The NFL is continuing its on-field social justice messaging for a sixth straight season.
All 32 teams will feature an end zone message of their choice at each home game throughout the season, selecting from four options: “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love” or “Inspire Change.” Once again, “It Takes All of Us” will be stenciled in the opposite end zone for all games. The only change from 2024 is that “Inspire Change” replaces “Vote.”
It’s “an end zone message of their choice” but all possible messages that can be chosen have been preselected for the teams. A team that wished to say “End Poverty”, for example, would not be free to make that choice. (One great way to end poverty would be for everyone who currently spends money on NFL tickets to instead donate that money to the poor! Another great way would be for everyone who watches NFL games on TV to instead work a gig job for those hours and donate the earnings to the poor.)
Who will be watching tonight’s game, the first of the season, and can let us know what social justice messages were communicated?
Separately, if you’re watching an NFL game on CBS make sure to turn off the TV before the news comes on. Bari Weiss, a traitor to the social justice cause (former NYT journalist), is going to be corrupting what had been a socially just news organization (from the NY Post):
Apparently, journalists who aren’t progressive Democrats are so rare that it cost CBS $200 million to hire one. Just how Deplorable is Bari Weiss? Here’s a recent Free Press article that contradicts progressives’ most authoritative source for health-related information (i.e., the Gaza Health Ministry):
The International Association of Genocide Scholars calls itself a body of experts, but joining requires only a form and a fee. Members include parody accounts like ‘Mo Cookie’ and ‘Emperor Palpatine.’
My comment on this august body of scholars:
They've identified a "genocide" and are sitting comfortably in armchairs in Europe doing absolutely nothing to assist the people who are the victims of the purported genocide?
I posted the following on Facebook last night during Game 7 of the NBA Finals:
Watching a WNBA game right now. It’s awesome how these tall ladies hit almost every three-pointer. Huge crowd too. I don’t know why they say WNBA has trouble filling arenas.
I was hoping to conjure the image of a person who almost never watches basketball, flips on the TV, and finds the world’s best players (Indiana v. Oklahoma City) and then, due to all of the hype about the WNBA exhibiting the world’s most skilled players, imagining that it is a WNBA game. About six friends liked it and probably at least half of them are so disconnected from the world of pro sports that they imagined it to be in earnest.
Separately, who has something more interesting to say about the NBA final? Our kids were cruelly denied access to the final quarter due to it extending past their bedtime. I don’t think we missed anything, though, because the spread between the teams at the end of third quarter (the only one that we watched) seemed to be maintained.
Is there any team in the NFL that rejects the U.S. official state religion? What would happen to a team that said they were going to celebrate African American Music Appreciation Month, created by Jimmy Carter, instead of Pride? (And maybe played “Gold Digger” by Kanye West during halftime while a huge fabric disk was paraded around the stadium with the image below, the way that European soccer fans will support an Walmart-sized pro-Palestinian flag or banner.)
I wouldn’t normally watch a basketball game, but the public school here texted out a message advising us that school uniforms wouldn’t be required today if students wanted to wear Gators or Cougars outfits instead (I would love to see the kid brave enough to wear a Houston shirt!).
Xfinity managed to stage a TV outage in our neighborhood (first time I’d tried to use cable since the Super Bowl), promising to have service restored by tomorrow evening, but I was able to see the end of the game via streaming.
Florida universities are searching for ways to pump more money into sports ahead of a proposed landmark NCAA settlement that would open the door for schools to directly pay athletes — and using state dollars could be on the table.
Florida has long held a bright line against putting tax dollars into college athletics. But that could change soon, as schools here and across the country grapple with revolutionary changes coming to the NCAA.
Athletic programs at Florida universities are by rule meant to be self-funded, paid for by student fees, ticket sales to events, NCAA distributions, sponsorships and donation dollars, among other sources.
The Iditarod leaders should cross the finish line within the next 24 hours. The leader, from Alabama(!), has just 73 miles to go.
As with aerobatics and endurance flying (see Department of Old Guys can Fly: nonstop cross-country at 1,100 lbs gross weight: “EAA keeps saying that their mission is to inspire young people, but if you look at the ages of the airshow performers, the round-the-world and over-the-poles pilots, and achievers such as Ebneter, maybe what EAA is actually doing is inspiring the elderly!”), it seems that the most inspiring story from the Iditarod is likely to be Mitch Seavey’s finish. The current #4 musher’s bio says “At 65 years of age, I’m running the Iditarod because it’s hard.” He won the race, which requires a lot of physical effort by both mushers and dogs, in 2004, 2013, and 2017.
It’s too bad that Donald Trump has gutted NIH funding, at least to the Queers for Palestine League. I would love to see a Columbia University study on the heritability of dog mushing prowess. (Mitch Seavey’s son Dallas Seavey has won the Iditarod six times.)
The mushers and their beasts (14-16 per sled at this point) have all made it to the mighty Yukon River at or past Tanana.
This is an all-gender race, just as I think all sports should be, and a woman is in the lead: Maggie Hamilton. She’s got a “T” bib for “Teacher on the Trail” and, I think, is traveling by air taxi. Three out of the five dog-pulled leaders are women:
The musher currently in 2nd place is Mille Porsild, listed as from Denmark but the bio later says “Mille lives in Alaska with her sled dogs” so I guess the dogs didn’t have to endure air freight before their big race. She’s dealing with a broken sled, according to Facebook, and meeting up soon with a new one that has been airlifted in. Bad news for our trade war: Michelle Phillips, the leader, is from Canada and lives halfway between Skagway and Whitehorse. Hope for the U.S. comes from Alabama in the form of Jessie Holmes, currently in third place.
Following the Iditarod via the site/video isn’t as much fun as I had hoped. It’s tough to get power and connectivity so the only video comes from checkpoints and we don’t get to experience a musher’s-eye view from the trail. It’s too bad that there aren’t any drones with Starlink and 100-mile range.
In this image from Dave Poyzer, the terrain isn’t the snow-blanketed landscape that you might expect (everything in Fairbanks was covered in snow last week!).
A Berkeley-based Effective Altruist invested in Sam Bankman-Fried‘s FTX after seeing a promotion for it by Tom Brady. He/she/ze/they becomes angry and lets loose a 15′ alligator inside Brady’s Miami mansion. Brady, unfortunately, cannot be extracted from the beast’s stomach in time.
On arrival in Heaven, God gives Tom Brady a welcome tour and shows him to an already-furnished 2500-square-foot house with white picket fence. There are weather-faded Tampa Bay and New England Patriots flags on either side of the front walk. “Because of your distinguished career,” God says, “you won’t spend eternity in the high-rise apartment blocks like our standard live-gooders. After your third Super Bowl win in 2005 we prepared this single-family home just for you and the hottest subset of your ladyfriends who ultimately arrive. I made sure that Gisele Bündchen’s future home here is all the way on the other side of town.” As they walk around to the back of the house, Brady sees a Jeff Bezos-style mansion two blocks away. Brady and God move toward it. The sidewalks all around the mansion are painted in eternal red and gold. There is a 75′ car dealer-style flagpole in the front yard with a 20×30′ Chiefs flag flapping in a constant 10 mph local wind. The arrowhead-shaped pool has “KC” in red tile on the bottom.
A 7′-high Mahomes #15 jersey hangs above the front porch:
There’s a 15′-high solid gold sculpture of a football in the front yard with a KC logo on the side. There’s a car in the driveway whose body is shaped like a Chiefs helmet (they use Grok in Heaven because ChatGPT did a terrible job):
Every window on the second floor is filled with the display of a jersey of a player on the 2024-25 Kansas City Chiefs team. There’s a private 100-yard regulation football field behind the mansion with the KC logo in the middle and the lushest greenest grass Brady has ever seen. Assisted by cheerleaders, two retrievers who look just like goldens structurally are running around the field. One retriever’s fur is Pantone PMS 186 C to match Chiefs red and the other is Pantone PMS 1235 C to match Chiefs gold. Here’s the best that ChatGPT could do with the vision:
A motor yacht is docked on one side of the house, which has direct access to the Heavenly Lake:
Tom Brady looks back at his own modest house and says, “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I won 7 Super Bowls. Patrick Mahomes won only 3. Why will he get this mansion while I will spend eternity in a regular house?” God laughs and says “Sorry for the confusion, Tom, but that’s not Patrick Mahomes’s mansion. It’s my house.”
Readers: Are you watching the Super Bowl this evening? The 6:30 pm Eastern start time is relatively kid-friendly. The half time entertainer is Kendrick Lamar. Here are some excerpts from “Backseat Freestyle”, one of his big hits:
Uh, Martin had a dream Martin had a dream Kendrick have a dream All my life I want money and power Respect my mind or die from lead shower I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower So I can f*ck the world for seventy-two hours Goddamn I feel amazing, damn I’m in the matrix My mind is living on cloud nine and this nine is never on vacation Start up that Maserati and VROOM VROOM! I’m racing Poppin’ pills in the lobby and I pray they don’t find her naked And I pray you niggas is hatin’, shooters go after Judas Jesus Christ if I live life on my knees, ain’t no need to do this Park it in front of Lueders, next to that Church’s Chicken All you pussies is losers, all my niggas is winners, screaming
…
Damn I got bitches, damn I got bitches Damn I got bitches, wifey, girlfriend and mistress All my life I want money and power Respect my mind or nigga
I wonder if the Palm Beach County Public Schools would have any issues with our third grader coming in and singing the song that he learned during the Super Bowl…
“America Is Abandoning DEI. The NFL Remains All-In.” (Wall Street Journal, Feb 6, 2025): Everyone from the federal government to Fortune 500 companies is dialing back their diversity efforts. But America’s most popular sport is standing its ground. … “We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue to do those efforts,” Goodell said. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get into it or a trend to get out of it.” … Yet the NFL is also facing a fresh bout of skepticism about the effectiveness of its own diversity efforts, including the Rooney Rule, a policy established in 2003 that now requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for important jobs such as coach. [Ed: Who defines “minority”?]
A portion of the closing ceremony is dedicated to the host city handover from Paris to Los Angeles, in which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo will give the Olympic flag to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. … The [Olympics closing] ceremony will feature prominent performers representing California, a nod to the next host city. Rapper Snoop Dogg — who has become a fixture of this year’s Games — will play a role in the handover segment.
(Prejudice against women is so severe all over the world that the handover is from one mayor who identifies as a “woman” to another mayor who identifies as a “woman”?)
I’m a big fan of Snoop Dogg’s performance in Starsky & Hutch, but it seems that he has a colorful past.
From Rolling Stone, “Snoop Lion Opens Up About His Pimp Past”:
When Snoop Dogg called himself a “pimp” back in 2003, he wasn’t joking. “I put an organization together,” the rapper-turned Rasta artist Snoop Lion tells contributing editor Jonah Weiner in the new issue of Rolling Stone. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, fuck a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, titty to titty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer.”
Unlike most pimps, Snoop says he let his women keep the money. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch, but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp . . . As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp, I dreamed of having cars and clothes and bitches to match. I said, ‘Fuck it – I’m finna do it.’”
The above statements get bowdlerized in OregonLive:
The rapper-turned-Rasta artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg tells Rolling Stone he fulfilled a life’s ambition by becoming a pimp — yes, literally — a decade ago.
“I’d act like I’d take the money from the (prostitute), but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp. … As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp.”
It’s an interesting reflection of current American social mores that Snoop Dogg’s involvement in the world’s oldest profession didn’t motivated Los Angeles officials to find a somewhat less colorful representative.
Readers: What were your favorite Olympics sports/moments this year and what should we watch on Peacock Premium Plus before we cancel the subscription that we started a couple of weeks ago? Our kids so far have enjoyed rugby, equestrian eventing (running horses through the country), breaking, synchronized diving, BMX, volleyball, tennis (Djokovic!), table tennis, and the transition from swimming to biking in the triathlon.
He had tried five times to win the gold, failing each time. … The two sets played had to go into a tiebreaker, which was neck and neck the entire way. During the first set, there were 13 unsuccessful break points. The match lasted nearly three hours, an eternity for earning the best two sets out of three.
A three-set match? That’s typically for tennis players who identify as “women”. Thus, it seems fair to say that Djokovic, who has repeatedly denied Science by refusing to be injected with a Scientifically-proven vaccine against COVID-19, won gold due to switching gender IDs. (It would have been easier if Spanish prodigy Carlos Alcaraz hadn’t also changed gender IDs.)
As previously noted, the Miami F1 event featured a race in which drivers who weren’t as good as the F1 drivers were nonetheless featured due to a personal characteristic (gender ID). How about a series in which a different personal characteristic is used to restrict who may compete: age? For drivers who are at least 80 years old… Formula Joe Biden (FJB). Because Joe Biden loves the 1967 Chevrolet Corvette (photo below is from “Joe Biden and Colin Powell drag race their ’67 and 2015 Corvettes”), the FJB series would put every driver into a C8 Corvette. Some of the drivers might suffer from slow reflexes, so the Corvettes would be restricted to “teen driver mode”.
