Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Kate falls into the trap of referring to evolution as just a theory. The problem with this is, everything we know about science is a theory. Some theories (quantum physics) are better than other theories (super string theory) but every thing is still a theory. We could wake up tomorrow and have the entire world turned upside down and everything we think that we know to be true could be false. The dichotomy of theory versus law is a false one. Evolution, especially micro evolution observable in the lab, describes the facts that we see in nature better than any other explanation. Evolution has been shown to accurately represent reality and therefore, should not be discussed as "only a theory".

Nothing about evolution is intellectually inconsistent with a belief in God. Evolution is a description of the natural world that we live in and observe. Evolution does not prevent a belief in God. To say that evolution is "only a theory" is to misunderstand the question of how we view the ideas that describe our natural world.
7:26:07 PM    What do you think?  []  trackback []


Keep the Navarro College players and students in your thoughts and/or prayers.
7:18:39 AM    What do you think?  []  trackback []

All the trade rumors involving the Mavericks and Rasheed Wallace, perennial asshole, can be put to bed. I'd like to think that we avoided a trade for Wallace because of his character, or lack thereof, and the chemistry we're trying to build with the current team. But the cynic in me figures he would have just cost too much damn money. Money quote:
    What you do in this situation is very clear, you start with a clean slate," Hawks general manager Billy Knight said. "You judge people on the way they are with you. I'm not going to go on what someone else said.

Actually, what's patently clear to me in this situation is that you don't trade for whiny, unproductive assholes who disrupt team chemistry and do nothing to enhance the idea of "team" but then I'm not the general manager of the Atlanta Hawks, a team going nowhere faster than most in the NBA. The NBA continues to go out of its way to project a gangster attitude that I believe is one of the main reasons, along with allowing high school players into the game (Note to the NFL: Amend the Collective Bargaining agreement, find a better judge, do whatever you have to do but please keep that whining asshole Clarett out of the draft) that the NBA's popularity continues to slide. When you allow players like Wallace and Sprewell to continue playing you do nothing but bad things to your brand and your image.

Hopefully the flip side of this is that we will keep a really classy player who will actually contribute value on the court.

Cuban, can you please do something to give Jamison some confidence he might be around longer than the trade deadline?
7:09:27 AM    What do you think?  []  trackback []


This headline reads "Olympic coach Larry Brown calls out Cuban" but it ought to say "Stupid Coach Makes Asinine statments about things he doesn't know anything about". In case you missed it, Brown basically called Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, a dumbass for Cuban's stance on not allowing players to play in the off-season in the Olympics.

Cuban nails the problem with Brown's logic here:

    This is a topic that's easy for Larry to comment on," Cuban said. "He has never had to write the check for an NBA payroll in his life. Has he ever run a business in his life? He isn't responsible to fans, and he gets paid regardless of what happens. If things don't work out, a player gets injured or he doesn't like the way things are going, he can do what he has done everywhere else, just leave."

The NBA is a business, granted it's a business that seems to shoot itself in the foot all the time, but the main job of any business is to protect its assets. That's all Cuban is doing here. Brown goes on to say stupid things like:
    We're supposed to be the best players, we're supposed to think of what's best for the game," said Brown, who won a gold medal as a player with the 1964 Olympic team and has been an assistant on several Olympic staffs. "But unfortunately, we have people who think only of what's good for themselves. That's why our game has gone from being a great team game to an individual sport. We have an opportunity to show everybody the right way to play, just like the teams we sent over in the past. So Maloof and Cuban ... this is before they even knew what basketball was like. They ought to be proud of the fact that we've improved the sport and stop thinking so selfishly.

I love it that Brown really thinks we, the fans, are so stupid as to really not understand who the selfish ones are in this equation. Players think they have some right to a guaranteed contract, even if they go out and suffer a career-threatening injury while playing for the Olympics.

Not only that, what the hell is Brown talking about when he says "The right way to play"? The right way to play would be to not allow pros into the Olympics and try to keep it a pure and untarnished emblem of competition and sportsmanship. Instead, for Coach Brown who seems to have forgotten, what we show the world when we let people like Jordan, Magic, and Shaq compete in the Olympics, is how to mercilessly crush opposing teams. Since 1992, when professionals were first allowed to play basketball in the Olympics, the USA players, those unselfish guys just playing for their country, have gone 24-0 winning games by an average of 32.25 points, scoring 2514 points to the opponents 1740, and suffering only 1 real scare, last year's match against Lithuania. This is the "right way to play?" If so, please let me change the channel.

Increasingly, the me-first attitude of NBA players has contributed to the ongoing slide in quality of play in the NBA. It's the players who are the selfish ones. And remember, Brown is the coach who didn't seem to mind that Allen Iverson just didn't think practice was that important.

Is it any surprise that he's this clueless?
12:16:10 AM    What do you think?  []  trackback []