Ok, so I like watching NBA games. I have since I was a kid, enamored of the Celtics and the Knicks, and later, Dr. J, David Thompson, and a long list of amazing players and revered teams. The end of season playoffs to determine the overall professional basketball champion was a time to look forward to, and to treasure as the best battled the best for the crown.

Unfortunately, over the years, NBA officials have seen fit to include more teams in the playoff draw, watering down the competition and extending the playoff run to a mind dulling two months each year. Including teams that barely break .500 is absurd - only the National Hockey League, a tragic joke whose death draws near, held the distinction of including a majority of its teams in post season play.

An additional and cynical change was to convert the first round of series play to a best of seven format, as opposed to the earlier best of five. My memory may be fading, but I seem to recall somewhat distant past when best of three was the opening round format, but don't hold me to it.

On top of playing 82 regular season games, NBA players who make it to the championship series will have played over a hundred games,, and more if they are taken to seven games in more than one series.

Ridiculous, in my view. Sure, they make mad cash, but the point of post season play is to pit best against best to determine the king of the heap for that year. Watering it down with irrelevant early round series by adding teams who don't deserve a shot at the championship is nothing more than a ratings ploy that serves to undermine the credibility of the entire playoff system. It also serves to wear out the players, leading to sometimes uninspired play and multiple injuries.

Kinda reminds me of baseball, where teams used to have 162 regular season games to get their shit together to make it into the post season, and one step from World Series play. Now there are preliminary rounds of play, longer post seasons, and falling TV ratings. Sports are, by their very nature, an arena for competition, victory and loss. Those who excel in regular season play ought not to have to wade through a sea of also-rans just to get to one another to determine who is truly the best.

'Nuff said.

A Plague Of Stupidity


I believe stupidity is a disease, and it's spreading.

The wife and I were on a foraging expedition at Walmart. (okay, okay, I know they're evil, exploit workers worldwide, all of that. We are on the thin edge of poor, and they have too many things we need at far lower prices than anyone else). Rachel drives slowly in parking lots because other people often fail to pay attention when backing out or turning into an aisle.

Today, a different kind of inattention nearly resulted in severe injury to a child.

We were crawling down a row of parked cars to reach a space far from the store itself - we don't mind the walk and hate to cruise looking for that one car actually leaving to take that space. On our right was a railing behind which were paving stones and bags of fertilizer. At the end of that row was a bunch of shopping carts. As we approached the mass of shopping carts, a little girl came running at full tilt from behind them, chased by a boy of roughly the same age. She popped out right in front of us. Rachel slammed on the brakes, and the girl retreated, still laughing, saying "sorry!."

Her mother, loading groceries to our left, looks back over her shoulder and says, nonchalantly, "sorry," in a singsong kind of voice. I yell at the kid, "watch what you're doing! You're going to get yourself killed." We drive on to a parking space, exit the car, and start walking back

The mother has her kids in the minivan and is leaving the parking lot, As she passes us one row over, she says to us "You didn't have to yell at her. Now she's upset." We countered with, "She nearly got hit." The woman repeats herself, then drives on.

This is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to begin. Had we been as inattentive as she was, and so many people driving in that parking lot often are, that little girl would have been struck, and likely injured, even though we were going slow. The mother didn't see it happen, she turned around at the sound of our brakes, and by then the girl had stepped back behind the shopping carts. She had no idea how close it actually was.

So, she yells at us.

Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't let their kids run amok in a Walmart parking lot full of over sized trucks battling for parking spaces, a parking lot full of frazzled parents trying to manage a cart stuffed with groceries and a coterie of children, or just trying to get the hell out of there and go home. It is a definite recipe for injury or death. It is not surprising to me, thinking about it now, that the mother thought we were out of line, not for nearly hitting her unsupervised kid but for yelling at her out of our own terror over the sudden near miss. I chock it up to the the whole "my kid can do no wrong" attitude that too many parents seem to exhibit. I hold little doubt the woman would have sued us, our insurance company, and Walmart had we even nudged her child. The cynical side of me says "thank god" there are security cameras in those parking lots - we would have won the case.

A case that almost resulted in an unnecessary tragedy.

Noted is the death of former football player and Arizona Cardinal's safety Pat Tillman, who walked away from a multi-million dollar career in the NFL to serve with the 75th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan. Tillman quit football in early 2002. He avoided media contact after his decision to join the Army became public, saying only that he felt he needed to give something back to his country.

Tillman's life is no more or less worthy than any other American soldier who is serving or has been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, it is his willingness to give up fame and fortune to do so that strikes me as unusual in modern America.

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Speaking of the dead, a Freedom Of Information Act request has pried loose hundreds of photographs of flag draped coffins containing American military dead being transported back home for burial. These are the pictures the Pentagon and this administration have been keeping away from the public eye, claiming a right to privacy for the families and relatives of the dead.

It was once tradition to allow pictures and video to be taken from a distance of the coffins as they arrived at Dover Air Force base and were unloaded beneath the watchful eye of a full color guard. Unfortunately, the Shrubsters have denied any access to the pictures or the air base, turning what would have been low key, respectful coverage into a contested political symbol. Shrub's true rationale was to keep this aspect of war out of the newspapers, while gladly handing out positive pictures of beaming soldiers in the desert, or video of our end of firefights.

But this cynical mindset is nothing new, not for an administration who has lied it's way into this war, and cannot seem to lie its way out, not for lack of trying. Iraq is where they wanted to go from the start of their time in office, and so they have dragged the rest of us along for the bloody ride. I think it only right and proper that every American see the stark, undeniable photographic evidence of the true cost of this war, of the lives given freely by those who serve in our armed forces, forces intentionally sent to their peril to fight an unnecessary war.

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Quoted from the Washington Post about the Republican smear campaign concerning John Kerry's military service:

The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum has a tale of two soldiers:

George Bush, fresh out of Yale, uses family connections to join the Air National Guard in order to avoid serving in Vietnam. After serving four years of a six-year term, he decides to skip his annual physical, is grounded, and heads off to Alabama, where he blows off even the minimal annoyance of monthly drills for over six months.

Conservative reaction: why are you impugning the patriotism of this brave man? He got an honorable discharge and that's as much as anyone needs to know.

John Kerry, fresh out of Yale, enlists in the Navy and subsequently requests duty in Vietnam. While there, according to the Boston Globe, he wins a Purple Heart, and then follows that up with more than two dozen missions in which he often faced enemy fire, a Silver Star for an action in which he killed an enemy soldier who carried a loaded rocket launcher that could have destroyed his six-man patrol boat, a Bronze Star for rescuing an Army lieutenant who was thrown overboard and under fire, and two more Purple Hearts.

Conservative reaction: Hmmm, that first injury wasn't very serious. This is something that deserves careful and drawn-out investigation, and it would certainly be unfair to impugn 'craven or partisan motives' to those doing the impugning.

Are these guys a piece of work, or what?

Last night the Resident was trotted out for a dog and pony show to prop up the mountain of lies threatening to crumble down on his soft little head. Soldiers are dying in the highest numbers since this ill conceived war began and Iraq is edging closer to civil warfare over the assumption of sovereignty due to take place June 30.

Given all of the noise about the September 11 commission and the Shrub's own strategy of basing his re-election on his status as a "wartime president," one would think he has some sort of reflective answer to the following question:

Toward the end of the news conference, Bush was asked what lessons he had taken away from events since the Sept. 11 attacks. He stopped, shook his head, looked quizzical and then came up empty, although it was the kind of question he must have been told to prepare for.

"I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer," he said. "But it hasn't yet."

Holy Shit.

This will serve as my last post on Rwanda.

Read this.

Hard on the heels of my outburst about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a principle player who sat on the sidelines while the wholesale slaughter went unopposed has written an editorial for the Washington post, "reflecting back."

Much as The Post can be useful, to avoid having you register, I've quoted the entire apologia on my own page. Notice he repeats himself several times, saying only "those of us who did not do enough." There are many reasons to find Bill clinton lacking in his performance as President, but none are so revolting as this.

Enjoy!

We recently traded in our standard cable box for a DVR box, one which allows the recording of programs and movies even while watching something else. (Cannot be done on a digital cable system with a VCR). Beats VCR tapes and hassles everyday of the week.

I can record programs I've not always been able to watch, especially programs considered too nerdy by my wife, like a recent NOVA program on tornadoes that centered on the University of Oklahoma and the National Storm Prediction Center, both of which are here in Norman. She actually wound up watching that one with me - tornadoes terrify her as much as they fascinate me, and I equate her sitting transfixed by the images of natural destruction with the look in the eyes of a mouse just before the snake strikes.

So I recorded Frontline last night without really reading the description of the show. Frontline is one of those programs worth watching, regardless of topic. "Ghosts Of Rwanda" is a two hour retrospective on the genocide of 1994 that annihilated at least 800,000 people in a premeditated mass slaughter. Western nations and the UN stood by as day after day, week after week, people were murdered, shot down, beaten, and hacked apart by machete. The interviews are gut wrenching, the pictures horrifying and sickening, and the response of the US nearly incomprehensible. I say "nearly," for in the news footage included on the program are clips of the State Department spokesperson giving the US government's take on the mounds of bodies piling higher by the minute. She contorts herself around the term "genocide," avoiding its use as long as possible, and finally caving as far as the phrase "acts of genocide."

"Acts of genocide."

As opposed to just plain "genocide."

I was reminded of Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's difficulty with the term "Guerrilla Warfare" in relation to the violent resistance to the US occupation of Iraq.

The term genocide carries specific legal definitions in the context of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of which the US is a prominent signatory. Under the Convention, combined with the UN Charter, member nations are required to act to end genocide wherever and whenever it occurs in the world. By avoiding the word, the US and European nations could abdicate their responsibility to act to intervene in a situation that fulfilled all of the definitions of the term genocide.

I quote:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The events that began on April 6, 1994, and continued until July of the same year could only be defined as genocide right from the start. In less than 100 days, greater than 800,000 people are destroyed, more than 8,000 every single day.

The Frontline program ends with clips of a series of visits by UN officials and US officials after the genocide was ended. It is nauseating in the extreme to watch as they expiate their own guilt by traveling to Rwanda to gaze upon the piles of bodies and scattered remains. President Clinton chose not to act, stating that the United States has no friends, only interests, and participating in international interventions will only occur in light of the extent of US interests. In 1998 Clinton traveled to Rwanda in a trip billed as an "apology" for choosing not to act. Not once in the brief speech he gave in Kigali did he use the word "apology" or the word "sorry."

I remember feeling sick at the time. Watching it all over again last night, I was very, very angry.

"Never again?"