Wonderful Matters

I opened up the newspaper on Friday to see another supposedly stunning revelation regarding the government’s brazen invasion of the people’s privacy. This one has the U.S. Treasury keeping tabs on all of our bank accounts, unbeknownst to us, those scoundrels . The thing I can never understand about all this is why any of this is news. Hey, all of you who actually think you have any privacy, news flash: The government can get any information about you any time they want . What is so stupefying is how dismissive they are of the fact that they themselves make it so this happens. By signing so many worldly contractual agreements, they hand over that "confidential" information and then act startled when the big bad giant creature called The Government has their paw prints all over it. It's even funnier when you see that Treasury Secretary John Snow blithely confessed that when they asked the banks for only a slice of information to follow particular terrorists leads, the bank...

I just noticed that the Dallas Mavericks will face the Miami Heat in this year's NBA Finals series. I don't watch it any more because once pro sports so consumed my psyche that in 1998 I stopped giving any attention to it, cold turkey. Therefore, it was just today I caught which two teams made it. I am somewhat interested in who's playing in the NBA Finals though, because I noticed something four years ago that was quite interesting, and I use this statistical piece to help make my case that pro sports manipulates competitive integrity so that the economic viability of the given sport is sustained. That is, because teams from the larger metropolitan areas can always generate more revenue for the entire league than teams from smaller ones, those larger teams are given certain advantages to aid their success. When the inherent integrity of sports is exploited through such items as free agency, it is indeed no different than giving one team three points per basket whereas the ...