Tendown September 4, 2016

239 is here. This is Tendown 240.

If I had any guts, I would never stand for the National Anthem and have felt that way for at least the last two decades.  My senior year of high school there was a kid who stopped standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, and I felt the same way about that.  I haven't wanted to kiss that flag since I was maybe ten years old and have always complied (and will continue to) to avoid the scorn which will follow.

But I hate that shit.  Now, if it were culturally required that we rise for Neneh Cherry's Buffalo Stance I'd be in.



1. Kaepernick

Few people know this because we only ever sing the first verse. But read the end of the third verse and you’ll see why “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not just a musical atrocity, it’s an intellectual and moral one, too

2. 

3. More Kaepernick

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Quite naturally, the flying monkeys were aloft within seconds. One fan achieved Internet glory by lighting Kaepernick’s jersey on fire, and did so while it was hanging from a tree, just in case, you know, you didn’t get the point. C. Montague Schilling, a former major league pitcher and now proprietor of one of Twitter’s most luxurious reptile farms—which is one too many, as far as I’m concerned—was beside himself, tweeting out pictures of soldiers who are not him and accusing Kaepernick of betraying them. By and large, the arguments against Kaepernick ran that, because he is a wealthy and prosperous (if not, at the moment, an altogether successful) professional athlete, he should shut up and be grateful for the country that has condescended to let him entertain it, although the country did not deign to allow itself to be entertained by African-American professional football players until 1946. This is a curious business indeed. Famous and wealthy Americans should not criticize the country because they are famous and wealthy. Poor and anonymous people can criticize the country all they want, but nobody listens to them anyway. This works out very well.

4. More Kaepernick

This is what a stand looks like. For better or worse, stands that demand people come together rarely have that effect. And contrary to popular belief, stands do not create divisions and fissures. Theyamplify them. The whole point of a stand is to put them on display, to ask the world to confront and examine their hypocrisies and ask why they’re on one side and not the other. Protests that don’t offend aren’t worth the effort. The ones that do are the ones that can change the world.

5. Clinton gave a speech about American Exceptionalism this week.  I'd rather vote for Kaepernick.  Here's the part where she said we need to increase military spending.

6. More Kaepernick

7. Yes, I know, what we're supposed to do is thank military, whose campaigns in the Middle East have somehow protected our freedoms.  

Or - thank unions.  

In the debates over the causes of wage stagnation, the decline in union power has not received nearly as much attention as globalization, technological change, and the slowdown in Americans’ educational attainment. Unions, especially in industries and regions where they are strong, help boost the wages of all workers by establishing pay and benefit standards that many nonunion firms adopt. But this union boost tononunion pay has weakened as the share of private-sector workers in a union has fallen from 1 in 3 in the 1950s to about 1 in 20 today.

While we avoid strict causal claims about wage determination, the analytical approaches summarized in this report enable us to assess the independent effects of union decline on wages and lend confidence to our core contention that private-sector union decline since the late 1970s has contributed to substantial wage losses among workers who do not belong to a union. This is especially true for men. And most hurt by the decades-long decline in the nation’s labor movement are those nonunion men who did not complete college, or go beyond high school—groups with the largest erosion of union membership over the last few decades.

8. Wait, some people are opposed to Kaepernick?

9. But Not People Who Matter.

10. 

Protest, not reverence for authority or overseas war, is what gained African-Americans political rights. #kaepernick

— Jim Jividen (@JimJividen) August 29, 2016

Two easily identifiable issues with the focus on how military members feel about Kaepernick.

1. Who cares?

The Military doesn't get a veto on political protest.  Even people supporting Kaepernick have felt the need to say "he's not saying anything at all against the military" as if that would be a bridge too far.  Fetishizing the military makes it easier to deploy the military.  

2. Seriously, who cares?

Stop saying the military fights for my freedoms.  WWII, sure.  After that? What the hell are you talking about?  Unless we kill a lot of Middle Easterners I might lose the freedom to listen to Buffalo Stance?  Get out of here with that. It's stupid.  

And one more...

EXCLUSIVE: the Iraq War considering endorsing Hillary Clinton

— Andrew Perez (@andrewperezdc) August 8, 2016

That's all for this time.  I'll be back next time...if there is a next time...

Your pal,

Jim

Let's Pick Some Football Games, Labor Day Weekend, 2016

I guess we'll do this again this year.  Picking football games, 2016.

N.Texas +10 SMU loss
Oklahoma -12.5 Houston loss
USC +12 Alabama loss
NCarolina +3 Georgia loss
Purdue -14 EKy win
WMich +4.5 Northw win
LSU -13.5 Wisc loss
Miami(oh) +28 Iowa win
Tex +3.5 ND win
Miss +5 Fl St.loss

4-6

Tendown August 28, 2016

238 is here.  This is Tendown 239.

1. The Piece to Read About Gawker.

Gawker always said it was in the business of publishing true stories. Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.

If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.

2. Trump supporters.

If there is no economic context, and Trump’s supporters are just mired in primordial racism, then they are forever lost in the morass of right-wing politics. This bolsters the vision of the Democratic Party as comprising an alliance of affluent whites and people of color with a political agenda of multicultural neoliberalism, where economic reforms can be limited to improved educational options and after-tax redistribution. If Trump voters are just “idiots” appealed to “not at a low intellectual level but at a sub-intellectual level” (as Jonathan Chait has put it) then progressives can forget about the angry white guys.

The Bernie Sanders campaign, however, held out another possible future: a multiracial working-class movement with socialist politics, seeking a fundamental reordering of power relations. That Sanders did so well in many white working-class regions where Trump also won big, like West Virginia, made such a strategy seem feasible for the first time in decades, if not longer. This conclusion is bad news for both parties’ establishments and the interests they represent. It’s difficult to believe that it was exclusively the racism or sexism of Democratic primary voters in poor white states that motivated them to support a self-described socialist who likes to cite Denmark as a model country.

We know that Trump finds a lot of support among blue-collar men who live in communities where white people are prematurely dying at shocking rates and young people have a bleak economic outlook. Despite the ways in which he grotesquely builds upon the politics of his more conventional predecessors, Trump is a bizarre and unsettling candidate. We still know too little about what is driving his support. But it’s willful ignorance to insist that economics doesn’t play a major role.

3. I don't have a link here...

I just wanted to offer the following thought - I find the Harambe meme (Harambe was the gorilla who was killed, referencing Harambe has now become a popular meme/joke, particularly on Twitter; this week the Cincinnati Zoo asked that people stop sending it tweets using the joke, as, you know it's painful; Harambe wasn't killed in 1977, it was just a few months ago) really unpleasant.  It's premised on the idea that the death of a gorilla isn't that big a deal and so it's funny to joke about.  

I've been snarky as long as I can recall, at least since Dave started Late Night - this might be the best evidence that I've aged out of that element of the culture.

4.

Twitter in a nutshell (via @FineFone) pic.twitter.com/d4ttkGEFkC

— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) August 21, 2016

5. The end of privatization?


6. Dont Have a Student Loan in Texas

Seven armed U.S. marshals arrived at his door in Houston last Thursday, arrested him on the spot, and took him to jail. He owed all of $1,500, outstanding since 1987. Aker told Fox 26 that without any warning, his 29-year-old debt was forcibly being collected; the marshals took him to federal court and made him sign a payment plan. “It was totally mind-boggling,” Aker told Fox 26. 

7. Get Ready for the Hide and Seek World Championship

8. Minor leaguers below the poverty line.

Matt Paré chatted with teammates and underwent a long treatment session as other Augusta GreenJackets players exited through a clubhouse door wedged open with a broken bat. He kept himself awake with a marathon shower.

By the time Paré dressed, he had the clubhouse to himself, along with what was left of the GreenJackets' postgame buffet. "What have we got, Sarge?" he called toward clubhouse manager Kristopher Nichols, a former Army drill sergeant who appreciates - and usually rewards - Paré's resourcefulness.

Paré is the oldest player for the San Francisco Giants' Class-A affiliate, and he begins most homestands by waiting out his teammates in order to stockpile free food.

9. Clinton Foundation

the more Clinton’s allies have worked to defend big money donations to the Clinton Foundation, the more closely they resemble the right-wing principles they once denounced.

In one telling argument in defense of the Clinton Foundation, Media Matters, another group run by David Brock, argued this week that there was “no evidence of ethics breaches” because there was no explicit quid pro quo cited by the AP. The Media Matters piece mocked press figures for focusing on the “optics” of corruption surrounding the foundation.

Such a standard is quite a reversal for the group. In a piece published by Media Matters only two years ago, the organization criticized conservatives for focusing only on quid pro quo corruption — the legal standard used to decide the Citizens United and McCutcheon Supreme Court decisions — calling such a narrow focus a “new perspective of campaign finance” that dismisses “concerns about institutional corruption in politics.” The piece notes that ethics laws concerning the role of money in politics follow a standard, set forth since the Watergate scandal, in which even the appearance, or in other words, the “optics” of corruption, is cause for concern.

10. Wait, Only Old People Buy Bars of Soap?

Americans between 18 to 24 are largely snubbing the old-fashioned bar of soap, leading to sales declines for the likes of Ivory’s iconic 125-year old bar and its bar soap rivals, according to new data from consumer research firm Mintel. Consumers who still buy bar soap, it turns out, have something in common: they tend to be over 60 years old and are men.

And one more...

That's all for this time.  I'll be back next time.  If there is a next time...

Your pal,

Jim

Athlete of the Month, August 2016

July was here.

Michael Phelps.  Runners-up: Katie Ledecky, Usain Bolt, Simone Biles

2/3 of the way through the year - here are the contenders for Best Athlete of 2016

January-Von Miller
February-Lionel Messi
March - Buddy Hield
April-Breanna Stewart
May - Klay Thompson
June - LeBron James
July-Serena Williams
August-Michael Phelps

Tendown August 21, 2016

237 is here.  This is Tendown 238

1. Kissinger?

2. Impractical Movements

3. A good Piece about the Campaign.

How is it “economic reductionism” to campaign on a program that seeks to unite the broad working class around concerns shared throughout the class across race, gender, and other lines? Ironically, in American politics now we have a Left for which any reference to political economy can be castigated as “economic reductionism.”

It is similarly instructive that a strain of identitarian feminists repeatedly sought to characterize support for Sanders as coming mainly from sexist men on the Left. This was an adaptation of an earlier hoax about the existence of a phalanx of misogynist “brocialist” men who threatened feminists with rape or other violence for their reluctance to subordinate feminist concerns to a male-centered class-reductionist socialism.

It’s immensely revealing, and exposing this is one contribution the campaign made that I never anticipated, that we now have a “left” in the United States for which socialism is considered a marker of backwardness. It’s good that that is now clear; it’s always good to know where people stand in relation to class struggle.

4. Papelbon's Trump Song
The line about "rap" probably gives away the game.

Now maybe players don’t, or shouldn’t, care whether the home fans like them. If a Nationals player did care, though, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to wear a T-shirt reading “Obama can’t ban these guns” to hislet’s-make-amends spring training news conference. Nor would he have, on multiple occasions, played a political anthem while reporters were inside the Nats clubhouse.

The ditty was called “Vote For Trump,” and it included promises that “the wall will get built by Mexico” and that Trump would “bring back country [and] get rid of rap,” also noting that “if you don’t like it you can all just kiss our ass.”

5.

6. Trillions?

7. Climate Change

We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation that follows.

8. Thinking about a Clinton Presidency (or why you shouldn't tell protesters at the convention that they're being ridiculous to curry favor with your fancy friends, Sarah Silverman)

The burgeoning social movements of the left should take a cue. The historical record is clear: Progress in America happens when militant social movements are willing to make life uncomfortable for liberal presidents, whether it be the sit-down strikes of the 1930s or the civil rights marches of the 1960s. Activists now have more tools in their political box, thanks to their online networks. Environmentalists, for instance, scored big by making the Keystone pipeline the target of their ire, combining targeted protests with online pressure campaigns to make it clear that Democrats—Clinton among them—couldn’t count on their vote until they landed on the right side of the issue.

Would President Clinton be annoyed by constant, nagging pressure from her left? Would her ferocious loyalists denounce the ungrateful dissidents for undercutting party unity in the face of Republican opposition? Yes, no doubt, on both counts. But if the left takes a chapter from Warren, from BLM, and from Sanders—and from the countless centrists and right wingers who have pressed their issues and images onto her for decades—Clinton may actually end up thanking them for the pressure.

9. 

10. Here's What Big Government Really Looks Like

Conservatives’ zeal for reining in government turns into something else when marginalized groups, or groups they disdain — people of color, women, LGBT Americans, low-income Americans — suffer under the only form of “big government” conservatives don’t seem to mind. In Baltimore and other cities, the police are essentially “big government in a blue uniform,” engaging in unchecked, arbitrary use of power against black citizens, without fear of punishment, and with the full authority of government behind them.

more.

America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be abducted by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings in our schools and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up our buildings, and that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets. All of these risks are real, but they are minuscule in probability: taken together, these threats constitute less than three per cent of total annual homicides in the US.[9] The numerically greater threat to our safety, and the largest single category of strangers who threaten us, are the people we have empowered to use deadly force to protect us from these less probable threats. The question for Americans is whether we will continue to tolerate police violence at this scale in return for protection against the quantitatively less likely threats.

And one more...

that's all for this time, I'll be back next time...if there is a next time...

Your pal,  Jim