How to kill 10 minutes

Mass shootings and white supremacy

How many mass shootings occurred in America between July 16 and July 28th, 2019? What was the race of the shooter identified by police?

There were 36 mass shootings across the United States during that two-week period. A white was named as the shooter in one of them. An Hispanic was accused in another one. In the other 34, police identified a black suspect as the shooter.

Violent-crime victims weapons used, Chicago, 2019 so far

All of these shootings were reported in the media, mostly local media only, although the NYT has generally reported them (usually buried in a back page). Here is the list.

The day after the Gilroy shooting, NY Mayor (and presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio was asked by a reporter whether the Gilroy shooting resembled the mass shootings in New York.

"Not all, said de Blasio. “We don’t really count them that way.” 

Why doesn't the Left count them that way? The Chicago Tribune explains that there is no way to politically weaponize black men shooting other black men. But they can weaponize El Paso and Dayton.

Those angry loner white boys with guns, this time in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have again erupted on the body politic.

And those with eyes to see are reminded that the American culture is ill.

But what of the mass shootings in Chicago, the 55 people shot over the weekend, with seven hit near a park and then eight more not far away?

You might think these are “mass shootings” too, but, in political/media terms, they’re not treated as such. The victims, and in all likelihood the shooters, are black. And Democratic politicians find no political advantage in weaponizing the victims of everyday street violence in a Democratic town. So Chicago’s dead are stepped over by national media and national Democrats on the way to 2020.

Black men killing other black men? That's not news. Middle-class white shooters killing white middle-class shoppers or club hoppers, now that's news!

A clergy colleague of mine wrote me of my observation,

This discussion is beginning to rise among African American pastors, at least in my neck of the woods:  

• There's lots of talk *now* about studies on mass murderers because *white* people are killing folks.
• Why haven't folks been as outraged about gangs?
• Black on black killing?
• Nobody cares about our public schools, where gangs recruit while white folks send their kids to "academies."
• A lot more people have died in urban violence than in mass school killings. Are we not as important? 

It needs to be a both/and where school shootings and urban violence are concerned. But our outrage seems to be selective - and for that, we must repent.

HT: Gerard Vanderleun, who also offers this collage of mug shots of every mass shooter in the US arrested by police from January - July of this year.

Yep, mass shooters are motivated by "white supremacism" all right.

Updates:

"You don't have to be a detective why the liberal media would rather have this story [about the political views of Dayton killer Connor Betts] just fade away. It's not the right kind of mass shooting."

"The Dayton Murderer Is Proof We Need To Take Left-Wing Violence Seriously"

Reuters: FBI finds gunman in Dayton, Ohio, rampage was obsessed with violence

Hollywood Film Depicts Trump Supporters Being Hunted for Sport by Liberals

Universal Pictures is set to release a thriller called The Hunt on September 27, which features left-wing “elites” hunting Trump supporters for sport. 

In the past few days we’ve been hearing a lot about how Donald Trump’s rhetoric is apparently to blame for the El Paso shooting, yet Hollywood apparently lacked the foresight to think that a movie promoting violence against “deplorables” might be in bad taste until after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, as only now is Universal rethinking their promotional strategy for the film.

"Did anyone see what our ratf**ker-in-chief just did?" one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: "At least The Hunt's coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables."

Update:

It was 52 years ago today . . .

It was fifty-two years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play
They've never gone out of style
And still guaranteed to raise a smile ... .

The Beatles' landmark album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released in the United States 52 years ago this day, June 2, 1967.

Its cover has become acclaimed as the most iconic album cover ever, featuring cardboard cutouts of historical figures surrounding the Fab Four, who are the only live persons in the camera's view.

But not every cutout was used. At the last minute, the cutout of Jesus was set aside, out of frame view. And so was one other figure. And when he heard about it later, boy, was he mad!

Here is the album on YouTube.

Movies and back to basics

Yeah, this about sums it up.

How to kick Colin Kaepernick to the curb

Like this:

How to review a bad movie

Do it the way that The Guardian reviewed Serenity, out this month, starring Matthew McConaughey as "a gigolo/fishing boat captain alongside Anne Hathaway in a thrillingly awful thriller with one of the most ill-conceived twists in recent history."

[Writer-producer-director Steven] Knight has successfully smuggled one of the most gobsmackingly ill-conceived twists in recent history into multiplexes nationwide. To reveal it here would rob the film of a measure of its great and terrible power, so suffice it to say that it would be like It’s A Wonderful Life ending with Jimmy Stewart discovering that everyone in Bedford Falls was a robot.

Now that's a movie review! Read the whole thing. 

Take an Angelic joyride

This is worth the hour it will take you. Go full screen with volume up.

 

School Shootings: increasingly within the boundaries

In the wake of this week's mass murders at a Texas high school by (allegedly) a 17-year-old student, it is chilling to think that what used to be outside the margins regarding guns and schools is now becoming normalized: "The Best Explanation for Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is the Least Comforting."

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyonearound him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Actually, this "infectious" behavior is well known and described by people who study and teach leadership. Take, for example, this video that was used in the TED talk below about the very processes Granovetter described.



Here are two real problems: First is what Granovetter describes and the TED talk confirms: once there are enough early adopters of a behavior, then mass adoption easily follows. Hence, Gladwell describes school shootings as a "slow motion riot." But portents are that it won't stay slow.

Second is what is revealed by retired Army officer and psychologist Dave Grossman, who documents in Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing and other works that more and more boys are growing up learning to kill vicariously through both popular media and electronic gaming - and that for increasing numbers the vicarious violence will give way to actual.

In one of his early works, On Killing, Grossman documented the great difficulty the US Army had in World War II in training its soldiers, especially infantrymen, actually to take the enemy's life. The leadership found that American men came into the military with deeply-inbred reluctance to harm other human beings, and that only a small minority of infantry even fired their rifles once in a firefight.

Grossman's thesis in what is happening to America today is that we have, as a whole society, widened the boundaries of what constitutes prohibited violence. Prior generations had mass murderers, of course, but even the most depraved killers in the not-too-distant past would never have even thought of shooting schoolchildren at their desks. Now it is, as Gladwell notes, becoming increasingly within the boundaries of conduct that society has moved.

In the coming days the editorialists and TV commentators will have a lot more to say. I do not expect their offerings to be much different from what they said after the Parkland, or Aurora, or Sandy Hook massacres or ... well, pick one. The media’s talking heads will recycle the same things they said before. We’ll hear a lot about America’s gun culture, and all the talk will be about guns and not about the culture.

Does America have a "gun culture?" You bet it does, and it this is it:

This movie was to open in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, the
day of the killing rampage in Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Warner Bros. pulled the opening

The Hollywood gun culture:

Business Insider reprints part of an AskMen piece on
"The 99 Most Desirable Women Of The Year."
Here is no. 99, Bérénice Marlohe, who plays Severine in Skyfall.

Glorifying violence, especially gun violence, is the present purpose of America's entertainment industry. This is what untold numbers of our children are doing in their homes:



The margins continue to be moved, whether we want it or not. Because there is too much money being made by murder-as-entertainment to give it up, and we the people are willingly paying for it.

Update: One of the ways that the Columbine shooting remains key is in how subsequent school chooters have imitated it to some degree. Not every shooter, but enough to see that Columbine still forms a template. For example,

Some aspects of Friday's [Texas] shooting had echoes of the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. The two teenaged killers in that incident wore trench coats, used shotguns and planted improvised explosives, killing 10 before committing suicide themselves.

As did the accused killer in Texas, except for the suicide. Reports say, though, that he told police he intended to commit suicide but found he could not go through with it.

FOFB: The Ben Hur Chariot Race(s)

There have been three makes of the 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. Wallace had been a major general in the Civil War, commanding a Union division in combat. Ben Hur is

... considered "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century". It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions. Ben-Hur remained at the top of the US all-time bestseller list until the publication of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936). The 1959 MGM film adaptation of Ben-Hur is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book's sales increased and it surpassed Gone with the Wind. [Wikipedia]

The first motion-picture adaptation was a silent film released in 1925, the most recent was released in 2016. All three versions feature the famous chariot race as the hinge of the narrative, about which all else revolves.

The 1959 version has justifiably gone down in cinematic history as one of the towering achievements of the silver screen. Here is an explanation of the its chariot race from Turner Classic Movies' FB page:
At the time of its release in 1959, MGMS’s lavish quasi-biblical spectacle Ben-Hur was the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of nearly $16 million. The famed chariot race alone required an 18 acre set at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, a five week shooting schedule & 7,000 extras, won a record 11 Academy Awards.

The chariot race in Ben-Hur was directed by Andrew & Yakima.​The chariot arena covering 18 acres, was the largest film set ever built at that time. Constructed at a cost of $1 million, it took a thousand workmen more than a year to carve the oval out of a rock quarry. The racetrack featured 1,500-foot long straights & five-story-high grandstands. Over 400 km of metal tubing were used to erect the grandstands​.​A chariot track identical in size was constructed next to the set & used to train the horses & lay out camera shots. Planning for the chariot race took nearly a year to complete. Seventy-eight horses were bought & imported from Yugoslavia and Sicily in November 1957, exercised into peak physical condition, and trained by Hollywood animal handler Randall to pull the quadriga.

The firm of Danesi Brothers built 18 chariots,​ ​nine of which were used for practice, each weighing 410 kg​. Principal cast members, stand-ins, and stunt people made 100 practice laps of the arena in preparation for shooting. Heston & Boyd both had to learn how to drive a chariot. Heston, an experienced horseman, took daily three-hour lessons in chariot driving after he arrived in Rome. The chariot scene took over three months​ ​to film at a total cost of $1 million​ ​& required more than 320 km of racing to complete.​

The cameras used during the chariot race also presented problems. The 70mm lenses had a minimum focusing distance of 50 feet, and the camera was mounted on a small Italian-made car so the camera crew could keep in front of the chariots. The horses, however, accelerated down the 1,500-foot straight much faster than the car could, and the long focal length left ​cinematographers​ with too little time to get their shots. The production company purchased a more powerful American car, but the horses were still too fast, and even with a head start, the filmmakers only had a few more seconds of shot time. As filming progressed, vast amounts of footage were shot for this sequence. The ratio of footage shot to footage used was 263:1, one of the highest ratios ever for a film​ for this 11 minute spectacle​​ and rest is history.

Here is a clip from the 1959 chariot race.




And here is a similar sequence from the 2016 release. Not nearly as much construction was needed for it because of CGI.



And the 1925 race, when anything remotely resembling special effects, as we know it, was unheard of then.



Finally, just for kicks and grins, what if retired NASCAR driver Darrel Waltrip had narrated the 1959 race?

Royal Wedding Classics

One supposes that these are musical selections used in one or another royal weddings in Britain or the other surviving European monarchies. Still, some really great selections here.

What did Seth know and when did he know it?

Well, he knew it four years ago. And as we are learning now, so did almost everyone else in tinsel town.

The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug

This was the NFL until last Sunday:

I got to thinking along these lines reading a comment on Glenn Reynold's site left by Thomas Wren in which he, having read my post on the suicide of the NFL, responded,

All Mr. Sensing writes is true but peripheral to the main problem. The NFL is in trouble because its product stinks. Its boring, predictable, violent, almost unwatchable.

To which I replied, "Yeah, you're right, and I kind of added that as an update."  Thomas is right - the games are just boring. In fact, pro football has always been boring - actual playing time barely reaches double-digit minutes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There are 60 minutes of game clock, split into two section of 30 minutes with about 15 minutes in between. A typical football game lasts, however, about 180 minutes from kickoff to final whistle. And in all that time, we get a mere 11 minutes of actual play.

Buddy, that defines boring.

Even so, Americans in their millions have thought that the NFL was the Wizard of Oz, Great and Powerful! Why? How did the NFL come to be so dominant in both our devotion and our money for half of the year? Why did we think that watching a game in which significant moments last fewer than 10 seconds each, with an average of 16 minutes in between, was exciting?

They were exciting because we looked at them through blinkered eyes. They were exciting because we wanted them to be, and so they were.

It was the mythos. Our imagination was fostered and carefully nurtured by the league and the networks to believe with near-religious fervor that something serious was at stake, that the players were larger than life, different from the rest of us, admirable and good - and most importantly, that the team was actually representing us, the residents of the city the team called home (this was explicitly an appeal made by Tennessee's governor to bring the then-Oilers to Nashville, my hometown).

Now all of that has gone a-glimmering. We now know that the Great and Powerful Oz is a fake, a phony, and behind the curtain is only a curmudgeon kicking dirt onto what we hold dear while demanding that we like it.

The NFL (and most pro sports) have always made money by relying on our willing suspension of disbelief, essential to any fictional story. But we are not willing anymore because last Sunday, they themselves pulled back the curtain. Now you and I can't see them as Oz again because now we know there is no there there. The whole enterprise is just a humbug.


Fans are reconsidering facts they ignored before: they are paying enormous sums to be mocked and scorned - at least $40 for a cheap ticket plus costs of parking and time spent in traffic jams, plus $12 beers, $6 hamburgers and $4 or $5 for a scoop or two of ice cream. And for what? They never really asked that question before very seriously, but now they are.

Television viewers see the games now as played under giant shadow that wasn't there before. The games are now political, amplified by willing accomplices at ESPN and to a lesser but still significant degree, the other networks. That receiver who just made the amazing catch and ran through four defenders into the end zone? While he celebrates like he just found a cure for cancer viewers know that he refused even to take the field to pay respect to the police/military/VFW/first responders honor guard presenting the colors. And I am supposed to cheer him and be happy because hey, he runs fast?

A member of a current-events FB group I read posted this today:

This does it for me. I'm totally through with the NFL. An Army vet who served 3 tours in Afghanistan should not be apologizing for having honored his country, his flag, and the memories of his fallen comrades all to appease his idiotic coach and his teammates who have never sacrificed a thing. I can't take this crap any longer. I've loved my Bears since 1974 and they haven't taken a knee (yet, but it's only a matter of time) but I have to put my country above these ungrateful multimillionaire athletes and coaches, and now ungrateful billionaire owners who are spitting in the faces of their customers. So long, NFL. I wish I could say I'll miss you but I really won't.

So now the games are boring and repulsive. And for enormous numbers of us, that's all they'll ever be.

Endnote: This is an interesting perspective.

The NFL lies down on its deathbed and forbids itself rise

It has been going around the internet that pp. A62-A63 of the NFL's rule book states this:

The problem is that the "league rulebook" (note the imprecision of the term) has zero to say about the anthem - if you are referring to the rule book governing game play. That rule book, available online, never mentions the national anthem and does not have any such pages as A62 or A63.

However, there is another NFL book called the Game Operations Manual, not available to the public, that does have those pages. And according to none other than The Washington Post (!), there is indeed such a rule:

Under the league rule, the failure to be on the field for the anthem may result in discipline such as a fine, suspension or loss of a draft pick. But a league official said the key phrase is “may” result, adding he won’t speculate on whether the Steelers would be disciplined.

The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league’s game operations manual, according to a league source. 

The WaPo is firewalled (it's owned by Bezos after all), but Time magazine confirms it. At this point, though, I would say that the rule of the Game Operations Manual no longer matters.

Three teams on Sunday stayed inside their locker rooms rather than take the field sidelines for the anthem, the Steelers in Chicago, the Seahawks and Titans both playing in Nashville. Attendance at the Titan's home game yesterday was 69,127, only 16 short of every seat. I'll try to remember to post the next home game's attendance here, too. (I have abandoned the NFL so I do not even know when their next home game is.)

In Chicago, a lone Steeler, former US Army officer and Ranger Alejandro Villanueva, left the locker room and saluted the flag while the anthem was played. His reward was two-fold:

First, he was excoriated by that empty suit of freedom respectfulness, his own head coach, Mike Tomlin.

But the second reward is, well, a reward: Sales Of Alejandro Villanueva Jerseys Skyrocket After Being Only Steeler To Stand For National Anthem

I posted 23 days ago that The NFL continues its slow suicide, with both attendance and TV viewership having declined for a few years in  row now. With this weekend's demonstrations, the NFL has made full transition from an athletic organization to a political one. So what will attendance and viewership do now? Well, Sunday night's game  - after the full afternoon of televised abstentions and kneeling - was down eight percent from just last week and was the worst this year.

LA Times reporter Lindsey Thiry tweeted this shot of last Thursday night's game stadium at kickoff time - this was before the Trump-storm and fury:

Also, remember that the stock market is a futures market: "NFL Broadcasting Stocks Slump As Protests Rise And TV Ratings Fall."

During the past month the overall stock market is up more than 2% but shares of companies that broadcast NFL games--Comcast, Walt Disney, Fox, CBS--are all down between 1% to 8%. ...

Towards the end of last season some felt the NFL's ratings dip would be temporary and therefore would not ultimately hurt the networks by forcing them to reimburse advertisers. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Ratings for the the NFL have been worse this season and attendance for some games has also been disappointing. The networks will pay over $5 billion this season to televise the NFL and were already facing unflattering margins on advertising profits. An article in The Hollywood Reporter reckons the drop in NFL ratings could trim the broadcaster's earnings by $200 million. Disney's ESPN, meanwhile, also continues to get hammered by cord-cutting.

I commented elsewhere that one thing the protesting players have done is lead viewers to look at the game and the league with new eyes and a new perspective. Even before this season, millions of them already concluded that they don't miss watching the games after all. Now with political conventions by disgruntled multi-millionaires being held every Sunday when there used to be football games, how many more millions will decide to use that time for other things?

It might be worth pondering some demographics here. One is that Millennials are not watching the games in anywhere near the same numbers as their parents.

Some observers believe that American football is dying a slow and painful death. ...

The threat to American football is no illusion. In a recent study, four out of five millennials stated that they were less trusting of the NFL than basketball, baseball, hockey or NASCAR. Out of those surveyed in the study, 61% identified the NFL as a “sleazy” Organisation, while 54% saw it as being anti-gay.

In another study, teenage interest in the NFL was found to have fallen from 26% to 19% over the last two decades.

And that was written in February of last year. Another demographic supports the case that the NFL laid down on its death bed long before the kneelers started kneeling.

“Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level,” says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.

“And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one.”

Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.

But what do the numbers from the hometown of the “Wheaton Ice Man,” the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?

“If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn’t tell you what’s happening, nothing will,” Herrera said. “Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I’ve got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love.”

But take heart! There is hope that the NFL season may end well after all! Doomsday Rescheduled: ‘Researcher’ Moves End Of The World To October.

And not a moment too soon.

Update:

I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh but I think he nailed it here:

I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.

The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone.

Also Law Prof. William A. Jacobson: Dear NFL: I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore, about you.

I’m officially over the Cowboys, the Patriots and the NFL. You were once one of the loves of my life. But now we’re breaking up, and it’s you, not me.

I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore.

You tried to make me care, but now I don’t care at all, about you.

Pretty much, yeah.

Update: Thanks to Donald M. who emailed me to point out that the Steelers played at Chicago's Soldier Field, not Pittsburgh (correction made above). He added, "So effectively, on Gold Star Mother Sunday - a day set aside to honor the families of soldiers who died in battle - at Soldier Field - named such to honor soldiers who died in the field - the Steelers refused to honor the flag and the National Anthem."

Update: My followup is here: "The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug"

Update: Well, I have to admit that this never occurred to me:

Peak professional football was probably a dozen years ago. It was around then that white mothers, especially divorced middle-class mothers, started turning against youth football. They did not want their little baby being run over by black kids. That’s why the concussion hysteria gained traction. It’s a ready made excuse for pulling the white kids out of football, that lets white women pretend it is not racism driving their decision. After all, they loved Will Smith in the concussion movie!

It’s why the NFL’s decision to let their blacks kneel during the anthem is going to be a disaster for them. The owners signed off on it thinking it added drama and would therefore draw in girls, because girls and girly-men like drama. Instead, those kneeling black players are a stark reminder to white women that the sport of football is for violent black men, not nice suburban white boys. Youth participation in football is collapsing and this will only serve to accelerate it. The NFL has now made football anti-white and un-American.

Hmm.

Your free movie of the day

Pretty much anything with William Powell in it is worth the time for movie nuts like us. So here is your free movie of the day, "Life With Father."

A financier from New York rules his numerous family, consisting of his wife and his four sons, with the meticulousity of a bookkeeper.

From tubi.tv.

"You can pick your friends ...

"... and you can pick your nose ..."

"... but you can't pick your friend's nose!" Well, it seems you can.

The NFL continues its slow suicide

Cleveland police, EMS unions refuse to hold flag at game after Browns players kneel

Cleveland safety forces have backed out of a plan to hold a large flag on the field for the opening game.
A dozen Browns players created a firestorm during a recent preseason game by not standing during the anthem. ...

We tracked down police union president Steve Loomis out of state at a police convention.

"I’m here at a national police convention, and soon as they hear that I'm from Cleveland, the first question is ‘What about those stinking Browns?'" Loomis said. "So if the ownership of the Browns and the league are going to allow that type of stuff to happen, and then come to us and say,  ‘We want you to help us with the flag,’ that's hypocritical. We're not gonna participate.”

What does Browns, Inc, have to say?

Earlier during the debate over the demonstration, the Browns issued this statement:

“As an organization, we have a profound respect for our country’s National Anthem, flag and the servicemen and servicewomen in the United States and abroad. We feel it's important for our team to join in this great tradition and special moment of recognition, at the same time we also respect the great liberties afforded by our country, including the freedom of personal expression.”

Which translates, "To heck with our city and our fans. Stuff it." And so the multi-millionaires of the NFL continue to commit professional suicide.

NFL Viewership Per Game (millions) For Regular Season

Season	Viewers
2014	19.2
2015	19.6
2016	17.6

Viewership dropped by about two million per game versus 2015 and about 1.6 million versus 2014. 

Cable TV competitors and Theodore Levitt

This feels a little like déjà vu. The country’s top cable and satellite TV providers just wrapped up another quarter of record subscriber declines as customers flee traditional pay-television distributors in favor of streaming and on-demand services, according to a research note from MoffettNathanson. Combined declines for the second quarter of 2017 came close to a million subscribers, the firm estimates, with Dish Network, DirectTV, and AT&T hit especially hard. As bad as it was, the customer exodus was not as bad as some analysts had predicted, prompting analyst Craig Moffett to ask the question, “Is ‘not as worse’ even a thing?”

“[Y]es, things are getting worse,” Moffett wrote. “But at least in Q2 they got worse more slowly. Less worse. Or, not as worse. Or, well, you get the idea.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because three months ago, the industry had just logged its worst quarter in history, losing an estimated 762,000 pay-TV subscribers. This time around, that number has jumped to 941,000 subscribers. Even Comcast, which had been bucking the trend over the last few quarters, ended Q2 with a net loss of 34,000 pay-TV customers. [Link]

The pace will continue downward because cable companies are not keeping up with their competitors, except for maybe DirectTV, which a few months ago launched a streaming-only service called DirectTV Now, which streams live shows. 

My wife and I moved to a new-construction house two months ago. It took forever for our address to validate and propagate through databases, especially Comcast's. They connected us only two weeks ago, insisting until then that our house didn't exist. We had been using DirectTV Now to fill the gap, watching it on TV using an Amazon Fire stick with our smart phones' wifi hotspot turned on. (Thank goodness for unlimited data plans.) When I was finally able to get Comcast to agree I existed, I became so disgusted at the continual TV upselling the customer agent was doing, and the endless fees and additions, that finally I said bluntly, I want internet only and if I can't get that then AT&T will take my call, too. Of course, AT&T does the same thing. DirectTV Now and Hulu Live are two of the main competitors to connected cable service. Of course, DirectTV is itself a connected cable satellite service, but the Now service is internet only. Hulu has been around a long time and has just this year got into the act of offering live TV.

Both DTVN and Hulu Live stream a number of live channels but none are local stations. The services' channel selections are mostly redundant. I tried both of them and finally decided to keep Hulu, but that decision was based more on Hulu's promises to expand than its present offerings. Neither of them require any of their own hardware, just a Roku or Fire Stick or the like - see their sites for details.
DirectTV Now's main advantage is that it works on more devices (Hulu does not yet offer a Roku app) and you can watch it on the web, which you cannot do with Hulu Live. Both work on smart phones and tablets. However, you can watch all the rest of Hulu's stuff on the web, a device or on your TV. DirectTV Now has a very limited on-demand selection. DirectTV Now also loads much slower that Hulu Live and often it did not load at all on our TVs using either our Amazon Fire Stick or our Roku 3. Also DTVN skipped and stuttered or paused a lot. One of the main decision points for me was that Hulu offers live major-league baseball games, which are absolutely not available on DirectTV Now, and I assume DTVN is similarly restricted for other sports. As I said, local channels? Fuggedaboudit on both services. We bought over-the-air HD antennas for local-channel broadcasts. I finally decided to keep Hulu Live and cancel DirectTV Now, even though the inability to watch Hulu's service on my computer is a major, major disadvantage for me. But that I can watch MLB games live is a huge advantage. Huku promises that PC viewing and Roku viewing are both coming, hopefully soon. I expect that both services will expand offerings and devices in the coming weeks or months.

Another big deal for both services is that there is no contract. They are both month-to-month. There is also YouTube Live, which seems really good and offers a one-month trial period, but its market is limited to large metro areas, so far.

There are other such services. My advice is to do a lot of research and take full advantage of trial periods.

At our prior home we had Xfinity's X1 service, which I really liked. But after so many weeks in a row of not watching TV at all, or watching very little, my wife and I both got used to two things:

• TV not being as big a deal as we used to think it was, and
• Not paying major bank to Comcast every month to rent many dozens of channels that we never watch.

There are channels on Hulu we don't watch, too, but not at near the cost. And we already had a Fire Stick and a Roku, but Comcast piles on fees every month: $10 per DVR/box, $10 for HD channels, $7 or so for sports, additional fees for local channels.

That said, Comcast does have an amazing streaming service that is really outstanding - but not by itself. You must have some level of their traditional cable TV service first. Bummer. Honestly, if they offered a streaming-only service, they would be king of the hill. I'd buy it for sure.

Maybe it is time for Comcast to ask themselves that crucial question, What Business Are You Really In? 

Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt, back in 1960, captured one of the major challenges most companies face today. His now classic article Marketing Myopia begins this way:  

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others which are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.  

That failure is caused by what Levitt called “marketing myopia” which he defines exactly as you would expect.  It’s what occurs when company leaders define their mission too narrowly; it’s a form of business nearsightedness or shortsightedness. Levitt offered what are now a few classic examples.

Industry	Myopic Purpose	The Broader Purpose
Railroads	Train Travel	Transportation
Hollywood	Movies	Entertainment
Oil Companies	Petroleum	Energy

On the flip side, he cites companies such as DuPont, and Kaiser and Reynolds that have thrived for centuries by remaining thoroughly customer focused and that evolved—in terms of the products and services they offered—as the needs of their customers did.

What a concept.

I went to a prizefight that was so violent . . .

... that a hockey game broke out. So goes the old joke. But bubba, those ice skaters ain't got nothin' on MLB's Brewers and Mariners.

From 1990, one of the all-time great baseball brawls:



From The Sporting News:

The setup: Brewers pitcher Bob Sebra nails Mariners hitter Tracy Jones, tempers flare and folks let their emotions get the best of them. Big time.

Why it makes the list: The main brawl leads to a couple of mini-brawls before order is restored — and then unrestored. Then order is restored again — and then it’s unrestored again. Finally, cooler heads prevail — until they don’t. The tension lingers and eventually someone slams Brewers manager Tom Trebelhorn to the ground, which sets everything off again. In the end, six players are ejected. This fight also features a slightly battered but stone-faced Randy Johnson, who looks not at all intimidated by the goings-on and ready to lend his towering frame to the festivities. 

More at the link.

Tom Cruise can't even play Tom Cruise any more

The beginning of the end:

Tom Cruise as German Army WW2 plotter Oberst Klaus von Stauffenberg, 2008. Critics hated his acting but at the time I thought it was a relief to see Tom Cruise not playing Tom Cruise again. Owen Gleiberman of Variety says this movie marks the beginning of the end for Cruise's descent into a box-office bore.

Tom Cruise: A Star in Slow-Motion Career Meltdown

The new Cruise era really kicked off with “Valkyrie,” the 2008 historical-curiosity thriller that cast him as a one-eyed German officer who became a secret member of the anti-Nazi resistance, leading a plot to assassinate Hitler. As ideas for movies go, this one wasn’t bad, but I remember being struck by how jarring it was that Cruise didn’t even try for a German accent. I realize, of course, that this isn’t exactly an issue of the strictest historical accuracy (the Germans didn’t just speak with German accents, they spoke German), but the point is: If you’re going to sign on to do a film like “Valkyrie,” why not use it as the opportunity to change up your persona? Don’t just give us the same-old same-old Tom Cruise, only now in an eyepatch and Iron Cross costume.

The movies that Cruise has made since then — “Knight and Day,” “Oblivion,” etc. — have played like imitation Tom Cruise movies, and that’s because the thing that they’re mimicking, as if it were there in the way it always has been, is his identity as a superstar.

Cruise's new outing, The Mummy, just got clobbered in its opening weekend by Wonder Woman, in its second weekend.

Update: 5 Reasons Why Tom Cruise’s ‘The Mummy’ Disintegrated at the Domestic Box Office

The best rock album ever and why

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is IMO the best rock album of the whole 60s-70s era. It has some tight competition, mainly the two Beatles albums Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.

As much as I really like the Beatles, today that's all that their music does for me - evoke likability and enjoyment. But none of the songs, much less whole albums, make me think about the human condition and what it means and about my place personally. DSOTM does. Here it is, "Live at Wembley," the full album.



I would call attention to two factors that still impress highly even after 40-plus years. One is the remarkable engineering of the tracks that leads them seamlessly one to another. But this was not their rock invention. In fact, the first credit for that innovation belongs to Sgt. Pepper's. Nonetheless, it is simply stunning here because in Pepper's the technique basically only provides a lead-in from one song to a different one that is thematically unrelated.

However, in DSOTM there is thematic unity from the first note to the last. This makes the album more of a concert than a rock performance, although it excels at that, too. The instrumentals are extended and compelling. The vocals are matched almost as a counterpoint to the instruments at one place, as a complement at another.

It is the fourth track, "Time," that pushes the album into the number one spot for me. When the album was released in 1973 I was graduating from high school. Now I am 44 years on, in my early sixties, and "Time" hits me harder now than ever:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say 

Home
Home again
I like to be here
When I can
When I come home
Cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones
Beside the fire
Far away
Across the field
Tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell

Trust me, young people, when you get to my age, this song will put you into a highly reflective and self-evaluating mode.

Photo link.