Day: February 3, 2021

Accepting your limitations and delusions

I won’t deny that, as a teenager, I just KNEW that I was going to be an NFL player someday.

Yes, that was me in 1974 after the Yokota High (my school) vs. Yo Hi game ..we won 34-14. But… I still remember their first touchdown. It was punt return and the returner was running toward me and a blocker got me with a body block. I got up just as the returner was running past me; I was off balance and basically awkwardly waved my arms at him as he ran past; I didn’t even slow him down.

No. Athletic. Ability.

A day or so ago, I saw this (note: the Vanderbilt coach is now the Penn State coach)

In this video they show…vertical jump (LOL), 40 yard dash (my best: 5.8..no kidding…and yes, first number is a 5). And they show the shuttle run.

I remember practicing the shuttle run for the service academy physical education test. You had to run back and forth between cones, and no matter how much I practiced and how hard I tried, I really, really, really sucked.

I made West Point and Annapolis (though West Point told me to get in shape before the summer) but flunked the Air Force Academy test. Mind you, I ran a 5:54 mile at the time.

But bursts of speed, quickness…no dice. And I was worst at changing directions quickly, which, if you think about it, is exactly what a football player needs to be able to do. If I flunked a service academy test…what in the world was I thinking in that I was going to be an athlete?

And it didn’t get better later; at Annapolis I flunked the obstacle course twice as a freshman..wait..3 times (passed it later..but only with a lot of practice). Flunked the obstacle course again in Pensacola …after practicing for it. (got it the second time). Mind you, I was running a sub 40 minute 10K at the time. I aced the pull ups, the XC run and the swim. But obstacles…agility while on the move…nope.

It literally frustrated me to tears.

So.. ..when I see it now..both when not-so-great NCAA players think they are going to the NFL..or when a student who can’t do math wants to be an engineer…I can sympathize…lend a kind word…and gently direct them toward their strengths.

Feb 2 Part 2: the state of politics as I see it.

Republicans They seem to have a “Trump wing” to deal with. Even someone with the Republican pedigree of Rep. Liz Cheney is not immune to it; she is paying a political price for her impeachment vote. Side note: note the lack of masks in the crowd; this is yet another reason we won’t be out of this anytime soon; too many idiots do not take COVID seriously.

People like Mitt Romeny and, yes, Mitch McConnell are trying to get some separation from the new wackos…though I am skeptical that Trump “tricked” McConnell into anything.

But, of course, we have our own problems.

For one, we Democrats …at least the liberals that I see, appear to value flash over substance.

And frankly, the wokes are out of touch with people. They seem to think that calling something “racist” or “sexist” will gain sway with the public at large. In fact, I think the public just views it as background noise from liberals.

Yglesias makes a good point here:

My suspicion is that this is a weird tic of campus politics that has followed graduates into the professional arena where they unconsciously started deploying it in less appropriate contexts. If you’re in a dorm at a fancy college and you can convince an administrator that something is racist, the administrator will probably put a stop to it. At the same time, “this is bad for poor people” just isn’t going to get you far as a campus argument. After all, these schools more or less openly auction off a number of admissions slots to wealthy donors (while, of course, practicing affirmative action to keep things diverse) so they can hardly take a hard line on class politics.

But electoral politics in a democracy isn’t like that. And to the extent that the US political system isn’t democratic, it’s mostly tilted in favor of over-representing white people with no college degree. So if you actually want to close racial gaps by raising the minimum wage, expanding union membership, expanding Medicaid, and reducing student debt, the last thing you want to do is to sell people on the idea that this is really all about race.

And wokes cannot help themselves: to them, *everything* in society is about “privilege”, race, gender, etc. And if you try to view things in simple terms as “helping people out” the wokes view you as a dinosaur.