Quotulatiousness

November 1, 2010

The other shoe drops: Randy Moss is waived by the Vikings

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:53

After Randy Moss spent his post-game “self-interview” blowing kisses to the team that just traded him, he’s now been waived by the Minnesota Vikings:

NFL Network’s Michael Lombardi reports that the Vikings waived Moss on Monday. At his Monday press conference, Vikings coach Brad Childress mentioned that he allowed Moss to stay back in Boston for a few days before re-joining the team. It looks like he can stay there.

We have no reason to believe the story is not true, but PFT can report via a league source that Moss is not yet aware that he’s been released.

Moss would now be subject to leave waiver rules and could be claimed by any team. (To clarify, even veterans are subject to the waiver process after the trading deadline. Think Chris Chambers last year.)

The Bills would have the first crack at him because they have the worst record. Any team claiming Moss would have to pay the rest of his $6.4 million base salary. If Moss goes unclaimed — a distinct possibility we’ll know by 4PM Tuesday — the Vikings owe him the rest of this contract.

That was unexpectedly sudden. I’m not saying it wasn’t the correct move, just that I didn’t think Childress would pull the trigger this fast.

It’s not liberal bias: it’s statist bias

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

Radley Balko uses the media positions on California’s Proposition 19 as a proxy to determine the actual bias:

For the last few months, my colleague Matt Welch has been tracking the positions of California’s newspapers on Proposition 19, the ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. At last count, 26 of the state’s 30 largest dailies (plus USA Today) had run editorials on the issue, and all 26 (plus USA Today) were opposed. This puts the state’s papers at odds with nearly all of California’s left-leaning interest groups, including the Green Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; progressive publications such The Nation, Salon, and The Huffington Post; and a host of prominent liberal bloggers. According to a CNN/Time poll released last week, it also pits the state’s newspapers against 76 percent of California voters who identify themselves as “liberal.”

On this issue, the state’s dailies are also to the right of conservative publications such as The Economist and National Review, prominent Republicans such as former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a growing portion of the Tea Party movement, and even Fox News personality Glenn Beck. (Beck has said he favors marijuana legalization, although he has been typically schizophrenic on Prop. 19.) So who are the newspapers’ allies? Nearly all of California’s major elected officials are against the measure, and the No on Prop. 19 campaign has been funded mainly by contributions from various law enforcement organizations, including the California Police Chiefs Association, the prison guard union, and the California Narcotics Officers Association.

It’s telling that the loudest voices opposing pot legalization are coming from the mainstream media, politicians, and law enforcement. The three have a lot in common. Indeed, the Prop. 19 split illustrates how conservative critics of the mainstream media have it all wrong. The media — or at least the editorial boards at the country’s major newspapers — don’t suffer from liberal bias; they suffer from statism. While conservatives emphasize order and property, liberals emphasize equality, and libertarians emphasize individual rights, newspaper editorial boards are biased toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem.

Shipping at Age-of-Sail speeds

Filed under: Asia, China, Economics, Germany — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:40

In an attempt to save fuel, shipping lines have been ordering their ships to go slower. Some of them are now slower than 19th century clipper ships:

For those who haven’t followed the situation closely, many container ships right now have practiced ‘slow steaming’ due to a glut of ships being built worldwide.

Essentially, they are sailing at speeds well below their potential in order to reduce the supply of ships in the market, and thus support shipping rates.

The way this works is that the slower a ship sails, the fewer times it can make a round trip per year. Thus purposely sailing slowly reduces the effective supply of ships. It’s a response to insufficient shipping demand relative to the size of the global container shipping fleet.

Yet these poor shipping companies have taken this practice to such an extreme that many ships are now sailing at speeds slower than old clipper ships from the 1800’s.

H/T to Monty:

Overcapacity in shipping means lower demand for the finished goods overall. This is also a prime reason why export-driven economies (China, Germany) are in for a pretty dramatic adjustment soon. They’ve been counting on an economic recovery in America and Europe to soak up all that excess production, but it looks like things are going to stay weak for at least another six months to a year.

QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.

The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.

In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.

Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.

I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.

L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31

Randy Moss “honeymoon” already at an end

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

Many commentators were reminding us that Randy Moss has a history of falling “out of love” with his current team fairly soon, unless he gets a steady diet of big plays. Big plays aren’t in the Vikings playbook this year, so the honeymoon is already over:

Straight regret, homey.

Vikings wide receiver Randy Moss sure sounded like he missed the New England Patriots in his full-court media press after Sunday’s 28-18 loss.

Moss clutched the podium for an impromptu five-minute press conference in which he refused to answer questions, gushed over the Patriots organization and ripped Vikings players and coaches for not listening to his tips about his old team from 2007 to Oct. 6, 2010.

[. . .]

“If it’s going to be an interview, I’m going to conduct it,” Moss said. “So I’m going to answer my own questions then give you all the answers.”

His first attempt focused mainly on his love for the Patriots, listing off everyone from quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichick, owner Robert Kraft and various Patriots team captains.
Belichick is “the best coach in football history” in Moss’ eyes.

Update: Moss has been waived after his verbal love letter to the Patriots.

Gallup calls current polling data “unprecedented”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

The US midterm elections are often taken as a poll on the performance of the President, so the Gallup organization is saying what many Republican and Tea Party speakers have been saying for weeks: Barack Obama is dragging down his party:

Gallup models the number of seats a party will control based on that party’s share of the national two-party vote for the House of Representatives, using historical voting data in midterm elections from 1946 to 2006. The model takes into account the majority party in Congress entering the elections.

Gallup’s historical model suggests that a party needs at least a two-point advantage in the national House vote to win a majority of the 435 seats. The Republicans’ current likely voter margin suggests that this scenario is highly probable, making the question of interest this election not whether the GOP will win the majority, but by how much. Taking Gallup’s final survey’s margin of error into account, the historical model predicts that the Republicans could gain anywhere from 60 seats on up, with gains well beyond that possible.

It should be noted, however, that this year’s 15-point gap in favor of the Republican candidates among likely voters is unprecedented in Gallup polling and could result in the largest Republican margin in House voting in several generations. This means that seat projections have moved into uncharted territory, in which past relationships between the national two-party vote and the number of seats won may not be maintained.

The other thing to keep in mind is that polling isn’t quite as definitive as pollsters would like you to believe: voters sometimes conceal their actual voting intentions. The most recent example of this was the Toronto municipal elections, where polls consistently had Rob Ford and George Smitherman in a statistical dead heat, but the actual result was a 12 point lead for Ford.

H/T to Ace for the link.

This will come as a surprise only to drug warriors

Filed under: Britain, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:10

A recent British study totted up the effects both on the individual and costs to society of various legal and illegal drugs:

Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack, according to a study published in medical journal the Lancet.

The report is co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former UK chief drugs adviser who was sacked by the government in October 2009.

It ranks 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.

Tobacco and cocaine are judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD are among the least damaging.

H/T to DarkWaterMuse, who writes:

An interesting result, no doubt, but one thing the researchers failed to do is to aggregate the harm due to all illicit drugs, or even a handful of drugs frequently abused by the same users. Seems to me this would likely reveal alcohol as relatively benign though it’s not clear how additive the effects are.

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