Current Affairs

African-American blindness to discrimination and animus in their own house

graham March 18, 2018 0 Comments

Sheesh, here we go again…
One of the more distressing aspects of race relations in the modern USA is the tendency of the African-American community to sign onto anti-Jewish ideas and conspiracy theories, and, when challenged on their public statements, to behave like rhetorical shitweasels.
There is a rich vein of such rhetoric, including the Rev.Jesse Jackson’s infamous “Hymietown” outburst about New York, and Louis Farrakhan’s numerous anti-Jewish references and comments, which he often tries to weasel out of when challenged.
Now we have another eye-opening instance from D.C. Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8), who apparently thinks that “the Rothschilds” control the climate. When challenged on the statement, he engaged in rhetorical shit-weaselling of the first order.
This is distressing. It is distressing because, at a time when animus by white nativists is manifesting itself against anybody who does not look white, and is being accompanied by a clear rise in anti-Jewish rhetoric, plus the return of active campaigning to roll back gay equality, communities impacted by this animus should be forming a united front to push back on it, not being divided.
The African-American community in the USA has multiple challenges on this front, since it is dismissing discrimination against other minorities, or itself engaging in the very racially, ethnically and religiously based discrimination that it rightly decries in others. Some commentators seem to realize this, but other leaders in the African-American community engage in rhetorical tap-dancing when asked about (say) the latest pronouncements of Louis Farrakhan.
Some contemplation in front of a mirror is required.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-lawmaker-says-recent-snowfall-caused-byrothschilds-controlling-the-climate/2018/03/18/daeb0eae-2ae0-11e8-911f-ca7f68bff0fc_story.html?utm_term=.9f7cbab4bb61

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

How to be useful on the Internet

graham March 18, 2018 0 Comments

Just a quick note about profiles and postings in this morass that we call the Internet.
Onlne, there are two extremes for how you present yourself. You can be a person, a three-dimensional individual, defined by your underlying personality and values, with useful and illuminating things to say.
Or you can be a slogan-based cipher, a source of nothing better than word salad and contentious nonsense, useful only as unserious troll-bait for fellow in-group members and the easily impressed.
Don’t be a slogan-based cipher.
In order to not be a slogan-based cipher, there are some things you should NOT do.
1. Don’t define yourself in your profile by your political positions or religious affiliations
Phrases like “constitutional conservative”, “commited socialist” or “devout Christian” are borrowed slogans that tell me you would rather be part of a herd than an individual in your own right. Talk about who you are, not which club you belong to.
2. Don’t brag about your skills or qualifications
A self-aggrandising phrase like “High IQ” immediately activates my bullshit detector. Really smart people don’t feel the need to assert their smartness. They expect that it will noticed over time. Only bullshitters and/or deeply insecure people try this.
3. Don’t include statements that make you look like a mean-spirited dick
Statements like “hates liberals” may get you an attaboy from Bill down at the bar, but they activate my Avoid Like The Plague switch. If you want to live in an echo chamber with other dicks, however, go right ahead.
(By the way, anybody who “hates Liberals” is telling me that they have somebody else living in their head and destroying them as a person).
4. Don’t plaster visual symbols all over your postings or profile to show how patriotic or American you are
Symbols, by definition, are not tangible things. Those pissed-off-looking eagles and the Stars and Stripes are being used in lieu of explanations. When you put a row of eagles on your avatar instead of an image of yourself, you tell me that you would rather signal virtue to an in-group than provide any useful information about YOU.
5. Don’t use memes to communicate on serious subjects
You should know my opinion on this by now. If you post a meme, you are using somebody else’s voice, not your own. I can find a meme for anything in 1 minute or less on Google. I want to read YOUR voice, not somebody else’s.
6. Extend the principle of charity
When somebody says something that you think is wrong or stupid, don’t assume that they are stupid. Assume that they merely see things differently from you, and inquire rather than attack.
7. Don’t use logical fallacies
If you don’t know what a logical fallacy is…well, there is still time to find out. Here. Here. Here.
People who are not interested in good-faith discussions almost always use logical fallacies, often without realizing it.
8. Don’t be a juvenile.
If you are discussing on a serious subject, talking like a school playground yahoo completely undermines the seriousness and credibility of anything you might say or write. Serious subjects generally require that you behave like an adult and devote some attention.
9. Don’t be a dick.
It’s not difficult to be kind.
10. Don’t be a dick.
Try to be nice. It’s not hard.

Current Affairs

Delta Airlines vs. Georgia – the next phase in the game

graham March 7, 2018 0 Comments

Delta Airlines responded defiantly to the news that the State of Georgia removed a clause from a tax incentive bill that would have given it a break on jet fuel purchases within Georgia. (NOTE – This was not specific to Delta – other airlines would also have benefited from the tax concession; however, Delta had more to gain because its main hub is in Georgia).
Delta also leaked some interesting titbits, the most important one being that a grand total of 13 NRA members had taken advantage of the now-discontinued discount program. If that is the correct number, the program was a waste of money for Delta, even before the public backlash when the existence of the program was discovered. You don’t have to be a math genius to work out that there was no upside to continuing the program.
The decision to strip the fuel concession from the bill was a state-wide political decision. Atlanta is a Democratic city, and rural Georgia is solidly Republican. The decision would therefore have appealed to rural GOP voters as sticking it to the corrupt Dems in Atlanta. All good retail politics in an election season.
The main question is: what next?
Delta is unlikely to leave Atlanta. They just extended for another 20 years with the City to use Hartsfield-Jackson as their man hub. They could leave, but long-term contracts like this one are difficult to get out of. When I visited Nashville in 2002 en route home from ORD to DFW (in the days when I had flight benefits on American Airlines), I found out that American had abandoned Nashville as a hub after 9/11, reducing it to a destination from several other hubs (ORD, DFW and RDU). However, they still had long term leases on close to 20 gates at the airport that they could not get out of. So some of the gates were shuttered, and some of them had been leased to SouthWest Airlines. The AA flights into and out of Nashville were full, but AA was losing money (“loadings are great, but yields are terrible” was the succinct summary of one of the AA gate agent supervisors) because of the combination of high fixed costs they could not get out of, plus competition from SouthWest, who were being subsidized via the cheap sub-leased gates.
So…Delta could leave ATL, but it is unlikely to do so, unless another city comes up with a dizbustingly-enticing tax and/or subsidy package.
What I think is most likely to happen is that the tax concession will be quietly resurrected in another bill, and passed later this year after the fuss has died down. Delta has been a GOP money donor, and the GOP will not be keen to lose donations in the future.
The entire incident is an example of what happens when virtue signalling becomes the main public currency of retail politics. Delta cancelled discounts for NRA members because there was no upside any more, given the backlash after the Parkland school shooting (Virtue Signal #1). The Georgia GOP removed the fuel tax concession from the bill to show that they could punish Delta and energize their base in an election season (Virtue Signal #2). Delta’s CEO informed the public that “their values are not for sale (Virtue Signal #3). If they are smart, the GOP will now repair the damage by quietly re-instating the fuel tax concession.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US, Uncategorized

The Delta Airlines NRA mess – the real game

graham February 28, 2018 0 Comments

The Lt. Governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle, caused a row 2 days ago by invoking a process to suspend debate on a bill in the State legislature that would have provided a tax concession on aviation fuel for Delta Airlines.
His stated reason was that Delta is discriminating against the NRA.
The stated reason is bullshit.
Delta was granting NRA members certain discounts on its services. These discounts were not available to customers who were not NRA members. The NRA members were therefore enjoying a privilege.
Removal of the discount was therefore removal of a privilege, not discrimination.
It is not clear to me whether the threat to withhold tax concessions to Delta violates any state or federal laws. At best, it is clearly an attempt to punish a corporation for offending political sensibilities. As such, the precedent is a dangerous one.
However, the backdrop to this action is easier to understand. The current Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, is term-limited. There are multiple GOP candidates to replace him. A primary election is scheduled to determine who the Republican candidate will be, and Casey Cagle is one of the primary candidates.
The action to try and derail the tax concession for Delta is therefore almost certainly an attempt to appeal to GOP primary voters. Just to validate that hypothesis, another GOP primary candidate for the Governorship, Michael Williams, claimed on-air today in a CNN interview that Delta grants discounts to Planned Parenthood supporters. (when pressed on the source for the claim, he cited Google as a source, and then ducked and weaved. Well OK then.).
What is going on here, folks, is an attempt by GOP primary candidates to out-crazy each other to appeal to their base. This is because in the current GOP world, winning the primary is all that matters. They expect to win the general election because…the GOP always wins.
The right answer is for them to emerge from the primary process looking like censorious twits, and lose the general. However, that is up to the electorate in the state of Georgia.
In the meantime, Georgia can kiss goodbye to any idea that Amazon might move there, and other states are only too willing to talk to Delta Airlines about moving its HQ and hub from Atlanta. Corporations always have options, and they can probably get a better tax deal from another state, which might leave Georgia with a 30+k job hole if that is the outcome.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Jay Rosen take on how the media has to change

graham February 21, 2018 0 Comments

This Twitter thread explains how the media has to change in order to combat the current rock vs. hard place zone that they have drifted into.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

How to spot trollbots on social media

graham February 21, 2018 0 Comments

When you look at social media accounts that are not what they claim to be, they fall into one of three general categories:

1. Real Person engaging in impersonation or astroturfing
This is still the most common behavior pattern. On the internet, you can be anybody you want to be, and you can pretend to be anywhere on the planet. Trollbot factories can have hundreds of fake accounts, many of them operated by the same person or group of people.

2. Partly automated trollbot account, sometimes operated by multiple persons
This is becoming more common. It gives trolling and social media subversion organizations the best of both worlds. In off-hours, the account will be set up to automatically post or replicate content from elsewhere. When the operators are awake, they will post and comment manually.

3. Fully automated bot
These are becoming less common, since they can be more easily spotted by tools. These are set up to post previously stored content, or to replicate content posted elsewhere by using keyword triggers to copy and re-post content. Usually, analysis shows that there is no original content from the account, it consists entirely of content copied from elsewhere. Sometimes hundreds of accounts are set up to re-post the same content.

Ways to spot accounts
So here is a base list of the ways in which you can spot accounts that are not what they claim to be. This is not exhaustive, and the trollbot factories are consistently coming up with new variations to try and outflank bot detection algorithms.

Account Names and bios
1. Account name that comprises mostly numeric digits, like Ann2865743. These are usually accounts created by an account mass creation or replication engine. These accounts usually have no picture or avatar and no bio.
2. Bio that consists of a long collection of hashtags or slogans like #MAGA, #TRUMP.
3. Use of a stock photo, or photo of a well-known person as the account avatar. Many fake accounts use stock images lifted from the internet, or images of famous people. (One account on Twitter that I suspected of being a Russian trollbot used an image of what turned out to be a Russian porn actress)

Posting patterns
1. Following huge number of people, but has next to no friends or followers
2. Creating massive numbers of postings or comments in a short time period, far more than a real human could reasonably be expected to type and submit. If you do the math and find that the account is creating 100 postings an hour…that is indicative of an automated bot account.
3. Discrepancy between stated location, time zone and actual posting patterns (this is especially obvious on Twitter accounts). If an account claims to be in Lost Angeles, but seems to be tweeting on Moscow time, that is a bit of a giveaway. (One Twitter account that I monitored claimed to be in the UK, but always posted on Moscow time).
4. Posting patterns point to the account operator residing in a time zone that clearly aligns with a notorious trollbot location (good examples are Moscow and Vladivostok).
5. Daily posting patterns show a spurt of postings over a 1-2 hour period, or constant posting over 24 hours. Neither of these are what you would expect if a real human being was operating the account. Humans do tend to sleep from time to time…

Posting content
6. Poor command of written English. Often the use of Google Translate results in stilted or grammatically incorrect sentences, since the authors link slogans and phrases to form a sentence without understanding the underlying English grammar rules (which are complicated compared to some other languages).
7. Discrepancies between postings concerning where the account is located, the age of the account owner, the account owner’s life etc. etc. When the account owner’s bio keeps changing from day to day, this is a bit of a giveaway.
8. Discrepancy between the dialect of English in use. Classic one is an account pretending to be in the UK, but constantly using spelling and idioms from American English.
9. Discrepancy between expected careabouts and actual careabouts. Example is account pretending to be in the USA but posting about European subjects. Many Russian trollbots constantly post about subjects like the Ukraine, which looks odd if they are claiming to be from Baltimore…
10. Inclusion of markup language tags in postings or comments due to poor software coding or usage skills. This is a real giveaway that this is an account that is (at least part of the time) set up to automatically post content.
11. Analysis of postings on the platform shows that the same content has been posted by dozens (sometimes hundreds) of accounts within a short period of time. A search often reveals identical text posted hundreds of times within a matter of minutes.
12. Analysis of the account shows that it was dormant for a long period of time, but has suddenly been posting massive amounts of content. This is indicative of an account that was created, but parked for later use. Many Twitter trollbot accounts were created as far back as 2009, but have only recently been active
13. Numerous account name changes over time. Real people tend to not change their account names that frequently. Trollbot accounts do it all the time, as they are re-purposed to post on the Latest Hot Topic.

Current Affairs

Bad behavior online (surprise surprise)

graham February 17, 2018 0 Comments

Folks, this is where I get upfront, blunt and candid.
I was reminded why I booted a person off of my Facebook last year when I encountered that same person trying to debate on somebody else’s wall today.
I say “trying”, because all of the classic signs of poor online behavior that led to me booting the person last year were still on display.
If your idea of a contribution to a debate is to post one or more of a combination of memes, collections of slogans or juvenile ad hominems,and attempts at diversion, then it will only be a matter of time before I unfriend, mute and/or block you.
You have a right to say and write whatever you like (assuming it does not rise to the level of a clear and present threat to the safety or lives of others). I also have the right to object and argue against it.
When I argue against assertions or propositions, I expect the person making the proposition to bring evidence and facts to support their proposition. That’s how debate and discussion work. Throwing memes, cliches, rhetorical bombs, attempting diversions and whatboutism, and generally behaving like a schoolyard juvenile doesn’t cut it.
I will, after warning you, walk away from that kind of interaction. It is a waste of my time. If you persist in wasting my time across multiple interactions, I will fire you off of my Facebook wall. That is a promise.
No, that is not “censorship” or me being intolerant or a snowflake. If your reaction is to simply hurl more slogans like that, well, what did I just say in a previous paragraph?
Right now, there are several people who are on Mute on my Facebook, either because because they have engaged in those behaviors in the past, or because they have expressed opinions that I find to be toxic or logically ludicrous. At some point i am going to un-Mute them and see if their behavior has improved. If there is no sign of improvement, they will get the heave-ho.
As a general rule I don’t fire people out of my social media world for expressing contrary opinions.Taking people or information sources seriously only if they express views that you totally agree with is a short cut to conformity and groupthink.
I usually fire them for behaving like dicks when discussing those opinions.
Contrary to what some people have claimed in the past, this policy is not me being pompous or condescending, or tuning our or censoring Stuff I Don’t Like. It is my way of using my time effectively. I don’t debate or discuss to “win”. I debate or discuss to gain insight. When people talk or argue in slogans and memes, they are not using their own voice, and they are usually not providing any cogent argument. On two counts, there is no insight likely with that style of communication. That wastes my time, and provides me with no positive RoI from interactions. So I will either not engage, or rapidly disengage, and if people persistently behave like toxic juveniles, they will get booted out of my online sphere.

Current Affairs

Holy flaming peckerballs Batman…

graham February 13, 2018 0 Comments

If there really is a deity, may that deity come down from wherever and spare us.
I want us to be spared from the avalanche of intellectually risible, fear-addled ratchet-jawing by fringe media frontmen (and notice, this is all men in my posting) who seem to think that the recently released portrait of former President Obama contains all sorts of pointers and symbols to…
Well…why don’t we take a quick look at what the looney-tunes ratchet-jaws are claiming, shall we?

1. Sean Hannity
A two-fer here, since Hannity, more even than Alex Jones, appears to have come unglued about the portrait. First he wrote this Tweet, but, realizing that maybe the mask had slipped, deleted it:

Sean Hannity has deleted this now, because the classic racism was too obvious, too clownish, too blatant, too much of a self-parody. Hannity's primary job at @FoxNews is to make racism seem reasonable, so that it spreads. pic.twitter.com/h5E66AMNam

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) February 13, 2018

Then he went on this rant about supposedly hidden detail in the portrait that of course, only he, the great savant, can see:

Sean Hannity says Obama's portrait artist included "sexual innuendo" with secret sperm https://t.co/zLg9D6TZ8k pic.twitter.com/4PDFa5BRlf

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) February 13, 2018

2. Alex Jones

Alex Jones claims that Kehinde Wiley secretly painted a sperm on Obama's presidential portrait to fulfill a globalist plot to make the world a "ritual of abomination"https://t.co/ZK1oXrJNB2

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 13, 2018

Whisky Tango Foxtrot. cubed.
This is an effing portrait we are looking at here.
Here we have two commentators who appear to have completely jumped the shark into…who knows where?
I remain consistently amused at the level to which authoritarian dim-bulbs and their wind-up rabble-rousers consistently invoke sexual metaphor and fear trigger-phrases when talking about Other Folks Not Like Them. How many times have we read phrases along the lines of “I don’t want homosexuality rammed down my throat”? A real psychologist would have a field-day analyzing how fearful exclusionary authoritarians use THAT phrase.
And here we have more of the same. “secret sperm”? Perlease.
This isn’t a dog-whistle. It isn’t rooted in reality, or anywhere within 100 fucking light-years of reality. This is the exemplification of fear-addled, racism-soaked fantasy. The umpteenth recycling of the old fear trope that Those People Who Don’t Even Look Like Us are actually a band of marauding, primitive savages, who are in the grip of the caranlistic desire to gang-rape Your Family Members.
If this was part of a fantasy novel plot, literary agents would be laughing at it. You should too. Ridicule is the only appropriate and logical response to these conspiracy-mongering wombats.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Arthur Jones and what he tells us about our country

graham February 8, 2018 0 Comments

By now most of you will have heard that Arthur Jones has managed to get himself on the Republican primary election ballot for the 3rd Congressional District in Illinois.
This is not Arthur Jones’ first attempt to win the GOP nomination for the seat. He put himself on the primary ballot in 2016, and was the only GOP candidate. However, the GOP went to court and succeeded in having him removed from the ballot because of petition signature issues. This left the Democratic nominee to win in an uncontested election. This time around, Jones appears to have ticked all of the boxes for the legality of his primary election submission.
There seems little doubt that Jones is a Nazi. The evidence is fairly compelling. He is a former leader of the American Nazi party, and is on record as claiming up to the present day that the Holocaust is a “racket” i.e. mostly a fabrication. He has a track record of blatantly anti-Jewish remarks.
A lot of people are hot under the collar about Jones’ appearance on any ballot.
We should not be surprised that this has happened.
Really.
Arthur Jones has not suddenly leaped into prominence in the GOP because the GOP has become a party of Nazis. He simply used a feature of the current political system; namely that anybody who can obtain the necessary number of supporter signatures and pay a filing fee can run for office. This is a good feature. We do not want a system where only the wealthy, or those with the right connections, can run for political office.
Personally, I also want Nazis to be public about their odious ideology and ideas. I want to have those ideas demolished in public, so that the entire Nazi movement can once again be consigned to the trash bin of human history.
Is Jones’ entry on the GOP primary ballot the result of a shift in the American political climate towards the normalization of racist and fascist ideology? That is a tempting hypothesis in the current climate, but I doubt its validity.
The real underlying issue is that 90% of Congressional races are not competitive. They are not competitive because over the last 60 years, the two major political parties have, by subtle electoral gerrymandering, slowly reduced the number of truly competitive House seats to a fraction of the total. This has resulted in a an incumbent class of representatives dominating congressional politics.
Most seats are now stacked heavily in favor of one of the parties, to the extent that a dead tree stump could probably get elected from the party that dominates the electoral map of the district.
Because the general election itself is usually a foregone conclusion, this has two consequences, both of them negative:
1. Good prospective candidates from a minority party have no interest in running in the primary election, except possibly as a one-off to show that they have the “right stuff” to later run for election elsewhere. Why invest time and donor money on a lost cause?
2. The primary elections, which are usually dominated by the hardcore support base of the two major parties, decide who will be the elected representative.
Neither of these are good outcomes. For an election system based on universal suffrage to be credible, it must be demonstrably fair in its structure and execution, and enough of the electorate has to participate for the winning candidates to be able to plausibly claim that they were elected by enough of the electorate to give their position and actions credibility. An election determined 6 months in advance by a few hundred primary voters does not meet either of the above criteria.

The GOP clearly understands how toxic Arthur Jones is to their party and their brand image. They want nothing to do with him.
However, one can make the case that it is partly the GOP’s fault that Jones is the GOP nominee. They could have run an “establishment” candidate, but chose to not do so (one suspects that no mainstream GOP person was interested in wasting the time and effort to run), handing him the opening to run for the GOP primary election. So, whether they want him or not, they are stuck with him sailing under the GOP banner for the next few months.
The good news is that Arthur Jones is highly unlikely to win the election in the 3rd Congressional District. This is a solidly Democratic electoral zone. In the 2014 and 2012 elections, the incumbent Democratic congressman won the district by an average of 65% to 35%. So it is long odds-on that Jones will be defeated by a large margin. The GOP will therefore not try the Roy Moore approach of vacillating over supporting him, distancing themselves from him in public while secretly funneling money and support to him in private. The GOP has no chance of winning the seat.
Since he is already disowned by the GOP, Jones will be unconstrained, and we can expect to read more incendiary comments and allegations from him as he seeks to gain attention. To use the old military expression, Jones will therefore cause collateral damage to the GOP by his very appearance on the ballot. The Democratic Party will seek to use his utterances as proof that the GOP supports racists and nazis. That may help them nationally, but, as is usual in the adversarial two party system, it completely ignores the underlying causes of why crackpots like Arthur Jones can even gain any traction.

Current Affairs, Current Affairs - US

Bill is getting ready for Superbowl

graham February 4, 2018 0 Comments

Bill hobbles slowly from the kitchen into the living room of his small house. His dog is sprawled, oblivious, on the carpet in front of the television.
Bill looks down at the dog. Damn it, he thinks, I wish I could be my dog. He doesn’t seem to have a dicky back and a creaking knee.
Bill went to see the doctor last week, after months of being nagged by his favorite bar worker Randy. It cost him money – real money, and resulted in the doctor muttering a string of three letter acronyms, stuff like “ACL”, “PCL”.
Bill hates those medical professionals. They talk all big words and mumbo-jumbo, like they are educated or something. Maybe they’re in practice to become politicians. Whatever. Apparently Bill’s knee is about to fall apart, and he needs surgery. But Bill is not going to get surgery any time soon. After what happened with his back, Bill wants to stay away from those damn doctors for a while. In the meantime, he hobbles.
Bill has a few bar friends coming over for Superbowl. They are all mostly going to be cheering for the Eagles. Hell, why would you want the Patriots to win? With pretty-boy Brady under center, and that scowling guy Belichick running the show from the sideline?
But Bill, being cranky Bill, went out to the store and bought Patriots paper plates and cups. He wants to see the guys’ reaction. Plus, although he doesn’t care for the Patriots, the are Winners. And Bill respects winners. “Winners not whiners”, that was what his buddy Mark used to say at the factory all of those years ago, when they watched sports together.
Bill sometimes wonders how Mark is doing since the factory closed and he lost touch with him. Mark moved to California (of all places) to find work. California! Bill remembers joshing Mark at the bar when he admitted he was moving to the People’s Republic. Bill just hopes that Mark was not indoctrinated by all of those gay-loving Marxists in places like San Francisco. Mark’s daughter was the one that talked him into the move, and you know how devious women and girlfriends can be.
At one time, Bill’s wife would cook all manner of food for Superbowl, and they would even have the wives over. But since Bill’s divorce, he tells his male buddies to “just bring what you want to eat”. Mostly, they just drink and heckle the players, or discuss the female sideline reporters.
Bill still does not know why they have women on the sideline. This is a man’s sport, dammit. Let men be men, that’s what Bill says. All of this equality shit grates on him. If God had intended for women to be equal with men, he wouldn’t have given them tits and a pussy, har har.
Bill told the guys at the bar last night that this will probably be his last Superbowl. The NFL seems to have become a sissy league, with all of those silly rules about catches, pass interference, helmet-to-helmet…what is this shit? In Bill’s high school days, if you had your bell rung, they gave you smelling salts, and you put on the helmet and went out there and got stuck in again. None of this “how many fingers do you see? What is your name?” bullshit from those damn medical guys while the game went on. And then there are all of those guys kneeling for the anthem. How dare they. In my day, Bill would have jumped in the air to salute for the anthem. The NFL needs to clear all of those ungrateful sons of bitches out of the place. Like Donald said. Damn it, why won’t those whiny-ass fake news people shut the fuck up and let Donald take charge? He knows what is needed.
Bill glances across at the picture on the wall behind the sofa. The one that shows a mythical NFL player, like John Wayne, bursting into the end zone, as light shines, seemingly from above. Nice picture. Real Man conquers the world. Bill skates past the rest of the story in his mind. The part where he bought the picture the week after Superbowl, and hung it on the wall to cover a hole in the sheetrock. The hole made where he heaved a wine bottle through the wall after his favorite NFL team lost in overtime to exit the playoffs.
Bill spoke to his son for the first time in months the other day. His son lives in New York with his girlfriend, and they are getting married next year. Bill doesn’t know if he will be invited to the wedding. When he told her to shut up yapping and fuck off back to New York two Thanksgivings ago, after he realized that she was one of those East Coast limousine liberals that Rush talks about, his son didn’t speak to him for a year.
But it matter not matter any way. Bill doesn’t know for sure if he will even be able to walk by that time, at the rate that his knee is going, he will probably be in a wheelchair by then.
Bill sits down gingerly on the sofa, and the dog comes over and puts its head on his leg. Bill looks down at the dog, and suddenly feels sad. Why can’t everybody be like the dog? You know, eager to get along? Ley bygones be bygones?

Bill down at the bar, Current Affairs