May172020

Episode 167 Show Notes – It’s About Life, Not Race!

I used to love bowling. I would go help my grandfather tend to his apartment building and he, in appreciation, would take me bowling.

I remember, one day, a black kid stole my grandfather’s wallet. We chased him but he got away.

I guess white people are in danger every time they go bowling. At least that’s the logic the New York Times is using.

 

 

 

The Space Force Rises

You might be wondering where my awesome introductory song went. Well, today is special.

President Trump unveiled the military flag for the Space Force. The Space Force will be a subsidiary of the Air Force much as the Marines are a subsidiary of the Navy.

Trump said:

“Space is going to be the future, both in terms of defense and offense and so many other things. And already, from what I’m hearing and based on reports, we’re now the leader in space.”

 

The flag is dark blue with a delta wing, an elliptical orbit and three large stars that are intended to symbolize the Space Force’s purpose of organizing, training and equipping, according to the White House. It is the first new military flag to be unveiled in 72 years.

During Friday’s presentation of the flag, Trump alluded to the development of a new U.S. military asset.

“We have, I call it the super-duper missile,” Trump said, explaining that it could travel “17 times faster than what they have right now.”

He is probably talking about a hyper sonic missile. We have a ton of other military weapons that were mainly designed to be in space including anti-missile defense systems, lasers for offense and defense and a rail gun system that use electromagnetic energy to launch a projectile. The projectile can be standard ammunition or a casingless projectile such as plasma (which they are also testing).

This is the future. Time for us to grasp it.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/498021-trump-administration-unveils-space-force-flag

 

Here We Go

There is an opinion piece in the New York Times that is disgusting.

Born in lily-white Oregon, it’s a sport that’s long claimed to be for everyone — even as African-American joggers have been persistently subjected to harassment and worse. – Banner

By Natalia Mehlman Petrzela – Author

“Free! Easy! Relaxing! That’s how jogging was marketed in the late 1960s, when the idea of heading out on a regular run was unfamiliar to most Americans. Unlike other physical fitness programs that required heavy, expensive gear, jogging was accessible to all, boosters claimed.

But history shows how untrue that is, and how long the sport of running has maintained this fiction.”

Running has been around for… forever. I can already see where this gal is going.

“When video surfaced of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the young black jogger gunned down in South Georgia, distance runners became a new voice among the usual chorus of social justice activists who grimly parse such tragedies. But among runners, reactions largely differed by one important factor: race.

 

Black runners recounted their own routines, intended to deflect the sort of suspicions that turned deadly for Mr. Arbery: steering clear of certain neighborhoods, going out only in daylight, wearing an Ivy League sweatshirt to broadcast respectability. Many white runners, by contrast, were aghast that the sense of peace they feel when hitting the open road reflected their racial privilege.”

Here’s a news flash: white people have to do that too when running. You know why? Because there is crime and there are jerks out there.

Now I want to point out: this article already assumes a lot. It assumes the guys which killed Arbery are racists and that’s the only reason they attacked him. It also assumes they killed him only because he was black. Reality is, though the video is ugly, we really don’t know why Arbery was targeted.

These guys could have been racists, they could have suspected Arbery of something, they could just be dumb murders. We don’t know. And the assumption here is dangerous.

“This disparity should come as no surprise: Running has been a pastime marketed primarily to white people ever since “the jogging craze” was born in the lily-white Oregon track and field world of the late 1960s. Black people have not only been excluded from the sport — one survey by Running USA found under 10 percent of frequent runners identify as African-American — they’ve also been relentlessly depicted as a threat to legitimate, white joggers.

The most apparently egalitarian exercise of all, running, is anything but — especially when it comes to race.”

She’s already invalidated her argument.

Running did not start in Oregon and it isn’t a United States sport. People have been running for thousands of years. Subsistence running still happens in Africa and South America. Africa has the best middle and long distance runner in the world.

And this isn’t recent in the United States either. Jessie Owens is black and he won the gold medal in the Olympics in 1936.

I also doubt she ever ran a marathon. Or at least she didn’t pay attention to the people around her. Road races are the most diverse events available. Any race, any age, any body type, any gender can be found. I have had running partners of all ages, races and genders. Why doesn’t she complain about basketball, which is mostly African American, or soccer, which is mostly Latin.

“Let’s start at the beginning, which is 1967: That’s the year a University of Oregon track coach named Bill Bowerman, together with cardiologist Waldo Harris, published a slim volume titled “Jogging,” which became a best seller.

Most Americans then thought of exercise as weight lifting or military-style calisthenics, but the book made a radical proposition: that a “steady, easy-paced run, alternating with breath-catching periods of walking,” was a suitable exercise for everyone, ages 7 to 70. Best of all, this simple activity required “no special skills,” no ”expensive clothing,” and no “health club membership.” All you needed, these running apostles promised, were rubber-soled shoes, a commitment to your health, and the will to head outdoors a few times a week.

Celebrity endorsements and new scientific research on “aerobics” made jogging a craze that spread far beyond the “jogging capital of the United States”: 99 percent white Eugene, Ore.”

There’s your history. Anything about race there?

“Yet the new national pastime never delivered on its promises of universalism. Women complained of being harassed by male passers-by. And at a time when a white middle class exodus to the suburbs had sapped big cities of a vital tax base, many black Americans who lived in these cities could not safely “just go outside” to jog in parks or on the street.””

This is soooo dumb.

  • I’ve read a lot of running books. Probably over a hundred. None of them talked about universalism. You know what they talked about? Running. Same as what these guys did in the 60’s in Oregon.
  • What does sexual harassment have to do with running? Also, you believe the sexual harassers were always white? Are you kidding me? A jerk is a jerk.
  • Her last line blows her argument out of the water. If all the white people are leaving the urban areas because they are racists and don’t want to be around black people and black people are still getting attacked, who’s attacking them? Could it be other black people? Is that racism? Probably not. It’s probably just crime.

 

“Marketing and media didn’t help: From the cover of People magazine to ads for Nike, which Bill Bowerman co-founded, the joggers were almost uniformly depicted as white. Black Americans pushed back, eager to embrace an activity that would combat the heart disease prevalent in their communities. The black press recommended jogging as a free antidote to “the sedentary trap,” and in Ebony, one full-page color ad for a phone company featured a smiling middle-age couple playfully competing over their five-mile pace. Some took on the stereotype of the white jogger head on: in 1979, a headline in Jet magazine proclaimed, “Jogging Not Harmful to Black Women; It’s Dangerous to White Women, Says Expert.””

I think “marketing” and “virtue signalling” have gotten confused in this day and age.

Marketing is when a certain image runs parallel to a company’s product. An example of marketing is the Lincoln commercials. Matthew McConaughey is shown driving to a party in his Lincoln SUV. He’s blond, handsome, good body (don’t make anything from that), rich, popular and wise. He has an internal dialog about the wonders of the universe.

That’s marketing. Women want McConaughey and men want to be McConaughey. Getting a Lincoln is the easiest way to become or be with Matthew McConaughey.

Virtue-signaling is when a company tries to align itself with some politically correct issue. Benetton,  The Gap, Nike and Levi’s are notorious for virtue-signaling (which is why I don’t patronize those businesses).

This is what this gal is complaining about with Nike. Bowerman didn’t follow the need to worry about political correctness. He wanted to sell shoes. So he put on the most attractive people he could find and they happen to be white. I’m sure he didn’t put any fat people in his ads either.

Here’s the problem: Companies are trying to make money. They need to attract people. Would Nike really sell more shoes with a 400 pound transgender mail African American?

And one more thing, isn’t what Jet magazine racist? She refers to that horrible statement as “taking it head on.” What if People Magazine said that, “studies show jogging is healthy for white women and dangerous for black women?” Would that be considered racist?

“Black track athletes, by contrast, were familiar and even celebrated in the United States. But to some white Americans, cheering on an Olympic athlete on television was entirely different from embracing black participation in an activity that took place on the streets of their neighborhood. By the 1980s, jogging had become known as a “yuppie” affectation, like eating croissants, owning a fancy juicer, and working on Wall Street.”

The first paragraph basically is breaking jogging up into the category of the one-percenter. And where is her proof? I lived in Santa Monica and ran along Ocean Blvd and San Vicente Blvd. This was the hot spot to run because of the great paths around the busy streets. There was not race issue. White, black, Hispanic and Asian all ran together. And the neighborhood was white.

My coach was black. He drove an old VW Bug where my family was very well off. I was from a white, Catholic, private school. But the school still hired me. He had no trouble yelling at me when I put in a poor performance or was screwing off.

Does that sound like class

“Blacks were constantly defined in contrast to this “legitimate” white jogger. The consequences could be fatal: In 1980, a white supremacist trying to make a point about the danger of “race mixing” fatally shot two black men jogging with two white women in Salt Lake City.”

I was waiting for this. This is where the exception does not prove (or in this case, create) the rule. I can find bad behavior everywhere. What about the Wilding incident in New York’s Central Park where a group of black kids beat and raped a white woman while she was jogging back in the 80s? Does this proves that jogging is racist against white people?

Of course not. Because it is an exception. They weren’t attacking her because she was jogging or even because she was white. Same with the writer’s statement. The white supremacist did not do his dastardly deed because the black guy was jogging. He did it because he was black. It doesn’t matter what he was doing.

“The African-American periodical The Crisis wrote in 1985 of how blacks were viewed by white runners: “the homeless and downtrodden are most times a ‘disgusting’ irritation to the jogging, orange-juice drinking yuppie who must step over or past them on his or her way to the office.” Nothing solidified this notion of the black threat to white joggers as viscerally as the case of the “Central Park jogger,” when five men of color were wrongfully convicted of raping and attempting to murder a white runner.”

How can we question the intentions of such a non-partisan African American periodical called The Crisis. Does it sound like they are looking for anything racist?

And who did they interview to get that “white” opinion about black joggers? They didn’t ask me or anyone I have been running with for the last 35 years.

Finally, this gal invalidated her article saying that the Wilding incident was a “wrongful conviction.” Those kids did it. They admitted it. They described the incident in great detail. They got off because race was a big thing back then and the prosecutor did some things that might, and I emphasize might, have been unethical. The prosecutor, to this day, says she has done nothing wrong, those kids were guilty and they got off because of politics.

“This racist presumption proved durable: In 1994, when a black jogger foiled a rape attempt in Central Park, the survivor celebrated him as a “black Superman.” But the police and the press minimized him as a mere “do-gooder” and didn’t publish his race, a damning oversight given the rabid coverage of black male perpetrators.

Six years later, when police officers pulled a gun on the Rev. Sheldon Stoudemire while he was running through his Pittsburgh neighborhood with a tape recorder they mistook for a firearm, he lamented, “One wrong move and here we’ve got another dead black man on the street.”

But the most enduring legacy of the racialized experience of recreational running is the surveillance and suspicion to which black people have long been subjected. “If you’re driving, walking, or — God forbid — running (jogging), and you simply look like an African-American, you are subject to a stop-and-search,” reflected The Michigan Chronicle in 1997.”

Again, this minimizes the celebration of black accomplishment (the breaking up of a rape by a black man) which was celebrated. It compares it to nothing.

And let’s look at her examples of white people killing black joggers: one from 1980s by a real white supremacist and something bad that happened (not a killing) by a dumb cop in the 1990s. These do not prove anything. These are exceptions. A real reporter is not going to make a blanket statement over a news article and a couple of horrid events (though one really doesn’t mean anything).

“American distance running is still stubbornly white. The United States is only for the first time sending black female marathoners to the Olympics in 2021, while the competitive amateur and recreational levels of the sport remain overwhelmingly white.

Mr. Arbery’s death and the ensuing outcry is in some ways the latest data point in the sick mash-up of structural racism, gun violence and vigilantism that’s become a hallmark of American life. But it’s also an example of the glaring whiteness of recreational running — a hobby that 47 million Americans embrace in part because of its enticing illusion of universalism, but that has never been, and still is far from, an equal-opportunity endeavor.”

So, let me debunk this entire article with ten lines:

 

All of these guys were the winners of the New York marathon in the last ten years. All are black and one is an American (Meb Keflezighi). I could go further back and the race does not change. I could also list hundreds of black, American runners. Heck, I can introduce to you many because I run with them.

Let’s not forget Michael Johnson, Carl Lewis, Justin Gatlin, Maurice Greene, Jesse Owens, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Tyson Gay, Tommie Smith, Edwin Moses and Donovan Baily, just to name a few. I have run with some of these people in Santa Monica (Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses). They didn’t seem scared or worried about race.

The running community does not care about race, creed, gender and religion. We do not care what language you speak, what you wear or what you practice. During a race, I have worns shorts, sweats, tights and a kilt. I have seen people run naked (ouch for the men). We belch, fart, dribble food and water on out clothes, vomit and sometime pee and poop on ourselves. We don’t care! We are runners!

This article is what it proclaims to fight against: racist. I know it is unpopular to say that racism can go against the white race but it can and does. Even if the racism is coming from an elitist, white woman (Natalia Mehlman Petrzela has a Ph. D. is political history and culture and has worked with Left wing outlets like Slate and HuffPo). The New York Times really needed to edit this trash a little more.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/ny-times-opinion-piece-reacts-to-arbery-case-jogging-has-always-excluded-black-people