Forgiveness for the Uninformed, Rage Against the News Machine / 2-6-12

Not forgiveness for the "Uniformed." That would be a very condescending post.

I kid, because defensive mechanism. In all honesty, I'm not sure what the point of this little essay is, yet. I'm going to start with a list, follow it with between one and a dozen observations, leading to a semblance of a point, perhaps gracing it all with a counterpoint, if you're lucky. I plan to offer a conclusiony item near the endy part.

(Not sure how it's all going to turn out. This is just how they teach you to operate in school. Begin to write, then think.)

Pre-thinking stage: engage.

a) Israel is thinking of starting a little war with Iran.

b) A riot killed 79 people in Egypt last week, and injured hundreds. The aftershock riot, a couple days later, killed 10 more.

c) Syria continues to knock off its citizens, day by day. Russia and China are vetoing any U.N. action.

d) Oh yeah, speaking of Russia, as hundreds of its citizens continue to die of cold, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in protest and support for apparent King Vladimir Putin.

e) The Republicans are choosing a presidential candidate, one state at a time. One guy seems to have taken charge, but it's been a pretty topsy-turvy ride so far.

f) Facebook is readying for what could be the largest IPO of all time. Hell, throw moderation out the window. This WILL be the largest one of all time.

g) Unemployment is dipping quickly.

h) Same-sex marriage is being considered/approved in three more states (WA, NJ, MN).

i) A Super Bowl was played yesterday. A good one, too. Record viewership for the game and the halftime show.

j) Outrage at the Susan B. Komen For the Cure's plan to defund Planned Parenthood caused the board to reverse its decision.

k) Citizens United is now two years old. The court case that paved the way for unlimited (unlimited!) donations from a single entity to a political campaign. It's being challenged everywhere, because most people are against bribery. (Unlimited donations! Pause for a second and think that one over.)

Those are just the top stories I can recite off the top of my head. A bit of shallow research reveals that a few other significant things are also ongoing.

l) Russian scientists are about to finish drilling through two miles of Antarctic ice and reach a pressurized underground lake that has not been explored for 100 million years. What's that again about the Mayan prophecy?

m) More European countries' debt ratings are in danger of being downgraded as they begin to deal with the consequences of unfunded spending programs. Like France and stuff. Big financial problems ahead, probably, with worldwide ramifications.

n) Fidel Castro was seen in public, touting a memoir. Remember him?

o) Hey, guess what: this little thing called "Occupy" is still happening, with peaceful protesters being mistreated by police every day, First Amendment be damned.

Thinking stage: engage.

First pointlet, then is that all that stuff listed above happened or continued to happen last week. How can a person possibly stay informed? Reading enough on each of these topics, just enough to rise above mal-informed to semi-informed, would take a person's entire trove of free time. No matter how much that person had! 168 hours might be sufficient, on a weekly basis, provided the person were a very fast reader. And possessed a time machine.

One could read headlines only. I have lots of days when that's all I can do. The experience is very unsatisfying, like a daily diet composed of fourteen snacks instead of three and a half meals.

I didn't even include any of the gossip "news" that bubbles at the surface -- Justin Bieber this, Kim Kardashian that, Brad Pitt this, MIA that. Best leave those "stories" to the professionals.

No sense in trying to stay up on the local stuff, either. Sticking strictly with national and international stories above, and just the big ones at that. Property taxes going up or serial killer strikes again in your town? You could hardly know that, unless it was your job to know so many things. So very many things.

That's why, today, pointlet two: I'm asking for and granting forgiveness to all uninformed parties everywhere. I am extending, right now, a blanket -- nay, a veritable quilt of mercy to all planetary inhabitants. You didn't know the city of Berkeley voted to pull out $300 million in assets from a large bank, so it could place the money in a more socially conscious place? Peace be with you. You didn't catch the headlines about the quake in the Philippines? Shalom anyway, Allahu Akbar and all that jazz. You holding on to something earth-shattering I didn't know about? I humbly beg your forgiveness.

There's too much information. It's too easy to disseminate. It's getting harder and harder to sort through it all, let alone keep up with a story for more than a day or two.

I'm not sure how this will turn out, still, but it appears a major point has stumbled into this post: We, as a nation, are bombarded with news. We've become are too adept at reporting stories. I submit that we have left the land of diminishing returns, news-wise, and have bravely set foot on a new patch of terra firma, where the amount of information available now places too much power in the hands of the aggregators and the opinion makers.

An amateur news-gatherer, or a semi-interested news reader, who has literally millions of informative blogs to choose from, is ironically more at the mercy now of news aggregators than ever before.

I can't stress enough how ironic the situation has become. There are hundreds of major news outlets slanted this way or that, and hundreds more trying so very hard to be unslanted. Old media and new media have merged -- you tell me how we should tell them apart. How do you find enough to make up your mind on any issue of importance? How do you find a reliable source, who will give you facts and analysis you can trust, and I don't mean based on ideology, but on sound thought processes and verifiable events?

For so very many of us, you don't. You stop by Daily Kos and the Huffington Post on your lunch hour if you're a liberal, catch some Rush Limbaugh on talk radio in the car and log on at redstate for a few minutes in the evening if you're a conservative. Why? Because you're not going to spend half your day researching a major issue or story, unless it's your job.

The junkiest of new junkies among us will always devour enough material to satisfy their appetites, and if they do it right, they'll turn that information into knowledge. The rest of us? Good freakin luck.

I don't think the current state of news presentation is healthy for our republic. But I also don't have a solution. Feel free to suggest one.

Ten Years. Now What? / 9-11-11

Happy September 11 to you.

I know, right? What do you say? How do you, well, celebrate? Celebrate? Remember? What. Gah.

Me? I slept in. I helped my brother move. I picked blackberries with my boys. We had a family dinner. I watched football, and agonized over the waning minutes of the fourth quarter of a Cowboys-Jets game (yep) that would mean fantasy league victory or defeat. (Thanks, Tony Romo, for your late-game ADHD moments!)

The most altruistic things I did, I would have done any other day. Packed a few boxes, moved some cabinets, made desserts for the neighbor kids, spent time being a good dad. It could have been Octemberpril 34th, for all the attention I paid the calendar today. I could have freakin' mowed the lawn, it was that kind of day.

That means something. For sure, some folks made today a day of service, or they did something significant to better the nation. Or they laid a flower somewhere, or they lit a candle, or they flew their flag.

Aw crap. The flag. Totally meant to do that. Our family loves displaying the flag. We take great pride in this nation's ideals, as symbolized by the Stars and Stripes. We flew it on Memorial Day 2011, Flag Day 2011, July Fourth 2011, and it'll probably make its way out there at Veterans Day 2011 too. Missed it today, though.

That means something.

Hm. There are no universally accepted 9/11 customs. It's only been ten years, after all. I didn't expect we'd all be exchanging gifts or sending family picture postcards or dressing up in red, white and blue, or anything like that on such short notice. But the event that was meant to unite us -- the event that did unite us, if ever so briefly -- has instead served mainly as a politicized flash point that separates Americans... often along party lines.

How you feel about the response to Sept. 11 -- a bungled war in Afghanistan, a couple trillion dollars and thousands of lives spent to messily redo Iraq, a ten-year manhunt for bin Laden that ended in a somewhat less than satisfying way -- how you feel about our last decade as a nation is bound to color how you commemorate it. And for half of us, we look at the last decade as an embarrassment, a missed opportunity, a stretch of history we'd rather forget quickly than relive annually. And then, for the other half of us, our military achievements of the last ten years have been giant foreign policy victories that have strengthened American hegemony, made us safer here at home, and crushed Al Qaeda like an unwanted insect.

Yeah, that's not the makings of a national holiday. Not even close.

OK, fine, maybe we can all agree on honoring first responders, firefighters, police officers, and ordinary heroes among us. I still get emotional thinking about what those folks accomplished that day. The bravery exhibited still floors me. When I put myself in their shoes...

But, like half the nation, I am shamed by the unconscionable actions we took between Sept. 12, 2001 and today. Such a colossal waste of life, money and such a wasted opportunity.

I'm not going to say that means the terrorists win. As comedian John Oliver likes to say, the terrorists are morons.

(Thank goodness, that means something too.)

But I think that in a way, America loses, until we figure out how to disassociate the date itself from the tragic, obscene, shameful acts of terrorism we perpetrated on innocent civilians, using that near-holy day of September 11, 2001 as a pretext.

So, no, not Happy September 11. Maybe someday. Or someday, Solemn September 11. Or Selfless September 11.

Can't wait until we get there, but like so many others these days, I am not hopeful.

Spring Bowl / 1-22-10

Remember the NFL's Pro Bowl?

Nah, me neither. I almost never watch it. For many years, it was held, rumor has it, on the week following the Big Game, in Hawai'i. Great way to end the season. Except everyone everywhere was all footballed out by then, including the Pro Bowlers themselves, so players skipped it, a bunch of injured superstar players skipped it out of necessity, and it's a freakin' exhibition. So lots of folks copied my original idea and failed to tune in to the game. In response to that well-deserved apathy, this year the league placed the Pro Bowl a week BEFORE the title game, in an effort to draw more attention and coverage.

Only now, a similar set of problems remains. It's still an exhibition. Injured players are still out. And players involved in the championship game get a pass... which could mean 15 players, or 20 percent of the entire roster, could opt out if Indianapolis and Minnesota win on Sunday. That's a joke.

Well, I have a drastic solution, which may not help one iota, but if the patient is terminal, it's not as if a few sessions of experimental treatment are going to harm the prognosis. It's been said before: Let's try that crazy thing. It'll either kill him or he'll get better. (Why yes, I have watched four seasons of "House." Why do you ask?)

Play the game in the spring. In mid-April. Yes, two-plus months AFTER the Big Game. (I can't even type the words "Super Bowl" without express written consent of the NFL, or my pants will be sued right off of me, which wouldn't be that terrible anyway since the webcam is broken. But anyway, enough Super Bowl chat.) Mid-April also happens to be four months before the preseason. It's right in the middle of nothing, sort of, for the players at least.

Because granted, this little thing called "the draft" is in late April, so some front offices like to use April to, you know, prepare 23 hours a day to select the wrong guy. That being said, several teams, including the suddenly inept Seahawks, hold April mini-camps, so many players are accustomed to some action that month. And scheduling the game before the draft allows for panicky teams to react a freak injury to their star left tackle, an event which, I'm told, can happen during actual football plays.

And now we're getting to the real problem with the Pro Bowl. Football players get hurt. The game is violent and demanding, even at the 50 percent speed utilized by Pro Bowl participants. If you're going to hold an exhibition, it needs to be as far removed from the season as possible, both to maximize participation and maximize potential recovery time.

And our collective national football hangover is usually done by April. Players have enjoyed multiple months off, and only a small amount of them have been arrested for shooting people. Baseball's opening days are through, the NBA and NHL have just embarked on their endless playoffs. The weather is even nice in places other than Hawai'i, Florida and California. You could have the game in almost any NFL stadium, even those places deemed "unfit" for the Big Game. (I'm not bitter or anything. Well, yes, I'm incensed.)

If you're going to play it at all, try it in April. Not that I'll watch anyway.

P.S. Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl Super Bowl ... Bite me Goodell!

Think again / 7-5-09

Steve McNair, renowned quarterback, died from a gunshot wound to the head this past weekend. And as the investigation into his death intensifies, it brought an oft-discussed issue to the forefront: why do guys from the NFL always seem to get into trouble?

And it happens everywhere. Locally, Seahawks star Lofa Tatupu was busted for a DUI last year, right about the time former Hawks star Koren Robinson had finished drinking and driving himself out of the league. Seahawks announcer and record-setting QB Warren Moon had already managed to get himself arrested on his own set of DUI charges near Christmas 2007. By the way, I'm going to leave out the rest of the Hawks' trouble, for space reasons. Away from Seattle, Hall of Famer Bruce Smith joined that same stupid club earlier this year. The capper: in March, Cleveland receiver Donte Stallworth killed a guy while driving drunk.

And then there's Michael Vick. Ugh... I don't even want to link to him anymore, I'd rather just forget he existed.

Wait... didn't O.J. play a down of football here or there?

So what kind of animal house is the NFL running anyway?

Not a very efficient one, I'd say, if the goal is to get guys into heaps of trouble. Pro football players are FAR LESS LIKELY to be arrested than the general population. No typo. Proof:

"We find two striking observations. First, we note that the NFL rates [of arrest] are less than half the general population rates for both whites and blacks. Second, we find that the NFL fraction is strikingly close for the two racial groups. Thus, even though our initial assessment was that the NFL rates looked very high, we find them well below the rates for the general population."

(Got that from a study published at Duke University in 2007. Done by scientist-type humans.)

LESS THAN HALF!

Well, that's just one study... except another one done by an intrepid reporter last year duplicated the results. 1 in 45 NFL players arrested in his research, compared with 1 of 23 of the rest of us.

So I'm hoping you'll forgive the caps, and twice at that, but I get really sick of people dumping on athletes who don't deserve it. Especially with the stickiness of racial stereotypes right beneath the surface of the conversation. (USA Today put 41 arrested NFL players on its covers throughout 2007. Care to guess how many were black? No, more. Higher. Almost there. Yep, bingo, 39.)

Can you be pissed at Tatupu for making an idiotic choice? Sure. Can you lament that McNair associated with the wrong people? Your call. Can you opine that oft-convicted cornerback Adam "Pac-Man" Jones is a complete waste of human cell tissue and all his talent should be transferred to someone who won't throw it away? Please do.

But cool the stereotypes, already.

(I'm really, really, really ready for some football.)

Michael Vick: Not in my doghouse / 5-21-09

Just in case you've been living at 123 Subterranean Ave., Underrock, Earth (ZIP code: -83686), you'll be pleased/aggrieved to learn that Mike Vick is out of the slammer. Yeah, the guy who used to be the NFL's next big thing, the guy who was supposed to revolutionize the QB position, the best thing since high fructose corn syrup, the guy on the cover of Madden 2004, that guy. He got out on Wednesday.

"Didn't he just serve time for running a cockfighting ring?"

It was dogfighting. But close enough. He just completed a relaxing 19-month stint at Leavenworth. The one in Kansas, where the federal pen is. Not the German-themed tourist trap in Central Washington. (Though there are striking similarities.)

So the guy's a gifted athlete. He's a free agent. Emphasis on free. But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is certain to place certain, um, conditions on his return to the league. You might say, tastelessly, that Michael Vick has been (ahem) put on a short leash.

Where does he land? The Raiders have a reputation for signing players with checkered pasts. The Seahawks' new head coach was Vick's coach in Atlanta. The Falcons' fan base still has feelings for him.

Well, let's kick it off at home: Michael Vick has an exactly 0.0 percent chance of landing in Seattle. This region is known for its lovery of dogs. ("Love" was just too weak of a word, it needed a suffix or two.) Seattle has the highest rate of dog treat bakeries per capita in the nation. Not. Happ. Ening. There would be a revolt.

My personal opinion is that a team will take a chance on him. He's too explosive of a talent for EVERYONE to pass on him. And there are too few good QB's in the league as it is. Or someone will plug him in at receiver or kick returner. (New England. Minnesota. Chicago. Jacksonville. Miami. One of those places. For what it's worth.)

And swiftly, he'll screw it up somehow. Vick's a classic knucklehead: he was busted for pot possession AFTER being hit with the dogfighting charges. You know me, I'm enthusiastically in favor of legalizing pot. But it takes a special kind of stupid to tempt fate by lighting up while awaiting other charges. And there's no indication he would have stopped with the caninicide anytime soon. Any regret, any remorse he expressed at sentencing -- or since -- is purely due to his getting caught, not a product of his conscience.

He'll last a year or so. Then a DUI or an assault charge will do him in. And we'll remember him as a flash-in-the-pan, when he could have been so much more.