The astonishing thing is that it has taken this long for professional and college sports to arrive at this point. I wouldn't have guessed anybody could get very far this year, and I was wrong about that, but football -- with its rosters of fifty-some-odd people -- has too many moving parts for this not to happen.
I am torn by hoping that Republicans' cynical and false allegations of voter fraud come back to bite them by persuading their voters there is no reason to vote again -- costing them elections they might've won -- and a believe that democracy isn't sustainable if a huge chunk of the population doesn't believe the results are legitimate.
NYT reports that Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired Army general, is under consideration to lead the Department of Defense under Joe Biden. I'd prefer not -- not because of anything necessarily wrong about Austin (I know literally nothing about him) but because Trump tried to blur the whole distinction between civilian and military control of the military, which has been a pretty important principle of our democracy. That's how former General James Mattis became Trump's first secretary of defense, even though he required a waiver to do so. There are civilian Democrats with expertise in national security. Pick one of them.
There's a lot of talk about "Federation values" in the Star Trek universe, but humans and Vulcans are pretty much always jerks to each other, except when they learn the lesson not to be at the end of the episode.
Also from Ryu Spaeth's takedown of Ben Smith:
However, every journalist, very much including Smith, at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own.I get that hawks are hawks, and they're going to want to go to war. But why do hawks in Israel and the U.S. seem to want a war with Iran so badly? What am I missing?
