Author / coopsies

Posts by coopsies

writer, sometimes comedian, sometimes radio personality, and shameless degenerate.
by coopsies

SB217’s Blind Spot: Colorado’s Police Should Return to Unencrypted Scanners

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers inspired one of the most widespread and heroic uprisings in modern United States history. Two weeks of rioting and protest have opened a dialogue about the nature of police and spurred more efforts at reform, or in some cases outright abolition, than years of voting and token civilian oversight efforts ever could have. This is a reckoning years in the making – rampant police brutality has persisted nationwide for decades and between the police unions making any accountability or policy change all but impossible, a “Thin Blue Line” “warrior” culture that has deliberately placed cops above the citizenry, and both peaceful protest and representative democracy failing to rectify the problem, it was only a matter of time before things finally exploded. The brutal, indiscriminate response from police all across the country exposed them as an occupying force with contempt for the populations they purportedly serve rather than a profession existing for conflict resolution; an extortion racket for the wealthy existing to crush dissent and keep systems and institutions failing the vast majority of people afloat to maintain revenue streams.

Unsurprisingly, Colorado law enforcement was in rare form. With a long history of protest suppression, the response to initial demonstrations in downtown Denver as well as Colorado Springs was a strategy of overwhelming force and intimidation. Mirroring the conflicts that played out in most major American cities, it was obvious that the police were starting the riots, but the segment of demonstrators willing to fight back – rightfully fed up with police overreach and invulnerability – was significantly higher than usual. A police murder and the subsequent efforts to crush any outcry should always be seen as a breach of the social contract, and a critical mass of people justifiably and righteously made that breach a two-way street by opening up a conflict with the police that raged for days and still shows very little sign of stopping.

Local efforts to diffuse the tension have ranged from nefarious, with a seemingly AstroTurf “activist” organization emerging overnight in Denver that focused immediately on tone policing, sowing division with a lack of respect for a diversity of tactics, and staging photo-ops for local politicians and the police department, to suspicious – there’s been speculation that the Denver Police stood down not just to deescalate, but because the department was running out of crowd control weapon munitions and had exhausted their manpower. It’s also likely the mayor’s office pulled them back after realizing the DPD handled everything terribly and was primarily responsible for escalating the situation. An officer was fired for posting himself and two other police officers in riot gear and captioning it “Let’s Start a Riot” on Instagram.

Token symbolic measures, like the painting of Black Lives Matter in front of the capitol building and some changing of street signs, were taken this week. Quite quickly, a flurry of activity at the statehouse to get some legislation on the books and hopefully quell anger was engaged, giving Coloradans SB217, a reform bill that’s already passed in the House and will be voted on imminently in the Senate. State Republicans and law enforcement groups (naturally) object to many of the proposals and will likely neuter key provisions in an already relatively toothless bill that seems, on its face, full of “reforms” that are nebulously enforceable.

Continue reading →
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Ostrich Theory: The Completely Avoidable 2020 Biden Nail-biter

If I’m a Democratic Party political strategist in 2020 (and I’m not, the closest they’ve hired to even a metaphorical knife-fighter in the modern era was Rahm Emmanuel), my eggs don’t go in the basket of a guy who spent the 70s propping up segregation and trying to tug at your heartstrings with a quote like “I don’t want my children growing up in a racial jungle.” Or the guy who eulogized Strom Thurmond in 2003. Or the guy who was one of the chief architects of the 90s crime bill. Or the guy who was the main Party cheerleader for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Or the guy who legislated the country’s way into the student debt crisis and then ensured it continued for generations by doing nothing about escalating tuition costs. Or the guy who was second-in-command while every single financial institution that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis emerged essentially unscathed and ready for the next decade with whole new asset portfolios they bought at fire sale prices. Or the guy who is on tape saying he doesn’t empathize with the new largest generational voting bloc’s problems, an age group that will be the first in decades to not be able to surpass the earning potential or quality of life that their parents had. Or the guy with arguably credible, incredibly creepy tendencies with women and girls captured in public and a litany of assault allegations. Or the guy with a son with questionable foreign business connections, rumors of crack smoking, and who married his brother’s widow. Any single one of those issues is such a gift to oppo researchers that I’d assume any of those guys is dead in the water as a candidate for alderman in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Joe Biden is all of those guys and the presumptive 2020 Democratic Presidential nominee. This Sam Porter Bridges of political baggage is wrapped in a rapidly decaying husk and has turned up an already gaffe-prone career (spun as “folksy” or “authentic”) to a level of senility and tone-deafness that makes you question as to whether or not he still ties his own shoes. Just yesterday, in a softball interview (and they’re all softball interviews) with Charlemagne tha Based God on popular urban youth radio program The Breakfast Club, when prodded ever so slightly about aspects of his legislative record regarding impacting black communities, Biden became flustered and retorted that if you look at him next to avowed white nationalist Donald Trump and vote for Trump, “you ain’t black.“

Putting aside the fact that this is a faux-Rust Belt Blue Dog Democrat that only was able to rehabilitate years of unforgivable career moves by being picked for Vice President solely to assuage racists and Red-baiters in the face of America electing its first black president, that’s just the kind of flat-out condescension that has ran through the blood of Joe Biden for decades. He’s coming off a primary that’s once again divided the party. The Sanders candidacy in 2016 seemed like a quixotic but hard-fought loss in which his constituency dug their heels in to influence the party’s platform after detecting a hint that perhaps some party machinations might have made some moves to consolidate an establishment candidate’s total victory. This time around, Biden didn’t seem to have a prayer until the party made huge, obvious calculations to drag their candidate over the line in the face of a coming progressive landslide. Now, as the neoliberal wing has adopted a posture of “we don’t even need you” towards progressives and socialists once eager to use the flailing Trump presidency as a catalyst to opening the rare window of opportunity for vast, wide-reaching legislation intended to improve social safety nets (not unlike steps taken by FDR and oddly enough, a far more conservative Democrat in LBJ), we’re starting to see a bit of kernel panic among the political and pundit class as the left (once again) floats third-party trial balloons or settles back into principled abstention relegated to those that won’t give their consent to Capital and/or vote for a lesser evil as a matter of harm reduction.

It’s easy to blame the corrupt intertwining of the donor and political class, a relationship the GOP seems to nakedly relish in, but is ultimately the crux of the issue: the rich have captured the electoral process by hedging their bets between both parties. The Democrats market themselves as “above” this seedy kind of arrangement, or at the very least attempt to justify it as a “necessary evil” in which they’re fighting “fire with fire.” If that was true, the sabotage would be less overt, the coronation process less expected, and it would be clear lessons had been learned from the party disaster of 2016.

A lot of the same dynamics were at play in 2016 that are replicated wholesale in 2020. Whether or not you believe Hilary Clinton deserves the decades of vitriol she generated from the bellows of right-wing discourse that poisoned many on-the-fence voters is irrelevant, your thoughts on Benghazi are irrelevant, her emails are irrelevant. What mattered was that it was in play for propaganda that would inevitably seep into mainstream, low-information voter discussions, and it was an exploitable weakness. Biden’s baggage isn’t what’s in the bag, it’s that there’s a bag at all, and that in both candidacy’s circumstances, there were better options with less exposed thermal exhaust ports to launch torpedoes at. The professional liberal political class is relying on a dicey, manufactured product of fundamental honesty and truth to overcome both the propaganda of an enemy that could give less of a shit about either, as well as an electorate that is, frankly, so goddamn stupid and easily manipulated and/or polarized that running candidates with glaring flaws is pure strategic suicide. Especially when said candidates don’t pass the smell test for non-negligible portions of your base or bring in substantial portions of leftist voters disenfranchised from participating in electoralism in the first place.

Pretending these issues don’t exist as well as failing to recognize that Obama’s victory in 2008 was very much due to capitalizing on the vaunted “Enthusiasm Gap” in American politics and not just a referendum on how terrible the Bush II presidency was, has gone on to doom Democrats both locally and on the national stage. Just as 2016 was probably the most winnable loss Democrats have ever had, 2020 should’ve been a triumphant mashing of Trump’s face into dog shit for nine straight months. His presidency has been an abysmal failure, culminating in the bungled response to a pandemic approaching a six-figure death toll and massive unemployment numbers in an election year, and many average people, unsurprisingly, want to go back to ignoring politics altogether.

Biden is up eight points according to polls from Fox News, but this is before potential debates almost inevitably expose new gaffes and Trump (perhaps disastrously) recommencing his Nuremberg marathon rallies for his frothing supporters to re-energize. The right-wing propaganda machine hasn’t even finished spooling up to fully operational. Expect Hunter Biden to be subpoenaed for something regarding work in Ukraine. Expect more sex pest stories and hair-sniffing montages. Expect a massive push towards black voters rightfully using ammunition Biden has manufactured over his long career and a huge underscoring on work with Kim Kardashian and Jared Kushner on actual prison reform initiatives. Expect likely projection of dirty tricks and election fraud. They’ll muddy the waters, the gap will tighten, and once again what would’ve been a blowout with a generic empty suit will come down to election night, where it will likely be close enough to run some illegal plays and steal this thing (again?).

There’s probably a quote about being a victim of one’s own hubris that I could sling at the DNC, but at the end of the day, they just lose. Like much of the pundit class presently engaged in a futile and damaging trench warfare campaign of chastising and demanding the left “know its betters” and fall in line, none of these people are ultimately affected by most of Trump’s worst policies. They’ve got no real skin in the game and this is all largely a purely academic and performative exercise for them. Enough of the local ground game has slowly been won back that there’s a chance they might get the Senate, and many of them stand to make a lot of money barking at Trump as a lame duck. But us regular folks, “who might wear a tennis shoe or the occasional python boot,” know the clock is ticking: on our planet’s vitality, on the health of ourselves and our loved ones, and on our ability to keep our heads above water financially. Increasingly it’s being made abundantly clear to us that there’s not, nor perhaps has there ever been, any hope at the ballot box.

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Nothing is More Indicative of a Completely Adrift Generation and a Civilization in Decline Than the Glut of Premium Pet Food Commercials

Everyone is a cord cutter anymore. Being more selective about what you watch and how, or even paying a premium, means one can avoid television advertising a lot easier than before. Commercials, once a ubiquitous fixture for most people and likely the closest modern society got to a shared popular culture, are now skippable before they can even hook you or entirely absent if you’ve got a few dollars (or a generous friend) for subscriptions. A few avenues of media still remain on the failing model (it’s proven catastrophic for journalism in regards to papers and magazines) but if you want to watch sports or most news, you’ll be subjected to commercials trying to capture your attention.

Just as the collective labor of enduring through commercial breaks and the shared experience of watching all of the same marketing firms meticulously craft spots built a kind of pop culture in the age of audio/visual mass media, it also lends insight into what the firms have determined is most grabbing: an algorithm that’s determined where and what the largest portion of its target population is experiencing in the given epoch in an effort to meet that population’s “needs,” consumerist whims, or fleeting, impulsive desires with a more-than-likely ephemeral product. This kind of glimpse is something that’s lost when you’ve atomized and alienated yourself from the sales specters into a curated cycle of King of the Hill reruns and HBO releases, until you’re wolfing down half of a DiGiorno’s Rising Crust™ pizza 45 minutes before work, boot up the YouTube TV app you got from a colleague’s family plan for sports and the brain hemlock of cable news, and turn on Jumanji on AMC to avoid silence in your living room like I did yesterday evening. The lost art of settling during channel surfing uncovered in the unkempt jungle beard of the late Robin Williams while freeze-dried pepperoni burns the roof of your mouth.

Somewhere between the introduction of David Alan Grier’s policeman character and the small boy viewer-surrogate character gaining ape features, during the ad breaks I noticed a phenomenon that’s been remarked upon enough towards my age bracket. No less than three spots aired advertising premium dog food in a single flight of commercials. One even flaunted that it was food “tested on humans” as it featured a small boxer leaping in ecstatic joy as its “dog dad” carried a full dish of honestly delicious looking food to its designated spot on the kitchen floor.

Living in a city, I’ve observed far too many people and their dogs. Even under quarantine, they lap past my house while I smoke on the porch and shit in my little patch of grass before scooping it into a specialized, dog-shit-sized bag. I’m no monster: I say hello to the dogs and greet the people. I don’t see a lot of strollers, just as on the television, I didn’t see any diaper commercials or Gerber food advertisements. Ostensibly, Jumanji is a movie that was marketed to children like me when it came out, and the advertising could reflect that maybe it’s shared viewing between millennial parents and their offspring. Instead, there were ads seemingly targeted to my age group, but whose main concerns regarding any dependents were geared towards dogs. Continue reading →

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Could Coronavirus Kill the Regional Sports Network?

It might seem a little callous to speculate on implications for entertainment industries while thousands of people die every day from the COVID-19 pandemic and millions lose their jobs, but as Major League Baseball tries to figure out a way to restructure a 2020 season, the NFL opts to draft from Roger Goodell’s basement, and the NBA throws together a H-O-R-S-E tournament, I’d argue that the issues are out there and worth exploring. A disclosure: I work in broadcasting, and so much of the following article’s main points certainly fall under my personal livelihood just as much as my interests as a sports fan. There’s absolutely a conflict of interest here, but I have zero ability to change anything about the present status quo within the industry, so this is merely an opinion of someone within the trade. I’ll also be using Colorado as a bit of a microcosm for the rest of the sports broadcasting industry, as it’s my understanding the business model is generally similar to most other areas.

Since MLB Spring Training was halted, not a day has gone by where I didn’t mourn the lack of baseball or think about my beloved New York Yankees. After last season, I’ve spent the off-time oscillating between chomping at the bit for the fellas to get back on the field and worrying about injuries and contracts, like any fan. I count myself lucky that this virus has yet to touch anyone close to me and I’m an “essential worker” that’s thankfully avoided layoffs, so it feels okay to lament about how much easier a quarantine would be if there was a realistic and safe way to distract a terrified, shut-in America with a couple of its favorite pastimes. A big part of feeling like things have “gotten back to normal” will be having sports and their corresponding large gatherings back again.

I splurged on seeing the Nuggets this year and was excited to get back to Coors Field and see the Rockies more regularly than my three or four games a season. The Avalanche were on a dominant tear that undoubtedly would’ve led to a playoff run, and like every year, I had resolved that the 2019-2020 season would finally be the year I got into hockey and follow the NBA closer than highlights and playoff games. Unfortunately, a contract dispute between Colorado’s regional sports network, Altitude Sports, and every major cable or satellite provider in the state meant games from the Rockies, Avalanche, or the Nuggets would have extremely little opportunity to be televised outside of national network showcases. This is still ongoing and has led to both a potentially landmark antitrust case and local bars pirating streams to keep up traditional revenue.

Before I go on to make the case that professional sports should be broadcast on local over-the-air signals, it bears mentioning that I side with Altitude in the contract dispute with the telecommunications infrastructure providers. Regional sports networks (RSNs from here on out), have their own employees and contractors for production and reporting and are giving cable and satellite providers one of the last products cord cutters can’t legally and reliably find an alternative for (yet). To squeeze the networks for a larger share of revenue when it’s only a matter of time before RSNs start fielding streaming deals independent of cable and satellite providers a la the YES Network’s presently-in-limbo arrangements with Amazon Prime seems extremely irresponsible and short-sighted.

Altitude was already likely taking a huge financial hit with its contract dispute before the pandemic hit. It’s not available over-the-air, with YouTube TV or other streaming platforms, and costs extra on top of the base cable package. This is the case with most RSNs. Other than the NFL, most professional sports are carried exclusively on a “premium” channel. Starving for content with sports cancelled, how long could an RSN remain solvent, and could they float for months or years until society is able to safely turn a corner on COVID-19? Broadcast television production and sports journalism are both specialized trades, and there’s surely been employee furloughs and layoffs, and non-renewals for workers on contract already. Those workers and personalities, vital to the quality of the network’s product as well as at the very least partially responsible to viewer retention, might not be back.

A larger question regarding the potential of floundering RSN might be should we even have them?  Continue reading →

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Official Notice Regarding the End of the Unexplained and Unannounced Indefinite Hiatus

Just as in the Aughts, when people still read blogs, in the 90s, people subscribed to magazines. These were the decades of my childhood, reading and news consumption was different then. You paid $29.99 a year for several Ivy League dicks to repackage a Pentagon press release so you could learn about “The Crisis in Somalia,” it sat on a coffee table as a kind of milquetoast status symbol, and then, sometime around April, the charge would fuck up your checkbook balancing because you forgot about it and like a New Year’s Resolution during a hangover, you’d decide to pick it back up before remembering Joel Stein as a kind of a blowhard failson and continuing the coffee table ritual once again.

This phenomenon for the reader is remarkably similar to what vain, unpaid indie blogger holdouts experience with their yearly WordPress webhosting bill a full two decades after blogs stopped being relevant reading, as the discourse went bite-sized, or devoured through earbuds by a half-asleep light rail commuter. I live, still, a year later, and for some reason still yearn to broadcast my dropout garbage person thoughts into the ether. My relationship with blogging, characterized as a sort of half-talk-radio-half-newspaper-column informal article writing, is not unlike my stormy betrothal to fiction writing. You sit on ideas, procrastinate, allow yourself to atrophy, and then ultimately decide getting back to your marital home half shitfaced is probably going to get you in more trouble than disappearing onto a westbound Greyhound bus route for a week or two until somebody files a missing person’s report.

Admittedly, my laziness is a blessing here. I lost my debit card in an ATM inside of an Arby’s twice last year, and waited until the final hours of my renewal period to decide to probably start writing again. An election year, traditionally, is my time to shine. Around the start of 2020, I figured I’d throw on the jaded black hoodie of my vandal youth and don my “I’m only in it for the horse race” hat and prepare to clown the sinister and false earnestness of the Democratic Party’s primary process while also couching hope that the age of illiterate, frothing-mad fascism of Republican power is waning. This spurt of productivity didn’t materialize, thankfully, or I’d be subjected to an embarrassing internal dialogue as I reviewed those posts, ridiculing my fleeting hope that a man like Bernie Sanders was a Sure Thing after vanquishing a rat-faced neoliberal mayor spouting empty platitudes in a deliberate clusterfuck Iowa Caucus, the narrow triumph in hard-nosed New Hampshire, and a complete, victory-lap worthy blowout in Nevada before watching voter suppression, an in-the-tank media apparatus and the antibodies of the Party Elite work in wish-dashing concert to coronate a senile Blue Dog Democrat with sexual assault allegations to go up against Lawrence Limburger from Biker Mice from Mars in November.

Lawrence Limburger | Villains Wiki | Fandom

How embarrassing that would’ve been, for me. I’m not particularly incisive regarding policy or legislation, but for a moment I had found a reluctant compromise in the Sanders campaign. He’s the only half-decent man to have a viable run for the office since The Party fucked McGovern, so it was only natural for him to crumble under the weight of an oppressive and insincere fetishization of civility and a craving for the same corporate-consolidated “normalcy” that has fucked the average worker since the dawn of economic globalization. As I sit here, at my deemed-essential night shift position, in Plague April reeking of hand sanitizer, I can’t help but feel smug as I reminisce over the last month’s total failure of Holy Free Market Capitalism, and inspired by the acts of Mutual Aid helping keep knots of people afloat. Like a bittersweet Charlie Horse, a spasm of both teenage anarchist “told-you-so” sure-headed glad-handing meets my regrettable cautious optimism that perhaps, representative democracy might do the right thing for once and it might be a laugh to, as ironically as possible, celebrate the Fourth of July in 2021.

It was not to be.

But they had to cheat. Fifteen years of hammering Emma Goldman quotes on electoralism into my brain didn’t dissuade me from getting taken by the siren song of wondering if for once in the thirty years I’ve been on this planet, everything wouldn’t intentionally and systemically suck fucking shit. What a fool, to even momentarily think you could vote your way through a middlemen orc horde snarling on behalf of the pedophile Monopoly Men, when the answer, of course, as I’ve known for most of my adult life, was to come together and raise a mob of Marauders, knives in their teeth, and rampage until the vampires and their world have been reduced to ashes beneath thousands of pairs of vegan Doc Martins. Continue reading →

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Arvada Police’s Feel-Good Vest Copaganda is Trash

As if Super Bowl 53 could’ve gotten worse, the shitty town I’m imminently moving out of at the end of this month was given the national spotlight in a prime-time commercial slot! Was it the civic failure saga of the “Ghost Train to Nowhere” being highlighted to the entire country, perhaps as a cautionary tale of the dangers of allowing private contractors to ruin public transit projects? No, it couldn’t be, unless I’ve hit the lottery and started running vanity ads like Tom Steyer. Maybe an ad trumpeting the area’s diversity and representation after Brianna Titone became the state’s first transgender lawmaker in a traditionally republican-held district? Not in a million years, like Pats fans need any more hate crime fuel.

It was in fact an advertisement paid for by Ford Motors for Colorado Springs nonprofit SHIELD616 featuring an Arvada Police officer hawking for donations for body armor:

Let’s put aside that Colorado police pulled $21 million just in marijuana tax revenue last year and that Arvada is consistently rated as one of the safest cities in America, seeing just 27 violent crimes for every 100,000 residents in 2017,  or that they are a great example of totally overstocked and overmilitarization in the first place, with quick access to the Jefferson County “BearCat” armored vehicle as well as the assault weapons I see slung around the backs of uniformed officers responding to apparent traffic incidents.

Never mind that the Arvada Police Department, until an officer was hit by a car in 2009, hadn’t experienced an officer fatality since 1961. This is a town that was literally rocked by a crime wave of teenagers breaking windows and grabbing a couple of things just a few months ago, not quite the epicenter of lawlessness and flying bullets that necessitate a $5+ million commercial spot during the most-watched television event in the country.

The Police Department received 20 vest kits in a publicity ceremony last week, quick to hearken on the three officers killed last year but conveniently neglecting to point out the rampage Colorado law enforcement has been on in the early months of 2019. As of March 5th, there have been 19 officer-involved woundings and 9 fatalities, including an incident where a man was killed and a woman was wounded after police and federal marshals opened fire on a vehicle with two toddlers in it attempting to arrest the man on a probation violation. Several other officer-involved shootings involved incidents in which the police reported being allegedly hit by suspect’s cars, which is an awfully remarkable coincidence for six of those altercations, and something that the Denver Police Department had to revise policy over after paying nearly $1 million to the family of Jessie Hernandez in 2017, a teen shot to death by police while sitting in an allegedly stolen vehicle with several other children in 2015.

It seems a little odd that the officers reporting that they were struck by fleeing vehicles didn’t need to be hospitalized, and that by claiming they were struck, were able to completely usurp a citizen’s right to due process and execute the alleged suspects, especially since the largest city in Colorado changed policy regarding shooting at fleeing vehicles. A lot more cops seem to be “hit” by vehicles these days as a correlation. An interesting connection is also the relentless pursuit of charges against a man recently acquitted of killing Colorado State Patrol Trooper Cory Donahue after two mistrials in two-and-a-half years. Once again, Colorado law enforcement have positioned themselves as vindictive against the public and reinforced an us-vs-them mentality against a man who by most sane accounts was involved in a highway accident. Continue reading →

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Nicholas Sandmann and the Covington Catholic Kids are Brownshirted Weasels: You’re Being Duped by a PR Firm and Probably Worse

Yesterday, in illustrating my largely “they’re-in-our-division” hatred for the Kansas City Chiefs, I brought up a story that I thought by now would have fizzled out because of common sense and decency. Nicholas Sandmann, the sneering teen made famous for squaring off against Native elder Nathan Phillips over the weekend in Washington D.C., is apparently meeting with Donald Trump in the White House tomorrow as part of the far-right’s active measures campaign to spin the narrative of the Covington Catholic school kids as victims of media bias and a left-wing mob mentality. It’s a predictable extension of the story and one a variety of outlets have fallen for in their hand-wringing about whether or not it’s OK to throw this young bigot and his friends under the bus.

As the waters of the story are muddied, it’s important to understand the basic facts before analyzing exactly what is happening with the rest of the narrative. Sandmann and other students from Covington Catholic School in Kentucky were flown into D.C. to attend the annual March for Life anti-abortion demonstration, where many of them chose to deck themselves out in Make America Great Again regalia. This happened to fall on the same day as the second Women’s March in D.C., also commemorating the ruling on Roe v Wade as well as a protest by indigenous people against the longstanding and continued marginalization of Native Americans.

Evidently either encouraged by chaperones or due to a complete lack of supervision (pick one), the students moved around National Mall in a large group, where they catcalled women, yelled right-wing slogans, and said things like “it’s not rape if you enjoy it”. This caught the attention of a group of Black Israelites, a fixture in many east coast cities notorious for aggressive, street-level proselytizing who began to heckle the group of “future school shooters” as “Donald Trump incest babies.” This interaction apparently got heated and the Native people moved to deescalate the situation, which is when the Covington students famously mocked the Native elder by doing tomahawk chop gestures, mocking “war cries” and even a Maori-inspired “school Haka” not unfamiliar at US sporting events.

Now, even engaging with the Black Israelites is a mistake akin to trying to have a nuanced debate with the Westboro Baptist Church or arguing with Scientologists, but that’s neither here nor there. These kids were roaming D.C. as a brownshirted mob, harassing women, Native and black people well before the escalation that peaked with the students chanting “Build the Wall” at Mr. Phillips. Using the Black Israelite apparent “aggression” as a an excuse for these kids is blatantly racist spin. It’s frankly unsurprising that a decades-old group notorious for yelling on street corners, unprompted, that white people are a race of demons created by an evil scientist on a Greek island chose to engage with a mob of youth screaming at Native people that they’re “drunken thieves” and that black people should “go back to Africa”. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. In no way does any of the par-for-the-course behavior exhibited by the Black Israelites excuse the frothing frenzy exhibited towards Nathan Phillips. Continue reading →

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How Could Anyone Possibly Give a Shit About Super Bowl 53?

Full disclosure: Nothing turned out the way I wanted it to regarding my gambling habit, but that’s beside the point. I literally didn’t care about any team that made this year’s post-season and my level of personal emotional investment is purely proportional to the infinitesimal amount of money I put on football games.

Yesterday’s AFC and NFC Championship games were such astronomical failure pyres it’s actually hard to see a future for the entire sport of football and I won’t be watching the Super Bowl this year again. The integrity of the game, specifically in the playoffs, has been compromised by inept or corrupted officiating, and until the NFL figures it out, there is hardly a reason to watch it at its highest level. Yesterday’s contests proved the league cares little about the actual sport and instead prioritizes media markets and television revenue over athletic competition. Shocker.

The NFC Championship between the Rams and the Saints was abysmal. In the final quarter, with less than 2 minutes, an obvious pass interference call at nearly the goal line on a third down conversion attempt wasn’t called by the referee squad. Now, plenty can be made about Sean Payton’s potential level of arrogance regarding clock management and play calling in that final drive, but we’re talking about a helmet-to-helmet, in NO WAY going for the football on behalf of Roby-Coleman, the corner on the play. Here’s the play as well as footage from the post-game interview, in which Payton claims the NFL senior VP of officiating, Alberto Riveron, told him the call had been blown:

This is a complete mistake that changed not just the outcome of the game, but the teams in the Super Bowl. Bookies are giving refunds. The LA Rams, just a few seasons out of their reprehensible departure from St. Louis, are now going to the Big Show. One of the largest media markets in the country who failed to embrace the team whatsoever just eighteen months ago are now championship contenders. A team owned by Stan Kroenke, media magnate and sports franchise collector, was never going to fail in Los Angeles, and the league would always make sure of that. Make no mistake: the Saints were robbed and it was no accident. Continue reading →

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True Detective Season 3 Episode 3 – “The Big Never”

*Spoilers for Episode 3*

Previous write-up here.

True Detective has always been more of a procedural and a character study than a whodunnit, watching a case unfold rather than stringing the viewer along with clues and giving them the satisfaction of solving the case themselves. Rather, the viewer is more encouraged to root for the detectives and stay eager for new breaks in the case, waiting for the investigation to turn and twist, certain that it will give fresh perspective to a genre that’s become stale with daytime cable. Tonight’s episode “The Big Never” certainly seemed to set the table for something interesting, adding dynamics new to the series and injecting some heart into the storyline.

Opening up on Dorrf’s Detective Roland West during his own deposition, who by 1990 has made Lieutenant (echoing earlier sentiment in Hays’s 1990 deposition scene that he goes on to “do well for himself”), he chastises his interviewers for the raw deal Wayne seems to have gotten: a desk job and lack of upward mobility within the department, even with the spreading of “affirmative action” in the department that he alludes to at the end of the episode sitting at the bar with Hays. He goes on to tell the interviewers that him and Wayne didn’t stay friends after their partnership ended, the circumstances of which remain murky.

Meanwhile, Hays and Amelia, assuming they’re fresh from their distant dinner and reeling with the news that Julie’s fingerprints have been found at the scene of a pharmacy robbery, drive down to the Walgreens in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. Hays feels that his reputation would precede him if he went to ask the local police department for more information, and Amelia, sensing a rift, asks Hays if they just want to get a motel, get hammered, and bang it out for a couple of hours before returning to their regular lives. She also offers to act as a kind of honeypot, feeling that her book about the case, which has a publishing deal, and her good looks and charm might be able to coax some information out of some of the detectives in the area. Continue reading →

by coopsies

Hey, True Detective is Back!

It was August of 2015 the last time True Detective was on, so its season 3 return requires a bit of commentary on television, the history of the show, and some other things I’d want to touch on before I shift into a more reviewing/recapping/investigatory gear regarding the two-episode premiere last Sunday. Just in time for episode 3, which I will be reviewing night-of or on Monday morning, it’s time to talk about True Detective. 

The first season of the show might be one of the most lightning-in-a-bottle instances of TV in history. Although HBO has undeniable cultural reach, I don’t think anybody had any idea how magnetic Matthew McConaughey would be in the role of Rust Cohle investigating cult murders in Louisiana with a cynical Woody Harrelson. The Yellow King/Crooked Spiral story came from a novel several years in development and it showed in the plotting, characterization, and dialogue.

r5zlja0It also came out at the same time as Rick & Morty‘s debut, and there are a lot of similarities between Rust and Rick as characters. Drunk, misunderstood genius white men, previously fueled by a passion towards their work acting as a mask to hide the personal tragedies that really drive them. Vulnerable nihilists just waiting for a little prodding to drop the facade, abusing substances, engaging in ultraviolence, and detaching themselves from meatspace’s reality to hide from their feelings.

They’re two characters that I feel get interpreted wildly differently depending on who is watching it, sometimes for the absolute worst, but for people with similar characteristics and outlooks, it was damn near jarring the sudden level of representation of not just the misanthropic outlook and behavior, but the philosophical frame of reference. Big-N nihilism is not something you see on television very often. “Losing your religion” without a church being involved, as both Rust and Rick have, and watching the fallout of failed idealism, self-destruction, the second-guessing, is something that I think hit the “No Child Left Behind” generation pretty hard. The bleak, post-Katrina Louisiana landscape, framed so well by season 1 director Cary Fukunaga, underscored why I think the series resonated with that coveted 18-35 demographic at the time. Despite the age difference and throwback to the early 90s as a setting, people saw a lot of Rust in themselves, or at least they thought they did.

To have to follow that up a year later was going to be a struggle. You’ve reinvented an actor in a way nobody this side of Tarantino can and ushered in a whole new phase of an underrated but arguably typecast career that they had to call it “The McConaissance.” Season 2 is met with middling reviews. Colin Farrell, in almost a rebuke to the soused superhero Rust Cohle, is even more broken, but not in a way anyone would want to identify with. Rachel McAdams, a good protagonist, channels the same coldness as the first series’s wife but it’s obvious creator Nic Pizzolatto might have listened to criticism that the female characters were too foil-y and thin (Taylor Kitsch is also the boys do cry anti-machismo CHP war veteran) and she’s (rightfully) criticized as a Mary Sue due to some hamfisted arc plotting. Vince Vaughn, running neck-and-neck with Farrell for the breakout, career-redefining role, comes across as wooden, but it’s integral to the story and character and I feel like he was unjustly panned.

It’s sophomoric and seems a little rushed, but once it ties together in the end, it felt a little unfair from a critical perspective. The week-to-week mystery solving pacing wasn’t there, Los Angeles didn’t have the swampy, nearly Eldritch-horror atmosphere of Louisiana, and a story about railway zoning, a dead city manager, and institutional corruption didn’t hold a candle to The Yellow King. It shouldn’t have had to, but with season 1 making such a splash, it was inevitable that in an anthology series, that second season had to be really strong. They tried to do something different with it, likely in an effort to prove they weren’t a one-narrative-gimmick show, and it fell flat with audiences. Standing alone, it’s very much watchable, well-acted and directed, but lacked the iconoclastic, page-turning clout that carried the first season.

Season 3 episode 1 & 2 spoilers after the jump!

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