Guy Chamberlin

Yeah, if you've been tracking COVID deaths, the number always go way down over the weekend, which actually show up in Sunday and Monday numbers, then climb back up, often doubling, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Virtually every single week of the pandemic. 222 is good news indeed, but we've had a lot of low numbers followed by quadruple digit deaths. Including just last week.

I'd like to welcome Jason Sitoke to the P&R forum. I've always found him to be a reasonable and often humorous poster.

No. Read it again. I said the offense was good enough to win a well scripted quarter, but didn’t make the right attitude or scheme adjustments when the other team did. That’s on coaching as much as talent. We need to do better with both.

Adrian Martinez did regress, and it was in his decision-making, not so much the failure of the talent around him. We saw that same offensive talent pay excellent and efficient quarters, including about 1/3 of the Ohio State cold opener. But the team and Martinez did not do so well when other defenses adjusted and the pressure ramped up. I like what I'm hearing about Martinez doing everything he can to make this year different and better. Wouldn't be surprised if he pulls it off and shuts up his doubters, including sometimes me. It only helps the team to have Martinez doing well on the field while Smothers gets itchy to play on the sideline. What probably wouldn't help is Martinez opting for his fifth year.

I was good friends with an older couple. He was a WW II vet, an intellectual and as understood it, an atheist. He and his wife were very active members of the local Methodist church, which did a lot of outreach in the community. He enjoyed the intellectual debates he had with the pastor, and the pastor enjoyed them, too. It seemed to work out pretty well. The churches that embrace community in the true sense of the word are fine with me.

As an agnostic, it frees me up to believe that life is beautiful, intricate and mysterious, and perhaps I'll never have answers to its biggest questions, but I never assume I was owed that. There are many different religions and religious texts, but they all revolve around the Golden Rule: treat others as you would treat yourself. It's that simple. But because we often want to treat people badly, and forgive ourselves, we create complex religions that let us feel superior to others. Religion has a really bad track record that way.

Dr. Fauci does not owe Rand Paul an apology. This is the perfect example of the problem: responsible scientists will tell you what they know, what they don't know, and what they would advise based on probabilities. Given an unprecedented pandemic, things change. They told you that up front. People who know far less than our top epidemiologists will look for anomalies to prove how much smarter they are than the experts. Then they'll try to get you to do stupid stuff on their behalf. This is hardly the first time Rand Paul's been a total d!(k.

Yeah, I mean "if it bleeds it leads" has been around journalism forever, and it didn't have anything to do with party politics. Did the media over-react to the first legitimate global pandemic in our lifetimes? No. You could argue the MSM was late to the party. Once the bodies started piling up, the fringes were torn between conspiracy theories: total hoax or Chinese terrorism? I'm guessing if a talking head on CNN had predicted half a million dead Americans last March, most of us would have considered that needlessly alarmist. Did someone actually say other countries didn't make such a big deal about COVID? That's simply not true. Many made a much bigger deal about it. And even with the alarmist media, only now are we realizing COVID was likely much worse than we thought. Mexico has admitted the real fatalities are probably twice what's currently reported. Russia has likely under-reported fatalities by a factor of 4. I see no possible way that China's numbers are correct. Strict lockdowns worked. Relaxed mandates spurred surges. Except in places where they didn't. Counties like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria should have been nightmares, but have remained relatively unscathed. There's still a lot to learn, a lot we don't know. The media reports that there's a lot we don't know, and some people don't like that. Politically, my understanding is that as soon as Joe Biden was elected, COVID would magically disappear from the news because Democrats had been over-inflating it to undermine Trump. That really hasn't been the case, even with good vaccine news and improving numbers. I see the same call for caution along with potentially troubling developments. The liberal media hasn't exactly sheltered Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo — they've been taking direct hits every night. Outside of speculation, what has the media gotten factually wrong -- repeatedly wrong -- about the pandemic?

Infrastructure is the ultimate political no-brainer; big government, perhaps, but a huge boon to private contractors and a wide variety of jobs across the sectors. It's stuff that needs to be done, brings immediate tangible benefits, and the whole notion of American Exceptionalism falls apart without it. It's worth remembering that on the day Donald Trump was scheduled to announce his own infrastructure program, he was still stewing about the events at Charlottesville. Reportedly, Trump was upset that he had chastised the white supremacists, giving in to the people who told him he had to denounce them -- and interrupted what should have been an unassailable and positive infrastructure announcement by going off the rails into his "good people on both sides" tangent that totally hijacked the news cycle. I honestly don't remember the infrastructure plan he introduced or what was done about it.

Well it has always sucked to have a late state primary. For years California had it's primary in June, when the winner was almost always decided. Crazy for the state with the biggest electoral vote. That's a system problem, but it doesn't necessarily tip to party powers and money. Weirdly, it seems to be the opposite. I don't know where or when you voted, or your party affiliation, but after the Nevada primary the Democrat leadership was unhinged about Bernie Sanders winning the nomination. Joe Biden was flagging badly, and carried the smallest campaign chest of anybody: down to $600,000 for all of Super Tuesday. Everything changed when Biden won South Carolina in a landslide. The party powers and the money had nothing to do with that: Biden had bet everything on securing the Black vote in SC, and probably did so with a single endorsement. That changed everything. I have no doubt the rumors were true: Barack Obama himself called upon Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttegieg to exit the race just days away from Super Tuesday in an attempt to consolidate a Dem centrist to defeat Sanders. And even with that subterfuge, the Dems and the Money were still at the mercy of Super Tuesday voters. On that day, you still had a choice of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, and Tulsi Gabbard. You might not have liked any of them, but I don't think the party powers and the money were that happy with how it shook out, either. I mean, Barack Obama himself avoided endorsing Joe Biden until he was the last man standing. I think the Party would have preferred Kamala Harris build off her fast start and power through. I think the money would have preferred Michael Bloomberg. The Republicans had already learned that if you criticize Trump, you get holy hell from your own voters. You and I might have done things differently, but it's still us.

Bernie voters turned out for Clinton as well or better than previous primary runners up, and Jill Stein's numbers don't explain anything: there were far more third party votes for Johnson/Weld and Evan McMullin, which would logically have drawn from typical Republican voters. I think a lot of "us" were forced to come to the same conclusion Hillary Clinton did: it was her turn. Deal with it. As they always do, the majority of Americans opted not to vote at all. Guess we'll be looking back forever on the election where one party ran the least liked politician in America against the second least liked politician in America.

Who else is there? Money wants to side with a winner. Money definitely has its favorites, but it's stuck with the candidates we vote for. So is the DNC and The RNC. Sometimes we're just lazy and vote for a Bush or Clinton because we already had a President with that name. Sometimes we change our minds throughout primary season. Sometimes we really confound the system. 2016 was an open election in both parties, and the lesson for both parties was that America wanted an outsider. Hillary may have won the nomination, but the success of Bernie Sanders in the primaries was both unexpected and terrifying to the system. On the GOP side, Trump was considered a novelty act who couldn't possibly win the nomination, much less the general, until he did. The people who prefer not to talk to pollsters had spoken. In 2020 there were something like 26 different Democratic candidates. The system gave us plenty of choice, but not very exciting ones. Party leadership definitely had a hand in the last second culling of the herd before Super Tuesday, giving voters a choice between Bernie Sanders and Not Bernie Sanders. By this point there was a single criterion: who had the best chance of beating Trump. Turns out it was the guy given up for dead just two primaries before. The people who didn't want Trump had spoken. Not saying the system isn't screwed up, but it's still forced to elect the people we vote for.

Actually the system didn't want Trump or Biden, and neither did the RNC or DNC. Big money donors could name a dozen candidates they would have preferred. This is on us. Also....anyone who WANTS the job is suspect. What sane person would want to go through that?

Fair enough. Nebraska beat only one team last year by double digits, and that was Purdue. If Vegas had given 10.5 on Nebraska, you would have lost. Purdue was a pretty bad team. When actual money is on the line, Nebraska has been a bad bet for more than a decade. And those metrics are far from binary W/L records.

Would you have put your own money on Nebraska beating KSU last year straight up? Or +10?

So the answer is never. There will never be a time when a Scott Frost failure can't be traced to Mike Riley and Harvey Perlman.

I went with no, but I'm not totally down on the team. It's no secret that our offense and its skill positions remain a work in progress. Our good draft isn't likely to pay dividends this year, and the rest of the young talent is still emerging. I can't even name my favorite running back. A killer defense can make up for a lot, but that's still a big step. They're going to be improved, but not killer. I'm betting we let a winnable game slip away, and maybe score a solid upset, but it's still going to be hard pencilling in six wins on that brutal schedule. So I guess I'm watching for the solid signs of improvement that make us a lock for a more than marginal bowl game in 2022.

I hope you know that I basically agree with you, — especially on offensive line priorities — and have approached every season with optimism for the past 50+ years because I'm a fan and because there's always at least some just cause. If I tweak you it's because we both know that had Mike Riley not been fired, and proceeded to make every single personnel decision and playcall that Scott Frost has made, generating the exact same result, you would be utterly apoplectic that he was still the coach of the University of Nebraska. Like most of us you would be convinced that none of this would have happened if Scott Frost was the coach. Tell you what, let's neither of us blame Riley or Pelini for anything. This is year four for Scott Frost. The expectation is that he start winning more games than Mike, and better games than Bo. The understanding is that we aren't "fine" at the moment, and it's on the head coach to do something about it in the next three years. Fair?

Well I was perky, optimistic and excited about Frost's seasons one and two, a little less so for season three. That's kinda how we got here. You can't keep pretending Mike Riley is Voldemort.

I mean, not to be a snarky doom and gloom kinda poster, but doesn't this mean the bar for Frost was historically low, making it much easier to meet or exceed expectations? As I understand it, the trajectory for Nebraska has already been adjusted in a direction that's not up, due to his fourth team being really young and the schedule being really tough.

Well maybe if someone had paid them enough money, they would have given the the conclusions they needed!

Hadn't read that before. Thanks. Looks like the study is most notable for being inconclusive. It cannot conclude that new gun laws would lower gun fatalities, or that the defensive use of guns outweighs the accidental deaths and suicides from having guns in the home. So it did not give gun control advocates the uhm....smoking gun they wanted. But it did not disprove the concerns either, while confirming it was a legitimate public health issue. The one thing everyone in the study agreed on is that the subject deserves more study. The fact that it failed to fulfill a political role is a pretty good endorsement for the independence of the research authors.

I think most people who are demanding some way to slow or ban the purchase of certain weapons are talking about mental illness issue at the same time. It's like walking and chewing gum -- I'm almost certain we can do both. The telling problem is that when Obama wanted to conduct a study on gun deaths -- modeled after an earlier study on automotive deaths -- the NRA and its congresspeople prevented its funding. Nobody was talking about banning cars, or under the illusion car fatalities could be ended, just that working out solutions with the cooperation of automakers, road builders and others could save thousands of American lives each year. And by gosh, they did. Bet you don't even remember your freedoms being infringed. Could have been the same with guns. But guns are now a zero sum game. It's not about freedom and protection, and it quit being about hunting ages ago. It's a fetish, a paranoid fantasy, and a political litmus test. Remember the huge run on guns and ammunition when Obama was elected? Good times.

And imagine if the people who think they're analyzing the facts actually read the articles in question and understood what per capita means.

According to Key & Peele, DiCaprio Bootle is a lock to make the NFL.