Category Archives: For Women

Eric Meeker & bad girls

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I was born in Oshkosh, WI, and lived in the township of Vinland, located in the Winneconne school district, which I attended K-8. It was am excellent school system back then (I can’t speak for since), particularly in English, science, math, physical education, music & art.

By my senior year in high school at Lourdes Academy, I lived in Oshkosh and stayed there during the undergraduate summers & holidays I attended Marquette University. I learned a lot about life in Oshkosh, including this emotionally traumatic childhood event I will now relate.

I was 6 years old, and just finished kindergarten in Winneconne, so it was summer. My mom often took my brother David & I to go shopping in Oshkosh, because there isn’t much in small-town Winneconne. My mother was always proud to show off her children to everyone, especially other mothers.

One day, a “friend” who had two daughters, one my age & one my younger brother’s age, asked if “Eric could come over and play.” My younger brother wasn’t requested, it was specifically a request to have me come over & play for the day. My mom agreed, and dropped me off at their house one sunny summer morning.

It was the age-6 daughter that really wanted to play with me. The younger, 5-year old daughter quietly acquiesced & followed her older sister in everything we did– watch TV, coloring books, go outside & play, go back inside & see mom for lunch, etc. By the early afternoon I had grown tired of the older sister’s bossiness. When she declared what we were going to do next, and I didn’t feel like it, I instead went into the living room and starting coloring in the pile of coloring books.

A few seconds later, the younger sister came to me, quietly sat down and started coloring with me. [!!] What happened next I will NEVER forget, although the names & faces are long gone. The older sister starts screaming, “NO!! You can’t play with him. You have to do what I say!! That’s not right! No, no, no…!!”

Mom hears this and immediately rushes into the living room and takes the older daughter up the stairs, then right-to-left down the banister hall into her bedroom at the end and locks her in. I can hear her pounding on & screaming through the door, “No! No!! It’s not fair…” over & over as mom rushes down and whisks her younger daughter away.

Mom comes back into the living room where I’m standing stunned and says sternly to me, “Sit over there, I’m calling your mother to come get you now.” No apology or explanation as to what just happened. It was an interminable 30-minute wait for my mom, and a quiet ride home. Who was the victim in that incident? Answer: It was the 6-year old boy, and that’s when I learned how certain girls feel about me, and how crazy they can get when I don’t do what the want.

Bad girls exist, and have existed for a long time. It is inherently prejudicial to believe women are always right & to be believed. That just isn’t true and anyone with life experience knows this. I have experienced it many times since I was first introduced to a bad girl at age 6. Many motives exist for all of us to be deceptive, manipulative, or just evil. To cynically claim this can’t be true is to stand reality on its head.

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The Eric Meeker

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Dr. Robert Cade at the University of Florida developed Gatorade in 1966. His laboratory potion had the right electrolytes & salts from the start, but it didn’t taste good, so the football players who needed it often wouldn’t drink it. Dr. Cade took home an early batch of Gatorade to his wife, who recommended cutting it with lemon, and thus sports science was changed forever. Sometimes a brilliant doctor just needs a good woman to help him out. Gatorade won QB Steve Spurrier the Heisman Trophy in 1966, and “The Sweat Solution” is one of the best ESPN 30-for-30 shorts.

Arnold Palmer popularized professional golf and invented his own drink, now commonly referred to as an Arnold Palmer– which is ice tea with lemon. There are arguments about how to proportion an Arnold Palmer, but Arnie says it is mostly ice tea with the lemon garnishing the drink. Some people prefer an Arnold Palmer with half lemonade or more, so it allows that flexibility and there are various acceptable preferences.

The most delightful moment in this ESPN 30-for-30 short is when Arnold Palmer reveals the moment he finally gave up and started referring to his favorite drink as an Arnold Palmer. His attributed concoction became so accepted & widespread that every waiter/waitress now knows what an Arnold Palmer is, so he gave up and started ordering it as an Arnold Palmer– laughingly hoping that no one will recognize him. It’s a great lesson in how to handle fame and giving up false humility from one of the most beloved athletes of the 20th century.

With that introduction, I am now sharing a drink I invented, which I have named after myself. An ‘Eric Meeker’ is half apple cider & half high-pulp orange juice. Individually orange juice and apple cider are very acidy, which limits  consumability, but surprisingly when these two are combined the acids mellow each other out and you are left with a fruity burst of natural sugar rich in vitamins & minerals your body needs. In this sense it is much better than Gatorade because it is organic. It’s superior to an Arnold Palmer in that it is much healthier, while being comparably delicious.

The Eric Meeker is a 50/50 mixture, and leans no more that 60/40 in either direction. The drink’s inventor says it’s better to have more apple cider than orange juice in an Eric Meeker, and you definitely need high-pulp OJ. Also, apple juice doesn’t work like apple cider. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about an Eric Meeker is its economy & easy mixing, with ingredients that are always available in any decent Midwest food market. The nutrient burst you receive from a cool Eric Meeker will replenish your body with what it needs– and fast.

For years Arnold Palmer didn’t self-reference his favorite drink when ordering it, but I’m skipping past all that. As I’ve learned, it’s a hoot to have invented your own drink, and this blog allows publication of the recipe with all the nuances, so enjoy!

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Classic comedy & crypto-fascism

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Mind if I show you a little something? I’ve been watching you, to see what the hell you’re up to, and this is what I see…

Caddyshack (1980) is the funniest movie ever. Beyond that, it was the first movie with a modern soundtrack, featuring the music of Johnny Mandel and also containing two hit songs from Kenny Loggins: “I’m Alright” the film’s classic theme song, and “Mr. Night” the caddy pool-party song. This christened a new movie soundtrack style for the decade, which showed-up in features across all genres including: Flashdance (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) & Dirty Dancing (1987) to name just a few.

Caddyshack is about class lines & the differences between country club members and the caddies who serve them. The class bite gets hidden somewhat underneath all the laughs. Danny Noonan represents the young, unmotivated everyman who see little reason to work hard because there is little-to-no reward for him.

Bill Murray delivers the best scenes, often by himself, and they live in golf lore– as every golfer loves Caddyshack. If you don’t laugh with the Caddyshack audience, then that audience is laughing at you. Few comedies can twist you up like that, and Caddyshack sets the standard.

And to clarify a Caddyshack point regarding Donald Trump, he is a real-life amalgamation of Judge Smails & his grandson Spaulding– meaning they are cheaters at golf, not golfers. This is why you have to be careful when someone asks you to kill every golfer on the course.

Rodney Dangerfield & Ted Knight represent the battle of new money vs old money in Caddyshack. Ted Knight never had a better or more memorable role. Rodney Dangerfield was in one other classic comedy, Back to School (1986), which is relevant to this discussion. Back to School is an underrated movie, with a stellar cast including: Sally Kellerman, Ned Beatty & Robert Downey Jr.

Sam Kinison helps students of history appreciate what happens when you give a good answer to a difficult question, but it isn’t the answer the teacher is looking for…

Robert Downey Jr. as Derek Lutz intervenes at his college homecoming rally to “point out that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.” Somewhere very recently, that line got me thinking and helped me theorize Trump-Musk crypto-fascism. This proves the arts & laughter are food for thought & meditation, so take a hike all you elitist fraternity scumbags…

The latest on crypto-fascism: Stablecoins are seen as “low hanging fruit,” so that’s the current top priority for the crypto industry. Congressional legislation in May has multiple crypto bills being circulated, as the financial media is finally beginning to see the priority of crypto in the Trump-Musk administration. Increasingly it is apparent that crypto is a primary economic & foreign policy driver for the Trump White House.

Stablecoins are a way of connecting worthless crypto to tangible assets such as the US dollar, Treasury notes, etc. In short: stablecoins are a gateway to a crypto-fascist billionaire heist of the US Treasury. Not one “stablecoin” has ever held its 1:1 peg to whatever it’s tied to. STABLE & GENIUS are the crypto bills currently being “debated.” Political blowback has already started as the ‘crypto PAC money Democrats’ are starting to sway due to increasing public concerns. Crypto is a political fight where an educated public can really benefit the cause of revolutionary socialism.

April 2 was “Liberation Day” when the Trump tariffs were announced. The tariff plan was to declare economic war on the nation of China, along with a cost-of-living & jobs war on the international working class. A side benefit for Trump was the chaos it provoked in the news cycles, which deflected attention away from his hidden crypto agenda. The crypto-fascist plan was for the STABLE & GENIUS bills to already be passed, or at least well on their way by now. But these bills have been “paused” instead. Crypto works best in secret, and the timelines on these events (tariffs & crypto legislation) suggest they were part of a coordinated fascist plan. Any public disclosures & analysis of crypto-fascist criminality damages Trump immeasurably.

Lou, dressing down his troops in Caddyshack: I’m gonna lay it right on the line. There have been a lot of complaints already– horsing around on the course, bad language, smoking grass, poor caddying! You wanna get fired, be replaced by golf carts– just keep it up.

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Wasting human capital

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Reuters/Markets headline: Treasuries, U.S. dollar sell off as Trump trade war drives recession fears

In Succession (2018-23) Logan, Kendall, Roman, Shiv & Conner constantly bounce stupid half-baked ideas back-and-forth, always choosing in the end to lean politically to the right towards fascism– and that’s how it ends up.

Two years later, we have in real life with the Trump administration the result of what was depicted in that HBO political drama series. In Succession, the 1%, and especially the 0.01% are clueless & impotent, back-filling their limitations with hysterics & rage. The power of money buys them everything, yet they still aren’t satisfied.

The most likable characters in Succession are the human throw-aways including: Tabitha, Jess, & (my favorite) Karolina. These minor characters are serious people who are intelligent & very good at what they do, but get no respect or love from those they dutifully serve. Without such talent, this parasite class would immediately shrivel up & die. These fictionalized conflicts wonderfully portrayed in Succession are actually real and are happening every day in all the institutions of bourgeois power.

Many of monied class don’t understand where money comes from at all, they simply perceive money as a divine right to be held by themselves. Inform them that money is a congealed expression of the value of human labor power, and the 1% gets hysterical and starts screaming for a fascist strongman.

It’s all very convenient for the puppet-masters of international finance & commerce. Their authority is never to be questioned, along with the 2-party political set-up and elite-biased court system. International law is ignored & attacked by US imperialism to further its predatory ambitions of world conquest and that’s how it is we are told. We are always fighting the evil Russians because of 1917, and we must submit because we are mere mortals compared to our demi-god leaders who are infallible.

The Frankfurt School of post-modernism provides the ideological justification for much of this propaganda, based on pre-fascist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche in their writings on the “overman-superman”, etc, expressing an admiration for a strongman leader. German soldiers received copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I, as a conscious attempt by the far right to divert the working masses from the Marxism of Lenin & Trotsky. The social Darwinism of ‘survival of the fittest’, Malthusianism depopulation, and the rest of this epoch’s pseudo-science are simply genocide-enabling bourgeois rationalizations.

Spinoza & Hegel are the philosophical & ideological influencers of Karl Marx. There is no ‘overman’ or ‘fuhrer principle’ with socialism, as that Nietzsche garbage belongs in the dustbin of history. What we currently have in the White House is a cabal of Nazis who think they can enslave the world and are determined to do so. The popular resistance they face is massive and unconquerable, yet the fascists insist on this fight to the death. The Democrats are aware and doing everything they can in their service of fascism to disarm & misdirect the working population.

The international youth & working class must organize itself independently from existing capitalist political forces, which are all lined-up for battle against the working masses. These hostile camps include the DSA & Greens, the union bureaucracies, and NGO’s/non-profits with their million ties to big business & the military-police state.

The police are of no help to the working masses, in fact they are brought in by criminal corporate & government officials to drive worker leaders out of the factories while arresting anti-genocide student protesters exercising their right to free speech on campus. I can’t remember the last time I heard of a real cop acting heroically, I suppose it happens, but I mostly read about police shooting & arresting people without cause and then being protected by the courts. I wonder why police abuse & terror and legal system corruption is never seriously discussed in the media? A lot of other people do to.

Deep in the Oval Office everyday, fascists are meeting and plotting their next attack on the population. Elon Musk & Stephen Miller appear to have the most influence over Trump at this point, which means anti-immigrant scapegoating, tariff wars & crypto. All these reactionary policies are implemented in a series of chaotic fits, then modified by unexplained zig-zags and walk-backs intended to placate political resistance until the death squads can take over. It’s remarkable to note that Biden-Harris had over a year to question Trump on all this during their election campaigns, but never seriously did so. Now the Democrats are acting surprised by Trump. For the rest of us, it’s like being forced to watch a hideously bad TV show every day.

A final word on acting: I’ve now seen Succession twice all the way through. It’s a beautifully done series on some really ugly issues and probably the best streaming content since House of Cards (2013-17). You certainly have to be in a certain mood to watch & appreciate it. Succession perfectly cast three amazing actors for extremely difficult roles in bringing humanity & likability to deeply-flawed characters in Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin & Sarah Snook. Succession viewers takes turns hating Kendall, Roman & Shiv, while fitting in touching human drama involving the human capital they are wasting & abusing. The Hollywood trap is to romanticize these characters into real life, instead of learning the political lessons, and thus absolving the ruling class from mass criminality.

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Modern Diet & Junk Food Cravings

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Human beings & popular culture keeps evolving. What I’ve noticed as I walk through life is how unhealthy much of the American population has become, including (and sometime especially) children. For reference, I’m Generation X and it wasn’t like this when I was a kid. So what are the causes?

For sure, advertisers targeted Gen-Xers during Saturday morning cartoons and any other children’s programming available back then– before cable & satellite TV. Then MTV, ESPN & TNT/USA came along and advertiser targeting became even more nefarious & precise. It is now a consumer fact that Gen-X and beyond craves Cocoa Puffs, Captain Crunch, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Hostess snacks, Cheetos, Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, McDonald’s & Pizza Hut. Kids my age were bombarded with millions of ads, while today’s internet kids see tens-of-millions of ads by adulthood.

So how do you control your junk food urges when watching TV or browsing the internet? To start, we must define junk food for everything it is. Junk food is a craving we can’t ignore, but it is a health-buster so it must be tamed. It’s all about correct identification, then finding substitutes & compliments.

For instance, after a certain point ice cream becomes a junk food. Everyone loves ice cream, but it’s a gut-buster, so I substitute cottage cheese in my diet and that handles my ice cream craving in most instances. I still have ice cream in my freezer for when the craving becomes the food I eat, I just eat a lot less of it since I substituted cottage cheese. Since cottage cheese can be boring by itself, it needs a compliment for it to be a sustainable substitute. I use jelly/jam or fresh fruit and that compliment gives the variety needed to sustain cottage cheese in my diet. That keeps the waist & ass leaner, while lowering the diabetes risk.

Rule #1 to a healthy diet is: Eat whole fruits & vegetables as staples. Peanut butter is a super-food that goes well with just about anything. So is milk, eggs & real cheese. This reduces meat consumption, while giving your body the necessary protein & good fats it needs. Remember that fresh is best and what is available depends on your geography. Learn to adapt– regionally, seasonally & economically.

For example if you juice cucumbers as part of your regular diet, and suddenly cukes aren’t available or become of poor quality, you must find an alternative source of juice & veggies. Fresh cucumbers are a super-food so making up the difference in lost nutrition will require a major re-adjustment to the fruits & vegetables in your diet.

I’ve mentioned super-foods a few times already, which is a generic term for nutrient-dense foods that give you health. Green peanuts & citrus are super-foods available in the southern latitudes of North America, while apples & cabbages are examples of super-foods that should be worked into a regular northern latitude diets. Consider juice or cider for citrus & apples if not in the native latitude. Understand that apples get mealy in the south due to extreme heat, so they are only super-foods when grown in the north.

Junk food is least damaging if it is consumed when all the body’s nutritional requirements have been met. Be honest with your deepest cravings and find a healthy alternative, particularly in the cereal aisle of your grocery store. Cereal is junk food, but Cheerios, Raisin Bran & granola are among its healthiest forms and can be substitutes. For me, Cheerios satisfies my potato chip craving and my stomach thanks me for it. A bowl of cereal with milk kills a lot of junk food cravings for candy bars, cookies, etc.

A hot air popcorn popper kills the corn meal junk food (Cheetos, etc) cravings. Eliminate bread & pasta from your at home diet, these starches are huge gut-busters, so only consume them when eating out. Substitute and find compliments. Vegetables need creamy dippers to encourage consumption, etc. You need to cover all your junk food cravings with always-available substitutes, otherwise these cravings will ruin your body & physical health. This is one of the most difficult challenges in modern life and one of the most important GenX lessons to learn.

Celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging

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Yesterday, a former US government official, Mike Benz, published an article on the USAID program to integrate imperialist messaging into popular music. Among those prominently named are: Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa & (of course) Pussy Riot. Also discussed in the piece are 22 rappers from around the globe, who have visited the US State Department over the years and been trained to write lyrics that dovetail with US imperialist interests.

The argument that USAID is necessary to fight global hunger, advocate for democratic rights, etc, is a fraud– a cynical concoction of Western intelligence. Trump/Musk are shutting down the notorious CIA fronts of USAID & the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) because of it’s fake left bias, which the fascists despise.

This has nothing to do with democracy, as Trump/Musk seek to reshape US intelligence in their Nazi image. Note that “Trump/Musk” and “intelligence” is an oxymoron.

It was a convenient starting point for the Trump/Musk government wrecking ball because so many people recognize this imperialist corruption. Only a few well-paid rainbow warriors (pic above) have protested the shutting down of USAID & NED. Perhaps the State Department can coax one of these celebrity assets into writing lyrics about the unfairness of this defunding. Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue, etc, would give it a great review– for sure. That’s their job.

“Celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging” is the exact State Department phrase which became the title. These trainable celebrities are fascist collaborators & sympathizers. The irony is that most of these puppets weren’t fascists to start, but the Black Hand has corrupted them and that’s the Faustian deal one must make to become a celebrity. These iconic defeatists see no hope, no path to fight Trump/Musk, taking all their political cues from the CIA Democrats. These trained celebrities who learned nothing from history are Vichy France.

Vichy collaborators were paraded though the streets of liberated Paris with swastikas drawn on their foreheads, while the women also had their hair shaved-off for giving aid & comfort to the Nazis from 1940-44. The population of France lined their streets to spit upon & hurl verbal abuse at these fascists, seething with revolutionary anger & class hatred of the bourgeoisie. Fascism, which flows out of imperialism, is the bitterest enemy of democracy and that’s the lesson of WW2. The masses of the world still hate Nazis, and it is this retribution of the international working class that historically awaits celebrities trained to spread desired messaging.

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Transgender athletes in mixed & co-ed sports

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Preface: This is my follow-up conclusion to “Trump to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports”, published yesterday and linked here.

Perhaps the final hurdle in this ideological debate is the question of transgender participation in co-ed sports. There are sports where women compete against men. Equestrian jumping & horse racing feature women jockeys competing against men from the Kentucky Derby to the summer Olympics. Auto racing forever changed with Danica Patrick. In these mixed sports (which men still dominate), gender doesn’t matter as much, since it is the horse or vehicle that is doing most of the work. Therefore transgender isn’t a competitive issue in these such sports.

For co-ed sports, there are rules to divide men & women– usually equally. For example, in most adult co-ed softball leagues there are 10-player teams (4 outfielders), divided half women & half men. The batting order has to alternate boy-girl-boy-girl, and if a guy is walked (intentionally or not) he gets second base while next batter up (female) gets a walk to first. This effectively disallows pitching around the men.

Transgender participants in co-ed sports need to be considered as their birth sex. If that fair-play rule violates their sensibilities, then don’t play. That’s how it goes in sports where competitive athletes don’t allow enabling. From all of us to them, “In you can’t play by the rules then form your own league or STFU.” Assuming they know how to play, a co-ed softball team with 5 transgender biological males playing as women would be unbeatable in most recreational leagues.

As I’ve discussed, this is an easy political victory for Trump when he needs it most. His anti-immigration policies, along with Elon Musk’s government takeover have backfired domestically, while his plan to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and build a casino resort for the rich on its ruins have been internationally rejected & condemned. Transgender athletes is a minor issue in comparison, but it gives Trump a much-needed credibility boost and thus more room for his fascist maneuverings. It allows Trump to go on the attack, with moral superiority over the Democrats. In Trump’s warped mind, canceling Biden/Harris DEI initiatives gives him the authority to attack anyone on the left. To be clear: DEI is fake left. Socialists who think & act like this writer are the true left, which is the real target of Trump & DEI/CIA Democrats.

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Trump to ban transgender athletes in women’s sports

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Donald Trump has announced today that he will ban all transgender athletes from competing against girls & women in sports. This is to apply to all ages, from grade school competition through NCAA & professional leagues. This after the Biden/Harris administration had backed their legal participation in women’s sports for years as part of their sweeping identity politics campaigns.

Much of this story was brought to a head by the controversy surrounding San Jose State University’s (SJSU) women’s volleyball team. The transgender athlete in question is Blaire Flemming (pic above), who led the 2024-25 SJSU women’s volleyball team in kills (314), kills per set (3.88) and total sets played (81). Second on the team in kills was Nayell T’ia with 228, and 3.45 kills/set. No other Spartans women’s volleyball player had more than 169 kills last season. A link to SJSU 2024-25 women’s volleyball stats is here.

A cursory look at these statistics, nullifies any argument that a transgender athlete creates no competitive advantage for a NCAA women’s volleyball team. Blaire Flemming was arguably SJSU’s most effective women’s volleyball player last season. Teammates & opponents describe how much higher Blaire Flemming can jump and how much harder she hits the ball, as compared to biological women.

Upon wide-spread discovery of this transgender athlete, NCAA opponents refused to play against SJSU women’s volleyball in 2024-25, as numerous matches were forfeited over principled opposition to a transgender athlete competing against women.

This is not a difficult issue for most of the population. Most people feel transgender people have democratic rights, but allowing them to compete as women in sports isn’t one of them. In fact, allowing this form of unfair competition only serves to increase society’s hatred towards those who are transgender. The problem here isn’t Blaire Flemming, the problem is the corrosive identity politics of the Democratic Party that (by design) irrationally divides society.

The team captain of SJSU women’s volleyball, Brooke Slusser, is suing her head coach, the university, and the conference over this, after being made to be the roommate of Blaire Flemming, without being told about Flemming being transgender [!!]. Apparently, SJSU & the NCAA knew Blaire Flemming was transgender when transferring to SJSU from Coastal Carolina in 2022.

ESPN has written multiple articles on this matter, in which they refuse to identify the transgender player as Blaire Flemming, in order to “protect privacy.” The privacy of Blaire Flemming’s roommates & teammates are of little-to-no concern to ESPN and this identity politics crowd. The mission of these moralist Democrats has been to create a post-modernist wonderland in female athletics, where protesters are silenced, while the “rights” of a handful of transgender athletes are tightly safeguarded.

Every male athlete in competition discloses that he is male to the NCAA. Every biologically female athlete does the same. But according to identity politics logic, transgender athletes can lie about their gender and are politically protected. For the record, Blaire Flemming is listed as “female,” not transgender, on the SJSU 2024-25 women’s volleyball page. This deeply unpopular & reactionary political position is despised by 99+% of athletes and the fans who watch. It allows a fascist imbecile such as Donald Trump to posture as a reformer for justice & common sense, and only the Democrats can do that.

One final note on gender identity. I always refer to Blaine Flemming as Blaine Flemming. That avoids the he/she them/they identity politicking. When I write about any athlete, I almost always use their first & last name together. For instance, Roki Sasaki was the most coveted MLB free agent this winter, and as a sportswriter I had to publish extensively on that. Notice that his name is Roki Sasaki, not Sasaki. Excessive use of a last name without the first dehumanizes the subject. In two long articles on Roki Sasaki, I referred to him by his last name only a few times over the course of thousands of words. I also referred to him, as a pronoun.

With men & women you easily can use pronouns. But with transgender, I prefer to use their full name only & always– writing & speaking. It’s the most accurate (& comfortable) way to write I’ve discovered. Consider that as my accepting nod of approval to transgender people who are having a hard time identifying themselves. The more these transgender people support the Democratic Party, the more voiceless & confused they become.

Liberals cry that “outing” a transgender person is a crime, when really it is a public reckoning of personal truth. You’re an adult now, so deal with it. It’s always uncomfortable, but more importantly it’s necessary. If you checked “female” to the NCAA when you are a transgender biological male, then you fundamentally lied. Enabling this pathological form of dishonesty is the root of all our problems.

Statistically speaking, as far as sample size goes transgender athletes are an extreme outlier. This means you can’t have a NCAA division of transgender competition because the numbers aren’t anywhere close to supporting it and never will be. There are so few of them, that if transgender people want to compete then they need to do it under rational scientific guidelines, meaning man/woman determination by birth gender. If there’s any question, then the athlete must submit to genetic testing, just like drug testing. Transgender athletes don’t get to make up their gender, or claim identity with a specific gender and make that a fact, which Democrats have shamelessly supported.

This isn’t an infringement on the rights of transgender people, it’s just a fair solution to a new problem. Instead of solving it rationally, the Democrats have tried to cynically exploit the issue of the rights of transgender athletes. What the Democrats always leave behind in the process are the rights of the great majority: in this case it’s the female athletes who have had to live, locker room, shower & compete with an unidentified transgender athlete that has been secretly protected by the NCAA from revealing their true biological gender. That’s creepy & murky murky.

The Blaine Flemming’s of the future will have to compete with the boys & men. It took Trump to do this, after 99% of the population already had clearly expressed their feelings on this issue. It’s an easy political win for Trump, always a specialty of the Democrats. Notice that I almost always refer to Donald Trump as Trump, and that’s because Trump is a dehumanized persona.

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NCAA, NIL, and US politics

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College sports have exploded since the landmark Ed O’Bannon v NCAA decision in 2015, which now allows NCAA student athletes to earn NIL money for themselves. This came into reality by 2020, and since then it’s been the NCAA trying to self-regulate NIL payments to athletes, followed by student athletes challenging these new rules in court– and often winning.

A well-written recent ESPN article by Dan Murphy titled “Texas senator aims to help NCAA regulate athlete payments”, indicates that Capitol Hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are ready to give the NCAA what it wants.

What’s at stake is big money. According to this ESPN article, “the Big Ten and SEC each raked in more than $850 million in their most recent fiscal year, leaving even their power conference peers in the ACC ($706 million) and Big 12 ($511 million) significantly behind.”

The core issue is collective bargaining rights for NCAA student athletes. The NCAA (& US lawmakers) are against it, while most student athletes don’t understand its revolutionary implications. To have collective bargaining rights, means you must be an employee that earns for an employer. Athletes that play big-time NCAA sports do just that, yet the NCAA insists their student athletes aren’t employees.

When such an impasse is reached in bourgeois politics, this is when its lawmakers & courts get involved, by crafting legislation into laws that don’t violate basic rights as defined by the judiciary– in theory at least. This is always a biased process, colored by class & personal interests.

It is worth recalling the only American institution which is exempt from federal antitrust laws is Major League Baseball (MLB). In 1922, the US Supreme Court made one of its more reactionary rulings which still stands, in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League, ruling that baseball was a “purely state affair” and not interstate commerce. The court concluded that profiting from local “human effort and skill” in the sport did not constitute interstate commerce. The court found that transporting teams to play in other states was a “mere incident, not the essential thing”.

What was at issue was the ‘reserve clause’, which kept MLB players bound to their club for life. The owners of MLB were granted anti-trust exemption by a business-friendly government, which kept players salaries artificially suppressed. It wasn’t until MLBPA legal representative Marvin Miller (pic below) challenged this in court in the 1970’s that free agency came to MLB, and eventually all the major sports leagues.

These same issues are in play today with the NCAA’s leading universities acting as owners to keep NIL athletes from forming a union and having collective bargaining rights. The NCAA doesn’t consider it’s money-earning athletes to be employees, even though they can be (and are) paid by universities & alumni boosters to make money for them. These athletes clearly work for the NCAA, and if that isn’t the definition of an employee, then what is? The courts have taken this legal position on every NCAA attempt to control NIL-athletes ability to earn, etc, as the courts don’t buy the NCAA’s argument that NIL athletes aren’t employees.

At this point, Congress has been asked to step into the fray, in the form of Ted Cruz (R-TX). Texas is a HUGE football state, and the University of Texas just joined the SEC, making the final four of the 2024-25 CFP. It’s the huge money at stake, in terms of TV revenue for football that is driving all this. Football generates over three times the revenue for the NCAA that basketball does.

NCAA hoops is booming too, particularly on the women’s side, as they finally have regular network TV broadcasts, largely catalyzed by the popularity of Caitlin Clark at the University of Iowa, etc. It’s the Big 10 & SEC that have expanded into super-conferences, who are taking the lion’s share of this revenue, and demanding more in the future. There is a perception among those in-the-know that the NCAA may become a two-tiered system– with elite schools competing for national titles in all the major sports, but especially football– and then all the rest just existing on the fringes. Some would argue that has happened already.

Ted Cruz has been brought in (& bought by) the NCAA to make sure no collective bargaining rights are appropriated to NCAA athletes. And so Congress has been entrusted to work out a system which favors the NCAA in its further exploitation of student athletes. No unionization means not having to pay insurance, health care costs, even pensions, etc, to student-athletes who have earned for the NCAA. Attempts at denying these employee-athletes their right to bargain collectively, and thus be a united fist against the NCAA, violate anti-trust laws and will be open to strong legal challenges in the courts.

This is a revolutionary issue for young student athletes, as this goes down to high school now. The window for elite athletic competition is small and it’s a young man’s/woman’s game. Young athletes need to learn their history and speak to each other on these issues. Today, all sports are designed to bring prestige & money to a NCAA university. Sports has tremendous value. Volleyball, skiing, gymnastics, etc, are now broadcast regularly on the major networks as weekend sports programming. If they don’t have football, then just about any other sport will do.

Regular TV has gone to total garbage, with AI now taking over. Reality TV is now largely sports-competition based, in case you haven’t noticed. That makes sports programming more coveted than ever. The NCAA is attempting to cap it’s cost/university. Right now each university is allowed to spend $20.5M/year in NIL money to its athletes. Of course, for Texas, Alabama, Ohio State & Michigan, that isn’t enough, so alumni boosters kick in another $5-10M annually to give them the competitive edge they insist on having. For all intents & purposes, these university presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners are the NCAA.

So what we have is a closed loop between the bourgeois politics of Ted Cruz and the NCAA. What has been left out of this political discussion are the athletes voices. This NIL & transfer portal era in the NCAA has become a Wild West of unethical recruiting, broken promises on agreed-to deals, and endless transfers & lawsuits from aggrieved student athletes. What it has done to the product on the playing field is obvious. There are no more programs at these universities– football, hoops, baseball, etc. They are now rotating sports factories designed to make maximum financial profit every year. This applies to the NIL athletes too.

And what we have are a bunch of kids who don’t fully realize the bigger game they are part of. They want to compete at the highest level, and they also want to get paid & go pro. Their competitive nature inherently directs them away from turning to others for help in obtaining their rights as employees of the NCAA. That is the barrier these young men & women must overcome to help themselves. By uniting and joining with others, you become stronger and help yourself in turn.

Final thoughts: Football & men’s basketball are the only profitable NCAA sports. The House Settlement, (named after ASU swimmer Grant House) which allows NIL revenue-sharing with student-athletes (along with back pay for former athletes dating back to 2016), has received preliminary approval from a federal judge. As with every other capitalist institution & setup, there are vast inequalities in this NCAA-NIL system. Of the $20.5M annually currently allowed (set to increase in the future), 90% of it will go towards football ($~15M) & men’s hoops (~$3M). The vast majority of NCAA student athletes don’t have NIL deals, and have been completely unrepresented in the process.

What this will create is a two-tiered layer of athletics across the NCAA and on every campus. The vast majority will be regular student athletes, with an elite layer of NIL-athletes for whom this professionalized system was created. Yes, stars are important to winning and they grab the TV ratings, but in football & hoops you need a TEAM to win. When all the programs become stratified in the manner I’ve described, you don’t have teams anymore– just a bunch of guys with the same-colored jersey. Thus, the competition becomes less compelling on every level.

NIL money for student athletes has the potential to revolutionize athletics for the better, but as anyone can see, it is instead being used by the NCAA & its power conferences to increase their monopoly power over college sports, while enriching only an elite class of athletes. This mirrors how real-world capitalism deals with any social inequality issue– it promotes a thin layer of union bureaucrats, blacks, women, gays, etc, to create the illusion of fairness & equality for all. The logic of identity politics is: Because OJ Simpson became rich & famous, all blacks should be happy– and so on.

Unless student athletes unite and appoint their own legal & media representatives in this fight, then most of them will be excluded from any benefits or compensation. Deion Sanders, head football coach at the University of Colorado has the clout to get his players (including his own son) top NIL deals. LeBron James can get his son a lucrative NIL deal at USC for a year, until he goes pro. These are the people being enriched by NIL money, and it’s an advantage most student athletes don’t have.

Also note that these NIL expenditures didn’t get the Trojans into the NCAA Tournament, or the Buffaloes into the CFP. It turns out you need a group players who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good (along with top talent) to win. NIL deals distort that paradigm. How can a coach create a consistent winning culture & team camaraderie when top players transfer every year? At this point, sports are all about entertainment, with winning & excellence being secondary– especially in the NCAA.

The professionalization of college & high school sports is a modern reality. The idea of sports is that it is fair to all and merit-based, meaning those who are the most-talented & work the hardest will excel above the rest. The reality is that if you don’t have money-backed competitive advantages working for you, you will get crushed by those who do.

Sports academies offer specialized professional training and top competition for aspiring young talent, but they are expensive and out-of-reach for most working class families. College sports is becoming more bourgeois at its roots, because you need these such advantages to compete for NIL deals at top NCAA universities.

On football:

When the NCAA kingpins who rule the Big 10 (now 18 schools) decided it would be a good idea to bring UCLA, USC, etc, into their conference because it benefits Michigan & Ohio State football, that doesn’t work out so well for the other sports whose west-coast athletes now have to fly to Rutgers & Maryland for conference competition. This is one example of the nefarious & destructive influence of football in college athletics.

In many ways football needs to be it’s own entity– apart from universities & education– because it is so powerful it can swallow up any school. It can absorb any evil such as organized crime & gambling in the NFL. The Universities of Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Texas, USC, Alabama, etc, are beholden to football. The power it has over alumni is incalculable.

Football often defines that institution, and in this era of branding & NIL rights, that is more powerful than ever. Football is the PR department for the University of Miami Hurricanes and has been since Howard Schnellenberger. The same goes for FSU under Bobby Bowden, and the Florida Gators under Steve Spurrier & Urban Meyer. UCF in Orlando has become a top-25 football program out of nowhere due to massive financial inputs from the university, alumni & boosters.

The problem of the NCAA & NIL rights can’t be divorced from football. It is an addicting game, but it has a tremendous cost which is largely overlooked. Football ruins the lives of people who don’t even play, but instead bet compulsively on it. Lots of them are former high school/college players who never made it any further, yet somehow believe they have some special insight into the game. They don’t. It’s a physical, punishing game that grinds its participants into retirement. CTE, Parkinson’s, etc, are just a few of the long-term brain afflictions that await football greats when they retire.

These realities need to be widely discussed and accounted for when collective bargaining issues such at NCAA NIL rights are at stake. It’s the athletes who are competing in field hockey, soccer, wrestling, etc, that are being excluded from these discussions. It’s the university athletic directors, presidents & power conference commissioners (based on football), that are running the NCAA in their own interests. The NCAA student athletes need to come together under the banner of collective bargaining to have any voice in their future.

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Pussy Riot reeks of provocation

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There’s a lot of fake political art out there: sophisticated propaganda that broadcasts liberal values to a liberal audience. Pussy Riot’s performance of A Punk Prayer (2012) occupies that pole: focusing on feminist-LGBT rights, while maintaining an explicitly anti-Putin line that dovetails with an undying support for the fascists in Kiev. It’s strictly identity politics & anti-Putin propaganda for these CIA cut-outs known as Pussy Riot.

Staged in brightly-colored balaclavas to conceal their identity, while punching & kicking the air in ‘punk defiance’, these feminist, pro-war phonies have existed under the protective wing of western imperialism for over a decade.  A Punk Prayer is nothing more than a provocative publicity stunt by a bunch of imperialist-backed puppets. After such a time, what is the balance sheet on their popular influence?

First, no one knows any songs by Pussy Riot. No kids have Pussy Riot content on any of their playlists, or seriously recommends their music. No members of Pussy Riot play any musical instruments or have any songwriting chops. No one can even name all the band members, or how they met, etc. Everything about Pussy Riot is shrouded in mystery. All their songs lyrics & political statements come straight from Langley, VA & the US State Department. Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon about Pussy Riot is they are so well known in the media, without having any real fans– or content.

Pussy Riot’s western support is entirely from a wealthy political class & the fake corporate media. Since being mercilessly exposed as nothing more than anti-Russian propaganda by myself in the late 2010’s, Pussy Riot were branded “foreign agents” by the Russian government at the end of 2021, confirming my political & artistic analysis. As a musical artist, these imposters never fooled me, as I smelled a rat with Pussy Riot from the start.

At this point in history, Pussy Riot now labels itself an “activist art collective”, because they are obviously not a band or even musicians. Their “concerts” are a joke— instead of performing music, they talk about their feminism/lesbianism at length, then chant anti-Putin vulgarities while dumping water on the crowd. In 2020, Pussy Riot was online promoting a fake tour that didn’t exist, due to venue lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Promoting Pussy Riot as ‘punk’ is no longer tenable, as all they do now is issue NFT crypto and promote US State Department propaganda through their website Mediazona. Here’s a cozy photo of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, with Antony Blinken in 2022.

Mediazona is a US-supported media propaganda outlet focused on anti-Putin opposition, founded by Nadya Tolokonnikova & her Pussy Riot cohorts in 2014. This has become Pussy Riot’s primary vehicle for “activism”, since their musical “popularity” has waned due to inconvenient facts coming to light. Once again, can you sing (or even hum) a single Pussy Riot song? Do you know ANYONE who can?

Pussy Riot has become a world famous “act” with no recognizable content. That’s quite remarkable, and reveals much about the state of art in today’s world. The art market has become completely corrupted by big money to the point where there is no art– only dressed-up propaganda narratives packaged as ‘art’.

In 2012, Nadya Tolokonnikova was listed as Time Magazine’s ‘100 Women of the Year’, while also receiving the LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2019, Tolokonnikova received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from Rhode Island School of Design – for being a “powerful voice in the fight against tyranny,” while The Guardian ranked her #4 in Best Art of the 21st Century, for her Punk Prayer video. In 2023, Nadya Tolokonnikova was awarded the Woodie Guthrie Prize, rendering that honor meaningless while muddying the name of that great original folk singer. And so it goes, as Hillary Clinton is a big fan of Pussy Riot.

Kathleen Hanna was The Punk Singer (2013), the unmistakable voice of Bikini Kill, the last great rock band (in this artist’s opinion). What happened to Bikini Kill is what happened to the entertainment industry overall. Kathleen Hanna embraced Pussy Riot around the time her (long overdue) documentary was released on Netflix, so clearly her support for Pussy Riot helped with the movie distribution. For what it’s worth, The Punk Singer is a good documentary film and that’s what happened to Bikini Kill & rock music.

No, Pussy Riot isn’t here to save humanity from catastrophe though their fearless activism. They are instead stooges of imperialism. Pussy Riot receives complete support from the corporate media and every other capitalist institution. A February 2021 Greyzone investigative article titled ‘Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal’, confirmed this. Pussy Riot’s role in this NATO propaganda campaign is discussed in it:

New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] programs to effect “attitudinal change” and “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” alongside intel contractors and Bellingcat… As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot. One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokonnikova, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolokonnikova trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”

For the record, Julian Assange is a heroic journalist, beloved by hundreds-of-millions worldwide, who was unjustly persecuted by the imperialist governments of the US/UK for years over phony sexual assault claims, for the crime of telling people the truth about government-approved war crimes, etc. Pussy Riot attacks Julian Assange (and anyone else who speaks for the oppressed masses) for inspiring revolutionary thinking & action. As reactionary puppets of imperialism, Pussy Riot reeks of provocation.

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