Slow Learners

by

by wj

Sometimes, I come across things that just totally blow my mind. This, from the Wall Street Journal:

The federal flood insurance program has paid more than $1.8 million between 1979 and 2015 to rebuild a single house in Kingwood, Texas. The house has been flooded 22 times since 1979
H/T FiveThirtyEight

The house appears to have any number of up-scale features. Including an indoor swimming pool . . . even when it isn’t flooded. This isn’t some poor guy who just can’t afford to live somewhere else.

I’m not sure who I consider the slowest learner here. The homeowner, who is only now figuring out that he ought to locate elsewhere. Or the Federal Flood Insurance program, which has been willing to keep sinking money into a property which is pretty clearly located on an utterly inappropriate site. (Our Federal tax dollars at work — since, of course, Texas keeps taxes low and lets the rest of us subsidize them for stuff like this.)

227 thoughts on “Slow Learners”

  3. Oh well………
    This will teach me to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I started drafting a travel post a week or so ago and it got so involved that I never finished it.
    *****
    Flood insurance…anyone remember GWB going on about how the gummint would make sure people like Trent Lott would have their houses rebuilt after Katrina?

  4. Iceland and New Zealand for the beauty. I think th reasons why people pick certain places are more telling that wha tthey pick. For example, if I was a better person Id pick the Sudan to help refugees or China to rescue dog meat dogs.

  6. As to who’s a slow learner — this particular guy night have decided that he’s sick of the hassle, but for a some people — well, if you love living by the water (and who wouldn’t!) and you can get someone else to keep paying for it, why not? /snark

  8. Apparently, government, at various levels, is the slow learner since it continuously subsidizes people living in risky environments.

  9. Yeah. How come I could get Federally subsidized flood insurance when living where there are lots of floods. But not Federally subsidized earthquake insurance? How is that fair?

  10. I’ve posted this before, but as a reminder, the NFIP does not subsidize Florida. We get back in benefits 25 cents on each dollar of premium.

  12. Apparently, government, at various levels, is the slow learner since it continuously subsidizes people living in risky environments.
    voters are the slow learners. we could elect people to change this, after all. ‘we’ just haven’t figured that out yet.

  13. I’ve posted this before, but as a reminder, the NFIP does not subsidize Florida. We get back in benefits 25 cents on each dollar of premium.
    Sorry – you probably posted a link too, and I missed it. When you have time, could you post it again? I’m interested in who pays for what to whom. I believe you – just want to look.

  14. we could elect people to change this, after all. ‘we’ just haven’t figured that out yet.
    Vote for libertarians. They would change it as a matter of principle. 🙂

  15. But there may be some question as to whether the straight libertarian doctrine is the alternative voters actually prefer. Just because the current approach is silly doesn’t necessarily that any alternative would be superior.

  16. I looked at the photo accompanying the article in the post and I’ll bet if I rowed a FEMA dinghy up to each of the structures swamped over their floor joists, I’d learn that a good many of the owners identify as libertarians.
    A few probably have Atlas Shrugged on their bookshelves and seek a galt’s gulch to live at the bottom of, not even giving a thought to the risk of flash floods, except maybe to demonstrate they walk on water.
    What bullshit. It’s Texas.
    I’ve driven the length of both coasts. Nothing but libertarians in homes cantilevered over water.
    It wasn’t subsidized flood insurance that “incentivized” Americans to settle and establish major metropolitan cities on coasts, river deltas, and America’s flood plains.
    Americans are full of shit, we are, always blaming someone else for tricking us into our decisions.
    You show me a libertarian who wants you to move away from the water and I’ll show you a guy who will swoop in with a consortium of developers and buy that land and structures cheap to build a marina, a yacht club, or plant good bottom land crops.
    Bullshit.

  19. I don’t mind paying my own way, but don’t ask me to subsidize NY and NJ and TX. Those states have enough money to cover their own risks.

  20. Talk about slow learners, Lindsay Graham is on a par with John Wayne Gacy, who left clown paint and his DNA on the dead fucks in his crowded crawl space, and kinda liked it.
    Attempted murder in full view.
    Happy birthday, pigfuckers. Blow out the candles and follow Lindsay home to be frogfucked.
    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12276797/what-is-cassidy-graham-plan/
    If McCain goes along, then I’ve lost respect for the North Vietnamese who coddled him.
    His tumor gets treated on my ticket. Fuck him.
    Don’t do this, McCain, or I’ll find your stinking grave at Arlington and desecrate it. I’ll dig you up.
    McConnell, of course, is nothing more than Lynddie England, torturing and killing for his murderous republican paymasters, his mouth downturned righteously in fake it-hadda-be-done-undertaker glee at the expected profit margins.

  24. I’m sorry, murderer Erdogan, that your thugs weren’t permitted by our misrule of law to actually kill Turkish dissidents on American streets.
    I don’t know what is the matter with politically correct us.
    Next time, have your thugs come to St Louis and help US murder BLM and our many other domestic enemies.
    Start with that guy, Countme.
    Love, Donald
    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/did-donald-trump-really-apologize-to-the-president-of-turkey/

  25. Learn this: The republican party, in all of its guises, is a psychopathic murderer. Each of its individual members and voters, regardless of gender, race, and religious affiliation, are cold-blooded killers. They raise their children to be merchants of death.
    It’s duped sympathizers are like the neighbors at Bergen-Belsen, going about their business covered in human ash and calling it partly cloudy.
    from John Harwood’s twatting feed:
    “Trump adviser (Stephen Moore) Moore on unfairness of the healthy subsidizing the sick: “people want insurance for their own families, not other peoples’ ”
    They will destroy Medicare too. Bloodthirsty Genocide.
    How is it that Stephen Moore, a mere plague-carrying tick on the heaving carcass of a dead rat, has plagued this Nation for decades, and knows nothing of how insurance operates?
    For the same reason that Charles Manson knew nothing about Beatle lyrics. Because he’s a perverted fucking mass murderer.
    He’s an economist like Adolph Eichmann was the conductor for Thomas the Tank Engine.
    Every meeting at the White House and on Capitol Hill with republicans in attendance, no matter the issue, is a reenactment of the Wannsee Conference. It’s a joyful gathering of Soviet wannabe state murderers designing Holodomor.
    It’s an epidemic of conservative principles being applied throughout the government like the motile bacillus of cholera being applied in Yemen.
    Ya notice how we NEVER hear a peep from so-called conservatives anywhere, ANYWHERE, about the dreadful pain of uncertainty of their millions of victims, unlike the outcry and outpouring of sympathy for jerks who refuse to bake a fucking cake for fags, or the stinking murderous Koch Brothers having to make minor adjustments in their “business models” to accommodate Obamacare.
    Years of whinging.

  30. If you’ve been living in the 1% bubble long enough (and Price, among others in this administration, clearly has), I suspect that you don’t even realize that Cabinet Secretaries don’t travel on private “company” jets. Literally, I doubt it even entered his head to fly commercial — even at business (or first) class. It simply isn’t something that happens in his life.
    A competent administrative assistant at the Department might have clued him in, of course. But by now I suspect they, like their peers in the other Cabinet Departments, have all learned that trying to tell the new boss “how things are done” is counterproductive.

  31. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-refers-to-country-that-does-not-exist-at-un-lunch
    Nambia. Maybe he was referring to where stinking racist conservative republicans think the namby-pampys live.
    I thought they lived on college campuses, but I could be wrong. Maybe they have their own country now.
    But that’s small beer. No, it’s when he referred to “his many friends who are going to Africa to try and get rich.”
    Pat Robertson. Maybe he has friends looking for King Kong.
    I wonder if the African statesman though to themselves, better put the hookers and baksheesh takers on high alert. Or maybe, they thought here comes more white American filth to rape our countries.
    If I were them I’d have marksmen stationed at all of the airports and ready for when any of rump’s corrupt, murderous friends, by which I suppose he means his family and his Cabinet.
    Maybe Tom Price is over there thinking he’s going to find a witch doctor to serve as his aide decamp at HHS.
    Apparently Obama attended the meeting and when rump saw him he ordered the Kenyan boy to press his pants and then snubbed him on the tip.
    Then he sat down in front of the President of Namby Pamby and asked for shoeshine and to send up a girl to his room.
    Look what you have done, America.
    Look what you have done.
    I hope centrifuges around the the world are working overtime to process weapons-grade uranium for nuclear missiles aimed at us in self-defense.

  34. They are faster learners than we are. We’re way behind the curve:
    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12438994/jeff-mateer-lgbtq/
    These people will murder the LGBT community. They will murder our gay family members, our gay friends, some of whom are members of the OBWI community.
    Cakes? Fuck you. That’s nothing. They will kill human beings.
    Here’s the odd thing, but it has precursors in the Nazi Party of the 1930s thru 1945. There are gay conservatives who will help the republican party and the crypto-Christian conservative movement murder their fellow gays.
    It is American right wing conservatism that is the new infection, the news AIDS epidemic.
    It’s not spread by the exchange of bodily fluids. The bacillus is spread by word of mouth and across the fascist airwaves and in their fascist conservative churches.
    Being gay or lesbian is not a decision.
    Becoming a conservative who wishes to outcast and discriminate against the gay community and the black community and the Hispanic community and anyone and everyone connected with liberalism and the sick, the poor, the uninsured and the unfortunate IS a decision.
    They have meetings and media and political action committees and politicians making the decisions to discriminate and murder.
    Decisions that will be avenged once and for all.
    AVENGED.

  35. The republican party, with rump as its latest malign incarnation, is now Colonel Kurtz up the river, off the grid, purposefully cut off and beyond and abandoning all human decency, all rules, all protocol, all normal behavior forsaken for savagery, marveling at its own savage, primitive strength, the strength, standing on a pile of hacked off little severed inoculated arms.
    Their methods are unsound. But frankly, I don’t see any method.
    Will they say he was a kind man? Will they call him a wise man?
    He does it for them.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C672_Fkzms
    We MUST be Willard.

  36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKm36o0ZUWI
    What kind of filthy, disgusting culture and country raises children to grow into mad mass murderers and celebrates and elects them as perverted, murderous freedom lovers:
    Here they are, the Manson family, the city fathers of Jonestown, the Mommie Dearests of our sickfuck sadistic republican society, the Nosferatus of bloodthirsty tax-cutting bloodlust, the murdering pieces of subhuman dogshit, posing for their mug shots BEFORE they commit their capital crimes.
    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/the-cynicism-behind-graham-cassidy-is-breathtaking/

  37. https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/please-just-go-golfing.html
    Nambia, the Narnia of bloodthirsty republican wet dreams.
    Nambia? Is that where the Namby-Pambys live that filth conservatives are always going on about, for whom American conservatives unzip their cocks to signal domination over.
    I thought the Namby Pambys lived on college campuses, but maybe I’m wrong.
    Ignoramus aside, the telling quote was this: “I have many friends who are going to Africa to try and get rich.”
    The assembled African leaders, knowing their prey, quickly returned to their countries to marshal their girl and boy hookers for rump Inc’s pending visit and set up offshore accounts to siphon the money back to rump and his corrupt little get family tax free.
    Not caught on tape was rump extolling our previous President to the African leaders: “That Kenyan bro of yours was the best nigger shoeshine boy I’ve ever seen.”

  38. Both Puerto Rico and Mexico should snub all visits by rump, in the first immediate case denying landing rights to Air Force One for his pending visit.
    Puerto Rico should solicit emergency aid and massive infrastructure funding transfers from Russia and China in exchange for both countries being permitted to construct Naval bases for their Atlantic warship fleets, each on opposite sides of the island.
    Mexico should solicit aid from both Russia and China, but should invite North Korean and Iranian diplomats as well to offer feasibility studies for basing long range ballistic nuclear missiles all along their northern border with the United States, with special emphasis on targeting red states where the main threats to world peace and stability have taken root.
    Make America Great Again.

  40. After the states that established Obamacare exchanges and accepted enhanced Medicaid worked their asses off to improve the lot of their uninsured populations AND the states that didn’t ignored their uninsured populations with chortling sadistic glee, now the former are having their hard work and funding stolen from them to carve out special treatment for those red welfare white trash republican queen states where the murderous confederate republican bacillae reside and who just declared bloody Civil War on America:
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/09/21/five-cassidy-graham-state-funds-flow-analyses/
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/09
    /21/whaaaaaatttttt/
    Cold-blooded killers.
    All to humiliate the nigger Obama. Yes, the republican party is a white supremacist, Jew-burning murdering disgrace.

  43. McCain says he won’t vote for the genocide bill.
    Not because the bill would commit genocide on a large segment of the American citizenry …. that’s seems OK by him and his murderous republican Governor of Arizona …. but because the “process” (there are no rules, there is no process, there is no government, as we have defined it for 230 years) isn’t transparent enough for him about the the genocide that would ensue.
    So, the fate of tens of millions of Americans depends on a terminally 80 year old plus individual. Those tens of millions now must undergo the torturous uncertainty, kind of like whether someone will bake them a cake or not for their weddings, but I don’t know, this seems worse somehow, of hoping that McCain’s own government-subsidized healthcare can keep HIM alive long enough to keep THEM alive.
    Meanwhile, over at the EPA, we have a guy, Scott Pruitt, who has ordered himself to be protected by, what, a dozen armed security people, some of whom were removed from their duties protecting the American citizenry from the polluting ravages of his paymasters in industry to cover his murdering ass.
    He says he’s been threatened.
    Since his ascension, like Beelzubub’s to the seat at the right hand of God, to head up the EPA, this guy has given speech after speech threatening the lives millions of Americans, and gotten rid of regulation after regulation that protects individual human beings from the overt death threats issued by private industry via the toxins they want to release into the environment, most of the time without telling us what those toxins are.
    This is par for the course. In these filth’s view of things, the government is there to protect their, and only their precious butts.
    They learned their statecraft and security procedures from the very-well protected Kim il-Jong of North Korea, Duerte of the Philippines, Erdogan of Turkey, and Donald Putin of Russia.
    Meanwhile, Vladimir rump.
    The rest of us are fucked.
    Manafort got Pence the Vice Presidency.
    Pence: “Who dat?”
    “Thou shalt lie your virgin Christian ass off.”
    Verse three, chapter 2, The Book of Fuckyouonomy.

  44. Ben Carson reclaims the stupid right wing from rump, momentarily, and endorses Moore Strange over rump’s choice, Merely Strange, in that Senate race in the Confederacy.
    Ben Carson: With every breath he takes, proving that the races can be equal in malign insanity and ignorance.
    Sarah Death Panel: Proving with every breath that women can be assholes right up there with their male counterparts.
    The patients who let this affirmative action malpractice king Carson operate on their brains ought to heed the next brain recall and check to see that he actually did something more than lay hands on them and pick their pockets.

  45. Roy Moore, whose statues (depicting him drunk with his pants down around his ankles) are already being removed, said the other day that the Nation is faced with the threat of transsexual soldiers, members (or not) of our military, running amok in our public bathrooms, although I understand they already use private bathrooms, and what’s with that?
    He promised that, if elected, he would order those soldiers to remove their dresses and he would redeploy them, bayonets drawn, to stand sentry and bivouac inside the vaginas of our womenfolk (he would make his rounds for periodic inspections of said vaginas on weekends, when he isn’t in Washington signing death certificates for the already born he plans to murder) to protect the unborn, even if the women are not pregnant.
    However, the soldiers could still wear high heels, the better to stomp around all up in there.
    They may also consume Viagra while on duty.

  46. Ah, libertarian Heaven.
    http://juanitajean.com/libertarian-face-plant/
    The money always goes missing … liberated, I believe they call it … with these people.
    And we’re going to send 200 billion more down the Texas rat hole. I might trust McKinney to distribute it, but not the thieves who run the state.
    Jeb Henserling, speaking for God, a privilege all republican filth seem to take upon themselves, said he doesn’t understand why people don’t just up and move (their mortgages will follow them like a snagged sea anchor, that’s why) when their homes are underwater.
    There are still refugees from New Orleans, the ones who weren’t gunned down crossing the bridges to escape drowning, who were kindly resettled in Houston by Houstonians, and now they are underwater AGAIN.
    I agree. I would resettle all of the black refugees in Houston in Hensarling’s neighborhood, where people can afford an Ark for the next deluge.
    Hensarling, who is scum, but even God I’m told loves him some scum, will reply that the Bible only permits two individuals of each species to board the ark, so sure TWO blacks, and two ONLY may move into his neighborhood, but keep them on another street.
    The rest will have to go with the duck billed platypusses and the kangaroos, who missed accommodation on the first Ark for reasons, having to do with bullshit, too complicated to elaborate on.

  47. George Clooney for President:
    http://www.thedailybeast.com/george-clooney-opens-up-about-why-hillary-clinton-lost-i-never-saw-her-elevate-her-game?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
    A presumptive elitist, he explains on point what a crock of shit the term “elitist” is as bandied about by lying conservative elitists.
    He also nails rump, the racist who employees racists, despite the fact that we’re supposed to breath a sigh of relief that he won because of the economy, not racist white nationalism.
    Hitler won because of the economy too, not because he promised to murder the Jews and the gays, so I guess that was understandable too, am I right?

  49. Well that’s what happens when you decide to go with a very small pool of very rich donors. You become completely dependent, with very few options.

  50. rump this morning called in thermonuclear strikes on several NFL teams.
    Half-time shows were canceled.
    Puerto Rico is in his thoughts, kind of like the taco bowl he ordered after midnight last night is in his colon.
    Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un of North Korea couldn’t get through to the dumb American, cheating, lying assholes we permit, on principle, probably because the Kremlin likes it, to oversee our credit history and simultaneously screw us over, to either view or freeze his credit, so he’s thinking about an after-the-fact nuclear strike on America.
    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/experian-transunion-equifax-free-credit-report-online-hell/
    I see his point.
    America, the full of shit.
    The republican freedom caucus in the House of Representatives will put forward legislation tomorrow assigning the entire mission of the Social Security Administration to a private consortium consisting of Equifax, Martin Shkreli, and a guy in a bathrobe named Rohrbacher living in his mother’s basement, which happens to be a dacha in the exurbs of Moscow.
    Please send your Social Security numbers to the following address: P.O. Box 666, Mar-a-Fucko Savings and Loan, Barbados.
    As Ben Franklin noted: “Keep it? You lot, you ignorant rabble, are going to shit all over it.”
    Have I mentioned that I HATE.

  51. President Trump seems to be running practice scenarios for dealing with North Korea using the NFL. His signature approach to interactions doesn’t seem to be working. As any of us could have predicted.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/09/24/jaguars-owner-joins-players-during-anthem-protest-in-first-game-since-trumps-nfl-remarks/?utm_term=.0a53497b3bca
    I’m beginning to wonder. Does he realize that, while he quite possibly could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing any of his supporters, attacking football is a whole different level of unacceptable?

  52. “Does he realize that, while he quite possibly could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing any of his supporters, attacking football is a whole different level of unacceptable?”
    No, the goalposts have been permanently moved just for him. As a result, America is deep into sudden death overtime.
    Maybe his buddy Belacheck can deflate the football and help rump cheat and lie his way through to a second term.
    Maybe Mike Leach can kiss my ass.
    Maybe Tyson, Ditka, Rodman, and Bobby Knight can fellate me at gunpoint.

  53. Does he realize that, while he quite possibly could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing any of his supporters, attacking football is a whole different level of unacceptable?
    I’m not convinced that attacking football is a bad idea for him. Surely a lot of football fans agree with him. I hope not as many as I think, but when has any optimism been justified about him or the people who elected him?
    I’m actually wondering whether we’ll get through today without instances of open fistfights (or worse) in the stands. Lots of beer, lots of anger and demonization….
    It’s a little confusing for me. I don’t give a flying banana about football in the first place, and with the CTE news getting worse and worse, and a personal contrarian need to somewhat distance myself from the New England worship of B&B (not least because of their apparent friendliness with YKW), I promised myself I’d pay even less attention than usual this year, which almost takes it into negative numbers. But I’ve been reading about Colin Kaepernick and finding him very impressive. And if a bunch of Seattle high school football players have this kind of courage, maybe I should pay a little attention after all.

  55. The deplorable base, missing dozens of points IQ on account of their sub-par genes, have gene envy for rump:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/reminder-about-trumps-eugenics-beliefs.html
    He just appointed a guy to a high post in the Department of Agriculture whose top resume bullet point was his stint running the cabana at a country club.
    I guess the expert going to hand out towels to agricultural extension officers for tips.
    I mean even Heinrich Himmler knew something about chickens, mostly how to kill them.
    If Aaron Hernandez had lived, rump was ready to appoint him as Concussive Brain Injury Czar in charge of the portfolio for removing brain injuries as a preexisting condition under all healthcare insurance schemes in the United States.
    That he murdered human beings was the resume bullet point rump considered first and foremost in concluding Hernandez was the man for the job.
    If mental illness is not covered under health insurance, then I conclude conservative whackjobs are shit out of luck.
    I am so confident knowing that cold-blooded murderers Cruz and Paul voted against the genocide bill because the dead body count was not up to their immaculate standards.
    Twenty-three million without health insurance, they scoffed. Call us when you get it up to 100 million and maybe we can do business.
    Twenty-three million people’s lives were saved, temporarily, because two killers thought mere mobile gassing vans were an inadequate compromise with socialists. Let’s wait until we get the construction of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belson completed and then do this right, they told their paymasters.
    I wouldn’t put out Cruz with raw sewage either if he was on fire.
    I’d use gasoline.

  56. Most uplifting was his call for more brain damage:
    “When the ratings are down massively, massively. The NFL ratings are down massively. Now the number one reason happens to be that they like watching what’s happening….with yours truly. They like what’s happening.
    Because you know if they hit too hard…Fifteen yards! Throw him out of the game! they hd that last week. I watched for a couple of minutes. Two guys, just really, beautiful tackle. Boom, fifteen yards!
    The referee gets on television, his wife is sitting at home, she’s so proud of him. They’re ruining the game! That’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit! It is hurting the game!”

  57. No, the goalposts have been permanently moved just for him. As a result, America is deep into sudden death overtime.
    At this stage, I think he is just playing permanently to his base, and they probably love this. They probably think there are too many damn n*****s in the teams anyway, and the ones that are there should be grateful for the money and the fame, and shut up and do what they’re told. Hell, Trump said exactly that, and I bet his people loved it.
    I’m starting to really fear a race war in America.

  58. When it was just Kaepernick, attacking his behavior probably was a plus for Trump. But by now, you have entire teams (including, earlier this weekend, an owner) kneeling. And the owner who donated a million dollars for Trump’s inauguration just ripped into him for his comments.
    Now, the NBA champions declined to come to the White House. And the protests are spreading to America’s past time.
    http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/09/23/as-catcher-bruce-maxwell-makes-statement-by-kneeling-for-anthem-before-game-against-rangers/

  63. When it was just Kaepernick, attacking his behavior probably was a plus for Trump.
    wj, I think you underestimate the latent malignancy of his base because of your own moderation and reasonableness. I say “latent” because I don’t (or don’t most of the time) think they are just racist monsters, but there is that potential in his core base, and he is doing everything possible to stoke it. Despite the widespread nature of the protests you refer to, the crowds booed the Steelers when they came on, and booed plenty of the other athletes too. I don’t think (although obviously I hope) that this will do him too much damage. And the latent racism, once fully roused, will be/is terribly dangerous. Maybe you think my talk of a race war is alarmist – I hope it is. But this resurgently acceptable racism meeting energised and politicised black protest looks like a very dangerous situation to me.

  64. It’s not difficult to get up a vigorous white booing section in Pittsburgh if it is black athletes kneeling. Yes, that city, my fair city, like Middletown, Ohio, my birth city, has changed for the better like the rest of the country, but it isn’t difficult to get an “It’s the Blahs” sotto-voiced conversation going when the subject of what’s-wrong-with-everything comes up.
    We’re already in a race war, not to mention a race TO war with at least four countries, with China and Russia readying their nuclear arsenals for whenever and wherever rump and the murderous republican party strike first.
    These are brown Americans. I predict there will be a travel ban, another feature of the race war, on them too if too many flee to the mainland.
    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-devastation-of-puerto-rico/
    This, below, at its root, is a race war too. For rump and his base and the republican Slavery Caucus in Congress, it’s a way of completely erasing the nigger’s legacy and punishing HIS politically correct multi-racial, multi-ethnic base, while throwing money at red pale-faced states.
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/09/25/monday-morning-open-thread-once-more-unto-the-breech/
    That it will hurt the republican party’s underemployed drug-addicted white base, who have been led to believe they are rump’s base, in areas of the country republicans themselves have hollowed out industrially on behalf OF themselves AS shareholders and themselves AS recipients of billions of dollars in campaign donations from ideological cretins and Ayn Rand sadists to keep their white base offshored, underemployed, and underpaid is the unique feature of contemporary conservatism:
    All of their lessers are niggers. It’s equal opportunity.
    Don’t think I’m defending the triangulating Democratic Party either here, as we sniff out the Goldman Sachs money pot too.

  65. Despite the widespread nature of the protests you refer to, the crowds booed the Steelers when they came on, and booed plenty of the other athletes too.
    They did. Or at least some of them did. But it may be worth asking: How many of them did?
    Certainly the racists (and others) feel emboldened, thanks to Trump. And they gave vent to their feelings. But in a crowd where, for example, half** have been Trump supporters, if 10% boo it’s noticeable . . . but a far cry from total support.
    Also, I suspect that the reaction will moderate over time. Trump will move on to some other passing twitter subject, and his followers will move, too.
    In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in time, Colin Kaepernick ends up playing again. The owners were unwilling to hire him when it was just (or principally) him. But now? A player kneeling is about as novel as getting wet in the rain. And he’s good enough that there are teams which could use his talents.
    ** I pick a number totally at random. I actually have no clue what portion of pro football fans are Trump supporters. Nor any other sport, for that matter.
    And no doubt it varies by location as well. When one of the Oakland A’s baseball players took a knee this weekend, there were a few of boos, and one guy yelling “stand up!” But you could distinguish that one guy precisely because it was only one guy.

  66. I’m halfway through Sherman Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. It’s painful and beautiful and relentless and honest (to the extent that one can judge that based on words on a page from a stranger).
    Pertinent to the present topic, he tells about how he got his parents’ permission to leave “the rez” and go to high school in a nearby town. He was the first Indian in that school. He did well academically, athletically, artistically…had a white girlfriend for several years…
    Then he observes that that county voted 70% or so for Trump, and he goes into a meditation about the times when, as a kid, he was subject to overt racism. There was far more kindness than hatred, he writes, but the bad times were:

    …when certain white folks feared I was taking something away from them.

    [snip]

    So, in the context of the 2016 presidential election, does any of this sound familiar?

    [snip]

    And those white folks elected him because they believe they are victims. Yes, I am a Spokane Indian–an indigenous American–who grew up with white folks who think this country is being stolen from them.

    Hahahahahaahahahahaahahahaahahahaha.

    I haven’t seen a better, pithier summary of what’s going on in this country than the page where that passage came from.
    Like GftNC, I’m worried, though I’m not sure an overt shooting war is where it’s likely to end up. And hey, it looks like I was wrong in my expectation of fights in the stands at football stadiums yesterday.

  67. wj, I think you underestimate the latent malignancy of his base
    GftNC, I think maybe where we diverge is not the malignancy of his base, but the size of his real base. I ran across something recently that may be relevant.
    During the mid-1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy was chair of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. He was holding hearings, and finding communists anywhere and everywhere — and ruining a lot of lives in the process. The country was pretty hysterical on the subject.
    But then, he turned his attention to the US Army. The “Army-McCarthy” hearings are a textbook example of how going too far can blow up in your face. The US Army came out just fine; McCarthy never recovered.
    I don’t know if this particular dust-up will be Trump’s equivalent. But I have no doubt it will come. And when it does, I suspect Trump’s real base will turn out to be rather smaller than you (or he) expect.

  68. There will be no fights in the stands to speak of.
    First attendance is down units of stadiums having nothing to do with the protests. Second, most people see the whole discussion as a distraction to the enjoyment of the game and, third, the people who object to the protests will, in increasing numbers, just not be there.
    I won’t be, I won’t pay to watch a game on tv and I won’t buy any piece of paraphenalia that might enrich any player or owner.
    I do think it is wrong to disrespect this country, but then I don’t watch awards shows Emmys, Oscars anymore either. Or late night tv, Except Fallon sometimes if he can avoid being an add like the rest.
    All of these things are paid entertainment that simply aren’t entertaining anymore.
    So I won’t pay.
    I wouldn’t worry about a shooting war, Colin Kaepernick ain’t picking up a gun. I’m pretty sure Colbert ain’t picking up a gun. They are grandstanders that like attention, despite the fact that they accentuate and reinforce every divisive thing in our society. They are just the Trump mirror, not the solution.

  69. The anti-fascists are the real fascists. The anti-racists are the real racists. Or, at the very least, they’re no better than the fascists and racists. Wash, rinse, repeat.
    The fact that we have a babbling man-toddler as president isn’t the larger problem. The lack of equity in our criminal justice system isn’t the larger problem. It’s equally people kneeling or locking arms or staying in the locker room during the national anthem (a funny history, that song has). It’s equally comedians making fun of the man-toddler president.
    The scales must remain in balance.

  70. Marty, just for clarity’s sake, are you saying that you will be boycotting the games and the merchandise etc because of disrespect to the country/flag, or because they are no longer entertaining? Or both?
    What do you say to the proposition that one of the things that disrespects the flag most is the confederate flag?

  73. GftNC,
    The confederate flag thing is just a stupid talking point. I live in a. neighborhood where every fourth hlus flus a Portuguese flag, French flags fly all over certain parts of the country. I was born in the south, I have a cultural history that slavery is only one part of.
    I think the protests are inappropriate. The country and its basic values, which the flag and the anthem represent, is what enables progress. It’s the wrong thing to protest.
    So I don’t care about some guys kneeling, at all, I would completely ignore them because, well, I’m there to watch a football game. Its entertainment. And now its not. I used to love the awarfs shows, good acts, a little comedy, heartfelt reactions from the winners and now its not.
    So I don’t watch nor pay when I can specifically not pay.
    And no, Trump is not the source of this problem, Ferguson st am happened before he was President. So making him the problem is ridiculous.
    Want to talk about the criminal justice system? Cool, not being addressed on your knee. The only person I have any sympathy for is Kaepernick, he doesn’t make a million dollars a month anymore, sucks for him.

  74. Rick Lowry explains how rump’s grandstanding is so gut-level understandable to the gutless:
    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-nfl-bashing-is-why-hes-president-2017-09-25?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    “And no, Trump is not the source of this problem, Ferguson st am happened before he was President.”
    “I have a cultural history that slavery is only one part of.”
    All of us do.
    I can deplore that part AND sit down and enjoy biscuits and gravy.
    And I’ll bet the fact that he wasn’t President when it happened and couldn’t tweetsquirt some lighter fluid onto the fire from the White House sticks in his craw.
    Entertainment and politics mixing. Someone tell Limbaugh and Alex Jones about this entirely new phenomenon.

  75. More on Kapernick’s contract here and here.
    Financially, he’s not hurting, but the fact that a guy with his talent is not playing is, well, telling. He is being whiteballed.
    Protest is what got us here, cf, American Revolution, abolitionist movement, underground railroad, Civil War, labor unrest 1860’s – 1930’s, women’s sufferage movement, civil rights, gay movement, etc. It’s all well and good to believe that protest is “inappropriate”, but that generally doesn’t go down to well with the oppressed, because your message to them is essentially, “Sucks to be you.”

  76. The US national anthem described the country as “the land of the free” when over a million of its people were slaves – approaching a fifth of the total population.
    How does that represent progress? Why is it inappropriate for the descendants of those slaves not always to join in with the rest of the country’s primitive worship of the song and the history it describes?

  77. I go to a baseball game to watch baseball.
    I don’t go there to sing my protest while standing with hat off regarding my grievances with the British Crown.
    And now during the seventh inning stretch, I’m made to stand and think, via the entertainment of “America The Beautiful” about my grievances with al Qaeda.
    But I indulge it.
    Play ball!

  78. “Want to talk about the criminal justice system? Cool, not being addressed on your knee.”
    Well, it was addressed in the other direction in an election wherein a racist was appointed to lead the criminal justice system, as you acknowledged in your way when Sessions was appointed: “Sessions is not a good choice”
    That some are mildly going down on one knee, and thus far leaving it at that, seems like a fucking lucky break for America and its criminal injustice system.

  79. So I don’t care about some guys kneeling, at all, I would completely ignore them because, well, I’m there to watch a football game. Its entertainment. And now its not.
    Sorry, Marty, but I’m still confused. If you don’t care about some guys kneeling, and would ignore them because you’re there to watch a football game, why is it now not entertainment? I don’t understand.
    And about the confederate flag v US flag question, surely French or Portugese flags are irrelevant? As far as I know, neither country staged a rebellion against the US and fought a war with it (based on a refusal to free their slaves). Or am I wrong?

  80. I’m pretty sure the French were a big help against that mean, old George III. I think I read that somewhere.
    At the Jersey Shore, there seems to be a competition between people flying Irish flags and people flying Italian flags. I’m not sure why it seems to be particularly a shore thing, but it does, and I’d educatedly guess most of the people flying those flags are super pissed at the people kneeling during the anthem. It’s all very confusing, no?
    I share in GftNC’s confusion over Marty’s stance. The anthem’s over before the game starts, so what’s it got to do with the entertainment value of the game?

  81. Why is it inappropriate for the descendants of those slaves not always to join in with the rest of the country’s primitive worship of the song and the history it describes?
    I don’t get that, either. People get very picky about the methods by which other people protest, even if they aren’t blocking traffic or disrupting any other efforts. It’s as though the way to protest, at least if you don’t agree with the protesters, is to do something no one will notice at all.
    The psychic disturbance of non-participation in a ritual is so beyond the pale.

  82. The kneeling was not a problem, the two hour discussion of the kneeling is. The arguing over whether they should be “allowed” to kneel is worse(these are grown men breaking no laws), Trumps attack made it even worse, the reaction to that was even more stupid.
    Worst of all, I’m not sure how many peep actually understand what is being protested. As for protesting where no will care, the Boston Tea Partiers didn’t shut down the Saturday night dance, they through tea in the harbor. Want to protest the just e system, picket the courthouse.

  83. When Rosa Parks moved to the front of the bus, some folks for whom keeping her at the back of the bus was only part of their culture said “Hey, we’re trying to ride a bus here! This here is about getting my keester from Point A to Point B on a bus system, not about your rights, lady!”
    Just so rump and his dupes: “This is not about free speech.”
    Which bookends with:
    “It’s not the right time to talk about climate change.”
    “This is not the right time to talk about curtailing the ownership of weapons or war in the hands of civilians and letting them carry them in public places.”
    However, it always seems time for conservatives at the dinner table, or anytime, anywhere to talk about cutting their tax cuts.
    Shut up and pass me the corn. Just for once.
    And don’t ever fucking shush me again, rumpsters.

  84. “As for protesting where no will care, the Boston Tea Partiers didn’t shut down the Saturday night dance, they through tea in the harbor.”
    It’s a well-known fact that the fiddle player for the Saturday night dance was dressed like an Iroquois squaw and war-whooping as he tossed the tea overboard. The owners of the tea and plenty of tea-drinkers in Boston found the behavior inappropriate and not a bit funny.
    The dance was canceled. By American Puritans, who hated dancing too.

  85. It seems to me (and I think is one of the first rules of modern protest – the Boston Tea Partiers did not have 24 hour news) that you protest wherever will get the most publicity for your cause, and will stimulate the most discussion, in the hope that this will eventually lead to change. If you can cause discomfort to the enemies of your cause, so much the better, particularly if it drives them to say things which reveal, for all to see, the revolting attitudes at the heart of their beliefs. Looked at in this context, and since I think most people do understand what is being protested, these protests seem pretty reasonable.

  87. Marty, it sounds like, based on your comment Posted by: Marty | September 25, 2017 at 02:46 PM, that you have a preference for a more targeted method of protest rather than a serious objection to what they’re doing, and that you would advise them (assuming it’s not just concern trolling) to do something you think is more effective.
    I still don’t get what it has to do with entertainment value.

  89. The kneeling was not a problem, the two hour discussion of the kneeling is.
    So what you’re saying is, the real problem is that the folks doing the pre-game TV shows are spending too much time talking about the protest? Because, as far as I can tell, the players simply took their knee (or linked arms with those doing so), and then went on with doing their jobs and playing the game. At most, they answered questions put to them later on the subject.
    But it’s not like the players were interrupting the game to wave signs, chant slogans, etc. They just made a brief symbolic gesture and let it go at that.
    So the guys you are actually unhappy with are the sports commentators. Got it.

  90. The owners of the tea and plenty of tea-drinkers in Boston found the behavior inappropriate and not a bit funny.
    One of my favorite (probably apocryphal; I think from a Disney show in the 1950s actually), had a scene of the wife of one of the Boston Tea Party participants, afterwards, opening the seams of this outfit to collect the tea which had ended up there during the course of the party. Because she loved her tea.

  91. wj, yes and no. and hsh,
    I can dislike three things, I’m not thrilled about the protest itself, wrong target.
    I’m really irritated at the NFL reaction and the broadcasters for tiresomely discussing it and,
    All that said, for what? It has no chance of accomplishing anything positive.

  92. Ineffective Symbolism seems to be all liberals, Democrats, and even the black contingent of Democrats have right now. Obama, Clinton, pink pussyhats, kneeling will breed nothing but contempt i9n our adversaries.
    You have to hurt them, cost them money. “Face” means nothing to Trump or NFL owners or cops…their true face is already out there, or at least the image they want to project.
    When was the last time we had a serious urban riot like Watts or Detroit? I don’t want to hear “well it didn’t work.” Rationality and consequences aren’t the point…expressed rage is the point.
    And why not? Is interesting.

  93. “Face” means nothing to Trump or NFL owners or cops…their true face is already out there, or at least the image they want to project.
    Um, Bob, you did notice, didn’t you, that the NFL owners** have pretty much all come out in support of their players on this. A couple of them even came out on the field during the national anthem and linked arms with their players. Maybe your ideology believes that it shouldn’t have happened that way. But the fact is, it did.
    ** And, in a couple of cases, there were cops out there linking arms, too. Just FYI.

  94. I remember when all we talked about was Janet Jackson’s wardrobe function.
    Let’s see that one more time.
    The news is a commodity. It’s a business.
    Therein lies the problem. I didn’t tell anyone to make journalism a shiny entertainment object.
    News is now entertainment and entertainment is fighting back by bringing us the news.
    Like Amazon, let’s be all things to all people. Gotta grow, baby.
    Gotta say, though, I liked it when Johnny Carson worked Vietnam and Civil Rights into his monologue.
    The producers and advertisers who sponsor the sports shows are the ones who think we would be entertained by the kneeling protests.
    “Do we have naked girls tonight, fellers?”
    “Not tonight, chief.”
    “Maybe the animal mascot will take an errant dump at the 50-yard line during the pregame.”
    “Well, but we have some players who are kneeling and rump is shooting his mouth off about it.”
    “OK. Get me in close with that on cameras three and four and we’ll lead with it. Pull up the President’s asshole Twitter feed in split screen and …… go!”
    Network vice president with his football ratings on the line, overheard in the green room: “You know, if this keeps up, the only thing that will save our bottom line is if ISIS attacks the kicker by drone on three and game.”

  95. “It has no chance of accomplishing anything positive.”
    This I might agree with.
    I don’t want to find out those kneeling players didn’t vote last November.

  97. Um, Bob, you did notice, didn’t you…
    So what?
    Face doesn’t mean anything, which means symbolic or verbal displays can go either way.
    Trump could verbally support Kaepernik and I wouldn’t be impressed. It has to cost to matter. Direct action matters.
    I’ll start getting interested when players and owners refuse to play. Cops kill black, that city gets no NFL.
    And I think I told you, I don’t listen to the English language anymore (ok, old music) so don’t watch tv and don’t keep up enough with the spectacle of the day/week. Just what I skim at Slate Vox etc.

  98. All that said, for what? It has no chance of accomplishing anything positive.
    everybody’s talking about it. mission accomplished.
    in any case, i’m still trying to get my head around the idea of rebuilding a house 22 times for $1.8M.
    just another way that TX ain’t MA.

  99. It has no chance of accomplishing anything positive.
    It will accomplish something if it brings home to people like you (I mean that as a relative compliment) that there are a lot of people in the USA for whom the words of the national anthem do not make comfortable listening.

  100. The French revolutionaries wanted to turn society and country upside down and change everything.
    The American revolutionaries were more like, “Go away and leave us alone so we can continue doing what we’ve been doing all these many decades.”

  101. Well, Pro Bono, it hasn’t accomplished that. Other than being pretty innocuous and overly sentimental it’s hard to imagine any actual valid objection to what gets sung at football games.

  102. Assuming you think that the civil rights mvt of 1960’s was a significant change, bob mcmanus, you have a point if you think that it came about because of the urban riots in Watts and Detroit. On the other hand, if you think it didn’t, then your dismissal of these non-violent protests is misplaced (a 3rd option is that you believe that the 60’s didn’t really make any difference)
    I don’t agree, but I do worry that Americans create a mythos around themselves about how their change is good change and other country’s change is bad change. This makes it easy to underestimate what is required to make people change.
    I do think it says a lot about the US that Trump can threaten North Korea with total annihilation (in a speech lauding sovereignty!) and barely get a raised eyebrow, but chooses to pick on pro athletes and all hell breaks loose.

  103. Then I’ll spell it out for you Marty. If the USA in 1812 was “the land of the free” then either slavery was freedom, or slaves were of no more account than livestock. Is that an innocuous message?

  104. Let me spell it out for you lj, it didn’t become the national anthem until 1912, almost no one, literally knows there is any part of the song beyond what gets sung at football games and the war of 1812 has been over 200 years.
    It is a beautiful expression of our pride in all of those who have defended her so that we all have the opportunity to be free. Even if in many ways that is aspirational.

  106. It is a beautiful expression of our pride in all of those who have defended her…
    Who says?
    When did the anthem get narrowed to mean pride in the military instead of pride (even if only aspirational) in the country as a whole?
    It’s not the military’s anthem, it’s the nation’s anthem ffs.

  107. “I pretty much think Rosa Parks defended our ideals, not a military only reference. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy died defending our country. Washington, Lincoln both bravely defended the country. Brave is measured in the moment.”
    Is what my first reaction was.
    Then, it is a song about a battle, that was lost. So yes it also has a military interpretation.
    Goid song in that way.

  108. A vet who took a knee.
    97 years old, to boot.
    Utterly battlingly, if you go to this link Twitter tells you that “This media may contain sensitive material” and offers you a button in case you want to risk it.
    I don’t know if the guy who put the picture there (the vet’s grandson) chose that — does anyone here know the inner workings of Twitter well enough to be able to say?
    Because if complaints or Twitter itself made that decision, and not the Twitter user himself, I have to ask why they don’t have that button attached to every vile syllable that spews forth from Mr. Clickbait himself.

  109. The American revolutionaries were more like, “Go away and leave us alone so we can continue doing what we’ve been doing all these many decades.”
    American Revolution = low taxes, no tariffs, slavery, and genocide (Native Americans). Hitler was a failed copy.
    For some reason, probably Sakai’s white settler ideology, it is who we are and always have been and always will be. New Deal an exception that ain’t coming back.

  110. I’ll start getting interested when players and owners refuse to play. Cops kill black, that city gets no NFL.
    Well, depends. Did the civil rights movement succeed (to the extent of passage of federal CR legislation, 1954-9165)due to the economic “cost” of the protests, or their symbolic nature of bringing attention to segregationist barbarism? Or was it LBJ’s breaking the political west(conservative)-south(racist) alliance on that issue by promising water projects to conservative western senators? Now there’s real money!

  111. “Cops kill black, that city gets no NFL”
    So here it is, what if a cop kills a white person? Which actually happens more often.
    Do they get a football team? Or lose two draft picks? Maybe a hundred thousand dollar fine and a six game suspension for the starter of their choice?

  112. And hell, the New Deal (and later Great Society) were all about financing and mobilizing the Great American Empire Expansion at a moment of opportunity.
    Hey, Vietnam was a roaring success. How many nations gone socialist after Vietnam? The message was sent, the lesson was learned.
    And white settlers my ass, J Sakai. Blacks Latinos and women have always jumped on board the US genocide trained when given a choice. Women may have lost effective reproductive freedom, but droning funerals and burning babies is fair compensation.

  113. Yeah, there’s something about the 3rd verse of the Star Spangled Banner, and its sneering at “the hireling and slave” that would make an African American want to stand up and sing, amirite?
    And no, nobody sings the 3rd verse. Then again, nobody sings the “Deutchland über Alles” verse anymore, either. Wonder if Trumpers will bring them both back.

  114. “So here it is, what if a cop kills a white person? Which actually happens more often.
    Do they get a football team?”
    Yeah, they do. They have all along.
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/kenny-havard-new-orleans-saints-funding-anthem-protests
    I’m more elemental than most. If a guy is going to bring another guy’s mother into it (“sons of bitches”), then he should be willing to do it face to face, so the sons a bitches have the opportunity to defend their mothers by physically beating the the living shit out of the one with the mouth on him.
    rump’s from New York.
    Try that on the street, ya pansy hotelier.

  116. It ain’t only gohmert. Ron Johnson thinks brain cancer is a creeping form of limp-wristed empathetic liberalism too:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/class-acts.html
    I guess I need a brain scan. If I’m free of brain cancer, then I suppose I’m free and liable to commit genocide like Gohmert and Johnson.
    And rump. He’s going to go after McCain like a
    Vietnamese regular building a tiger cage.
    I can take McCain or leave him. He merely wants the process to be more transparent so the genocide intended by the republican effort to deny Americans health insurance is clear for all to see and a few Democrats can cave.

  119. See, what I think is that rump thinks Colin Kaepernick is a Puerto Rican who once requested a pay raise for operating the freight elevator at rump rowers, and so he’s one of THOSE people:
    http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/09/25/its-time-for-trump-to-focus-on-puerto-rico/
    The Chinese and the Russians, and the Cubans, and the North Koreans, and the Iranians need to fill the vacuum in Puerto Rico.
    Take it away from us.
    I haven’t heard the fucking Christian Governor of Texas demanding $200 billion for Puerto Rico, even thought the population of PR is half again what it is of Houston.
    I’ll bet the Spanish libertarians are sorry they settled Puerto Rico.
    They desired eternal youth, but all they got was high winds, so fuck these people.

  120. So here it is, what if a cop kills a white person? Which actually happens more often.
    Do cops kill more white people? Sure. Do they kill more unarmed and non-threatening white people? Really? Got data on that?

  129. Hey, Vietnam was a roaring success. How many nations gone socialist after Vietnam?
    Interesting hypothesis….but may be confusing correlation with causation… maybe what killed international socialism more than LBJ, Nixon, and Kissinger was Deng and Leonid…could be it was an inside job, eh?
    🙂 keep on truckin’

  130. One cute little detail crops up in that article Bobby links to. Enlisted men swear to, among other things, obey the orders of the President and their superior officers. Officers . . . don’t.
    As an officer, I swore to support, protect, and defend the Constitution. Regulations required me to obey orders. But if those orders conflicted with the Constitution, my oath required me to disobey.
    I’m guessing that Trump, draft dodger that he was, has no clue about that. I suspect he thinks that military officers to obey any orders he gives. It ain’t necessarily so.

  131. wj, someone on Balloon-Juice said the other night that even in relation to enlisted personnel, the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that you aren’t supposed to obey an unlawful order. I am not going to spend the next few hours trying to find the comment; BJ goes too fast for me.

  132. This “taking the knee” Phrase. is this an indication of the insidiousness of Game of Thrones? Where guys are always arguing about whether or not they should be bending the knee?

  133. paraphrased from facebook:
    thinking that the NFL guys taking the knee are protesting the flag, or the anthem, is like thinking Rosa Parks was protesting public transportation.
    allow me, an aging suburban white dude, try to break it down for you.
    many black people feel like they do not have a fair stake in American life. in particular, they feel like what should be ordinary encounters with police result in dead black people.
    so, when kapernick hears the anthem, he kneels.
    the anthem, the knee, football, trump, none of them are the point.
    dead black people. that is the point.
    maybe, someday, we’ll be able to talk about substance.

  134. And no, nobody sings the 3rd verse. Then again, nobody sings the “Deutchland über Alles” verse anymore, either. Wonder if Trumpers will bring them both back.
    And that was the first verse (the current German anthem is the third, the second is akin to the original text to the tune of Star Spangled Banner).
    Maybe the English will revive the anti-Scottish verse of God Save The King soon too. 😉
    The GOP/TP should take me up on my offer and adopt my “Embrace the flag and close your eyes to reason” (sung to the tune of the Horst Wessel song) since it is unlikely that “Die Partei, die Partei die hat immer recht” will find acceptance given its origin.

  135. dead black people. that is the point.
    maybe, someday, we’ll be able to talk about substance.
    And maybe our president will spend more time thinking about Puerto Rico than obsessing over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.

  137. Marty, you may think that a song dismissing slaves as unpeople is beautiful, but you could at least recognise there some may reasonably disagree.
    The third verse is relevant only in that it leaves no doubt what Key meant by the “land of the free” in the first verse – he meant the land of white people free to keep slaves.
    Russell is quite right of course that the protests are not about the words of the anthem. But it would make more sense to demand respect for the anthem if it had been composed for all Americans.
    btw (wonkie), “taking a knee” is a long-established term in American Football. Nothing to do with Game of Thrones. I think.

  139. Bending the knee is also a long-established, if now somewhat archaic, term. I guess GOT has just given it a new lease of life.
    I wonder if any of you read this, calling Trump The Abbie Hoffman of the Right in today’s New York Times, and if so what you thought of it?

  141. The anti-Scottish verse is a bit much, but we can all get behind the second verse, surely ?
    “Confound their politics
    Frustrate their knavish tricks..”

  142. I was just explaining take a knee to some british FB friends. It comes from HS football, where the physical fitness of the players is still not so high. The coach says ‘take a knee’, it means you can relax but not get too comfortable. That evolved to the coach wanting to address the players, so he says ‘take a knee’, which then puts the players lower than him, enforcing the hierarchy. Not related to the GoT bend the knee.
    I’ve obviously not played at college or pro level, but ‘take a knee’ is difficult to imagine a pro coach saying.
    This is all ironic in terms of taking a knee during the national anthem. If the players had dropped to both knees and intimated that it was related to christian principles, maybe no one would have batted an eye. However, take a knee becomes threatening even though it has its origins in acknowledging the hierarchy. Which just goes to show that whatever was done, it wasn’t going to be accepted and there is no proper way of protesting.

  144. I wonder why fundamentalist Christians are OK with the national anthem. After all, the original words are a) dedicated to a Greek (i.e. false) god, and b) celebrate drunkenness and other immorality.
    But I suppose they are simply ignorant of the history of the tune.

  145. lj, I made the mistake of reading some of the comments at that NYT op-ed. It’s as though some of the people making negative comments didn’t even read, or at least comprehend, what Eric Reid wrote. It’s just a matter of assertion that what they’re doing means what the critics say it means and that it’s disrespectful to the flag, the anthem, America, our military, Mom, apple pie, hot dogs, etc.
    It’s very frustrating.

  146. I thought “take a knee” was what the quarterback does to run the clock down when leading at the end of the game. But I’m not a native speaker of American Football.

  147. And maybe our president will spend more time thinking about Puerto Rico than obsessing over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.
    And, if he really wants to help Puerto Rico, he will call for the repeal of the Jones Act.

  149. no still correct
    In 2015, The Washington Post launched a real-time database to track fatal police shootings, and the project continues this year. As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).
    more. more often. 2 to 1. Plus others it’s over 3 to 1.

  150. Come on Marty, I know you can do simple math.
    Population of the US:
    White: 73%
    Black: 13%
    So roughly 5.6:1
    Compared to your 2:1 or 3:1
    Which means that your odds are 2 to 3 times worse if you happen to be black.

  151. I said nothing about f’ing odds, I said more white people were shot than blacks by cops. That’s a fact. No math necessary.
    I’m pretty sure if you stratified those economically the difference would be significantly less even in the odds.

  152. Which means that your odds are 2 to 3 times worse if you happen to be black.
    Marty’s own article points that out. There seem to be advantages to not providing the link.

    “U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.”

  154. Great. Now you can completely ignore the fact that more white people die and there is no outcry, because math.
    In the link where sapient quoted they even did the math wrong, at least wj did the math right.

  156. This is the same Marty logic as when he characterized gay people asking for the right to get married as “I got mine screw you” because his son and his son’s girlfriend lacked the rights of married people just the way gay couples did.
    The fact that his son and his son’s girlfriend already had the right to get married…. what did that have to do with anything?
    As for the math: if cops killed 50 white people out of, let’s say, 100,000, that’s .0005 (50/100000).
    If the white population is five times the black population, then in my example there are 20,000 black people. 50/20,000 = .0025, or five times the odds for white people.
    The relative fractions don’t change no matter what initial # you plug in for population.
    So I’m wondering: why is this math wrong?
    Of course, as an amateur editor, I would pounce on the phrase “five times larger” from that quote, but that’s a different nitpick.

  157. I’m pretty sure if you stratified those economically the difference would be significantly less even in the odds.
    If true, it would show that black people are more concentrated in those economic strata more likely to be shot by police. So no problem!

  158. More women than men die at age 100 and above. So obviously women are more susceptible to the perils of extreme old age. After all, more of them are dying then. Never mind that far more women than men manage to even reach age 100.
    If you were to harp on the fact that more women die then, when we are discussing aging…. Well you wouldn’t, because it would be self-evidently ridiculous. So why do you keep bringing up a similarly ridiculous datum here?

  160. hshs’s way was easier, and much less confrontational. I bring up datum because whether you are black or white your chance of being killed by a cop while unarmed is 1 in 3.5 million. Your chances of dying from falling out of bed is 2 in 3.5 million.
    If you want to keep leaning on statistics then admit just how rare this is for anyone.
    Statistics are created to support a point if view, to create an emotional reaction whether one is warranted.
    If a cop shoots somebody and it is unjustified then we should determine why that cop shot that person. If there is a trend in that department it should be dealt with.
    It is not a failure of the United States, it is failure of a very small number of police and departments.
    The statistics don’t support the charge of widespread racism causing cops to shoot black people substantially mote than whites. The numbers are not significant statistically.
    The deaths are significant individually, and should be examined and dealt with that way.

  161. If true, it would show that black people are more concentrated in those economic strata more likely to be shot by police. So no problem!
    Well except for no problem yeah. The problem, statistically significant and IMO “the problem”, is that black people are poorer at a much higher percentage, three times higher. So, while not accounting for the whole difference it does, narrow that statistical delta significantly.
    Solving the problem of poverty, In my opinion, more effectively reduces the disparity than generalizing racist cops as the problem.
    There might be a disparity all the way up the economic strata, I just don’t know, and can’t find that statistical cross check to understand the difference.
    Disclaimer: I am referencing specifically the difference between blacks and whites in conflict with police. There is no generalized conclusions or comparisons to other forms of explicit and implicit racism that manifest differently across society.

  162. Police in the US shoot people they perceive to be a threat. Crime statistics suggest that it’s rational that they’re more likely to feel threatened by black people.
    The result of this is that a black person going about his lawful business is much more likely than a white person to be shot by a policeman.
    The heart of the problem isn’t that the police are racist, it’s that they shoot too many people – in this respect I agree with Marty.
    However, the point of BLM is that the US isn’t doing anything about it, and the reason why not is that the children of the rich and powerful and white are not the ones getting shot by police.

  163. It is not a failure of the United States
    The persistent, consistent treatment of black and brown people as being of a status less than that of white people is one of most salient and egregious failures of the United States.
    From before it even was the United States, until now.
    This will never change until people get their freakings heads out of their behinds about it.

  164. 1 deny there’s a problem
    2 deny there’s a specific problem
    3 deny that it’s worth complaining about
    4 deny that complaining will help
    5 deny that the complaints are the right complaints
    6 deny that the complainers are legitimate
    7 deny that there’s a solution
    8 the next time the subject comes up, start all over at 1 again

  166. re Pittsburgh.
    Yeah, the epithet “nigger” is always available and just below the surface in my hometown. Jerry Jones, the Coach of the Dallas Cowboys will never be called a nigger. The black coach of the Steelers will be. It doesn’t matter what Mike Tomlin achieves in exemplary America. The word “NIGGER” is held in reserve for him.
    Marty and I can fuck up all we want and no one will ever call us a “NIGGER” or request our birth certificates. Doesn’t matter whether the economy is up or down. It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s that neither of us is a NIGGER.
    I’m going to predict now that Marty will point our that his great, great grandmother was a racial half-caste sharecropper in the old South, so what’s to see here?
    No white President will ever be accused of being born in Kenya and lying about it, which is just another way of anagraming, out of rump’s mouth and his racist Attorney General and millions of his racist, stinking pigfucking supporters, the word NIGGER.
    Lee Atwater, mainstream republican cracker racist filth, was way ahead of rump.
    “A fire chief from Pennsylvania has apologized for calling Steelers coach Mike Tomlin a “no-good n*gger” after his team did not come out onto the field for the national anthem during this Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears.
    CBS Pittsburgh reports that Paul Smith, the chief of the volunteer fire department in Cecil Township, Pennsylvania, posted on Facebook that Tomlin “just added himself to the list of no-good n*ggers” for his decision to note take the field during the anthem.”
    Apology not accepted. Ya see, white racists like the Chief, here, don’t think they are racists because they claim to differentiate between a plain ole affirmative action black guy like Ben Carson who will be appointed to a high position in government to stop “giving it all away” to the blahs, those OTHER ones, the no-good NIGGERS.
    There’s the good uns, and the no-good uns.
    Black cops should shoot more unarmed white people in the back at traffic stops. In fact, target white rump supporters. We’ll get rump supporters down on THEIR knees protesting THAT, while they carry the Confederate flag, which is the one American flag that can’t be disrespected because it is the flag the disrespectful have always called their own. Then for good measure, once they take a knee, we’ll call them NIGGERS.
    I’m going to stick with “DEPLORABLES”. That seems to get them plenty riled up and feeling oppressed. They don’t take a knee in protest, No, they protest by voting racist vermin into the highest offices on the land.
    rump is a NIGGER. Sessions is a NIGGER. Get down on your knees, pigfuckers. Look, they have guns, too. You cant trust a NIGGER with a gun. Fire away.
    Here’s a human being who wouldn’t be down on his knee either. He’d be taking rump out with high spikes flying. Jackie Robinson:
    “Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem, I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

  167. “It is not a failure of the United States.”
    Yes, well, as corporations are now sentient people with more rights than actual human beings, the United States has always been a Limited Liability Corporation.

  172. Another thing to consider is that it’s not just about shooting people. That is but one aspect of the larger racial problem with our criminal-justice system, on a national level.

  173. I suppose I should add that using crime statistics to state that it’s rational for police to be more fearful of black people ignores that biased policing and the biased court system partly drive those same statistics. There’s a certain circularity to that, no?

  175. Be aware that the republican effort to get rid of the federal tax deduction of state and local taxes is an essential component of republican genocide in America.
    It will make it even more difficult for states and localities to fund the medical insurance burdens of their poor and uninsured once Medicaid is cut and block-granted to state responsibility.
    Cold-blooded killers.

  176. No white President will ever be accused of being born in Kenya and lying about it, which is just another way of anagraming, out of rump’s mouth and his racist Attorney General and millions of his racist, stinking pigfucking supporters, the word NIGGER.
    Count, you missed the obvious. John McCain was born outside the US (in Panama), and Ted Cruz was, too (in Canada). Going back further, George Romney (Mitt’s father) was born in Mexico, to American parents. Which got mentioned when he was running for President, but barely more than that.
    But somehow that was considered irrelevant for all of them. As it should have been (and for Obama as well). If you have a parent (even just one)** who is a US citizen when you are born, then you are a US citizen by birth and eligible to be President. Period.
    Unless, as you say….
    ** And when, as in Obama’s case, that parent is your mother, there isn’t even room to demand a DNA paternity test. 😉

  177. Be aware that the republican effort to get rid of the federal tax deduction of state and local taxes is an essential component of republican genocide in America.
    Not exactly to your point, but I would most likely have to move if this were implemented without something to significantly offset the increase in my federal tax burden. My taxable income would go up by about $13k a year.
    I imagine Delaware’s population would increase quite a bit, what with all the people from NJ and PA moving there. Maybe MD, too. I’m not too hip to their tax regime.

  178. “Count, you missed the obvious.”
    Not really. I call Cruz a CANADIAN all the time, and no one blinks an eye, except to say that it is his only good feature.

  179. Moving from NJ wouldn’t help. As far as they are concerned, if you work for a NJ company, you still pay NJ income taxes. (I live in CA, had a consulting gig entirely in CA, but a NJ company was involved, so I got stuck paying them as well.)

  180. The more I think about it, though, the more it is to the Count’s point. I can afford to move. People like me will leave. The tax base will erode rapidly in states like NJ, while the burden on state budgets will not.
    I might not even be able to afford to leave if everyone else starts leaving. The market value of my house would probably drop significantly. Does that mean my property taxes would, too? Maybe. But my mortgage balance wouldn’t go down. My state income taxes wouldn’t go down.
    Regardless of what would happen to me, NJ would be good and well fncked.

  183. I hope you’re not suggesting that these stories had the same kind of public profile that Obama bitherism did – over the course of a decade or so.

  184. Fast learners:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/republican-senators-roy-moore-give-him-a-chance
    I remember when Hitler was climbing the ladder too and at each rung he attained, even some of the folks he promised to murder said “maybe he’s being stereotyped. Let’s see what happens. Maybe he’ll just murder the no-good Jews and leave the good ones alone.”
    The gay alt-right wants those tax cuts. They can use them to build bigger closets once Moore makes their love a felony.

  185. Not to mention that the facts of those births outside the US weren’t the basis of the debate. Obama was born in the US, which should have been the end of the story.

  187. rump added that what really rankled him was that Price didn’t stay in rump fleabag hotels on his travels and charge his per diem to the taxpayer:
    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/price-could-be-fired-over-private-jet-use-trump-indicates-2017-09-27?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    Only the big dog is permitted to be a lying, cheating, thieving, corrupt republican conservative, but I repeat myself.
    rump also asked it Martin Shkreli is available to take over Price’s murder gig at HHS. “That guy knows his price points.”

  188. A more relevant conservative republican racist tactic vis a vis McCain were the venomous attacks on his adopted dark-complected Bangladeshi daughter in South Carolina.
    He put up with it because he wants the tax cuts.

  190. MD’s income tax is fairly high, because there is a county-level income tax levied on the middle of the road state income tax.

  191. Why do I have to go to a conservative website to read this:
    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-real-problem-the-militarization-of-the-nfl/
    if rump gets his way, next year’s Super Bowl halftime will feature a parade of ICBMS, tanks, killer drones flying in formation and an aircraft carrier dragged across the 50 yard line.
    American worships the military submission of the world just as Russia and China do.
    Better that professional sports feature sign-up info for Obamacare open season with booths to facilitate. But wait, even the website has been ordered shut down for 12 hours EVERY Sunday for “maintenance” during the shortened period.
    Because making Americans more likely to fucking die from lack of health insurance is a conservative principle, just as promoting our fetish with blowing shit up abroad is conservative principle.
    Concussions at home, concussions overseas.

  192. Just remember, it is the sacred right of every American to stand and listen to their national anthem before spending several hours imbibing overpriced beer while fervently cheering for adults playing children’s games.

  193. “I imagine Delaware’s population would increase quite a bit, what with all the people from NJ and PA moving there.”
    Moving there and INCORPORATING. It seems to be the only way to keep your rights & political influence.

  194. Actually, it’s the sacred right of every American to sell beer at the concession stands while the national anthem is being sing.
    Just as it is the scared right of every American to stand at the foot of flagpoles flying the largest American flags ever manufactured while lying their asses off about the value of an exorbitant undercoating on a new car.
    Don’t let it get around that the author of the Pledge of Allegiance was a Socialist and a strict adherent of the constitutional separation of church and state. Contemporary conservative republican assholes, who are neither conservative nor American will be removing their children from schools and taking a knee in protest.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bellamy
    He didn’t include the words “under rump” in the pledge either.
    ‘Bellamy was a Christian socialist[1] who “championed ‘the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus.'”[6] In 1891, Bellamy was “forced from his Boston pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism”,[2] and eventually stopped attending church altogether after moving to Florida, reportedly because of the racism he witnessed there.[7]’

  195. I’ll bet Roy Moore gets all sentimental weepy-eyed when he recites the Pledge.
    He’d jail and probably kill Bellamy.
    If Bellamy was alive and protested at a rump rally or any fucking subhuman republican political rally in this fucked up time, he’d be set upon by the new republican, anti-American filth.

  196. rump has removed the in-flight refueling feature of the soon-to-be manufactured Air Force Ones:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/09/air-force-one
    Seems he wants future Presidents to stay aloft for a little while during a nuclear Holocaust or a future 9/11 and then land to be incinerated like the rest of us, or better yet, plummet to Earth and crash.
    Now that’s populist.
    Wait, republicans will have to pay extra to retrofit.
    Conservative principles spreading throughout your ruined pigfucking government.

  197. Alabama has a choice between true American decency:
    “And, not for nothing, but Moore’s opponent is a guy named Douglas Jones. In 2001, Jones convicted two men for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, one of the iconic white supremacist terrorist acts of that period. One of those bastards already died in prison and the other keeps getting denied parole. If you’d rather be represented in the Senate by a lawless theocratic lunatic, rather than a guy that finally got justice for four murdered little girls, well, you deserve anything that goddamn happens to you.”
    Excerpted from:
    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12484953/who-is-roy-moore/
    …. or right wing crypto-Christian, fag-murdering, racist right wing fascism.
    The National Republican Party, the Republican Congress, and the White House have decided which one they want.
    If they get their way, it will be the last choice they ever fucking make.

  202. Who da slow learners?
    It takes white conservative filth 230 years to figure out the rudiments of the First Amendment, but they can read any sort of murderous weapon of war into the Second Amendment.
    Fuck off, motherfuckers.
    According to Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker:
    “Sixty years ago, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, became a flash point in the nascent civil-rights movement when Governor Orval Faubus refused to abide by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Faubus famously deployed the state’s National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from attending classes at the high school. In the midst of the crisis, a high-school journalist interviewing Louis Armstrong about an upcoming tour asked the musician about his thoughts on the situation, prompting Armstrong to refer to the Arkansas governor as several varieties of “motherfucker.” (In the interest of finding a printable quote, his label for Faubus was changed to “ignorant plowboy.”) Armstrong, who was scheduled to perform in the Soviet Union as a cultural ambassador on behalf of the State Department, cancelled the tour—a display of dissent that earned him the scorn and contempt of legions of whites, shocked by the trumpeter’s apparent lack of patriotism.
    The free-range lunacy of Donald Trump’s speech on Friday night in Alabama, where he referred to Colin Kaepernick—and other N.F.L. players who silently protest police brutality—as a “son of a bitch,” and of the subsequent Twitter tantrums in which the President, like a truculent six-year-old, disinvited the Golden State Warriors from a White House visit, illustrates that the passage of six decades has not dimmed this dynamic confronted by Armstrong, or by any prominent black person tasked with the entertainment of millions of white ones. There again is the presence of outrage for events that should shock the conscience, and the reality of people who sincerely believe, or who have at least convincingly lied to themselves, that dissenters are creating an issue where there is none. Kaepernick began his silent, kneeling protest at the beginning of last season, not as an assault against the United States military or the flag but as a dissent against a system that has, with a great degree of consistency, failed to hold accountable police who kill unarmed citizens…
    Yet the belief endures, from Armstrong’s time and before, that visible, affluent African-American entertainers are obliged to adopt a pose of ceaseless gratitude—appreciation for the waiver that spared them the low status of so many others of their kind. Stevie Wonder began a performance in Central Park last night by taking a knee, prompting Congressman Joe Walsh to tweet that Wonder was “another ungrateful black multi-millionaire.” Ungrateful is the new uppity. Trump’s supporters, by a twenty-four-point margin, agree with the idea that most Americans have not got as much as they deserve—though they overwhelmingly withhold the right to that sentiment from African-Americans. Thus, the wonder is not the unhinged behavior of this weekend but rather that it took Trump so long to exploit a target as rich in potential racial resentment as wealthy black athletes who have the temerity to believe in the First Amendment…”

  204. Wear the double-edged spurs, popular in Filipino cock-fighting, when you go after Seagal.
    He uses his hands as weapons, but he keeps a small pistol strapped to his ankle for cheating purposes, like all cowards.
    That vacant squint of his is him putting his full two-synapse brain power to work trying to remember the time Jackie Chan removed Seagal’s athletic cup during a match and presented it to him filled with plucked pansies, all in one deft move.

  216. No, here’s what is misguided. That a murderer wears the flag-lapel pin:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul-ryan-misguided-protest-anthem-flag
    Nothing like it, when conservative republican psychopaths let their victims twist in sadistic uncertainty …. remember their pigfucking whinging about uncertainty …. and then murder the children:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/after-sinking-months-into-failed-repeal-congress-poised-to-let-health-programs-expire

Comments are closed.