10 Thoughts for December 2, 2014

1. Football: Bitcoin Bowl? There are 39 bowl games in total, including the two playoff games and the championship game. Bowl season is officially out of control when you have a bowl game named after an intangible currency.
2. Football: Great win for USC over rival Notre Dame, and a great way to end the season on a very high note, with Cody Kessler taking the weekly honor of PAC-12 offensive player of the week. If we -- fans -- are upset at Sark, it is because we saw the potential of this year's team, and if not for a couple of plays, USC would be a two-loss team playing Oregon in the PAC-12 championship and possibly in the CFB playoffs and Kessler would be competing with Marcus Mariota for the Heisman.  That's all.
3. Football: Oregon Ducks fans may be about to hit the sweet spot and win a national championship while seeing its starting quarterback win the school's first Heisman. With Heisman in tow, the Beavers no longer have anything to brag over the Ducks -- a very big deal in these parts of the country. Enjoy it, soak it up, Duck Fans!
4. Football: Michigan Wolverines football head coach Brady Hoke was fired. I said it before and say it again, that it was never about his handling of a player showing concussion symptoms on the field. Rich Rod, the former UM head coach, had his own moment of truth when he allowed his quarterback to play, even as he threw up on the field in a game against USC during a commercial break, following a blow to his head. Rich Rod made UA competitive while Brady Hoke's teams have gotten worse. This was always about winning and never about the health of athletes.
5. Football: Nearly 3 weeks ago I said that the top 4 in the first college football would be Oregon, TCU, Alabama and Ohio State. FSU has so far escaped losses to mediocre teams and has dropped to #4, while TCU has leapfrogged them to #3 and Ohio State is at #5 knocking at the door.  Unfortunately, with OSU losing its (second) starting quarterback to injury last weekend, it does not look good for them against Wisconsin for the B1G championship. As a result, the CFP may be stuck in a difficult position of allowing two Big-12 teams into the playoffs or a 2-loss team.
6. Geopolitics: Russian Stagflation? Russia's Central Bank has raised its key rate to 9.5%, just as its core inflation rate is expected to hit 8.59% for November. The value of its GDP has shrunk significantly as its currency undergoes rapid devaluation (~69% decline) making its boot from the G7 a moot point, while it is expected to hit an official recession in 2015, with a -0.8% decline -- might it get booted from the G20, as well? I think we're starting to see the effects of forced deglobalization.
7. Race: I had a true epiphany yesterday, that racism is part of a series of biases that make us a less-efficient capitalist market. When you decline to hire someone because of their skin color, religion or creed, you may have turned down a future leader of the company or your future top employee. When that bias is systemic, then society is less prosperous and less efficient than what it could otherwise be. Similarly, inequality is driven by the insidious bias that the richer you are, the smarter you are, and therefore again, creates inefficiency.
8. Race: I had an entire piece, written in draft, on the results of the Ferguson / Darren Wilson / Michael Brown case. But then I realized that when I popped my head up and looked all around me, no one gave a damn about research and truth. Ferguson is about themes, and practically no one in the media or politics is willing to tackle the discomforting contrast between themes and reality. In other words, not only are we not in a post-race world, but most people are trapped or otherwise caught up in these overarching themes. These are dangerous times to be an independent thinker; these are dangerous times to attempt to disentangle racial themes from Ferguson. It bothers me to no end, that the nation has taken up Michael Brown as a worthy martyr, even while Trayvon Martin has become nothing but a footnote in racism.
9. Race: Well, since I'm on the topic of race, this is an interesting test to see if you have preferences towards Black or White Americans. The instructions seem to me to be a bit oddly written, though, and I had to sit there for a minute to verify that I understood what they were saying. Interestingly, I belong to the group with the lowest percentage -- I have a "Moderate automatic preference for Black people". I can definitely empathize with Black Americans, far more than White Americans, though I find it difficult to believe that I lean towards Black Americans. [add:] I found the European / Asian American IAT bias test (among many others) here. In this case, I have "little or no association between Asian American and European American with American and Foreign." In other words, I have no bias between Asian and European Americans.
10. Economics: You might have heard that the EU is looking to break up Google. Meanwhile it is also looking to boost its domestic companies' competitiveness by investing in a private-public venture capital fund. In a nutshell, this perfectly illustrates Europe's problems as an old-world system: On the one hand they cannot compete with foreign countries, therefore have taken to anti-competitive actions. While SpaceX uses private money and minor federal (competitive) grants to create its own rockets, Europe has announced billions in public investments to bolster Arianespace to compete with low-cost space transportation from SpaceX.