Tag Archives: sends

NFL sends mixed message with The Weeknd

The NFL season ends Sunday, and I suspect it will end the same way it began: with reminders that we’re all racists who need to change our ways. No specifics will be given. None are ever given.

And having not oppressed a minority since breakfast — hell, I’ve been a virtual shut-in since March — I’m sick of it.

It’s all part of the radically mixed, highly selective social and racial messages that have been delivered with the cowardly, pandering certification and capitulation of Roger “The PSL Salesman” Goodell and a chosen blindness to what most continues to afflict black America.

Scheduled to perform at Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime is the popular black entertainer who calls himself The Weeknd. It’s unlikely he’ll perform this one — though you never know — but here are the lyrics from one of his numbers, titled “Ebony.” Apparently it’s a love song. I’ve added the edits:

“I think I’ve finally fell in love now

Her name is Tammy, she got hella bitches

She let me f–k ’em while my n—-s film it …

Man, I love my baby, man, I love my baby

Trust me, trust me, I love my baby

Man, I love my baby, man, I love my baby, trust me, trust me. …

Girl go ’head and show me how you go down

And I feel my whole body peakin’

And I’m f—in’ anybody with they legs wide

The Weeknd is set to perform in the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show.
Getty Images for TW

Got me higher than a n—a from the West Side

East coast n—a reppin’ North Side, never waste a ho’s time

Bitch, I’m on my own time, fuck a n—a co-sign

’Cause I get it better like proline, baby girl, I don’t lie

Used to have no money for a crib

Now my room service bill cost your whole life

N—a try to me step me, I go all-out military

I’m camo’d all-out like I’m in the military

Free my n—a Jack, wish he was out in February

Perfect time to come out for the album drop

But this s–t a throwaway”

It’s worth noting that a few weeks ago when CBS’ James Brown, a black man who often decries racial discrimination, announced on CBS’ NFL pregame that The Weeknd would headline this Super Bowl, he said he was delighted by this news — as was CBS, the NFL, and NFL Talent and Justice Coordinator Jay-Z. Pepsi is the halftime sponsor and enabler.

The Weeknd has a few clean songs, but many are aimed at those born to satisfy his immediate sexual lust, including a number in which he repeats, “who’s gonna f- -k you like me?” plus other more N-worded odes.

But James Brown claims to be delighted by the choice of The Weeknd, and it carries the NFL’s stamp of approval — as if Brown and Goodell would demonstrate the courage of their conviction by publicly repeating such lyrics.

And in our world gone nuts, to protest the use of the N-word is to risk condemnation as a tone-deaf racist who doesn’t understand the context— as if there’s a good one, as if the martyred Martin Luther King Jr. also just didn’t get it.

It remains to be seen if this year’s Super Bowl halftime family entertainment will be an improvement over recent go-low extravaganzas. In 2019, the halftime show included stars who were N-wording, women-degrading, crotch-grabbing rappers. Last year Jennifer Lopez’s classless, pole dancing strip-joint revue made its intended beyond-football splash.

Goodell and the NFL gave it their usual, selective silence.

But remember: Fight sexism! Fight racism!

Handful of schools conquer politics and NFL

For this year’s Super Bowl Quiz, we call upon reader Hank Ratner, who challenges us to name the five colleges that have produced a U.S. president and a winning Super Bowl quarterback.

The answers will be in next month’s congressional record. Nah, the answers will be where they’ve been, since Gutenberg first cranked his press: below.

Promo Code Evan: True or False? A gambling line has been established for total number of players to miss this Super Bowl due to COVID-19 restrictions. Too ghoulish to be true. Ah, but it’s true. It’s 1.5.

False, but only thus far: Over/Under is 3 on how many times CBS will needlessly cut to sideline reporters.

Over/Under on times running backs and receivers will signal first down to emphasize that they, and no one else, had the ball: 3.

Number of times Jim Nantz or Tony Romo will say “moves the chains” rather than first down: 2.5.

Quiz Answers:

Joe Biden, Ravens’ Joe Flacco; Delaware. Benjamin Harrison, Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger; Miami of Ohio. Gerald Ford, Patriots’ Tom Brady; Michigan. Jimmy Carter, Cowboys’ Roger Staubach; Navy. Herbert Hoover, Raiders’ Jim Plunkett and Broncos’ John Elway; Stanford.

Outdated tough talk by coaches

Reader Bill Moniz: “Watching the recent immature, semi-coherent ramblings of new NFL head coaching hires … Dan Campbell (Lions) and Nick Siriani (Eagles) make Joe Judge seem a combination of Winston Churchill and Vince Lombardi.”

According to impeachable sources, a touchdown in Sunday’s Puppy Bowl will conclude with a beagle flagged for performing a genuine Odell Beckham Jr. in the end zone.

How does an NFL QB know when he has made it big? Well, when you type “Roethlisberger,” the computer no longer adds that red underline to alert spell-check.

My curb-feelers tell me that Sunday’s game will in large part be determined by at least one extra-long gain after the defender tried to devastate the ball carrier rather than simply tackle him.

Other than that both retired last week,after terrific careers, what do Daniel Murphy and Dustin Pedroia have in common? A: Early in their careers both were fully and expertly dismissed by Mike Francesa as totally bereft of MLB talent.

Happy 90th Larry Merchant, former Post sports columnist and later the plain truth-telling, HBO boxing commentator and former undersized third-string Oklahoma running back from Brooklyn.

Reader Louis Motola admits to taking an NBA “load management” day. “I walked behind a snow plow.”

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Mars mission: Tianwen-1 sends back its first picture

This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called Recurring Slope Lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.

This artist’s illustration shows the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter as it orbits Mars. The orbiter detected a layer of glowing green oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover took a selfie shortly before completing its steepest climb yet on Mars up the Greenheugh Pediment, which tilted the rover 31 degrees.

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama, including more than a thousand images and 1.8 billion pixels, of the Martian surface between November 24 and December 1, 2019.

The cloud in the center of the image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.

This perspective of Mars’ Valles Marineris hemisphere from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.

NASA’s Curiosity rover took this selfie on October 11, 2019, in the “Glen Etive” region.

The InSight lander was imaged from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Is that cookies and cream on Mars? No, it’s just polar dunes dusted with ice and sand.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.

A recent photo taken by the Curiosity rover shows its current location, known as “Teal Ridge.” The rover has been studying the clay-bearing unit in this region.

Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the “Star Trek” symbol.

NASA’s InSight lander used a camera on its robotic arm to capture this sunset on Mars on April 25.

InSight’s seismometer recorded a “marsquake” for the first time on April 6, 2019.

A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars, taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.

This is NASA InSight’s first selfie on Mars. It displays the lander’s solar panels and deck. On top of the deck are its science instruments, weather sensor booms and UHF antenna.

Rovers can take selfies, too. This self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.

Mars is far from a flat, barren landscape. Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.

What are blueberries doing on Mars? These small, mineral hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA’s Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals suggests that Mars had a watery past.

Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. These 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance when haze raised by dust-storm activity in the south became globally distributed.

Curiosity took images on September 9, 2015, of Mount Sharp, a hematite-rich ridge, a plain full of clay minerals to create a composite and rounded buttes high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers of Mount Sharp suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.

HiRISE captured layered deposits and a bright ice cap at the Martian north pole.

This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles across, and the dark bands in are deep troughs. To the right of center, a large canyon, Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is about the length of the United States’ famous Grand Canyon and up to 1.2 miles deep.

Although Mars isn’t geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the Red Planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars’ thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.

From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.

HiRISE took this image of a kilometer-size crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars is heading into spring.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.

A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera on November 19, 2013. The crater spans approximately 100 feet and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area.

Opportunity used its panoramic camera to record this eastward horizon view on October 31, 2010. A portion of Endeavour Crater’s eastern rim, nearly 19 miles in the distance, is visible over the Meridiani Planum.

In this artist’s concept of NASA’s InSight lander on Mars, layers of the planet’s subsurface can be seen below and dust devils can be seen in the background.

The two largest quakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.

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China’s space probe sends back first image of Mars, landing scheduled this year

Issued on:

China’s Tianwen-1 probe has sent back its first image of Mars, the national space agency said, as the mission prepares to touch down on the Red Planet later this year.

The spacecraft, launched in July around the same time as a rival US mission, is expected to enter Mars orbit around February 10.

The black-and-white photo released late Friday by the China National Space Administration showed geological features including the Schiaparelli crater and the Valles Marineris, a vast stretch of canyons on the Martian surface.

The photo was taken about 2.2 million kilometres (1.4 million miles) from Mars, according to CNSA, which said the spacecraft was now 1.1 million kilometres from the planet.

The robotic craft ignited one of its engines to “make an orbital correction” Friday and was expected to slow down before being “captured by Martian gravity” around February 10, the agency said.

The five-tonne Tianwen-1 includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a rover that will study the planet’s soil.

China hopes to ultimately land the rover in May in Utopia, a massive impact basin on Mars.

Billions of dollars

After watching the United States and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme.

It has made huge strides in the past decade, sending a human into space in 2003.

The Asian powerhouse has laid the groundwork to assemble a space station by 2022 and gain a permanent foothold in Earth orbit.

But Mars has proved a challenging target so far, with most missions sent by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and India to the planet since 1960 ending in failure.

Tianwen-1 is not China’s first attempt to reach Mars.

A previous mission with Russia in 2011 ended prematurely as the launch failed.

China has already sent two rovers to the Moon. With the second, China became the first country to make a successful soft landing on the far side.

All systems on the Tianwen-1 probe are in “good condition,” CNSA said Friday.

(AFP)

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US sends warship through Taiwan Strait for first time under Biden

The Japan-based USS John S McCain made the routine transit in accordance with international law, Lt. Joe Keiley, a spokesperson for the US Navy’s 7th Fleet, said in a statement.

“The ship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The United States military will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” Keiley said.

The issue of self-governed Taiwan has been one the first big foreign policy challenges for US President Joe Biden.

Beijing claims full sovereignty over Taiwan, a democracy of almost 24 million people located off the southeastern coast of mainland China, despite the fact that the two sides have been governed separately for more than seven decades.

On the first weekend of the Biden presidency, China dispatched two large formations of warplanes close to the island, prompting Taipei to take defensive measures including scrambling fighter jets to monitor the Chinese flights.

US warships transiting the Taiwan Strait are seen by Beijing as provocations that threaten stability in the region by encouraging supporters of Taiwanese independence.

The last transit occurred on New Year’s Eve when the McCain and a second destroyer, the USS Curtis Wilbur, went through the strait, according to US Navy statements.

US warships transited the waterway 13 times in 2020, according to the US 7th Fleet, the most since 12 such transits in 2016, the final year of former President Barack Obama’s administration.

The US showed a strong commitment to Taiwan’s defense during former President Donald Trump’s administration by approving the sale of sophisticated military hardware to Taipei, including F-16 fighter jets, advanced missiles and main battle tanks, while sending high-level envoys to the island.

Recent statements from the Biden administration suggest there will be no pullback on these actions.

“There’s been a strong and long bipartisan commitment to Taiwan,” new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his confirmation hearing last week. “Part of that commitment is making sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself against aggression. And that is a commitment that will absolutely endure in a Biden administration.”

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