Pro Football As A Computer ‘Geek’ Contest

Pro Football As A Computer ‘Geek’ Contest

Professional football is more and more becoming a sport in which ‘experts’ of all ilk are finding themselves without any expertise when it comes to predicting how teams will do. It has become almost laughable and pitiful. Football practices and games are analyzed to death before, during, and after the season. Many of these people are not dumb and have been around football all their life. 

At the start of the season, after watching teams practice and participate in pre season games the sport writers and TV experts summarized what the new season was going to look like. Seattle was far too good to be ousted from the top, or so was the consensus. San Francisco was right up there, the Packers were like in 7th place on the list, Denver was up there, New England was up there, the Cowboys were going no where, and I just don’t remember a lot of it. 

But the season is half over and nothing is like all the expert’s predicted. Now either the experts are not knowledgeable about football (which I assume is not true) or football has become more and more impossible to predict. Here is how they line up at the half-way point by wins and losses:

6 wins: Dallas, Detroit, New England, Denver, Arizona

5 wins:  SanDiego, Philly, Green Bay, 

And opinion changes constantly.  Green Bay was back in about 7th place in likelihood to get to the Super Bowl early in the season, then after losing a couple of games badly, they sunk to 16th place, then they won a game, then clobbered some team. That week I saw a prediction by some major sport channel that the two teams most likely to be in the Superbowl by some sort of computer prediction were Denver and Green Bay.  Huh?  How did Green Bay go from 16 to the top two?

The sportscasters who broadcast the Bear games on radio, all of whom have been around football all their life and know enough football to talk about each position, game plans, etc for hours in pre and post game broadcasts were really excited about the Bears after covering training camp. And most other experts put the Bears up there, often ahead of the Packers. I myself thought Trestman seemed to know what he was talking about. Well, the Bears have won 3 games. 

When I look at prediction contests between the ‘experts’ from week to week the top predictors guess correctly anywhere from 8-12 games right. At the end of the season the winner will win with some sort of low 60’s percentile. That’s a little over 10% better than just guessing.  And if we take out the poorest teams, the winning predicting percentage would be even closer to 50%. And each week there will be some games where everyone picks a certain team to win. This season so far, there will be anywhere from 3-5 games per week in which the unanimous picked winner will lose. I mean wow.

While I don’t have stats on this, it just seems 40 years ago games were a lot more predictable. 

So what gives?  My guess is that professional football is becoming some sort of chess match with computers and other gadgets creating the ‘chess moves’.  It used to be the coaches and players who determined the outcome of the game pretty much on their own. Raw talent and good coaching and you carried the day. Not today, except for the quarterback and lineman, the other players are more and more dependent on an every down chess game going on with every game and many downs. Multiple players come on and off the field with every play practically, and many key players have mics in their helmets to think for them. What, I begin to wonder, am I rooting for?  The best computerized game plans? Whose computers can cough up adjustments the fastest and implement the quickest?  The best of position players can’t make a tackle or catch a ball if the plays called don’t put them in a position to tackle or catch. Are there any teams today which demonstrate solid consistency? Certainly individual player talent can’t vary so much from game to game. And if player talent is less the answer, for what are people rooting for? 

Maybe in the near future the Coaches will all be computer geeks who have never played a football game in their lives. And every player will have mics in their helmets to think for them. Maybe to be maximally efficient, we won’t need games where so many serious injuries are now occurring, and instead, the Head geek coaches will arrive at midfield to submit their plays or defense schemes for every down. Then another computer will figure out what happened, and this will continue until at the end of the game the winner is declared by the best computerized input. No injured players, no bad referee calls, no bad weather, no personal fouls or misconduct, no fighting, no loud crowd noise to interfere with the plays, and no debate over who should have won the game.

After I wrote the above Dallas got beat by Washington, still another game when just about everyone predicted an easy win for Dallas. A week ago Dallas had been elevated by the experts to now be one of the top two teams this season. Based on all the above in earlier paragraphs I guess it figures that they would then be beat by one of the poorest teams in the league. These football experts (and they really do know a lot bout the nuts and bolts of football) are like the financial experts who explain why the stock market went up or down a particular day.  Look, if they could really predict what the stock market was going to react to, they then would every dam night be able to use the same reasons they will use after the fact, to predict the same change the night before. Outside of a major global event it doesn’t work at all. Same with football, before the game the experts rarely can predict the outcome with any degree of accuracy at all these days, while after the game they can analyze the game for hours to explain why the outcome was the way it was. 

The funniest post game analysis is probably baseball where the coaches are reduced to such brilliant comments as “we need to score more runs”,  “we need to have fewer errors”, “we need better pitching”, “we need the bullpen to do it’s job”, “we need to be more consistent” and blah blah blah.

The favorite one to me is the “we need to play better as a team”. That is really a dumb thing to say in a sport like baseball. When somebody is at the plate does the coach tell them “we need to play better as a team” or is it well understood by the player and coach that “if you don’t get enough hits when at bat your salary or your being on the team is at stake”. Of course as coach you want teammates to get along with each other and this boils down to accepting diversity. Some players are quiet, some are motor mouths, some players are good leaders and others like the “Beast” in Seattle just need to be allowed to be their ‘weird’ selves. It is rare for a teammate to be dismissed because of their personality unless they physically or verbally are assaulting others on the team. The best way to help your team is to be the best you can at your position.

If I had my way, when the game starts neither the coaches or players would have any gadgets to assist them during the game. I prefer to depend on, and root for, good players and coaches, not some gadgets running the show. Fill the coaches and players with all the information you can during practice and the information can come from any source.  But once the game starts it should be the players and coaches calling the plays and making adjustments. I am not sure I even want any shifting of players until four downs are completed, minus injury to a player. I prefer the game to be won by those athletes on the field with the most physical/mental talents. The way it is heading now it might not be too far off when all 17 assistant coaches are wired to particular players via mics in the helmet to ‘assist’ the player while on the field. I never have been all that appreciative of puppet shows.   

Election 2014: Delay Of The Inevitable

Election 2014: Delay Of The Inevitable

This current election mirrors the times. People are unhappy for many different reasons. Everything is changing so fast, and so many potentially dire threats to our planet and our natural environment are coming from different directions all at once. We are like deer frozen in the headlights. And there are so many of us now on earth that the resources simply are not there for all earthly human inhabitants to live a life style the affluent now live. No one really denies if the human population doubles again, like it has in my lifetime, that this is going to be trouble. 

We understand a lot of things in principle, but we choose not to act on these long term threats, but instead use our energies to protect our own immediate self-serving needs. We spend money by borrowing it, knowing that the next generation will have to pay off the debt, one way or another. And we do this at the same time telling ourselves and others how much our children mean to us. We often adopt family values as our religion even though we know every major religion is based on ‘we are all God’s children’. Ok, that sounds nice, but in reality we tend to act like only our own family is important. Why else would we favor a system in which the amount of money to educate children varies widely?  

We fight wars in which we cannot win because in the past wars did produce winners and losers.  And we keep spending more and more on weapons which are extremely expensive and useless in modern wars. What good is an atomic bomb or a zillion drones in the war against terrorism? Totally useless, unless we are gong to exterminate the entire population of a country. Maybe it will come to that. With the internet how do we propose to stop Terrorists from becoming cohesive groups without ever meeting in person in any particular place? We fight wars in which we are the only combatants in uniform. That’s a difficult conundrum. And how can the affluent, who control global and domestic operations, those who have much to protect, win any long term wars against those with nothing to lose?

And who are the terrorists anyway? Mostly they are people oppressed with little hope of things getting better for them, and they fight with whatever means at hand, and don’t care about the risks because they have nothing left to lose. Those with wealth are amassing more wealth at an exponential rate across the globe, regardless of what form of government.  And that ever increasing addictive need for more wealth has to come from the middle class. It cannot come from the poor because the poor have nothing left to give, and have so little that they don’t even have to pay income taxes. Thus, for this appetite of the rich to become even richer, this enough is never enough money has to come from the middle class, and this appetite pushes more of the middle class into poverty. These addicted to wealth individuals are just as much terrorists as the poorest suicide bombers who strap bombs to themselves or plant bombs, or become snipers, etc. When anyone is extracting wealth from others, because they have the power to do so, not because of any legitimate exchange for goods or services, they are terrorists. It is simply unearned wealth, wealth earned only because they have the political power to take this wealth. 

There is less of a community mentality today than ever before. People to people contact is mostly through electronic gadgets, and this communication between the same people instantly over and over throughout the day provides precious little time for any serious thoughts about the varied aspects of life. We barely know most of those around us. We only know those at the other end of our gadgets, and they exist so we never have need to contemplate things much. People cannot be on a bus, train, walking, or in a store without someone chatting to them over a gadget. It is not just an information overload, but a useless information overload. The tower of Babel is in our ears or in front of our eyes most of the day. 

It may seem strange that the 1-5 percenters, who own like 90% of the wealth in this country, can manage to convince so many others of the middle and poor class to vote for the candidates they financially bankroll. Why would so many people vote against their own economic welfare? 

Everybody knows that the poor, as well as the non poor, have a lot of personal prejudices, prejudices which have a lot of meaning to them. The wealthy use these prejudices to get a lot of people to vote for their candidate. We have birth control, gun rights, abortion, gay marriage, drug abuse, 

patriotism, and so on, PLUS it is ever so easy to get many people to blame the existence of all kinds of minorities as the reason life is getting worse for them financially. There is little more pitiful than some marginally affluent person voting Republican because it gives them some sort of ego boost to feel they are more elite, not a part of the riff-raff they so detest.

So somebody will win this election and the Republicans will control both houses of congress or they will not. It matters little since nothing much is going to change or happen either way. Each party can block all important legislation at will whether they are the majority or not. So we are likely to limp along for the next couple of years and the day after this election the next election will start and the millions upon millions of dollars will begin to be collected by both parties. Buying elections has become a major industry in this country. 

If the Republicans win the election for President in 2016 they lose since then they have to actually correct the problems they created,  and will reap the pent up anger of so many, an anger kept under wraps because Obama was president and most of the poor and minorities had hope and kept patient. But the massive movement of money to the already very rich has continued and with the Republicans in charge the chaos and third world like guerrilla domestic terrorism will spring up and grow like a weed. The Republicans simply have no plan whatsoever to stop the flow of money to the already rich.  In fact that is precisely their main goal. The Koch Brothers and their ilk didn’t spend millions to get their ‘kind’ elected to have any reasonable regulation and limits to their capitalistic ventures. Capitalism is the best system yet devised except it can’t work well very long without reasonable regulations and set limits for profits. Those losing the battle for a share of the economic pie are not going to wait much longer. They are getting more restless. Human overpopulation is going to suffer the same consequences any other species suffers from over population. Mother Nature bats last and she is certainly now in the warm up circle. Evolution will survive and we cannot predict how long or how severe the correction will be. Evolution has never worked on human time and there could be millions of years pass by before things begin to wend upward again. Humans now have the knowledge and brain power to prevent damage to the environment but we don’t have any real inclination to do so. Responsible reproduction is not even mentioned in political debates. 

For the first time in evolutionary history a species possesses the inherent intelligence to prevent many kinds of catastrophic situations which can cause major environmental changes. But intelligence and the will to use that intelligence are two separate things. We all really do know that the only constants in life are change, diversity, and luck. We all really do know that the Golden Rule is the basis for ethics. Every culture everywhere realizes the Golden Rule as an ethical concept. But what we really know and what we really do are often a disconnect. Maybe that is why every major religion has invented the concept of forgiveness so that Heaven can still be achieved. The human system of ethics has improved over time just like physical traits improve over time. Humans have, in theory, the basis to make life more contented for everyone and other species too, but we are still too wedded to circling the wagons, inventing family values, using inherited religious dogmas for our ethics, the our country right or wrong mentality, ethical and cultural allegiances, and all sorts of self serving biases which serve to make the Golden Rule inoperable. When all is said and done, the immediate future looks bumpy, if not setting the stage for a dire evolutionary correction, BUT the long term future of evolution will proceed as it has for billions of years. I know, that’s fine but it doesn’t include us. That’s ok, none of us are in an apoplectic state because we were not present for all the millions of years which preceded us, and I reckon there is no need to become apoplectic about not being present for the millions of years in the future. “Thus, that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.” Epictetus (Greek philosopher). 

The Sanctity of Marriage

The Sanctity of Marriage

The American public has just gone through a remarkably swift social upheaval regarding the legal definition of marriage. It is not easy to comprehend why, on a topic so emotional and well-ingrained, there has been such rapid reversal on the issue of whether gays can marry and be a legitimate presence in the social and workplace environment of our society.  Many, with genuine seriousness, insisted that the sanctity of marriage was at stake. What, it begs the question, does the sanctity of marriage really mean?

Anything written on this topic is guaranteed to stir up varied emotions and opinions, but that is never a good reason to avoid a topic. Nothing which follows will be accepted in it’s entirety by hardly anyone. The whole issue is rather personal. Even though I have never been married, this hardly leaves me any more objective about the topic than anyone else. When someone claims to be an expert on marriage because they are married, at most this makes them an expert on their own marriage. Since half of marriages fail, it seems there is a dearth of experts.  Intimate relations of any sort between two individuals are experiences beyond any precise and rational interpretation. I, like others, have tried to use logic and reason to understand intimate relationships, but in the end I sort of conclude, for lack of any success, that sex and sometimes love just prove God has a sense of humor. After many decades of observation I still have no more idea which two people will have a lasting marriage.  And neither do at least 50% of those who marry since at some point they divorce. The figure is really much higher than that since many marriages which last become relationships of convenience as much as anything else. I have seen endless married couples in a restaurant go through an entire meal and not say a word to each other. Why are they even eating out together? Sometimes one or both get on their cell phones and have conversation throughout their dinner, but not with each other. 

It need be stated at the onset here that my own personal sense of the matter is that there is nothing better than a good marriage, nothing worse than a bitter divorce, and every other kind of relationship falls in between. Stats indicate married people are happier than non married, but these stats are suspect in that many people, for many reasons (mental, physical, and personality-wise) are not a good fit for marriage or to live the longest or be the happiest under any circumstances. So these stats carry a lot of baggage that is not related to marriage itself. It is probably also true that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. One of the most astute statements about love was made by James Baldwin: “Everybody’s journey is individual.  You don’t know with whom you’re going to fall in love…If you fall in love with the wrong color, wrong religion, wrong sex—you fall in love”. And that pretty much sums it up. 

Well, maybe it should, but for many it doesn’t.  And it doesn’t help to get a tad silly about it either. When a preacher says at a marriage ceremony “Let no man put asunder what God has put together”, this is a strange thing to say since half the marriages don’t last.  God probably could do much better were there any truth to the statement.  And we need do away with the illusionary concept that each person seeks out the one true love and marries that person. More realistically, most people do not marry the person they would most like to marry simply because they are bit down the ladder of desirability for marriage. We learn quickly in high school that, for most of us, there is little sense asking to the prom, the prom King or Queen. Most of us have to drop our sights quite a bit lower, and end up asking someone who might possibly be able to be attracted to us, at least for the evening. With all the media beautiful bodies beamed at us, and even pornography, most of us are not going to measure up. How many couples do any of us know whose sex life would sell well in the sex video market?  And sadly, how many of us ourselves would sell well in the sex video market? And if sex is such a serious and sanctified act why is it probably the favorite topic for humor? Things are only funny if they are a bit absurd. And human sexual behaviors are certainly more funny than they are wrapped in sanctity. Just look at the struggle most couples have trying to adjust their own inclinations regarding sex with their partner. In that process the humor gets lost for the couple involved. 

If sexual liaisons come easy to an attractive person the person either tends to become bored with it all, or addicted to it—with the usual trait of an addiction that enough is never enough. Nothing so far in this musing helps at all with understanding the sanctity of marriage. Is the meaning found in what was once the sanctity of slavery——your slave is your property and no one else has any business interfering with your property?  I don’t think this is what is meant by sanctity of marriage. We have already dismissed marriage as being sanctified by God. 

Most people would agree that a strong loving relationship between two people is a good thing, and if we don’t have such a relationship we are envious because all of us want a good thing. It seems the difference of opinion here is whether it is only a good thing IF this loving relationship is between a male and female. What about a loving relationship with a pet?  That doesn’t seem to come with the same qualification. It seems we have the same problem here as we have with pornography, where one Supreme Court Justice remarked: “I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it”.  Unfortunately, we all see things through different eyes. Therein lies the crux of the matter. We also need be reminded of the famous saying, “I don’t really care what they do for sex as long as they don’t do it in the streets and scare the horses”. Perhaps those who feel same sex marriages are sinful mean it this way “I don’t care what they do for sex as long as they don’t do it under the umbrella of marriage.” But this just leads to another conundrum. What sex acts are appropriate to protect the sanctity of marriage? If it is the sex acts that confer sanctity, then that must mean the only sex acts permissible are those which lead to pregnancy. That works I guess except what about those heterosexual couples who engage in all sorts of sexual acts that have nothing to do with getting pregnant? And if pregnancy is the whole purpose of marriage why don’t heterosexual couples who are non fertile have their marriage annulled by the state?  What the hell are they doing in bed that fulfills such a definition or purpose of marriage? They certainly aren’t procreating. 

We could go on endlessly here and others have, but we have gone far enough here to see the wisdom of “live and let live” regarding sex and marriage. If a couple, heterosexual or same-sex, have a foot fetish, what harm is that to anyone else? In forced sex there is a victim. With consensual sex between adults there is no victim.  When groups chant “Make love not war” the assumption here is that love is a good thing. They don’t chant “Make heterosexual love, not war”.  

What about the statement “I don’t care what gay people do in private as long as they keep this behavior out of sight.”  I was under the impression most sexual acts are to be kept out of sight for the valid reason that almost every sexual act is offensive to some. And past a certain age, most couples having sex are not a sight to feast anyone’s eyes on. By 50 it has been said, “everyone has the face (and body) they deserve”.

When it comes to love and sex perhaps the word sanctity has no application. And when it comes to relationships, whether they be one of friendship, love, or workplace interaction, the relationships are all different simply because each of the participants in a relationship is unique. We all have genetic factors, environmental factors and something called good fortune which molds our personality. Each relationship is unique, which is amazing in itself, and it hardly behooves any of us to even think there are any rules set in stone upon which a relationship is to be based. No victims, no crime. Each relationship is about the two involved in the relationship, and has little, if any bearing, to anybody’s else’s perception of what their relationship is, or should be.  In addition to all this, just to make this whole topic more convoluted, all of us change over time and this impacts greatly on any relationships we have. This makes it difficult, at any point in time, to predict how long a relationship will survive or the nature of any survival. When it comes to relationships, including any marriage, Baldwin is right that “Everybody’s journey is individual”.

Because of all this, the nature of marriage is changing, much to the chagrin of the ‘purists’ who would label the last paragraph a ‘bunch of crap’. They operate in a faith based mode, where what works for them becomes the ‘holy grail’ for what must be the way it works for others. These kind of faith based modes make life difficult for them all their life, what with being surrounded by so much diversity and heathens. People who fall in love, if I can use the term loosely, sometimes don’t even engage marriage as the basis of their love for various reasons. It used to be fiancé and spouse sufficed to address one member of a couple. Not any more. I recently asked a gal something about her fiancé and was told, “he’s not my fiancé, he’s my boyfriend.” Okay, it is really getting complicated. Maybe they are the honest ones, who realize that change, one of the constants in life, may alter the relationship down the road and they don’t want to get entangled in a bitter legal battle over who get’s what.  This is not to say this ensures any smooth breakup.  After all, there may be kids involved, pets, common property, etc. Given all the complexities and uncertainties of any relationship the term sanctity seems hardly applicable at all, and when used, seems to have little real meaning. The absence of any ‘sanctity hardly removes any genuine-ness or altered feelings for those in love.  When asked how a marriage of two gay people impacts on their own heterosexual marriage, the ‘purists’ inevitably stumble through a lot of mumbo jumbo which is incomprehensible, albeit sincere.  Their reasoning is clearly based on emotions and faith based beliefs, both of which really do make the whole topic painful, frustrating, and unnerving to them, much like a child finding out there really is no Santa Claus.   

Employer Rights Regarding Employment

Employer Rights Regarding Employment

This is written without any research into what legal rights employers already have. Rather, the point here is to start with general issues and use logic and justice to arrive at what rights employers should have regarding whom they employ and on what basis an employee can be fired.

How much leeway should an employer have when hiring or firing? To one extreme is the notion that an employer should be able to hire or fire anyone they want for any reason they want. It is their business. This, I suppose, makes sense if the rights of individuals are supreme.  But they are not. The needs of society trump individual privileges.

Now let’s take the issue from the extreme side of a potential employee.  This is the notion that an employer is obligated to hire the most qualified person for the job, period, and can only fire someone if they fail to perform their job satisfactorily. 

It seems these two extreme positions can only be modified via social justice. The needs of society always trump individual needs. There was a time when blacks, for example, could not be hired in certain jobs. But blacks were citizens and needed to able to work, just like any other citizen. So, in the interests of justice and social necessity employers were told they can’t refuse to hire blacks. 

And thus began the road down a tricky slope. The question begs: to what degree should an employer be able to use their own prejudices in hiring? If employers can’t have any prejudicial leeway then I suppose a clearance center could be set up and when an employer needed to hire, the clearance center would simply send out the most qualified available person. That seems a tad heavy handed. Lot’s of time an employer picks a person out of a qualified group with whom they feel most comfortable personality-wise. That seems fair enough unless, of course, the person is uncomfortable with certain ethnics or gays or women or men or older persons or younger persons or how certain people dress etc. Thus, where should the line be drawn?  And how do you make someone tolerate the objects of their prejudice?

We don’t have to proceed too far with this before realizing the gray area here is huge. How do we balance personal bias with social justice?  No matter where the bar is set regarding the attempt at justice, the issue is nearly impossible to completely solve.  An employer can always set up a scenario in which it appears everyone is equally considered but in reality the deck is stacked against certain applicants. This happens a lot. If an employer has 5 candidates all qualified for the job, how do we prove the one armed unattractive black lesbian wasn’t hired because of any of that? Then the lawsuits fly and everyone is tired of it all. 

The fewer the employees the less attention hiring practices come under scrutiny. An employer who hires less than 5 employees has more leeway than an employer who hires 100 employees. The ultimate answer is, of course, that the more diversity is respected in any society, the more successful employment justice is achieved. To some extent with these small businesses, the matter gets evened out a bit since some people pride themselves on having a diverse staff and this helps offset those who kind of hire only certain kinds of people. 

Right now the legal system stipulates that an employer cannot refuse to hire on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. All this is fine and noble and proper for a government, but it can only go so far. The real battle is always in the ethical principles of the society at large. This does change and has changed. Early on in my own life I realized there were harmless racists and dangerous racists. I have known people who, in private, will admit they feel it best certain groups stay to themselves in order to keep peace in society, BUT they then go out of their way to be fair to the groups in question because they want members of these groups to get a fair deal, but just not be part of their own social circles. The dangerous racists are those who never miss a chance to make life miserable for the objects of their dislike. 

Progress in hiring fairness has improved a lot over the years. In part this improvement occurs because for every prejudiced employer there are often those who do more than their share of hiring those for whom prejudice against them is high. Not only that, but more and more employees see profit in diversity of their staff. If a business supplies a service or product to the public then hiring a hispanic, for example, may help direct more hispanics to the business. And then we also have those who we all should most admire in this area. These are the employers who look at our one armed unattractive black lesbian and if she is qualified, will hire her because if they don’t, it is not certain who will. 

One problem that damages our society to a great extent is criminal records. This is a real difficult conundrum. A lot of young people get put in jail for political reasons (smoking or selling pot), or moments of immaturity in which they assault or steal etc. Murder, rape, white collar monetary crimes and others are clearly crimes which any employer would shy away from. But for the lesser crimes, especially in youth, if they are safe enough to be released from jail the least smart thing is to make them unemployable. For these lesser crimes the government should offer a bonus for anyone who first employes them at a meaningful job. After all, it costs around $30,000 a year to keep them in jail so we all have a stake in getting them gainful employment. Gainful employment is the biggest factor which will determine whether they return to crime. Another approach would be to couple assistance in getting a job with the severity of the sentence if they commit another jailable crime. The worst thing to do with these youthful offenders is to simply dump them back in society with a felony on their record. 

Now comes the other side of the coin, how much freedom should an employer have to fire someone?  This is just as difficult as the hiring side of the question. At one extreme an employer might claim they have the right to fire anyone at any time for any reason. Period.  At the other extreme is an employee who feels the only reason they should be fired if they don’t do their job satisfactorily. This is every bit the conundrum as the employing side. If the employer doesn’t want an employee around he/she can always make the situation miserable for the employee. Or give them assignments they know the employee can’t handle, and the gimmicks go on and on, as do the lawsuits. And we again are all tired of it. While there has been improvement here also over time, the present climate is such that almost all employees are feeling the assault by the bottom line and the growing disparity between worker salaries and management salaries. In this sense, most employees are being discriminated against today in that a they are not being given a fair share of profits. The money is increasingly heading to management. Of course this is counterproductive since the less money workers have to spend the greater the decline in the economy. 

It would seem fair that owners be required to specifically state what offenses are intolerable and what the punishment will be. This would at least bring some consistency to punishment for the same crime, and give a potential employee advance warning. For the most part, there has been considerable progress in the area of what is unacceptable and acceptable at the work place without a lot of specific regulation. Most people today can wear their hair as they like without workplace discipline. Short of being ridiculously obscene there is not an awful lot of reason to set dress codes for most workers. If an employer wants some sort of attractive and consistent appearance on their workers for the public then the safest thing is to by them uniforms of some sort. This beats arguing over what is a ‘neat’ and presentable appearance. What is really neat is when people learn to find out the guy with dreadlocks or ponytail etc can be one of the best persons in the business with which to deal. Dressing styles, especially for the young, are going to change rapidly over time.  This has always been the case and probably always will. So why fight it? It is better for an employer to comment, “Hey shaggy hair, you better be one of my better employees so I don’t begin to notice the shaggy hair too much.” 

Fighting it just expends a lot time for what——increased tension at the work place? Some employers have this exaggerated imagination that people do business with them because of the way their employees dress. That is rather rare. Most people are looking for bargains, quality service, and quality products. It is much more likely that it is the employer who gets satisfaction of seeing his/her workers dolled up for work exactly as it most appeals to him/her. These are the same employers who rant that no one is going to tell them how to run their business. For the most part it is best to let it be. They hurt themselves more than anything else. However, it does seem fair that these little dress quirks of an employer be in writing and up front, not arise out of the blue retroactively. It is hard to figure what to do about such policies as no long hair for males. Perhaps employee dress codes should be posted in plain view for the public. After all, if the employees cannot have long hair why should customers be welcome who have long hair? In other words the employer needs to let his/her customers know about his/her dress code prejudices for employees so those who also dress that way can go elsewhere if they choose. Fair is fair.  With honesty about personal prejudices we lose some customers and gain others. It is often a crap shot. 

Then there is the knotty issue of behavior outside of the workplace. For the most part the employer controls behavior on the job and our legal system controls behavior off the job. We should never take lightly the right of every person to have due process of law for criminal behavior. So the question immediately begs what about a person who commits a serious crime like robbing or assaulting someone outside the work place? The NFL is now attempting to include such crimes as spousal physical fights, improper discipline of children, smoking marijuana and other such common but less clear crimes that have a very individual nature. And of course the NFL, like it operates almost entirely outside any kind of regulation, wants to set up its own judicial system for any kind of behavior they think hurts the NFL image. It is not the crime itself which is so intolerable but the loss of revenue from angry fans. The latter is hardly true since most of us who watch football are addicted to it, and put up with anything and still watch, while Congress waives the NFL’s obligation to be accountable to anyone regarding taxation, punishments, contracts, anti trust laws, and so on. The NFL in America is more like the Vatican in Italy, it is an independent empire. 

Under what circumstances should someone lose the right to due process of law before punishment?

Clearly if I kill someone off the job and am waiting trial most people would not like to see me in the workplace, neither customers nor employees. Some employers suspend the worker with pay until after the trial, others suspend the worker without pay until after the trial, and others do not suspend the worker until he is convicted. It seems our judicial system should decide these matters, not owners whose competence to decide such matters is all over the place. If a person is a threat to society then the courts can refuse bond. If the court states the person is no threat then that should be the law in this case and an employer should not be able to fire or suspend without pay. Suspend with pay seems a fair option if the employer is really adamant about not having the worker around before trial. 

The NFL already has shown it is not a competent judicial body. How the hell can an enterprise run by a cabal of millionaires with a Commissioner responsible only to them, be in charge of any judicial process? That concept is outrageous. They have already shown their mentality with the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson cases. First they concluded without any fair judicial process that a 2 month suspension was good enough for someone who punched his wife and knocked her out. Then the video appeared establishing that yes that someone did punch their wife and knock her out. None of the facts changed but suddenly, to appease a change in public opinion, the someone was suspended indefinitely. Image is everything to the NFL, justice to any individual is way down the line. 

Domestic assault cases and child punishment cases are very individual and complex. There are many factors to consider, among them:

Is this the first time for the offense?

Has the person received any professional help about the problem?

How severe was the assault?

What was the reason for the assault?

Does the victim(s) want to press charges?

How likely is this behavior to continue?

What kind of punishment will bring the best results for all involved?

What about the person’s total personality as seen by character witnesses of the defense and prosecution?

All of this is best handled by the judicial system, not some corporate enterprise in business to make money and protect an image. If reform is needed, and certainly is, then it is the judicial system where the reform should occur, not setting up the NFL as a separate judicial body at tax payer expense. 

Many outstanding business owners often use their anger at a particular behavior by stating they would fire on the spot an employee who committed such an assault.  Reality is another story. Rarely is a good employee fired who has a domestic violence incident. And rarely is an employee fired who is not a good parent in one way or another. If you are the employer of a good worker who suddenly has a domestic violence incident you are first shocked, then want to help your good employee get help so that this tendency can be treated and overcome, and then you want to do your part to help the family move on and continue to have a good life minus the physical violence. Domestic violence is relatively common and is a serious problem which needs far more attention by the courts and the medical community in terms of treatment. The person who committed the assault may get convicted and punished but until then rarely does the employer get involved. Child abuse, of any kind, physical or mental, should be reported and act on by the courts and social agencies. How many employers are remotely trained to deal with these cases? What a joke that is. 

We all have known many cases of spousal or child abuse but rarely is this an issue as to where we shop. When is the last time we ever heard someone say “I don’t shop at X anymore because one of their employees had a spousal argument and hit their spouse”, or “I don’t shop at X anymore because one of their employees gave his child a ‘whupping’.  Both these issues have surfaced big time because two professional and popular football players were caught redhanded, one throwing a punch at his then girlfriend, now wife.  The other gave one of his sons a ‘whupping’ that left noticeable scars on the 11 yr old child’s skin.  Neither one of these behaviors is acceptable in our society and these behaviors are widespread. There are some 1.3 million known physical assaults on those with whom the attacker has an intimate relationship. And probably as many or more parents who use corporal punishment as a tool of discipline for their children. While human nature may be such that these problems cannot be totally eliminated, the goal is to limit the occurrences as much as possible. 

But one thing is logically quite clear: Eliminating such behavior from professional football players does not do hardly anything at all to eradicate the problem. There are about 1700 professional football players and if we manage to stop this behavior among many of the perhaps 20 players who are engaging in this sort of thing, what kind of dent does this put amongst the more than a million other such cases in our country? What are we saying here except so many of us know these players and we don’t want these issues in our face raised by those people we cheer on to win games for us. Any genuine attempt to limit these unacceptable physical assaults on family members has to address the issue is a fair way to all those engaging in such behavior. Anything we do for some to help them stop this kind of behavior need be done for all who engage in such behavior. That’s justice. Anything else is disingenuous window dressing. 

The next point to accept is that this is a legal, social, and medical issue, and therefore courts deal with it, not private clubs of any sort setting up their own judicial system. Let the NFL concentrate on football and let our efforts to reduce the occurrence of these kind of assaults be directed at improving the speed and effectiveness of trials and availability of medical help to those with these tendencies. To take the view that at least we are going to better control this system in the NFL, and for the wrong reasons, is a cop-out. For some people to proudly boast that they would fire or suspend a person without pay immediately for spousal abuse or ‘whupping’ a child is nothing more that their way of stating how much they are opposed to such behavior. In reality, such actions are rare. Most of the time the employer knows the employee, has bonded to the employee, and wants to help them with the problem, not destroy a family and create financial problems on top of the already serious problem. So they wait for the legal system to conclude it’s process. 

Thus, in the last analysis it is the legal, political, and medical community which need to make changes is the way these two problems are handled. The goals should be early intervention, swift early determination by the courts as to the danger of the individual to their family or anyone at their job, and if this is of concern then the person should be held in jail until after the trial, and the trial should be reasonably swift and of reasonable length. What is fair about similar crimes in similar situations resulting in some trials being over in a day or two and others go on for a month or more? The last thing we should do is let a cabal of wealthy owners set up their own private judicial system. Hell, there is little real justice in much of anything these owners effectuate with their existing exemptions from the law, and to add still another one is simply absurd.

The needed changes in our judicial process to better address spousal abuse and child corporal punishment should be made in the judicial process and these specific changes are not something which I have any expertise to delineate, anymore than most employers have.   

Best of Friends—what does that mean?

Best of Friends—what does that mean?

We often hear someone tell us that so-and-so is one of their best friends. Ok, we accept that. Sometimes a person will tell us that so-and-so has been one of their best friends since youth. That statement becomes a little more tricky. It seems best friends change with age, with distance, with changing times and personalities. We really don’t like to drop the ‘best friend’ tag unless there has been some sort of personal and angry fallout. It seems disloyal to drop the term ‘best friend’  just because they live a long way away, or we live different lives and seldom see each other except for brief reunions few and far between. To do so seems disrespectful. 

In some respects though, it seems a tad silly to refer to someone as a best friend if there is little interaction and most likely will never be much interaction anymore except maybe at a funeral. Sometimes I play a mischievous game when someone tells me some friend in youth is still their best friend. “Oh, you still hang out together a lot?”  “No, I haven’t seen him/her in years, but we are still very close” “What current aspects of your life or his/her life do you talk a lot about?”  “Well I don’t mean it that way. If I have a current problem I would not want to bother him/her, they are too far away to get meaningfully involved. But when I do see him/her I might tell them about the problem after the fact”. “Under what circumstances in your current life would you call them right away and get them involved? “Why would I impose a current problem on them? That would not be appropriate.” “Well, why is he/she still a best friend if you don’t involve them in your current life?”  “Well because that isn’t right, we live our own lives now.”  So it is like an honorary degree, just a title given out of respect?”  “What are you driving at? Can’t you just accept they are one of my best friends?” “Ok, you are right to be annoyed, I just don’t always know what that term really means.”

Of course I am being picky, picky, picky here, but in reality I think we have different best friends with every stage of our life. Of course there can be exceptions and some people remain tight and very involved with each other’s daily life till death do they part. Most of the time that means a spouse, a boss, a friend with where you both live in the same place still. Today, people move around a lot, and in a practical sense they are going to have different ‘best friends’ in different places. It is all semantics. 

I grew up with a tight network of close friends who could not have been better ‘best friends’ to one who was hardly of a common personality. While hardly aloof with them, I was with most others. In school I was not active in anything—just observed, observed, and then observed more. I am still a incessant observer of people, and people watching is one of my biggest hobbies, in addition to often writing about my observations on most anything. I was never much of a leader in anything when young for varied and good reasons. For one thing I was never mainstream in most anything, and too insecure to attempt any control over others. I stayed that way through college and then metamorphosed into some kind of leader and organizer for varied pursuits. Perhaps I just loved a contest, but at least the contests were invariably for good causes involving good people and justice for them. I never found much need to battle for personal gain involving money or titles or power. Enough of that sort of fell into my lap. I always seemed to know when ‘enough was enough’ and focused on other kinds of battles. Of course once one becomes a lightning rod for action one becomes a genuine risk at the highest administrative levels, where tradition and languid tranquility are required for survival. It often is a personal choice whether one wants tranquility or justice and progress. 

If I digressed briefly above, it is as a way of explaining why I conclude our ‘best friends’ change from time to time, place to place, contest to contest. If we ‘sign on’ to battling causes, and are willing to stir up the nest for these causes, whether they be for a group or an individual, we end up standing out, and lose the comfort of pleasant enough neutrality. Thus we end up with an abundance of ‘best friends’ for the battles and strong enemies on the other side. When one battle is over and a new battle begins, our best friends change again, as do our strong enemies. I learned early in my career that any serious challenge for change or justice or improvement in an existing system leaves one vulnerable for personal attack.  At first I got in over my head and was only saved from destruction by some very kind and good people who came to my rescue from all walks of life and personal station in life. BUT—I also learned never again to place others in a position like that since, when the dust settles, I may not be able to save them from the retribution they received for supporting me. It remains one of the biggest regrets in my life that so many people paid a price for supporting me. There were many endless battles for good causes that ensued but never were those unable to protect themselves put in harm’s way by me. If we are going to fight some tough and difficult battles for issues, or justice for groups or individuals, we need to have strong reserve support from those powerful enough to protect us without themselves being subject to retribution. Never go into battle until there are those high enough on the ladder, and secure enough in their position, who will likely protect us, if the need arises. If we cannot protect ourselves when we mount a campaign for any kind of justice anywhere, we cannot, in good conscience, leave the most vulnerable in line to pay a sacrifice from which they often cannot recover. 

At any rate, ‘best friends’ for some people like myself are going to vary from place to place, time to time, issue to issue. What is the point of trying to maintain close friendship when time and place and change take place?  It simply can’t be done, and any attempt to keep such  friendships strong will fail. When I meet with those who were once so large a part of my small world it is like entering a whole strange environment. One on one it is much better since at least one gets a chance to delve into their mindset and life situation in a realistic way.  In a group it is almost always each person projecting an image they wish to project plus endless humorous witticisms. That sort of thing is fine——for about several hours then it wears thin, but can’t be stopped. It is almost depressing to meet with them years later and have so little to talk about in common except memories and inane chit chat about people and activities which are no longer relevant to any of us. The plus is, and it is a huge plus, that when we retire from all the good cause battles, there are many once ‘best friends’ who gave us a ton of good memories to sustain us in a cheerful mood during our terminational years. Those wonderful memories about so many good people, all different but good, are the stepping stones to contentment in our later years. There are a ton of good people out there in life, and the more you meet them, work with them, and help them, the more good memories go into your memory bank to support your faith in this whole thing called life until we meet our end. Those who enter their terminational years with only money, things, and titles to remember, find these things by themselves lead nowhere except an addiction for more. When enough is never enough, contentment can never be reached.

Like most topics, little is set in stone. There are many people who don’t have a lot of ‘best friends’ in life, and do retain a, or a few, best friend(s) throughout life. Sometimes it might just be a spouse or their kids or their parents etc. There always seems to be something unsettling about families who never generate very many close relationships with anyone outside their own nuclear family. It doesn’t seem natural to have never really left the nest.  And we should never forget pets. They really usually do remain our best friends for life. The trouble is, their life is almost always shorter than ours. That’s ok too, at least we were able to ensure our pet had a best friend for life. Most of us need a cabal of best friends, that come and go through a revolving door. Change and diversity are always the engine which drive evolution and our own lives. Time seems the only constant. 

P.S. Some of my childhood friends still manage to find genuine pleasure in reunions 50-60 years later even though little of their lives today do they have in common. They can reunionite for 5-7 days and find delight in all of it.  It doesn’t work so much for me—I once knew them like a book, but not anymore— too much time and distance has taken place and I feel like I would need to start all over again to know them well now, and they likewise only know the me of yesteryears—many yesteryears. I still try to relate to them like we were still teenagers but that only goes so far. Still, there is something to be admired and rare occurring with their reunions. And that’s ok, none of us need to win every jack-pot in life. My perception is simple, like most everything in the terminational years—let those in their formative and productive years win the jackpots, I have won enough of them and prefer now to just go gently down the stream in a peaceful contemplative mode of life.