Kickoff

I probably won't have much to offer through the weekend (Hmm, how unusual) as football gets started in earnest tonight.  Wouldn't hurt you either to take a break from your RBP addiction.

Do something else with your internet life.  You don't have to be an idolater for awhile, I'm not going anywhere, unless I die and go to hell.

That could happen, and OSU could beat tOSU Saturday in Columbus.  Actually, I give my demise a higher probability.

This is it, the day we've been waiting for, the real deal.  Last weekend was a small taste.

Tonight one of the most entertaining quarterbacks in college ball, McKenzie Milton, takes the field for Central Florida versus UConn.  UCF was undefeated last year, then head coach Scott Frost unsurprisingly split for Nebraska.

Be interesting to see how the team rolls without him.


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Neo-Slavery

In 1911 a congressional special committee convened to investigate the impact of new business practices on the lives of workers. Of particular interest to the committee was something called scientific management, a technique that sought to measure and improve worker productivity. The system’s most vocal proponent, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, had just published his magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s work would become an inspirational touchstone for the management profession. Indeed, his influence continues today. Articles profiling management pioneers often begin with him, lauding his efforts to apply precise metrics to even basic processes.--CR

No big surprise here if you've ever held a bullshit job.


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Crunchy

In the Age of Trump, American politics has come to resemble a drearily formulaic, militantly lowbrow, cutthroat, reality TV show.  As per the formula, each day’s news all but invites us to imagine a contest in which the most deplorable wins – gets to stay on the island, as it were, or to avoid being fired.

Trump would be a strong contender in his own right, though, if he were still only a sleazy, politically connected, wheeler-dealer flimflam man with bad taste, too much money, and a penchant for riding around in golf carts, nobody would pay him any mind. There are plenty more where he came from, and most of them are more interesting than he is.--AL

The always illuminating and crunchy Andrew Levine.


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New Book!/Oregon Football Diary

I've published my football diary, Third and a Mile.

You can read all about it at Round Bend Press Books.

Just in time for the 2018 kickoff, it's a hella deal for under 20$.  Read it at halftime of the big game.

Read it in bed...Well, maybe not.  You've already ignored your family all day while you were watching football.

Give everybody a hug instead, but read the book when you can.


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McCain, RIP

McCain was a scumbag and big fat liar.

I never respected the warmongering fraud when he lived, and I damn well can't comprehend why I should mourn him in death.





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Rewrite

If you buy into the notion that the Democratic Party is viable and representative, and capable of making itself over (I don't), this news is for you, but it's a little like advocating for coitus interruptus as a surefire method of inducing pregnancy, i.e., the percentages are against you.

Here's what the U.S. needs: a Second Constitutional Convention, and this time let the women, the slaves, the people of color, the unpropertied, the prisoners and the poor in on the deal.


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Blind Spot

It’s about more than news censorship, however. The “mainstream media” work relentlessly to reduce their consumers to view issues from the point of the merely personal and private. It erases the social, historical and institutional. It inculcates the primitive level of consciousness where one can grasp something as childish as “Omarosa and Stormy Daniels were treated badly by Donald Trump” but nothing more complex beyond the individual scale than “America Good, Its ‘Enemies’ Bad”—and certainly nothing as involved and ideologically verboten as “the American Empire and military-industrial complex is invested in the murder of children in the Middle East.”--PS

Paul Street nails it like a man building a shelter from the coming storm.


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This Season's Scandal

Meyer stood in front of a room full of reporters and television cameras Wednesday night, taking center stage in what was the biggest story in sports, and apologized more to "Buckeye Nation" than he did to Courtney Smith.

It's not just what Meyer said or the adolescent, bumbling way in which he delivered it. It's what he didn't say -- starting with her name.--HD

No surprise here, and a great piece.

Canzano does a good job here.

Folks, when I bring "Third and a Mile" out all of your questions will be answered.


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No There There

That is what is happening in the case of Julian Assange. Many American news outlets are willing to selectively use the documented evidence made available by Wikileaks. To do so is to draw on what the website has placed in the public domain. But they will not stand up and publicly defend the “whistleblower” who makes the information public. I imagine publishers, editors, and media moguls, and the vast majority of those they employ, just don’t have the courage to support the individual who breaks some unprincipled law or regulation designed to enforce silence in relation to official crimes and hypocrisy.--LD


Here is a terrific article on the abdication of the press regarding the case of Julian Assange. For the most part the press delivers a yawning silence followed by a 24-hour news cycle of yammering about the criminal Trump and his associates.

There's so much more out there, but who's going to get it?

Potatoes, no meat.


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Dressed for Success

Oregon has flashed some good ones over the years but nothing beats this 90's retro uni from 2014 (above), when Marcus Mariota and the Ducks thrashed Washington yet again on the way to the national championship game.

This is the one Oregon ought to go with.  Fuck the rest of them.

A lot of Duck fans think Oregon has rebounded enough this year to beat Washington, a poll favorite to make the CFP.

We'll see.  The game is in Autzen.


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AL West

With the A's and Astros tied like a granny knot for the AL West lead, and Seattle just 2.5 games behind them, it's coming down like a flash flood tonight in Seattle.

Seattle and the the Astros in the second game of three gets under way in about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile Oakland is hosting Texas.

As Jim Morrison said, "The West is the best."


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Land of the Freaks

What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts — stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude — has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.--WJA

Hear, hear!

Or as I wrote a couple years back.


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On the 300 "Victimized" Newspapers

In other words, Trump isn’t — despite what 300-plus newspaper editorial boards would have us think — a root cause of American crisis. He is a symptom of preexisting conditions. This is important. Because if we delude ourselves into thinking that getting rid of Trump will fix what ails us, things will only get worse.

Running down the list of what offends people about Trump, there is nothing here we haven’t seen before — and ignored when other presidents did them.--TR

Ted Rall cuts to the bone here about corporate media's state of agony over being dissed by DJT.  If corporate media actually served a purpose other than collecting billions and billions of advertising dollars and giving platforms to corrupted/insider Washington hacks like George Will, David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, all of CNN and MSNBC (you Rachel), NPR and a crew of other nonsensical voices, I'd be worried as well--but they don't, and I'm not.

On the other hand, when the Washington Post colludes with PropOrNot to silence the voices of disagreeable, independent journalists--Julian Assange among many others for instance--I do see the problem with verbal attacks on a free press.  It's just tough to say who's actually leading the most dangerous attacks if not the corporate hooligans themselves.

And it is at that pinnacle of shame, when FOX begins to howl, that the charade is in full bloom--Hannity and Maddow in an ideological cage fight that will have no winner.

Ignorance marches on, but here's some more common sense.

Finally, and powerfully, here is Paul Street's opus on the media from the weekend.


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Where's My Team?

Curious, the Oakland A's are contemplating a move because their old stadium is about to fall down, they're drawing around 10K fans a game, and Portland is said to be a player if the organization chooses to move.

After Matt Olson's walk-off homer (his first) in the 10th tonight Oakland's a game back of Houston in baseball's best division, the AL West.

What should the billionaires do?


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Weekend Rebellion

You want to know something?

Okay then read this.  All of it, even if it means forsaking television and CNN for a day.



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New Book: Charles Lucas

I've published a new book of photos by Charles Lucas, his second for Round Bend Press.

I like this one a lot as Lucas explores color and form to the extreme and imaginatively re-evaluates the status of rust, something generally not given much consideration beyond its basic scientific properties.

You can see the purchase info here.


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So a sick man walks into a clinic...

I signed up with a new HMO about four months ago after my former group went out of business due to a protracted monetary fight with the state of Oregon.  Family Care Inc. and Oregon's healthcare bureaucracy shattered the system in a spasm of mutual greed, flitting away their sweetheart Medicare deal, and left many without a provider, including me.

My Medicare agent hooked me up with "Providence Advantage Plans," but as yet I've been unable to find a personal care provider who will take me as a client.  This incompetent agent, nameless for now, has given me three PCP's names and sworn I was in the HMO's loop each time.  Even had slick membership cards printed up with my supposedly new primary care physicians' names embossed on them.

Beautiful, except not one of the docs named would see me because of the caseloads in front of them.  Yesterday I finally got a Providence associate to set me up with one of its clinics and a doctor.

I have an appointment scheduled--six weeks from now!

However, recently I've been in pain because of my ongoing  battle with trigeminal neuralgia.  So I went to an urgent care center and met for the first time in my nearly 68 years with a doctor that can only be described as a hack, a quack, an idiot, and an arrogant asshole.

The American healthcare system needs to change ASAP.

Definitions:

Urgent Care, as in urgent to take your money and move on quickly to the next sap.

Medicare agent, as in a fraudulent middle-man insurance scammer who is ripping off the system.


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America is Stupid

The more business and bureaucracy collides with alternate humanistic realities, in what amounts to a centrifugal-mixture of illogical and unattainable social meaning, the more horseshit one it forced to endure as a breathing, living human being.

The unbearable always comes from one's inferiors, people simply following a code of belief or rules made by even more ignorant superiors.

You can't be yourself, because you're owned by your overlords.  You are who they say you are, unless you rebel against their asininity.

The effort has killed many a man and woman.

I spend way too much time certifying who I am at the behest of my overlords in the upper echelons of society--the very Lords of housing, education, employment and  health, who are threatening to monetize me to an early grave, er, cremation.

The bullshit makes me alternately depressed and angry.  I am very tired of irresponsible, meaningless, useless power.

Here's a thoughtful review.


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Book Cover

Pushing toward publication of my Oregon football diary.

Some people hate it, others like it.

That, friends, is the story of a writer's life.


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Street Corner Talking

If the Democrats take back Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020, all will be well in her political world view: democracy and decency restored. You betcha!

She blames Trump’s presence in the White House on … you guessed it, Russia. Like millions of other MSDNC (sorry, I meant MSNBC) and Rachel Maddow devotees, she has let the obsessive CNN-MSNBC Russia-Trump narrative take over her understanding of current events. The “Russiagate” story has trumped her concern with other things that one might think matter a great deal to self-described liberals: racial oppression, sexism, poverty, low wages, plutocracy and—last but not least—livable ecology.--PS

Paul Street's weekend column at Truthdig.

Dig it.


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Hold On, Here We Go

HOUSTON -- Ryon Healy hit a tying home run with two outs in the ninth inning, Mitch Haniger delivered an RBI double in the 10th and the Seattle Mariners beat Houston 4-3 Sunday to sweep a four-game series from the AL West-leading Astros.

It's the first time in franchise history that Seattle swept a four-game series from the Astros. The third-place Mariners pulled within four games of Houston.--ESPN

You have got to be kidding me.

An unlikely sweep of the Astros by Seattle, and the continued stellar play of Oakland, has turned the AL West into the  mother of all divisional races.

Well, sort of...

There's this, after all.


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Tweet of the Day

Honestly, these people are bound and determined to deflate and demobilize their base - and then blame the Russians when they lose.--NK

The DNC marches on to ignominy.


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Stay Cool

Y'all have a good weekend.  I reckon I'll try myself, if'n I can find me some ice cream and a spot 'o shade to sit down in and think about things.

It's all good, folks.


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Beyond the Obvious

I find it sad and sickening that most Americans, and the corporate media that shapes them, are more concerned about the effects of Russian “meddling” on our “democracy” than they are about our own home-grown oligarchs, who are not only meddling, but have bought Congress and turned this wonderful democracy we’ve been told we have into a joke—an anti-democratic cesspool.--TS

My latest at CounterPunch.  This one will piss off all the Democrats who go on and on about Trump because he's the worst of the worst, which is true, but no cause for the vast majority of them to bury their heads in the sand and forget, ignore and misrepresent how we got here.

If we are products of our history, it's time we start taking history seriously, which means nuking the idea that the ruination of America commenced with Trump.

It's become an annoying trope, the kind of garbage that keeps intellectually-moribund mainstream outlets like the Huffington Post in business.


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Last Chance to Dance?

Seattle is at Houston tonight, set to begin another crucial series, as the Mariners are now more or less battling themselves to earn a Wildcard entry into the AL playoffs.

Seattle is eight-games behind the Astros, and three behind second-place Oakland in the AL West.

Mariners are still in it, but last I watched Felix "King" Hernandez was jostled around like a rubber bone in the jaws of an overly-playful Rottweiler.

Pitching wins championships, or so some baseball experts claim, and right now the Mariners need to find some.


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Thoughts on Stupidity

Often wondered about his myself.









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Threat

"Both well-meaning and more illicit-minded intelligence professionals basically realize [exposures of the inner workings of power] can't go on," Barrett Brown, a publisher and journalist who has been targeted by the FBI, tells "On Contact" host Chris Hedges in a conversation about attacks on WikiLeaks and other organizations.--Truthdig

The hackers go to jail, but so do the journalists who simply report what is open-sourced new information emerging from the secretive collusion between corporations and their government toadies.

It ain't right.  Say it ain't so, Joe...


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Not Funny

But hilarious.











(pic from last summer's gorge fire in Oregon)


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Read!

Find a good book and read it.









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Nixon Was Better Than Trump/Kissinger Approves

Just weeks after the coup, the US ambassador in Chile sent a memo to Henry Kissinger noting that "the military government of Chile requires adviser assistance of a person qualified in establishing a detention centre for the detainees ... adviser must have knowledge in the establishment and operation of a detention centre".

Even when the full extent of the torture and executions in Chile were well known, the US government sought to integrate the Pinochet regime into international business circles.--The Guardian

A reporter reminded the Patriot Prayer member (above) that Pinochet was a murderer.

The dictator's victims were "communists weren't they?" was his reply. Justified, apparently, if even remotely true.

The game story.


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Who's Cackling Now?

This is how I put it down a little over eight years ago in the early days of my blogging career.

By July 26, 2010 I'd had enough of Barack Obama's lies and deception.  Two years into his presidency it was clear.  The first black American president was a fraud.

I took him to task, as did many others on the left, for his duplicity.

Yet today he is still revered in most Democrats' eyes, in a deeply disturbing nostalgic way.

The Dems had a problem back then, and they refused to deal with it, perhaps because of their corporate myopia and pathetic search for the golden urinal.

This piece is a good intro for the centrist mob that still mourns for Hillary and the stupidity surrounding her '16 run for the top job.

America was cheated out of a presidential race that year, via corporate-groomed subterfuge, and what we got is exactly what we deserved.

As much as I'd love to blame the Russians, it ain't gonna happen.  Comrades, it is the fault of the American oligarchy--not Russia's.


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Reality: It Begins

And so it begins again, another campaign.

Not the political variety, which are increasingly stupid in American society (witness the two swine who ran for Prez in '16), but the one that matters.

Good old American college football.

I'm so pumped up I could be on steroids or something.  I feel like knocking the shit out of somebody.

The opportunity could present itself at tomorrow's guaranteed downtown riot.


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Capitalism: Class No Class

The election of Donald Trump fractured the American Left. The abandonment of class analysis in response to Mr. Trump’s racialized nationalism left identity politics to fill the void. This has facilitated the rise of neoliberal nationalism, an embrace of the national security state combined with neoliberal economic analysis put forward as a liberal / Left response to Mr. Trump’s program. The result has been profoundly reactionary.--RU

Rob Urie analyzes why class issues always get swept under the rug when the duopoly picks sides in its recurring mud fights.

Andrew Levine slaps Russophobia silly in the essay of the day.

The weekend's whole enchilada.


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Voice/Face

Dave Sims,one of the Seattle Mariners' lead television announcers, sounds just like the actor Woody Harrelson.  It's kind of eerie.

Sims and Mike Blowers have an interesting give and take in their work, sharing play-by-play and analyses in a seamless order.  Kinda different.

And this old Pirate, Bones Ely, looks just like a kid I once worked with in the restaurant biz.

Thought you should know this info, though I would be stressed to explain why.


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Amy and Noam

In case you missed it.

And an important partial transcript.


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Assholes

Fiendish swine.


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Noteworthy

If you like David Foster Wallace, which I do in essay form--I haven't read "Infinite Jest"--you might dig this reportage on the annual "DFDub" Conference in Normal.

I'm still having trouble with "Ulysses," but maybe I can get to "IJ" before my time expires.



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Protecting the Rich

Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer was placed on paid administrative leave Wednesday as the school announced it is investigating Courtney Smith's claims that several people close to the coach knew of a 2015 allegation of domestic violence against her ex-husband, former Ohio State assistant football coach Zach Smith, who was fired in July.--ESPN

With the college football kickoff about a month out, this is hella deal.

Corrupt, who said anything about corrupt?  As with the Joe Paterno/Penn State fiasco a few year back, it is simply unrealistic that the head coach, through the top-down guys to the ball boys, didn't know what was going on in a situation like this.

The universities protect their multi-millionaire coaches until they can't from a PR perspective.  Many heads rolled at Penn State; hopefully they will here too.

But I won't be surprised if they don't. It would mean everyone was satisfactorily purchased to avoid the main mess.


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