How to completely destroy Nebraska football in four easy steps.*

1. Be a nearly all-white state.

2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive.

3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players.

4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in!

* Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

George RR Martin predicted the end of football ... back in 1975.

I was trying to remember this afternoon, a story I read in sixth-grade English about how professional sports had declined because people had come to enjoy video simulations of them much more. It struck me as possibly prescient, so I plunged into Google.

Turns out the story, "The Last Superbowl," was written by none other than George RR Martin. *

The story is actually two tales, as he covers the last Superbowl which takes place in January 2016 and interjects the depiction of that Superbowl, between the Green Bay Packers and the Hoboken Jets, and the downfall of real sports. Real sports, in the 2016 of Martin’s fictional world, have been overtaken in popularity by simulated sports. 

Simulated sports are controlled by a computer that can put any team, from any era, against any other for the enjoyment of the spectators. The technology he describes in the computers that control the simulated sports may have been a thing of science fiction in 1974, when I assume he wrote the piece, but here in the real 2015, our computers are powerful enough to create those simulations. Just look at video games like Electronic Arts’ Madden and FIFA series.

The Super Bowl is still pretty popular, and doesn't look to be overtaken by video games this decade, at least. But with growing concerns about what CTE does to the brains of football players — and the dearth of injuries and suicides by digitized players — it's not difficult to see Martin's scenario, or a version of it, coming to pass.

* I thought it had a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity and sex for a story in a sixth-grade textbook.

Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

The conventional wisdom so far is that Hillary Clinton is so personally unpopular that she might be the only Democratic candidate that could lose the presidential race to Donald Trump. I have an alternative theory.

Hillary's the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump, at least this year.

Donald has turned all the subtext of politics into text, and thus — in the primaries, at least — all but turned the campaign into a dick-measuring contest: He beat his GOP opponents mostly by displays of dominance: "Lyin' Ted," "Little Marco," "No Energy Jeb." The TV news coverage looked less like a campaign and more like nature documentary footage of wild predators establishing a clan's alpha male.

Watching Hillary play rope-a-dope tonight — baiting Donald, then watch him bluster and interrupt while she smiled calmly — it occurred to me she's not playing the dick-measuring game. She was content to poke him, then step back and let him reveal his essential nature while she plugged away with a wonk's command of facts, figures, and plans.

The skills she displayed, a million women Tweeted tonight, are the kinds of skills that smart, professional women generally have had to employ in a world full of mansplainers. It's a form of jiujitsu — let the dudes demonstrate their alpha male moves while the women maneuver around the egos and get stuff done.

A traditional male candidate might not be able to beat Donald Trump's dominance displays this year. A woman? One like Hillary who has spent decades maneuvering among alpha male egos at the highest level? She might be the only person who could beat Donald Trump this year.

Let's turn the news into a public utility. Let the BBC be our model.

Another shitty day for local journalism:

I mean, damnit.

We're left with a couple of conclusions:

• The business model for local newspapers has utterly failed.
• The mission of local newspapers is needed, desperately.

So I make a proposal — one I don't think will find much support in a nation used to thinking of "news" as a "business," but one that recognizes that knowing what's going on is vital to our civic health.

It's time to make the news a utility.

I thought for awhile that the model for this should be public radio, with its funding reliant on donors, grants, and some public backing. But I don't think that'll do that trick. Instead, my model is the BBC, where anybody who uses a TV is required to hold a "TV license" that pays the television, radio and online services of the BBC.

Every city, I now believe, should charge a similar licensing fee and use it to create an online news service to serve the local population. The city's governing body would appoint an independent board to oversee operations and insulate the news operation from political pressures. And while the operation would serve as a repository for citizen opinion — comments, letters to the editor, submitted op-eds — it probably wouldn't have an editorial voice the way newspapers do, so as to reduce the odds your local city council unduly influences public opinion. (This doesn't save Yael's job, unfortunately.) 

A publicly funded news operation would cover the meat-and-potatoes: Local government, crime and courts, schools — and covering sports teams of the local schools would probably be part of that — and business.

Oh, and because it's a public operation: Other news outlets, even for-profit outlets, would be able to use the content generated by the Utility News for free.

Is this a perfect solution? Nope. Will it work? I think it's time to get news out of the news business; we've had 20 years to find a business model and so far we really haven't. The information produced by the news business, however, is still needed. It's time to experiment with new forms.

Evening Walk: Venus

Walking in my neighborhood, after dark. It's not lit as well as my old Philadelphia city block — I probably need to buy reflective shoes or something. The app on my phone tells me I have 2,000 steps to go to make my daily goal, so I keep walking, keep walking, keep walking past my house and my path occasionally lit by the occasional street lamp.

Holst's "Venus: Bringer of Peace" is on my headphones. Above, through breaks in the clouds, I can see a star or two — the benefit of reduced light pollution. The darkness and the music go together; I feel like I'm creating or experiencing my own private segment of Walt Disney's "Fantasia" as I move through the neighborhood.

For a moment, the real world and the digital world playing in my head merge. Everything flows.

And then the music ends.

The tragedy of George W. Bush

This picture:

George W. Bush was, to my mind, the biggest failure as president in postwar history — more than Jimmy Carter, more than Richard Nixon. His choices were uniformly wrong. Budget surplus? Let's fritter it away. Terror warning? Ignored. Terror attack? Respond with attack on Iraq. Devastating hurricane? Heckuva job, Brownie. And, finally, he left us with the Great Recession.

But now, we see, that list doesn't even encompass the worst of his legacy.

For all his faults, you see, Bush doesn't strike me as a bad man. And more than any major Republican before him — at least in the post-Civil Rights Era — Bush seemed to want to treat African Americans as part of America: No Child Left Behind, despite its problems, as aimed at improving educational outcomes for blacks. His RNC chairman acknowledged and refuted the GOP's long-running "Southern strategy." And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, he helped get funding for the national museum of African-American history past reluctant Republicans. (In this he was aided by Sam Brownback. Yeah, I'm still struggling with that, too.)

And so I wonder:

If Bush's presidency hadn't been so thoroughly discredited by nearly everything else that happened in Bush's presidency — if he hadn't failed so badly that even Republicans turned their back on him — would we have today's Trumpist GOP, with white nationalism and, yes, racism resonating so strongly with the base of a major political party?

I do believe the surge in white nationalism is, in part, a backlash to America's first black president. But even Barack Obama became inevitable only because of Bush's failures — chiefly, Iraq — and the complicity of his opponents (Hillary, John McCain) in those failures.

So I'm left  pondering: If George W. Bush been a success, might other Republicans view his example on race as part of the template to follow?

Daniel Pipes, burqa bans, and basic math

Daniel Pipes calls me out at NRO:

I am frustrated that Westerners don’t perceive the obvious point that burqas and niqabs, both of which cover not only the head but the whole body, threaten public security. A person wearing these Islamic garments can be male or female, can carry an assault rifle, and can usually get away with anything anonymously. 

But no, whether it be an intellectual like Martha Nussbaum, a journalist like Joel Mathis, or the many, many voices opining on the recent burkini ban from French beaches, security issues inspire a collective shrug, with almost everyone focused instead on the symbolism of these two garments, whether it be concerning the welcoming of the other, the inhibition of social interaction, or the status of women. 

I'm old enough to remember when National Review was filled with cries for religious liberty.

But I digress. This argument goes back a couple of years, to when a man in a burqa robbed a Philadelphia bank, and Pipes — per usual — offered it as a reason we need to make Muslims act like the Rest of Us.

The problem is, he's right. This particular issue, so far at least, deserves a bit of a shrug.

Pipes:

I expected that my compilation of burqa- and niqab-assisted crimes and acts of political violence going back nearly fifteen years and now about 150 incidents long, would convince any sensible observer of the public security problem.

Let's do the math.

One hundred fifty incidents in 15 years. That's 10 incidents a year.

And Pipes is taking his examples from around the world, not just Philadelphia, or not even a single country. Which means he's drawing on a world population of 6 billion, more or less, in which those 10 incidents are produced.

What's the per capita number, then, on those incidents per year? It's not quite zero, but it's pretty damn close.

So for a problem that, by Pipes' own statistics, is so small as to be unobservable if he hadn't set out to observe it, Pipes would have us deprive millions of Muslim women the right to make their own religious choices.

I don't buy it.