Pure genious from the World Anti-Doping Administration

WADA, which manages anti-doping efforts for the IOC worldwide, has just admitted, apparently, that about 23 Chinese Olympic swimmers (3/4 of the team) tested positive for "low levels" of trimetazidine, an angina medication which also changes the way the body uses glucose and fat for fuel.  Now WADA has apparently bought the explanation that it was "contamination" (doesn't everybody occasionally get angina medications in their groceries?), but if I approach this from a statistical point of view, when I see everybody having similar low levels of a drug that has a half life in the body of about eight hours, my best guess is that all of the team was given a much higher dose of the drug a few days earlier.  On purpose.

Worth noting as well is that this is not something, given different food preferences, that can be explained by "oopsie, something fell into the fried rice in the cafeteria."  So what do we have here?  In my view, what we have is a partial resurrection of the Communist bloc flouting of IOC doping rules.  

A huge threat from North Korea?

Evidently North Korea and Russia have signed a mutual defense pact, and the Soviets Russians are now apparently threatening to arm the North Koreans if South Korea provides weapons to Ukraine.   I'm sure that the South Koreans are quaking in their boots as they consider all those T-34s and Mosin-Nagants that will augment the vaunted North Korean artillery--fed by shells that, when sent to Ukraine to be used by Russia, quickly got a reputation for actually destroying the artillery pieces into which they were fed.

Yes, Mr. Putin, you may have nukes which may or may not work.  But you've been proving to the world that otherwise, your country is a paper bear.  

Putin delenda est!

We need "loser pays" and a lot of disbarments

 Take a look at this excellent column regarding the case of Jack Phillips, the Colorado cake baker who has been repeatedly sued and prosecuted by the state despite Supreme Court rulings establishing that, yes, First Amendment protections apply to the messages created by cake decorators.

More or less, the state appears to be ignoring the Supreme Court for a simple purpose; to make the process so painful that their policies will be implemented simply out of fear of losing one's livelihood one billable hour at a time.  The response needs to be swift and emphatic; if a prosecutor or plaintiff's lawyer ignores Supreme Court precedent and proceeds to lose again at the Supreme Court or other federal court, they lose their law license and are liable for damages to the defendant.  In the same way, state court jurists whose decisions are found to contradict Supreme Court precedent, and then proceed to lose again at the federal level under the same precedent, need to lose their law licenses and pensions.

Put simply; "the process is the punishment" needs to be severely punished.

Mergers out of control

 Boeing has admitted that they have retaliated against whistleblowers, making a Babylon Bee article about the same no longer completely satire, but partially reality.  Ugly reality is that when a company achieves majority position in their field, they do have the power to tell workers "Well, if you don't like it, you can be a greeter at Wal-Mart", and that is a powerful disincentive to tell the truth about what's going on.  It is also worth noting that if you are in the business of large airliners, you have Boeing and Airbus, and that's about it.  "We can suck as bad as our one competitor, take it or leave it.", more or less.

Hope for Alzheimer's patients...?

Dean Ornish of UCSF appears to have come up with a free way of improving the outcomes of Alzheimer's patients; more or less a sound diet, exercise, and interaction with loved ones.  To paraphrase Dave Ramsey,  "It's beans and rice time", and make sure you take a walk with loved ones afterwards.

Given that I'm going to visit my father-in-law this weekend, who's just had a stroke, this sounds about right to me.  As I've suspected--and been taught--for decades, there is a lot that one can do for your health that doesn't necessarily involve a doctor--and is very often delicious, too!  Just skip the "Hurricane" when you have your red beans & rice.  

And in Hockey....

There is apparently a women's professional hockey league, and apparently, the #1 draft pick for Minnesota's team, Britta Curl, is in trouble for having stated in public that "transwomen" (men cosmetically altered to sort of look female) don't belong in the sport.

Now I understand the desire of "transwomen" to be accepted as female, but the fact remains that hockey is a contact sport (although the women's game does not allow checking, I'm told), and males (XY) are 25% heavier, 10-12% faster, 8% taller, and up to 80% stronger than females (XX).  So in this case, it's not just a case of unfair competition, but of people likely getting seriously hurt.

And on the off chance that Miss Curl is reading, welcome to Minnesota, and we desperately need sane people here, especially in the Twin Cities.  Praying for you to do well! 

On women's fashions

Viewing the mess that is womens' fashion these days, this column by Laura Hollis really hits home.  The killer quote from Ms. Hollis mother is apt:

Designers used to love women, and it showed.  Today's styles make it look as if they hate us.

Along the same lines, I've joked for years that it's long past time to take women's fashion back from designers who....are not women, and are not attracted to women.  Given that the vast majority of women are not the size 0-4 that most runway models are, shouldn't what we see in the fashion magazines reflect their actual bodies?

New wave diplomacy?

If reports be trusted, the latest in North Korean diplomacy, or perhaps low scale warfare, appears to be "littering".   I would suggest that the response to this new wave of diplomacy ought to be derisive mockery, starting with wondering how a starving country like North Korea actually got enough trash and balloons to send south to South Korea.  Maybe they bought it from Russia in trade for defective munitions that destroyed Russian artillery pieces in Ukraine.

Yup, derisive mockery it is.

But can she skate?

With all the cheap fouls being committed against Caitlin Clark lately, her team is seriously considering putting an enforcer on the court.  Humorous to think, first of all, that not only has Miss Clark elevated the level of play in the WNBA (at least when she's not being flagrantly fouled) and sold far more tickets than the WNBA has previously been able to sell, but she's apparently already turning it into the NHL.  

With a bit of luck, WNBA fans could be treated to this soon:

Another sign of white supremacy

 If I were black, I'd be telling Mrs. Bubba to give me some "white supremacy".  Seriously, the perpetrator of this idea is, apparently, University of California Santa Barbera professor Sabrina Strings, and she notes that she has had a series of "bad relationships".  

My pro tip for her and others who have had a a series of bad relationships; look in the mirror.  You get a mulligan for one or two, but at a certain point, you've got to say "I'm looking for love in all the wrong places."  Yes, I'm saying Ms. Strings needs to give "three chords and the truth" a try.

A bit of perspective

A bit of thinking about Alvin Bragg's case suggests some very sobering thoughts about it.  For starters, the team of 15 people worked for a couple of years on it, and ordinarily, those prosecutors would have tried about 100 cases....apiece.  In some cities, prosecutors get up to 1000 cases per year.  Conclusion?  There are most likely thousands of violent criminals walking the streets of New York who are out there because the DA chose to pursue a misdemeanor paperwork violation.  So if you've recently been mugged or worse by a New York thug, you have, in part, Alvin Bragg to blame.

Also very interesting is the case of Matthew Colangelo, who left his job as acting associate attorney general to join Bragg's team in 2022, and who has been instrumental in....according to the article....coordinating cases against President Trump to keep him off the campaign trail. 

Now there is little chance of this getting--rightfully--to a prosecution of Colangelo, Bragg, and others, but as one would infer from the burst of legally tenuous prosecutions at this time, there is a concerted effort to keep Trump off the campaign trail, and it strikes me that if a payoff to Stormy Daniels amounts to an illegal campaign contribution, so does leaving the DOJ to join a legally tenuous investigation in New York City.  Colangelo's case is especially problematic because as a rule, leaving the DOJ to join Alvin Bragg's staff is a serious drop in pay, prestige, and career possibilities--unless there is, of course, a big payoff that has been promised to him.

In short, we have here clear indication of illegal campaign contributions, quid pro quo arrangements that amount to bribery, and RICO violations--all likely bound up in the person of Matthew Colangelo.  Now with the current DOJ, charges are not even remotely likely, but just to place things in perspective.

Great achievements in parenting!

Or perhaps, a great failure. I have taught both of my sons to tie a tie without bringing them to tears.  

On that conviction

The most interesting, and kind of entertaining, thing about this is the response of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.   OK, Trump pardoned him, so maybe this is payback, and Blago doesn't really address specifics, so I'll leave it at that; interesting, but not dispositive.  I remember his trial in 2009, however, and the most interesting thing about it was that the Chicago Tribune broke the case wide open.....late enough in the investigation for Blago to be impeached and removed from office, but not late enough that bids for Barack Obama's Senate seat would implicate the big hitters in Chicago politics for a generation, crippling the Democratic Party statewide.  

But regarding the Trump trial and conviction, here are my thoughts:

• When a candidate for prosecutor tells you he (she) will make convicting a particular political opponent a priority, believe them and vote against them.  They will be releasing rapists and murderers to put politicians in prison.
• When a candidate for prosecutor tells you he (she) will make convicting political opponents a priority, just get down to it and file disbarment papers.  It's not acceptable behavior for a politician.
• When a prosecutor files a case without a clear statement of a crime, tell him to go back to the office and come up with one first.  Second time, disbar him.
• If a judge signs off on an indictment without a clear statement of the crime to be tried, disbar him and remove him from the bench.
• If a prosecutor hires 15 lawyers to try a misdemeanor case while downgrading sexual assault and attempted murder cases to misdemeanors, fire him.  And disbar all of them.  
• If a judge silences expert opinions on the presumed law to be used against a defendant, remove him from the bench and disbar him.  
• If a judge, in the jury instructions, allows the defendant to be convicted with differing votes on which laws were violated, remove him from the bench and disbar him.

OK, the list can go on and on, but you get the gist.  My take here is that when a judge allows a prosecutor to prosecute a person without the crime clearly named, he is depriving the defendant of the right to an effective defense, weakening his right to counsel, and a lot more.  Hopefully this will be overturned promptly with a harsh rebuke to "Judge" Mecham and "Prosecutor" Bragg.

Really, overall, I don't think that the legal establishment quite understands the harm that is done when legal rights are not honored.  Yes, if you can afford it, you can appeal it to the Supreme Court, but for 99.9% of us, that's really not an option, and even if you can afford it, you might want to do something else with your time and money.  

Now this is interesting

Diplomats are aghast at the apparent fact that an Israeli "hit" on a place where terrorist leaders were said to be hiding ended up igniting at least a fuel tank, and maybe an ammunition depot.  Now given that refugees do not cook with diesel fuel or gasoline, and are not supposed to be combatants, why, pray tell, was there at least a large fuel tank in the vicinity?  It is also worth noting that a good portion of the injuries spoken of in the published reports are by shrapnel.  So unless the hit was by a couple of cluster bombs instead of small 17kg bombs, as the Israelis claim, we are looking at yet another war crime by Hamas that is getting a lot of their own people killed.

I do not know what you do with people who will do this to their own flesh and blood. 

Update: it turns out that the bombs used had 16-17kG of explosive, but were about 250 lbs overall, but recordings from the site do indicate that an ammunition dump was accidentally hit, decimating the refugee camp.  So once again, "distrust, verify, distrust some more" is the proper response to breathless Hamas reports from the region.

Great genius from the ICC

WIth regards to the ICC's allegations that Israel is "using starvation as a weapon of war", it turns out that the Israelis have allowed 500,000 tons of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza since the war began in October.

We might joke that, given up to 500 pounds of food aid per man, woman, and child in Gaza being available, that the Israelis are not using starvation, but rather obesity and gout as weapons of war against Hamas.  It is the same war that the supermarket and Mrs. Bubba's cooking wage on me, but I'm not sending Mrs. Bubba to Den Haag for obvious reasons.

Keep waging war on me, Hy-Vee and Mrs. Bubba!  Burp.

Seriously, this is one big reason that I don't want the United Nations anywhere near the administration of justice.  You get the brothers of pedophiles like Karim Khan coming out with ludicrous indictments like this for political reasons.