Not a Potted Plant

College football has finally acquiesced to a playoff. I’ll be honest, though, that I don’t fully understand how it’s going to work:

The group of presidents also endorsed a rotation of the semifinal games among six bowl sites and a rotation of the championship game among neutral sites. The semifinals either will be played on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, and the national title game will be played on “Championship Monday,” the first Monday in January that is six or more days after the final semifinal game is played. […]

There will be three contract bowls — the Champions Bowl, which is a partnership between the Big 12 and SEC, the Rose Bowl, which has a longstanding tradition between the Big Ten and Pac 12, and a bowl to be determined for the ACC, which is likely to continue its partnership with the Orange Bowl.

“In terms of our contract bowl, and our New Year’s Day tie-in, we expect to have an announcement on that jointly in the very near future,” Swofford said.

The three other bowls, called “access bowls,” have yet to be determined, but the decision will force the Sugar Bowl and Fiesta Bowl to become bidders.

Okay, here is what I don’t fully understand. Let’s assume that the final three bowls are the Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and Cotton Bowl. Let’s also assume have included Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma State, and Oregon. Let’s further assume that in the rotation, the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl were the semi-final games. LSU and Oregon to Sugar, Alabama and Oklahoma State to Rose Bowl.

Does the Champions Bowl take the number three team in the SEC and the number two team in the Big 12? Or does this create vacancies so they take the best teams they can find? In the BCS, the Rose Bowl would take teams like TCU, but in the BCS they were limited in which teams they could take and it’s not clear whether the new system would be so limited.

With only four teams, it’s going to be tough for teams outside of the big four to get in, and will require a fair amount of luck. The ACC will have a tough time of it, the Big East tougher, and I don’t see how any team from any other conference gets in period. So their access – or lack thereof – to the premier bowls is important.

Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. If the bowls are expanding to 12 teams, then the Champions Bowl having Arkansas (#6) and Kansas State (#8) isn’t the end of the world. The question, ultimately, is whether Boise State (#7) would have gotten in at all, or if instead big conference schools outside the top 12 get in. If it’s up to the bowls, it may well be the latter. If it’s up to committees or some formula, it’ll be the former.

For all of the complaints about the BCS by the lesser conferences, they at least had guaranteed admission if they fit certain criteria. If the new system does away with that, it will actually be much worse than the status quo. They’re still probably left out of the playoff system*, and may get passed over for worse teams with bigger followings for the big bowl games. It remains to be seen whether or not this is the case.

Right now, this announcement raises more questions than it answers about the college football post-season.

* – TCU twice managed a top 4 ranking from a non-AQ conference. However, that conference no longer exists in that form (a form many argued was AQ-worthy) and a current champion from either the Mountain West Conference or Conference USA can go undefeated and will still likely be outside the top 4.

1. If it was a USAF jet that was shot down over international waters instead of a Turkish jet, there would be calls to reduce every airstrip in Syria into pools of still-quivering molten glass. But it was a Turkish jet and there are calls for an appropriate restraint and diplomatic condemnation. NATO membership counts for something, except when it doesn’t.
2. With that said, going to war in Syria would be a bad idea. It wasn’t such a swift idea in Libya, a nation now well on its way to becoming Somalia – North. Syria is better-armed and has closer ties to Russia.
3. Has it really been a whole month since LeagueFest? I felt so relaxed back then.
4. Continue Reading →

Minimize the amount of direct contact the parties have with one another.

Consider this story. Granted, this isn’t exactly what was said, at high volume and rapid speed, this morning in the hallway outside the courtroom. I can’t remember the exact details as I handled eight other eviction cases functionally exactly like this one this morning. But the exchange below conveys the sense of one case I settled this morning in the hallway outside the courtroom.

I said, “Hello, Ms. Defendant. I wonder if we might discuss some kind of agreement to work out the dispute, that’s usually better for everyone involved.”

Quoth the defendant: “I’m not paying your lying-ass fishing fisher of a fishing client one red goddamned penny over $2,000. And I’m not moving out for two weeks until my new place is ready!” Her neck muscles were bulging like suspension bridge cables in rage.

So then I walked down to the other end of the hall, where my client was sitting. “I spoke to her.” My client interrupted me.

Quoth the plaintiff, literally spitting in anger: “You tell that fishing thief down there that if she doesn’t pay me all 2,000 fishing dollars she owes me, and if she doesn’t give me my fishing house back in two goddamned weeks that I won’t stop suing her fishing ass until Arma-fishing-geddon! And she can take that to the motherfishing bank!” He pokes me in my chest with his index finger, then remembers who he’s talking to. “I’m sorry, Burt, I’m just upset. So what did she say?”

“You know what? I think I can get her up to what you just said. Hang tight right here, and let me negotiate with her some more.”

Thus, I position my clients in the courthouse hallway as far away from where the other parties can be found as possible. In this case, if these two had been within earshot of one another, I’d no doubt have had to have tried the case despite the fact that they both came out of the starting gate agreeing with one another on the amount of both money and time, the only things that matter in an eviction.

In a recent linky-post, I mentioned a study that suggests that skeptics of global warming are actually more scientifically knowledgeable than believers:

Some righties are getting a real kick out of a new study suggesting that global warming skeptics have more scientific and numeric literacy than its believers. Since that was clearly not the results that the study’s founders had hoped to find, that’s icing on the cake. Seriously, I don’t consider it particularly relevant. I don’t consider it surprising. I consider it funny as hell.

At some point I will write my magnum opus on this, but some things can’t wait.

What the study actually found was not that there was a strong correlation on skepticism and scientific knowledge, but actually that the more knowledgeable someone was, the more polarized they were:

We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

This makes nothing less than complete sense to me. Studies have shown that both Republicans and Democrats tend to be smarter and more knowledgeable than independents. The more intelligent and knowledgeable, the more extreme. This is a little foreign to me, personally, because the more I read and consume, the less certain I become about anything.

In another way, however, it makes perfect sense. We do not consume information objectively. When we sort out data and turn it into information, we often do so with an endgame in mind. Rather than increased intellectual firepower and knowledge resulting in a greater objective understanding of anything, it merely results in the ability sort information to confirm our existing biases. It allows us to rationalize or contradict inconvenient information, and to make more sense of and expound upon affirming information.

In the case of global warming, people assign scientific concepts they know or have heard about (a glass of icewater not overflowing when the ice melts) in misapplied ways towards global warming (doesn’t apply because ice will be falling off actual land and into the water).

The cause-effect here can be circular. The mind tries to find order in all of the chaotic information in processes. Intelligent minds are more capable of this than not. And so as more information comes in, it’s sorted to fit a particular pattern. On the other side, people with a particular passion tend to seek out more information on something. There are anti-evolution people who know far, far more about the theory of evolution than I ever will – and they sought it out with a particular conclusion in mind. The same applies to anti-vaccination people, who know a lot more about vaccinations than anybody but researchers, doctors, and activists on the other side. More information sought, more information processed, more righteousness accumulated.

Over the past few years, I have known people who have gone from unreasonably right to unreasonably left. They were intelligent before, and they are intelligent now. All that was required was a massive re-sorting of data. Full speed, other direction.

If you haven’t read Elias Isquith’s post on respect and the presidency, it’s well worth your time.

The Economist also had a good piece on the subject:

The beautiful idiocy of Cartman’s demand to “respect mah authoritah!” is that he deserves none; he’s just a self-appointed cop, and besides, he’s a foot and a half tall. But someone who wins a majority of votes in a democratic election is, in his capacity as an officeholder, entitled to respect. His actions in that office are the effectuation of the democratic will, and the office deserves more respect than, say, that of chief financial officer of Exampleco because the people voted to have him be the guy who exercises political power. If we don’t respect the offices to which we elect people, then we don’t respect ourselves as citizens. In parliamentary democracies, this sort of respect may be more vested in legislatures, parties and procedures. In our system, a lot of it ends up vested in the presidency. That may not be optimal, but we have to respect some instantiation of the national will, or democracy is pretty thin, bitter gruel.

So often, the response to this sort of thing is to compare the disrespecting of the last president or how the hecklers of this one demanded respect for the last one. Yeah, some people are hypocrites. Sometimes, the people you remember disrespecting the last guy aren’t those who are now suggesting the office be respected. I give Chait credit for being consistent. I have at least tried to be consistent in the opposite direction. I try not to even leave it at “Obama” except when I have previously referred to him as President Obama though I’m imperfect about that.

My reasoning is similar to Elias’s, and he states it better than I probably can.

Monday, June 25, a week from today, is expected to be the Big Opinion Drop at the United States Supreme Court. The tea leaf readers are predicting a 5-4 decision, with Anthony Kennedy providing the decisive vote, striking down at least part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the case of State of Florida v. United States Department of Health and Human Services. Florida v. HHS is only the most prominent of several companion cases challenging “ObamaCare.” Also watch out for Arizona v. United States, the challenge to Arizona’s HB 1040. I’d look for that decision to come down on Monday also. And maybe a few others of interest.

I will be in trial all day June 25 and likely again all day on June 26. Which is a bummer of a situation for a Supreme Court watcher like me to be on the biggest day of the Court’s year. So I may not have time to get to much analysis until later next week. I’m sure, though, that there will be the appropriate OMG-the-sky-is-falling rhetoric on the one side and rejoice-the-Republic-is-saved rhetoric on the other. As for sober analysis, well, y’all are just going to have to wait until the trial courts here in California give me some time to read and think. Or you could always, you know, read and think before evaluating on your own in the interim. Just a suggestion.

In a move that, if not intentionally calculated to polarize the electorate, might as well have been, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced an order aimed primarily at U.S. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, by which “low-priority” undocumented persons will effectively no longer be apprehended or deported. It took effectively zero time for critics of the Obama Administration to accuse the President of imperiously, unilaterally, and quite possibly unconstitutionally enacting the DREAM Act, a bill which Congress has twice failed to pass, by Executive Order.

Now, this isn’t an Executive Order. It is a Cabinet Department statement of policy, which is not quite the same thing as an Executive Order. But, does this policy usurp Congress’ clear power to control immigration policy? You don’t have to be a flag-waver for Team Red to be concerned about something like this, after all. Continue Reading →