Friday, July 31, 2015

WTF??? Nuttier than Trump

"GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is open to the idea of using federal troops and the FBI to stop women from having abortions.

"I will not pretend there is nothing we can do to stop this," Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and an outspoken social conservative, said Thursday at a campaign stop in Jefferson, Iowa. 

Huckabee addressed abortion again at his next stop in Rockwell City, Iowa, where a reporter asked him whether stopping abortion would mean using federal troops or the FBI.

"We'll see if I get to be president," Huckabee said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

"All American citizens should be protected," he added."

Huff Post 

Thursday, July 30, 2015

we are all confident idiots by David Dunning

The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)



Monday, July 13, 2015

Eleven Excellent Basketball Books That I Have Read


I have just finished  Not a Game:  The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen  Iverson.  Very good book.  Well documented.  As I am from  the Philadelphia area and a basketball fan, there were very few surprises upon reading the book. While Iverson was a star on the court,  he was not nearly as successful off it.  Babb  focuses on dark side of Iverson, his legal issues, marital woes, financial problems and lack of discipline in missing meetings, practices  and dealing with management ( including coaches.)













 I am also including a list of the top books that I have enjoyed about basketball. Off the top of my head and in no particular order:
  1. A Sense Of Where You Are by John McPhee
  2. A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein
  3. A  Season inside: One Year in College Basketball by John Feinstein
  4. The Miracle of St. Anthony by Adrian Wojaarowski
  5. Dream Team by Jack McCallum
  6. Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich byMark Kriegel
  7. The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam
  8. The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
  9. The Hoops Whisperer by Idan Ravin
  10. Showtime by Jeff Pearlman
  11. Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson