I think that Football needs to be reformed. According to a recent segment on 60 Minutes, pro football players are something like 16 times more likely to get Alzheimer's or dementia. If there's a moral case to be made, this seems like it. Do we really want to watch people put themselves at risk for a horrible disease simply so we are entertained?

Agreed. Fortunately, the NFL appears to take this seriously, and constantly amends the rules to try to reduce concussions. The best way might be to "detune" the helmets. If the players knew the helmets offered no protection they might not be so eager to bang heads.

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/diploma-mill/2009/11/13/race-bottom

You'll love this spock. Three states, New York, South Carolina, and Hawaii, are cutting their school budgets. Not one word on cutting school sports to save money.

Love this quote: "Corrections Department Director John Ozmint said a 15 percent reduction would slash $49 million from his $330 million budget. He said he could handle that by closing prison facilities and releasing inmates."

Release the inmates. Start with the schools.

Well, it doesn't say much at all about the cuts planned for NY or South Carolina. Hawaii says they'll cut 17 days of schools, so that will hit everything, although the impact on sports is likely to be minimal.

The most offensive part of the article is the indication that Obama is following in Bush's footsteps with education "reform." More testing--a play straight out of No Child Left Behind that isn't working now and isn't going to work because a democrat pushed for it. There is plenty of testing going on now, the problem isn't too little testing, it is too little attention to testing what is important. Too much emphasis on breadth and none on depth.

Like Bush, Obama wants more accountability. If a school district doesn't do well for five years in a row the feds are supposed to come in, fire everyone, and start over. What's Obama planning to do to top that?

Not that I oppose accountability--I expect public agencies to be accountable for their actions and use of public funds. But you cannot truly hold someone, or something, accountable for its actions when many of those actions are outside of its control. Too many parents are whining about too much homework interfering with Johnny and Susie's extra curricular schedule so teachers stop assigning so much homework. Too many parents worry about their kids getting AP courses in high school rather than asking that their kids be pushed to perform in regular classes.

Bah. More of the same and it isn't going to work.

My brother was teaching at an "underperforming" school last spring. One of the teachers there said "This is our last year as an underperforming school. We'll all have to come back and reapply for our jobs. Nobody's gonna come down here and take our jobs. We can't even get subs to come out here."

I wonder if that held up under the recession.

http://www.slate.com/id/2236426/


An interesting, though not great, article on the relationship between domestic violence and football.

Going back to the first post in this thread:



That would make me cynical too, if I had ever been told that playing basketball would teach you valuable lessons about financial planning. I just don't remember ever hearing that before.

Actually, this article makes me less cynical about pro sports. If you don't like the fact that athletes earn millions of dollars for throwing a ball around, you should take heart at this. In the end, he didn't! He pumped all that money back into the economy without saving diddly for himself. We need more athletes like Antoine Walker.



Well, probably partially that, but also because in a lot of schools the sports program actually brings money into the school rather than taking it out. Either way, going by your first argument, school sports programs seem a lot less offensive. There's a lot less misplaced adulation bestowed on those athletes than on the Millionnaires' Club.

RE: Walker. So he lost his money. Where did it go? To the unscrupulous people who prey on guys like him. I wish I could manage the money of a rich sports star.

RE: moritorium on sports. I was thinking of the public schools, who don't make much more than the widow's pennies from gate receipts. They spend a lot of money on a few kids, though.

Either way, he doesn't have millions of dollars for throwing a ball around. But just to keep it in perspective, at least sports heroes are idolized for what they do. Actors are too often idolized for doing nothing. You'd never see a sports hero summoned to Congress to testify about farm policy simply because they'd once played a farmer in a movie (as happened with Meryl Streep). At least people don't tend to assume that sports figures know about anything outside of their field. It's usually the reverse, the stereotype is that jocks are pretty dumb.

You'd probably be glad to expand the argument to say that actors are overpaid too. In a way they are, in a way they aren't. What they do on a film isn't worth 60 zillion dollars by any reasonable measure of value. On the other hand, why do their bosses have that kind of money to pay them in the first place if not because a LOT of people paid money to see their performances? As long as the money came in, I don't see that letting a studio head keep it would have been any better.

Is that evidence of misplaced values on our part? Well, I went to see Jim Carrey's new Christmas Carol movie last week, so I contributed to his exorbitant salary. But I only paid $9, and don't see movies in the theater all that often (I think the last time I did was for Star Trek XI in May). I don't think simply seeing his movie is indicative of any poor value system on my part. On the other hand, if I assumed that he knew anything about farm policy or the like simply because he was famous, I think that would indicate massively screwed up values on my part. That's one of the reasons I could never stand to watch Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. It seemed to be totally founded on the premise that being a star means you know something about public policy. I don't think we're anywhere near seeing a talk show devoted to hearing washed-up jocks discuss fiscal policy.

Let's stick to sports here. We can do a separate thread on "Reasons to be Cynical about Hollywood".

Simply because people ripped off Antoine Walker does not excuse giving him the money in the first place.