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The College Football Czar: Week 6 Week five in review: The lesson through the first five weeks of the season is that, apparently, nobody is really very good. Four of the Top Ten teams lost last Saturday, while numbers one and two, Ohio State and Michigan State, looked terrible in clinging to victories against conference foes they’d normally be expected to steamroll. Even as parity dominates, there are 20 undefeated teams at this point in the season, partly because most teams had scheduled at least one phony game against a lower-division opponent, and one deliberately uncompetitive game against a small-conference...

There are few things as fascinating as seeing what people in the past dreamed about the future. "France in the Year 2000" is one example. The series of paintings, made by Jean-Marc Côté and other French artists in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910, shows artist depictions of what life might look like in the year 2000. The first series of images were printed and enclosed in cigarette and cigar boxes around the time of the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, according to the Public Domain Review, then later turned into postcards.

The College Football Czar: Week 5 Week four in review: The College Football Czar had another bad week, although the week the replay officials had around the country was far worse. A completely unjustifiable reversal on a fumble call to decide the Thursday night Memphis-Cincinnati game set the tone for a long Saturday of blown calls on replay. The Czar accepts the fact that instant replay reviews are here to stay, but he’ll thank announcers to stop justifying the practice with the asinine assertion that “the important thing is to get the call right in the end.” Those teams that...

The College Football Czar: Week 4 Week three in review: It was a dismal week for the College Football Czar, but he’s not the only one. Top-ranked Ohio State barely eked out a victory over Northern Illinois, while both Alabama and Southern Cal D-sintegrated before our eyes. It was a Saturday filled with seesaw battles decided by razor-thin margins, several of which turned against the Czar at the last moment. For the week, he was 9-11, causing his overall record to plummet to 39-21, for a .650 winning percentage. All the on-air personalities at the Seamy Underbelly of Networks have...

The College Football Czar: Week 3 Week two in review: You knew that when the AP put ten SEC teams in the Top 25, it was setting the league up for a fall. Three of those teams (Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi State) have fallen out of this week’s rankings, and Auburn has plummeted to #18 after barely surviving a challenge from Division I-AA Jacksonville State. The Czar, for one, did not think that highly of MSU before the season, nor during their opener against Southern Miss, but now thinks they’re actually more worthy of a ranking after a competitive loss...

The College Football Czar: Week 2 Week one in review: There were so few games of consequence during the opening week that Saturday’s highlight was when a Bowling Green defensive lineman attempted the worst fake injury in recorded history. DT Mike Minns lost a shoe between plays in a goal line series against Tennessee, and for some reason expected the officials to stop the game until he could put it back on. They didn’t, so he did what must have appeared to be the only sensible thing to do. Waving his shoe over his head, he pleaded for a stoppage,...

The College Football Czar: Week 1 If you're reading the College Football Czar’s week one picks, that must mean that yet another long summer of terrible TV is about to come to a merciful end. So – if you’ve found yourself holding up a pencil in front of the television and yelling “not so fast” at the morning weatherman... If you’ve been bringing home bags of tiny rubber pellets, in order to give your living room carpet a more footbally feel... If you’ve let yourself be henpecked into renting Jerry Maguire, just because it’s sort of, more-or-less tangentially related to...

Based on speculative fiction, the following visualization analyzes 62 'foretold' future events (social, scientific, technological, or political). Many are catastrophic, but, in the end - good news - in 802,701 the world will still exist and everything will be more or less ok... 62 'foretold' future events

The College Football Czar 2015 Season Preview a sports publication from The Shinbone by Daniel Clark Welcome to the 2015 season preview issue of The College Football Czar, a seasonal sports publication by the author and editor of The Shinbone. In the coming months, you will find weekly analyses of upcoming college football action posted at this site. To find out more, please see the Ground Rules. This issue contains the Czar's rankings for all 128 teams in Division I-A football, as well as conference preview capsules, potential upsets to watch for, bowl projections, and a guide to help you...

Shortly before Scott Walker was re-elected Wisconsin’s Governor for the third time in four years, I made the case that if Walker prevailed Republicans should nominate him as their presidential candidate right then and there. Since January, Walker has been at or near the top of most public opinion polls of preferred standard bearers for the GOP in 2016, and today he officially launches his White House bid, making him the 15th Republican to join the field. While this field is quite crowded, I believe it will soon become apparent that Scott Walker stands out head and shoulders above the...

We’re probably going to suffer through quite a few of these over the next fifteen months so let’s just get used to it now. Doug Sosnik at Politico has a lengthy “think piece” on the subject of how most presidential elections are actually over long before the polls close on the big day, and a clever reader of the tea leaves should be able to know who is going to win long in advance. Of course, such an article wouldn’t be much fun if you weren’t going to announce the winner, so Doug does so. And… surprise, surprise… it’s not...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

The private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, recently published its Decade Forecast in which it projects the next 10 years of global political and economic developments. In many ways, Stratfor thinks the world of 10 years from now will be more dangerous place, with US power waning and other prominent countries experiencing a period of chaos and decline. 1. Russia will collapse ... "There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow's withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum," Stratfor warns. "What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments...

It has come to my attention that on May 4, 2007 the UN panel on Global Warming stated that we would reach the tipping point in exactly 8 years unless drastic measures were taken. The deadline arrived today.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the year just ended is the vindication of Chief Justice John Roberts -- a vindication that showed up as the national catastrophe known as ObamaCare got rolling. Roberts may have also doomed Hillary Clinton's chance to live in the White House again. The chief justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush and reputedly a constitutionalist in his jurisprudence, set his diabolical trap (diabolical to Democrats) on June 28, 2012, when he joined with the four liberal justices on the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Conservatives and Republicans across the...

Taipei, May 1 (CNA) Taiwan's Navy decommissioned two of its eight Knox-class frigates Friday with the intention of replacing them with two Perry-class guided missile frigates that is part of a fleet modernization effort. The two Knox-class vessels were retired from service at a ceremony in the southern city of Kaohsiung, which was presided over by Navy Commander Adm. Li Hsi-ming (李喜明). It was part of the effort to modernize the Navy's fleet of vessels and enhance the country's maritime defense capabilities. The Navy plans to decommission all eight of its 4,300-ton Knox-class frigates that were built in the early...

China has conducted the first test flight of a new, upgraded version of its J-11 fighter jet. According to Russian media outlets, which cited unnamed Chinese reports, on Wednesday the People’s Liberation Army Air Force conducted the first flight tests of its J-11D fighter aircraft. The plane is an upgraded version of the J-11B fighter jets, which themselves are copies of the Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27. According to the reports, the new J-11D incorporates a number of technologies from China’s J-16 fighter jets. Both planes are manufactured by the Chinese company, Shenyang Aircraft Corp, and the J-16 is believed to have...

Chinese strategists see a window of strategic opportunity for China early in the 21st century, though they haven’t publicly outlined the basis for that view. But we can make a good stab at it. Firstly, an air of inevitability is important in winning battles. While China is perceived to have a strong, growing economy that is crushing all before it, that perception of inevitability rubs off on China’s military adventures. To use that perception, China has to attack before its economy contracts due to the bursting of its real estate bubble. This explains the current rush to build the bases...

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the...

A new study shows Christianity on the decline in the wealthy West, with Islam surging. What Would Jesus Say? It’s not what you think. A study released by the Pew Forum last week demonstrates that the future of the religious world is rapidly and dramatically changing. Differences in fertility rates and the high incidence of conversion make Islam the world’s fastest-growing religion. And, if current rates continue, by 2070 Islam could be the world’s largest. Between now and 2050 the number of Muslims is projected to rise to 2.8 billion, a 35 percent increase. While India will continue to be...