#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
We knew the Azzurri were mediocre, but we didn’t know they were this bad.
Switzerland 2, Italy 0
Both Swiss goals were quality. And the Swiss back 5 were excellent. But the combination of Scamacca for the Italians and Embolo for the Swiss may have been the worst pair of opposing strikers that I’ve ever seen at this level.
I sent a text to one of my Italian friends, asking what’s up with the Azzurri. His response was six – no less than six – facepalms.
Willie Mays was a genus of one. He was a bolt of lightning, a game-changing force of athleticism and beauty on the diamond that snapped you to attention. There is no second strike of his kind of lightning. The likes of Willie Mays were seen never before and will never be seen again. Mays passed away at age 93 Tuesday, just two days before he and his fellow Negro Leaguers are to be honored at a game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field. Opened Aug. 18, 1910, Rickwood is the oldest ballpark in America. It is the Mother Church of baseball. It is the cradle of the career of the greatest all-around player who ever lived. And now it is where we say goodbye.
Willie Mays haunted my teen years. Not because I watched baseball, but because my younger brother loved a song called “Say Hey Willie” that was sung by some little kid. No sooner did we get into our Oldsmobile station wagon – the white one with the fake wood panels – than he would start calling “Willie, Willie!” And so we’d have to listen to it three or four times every time we got in the car to go anywhere.
Total nightmare. But I did read up on Willie Mays as a result of wondering why there was this song about a baseball player, so it wasn’t a total loss. Requiescat in pace Willie.
Jerry West, one of the most important figures in the history of the NBA, has passed away at the age of 86. West, the inspiration for the silhouette of the league’s logo, was a 14-time All-Star during his playing career with the Los Angeles Lakers.
🔸1972 NBA champion
🔸1969 NBA Finals MVP
🔸14x All-Star
🔸12x All-NBA Team
🔸5x All-Defensive Team
🔸8x NBA champion as executive
Jerry West was so well-respected by his opponents that his longtime rival Bill Russell of the Celtics paid his own way to attend West’s memorial game in LA before his retirement.
Africans in the WNBA are literally beating up Caitlyn Clark because she is a popular sports star.
There is an easy solution. If Africans hate having white players in their leagues, they can simply enjoy their own segregated sports leagues. Perhaps we could call it, oh, I don’t know, something like the Negro Women’s Basketball League?
It’s a good thing for Livvy Dunn that gymnastics isn’t a contact sport. Caitlyn Clark isn’t even blonde or particularly attractive. And apparently, the men want their own Negro league too.
In December, former NBA guard and thug Gilbert Arenas encouraged black players on his podcast to “take out” white players on the court because they were coming for “our league.” Since then, Pistons’ forward Isaiah Stewart punched Suns’ forward Drew Eubanks during a confrontation before the teams’ match-up in February, Draymond Green struck Jusuf Nurkic in the face, and stomped on the chest of Kings’ guard Domantas Sabonis during a game.
It’s always informative how the white people who can spot racism in their fellow white people more easily than a shark scents blood in the water never seem to be able to detect this undisguised race-based hatred.
The Champion’s League final was over at halftime, as Dortmund had failed to capitalize on its three chances in the first half. When you’re playing a team as good as Real Madrid, you have to make the most of all your opportunities, because you’re just not going to get very many over the course of 90 minutes.
I thought the Dortmund defense simply ran out of gas in the end, first giving up one lazy goal on what should have been an unnecessary corner, followed by a horrific backpass that went right to Vinicius Junior at the top of the Dortmund area and would have been unacceptable at the scuola calcio level. And the goal that would have made it a game at the end was correctly ruled offside.
While it’s fun to see a new team make it to the final, there is a reason it’s usually the most-expensive, top-quality teams meeting there.
Forced speech is the end game of Clown World’s so-called “free speech”:
Professional footballer Mohamed Camara, who plays for AS Monaco in France, has been benched for the next four matches for refusing to take part in an anti-homophobia campaign, the French League (LFP) announced on Thursday.
During a Ligue 1 match against Nantes on May 19, the jerseys of Monaco’s players featured a logo to mark the World Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. However, 24-year-old Camara, a Mali national, chose not to support the LFP campaign and used white tape to cover the logo on his uniform and refused to join his team for a photograph.
The match, which was the final game of the season, ended 4-0 in favor of Monaco, with Camara scoring from the penalty spot. After the match, the footballer was referred to the LFP for disciplinary action.
“After hearing the player Mohamed Camara, and noting his refusal during the meeting to carry out one or more actions to raise awareness of the fight against homophobia, the commission decided to impose a four-match suspension,” the LFP said.
Silence is not enough for Clown World. Its social justice warriors always demand complete submission and compliance, which is what convergence means. This is why it’s absolutely necessary to stop trying to be nice, inclusive, and more responsive to the purported “feelings” of others than to the truth. Give the clowns an inch and they will view it as both a confession of weakness and an invitation to take a mile.
Bill Walton, a two-time NBA champ and Hall of Famer who later became a legendary announcer, died Monday after a battle with cancer, the NBA announced. He was 71 years old. Walton won two national championships under John Wooden at UCLA and was the No. 1 overall pick by the Potland Trail Blazers in the 1974 NBA draft. He led Portland to a NBA title in 1977 and was later the sixth man for the 1986 Boston Celtics team that won the championship.
If you weren’t an 80’s basketball fan, you’d have to read the chapter of Bill Simmons’s book on basketball devoted to his pilgrimage to Bill Walton’s house and subsequent interview of the man to understand what a unique athlete, and unique individual, he was.
There is a panoply of ignorance on display in the recent UFC vs Navy SEALs debate in the sports world:
Sean Strickland, the UFC superstar, made some waves when he claimed no Navy SEAL could make it through the training he does. While he didn’t specify, it definitely seemed like he meant fight training. Could a Navy SEAL beat Sean Strickland in the octagon?
You know who else found the response to Strickland absolutely cringe? Andy Stumpf. For those of you who might not have heard of Andy Stumpf, he’s a legit dude. He was an operator in SEAL Team 6, got shot in Iraq on the same mission Tyler Grey was blown up, recovered and deployed again. The man isn’t a joke or someone pretending to have knowledge of the topic. He’s fought alongside some of the greatest warriors in America’s history, and he thinks this entire situation is embarrassing…
I spoke to another ST6 operator and one more Spec. Ops. veteran about Strickland’s comments. Both had reactions that mirror Stumpf’s and both admitted it wouldn’t be a fair fight against Strickland…..and that many UFC fighters would struggle in a Spec. Ops. training pipeline.
I don’t know about UFC fighters making it through the military training. I have no experience in that regard. But I am 100-percent certain that no Navy SEAL could ever beat a top UFC fighter in the Octagon. The two SpecOps guys are right. It wouldn’t even be a fair fight. Allow to explain:
I was never one of the top five fighters at my dojo, which was much respected by the other dojos in the Twin Cities, where we practiced an early form of MMA. Being the only dojo to ever take all the trophies from white belt to black in a statewide competition – it was only point-fighting, it must be said – we were basically the Cobra Kai of the state right down to the black gis, although the base of our style was, ironically enough, much more akin to Miyago-do, being Okinawan. I think it’s fair to say I was one of the top ten fighters there, as I was selected for a few of our public demos, including a pretty wild one at Glam Slam that involved fighting under strobe lights.
On several occasions, I had the opportunity to spar with guys who had military training, usually Marines for some reason. And while they weren’t completely hopeless like the normal guy walking in off the street with absolutely no training, they were never above the level of a fairly recent gold belt who had just started sparring a month or two prior. Never. I maintained a weight of 170, and didn’t even need to break a sweat to take apart a Marine who went 235, although, as I’ve said in the past, my little physics experiment in trying to go toe-to-toe with him was a complete failure.
When the Commandant of the Marine Corps was talking smack one day about the lethality of the Marine Fu that the Corps had adapted from the Israeli Krav Maga, I just laughed at him, pointed out that six weeks of fight training is inadequate preparation for going up against anyone with six years of fight experience, and told him to bring it on. He came at me and tried a basic takedown at the waist, so I put him face-down on the carpet in a neck-breaking lock that forced him to tap out in about five seconds.
Now keep in mind that my training was built around the striking arts and that my preference was always for counterattacking with a combination of speed and upper body strike power to stun and overwhelm an opponent. And yet, it took less than 10 seconds to completely incapacitate a very highly-trained Marine a) without harming him and b) without throwing a single strike of any kind.
Think about the degree of total superiority that implies. And yes, there were no shortage of witnesses, including Spacebunny.
Now, based on my experience fighting two national champions and one guy who was better than either of them, a fighter like Strickland would probably beat me in my prime in about 45 seconds. I’m confident that I’d get two or three good shots in – I was benching 295 then and even the very best guys had to be wary of my speed – but I’d definitely lose and lose comprehensively. So, there is no way, none whatsoever, that any military training would prepare a Navy SEAL or anyone else to beat a highly trained specialist like Strickland. It would be like spending a few weeks shooting clay pigeons with a shotgun, then challenging a Force Recon sniper to a long-distance shooting competition.
Again and again and again, we see that the “human rights” promoted by the self-styled “liberals” of the Enlightenment were always fraudulent to their very core. Here we see in England how so-called “equality” only goes one way and works systematically to the disadvantage of boys:
One of the biggest girls’ football leagues in the country faces being shut down by the Football Association for refusing to allow a boy to play in its matches.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a row has broken out between the FA and officials running a female league in Yorkshire after parents complained their son had not been allowed to join.
It is understood the FA has threatened the West Riding Girls Football League with sanctions and a possible suspension if it does not agree to let boys on the pitch, a scenario officials have branded ‘a massive threat to the girls’ game’.
Last week an emergency meeting was held by organisers of the league – which has at least 6,000 under-18 girls playing across more than 300 teams – where managers voiced their concerns that allowing boys to play would ‘open the floodgates’.
The FA’s gender policy states that any under-16 teams must allow both boys and girls to play, despite admitting that ‘physical strength, stamina or physique’ can put one sex at the disadvantage of the other. Fiona McAnena, at sex-based rights group Sex Matters, said: ‘A boy on the pitch changes everything. The law is clear that female-only sport is allowed. It’s sex discrimination for the FA to tell girls they must accept a male player.’
Top girls’ football league faces being shut down, THE DAILY MAIL, 3 March 2024
This is what inevitably happens when reality intrudes upon the dogmatic Enlightenment principles to which the secular champions of social justice have been appealing for more than 200 years. Whenever the ideological principle violates their identity priority, the principle always crumbles into dust.
We’ve seen it with free speech, as that has been trumped by the need for protect the ability of one group to believe they were uniquely persecuted in the 20th Century and for another group to ignore crime statistics. We’ve seen it with “democracy”, as that has been trumped by the need of Clown World governments to ignore the will of the people. And now we see it with “equality”, as three generations of unrestrained assaults on male-only activities are suddenly jettisoned as soon as female-only activities are threatened.
We are somehow supposed to believe that equality means telling girls they must accept a male player is sex discrimination, while not telling boys they must accept a female player is also sex discrimination. Which is, of course, a certain sign that satanic inversion is somehow involved.
The Enlightenment is the philosophical basis for Clown World. It is an outdated and sophistic philosophy that will disappear in the aftermath of Clown World’s demise.
It was a pretty good game last night. However, I’m beginning to conclude that for all his many strengths, Kyle Shanahan simply isn’t a big-game coach. Rather like Denny Green with the Vikings back in the day, he’s capable of putting together a great team and getting them to play very well in the regular season, but he doesn’t have the mental flexibility to win the chess games that is necessary at the championship level.
Some things can’t be controlled. McCaffrey uncharacteristically fumbling in the red zone, Greenlaw getting hurt running onto the field, the punt hitting the leg of the blocker, the extra point being blocked. But I was pretty certain that Shanahan choked when he failed to try to close out the game when the 49ers had the ball in scoring position inside the two-minute warning of a 16-16 game.
There are two ways to play to win in that situation. The best is to burn the clock down to 10 seconds, then score. This is necessary when playing against a top-tier quarterback. You can trust your defense to hold on in many cases, but not against a Brady, a Mahomes, or a Rodgers. The other option is to play for a touchdown. In both cases, you are playing to win the game.
However, the NFL tradition is to always play to put off the final decision. Perhaps this is a league-dictated thing, or perhaps it is the textbook decision because it allows a head coach to avoid the criticism and accountability that comes in the wake of an execution failure that makes what was the right decision at the time look incorrect in hindsight. Shanahan kicked the field goal with too much time on the clock, and was lucky that Kansas City only scored three to send the game to overtime instead of putting the game away with a touchdown inside regular time.
If you don’t play to win, you don’t really deserve to be a champion anyhow.
And who would have thought that Andy Reid – ANDY REID – would win a clock management battle? In the Super Bowl! This is surely a sign of the Apocalypse.
UPDATE: With regards to the entertainment scripting theory, I think the NFL actually wanted SF to win. The one egregious call was the defensive holding call on 3rd and 13 in OT. And the grounding call on Mahomes, while 100-percent legitimate, could have easily been waved off due to the receiver in the vicinity, had the league been favoring the Chiefs.