically bayed at the moon. Controlling for tuition payment, the co-ed private schools never seemed to be as out of control.

Of course, my opinions are prejudiced since I met my wife in high school, which would never have happened at Jesuit. What other doors that would have opened, I don’t know, but I’m happy where the traditional co-ed system took me.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Tackle any topic or go for all three.