"The F.B.I.’s increasingly pervasive use of the polygraph, or a lie-detector test, has only intensified a culture of intimidation."

"Mr. Patel has wielded the polygraph to keep agents or other employees from discussing a number of topics, including his decision-making or internal moves. Former agents say he is doing so in ways not typically seen in the F.B.I.... Jim Stern, who conducted hundreds of polygraphs while an F.B.I. agent, said... that if someone violated policy, the F.B.I. could polygraph them. But if an agent who legitimately talked to the news media in a previous role had to take one, he said, 'that’s going to be an issue.' 'I never used them to suss out gossip,' he said. At a recent meeting, senior executives were told that the news leaks were increasing in priority — even though they do not involve open cases or the disclosure of classified information. Former officials say senior executives, among others, were being polygraphed at a 'rapid rate.' In May, one senior official was forced out, at least in part because he had not disclosed to Mr. Patel that his wife had taken a knee during demonstrations protesting police violence...."

From "Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials/Senior executives are being pushed out and the director, Kash Patel, is more freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks about leadership decisions and behavior" (NYT).

I've made a new tag — "lie detector" — and gone back and applied it to old posts. Interesting to see how many times the topic has come up:

April 2004: "[E]ven if the lie detector was not to be used on [Omarosa], and, indeed, even if lie detector tests are not reliable, if she believed it was to be used on her and believed it was reliable, her running off at the sight of it is some evidence that she had lied in her accusation about the other contestant....."

April 2005:  "Everyone on TV was into analyzing why [the groom-to-be of the Runaway Bride] would take a private lie detector test, but wanted special conditions before he'd take the police test. He wanted it videotaped, and the police refused...."

July 2005: "Some researchers attached sensors to 101 penises and then showed the possessors of these penises either all-male or all-female porn movies. It was kind of a lie detector test, because the men had all professed to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual...."

October 2008: Ashley Todd, the woman who claimed a black man had carved the letter "B" on her face.

June 2012: "'$1.1 million-plus Gates grants: "Galvanic" bracelets that measure student engagement.'... [I]sn't this basically a lie detector? And if so, won't students train themselves to fool the authorities?"

April 2013:

Is forced prayer the answer to the National Anthem problem?

I'm watching the opening ceremony for the Ravens vs. Steelers game on TV right now because I wanted to see how they'd handle it. The plan was in place, with an announcer on the public address system saying:

Before the singing of the National Anthem, please join Ravens players and coaches and the entire Ravens organization to pray that we as a nation, embrace kindness, unity, equality, and justice for all Americans.

All the players shown on camera then took the position that we've seen players use in the protests during the National Anthem. So the position that meant protest was supposed to transform into meaning supplication toward God.

This was coercive prayer, and I don't know what kinds of religious-freedom objections the players and coaches and spectators might feel: Is there something wrong with using prayer this way, to fix a political (and commercial) problem?

The Ravens coach,  John Harbaugh — who is a vocal Catholic — made the sign of the cross, and I wondered if there were others whose religion impels them to pray in some special way that was not provided for here and still others who are nonbelievers and troubled by the burden of coerced prayer.

From the fans, I heard loud booing, which I interpret as calling bullshit on the instrumental use of religion to preserve the protest gesture they don't like. Management might have thought the prayer packaging would silence the crowd, lest they sound as though they are objecting to religion. Surely, religion will be respected. They thought wrong. Public displays of religion are often the insincere use of religion as a means to an end and sometimes it works, but it didn't work this time, judging by the boos.

But perhaps that was only a minority booing, the booers will be seen as disrespectful, and the pre-anthem kneeling in prayer will become the ongoing solution to the National Anthem problem. I kind of doubt that, because I associate political liberals with a longstanding objection to prayer before football games. Here, read what Linda Greenhouse wrote in the NYT about Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the football prayer case. (Yes, this was about teenagers and public school, so there are big differences, but the point is that political liberals tend to have strong compunctions against coerced prayer and little sentimental empathy about football prayer.)

After the prayer at the Ravens game today, there was a particularly patriotic version of the National Anthem, complete with a call to "remove your hats as we honor our nation" and the "military who protect us" and a flyover A-10s — with fireworks — as the anthem — which was "written right here in Baltimore" — was sung in luscious harmony vocal trio from the US Air Force Heritage of America Band. The crowd in the stadium responded to all of that with great enthusiasm.

The players and coaches, of course, rose from the kneeling position before the anthem-related section of the opening ceremony began.

James Golden (AKA Bo Snerdly) was surprised to see NFL owners "line up against their fans, or a portion of their fan base..."

"... deciding that alienating some of the most patriotic people in the country makes good sense for a national sports league, and lining up behind some players that, in some cases, one wonders if they even know what they’re protesting about. It’s all very strange."

Strangely, he pronounces the word "strange" strahnge. I guess that's a joke (like saying garbahge for "garbage" (Rush has some running jokes like that)).

The interviewer is Ginni Thomas (the wife of Clarence Thomas). At about 8 minutes into the interview, Thomas asks Golden if he has any "triggers," and he immediately says "Anybody attacking Rush triggers me." He gets pretty emotional about that.

National anthem problem resolved (I think).

On Thursday Night Football, just now, the Green Bay Packers followed through with the plan to stand with locked arms during the National Anthem, and the Chicago Bears did the same. I think all the Packers locked arms, but at least 2 of the Bears did not. Many of the players on both teams locked arms in a way that included bringing the right hand up to the heart.

Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers had urged all the fans to lock arms too:

“This is about equality,” Rodgers said. “This is about unity and love and growing together as a society, and starting a conversation around something that may be a little bit uncomfortable for people. But we’ve got to come together and talk about these things and grow as a community, as a connected group of individuals in our society, and we’re going to continue to show love and unity. And this week we’re going to ask the fans to join in as well and come together and show people that we can be connected and we can grow together.”

The TV cameras found at least a few fans who went along with that idea, but the vast majority used only the hand-on-heart gesture.

I think the locking arms solution is about as good as it can be. I know some people (e.g., Scott Adams) have mocked it as looking like The Rockettes, but I think it was respectful and demonstrative of a shared desire to get together and solve problems — not just this anthem-at-the-football-game problem, but racial discord.

Locking arms during the anthem is...

the best solution, expressing respect and a desire to come together.

a distraction, calling attention to a protest and not to the flag and country.

less disrespectful, but still disrespectful.

really stupid looking. An embarrassment.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Greene vowed to kneel until there was 'nothing left in me' and stuck to his promise."

"Supported by his some of his fellow [University of Michigan] students who either joined him, brought him food, or offered words of encouragement, [Dana] Greene knelt for just over 20 hours, from 7 a.m. Monday until 3:30 a.m. Tuesday morning local time."

Reports Good.

It's getting to be like religious mortification — such as "Simeon Stylites the Elder who climbed a pillar in Syria in 423 and remained there until his death 37 years later"....

2 big problems with "taking a knee" as the new standard form of protest.

1. It's sexist. See the problem:

If you wear a skirt (other than a very long skirt), you can't go down on one knee without creating an upskirt view. It's interesting to me to see that photograph taken with the woman in the short skirt in the most prominent position. She's not in the taking-a-knee position, because she's down on both knees, for the obvious reason. But I don't know how she managed to get into that position without exposing whatever she's wearing under the skirt. Maybe she prepared and — like a figure skater — donned some sort of exposable undershorts. I'm thinking of something like this, but even then, people are going to think it's not intended to be exposed. I'd hate to find myself in some sort of work event — as a lawprof, I usually wore an above-the-knee skirt — and expected to go along with a group activity that put pressure on me to expose myself. It's a disparate burden with an element of sexual harassment.

2. It's ageist and ableist. Look at Sheila Jackson Lee taking the knee at the end of a House speech on the subject of the First Amendment:



She's an older woman — 67 — and I don't know about her health, but it's a long way down for her, and the last 6 inches or so are more of a fall. And to get back up, she pulls on the lectern. It's one thing for professional athletes to go down on one knee, hold the position, and then get back up, but many people are not able to do it easily, gracefully, or without pain. Many cannot do it at all. It's just not an inclusive gesture. Here is this trending expressive activity some people might want to be part of, and they are forced to think about their own physical limitations, which they might feel bad about, but nobody is paying attention to. They may think: Why don't they care about me? Why are they making me expose my weakness?

A tell at 0:06?

Those are clips from a much longer press conference, which you can read here: "Transcript: Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva met the media Monday to discuss what happened prior to Sunday's game in Chicago" (ESPN). Excerpt:

"I haven’t seen a single play that happened yesterday in the NFL. And I’m not urging people to… It’s not a boycott. I just didn’t feel it."

"As I said, the thrill’s gone. The sadness was overwhelming.... I don’t know that the NFL understands what’s happening to it. I really don’t think they do," said Rush Limbaugh on his show today.

Trump supporters to this day are not understood. They are still impugned and mocked and laughed at. But they have grown tired of a country they love as being under assault as unjust or immoral or illegitimate. They’re fed up with it. Their president defends it, defends them. The specifics don’t matter. There is finally somebody speaking up for America. “But, Rush! But, Rush! The protesters are speaking up for America.” They may think so, but they’re not, in the eyes of most NFL fans. They’re not speaking up for America. This is not complicated, either....

Donald Trump instinctively knows where the heart of America is. The National Football League all these years has thought that it knew because of its robust popularity and money. But it turns out it didn’t, and doesn’t.

Here’s another theory that was sent to me. My old buddy Seton Motley said: “The left’s idea to play up the NFL protests knowing it would further the left’s effort to kill the NFL by bringing the right against it is brilliant strategy, and the political neophyte NFL is the useful idiot in its own impending demise.”

Motley's point, by the way, is close to what I was saying yesterday in "Just when liberal media was gearing up to destroy football over all the brain damage, Trump calls for a boycott of football over the National Anthem protests."

Classic liberal manipulation: Creating the fear that you will be thought of as uncaring.

1. CTE: bad.
2. Threat to free expression: also bad.
Althouse doesn't care about brains or freedom;
anything that annoys liberals: good. https://t.co/UqdQpzRmH8

— Mark A.R. Kleiman (@MarkARKleiman) September 24, 2017

This is particularly effective used against women. I will never forget the time I heard a little girl in the playground — reacting to a criticism I can only imagine — expressing anguish with the repeated line "I don't want to be mean!"

And that is how women are disciplined into insignificance. 

Professor Mark Kleiman has no reason whatsoever to think that I don't care that young men are suffering brain damage playing football. Yet he throws out that charge about me to push me back and to warn other people (women, especially, I suspect) that we should be afraid that if we don't merge our identity with whatever the liberal line happens to be, we will be regarded as lacking in empathy and deserving of social shunning.

Say no, little girls and little women. Don't fall for that manipulation. I don't fall for it anymore, but I am old, and I lost a lot of time reacting to the fear of being thought not to care and the mind-numbing, thought-inhibiting effort to be nice. Absurdly, I do still care. That's why I have to write a post like this to show my work suppressing the fear. I hope in doing this I've helped somebody like that little girl whose "I don't want to be mean!" made such an impression on me decades ago. 

Does Trump — in the middle of an interview about the National Anthem controversy — give the finger?

You decide:

President Trump: Kneeling during national anthem is “very disrespectful to our flag and to our country” https://t.co/1JP68WuPUM

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 24, 2017

I got that from Perez Hilton, who is sure it's intentional and says "That's so boldly, wildly absurd, it's actually… kind of funny?? But seriously, after all the bull shit stunts, outright bigotry, and unbelievable ignorance this President has showed off that should legitimately cause outrage, this is just… hilarious."

I don't think it was an intentional finger. He was just preening his eyebrow. Want to see a President give the finger? It looks like this?



Miss him yet?

"Trump is wrong on the flag and the anthem. Forced respect isn't respect, it's submission."

So writes ace commenter rhhardin in the previous post, which is about Trump's new tweet, "If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!"

1. Trump did not say You must respect. He didn't even say You must stop disrespecting. He only made an observation about cause and effect: If fans stop attending games because the showing of disrespect is part of the spectator experience, it will create market pressure on management and players to improve their product to win back their customers.

2. There is a difference between outward display and what is in a person's heart, but you can refrain from displaying disrespect toward people and things you don't respect because you, in fact, do have a sincere appreciation for peace and civility or because it's in your social or economic interest. That's something most of us do every day, when we refrain from vocalizing random unkind thoughts or smile and speak pleasantly to people who are bothering us for one reason or another.

3. Let's assume that management gets the message that the product — a football game — is unacceptable to the customers —  the spectators — without the traditional opening ceremony — all players standing as a group and not drawing attention to their own individual opinions. How can management insure that every single player goes along? Trump's idea is: Just make it clear that it's a firing offense. Presumably, then, every man would stand there as required.

4. Now, the problem raised by rhhardin is that we would know they were all just standing there like that because of the firing threat. When the camera shows the faces of the players, there'd be static in the old-time fan-fantasy that these guys really love our country. We might think: Oh, he's just doing what they forced him to do.* That's not real love. He might be seething inside, hating the country even more, because he knows he's doing it for the money. ("[T]he average salary of an NFL player is only $1.9 million per year.")

5. The serious question — as I hear rhhardin's pithy comment — is what is the satisfaction for the fans? How will they experience the new product? It may look like respect, but we know what some of them are really thinking, and they're only acting respectful because their livelihood was put on the line. Let's do a poll:

Under the proposed new policy, what would be the most common experience for the kind of football fan who cares about the traditional opening ceremony?

The outward show of respect would be enough to convey respect as it had in the past.

It wouldn't read as true respect, so the fan would be dissatisfied.

There would be added enjoyment observing the submission of the would-be protesters.

Knowledge of the submission would make it worse than having to see a player kneel.

pollcode.com free polls

_______________________

* As I read this post out loud, this sentence makes Meade start singing the same Bob Dylan line that was in my head as I was writing: "Sooner or later, one of us must know/That you were just doin' what you’re supposed to do..."

ADDED: Poll results:

Just when liberal media was gearing up to destroy football over all the brain damage, Trump calls for a boycott of football over the National Anthem protests.

Here was the devastating NYT story 3 days ago: "Aaron Hernandez Had Severe C.T.E. When He Died at Age 27":

Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E. that the damage was akin to that of players well into their 60s.

It was, a lawyer for his family said, in announcing the findings on Thursday, “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age.”

C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L. players, some of whom committed suicide, according to researchers at Boston University.

Well, that's it, I said to myself. That's the end of football. How can we sit back and enjoy watching activities that we know are wrecking the players' brain?

Here's the top-rated "NYT Pick" comment there:

I'm a diehard football fan, but the moment is rapidly approaching when I'll stop watching. The Kaepernick situation. The head injuries. The continued blind eye and mishandling of domestic violence cases. Plus, the Giants are 0-2 with no signs of a new left tackle anywhere in sight. I'll miss the ritual of the whole thing most of all (I love spending Sundays with my wife and freinds-eating nachos, drinking beer and watching endless truck commercials), but I think football is something that future generations will look back on with much the same feeling of shock and mild disgust that we feel when contemplating Roman gladiators.

This is a blunt, loud call to stop watching. You're a bad person if — knowing what you know now — you continue to watch football. This isn't a new message. Rush Limbaugh has been saying for years that this issue has already killed football, and it's only a matter of time. But this news about Hernandez was a devastatingly hard hit. Here's how it looked in the middle of the NYT front page last Friday:



Football was down. The end. We, the good people who read the NYT, must say no to football. What is known cannot become unknown except by willful, immoral forgetting. No decent person can take pleasure in football. No fit parent can allow a child to take up the game. The era of American football is over. Bury it. We can end the misery through the simple and necessary refusal to watch anymore. Say no, America... or hey, wait a minute. Here's that nasty President of the United States and he's calling for a boycott of football...

If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

Now, what?! If you really hate brain damage, you might say, great. We can successfully destroy football now, because we've got a powerful second reason for football-watchers to end their support for the evil, destructive game. The people who are least receptive to the brain-damage problem might be the most likely to get into the strict discipline of firing players for "disrespecting our Flag & Country." Look at that capitalization, from the man who said "I love the poorly educated." He knows his audience. They don't read The New York Times. They're not going to let complicated news stories about CTE stop them from watching football. Can they even say chronic traumatic encephalopathy? But they sure get the prod from the Prez about Flag & Country.

Do you ally with your enemy against a common enemy? But Trump isn't the enemy of all football. The National Anthem protests have been hurting football. The ratings have been declining badly, seemingly because of those protests. Trump may be trying to revive football, by demonstrating the strength of the support — among the real fans — for a harsh policy that would end the protests and bring the fans back. But it seems unlikely that football management will adopt that approach, as Trump must know, and so I imagine he's thinking that he's putting his personal stamp on the protest problem. He told management what it needed to do: Fire the protesters. They didn't do it, and the decline of football continued. He told them. He showed them how to save football, and they wouldn't do it, because they don't respect their own fans. They listened to the elite media that has no respect for the people who really watch football (and who vote for Trump).

So, watch the liberal media endeavor to save football from bad old President Trump. He's a racist. This is his racism once again, stirring up the stupid people who voted for him. Here's the NYT today:

The tweet suggested that the president, who used an expletive on Friday night to refer to players who kneel or sit in protest during the anthem — a practice that took hold last season among some African-American players after Colin Kaepernick, the now-former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, did so to protest racial and social injustice — is bent on deepening a bitter culture-war fight with the N.F.L.

It is a highly charged debate, with unmistakable racial undertones, pitting advocates of free speech who argue that professional athletes should have a right to use their positions to call attention to social issues against those who contend that refusing to honor the anthem disrespects the military and the nation, and that sports is no place for such displays.

Let the brain damage continue. We've got a culture war to fight.

"Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!"

Tweets Trump.

That's the basketball + Trump news. In football + Trump news, there's: "NFL Stars Erupt In Anger Over Donald Trump’s ‘Son Of A Bitch’ Speech":

During what was supposed to be a stump speech for Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), Trump drifted away from campaigning to ask members of the crowd if they’d “love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired?’”

Here's the video:



ADDED: On a fashion note, what's up with the peppermint candy necktie?

"To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine..."

"... is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."

Wrote Justice Jackson in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court case that that recognized a free-speech right of public schoolchildren to resist compulsion to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That's quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in a New Yorker article about Colin Kaepernick's refusal to show the customary respect of standing during the National Anthem as it is played before professional football games.

Toobin acknowledges that Barnette is about a legal rights that can only be asserted against the government. He doesn't mention that compulsion to recite a pledge is very different from compulsion to show respect while somebody else is saying/singing words that are not even a pledge. And he doesn't mention that Kaepernick chose to join a team, while the children in Barnette were compelled to go to school. And children compelled to go to school are required to follow dictated behavior standards while they are taught material that may be designed to instill patriotism or other political dogma that they might not believe.

And, most importantly, Kaepernick is not being compelled to stand during the national anthem. He sits or takes the knee and we all get to see that. He's got his freedom of expression. He's just being criticized for what he is expressing. There was absolutely nothing in Barnette that saved the schoolchildren from being regarded as bad and unpatriotic for failing to say the pledge.

The criticism too is free speech.

If Tebow can go down on 1 knee, Abdullah can go down on 2.

"Husain Abdullah should not have been penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct following his fourth quarter touchdown."

"Rule 12, Section 3, Article 1 (d) states 'players are prohibited from engaging in any celebrations or demonstrations while on the ground.' However, the officiating mechanic in this situation is not to flag a player who goes to the ground as part of religious expression, and as a result, there should have been no penalty on the play."

No sect preference. It's a very basic American rule of religion and government football.

And don't tell me Tebow only got 1 so Abdullah shouldn't get 2. We're not counting knees here. We're getting to equivalence in parallel religious expression. It only gets complicated when some nonreligious showboat flops down on his knees in a clownish celebration.