February, 2019 archive
Gaming the Game 0
In the lead up to the Super Bowl (which I shall honor by watching a mystery show or two*), Peter Certo points out that those who bemoan the “politicization” of pro football conveniently forget who promulgated said politicization.
Here’s a bit from his article; I commend the rest of it to your attention:
But it wasn’t the “social justice warriors” who politicized football.
In fact, professional football has been deeply politicized for years. Maybe you didn’t notice before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, but the fact that one guy on one knee sparked a national firestorm highlights the politics of the stage on which he acted.
It wasn’t until 2009, for example, that NFL players were even required to leave the locker room for the national anthem, much less stand for it.
That year, the Pentagon was gearing up for a major troop surge in the Afghan war, which even 10 years ago was already old, unpopular and largely forgotten. It needed recruits, and it needed a compliant public.
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*I’m not sure what turned me off first: the blatant corruption of the NCAA or the brutality (think CTE) of the NFL. Whichever it may be, I can no longer enjoy watching large men run into each other at high speed.
The Trumpettes May Blow . . . . 2
. . . but Leonard Pitts, Jr., doesn’t care to listen. Indeed, he publishes his “don’t bother to read” list. An excerpt:
(snip)
At this stage of the game, how much satisfaction is there in being able to say, “I told you so?”
About as much as there is in buying a fire extinguisher after the house burns down.
Follow the link for more.
“The Bible Tells Me So . . . .” 0
The Las Vegas Sun concedes that Sarah Huckabee Sanders may have a point in stating that God wanted Donald Trump to be the American President. It examines the evidence. Here’s a bit:
- Plague of fiery hail. What is Trump’s Twitter account if not the modern, digital version of this form of torture?
- Plagues of flies and lice. See Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, the Mooch, etc.
Follow the link for more witness.
The GOP Health Plan: “Don’t Get Sick. If You Do Get Sick, Die Quickly” 0
Thom tries to understand why Republicans are so dead set against affordable health care. Callers propose various theories.
(I think the second caller may be onto something.)
None Dare Call It Terrorism 0
Will Bunch is considers the continuing cascade of mass shootings. A nugget:
Terrorism.
A Picture Is Worth, Democracy Inaction Dept. 0
Headline: McConnell: Making It Easier to Vote Is Undemocratic
An illustrative rendering thereof:
Image via Job’s Anger.
“Those Words Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean” 0
Werner Herzog’s Bear decodes de code.
Geeking Out 0
The KDE Plasma desktop environment on Debian 9 with the GkrellM system monitor and Firefox with the Quick Dial speed dial plugin running on a Zareason Mediabox computer.
Aside:
Quick Dial will sync as part of a normal Firefox sync. You don’t have to create an account at somewebsite.com the provenance of which you know nothing.
It allows you to choose a background image from your own image library, but the backgrounds will not sync; they must be selected locally on each machine.
Quick Dial also gives you more options for configuring the appearance of the individual dials than I have encountered with any other speed dial plugin. For example, you can change the labels of the individual dials, as well as the color of their font and background. This is useful when the default title is “All the News You Can Use | Some City’s Newspaper”; that can be edited down to “Some City’s Newspaper.”
I like it so much that I kicked in a small donation to the maintainer and you can too.
