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When bad metrics happen to bad GMs

Anyone who’s read our VM basketball previews in the last few years knows that the Timberwolves are in terrible shape, and it’s due to the incompetent dealings of its general manager, Kevin McHale, who can also be faulted for being part of the Joe Smith debacle that ruined Kevin Garnett’s career.

So that’s why it’s really funny that when Forbes.com came up with a system of metrics to evaluate general managers across the major sports, they ended up with Kevin McHale as #1.

Given the failure of that system, I’m going to have to take any of their other rankings with a grain of salt. I think this is an instance where the metrics sounded good, but when they were applied and led to this Bizarro world where McHale’s #1 and Billy Beane is #26, someone should have said, “Maybe we need to re-weight or add some other factors.”

And ranking Billy King of the Sixers at #3 was also pretty mind-boggling.

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Monday Morning Montaigne

This week’s Montaine passage comes from On the Education of Children, which was written to Madame Diane De Foix, Comtesse De Gurson, who was expecting the birth of her first son. How do we know it’s a son? Well, “[You] are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male,” Michel tells us.

Montaigne uses the occasion of this essay to praise the merits of a liberal arts education. I wish I had it on hand to explain my master’s degree to people. He’s telling us to learn how to think, and how to be curious (and also how to inure ourselves to torture in case we end up in the clutches of an Inquisition). In this passage, we find that it’s not so important to quote the great thinkers (which Montaigne still does a bunch) as it is to understand how they thought:

Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or the Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured.

“For doubting pleases me no less than knowing,” says Dante. For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. “We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.” [Seneca] Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it in the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

Let him hide all the help he had, and show only what he has made of it. The pillages, the borrowers, parade their buildings, their purchases, not what they get from others. You do not see the gratuities of a member of Parliament, you see the alliances he has gained and honors for his children. No one makes public his receipts; everyone makes public his acquisitions.

The gain from our study is to have become better and wiser by it.

Oh, and Montaigne also offers up some advice for tutors, in the off chance this liberal education doesn’t take:

If this pupil happens to be of such an odd disposition that he would rather listen to some idle story than to the account of a fine voyage or a wise conversation when he hears one; if, at the sound of a drum that calls the youthful ardor of his companions to arms, he turns asideto another that invites him to the tricks of the jugglers; if, by his own preference, he does not find it more pleasant sweet to return dusty and victorious from a combat than from tennis or a ball with the prize for that exercise, I see no other remedy than for his tutor to strangle him early, if there are no witnesses, or apprentice him to a pastry cook in some good town, even though he were the son of a duke.

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China Syndrome

This massive article on China purports to have been written by only two reporters, but its portrayal of China’s economy and social condition is so fragmented and contradictory that I have to assume at least six different writers contributed pieces to it, and that their editor was on vacation.

This piece on China’s first-strike capacity is much more internally coherent. Unfortunately, it seems to propose we return to a cold war-style arms race.

Oh, and Yao Ming is the slowest guy in the league.

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Atlantis Acres

A township near my home plans to buy out 33 houses on River Road near the Pompton River, level them, and “return the land to its natural state.” The state and feds are kicking in a couple million to do this, since

A federal spokeswoman said Hoffman Grove ranked second in New Jersey — Ocean City is first — in ongoing loss claims. The state ranks fourth in the country.

If you live on “River Road” or in “Ocean City”, you should probably expect to get flooded every so often.

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Major, Burns!

Charles Burns, one of the finest cartoonists currently practicing the craft, recently released a book of “paired photographs” called One Eye. Chris Ware, another of the finest cartoonists around, wrote about Burns and the photos at Virginia Quarterly Review. Some of the photos are in the article, and they’re gorgeous, so check it out.

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Talk about scorched earth

Brendan O’Neill attacks genocide vogue. I think he’s had some previous articles where he’s examined the guerrilla warfare and insurgencies that lead to the conditions that the west labels as genocide, and how that fighting gets ignored in favor of a clear-cut recasting of murderers and victims.

In international relations genocide has become a political weapon, an all-purpose rallying cry used by various actors to gain moral authority and boost their own standing. Anyone with a cursory understanding of history should know that the bloody wars of the past 10 to 15 years — in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur — are not unprecedented or exceptional. Certainly none of them can be compared to the Nazi genocide against the Jews, which involved the industrialised slaughter, often in factories built for the purpose, of six million men, women and children. Rather, the labelling of today’s brutal civil wars as ‘genocides’ by Western observers, courts and commentators is a desperate search for a new moral crusade, and it has given rise to a new moral divide between the West and the rest, between the civilised and enlightened governments of America and Europe and those dark parts of the world where genocides occur.

I have a big problem with laws that make “holocaust denial” illegal, because I think those play right into the hands of the denying set, showing how they’re oppressed by the government, which doesn’t want their viewpoint getting out. It’s a free speech issue, so I wouldn’t expect Europe to be out in front on that.

This article also made me think of the “Everyone has AIDS!” musical number from Team America.

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Making Music

Michael Bierut at DesignObserver feels that Dreamgirls misses the soul of the music that it’s trying to capture, and he has some neat remarks about the “production line” of Holland, Dozier and Holland at Motown records. It puts me in mind of Jack Kirby’s most prolific and productive era, in the 1960s, in which he was drawing tons of pages but also inventing (or co-inventing) mind-bending character after character.

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No-No-NO,LA

In the last few days, I’ve come across a pair of strange articles about New Orleans.

The first contends that a collection of public-housing buildings should not be knocked down, since they’re pretty nice buildings and just need “full-scale renovations”.

Oh, and the low-income residents shouldn’t be brought back in. Instead, the apartments should be sold to middle-class people, because, um, there are enough poor people in New Orleans already. Seriously:

The feds’ impulse to replace such perfectly good housing takes root in the flawed notion that the buildings are the problem with blighted public housing, not the dependent underclass people who live in it. Most residents of New Orleans’s housing projects paid less than $100 in monthly rent. Even if they weren’t on welfare, in other words, they were essentially dependent on government. Also, the complexes teemed with long-term tenants’ sons and grandsons, who terrorized the projects through violent crime. The failure of the city’s elected leaders to police and incarcerate these criminals long ago turned the projects into killing grounds with their own system of murderous street justice.

And nearly 18 months after Katrina, New Orleans certainly isn’t lacking for an underclass. In fact, the city’s murder rate is once again out of control, mainly due to unparented, impulsive young men shooting other unparented, impulsive young men.

What New Orleans is lacking is enough middle-class and working-class residents, who began leaving the city long before Katrina. Without such citizens, the Big Easy won’t have the committed voters and tax dollars it needs to become a functional, healthy city — something it hasn’t been for decades.

But, amazingly, that’s not the strangest and most insulting assessment I’ve read about the city this week. No, that honor goes to Andres Duany, who says, well, I’ve gotta just let him speak for himself:

I remember specifically when on a street in the Marigny I came upon a colorful little house framed by banana trees. I thought, “This is Cuba.” (I am Cuban.) I realized at that instant that New Orleans is not really an American city, but rather a Caribbean one. I understood that, when seen through the lens of the Caribbean, New Orleans is not among the most haphazard, poorest, or misgoverned American cities, but rather the most organized, wealthiest, cleanest, and competently governed of the Caribbean cities. This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and truly began to sympathize. But the government? Like everyone, I found the city government to be a bit random; then I thought that if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place — and not one that I could care for. Let me work with the government the way it is. It is the human flaws that make New Orleans the most human of American cities. (New Orleans came to feel so much like Cuba that I was driven to buy a house in the Marigny as a surrogate for my inaccessible Santiago de Cuba.)

Keep reading, because his prescription for the city’s future success relies on this, um, lowering of standards.