Is there a “secret” to success? Yes, but it’s not a secret. Michele Tafoya, Sideline Reporter for NBC Sunday Night Football, shares the secret…that you already knew.
Author: Papa Giorgio
The National Anthem Protests — Do Facts Matter? (Larry Elder)
Larry Elder’s EXCELLENT article, via LARRYELDER.COM:
Where was the angry left when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the national anthem protests “dumb and disrespectful”?
Let’s focus on the “dumb” part.
NFL player Colin Kaepernick, who started the protests, did so over the supposed widespread instances of police brutality against blacks. Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. … There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1968 police killings of blacks have declined nearly 75 percent. According to The Washington Post, almost 500 whites were killed by cops in 2015, an average of more than one a day. Two hundred fifty-nine blacks were killed by the police. Most suspects killed by police had a weapon.
Now for some perspective.
Do you know anyone who has been struck by lightning? Neither do most people. Yet each year an average of about 300 Americans are killed or injured by lightning. That’s approximately 40 more than the number of blacks killed by the police in 2015. Is there an “epidemic” of Americans being struck and injured by lightning? We don’t know the number of black men injured by lightning every year, but let’s assume the number is 7 percent of the total people struck by lightning, mirroring the percentage of the black male population in America. That brings the average number of black men injured by lightning to about 21.
Out of the 965 people killed by the police in 2015 (as of Dec. 24), the Post reported (on Dec. 26) that “less than 4 percent” involved an unarmed black man and a white cop, the fact pattern most commonly referred to by anti-police activists like Black Lives Matter. Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.
But blacks are routinely and disproportionately being stopped, pulled over and/or arrested due to police misconduct, right?
No, not according to numerous studies, many by the government. Take traffic stops. In 2013, the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation agency of the Department of Justice, published a study of whether the police, as a result of racial bias, stop blacks more than other drivers. The conclusion? Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”
According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.
But what about the experience of a black person with the police versus that of a white person? The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics regularly studies this, too. Every year, the BJS surveys a representative sample of 70,000 people. Among the questions, the survey asks whether respondents had contact with the police in the last 12 months. If the answer is “yes,” the survey asks a number of follow-up questions, including about use of force.
Let’s concentrate on cases involving use of force.
Lemoine writes: “Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. … Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified.” And keep in mind the much higher levels of crime by mostly black males. It is estimated that half of all homicides are committed by, and mostly against, black males.
In 1995, the federal government looked at 42,500 defendants in the nation’s 75 largest counties. A government statistician, Patrick A. Langan, found “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.” So much for the so-called “institutional racism” in the criminal justice system.
Recently, in Illinois, in a kids’ 8-and-under football league, the entire team, which appeared to be all black, including the coach, took a knee during the national anthem. Asked why, one third-grade player parroted Kaepernick, saying, according to the coach, “Because black people are getting killed, and nobody’s going to jail.”
Facts don’t matter. The coach, presented with a teachable moment, fumbled it away.
Why I Prefer Baseball – By Daniel Henninger
The WALL STREET JOURNAL hurts itself closing article this good and important to the current dialogue surrounding this topic. Here is Daniel’s article:
We’ve arrived at a moment when some choices have to be made. After a lifetime watching America’s three main professional sports—baseball, football and basketball—I’ve decided I prefer baseball.
Starting Tuesday, I’ll exclusively devote what’s left of my sports-viewing budget to the Major League Baseball playoffs. And not just in the hope that my hometown Cleveland Indians will overcome last year’s heartbreaking loss for the ages to the Chicago Cubs.
Set to one side that the reason most Americans can sing the words to their national anthem is that for generations, every American attending a professional baseball game has stood to look at the flag while someone sings “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Many Americans think the last words of the national anthem are “Play ball!”
Baseball is about baseball. The NFL and NBA seem to be about more things than I can process—some of them political, some of them personal.
Baseball has an informal code of on-field conduct, which has held for a hundred years. The NFL doesn’t seem to have an enforceable code of anything.
Last Sunday, after the New York Giants’ wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. caught a touchdown pass, Mr. Beckham got down in the end zone and imitated a dog urinating on a fire hydrant, which the opposing Philadelphia Eagles (who won) took as mockery of their team.
From Babe Ruth 90 years ago to Aaron Judge now, when you hit a home run, you run around the bases and into the dugout. That’s it. No end-zone antics that suggest the sport itself takes a back seat to a personality.
After the Yankees’ Mr. Judge hit his 50th home run this week, a record for a rookie, his teammates had to force him out of the dugout to wave to the cheering crowd.
For some years, the parsons of the sports press have pushed the idea that demonstrations of high-level athletic skill, the result of uncountable hours of practice, were morally insufficient. Athletes, the parsons intoned, had to “give back” by dedicating their status to solving the nation’s endlessly unresolved issues of race, gender and—the inevitable guilt trip they laid on pro athletes—income inequality.
And so last September, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback, reduced the parsonage’s moralistic hectoring of professional athletes to its absurd end by deciding that the pregame national anthem was the place to raise the issue of inner-city policing.
Only the innocent could feign shock that eventually Donald Trump, in his capacity as president of the United States, would go after the kneeling players about the same way you’d hear from a guy sitting in the high seats at a New York Jets game, who by the third quarter is on fumes: “Get that son of a bitch off the field!”
Stepping down to the Trumpian moment, LeBron James tweeted, “U bum!”
Sportswriters sometimes use the phrase “lunch bucket” about a player who is mainly interested in doing his job well without drawing attention to himself. Other than someone like Kawhi Leonard of the San Antonio Spurs, you don’t see too many stars in the NFL or NBA described as lunch-bucket guys anymore.
Most future stars of basketball and football are identified while they’re in high school. They often play in special leagues and receive constant visits from coaches at Division I universities.
Once inside the university, these players live and practice in gold-plated facilities. They play on national TV and are talked about nonstop by analysts and the political commentators at ESPN. They get famous young. (Though let it be said, 90% of the non-sports NFL and NBA news was made by maybe 10% of the players, until now.)
The road up in baseball is different. Promising teenagers go from high school into baseball’s minor leagues. They play for teams in places like Delmarva, Clinton and Greenville. They travel by bus and play before crowds not much bigger than what they had in Little League. They rise from A ball to AA (say, the Trenton Thunder) then AAA teams, which are in places most people have heard of, like Toledo, Fresno or El Paso.
Years spent competing and surviving against other skilled players teaches them they have to learn to be a member of a team before anyone calls them a star.
Some might say baseball isn’t political because so many players are from Latin America. But maybe the Latin players are mostly bemused at what the U.S. considers social problems, compared with escaping from Cuba across shark-infested waters or getting out of a dirt-road slum in Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic.
There is an expression in sports: Don’t leave it in the locker room. It means you are supposed to save your best performance for the game. With baseball, that’s still what you get.
We live in a highly polarized country. If people want their sport and its performers to be an affirmation of their politics, feel free. I don’t.
BREAKING: Did Raiders Throw NFL Game Over Anthem?
Driving to a follow up visit I was listening to the Armstrong and Getty Show (The Morning Answer sucks!) and they broke some news that will surely be investigated to be substantiated if true. Due to the quarterback standing during the anthem and the all black offensive line kneeling, there could be some ideological as well as racial animus going on. I included Bill O’Reilly’s thoughts as well. (Follow A&G on TWITTER)
Mitch McConnell Funds GOP Attacks on Conservatives
This is the CONSERVATIVE REVIEW article Mark Levin is reading from:
….According to FEC data, accessed Monday, outside groups have spent nearly $10 million to either support Strange’s candidacy directly, or oppose Moore’s. McConnell’s leadership PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) is responsible for the lion’s share of that spending. The SLF has spent just over $2 million to bolster Strange and nearly $4.5 million, mostly in negative advertising, opposing Moore. That’s over $6.5 million on a race that is, by all appearances, a loss.
Strange’s latest FEC filing, covering activity up to Sept. 6, 2017, showed that of the $4.46 million Strange had either raised or loaned his campaign, over 28 percent came from political action committees. That means that in addition to the nearly $10 million in outside spending, the K Street lobbying class has dumped almost $1.3 million in PAC donations into Strange’s campaign to ensure the status quo in Washington.
Moore, on the other hand has only benefited from a total of $1.35 million spent on his behalf, or to oppose Strange, and had raised — as of his FEC filing covering activity up to Sept. 6 — only $1.42 million, of which only $5,000 was from political action committees.
The most notable independent expenditures on behalf of Moore come from the Great America Alliance and Great America PAC organizations that are run by pro-Trump individuals. Together, in breaking with the president, those organizations have spent just over $170,000 to help Moore. The Senate Conservatives Fund and Senate Conservatives Action have spent just over $900,000 to bolster Moore, in the final stages of the campaign.
Last wee, Breitbart reported that Drew Messer, a senior adviser to the Moore campaign, estimated that $30 million had been spent by Strange and McConnell’s allies against Moore. The data shown here is what was publicly available as of Monday via the FEC.
Surely by using his network’s resources to vastly outspend those supporting Roy Moore, McConnell believes that Strange would fare better against the Democratic candidate Doug Jones. According to an Emerson College poll (PDF) released on Monday, that is not the case. Emerson found Moore with a 52 percent to 30 percent advantage over Jones, while Strange fared worse at 49 percent to 36 percent.
In addition to the $6.5 million spent for Strange and against Roy Moore, McConnell’s leadership PAC spent $2.4 million against conservative House member Mo Brooks leading up to the August primary. That’s a total of around $9 million that McConnell has spent on this campaign to prop up Strange. ….
Bill Cunningham Fills In for Mark Levin
A Talented Music Break From All The “Toxicity”
“Toxicity” by System of a Down arranged and performed by 16 year old Marcin // Buy my CD! – http://marcinpatrzalek.com and on iTunes
Jimmy Kimmel Used Democrat Talking-Points
Here is more from THE DAILY CALLER:
…Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office offered Jimmy Kimmel “technical guidance” to assist the talk show host in his vendetta against Republicans’ most recent attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Schumer’s office “provided technical guidance and info about the bill, as well as stats from various think tanks and experts on the effects of [Graham-Cassidy],” a source familiar with their conversations told the Daily Beast….
Are Medical Insurance/Big-Pharma Company Profits… Evil?
R & D Costs for “Big Pharma”
This comes via ChEMBL-og:
Came across a link on Google+ to a post to a Forbes article (via Greg Landrum) and thought I would post a link here. It’s a simple economic analysis of the costs of Large Pharma drug discovery. Very simple, money in vs. drugs out. There is however a lot of complexity behind the numbers, for example – quite a few of the drugs will have been licensed in, the transaction costs for these in-licensing events have probably been factored in, but what about all the other burnt capital in the biotech companies that supplied the in-licensed compounds – this will inflate the numbers further. Of course the majority of these costs are incurred on the failed projects, the wrong targets, the wrong compounds, or the wrong trials.
To put the AstraZeneca number of $11.8 billion per drug in some national context (equivalent to £7.5 billion) – this is almost 17 years of the entire BBRSC budget (£445 million in 2011), or only two drugs from the entire investment portfolio of the mighty assets of the Wellcome Trust (~£14 billion in 2011) – that’s right, not two drugs from their annual research budget, but two drugs by shutting down the investment fund and putting it all into drug discovery and development (at Astra Zeneca ROI levels).
Scary numbers, eh? Are public funding agencies up to the task? Do we really know what to do differently? There’s also a POST on the same Forbes article on the In THE PIPELINE BLOG.
(An updated Forbes article is HERE)
Dennis Prager Discusses the NFL’s “Weak” Three
I stitch together a few segments from hour one and hour three. Enjoy Dennis’ insights/opinion.
Larry Elder Referees the NFL’s Weak Kneed Week Three
Larry Elder responds to the weekends events of NFL teams dissing the National Anthem and Trump’s multiple comments on the issue. Per the “Sage Rule,” facts are sticky issues used to bring logical thinking and reasonable thought together to create informed opinion. The below NATIONAL REVIEW article was mentioned during the show, of which some of it is reproduced (follow the author on his TWITTER):
…According to this narrative, black men are constantly harassed by the police and routinely brutalized with impunity, even when they have done nothing wrong, and there is an “epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men.” Even high-profile black celebrities often claim to be afraid of the police because the same thing might happen to them. Police brutality, or at least the possibility that one might become a victim of such violence, is supposed to be part of the experience of a typical black man in the U.S. Events such as the death of Brown in Ferguson are presented as proof that black men are never safe from the police.
This narrative is false. In reality, a randomly selected black man is overwhelmingly unlikely to be victim of police violence — and though white men experience such violence even less often, the disparity is consistent with the racial gap in violent crime, suggesting that the role of racial bias is small. The media’s acceptance of the false narrative poisons the relations between law enforcement and black communities throughout the country and results in violent protests that destroy property and sometimes even claim lives. Perhaps even more importantly, the narrative distracts from far more serious problems that black Americans face.
Let’s start with the question of fatal violence. Last year, according to the Washington Post’s tally, just 16 unarmed black men, out of a population of more than 20 million, were killed by the police. The year before, the number was 36. These figures are likely close to the number of black men struck by lightning in a given year, considering that happens to about 300 Americans annually and black men are 7 percent of the population. And they include cases where the shooting was justified, even if the person killed was unarmed.
Of course, police killings are not the result of a force of nature, and I’m not claiming these are morally equivalent. But the comparison illustrates that these killings are incredibly rare, and that it’s completely misleading to talk about an “epidemic” of them. You don’t hear people talk about an epidemic of lightning strikes and claim they are afraid to go outside because of it. Liberals often make the same comparison when they argue that it’s completely irrational to fear that you might become a victim of terrorism.
One might retort that, while it may be rare for a black man to be killed by the police, black men are still constantly stopped and routinely brutalized by the police, even if they don’t die from it. However, even this weaker claim is false. It just isn’t true that black men are kicked, punched, etc., on a regular basis by the police.
In order to show that, I’m going to use data from the Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), which, as its name suggests, provides detailed information about contacts between the police and the public. It’s conducted on a regular basis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and is based on a nationally representative sample of more than 70,000 U.S. residents age 16 or older. Respondents are asked whether they had a contact with the police during the past 12 months; if they say they did, they answer a battery of questions about the nature of their last contact, including any use of force. Since the respondents also provide their age, race, gender, etc., we can use this survey to calculate the prevalence of police violence for various demographic groups. The numbers in this piece are from my own analysis of the data, the details and code for which I provide here, but they are consistent with a 2015 report compiled by the BJS itself to the extent the two overlap.
First, despite what the narrative claims, it’s not true that black men are constantly stopped by the police for no reason. Indeed, black men are less likely than white men to have contact with the police in any given year, though this includes situations where the respondent called the cops himself: 17.5 percent versus 20.7 percent. Similarly, a black man has on average only 0.32 contacts with the police in any given year, compared with 0.35 contacts for a white man. It’s true that black men are overrepresented among people who have many contacts with the police, but not by much. Only 1.5 percent of black men have more than three contacts with the police in any given year, whereas 1.2 percent of white men do.
If we look at how often the police use physical force against men of different races, we find that there is indeed a racial disparity, but that this experience is rare across the board. Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. To be fair, these are probably slight undercounts, because the survey does not allow us to identify people who did not experience physical force during their most recent contact but did experience such force during a previous contact in the same year.
Further, physical force as defined by the PPCS includes relatively mild forms of violence such as pushing and grabbing. Actual injuries by the police are so rare that one cannot estimate them very precisely even in a survey as big as the PPCS, but the available data suggest that only 0.08 percent of black men are injured by the police each year, approximately the same rate as for white men. A black man is about 44 times as likely to suffer a traffic-related injury, according to the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified.
Now, it’s true that there are significant differences in the rates at which men of different races experience police violence — 0.6 percent is triple 0.2 percent. However, although people often equate racial disparities with bias, this inference is fallacious, as can be seen through an analogy with gender: Men are vastly more likely to experience police violence than women are, but while bias may explain part of this disparity, nobody doubts that most of it has to do with the fact that men are on average far more violent than women. Similarly, if black men commit violent crimes at much higher rates than white men, that might have a lot to do with the disparity in the use of force by the police…
Heinrich-Guevara Meets SJW
…Notice the shirt. Che Guevara was chief executioner for Fidel Castro’s monstrous regime. He is the direct corollary of Heinrich Himmler: the guy in charge of making sure large numbers of people were murdered on schedule. She probably believes oligarchical collectivism is morally justified, so long as you call it communism instead of Nazism. (MOONBATTERY)
