Guy Chamberlin

No time to read? Start by telling me how this angry Black woman is wrong:

Pretty sure those issues were covered in the long academic research paper I provided and you never read.

Hey, I used to be like you. I considered 150 year old grievances to be unrealistic and opportunistic. I wasn't about to take the blame for something my ancestors did, and they weren't even MY ancestors. I believed it still came down to personal choices and personal accountability, and if you looked around modern America, you'd find every opportunity you needed to move up and create your own future, regardless of race or gender. But as I got older I realized how much I had wrong. I had avoided a lot of inconvenient truths because they made me uncomfortable.

That's what I was warning Archy to be careful about.

Man, if there were only some connection to keeping a race in a constant state of poverty, and a cultural history of families being torn apart.

Hey it just occurred to me: does it make a difference if we can trace current injustice back to slavery, or is the fact that there's current injustice damning enough? Anyway, it turns out the slavery link is not an uncommon theory, one of many factors to be considered. Here's one of the more clear-headed and academic, Archy. Dig in! https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/sugar_16_04_2019.pdf

Will do. Meanwhile, I'd like to hear your explanation for why Black families have a considerably higher rate of broken homes than Whites, Asians, or Hispanics. Be careful.

good for you. But I’m sticking with the people who’ve painstakingly researched the problem.

Right. We need to concentrate on the awesome playcalls we would have made that Scott didn't.

Well.....not exactly. I mean, yeah, slavery took place all over the world, including Africans enslaving neighboring tribes, a fact that often gets pulled up to distract from the current issue. So while reparations may not be the answer, there is still justice to be found for slavery, and all involved are not gone. Systemic discrimination in wealth, property, equity, and broken family units continue in the Black community in a way they don't in other minorities without slave histories, and the people who will happily continue that marginalization have risen to the highest seats of power in America, including national news media that clutch their pearls about last summer's black lives matter protests while downplaying January's white supremacist coup attempt and, wait for it.....blaming it on leftwing instigators. I'm against Reparations because they allow too many people to claim Black people are demanding too much.

Opposing reparations might seem selfish and racist. Yet writing a check to salve your guilt seems like another patronizing and ultimately shallow gesture of liberalism. And are we talking about grievances from systemic inequity? Cause that's a looooooooooong list. Slavery wins priority hands down. Unless you stop to consider Native-American genocide. Generations of gays might tell you they were more likely to be shunned, fired, beaten, and killed without consequence than Black Americans. And what would be the price of justice anyway? Who comes up with that incredibly controversial figure, and how exactly does that change either the past or the future? It's a third rail issue with a lot of counter-productive baggage attached. When Jeff Bezos' ex-wife made huge unrestricted donations directly to a few Historically Black Colleges, that was more genuine remediation than putting the pro-rated cash in millions of hands. If Republican redistricting and voter suppression are simultaneously marginalizing the Black vote, reparations hardly matter. We've got to make investments in all kinds of underserved sectors of America -- and promote them as investments, not handouts -- because they will have a significant positive return on the economy as well as the social fabric, a fact that gets lost in the Maker/Taker narrative horses#!tt.

It's a tough list because the worst Riley losses confirmed we weren't moving past Bo, we were plummeting back to Callahan 2007 Nebraska football. But the Frost losses might have felt worse because he was Scott Frost, and if he couldn't turn it around, who could? I think the talent question took a hit in last year's Minnesota game when a middle-of-the-pack Minnesota team down to its third and fourth stringers outplayed and out-coached the Huskers, including our Junior quarterback who had been a Heisman hopeful just two years earlier. It felt impossible to have a conversation about forward motion after that game. The turnaround is still coming. Statistical probability says it has to. Of course I'm rooting for Frost, but can you imagine someone in 2018 telling you: "just wait until Year Four when Scott gets some real offensive linemen in here — we'll have a very good chance of going 6-6."

Given the chance, Republicans cut taxes and deregulated everything in sight, and pursued wars of intervention that had long been in the conservative think tank playbook. The funneling of money up to the 1% has informed almost every policy since the Reagan era, and direct action has been taken to discourage voting by the opposition party, take hard line immigration stances, and fight things like healthcare and civil rights. It's been a long struggle for conservatives, but they could not be more thrilled by the success of the Bush and Trump administrations, and the c$%k-blocking of Obama. What country have you been watching?

That's a pretty good summation. I do think the majority of fans were tired of both Bo's antics and lack of forward progress, but I think a majority were also willing to give him a couple more seasons and didn't like the look of firing him. Mixed bag, as a lot of other fans wanted him gone after Iowa 2013. I'm betting alums and donors weren't all on one side. But everyone -- and I mean everyone - could have rationalized the sideline behavior if Bo had delivered just a little more than he did. If the clock runs out against Texas, this whole conversation might be different. But it would mostly be a matter of time. That famous locker room tape and Bo's post-Nebraska career suggests Perlman and Eichorst weren't wrong to get him out of there. I believe the damning stat around the time was Bo's really poor record against ranked teams, and sub-.500 record against teams with winning records. IIRC, there were only two Power 5 schools that had fewer "upsets" over higher ranked teams than Nebraska during the Pelini years. Duke was one of them. As mentioned, I'm sure some fans and Athletic Department folk loved having Mike Riley to cleanse the palate, but he was most definitely hired to win at the same time. Nice Mike felt the heat the moment BYU caught that Hail Mary.

But these were boilerplate GOP policies before Trump ran or became President. Go back and watch the 2008 Republican Presidential debates. The guys on stage were trying to our right wing each other. John McCain's centrist leanings actually got booed. Party stalwarts knew he wasn't a True Believer. Ron Paul was dismissed as a libertarian looney, though he commanded his own sizable wing. Mitt Romney was held suspect by party stalwarts too. But when Republican voters pulled the lever, they went for McCain and Romney the next two elections. Was it those two losses that turned the party farther right? How did guys like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson get as far as they did? They weren't bringing new ideas as much as they were declaring themselves cultural warriors. Sensible and less-frightening Republican candidates suddenly found themselves on the inside looking out. But for all the cult of personality stuff, almost all of these candidates would have advanced similar agendas and policies. Yet none of them would have been willing to subvert democracy and try to remain in office as dictator other than Donald Trump. The most un-American president in history is now the golden idol of millions of Republicans and Christians who don't get the irony. It's really creepy.

My understanding is that Eichorst first reached out to Brett Bielema, so the "nice guy" theory can't be entirely true. It's also true that most coaches would be a better public face for the University than Bo Pelini, so pretty much any HC could be accused of being nicer. Turns out the big names weren't interested in the job. I'm sure some people loved the fact that Mike Riley was extra nice, but he was hired because he had a reputation as a great recruiter — Rivals considered it a coup — and some folks thought he could do better with Nebraska's resources than Corvallis'. If you look back to 2014 and consider the coaches Nebraska couldn't or didn't hire, you won't find a lot of less-nice guys with can't miss records.

This is why the attempt to create a "maker vs. taker" dichotomy linked to the two parties is so dishonest. But definitely congratulate that Physical Ed teacher on accumulating wealth. It's not easy in that position.

$22 for 9 Chicken McNuggets? Thanks Biden!!!!!!! Seriously, I hadn't eaten at McDonalds for a few years and got a craving for a Quarter Pounder w/Cheese during the quarantine and went through the drive-through. Absolutely shocked to discover that a QP with Cheese was now a $6.10 hamburger. There are better hamburgers for the same price or less everywhere, including across the street of this McDonald's. Don't know how they compete these days. I think breakfast is its most profitable segment these days, and I'm not gonna deny the tastiness of them little biscuit sandwiches.

The "China Joe" narrative was hand crafted during the election by Republican opposition, pretty much ignoring the precedents of every administration, including Trump's, and capitalizing on anti-China sentiments created by the Kung Flu. It was then spun-off into it's own voter fraud conspiracy theory, in which China mailed millions of pre-filled physical ballots to the United States to be secretly dumped into the system, hoping to elect Joe Biden, a man who will let them get away with anything. The rightwing meme-makers were perfectly capable of pushing this on their own, but if you ever see The Epoch Times as a source, check out the history and agenda of The Epoch Times.

And of course that includes the free market capitalists who create the goods and services and debts the recipients will be paying for.

As I remember it, Riley was most definitely expected to win more and better games than Bo Pelini. That's what he was hired. And when Riley tanked, Scott Frost was literally the only choice. Had the former Husker star coming off an undefeated season at UCF gone to any other team, we would have blamed 4-8, 5-7, and 3-5 seasons on not having Frost as our head coach.

If you are using season records as your metric -- and you are -- you're still stuck with 4-8, 5-7 and 3-5 as your trajectory. I think we can both agree that another couple seasons will better confirm the trajectory, and that better offensive linemen is a great place to start. But you're gonna have to pick a year when it's not Mike Riley's fault.

Honest question: how do you feel about Husker team performance in the second half? We've certainly seen glimpses, including the first quarter of Ohio State this year, where it looks like Nebraska's talent and Scott's schemes are able to hang with good teams and dominate lesser teams. But in the second half, our opponent makes the better adjustments and either a sluggish Nebraska first half performance doesn't improve, or the solid first half performance turns sluggish. Or is that an unfair assessment of Husker tendencies?

There's pretty much nobody in football who doesn't acknowledge Shanahan's offensive savvy and play-calling. He inherited a Riley size dumpster fire and the only season where he had a healthy above average quarterback, he took them to the Super Bowl. The topic was fullbacks. Shanahan uses them very effectively, one of the few coaches who does. Not sure what you mean by margin of error. Juszczyk is simply an extra weapon utilized for about 30% of the plays, including vintage fullback executions and wide receiver routes that catch defenses off-guard. It's all good.

Yeah, that was definitely a dead man walking team, but if the question is "progress" I think Nebraska is still shuffling around on the same rock bottom and we're quibbling about inches. The reason I brought up last year's Minnesota game is because it felt so much like a 2017 game. I can't pretend it's about a bare cupboard anymore. Like I said earlier: good recruiting class, clean slate, super reasonable expectations and optimism, but I need a little more forward and upward motion in year four.