Category Archives: News and Comment

When he had the opportunity, Colin Kaepernick knelt to bring attention to an important and sad fact about America, namely how our racism results in the impoverishment and the early sudden death of black people, by violent means if not by by disease.

And what can I do about this?  I am not an NFL player.  In fact, I am done with the NFL. I am an older privileged white guy who pays $50 a year to have a website and write a blog, and I support Colin Kaepernick, as I have done before on this site, here and here.

The Nike shoe-burning by American racists/supremacists who want to make sure that black people know “their place” reminded me of the 1966 Southern Baptist bonfires of Beatles items, when John Lennon dared compare the Beatles’ popularity to that of Jesus.  Insult what we believe and we will torch you, was (and is) their poisonous message.

The poison persists and runs down the river, splashing over the rocks, baptising those who willingly stand in that current of hate, mistaking the force of the current for truth.

This was Keith Olbermann’s final commentary for GQ on November 28, 2017.  At the time, Olbermann seemed to think it was inevitable that Trump’s days in office were numbered.  He may be right — the scenario that Olbermann describes at 4:00 in this video seems more plausible than ever, if the anonymous op-ed piece in the New York Times is to be believed.

I always enjoyed Olbermann’s bombast and I’m happy to devote a little space here for it (even though he has moved onto other things) not only because it remains timely but also because he gives voice to the resistance.  Voices matter.

I superimposed a map of homicides (denoted by pins) in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area so far in 2018 (source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Interactive) with a map of the 2016 median household income in the area (source: city-data.com).  The city limits are outlined in red.  As of this writing, there have been 75 homicides this year in the Pittsburgh area.

Click on the map to view a larger version in a new tab.

Median household income in the yellow areas is $100,000.  In the medium-to-dark-green areas, it is $150,000 or more.  In the medium-to-dark-orange areas, it is $50,000 and less.

It may not be news that poorer communities have higher homicide rates* but Pittsburgh’s intermingling of poor and affluent neighborhoods illustrates this pretty vividly.

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* As the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2014: “Persons in poor households at or below the federal poverty level … had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households. … The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks.”