They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.
—Willie Mays
They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.
—Willie Mays
An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame—Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
I was the Elvis of boxing.
—Muhammad Ali
My ambition is to hit .400 and talk 1.000.
—Yogi Berra
The Daily Caller reports that LA County will hand out KN95 masks to Super Bowl fans. The county’s Covid policies require people at “outdoor mega events,” must wear masks at all times. That’s at any event with 5,000 or more people., and a mask must be worn regardless of a person’s vaccination status.
It is my opinion that a second-string male athlete who pretends to be a girl so that he can win by competing with smaller, weaker competitors is a bully.
The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
—P. G. Wodehouse
MLB has moved the All Star Game from Atlanta (39 % White/54 % Black) to Denver (69 % White/10 % Black) because Georgia will begin requiring voters to show ID just as they must in Colorado.
I suppose that makes sense because Colorado’s raaaaacist election laws affect a smaller proportion of its population than Georgia’s.
Major League Baseball games are played in these American cities—If they go woke and move the All Star Game out of Atlanta, they will likely find that a significant percentage in their fan base resides outside of those cities in flyover country. Local politics may not be good for a national pastime.
The House has passed a legislative nightmare called the “Equality Act.” If it passes the Senate and becomes law, it would amend federal statutes to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and it explicitly will destroy religious freedom protections related to sexual and gender identity. The bill explicitly states: “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”
Stephen Kruiser has suggested that the Equality Act is proof that the Democrats are clinically insane. OTOH, The Party may need the words “equal” and “equality” to have different meanings. Sometimes two plus two equals four. But not always.
Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
I just catch ’em.
—Willie Mays
I’m seeing some interesting suggestions for a new name for the DC NFL franchise, among them—
The Washington Special Interests
The Washington GS-13s
The Washington Anonymous Sources
My suggestion—given that all the players are male, the Washington Taxmen. However, if that is too “gendered,” the Washington Revenuers.
Video Credit: ESA
Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
—Samuel Johnson
It looks as if Megan Rapinoe has had her flash of fame. Her captaincy of a metric football team gave her a platform to engage in narcissistic anti-Americanism, but she lacked the necessary poise to be a sports heroine. While she’ll probably be given a spot among the D-list celebrities for her service to The Narrative, she’ll never really be famous.
UPDATE—Typo fixed. I hate autocorrupt.
The US team won its match with the English team 2-1 in the Women’s World Cup series.
The Brits have been having trouble with us during the month of July for the past 243 years.
I’m 5′-8″. That puts me within one standard deviation of average height for an adult American male but definitely on the low side of average. That fact causes certain limitations on me. For instance, no NBA team would consider me for a position on their roster. Indeed, even if I claimed to be transgendered, I’m still too short to make the cut on a good women’s team. OTOH, there are women’s sports where a man my size could dominate, and we’re beginning to see such men (who probably couldn’t be top-level competitors on a fair playing field) push women out of the winner’s circle. A man just won the NCAA women’s track championship.
Meanwhile, the LGBT activists are up in arms because the Trump Administration has released an updated version of an HHS regulation that recognizes the term “sex” as having a biologically defined meaning. The previous version of the regulation had been changed during the Obama administration to include “gender identity” within the mean of “sex.” This required health insurance companies to pay for transgender-specific services that had previously been considered elective or cosmetic. According to an HHS spokesman, the regulation was revised back to the old wording because “the regulation’s coverage of gender identity and termination of pregnancy was contrary to law and exceeded statutory authority, and that the rule’s harm was felt by health care providers in states across the country.”
The LGBT media is trying to spin that change as allowing hospitals to deny emergency room care and other normal medical services to transgender people. That’s nonsense. In fact, unidentified gender dysphoria can put patients at risk. According to the AP, a hospital’s treatment of a person who presented in the emergency room as an obese male as if “he” were a man resulted in a death. The “man” was pregnant, and the stomach pains were labor pains. Because proper intervention was delayed, the baby died.
People are entitled to live their lives as they wish so long as they don’t adversely impact others. If I wanted to self-identify as a 6′-3″ female basketball center, the world should let me so long as my rejection of Reality doesn’t cause a problem for someone else. But world should not be compelled to humor my fantasy. And the taxpayers certainly shouldn’t subsidize it.
LBGT people should be treated fairly and with the personal dignity all humans deserve. However, the mutual tolerance we should have for one another doesn’t change the stubborn facts of biology. I have a Y-chromosome. I’m male, and barring genetic abnormalities, so is everyone else with a Y-chromosome.
A NBC News report on transgender athletes contains this statement—
“There’s no simple or even complex biological test you can apply that tells you who’s a man and who’s a woman,” Roger Pielke Jr., director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, said.
The Washington Times reports that Terry Miller of Bloomfield High has set a Connecticut girls’ state indoor record of 6.95 seconds in the 55 m sprint. Second place in the event was taken by Andraya Yearwood. Both Miller and Yearwood have Y-chromosomes. Third place in the event was taken by a girl.
I wonder if athletes such as Miller and Yearwood are afraid to compete on a level playing field or if they want to take advantage of weaker competitors or if I should embrace the Power Of And in such cases.
… I remember watching a Boston Braves game on TV, but that shouldn’t be surprising because today is my 71st birthday.
While many companies benefit from the political agendas of one side or the other, most try to appear to be more-or-less neutral. That’s a reasonable strategy aimed at avoiding upsetting what could turn out to be a large group of customers. Nike has taken sides, most visibly with their selection of Colin Kaepernick as the face of the next “Just Do It” campaign.
Nike is politically involved in other ways. The Oregonian reports that Nike has given $25,000 to the reelection campaign of Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D).
Nike is poised for an unusual level of involvement in the November election. In July, the company poured $100,000 into the Common Good Fund, a new political action committee headed by Julia Brim-Edwards, Nike’s senior director of government and public affairs.
That contribution came days after Brown met with Brim-Edwards and other representatives of major Oregon-based companies. It also was a couple days before the deadline to turn in signatures to qualify initiatives for the November ballot. Brown’s campaign told Oregon Public Broadcasting the governor helped negotiate a deal to keep a public employee union-backed corporate transparency measure off the ballot. If passed, it would have required Nike and other large companies to disclose sensitive tax details.
Get Woke, Go Broke meets Quid Pro Quo? Or a belief that wokeness confers the right to special treatment? Or stupid marketing and plain-old greed?
Whatever.
I’m wearing a pair of Reeboks.
As a Vanderbilt alumnus, I am pleased.
Video Credit: NASA
The Blaze reports that in Connecticut a transgender freshman sprinter, born a male, won two girls state championships. (H/T, Instapundit)
No East German female athletes were available for comment.