kurtadb

David Leonhardt passes along this chart today, and it's one of the most important ones you'll see. It was my candidate for chart of the year in 2013.

What it shows is unprecedented: government employment fell during an economic recovery. This has never happened before in recent history. Employment rose during the Reagan recovery. It rose during the Clinton recovery. It rose during the Bush recovery. And that's one of the reasons those recoveries were fairly strong.

Only during the Obama recovery did austerity fever force government employment to fall. It's not the only reason this recovery has been so weak, but it's certainly one of the leading causes. More here.

The NASL's downfall was caused by huge salaries and rapid expansion. MLS is following a similar path right now, is their business plan better?

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." - Dr. Emmett Brown

Hard to believe that three weeks ago, the Rapids were not only fighting Chivas but Mother Nature with a cold and snowy day.  This past Sunday's sunshine was plentiful and the Rapids responded with their most complete match of the year.   With an impressive cross by Wynne, a beautiful header by unmarked Brown and then the rout was on.  Amazing how an early goal can pretty much put a team on its heels.  Later on in the first half Brown, after receiving a nice pass from Powers, scored his second of the game and Rapids entered half time with a 2-0 lead.

Houston never seemed to get traction with the Rapids continued pressure.  Rapids finished the scoring with a goal of the week nominee from none other than Kamani Hill!  If you read my post last week you understand the scoring beast that is Kamani Time!  Great game by the team upfront this week.  Realistically the score could have been worse for Houston.

The Rapids now find themselves in 3^rd place (!) with 21 points after 13 games.  This puts them on pace for 55 points.  While two home games against two struggling teams shouldn't indicate Rapids have solved all of their problems, it does suggest that the team is finding its stride.  It should also be noted that Pablo's incessant lineup juggling has slowed which theoretically is allowing the players to get on the same page.  With a mid-week match against Chicago and another match on Saturday against FC Dallas, the Rapids will have the World Cup break to catch their breath (sort of, a USOC game is scheduled for 6/17).

Back in mid-May ESPN and Fox put up $720 million on a new 8 year TV Deal to show MLS games.  Assuming a 24 team league, this would amount to about $3.75M per team, per year (if of course all that money was given to the teams).  In 2013, if you remove LA, NY, and Seattle from the salary question the remaining 16 teams average team salary was close to $4M.  So essentially the new deal would cover the salaries of current team payrolls.  Throw in the fact that in 2015 a new collective bargaining agreement with the player's union will begin and it will be interesting to see what happens to MLS player salaries.  With the MLS flush with new cash, players will certainly ensure that the minimum salary of $48,500 will be a thing of the past.  Anything look odd to you about this graph of distribution of player's salaries in the league (2014)?

As sport's fans we have been inundated with athletes and owners alike crying foul when it comes to salaries.  In an area where salaries are known quantities, it makes the issue very contentious especially when your owners tout an 8 year TV deal.  While most people agree the current MLS and American soccer society are very different then 30 years ago when the NASL fell apart, I hope that sanity occurs come bargaining time, otherwise this paragraph, plucked from Wikipedia could find another use...

"At the close of the 1980 season, NASL's woes were beginning to mount, as NASL was feeling the effects of over-expansion, the economic recession, and disputes with the players union. In the early 1980s the U.S. economy went in the doldrums, with unemployment reaching 10.8% in 1982, its highest level since World War II. NASL's owners, who were losing money, were not immune from the broader economy."

"Perhaps most troubling of all, NASL owners were spending sums on player salaries that could not be covered by league revenue. Whereas NFL owners in 1980 were spending on average 40% of the team's budget on player salaries, NASL owners were averaging over 70% of their budget on player salaries. The Cosmos in particular, owned by Warner Communications, were spending lavish sums on player salaries, and while other teams-such as Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Portland, Toronto, and Montreal-that were owned by major corporations could keep up with the Cosmos, owners without deep pockets could not keep pace with the spending levels.  Owners spent millions on aging stars to try to match the success of the Cosmos, and lost significant amounts of money in doing so."

Future MLS Problems?

For the World Cup, the managers of Mexico, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Spain, Germany, and Chile have all banned players from having sex for the duration of the tournament. France and Brazil's players have to slow down, too:

Usually normal sex is done in balanced way, but there are certain forms, certain ways and others who do acrobatics. We will put limits and survey the players. -- Brazil manager Luiz Felipe Scolari

Intriguing but creepy! (What does "survey" mean?)

Athletics and abstinence have gone together for seemingly forever, but scientific studies suggest that sex as such doesn't impair athletic performance.

The bigger worry might be the cultural connection between sex and sports, particularly soccer in Brazil: Adidas withdrew two purportedly World Cup-themed T-shirts with the slogans "Looking To Score" (with a woman in a bikini and a soccer ball for the O in "Score") and "I

There's a weird dehumanization that happens in sports and sports fandom. Athletes get reduced to their performance, which is usually understood in abstract terms: statistics, salaries, wins and losses. Everything around the game, from families to fans to the ordinary women and men whose lives intersect with the players, is measured in terms of how it affects competition. This in turn justifies all kinds of intrusions into people's lives, whether from coaches or fans or media, but never for its own sake.

It's almost as if when you start to think about sex as an act with ethical dimensions, it disrupts (in a good way) the shallow ways we usually consider people's bodies for the purposes of both work and commerce. When nobody is disposable, it throws the whole system off. That's a kind of acrobatics that sports just can't seem to handle.

("Normal Sex, No Acrobatics" via @webbmedia)

Go go, U-S-A!

It has been nearly four years since Landon Donovan came running in late to knock home a rebound, beat Algeria and put the United States into the round of 16 at the World Cup. And somehow, it took until now for someone to animate it.

We, as a country, failed. We did not take it upon ourselves to turn the greatest moment in world history* and animate it. Luckily, Lawrence Becker did. He is a hero and should be treated as such.

You will notice that Donovan has significantly more hair in animation than in real life. As it should be. Now if someone could just sync this up to Ian Darke's call, everything would be right in the world.

* A slight exaggeration. SLIGHT.

Regular readers will know I’m a sucker for anything made from wood, but even I was surprised to see a wooden iPad sleeve. You’d think that wood would be too heavy and inflexible for a slip-in protective sleeve for an iPad Air, but no, this one is neither.

Available for both the iPad Air and the iPad mini (either model), the sleeve comprises a wood veneer outer, a wool lining and a leather and brass pull-strap to slide the iPad out of the sleeve … 

Grovemade offers a choice of two woods: eastern hardrock maple and Oregan black walnut. The one I tried is the walnut.

You do get a real sense of quality right from the moment the sleeve arrives, complete with hand-signed, embossed thank-you card. As they are hand-made, I assumed at first glance that this would be signed by the person who made it, but the embossed legend instead said ‘Packed and sealed by’ – not quite the same image!

There’s also an adhesive sticker should you wish to apply it. Without the sticker, the sleeve has only the tiniest and most subtle embossed logo in the bottom-right corner of the sleeve.

The wood veneer is exceedingly thin, so the sleeve is flexible, the geometric shapes allowing it to move without any risk of cracking the wood.

The wool lining in the interior feels a little rough to the touch, but certainly nothing that is going to scratch.

Getting an iPad out of a tight-fitting sleeve can sometimes be awkward, but the leather pull-strap makes it easy with this one. Just pull the bar at the top (a brass tube enclosed in the leather) and it slides right up.

Any sleeve of course adds bulk to the iPad, but it’s still a compact enough package to slip into a bag.

The only disappointment to me is the feel of the wood. It has a very smooth, polished feel that is so slick to the touch it doesn’t really have the tactile sense of real wood.

That aside, however, I was very impressed. It looks fantastic (and several people asked me about it when I was out and about), offers a decent level of protection and the pull-out strap removes the fiddliness of sliding the iPad out.

Grovemade wooden iPad sleeves cost $79 for the iPad mini and $89 for the iPad Air.

Check out 9to5Mac for more breaking coverage of AAPL Company.

What do you think? Discuss "Mini-review: Grovemade hand-made wooden sleeve for iPad Air/mini" with our community.

Orwell on the Half Shell: RW on Bergdahl proves you don't need a totalitarian state to create a totalitarian mindset http://t.co/IDGTrWKx1k

— billmon (@billmon1) June 4, 2014

Dave Weigel has the backstory:

The undisputed winner of Twitter today is Matt Binder, a producer at Majority FM who has spend untold minutes/hours digging up tweets from conservatives who called for Bowe Bergdahl to be freed … until he was, and they turned on him…

The feed is full of such things, and Adam Weinstein has already curated some highlights…

Share

Tomasky today predicts that the Bergdahl prisoner swap may well become the next Benghazi on the fetid horizons of the Palinite right. I hope he’s wrong, but I’ve learned not to under-estimate the extremism of the Dolchstoss brigade. The Benghazi and Bergdahl “scandals”, after all, are both rooted in the assumption that the president is in some way anti-American, that his loyalty is somehow not to the United States, but to some other abstract but foreign authority, and so he would obviously be happy to leave Americans to perish in an undefended consulate and lie about it afterwards to cover his negligence up … or be content to deal with the Taliban on behalf of another “anti-American”.

Beneath the intricacies and easy emotional manipulation, this McCarthy era paranoia is what drives both obsessions. The contradictions are, of course, bleeding obvious. Obama is to be excoriated for abandoning Americans in the line of fire in Benghazi and then excoriated for rescuing a servicemember in enemy captivity in the matter of Bowe Bergdahl. You’ll see that, not for the first time, the president cannot win. You’ll also note that one of the American right’s heroes, Bibi Netanyahu, released more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, some of whom had actually murdered Israeli civilians, in order to retrieve Gilad Shalit. Somehow Netanyahu is not regarded as a terrorist-sympathizer by the Tea Party.

And it is an outright calumny, of course, to impugn this president’s patriotism, the kind instinctually propagated by Palin and her spittle-flecked confreres. Barack Obama is, au contraire, a uniquely and proudly American story. He has been relentless in pursuing the enemy in Afghanistan and Pakistan in his period in office. He killed bin Laden and Anwar al -Awlaki. His emergence as a biracial president would give any sane American a reason to be proud, not squeamish. And what he did, in the case of Bergdahl, requires no further explanation than that a commander-in-chief’s task is to leave no servicemember behind enemy lines, especially as a war comes to a close. (There’s also a strong argument to be made that, as the war in Afghanistan comes to a close, the Taliban commanders at Gitmo had a right under international law to be exchanged.)

I’m not saying, of course, that robust pushback against this tough call is not legitimate. That’s embedded in the very notion of a tough call. There are powerful questions that need addressing:

Was the deal a good one? How effective will the monitoring of the Taliban commanders be? Did the president comply with the letter of the law? But I’d argue vehemently that Bergdahl’s personal politics and Obama’s core motivations aren’t among them. Whether Bergdahl was a deserter or not, whether he was “anti-American” or not, whether he may have cooperated with his captors under duress or not: these questions should be dealt with by the regular process of military justice and investigation. But none of that can truly happen without Bergdahl himself to question and interrogate. And if we are going to rescue a service-member depending on our assessment of his politics or character, we have undermined a key principle of military justice and discipline. You wear the uniform, you get rescued if captured. Period. No other questions need to be asked or answered until after you’re safe and in US custody.

One final thing about the 30-day notification of Congress requirement. The one exception to the executive’s deference to the legislative in statutory matters such as this are contingent, time-constrained executive actions that require immediate implementation. A quick military response, a drone strike, a raid, or a rescue: these fall into the most solid executive area of legitimate, unilateral executive action. For the Republicans who only recently defended a far greater degree of executive power to cavil at this almost text-book case of executive expedition is a triple lutz in hypocrisy and inconsistency. But this, alas, is not news. They will use any weapon at hand, even if they have to trash some of the most important military principles to indict him.

(Photo: Jani Bergdahl, the mother of freed US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, walks through the Colonnade with US President Barack Obama to speak in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 31, 2014 in Washington, DC. Obama spoke after the release of Bergdahl by the Taliban in Afghanistan. By Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Please put a sock on the door.

You only get a single move in One-Tap Quest, so you had better make it a good one. This game has no right to be fun, but somehow it is. My top score so far is 15,800...the best score I've seen is 21,400. (via @mrgan)

If you talk with Germans about Jürgen Klinsmann’s ill-fated stint as the coach of F.C. Bayern Munich, it’s only a matter of time until they bring up the matter of the Buddha statues. After arriving in July of 2008 at Bayern—the free-spending New York Yankees-style hegemon of the German soccer league—Klinsmann’s first intervention was to personally oversee an overhaul of the team’s training center. The local press openly wondered whether the movie theatre, the so-called “quiet room,” and the high-end d.j. console that he installed had much, if anything, to do with soccer, but they seemed willing to give Klinsmann the benefit of the doubt.

But when a number of Buddha figures appeared around the training campus, Bavarians took it as an affront. In a region where crucifixes still hang from classroom walls, and the Catholic Church remains a powerful political force, the statues quickly attracted controversy. Catholic interest groups, local politicians, and, eventually, players quoted anonymously began to criticize the relics’ allegedly implicit proselytism. One prominent Bavarian politician questioned whether Klinsmann, who was raised in Germany but moved to California after the conclusion of his playing career, in 1998, was too “American” to properly coach Germany’s most prominent club team. (It didn’t help matters that the team was struggling on the field.) Midway through his first season, Klinsmann was fired. The statues were quickly taken down after Klinsmann’s departure, but, in Germany, they remain a symbol of his penchant for pushing change in sweeping, sometimes reckless fashion.

The moves that expert chess players use to open a game have changed significantly since the 1850s.

It's a well-known fact that White has a small advantage at the beginning of the game. To maintain this advantage, White should press their advantage to take over the middle of the board as quickly as possible. The most popular first White moves from 1850-2014 are shown below. Note that all of these are fairly aggressive openings that build toward control of the middle of the board.

In 1850, White openings were fairly homogeneous: Most chess experts played King's Pawn. Chess players didn't begin to explore variants of the King's Pawn in earnest until the 1890s, when Queen's Pawn (moving a Pawn to d4) started to replace King's Pawn in some player's repertoires. The 1920s saw another burst of innovation with the rising popularity of the Zukertort Opening (moving the Knight to f3) and the English Opening (moving a Pawn to c4), which completed the set of staple first-turn openings that are really ever used nowadays.

Today is the centenary of a bandleader whose artistic legacy, within and beyond jazz, is as deep and as strong as that of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, a musician who took a name that bespeaks similarly grand ambitions and visions: Sun Ra. Ra was a crucial creator of what’s commonly called free jazz, and, unlike his swing-era predecessors, he found himself in the position of many modernists, both musical and otherwise: his work has eluded popularity. His influence and authority, even now, twenty-one years after his death, far outshine his name recognition, but his music remains among the essential experiences and representations of his times.

A musical prodigy in his home town of Birmingham, Alabama, Ra, who was born Herman Blount, had a firm footing in traditional jazz. He moved to Chicago in 1946 and worked as a pianist and arranger with the Fletcher Henderson band, but by that time he was already pursuing advanced musical and philosophical ideas. Fascinated with outer space, he changed his name—legally, to Le Son’y Ra—and worked out a literary vision of a quasi-scientific utopia based on a mythic past, which he ultimately realized in music.

Landon Donovan's place on the World Cup team will be decided in the next two weeks.

Landon Donovan has been the face of United States soccer for more than a decade. Even when Tim Howard was at Manchester United and Clint Dempsey scored an incredible goal to beat Juventus and advance to a European final, Donovan was still in the American spotlight.

That spotlight may go out this summer, because Donovan may not even make the World Cup team.

While Howard rebounded from last year's struggles with one of his best seasons in years for Everton and Dempsey started off the MLS season as arguably the best player in the league, Donovan has struggled. He's looked slow at times, missed chances, made bad decisions and, all in all, looked entirely human.

For a player who is on the verge of breaking MLS's all-time goalscoring record and is the top goalscorer in U.S. history, mortality is not supposed to set in ever, and certainly not so quickly. But Donovan does look mortal, sometimes even bad, and Jurgen Klinsmann has made it clear that the 32-year-old won't be on the plane to Brazil because of the 57 goals he's scored in a U.S. shirt before. If he goes, it will be for the contribution he can make to the U.S. next month.

The problem for Donovan is simple -- age.

Donovan has admitted that his body isn't what it used to be. While he used to be able to run all day, every day, he acknowledges that on some days he just doesn't have it and that he needs more days off. That's not to say one of those days will be a match day, or even that he can't turn things up for games, but he can't be a star every day in training anymore, which is a problem. Klinsmann believes in competition, especially in training.

When Donovan has an off day in training, he makes it tougher for Klinsmann to pick him. When Donovan is slow to a ball in 7v7, he makes it tougher for Klinsmann to pick him. When Donovan loses his legs and misses a shot late in practice, he makes it tougher for Klinsmann to pick him.

An argument could be made that Klinsmann needs to be more considerate of an aging player and that training shouldn't be weighed as heavily for players he knows can turn it on come match day, but that's the problem Klinsmann faces right now -- Donovan hasn't proven that he has that switch.

Donovan has no goals and just two assists for the Galaxy this season. It hasn't been for a lack of opportunities -- he's been central to the LA attack and has the second most shots on the team -- but he's given the ball away, finished poorly and failed to beat players to the ball like he used to. He's been average by MLS standards, a far lower bar than the one Klinsmann has set.

To this point, Donovan hasn't shown that he can ease his way through training and shine in matches. How can Klinsmann justify picking him?

At this time, he can't, and that is what makes training camp so vital to Donovan. Nothing that Donovan has done in 2014 suggests he should be on the U.S. team, not with fringe players like Alejandro Bedoya, Terrence Boyd and Chris Wondolowski playing well for club and/or country, but Klinsmann isn't blind to what Donovan has done before.

Donovan has played in three World Cups, has scored in two of them and has been capable of disappearing for 89 minutes, only to make the one game-changing play in the 90th. All Klinsmann needs is a sign, any sign, that Donovan still has that in him somewhere.

The U.S. doesn't need Donovan to be as a starter for 90 minutes, or even for three matches. If he can be an asset off the bench, that will do. If he can start one match against a specific opponent and exploit a weakness, that will be good enough for him too. But can he do that?

Klinsmann has said that he views Donovan as a forward, a position which was clarified after Donovan played every Gold Cup match last season at the position. In that tournament, he scored five goals, but he did much more than finish in front of net. He made runs over the top, stretching the defense, and drifted wide to create width and open up space centrally. He wasn't a true striker by any means, but he was a forward who single-handedly changed the shape of the U.S. attack with regularity, confounded defenses and causing havoc.

A year ago, Donovan was also in much better form. He was playing faster, finishing better and tidier with the ball.

Then again, four years ago, Donovan was also blasting the ball at a Slovenian goalkeeper's head and pouncing on rebounds to set the U.S. into the knockout stages, creating some of the country's most memorable moments along the way.

A lot has changed for Donovan, and for the U.S. since then. He has taken a break from the game, traveled to Cambodia, and aged, all while the U.S. brought on a new manager that cares less for the team's elder statesmen then ever before.

There is still a place for Donovan on the U.S. World Cup team, but not the Donovan that has put on the Galaxy shirt this season. Now Donovan has two weeks to prove that the other Donovan -- the U.S. all-time leading goalscorer Donovan -- still exists within him. If he can't, he'll be watching the World Cup from his couch.

If distillers can't keep up with the current and growing worldwide demand for bourbon, we may have to turn to rum instead.

You can buy some old-ass rum, which, after being distilled from molasses or sugar cane, has sat around in barrels for long periods of time, for relatively small sums of money: El Dorado 15 is, as you might expect, made with a blend of rums that have sat in a barrel for at least fifteen years. Is it slightly sweet and rounded with a "full nose packed with dark coffee, candied orange, almonds, dark chocolate, pepper and rich vanilla." It is only thirty-six dollars. Barbancourt 15 is kind of soft and woody and fruity and other things you might say about a bourbon, but instead of corn it's like molasses. It's about forty bucks. Ron Zacapa 23, which is a blend of rums between six and twenty three years old, is probably the first rum that made a lot of people go, "Oh, rum isn't just that stuff that goes in a daiquiri or a mojito or that made me vomit pieces of my intestines into a urinal while I was wearing a silver crown." Here are some tasting notes for it: "Nose full or apricots, citrus fruits, vanilla, cocoa and bourbon."

Deuteronomy 15: 12-15:

And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: Therefore I command thee this thing to day.
 

John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government:

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation …

Bailey Wyatt, freedman:

We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land .… And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops of corn, of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything. And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? I say they has grown rich, and my people is poor.

The Atlantic, next week:

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/371050/

The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish: the title is pretty self-explanatory. In Arizona and New Mexico, it’s Navajo, which is unsurprising. In California, Nevada, and Hawaii, it’s Tagalog, which surprised me. In large swaths of the Midwest, it’s German. And in Oregon, it’s Russian! (Thanks, Sven!)

Lest we be too pleased with ourselves for remembering to call mom on Sunday, Ezra reminds us how tough it is for working mothers in the US, who have no guarantees of paid time off to care for an infant or a sick child:

While a handful of states, like California, offer modest paid maternal leave, there’s no federal guarantee of either paid maternal or paternal leave. We make mothers choose between spending a month with their newborn child or keeping a roof over their child’s head. That’s not how it looks in countries that value the work mothers do.

The Daily Show‘s “senior black correspondent”, Larry Wilmore, has been tapped to step into Stephen’s shoes when he leaves to take over for Letterman next year. To get a sense of Wilmore’s wit, here’s the trailer for a special he did a few years ago:

A more recent clip of Wilmore in action is here. He will host a panel show called The Minority Report:

As the late-night shuffle has taken place over the last few weeks, speculation had ramped up as to whether Comedy Central would mix things up and diversify the predominantly white and male line-up across the late-night TV spectrum. That fact was not lost on the network: “’The Minority Report with Larry Wilmore’ will provide viewers with a distinct point of view and comedic take on the day’s news from a perspective largely missing in the current late night landscape,” the show description reads. “The series will feature a diverse panel of voices currently underrepresented in comedy and television.”

Sharan Shetty is pleased with the network’s choice:

It’s a solid hire, as Wilmore is an accomplished wit with a sterling track record in television: besides his lauded work on The Daily Show, he created the critically-acclaimed Bernie Mac Show, and will also serve as executive producer of forthcoming ABC sitcom Black-ish. The real victory here, of course, is the refreshing addition of a minority voice to the white-male-dominated landscape of late night television. Wilmore is an ideal choice to subvert that genre’s stale perspectives—he’s a thoughtful and compassionate comedian, but one unafraid to confront issues of race, politics, and even Mormonism.

Marlow Stern takes a look at Wilmore’s politics:

As far as where he leans politically goes, Wilmore told Laughspin in 2012: “I call myself a ‘passionate centrist,’ and what that means is that I have opinions, I just don’t care if they’re on the right or the left. Yes, I’ll have an opinion, I’m just not trying to prove either side.”

His stand-up comedy special for Showtime, Race, Religion and Sex, was well-received that same year, and he’s also proven to be a reliable character actor in film and television comedies, appearing in the flicks Dinner for Schmucks and I Love You, Man, as well as a recurring role on the sitcom Happy Endings, playing Brad’s (Damon Wayans Jr.) strict boss, Mr. Forristal.

Matt Willstein wonders if The Minority Report will be successful in addressing the lack of diversity in late night:

On the one hand, Jon Stewart and Comedy Central have declared definitively that they want to produce a show that puts diverse voices in the foreground, giving comedians who may not otherwise get a platform a place where they can share their views on a wide variety of issues. Instead of being the “senior black correspondent” who shows up once every few weeks on The Daily Show, Wilmore will get equal time to Stewart.

But on the other hand, there is a risk that by putting its “minority” talent all together in one place on this show, it actually separates them from the late night mainstream that is still dominated by white guys named Jimmy. By so blatantly making the show about race does Comedy Central risk sending the message to white people that this show isn’t for them?

But, for James Joyner, the bottom line is whether the host can bring the laughs:

I don’t choose my entertainment for the diversity of its viewpoints or a sense of fairness but rather its entertainment value.  More than any of the remaining supporting members of the “Daily Show” cast, Wilmore manages to be consistently funny. Alas, maybe because he lives on the other coast, he’s on far too infrequently. His getting his own vehicle is great news.

Reuben Fischer-Baum, Aaron Gordon, and Billy Haisley, "Which Words Are Used To Describe White And Black NFL Prospects?", Deadspin 5/8/2014

Do NFL scouts talk about white players and black players differently? Are certain words reserved for white players? Are others used primarily to describe black players?

Let's try and find out. We've pulled the text from pre-draft scouting reports from NFL.com (written by the infamous Nolan Nawrocki), CBS, and ESPN, split them by player race, counted the number of times individual words appeared using the Voyant tool, and then calculated the rate at which each word appeared per 10,000 words. (In total we pulled 68,465 words on 99 white players—6,228 unique—and 223,868 words on 288 black players—10,580 unique). You can play with the data in the interactive below; simply plug a single word into the input field, hit search, and see how often the word appeared in black and white scouting reports.

Here's what the "interactive" looks like:

(For readers who are unfamiliar with the culture of American football, "center" is the name of a position on the offensive line, while "safety" in the name of a position in the defensive backfield.)

It's interesting to see such a nimble use of simple "text analytics" in this context. But the most striking part of it, to me, is this:

You can check out the code/documentation for the graphic over on Github.

It's neat to see magazine writers posting their data and code!

So I downloaded the .zip file and subjected the raw word counts to the same ranking method used earlier to rank "Obama's favored (and disfavored) SOTU words" (1/29/2014) — the "weighted log-odds-ratio, informative Dirichlet prior" algorithm described on p. 387-8 of Monroe, Colaresi & Quinn "Fightin' Words: : Lexical Feature Selection and Evaluation for Identifying the Content of Political Conflict", Political Analysis 2009.

For each word in the list, I've printed out seven numbers:

1. The count in the scouting reports on black players
2. The black-player count expressed as frequency per million words
3. The count in the scouting reports on white players
4. The white-player count expressed as frequency per million words
5. The sum of 1 and 3
6. The sum of 2 and 4
7. The weighted log-odds ratio after Bayesian shrinkage and regularization

For the two position-words in the examples above, the results are

center 48 (214.412) 59 (861.754) 107 (366.021) -5.355
safety 148 (661.104) 3 (43.818) 151 (516.534) 4.300

Other offensive-line words tend to be white-associated:

guard 79 (352.887) 84 (1226.9) 163 (557.583) -5.885

And other defensive-backfield words tend to be black-associated:

cornerback 105 (469.026) 3 (43.818) 108 (369.442) 3.509

By this criterion, many of the most white-associated words are connected with the quarterback position:

accuracy 18 (80.4045) 68 (993.208) 86 (294.185) -8.096
pocket 72 (321.618) 94 (1372.96) 166 (567.846) -6.970
arm 172 (768.31) 149 (2176.29) 321 (1098.06) -6.798
placement 37 (165.276) 57 (832.542) 94 (321.551) -5.844
throws 163 (728.108) 121 (1767.33) 284 (971.495) -5.353
pressure 47 (209.945) 57 (832.542) 104 (355.759) -5.226
throwing 21 (93.8053) 39 (569.634) 60 (205.245) -5.181
delivery 6 (26.8015) 25 (365.15) 31 (106.043) -4.981
velocity 9 (40.2023) 27 (394.362) 36 (123.147) -4.892
passing 74 (330.552) 67 (978.602) 141 (482.327) -4.713
mobility 13 (58.0699) 28 (408.968) 41 (140.251) -4.597

This is probably the main reason for the difference in (normalized) frequency of "intelligent"

intelligent 15 (67.0038) 17 (248.302) 32 (109.464) -2.748

The black-associated words seem to be connected to a wider range of positions:

burst 360 (1608.09) 41 (598.846) 401 (1371.72) 4.386
return 127 (567.299) 4 (58.424) 131 (448.119) 3.816
coverage 398 (1777.83) 64 (934.784) 462 (1580.39) 3.427
acceleration 100 (446.692) 5 (73.03) 105 (359.179) 3.142
man 178 (795.111) 20 (292.12) 198 (677.31) 3.108
cuts 89 (397.556) 4 (58.424) 93 (318.13) 3.027
leaping 82 (366.287) 4 (58.424) 86 (294.185) 2.860
explosive 169 (754.909) 22 (321.332) 191 (653.364) 2.733
receivers 187 (835.314) 26 (379.756) 213 (728.621) 2.721
runner 231 (1031.86) 36 (525.816) 267 (913.342) 2.703
returner 62 (276.949) 2 (29.212) 64 (218.928) 2.658

The whole list is here.

It's nice to see that the (currently 317) comments on the Deadspin piece are free of racist invective, as far as I can tell. Either someone is policing their comments closely, or (more likely) it's just a different crowd from the people who comment in some other places.

[Tip of the hat to JP Settles]

I had been waiting for the world's media to notice the extraordinarily anomalous character of Vladimir Putin's notion that he can annex pieces of land simply because speakers of the Russian language live there and are feeling aggrieved or imperilled. And now The Economist has done the job very nicely. See this page for an article about what the world map would look like under a generalization of Putin's doctrine.

Basically a very large part of the world ends up getting divided between the English Empire (all of the British Isles, North America, Australasia, Nigeria, and eastern and southern Africa), Nueva España (Spain, Central America and all of the western side of South America), Portugal Maior (Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique), Vikingland (Scandinavia and Greenland), Arabia (everything from Western Sahara to the Persian Gulf), La Francophonie (France and a lot of western and central sub-Saharan Africa — The Economist controversially omits Quebec), Indo-Pakistan (all of South Asia), and Greater Russia (Putin's empire under his most grandiose dreams).

Korea, of course, gets unified; China stays almost exactly the same as it is now; so do many other countries, including some big ones (Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Myanmar, Turkey, Thailand) and many small ones. Switzerland would have to disappear completely, clearly, but new nations like Basqueland and Kurdistan would obviously have to arise.

The idea is, of course, political lunacy. Whoever started the reunification of India, Pakistan, and Bangla Desh would probably be creating a nuclear war rather than a peaceful Hindi-Urdu-speaking friendship zone. And one by one the speakers of smaller languages (the vast majority of the roughly 7,000 languages on the planet) would start declaring independence or seizing pieces of their neighbours' land (Russia could well lay claim to certain select parts of London: the UK now has more billionaire residents than any other country, and quite a few are Russians living in Mayfair and Chelsea and Knightsbridge).

But the thought experiment does underline the utter madness entailed by Putin's idea that the battles for ethnic and national minority rights that have caused the deaths of so many millions in so many horrible civil wars might now be extended to allocate territory to people who merely maintain a specific language as their preferred medium of daily conversation. As Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern Ukraine vote today on becoming independent people's republics, in referenda both organized and tabulated by pro-Russian militants, the Economist's mordant contribution could hardly be more timely.