Matins

¶ Why professional football must change or die: the scandal of glossed-over concussions. Cord Jefferson, at The Awl, goes on to target the economic foundation of sports-pension inequities. (“Boxing, which drops the niceties of football and lets minorities and poor whites pound each other’s heads sans helmets, sometimes until someone dies, has no nationwide pension plan at all.”)

Exacerbating its unwillingness to accept that football can cause brain damage is that the NFL isn’t doing everything within its power to prevent head injuries in the first place. As recently as February, helmet-manufacturers were questioning the league’s helmet-testing program, worried that it was dangerously flawed. The tests proved so bad, in fact, that one manufacturer pulled out, with its CEO saying the NFL’s tests are “not deserving of credibility.”

For reasons that are obvious yet difficult to describe, the NFL’s policy of allowing its players to gradually destroy themselves would probably be less offensive were African Americans involved in ways other than just running, jumping and hitting. They aren’t. As of today, there are still no black majority owners in the NFL, and only one who comes close (Reggie Fowler owns 40 percent of the Minnesota Vikings). Out of 32, only six of the league’s head coaches are African American, a dearth that may be part of why blacks don’t even watch the NFL. According to an ABC study, less than 13 percent of the league’s viewership is black. Football fans are primarily white and relatively wealthy, earning $55,000 annually on average. 40 percent are over the age of 50. “Football has demographics that baseball would kill for,” said one CNN analyst, who, were he more direct, would have said, “White guys with hefty disposable incomes watch football.”

Maybe it’s a fair trade–black kids losing the ability to remember their mother’s name in exchange for a decade of big checks and fame amongst middle-aged white men. What’s not fair by any reasonable metric is what comes next, when players retire. Although the NFL recently started a fund that will give ex-players with dementia $50,000 a year for medical treatment, it’s also installed a byzantine bureaucracy between the patients and that money. Brent Boyd, a former Vikings lineman who now suffers from dizziness and chronic headaches, has been deemed ineligible for funds multiple times by league doctors, who say that one of his major on-field concussions “could not organically be responsible for all or even a major portion” of his symptoms.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody writes so persuasively about the virtues of Alejandro Amenábar’s film, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, that we’re going to make a point of seeing it while it’s still in the theatres; we had planned on waiting, but no longer.

It’s a parable which is intended to comment on theocracries in the middle east which (just yesterday it was reported) stone women to death for pregnancy outside marriage.

It does makes a strong use of ritual scenes and large crowd ones (part of the point) but these are made more interesting by also moving out to shoot the earth from a distance. We have a metaphysical take or perspective (dazzling visuals as Izzy says), and as in George Eliot’s films, intertitles (yes intertitles are used and skilfully) persist in framing these events as universal and felt somehow further off or in history (writing) as in Eliot’s poem (above).

But at its heart is something quiet: there are so many intimate quiet scenes of learning, of reading, and of teaching, thinking, trying to understand how the earth relates to the sun, and both to the cosmos. The script is intelligent and the acting subtle and vivid, the stage business filled with intensities, including Hypatia’s large sandbox where she traces out with her faithful servant different visions of the planet’s movements. There’s a sequence of Hypatia aboard a ship with Orestes on the water with Orestes in a classical kind of boat. I don’t know if historically accurate but it was visually stunning and I liked to see her enjoy herself out in the open too.

Prime

¶ At the end of a lengthy piece about deficits, fiscal austerity, and other bugaboos, Simon Johnson and James Kwak remind plutocrats that cake cannot be had and eaten — not even theirs. You say that tax cuts ought to be extended, as a form of drip-down stimulus. Well, this is probably idiotic, but assuming it’s not, then the tax cuts should be terminated as soon as the unemployment drops to healthy leavels. We think that you’ll have a lot of fun pondering this object lesson. (The Baseline Scenario)

What do matter are taxes and entitlements. Therefore, the coming battle over the Bush tax cuts is of real importance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending the Bush tax cuts would add $2.3 trillion to the total 2018 debt. The single biggest step our government could take this year to address the structural deficit would be to let the tax cuts expire. And a credible commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability should reduce interest rates today, helping to stimulate the economy.

Critics say that this amounts to increasing taxes at a time of high unemployment, and that instead the tax cuts should be extended as a stimulus measure. This overlooks the fact that tax cuts are an inefficient form of stimulus, because many people choose to save their additional income instead of spending it.

If the goal is to boost growth and employment immediately, it would be better to let the tax cuts expire and dedicate some of the increased revenue to real stimulus programs. Alternatively, if some tax cuts are extended – as it seems likely that at least those for the middle class will be – there should be provisions to eliminate them automatically when unemployment falls to a preset level. 

Tierce

¶ At You Are Not So Smart, a frontal attack on the Hydraulic Theory of Anger — to which you are, in all likelihood, an unwitting subscriber. Far from dissipating toxic frustrations, it seems, catharsis — well, venting, anyway —creates a need for them.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist.

He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like – anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. If you don’t vent the pressure, someone is going to get a beating.

It sounds good. You may even look back on your life and remember times when you went batshit, punched a wall or broke a plate, and it made things better, but you are not so smart.

Sext

¶ Dear Choire Sicha: the Daily Blagueurs want you to know that they totally get you. We never, ever complain about how hard it is to do what we do here, never.

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Never! Not ever. (If anything, our labors have made the Editor somewhat insufferable; he likes to boast to friends that “now,” (and this would be thanks to us), he’s “staggeringly well-informed.” (But then we’ve always known that his role model is the Jodie Foster character in Inside Man.)

Nones

¶ Why is Beijing cozying up to the PRC’s ancient enemy, the KuoMinTang party of Chiang Kai-Shek? Well, things evolve, and it’s the KMT’s opposition that China would like to keep out of power.  (It is our expectation that the democratization of China will be accomplished by a gradual Taiwanese takeover of the Mainland.) Nicholas Consonery at Foreign Policy:

The Chinese government is looking for ways to bolster support within Taiwan for Ma and the KMT — and, by extension, for the current direction of cross — Strait relations. Ma’s government has moved Taiwan toward ever-closer economic integration with the mainland and is probing the political implications of this integration. But Beijing is aware that skepticism of the mainland’s intentions remains strong in Taiwan, and that Ma must avoid being cast as overly solicitous of Beijing. 

That said, a major driver of Beijing’s approach is a trend I laid out on this blog last year: Beijing is seeking to avoid steps that create opportunities for Taiwan’s major opposition party — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — and is working hard to avoid any risk of a DPP resurgence. The Chinese leadership does not want to revisit the lows reached during the presidency of former DPP head Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan.

Beijing is playing this game deftly. For the past year, Ma has promised Taiwanese voters that he would boost Taiwan’s international profile by signing the controversial Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, a deal he said would open the door to trade agreements with other countries. If Beijing had pressured Singapore to back away from these negotiations with Taiwan after ECFA, it would not only have raised Taiwanese ire toward Beijing — it would have inflicted serious harm on Ma’s domestic credibility and strengthened DPP arguments that Taiwan should simply go it alone.

Vespers

¶ Yes, yes, we ought to read The Huffington Post on our own more often, instead of waiting for other people to find the fun. It has been days and days and days since Anis Shivani published his list of the 15 most overrated American writers. but if his list is no longer news, exactly, it’s still a gas to read. Here he is on the last writer on his list — whom he rushes to insist is not a writer — the Times’s own Michiko Kakutani. Rude and impolite it may be, but we dare you to look away. (via MetaFilter)

Not a writer, by any stretch of even my novelistic imagination, but I include her here as the enabler-in-chief for the preceding mediocrities. Simply the worst book critic on the planet. Possesses only one criterion to judge fiction–does it fit her notions of the mid-twentieth century realist novel? No postmodern experiments for her, nothing radical that doesn’t fit her naive realist mold. If she loves a book, avoid it like hell (it’s bound to be banal). If she dislikes it, consider buying it. If she really hates it, run to the bookstore and get it, right now! Every good book is Chekhovian or Jamesian or Forsterian or Updikean–she has mastered the technique of saying nothing in a review by comparing books to an author’s previous books and to classics which have nothing to do with the book at hand. Judges books as if the entire modernist and postmodernist canon had never existed. One of the world’s great purveyors of mindless philistinism–it’s divine justice that she would be the New York Times‘s chief book critic (and soon to go behind the pay wall). Sample judgments: “What’s amazing is that Mr. [Denis] Johnson [in Tree of Smoke] somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original–and potent.” “A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.” I limn you, Michiko, lapidarily!

Compline

¶ The fracas ensuing from Target’s contribution to the campaign of a gubernatorial candidate with an anti-LGTB agenda has thrown an unholy practice into a new and probably darker zone. While Target has endeavored to make nice with gay activisits, many lobbyists feel that the affair will just push corporations to figure out more anonymous ways of giving. We hope that the Human Rights Campaign will seize the day by demanding verifiably transparent campaign-contribution disclosures from targeted companies. We heartily support business boycotts. (Los Angeles Times; via  The Morning News)

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Have a Look

¶ Has somebody remembered Giambologna’s Marina from Art 101? Cool. (Mila’s Daycreams)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 10:30 am.