Ten million and counting

That's the cost of an independent audit investigating the misconduct of former Michigan football coach Sherrone Moore. Now granted, top lawyers are expensive--I'm guessing that the lawyers for this are going for $1000 per hour or so--but even given that, this means that the investigation is in the ballpark of ten thousand hours, meaning there is a LOT to go through.

And then you've got, I would assume, the investigation of Matt Weis, the other offensive (to put it mildly) coordinator who appears to have spent most of his time ogling pretty athletes on the NCAA social media portal.  And with both of them having every email, every letter, and the like read, you've got to wonder how much it might tell us about the sign-stealing cheating that went on.  I am still not persuaded that Harbaugh, Moore, Weis, and others could have watched footage of games without asking themselves "Boy, this defensive unit is uncanny....they're in the right place almost all of the time, which never used to happen before.  I wonder what that Navy grad is doing going to games with our rivals?"

Put gently, there is a lot of rot at Schembechler Hall.  Hopefully, they come clean.

A thought on marriage

Probably a little bit risque, but regarding the obligation of men to protect their wives, it struck me this morning that if a man doesn't have his wife's back, he probably won't get her front, either. 

There's a nice confession

Iran is noting that if Israel keeps on attacking the terrorist group Hezbollah, future talks will be meaningless.  Well, that's a nice way for Iran--and their sponsor Russia--to admit that when Hezbollah launches attacks on Israel, the reprisals ought to be in Teheran, not Lebanon and Syria.

Really, my thought is that by not making the case for reprisals on Iran itself, Trump has shot himself in the foot, and if we openly had a policy "you attack in Israel, we respond in Iran", this kind of nonsense would stop quickly.  Hezbollah is, sad to say, more or less a gambit that Iran plays to attack Israel, and when the pain is suffered in Iran, the mullahs will start to realize that we mean business. 

Update: I just remembered a story I learned way back in college European history class.  Apparently in the late 1800s, German nationalists were very concerned that the larger French garrison near Cameroon would allow the French to take the German colony.  Chancellor Otto von Bismark responded by saying "That would be an act of war, no?", and when they replied in the affirmative, he's said to have said "Then if France desires war, they shall have war--on the Rhine.".  And there were no attacks in Cameroon until there was a very active war on the west side of the Rhine.  It is critically important that the instigators of problems feel them where they care the most.

Academics, smackademics

All ten starters in yesterday's "national championship" game were transfers.  What that means, in practical terms, is that none of the starters were developed from high school by their college coaches.  None of them took their lower division (freshman, sophomore) courses at Michigan or Connecticut, and for that matter, none of Michigan's players have their major declared on Michigan's fan site.  It is a reasonable question; do any of them ever take upper division courses?  Are Michigan and UConn sheepskins going to provide huge competition for Charmin?

More or less, both teams in the "championship" game are "the best money can buy", and neither team really has the kind of player and personal development that was the rule in college sports just a couple of decades ago.  For that matter, neither team has the personal or player development that was the rule in the professional leagues until the great expansion of free agency made the development (minor) leagues and player development less important.

To me, it's a scary reality that the going deal in college basketball is pretty mercenary--the old goal of developing the player, personally, sportswise, and professionally, is all but gone.  edit/update; it strikes me that the current college sportsball complex is the Monkees to the old Beatles, the "Pre-fab 4" to the genuine "Fab Four".

 

An interesting viewpoint...

Marriage psychiatrist John Gottman is renowned for coming up with a theory of the "Four Horsemen" (Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, Layden) of marriage, specifically four behaviors of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  Evidently he's got statistical evidence that these behaviors predict marital failure better than anything else.

For a long time, I resisted this, because in my mind, it was more important about the "why" people might engage in criticism, contempt, and the like.  Wasn't it important if someone was assaulting their spouse, or cheating on them, and the like?  

Well, I don't change my opinion that the provocation matters, but upon looking at Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden Gottman's definitions for criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, what I notice is that Gottman defines these behaviors as a rule in terms of attacking the person instead of addressing the behavior.

Or, in a nutshell, what he's done is to formulate family breakdown in terms, so to speak, of genetic fallacies in general and the ad hominem fallacy in particular.  If you're willing to routinely attack your partner, more or less, don't be surprised when the relationship doesn't work out.  And if you want to preserve relationships--marital or otherwise--it'll help a lot if you're addressing behaviors, not attacking a person.

Well, might as well have fun with this

Apparently, a Russian court has sentenced German artist "Tilly" in absentia for the  "crime" of making fun of Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kyrill at a Karnival (Fasching) parade in Dusseldorf.  Now for the uninitiated, at Karnival parades, you can make fun of just about anything, and the last Fasching Parade where certain political statements were verboten would have been during World War Two, if you catch my drift.  Tilly has also done a float featuring Trump with a swastika--any other day in Germany, that's banned, but not on Rosenmontag.

So more or less, by trying to prosecute this "offense", Putin joins the company of no less than Adolf Hitler.  Since Putin's been putting up statues of his hero (and Hitler's buddy, well, until he invaded the USSR) Stalin, that sounds about right.  And so let's see what Tilly did to 'ol Vlad:

Verdict; given that Kyrill is, like Putin, a former employee of the KGB, and has spent a fair amount of time and effort backing Putin's series of war crimes in Ukraine, this is absolutely true.  In civilized countries, defamation has to make you look worse than you actually are.  We might say that Tilly's work actually downplays the evil of Patriarch Kyrill and Fuehrer Putin.