No comments on Presty the DJ for July 29
-
-
Michael Smith first wrote:
“I say put mental health first, because if you don’t, then you’re not going to enjoy your sport and you’re not going to succeed as much as you want to. It’s OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself because it shows how strong of a competitor and a person that you really are, rather than just battle through it.”
Says Simone Biles.
What I’m about to say may not be very popular, but if you have read my stuff for any period of time, you know I tend to say what I am thinking.
I feel sorry for her, but more sorry for her teammates. Her statement just seems to be the antithesis of the traditional American spirit.
Biles is a not a kid, she is 24. She is an adult. She indicated in an interview last night that she was feeling fear. Fear of injury, fear of making a mistake, fear of letting her teammates down.
So, she didn’t saddle up. Her mental toughness is gone. I’ve seen this before in people, they become so paralyzed with fear that they can’t even act. It is a from of PTSD or the old version known as “shell shock” – but the Biles situation isn’t a life threatening one. This is a sport.
But it isn’t just Biles – maybe she is the most famous example of it, but I have known young adults to not show up for work, calling out sick and claiming they had such a stressful week, they needed a “mental health day.”.
Somehow I can’t imagine a Chinese or Russian athlete walking away from a competition and you know, those CIA and US Army advertisements celebrating mental weakness and wokeness as desirable characteristics for intelligence employees and soldiers didn’t fill me with confidence.
Biles should not be disparaged for doing what she thought she needed to do for herself, but she damn sure should not be celebrated for it either. She let down her team and an entire country.
I am left to wonder if this is an example of the new America in the hands of the Biles generation, that they just don’t think they should “battle through” when things get tough.
May God have mercy on our souls if that what we have wrought.”
Then Smith wrote:
Many have criticized my comments about Simone Biles. That’s fair – but I have a personal reason for my opinion.
In the late 90’s the business I was part of failed. I was unemployed and dead broke, loaded with debt and with a wife and three kids to feed and literally no food in the house. I can imagine that kind of stress is at least equivalent to what Biles feels. Yet, I didn’t quit.
I couldn’t quit. My family depended on me.
I couldn’t find a job in my field at a comparable level so I turned to skills I learned working in construction from college, doing anything I could to make money to feed my kids. I didn’t give up, I wasn’t embarrassed to take any job I could find.I clawed my way back over the past 30 years.
That’s real life. I know other people share a similar story. Rare are people who have never faced setbacks in life. Some buckle down and get things done, some people quit – on their families, their teams and themselves.
That has real and immediate consequences, so people will have to pardon me if I am harsh toward an athlete who quits for “mental health” reasons. She has been supported all her life by other people because she can do things nobody else can – and now she can’t (or won’t) do those things.
I don’t know her, and I have said she has the right to do whatever she wants to do and for whatever reason (or no reason at all), but again, she doesn’t just get to escape the consequences – people forming opinions of her or the real impact to her family and her teammates.
We all are entitled to our opinions, but now she is out of the individual competition as well, her legacy will forever be that she quit.
She doesn’t deserve denigration – but by the same token, she sure as hell shouldn’t be celebrated for quitting. Many are celebrating her for “living her truth” and “taking care of herself.”
I can’t do it. I won’t do it. I’m sorry for her problems but she performs in a sport that is basically entertainment, as all sports are to one degree or another. All sports, especially the Olympics, are luxury appendages of a prosperous world. They are nice, but not necessary, so maybe this doesn’t deserve the attention it is getting
Whether Simone Biles ever competes again will not change my world one iota. The fact remains that the behavior of elite athletes in several sports are making me not care about things I once enjoyed and supported (my wife, daughter and I volunteered and worked in the 2002 Salt Lake Games).
A friend once told me that society will forgive anything except going broke. The fact is that I’ll forever carry the stigma of being broke and bankrupt, but I will never be called a quitter.
-
We begin with our National Anthem, which officially became our National Anthem today in 1931:
-
They want to make your life worse. They are the various diversity, equity, and inclusion activists and apparatchiks whose obsessions with race, sex, and gender now govern much of American life. They are the nation’s scolds, afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun in a way that offends the ever-shifting demands of diversity and inclusion.
The latest victims of their killjoy spree are in Virginia, where prom kings and queens and daddy-daughter dances are about to be banned in public schools. By law, all Virginia public schools are required to implement policies that are “consistent with but may be more comprehensive than the model policies developed by the Department of Education.” These model policies are a disaster, requiring schools to “accept a student’s assertion of their gender identity without requiring any particular substantiating evidence, including diagnosis, treatment, or legal documents.”
Thus, on nothing more than a child’s say-so, schools must allow males into female locker rooms and showers, and house boys with girls on overnight trips. School employees are even told to keep a student’s steps toward transition secret from parents deemed insufficiently “supportive,” and to consider calling Child Protective Services on them. But the malice of the trans-kids movement may be most evident in the smaller cruelties of prohibiting prom queens and daddy-daughter dances.
This directive is meant to ensure the inclusion of students who identify as transgender, but it is an inclusion by elimination, achieved by banning sex-specific celebrations and honors. Any sex-specific distinctions, it is feared, might hurt the feelings of those with gender dysphoria.
But by this logic, even a generic gender-neutral parent-child dance should be cut for making children with dead, absent, or terrible parents feel left out. Indeed, dances in general should be cancelled because they might make socially awkward or physically disabled students feel bad. And so on the reasoning goes, cancelling everything that might make someone, somewhere, feel excluded.
This mindset allows misery to take happiness hostage, and it is particularly pernicious for sex and gender. We are embodied, and the reality of biological sex is fundamental to our being. It is also essential to human existence, for new persons are conceived through the union of male and female. That some people are uncomfortable with the sexed reality of physical embodiment is tragic (that cultural and political leaders are trying instill and encourage such discomfort is wicked), but that is no reason to require everyone else to officially ignore the basic experiential reality of being male and female.
Yet this is precisely what Virginia is doing to the children in its public schools. The cancellations of dances and other events are emblematic of a deeper erasure of identity, in which young men and women have the sexed reality of bodily existence officially erased in the name of inclusion. We are born male and female, but Virginia has decided that helping children grow into men and women is wrong, and that fundamental relational identities such as “father” and “daughter” must be publicly eliminated.
The irony in this is that those who preach most fervently about celebrating diversity seem terrified of acknowledging human differences. If, for instance, they really believe that “trans women are women,” then what is diverse about them? Only by acknowledging the difference between biological women and biologically male trans women can there be any diversity to celebrate. But admitting these differences threatens the entire ideological project.
The difficulty the ideologues face is that their mantra of diversity, equity, and inclusion is borderline incoherent. Diversity means difference, which intrinsically imperils equity and inclusion, for differences are by nature unequal in some way and exclusive of something. To be one thing is to not be another. To prefer one thing is to disfavor another. And so on.
Identifying and responding to important differences are always fundamental social and political tasks, as is finding commonalities that might unite us. These duties require wisdom and discernment, and the advocates and acolytes of diversity, equity, and inclusion are not up to the job. They efface essential differences and magnify those that they should minimize. And they lack a unifying principle that could unite different people and groups. Hence their flailing attempts to reconcile the tensions inherent in their sloganeering.
The Virginia public school system is a case in point, with Loudoun County alone providing a plethora of egregious examples that have provoked a major parental backlash even in this wealthy, solid-blue area. For instance, Loudoun administrators have illegally punished a teacher for stating the truth about biological sex, and they have become racial obsessives who have spent tens of thousands on critical race theory training that denounces colorblindness.
But the distinction between male and female is literally fundamental to human existence, whereas the construction of racial identities has little to no basis in biological reality. Effacing the former while emphasizing the latter is the opposite of what educators should be doing.
This folly arises because they are trying to remake society with a half-baked, incoherent ideology that is enforced by the shifting demands of the woke internet mob. And those people will always find something else to be unhappy about and another ideological envelope to push. Thus, the same ideology that cancels daddy-daughter dances in Virginia is putting men into female prisons in California, with predictably horrifying results.
These policies are the products of unhappy people who have realized that combining ideology and claims of victimhood give them power, which they can use to hurt others. This is why so much of our public discourse, especially from thelLeft, amounts to little more than accusations that “the thing you like is bad, and you should feel bad for liking it.”
The truth is that a daddy-daughter dance hurts no one, except those already determined to be miserable. Banning the dance helps no one, except for those eager to punish those who are happy.
-
Today in 1977, John Lennon did not get instant karma, but he did get a green card to become a permanent resident, five years after the federal government (that is, Richard Nixon) sought to deport him. So can you imagine who played mind games on whom?
-
A video guide to the Bucks’ NBA championship:
-
On Tuesday the Milwaukee Bucks ended a 50-year NBA championship drought.
It shouldn’t be surprising given our fractious times that this was not met with universal praise throughout the home state of the Bucks. Some people fail to grant others the same rights of opinion as they grant themselves when opinions disagree. (This is a bigger thing with liberals than conservatives, but too few conservatives grant others the right to be wrong.)
There is also the dynamic of Milwaukee vs. the rest of Wisconsin. Some of that comes through this rather defensive piece from On Milwaukee:
Hello, big market sports punditry. I see you over there on the coast, scoffing about Milwaukee’s historic victory in the NBA Finals.
You’ve probably never been to Milwaukee, so let me try to explain this to you.
What’s happening in Milwaukee this week is about so much more than an NBA title. It’s about so much more than some sports talk blowhard who called us a “terrible city.”
It’s about humility. It’s about passion. It’s about showing up and being yourself when everyone else says you should be embarrassed of who that is, and grinning like Bobby Portis and not giving a f*ck.
Did you catch that, Stephen A? We know you didn’t want to come to Milwaukee. We don’t care, we were having a great time regardless. We think it’s hilarious that you had to come anyway. We hope you hated how much fun you had.
Because being a champion is easy when everyone else sees a champion. Being a champion when everyone sees a nobody – when the world sees “Flyover Country” – that takes guts.
That’s why Giannis Antetokounmpo is such a perfect avatar for this place. That’s why his statue will stand taller than the “Bronze Fonz” (but probably in its general vicinity).
Because nobody outside of Wisconsin saw a champion when Giannis stepped onto an NBA court as a gangly, quiet 18-year-old who barely spoke any English.
He doesn’t fit the mold of an NBA champion. Even today, there is a sizable segment of the national sports punditry that (not-so-secretly) resents him for that.
He doesn’t brag. He doesn’t make drama. He’s not flashy.
He shows up, and he does the work. He stays humble and grateful. He doesn’t just remember his roots, he never left them.
There’s no pretension there, just an authentic human being who is awkward and doofy and full of passion.
NBA fans no longer get to count the seconds as Giannis prepares for his free throws.
No, from here on out, they have to spell:
A-N-T-E-T-O-K-O-U-N-M-P-O
After the game, Giannis described himself as “a people pleaser.”
Believe me, the people of Milwaukee are pleased. We identify with this dude.
If he stays in Milwaukee Antetokounmpo will be as loved as Henry Aaron was. And those who are ignoring the Bucks because of (they believe) incorrect political views are missing out on one of the greatest sports figures (not just for athletic reasons) in our lifetimes.
And we needed this W bad.
Because you don’t GET nice things when you’re from Milwaukee. This city’s entire history is about getting knocked on its butt just when it’s on the precipice of having something nice.
Kevin Smith’s movie classic “Dogma” sums it up succinctly. When Linda Fiorentino asks if Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were sent to hell, Alan Rickman infamously deadpans, “Worse. Wisconsin.”
Nobody quotes that line more than we do here in Milwaukee, and we laugh it off with our customary Midwestern good grace. But there is real pain under that laughter.
People forget that Milwaukee was poised to be a global super-city at the turn of the 20th century. Milwaukee City Hall was the tallest secular building in the world, and the city had growth and population density that rivaled New York, London and Paris.
Maybe we forgot because no one reading this was alive at the time. But I digress.
It didn’t pan out – seems like it never does for Milwaukee. People forgot about the city that “Feeds and Supplies the World.” Factories closed. Racial discrimination reared its ugly head. The rust belt decay took hold. Affluent folks fled to the suburbs and took their wealth with them, and Milwaukee became a scapegoat for the rest of the state to look down upon.
Even when we learned Milwaukee would play host to the Democratic National Convention in 2020 and soak up some warm political press, somehow we knew it wouldn’t work out. We’d never heard of COVID at that point, but we knew that Milwaukee can’t have nice things.
So some thing or another was bound to screw it up.
It’s OK. We’re still here. We’re still doing the work. And let me tell you what I saw Tuesday night in Milwaukee.
I saw 100,000 deliriously giddy people packed into a “Deer District” that sits on top of a scar.
When I moved to Milwaukee nine years ago, that’s what it was – a scar, both metaphorical and physical.
This scar was a reminder of a time when some privileged someones decided to rip out one of the Midwest’s most vibrant African American neighborhoods so they could build a freeway, so that some white folks could get to their homes in the suburbs five minutes more quickly.
And then decades later, when they tore down that ill-conceived Park East Freeway, 24 acres of blighted gravel pit just sat there like a knife through Milwaukee’s heart. When I moved to Milwaukee, I figured that ugly scar would be with us forever.
My hat is off to the Lasry family. When they bought the team in 2014, Milwaukeeans had low expectations. Billionaires from New York don’t normally do much for us here in “Flyover Country.”
Not so with the Lasrys. They threw their talents and their wealth into healing that scar – both metaphorically and physically.
The Lasrys didn’t just build the new Fiserv Forum arena and the surrounding Deer District on top of that ugly Park East Freeway scar.
They committed to hiring unemployed or underemployed Milwaukeeans to make up 40% of their construction workforce. Contractors and detractors said it couldn’t be done, but the Lasrys invested in recruitment and upskilling programs and exceeded that goal.
Those people dancing in the Deer District last night were dancing in a monument to Midwest urban renewal that was built for Milwaukeeans, by Milwaukeeans – folks who showed up and did the work.
Those kids diving off the bridge into the Milwaukee River – they would have come out with chemical burns if they had tried that in 1971.
The scars are healing.
Now, it would be ridiculous and reductionist to say this NBA title marks a turning point for the city of Milwaukee.
This city still grapples with a legacy of racial discrimination that won’t just go away. It’s still the scapegoat of a state legislature that sees Milwaukee as its perennial punching bag. And a humming decade of businesses reinvesting in Milwaukee has suddenly been slammed into neutral amid the uncertainty of the pandemic.
Maybe if Milwaukee wasn’t the source of most of the state’s social pathologies — high (compared with the rest of the state) crime, horrible schools (that no additional amount of money could fix), playing of the race card against the rest of the non-Madison state, and failure to get rid of the politicians who are fixing nothing, to name four — and had made any attempt at all to rectify that, Milwaukee might have more sympathy outside the 414 area code. We’ll return to that “punching bag” point momentarily.
But last night, Milwaukee finally got to have something nice. And it may not be a panacea, but it reminded us why we keep showing up, and why we keep doing the work.
In Downtown Milwaukee, I saw a vibrant city firing on all cylinders and living up to its full potential. I saw white guys who wear MAGA hats hugging Black guys who wear Black Lives Matter shirts. I saw just a little bit of pride creeping out from under that Midwest veneer of humility.
No, we’re not LA or New York or Miami. We never will be. We don’t want to be.
We’re authentic and awkward and doofy and full of passion. We’re Milwaukee.
Any basketball fan will tell you it doesn’t matter what the scoreboard says at halftime.
What matters is momentum. And right now, Milwaukee has the momentum.
Jake Curtis presents an alternative view:
As Wisconsin basks in the glory, it is worth keeping in mind how the Bucks got to this point and the important role the state’s conservatives played in ensuring this moment was possible.
During Games 4 and 6, the packed Fiserv Forum literally shook, and on Tuesday night over 65,000 additional fans packed the Deer District just outside the arena. The story of the Fiserv arena offers proof that the bold reforms ushered in during Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s era included a long-term vision for economic development based on true public-private partnerships, not the phony ones that far too many taxpayers have had hoisted upon them.
Following the 2014 sale of the franchise by longtime Bucks owner (and former U.S. senator) Herb Kohl to hedge-fund managers Marc Lasry and Wes Edens, the NBA made it clear if the Bucks did not upgrade the aging Bradley Center, the team would be purchased by the NBA and sent off to Las Vegas or Seattle. Unlike other boondoggles, Kohl and the new ownership group put up $250 million while the remaining cost (the total came to around $524 million) came from state income tax revenue, a ticket surcharge, $4 million annually from Milwaukee County, $47 million from the City of Milwaukee, and $203 million in Wisconsin Center District bonding.
Would the billionaire owners have had the ability to pay for the entire construction package? Probably. In a perfect world, should Wisconsin taxpayers have been forced to shoulder the load? No. But the reality at the time was that the Wisconsin legislature, under the leadership of state Sen. Scott Fitzgerald (now a member of Congress) and longtime Speaker Robin Vos, and Gov. Walker and his team ushered through the financing plan. Without their work, which was aided by the state’s largest business lobby (the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce), NBA fans could very well have been left watching a Finals played between the Phoenix Suns and Las Vegas Bucks.
Despite opposition from some Milwaukee Democrats, legislators like my former boss, Sen. Duey Stroebel, who represented districts that straddled metro Milwaukee and more rural communities, were forced to take a tough vote to keep the team in Milwaukee. As a result of this bold leadership, the financing package ultimately garnered bipartisan support in both chambers.
The jury is still out on whether public financing arrangements like the one that made the Fiserv Forum possible directly benefits taxpayers. Critics of such deals raise legitimate free-market concerns. However, had Wisconsin conservatives not stepped forward to assist, Wisconsin would have lost an asset and the city’s Deer District would be nothing more than an aging basketball skeleton. Instead, as the Bucks took the court Tuesday night, a full house was present in the Fiserv Forum, 65,000 plus were cheering (and spending money in nearby bars and restaurants) outside, and viewers across the state witnessed a historic performance by Giannis and his teammates.
Everyone should be thankful that in 2015 Wisconsin conservatives did not let the team leave on their watch. Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and ensured the Bucks would remain part of the state’s amazing economic comeback. And because of their efforts, Wisconsin will be able to proudly feature a humble and hungry role model like Giannis for years to come.
About that opposition from Milwaukee Democrats: One of them, Rep. David Bowen, sent a congratulatory social media message that might make you think he had supported the Fiserv Forum package. He didn’t.
As was pointed out in the aforementioned post (when reposted on Facebook), the state funding package was more an allocation of tax revenue than a tax increase, by earmarking the so-called “jock tax” toward the package instead of just dumping it into state General Purpose Revenue. As Walker put it at the time, “I think it’s arguably the most fiscally conservative idea in the country for a professional sports team,” Walker said. “We’re having them pay their own way. It’s not coming out of revenues from anywhere else. It’s not coming from new taxes. It’s keeping the foundation we have today.”
And yet, it helped Walker in no political sense. In fact, nothing the Republican Party has done to help Milwaukee has helped the GOP politically. Did Republicans benefit by getting Miller Park built? Ask former state Sen. George Petak, who got recalled for his support of the 0.1-cent stadium tax, which then lost control of the Legislature. How about Milwaukee school choice? Democrats outside Milwaukee routinely bludgeon Republicans on the spurious claim that private school choice money takes away from public schools.
Fiserv Forum? Notice that instead of Walker as governor …
… Wisconsin has a governor who, as politicians will do, takes credit for something he had absolutely nothing to do with.
-
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones were to release “Beggar’s Banquet,” except that the record label decided that the original cover …
… was inappropriate, and substituted …
… angering one member of the band on his birthday.
The number one single …
… and album today in 1975:
-
Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:
Today in 1973, George Harrison got a visit from the taxman, who told him he owed £1 million in taxes on his 1973 Bangladesh album and concert:
-
Today in 1964, a member of the audience at a Rolling Stones concert in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, England, spat upon guitarist Brian Jones, sparking a riot that injured 30 fans and two police officers.
The Stones were banned from performing in Blackpool until 2008.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is not like said Rolling Stones:
Today in 1967, the Beatles and other celebrities took out a full-page ad in the London Times calling for the legalization of …
… marijuana.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 