Rick Reilly puts on his Holier-Than-Thou hat

Before I give my opinion, check out his article from ESPN here

I think Rick Reilly is sometimes entertaining. He plays the similar card as Bill Simmons from a different angle ('I'm just a normal guy who gets to live a life that revolves around sports') and most of the time it works fine, if forgettably. But, he can also be an annoying little bitch. I do have to allow for the fact that he has to crank out an article on regular intervals that fits within his normal-white-guy niche and this story had been floating around the interwebs.

He makes a valid point that the Northrups didn't mention any of the pseudo-sexual contact in their reasoning for having their son default to Cassy in the opening round. To me, that's a good thing. I would tend to think that it is them trying to rock the boat the least and give the most bland answer to a story-hungry media and move on. Boys and girls are different. That is an awkward fact, especially when you're in HS.

As you may know, I wrestled in Texas for a little over a decade. Fortunately, I never had to deal with wrestling a girl, but I had friends that did. There are various ways to deal with it (some guys even molested them, which is the worst outcome in my opinion), but for the guy, its a no-win situation: win and you beat up on a girl. Lose and you lost to a girl. That is a fate worse than death for an adolescent boy. I know that losing is something you have to learn to do, yadda yadda, but I can understand his desire to avoid it.

The biggest issue for me here, is not Reilly's difference of opinion or his logic. Its the fact that he (like many other sports writers) think there is something to be gained from taking this imagined moral high ground and that they can't fathom any other line of logic. His closing line is the kind of thing that would get your ass kicked in most any athletic environment:

Neither he, nor his coaches, nor his dad, had any comment. He was reportedly on his way back home to Marion, Iowa, where his mom was about to deliver her eighth child.

For the kid's sake, I hope it's a boy.

I hope he has some hint as to how big of a self-righteous douchebag he is. Maybe he can share his enlightenment with Easterbrook and King. 

LA Times: Scientists: Carbs, not fat make you fat

Paleo is not inherently low carb. It is more about food quality than quantity (versus a weighed-and-measured approach of The Zone Diet). Several high caliber endurance athletes have switched to paleo and continue to get alot of their fuel from carbohydrates. That said, the majority of us walking around could use being on the lower-carb side of the equation. There was an interesting article in the LA Times a few days ago about this. It serves as a good crash course in the metabolic process for dealing with the three main macro-nutrients: protein, carbs and fat.

Here is my simple logic test for what is wrong with out diet: in the last generation, we have consumed drastically less fat and yet we continue to get fatter as a nation. All those 'low-fat' processed foods just contain more sugar or artificial sweetener (which spikes your insulin just the same since the taste buds taste sugar and stimulate the appropriate response). Check out the article and maybe try going all of January without gluten. While not fully paleo, it will be a step in the right direction.

Hat-tip Crossfit Football

Tony Blair on Muslim Integration

Interesting Opinion piece in the WSJ today by Tony Blair about Muslim integration in the UK. My favorite quote (emphasis mine):

However, some don't integrate. But when we talk about this in general terms, without precision, for fear of "stigmatizing" Muslims, we alienate public opinion and isolate the majority of Muslims who are integrating and want to be as much part of our society as any other group. Then, because we won't identify the problem as it is, a subterranean debate takes the place of an open one, and that debate lumps all Muslims together. So in the interest of "defending" the Muslim community, we actually segregate it by refusing to have an honest debate about what is happening. 


I think the former PM has articulated well a point that causes alot of issues in the US as well: We are so concerned about avoiding culturally sensitive topics that we end up skipping thoughtful discussion altogether and indirectly contributing to xenophobia. I think this is particularly true regarding the Mexican immigrants in the southwest. The lack of authentic consideration results in diametrically opposed groups with guns drawn across lines in the sand, completely unwilling to negotiate. 


Of course, another factor is the sound-byte era where we boil any sort of discussion to either pro- or anti- hot-button issue or a candidate as a referendum on their opponent. The result, in my opinion, are these radical, thoughtless swings in political ideology: Bush sucks, so we elect anti-Bush (=Obama for those of you playing at home). Obama isn't doing enough to save the economy (I have issues with that statement, but that's for another discussion), so we elect a wave of anti-Obama Tea Party candidates, some of whom have terrifyingly little intelligent thought. At some point we have to stop jerking the steering wheel from one side to the other anytime we stray from our chosen lane of travel.


One interesting side effect of being across the pond is that I tend to be even further removed from the political discourse than I was previously. My sound-byte on the subject: We (the U.S.) look stupid.

Can the Nation Stimulate Its Way to Prosperity?

Note: this started as a quick post on the Dallas Fed paper and devolved into a macro-econ wrap-up. More for my benefit than anyone else's as it helps me to step back every once in awhile and make sure my head's not buried in the sand. Gold trading is very much a macro-economic exercise at times. Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness disorganization:

The Dallas Fed (led by my favorite Fed president, Richard Fisher) has released a letter looking at Can the Nation Stimulate Its Way to Prosperity? My favorite line:


Compared with no stimulus, the stimulus plan in 2009 alone was expected to increase GDP by 1 to 3 percentage points, raise payroll employment by 500,000 to 1 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate by half a percentage point.

At first glance, it doesn’t appear the stimulus achieved these objectives. 

In the year after the plan’s passage, the labor market continued to hemorrhage jobs and unemployment climbed above 10 percent. Indeed, the unemployment rate is now higher than it was expected to be without the stimulus plan—and has been every month since the plan’s passage (Chart 5).

This seems inconsistent with official estimates of the plan’s performance. 


The first quarterly report, including data through September 2009, found that the plan had created or saved about 1 million jobs and boosted GDP 2 to 3 percentage points in the second and third quarters.[2] Subsequent analysis from the Council of Economic Advisers and several private forecasting firms found even more favorable results, seeing the stimulus on track to save or create the 3.5 million jobs that were originally forecast for the 2009–10 period. How can this be? 

To be fair to administrations past and present, I think the economic situation if left alone would be worse than it is now, but I'm not sure we've justified the costs.

The basic equation of macro-econ is: GDP = C + I + G + net export (where C= consumption, I=investment, G=Govt spending). If a country's economic health is measured in GDP or GDP per capita (which are very debatable issues, but that's an entirely different post), then we are simply running against the old adage by trying to spend our way to prosperity or borrow our way out of debt. The fact that it is now the public sector instead of the private sector (we saw how this would turn out starting in August 2007) shouldn't make that big of a difference right?

There's a good analogy on saving v. spending in the article: If I give you seed corn, you can either eat it now or plant it and  eat it later (after some further investment) as a much larger quantity. The growth rate of the corn would be analogous to our current interest rate environment. Low rates should induce spending v. saving but we're not seeing that because of future concerns. Companies are raising capital at record low rates (IBM sub 1%) but not increasing CapEx. No one is hiring because of political uncertainty and overhead costs.

Despite record low rates, the velocity of money (as measured by M2) doesn't seem to be creeping higher at all and consumer prices are dropping. It's very possible (even likely) that I'm missing something, but how are we not entering a deflationary period? Especially if home prices have another 10% down to go? And I won't even go into the ridiculous lengths the gov't is going to in order to give the banks higher profitability and a larger cushion for real estate losses that they aren't even marking down.

Everyone has a proposed solution and none of them are perfect, but it certainly does seem to me that fiscal policy has failed (mostly because of poor execution of the stimulus) and monetary policy isn't being as effective as normal because of political uncertainty. I'm not sure that there is a point of no return for deficit to GDP ratios, but I am sure that its not good to test it in any case. In some ways its similar to my stance of global warming/climate change: we don't know how bad it will be (or exactly how to deal with it), but we are very certain it won't be good.