Quotulatiousness

September 14, 2013

Highlights of the 2013 Ig Nobels

Filed under: Humour, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

At Ars Technica, Dean Burnett rounds up the wins and near-misses of the 2013 Ig Nobel awards:

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 12 at a meeting of nerds at Harvard University. The prizes are given for genuine scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.”

So, at first glance, the research may strike you as somewhat baffling, surreal or even downright ridiculous. But science is rarely frivolous. None of the experiments awarded an Ig Nobel will have been the result of casual whims or unplanned notions, like the cast of TV series Jackass being set loose in a laboratory. If any of the prize-winning experiments really are “mad,” it is a determined, dedicated, thorough sort of madness that is probably a lot more worrying in the long run.

Like the Nobels, the Ig Nobels are awarded for individual categories.

[…]

Psychology

The Ig Nobel for psychology went to Laurent Bègue and colleagues for showing through experiment that drunk people consider themselves more attractive. With alcohol such a common intoxicant the world over, analysis of its effects on human behavior is never not-relevant. People may think it’s obvious that drunk people find themselves more attractive, but that’s never been objectively demonstrated. And with alcohol having so many knock-on effects for society, assessing how it affects people’s behavior is always potentially useful.

This award must be doubly welcome after the original experiment about whether drunk people are more aggressive if you spill their drinks had to be abandoned due to the hospitalization of several post-docs.

[…]

Probability

Bert Tolkamp and colleagues showed that cows are not more likely to lie down if they have been standing up for a longer time. Ergo, cows don’t get tired. This could be useful data for the agricultural industry.

This study was chosen ahead of the other favorite, a study titled “The defecation habits of wild bears in areas of high forestation.”

Vlad the (journalistic) Impaler

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:06

Mark Steyn on the sudden re-emergence of Russia on the international stage:

For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.

It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.

All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekend.”

As Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” It’s not just that he can stitch him up at the G-8, G-20, Gee-don’t-tell-me-you’re-coming-back-for-more, and turn the leader of the free world into the planet’s designated decline-and-fall-guy, but he can slough off crappy third-rate telepromptered mush better than you community-organizer schmucks, too. Let’s take it as read that Putin didn’t write this himself any more than Obama wrote that bilge he was drowning in on Tuesday night, when he took to the airwaves to argue in favor of the fierce urgency of doing something about gassed Syrian moppets but not just yet. Both guys are using writers, but Putin’s are way better than Obama’s — and English isn’t even their first language. With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.

Reason.tv: George Will’s Libertarian Evolution

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

“I’ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that’s a lot of folly to witness up close,” says Washington Post columnist George Will. “Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.”

“In part, I owe my current happiness to Barack Obama,” continues the 72-year-old Will, who “so thoroughly concentrates all of the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it, that he’s really put the spring in my step.”

Branded “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America” by the Wall Street Journal, Will received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977 and is the author of numerous books, including Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, and One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of our Singular Nation. A regular panelist on ABC’s This Week, Will has the distinction of having been attacked in the pages of Doonesbury and praised in an episode of Seinfeld (for his “clean, scrubbed look”).

More recently Will has become a champion of libertarianism, both in print and on the air. “America is moving in the libertarians’ direction,” Will wrote in a 2011 review of The Declaration of Independents, “not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous.”

Will sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch to discuss his libertarian evolution (2:16), how Sen. John McCain spurred his political transformation (4:07), Ronald Reagan (4:29), the tax code (8:45), why the Republicans are becoming more interesting (19:30), what the government should be spending money on (23:14), war hawks and foreign policy (25:19), the benefits of judicial activism (34:49), gay marriage (37:55), marijuana legalization (39:04), the importance of Barry Goldwater (40:28), Mitt Romney (45:45), the 2016 election (46:37), Medicare (48:52), how Everett Dirksen’s untimely death changed his life (50:42), why President Obama makes him happy (52:06), affirmative action (53:07), and his optimism in America’s future (57:31).

QotD: Humanity and alcohol

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Anthropologists assure us that wherever we find man he speaks. Chimpanzee-lovers notwithstanding, no animal other than man is capable of laughter. And, although some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian jungle might conceivably provide an exception tomorrow, every present-day society uses alcohol, as have the majority of those of the past. I am not denying that we share other important pleasures with the brute creation, merely stating the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.

There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate. A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War. Not only is drink here to stay; the moral seems to be that when it goes, we go too.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

September 13, 2013

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:26

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s collection of links seems to indicate that every single video-maker in the community did at least one covering the Super Adventure Box. In addition, we’re starting to get information about next week’s content release (Tequatl Rising, featuring a major revamp to the dragon event) and the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

The fatal challenge facing Apple and Samsung – boredom

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski speculates that we’ve hit PEAK SMARTPHONE:

Apple’s keynotes seem to command more mainstream front-page press attention than ever before — but each time, there’s less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?

Apple’s announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily predictable. Cupertino just doesn’t seem to be where the action is any more.

It is almost as if Apple and its arch-rival Samsung have exhausted themselves by suing each other around the world — and now look like two very knackered boxers agreeing to shuffle their way through the remaining rounds to the bell, rather than risk throwing big punches.

[…]

But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly held “crisis talks” this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and, well, “Peak Apple“.

Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking, simply because it could. Apple’s user-facing innovation (the A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a fingerprint scanner — a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the only “radical” moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or “Not F*cking Connecting”, as it’s known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.

The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means to an end — and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone itself became less … important. It didn’t really matter what access device you were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it doesn’t really matter what black rectangle you’re carrying — provided it accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches.

The Catalonian separation movement

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:15

If you’re not already enthralled by watching Canada’s separatist movement in Quebec or the Scottish independence campaign, there’s a potentially even more disruptive separation brewing in Spain. Tyler Cowen thinks it’s not getting as much media exposure as it deserves:

Personally, I am still waiting to hear why Catalonian independence would not bring the fiscal death knell of current Spain, and thus also the collapse of current eurozone arrangements and perhaps also a eurozone-wide depression. Otherwise I would gladly entertain Catalonia as an independent nation, or perhaps after the crisis has passed a referendum can be held. When referenda are held during tough times, it is often too easy to get a “no” vote against anything connected with the status quo.

Is the view simply that “now is the time to strike” and “it is worth it”? Obviously, an independence movement will not wish to speak too loudly about transition costs, but I would wish for more transparency. Or is the view that Spain could fiscally survive the shock of losing about twenty percent of its economy, with all the uncertainties and transition costs along the way? That could be argued, but frankly I doubt it, OMT or not, furthermore other regions would claim more autonomy too. An alternative, more moralizing view is that the fiscal problems are “Spain’s fault in the first place” and need not be discussed too much by the pro-independence side, but I am more consequentialist and marginal product-oriented than that.

This piece, in Catalan, does cover the fiscal implications of debt assumption for an independent Catalonia. The site also links to this somewhat spare piece by Gary Becker, but I still want more of a discussion of the issues raised above.

Keep in mind that two clocks are ticking. The first is that education in Catalonia is becoming increasingly “hispanicized,” the second is that as economic conditions in Spain improve, or maybe just become seen as a new normal, getting a pro-secession vote in a referendum may become harder. It doesn’t quite seem like “do or die” right now, but overall time probably is not on the side of Catalonian independence.

For those that assume Catalonia has always been part of Spain, Edward Hugh discusses why September 11 has been an important date in Catalonian history for nearly 300 years:

Catalonia was a party in the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), where the old crowns of Castile and Aragon fought, alongside their European allies, over who should be crowned as king of Spain following the death of Charles II. Catalonia, which favoured archduke Charles as successor, lost a war which ended with Europe recognising Philip V as the new king of Spain. The long war ended with a prolonged siege of Barcelona, Catalonia’s capital, which was systematically bombarded by Spanish troops fighting for the Bourbon candidate, Philip V. After months of resistance Barcelona finally surrendered on September 11 1714. Modern Spain was born, but Catalonia was to pay a heavy price for its support for the Austrian candidate: Catalan language was forbidden and Catalan institutions abolished. Every year, on September 11, Catalans commemorate the day on which Barcelona fell, honouring those killed defending the country’s laws and institutions.

Medicare costs as seen by the public

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:58

The Harvard School of Public Health released a summary of public opinion on various issues surrounding the Medicare system:

As debate over the national debt and the federal budget deficit begins to heat up again, an analysis of national polls conducted in 2013 shows that, compared with recent government reports prepared by experts, the public has different views about the need to reduce future Medicare spending to deal with the federal budget deficit. Many experts believe that future Medicare spending will have to be reduced in order to lower the federal budget deficit [1] but polls show little support (10% to 36%) for major reductions in Medicare spending for this purpose. In fact, many Americans feel so strongly that they say they would vote against candidates who favor such reductions. Many experts see Medicare as a major contributor to the federal budget deficit today, but only about one-third (31%) of the public agrees.

This analysis appears as a Special Report in the September 12, 2013, issue of New England Journal of Medicine.

One reason that many Americans believe Medicare does not contribute to the deficit is that the majority thinks Medicare recipients pay or have prepaid the cost of their health care. Medicare beneficiaries on average pay about $1 for every $3 in benefits they receive. [2] However, about two-thirds of the public believe that most Medicare recipients get benefits worth about the same (27%) or less (41%) than what they have paid in payroll taxes during their working lives and in premiums for their current coverage.

Differences between experts on the financial condition of Medicare and the public can also be seen when examining the reasons for rising Medicare costs and ways to reduce future Medicare spending. Unlike many experts, the public does not see overuse of medical care and the cost of new medical technologies as among the most important reasons for rising Medicare costs. Only one in six Americans (17%) believes that “people receiving drugs and medical treatments they don’t need” is one of the most important reasons why Medicare care costs are rising, and only 6% see “new drugs, tests and treatments being offered to the elderly” as one of the most important reasons. The three reasons cited most often by the public are poor management of Medicare by government (30%), fraud and abuse in the health sector (24%), and excessive charges by hospitals (23%).

Many experts believe that one of the most important reasons for rising Medicare costs is unnecessary care provided to patients. The public, however, sees the bigger problem for people on Medicare as not getting the health care they need (61%), rather than receiving unnecessary care (21%). Many experts see capitated payments (doctors getting paid a fixed amount of money so they can manage all of a patient’s health care for the year) as a preferred way of reducing future Medicare spending. However, a majority of the public favors continuing fee-for-service payments (65%) rather than changing to capitated health care arrangements (30%). This resistance to change may be related to the fact that a majority of the public sees Medicare in some cases already withholding treatments and prescription drugs to save money, including 63% who believe this happens very or somewhat often.

QotD: The constant theme of British battles through history

Filed under: Britain, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I have a theory that, while the battles the British fight may differ in the widest possible way, they have invariably two common characteristics — they are always fought uphill and always at the junction of two or more map sheets.

Field Marshal William Slim, “Aid to the Civil”, Unoficial History, 1959.

September 12, 2013

QotD: The “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:11

The lesson I remember best from my religious instruction as a youth in the Catholic church came from a nun who was explaining the ten commandments. She asked me to explain the prohibition of taking the Lord’s name in vain; I said it meant I should not curse using God’s name. She corrected me — ultimately the commandment means we should not invoke God’s name for our own power or glory or purposes rather than His own, she said.

9/11 — like every great and terrible thing and event that has ever come before it — is invoked to demand and justify a wide array of ends and prove a confusing jumble of conclusions. Many of those ends and conclusions were sought by their advocates well before 9/11. It has ever been so. People will seek power, seek prominence, seek money, seek their religious and ideological goals by invoking events — by trying, as I suggested in #4 above, to blur the line between the thing and our reaction to the thing. This has been a constant theme on this blog: the government has sought more and more power over us, and more and more limitations on our rights, by invoking 9/11, only to use those new powers to fight old fights unrelated to terrorism and to suppress things they didn’t like before 9/11. The PATRIOT ACT was an incoherent jumble of law enforcement wet dreams and wish lists, components of which had been floating about for decades. But though the government’s efforts to use 9/11 has carried the most weight, the invocations have not come only from the government — they’ve come from everywhere, left and right, seeking to use the tragedy to prove preconceptions about America and its foreign policy.

Ken White, “Ten Things I Want My Children To Learn From 9/11”, Popehat, 2011-09-11

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky

Filed under: Middle East, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Steve Chapman thinks Barack Obama is a very lucky man indeed:

In assessing the feasibility and probability of Russia’s proposal to secure Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons, one overlooked factor should be paramount in our minds: Barack Obama is the luckiest politician on the face of the planet. If he were tied to a railroad track, the train would levitate and pass harmlessly over him. He’s always the windshield, never the bug.

In this instance, Obama got himself into a box that would flummox Harry Houdini. In a procession of careless comments, he said Assad had to go and that if he ever used chemical weapons against rebels, he would face “enormous consequences.”

When the Syrian dictator used them anyway, Obama was forced to prepare for a military strike that found scant public support. When he tried to gain the upper hand by asking for congressional authorization, he got an Arctically frigid reception.

So he faced two unpleasant possibilities: Congress would refuse, in which case he would look like a chump. Or it would agree, forcing him to carry out an attack that was likely to accomplish nothing except to wreck his approval rating.

But then along came the Russians to open an escape route. Acting in response to another unscripted remark, from Secretary of State John Kerry, they proposed to place Syria’s chemical gas arsenal under international control. The Syrians responded by not only admitting that they had such weapons, but offering to surrender them.

The proposal sounded implausible and impractical, but it had too many things going for it to be passed up. Most importantly, it serves the interests of every important party. It spares the Syrian regime a damaging attack by the United States. It spares the rebels being gassed again. It validates the great power status of Russia — and might even win Vladimir Putin a Nobel Peace Prize.

Not least, it saves Obama from looking like an appeaser, a warmonger or an incompetent. It even allows Kerry to portray the administration as unsurpassed in its diplomatic brilliance.

American voters suddenly decide to take a serious look at foreign policy

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

A guest post at Zero Hedge by Robery W. Merry suggests that somnolent American interest in foreign policy may be waking up:

Political analysts over the next year or so, and historians well into the future, are likely to point to the fall of 2013 as a fundamental inflection point in American politics. That period, they will say, is when the American people forced a major new direction in American foreign policy. Before the events of this fall, the country’s electorate largely delegated foreign policy to its political elite — and largely supported that elite as it projected American military power with more abandon than the country had ever before seen. Even as the government steadfastly expanded the range of international problems that it said required U.S. military action, the electorate accepted that expanded international role and that increasingly promiscuous use of force.

Those days are gone now. The American people conveyed emphatically, in public opinion surveys and in communications to their representatives in Washington, that they did not want their country to launch air strikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Not even if Assad used chemical weapons against his people, as they generally believe he did. Not even if the strikes are limited in magnitude and duration, as Obama promises they will be. Not even if the president of the United States says the strikes are in the country’s national interest. They don’t buy it, and they don’t want it.

Poll numbers in recent days have demonstrated this turnaround in stark fashion. In addition, congressional reluctance to support the president’s authorization request was growing inexorably. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the president was “losing ground in both parties in recent days,” while the Wall Street Journal said support for Mr. Obama’s position on Syria “was slipping in Congress.” If Russia’s Vladimir Putin hadn’t interrupted the U.S. political process with his call for a negotiated end to Assad’s possession of chemical weapons, it seems inevitable that the president would have suffered a devastating political defeat in Congress. That’s still the likely outcome if it ever comes to a vote.

[…]

In a survey reported in Tuesday’s New York Times, the paper asked broader questions about American foreign policy, and the results were revealing. Fully 62 percent of respondents said the United States shouldn’t take a leading role in trying to solve foreign conflicts, while only 34 percent said it should. On a question whether the United States should intervene to turn dictatorships into democracies, 72 percent said no. Only 15 percent said yes. The Times said that represents the highest level of opposition recorded by the paper in various polls over the past decade.

To understand the significance of these numbers, along with the political pressures building on lawmakers on the issue, it’s important to note that American political sentiment doesn’t change willy-nilly, for no reason. What we’re seeing is the emergence within the American political consciousness of a sense that the country’s national leaders have led it astray on foreign policy. And, given the country’s foreign-policy history of the past two decades, it isn’t surprising that the people would begin to nudge their leaders with a certain amount of agitation.

This is rather sinister

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok talks about a statistical study which concluded that being left-handed had serious impact on your lifespan:

In 1991 Halpern and Coren published a famous study in the New England Journal of Medicine which appears to show that left handed people die at much younger ages than right-handed people. Halpern and Coren had obtained records on 987 deaths in Southern California — we can stipulate that this was a random sample of deaths in that time period — and had then asked family members whether the deceased was right or left-handed. What they found was stunning, left handers in their sample had died at an average age of 66 compared to 75 for right handers. If true, left handedness would be on the same order of deadliness as a lifetime of smoking. Halpern and Coren argued that this was due mostly to unnatural deaths such as industrial and driving accidents caused by left-handers living in a right-handed world. The study was widely reported at the time and continues to be regularly cited in popular accounts of left handedness (e.g. Buzzfeed, Cracked).

What is less well known is that the conclusions of the Halpern-Coren study are almost certainly wrong, left-handedness is not a major cause of death. Rather than dramatically lower life expectancy, a more plausible explanation of the HC findings is a subtle and interesting statistical artifact. The problem was pointed out as early as the letters to the editor in the next issue of the NEJM (see Strang letter) and was also recently pointed out in an article by Hannah Barnes in the BBC News (kudos to the BBC!) but is much less well known.

The statistical issue is that at a given moment in time a random sample of deaths is not necessarily a random sample of people. I will explain.

Stirring up opposition to the Charter of Quebec Values

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gives a bit of sovereigntist history and brings us up to date on the proposed Charter of Quebec Values:

When Bernard Drainville, another minister in today’s post-cosmopolitain PQ government, released the text of his proposed Charter of Values — complete with handy wall charts showing the articles of clothing (Veil! Kippah!) that will heretofore be banished from public servants’ bodies while at work — he had the handy effect of smoking out two federal party leaders who have been equivocal until now. The Liberal, Justin Trudeau, has opposed the charter since the PQ started putting up trial balloons nearly a month ago. The New Democrat, Thomas Mulcair, has most of his seats in Quebec, and had resisted comment until now. So, mostly, had the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, although he did tip his hand when asked about the PQ plan in Toronto: “Our job is making all groups who come to this country, whatever their background, whatever their race, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their religion, feel home in this country and be Canadians. That’s our job.”

On Tuesday the trial balloons became official government policy. The NDP and Conservatives came out unequivocally against the PQ. Speaking for the government, Jason Kenney suggested a possible federal court challenge.

This, too, happens to be one of the tactical tricks Jean-François Lisée cooked up during the long years before he entered electoral politics. In his 2000 book Sorti de secours, Lisée suggested the PQ cook up some scheme that would be rejected by the rest of the country, so Quebecers would feel insulted and want to secede.

Such a plan would depend for its success on a clear distinction between Quebec public opinion and the actions of national parties. So far it’s not going well for the PQ. Mulcair and Trudeau are Quebecers whose parties hold 66 of the province’s 75 seats. The Bloc Québécois did not hurry to embrace Marois’s scheme. Every Montreal mayoral candidate opposes it, as does the Quebec Federation of Women.

The inspiration for the PQ’s decision to retrench is purely electoralist. It is a reaction to 30 years of failed efforts to make the sovereignty movement every Quebecer’s fight. Forced generosity having failed the PQ, the party is falling back on cynicism and pettiness. It’s make-or-break for the entire sovereignty movement, and I’m pretty sure Marois, Lisée and Drainville just broke it.

September 11, 2013

NFL still not serious about player safety

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Detroit’s Ndamukong Suh has a long history of abusive play: he’s been fined several times for deliberately attempting to harm other players (Green Bay’s Evan Dietrich-Smith and Houston’s Matt Schaub, both during Thanksgiving Day games, and now his illegal hit on Minnesota’s John Sullivan during Sunday’s game). ESPN1500‘s Judd Zulgad says the league “dropped the ball” in the latest incident:

In Suh, the NFL has a repeat offender and a player who has tried to injure opponents. That means they have the perfect man to make an example of at every turn.

The fact Suh is a key part of the Lions’ defense is even more of a reason to do this. He has lost the right to ever receive the benefit of the doubt.

For this hit, the NFL should have fined Suh $100,000 and suspended him for one game.

The league should have then informed Suh that the next time he thinks about throwing a questionable block, stomping on someone or delivering a questionable hit that the fine will be $150,000 and the suspension will be two games.

The third time, he will be out $200,000 and the suspension will be three games.

This will give the Lions far more incentive to make sure that Suh cleans up his act and if he can’t then he will cheap shot his way right out of the NFL.

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