It’s officially complete.

Somehow, it is now possible to intellectually marry war in the name neo-conservatism with war in the name of liberal humanaitarianism. I’m just going to call it neo-humanitarianism.

Now, I’m not a fan of neo-conservatism or humanitarian interventionism (although I’m not this negative on the latter). But I understand them as philosophical orientations to geo-political problems. And I suppose the backers of each ideology have always had some a few things in common, perhaps more than they were willing to admit: a sense of self-righteousness, an ignorance of the theory of unintended consequences, and a pair of rose-colored glasses.

But any attempt to describe an individual war of choice as somehow fulfilling the desires of both theories, that’s insane. Or the definitions have just become so vague as to be meaningless. Newspeak.

More interesting to me is the idea of public desensitization to war. Not to harp on Orwell, but the first thing I thought of on Friday was  how little of the public discussion space all of this was taking up. Think back to the Gulf War buildup, fall 1990 and winter 1991. Make that the origin point, with time going forward on the X axis and public discourse on the Y. This function not only has a negative slope, but the second derivative is negative, too, right?

Seriously, how much longer can it be until we are at war with Eastasia?

Once upon a time, I used to be mildly embarrassed to admit that my foreign policy ideology most closely resembled Quaker Pacifism, and consequently manifested itself as isolationism. But not anymore.  And I guess there’s a silver lining that more people must have woken up today than yesterday and fancied themselves foreign policy realists (a positive second derivative!). I’ll take that over this eight days a week.

But it’s cold comfort indeed.

I just switched over from C-SPAN to CBS to watch the first game of the tourney, and I swear this was the first line of audio after the broadcast started, courtesy of Ian Eagle:

“Welcome everyone, to Tampa, Florida,  for the second-round matchup of Temple and Clemson.”

They’re really going to go with it. Just kill me. I predict the 2012 tourney does not feature this nomenclature nonsense.

I’ve now had three different people, all quite intelligent by most standards, try to tell me that the earthquake in Japan may end up having a net positive economic effect on Japan’s economy, because of the stimulative effect of all the rebuilding.

This is completely insane.

It is almost, by definition, an example of the broken window fallacy. You cannot create wealth by destroying things. That is not an opinion, or a political argument. It’s not even a case-closed “theory” like evolution or gravity. It’s just true.

Destruction can proportionally re-allocate the total remaining wealth, post-destruction, which can produce relative and localized wealth booms (i.e. the U.S. after WW2, when the rest of the world lay in ruins and we were largely unscathed), but it cannot increase the aggregate size of the pie; the total amount of wealth in the world inherently goes down when things are destroyed. If this were not true, we could just pay people to build houses in the morning, and then pay other people to knock them down at night.  Voila, boom time!

Yes, production in Japan is probably going to go up soon, but it will be production that replaces lost wealth at the expense of the things that would have been created new, absent the earthquake. Maddeningly, the GDP statistic in Japan will also go up, because it does not capture the negative value of capital destruction.

As David Bernstein said in response to a Wall Street Journal piece that said the earthquake may lift the economy in Japan, “Sure, and instead of sending American aid, let’s follow up the earthquake with a few bombing runs over Tokyo. That will really ‘lift the economy.’ Geez.”

For years, I’ve been bothered by NCAA’s insistence on formal language in regard to the tournament. For example, it drives me nuts that Greg Gumbel continually says things  like  “stayed tuned for more of CBS’s continuing coverage of the 2011 NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament.” Just call it “the NCAA tournament,” dude. Or “the tournament.” Or at the post-game press-conferences, when the moderator continually says “student-athletes” instead of “players.” I’d like to remind everyone to please direct your questions to a specific student-athlete. And it’s not like he does it once, it’s every time. Does anyone have any more questions for any of our student-athletes?

But the real kicker has to be “national semi-finals.” No one in the entire country calls it anything else but the “Final Four.” The NCAA uses the term “Final Four” all over its website. CBS’s pregame program before every single tournament game is called “The Road to the Final Four.” But anytime they discuss the games that occur on the Saturday just prior to the Monday night championship game, the say “national semi-finals.” Just a reminder folks, that Duke will play Memphis St. in our first national semi-final game, a 7:06 tip, next Saturday. Butler will meet Siena in the other national semi-final game, 20 minutes after the conclusion of the first game. Just kill me. And it’s not like this formality is universal or anything. They all call the first round of the regionals “the sweet sixteen.”

Still, they may have taken it to a whole new level this year, with the 3rd round nonsense.

Backfill: now that they have three play-in games instead of one, they’ve changed the name of that round from “opening round” to “1st round.” The old 1st round  is now the “2nd round,” and the old 2nd round is now the “3rd round.” 3rd round winners will make the sweet sixteen. The problem here is that there has not been a fundamental change to the tournament. This isn’t like when they went from 48 to 64 teams; this is like when they went from 64 to 65. You aren’t adding games anyone cares about, you’re adding more buildup. You might as well start calling the small-conference championship games “1st round” too. Same difference.

I guarantee you that no one — NO ONE — who does not work for the NCAA or CBS will be using this terminology. But we’re going to suffer through it on TV for at least a year, until someone turns their brain back on at CBS. I mean, it’s not like the office pools are suddenly going to start using “1st round” games. That would not only require people to care about what happens on Tuesday and Wednesday in the first round, but it would also mean organizing an entire office pool in less than 36 hours.

Ivy League basketball.

You probably know that the Ivy League is the only league left that has no conference tournament, and thus the regular-season champ gets the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. And since the Ivy League rarely has two teams worthy of an at-large bid (remember, there’s no conference tournament so there are no upset champs), it is almost invariably the case that the regular-season champ — and only the regular season champ — makes the tourney.*

This makes Ivy League hoops pretty unique, and pretty awesome. Like a throwback to the 70’s — when each conference was only allowed 1 tourney bid and most conferences didn’t have end of year tournaments — every game counts. It’s super refreshing. Every night plays out like a do-or-die playoff game; fall two games back in the standings and it starts to look really dire.

On top of this, following the Ivy League is a lot like following the NFL; because of league rules, almost all games occur on Friday and Saturday nights. There are eight teams, you play the other seven two times each, for a 14-game conference season. In effect, it’s six weekends of Friday/Saturday games, plus two random games against the team you are “paired” with. For example, Yale is paired with Brown. So each weekend, Yale and Brown either have home games against another two paired teams (like Harvard and Dartmouth) on Friday and Saturday night, or travel to play the same two teams on Friday or Saturday night. (Yale also has to play it’s pair team — Brown — twice. Those two games are split, usually one early in the season, one late).

The effect of this is that the standings “sync” the way they do in the NFL — nothing happens all week, and then over the weekend everyone plays the same number of games, and the standings adjust. It’s great. Unless, of course, it’s your team’s turn for the dreaded trip to Penn and Princeton.

Of course, this all leads to what happens last night. Princeton beat Penn in the season-finale “pair” game, creating a first-place tie between  Princeton and Harvard. Which means the Ivy league has to have a playoff game, for all the marbles. There is so much to talk about here.  Four observations: Continue reading →