LukeinNE

Im annoyed that his stat line doesn't say 3 total TDs. Should that annoy me? Am I overreacting?.

He should win regardless, but yeah his stat-line should read 313 or whatever it was all purpose yards, 3 TD's against Miami.

The weak spot right now is linebackers. As long as the front 4 stays healthy (knock on wood), between the tackles running shouldn't be a problem, and I'm not worried about our secondary. But those linebackers.....I don't have a stat on this but it feels like the vast majority of damage against our defense so far this year has been on a combination of running plays getting to the edge, shallow crossing routes to speedsters and check downs to the flats. I think they'll get that leak patched up somewhat, but it's definitely the weak link in an otherwise pretty strong chain.

Slightly different take. I was in the south end zone. The crowd was pretty loud all the way through, but not exceptionally so for a lot of the game. Much of the first half, I thought we sounded nervous. Once we got deep into the 3rd quarter though, the crowd got into it at a level that I'm not sure I've ever seen. Maybe the huge rally against OSU in 2011, or the 2009 OU game, but man, once the zebras screwed us on Gerry's pick and Thug U emerged, the crowd was absolutely rabid.

Pelini did nothing wrong. As a basketball ref, I can say (unless I'm some oddball weirdo), that referee management by coaches is an enormously important thing, not only to argue calls, but to point out stuff that's going on that you don't like. In any sport, there's going to be some borderline plays/calls. If I make a close call, or a bad one, and I don't hear anything from the coach, I'm going to subconsciously file that away as not being a bad call. If I know I blew a call and the coach is on me, I'm on my toes, and I'm going to do my best to not bring that coach down on me again, at least soon. The rule book says never, ever, partake in makeup calls, but the reality is that they happen all the time. If I call a blocking foul on Team A on a 50/50 play, and the coach gets on me, I'm not exactly going to be feeling bad, but I will be extra mindful to not turn around and nail Team A with a charge on a similar play on the other end of the court.

Referees above all else want to be fair. Many would privately concede that the perception of fairness might even trump accuracy in some limited circumstances. Good coaches exploit this impulse by getting inside the official's head and trying to convince them that their team is getting the short end of the stick from the refs. Two step guide to doing that: pick your spots wisely and manage your tone. I *hate* whiny coaches and players. Complain about everything and I'm going to stop taking your complaints seriously and start getting annoyed with you personally, which while not intentional, likely will not help you as the game goes on. Tone is important, though the acceptable range is wider. The ideal coach chooses his words carefully, makes sound, rational arguments, says thanks and pats you on the back after you acknowledge his comments. That said, anger isn't always bad. I'm a fan, I get mad at the refs too, and we understand this. It's just riskier, because we don't appreciate getting b!tched out especially when we don't deserve it, which happens. This would be Pelini's overall weakness, but it's his style and he's not going to change. For him, the main focus is picking his spots wisely, which I generally think he does, and limiting the blow ups to genuinely bad calls that really hurt the Huskers.

Just my $.02, other zebras on here might have different perspectives.

It all has to do with context. Knapp elsewhere and previously has commented at length about the swell performance this past week. I believe this OP of his was strictly intended to address the curious comments of that FAU player. I didn't take it as a downer post at all but rather as attacking a related issue from a different angle-FWIW.

 

Got it. Work has kept me off these boards for the past few weeks, so I would've missed Knapp's previous comments. I do think the FAU guy is just a dumbass though. If he was barking coming into the game, that's another matter, but to essentially claim that FAU is the better team after one of the worst statistical defeats in school history....odd.

I agree with the general point that the mystique of Nebraska has steadily eroded since....basically Osborne departed. It's a long road to get back there.

That said, I find this a curious time for a topic like this. Last Saturday, Nebraska did exactly what a vintage Husker team would've done to a cupcake: ran up an obscene number of yards, the game was over by halftime, lots of reserves, who played hard to the end. I would think that a relatively downer post like this would make more sense after a lackluster showing against someone.

There are plenty of areas in Appalachia that are every bit as poor as Detroit, and yet those areas do not suffer from crime epidemics. Poverty is part, not all of the crime problem.

There are a slew of reasons why Detroit has the problems they do. My irritation is with Luke's insistance that since there are black elected officials in Detroit, the black citizens should be doing as well as whites economically. You ask where he said that; read his various posts. That's the implication.

I haven't said or implied that either, if I did, it was purely accidental. My question is very simple, and narrow: discrimination against blacks has been cited as a major reason blacks can't advance in this country. Detroit has implemented many remedies to this alleged problem. I'll be even more specific for you: a good deal of this thread has focused on racism being responsible for the disparity in arrests between blacks and whites, as a direct result of white officers patrolling black neighborhoods. Has having a majority-black police force in Detroit made any difference in the arrest rate of blacks in that city?

Then what was your point in bringing Detroit up in the first place? You brought up Detroit as "one of America's worst cities" and made specific mention of the black population and the demographics of police and elected officials. So... what exactly was your point?

Again: it's been said many times in this thread that the primary reason blacks have not advanced in this country is racial discrimination. I find it....hard to believe that blacks routinely face white discrimination in a city where the laws are made by a black city government and enforced by a mostly black police department. Many of the suggested remedies have been implemented in Detroit: more blacks in government, more black cops, more black teachers, and so on. According to the "racism is the dominate factor in holding blacks back" theory, these steps should have led to a dramatic closure of the gap between blacks and whites in the Detroit area. They haven't.

I think this is having it both ways.

Only if the whites are relatively well off at the expense of the blacks, which is a theory I would reject.

Look, I'm not saying the city government is immune from criticism here. Kwame Kilpatrick was a huge problem all by himself... but you have to acknowledge there are far more factors at play in this situation than "black citizens have a black mayor".

I don't think anyone said that, Junior. The race of the people running the city is only relevant if we're talking about racial discrimination in Detroit. Corruption and incompetence are common diseases that infect public "servants" of all races.

Black people have a tough time in Detroit, but white people do too, do they not?

 

 

That's kind of the point - you can't compare one black community to another, you compare that black community to the white community in the same place. Even though it's all sh**ty, my guess is that it's more equally sh**ty for everyone there.

I guess it would depend on what one's definition of "equally sh#tty" would be. Whites in the Detroit metro area do much, much better than blacks do.

So why do you think that those involved with Detroit's economic development have failed so miserably in attracting new industry to the city?

Nothing to do with the city's annual tradition of mass arson the night before Halloween, I'm sure.

So you think that because the public office holders are black there is no discrimination? Who would you say are the largest employers in Detroit?

 

That's not to say that any of these people are racist, but the idea that racism doesn't exist because the mayor is black is laughable. The President of the United States is black... so RACISM HAS BEEN VANQUISHED!

 

Additionally, there's more to Detroit than Detroit city proper. The Detroit metro area has a demographic break down as follows:

70% White

22.8% Black

 

And as a person that lived three years in Michigan, I can assure you Detroit isn't the only area that is suffering in that state. The struggles of "Detroit" should probably be labeled as "southeast Michigan". Detroit is just a convenient phrase to use, like you would say you are going to Omaha if you are driving from Lincoln to LaVista.

 

Point to the discrimination in Detroit, then. Please tell me how the CEOs of the big auto companies are hurting blacks in Detroit. Or how suburban whites have much of anything to do with the inner city woes of Detroit. How the majority black police force targets black youths. Or how the majority black city government writes discriminatory statutes targeted at blacks.

I'm not making the case that Detroit is failing because it's black, I'm wondering about why, if blacks get to make the rules and enforce them in Detroit, do the blacks in Detroit look....pretty much like every other black community in the country that is supposedly failing under the constant pressure of white racism?

Being married makes you magically a better parent?

It makes you more likely to be present and active in the home, which, yes, indeed does make you a better parent.

So what are you implying about Detroit? Because I can easily explain the problems in Detroit without invoking race... But you seem to have an idea in your head about it and I'm curious as to exactly what that is.

 

The case has been made in this thread, implicitly and explicitly, that the main reason for blacks not advancing in America is pervasive racism and discrimination. I'm wondering how such discrimination could be taking place in Detroit when blacks run the show there. In short, I'm not implying anything about Detroit. I'm citing Detroit as an example where the effects of white racism should be at its nadir, considering they've been largely removed from the city's levers of power and police force....and yet blacks haven't prospered there, either. My implication is that white discrimination is a convenient, but grossly overblown scapegoat for the problems that plague blacks in this country.

How many of those can be tied to an overall problem of discrimination in nearly every aspect of life?

Malcolm X and other black separatists ascribed to much this same line of thought: blacks could not and would not advance in a society dominated by white people. That white discrimination simply made this impossible. Therefore, they said, it is desirable for blacks to be separate to the greatest extent possible from the rest of the American community. Malcolm X's dream has come to pass in the form of Detroit: 80% black, 10% white, the city council has 1 white member (out of 9). Detroit just elected its first non-black mayor in 20 years. Detroit's police chief is black. Detroit's police force is 2/3 black. Black people run most everything of importance in Detroit. It is inconceivable that black residents in Detroit face "discrimination in nearly every aspect of life." Many of the things that social justice warriors have called for as fixes to the plight of black people in this country have been implemented in Detroit - and Detroit is now one of America's worst cities. In order to make the case that discrimination is the main cause of black failings, one must explain Detroit.

And if you think that the black community doesn't have a strong family culture....

 

 

Strong family culture as evidenced by what? The 70%+ out of wedlock birth rate? The highest percentage - by far - of fathers not living with their kids among all races? The lowest marriage rate among all races? The highest divorce rate among those who do get married?

Elder care is a particularly touchy aspect of health care. It's always a life and death issue, just with them, the "death" part is always more of an immediate consideration. I've had two grandparents die in the past 20 months. In one case, it was a series of strokes and broken hips that turned my 80 year old, basketball-playing grandpa into a wheelchair-bound old man who had trouble eating on his own. That went on for 6 years until he finally passed away in 2012. For my grandma, it was a single, devastating stroke that basically rendered her paralyzed and on a feeding tube for her last six weeks.

In both cases, hundreds of thousands (possibly into the millions, for all I know) of dollars were poured into keeping them alive in their miserable states, with no hope of an eventual recovery. Objectively, was this a good use of resources? No, not really. But they were human beings, and we instinctively - both for ourselves and for the dying - fight the battle against death to the very end, even when we know it's in vain. I can't even begin to wrestle with the moral questions surrounding this issue and what, if anything should be done to how we view it.

The other issue is the cost of nursing home care. Frankly, even though its prohibitively expensive, this needs to be folded into Medicare. I have heard nightmare stories about entire farms being sold off to pay for someone's care in a nursing home, leaving nothing to pass down to children, which is a tragedy. In our case (like most others in our position do) we were able to put the bulk of my grandparents' estate into a trust, which, after 5 years of self-funded nursing home care, can't be touched by the government when the non-trust assets are exhausted and Medicaid is asked to take over payment. Medicaid covers most nursing home residents anyway, so we might as well shift the burden to Medicare and make it part of the national retirement safety net.

We can agree that it's a problem though right? I'm just guessing that you're not a fan of a 6% voter participation rate either...so what can be done to further participation? Because I also think we can agree that increasing the black involvement in the government is a positive.

I look at the low turnout rate as a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. So, I don't think the right approach is saying "how can we increase black voting participation?" In the end, we see civic participation when people take ownership of their communities - which historically has been a strength, not a weakness of blacks in this country.

I'm curious what you attribute to the failings of the black community and who is to blame for their failings.

This is my initial post in this thread.

I would define the bolded points as both very destructive to the black community, and a problem that is pretty much exclusively theirs to solve. Out of wedlock births, for example, is something that any sociologist will cite as a risk factor that leads to poverty, troubled kids, and so on. Black out of wedlock births were 24% in 1965. They are nearly 75% today. I'm....skeptical that the usual excuses (access to contraception, discrimination, sex ed) have somehow gotten worse for blacks since 1965.

So yes, you seem to recognize the problems, but then I still get pushback from you when I claim there are problems, which seems weird to me.

You probably get push back because you take the caricatured left-wing view that any and all discrepancies between whites and blacks simply must be due to white racism, whether explicit, implicit, or built into the system, and has nothing at all to do with failings within the black community. In fact, you've never expressed what you think blacks should be responsible for. Voting? It's totally free, it can be done in person, in the mail, on election day, usually a month + before election day - it is not hard to do. WaPo's numbers state that during the 2012 elections, blacks in Ferguson voted roughly at the same rate whites did. This demonstrates, beyond a doubt, that when they want to, blacks (in Ferguson, at least) can vote just as easily as whites can.

The rules did not change in between the 2012 and 2013 elections, but black participation dropped from 54% to 6%. There is only one reasonable explanation why black participation dropped so much: they didn't want to. That's not racism, that's black people in Ferguson choosing not to participate in our democratic process, which is their right. Their choice is not something that we need to swoop in and "fix." Honestly, when you speak of "problems" like this, I immediately envision the amorphous blob humans on WALL-E - incapable of anything without their floating chairs. We're being racially insensitive by bothering black people to vote more than once every four years? Bring out the hover chairs (government-funded, of course). This is about the most obvious example of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" you will ever get.

I've offered plenty of ways over time, but half the battle in this thread is convincing people that race is an issue, so that's what I've been spending my time on. See: LukeinNE, StPaulHusker

Actually, I think you spend your time on it because you don't have answers, you just enjoy the political points you can score by labeling people you don't agree with as racially insensitive and therefore not worth listening to (and...when we don't cooperate in being racially insensitive, it's time to make things up, apparently). I have said again and again and again and again and again in this thread alone that racial bias exists in this country.....but here we are on page 8, with me having to make a post stating that, yes indeed, I do believe racial bias is a problem in this country. So...why are you focusing on our supposed denialism? A convenient straw man, to be sure, but I'm not sure how it helps move any conversation forward.

Where the f#ck did you pull that out of?

You're drawing very strange conclusions. The data in the article is incredibly clear. Odd-year voting and Non-partisan ballots decrease voter turnout and decreaase knowledge about the candidates, an effect that occurs disproportionately with income and educational status, which have a big correlation with race, unfortunately. You want really-indepth details? There's tons of peer-reviewed research out there with more info.

 

Let me ask you a simple question, do you think that it is better to hold elections in even years or odd years based on this data? And no, you cannot say "It's irrelevant," you must choose one.

 

Off-year elections are a good idea for municipal elections precisely because it is desirable for the electorate to know something about the people they're voting for. This spring, I spent probably 2 hours going through the various World-Herald election stories that I saved so I could get my primary ballot for things like the Westside school board, MCC Board of Regents, etc right. Voters who do that are rare enough, how many do you think would do it if we had a presidential campaign raging, sucking up all the oxygen and air time?

There is no tax for people to pay to vote. Early voting ballots are widely available, they'll even mail them out if you request them to. There is no good excuse to not vote. Labeling off-year elections implicitly racist because 19/20 blacks (as opposed to 17/20 whites) can't be bothered to exercise a key Constitutional right is ridiculous.

....

Carl, I don't think we're too far apart on the autopsy. Hopefully the federal/county ones are a little more informative.

Unbelievably fast reflexes? Wouldn't it depend on the spacing and order of the shots?

I wasn't clear enough. Witnesses say that Brown turned and put his hands in the air, and then was shot. His hands being in the air and the officer shooting is a crucial element in the sequence, probably the one that will decide the officer's fate. If his hands were in the air when the officer shot his first round, there are three options based on the location of the bullet wounds: 1): the officer missed completely, 2) the officer winged him, and that bullet passed through his arm off somewhere else, 3) the bullet hit his arm and did something weird and ended up in his chest. We don't have enough evidence to know which, if any of those are possible, but Brown obviously wouldn't have had enough time to bring his arms down to shield himself from the first incoming bullet. The only other alternative is that "hands up" never happened.

Sloppy on my part. The police say at least one shot, Johnson said one. When it comes to GSR , that should be a distinction without a difference. What I was getting at was that both sides agree that a shot was fired at close range, which should've left GSR on both of them, and it is therefore curious that the autopsy did not show this.

Maybe this will get the ball rolling on cruiser cams in MO. Pretty unbelievable to me that they don't have that equipment.

That would seem correct only if he didn't lower his arms as bullets were striking him. That doesn't seem likely to me.

That would require either unbelievably fast reflexes on Brown's part or (more likely, though still not very likely, imo), the police officer shot and missed a stationary target at 10 yards a couple of times before re-centering and firing again. If he had a shot or two to the abdomen in addition to the pass-thrus on the arm, I would say the defensive reflex theory would be more likely...

Other than the 1 shot fired from/in the vehicle are both sides claiming that shots were fired at close range? I thought that the consensus was ~35 feet.

1 shot should've been all it took to leave GSR on his body....or clothes, which Baden said he didn't have access to.

Also, a partial autopsy, from Michael Baden, hired by the Brown family, is out.

Quickly....

-shot 6 times, 4 times in the right arm, twice in the head.

-all six shots hit him from the front, he wasn't shot in the back, as Dorian Johnson claimed

-I'm not familiar with the physics of bullets, but several of the arm shots wound up in his body, which doesn't seem consistent with the "hands up" theory.

-curiously, no GSR was found, which seems to contradict both sides' claim of shots fired at close range

-again, curiously, no physical signs of a struggle, which again contradicts both sides' claim of a physical altercation.

In other words, just another small piece of the picture. Hopefully the city and federal ME's can shed more light on what happened.

Good to see, and yeah, this is for publicity for the ALS Association, who I'm sure is getting donations as a result of this campaign from many times more people than have actually taken the ice bucket challenge.

Anyway, hopefully we see Bo getting the ice water bath a couple more times this year!