Let's take a little trip back to a religious parody series I started a while ago, and I'd like to continue it now, not with any of the things I said I was going to do, but with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I've tried to parallel them as closely as possible to the prophecy given in Revelation, from the color of the horses to the form and means of destruction represented by each rider. Anyway, these may sound all too familiar, and you can probably guess them now without reading, but here are the four riders who shall bring war, famine, pestilence, and death to our happy little existence:
The first rider, upon a white horse, bearing a bow and wearing a crown of thorns, shall be the Christ, Lord of Loathing and King of Thieves. He represents religion, ignorance, and false hope, and shall cause destruction through hatred and conquest from within the nations with the false lure of righteousness.
The second horseman shall ride a beast the deep red color of freshly spilt blood and shall wield a sword. He represents governments and the flawed establishments of state power. He brings destruction through warfare and conquest between the nations.
The third horse is black, and the rider bears the scales. He represents the famines and death that accompany a currencied economy. Inflation, greed, and inequality are the results of his skewed fiscal justice.
The fourth rider, whose horse is pale and sickly, represents the death and weakness brought by medical science and technology. His works upon the earth are the most evil and the most destructive, for they are the root of all others. Not only is the weakened gene pool that medicine brings inevitable, but the interdependence created by improved science and technology, is the father of society, and is therefore the father of society's three great evils - religion, government, and economy.
I don't know if that made any sense, but it's late and I'm pissed, and I felt like taking it out on religion instead of the boredom and bitter nostalgic regret I get every time I set foot in this house. I may be a welcome guest, but I cannot welcome the sight of this house anymore. The geologic layers of filth around here have formed a monument to my mediocrity and laziness. There are parts of this house that haven't been touched in half a decade, and I'm not the boy I was then. I need to get out of this museum and back to my home.
Yes, friends, the holiday season is upon us. The season is well underway, and although the biggest holidays of the year aren't till tounament time in March, the start of conference games is a cause for celebration in December. This season is particularly exciting because of all the changes around the league. With three teams moving from the Big East to the ACC, both conferences have a whole new dynamic. And it doesn't stop there. Those holes in the Big East were filled with teams from Conference USA, who in turn accepted schools from several mid-major leagues. With so many changes to these conference schedules, the landscape of college basketball has been totally redefined. In the ACC, this means the end of the traditional round-robin schedule, in which each team will play every other team twice, once at each school's home venue. With more teams in the league, there's just not enough time in the schedule to play everybody twice. The coaches have made appeals for some of the bigger rivalries to be played twice, but otherwise it's just pot luck as to who you will play only once, and whether it will be home or away.
The same situation has occurred in our CAA, with two new teams entering the conference this year. In fact, the similarities between the ACC and the CAA don't stop there. Both conferences now have twelve teams, including several pairs of in-state and conference rivalries that are intense year to year. Both conferences are known especially for their parity. Besides one or two standout teams and one or two cupcakes, anybody can beat anybody else in a given game within these conferences. This is a mark of a great conference because it creates true competition for dominance in the league, and a more significant sense of accomplishment for winning. Speaking of winning, both of these conferences play intense non-conference schedules, and they win. Even the teams at the bottom of both conference beat the teams they play outside of conference. This is another sign of a great conference because it shows the superiority of the teams in these conferences over their respective rival conferences (Big Ten for ACC and So-Con for CAA). Most importantly, though, is that these two are basketball conferences. The CAA schools don't even have football teams, so basketball is all we have, and the ACC just doesn't care about football except for Florida State, VT, and Miami. For these reasons and more, the CAA has been refered to as the ACC of Mid-Majors, or the Poor Man's ACC. UNCW's Trask Coliseum is known as the Cameron of the CAA for it's intensity and difficulty for incoming teams that mirrors Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium. But that didn't happen by accident. Most of UNCW's students were raised deep in ACC country, living and breathing college basketball all their lives, and whether they're Duke, Wake, Carolina, or State fans, they bring the passion and intensity of ACC ball to UNCW. Other schools have seen this in Trask and have begun to incorporate ACC style fandom into their own courts and arenas.
So remember the little guys this conference season. Mid-Majors make college basketball what it is. As conference allegiences shift, the definition of a Mid-Major changes as well. So check out www.collegeinsider.com for all the latest Mid-Major news, including the Mid-Major Top 25 to keep up with UNCW's climb up the ranks.
It's time for a new segment here at the Desk that I like to call Three Good Reasons. Each week (or month (or just today)), I'll pick out something around here that doesn't work like it ought and give you three good reasons why it doesn't work like it ought. Today's feature:
Three good reasons our nation's penal/judicial system doesn't work like it ought:
1. Prison time is an incentive for much of the criminal population. Not only do they ensure three square meals a day and a roof over your head, most of our nation's prison's are not terribly unpleasant places to spend a few months or years compared the alternatives. Not only that, Katrina showed us that the prisons are the very first thing to be evacuated in the event of natural disasters - before mental institutions, nursing homes, and hospitals. Why? So the prison doesn't get destroyed and set them all loose. But the real result of all this turns out to make prisons a more desireable home that the streets these people crawled off of. People know how to get caught and how not to get caught, and they know exactly how to keep from getting too harsh a sentence. Minor drug or prostitution offenses are responsible for a majority of the prison population and there's a reason for that. People will intentionally get caught for minor crimes just so they can have a decent place to live for a few months. That's a problem because it makes the prisons overpopulated with people who really don't deserve to be there. The solution? Make prison an unpleasant experience. We're too afraid these days of infringing on people's rights and getting the pants sued off us that we forget what the government is here to do in the first place. The whole point of punishment, and the whole definition of punishment is that is in some way or other unpleasant. If it's actually a step up to go to prison, then prison is nothing but a concrete hotel.
2. We put people in prison for white-collar crimes. It's true. Embezzlement, fraud, and other paper crimes can land you hard time. Again, we see a significant portion of the overpopulated prison system behind bars who don't need to be. It makes more sense to punish these sorts of crimes in a more fitting way - in the wallet. Make them pay it back with interest; that's what that demographic will respond to. Besides, it makes no sense to keep white-collar criminals in a facility designed to keep dangerous criminals off the streets. These people didn't hurt anybody in a way that would require their physical isolation from society like murderers and rapists - they hurt people in a way that requires money and only money to fix.
3. Another problem augmenting the overpopulation of prisons is that a life sentence is cheaper to precsribe than the death penalty. Yes, it's cheaper to feed and house a person for, say, thirty years, and even continue to build prisons for this growing population (which are going up faster than schools, by the way), than it is to hire the teams of lawyers and judges and other court officials to go through the years of automatic appeals associated with capital cases. The solution here has nothing to do with the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty - again the bottom line is, and always is, money. Money problems can be solved by printing out the budget and getting a pair of scissors. I'm no economist, but I know the government's wasting your money in more ways than this one.
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