Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. WNBA
2. Ship 40
3. Ceuta
4. College
5. Rights
1. WNBA. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, a professional sports league made the business decision that the best way to be successful was to put the best product, , reasonably refereed, competitive games in front of the public and hope for the best. With a few notable exceptions, that has worked pretty well for most men’s leagues, though they are not without their exercises in self-destruction, usually strikes, criminal arrests and the occasional cheating scandal tied to betting. Professional women don’t seem to have gotten the message, dabbling in woke to the detriment of the success of the entertainment product they put in front of the public. First up was the US Women’s Soccer Team, with a successful lawsuit demanding equal pay with US Men’s Soccer, closely followed by an excursion into all things woke. This managed to crater public goodwill and support created after they won an Olympic gold medal in 1996 and the World Cup in 1999, 2015 and 2019. That brings us to the WNBA, women’s professional basketball….
- The WNBA is a wholly owned and supported subsidiary of the NBA, which pays their bills. They are an entertainment product based on professional sports that seems to have forgotten that their entertainment product is high level sports competition. They do not make any money. They do not support themselves in the sports entertainment marketplace. This year, they appear to have decided that their product is cheap shot personal fouls, race and sexual controversy (lots of blacks and lesbians in the league), vocal support of men in women’s sports, and gambling on games. Quite the popular mix for the fans, that.
- Three seasons ago, the Indiana Fever selected a 6’ guard out of Iowa, Caitlin Clark in the draft. She was an exceptional shooter in college, compared by some to Warriors guard Steph Curry who changed the NBA game, and brough that game to the WNBA. Unfortunately, she also brough an abrasive personality to the court, incessantly complaining about everything, reminding some of us of former Celtics guard Danny Anige, though his whiney face after a foul was called on him was a lot more impressive than Clark’s. She was wildly popular outside the league, bringing a lot of new fans to the league. New fans bring new money, which in turn brings new revenue, better transportation, and bigger contracts. This was a bad combination, as the older players took out their jealousy of her on the court in the form of multiple hard, cheap fouls, many of them never called by officials. Last week, she had a technical foul called on her for having the temerity to stop a swinging elbow by another player with her face. While the abuse appears to be based on jealousy of her popularity, there is a significant undercurrent of racial and sexual animus. Clark has been one of the better guards in the league when healthy.
- Usually in sports, when someone is beating up on your star, someone or many someones on your team return the favor. There were entire NBA teams infamous for bully ball. The Patrick Ewing Knicks and the Isiah Thomas Pistons are two of the most obvious over the last 40 years. The Fever has another guard, Sophie Cunningham, who decided to fill this role. As such, she became a target, not only for the barrage of cheap, dirty plays, but by sports reporters anxious to create a story. If you thought the normal media was lockstep leftist, the sports media makes them look like Fox employees.
- One of them asked Cunningham last week if men should play women’s sports. She responded like most of us would expect, that there is a reason for segregating players based on sex. Her response got the media to blow it up into a massive controversy, dragging us all down their wokester rabbit hole with them. Players and coaches even managed to get themselves involved in support of trans women (men in their league pretending to be women), though one of the coaches in support decries the notion of men being WNBA coaches. Here’s where it got funny.
- Clay Travis, one of the creators of Outkick the Coverage media company is part of the duo filling the 9 AM ADT morning AM radio slot previously filled by Rush Limbaugh. He finally channeled his inner Rush, who famously noted that the best way to illustrate absurdity is by being absurd. Travis offered to purchase a WNBA expansion franchise that will be named the Nashville Balls, with an entirely trans roster and trans coaching staff just to make sure everyone knows he is fully supportive of trans. And if he can’t buy a franchise, he can roll out the Nashville Balls as a Harlem Globetrotters style entertainment, where they can tour the country playing against an all-female version of the Washington Generals beating them at every stop. Problem with the Globetrotters model is that while the Washington Generals were portrayed as having a chance to win, and they did once or twice, the ladies never will. Sooner rather than later that sort of beatdown becomes less than entertaining and will chase customers away.
- A few days later, a pair of retired NBA players announced they were now identifying as women and would be submitting their name to the 2027 WNBA draft. To date, the league has been silent. These are the first two. There will be others.
- We are about to find out how serious the WNBA ladies are about their support of trans women and will get a real demonstration of the dangers of virtue signaling compared with actual beliefs. Will anything good come of all this? Unlikely, though a little (or a whole lot) embarrassment would be a positive lesson for the WNBA or its financial backers in the NBA. Either way, it should be entertaining.
2. Ship 40. Perhaps the biggest surprise out of Starship IFT 13 was the survival of Ship 40 after it landed in the Indian Ocean W of Oz. Previous water landings were hard enough to cause the ship to rupture, mixing methane and oxygen producing a bleve fireball, destroying the Ship. The floating Ship allowed close drone inspection and triggered a recovery attempt currently involving at least three ships. That recovery started a few days after the flight, 10 days ago. The good news is that Ship is so far intact and under tow. The bad news is that it is huge, empty, not designed to be a boat in heavy seas (4 m swell) and 20 – 30 kt winds. As of today, its continued survival above the waves is not looking good. Recovery would allow SpaceX to inspect the heat shield system to see what worked and what didn’t. It would also allow them to do an overall health check on the entire vehicle. The initial plan was to tow it to western Oz, some 1,200 km away. In the contingency world, whether this is successful or not, it does present another option for SpaceX, whose goal is rapidly reusable spacecraft. In the event of a tower waveoff, failure to catch Ship as it returns from orbit, Ship can be flown a couple miles out to sea and soft landed, immediately recovered, and returned to the launch site. Is it worth doing? Unknown, probably even unlikely. But more options are better than fewer, and finding your hardware has capability never intentionally designed into it is always a pleasant surprise rare in aerospace.
3. Ceuta. Shades of Joe Biden and the open borders crowd. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’ open borders / citizen replacement worldview managed to finally trigger an actual invasion of Spain by Morrocco for the fourth time after 711 AD. The previous invasion was 1147. This one saw 60,000 – 78,000 unarmed invaders, mostly men, rush the border, crossing into Spanish territory starting July 30. The Spanish government did its level best to slow roll reporting, and make sure the Spanish public did not know about the invasion. They fired at least one member of the government who notified media of the invasion. Local response this time around was pretty good, with the military and police unable (unwilling or ordered) to do anything about the invaders, the locals locked up the city and stayed home defending individual homes. As the invaders planned on using local sources for their food, consumables and lodgings, they started returning back to Morrocco by Aug 3, at which time the socialist Spanish government loudly thumped its collective chest claiming that at least 70,000 had left. This conflicts a bit with a report around the same time that an estimated 5,000 – 10,000 were still running around the hills outside of town. For their part, the government of Morrocco arrested nearly 90 as part of the conspiracy to plan and execute the invasion, quickly convicting 11. Fallout from this ought to be most interesting as it puts the EU internal agreement that all member nations are to allow people from any member nation, citizens or not, to cross international borders once in country. This agreement has allowed the Muslim invaders a free pass to most of western Europe. That agreement should be at some risk, if not immediate death.
4. College. I am always interested in how things came to be. Problem with that in near real time comes out of Sturgeon’s Law, where 90% of everything is crap, or worse. Ran across the following piece from Campus Reform attempting to explain how college students swung so hard left over the years. There is a lot to be learned here; there is a lot to ignore. For instance, the piece ignores the massive sexual shift in college students, with 60% of all of them women today. It also ignores men swinging hard right while the women swing hard left. Instead, it bundles them all in one massive blob which acts and reacts to years-long input. And what do they think that input is? Better yet, why does it trigger the reactions it does? While this may be an exercise in wishful thinking, it is useful from time to time to understand at least a little bit the motivations of the Other Side, if for no other reason than to chip away at their armor a bit. The writer is Class of ’30, meaning a freshman. He points out that the shift took place after the mid-2000’s, the O’Bama years, when educational achievement was increasingly tied to partisan identity. Thank you, Barak for your transformative presidency. Today, at least 80% of college graduates identify as DSA. The big changes were an explosion in tuition and student debt. At the same time, value of degrees declined leaving graduates with higher explanations, weaker job prospects and greater dependence on government assistance. DSA members report a median household income nearly $16k less than that of US households headed by college graduates. At the same time, leftist indoctrination spread from the humanities departments into nearly every other academic field. In other words, the modern university does not merely educate a more liberal electorate. It creates one. A parallel problem, also caused by democrat policies, is that economic pressures shaped young American politics more profoundly than campus culture alone, creating the appeal of socialism among financially struggling and economically illiterate graduates. But with every problem, there is an opportunity. It is up to us on the political right to take advantage of those opportunities. More about that next week via the Great Burrito Wars.
5. Rights. There is a reason the media has been hellbent to keep HHS Secretary RFK, Jr out of the public view. Last week, in a contentious interview with CNN Dana Bash, Kennedy made his case that individual constitutional rights override and are superior to collective rights, which are nowhere defined in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. This is the fundamental fulcrum upon which every single COVID restriction rests. Upon what right did the public health apparat justify its extinction of individual constitutional rights during COVID? None exists outside the media created bubble. Either we identify and address this problem, or we are going to have it again, time after time, until we remove those who believe in it from the political gene pool with extreme prejudice. Sooner would be better than later. Congratulations to Secretary Kennedy for publicly identifying the problem and the solution. For her part, Bash served as little more than an apologist for the Public Health apparat.
More later –
- AG