Saturday, February 01, 2020

For your Super Bowl weekend

That's Hard Rock stadium, the Miami venue for the big game, as it is likely to look quite frequently in the next few years. Grist spells out the prospects:

... Floods are inundating low-lying cities like Miami even on sunny days.

A new report from Climate Central — an organization that analyzes how climate change affects the public — shows that Hard Rock Stadium, between 4 and 6 feet above sea level, is likely to experience some of this flooding in the coming century. It’s not just the football field that’s at risk of getting swamped by climate change. Local roads, the stadium’s $135 million training facility, the tennis center, and parking lots will face higher odds of being submerged.

... The Hard Rock Stadium property has at the very least, a 1 percent chance of being submerged by rising seas every year by 2070 if the world continues emitting greenhouse gases business-as-usual. By 2090, the risk of the stadium experiencing serious flooding each year rises to 10 percent.

Remember, this is likely an underestimate...

...
Meanwhile, the National Football League continues to strive to erase its most socially useful recent player according to Samer Kalaf. Kalaf denounces the league for trying to substitute an anodyne advertising campaign for Colin Kaepernick's fierce protest against police killings of black and brown men.

Inspire Change is a shameless strategy for Commissioner Roger Goodell and the league’s owners to pretend that they not only supported the movement to bring attention to police violence and systemic oppression all along, but that they were really the progenitors of the whole idea. Any player who accepts the deal on these rotten terms is welcome. The painfully obvious tell is that former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is nowhere to be found — not in the Inspire Change materials, not as part of the Players Coalition, of which [Anquan] Boldin is a co-founder, and not on an NFL roster, as his former team plays the Kansas City Chiefs for the title Sunday.

Kalaf is certainly right about what the NFL is trying to get away with. But they are playing with fire here -- highlighting police violence now matter how hypocritically can lead to unexpected results. And I don't think we can be disrespecting former 49er Anquan Boldin's real pain over the killing of his cousin by a Florida cop. Sure -- the powers-that-be will co-opt and pollute anything to hold on to their power. But it's time to stop the killings.

Meanwhile -- GO 49ERS!

No comments: