September 2011

As a follow-up to a (mostly) deliciously peaceful week in Lake Tahoe, a friend who is a Disneyphile and his wife invited The Wife and I to a double-date at Disneyland. It was during the week but it included lunch at Club 33, so of course we went. Frankly, I don’t think I can ever enjoy Disneyland again — at least, not eating there. Fortunately we have California Adventures right next to the California park so a bit of alcohol is still available, but those were strong, good drinks. The staff at the club were all visibly appreciative of the opportunity to work in that most exclusive and luxurious of environments. Didn’t recognize any celebrities amongst our fellow-diners although there were some industry types talking industry stuff. All in all, it was better than working.

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From no less a source than the Economist:

DISCUSSIONS of Texas often turn to an exploration of the American South’s most distinctive regional locution, “y’all.” The common view, among outsiders, is that insofar as “y’all” is from the region specified, it’s also a bit sub-literate and redneck.

That’s a bit snooty. The fact is that “y’all” is pretty useful, as formal English doesn’t have a distinctly plural version of “you.” There is no “yous” (except in places like New York city and New Jersey, sometimes in the form of “youse guys”). This suggests that the referent is usually clear enough in context. But the existence of “y’all,” the related “you-all” and “all-y’all,” and other workarounds like “you guys” and “you lot” show that there is, in fact, room in the market for new second-person plural pronouns. Visitors to Texas typically realize the value of “y’all” within 48 hours.

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The long nightmare in New Mexico is over:

New Mexico coach Mike Locksley was fired Sunday, one day after yet another tough loss and another embarrassing off-the-field incident.

Athletic director Paul Krebs announced Locksley’s dismissal in a statement and said associate head coach and defensive coordinator George Barlow will serve as interim head coach for the rest of the season.

Krebs said he will hold a news conference Monday afternoon to discuss the coaching change.

Locksley won two games in two-plus seasons, for a career record of 2-26. The Lobos dropped to 0-4 this season after losing to FCS Sam Houston State 48-45 on Saturday before an announced crowd of 16,313 at University Stadium in Albuquerque. It was the Lobos’ smallest home crowd in almost 19 years.

A couple years ago I wrote the following of Locksley:

New Mexico got some good press by hiring Mike Locksley. Since then, he has been the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit, he punched an assistant coach, and has gone 0-5 with the only one of those games within twenty points being the first loss to annual rival New Mexico State in six years (UNM has a 66-28 record with NMSU overall with only 14 losses since 1940). Do you fire a coach after one season? That’s always a tricky question. Made even trickier if they fire the first black coach they ever had after one season.

I think people would be hard-pressed to cry racism at this point. The depths of Locksley’s ineptitude are difficult to fully explain. Scandal after scandal, loss after loss. New Mexico is not a perennial cellar-dweller. Rocky Long, Locksley’s predecessor, had a sub-.500 winning percentage, but had more winning records than not. He was fired for a 4-8 season, but has rebounded and is now the head coach at San Diego State.

This complete and utter failure could not possibly have come at a worse time. If New Mexico were at the top of their game, they would be candidates for the Big 12. While the Big 12 is looking at a school that has hit the skids recently (Louisville), Locksley’s Lobos are just toxic. The buyout is supposed to cost $1.4m, but it’ll be worth it. Given Locksley’s off-the-field antics, however, they may be able to fire him with cause. One of Locksley’s predecessors, Dennis Franchione, had a substantially lower buyout than he was scheduled with less dirt than Locksley has.

On a tangent, up until last week, both New Mexico and Kentucky had the distinctions of having only black head coaches leading their programs. One of the success stories is that of New Mexico’s in-state rival, New Mexico State. DeWayne Walker has only gone 5-20, but he’s at least managed to beat the Lobos twice and managed to convert an convulsive seizure on the part of Minnesota’s head coach into an upset win. That’s more than it seemed Locksley was capable of doing.

The solution for UNM seems obvious to me (if the ascended assistant coach doesn’t work out): Since they can’t afford to get the coach they want, most likely, they should get the coach that nobody else wants. Someone willing to work anywhere and work cheap. UTEP did this with Mike Price and it had mixed results. UCF did this with George O’Leary and it has had great results. The name that comes to mind is… Terry Bowden. The guy has won everywhere he has coached. He’s thrown himself at nearly every vacancy, no matter how dire the situation (Marshall, Louisiana Tech, SMU), but is stuck in Division II hell. It wouldn’t take much to pay him more than he is being paid now and he would probably be willing to work cheap for the first couple of years to get the chance to prove himself. I would have mentioned hiring back Dennis Franchione, but he was already hired back by another former employer. Mike Leach would be another one, though I don’t know that he would be willing to work so cheaply. Even Todd Dodge might have better luck at New Mexico than he had at North Texas. But first call should be to Terry Bowden.

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India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Thailand, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar are the ten largest (by population) member nations of the UN that have yet to find enough people to do what?

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Brevity has never been my strong suit. So if you want to know what the below post is about, but do not want to read a couple thousand words, it’s this:

The famous donor/beneficiary map, which purports to show that residents of red states are the beneficiaries of government largess, is a gross oversimplification. It acts as though government were a matter of taking checks from one state and then giving it to another. It overlooks that much of the “extra” spending in (for instance) rural western states is on the wide assortment of properties that the federal government owns, on Indian Reservations, and so on. These things are not spent for the benefit of all of the residents of their state, but rather for a select few, sometimes for services rendered (such as the military), and on things that are aimed to benefit not just residents of that specific state but of the nation as a whole (such as national parks and Interstates).

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I’ve been leaving intemperate comments here and there regarding the infamous donor/beneficiary map, which reveals that a lot of red states actually get more in federal funding than they put it. This is my more temperate response to that. At least I’m going to try. It’s hard, because this map really pushes my buttons. It is used to supposedly demonstrate that the federal government favors the rural states (often used in conjunction with “See what the Senate has wrought?!”) and, by implication, that residents of the red states ought to know their place and be appreciative or otherwise be hypocrites. The use of the map is not to launch a discussion on how we spend our money or where, but instead treats this money as though it is entitlements or welfare. At best, it’s a cheap shot often made by those I expect better from. At worst, it’s demagoguery or something bordering on it: Making people different from you or that you don’t approve of into Bad People or the subject of resentment.

I am going to be focusing on a few states here. I didn’t cherry-pick them, nor are they a random sampling. They are simply states I know quite a bit about for one reason or another.

Before I start getting into some of the specifics, what we have to keep in mind is that because more money is being spent in one state compared to another, it doesn’t meant that a check is being written to the residents of said state. We simply can’t treat entire states as sponges because a lot of the money is (a) going to very specific things and people, (b) payment for services rendered or materials exploited, (c) money they would have gotten but for the federal government’s (often benign) intervention, or (d) extra costs associated with giving that state the same services as the others.

To take some broad examples, when the government owns a substantial portion of the land of a state, that state is inherently have some money spent there on upkeep, exploitation, and so on. We keep our national parks not just for their benefit, but for ours and because we like to consider ourselves the kind of people that preserve nature. The nuclear silos in the Dakota are there because we want them to be away from other things and are not specifically a gift to all Dakotans. Per capita, it costs more to build roads from one side of Montana to the other than Illinois, but we’re not giving Montanans something special that other states don’t have. The same goes for mail service, energy, and so on.

If you want to make the argument that these states shouldn’t have them unless they can pay for them with their own tax dollars, go ahead. Libertarian-leaning Brandon Berg made that exact argument when I brought the subject up a while back. There are also environmental arguments that we should evacuate these places and let Mother Nature have them. But whether we want to go down these (dirt, gravelly) roads or not, we do have to remember that at least in these respects they are not getting anything the rest of America isn’t. [click to continue…]

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The New York Times has an article about the Marines’ efforts to recruit gays:

The Marines were the service most opposed to ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but they were the only one of five invited branches of the military to turn up with their recruiting table and chin-up bar at the center Tuesday morning. Although Marines pride themselves on being the most testosterone-fueled of the services, they also ferociously promote their view of themselves as the best. With the law now changed, the Marines appear determined to prove that they will be better than the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard in recruiting gay, lesbian and bisexual service members.

I know some people like that. As soon as they stop fighting against something, they start measuring everybody by their support for it. Arguably, it’s this mentality that provides a backbone for a cohesive society in times of change. God bless them, however irritating they can be…

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Given current event, I thought it appropriate to post Steve Earle’s “Ellis Unit One,” as powerful a song on the subject that I have ever heard. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s a song from the point of view of a prison guard at Texas’s infamous Ellis Unit One death row.

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