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NFL Week 4: The league offshores the Cardinals and 49ers. Plus: Can the Colts ever learn how to score?

The NFL will play its first regular-season game outside the United States Sunday night when the San Francisco 49ers and Arizona Cardinals meet at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.

More than 100,000 fans will cheer their every move madly, then turn to each other and say, “That was nice. Now where’s the NFL game?”

This isn’t football, it’s free trade. The U.S. is sending its least attractive jobs south of the border. Cardinals lineman, 49ers cornerback, that sort of thing.

But there are advantages beyond economics. It can get to be a real burden to sit through seven hours of NFL football on a Sunday afternoon, only to face three and a half hours more in prime time on Sunday night, then yet another game Monday evening.

The Week 4 schedule offers a welcome respite with that 49ers-Cardinals game, then the Green Bay Packers at the Carolina Panthers on Monday night. Combined records of the teams playing in prime time during the season’s fourth weekend: 2-10.

When the late games are over on Sunday afternoon you can turn off the TV and go find your family, or maybe read a good book, do those dishes that have been piling up since Friday. You won’t miss much. Next week’s prime time is Cincinnati-Jacksonville and Pittsburgh-San Diego, so enjoy the break.

Onward to the predictions by your Panel o’ Experts co-leader, sort of the San Diego Padres of prognosticators. The panel standings are in Table Talk. Winners are in caps:

Buffalo (1-2) at NEW ORLEANS (1-2): The Saints finally get a home game, sort of, as they play at the Alamodome in San Antonio for the first of three times. The Bills are looking pretty sketchy, and losing linebacker Takeo Spikes last week won’t help. The Saints have been awful the last two games, but forget all the hurricane stuff. This is the Saints. They specialize in looking horrible for a while, then playing well.

Detroit (1-1) at TAMPA BAY (3-0): The Bucs have been looking pretty good, but their three wins have been over Minnesota, Buffalo and Green Bay, all of which have been looking some shade of bad. The Lions looked pretty good against the Packers, and then got smoked by the Bears, who turned around and got drilled by the Bengals. All of which means? Uh. I don’t know but I don’t think it’s good for Detroit. If Joey Harrington’s ever going to put it together, now’d be a good time, but I’m starting to think Joey Harrington’s never going to put it together.

INDIANAPOLIS (3-0) at Tennessee (1-2): If the defense-first Colts could ever figure out a way to score, they might end up being a pretty good team.

San Diego (1-2) at NEW ENGLAND (2-1): Troy Brown. Paging Troy Brown. The Patriots secondary is dented up again, with Rodney Harrison out for the year and Tyrone Poole and Randall Gay also hurting. And so are their backups. Last year the Pats had receiver Brown play in the defensive backfield and were fine. This year they’re going to need Brown, Johnny Damon and a couple of hot dog vendors. It’ll still work out.

Denver (2-1) at JACKSONVILLE (2-1): The Broncos, on the other hand, aren’t likely to ask Ashley Lelie to replace Champ Bailey if his hamstring keeps him out. The Jags’ attacking defense is likely to make Jake Plummer do some of those things that make him Jake Plummer, and that give him a chance to try to lead his team to a comeback win, if you know what I mean.

HOUSTON (0-2) at Cincinnati (3-0): What the Heck™ Pick of the week. And mighty What the Hecky™ at that.

SEATTLE (2-1) at Washington (2-0): Washington might be the worst 2-0 team of the century. See how I said “might” so I don’t have to look anything up? Watch and learn, young writers. But really, the Washingtons could be 0-2 without playing any differently. The Seahawks, meanwhile, looked pretty good last week in beating the — oh, wait, it was the Cardinals.

And to answer a question I’ve gotten in a few e-mails, yes, I’ve decided to stop using the Washington football team’s racist nickname. Call me self-righteous if you want. I just can’t stand to type it anymore.

St. Louis (2-1) at N.Y. GIANTS (2-1): The Giants and Jets reached agreement this week on a new, $800 million stadium to be built in the Meadowlands. Acting New Jersey Gov. Richard J. Codey said the Jets will move their headquarters to the state from Long Island, and that the deal guarantees both teams will stay in New Jersey for 99 years. The teams will divide the cost of building the stadium and share the revenues. Naming rights will be sold to the highest bidder, but the Giants and Jets will each get to bury someone under one of the end zones.

Meanwhile, at the current crib, the Rams are banged up on offense — Stephen Jackson, Isaac Bruce — and have a rookie trying to block Michael Strahan. Unless Marshall Faulk discovers the Fountain of Youth in the swamps there, the Giants will do just enough to eke out a win.

N.Y. Jets (1-2) at BALTIMORE (0-2): You know the Jets made a phone call to Neil O’Donnell this week, don’t you? The Ravens did too. Third-stringer Brooks Bollinger will start for New York after starter Chad Pennington and backup Jay Fiedler were both lost with shoulder injuries last week. Vinnie Testaverde was signed as insurance, by which I mean he fit the suit. Long year for the Jets. Ravens too. Baltimore wins this one 9-6, and of course every time I say that, you should take the over.

PHILADELPHIA (2-1) at Kansas City (2-1): The Chiefs spit the bit against the Broncos last week, and now they’re mad because miked-up Denver cornerback Champ Bailey said so on ABC’s air during the game. So they’ll be fired up, as will the home crowd. Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb seems to pick up an injury a week. Chest, shin, abdominal strain. What injury will he incur in this week’s win?

Dallas (2-1) at OAKLAND (0-3): These are two weird teams. The Cowboys snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against Washington, then turn around and do the opposite against San Francisco. They’ve played well once and lost, played poorly twice and won. The Raiders have given both of last year’s Super Bowl teams and a hot Kansas City team a decent game, but on the other hand weren’t able to beat the Eagles last week despite Philly making every attempt to hand the game over. I’ll take Oakland on the bonehead theory that the Cowboys aren’t as good as 3-1 and the Raiders aren’t as bad as 0-4.

Minnesota (1-2) at ATLANTA (2-1): The Vikes finally played some good defense last week against the Saints, but they’re all banged up, especially in the secondary. Fortunately, that’s not as bad as it sounds with a game against Michael Vick coming up, as long as the front seven can keep Vick from running past them. That’s a big as-long-as.

San Francisco (1-2) at ARIZONA (0-3): Mexico. So close to the NFL, so far from God.

Green Bay (0-3) at CAROLINA (1-2): Another thing that might be fun to do Monday night would be to watch a baseball tiebreaker game, but ESPN says it’s unlikely any game would be on opposite the football on ABC.

Season record: 30-16
Last week: 10-4
What the Heck™ Picks: 2-1
Jimmy Hoffa jokes: 1

Previous column: Baseball’s last weekend

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If we don't want six-day workweeks at rock-bottom pay, we need to rethink how America's free market functions

By David Sirota

An employee works at the Yiwu Lianfa clothing factory in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, June 8, 2011 (Credit: Carlos Barria / Reuters)

Topics:U.S. Economy, China

For the last two decades, we’ve heard many myths purporting to explain the loss of American manufacturing jobs. CEOs, for instance, typically say they have sent jobs overseas because they can’t find skilled American workers. Conservative economists say the giant sucking sound is that of technology replacing obsolete workers. And conservative politicians say job loss is the result of high corporate tax rates, even though ours are among the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world.

All of these explanations are fables with a purpose: They are designed to deny the obvious by pretending that exploitation and policies that encourage exploitation aren’t the root cause of offshoring. More specifically, they ask us to ignore the fact that tariff-free trade agreements and tax loopholes incentivize companies to shift production to countries where slave wages, environmental degradation and human rights abuses are tolerated.

But now at least a few manufacturing jobs are suddenly coming back to America, and the same CEOs, economists and politicians who have tried to squelch any honest discussion of exploitation are inadvertently admitting that exploitation has always been the manufacturing economy’s invisible hand. They are admitting it when they concede that jobs are returning primarily because American wages are precipitously dropping at the same time Chinese minimum wages have slightly risen — from awful (in some places, $100 month) to a mere terrible (still just a $240 a month).

This is not some fringe theory. It’s a widely acknowledged fact.

President Barack Obama admitted it when in his State of the Union address he said jobs are returning because “it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China.” Economists at the Boston Consulting Group underscored it when in August they said employment growth is happening because rising Chinese wages are “eroding China’s cost advantages” while the United States “is becoming a lower-cost country” as American wages decline. And GE Consumer & Industrial CEO James Campbell reiterated it when he recently told the New York Times that “making things in America is as viable as making things any place” because domestic labor costs are now “significantly less with the competitive wages” — read: far lower wages — now accepted by American workers.

Now that this consensus is finally out in the open, the real question for America is simple: Do we accept an economic competition that asks us to emulate China?

If our answer is yes, then we should support current state legislative proposals to reduce child labor protections; back federal legislation to eliminate all environmental, wage and workplace safety laws; and applaud corporations that crush unions and further reduce wages in America. We should also probably encourage our fellow countrymen to follow Apple Inc.’s Chinese workforce by simply accepting $17-a-day paychecks, 12-hour workdays and six-day workweeks. Indeed, if we accept this race-to-the-bottom style of competition, then we’re basically saying Chicago should look more like Chengdu; our heartland should look more like the poverty-stricken interior of China; and 21st century America should look more like late-19th century America.

If, alternately, we reject this dystopian future, then it requires us to more seriously consider things like tariffs, industrial policy, tax incentives for domestic investment and Buy America laws for government procurement. In other words, it requires us to declare that access to the American marketplace is no longer free — that corporations who want to sell things to Americans must play by our wage, environmental and human rights rules no matter where they make their products.

Between these two paths, there is no “third way”- – and doing nothing will likely mean that the uptick in American manufacturing jobs will prove fleeting. A choice, therefore, must be made, and it should be a no-brainer.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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The CNN host speaks on the "frightening" Iranian threat in ways that have to be seen to be believed

VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

I’m finishing up a long investigative article that will be posted later this morning, but I just could not let go unnoted this commentary on The Iranian Threat by CNN’s Erin Burnett (“frightening,” she observed). I barely know what to say about it — the critiques of media fear-mongering I wrote the last two days apply in spades to this — but it really just mocks itself. It’s the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn’t dare go this far because you’d want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran’s long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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Two Parsons professors discuss their best students' work and their favorite classic color theorists

By Jude Stewart, Imprint

Bezold Effect study (Credit: Liz Marshall)

Topics:Imprint, Design

This article originally appeared on Imprint.

Welcome back to an ongoing, freewheeling conversation on color with Thomas Bosket and Langdon Graves, who both teach color theory at Parsons the New School for Design. (Read part 1 to catch up.)

Do you have any knockout students in your color theory classes right now?

Thomas Bosket: I haven’t taught color this past year, so here are some students from previous years: one work by Liz Marshall exhibited the Bezold effect and the economic use of color. [Ed note: the Bezold effect is an optical illusion in which two colors, juxtaposed in small doses, distort the impression of each color’s shade, just by proximity to another hue.] The other, by Stephanie Luk, offers a redesign of Parsons’ very narrow hallways.

Bezold Effect study by Liz Marshall

Colour of Space assignment for Parsons’ narrow hallways, by Stephanie Luk

Langdon Graves: I had a terrific class last fall because of how dedicated the students were. Early each semester, I assign a Creative Color Chart — a spin on the traditional color wheel — for which the students create their own progressive designs featuring 12 hues, tints and shades. One student, Christine Gurtler, designed a chart inspired by the grid of a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan:

That’s all acrylic paint and paper. Obviously, she went beyond 12.

Two semesters ago I gave the assignment to design an infographic to represent a personal experience, using color in a significant way. A student named Vaishnavi Mahendran charted the progression of her taste in music and fashion from childhood to adulthood, assigning an increasingly darker, more sophisticated hue of pink to each phase of her life (interrupted by an amusing black/metal phase). It’s such a clever and attractive design, I love sharing it:

Detail from infographic by Vaishnavi Mahendran

Lightning-round: Whom would you rather have as a roomie on a desert island, Josef Albers or Johannes Itten? [Note: both men are Bauhaus artists noted for their contributions to “classic” color theory.]

From Homage to the Square color-interaction series, by Josef Albers

TB: Itten. He was trying to understand color and contextualize it. Albers feels too esoteric (in an uninteresting and exclusive manner — we have history, Albers and I … grad school!) and his work has been turned into “rules,” no fault of his, but I could just see hours and hours of argument about the color of the sunsets.

Horizontal Vertical, by Johannes Itten

LG: I know I should say Itten because he was such a master and without him, we certainly wouldn’t have as much to learn from Albers. But I think I would choose Albers because of how much he attributed his appreciation for color to his experiences with his students.

This is how I continue to learn about color, myself: by interacting with other people and learning as much from them as they do from me. I also like the thought of sitting around on a desert island with Albers, creating simultaneous contrast collages of found mango leaves.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

: More Jude Stewart

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She used to find it hard to climax, but suddenly, inexplicably, it became quick and easy. What happened?

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/pascalgenest)

Topics:Salon -- After Dark, Am I Normal?

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to orgasm. Even with the most sensitive partner, it would often take a long while, if at all. I would often resort to faking it because I was taking too long. Even while masturbating, it sometimes took me up to an hour, despite being really turned on.

Then I started seeing someone new, stopped faking orgasms and tried to worry less. I started coming, and it became easier and more reliable. Now it happens every time, sometimes multiple times. While masturbating, I can orgasm within seconds, which was never, ever possible before. What’s going on here?

“I wish I knew.” That’s Barry Komisaruk’s matter-of-fact answer, and he’s the leading expert on the science behind the female orgasm.

His lab at Rutgers University was the first to produce a video of the brain during climax in women — just last November. “We’re in the embryonic stage of understanding,” he says. “It’s not even in its infancy.” That’s in large part because it’s tremendously difficult to get funding for sex research — but that’s a story for another day (and you can bet I will be telling it someday soon).

Komisaruk, whom I’ve interviewed before, and his team have made huge strides, but still, he says nobody fully understands the mechanism at work here. Just to give a sense of the range of scenarios, Komisaruk explains, “What about people who used to have orgasms but now they’re on antidepressants or antipsychotics and they no longer can have orgasms? The blockage could occur in a part of the brain that’s different from people who, say, have had a traumatic psychological event like sexual abuse and no longer can have an orgasm.” There is no one thing that makes it difficult, or impossible, for women to orgasm.

It’s not unusual for a new partner to come with a change in your orgasmic experience. Recently, a woman who had never orgasmed called Komisaruk and volunteered to do a brain scan for his research. “I set it up and then a couple days before the scan was scheduled, she called me up and said she just got a new boyfriend and she had her first orgasm,” he says. “So, bummer — for me, not for her!”

What’s most interesting in your case, is that your experience of orgasm even during masturbation changed profoundly and, it sounds like, without a dramatic adjustment in technique. “It seems like it’s more of a psychological factor,” he says. “If somebody can suddenly start having orgasms, there could be attitudinal changes. It seems more likely that it would be an attitudinal change rather than a physiological change.” There’s also the annoying irony of getting what you want when you stop trying.

An important part of what’s going on here is that by no longer preempting your orgasm with fakes one, you were able to begin experiencing legitimate climaxes with your partner. I asked Komisaruk if it’s possible that you experienced a snowball effect: The more orgasms you had, the easier it became to come in the first place. In my supreme scientific in-expertise, I suggested: Maybe she, like, burnt new neural pathways? He responded: “We don’t really know; it’s possible.”

You see, there are many possible explanations. What’s important is that you’ve got ahold of your orgasm. Enjoy it, treat it well and don’t let it go!

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Pick of the week: Inside the creepy groupthink of the Russian president's proto-fascist youth movement

By Andrew O'Hehir

Topics:Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Documentaries, Russia

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president turned prime minister (turned president again, probably) likes to say that his country has developed a “special democracy” or “sovereign democracy” in the 21st century. As an opposition politician observes in Danish director Lise Birk Pedersen’s film “Putin’s Kiss,” that’s a little like a store owner claiming to sell somewhat fresh fish. It either is or it isn’t, and Russia’s version of democracy doesn’t pass the smell test. (Please note, foreign readers, that I’m not holding my own country’s political system up as some shining example. But it’s still true that I can write what I want to about Obama or Romney or anybody else without being beaten half to death.)

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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