Category Archives: Culture

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Half of the real women are deserting SJSU volleyball team

We have previously reported on the controversy over San José State University’s ‘transgender’ women’s volleyball player. Brayden Fleming, a male, has been passing himself off as female, apparently well enough that most of the women’s volleyball team didn’t know that she was a he. During recruiting, prospects were not told that there was a male on the team.

Five colleges chose to forfeit seven regular-season games rather than play SJSU, and then one of those five opted to forfeit the semi-final match against the school in the Mountain West Tournament as well. SJSU lost in the conference final, and was not invited to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team, which ended Mr Fleming’s career; he was a senior, and is out of eligibility.

One SJSU player, and an assistant coach, joined the lawsuit against the college, but it seems that perhaps more than one of the team members were unhappy:

SJSU responds to volleyball player mass exodus after trans athlete scandal rocked program

7 players have entered the transfer portal

by Jackson Thompson | Friday, December 20, 2024 | 7:33 AM EST

San Jose State University has acknowledged a recent mass exodus of volleyball players who entered the transfer portal after a controversy-riddled season involving a trans athlete on the team.

The university provided a statement to Fox News Digital in which it expressed “respect” for the recent wave of players who have opted to transfer. “Student athletes have the ability to make decisions about their college athletic careers, and we have the utmost respect for that,” the statement read.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that seven of the team’s players have entered the transfer portal.

The team roster, as of 1:03 PM EST, showed nineteen players on the squad. The roster indicates that six players, including Mr Fleming, were seniors, leaving thirteen returning players for next year . . . and more than half of them have entered the transfer portal. Since Mr Fleming was a redshirt senior, he is completely out of eligibility, and would not be on the team next year.

We do not know if the transferring players were upset that a male was allowed to disguise himself and play on the team, that the school knew he was male and hid it from the players, or they were simply unhappy with the way the program was being handled, but it seems certain that Brayden Fleming’s presence has been catastrophic to team cohesion.

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

As we reported on December 3rd, Bluesky suspended the account of Libs of TikTok. Given that Chaya Raichik’s modus vivendi is to search out idiocy from leftists on social media and then publish it more widely, to mock the left, it seems that Bluesky just can’t handle the truth. No one, after all, accuses Miss Raichik of falsifying what she posts.

And now she’s tweeted out this one:

BlueSky Sees Surge in New Users and Child Sexual Abuse Material

Swelling numbers for the decentralized social platform BlueSky have brought a wave of harmful content, leading to attempts to moderate it.

by Jason Nelson |
Tuesday, November 26, 2024

A surge in new users to social media platform BlueSky has also brought a rise in “harmful content,” leading to a mass moderation campaign to purge images from the network, the platform said on Monday.

“We’re experiencing a huge influx of users, and with that, a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network,” BlueSky’s Safety account said. “As a result, for some very high-severity policy areas like child safety, we recently made some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision.”

After President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month, millions of users abandoned X, the platform formerly known as Twitter in search of alternatives.

Given that Bluesky admitted it, that’s all the proof that’s required. I haven’t seen any child porn on Bluesky, but I did see a surge in followers, most of which seemed not to be people agreeing with me politically, but pretty women, most with nothing in their bios, which seemed to be nothing but trolling for followers to promote Only Fans paid porn accounts. Nope, not interested.

Then there is this:

Jesse Singal: Bluesky Has a Death Threat Problem

It was supposed to be a gentler, left-wing alternative to X. My grim experience proves that just isn’t the case.

by Jesse Singal | Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Recently, like a lot of journalists, I joined Bluesky, a social media platform that is enjoying a burst of postelection growth and positive press attention. It’s been lauded as a “kinder, gentler”—and, perhaps most importantly, more left-wing—alternative to X, which is increasingly seen as infested with what a Bluesky user might call “MAGA chuds.”

While I thought some of the critiques of X were overstated, over the last six months or so I’ve increasingly soured on it. It felt like an ever more hostile, hateful place, the technology seemed more broken every day, and I am not a fan of owner Elon Musk’s recent conspiracy theorizing and all-in support for Donald Trump. It seemed like time to scope out a potential alternative.

This was a mistake.

On December 6, I made my first post on Bluesky—which was actually launched by Twitter in 2019, before becoming an independent company two years later. As I soon found out, it is an exceptionally angry place. And in part because of a widespread culture of impunity when it comes to violent threats among some of its users, it comes across as a potentially dangerous one—in a way X, or Twitter, never did for me in my decade-plus of actively using that platform. Bluesky has either made a conscious decision to take a laissez-faire attitude toward serious threats of violence, or its moderators are incapable of guarding against them, or both.

There’s more at the original.

The very lovely and immunocompromised Taylor Lorenz, who trashed her career with both The New York Times and The Washington Post, has been desperately seeking relevance again, and as we have previously reported, has been celebrating the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and trying, in her own way, to create what, some sort of revolution or wave of killings of health insurance executives. Now she’s telling us of her problems with CVS Caremark.

That skeet was yesterday; today she told us that it was “Another day of going to war with CVS Caremark!!!!!!!!!!!” I’m just waiting for her to dox the CEO of CVS.

Her fans? In that threat, there were two skeets with pictures of the far left’s newest hero, the (alleged) murderer St Luigi Mangione.

Bluesky is exactly what the left accuse Twitter of being, just from the left. Actually, in my limited viewing of it, the far left; I don’t see many moderates over there.

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Oh the poor little lambs who don’t want to return to the office!

During the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but is spelled exactly the way I see it — employees who could work from home were told to do so. As it happened, my younger daughter, an IT/communications professional, worked from our farm. Fortunately, I had already installed an outdoor electric receptacle on the screened-in porch, and she did a lot of her work there.

A cup of raktajino — Klingon coffee — in a mug celebrating my status as a descendant of white, Christian, settler colonialists to start the morning.

And she was quite honest about the whole thing: she was just not as productive working at our home. With cats and dogs and chickens, with fine Kentucky spring and summer weather, there were simply too many distractions.

And it’s good for the employees as well . . . as long as they are not Jeffrey Toobin. A cup of coffee in the morning costs me 50¢, not $4.50 at Starbucks.

Logically, if most employees were as productive working from home as they are at the office, employers would love that. Having employees working at home means that employers could maintain smaller offices, have smaller parking lots, reduced janitorial services, reduced office ‘perks’ expenses, just a whole host of things. It only makes sense to require people who could work from home to come into the office if productivity is a real issue.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs

These people are coming to terms with the fact that they might never work from home again

by Callum Borchers | Wednesday, December 11, 2024 | 9:00 PM EST

If you’re reading this from your home office, it’s time to consider whether you’re prepared to lose your job over a return-to-office mandate. Continue reading →

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Is it possible that our friends on the left prefer journolism to journalism?

It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle

MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading →

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

It was 6½ months ago that we published “Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right,” noting Olivia Reingold‘s report that addiction activists say they’re ‘reducing harm’ in Philly, but Kensington locals say they’re causing it. It was an article noting that the oh-so-well-intended activists trying to help junkies — we’re not willing to use the less loaded term “addicts” any more than necessary — are actually harming the larger community around them. We also snarked that Miss Reongold’s article would never, ever, have been published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, the ever-soft-hearted liberal newspaper.

And here they go again:

Banning mobile care in Kensington could lead to amputations, hospitalizations, maybe even deaths

No shirt, no shoes, no wound care? A bill proposing a ban on mobile services runs counter to best health care practices, writes street wound care nurse and researcher Eleanor Turi.

Continue reading →

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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to On that nice, polite, all-sweetness-and-light social media service, the Usual Suspects are cheering the murder of a health insurance CEO

A thus-far unidentified gunman waited for 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, and shot him to death, in what the New York Police Department labelled a “brazen targeted attack.” Naturally, some of the [insert plural slang term for the anus here] are celebrating the murder of this innocent man, as can be seen in the tweet screen captured at the right. The waste of water and air in the video called the murderer a hero.

In a land of fruits and nuts, in which anyone has the right to say stupid stuff and then put it on TikTok, it’s unsurprising that some deranged guy would celebrate a targeted murder like that. But, what would you say if a well-paid columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the winner of over twenty Pulitzer Prizes, celebrated the same attack? Continue reading →

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My local Bishop really, really doesn’t like Donald Trump

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

While I cannot say that I am friends with His Excellency, the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M. Conv., Bishop of Lexington, we are at least acquainted with each other. The Bishop at least recognizes me when he sees me, though I cannot be certain he remembers my name. We have had some pleasant conversations the few times he has visited our small parish.

I have written about him, or at least mentioned him, on this poor site, in 17 previous articles, not always charitably. Bishop Stowe is an excellent homilist, one who can really connect with a congregation, and I have no doubts at all about his faith. But, as a Catholic priest, he chooses the wrong things far too often for me.

Kentucky prelate calls lack of election response from American Church ‘disappointing’

by John Lavenburg | Tuesday, December 3, 2024

NEW YORK – In the month or so since former President Donald Trump was elected to occupy the White House for a second term, the majority of American bishops have either not commented on the election publicly, or issued a generic statement about the importance of civility, unity, and democracy.

That extends to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where – outside of responses to Trump’s stated plan for mass deportations – not much has been said. Bishop John Stowe, in a recent conversation with Crux, said that reality isn’t surprising considering how American Church leaders have handled the presidency of Joe Biden over the last four years.

“It was not surprising coming from the USCCB. What was surprising was the attitude when Joe Biden was elected, a Catholic president four years ago, and there was such an uproar in the conference about that election, and because of that, I really had no expectation that there would be much said about the Trump election,” said Stowe, the bishop of Lexington in Kentucky.

His Excellency the Bishop does not like former and future President Donald Trump. Speaking in August of 2020, before the 2020 election, the Bishop let us know, let all of his Catholic parishioners know, that he was opposed to President Trump’s re-election. Bishop Stowe was appalled by Mr Trump’s anti-illegal immigration policies, calling them “anti-life.” Continue reading →

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San José State University’s mostly women’s volleyball team is beaten in conference finals

Brayden Fleming, photos by San José State University.

This site has previously reported on the forfeits that several colleges have accepted when their women’s volleyball teams refused to play against San José State University, which has Brayden Fleming, a male player pretending to be a female going by the pseudonym of “Blaire”. The credentialed media have been trying to ignore the story to death, but my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, reported on Saturday how the Grey Lady finally said something . . . and tried to make it seem as though men males claiming to be women playing on women’s sports teams was no big deal.

How a Women’s College Volleyball Team Became the Center of the Transgender Athlete Debate

Not since the swimmer Lia Thomas has a college athlete or team put the fiercely contested issue of transgender rights in sports under such a bright spotlight.

by Juliet Macur | Thursday, November 28, 2024

On the court, they seem like any other college women’s volleyball team. At a recent game, the players moved around the court in staccato rhythm, setting and spiking the ball, springing into the air like pogo sticks to block attacking shots, all in their blue and gold uniforms of the San Jose State University Spartans.

Off the court, though, the team is trying its best not to crumble during an unexpected season of tension and tears, confusion and anger. The players are at the center of a drama playing out over one of the most explosive issues in American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team. Continue reading →

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough!

Upon seeing this tweet from Eyal Yakoby, I had to check the article to see if it was as bad as I suspected. In some ways, it really wasn’t, because most of it was based on the legal problems for José Ibarra’s defense, and the decision to seek a bench trial, a trial by a judge rather than a jury.

Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance

For all the political controversy surrounding Jose Ibarra, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

By Danny Cevallos, MSNBC legal analyst | Thursday, November 21, 2024 | 7:07 PM EST

Jose Antonio Ibarra was convicted on multiple counts of murder Wednesday in the February killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Ibarra was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, along with other consecutive sentences for lesser crimes, including aggravated assault with intent to rape and “peeping Tom.”

Riley’s murder became a political rallying cry at this summer’s Republican National Convention because Ibarra entered the country illegally in 2022. But for all the political controversy, the outcome of this trial was never in doubt.

Continue reading →