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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Bigtime Respect for “Big Game Bob”

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Bob Stoops: so glad to see this great Hall of Fame coach’s career resurrect for one more night (and a month of preparation before) so he could go out with victory, honor and the utmost respect and love of players, fans and colleagues alike. So it was.

There was absolutely no guarantee OU would win the game, of course, but something seemed predestined and inevitable about this — especially with his son on the team (who, in a moment fit for a movie, scored a touchdown in the game), and also, the particulars of who was the opposing team. History was coming full circle.

The hotshot young assistant coach to whom Bob had handed the keys to the OU football Ferrari, and who won a lot of games here afterward, clearly had been distracted and performing uncharacteristically out of sorts all season after the USC job opened in September. Then we all found out why.

Behind everyone’s backs, hours after the last game of the season, he reached a lucrative deal with that historically storied yet recently far lesser program halfway across the country, taking several coaches and future 5-star recruits with him right away. Anyone who thinks that all came together only in a few hours one Sunday morning: I’ve got beautiful land 10 miles east of downtown Miami to sell you.

Joe Castiglione called Bob off a golf course out of the blue that afternoon, to tell him the hotshot coach is fleeing town, and would he please coach the bowl game? After several years of retirement, Bob dropped everything he was doing. With no hesitation, he went straight to work in under an hour. He first went on TV and online, and in one of the greatest motivational-leadership moments I’ve seen in sports, said all the right things and quickly cooled off what could have turned into a massive dumpster fire. Bob reassured players and fans alike that no one (not even himself nor any coach) was bigger than the program.

Then he set about preparing players he hadn’t coached before, and an assortment of leftover assistant coaches who hadn’t drawn up an offensive or defensive game plan on their own, to beat an opponent that was in one respect thoroughly unknown, and in another, hauntingly familiar. He even tried at first to turn down the pay they offered from the previous coach’s voided contract — he wanted to volunteer, out of sheer devotion to the program. Who else does that?

Flashback 2006: Likely the bitterest, most frustrating moment of Bob’s career was when OU got screwed horribly by both field and replay officials in Eugene, when the Sooners clearly recovered an Oregon onside kick and displayed the ball for the whole stadium and TV audience to see…except the refs, who shockingly didn’t see, thought the ball was still in the pile, and awarded it to Oregon, who went on to “win” a game everybody involved knew they didn’t deserve. In the annals of botched officiating, this was among the top few worst of all time, rivaled only by the Colorado “fifth down” against Missouri. Refs from that Oregon crew soon got fired and suspended for their egregious errors in that game, but officially it went down as an Oregon win for ever and ever.

What goes around, comes around…29 December 2021: OU 47, Oregon 32 (and it wasn’t that close). As one of my colleagues said, Oregon lost to a part-time tequila salesman. Yes, and one who still could coach, too. Bob got ’em back good, in an opportunity he shouldn’t have had, by all rights. Afterward, in the midfield stage celebration, he conducted a ceremonial “passing of the visor” to the new, full-time, head ball coach — his longtime defensive assistant here in the 2000s, Brent Venables. And now a new era of winning begins in Sooner football.

Bob Stoops represents what is too often sorely lacking in high-stakes sports (and I include college football in that category): integrity, dedication, loyalty, tremendous work ethic, and a drive to not only win, but win the right way. Bob will never have to pay for a drink in this state again, and you can bet his statue outside Memorial Stadium will be kept spotless and clean.

Already in the College Football Hall of Fame, he showed himself to be a hall of famer in the character department too. All due respect, Big Game Bob. This time, he went out on the right terms.

BOOMER

Some Advice for the Voting Booth

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Looking over events of the last few decades, and the trends that have led to our current political state, one conclusion is clear: too many Americans treat the Presidency as a golden calf, and its power as an object of idol worship.

The artificial realm of social media overwhelmingly requires performative supplication to one worldly partisan conformity cult or the other. Independent and critical thinking is verboten. Herd mentality, and virtue signaling toward the popularity cliques, reign. It is a giant, digital online version of the cool kids’ lunch tables in middle school, and no less immature nor petty. Its mantra distills to the words Geddy Lee sang in Subdivisions: “Be cool or be cast out…”

The unquestioning supine positions taken by so many highly educated and otherwise decent people among my friends and acquaintances, toward the political duopoly’s false dichotomy, and demands for conformity thereto in order to fit in and be hip with the crowd, reveal the great lie. That calf is fool’s gold.

Online, I now often see holders of scientific PhDs turn into gullible, emotion-steered suckers for a sob story at the drop of a hat, all too easily inflamed and manipulated by the by the latest breathlessly hyped headline about some “injustice” or another (often turning out weeks to months later to be misleading, false-flag, or just plain false). Psyops work for reasons, and not just on the “dummies”. Eschewing critical thinking, cooly analytic logic and emotionally detached reasoning skills that were God-given congenital, cognitive capacities, and at one time, useful in acquiring those educational credentials…otherwise smart people become easily played fools for the latest provocative headline.

This is where street smarts, and the related ability to see right through manipulative BS, help. That ability frequently evades, or is woefully undeveloped, in those with sheltered, protected, privileged upbringings that led them to ivory-tower success but cluelessness regarding the workings of the world, eloquent and talented in their narrow specialties but blissfully ignorant of reality on the streets. The easy path: follow the outrage herd. Collect likes. Bathe in the comfortable warmth of approving attaboys from sycophants in the comments and replies.

The harder but truer path: question the outrage-mentality dogma, think for yourself, understand candidates and issues factually and with cool-headed rationality, and map out your votes carefully up and down that ballot.

But don’t think selfishly. I often have seen some of those same educated peers complain about a group of voters voting “against their own interests”. First off, who are you to judge their self-interests? Second, and more importantly, voting should not be about what’s best for oneself, but what’s best for the country. Voting against one’s own interests can be admirable, and the right thing to do! But too few see outside that obnoxiously small bubble of “What’s in it for me?” when voting.

As a result, we get what we’ve got. What we’ve got is a sociopolitical train wreck of chaos, discord and hateful division. Divide and conquer: it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.

And so the golden calf is pleasured, whomever may occupy its role, by whatever partisan label.

This is not a plea for detachment, which is a cowardly cop-out—but instead, for critical and independent thought, and even more importantly, for a call to a higher authority than oneself over the decisions involved. No person perfect. No human is omnipotent. So after applying those God-given reasoning skills, don’t stop there. Dial up some wisdom and clarity from above, then listen.

Pray over your vote. Vote your conscience in prayerful reflection, not what other flawed and biased humans demand of you. Your friends, relatives, and co-workers are not in that (real or home-based) voting booth with you. God is! Remember this.

What goes on that ballot, in that moment, is known only to you, and far more importantly, to God. Vote accordingly.

This is a nonpartisan statement.

Lessons: Retraction of Highly Publicized Study on Religious Children

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Yet another published social-science/humanities study has been retracted formally. This one got huge attention from secular (of course!) media for supposedly showing that religious children were less generous & altruistic.

Fortunately other scientists, who had been doing similar work with different data, and whose work (along with prior studies) showed much the opposite, didn’t buy it. They suspected something was awry with those results…rightly so! They asked for the study data, got it, reproduced the analyses, and found that the results were indeed bad, due to a simple coding error. See the link I provided above for more details on how this mess happened.

Another festering sore has appeared on the face of peer review as a practice, science as a whole, and on “soft science” humanities in particular. Lessons are many, and include:

  • Peer review is good, but not always good enough. Not just in the “soft sciences” either! It can miss important analytic flaws, as I have seen first-hand in physical (atmospheric) science. I find minor errors in published papers often, and mostly e-mail authors directly about them. Once, however, the problems were so numerous and crucial that I lead-authored a published rebuttal of many points in a formally peer-reviewed work that had appeared in an AMS journal.
  • Peer review in a highly specialized science can be insular, even incestuous. Reviewers are busy, and can slack off details. Reviewers often know the people whose work they’re reviewing, and/or can be awed by admiration for a respected name, and let stuff slide. It helps to have at least one anal-retentive reviewer willing to re-analyze data, or at least question findings that don’t make sense. Obviously this paper’s reviewers did not find anything suspicious—perhaps because their own preconceived biases about religious people clouded their potential to find such results puzzling.
  • Evaluate the biases of the media that promote scientific results, especially in more subjective fields like humanities and social science, but really, any science. What sociopolitical slants are evident in their other stories in general, including choices of subjects about which they publicize scientific results?
  • Don’t count on mass media to promote retractions, to more than a tiny, token, trivial fraction of the extent they pushed forth original, likely agenda-conforming results. Sometimes a retraction will be noted on a deep page (physical or digital) for the purpose of tokenism. Keep up with the latest retraction news on reputable, devoted watchdog sites.
  • In science, reproducibility is paramount! The greatest of alarm bells should go off when relatively recent (less than a decade or so) studies cannot be reproduced, especially if they involve unavailable data. In decades of yore, data were in hardcopy or primitive digital form, and often got lost, burned, flooded, heaved into the dumpster, etc. Today, with data-storage, archival and retrieval capacity smashing new records on a monthly basis, and redundant and cloud storage being common, there’s little, if any, valid excuse for the data not being there. This includes so-called “proprietary” data. Science is about openness, and all research data should be made available upon request, for the fundamental scientific tenet of reproducing analyses and results.