Innocent Bystanders

Announcing My Eligibility for Competing in Women’s Sports March 22, 2022

Time to publicly announce my transition from a man to a woman, so that I, too, may compete against women in sports. Or at least hang with women in sports, since actually doing the sports seems troublesome.

Anyway, seems like the bar for eligibility to be considered a woman is pretty low:

The Indiana High School Athletics Association (IHSAA) also claimed transgenders had no unfair advantage in women’s sports by requiring transgender athletes to specify they have been living as their preferred gender for over a year.

“But geoff!” you exclaim, have you really been living as a woman for over a year?

Why yes, yes I have. I’m just not very good at it, so you probably can’t tell.

I’m thinking of writing a guide for fellow transitioners, which will cover the major points of the geoff approach:

1. Keep doing what you’ve always been doing
2. Keep liking what you’ve always liked
3. Keep wearing what you’ve always worn
4. Don’t mess with your body
5. Tell everybody they must accommodate you because of your gender transition

In retrospect, I suppose this is pretty similar to Lia Thompson’s Thomas’s (dammit) method, where you keep all your parts and keep dating women, but also get hang with winsome, athletic, nubile young ladies in their locker room and kick their butts in sports.

But if they can photoshop me like they photoshopped Lia, I’m sure marketing and branding can get me a substantial portion of the transgender guidebook marketplace.

The VP Puts the Noxious in NOx March 9, 2022

Our Vice President has decided to tackle air pollution:

“Pollution from heavy-duty trucks and buses has made the air poisonous to breathe and this pollution is also, of course, accelerating the climate crises,” Harris said during a speech near the White House on Monday. “Threatening the future not just of our communities, but of the entire world.”

…

Harris, who is not known for great speeches, gave a word salad recollection of a California community that she supposedly visited when she was attorney general in that state. She proceeded to blame heavy-duty trucks and public buses for pollution there and a myriad of health issues such as cancer, asthma, and heart disease.

“Heavy-duty vehicles, like buses and trucks, make up nearly one-quarter of all U.S. transportation greenhouse gas emissions, and heavy-duty vehicles are the largest contributor of nitrogen oxides (NOx)—air pollution that is known to cause asthma, heart and lung disease, and other serious respiratory issues. …” the vice president announced in a fact sheet released by the White House.

The NOx emissions she’s talking about are represented by the purple line in this chart from the EPA: the line that was running about 25% below the national standard from 2016 to 2020. Meaning, of course, that the average air pollutant concentrations for all sources currently meet air quality requirements.

So what’s this all about, other than throwing some shade at the trucker convoy in DC?

I think it means that the White House has chanced upon a new strategy for using the VP. Rather than having her fail repeatedly at solving problems, they’re giving her problems that have already been solved:

Congress Loves Its Low-Hanging Fruit March 9, 2022

So the Emmett Till Antilynching Act finally passed (nearly unanimously), to the sighs of relief of everyone who was worried that rampant lynching was being inadequately punished in this country. Which, honestly, should have been absolutely nobody.

According to Wikipedia, there have been all of 12 lynchings in my 61 years of existence; the last in 1998. And the punishment for the perpetrators of that lynching?

Two were executed and one was sentenced to life in prison.

Now, with the new Act in place (presuming Biden signs it immediately), we can look forward to real justice. Those fellows back in 1998 would have been “…imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.”

Those idiots who chased down Ahmaud Arbery (a near-lynching) would have trembled in their shoes had this Act been in place, since their convictions for hate crimes resulted in mere life sentences.

Let’s sum up: In a time with existential foreign and domestic issues, Congress has successfully passed a bill to impose weaker punishments on crimes that haven’t happened in 24 years, and that were rare before that. And the Act was named for a lynching that occurred before I was born.

I, for one, am breathing much more easily today.

An Unfairly Maligned VP? March 2, 2022

Kamala Harris’s synopsis of the situation in Ukraine has been highly criticized, and with justification, given its elementary school-level analysis:

So Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.

But I’m here to defend the vice president. After all, I think it’s fairly likely that she just repeated what she heard White House staffers tell the president. Probably heard it more than once. And it probably represents a large fraction of the knowledge embodied by the White House team.

Maybe not, but at least my theory is consistent with what we’re seeing in our foreign policy.