WNBA in MAGA’s crosshairs

Professional sports in the US is dominated by male teams whose players get the big contracts and media focus and thus are able to build up a big fan base. Soccer is one instance where the women’s teams have been much more successful than the men in international competitions and thus get a lot of attention though this has still not translated into financial parity.

Now it appears that women’s basketball, after a rocky start, is gaining in popularity and not just with female fans.

This season, the W.N.B.A.’s fan base was 57 percent male and 43 percent female, according to statistics provided by the league. Men have actually made up more than half of viewership for years, but they were mostly middle-aged before. Now they’re skewing younger. The number of boys under 18 who watch W.N.B.A. games has grown by 130 percent over the past four years.
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“The quality of the players has definitely gotten better,” said Joe Lacob, the billionaire who owns both the Valkyries and the Warriors. He said 55 percent of ticket holders at the women’s games in San Francisco were male.

The women are gritty and fierce, playing fast and sinking more 3-pointers than ever before.

Lacob sits courtside for most Valkyries games, and his guy friends are constantly asking him for tickets, he said. At one recent game, I spotted several heavily tattooed football players for the 49ers sitting beside him.

“People are not dumb,” Lacob said. “They see that it’s better. It just clicked.”

The Valkyries managed to become the first W.N.B.A. team to sell out all their home games, helping to propel the league to record attendance numbers. When you’re in their arena, the Chase Center, it feels like one big party.

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What happened to the gentility of golf?

I do not follow this game except for passing glances at headlines but was under the impression that decorum among players and spectators was highly valued, at least in public. Even TV commentators would theatrically resort to hushed voices whenever a player was about to hit a shot, even though they were nowhere near the action and could not disturb the player even if they shouted. I remember the fuss some years ago when some wag among the spectators would shout “You da man!” at key moments in major tournaments when a player was about to hit the ball, much to the discomfiture of players and officials who could not locate him.

The usual competitive ugliness that is endemic to most sports would take place behind the scenes in golf. Hence I was surprised to see this report of spectators at the Ryder Cup match between the US and Europe, taking place this weekend in the US, making rude chants at a European player. What surprised me even more is the tone of the article suggested that this was no longer considered that shocking.
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Jimmy Kimmel keeps hammering Trump and Conservative networks put him back on the air

He is not letting up in his attacks on Trump.

Now conservative networks Sinclair and Nexstar that own about 25% of ABC affiliates and who had vowed to not show Kimmel’s show have reversed course and now say that he will be back on.

In a statement, Sinclair said it received “thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives”.

“Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience,” the firm said.

The company said that it had “ongoing and constructive discussions” with ABC where Sinclair proposed measures to strengthen accountability and viewer feedback, including having a “network-wide independent ombudsman”. ABC and Disney have not agreed to the measures, and Sinclair noted that it “respects their right to make those decisions under network affiliate agreements”.

Nexstar separately said: “We have had discussions with executives at [Disney] and appreciate their constructive approach to addressing our concerns.”

I suspect that the ‘thoughtful feedback’ consisted of furious viewers yelling at them. Basically, they ended up getting exactly what Al Pacino offered a senator in The Godfather: Part II who tried to strong arm him into giving him a bribe.

I predicted that since money is their god, if Kimmel’s ratings stayed high, as they have, they would cave. It is interesting that they announced this decision on a Friday when most of the late night comedy shows do not have new shows, so that they would be spared immediate ridicule.

But I expect them to be mercilessly lampooned by all of them come Monday.

Trump must be bigly annoyed but hasn’t said anything yet.

Back to the days of half-baked medical advice

We all recall the days during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when Trump would hold press conferences where he would promote whatever the latest crackpot idea that he heard about to treat Covid, such as injecting disinfectant or hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine or ultraviolet light or the animal dewormer Ivormectin. And since as president he commanded much media attention, a lot of people listened to him.

It looks like we are back to those days, only much worse since Trump is now backed by another crank in RFK Jr. whom he has appointed to the post of secretary of the department of health and human services and who has long espoused anti-vaccine views as well as promoting false theories as to the causes of major ailments.

They seem to think that they have found the cause of autism and that it is the over-the-counter analgesic Tylenol, long a staple of home remedies for fevers and minor pain. He and RFK Jr have launched a major attack on it, claiming that it can cause autism.
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Jimmy Kimmel returns and slams Trump

After a major uproar over the cancellation of his show, ABC’s parent company Disney decided to reverse course and bring Jimmy Kimmel back. The return was eagerly anticipated but if Trump and his critics expected Kimmel to tone down his mockery of him, they would be disappointed, as you can see from this segment that aired last night as Kimmel did not pull his punches. I thought that he hit pretty much the right note.


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What makes a disease incurable?

In my previous post on Canada’s system known as MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), there was an issue that I did not properly address and thought worth exploring in more depth, and that is the question of when a patient’s request for assistance in dying should be honored. The criteria have been getting steadily looser over time, which is not surprising. Once the threshold has been crossed that it is acceptable for medical professionals to end the life of a patient, the line as how much it should be limited becomes difficult to draw.

In 2014, when the question of medically assisted death had come before Canada’s supreme court, Etienne Montero, a civil-law professor and at the time the president of the European Institute of Bioethics, warned in testimony that the practice of euthanasia, once legal, was impossible to control. Montero had been retained by the attorney general of Canada to discuss the experience of assisted death in Belgium—how a regime that had begun with “extremely strict” criteria had steadily evolved, through loose interpretations and lax enforcement, to accommodate many of the very patients it had once pledged to protect. When a patient’s autonomy is paramount, Montero argued, expansion is inevitable: “Sooner or later, a patient’s repeated wish will take precedence over strict statutory conditions.”

As the size of the aging population gets larger and we see many cases of painful and protracted end of life, and as more and more people become comfortable with the idea of assisted dying and know of people who have taken the route and died peacefully, they are likely to want greater access, and that has happened in Canada with the expansion occurring at a faster rate than in Belgium
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Canada grapples with medically assisted dying

That people should be able to request medical assistance in dying peacefully if they face a long and painful death due to illness or chronic pain is something that many people can sympathize with it. But implementing such a program in practice can create problems for the family and the medical professionals involved. Canada legalized the practice following a supreme court decision in 2015 and has seen a rapid rise in what are called MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) deaths. The August 11, 2025 issue of The Atlantic magazine has an article by Elaina Plott Calabro titled Canada is Killing Itself that takes a very deep dive into this ethically challenging area.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.
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The new law approved medical assistance in dying for adults who had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing them “intolerable suffering,” and who faced a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. To qualify, patients needed two clinicians to sign off on their application, and the law required a 10-day “reflection period” before the procedure could take place.

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Oh, the humanity!

Europe’s richest man is whining about a proposed wealth tax for France. But of course, he is not complaining that it would hurt him personally, which would be very selfish, but that it would hurt the entire economy, which makes him a noble crusader and protector of the economic health of the country.

Europe’s richest man, the luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, has said that a wealth tax that could cost him more than €1bn (£817m) would be deadly for France’s economy.

The French founder of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said in a statement to the Sunday Times that calls for a 2% wealth tax on all assets “aims to destroy the liberal economy, the only one that works for the good of all”.

The idea of a wealth tax has steadily gained ground in France because of a political crisis, with the government trying to push through unpopular budget cuts. The idea of a 2% wealth tax on fortunes worth more than €100m has been proposed by Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor who has become a household name in France.
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Zucman is a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École normale supérieure, and last year wrote a prominent study on the wealth tax for the G20. In June, Zucman wrote in the Guardian: “Unprecedented wealth concentration – and the unbridled power that comes with such wealth – has distorted our democracy and is driving societal and economic tensions.”

But Arnault insists that his motives are pure and that those who are pursuing this tax are doing so because, for some reason, they want to destroy the economy.

“This is clearly not a technical or economic debate, but rather a clearly stated desire to destroy the French economy,” Arnault’s statement said. “I cannot believe that the French political forces that govern or have governed the country in the past could lend any credibility to this offensive, which is deadly for our economy.”

Really? They ‘clearly stated’ that their desire is to destroy the economy? Where and when did they say this?

People like Arnault should continue to speak out like this so that people will increasingly see that what greedy, selfish jerks they are.

Here we go again – another cutely-named voting group

In every election, political consultants love to come up with a new demographic group with some cute identifier that they signal will be THE swing group whose votes will determine the outcome, and the media promptly latches on it it. Sometimes these groups consist of women. Remember the ‘soccer moms’ phase?

Well, we have a new entry for this election cycle: the ‘weighted vest moms’, which consists of (I kid you not) women wearing weighted vests as they walk around or jog or otherwise exercise. This is apparently the latest fitness fad promoted by TikTok influencers and others such as Gwyneth Paltrow. (That last piece of information alone should give you pause.)
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