Tough Love for the Rapids

Chivas 2, Rapids 1. It was tough to watch that second half. The Rapids just collapsed after giving up the second Nagamura goal. For that, I think the whole team needs to work on their resilience. It was like they knew they were lucky to take the lead, and lost hope when reality caught up and they fell behind. The first half Rapids dominated, and deserved the Cummings goal. The second half Rapids panicked.

Now for the tough love. There are a lot of Kimura fans in Colorado. I am not one of them. I know you can't place blame on one player for a loss, but I cannot sit back and pretend Kimura is a reliable defender when I see his blunders lead to goals so often. When I saw him starting again on Saturday, I thought, here we go... but I will try to love him. He did ok, but it did not last. And neither did my hopes of trusting him this year. Let's go to the tape:



A Chivas cross goes harmlessly into the box with three Rapids around, no Chivas challenging for the ball . Kimura has lots of options: control-and-clear, head wide right out of danger, head-tap back to Pickens... but no. Instead, a nice soft head-pass, across the top of the box, to settle perfectly at the feet of Paulo Nagamura. Clear shot, easy goal. Appalling. Unacceptable.

Gary Smith has called for accountability and earning your spot every week. If that is true, he must hold Kimura accountable for these gaffes. Last year's last-minute Movsisyan RSL goal in that knocked us out of the playoffs was also a nice setup from KK. I noticed these things several times last year, and the problem has not been fixed. So, in the name of accountability, I am starting a tally sheet, tagged here for the first time as Kosuke Kimura own-goals. Somebody's gotta keep track of these things. I mean, I know its not literally an own goal, but a gaffe like that might as well be.

Kosuke Kimura 2009 Own-Goal Tally: 1

By the way, Soccer by Ives noticed it too. Ives has Kimura on his week 1 Worst XI, along with Zach "The Snack" Thornton who gave us a gift for the first goal.

I love you Rapids. That's why I rant.

God makes the laws 'round these parts

Two Colorado Senate Republicans are letting their true colors show. I call those colors "Bigotry Brown" and "Holy-BS Red."

• Senator Dave Schultheis (R- Colorado Springs- big surprise) voted against a bill to get pregnant women tested for HIV (he was the only "no"vote). Why? Because he thinks HIV comes from promiscuity, and that those women and their children deserve to suffer the consequences of that promiscuity. A direct quote from him: "What I'm hoping is that yes, that person may have AIDS, have it seriously as a baby and when they grow up, but the mother will begin to feel guilt as a result of that."

• Greeley's R Scott Renfroe quoted scripture in the senate to explain why gay partners shouldn't be able to share health benefits: "We are taking sins and making them to be legally OK, and that is wrong. That is an abomination, according to scripture.
  "And I'm not saying that this is the only sin that's out there. Obviously we have sin, we have murder, we have all sorts of sin. We have adultery ... and we would never think to make murder legal."

The saddest thing is that these people probably actually reflect the opinions of their God-crazy constituents in the bible-black-holes of the Springs and smells-like-Greeley. Seriously people- all this religious lawmaking stuff is getting old. You are acting like children. Grow up.

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and by the way... So long to the Rocky Mountain News. I grew up with that paper every morning, and was always annoyed any time I got stuck reading a giant Post. Now our fair city takes a small step backwards and we have one newspaper. Great.

Happy Darwin Day!

Today is Charles Darwin's birthday. His ideas have been the basis of biological science for 150 years. Unfortunately, we live in a country that still thinks he was full of BS (see chart below, from The Economist). More than half of the US population rejects the scientifically proven fact of evolution. It's like rejecting the idea that gravity exists. It's mass delusion.

Fortunately, there is more data all the time to help us open our eyes.

I think things are slowly changing. We have a long way to go, but people are starting to see the light. Evolution is a beautiful theory that really makes the world seem more amazing and interesting to me. It may be easy to think the complexities of the human brain and the sophistication of the eye are designed by some sort of supernatural god. But it is wrong. All it takes is a little interest in the subject; just a little research, and it opens up a world of understanding of how life works. It can be hard to figure out how an octopus' skin changes color, but that doesn't mean it is a magic trick; it isn't God showing off. To say so is to discount how amazing it is that life exists on our little planet in all of its amazing varieties. All of these sentiments have been expressed by millions of people already, I know. I just thought I should add to the growing roar of people fed up with this age of ignorance we have been living in. Wake up, people. The world is more amazing than your God could have ever imagined. Happy b-day Charles.

Suggested reading: Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins

Artificial Selection

I just read Carl Sagan's Cosmos for the first time (I was stoked to find it at an English bookstore in Buenos Aires). One of the many interesting things Sagan wrote about was the idea of "Artificial Selection," which is basically rapid evolution caused by human interference. Some manifestations of this phenomenon are intentional: sheep bred to have something like 300x more wool in their coat than occurs naturally, domesticated dogs, etc. There are also unintentional examples of humans changing entire species.

Sagan told a cool (true) story about the Heike crab in Japan. The Heike gets its name from a Japanese legend of a samurai clan (the Heike) who were defeated by another clan. In their defeat, the surviving samurai all jumped into the sea. The legend says that these Heike became crabs and walk the seafloor to this day. For centuries, Japanese crab fisherman have been finding crabs that seem to have a samurai face on their shell (as seen below). They assume these crabs are the Heike and throw them back in the sea out of respect for the Heike.

Of course, these are not mystical samurai crabs. They are simply descendants of a specific species of crab that has passed on its genes for hundreds of years because it looks like a samurai. Human fisherman selected which crabs would survive. In fact, they did in a way that the only crabs to survive were the ones that looked most like samurai faces on their shells. Artificial selection.

Recently, a study came out showing how humans are the earth´s super-predators, and how we have changed the characteristics of 29 different species forever (only 29 were in the study, there are undoubtedly many many more). Big-horn sheep have smaller horns, Atlantic cod are shrinking, and you can imagine how we have affected others.

Cosmos was written in 1980. This study will be published in the July 31 issue of ScienceNOW. It's just another scary example of how we know we are harming the planet, but most of us just don't give a shit. The next 50 years will be scary. It looks to me like the African elephants, polar bears, and many great whales will go extinct. Maybe everyday Joes can't do anything to stop those inevitabilities. But we can start thinking about what happens to other species and parts of the world when we make everyday decisions; what to eat, what to buy, how to get to work. There are consequences.

Boo Hoo for Big Auto

For a whole decade the Big 3 US automakers were raking it in selling giant SUVs to Americans addicted to cheap oil. Now they are begging Congress for help, because nobody wants a monster gas guzzler at $4 a gallon. These are some of the big corporations who advocate deregulation and free market principles. They have always resisted better fuel economy, because hey, it makes good business sense. Now the market is telling them that we don't want what they're selling, and they suddenly want intimate involvement from the government, in the form of billions in cash.

I got sick of the whole big oil game a couple years ago, and have been wary of the many ways corporations influence our country and world since I became old enough to think about it. That is why I decided to get a job close to my home, at an environmentally friendly company, where I could ride my bike to work every day. Well, that and the fact that I cannot stand driving anymore. Unfortunately I probably wiped out more than a year's worth of carbon-footprint-reducing by flying to South America and Vegas this year. Travelling is not earth-friendly. But the minute there is a sustainable airline I will be among the first frequent-flier members.

I've been going back and forth over this whole debate on the evils/merits of the free market lately. I used to be more of a free market guy, but again, that was before I really thought about it. The free market only serves the companies that provide desired products at reasonable prices. This gives us cheap "quality" goods. Getting those things we want at a low price usually comes at the expense of the environment, our health, foreign workers' quality of life, or our own jobs (among many other things). I'm no economic genius, and I can't claim to know very much about these things, but it does not take a genius to realize the truth: when there is money to be made, all you have to do is think about how a given product made it to the store shelf in front of you at its price. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination to realize that a corporation will go to any lengths to get away with selling you their product.

So, should the government allow the US automakers to fail? The arguments against it seem obvious; thousands of jobs lost, increased strength of foreign competitors, a big hit to a weak economy. But the free market theory says we should let that happen. These companies made their bed. They chose to sell us bigger cars rather than offer the selection of small fuel-efficient vehicles available in Europe, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else. They focused on gas-guzzlers while Toyota developed the Prius into a waiting-list must-have. They failed to innovate or even keep up. So they are dying. That is what happens. If they do fold, something better will rise up in their place; new car companies that give consumers what they are looking for will take over.

They say they are learning from their mistakes. But why should we believe their greed won't get the better of them? Their whole strategy has been to choose what to market to Americans and force it upon us. At least it seems that way to me. They attached a stigma to small cars by saying they are less safe (because there are so many big trucks on the highway). They probably said that we don't want hybrids because they aren't as powerful or sleek. Maybe they even had some sort of deal with Big Oil to keep gas cheap in the US so they could sell us the more profitable SUVs. You would think that these giants, who started the industry, who have been in it from the start, would know the best way to do business. It turns out they don't know what they are doing. We can learn from their mistakes, and maybe they can do better in the future. But rather than save these dinosaurs, why not give that money to new industries? Maybe give loans to start-up automakers in the US who start with a green focus, rather than lend to the old guys who promise to do better next time? If we're so worried about job loss, these new companies can give preference to industry veterans for their work force. It would take time for the economy to recover, and this whole recession may be prolonged in order to heal the problems. But maybe the industry would be better for it.

I don't even care that much about the auto industry. I guess I went on this whole rant because I'm sick of the hypocrisy of big business. You could make similar arguments about the airline industry and banking, and I think in the coming decades we will see many of the old industries collapse as we begin to realize that their ways of doing business are wrong. The beauty of the information age is the increasing clarity of everything. Many industries have gotten away with murder for their entire existence. Now that they are beginning to reap what they have sowed, I'm almost happy to see them suffer.

Here is a relevant link to show how things could be different: We Can Solve It.org