State of the Association pt. 1

Since the election (and since the Browns are bad even for the Browns) I've been mostly pretending that the only thing that exists in the universe is NBA basketball.

Given that fact, and the fact that I haven't been writing much, here's a post (or, fingers crossed, a series of posts!) about the state of the NBA, with a special focus on my beloved Lebrons, erm, I mean, Cavaliers.  I thought about starting a new blog called The High Post based on my love of the Lowe Post basketball podcast with the great Zach Lowe, but The High Post is already taken as a blogger blog, and also I have enough fallow blogs.  So here goes.

True NBA fans know that the "real" NBA regular season runs from Christmas day to the middle of March, a span of about twelve weeks.  Everything before that is too early to worry much about, and everything after that (late March and early April - the playoffs start on Tax Day) is garbage time since a big portion of the league isn't really trying to win games but rather to jockey for lottery position.  

Thus it's a good time right now to take a look around the league and see where things stand at the end of what we might call the post-preseason, aka the first third of the regular season when teams are still trying to figure out what they might have.  

Part One:  The Hopeless Garbage

30.  Philadelphia 76ers

Fans of the Sixers will probably chafe at this ranking, and indeed it gives me no pleasure.  The Sixers are fun to watch, and they have a lot of interesting pieces.  But oh my goodness they are terrible.  Their offense is basically what happens when you pick up a new basketball video game for the first time and you can't really figure out how it works so you're constantly making the wrong pass, jacking up bricky fadeaways with 15 seconds left on the shot clock, and dribbling out of bounds for no reason.

The Sixers are super-young, and they will get better as the season goes along and Joel Embiid works his way into a full-time job.  As many jokes as we've made about Embiid during his two-year odyssey to return from foot problems, he appears to be as good as advertised.  He's far and away their best player and if he stays healthy he's a lock to become an All-NBA fixture.  

That said, this team is a major mess, and it's hard to imagine them winning a playoff series with anything like this configuration.  The Process continues.

29.  The Phoenix Suns

Oh, the poor Suns.  Once the Moneyball A's of the NBA, the Suns pioneered many of the modern pace-and-space concepts that are now the accepted model for constructing an offense.  Then all those guys retired and left this... thing.  I can't say a ton about them because I don't watch them.  Neither should you.  Their niche is that they are a smallish team that doesn't shoot the ball very well and doesn't play very good defense.  That's not a niche you want to be in.  

Like the Sixers, they have a lot of young players who will get better.  Unlike the Sixers, they don't have anyone who particularly seems like a transcendent talent.  No franchise has a bleaker outlook at the moment, except maybe...

28.  Brooklyn Nets

Suns fans may be howling "how can you put us lower than the Nets?"  Honestly, you're probably right, and the fact that is the best thing that can be said about your team is a sign of something very, very sad.  The Nets STINK.  Worse, they're not even young.  Their situation is utterly hopeless, stretching endlessly out into the future.  They have been terrible for years after trading away their draft picks, meaning they haven't even gotten any young talent in exchange for their awfulness.

The only reason I can't put them lower than the Suns is that the East is so bad that it's possible the Nets could somehow stumble into a playoff appearance in the next couple of years and maybe even give some 3-seed trouble.  That will not happen to the Suns. 

Remember those pace-and-space concepts we were talking about?  Yeah.  The Nets two best players are Brook Lopez, who can't run, and Trevor Booker, who can't shoot.  They're also giving major minutes to Anthony Bennett, who can't do anything.  Do not watch this team.  That is all.

27.  LA Lakers

Another storied franchise that's fallen on some hard times, these Lakers, like the Sixers, are actually quite watchable.  They have a few interesting characters (Metta World Peace!  Jose Calderon!), a quirky, talented bench (Larry Nance, Jr!) and some veteran leadership (Timofey Mozgov!  Luol Deng!)  What they don't have is anyone who can credibly guard another human who is more than five feet from the basket.  

The Lakers are the bizarro version of the Warriors - they give up points so effortlessly it almost seems like a different sport.  Opposing dribblers get into the lane with such ease that someone watching their first basketball game might come away with the impression that it is illegal for the defender to be in the offensive player's way.  Their attempts to defend pick-and-roll have the appearance of a team that wasn't told before the game that the pick-and-roll is a thing.  

Brandon Ingram should improve, and that will make a big difference because right now he is absolutely KILLING the Lakers with a brutal 35/27/71 shooting split, and D'Angelo Russell seems to be developing into a nice shoot-first, pass-second, defend-last point guard in the Kyrie Irving mold, so there's some reason for optimism here.  But it has to be a concern that the Lakers are trying to develop young guards on a team where absolutely no one plays defense.  That kind of thing tends to be contagious.  

26.  Orlando Magic

By far the most talented of the truly hopeless teams, the Orlando Magic might be the most oddly-constructed team in the NBA.  It's as if someone started collecting interesting puzzle pieces that had been cast off from other teams...  and then just kept collecting those interesting puzzle pieces until the roster had 15 guys on it.  Actually that is basically how this team was constructed, and it shows.  

The Magic's best player is Serge Ibaka (and it's not close), who is a major asset because he can shoot and he can play the 4 or the 5 for short stretches (or longer stretches if the opponent goes small a la the GSW Death Lineup.)  Also on the roster are Nikola Vucevic and Bismack Biyombo, neither of whom can shoot threes (Biyombio can't shoot at all; Vucevic has a nice midrange game) or play any position except center, thus taking away some of Ibaka's value.  I cannot explain this.  I doubt Orlando can either.  

When teams let Orlando ground-and-pound with their bigs on the floor, they can beat you up and wear you down.  But it's not too difficult to put Biyombo in situations he can't handle (and that's being kind) at which point this becomes a team with no ideas beyond Elfrid Payton's sometimes-nifty drive-and-kick game.  The problem there is that other than Ibaka and Evan Fournier, the Magic just don't have the shooters to scare anyone away from just clogging the paint and forcing Payton to jack long jumpers that he has no prayer of making.  

There are enough assets here that you get the feeling the Magic could become something, but right now they're locked into this Island of Misfit Toys act and it's pretty excruciating.  

Next:  The Hopefully Mediocre

Inside Out

Some movies are like memories - frozen moments in time that define a character and the fictional world around her.  Some are like ideas - lines of reasoning aimed at making sense of the world as it presents itself.  

Inside Out is both and neither at the same time.  It is a movie about how ideas, the tools we use to try to navigate the trials of life, affect our memories, and how our view of our memories affects our ideas about how to live.

Few children truly live the life of Riley, but most think they do until age ten or so, at least according to our cultural mythology.  At the beginning of Inside Out we meet our Riley at the age of eleven and she’s just endured a setback that threatens to overwhelm her sunny disposition with sadness.

If it stopped there it would be a standard schmaltzy children’s movie (“Don’t say the D-Word!” - managing editor Fake Bill Simmons) but Pixar went above and beyond in this one, sacrificing some narrative zip for some real thematic breadth.  The problem with Riley’s sadness isn’t how it makes her feel, it’s how it affects what she might do.  For the parents in the audience at least, the movie takes on its momentum at the instant we realize that Riley’s choices in response to her deteriorating emotional situation might really be limiting what she might be able to accomplish in her life.  We are in danger of losing her.

Amidst all this is a serious meditation on the finality of forgetting - the knowledge that when a little girl forgets a memory that bit of time is irreversibly discarded, used up.  And we can rewind the movie as many times as we want but that yawning pit of forgetting is always there, disintegrating everything into dust as black as ink.  

Yet rarely has a movie ever seemed so effortlessly positive about the state of the human condition.  Everyone in this movie suffers, and none of it is meaningless.  The terrifying trials the animated children of our childhood memories endured are the blueprints for houses we live in today, where we stuff coca-cola and twizzlers into our backpacks before taking our children to movies to learn important lessons about honesty.  

Pixar has put the entire universe into the mind of a depressed preteen girl and made the universe seem all the more limitless for it.  A best picture nomination seems assured.  Bravo.

My Quickie Take on the Series Right Before It Starts Because I’m a Procrastinator and Didn’t Do It Before Now

Why The Heat Will Win

 I’m rooting for the Heat so this could very well be motivated reasoning.  But I think of boxing history, where we find many examples of an aging champion having a tough fight with a young upstart and losing a contest that could have gone either way.  

 In this situation the two fighters almost always rematch within the year, and the fighter who won the first fight almost always wins the second fight easier than he won the first fight.  The reason is fairly straightforward - the aging ex-champion is older, slower, and creakier, while the young champion is about the same.  

 He may even be better.  Lebron is having his best, most efficient playoffs since he tried to take on the entire NBA by himself with the 2008-09 Cavs.  The Spurs gave Lebron some trouble early in the series in 2013, but he may be ready for them this time.  His shot selection and relentlessness have been the Scylla and Charybdis that have sunk some excellent Eastern Conference defenses, while Tim Duncan’s minutes and production have been dwindling for years.

 What’s Wrong With This Reasoning

 Basketball isn’t boxing.  They let you bring other guys on the court with you to help you win, and the Spurs are better than last year with the addition of Marco Belinelli and the continued development of Kawhi Leonard.  It must have pained other Western GM’s to see Belinelli go to the Spurs - he’s the perfect bench shooter for them and he makes the series just a little bit more fascinating.  

 The Spurs’ role players are mostly young guys, and the Heat’s supporting cast is practically an AARP meeting.  Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis, and Shane Battier may all be too old to be expected to reasonably defend any position in the Spurs aggressive offensive scheme for more than a few minutes.  

 If that happens, the Heat don’t really have a plan B.  James Jones can’t guard anyone either, so their other outside shooting option is Norris Cole, who creates super-small lineups when he’s on the floor with Chalmers, lineups the talented San Antonio frontcourt will be able to exploit.  

 Why the Heat will Win Anyway

 Lebron James is very good at basketball.  Kawhi Leonard had a decent time defending Lebron last year, but in the end James was too good shooting the jumpshot and lit him up in Game 7.  There’s no real reason to think Leonard has James’ number.  He has to prove it all over again, and it may be too much to ask a third-year player to be Lebron James’ primary defender in two straight Finals.

 The even more important difference that’s easy to forget is that Dwyane Wade was a shell of himself last season.  There’s a reason Spo created the “maintenance program” that saw Wade play just over half of the regular season.  Wade wasn’t awful in last year’s playoffs, but he wasn’t Dwyane Wade - he was a solid two-guard, nothing more, nothing less.  

 This season he’s back and he’s killing teams with his ability to get EASY midrange jumpshots (and the death of the EASY midrange jumper is greatly exaggerated) and that little hook he uses as he dribbles across the lane out of the post.  Not to mention the fact that Wade and James are still the most terrifying fast break force since Jordan and Pippen.  

 Chris Bosh, as always, will play a big role without necessarily needing to put up big numbers.  The Spurs bench is clearly better, so the Heat stars will have to shine.  But they will, and they’ll do it the same way they did it against Indiana - stealing one in San Antonio, winning both in Miami, losing game 5, and then closing it out in six.  Game Six won’t be a blowout, though, and it’ll end on a controversial call.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Macroeconomics #1

Originally I was trying to keep this blog very focused.  But it turns out a lot of days I just don't have it in me to write about personal, stay-at-home-dad type stuff, and so I don't write, and it breaks the chain.  So I'm going to write about whatever, and figure people can ignore the stuff that isn't their thing.

Which brings us to macroeconomics, and to this excellent (though long) post by William Black on the topic of news coverage of austerity budgeting.  I don't expect most people to read the whole article, though if you do bravo, but here's the key bit I want to highlight:

"It is not acceptable journalism to ignore the dominant economic view, 75 years of supporting events, and the empirical studies by austerians (the IMF) finding that fiscal changes have more powerful effects on the economy consistent with the dominant theory.  It is not acceptable journalism to ignore unemployment and inequality and the role of austerity in increasing both. "

Allow me to clarify and expand on this point briefly.  What Black is driving at is this - there is a dominant view in macroeconomics, which has held for over 75 years, that governments should not "tighten their belts" during periods of recession but should in fact spend more money and collect less money in taxes.

This view strikes non-macroeconomists as very odd and counterintuitive because people's experience with money suggests that when "times are tough" you have to cut back or "generate more revenue" as the common Newspeak phrase goes.  Also, economics is somewhat like climate science in that while there is broad agreement on many points, there exists a small rump of mostly non-scientists who make a living trying to muddy the waters and make it appear as if there is controversy even on these points of broad agreement.

So it falls to humble bloggers to say this:  despite what you hear from policymakers, think tanks, your Facebook friends, etc., there is a broad consensus in macroeconomics that austerity budgeting in a recession does not do any good and in fact makes the problem worse.  You can argue with that conclusion but if you are a reporter or commentator you should begin with the acknowledgement that this is, in fact, the overwhelming view of mainstream economics.  This is the meaning of the quip "We are all Keynesians now" that is attributed to Milton Friedman in the 1960's.

It's beyond the scope of this post to go into the academic research, which is voluminious, into the phenomenon of austerity budgeting.  What we can do is address one extremely important misconception about federal (national) budgets.

FEDERAL DEBT IS NOT OWED TO ANYONE AND DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PAID BACK.

This is extremely important.  Many lay people have a misconception that deficits mean that the government has borrowed money from someone - a bank, the Chinese, etc. - and that this money will have to be repaid by future taxpayers.  In a system like ours (Europe is a bit different which is why their system is in so much of a worse pickle than we are), the federal government does not borrow money in order to spend.  Bond issue is a completely separate consideration that has nothing to do with financing government operations.  The federal government simply spends money into existence.

The situation of a federal government is exactly like the situation if you had a system of scrip in your home for motivating your children to do chores.  You issue your child a piece of scrip each time he or she cleans up a room or takes the trash out, and the scrip is redeemable later for some privilege.

Since it's impossible to run out of scrip (because you issue it) and since you control the privileges your kids have, there is no level of debt that is "unsustainable" in the sense of not being able to "pay it back."  You didn't borrow the scrip from anyone, and since from your perspective it's merely a notional extension of your police power over your kids, there's nothing to run out of in any case.

The federal government is in the same situation.  From the USG's perspective, a dollar is simply a voucher against future (or present) tax liability.  Issuing too many such vouchers can erode their usefulness ("inflation") but there is no sense in which issuing too many such vouchers can lead to a "debt crisis" in the traditional sense, if a nation controls its own currency.

This is widely known and understood by macroeconomists, but unfortunately is known and understood by almost no one else, including policymakers.  As long as that sad state of affairs persists, we will persist in these terrible, useless policies that are causing untold suffering and waste for no reason at all.

Why I Believe Dylan

As everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock already knows, Dylan Farrow recently published a letter in the New York Times describing her alleged sexual assault over 20 years ago at the hands of her adoptive father, Woody Allen.  Immediately the world divided into two main camps - those who believe Dylan and those who think that she is suffering from a memory implanted by her mother, Mia Farrow.  

I have nothing to contribute to the facts of the case as I know none of the people involved and don’t have access to any information that is not already public knowledge.  Those wanting to familiarize themselves with the facts should read what is available for themselves.  What I do have, I think, is an interesting background and perspective on the case.  

Twenty years ago I was a high school student in Richmond, VA.  The “Internet” was something that almost no one knew about, and even fewer had ever used beyond connecting to one of the “portal” sites like AOL or Prodigy that offered a severely dumbed-down, barely functional platform for accessing what would later become the most powerful research tool the world has ever known.  

I was one of those lucky few, thanks to my friend Tim who gave me the credentials to his Virginia Commonwealth University dialup account.  This account provided the same access most people take for granted today, albeit at a very slow speed (I think I was still using a 2400 baud modem, which is less than 1/20th the speed of modern dialup and about 1/5000th the speed of the connection I’m using now.)  

Most of what we now think of as “The Internet” - that is, the millions of HTML pages that form the World Wide Web - did not yet exist.  There were web pages but they were mostly sad, silly little things that were powered by potatoes (OK just one was powered by a potato: http://totl.net/Spud/).

The real action was on Usenet, a decentralized system for discussion of news from around the world.  Like just about everyone, I originally used Usenet for downloading porn, but eventually I discovered that you could read actual news on Usenet, and that there was some pretty interesting stuff.  It was the beginning of news aggregation and comment threads - you could go into a newsgroup and find posts on a given subject discussing news from almost anywhere.

One topic area that was hot at the time was something called Satanic Ritual Abuse.  This was a specific form of child abuse that was allegedly occurring in pockets of depravity all over the country.  What was interesting, though, was that evidence was mounting that the abuse wasn’t actually occurring.  It was a psychosocial phenomenon - people would become convinced that some preschool teacher or neighborhood weirdo was a crazed Satanist, and experts would be called in to interrogate children until one poor kid coughed up a story - the more implausible and insane the better.  Then the other children would be presented with the “facts” gleaned from the first child’s story until everyone agreed that the accused had committed hundreds of shocking acts of child sex abuse.

Something about this phenomenon fascinated me, and I became an activist of sorts, lecturing people endlessly about how our standards of investigation of child abuse had to change, and how people were being railroaded and destroyed by accusations that were not the least bit credible when looked at objectively and dispassionately.  

I devoured anything I could find on the subject, and after HBO aired “Indictment,” its excellent dramatization of the McMartin preschool trial, there was a lot to devour.  I talked the ear off anyone who would listen, but I found that many people were extremely hostile to the idea that these accusations were witch hunts.  It wasn’t so much that people didn’t believe what I was saying as that they were angry that I would say it.  People asked - frequently - why it was so important to me to undermine the accusations of children who said they were molested.  I was sometimes asked pointedly why I didn’t just believe the children - a difficult, albeit purely emotional, challenge to meet.

The most difficult objection that I heard to my efforts to raise awareness about SRA witch hunts was that by spreading these stories of false child abuse accusations, I would undermine the credibility of accusers generally, leading to real child abusers getting away with their crimes.  That contention struck me as not only beside the point (the truth is the truth, no matter what its implications) but preposterous - what I’d seen from these cases was that our society’s eagerness to believe absolutely ANY accusation of molestation, no matter how outrageous or obviously impossible, meant that there would certainly never be a time when an accused molester would gain an unfair benefit from public understanding of false memories and phony accusations.  

Fast-forward twenty years and imagine my surprise when, upon Dylan Farrow’s renewal of her 20 year-old claims of garden-variety sexual molestation by her adoptive father, suddenly everyone on the Internet was an expert in the science of false memory.  Endless lectures poured forth in blog comment threads, on Facebook, and yes, on Usenet.  “Don’t you realize,” these people told us, “how easy it is to implant false memories of abuse? Don’t you know these chlid molestation cases are so often witch hunts?  People get falsely accused of molesting children ALL THE TIME.”  And then, the bitter irony as all the SRA cases that everyone had once tried with all their might not to accept were witch hunts - McMartin, Kern County, Cleveland, Nottingham, and on and on - now used as evidence that Dylan Farrow must be working from a false memory implanted by Mia Farrow, her witch of a mother.  

Far be it from me to say that people aren’t entitled to their own opinion about these things.  Farther still from me to say that people shouldn’t hold a certain view because of its implications.  But if we disbelieve Dylan Farrow because of Satanic Ritual Abuse and repressed memory hoaxes, the fact is we must disbelieve almost ALL claims of sexual molestation.  That’s because Dylan Farrow’s account of her experiences with Woody Allen bear absolutely no resemblance to classic SRA or repressed memory cases.  Though I am not an expert in memory or in child sexual abuse, I have been studying these cases as an amateur for 20 years, and they have a few things in common.

The Kern County case is instructive - not least because it involves, like the Woody Allen case, a period of over two decades.  In Kern County, California in the early 1980’s, thirty-six people were convicted of participating in a child molestation ring involving over 60 children.  Most of those convicted in these cases were exonerated by the appeals process, but one who was not was John Stoll, a carpenter who wound up spending 20 years behind bars.  

Stoll was only released in 2004, when four of the six alleged victims who had testified at his trial in 1984 returned to the witness stand to confess that they had lied under pressure from adults, and that the abuse they had reported had never occurred.  

The other two accusers - one of whom is Stoll’s son - have not recanted, but they make a claim common to many accusers who maintain that their now-debunked accusations are true.  They claim that they do not remember details of the abuse.  These are the two common types of false accusations in these cases - those who later admit they were lying under pressure, and those who cannot remember the abuse itself.  

So isn’t this evidence that, indeed, Dylan Farrow may be in the same situation, of having been convinced by an adult (her mother) that her father molested her, even though it never happened?  On the contrary.  While we know that moral panic can often produce accusations of child abuse where none occurred, it is perverse to argue that because of Kern County we should not believe individual children who accuse individual adults of molestation.  There is no connection between an SRA witch hunt and the Woody Allen case.  

Of course when it comes to the human mind anything is possible.  But if Dylan Farrow is suffering from a confabulation - a false memory - it is an extremely nonstandard confabulation because it involves specific details of a traumatic event that has remained stable over a long period of time.

People do lie, and Dylan Farrow could be lying.  The Leadership Council, an independent British group that promotes the application of reliable science to human welfare, estimates that a very small percentage, perhaps 1-2%, of child sexual abuse allegations are false (http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/csa-acc.html).  

Dylan Farrow could be part of that small percentage - we unfortunately have no way of knowing, and this case will probably never be resolved.  But the popular, comforting view - that what Dylan Farrow reports having experienced could be a false memory, and that in fact this is all a big misunderstanding that can be laid at the doorstep of our favorite villain, the crazy, jilted mother - is very weak sauce.  Chances are, someone in this case, either the accuser or the accused,  is lying.  People can and will make their own judgments about which one it is.  But we should abandon the comforting illusion that this is a case of a witch hunt or a false memory.  It’s not.  

Love #1

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, then enjoy this.  If it's not the sort of thing you enjoy, well, I guess I feel a bit sorry for you.  But I'm rooting for you nonetheless.



She runs guns.  There she go!

Gundlach #1

There's a lot of debate out there about group exercise classes.  I have no interest in participating in that debate, so I'll use my favorite dodge I got from a good friend on the Left Coast - I think group exercise classes are a wonderful thing and their critics are almost entirely correct.

I did a group exercise class for a few months when I was having trouble getting motivated to stay in shape.  The big advantage of the group exercise class - SEAL Team, if it matters - for me was that it got me in MUCH better shape than I realized I could be in.  It opened up a lot of possibilities for me because when I'm in excellent shape (as opposed to just "decent shape") I feel really 100% mentally healthy most of the time, which is a new experience for me.

One thing that rubs me the wrong way about a lot of fitness coaches is their relentless positivity.  I'm not into the whole positivity thing.  When someone is constantly trying to reframe stuff that sucks into something wonderful, or to redirect my attention away from what sucks, I find it extremely annoying.  I want to kick them in the head and say "There!  Enjoy that wonderful learning experience, did you?  Why not focus on the positive?  Think of all the people who DIDN'T just kick you in the head!"

As it happens my instructor for many of the fitness classes I went to was a big Australian named (I think) Gundlach, and I loved Gundlach and learned a great deal from him, including how to do positivity the right way.  He wasn't a chipper guy; he actually had kind of a sour affect.  But he had an optimistic worldview and the combination for me was perfect.

I thought of him today because I obviously failed to remember one of his constant refrains yesterday - "Hydration is not drinking a bottle of water in the car park on the way to your workout.  You're sipping on water," and here he would pause for dramatic effect, "throughout the day."  This morning I was very dry during my run and I'm sure it was because I didn't sip on water enough yesterday.

At the end of my run I thought of him again, because I had a weak time that wasn't very close to a new low, which I found dispiriting.  The "positive" response would be to say "The important thing is that you did it!" or something like that.  But Gundlach's answer would be more like this:  "The faster you get the more runs you are going to have between personal records.  So when I have a bad run I think "Good!  I'm one run closer to that next record."

If you wake up sore, you say "Good!  I can tell I'm getting stronger."  And on like that.  You don't have to talk yourself out of feeling shitty or "look on the bright side" in some superficial way.  Just do what you have to do to keep going and reach your goals.  That's the Gundlach way.  Thanks Instructor!