5 Thoughts for November 25, 2015

1. USC Football: Is LSU going to get rid of Les Miles? What a curious thing, if USC hired Les Miles, and Les Miles brought Ed Orgeron with him, don't you think? Of course, Pat Haden would have to leave before Ed stepped back on campus; Ed is probably more popular with the alumni, than Pat is, right now. It would be nice to hear that gruff voice once again, especially since he doesn't make excuses or sound confused about what went wrong, after games, like the current defensive staff seems to do -- when someone tells you that they need to look at the tape to figure out what went wrong, it seems to me that the team will never be able to make successful adjustments during the game.
2. USC Football, part II: Six of the past seven years (including the current season), USC has lost at least 4 games in a season. This looks an awful lot like the nearly two decade stretch of Ted Tollner - Larry Smith - John Robinson - Paul Hackett - first year of Pete Carroll. The most successful season in the last 7, was, oddly enough, Lane Kiffin's second year. I just don't have a lot of confidence about the current team's ability to win another game, however, which would likely mean that it will finish as it did in Kiffin's 2012 season, at 7-6, and Clay Helton will definitely not be offered the head coaching job. It's not that this team is lacking in talent; it's that the coaching staff is severely deficient on the defensive side.
3. Donald Trump: A few days ago, Trump retweeted a misleading statistic that was tossed at me in an online comment section just over a month ago; of course, I responded back easily, but rather than simply cite the same information that media outlets have used to refute Trump, I actually spent some time to go back through the FBI's UCR data, to show what's actually happened the last two decades. Today, I retrieved it from my Drive and pulled up the chart that I had built. What you'll notice is that the gap between black-on-black and white-on-white crimes, has decreased over twenty years:
   
   
4. Netflix: After finishing Jessica Jones, I'm now binge-watching Hell on Wheels. I love Westerns, so this has been a very enjoyable show and it's got lots of twists and turns, with clear antagonists and a protagonist who is troubled and flawed, but knows it, and doesn't give a damn about it. I love it all; it's got Mormons (Brigham Young, no less), Irish Catholics, Blacks, Chinese, corrupted politicians, Native Americans, and Cowboys of course.
5. Race Issues in America: I truly find it amazing, that this issue has come up and become a very critical issue this year. For decades I've seen racism, and to this day I still see it. Whether it was the outright verbal insults or the subtle act of a vehicle stopped to ensure that I did not enter a condo's garage while its door was closing, or having to wait for service while others were tended to, I've seen and felt its ugly fangs. Does anyone actually think that Black Americans weren't being targeted and killed by police, until just recently? I hope not, because the real problem has always been the lack of attention the media has paid, to these cases. No, as far as I can tell, the only thing that has actually changed, is that now we have dashcams and smartphones with cameras, everywhere, to capture that which had all along been occurring. That people weren't being successfully prosecuted for murder, seems to highlight this problem of not having video of the incident to show to a jury. To many white folks, race issues have improved, but since they were never the targets of racial repression, subtle or overt, they couldn't possibly know the state of race issues in America; to pretend otherwise is paternalistic.