Stephen or Frederick?

It's not that it bothers me; it's that I don't believe you. And I doubt that anyone else here does, either.

Are you under the impression that you have to "really pay attention" to see what is literally in front of your face if you watch the damn game, even if you don't care about it, or that there is some kind of virtue in pretending you don't notice what most people, who do notice, consider an obvious and innocuous fact?

As Yogi Berra once said, if people don't want to come to the ballpark, you can't stop them.

We don't just look at the forearms. A good bit of the time, they have their helmets off, or you can see their faces, or you might actually know who the f**k they are and some facts about them. Third-string QBs on a team where the starter doesn't miss games and you've never seen them play, and nobody writes about them -- I'm talking about you, Jacoby Brisette -- are under the radar, so you damn well wouldn't know what race they are and really shouldn't care, but if you watch the damn game when they play, you can usually tell -- even if you don't care.

I don’t know how you could tell what race a player is, anyway.

Most of the rest of us do know and can tell.

I don’t know anyone who views Kaepernick’s actions through the lens of race.

Either you don't know enough people, or you don't know the people you know as well as you think.

I agree with Burt and rtodkelly that, in practice, both students and teachers would make a hash of this, the students because they wouldn't know how to do anything else, and the teachers for more complicated reasons..

As a legal matter, despite what many people either actually think or pretend to think to wind up the bubbas, there is no reason public schools can't teach about religion. In a sane world, they would and should. But we do not live in a sane world, and any academically honest teaching about any religion, especially the dominant religion in the country, would raise holy Hell. (I think it was John Dos Passos, arguing with a copy editor, who insisted that "Hell" be capitalized because "it's a real place, like Scarsdale.") This particular proposal, calling upon youngsters to declare and defend beliefs and disbeliefs and argue them, rather than merely give an account of what others have believed and disbelieved and why, would bring out the pitchforks and torches.

I think Tim Raines suffered because he was the second-best player of all time with his particular, unusual, underappreciated skill-set, and a rough contemporary of the best of all time of that type, Rickey Henderson.

As far as the Phelps example goes, you read the book and I've read only your excerpt, so maybe there's something else in the book that justifies your take on the excerpt, but based only on the excerpt, I'm not sure you have it right. Is Duhigg really saying that the only difference between Phelps and other world-class swimmers nearly as good as he is is his use of (well-known and widely-practised) visualization techniques, which, I agree, is implausible? Or is it that using the visualization techniques got him past being the big fish in a small pool and into the big pool in the first place, and that techniques like that are necessary to make that jump?

And then you went and proved it.

Most of the white people who voted for Trump are the same white people who vote for any Republican. There's no mystery in that, and there's nothing much to say. If they are willing to vote for the Republican as usual even when he is a bigoted, ignorant loudmouth like Trump, then there is no strategy for getting their votes. The issue is the blue-collar whites who normally vote for Democrats but voted for Trump in key states. Their problems are real, but if they have any awareness of their own lives, they know they have been well and truly f****d for about 40 years. They have been well and truly f****d by forces beyond the power of one party or the other to oppose effectually -- though someone who looks with care can figure out which party's policies will do more to mitigate the damage and which party's will make things worse. It is a hard truth they don't want to hear that the manufacturing and extraction jobs that allowed low-skilled but hard-working people a roughly middle-class life are gone and will not come back. Nothing Trump can do will force utilities to build coal-fired plants when natural gas, and now wind, are cheaper and plentiful fuel sources. The largest utility in Michigan has plans set in stone to close eight coal-fired plants for purely economic reasons over the next several years and replace them with plants using other fuels. So what to do? Trump is willing to lie about what he can and will do, and maybe they'll buy it for one election cycle. Then they will be disillusioned. So what to do? Us lying to them won't work; the Republicans do it better anyway. There is not, in fact, a solution that will make them happy. So what to do?

I have owned several guns in my time, and still do. What I'd like to know is why this particular gun? It's fun to play with, of course, but a bad choice for just about any plausible civilian use. It's a lousy hunting weapon and if your plausible home defense threats run to burglars rather than an invasion by the crew from a nearby meth lab it's far more than needed to deal with the threat.

Obviously, there are some well-connected people who have sources of their own. After all, the mainstream media must get the information they report from somewhere. Maybe you are one of those well-connected people, though nothing you have posted gives us any reason to believe it. But that doesn't change Nelson's point for the great unwashed masses of us who don't have, or think we have, or pretend we have, improbably-placed agents and informants of our own. What we think we know, by and large, comes proximately or ultimately from the mainstream media some of us think are covering up these things we managed to find out somehow.

the Krugman objection to free trade

There is no "Krugman objection to free trade." He is for free trade. All Krugman has done is point out what every free-trade advocate has always known and most have said: that in a regime of free trade, there will be domestic winners and losers, but that, on the whole, there will be more domestic wealth. It is 100% orthodox classical theory that the domestic losers could be compensated out of part of the overall gain going to the domestic winners, making everyone better off. I get a nice dress shirt at an affordable price from Malaysia or Indonesia, some of the surplus I would have had to pay for an American-made dress shirt gets taxed for some program to help out unemployed North Carolina textile workers. Or it doesn't. Either way, the theory of free trade holds, as people knew and explained before Krugman or Rawls were gleams in their parents' eyes.

Now, now, we can't be dragging facts into this. But this gives me a chance to recycle a favorite story. During the '90s, I was watching C-Span. The guest was the (now late and lamented) Lars-Erik Nelson, then the D.C. Bureau Chief of the New York Daily News. A caller was ranting about all the Clinton scandals that the media were covering up, giving chapter and verse about their alleged (and later largely debunked) sins. When the caller took a breath, Nelson told him he seemed to be very well informed about the Clinton scandals, and asked: "Where did you hear about them?" The caller didn't seem to get it. Nelson pressed on: unless the caller had private sources of his own, he had to have learned all these impressive details somewhere. Probably the same media he was accusing of covering them up. Of course that was a long time ago, but even now, when people get their information proximately from like-minded bloggers, anything that wasn't just made up s**t usually came, ultimately, from the mainstream media.

So if the command at Pearl Harbor had had, say, 5-6 hours' clear notice that an attack was coming, what would have been the best course of action? Or, if our commanders wouldn't have figured that out, the most likely course of action? A few comments almost seem to suggest that moving the fleet out to sea or scrambling the planes would have been even worse than doing nothing.

How about eliminating the debt ceiling entirely?

I had to do the same thing recently. Of course it was the right thing to do. And knowing that doesn't help a bit. All we can do is muddle through.

"Gaslighting" is a useful term for X telling Y that Y isn't experiencing what, in fact, Y is experiencing. We could use a similar term for X getting Y worked up over experiences that Y is not, in fact, having. Any suggestions?

Maybe I'm showing my age, but I thought Jaybird was referring to Columbia University blowing up. Maybe he'll clarify things.

I don't hunt myself, but I have no problem with people who do, assuming, of course, that they are responsible about it.The natural end of an animal in the wild is likely to be pretty grim, and being shot cleanly is among the better alternatives. What I'd like to know is how much of the decline of hunting is simply declining interest.

Somebody superficially like Rubio could have been very strong. The actual, existing Rubio, not so much.

In many ways, the precise reach of the Second Amendment is beside the point. As a political matter, in no place larger than a municipality is it possible to enact something that would violate the current judicial understanding of the Second Amendment, or any refinement of it we are likely to see.