Nike provides them, to do two things.
Here’s Nike’s ad regarding the WNBA. Especially beginning at 0:19, and most especially Nike’s closer, starting at 0:23.
The two things: continue not watching the WNBA, and not doing business with Nike (which company also does enthusiastic business with the genocide-committing People’s Republic of China, so here’s an additional reason for not doing business with Nike).
H/t Not the Bee
As I write on Wednesday, President Joe Biden (D) is negotiating with Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R, WV) and some of her Republican Senate colleagues on an infrastructure bill. Or so he says.
The Republicans already have nearly doubled their surrendercounter-offer from their original $500+ billion dollar for a bill limited to actual infrastructure to more than $900 billion for a gussied up bill that is less than strictly about infrastructure. That’s some negotiation Capito and hers are doing.
The yet more serious problem, though—if that’s possible—is the behavior of Biden and his Congressional Progressive-Democrats.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA):
So why are we negotiating with Republicans for a smaller infrastructure plan? Now is the time to GO BIG.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):
The Republican party has already shown a pattern of the fact that their vote can’t even be counted on[.]
Because too many Republicans won’t vote the way their Betters tell them to.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):
Reconciliation is certainly a serious consideration to get that big, bold action if we can’t get it with Republicans[.]
If Republicans won’t be bipartisan the way Progressive-Democrats demand, they need to be bypassed and ignored.
There’s also the question of who’s actually in charge in the White House. Senator Roger Wicker (R, MS):
If the president gets to make the decision, he will accept this [surrender offer of the $900+ billion proposal.]
Because when Republicans go talk to Biden’s subordinates,
they’ve been frustrated by subsequent talks with his aides and other White House staffers, who they say appear to be less interested in making a deal than the president….
Of course, Biden is the one in charge; his subordinates are simply doing out of the public’s eye what he’s instructed them to do, out of the public’s eye.
“The White House,” last Tuesday:
The president is looking forward to hosting Senator Capito on Wednesday afternoon at the White House, where they will continue their bipartisan negotiations about investing in our middle class and economic growth through infrastructure.
Well of course he is. He’s enjoying his pro forma meetings.
Biden’s pseudo-negotiating is a sham, purely for eyewash and to accrue talking points for next year’s election campaigns.
A letter writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of racial discrimination, at least as practiced by Harvard, in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case.
If the plaintiffs…win, you can bet that elite college- and graduate-admissions offices around the country will establish workarounds to assure that opportunities remain for admittance of significant numbers of underrepresented minorities.
Therefore, he asserts,
The justices would be wise to take a pass on the Harvard case, or to affirm the lower courts’ decisions.
Which decisions upheld Harvard’s practice of racial discrimination for admission to its ivy-coated halls.
Harvard, to the letter writer’s first plaint, already uses “workarounds”—opaque and obscure criteria for assessing admissions “essays” and “descriptions of what this means to me” for starters—in selecting entrants on the basis of race while nonselecting other entrants on the basis of race.
Were the letter writer serious, he’d stop demanding free passes for the “underrepresented minorities” solely on the basis of their under-representation; that’s just racism under another guise. They’re underrepresented because they’re not qualified.
The solution is not free passes at the late date of college admissions applications, it’s getting these high school “graduates” actually educated and qualified.
More importantly, the solution is working to correct the K-12 systems and broken families that are the cause of unqualified-ness. But that takes actual work, and it’ll be a generational struggle to correct the ills so deeply embedded in what we’re pleased to call our education system. That solution is not the feel-good quick fix of which the Left is so enamored.
Another letter writer, however, takes a markedly differ view of the matter.
It [The Supreme Court] ought to take this case and apply strict scrutiny to the rationales advanced to justify treating some students more favorably than others merely on account of their ancestry.
But that doesn’t go far enough. As Chief Justice John Roberts already has said, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. On this, he’s right.
There is no justification for discriminating on “account of ancestry.” No more strict scrutiny; end the use of race as a discriminant, no matter how far down the list of selection criteria. Any—any—use of race as a selection criterion is rank racism.
Full stop.
Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”
ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.
The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.
What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?
There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?
And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.
Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.
And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?
Texas’ Progressive-Democrat State congressmen have joined Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen and Indiana’s Progressive-Democrat State congressmen in their abject cowardice, masked by their o’erweening arrogance.
In order to block legislation of which they personally disapprove, they’ve run away from the State’s House of Representatives explicitly to deny a quorum and to block a bill that would expand access to the ballot box while also expanding the sanctity of each Texas citizen’s vote.
Texas Democrats walked out of the state House’s chamber just before midnight on Sunday to deny Republicans the quorum needed to hold a final vote on a controversial bill that would tighten voting laws in the state.
This has been all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party over the last several years. If they can’t get their way, they block democracy—especially our republican form of democracy—altogether with their cowardly and toddler-esque temper tantrums.
Or they rule with their pen and phone. Or, when they’re in complete control, they simply ignore all others and act unilaterally. Or as President Joe Biden (D) has said, repeatedly, regarding the spendiferous and tax exploding bills Party currently is ramming through, he’d like to have Republican bipartisanship, but if they won’t come along, he and Party will act alone.
This instruction from the State’s House Minority Leader Chris Turner (D, 101st District (centered in Tarrant County) says it all.
Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly. Do not go to the gallery. Leave the building.
Do not go to the gallery. Slink away through the back door and alley. Do not face Texas’ citizens.
Keep in mind, too, that this isn’t the first time that Texas’ Progressive-Democrats have run away from their duties.