All That and a Bag of Mail

It’s Friday and I’m getting a bit of a late start today because I was up so late watching the awful news from Dallas. 

Yesterday I gave you guys the data on police shootings and we did our entire Outkick Show on it. I’d encourage you to go read and share that column. So while I’d like to say I’m surprised that last night happened, I’m really not, this is what happens when everyone becomes factionalized by the national media and social media to believe that their side is “right” and the other side is “wrong.”

The reality is this, a tiny minority of cops, as part of their millions of violent interactions a year, make mistakes at their job and kill innocent people of all races. With the rise of hand held cameras we have more evidence of police behaving both correctly and incorrectly. Sadly, the media has chosen to focus on a tiny minority of those tiny minority of incidents and paint the picture that black people are being regularly murdered by racist white police. Again, the data doesn’t reflect this is true, but this story that sells and dominates the news cycle. As I asked you yesterday, why haven’t we seen stories about police officers killing hundreds of white people over the past two years. It’s because that doesn’t fulfill the narrative the media and social media want to advance. 

The result is that many people believe the false narrative that white police are murdering innocent black men. Once you buy into this false narrative then the hate festers and if enough people allow that hate to fester then eventually someone acts on that hate.  

Last night’s shooting of police, in my opinion, is a direct result of the way this story has been covered and the hashtag activism that surrounds it. That’s how we get to this statement from Dallas police chief David Brown: “The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people – especially white officers.” A black guy is so angry at alleged police racism — which isn’t supported by the data — that he’s willing to kill innocent white police officers to even the scales of justice in his mind.

I said it yesterday and I’ll say it again today — it’s time for reasonable people of all races to disavow our racial categorizations and embrace our common humanity. The vast, vast majority of people in this country of all races, ethnicities and creeds are reasonable and decent, we’ve just allowed our voices to be drowned out by hashtag activism and a salacious media seeking to foment racial disunion because it leads to better ratings.

If you really are hung up on racist murders — THEY ALMOST NEVER HAPPEN IN THE COUNTRY TODAY. 90% of all black murder victims are killed by blacks and 84% of all white murder victims are killed by whites. Just 7% of black people are killed by white people and just 14% of white people are killed by black people. If you want to be scared, that’s fine — you shouldn’t be because murder has never been rarer in this country than right now — but if you want to be scared, you should be scared of your own race killing you, not another race.   

Share the facts, come together, be decent to one another. The fact that people are telling me to kill myself for sharing facts about police shootings proves how far we’ve lost our way. 

Remember, death sucks, and I hate it more than all of you combined. 

I’m off my soapbox.

On to the mailbag, which is only going to feature funny questions because I’m tired of all the awful shit that’s happened this week.   

“Keeping nudes on your phone is clearly a huge risk, especially when they’re your ex girlfriends nudes. I was afraid my current girlfriend would find them so in an attempt to hide them I put them in my drafts folder of my personal email a while back. I’m a college student who went home to my parents on the weekend and after using my mom’s laptop I never signed out of gmail, so the next time she went to gmail mine was open.

The drafts page was somehow opened (was my mom looking through my stuff, which seems weird for a gmail account?) and she found 2 naked pictures. The ex girlfriends face was not in the picture but she has big boobs and probably could be recognized even without the face. So now my mom has seen my ex naked and confronted me about having naked pictures. I denied that somehow my account was hacked or my friends signed me up for a fake dating account and somehow nudes ended up on my email (terrible lie, but what else could I have done?)”

This is just the kind of question we need to bring America back together after fucking race murders left and right all week long. What do you do when mom find’s naked pictures of your ex-girlfriend?

Okay, first your mom was clearly snooping in your gmail account. I think you blew it by not attacking her on this instead of making up bad excuses for why you have naked pictures of your ex-girlfriend. Of all the places to end up she checked your draft email inbox? So she intentionally went through your emails. But what’s surprising here is that the only thing she found to complain about was some naked photos of an ex-girlfriend? I’d think my college-aged son was a saint if that’s all I found snooping in his emails. 

Instead of making up a story about how you got naked photos in there — why do you have to apologize for this? Every guy under 25 in the country has naked photos of a girl somewhere — you should have just been brutally honest with your mom. “Yeah, my ex-girlfriend sent them to me. When she wasn’t around I jerked off to them.”

I think your mom would be stunned into silence by this honest response. What can she say at this point? You’re going to hell for jerking off? You can’t jerk off anymore in this house? I mean, you’ve painted her into a corner with the truth and pointed out how absurd her criticisms of you are. 

P.S. you know who is really upset here? Your dad. He’s definitely thinking, “Damn it! How come I didn’t get to see (ex-girlfriend’s) great boobs?”

Tim writes:

“So I’ve spent the last week on vacation with my family in Gulf Shores, and I’ve noticed something on the beach that’s really bothered me…hardly any of the teenage males can throw a decent spiral.

I know that I shouldn’t have let this distract me.  I should have spent all my attention doing what all middle aged dads do at the beach…using dark sunglasses to keep the wifey from noticing all the chicks I was spying. But there were footballs being thrown everywhere, and I saw more ducks than Floyd Mayweather’s career. And these weren’t band nerds, these were athletic looking guys.

Is this the product of generations of absentee fathers? When I was that age, everyone I knew could throw a spiral with a regulation football and a curveball that could break at least six inches. Why are kid’s today such pussies?”

It’s funny you mention this because when I was down on 30A a month or so ago I was throwing one of those cheap rubber footballs that you buy for $8 or so with my wife and it was really windy and my passes weren’t very good spirals and I was actually thinking, “I hope there isn’t an Outkick reader seeing this right now because if he videoed me throwing bad spirals and Tweeted it out I’d be mortified.”

That’s how much I cared about how bad my spirals looked on the beach. I was just totally ashamed. I even switched up my grip because my wife was throwing better spirals than me and she wasn’t even using the laces. Turns out when you throw the damn cheap footballs wrong you had a better chance of throwing a spiral.

So here is my hypothesis: I’m thinking there are a ton of shitty beach footballs being made — probably in China — that aren’t being crafted correctly. It’s like the laces don’t even matter when it comes to throwing a spiral with these footballs. Combine that with the wind and it’s a recipe for spiral disaster.

I think all this proves, by the way, is that dad’s like you and me spend a lot of time defining our masculinity based on whether we can throw a tight spiral or not.

Which is, of course, why we’re not pussies.

A man has to have pride in at least two things in life: his football spiral and his ability to consume any liquor drink and immediately describe it as “not that strong.” 

“I am entering my senior year in college, and my friends and I have come into a very serious debate which needs an expert handler. There is about 8 of us, all working internships in the city of Chicago. One of my buddies recently stated that he has been masturbating in the bathroom at work for a midday stress reliever. Some of the guys jumped right on board, and have been consistently jerking it at work (they are jerking it dry-no lotion). The 8 of us are split evenly, 4 of us think this is hilarious and downright awesome, but the other 4 find it strange, not funny, and not worth the risk. I think that some of the 4 on the side of not jerking off have definitely done this but didn’t want to admit it.  My question for you is this, how many people do you think actually do this at work? How fucked up are we for thinking this is funny?”

This reminds me of the Matthew McConaughey character telling Dicaprio’s character that he had to jerk off at work to keep his mind right. 

The scene is just perfection. 

Of course the idea of jerking off at work is funny, there’s no harm there. And, of course, I totally get the desire, but here’s the issue, is the risk/reward really worth it? Put simply, what if you got caught jerking off at work? Every man is immediately abandoning you on the jerk off battlefield and acting like you’re a social pariah, right? It doesn’t matter if all your buddies were jerking off at work too, the next time your arrest for jerking off at work gets mentioned by a cute girl at the bar, your buddies are feigning public disgust. “Yeah,” they’ll say, “I can’t believe he would do that. Total sicko move.”

Think about it this way, is there a more humiliating way to get arrested than for jerking off in public? Think about your poor mom. All her friends are reading about you treating your body like an amusement park. No way she holds her head high in church for months. 

So I’d counsel restraint here. 

Steve writes:

“So the Saturday before Father’s day, I was in Lake Charles gambling with 20 or so people for a friend’s birthday. We are all at dinner at the Nugget and a guy I know that is in our group (and on my gambling group message thread) starts talking about how his team on the Draft Kings US Open million dollar game is looking great and he thinks he might actually win some money. Sure as shit, we come back to Houston on Sunday and the kid wins $1,000,000. He’s 24 and just out of college. My question is, what do you do if your 24 and just won $1,000,000. I think it comes out to between $600-$700,000 after taxes etc. So lets say he just received a wire for $700k, what does he do? In reality he immediately put $50k on Cavs game 7. Gotta love that. I have attached a pic to prove the story.”

I love that the 24 year old who won a million dollars on the U.S. Open on DraftKings immediately put $50k on the Cavs in Game 7 of the Finals, I wouldn’t expect anything less. 

If I were 24 and won that kind of money, I’d put $350k into a stock market index fund and never touch it again. At 8 or 9% a year, you could retire by 50 with ease if you just put $350k aside and left it there to grow. 

Then I’d probably buy a decent condo with around $250k. I’d just buy it with cash — again, nothing fancy — and kill ever needing to pay a mortgage on it. You know you’ll get your money back when you sell it, so there’s no risk here. When you sell the condo you use the money that comes back to you as a downpayment on a house when you actually get married. That would leave me $50k to have fun with. 

Financial tip from me — once you get a certain amount of income rolling in, your life gets better, but you definitely top out in terms of how much each additional amount of money adds to your enjoyment. At least I have. The only thing I don’t have now that I’d like to have is access to on demand jet travel. That’s an insane level of wealth that I probably won’t ever hit, but other than that I can honestly say there isn’t anything that I want that I can’t afford. 

So my parting advice as we head into the weekend is this — live your life in such a way that if you won hundreds of millions of dollars in the lottery you’d wake up the next day and live the exact same way. Because I can honestly say that’s what I’d do, I wouldn’t change anything if I had hundreds of millions in my bank account tomorrow. I’d still be the same person and I’d still be writing the mailbag for you assholes.  

Love you guys, stay safe and don’t allow hashtag activism from idiots to divide us.