Tag: texas

The biggest ego in Texas?

Most of the time, I’m proud to be a Texan, and specifically I’m proud to be a Houstonian. I have spent a grand total of around 2½ years of my life living outside of Houston city limits, and even that time was all in what most people would consider the “greater Houston area.” However, we have a few times where certain elected leaders do certain things that I refer to by the highly technical term “stupid shit.” This is one of those times, and this is the kind of thing that makes me a bit ashamed to be a Texan.

I am referring to this Houston Chronicle article on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton encouraging county clerks to ignore the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. As you may know, judging by the number of rainbow Facebook avatars, this past Friday the Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriages throughout the country (including Texas). However, it seems that Mr. Paxton thinks he and the county clerks who just don’t want to obey the law, are above the law.

As those who have read my blog in the past know, I have a rather low tolerance for stupidity. Obviously, this crosses the line, but it’s shameful because I’d expect better from someone who is in fact the attorney for the entire state when it comes down to it. There’s some consolation in knowing I didn’t vote for this idiot. A lot of us have known for a long time that love knows no boundaries. The hypocrisy of conservative religious groups protesting regarding the sanctity of marriage, yet remaining deafeningly silent on the subject of things like divorce doing far more harm to said sanctity, has completely discredited those groups in my view. It is archaic to restrict marriage based on gender.

To make matters worse, Texas’s marriage license forms went as far as to have one space for male partner, and one space for female partner. I couldn’t find the news stories covering this, but I do know this fact in and of itself got news coverage as the Supreme Court prepared to hear Obergefell v. Hodges. Has it always been like this? Did someone make this change on purpose, to make it as difficult as possible for same-sex marriages (requiring a scratch-out on the form for one gender or the other)? I’d be willing to bet it’s the latter case but it will be difficult at best to prove.

In closing, it is frustrating to me that the Supreme Court’s decision is not only getting a lack of respect, but is being flaunted on purpose by an attorney general who is doing an incredibly poor job of representing Texas. To the rest of the US (and the world): we aren’t all like this, and a significant number of us did not vote for this clown.

What does the NCAA really stand for?

I haven’t done a good sports-related post in forever. Apparently, it takes a broken leg to get me interested in college sports. I’ve learned more about how the NCAA started than most college fans probably want to know, and I’m shocked by what I’ve found out.

This ThinkProgress article on Kevin Ware’s broken leg takes a pretty big swipe at the NCAA. It quotes a story from the 2011 October issue of The Atlantic at length, which while being over a year old, is still quite timely and relevant:

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed … to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

…The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. …

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Now, think about this last paragraph in the light of such things as the Texas “No Pass No Play” rule, which came into effect in 1985–and has had unintended deleterious consequences, I might add. (Without going off on too much of a tangent, let’s just say youth gangs don’t care what’s on the last report card.)

The rule was originally intended to decrease failing grades by eliminating “distracting” sports, mainly for students in football, and mainly those who failed two or more courses. (If memory serves me correctly, the news exposé at the time brought to light students who failed four or more courses.) Instead of a rule focused strictly on the biggest part of the problem, the Texas version of the rule lets any teacher who can find a way to flunk a student have complete control of whether or not that student is in any extracurricular activities. Yes, there are (or at least were) teachers who will get “creative” and round down a 69.9 average so the student gets an “F” instead of a “D”. Bam! Game over. No sports, no band, no choir, no part in the school play for the next six weeks. I was stuck in “cadet band” one semester because of this, and I got a failing grade in band (68) during a grading period as a result due to the ridiculous number of demerits that being in “cadet band” set me up for. The school counselor, not surprisingly, didn’t believe me. (This is why I quit school band after that year.)

So, back on topic… any way you slice it, the bit about not meeting the academic standards of their peers is definitely hogwash today. Being on the football or basketball teams is not an excuse for having lower grades and honestly, I don’t realistically think it ever was.

The article from The Atlantic goes into detail about just how the NCAA has resorted to selling game broadcast videos and made other merchandising deals in apparent exploitation of the athletic students it should be protecting. A small portion of this:

All of this money ultimately derives from the college athletes whose
likenesses are shown in the films or video games. But none of the profits go to them. … Naturally, as they have become more of a profit center for the NCAA, some of the vaunted “student-athletes” have begun to clamor that they deserve a share of those profits. You “see everybody getting richer and richer,” Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, told USA Today recently. “And you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”

… “Once you leave your university,” says [Ed] O’Bannon, who won the John Wooden Award for player of the year in 1995 on UCLA’s national-championship basketball team, “one would think your likeness belongs to you.”

Later on in the article comes a huge indictment of how the NCAA defines amateur status. I obviously can’t quote the entire article here but this should give you some idea what’s at stake. We have, on one hand, the NCAA, which has gone from its original mission to what is in effect a near-monopoly on college sports, using this flimsy excuse that college athletes are amateurs to first, exclude them from worker’s compensation claims, and second, to keep them from even negotiating with professional sports teams at all without risking their supposed amateur status.

The idea that (most) college athletes are amateurs is absurd. College athletes are paid when they get an athletic scholarship. (The walk-ons might be true amateurs, thus the “most” above.) The NCAA is truly treating college athletes like professionals by licensing their likenesses and, worse, not paying them for the privilege. The Olympics abandoned amateur status requirements back in 1986, for better or for worse. On top of this, it strikes me as just plain silly to rule players ineligible just for testing the market by negotiating with a professional team–even if no money changes hands.

This would be less of an issue if not combined with the most utterly short-sighted and galactically stupid limit of one year on scholarship commitments. Add this all up and you have the following: college athletes are at the mercy of their coaches and pretty much commit to playing their sport of choice for all four years to have a chance to graduate, if their coaches will let them. If the coach decides to cut an athlete the following year–boom! It’s either don’t graduate, hope to qualify for a Pell grant, or take out student loans.

I will probably revisit this topic at a later date. It will take me time to find suggestions on ways to fix the problems, because there are simply too many. But it’s clear to me that the NCAA as it stands today, stands for what is wrong with college athletics. We, the sports fans of the US (and the world), deserve better.

Attention Texas voters: Please vote FOR Prop. 9

I don’t ask this kind of thing very often of my readership. But if you live in Texas and you are registered to vote, I would really appreciate it if you’d vote FOR Proposition 9. I’ll explain why.

I commented on the case of Dale Lincoln Duke in my previous post. I mentioned again, at the end, how Dale got a 20 year prison sentence on a revocation of a 10 year deferred adjudication. This is the very real peril of a deferred adjudication sentence: it is relatively risk free for the prosecution and the judge unless the defendant re-offends in a particularly egregious manner, because the judge can always sentence the defendant to the maximum sentence after imposing a conviction. Worse, a particularly cruel judge can extend probation to the maximum allowed by law, then impose a maximum sentence. Judges can even revoke probation for relatively arbitrary reasons that most sane people would consider galactically stupid.

Now, the flip side of deferred adjudication is that the defendant is supposed to have no record of the offense on completion of the sentence. Well, it turns out this isn’t exactly true. Even if the defendant completes the sentence successfully, he/she still has to apply for an order of non-disclosure (OND). (And some offenses are actually not eligible for an OND.) For at least the first two or five years after the sentence is completed, he/she will still have what they call a record of the arrest until the OND is granted. I’m going to call this arrest record what it actually should be called, a “looks-like-a-conviction.” Actually, in effect it’s still a conviction to just about everyone who would run a background check. It’s certainly still a conviction as far as Federal guidelines go (which I think is also a load of bovine excrement, and which I will probably discuss in a later post). This “looks-like-a-conviction” is only truly not a conviction in three cases:

  1. the right to vote (for what it’s worth);
  2. the right to serve on a jury (which, actually, many people will read as a loss of the “right” to get a free pass out of jury duty);
  3. applying for a pardon (because there’s no conviction, there’s nothing to pardon).
    That’s where Proposition 9 comes in, because #3 above should not be there and is an unfortunate consequence of laws written prior to deferred adjudication. Is it really fair for someone to be given something that looks like a conviction, walks like a conviction, and quacks like a conviction, except all of a sudden it’s not a conviction when it comes time to ask for a pardon?

Note that Proposition 9 does not automatically grant pardons to anyone. They still have to be requested and clear the Board of Pardons and Paroles and the governor the same as before. What Proposition 9 does do, is realize this post-deferred-adjudication “arrest record” passes the duck test for a conviction and allows one in this situation to be pardoned the same way as someone with an actual conviction.

While it is not perfect, I believe this to be a huge step in the right direction for justice. Please, vote for justice, vote for Proposition 9.

(This is not a political advertisement by any third party, merely my own personal view. This blog has been paid for out of my own personal funds, as always.)

Police states: the new world order?

The Register reports on one of the more alarming attacks on civil liberties in the UK. Two people have been convicted for refusing to hand over encryption keys.

This highly controversial UK law went into effect in 2007 October.

Of a total of 15 notices served under this law, there were 11 cases of non-compliance, of which seven were charged, and two were convicted.

I still think that’s two too many. This law should not even be on the books. Of course, that is the UK, where they think nothing about putting up tons of CCTV cameras in public spaces as a security measure.

And my loyal readers, or even those just dropping in at random, may well be wondering “why does this crackpot even care about the UK when he obviously lives in the US?” My answer is simple: governments look to each other for ideas. The US and UK are rather closely allied today–the whole thing about dumping taxed tea into the harbor is well over two centuries old now–and the possibilities that certain US states will try to emulate the UK is horrifying.

So what is going on here in my home state of Texas? We had an attempt to pass what has been known as the “papers please” law, SB 1175, making it a crime to refuse to identify to a law enforcement official if detained. The existing laws already make it illegal to falsely identify, but do not proscribe refusing to identify at all. The Fifth Amendment implications should be obvious.

Thankfully, that attempt appears to have gone down in flames, at least for now. While I despise terrorism like any American who loves his country, it is our freedoms that make this country what it is. By passing the laws that erode what is left of our civil liberties, our Congresspeople, state legislators, and local-level representatives surrender what makes our country the great place it was. And they’re doing it while pretending to represent the best interests of those that elected them.

And I find that absolutely, positively, galactically disgusting.