So professional handicappers look at it this way.  I agree with some but not all of their analysis.  Notre Dame is without a doubt the worst team UConn could face and they will have to play very hard and carefully to win.

Baylor on the other hand is not a team that presents an unsolvable problem.  Brittney Griner is without a doubt a phenomenon, but you send your bench at her inside and get her in foul trouble.  Stanford is a premier program and has the depth and discipline to do this.

It’s been a bad season for the Lady Huskies, the worst in years, even so they are capable of going all the way against any team in the field.

Regional Final Results-

Tonight’s Action-

I find myself otherwise engaged tonight as does TheMomCat.  I’ve asked BobbyK to check in from time to time, please be nice to him and make your own fun.

My predictions so you can point and hoot are Louisville over Kentucky and Ohio State over Kansas.  I like Louisville because of their Big East connections, Ohio State I don’t like at all but I like Kansas less.

Joe Nocera wrote a piece that everyone is talking about-

Orwell and March Madness

By JOE NOCERA, The New York Times

Published: March 30, 2012

Athletes are “student-athletes,” a phrase coined by Walter Byers, the man who turned the N.C.A.A. into a modern powerhouse, because he feared that some states might try to classify football and basketball players as employees. College sports follows “the collegiate model,” a term coined in 2006 by one of Byers’ successors, Myles Brand. Realizing that amateurism was becoming outmoded, he needed a new concept that would allow athletic departments to continue exploiting athletes while denying that is what they were doing.

The essence of “the collegiate model” is that college athletes are students first, and that college athletics is secondary to academics. One can then ignore the fact that during this three-week tournament, the N.C.A.A. will reap around $800 million, while the players who make that possible will get nothing. They’re students, after all.

…

Calipari, complained Emmert, was “throwing away the collegiate model.” But, he’s not, because in the big-money sports of football and men’s basketball, the collegiate model is a fiction. Rather, Calipari is dispensing with the hypocrisy that everyone else goes along with, including our basketball-mad president, who allows himself to be interviewed while filling out his March Madness brackets, but can’t bring himself to utter a word on behalf of the athletes that college sports so ruthlessly exploits.

Regional Final Results-

Tonight’s Action-

The Eight Big Mistakes Democrats Made Regarding the Constitutionality of ObamaCare

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Friday March 30, 2012 7:48 am

In the end, the decision about the constitutionality of the individual mandate and the entire Affordable Care Act will come down to the nine members of the Supreme Court. It is ultimately their call, and they will be fully responsible for what they decide. That said, the Democrats had many chances to take steps to prevent the health care law from ever getting to the point where there is even the possibility the Supreme Court could throw it out. The issue only got to this point because Democrats, on multiple occasions, horribly mishandled their job and totally failed to prepare for what was an entirely foreseeable eventuality.

…

1. Lack of severability clause in the law
2. Ignoring Republican promises to challenge the mandate
3. Ignoring public hatred of the mandate
4. Dropping the Public Option
5. Congress refusing to call it a tax
6. Obama team refusing call it a straight tax
7. Obama administration’s bizarre severability argument
8. Failed to articulate a clear limiting principle

Still, overturning the ACA might be the best thing that could happen from a policy standpoint.

Individual Mandates and Unraveling the Great Society

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Thursday March 29, 2012 9:26 am

There are are two main ways for the government to provide universal public goods. The first and normally best way is to have the government raise money through taxes and then use that money to directly provide the service to everyone. The other option is to create an individual mandate forcing everyone to buy the service from private corporations while having the government subsidize some of the cost. These needless middlemen mostly just increase costs for regular people and the government. This is why corporations love this setup and push hard for it.

…

If the Supreme Court rules against this individual mandate in a way that basically makes it legally impossible to replace most of our current public insurance systems with mandated private systems, that should be seen as a big silver lining for progressives.

A stronger prescription for what ails health care

By Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

Published: March 29

Eventually, however, our health-care system will be restructured. It has to be. The current fee-for-service paradigm, with doctors and hospitals being paid through for-profit insurance companies, is needlessly inefficient and ruinously expensive.

When people talk about out-of-control government spending, they’re really talking about rising medical costs that far outpace any conceivable rate of economic growth. The conservative solution – shift those costs to the consumer – is no solution at all.

Our only choice is to try to hold the costs down. President Obama tried to make a start with a modest approach that works through the current system. If this doesn’t pass constitutional muster, the obvious alternative is to emulate other industrialized nations that deliver equal or better health-care outcomes for half the cost.

I’m talking about a single-payer health-care system. If the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare, a single-payer system will go from being politically impossible to being, in the long run, fiscally inevitable.

I’m not a vegetarian, though I don’t eat much meat because I don’t see the point of it.  Some hummus and a nice ciabatta (that’s a Silence of the Lambs reference, but the important thing about my jokes is that they amuse me).

Still, if you are a vegetarian you don’t have to worry about things like this-

The other day my email got hijacked and I had to send a warning to all the people in my contact list.  I was pleasantly surprised that my address for CSI Bentonville (a vegetarian of my online acquaintance) is still good and she seems to be well and happy.

She sent me this link to a documentary which is available today and tomorrow.

And also there is this-

USDA Undersecretary for Pink Slime Hagen refusing to talk to media while defending beef additive

By John Aravosis, Americablog

3/30/2012 11:04:00 AM

Since these GOP governors and the USDA “safety” director are in theory so supportive of the free market, what’s to fear about clearly labeling products that include Pink Slime and letting consumers decide. Surely there’s nothing to fear since it’s such a wonderful product. Right? And why stop at school lunches — the entire administration should be serve 100% pink slime in its cafeterias and lead by example.

Someone please remind me why Dr. Elisabeth Hagen still has a job with this administration? Obama needs to do a lot better than this for a job as important as food safety. But maybe he likes Pink Slime and thinks it’s OK to feed to his family?

The Bats Affair: When Machines Humiliate Their Masters

By Brian Bremner, Business Week

March 23, 2012

In the annals of business screw-ups, Bats has certainly made its mark. Bats stands for Better Alternative Trading System and the company runs two exchanges that collectively rank third in terms of U.S. share trading, behind New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Bats exchanges account for 11 percent to 12 percent of daily U.S. equity trading, according to its website. The company came of age with the expansion of high-frequency trading over the last decade and the proliferation of quant-jock-driven electronic firms that dominate the buying and selling of U.S. equities. Bats founder Dave Cummings is chairman and owner of high-frequency trading firm Tradebot Systems.

Today was supposed to be the Lenexa (Kan.)-based company’s moment in the limelight as it tried to sell about 6.3 million shares in the $16 to $18 dollar per share range. Instead, something went terribly wrong. The company’s shares somehow ended up trading for pennies per share early in the trading day on both the Bats bourse and Nasdaq, according to data reviewed in this Bloomberg story. Then tech investors and Apple (AAPL) fanboys the world over were dismayed when a single trade for 100 shares executed on the Bats market sent Apple’s shares to $542 per share, down sharply from recent levels. (The company set a new 52-week high of $609 per share on March 21.) The stock temporarily halted trading and recovered.

And, as a matter of fact, we do know what went wrong.

Bats: The Epic Fail of the Worst IPO Ever

By Dan Beucke, Business Week

March 23, 2012

Bats priced 6.3 million shares through underwriters yesterday and appeared set to begin trading about 90 minutes into the day when chaos erupted. While the company quoted its shares at $15.25 at 10:45 a.m. on its website, feeds including those sent to Bloomberg LP displayed different prices. At 11:14 a.m., Bloomberg received data showing 1.26 million shares had traded, with the most recent execution at 3.84 cents and the lowest transaction at 0.02 cent.

Compounding the confusion, a single trade for 100 shares executed on a Bats venue at 10:57 a.m. briefly sent Apple down more than 9 percent to $542.80, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Two more transactions, which sent the stock back above $598, were made before the halt. The stock stayed around that level once trading resumed five minutes later and the errant trade, along with the Bats transactions, were later canceled. Bats sent a notice about 10 minutes before the Apple trade saying it was investigating “system issues” affecting companies with ticker symbols ranging between A and BF. Apple’s is AAPL. Bats’s ticker was BATS. At 11:07 a.m., Bats’s BYX Exchange took a procedural step known as “declaring self help” against its BZX exchange, indicating that it had stopped routing orders to the market because BZX wasn’t responding to messages quickly enough.

BATS exchange withdraws IPO after stumbles

By Olivia Oran, Jonathan Spicer, Chuck Mikolajczak and Carrick Mollenkamp, Reuters

Sat Mar 24, 2012 1:37pm EDT

The debacle raised questions for regulators, investors and the underwriters, including Citigroup Inc, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Group, which were listed before the IPO as major shareholders.

…

Since the May 2010 “flash crash” in which nearly $1 trillion in market value disappeared in minutes, the Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Mary Schapiro has pledged to crack down on problems in the high-speed electronic marketplace, which regulators worry has grown unstable and perhaps unfair as high-frequency trading has grown in prominence.

…

It is expected to draw even more scrutiny from regulators looking into the soundness of the exchange’s servers, trade-matching engines and computer codes, and it could land BATS in legal trouble for withdrawing its IPO after trades were executed in the public marketplace, according to experts.

…

“It’s just another black eye for the fragmented equity structure,” said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey, and a frequent critic of U.S. equities market structure. “Every day we see things like flash crashes and now IPOs that can’t get off the ground.”

But don’t worry, our captive fearless SEC facilitators regulators are on the case and the Obama/Holder Justice Department will make sure that everyone skates any irregularities are appropriately corrected.

Or not.

You see, the thing is that the US contribution is already so insignificant that it’s chump change even for Gabon.

Part 1

Part 2

Yup.  We are exceptional.

So the big local story is that Geno had a blistering team takedown after the 77-59 victory over Penn State.  They didn’t play hard enough.

That’s how he rolls folks and why UConn is arguably the #1 program in the country.

Do they have enough this year?  The regular season was not outstanding and they’re not exactly laden with stars, but they do have a program and tradition and even if unsuccessful tonight are easily the best Basketball team in Connecticut.

As in they would kick the Men’s team’s ass if they let them.

To me the great threat is Notre Dame who are lean and hungry and not intimidated by Geno and the Huskies so if they go down tonight, hey… that’s how you play Survivor.  Alas I expect they will advance which will cause me anxiety in the Championship.

Did I mention a cappela?  Both games on ESPN.

Yesterday’s Results-

Tonight’s Action-

No Mercy.  Geno doesn’t have any and neither do I.  Tonight’s Regional Finals are on ESPN.

It would be nice if Stanford also went down though Duke is no pushover.  And what did I tell you?  You have to watch out for the Fighting Irish.

Also this year’s seeders did an excellent job.  No upsets either.

Yesterday’s Results-

Tonight’s Action-

You know my methods Watson.

“But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle – how excessively odd! I was sure you were mad. And why did you insist upon letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?”

“Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea.”

The problem of fake gold bars

Felix Salmon, Reuters

Mar 25, 2012 16:19 EDT

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten. This bar was discovered only because it was 2 grams lighter than it ought to have been: the forgers failed to add quite enough gold to the outside of the bar to make up for the weight lost when they replaced gold with tungsten. But if they’d gotten the weight right, it would probably still be circulating today.

…

In the case of gold, then, what JK Galbraith famously called “the bezzle” – the amount of wealth that people think they have, which in fact they don’t have – could be truly enormous. If there are 1.3 million salted 400 oz bars in existence, and each one is 75% tungsten, then that makes 390 million ounces of gold which in truth isn’t there. At $1,660 per ounce, that’s over $600 billion which people think they own but don’t. To put that number in context, it’s roughly half the total quantity of subprime mortgages which had been issued at the height of the housing bubble.

…

In any case, there’s clearly now serious tail risk for anybody in the physical-gold market. And like most tail risks, measuring and/or insuring against it is extremely difficult. Any store of value has problems, be it fiat currency or sovereign debt or bitcoins. This latest discovery just goes to show that the problems with gold aren’t just the obvious ones surrounding things like the risk that the price of gold might plunge. There are non-obvious ones, too, which have the potential to be even bigger.

From the comments by Doly

Just to get people who worry about this slightly more worried: gold-plated tungsten will fail the density test, but this is because tungsten is slightly too dense. Making sure you leave some small hole of the right size, or add the right amount of almost any other metal (most metals are less dense), should solve this problem. This is an example of a very shoddy forgery. Somebody who took their forgery as seriously as they should when we’re talking some decent money, should have no trouble at all producing bars of the right weight and density. As Felix points out, conductivity would still show… but frankly, I think any competent chemist should be able to produce a gold-plated bar that passes most tests except cutting it in half.

As always, I only traffic in the most scurrilous rumors.