Tom Woods' Obsession with the Sandmann Kerfuffle
Familiar readers probably remember one minor personal feud I had with with libertarian podcaster/historian Tom Woods on Facebook. Woods is a pretentious self-promoting personality who had a profound distaste for certain people, including Romney, while obsequious of others, including a promoter of Ron Paul's quixotic Presidential campaigns. I suspect that Romney's defeat of Ron Paul in his final Presidential run left a particular foul taste in Woods' mouth. At the time I was in Woods' Facebook group and had been promoting his emerging podcast; Woods then posted something of the nature, "Happy birthday, Ron Paul! Every day I thank God you're not a phony like Mitt Romney" I just took exception to this cheap shot and shot back at Woods' incivility. If anything, this amused Woods as he encouraged his minions to take care of this Romney interloper. Now I have my own criticisms of Romney, but I was more than ready to dispatch Woods' eager minions while challenging Woods to a public debate, which Woods laughed off. I decided the best way to respond to Woods' nonsense was to leave the group (and I've never looked back) while dropping Woods' podcast. Woods mocked me for that, portraying his sponsored podcast as his gift to mankind. Yeah, Tom; play the world's smallest violin. As most readers of my daily blog know, I later reversed my decision and will typically (but not necessarily) include 2 or 3 of his podcasts a week, depending on topics.
But Woods can be repetitious and annoying and one thing in particular has been his obsession with the Sandmann incident; I think I have personally heard Woods bring this up at least 6 to a dozen times. Now let me point out that Woods has a certain point, particularly over how the media and Twitter went after MAGA-cap wearing Sandmann and his fellow Catholic high school march, I believe during the annual Jan. 2019 March for Life protest against Roe v Wade. Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, for unknown politically correct reasons, decided to target the high school group for intervention in puzzling support of certain black religious extremists which had been, in fact, taunting Phillip's own group. Sandmann and his fellow students were confused by the intervention, at first thinking that Phillips and the others were joining their protest. Then came Sandmann's "smirk seen across American", seeming to mock Phillips' drumming in his face. Twitter world erupted at the "racist" white Trumpkin students targeting Native Americans. I myself wasn't happy with how Sandmann had responded to Phillips, which I considered disrespectful, and that hasn't changed, although perhaps I should have been more tolerant of how young people might respond to the unusual circumstances.
Woods has painted his own response to the kerfuffle in heroic terms, how he went through the available tapes of the entire kerfuffle, which showed the black religious extremists taunting the Native Americans for losing their land, etc., because of their religious practices which had offended God. The white Catholic students largely ignored the insults the same group directed at them. Woods is particularly disdainful of Phillips' post-protest disingenuous spin of his purported peacekeeping intervention between the Catholic group and the black extremists.
I do think the facts mostly back Woods' perspective; I just don't think it's the broad indictment of the mainstream media that Woods makes it out to be. In fact, I thought the media had largely reversed the initial rush to judgment over the coming week of coverage as other video coverage became available. I really don't see conventional coverage that continues to support Phillips' account of events.
Girls I've Been Attracted To
It's interesting to me how people's tastes in the opposite sex will differ. Some of the women I've been attracted to were very attractive and to some extent attracted to me. I remember a very pretty blonde about 3 years older at OLL to my 18 as a junior/senior. For a shy male who had never dated in high school (and who got his first drivers license as a Navy ensign about 4 years later), S made it easy; she asked me out to a taco stand off campus for our first date (and she paid). Even the dorm resident playboys were complimenting my taste in women. I don't think I would have ever had the confidence to ask her out. On a campus two-thirds female, she stood out as a gorgeous blonde. I can only guess that I had gotten a reputation as a guy who treated coeds with respect, which somehow stood out as different. I have written a few times about getting invited to join a coed table at lunch one day; the pretty Latina who had invited me said, "Ron, we heard you treat the ladies just like the guys." I literally choked on my food in response, stammering out, "I hope not; I like girls."
S and I had an unusual relationship which often had unorthodox dates. She was a Catholic Pentecostal, and I remember one of the college sisters/nuns (CDP) had chaperoned a skeptical me with S to this event. This one guy nearby got up and started channeling "Ba-la-kun-ga-sha-la-ka-da." The crowd embraced this like divine revelation, and I turned to S and judgmentally said to her, "Oh, COME ON. Give me a break." I don't think I ever saw a woman look at me as pissed off as she did at that moment. And then she did the one thing I never expected: she got up and started "speaking in tongues" herself. I was beyond mortified. I immediately walked a row or two away from her. The Ice Age had nothing on the atmosphere in the car back to campus.
I don't think the relationship ever really got past that point, but there were other moments I remember. We had sort of a prayer date and she showed up in red hotpants. I knew that female legs can be quite attractive, but I never realized until then how much so; I caught myself almost compulsively staring at her beautiful legs almost every chance I could get (which I'm sure she was going for).
I got the distinct impression she wanted a commitment from me. She had been invited to a Catholic Pentecostal commune somewhere in the Dallas area. I could barely manage my own school expenses and the idea of getting married and starting a family was not something I had prepared for. I told her she had to make the decision that was right for her; I wanted her to stay in San Antonio, but I wouldn't stand in her way. I never heard from her again.
She wasn't the only coed. I even had an unwanted secret admirer. One of my coed friends F who I had a bit of a crush on had a little (taller) sister J who was in desperate need of a typewriter for end-of-the-semester papers. I had already finished my papers and my Smith-Corona was available. I never gave a second thought to letting her borrow it.
The following semester (one of my men's dorm friends played the go-between) started a mysterious secret admirer exchange. I wouldn't call them love letters, but they came from a woman who really liked me and wanted to brighten up my day. But to a certain extent it was freaking me out because I had never experienced this before. The final straw was when my dorm friend delivered a fresh pan of brownies. And I was a little paranoid that maybe the admirer had baked marijuana into the brownies, and I was pretty straight in avoiding anything to do with illicit drugs. I had a come-to-Jesus moment to my dorm friend this obsession had to end. I got a final heartbroken note from my crush saying she never intended for me to feel that way and she would honor my request to leave me alone.
Now the story would have ended then and there except for a chance meeting with my friend F some time later. F wanted me to know her sister J now had a boyfriend and was happy in her personal life. I couldn't figure out why F was telling me this--when it suddenly dawned on me that J had been my secret admirer. And I felt like a piece of crap because I wouldn't have hurt F or J for anything in the world. Who knows if J and I ever dated? Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I just never expected how J would respond to a simple favor. I think if F had simply introduced me to J, things might have evolved differently. She obviously thought I knew J was my secret crush. Nope.
But my taste in the opposite sex didn't follow any particular formula. I remember this red-haired high school military dependent, like me, seemed to want to impress me at the bus stop, claiming that she had a 37-inch bust, one inch shy of a perfect figure. To be honest, I hadn't particularly noticed her figure and wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to respond to the revelation: congratulate her on her genetic fortune? I was actually more interested in a brainy sophomore with glasses who also happened to run track. I did have a high school friend who was attracted to the busty redhead.
There was no particular pattern of attributes; for example, two of my biggest crushes have been petite women barely 5' tall if that, while I was also attracted to a tall high school blonde who claimed to measure a quarter inch shy of 6 feet, nearly 3 inches taller. It was hard not to notice her when our geometry teacher had her come to the chalkboard to solve a problem; JE always wore flat shoes but still towered over our average height teacher wearing a decent pair of heels, looking straight up at her. (JE was born into a tall family; I ended up graduating early with her 6'6" big brother. Her little brother nearly stretched 7 feet and ended up playing center for the Rice Owls.) I had been a little sensitive about my height since my pre-puberty sixth grade days when a tall girl, several inches taller than my own parents and nearly a full foot taller than me, had ridiculed my height. JE, though, was always nice to me. I remember years later as a graduate student at the University of Texas approaching an intersection and seeing a tiny blonde barely reaching the shoulders of this statuesque blonde next to her. waiting to cross the street. The tall blonde must have sensed I had noticed her, turned around, glanced down at me, broke into a big smile and called me by name. JE I think was a BBA student majoring in finance. (Of course, tall girls in Texas are not unusual. I remember at one point standing in line at the DMV behind 4 consecutive women, each at least 2 inches taller than me.)
I also found some women particularly interesting. One was a female trainer I had met while working for a branch of STSC in Houston. STSC (a defunct computer timesharing company) was headquartered in the wealthy LA suburbs. Anyway, my trainer friend was despondent while in Houston because she had to be away from her car baby on its birthday. So she went to buy a card and mailed it home. I thought this was an amusing quirk to her personality and she was putting me on. Until I had to visit LA a short while later for some other orientation/training stuff. I'll never forget; the airline had John Stewart's "Midnight Wind" with Stevie Nicks wailing backup on heavy rotation, which I continue to play to today. This business trip was like out of some stereotype of California. We had some social at an executive's mansion and a blonde bombshell trophy wife actually went around saying stuff like "Mellow, man." My trainer friend was also one one of those babes who went rollerblading down muscle beach in Venice. So somehow I end up in the blond trainer's convertible to go to lunch or wherever, and without saying a word, she points to a birthday card hanging from a lanyard from her dash mirror. No shit! Now her quirkiness probably would have driven me crazy, but it would certainly have made life more interesting.
Nobody I really met from work where I had a relationship. There was an overweight computer programmer who seemed to have a crush on me in Houston, but there was no connection or attraction (was it just her weight? No, but it did affect how I perceived her). I had met a couple of women while in the military but it was more a matter of poor timing with both women in other relationships at the time. My office neighbor at UWM, a tenured faculty member, seemed a little too personally interested in me (no interest in her whatsoever; in fact, it creeped me out; she was also a bit weird, who had come back one weekend with an adopted baby from South America; the last thing I expected as a junior professor was a wailing baby in the office next door); I remember at one point she had insisted on my bringing something from her office to her condo which I really didn't want to do; no, the dean's office couldn't have it delivered. I don't know what her intentions were, but I treated it as nothing more than a dropoff. There were over the years maybe a handful of co-workers or former students I tried to ask out (the latter after they were no longer my students), but they weren't interested, and I actually almost got terminated a couple of times, in one case over a nepotism policy (I knew my STSC co-worker liked the Nutcracker Suite and wanted to buy her and me tickets for a local performance. One day I got called into the branch manager who pointed out he had fired our receptionist after she married one of the programmers. He "knew" I was interested in J, and if the relationship went anywhere one of us would have to go (and she worked on a key, high-profile account). There was only one way he knew about this, and I don't know why she told him.) I actually didn't have a romantic interest in J; she was a bit of a mess and a coffee junkie unlike anyone I've ever met. She would actually start shaking without caffeine.
So most of my dating has been sporadic over the years. I once dated one of my sisters' college roommates (and she had subsequently done something that had upset my sister, and I wanted nothing more to do with her), I met women in church groups, I met some single Brazilian women during a business trip, while a professor, I sometimes met women in other ways (e.g., a female grad student who was managing a statistics lab I was using at UWM).
In one case I even reconnected with a girl I had met as a high school freshman in south Texas. (She was the sweet younger sister of a math/science prodigy who eventually got accepted at MIT straight out of junior year.) She loved her brother and saw some of the same qualities in me, encouraging me to join him in interscholastic league science contests, etc. (which I did later). She would tell me some of her favorite accomplishments would be like getting the next highest grade (to mine) on a math test, etc. There were some sad aspects to her life story, including parental abuse. (She left our high school after a year. I think her brother had aspired to be a Nobel laureate. He apparently never graduated MIT but became involved in some startup, cashing out as a millionaire by his early 30's.) The sister apparently married 3 times, including once to an airline pilot, had at least two sons, one who took his own life. I think she had ended up as a high school English teacher in California, who had some sort of incident where she fell in the classroom resulting in some head injury, eventually leading to disability retirement. She was supplementing her income in various ways, like gatekeeping, house sitting, and pet handling.
WWE Wrestling
Now I have to admit WWE had swerved me in the long-predicted breakup between best pals and two-time tag champions Sasha Banks and Bayley. The lead up to the loss of the tag titles and Bayley's subsequent heel attack on Sasha had led me to believe that Sasha would attack Bayley, after in a prior PPV, she had helped fend off Asuka's attack on Bayley's Smackdown title, just to find Bayley didn't return the favor as Asuka took back her Raw title. So I thought the logical storyline response was for Sasha to go after the Smackdown title in return. Bayley, at one time the ultimate babyface, didn't really have an obvious motive in going after Banks, except with a preventive attack on someone she always saw as a threat to her own championship (keep your enemies closer). I suspect they are saving the real program for a live show down the line, although the way they have been stressing Bayley's tenure, I could see them write Sasha's interference into the coming PPV costing Bayley her cherished title.
I really liked to see them book Sami Zayn's return as the "real" Intercontinental champion (his title had been vacated earlier in the year during the COVID-19 crisis) into a 3-way feud with former champ AJ Styles and current champ Jeff Hardy.
I have never liked Roman Reigns the babyface, but I think his return as the stoic heel champ paired with the brilliant manager Heyman works. Having him go after his cousin in his first major defense helps cement the heel turn; could we see The Rock himself return to confront the Big Dog?
I've also been intrigued by Alexa Bliss' slow migration into a Bray Wyatt counter-character, including his Sister Abigail finishing move.
The Drew McIntyre/Randy Orton feud has never appealed to me. Putting the US title on Lashley has an appeal, although I think the ultimate match is to have Lesnar resurface and confront Lashley.
I still don't see how WWE has supported the Money in the Bank storyline which put the championship contract in the hands of tag team novelty talent Otis, never mind his unlikely romantic storyline with blond beauty Mandy Rose, recently sent off to the rival Raw brand.
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