Just checking to see if the forum is alive
Last Post 06/12/2020 06:19 PM by Nicholas Arenella. 31 Replies.
Author Messages
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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06/02/2020 09:16 PM
Because I'm numb after all this and 45's actions. Damned right this is the dark side.
zootracer

Posts:833

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06/03/2020 12:20 AM
It's going to get worse...this is just the beginning.....
6ix

Posts:485

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06/03/2020 08:03 AM
So much winning. It's just too much winning. I can't handle it.

Forum is still here but on life-support. Think there are only about 10 people on a planet of over 7.5 Billion that even look at this.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/03/2020 12:18 PM
I'm still here. And back into riding. Past the first three weeks. (Any athletic activity I have ever done has been grueling those first three, then there's the moment when i works and it's fun.) But worthy of its own thread so you'll have to check back!

Ben
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/03/2020 12:21 PM
I didn't have much to say on the Castelli golve thread. Higher end gloves than I have ever owned. I checked back every day but it was still llsd at post #17.
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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06/03/2020 01:28 PM
Lots of interesting remote rides in recent weeks but this place is not particularly suited to posting pics so that joy is reserved to those on FB. I briefly crossed the border on a gravel road at Ross Lake International Point, Cascades NP. Someone wink wink said I should now be 14 days in quarantine but all I saw was bear squat.

Might be worth transitioning to an APP like Slack. My club uses it for ride planning and just general chit chat. Easy to post pics, make different threads/topics etc. etc.

Things are pretty brutal on your end of the 49th. It is mind numbing that the Kerner Commission report issued 52 years ago put their finger very precisely on all the sore spots and it was ignored (surprise surprise). 45 is particularly unhelpful in fanning the flames but this runs much deeper and longer than that.
6ix

Posts:485

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06/03/2020 01:33 PM
45 is that liquid stuff that leaks out of the garbage trucks.

Since 45 has thrown any adherence to the Constitution out of the window, what's the possibility we could bring Obama back?
zootracer

Posts:833

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06/03/2020 06:20 PM
I stopped riding around Thanksgiving of last year. I did a ride back in January and it nearly killed me. Bit the bullet and starting riding a few weeks ago. Extremely hard for this almost 78 year body. I don't think I will ever put it the miles like I did a few years ago. The summer heat kills me. Sometimes I wonder why I even try anymore. I take my Labrador Retriever for one hour walks and I can't manage both walking and riding the same day. Right now it's alternating riding and walking every other day. I did not heed my motto "never quit".

6ix-A president can not serve more than two terms in office.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/03/2020 09:27 PM
Posted By Orange Crush on 06/03/2020 01:28 PM
...

Things are pretty brutal on your end of the 49th. It is mind numbing that the Kerner Commission report issued 52 years ago put their finger very precisely on all the sore spots and it was ignored (surprise surprise). 45 is particularly unhelpful in fanning the flames but this runs much deeper and longer than that.

OC, the big piece that never changes and is on the mind of every young to middle aged black man and every woman who loves him is that he knows he is on the wrong side of an unwritten law that has him pegged as a felon (and quite likely a capitol felon).

Yes, the law forbidding DWB is not on the books and any case will be instantly tossed it it is every said, written or heard.  (The "D" isn't important, just the "WB".)  So the legal system from enforcement to punishment has to come up with another felony to charge the guilty party.  But all know he is guilty so that is easily done.  And as this is a capitol felony, executing the punishment quickly serves the intent of the law nicely.  (The enforcing police officer may be suspended, even fired, but rarely more than that.

If you study the written text of the law, you will see that what those police officers do qualifies as murder most of the time,  But in accordance with our true legal system, that murder charge gets applied and held to 1% of the time.  All black men know this.  (Black lives matter?  No, really black lives haven't since the value of a hardworking black man went from $2000 to $0 when the South surrendered 155 years ago.)

Do I like what I just wrote?  Not at all.  But it is the truth.  And until we can talk about it as simple fact, it will never change.

Ben
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/03/2020 09:45 PM
Posted the above, went to my E-mail and read the following in my daily NY Times briefing.

"When jail becomes normal

(photo)
The exercise yard at California Medical Facility in Vacaville, Calif.Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

For most white Americans, interactions with the police happen rarely, and they’re often respectful or even friendly. Many white people don’t know a single person who’s currently behind bars.

In many black communities — and especially for black men — the situation is entirely different. Some of the statistics can be hard to fathom:

Close to 10 percent of black men in their 30s are behind bars on any given day, according to the Sentencing Project.

Incarceration rates for black men are about twice as high as those of Hispanic men, five times higher than those of white men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic women or white women.

When the government last counted how many black men had ever spent time in state or federal prison — in 2001 — the share was 17 percent. Today, it’s likely closer to 20 percent (and this number doesn’t include people who’ve spent time in jail without being sentenced to prison). The comparable number for white men is about 3 percent.

The rise of mass incarceration over the last half-century has turned imprisonment into a dominant feature of modern life for black Americans. Large numbers of black men are missing from their communities — unable to marry, care for children or see their aging parents. Many others suffer from permanent economic or psychological damage, struggling to find work after they leave prison.

A recent study by the economists Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles found that 27 percent of black men in the prime working years of their lives — between the ages of 25 and 54 — didn’t report earning a single dollar of income in 2014. “That’s a massive number,” Charles, the dean of the Yale School of Management, told me. Incarceration, including the aftereffects, was a major reason.

The anger coursing through America’s streets over the past week has many causes, starting with a gruesome video showing the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But that anger has also been building up for a long time. It is, in part, anger about incarceration having become normal.

An explainer podcast: How has mass incarceration happened? “Justice in America” — hosted by Josie Duffy Rice of The Appeal — tries to answer the question. The Times’s Caity Weaver recommends starting with the first episode, about bail. “I learn so much from this freaking podcast,” Caity tweeted yesterday."
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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06/03/2020 10:29 PM
Kudos to Mathis and the Canadian Premier. https://twitter.com/i/status/1267845513786863617 Truly an appropriate pause that will be lost on the Jethros in full support of killing black men and the current occupant.
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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06/03/2020 11:31 PM
Ben - The Kerner report dealt with institutionalized segregation, first in official form though covenant law then later perpetuated to this day in many unofficial forms. The DWB is just one of the many outcomes of that segregation. The current state of affairs another. Etc etc.

6ix - the stuff that oozes out of back of a garbage truck. I like that parallel. Haha.

And dang we have a 78 yr old forum member. Now I feel like a spring chicken again at 55.
smokey52

Posts:492

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06/04/2020 10:38 AM
I'm 68 and riding less as well. Spring was cold and damp here in the Hudson Valley. Our son is a public defender in Greene County, so he does have to go into public places like court houses periodically, which means he has potential exposure to Corona. We have to keep our distance. A couple of weeks ago I met up with him on a Sunday in Woodstock and rode around Ashokan Reservoir: https://www.roberts-1.com/bikehudson/r/west/wood_ash/cue_sheet/index.htm
Later that same day, our daughter escaped Brooklyn with her husband and our two grandchildren and moved in with us for the duration. It's a joy but time intensive. The 4-year old is in pre-K and still doing school. My wife is his teacher and his Nonna. The 8-month old is my playmate. The daughter and son-in-law are both working remotely for now. The house is a mess, but worth it.
-Grandpa Smokey
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/04/2020 11:54 AM
DWB goes much further back than institutionalized anything. Klu Klux Klan immediately after the Civil War and the patrols before where a black man needed a pass from his master to be on the street and better not get caught out after curfew. Severe whipping was the expected punishment. Survival was not guaranteed. The patrollers were vigilantes. The punishments they imposed were often far more than anything the slaves' owners wanted done to their property

While there is no written law, the current police practices look too much like those patrols. Any black man on the street can be stopped and ID'd. If suitable response isn't obtained (and even if it is), instant "justice" is applied.

I just finished reading "Voices from Slavery, 100 Authentic Slave Narratives". Sobering how little has changed. I spent three years of my life wondering if I was going to be required by my government to kill someone or be killed. These young men spend their entire lives in that limbo. And they don't get an envelop in the mail that says "your ordeal starts in 3 weeks". They may be put to that test at any time.

Speaking of institutions - the two crimes we have "outlawed" but institutionalized are slavery and murder. Want to commit murder? Join the military or the police. (You'll have to do your homework to get yourself into the right unit.) And slavery - preserved in the 13th Amendment. Section 1 "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Since all black men are by definition guilty of felony, it is just a matter of enforcing, ruling and now they are slaves again. That wording is no accident. The writers knew exactly what they were saying. (The song "Angola Penitentiary Blues" is a song of a black man convicted for life of a crime he didn't do, now picking cotton on the old Angola Plantation in Louisiana, only the mansion has been torn down and replaced by the prison. I heard Christian Scott tell the story, then play the song. He was born and raised in New Orleans. It was chilling. I guessed his version; the man being his teen cousin, at his house when the murder happened, was fiction but as time passes, I an thinking it might well be true. If not his cousin, somebody he knows.)

Another song that we all know - "House of the Rising Sun". A brothel in New Orleans. The woman of the song is going to New Orleans to work after her man is jailed (for whatever) as so many rural black women last century had to do because they could not maintain a a farm by themselves. Old story. Black man returned to slavery, house and property lost (to a white institution; town, bank, realtor), woman selling her body to survive.

I grew up thinking I was of the blood of the good guys. Boston, Union army, ... I now am pretty certain my family had money in the Lowell cotton mills that were the start if the industrialized revolution and that relied on cheap, slave picked cotton to function and make huge amounts of money. We used to summer n Bristol, RI. The downtown is of buildings built with huge blocks of choice granite, sidewalks and streets paved with granite. All built on money from the shipping trade - building and operating ships to deliver sugar cane from the West Indies to southern New England to be turned into rum to be shipped on the same ships to Africa to be sold to buy slaves to work that sugar can (again, same ships). (Some of the shipping income was from whalers, a little cleaner source of income. )

To say this is an institutional issue is to write it off lightly. This goes to our blood, core and soul as a nation and as a people.

Ben
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/04/2020 11:58 AM
OC, I'm 67, With you and zoot, that makes me a 'tweener". (Takes me back a few years!)

Ben
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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06/04/2020 09:10 PM
I don’t think you understood what I said. Suggest reading a digest of the Kerner Commission report to understand the root causes and solutions. “American Apartheid - the making of the underclass” is another authoritative work that gets to heart of it. The issues with policing are one of the most evil consequences but not the root cause. The rotten tooth needs to be pulled at its root (segregation) for there to be a solution.
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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06/05/2020 07:58 AM
A bit of good news here in Richmond VA: the iconic confederate glorification statues on Monument Avenue are coming down. The 2015 Worlds course featured this road. It was inevitable, but did not expect it to happen in my lifetime. To some degree this is a consequence of Trump being such a disruptor, nice to see something good come out of it.
Dale

Posts:1767

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06/05/2020 10:22 AM
Isn't now about the time for the US government to load tRump on an Air Force jet to spirit him away to a haven someplace like we did with Baby Doc and the Shah? Yeah, I know they left their countries in a smoldering ruin for others to clean up but I'm willing to grab a broom and do my part.

Just. Go.
Cosmic Kid

Posts:4209

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06/05/2020 12:26 PM
A bit of good news here in Richmond VA: the iconic confederate glorification statues on Monument Avenue are coming down. The 2015 Worlds course featured this road. It was inevitable, but did not expect it to happen in my lifetime. To some degree this is a consequence of Trump being such a disruptor, nice to see something good come out of it.


That is indeed great news....I remember the first time I "rode" down the road on Zwift and could see statues in the looming distance and thought "please tell me they did not put that racist crap in the actual game...."

Luckily Zwift was smart enbough to change them to cyclist statues int eh game.....
Just say "NO!" to WCP!!!!
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/05/2020 12:40 PM
OC, I understand. But the "institution" goes far deeper than anything on paper. It goes to the roots of this country. Those who came to this land from England came for several reasons. Some, to escape religious persecution (pilgrims, quakers), many for opportunity to make money and a better living; building the wealth of Boston, New York, etc. (often third and fourth sons of the English wealthy who were not in line for inheritance). There was an important subset of those third and fourth sons, those that saw they could live the life of wealth by following a simple formula. Go to America, acquire fertile land in the southern states, buy slaves (many of the first were Native Americans but for the most part those didn't pan out well) and through hard work and good management, come to a place where they could retire to a life of luxury, surrounded by servants and enjoying the good tings in life like proper English wealth would.

This lead to a land of three classes. The wealthy; many of them slave owners, the slaves (who were fundamentally and financially important to their owners while being just property and tools) and the working class whites, thought of by the wealthy as far less valuable than the slaves they paid real money for. The bitterest hatred was from the working class to the slaves who, while being slaves, had value and would be fed and cared for (to varying degrees) though thick and thin because they had value.

While all this was happening, our country formed, the Constitution was written and the first 12 Amendment adopted. At every point, the institution of slavery was protected and the power of the southern wealthy insured even though they were a minority. This protection has lead to several presidents who did not acquire the popular vote. When the Civil War ended, as I noted earlier, the Amendment to end slavery was adopted except it didn't end slavery- by design.

Yes, all this has been institutionalized. But the institutions aren't the core of the problem. It is the mindset behind them and the core beliefs about what America is. Changing that is far more difficult.

OC, for an excellent read - get a hold of "Slaves in the Family". A story about a South Carolina family and plantations written by on of the descendants. It's quite an eye-opener. (And there is real hope, but the start comes when we start talking plainly about what happened and what still is.)

Ben
bluezurich

Posts:17

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06/06/2020 12:19 PM
I'm here, riding more than I have in the last 4 years, I'm 55 for the time being since we're all stating tree rings. Enjoying the abatement of many ailments and issues which kept my mileage low in the past years and loving the cycling high once again, be it building a bike, riding, following sport ( although it is an asterisk year) and all the peripheral bicycle related things in life. I'm happy and fortunate to live in an area which never had riding restrictions as I cannot fathom riding indoors longer than our already semi-long winters here in Utah. Oh and I've lost 20 pounds, good thing it's not from Covid and comes with silly tan lines, eh? One of my favorite cycling things lately has been seeing Garret and Jos' pics from their gravel rides in the Pacific Northwest, gorgeous, not too mention Olmo's serene bike leans. Love this group.
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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06/06/2020 02:40 PM
Blue - wait, where is Olmo?

He used to be on FB but I haven’t seen anything from him in like forever.
bluezurich

Posts:17

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06/07/2020 08:32 AM
IG, olmofin
Berzin

Posts:76

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06/08/2020 09:54 AM
There is only one thing going forward that will have some sort of positive effect-the dismantling of the for-profit institutions that rely on the free labor provided by African Americans. This includes NCAA Div. 1 revenue-producing sports (the two main ones being football and basketball), where generational wealth is created for others on the backs of black athletes. It includes the for-profit prison system, where Fortune 500 companies gorge themselves on labor that is mandatory for the prisoners and where the payment for said labor is modeled after the German concentration camp system. What also needs to go is the salary cap for professional sports, which protects the profit margins of poorly run franchises (ironically one being Michael Jordan's Bobcats) while salaries are suppressed for the players. The capitalist tenets of fair market value are strangled under this system and makes losers into winners with the revenue-sharing aspects of these collective bargaining agreements.
79pmooney

Posts:3178

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06/08/2020 12:46 PM
+1 Berzin. The 13th Amendment combined with the fact that all black men are born guilty of a felony (DWB; just not yet apprehended, charged with a legal substitute and convicted) means that we will have Constitutionally approved slavery for a long time. (The chilling song "Angola Penitentiary" of - as I heard Christian Scott tell it - a man serving life for a murder he did not do and picking cotton in the same plantation as his for-bearers. Angola Prison being located at the site of the mansion of the Angola Plantation.)

I"m not as passionate as you re: pro sports. I don't mind the colleges using blacks but - give them a first class education and show them love and real support going into the world on graduation so they can give back to their (black) communities. Those colleges also should be VERY vocal re: abuses like DWB enforcement. There are probably legal restraints on what a public college can say (sick if true) but private colleges do not have that restriction. (Yes, it will offend alumni and hurt donations. Suck it up and strap on a pair.)

Of course all this means the heart has to count for a little more than the almighty dollar.

Ben
Orange Crush

Posts:4499

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06/08/2020 02:46 PM
There are some big questions for Joe in the current situation.

His record on segregation and for profit prisons isn't exactly stellar. The first indications on criminal justice reform aren't promising: https://filtermag.org/biden-bernie-criminal-justice-disappointing/

At same time there are calls for a black VP pick, which to me is just a secure the vote move but otherwise meaningless window dressing.

What I would like to see him do is: 1) make that black VP happen but don't stop there 2) give VP a clear mandate to address issues and recommendations from Kerner Commission report on segregation, police and criminal justice reform etc., and turn their recommendations into policy.

This would send a clear message to the electorate and would be very hard to oppose by anyone but the most die hard Trump supporters who are a lost cause anyway. Kamala Harris would be a great pick; she has all the right background to make this happen.
Cosmic Kid

Posts:4209

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06/08/2020 03:32 PM
Kamala Harris would be a great pick; she has all the right background to make this happen.


Spot on.

But I am willing to bet he either submits to the left-wing of the party and chooses Warren or makes a 'safe" pick and selects Klobuchar.

the good news is that Biden has sky-high approval ratings among black voters....his challenge won't be winning them over, it will only be mobilizing them. If he does that, he is a very solid position come November.
Just say "NO!" to WCP!!!!
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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06/08/2020 08:05 PM
Given Biden’s age and mental infirmity, the Veep pick is huge.
smokey52

Posts:492

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06/08/2020 09:38 PM
LSD - I recognize Biden's age but not the mental infirmity. He has always been given to verbal gaffs but nothing too serious. Just check The Onion; he has been one of their favorite targets over the years. With his long history of public service, it's easy to find examples of less than perfect performance. His treatment of Anita Hill is one example. However, as VP, he pushed Obama to recognize gay marriage. He was not just a bump on a log.
With respect to his VP selection, I think age is a serious factor. Warren is a robust woman but up there in years too. Plus she is a huge factor in the Senate, which would be even greater if it swings to a Democratic majority. I would be happy with Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar.
Cosmic Kid

Posts:4209

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06/09/2020 01:39 PM
Given Biden’s age and mental infirmity,


I don't understand how Trump supporters think this is a winning tactic for them.

(Note - absolutely not saying you are a Trump supporter, LSD!! Just amazing to me that his supporters think they can hurt Biden with these comments, when they apply double to Trump)
Just say "NO!" to WCP!!!!
longslowdistance

Posts:2881

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06/09/2020 04:01 PM
Seem true to me. Joe is slower on his feet by a lot than a couple of decades ago. Trump never was the sharpest tool in the shed, aside from being mentally ill, evil, narcissistic, etc.
Nick A

Posts:625

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06/12/2020 06:19 PM
53 for now. Haven't been this out of shape in almost 20 years. Still alive. My riding is running off my German Shephard's insane energy on a thirty year old mountain bike around the neighborhood.

N


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